[4] On the 18 of November 1939, during the early months of the Nazi occupation of Poland, Oskar Schindler was introduced to Stern,[5] who was then working as an accountant for Schindler's fellow Abwehr agent Josef "Sepp" Aue, who had gained control of Stern's formerly Jewish-owned place of employment as a Treuhänder (trustee).
[6] Schindler showed Stern the balance sheet of a company he was thinking of acquiring, an enamelware manufacturer called Rekord Ltd owned by a consortium of Jewish businessmen (including Abraham Bankier) that had filed for bankruptcy earlier that year.
And if a German asked you a question in the street it was compulsory for you to precede your answer with 'I am a Jew....' But it was only on December 1st that we had to begin wearing the Star of David.
It was just as the situation had begun to grow worse for the Jews, when the Sword of Damocles was already over our heads, that I had this meeting with Oskar Schindler.In a later meeting, Stern informed Schindler that he could use Jewish slave labour to staff his factory, Deutsche Emaillewarenfabrik (German Enamelware Factory) at a lower price than Polish laborers, which would also allow those laborers to be protected from deportations.
[3] After the liberation of the Brünnlitz camp by the Red Army, Stern moved to Paris and eventually emigrated to Israel.
[11] In 1938, Stern was engaged to Sophia Backenrot, who survived the war due to her Aryan appearance in the Drohobycz ghetto.
At the end of the film, Stern's widow Sophia appears in a procession of Schindlerjuden and the actors who portrayed them, placing stones on Schindler's grave on Mount Zion, which is a Jewish tradition showing respect for the deceased.