Searching for Schindler

  They responded, “Poldek, we have a dinner to go to.”

  It was no doubt the truth. But Poldek said, “So Schindler saves your life and you don’t care enough to cancel a lousy dinner engagement? Is this what I’m to tell Pemper in Munich? And Bejski in Israel?”

  That was how I met the former sprinter and her husband—indeed, some days after the interview, on our last night in New York, Poldek insisted that before flying to Europe we visit their generous table and dine copiously on Polish food. Again, Poldek’s rule was never to approach any flight unless well-fed. “Those airlines,” he gurgled, urging me to clean my plate, “they serve cardboard.”

  Mr. Kinstlinger had a less fraternal attitude to Herr Direktor Schindler than Poldek, the Rosners, Ingrid and her family, the Horowitz family and other New York area Schindlerjuden I interviewed.

  “Look, he made plenty out of us, that guy.”

  “But he saved you, Henry.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It suited him to let us breathe. But he made plenty out of us. He was no saint.”

  “Would you rather he was son-of-bitch, starving and beating us?”

  “Okay, he didn’t starve, he didn’t beat. But he used us.”

  “What makes you bitter?” Poldek challenged him.

  “I’m not bitter, but I tell you, he made plenty.”

  “And lost it all!”

  “That’s not our fault.”

  I already felt as glutted with stories as I was with Polish pierogis, but there were many, many miles to travel yet and a night flight to endure. We found ourselves after midnight queuing at JFK for a Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt, as a base from which we could meet up with Oskar’s former secretary Mietek Pemper and others. A young Hasidic Jew was moving down the line of passengers as we waited to embark—a not uncommon practice in New York, where the Hasid chooses a person who looks like a worldly Jew and urges him to lead a more Orthodox life. To my astonishment, the young Hasid stopped in front of me.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said very politely, “are you Jewish?”

  Poldek, unabashed in a queue which included many Germans, roared, “No! I’m the Jew. He’s an Australian, you schmuck!”

  The line reverberated through the departure hall, and so we boarded.

  Five

  * * *

  Thanks to the destruction of the old city in World War II, Frankfurt am Main proved to be a fairly anonymous place full of modernist architecture. It had a nickname to go with its look—Mainhattan. There were not many Schindlerjuden in Frankfurt, but the one I remembered best was Adam Garde (Number 656), who lived with his wife in a small but superbly designed Frankfurt apartment. Garde’s hand had been crushed, as he now showed me, when he was building Goeth’s conservatory in Plaszów. For fear of being sent away to a death camp because of his disabling injury, he had to conceal the damage. Though one of the Jewish doctors in Plaszów put it in a cast, he cut it free for fear he might be shipped out. He was delighted to go to work in Oskar’s factory, DEF, in Kraków, and to land in Oskar’s camp in the enamel factory backyard. As a result of that, he went on to Oskar’s new camp in Brinnlitz.

  An engineer, Garde had stayed on in Germany after being released from a displaced persons’ camp, and had a positive view of German society. Unlike many of his fellow survivors in other places, he considered Nazism something that could happen anywhere, the result of a failure of civilization, a disease in the universal soul rather than a phenomenon specific to Germany.

  He told me about his experiences of being one of Oskar’s engineers. He assured me that in both Emalia and Brinnlitz, Schindler would have him subtly decalibrate machines, so that the production tests of shells would fail. He was not the only one to tell me that to pass a test late in the war, Oskar ordered in a supply of shells from another manufacturer. With all the complaints coming in from other factories about the deficiency of the shells Oskar was making, the prisoners themselves would have wanted the factory at Brinnlitz to have a good reputation so that it could continue as their haven. It was Oskar who took joy in flouting the system, not his engineers like Garde. And it was Oskar who, drinking cognac on the morning of his birthday, laughed off a telegram from an assembly factory complaining about the poor quality of the shell casings Brinnlitz produced.

  In Germany, Poldek’s energy remained ferocious. After the city’s Historisches Museum and Jüdisches Museum, we visited the central railway station, the Hauptbahnhof, an ambiguous place full of lost souls and garish bars. Walking north from the station, past strip joints and more bars, we came to the decaying nineteenth-century facade of the apartment building to which Oskar always returned from his adventures in America or Israel, as if to recover from the respectability of those whom he had saved. The place possessed a piss-reeking lobby and seedy grand stairway. But it was from here, long after the war, that Oskar pursued his last love affair, this one with a German surgeon’s wife. He had first spoken to this lover, Anne-Marie, in the King David Hotel during one of his Israel visits. And it was here in his apartment on an upper floor that Oskar, a strange kind of displaced person himself, sneered at by anti-Semites and closet Hitlerites, had collapsed in October 1974, and was taken to the hospital where he died on October 9.

  All our touring and research was considered by Poldek to be a mere prelude to meeting the former secretary Mietek Pemper, who lived and worked as an accountant in Munich. Yet even on the plane journey down there, sitting side by side, Poldek instructed and I wrote. What I had heard from people kept me wakeful. I was full of the chemicals which guarantee industry. A parallel force in me kept me writing, writing, and Poldek talking, talking.

