Oskar Schindler

IT WAS A TYPICAL, HOT, LATE JULY DAY IN TEL AVIV IN 1970. Ami (Annemarie) Staehr had just arrived in Israel’s beautiful coastal city with her husband, Dr. Heinrich Staehr, who was working with West Germany’s reparations (Wiedergutmachungen) program for Israel’s Holocaust survivors. Dr. Staehr was there medically to investigate and help determine the amount each survivor was to receive, which was to be based on the trauma he or she had suffered during the war. Ami Staehr was sitting alone on the beach when she noticed someone standing near her. The soles of the man’s bare feet were covered in blood. Standing before her was Oskar Schindler, so drunk that he did not know he had blistered his feet on the hot sand.¹ A month earlier, Oskar had done the same thing at the Dead Sea.² Entranced by this tall, handsome German, Ami bandaged his feet. Several days later, she wrote her daughter-in-law, Tina Staehr, that she had met “a real hero, a hero named Oskar Schindler.”³ Thus began the last, and perhaps most important romance in Oskar Schindler’s life. After Oskar died in Hildesheim in 1974, Ami gathered many of his private papers from his apartment in Frankfurt and took them back to her home in Hildesheim, which is about two hundred miles northeast of Frankfurt. These famed Koffer (suitcase) files were later discovered by her son, Chris, after the death of his father, Heinrich, in 1997. In the midst of two pending lawsuits by Emilie Schindler, who still lived in Argentina, Chris Staehr managed to spirit this vast collection of Oskar Schindler’s private papers out of Germany to Yad Vashem in Israel.

Oskar Schindler had many girlfriends throughout his life. But apart from his marriage to Emilie and his relationships with his wartime mistress, Eva “Marta” Kisza (Kisch) Scheuer, Gisa Schein, and Ami Staehr, none of his other romances seemed very important, with the exception of his staid affair with Herta Kluge, who was Oskar’s girlfriend and secretary in the 1960s. As he grew older, Oskar, unlike many men his age, sought ties with attractive mature women. Oskar had a magnetic personality and remained handsome even as he aged. He never had trouble attracting women; his only problem was keeping them. I asked several of the Schindler women who had worked for Oskar at Emalia or Brünnlitz whom they found most attractive, Oskar or Liam Neeson, the actor who played Oskar in Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List. Each time, and without hesitation, they answered with a sigh, “Oskar!”

Dr. Dieter Trautwein said that the main reason Oskar had trouble keeping girlfriends was his drinking. Oskar knew he drank too much and that his heavy drinking was partly responsible for his poor health. In fact, his heavy drinking was one of the few criticisms I ever heard about him from his Schindler Jews. Oskar tried time and again to stop drinking, but always slipped back.⁴ His close friend Lotte Schiffler wrote him an “SOS” letter in 1970 in which she, along with his physician in Frankfurt, Dr. Horst Metz, gave Oskar a blunt warning: “You are completely ruining yourself with alcohol.” Lotte Schiffler told him that he had many friends who wanted to “spend a decade of friendship” with him. But they wanted him this time to be “rosy red and not blue [drunk].”⁵ Unfortunately, about the best Oskar could do about his drinking problem was try to limit the amount he drank each day. An autopsy report, two days after his death in Hildesheim on October 9, 1974, noted that Oskar drank from two to four cognacs a day and smoked twenty cigarettes (down from forty).⁶

By the time Oskar met Ami Staehr on the beach in Tel Aviv, he had already suffered one heart attack and had serious kidney problems and diabetes. Ami fell madly in love with Oskar, though in a mature, distant way. She remained true to her marriage and husband, Heinrich, who had previously indulged in numerous affairs, and Oskar was drawn into their family circle as a friend.

Consequently, though Oskar had a special relationship with Ami, he also seemed close to Heinrich, at least from the perspective of some of Oskar’s Israeli friends. Klara Sternberg, for example, wrote Ami in early 1973 that Oskar’s “greatest fortune” was Ami and her husband; she added: “We cannot imagine what would happen to him [Oskar] without your selfless and loving help.” Klara’s only concern was that Ami might sacrifice her life “as his caretaker.”⁷

Oskar occasionally traveled with Ami and Heinrich and became close friends with their son and daughter-in-law, Chris and Tina, who approved of Ami’s relationship with Oskar. Chris and Tina had always fretted over Heinrich’s affairs with other women and knew that they depressed Ami. They were overjoyed that her relationship with Oskar made Ami happy. Oskar’s death devastated Ami but also led to the revitalization of her marriage to Heinrich. Dr. Staehr, who became one of Oskar’s physicians, was well aware of their relationship and a bit jealous of Oskar. Fortunately, he and Ami became closer after Oskar’s death in 1974 and had a happy marriage in the years before Ami’s death in 1988.⁸

What we know about Ami’s relationship with Oskar comes from her modest diary, the comments from Oskar’s friends, Dieter Trautwein and Dr. Lotte (Charlotte) Schiffler, and the extensive conversations I had with Chris and Tina Staehr in Stuttgart, Germany, in 2000 and 2003. His chance meeting with Ami Staehr came at a particularly meaningful time for Oskar, who had broken up with Herta Kluge the year before. Though Oskar never said much about it, his friends sensed his pain over the breakup. For years, Herta had accompanied Oskar on his visits to Israel and the United States. Jakob Sternberg blamed the breakup on Herta’s daughter. Lotte Schiffler, who seemed infatuated with Oskar even though she was married, also sensed his loneliness and told Oskar that he needed “the sympathy of a woman,” one “who is quite free of other baggage, who has no grandchildren on her lap”; in other words, a woman who would “make herself beautiful” for him alone. Ami Staehr, though she had a grandchild, was able to give herself totally to Oskar within the context of her married life in Hildesheim. She became his intimate friend, confidant, and nurse, and the times they spent together, particularly in Israel, were some of the happiest in Oskar’s life. Oskar called Ami “a piece of gold” for all she did for him when he was sick in the summer of 1973, and Lottie Schiffler added that Ami was even better than gold for Oskar.⁹

The day after Ami met Oskar on the beach, she sent an elegant, handmade get-well card to his room, No. 74, at the Hotel Narciss. It is difficult to describe the care and love that went into making this card, but it let Oskar know that it was sent by someone who had more than just a passing interest in this “real hero.” Later that year, they vacationed together in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, and the following spring spent some time together in Israel. Some of the most memorable photographs taken of Oskar during the last years of his life show him with Ami in Israel. They depict a happy, content couple and a surprisingly tanned, healthy-looking Oskar. When they were not together abroad, Oskar would go to Hildesheim for Christmas and other family gatherings. It was no secret, of course, that their relationship was more than platonic. Chris Staehr told me that his father was well aware of this, though there was little he could do about it, considering his own track record with other women. Beyond this, Dr. Staehr considered Oskar his friend and patient and evidently never let Oskar’s relationship with Ami affect his professional and personal ties to Schindler.¹⁰

It is said that pictures are worth a thousand words, though I suspect that those of Oskar and Ami in Israel in 1973 do not reveal the delicate state of Oskar’s health. In their 1974 autopsy report on Oskar, Dr. H. Kleinsorg and Dr. Rosemeyer indicated that he was “always healthy until December 1973,” when he had a stroke. In reality, he was a very sick man and in a lot of pain well before this date.¹¹ As early as 1972, Oskar talked about problems with “circulatory collapse” and “severely high blood pressure.” In a detailed letter to Leopold “Poldek” Page on October 30, 1972, he said that he had been “seriously ill with a variety of ailments for three months.” These problems included a defect of the lower spine that was “similar to arthritis” and was so painful that it kept him from sleeping. In addition, Oskar talked about a “strophantinkur for the heart” and constant “kidney-basin suppuration.” He also had nerve pain in the foot and had an “oscillograph” treatment for his legs. He also wrote Page that he had received “radioactive isotopes” for his kidneys as well as a hundred injections. He became quite ill in Israel during a visit with the Staehrs in June 1973, and, though Oskar returned to Germany, Dr. Moshe Bejski told him that he needed “constant medical supervision.”¹²

I asked Dr. James C. Osborne, a prominent internist in Greensboro, North Carolina, to look over Schindler’s medical files and evaluate them for me. Dr. Osborne told me that it is important to remember that, until recently, European, and particularly German, medical traditions were different in that the Germans used a “whole pharmacopia” of herbal medications that were not used in the United States. The long list of drugs that Oskar took indicated serious problems with high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart failure. But Oskar also had other issues that affected his health. The “circulatory collapse” he referred to in several of his letters meant that he simply passed out, possibly due to congestive heart failure. Dr. Osborne told me that the pain in his lower spine was probably caused by some degenerative disc disease. The “strophantinkur” for the heart was a reference to tincture of stophan, an herbal medication to help with congestive heart failure. The problems with “kidney-basin suppuration” meant simply an infection. Other medical reports indicate that Oskar suffered from frequent kidney infections during the last years of his life. The “nerve pain in the foot,” Dr. Osborne explained, was neuropathy, something common in people with diabetes. Neuropathy causes pain and numbness in the feet and is worse at night or when someone is resting. This, of course, would be another reason for Oskar’s problems with insomnia. The “oscillograph” he mentioned to Page was a painful procedure that looked for nerve activity in his legs. The “radioactive isotope of the kidneys” was probably another test, this time to gauge the function of his kidneys.¹³

These problems paled compared to the stroke Oskar suffered in December 1973, which left him paralyzed on his right side. However, according to his autopsy report, Oskar did not lose the ability to speak, which Dr. Osborne found surprising because the left side of the brain, which includes the speech center, is affected by a right-sided stroke. This meant that Oskar might have been one of those rare people whose speech center was either missed by the stroke or whose speech center was on the right side of his brain, occasionally found among people who are left-handed, as Oskar was. These problems left Schindler bedridden for months and under the care of Ami Staehr. Ami Staehr’s sole entry in her diary, dated December 8, 1973, evidently the date of Oskar’s stroke, and January 14, 1974, mentioned that there were discussions about Oskar’s weak heart caused by arteriosclerosis (hardening of the arteries).¹⁴

Until his stroke, Oskar lived a reasonably normal life, though he must have been in constant pain. In 1972, he testified in a preliminary war crimes investigative against a former guard in Płaszów, Laaf, and told the investigating judge in the district court in Bochem that he was the volunteer director of the German Association for the Society of Friends of the Hebrew University in Germany (Geschäftsführer des Bundesverbandes der Gesellschaften der Freunde der hebräischen Universität Jerusalem in Deutschland).¹⁵ His involvement with Hebrew University in Jerusalem was very important to Oskar, particularly the development of the Truman Center and the creation of the Oskar Schindler scholarship. His involvement with the German Friends of Hebrew University began in 1968 and continued until the end of his life. Oskar deeply loved Israel, which Lotte Schiffler called the true love of his life, and his work for Hebrew University was simply an extension of the affection he had for that country. Oskar’s work for Israel was such that Walter Hesselbach, the chairman of the board of the Bank für Gemeinwirtschaft (BfG) in Frankfurt and the chairman of the German Friends of Hebrew University, paid Oskar a modest salary for his work as honorary chair of the German Friends organization.¹⁶

Oskar’s work with the Friends of Hebrew University in Germany centered mainly around fund-raising efforts. Hebrew University, which is Israel’s most prominent institution of higher learning, was opened in 1925 on Mount Scopus in Jerusalem. During the 1948 War of Independence, Mount Scopus was cut off from the Jewish sections of the ancient Israeli capital. A new campus was built in Givat Ram in western Jerusalem. After Israel’s victory in the Six Day War in 1967, a new Hebrew University campus was begun on Mount Scopus, which was completed in 1981. In 1972, Oskar became actively involved in trying to help raise money for a scholarship in his name at Hebrew University. In January of that year, he went to New York, where he was honored by Schindler Jews at the headquarters of the American Friends of Hebrew University in Manhattan. The group, led by three prominent Schindler Jews, Isaac Levenstein, Murray Pantirer, and Abraham Zuckerman, announced that they had raised $125,000 for an Oskar Schindler scholarship at Hebrew University. They also wanted to honor Schindler and the Jews he saved with a plaque somewhere on the university’s Mount Scopus campus. Oskar was deeply moved by this news, and explained to his gathered friends, first in German, then in Yiddish, and finally in halting English, why he did what he did during the Holocaust: “What is there to say? They are my friends. I would do it again, over and over—for I hate cruelty and intolerance.”¹⁷ After his death, a special corner was devoted to Oskar at the Truman Institute for International Peace at Hebrew University. It includes a plaque honoring Schindler as well as a statue and a bust of him. The latter was donated to the Truman Institute in 1999 by Pantirer and Zuckermann. They also donated copies of this beautiful and striking bust to Steven Spielberg and Kean College, and keep the original in their Oskar Schindler office complex in Union, New Jersey.¹⁸

The first recipient of the Oskar Schindler Scholarship was Yossi Windzberg, a graduate student in Hebrew University’s Institute of Communications. The university informed Oskar about the award to Windzberg in the spring of 1974. Eliyahu Honig, the director of Hebrew University’s Department of Information and Public Affairs office, told Oskar that Windzberg was a young army veteran who had earlier served as an artillery officer in the Israeli Defense Forces. He noted that students who had recently served in the military, a reference to the recent 1973 Yom Kippur War, faced special problems. Scholarships such as this one enabled students such as Windzberg, who came from a family with little money, to complete their education.¹⁹ It would have pleased Oskar to know that this scholarship continues to be awarded by Hebrew University to this day. The fact that the first scholarship was given to an army veteran in the aftermath of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War also had special meaning for Oskar.

