Searching for Schindler (13 page)

Auschwitz 1, the first of the camps, was designed for Russian prisoners and political prisoners, and for medical experiments on children, twins and women. Hangings, detention of people in absurdly small spaces, and obscene medical examinations were the order of the day in this first camp, close to the villa of the commandant of the entire Auschwitz system, Rudolf Höss. It is the camp which carries over the gate in wrought iron the renowned improving adage
ARBEIT MACHT FREI
—Work Makes One Free. (It was from a barracks at Auschwitz 1 that the child Ryszard Horowitz, until then surplus to experimental requirements, was liberated at the end of the war.)

Auschwitz 2, also called Auschwitz-Birkenau, was a massive area, death’s anteroom for numberless Jews from Ruthenia to Greece to Paris. It was reached via a gate through which the trains arrived full from all over the Reich, and departed empty. This is the camp which above all plays on our imagination, for it was in Auschwitz 2 that, having found through experimentation the correct asphyxiant gas, the Nazis were able to produce death as an industrial outcome, and to attend to the greatest problem, the obliteration of the remains, in industrial ovens. Walking down the lanes of Auschwitz 2, one can feel the
accidie
, the operational ennui which produced the daily results. As in any factory, many of the SS workers were bored with the process and were driven, as happened in the famous scene in the book and movie
Sophie’s Choice
, to play games to relieve the monotony in this extraordinary place in which humans were reduced to a whisper from a chimney.

Huge Auschwitz 2 was largely demolished, and the gas chambers and ovens dynamited, as the Russians drew close, but there is enough material remaining to horrify. The railway itself, with its archway, would be used by Spielberg in the film that at this point no one but Poldek dreamed of, and is still capable of carrying a large locomotive and rolling stock. The huts were thin-walled, unlined and inadequate for winter. When one goes to the western end of the camp and descends the stairs into the chambers, it takes an effort to walk to the middle of the space. An irrational fear arises that the door might be closed and, through the nozzles in the roof, a vaporous death enter.

I found it hard to believe that those Schindler women I had met, those faces of familial normality, had been caught here in Auschwitz 2 in 1944 as potential oven fodder. As I would write, there were a number of versions of the story of how the Schindler women had survived the place and then been shipped out to Brinnlitz. Their rescue is universally attributed by former prisoners to Schindler. A number of male prisoners claim independently of each other to have approached Oskar when their womenfolk did not arrive in Brinnlitz. Some say he paid diamonds, others that he sent one of his better-looking secretaries to talk to and if necessary give herself to officials. That the women survived is assured. That Misia Pfefferberg and Leosia Korn, Manci Rosner and Niusia Horowitz, were rescued is a matter of fact.

We had a little time now to drive to the mountains and look over the Danube toward Oskar’s hometown, Svitavy—Zwittau—and the site of his long-vanished Brinnlitz camp. We decided we would need to come back later in the year, but the truth is that we never did. The writing of the book would begin under pressure of ingested tales, and claim all the coming months.

One morning in Kraków between two and three I was awakened by a knocking at the door of my room. I thought it might have been restless Poldek, with more information to impart. When I opened up, I found an exquisite and very drunken Polish girl, perhaps twenty-five years old, wrapped only in a blanket and otherwise apparently naked, asking for a light. It is likely she had been working from room to room. She didn’t look like an agent provocateur of the kind Poldek had warned me of. She could have modeled for a statue of Polonia, the nation, but a Polonia worked over by tyranny and vicious times. Yeats saw Ireland itself similarly, incarnated in his character Kathleen Ni Houlihan, a woman formerly beautiful but now misused and debauched. Of course, I did not think too deeply along these lines at the time. She was magnificent, whatever her purpose, but all too blatantly a victim. I hope it was virtue which made me send her away. In any case, out of mischief I gave her Poldek’s room number and told her he had a light.

This girl somehow became confused in my head with that anthem that was played each noon on Polish radio—one clear, melodic trumpet call originally played, at least according to legend, from the steeple of St. Mary’s Church in Kraków, and stopped mid-note at the point that a Tartar arrow struck the trumpeter. This interrupted melody, a combination of unfinished business and violated spirit, was known as the
Hejnal Mariacki
.

