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PACE 12 THE SOUTHERN ISRAELITE December 24, 1982
First Affiliated Securities, Inc.
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Michael Senator
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'iB FRANK AAA'S .Art
•"WaiC
R£S7A0RAN7
presents
An Authentic, Traditional
Chinese Banquet
during
New Year’s
Dec. 24-Jan, 2
Soup: Dragon & Phoenix soup
Appetizer: Four Combination Cold Plate Deluxe
Main Courses: Peking Duck
Mandarin Shredded Beef
Orange Chicken
Four Seasons Vegetables
Shrimp / Tomato Sauce
Fish Fillet in Hunan Sauce
Dessert: Glazed Banana & Apple or Fruit Platter
The above menu is just for your reference. We honor
special requests.
Reservations required • minimum of 8 people
'16 per person excluding drinks. No M S G. in our food.
i All dishes prepared personally by Frank Ma)
6280 Roswell Rd
Sandy Springs
252-8672
257-9046
‘Schindler’s List’
Story of an unlikely Holocaust hero
by Joseph Cohen
With the passing of the years, I
seem to have a harder time reading
Holocaust literature. It may be
that my increasing disinclination is
a natural result of some decades of
continuing awareness of the
tragedy—it is an accretion which
those of us who remember the
event historically must always
carry — and of more than
v casional familiarity with the
extensive literature that has
developed around it.
Yet, as much as I would seek to
escape from it, there is no escape.
A few months ago, I found myself
absorbed in George Steiner’s
“Portage to San Christobal of
A.H.,” and from time to time
the lines from Dannie Abse’s poem
“No More Mozart” pop into my
head: “The German streets
tonight/Are soaped in moonlight./
The streets of Germany are
clean/like the hands of Lady
MacBeth.” And while I ponder the
inescapability of reading
Holocaust literature, I go on
reading it. I have just finished
Thomas Keneally’s “Schindler’s
List” (Simon and Schuster,
$16.95), and it is sufficiently
compelling to urge it upon others.
It is a remarkably dramatic
story. Keneally exploits all of its
dramatic potential within the
discipline that comes from having
successfully authored 13 novels.
While this is a factual account, it is
packaged as a novel though
Keneally is careful to maintain the
veracity expected both of the
documentary and of the
biography.
It seems astonishing that Oskar
Schindler’s name is not as familiar
to us as are those of Simon
Wiesenthal and Raoul Wallenberg.
Perhaps it is not all that
astonishing since we still know
very little about Wilfred Israel, a
German Jew who also managed to
save many Jewish lives. There may
be others, too. At at time when
Wallenberg’s exploits in saving
Hungarian Jews are well known
and Simon Wiesenthal’s efforts in
tracking down Nazi war criminals
have become legendary, it is well to
place in their company yet another
who achieved the impossible.
Oskar Schindler was a German
from the Sudetenland, Catholic-
bred yet non-observant, a
businessman and industrialist, a
hedonist, an adulterer and
womanizer (though he never took
advantage of his Jewish charges),
an adept at large-scale bribery, a
hard and steady drinker, an
influence peddler, a war profiteer,
a black marketeer, and a boon
companion of high-ranking S.S.
officers. He seems the least likely
person in all of Central Europe
during World War II to develop a
passion for saving Polish Jews
from the gas chambers; and if some
renowned writer indulging his
wildest fancies had created a figure
like Schindler and invented the
story of his organization of a slave-
labor camp for the protection of
Jews, no one would attach any
credibility to so unbelievable a
fiction.
Still, this is what Schindler did,
and for it his name is now in the
Avenue of the Righteous People at
the approaches to Yad Vashem,
and he lies buried in Jerusalem
among the honored dead.
Schindler began his industrial
career as a shrewd opportunist.
His family had been in the farm
machinery business when he was
growing up, and he had a mania
for fast sports cars. Not only did he
know machinery, he was a natural-
born salesman. Sensing the
economic and political advantages
of identifying with the S.S. early,
he began to build friendships
among its emerging leaders.
On the heels of the German
army as it rampaged its way
through Poland, Schindler
surfaced in Cracow to go into
business. He found an enamelware
factory in bankruptcy and took it
over. There was a fortune to be
made through war contracts, and
Schindler needed large sums of
money not only to maintain
himself in the style of a rich and
profligate industrialist but to
secure through bribes the contracts
he wanted.
it was a perfect setup: an
unstable society which encouraged
manipulation, widespread greed,
plenty of slave labor from the
Cracow ghetto, ample raw
materials for making pots, pans
and other enamelware, easily
bribable German bureaucrats in
low and high places, and a cadre of
bright, dependable Jews to provide
information and counsel, enabling
Schindler to stay one step ahead of
the cumbersome but nonetheless
deadly bureaucracy.
Without any clear motivation or
understanding of his actions,
Schindler became fiercely
protective of his approximately
1,300 Jewish laborers. As the
sadistically brutal S.S. commanders
began the systematic decimation
and destruction of the large Jewish
population in Cracow and the
surrounding area, Schindler, at
lavish parties, and with car trunks
filled with liquor, caviar and other
unobtainable delicacies, and, in
time, with packets of diamonds,
or, when, necessary, through
threatening to or actually writing
intimidating letters to the
strategically placed German
officials, prevailed upon the
liquidators of the Jewish
population to leave his work force
alone. He constructed barracks on
the factory grounds and moved his
work force into them, denying the
S.S. guards access to his
“Schindlerjuden.”
It was not simply a matter of
feathering his own nest. Time and
again, he put himself into extreme
jeopardy to save individual Jews
from summary execution. He was
arrested three times, interrogated
and investigated, saved only by his
earlier foresight in establishing
powerful contacts and keeping
them well-oiled.
Perhaps his most astonishing
feat was the complete removal of
his factory and work force from
Cracow to Moravia when the
Russians were approaching and
Continued next page.
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