Miep Gies
Miep Gies, tiny, gentle and courageous, is now 96 years old. An unfamiliar name to most people, but without this remarkable woman, there would be no The Diary of Anne Frank. During the Nazi occupation of Holland the Austrian-born Dutch woman risked her life daily to hide Anne Frank and her family from the Nazis. For more than two years, Miep helped the Franks and four other people evade the Gestapo by bringing food, comfort and news of the world to them in a tiny hideout in the canal-side building that housed the family business.
It all ended on August 4, 1944, when their hiding place was betrayed and the family was arrested by the Nazis. A few hours later, wandering mournfully through the four small upstairs rooms, Miep discovered the plaid-cloth-covered diary kept by the young teenager.
By saving the diary from the debris left by the Nazis, Miep Gies made sure that Anne Frank’s name was known around the world - since its initial publication in 1947, The Diary of Anne Frank has sold more than 25 million copies in 54 languages. After the Bible, it is the most widely read book in the world - for many children, their first direct brush with the horrors of the Holocaust. Though Anne Frank never lived to see her 16th birthday, her innermost thoughts scribbled on scraps of paper still challenge us a full fifty years after her death ...
Ever since, Miep Gies has devoted her life to keeping the memory of her beloved friends alive. She is the only person mentioned in The Diary of Anne Frank who is still alive. Every year on August 4, she closes her curtains, ignores the doorbell, the telephone. Every year on August 4, Miep Gies grieves for her lost Jewish friends.
Miep Gies was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1909 as Hermine Santrouschitz. She was five years old, when the First World War began and because of the serious food shortages during the war, she soon became undernourished and sick. In her book Anne Frank Remembered Miep recalled:
"When I was ten years old, my parents had another child; another daughter. Now there was even less food for us all. My condition was worsening, and my parents were told that something had to be done or I would die."
As part of a relief program to help malnourished children she was sent by her hard-pressed parents to live with a middle-class Dutch foster family in Leiden in Holland:
"The train was filled with many children like me, all with cards around their necks. Suddenly, the faces of my parents were no longer in sight anywhere and the train had begun to move. All the children were scared and apprehensive about what was to become of us. Some were crying. Most of us had never even been outside our streets, certainly never outside Vienna. I felt too weak to observe much, found the chugging motion of the train made me sleepy."
It was pitch-black, the middle of the night, when the train stopped. The sign beside the still-steaming train said Leiden:
"Opposite the exhausted, sick children crowded a group of adults. Suddenly, those adults came at us in a swarm and began to fumble with our cards, reading off the names. We were helpless to resist the looming forms and fumbling hands. A man, not very big but very strong-looking, read my tag. Ja, he said firmly, and took my hand in his, helping me down from the chair. He led me away, I was not afraid and went with him willingly."
After several weeks, some of Miep's strength began to return.
Young Miep thrived in her new Dutch home, she came to love her new family very much - five children, not much money, but great kindness. They taught her generosity. She never lived with her parents again. She was a good student, a reliable secretary, had a lively social life and was one of the first girls in Amsterdam to learn the Charleston.
In 1933 she took a job as an office assistant for Otto Frank, who had brought his Jewish family to Holland from Germany to escape the Nazis and reestablished his business in Amsterdam. Miep soon became good friends with the Frank family - Otto, his wife Edith, and their daughters, Margot and Anne.
The family's feelings of security collapsed, however, when in 1940, Adolf Hitler and his troops conquered Holland and the freedom of the Jews began to be severely restricted. Dictates on where Jews could shop, swim or go to school became a part of everyday life. As the brutality of the Nazis soon accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the Jews dawned on Otto Frank in all its horror. He spent 1941-42 preparing and stocking an annex behind his business office at Prinsengracht 263 into a hiding place. The entrance to these rooms on the third and fourth floors was concealed by a moving bookcase which could be closed.
He came to his loyal employee and friend Miep Gies with a question that would, in a split second, change her life forever. 'Miep,' he said, 'Are you willing to take on the responsibility of taking care of us if we go into hiding?' There was an immediate reply: 'Of course'. Of course, she said without asking for details. She agreed to help the Franks go into hiding in the secret annex despite threat of imprisonment, deportation or execution.
On her 13th birthday in 1942 Anne received as a gift from her parents, a diary. She immediately took to writing her intimate thoughts and musings. A few short weeks later, however, Margot received a notice from the Nazi SS to report for work detail at a labor camp. On July 5th, 1942, Anne and the Frank family moved to the 'Secret Annex' ..
