Oskar Schindler

15. AFTERTHOUGHTS

WHEN I BEGAN WORKING ON THIS BOOK MORE THAN SEVEN years ago, I knew little about Oskar Schindler other than what I had read in Thomas Keneally’s historical novel and in the few scattered works written about him after Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List, came out in 1993. Though I had a copy of Elinor Brecher’s wonderful collection of Schindler survivor testimonies, Schindler’s Legacy (1994), I had not come to understand its richness and diversity. As I began my research, I struggled with the images in Spielberg’s film. This was particularly the case during my first trip to Kraków. Though I had been to this beautiful medieval Polish city before, this time was different. I wanted to explore first-hand each of the sites discussed by Keneally and depicted in the Spielberg film. What I slowly discovered over the course of my research travels, which brought me back to Kraków and Brünnlitz several times, was that I could escape Keneally and Spielberg’s literary and cinematographic images of Oskar Schindler only by creating new ones based solely on my own exacting scholarly research.

Over time, I became very comfortable with my own, separate image of Oskar Schindler, whom I found to be a far more complex, and, at times, sad figure, than the person captured in the pages of Keneally’s historical novel or in Spielberg’s film. Moreover, I found my own views constantly changing towards a person who was one of the most remarkable figures to come out of the Holocaust. In the early part of the book, I was disgusted by Oskar Schindler’s continual affairs and his decision to spy for Nazi Germany. One of the first people I interviewed in the Czech Republic was Dr. Jitka Gruntová, a Czech historian who has written quite a bit about Schindler. She was extremely critical of Schindler’s work for Abwehr and his efforts to help destroy Czechoslovakia in the immediate years before World War II. Needless to say, I did not have a high opinion of Schindler at this point in my research, and this did not change as I explored his move to Kraków in the early days of the war. At this point, I saw Oskar Schindler as nothing more than a greedy ethnic German “carpetbagger” who sought to take advantage of Poland’s despair to enrich himself and escape further service in the military.

But then something changed, both on the part of Oskar Schindler and within myself. I have to admit that up until this point in my research and writing, I had begun to doubt the merits of Schindler’s postwar acclaim. But as I went through the vast body of personal testimonies and other material I had gathered, my opinion of him slowly became more positive. Oskar was in Kraków to do one thing—make money. But in the process of trying to set up a factory that he did not seem to know how to run, Schindler befriended a handful of Jews who became not only the key to his success during his five years in Kraków but also close, trusted associates. Though much has been made of Oskar’s supposed signs of pro-Jewish sentiments well before the war began, there is little concrete evidence to support this. It was the war and the growing horror of the Shoah that forced Oskar Schindler to reevaluate his relationship with the Nazi regime and his Jewish workers.

So when did Oskar Schindler change from being a greedy factory owner into one of the most remarkable Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust? I think his transformation took place slowly over a long period. Oskar did not begin to use a significant number of Jewish workers until several years after he arrived in Kraków. Jewish workers were much cheaper than Poles and in many ways more dependable. I concluded early in my research that I would have to separate my own image of Schindler as a heavy drinker and womanizer, which I drew partially from Keneally and Spielberg, from the almost god-like figure adored by most Schindler Jews. It became obvious to me as I began to interview Schindler Jews that few of them knew much about Oskar during the war. At the time, most accepted him, at a distance, as a kind, caring man, though it was not until after the war, when they began to compare notes with other Holocaust survivors, that they came to understand everything Oskar Schindler had done and sacrificed to save them. I also decided that I would have to separate the stories of the Schindler Jews who had worked for Oskar in Emalia from those who only knew him during the last eight months of the war in Brünnlitz. Life in this latter factory sub-camp was quite different from the one that Schindler ran in Kraków.

In the end, there was no one, dramatic, transforming moment when Oskar Schindler decided to do everything he could to save his Jewish workers. I think that Keneally and Spielberg found such a moment very useful. I also think they were wrong. One of the most frightening things about the Holocaust is the “ordinariness” of most of the Germans and others in the supporting network of businesses and factories that fed off the SS slave labor pool in the ghettos and concentration camps. In some ways, at least in the Kraków area, Oskar Schindler was not particularly unique in his initial treatment of his Jewish workers. Giving your Jewish workers adequate food and modest protection from SS mistreatment was simply good business and something other factory owners and managers such as Julius Madritsch and Raimund Titsch also did in Kraków.

But Oskar took his care and concern for the well-being of his Jewish workers a step further than Madritsch, Titsch, and others. But the question remains—why? I think that Oskar Schindler was, at heart, a fairly decent human being despite his womanizing and heavy drinking. Over time, I think the growing violence and death that enveloped Kraków’s Jews disgusted him and prompted him to do whatever he could to protect his Jewish workers from the SS. This development probably started as good business but evolved into something more humane as the Holocaust became more deadly. I am fairly certain, based on the information Oskar provided Shmuel Springmann and Reszőe Kasztner in Budapest in November 1943, that Schindler was quite knowledgeable about the most deadly aspects of the Final Solution.

