Oskar Schindler, page 85
I returned to the United States a week later thinking that Emilie would spend the last days of her life in Hogar los Pinos aided by the gift from the Stuttgarter Zeitung. Needless to say, I was stunned to learn five weeks later that Erika Rosenberg had checked Emilie out of los Pinos and taken her to Germany. The reason I was so upset was that I instinctively knew that the trip would kill Emilie. And I was not the only one concerned about Emilie’s well-being. Linda Diebel, a reporter with the Toronto Star, and Cristine Hurtado, an Argentine journalist who had spent a great deal of time with Emilie over the years, interviewed Rosenberg and visited Emilie just before Erika took her to Germany. Diebel, the Star’s Latin American correspondent who published a featured article on the interview and visit just after Emilie arrived in Germany, was extremely critical of Rosen-berg’s treatment of Emilie, who, she claimed, now “languishes in a German hospital, drugged, and appearing to be under the complete control of one Erika Rosenberg.” Moreover, Deibel went on, Rosenberg checked Emilie out of los Pinos against the advice of her doctors and flew her to Germany, a trip that coincided “with the imminent German publication of Rosenberg’s fourth Schindler book.”112
Yet who was this person who seemed to wield such power over Emilie Schindler’s life? Erika Rosenberg, the child of German Jews who fled to Argentina in 1936, got to know Emilie in the early 1990s as part of a research project she was doing on German Jewish immigrants to Argentina. Peter Gorlinsky, the editor of Argentina’s principal German newspaper, the Argentinisches Tageblatt, told Rosenberg about Emilie and asked her whether she knew of “Mother Courage.” Rosenberg, intrigued, contacted Emilie in San Vicente and slowly established a very close relationship with her. After she gained Emilie’s confidence, she asked to record their conversations, which centered around the story of Emilie’s life. Over time, Erika put their talks on four hundred tapes, which became the basis of Emilie’s published memoirs. Over time, Rosenberg came to consider herself Emilie’s “voice” and “mouthpiece.”113
Linda Diebel considered Rosenberg’s relationship with Emilie pure opportunism. Moreover, Diebel and Hurtado blamed Rosenberg for Emilie’s criticism of Steven Spielberg and the suggestion that she did more to help Jews during the Holocaust than her husband, Oskar Schindler. Hurtado, who had interviewed Emilie many times between 1993 and 2001, said that “Emilie never, ever talked about money, or claimed that she was greater than Oskar.” Hurtado went on, “She never tried to take attention for her self. She would always say, ‘I don’t understand the fuss. It was not heroism. If you had been there, you would have done the same thing.’” Emilie also revealed her true feelings for Oskar. “I still love Oskar, I married him for life, until death.” Hurtado once asked Emilie whether she believed in heaven. “Who knows. But if there is, and I see Oskar, I will ask him: Why did you leave me alone?”114
Though Cristine Hurtado had established her own, special relationship with Emilie, she and Linda Diebel found it difficult to see Emilie in the summer of 2001. Diebel wrote that the only way Rosenberg would allow the two reporters to see her was if they paid for the interview. But the Toronto Star, Diebel explained, “doesn’t pay for interviews.” Finally, after a great deal of effort on Hurtado’s part, Rosenberg agreed to let them spend some time with Emilie in los Pinos. It was not a pleasant visit. They found her “lying in her bed, uncovered and exposed.” They were upset to find that Emilie’s wheelchair had no footrest and that “her feet drag[ged] along the ground.” Rosenberg was unresponsive when Hurtado mentioned this to her. Later, she was equally silent when both reporters complained about leaving Emilie outside in the cold. When Hurtado finally insisted on moving her back into her room, “Rosenberg complied.” Once inside, Rosenberg kept asking Emilie, “Isn’t Spielberg a pig?” Emilie did not respond and stared out the window.115
From Diebel’s perspective, Rosenberg’s relationship with Emilie “seem[ed] to be pretty much about money.”116 This, in part, also seemed to have been Emilie’s take on her friend. While I was in Argentina, several of the Traducion women I spoke to told me that during a Christmas party for Emilie the previous year, someone had asked her about Erika Rosenberg. Emilie responded that all Rosenberg wanted was “money, money, money.”117 The idea that Emilie was living in poverty was absurd. This idea is insulting not only to her neighbors in San Vicente but to her Traducion friends who cared for her over the years. Her home in San Vicente, though modest, was quite lovely and in a very desirable section of the town. If her house was a mess, it was, in part, because she allowed her many pets to roam freely through the house. Who would want or have nice furniture that twenty cats and multiple dogs would destroy? If Emilie