The war began on October 6, 1973, which was also Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement), the holiest and most solemn day in the Jewish religious calendar. At 2:00 P.M., Syrian and Egyptian forces began simultaneous attacks along the Golan Heights and the Suez Canal. Soon other Arab countries, as well as a large contingent of men and tanks from Iraq, joined Syria and Egypt, and the war for the survival of Israel raged over the next two and a half weeks.²⁰ Stunned by the early successes of the Arabs, Prime Minister Golda Meier of Israel went on television four days later and promised that Israel would not let itself be destroyed. Her government, she reassured her audience, had done everything possible to prevent the invasion, which she called “an act of madness.”²¹ She asked Israeli citizens not to allow themselves the “‘luxury’ of despair” and added: “I have one prayer in my heart, that this will be the last war.”²²

But Israelis did worry about the fate of their country, as evidenced by a letter that Yad Vashem sent to Oskar Schindler and other Righteous Gentiles throughout the world. Signed by Gideon Hausner, the prosecutor at Adolf Eichmann’s trial, a member of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, and later chairman of the World Council of Yad Vashem, and Dr. Chaim Pazner, the deputy chairman of Yad Vashem’s executive council, the letter told Schindler and the other Righteous Gentiles that the purpose of the current “criminal attack” was the destruction of Israel and the extermination of its people. They reminded them that the Yom Kippur assault was similar to a tactic used by the Nazis, who liked to begin their “actions” against Jews when they were most unsuspecting and vulnerable. At this tragic moment, the letter went on, Yad Vashem “thankfully remember you, following the natural human feeling, who risked your lives in the horror of the Nazi regime to save persecuted and endangered Jews. The efforts of the Righteous Gentiles encouraged Israelis to fight once again for their survival. We are convinced that just as back then, you are with us today. Raise your voice during this fateful hour for the state of Israel and declare your solidarity with us in any way you can.”²³

Dr. Dieter Trautwein said that Oskar was deeply upset by the Yom Kippur War. Throughout the years, Oskar had gotten into a lot of arguments with people who called him the “servant of the Jews.” This did not dissuade Schindler from voicing support for Israel, which occasionally offended people with more pro-Arab sensibilities. After Oskar got the letter from Yad Vashem, he went to Dr. Trautwein’s house in a “furious mood.” He insisted on repeating his well-known opinions on Israel and the Arabs, which to a great extent were driven by his worries about the lives and well-being of his friends in Israel. And he had every right to be worried. Few Israeli households were untouched by the deaths of more than 2,600 Israelis in the conflict. On November 21, for example, Dr. Moshe Bejski wrote Oskar that he was “almost paralyzed” by the death of his nephew, Haim. The following day, Dr. Bejski wrote Ami Staehr that the situation in Israel was far worse than she could imagine and that he wondered whether the family would ever recover. Golda Meir spoke of those times as ones of national “trauma.”²⁴

Oskar’s special fondness for Israel and his decision to live permanently in Germany confounded his Israeli and German friends. Several Schindler Jews ask me why Oskar chose to live in Germany, particularly as he loved Israel so much and would later be buried there. From their perspective, Oskar had suffered nothing but hardship and pain in Germany. Dieter Trautwein was extremely sensitive about this issue and a bit defensive when it came to the question of Oskar’s life and friendships in Germany. He was particularly troubled by the idea among some Schindler Jews, particularly in Israel, that Oskar died poor and alone in Frankfurt. Trautwein, who became the Propst (conference minister) in Frankfurt, was a devout friend of Israel and an important figure, along with Dr. Lotte Schiffler, in developing a mature German-Jewish dialogue in West Germany. He thought that this perspective on Schindler’s life in Germany was too simplistic. Though Trautwein agreed that Oskar was, to a point, poor and alone in Frankfurt, he pointed out that Schindler had a special relationship with Ami Staehr, who lived in Hildesheim, and Dr. Lotte Schiffler. Unfortunately, Oskar and Dr. Schiffler’s relationship was contentious, because, at least from Schindler’s perspective, she was trying to control his life. Dr. Schiffler was an extremely kind, ecumenical person who hated any form of racism and helped raise children of different ethnic and racial backgrounds. But she and Oskar had numerous fights and, after his stroke, he banned Lotte from his apartment. Oskar was also befriended by Walther Kampe, a Suffragan Catholic bishop, who offered Oskar his private apartment in Frankfurt after Oskar’s stroke. In fact, Oskar had already made arrangements to move into a retirement home, the Haus Leonhard, in Frankfurt after his pacemaker operation in 1974.²⁵

On the other hand, Dr. Trautwein agreed that the West German government in Bonn did not do enough for Schindler. He thought this might have been deliberate because the “politics of that era” dictated that “certain issues be suppressed.” West German officials, Dr. Trautwein told me, were particularly leery of Schindler because he “brought Auschwitz with him.” Yet discussions were underway in West Germany at the time of Oskar’s death to upgrade the level of his Federal Cross of Merit in order to increase the amount of his honorary pension given by the president of West Germany. Several years earlier, there had also been efforts to nominate Oskar for the Heinrich Stahl Prize, which was given out annually by the Jewish community of Berlin. There is nothing to indicate whether either of these efforts bore fruit.²⁶

One of the things that Dr. Trautwein had difficulty understanding was Oskar’s relationship with Frankfurt’s Sudeten German community and his friendships in the bars around the train station near his apartment. Dr. Trautwein said that Oskar would occasionally take him “bar hopping” to meet his many local friends. Oskar evidently saw himself as “the agency of the church [Catholic] in the train station area.” He once told Dr. Trautwein that he had taken a young couple aside when he discovered that they had a child but were not married: “What, you’re not yet married?” he lectured. “Now that you have a child, you can’t just stay unmarried. Go and see the city deacon, you have to resolve this now!”²⁷

In some ways, these relationships defined Oskar in a very different way than his friendships with prominent churchmen such as Dr. Trautwein and Bishop Kampe, or his ties with Israel and his Schindler Jews. It is doubtful that Oskar would ever have been comfortable living permanently in Israel. Though he was always happy there, it was an artificial existence, dependent on the adoring presence of his Schindler Jews. And there was some tension in Israel over Oskar. The Schindler Committee in Israel tried to do what it could to help Oskar financially and usually covered his expenses when he was there. Some Schindler Jews, though, resented the fund-raising efforts of the Schindler Committee because they said the money would just go for “vodka” for Oskar. Other Schindler Jews were still struggling to make ends meet in Israel and simply did not have the money to donate to the Schindler Committee. Oskar could go through large sums of money in two or three days and had no qualms about calling Dr. Bejski and asking for more.²⁸

Oskar’s life in Frankfurt was quite different and centered around his modest, smoky apartment (No. 63) on Hauptbahnhof 4. But what Dr. Trautwein and others in West Germany failed to see was Oskar’s more pedestrian side. He enjoyed living next to the central train station with its interesting people and bars. Moreover, Oskar was by heritage and birth a Sudeten German and he never forgot it. His ties and friendships in the Sudeten German exile community in Frankfurt and its Zwittau Heimatrunde (Svitavy Home Circle) helped him maintain his links to this past; and his friendships in the pubs around the train station allowed him to “let loose” and simply be Oskar Schindler—a hard-drinking man-of-the-world. Many of Oskar’s Israeli and German friends suggested time and again that he consider living all or part of the year in Israel. Dr. Moshe Bejski asked him to move to Israel on several occasions, and Lotte Schiffler suggested that he take a small apartment in Israel and keep a “tent” in Frankfurt.²⁹ To some extent, Oskar remained in West Germany because of the various stipends he received there. If he had moved to Israel, it is doubtful that he would have continued to receive all of them. Oskar was also a proud man, and though he had no trouble taking money from his friends, he knew that if he moved to Israel he would probably become almost totally dependent on his Schindler Jews, many of whom still struggled to build a comfortable life. But the main reason that Oskar chose to remain in Frankfurt, despite the fact that Jakob Sternberg considered him a “Jewicized Christian,” was because he was ethnically, culturally, and socially a German. Simply stated, he felt more comfortable being a German in West Germany than a “Jewicized Christian” in Israel.³⁰

The Death of Oskar Schindler: Tribute and Mourning

For the most part, Oskar never fully recovered from his stroke, though Lotte Schiffler told him when she saw him in April 1974 that he seemed “fresh and rested.” Yet a month earlier Oskar would not permit her in his apartment to help him with small things such as “clipping the nails and other things.” Oskar was still having trouble with the paralysis on the right side of his body, and Lotte suggested that he receive a salt water treatment to help “revive the right side again.” She also wondered whether the expensive injections he was receiving were helping his paralysis.³¹ Oskar was able to travel and went to Hildesheim for four days for Ami Staehr’s birthday in early March. After the stroke, the Staehrs made up a small room for Oskar in their apartment in Hildesheim, which in a way became his second home. He returned for a visit to Hildesheim in late May and stayed with the Staehrs for about ten days.³²

Oskar returned to Hildesheim on August 8, and, except for a brief trip back to Frankfurt approved by his physician, Dr. Kleinsorg, he would spend the remaining weeks of his life in Hildesheim with the Staehrs. Oskar’s health was deteriorating and Ami Staehr called Dieter Trautwein in late August to let him know of Oskar’s continuing heart problems. Dr. Trautwein then called Lotte Schiffler, who wrote to Ami Staehr and asked her about the prospect of a heart operation for Oskar. Dr. James Osborne told me that heart surgery was still in its infancy at the time, so he was uncertain what Schiffler meant by this. Instead, the decision was made to give Schindler a pacemaker to help stabilize his heart rhythms.³³

It is possible to piece together what happened next from the autopsy report prepared two days after Oskar died, a letter that Ami wrote to Dr. Bejski and Itzhak Stern’s wife for all Oskar’s Israeli friends just before he died on October 9, and one that she sent to Oskar’s niece, Traude Ferrari, in December 1974. The autopsy report noted that a week before he was admitted to the hospital (September 24), Schindler was suffering from “swollen feet as well as severe breathing problems, lack of appetite, and sleep.” The decision was then made to give him a pacemaker at the St. Bernward Krankenhaus, a Roman Catholic hospital, in Hildesheim. During the operation Oskar slipped into a coma and never regained consciousness. He was placed in the intensive care unit of St. Bernward’s. Ami described what happened next in her letter to Dr. Bejski and Mrs. Stern. She wrote it on October 7, and described Oskar’s condition after he slipped into the coma. For the most part, she told them, he was “dozing along in constant unconsciousness though he was periodically responsive to those around him. When his name was mentioned, he would open his eyes and sometimes say ‘Yes.’” But for the most part, Ami explained, he had no idea where he was or what was happening to him. Because Oskar was in intensive care, Ami was not able to be with him all the time, though she frequently called the hospital to find out how he was doing. And she was always told the same thing: “No change, but Mr. Schindler is still alive.” She reassured Bejski and Stern that everything was being done medically and personally to care for him. On the day she wrote the letter, it was decided to put Oskar on “liquids and astronaut food” to help flush his kidneys. Oskar was now nothing more than “skin and bones.” She was glad that Dr. Bejski and Mrs. Stern did not have to see Oskar like this. She ended by writing that she felt it was “a greeting from God” that Oskar was oblivious to what was happening to him “since the unconsciousness also spare[d] him the pains, the tortures.”³⁴ Two days later, October 9, 1974, Oskar Schindler passed away. During this period, the pacemaker worked very well. His body, damaged by his diabetes as well as his kidney, heart, and other problems, simply gave out.³⁵ From Ami Staehr’s perspective, his slow death “was more an extinguishing of his spirit, a diminishing of all energies, a break down of all functions.” Oskar Schindler was sixty-five years old.³⁶

Oskar’s death devastated Ami Staehr. She wrote Dr. Bejski a month after his death that, for her, “time now stood still”:

