Holocaust Survivor Advised on Schindler’s List – The Hollywood Reporter

This story is part of “The Last Survivors,” originally published Jan. 8, 2016.

When Steven Spielberg was considering Liam Neeson for the lead role of the savior industrialist in Schindler’s List, there was concern that the star was too attractive to play the part. So then-MCA/Universal head Sid Sheinberg reached out to the executive vp of his concert division, Robert Biniaz, who called his mother, Celina — a real-life member of the list — for input: “I told them that Mr. Schindler was very handsome, so he gets the job.”

Celina Biniaz, now 84, observes that “Schindler saved my life,” but Spielberg “gave me a voice” following a half-century of near silence. For years, “I didn’t want to tell them,” she says of sharing the searing details of her experience with friends and family. “I didn’t want to put a guilt shtick on them. My mother used to always say, ‘The world owes you nothing.’ ” Since the film’s release, Biniaz has been a key supporter of Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, which grew out of his work on the film. (Her testimony later was included as an extra on the Schindler’s List DVD to help gird against Holocaust deniers.)

Born in Krakow, Poland, the only child of a pair of accountants, Biniaz and her parents were forced into a labor camp called Plaszow and worked in factories belonging to an associate of Schindler’s — her parents as bookkeepers, she as part of a child’s cooperative making envelopes and brushes. When that associate decided to shut down his factory, Schindler put hundreds of its employees on his now-famous list. But soon after that, his female employees would be erroneously sent to Auschwitz, where Biniaz lived one of the film’s most indelible scenes, in which the women, seeing “the fiery plumes in the sky,” assumed the worst when herded together into a group shower chamber, but “fortunately water comes out and we figure we have another lease on life.” At another moment, during one of the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele’s selections, she was chosen to die. “I guess my survival kicked in,” she says. “The will to live. I just looked at him and I said three words — ‘Lass mich gehen’ — which in German is, ‘Let me go.’ He pushed his pencil the other way, and I ran out naked into the snow.”

In time, she would immigrate to Iowa (an uncle lived there), graduate from college (after missing out on formal education between second and 12th grades), spend her adulthood in Long Island and retire to Camarillo, California. This year, to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi camps, she returned to the site where she’d escaped slaughter. “The first time I went to Auschwitz was in a box car,” she says. “This time I went to Auschwitz in business class.”