A half-hero of our time
David Pryce-Jones
WHERE LIGHT AND SHADOW MEET by Emilie Schindler, with Erika Rosenberg W. W. Norton, £16.95, pp. 162 Poor old Mrs Schindler is 90. In the small town of San Vicente, close to Buenos Aires, she lives alone with no fewer than 20 cats. She has long had ulcers and trouble with her back. One exiled German among others, she might well have died in some bitterness, except that she is the widow of Oskar Schindler, and Steven Spielberg suddenly made a world celebrity of her.
Perhaps Mrs Schindler left it too late to be able to recall her former husband in the round, with the requisite detail in support. Perhaps Erika Rosenberg was incompe- tent. Between them they have been able to add little to the portrait of Oskar already dramatized through the Spielberg film. Not at all in the noble mode, Schindler was a small-time profiteer on to a two-way bet. If the war was won, he made money by requi- sitioning Jewish slave labourers for his enamelware factory. If the war was lost, he had covered himself by saving their lives. So equivocal a hero was certainly represen- tative of the age. Many of the names provided here are incomplete, while dates and facts are usual- ly wrong or puzzling. People and anecdotes flicker and fade inconsequentially. In more than one sense, this is a ghost of a book, sustained only by its undoubted human interest.
The Schindlers were both Sudeten- deutsch, she from a little place called Alt Moletein, he from Zwittau. Her forebears on all sides were apparently landowners. One grandmother had an uncle who was a cardinal in a city not far from Alt Moletein' (but who was he, and where was that?). Here was a childhood with farms and forests, a goat-cart, goose for Christ- mas and a convent education. Her father returned a nervous wreck from the first war• Oskar first arrived at the house as a salesman for electric generators. Twenty at the time, she did not trust him, she says, but 'his passionate kisses and embraces Wept away all my doubts'. Married, they set up house first in Zwittau, then in Morayska Ostrava. Not what he seemed, Oskar was working well before the war for the Abwehr, or German counter-intelligence. More than a Nazi, he was a traitor. Emilie helped him. Exposed by a Czech double-agent, Oskar was sentenced to death, she says, and saved only by 'the German invasion of Czecho- slovakia in 1939'. Typically, this whole decisive episode is confused in its chronology and its implications.
During the war, Mrs Schindler once rebuked an officer for breaking her Baccarat glass after he had drunk a toast from it. On another occasion, she says that she persuaded a Polish lady to give some flour from her mill (but the Germans could simply have appropriated it). Hilde, a friend from Zwittau, is alleged to have interceded successfully at Auschwitz on behalf of the Jewish women on Schindler's list (but how so, and who was she?). Oskar enjoyed a steady flow of diamonds, caviar, cigarettes, cognac and other black-market treasures. But where did the money come from?
What really exercised her — as it still does — was Oskar's womanising. His smile and beautiful blue eyes were truly seduc- tive, though she makes sure to observe that Oskar's women seemed 'ugly, vulgar, lower-class'. She resented having to make so many allowances for him. There was Amelia in Cracow, as well as the Polish Viktoria Klonowska 'who improved Oskar's connections with the Gestapo' (but how could that be?). Fleeing in a stately Horch before the incoming Red Army, Oskar insisted on bringing Annelie, his current mistress. The Schindlers were down to their last diamond, and that was then lost too.
In search of elusive high life, they emigrated to the Argentine, with Gisa, the latest mistress, again making three. In recognition of what the Schindlers had done, Jewish organisations supported them. Oskar then returned to Germany, to receive 100,000 marks as compensation for his factory (but surviving Jewish slave labourers received nothing). He sent his wife 200 marks and a copy of Anne Frank's diary. The marriage was over. Resigned by now, she has come to see him as the victim of his own mischief.
Lately she has been meeting the Pope, grand rabbis, heads of state, all of them desperate to find a decent German. At the avant-premiere of Spielberg's film, in the presence of President and Mrs Clinton, poor old Mrs Schindler quickly and appropriately fell asleep.
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