THE RIGHTEOUS GENTILES

He who saves one life, it is as if he saves the world entire.

-- Jewish Talmud

In Poland, the setting of the Holocaust, cities where tens of thousands of Jews had lived were now wholly devoid of even a hint of Jewish life. So great was the destruction and so immense the human cruelty that few scholars gave a thought to the rescuers, a relative handful of Gentiles (non-Jews) who protected a relative handful of Jews from Nazi annihilation.

Rescue was the exception, destruction the rule. As sociologist Nechama Tec has observed, "It is only natural and expected that those who studied the tragic events focused first on the typical experience rather than the rare exception." It was not until the 1980's that the stories of the rescuers began to attract wide attention.

The rescuers themselves did not publicize their actions. They were, generally speaking, a most unassuming lot and did not view their actions as "heroic." In addition, anti-Semitism persisted in Europe after World War II, and it was perhaps more intense after the war than it had been before. Jewish life had little value for six long years. Many of the rescuers feared alienation and even death at the hands of those anti-Semitic countrymen who viewed their actions dimly.

The moral outrage that today accompanies the Holocaust is very much a latter-day reaction.

YAD VASHEM

The Righteous Gentiles cited in Hasidic teachings were mostly poor, simple people, but "the world is supported by them . . . the vessels into which the suffering of the whole world flows . . . If even one of them were not here, the world would perish with suffering."

In 1963, Yad Vashem honored its first rescuer, Ludwig Woerl, a German political prisoner who helped Jewish inmates at Auschwitz-Birkenau. During the Second World War, seven thousand Jews survived in Germany and in Austria, hiding with the aid of Gentile benefactors. Yad Vashem has honored roughly one hundred Germans and Austrians for their rescue efforts, Oskar Schindler among them.

Schindler was responsible for the rescue of 1,200 Jews, referred to as the "Schindlerjuden" (Schindler Jews). This was a very large number of Jews saved by anyone, but it is important to view Schindler's rescue efforts in perspective. Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, quite accurately has written, "Oskar was only a minor god of rescue." Similarly, Danka Dresner, one of the Schindlerjuden, 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 vast majority of the Gentiles honored by Yad Vashem have been Poles and Dutchmen. In all, more than 11,000 Gentiles have received the distinction of Righteous Gentile, a small percentage of the number who were actually involved in Jewish rescue. It should be emphasized, however, that significantly less than one percent of the non-Jewish population in Nazi-occupied Europe embarked upon the path of Jewish rescue. Many people were afraid to help the Jews, knowing well the Nazi penalties. Many were indifferent to the Jewish destruction. Many were delighted by it.

The term Righteous Gentile is controversial in itself. In Poland, where three million Polish Catholics perished during the war in addition to the three million Polish Jews who were exterminated, a great number of people resent the implication that Poles who failed to help beleaguered Jews were somehow not Righteous. Indignantly, the Poles have turned the argument around: The Jews did not have the "right" to ask to be rescued; after all, the request implicitly endangered the Gentiles and their families. Thus does recrimination fill the void left by the destruction.

In Poland, the Nazis made it very clear that death was the punishment for any Gentile who assisted Jews; death for the rescuer, and death for "abettors and accomplices." In western Europe, the Nazi policy was different. The Gentile caught sheltering a Jew was sent to a concentration camp where there was the possibility of survival. In Poland, the Nazis had no inhibitions: The Gentile was hung in the town square, or put up against a wall and shot. The list of those executed, with red borders, was publicized on the street.

Petitions for recognition of Righteous Gentiles generally come from the Jews who were rescued, although surviving witnesses and documents are accepted. "Ordinary acts of charity" are not considered. Those who profited materially from the rescue of Jews are rejected, even if they accepted payment to defray the expenses of hiding a Jew.

The exact wording of Yad Vashem's requirement to be honored as a Righteous Gentile is as follows:

Extending help in saving a life; endangering one's own life; absence of reward, monetary and otherwise, and similar considerations which make the rescuer's deeds stand out above and beyond what can be termed ordinary help.

Yad Vashem honors the Righteous Gentiles with a medal which quotes, in Hebrew and in French, a verse from the Jewish Talmud: "He who saves one life, it is as if he has saved the entire world."

