Soundbites

Is peacemaking ever bad for business?

My memories of friends stiff with shrapnel, and former parks filled with tombstones, push me toward pacifism. During times of saber-rattling, I fly a peace flag from my office building. A neighbor once asked if I knew how much business I’ve lost by flying that flag. Because of what I’ve learned about the human costs of war in places such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, El Salvador, and Iran, it hadn’t occurred to me to measure the economic costs to my business of speaking out for peace. In fact, it’s hard for me to understand how someone could support a war they didn’t believe in because it was good for their business. — Travel entrepreneur Rick Steves in Travel As A Political Act

Bench strength

One of the greatest untapped strengths of The Church is the entrepreneurs sitting in the pews every Sunday morning. They have unlimited business ideas that come from years of experience. These gifted entrepreneurs don’t need a structured system to tell them HOW to use their skills ... They just need someone or something to tell them that work can be worship. — Business as Mission Network

Philanthropreneurs

A new generation of “philanthropreneurs” are less content with “chequebook charity” or simply engraving their names on a plaque at a building’s entrance. Instead, they’re taking a businesslike or investor-like approach to giving, insisting on accountability, setting up quantifiable goals to measure the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome leading the agribusiness and finance group

the success of their donor efforts, and trimming the fat when it comes to charitable administration. — Investment executive Thane Stenner in The Globe & Mail

Why hunger?

Breaking and sharing of bread is a symbol of love and communion, as well as food. In today’s world we can talk and send messages to any part of the world with a few clicks, so why is there a problem of hunger? On the wall in the India room in the FAO is a picture of Gandhi with a quote, “For he who lacks two meals a day, food appears as God.” The role of the UN, the role of MEDA and the role of many other development agencies is to build a world without poverty and hunger. Some do it with giving food, others with helping produce more food, and others with building businesses and infrastructure needed to process and distribute food and other necessities. Each play a vital role [but] more is needed, since the food supply must increase by 70 percent by 2050. — Former MEDA staffer Calvin Miller, now senior officer in

Drivers of growth

Today, more girls worldwide are in school. More women hold jobs and serve in public office.... But our progress is far from complete. Women are still the majority of the world’s poor, uneducated, unhealthy and unfed. They are the majority of the world’s farmers but are often forbidden from owning the land they cultivate or accessing credit to make those farms profitable. Women care for the world’s sick, but women and girls are less likely to get treatment when they themselves are sick. They rarely cause armed conflicts, but they always suffer their consequences and are often excluded from peace negotiations.... When women are free to develop their talents and contribute fully to their societies, everyone benefits.... When women are free to earn a living and start small businesses, they become drivers of economic growth. When women are afforded the opportunity of education and access to health care, their families and communities prosper. — U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in The Globe & Mail

Working faith

It is the daily tasks, daily acts of love and worship that serve to remind us that religion is not strictly an intellectual pursuit.... Christian faith is a way of life, not an impregnable fortress made up of ideas; not a philosophy; not a grocery list of beliefs. — Kathleen Norris in The Quotidian Mysteries

Sole business

I like my work, even if the thing that interests me is trodden upon by you. — Shoe manufacturer and early MEDA founder Orie O. Miller, in a letter to former classmates in 1916

In his father’s footsteps

Carpenter Rick Zerbe Cornelsen finds coffin-making a rewarding career change

Photo by Evelyn Rempel Petkau

by Evelyn Rempel Petkau

It’s an unassuming workplace. An expanded garage behind Rick Zerbe Cornelsen’s house is the workshop of The Village Casketmaker. For the past six years, Cornelsen has been building caskets between renovation and construction jobs. Today, he has left almost all the construction jobs behind to devote more time and energy to making coffins.

Cornelsen, a member of Hope Mennonite Church, Winnipeg, where he serves on the steering committee, comes from a family of woodworkers. His father was a furniture maker in Germany, who came to Canada in the mid-1950s and eventually became a pastor.

“But he never left woodworking entirely,” says Cornelsen. “It became a hobby and then in his retirement it re-emerged as a passion. When he retired, he built a casket for himself and one for Mom out of reclaimed materials and stored them in the garage.”

Through a funeral director friend, the family “became aware of the exorbitant mark-up on caskets,” he says. “Being a practical-minded and woodworking family, we often talked that someone should set up a small shop in their backyard where they could make caskets and sell them directly to families, offering something simple, not too expensive and locally made. We talked about it off and on for years, but it was my dad who finally did something about it.”

Rick Zerbe Cornelsen of Winnipeg demonstrates how to put together his simple Timberwise casket. “Extreme fanciness when people haven’t lived that kind of life in the first place seems incongruent” at their death, he says of his Anabaptist and Mennonite customer base.