Ami was particularly troubled when, despite specific instructions from Oskar, Dr. Schiffler entered his apartment after he died and took keepsakes that meant so much to Ami. Somehow, Dr. Schiffler had been given Oskar’s power of attorney and had taken away many of his private belongings. Ami later wrote Oskar’s niece, Traude, that she considered Schiffler’s efforts a “Blitzaktion” (lightning operation). Dr. Schiffler gave many of Oskar’s private possessions away and, at least according to Ami, even paid people to take them. Schiffler completely cleaned out his apartment. Fortunately, before this happened, Ami, who had a key to Oskar’s apartment, had the foresight to go with her son, Chris, to gather up as many of Oskar’s private papers as she could find. But, according to Ami’s letter to Traude, for some reason the papers she took out that day wound up in the hands of Stefan Pemper, the brother of Mietek Pemper. Her efforts to get him to return them to her, at least by the end of December 1974, were unsuccessful. Fortunately, some time earlier, Oskar had shipped a very heavy, hard-sided Samsonite suitcase filled with some of his most important personal papers to the Staehrs in Hildesheim. This was the storied suitcase, which Chris and Tina Staehr later found after Heinrich Staehr’s death in 1997, that became the basis of the world-wide stories about the discovery of the original “Schindler’s List.”³⁸

Ami and Chris knew Oskar’s apartment well, and he kept papers scattered everywhere. However, one of his favorite places to store his papers was a sideboard in the kitchen. Ami and Chris had a soft-sided suitcase with them and filled it with about a third of the papers in Oskar’s apartment at the time. When they came back the next day, they discovered that Dr. Schiffler had taken the rest. Within three days, the apartment was completely empty. Chris and Tina Staehr both think that Ami and Dr. Schiffler were looking for their love letters to Oskar. Ami had hidden the letters that Oskar had sent to her in her apartment in Hildesheim. After Heinrich Staehr’s death in 1997, the apartment was sold and the people who bought it found the papers and threw them away. Chris Staehr later asked them whether they knew how important the letters were historically. They said they had no idea they were from Oskar Schindler’s estate.³⁹

What troubled Ami most about Dr. Schiffler’s “Blitzaktion” was the fact that Oskar told her where to find handwritten instructions in the apartment detailing exactly what he wanted done should he not survive the pacemaker operation. Oskar did not expect to die during surgery and talked with Ami about future plans. But he also had enough foresight to realize that the operation might not go as planned. It was possible, Ami later wrote, that Oskar, who was “already quite forgetful and so weakened by illness,” might have forgotten where he had put the instructions. Ami looked where Oskar told her he had put them but could not find them. It was possible, of course, that Dr. Schiffler had taken Oskar’s statement of his last wishes along with everything else she took out of the apartment. Ami later wrote Traude that being prevented from carrying out this wish left her “no rest.”⁴⁰

As a result, Ami had to make plans for Oskar without knowing his exact wishes. She worked night and day over the next three weeks making arrangements for his memorial service and Requiem Mass in Frankfurt and burial in Israel. But were these Oskar’s wishes? Dr. Moshe Bejski told me that Oskar never said anything to him about wanting to be buried in Israel. On the other hand, Dr. Dieter Trautwein told me that Oskar said he wanted to be cremated and have his ashes scattered around his tree along the Avenue of the Righteous at Yad Vashem. Instead, he was buried at the Latin Cemetery on Mount Zion just outside Jerusalem’s Old City.⁴¹

Ami called Dr. Bejski in Tel Aviv on October 9 and told him that Oskar wanted to buried in Israel. Dr. Bejski set to work with several other members of the Schindler Committee planning for Oskar’s funeral; at the same time, Ami and Dr. Trautwein made plans for his memorial service in the Trauerhalle of the Hauptfriedhof in Frankfurt on October 16 and his Requiem Mass several days later. Five dignitaries spoke at Oskar’s October 16 memorial service, which began at 2:00 P.M.—Dr. Moshe Bejski, Dr. Dieter Trautwein, Stadtdekan Msgr. Walter Adloch, Dr. Walter Hesselbach, and Dr. Heinrich Staehr. Msgr. Adloch, the rector for Frankfurt’s St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral, began the service and provided the religious intercessions. Dr. Trautwein preached the memorial sermon, and Shlomo Raiß, the Senior Cantor for Frankfurt’s Jewish community, sang Psalm 16 in Hebrew. Songs written to honor Schindler’s life and works were also performed during the service. Richard Hackenberg, a leader in Frankfurt’s Sudeten German community and a friend of Oskar’s from the Svitavy region, also spoke at the memorial service.⁴²

Dr. Trautwein began his sermon with two biblical verses from the Torah that he thought would be most fitting on Oskar’s tomb, “Love your Lord” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Or, he added, you could use Martin Buber’s words, “Love your neighbor, because he is like you.” He told those in the congregation that they knew whom to thank for this commandment—Israel and its God. When Oskar Schindler arrived in Kraków, Trautwein continued, such commandments were “despised and ridiculed… everything stopped: love, humanity, the simplest decency was gone.” But not for two people, Oskar and Emilie Schindler. Their accomplishments during the war could not be expressed in words. Today, there were 3,000 to 4,000 people, the Schindler Jews and their descendants, who “entered the arch built by Schindler and thereby entered a new world.” Dr. Trautwein recalled the old Talmudic saying: “Whoever has saved one single life has saved the entire world! The Schindlers and their helpers have saved more than a thousand worlds.”⁴³

Dr. Trautwein reminded everyone that Oskar never took sole credit for what he did during the war. He could not, Dr. Trautwein explained, have saved as many lives as he did without the help of “many supporters, even supporters on the side of the enemy.” But the question was, why? It began with his friendships with Jews when he was a young man in Svitavy. And when he saw what was happening to Jewish children in Kraków, Buber’s commandment of life, “Love your neighbor, because he is like you,” came to life. Later, a Schindler Jew addressed Oskar: “That wasn’t you, someone else saved you through the thousand worlds.” Oskar’s achievements during the war, what Dr. Trautwein called Schindler’s “high hour of confirmation, had been so unique and extraordinary,” that Oskar, this “generous, goal-oriented person,” could never top his wartime deeds. “And that’s why,” Dr. Trautwein thought, “a lot of things that came after this depressed him, whether they were his own fault or the misfortune of the moment.”⁴⁴

Despite these problems, Oskar remained “an agent of peace” in this city [Frankfurt] through his bridge building between Germany and Israel. “Who among our people, which has shown so little mourning and gratitude, knows what he has done to improve the German reputation throughout the world?” But we should not be sad, he told the congregation. “We need to be very thankful,” he went on, “thankful that God has given him a palette of generous engagement for other people!” Schindler had many friends, including his Schindler Jews, his acquaintances among the German Friends of Hebrew University and, most important, Ami and Heinrich Staehr. They were with him to the end, “when his suffering became worse and worse, when surgery became unavoidable, when only imploring and praying with him and for him were possible.”⁴⁵

Dr. Trautwein ended his sermon by reminding the congregation of the words, “Nothing is bad except if we lose our love.” Even in mourning, the “love that God let shine through this Oskar Schindler ha[d] not perished.” Such love can flourish through those present while Oskar’s tree at Yad Vashem would remind everyone of love. “Our hope is that we will be together with this beloved deceased in the ‘bundle of life,’ and that the enigmas and sorrows of his life, and the bitter questions of the many, too many, who were not saved, will find answers.” Most important, he told everyone, “the commandment, which has become the offer of life for Jews and Christians and all people, should not and must not be ridiculed and despised; love your Lord—and love your neighbor as yourself!”⁴⁶

Richard Hackenburg, Oskar’s Sudeten German friend, also spoke and talked about Oskar’s deep love for his home town, Svitavy, and his Sudeten German homeland. He found a piece of the Sudetenland in Frankfurt, Hackenburg noted, among his Sudeten German friends there. Hackenburg concluded his brief remarks: “We thank God he was one of us.” Hackenberg also spoke at a Requiem Mass for Oskar three days later at Frankfurt’s St. Bartholomew’s Cathedral. A number of prominent German officials spoke at the Mass as well as Richard Rechen, who drove the truck that accompanied Oskar and Emilie during their escape from Brünnlitz at the end of the war. Rechen noted that the Chief Rabbi of Tel Aviv had recently said that “Oskar Schindler was an ambassador of the Almighty.” Oskar’s greatness, Rechen thought, rested on the fact that even during the time of greatest Nazi victories, he [Schindler], as a young man, “simply did not participate.” He saw Schindler as a great humanist:

And Rechen, Dr. Bejski, Jakob Sternberg, and other members of the Schindler Committee in Israel were able to fulfill that promise. On October 24, his body was flown to Israel where, four days later, he was buried in the Latin cemetery in Jerusalem. The State of Hesse, BfG, and the Lutheran and Catholic churches of West Germany paid the costs of his transport to Israel.⁴⁸

Ami Staehr was in charge of the preparations for shipping Oskar’s body to Israel. This involved extensive paperwork and phone calls, overseeing the embalming of the body, and shipment preparation that required three caskets. Working with Dr. Bejski and other members of the Schindler Committee in Israel, Ami also arranged for Oskar’s burial in a Christian cemetery in Jerusalem. Ami later admitted that she was so busy making these arrangements that she did not have time to grieve for Oskar. She was so exhausted from making his funeral arrangements that, though she went to the airport to see his body off, she did not accompany the body to Israel, nor did she attend the funeral there. She would later visit his grave with Dr. Trautwein and Dr. Bejski in the summer of 1975.⁴⁹

A Requiem Mass was held for Oskar at St. Saviour’s Roman Catholic Church in Jerusalem’s Old City near the New Gate on October 28, 1974. The church was filled with four hundred Schindler Jews and their families as well as prominent figures such as Jesco von Puttkamer, West Germany’s ambassador to Israel, Yitzhak Arad, the head of Yad Vashem, and representatives from Hebrew University. Dr. Bejski said that he was surprised to see a group of Orthodox Schindler Jews at the service in the church. One, Mordechai Broder, told Bejski that for Oskar, he “would even go to Hell.”⁵⁰ Another devout Schindler Jew told a reporter: “For him it is not only permissible to carry his Christian coffin on our shoulders, but it is a mitzvah [religious commandment or duty] to accompany him on his last journey even inside the church. He was a saint in his lifetime.”⁵¹

When the Requiem Mass was over, six Schindler Jews gently placed Oskar’s coffin on their shoulders and, led by three Franciscan monks, began the long procession through Jerusalem’s Old City to the Franciscan Latin Cemetery on Mount Zion just outside the Zion Gate. A group of Schindler Jews walked in front of the coffin carrying wreaths in honor of Oskar. Yad Vashem asked Dr. Moshe Bejski to deliver the graveside eulogy. Each Righteous Gentile, Dr. Bejski noted, deserved “the full measure of recognition and gratitude” for their rescue actions. But Oskar Schindler’s deeds, he added, were “without precedent” as evidenced by the three hundred women he saved in Auschwitz. The fact that he “snatched” 1,200 Jews “from the jaws of death, place[d] Schindler in the first rank of Righteous Among the Nations.”⁵²

But, Dr. Bejski went on, Oskar was more than a rescuer: “He became a legend in his lifetime among the survivors because of his humanity, his personal care of his protégés, his willingness to listen and find solutions to countless personal, everyday problems.” There were many examples of this during the war though the one that stood out most for Dr. Bejski was Oskar’s efforts to save the Jews on the Golleschau transport in early 1945: “Oskar Schindler revealed himself as a humanist, a person with a sensitive heart, who was deeply moved by the suffering of his fellow men, a person who spared no effort to ease our suffering and protect us to the limit of what was possible under the circumstances. No matter how extensive is the chronicle of his acts of kindness, it still cannot relay the full measure of his benevolence.”⁵³

After the war, Dr. Bejski continued, Oskar “remained bound with the strongest ties to his survivors and the State of Israel, in which he rebuilt part of his life.” He “continued to experience the trauma of the Jewish people” and worried a great deal about the threats against Israel. He was extremely devoted to Hebrew University and to a “rapprochement between Jews and Christians.” This was a Christian burial service, Dr. Bejski acknowledged, though he told everyone that he would like to add one Jewish element to it. After the mourner’s Kaddish (Sanctification) is said at the grave site of a Jewish funeral, it is normal to ask forgiveness of the deceased for “any harm done to him by persons close to him.” Dr. Bejski continued:

In her letter to Traude two months after Oskar’s death, Ami wrote that “if only in his lifetime so many had thought of him, helped him, supported him, not left him alone so much.” She went on: “Sometimes I think that much was done from a bad conscience.” As a result, she added, “Oskar was very disappointed in everyone and refused everything from the past.”⁵⁵

Today Oskar’s grave is among the most frequently visited in Jerusalem. The inscription on his tomb, in German and in Hebrew, simply reads: “Oskar Schindler, 28.4.1908–9.10.1974. ‘Der unvergessliche Lebensretter 1200 verfolgter Juden. [The Unforgettable Savior of 1200 Persecuted Jews].’” It somehow seems fitting that the man who saved the lives of almost 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust and spent much of his time after the war trying to build bridges between Israel and West Germany should be buried in this beautiful, quiet setting among Arab Christians overlooking the rolling hills beyond Mount Zion.⁵⁶

