E. Schindler, 93; Saved Jews From Nazis

Emilie Schindler, the wife of industrialist Oskar Schindler who played an important role in his efforts to save hundreds of Jews from Nazi death camps during World War II, has died. She was 93.

Schindler died Friday at a hospital in Strausberg, outside Berlin, where she had been taken July 21 for treatment of an undisclosed ailment, her biographer, Erika Rosenberg, announced in a statement.

The cause of death was not revealed, but news reports at the time of the hospitalization said she had suffered a stroke.

The Schindlers’ campaign to save at least 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust went largely unnoticed until Thomas Keneally’s book about the effort was published in 1982. Even more acclaim grew from the 1993 Oscar-winning film by Steven Spielberg.

Yet Emilie Schindler complained bitterly that “Schindler’s List” overlooked her role in keeping the Jews alive. “Oskar is the hero--and what about me? I saved many Jews too,” she told German television in 1999.

According to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, which bestowed on her the “Righteous Among the Nations” designation in 1993, she prevented the Nazis from sending a trainload of 120 starving Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz.

Oskar Schindler convinced the Nazi SS camp commander that the emaciated, frostbitten men were needed to work in his factory. Upon their arrival, Emilie Schindler nursed them back to health. None of them ever worked.

In 1994, she received the highest honor bestowed by the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles--the Righteous Among the Nations award. Rabbi Marvin Heir, the center’s dean and founder, called her contributions substantial.

“She was not only the woman behind the man,” he said. “She was . . . an equal partner in his achievements.”

Heir said the Schindlers “did what kings and prime ministers and popes would not do. They cared.”

The daughter of a wealthy farmer, Emilie Pelze was born in a German-speaking village in what is now the Czech Republic, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. She met Schindler, then a tractor salesman, when he made a sales call on her father. They married in 1928 and moved to Krakow, Poland, where they ran a factory later used to harbor Jewish laborers during World War II.

The Schindlers immigrated to Argentina after the war, but Oskar returned to Germany in 1958, leaving Emilie behind. Though they never saw each other again--he died in 1974--the childless couple never divorced.

For decades, she lived alone in Argentina, subsisting on a state pension until the film brought her more attention.

In her memoir, “Where Light and Shadow Meet,” written with Rosenberg and published by Norton, Emilie Schindler portrayed her husband as a womanizer and as self-serving as he was generous.

Her recollections of scrounging for bread and medicine on the black market and begging for food for the Jewish laborers they kept were detailed in the book, illustrating her claims that her husband hadn’t single-handedly saved the lives of the condemned Jews.

She had lived in Argentina since 1949, but moved to Germany this year, saying she wanted to spend her final days there. A retirement home in Bavaria accepted her, but she fell ill and was hospitalized at the Maerkisch-Oderland clinic.