Frau Schindler -- Bitter Widow Who Helped Save Jewish Workers Says Oskar Was No Hero To Her

SAN VICENTE, Argentina - Fame, like love, has not been kind to Frau Emilie Schindler.

Celebrity chased her down in her 86th year, after half a lifetime of nearly total obscurity.

Now the reporters literally line up outside the door of her small house 40 miles south of Buenos Aires, where she lives with her part German shepherd and more cats than she can count.

The visitors come seeking intimate memories of her late husband, Oskar Schindler - the suave and handsome World War II savior of more than 1,200 Jews and the hero of the new Steven Spielberg film "Schindler's List."

Emilie, harassed and weary, nonetheless obliges.

"He was stupid. Useless. Half crazy," she says, grinning brightly when her visitors flinch. "To hell with him."

To be sure, neither Spielberg's movie nor the award-winning 1982 book on which it is based, by the Australian author Thomas Keneally, hide Herr Schindler's lifelong recklessness with money, heavy drinking and prodigious womanizing.

Yet the magnetic emphasis of both is rather on how such a flawed man ended up risking his life to save hundreds of virtual strangers: the Jewish workers in his wartime factory.

But for Emilie, living alone in Argentina, where Schindler left her after 29 years of marriage, such behavior yields to less flattering interpretations.

"He was a hero to the Jews," Emilie says. "Not to me."

A stooped, slight woman with fine white hair and sharp blue eyes, Emilie first disclosed her bitterness last summer to a Buenos Aires newspaper.

Until then, she had lived without apparent complaint in the house that the Argentine B'nai B'rith Jewish welfare group provided for her just after Oskar left in 1957 for Germany, saying he meant to seek compensation for his losses in the war. He died in Frankfurt of a seizure in 1974 and was buried with honors in Jerusalem.

The man with the Charles Boyer charm had promised his wife when he left that he would return, "but the first thing he did when he got to Germany was cash in his return ticket," Emilie says.

This came as no surprise, she hastens to add. She had discovered Schindler's modus operandi on their wedding day in 1928, when a vengeful former lover reported him to the police on a trumped-up charge and had him called in for questioning.

After Oskar's first betrayal, Emilie says, she never trusted him again. According to Keneally, they lived mostly apart from 1939 to 1944. Emilie disputes that, saying she moved back with him in 1942.

Those first three years were crucial for Schindler's story, the period in which he took over and developed a bankrupt enamelware factory outside Cracow, Poland.

With the advance of Russian troops, he was forced in 1944 to relocate the factory, and his "list" of Jews, to Brinnlitz, Czechoslavakia.

In those years, Emilie says, she suffered four miscarriages that she now blames on the turmoil of her marriage.

"Thank God he was more faithful to us than to his wife," Oskar's Jews used to say, according to Keneally.

The "Schindlerjuden" - Schindler's Jews - have testified to Emilie's bravery at Brinnlitz, where she worked in the factory clinic and scrounged for medicine and food on the black market.

"She kept us alive," says Rosa Dimm, 74, a German-Czech Jew who arrived at Brinnlitz suffering from scarlet fever in 1944. "She was equal to her husband in everything."

The Schindlers fled Czechoslavakia in May 1945, heading for the Swiss border with a group of Jews. Four years later, with aid from Jewish organizations, they moved on to Argentina.

Listening to Emilie, one would think she bears the most ill will toward Keneally, whose novel is classed as fiction even though he relied on exhaustive documentation and interviews.

She accuses the author of trusting too much in Oskar's memoirs, which she claims he distorted to hog all the credit. Keneally, she says, never interviewed her and downplayed her own role in saving the Jews.

Keneally said he approached her through her lawyer but was told that at the time she was too ill. He sent off a list of questions, to which she responded by mail.

Today, Keneally acknowledges, "the book might be different" had he met with Emilie face to face.

Yet Keneally defends the overall weight he gives to Emilie in his book - a relatively light weight, in which she appears mostly as a spurned wife and only briefly as a heroine - saying it was the same weight given in most of the accounts of survivors he interviewed at length.

In Spielberg's film, he points out, she has even less of a role.

The main problem, according to Keneally, was that Schindler was so charming and flamboyant that in the book and film he "sucks up all the available oxygen."

Twenty years after his death, he still manages this trick.

Emilie says she had no other lover after Oskar. She still wears his wedding ring and keeps pictures of him, even a snapshot of his tomb.

She gets flustered when asked about all that.

Last May, Spielberg flew Emilie to Israel to be part of the epilogue to his movie, in which Schindlerjuden visit their hero's grave.

Looking down at Oskar's tomb, she felt "nothing, nothing, nothing," Emilie says, spitting out the words. Yet as she was led away, she recalls, her ulcers acted up, and she was briefly unable to walk.