Courage
| 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 SchindlerAnother 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 … |