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A Widow's Memories of a Flawed Saint

SAN VICENTE, ARGENTINA -- To author Thomas Keneally and director Steven Spielberg, Oskar Schindler -- the subject of the docu-novel and film "Schindler's List" -- was a flawed hero.

To Emilie Schindler, he was just plain flawed.

Oskar Schindler was a big man who did things in a big way. At the height of World War II in Central Europe, he dressed well, drove snazzy cars, enjoyed his brandy and the company of beautiful women. Emilie lived in a small, nearly invisible world. Her husband's friends sometimes mistook his mistresses for "Frau Schindler."

A half century later, the reclusive widow of the man who saved more than 1,100 Jews from Hitler's gas chambers seems even more diminished.

At 86, Emilie Schindler is living out her days in a cottage in this semi-rural community southwest of Buenos Aires in the company of her cats, dog and roses. Her bones ache. It is painful to watch her inch her way across the tiny living room of the home that B'nai B'rith has provided for her.

"They can make a movie if they want. It doesn't interest me," she grumbles in her thickly German-accented Spanish. "I have been 43 years here in Argentina and nobody remembers me. ... I don't remember much myself."

Emilie Schindler first saw Oskar when he came to the door of her father's farmhouse in Alt-Molstein. It was 1927 and Oskar was selling electric motors. Alt-Molstein and Oskar's home town, Zwittau, where the couple settled, had been in the Austro-Hungarian empire when Emilie was born 20 years earlier, but when she met Oskar it was in the recently constituted state of Czechoslovakia. Soon it would be part of the Third Reich, which she and Oskar, as ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland, would support -- at least by all outward appearances.

After the Schindler family business went bankrupt, Oskar made his way to Poland in the wake of the advancing German occupation troops, looking for a place to invest. Emilie was left behind in Zwittau.

In Krakow, Schindler bought an enamel works factory, previously owned by Jews, and staffed it with hundreds of residents of the Jewish ghetto that the SS had established in the Polish city. It was employment in Schindler's factory -- and Schindler's willingness to buck the Nazi machine to keep them there -- that saved the lives of more than 1,100 Polish Jews.

In Keneally's account, on which Spielberg's movie is based, Oskar Schindler emerges as a man willing to take risks for a great principle, even while making sure that in the process he doesn't miss out on life's creature comforts. Less dramatic principles, such as fidelity to his spouse, appear never to have crossed his mind.

Emilie Schindler seems almost peripheral to Oskar Schindler's story. But Jewish organizations have honored her for her efforts during the war, mainly foraging for food for the hungry workers in a second factory that Schindler opened in Czechoslovakia, this one for making tank ammunition. The Israeli ambassador to Argentina recently presented her with a medal, which she is proud to show. Last week she was feted at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

"It was so little that they gave the people to eat," Emilie Schindler says now. "To everyone, not just the Jews, no matter who they were. For everyone it was very little. And the Jews, in 10 days they were out of food" from their monthly allotment. "For the next 20 days, what did they eat? Air."

She seems to want to minimize her contribution, insisting that her efforts were for all the hungry people around her, not just the Jewish prisoners: "They say in that book 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."

The Schindlers, like many Germans, fled Europe after the war. The Czech government stripped ethnic Germans of their citizenship, Argentina was accepting stateless people, and the Schindlers landed here at the end of 1949. They supported themselves on a small farm, first raising chickens and then nutrias, until Oskar was able to get 100,000 marks from the West German government as indemnification for the loss of his business property.

But, Emilie said, Oskar blew the money on "what do I know ... idiocies."

Once she was asked by a visitor from a Jewish group in New York what Schindler did for a living. "Do you know what I answered? 'Schindler doesn't do anything. He just runs around with young women in luxury hotels and spends money.'

"With that money, if he wanted to work he could have done well and become rich," Emilie Schindler says. "He didn't want to. Here he had a good job offer. He didn't want that either."

Sometime in 1957, Schindler took a trip to Europe and never came back.

"The first thing he did was sell his return ticket," Emilie says with a bitter-sounding laugh. She was forced to mortgage the farm and then lost it when she couldn't keep up the payments. For years after that, she supported herself by raising dairy cows on a small rented parcel.

"Schindler never sent anything," she says. "He spent the money on women."

Yet she insists that she is not bitter. Not much: "People who are no good don't make me mad."

Was there ever a happy moment in their 30-year marriage? "No. People who don't like to work, I don't like."

Like the places of her youth, Alt-Molstein and Zwittau, Emilie Schindler is of undefined nationality. Today she prefers to think of herself as Austrian -- even though her home town hasn't been in Austria for 75 years -- or even as Argentine. She says she dislikes Germany, yet she keeps German citizenship and accepts a German government stipend. Her only living relative, a niece, lives in Bavaria.

She met both Keneally and Spielberg in Jerusalem, where Schindler is buried, during filming of a cemetery scene, which was attended by about 300 of Schindler's survivors.

She describes her visit in almost surrealistic terms: "I hardly knew anyone. ... 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."

The visit to her husband's gravesite in Israel -- he died in Frankfurt in 1974 -- left her shaken. "I was scared," she said. "My dog will have a better grave. They don't have a cross; they don't have a flower; they don't have anything ... but sand."

Her place in the book and the film does not make her feel like a celebrity. "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."

The passages in the novel about Schindler's promiscuous love life embarrass her.

"For a novel, it is awfully clear," she says, meaning too close to the truth. She wishes Keneally had stuck to "the serious things, what happened. ... Leave the other apart."

In the end, she seems to want to give Schindler his due, but she finds it difficult to be dispassionate about him. Trying to decide whether her husband was a saint or a devil, she settles on "a saint of the Devil. He did have his things, eh? For the Jews he did much, no? But I don't recognize it when he lies. You know, when he says that he brought the food? No -- nothing did he bring! All the food, I brought! ... All the food that the Jews ate, that the Germans ate, that the SS ate, I brought. Not him. He brought nothing.

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