had financial problems, some of it was because she had never handled money particularly well. This was a trait she shared with her husband, Oskar. In her article, Linda Diebel correctly noted that Emilie received various Argentine, German, and Jewish pensions, had received a $50,000 gift from Steven Spielberg, and royalties from the books that Rosenberg published under her name. Moreover, groups were constantly trying to find other ways to help her. Rosenberg, though, refused to discuss her financial relationship with Emilie. On the other hand, she claimed that Emilie needed a lot of money because her various pensions did not cover her medical expenses. Rosen-berg claimed, for example, that she owed los Pinos thousands of dollars for Emilie’s care; but the director, Arno Hinckedeyn, said the German charity hospital required patients to pay only what they could afford. Moreover, B’nai B’rith had earlier offered to put Emilie in a German-speaking Jewish rest home free of charge, but Rosenberg rejected the offer.118
But all was moot once Rosenberg decided to take Emilie to Germany. According to Rosenberg, Emilie signed a notarized statement in 1997 stipulating that, upon her death, she be cremated and her ashes scattered along the La Plata River in Buenos Aires. But she also claimed that Emilie wanted to return to Germany. So, even though Emilie was too weak to get out of bed by herself, Rosenberg was determined to take her to Germany. Diebel, who interviewed Rosenberg just before she took Emilie to Germany on July 6, 2001, questioned the wisdom of taking this frail, ninety-three- year-old woman to Germany. After they left, Diebel asked Arno Hinckedeyn about this. He told her that the rest home’s physicians had advised against it. But Rosenberg somehow managed to find a physician in the German embassy to sign her out. Rosenberg, though, promised the los Pinos staff that she would return Emilie to Buenos Aires on July 21. But Diebel wondered how a person “so frail it is a huge deal to get her to the bathroom” could cope “with such a long flight [thirteen hours] to Germany.” Rosenberg told her that “Emilie would be medicated.” But this did not reduce the stress of the flight. Once in Germany, they had to wait for four hours in the Frankfurt airport for their flight to Bonn. When Emilie failed to wake up after the landing in Bonn, an emergency medical crew was brought on board and she was admitted to the Porzer Hospital for observation.119
But did Rosenberg really intend to return Emilie to Argentina as she had promised? Just before Rosenberg left with Emilie for Germany, Linda Diebel interviewed Erika in her apartment in Buenos Aires. Erika had now completed her last book on the Schindlers, Ich, Emilie Schindler, and she told Diebel: “It is enough. I am finished. I can only be responsible for myself.” As she looked around Rosenberg’s apartment, Diebel noticed several brochures on nursing homes in Germany on a nearby table, an indication that Rosenberg was at least looking into the prospect of leaving Emilie in Germany. Rosenberg explained that she might do this is “if that is what she [Emilie] wants.”120
Rosenberg had planned for Emilie to be with her at their first news conference in Bonn on July 9 at the House of History (Haus der Geschichte) to announce the presentation of several items to the museum and the opening of a permanent exhibit on the Schindlers. Emilie, who was still in the hospital, was unable to meet Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, who also attended the ceremony. But the next morning, Rosenberg checked Emilie out of the Porzer Hospital and took her by car to Berlin—a four-hundred-mile trip. The following day, Emilie and Erika went on a tour of the Berlin’s New Synagogue-Centrum Judaicum and held a short press conference. Afterwards, they attended a lunch sponsored by the Oskar Schindler School (Oskar-Schindler-Oberschule) where, according to Rosenberg, “Emilie spoke with everyone at the table and even made a few jokes.” This was followed by a reception at the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament. It was apparent that Emilie was confused by everything going on around her because she frequently asked, “Where are we?” Rosenberg always explained that they were in Germany.121
The following day, they attended a special ceremony at the Oskar Schindler School, where Emilie signed autographs for an hour. Over the next few days, Emilie and Rosenberg visited the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation, a local Protestant church, and the Berlin Zoo. Emilie, Rosenberg explained, “accepted everything naturally . . . and seemed to enjoy the attention she received.” Two days later, Rosenberg took Emilie to the Katharinenhof in nearby Fredersdorf, where she could rest before her final journey to Bavaria. On July 16, the State of Bavaria offered to find and pay for a suitable rest home for Emilie should she wish to settle in the southern German state. Rosenberg quickly accepted the Bavarian offer and arrangements were made