Oskar Schindler, page 81
Ami was particularly troubled when, despite specific instructions from Oskar, Dr. Schiffler entered his apartment after he died and took keepsakes that meant so much to Ami. Somehow, Dr. Schiffler had been given Oskar’s power of attorney and had taken away many of his private belongings. Ami later wrote Oskar’s niece, Traude, that she considered Schiffler’s efforts a “Blitzaktion” (lightning operation). Dr. Schiffler gave many of Oskar’s private possessions away and, at least according to Ami, even paid people to take them. Schiffler completely cleaned out his apartment. Fortunately, before this happened, Ami, who had a key to Oskar’s apartment, had the foresight to go with her son, Chris, to gather up as many of Oskar’s private papers as she could find. But, according to Ami’s letter to Traude, for some reason the papers she took out that day wound up in the hands of Stefan Pemper, the brother of Mietek Pemper. Her efforts to get him to return them to her, at least by the end of December 1974, were unsuccessful. Fortunately, some time earlier, Oskar had shipped a very heavy, hard-sided Samsonite suitcase filled with some of his most important personal papers to the Staehrs in Hildesheim. This was the storied suitcase, which Chris and Tina Staehr later found after Hein-rich Staehr’s death in 1997, that became the basis of the world-wide stories about the discovery of the original “Schindler’s List.”38
Ami and Chris knew Oskar’s apartment well, and he kept papers scattered everywhere. However, one of his favorite places to store his papers was a sideboard in the kitchen. Ami and Chris had a soft-sided suitcase with them and filled it with about a third of the papers in Oskar’s apartment at the time. When they came back the next day, they discovered that Dr. Schiffler had taken the rest. Within three days, the apartment was completely empty. Chris and Tina Staehr both think that Ami and Dr. Schiffler were looking for their love letters to Oskar. Ami had hidden the letters that Oskar had sent to her in her apartment in Hildesheim. After Heinrich Staehr’s death in 1997, the apartment was sold and the people who bought it found the papers and threw them away. Chris Staehr later asked them whether they knew how important the letters were historically. They said they had no idea they were from Oskar Schindler’s estate.39
What troubled Ami most about Dr. Schiffler’s “Blitzaktion” was the fact that Oskar told her where to find handwritten instructions in the apartment detailing exactly what he wanted done should he not survive the pacemaker operation. Oskar did not expect to die during surgery and talked with Ami about future plans. But he also had enough foresight to realize that the operation might not go as planned. It was possible, Ami later wrote, that Oskar, who was “already quite forgetful and so weakened by illness,” might have forgotten where he had put the instructions. Ami looked where Oskar told her he had put them but could not find them. It was possible, of course, that Dr. Schiffler had taken Oskar’s statement of his last wishes along with everything else she took out of the apartment. Ami later wrote Traude that being prevented from carrying out this wish left her “no rest.”40
As a result, Ami had to make plans for Oskar without knowing his exact wishes. She worked night and day over the next three weeks making arrangements for his memorial service and Requiem Mass in Frankfurt and burial in Israel. But were these Oskar’s wishes? Dr. Moshe Bej-ski told me that Oskar never said anything to him about wanting to be buried in Israel. On the other hand, Dr. Dieter Trautwein told me that Oskar said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered around his tree along the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem. Instead, he was buried at the Latin Cemetery on Mount Zion just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.41
Ami called Dr. Bejski in Tel Aviv on October 9 and told him that Oskar wanted to buried in Israel. Dr. Bejski set to work with several other members of the Schindler Committee planning for Oskar’s funeral; at the same time, Ami and Dr. Trautwein made plans for his memorial service in the Trauerhalle of the Hauptfriedhof in Frankfurt on October 16 and his Requiem Mass several days later. Five dignitaries spoke at Oskar’s October 16 memorial service, which began at 2:00 P.M.—Dr. Moshe Bejski, Dr. Dieter Trautwein, Stadtdekan Msgr. Walter Adloch, Dr. Walter Hessel-bach, and Dr. Heinrich Staehr. Msgr. Adloch, the rector for Frankfurt’s St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral, began the service and provided the religious intercessions. Dr. Trautwein preached the memorial sermon, and Shlomo Raiß, the Senior Cantor for Frankfurt’s Jewish community, sang Psalm 16 in Hebrew. Songs written to honor Schindler’s life and works were also performed during the service. Richard Hackenberg, a leader in Frankfurt’s Sudeten German community and a friend of Oskar’s from the Svitavy region, also spoke at the memorial service.42