Life in Death

It is not certain when Emilie learned of Oskar’s death. However, in early 1976, she gave Dr. Lotte Schiffler her power of attorney to settle Oskar’s will and to enter into negotiations with the Lastenausgleich authorities over any balance owed Oskar after his death. On June 20, 1976, the main Lastenausgleich office sent Emilie a check for DM 18,541.88 ($7,856.73), the final balance on Oskar’s account.⁵⁷ In the meantime, Oskar’s friends in West Germany became involved in the production of a forty-five-minute television documentary film on Oskar’s life, Die Juden nennen Ihn, ‘Vater Courage’ (The Jews Call Him ‘Father Courage’). Produced by Reinhard Albrecht, Vater Courage was the first detailed television documentary on Oskar’s life. It first aired on November 28, 1975, on Südwestfunk 3, and copies were sent to Israeli television, which helped produce it, the BBC, and NBC. The program centered around a series of interviews that Hessische Rundfunk did with Oskar in 1965 in Frankfurt in the midst of the final trials of twenty Germans who had served in Auschwitz as well as interviews with Emilie Schindler, Walter Pollack, Mietek Pemper, Dr. Dieter Trautwein, Dr. Lotte Schiffler, and Ami Staehr. Albrecht also spent a week in Israel interviewing Schindler Jews such as Dr. Moshe Bejski, who, as always, insisted upon “seriousness, tact, and responsibility,” Jakob Sternberg, and others. Ami Staehr and Lotte Schiffler served as the documentary’s historical consultants and Ami provided Albrecht with photographs of Oskar in Israel and some of his private papers. Albrecht also used Oskar’s own account of his wartime activities from Kurt Grossmann’s Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen (1957).⁵⁸

Lotte Schiffler, who was one of the driving forces behind the documentary, wrote Ami Staehr in March 1975 that the Schindler project was not a “blauer Dunst [blue mist]” production “like all of the USA promises,” but one fully approved by Südwestfunk. Schiffler hoped that the film would create new sympathy for Israel and that “Schindler’s life should be a last call to activate everything ‘for his land.’” She also hoped to obtain an honorarium for their work on the documentary to help pay for a tombstone at Oskar’s grave in Jerusalem.⁵⁹

From Albrecht’s perspective, the program was aimed at German youth, and, using the famed “list” with its bare listing of names, concentration camp numbers, nationality, race, and occupation, was the documentary’s “red thread” by which Albrecht tried to bring each of the Jewish survivors and their testimonies to life. Albrecht saw Oskar Schindler as an “antihero,” a “Father Courage,” a “Schweijk”-like figure, a daredevil, and a humanitarian who was willing to take responsibility for the fate of his Jewish workers and do whatever was necessary, even if it meant sacrificing his own life, to save them. Albrecht thought that Oskar Schindler was a man “who was touched by God’s finger, human like you and I, with all the human weaknesses and strengths of a person of stature.”⁶⁰

The program began with a brief overview of the Holocaust and the statement that only 330,000 of the 2 million Polish Jews in the General Government survived, 60,000 of them in labor and death camps. Out of this latter number, 1,200 were saved by one man, “a German, a man, a mixture of Schweijk and the devil’s general, an anti-hero, who succeeded in outplaying the Nazis. His name: Oskar Schindler.”⁶¹ According to Schiffler, Oskar went with Admiral Canaris to Dachau in 1939, a trip which “opened his eyes so much that he decided to find ways to prevent the same fate from happening to his Jewish friends.” Though there is no evidence to document this experience or that Oskar ever met Canaris, it had entered the Schindler mythology by this time. The rest of the program was based on statements from Oskar’s friends and numerous Schindler Jews such as Dr. Moshe Bejski and Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein as well as lesser known Schindlerjuden such as Mordechai Bruder (Markus Broder), Dolek Gruenhaut (Adolf Grünhalt) and Moritz Reichgoot (Mortiz Reichgod), who survived the Golleschau transport.⁶²

At some point in his interview with Hessiche Rundfunk, Oskar was asked about his relationship with Emilie and their work together during the war. He said that they did have problems which were exacerbated by their childless marriage. Regardless, Oskar stated, Emilie “always proved to be a loyal and good comrade. She played a particularly important role in Brünnlitz and oversaw feeding the workers in the camp.” This was, Oskar explained, “a gigantic task,” since she was also responsible for the camp’s hospital. He told Hessiche Rundfunk that it was important to understand that “whenever necessary, [Emilie] fearlessly protected and stood up for the endangered Jewish workers.” The German television crew also interviewed Emilie, who, it noted, lived in poverty in a suburb of Buenos Aires in a house built for her by “Schindler Jews.” It added that the West German government never granted her a pension. Emilie was asked to explain Oskar’s failures after the war. They were caused, she noted, by the fact that “Herr Schindler was thrown out of the ordered paths,” and that all the changes after the war “really affected him… and he didn’t get back on track. He didn’t have the people, the personnel, he didn’t understand it [new postwar life], that was missing, that’s why it [his recovery] failed.”⁶³

The last part of the documentary explored Oskar’s last years in Germany. This was a time, Lotte Schiffler stated, when Oskar was “very broken, quiet, sick.” Jehuda Kahrwisch, the press coordinator for Hebrew University, said that once Oskar’s Israeli friends realized how sick he was, they decided to speed up contributions to an Oskar Schindler scholarship so that it could be awarded before Oskar died. Oskar, Kahrwisch told Albrecht, was not interested in having buildings or monuments named after him. Instead, he wanted his name to be used “to help actually living young people.” The program ended with a statement by Mordechai Bruder, one of the pallbearers at Oskar’s funeral in Jerusalem. Broder told Albrecht that someone later asked him how he could carry a coffin with a cross on it. He responded that it was not the coffin of an ordinary man: “It is the coffin of a man who saved me and many other Jews; there are not many people like him, and this is my obligation. I was happy to do this, and I believe that it is a command from God that it be done.”⁶⁴

The interviews done for Vater Courage were important in keeping Oskar Schindler’s story alive in the minds of the people who so cared for him. This was particularly true in the case of the Schindler Jews in Israel, who would become the principal source of information for the next major look at Oskar’s life—Thomas Keneally’s novelized biography, Schindler’s Ark. The person initially behind Keneally’s work was the irrepressible Leopold Page, who continued to pester anyone who came into his leather goods shop about Oskar’s story. In 1980, the Australian novelist was in Italy to attend a film festival. While there, his publisher called him to ask whether he would be interested in going to the United States for a book tour for his recently published novel, Confederates (1979).⁶⁵

One day as he was strolling in downtown Beverly Hills, Keneally stopped in front of a luggage store. It was 105 degrees outside, and the owner asked Keneally to come in and get out of the heat. After looking around, Keneally decided to buy a new briefcase. While he was waiting for the processing of his credit card, Page asked Keneally what he did for a living. Keneally told him, “I am a writer.” Page responded excitedly, “If you are a writer, I have a story for you.” He then told the Australian novelist about Oskar Schindler and took him to the back of the store to show him the documents he had on Schindler.⁶⁶ Keneally, though fascinated by Page’s story and documents, told the Schindler Jew that he was not the person to write the story because he was only three when the war broke out and, as a Catholic, knew little about the Holocaust and the fate of the Jews. Page said those were the very reasons Keneally should write the book. Page, who became Keneally’s consultant on the novel, took him on a detailed research trip to Europe and Israel very similar to the one he had taken with Martin Gosch and Howard Koch in 1964. Ultimately, Keneally, who had access to the script for To the Last Hour, would interview fifty Schindler Jews for his book. Their testimony became the basis of his historical novel, which was first published as Schindler’s Ark in Great Britain in 1982. When it came out in the United States, it was re-titled Schindler’s List. In 1982, Schindler’s Ark won Great Britain’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize for Fiction (today the Mann Booker Prize for Fiction). Once Page convinced Keneally to write his book on Schindler, he sold the film rights to Irving Glovin, who in turn sold them to Sid Sheinberg, the head of Universal Studios, who was interested in having one of his younger, most brilliant directors, Steven Spielberg, make a film based on Keneally’s novel. It would be a decade, though, before Spielberg was ready to make his film about Oskar Schindler.⁶⁷

Keneally’s novel, though, did more than just spur interest in a film account of Oskar Schindler’s life. Its publication in Germany (Schindlers Liste) in 1983 prompted further efforts by Oskar’s friends to memorialize his wartime heroics. On October 14, 1984, the Ackermann Gemeinde Hessen (Ackermann Congregation of Hesse), a community of Sudeten German Catholics in the state of Hesse, organized a large memorial service for Oskar on the tenth anniversary of his death in Frankfurt celebrating his life and his saving of almost 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust. The speakers at the service represented a broad range of important German religious and political leaders as well as letters of support from prominent Jews such as Jerusalem’s mayor, Teddy Kollek and Dr. Moshe Bejski, who was now a member of Israel’s Supreme Court. The Ackermann Congregation published a full account of the memorial service in 1985, which included excerpts from press reports about the service, reviews and portions of Keneally’s novel, and selections from an article in a Polish journal on Schindler, “Eine Krakauer Stimme zu Oskar Schindler” (A Kraków Voice on Oskar Schindler) by Maciej Kozlowski.⁶⁸

Suffragan Bishop Walther Kampe, a close friend of Schindler’s, wondered how God could “just silently watch” the mass murder of the Jews during the Holocaust. Edward Knechtel, the chairman of the Ackermann Congregation, while noting the presence of many distinguished guests and letters of support from others, said that if it had not been for Thomas Keneally’s novel, Oskar would hardly have been noticed in Germany. It was important to learn from Schindler’s example, a proud son of Moravia, to insure that brutal expulsions, whether it be “in Moravia, Uganda, or Biafra,” did not happen again. The Ackermann Community felt it was particularly important to remember Schindler because it thought it was “an essential part of its agenda to fight for humanity and the right to live and for practical Christian charity.” If Schindler provided the world with an example, it was “that the human being remains the measure of things, but also, as a continuous model, to remember the words of Tobias: ‘Compassion covers sin.’”⁶⁹

Dr. Dieter Trautwein expressed sympathy for the fate of the expelled Sudeten Germans and thanked the congregation for permitting one of them to “become one of us.” Dr. Trautwein then talked about his seven-year relationship with Schindler and his correspondence with Thomas Keneally. Though he was generally pleased by Keneally’s novel, he was disappointed that there was so little in it about Oskar’s Frankfurt years. He was particularly troubled that Keneally seemed to know nothing about Schindler’s close friendship with Ami and Heinrich Staehr, who were in the audience and had done so much for Oskar during the last years of his life. Regardless, Trautwein went on, Keneally’s novel finally brought to life the story of a light [Schindler] that “professes that our world still has hope and mercy.” He then mentioned the struggles that Steven Spielberg was having with producing a movie about Oskar Schindler. Any film about Schindler, Dr. Trautwein thought, had to express what he [Dr. Trautwein] stated in the last verse of a song that he had written for Oskar in 1968:

Michael Friedman, a member of the board of the Jewish Congregation in Frankfurt and the son of Schindler Jews, described Oskar as an “opalescent personality, an epicurean” but “mainly a human being [a Mensch],” a man “who took the Ten Commandments seriously,” a man “who fulfilled the demand ‘Love thy neighbor as you love yourself.’” Dr. Lotte Schiffler continued with this theme by talking about Schindler’s respect for Judaism and Jews. She described Oskar’s childhood friendships with Jews and his determination not to allow any of his Jewish school friends to be bullied by others. Oskar agreed with the idea that “we had to understand Judaism as God’s first love” and supported ongoing efforts to “renew the friendship between Jews and Christians.” Richard Hackenburg, a friend of Oskar’s and a prominent Sudeten German leader, ended the service by praising Oskar’s “courage and humanitarian undertakings.” He “should remain our continuous admonition for active solidarity with persecuted and suppressed people all over the world.”⁷¹

But Thomas Keneally’s novel and the 1984 memorial service in Frankfurt also prompted renewed interest on the part of Emilie, her friends, and family about Oskar and his story. In early 1983, Mila Pfefferberg-Page wrote Emilie to see how she was doing. Mila mentioned that though she had written Emilie a few years earlier she had never received a response. She told Emilie that the Schindler Jews in their mutual circle of friends thought of her “often and with love.” She then went on to tell Emilie about Thomas Keneally’s new book, which was mostly about her, about Oskar, and about Płaszów and Brünnlitz.⁷² In the meantime, Bernard Scheuer, a close friend of Emilie’s and the husband of Oskar’s wartime mistress, Marta (Eva Kisch Scheuer), decided to look into the question of Emilie’s legal rights via-à-vis Keneally’s novel and the film rights to the Schindler story. Scheuer wrote Irving Glovin about this, who told Scheuer that he and Poldek Pfefferberg (Leopold Page) had purchased “all of the rights from M.G.M. and commissioned Mr. Keneally to write the book.” Glovin added that he had sold these rights to Universal Pictures. Glovin explained that once Oskar sold his film rights to MGM, he “no longer had a claim.” Glovin also sent Scheuer an excerpt from the original 1964 contract underscoring these points. Scheuer wrote Emilie to explain the terms of the excerpt of the contract but admitted that this was a matter for an attorney. Consequently, he hired a lawyer for $1,000 to look into the book and film rights for Emilie. He added that he presumed Glovin would want to settle the matter out of court to avoid “a legal scandal.”⁷³

Scheuer continued to pester Glovin and Page about this matter, though he had no legal basis to challenge their claim to ownership of the Schindler story.⁷⁴ Erika Rosenberg, Emilie Schindler’s legal heir, claimed in 2002 that she had received a letter from Glovin dated July 13, 1984, promising Emilie 5 percent of the net from any film on Oskar Schindler.⁷⁵ The original 1964 contract, which was signed by Schindler, Page, and Martin A. Gosch, stated that if the film was never made, ownership would revert back to Schindler and Page. Emilie signed away her rights to her husband’s story in return for the $5,000 advance she received in 1965. When Oskar died in 1974, Leopold Page became the sole proprietor of the Oskar Schindler story. Consequently, he had full legal rights to commission Thomas Keneally’s novel and to sell these rights to Irving Glovin. The ownership issue is very important, not only because of the success of Keneally’s novel and Spielberg’s film, but also later charges by Emilie and lawsuits by her heir, Erika Rosenberg, that claim that Keneally, Steven Spielberg, and even Universal Pictures owed Emilie and/or her estate considerable profits from the book and motion picture. There is nothing in Oskar Schindler’s extensive documentary collection scattered in archival and private collections in Israel, Germany, and the United States to support this. Moreover, it must be remembered that Irving Glovin was a topnotch, well-respected Hollywood attorney who knew his way around the film business. He had been deeply involved in the initial legal stages of the contracts with Oskar Schindler and was knowledgeable on who owned the rights to the Schindler story.

