Oskar Schindler

DURING ONE OF THE EARLY INTERVIEWS I DID WITH SOL URBACH, he asked me why Oskar settled in Argentina. “Wasn’t that,” Sol wanted to know, “where many former Nazis settled after the war?” “Yes,” I told him, “but so did many Jews.” Argentina was and remains an historical enigma. More than 180,000 Jews fled Russia and Eastern Europe for Argentina from 1881 to 1930; by 1933, Argentina had the world’s third largest Jewish population: 240,000. By the 1960s, 350,000 Jews lived in Argentina. Large numbers of Jews fled that country during the 1970s and early 1980s as military dictatorships and the resulting “Dirty [civil] War” devastated Argentina. More left after the bombings of the Israeli embassy in 1992 and the AMIA (Kehilá Judia de Buenos Aires) Jewish community center in Buenos Aires two years later. Many more fled the country during the financial crisis of the 1990s. Today, Argentina has 230,000 Jewish citizens, most of them living in Buenos Aires. Jewish religious and cultural institutions are now heavily guarded and I sensed a certain unspoken discomfort with life in Argentina among the Jews I interviewed there in 2001.¹

But Argentina was also home to a large German population, and today 400,000 Argentines identify themselves as ethnic Germans by language.² Roberto Aleman, the co-editor of the German-language Argentinisches Tageblatt, told me that during the war the German population was evenly split in terms of support or opposition to Hitler, a fact disputed by Uki Goñi in his The Real Odessa: How Perón Brought the Nazi War Criminals to Argentina (2002). What we do know is that Argentina’s postwar dictator, Juan Perón, who ruled Argentina from 1946 to 1955 and again from 1973 to 1974, permitted hundreds of Nazi war criminals to enter Argentina at the same time he allowed Jews to enter the country.³ Given Oskar Schindler’s well-known reputation for helping Jews during the war, it is hard to imagine that he had anything to do with these former Nazis or, for that matter, the Nazi sympathizers among the large German population in Buenos Aires at the time, where he spent much of his time. Oskar had a Jewish girlfriend, Gisa Schein, during the years he lived in Argentina, and after 1953 it seems he lived with her in Buenos Aires. Yet, despite this, when he returned to Germany, Oskar showed a certain fondness for Sudeten German organizations, which surprised and confused his Jewish and German friends. But given the depth and nature of his ties to the Jewish community in Buenos Aires during his years there, it is hard to believe that he had much to do with anyone in the German community with links to Germany’s Nazi past. But anything, of course, is possible.

What little we know about Oskar and Emilie’s life in Argentina from late 1949 until 1957, when Oskar left for Germany, comes principally from Emilie’s memoirs. Information about his life there also appears in scattered documents in the Schindler Koffer (suitcase) collection at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. Needless to say, Emilie was very critical of the film and of her husband in her memoirs and in the interviews she gave before her death in 2001. In a 1994 interview, she told a German journalist that Oskar was a “a womanizer, drinker, and good-for-nothing… an idiot” whom she had forgotten for thirty-seven years.⁴ Oskar spoke or wrote little about his life in Argentina, perhaps because he was so embarrassed by his failures there.

But Emilie and Oskar were both full of hope when they arrived in Argentina in late 1949. In fact, in the summer of 1951, Oskar wrote Fritz Lang that he was now “free of complexes and depressions, and thank God once again full of vitality.”⁵ For the first time in many years he had an ample supply of money and unlimited prospects. The Joint had given him $5,000 before he left Germany to open an automobile radiator factory in Argentina. The Joint also paid the expenses for his trip to Argentina and loaned him Arg$5,000 (Argentine pesos) ($695) when he arrived in Buenos Aires to help with initial living expenses. The idea was that Oskar would repay the Joint for these expenses and for the loan, which totaled Arg$18,851 ($2,513), out of the final grant payment of $10,000, which he received soon after he arrived in Argentina. Unfortunately, Oskar repaid the Joint only Arg$10,000 ($1,180). After they made modest efforts to collect the rest of the money, Joint officials decided in 1952 to write off the debt.The Joint also put Oskar in contact with important Jewish businessmen in Buenos Aires who did what they could to help the storied German who had helped Jews during the Holocaust. One of them, Jacobo Murmis, had recently purchased a small farm in San Vicente, a village about forty miles from downtown Buenos Aires. He gave Oskar and Emilie jobs as caretakers at the farm.⁶

It is hard to imagine Oskar Schindler running a farm, but there is a picture of him on a tractor in the photographic archives at Yad Vashem. Emilie, coming as she did from a remote rural farm community in Czechoslovakia, took immediately to farm work. Their principal job was to raise chickens and egg-laying hens. Neither of them knew anything about this and they were hampered by their poor Spanish. But Emilie said that Oskar never really seemed interested in the chicken farm and was more intrigued by the “adventures the capital could provide,” meaning Gisa Schein.⁷ By the fall of 1950, Oskar had applied for a mortgage on a small ten-acre farm in San Vicente. At first, they continued to raise chickens and hens there, though in 1953, Oskar came up with the idea of raising fur-bearing otters. Emilie considered this a hare-brained, stupid idea: “just like marrying Oskar.”⁸

On March 13, 1953, Oskar, Emilie, and Murmis established “Oskar Schindler and Company,” which was to be a “hatchery of otters and wild animals in general” with a capital value of Arg$200,000 ($26,666). The new company was to be based on the new ten-acre farm in San Vicente. Oskar was the principal partner and owned shares worth Arg$80,000 ($10,507); Murmis’s shares were worth Arg$70,000 ($9,333), and Emilie owned the rest of the shares (Arg$20,000; $2,667). The new firm was valued at Arg$200,000 ($26,667).⁹ Problems started almost immediately, though Oskar assured Emilie that the otter-fur business was “the business of the century” and made her extravagant promises: “We’re going to be millionaires,” he said. “All the women wear fur coats.”¹⁰

Neither of them knew anything about otters or furs and Emilie spent most of her free time before the animals arrived reading books on the subject. She quickly discovered that otters were not native to Latin America and that the animals Oskar had bought to start the farm were nutrias, not otters. When the nutrias arrived, Oskar disappeared, leaving Emilie to care for the farm and the nutrias by herself. In fact, she saw Oskar only on weekends, when he would bring Gisa or other friends to lunch. After a while, she became frustrated with his infrequent visits and often went horseback riding while he regaled his guests at the farmhouse.¹¹

The 150-year-old-farm and the house on Viamonte 102–108 that Oskar and Emilie bought in 1953 are still there. Seven blocks away is Juan Perón’s palatial country estate, which is now a museum. The family living in the former Schindler home was quite friendly when I visited them in the spring of 2001. They showed me through the home and even lent me a copy of a document signed by Oskar in 1957 transferring his property rights to Emilie. Though some renovations were made on the house after Emilie was forced to sell it, it still is very much as it was in the 1950s. It is a one-story hacienda-style home with a large front porch surrounded by large trees. The house is dark and damp inside. Much of the original land was sold off after Oskar left for Germany. In the early 1960s, Emilie moved to a house several blocks away on San Martin 353 built for her by B’nai Brith (Bene Berith). What particularly struck me about the house on Viamonte 102–108 was its rural setting vis-à-vis Emilie’s more urban home near the center of San Vicente. Her new house was on a paved street just a block or so from San Vicente’s quaint town square, but the house at Viamonte 102–108 still has a dirt road in front of it, as it did when Oskar lived there. While I was there, cattle wandered freely in front of the former Schindler home.

Within months after buying the new farm and setting up the nutria business, Oskar was already thinking about returning to Germany to pursue his reparations claims for his lost factories in Poland and Czechoslovakia. He contacted Beate Pollack, who worked for Joint offices in Buenos Aires, to help him find someone to file his claim in West Germany. On July 27, 1953, Pollack, who, along with her husband, Walter, would become two of Oskar’s closest friends, wrote to Moses Beckelman, the head of Joint operations in Europe, to ask for help. This letter was prompted by Oskar’s conversation a week or so earlier with Julius Lomnitz, the director of the Joint’s Latin American operations in Buenos Aires. Oskar wanted Lomnitz to recommend “an influential person,” such as Mr. Beckelman, “or another friendly institution” who could submit his application to the president of the Federal Compensation Office (Bundesausgleichsamt) in Bonn. Oskar told Lomnitz that he should immediately request DM 50,000 ($11,905) and possibly “an additional rebuilding credit” from this office in Bonn. Lomnitz suggested that the best person to do this would be Dr. E. G. Lowenthal, the director of the Advisory Committee for the Claims Conference (Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany), which had been created by twenty-three major international Jewish organizations in New York in 1951 to negotiate with West Germany over Holocaust-related damages to Jewish individuals and the Jewish people. The Claims Conference would become the principal Jewish organization involved in negotiating compensation and indemnification programs for Holocaust victims, and in 1998 had paid out more than DM 118 billion ($66.6 billion) in indemnification payments to Holocaust victims.¹²

In her letter to Beckelman, Beate Pollack reminded him of Oskar’s extraordinary assistance to Jews during the Holocaust and asked him to find him an attorney. After the discussion with Lomnitz, it was decided that Lowenthal would probably not be a good choice as Oskar’s lawyer because he might not be able “to accept his power of attorney.” Most important here, she reminded Beckelman, was the “utmost urgency” of Schindler’s case because the deadline for filing claims was August 31, 1953. Oskar would have preferred that the Joint accept his power of attorney because it had awarded him the $15,000 grant earlier. She enclosed with her letter a second letter from Oskar to Beckelman that provided more details about the particulars of his claim. “It would be for us a real pleasure if we could be of real help to Mr. Schindler in this matter,” she wrote, “because only a few of his kind deserve it so much.” Pollack urged Beckelman to cable his response as quickly as possible.¹³

Oskar’s letter to Beckelman, dated July 21, 1953, said that he still did not have an adequate income, “especially in light of the last economically difficult years.” He explained that “high interest rates and high wages and new demands” made it imperative for him to press his claims against West Germany. He could not, he added, “allow the German government to keep [his] claim of over $30,000.”¹⁴ In fact, before he left Germany in 1949, he had already given Alfred Schindler, his former office manager in Kraków and Brünnlitz, his power of attorney to deal with claim opportunities and other matters relating to the two factories. He also wrote to the State Commissariat for Racial, Religious, and Political Persecutees in Munich, which opened a file on his claim in Regensburg, though this office told him in 1949 that they were uncertain when or whether such a compensation fund would be set up.¹⁵

The problem for Oskar, though, was that he did not know how to pursue his claim in light of the new 1952 Lastenausgleich law in West Germany. Consequently, he asked Beckelman for help in filing a Lastenausgleich claim there. But Oskar also raised an issue that seemed to cast doubts on his prospect for Lastenausgleich compensation. From what he could determine, one had to have been living in Germany on December 31, 1950, to be eligible to file a claim. This date did not apply if the applicant had moved to another country as a public employee before that date. Oskar claimed that he made several trips abroad for the Joint in the summer of 1949 and considered his trip to Buenos Aires as foreign travel for the Joint. Consequently, he wanted Beckelman to certify that he was a Joint employee when he made these trips. He also asked for Beckelman’s help in getting a position as an importer with the Israeli mission in Germany and mentioned the work he had done in a similar position for the Jewish Agency in Munich between 1947 and 1948. In return for the Joint’s support, Oskar told Beckelman, he was willing to make the Joint his “legal heir,” which would enable him to return to Argentina after a brief spell in Germany to file his claim.¹⁶

Beckelman immediately cabled Pollack after he received her letter and followed this up with a more detailed letter on August 4. But before he cabled her, he called Benjamin B. Ferencz, the director general of the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization (JRSO) office, which had been designated by the U.S. Military Government “to recover heirless property” in the Palace of Justice in Nürnberg, Germany.¹⁷ Ferencz told Beckelman that neither JRSO nor the United Restitution Office (URO) could handle Lastenausgleich claims and later cabled him the name of Professor Dr. Robert Ellscheid in Cologne as the best person to handle Schindler’s claim. He added that the deadline for filing such claims had been extended to March 1954.¹⁸

