German businessman Oskar Schindler (1908-1974) saved Jews in Poland and Czechoslovakia from death at the hands of the Nazis during World War II by employing them in his factory.

Oskar Schindler was the unlikeliest of heroes--indifferent to religion and politics, partial to gambling and drinking, and not averse to skirting the law in his many business ventures. Yet to the eleven hundred Jews whose lives he saved during World War II, he was nothing less than a saint. Until the 1980s, his name was barely known outside the world of Holocaust survivors. Thanks to a book and then a movie about his exploits, however, he has taken his place among those the Israelis call "Righteous Gentiles"--non-Jews who took great risks to ensure the safety of Jews doomed by the Nazis' "Final Solution."

Schindler was born in 1908 in the industrial city of Zwittau, Moravia, then a German province...