7 INSIGHTS
I.
A man joins the Nazi Party.
He sees opportunity in war. He takes over a factory previously owned by Jews, now a forced labor camp.
He manufactures weapons for the German army.
He profits from the Holocaust.
II.
He lies to officials. Bribes generals. Forges documents. Cheats the system at every turn.
His motives are impure. His methods are corrupt. He breaks every moral code.
Is this a moral man?
III.
On the surface, he is the worst of the worst.
A war profiteer. An exploiter. A Nazi.
IV.
And yet—this man saved over 1,200 Jews from the gas chambers.
He spent his entire fortune protecting them. He risked his life again and again. When the war ended, he was penniless. The people he saved gave him a ring inscribed with a line from the Talmud: “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.”
His name was Oskar Schindler. They made a movie about him.
V.
How can this be?
How can a Nazi war profiteer—corrupt, impure, a sinner by every measure—end up a moral hero?
How can the same man be both monster and saint?
VI.
And where were the righteous?
Pope Pius XII knew about the Holocaust. He stayed silent. The world’s moral authority, guardian of a billion souls and he said nothing.
The clergy followed their codes. The institutions protected themselves. The “good people” looked away.
How can the men who represent morality itself—who wear its robes, speak its language, guard its traditions—fail to act when it mattered most?
VII.
A Nazi who saved 1,200 Jews.
A Pope who saved none.
The sinner acts. The saint stays silent.
What does morality even mean when sinners turn into heroes while the self-righteous men of morals and virtues do nothing?
4 QUOTES
I.
“He who saves one life, saves the world entire.”
The Talmud
II.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
Edmund Burke
III.
“No man is more unhappy than he who never faces adversity. For he is not permitted to prove himself.”
Seneca
IV.
“The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”
Albert Einstein
1 QUESTION
If an individual like Schindler can be regarded as a moral hero, what does it mean to be moral?