The day after POTUS again said there were very fine people among the tiki-torch marching white supremacists who chanted “Jews will not replace us”; the day after another shooting in a synagogue in CA—remembering the birthday of Oskar Schindler, born 111 years ago, 4/28/1908.
Conversation
Not anyone’s candidate for a hero: an opportunist and profiteer, member of the Nazi party, a gambler, faithless husband, who made a fortune off slave labor. Yet something impelled him to turn his business into a pretext for saving lives: as many as 1200.
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He spent his fortune and risked his life in this enterprise. The mystery of Schindler is a reminder of the audacity that distinguishes heroism from conventional virtue and piety—much less rote “denunciations” of anti-semitism or after-the-fact “thoughts and prayers.”
