Oskar Schindler was the swashbuckling hero who saved more than 1,000 Jews from Nazi death camps. But the remarkable role played by his widow is only now emerging as she lies dying in a German hospital.
After more than 50 years of self-imposed exile in Argentina, Emilie Schindler flew home to Germany three weeks ago but slipped into a coma last Saturday.
Now, with the 94-year-old woman close to death, a fierce row has erupted over the part she played alongside her husband in rescuing 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers.
According to her friends, Emilie, who married the womanising German industrialist before the war, has spent years living in poverty, unable to benefit from the millions made from books such as Schindler's Ark and the Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List, which starred Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes.
Unable to pay for her own treatment, Emilie has had to rely on friends who are desperately trying to collect money to pay for her medical bills. 'Emilie has suffered her whole life from being the woman in the shadow of a great man, when in fact their roles in saving the Jews could be split 50-50,' said Erika Rosenberg, her friend and carer for 11 years. 'But she was cut out of the film and the book in a very humiliating and offensive way.'
The publication this autumn of a book by Rosenberg about the life of Emilie Schindler will fuel the controversy still further. Ich, Emilie Schindler is a drastic rewriting of the Schindler story and will reveal how Emilie spent her final years embittered about those who overlooked what she claims was her equally heroic role in saving the Jews on the list. Her husband, in contrast, was feted around the world.
Schindler, who became a member of the Nazi party so that he could win a string of lucrative business contracts, first began employing Jewish workers from the ghettos in Krakow in southern Poland. Later he compiled his famous list and paid Nazi commanders thousands of pounds to obtain an entire workforce for his munitions factory.
Rosenberg's book will also include astonishing attacks on Spielberg and Thomas Keneally, the author of Schindler's Ark, the book used as a template to make Schindler's List. She accuses Spielberg of failing to consult Emilie during the production, claiming that he only invited her to take part in the final scene - when stones are laid on Oskar Schindler's grave in Jerusalem by those he saved - for which she received a paltry sum.
Keneally, meanwhile, is accused by Rosenberg of failing to turn up at a meeting in Uruguay in 1996 at which she claims he had promised to hand over a payment of $2,000 to Emilie Schindler. Rosenberg also alleges Emilie received nothing from Keneally for the substantial eye-witness information with which she furnished him for his book.
But this weekend Keneally and Spielberg struck back, claiming that they had been fully supportive of Emilie Schindler for many years. 'Her Argentinian supporters have always felt she was the real heroine, the good angel behind the venal, corrupt Schindler who later left her in poverty,' Keneally told The Observer from Sydney.
'But the fact is she wasn't around at the beginning in Krakow, so it just isn't true to say she played an equal role, although there are too many tales of the good things she did for them [the Jews] for anyone to doubt her altruism.'
The author also denied breaking any arrangement to meet in Uruguay. 'There was never any arrangement, that's absolute nonsense, and actionable,' he said.
Keneally said that when he was researching his novel in the early Eighties he received a request from Emilie's lawyer that she be sent a series of questions to answer. Keneally added that he paid her an agreed sum for the information he received. Emilie is also said to have received a large payment from Spielberg after Schindler's List was completed in 1993.
Marvin Levy, a spokesman for Spielberg at Amblin Entertainment, said: 'Emilie had nothing but great, great praise for it [the film] - she was at the premiere event in Washington, where she met the Clintons, and in New York. The only criticism she seemed to have then is that the film failed to show the true extent of Schindler's womanising as she experienced it.'
Levy added that it was inaccurate to claim Emilie Schindler's role in saving lives had been as significant as that of her husband. 'Oskar was clearly the one who came up with the idea and paid for it,' he said. 'The survivors, while acknowledging her efforts, say she was only there part of the time, although when she was there she distinguished herself.'
After the war, the couple fled to Argentina and started a farm outside Buenos Aires. Emilie Schindler claims she was forced to do most of the work while Oskar began a string of affairs with other women. In 1957 he left her and went back to Germany, where he died in 1974, having never returned to Argentina.
Rosenberg's book tells of Emilie's years of loneliness on her farm 40 miles from Buenos Aires and how she took in stray cats for company. It reinforces the image portrayed in both the book and the film of Schindler as a philandering, selfish man who left his wife destitute. Despite this, she was capable of expressing both her love and bitterness towards him in one sentence, calling him a 'saufkopf' (drunk) and 'weibheld' (womaniser), but also saying: 'If he'd stayed, I'd have looked after him.'
She spent the next 40 years surviving on donations from Jewish organisations, and a pension from the Argentine and German governments. The Argentinians nicknamed her Mutter Courage. A journalist who visited her three months ago described her house as 'very basic and stinking of cat piss', but pointed out her pension was 10 times that of the average Argentinian.
Keneally said Emilie Schindler's resentment towards her late husband only intensified after the film's release. 'She emerged from the film as a betrayed and misused wife, but she'd also had to look at this bloke who'd abandoned her in poverty, as he became a byword for swashbuckling altruism.'
Rosenberg, who lost all her relatives in the Holocaust and describes Emilie as her ersatz grandmother, has also been criticised after the obviously frail Emilie undertook a gruelling programme of school visits, TV interviews and meetings with politicians following her arrival in Berlin on 9 July.
On more than one occasion she was seen to nod off. During one interview, which was later deemed unsuitable for broadcast, she was incapable of answering questions, saying that she had never been married, asking after her cats and expressing her distaste for biscuits. Commenting on her wartime role, she could only say: 'It was hard work. We had to keep going.'
Was it right to bring her? 'I did not come to promote my book, I came to help Emilie fulfil her last wish,' said Rosenberg. 'I sensed her relief when we arrived in Germany that finally she had made it and could now give up.'