At a beginning

An unlikely exemplar for a commencement address

By Kyle Garza

[Editor’s Note: Kyle is a past columnist here, and we are grateful that he has shared this witty, serious piece of writing with us. It is the text of a speech he delivered last June at the commencement of the graduating class of Calvary Christian School, Oxnard, California.]

Thank you kindly, Dan, for those words that I may or may not have written myself. I can proudly attest to the truth of one of those points: today actually does mark the 1,095th day, or 3-year-anniversary, of my marriage to McKenzie, which means we’ve outlasted the average Hollywood marriage span by about three years now.
    And thank you, Calvary Christian, for asking me to speak here today. I know that I am here as the backup speaker for whoever cancelled before me, but I figure even silver medalists have the honor of saying they “won” in the Olympics, right?
    For you family and friends who have come today, welcome, and thank you for pouring into the lives of these young men and women. You have been graciously supporting them through their Christian education, and now I only ask that you extend that grace as we enter that most cherished part of every graduation ceremony where we listen to a complete stranger say inspiring things to the graduates that we’ll all forget by next week.
    So, while most of my remarks are directed to the graduates, you may all listen in because, for one, you have no other choice, and two, I’m going to be telling them something that I myself need as a reminder on a daily basis.
    So, graduates, today is an especially remarkable occasion for you seven before me because you have achieved something that only 91% of your fellow Americans have: you are graduating high school. Today you join the ranks of such noteworthy giants who came before you like Kanye West, John Stamos, Taylor Swift, and even Vermin Supreme (and if you don’t know who that is, prepare yourself at home for a wild and weird ride through the wonders of YouTube). In fact, I don’t know if you know this, but today, you are accomplishing something that a bunch of nobody’s before you never did: nobody’s like John Travolta, Keeanu Reeves, and Katy Perry.
    But today isn’t about the status of celebrity that you may or may not be obtaining by gaining membership in the prestigious club of high school diploma owner’s.
    No, today is the end of one leg of your journey through life, and the beginning of the next, hence we call this a “commencement” speech because it marks a new stage of your life that begins or “commences” today.
    I apologize because I know there’s nothing worse than finishing something huge and then being told you’ve only just begun.

But as you begin the course that follows high school, whatever that may be for you – military service, college, career – I want to impress on you the need to be like someone I know.
    You’ve probably heard plenty up to this point in your life to just “be yourself.” Well, forget that. It’s not good enough. There’s no personal growth in that challenge, because you’re always doing that.
    And I’m going to go off the deep-end today by telling you to be like someone not commonly mentioned on graduation days.
    It would be easy to say you should be like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who saw great social injustice in his generation and put his life on the line to make changes in the world for the better.
    It would be easy to say you should be like Benjamin Franklin, who did something amazing in just about every facet of his life, from helping draft the Declaration of Independence, to inventing glasses, to enlisting the aid of the French in the Revolutionary War.
    It would be easy to say you should be like Mother Theresa, who dedicated her life to serving the impoverished and destitute around the world, though primarily, we remember, in India.
    It would be easiest, and frankly best to say, you should just be like Jesus Christ Himself, who, being the God of the universe, incapable of experiencing pain or mortality, came to this earth some 2,000 years ago to restore humanity to a right relationship with God the Father through a humiliating and gruesome death on a Roman cross so that those who believe in His death and resurrection, through the Holy Spirit, might have eternal life in paradise with Him forever and ever, amen?
    Yeah, I could just say that and be done with it.
    But I’m going to give you someone today that I know you’ll remember, because the first thing I tell you about him will probably raise at least an eyebrow and probably stir some others uncomfortably in their seats.
    The man I want to tell you about today was a member of the National Socialist German Worker’s Party during World War II. Today, we simply call that the Nazi Party. And you’re probably now thinking, “This guy is telling the graduates to be like a Nazi?” Hear me out. This man is the only official member of the Nazi Party to be buried on Mount Zion in Jerusalem.
    His name is Oskar Schindler, who I’m sure many of the adults in the room might remember was played by Liam Neeson in Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List, which was released in theaters in 1993 and received seven Academy Awards.
    Now Oskar Schindler was not a saint. Far from it. He was more of a swindler and a hedonist than anything else for the majority of his life. Please, graduates, don’t model your whole life after this man.
    But there’s this thing I notice that Christians like to do: we like to focus on specific chapters of people’s stories. We love to hear about David and Goliath – not David and Bathsheeba. So likewise, there’s one chapter of Oskar Schindler’s story I want to focus on, and it’s the chapter that involves his joining the Nazi Party near the beginning of World War II.

