22 Elul – Krakow & Oskar Schindler – 1939
On this day in 1939, the Nazis took control of the town of Krakow in Poland. The city surrendered immediately avoiding the destruction that befell other Polish cities like Warsaw, Bialystok, and Levov.
Krakow had been a strong Jewish community since the 13th century and was home to many great rabbis including R’ Moshe Isserles better known as the Rama who wrote the Ashkenazi glosses to the Code of Jewish Law.
In 1939, there were around 70,000 Jews in the city. In May 1940 the Nazis forced mass deportation leaving behind 15,000 Jews in the city’s overcrowded Jewish ghetto where everyone was crammed into 3,000 rooms. One of the many German businessmen who took advantage of the slave labour from the Krakow ghetto was Oskar Schindler.
Oskar Schindler at first sought cheap labour in coming to the ghetto. Eventually, he became disgusted with the actions of his own Nazi party. He used his connections and every penny of his fortune to save 1,200 Jews during the war by employing them in his factory and relentlessly bribing Nazi officials to leave his workers alone.
By 1958, Schindler was completely destitute, and from that point, until he died in 1974, he was financially supported by Schindler’s Jews; those whom he had saved and their descendants. Schindler is the only member of the Nazi Party buried on Mount Zion in Israel.
Oskar Schindler was the subject of the 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark. The rights to the book were bought by Steven Spielberg in 1983, and 10 years later the movie Schindler’s List was released.