Searching for Schindler (3 page)

I asked how he had come to America. After Schindler’s factory camp had been liberated by a Russian officer riding a donkey, he and Misia came west into a displaced persons’ camp, and he worked for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Repatriation Agency. He had a uniform given him by an American officer, and indeed one could imagine some officer surveying the lines of edgy, fearful former prisoners and seeing something undefeated in Poldek, and putting him into uniform.

Misia and Poldek, having survived and given Schindler the credit for that survival, came to the United States in 1947 and rented a tiny room on Long Island which they shared with other survivors. Poldek saw another Polish refugee repairing handbags in a little temporary store on the pavement. He got talking to the man, and watched him at work, and went home to tell Misia they were now in the handbag business. They did well enough in New York to move out to California in the 1950s, to start importing and to own a few outlets, like the one I had wandered into. That was it. Poldek moved like a man who believed luck was on his side.

The young bank clerk had returned to the counter with the photocopies. He waved to Poldek that they were ready. “I’ll pay for these,” I offered.

Poldek said, “Are you mad, Thomas? I give this bank all my good business.” He accepted the copies from the young man and took his hand for a brief, passionate clasp, as if they had both been into battle together. He waved to the fraught female juniors who were catching their breath further back in the office. “Young ladies! (Aren’t they beautiful Beverly Hills girls, Thomas?) Thank you, darlings.”

I went back
to my cool hotel room with the pile of photocopied papers in my new briefcase. I switched the television to that day’s Notre Dame game—I don’t remember who they were playing, but I did know vaguely that my grandfather’s brother, a great-uncle who settled in Brooklyn, had a son named Patrick Keneally who had gone to Notre Dame on a football scholarship, and this was enough to imbue my viewing with a tinge of partisanship.

With the sound low, I began reading the papers Poldek had given me. It was instantly engrossing material. There was a speech that one of Oskar Schindler’s Jewish accountants, Itzhak Stern, made in Tel Aviv in 1963, about his experience working with, as well as for, this Nazi who had been a factory owner. There were a number of other such speeches translated into English from Schindler survivors living all over Europe and the United States. Then there was a series of affidavit-like testimonies from a range of former prisoners, Poldek and Misia among them.

For those who do not know the tale of Schindler, it is briefly stated thus. A young, hulking, genial but not quite respectable ethnic German came to conquered Kraków in 1939 from his native Sudetenland, a part of northern Czechoslovakia where many other ethnic Germans lived. He looked around for business opportunities in Kraków and acquired a factory which he named Deutsche Email Fabrik (DEF), German Enamel Factory. Its nickname among the prisoners who would work there would be Emalia.

As well as sincerely desiring wealth, Schindler was an agent of Abwehr, German military intelligence, an arrangement which saved him from conscription. At DEF he manufactured both for the war effort and for the black market, and developed a symbiotic relationship with his Jews. But to acquire labor, he had to deal with the commandant of the chief labor camp of the area, Plaszów. That is, he bought his labor, at a cheap price, from the SS.

Plaszów concentration camp, on the northern edge of Kraków, was run by the SS man Amon Goeth. Amon was a man very like Oskar, it seemed; of like age, a drinker, a womanizer. In different circumstances, they might have seemed the same sort of man—unsatisfactory husbands, shifty businessmen. The resemblance stopped there, however, for Amon was a killer who pot-shotted Plaszów prisoners with a sniper rifle from his balcony. Where Amon was a figure of terror in the dreams of all the people whose memoirs I read that Saturday afternoon, Oskar was the improbable savior. His motives were hard to define, and there were ambiguities to be teased out. But his prisoners didn’t care. And neither did I.

Then when the Russian advance of 1944 led to the closure of Plaszów and DEF, Oskar went to the trouble of founding another camp, near his hometown in Moravia, in northeastern Czechoslovakia, where his own black-marketeering and the morally ambiguous deliverance of Jewish prisoners continued.

