What occurred in Europe during the 1940’s will never be forgotten for centuries to come because of what most people call World War II, where Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler invaded Poland and many other countries on the sole reason to kill as many innocent Jewish people as possible. To many Jews there was absolutely no hope in Poland of surviving such a brutal travesty, but to a select few who were lucky enough to be forced laborers at Oskar Schindler’s factory next to the Krakow death camp there was a guarantee of life. The Jews that worked for Oskar Schindler considered him an angel, or some sort of savior to rescue them from the evil Nazi party because of what good and protective working conditions he provided and the list that he and his colleagues developed to enable the Jews to immunity from death by the hands of Nazi officers. Even though Oskar Schindler went into the war with a plan to take advantage of it and make a large profit; he came out not only without any money left but a legacy that will live on in the thousands of Jewish generations that he made possible by simply giving the innocent a chance to live. Although the legacy of Oskar Schindler as a profiteer is important, his actions of saving 1,200 Jews from the Nazi party, tricking and bribing Nazi German officials, and creating a fake ammunition factory to harbor Jews from extinction in the Krakow death camp are more important because they create his legacy.

When Oskar Schindler was growing up in what is now the Czech Republic, he seemed like a normal active youth. Born on April 28th, 1908 Oskar Schindler was born into his middle-class catholic family in a German speaking community in the Sudetenland (Yad Vashem: The Righteous Among Nations: Oskar Schindler). Schindler went to German grammar school and studied engineering, following his father’s footsteps as a factory owner. Like most German youths of the Sudetenland, Schindler was a part of the Conrad Heinlein’s Sudeten German party; they strongly supported the Nazi party, and in 1938 when Sudetenland was incorporated into Nazi Germany Schindler became a full member or the Nazi party (“Yad Vashem: The Righteous Among Nations: Oskar Schindler”). How this man was raised greatly impacted the way he thought of things as an adult.

In Schindler’s middle age he made a fortune profiting off the war while in Poland and began to realize what the Jews were going through. In around 1939 Schindler met his intelligent Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern. To employ his factory, Stern informed Schindler to turn to Krakow’s Jewish community for cheap, reliable labor. By letting the Jews work for him in his factory they were safe from extermination by the Germans. Schindler did many things to help the Jews, things that if he had gotten caught he would have been killed by his own party. After the war ended on May 8th, 1945 Schindler feared that the Nazi’s would come after him, so he fled to west to avoid Russian troops advancing from the east (“Yad Vashem: The Righteous Among Nations: Oskar Schindler”). With out the help of Itzhak Stern Schindler would had never gotten the chance to employ his factory with as many Jews as possible, which was his goal.

Schindler’s post war life was not yet as amusing as his middle age period, but he still was honored greatly amongst the Jewish people. Because of Oskar Schindler many people’s lives were saved, including the ones that weren’t even born yet. In 1949 Schindler moved to Argentina and bought a farm; by 1957 Schindler went bankrupt and looked to the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith to survive on charity (“Notable Biographies: Advameg Inc.: Oskar Schindler Biography, Section 7: After World War II”). Oskar Schindler is a profiteer, a trickster, and a savior witness of what occurred during the 1940’s in Poland and Germany because of his intelligence, bravery, and heart.

            We don’t remember Oskar Schindler because of where he is from or how he grew up, we remember him for what he did and how he did it during the 2nd World War. One of the many ways Schindler saved these Jews from the powerful wrath of the Nazi party was by founding and running a fake ammunition factory right next to the death camp in Krakow, Poland called Brunnlitz. This fake ammunition factory gave the Jews a reason to live again due to its great working conditions and shelter to protect them from the German Nazi’s working at the nearby death camp. Schindler gave them food and the guarantee that they wouldn’t be killed for no reason. At the end of the war Schindler gave a very inspiring speech to the Jews that were working in his factory at the time; in this speech Schindler explains to the Jews what he had to go through and what it felt like to lose even one Jewish worker, Schindler quotes

“Many of you know the persecutions, harassment and obstacles that I had to overcome in order to keep my workers during these terrible years. Although it was already difficult to protect the limited rights of a Polish worker, to help him keep his business, protect him from being deported into the Reich, protect his property and preserve his modest belongings and assets – the difficulties of protecting Jewish laborers often seemed insurmountable. Those of you who have worked with me from the beginning, through all these years, know how I made innumerable personal interventions after the closure of the ghetto, how I worked with the camp administration on your behalf in order to save you from deportation and liquidation, or how I managed to reverse orders that had already been given. How many worries it caused me, how threatening the danger was, to think that I might lose my Jewish laborers, when you were kept away from the factory under various pretenses for days, in some cases even for weeks. Very few of the workers who were sent to me actually had experience as skilled laborers before the war, the kind of workers that I was looking for to do this work, and it is a miracle that we were able, thanks to your positive attitude, to overcome the greatest difficulties” (“Oskar Schindler: Farewell Address to Jewish Factory Workers at Brunnlitz”).

