Searching for Schindler (5 page)

The coffee finished, we drove home. Our house lay above a Sydney beach, unspoiled by promenades, cement or hotels, and the garden was connected to the sand by a little track of about forty or fifty meters. My office was located above this track on the ground floor—it had a desk, bookshelves and a pub snooker table which I had purchased from a group of jovial surfies who had mass-rented the place next door. This would prove to be a perfect surface for the spreading of research documents. I often wrote standing up there, clearing off my pages only for an occasional game of pool. Meanwhile, on the beach below, board riders innocent of old-world malice performed their calm stunts amid crashing waves.

From here I began to make Schindler contacts in Sydney. First was a meeting with a general practitioner, Dr. Roman Rosleigh, who practiced medicine from a surgery at the front of a bungalow in the eastern Sydney suburb of Rose Bay. Rosleigh was a stately, handsome man, a contemporary of Poldek, a survivor of Plaszów and of its evil commandant Amon Goeth. He had been a doctor in the camp hospital and now he was generous with his information. When he first arrived in Australia as what the locals called “a reffo,” he had worked in a tire factory until he passed the certification exams the authorities imposed on immigrant doctors. He had founded an Australian family—I would often run into his son at the Sydney Football Stadium, wearing an Easts football sweater, no shadow of evil Plaszów or of Amon Goeth hanging over him. As for Dr. Rosleigh’s daughter, Monica, she is now the director of a nuclear medicine department in one of Sydney’s hospitals.

Dr. Rosleigh had not been on Oskar’s list for Brinnlitz, but he had often observed Schindler as he moved about Plaszów on business and had great respect for him, he said. And he knew intimately many of the
Schindlerjuden
. He’d known Stern, Schindler’s chief accountant and reputedly a great influence upon Oskar. He had seen, from his post in the clinic, Amon Goeth striding along or riding his white horse around the interior roads of the Plaszów camp, with each prisoner his eye lit upon feeling doomed to a bullet, if not today then tomorrow. Dead Goeth rampaged through Dr. Rosleigh’s dreams as he did through the dreams of all survivors of Plaszów.

As we drank tea in the house after surgery hours, he showed me a treasure from his bookshelf. It was the Polish transcript of Amon Goeth’s postwar trial, the full account by witnesses of Goeth’s behavior, beginning with the time he rolled into Kraków from Tarnów with the job of liquidating the Kraków ghetto. It covered the random shooting of prisoners from his balcony; the numbers of Polish Gentiles and Jews who were slaughtered at Chujowa Górka, a former Austrian hill fort at the southwestern end of the camp; his ambiguous relationship of hate and desire with his maid Helen Hirsch; his teasing of the boy prisoner Lysiek with the prospect of death, followed by his ultimate delivery of it with a bullet—all this freshly remembered in the evidence of those witnesses who in 1946 brought down a guilty verdict upon Amon’s head and sent him to the gallows.

Dr. Rosleigh, short of time, nonetheless patiently took me through the transcript, translating sections into English.

The transcript of the trial was also richly interspersed with photographs, including a photograph of the sensualist Goeth, in a fairly ordinary suit, being hanged from a low scaffold at Plaszów, scene of his crimes.

Dr. Rosleigh had a professional gravitas Poldek lacked, and to hear the same stories emerging from both kinds of men, so far apart geographically, impressed me greatly. There
had
been a fallible, heavy-drinking man named Schindler who had provided rescue, but he did it by drinking with another fallible yet utterly warped man of the same age, Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) Amon Goeth.

Poldek had also given me the Sydney address of a family named the Korns, Leosia and Edmund, or Edek. In Brinnlitz, Oskar’s second camp in Czechoslovakia, Edek had been a welder with Poldek, and he too had the build I came to associate with male Holocaust survivors—below six feet, a compact trunk with considerable upper body strength or wiriness. Leosia was different—a delicately built woman, like Misia. Also like Misia, she had been on Schindler’s list for Brinnlitz, but had found herself by accident, and with the other Schindler women, right in the midst of that very conurbation of slaughter, Auschwitz. How astounding to see her in a pleasant home in the eastern suburbs, where she lived on the incline rising to the sandstone cliffs of Bondi.

