For him as a child, Oskar Schindler was not yet a hero, but also a heart carrier and also “somewhat curious uncle,” says Hans-Michael Trautwein. Traut wine was old for ten years when he met the “Jewish Savior”. Schindler, who lived in Frankfurt from 1957 until his death in 1974, was often guests with his parents. Trautwein, now an economic professor in Oldenburg, describes him as a man who was often exuberant in his generosity who loved to spoil children. “Once we were traveling in the car in summer, six in the Ford Taunus, it was terribly hot,” says Trautwein. “Too hot,” thought Oskar Schindler. So they stopped and Schindler ran into a business. He came back with ice cream. But not with a normal portion, but with “a family pack for Prince-Pückler ice cream for every child”. In a ceremony in the Kaisersaal of the Frankfurt town hall Römer, Trautwein remembers this anecdote. The occasion: The city named the forecourt of the main train station to Oskar Schindler-and according to his wife Emilie, who, together with her husband, saved more than 1200 Jewish forced laborers. On Sunday, the Emilie-and-Oskar-Schindler-Platz ceremoniously got its name. “Schindler’s list” made the events known worldwide. The Schindlers had had their Krakauer factory classified as a “war-important production facility” and thereby protected their Jewish workers from the Nazis. At the end of 1944, when the Red Army advanced on Krakow, they managed to move their factory to Brünnlitz in Moravia. If this had not been succeeded, their workers would have been deported to Auschwitz – and thus sent them to safe death. Steven Spielberg told this unusual story in his cinema film “Schindler’s list” in 1993 and made it known all over the world. “Schindlerjuden” were mentioned, some of her descendants have now also traveled to Frankfurt. Erika Rosenberg-Band, historian and administrator of the estate of Emilie and Oskar Schindler came from Buenos Aires. Her parents had fled to Argentina from Germany in 1936 via Paraguay. In 19990 Rosenberg band Emilie Schindler had met, who lived in a village south of Buenos Aires: “Very impoverished”, in a small and easy apartment. In 1947 the Schindlers moved to the South American country to build up a low in nutria. But the company went bankrupt and the couple alienated. Emilie Schindler stayed in Argentina when her husband decided in 1957 to return to Germany. “She told, told, told, told” Rosenberg band actually wanted to write about exile in Argentina and had therefore contacted Emilie Schindler. “She told, told, told,” she recalls in the Kaisersaal of her first meeting with the woman who became a girlfriend. Together the two made a book out of their memories. In order to describe Emilie Schindler, Rosenberg-Band uses the Yiddish expression “A Mensch”: she was always concerned about her fellow human beings, was a woman who “saw with her heart”, showed her how important it was to act courageously. “She entrusted me with her life,” says the author. More on the subject of further advertisements Hans-Michael Trautwein’s parents-the then evangelical city youth pastor in Frankfurt, Dieter Trautwein, and his wife Ursula-had heard of Oskar Schindler for the first time in the Israeli memorial Yad Vashem. In Frankfurt, the pastor then visited Schindler, invited him to speak publicly about his experiences. “He always spoke plain text,” he recalls in the Kaisersaal of Schindler. As a child, he couldn’t understand what he had done during the Nazi era, says Trautwein. The “curious uncle” only became the model later.
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