But this question continued to crop up. In 1985, Traude Ferrari, Oskar’s niece, called and wrote Ami Staehr about certain letters and other documents relating to this matter in her uncle’s papers in Hildesheim. Traude was particularly interested in anything between Oskar, Leopold “Poldi” Pfefferberg [Page], and Martin Gosch. Ami sent Traude two letters as well as Oskar’s empty check register, but added in a letter on May 30, 1985, that “nothing remain[ed].” She explained that her husband, Heinrich, told Ami that the Polish letters in the suitcase, which he could not read, would probably not interest anyone. The letters, of course, were from Leopold Page, who wrote to Oskar almost exclusively in Polish. Ami added that she knew nothing of the “Martin” in one of the letters and expressed worry that the letters she sent Traude might fall into the wrong hands.⁷⁶

Traude responded to Ami’s letter a month later and explained why this matter was so important to her. She was looking for correspondence between her uncle and “Poldi Pfefferberg and otherwise with ‘America’ which could give information about possible monetary gifts.” Traude explained that the letters and other documents that Ami had earlier sent her were of no value. She was evidently looking for evidence of hidden funds in the United States, not for herself, but for Emilie. Her aunt, she noted, had “worked hard for thirty years to pay off the debts left by [her] uncle of a million [pesos] so as not to defile the name of ‘Schindler.’” In fact, Traude explained, though her uncle had always claimed that Emilie did not want to go with him to Germany, the truth was that she could not leave Argentina because of their debts. All Traude now wanted to do was “help a woman who sacrificed thirty years of her life” for Schindler’s debt and to make her “last remaining years as comfortable as possible.” She appealed to Ami to help her find “a few useful letters in the suitcase full of documents” in her attic to help her with Emilie’s cause. Traude assured Ami that these documents would not fall into the “wrong hands” and reminded her that she “loved [Oskar] above everything, like a daughter.” She ended by expressing bitterness that Ami had failed to inform her of Oskar’s death in 1974.⁷⁷

Ami did not send Traude any more documents from her uncle’s suitcase and Traude remains bitter about it to this day. In an interview with Der Spiegel’s Jürgen Dahlkamp in 1999, Traude was harsh in her criticism of Ami Staehr. She complained that she learned of her uncle’s death from a newspaper and that all Ami sent her afterwards were five photographs and an un-mailed postcard written by Oskar addressed to “Dear Traude.” Oskar’s niece also told Dahlkamp that she was shocked to learn that there had been a suitcase full of his documents in his Frankfurt apartment, and that she felt “deceived” by the whole matter. When she asked Ami for some of the letters from the suitcase in 1985, she claimed that Ami “curtly refused” to send her anything.⁷⁸ The reality of the situation, though, is quite different. What Traude did not realize was how difficult it was for Ami, both emotionally and physically, to dig around in the mass of papers in the suitcase in the attic. From what Chris and Tina Staehr told me, once the suitcase and the papers from the suitcase had been stored in a large wooden crate in the attic, they were left mostly untouched because Ami did not have the physical or emotional strength to go through them and that to do so would possibly put a strain on a marriage that had been reborn and was in good health. Ami had not been in good health for some time and would pass away in 1988. It is hard to imagine that the kind-hearted, gentle Ami Staehr could be “curt” with anyone. Ami seemed to know little about Oskar’s business dealings with Leopold Page and Martin Gosch and could not be expected to dig through thousands of pages of letters and other files to try to find the few vague documents that Traude wished to locate. She did mention the Polish letters from Page to Oskar, though Traude never responded to this point. After Ami died in 1988, Heinrich Staehr told his family not to go through the suitcase and other Schindler documents until after his death. His family respected his wishes.⁷⁹

Steven Spielberg, Schindler’s List, and Emilie

Questions about the contents and ownership of the collection of Oskar Schindler papers in the attic of the Staehr apartment in Hildesheim would not come up again until the late 1990s, when they were rediscovered by Chris and Tina Staehr after the death of Dr. Heinrich Staehr in 1997. By this time, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster film, Schindler’s List, had made Oskar Schindler’s name a household word throughout much of the world. But the film and its success, financial and otherwise, brought increasing criticism from Emilie Schindler, who felt not only left out of the story of her husband’s incredible exploits during the Holocaust but also from the film’s financial success. Emilie and her legal partner and heir, Erika Rosenberg, traveled widely criticizing Spielberg and his film. They also filed several law suits in Germany to gain control of the Schindler collection found in Hildesheim two years earlier and to seek damages from the newspaper that published a series of articles on the collection’s contents.

The story of Steven Spielberg’s decision ultimately to make Schindler’s List has been amply told elsewhere. Initially, Spielberg tried to turn the project over to other directors such as Billy Wilder, Roman Polanski, Sidney Pollack, and Martin Scorcese. Despite Spielberg’s entreaties, Polanski, who as a child lived in the Kraków ghetto and whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz, felt the story was too close to home. Pestered by Leopold Page, who called him every week from 1983 onwards about the film, Spielberg had various scripts drafted by Thomas Keneally and Kurt Luedtke, who wrote the script for Out of Africa. None of these scripts satisfied Spielberg, so he approached Martin Scorcese in 1988 with an offer to produce Schindler’s List if Scorcese would direct it. Scorcese asked Steven Zaillian to prepare a new script. However, after he saw Zaillian’s script, Spielberg had a change of heart. He convinced Scorcese, who thought only a Jewish director could adequately film the story of Oskar Schindler, to trade him Schindler’s List for another film on Spielberg’s production list, Cape Fear.⁸⁰

Spielberg’s decision finally to make a film of Keneally’s book was based on emotional growth and a need to come to grips with his own Jewishness after the birth of his first child. The results astounded everyone, including Spielberg, who was uncertain that the three-and-a-half hour film would break even financially. And, he wondered, how receptive was the world to a film as graphic as this one on the Holocaust? Schindler’s List, which opened in December 1993, received eleven Academy Award nominations and won seven for Best Film, Best Director [Steven Spielberg], Art Direction, Editing, Original Score, Cinematography, and Screenplay. During the next ten years, Schindler’s List grossed $321 million worldwide. Spielberg made $65 million on the film.⁸¹

To Spielberg’s credit, he donated his profits to the Righteous Person Foundation, “which was set up to encourage the flourishing of Jewish Life in the United States,” and the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which was to create an archive made up of the testimony of 50,000 Holocaust survivors throughout the world. In early 2004, the Shoah Foundation had recorded the testimony of 52,000 Holocaust survivors. When the project is completed, these testimonies will be placed in prominent archives and museums throughout the world for public use. The Shoah Foundation is also involved in other educational projects for young people on the Holocaust and genocide.⁸²

But Spielberg’s post-Schindler’s List humanitarian efforts meant little to Emilie Schindler, who achieved newfound fame as a result of the film. On June 24, 1993, she, along with Oskar, was declared a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem. She received the Righteous Gentile medal in both names in a special ceremony in Buenos Aires, and the sign in front of Oskar’s carob tree along the Avenue of the Righteous was changed to read “Oskar and Emilie Schindler.” Such recognition, though, only fueled Emilie’s criticism of her husband. Her first broadside came in a lengthy interview for the British tabloid, the Daily Mail (London) at the end of 1993, which was quickly republished in Ma’ariv, one of Israel’s most important daily newspapers. Emilie began the interview by discussing her disastrous marriage to Oskar, which she claimed began with his arrest on the day of her wedding because of trumped-up charges by a former lover. She spent her wedding night alone and considered her husband’s actions “beyond forgiveness.” She added: “My marriage was finished.” Expressing frustration over his fame, awards, and legend, Emilie considered “him simply as ‘the asshole.’” From her perspective, at the end of his life he was “a broken-down alcoholic, unable to come to terms with his diminishing sexual powers,” though it is hard to determine how she knew this because she had absolutely no contact with him during the latter part of his life.⁸³

The Daily Mail article by Corinna Honan depicted Emilie as an impoverished widow living “her last years at a subsistence in a shantytown outside the southernmost suburbs of Buenos Aires, Argentina.” She lived in a small house provided her by a local Jewish organization and her income was $300 a month. Emilie expressed particular contempt for Thomas Keneally and “roll[ed] her eyes at some of Spielberg’s more romantic fictions.” Yet she was more fair-minded when it came to the reasons for her husband’s actions during the Holocaust and the role she played in helping save Jews. Oskar, she explained, was motivated partly by humanitarian reasons because he had befriended some of the Jews that he saved. But, she added, “he was also looking after himself.” With the Russians moving closer and closer, Oskar, whom she considered a coward, “used the Jews as support” to avoid being sent to the front to fight the Russians. Emilie explained that her husband also regarded his Jewish workers as a “cushion.” She went on: “He felt more secure taking them with him. They seemed to give him courage.” She was equally forthright when it came to her involvement in helping saving Jews, which began when they all moved to Brünnlitz in the fall of 1944.⁸⁴

Emilie also told Honan, who spent quite a bit of time with her in San Vicente, that she did not enjoy the trip to Israel to film the final scene for Spielberg’s film. She expressed annoyance with the hundreds of Schindler Jews who tried to thank her for saving them and said she felt nothing at Oskar’s grave. She considered the Latin Cemetery where he was buried “a dump.” As she told the reporter: “My dogs have better graves. Ugly is not the word; it is worse.” She also felt nothing when she learned of her husband’s death. “I can only feel pity for myself, not for him.” She was equally distraught over her trip to Washington to see the premiere of Spielberg’s film. There, she saw the film twice. First with President Bill Clinton, when she fell asleep, and later in New York. “It was terrible, too much. First the museum [the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which had just opened], the film; I felt ill. The film looked just like it was then, and it took me back in time. It upset me very much. I lost my peace of mind.”⁸⁵

A flood of reporters made their way to Emilie’s home in San Vicente after the release of the film at the end of 1993. For the most part, the reclusive Emilie seemed to enjoy the fame and the opportunity to continue to criticize her husband, Thomas Keneally, and Steven Spielberg. To Katherine Ellison of Knight-Ridder Newspapers in early 1994, she insisted that Oskar was “stupid. Useless. Half crazy.” She added: “To hell with him.” She remained extremely critical of Thomas Keneally because she saw him as the source of the distorted view of her husband. Keneally, she claimed, relied too much upon Oskar’s memoirs and interviews with the Schindler Jews. She claimed that Keneally had never interviewed her and therefore downplayed her role in the “Schindler story.” But Keneally said that he tried to contact Mrs. Schindler through her attorney but was told at the time that she was too sick to do an interview. Instead, he sent her a list of questions to which she responded by mail. From Emilie’s perspective, her husband did little to save his beloved Jews: “It wasn’t Schindler, it was me. Schindler didn’t do anything. He was pitiful.”⁸⁶ This consistent and false complaint, particularly when coupled with Emilie’s harsh criticism of her husband, annoyed a lot of people who otherwise were ready to acknowledge all the wonderful things that she did for the Jews in Brünnlitz. This was particularly true of many of the Schindler Jews I interviewed. Though they were certainly sympathetic to Emilie’s sad, difficult life and her unfortunate marriage to Oskar, they had trouble embracing someone who was so openly critical of their beloved savior.

