Oskar Schindler

Filmmaker Jon Blair, whose 10-year-old British documentary about Oskar Schindler airs tonight just before those other Oscars, has recently fretted on the record that he never "cracked" the Schindler enigma. "I always felt it was a weakness in my film that I couldn't explain Schindler's motivation," Blair said about the man who rescued 1,100 Jews from the Nazi ovens, "and ("Schindler's List" director Steven) Spielberg told me the same about his. . . ." Blair--and Spielberg--needn't fret.

Among the 1,100 Jews saved from the Nazis by German industrialist Oskar Schindler was an emaciated 13-year-old boy named Leon Leyson, who had to stand on a box to reach the machinery in the Krakow factory where Schindler sheltered him and his family. The boy Schindler called "Little Leyson" survived the Holocaust to start life over in Los Angeles. He taught high school in Huntington Park for 39 years, rarely mentioning to anyone the pain and perils he experienced during the war that claimed the lives of 6 million Jews.

Two elderly Polish women gaze at a grainy photo of a man of easy confidence astride his horse. It is Oskar Schindler, a Nazi Party member who became their wartime savior. Schindler came to Krakow to profit from the German occupation, and then, for reasons never entirely clear, saved Poles from forced labor and hundreds of Jews from death camps.

As I stood on a cracked concrete sidewalk in the Podgorze district of Krakow, I began to understand just what "wrong side of the tracks" meant. Ahead of me was a stark railroad bridge that carried commuters across the Vistula River to the city's historic heart. Beneath it was a pedestrian walkway, claustrophobically low and forbidding. Punctuating the end of the street, it seemed like a grim gateway of sorts, and so it was. Beyond the bridge, past a collection of featureless industrial buildings in various states of repair, was Krakow's newest attraction ?

As I stood on a cracked concrete sidewalk in the Podgorze district of Krakow, I began to understand just what "wrong side of the tracks" meant. Ahead of me was a stark railroad bridge that carried commuters across the Vistula River to the city's historic heart. Beneath it was a pedestrian walkway, claustrophobically low and forbidding. Punctuating the end of the street, it seemed like a grim gateway of sorts, and so it was. Beyond the bridge, past a collection of featureless industrial buildings in various states of repair, was Krakow's newest attraction ?

He's a retired printer living in Arizona who unwittingly ensured Oskar Schindler's passage to safety in the uncertain days after the fall of the Third Reich. He also recently became a key figure in an unsettling documentary about American attitudes toward Jews in the days of Adolf Hitler. Kurt Klein, now 74, had a quirky encounter with Schindler at the end of World War II that probably saved Schindler from confinement in a detention camp.

The memories, Leon Leyson says, have not diminished with time. Memories--of German troops invading Poland in 1939 and his family being herded into the Jewish ghetto in Krakow when he was 9. . . . Of hiding in a cramped attic crawl space to avoid being killed or sent to a death camp by SS commandos who periodically swept through the Jewish quarter. . . . Of living in a concentration camp run by a sadistic SS commandant who would shoot Jews for sport. . . .

When Chris Tashima was first offered the role of Chiune "Sempo" Sugihara in Tim Toyama's one-act play "Visas and Virtues," it didn't take long for him to accept. "Being an Asian actor you don't get a chance to play heroes," Tashima, 37, says. "The fact that the play was about Sugihara excited me. . . . The chance to portray him onstage for even a moment would be great."

Leopold Page, the Polish-born Jew whose story of Oskar Schindler inspired the award-winning book and film "Schindler's List," will speak Wednesday at Saddleback College. The free event is open to the public and will be in Room 225 of the Student Services Center. The college is at 28000 Marguerite Parkway. Page immigrated to the United States in 1947 and opened a leather goods store in Beverly Hills.

