Oskar Schindler's Early Years Included Many Failures
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- At age 16 Schindler was was expelled for forging his report card. He eventually graduated but didn't take the exams he needed to be able to go to college. He learned to be a chauffeur and took classes in machinery so he could work for his father who owned a farm machine business.
- At age 20, he married Emilie Pelzl, and they lived upstairs in his parents house for seven years. After he got married, Schindler quit working for his father and had a series of jobs for the next 3 years, from managing a driving school, to 18 months in the Czech Army, to Moravian Electrotechnic, which went bankrupt.
- Shortly after Moravian Electrotechnic went bankrupt, Schindler's father lost his farm machine business. This left Schindler unemployed for a year.
- In 1931 Schindler got a job with a bank in Prague, Czechoslovakia. He worked there for 7 years. But in that time, he had 2 children with a woman he had an affair with; his father abandoned his mother, who died a few months later; and he started drinking heavily and was arrested many times for public drunkenness.
- By 1935, Schindler was 28 years old, drinking heavily and deeply in debt. In order to get out of debt, he joined the German Separatist Party and became a spy for the Nazi Intelligence Service, Abwehr. He spied on the Czechs for the Germans in order to make money. He collected intelligence for the Germans on railways, Czech troops and military bases so that Germany could plan an invasion of the country.
- Schindler was arrested by the Czech government for spying and sent to prison, but was later released. He became a Nazi, got promoted to second in command of his Abwehr unit, in charge of 25 other spies, moved to the border of Czechoslovakia and Poland and continued spying for the Germans.
- In 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, they began stripping the Jews of their rights. They took their homes, their business and most of their possessions. They were then forced into special living areas called ghettos. Schindler moved to Krakow, Poland, in order to spy on that country, taking over the apartment of a Jewish family who had been force to move out.
- By this time, there was a lot of money being made in the black market and bribery was everywhere. He was friends with many powerful Nazis and was able to bribe enough people to take over the operation of a formerly Jewish-owned factory that made enamel goods. The factory was near the Jewish ghetto in Krakow, so Schindler hired Jewish workers because they didn't have to be paid as much as the Polish workers.