Schindler, Emilie Pelzl

▪ 2002

      German-born industrialist (b. Oct. 22, 1907, Alt Moletein, Sudetenland, Austria-Hungary [now Czech Republic]—d. Oct. 5, 2001, Strausberg, Ger.), was the wife of Oskar Schindler, whom she helped in saving some 1,300 Jews during World War II. She married Schindler in 1928 and worked closely with her industrialist husband throughout the war, scrounging on the black market for food and other supplies for the Jews in their employ, as well as personally protecting them and caring for those too ill to work. In 1949 the bankrupt Schindlers moved to Argentina, where Emilie lived in poverty after her husband returned to Germany in 1957. She eventually was granted a small pension. She received Israel's Righteous Among the Nations award in 1993, and two years later Argentina bestowed its highest honour for foreigners, the Order of May. Although Thomas Keneally's book Schindler's Ark (1983) acknowledged her pivotal role in saving the so-called Schindlerjuden, Schindler repined that the award-winning movie based on it, Schindler's List (1993), had ignored it. She further delineated her wartime efforts in her 1997 memoir, Where Light and Shadow Meet.

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