Thanks to the book Schindler’s Ark, and the film, Schindler’s List, the name Oskar Schindler became known to millions of people around the world. Schindler was a German industrialist. During World War II he saved over a thousand Polish Jews from the concentration camps. As the war ended the Germans pulled out of Poland, and the people awaited the arrival of the Russians. Just before the Russians arrived, Schindler too decided to flee westward.
When his Jewish workers, now free, heard he was leaving they got together to see how they could express their gratitude to him. All that was to hand to make a gift was base metal. Then one of them suggested something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework.
‘Take this,’ he said. ’Were it not for Oskar, the SS would have had the stuff anyway. My teeth would be in a heap in some SS warehouse, along with the golden fangs of many others.’
At first the others resisted the man’s offer but he insisted. So he had his bridgework extracted by a prisoner who had once been a dentist in Cracow. A jeweller among them melted the gold down and fashioned a ring but of it. On the inner circle of the ring they inscribed these words from the Talmud: ‘The one who saves a single life, saves the entire world.’
It was an astonishing and deeply moving gesture of gratitude. That is one of the marvellous things about gratitude — it makes us want to give something back. ‘Gratitude is the heart’s memory’ (French Proverb). But then someone might say that it was the least they could do since they owed their lives to Schindler. The ten lepers in the Gospel also owed their lives to Jesus; yet only one of them came back to thank him.
It seems strange that the one who came back to give thanks was an outsider – a Samaritan. But isn’t that how it often is? The insider takes everything for granted and is taken for granted too. The outsider, on the other, hand sees everything as a gift. We find the same in the first reading. We see the foreigner, Naaman, coming back to thank Elisha for his help.
With love and prayers, Fr Michael