Searching for Schindler (27 page)

Twenty

Invited by Spielberg, Poldek and Misia, Judy and I attended the Academy Awards together. Poldek received a splendid tribute from Spielberg, and yet there was still an avuncular disapproval in Poldek of the time Steven had taken to “wise up” and make the film. As Spielberg entered the foyer for the Governor’s Ball after the awards, Poldek grabbed one of the two Oscars he’d won for direction and Best Film, an artifact of quite surprisingly heavy mass, and made as if to cuff him on the head. “What did I tell you?” demanded Poldek. “What did I tell you? An Oscar for Oskar.”

I was most comfortable, of course, with the premieres in Australia—particularly the first, the Sydney premiere, to which Ben Kingsley came. A press conference was held in the Sydney Jewish Museum, a regional museum of the highest quality. I was fascinated that it commemorated the first Passover seder in Australia, in 1788, when a Jewish Cockney girl convict named Esther Abrahams was given a special ration of wine and bread to enable the Jewish convicts to observe the holiday.

The third member at the press conference was my old friend Leo Rosner, the accordionist who, with his brother Henry, had once been forced to entertain Amon Goeth day after day. That evening there was a cocktail party at the Sydney Hilton to which Leo brought his accordion. He had never heard John Williams’s splendid film score before, but instantly picked up the dominant theme and played it with the orchestra there. Here was a Jew in a remote place—I don’t think Hitler thought much of Sydney or Australia in his career—and the Jew was playing an accordion in the Sydney night, affirming his survival.

My father was by now elderly, and found it hard to walk from the Hilton to the cinema in Pitt Street. But to the very end of his life he remained too proud to use a wheelchair and so, painfully, we made our way across Pitt Street to the theater, aware of his pain as he asked, “How bloody far is it now?” Thus my father approached Steven Spielberg’s most remarkable rendition of the Nazi regime, against which the old man had certainly “done his bit.” I sat next to him in the cinema and was aware that though his eyesight was impaired and his bladder touchy, he was engrossed for three and a quarter hours.

At the Melbourne premiere, while speaking before the film, Ben Kingsley, that wonderful traveling companion, took on the Melbourne Club, the focus of the Melbourne establishment, which still had not admitted a single Jew as a member. And in that city on the next somewhat hungover day, we said good-bye to each other.

The last time
I saw Poldek was in the spring of 2000. It was in his living room where Misia had always staged our high afternoon teas, with pastries and cakes and
herbata
. Poldek was suddenly having trouble walking, and that fact shocked me. He had always been such an emphatic walker, and not to have the power of locomotion stripped him of some of his purpose. “The computer is fine,” he told me, tapping his head. “But the machine—it needs replacing.”

I had not expected Poldek to decline so young—he was eighty-seven, but that was young for him. I wondered whether having been a prisoner had any impact upon his health. Certainly he still received a payment from the German government as compensation for the back damage the Ober-scharführer who regularly beat him up in Plaszów had imposed on him. A therapist says of Holocaust survivors that as they get older and their long-term memory increases, their helplessness in old age begins to reflect their former helplessness in the camps. Poldek still seemed a very positive-minded human being, but whether the stress, the fear, the hunger of the past, had affected that boiler of a heart of his is a question that, when he was alive and vivid, many of his friends forgot to ask.

To what extent was he, too, haunted? Did he, in the delirium of his passing, think even for a moment that he was subject to Amon Goeth, and grist for the cruel laws which had once sought to take away his oxygen? Common sense would have to say that not even Poldek could have escaped some permanent damage, some abiding erosion. So that perhaps his greatest success, even greater than turning Schindler into a modern legend, was to be able to live a normal life in normal streets, such as South Elm Drive in “California, Beverly Hills.”

That year in which Poldek was declining, my ninety-two-year-old father’s health was deteriorating too, in a slow collapse of the various functions of the body. But again it was impossible to believe that this amusingly profane, bush-eloquent patriarch could stop breathing.

My father, as was natural to him, gave death a hard run. For weeks he fought. A young priest came to give him communion, and they said the Our Father together. A sad thing to see a larrikin, a boy from the bush, humbly uttering those ancient sentiments to the Deity! No sooner was “Amen” out of his mouth than he added, “Well, Father, I think I’m bloody rooted.” This was his Australian
Nunc Dimittis
, his version of “Now let Thy servant depart in peace…”

He died on a bitter August day. At his funeral, a man from the Returned Services League described him as “the good sergeant,” and the consonance between that and the old usage of “good sergeant” as an image of death set off howls of grief in his smart-alec son’s mind, and the tears came and were not readily staunched.