In 2001, when Cornelsen’s mother died and the family buried her in the homemade casket, “the experience revived thoughts of offering something similar to the wider public,” he says. Cornelsen left his work as coordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee Aboriginal Neighbours program in 2004 and began to build caskets in his backyard, supplementing it with construction and renovation work. He enjoys the pastoral aspect of this work. “There is a service element to this,” Cornelsen says. “In a very, very small way I can offer people something that is redemptive because it brings the community back togeth-

er a little bit. We need to face these events together as communities, as families and support each other.”

Cornelsen comes into contact with people at a point when they are confronted with death.

“Being in this business helps me to face the fact that death is a reality, inevitable, but my faith proclaims it is not final,” he explains. “It is not something to be denied or run away from. This work has been quite life-giving for me, actually.”

For Anabaptists or Mennonites who come from a tradition of simplicity and frugality, Cornelsen’s work offers them an alternative.

“I don’t do this work because I want people to have a cheaper option, but a simpler option that is sensible in terms of our desire to walk lightly on the earth,” he says, adding, “Extreme fanciness when people haven’t lived that kind of life in the first place seems incongruent.” Cornelsen also believes that part of people’s God-given work is to use their creative gifts for a good purpose. His caskets speak to an elegant efficiency. Finely crafted, the caskets he sells locally are beautiful yet simple.

In addition to wanting to give people a simpler and locally produced alternative, Cornelsen feels a strong sense of environmental responsibility. He has designed a casket that uses sustainable resources and is very suitable for natural burials. The Timberwise casket is made from a soft wood that is fast-growing and readily available in Canada, uses no glue or metal, and biodegrades quickly. Weighing less than 85 pounds, his caskets can be shipped and easily re-assembled.

Cornelsen sees an emerging interest in alternative ways of doing funerals.

“What I am doing is not radical,” he says. “It just means that people need to step outside the mainstream for this piece of the puzzle.” While his business is still small, the volume

of work has grown by word of mouth over the years. Cornelsen plans to develop a website (timberwise.ca) to market his Timberwise caskets across the country and even abroad.

“Because I have a small workshop, relatively simple tools and little capital investment, I can make the caskets and sell them relatively inexpensively and still make a reasonable wage, thanks in part to the fact that the industry marks up caskets so much,” he says, admitting, though, that “it will get tougher as Costco and places like that start selling caskets from China. I’m hoping people will also make choices based on the integrity of the whole process. If that’s too idealistic, I guess I’ll be doing some other kind of work.”

Originally published in the March 22, 2010, issue of Canadian Mennonite. Reprinted by permission. ◆

On Schindler’s List

The youngest survivor describes working in the factory of Oskar Schindler

’m here to tell you my horrible story.” Leon Leyson, now 80, spoke gently despite his strong words. Students from two Winnipeg Mennonite high schools listened raptly.“I

Many of the 600 young people had seen the 1993 movie, Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Ben Kingsley, and directed by Steven Spielberg. It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

The movie depicts real-life Oskar Schindler as a Nazi Party lages and murder them. It chills my bones to think that a nation of philosophers, a nation of scientists and composers, would have a battalion of soldiers who would follow the invading army and ferret out Jews.

A month after the invasion they came to my home town. Everyone who was related to me in Poland was murdered. My oldest brother who had escaped to the Soviet side was murdered there.

Shooting people with bullets one at a time wasn’t fast

member and war-profiteer who used his business influence to save 1,200 Polish Jewish refugees by employing them in his factories and keeping them out of death camps.

Leyson, the youngest worker on that famous list, attributed his escape to Schindler’s personal intervention. Leyson addressed the Mennonite students as part of a larger speaking tour that included an MBA class on Executive Responsibility at the University of Manitoba. Here is a paraphrase of the story he told.

Until I was nine we lived in a small town in northeastern Poland My father, a craftsman, was moved to Krakow to work in a factory, and eventually brought us all there.

In the fall of 1939 Germany invaded Poland and everything changed. I went from a curious boy who looked forward to every day, to an enemy of the state.

Step by step we Jews were marginalized. People lost their jobs because they were Jewish. Because I was a Jew I couldn’t go to school. At first I thought that was pretty good. But after a few days it wore off. We were not allowed in Krakow’s lovely parks. Jews had to provide free labor, and wear armbands with the Star of David. Then we were no longer allowed to live together with the resident population; we had to move to a ghetto with high brick walls.

I don’t remember a time in the ghetto when I wasn’t hungry. Before the war Poland had been an exporter of food, but the Nazis restricted the food supply and now there was a shortage. Food became scarce. We didn’t have enough.

My father had a job, and could leave the ghetto to go to work. On his way home he would smuggle food home — a few potatoes, some bread.

In 1941 the Nazis broke their agreement with the Soviet Union and invaded the rest of Eastern Europe. They sent special troops, behind the regular troops, to seek out Jews in the vilenough. They devised ways of murdering people en masse. So they built death camps, and began to transport people from the ghetto to the death camps.

He did what a good manager does — talk to his employees.

All that stood between

our family and the death camps was Oskar Schindler. Schindler had come to Poland as a war profiteer. He had been a counter-intelliLeon Leyson gence officer of considerable rank and part of his “reward” was a factory that made kitchen goods. He turned it into a moneymaker, supplying enamelware to the army, and later added other war-related lines.

He needed craftsmen, and heard about my father. My father was the first Jew he hired, and then he hired other Jews.

As a youngster I, too, worked in one of Schindler’s enterprises. I first worked in a brush factory, making pushbrooms. My job was to nail the wooden covers on the base after the bristles were threaded. One day a Nazi officer stopped at my work station and said, “If you put the nail in crooked you’ll be shot in the head.”

Later I operated a lathe, working 12-hour shifts. I was too small to reach the controls so I stood on a box.

Schindler did a lot of entertaining in his office; there were parties every night. Afterward he would walk through the factory and visit with employees — as if they were human beings. He would stop and talk to me, even though I didn’t have much in common with him. One day when I went to get my food I found that he had left orders to double my ration.

I don’t think he ever had a course in business management, but he did what a good manager does — talk to his employees. He was running a business, yet he would stop to talk to this boy on a box. He just wanted to make human contact with this kid of 13.

Leon Leyson, originally shown as Leib Lejzon on Schindler’s List, speaks to an MBA class on Executive Responsibility.

Schindler would call me to his office and give me a piece of bread, which I would take back and share with my father and brother. He left orders that I should no longer be assigned to the night shift.

One day when things looked especially bleak Schindler came to where my father was working, put his hand on his shoulder and said, “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be okay.”

He was the kind of person who did the right thing, even if it meant taking a risk. It was very dangerous and treacherous to treat a Jew as a human being.

Schindler was the unlikeliest of all role models —

Nazi member, war profiteer, womanizer. But he had a spark of humanity, and he put it to use to save Jews.

He hired many Jewish workers, and used his clout to protect them. When offered other employees to replace them, he argued that he couldn’t do without their expertise.

When the authorities wanted to close the ghetto and send its occupants to a concentration camp, Schindler persuaded them to let him build a sub-camp adjacent to his factory, arguing that it was inefficient and bad business for them to be escorted back and forth from the concentration camp.

He spent his own money to do that; you couldn’t do that without bribes.

Schindler couldn’t save all his employees. In the brush factory where I worked, one after the other were taken. But Schindler did manage to save many.

When his accountant was taken, Schindler went personally to the station to pull him off the train.

My father and brother, and later my mother, were scheduled to be sent to the death camp, but Schindler intervened at great personal risk.

One day my father, brother and I were put on a list to go “somewhere.” When Schindler found out about it, he ordered us on the spot to move to the group that was staying. The ones who left all perished.

Not only that, but Schindler went to my mother and told her “not to worry — your husband and two children are coming back.” That’s beyond the call of duty of a manager.

He bribed to make sure all the women who were being sent to die were saved. One of those was my mother, who was taken out of a group that was going to be gassed. This was 1944.

He spent most of the fortune he came to make to save 1,200 people from the death camps.

After the war my parents and I were sent to a displaced persons camp in Germany for three years. Word finally reached relatives in the U.S. that we were still alive, and we moved to Los Angeles to start a new life.

I got further training in the same line of work I had done in Schindler’s factory and began a career teaching high school industrial arts. For years afterward, everything I touched reminded me of the factory.

People often ask, How accurate was the movie, Schindler’s List. If anything, it understated the reality. The movie can’t show you enough.

My reaction? It was chilling. The worst part for me was the time the Jews were forced to go into the ghetto. The walls were so realistic. It could have been a picture of my family going to the ghetto. When I came to that part of the movie I almost wanted to jump up and shout at the screen — “Don’t go!” Schindler was a much better person in real life than he was shown in the movie. The indecision and wavering you see in the movie never happened. He was given credit for saving 1,200 human beings. But he did a lot more than that. That was only the beginning. Someone has said, “If you save one life, you save the world.” For every life he saved, there were all those people who were still to be born. There’s no telling how many people are still to come.

An unlikely role model, Schindler was a better person than shown in the movie. He never wavered in his

resolve. After the war Shindler’s prospects faded. He went to Frankfurt, which had been bombed flat, and tried to start a cement factory, which would have been a pretty good business, but no one would do business with him.

I met Schindler again, in 1965. He had been invited to Los Angeles by a Jewish group and I went to meet him. I stood in line, and when my turn came I was about to introduce myself, but Schindler stopped me.

“I know you,” he said. “You’re Leyson.”

He remembered me — 20 years later. We had a nice visit. I told him I taught industrial arts. He liked that. “It’s good,” he said. He felt he had something to do with that, which of course he did.

Schindler died in 1974 in Argentina.

He never enjoyed success again. He died a poor man. He paid a big price, personally. He spent his whole fortune saving Jews, simply because he thought it was the right thing to do.

You don’t see business ethics like that nowadays. ◆