When, apparently miraculously after three weeks, Leosia was shipped out of Auschwitz again with the others for Brinnlitz, she weighed less than forty-four kilos, was suffering from scarlet fever and did not have the resistance to combat it. She was put to bed among the boilers in the basement of the Brinnlitz factory, where Mrs. Emilie Schindler hand-fed her semolina she had acquired on the black market. Leosia was able to get out of her cot, in that warm cellar at the end of one of Europe’s saddest winters, on the day before the German surrender. Yet there she is on the list, marked down like frail Misia as a
Metallarbeiterin.
There were few other spaces than that boiler room where she could have survived. These grandparents, Edek and Leosia, now took their children and grandchildren to Bondi and were Sydney and eastern suburbs patriots in the same way Poldek was a Beverly Hills patriot.

The Korns’ immigration story was a little like Leopold and Misia’s. When they arrived in Sydney postwar, they had been amazed to discover that the chief sectarian fight was not between Gentile and Jew but, at that stage, between Catholic and Protestant. “I said to a friend,” Leosia told me, “here the Catholics are the Jews!” Australians, who with unabashed xenophobia labeled all foreigners
wogs
, did not discriminate between Polish Catholics and Polish Jews, and abused them both with equal ferocity. Equality at last, thought the Korns.

At first Edek had worked at a rubber factory. In the period immediately after the war, housing was so short in Australia that if you wanted to rent the humblest flat, you were forced to offer the agent and/or owner a special tax named “key money”—that is, a bribe. His fellow workers in the rubber factory, who knew him by now, took up a collection and raised the key money he needed. It was given to him by one of his Australian coworkers with the words, “Listen, you wog bastard. Make sure you pay it all back!” That was the thing about Australians, said Edek Korn, quite admiringly. When you first arrived and they didn’t know you or like you they called you a wog bastard, and when they got to know and like you they called you a wog bastard. It was characteristic of a society largely made up of the hard-handed descendants of economic and political refugees that men expressed their deepest prejudice and their truest affection in the same words and with barely altered emphasis.

As soon as they could, Edek and Leosia had acquired some sewing machines, rented an upstairs room in an inner suburb, and started turning out trousers. One thing the Holocaust did for its survivors—and the experience of being a
Schindlerjude
did it too—was to give them vocational flexibility. They would turn their hand to anything that might earn them a space to breathe on earth.

By the time I met them, the Korns were well-to-do manufacturers, but Leosia confessed to me that she could never leave home to go shopping, even to the plush emporium of David Jones in the Central Business District, without taking with her a crust of bread. It was a quirk I would run up against in many of the
Schindlerfrauen
. Reason told them that between Dover Heights and Sydney, between New Jersey and Manhattan, they were unlikely to be loaded unexpectedly into a truck and shipped away, but the experience of hunger was so seared into their brains that they could not travel without the irrational fear that the bus or the taxi in which they rode would be stopped, that the trucks of the tyrant would lie in their paths, that they would be taken off their conveyances and packed tight in something in which there was no guarantee of survival, let alone the next meal. I told this story at a table of survivors in a New York restaurant, and almost shamefully a number of women began to confess they were the same, and took crusts from their handbags to prove it.

The Korns had two daughters, one a mother of young children, and another about to become an eminent criminologist. One took from the Korns a sense of precisely what talent had been redeemed from the furnace, though a mere modicum of the whole tapestry, of course.