Eight people eventually came to live in the secret annex. There were the four members of the Frank family, Otto Frank, Edith Frank, Margot and Anne, three from the Van Pels family, Herman and Auguste Van Pels and their son Peter, and an elderly man named Pfeffer, Miep's dentist.
On July 16, 1941, Miep Santrouschitz married her boyfriend, Jan Gies, a social worker and member of the Dutch underground. Miep, Jan and three others risked their lives daily and acted as helpers for the people in the annex, and brought them food, supplies and news of the world outside the darkened windows.
Miep's friendship with Anne Frank was especially strong. When she wrote the diary, Anne changed all the names of the people in it, to protect them from Nazi retribution - except for Miep, whose first name remained the same.
Miep brought her blank accounting books so Anne could continue to scribble her thoughts after she filled the checkered diary. Miep bought Anne her first pair of heels, secondhand red pumps, which Anne teetered around on, biting on her lip, until she mastered them. Miep even supplied some lavender peonies to Peter, who presented them to Anne as a sign of his affection.
One night, Anne persuaded Miep to sleep over in the attic. Miep spent a suffocating, sleepless night on Anne's small, hard bed. She listened to the church clock across the garden chime at 15-minute intervals, listened to her own heart pound. She became aware of what it meant to be imprisoned in those small rooms and felt a taste of the helpless fear these people were forced to endure day and night.
It all ended on August 4, 1944, when their hiding place was betrayed, probably by a Dutch woman Lena Hartog-van Bladeren. She was one of the cleaning women working in the office in front of the annex ...
The eight who lived in the annex were arrested by the Nazis and taken to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, where the courageous Miep rushed to plead for their release - in vain. Two of the five who hid the group were sent to concentration camps. She herself was spared only because she was Austrian by birth, like the arresting officer.
As the Nazis searched the annex for valuables such as money, the briefcase in which Anne kept her writings was opened and the papers were scattered on the floor. Little did these men realize the eventual value of these materials.
Miep, who had supplied all of the notebooks for her young friend' s diary, was determined to retrieve them, despite the enormous threat from the Nazis. Using a spare set of keys, she visited the ransacked attic after the arrests, in defiance of Nazi orders. There, among the scattered papers on the floor, she found Anne's red-checked diary. Without opening it, she put it in an unlocked drawer of her desk, hoping to return it to Anne after the war.
Otto Frank was the only survivor of the eight hidden Jews. Herman Van Pels was gassed upon the group's arrival at Auschwitz, September 6, 1944. His wife died between April 9 and May 8, 1945, in Theresienstadt KZ camp in Czechoslovakia. Their son Peter died on May 5, 1945, in Mauthausen KZ camp in Austria, after a forced march from Auschwitz. Fritz Pfeffer died December 20, 1944, at Neuengamme KZ camp. Anne's mother died January 6, 1945, at Auschwitz-Birkenau and her older sister, Margot, died at Bergen Belsen a few days before Anne.
Miep Gies hid the precious diary, keeping it for a year until official word arrived that Anne was dead. On that dreadful day, she reached into her desk drawer, removed the sheaves of paper, and handed them to a shattered Otto Frank.
'Here,' she told him, 'is your daughter Anne's legacy to you.'
Otto Frank decided to fulfill his daughter's wishes and arranged for the diary to be published in 1947. He lived with Miep and Jan Gies for seven years. He died in 1980.
Miep Gies didn't just help the eight people in the annex. She and Jan Gies hid a young Jewish student in their apartment. Miep never told Otto Frank about that.
Today, more than fifty years later, Miep Gies has spoken all over the United States and Europe on behalf of the Anne Frank Center, an international organization dedicated to tolerance. She lives alone in Amsterdam. Her husband, Jan, died in January 1993, 87 years old. He was honored after the war for his work in the resistance, receiving the Yad Vashem medal in Israel in 1977. In 1987, Jan and Miep Gies were presented with an award from the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith. In 1994 she received the Raoul Wallenberg Award for Bravery and in May that same year, she received The Righteous Amongst the Nations Award - along with Emilie Schindler.
Not long ago Miep Gies told about her friends hiding in the Annex:
"I have no word to describe these people who were still always friendly and grateful. Yes, I do have a word, Heroes. True heroes they were. People sometimes call me a hero. I don't like it .. I myself, I'm just a very common person. I simply had no choice. I could not save Anne's life. However, I did save her diary and by that I could help her most important dreams to come true. She tells us that she wants to live on after her death. Now, her diary makes her really living on in a most powerful way. And that helps me in those many hours of deep grief.