Chiune Sugihara ("An Unsung 'Schindler' From Japan," March 20), who saved between 2,000 and 6,000 Jews from the Nazis by writing visas for them when he was Japan's consul general in Lithuania, was honored in this country in May, 1989, by the Anti-Defamation League when it awarded him its "Courage to Care Award." The award, instituted by the ADL to recognize heroic efforts by non-Jews in behalf of Jews, was presented to Sugihara's widow, Yukiko, and their son, Hiroki, in a moving ceremony I attended at the agency's national headquarters building opposite the United Nations in New York.

Talk about an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. In Quentin Tarantino's blood-soaked new film, "Inglourious Basterds," a band of Jewish soldiers bash collect Nazi soldiers' scalps in a bid to avenge their people and stop the Holocaust. Tarantino's World War II fantasy and its orgy of violence are little more than cartoonish savagery and perhaps a cathartic experience for some Jewish viewers. It's a sort of reverse form of Schadenfreude: Jews giving Nazis the ultimate taste of their own medicine.

Gilberto Bosques Saldivar has never been the subject of a major motion picture by Steven Spielberg. American history books seldom, if ever, mention his name, and he does not have his own Wikipedia page, in Spanish or English. But the former Mexican diplomat, stationed in France during World War II, helped save as many as 40,000 Jews and other refugees from Nazi persecution.

The "Silent Heroes" now have a voice. A new memorial center in Berlin pays tribute to the thousands of German gentiles who risked everything to save Jews from persecution by the Nazis and documents the stories of those who sometimes spent years in hiding. The "Silent Heroes" memorial center opened to the public last week amid a new focus in recent years on the legacy of the "good German" -- individuals who resisted Hitler, were labeled as traitors by the Nazis and were often shunned after the war. "Their accomplishments were totally forgotten, and this is an initiative to bring them back into our memory," said Johannes Tuchel, director of the German Resistance Memorial Center Foundation, which is behind the new memorial.

As all the world knows by now, a hard-drinking, womanizing, black-marketing German industrialist named Oskar Schindler saved some 1,100 Jewish slave laborers from the Holocaust. Thomas Keneally turned the story into a novel -- originally titled "Schindler's Ark" in Britain -- that won the Man Booker Prize in 1982.

The factory where Oskar Schindler shielded more than 1,000 Jews from the Holocaust is to be turned into a museum commemorating the German industrialist whose life was made famous in Steven Spielberg's film, officials said Friday. Since the 1993 release of the Academy Award-winning "Schindler's List," tourists to Krakow have sought out the factory where Schindler kept the emaciated Jews, claiming their work was essential to the survival of his metalworks.

Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning "Schindler's List," one of the most acclaimed films about human survival amid the horrors of the Holocaust, is coming to DVD. The disc set, planned for release March 9, will be accompanied by interviews with some of the people who lived through the movie's story in real life, Universal Studios Home Video announced Wednesday.

Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning "Schindler's List," one of the most acclaimed films about human survival amid the horrors of the Holocaust, is coming to DVD. The disc set, planned for release March 9, will be accompanied by interviews with some of the people who lived through the movie's story in real life, Universal Studios Home Video announced Wednesday.

Leopold "Paul" Page, a Holocaust survivor whose unremitting determination to honor the German businessman who saved his life and those of 1,200 other Jews during World War II inspired the book and epic film "Schindler's List," has died. A retired Beverly Hills retailer, Page died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 87. Page's achievement boils down to this: He had a story to tell, and Thomas Keneally needed a briefcase.

Emilie Schindler, the wife of industrialist Oskar Schindler who played an important role in his efforts to save hundreds of Jews from Nazi death camps during World War II, has died. She was 93. Schindler died Friday at a hospital in Strausberg, outside Berlin, where she had been taken July 21 for treatment of an undisclosed ailment, her biographer, Erika Rosenberg, announced in a statement.

Leopold "Paul" Page, a Holocaust survivor whose unremitting determination to honor the German businessman who saved his life and those of 1,200 other Jews during World War II inspired the book and epic film "Schindler's List," has died. A retired Beverly Hills retailer, Page died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 87. Page's achievement boils down to this: He had a story to tell, and Thomas Keneally needed a briefcase.