  At the airport in Munich we were met by the sober, reticent, learned Mietek Pemper, the man who had been secretary to Amon Goeth, commandant of Plaszów, as well as to Oskar Schindler. At the risk of his life but for the sake of history, and for ultimate evidence against Amon, he had always made an extra carbon copy of camp documents, and hidden that copy, or passed it to Schindler. The SS, who looked toward the completion of their plan and the disappearance of a race, did not take into account the Pempers, for in their belief Pemper was scheduled to disappear too.

  Temperamentally, Mietek Pemper still seemed to possess some of the august loneliness which must have attached to his secret garnering of carbon copies of Goeth’s correspondence. It became obvious to me as he took us to his black Mercedes in the airport car park that if Poldek ever revered anyone, it was this man. Pemper took us to the Bavarian Provincial Museum and introduced me to some significant documents on the SS. I had a feeling he was testing me, to see if I were the right person and could make use of resources. There was a tendency on the part of some of the survivors, when during a meeting Poldek would leave for a moment, to warn me to be careful of Poldek’s exuberant narratives. They were worried in case something unreliable was published. I believed that, even given my own enthusiasm, I had to be careful, but they could not know that. When three or four survivors told the same story, though, and the story was supported by documents…well, I believed it had just about earned its place in the ultimate record.

  Scholarly Pemper either agreed or asked to read the manuscript when it was done—his manner made it hard to distinguish an offer from a demand. In any case, he would be able to sort out its excesses and errors, and I was very pleased that he was willing to do so. It was an offer-cum-demand that many other survivors would also quite rightly make, but the validity of their requests meant that this book would be all the more in the tradition of Capote and the early Tom Wolfe.

  At our hotel that evening, after interviewing Pemper, Poldek showed me a fairly nondescript badge. With pride, he said, “I bought this for two hundred dollars in New York.”

  “Two hundred dollars? Is it a special badge?”

  “Is it a special badge?” he repeated in affectionate mimicry. “I’m telling you, it’s the official badge of Orbis, the Polish government’s travel agency. It opens doors.” His eyes glittered with the hope of the bene
fits this dourly enameled badge would bring us in Poland.

  The next day Pemper showed me a number of his Schindler documents for copying and to add to the record, and then, after he had adequately explained them to me, delivered us back to Munich airport. We caught a slightly seedy LOT Airlines jet and, penetrating steely clouds, it brought us into dismal Poland in early evening. General Jaruzelski, the Polish prime minister, had banned the new people’s liberation movement, Solidarity (Solidarno), and was girding his loins to proclaim martial law. He had been under pressure to do so from Marshal Kulikov, Russian Commander-in-Chief of the Warsaw Pact Armies, who had twenty Russian divisions ready to take Poland over should the Kremlin consider that necessary. Soon Russian troops were entering anyhow, since Kulikov had insisted that the two armies, Polish and Soviet, should hold joint spring maneuvers.

  At a dimly lit Warsaw airport, customs and immigration men were sullen. Indeed, wariness and hostility would characterize the country. Habitually repressed hunger and anger had brought an ineradicable sadness to faces. There was no spacious atmosphere of welcome for the traveler, and despite the occasional poster of skiers in the Carpathians and of the old town of Warsaw, this was not a country for tourists.

  Like all visitors, we were required to make a list of all the money and jewelry we had. We were warned by frowning, armed officials in an unspecified uniform that we must always change our dollars at the state exchanges, and we had to sign a document which bound us to do that and present proof that we had when we departed. So a further document was to be given over to government money exchangers every time we changed our dollars for zloty.

  After all the gloom of being processed, it was wonderful when we had reclaimed our bags to march out of the sliding door into the main hall and see a jockeylike, leather-capped man waiting for us and beaming. It was our cab driver Marek, whose family Poldek had been supporting with food packages and money. There were many dzien dobrys (hellos) as Poldek, unwilling to be repressed by the times, shouted his raucous greetings and kissed Marek on both cheeks.

  “This little guy!” intoned Poldek, taking in his fingers a fold of Marek’s cheek. “He’s a good Pole. He knows Walesa. He’s Solidarno. Worked in the same shipyard as Walesa!”

  Marek revived my spirits by not seeming too scared of Poldek’s enthusiasm, though he did make the mildest restraining gesture with his hand. In response, Poldek turned to me and said huskily, “Don’t talk loud, Thomas. Better be careful in case some son-of-bitch listens.”

  Led by Marek, we walked out to where his taxi was parked. He insisted on carrying our heavy bags, but I kept in my hand the briefcase I had bought from Poldek the previous October. By now it contained a trove of interviews, and copies of documents Mietek Pemper had given me. To leave it out of my sight made me restless, so I took it into the backseat of Marek’s Mercedes cab. Poldek, in front with Marek, discussed the state of the nation in Polish.

