New York – A legal battle has been sparked by plans to auction off the one of Oskar Schindler’s original lists for £2million.
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An original version of the document, which saved some 1,200 European Jews from the Nazi gas chambers, has gone up for sale on the website of a U.S. memorabilia dealer.
But Erika Rosenberg, an heiress of the Schindlers, says the historic document should be in a museum and is trying to block its sale.
Schindler’s List, the inspiration for the 1993 film of the same name, was produced by German industrialists Oskar and Emilie Schindler.
They gave jobs in their weapons factories to some 1,200 Jewish workers to save them from Nazi concentration camps.
The website of Gary Zimet, the dealer who has arranged the sale, says the ‘exceedingly rare’ original copy of the list is ‘the only one ever to be on the market’.
The website claims that the list’s ‘ironclad’ provenance stems from its links to the family of Yitzhak Stern, Schindler’s Jewish accountant and co-conspirator.
‘This version of the list (there are seven all told) is the penultimate, being 14 pages in length and listing 801 names, dated April 18, 1945,’ the website says.
Oskar and Emilie Schindler died poor in Argentina after leaving their lives in Germany behind when the war ended
The daughter of Germans who fled to Argentina in 1940, Ms Rosenberg met Emilie Schindler in Buenos Aires in 1990.
When Mrs Schindler died childless in 2001, she chose Ms Rosenberg as one of five heiresses.
Well, Mrs. Schindler may have named Ms. Rosenberg – not a blood relative as one of her heiresses, there is at least one blood relative remaining. Rosemarie Schindler is the great-neice of Oscar Schindler. She recently visited the city that I live in. I certainly hope that she steps in to this fray. Ms. Schindler is quite an amazing woman – she spends her time promoting Xtain tourism to Israel, visiting travel agents all across North America (and beyond, I believe).