Nine

The night was dank when we went to the airport at Kraków to catch our plane out of the Poland of fears and whispers, and to Vienna. Early in the afternoon I had asked Poldek about dumping some of our plentiful zloty. He had told me, “Don’t be a worrier. They won’t even ask us—they won’t make a fuss when they see my Orbis badge.”

But having arrived in the dimly lit terminal we ran into exactly the trouble I had feared, and Poldek’s Orbis badge proved, for once, inadequate protection. We were required to change our zloty back into U.S. dollars at the government exchange booth, and when we did so we had more dollars than were accounted for by hotel and food receipts. An official in a blue uniform to whom I presented my papers saw the difference and seemed very disturbed by us. He led us away from passport control, which lay between us and our exit to some happier land, and took us to a desk far off on the flank of the airport terminal, and into an office full of men in greenish paramilitary uniforms, some of them bearing semiautomatic weapons. The official assigned to us was one of the latter. His Kalashnikov strapped very martially to his chest, he began looking at our papers and passports. It has to be remembered that in 1981 such procedures and such publicly displayed arms were not common in the West, and were of their nature more alarming than they would be now. But Poldek seemed un-amazed. He whispered to me to get out my latest novel again, a copy I was taking to Moshe Bejski, Schindler’s former forger, now an Israeli Supreme Court justice.

Meanwhile, the official pursed his lips over my financial document and the latest exchange document I had. He began speaking in Polish with a lazy hostility. Poldek answered him loudly, as if trying to smother him in fearlessness. According to him, I was prodigiously well-known, a virtual Hemingway. (Technically that could be said of any novelist—they were all prodigiously well-known by their small readership.) And here we had been in Poland, Poldek asserted, for research for a multimillion-dollar film concerning World War II Polish history. The film would win the Academy Award, Poldek assured the fellow. Everyone, he said, agreed with that. Obviously, he implied, we were so focused on injecting millions of dollars into the Polish economy that we hadn’t had much time to sort out small matters concerning zloty.

Now he pulled from his pocket every card he had gathered in every office and from every official we had met, including the young manager of the Holiday Inn in Kraków and the officials of the telephone components company we had met in Oskar’s old factory. All these gentlemen en masse, he said, were ecstatic at our efforts, and right behind us, and anxious that no hindrance be placed in our path. The thought of so many millions of dollars in production money delighted them—and they were, of course, all significant men and, by gentle implication, men with the power to make this uniformed fellow miserable.

Poldek did not once tell the man that our heroic Polish book was not yet written, but he showed him the book he had taken from me. An American hardcover edition of a novel was indeed a remarkable artifact by the standards of Poland then, its books being produced with limp, tearable covers on thin, speckled and yellowing paper. The official thumbed through its thick-napped pages and checked me against my picture on the inside back cover. Even so, I was waiting for this monetary cop or whatever he was to turn on Poldek angrily and tell him to be silent, and to call in other officers to help deal with us for exchange crimes. It was now, as the man absorbed and weighed my book and what had been said, that Poldek went beyond the bounds of credibility.

“And don’t you think, Thomas,” he asked, “that this man has exactly the sort of heroic Slavic features we need for our film? Sir, sir, if you would be so kind, could we have your name and address?”

The man’s eyes nearly closed and became ambiguous slits. I was sure the screaming and gun-pointing would begin now.

“Here, I have paper, my friend,” Poldek announced, tearing a page out of a notebook and offering it to the official. The man’s brow unclenched and he broke into a sneer, or so I thought. It grew, however—and to my astonishment—to become an authentic grin of delight. Suddenly the man was handing back my book and joking in Polish with Poldek. He leaned over our financial statements still on the table but no longer a matter of primary concern, and took up a ballpoint pen. I remember that he seemed to write in urgent hope in sharp-edged Polish script. He wanted to escape the address he was putting down on paper. I could not believe that such egregious and transparent balderdash as Poldek had brought to bear had produced this new geniality at the counter. When the man had finished writing he held the page up like a student offering his essay to a teacher. In this case, to Professor Magister Pfefferberg.

