As he entered his sixties, he began working for the German Friends of the Hebrew University, raising funds. This involvement resulted from the urgings of those Schindlerjuden who were concerned with restoring some new purpose to Oskar’s life. 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 state of his health, he still lived and drank like a young man. He was in love with a German woman called 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 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 behaviour 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 had summoned forth his deeper talents.
In 1972, during a visit by Oskar to the New York executive office of the American Friends of the Hebrew University, three Schindlerjuden, partners in a large New Jersey construction company, led a group of seventy-five other Schindler prisoners in raising a hundred and twenty thousand dollars to dedicate to Oskar a floor of the Truman Research Center at the 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 had brought them to Brinnlitz. Now Oskar’s children had become his parents, his best recourse, his source of honour.
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 hospital on October 9th. His death certificate 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 lead coffin 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 – amidst a stream of other Schindler Jews – Itzhak Stern, Moshe Bejski, Helen Hirsch, Jakob Sternberg, Juda Dresner.
He was mourned in every continent.
About the Author
Thomas Keneally began his writing career in 1964 and has published twenty-five novels since. They include The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates and Gossip from the Forest, each of which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His most recent novels are Bettany’s Book, The Office of Innocence and The Tyrant’s Novel. He has also written several works of non-fiction, including his boyhood memoir Homebush Boy and his latest, Commonwealth of Thieves. He is married with two daughters and lives in Sydney.
Schindler’s Ark won the Booker Prize in 1982. In 1993 it was made by Steven Spielberg into the internationally acclaimed film Schindler’s List, which went on to win seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Schindler's Ark Page 44
