Schindler's list should return to Germany: widow
Oskar Schindler’s widow insisted yesterday that a suitcase full of the German industrialist’s documents, among them a list of some 1,200 Jewish prisoners he is credited with saving from the Nazis, should be moved from Israel to Germany.
‘‘It is my wish and will that these documents, with the list of names of the rescued Jews, return to Germany soon,’’ Emilie Schindler said at Germany’s main history museum in Bonn, which she maintained would be the best place for them.
Schindler’s 94-year-old widow, who now lives in a home for the elderly in Argentina, has claimed she was Schindler’s sole heir, even though they had not lived together in their later years.
She says she has the right to the documents found by a German couple in 1999 and given to the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper, which published excerpts and donated the papers and photographs to Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial.
Last month, a Stuttgart court ordered the newspaper to pay Emilie Schindler 25,000 marks (about £8,000) for publishing the documents. However, she reportedly has abandoned legal efforts to claim the documents.
Oskar Schindler saved Jews by drawing up lists with fictitious jobs in his factory in occupied Poland to convince the Nazi SS the workers were vital to the war effort. His efforts are well known thanks to the movie Schindler’s List.
Schindler and his wife emigrated to Argentina in 1949, but he left her behind in 1958 and returned to Germany, where he died in 1974. He was buried in Jerusalem at his own request.
Emilie Schindler was at the Haus der Geschichte, or House of History, in the former German capital of Bonn today to hand over officially other documents she donated earlier this year, including excerpts from the diary of one of the Jews her husband saved.
