Rare Schindler papers up for sale
Boston: A historically important letter from Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist whose efforts to save Jews from the Holocaust were made famous in the 1993 Oscar- winning film
Schindler’s List, is among the Schindler documents to be sold at New Hampshire auction house.
The one- page letter signed by Schindler was sent from his enamelware factory in Krakow, Poland, where he employed more than 1,000 Jewish workers from a nearby Nazi concentration camp, Bobby Livingston, vice- president at RR Auction, said on Wednesday. The letter, written in German and dated August 22, 1944, was sent on behalf of one of Schindler’s employees, Adam Dziedzic, who had “received a clearings contract for unloading and assembling war- necessary machinery and has been sent to Sudetengau.”
Schindler had been tipped off in the summer of 1944 that the Nazis planned to close factories unrelated to the war effort. Through bribery and personal connections, he got permission to produce arms and move the factory and its workers to Brunnlitz, in Sudetenland, or Sudetengau, in what is now Czech Republic. “This is the first document I have seen verifying this move and it is quite important because I thought it took him much longer to get such permission,” David Crowe, a Holocaust historian and Schindler biographer, said in a statement.