The businessman Oskar Schindler was a member of the NSDAP. In 1939 he took over an enamelware factory in German-occupied Kraków. He began by employing Polish workers, then from 1941 he increasingly took on Jewish forced laborers from the Kraków ghetto.
Schindler saw how Kraków’s Jews were maltreated by the occupiers. He tried to protect his Jewish workers. After the ghetto’s liquidation in March 1943, its remaining inmates were transferred to Plaszow labor camp outside the city. Schindler bribed the camp commandant Amon Göth, who granted permission to house his workers on the factory premises. They were treated better there than in Plaszow and were initially protected from deportation.
In 1944 the Plaszow camp was vacated. Schindler relocated his production to Brünnlitz (Brněnec) in Moravia, and received permission to take his workers and their families there. However, around 300 women were first deported to Auschwitz. Schindler managed to liberate them from there. Along with his wife Emilie, Oskar Schindler saved around 1,100 people’s lives.
Schindler was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli Holocaust memorial center Yad Vashem in 1993.