One
night in the last weeks of the war a tireless Emilie
Schindler, acting
alone while her husband 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 Schindler 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.
The
Holocaust
After the war many 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 she 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."
Emilie Schindler
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, Oscar 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 ...
