Some contents from Schindler's suitcase

Battle of the
Schindlers, cont'd

By Binyamin L. Jolkovsky

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- CALL IT A CASE of she says, she says.

In the latest round of bickering over Schindler's List -- the real document, not the movie, -- an illegitimate daughter of the famed Holocaust opportunist is advising that a recently discovered suitcase belonging to her father be given to a Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem --- and not to Oskar Schindler's ex-wife, who is laying claim to it.

In addition to the "list," the Samsonite piece, which was given to a German newspaper, Stuttgart Zeitung, last year by a couple who found it while cleaning the home of their late parents, contains an exchange of letters from the 1940s through the 1960s and a speech given by Schindler at the end of the war. It urged the Jews from his factory not to take violent revenge.

The finders' parents had been close friends of Schindler. They entrusted the suitcase to the newspaper, which has been publishing stories about its contents.

Though she had not spoken to, or had any interaction with, her ex-husband for decades preceding his death, Emilie Schindler, 92, who lives in a small town outside Buenos Aires and who is the author of "In Schindler's Shadow," is claiming ownership of the parcel, which no doubt could fetch a pretty penny. Schindler told a German magazine, that the suitcase, with a tag still attached to it that reads "O. Schindler," "belongs to me, because I am the widow and legal heir of Oskar Schindler."

"I don't think that (Schindler) left the suitcase with the condition that it be given later to Emilie Schindler," the 64-year-old bastard daughter, whose identity was verified by witnesses and records of alimony payments to her mother from Schindler, told a German newspaper, Stuttgarter Nachrichten.

Stuttgart Zeitung plans to indeed send the suitcase to the Israeli Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem.

Related: Schindler widow wants a piece of the pie