⚠️ Historical Documentation Notice
This document is part of a historical archive and is presented for scholarly research and educational purposes.
The content reflects historical perspectives and should be understood within its historical context.
In an episode known as the Golleschau
transport, which is depicted in the book
but not the film, two boxcars arrived in
Brünnlitz filled with Jewish
prisoners, some frozen to death. Schindler
and his wife (right)
were able to save many of the
prisoners.
Amid the chaos, Schindler also tried to accommodate Jewish religious law, getting
SS officers drunk so that Jews could be properly buried.
Mr. Crowe said that the only part of the film that angered him was the ending, in which Schindler flees as the Russians advance. The Jews are shown as defeated, but in fact, Mr. Crowe said, Schindler had created “an armed guerilla group of
Jews.”
“They were armed to the teeth, ready to fight till the death,” he said. Hours after Schindler left, they hung a Jew who worked for the Nazis.
In the film, Schindler gives a speech and breaks into tears because he did not do more. But Mr. Crowe obtained a transcript in which Schindler, always a wily pragmatist, also reminded the Jews of how much he had done for them, possibly to protect himself from prosecution for war crimes.
After the war Schindler was a failure.
He squandered money given to him by the
American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee and moved to Argentina, where he attempted to breed nutria. He then returned to Germany and bought a concrete factory, where workers attacked him for saving Jews during the war. That factory went bankrupt. Schindler continued drinking, and begged Jews he had saved to help him financially. He died from alcoholism and heavy smoking, Mr. Crowe said.
Mordecai Paldiel, director of the Righteous Among the Nations department at Yad Vashem, said the new revelations show that “even people with all these characteristics can do a great, saintly deed.”
“It seems we all have a little angel sitting inside us and just waiting to be allowed to go to the surface, to expose himself,” he said. “A little, saving angel.”
Copyright
2004 The New York Times Company
Our website
dossier on Schilder and the film
Schindler’s List
The src=”/legacy-images/pictures/DISmall.GIF” width=”14″/>
above news item is reproduced without editing other
than typographical Register
your name and address
to go on the Mailing List to receive©
Focal Point
2001 
write to David
Irving