Oskar Schindler was not a good man. He was a drunk, a womanizer, a war profiteer, and a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. He came to Krakow in 1939 to get rich off the German occupation, and he did — running an enamelware factory staffed with cheap Jewish labor from the nearby ghetto. He liked the money. He liked the power. He liked the parties with SS officers where the champagne never stopped.
And then something turned. No one has ever been able to pinpoint exactly when or why. He watched the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto in March 1943 from a hilltop — saw the soldiers pulling children from hiding places, saw the streets turning red. Something broke open in him, or something that had always been there finally won. He began spending his entire fortune on bribes to keep his Jewish workers alive. He argued they were essential to the war effort. He fabricated production quotas. He bought people off death lists the way other men bought cars.
By the war's end, he had saved approximately 1,200 Jews. He was bankrupt. He spent the rest of his life drifting between failed business ventures in Argentina and Germany, supported financially by the very people he had rescued. He died broke in 1974 and was buried in Jerusalem, on Mount Zion, at his own request.
He started as the worst kind of man in the worst kind of system. He became something else. That possibility — that anyone can become something else — is the whole argument for not giving up on people.
"Perhaps the reason the Universe gave you a broken world is so that you could have a chance to fix it."