SCHINDLER AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

If we sent him three thousand to four thousand dollars, he spent it in two or three weeks. Then he phoned to say he didn't have a penny.

--Mosche Bejski, a Schindlerjuden

Not unlike before the war, Oskar Schindler's postwar life was characterized by a notable lack of achievement. In fact, Schindler was a failure in everything he attempted. Immediately after the war, he tried to produce a film. The effort failed. In 1949, the Jewish Distribution Committee ("Joint") made Schindler an ex gratia payment of $15,000 in appreciation of his wartime efforts. In addition, Schindler received one hundred thousand marks from the West German government as indemnification for his property confiscated by the communists in the east.

SOUTH AMERICA

With this tidy sum (and with his wife Emilie, his mistress, and half a dozen Schindlerjuden families), Schindler emigrated to Argentina, the destination of many former Nazis. There he purchased a farm and tried his hand at raising chickens and nutria, the latter a small animal whose fur was deemed a luxury item. The effort failed. Nutria fur did not become popular, and, in any event, Schindler squandered his money.

What did he spend it on? "Idiocies," said his wife. When Emilie was asked what Schindler did for a living, she replied, "Schindler doesn't do anything. He just runs around with young women in luxury hotels and spends money."

By 1957, a bankrupt Schindler and his wife lived in a house outside of Buenos Aires provided by the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith.

RETURN TO WEST GERMANY

In 1958, Schindler left Argentina for West Germany. He never returned, abandoning both his wife and mistress. The two became close friends.

"The first thing he did was sell his return ticket," Emilie said. She was left in very difficult straits and lost the farm when she was unable to pay the mortgage. Emilie then raised dairy cows on a small plot of rented land.

With additional money given to him by "Joint" and by grateful Jews, Schindler tried to establish a cement factory. It failed. Explaining this series of financial debacles, Keneally has written that Schindler had "a low tolerance for routine."

In the late 1950's, Schindler lived in a cheap apartment overlooking the train station in Frankfurt, West Germany. It was hardly an enviable setting for the man accustomed to a beautiful woman on the arm of one of his tailored suits. Schindler's life had turned a full circle since his glory days in Krakow when he boasted to his wife that he had 350 employees in contrast to his father who in his heyday had only 50.

Schindler's subsistence was now based on gifts from the grateful Jews he saved, and his spirits reflected the reversal of fortune. Poldek Pfefferberg, urging the Schindlerjuden to donate at least a day's earnings per year to their savior, described Schindler's mental state as one of "discouragement, loneliness, disillusion."

One of the Schindlerjuden, Mosche Bejski, the forger of Nazi documents who later became an Israeli supreme court justice, said, "If we sent him three thousand to four thousand dollars, he spent it in two or three weeks. Then he phoned to say he didn't have a penny."

ISRAEL

In 1961, a group of Schindlerjuden invited Schindler to Israel for a visit. This was the year that Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who organized the deportation of Jews to the death camps, was tried in Jerusalem. One of the witnesses against Eichmann was a German civilian engineer named Herman Grabbe. He had rescued Jews in Ukraine. Grabbe had previously testified against Nazi war criminals at the International War Crimes Tribunal at Nuremberg after the war; the subsequent publicity caused Grabbe and his family to be ostracized in West Germany.

During the Eichmann trial, Grabbe's testimony highlighted the existence of the non-Jews who had risked their lives to rescue Jews, a subject that hitherto had enjoyed little publicity. In turn, the contrast between Eichmann and Schindler, who was then vacationing in Israel, was noted by the Israeli press, and an effort began to honor Schindler as a Righteous Gentile.

RIGHTEOUS GENTILE

The honor came on his birthday in 1962. Yad Vashem bestowed upon Schindler the medal inscribed with the Talmudic verse (in Hebrew and French): "He who saves one life, it is as if he saves the entire word." In addition, Schindler was invited to plant a carob tree (with a plaque bearing his name) on the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem.

The surviving Schindlerjuden turned out in great number to honor their wartime savior, but, as with Herman Grabbe, reaction in West Germany was not exactly cordial.

As with many Righteous Gentiles after the war, Schindler was ostracized by many of his countrymen precisely because he had saved Jews. His postwar testimony against Nazi war criminals compounded the hatred many Germans had for him. Schindler was hissed at on the streets of Frankfurt. Stones were thrown at him. "Too bad you didn't burn with the Jews!" a group of workmen shouted. In 1963, Schindler punched a factory worker who called him "a Jew kisser." Schindler was dragged into a local court, given a lecture by the judge, and ordered to pay damages. "I would kill myself," Schindler wrote to one of the Schindlerjuden, "if it wouldn't give them so much satisfaction."

