RUTH IRENE KALDER : MISTRESS OF NAZI WAR CRIMINAL AMON GOTH

OSKAR SCHINDLER

The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities,

and the True Story Behind the List

by David M. Crowe

Westview Press - A member of Perseus Books Group

(The primary reference for this month's subject)

RUTH IRENE KALDER

Ruth Kalder started out as a secretary to Oskar Schindler at a business he had in 1942.  He brought her along to one of Amon Goth's luxurious parties at the mansion in which he lived in above the death camp at Plaszow. Amon, married with two children, is said to have fallen in love with her at first sight but also told her he would never divorce.  His wife and the children remained in Vienna. She was an actress from Beslau (today Wroclaw, Poland).  Amon was from a well to do Viennese publishing family.  It's said that he had two personalities, one the Viennese gentleman.  His legendary temper could turn fast. 

Ruth loved her rich life at the mansion above the camp.  Her days were filled with horseback riding, tennis, and sunbathing on the balcony that had a view of the camp, a camp she claims to have never visited.  For two years she lived with Amon, and while she may have somehow been blissfully unaware of the killings and whippings that occurred at the camp, many of them carried out by the violent man who loved to kill that she slept beside, she was not innocent of the way he treated his two Jewish maid-slaves, one of whom is depicted in the film "Schindler's List."  She stopped him from raping one of them, Helen, when she came upon his tearing off the woman's clothes off.  It's unlikely this was the first time the woman was raped by him.  One witness depicted in the film, Itzhak Stern, said that the maid Helen was "the most unfortunate of all the inmates at the Plaszow Camp" and that she suffered under Amon Goth "more than ten lifetimes." (Page 261)

Ruth called Amon by his childhood nickname, "Mony,"and is said to have adored him.  She would tell the daughter they had together, Monica Christiane, that he was a ladies man with a beautiful singing voice.  He was hung when Monica was 10 months old, and the truth about her father was withheld from her in her childhood. It became a long painful struggle for Monica to come to terms with the monster her father really was, but since research was being done around Oskar Schindler, she did interviews in which she said that Schindler could never have saved Jews if it were not for the friendship and cooperation of her father.

Ruth told her daughter when she was about 12 that her father only killed Jews for "sanitation" reasons.

 * Along with his wife, this number goes to about 1300.