Elie Wiesel and Oskar Schindler

In 1942, Adolph Hitler allegedly gave orders to set up death camps all over German-occupied Europe for the express purpose to annihilate the Jews in Europe and other ethnic groups which the Nazis saw as inferior to themselves.

At these death camps, such as Dachau, Buchenwald and Auschwitz, the strongest ten percent were kept as slaves, while the others went quickly to their deaths, often in gas chambers disguised as showers or murdered by electrocution, phenol injections and execution squads.

When World War II ended in 1945, Allied troops entered these death camps where they witnessed inhumanity on a scale that is nearly impossible to imagine. For example, at Dachau, Allied troops found 200,000 malnourished and mistreated prisoners, while at Bergen-Belsen, some 13,000 corpses remained unburied.

Thus, in this nightmarish environment, two men dared to fight against the Nazis-Elie Wiesel, himself a death camp survivor, and Oskar Schindler, best remembered for saving hundreds of Jews from a fate worse than death at the hands of the Nazis.

Elie Wiesel

As the author of more than thirty-six books on Judaism and the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel stands today as the penultimate Holocaust survivor and has constantly strove to mandate the moral responsibility of every human being to fight against hatred, racism and genocide. In his autobiography Night, Wiesel provides one of the most powerful reminiscences about being caught up in the nightmarish world of the Nazi death camps in 1944 when he was only sixteen years old – “Never shall I forget that night… which turned my life into one long night… Never shall I forget that smoke… the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke… Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my
soul… Never.”

Not surprisingly, Elie Wiesel has dedicated his life to making sure that we never forget what happened to the Jews in the Nazi death camps during World War II. As a strong and resilient Jewish scholar and historian, Wiesel survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald and when the Allied forces liberated these and other death camps in April of 1945, Wiesel was one of the fortunate few to make it out alive and to write about his horrible experiences in the death camps which forever changed his outlook on living and the depths to which man can sink when given absolute power and control over his fellow human beings.

As a humanitarian and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and the Congressional Gold Medal of Achievement, Wiesel sums up his dedication to his fallen Jewish comrades in the death camps by stating “Let us remember… the heroes of Warsaw, the martyrs of Treblinka, the children of Auschwitz. They fought alone… suffered alone… lived alone, but they did not die alone, for something in all of us died with them.”

Oskar Schindler

In comparison to Wiesel, Oskar Schindler, although not a Jewish Holocaust/death camp survivor, accomplished perhaps as much as Wiesel has over the years since the end of World War II, due to helping to save the lives of hundreds of Jews employed in his factory in Germany as the Holocaust raged on all around him. In essence, Oskar Schindler, much like Wiesel after being saved from the death camps, dared to take on the Nazis in December of 1939 and as a result ended up becoming one of the great heroes of the Second World War.

However, unlike Elie Wiesel, Schindler came of age in a rather wealthy Catholic family, but when he attained manhood, he began to practice outright hedonism with his constant hard drinking and womanizing in Austria-Hungary (now the Czech Republic).

During this time, Schindler was not much different from his fellow German businessmen, for he often invested for his own benefit in properties confiscated by the Nazis in the city of Krakow in Poland and was soon involved in the black market and the criminal underworld in which he sold and bartered young, innocent girls and alcohol, all the while hiring the cheapest labor he could find for his factory, being the Jews of Krakow.

However, for reasons that remain unclear, Schindler had a change of heart, for by the end of the war, Schindler had spent a great deal of his own money to keep more than 1,300 Jewish men and women from the horrors of the death camps while also taking advantage of the Nazi system through bribery and the black market.

In addition, Schindler did everything in his power to thwart the Nazis, for in his factory, he made defective bullets and lived in almost complete poverty. It was during this time that he composed his famous “Schindler’s List” which helped to save most of his Jewish workers from the death camps after relocating his factory to Brunnlitz, Switzerland in October of 1944. Schindler died in 1974 and the question as to why he saved his Jewish workers has often been asked. One of the survivors is quoted as saying, ”I don’t know what his motives were… but I don’t give a damn. What’s important is that he saved our lives.”

In conclusion, Elie Wiesel and Oskar Schindler, although from very different ethnic and social backgrounds, share one very important trait-they both saw a dire need to not only save the Jews from certain death but also to chronicle their struggles against the Nazis, with Schindler

risking his own life to outsmart the Nazis and Wiesel having the courage and fortitude to survive the death camps and live to tell his story.