In what may have taken Schindler minutes or hours to make his speech; no matter how long it took him to make, it was still a master piece and music to the Jewish workers ears to hear the voice of a savior angel telling them that the nightmare is over.

Another one of Schindler’s greatest accomplishments was the making of a list, a list that contains the names of hundreds of Jewish workers that Schindler had employed. To be on this list as Jew was the same as being told you will not die today or the next day or the days to come. This is a quote from one of Schindler’s many workers; his name is Abraham Zuckerman and he says what Schindler was like. Zuckerman quotes, “There were SS guards but he would say `Good morning`to you. He was a chain smoker and he`d throw the cigarette on the floor after only two puffs, because he knew the workers would pick it up after him. To me he was an angel. Because of him I was treated like a human being. And because of him I survived” (“Quote from Abraham Zuckerman: Schindler’s List sponsored by Louis Bülow”). This quote tells you how Schindler felt about Jews and how he respects them even if there are SS soldiers behind him. Schindler made this list to protect the ones who worked for him; if you were on the list you would have a very good chance of surviving the Holocaust.

The things Schindler had to do to let his Jewish workers live were dangerous and he had a very good chance of getting caught and killed for it. These things he did include trickery, bribery, and reversing orders that were already given. One example of this is how Schindler changed the destination of the carts filled with Jews to his safe haven of a factory. Schindler had no authority to take the cars. But he asked a railway official to show him the bill of lading, and when the official was momentarily distracted, he altered the bill and wrote on it: “Final destination, Brunnlitz” (“Louis Bülow: Least We Forget Brunnlitz”). Schindler also bribed Amon Goeth to secure as many as one thousand Jews to his factory next to Krakow in Poland. Even though Amon Goeth thought him and Schindler were friends Schindler actually did not like him at, he just used him to get what he wanted, which was saving more Jews. Schindler quotes, “If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car, wouldn’t you help him” (“Brainy Quotes: Oskar Schindler Famous Quotes”). This quote says that Schindler felt pity for the Jews and would do anything to help them. Oskar Schindler has been arrested before because of what he tried to accomplish; he could have been killed but that did not stop him from deceiving and manipulating many German officials and use them as puppets to get what he wanted.

            Even though we may remember Oskar Schindler’s for his actions, he still lived on after the Holocaust as a noble and generous man. Schindler was a member of the Nazi party during WWII  and the Jews relieved him of his guilt by named him a righteous person among Jewish people after the war ended. After Schindler’s 54th birthday in 1962, he was declared a “Righteous Gentile (non-Jew)” and was invited to plant a tree on the avenue of the Righteous leading up to Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Museum, a memorial to the Holocaust, the name for the German liquidation of Jews during World War II (“Notable Biographies: Advameg Inc.: Oskar Schindler Biography, Section 7: After World War II”). Danka Dresner, one of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler’s Jews), has said, “We owe our lives to him. But I wouldn’t glorify a German because of what he did for us. There is no proportion.” (The Southern Institute for Education: Section Yad Vashem: Paragraph 4: Danka Dresner Quote). Because of the hundreds of Jewish people Schindler saved he was awarded one of the most favorable awards a non-Jewish person can receive.

            Because of Schindler, many generations were given the chance to flourish into thousands of Jewish people. Today there are more than 8,000 descendants of the Schindler-Jews living in US and Europe, many in Israel. Before World War II, the Jewish population of Poland was 3.5 million. Today there are between 10,000 and 15,000 left. (“Louis Bülow: Schindler’s Legacy”). At the end of the movie Schindler’s List (based on the true story of Oskar Schindler) many of “Schindler’s Jews” that are still alive lined up to pay tribute to the grave of Schindler. Schindler helped save a once populated religion by rescuing many Jews and their generations.

Oskar Schindler loved the Jewish people so much that he requested to be buried in Israel. Schindler was given a small pension that the West German government gave him shortly after he left his wife to move back to where he lived for many years, Germany. Upon his death from heart and liver problems in 1974, he was granted his request to be buried in Israel. About five hundred Schindlerjuden attended his funeral and watched as his body was laid to rest in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem (“Notable Biographies: Advameg Inc.: Oskar Schindler Biography, Section 7: After World War II”). Because Schindler loved the Jewish people so much he had chosen to be buried in Israel soil, the land that which many Jewish people hail from after Poland and Russia (had the two biggest Jewish population before the war) had lost so many Jews.

            The actions of Oskar Schindler as a profiteer are important,  including the saving of 1,200 Jews from the Nazi party, tricking and bribing Nazi German officials, and creating a fake ammunition factory to harbor Jews from extinction in the Krakow death camp and because of these his legacy will live on forever. Oskar Schindler just barely escaped the grasp of the Nazi’s during WWII carrying along with him 1,200 Jewish people that owe him there lives for what he has done for them; by letting them work at his factory and deceiving Amon Goeth into saving the Jews by giving lots of them to Schindler.

If Oskar Schindler had never been born neither would 7,000 Jewish people that were in the future generations of those who he saved. Oskar Schindler, the messiah of the Schindlerjuden.

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Schindler’s fate would remain a marginal issue, though in 1992 it did not make the movie “Schindler’s List” director Steven Spielberg Jewish origin based on a novel by the 1982 Australian writer Thomas Keneallyho. War drama from the world famous director and an excellent cast presented as recorded by a true event to electrify the audience and almost all his attention on the heroism of German businessmen.

Oskar Schindler was born on the 29th of April 1908 in Svitavy, Moravia (Then part of Austria-Hungary, Now the Czech Republic) to an ethnic German family. He was brought up as a catholic by his family and remained so throughout his life. He is most famous for saving the lives of hundreds of Jews from the Holocaust.

Schindler was a very keen businessman; this is extremely evident as he started to work as a commercial salesperson after school as a job.

On 6 March 1928, Oskar Schindler married Emilie Pelzl, the daughter of a wealthy Germanic farmer from Moravia, who was also a devoted catholic who was educated in a nearby monastery. 

Oskar Schindler switched his jobs many times in the 1930s, he decided to create businesses, but was soon left bankrupt due to the great depression.

After this, he joined the Sudeten German Party in 1935. Even though he was a citizen of Czechoslovakia, he started to work for the German Military Intelligence; he was caught and prosecuted in 1938, but soon released as a political prisoner after the Munich agreement.

He then joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP or commonly known as: The Nazi Party) in 1939.

Oskar Schindler was one of many opportunistic businessmen who wanted to make a profit through the invasion of Poland. He soon grabbed hold of an idle factory which he renamed: Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik or DEF. With the help of his German-speaking, Jewish assistant, he soon got hold of 1,000 Jewish workers.

Schindler soon became a well-respected person at Nazi parties, he adapted to his income. Schindler was inspired by money.

Schindler soon came to know about the extermination and concentration camps; he was appalled at how many of his workers were killed. After witnessing the 1943 raid, he was soon extremely protective about his workers, regardless of the cost of keeping them safe, he used all his skills to protect them. He used his great persuasive skills and his bribing charm to save them from possible extermination, if the German army got close, he moved them around, he lied for them, and he traded in the black market to give them supplies.

After the red army came close to the Auschwitz concentration camp, he asked for permission to move his 1,100 workers into a new arms factory in the Sudetenland province. All his time spent there, not a single weapon produced could actually be fired, so in the end he lost money trying to bribe people and look after his workers.

After the war he was left with little money and relied on Jewish charities to help sustain him, after many failed attempts at creating a new business, he finally went bankrupt.

He died on the 9th of October 1974, at the age of 66.

O’Brien says “You can tell a true war story by the way it never seems to end”. Schindler’s List would be a proper representation of a “true war story” according to O’Brien’s definition. The disgusting devastation of World War II hasn’t ended. At the end of the film, some of the surviving Jews who were saved by Schindler walk hand in hand with the actors who played them. Seeing these humans who witnessed the movie first hand makes the film real. Even with phenomenal, believable acting, knowing that it is still a movie does take away some of the impact. Steven Spielberg is brilliant by showing the audience of Schindler’s List the real people that lived though the Holocaust. The film is already an impacting and powerful film, but seeing the people who lived the movie made it “true war story”.  The people weren’t just seen as a character anymore, they had a life, a real life, and a story.