And so I came across the typewritten list of workers for Schindler’s camp in Moravia, Zwangsarbeitslager Brinnlitz—that is, Forced Labor Camp Brinnlitz, which was theoretically under the control of a mother camp, the infamous Gross-Rosen. Searching through the list, I came upon the names of Poldek and Misia Pfefferberg. Misia, prisoner 195 on the list, was recorded as having been born in 1920 and was marked down as a
Metallarbeiterin
, a metalworker, though she had never worked with metal until then. Leopold Pfefferberg, another “Ju. Po.”—Polish Jew—was number 173 and a
Schweisser
—welder. He had not used a welding iron until then, but was confident he could learn. This document, seen by the television glow, representing an acre of safety in the midst of the huge square mileage of horror that was the Holocaust, would achieve an international renown as Schindler’s list. The list was life, I would one day write and actor Ben Kingsley would say, and all around it lay the pit.

I found as well a translation of Schindler’s speech, taken down by two of his secretaries, made on the last day of the war, addressed to prisoners and to the SS garrison of the camp at Brinnlitz. The sentiments expressed by the tall Herr Direktor of the camp in this speech were extraordinary, with Schindler telling his former laborers that they would now inherit the shattered world, and at the same time pleading with the SS guards who had been ordered to exterminate the camp to depart in honor, and not with blood on their hands. Poldek would tell me that while Schindler gave this finely balanced speech, the hairs were standing up on people’s necks. Schindler was playing poker against the SS garrison of his factory-camp, and all the prisoners knew it. But it had worked. The SS drifted away, and left the factory and compound of Brinnlitz, and fled west toward the Americans in Austria.

From these documents concerning Herr Oskar Schindler, I gathered he was a ruined hedonist Catholic. As a former seminarian, and a struggling Catholic myself, I had some time for fellows like Oskar, and little for the over-formal, over-legalistic mediators of Christ who too often asserted that they stood for the real thing. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, had been a good practicing Catholic by legalistic standards and made a lengthy confession before his death. Oskar did not. But Höss was a devourer of souls and bodies, and Oskar, the reportedly lecherous bad husband, was the deliverer. Oskar showed that virtue emerged where it would, and the sort of churchy observance bishops called for was not a guarantee of genuine humanity in a person. Catholic legalism on matters of sexuality evoked sexual neuroses in some men. In others, it produced a dancing-on-the-lip-of-hell exuberance. Schindler was obviously of the latter type, if one can believe the testimonies of all the prisoners who had known him.

Among the testimonies which Poldek had given me, one woman prisoner uttered a sentiment I would later hear from many of his women prisoners. “He was so good-looking and so well-dressed, and he looked you in the eye, and I think if he had asked me for favors, I could not resist. But why should he ask for favors from me, who weighed forty-five kilos, when he was surrounded by beautiful German and Polish girls in the pink of health?”

Some people have always been troubled by Oskar’s ambiguity. To me it was from the start the whole point of the tale. Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful. On top of that, the times in which Oskar operated were morally inverted, and so was language. Plain terms—
health action
,
special treatment
,
final solution
,
Aryanization
,
resettlement
,
blood protection
—often meant the opposite of what they implied.

But I doubted I could write a book on this. I was not a Jew. I was a kind of European, but from the rim of the earth.
Après nous les penguins
, I sometimes said in bastard French and as a joke. My father had served in the Middle East in World War II and had sent back Nazi memorabilia—Afrika Korps
Feldwebel
stripes, Very pistols marked with the swastika, a Luger holster similarly stamped—just like the ones the Nazis wore in the Saturday afternoon pictures in the Vogue Cinema in Homebush, Australia.

I remembered, too, the Saturday evening when Aunt Annie minded my little brother, and my mother and I went to the show at the Vogue—at the time, this was the most sophisticated activity possible according to my horizons. It was May 1945, my father was still away and, as far as we knew, about to be shipped to some location in the Pacific’s ongoing war. And there on the screen was the newsreel footage of Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the horrified Allies. There were the corpses, thin and rigid as planks, stacked like so much timber. I could remember the combined shock of the women of that western suburb of war-remote Sydney. The question that hung in the air was: How could anyone have gone to such extremes?