Beckelman immediately shared this information with Beate Pollack and told her that it was “out of the question” for the Joint or any other Jewish organization to handle Lastenausgleich matters because such actions were forbidden by the licensing arrangement the organizations had with the West German government. According to Beckelman, the logic of this was that “all the Jewish organizations [had] protested against the imposition of any Lastenausgleich obligations on Jewish survivors of Nazi persecutions,” which made it “entirely inappropriate for any of these groups to concern themselves with such claims.” He told her about Dr. Ellscheid and said he was “a reputable and reliable person.” He also let her know about the new deadline for filing Lastenausgleich claims.¹⁹

But Beckelman was a little puzzled by the link between the $15,000 grant that the Joint had earlier awarded Schindler and his proposal to transfer his power of attorney to the Joint. This would be impossible for the Joint to do, though he added that it should not be taken as a sign of disinterest in Schindler’s case. At this point, Beckelman was also uncertain about certifying Schindler’s claim about travel for the Joint in 1949 and 1951 but wrote that he would look into the matter. He did not think, though, that travel for the Joint would fulfill the requirements of the Lastenausgleich law about such matters because the Joint was a “private philanthropic organization.”²⁰

Several days after Beckelman wrote Beate Pollack, he sent Benjamin Ferencz a letter and asked him whether he thought Oskar’s claim of travel for the Joint in 1949 and 1951 “would reestablish his eligibility under the Lastenausgleich law.” He included a copy of Oskar’s July 21 letter. On the same day, August 8, Beckelman wrote Beate Pollack that he had looked into the possibility of Oskar’s being employed by the Israel Purchasing Mission (IPM) in Germany. The director of the IPM told him that the nature of their ties to the German government specified that they could employ only people “directly connected with the Israel[i] Government.”²¹

Ten days later, Beate Pollack clarified Oskar’s request for a position with the IPM in a letter to Beckelman. One of the purposes of the Lastenausgleich law, she explained, was to help dispossessed ethnic Germans from Central and Eastern Europe reestablish themselves financially in West Germany. Oskar did not want a job with the IPM. Instead, he wanted to open an “intermediary agency” that would sell German goods to the IPM. What he needed now was a letter from the IPM stating that they would be interested in purchasing goods from him. This would, she went on to say, “serve him before the German authorities of the ‘Lastenausgleich’ as proof that he really had the intention to found such an agency” and really needed “the money he is asking for.” She added that Oskar would then mortgage his Lastenausgleich claims to the Joint and use the attorney recommended by Beckelman and Ferencz. The Joint would become his creditor, which would enable Oskar to return to Argentina sooner because the Joint would be dealing directly with Lastenausgleich officials in Germany.²² She went on to explain in another letter several weeks later that Oskar wanted to reimburse the Joint fully for the $15,000 it had given him earlier and thought that if the Joint was his Lastenausgleich beneficiary, the matter would be resolved much more quickly.²³

In the meantime, Ferencz and another official at JRSO, Ernst Katzenstein, sought the advice of a German attorney, F. A. Stadler, about Oskar’s Lastenausgleich questions and claim. According to Stadler and Katzenstein, the Lastenausgleich law stipulated that a person was eligible for such funds only if he had been a resident of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) or West Berlin on December 31, 1950. The only exception to this was someone who, as a civil servant or a member of a “permanent trade commission,” had been abroad on official business on or before this date. This meant that Schindler, who had emigrated for personal reasons, could not be included in this category. Stadler and Katzenstein added, though, that Schindler should pursue his claims as a Joint official traveling abroad in 1949 and 1951 because this was a gray area in the Lastenausgleich law. But more than likely, even employment by the Joint would probably not make him eligible for such claims because he was not “Angehoeriger des oeffentlichen Dienstes” (a member of the civil service).²⁴ When Ferencz sent Beckelman a copy of the Katzenstein-Stadler report, he added a note: “A good lawyer might persuade the competent German officials that the JDC is the same thing as an official German body. He would probably have to be a damn good lawyer. Nothing can be lost by trying.”²⁵

But this was not the end of the Joint’s investigation into Oskar’s questions about his Lastenausgleich. Beckelman also contacted the Joint’s office in Munich about Schindler’s claim that he had worked for the Joint between 1949 and 1951. On September 14, Samuel L. Haber, the director of the Joint’s Munich operations, wrote to Charles Jordan, who worked for Beckelman in Paris and had formerly headed Joint operations in Cuba, that Schindler had never been employed by the Joint. A month later when Jordan shared this information with Beate Pollack, Oskar’s effort to persuade the Joint to intercede for him in his Lastenausgleich claim seems to have ended.²⁶

On the other hand, Oskar continued to look to the Joint as his benefactor and had no qualms about going back to the Joint again and again over the next four years for financial resources to live in Argentina and ultimately return to Germany to pursue his Lastenausgleich claims. Yet it is interesting that no one had any way of knowing who had originally owned the two factories Oskar had acquired during the war. If Joint officials had been aware that Oskar had taken over Aryanized Jewish property or that there would be charges of brutality leveled against him by Jewish Holocaust survivors, perhaps they would not have been as eager to help him. In fact, the principal accuser against Schindler, Nathan Wurzel, had first written to the Joint in Paris in the fall of 1951 under his new Israeli name, Antoni Korzeniowski, about Oskar’s whereabouts. But instead of accusing Schindler of brutality, he said that he wanted to find him so that Oskar could help him locate his “lost relatives.”²⁷

It would be almost a year before Joint officials heard again from Oskar Schindler. On September 21, 1954, Oskar paid a visit to Joint offices in Buenos Aires, where he discussed with Moses Leavitt, the international head of the Joint, who was visiting the Argentine capital, the possibility of the Joint’s granting him a two-year loan of $5,000 against a second mortgage on his property in San Vicente. Jacobo Murmis, who was still a partner in Oskar and Emilie’s nutria farm, strongly backed the idea and said the loan would be “amply covered.” Leavitt said he would agree to recommend the loan to the Joint’s executive committee in New York only if Oskar took out a third mortgage on the property and agreed to pay it back in two years. With only one dissenting vote, the committee approved the loan because of Schindler’s “assistance to so many of the people in whom [they] were interested.” The only stipulation was that the third mortgage had to be in Murmis’s name. On October 14, 1954, the Joint office in Buenos Aires gave Oskar Arg$130,000, the equivalent of $5,000. But when it came time to repay the loan two years later, Oskar was unable to do so because, Murmis explained, he had “economic difficulties” and had not yet received his “Widergutmachung [reparations] from Germany, which he [had] been awaiting for such a long time.” Murmis advised the Joint to give Oskar a ten-month payment extension on the loan, which it did, though he also asked Joint officials in New York for an explanatory letter about the nature of the loan so that he would not to have to pay Argentine income taxes on the $5,000. Because Oskar never did repay the loan, he seriously damaged his relationship with Murmis; it seems that he even blamed Murmis for some of his financial difficulties.²⁸

For all practical purposes, the scheme to farm and raise poultry and nutria had failed and the Schindlers were deeply in debt. At the end of 1955, Itzhak Stern, now acting as Oskar’s “general attorney,” received this letter from Schindler:

Oskar frustratingly added that had he “been lazy over the past six years instead of working hard, [he] probably would not even have one third” of his current debts. Yet he also seemed willing to accept some of the blame for his financial problems. He explained that though he had no control over the Argentine economic crisis, which included the devaluation of the peso, he “should have long ago given up this occupation [farming], which kills your intelligence.” He added, “I should have looked for a better way to earn a living.”³⁰ In another letter to Stern the following spring, Oskar expressed frustration over his “isolation and mind-killing inactivity.” But he hoped that his “good star” would soon be in the ascent. But what bothered him most was his “powerlessness” in confronting his most basic problems.³¹

But Oskar’s failures in Argentina could not be solely blamed on the government or the economy. After Schindler died in Hildesheim in Germany in the fall of 1974, a memorial service was held for him in Frankfurt before his body was shipped to Israel for burial. When the service was over, Mietek Pemper approached one of the Argentine Schindler Jews and asked him how they could have let Oskar lose everything in Argentina. The Schindler Jew responded, “You cannot reprimand us for the fact that there were people in Buenos Aires who could play poker much better than Oskar Schindler.”³²

Oskar’s financial situation continued to deteriorate during his last months in Argentina and, on November 20, 1956, he wrote another letter to Stern: “I am at the end and only a quick partial payment of my claim against the Federal Republic can save me.”³³ Once again, his Schindler Jews came to his rescue. On January 23, 1957, Roma Horowitz and five Schindler Jews asked Sidney Nelson, now the head of Joint operations in Buenos Aires, to forward a letter they had written to Moses Leavitt in New York, further explaining Oskar’s desperate financial situation and asking for more help. Schindler, they explained, had been living for the past few years “under really impossible and not–to–be borne circumstances.” When he arrived in Argentina, he was “badly advised” on how best to invest the money he had received from the Joint and now stood “on the brink of a complete bankruptcy.” Consequently, despite his willingness to work, Schindler was “totally unable to pay the enormous overheads and taxes from what he makes.” His relationship with his former partner, Jacobo Murmis, was now over “since it [had] brought nothing but losses through the years.” The only option open to Schindler at this point was to sell what remaining land he owned, which was impossible “due to the circumstances” current in Argentina. If Oskar could sell his land, the Schindler Jews wrote, then he could go to West Germany where he was supposed to receive “a great deal of money” from the Lastenausgleich fund. But he would need considerable travel and living funds and, consequently, the group asked the Joint to loan Oskar another $2,000 to help him make the trip. Oskar would repay this money as soon as he received his Lastenausgleich money. If they could, they explained, they would loan Oskar the money themselves but they simply did not have it. At the same time, they argued, $2,000 was “really a very small sum in comparison to what Mr. Schindler did to save so many of [them].” They went on to say that the “Jewry of the whole world and especially the thousand… whom he saved will undoubtedly be proud to know that it [the Joint] helped such a man and saved him from an extremely unpleasant fate.”³⁴

Several months later, Nelson informed New York of conversations he subsequently had with Murmis and several other Jews in Buenos Aires who knew Oskar well. They said that the Joint should not loan him any more because he might“use the money for some other purpose and fail to carry out his intended mission.” They also told Nelson that Schindler had “a history of obvious financial irresponsibility.” On the other hand, Murmis and others suggested that the Joint consider buying Schindler a roundtrip airplane ticket to Germany and give him $200 to $300 for expenses. And even though they questioned Oskar’s handling of money, they reminded Nelson of his “invaluable service” to fellow Jews during the Holocaust and of the “many friends who [had] been calling insistently on his behalf.” As the Joint had gone this far with Schindler, they thought it should do everything reasonably possible to help him settle his claim.³⁵

In late April 1957, Moses Leavitt told Nelson that he had talked to Mr. Mirelman, a prominent Jewish leader whom Oskar had also contacted about the loan. Oskar asked Mirelman, who was evidently quite fond of Schindler, “to press the request upon [the Joint]” and also to let him visit the United States on his return trip from Germany. Oskar told Mirelman that he hoped to stop off in Venezuela on his way back from Germany to see whether he “could do something in that country.” Leavitt added that Nelson should tell Mr. Schindler that the Joint could not keep making loans to him, though it was prepared to help him with his trip to Germany if he could provide the Joint with information regarding the status of his Lastenausgleich claim. But Leavitt also wanted to determine whether there was any need for Oskar to go to Germany. If so, he was ready to ask URO lawyers to look into Schindler’s claim and determine whether they could help him win settlement sooner. But nothing more could be done until Oskar gave them an update on his Lastenausgleich application.³⁶