The Righteous Gentiles are invited to plant a carob tree along the Avenue of the Righteous which leads to Yad Vashem's museum (and memorial) in Jerusalem. A plaque with the rescuer's name is affixed to the tree. Rescuers in dire financial straits are awarded a small stipend.

Yad Vashem honored Oskar Schindler as a Righteous Gentile on April 28, 1962, his fifty-fourth birthday. When Schindler died in October, 1974, in West Germany, his wish of being buried in Israel was honored. He was laid to rest at the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.

On his tombstone are written the words in Hebrew: "The unforgettable life savior of 1,200 oppressed Jews."

BACKGROUND OF THOMAS KENEALLY'S SCHINDLER'S LIST

The film Schindler's List, by Stephen Spielberg, is based on the "docu-novel" by Thomas Keneally, an Australian novelist.

In the author's note at the beginning of the book, Keneally recalled the day in 1980 when he visited a luggage store in Beverly Hills, California.

The owner of the store, Leopold Page, was a Schindlerjuden, that is, a Jew saved by Oskar Schindler in a world far removed from the blue skies of southern California. In the former world, Leopold Page answered to the name of Poldek Pfefferberg.

"It was beneath Pfefferberg's shelves of imported Italian leather goods that I first heard of Oskar Schindler," Keneally remembered. For thirty years, Pfefferberg had tried to interest every writer who entered his shop with the story of Oskar Schindler. Until Keneally, nobody was interested. Indeed, until the 1980's the Holocaust interested few people in the United States, least of all in Hollywood.

Keneally published his book, Schindler's List, in 1982. Twelve years later, when the film Schindler's List made its remarkable debut, Pfefferberg told an interviewer, "A single person, a human being, can change the world."

To research the story of Oskar Schindler, Keneally interviewed fifty Schindlerjuden in seven nations. He read the documents and the testimonies at Yad Vashem in Israel (and elsewhere), consulted Schindler's postwar friends as well as his wartime associates "who can still be reached," and visited Poland, the setting of the Nazi genocide and of Schindler's efforts.

In his "Author's Note," Keneally writes, "It has sometimes been necessary to make reasonable constructs of conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. But most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindlerjuden, of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar's acts of outrageous rescue."

Keneally also offers thanks to those who "gave interviews and generously contributed information through letters and documents." The first person Keneally lists is "Frau Emilie Schindler," Schindler's wife. In the book, however, the role of Emilie Schindler and her influence upon her husband in the rescue of Jews are touched upon only lightly. She appears to have been quoted one time not from an interview Keneally conducted with her but from a 1973 West German documentary on her husband. The story of Emilie Schindler remains largely untold.

With unconcealed bitterness after the film opened, she said, "The Jews he saved, me he abandoned."

Pfefferberg, who accompanied Keneally on the trip to Poland, was the author's guiding spirit. The book is dedicated both to Pfefferberg and to Schindler. Keneally also acknowledges the help of two other Schindlerjuden: Mosche Bejski and Mieczyslaw Pemper.

During the war, Bejski had been an expert forger of German documents, a skill of inestimable value. He later became an Israeli supreme court justice and (to turn a full circle) is today the director of the special commission of Righteous Gentiles at Yad Vashem.

A BRIEF CHRONOLOGY OF OSKAR SCHINDLER

April 28, 1908 - Oskar Schindler is born in present-day Czechoslovakia

1914-1918 - World War I; Czechoslovakia is established November 1918

1927 - Schindler marries Emilie after a six week courtship

1935 - Schindler family business goes bankrupt; father abandons mother

September 1938 - Munich Conference, Sudetenland ceded to Nazi Germany

September 1, 1939 - Nazi Germany invades Poland

September 17, 1939 - Soviet Union invades Poland; Poland partitioned between Nazi Germany and Soviet Union

October 26, 1939 - Krakow becomes capital of German-occupied Poland, the so-called General Government

November 1O, 1939 - Krakow Jews forced to wear blue-white armband with Star of David

December 1939 - Schindler purchases enamel factory

March 20, 1941 - Germans establish ghetto in suburb of Krakow

June 1942 - Germans begin construction of labor camp at Plaszow

June 2, 1942 - First deportations of Jews from Krakow to Belzec death camp

October 28, 1942 - Second wave of deportations to Belzec

March 13, 1943 - Final liquidation of ghetto

September 1944 - Schindler's factory is closed; Schindlerjuden are taken to Plaszow

October 1944 - Schindler prepares "list" of Jews he takes to Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia

November 1944 - Schindler rescues Jewish women from Auschwitz-Birkenau

May 8, 1945 - Second World War ends; Brunnlitz camp liberated following day

April 28, 1962 - Schindler named Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem

October 9, 1974 - Schindler dies in Frankfurt, West Germany; buried in Israel

OSKAR SCHINDLER
BEFORE THE SECOND WORLD WAR

It is not immediately easy to find in Oskar's family history the origins of his impulse toward rescue.

--Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List

Oskar Schindler was born on April 28, 1908, in Zwittau, an industrial city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was baptized in the Catholic church. Today the city of Schindler's birth is Zvitava in the province of Moravia of the Czech Republic.

At the beginning of the 16th century, the Schindler family emigrated to Zwittau from Vienna, the capital of the Austrian (Habsburg) Empire. The region, heavily populated by Germans, became known as the Sudetenland, after the nearby Sudeten Mountains.

Schindler's father, Hans, was the owner of a factory which produced farm machinery, and Oskar and his sister, Elfriede, were raised in privileged circumstances, a fact of considerable importance.

The typical young man in the regimented Austro-Hungarian Empire had to follow societal rules if he expected to land a job after his schooling. But Oskar Schindler was not typical. He was guaranteed a position with the family business--whether or not he co mplied with societal rules. This economic security gave Schindler patrician self-assurance and, perhaps, a willingness to flaunt the rules he believed did not apply to him. In a word, Schindler's privileged upbringing allowed him to be different.

Schindler's mother, Louisa, who he adored, was a deeply religious women, forever "redolent of incense" from her frequent visits to the Catholic church. His father, Hans, preferred sipping cognac in the local coffee house to attending services at the Catho lic church, a preference he bequeathed to his son, who spoke little of God. The extent of the elder Schindler's political involvement seems to have been lighting a candle each year to honor the birth of the Austro-Hungarian Kaiser (or Emperor) Franz Josef , beloved by the Jews of his empire.

As Austrians living amidst a subject people (the Czechs), the Schindler family ranked high among the social and economic elite of Zwittau. Schindler's early life was pleasant, at least from the material point of view. His father gave him an extravagant bi rthday gift; a powerful motorcycle. The teenage Schindler entered several racing contests. He was adventuresome, reckless, and a daredevil. A tall young man with charm and good looks, he was a womanizer of the first order, even after he married Emilie Sch indler in 1927.

Emilie was educated in a Catholic convent, and, like Schindler's mother, she was deeply religious. She and Schindler met in 1927 when he made a sales trip to her father's farm. At the time Schindler was selling electric motors for the family business.

It is not surprising that Schindler took a fancy to Emilie. Her early photographs show a beautiful woman. Her widowed father, a "gentleman farmer" and a man of wealth, disapproved of his daughter's marriage to Oskar Schindler, knowing well his reputatio n. Schindler's father also opposed the marriage, believing his son too young and the betrothal too sudden.

After a six week courtship, the two were married. At a young age, Schindler was long accustomed to getting what he wanted. Emilie's father refused to give Schindler the traditional dowry, a bitter point with the son-in-law. The marriage became rocky aft er a short while, as Schindler resumed his drinking and womanizing.

Oskar Schindler and Emilie did not have children, but Schindler had two children outside of the marriage.

If Schindler's youth had been one of privileges, the privileges did not include a warm and loving relationship between his parents. In 1935, the Schindler factory went bankrupt due to the worldwide depression triggered by Wall Street's collapse in 1929. J ust as economic disaster struck the family business, Schindler's father abandoned his wife. Schindler's mother died not long after his father left home.

The family business in ruins, Schindler became a salesman for another machinery company, a job that took him to nearby Poland. Though raised in privileged circumstances, young Oskar had made little of his life. He was known as a delightful personality, b ut not a serious person. The thought of work made him tired. He slept late, had a roving eye for beautiful women, and could not decline a drink.

WORLD WAR I

It was a stunning reversal of fortune. Oskar Schindler was ten years old.

