Meanwhile, the official pursed his lips over my financial document and the latest exchange document I had. He began speaking in Polish with a lazy hostility. Poldek answered him loudly, as if trying to smother him in fearlessness. According to him, I was prodigiously well-known, a virtual Hemingway. (Technically that could be said of any novelist—they were all prodigiously well-known by their small readership.) And here we had been in Poland, Poldek asserted, for research for a multimillion-dollar film concerning World War II Polish history. The film would win the Academy Award, Poldek assured the fellow. Everyone, he said, agreed with that. Obviously, he implied, we were so focused on injecting millions of dollars into the Polish economy that we hadn’t had much time to sort out small matters concerning zloty.
Now he pulled from his pocket every card he had gathered in every office and from every official we had met, including the young manager of the Holiday Inn in Kraków and the officials of the telephone components company we had met in Oskar’s old factory. All these gentlemen en masse, he said, were ecstatic at our efforts, and right behind us, and anxious that no hindrance be placed in our path. The thought of so many millions of dollars in production money delighted them—and they were, of course, all significant men and, by gentle implication, men with the power to make this uniformed fellow miserable.
Poldek did not once tell the man that our heroic Polish book was not yet written, but he showed him the book he had taken from me. An American hardcover edition of a novel was indeed a remarkable artifact by the standards of Poland then, its books being produced with limp, tearable covers on thin, speckled and yellowing paper. The official thumbed through its thick-napped pages and checked me against my picture on the inside back cover. Even so, I was waiting for this monetary cop or whatever he was to turn on Poldek angrily and tell him to be silent, and to call in other officers to help deal with us for exchange crimes. It was now, as the man absorbed and weighed my book and what had been said, that Poldek went beyond the bounds of credibility.
“And don’t you think, Thomas,” he asked, “that this man has exactly the sort of heroic Slavic features we need for our film? Sir, sir, if you would be so kind, could we have your name and address?”
The man’s eyes nearly closed and became ambiguous slits. I was sure the screaming and gun-pointing would begin now.
“Here, I have paper, my friend,” Poldek announced, tearing a page out of a notebook and offering it to the official. The man’s brow unclenched and he broke into a sneer, or so I thought. It grew, however—and to my astonishment—to become an authentic grin of delight. Suddenly the man was handing back my book and joking in Polish with Poldek. He leaned over our financial statements still on the table but no longer a matter of primary concern, and took up a ballpoint pen. I remember that he seemed to write in urgent hope in sharp-edged Polish script. He wanted to escape the address he was putting down on paper. I could not believe that such egregious and transparent balderdash as Poldek had brought to bear had produced this new geniality at the counter. When the man had finished writing he held the page up like a student offering his essay to a teacher. In this case, to Professor Magister Pfefferberg.
Analyzing all this later, I realized that even had I the daring to offer an inducement anyone should have been able to see through, I would have revived suspicion in the guard behind the counter. But Poldek knew instinctively that when persiflage reaches its apogee, it must be maintained unapologetically and without apparent fear or rush, and its intensity retreated from only gradually. Poldek took out his wallet, kissed the man’s name and address before folding the page deftly with his free hand and placing it within the wallet. After he had returned the wallet to his breast pocket, he kissed his fingers, a Polish gesture which implied the data he had just deposited was sacred.
“I shall wear this by my heart,” he told the policeman, “until I return to Beverly Hills.”
Almost as an afterthought, the man stamped my statement. Poldek shook his hand enthusiastically and asked him about his children. Then, with undue awe, the man shook my hand too.
I had left what the West considered repressive countries for “liberal” destinations before—Beijing to British Hong Kong, for example. The contrast had not been as starkly revealed, though, as in the short aircraft journey from Poland to Vienna. The center of Vienna seemed exquisite and exuberantly lit in a way that, despite a sinister history, defied all fear and whispers. We stayed at a hotel which had once accommodated Hitler, and I felt the delirium of Vienna’s brighter air.
