oskar schindler

Self-made entrepreneur and bon viveur who almost by default found himself saving Polish Jews from the Nazi death machine.
He is a flawed hero; he is not "without sin". He is a drinker, a womaniser and, at first, a profiteer. After the war, he is commemorated as Righteous among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, but he is never seen as a conventionally virtuous character.
His wife Emilie remarked in a German TV interview that Schindler did nothing remarkable before the war and nothing after it. "He was fortunate therefore that in the short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who had summoned forth his deeper talents." After the war, his business ventures fail and he separates from his wife. Then, he ends up living a shabby life in a small flat in Frankfurt. Eventually he arranged to live part of the year in Israel, supported by his Jewish friends, and part of the year as a sort of internal émigré in Frankfurt, where he was often hissed at in the st…more