Schindler’s List for sale for 2.2 million dollars
The Supreme Court of the New York State pronounced the list – a historical document – a possible object of transaction. By taking this decision, the Court overruled the ban on selling the “list”, which was in effect until now.
In March 2010 an anonymous owner put the document up for sale. The transaction was blocked by the heir to Oskar Schindler’s widow. After the decision of the Court, the owner of the list can put it up for sale again.
The offered version of the document has 13 pages and was created on April 18th, 1945. It contains the names and personal details of 801 Jews.
The Schindler’s Factory is a branch of the Kraków Historical Museum. However, this institution is not planning to buy the list. “2.2 million dollars is a totally abstract sum for us” – says Jacek Salwiński, deputy director of the Museum. The Museum annually spends about 200 thousand zlotys on new exhibits.
In the Schindler’s Factory visitors can see a copy of one of the original versions of the list, which is part of the collection of the Gross-Rosen Museum in Rogoźnica (Dolnośląskie Province), where the former Nazi extermination camp was located.
Oscar Schindler started creating his list in the fall of 1944 in Kraków. “There were numerous versions of his list, new ones were created as the situation kept changing” – explains Prof. Aleksander Skotnicki, who is researching the history of Kraków Jews.
In April 2009 one of the versions of the list was found in a library in Sydney. The other ones are, among others, in the collections of the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem and of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.
In 1963 Oscar Schindler, was honored by the Yad Vashem Institute with the title “Righteous Among the Nations” for saving Jews during the Second World War. He rescued over a thousand people. Schindler passed away in 1974.
More about Oskar Schindler and the building of the Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik in Kraków.
