Oskar Schindler, page 74
On the other hand, for the sake of the public, Yad Vashem diplomatically considered Oskar a Righteous Gentile because of the tree he had planted along the Avenue of the Righteous. In 1993, when the Designation of the Righteous Commission, which was now chaired by Dr. Bejski, learned that Emilie was coming to Israel to film the final scene in Schindler’s List, Dr. Bejski decided it was time to clear up the matter. So on June 24, 1993, the Designation Commission declared Oskar and Emilie Schindler Righteous Gentiles and awarded them a single medal and certificate for both. She was later presented the medal and certificate in Buenos Aires by Israel’s ambassador to Argentina. Emilie’s name was then added to the plaque in front of Oskar’s tree along the Avenue of the Righteous.126
But Dr. Paldiel also told me that if Emilie had not been in Israel for Spielberg’s film, which prompted the Schindler Jews to ask Dr. Paldiel’s help in getting Oskar declared a Righteous Gentile, he “would not have benefited from full recognition.” From Dr. Paldiel’s perspective, Schindler was “indeed a bona fide Righteous [Gentile]—though not a saint all his life.” He later told me that Oskar “did save the lives of twelve hundred Jews; in fact, more than any other single rescuer during the Holocaust (Raoul Wallenberg had a trustworthy team at his side).”127 Dr. Paldiel also told me that Oskar claimed that he did not care about the award but was pleased that a tree had been planted in his name. He said he did not need medals or awards. I doubt whether Oskar really felt this way. Though I can certainly see Oskar saying such a thing once he learned he would not get a medal, this was probably more of a rationalization than a statement of his true feelings. In fact, he wrote several of his friends in Israel after his return that his first trip to Israel and the recognition he received gave him the “strength in the future to find a way to want to live with people and to believe in people.”128 By the time that he received his letters from Yad Vashem in early 1964 he had suffered through a major heart attack and the collapse of his stone and cement business in Germany. All he had now in his life was the extraordinary love and dedication of his Schindler Jews and a growing reputation fueled by the stories of what he had done to save them during the war. Though he would suffer more disappointments, the support and adoration of his Jewish and German friends came to fill a big void in his life. Throughout the 1960s, the modest fame he would come to enjoy as well as the major disappointments he would suffer were inextricably linked with those of his Jewish friends and supporters. During this time, he lived in two worlds—one Jewish and one German. The same was true of Emilie, who struggled to rebuild her life in Argentina after Oskar left for Germany in 1957. Though they would never meet again, their lives remained intertwined throughout the last seventeen years of Oskar’s life.
13.
THE EVENING OF SCHINDLER’S LIFE
OSKAR SCHINDLER’S LIFE IN THE 1960S WAS FILLED WITH SERIOUS financial and health problems that were exacerbated by a humiliating failed movie deal with MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) and an unscrupulous effort to use his name to raise funds for a phony Martin Buber prize in London. There were some momentary high points in his life during this period, though Oskar struggled with long bouts of depression. He came to depend more and more on his Schindler Jews in Israel and the United States for his emotional and financial well-being. The same was true of Emilie, who received similar support and friendship from the German Jewish community in Buenos Aires. This group was determined to care for what one Argentine German newspaper called “Mother Courage” for the rest of her life.1
Oskar left Emilie deeply in debt and emotionally devastated when he departed for Germany via New York in 1957. They said almost nothing to one another during the trip to the airport on that fateful day in June 1957. As Oskar boarded the plane, he said goodbye without looking directly into Emilie’s eyes. And though she knew their marriage had ended long before and that Oskar was a complete stranger to her, she felt as though “a part of [herself] . . . was leaving.” She felt “a tangible emptiness” when she returned to their farm in San Vicente. She was also broke and had no money to pay the workers who helped her with the small farm. Emilie estimated in her memoirs that she was a million pesos ($14,706) in debt and survived by selling milk from her cows.2
There is little evidence of much direct contact between Oskar and Emilie once he returned to Germany. He wrote her periodically, though Emi-lie said that his letters all “seemed copies of one another.” From her perspective, they “amounted to a lot of excuses, delays, and confused stories, without the slightest reference to [her] repeated pleas for help and to the difficult situation” he had left her in. He sent her money only once, DM 200 ($47.62), along with a copy of the Diary of Anne Frank. At first, Emilie held out hope that Oskar planned to return to Argentina. After a while, she decided to ignore his letters.3 On the other hand, Oskar still seemed to care for Emilie and expressed frustration over her failure to respond to his letters. Some of his concern, though, probably came more from their mutual financial interests in Argentina and the MGM film deal than any deep affection Oskar might have had for her.