Nelson informed Oskar of Leavitt’s request and Schindler sent Leavitt a copy of the Lastenausgleich application that had been sent by several Schindlerjuden to Dr. Theodor Heuss, the president of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation (Gesellschaft Christlich-Jüdischer Zusammenarbeit), and the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany. Other than Konrad Adenauer, Heuss was West Germany’s most prominent elder statesman. Oskar told Leavitt that he had also approached Dr. Nahum Goldmann, the president of the Claims Conference and the chairman of the World Jewish Congress, about the matter. When Schindler later met Goldmann in Buenos Aires, he gave Oskar a letter of introduction to present to Felix von Eckhardt, the chief of the press and information service of the West German government.³⁷ It stated that Schindler had become “an outright legendary figure among many Jewish refugees” because of his efforts to help them during the war. He mentioned Oskar’s stalled claims efforts and asked Eckhardt to do everything he could to help him, particularly in regard to connections in Bonn. Separately, Goldmann told Schindler he would do whatever was necessary to help his case when the Jewish leader was in Germany that summer. Because of this, Oskar concluded that it was urgent for him to go to Germany as quickly as possible. In a May 11, 1957, letter to Moses Leavitt, Oskar said he needed a loan from the Joint to get there. He added that he now planned to stop in the United States on his way to Germany but assured Leavitt that it would not cost that much more to make this side trip.³⁸

From what we can gather from Oskar’s private papers, the United Restitution Office was now handling Oskar’s application. On March 30, 1955, the Compensation Office (Ausgleichsamt) in Regensburg had written Dr. H. Wolf, of the URO’s office in Munich, and reminded him that Schindler had to be a resident of West Germany or West Berlin by December 31, 1950. In addition, Schindler was not registered at the local refugee office as an exiled person and had emigrated to Argentina on September 7, 1949. Consequently, he did not meet any of the residency criteria under the Lastenausgleich law for compensation. This, of course, did not prevent Oskar from continuing to press his case. In the fall of 1956, he forwarded a new set of application forms to Dr. Wolf in the URO office in Munich. When he heard nothing back, he again enlisted the help of Schindlerjuden in Argentina, which prompted the January 28, 1957, letter to Dr. Heuss in Bonn.³⁹

This letter, which was signed by Roma and Edmund Horowitz as well as nine other Schindler Jews from Buenos Aires, went into detail about Oskar’s aid to Jews during the war. The authors included a copy of the May 8, 1945, letter given to him by prominent Brünnlitz Jews and also mentioned Emilie’s sacrifices and good deeds. What was so impressive about Schindler’s efforts, the letter noted, was not the money he spent to save Jews or the danger to his own person. It was his consistent aid to Jews throughout the war. Oskar was, they explained, more determined to protect his Jews until liberation than to “bring his life and wealth to safety.” For the past two years, the Schindler Jews wrote, he had lived without income and it was only through the efforts of the Joint that he was now able to return to Germany to press his Lastenausgleich claim. Unfortunately, despite the support of the Joint and the URO, his claim was tied up with “the usual bureaucratic rhythm” at the Regensburg refugee office. The Schindler Jews pleaded with Dr. Heuss to do everything he could to push Oskar’s case to conclusion. They argued that it was essential to do whatever possible to help this “deserving man, who in the most dangerous time showed extraordinary heroism.” It was important that he no longer be allowed “to vegetate in a catastrophic and shameful situation, without hope, in the shadow of [Germany’s] economic miracle.”⁴⁰

In the meantime, the Joint continued to investigate the status of Oskar’s claim through the URO in Munich. In June, the Joint bought him a round-trip airline ticket with a stopover in New York. In addition, the Joint also gave him about $750 in pocket money. Oskar flew to New York in mid-June, where he spent almost three weeks with Schindler Jews there, and arrived in Frankfurt in early July. Within a few weeks, he was out of money and called Dr. Katzenstein, who was now working with the Claims Conference in Frankfurt. He told Dr. Katzenstein that he had arrived in Germany with only $400 in his pocket and was now down to $100. Dr. Katzenstein had helped Oskar quite a lot and had introduced him to Dr. Heuss and the Minister of Finance. He was also convinced that Oskar would soon receive his Lastenausgleich payment but needed some money to tide him over until he received it. Dr. Katzenstein called the Claims Conference about Schindler and they said that they could not help him. The Claims Conference suggested that Dr. Katzenstein contact the Joint, as it had already helped Oskar quite a bit. Officials at the Claims Conference also thought it might embarrass “Mr. Schindler if he were to be assisted by another organization.”⁴¹

Oskar came to the Joint office in Frankfurt on August 6, 1957, and explained his predicament to officials there. He stated that he had left Argentina with $1,000 and arrived in Germany with only $400, meaning that he had spent $600 while in the United States. He added that he “had left his wife without money and he had to send her $100.” What he wanted was a loan of DM 1,000 ($238), which he would repay when he received his Lastenausgleich payment, which he expected in a few months. He added that it had cost him about $400 to live during his first month in Germany and thought that DM 1,000 would get him through the next few months. Joint officials decided to grant Oskar the loan, which he agreed to pay back in three months.⁴²

Needless to say, Schindler did not repay the loan because his Lastenausgleich payment was delayed. Furthermore, several months later he cashed in the return portion of his KLM ticket that the Joint had bought for him. And by January 1958, he was broke again and approached the Joint for another loan. But this time he at least had confirmation from his attorney, Dr. Alexander Besser, that he had been approved for a minimum Lastenausgleich payment of DM 50,000 ($11,905). Moreover, Dr. Katzenstein had now become Oskar’s advocate and his story began to appear in publications such as Reader’s Digest and the Catholic Digest. This was probably because of the publicity he got in the New York Times, The Forward, and other American publications while he was in New York in June. His trip to New York was also picked up by the Sudeten German Der Sudetendeutsche and other German publications. He stayed with Henry and Manci Rosner while in New York and held a press conference at Joint headquarters there. Slowly, Oskar Schindler was becoming famous. He was also becoming accustomed to the adoration of his Schindler Jews, who were vocal about his deeds and current plight.⁴³

Consequently, after considerable discussion, the Joint approved a new loan of DM 1,200 DM ($286), which would be paid back in two installments with the proviso that this would be the last loan that it gave Oskar Schindler. But two months later, Dr. Katzenstein and Schindler’s attorney, Dr. Besser, approached the Joint again about a new loan. Given the large amount of money that the Joint had loaned or given him over the years, it is not surprising that his request was turned down. Moreover, Oskar never repaid any of the loans that the Joint gave him between 1954 and 1958. In the end, the Joint simply had to absorb these losses. Yet it did not sever its ties with Schindler and still intervened on his behalf the following year when Jacobo Murmis tried to foreclose on the two mortgages he had on Schindler’s property in Argentina.⁴⁴

The Struggle to Succeed in Germany

The Lastenausgleich program was set up in West Germany to compensate Germans who had lost property during the war; ultimately, it paid out more than DM 140 billion ($93,000,000,000) in compensation, much of it in pensions. It was not designed to pay for full property loss and payments. Full restitution was available only for those with claims of DM 5,000 ($3,300); large claims such as Schindler’s would receive only a small percentage of their actual property loss. Needless to say, West German Lastenausgleich officials reduced Oskar’s initial claim of DM 5,256,400 ($1,251,524) substantially after he filed his claim. Between 1962 and 1968, the West German government gave him DM 177,651 ($42,298). According to Oskar, about two thirds of this money went to pay off his debts or his legal fees. What remained, about DM 50,000 ($11,905), was credited to him to help buy a new factory. His estate received another DM 10,886 ($4,252) after his death to cover various expenses, and Emilie received a final payment of DM 18,541.88 ($7,243) from the West German government two years after Oskar’s death.⁴⁵

Oskar was too young for a Lastenausgleich pension in 1957, so the only way he could be compensated for his losses was through the purchase of a bankrupt business with a loan guaranteed by the Lastenausgleich bank in Bad Godesberg.⁴⁶ Most of the deals fell through, and the one business he finally succeeded in acquiring in 1962 quickly failed. These failures compounded the tragedy of Oskar Schindler’s postwar life and left him devastated.

Oskar settled in Frankfurt after he arrived in Germany and soon rented a small apartment at Arndtstraße 46 . Soon after his return to Germany, Oskar contacted Mietek Pemper, who was now living in Augsburg, and asked him to help him work his way through the Lastenausgleich bureaucratic maze. Pemper, an extremely gentle, kind man, reminded me several times during my interviews with him that he was hesitant to say anything critical of Schindler. He owed his life to Oskar and simply would not make negative comments about him. I interviewed Mr. Pemper in Augsburg in May 1999 and in January 2000. During our last visit, I asked Mr. Pemper for more details about his relationship with Oskar after the war. Until this moment in our conversation, I had been writing down everything he said. He gently put his hand on mine, a sign that he would tell me a few things but did not want me to take them down. To honor his request, I will not reveal these particular things about Oskar.⁴⁷

But during our first visit, he told me several things about Oskar that he later repeated in an interview with two journalists from the Stuttgarter Zeitung, Claudia Keller and Stefan Braun. They later published their interview with Mr. Pemper in their Schindlers Koffer: Berichte aus dem Leben eines Lebensretters (1999), a collection that included their series of articles about the contents of the recently discovered Schindler Koffer, which contained many of Oskar’s private papers. Pemper helped Oskar put together his list of claims and went with him in 1958 to Bad Godesberg to press his claim. It became apparent, at least to Pemper, that this matter was not going to be settled quickly. Though there were many failed businesses to take over, the “elderly gentlemen” in the claims office constantly “fixed new levies and always demanded new evidence and documents” from Oskar, delays that kept him from acquiring one of the bankrupt firms. On one occasion, as Schindler and Pemper left the claims office, Oskar told Pemper: “You know, if I had murdered 1,200 Jews instead of rescuing them, I would have had no difficulty receiving my Lastenausgleich payment.”⁴⁸

But Pemper also admitted that you could not blame all the problems Oskar had in getting his Lastenausgleich loan on officials in Bad Godesberg. Oskar, he said, “had absolutely no understanding about the whole paper war.” Oskar was not a good planner. This did not fit with his personality. Pemper stated that he always felt he had “two opponents” to deal with as he helped Oskar try to settle his claim. The first was the bureaucracy and the second was Oskar himself. Schindler did not seem to care about the financial state of any of the firms he looked at. All he wanted to do was close the deal quickly, something that Pemper advised him not to do. To some extent, Oskar’s later failure was caused by this impatience and his seeming inability “to find his way again.” Pemper said that Oskar had never really gained entrepreneurial experience in Czechoslovakia, Kraków, and Brünnlitz. Emalia, for example, was run by Schindler’s Jews. And Oskar did not invest all the money he received from the Lastenausgleich fund in the firm he finally acquired in 1962. Moreover, Oskar was simply not a desk person. It was one thing to run a large factory with thousands of employees as he did during the war, but Schindler was simply incapable of making the step “downwards.”⁴⁹

In his haste to find a business, any business, that he could quickly take over, Oskar first tried to buy into a firm owned by an Israeli, Benjamin Mayer, who owned a chemical and plastics company, “MAFIT.” After this deal fell through, Oskar, working through his attorney, Dr. Alexander Besser, whom Mr. Pemper did not consider particularly helpful, then tried to purchase the Feinlederfabrik Albert Kastner, a fine-leather factory in Kemnath that made high-quality leather goods, in late 1958. Oskar and Dr. Besser spent months working out the deal to buy the leather factory, only to have it fall through because of problems with officials in Bad Godesberg. Oskar then unsuccessfully tried to buy a bankrupt box factory in Kemnath in early 1959.⁵⁰

