Oskar Schindler's Accomplishments

It all started in Zwittau, an industrial city part of what is now the Czech Republic, on April 28, 1908. The baby was Oskar Schindler, the son of a farm machinery manufacturer. His family came from Germany and practiced Catholicism, he drank and traded on the black market, the exact opposite of what you might expect a Jewish savior to look like. And yet he was the reason why eleven hundred Jews survived the terrible events of World War II. Even though Schindler wasn't always a great man, he became one of the best when he was faced with the horrors of the Holocaust.

His life before the war showed him to have no obvious traits of a courageous hero. Oskar's was mostly raised by his father, an uneducated alcoholic, as his mother died young. Their

They forced them into a ghetto, not letting anyone in or out, but Oskar's workers got blue stickers allowing them to pass through the gates. Schindler was able to add a munitions section to make antitank shells so that his factory would be "essential" to the war effort(US Holocaust Memorial Museum). In early 1943, the Jews were forcibly removed from the ghetto and relocated to Plaszow. Amon Goeth, the camp's overseeing officer, tried to move all factory jobs into the camp, but Schindler resisted. He convinced Goeth, through bribes in the form of alcohol he secured on the black market, to allow him to create a subcamp of Plaszow right at his factory for his workers. Not only that, but he would pay to build the camp and feed and care for the Jews at his own expense. Such a deal could not be refused, and the camp went up quickly. Schindler's Jews knew just how lucky they were, with good meals, no guards inside the camp, and no officer brutalizing them, they had found something truly incredible. A "paradise", they said, a paradise has sprung up in the midst of

By 1944, he was forced to use expensive bribes just to keep the Jewish workers in his employ. Near the end of the year, German officials ordered the closing of his camp and Schindler was offered a weapons factory in Czechoslovakia. The problem? Now he had to pick who to take with him. With the help of his associates, he created the infamous Schindler's list that named more than one thousand Jews from his factory and Plaszow who would be moved to his new factory as workers. A total of seven hundred men and three hundred women were on the original list, with an additional hundred arriving later. There was one scare early on, as one train carrying the workers brought only the men and sent women and children to Auschwitz, one of the horrific Nazi death camps. Oskar used a bag of diamonds to bribe officials for the release of these workers, then secretly nursed them back to health along with his wife. Schindler's second factory was open for seven months and produced just one wagonload of live ammunition, and all other weapons he sold were bought from other manufacturers and passed off as his own(Gale