As he entered his sixties, he began working for the German Friends of Hebrew University. This involvement resulted from the urgings of those Schindlerjuden who were concerned with restoring some new purpose to Oskar’s life. He began to work raising funds in West Germany. 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 precariousness of his health, he still lived and drank like a young man. He was in love with a German woman named 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 she was 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 behavior 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 summoned forth his deeper talents.
In 1972, during a visit by Oskar to the New York executive office of the American Friends of Hebrew University, three Schindlerjuden, partners in a large New Jersey construction company, led a group of seventy-five other Schindler prisoners in raising $120,000 to dedicate to Oskar a floor of the Truman Research Center at 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 brought them to Brinnlitz. Now Oskar’s children had become his parents, his best recourse, his source of honor.
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 a hospital on October 9. 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 leaden casket 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—amid a stream of other Schindler Jews—Itzhak Stern, Moshe Bejski, Helen Hirsch, Jakob Sternberg, Juda Dresner.
He was mourned on every continent.
APPENDIX
SS Ranks and Their Army Equivalents
Oberst-gruppenführer: general
Obergruppenführer: lieutenant general
Gruppenführer: major general
Brigadeführer: brigadier general
Oberführer: (no army equivalent)
Standartenführer: colonel
Obersturmbannführer: lieutenant colonel
Sturmbannführer: major
Hauptsturmführer: captain
Obersturmführer: first lieutenant
Untersturmführer: second lieutenant
Oberscharführer: a senior noncommissioned rank
Unterscharführer: equivalent to sergeant
Rottenführer: equivalent to corporal
About the Author
THOMAS KENEALLY was born in 1935 and was educated in Sydney, Australia. In addition to Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker Prize and the L.A. Times Book Award for fiction, his books include To Asmara, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and Flying Hero Class, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. He presently teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine, where he holds a Distinguished Professorship. He is also Chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, which seeks to end Australia's constitutional connections with Great Britain.