From halfway through the Sydney Olympics in September until Christmas I was useless and finished, physically and mentally. Some years before, a commentator in a literary and political magazine had prematurely written a piece with a title like “Thomas Keneally, My Role in His Destruction.” But it had taken factors more universal and more forceful than mean faction-fighting to make me believe I was, indeed, finished.

As I had my crisis, I did not know Poldek was having his. He was at one with my father in that he didn’t believe in making a fuss when he got sick. He had gone full of confidence to Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills, but there his end was fast. In March 2001, an email appeared on my computer from Poldek’s daughter, Marie, saying that he had died in the hospital, apparently quite suddenly. So both the old heroes were improbably dead! My own health and the practice of prompt Jewish burial kept me from Poldek’s funeral. I sent a message of profound regret and in it told the story of his indomitability, of traveling to Poland with him under the protection of his Orbis badge. It was read in the chapel of the Hillside Memorial Park where Poldek was buried. As a sign of resignation, Misia put a stone on her husband’s grave. At the time I write this she is still living, sixty years after—as a medical student in Vienna—she saw Hitler triumphantly enter the city. One of her comrades from Auschwitz and Brinnlitz, Sydney’s Leosia Korn (Losia the Optimist in the book), has recently died.

These days, writing again, feeling more robust, I do not easily forgive myself for failing to have seen Poldek into the grave, to the lip of which, he had told me, we would be brothers. He died a man without enemies, and with the knowledge that his easily dismissed predictions had come true almost by his own force of personality. The Righteous Persons Foundation was quick, with Steven Spielberg’s assistance, in endowing a series of lectures at Chapman University in Poldek’s name. Many of his documents and photographs are in the National Holocaust Museum in Washington. The
Los Angeles Times
honored him in an obituary as the initiator of the entire process with which this tale has concerned itself.

What did I tell you? he would have asked. What
did
I tell you?

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

THOMAS KENEALLY
has won international acclaim for his novels
Schindler’s List
(the basis for the movie and the winner of the Booker Prize),
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Confederates, Gossip from the Forest, The Playmaker, Woman of the Inner Sea, A River Town, Office of Innocence
and
The Tyrant’s Novel
. His most recent works of nonfiction are
A Commonwealth of Thieves, The Great Shame
, and
American Scoundrel
. He resides in Sydney, Australia.

ALSO BY THOMAS KENEALLY

Fiction

The Place at Whitton

The Fear

Bring Larks and Heroes

Three Cheers for the Paraclete

The Survivor

A Dutiful Daughter

The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

Blood Red, Sister Rose

Gossip from the Forest

Season in Purgatory

A Victim of the Aurora

Passenger

Confederates

The Cut-Rate Kingdom

Schindler’s List

A Family Madness

The Playmaker

To Asmara

By the Line

Flying Hero Class

Woman of the Inner Sea

Jacko

A River Town

Bettany’s Book

Office of Innocence

The Tyrant’s Novel

Nonfiction

Outback

The Place Where Souls Are Born

Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish

Memoirs from a Young Republic

Homebush Boy: A Memoir

The Great Shame: And the Triumph of the Irish in the English-Speaking World

American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles

Lincoln

A Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia

For Children

Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

Roos in Shoes

Copyright © 2007 by The Serpentine Publishing Co., Pty., Ltd.

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese, an imprint of The Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.nanatalese.com

Originally published in a slightly different form in Australia by Random House Australia, Sydney, in 2007. Copyright © 2007 by The Serpentine Publishing Co., Pty., Ltd.

Insert photographs courtesy of Steven Spielberg and Mrs. Ludmila (Misia) Page

DOUBLEDAY is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keneally, Thomas.

Searching for Schindler / Thomas Keneally.—1st ed. in the U.S.A.

p. cm.

1. Keneally, Thomas. 2. Authors, Australian—20th century—Biography. 3. Authors, Australian—21st century—Biography. 4. Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s list. 5. Schindler’s list (Motion picture) I. Title.

PR9619.3.K46Z46 2008

823—dc22

[B]

2008015738

eISBN: 978-0-385-52849-8

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