‘What is unique about the invitation is that Spielberg wrote to Oskar’s widow as a Jew whom Oskar would have saved. She said: ‘I met Emilie three years before Spielberg sent her an invitation to the last scene of Schindler’s List to be held in Jerusalem.

For auction at Lyon and Turnbull, Edinburgh “He was on the list and gave me a lamp I keep in my living room.The lot of 48 cassette tapes, containing a series of interviews conducted with Emilie Schindler between 19, but some as late as 1998. “He showed me his concentration camp number tattooed in his arm and told me I had been like a mother to him. “The only visit that really moved me was from a man that came here and barely said a word,” she writes in her book. When the hype over the film was over, she moved back to her house and her 12 cats. In 1963, the Argentine B’nai B’rith association found her and gave her a small monthly pension.Īfter Spielberg’s movie was released, she was invited to the United States and Israel and was received by the pope. The Germans did not want Jews in their town.”Įmilie further claims that Oskar was “indifferent” to his workers’ welfare, adding that it was she who saw after their well-being.Īfter the war, the Schindlers left Europe for Argentina.Īfter failing in several business ventures here, Oskar took a loan from a lover and left his wife, never to return.Įmilie sold everything to pay his debts and moved to a simple house in a poorer suburb of Buenos Aires.įor years, she subsisted “on tangerines from my trees and milk,” she writes. “It was I who got the major of Brunnlittz to authorize the Jewish workers to settle in his town. “Neither he nor Tom Keneally, who wrote ‘Schindler’s Ark,’ on which the movie was based, ever bothered to ask me how things truly were,” she writes.Īccording to Emilie, Oskar’s role in saving the Jews on the list was “overstated” both in the movie and the book. Schindler also claims that Spielberg “idealized” her husband’s actions during the war. In the book, co-written with journalist Erika Rozenberg, she charges that her husband struggled to keep his factory open only because “he feared he would be drafted and sent to the Russian front if he ceased to be an industrialist.”

In “Memoirs,” a book just published here, Emilie Schindler attempts to set the record straight about her late husband, whom she describes as a “selfish coward,” a womanizer who did not particularly care whether she found out about his adventures and an agent for the German intelligence service.

This is the message that Emilie Schindler attempts to convey about her husband, Oskar, the subject of director Steven Spielberg’s highly acclaimed film “Schindler’s List.”

Oskar schindler's wife