Next, Oskar tried to buy a cannery, the Konservenfabrik Remy & Kohlhaas in Erbach/Rheingau. After the cannery deal fell through, Oskar then briefly considered buying the Hotel Jung in Rüdesheim am Rhein.⁵¹ But like the rest of his earlier deals, the venture fell through because of problems with Lastenausgleich funding. It was not until 1962, more than four years after Oskar arrived in West Germany, that he was finally able to purchase a business, the Kunststeinwerk Kurt Ganz in Hochstadt am Main, in early 1962, with the help of a DM 50,000 ($11,905) credit from his Lastenausgleich compensation. There is no doubt that the transfer of his claim from Bad Godesberg to Hessen state officials in Regensburg helped speed along a final decision on his case. He quickly renamed the company the Beton- und Kunststeinwerk Oskar Schindler (Concrete and Artificial Stone Work Oskar Schindler). The firm made window boards and stair cases made from stone and cement. But within a year, the factory went bankrupt, and, in the process of trying to run it, Oskar suffered a severe heart attack that almost killed him.⁵²

Oskar later blamed the failure of his business in Hochstadt on the lack of adequate Lastenausgleich funds, a bad winter, and the high monthly rent for the factory. But he also had trouble with his thirty-five workers, particularly after he was nominated as a Righteous Among the Nations (Righteous Gentile) in Israel in the spring of 1962. According to Oskar, his workers physically attacked him and called him a “Judenfreund” (friend of the Jews).⁵³ This would not be the last time Oskar had trouble with accusations that he was sympathetic towards Jews. Richard Hackenburg, an old Sudeten German friend who lived in Frankfurt, said that on another occasion Oskar attacked a man who called him a “Judenknecht” (vassal or servant of the Jews). The accuser took Oskar to court over the matter and Schindler had to pay a fine for the incident.⁵⁴

On January 24, 1963, Oskar sent a letter to Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Dr. Moshe Bejski in Israel:

By the end of 1963, Oskar was forced to declare bankruptcy. He later stated that the “process of dissolving the business was paid for by me with a voluntary 20 percent settlement from delayed Lastenausgleich payments” received after the collapse of the concrete and stone business. Between 1962 and 1964, Oskar received over DM 45,000 ($10,714) from the Lastenausgleich fund to help settle his debts. In 1964, he had a massive heart attack and spent a month in a sanatorium. For the next ten years, Oskar struggled with growing health problems that would have crippled a weaker man.

Fame and the Righteous Gentile Controversy

From the late 1940s on, Schindler Jews in Europe and the United States had done everything they could to tell the world about Oskar Schindler’s deeds during the war. Stories about Oskar’s exploits appeared periodically in newspapers and magazines in Europe and the United States. But some Schindler Jews, such as Leopold “Poldek” Page and Itzhak Stern, were determined to tell Schindler’s story to a broader audience. Their efforts resulted in his nomination as a Righteous Among the Nations (Righteous Gentile) by Yad Vashem in 1962, which became mired in controversy. In this particular instance, though, Oskar was able to mask his disappointment with the adoring tributes he received from the Schindler Jews who wined and dined him while he was in Israel to receive the award in 1962.

Leopold “Poldek” Page was one of the driving forces behind efforts to tell the world of Oskar’s work to save more than a thousand Jews during the Holocaust. In the early 1950s he convinced the famed Austrian American film director Fritz Lang to consider doing a film on Schindler and in the 1960s was the driving force behind MGM’s decision to make a film about Oskar on his wartime heroics. After Schindler’s death, Page continued to promote Schindler’s story and was the one who convinced Thomas Keneally to write Schindler’s Ark (later Schindler’s List). A decade or so later, Steven Spielberg, using Page as his film consultant, produced Schindler’s List based on Keneally’s historical novel.

After the war, Poldek Page and his wife, Ludmilla (Mila), fled to Bratislava, Slovakia, and then struggled to find a way to Palestine. Ludmilla Page shared this information with me when I interviewed her in November 2001. I was in Los Angeles to give The “1939” Club’s Leopold Page Memorial Righteous Rescuers Lecture at Chapman University, which was sponsored by Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation. Poldek had died earlier that year, which made my visit with Mrs. Page particularly special.

Ludmilla Page is a study in graciousness. Though she was never as well-known as her husband, she was an integral part of the Schindler story. She and Poldek married while they were still in the Kraków ghetto. Though she and Poldek knew Oskar throughout the war they did not begin working for him until they were put on the famous “Schindler’s Lists” in the fall of 1944. When the war ended, Poldek and Ludmilla began a modest odyssey that took them to Bratislava, Budapest, and Prague before they wound up in Munich, where they reconnected with Oskar. They lived in Munich for two years and spent a great deal of time with Oskar, who traveled to Munich frequently to meet with the many Schindler Jews there. They would frequently meet him at the city’s Deutsches Museum, which at the time served as a refugee center. Ludmilla particularly remembered Oskar’s birthday party in Regensburg in 1946, which brought together Schindler Jews from throughout the area.⁵⁶

After failing to find a way into Palestine, Poldek decided to try to get papers for the United States, which he received in the spring of 1947. But before he left Germany, Poldek promised Oskar that he would do everything he could “to make his name a household word.”⁵⁷ The Pages lived in New York for three years. Though well-educated, Poldek had no trade or technical skills. He got a job in New York as a shipping clerk with a company that imported leather goods from Latin America. A friend, Arthur Rand, suggested that Page open a leather repair shop. Poldek then walked into a New York city bank and asked a banker for a $1,200 loan to start his new business. When the banker asked Page for collateral, he held up his hands and said, “These will pay back your loan.” Page then persuaded the import company he was working for to let him repair their bags. When they had free time, Poldek and Mila (Ludmilla) would hand out leaflets advertising their repair service on Madison Avenue. Poldek repaired the bags and Mila, who also worked as a seamstress at Maximillan furs, delivered them to their customers. In 1950, Poldek and Mila followed Arthur Rand to California. Before they left New York, several of their friends suggested that they settle in the “triangle” area of Los Angeles, which included Beverly Hills. When they got to California, the Pages decided to open a small leather repair shop there. Throughout this period of transition, the Pages had maintained contact with Oskar. They were also friends with Roma and Edmund Horowitz, who traveled with the Schindlers to Argentina in 1949.⁵⁸

Ludmilla described their first leather repair shop, which was on Linden Drive, as a “hole in the wall.” However, it was significant enough to attract customers such as Lily Latté, who managed Fritz Lang’s household and later became his wife. It was not until after the war that Schindler Jews such as Page came to appreciate the significance of what Oskar had done to save them. Page, though, was more than just appreciative. He would spend the rest of his life trying to tell the world of Oskar’s exploits. And his small shop in Beverly Hills, the home of many Hollywood greats, would be his Schindler pulpit. Poldek and Ludmilla met Lang through Lily, who came into Poldek’s shop to have a bag repaired. When the gregarious Poldek learned who she worked for, he told her Schindler’s story. Latté, a statuesque native Berliner and a Jew, was a very influential figure in Lang’s complex life, and he was quite dependent on her.⁵⁹

Page’s stories about Oskar evidently moved Ms. Latté and on April 27, 1951, she wrote Oskar expressing Lang’s interest in his wartime efforts to save Jews. Oskar wrote back in June and said he knew that “a superb personality such as Mr. Fritz Lang could create a masterpiece of incalculable psychological value from this factual material.” Oskar said that, in principle, he was agreeable to the filming of his experiences during the war as long as Lang based it on fact. “Pfefferberg [Page]” could provide Lang with the appropriate introductions to his story and even flesh out some of the important details. Oskar enclosed some important documents with his letter related to his story. He authorized Page, who had his “unconditional trust,” to undertake the “required initial negotiations” for the film. On the other hand, he added, if these talks led to a movie deal, then Oskar wanted to be a direct part of the film project because he “had the chance during those sad years to experience the mentality of both fronts and to study them from both sides.” He added: “I cannot imagine that a merely written transference of the material is possible, despite consideration of a sensitive movement, without distortion and shallowness being the consequence.”⁶⁰

A month later, Oskar sent Lang a letter that went into great detail about his life before and during the war. At some point in the talks about a film deal, Poldek and Mila invited Lang and Latté to their small apartment for dinner. Mila admitted that she was an inexperienced hostess, and was quite nervous, given Lang’s fame as a film director. But the mercurial Lang, who could be quite harsh at times, was most complimentary of the meal. He was particularly taken by Mila’s thoughtfulness in serving her guests chocolates afterwards. Lang told her that such niceties were “so refreshing. In the U.S., you finish dinner and that’s it.”⁶¹

It is difficult to say how serious Lang was about the Schindler story. He met the Pages at one of the lowest points in his career. His worst film, American Guerilla, had just been released and Lang was convinced that he was the subject of secret investigations by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In some ways, he was a Hollywood “untouchable.” Even so, his cinematic output during this low point in his career was still remarkable. He directed two films in 1952 and the same number a year later. So his interest in Oskar’s story did not come from a directorial void in his life. It is possible, of course, that he was interested in Schindler’s heroics during the war because they involved a fellow countryman who was that rare “good German.” Yet Lang bore no love for Germany and in late 1944 he spoke out against Fred Zinnemann’s The Seventh Cross, which told the story of escaped concentration camp inmates who were helped by the German resistance.⁶² Lang thought it was “too soon to celebrate any good in the German character.”⁶³ More than likely, though, Lang was interested in Schindler because he had saved Jews. But Lang, who was half Jewish, always regarded himself as a Catholic and seldom talked about his Jewish background. On the other hand, most of the people he worked with in his company, Diana Productions, were Jewish, as was Lily, whom he married in a private Jewish ceremony.⁶⁴ He did this for Lily, who was “highly conscious of her Jewishness.”⁶⁵ So in the end, it was probably Lily and the Jewish aspect of the Schindler legend that drew Lang to Poldek and Ludmilla.

Regardless, nothing ever came of the Lang film idea except for the seed that he planted in Oskar and Poldek’s minds about a future movie deal. It is difficult to say why the film deal with Lang fell through, though Oskar provided a partial explanation in a letter he wrote to Page in early 1965 when they were working on another film idea about Schindler’s wartime experiences. Oskar reminded Poldek how difficult it had been during his negotiations with Fritz Lang ten years previously “to find an idealist for a movie about concentration camps who was ready to sacrifice even one dollar.”⁶⁶ According to Ned Comstock, the well-respected archivist who oversees the vast Fritz Lang collection in The Cinema-Television Library and Archives of the Performing Arts at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, there is nothing in the collection on Schindler. The only written record we have of any contact between Oskar and Lang is the lengthy biographical letter that Oskar wrote Lang on July 20, 1951.⁶⁷

But Page was not the only Schindler survivor who was trying to tell the world about Oskar. As early as June 1947, several Schindler women approached Kurt R. Grossman, a Jew who had fled Germany in 1933 and was at the time working for the World Jewish Congress (WJC), and asked him to send food packages to Oskar in Germany. After they explained why, Grossman, a prominent intellectual and scholar, became fascinated with Schindler’s story and during the next decade discussed it frequently with his colleagues. In 1956, he asked Oskar to contribute an essay on his experiences to a collection of testimonies that Grossman was putting together on Gentiles who had helped Jews during the Holocaust. And prior to Oskar’s return to Germany in 1957, Grossmann wrote letters of introduction for him to government officials and the editors of several newspapers such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Neue Presse. Grossmann wanted them to know that the most prominent figure in his book, Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen (The Unsung Heroes: People in Germany’s Dark Days), would be returning to Germany on the eve of its publication in Berlin.⁶⁸ By the time that Oskar left Argentina in 1957, he was gradually becoming famous in certain circles in the United States, Germany, and Israel. This was, of course, all due the efforts of his beloved Schindler Jews.

