An ethnic German and Catholic, Oskar Schindler was a ruthless industrialist and a member of the Nazi party. Yet despite the foreboding bio, Schindler risked it all to rescue more than 1,000 Jews from deportation to Auschwitz during World War II.
Why did he help? In a 1964 interview he said, “The persecution of Jews in the General Government in Polish territory gradually worsened in its cruelty. In 1939 and 1940, they were forced to wear the Star of David and were herded together and confined in ghettos. In 1941 and 1942, this unadulterated sadism was fully revealed. And then a thinking man, who had overcome his inner cowardice, simply had to help. There was no other choice.”
Schindler died in Germany, broke and virtually unknown, in 1974. Many of the people he helped and their descendents financed the transfer of his body for burial in Israel, his final wish. In 1993, the United States Holocaust Memorial Council posthumously presented the Museum's Medal of Remembrance to Schindler.
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