Larry Pantirer of Millennium Homes donated the amphitheater and surrounding three acres of land to the township of West Orange. His sole request was to name the amphitheater after Oskar Schindler, who saved hundreds of Jews during the Holocaust, including Pantirer's father, Murray Pantirer. West Orange town leaders were pleased to oblige Pantirer's request. The OSPAC is the only performing arts theater in the United States named for Oskar Schindler.

Murray Pantirer's Story

Mejzesz Puntierer - today Murray Pantirer - was born in June 1925 as the second of seven and grew up in Krakow, Poland, where he attended afternoon Hebrew school. His life was often interrupted because the Germans occupied Krakow in 1939. Pantirer's family split up on several occasions to search for food and other necessities. Eventually, they were confined to the Krakow ghetto. In 1942, Murray and a brother were sent to Plaszow for forced labor. In May of 1944, his brother was sent to Auschwitz. That year, Murray was transferred to Gross-Rosen and to Brunnlitz to work for Oskar Schindler.

Schindler employed Jews in his enamelware and munitions factories. Pantirer was chosen to be one of 900 workers at Schindler's munitions factory in Czechoslovakia. He remained there from October 1944 to May of 1945, when the survivors at the factory were liberated.

Pantirer remembers the struggles in Brunnlitz and Schindler's involvement. One story tells of a man who was punished for stealing potatoes. "An SS man put a potato in his mouth; he had to stand outside like that in the cold weather, and it was written on him 'I'm a potato thief.' When Schindler saw it, he took the potato out of his mouth, and said to the guy, 'go back to your work.' And he told the SS man, 'In my camp you don't do those things.'"

Pantirer also recalls the well-known story of Oskar Schindler rescuing a trainload of frozen Jews. Emilie Schindler, Oskar's wife, explains that he helped nurse them back to health, cooking for them and tending to their needs. When a young girl died, Oskar Schindler bought a piece of land and allowed her to be buried according to Jewish law.

Schindler's Factory

At Schindler's factory, workers were only half as hungry as in other camps - Schindler's meals had a calorie count of 2000 versus 900 in other places. When food supplies became critically low, Schindler used great sums of his own money to purchase food on the black market.

Schindler assured the survival of many Jews by altering their registrations at his factory. People survived if they were essential to the war effort. He registered elderly workers as 20 years younger and children as adults. Lawyers, doctors and artists were registered as metal workers and mechanics - all so they could survive as essential to the war industry.

At Schindler's factory, nobody was hit, nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps.

Until the liberation in spring of 1945, Oskar Schindler used all means at his disposal to ensure the safety of his Schindler-Jews. He spent every pfennig he had, and even Emilie Schindler`s jewels were sold, to buy food, clothes, and medicine. He set up a secret sanatorium in the factory that housed medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie Schindler looked after the sick.

To this day, Pantirer, who was a teenager during the war, remains mystified about how his name appeared on Schindler's list. Pantirer was listed as a sheet metal worker, an occupation he said he knew nothing about. Murray Pantirer was liberated in 1945, the only one of nine family members to survive.

Post-war life

After the war, Pantirer spent a couple of years in an Austrian refugee camp at Bindermichel, then emigrated to the United States in 1949. A year later he set up a construction firm with his friend Abraham Zuckerman.

From the beginning, they knew they had to find a way to honor and remember their protector. "After the war he couldn't find himself," said Pantirer. "He was too big of a man to start over."

"When we started the business (we came in 1949, we incorporated in 1950) in our first subdivision in South Plainfield, N.J., the first thing we did was put his name on a street - Schindler Drive", said Pantirer.

Their first residential complex was built in 1953, and included four-room single-story homes. Today they build developments with luxury houses. Their past and present complexes have one thing in common: each has a Schindler Street, a Schindler Drive or a Schindler Way, named for Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more Jewish lives during the Holocaust than any other person.

Zuckerman and Pantirer survived the Third Reich because Schindler gave them and 1,200 other Jews work in his factories, provided them with food and protected them from the Nazi reign of terror. To express their gratitude, to date Zuckerman and Pantirer have dedicated 25 streets in New Jersey to Oskar Schindler's memory.

Over the years, people have often objected to living on a street named "Schindler" until they learned of its origin. "After the (Steven Spielberg) movie, when 'Schindler' became a household word, (people would show) me envelopes with their address...they were so proud to be on Schindler Drive."

Zuckerman and Pantirer's devotion didn't stop with street naming. From 1957 until Schindler died in 1974, the two helped him financially, by sponsoring his trips to America, where they would buy him clothes and shoes.

"We did it so that he wouldn't think it was like charity," says Zuckerman. "It was a gesture like - he got a coat, I got a coat. I'd say, 'I need one too.' Besides that we gave money into his hands," he added, declining to say how much.

From the early 1950s until Schindler's death in 1974 at the age of 66, Pantirer and Zuckerman treated him as an honored member of both their families. One of the last parties that Pantirer held in 1972 at which Schindler attended, Schindler was lifted and carried in a chair around the room - an honor usually reserved for wedding couples.

Pantirer's son, Larry, met Schindler on that occasion and remains in awe of the person who saved his father's life. "He still had charm and personality," recalled the younger Pantirer. "You could see the way he carried himself, even as an old man."

Pantirer not only assisted Schindler but also contributed to the construction of various Jewish and Holocaust museums, and founded, in Schindler's name, a bursary for Hebraic studies in Jerusalem, again partnering with Zuckerman.

As their primary goal, Pantirer and Zuckerman wish to express their everlasting gratitude to the man who saved them both from almost certain death. They also want to honor the memory of all the Jews who perished in their boyhood town of Krakow, Poland. Through all the years, and all the conversations they had when they would get together in America, Europe and Israel, the big question always remained: Why? What prompted Schindler to act as he did, at tremendous risk to himself?

Pantirer thinks he heard the answer. "He came to my house once, and I put a bottle of cognac in front of him. I thought this is the time to ask him the question 'why'."

Why did he do it?

"And his answer was, 'I was a Nazi, and I believed that the Germans were doing wrong ... when they started killing innocent people, 0menschen - I decided I'm going to work against them (the Nazis) and I'm going to save as many (innocent people) as I can.' And I think that he told the truth, because that's the way he worked."

But for these Schindlerjuden, as they are called, the "why" is not as important as the fact that he did what he did, and that he be remembered for it. Adds Pantirer, "If he wasn't that way, maybe he wouldn't have taken the risk that he took. He took a tremendous risk."

Like most survivors, Pantirer always felt a need to explain how his survival was nothing less than a miracle. While there were a finite number of ways people could die in the Holocaust - gas, starvation, shooting, torture, suffocation, electrocution - every one of the hundreds of thousands who survived did so through a unique combination of circumstances.

For decades, the Schindlerjuden were telling people their story, and were frustrated that not many seemed interested in hearing it. When Keneally's book was published in 1982, they finally had something in hand that told their story, which is more than most survivors enjoy.