And Oskar had a no more devoted follower that Itzhak Stern, who had settled in Tel Aviv after the war and served as Oskar’s legal adviser before his return to Germany. At the time, Stern was Oskar’s closest confidant in Israel, though Oskar also had strong relationships with Simon Jeret, Dr. Moshe Bejski, and Jakob Sternberg, among others. But in the 1950s, it was Stern’s advice that he most sought in Israel. Oskar sent Stern a rough draft of the article he planned to send Grossman for publication and asked his advice about it. At the time, in addition to offering Oskar legal advice about his Lastenausgleich efforts in Germany, Stern was also acting as Oskar’s go-between with Dr. Kurt Jakob Ball-Kaduri, who was collecting testimony about Schindler’s activities during the war for the newly established Holocaust memorial and archives in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem. Oskar sent Stern, whom he occasionally referred to as “Izu,” various documents for Dr. Ball-Kaduri’s investigation, including the April 18, 1945, Brünnlitz “Schindler’s Lists.” In December 1956, Stern gave the Yad Vashem archivist a detailed account of his own experiences with Schindler. The testimony and other documentation that Dr. Ball-Kaduri collected on Oskar would later help prod Yad Vashem to consider nominating Schindler as a Righteous Among the Nations in 1962. Schindler’s nomination, though, was going to be clouded by a controversy over his actions during the war that begin in the 1950s and haunted him for years.⁶⁹

One of the most interesting things about Oskar’s correspondence with Stern at this time was his pro-Israeli attitudes. On October 29, 1956, a joint Anglo-French-Israeli alliance attacked Egypt. The British and the French wanted to end Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and Israel was responding to a blockade of its shipping in the canal as well as to escalating Arab guerilla attacks and military threats from Egypt. Within a matter of days, Israel, as part of the Allied military effort, had captured the Gaza Strip and much of the Sinai desert. The crisis that led up to the invasion had been developing for more than a year. It almost exploded into war in April 1956, when Egypt mounted a series of deadly guerilla attacks against Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip in response to Israeli mortar attacks in Gaza City.⁷⁰ Oskar wrote Stern on April 16 that he was “filled with unrest at having to experience [Israel’s] difficult situation without being able to do anything to help [his] old friends.” If he were in Israel, Oskar assured Stern, he would do something “to help your good cause.”⁷¹ And on November 20, 1956, Oskar congratulated Stern for Israel’s recent military successes, particularly the capture of so many Arab weapons. He wrote Stern that he hoped that God would assure that “no serious complications occur” and regretted that Israel had not taken Jerusalem. But this could, he assured “Izu,” come at a later time. Oskar added that he had “always advocated that one must defend Israel at the Suez and the Black Sea, the Bosporus, and not in Jerusalem.” In fact, Oskar wrote Stern that he was willing to help Israel in any way, even if “it were only as a tank driver.” All he needed was an airline ticket. Then he would “come immediately.”⁷²

Oskar’s growing, deep love for Israel, unfortunately, did not protect him from scandal in that country, which could be traced back to the last months before World War II. It had its postwar incarnation in 1951 when Natan Wurzel, who by this time had changed his name to Antoni Korzeniowski, wrote the Tel Aviv office of the Joint requesting the whereabouts of Oskar Schindler. Wurzel explained that he was looking for certain family members that he had lost contact with during the war. Helen Fink, a Joint administrative assistant, told Wurzel that she thought that Schindler had moved to Argentina. Four years later, Wurzel, now working with a Schindler Jew, Julius Wiener, openly charged Schindler with theft and abuse. It is difficult to determine what prompted both men to choose this particular time to mount their attack against Schindler. In a letter to Wiener in the spring of 1955, Wurzel told Julius that he wanted Schindler, whom he thought “live[d] well, with wealth, without worries,” partially to compensate him for his wartime losses.⁷³ Given Oskar’s impoverished lifestyle at this time in Argentina, it is difficult to know where Wurzel got the idea that Oskar was well off. Regardless, this sense that Oskar was flourishing in Argentina was what drove both men to begin telling Jewish organizations in Israel that Schindler had mistreated them during the Holocaust.

What made all this so bad was that their stories about Schindler ran counter to the evolving Schindler legend. Yet their accusations also served to rally the leadership among the two hundred to three hundred or so Schindler Jews in Israel at that time to his side and strengthen the resolve of Itzhak Stern and others to begin to gather testimony about “Schindler’s miracle” for Yad Vashem. In fact, when Oskar was corresponding with Stern and Dr. Ball-Kaduri about his efforts during the war, Natan Wurzel and Julius Wiener were supplying Yad Vashem with testimony about their mistreatment at the hands of Oskar Schindler. The charges came at a particularly low point in Oskar’s life and his only defense was a detailed account that he wrote in April 1955 to prominent Schindler Jews in Israel that centered around an attack against Wurzel, whom he considered a thief and a collaborationist. He ended this lengthy defense statement with a list of twenty names of Jews, Poles and Germans in Israel, Poland, the United States, Germany, and Austria who could back up what he said in defense of himself. But despite his efforts, the Wurzel-Wiener controversy would be a cloud over Oskar’s head for years.⁷⁴

The charges themselves could be traced back to the summer of 1939, when Wurzel claimed that he had bought the machinery and dies from the Jewish-owned, recently bankrupt Kraków enamelware factory, Rekord, Ltd. The initial controversy that later led to charges against Schindler centered around whether Wurzel had the legal right to take possession of the machinery and dies, which the factory’s owners, Michał Gutman and Wolf Luzer Glajtman, essentially “pawned” to him in return for a loan they hoped would help keep the factory running.⁷⁵

By early August 1939, both sides had hired lawyers to resolve the matter, which then went before the regional trade court in Kraków. When Oskar decided to buy the factory in 1942, the court appointed a lawyer, Dr. Bolesław Zawisza, to determine who really owned the factory prior to its auction in late June 1939. He wrote Wurzel about the matter and also interviewed him in the Brzesko ghetto. Wurzel, perhaps frightened by the prospect of a conflict with a German, told contradictory stories about his claim of ownership of the machines and the factory’s enamelware. In his final letter to Dr. Zawisza on August 3, 1942, Wurzel said that he had denounced his right to the machines in August 1939, which he said he had bought for the owners of the factory.⁷⁶

By 1941, Wurzel, who worked for Schindler for a year and a half after the war began, had several unpleasant run-ins with Emalia’s lessee. Schindler became particularly annoyed with him after the manipulative Wurzel tried to have Abraham Bankier removed from his managerial position at Emalia. Oskar warned Wurzel about his behavior but finally got rid of him after he discovered that Wurzel had stolen money paid to Emalia by a German customer. But even after his dismissal, Wurzel continued to drop by Emalia for handouts of food. The kindly Bankier could not say no to someone in need.⁷⁷ According to Schindler, during one of these visits in the summer of 1941, Wurzel said something that angered SS-Hauptsturmführer Rolf Czurda, the SD’s liaison with the Armaments Inspectorate. Czurda slapped Wurzel twice in front of Oskar and his secretary. Wurzel would later claim that Oskar ordered Czurda to strike him.⁷⁸

Julius Wiener later testified that he heard a different account of the beating from Wurzel’s brother. According to this version, Oskar had asked Wurzel to come to the factory and, once there, demanded that he sign a false statement saying that Wurzel had earlier sold the factory to a Christian. When Wurzel refused, Oskar had two SS men beat him. Wurzel then signed the false statement. Oskar warned him that if he talked about the incident, he would be sent to Auschwitz. Oskar never denied that Czurda slapped Wurzel though he did disagree with the claim that he had ordered the SS man to do it. He added that Wurzel used the incident to establish “a quite profitable collaboration” between himself and the SS-Hauptsturmführer. ⁷⁹ For the most part, Oskar’s version of the story, particularly as it relates to the ownership transfer of Rekord, Ltd., is more in line with Polish trade court records that Wurzel’s account. But the charges of abuse, both on the part of Wurzel and later his friend, Julius Wiener, are a different matter.

Oskar’s staunch defense of himself and his countercharges against Wurzel never adequately dealt with the accusations of abuse, particularly against Julius Wiener and his father, Shlomo. Nor did Oskar say much about the charges that he brutally took over the Wieners’ wholesale business, which he then turned over to his mistress, Marta, to manage. According to Wiener, about a month before Oskar leased Emalia in the fall of 1939, he came to the office of the profitable enamelware wholesale business owned by Wiener’s father, Shlomo, and forced the Wieners to accept him as its trustee. In the process, Oskar, in league with Marta, who accompanied him, claimed the Wieners were thieves. Oskar verbally abused the elder Wiener, and, according to Julius, even made him kiss Hitler’s portrait. After he acquired the Wiener business, Oskar briefly kept both men on the payroll though he refused to let Shlomo on the premises. After Oskar acquired Emalia, he accused Julius of theft and fired him. When Julius tried to discuss this matter with him, Schindler had him beaten by six SS or Gestapo men. Afterwards, they warned him that if he ever returned to Emalia, they would take him to “a place from where there is no return.”⁸⁰

Oddly enough, Wiener somehow made it on one of “Schindler’s Lists” in the fall of 1944, though he wanted nothing to do with Schindler. He seldom saw Oskar during his eight months in Brünnlitz, and when he did, Oskar asked him whether he had enough to eat and the whereabouts of his father.⁸¹ This was all that Oskar seemed to remember about the Wiener affair. In his lengthy April 1955 defense letter to Salpeter, Stern, and others, he mentioned the Wieners only once and then in a very positive way. He said that he “only decided to lease the bankrupt Record and take up enamelware production in Krakow after [he] held several daylong friendly negotiations with the Jewish enamelware wholesalers like the brothers Bossak, Samuel [Shlomo] Wiener and son [Julius], Kempler, among others.” During the negotiations, Oskar continued, “these gentlemen guaranteed the sale of the total production [of Emalia products] and spurred [him] on toward taking over the business.”⁸² Needless to say, Oskar never really addressed the Wieners’ charges other than to imply that they somehow approved his takeover of Emalia even though they knew that their property was on the verge of Nazi appropriation. The logic of his argument does not fit with the racial and political realities at the time.

The testimony that Natan Wurzel gave to Yad Vashem in late 1956 against Oskar seemed to be the last shot fired in this phase of the Wurzel-Wiener controversy until 1961, when it flared up again after Oskar began to be considered a nominee for one of the first Righteous Among the Nations awards. There are a few letters between Simon Jeret and Oskar at the end of 1956 that touch on the matter, though most Schindler Jews such as Jeret seemed to respond to the charges indirectly by simply accentuating the wonderful things that Oskar had done for them during the war. In fact, this was the line taken by a group that called itself “The Enterprising Committee of the Work Camp Survivors Oskar Schindler in Brünnlitz,” when they wrote to Dr. Aryeh Kubovy, the head of Yad Vashem, which had been created in 1953 to commemorate the Holocaust. According to the Yad Vashem Law that created the Israeli Holocaust commemoration authority, one of its missions was to honor the hasidei umot haolan (Righteous Among the Nations or “Righteous Gentiles”), non-Jews who risked their lives to help Jews.⁸³

By the time the “Enterprising Committee” wrote Dr. Kubovy, the Yad Vashem authority had created a Righteous Among the Nations committee headed by Dr. Moshe Landau to consider naming the first group of Righteous Gentiles. The Schindler committee’s letter was prompted by news that Oskar was living in poverty. In early December 1962, an announcement appeared in the Polish-Israeli newspaper, Nowiny I Kurier asking “all former captives of concentration camp Brinnlitz who knew Oskar Schindler the German should contact the newspaper immediately.” The newspaper editor, Edward Rosdal, strengthened the appeal when he wrote in an editorial that “the laws of God never forget that the just may forgive that there was goodness among oppression and friends among enemies.” The newspaper was flooded with replies from Schindler Jews who wanted to help their savior.⁸⁴ Ultimately, the group collected $4,000 for Oskar and sent it to him in Germany. As the collection effort filtered through Israel’s large Schindlerjuden community, Wurzel-Kozienowski and Wiener revived their charges against Oskar, who was now under consideration as a Righteous Among the Nations. The letter from the “Enterprising Committee,” which was signed by fourteen Schindler Jews, among them Jakob Sternberg and Itzhak Stern, intended their letter to respond not only to the charges against him but also to document Schindler’s actions as a “saving angel sent by Providence to Poland in 1939.” From their perspective, it was imperative that Oskar “receive the recognition of the people and the State (of Israel)” for saving 1,200 Jews during the Shoah.⁸⁵