It has happened that people walk up to me and ask me what I would answer to those who deny that the Holocaust even took place. My response is that on August 4, 1944, at 9'oclock in the morning I did meet a healthy and strong 15-year old girl, Anne Frank. The next thing I saw was her name in a German list of people on a cattle train to Auschwitz. So please, tell me where Anne Frank lives at this moment if the Holocaust did not take place, because Anne Frank would still be with us today .."
Anne Frank would have been nearly 73 years old now. What would she have become? In an interview with Steve North, Jerusalem Post, Miep Gies has no doubt:
"Oh, a writer, of course. A good, famous writer ... and a grandmother. She would have been a grandmother .. "
Irena Sendler
When Hitler and his Nazis built the Warsaw Ghetto and herded 500,000 Polish Jews behind its walls to await liquidation, many Polish gentiles turned their backs or applauded. Not Irena Sendler. An unfamiliar name to most people, but this remarkable woman defied the Nazis and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto. As a health worker, she sneaked the children out between 1942 and 1943 to safe hiding places and found non-Jewish families to adopt them.
Today the old woman, gentle and courageous, is living a modest existence in her Warsaw apartment - an unsung heroine.
Her achievement went largely unnoticed for many years. Then the story was uncovered by four young students at Uniontown High School, in Kansas, who were the winners of the 2000 Kansas state National History Day competition by writing a play Life in a Jar about the heroic actions of Irena Sendler. The girls - Elizabeth Cambers, Megan Stewart, Sabrina Coons and Janice Underwood - have since gained international recognition, along with their teacher, Norman Conard. The presentation, seen in many venues in the United States and popularized by National Public Radio, C-SPAN and CBS, has brought Irena Sendler's story to a wider public.
The students continue their prize-winning dramatic presentation Life in a Jar. They have established an e-mail address isendler@hotmail.com.
Irena Sendler was born in 1910 in Otwock, a town some 15 miles southeast of Warsaw. She was greatly influenced by her father who was one of the first Polish Socialists. As a doctor his patients were mostly poor Jews.
In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror.
At the time, Irena was a Senior Administrator in the Warsaw Social Welfare Department, which operated the canteens in every district of the city. Previously, the canteens provided meals, financial aid, and other services for orphans, the elderly, the poor and the destitute. Now, through Irena, the canteens also provided clothing, medicine and money for the Jews. They were registered under fictitious Christian names, and to prevent inspections, the Jewish families were reported as being afflicted with such highly infectious diseases as typhus and tuberculosis.
But in 1942, the Nazis herded hundreds of thousands of Jews into a 16-block area that came to be known as the Warsaw Ghetto. The Ghetto was sealed and the Jewish families ended up behind its walls, only to await certain death.
Irena Sendler was so appalled by the conditions that she joined Zegota, the Council for Aid to Jews, organized by the Polish underground resistance movement, as one of its first recruits and directed the efforts to rescue Jewish children.
To be able to enter the Ghetto legally, Irena managed to be issued a pass from Warsaws Epidemic Control Department and she visited the Ghetto daily, reestablished contacts and brought food, medicines and clothing. But 5,000 people were dying a month from starvation and disease in the Ghetto, and she decided to help the Jewish children to get out.
For Irena Sendler, a young mother herself, persuading parents to part with their children was in itself a horrendous task. Finding families willing to shelter the children, and thereby willing to risk their life if the Nazis ever found out, was also not easy.
Irena Sendler, who wore a star armband as a sign of her solidarity to Jews, began smuggling children out in an ambulance. She recruited at least one person from each of the ten centers of the Social Welfare Department.
With their help, she issued hundreds of false documents with forged signatures. Irena Sendler successfully smuggled almost 2,500 Jewish children to safety and gave them temporary new identities.
Some children were taken out in gunnysacks or body bags. Some were buried inside loads of goods. A mechanic took a baby out in his toolbox. Some kids were carried out in potato sacks, others were placed in coffins, some entered a church in the Ghetto which had two entrances. One entrance opened into the Ghetto, the other opened into the Aryan side of Warsaw. They entered the church as Jews and exited as Christians. "`Can you guarantee they will live?'" Irena later recalled the distraught parents asking. But she could only guarantee they would die if they stayed. "In my dreams," she said, "I still hear the cries when they left their parents."
