If you’re a history buff with a few million dollars sitting around, you can buy one of the most famous lists in history – on eBay.
Schindler’s List, or the List of Schindlerjuden, is now up for auction on the site. No, not the Academy Award-winning film, but the actual list – one of only 4 remaining copies. The bidding starts at $3 million.
Its sellers, Gary Zimet and Eric Gazin, hope that the final price could hit as high as $5 million.
“We decided to sell the list on eBay because it has over 100 million worldwide members, and this is a global story,” said Gazin. “There are billionaires using the site, wealthy celebrities. We like the platform.”
This copy of the list, which is responsible for saving over a thousand Jews during the Holocaust, comes from the family of Itzhak Stern – Oskar Schindler’s accountant and friend.
“This exceedingly rare original Schindler’s List is the only one ever on the market. It emanates from the family of Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s accountant and right hand man (played by Ben Kingsley in the Academy Award-winning film). There are 3 others known which are in institutional hands. It is 14 pages in length and lists 801 male names, dated April 18, 1945. It is guaranteed authentic,” says the listing.
Oskar Schindler is credited with saving the lives of at least 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them at his factories, which made enamelware and ammunitions. At first, his connections helped him protect his workers from internment in Nazi concentration camps. But after a while, he could only maintain their safety through bribes. By the end of the war, Schindler had spent most of his money on bribes to protect the Schindlerjuden.
In 1944, with the help of a Jewish ghetto police officer, his secretary Mietek Pemper, and Stern, Schindler compiled the famous list, which contained 1,200 names of workers he would transport with him to a new factory. The list would ultimately save them from near-certain death.