All this was the barest of qualifications to write the book. But then the wonderful aspect of the material, which I saw at once, was that Oskar and his Jews reduced the Holocaust to an understandable, almost personal scale. He had been there, in Kraków and then in Brinnlitz, for every stage of the process—for the confiscation of Jewish property and business, for the creation and liquidation of the ghettos, and the building of labor camps,
Arbeitslager
, to contain labor forces. The
Vernichtungslager
, the destruction camps, had cast their shadow over him and, for a time, subsumed three hundred of his women. It was apparent at once that if one looked at the Holocaust using Oskar as a lens, one got an idea of the whole machinery at work on an intimate scale and, of course, of how that machinery made its impact on people with names and faces. A terrible thing to say—but one was not defeated by sheer numbers.

I would find out very soon the reason Leopold Pfefferberg possessed these documents, and many others as well. As he had told me, I had not been the only customer to the Handbag Studio to be fraternally ambushed. In the early 1960s, when Oskar was still alive, the wife of a well-known and controversial movie producer named Martin Gosch had brought her handbag into Leopold’s store for repair. No doubt with much loving pouting of lips and praise of Mrs. Gosch’s beauty, and with the handbag as hostage, Poldek had insisted that she set up an appointment for him with her husband. For a while Mrs. Gosch found this eminently refusable, but Poldek’s powers of perseverance and undentable charm wore her down. Poldek told me that when Martin Gosch invited him to MGM Studios for an interview, the producer had at first chided him for being so importunate with his wife.

“You must forgive me,” said Poldek, “but I am bringing you the greatest story of humanity man to man.”

Martin Gosch had recently tried to make a film about Lucky Luciano, the mobster, but the Mafia had put pressure on the project, and the research was ultimately transmuted into a bestseller,
The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano
, which would be published in 1974. Gosch had also improbably produced
Abbott and Costello in Hollywood
(1945), and had been a Broadway producer in the 1940s. Hearing now the Schindler tale from the lips of a prisoner, Poldek, Gosch was enthused and got together a team including the screenwriter Leopold had mentioned earlier, Howard Koch, famous for his involvement in the screenplay of
Casablanca
and for having been on the black list of presumed communists during the McCarthy era. In a long life, he would write some twenty-five feature films which would be produced, as well as his ultimately unproduced screenplay of Schindler. His best-known credits included
Sergeant York, Rhapsody in Blue, The Greengage Summer, The War Lover, The Fox
, and the telemovie of Orson Welles’s famous broadcast about Martian invasion,
The Night that Panicked America
.

Gosch and Koch began to interview Schindler survivors around the Los Angeles area. Both of them also wanted to meet Oskar, who at the time was living in Frankfurt, largely broke except for contributions from his former prisoners. I would later see in Poldek’s storeroom archives a photograph of Gosch, Koch, Poldek and big, bearlike Oskar, sitting around a table, conferring. Oskar’s small Frankfurt cement works, funded by the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish charity based in New York, had just gone bankrupt in the severe winter of 1962–63, so the idea of film rights must have seemed like rescue. Gosch, Koch and MGM decided that they should ultimately take Poldek and Oskar to meet and gather research from Schindler survivors in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Poldek became de facto archivist for all that was gathered, for every testimony and every document he could corral. For example, the photographs of Plaszów taken by Raimund Titsch, manager of the Madritsch uniform factory inside that horrible camp, were bought by Poldek, in his job of acquiring an archive, in Vienna. The brave Titsch, even eighteen years after the war, was still very nervous of repercussions should it be learned he had kept a secret photo archive. Then Schindler himself supplied documents for Leopold’s filing cabinets. More documents were ultimately collected in Israel that year, 1963, when Oskar went back to see many of his former prisoners for the first time since the war.

In Israel, he was given an astounding reception. Itzhak Stern made a speech in which he detailed his intimately perceived version of Oskar’s heroism. Hundreds of Oskar survivors gave their testimonies to Yad Vashem, the Memorial and Library of the Holocaust located in Jerusalem, and he was asked to plant his own cedar tree among those dedicated to the small number of rescuers in the Avenue of the Righteous outside Yad Vashem. Among the documents was a picture of Schindler, bulky in a suit, planting his tree. And there were other rewards. A Romanian restaurant near the Tel Aviv waterfront laid on free food and Martell brandy for Oskar.