#TwistedTropes 25. Schindler's shopping list

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Oskar Schindler was an industrialist, playboy and philanthropist during the Nazi occupation of Europe. Schindler's 'list' refers to his quiet defiance of Hitler's murderous regime when he saved several hundred of his Jewish employees from the Nazi death camps. Thomas Keneally's 1982 book Schindler's Ark tells the story of his high risk strategies to save his workers from the Nazis.

When Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg acquired the film rights, he was forced to use the more anodyne title Schindler's List. This was because the Ark suffix had already been claimed by Noah, or more likely, by his publicist. At first Spielberg didn't really want to make the film, and offered it to several other directors, and also to a taxi driver by mistake, but eventually he agreed to direct the movie when he realised that one Oskar could be multiplied into several more. At the time, Hollywood couldn't get enough of Nazis running about in jackboots and any film that featured them tended to be a big hit. These included Spielberg's earlier movie Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981 - confusingly not the same ark as Noah's ark), Das Boot (1981 - a story about a lost jackboot) and ultimately the brutally violent the Sound of Music which featured a volatile mix of Nazis and nuns (1965) (there are misleading statements here that need to be corrected - Editor).

Schindler didn't really create a list, nor did he build an ark, mainly because he was too busy running his enamelware factory and raking in the money. If Schindler had created a real list - an alternative one to the one we all know he didn't create - what would be contained within that list? Would it be a list of all his Swiss bank accounts? Or a list of the number of time he restrained himself from hitting Gestapo officials when they called around for a drink? Or later in life, a list of all the book and film deals he was offered?

I think it would be a shopping list, because Oskar had plenty of money to splash about, owning a large factory (and also a huge advance from MGM studios for a film of his life that was never made, that he spent pretty quickly). You could imagine him nipping off down to his local Tesco Express (more likely to be Lidl or Aldi - Editor) to get his Drambuie, Camembert and a couple of baguettes, along with a copy of Völkischer Beobachter, to keep up appearances as a loyal Nazi party member.

You see, Oskar Schindler was a real anomaly. Although he was a fully paid up, card carrying member of the Nazi Party, which was responsible for the wholesale slaughter of millions of innocent people, he was also considered by the Jewish people to be righteous among the nations and several gave him financial aid after the war when he became bankrupt. Although Schindler was in the Party, he was not of the Party. He wasn't really a party person at all, not even at Christmas time. Schindler was actually a positive deviant. He was an oxymoron - a Nazi who was also a philanthropist (I suspect he wasn't a Nazi at all - Editor).

Schindler did things differently to all those around him, and would be considered a deviant if he had been caught out, but he deviated in a positive way. Some might call him a 'mole' but he didn't infiltrate the Nazi Party. He worked his way from the inside out to protect his workers from the fascists.

We can all learn a lot from Oskar Schindler, not least about standing up to the mob, swimming against the tide, and making great shopping lists. In spite of his many faults, he still tried to do some good in the midst of an appalling situation. I want to be a good positive deviant a little like Schindler. I want to make a positive difference in any organisation I work within, because it's the right thing to do. In fact, it's on my bucket list.

Next time: 26: Victoria's horrible secret

Previous posts in the #TwistedTropes series
1. Pavlov's drooling dog
2. Chekhov's smoking gun
3. Occam's bloody razor
4. Schrödinger’s undead cat
5. Pandora's closed box
6. Frankenstein's well-meaning monster
7. Thor's lost hammer
8. Noah's character ark
9. Hobson's multiple choice
10. Fibonacci's annoying sequence
11. Plato's empty cave
12. Dante's lukewarm inferno
13. Sod's unlucky law
14. Aladdin's miserly lamp
15. Batman's tangled cape
16. Cupid's bent arrow
17. Fermat's dodgy last theorem
18. Moore's obsolete law
19. Lucifer's idiotic fall
20. Adam's poisoned apple
21. Hadrian's busted wall
22. Montezuma's terrible revenge
23. Dale's shameful cone
24. Maslow's awkward hierarchy


Schindler's shopping list by Steve Wheeler was written in London, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Posted by Steve Wheeler from Learning with e's