being lucky enough to be in SCHINDLER’S LIST

DISCLAIMER : This is a fictional narration, based on Steven Spielberg’s movie SCHINDLER’S LIST. The film depicts the real life story of an industrialist Oskar Schindler who had significant contribution in saving some Jews within his capacity. This story/narration is based on one such fictional Jewish man, who could have been in such camp and saved by Schindler.

It’s in the memory of those innumerable innocent souls, who faced deaths in one of the world’s worst tragedies caused by man..........

Born with both, brains and money into a well to do family, secured my future. Time was coming near when I could finish my education, get a good job and marry my love Kelly.

All was well until the beginning of World War II in 1939. Suddenly I was a no use man. I was blamed for every wrong thing happening, for every loss of my country and in fact blamed for even taking birth.
And what was my fault?

I was a Jew. Yea the authorities and even the other communities had held us responsible for everything. Right from the defeat in WW I to every other national issue.

The outcome: we were hunted. We were forced out of our homes. Our houses, business everything was taken away by the government.
We were taken down in the Krakow Ghetto, which was very small to accommodate the large Jewish population of us but the government didn’t care.

By that time an angel had arrived, Oskar Schindler. He was there for business. Schindler acquired a factory for the production of army mess kits. Not knowing much about how to properly run such an enterprise, he gained a close collaborator in Itzhak Stern, an official of Krakow's Judenrat (Jewish Council) who had contacts with the Jewish business community and the black marketers inside the Ghetto

Opening the factory, Schindler pleased the Nazis and enjoyed his newfound wealth and status as "Herr Direktor", while Stern handled all the administration. Schindler hired Jewish Poles instead of Catholic Poles because they costed less (the workers themselves got nothing; the wages were paid to the SS). But the workers in Schindler's factory were allowed outside the Ghetto, and Stern falsified documents to ensure that as many people as possible are deemed "essential" to the German war effort, which saved them from being transported to concentration camps, or being killed.

SS-Lieutenant Amon Goeth arrived in the camp at Ghetto one day. He was there to see the construction of site over there. We were working very hard on it. With constant fear of losing life because we never knew when anyone of us would be dead.

Once the construction was complete Amon Goeth ordered the final liquidation of the ghetto and Operation Reinhard in Kraków began, with hundreds of troops emptying the cramped rooms and arbitrarily murdering anyone who protested or appeared uncooperative, elderly or infirm. Schindler watching this scene was very upset and as any good human being would have felt, he got sad for my people and got angry at the Nazis, but he knew he couldn’t fight against the Nazis.

Schindler bribed Goeth into allowing him to build a sub-camp for his workers, so that he could keep his factory running smoothly and protect them from being randomly executed. As the time passed, Schindler acted on information provided by Stern and saved as many lives as he could earning a god like status for himself.

When the war shifted, Goeth received orders from Berlin commanding him to exhume and destroy the remains of every Jew murdered in the Kraków Ghetto, dismantle Płaszów, and ship the remaining Jews, including Schindler's workers to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where they could kill them in gas chambers.

Schindler persuaded Goeth to allow him to keep his workers so that he could move them to a factory in his old home of Zwittau-Brinnlitz, in Moravia away from the Final Solution, now fully underway in occupied Poland. Goeth eventually acquiesced, but charged a massive bribe for each worker. Schindler and Stern assembled a list of workers who are to be kept off the trains to Auschwitz.

Amongst the lucky souls in that list, I happened to find a place. Schindler was paying too much behind every one of us. Finally after a lot of hardships we were moved and sent at the new factory.

Things didn’t get easy for Schindler here too. He was losing a lot of money due to our lack of experience.  But this man had different plans. He was happy that our factory was producing under grade war ammunitions. In fact he even agreed sometimes that he will be unhappy if anything worth hurting a human life was ever made in his factory. Schindler used to buy products from other factories and later pass them on as ours. He was losing quite a fortune of his in saving us and at the same time keeping his principles.

By the time, the war had ended Schindler was almost a broken man. He had lost almost all of his fortune in protecting a few Jews. No misery is permanent. The war ended. We were free from the Nazis. Actually now they being were hunted down for counts of inhuman charges.

Schindler had to flee. He was considered as a profiteer of slavery and thus a criminal, but we knew he was a God. So we wrote a letter describing him as a god to us and signed it. He saved about eleven hundred of us. Even while leaving that great man cursed himself and ashamed for not putting his full efforts, saying he could have saved more if he had tried hard. But that was not true. He had tried hard, almost risking his life, losing his wealth and every damm thing.

We wanted to do something to let him know that we would remember him for our entire lives. Not only us but our generations to come. We then secretly made a ring from a worker's gold dental bridge and engraved it with a Talmudic quotation, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." And gifted it to this great man