Searching for Schindler (7 page)

Vintage trains used to re-create scenes of the shipment of Jews to the labor camps. These scenes were particularly difficult for survivors to watch.

Judy, Tom and Steven Spielberg after the New York premiere of
Schindler’s List.

Meeting the Austrian chancellor, Frank Vranitzky (head of table): Steven Spielberg, Jerry Molen and Tom, February 1994.

Press conference prior to the film premiere of
Schindler’s List
in Vienna, February 1994. (Left to right) Jerry Molen, Tom, Steven Spielberg, Simon Wiesenthal (war-criminal hunter) and Branko Lustig (producer and child survivor of Auschwitz).

Simon Wiesenthal, Spielberg, Tom and Poldek with the U.S. ambassador to Vienna, Swanee Grace Hunt, at a party she hosted at the U.S. embassy before the premiere of the film in Vienna, February 1994.

Tom and Poldek were awarded a chocolate Oscar at a pre–Academy Awards party hosted by Century City magnate Joe Segal. They are pictured here with Segal’s Australian-born wife, Kaye Kimberly-Clark.

Misia, Poldek, Judy and Tom at the Segal party.

Liam Neeson with Tom at Segal’s opulent home. Neeson returned from the bathroom and said to Tom, “The fookin’ Cézannes, man! Have you seen the fookin’ Cézannes?”

Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes ham it up at the Segal party.

Tom and Judy Keneally on their way to the Academy Awards on March 22, 1994, in a stretch limousine arranged for by Universal Studios.

Outside the Academy Awards before the announcement that
Schindler’s List
had won Best Film and Spielberg Best Director.

Tom with Ben Kingsley (now Sir Ben Kingsley), who played Itzhak Stern, at the premiere of
Schindler’s List
in Sydney.

Three

In California, Poldek was waiting at the airport. “Tow-mass, my brother! We are brothers to the grafe. What a great little guy!”

I could later joke about his grammatical usage, but even here I am partly uneasy for I, too, had a sense we were somehow brother-adventurers, a sense that this journey was somehow larger than the accumulation of our joint endeavors, and a certainty that his Polish was splendid and mine nonexistent.

In the following days I was taken to see more people who had known Schindler—for example, the impressive Rabbi Jacob Pressman in whose temple, Beth Am, Schindler had been a guest and once made a speech. With Irving Glovin in his Glenwood office, I, foolishly perhaps, let loose the fact that I had not knowingly met a Jewish Australian until I was in my twenties. Indeed I confessed that although the Australian forces in World War I had been commanded by the brilliant son of Prussian Jews, General Sir John Monash, after whom an Australian university and suburbs were named, it was not until my twenties that I caught on to the idea that Monash was actually Monasch. This confession of mine seemed to increase rather than diminish a certain uneasiness in Glovin about Poldek’s enthusiasm for me.

Amid the visits and extraordinary interviews with Holocaust survivors and Oskar acquaintances, Poldek and Misia maintained, from their untroubled childhoods, the practice of giving guests high Polish tea. Resplendent pastries were arrayed in the Pfefferberg apartment in Elm Drive, Beverly Hills. The walls were covered with scenes of Polish farmhouses and snowbound streets in Kraków, and paintings of Hasidic dancers.

Such stories Poldek told, such legends he spun, such good oil he exuded! Misia too, with softly muttered and extraordinary tales of her time in the presence of Amon Goeth or in Auschwitz, holding her breath, barely possessing the strength to stand, rubbing beets into her face to put color in her cheeks as the bored, sardonic SS doctors went by, selecting. I knew, even then, that I would try to write the book in the spirit of Tom Wolfe, as what Truman Capote or his publisher called
faction
. I knew, too, that things said by any one interviewee would have to be matched or weighed against what the historic record said, against context and the memories of other former
Schindlerjuden
.

One early story Poldek told me again, but not in Misia’s hearing, concerned the requirement laid down by the SS for delousing plants in all their camps, including Schindler’s. The sons-of-bitch Nazis, he said, as willing as they were for Jews to suffer from typhus, were very particular about its power to disrupt production and, above all, to infect them. The mother camp, Gross-Rosen up in Lower Silesia, of which Brinnlitz was a satellite, had ordered Oskar to build one in his factory-camp. Having described himself as a welder for the sake of getting into Brinnlitz, Poldek had to work with Edek Korn, the man I had met in Sydney, in welding a delousing system for prison clothing, blankets and other sources of lice-borne infection. The welders worked day and night on it, because they were anxious that the camp and factory would be closed down by the SS engineers at Gross-Rosen for lack of proper facilities.