One of our chief objectives now was to trace Goeth’s family—they had owned a printing company. There was no printing company of that name in the Vienna business registry or in the phone book. Nor did we yet know that in a nearby apartment Goeth’s embittered former mistress Majola was dying of emphysema.
At the Adlon Hotel, within sight of that wonderful cathedral the Stephansdom, we interviewed two survivors, fashionably dressed Viennese, the Hirschfelds; and another survivor who wished to be identified in the book by the letter M. M was an interior designer in Vienna, but had witnessed, as a prisoner, the killing of Polish women in the old Austrian fort to the southwest of Plaszów camp, on Chujowa Górka. During these interviews, as ever, I made tape recordings and took notes as well, a frenetic combination, belt and braces, but justified by the honor all these Schindlerjuden had done me in granting me interviews, even under the compelling aegis of Poldek. We and the Hirschfelds had a Martell brandy together at the end of the evening, in honor of Oskar’s own passion for brandy.
Another Viennese we made contact with was Mrs. Bankier, the widow of Oskar’s factory manager, a man who had much honor among his fellow survivors. It was Bankier—not, as the film has it, Itzhak Stern—whom Oskar rescued from a transport to the east one morning at Prokocim Station. He had been found without his Kennkarte and his Blauschein. He had also been related to the former owners of Rekord, the company Oskar took over.
We failed to find Goeth’s relatives, despite the helpful suggestions of the Hirschfelds and Mrs. Bankier. Understandably, they had never tried to seek them out, and only a tiger like Poldek could contemplate meeting them in polite surroundings. I was certainly uneasy about interviewing them, about asking them to fill me in on the childhood and young manhood of Amon. In any case, Vienna was something of a whistle-stop on the way to the cornucopia of Schindlerjuden which Israel would offer.
Our dawn landing at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv caused many passengers to sing and others to become meditative. Many stepped to the side of the stairway on descending from the plane and kissed the cool morning tarmac. It was now full spring, and the griefs and terrors of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed far away from Tel Aviv, beyond the Golan Heights. To look upon the string of hotels along the beachfront, one would see Tel Aviv as a pleasure port. But for Arabs as for Jews, it could be a place of ferocious memory.
Israel, at that time an unusually rigorous processor of boarding and disembarking travelers, had nonetheless let through as baggage a strange item, the Zakopanean ice pick Poldek had insisted on buying for me in the Sukiennice in Kraków. To someone not accustomed to the Polish mountains south of Kraków, it was a strange implement: a wooden shaft, highly ornamented, with metal casings from which little rings hung. At one end it sported an ice spike, and at the other an ornamental ax blade. I had consigned it to the baggage hold because I hoped the Austrian or Israeli security would confiscate it. Perhaps the baggage officials who no doubt inspected it were familiar with such things and considered it purely decorative. Yet it was as potentially lethal as a combination baseball bat, gouger and ax. I would in fact be accompanied by it all the way back to Australia, through many airports, ever hoping that someone in their right mind would consider it too perilous to tranship. But always, as I waited for my luggage, its jaunty blade and metallic fixings would jerk up the conveyor belt at the top of the baggage carousel, and I would in the end find I was stuck with the thing for life.
Our ar
rival in Israel brought the question home to me, the one I always knew I would have to face. I sympathized greatly with the Palestinians. I saw them, simplistically no doubt, as having paid the ultimate price for European anti-Semitism. European culture, through the Nazis and their collaborators, could not have made it clearer to Jews that Europe had never been and would never be a safe place for them. Europe’s rivers of anti-Semitism still ran robustly underground in the post– World War II period. I could well understand the political passion of Zionism to find an unassailable nation of one’s own, better than I could grasp the religious fervor which also sometimes went into it.