Dr. Trautwein began his sermon with two biblical verses from the Torah that he thought would be most fitting on Oskar’s tomb, “Love your Lord” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Or, he added, you could use Martin Buber’s words, “Love your neighbor, because he is like you.” He told those in the congregation that they knew whom to thank for this commandment—Israel and its God. When Oskar Schindler arrived in Kraków, Trautwein continued, such commandments were “despised and ridiculed . . . everything stopped: love, humanity, the simplest decency was gone.” But not for two people, Oskar and Emilie Schindler. Their accomplishments during the war could not be expressed in words. Today, there were 3,000 to 4,000 people, the Schindler Jews and their descendants, who “entered the arch built by Schindler and thereby entered a new world.” Dr. Trautwein recalled the old Talmudic saying: “Whoever has saved one single life has saved the entire world! The Schindlers and their helpers have saved more than a thousand worlds.” 43
Dr. Trautwein reminded everyone that Oskar never took sole credit for what he did during the war. He could not, Dr. Trautwein explained, have saved as many lives as he did without the help of “many supporters, even supporters on the side of the enemy.” But the question was, why? It began with his friendships with Jews when he was a young man in Svi-tavy. And when he saw what was happening to Jewish children in Kraków, Buber’s commandment of life, “Love your neighbor, because he is like you,” came to life. Later, a Schindler Jew addressed Oskar: “That wasn’t you, someone else saved you through the thousand worlds.” Oskar’s achievements during the war, what Dr. Trautwein called Schindler’s “high hour of confirmation, had been so unique and extraor- dinary,” that Oskar, this “generous, goal-oriented person,” could never top his wartime deeds. “And that’s why,” Dr. Trautwein thought, “a lot of things that came after this depressed him, whether they were his own fault or the misfortune of the moment.”44
Despite these problems, Oskar remained “an agent of peace” in this city [Frankfurt] through his bridge building between Germany and Israel. “Who among our people, which has shown so little mourning and gratitude, knows what he has done to improve the German reputation throughout the world?” But we should not be sad, he told the congregation. “We need to be very thankful,” he went on, “thankful that God has given him a palette of generous engagement for other people!” Schindler had many friends, including his Schindler Jews, his acquaintances among the German Friends of Hebrew University and, most important, Ami and Heinrich Staehr. They were with him to the end, “when his suffering became worse and worse, when surgery became unavoidable, when only imploring and praying with him and for him were possible.”45
Dr. Trautwein ended his sermon by reminding the congregation of the words, “Nothing is bad except if we lose our love.” Even in mourning, the “love that God let shine through this Oskar Schindler ha[d] not perished.” Such love can flourish through those present while Oskar’s tree at Yad Vashem would remind everyone of love. “Our hope is that we will be together with this beloved deceased in the ‘bundle of life,’ and that the enigmas and sorrows of his life, and the bitter questions of the many, too many, who were not saved, will find answers.” Most important, he told everyone, “the commandment, which has become the offer of life for Jews and Christians and all people, should not and must not be ridiculed and despised; love your Lord—and love your neighbor as yourself!”46
Richard Hackenburg, Oskar’s Sudeten German friend, also spoke and talked about Oskar’s deep love for his home town, Svitavy, and his Sude-ten German homeland. He found a piece of the Sudetenland in Frankfurt, Hackenburg noted, among his Sudeten German friends there. Hacken-burg concluded his brief remarks: “We thank God he was one of us.” Hackenberg also spoke at a Requiem Mass for Oskar three days later at Frankfurt’s St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral. A number of prominent German officials spoke at the Mass as well as Richard Rechen, who drove the truck that accompanied Oskar and Emilie during their escape from Brünnlitz at the end of the war. Rechen noted that the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv had recently said that “Oskar Schindler was an ambassador of the Almighty.” Oskar’s greatness, Rechen thought, rested on the fact that even during the time of greatest Nazi victories, he [Schindler], as a young man, “simply did not participate.” He saw Schindler as a great humanist:
Alone, and often at the risk of his life, he swam against the superior forces of the torrent of hatred and cruelty. He not only saved our bodies but our souls as well. If we did not lose our faith in humanity, it was only thanks to his assistance. He showed that there were and are Christians who in the spirit of Good Samaritans will pour oil and wine into the wounds of those who have fallen among thugs.