After an all-night work session, Poldek claimed, with snow outside the compound and considerable heat in the factory, and with the oxyacetylene dazzling the air, he and Edek decided to ascend to the catwalks which ran across the roof of the factory, and go to one of the water tanks located up there for a quick swim. Upon arrival they found Schindler and a good-looking SS woman sharing the water. In fact,
cavorting
was the word for it. Poseidon and Amphitrite in their heaven. “I said, Forgive me, Herr Direktor! And Edek and I walked away. The Herr Direktor didn’t seem to be too worried, he didn’t blush. And as long as he was saving us from sons-of-bitch, we were happy. Let him have more girls than King Solomon!”

Further documents were forthcoming now—the entire contents of the filing cabinets at the back of the repair room were photocopied, including the awful SS telegram from Gross-Rosen which arrived at Brinnlitz on the morning of April 28, 1945, addressed not to Oskar but to the SS commandant, Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant) Liepold, whose job was to guard Schindler’s camp. Liepold was ordered to liquidate the prison, and the term “liquidate” meant killing the prisoners. A brave young prisoner named Mietek Pemper, Oskar’s secretary, who throughout the war made copies of many such incriminating documents, had a copy of the telegram in Schindler’s hands before breakfast time. This day was Schindler’s birthday—as early as this, he was already drinking cognac!—and he gave Pemper reassurances of the inmates’ survival.

As we went round Los Angeles together, Poldek mentioned off-handedly that he had recently had a heart bypass operation. They weren’t as common then as they are at the time of writing, but he told me his cardiac surgeon had declared it necessary, and he had cried, “Let’s do it now and get it over.” I was astonished that such a vital, hectic man should have recently needed a heart operation, and one at that stage considered quite serious.

He told me, too—not as a related incident but as another stanza of his life as a prisoner—about the SS noncommissioned officer (NCO) who regularly beat him with a truncheon in the barracks at Plaszów. Poldek had somehow attracted the young man’s irritable attention. The SS man intended to break Poldek. During one beating Poldek felt a sudden collapse of a disc in his back. But the intuition came to him that if he yelled now, the man would kill him. So he remained silent as his brain shrieked with pain. The beating ended and, from that point on, the NCO never touched him again, and Poldek became what Himmler had warned the SS about—he became the man’s special friend. As Plaszów was being closed down, the NCO came to Poldek one night, gave him a bottle of vodka and advised him to get onto Schindler’s list. Then he broke down and wept and said he had done things his mother wouldn’t believe. He hoped to be transferred to the Waffen-SS and die in battle. As far as Poldek knew, that was what happened, for the man never turned up on the lists of war criminals and was not in the files of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Poldek and I arranged to begin our research journey to interview survivors and collect documentation in late February. In the meantime he and I would work on a list of contacts and their addresses. One of them was Oskar’s abandoned wife, Emilie, in Buenos Aires.

At home on the beach in Sydney, I began to write as much as I could, basing the text on the documents Poldek had given me before Christmas and on interviews and documents I had garnered since. I had also collected a set of helpful reference books on the Holocaust. They included Lucy Davidowicz’s history
The War Against the Jews: 1933–1945
; Nora Levin’s
The Holocaust
; Raul Hilberg’s encyclopedic
The Destruction of the European Jews
, rich with Nazi documentation; Walter Laqueur’s
The Terrible Secret
;
Patterns of Jewish Leadership in Nazi Europe, 1933–1945
, the proceedings of a Yad Vashem history conference; the transcript of the trial of Amon Goeth; Martin Gilbert’s
Atlas of the Holocaust
and
Auschwitz and the Allies
; innumerable other books, including the startling biography of the SS chemical officer Kurt Gerstein, who both supplied Zyklon B to the system yet tried to let the West know about the extermination process—Saul Friedländer’s
Counterfeit Nazi
.

In those pre-email days, I made contact with some survivors by letter, including Mietek Pemper, Oskar’s former secretary, and Moshe Bejski, an Israeli Supreme Court judge who had once been Oskar’s forger of official papers.

I had also already written to Emilie Schindler in Buenos Aires via her lawyer, Juan Caro, whose address Poldek had given me. Oskar’s wronged wife, a hero in her own right, lived in San Vicente, a suburb of the city. Poldek had told me there was a devoted group of Argentinian survivors and others in the Jewish community who had sustained Mrs. Schindler in modest comfort since the nutria farm she and Oskar had started went bust in the late 1950s. Juan Caro replied that Mrs. Schindler was ill, too ill to be pestered by a visit. But she would send me answers if I forwarded questions, and I should also forward an appropriate fee at the same time. So I sent off a list of questions, and the substantial fee, to Emilie.

