Oskar Schindler, from Holocaust hero to obscurity

0 Comments | AFP, May, 2008

BERLIN (AFP) — Oskar Schindler saved more than 1,000 Jews from the gas chambers, but after 1945 he fell into obscurity and poverty and died without the recognition he deserved, a new exhibition in Frankfurt shows.

After years of ill health and a string of failed business ventures, Schindler died a bitter man aged 66 in 1974, two decades before Steven Spielberg's 1993 film "Schindler's List" made him famous worldwide.

"He was an unusual man for an unusual time. But (the war) was the high point of his life and afterwards things went downhill," says Ursula Trautwein, a friend of Schindler in Frankfurt, where he lived from 1957 until his death.

His beginnings and early life were hardly auspicious, and he remained something of an enigma to the end.

Born...