The model for the gold ring that Jewish workers gave to World War II hero Oskar Schindler has been donated to a Melbourne museum.
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Louis Gross, son of the late Jozef Gross, who made the ring and its lead prototype, has told how the item was almost thrown out after Jozef died.
In an emotional scene in the 1993 movie Schindler's List, labourers in Schindler's armaments factory hand him the ring as thanks for saving their lives.
In real life, before the labourers were liberated in early May, 1945, Jozef Gross had used an oxy-acetylene torch to make the ring prototype from a lead pipe at the factory in Brunnlitz, in today's Czech Republic.
Mr Gross pressed the model into two pieces of cuttlefish. Fellow workers donated a gold tooth and jewellery but it was not enough, so Mr Gross added copper and a silver coin, then poured the melted alloy into the moulds to make the ring.
No one knows what became of the gold ring, but Mr Gross took the model when he migrated to Australia in 1949 with second wife, Janka (Joanna) and son Louis, 2.
They settled in Melbourne, as did Janka's sister Helen, and Helen's husband, musician Leo Rosner, who were also "Schindler Jews".
Jozef's first wife Chaya, their four-year-old son Ludwik, Jozef's mother and his seven siblings all died in concentration camps.
For more than 30 years, Jozef kept the ring model in a razor box in his CBD jewellery workshops.
After Jozef died in 1997, Louis took the box, full of odds and ends, to Jozef's long-time business partner, Andrew Belza, to decide what to throw out. Luckily Mr Belza recognised the model and its Schindler story, and told Louis.
Jozef had kept the model as a memento but he wasn't sentimental about Schindler.
Louis says the new display at the Jewish Holocaust Centre in Elsternwick, accurately states how Jozef regarded Schindler as an opportunistic and manipulative Nazi sympathiser who profited from Jewish slave labour.
Jozef told how some Jews paid to get on to Schindler's list – Louis's mother "didn't have enough money" and was sent to Auschwitz.
Later in life Jozef realised life was better at Schindler's factories "than it would have been elsewhere".
Jozef thought the movie, "very accurate except for two things: Schindler did not give a speech at the end, and there were no engraving tools so there was no inscription on the ring" – the movie gives the saying as a Talmud quote: `He who saves one life, saves the world entire'."
Louis says displaying the ring model "shows people's spirit in the face of adversity" and is a tribute to his father's skills.
Museum curator Jayne Josem said the display conveys the complexity of Schindler. "He was a sinner and a saint; it's not a straightforward story".