schindler’s list.docVIP

Pre-reading questions: 2 Building vocabulary 4 Culturally speaking 6 Reference 8 Pre-reading questions: Have you watched the movie Schindlers List before? What do you think of Oskar Schindler? What can you learn from the man? In your opinion, what kind of man is a good man? And what is your definition of a hero? A good man in bad time Paul Zweig When the German Army invaded Poland in 1939, a swarm of carpetbaggers trailed after it, eager for the spoils of empire. They were the black marketers and middlemen, the young sharks who knew how to get a general drunk and leave with a contract in their pockets. Among them was a young Sudeten German named Oskar Schindler, who had a reputation for womanizing and giving lavish parties for his influential friends. Schindler knew how to make a bureaucrat happy, and he was rewarded with one of Cracows plums. He was appointed Aryan treuhandler -read plunderer - of a prosperous Jewish-owned enamelware factory. It was good to be an enterprising young German in Cracow in 1939. There was a problem, though, which Schindler experienced firsthand in the anguished faces of the Jewish workers at his newly acquired factory. A stream of directives had made Jewish life increasingly precarious in Cracow. Walls went up around a suburb, and the citys Jews were packed into it, half a dozen to a room. Schindler shrugged uncomfortably and hoped that these excesses would soon stop. They were the exuberance of empire, the unruly high spirits of various unpleasant elements in the occupying forces, in particular the SS, those puritans who swallowed ideology the way Schindler swallowed cognac. Meanwhile he dropped hints to some of his Jewish workers about upcoming Aktions by the SS, which he had gleaned during his drinking parties with the colonels, captains and supervisors. History would not normally be concerned with such a man as Oskar Schindler, a mere minor player in the sybaritic night life of a small Polis