Oskar, you were a Good Samaritan. It was your wish that your place of last repose should be in the sacred city of Jerusalem. We promise to do our utmost to honor that wish.47
And Rechen, Dr. Bejski, Jakob Sternberg, and other members of the Schindler Committee in Israel were able to fulfill that promise. On October 24, his body was flown to Israel where, four days later, he was buried in the Latin cemetery in Jerusalem. The State of Hesse, BfG, and the Lutheran and Catholic churches of West Germany paid the costs of his transport to Israel.48
Ami Staehr was in charge of the preparations for shipping Oskar’s body to Israel. This involved extensive paperwork and phone calls, overseeing the embalming of the body, and shipment preparation that required three caskets. Working with Dr. Bejski and other members of the Schindler Committee in Israel, Ami also arranged for Oskar’s burial in a Christian cemetery in Jerusalem. Ami later admitted that she was so busy making these arrangements that she did not have time to grieve for Oskar. She was so exhausted from making his funeral arrangements that, though she went to the airport to see his body off, she did not accompany the body to Israel, nor did she attend the funeral there. She would later visit his grave with Dr. Trautwein and Dr. Bejski in the summer of 1975. 49
A Requiem Mass was held for Oskar at St. Saviour’s Roman Catholic Church in Jerusalem’s Old City near the New Gate on October 28, 1974. The church was filled with four hundred Schindler Jews and their families as well as prominent figures such as Jesco von Puttkamer, West Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Yitzhak Arad, the head of Yad Vashem, and representatives from Hebrew University. Dr. Bejski said that he was surprised to see a group of Orthodox Schindler Jews at the service in the church. One, Mordechai Broder, told Bejski that for Oskar, he “would even go to Hell.”50 Another devout Schindler Jew told a reporter: “For him it is not only permissible to carry his Christian coffin on our shoulders, but it is a mitzvah [religious commandment or duty] to accompany him on his last journey even inside the church. He was a saint in his lifetime.”51
When the Requiem Mass was over, six Schindler Jews gently placed Oskar’s coffin on their shoulders and, led by three Franciscan monks, began the long procession through Jerusalem’s Old City to the Franciscan Latin Cemetery on Mount Zion just outside the Zion Gate. A group of Schindler Jews walked in front of the coffin carrying wreaths in honor of Oskar. Yad Vashem asked Dr. Moshe Bejski to deliver the graveside eulogy. Each Righteous Gentile, Dr. Bejski noted, deserved “the full measure of recognition and gratitude” for their rescue actions. But Oskar Schindler’s deeds, he added, were “without precedent” as evidenced by the three hundred women he saved in Auschwitz. The fact that he “snatched” 1,200 Jews “from the jaws of death, place[d] Schindler in the first rank of Righteous Among the Nations.”52
But, Dr. Bejski went on, Oskar was more than a rescuer: “He became a legend in his lifetime among the survivors because of his humanity, his personal care of his protégés, his willingness to listen and find solutions to countless personal, everyday problems.” There were many examples of this during the war though the one that stood out most for Dr. Bejski was Oskar’s efforts to save the Jews on the Golleschau transport in early 1945: “Oskar Schindler revealed himself as a humanist, a person with a sensitive heart, who was deeply moved by the suffering of his fellow men, a person who spared no effort to ease our suffering and protect us to the limit of what was possible under the circumstances. No matter how extensive is the chronicle of his acts of kindness, it still cannot relay the full measure of his benevolence.”53
After the war, Dr. Bejski continued, Oskar “remained bound with the strongest ties to his survivors and the State of Israel, in which he rebuilt part of his life.” He “continued to experience the trauma of the Jewish people” and worried a great deal about the threats against Israel. He was extremely devoted to Hebrew University and to a “rapprochement between Jews and Christians.” This was a Christian burial service, Dr. Bejski acknowledged, though he told everyone that he would like to add one Jewish element to it. After the mourner’s Kaddish (Sanctification) is said at the grave site of a Jewish funeral, it is normal to ask forgiveness of the deceased for “any harm done to him by persons close to him.” Dr. Bejski continued:
