Original 'Schindler's List' found in Sydney

The Internet has opened up a marvelous world of resources for the Social Studies teacher to use in connecting the past to the present and/or the present to the past. We can also read news releases from a variety of countries - in English editions. I was regularly reading the PRC news releases during the Olympics to get their view of things.

The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia) had an article on April 6th revealing an amazing discovery that should be discussed in our classrooms.

Original 'Schindler's List' found in Sydney
April 6, 2009

A list of Jews saved by Oskar Schindler that inspired the novel and Oscar-winning film "Schindler's List" has been found in a Sydney library, its co-curator said.

Workers at the New South Wales State Library found the list, containing the names of 801 Jews saved from the Holocaust by the businessman, as they sifted through boxes of Australian author Thomas Keneally's manuscript material.

The 13-page document, a yellowed and fragile carbon typescript copy of the original, was found between research notes and German newspaper clippings in one of the boxes, library co-curator Olwen Pryke said.

Pryke described the 13-page list as "one of the most powerful documents of the 20th Century" and was stunned to find it in the library's collection.

"This list was hurriedly typed on April 18, 1945, in the closing days of WWII, and it saved 801 men from the gas chambers," she said. "It's an incredibly moving piece of history."

She said the library had no idea the list was among six boxes of material acquired in 1996 relating to Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel, originally published as "Schindler's Ark". The 1982 novel told the story of how the roguish Schindler discovered his conscience and risked his life to save more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazis.

Hollywood director Steven Spielberg turned it into a film in 1993 starring Liam Neeson as Schindler and Ralph Fiennes as the head of an SS-run camp.

Pryke said that, although the novel and film implied there was a single, definitive list, Schindler actually compiled a number of them as he persuaded Nazi bureaucrats not to send his workers to the death camps.

She said the document found by the library was given to Keneally in 1980 by Leopold Pfefferberg -- named on the list as Jewish worker number 173 -- when he was persuading the novelist to write Schindler's story.

As such, it was the list that inspired Keneally to tell the world about Schindler's heroics, she said. Pryke said she had no idea how much the list was worth.

Schindler, born in a German-speaking part of Austria-Hungary in 1908, began the war as a card-carrying Nazi who used his connections to gain control of a factory in Krakow, Poland, shortly after Hitler invaded the country.

He used Jewish labour in the factory but, as the war progressed, he became appalled at the conduct of the Nazis.

Using bribery and charm, he persuaded officials that his workers were vital to the war effort and should not be sent to the death camps.

Schindler died relatively unknown in 1974, but he gained public recognition following Keneally's book and Spielberg's film.

Essential Question: How can we use discoveries such as Schindler's List to relate to the past - and the past to the present?

Photo: DPA