Walter and Beate Pollack, two of Oskar’s closest friends in Buenos Aires, were German Jews who had come to Argentina in the 1930s and met Oskar through their involvement with the Joint. The Pollacks adored Oskar and did everything they could to help Emilie after he left Argentina. In fact, most of what we know about Emilie’s life after 1957 comes either from her memoirs or from Walter and Beate Pollack’s correspondence with Oskar. Over time, Walter Pollack became the intermediary between Oskar and Emilie because of her refusal to have any contact with her husband.
As Emilie’s financial plight worsened, she was forced to sell their quinta (house) and sold about half their farm in 1963 to cover back taxes and debt. She was fifty-six years old now and considered herself “con mano atrás y otra delante” (destitute: with nothing on and trying to cover oneself). 4 After she sold her beloved quinta, Emilie lived in an outhouse until a neighbor took pity on her and gave her a small shack to live in. One neighbor told me that she remembered Emilie picking and eating tangerines from neighbors’ trees.5 Another friend, Walter Pollack, wrote Leopold Page in 1965 that when he first got to know Emilie several years earlier she “almost literally” lay in the street. Her only steady companions seemed to be the growing menagerie of dogs and cats that she was so fond of, though she later had several boy friends and female live-in companions. She wrote that in the immediate years after Oskar’s departure, her “loneliness was so absolute” that she hardly knew how to bear it.6 Emi-lie, like Oskar, was deviled by long bouts of depression brought on by loneliness and financial desperation. But that would all change when Peter Gorlinsky, a writer for the Argentinisches Tageblatt, Buenos Aires’ major German newspaper, wrote an article about Emilie’s plight in January 1963, Vater Courage bleibt unvergessen—aber wie steht es mit Mutter Courage (Father Courage Has Not Been Forgotten—But How Does It Stand With Mother Courage?). Gorlinsky’s article was stimulated by two things: news in the Argentine press of Oskar’s Righteous Among the Nations nomination and efforts by Emilie’s neighbors in San Vicente to contact B’nai B’rith about her plight.7 Gorlinsky praised Oskar Schindler, whom he called the “‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of the Second World War,” and noted that he now lived modestly in Frankfurt. For the most part, he went on, the world seemed unmoved by Oskar’s wartime deeds.8
But most of Gorlinsky’s article dealt with Emilie, whom he argued deserved as much acclaim as her husband. Time and again, he noted, the Schindler Jews talked of her “kind smile” and her efforts to help save them. Yet few people knew of her efforts during the war and treated her as though she lived “on another planet.” Argentinians, for example, would be surprised to know that she lived in Buenos Aires, “not as a legend, not as a modern fairytale, but as a human being made of flesh and blood.” Yet, Gorlinsky continued, “Mother Courage” was struggling to survive and lived in far worse conditions than the survivors whom she helped save. All she had in life was a “small plot” of earth and it was possible that she would soon lose this; indeed, Emilie Schindler was “barely able to make a scant, humble living.”9
This, Gorlinsky added, had to change. There had to be a way in the “evening of her life” to give some security to the woman who had helped so many others. There were pensions available for judges and civil servants (in Germany) who had once supported the Nazis but none for people like Emilie Schindler. So the only ones who could now help her were the people who had received [her] “good deeds.” It was, Gorlinsky concluded, the responsibility of everyone to set right “a truly insufferable state of affairs.”10