Emilie continued to criticize not only her husband but the Schindler Jews in a detailed interview she did with the German magazine Bunte in 1994, though she at least gave Oskar credit for coming up with the idea of saving his Jewish workers. But it was she, and not her husband, she claimed, who really did the hard work of saving the Schindler Jews. Yet she did agree that “Schindler [she refused to call him Oskar] really did worry greatly about [their] Jewish friends and workers.” But he had no idea about how to run a factory and how to protect people: “Thus I had to pull all of the strings together and regulate everything.” Emilie attributed his drinking, which became a particular problem for Oskar after the war, to the constant demands of partying with the SS.⁸⁷ She was also less than gracious when it came to the Schindler Jews, who, she claimed, never even thanked her for saving them.⁸⁸ This, of course, was simply not true. All the Schindler Jews I spoke to were extremely grateful for all that Emilie and Oskar had done for them. Moreover, people such as Itzhak Stern and Dr. Moshe Bejski had repeatedly tried to persuade Emilie to move to Israel in the 1960s and had been the ones who insisted that she be included in the financial aspects of the MGM film deal. Emilie, unfortunately, chose to cut herself off from the Schindler Jews, at least until after Spielberg’s film came out in the 1990s. This was her way, I suspect, of dealing with the pain of Oskar’s return to Germany in 1957.

Emilie’s tone was somewhat different in the memoirs she prepared with the help of Erika Rosenberg in 1996. Published first in Spanish as Memorias, they came out in the United States the same year as Where Light and Shadow Meet, and in Germany a year later as In Schindlers Schatten (In Schindler’s Shadow). Perhaps Emilie became more temperate because of her growing fame and the presence of Rosenberg, who increasingly saw herself as Emilie’s closest confidant and biographer. Emilie presented a much softer and more revealing side of herself in her memoirs, particularly as it related to her relationship and feelings towards her famous husband. It is apparent now from reading the interviews she gave soon after Spielberg’s film came out that she was initially shocked out of the protective psychological cocoon that she had built around herself in the years after Oskar’s return to Germany. The bitterness that she had held in check for so long exploded in the midst of her husband’s newfound fame.⁸⁹

She stated in her memoirs that she was particularly moved and troubled by her trip to Jerusalem in 1993 for the filming of the final scene in Steven Spielberg’s film. She remained bitter, though, towards “others in Los Angeles, whose names [she] would rather forget, who were very much aware of [her] existence and had made a lot of money selling the rights to the movie without any consideration for [her] whatsoever.”⁹⁰ Her trip to Jerusalem really made her come to grips with her repressed feelings towards her husband. Though she admitted that she knew little about his death, she claimed that he planned to return to Argentina a month before he died, a trip thwarted by “his latest lover.” She was uncertain whether she would have “taken him back” if he had returned to San Vicente. She then drifted into thoughtless accusations against Dr. Heinrich Staehr, who was, according to Emilie, “in charge of the operation” and the “husband of one of [Oskar’s] lovers.” Emilie said in her memoirs that she decided not to press charges against Dr. Staehr, but considered the nature of her husband’s death peculiar: “A defenseless man places his life in the hands of a potential enemy… perhaps in some way, it was Oskar’s last flirtation with danger.” These are strange comments and charges for a person who claimed she had no feelings for her husband.⁹¹

But perhaps more revealing was her new account of her visit to his grave in the Latin Cemetery in Jerusalem. She now admitted that she had placed a ritual stone on his grave and “silently said to him”

Emilie left Oskar’s grave knowing somehow that “the power of [her] thoughts had reached him, and felt, after all those years, a strange inner peace filling [her] spirit.”⁹² She went on to explain later in her memoirs her feelings about forgiveness, which she considered “magnificent,” particularly as it related to the Holocaust. “It requires us,” she explained, “at once to understand and to not forget, to value life and at the same time to not abandon the memory of those who died or the passion for justice.”⁹³

To say that Emilie’s world was forever changed by Spielberg’s film would be an understatement. In addition to meeting President Bill Clinton, she would also be received by numerous other dignitaries, such as President Roman Herzog of Germany, who earlier had given her Germany’s Federal Cross of Merit, and Pope John Paul II. She was particularly excited by her visit with the Holy Father in Rome in the spring of 1995. Though not a devout Roman Catholic, Emilie held closely to her beliefs and occasionally went to mass in the beautiful Catholic church just a block from her home in San Vicente. As she prepared to leave for her trip to Europe, she admitted her frustration: “I couldn’t tell then what it was I hated more: Oskar, or myself for being unable to expel him from my mind.” Her audience with the Holy Father in the Vatican reminded Emilie of her special ties to Oskar. The Pope, who spoke to her in “perfect German,” told her that as a Pole, he was “very grateful” for what she had done. Many Polish Jews, particularly in the Kraków area, had thanked Emilie and Oskar for saving their lives. John Paul II then added: “Your example of solidarity also saved Polish Catholics.” After her meeting with the Holy Father, Emile met the Chief Rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff, who held a wonderful reception for her and presented her with two books on the history of Italian Jewry.⁹⁴

But perhaps the most moving part of her trip to Europe that spring was her return to Germany for the first time in forty-six years. While in Bonn waiting to be received by President Herzog, she had a reunion with her beloved niece, Traude Ferrari. Emilie had helped raise Traude, and called her “my little girl.” Traude brought with her a photo album of family pictures that Emilie had given her in Brünnlitz. Emilie had few family pictures with her in San Vicente and only two of Oskar. This album was Emilie’s “only existing testimony” of her family, her childhood, her “years with Oskar.” Traude, who was, along with her mother and younger brothers, at Brünnlitz at the end of the war, had torn the photos out of the album and stuffed them under her blouse as Russian soldiers marched into the camp. The photographs, which Emilie included in her memoirs, gave Emilie “back an important part of her life.”⁹⁵

Emilie would not return to Europe for four years, when she made a trip back to visit Germany and her hometown, Maletín, in the Czech Republic. But she could not escape the shadow of her husband, who continued to be honored in both countries. In the summer of 1993, the Ackermann Congregation in Frankfurt and the Jewish congregations in the Czech Republic erected a memorial plaque in honor of Oskar outside the house where he had been raised in Svitavy. In 1994, ZDF (Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen), Germany’s public television station, produced a documentary about Oskar, Oskar Schindler: Retter and Lebemann (Oskar Schindler: Rescuer and Man of the World). The film, which was stimulated by Schindler’s List and included an interview with Spielberg, also had comments from Schindler Jews such as Dr. Moshe Bejski, Michael Garde, Ester Rechen, Joseph Bau, and Zeev Nahir. ZDF also interviewed Robin O’Neil, a retired British police inspector and scholar who had conducted considerable research on Schindler, and Dr. Dieter Trautwein.⁹⁶

The Koffer (Suitcase) Controversy

A few years before Emilie’s return to Germany in 1999, a discovery took place that had the potential to change dramatically the Oskar Schindler story as constructed by Thomas Keneally and Steven Spielberg. Once Emilie learned of it, she initiated two lawsuits in Germany, first to gain possession of her husband’s private papers, and then to win damages from the newspaper that published a series of articles on the famed collection. The discovery, of course, was Oskar Schindler’s forgotten suitcase (Koffer) containing many of his personal papers in the attic of the apartment of Ami and Heinrich Staehr in Hildesheim, Germany. Oskar had sent the first part of this collection in his grey, hard-sided Samsonite suitcase to the Staehrs sometime before his death. A few days after he died, Ami and her son Chris were able to retrieve more of his papers from his apartment in Frankfurt. Ami evidently loaned them briefly to Stefan Pemper, who later returned them. She then put the entire collection in Oskar’s Samsonite suitcase and stored them in a large wooden crate in the attic of her Hildesheim apartment. For the most part, at Heinrich’s insistence, the files were left untouched except for the times when Traude Ferrari asked for documents from the collection. After Ami died in 1988, Heinrich asked that the Schindler papers be left untouched by the family until after his death. After Schindlers Liste came out, he also refused to allow plaques to be erected to Oskar outside their home, fearing that neo-Nazis might use the site as a shrine. He asked his daughter-in-law, Tina, to handle all questions from the press about his relationship with Oskar Schindler. In time, the family completely forgot about the Schindler papers in the attic.⁹⁷

Dr. Heinrich Staehr died on June 3, 1997. A few days after his death, Chris, his brother Konrad, and Tina were cleaning out the apartment and collecting Dr. Staehr’s medical records and other private papers. Towards the end of the day, they decided to check the attic to see whether there was anything there. All they saw was a large wooden crate. As Chris looked inside, he saw a large stack of bundled papers. When he lifted the papers from the box, he saw a large, grey Samsonite suitcase at the bottom of the crate. He turned the suitcase’s luggage tag over, which read “O. Schindler.” Though Chris had helped his mother take papers out of Oskar’s Frankfurt apartment in 1974, he knew little about the suitcase full of documents that Oskar had sent earlier to Hildesheim. He also did not know that his mother had stored most of Schindler’s private papers in the Samsonite suitcase. Because his father had insisted that the family not touch or discuss the Schindler papers in the attic, Chris and the rest of the family presumed that Ami had earlier sent most of Oskar’s papers to Yad Vashem.⁹⁸

As Konrad seemed to have no interest in the suitcase, Chris and Tina decided to bring it home with them to Stuttgart, where they stored it in their basement. Though they were fully aware of the importance of its contents, they were not sure what to do with it, though their first instinct was that it should go to Yad Vashem. Several months later, Chris called Dr. Moshe Bejski in Israel and asked him about the prospect of donating the suitcase and Schindler’s private papers to Yad Vashem. Dr. Bejski told Chris that there was no hurry giving the papers to Israel’s national Holocaust memorial and archives. But questions about what to do with the suitcase collection were put on hold after it was discovered that Tina had breast cancer. Chris initially gave some thought to taking the suitcase to Yad Vashem himself but gave up that idea because of Tina’s illness. It would be another year before the Staehrs revisited the question about what to do with the suitcase. By Christmas 1998, Tina had fully recovered from her cancer and decided to organize the contents of the suitcase. When she had completed her work, Chris thought of writing an article about Oskar based on his own memories and the documents in the suitcase to commemorate Oskar’s birthday on April 28, 1999. But after a while, Chris decided that the topic was too personal for him. Consequently, he contacted a friend, Dr. Wolfgang Borgmann, who was the science editor at the Stuttgarter Zeitung, and asked whether he had any suggestions about what to do with the suitcase.⁹⁹

Dr. Borgmann suggested that Chris and Tina let one of his younger colleagues, Stefan Braun, who had just returned from Israel, look over the Schindler papers. Braun spent two days going through the suitcase files at the Staehr’s home in Stuttgart. Braun quickly concluded that the files were extremely important. Chris and Tina told him to take them back to his apartment where he could carefully go over them with another reporter from the Stuttgarter Zeitung, Claudia Keller. Claudia, a freelance reporter, spent the summer of 1999 going through the Schindler papers and decided to write a series of articles summarizing the most important documents in the suitcase. She was not certain, though, whether the Stuttgarter Zeitung’s editor, Dr. Uwe Vorkötter, would be interested in such a series because the articles were quite long. She thought she might have a better chance of publishing the articles in another German newspaper, Die Zeit, or in the German magazine Der Spiegel. However, once Stefan told Dr. Vorkötter about Claudia’s series, which Stefan coauthored, the editor insisted that they publish them in the Stuttgarter Zeitung. Claudia wrote most of the articles, which Stefan and Dr. Vorkötter edited before publication.¹⁰⁰

But before he decided to publish the series, Dr. Vorkötter invited Chris and Tina to his offices to make sure they were comfortable with its publication. He also wanted confirmation that the collection was genuine. He was a bit suspicious because of the 1983 scandal involving another German publication, Stern, and the fake Hitler diaries. On the eve of the publication of what became one of the longest series to run in a German newspaper, Stefan Braun brought the suitcase to the offices of the Stuttgarter Zeitung because, Dr. Vorkötter assured him, the newspaper had insurance to protect its contents. The series, which began in the Stuttgarter Zeitung on October 16, 1999, became an international sensation, mainly because it was thought that the Schindler collection contained the long lost original “Schindler’s List.” We now know, of course, that it did not. The excellent, well-written seven-part series, which appeared from October 16 through 26, was interspersed with articles about Emilie and comments from the international press on the discovery of the suitcase files. The Stuttgarter Zeitung later published the entire collection of articles, along with a lengthy interview with Mietek Pemper, as Schindlers Koffer: Berichte aus dem Leben eines Lebensretters (Schindler’s Suitcase: Report on the Life of a Rescuer).¹⁰¹

I first learned of the series while watching the late-night news in Washington, D.C. As a picture of Oskar Schindler was flashed on the screen, the reporter announced that the original “Schindler’s List” and Oskar’s other private papers had, according to the Stuttgarter Zeitung, been discovered in Germany. When I returned home several days later, I went to the Stuttgarter Zeitung’s Web site and downloaded the articles that had already been published. I knew immediately from reading the articles that the collection was genuine and that it would be invaluable to my research. I had long suspected that Schindler’s private papers were somewhere in Germany, though I thought the family of Dr. Lotte Schiffler probably had them. I decided to send an e-mail to Dr. Vorkötter and ask whether he could tell me more about the collection. He responded immediately and told me that the Schindler papers, along with the suitcase, had been sent to the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. He suggested that I contact Dr. Wolf Buchmann, the head of the Bundesarchiv there, about access to the collection. What I did not know at the time was that Emilie Schindler was preparing to file a lawsuit in Stuttgart to gain control of her husband’s private papers. I sent an e-mail to Dr. Buchmann, who told me that I was welcome to come to Germany and review the collection, though he could not guarantee access to it when I got there because of the impending lawsuit. I decided to take a chance, and spent much of January 2000 working in the Schindler collection in Koblenz.