In fact, the “Enterprising Committee” had conducted its own investigation into the charges and told Dr. Kubovy that there were so many “errors and contradictions” in Wurzel and Wiener’s stories and charges that there was “doubt about the truth of their words.” According to Moshe Bejski, he and the committee’s leadership, Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Hersch Mandel met with Wiener in Stern’s Tel Aviv apartment to discuss the charges against Schindler. Dr. Bejski asked Wiener whether the Germans had not taken his property outright in 1939. Wiener said no, the property was still under the control of the Treuhänder (trustee) system, which meant that his father still had indirect control over it. After Wiener repeated his accusations against Schindler to the group, Dr. Bejski asked Julius Wiener how he could make such charges. Wiener replied, “This was a testament to my late father.” As he was dying in the Kraków ghetto, Shlomo Wiener told his son, “Do not forget what Schindler did to us.”⁸⁶

The committee, which had trouble accepting the charges even if they were true, was also upset because Oskar was not given an opportunity to respond to them. So because many of the committee members had known Wiener since he was a boy and were familiar with Wurzel’s business dealings, they decided to testify for Oskar. And both men, the committee wrote, dealt more with “assumptions” than facts. The letter then went on to discuss the committee’s major points of disagreement with Wiener and Wurzel. They were quite disturbed about Wiener’s statement that Schindler saved Jews as an alibi to help save himself after the war. But, they asked, “an alibi for what?” For five and a half years “he was a man trusted by the Jews, he saved them; acted on their behalf; interfered in their favor every step of the way.” The committee also pointed out that Wurzel and Wiener were the only Holocaust survivors who did not see Schindler “as a saving angel.” They also disagreed with the charge that Oskar had fled Brünnlitz to escape punishment for his treatment of Jews. The committee reminded Dr. Kubovy of everything that Oskar had done to prepare them for his escape and the response of his survivors to his flight to the American zone.⁸⁷

The letter went on to explain why they thought Julius Wiener had accused Oskar of stealing his father’s business. It argued that the accusation “flowed from a personal hatred whose source [lay] in the fact that his late father, who died in the camp [Płaszów] from typhus (and was not murdered) said at the time of his death that Schindler took away his business.” The letter added: “This is what Mr. Wiener holds as a testament against Schindler.” The committee expressed sympathy for Shlomo Wiener’s death, but stated: “Objectivity still compels us to view the matter correctly.” In the end, the group explained, the source of Wiener and Wurzel’s hatred of Schindler centered around an economic matter—“loss of property.” Everyone on the committee had suffered financial and family losses. But in light of Wurzel’s charges, one had to look “through the eyes of the situation of the Jews at that time,” particularly “in light of the looting laws of the Nazis.” Only then would “the actions of Mr. Schindler stand out.”⁸⁸

The committee then drew Dr. Kubovy’s attention to a decree of September 6, 1939, and also cited an article that dealt with the creation of the trusteeship system, which either placed property in the hands of German Treuhänder or completely nationalized it. It is difficult to know what the committee meant by the decree of September 6. Was it a reference to several decisions made by Reinhard Heydrich at his Gestapo office in Berlin on September 7, 1939, regarding the forced expulsion and concentration of Jews in Poland and the expulsion and confiscation of the property of Polish Jews in Germany? Or could it be that the committee made an error on the date? Perhaps the letter was referring to the military order of September 29, 1939, which gave authorities the right to take over property owned by absentee owners or businesses that were not properly managed. This became the pretext for the seizure of Jewish property in Poland by trustees and others like Oskar Schindler. It might be, of course, that the committee was referring to Hermann Göring’s decree of September 17, 1940, which ordered the immediate seizure of Jewish property in Poland with the exception of personal belongs.⁸⁹

The committee went on to argue that Wurzel’s charge that Schindler was dishonest was not valid because as late as 1942 he owned the machines in question and was working for Oskar. In fact, the Schindler committee noted, in light of German nationalization policies at the time, Wurzel’s situation was unique because “he was still working in the business and did business as Schindler himself testifie[d].” And though the nationalization process was nothing more than “stealing Jewish property,” Schindler thought that he was acting within German law when he acquired Emalia after it was nationalized. And, the committee told Dr. Kubovy, Wurzel benefitted from this situation until 1942. For a Jew to still own property this late in the war, the Schindler Jews wrote, was very unusual because by this time every Jew was willing to hand over everything he owned just to get a work permit.⁹⁰

The committee argued that even if it accepted Wurzel’s claim about the ownership of the machines as late as 1942, the fact remained that Jews were working in Emalia where the machines were located. Their work there allowed them to remain in the Kraków ghetto and avoid being expelled to a concentration camp. So if Wurzel was correct, and had refused to sign the papers transferring ownership of the machines to Schindler, his refusal “would have endangered the Jews that worked there under the protection of Mr. Schindler.” And if you projected this situation forward to the last year of the war, when Oskar transferred “1,200” Jews to Brünnlitz and survival, then Wurzel’s decision to transfer ownership of the machines kept these Jews “from the hell of Groß Rosen and Auschwitz.” Moreover, what was the value of such property in light of ongoing Nazi Aryanization policies at the time? The “most valuable possession at that time was a work permit and bread and nothing more.”⁹¹

The December 10 letter then asked about the nature of Wurzel and Schindler’s relationship from 1939 to 1942. According to the committee’s investigation, Wurzel claimed that his relations with Schindler were quite good until he left for Hungary in 1942. Certainly a Jew about to flee to Hungary would not have caused an uproar about property, particularly as Schindler knew all about his plans to flee. Moreover, was it possible for a man who was so kind and helpful to so many Jews during the war to be so “cruel and German like all Germans” towards only two Jews? To the “1,200” people he saved, the letter concluded, Oskar Schindler “was their rescuer from the moment that he happened on their path… . [It was] a singular and special occurrence and this [was] the attitude of all the survivors from all over the world.” The committee had ample testimony to document Oskar’s “deeds and actions” and thought it imperative that the people and the state of Israel honor this “man who gave his protection to the Jews in 1939, stayed with them for 51/2 years and risked his life for them; fed them; worried about them; and did for them more than any other man, and in the end saved them because of these actions.”⁹²

What is so interesting about this letter is that, unlike Schindler’s April 1955 letter, it did not attack either Wiener or Wurzel and left open the possibility that some or all of their charges were true. There are really three issues here—whether Oskar Schindler stole Jewish property, abused Jews, and treated the bulk of the Jews he encountered with dignity for five and a half years and ultimately saved more than 1,000 of them from certain death. This was, of course, the crux of the whole Schindler controversy— the balance between Schindler’s mistreatment of a few Jews and his kindness towards hundreds of others. From the perspective of the Schindler committee, it was hard to imagine a man who was so kind to his Jewish workers and risked life and limb for years to save them to have abused other Jews. Schindler was, of course, quite capable of abusing Jews and he even admitted this after the war. Moreover, he walked a fine line between the need to appear as a staunch Nazi in the eyes of Göth and the other Nazis he had to deal with every day and also be a good Samaritan to his Jewish workers. More than likely he did physically harm Julius and Shlomo Wiener and did take over their property as a trustee. Nazi law in this regard was simply a legalistic cover for theft and in that regard Oskar Schindler stole the Wieners’ property. The question of Schindler’s relationship and problems with Natan Wurzel is more complex and has been discussed in depth elsewhere in this study. Oskar’s decision to acquire Emalia from the Polish trade court was really no different from what he did with the Wieners’ property. It simply meant dealing with less German bureaucracy.

So the ultimate question unconsciously raised by some of Israel’s most prominent Schindler Jews in their letter to Dr. Kubovy was whether Schindler’s seizure of Jewish property and possible abuse of the Wieners and Natan Wurzel was morally counterbalanced by what he later did with the property to help a much larger group of Jews. Unfortunately, the Schindler committee seemed to discount the worst charges against their “savior” by arguing that the same person who was so kind to so many certainly could not have been so horrible to just three Jews. This argument is weak. The Oskar Schindler of 1939 or even 1942 was not the same man in the later months and years of the war. Oskar Schindler came to Poland on the coattails of the Wehrmacht in the fall of 1939 to avoid military service and make his fortune. If it meant humiliating and slapping a few Jews around while he took over their property, then it is quite possible he did this.

But why did he treat the Wieners so shabbily while being so kind at this time to Abraham Bankier and Itzhak Stern? Schindler was the ultimate opportunist who saw the Wieners as a nuisance standing in the way of his acquisition of their business. On the other hand, an opportunistic Schindler treated men such as Itzhak Stern, Abraham Bankier, and even Natan Wurzel with greater respect because he needed their advice or expertise to help run Emalia. In other words, his initial relationship with these Jews was simply business, though in time he developed a genuine affection for Bankier and Stern. On the other hand, he became quite uncomfortable with Wurzel’s aggressive efforts to undercut Bankier, whom Oskar genuinely cared for and trusted. But the committee seriously erred when it claimed that Oskar and Wurzel had a rosy relationship until 1942. By this time, Wurzel was already living in a ghetto and efforts to make him sign away the machines, which he did in 1941, not 1942, to Oskar had more to deal with legal niceties than any legitimate claim that Wurzel might have had on the machines. In other words, in the context of German Aryanization policies at the time, Wurzel had no other choice but to sign them over, which makes one wonder whether he needed to be beaten to do this. On the other hand, Wurzel also seemed to be a bit of a manipulator and very feisty, so it is possible that he went too far in his aggressiveness towards Schindler and Czurda. And even after Czurda had him beaten, Wurzel somehow knew how to make political gain out of the beating. So although many of the most prominent Schindler Jews held out the prospect that Oskar Schindler might have abused two Jews and stolen their property, his deeds throughout the rest of the war to help more than “1,200” other Jews tended to diminish the significance of his earlier “sins.”

Needless to say, the letter to Dr. Kubovy did little to still the controversy surrounding Oskar’s possible nomination as a Righteous Gentile. At the time, there were no specific guidelines for nominating and choosing a Righteous Gentile. The refusal of two Israeli Holocaust survivors, one of them a Schindler Jew, to rescind their accusations of theft and abuse ran counter to the spirit of the Righteous Among the Nations award. Beyond this, Israel was in the throes of the Adolf Eichmann trial at the time and it was essential for the credibility of Yad Vashem and the Righteous Among the Nations awards that the first group of Gentiles selected for this award be of sterling character and reputation when it came to the matter of saving Jews during the Holocaust.⁹³

The relationship of the Eichmann trial to the Schindler controversy was important. Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, had fled to Argentina after the war and had been kidnapped by Mossad, Israel’s General Security Service, in May 1960 and brought to Israel, where he was put on trial the following spring for various crimes against the Jewish people. His capture and trial consumed Israel for the next two years. Dr. Landau was the presiding judge at the trial and Dr. Moshe Bejski testified against Eichmann. He was found guilty on December 15, 1961, and sentenced to death. Eichmann appealed the sentence, which the Israeli Supreme Court turned down on May 29, 1962. Two days later, he was hanged.⁹⁴

The Eichmann trial prompted many Schindler Jews in Israel to make comparisons between Eichmann and Schindler. On December 11, 1961, an article appeared in the London Daily Mail that contrasted the actions of the two men during the Holocaust. Most of the article, which was based on interviews with Schindler Jews, concentrated on Schindler’s story. It ended with a statement that several Schindler Jews had prepared as part of their efforts to convince Yad Vashem to recognize Oskar for his efforts to save Jews during the Holocaust:

We cannot forget the sorrow of Egypt, we cannot forget Haman [ancient Persian official who plotted to kill Jews but was stopped by Esther and hanged], we cannot forget Hitler. But we also cannot forget the just among the unjust; remember Oskar Schindler.⁹⁵

In light of such feelings, it is not surprising that some of the most prominent Schindler Jews in Israel continued to push for such recognition for Oskar. Compared to Adolf Eichmann, Schindler was a saint, an “angel of mercy.” Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, the head of the Righteous Gentile Department at Yad Vashem, told me that many Schindler Jews were aware of Oskar’s earlier wartime transgressions, but thought he had atoned for his earlier conduct when he saved more than a thousand Jews at the end of the war. But Oskar’s nomination caused some problems within the twelve-member Yad Vashem Directorate. Dr. Bejski, who became head of the new Designation of the Righteous Commission in 1970, told me that Dr. Moshe Landau, the first head of the committee and the Israeli Supreme Court justice who presided at Eichmann’s trial, opposed Schindler’s selection, along with several other committee members. Dr. Landau thought that the committee should select only the most outstanding humanitarians for this first round of the award who would then become models for future nominees. On the other hand, Justice Landau did not accept Wurzel and Wiener’s accusations against Schindler. The discussion surrounding Oskar’s nomination was heated and contentious. According to Dr. Paldiel, there was some concern that one or two committee members might resign if Schindler was selected. Those who opposed his nomination argued that he was a German and a Nazi Party member who partied with and befriended other Nazis. His supporters pointed to the large body of testimony in support of his nomination and the fact that he had directly saved the lives of almost 1,100 Jews during the last year of the war. In the end, a majority of the Yad Vashem Directorate voted to allow Oskar Schindler to plant a tree along the Avenue of the Righteous along with others in the first group of Righteous Gentile recipients. Emilie Schindler was never seriously considered for the award at that time.⁹⁶ The controversy did not end here, though, but continued until the end of 1963.

