Activity 10: What motivated the rescuers?

Oskar Schindler

Oskar Schindler saved the 1,200 Jews who worked in his factory in Krakow from being sent to Auschwitz.  He already had a large number of Jews working in his factory, but when he discovered that Jews from the nearby Plaszow camp were to be deported to Auschwitz, he compiled his famous ‘list’ to rescue as many as he possibly could and found them all ‘jobs’.

At first glance, however, Oskar Schindler would appear to have been a most unlikely candidate to risk his lives to save others.  He had been a member of the Nazi party since 1938, a German intelligence agent and had associated with a number of leading Nazis in order to further his business interests.  He initially employed Jews to work in his enamelware factory in Krakow because it was cheap to do so.  He was also a drunkard and a womaniser.  After the war ended, he was unable to hold down a job and was frequently in debt.

One of the Jews Schindler saved, Moshe Bejski, who went on to become an Israeli Supreme Court Judge, recognised all Schindler’s failings but also said about him, “Schindler was a very complex person.  Schindler was a good human being.  He was against evil.  He acted spontaneously.  He was adventurous, someone who took risks, but I’m sure he enjoyed taking them.  He did things because people asked him to do them.”

In the late 1960s, Bejski asked Schindler why he had done what he did.  Schindler replied, “I knew the people who worked for me.  When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings”.
   

Charles Coward, the “Count of Auschwitz”

Charles Coward was a professional British soldier.  He was captured and escaped many times during the war.  Eventually, he was imprisoned near Auschwitz extermination camp in Poland, where he was the International Red Cross liaison for British prisoners of war in the area.  Whilst a prisoner of war, Coward did his best to sabotage the German war effort whenever possible.

Coward once witnessed the arrival of a trainload of Jews at Auschwitz, followed by their ‘selection’ for either slave labour or the gas chambers.  His biographer has identified this as one of the spurs that made Charles Coward try to rescue Jews.

One of the most bizarre methods that Coward devised to rescue Jews was when he bribed a German guard to provide him with three corpses of Jews who had died whilst at work, as frequently happened.  Coward then arranged an elaborate plot to exchange these three corpses for three relatively healthy Jews in order to help them escape.  Every night around 200 Jews who were deemed to be no longer fit for work were marched from Auschwitz to the gas chambers at Birkenau camp.  The three healthy Jews secreted themselves among this group and then inconspicuously jumped into a ditch at the side of the road.  The three corpses were then scattered on the road to give the impression to the Nazis that they had died on the march.  Coward carried out this plot on numerous occasions.  Estimates of how many Jews he saved altogether range from 400-800.

Coward always insisted that he hadn’t done anything special.  In 1953, he testified at a trial in Germany of a damages suit brought against the chemical company IG Farben who had used slave labourers from Auschwitz.  The German judges at the trial commended his moral courage and wrote, “He did this for the mere reason he and the prisoners were fellow human beings”.