Schindler’s List For Sale on eBay

By Anne Cohen July 19, 2013

You can’t Netflix this version of “Schindler’s List.”

One of the original lists by Oskar Schindler is up for auction on eBay tonight, the New York Post reported. The only copy ever to be sold on an open market is priced at a whopping $3 million.

“Enter US $3,000,000.00 or more” the listing will coach bidders at 9 p.m. EDT, according to an advance copy obtained by The Post.

“Free Local Pickup,” the listing adds. “Item location: Israel.”

Though there were originally seven versions of the list that saved thousands of Polish Jews from death at the hands of the Nazis, only four have been located. Two are at Yad Vashem and one in the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington.

According to the Post, the list offered on eBay is a 14-page long onionskin document, dated April 18, 1945. 801 male names are featured.

The historic item’s sellers, Gary Zimet and Eric Gazin, two California collectors told the Post they hoped the list would sell for as high as $5 million.

“It is extremely rare that a document of this historical significance is put on the market,” Zimet said. “Many of the survivors on this list and their descendants moved to the United States, and there are names on this list which will sound very familiar to New Yorkers.”

After forking over a $10,000 deposit (with the balance due within a week), the bid-winner will receive an affidavit from Nathan Stern, the list’s original owner, and nephew of Itzhak Stern — played by Ben Kingsley in the 1993 movie — responsible for typing out the lists.

“We decided to sell the list on eBay because it has over 100 million worldwide members, and this is a global story,” Gazin said.

Anne Cohen was the Forward’s deputy digital media editor. When she’s not looking for the secret Jewish history of Voodoo in New Orleans, or making lists about Ruth Bader Ginsburg, she writes for The Assimilator. She graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism with an M.S. magazine concentration in 2012.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO