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Schindlers
List
Emilie Schindler
This
woman showed us an intriguing glimpse at the shadow world between memory
and legend. Her husband Oskar
Schindler became a household name as one of the great humanitarians of
the century, saving 1,300 Jews from certain death in the Nazi death camps
during World War II.
While Oskar Schindler's efforts to save hundreds of Jews are well known
thanks to Keneally's book and the movie Schindler's List, the
silver-screen version left Emilie on the sidelines. An unsung heroine. Now
a new German-language book Ich, Emilie Schindler by the Argentinean
author Erika Rosenberg tries to show that Emilie was just as involved in
shielding Jews from the Nazis.
The biography highlights Emilie Schindler's bravery during the Holocaust
and portrays her not only as a strong woman working alongside her husband
but as a heroine in her own right. Erika Rosenberg, a journalist who
befriended Emilie Schindler many years ago, is writing the book to fulfill
one of the old widow's last wishes, to tell her story and to correct a
historical oversight. For Emilie Schindler, the book is about finding
peace. As Rosenberg says: 'She's looking for recognition. Not in the form
of money, but recognition for her service .. to be the same like her
husband.'
For the last five decades Emilie Schindler led a modest existence in
her little house in San Vicente 40 kilometers south-west of Buenos Aires
with her cats, dog and beautiful roses. Only the uniformed Argentinean
police disturbed the idyll. They were posted 24 hours a day to protect the
old lady from anti-Semitic and ultra-Conservative extremist groups.
Emilie Pelzl was born on October 22, 1907, in the city of Alt Moletein, a
village in the German-populated border region of what was then The
Republic of Czechoslovakia. Emilie later recalled the local pastor, an old
family friend, who instructed young Emilie that her friendship with a
young Jew, Rita Reif, was not good. Emilie defied the pastor and retained
her friendship with Rita, until Rita was murdered by the Nazis in front of
her father's store in 1942.
Emilie Pelzl first saw the tall, handsome and outgoing Oskar Schindler
when he came to the door of her father's farmhouse in Alt Moletein. It was
1928 and Oskar was selling electric motors. After a courtship of six weeks,
they were married on March 6, 1928, in an inn on the outskirts of Zwittau,
Oskar's hometown. Emilie's father had given Oskar a dowry of 100.000 Czech
crowns, a considerable sum in those days, and he soon bought a luxury car
and squandered the rest on outings. In her A Memoir Where Light And
Shadow Meet Emilie recalls how she struggled trying to understand him:
"In spite of his flaws, Oskar had a big heart and was always ready to help whoever was in need. He was affable, kind, extremely generous and charitable, but at the same time, not mature at all. He constantly lied and deceived me, and later returned feeling sorry, like a boy caught in mischief, asking to be forgiven one more time - and then we would start all over again ..."
In
the thirties, now without employment, Oskar Schindler joined the Nazi
party, as did many others at that time. Maybe because he had seen
possibilities which the war brought in its wake, he followed on the heels
of the SS when the Germans invaded Poland.
He left Emilie in Zwittau and moved to Crakow, where he took over a Jewish
family's apartment. Bribes in the shape of money and illegal black market
goods flowed copiously from Schindler and gave him control of a
Jewish-owned enameled-goods factory, Deutsch Emailwaren Fabrik, close to
the Jewish ghetto, where he principally employed Jewish workers. At this
time presumably because they were the cheapest labor ...
But slowly as the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence
and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the
Jews dawned on Schindler in all its horror - he came to see the Jews not
only as cheap labor, but also as mothers, fathers, and children, exposed
to ruthless slaughter.
So with help from Emilie he decided to risk everything in desperate
attempts to save the 1300 Schindler Jews from certain death in the hell of
the death camps. Thanks to massive bribery and Oskar's connections, they
got away with actively protecting their workers.
Schindler promised the Jews who worked for him that they would never
starve, that he would protect them as best he could. And he did, building
his own workers barracks on the factory grounds to help alleviate the
sufferings of life in the nearby Plaszow labor camp. He gave safe haven to
as many Jewish workers as possible, insisting to the occupying Nazis that
they were "essential workers", a status that kept them away from
harassment and killings.
At Schindler's factory, nobody was hit, nobody murdered, nobody sent
to death camps. But conditions at the factory were far from comfortable.
Freezing, lice-ridden inmates still suffered typhus and dysentery.
Until the liberation of spring, 1945, the Schindler's used all means at
their disposal to ensure the safety of the Schindler-Jews. They spent
every Pfennig they had, and even Emilie's jewels were sold, to buy food,
clothes, and medicine. They set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with
medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie looked after
the sick. Those who did not survive were given a fitting Jewish burial in
a hidden graveyard - established and paid for by the Schindlers.
Later accounts have revealed that the Schindlers spent something like 4
million German marks keeping their Jews out of the death camps - an
enormous sum of money for those times.
The factory continued to produce shells for the German Wehrmacht for 7
months. In all that time not one usable shell was produced! Not one shell
passed the military quality tests. Instead, false military travel passes
and ration cards were produced, just as Nazi uniforms, weapons, ammunition
and hand-grenades were collected.
One night in the last weeks of the war a tireless Emilie, acting alone
while Oskar was in Crakow, saved 250 Jews from impending death. Emilie was
confronted by Nazis transporting the Jews, crowded into four wagons, from
Gollechau to a death camp. She succeeded in persuading the Gestapo to send
these Jews to the factory camp "with regard to the continuing war
industry production". In her A Memoir she recalls:
"We found the railroad car bolts frozen solid .. the spectacle I
saw was a nightmare almost beyond imagination. It was impossible to
distinguish the men from the women: they were all so emaciated - weighing
under seventy pounds most of them, they looked like skeletons. Their eyes
were shining like glowing coals in the dark .."
Each had to be carried out like a carcass of frozen beef. Thirteen were
dead but the others still breathed. Throughout that night and for many
nights following, Emilie worked without halt on the frozen and starved
skeletons. One large room in the factory was emptied for the purpose.
Three more men died, but with the care, the warmth, the milk and the
medicine, the others gradually rallied.
After the war survivors
told about Emilie's unforgettable heroism in nursing the frozen and
starved prisoners back to life ..
Emilie Schindler is credited with many acts of kindness, small and large.
Even today surviving Schindler-Jews remember how Emilie worked
indefatigably to secure food and somehow managed to provide the sick with
extra nourishment and apples. A Jewish boy, Lew Feigenbaum, broke his
eyeglasses and stopped Emilie in the factory and told her: "I broke
my glasses and can't see .." When the Schindler-Jews were transferred
to Brunnlitz, Emilie arranged for a prescription for the eyeglasses to be
picked up in Crakow and delivered to her in Brunnlitz.
Feiwel (today Franciso) Wichter, 75, was No. 371 on Schindler's List, the
only one of the Schindler Jews living in Argentina:
"As long as I live, I will always have a sincere and eternal
gratitude for dear Emilie. I think she triumphed over danger because of
her courage, intelligence and determination to do the right and humane
thing. She had immense energy and she was like a mother."
Another survivor, Maurice Markheim, No.142 on the list, later recalled:
"She got a whole truck of bread from somewhere on the black market.
They called me to unload it. She was talking to the SS and because of the
way she turned around and talked, I could slip a loaf under my shirt. I
saw she did this on purpose. A loaf of bread at that point was gold ..
There is an old expression: Behind the man, there is the woman, and I
believe she was the great human being."
In May, 1945, it was all over. The Russians moved into Brunnlitz. The
previous evening, Schindler gathered everyone together in the factory,
where he and Emilie took a deeply emotional leave of them.
The Schindlers - and 1300 Schindler-Jews
along with them - had survived ...
Oskar Schindler's life after the war was a long series of failures. He
tried without success to be a film producer and was deprived of his
nationality immediately after the war. Threats from former Nazis meant
that he felt insecure in post-war Germany, and he applied for an entry
permit to the United States. This was refused as he had been a member of
the Nazi party.
After this he fled to Buenos Aires in Argentina with Emilie, his mistress
and a dozen Schindler Jews. The Schindlers settled down in 1949 as
farmers, first raising chickens and then nutrias. They were supported
financially by the Jewish organization Joint and thankful Jews, who never
forgot them. But Oskar Schindler met with no success, and in 1957 he
became bankrupt and traveled back alone to Germany, where he remained
estranged from his wife for 17 years before he died in poverty in 1974, at
the age of 66.
He never saw Emilie again ...
Emilie stayed in Argentina, where she scraped by on a small pension from
Israel and a $650 a month pension from Germany. Her only relative, a
niece, lived in Bavaria, Germany.
Jewish organizations have honored her for her efforts during the war. In
May, 1994, Emilie Schindler received The Righteous Amongst the Nations
Award - along with Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank's family in the
Netherlands and preserved her diary after the family was taken away by the
Nazis.
Almost 2,000 people attended the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Yom Hashoah
commemoration honoring Emilie Schindler. The tiny woman in the navy blue
pantsuit was greeted with smiles and tears as she made her way, supported
by two rabbis, toward the menorah-shaped monument at the Museum of
Tolerance, where she lit the memorial flame to remember the 6 million Jews
killed in the Holocaust. 'Let me touch you,' said one woman as she reached
out to embrace Emilie Schindler.
In 1995, Argentina decorated her with the Order of May, the highest
honor given to foreigners who are not heads of state. In 1998 The
Argentine government decided to give her a pension of $1,000 a month until
her financial situation improved. Later Emilie Schindler was named an Illustrious
Citizen by Argentina.
Once Emilie fell at her home in San Vicente. She lay for hours, alone.
After undergoing a hip replacement operation, Emilie had to enter a home
for the elderly in Buenos Aires, her care heavily subsidized by Argentine
charities. Hospital officials had delayed her surgery for three days
because she could not afford the operation. Financial help eventually came
from several soccer players, River Plate, and other Argentine citizens.
In July, 2001, during a visit to Berlin, Germany, a frail Emilie handed
over documents related to her husband to a museum. Confined to a
wheelchair and totally dependent upon others, she told reporters that it
was her 'greatest and last wish' to spend her final years in Germany,
adding that she had become increasingly homesick. 'I am very happy that I
can be here,' she told with a dazzling smile.
Her Argentinean biographer Erika Rosenberg said she was urgently seeking a
German home for Schindler's widow. 'Now, as an old lady, Emilie Schindler
needs help herself for the first time,' Rosenberg said. The German state
of Bavaria immediately offered a home to Emilie Schindler. Bavaria would
be happy to help fulfill her wish, Bernhard Seidenath, a spokesman for the
Ministry of Social Affairs, said Monday July 16, 2001.
A deeply grateful Emilie accepted the offer. She will be taken Sunday July
22, 2001, to the Adalbert Founder Home in the Bavarian town of
Waldkraiburg by ambulance from Berlin, said Joerg Kudlich, head of the
home.
But the plans to transport her to the retirement home was put on hold as
she was hospitalized in critical condition on Saturday July 21. Mrs.
Schindler is in intensive care, a transport is out of the question, said
Dr. Hans Pech, head of interior medicine at the Maerkisch-Oderland
Hospital outside Berlin.
Emilie Schindler died Friday night October 5, 2001, in the Berlin
hospital.
The famous Argentine journalist Sol tells that one of her favorites
interviews was on radio with Emilie Schindler:'When I talked with her I
felt a great spirit of love and wisdom in her words. She's a great woman,
a woman of courage and a woman of love and compassion for others. She did
much more than the movie presents.'
As to Oskar Schindler the author Erika Rosenberg had no doubt: 'Emilie
still loved Oskar Schindler', though Emilie was bitter and disillusioned:
'He gave his Jews everything - and me, nothing.' But she was capable
of expressing both her love and bitterness towards him in one sentence,
calling him a drunk and womanizer, but also saying: 'If he'd stayed, I'd
have looked after him.'
In A Memoir Emilie tells about her inner thoughts, when she
visited his tomb, over thirty-seven years after he left:
At last we meet again .. I have received no answer, my dear, I do not know why you abandoned me .. But what not even your death or my old age can change is that we are still married, this is how we are before God. I have forgiven you everything, everything