Emilie Schindler - Life After War

Life After War

The Schindlers were deprived of their nationality immediately after the war. They lived under continuous threats from former Nazis, which meant that they were insecure in post-war Germany. They fled to Buenos Aires in Argentina, with Schindler's mistress and a dozen of Schindler Jews. In 1949, they settled there as farmers and were supported financially by a Jewish organization.

In 1957, a bankrupt Oskar Schindler abandoned his wife and returned to Germany, where he died in 1974. Although they never divorced, they never saw each other again. Thirty-seven years after he left, she visited his grave:

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..."

Emilie's visit to Oskar's grave is documented at the end of Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List. In the film's closing scenes, Emilie, accompanied by actress Caroline Goodall (who portrays her in the film), lays a stone on the grave of Oskar Schindler, with many of the present day surviving Schindler's Jews.

After the film's release, Emilie's close friend and biographer, Erika Rosenberg, began spreading rumors that the filmmakers had paid "not a penny" to Emilie for her contributions to the film. These claims were disputed by Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's Ark, who claims he had sent Emilie a cheque of his own, and that he had gotten into an argument with Rosenberg over this issue before Emilie angrily told Rosenberg to drop the subject. Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard latched onto the rumor that Emilie had not been paid for her efforts and, in his 2001 film In Praise of Love, accused Spielberg of neglecting Emilie while she was supposedly dying, impoverished, in Argentina. In response to Godard, film critic Roger Ebert mused, "Has Godard, having also used her, sent her any money?" and "Has Godard or any other director living or dead done more than Spielberg, with his Holocaust Project, to honor and preserve the memories of the survivors?"

Emilie Schindler lived for many years in her small house in San Vicente, 40 kilometres south-west of Buenos Aires in Argentina with her pets. She received a small pension from Israel and Germany. Uniformed Argentinean police were posted 24 hours a day to protect her from anti-Semitic and extremist groups. Here she formed bonds with many of the soldiers.