Abraham Bankier (May 5, 1895 – 1956) was a Polish businessman and Holocaust survivor who assisted Oskar Schindler in his rescue activities and worked as his factory manager.
Bankier was able to leverage black market dealings with extra scrap metal to bring additional Jews to work at the factory, thereby giving them temporary reprieve from deportations and from the dangers of Kraków Ghetto (and after the closure of the ghetto, the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp), thus ultimately saving many lives.
[2] Bankier himself was saved by Schindler when, having forgotten his employment pass, he and some other Emalia workers were put on a train destined for a Nazi extermination camp in eastern Poland.
[2] This was a distortion, most likely caused by the fact that most of Keneally's and Spielberg's historical witnesses knew Schindler from his subsequent time in Brünnlitz, not in Kraków, where most of the film transpired and Bankier did much of his work.
According to American Holocaust historian David M. Crowe, "Bankier's skills as a businessman and a black marketeer provided Oskar Schindler with the vast resources he needed to hire, house, feed, transfer, and save hundreds of Jewish workers.