As follows are but some extraordinary men and women, who, at great personal risks, have done all they could to save lives. Most of their deeds may have gone unnoticed during their lifetimes but many have been honored by Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial with the title “Righteous among the Nations” or “Righteous Gentiles” recognizing those non-Jews who helped save Jews from the Holocaust.

Raoul Wallenberg (1912 – 1947?)

Swedish Diplomat

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Immediately following his arrival as First Secretary to the Swedish embassy in Budapest in July 1944, Wallenberg used his diplomatic status to issue “protective passports” to thousands of Jews, identifying them as Swedish citizens, thereby preventing their deportation to death camps. He would often personally intervene to obtain the release of these passport bearers, including those with forged documents, from the Jews who were forced to march toward the Austrian-Hungarian border for deportation, saving as many lives as possible. He even rented more than 30 buildings to house about 10,000 Jewish refugees, putting up fake signs as “The Swedish Research Institute” and hanging the Swedish flag to avoid detection. All in all, this soft-spoken Swede is credited to have rescued more Jews than any single rescuer or country, around 100,000 of them; but he was unable to save his own. In January 1945, he was taken by the Soviet Red Army troops to a Soviet prison, where he was reported to have died in 1947, although the exact circumstances of his death are still very much in dispute.

Irena Sendler (1910 – 2008)

Polish Catholic Social Worker

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People and their households caught hiding Jews risked death sentences in German-occupied Poland. As a Jewish sympathizer since childhood, Sendler (Sendlerowa) and her friends produced thousands of false documents to help Jewish families prior to joining the resistance group Zegota (Council for Aid to Jews). Upon her appointment as head of Zegota’s newly formed children’s department, she organized the smuggling of some 2,500 children out of Warsaw ghetto and had them placed in Polish families, orphanages and convents. She gave each child a new identity and carefully recorded their names and placements so that they could be returned to surviving relatives after the war. Her work was interrupted when she was arrested, tortured and sentenced to death by the Gestapo in 1943. However, she was successfully rescued by Zegota before her scheduled execution. She then went into hiding and resumed her work for Jewish children for the remainder of the war. In 2003, she received Poland’s highest civilian decoration, the Order of the White Eagle.

“Every child saved with my help is the justification of my existence on this Earth and not a title to glory.” – Sendler’s letter to Polish Parliament

Giovanni Palatucci (1909 – 1945)

Italian Police Official and Lawyer

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Palatucci entered the police service in 1936 and was assigned to be in charge the Adriatic seaport of Fiume (present day Rijeka, Croatia). When anti-Jewish laws were enacted in 1938, he used his authority as chief of the Foreigners’ Office to forge travel papers that permitted hundreds of Jews flee persecution in Eastern Europe and settle in Fiume, sometimes even providing them with funds. However, his effort became riskier in 1943, when Mussolini’s government fell and the Nazis occupied the place. In defiance against orders to arrest and deport the Jews in the area, he made sure that they were sent instead to a prison-turned refugee camp managed by his uncle, Bishop Giuseppe Maria Palatucci, in Campania southern Italy, by destroying documented records of some 5,000 Jewish refugees, thus saving them from certain death in concentration camps. When his activities were discovered in 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo, and sent to Dachau, where he died just a few months shy of his 36th birthday.

Andre Trocmé (1901 – 1971)

French Protestant Pastor

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Andre Trocmé, as the spiritual leader of the town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and as a man clearly driven by ethical and religious convictions, spoke against discrimination as the Nazis were gaining power in bordering Germany and repeatedly asked his congregation to help protect “the people of the Bible.” When the Nazi occupied France, he and his wife Magda (1901 – 1996) arranged for the rescue of between 3,000 to 5,000 Jews fleeing the Nazi persecution. Under their leadership, many private families willing to take in Jewish refugees and children were located, and town schools got ready for a sudden increase in the number of students. Their courageous efforts made Le Chambon and nearby villages a unique refuge in Nazi-occupied France. When forced to produce a list of Jews in the town, he responded, “We do not know what a Jew is; we know only men.” Despite rumors of his imminent arrest, he encouraged his congregation to “do the will of God and not of men.” In January 1971, Yad Vashem recognized André and Magda Trocmé as “Righteous among the Nations.”

