Schindler’s ‘Equal Partner’ : Holocaust: Survivors and others praise the courage of the 86-year-old widow of the German businessman who saved more than 1,100 lives during World War II.

The tiny white-haired woman in the navy-blue pantsuit was greeted with smiles and tears as she made her way, supported by two rabbis, toward the menorah-shaped monument at the Museum of Tolerance, where she lit a flame to remember the 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

“Let me touch you,” said one woman as she reached out to embrace Emilie Schindler, who as the wife of Oskar Schindler helped save more than 1,100 Jews during World War II.

In the movie “Schindler’s List,” Emilie Schindler was portrayed as the long-suffering wife of a man who did great good but had a fondness for high living, and a straying eye, that few spouses could endure.

But on Sunday, during a day of Holocaust memorials, the 86-year-old widow was welcomed to Los Angeles as the woman who persuaded Nazi officials to let Schindler move his factory from Krakow, Poland, to their home town of Brinnlitz, Czechoslovakia--and their Jewish workers along with it.

She also helped keep the factory open by retrieving her husband repeatedly after he was arrested by the Gestapo, and procured black-market food and medicine for the workers. And she helped spoon-feed women who arrived at the factory from the death camp at Auschwitz, where they nearly starved.

“She was not only the woman behind the man. She was . . . an equal partner in his achievements,” said Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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Hier told about 2,000 people gathered in the courtyard of the Westside museum that the Schindlers “did what kings and prime ministers and popes would not do. They cared.”

In May, Emilie Schindler will receive the Wiesenthal Center’s highest honor--the Righteous Amongst the Nations award--along with Miep Gies, who hid Anne Frank’s family in the Netherlands and preserved her diary after the family was taken by the Nazis.

Schindler spoke briefly at Sunday’s lunchtime event, from which several hundred people had to be turned away because of lack of space. Later in the afternoon, a candlelight procession and prayers were conducted at the Los Angeles Holocaust Monument in Pan Pacific Park, marking the 50th anniversary of the liquidation of the Hungarian Jewish community.

“Thank you for the love you are extending to me,” Schindler said in German through a translator. “I did not expect any thanks. I just did what a person can do when other people are in trouble, when people are being murdered.”

She was greeted by a dozen local Holocaust survivors saved by the efforts of her and her husband. Among them was Leopold Page, the Beverly Hills luggage store owner who persuaded Thomas Kenneally to write the book on which the celebrated movie was based.

Emilie Schindler traveled to Los Angeles for the ceremony from her home in Argentina, where she and her husband moved after the war. In the late 1950s, Oskar Schindler left Argentina for Germany after several business ventures failed, but Emilie stayed behind. The Buenos Aires chapter of B’nai B’rith bought the house in which she still lives and helped her out financially as her husband, who died in 1974, never repeated his wartime business successes.

In interviews after the ceremony, Schindler cracked jokes and responded with a twinkle in her eyes as she fielded reporters’ questions. Her first impressions of her husband? “He was very elegant.”

But she soon tired of the same old subject and declared with a smile: “Enough about him!”

Was she afraid during the war of what might happen to her for aiding the Jews?

“If I was afraid, I wouldn’t have done anything,” she said. “If you’re afraid to do something, you’ll never do anything.”