Sometimes art does not reflect life. This is the message that Emilie Schindler attempts to convey about her husband, Oskar, the subject of director Steven Spielberg’s highly acclaimed film “Schindler’s List.”
In “Memoirs,” a book just published here, Emilie Schindler attempts to set the record straight about her late husband, whom she describes as a “selfish coward,” a womanizer who did not particularly care whether she found out about his adventures and an agent for the German intelligence service.
In the book, co-written with journalist Erika Rozenberg, she charges that her husband struggled to keep his factory open only because “he feared he would be drafted and sent to the Russian front if he ceased to be an industrialist.”
Schindler also claims that Spielberg “idealized” her husband’s actions during the war.
“Neither he nor Tom Keneally, who wrote ‘Schindler’s Ark,’ on which the movie was based, ever bothered to ask me how things truly were,” she writes.
According to Emilie, Oskar’s role in saving the Jews on the list was “overstated” both in the movie and the book.
“It was I who got the major of Brunnlittz to authorize the Jewish workers to settle in his town. The Germans did not want Jews in their town.”
Emilie further claims that Oskar was “indifferent” to his workers’ welfare, adding that it was she who saw after their well-being.
After the war, the Schindlers left Europe for Argentina.
After failing in several business ventures here, Oskar took a loan from a lover and left his wife, never to return.
Emilie sold everything to pay his debts and moved to a simple house in a poorer suburb of Buenos Aires.
For years, she subsisted “on tangerines from my trees and milk,” she writes.
In 1963, the Argentine B’nai B’rith association found her and gave her a small monthly pension.
After Spielberg’s movie was released, she was invited to the United States and Israel and was received by the pope.
When the hype over the film was over, she moved back to her house and her 12 cats.
“The only visit that really moved me was from a man that came here and barely said a word,” she writes in her book. “He showed me his concentration camp number tattooed in his arm and told me I had been like a mother to him.
“He was on the list and gave me a lamp I keep in my living room.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
