On
January 21, 1945, more than a hundred Jews from the slave work labor camp
Golleschau, a subcamp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, were loaded into sealed cattle cars
labeled Property of the SS and transported westward without food or water.
The train
travelled aimlessly on the railways for ten days, covered in ice - the stamps,
with the date, of the following train stations can be seen on the bill of lading,
preserved in the archives of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Authority:
Golleschau,
January 21
Teschen,
January 21
Oderberg,
January 22
Schönbr.,
January 22
Freudenthal,
January 25
Brüssen-Brünnlitz,
January 29.
The
author Thomas Keneally tells in his milestone of Holocaust literature Schindler's
Ark how the starving and freezing prisoners were travelling without food
for many days and with the doors frozen shut. They were abandoned on sidings,
reattached to locomotives, dragged for 50 miles, uncoupled again.
Many
prisoners froze to death as the erratic journey continued. After six days the
sealed cattle cars reached Zwittau where they were detached and abandoned on an
isolated siding.
But
several more days passed before a railway worker heard human scratching and
cries from inside the cattle cars. He informed Oscar Schindler's brother-in-law,
who worked for the German Railway, and Schindler was immediately notified that
cattle cars with Jewish prisoners had arrived at the station.
Sir
Martin Gilbert tells in his great books Atlas of the Holocaust and The
Holocaust: The Jewish Tragedy how Schindler desperately tried to get permission from the
SS to shunt the cattle cars to his armament factory nearby at Brunnlitz. He was
unsuccessful, but then decided to go personally to the railway station.
A bon vivant, a member of the Nazi party, a shameless womanisor of the
worst sort - and at the same time one of the greatest, if not the
greatest, humane figure in the horrors of Holocaust. Millions of Jews
died in death camps like Auschwitz - but Schindler's Jews miraculously
survived.
To more than 1200 Jews Schindler was all that stood between them and
death at the hands of the Nazis. But he remained true to his Jews, the
workers he referred to as my children. In the shadow of
he kept the SS out and everyone alive.
Today there are 7,000 descendants of Oscar Schindler's Jews living in US
and Europe, many in Israel. Before the Second World War, the Jewish
population of Poland was 3.5 million. Today there are between 3,000 and
4,000 left.
Schindler's name is known to millions as a household word for courage in
a world of brutality - the flawed hero who saved hundreds of Jews from
Hitler's gas chambers. A saint walking through hell ...
