Margot Landwirth / Margot Glazer (F / Belgium, 1927-2017), Holocaust survivor
Margot Landwirth / Margot Glazer (F / Belgium, 1927-2017), Holocaust survivor
Henri Landwirth (M / Belgium, 1927-2018), Holocaust survivor
Biography
Twins Henri and Margot were born into a Jewish family in Antwerp, in northern Belgium, March 7, 1927. Children of Max and Fanny Landwith. Father was a diamond-cutter. During World War II, Henri and his family were separated and were prisoners in the Nazi death and labor camps. Henri spent the years between ages 13 and 18 in Nazi camps, including Auschwitz and Mauthausen. Both of his parents were killed in the camps, but Henri and his twin sister, Margot, survived. After the war, the Landwirth twins made they way to America.
Orland Sentinel (10 January 1994)
Margot Glazer didn't need to see Schindler's List. "I was in that movie for five years. That was my life."
An Orlando owner of several gift shops and twin sister of philanthropist Henri Landwirth, Glazer, 66, grew up in Krakow. She lived in the city's Nazi-created ghetto and then in the nearby Plaszow labor camp.
She remembers camp commandant Amon Goeth well, though she was surprised that Schindler's List, so accurate in its re-creation of the camp, didn't make more of Goeth's dogs.
"He had two big, vicious dogs - one was a German shepherd, the other a huge Great Dane. He'd bring the dogs to the entrance to the camp and if he saw a face he didn't like or maybe someone carrying a piece of bread, he'd set the dogs on them. They'd tear them apart, kill them."
Nothing in the movie was exaggerated, Glazer said. She didn't work for Oskar Schindler, who ran a cookware plant at Plaszow, but for Julius Madrich, a clothing manufacturer who played a minor role in the movie.
"Madrich was just like Schindler. He was handsome, a womanizer, a drinker. But he was decent to us. He didn't beat us or shoot us," she said.
When Plaszow was ordered shut down in 1944 and its prisoners sent to Auschwitz, Schindler bribed Nazi officials into letting him move his workers to a munitions plant he had constructed in Czechoslovakia.
Madrich tried to do the same thing with his factory workers, Glazer said, and succeeded in moving some of them to a relatively safer concentration camp, Theresienstadt.
Glazer was not one of Madrich's lucky workers, however. She was shipped to Auschwitz. "There were 145 people in our cattle car, and three days later when they opened the door, half of them were dead."
The movie's harrowing scene at the Auschwitz train station was accurate, she said. "All we heard were the dogs and a lot of screaming." But the real prisoners who got off the trains in 1944 shared little resemblance to the actors who played them 50 years later in Steven Spielberg's movie.
"We were not looking like this: You can hardly look like this when you have one bowl of soup made from garbage and one piece of bread a day. But that didn't bother me. I wouldn't want to look at emaciated people" in a movie.
Glazer was 17 when she arrived at Auschwitz. A girlfriend smuggled in a gold coin by hiding it in her mouth during inspection. The gold coin bought 200 cigarettes, which the girls used during the three months they were there to barter for soup. "One cigarette for one soup."
After three months at Auschwitz, Glazer was shipped to a series of camps before being liberated in the spring of 1945. She and her brother survived the Holocaust; her parents did not.
She married soon after the war ended but refused to live in either Poland or Germany. Strict quotas kept her out of the United States, so she first lived in Belgium, then in Canada. She finally made it to Florida in 1962, promising her brother Henri - who came over from Belgium in 1948 - that they would never be apart again.
She has two children and four grandchildren, and they're the reason she went to see Schindler's List. Her two sons and her 16-year-old granddaughter sat with her in the theater. "I never go to horror movies or murder movies or movies with violence. But I was interested to see what Spielberg did with it, and I wanted my children to see it. I can't talk to them about it.
"I didn't like the movie, but I thought it was excellent - very strong, very powerful. And I liked seeing the town I was brought up in and the two camps I was in without having to go there.
"I was so happy to see it in the United States of America."