Written by Emilie Schindler with Erika Rosenberg C 1996
and translated from the original Spanish by Dolores M. Koch
W.W. Norton and Company Publishers
also
Editorial Planeta Argentina
EXCERPTS and NOTES:
(Pages 50 -51 About living in Cracow, Poland as a married couple beginning in 1941.)
"We lived in an apartment that Oskar had purchased from a very wealthy Jewish family. The luxury was evident in the porcelain vases, Persian rugs, tapestries, and heavy velvet curtains. The windows opened on the Planty, a group of parks that followed the contours of the old city walls near the Wawel fortress.
Before I finally moved to Cracow, Oskar used to take his lovers to the apartment, especially two* of them: Amelia and a Polish women Viktoria Klonowska. Amelia worked with him in counterintelligence, while Viktoria, thanks to her contacts with high authorities, improved Oskar's connections with the Gestapo." *here I eliminate the name of one of them as in other books it's said that her memory was wrong),
"Before I moved in with Oskar again, I had visited his apartment many times. Whenever I arrived, his lovers would vanish into thin air, although Oskar did not manage to conceal entirely what was going on during my absence. I had realized that he was not sleeping alone, but I chose to look the other way. I knew much more than he imagined, and even got to know some of his women personally."
(Page 60 - About OSKAR and GOETH (i.e Amon Goth)
"Edith**, his lover, tried to appease him when he was in an indiscriminate killing rage, but she seldom succeeded in turning him away from this bloody practice.
It was Oskar who had introduced her to Goeth. They had a daughter, who has never admitted to her father's crimes. Edith currently lives in the Unites States and has tried to distance herself from this part of history. She remarried, then divorce, and now lives with another man." **Here again the name of Goth's mistress is incorrect. It should not be Edith but Ruth. I wonder about this name change since Ruth is a more "Jewish" name.
(Page 115 - after the war - during the five years in Regensburg, Germany where the Schindlers found themselves to be 2nd class Germans and unwanted.)
"One evening while we were at the movies watching a romantic film, I felt a terrible pain in my lower abdomen. At first I tried to pay no attention to it, but it became more and more unbearable, and I developed a high fever. We rushed to the town hospital, where I was admitted right away.
An operation was performed the following day. I had a dead baby inside of me. As a result of that operation, I could no longer think of having children on my own. (Note this was her fourth miscarriage. Oskar had two children after their marriage with another mistress, this one a woman he had once been involved with before as a teenager.)
Still in pain, and under the influence of anesthesia, I opened my eyes and saw Oskar's smiling face. To my surprise, he was not alone. His companion was Gisa, his lover, whom he would later drag along with him to Argentina. In my condition I could not really grasp what was happening, but I felt a tremendous letdown in every fiber of my body.
I wept disconsolately. As I began to understand the real situation, I blamed myself for having believed that Oskar would ever change..."
(Pages 117-118 - MONEY and LOVE)
"I had often considered the possibility of leaving him, of starting a new life without him, without his lie4s, without his repeat deceits and constant insincere repenting. But my religious ideas, my belief in God and the teachings of the Church, dissuaded me from doing so..... I had no choice but to adapt, to tighten my lips and close my eyes to Oskar's neglect and indifference. I shed many bitter tears because of him, but in my time I toughened up. I stopped crying and immersed myself in my work.
(Page 128 - in ARGENTINA - OSKARS LOVE AFFAIRS)
When I was walking in town or attending some get-together, I used to look at all the women and ask myself which ones and with how many of them had Oskar had affairs. The answer became easier over time: surely with all those who would allow it. The interesting thing was that these conquests required no effort on his part. With his natural seductiveness, it was the women who were constantly after him.
(Page 129)
..." Oskar was aware that women noticed him, and he seemed to feel an obligation to play his part in these casual affairs. But once he got involved - and this he confessed to me more than once when, repentant, he came back to my arms - he did not know how to break free.
(Page 130 - GISA, whom OSKAR took to ARGENTINA with him, as well as Emilie!)
The strangest thing of all was that Oskar's infidelities had the approval and collaboration of some of our best friends. When we passed through Munich after the war, we stayed with a Jewish family who had been with us at Brunnlitz. The woman had a friend named Gisa, then a fairly common Jewish nickname. Oskar quickly started a liaison with her. The affair flourished with the help of the lady of the house, who provided a room for Oskar and Gisa to enjoy their romantic union whenever my husband went to Munich with the excuse of having to take care of some business. What Oskar did not tell me when he brought the tickets for South America was that Gisa would be coming with us. When I found out, just before packing, I did not have the energy for futile reproaches anymore. As absurd as it may seem, I clung to the hope that once in Argentina., I would again be Oskar Schindler's only woman. It proved to be a false hope.
Fortunately we moved to San Vincente , which offered its main advantage that it was quite far from the Belgrano neighborhood, where the inevitable Gisa lived. She used my husband for all he was worth, made him give her jewelry and even an authentic otter coat. When he returned to Germany for good (abandoning both wife and mistress in Argentina) Gisa felt forsaken and wrote letters to him full of reproaches. One day I received a few lines from Oskar asking me to speak to her and try to persuade her to stop her epistolary insults, and to tell her that if she kept threateing him, he would never come back to her. (She did not.)
NOTE: They lived about an hour away from each other. Oskar in the capital with Gisa, who he spent most of his time with. Obviously, in my opinion, the marriage had been long dead but there was no divorce.)
NOTE: Oscar continued to sporadically send his wife letters, often insensitive to her hard work and poverty in Argentina. She began to throw them in the fire without reading them. B'nai B'rith eventually bought her a house and sent her money, about $300 a month, to live out her old age in Argentina. 37 years after he left Argentina, due to the Spielberg film, she was able to visit her husband's grave for the first time. It's in the last scene when survivors and their descendants walk down the hill to his grave to put stones on it.
Bill Cunningham discovered he liked to wear girl's dresses when he was a boy and an errant parent tried to beat the girl out of him. What he loved was beauty. He was destined to work in fashion and his first preoccupation, circa the 1940's was to be a milliner - a designer of hats - which went on until 1960 when hats went out of fashion in favor of showing hair. By the time he died in 2016 at the age of 87, Cunningham was best known as a photographer who was on the streets of New York as well as anywhere fashion was being made, worn, modeled. His overall work is sometimes thought of as "fashion anthropology," a documentation of that world and how it translates to the people. What no one knew as that he had been working on a memoir. The writing was found after his death and "Fashion Climbing" is the result.