In the meantime, the principal Schindler Jews in Israel informed Oskar of his selection and told him that the planting of his carob tree along the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem would take place on May 1, 1962. This date coincided with Yom ha-Sho’ah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. Oskar must have been thrilled when he learned that he had been named a Righteous Gentile, though it was difficult to get him to commit to specific arrival and departure times. Dr. Bejski wrote him in mid-April suggesting that he arrive on April 27 and depart on May 8. Itzhak Stern had kept Oskar abreast of the developments in Israel and in turn had told Dr. Bejski about Oskar’s good fortune in acquiring the stone and cement factory in Hochstadt am Main. This was probably why Oskar delayed telling Bejski when he would arrive in Israel. Dr. Bejski informed Oskar that the World Jewish Congress would help coordinate his visit and that his participation in the tree planting ceremony was “already assured.” But Dr. Bejski also pressed Oskar for his arrival and departure dates because the Schindler Jews in Israel wanted “to prepare the press” for his arrival and make final plans for a reception in his honor and a meeting with Israel’s Schindler Jews.⁹⁷

And prepare they did. Oskar’s arrival at the Lydda Airport near Tel Aviv airport was tumultuous. Dr. Bejski told me that word of Oskar’s arrival had spread like wildfire among Israel’s Schindler Jewish community once the Israeli-Polish newspaper Noviny I Kurier had announced the date and time of his arrival. It was April 28, 1962, Oskar’s birthday. Much to the surprise of the police, three hundred Schindler Jews and their families had gathered on the observation deck of the airport terminal to wait for Oskar’s arrival. As Oskar came down the steps of the plane, the crowd began to shout “Oskar, Oskar!” Dr. Bejski, who as a judge had a special permit to go to the steps of the plane, then escorted Oskar into the terminal, where the crowd of Schindler Jews pushed forward to touch him and shake his hand. Tears were streaming down their faces. More than twenty reporters and TV crews from abroad were also there and news of his arrival quickly spread abroad. As Oskar moved towards the crowd, he exclaimed, “I recognize all of my Jews.” The crowd now encircled him as many of his beloved Jews tried to hug him or touch him. He later told one reporter:

Afterwards, a long caravan of cars and buses escorted Oskar to his hotel, the Spalier, in Tel Aviv.

The crowd followed Oskar into the hotel lobby, where many of his Schindlerjuden begged for a few minutes alone with the man who had “saved their lives.” According to a Deutsche Presse Agentur (German Press Agency) account of the arrival, “an extensive visitor program awaited him over the next few days, including the tree planting on the Avenue of the Righteous.” But Oskar now decided that he wanted to forgo certain aspects of his official visit so that he could, as he told another reporter, “be together” with his friends. He went on to say that “to do justice to all of them,” he would have to stay there “half a year instead of just two weeks.” When he was finally able to break away from the adoring crowd in the lobby, he went up to his hotel room, which “looked like a flower shop.” Oskar Schindler had come home. Or had he?⁹⁹

Unfortunately, the joy of Oskar’s arrival in Israel soon dissipated when the Yad Vashem Directorate decided not to let him plant his tree along with the eleven other new Righteous Gentiles. After Oskar’s arrival, the Yad Vashem Directorate learned that there was the possibility that Julius Wiener, angry about Schindler’s selection, might either disrupt the tree planting ceremony or continue to make a public issue of it. So the committee decided it would be unwise to allow Oskar to take part in the ceremony. Instead, they decided to hold a separate tree planting ceremony for him on May 8. On May 2, the Jerusalem Post reported that Oskar “was taken ill” and did not take part in the tree planting ceremony at Yad Vashem with the other honorees. Perhaps it helped that another newly named Righteous Gentile, Jan Rijtsema, was also unable to attend this gathering.¹⁰⁰

The decision infuriated many Schindlerjuden. Jakob Sternberg, one of Oskar’s closest friends in Israel, wrote a letter to the editor of Ha’aretz, one of the country’s leading newspapers, and said that the Israeli government had not treated Schindler fairly. Government officials had time to welcome Frank Sinatra, Sternberg noted, but not the man who had saved the Jews.¹⁰¹ Oskar’s quiet tree-planting ceremony took place on May 8 before a small gathering of friends and supporters. Perhaps the sting of Yad Vashem’s decision not to include him in the official ceremony six days earlier was assuaged by a wonderful banquet held for him by his Schindler Jews in Tel Aviv on May 2. Three to four hundred Schindler Jews and their families attended. On the podium with Oskar were Dr. Bejski, Itzhak Stern, and three or four other prominent Schindler Jews. During the banquet, it was decided to let people in the audience stand up and say a few words to honor Oskar. According to Dr. Bejski, what followed “was something very great.” As survivor after survivor stood up and began to give his testimony, Dr. Bejski realized it was important to take down what each one was saying because he had never heard many of these stories before. Using napkins and other scraps of paper, Dr. Bejski began to take down everything that was said that night. Afterwards, he went home and typed his notes. Two years later, when Leopold Page called him about the possibility of an MGM film on Schindler, Dr. Bejski told him about the banquet testimony and Page asked him to send the material to him. Dr. Bejski asked someone in the Israeli embassy in Washington to translate his notes into English, which were then sent to Page in California. This transcript provided Page with some of the survivor testimony he needed to help promote the film in its early planning stage.¹⁰²

Dr. Bejski gave me a copy of the English translation of his forty-two-page transcript of the banquet testimonials. It began with a lengthy introduction by Jakob Sternberg, who asked the group to pay silent homage to the Jews who died in the Holocaust. He then went on to discuss the highlights of Schindler’s efforts to save his Jews, and contrasted life under Amon Göth in Płaszów with that under Schindler in Brünnlitz. As most of the Jews at the banquet were only with Schindler in Brünnlitz, Sternberg talked about what happened there. He considered the “Herr Director’s” efforts to save the Jews on the Golleschau transport to be “the peak of Schindler’s humanitarian accomplishments.” He went on to talk about Oskar’s decision to permit Rabbi Levertov bury the Golleschau dead in a nearby cemetery and then told stories about Schindler’s efforts to help individual prisoners maintain their human dignity. He ended by addressing Oskar: “Be thou blessed in thy arrival to and thy departure from Israel. We shall never forget you!”¹⁰³

Dr. Leon Salpeter, a pharmacist in Tel Aviv, spoke next. He talked about the evolving Schindler legend in Płaszów and credited Abraham Bankier with putting him on “Schindler’s List.” According to Salpeter, when Oskar asked Bankier about him, Bankier told him that he was a “good accountant.” Oskar responded: “Salpeter is more of a Zionist than an accountant, but enter his name on the list anyway.” Salpeter was the first survivor at the banquet to bring up Emilie’s name, who, he said, “was no less conscientious than her husband” in helping Jews. In fact, Dr. Salpeter told the group, the motto of both Schindlers in Brünnlitz was “Let not the Jews starve.” From Salpeter’s perspective, Oskar was a “messenger of God,” particularly when it came to his efforts to save the Jews on the Golleschau transport. No ordinary man was capable of such deeds. Salpeter added, “Only a messenger of God takes upon himself such as mission of rescuing Jews in that time.”¹⁰⁴

Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein, a physician at Brünnlitz and the author of a valuable memoir on the history of the Kraków ghetto, Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie, was the next to speak. He talked about the grave health issues that everyone faced in the newly opened camp, particularly typhus. Soon after the men arrived at Brünnlitz, they discovered three cases of typhus, which could doom the camp if the SS found out. Oskar immediately ordered the opening of baths and a disinfection facility as well as a laundry and showers; in fact, whenever the medical staff asked for something, Oskar always managed to find it. Dr. Bieberstein also credited Emilie with helping to save lives. Dr. Bieberstein said that “she worked incessantly, caring for the sick. Not a day went by without her visiting at least twice, to inspect what had been done, and bring[ing] additional food.” Without her efforts, he added, no one on the Golleschau transport could have survived.¹⁰⁵

Dr. Moshe Bejski then gave his testimonial, certainly one of the most thoughtful of the evening. He decided to speak in German so that Oskar could understand him. Dr. Bejski, an attorney and a judge, took a precise, judicial approach to the questions he raised at the beginning of his speech. Where, he asked, did Schindler find the “patience and perseverance to carry all [their] problems and solve them, when the solution of each single one involved risking his own life”? Moreover, why did Schindler do what he did? “As a German he would have fulfilled his humanitarian obligation by doing a small portion of what he achieved.” In the end, he could only attribute this to “Schindler’s personality.” In fact, he told the audience, he had not understood the full truth about Schindler until Oskar arrived in Israel several days earlier. Since Oskar’s arrival, Bejski explained, he had heard story after story about “the big feats” of Schindler, but also the “small, individual deeds.” Oskar did not just care for “1,200 people collectively, but each one of them individually. Each of us was under the impression that he alone received that treatment.”¹⁰⁶

Dr. Bejski said that during the war Oskar was the only German he had not been afraid of: “On the contrary. And the same goes for every one of us!” Whenever a German walked into the factory in Brünnlitz, everyone scurried around, pretending to work. But when Oskar entered the factory, “nobody cared to even pretend, and the women went right on with their knitting of sweaters and underwear from wool they had pinched from the neighboring Hoffman factory.” But not only were his workers not afraid of him, everyone expected Oskar “to stop by him” in hopes that he would leave a cigarette, or, if you had a problem, you could tell him about it. What Bejski had learned over the past four days was how Oskar “then knew, and still remember[ed], every small detail which occurred among [them]; whose child stayed with some gentile, and how the contact with the women was maintained. Everything!”¹⁰⁷

Dr. Bejski went on to talk about how Oskar procured the instruments necessary for the camp’s physicians to perform an abortion on one of the inmates because pregnancy “was the equivalent of a death sentence.” On another occasion, Oskar told Bejski about his ongoing discussions with Itzhak Stern on the Talmud. Each one, Oskar told the future judge, always ended with “another request for an additional half loaf of bread for everybody.” Bejski also told the story about Schindler’s decision to allow the radio technician Zenon to continue to repair his personal radio so he could listen to the Voice of London each day, and then share the news with the rest of the camp. But along with many of the Schindler Jews that night, what Dr. Bejski remembered most were Oskar and Emilie’s superhuman efforts to save the Jews on the Golleschau transport. Later, when the Golleschau survivors began to regain their strength, Oskar made sure they were given easy jobs so they could continue to recover. He also repeated the story about the burial of the Golleschau dead in a nearby cemetery.¹⁰⁸

