THE LIVING ROOM CURTAINS ARE DRAWN against the late-afternoon sun, and Emilie Schindler's face, as she sits stiffly in a leather chair to ease her aching back, is obscured by shadow. A cat, one of 17 strays she has rescued, ambles past. A dog rests nearby. "I am here in Argentina for 43 years," she says, speaking from the shadows, "and nobody remembered me, until now."

For Schindler, 86, and in poor health, past and present have come together in this one-bedroom cottage 45 miles from Buenos Aires. She is the widow of Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who saved more than 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust. With this month's premiere of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, the exploits of Emilie (played by Caroline Goodall), like those of her husband (Liam Neeson), may not soon be forgotten again.

Emilie finds the prospect of becoming a celebrity daunting. Now she must grapple with ambivalent memories of Oskar—the Pimpernel who bribed, cajoled and outwitted the Nazis, and the unfaithful husband a who abandoned her.

Nearly destitute and living on the kindness of those who remember what the Schindlers did—B'nai B'rith provides the house she lives in—Emilie speaks without affection of the man she calls Schindler—never Oskar or my husband.

"For the Jews he did much, no? And I recognize that," she says in German-accented Spanish. "But for me?" She shrugs. "They make him important—a star, you know, that shines. But he's gone."

Emilie Pelze, a wealthy farmer's daughter, was 20 when she met Schindler, a handsome fellow-Catholic from the German-speaking Sudelenland region of Czechoslovakia. He was selling tractors in the area and met Emilie on a sales call. They married six weeks later.

Emilie's father opposed her marriage lo the fast-talking suitor who was, in the words of Australian writer Thomas Keneally, who first told the story in a 1982 book on which Spielberg's movie is based, "a sensual husband, a boy with a wild streak, looking too early in his life for some sort of peace from a nunlike, gracious, unsophisticated girl."

By the late 1930s, with Czechoslovakia and Poland under German domination, Oskar's political contacts—cultivated as assiduously during Hitler's rise to power as his busy extramarital sex life—paid off. He was able to buy a bankrupt enamelware factor)' in Cracow, Poland, make it prosper with hefty military contracts—and run it with Jewish workers, who otherwise would have been destined for the concentration camps. "At first we knew nothing about the Jews," says Emilie. "Eventually everyone in Cracow knew they were killing Jews in the camps. My god, how could we not know?"

As the war progressed, Schindler the war profiteer became Schindler the hero. His list, the names of the 1,200 or so people he claimed he needed lo keep his factory going, was the source of hope for the men, women and children he struggled to keep alive and fed. In this battle for survival, Emilie was just as heroic. "I searched for bread and potatoes for the Jews," she says. "It says in the book that I gave the Jews the food in their mouths, but I never had time to find out who was sick and had to be fed by hand. I tell you frankly, I have no talent for nursing. I brought the food for everyone."

In 1944, fearing that Cracow might fall to the onrushing Red Army, the Nazis allowed Schindler to relocate his factory—and all the workers—to Brinnlitz, in Moravia. It was there, in 1945, that the Schindlers, fearing they would be taken prisoner by the Russians, finally said goodbye to their charges—but not until the SS had left. "We couldn't leave before the SS," says Emilie. "If we'd gone, what would have happened to the Jews?" Then, dressed in the same striped uniform that the workers wore, Emilie and Oskar fled west and eventually crossed the American lines.

The Schindlers finished the war penniless, their property confiscated by the Soviets and their personal effects stolen by looters. In 1949, buoyed by Oskar's optimism—and helped by a grant from a Jewish relief group—they emigrated to Argentina, where Oskar hoped to strike it rich as a farmer. The childless Schindlers struggled for eight years before Oskar decided to go home to Germany. "Schindler was supposed to come back," says Emilie. "But I think the first thing he did was sell the return ticket. He had mortgaged our farm, so I had lo sell it off to pay the bills."

After he returned to Germany, Schindler failed at several businesses and died alone in Frankfurt in 1974. He is buried in Jerusalem, where his coffin was escorted to the gravesite by men and women whose lives he had saved. In June, for the first time, Emilie—who displays no photographs of Oskar in her house in San Vicente—visited his grave. Spielberg's film footage of her visit serves as the epilogue to his $23 million black-and-white epic.

But Emilie, after all these years in anonymity, puts little stock in such citations. "I don't feel like a celebrity," she says. "I don't need those things. What I did, I did for humanity."

MICHAEL NEILL
JANE SIMS PODESTA in San Vicente