News about Oskar Schindler

Cioma Schonhaus was number one on the Third Reich's most wanted list. A master forger, he had helped hundreds of Jews escape Nazi death camps by creating fake IDs widely acknowledged to be almost indistinguishable from the real thing. But, 80 years on - unlike the stories of Oskar Schindler and Anne Frank - his name is almost unknown, beyond Germany and Switzerland, where he eventually settled.

Mel Gibson was one of a few A-listers 'interested' in appearing as Oskar Schindler in Steven Spielberg's 1993 Holocaust drama Schindler's List, 14 years before his anti-Semitic fiasco. The name of 'Mel Gibson' came up.' He was curious. In a 30th anniversary oral history, his agent brought him forward,' CAA co-founder Michael Ovitz told THR on Thursday. But it wasn't going to happen.' Steven wanted a non-movie actor to play the role.'

Janina Mehlberg graduated from Lwów's prestigious university (today Lviv, Ukraine) at the age of 22. She lived in luxury and was instrumental in Lwów's prewar intellectual circles, with her husband, philosopher Henry Mehlberg. Then the war began. The Germans confiscated Lwów, and the Mehlbergs lived with the horrors of persecution, privation, and the constant threat of murder. This is when Janina displayed the first signs of extraordinary courage. Even after a militiaman cracked her in the chest with his rifle butt, she refused to leave his side when Ukrainian militia seized Henry for a mass shooting. The Mehlbergs were required to move to Lwów's ghetto in December 1941, where they knew death awaited them. Rather, they fled with Count Andrzej Skrzysski, who told them that if they went with him to Lublin, they would get them false papers as Polish Christians. Janina appeared as the Countess Sucholska later on to offer assistance to prisoners at the Majdanek concentration camp, where 63,000 people were killed. All the while, she was concealing a plot that might have killed her.

At least 1,098 at his munitions and enamel plant during World War II, a German businessman who persuaded the Nazis that they were too important to be killed in the Holocaust. When his company was relocated from Krakow, Poland, to the Brünnlitz labor camp, now in the Czech Republic, only four of which survived today, one of which, typed up on April 18, 1945, is up for auction. Schindler's tale was immortalized in the 1993 film starring Liam Neeson (left), which received seven Oscars and reignited interest in the Holocaust.

LORD ASHCROFT: As she handed over her identification papers to the Nazi troops guarding one of the few entrances to the Warsaw Ghetto, the young, dark-haired young woman in a nurse's uniform thumped inside her chest. It was the summer of 1942, and the truth about the Jews' brutal genocide was becoming painfully clear. As the guard blasted her inside, the knot in her stomach slowed slightly. She knew that if the truth of her unethical mission was revealed, she would be tortured by the ruthless, sadistic SS and fired, Agonizingly. She sighed with relief, but knew an even more difficult challenge lay inside the walls of the ghetto, where up to 500,000 Polish Jews had been corralled ten-to-a-room in a warren of buildings and streets in a little more than a square mile. The stench of death and disease was revolting. Thousands of half-starving people merrily walked around with just rags to shield them from the bitter cold.

In an attempt to combat hunger, prisoners clung to memories of simpler times and their favorite family dishes. Now, a new cookery book by 29 camp survivors has turned these memories into a book of recipes. The 110 recipes are divided into chapters, each of which starts with an introduction where the survivors' recall what the food means for them. Eva, a writer who died from typhus after being released from the camp and trying to walk home, wrote a recipe for Hungarian Layered Potatoes: "This particular dish of rakott-krumpli was the last meal we had on the night before the deportation to Auschwitz.'

During the Second World War, Trevor Chadwick assisted Sir Nicholas Winton in the rescue of 669 Jewish Jews from Czechoslovakia. The Dorset schoolteacher helped create exit passes to deceive the Nazis and ensure that children were safely in the United Kingdom, putting them at a risk of personal danger. In 1939, he moved back and forth between England and Prague to oversee the movement of hundreds of thousands of people by rail and aircraft. Mr Chadwick (pictured inset and right with some of the rescued children) died in 1979, but his heroic deedwick didn't appear until the 1990s. Moira Purver was charged with creating a life-size statue to honor Mr Chadwick's life in Swanage, Dorset. Mr Chadwick's creation, which depicts him dressed informally and holding a toddler when not holding another child's hand, has been erected next to a children's play area. His grandchildren, as well as Nick Winton, the son of the late Sir Nicholas, whose own heroics were revealed on BBC Programme That's Life in 1988, were among the guests at an unveiling ceremony.