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Authors: Thomas Keneally

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Freddy was listening to this with a minor nod. It was the family story, as central as a book of the Pentateuch.

“Come back into the repair shop, I’ll show you.”

Poldek led me through the curtained door. Freddy followed. We came into a spacious room with an open office at the rear. The light in the room behind the store area was factory-dim. A slim, well-dressed woman in advanced middle age was working at a repair table running lengthwise along the room, covered with expensive handbags with broken clasps or hinges, and with pliers and receipt books.

“Misia, darling!” Poldek boomed.

The woman looked up with a faint, even timid frown, like a wife used to having her husband’s extravagant enthusiasms imposed on her. Poldek introduced me to her. A beautiful guy, he said I was. I was a writer and he’d been telling me about Schindler. This was the first time I heard that name.

“Oh,” she smiled. “Oskar. Oskar was a god. But Oskar was
Oskar
as well.”

She gave the sort of smile I would get used to from people who had been under Oskar Schindler’s control in one or other of his two Second World War camps. The smile of those somewhat baffled by a phenomenon.

“Tell him, Misia!”

“Schindler was a big guy, beautiful suits, the best,” she said. “He was very tall and women loved him. Poldek and I were in his camp.”

“But your husband tells me you were also in Auschwitz?” I asked.

She admitted it with a dolorous nod. “Oh, dear sir, I was. It was an accident. They sent our train the wrong way. When one of the girls reached up to the window of the cattle truck to break off ice, she saw the sun was in the wrong place for us to be going south to Schindler’s camp. We were going west.
O
wi
cim.
Auschwitz. It broke our hearts!”

Freddy, the good son, said, “But Oskar got you out, Ma.”

Poldek said, “Oskar sent this
bee-ourt-ee-ful Volksdeutsch
secretary off as a bribe to the SS.”

“Poldek,” Misia chided. “That’s just what some people say…”

¸

“Darling Misia, Pemper told me!”

“Well, somehow…I don’t know…he got us out.”

Just the same, one could tell she had her ideas about it.

“The best journey of my life,” she said. “Out of Auschwitz. Half of us with scarlet fever or the typhus. And we turned up at Brinnlitz at dawn, a freezing day, and we see Oskar standing in the courtyard of the factory in a little hat…a…Poldek, help me.”

“In one of those Tyrolean hats, you know, with the feather on the side.”

“Yes, a Tyrolean hat. There were SS all about, but we had eyes just for him. He was beautiful. And he told us there was soup.”

“Otherwise,” said Freddy, “
I
wouldn’t be here, would I, Ma?”

“Exactly right, Freddy darlink.”

Misia had, like her husband and many Polish-Jewish characters, the tendency to put a
k
on the end of darling. Who was I to talk? My Irish granny, Katie Keneally, had been unable to pronounce a
th
and spoke of
t’roat
(throat) and
cat’edrals
. As for Australians, as a friend would say, our five vowels were
i
,
i
,
i
,
i
and
u
. So Mrs. Misia Page’s verbal mannerism had no low-humor effect on me, emerging as it did from the mouth of a woman who had seen the great necro-manufactory of Auschwitz.

Poldek said, “And I wouldn’t have had my darling Misia. She is so cute this lady. Too clever for me. She was meant to be a surgeon.”

“I’m a surgeon on handbags now,” she reasoned. “And I love it here. Beverly Hills people—some are huffy, you know—but mostly so nice. Excuse me, sir, a second.” She moved to Poldek and muttered a few words to him, about problems with a Mrs. Gerschler’s handbag and how Poldek might have to replace the whole thing.

“She’s got other handbags,” Poldek rumbled.

“No, Poldek,” Misia said softly. “The poor woman has to take the bag she wants to take. She’s been a customer twenty years.”

“I suffered every one of them, ai! Si Gerschler…such a nice guy married to that shiksa. Tell her, I’m trying to get a replacement one out of the manufacturers. It’s on the way.”

“Poldek, how can she wear it to the Century City Plaza tonight if it’s in a boat somewhere?” asked small-boned Misia, descending into her own guttural range. “I called Mason’s wholesale. They have one in stock. They’re sending it over to us.”

“Misia, darling, that’s so expensive and a big write-down.”

“We don’t have a choice, Poldek.”

Misia turned to me and said, “Forgive me. Business, you see.” But now it had obviously been settled in the well-practiced way they had.

“Come and see, Thomas, if I may call you,” Poldek boomed. “Come and see what I have here.”

He led me toward two filing cabinets that stood by the desk at the back of the storeroom, and as he went he settled at top voice with Misia and Freddy the issue of a Bel Air woman’s handbag and who would deliver it. Poldek was brought to a pause by the crisis and stopped walking. He sounded bearishly reasonable. “Misia, I have the gentleman here. He’s a very famous writer. In
Newsweek
I see his review. If you can call Mason’s and get them to deliver it straight to—”

“Poldek, they only deliver retail. You know that. Where’s Sol?”

“Sol’s on the phone with some MasterCard nebbish. Besides, he’s a lousy driver.”

“I’ll get it there, Pop,” said Freddy. “On the way home.”

“Could you, Freddy darling? You see, Misia, what a fine boy we made?” And Poldek parted his lips and made a kissing noise, first toward Freddy and then toward his wife.