Irena Sendler accomplished her incredible deeds with the active assistance of the church. "I sent most of the children to religious establishments," she recalled. "I knew I could count on the Sisters." Irena also had a remarkable record of cooperation when placing the youngsters: "No one ever refused to take a child from me," she said.
The children were given false identities and placed in homes, orphanages and convents. Irena Sendler carefully noted, in coded form, the children's original names and their new identities. She kept the only record of their true identities in jars buried beneath an apple tree in a neighbor's back yard, across the street from German barracks, hoping she could someday dig up the jars, locate the children and inform them of their past.
In all, the jars contained the names of 2,500 children ...
But the Nazis became aware of Irena's activities, and on October 20, 1943 she was arrested, imprisoned and tortured by the Gestapo, who broke her feet and legs. She ended up in the Pawiak Prison, but no one could break her spirit. Though she was the only one who knew the names and addresses of the families sheltering the Jewish children, she withstood the torture, refusing to betray either her associates or any of the Jewish children in hiding.
Sentenced to death, Irena was saved at the last minute when Zegota members bribed one of the Germans to halt the execution. She escaped from prison but for the rest of the war she was pursued by the Gestapo.
After the war she dug up the jars and used the notes to track down the 2,500 children she placed with adoptive families and to reunite them with relatives scattered across Europe. But most lost their families during the Holocaust in Nazi death camps.
The children had known her only by her code name Jolanta. But years later, after she was honored for her wartime work, her picture appeared in a newspaper. "A man, a painter, telephoned me," said Sendler, "`I remember your face,' he said. `It was you who took me out of the ghetto.' I had many calls like that!"
Irena Sendler did not think of herself as a hero. She claimed no credit for her actions. "I could have done more," she said. "This regret will follow me to my death."
She has been honored by international Jewish organizations - in 1965 she accorded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem organization in Jerusalem and in 1991 she was made an honorary citizen of Israel.
Irena Sendler was awarded Poland's highest distinction, the Order of White Eagle in Warsaw Monday Nov. 10, 2003.
This lovely, courageous woman was one of the most dedicated and active workers in aiding Jews during the Nazi occupation of Poland. Her courage enabled not only the survival of 2,500 Jewish children but also of the generations of their descendants.
Maria von Maltzan
Countess Maria Helene Francoise Izabel von Maltzan was born on March 25th, 1909, to enormous wealth in Silesia, Germany, and was raised on a private estate - 18.000 acre - as the youngest of eight.
She decided to study veterinary medicine, quite unusual for a girl during this time. Her family was strictly against the idea, but her teachers supported her and she got the permission. In 1928 she made her exam in Berlin and five years later she got her doctorate in natural sciences.
Her sense of justice made her join different resistance movements against the Nazis as early as 1933 and for years she worked as an underground-fighter. As the brutality of the Nazi Régime accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the Jews dawned on Maria von Maltzan in all its horror - and she immediately decided to act ..
She always responded to calls for help and took the Jews into her own home, fed and protected them, right under the noses of the Gestapo. Throughout the war Maria von Maltzan provided a safe haven for more than 60 Jews, arranging for them to escape to safety. She falsified official visas and other documents and helped many Jews escape from Berlin in trucks that she often drove herself.
Before WW2 she got to know the Jewish author Hans Hirschel, the former editor of Das Dreieck, an avant-garde German literary journal founded in 1925. From 1942 to the end of the war she sheltered Hirschel in a special hiding place inside a couch in her living room, thus saving his life at the peril of her own.
According to The Simon Wiesenthal Center Hans Hirschel managed to continue to write in his hiding place because of Maria von Maltzan: Hirschell also had a great deal of specific work - more, ironically, than he had ever had in normal times - articles, book reviews, radio plays, even short books. It was Maria who would obtain the assignments, ostensibly for herself. She would then give them to Hans to do, along with the research materials.
Once the Nazi Gestapo came to the flat and Hans Hirschell was hiding in the couch. Maria had fixed the couch so that it was impossible to open, and covered his hiding place with a thin material. She drilled holes in it for air, and every day she put a glass of water in there with a little codeine to suppress a cough. The SS officer asked, 'How do we know nobody is hiding in there?' Maria answered, 'If you're sure someone is in there, shoot. But before you do that, I want a written signed paper from you that you will pay for new material and the work to have the couch recovered after you put holes in it.'
The SS officer didn't do a thing. He left ...
Maria became pregnant with Hans's baby. She later recalled how the new-born baby was placed in an incubator and the hospital was bombed. The electricity running the incubator stopped and the baby died. Shortly afterwards she adopted two little girls of a children's camp.