The constitution of another oppressed people, the Irish, demonstrated behind its powerful civic pieties the uneasy relationship between the bureaucracy of the Catholic Church and the liberal democracy which was the true aspiration of the Irish people. The same conundrum faced Israel, and would come to bedevil it more and more. And glib European claims that the Jews and their Judenräte sometimes connived at their own destruction by showing passivity (though there wasn’t much passivity in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising!) were something the Israelis were bound to react to by becoming militarily ruthless. “Never again!” was the cry. So European malice created not only the original calamity but a determination in the Middle East that never again would Jews be accused of collaborating in their own destruction. The Palestinians bore the brunt of this rigorousness.
I knew that trying to tell a story which, because of its human scale, made it possible for readers to imagine the Holocaust, could be seen by some as an encouragement to Israeli hardliners. This was not a trite concern. Naturally, by now, I wanted to attempt the book, especially having heard the tale from so many mouths, and particularly since with its moral puzzles about Oskar’s character it exerted a particular attraction. I was aware that some Irish historians believed any dwelling on, or overemphasis of, the catastrophes of Irish history, particularly the Famine, encouraged the Provisional IRA in its explosive campaigns in Northern Ireland and the British mainland. Years later, I would come under a multipaged attack by Fintan O’Toole, Irish revisionist commentator, in The New Republic, for my history of the Irish world, The Great Shame, from the point of view of Irish political prisoners transported to Australia. The Germans had their own Historikerstreite, historical conflicts, about Nazism and the Holocaust, what should be made of them and what should be emphasized and de emphasized, and what the political consequences might be of history written in a particular style. And in Australia there were many historiographical, and thus political, debates over both the nature of convictism and the legitimacy of Australian settlement in light of the dispossession of the Aboriginals.
But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed—and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish—is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. Thus, though worried, I was defiant in my intention to write this book.
Poldek’s excitement at being here after our night flight seemed not so much because he was back on an ultimate ancestral land, but because he was about to meet so many of his friends again. He had come here with Oskar and Gosch and the screenwriter Koch nearly twenty years before. But he made sure we stayed in the same beachside hotel in the Marina area as Oskar had then, where the Mediterranean came surging in on an enormous beach full of the muscular and shining young.
After a nap and a bracing shower, and no time for swimming—we were not here for that—Poldek led me out to a marketplace, the little jewelry stall of Helen Hirsch. Hirsch was the handsome woman who, when a young prisoner, had been chosen by Amon Goeth to be his housekeeper. She had suffered many strange and frightening experiences in Goeth’s villa, and her hearing in one ear was still permanently impaired from a blow he had given her. Goeth had seemed in part attracted to her, in part repelled. Now she was in late middle age, married, and still making an adequate living out of selling her Middle Eastern style filigreed jewelry. I bought from her two filigreed hamsehs, open hands with the eye of God in the palm. In Goeth’s kitchen, though, she had not been aware of any particular divine vigilance over her.
She was not exactly a vocal woman, but in a lowered voice she would tell me a number of tales of Schindler visiting her in the kitchen of the villa at Plaszów where she was Goeth’s slave and the butt of his unreliable fury. Schindler had told her toward the end of the camp’s existence that he got her on the list for the Brinnlitz camp by winning a hand of vingt-et-un, blackjack, against Goeth. In telling the story, Oskar showed a man-of-action indifference to the question of what would have happened to her had he lost the hand. He simply possessed an ill-advised confidence that he always won at cards. Fortunately for her, she also survived the changes introduced into the list by the corrupt Jewish clerk-cum-policeman Marcel Goldberg.
Since Oskar had such a reputation as a womanizer and charmer, and since the Schindler women understood this, there was always the question of whether his kindness had a sexual motive. Manci Rosner of New York, grandmother, matriarch and survivor—as well as other women survivors—had answered the question in her own way. “You should have seen the women he had. Beautiful women, healthy women, in beautiful dresses. He should want me, covered with lice?” Helen in Tel Aviv said, “Schindler was Schindler. You can’t argue about him. He was what he was. His motives you couldn’t guess and, being who he was, they made sense only to him. In some ways he was crazy.”
