SCHINDLER - Widow dies

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BBC Saturday, 6 October, 2001, 12:53 GMT 13:53 UK Schindler's widow dies Emilie Schindler helped stop Jews being sent to Auschwitz

Emilie Schindler, who helped her husband Oskar save Jews from Nazi persecution, has died at the age of 93.

The heroic rescue of more than 1,000 Jews from the Nazi death camps, was depicted in the Stephen Spielberg's film Schindler's List.

But Emilie Schindler, who helped her husband to save 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust, often criticised the movie for neglecting her part.

She died in hospital in Germany, after moving there from Argentina earlier this year.

The cause of her death was not announced, but she had been moved to a hospital near Berlin after reports that she had suffered a stroke.

Film

Oskar Schindler and his wife emigrated to Argentina after World War Two, but he left her in 1958 and returned to Germany, where he died in 1974.

The couple's actions in freeing hundreds of Jews was not widely known until Spielberg's film came out in 1993.

It told the true life story of how Oskar Schindler persuaded an SS concentration camp commander that the emaciated Jewish prisoners were needed to work in his factory.

Emilie Schindler often spoke out that the film failed to acknowledge her part in the rescue.

"Oskar is the hero - and what about me? I saved many Jews, too," she told German television in a 1999 interview.

Nursed Jews

According to Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, which bestowed her with the Righteous among the Nations award, Emilie Schindler stopped the Nazis from transporting a trainload of 120 Jewish prisoners to Auschwitz.

After her husband negotiated with the prisoners' captors, she nursed them back to health and none of them ever worked.

Emilie Schindler was born on 22 October, 1907 in a German-speaking village in today's Czech Republic.

She married Oskar in 1928 and moved with him to Krakow, Poland, where they ran a factory, later used as a safe haven for Jewish labourers in the war.

She donated artefacts belonging to her husband to a Bonn museum, but lost a legal battle to gain ownership of the original list of Jews found in 1999.

Emilie Schindler said it was her greatest and last wish to die in Germany.

-- Anonymous, October 06, 2001


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