Bankier was born in
Kraków, then a part of
Austria-Hungary, on May 5, 1895, to an observant Jewish family. Prior to
World War II, Bankier was one of the owners of the Ltd. factory on Lipowa street in
Kraków, Poland, that
Oskar Schindler took over during the
Nazi occupation of Poland. Schindler then employed Bankier to manage the factory, which was renamed (German Enamelware Factory Oskar Schindler), called "Emalia" for short. 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. 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. Schindler found them shortly before the train departed and was able to have them taken off the train. When
Thomas Keneally's 1982 novel ''
Schindler's Ark was adapted into the movie Schindler's List'', Bankier's role was combined, along with those of
Itzhak Stern and
Mietek Pemper, into the composite character "Itzhak Stern". 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." Bankier died in 1956 in
Vienna,
Austria, at the Vienna South Train Station, of his third heart attack. ==Notes==