After the war Maria married Hans Hirschel but the marriage failed. They separated after two years, then remarried in 1972. Hans Hirschel died in 1975.
During the post-war-years Maria had many difficulties, but grateful Jews, who never forgot her heroism, helped her survive bitter years. Because of the horrors of the war she became addicted to drugs and she later recalled how she was thrown in an insane asylum and had to scrub floors day after day.
Countess Maria von Maltzan spent many years in a Berlin slum, and in an interview she told about her life in Berlin:
"I'm quite engaged in social things now because this part of Berlin is a perfect slum. They don't like me to say it. I really stand up for this part of Berlin, Kreuzberg. They've shoved everybody into this area - Turks, colored people, Poles, everyone stuck into this corner! We have houses with eight flats on one floor with one w.c. on the staircase. The police, you can't imagine how brutal they are down here, beating. If I see it - because you can see I have big corner windows with a clear view - I go down and get hold of the police and say, "Why are you beating these people?" And the silly police say to me, "Perhaps you like colored here!" "Well, " I say, "I prefer them to helmets!"
The perpetual rebel Countess Maria von Maltzan died on November 12th, 1997.
Gay Block and Malka Drucker spent three years interviewing rescuers from ten countries. In their book Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust they tell about their meeting with Maria von Maltzan, who acted with such humanity in a time of barbarism:
"The taxi asks us to check our address in West Berlin - this is not a good neighborhood. But we soon learn that Countess von Maltzan, born to enormous wealth in Silesia, in Germany, lives in this primarily Turkish 'slum,' as she calls it, with pride and conviction. Although the apartments around her have been burglarized, hers is left unharmed because neighbors know her as a friend of the weak and powerless .."
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Jane Haining
In the summer of 1944 an almost unknown Scots woman stood out among the tide of human misery shuffling from the railway cattle trucks into the barracks at Auschwitz. Her fair skin and bright blue eyes marked her out instantly as an Aryan, a non-Jew. She had been transported from a holding camp east of Budapest to Auschwitz where she was murdered in the gas chambers within a matter of weeks. The missionary Jane Haining died for helping Jewish children in her care survive the Nazi regime.
Jane Haining was born in Dunscone near Dumfries in Scotland in 1897. She lost her mother at the age of five and grew up a determined, capable woman. She worked for ten years in a thread maker's in Paisley, but at a meeting in Glasgow about the Jewish Mission she turned to a friend and said, prophetically: 'I have found my life-work.' She got the call to work at a Church of Scotland mission to the Jews in Budapest in 1932.
Famous for her broad Scots accent, she was popular with the 400 children, a mix of Christians and Jews, attending the school. Many were orphans, from broken or poverty-stricken homes, while others were sent simply because they got an excellent education from the Scots.
She loved her little ones. In one letter, she wrote: 'We have one nice little mite who is an orphan and is coming to school for the first time. She seems to be a lonely wee soul and needs lots of love. We shall see what we can do to make life a little happier for her.'
Another letter read: 'We have one new little six-year-old, an orphan without a mother or a father. She is such a pathetic wee soul to look at and I fear, poor lamb, has not been in too good surroundings before she came to us .. she certainly does look as though she needs heaps and heaps of love.'
She was in Scotland on leave when World War 2 broke out, but immediately undertook the hazardous journey back to Budapest to help the Jewish children.
Later the missionaries were ordered back to Scotland to safety when the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944. Jane Haining disobeyed and remained to take care of her children. 'If these children need me in the days of sunshine', she said, 'how much more do they need me in the days of darkness?' Her sister Nan O'Brien later recalled: 'It was no surprise that she refused to come back. She would never have had a moment's happiness if she had come home and left the children.'
During the war the Nazi brutality accelerated with murder, violence and terror and the little Jewish children were increasingly under threat. Jane protected them to the best of her ability.
Jane Haining was denounced to the Nazi authorities and SS men raided the place early in May. They searched her office and her bedroom, gave her 15 minutes to get ready and took her away. She was thrown in jail on charges of British espionage and helping Jews. She was accused of working among Jews and of weeping! She wept as she had to sew the yellow stars of David onto the dresses of her children ..
One of her former wards later recalled: 'I still feel the tears in my eyes and hear in my ears the siren of the Gestapo motor car. I see the smile on her face while she bade me farewell. I never saw Miss Haining again, and when I went to the Scottish Mission to ask the minister about her, I was told she had died. I did not want to believe it, nor to understand, but a long time later I realized that she had died for me, and for others. The body of Miss Haining is dead, but she is not alone, because her smile, voice and face are still in my heart.'
