The Boy On The Wooden Box

Schindler (1908-1974) is central to the book as the principal cause of Leon and his family surviving the Holocaust. Schindler was born in Moravia (part of the present-day Czech Republic) in 1908 and served in the Czechoslovak army before becoming an intelligence officer for the German military. Schindler joined the Nazi Party, most likely for pragmatic reasons. After Germany’s invasion of Poland, Schindler moved to Kraków, where he became involved in the underground economy. There, he founded his enamel factory, Emalia, at which he employed an increasing number of Jews. Although at first Schindler was motivated by self-interest, he came to genuinely care for his Jewish employees. 

After the war, Schindler fled to Argentina, then in 1957 returned to West Germany. For the rest of his life, his business ventures were largely unsuccessful, and he lived off donations from the Jews he had saved. 

Schindler was self-described as a “sybarite,” or lover of pleasure and luxury, and Leyson says that the terms “scoundrel,” “womanizer,” “war profiteer,” and “drunk” were typically applied to him (67). However, these factors do not really apply to the Schindler depicted in the book, where he is limited to his dealings and interactions with the employees at the factory. We only get a hint of Schindler’s party-loving ways when Leon overhears sounds of merriment from Schindler’s party downstairs in the factory. For the most part, Schindler is shown as a benevolent, humane man, concerned for the welfare of his employees and taking great risks to save their lives. We see this when he arranges to recruit inmates from Płaszów to Emalia, later when he arranges to have them sent to the new factory in Brünnlitz, and finally when he has the female prisoners transferred there as well. When he takes leave of his employees, he gives them gifts of liquor and cloth, showing his generous nature. 

Schindler saves his Jewish workers by convincing Nazi officials that they are indispensable to the war effort. The trickery Schindler uses to carry this out has its comic or ironic aspects; Leyson states that “[h]e outwitted the Nazis by claiming we were essential to the war effort even though he knew that many of us, myself included, had no useful skills at all” (3). 

Schindler’s status as a member of the Nazi Party gives him the clout to carry out these subversive actions that undermine Nazi ideology. Moreover, Schindler is able to feed his employees with food obtained on the black market. Thus, by using his “street smarts” as a businessman and war profiteer, Schindler saves lives and becomes an unlikely hero who embodies The Importance of Kindness in Dark Times.