to send Emilie to the Adalbert-Stifter Nursing Home, a Sudeten German rest home in Waldkreiburg. According to Rosenberg, this was where she wanted “to spend the evening of her life in the circle of her fellow Sudeten German friends.” But on July 21, the day before they were to leave for Waldkreiburg, Emilie had a stroke and was sent to the Märkisch-Oberland Hospital in Strasbourg, outside Berlin. Emilie’s physicians told Rosenberg that their patient could no longer speak and was physically too weak to travel to Bavaria. They also advised her to expect the worst. Emilie seemed to recover and regain some of her speech just as Rosenberg prepared to leave for Argentina, where she had pressing obligations. Soon after she returned to Buenos Aires, Rosenberg completed her final editing for her book on the Schindlers, Ich, Emilie Schindler. Her final statement in this work, dated August 2, 2001, was “All the best and love, Emilie!”122
Rosenberg might have also gone back to Argentina to escape growing press criticism of her treatment of Emilie in Germany. Though she claims in Ich, Emilie Schindler that Emilie enjoyed the visits and the press conferences, the truth is somewhat different. Reporters were particularly critical of the 80 Euro ($97) fee that Rosenberg demanded for each interview, regardless of whether Emilie took part or not, and what seemed to be Rosen-berg’s insensitivity to Emilie’s deteriorating health. When someone asked Rosenberg about the fees, she responded: “Journalists earn money from the interviews we give them, so why shouldn’t we, Mrs. Schindler, have the right to earn money to live from?” Derek Scully of the Irish Times, though, was more concerned about Emilie’s physical condition than the fees. The same was true of Kate Connolly at the Observer (London). Scully noted, for example, that during a press conference in the German parliament, Emilie sat with her “eyes shut, looking exhausted.” During her visit to the Oskar Schindler School, students rushed her wheelchair, pushing books in her lap to sign and “asking one question after another about her husband.” The visit, Scully observed, “overwhelmed and exhausted” Emilie. Rosenberg had to cancel several television interviews with the BBC and other networks because of Emilie’s growing exhaustion. Scully said that “the rapid deterioration of Emilie’s health is no surprise to those who watched her as she was dragged along from one reception to another for a week, accompanied always by Rosenberg.” During one of the few interview sessions that Emilie was able to attend, she was “so mentally unaware that it had to be abandoned.” Needless to say, the interview was never aired. When Kate Connolly asked Rosenberg whether she had brought Emilie to Germany to help promote her new book, Rosenberg denied it. But Erika told Derek Scully of the Irish Times that she hoped Emilie would “recover for the October launch of Ich, Emilie Schindler, which . . . would tell the full story of the woman behind Oskar Schindler.”123
Emilie seemed to recover a bit after Erika left and by mid-August was able to sit up in bed and smile. But during the next seven weeks, her condition deteriorated and on Friday, October 6, 2001, she died of a stroke, just sixteen days short of her ninety-fourth birthday. But it would be another week before a cemetery could be found to bury her. With the help of Dr. Herbert Flessner, a prominent Sudeten German who owned Langen Müller Herbig, the publishing house that did Erika Rosenberg’s books on the Schindlers, it was decided to inter her in the cemetery in Waldkreiburg, which is about an hour’s drive east of Munich. I visited Emilie’s grave in Waldkreiburg in the fall of 2003, and I have to say that it is exquisitely beautiful. In fact, once I got beyond the confines of Munich and into the rolling hills of southeastern Bavaria, I felt that I was once again back in the Sudetenland. It was most appropriate that Emilie be buried here. According to Dr. Eva Habel of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft in Munich, Waldkreiburg was founded after World War II by Sudeten Germans forced out of Czechoslovakia. Though the village’s population is now only about half Sudeten German, the cemetery is a quiet tribute to its Sudeten German heritage.124 Emilie’s white tombstone is simple but beautiful. It has a cross carved on the left with two inscriptions to the right—“Emilie Schindler: Alt Moletein/Sudeten 1907-Strausberg/Brandenburg 2001” and “Wer einen Menschen Rettet, Rettet die Ganze Welt [Whoever saves one life saves the whole world].” Just to the right of the tombstone is a crucifix. As I placed a stone on her headstone and a candle just in front, I thought of Francisco Wichter’s final tribute to Emilie. I had written Franciso in the summer of 2001 after I learned that Emilie had been taken to Germany. I wanted to know when he had learned of Emilie’s departure. He told me that he did not know about it until after Emilie left for Germany but had suspected something as we were leaving los Pinos on the day of our visit. Emilie, he said, bid us goodbye in a very “maternal way,” something she had never done before. Needless to say, he and Emilie’s other Traducion friends, who had loved and cared for her for many years, were upset because they never had a chance to say goodbye. These are the last words in his mournful letter: “Emilie, may your soul rest in peace and wholeness. She was a great fighter in the good and bad times.”125