It is difficult to know how Emilie and Erika Rosenberg first learned of the discovery of the suitcase. Erika worked at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires and was known to be very close to Emilie, so she probably learned about it as soon as the Stuttgarter Zeitung articles began to appear. Regardless, several days later, one of Germany’s most prominent magazines, Der Spiegel, called Emilie and asked her opinion about the recent discovery. Another magazine, Stern, also contacted Emilie in an effort to determine whether the suitcase files were genuine. Emilie said she could not tell until she saw them. She added, “I will fly to Germany within the next few days… to take the suitcase with me.”¹⁰²

But Emilie, who was about to turn ninety-two, was not physically able to make the trip. Instead, she sent Erika Rosenberg to Germany to retrieve the suitcase. Erika immediately flew to Stuttgart, thinking that the suitcase and the Schindler collection was still in the Staehr’s apartment. On the evening of October 21, Chris heard the bell ring at the gate outside their home. Tina, oddly enough, was talking on the telephone with Oskar’s daughter, Edith Schagl. Chris opened the outer gate leading to their home. A few seconds later, Erika Rosenberg knocked on their front door. She introduced herself and explained that she was a friend of Emilie’s who worked at the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires. “Emilie,” Erika went on, “sent me to fetch the suitcase.” Chris remembers that Erika was extremely nervous and was trembling. Chris asked Erika to come inside and offered her a glass of wine. Chris told Erika that though he believed the suitcase belonged to Emilie, he no longer had it.¹⁰³

When she had finished her white wine, Erika told Chris and Tina that she had to go. Chris, ever gracious, offered to call a taxi for Erika. She declined, saying that someone was waiting outside for her. Chris walked Erika to the front gate and noticed a TV crew from ZDF across the street. When the crew spotted Chris and Erika, they rushed over, and a ZDF journalist asked Chris about the location of the suitcase. Chris, who dislikes interviews and photographs, declined to be interviewed. Early the next morning, Erika called Tina and suggested that they meet at the Hotel Gloria at 9:00 A.M. Tina agreed, with one proviso—they be alone. When Tina drove up to the hotel, she saw the ZDF crew with Erika. She turned around and went home. Later, Erika called Tina to ask whether they could meet alone. Tina told her that she was too busy. With the exception of another telephone call from Erika four or five months later asking for another meeting, this was the last contact the Staehrs had with her. In light of Emilie’s lawsuit, Tina again declined to meet with Erika.¹⁰⁴

What Erika did not know when she first showed up at the Staehr’s home was that the suitcase and its files were being prepared for shipment to Yad Vashem via the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. Chris Staehr wanted the Bundesarchiv to make two copies of the files before they were sent to Israel— one on microfilm for researchers to use in Koblenz and a hardbound copy for Emilie. I was able to work in the Koblenz collection during much of January 2000. Each day, Dr. Buchmann would come by to see how I was doing. One evening, he invited me up to his office for coffee. As we were talking, he pointed to a library cart that was filled with grey bound volumes. This was the carefully reproduced, bound set of every letter and document in the Schindler suitcase that was to be sent to Emilie in Buenos Aires. Erika Rosenberg used this bound collection to produce her two edited, documentary collections on the Schindlers, Ich, Oskar Schindler: Die persönlichen Aufzeichnungen, Briefe und Dokumente (I, Oskar Schindler: The Personal Notes, Letters, and Documents) and Ich, Emilie Schindler: Erinnerungen einer Unbeugsamen (I, Emilie Schindler: Memories of an Inflexible One).

The transfer of the suitcase with all its valuable papers from the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz to Yad Vashem in Israel took place in early December 1999. It was initially sent in a diplomatic pouch from Frankfurt to David Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv via Lufthansa, the German national airline. For some strange reason, it was mysteriously sent back to Frankfurt. It was then reshipped to Israel in two separate packages—one containing the suitcase and another with the actual Schindler files—and arrived at Ben Gurion on December 4, 1999. As it was Shabbat, no one could pick it up from Yad Vashem and it remained there until the next day, when it was transferred to Yad Vashem. About ten days later, Chris and Tina arrived in Israel to check the status of the suitcase files. They were given a tour of Yad Vashem and spent about two hours meeting with Dr. Mordecai Paldiel, the head of the Righteous Gentile Department, who told them it would be about two years before scholars could have access to the collection. They also spent several days with Dr. Bejski in Tel Aviv.¹⁰⁵

But before all this took place, Emilie’s attorneys had contacted the police about the suitcase. About a week before it was sent to Israel, the police came to the offices of the Stuttgarter Zeitung looking for it. By this time, of course, the collection was at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. The police search was part of the first lawsuit that Emilie filed against the Stuttgarter Zeitung and Chris Staehr in November 1999 in an effort to gain control of Oskar’s suitcase and its contents. By the time the matter was brought before the court in Stuttgart on January 20, 2000, the suitcase and its contents were already in Israel, though Yad Vashem agreed to return everything if Chris Staehr and the Stuttgarter Zeitung lost the lawsuit. The court in Stuttgart quickly dismissed Emilie’s suit and held her responsible for the costs of her failed legal action.¹⁰⁶

The matter did not end there. Emilie and Erika decided to file a second lawsuit against the Stuttgarter Zeitung that asked for damages of DM 100,000 ($58,823). According to Emilie’s new lawsuit, the publication of the series by Claudia Keller and Stefan Braun in the Stuttgarter Zeitung in October 1999 had “infringed upon the ownership and author-rights to the papers in the suitcase.” According to Emilie’s attorney, had the suitcase and its contents been sold to a publication such as Der Spiegel, DM 100,000 was the estimated amount they would have fetched. But from Emilie and Erika’s perspective, there was more at stake here than just the assessed value of the suitcase and its contents. Before the trial, Rosenberg also asserted that the publication of the Schindler series in the Stuttgart newspaper had prevented her edited collection of documents, Ich, Oskar Schindler, from becoming a “bestseller.” The trial, which began on April 26, 2001, lasted only two days. Attorneys for the Stuttgarter Zeitung argued that the suitcase and its valuable papers had been a gift from Oskar Schindler to Ami Staehr and belonged to her estate and heirs. The court agreed and on April 27 Judge Werner Müller ruled that the Stuttgarter Zeitung had not acted “culpably” in printing the series eighteen months earlier. But though the court supported the position of the Stuttgart newspaper, Judge Müller suggested that it consider making, “as a charitable gesture and without recognition of a legal obligation,” a gift of DM 20,000 to DM 25,000 ($11,695 to $14,620) to Emilie. The judge said he doubted that Emilie could ever win a long legal battle in German courts over the matter, which meant that she would probably not live long enough to see the outcome.¹⁰⁷

I had been in contact with Dr. Vorkötter during this period and told him that I was going to Argentina in May to interview Emilie. Initially, he had been hesitant to agree to the humanitarian gift to Emilie because it might be seen as an admission that the Stuttgarter Zeitung had done something wrong in publishing the series on Oskar’s suitcase files. However, after some reflection, Dr. Vorkötter realized it was the right thing to do. But he was concerned that the money would go to Erika Rosenberg and not Emilie. Consequently, he asked whether I could contact someone with B’nai B’rith or another prominent Jewish organization in Buenos Aires who would be willing to accept the contribution from the Stuttgarter Zeitung and use it to create a trust fund to help Emilie. Fortunately, my research assistant in Buenos Aires, Adriana Brodsky, was a member of a very prominent Jewish family in the Argentine capital, and she was able to put me in contact with Elias Zviklich, the international senior vice president of B’nai B’rith International. I met with Mr. Zviklich, and he expressed interest in helping Emilie by creating a trust fund for her. I shared this information with Dr. Vorkötter when I returned to the United States several weeks later, though nothing ever came of these plans. In late June, the Stuttgarter Zeitung decided to give Emilie a “gift” of DM 25,000, which presumably went directly to Erika Rosenberg.¹⁰⁸

But my meeting with Mr. Zviklich was not the most important reason for my trip to Argentina. I went there to interview Emilie and to see what I could find out about her life and that of her husband while they lived in Argentina. Working with Adriana Brodsky, I was able to meet some of Emilie’s closest friends there, including Francisco Wichter, the last Schindler Jew in Argentina, and Ilse Chwat, Monika Caro, and Ilse Wartenleben. Each was a long time member of Traducion and had known Emilie for decades. They considered Emilie a friend and had played important roles in helping and befriending her. Ilse, Monika, and Ilse agreed to take me to see Emilie and to do anything they could to help me with my research. Their only stipulation was that they would not be in the same room with Erika Rosenberg. They said this without malice or anger. They just did not like her or trust her.¹⁰⁹

Francisco, Ilse Chwat, and Ilse Wartenleben took me to see Emilie on May 22 at Hogar los Pinos (Home in the Pines), the German rest home where she was living in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Emilie had been there since November 2000 after she fell and broke her hip while trying to move a wheelbarrow full of bricks. She lay alone in her yard for five hours before someone found her. Rosenberg, who visited Emilie only on weekends, was in Germany at the time promoting her book on Oskar Schindler, though she had people checking on Emilie twice a day. Before we went to visit Emile, I asked Francisco and Ilse Chwat whether I should bring anything for Emilie. They told me she had a sweet tooth and liked flowers. Adriana, who accompanied us on the visit, took me to a wonderful confiteria in Buenos Aires, R. Mossuti, where we picked up a pound of delicious handmade chocolates for Emilie. Francisco also had his wife make her a wonderful apple strudel, a Sudeten speciality. Ilse Chwat brought her flowers.

Needless to say, everyone was a little nervous about the visit because they were concerned that Erika would find out about it and try to intervene. There were a few tense moments when we arrived at the front gate. The staff was protective of Emilie’s privacy but, with the exception of Adriana and myself, knew everyone in our party because they visited Emilie frequently. Everyone warned me beforehand that Emilie had good days and bad days and they were not certain how receptive she would be. She evidently was quite bitter and depressed about being in the rest home and constantly talked about wanting to go home while we were together. Personally, I had less interest in an actual interview with Emilie than simply being in the presence of someone for whom I had high regard.

It was a cool, crisp fall day at los Pinos and Emilie met us outside. She was in a wheelchair and her nurse had settled her in a small pavilion. Fortunately, this was one of Emilie’s good days and she was quite talkative. I brought some photographs I had taken of her hometown, Maletín, and when she saw them she kept saying “Alte, alte.” It was fairly obvious that she was suffering from some form of dementia, common for someone of her age. Yet she was also full of life, particularly when we took her inside for strudel. I had taken some photos of her outside and she really warmed up to the camera when we went inside. Even at her age, Emilie had a radiant smile. You could also tell that she was accustomed to being in front of cameras. It took little prompting to get her to pose for a photograph. Periodically, she would look back at me and smile. Ilse Chwat said Emilie was very proud to know that an American had come so far to see her. Though she spoke heavily accented Spanish in San Vicente, she had reverted to German during our visit, though she would periodically mumble “Santa Maria y Jesus.”¹¹⁰

I left los Pinos late that afternoon with some wonderful memories of Emilie Schindler. I also hoped that my modest efforts to help set up a trust fund for her with B’nai B’rith would benefit her. Yet I was also worried about her well-being and health. Her wheelchair was rather shabby and I told one of the nurses that I would be more than happy to buy her a new one. But I was also concerned about her health. Her nurses told me that she was extremely depressed and slept most of the time because of the medication she was taking. This was why visitors were so important to her—at least they got her out of bed. But she was so frail and mentally sluggish that I asked Monika Caro, another close friend of Emilie’s, whether it was possible to talk with her physician to discuss her condition. Several days later, Dr. Alfredo May called me at my hotel. He confirmed that Emilie suffered from dementia and would never be able to leave the rest home. She was simply too ill.¹¹¹

I returned to the United States a week later thinking that Emilie would spend the last days of her life in Hogar los Pinos aided by the gift from the Stuttgarter Zeitung. Needless to say, I was stunned to learn five weeks later that Erika Rosenberg had checked Emilie out of los Pinos and taken her to Germany. The reason I was so upset was that I instinctively knew that the trip would kill Emilie. And I was not the only one concerned about Emilie’s well-being. Linda Diebel, a reporter with the Toronto Star, and Cristine Hurtado, an Argentine journalist who had spent a great deal of time with Emilie over the years, interviewed Rosenberg and visited Emilie just before Erika took her to Germany. Diebel, the Star’s Latin American correspondent who published a featured article on the interview and visit just after Emilie arrived in Germany, was extremely critical of Rosenberg’s treatment of Emilie, who, she claimed, now “languishes in a German hospital, drugged, and appearing to be under the complete control of one Erika Rosenberg.” Moreover, Deibel went on, Rosenberg checked Emilie out of los Pinos against the advice of her doctors and flew her to Germany, a trip that coincided “with the imminent German publication of Rosenberg’s fourth Schindler book.”¹¹²