He opened the two filing cabinets, selecting documents—a piece on Oskar Schindler from the
Los Angeles Examiner
, copies of postwar speeches by former Jewish prisoners made in Oskar Schindler’s honor, carbon copies of letters in German, and documents partly yellowed, old enough for the staples in them to have rusted somewhat even in Southern California’s desert climate. There was a notice of Schindler’s death in 1974, and the reburial of his body a month later in Jerusalem. There were also photographs of scenes from a prison camp. I would discover they had been taken by one Raimund Titsch, a World War I veteran with a limp, the brave Austrian manager of a factory in the terrible camp of Plaszów, southeast of the city of Kraków, from which Schindler drew the laborers for his kindlier small camp within the city.

As Poldek extracted documentation from this drawer and then another, opening and shutting them with gusto, he went on commentating: “This guy Oskar Schindler was a big master-race sort of guy. Tall and smooth and his suits…the cloth! He drank cognac like water. And I remember, when I met him the first time, he was wearing a huge black and red
Hakenkreuz
, you know, the Nazi pin.”

He riffled through a folder full of photographs and pulled one out, and there was his younger self, very snappy in his four-cornered Polish officer’s cap, a stocky boy in a lieutenant’s uniform, wearing the same confident, half-smiling face that he now directed at me.

“You see, there! I was Phys Ed Professor Magister at the Ko
ciuszko Gymnasium in Podgórze. The girls loved me. I got wounded on the San River and my Catholic orderly saved my life and carried me to a field hospital. I never forget. I send his family food parcels. Then, after Hitler gave half of Poland to Stalin, we officers had to decide to go east or west. I decided not to go east, even though I was Jewish. If I had, I would have been shot by the Russians with all the other poor guys in Katyn Forest.”

Back in Kraków as a prisoner, Poldek had used a German-issued document, which originally had been intended to enable him to visit his soldiers in a military hospital further east, to bamboozle a barely literate German guard. So he slipped out of the railway waiting-room yard and caught a tram and went home to his mother. “And here’s this big German guy, handsome, and he’s discussing with her that she’ll decorate his apartment at Straszewskiego Street. That’s how I first met this Oskar Schindler.”

By now, Sol had appeared in the doorway of the repair room.

“They came through. The card turns out okay.”

“Thanks God,” said Poldek. “Now, would you like the briefcase wrapped, sir?”

“No,” I said. “I’ll carry it with me.”

Leopold turned to his patient son. “Stay with the store a while, Freddy. I’m taking Mr. Thomas up to make some photostatic copies.”

“Where will you get photocopies this time of day on a Saturday, Pop?”

“The Glendale Savings. They owe me.”

“Wow!” said Freddy, shaking his head.

I said good-bye to Misia Page/Pfefferberg, and we reemerged into the store. On Poldek’s instructions, I left my briefcase there for the time being. I could carry the copies we got made back to the hotel in it. I said good-bye to Sol and Freddy.

We crossed the road and made for the Glendale Savings Bank on the corner of Wilshire. Arriving there at a brisk pace, we queued a time in front of the Enquiries and Transactions counter of the busy Saturday noon bank. At last we reached the counter and a young man attended to us. He called my friend “Mr. Page,” confirming that Poldek was indeed well-known at this branch. Poldek handed over his considerable wad of papers. “I need photostatic copies of these, please.”

The young man’s eyes looked blank. “Mr. Page, you can see it’s a very, very busy time.”

Leopold did what he would always do when thwarted. He stepped back and raised his hands in a gesture invoking forces greater than this mere transaction.

“So I have lunch with the president every second Tuesday, and you don’t have time to give me a few lousy photostatic copies? Is this what you want me to tell your boss? This is an important gentleman.” He pointed to me. I had begun the morning as a furtive shopper and was now the center of the gaze of many customers. “He is a famous writer from Australia.” Was there such a thing? I looked around in discomfort. “He is here for only one day and a half. So we’ll wait.” It was clear to the young man that the copies needed, under the pressure of history, to be done
now
.

Cowed by Leopold’s portentousness, he said it might take a little time. As I watched the clerk pass on the problem to two women even younger and more flustered than himself, Poldek stepped aside with me to await the copies, and filled me in on more of his history.

Misia had been deported from Lodz in 1939 with her mother, Dr. Maria Lewinson, founder of one of the first institutes of medical cosmetology in Poland. Misia herself had earlier been a medical student in Vienna, and had seen the Führer’s triumphal entry into Vienna, and came home to Poland when war began.

“She saw the son-of-bitch, and then he ruined her life. This is how I come to meet a beautiful girl like Misia. And smart. I mean, we were from a good family, my sister and me. But my God, Misia’s parents had brains you wouldn’t believe. The Nazis deported her mother to Belzec death camp in 1942 and we never saw her again. Why? She had a brain and she was a Jew!

He had longed for Misia, he said, but another Jewish ghetto dweller and former officer had a prior interest, and an officer and a gentleman did not try to court a comrade’s girl. But the other man relinquished her and Poldek set out to the Lewinsons’ little room in the ghetto to persuade her mother, who considered him a braggart. It took many hours of relentless talk. And then her mother was shipped away and never seen again, and Misia married him.

BOOK: Searching for Schindler
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