Jane Haining was deported along with some of her Jewish children to the death camp Auschwitz. In three months 1,300,000 were liquidated in Auschwitz, among them No. 79467, Jane Haining, who refused to reject her children and showed herself to be a saint. She died for her beliefs and was gassed along with a batch of Hungarian women on August 16th, 1944, at the age of 47.
Because Jane Haining was a British citizen and passport-holder, the Church of Scotland was sent her death certificate from Auschwitz: 'Miss Haining, who was arrested on account of justified suspicion of espionage against Germany, died in hospital, July 17, of cachexia brought on by intestinal catarrh.'
In 1997 Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Memorial in Jerusalem, awarded Jane Haining a medal and a place among the Righteous Among the Nations for her selfless dedication to the children. The award was presented to her sister, Nan O'Brien of Londonderry, Northern Ireland, by the Israeli Ambassador to Britain at a ceremony in Glasgow.
Jane Haining is thought to be the only Scot to be slain in the Nazi death camps. She is remembered in the stained-glass windows of Queen's Park Church in Glasgow and at the Church in Dunscore.
Emilie Schindler
This woman showed us an intriguing glimpse at the shadow world between memory and legend. Her husband Oscar Schindler became a household name as one of the great humanitarians of the century, saving 1,300 Jews from certain death in the Nazi death camps during World War II.
While Oscar Schindler's efforts to save hundreds of Jews are well known thanks to Keneally's book and the movie Schindler's List, the silver-screen version left Emilie on the sidelines. An unsung heroine. Now a new German-language book Ich, Emilie Schindler by the Argentinean author Erika Rosenberg tries to show that Emilie was just as involved in shielding Jews from the Nazis.
The biography highlights Emilie Schindler's bravery during the Holocaust and portrays her not only as a strong woman working alongside her husband but as a heroine in her own right. Erika Rosenberg, a journalist who befriended Emilie Schindler 11 years ago, is writing the book to fulfill one of the old widow's last wishes, to tell her story and to correct a historical oversight. For Emilie Schindler, the book is about finding peace. As Rosenberg says: 'She's looking for recognition. Not in the form of money, but recognition for her service .. to be the same like her husband.'
For the last five decades Emilie Schindler led a modest existence in her little house in San Vicente 40 kilometers south-west of Buenos Aires with her cats, dog and beautiful roses. Only the uniformed Argentinean police disturbed the idyll. They were posted 24 hours a day to protect the old lady from anti-Semitic and ultra-Conservative extremist groups.
Emilie Pelzl was born on October 22, 1907, in the city of Alt Moletein, a village in the German-populated border region of what was then The Republic of Czechoslovakia. Emilie later recalled the local pastor, an old family friend, who instructed young Emilie that her friendship with a young Jew, Rita Reif, was not good. Emilie defied the pastor and retained her friendship with Rita, until Rita was murdered by the Nazis in front of her father's store in 1942.
Emilie Pelzl first saw the tall, handsome and outgoing Oscar Schindler when he came to the door of her father's farmhouse in Alt Moletein. It was 1928 and Oscar was selling electric motors. After a courtship of six weeks, they were married on March 6, 1928, in an inn on the outskirts of Zwittau, Oscar's hometown. Emilie's father had given Oscar a dowry of 100.000 Czech crowns, a considerable sum in those days, and he soon bought a luxury car and squandered the rest on outings. In her A Memoir Where Light And Shadow Meet Emilie recalls how she struggled trying to understand him:
"In spite of his flaws, Oscar had a big heart and was always ready to help whoever was in need. He was affable, kind, extremely generous and charitable, but at the same time, not mature at all. He constantly lied and deceived me, and later returned feeling sorry, like a boy caught in mischief, asking to be forgiven one more time - and then we would start all over again ..."
In the thirties, now without employment, Oscar Schindler joined the Nazi party, as did many others at that time. Maybe because he had seen possibilities which the war brought in its wake, he followed on the heels of the SS when the Germans invaded Poland.
He left Emilie in Zwittau and moved to Crakow, where he took over a Jewish family's apartment. Bribes in the shape of money and illegal black market goods flowed copiously from Schindler and gave him control of a Jewish-owned enameled-goods factory, Deutsch Emailwaren Fabrik, close to the Jewish ghetto, where he principally employed Jewish workers. At this time presumably because they were the cheapest labor ...