The impact of the article on Argentina’s German Jewish community was electrifying. Its B’nai B’rith (Bene Berith) lodge, Traducion (Tradition), began to send her Arg$5,000 ($37.31) a month in March 1963 but soon increased this to Arg$9,000 ($67.16). That fall, the Joint decided to give her a additional monthly stipend of Arg$5,000 ($37.31). She would later receive stipends from the Argentine and German governments as well as some money from MGM after they began to consider making a film about Oskar’s wartime exploits. In addition, Traducion, which periodically held fund-raisers to help Emilie, created the Helen Strupp Foundation to build her a lovely home near the center of San Vicente. Walter Pollack told Oskar in the summer of 1964 that the Buenos Aires German Jewish community had “committed itself to care for [Emilie] for the rest of her life.” Emilie moved into the house at San Martin 353 in 1965 and lived there until she was forced permanently to enter the Hogar los Pinos (Home in the Pines), a German retirement home in the suburbs of Buenos Aires, after she broke her hip in November 2000. But from the perspective of Traducion, which owned the deed to the house and land, it remained her home until her death in Germany in the fall of 2001. 11
Oskar, Emilie, and MGM: “To the Last Hour”
Emilie’s bitterness over Oskar’s departure clouded her perspective when it came to his explanations about why he was not able to help her anymore than he did in the immediate years after his departure. She was very bitter, for example, that he had “received a hundred thousand marks in compensation for the Brünnlitz factory” but that she “never saw a penny of it.” It was evidently never explained to her that this money was not paid directly to Oskar but was used to help him purchase a bankrupt business in West Germany. Though she never mentions it in her memoirs, she must have known about his failed stone-and-concrete business because Oskar had told the Pollacks, who were very close to Emilie. But by the time that Oskar began to involve her in the contractual issues surrounding the planning for the film deal with MGM, Emilie refused to have direct contact with her husband and worked with him through Walter and Beate Pollack.
By the early 1960s, Oskar had become something of a media figure in Europe. In the fall of 1960, Bayerischer Rundfunk did a radio play, “Licht in der Finsternis” (Light in the Darkness), that included a section on Oskar’s wartime efforts to save Jews. In 1962, he was approached by MCA (Germany) about signing a multi-media contract. He ultimately signed a contract with George Marton with the idea of developing a film script with Austrian writer Jochen Huth. When filming began, Oskar was to receive $10,000. Oskar was also working with Walt Disney Productions in Vienna, which prepared an eleven-page synopsis for a film project that was essentially based on the article he had done years earlier for Kurt Grossmann. It is difficult to determine whether this was linked to the movie envisioned by George Marton. Regardless, nothing ever came of either of these projects, though they no doubt did help generate some interest in Europe and the United States in Oskar’s story.12
This new interest in Oskar’s efforts to save his Jewish workers during the war came from widespread news reports about his Righteous Among the Nations nomination in Israel. But it would be another year and a half before any serious effort to make a film about his life bore fruit. And that would come not in Europe but in the United States. Leopold Paul (“Poldek”) Page was the person responsible for what would become the most serious effort to memorialize Oskar Schindler’s wartime exploits in film prior to Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. From 1964 on, Page would be the driving force behind Hollywood’s interest in telling the story of his beloved Oskar Schindler.
