Oskar Schindler was called “the swindler” – for a schindler-swindler pun – by the inhabitants of Svitavy, the Moravian town where he was born in 1908 and where Germans from the Sudetenland (the majority), Czechs and Jews lived together.
Oskar had a rather turbulent childhood. He already liked engines and social life, and he was a precursor to labor mobility. Even his marriage to Emilie Pelzl soon went into crisis, and his impetuous nature led him to have trouble with the law. When the wave of National Socialism spread from Germany to the Czech border regions, Oskar became a member of the Party of Sudeten Germans, a puppet of the Nazi Party. In order to continue the standard of living which he was used to, Schindler agreed to enter the Abwehr, German military intelligence, passing logistical and military information about Czechoslovakia and Poland. He was considered confidant and brave, and he earned large sums and made important connections that would serve him in the years to follow. In October 1939, following the invasion of Poland, he was sent to Krakow with the paradoxical task of monitoring the activities of other police forces of the Reich, in competition with each other. Meanwhile, he saw the opportunity to do business and get rich easily.
This is where we meet him in Spielberg’s famous film, when he engages in a risky game of chess with the Nazi regime in which the stakes were no longer a million Reichsmark, but his own life and the lives of his prisoner-workers.
However, in Czechoslovakia after the war, liberated by the Red Army and ending up in the Soviet sphere, Schindler was one of the three million Sudeten Germans indiscriminately suspected of collaborating with the enemy and expelled to Germany and Austria. An in absentia trial was begun against him, accusing him of having supported the Nazis and betrayed his country, and threatening him with life imprisonment or the death penalty, despite Wiesenthal’s interventions in his defense. The Marxist reading of history that celebrates the “glorious red partisan”, the one called to save the world, sees Schindler as “a former businessman who exploited prisoners” and who changed his attitude only at the end of the war in order “to be celebrated as a defender of the Jews even in Israel”.
Besides, the same Jews who were liberated by the Soviets and co-opted into the socialist paradise certainly did not have easy lives. On their return from the concentration camps, in addition to their anxiety over the loss of family members, they found their houses inhabited by strangers and their companies nationalized by the State. When Soviet policy towards the State of Israel changed, the new slogan, “Zionism”, spread even to the satellite countries. “Zionism” was understood as “a peculiar reactionary and nationalistic form of imperialism”. The anti-Zionist campaign culminated in Czechoslovakia in the early 50’s with a series of show trials against politicians, one of them being that of Rudolf Slansky, which ended in the hanging of 11 defendants, including 8 Jews.
Diplomatic relations with Israel were interrupted (and only resumed in 1990 with Havel), freedom of religion was limited and the Jewish citizens began to be catalogued (through their personal data, group and work life, family ties abroad and the surveillance of their mail), an operation that was useful for filtering their access to key posts in businesses and institutions. The communist authorities drew directly from information on prisoners found in Nazi concentration camps…
Towards the end of the 50’s, the “bureaucratic anti-Semitism” loosened its grip, and the situation improved for about 30 thousand Czechoslovakian Jews, though they were still discriminated against on religious grounds.
After the Soviet invasion of ’68, a new, doubly negative concept was introduced: “intellectual Jew”; supporter of the “counterrevolutionary forces”; a “cosmopolitan Zionist”. Even very prominent politicians, like Sik, Kriegel, and Goldstücker paid the price. In the book, Zionism and Anti-Semitism, F. Kolar even denies the existence of anti-Semitism: “This problem does not exist, either here or in the USSR or in any other socialist country. And we will not allow the Zionists or the imperialist propaganda to exhume it”. When it was necessary to have someone to blame for the “crisis” that had led to ’68, the words “Jewish intellectuals, initiators of the counterrevolution” and “the Zionists, the servants of Western imperialism” appeared again. The monitoring of the Jews began again in 1971 in order to “draw a comprehensive picture of the areas of their activities, to identify and expose their hostile activities and to paralyze the negative influence of the Zionists and their organizations that affect the Jewish religious community from abroad”. In January 1977, after the spread of the Charter 77 planning document, the Rudé právo condemned the initiative as coming from “the anti-Communist and Zionist headquarters”, and thereafter the “Healing” operation, in which political police “advocated” expatriation, was directed not only at dissidents but also at Jews.
The “swindler” of Svitavy died in 1974. That anarchist who, as Keneally wrote, liked to ridicule the system, loved the transparency and simplicity of good deeds, and was able to feel outraged by cruelty and to react, remains an awkward figure for those who take an ideological reading of history, and even at the end of the 90’s, there were still those in the Czech Republic who tried to tarnish his memory. Joseph Bau, one of the Jews saved by Schindler remembers, “Our possessions were seized at Gross-Rosen. Among my things there was a book of poetry and memoirs… A few days after our arrival in Brünnlitz, Schindler entered the workshop and asked for me. He handed me the book of poetry and said: ‘I think this is yours’. What kind of person was he? I never understood”.
(translation by Maria Bond)