Unlikely Wartime Hero a Savior to Poles, Jews : Europe: Nazi Oskar Schindler’s motives were unclear, but those he helped say they owe him everything.

Two elderly Polish women gaze at a grainy photo of a man of easy confidence astride his horse. It is Oskar Schindler, a Nazi Party member who became their wartime savior.

Schindler came to Krakow to profit from the German occupation, and then, for reasons never entirely clear, saved Poles from forced labor and hundreds of Jews from death camps.

Hollywood has taken up the tale of the German who combined charm and wile with prodigious amounts of liquor and luxury goods to manipulate the Gestapo and protect his workers, first at an enamelware factory in Krakow and later at a munitions plant over the Czech border.

For Stella Madej and Lidia Rybik, who still live in Krakow, and other survivors scattered around the world, the story of Schindler’s wartime heroics is their own.

“Everything in my life is due to Schindler,” said Madej, who escaped the Auschwitz gas chambers along with her mother, father and brother because Schindler put them on the list of his workers.

The scrapbook photo of Schindler, found by historians researching his remarkable story, brought memories flooding back to the two women. So has a movie-set backdrop of wartime Krakow, where black boots clump across cobblestones and yellow stars are sewn onto tattered sleeves.

Steven Spielberg is filming Schindler’s story, starring Irish actor Liam Neeson. The screenplay is based on “Schindler’s List,” the award-winning book by the Australian author Thomas Keneally, published in 1982.

Production crews have re-created the Kazimierz district, which flourished as a Jewish center from the 14th Century until it was obliterated by the Nazis.

Spielberg also rebuilt the Plaszow detention camp and, after some controversy, filmed outside Auschwitz, about 40 miles away. On shooting days in Krakow, actors portraying Nazi SS guards patrol with dogs, as their doomed victims cower.

When the Nazi terror was real, about 1,500 people found a degree of shelter in the Schindler factory, making pots and pans--and in one secret section, artillery detonators.

Some were Jews. Others, like Rybik, were young Poles who would have been deported for forced labor in Germany.

Schindler provided working papers that protected them from Nazi roundups and entitled them to extra food. There were even moments of levity on the weekend outings that Schindler, who had a taste for the good life, dared to organize for his non-Jewish workers.

“Every mother tried to save her children,” Rybik recalled. Rybik remembers the enamelware factory as an “oasis” and Schindler as “a magnificent person” with “something special, something very warm in his eyes.”

When Gestapo inspectors came, Schindler would say, “Lidia, take care of ‘ours,’ ” meaning the Jews. She would walk through the factory whispering, “Beware today.”

With liquor, black-market delicacies and bravado, Schindler managed to outmaneuver the Nazi bosses, even securing the release of Polish workers picked up by the Gestapo.

His most amazing feat was the list, drawn up in 1944 when he was forced to close his Krakow factory as Allied troops approached. He persuaded the Gestapo to let him take more than 1,000 Jews to his munitions plant in what is now Brnenec in the Czech republic.

Madej was about 12, or so her mother claimed, when her family was moved from the walled Jewish ghetto to the Plaszow detention camp in late 1942--just old enough to avoid being sent to the children’s barracks. Those youngsters were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz; she made it onto Schindler’s list.

“We heard rumors of the ‘list,’ ” she said. “We didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t believe that we could survive, that this could happen. All we heard was that there was this extraordinary man.”

Because Schindler’s motives were not clear, they have been scrutinized by virtually everyone who has studied the story. Madej denies one accusation, that people bought their way into Schindler’s graces. “In 1944, nobody had any money left, after so many (death camp transport) selections,” she said.

Before the Jews could be taken to Schindler’s Czech factory, about 300 girls and women, young Madej and her mother among them, were sent to Auschwitz.

She remembered that those at Auschwitz “balanced between life and death” before Schindler got his way in late 1944.

Then, she said, “We were packed into rail cars. We were freezing for three days. We didn’t know Schindler had sent the cars. . . . When the cars were opened, we were in Czechoslovakia. There was a factory and a camp.

“It was at that moment that we thought, ‘This man is really saving our lives.’ ”

Israel recognized Schindler’s bravery in 1962, naming him a “righteous Gentile.”

By all accounts, Schindler’s talents were expended on this shining deed. Business failures dogged his postwar years. He died in 1974.

Rybik picked up her life in Krakow after the war, working in a tailor’s shop.

Madej and her family were among the few Jewish survivors who chose to return to Poland, though she said it meant “learning to live in a big cemetery.”

At most, 500,000 Polish Jews survived, out of a prewar Jewish population of 3.5 million. Most of them emigrated to Israel or the United States.