Bob CollinsYou’ll not read a more incredible journey in an obituary than the one told in the Chicago Sun-Times today about Margot Schlesinger, one of the last living people on Schindler’s list.
Margot Schlesinger greeted the births of each of her three children, eight grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren with love, gratitude and just a touch of glee.
“Each one that is born,” she’d say, “is my revenge against Hitler.”
In a grand and final rebuke to Hitler, Mrs. Schlesinger lived to be 99 and a half years old.
Mrs. Schlesinger died last week.
She was one of industrialist Oskar Schindler’s 300 female workers sent to Auschwitz where she was personally selected by Josef Mengele to go to the line for execution.
“I got very frightened and very pale, and I said, ‘I’m young, I can still work,’ ” she told the USC Shoah Foundation. “So there was another doctor, and he said, ‘Let her go back.’ ’’
She met him again at the Plaszow forced-labor camp.
It was a horrific scene that made it into the movie that told Schindler’s story.
Schindler eventually got the women back.
No one ever walked out of Auschwitz except for this group of Schindlerjuden, the Sun Times said in its remembrance.
Mrs. Schlesinger described her life philosophy this way: “Everybody’s born as a human being. . . . There’s no place in the world for bigotry and for race-hating.”
She also said, “They should watch their government very much and the people who they vote for.”
