The story of Oskar Schindler, who saved 1,200 Polish Jews from the concentration camp together with his wife Emilie, became internationally known through Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List” based on the book by Thomas Keneally. And is one of the most important depictions of the persecution and extermination of the Jews in Poland. “Which story is the true story,” asks the author Rena Finder, one of those who were saved, in her book “I Survived. A Girl on Schindler’s List” of her young readers. “Is it the one we read about in history books? The story we see in movies? The story told to us by survivors?” What’s closest to the truth? Movies have their own drama and survivors’ memories are changing too. “Perhaps you would like to talk about it in a class,” she encourages her young readers. She appeals to her critical thinking so that her readers also discover references to the political present, and see Oskar Schindler not as the historical hero, a saint, but as a person with weaknesses, but with a conscience and a cunning that he developed over the course of the war more and more to save his workers.
One notices the author’s account of her experiences with students, she sticks to the facts, tells her life chronologically in short chapters, about her happy childhood and youth – despite the anti-Semitism that was already widespread in Kraków at the time. When the Germans invaded Poland on September 1, 1939 and soon occupied Kraków, she was ten years old and persecution, oppression and murder began.
The hope that foreign countries would help faded when they were taken to the ghetto, she says, and about being forced to work for the Nazis. Some in Oskar Schindler’s enamel factory, who had good relationships with the responsible officials – also through clever bribery. When the ghetto was closed in 1942 and 2,000 people were murdered in Auschwitz, Rena Finder and her mother were lucky enough to be sent to the Plaszow labor camp when able to work, but escaped abuse and death only because they managed to get a job from Schindler, who had moved their factory to Plaszow to be closer to their workers.
And Schindler’s workers returned the favor at the end of the war with a thank you letter that saved him from being condemned as a Nazi.
He saved her with cunning and the use of his fortune – Höss, the commander of Auschwitz, received a bag of diamonds. And Schindler’s workers returned the favor at the end of the war with a thank you letter that saved him from being condemned as a Nazi. The credo of Rena Finder, who works for the organization “Facing History and Ourselves” after emigrating to the USA: “You don’t have to love everyone, but everyone deserves to be treated properly”. (from 13 years)
Rena Finder, Joshua M. Greene: I Survived. A girl on Schindler’s list. Translated from the English by Manuela Knetsch. Hanser 2022. 100 pages, 15 euros