15.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
WHEN I BEGAN WORKING ON THIS BOOK MORE THAN SEVEN years ago, I knew little about Oskar Schindler other than what I had read in Thomas Keneally’s historical novel and in the few scattered works written about him after Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List, came out in 1993. Though I had a copy of Elinor Brecher’s wonderful collection of Schindler survivor testimonies, Schindler’s Legacy (1994), I had not come to understand its richness and diversity. As I began my research, I struggled with the images in Spielberg’s film. This was particularly the case during my first trip to Kraków. Though I had been to this beautiful medieval Polish city before, this time was different. I wanted to explore first-hand each of the sites discussed by Keneally and depicted in the Spielberg film. What I slowly discovered over the course of my research travels, which brought me back to Kraków and Brünnlitz several times, was that I could escape Keneally and Spielberg’s literary and cinematographic images of Oskar Schindler only by creating new ones based solely on my own exacting scholarly research.
Over time, I became very comfortable with my own, separate image of Oskar Schindler, whom I found to be a far more complex, and, at times, sad figure, than the person captured in the pages of Keneally’s historical novel or in Spielberg’s film. Moreover, I found my own views constantly changing towards a person who was one of the most remarkable figures to come out of the Holocaust. In the early part of the book, I was disgusted by Oskar Schindler’s continual affairs and his decision to spy for Nazi Germany. One of the first people I interviewed in the Czech Republic was Dr. Jitka Gruntová, a Czech historian who has written quite a bit about Schindler. She was extremely critical of Schindler’s work for Ab-wehr and his efforts to help destroy Czechoslovakia in the immediate years before World War II. Needless to say, I did not have a high opinion of Schindler at this point in my research, and this did not change as I explored his move to Kraków in the early days of the war. At this point, I saw Oskar Schindler as nothing more than a greedy ethnic German “carpetbagger” who sought to take advantage of Poland’s despair to enrich himself and escape further service in the military.
But then something changed, both on the part of Oskar Schindler and within myself. I have to admit that up until this point in my research and writing, I had begun to doubt the merits of Schindler’s postwar acclaim. But as I went through the vast body of personal testimonies and other material I had gathered, my opinion of him slowly became more positive. Oskar was in Kraków to do one thing—make money. But in the process of trying to set up a factory that he did not seem to know how to run, Schindler befriended a handful of Jews who became not only the key to his success during his five years in Kraków but also close, trusted associates. Though much has been made of Oskar’s supposed signs of pro-Jewish sentiments well before the war began, there is little concrete evidence to support this. It was the war and the growing horror of the Shoah that forced Oskar Schindler to reevaluate his relationship with the Nazi regime and his Jewish workers.
So when did Oskar Schindler change from being a greedy factory owner into one of the most remarkable Righteous Gentiles in the Holocaust? I think his transformation took place slowly over a long period. Oskar did not begin to use a significant number of Jewish workers until several years after he arrived in Kraków. Jewish workers were much cheaper than Poles and in many ways more dependable. I concluded early in my research that I would have to separate my own image of Schindler as a heavy drinker and womanizer, which I drew partially from Keneally and Spielberg, from the almost god-like figure adored by most Schindler Jews. It became obvious to me as I began to interview Schindler Jews that few of them knew much about Oskar during the war. At the time, most accepted him, at a distance, as a kind, caring man, though it was not until after the war, when they began to compare notes with other Holocaust survivors, that they came to understand everything Oskar Schindler had done and sacrificed to save them. I also decided that I would have to separate the stories of the Schindler Jews who had worked for Oskar in Emalia from those who only knew him during the last eight months of the war in Brünnlitz. Life in this latter factory sub-camp was quite different from the one that Schindler ran in Kraków.
