Brinnlitz, and though it understates numerically the
extent of his rescue, it declares that it has been
erected in love and gratitude. Ten days
later in Jerusalem, he was declared a Righteous
Person, this title being a peculiarly
Israeli honor based on an ancient
tribal assumption that in the mass of Gentiles, the God of Israel would always provide a leavening of just men. Oskar was invited also to plant a carob tree in the Avenue of the Righteous leading to the Yad Vashem Museum. The tree is still there, marked by a plaque, in a grove which contains trees planted in the name of all the other Righteous. A tree for Julius Madritsch, who had illicitly fed and protected his workers in a manner quite unheard of among the Krupps and the Farbens, stands there also, and a tree for Raimund Titsch, the Madritsch supervisor in P@lasz@ow. On that stony ridge, few of the memorial trees have grown to more than 10 feet.
The German press carried stories of
Oskar’s wartime rescues and of the Yad
Vashem ceremonies. These reports, always laudatory, did not make his life easier.
He was hissed on the streets of Frankfurt, stones were thrown, a group of workmen jeered him and called out that he ought to have been burned with the Jews. In 1963 he punched a factory worker who’d called him a “Jew-kisser,” and the man lodged a charge of assault. In the local court, the lowest level of the German judiciary, Oskar received a lecture from the judge and was ordered to pay damages. “I would kill myself,” he wrote to Henry Rosner in Queens, New York, “if it wouldn’t give them so much satisfaction.”
These humiliations increased his dependence on the
survivors. They were his only emotional and
financial surety. For the rest of his life he
would spend some months of every year with them, living
honored and well in Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem, eating free of charge at a
Rumanian restaurant in Ben Yehudah
Street, Tel Aviv, though subject sometimes
to Moshe Bejski’s filial efforts to limit his
drinking to three double cognacs a night. In the
end, he would always return to the other half of his
soul: the disinherited self; the mean, cramped
apartment a few hundred meters from
Frankfurt’s central railway station.
Writing from Los Angeles to other
Schindlerjuden in the United States that
year, Poldek Pfefferberg urged all
survivors to donate at least a day’s pay a
year to Oskar Schindler, whose state he
described as “discouragement, loneliness, disillusion.”
Oskar’s contacts with the Schindlerjuden
continued on a yearly basis. It was a seasonal
matter—half the year as the Israeli
butterfly, half the year as the Frankfurt
grub. He was continually short of money. A Tel Aviv committee of which Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Moshe Bejski were again members continued to lobby the West German government for an adequate pension for Oskar. The grounds for their appeal were his wartime heroism, the property he had lost, and the by-now-fragile state of his health. The first official reaction from the German government was, however, the award of the Cross of Merit in 1966, in a ceremony at which Konrad Adenauer presided. It was not till July 1, 1968, that the Ministry of Finance was happy to report that from that date it would pay him a pension of 200 marks per month. Three months later, pensioner Schindler received the Papal Knighthood of St. Sylvester from the hands of the Bishop of Limburg.
Oskar was still willing to cooperate with the Federal Justice Department in the pursuit of war criminals. In this matter he seems to have been implacable. On his birthday in 1967, he gave confidential information concerning many of the personnel of KL P@lasz@ow. The transcript of his evidence of that date shows that he does not hesitate to testify, but also that he is a scrupulous witness. If he knows nothing or little of a particular SS man, he says so.
He says it of Amthor; of the SS man
Zugsburger; of Fraulein Ohnesorge, one
of the quick-tempered women supervisors. He does not hesitate, however, to call Bosch a murderer and an exploiter, and says that he recognized Bosch at a railway station in Munich in 1946, approached him, and asked him if—after P@lasz@ow—he could manage to sleep.