Page stubbornly talked to anyone who would listen to his stories about Oskar. In the summer of 1963, he met a Los Angeles Times reporter, Anton Calleia, and told him about Schindler. Calleia decided to interview Page as well as many other Schindler Jews in the Los Angeles area and finally contacted Oskar in Frankfurt as part of his research. Calleia told Schindler that although he was impressed by his heroism during the war, what touched him the most was “the deep love and reverence” that these people had for him: “You are their angel.” He wanted to share these thoughts and sentiments with Oskar so that they might comfort him in his “moments of loneliness, discouragement or sadness.”13 Several months later, an article appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on Oskar. This time, it was not Leopold Page but his close friend, the violinist Henry Rosner, who provided the author, Robert Parrella, with information about Oskar’s wartime exploits and his current problems in Germany. Rosner noted, for example, that earlier in the year Schindler had been stoned in Frankfurt for helping Jews during the war. But, Parrella added, Schindler Jews in Israel and the United States were doing everything they could to help their “old friend.” The Schindler Jews in Los Angeles, for example, were “contributing one day’s pay per year to assist the Schindler cement plant” in Germany.14
Three months later, Lucille “Chip” Gosch, the wife of Hollywood film director and writer Martin Gosch, had walked into Leopold Page’s luggage shop in Beverly Hills to have a bag repaired. Poldek immediately recognized her and said: “I have an interesting story for your husband. I am one of thirteen hundred Jews saved by Oskar Schindler.” Gosch, who had been blacklisted in the 1950s and had recently returned to Hollywood from Spain to rebuild his career, was fascinated by what his wife told him about Oskar Schindler. He went to Page’s shop and asked him to repeat the story. Gosch later told a reporter with the Los Angeles Times that he was astounded. “How could such a story be kept out of the public limelight for so long?” Gosch asked. But he also found Page’s tale about Schindler hard to believe. He had the Schindler story checked out by the State Department and other sources abroad and found Page’s account “to be true and incredibly exciting.” He did more research on the subject and in May 1964, prepared a thirty-six-page preliminary analysis titled “The Oskar Schindler Story.” Gosch showed his analysis to Delbert Mann, who had received an Academy Award in 1956 for his film Marty. According to Gosch, Mann “jumped” at the chance to film the story of Oskar Schindler.15
Once Mann agreed to direct the film, contractual preparations for the film moved along very quickly. On May 1, 1964, Page sent Gosch a preliminary contract for the film with Poldek acting as Oskar Schindler’s “Attorney in Fact.” On January 24, 1964, Oskar had agreed to give Page his power of attorney. The draft contract gave Gosch “exclusive rights” for a period of nine months commencing on February 28, 1965, to develop a film script of the Oskar Schindler story. Gosch would pay Schindler through Page $50,000 for the story rights. Oskar would receive a $25,000 advance for these rights during the option period and another $25,000 on the first day of filming. Once the film was completed, Gosch, who would now own the rights to the Schindler story “in perpetuity,” would give Schindler through Page 5 percent of the producer’s profits, which in this case amounted to 50 percent of the film’s net profits. Other clauses required additional payments of 50 percent or $10,000, whichever was greater, if Gosch sold the Schindler story rights for purposes other than a film. Page was to receive 2.5 percent of the producer’s profits and 10 percent of the profits from any sale of the Schindler story to other media outlets once Oskar had received his payments for the non-film story rights. If for some reason Gosch was not successful in commercially exploiting the Schindler story, then the contract with Schindler and Page would become “null and void.”16
The preliminary contract also stipulated that if Gosch and his associates did complete the film script, Schindler and Page would serve as paid film consultants. Prior to filming, Oskar and Poldek would offer their expertise without compensation. However, once filming began, then they would be paid consultants for a minimum of ten weeks with a fee of $300 a week apiece. In addition, Gosch would fly each of them as well as Emi-lie first class to any film site not in “the environs of Frankfurt, Germany.” He would also pay for their daily living expenses during the filming.17
A month later, Irving Glovin, an attorney in Beverly Hills, wrote Oskar that he had been hired by Leopold Page to represent the two of them “with reference to [their] war experiences.” Glovin told Oskar that he, Gosch and Page were working “with people and companies whom [they] consider of sufficiently high caliber and standing to be capable and worthy of doing a story such as this.” Operating under Page’s power of attorney, they expected soon to enter into a commitment to develop the film. At this time, Page would sign a new contract for Schindler after which he would “be advised of its complete provisions.” Glovin added that Page’s “personal co-operation will be necessary” and that everyone involved in the film development process thought that this would be a “very successful and profitable venture.” He hoped that they would have the opportunity to meet soon. In the meantime, Glovin asked Oskar not to discuss these exclusive arrangements with anyone. “The arrangements we are making are intended to be world wide in scope and the parties with whom we are dealing undertake all of the necessary publicity at that time.” He concluded by asking Oskar to acknowledge the receipt of his letter and his “understanding of its contents.” He added: “This could be persuasive with the parties with whom we are negotiating that you do understand and approve our proceeding.”18
