the grave of Oskar Schindler

Sunday, Chelsea’s last full day in Israel, was going to be spent visiting different tourist attractions. After I had attended my morning classes, the two of us set out for the Old City so I could drop by Jeff Seidel’s office to hand in my paperwork, and then we set off for the grave of Oskar Schindler, stopping off at the Old City Holocasut memorial museum along the way.

Following the guide books directions, we managed to find the cemetery easily enough. The path led out of the old city, east from where I live; the roads were a little less clean, a little less smooth. Eventually we found the Christian cemetery we were in search of. It was very nondescript but for the small, cheap looking sign telling people “Oskar Schindler’s grave.”
Oskar Schindler, although originally motivated by economic opportunity during the reign of the Third Reich, began to care for his Jewish workers above his own fate and fortune. Saving more than 1200 individuals—unskilled workers, women, children, handicapped individuals—bribing the SS and Gestapo, and even once going so far as securing the return of individuals sent to Auschwitz. Although at the height of his career he was among the economic elite, his unyielding efforts ate away at his fortune, leaving him impoverished after the war, needing to largely rely on social welfare, even for his final hospital bills.
Oskar Schindler was honored as a righteous gentile, a Righteous Among the Nations, in 1963 by Yad Vashem, and he died 11 years later, interred—according to his wishes—in a Franciscan cemetery on Mt Zion, making him the only member of the Nazi party to be buried in Israel.

There was one other man in the cemetery when Chelsea and I were there, presumably looking for the same thing we were.
According to the book’s information, the grave itself was fairly poorly marked, in the lowest section of the cemetery four rows from the left, or something to that affect.
After looking around for a bit, Chelsea and I were not exactly sure how we would find what we were searching for, without literally going through every grave.
Then in the distance I saw a simple grave that differed significantly from its neighbors: it was covered in rocks.

(this is a Jewish custom, to leave rocks on the headstone)

I knew I had found my man.
It seemed simultaneously appropriate and odd that Schindler, who had at great personal risk saved the lives of so many, should in his final state be so plain. There was no special marker from Yad Vashem. There was nothing from the State of Israel, or from the Federal Republic of Germany honoring him. He lays alone, having divorced from his wife in the 1950’s, and is surrounded largely by unknowns, as well as a decent amount of garbage from years of neglect to the cemetery at large. Why is it seemingly acceptable that such a man should be in his end so treated?
And on the other hand, while his actions were indeed great, they are what in theory ought to have been by so many more; his behavior in an ideal world would have been the norm, going to great lengths to insist on an acceptable level of humanity, not the exception. He has been granted all of his final wishes, being buried in Jerusalem, and so perhaps the relative simplicity of his actual legacy—greatly supplemented by his virtual legacy built by Steven Spielberg—is appropriate for a man who acted as we would hope should be ordinary in times that were far beneath him.
In either case, I had done what I considered a responsibility for myself, not only as an Ashkenazi Jew, but as an ordinary human being: going to pay my respects to one of the few men who managed to maintain their expected decency and normality in a time of unexplainable inhumanity.