In part, the key to understanding Oskar’s transformation can be found in his Abwehr contacts. Oskar was a part of many German and Nazi circles in Kraków, and I think he was probably most comfortable with his old friends in Abwehr and the Wehrmacht. I also feel that his continual runins with the Gestapo and the SS helped form his own attitudes towards Jews. In other words, helping his Jews became one of the ways Oskar acted out his own disillusionment with the Nazi system.

Dr. Moshe Bejski, a Schindler Jew and one of Oskar’s closest postwar friends, has a pragmatic and unromantic view of Schindler. He told me that, for him, the defining measure of Schindler’s commitment to doing everything possible to save his Jewish workers came in the fall of 1944, when Oskar chose to risk everything to move his armaments factory to Brünnlitz. Oskar could easily have closed his Kraków operations and retreated westward with the profits he had already made. Instead, he chose to risk his life and his money to save as many Jews as he could. Though there is no doubt in my mind that Oskar had vague dreams of transforming his Brünnlitz factory into a postwar economic powerhouse, I do not see that as the prime motive for his move. At this point in the war and in his life, I think Oskar Schindler was absolutely determined to do everything he could to save as many Jews as he could regardless of the cost, either personal or financial. During the last two years of the war, he had undergone a dramatic moral transformation, and, in many ways, he came more and more to associate himself with his Jews than with other Germans.

It could be argued here, and Emilie at one point says this, that Oskar’s growing closeness with his Jews was a self-protective measure adopted to insure his post-war safety. Oskar was well aware that the Allies could possibly prosecute him as a Nazi Party member who used Jewish slave labor during the war. Yet there was something beyond just mere self-protection that motivated Oskar to go to such extremes to save his growing number of Jewish workers. I am hesitant to get into the dangerous realm of pop psychology, but I think that as the war went on, and the Nazi system, wrapped as it was in its self-serving, irrational propaganda and racial ideology, he found moral comfort in his association with his Jewish workers, who clung to their ancient faith and cultural traditions in the midst of absolute horror.

By the end of the war, Oskar became so close to his Jewish workers that it became difficult for outsiders, particularly in Germany, to separate Oskar from his Schindler Jews. In some ways, his efforts to help Jews during the war created a unique symbiosis between himself and his Jewish workers, and in many ways they became one. The only difference is that after the war, the Schindler Jews traded places with Oskar, now himself part of a dispossessed ethnic minority, and collectively became his protector and benefactor. I am not certain, though, that Oskar fully appreciated the richness of these relationships, because he was constantly using his Jewish friends to try to regain his professional footing. I have to admit that I have been dismayed by Schindler’s sense of opportunism, particularly when it came to his efforts to gain economic benefit from his friendships with his Jewish friends after the war. But it should be remembered that whenever he did this, it was with the active encouragement of his numerous Jewish acquaintances, whether they be Schindler Jews or not, remained in awe of what he had done for Jews during the Holocaust. Moreover, I think that had Oskar been able successfully to rebuild his life after the war, he would have developed a more mature, less opportunistic relationship with his Schindler Jews. I think we see a hint of the true Oskar Schindler in the final years of his life, when, with a steady income and more stable life, he was able to give himself fully to something that he came to love most deeply—Israel. His love of Israel was a mere reflection of the close relationship that he had developed after the war with his many Jewish friends throughout the world. These friendships were buffered by equally close ties with many Germans who shared Oskar’s passion for Israel and a closer German-Jewish relationship.

So how should history judge Oskar Schindler? From my own perspective, I look to the Schindler Jews for guidance, who knew and observed Oskar Schindler with all his virtues, strengths, and flaws. As I researched and wrote this book, I had the opportunity to interview and correspond with many Schindler Jews. With one or two exceptions, their feelings towards Oskar are pragmatically romantic. To a person, they will tell you that if it had not been for Oskar Schindler, they and their families would not be here today. Most of them were well aware of Oskar’s human flaws but put these moral qualms aside when it came to judging him. They felt he deserved all the accolades that the modern world has to offer. The only negative in all this was the guilt that most of them expressed about not having done more to help their beloved Oskar after the war. I have seen many Schindler Jews weep when it came to this issue.

Finally, I go back to a conversation that I had with Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, the head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department at Yad Vashem. Other than Dr. Moshe Bejski, there has been no other person in Israel more intimately involved in investigating the thousands of nominations for Righteous Gentile status over the past few decades. From Dr. Paldiel’s perspective, there was no person more deserving of Righteous Gentile status than Oskar Schindler, including Raoul Wallenberg. I agree. I think that Oskar Schindler’s heroism is unique because of the fact that what he did, both in Kraków and Brünnlitz, took place in the midst of the most horrible killing center in modern history. Moreover, while his most dramatic efforts took place during the last year of the war, Oskar Schindler’s efforts to help and later save Jews was a stance that evolved over three or four years.

Yes, Oskar Schindler was a flawed human being. But he also personally risked his fortune and his life to save almost 1,100 people. Beyond this, he provided hundreds of other Jews who worked for him at Emalia with a quality of life that better enabled many of them to survive the Holocaust. Finally, Oskar Schindler should also be remembered for his willingness to supply Jewish aid organizations with information about the Final Solution and life in the General Government and his efforts to help these organizations bring money, food, and medicine into Kraków to help sustain Jewish life in the Płaszów concentration camp. Such unique acts of humanity were rare during the Holocaust.