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
v3.0
Thomas Keneally, Searching for Schindler
(Series: # )
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