He went to Poland specifically to profit off the losses of the Jews and to use them as slave labor. He was a very bad man.
It’s just that, when the situation became even worse than that, he didn’t do the easy thing and ride the tide like so many did in those days. He took a stand.
The fact that he didn’t start out a holy man, like the above mentioned St. Kolbe, just makes his story all the more powerful. If someone as bad as Schindler can be bothered to risk his neck to do the right thing, maybe there’s hope for the world yet.
I remember watching a TV documentary about Holocaust survivors when I was a kid. The one story that stuck with me was of a woman who was on a truck headed to one of the camps at the end of the war, when the Nazis had pretty much given up on the “workcamp” pretense and were just killing as many people as they could before the Allies found out what was going on.
Somewhere along the route to the camp, her truck stopped. The guard opened the back of the truck and told everyone, “Get out. Get out and run.” They did, most of them probably expecting to be shot in the back, but the guard just got into his truck and drove on. She and a few other survivors hid out in a ruined cellar until the front lines passed them by. She had no idea who the guard was, or what happened to him. I’ve always wondered about him myself. Was he new to that position? How many truckloads of Jews had he driven to that camp? How much did he know about what would happen to them there? What was it that finally made him say, “No more”? How much evil did that man have to atone for, and how much of it was answered by that one act? And how could you measure that, even if you knew all the facts of his life?
Not only did he survive Auschwitz, but the experience inspired him to develop his own meaning-based view of psychology, which I think is a welcome alternative to the likes of Freud and Jung. Despite his inhuman treatment, he did his best to help his fellow inmates and the Nazi soldiers with their psychological problems.