But slowly as the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the Jews dawned on Schindler in all its horror - he came to see the Jews not only as cheap labor, but also as mothers, fathers, and children, exposed to ruthless slaughter.
So with help from Emilie he decided to risk everything in desperate attempts to save the 1300 Schindler Jews from certain death in the hell of the death camps. Thanks to massive bribery and Oscar's connections, they got away with actively protecting their workers.
Schindler promised the Jews who worked for him that they would never starve, that he would protect them as best he could. And he did, building his own workers barracks on the factory grounds to help alleviate the sufferings of life in the nearby Plaszow labor camp. He gave safe haven to as many Jewish workers as possible, insisting to the occupying Nazis that they were "essential workers", a status that kept them away from harassment and killings.
Until the liberation of spring, 1945, the Schindler's used all means at their disposal to ensure the safety of the Schindler-Jews. They spent every Pfennig they had, and even Emilie's jewels were sold, to buy food, clothes, and medicine. They set up a secret sanatorium in the factory with medical equipment purchased on the black market. Here Emilie looked after the sick. Those who did not survive were given a fitting Jewish burial in a hidden graveyard - established and paid for by the Schindlers.
The factory continued to produce shells for the German Wehrmacht for 7 months. In all that time not one usable shell was produced! Not one shell passed the military quality tests. Instead, false military travel passes and ration cards were produced, just as Nazi uniforms, weapons, ammunition and hand-grenades were collected.
One night in the last weeks of the war a tireless Emilie, acting alone while Oscar was in Crakow, saved 250 Jews from impending death. Emilie was confronted by Nazis transporting the Jews, crowded into four wagons, from Gollechau to a death camp. She succeeded in persuading the Gestapo to send these Jews to the factory camp "with regard to the continuing war industry production". In her A Memoir she recalls:
"We found the railroad car bolts frozen solid .. the spectacle I saw was a nightmare almost beyond imagination. It was impossible to distinguish the men from the women: they were all so emaciated - weighing under seventy pounds most of them, they looked like skeletons. Their eyes were shining like glowing coals in the dark .."
Each had to be carried out like a carcass of frozen beef. Thirteen were dead but the others still breathed. Throughout that night and for many nights following, Emilie worked without halt on the frozen and starved skeletons. One large room in the factory was emptied for the purpose. Three more men died, but with the care, the warmth, the milk and the medicine, the others gradually rallied.
After the war survivors told about Emilie's unforgettable heroism in nursing the frozen and starved prisoners back to life ..
Emilie Schindler is credited with many acts of kindness, small and large. Even today surviving Schindler-Jews remember how Emilie worked indefatigably to secure food and somehow managed to provide the sick with extra nourishment and apples. A Jewish boy, Lew Feigenbaum, broke his eyeglasses and stopped Emilie in the factory and told her: "I broke my glasses and can't see .." When the Schindler-Jews were transferred to Brunnlitz, Emilie arranged for a prescription for the eyeglasses to be picked up in Crakow and delivered to her in Brunnlitz.
Feiwel (today Franciso) Wichter, 75, was No. 371 on Schindler's List, the only one of the Schindler Jews living in Argentina:
"As long as I live, I will always have a sincere and eternal gratitude for dear Emilie. I think she triumphed over danger because of her courage, intelligence and determination to do the right and humane thing. She had immense energy and she was like a mother."
Another survivor, Maurice Markheim, No.142 on the list, later recalled:
"She got a whole truck of bread from somewhere on the black market. They called me to unload it. She was talking to the SS and because of the way she turned around and talked, I could slip a loaf under my shirt. I saw she did this on purpose. A loaf of bread at that point was gold .. There is an old expression: Behind the man, there is the woman, and I believe she was the great human being."
In May, 1945, it was all over. The Russians moved into Brunnlitz. The previous evening, Schindler gathered everyone together in the factory, where he and Emilie took a deeply emotional leave of them.
The Schindlers - and 1300 Schindler-Jews along with them - had survived ...
Oscar Schindler's life after the war was a long series of failures. He tried without success to be a film producer and was deprived of his nationality immediately after the war. Threats from former Nazis meant that he felt insecure in post-war Germany, and he applied for an entry permit to the United States. This was refused as he had been a member of the Nazi party.
After this he fled to Buenos Aires in Argentina with Emilie, his mistress and a dozen Schindler Jews. The Schindlers settled down in 1949 as farmers, first raising chickens and then nutrias. They were supported financially by the Jewish organization Joint and thankful Jews, who never forgot them. But Oscar Schindler met with no success, and in 1957 he became bankrupt and traveled back alone to Germany, where he remained estranged from his wife for 17 years before he died in poverty in 1974, at the age of 66.