Analyzing all this later, I realized that even had I the daring to offer an inducement anyone should have been able to see through, I would have revived suspicion in the guard behind the counter. But Poldek knew instinctively that when persiflage reaches its apogee, it must be maintained unapologetically and without apparent fear or rush, and its intensity retreated from only gradually. Poldek took out his wallet, kissed the man’s name and address before folding the page deftly with his free hand and placing it within the wallet. After he had returned the wallet to his breast pocket, he kissed his fingers, a Polish gesture which implied the data he had just deposited was sacred.

“I shall wear this by my heart,” he told the policeman, “until I return to Beverly Hills.”

Almost as an afterthought, the man stamped my statement. Poldek shook his hand enthusiastically and asked him about his children. Then, with undue awe, the man shook my hand too.

I had left what the West considered repressive countries for “liberal” destinations before—Beijing to British Hong Kong, for example. The contrast had not been as starkly revealed, though, as in the short aircraft journey from Poland to Vienna. The center of Vienna seemed exquisite and exuberantly lit in a way that, despite a sinister history, defied all fear and whispers. We stayed at a hotel which had once accommodated Hitler, and I felt the delirium of Vienna’s brighter air.

One of our chief objectives now was to trace Goeth’s family—they had owned a printing company. There was no printing company of that name in the Vienna business registry or in the phone book. Nor did we yet know that in a nearby apartment Goeth’s embittered former mistress Majola was dying of emphysema.

At the Adlon Hotel, within sight of that wonderful cathedral the Stephansdom, we interviewed two survivors, fashionably dressed Viennese, the Hirschfelds; and another survivor who wished to be identified in the book by the letter
M
. M was an interior designer in Vienna, but had witnessed, as a prisoner, the killing of Polish women in the old Austrian fort to the southwest of Plaszów camp, on Chujowa Górka. During these interviews, as ever, I made tape recordings and took notes as well, a frenetic combination, belt and braces, but justified by the honor all these
Schindlerjuden
had done me in granting me interviews, even under the compelling aegis of Poldek. We and the Hirschfelds had a Martell brandy together at the end of the evening, in honor of Oskar’s own passion for brandy.

Another Viennese we made contact with was Mrs. Bankier, the widow of Oskar’s factory manager, a man who had much honor among his fellow survivors. It was Bankier—not, as the film has it, Itzhak Stern—whom Oskar rescued from a transport to the east one morning at Prokocim Station. He had been found without his
Kennkarte
and his
Blauschein
. He had also been related to the former owners of Rekord, the company Oskar took over.

We failed to find Goeth’s relatives, despite the helpful suggestions of the Hirschfelds and Mrs. Bankier. Understandably, they had never tried to seek them out, and only a tiger like Poldek could contemplate meeting them in polite surroundings. I was certainly uneasy about interviewing them, about asking them to fill me in on the childhood and young manhood of Amon. In any case, Vienna was something of a whistle-stop on the way to the cornucopia of
Schindlerjuden
which Israel would offer.

Our dawn landing
at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv caused many passengers to sing and others to become meditative. Many stepped to the side of the stairway on descending from the plane and kissed the cool morning tarmac. It was now full spring, and the griefs and terrors of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed far away from Tel Aviv, beyond the Golan Heights. To look upon the string of hotels along the beachfront, one would see Tel Aviv as a pleasure port. But for Arabs as for Jews, it could be a place of ferocious memory.