THE LAST YEARS

Each spring, from 1961 to his death in 1974, the Schindlerjuden invited Schindler to Israel. His Jewish friends paid his expenses. Usually accompanied by a mistress, Schindler invariably slept late, never arising before eleven in the morning. Each day he "held court" with friends at a street-side cafe in Tel Aviv.

On April 28th of each year, the Schindlerjuden gathered to celebrate Schindler's birthday. He always waited until everybody was seated before he made a grand entrance "like a prime minister," as a Schindlerjuden recalled. "He loved children. He saw all the children and grandchildren of those he had rescued as his own family."

Today, the descendents of the 1,200 Schindlerjuden number 6,000.

Schindler, whose raspy voice and ruddy face were the marks of a drunkard, followed his pleasures to the grave. He died of liver failure on October 9, 1974, at age sixty-six. At his side was a mistress, this time the wife of his doctor.

"One of the church's least observant sons," Keneally writes, was buried at the Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem. Five hundred Schindlerjuden stood at his grave, paying last respects to the enigmatic man to whom they owed their lives.

EMILIE SCHINDLER
AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The Jews he saved, me he abandoned.

-- Emilie Schindler

In a 1994 interview, Helen Rosensweig, a Schindlerjuden, remembered Emilie Schindler as "a very quiet, subdued, refined looking lady."

Today Emilie Schindler, age 87, lives in San Vincente, a suburb of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is a one room cottage that the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith provides her. Emilie spends the twilight of her life taking care of her dog, seventeen stray cats, and a rose garden. Her bones ache and she walks slowly. Now, since the film Schindler's List, her life has been interrupted by curious journalists. "They can make a movie if they like," she said in a December 1993 interview. "It doesn't interest me. I have been forty-three years in Argentina and nobody remembers me . . . I don't remember much myself."

One thing Emilie Schindler does remember is the high-handed manner in which her husband abandoned her. In 1957, he decided to return to West Germany for a visit, but he never returned. According to Emilie, "Schindler was supposed to come back, but I think the first thing he did was sell the return ticket. He had mortgaged our farm, so I had to sell it off to pay the bills."

Emilie Schindler does not refer to her late husband as "Oskar" but only as "Schindler." It is a measure of her contempt. "Schindler never sent anything. He spent the money on women."

The world has come to admire Oskar Schindler, but Emilie despises him. Was he a saint or the devil? "A saint of the devil," she replied.

The savior of the Jews was a scoundrel: "He did have his things, eh? For the Jews he did much, no? But I don't recognize it when he lies."

Schindler was a lazy, self-indulgent man. "With that money," Emilie said, referring to Jewish gifts and a payment from the German government for lost property, "he could have become rich. He didn't want to. Here he had a good job offer. He didn't want that either."

Is she bitter? "People who are no good don't make me mad."

Was there ever happiness in the marriage? "No. People who don't like to work, I don't like."

What explains Schindler's rescue efforts on behalf of the Jews? Emilie gives credit to the Jews who influenced him. In a 1973 interview, she said that Schindler "had done nothing astounding before the war, and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate to have people in that short fierce era who summoned forth his deeper talents."

Her opinion of the book? "For a novel, it's awfully clear," Emilie says, referring to the depiction of Schindler's promiscuous life-style which she believes has no part in the story. She would have preferred that the story stick to "the serious things, what happened . . . Leave the other apart."

Does she feel like a celebrity now that the movie is out and has been so well received? "Never. I am not for those things, you know? What I did I did for humanity. I don't need publicity. I don't need songs or whatever. I'm very simple in that sense."

"They make him a star that shines. He was. But now he is not."

Emilie travelled to Schindler's grave in Jerusalem for the filming of the cemetery scene which closes the film. "I hardly knew anyone," she recalled. "The Jews know me, they all know me. But . . . I can't keep them in my head . . . They all knew me because they came in contact for food and everything . . . One says this, the other says that, gives me this: I can't remember anything."

Like many who assisted Jews during the war, Emilie minimizes her courageous acts: "They say in that book (Keneally's Schindler's List) that I gave the Jews the food in their mouths. I never had time to find out who was sick and who had to be fed (by hand). I am no good as a nurse, I tell you frankly. I have no talent for nursing . . . I bought the food for everyone."

Emilie Schindler did not receive Yad Vashem's distinction of being honored as a Righteous Gentile. Her deeds, which came largely at the end of the war when the Schindlerjuden had been transferred from Plaszow to Brunnlitz, did not constitute, according to Yad Vashem's strict criteria, actions that went beyond "ordinary acts of charity."

In December 1993, the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., awarded Emilie Schindler a medal for her wartime efforts. She had her photograph taken beside Miep Dies, one of the protectors of Anne Frank in Amsterdamn. Stephen Spielberg was present. He described Emilie Schindler combing through the dead bodies in a railroad car, searching for Jews who might have survived.

In German, she replied with the modesty typical of a Good Samaritan: "We just tried to do what we could."

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