I have been home for the last few days, recuperating from a recent illness. Today, I watched Schindler's List for probably the twelfth time. It is a very powerful movie about a topic that most of us know a great deal about from the various TV specials and books that have been authored about the Holocaust over the last sixty years. The New Jersey State Core Curriculum has a Holocaust Study unit in the curriculum itself. However, that curriculum was not there when I was in high school. The first I learned about the Holocaust was when I was a sophomore in high school and found a book by Rudolph Vrba, a Holocaust survivor, titled I Cannot Forgive. I was amazed by what I read in that book. Amazed and horrified. After all, my father fought in World War II. He was on a minesweeper that took part in the Invasion at Normandy. I was born four months after Japan surrendered in August, 1945. Yet, I never heard anyone speak about the dozens of concentration camps that spotted the European landscape only a few years before.
Over the years, I viewed, read and learned about this abomination in human history, and tried to grapple with what could have motivated a people to put ten million people to death, people who had done nothing them. So when I first saw Schindler's List, it was not a new experience even though it was a very powerful one. The story of Oskar Schindler fascinated me in a way none of the previous information I learned had. Here was an ethnic German, and a member of the Nazi Party, who seemed to turn from what his country's policy had been to the Jews, and took a different path. Oskar Schindler was a womanizer, an alcoholic and a man that was addicted to the "good life." He was an industrialist who was more than willing to take advantage of the bad fortune of the Jews to absorb Jewish money to increase his own fortune. Jews, who once owned their own businesses, were now absorbed into Schindler's future, their money financing Shindler's industry, their bodies working in his factories.
As I learned about this story, I looked for something to explain what would make a crass materialist and opportunist change his whole focus in the middle of a war to transform himself from a materialist to a humanitarian. What would motivate a Nazi Party member to defy his country's policy of the racial extermination of a people to help that people to survive at the cost of his own fortune. His past did not indicate that he had the profile of a hero, yet a hero he was for he ended up saving, at the risk of his life and at the expense of everything he owned or had formally held dear, almost 1,300 people. What made him do that? Did he have what some call a "Damascus moment", a reference to Saul, a Roman citizen and persecutor of the Christians, to Paul, a Christian saint? If so, what was the motivation? When was the moment? History doesn't tell us. He just did it.
The writer Herbert Steinhouse, who interviewed Schindler in 1948 at the behest of some of the surviving Schindlerjuden (Schindler's Jews), wrote:
Oskar Schindler's exceptional deeds stemmed from just that elementary sense of decency and humanity that our sophisticated age seldom sincerely believes in. A repentant opportunist saw the light and rebelled against the sadism and vile criminality all around him. The inference may be disappointingly simple, especially for all amateur psychoanalysts who would prefer the deeper and more mysterious motive that may, it is true, still lie unprobed and unappreciated. But an hour with Oskar Schindler encourages belief in the simple answer. Wikapedia, the free encyclopedia
Whenever or however he made that decision, he made it none the less. And that decision was made at an immense expense in treasure, the real risk of his own life, and the peril of his future. That decision saved almost 1,300 people to live to be over 10,000 today. That decision made it possible for the state of Israel to declare a German, a member of the Nazi Party a "righteous gentile" and allow him to be buried in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish state, where Jews from all over the world leave a stones on his grave, year after year, as a tribute to his courage in making it. And that is the decision that fascinates me. For in a world that seems to be getting more selfish and greedy every year, here was a man that, in perilous times, was able to make a decision against his own self interest, and at the peril of his own life, to "save the world entire" for over 10,000 people.
That decision that Oscar Schindler made over sixty years ago, makes me believe that making decisions like his are a part of our humanity. It is that belief that gives me hope that each one of us can get beyond our baser instincts to choose to be righteous ourselves.
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