Saving Lies: Schindler and the Hebrew Midwives

By Clint Archer - Posted at The Cripplegate:

Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece motion picture, Schindler’s List, is a true-life chronicle of the German Nazi, Oskar Schindler, who used his connections with the Nazi regime in the Second World War to preserve the lives of hundreds of Jewish prisoners. When Hitler set his unstable mind on the annihilation of the Jews he had them sent to concentration camps where the prisoners did hard labor until they were executed en masse in gas chambers.

Schindler, even as a Nazi himself, grew to find this reprehensible. But he couldn’t just come out and say so. To resist Herr Hitler was to risk finding yourself in a concentration camp, or dead.

So, Schindler used his entrepreneurial acumen as a ruse to save the lives of the condemned Jews. He procured a steelworks factory that had formerly produced pots and pans and converted it into a munitions factory, cranking out countless casings for bullets and bombs.

He then “convinced” the Nazis (i.e. bribed them) to let him select Jews that would leave the concentration camp and work for him for no pay as slave labor. Unbeknown to the Nazi authorities Schindler had specifically told his factory foreman that he would be highly disappointed if a single working bombshell was ever produced in this factory. His intention was never to assist the Nazis in their sinister genocidal efforts, but rather to subvert their cause and save the Jews.

When I visited Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, I found the tree which the Jews had planted as a memorial to Oskar Schindler in the “Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles.”

But were Schindler’s deeds righteous or not?

• He illegally bribed government officials.
• He purposefully lied to the authorities.
• He willfully undermined his government.
• So, did he do the right thing or not? Good question. Let’s see if we can learn any lessons from Exodus 1.

Read more here.