Oskar Schindler's Grave | Life, Death & Final Resting Place

Schindler had spent his whole fortune on bribery and illegal market purchases of provisions for his staff by the end of the war. He traveled to Regensburg and then Munich, almost destitute, but did not flourish in postwar Germany. In 1949, Schindler moved to Argentina, where he experimented with rearing chickens and later nutria (coypu), a small mammal kept for its fur. He left his wife and moved to Germany after the company went bankrupt in 1958, where he had a succession of failed business enterprises, such as a cement factory. He filed for bankruptcy in 1963 and had a heart attack the following year, resulting in a month in the hospital. 

Schindler survived on money sent by Schindlerjuden from all over the world, keeping in touch with many of the Jews he met during the war, notably Stern and Pfefferberg. On October 9, 1974, he died of liver failure. He is the only person of the Nazi Party to be honored by being buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. On May 8, 1962, Yad Vashem honored Schindler with a service in which a carob tree was placed in his honor on the Avenue of the Righteous in recognition of his wartime labor. Even to this date, Oskar Schindler’s contribution and legacy are remembered fondly amidst the grim memoirs of the holocaust.

Oskar Schindler is responsible for saving the lives of 1,200 Jews by engaging them at his enamelware and ammunition businesses in seized Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust. Initially motivated by profit, Schindler learned to see through the Nazi ideology and acknowledged the plight of the Jews. He leveraged his position to save numerous lives and was honored with a burial ground atop Mount Zion in Jerusalem.  The Hebrew inscription on his grave reads, "Righteous Among the Nations" and the German inscription reads, "The Unforgettable Lifesaver of 1200 Persecuted Jews". On June 24, 1993, Oskar Schindler and his wife, Emilie, were declared Righteous Among the Nations, a distinction given by the State of Israel to non-Jews who actively participated in the rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.

He was the subject of the 1982 novel Schindler's Ark and the 1993 film adaptation Schindler's List, both of which depicted his life as a profit-driven hustler who eventually demonstrated great initiative, perseverance, courage, and commitment to save the lives of his Jewish laborers. Artifacts relevant to Oskar Schindler’s fearless act are valued highly to this day. In the attic of Ami and Heinrich Staehr's Hildesheim flat in 1997, a bag belonging to Schindler was unearthed, including historic photographs and documents. Workers searching through boxes of material obtained by author Thomas Keneally uncovered a carbon duplicate of one variation of the list at the State Library of New South Wales in early April 2009.