Marta Rosenberg, an heiress to the widow of Oskar Schindler, has filed a lawsuit against the New York art dealer Gary Zimet in order to stop the US$ 2.2 million sale of a copy of ‘Schindler’s List’, which she alleges is a fake. Zimet announced in March that he was selling the list, allegedly one of four surviving original lists in the United States, on behalf of an anonymous seller. Rosenberg, an Argentinean citizen who wrote a biography of Schindler and his widow Emilie, contends that the will of Emilie Schindler had given her the exclusive rights to anything that belonged to the couple, the ‘New York Daily News’ reports. Her lawyer John Gleason says: "She wants it off the market. She doesn't want it sold as a trinket for somebody's bookcase".
"If Zimet is permitted to offer for sale...what he purports to be the List, when in fact it is not a true copy of the List, such transaction would cause irreparable harm to Rosenberg," the suit says, according to the 'New York Daily News'. The paper quotes Zimet as rejecting the allegation. The list "is 100 percent fine," he reportedly said.
The list in question is dated 18 April 1945, 13 pages long and contains the names of 801 Jewish workers employed by the German industrialist Schindler and saved from deportation to the Nazi death camps. Several copies of the list were drawn up by Schindler and his accountant, Itzak Stern. The four known surviving originals are kept at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, the German federal archives in Koblenz and two at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.