The German minority in Czechoslovakia was accorded limited cultural and political rights by the Prague government, but resentment towards the new Czechoslovak state was always present. It could not have been otherwise. The lord does not become a subject with grace and equanimity. The best jobs in government now went to the Czechs as formerly the best jobs had gone to the Germans. The hard feelings between the two people intensified following the world depression in 1929 and Hitler's seizure of power in n eighboring Germany in 1933.

THE RISE OF HITLER

Out of this dissatisfaction and bitterness emerged the Sudeten German Party under Konrad Henlein, himself a Sudeten German. Henlein, later one of the most brutal Nazis, was a disciple of Hitler and took his orders directly from the Fuehrer's chancellery i n Berlin. Oskar Schindler, who at the time was working as a salesman in the Sudetenland, joined the Sudeten German Party. His finely tailored suits now sported a Henlein badge in the lapel.

The author Keneally suggests that Schindler joined the Henlein party less for political reasons than for reasons of personal advancement. After all, very few Sudeten Germans did not join, or at least support, Henlein's party. "All things being equal," Ken eally writes, "when you went in to see a German company manager wearing the (Henlein) badge, you got the order."

The reader of Keneally's book might be led to believe that Schindler was interested not so much in politics as he was in profit; that he was an opportunist of the first order. However close to the mark, the argument too easily dismisses the very genuine appeal Hitler exerted upon the Sudeten Germans, Schindler included.

There was a great deal about Hitler's program that resonated in the soul of the Sudeten German. Hitler promised to restore the Reich to its former glory. He pledged to end unemployment and usher in a new era of economic prosperity and security. He vowed t o destroy the communists. And he offered a scapegoat for Germany's problems: The Jews. It was a rare Sudeten German who did not respond to Hitler's message.

Schindler's wife, Emilie, was one of them. She despised the Nazis from the start. According to Keneally, she believed "simply that the man (Hitler) would be punished for making himself God." Schindler's father also despised the Nazis, but because he sens ed that they would lose the war Hitler intended to launch.

His silent dissent was more practical than moral.

THE MUNICH CONFERENCE

On September 30, 1938, Hitler signed the Munich Pact with representatives of England and France, which forced Czechoslovakia to cede the German populated Sudetenland to Nazi Germany. The two Western democracies, which had been allies of democratic Czecho slovakia, sought to "appease" Hitler's ambitions by abandoning the Central European nation. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain described this as "peace in our time, peace with honor." Ultimately, appeasement failed, and the term "Munich" has come to symbolize betrayal.

When the German army occupied the Sudetenland, the local German populace greeted it rapturously. The Czechs and the Jews of the region, however, were less enthusiastic. Almost immediately they were expelled and their property confiscated. The Nazi Aktion was conducted with characteristic brutality, and Schindler, according to Keneally, was repulsed by the Nazis' behavior.

But moral indignation did not interfere with opportunity. After all, he quickly joined the Nazi Party and began wearing the Nazi swastika on his lapel. In the late autumn of 1938, Schindler joined the Abwehr (German military intelligence). Schindler was an ideal operative, a bon-vivant who could strike up a conversation with anyone, preferably in a bar. He travelled frequently to Poland on business and returned with information about Poland's military preparedness. It is noteworthy that Schindler's Abweh r membership excused him from active military service.

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939

In the early morning hours of September 1, 1939, the Second World War began with the German attack on Poland. The Poles, valiant but disorganized, their army utterly antiquated, were quickly overwhelmed by the German tactics of "blitzkreig" or "lightning war." This new type of warfare involved close coordination between the German tanks (panzers) and the air force (Luftwaffe). The effect was devastating in Poland, as it would be a year later in France and two years later on the steppes of Russia.

On September 6, 1939, German armored forces captured the southern Polish city of Krakow, the ancient seat of Polish kings. Shortly thereafter the Nazis established in Krakow their government for Nazi-occupied Poland, known as the General-Government. Hans Frank, Hitler's longtime lawyer, became Reichsfuehrer of the General-Government and immediately issued a decree for the "voluntary departure" of all but the "economically indispensable" Jews. He could not abide the thought of Germans breathing the same air as Jews.

In the wake of the German army, Oskar Schindler arrived in Krakow. A Sudeten-German businessman, a member of the Nazi Party, and a failure in life, Schindler was determined to reverse his fortunes in Nazi-occupied Poland.

He was thirty-one years old.

Continue or
Return to Index