I had to go to Melbourne too, and set up a meeting with a family named the Rosners, who lived there. The Rosner brothers had enjoyed the curious privilege of being Amon Goeth’s musicians in Plaszów. Before the war, Leo Rosner, an accordionist, had performed in the best hotels in Kraków with his brother Henry, a violinist. Even in the ghetto they were sometimes summoned to Nazi parties, and they played together in cafés inside the ghetto itself. Then, in the Plaszów camp, it was under orders that they put on their dinner suits in the appalling barracks to go up to Goeth’s villa and perform at lunches and cocktail parties. They got used to playing on, sustaining the required flow of music no matter what happened in Goeth’s living room and on the balcony. Now Leo and Henry did not live on the same continent—Henry lived in Queens, and I hoped to see him eventually.

Since the first discovery of gold near Melbourne, Sydneysiders and Melburnians have been locked in rivalry for a century and a half, and I was amused to find that Leo Rosner, Schindler survivor and accordion player, was a full-throated participant in the dialogue. “You should live in Melbourne,” he told me in the Rosner house in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick. “We have better roads. Sydney people are so ruthless. Thank God I came to Melbourne!” His intense civic pride was characteristic of Melburnians, who possessed a municipal self-esteem which puts the more relaxed Sydneysiders to shame. In the most congenial way possible, Leo Rosner had survived to become a typical Melburnian. A patriot of that golden city, as Edek Korn was of Sydney and Poldek of his “California, Beverly Hills.”

Like Edek Korn, Rosner proved to be a sturdy little man, and was still a professional musician, in demand for weddings and parties all over the state of Victoria, being equally able to play a rousing Australian folk song and a plangent prewar Hungarian song of doomed love. His brother, he told me, regularly played the violin at the Sign of the Dove in New York. “Poldek will take you there,” he promised. It was an appropriate idea, because Rosner possessed much of Poldek’s own indomitability. But it became apparent, too, that many who possessed these qualities had once, for a second, taken the wrong direction, been stopped with a bullet, or forced to ingest the lethal gas. It was in the women, in his wife, Helena, who had survived the Holocaust without being a Schindler Jew, that one encountered the fragility, the wariness, the gentleness, and the more subtle invincibility.

It was during these visits to the Rosners that I met another Schindler survivor, this time from Argentina, a man named Edward Heuberger, a blithe, sun-tanned, open-browed sort of man who contributed his tale of Plaszów, Schindler’s DEF (Emalia) and Brinnlitz. He had been one of the young prisoners who at the war’s end had accompanied Oskar to the West, to testify on his behalf should he be captured. They had finally run into an American patrol just beyond the Austrian border. Heuberger, not having seen any cinema for many years, was astonished by the fact that the Americans all chewed either tobacco or gum in a uniform display of mastication as they took Europe away from the Wehrmacht.

Heuberger gave me a very detailed account of that journey to the West, including the confiscation of Schindler’s diamond-loaded Mercedes by the Czech underground, and the ultimate arrest of Schindler by the Allies in Konstanz, near the Swiss border. He was soon freed on the strength of a plea signed by all his prisoners.

Back in Sydney’s northern beaches, from the desk in my office, I began composing an account of Schindler’s activities, on the basis of a possible contract from Nan Talese. I could see the husky, nonverbal surfers riding their boards on the beach below. The beach we lived on seemed frequently to guarantee good wave formations—
sets
, as the board riders called them.

By December 1980, I took off for Los Angeles again to formalize arrangements and plans for a research journey with Poldek and Glovin, leaving a family who had become enthused with the story by way of our table talk. Nan Talese had offered an advance of U.S.$60,000, not a bad advance by the standards of 1980. It would enable me to deal with Glovin and to take Poldek with me on a research journey, but also to have a living wage while I wrote the book. My British agent, a splendid woman and by birth an Austrian baroness, Tessa Sayle (formerly von Stockert), took the treatment and the abstract and showed them to a British publisher called Hodder & Stoughton, particularly to a jolly, bearded editor named Ion Trewin. So Hodder & Stoughton, too, became interested in the book for English and Australian publication, and at some stage gave me an advance for it.

I was suddenly in deep. It was where, to be honest, I wanted to be. There was a hunger for more tales of simultaneous horror and deliverance. I did not pause to ask what that said of my nature. Writers don’t.