The
Schindler Jews were protected and saved by Oskar
Schindler. In those years, millions of Jews died in camps like
Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz, but Schindler's Jews
miraculously survived right up to 1944.
Schindler bribed the Nazis to get food and better treatment for
his Jews during a time when one of the most civilized nations of
the world was capable of systematic mass-murder.
When the Germans were beaten back on the East Front, Plaszow and
its satellite camps were dissolved and closed. Schindler had no
illusions - desperately he exerted his influence on his contacts
in the military and industrial circles in Crakow and Warsaw and
finally went to Berlin to save his Jews from a certain death. With
his life as the stakes, he employed all his powers of persuasion,
he bribed uninhibitedly, fought, begged.
Where no one would have believed it possible, Oskar Schindler
succeeded. He was granted permission to move his factory from
Plaszow to Brunnlitz in occupied Czechoslovakia and furthermore,
unheard of before, take all his workers - his Schindler Jews -
with him. In this way, the 1,098 workers who had been written on
Schindler's list in connection with the removal avoided sharing
the fate of the other 25,000 men, women and children of Plaszow
who were sent without mercy to extermination in the gas chambers
of Auschwitz, only 60 kilometers from Plaszow.
Until the liberation of spring, 1945, Oskar Schindler used all
means at his disposal to ensure the safety of his Jews. He spent
every pfennig he had, even Emilie Schindler's jewels were sold, to
buy food, clothes, and medicine. He set up a secret sanatorium in
the factory with medical equipment purchased on the black market.
Emilie Schindler looked after the sick. Those few who did not survive
were given a fitting Jewish burial in a hidden graveyard -
established and paid for by Schindler.
Later accounts have revealed that Oskar Schindler spent something like 4
million German marks keeping the Schindler Jews out of Auschwitz -
an enormous sum of money for those times.
- Louis Bülow
www.auschwitz.dk
www.deathcamps.info
www.shoah.dk
www.annefrank.dk
www.oskarschindler.com
Links:
Yad
Vashem
The Jewish Student Online Research Center
The Nizkor Project
The Simon Wiesenthal Center
A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust
A - THE - World War 2 Portal
Aktion Reinhard Camps
Cybrary of the Holocaust
War Crimes and Genocide
The Einsatzgruppen
Fortunoff Video Archive - Yale University
The Holocaust History Project
The Kindertransport Organization Home Page |