Oskar Schindler (1908 – 1974)

German Industrialist

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Schindler was an unlikely rescuer of the Jews, as he was all too flawed. He was a Nazi, a womanizer, and an opportunistic businessman motivated by greed; and yet he heeded the call of his conscience. He initially sought to profit from the 1939 German invasion of Poland by hiding wealthy Jews and employing around 1,000 cheap Jewish slave laborers for his ammunition factory in Poland. However, appalled by the immense brutality of Nazism, he began shielding his workers without any regard for cost. He smuggled children out of ghettos and used his connections in high places to request for hundreds of Jews to be moved to an adjoining factory. He would call on his legendary charm and persuasive eloquence to help his “Schindlerjuden” (”Schindler Jews” as they came to be known) get out of difficult situations, claiming that women, children, handicapped and unskilled workers were vital to his business. While he died penniless at age 66 having spent all his wealth by the end of the war and having failed in his post-war business efforts, he gained the perpetual gratitude of his Jews, whom he affectionately referred to as “my children.” He is the only Nazi to be buried in a cemetery in Jerusalem.

Nicholas Winton (1909 – )

British Stockbroker

(Winton holding a boy)

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In 1939, Winton visited Prague at the invitation of a friend from the British Embassy and was alarmed by the influx of refugees, endangered by the impending Nazi invasion. He noticed that the refugee camps set up by the British team were dealing mostly with the elderly and other vulnerable adults, but nothing was being done for the children. So he took it upon himself to organize the Czech Kindertransport, managing to save 669 children out eight trains prior to the outbreak of World War II and finding them foster parents in England and Sweden. He was not troubled by the fact that his humanitarian efforts went unrecognized for he did not view his acts as something extraordinary. His exploits became known only in 1988 when his late wife discovered lists of children and letters from their parents in the attic. He is very much revered as the father who rescued his many “children” from certain death in Nazi camps. Known as “Schindler of Britain,” Winton currently lives in Maindenhead, Great Britain; he was knighted in 2002 and was nominated by the Czech government for the 2008 Nobel Peace Prize.

Chiune Sugihara (1900 – 1986)

Japanese Diplomat

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Though Sugihara was named vice-consul of the Japanese consulate in Kaunas, Lithuania in 1939, his main duty was to keep the Japanese forces informed of the Soviet and German troop movements. Following the 1940 Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Polish Jews as well as Lithuanian Jews had difficulty acquiring exit visa, making it unsafe to travel and difficult to find countries that will issue them. With no discernible motivation other than to do the right thing, he started issuing visas to all who applied including those who did not meet immigration requirements, allowing them to enter Japan for up to 15 days, in direct violation of his orders. He was subsequently reassigned to Berlin when the Soviet took over Lithuania. While en route to the train station, he continued to give out visas for a mob of desperate refugees surrounding his car. However, many passports remained unstamped when he boarded the train, so he threw the official stamp to the crowd. His altruistic acts saved anywhere between 2,000 and 10,000 Jews based on some estimates. Sugihara, the “Japanese Schindler,” was honored as “Righteous among the Nations” by the Israeli government in 1985.

“I cannot allow these people to die, people who have come to me for help with death staring them in the eyes. Whatever punishment may be imposed on me, I know I should follow my conscience.” – Sugihara

Varian Fry (1907 – 1967)

American Journalist

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Distressed by what he personally saw of Nazi barbarities against Jews during his 1935 Berlin visit as a foreign correspondent for an American journal, the Harvard-educated Fry started to help raise funds for European anti-Nazi movements. Following the 1940 invasion of France, he went to Marseille and ran an elaborate rescue network in direct opposition to French and even some American authorities. Despite being under constant surveillance by the puppet Vichy regime, he was able to secure visas with the aid of American Vice-Consul in Marseille Hiram Bingham IV for around 3,000 anti-Nazi and Jewish refugees (among whom were many prominent artists and intellectuals including Marc Chagall and Wilhelm Herzog among others) escape to neutral Portugal before making their way to the United States. A few months prior to his death, France presented him with the Legion of Honor for his heroic work in Marseille from 1940 to1941. Fry, also known as the “American Schindler,” was posthumously honored by Yad Vashem in 1996, the very first American to be listed as “Righteous among the Nations.”

More Holocaust-themed articles:

·        Heroes of the Holocaust & Their Stories of Courage 2

·        Famous Holocaust Survivors

·        Six Classic Holocaust Literatures

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.