Mr PitBull Stories@MrPitbull07
October 9, 1974.
Oskar Schindler collapsed on a street in West Germany.
When authorities searched his apartment, they found almost nothing:
unpaid bills, old letters, and money sent from Israel.
For the last years of his life, the Jews he saved during the Holocaust were paying his rent and buying his food.
Because Oskar Schindler died broke.
And he was broke for one reason:
he spent his fortune saving people.
The strange part is that Schindler didn’t start as a hero.
He was a Nazi Party member.
A war profiteer.
A heavy drinker.
A serial adulterer.
In 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, Schindler saw opportunity.
He took over a Jewish-owned factory in Kraków and got rich producing enamelware for the German military using cheap Jewish labor.
At first, survival wasn’t the goal.
Profit was.
Then he witnessed the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto in 1943.
He watched SS troops shoot civilians in the streets.
Children ripped from parents.
People hunted like animals.
Something changed in him after that.
Schindler began using his factory differently.
He bribed Nazi officers constantly — with cash, alcohol, jewelry, anything they wanted — to keep his Jewish workers alive.
He built a subcamp at his factory where conditions were far safer than the concentration camps nearby.
He smuggled food.
Bought medicine on the black market.
Protected workers from deportation.
Every bribe cost money.
He kept paying anyway.
Then came 1944.
The Nazis started emptying camps and sending prisoners to Auschwitz.
Schindler knew his workers would be killed if they stayed behind.
So he made “the list.”
1,200 names.
Men.
Women.
Children.
The elderly.
He claimed they were all essential workers needed for the war effort.
It was a lie.
But it saved 1,200 lives.
When one train carrying the women was accidentally sent to Auschwitz, Schindler personally traveled there and bribed officials until they were released.
By the end of the war, he had burned through his entire fortune.
Everything was gone.
After Germany collapsed, Schindler failed at almost every business he tried.
Argentina failed.
Farming failed.
A cement company failed.
Eventually he ended up alone, bankrupt, and forgotten in a small apartment in Frankfurt.
Except by the people he saved.
The “Schindlerjuden” supported him for the rest of his life.
They mailed him money every month.
Paid his bills.
Kept him alive.
And when he died in 1974, they buried him in Jerusalem.
Not because he was perfect.
He wasn’t.
He began as a profiteer inside one of history’s worst regimes.
But at some point, Oskar Schindler made a choice:
keep the money,
or save people.
He chose people.
And 1,200 descendants are alive today because he did.
