Oskar Schindler by David Crowe

Author:David Crowe [DAVID M . CROWE]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-10T16:00:00+00:00

Oskar responds by slowly emptying a small pouch of six or seven large diamonds on Baer’s desk. As he does this, he reassures Baer: “Allow me to express the reason. I’m not making any judgements about you. It’s that I know in the coming months that we all are going to need portable wealth.”103 Baer responds by telling Oskar that he could have him arrested for this. Oskar explains that he is “protected by powerful friends,” something he is sure the commandant knows.104

Baer now becomes less defensive and tells Oskar, “I do not say I’m accepting them. All I say is I am uncomfortable with them on the table.” As Baer slides the precious gems into the top drawer of his desk, he offers Schindler a different group of Jewish women. “I have a shipment coming in tomorrow. I’ll cut you three hundred units from it. New ones. These are fresh. The train comes, we turn it around. These are yours.”105 Needless to say, Oskar will have none of this. “Yes, yes, I understand. I want these.”106 Baer, who now begins to prepare himself a bicarbonate, tells Oskar that he “shouldn’t get stuck on names.”107 Oskar, sitting stone-faced, says nothing. As Baer prepares to drink his bicarbonate, he explains to Schindler, “That’s right, it creates a lot of paperwork.”108

The scene then shifts to the rail lines just inside Birkenau’s archway. The Schindler women are lined up for a final roll call just before they board the train for Brünnlitz. As they move towards the train cars, a male SS guard drags two of the young girls out of line. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Oskar Schindler appears. “Hey, hey, hey,” he shouts, “What are you doing? These are mine. These are my workers. They should be on my train. They are skilled munitions workers. They’re essential, essential girls. Their fingers polish the inside of shell metal casings. How else can I polish the inside of a 45 mm metal casing. You tell me?”109 The dumbfounded guard now shouts, “Back on the train!”110 In the next scene, the women are seen marching slowly into Brünnlitz as their husbands, fathers, and sons peer thankfully through the factory’s windows. Leading them into the camp is their savior, Oskar Schindler.111

The myth of Schindler’s personally saving the women in Auschwitz seems to have begun during the interviews that Oskar did with Martin Gosch and Howard Koch in 1964. According to the written summary of their discussions with Schindler, when Oskar learned that his three hundred women were in Auschwitz, he drove there and told the commandant, “Look, if you give me three hundred other women, I have to begin training them again, and this is pretty late to do this—the war effort needs the things that we are going to make, and you take away from me the women who are already skilled, the women I’ve already trained, and this is going to hurt our production there, so it doesn’t make any sense.” The commandant finally agreed to release the three hundred women to Schindler in return for a modest bribe.

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