Israel, at that time an unusually rigorous processor of boarding and disembarking travelers, had nonetheless let through as baggage a strange item, the Zakopanean ice pick Poldek had insisted on buying for me in the Sukiennice in Kraków. To someone not accustomed to the Polish mountains south of Kraków, it was a strange implement: a wooden shaft, highly ornamented, with metal casings from which little rings hung. At one end it sported an ice spike, and at the other an ornamental ax blade. I had consigned it to the baggage hold because I hoped the Austrian or Israeli security would confiscate it. Perhaps the baggage officials who no doubt inspected it were familiar with such things and considered it purely decorative. Yet it was as potentially lethal as a combination baseball bat, gouger and ax. I would in fact be accompanied by it all the way back to Australia, through many airports, ever hoping that someone in their right mind would consider it too perilous to tranship. But always, as I waited for my luggage, its jaunty blade and metallic fixings would jerk up the conveyor belt at the top of the baggage carousel, and I would in the end find I was stuck with the thing for life.

Our arrival in Israel brought the question home to me, the one I always knew I would have to face. I sympathized greatly with the Palestinians. I saw them, simplistically no doubt, as having paid the ultimate price for European anti-Semitism. European culture, through the Nazis and their collaborators, could not have made it clearer to Jews that Europe had never been and would never be a safe place for them. Europe’s rivers of anti-Semitism still ran robustly underground in the post– World War II period. I could well understand the political passion of Zionism to find an unassailable nation of one’s own, better than I could grasp the religious fervor which also sometimes went into it.

The constitution of another oppressed people, the Irish, demonstrated behind its powerful civic pieties the uneasy relationship between the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church and the liberal democracy which was the true aspiration of the Irish people. The same conundrum faced Israel, and would come to bedevil it more and more. And glib European claims that the Jews and their
Judenräte
sometimes connived at their own destruction by showing passivity (though there wasn’t much passivity in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising!) were something the Israelis were bound to react to by becoming militarily ruthless. “Never again!” was the cry. So European malice created not only the original calamity but a determination in the Middle East that never again would Jews be accused of collaborating in their own destruction. The Palestinians bore the brunt of this rigorousness.

I knew that trying to tell a story which, because of its human scale, made it possible for readers to
imagine
the Holocaust, could be seen by some as an encouragement to Israeli hardliners. This was not a trite concern. Naturally, by now, I wanted to attempt the book, especially having heard the tale from so many mouths, and particularly since with its moral puzzles about Oskar’s character it exerted a particular attraction. I was aware that some Irish historians believed any dwelling on, or overemphasis of, the catastrophes of Irish history, particularly the Famine, encouraged the Provisional IRA in its explosive campaigns in Northern Ireland and the British mainland. Years later, I would come under a multipaged attack by Fintan O’Toole, Irish revisionist commentator, in
The New Republic
, for my history of the Irish world,
The Great Shame
, from the point of view of Irish political prisoners transported to Australia. The Germans had their own
Historikerstreite
, historical conflicts, about Nazism and the Holocaust, what should be made of them and what should be emphasized and de emphasized, and what the political consequences might be of history written in a particular style. And in Australia there were many historiographical, and thus political, debates over both the nature of convictism and the legitimacy of Australian settlement in light of the dispossession of the Aboriginals.

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed—and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish—is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. Thus, though worried, I was defiant in my intention to write this book.

Poldek’s excitement at being here after our night flight seemed not so much because he was back on an ultimate ancestral land, but because he was about to meet so many of his friends again. He had come here with Oskar and Gosch and the screenwriter Koch nearly twenty years before. But he made sure we stayed in the same beachside hotel in the Marina area as Oskar had then, where the Mediterranean came surging in on an enormous beach full of the muscular and shining young.

After a nap
and a bracing shower, and no time for swimming—we were not here for that—Poldek led me out to a marketplace, the little jewelry stall of Helen Hirsch. Hirsch was the handsome woman who, when a young prisoner, had been chosen by Amon Goeth to be his housekeeper. She had suffered many strange and frightening experiences in Goeth’s villa, and her hearing in one ear was still permanently impaired from a blow he had given her. Goeth had seemed in part attracted to her, in part repelled. Now she was in late middle age, married, and still making an adequate living out of selling her Middle Eastern style filigreed jewelry. I bought from her two filigreed
hamseh
s, open hands with the eye of God in the palm. In Goeth’s kitchen, though, she had not been aware of any particular divine vigilance over her.