28 April: Oskar Schindler

Born this date in 1908: Oskar Schindler, the German businessman credited with saving about 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust. 10 things you might not know about the man who inspired Schindler's List.

Schindler's factory in 2004.

1. He was born in Zwittau, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic, part of the area known at the time as Sudetenland. His father, Johann Hans Schindler, owned a farm-machinery factory.
2. As a young man, he worked for his father, but when Oskar married Emilie in 1928 the two fell out. He had a succession of jobs after that.
3. In the early 1930s, Oskar Schindler was a drinker and a womaniser who got arrested several times for being drunk in public.
4. He was a member of the Nazi party, though not because he particularly believed in what they were doing, but because it made good financial and business sense to be on the right side of the people who'd annexed his country.
5. He worked as a spy leading up to the German occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, collecting information about the railways and troop movements to pass on to the German government. This activity got him arrested by the Czech government but he was released under the terms of the Munich Agreement in 1938.
6. In 1939 he bought an enamelware factory in Krakow, Poland, at which most of the employees were Jewish. At first, he kept them safe by bribing Nazi officials with goods from the black market. Somewhere along the line, he went from a man doing all he could to preserve a cheap work force, to someone committed to saving the lives of as many Jews as possible. By the end of the war, he'd spent his entire fortune on bribes.
7. In 1943, the Nazis ordered the final "liquidation" of the Krakow Jewish ghetto, where Schindler's workers lived, and move everyone who lived there into a labour camp, Plaszow. Schindler used his influence to have his factory turned into a sub-camp. He insisted he would run it, and that none of the camp guards would be permitted inside. That meant his workers got better food and accommodation and weren't beaten or tortured.
8. When Plaszow was re-designated as a concentration camp and the workers were to be shipped off to Auschwitz, Schindler stepped in to save his workers again, by convincing the authorities he'd set up a vital munitions factory in Brunnlitz. It was then he was asked by the Nazis to make up his famous list of people he wanted to take with him. He came up with a list of eleven hundred people, including all his employees and a number of others, including three hundred women and children. The women and children were mistakenly shipped to Auschwitz anyway and Schindler again stepped in to save them. He argued that they were as essential to the factory as the men, because they had smaller fingers and could polish the inside of shells. They believed him (though possibly some bribes helped) and the women and children were sent back to Brunnlitz.
9. When the news came that the war was over, Schindler gathered his workers on the factory floor to tell them the good news. He asked them not to seek revenge for what had been done to them, and called for a moment of silence in memory of those who had perished. Before he left to take his chances with the approaching American forces, the workers gave him a letter attesting to his good deeds in case he was captured and needed it to defend himself, and a gold ring made from the bridgework of one of the prisoners, and inscribed in Hebrew with a verse from the Talmud, "He who saves one life, it is as if he saved the entire world."
10. Having spent his fortune on saving people, after the war Schindler suffered a string of failed business ventures including a concrete factory and a farm in Argentina. He never became destitute, because Jewish organisations and the families of people he'd saved would help support him. In 1962, Schindler was officially declared a "Righteous Gentile" and invited to plant a tree on the Avenue of the Righteous leading up to Jerusalem's Yad Vashem Museum, a memorial to the Holocaust. When he died, he was buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, the only member of the Nazi Party to be honored in this way.

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Closing the Circle

A stable wormhole has been established between Earth and Infinitus. Power Blaster and his friends can finally go home.

Desi Troyes is still at large on Earth - Power Blaster has vowed to bring him to justice. His wedding to Shanna is under threat as the Desperadoes launch an attempt to rescue their leader. 

Someone from Power Blaster's past plays an unexpected and significant role in capturing Troyes.

The return home brings its own challenges. Not everyone can return to the life they left behind, and for some, there is unfinished business to be dealt with before they can start anew.

Ben Cole in particular cannot resume his old life as a surgeon because technology no longer works around him. He plans a new life in Classica, away from technology. Shanna hears there could be a way to reverse his condition and sets out to find it, putting herself in great danger. She doesn't know she is about to uncover the secret of Power Blaster's mysterious past.

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Completes The Raiders Trilogy. 

Other books in the series:

Book One

Book Two