Oskar Schindler was born to a Catholic family in what is today the Czech Republic. His early life was far from noble or legendary: at age 16 he was expelled from school for forging his own report card. In his twenties he was arrested several times for public drunkenness. He had numerous affairs after his marriage, and two illegitimate children by a woman who was not his wife. He was basically the guy you would never bring up in a graduation commencement speech.
    But it gets better. After his father abandoned his mother and she died shortly thereafter from illness, he became a traitor to his own country when he joined the intelligence services for Nazi Germany and quickly formed friendships in the ranks that would eventually open up contacts for black-market trading.
    Down the road, a friend of his from the German intelligence services told him about a Jewish-owned factory that was going bankrupt in Krakow, Poland, after the German-Soviet invasion of 1939, which started WWII. In purchasing the factory that produced cookware, Schindler met the Jewish man who would later help him manage the company, Abraham Bankier, even after the Nazis converted the factory into one that produced bullet casings for the war effort.
    As the Nazis began to drive the Jewish community out of Krakow, or into specific districts known as ghettos in 1940, Schindler personally witnessed men, women, and children thrown out of their homes and into the streets, yellow-star armbands awaiting them at the hands of SS officers. Following this, Schindler and many other non-Jewish business owners became overnight safeguards of the Jewish people. Schindler fought to keep those families employed by him in Krakow – then at least 1,000 families represented in his small factory – and he was successful in keeping them there, often through bribes and sweet talk to German military personnel, thus saving his workers from deportation to concentration camps like Belzec, Plaszow, and Auschwitz.
    Since the Jews weren’t wanted in Poland, the Germans read Schindler’s noble efforts to save them as “opportunism,” since Jewish labor was cheaper to subsidize. Because his factory was conscripted into the German war effort like every other company, Schindler saved his employees, including women, children, and the disabled, from being deported by claiming that they were “business essentials” to the upkeep of the factory’s productivity.
    Unbeknownst to the inspecting SS officers, he gave specific orders to his factory managers, including his lead Jewish manager, Abraham Bankier, to intentionally produce shells that would be completely unusable in the German war effort.
    Several of his employees still lived in the Krakow ghettos, though, and several times he saved them and their families, thanks to his contacts in the German intelligence forces: whenever he received word that German forces were to sweep into the city for indiscriminate killing, Schindler told his employees to stay the night in the factory, in the clinic, the kitchen, the dining room, the extended campgrounds he had constructed, wherever it was possible, just so they could avoid going home to their potential deaths.
    In fact, he was arrested three times for suspicions of Jewish sympathy; one time was after giving a thank-you kiss to a young Jewish girl who worked in his factory who had baked a birthday cake for him. All three times he bribed and sweet-talked his way out.
    Schindler was later asked why he risked so much for a people that weren’t even his own, and he answered, “I had to help them; there was no choice.”
    I want you to catch this: after all the bribes, the swindling, the black market purchases of food and supplies to keep his Jewish employees alive (estimated at a little over $1,000,000, and mind you that’s $1,000,000 in the 1940’s in an economically collapsed Germany) – by the end of all that, Oskar Schindler had invested literally every dollar he had in saving those people.
    By the end of the war in 1945, he had saved an estimated 1,000-1,300 Jews by purchasing them wherever he could, a list of people that we endearingly refer to today as “Schindler’s List.” While it seems so dismally small a number compared to the more than 6 million that lost their lives, the descendants of those saved Jews today outnumber the total number of Jews currently living in Poland.
    And after the war, he never had a successful business venture again.
    The Jews whom he saved, who called themselves “Schindlerjuden,” or “Schindler’s Jews,” pooled their funds together to keep him on his feet.
    Most of what we know about Oskar Schindler comes from eye-witness testimonies of those Jews whom he saved, several of whom were only teenagers when they first worked for him. He visited them in Israel throughout the years and was even invited to plant a tree, which you can still see today, at Yad Vashem, the Jewish Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.
    They arranged to have him buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion in 1974. He is the only member of the Nazi Party buried on Mount Zion.

Here’s the point: Oskar Schindler didn’t change the world. And yet Abraham Bankier, his Jewish factory manager, once told him a verse paraphrased from the Talmud that says, “He who saves the life of one man saves the world entire.”
    And that is why I think Oskar Schindler is worthy of your consideration today. Because statistically speaking, of the 7.4 billion people on earth, you are probably not the one who’s going to change the world. But, if you’re like Oskar Schindler, you’ll change thousands of worlds just by investing in people’s lives.
    Schindler’s story teaches us something unique about heroism. You don’t have to be an incredible human being to make a difference in the world. You just need to be good to God’s children when no one else is.
    So I’m not going to tell you to go change the world. Instead, change just one person’s life and you will change Heaven forever.

Because the day will come when you stand before God and He’ll ask you, “Where did you invest the life that I gave you?” And on that day, the right answer will not be “in a house.” It won’t be “in a trade” or “in a company.” It certainly won’t be “in Fortnite.”
    But it will be in people.
    I don’t know if you know this, but people are the only eternal things that will leave this world. You want to invest your life well? Invest it in something eternal.
    And the only eternal thing worth investing in is Jesus foremost (that’s between you and Him), and thereafter, it’s people – people who are made in the image of God Himself, who are in desperate need of the life that only He can give.
    And I can tell you this as one who has been guaranteed the same thing: one day you will see with your own eyes the return on your investment. And you will live with your investment forever.
    So, if you can’t change the world like Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Franklin, or Mother Theresa – if you can’t be perfect like Jesus (which, FYI, you can’t) – at least be like Oskar Schindler, who, for all his faults, invested in what mattered when it was desperately needed – when the world around him had lost its sense of what is truly valuable.
    And if you believe, as I do, that this world isn’t going to last, then invest in the one thing that will. That thing is sitting beside you right now, and one day it will hopefully be standing beside you, praising God for eternity for the life that we have in His Son.
    Your mission commences now. God speed.

Copyright © 2018, 2019 by Kyle Garza