In 2000 Emilie Schindler fell at her home in San Vicente. She lay for hours, alone. After undergoing a hip replacement operation, she 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 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.

Emilie Schindler, An Unsung Heroine

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 Oscar Schindler Erika Rosenberg had no doubt: 'Emilie still loved Oscar 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.'

Emilie and Oscar Schindler

In A Memoir Emilie Schindler 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.