Dr. Bejski added that he knew that the other Schindler Jews in the audience had similar stories, though it was difficult for all of them to find the words to say what really needed to be said about Oskar. “But from all things,” he added, “always the humanitarian in him stands out. He is to inherit Heaven not for a single rescue operation, but for his fatherly attitude and self-sacrifice, which are indescribable; he passed a test which has no equal.” And he reminded them of the time when Oskar was arrested in Kraków in the fall of 1944 to be questioned about the Göth investigation. As long as Oskar was around, Bejski said, he was their “beam of hope.” When word of his arrest spread among the remaining inmates in Płaszów, they all felt lost. When they learned that he had been released, “up surged… hope again” that they would survive. He reminded the group of Schindler’s final departure on May 9 and the ring that they had given him. Oskar lost the ring after the war but Dr. Bejski told everyone that Hersch Licht, who had made the original ring, had made a new one, which they would present to Oskar at the end of the evening. In his closing remarks Bejski directly addressed Schindler: “Not a thing you and your wife have done for us have we forgotten, nor shall we ever forget as long as we live.”¹⁰⁹

Little was said by the other survivors who spoke about Yad Vashem’s decision to delay the planting of Oskar’s tree along the Avenue of the Righteous. Wilhelm-Zeev Nachhauser, though, mentioned recent statements by Dr. Kubovy and Dr. Nahum Goldmann, the head of the World Jewish Congress, recognizing that Schindler was “unique in the period of the Holocaust.” Nachhauser added, “If Nansen [Nansen International Office for Refugees] received the Nobel prize for peace [in 1938]— Schindler ought to receive from the State of Israel a prize for the rescue of Jews in ways and numbers not to be compared anywhere. He did his deeds without any selfish interest, in times when nobody was willing to rebel and help. As a German, he found the courage to go against the general stream.”¹¹⁰

Other Schindler Jews such as Maurice (Maurycy) Finder, Benno (Benzion) Florenz, Hersch Licht, Benjamin Wrozlavsky-Breslauer, Moshe Henigman, Meir (Marsk) Bossack, and Shmuel Springmann each stood and gave brief testimonials. Their words were often interspersed with comments from other survivors. Meir Bossak read a long poem, “Judgement of Jerusalem. To Oskar Schindler. The Lantern in the Darkness,” which took a poetic overview of the Holocaust and the failure of “The Holy Father [Pope Pius XII]” to speak out.¹¹¹

Finally, Oskar got up to speak. He thanked everyone for the reception and told them that for seventeen years he had lived in solitude. He went on: “The experiences of these last days have lifted my spirit very much, and I feel compensated. To see you all with your families and children, looking well, brings me happiness.” He told everyone that he did what he had to do to save Jews and only wished that more Germans had done the same thing. If they had, “the situation would probably have been different.” He reminded the audience that he had suffered a lot for his efforts to save them, and was used to such suffering. He went on: “[If] someone comes out now in Israel, complaining about me… the truth has already been told by you yourselves, and the things told here are truth itself—every part of it. As to myself, I do not attribute importance to the blame put on me, I am only sorry to have caused you to be chagrined.” He then explained why he came to Poland in 1939 and what led him to begin to help his Jewish workers. He mentioned his work for the Jewish Agency and the numerous problems he had with the SS. He asked everyone to remember Abraham Bankier, Simon Jeret, and Uri Bejski. He ended by saying that though he had met with his Jews since the end of the war, he was most happy in Israel.¹¹²

The evening ended with speeches by Jakob Sternberg and Itzhak Stern. Sternberg said that everyone was deeply moved by what was said that evening by the survivors and the meeting with their “saviour Schindler.” He added that the two happiest days of his life were his arrival in Israel twelve years earlier and April 28, 1962, when they welcomed their “saviour and friend Schindler.” Sternberg then presented Oskar with the gold ring that Hersch Licht had made for him. It was engraved with the Hebrew saying “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Sternberg then addressed Oskar: “Be Blessed many fold, on your leaving Israel. May our blessings and wishes for all the very best, accompany you and your wife. May we meet again soon.”¹¹³

Itzhak Stern was the last to speak and shared with the audience many of the stories he had told Dr. Ball-Kaduri at Yad Vashem seven years earlier. He talked about his first meeting with Schindler in 1939 and the contacts he had with him during his time in Płaszów. As the war went on and Schindler intensified his efforts to help Jews, Oskar “was already ready for anything.” He never said no to any of Stern’s requests about helping Jews. Stern went into great detail about the visit of the two Jewish Agency representatives to Płaszów in 1944 and Schindler’s later arrest in the fall of 1944 as he was making plans for the move to Brünnlitz. According to Stern, the first thing he did after Emilie arranged his release was to come to Płaszów, “dirty and unshaven,” to tell Stern and others that “he was with [them] again.”¹¹⁴

He then mentioned Oskar’s efforts to release the women from Auschwitz and the opening of “a symbolic Jewish cemetery” to bury the camp’s Jewish dead. He also gave details about Schindler’s decision to arm the inmates at the end of the war. He ended his remarks with a discussion of the Herculean efforts to save the Jews on the Golleschau transport. He was particularly complimentary of Emilie’s work and Oskar’s insistence that Rabbi Levertov perform a Jewish funeral for the dead at the new cemetery plot he had just acquired. “My brothers,” Stern continued, “in the Hebrew language, there are three definitions of a human being: first he is born a man; secondly, he grows into a person; and third, he becomes like Adam, a full human being. Now, I think, there should be a last, and additional stage, and it should be called Oskar Schindler.”¹¹⁵

The impact of the banquet on Oskar and the Schindler Jews in Israel is immeasurable. There would never be another gathering like this during Oskar’s life. So many of the Jews he had saved during the Holocaust had the time to come together to celebrate the life of the man that they truly adored. The banquet also served to solidify the legend that was developing around Oskar. This would be the first of many trips that Oskar would make to Israel during the next twelve years. But none would mean as much to him as this one. Unfortunately, the words of adoration spoken at the Tel Aviv banquet had little impact on the Wurzel-Wiener controversy, which continued to haunt Oskar and Yad Vashem, particularly after their accusations appeared in the press.

On May 2, Ha’aretz published an interview with Julius Wiener, who worked as a customs officer in Jerusalem. He repeated his accusations against Schindler, whom he considered “a Nazi like all the other Nazis” who “began to save Jews only towards the end of the war in order to save his own skin.” He admitted that Schindler had to be shown some gratitude for what he did to help Jews, but it must not be wrapped “in a halo of praise.” Ha’aretz also interviewed Wurzel, who said he had once filed a law suit against Schindler but withdrew it when he learned of his rescue work later in the war. He did not think Schindler was “altogether innocent” but thought that his good deeds later in the war overshadowed his earlier mistreatment of Jews like himself. A Ha’aretz reporter also spoke to Dr. Bejski, who noted that he had only learned of the accusations on the eve of Schindler’s arrival in Israel. He said that Schindler’s friends in Israel talked to Mr. Wiener about his charges and then turned this information over to Dr. Kubovy. He in turn explained that Yad Vashem decided to do nothing about the accusations because Yad Vashem had not officially invited him to Israel. Instead, he, like the other Righteous Gentiles, had been invited by their survivors. Moreover, the only evidence that Yad Vashem had against Schindler were the charges of Julius Wiener. On the other hand, the Holocaust memorial institution had testimony from hundreds of Schindler Jews that told of his efforts to save them during the war. Later, the leadership among the Schindler Jews called a press conference to respond to Wiener’s charges.¹¹⁶

In the meantime, the Schindler controversy prompted Yad Vashem to create a twelve-member Designation of the Righteous Commission headed by Justice Landau. One of the commission’s first tasks was to develop a specific set of guidelines that it would use to select Righteous Among the Nations nominees. For one thing, the criteria for consideration for this award were precise when it came to a Gentile’s treatment of Jews during the Shoah. According to Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, the specific requirements are:

There were also other subcriteria that expanded on each of these points and looked into the extent to which the nominee fulfilled each of them.¹¹⁸ In addition, Dr. Paldiel told me during one of our conversations about the Schindler controversy that the award was not to be given to anyone who “had caused pain or injury to Jews.”¹¹⁹ When the commission was formed in early 1963, it decided to use these new standards to reevaluate the twenty-five Gentiles who had been nominated as Righteous Among the Nations the year before. In August 1963, members of the Righteous Designation Commission interviewed Wiener, Esther Schwartz (Erna Lutinger), and Simah Hartmann (Gelcer) about the charges against Oskar Schindler. Jakob Sternberg, Itzhak Stern, and Dr. Moshe Bejski testified on Schindler’s behalf at the four hour hearing. At one point, there was a confrontation with Wurzel over the charges that he and Wiener had leveled against Oskar. Several days later, Sternberg wrote Oskar that the Schindler Jews in Israel had sent Dr. Landau a number of documents that emphasized “the most important moments of your superhuman sacrifice for the rescued 1,100 inmates.” In the meantime, Wurzel wrote Wiener that he had made some sort of “business agreement” with Schindler and suggested that Julius consider doing the same thing. By 1963, Oskar was in deep financial straits and did not have the resources to pay Wurzel off. More than likely, this was done by the Schindler Jews in Israel. Mrs. Schwartz’s testimony supported Wiener’s allegations, though the statement of another witness, Simah Hartmann (Gelcer), was inconclusive. Yad Vashem, of course, also had Wurzel and Wiener’s testimony from late 1956.¹²⁰

But what the Righteous Designation Commission heard in the summer of 1963 was not conclusive enough for them to launch a more detailed investigation into the charges. It decided formally not to name Schindler a Righteous Gentile and did not send him a certificate or a medal. Instead, on December 24, 1963, it sent Oskar two letters in German in two separate envelopes signed by Dr. Landau and Dr. Kubovy. The first explained that the commission was aware of the claims of Julius Wiener and Natan Wurzel that Schindler had stolen their property and physically abused them. However, it went on to say that “the commission [Designation of the Righteous Commission] [could not] come to a conclusion over these claims without a thorough investigation of these matters, that are disputed between Mr. Wiener and Mr. Wurzel on the one hand and Mr. Schindler on the other hand.” Consequently, the commission did not feel that it could “undertake such an investigation.”¹²¹

The second letter, which was titled “Official Citation to Oskar Schindler by the Government of Israel, December 24, 1963,” dealt with the positive efforts of Oskar during the war:

But Oskar Schindler was no longer officially considered a Righteous Gentile, even though no one gave any thought to removing his carob tree along the Avenue of the Righteous.¹²³ Regardless, Dr. Kubovy told Jakob Sternberg in 1965 that he considered Oskar “one of the great Righteous Ones.” But how did Yad Vashem choose to deal with the fact that Schindler’s tree remained on the Avenue of the Righteous?

I asked Dr. Paldiel, who shared all the Schindlers’ files with me when I was working at Yad Vashem. One day, he called me to his office and said that because I was working on a scholarly biography of Schindler, he was going to tell me the real story about the Righteous Gentile controversy. We subsequently corresponded on this matter. He said that Oskar was given the certificate for the tree planting but was technically not considered a Righteous Gentile at the time. When Dr. Bejski became head of the Commission in 1970, some of the Schindler Jews asked him to rectify the Schindler matter and grant Oskar full recognition. Dr. Bejski refused to do so, saying that he did not want to use his position to overturn Judge Landau’s earlier decision. Landau, who by this time was president of the Israeli Supreme Court, remained on the commission until the mid-1970s. Instead, Bejski arranged to send Oskar a certificate acknowledging that he had planted a tree along the Avenue of the Righteous.¹²⁴ Dr. Bejski told me that he regretted this decision. But, as a judge, he was familiar with controversy and was afraid that if he pushed too hard on the medal for Oskar, he would reignite the Wurzel-Wiener controversy.¹²⁵

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.