I did not quite understand then that Oskar’s abandonment of her was an act of treachery—in fact, the chief treachery she had suffered in her life—and that to hear Oskar praised as heroic, when he had failed to rescue her from the ignominy of being a dumped wife, was for her still the main issue, the unresolved wound, of Schindler’s history. In my questions I asked her to describe as fully as she chose the background she and Oskar came from, the circumstances of their marriage, and her own part in any of his activities. I told her that I had already heard tales of her own independent bravery, of her hand-feeding of women such as Leosia Korn. I said I sought to give her a proper place in the book.

She answered these questions perhaps reluctantly but fairly fully. She and Oskar came from the neighborhood of Zwittau (Svitavy) in northeastern Czechoslovakia, an ethnic German town near Brinnlitz, where Oskar would ultimately have his second camp. She did not express in her answers any rancor toward him for the hard dance he had led her through history. She told me particularly of the moribund women like Leosia and Misia, who were extricated from Auschwitz and brought back to Brinnlitz, and then the horrifying story of the two railway carriages that were dumped in the local railway depot at Brinnlitz. They had turned up there in the midst of the war’s last savage winter.

I had already heard of these trucks from Poldek and Edek Korn, who were both summoned to cut the frozen locks open. Inside each truck lay a pyramid of dying and dead workers from the Auschwitz quarry of Goleszów. These trucks had been shunted around Eastern Europe for two weeks in that frightful winter.

Frau Schindler’s answers did not claim, as some of her friends later did, that she was the chief force behind Oskar’s decency toward his Jewish workers. Yet they show she was her own woman and, from Brinnlitz, organized the sale of black-market items to buy food and medicine for both the women who came to her from Auschwitz and for the Goleszów men. Her service to those people was, according to the other prisoners, astonishingly generous and full-blooded, and much more than she would have needed to do to escape any future criminal judgment should this happen to be the war’s last autumn and winter.

The contract from
Simon & Schuster arrived, and I signed it on the pool table among the Schindleriana I had so far collected, and sent it back.

February 1981 came quickly. The beach below our house was dotted with people, some days crowded with them. My daughters went swimming and watched Australia play a Test series against New Zealand on television. It is a good, lazy month in Sydney, with the new school year just begun.

Back across the Pacific again, the lights of Sydney soon lost, there was nothing to see until, with morning and sunshine falling on Catalina Island off one wing, we inserted ourselves into the great air jam around Los Angeles airport.

There was time for a last few interviews in Los Angeles before Poldek and I took to our journey. I now met a middle-aged woman, a radio journalist and survivor who made a particular point to me. She insisted that she was one of Schindler’s Jews too, even though she hadn’t been to Brinnlitz. She was a Schindler Jew, she said, in the sense that the Czechoslovakian province of Moravia had been kept free of Jewish labor camps for nearly five years of the war. It was the Reich’s concession to the wishes of the local Sudeten German population, and it was also the wish of the Moravian police chief, Otto Rasch. The prisoners all seemed to take it for granted that Schindler had offered inducements to Rasch to persuade him to permit the opening of his labor camp in the province. Once the precedent had been created, there was room for other camps.

According to this woman, many young Jews whose lives would have been lost one way or another in the liquidation of Auschwitz, as the Russian army drew near the Vistula and the German factories were moved out of Auschwitz-Monowitz, were now sent to labor in a sequence of new Moravian work camps. This woman, very Californian, well-coiffed, expensively dressed, told me that she had been a prisoner in a Luftwaffe manufacturing plant in Moravia that would never have been opened had Schindler not broken the ground first by founding his own plant. Later I read the same argument in some documents written by Oskar’s accountant Itzhak Stern, and supplied to me by his widow. Itzhak would make the claim that up to twenty thousand Jewish prisoners were saved by Oskar’s initiative in Moravia.

As well as introducing me to Holocaust survivors in the 1939 Club—a Beverly Hills survivors’ club Poldek had helped found, whose members had not necessarily been in Oskar’s camp but who had known him postwar in California and Israel—Poldek talked to me endlessly about Goeth and Oskar and the SS and prisoners he knew, and answered my questions. I made notes on paper or by tape recorder. On the streets of Beverly Hills, his flow was interrupted only by ornate nods to friends or conversations with them, many being either former prisoners or people who had met Oskar or both.

In Gelson’s Supermarket in Beverly Hills on a Sunday morning, he stopped suddenly in front of the fruit section like a man struck by an intuition and reached out his hand to an elderly woman who seemed to be considering buying a melon. “Janka, darling. How did you get even more beautiful than to start with?” They kissed each other on both cheeks, Eastern European style, and Leopold introduced me. “Yes, there is going to be a book, darling. And a film. Sure, this will be a film. Why wouldn’t it be? Such a story of humanity man to man,” etc., etc., After asking her to raise her chin and proclaiming “Ageless, darling! Such bone structure!” a number of times, and making kissing sounds, he bade the woman good-bye, completed his purchases, and led me back to his car.