BLAME IT ON MY YOUTH : KEITH JARRETT TRIO

SNOWFLAKES

LITTLE THINGS MEAN A LOT

THANK YOU

OK, TAKE A DEEP BREATH AND LET IT OUT - LET'S GIVE THANKS

I always wanted to cover some NAZI MISTRESSES, and I kept putting it off, because it's an especially tough subject and there seemed to be no good time to do so.  How can a woman love a man who is a murderer, blatantly so, as Amon Goth was?
How did Nazi's manage to do what they did?
Pure evil? Mass Hypnosis? Conformity? Rationalization?

These are things we should think about, absolutely.  The posts are there for you to get back to another time, because I know you need to take a deep breath and let it out. 
I know that you are ready for the American Holidays, beginning tomorrow, Thanksgiving, our celebration of Prosperity, as well as a celebration of our appreciation of the Freedoms of our Country, the United States of America, and being free of tyranny is part of that..

So, now's the time to redirect your thoughts to the Good in our world.

This past year I've met a few people who by my way of thinking qualify as Saints because of the selflessness they exhibit in kindness and service to others.

Here are two examples.

I know a woman, Betty, who agreed to have Power of Attorney to another woman, Mazie, when Mazie's husband died. They had known each other for over 30 years when he died.  Mazie, once brilliant and highly educated with a good career, has Alzheimer's and over the last six years Betty has done everything to give this a woman the best quality of life possible, though there came the day when she had to move her out of her house and into an Assisted Living home, something she feels bad about. Now Mazie sits in the corner paging through picture books, but Betty even tries to find her picture books she'd actually be interested in.

I met Shauna long ago and never really got to talking to her until recently. She always impressed me as a fashionista, because she seems to change her eyeglasses, hair and nails frequently, coordinating them with various colorful outfits. So I sat with her and asked her if she was on her way home and she said no, she was going to see a relative in a home where he must receive round the clock care for the rest of his life.  Shauna lives at least an hour and a half to two and a half hours, depending on how transportation is running, from the Nursing Home her relative lives in.  Eight years ago he was in a terrible accident and wasn't supposed to live.  The doctors determined they would pull the plug.  Shauna told God that if he would allow this relative to live, she would visit him every day.  And she has, not missing a day in EIGHT YEARS! 
I said, "You are so dedicated and loyal!" 
She said, "No it's God.  He's the one who opens my eyes each morning and when my eyes are open, then I know I have to get dressed and go!"  Here I thought I was sitting with a fashionista, but really I was sitting with a SAINT!

These people are exceptional.

I'll bet there is someone in your life who you are grateful for.  Remember to thank them!
Missy
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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.

WHERE LIGHT and SHADOW MEET by EMILIE SCHINDLER, OSKAR's WIFE, ON THEIR MISTRESS ACCOMMODATING MARRIAGE

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.

STEVEN SPIELBERG's FILM SHINDLER'S LIST : EMILIE CATCHES HER HUSBAND ONE MORE TIME

Shindler's List is the film called Steven Spielberg's Opus. 
If you haven't seen the film, it's a must. 

The original title of this post was STEVEN SPIELBERG's FILM SHINDLER'S LIST : EMILIE CATCHES HER HUSBAND ONE MORE TIME and the video is gone.

In the film Oskar Schindler's wife comes to visit him and his Mistress is there with him and quickly leaves.  All he has to say to his wife is how embarrassed the woman must be.  For the purposes of the film the Mistress is seen as a sexual being, as if she is only there for sex with Oskar. Is Emilie Schindler accepting or long suffering her husband's infidelities?

June 2021 

ENEMIES A LOVE STORY based on the book by ISAAC BASHIVIS SINGER

Ron Silver, as the man Herman Broder who has Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome because of his Holocaust experiences, Angelica Huston as the wife who was thought to be dead in the Holocaust, but who comes to New York alive - their children dead, Lena Olin as the mistress (who is married to another, older, man and lives with her mother), a Holocaust survivor who was in the camps, Margaret Sophie Stein is the Polish peasant who saved his life and who he wed out of gratitude. She wishes to become a Jew and becomes pregnant.


Herman loves all these women in different ways.


A fine work by Issac Bashivis Singer, full of complexities. Such situations did happen post World War II. The Red Cross (there's a link in the Kathleen Kennedy month) did it's best to reunite people who were separated by the war and the death camps and to this day will try to help people locate lost relatives. I'll never forget the first time I saw an old man survivor with his Nazi death camp tattoo, a number on his arm, dehumanizing him. Since then I've attended Holocaust memorials, gone to hear a Shindler's List survivor speak, and learned a lot about Naziism.