He never saw Emilie again ...
Emilie stayed in Argentina, where she scraped by on a small pension from Israel and a $650 a month pension from Germany. Her only relative, a niece, lived in Bavaria, Germany.
Jewish organizations have honored her for her efforts during the war. In May, 1994, Emilie Schindler received 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 away by the Nazis.
Almost 2,000 people attended the Simon Wiesenthal Center's Yom Hashoah commemoration honoring Emilie Schindler. The tiny 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 the memorial flame to remember the 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust. 'Let me touch you,' said one woman as she reached out to embrace Emilie Schindler.
In 1995, Argentina decorated her with the Order of May, the highest honor given to foreigners who are not heads of state. In 1998 The Argentine government decided to give her a pension of $1,000 a month until her financial situation improved. Last November, Emilie Schindler, was named an Illustrious Citizen by Argentina.
Emilie fell last Nov. 1 at her home in San Vicente. She lay for hours, alone. After undergoing a hip replacement operation, Emilie had to enter a home for the elderly in Buenos Aires, her care heavily subsidized by Argentine charities. Hospital officials had delayed her surgery for three days because she could not afford the operation. Financial help eventually came from several soccer players, River Plate, and other Argentine citizens.
In July, 2001, during a visit to Berlin, Germany, a frail Emilie handed over documents related to her husband to a museum. Confined to a wheelchair and totally dependent upon others, she told reporters that it was her 'greatest and last wish' to spend her final years in Germany, adding that she had become increasingly homesick. 'I am very happy that I can be here,' she told with a dazzling smile.
Her Argentinean biographer Erika Rosenberg said she was urgently seeking a German home for Schindler's widow. 'Now, as an old lady, Emilie Schindler needs help herself for the first time,' Rosenberg said. The German state of Bavaria immediately offered a home to Emilie Schindler. Bavaria would be happy to help fulfill her wish, Bernhard Seidenath, a spokesman for the Ministry of Social Affairs, said Monday July 16, 2001.
A deeply grateful Emilie accepted the offer. She will be taken Sunday July 22, 2001, to the Adalbert Founder Home in the Bavarian town of Waldkraiburg by ambulance from Berlin, said Joerg Kudlich, head of the home.
But the plans to transport her to the retirement home was put on hold as she was hospitalized in critical condition on Saturday July 21. Mrs. Schindler is in intensive care, a transport is out of the question, said Dr. Hans Pech, head of interior medicine at the Maerkisch-Oderland Hospital outside Berlin.
Emilie Schindler died Friday night October 5, 2001, in the Berlin hospital.
The famous Argentine journalist Sol tells that one of her favorites interviews was on radio with Emilie Schindler:'When I talked with her I felt a great spirit of love and wisdom in her words. She's a great woman, a woman of courage and a woman of love and compassion for others. She did much more than the movie presents.'
As to Oscar Schindler the author Erika Rosenberg had no doubt: 'Emilie still loved Oscar Schindler', though Emilie was bitter and disillusioned: 'He gave his Jews everything - and me, nothing.' But she was capable of expressing both her love and bitterness towards him in one sentence, calling him a drunk and womanizer, but also saying: 'If he'd stayed, I'd have looked after him.'
In A Memoir Emilie tells about her inner thoughts, when she visited his tomb, over thirty-seven years after he left:
"At last we meet again .. I have received no answer, my dear, I do not know why you abandoned me .. But what not even your death or my old age can change is that we are still married, this is how we are before God. I have forgiven you everything, everything."
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The Holocaust was the systematic annihilation of six million Jews by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis during World War 2.
In 1933 approximately nine million Jews lived in the 21 countries of Europe that would be military occupied by Germany during the war. By 1945 two out of every three European Jews had been killed by the Nazis. 1.5 million children were murdered. This figure includes more than 1.2 million Jewish children, tens of thousands of Gypsy children and thousands of handicapped children.
The Holocaust
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The Holocaust Children
Lest We Forget
Father Kolbe
Gates To Hell
Adolf Hitler
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Admiral Canaris
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The Holocaust Website - www.auschwitz.dk - with stories of crimes, heroes and villains started 1996. It is based on more than 30 year's research into the topics of World War 2 and the Holocaust. Most articles have been published in newspapers and magazines.
- Louis Bulow
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