Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler

What is your paradigm of a hero? Is it someone who is a comic strip hero? Or is it someone who has a remarkable talent for a sport? Perhaps the person you have in mind is a person who has impeccable integrity. Oskar Schindler would not fall under any of these categories. He was a crook, an egotist and a member of the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party- a Nazi. Even so, he single-handedly saved more than 1,000 Polish Jews, a lot more than any other person in the course of the war. He was outraged at his own people, yet he was no saint. He was a walking oxymoron (Roberts 10).

"By Schindler, we were hungry, but not starving. We were cold, but not freezing. We had fear, but were not beaten" ( A Schindlerjude ,Brecher page xviii). When you are thankful for something, these are probably not the first words you would use. However, this is about the Holocaust, where starvation was very common. Schindler, who was born in 1908 in the Austro-Hungarian town of Zwittau, saved at least 1,000 people. In 1919 the Nazi Party was formed. In 1928, Schindler married Emile Pelze. During this time he was a Nazi. Even though she is his wife, she doesn't play a big part of Schindler's life, which shows one of Schindler's many faults. He showed devotion to her and all of the Ð''others', but it was to his Jews that he showed the most compassion to (Jack L. Roberts, page 8-10).

I believe that personal faults do not decide if you are a hero or not. I strongly believed that, as demonstrated by Schindler, your public actions decide this. He was very persuasive, enabling him to find his own way. Oskar Schindler was part of the Nazi party, the very group of people that he later fought against. He was a heavy drinker and an egotist, a profiteer, a crook, an opportunist, and a womanizer. "But in the end, to more than eleven hundred Polish Jews none of that mattered. To these survivors Oskar Schindler was simply, yet miraculously, a savior" (Roberts 10). After Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1939, Schindler moved to Krakow, Poland. This became the center of the new government. Because he saw many business opportunities there for eager and energetic men, he opened a factory that made enamelware for the war. He used the cheapest labor source he could find-the unemployed Jewish people. At first he paid them small wages- he thought this was only fair, but later the SS forced him to hand over the Jewish people's wages. Schindler was clearly upstanding to the Jews, unlike his Nazi friends. Schindler received an apartment that was taken from a Jewish man. Oskar later found this man and gave him enough money to flee Poland.

Many say that even though he was anything but a moral man, but he did have compassion. His inner turmoil has been described by Reverend Moshe Taube, "I feel that his drinking and his other vices helped him numb the rage against his own people, whom he saw committing atrocities and degreeing genocide" (Roberts 12). Oskar was heroic because he stood up to the majority, he used his cunning and his wit to charm those that he needed, and was loved by those who looked up to him. None of these traits were the traits that any German Nazi had. "I think he was a gambler and loved to outwit the SS," says Rena Finder. "In the beginning it was a game. It was fun at first, He joined the [Nazi party] to make money. But he had no stomach for the killing. He enjoyed the wheeling and dealing and doing outrageous thingsÐ'--living on the edge. But then he realized if he didn't save us, nobody would." (Brecher page xxxii)

Oskar Schindler,