From Helen Hirsch, Itzhak Stern’s wife Dr. Sophia Stern, and the Dresner and Schindel families, I got a sense of what a haven Oskar found in Israel in the 1960s. Even so, he always returned in the end to his little apartment in Hauptbahnstrasse in Frankfurt. His survivors were middle-class people here—the successful thoracic physician Dr. Idek Schindel, for example, and the Dresners. Dr. Schindel, who gave me some treatment for the congestion I’d developed in Poland, told me he had said to Oskar one night in the 1960s, “Oskar, you are very welcome in my home, but you cannot have more than two brandies.” Schindel said Oskar took that restriction with good grace, but left early to go to his hotel bar.
Danka Dresner, who had been a child during the war years, told me of her parents’ attempts to shelter her and her brothers from Health Actions and the various combings of the ghetto by SS and Jewish OD personnel, some of whom overlooked Danka because of their previous friendship with the family. Danka Dresner, like Niusia Horowitz, became one of those children who Oskar claimed were essential to his war efforts for polishing the insides of small-caliber shells.
The little girl who wore red, Genia, was the cousin of Danka Dresner, and her guardian in the camp was Dr. Idek Schindel, then a young ghetto doctor and also a cousin of the Dresners. She had previously been hidden by a family outside, but then had wanted to be with her parents in the ghetto. Yet by the time of the clearance of the ghetto, Genia’s parents had vanished, and so she became the ward of Idek, who had a lively, whimsical character and was more than capable of entertaining and calming such a child. It was during the first large clearance of the ghetto in 1942—the gleaning out of some seven thousand people, including children—that Genia made her now famous walk. Dr. Schindel was fully occupied at the ghetto hospital, where there were many fever and malnutrition cases, and Genia had hidden herself for a time, as her uncle had advised her to do if ever this sort of thing were to happen. Then, as if drawn by the magnetism of events outside, she emerged and walked the streets, small fry seemingly ignored by the SS, and then returned to her normal or
some other hiding place.
Her walk through the ghetto, which Spielberg would honor with one of the few patches of color in the otherwise black-and-white film, was noticed with amazement and concern by some of her relatives, including the preadolescent Danka and her mother. Living on for the time being, Genia survived until the final liquidation of the ghetto the next year, and then vanished. Danka said she had died in Auschwitz. The loneliness of her death, the sense of abandonment which went along with the bullet or the gas, is hard to countenance and bear—though I would later see similar tragedies overtake East African children living in fear and exercising unavailing valor.
The Dresners took to feeding Poldek and myself royally in their house in Tel Aviv, and so did Dr. Idek Schindel, who liked to make jokes about my having “a strongly developed gag response” when he’d examined me. I had not always had that; surely it could not be the regular tales of asphyxiation and sudden death that had made my throat overreactive?
Dr. Sophia Stern, wife of Oskar’s late accountant, Itzhak Stern, had passed over to me for copying her husband’s documents and speeches relating to Oskar’s war record. Among these was a highly useful published tract which Itzhak had written in honor of Julius Madritsch, the Austrian owner of the uniform factory in Plaszów. I had heard Madritsch praised by Misia and others; and in Israel, too, I heard nothing but good of him. If from the point of view of history he had a fault, it was that in 1944, having perceived the full intent of the Nazis, he despaired of the survival of his Jews as any sane man would have. By then he had concluded on good evidence that the destruction machine would get them all. But while there was always ambiguity in Oskar’s tale, Madritsch was a more predictably decent fellow. In Itzhak’s mind, his virtues—his provision of extra rations for his prisoners; his willingness to protect them from SS brutality while they were inside the factory—needed acknowledgment. For the system had given him plenty of license to be a brute, and he was not. Some other German institutions behaved well too, but some of the largest, most famous corporations did nothing effective to try to ameliorate the inhuman treatment of their slave workers. Stern’s limited-edition tract in German, printed on glossy paper to honor its subject, was entitled Menschen in Not—Humans in Need.