I consider it my duty to ask forgiveness from Oskar Schindler on behalf of all the survivors in Israel and in the Diaspora, not only for the injuries we had caused him, whether intentionally or unintentionally, but also for not having done enough for him as we were duty bound to do for the rescuer and benefactor that he was. We could have done much more. Blessed be his memory.54
In her letter to Traude two months after Oskar’s death, Ami wrote that “if only in his lifetime so many had thought of him, helped him, supported him, not left him alone so much.” She went on: “Sometimes I think that much was done from a bad conscience.” As a result, she added, “Oskar was very disappointed in everyone and refused everything from the past.”55
Today Oskar’s grave is among the most frequently visited in Jerusalem. The inscription on his tomb, in German and in Hebrew, simply reads: “Oskar Schindler, 28.4.1908–9.10.1974. ‘Der unvergessliche Lebensretter 1200 verfolgter Juden. [The Unforgettable Savior of 1200 Persecuted Jews].’” It somehow seems fitting that the man who saved the lives of almost 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust and spent much of his time after the war trying to build bridges between Israel and West Germany should be buried in this beautiful, quiet setting among Arab Christians overlooking the rolling hills beyond Mount Zion.56
Life in Death
It is not certain when Emilie learned of Oskar’s death. However, in early 1976, she gave Dr. Lotte Schiffler her power of attorney to settle Oskar’s will and to enter into negotiations with the Lastenausgleich authorities over any balance owed Oskar after his death. On June 20, 1976, the main Lastenausgleich office sent Emilie a check for DM 18,541.88 ($7,856.73), the final balance on Oskar’s account.57 In the meantime, Oskar’s friends in West Germany became involved in the production of a forty-five-minute television documentary film on Oskar’s life, Die Juden nennen Ihn, ‘Vater Courage’ (The Jews Call Him ‘Father Courage’). Produced by Reinhard Albrecht, Vater Courage was the first detailed television documentary on Oskar’s life. It first aired on November 28, 1975, on Süd-westfunk 3, and copies were sent to Israeli television, which helped produce it, the BBC, and NBC. The program centered around a series of interviews that Hessische Rundfunk did with Oskar in 1965 in Frankfurt in the midst of the final trials of twenty Germans who had served in Auschwitz as well as interviews with Emilie Schindler, Walter Pollack, Mietek Pemper, Dr. Dieter Trautwein, Dr. Lotte Schiffler, and Ami Staehr. Albrecht also spent a week in Israel interviewing Schindler Jews such as Dr. Moshe Bejski, who, as always, insisted upon “seriousness, tact, and responsibility,” Jakob Sternberg, and others. Ami Staehr and Lotte Schiff-ler served as the documentary’s historical consultants and Ami provided Albrecht with photographs of Oskar in Israel and some of his private papers. Albrecht also used Oskar’s own account of his wartime activities from Kurt Grossmann’s Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutsch-lands dunklen Tagen (1957).58
Lotte Schiffler, who was one of the driving forces behind the documentary, wrote Ami Staehr in March 1975 that the Schindler project was not a “blauer Dunst [blue mist]” production “like all of the USA promises,” but one fully approved by Südwestfunk. Schiffler hoped that the film would create new sympathy for Israel and that “Schindler’s life should be a last call to activate everything ‘for his land.’” She also hoped to obtain an honorarium for their work on the documentary to help pay for a tombstone at Oskar’s grave in Jerusalem.59
From Albrecht’s perspective, the program was aimed at German youth, and, using the famed “list” with its bare listing of names, concentration camp numbers, nationality, race, and occupation, was the documentary’s “red thread” by which Albrecht tried to bring each of the Jewish survivors and their testimonies to life. Albrecht saw Oskar Schindler as an “antihero,” a “Father Courage,” a “Schweijk”-like figure, a daredevil, and a humanitarian who was willing to take responsibility for the fate of his Jewish workers and do whatever was necessary, even if it meant sacrificing his own life, to save them. Albrecht thought that Oskar Schindler was a man “who was touched by God’s finger, human like you and I, with all the human weaknesses and strengths of a person of stature.”60