Yet who was this person who seemed to wield such power over Emilie Schindler’s life? Erika Rosenberg, the child of German Jews who fled to Argentina in 1936, got to know Emilie in the early 1990s as part of a research project she was doing on German Jewish immigrants to Argentina. Peter Gorlinsky, the editor of Argentina’s principal German newspaper, the Argentinisches Tageblatt, told Rosenberg about Emilie and asked her whether she knew of “Mother Courage.” Rosenberg, intrigued, contacted Emilie in San Vicente and slowly established a very close relationship with her. After she gained Emilie’s confidence, she asked to record their conversations, which centered around the story of Emilie’s life. Over time, Erika put their talks on four hundred tapes, which became the basis of Emilie’s published memoirs. Over time, Rosenberg came to consider herself Emilie’s “voice” and “mouthpiece.”¹¹³

Linda Diebel considered Rosenberg’s relationship with Emilie pure opportunism. Moreover, Diebel and Hurtado blamed Rosenberg for Emilie’s criticism of Steven Spielberg and the suggestion that she did more to help Jews during the Holocaust than her husband, Oskar Schindler. Hurtado, who had interviewed Emilie many times between 1993 and 2001, said that “Emilie never, ever talked about money, or claimed that she was greater than Oskar.” Hurtado went on, “She never tried to take attention for her self. She would always say, ‘I don’t understand the fuss. It was not heroism. If you had been there, you would have done the same thing.’” Emilie also revealed her true feelings for Oskar. “I still love Oskar, I married him for life, until death.” Hurtado once asked Emilie whether she believed in heaven. “Who knows. But if there is, and I see Oskar, I will ask him: Why did you leave me alone?”¹¹⁴

Though Cristine Hurtado had established her own, special relationship with Emilie, she and Linda Diebel found it difficult to see Emilie in the summer of 2001. Diebel wrote that the only way Rosenberg would allow the two reporters to see her was if they paid for the interview. But the Toronto Star, Diebel explained, “doesn’t pay for interviews.” Finally, after a great deal of effort on Hurtado’s part, Rosenberg agreed to let them spend some time with Emilie in los Pinos. It was not a pleasant visit. They found her “lying in her bed, uncovered and exposed.” They were upset to find that Emilie’s wheelchair had no footrest and that “her feet drag[ged] along the ground.” Rosenberg was unresponsive when Hurtado mentioned this to her. Later, she was equally silent when both reporters complained about leaving Emilie outside in the cold. When Hurtado finally insisted on moving her back into her room, “Rosenberg complied.” Once inside, Rosenberg kept asking Emilie, “Isn’t Spielberg a pig?” Emilie did not respond and stared out the window.¹¹⁵

From Diebel’s perspective, Rosenberg’s relationship with Emilie “seem[ed] to be pretty much about money.”¹¹⁶ This, in part, also seemed to have been Emilie’s take on her friend. While I was in Argentina, several of the Traducion women I spoke to told me that during a Christmas party for Emilie the previous year, someone had asked her about Erika Rosenberg. Emilie responded that all Rosenberg wanted was “money, money, money.”¹¹⁷ The idea that Emilie was living in poverty was absurd. This idea is insulting not only to her neighbors in San Vicente but to her Traducion friends who cared for her over the years. Her home in San Vicente, though modest, was quite lovely and in a very desirable section of the town. If her house was a mess, it was, in part, because she allowed her many pets to roam freely through the house. Who would want or have nice furniture that twenty cats and multiple dogs would destroy? If Emilie had financial problems, some of it was because she had never handled money particularly well. This was a trait she shared with her husband, Oskar. In her article, Linda Diebel correctly noted that Emilie received various Argentine, German, and Jewish pensions, had received a $50,000 gift from Steven Spielberg, and royalties from the books that Rosenberg published under her name. Moreover, groups were constantly trying to find other ways to help her. Rosenberg, though, refused to discuss her financial relationship with Emilie. On the other hand, she claimed that Emilie needed a lot of money because her various pensions did not cover her medical expenses. Rosenberg claimed, for example, that she owed los Pinos thousands of dollars for Emilie’s care; but the director, Arno Hinckedeyn, said the German charity hospital required patients to pay only what they could afford. Moreover, B’nai B’rith had earlier offered to put Emilie in a German-speaking Jewish rest home free of charge, but Rosenberg rejected the offer.¹¹⁸

But all was moot once Rosenberg decided to take Emilie to Germany. According to Rosenberg, Emilie signed a notarized statement in 1997 stipulating that, upon her death, she be cremated and her ashes scattered along the La Plata River in Buenos Aires. But she also claimed that Emilie wanted to return to Germany. So, even though Emilie was too weak to get out of bed by herself, Rosenberg was determined to take her to Germany. Diebel, who interviewed Rosenberg just before she took Emilie to Germany on July 6, 2001, questioned the wisdom of taking this frail, ninety-three-year-old woman to Germany. After they left, Diebel asked Arno Hinckedeyn about this. He told her that the rest home’s physicians had advised against it. But Rosenberg somehow managed to find a physician in the German embassy to sign her out. Rosenberg, though, promised the los Pinos staff that she would return Emilie to Buenos Aires on July 21. But Diebel wondered how a person “so frail it is a huge deal to get her to the bathroom” could cope “with such a long flight [thirteen hours] to Germany.” Rosenberg told her that “Emilie would be medicated.” But this did not reduce the stress of the flight. Once in Germany, they had to wait for four hours in the Frankfurt airport for their flight to Bonn. When Emilie failed to wake up after the landing in Bonn, an emergency medical crew was brought on board and she was admitted to the Porzer Hospital for observation.¹¹⁹

But did Rosenberg really intend to return Emilie to Argentina as she had promised? Just before Rosenberg left with Emilie for Germany, Linda Diebel interviewed Erika in her apartment in Buenos Aires. Erika had now completed her last book on the Schindlers, Ich, Emilie Schindler, and she told Diebel: “It is enough. I am finished. I can only be responsible for myself.” As she looked around Rosenberg’s apartment, Diebel noticed several brochures on nursing homes in Germany on a nearby table, an indication that Rosenberg was at least looking into the prospect of leaving Emilie in Germany. Rosenberg explained that she might do this is “if that is what she [Emilie] wants.”¹²⁰

Rosenberg had planned for Emilie to be with her at their first news conference in Bonn on July 9 at the House of History (Haus der Geschichte) to announce the presentation of several items to the museum and the opening of a permanent exhibit on the Schindlers. Emilie, who was still in the hospital, was unable to meet Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, who also attended the ceremony. But the next morning, Rosenberg checked Emilie out of the Porzer Hospital and took her by car to Berlin—a four-hundred-mile trip. The following day, Emilie and Erika went on a tour of the Berlin’s New Synagogue-Centrum Judaicum and held a short press conference. Afterwards, they attended a lunch sponsored by the Oskar Schindler School (Oskar-Schindler-Oberschule) where, according to Rosenberg, “Emilie spoke with everyone at the table and even made a few jokes.” This was followed by a reception at the Bundestag, the lower house of the German parliament. It was apparent that Emilie was confused by everything going on around her because she frequently asked, “Where are we?” Rosenberg always explained that they were in Germany.¹²¹

The following day, they attended a special ceremony at the Oskar Schindler School, where Emilie signed autographs for an hour. Over the next few days, Emilie and Rosenberg visited the Rosa-Luxemburg Foundation, a local Protestant church, and the Berlin Zoo. Emilie, Rosenberg explained, “accepted everything naturally… and seemed to enjoy the attention she received.” Two days later, Rosenberg took Emilie to the Katharinenhof in nearby Fredersdorf, where she could rest before her final journey to Bavaria. On July 16, the State of Bavaria offered to find and pay for a suitable rest home for Emilie should she wish to settle in the southern German state. Rosenberg quickly accepted the Bavarian offer and arrangements were made to send Emilie to the Adalbert-Stifter Nursing Home, a Sudeten German rest home in Waldkreiburg. According to Rosenberg, this was where she wanted “to spend the evening of her life in the circle of her fellow Sudeten German friends.” But on July 21, the day before they were to leave for Waldkreiburg, Emilie had a stroke and was sent to the Märkisch-Oberland Hospital in Strasbourg, outside Berlin. Emilie’s physicians told Rosenberg that their patient could no longer speak and was physically too weak to travel to Bavaria. They also advised her to expect the worst. Emilie seemed to recover and regain some of her speech just as Rosenberg prepared to leave for Argentina, where she had pressing obligations. Soon after she returned to Buenos Aires, Rosenberg completed her final editing for her book on the Schindlers, Ich, Emilie Schindler. Her final statement in this work, dated August 2, 2001, was “All the best and love, Emilie!”¹²²

Rosenberg might have also gone back to Argentina to escape growing press criticism of her treatment of Emilie in Germany. Though she claims in Ich, Emilie Schindler that Emilie enjoyed the visits and the press conferences, the truth is somewhat different. Reporters were particularly critical of the 80 Euro ($97) fee that Rosenberg demanded for each interview, regardless of whether Emilie took part or not, and what seemed to be Rosenberg’s insensitivity to Emilie’s deteriorating health. When someone asked Rosenberg about the fees, she responded: “Journalists earn money from the interviews we give them, so why shouldn’t we, Mrs. Schindler, have the right to earn money to live from?” Derek Scully of the Irish Times, though, was more concerned about Emilie’s physical condition than the fees. The same was true of Kate Connolly at the Observer (London). Scully noted, for example, that during a press conference in the German parliament, Emilie sat with her “eyes shut, looking exhausted.” During her visit to the Oskar Schindler School, students rushed her wheelchair, pushing books in her lap to sign and “asking one question after another about her husband.” The visit, Scully observed, “overwhelmed and exhausted” Emilie. Rosenberg had to cancel several television interviews with the BBC and other networks because of Emilie’s growing exhaustion. Scully said that “the rapid deterioration of Emilie’s health is no surprise to those who watched her as she was dragged along from one reception to another for a week, accompanied always by Rosenberg.” During one of the few interview sessions that Emilie was able to attend, she was “so mentally unaware that it had to be abandoned.” Needless to say, the interview was never aired. When Kate Connolly asked Rosenberg whether she had brought Emilie to Germany to help promote her new book, Rosenberg denied it. But Erika told Derek Scully of the Irish Times that she hoped Emilie would “recover for the October launch of Ich, Emilie Schindler, which… would tell the full story of the woman behind Oskar Schindler.”¹²³

Emilie seemed to recover a bit after Erika left and by mid-August was able to sit up in bed and smile. But during the next seven weeks, her condition deteriorated and on Friday, October 6, 2001, she died of a stroke, just sixteen days short of her ninety-fourth birthday. But it would be another week before a cemetery could be found to bury her. With the help of Dr. Herbert Flessner, a prominent Sudeten German who owned Langen Müller Herbig, the publishing house that did Erika Rosenberg’s books on the Schindlers, it was decided to inter her in the cemetery in Waldkreiburg, which is about an hour’s drive east of Munich. I visited Emilie’s grave in Waldkreiburg in the fall of 2003, and I have to say that it is exquisitely beautiful. In fact, once I got beyond the confines of Munich and into the rolling hills of southeastern Bavaria, I felt that I was once again back in the Sudetenland. It was most appropriate that Emilie be buried here. According to Dr. Eva Habel of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft in Munich, Waldkreiburg was founded after World War II by Sudeten Germans forced out of Czechoslovakia. Though the village’s population is now only about half Sudeten German, the cemetery is a quiet tribute to its Sudeten German heritage.¹²⁴ Emilie’s white tombstone is simple but beautiful. It has a cross carved on the left with two inscriptions to the right—“Emilie Schindler: Alt Moletein/Sudeten 1907-Strausberg/Brandenburg 2001” and “Wer einen Menschen Rettet, Rettet die Ganze Welt [Whoever saves one life saves the whole world].” Just to the right of the tombstone is a crucifix. As I placed a stone on her headstone and a candle just in front, I thought of Francisco Wichter’s final tribute to Emilie. I had written Franciso in the summer of 2001 after I learned that Emilie had been taken to Germany. I wanted to know when he had learned of Emilie’s departure. He told me that he did not know about it until after Emilie left for Germany but had suspected something as we were leaving los Pinos on the day of our visit. Emilie, he said, bid us goodbye in a very “maternal way,” something she had never done before. Needless to say, he and Emilie’s other Traducion friends, who had loved and cared for her for many years, were upset because they never had a chance to say goodbye. These are the last words in his mournful letter: “Emilie, may your soul rest in peace and wholeness. She was a great fighter in the good and bad times.”¹²⁵