The story of Oskar Schindler is the basis of a best-selling book and an Oscar-winning film.  Through charm and bribery, Schindler saved over 1,000 Jews from the Nazi gas chambers and concentration camps during World War II.  Uncovered in late author Thomas Keneally’s six boxes of research notes was a brittle yellow gem:  a carbon-paper copy of one of Schindler’s actual lists.

The 13-page document lists the names of 801 Jews from Schindler’s factory in Krakow, Poland.  The historical value of the document is priceless.  The 800 people on the list are only a small portion of the thousands or millions of lives saved thanks to heroes like Schindler and WWII veterans worldwide.

Sometimes it feels as though one person can not make a real difference.  Hopefully this will remind everyone that one person’s effort matters, even when staring down the fearsome Nazi war machine.

Tags: World War II, WWII, Schindler’s List, historical documents, Schindler’s Ark, Schindler’s list discovered, Thomas Keneally, Oskar Schindler

Margaret O’Callaghan had a need for a new type of kitchen utensil.  The round-bottomed ladle and the spatula are just not good enough when you’re dealing with things like crock pots and serving dishes.  That’s why she invented the scrudle, a combination ladle and spatula designed to scrape the deliciousness from any sort of cooking […]

Every day, Tom Baker deals with the issue of traffic.  Given Southern California’s massive concentration of cars, it’s no wonder that Baker would get frustrated dealing with the daily traffic routine.  That inspiration resulted in these great images of Los Angeles without the cars.   Here’s the full image gallery, and it’s awesome.
I love the […]

Have you ever wondered where salt comes from?  I mean, salt is in everything from fertilizers (potassium chloride) to the dinner table (sodium chloride), but where does it actually come from?  Why, salt mines, of course!  They’re not just for horrible industrial accidents or mad scientist lairs anymore.  English Russia has a great look inside […]

For some reason, the kids these days love the Twilight saga.  Believe me, it pains me to call it the Twilight saga, because to me a saga is a great, sweeping work of masterful literature, not a teenage vampire romance novel.  Either way, the latest movie based on the Twilight books, New Moon (officially The […]

People worry about all kinds of crises as the world ends, but as the movie Zombieland taught us, sometimes it’s our snack foods that are most important to our happiness.  For Tallahassee, it was his beloved Hostess Twinkies.  If your favorite food is the humble Eggo waffle from General Mills, then you’d best head to […]

I love goofy little websites like this.  From the Wal-Martians to quality engineering, I love a nice, odd corner of the Internet to investigate.  If it’s something that can result in some comedy thanks to random word generation, even better.   That’s why when Mysterio offered to predict my holiday gifts, I jumped at the […]

Linguist d’Armond Speers is an odd bird.  How else could you explain someone that taught his son Klingon as his first language? For the first three years of his son’s life, Speers spoke to his son only in the fictional alien language Klingon from the Star Trek universe.  His reasoning?  It was an experiment to […]