Emilie schindler young

Overview

Interview Summary

Interviewee

Emilie Schindler

Interviewer

Jon Blair

Date

interview:  1983 May 18

Physical Details

Language

EnglishGerman

Genre/Form

Documentary films.

Extent

2 sound cassettes (90 min.).

Rights & Restrictions

Conditions on Access

There are no known restrictions on access to this material.

Conditions on Use

Restrictions on use. Permission to copy and/or use recordings in any production must be granted by the Imperial War Museum and by the copyright holder, Thames Television.

Keywords & Subjects

Topical Term

Black market--Czech Republic--Brnenec.Bribery.Escapes.Rationing--Czech Republic--Brnenec.World War, 1939-1945--Concentration camps--Poland.World War, 1939-1945--Jews--Rescue.World War, 1939-1945--Military intelligence--Germany.World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, German.World War, 1939-1945--Women.Women--Personal narratives.

Geographic Name

Argentina--Emigration and immigration.Brnenec (Czech Republic)Kraków (Poland)Poland--History-

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Oskar and Emilie Schindler

Schindler’s List

Oskar Schindler was born on April 28, 1908 at Zwittau/Moravia (today in the Czech Republic).

His middle-class Catholic family belonged to the German-speaking community in the Sudetenland. The young Schindler, who attended German grammar school and studied engineering, was expected to follow in the footsteps of his father and  take charge of the family farm-machinery plant. Some of Schindler’s schoolmates and childhood neighbors were Jews, but with none of them did he develop an intimate or lasting friendship. Like most of the German-speaking youths of the Sudetenland, he subscribed to Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party, which strongly supported the Nazi Germany and actively strove for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia and their annexation to Germany . When the Sudetenland was incorporated into Nazi Germany in 1938, Schindler became a formal member of the Nazi party.

Shortly after the outbreak of war in September 1939, thirty-one-year-old Schindler showed up in occupied Krakow. The ancient city, home to some 60,000 Jews and sea

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Emilie Schindler

But slowly as the brutality of the Nazis accelerated with murder, violence and terror, the seeds of their plan for the total extermination of the Jews dawned on Schindler in all its horror - he came to see the Jews not only as cheap labour, but also as mothers, fathers, and children, exposed to ruthless slaughter.

Schindler promised the Jews who worked for him that they would never starve, that he would protect them as best he could. And he did, building his own workers barracks on the factory grounds to help alleviate the sufferings of life in the nearby Plaszow labor camp. He gave safe haven to as many Jewish workers as possible, insisting to the occupying Nazis that they were "essential workers", a status that kept them away from harassment and killings.

At Schindler`s factory, nobody was hit, nobody murdered, nobody sent to death camps. But conditions at the factory were far from comfortable. Freezing, lice-ridden inmates still suffered typhus and dysentery.

Until the liberation of spring, 1945, the Schindler's used all means at their dispo