Bosch, says Oskar, was at that point living under
an East German passport. A supervisor
named Mohwinkel, representative in
P@lasz@ow of the German Armaments Works, is also roundly condemned; “intelligent but brutal,” Oskar says of him. Of Goeth’s bodyguard, Gr@un, he tells the story of the attempted execution of the Emalia prisoner Lamus, which he himself prevented by a gift of vodka. (it is a story to which a great number of prisoners also testify in their statements in Yad Vashem.) Of the NCO Ritschek, Oskar says that he has a bad reputation but that he himself knows nothing of his crimes. He is also uncertain whether the photograph the Justice Department showed him is in fact Ritschek. There is only one person on the Justice Department list for whom Oskar is willing to give an unqualified commendation. That is the engineer Huth, who had helped him during his last arrest. Huth, he says, was highly respected and highly spoken of by the prisoners themselves.
As he entered his sixties, he began working for the German Friends of Hebrew University. This involvement resulted from the urgings of those Schindlerjuden who were concerned with restoring some new purpose to Oskar’s life. He began to work raising funds in West Germany. His old capacity to inveigle and charm officials and businessmen was exercised once again. He also helped set up a scheme of exchanges between German and Israeli children.
Despite the precariousness of his health, he still lived and drank like a young man. He was in love with a German woman named Annemarie, whom he had met at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. She would become the emotional linchpin of his later life.
His wife, Emilie, still lived, without any
financial help from him, in her little house in
San Vicente, south of Buenos Aires. She
lives there at the time of the writing of this book. As
she was in Brinnlitz, she is a figure of
quiet dignity. In a documentary made
by German television in 1973, she spoke— without any of the abandoned wife’s bitterness or sense of grievance—about Oskar and Brinnlitz, about her own behavior in Brinnlitz.
Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.
In 1972, during a visit by Oskar to the
New York executive office of the American
Friends of Hebrew University, three
Schindlerjuden, partners in a large New
Jersey construction company, led a group of
seventy-five other Schindler prisoners in
raising $120,000 to dedicate to Oskar a
floor of the Truman Research Center at
Hebrew University. The floor would house a Book of Life, containing an account of Oskar’s rescues and a list of the rescued. Two of these partners, Murray Pantirer and Isak Levenstein, had been sixteen years old when Oskar brought them to Brinnlitz. Now Oskar’s children had become his parents, his best recourse, his source of honor.
He was very ill. The men who had been
physicians in Brinnlitz—Alexander
Biberstein, for example—knew it. One of them
warned Oskar’s close friends, “The man should not be
alive. His heart is working through pure
stubbornness.”
In October 1974, he collapsed at his
small apartment near the railway station in Frankfurt and died in a hospital on October 9. His death ce
rtificate says that advanced hardening of the arteries of the brain and heart had caused the final seizure. His will declared a wish he had already expressed to a number of Schindlerjuden—that he be buried in Jerusalem. Within two weeks the Franciscan parish priest of Jerusalem had given his permission for Herr Oskar Schindler, one of the Church’s least observant sons, to be buried in the Latin Cemetery of Jerusalem.
Another month passed before Oskar’s body was
carried in a leaden casket through the crammed
streets of the Old City of Jerusalem to the
Catholic cemetery, which looks south over the
Valley of Hinnom, called Gehenna in the
New Testament. In the press photograph of the
procession can be seen—amid a stream of other
Schindler Jews—Itzhak Stern, Moshe
Bejski, Helen Hirsch, Jakob Sternberg,
Juda Dresner.
He was mourned on every continent.
APPENDIX
SS Ranks and Their
Army Equivalents
COMMISSIONED RANKS
Oberst-gruppenf@uhrer: general
Obergruppenf@uhrer: lieutenant general
Gruppenf@uhrer: major general
Brigadef@uhrer: brigadier general
Oberf@uhrer: (no army equivalent)
Standartenf@uhrer: colonel
Obersturmbannf@uhrer: lieutenant colonel
Sturmbannf@uhrer: major
Hauptsturmf@uhrer: captain
Obersturmf@uhrer: first lieutenant
Untersturmf@uhrer: second lieutenant
NONCOMMISSIONED RANKS
Oberscharf@uhrer: a senior noncommissioned
rank
Unterscharf@uhrer: equivalent to sergeant
Rottenf@uhrer: equivalent to corporal
Schindler's List Page 46