After the war, when asked, the real Schindler would simply say, “There was no choice.” His answer to Moshe Bejski, a former prisoner, was more revealing, perhaps in an unintended way: “If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car, wouldn’t you help him?”
Schindler came to occupied Cracow to make his fortune. Gradually he saw what was happening to the Jews. Simple kindnesses such as handing out extra food turned into his dangerous practice of declaring unqualified Jews as workers essential to the war effort. In autumn 1942, Schindler agreed to a secret meeting with Jewish leaders in Budapest to tell what he knew of impending plans to deport Jews.
He seemed to thrill at such danger. He had a near “manic” attraction to the black market, says Thomas Keneally, author of the book on which the movie is based. Undoubtably, Keneally says, Schindler liked his life in Poland and spent lavishly to keep it going. He was, after all, a slave-camp profiteer. “You add up all the elements–the expediencies and the decency–and you don’t get the sum of what happened,” Keneally says. “Ultimately, he had no motive except the desire to create a haven.”
Schindler seemed lost after the war. He moved to Argentina in 1949 with his wife, Emilie, and his German mistress to start a nutria farm. When it failed, he abandoned both women (today they are close friends) and went back to Germany and more bankruptcies and alcoholism. In 1961 Schindler traveled to Israel. Each year thereafter he spent six weeks in Israel, at the expense of the Schindlerjuden. “When he was here it was easier for us to help him,” says Janek Dresner. The ring made for him from a prisoner’s gold teeth at the end of the war disappeared. “Ah,” Schindler said, “That went to schnapps.” He died in Frankfurt in 1974 at 66.
Some survivors are uncomfortable with any attempt to canonize Schindler. “We owe our lives to him,” says Dr. Danka Dresner Schindel. “But I wouldn’t glorify a German because of what he did to us. There is no proportion.” Emilie once said Schindler had lived an unremarkable life before and after the war. Somehow, in the six years in between, he reacted in remarkable ways to the extraordinary events of his world.
