The Israelis did not hear the name of Oscar Schindler, who saved thousands of Jews

When my Armenian friends ask why Israel does not recognize the Armenian Genocide, this is usually a rhetorical question. Everyone understands that out of fear of losing defense contracts with Azerbaijan and Turkey. But the real revelation for me was the fact that many Israelis do not remember their own history. I decided to find in Jerusalem the grave of Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved several thousand Jews from being sent to fascist concentration camps during the Second World War. About this man in 1993, director Steven Spielberg shot the magnificent film "Schindler's List." In the final frames of the film, we see Schindler’s grave in the Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem and dozens of Jews saved by him, standing around his grave. I wanted to find this place.

As you know, Schindler bought the Jews from the Nazis, who were waiting to be sent to concentration camps for extermination, explaining that these women, children, and the elderly are irreplaceable workers for his factories. Naturally, for the most part these were just unhappy people who did not bring him any benefit. He bought thousands of Jews, and they worked to the best of their ability in his factories, surviving almost the entire war. At the end of 1944, the Nazis began the mass extermination of all Jews in Auschwitz and other concentration camps. Schindler managed to take out a thousand of his wards to Brenec in Moravia and thereby save them from death in the death camps. He had to spend almost all nights at his enterprise, for he was afraid of the sudden appearance of the Gestapo. He invested all his savings in saving these people, selling even family values in order to redeem a few dozen unfortunate people from the Nazis.

It is noteworthy that he is the only member of the Hitler party in history, buried with honors in Israel. We do not take into account the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was taken by Mossad from Argentina to Israel in 1960, accused of killing millions of Jews and executed in the Lod prison in Tel Aviv.

Finding this place was not easy. There were references on the net that Schindler was buried in a Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion, not far from the walls of the Old City. But anyone who has been to Jerusalem remembers that there are a lot of cemeteries, for the most part they are not organized and are randomly scattered across a vast territory. For about forty minutes we walked around the Zion Gate and near the Jewish religious yeshiva, looking for the right grave. Nearby is a Protestant cemetery, a Catholic one, and even an Orthodox one nearby.

The thought occurred to me: for sure, local Jews from the religious yeshiva should know where Schindler is buried. Moreover, in the yeshiva’s yard there was a monument to 1.5 million Jewish children killed in concentration camps. Such a monument left no doubt that people working and studying here necessarily know where the grave of a man who saved thousands of Jews is.

What was my surprise and even shock when, out of about eight people I asked (mostly Orthodox Jews) no one heard about Oscar Schindler. They not only had no idea where he was buried, but even in principle did not know about his existence. Neither young Yeshizhniki (students of the Jewish religious seminary), nor their teachers, nor even the rabbi who was there, knew about Schindler. God, what a disgrace!

As a result, we were prompted by a completely stranger, a telephone company employee who was repairing something in the neighborhood.
While walking to Schindler’s grave, the words came back to mind: “A people who do not remember their past have no future.” And the film, who did not watch, I highly recommend to see. Here are a few frames from it.