  The streets we drove through seemed identically full of Stalinist tenement blocks. Warsaw looked a cheerless city, but Poldek insisted on being cheered despite it all. A homecoming, he told me. “Polonia! But Marek tells me there are a lot of Russian soldiers here now.”

  Marek said something and laughed. Poldek explained the joke: “If you smell, you know, human pee all over the place, it’s the Russians. They wash their hands in water closets, and piss on the tiles. They know nothing from bathrooms.”

  Marek continued to fill Poldek in on the tragedy of Poland. Though a grit of weariness seemed to lie over the entire city, a flame of patriotism warmed these two Poles in a taxi on the way to the Orbis Europejski Hotel near the west bank of the Vistula. Poldek would continue to relay the substance of their talks back to me enthusiastically.

  “My friend Marek was up in the north when the shipyard strikes began, and the workers sat on the wharves waving at people going past in cars and trams. Waving yet! People haven’t waved at each other for years in this country.”

  I could tell by a scapular hanging from his rearview mirror and the Miraculous Medal welded onto the dashboard that Marek was a Catholic, but Poldek was obviously at one with him in their Polish identity. Unlike many former prisoners, Poldek did not view the Polish decades of misery since 1939 in serves-them-right terms. He saw it for the great tragedy it was.

  Before going to our rooms we said good night to Marek, and Poldek conducted a two-way conversation with me and the driver about our plans for the following days. We did not need him that evening, since we were going to the old city, and vehicles were not permitted there.

  In the unexpectedly bright lobby of our hotel, the government exchange office stood near the reception desk. The official exchange rate was pegged at some thirty-seven zloty to the U.S. dollar. As Poldek checked us in at full volume, I headed for its grille to change my money. Before I reached it, however, Poldek rushed to me. “Thirty-seven zloty to the dollar? Ridiculous! Son-of-bitch thieves. I can get at least three times that on the street!”

  “Black market?” I suggested timorously and in a whisper.

  “Don’t shout it everywhere, Thomas, my dear friend,” he advised me, and then vociferously concluded his sign-in at the reception desk, where the clerk seemed as awed by his Orbis badge as Poldek had predicted. Throughout our journeys in Poland, backing up his general air of self-confidence, the badge gave him immediate, unguessed-at authority with hotel staff, causing a flurry among them. He would then raucously put them at ease, praising their bone structure in Polish before uttering many bardzo dzie kujes (thank you very much). Again this was no mere act, however. This was his singing of the survival of the Poles. He overwhelmed people through his genuine joy, and in praising the harried Polish girls of 1981, he sang the remembered glory of the girls of 1939, Jewish and Catholic, all of them with the coming sword hanging above their dazzling heads.

  We would be spending some days in Warsaw, not because we had many survivors to visit there but because it was the center of the lost lives of the Schindlerjuden, the big smoke of their youth. It was in its large ghetto that the great uprising occurred. Though in the occupation it had been under different administration than Kraków, it was essential background.

  On Hitler’s orders, Warsaw had been totally dynamited as a final gesture of cultural punishment before Hitler’s troops withdrew. But the old town had been rebuilt from photographs and from Canaletto’s famous painting of the city. Indeed, the streets of the old town, an easy walk from the hotel, were still under cash-starved but elegant restoration, and again Poldek took a patriotic joy in this, that a nation plundered by the Germans, and economically and politically oppressed by Stalinism, should find the spirit to rebuild its old graciousness, including the fascinating Royal Castle and the Cathedral of St. John, the Jesuit church. In the town square, the Rynek Starego Miasta, Poldek stood expatiating. People gave him a wide berth. With Solidarno consigned to the shadows, and arrests and beatings of its members by the security police, only a lunatic or a man of power could speak at such high volume. In the end, even Poldek fell silent. He stood still and saluted the dead of history, to whom this city had contributed untold battalions.

  There were a number of restaurants nearby, and Poldek had me eating soups full of barley and dumplings, and delicious courses of stuffed tripe, considered offal in richer countries but presented with artistry and succulence here. We finished with pancakes and drank Hungarian Bull’s Blood wine.

  Even though Marshal Pilsudski’s Sanacja Party had made an alliance, after the old man’s death in 1935, with the Camp of National Unity, an anti-Semitic group, Poldek considered these cobblestones on which he himself had been elevated to the Polish officer corps to be holy ground. A few years after he received his commission, Poldek’s division began a bitter retreat before the invading Germans, from the direction of Wroclaw through Katowice to hold a position at Kraków. The Germans bypassed Kraków, however, and Poldek’s division scuttered out along the road toward Lwów and along more obscure arteries, beneath predatory dive
bombers, to take up a final position at the San, where he was wounded and lost his beloved platoon sergeant and was helped to hospital in Przemyl, by an NCO. The place was soon overrun by the German army and Poldek, recuperating, became a prisoner. It was while being transhipped in Kraków from one POW train to another, going west to Germany, that he made his escape home, catching a Number One tram ten blocks to his parents’ place in Grodzka Street, Kraków.

  Poldek felt little martial shame over the defeat of 1939. He seemed genuinely to believe, as the free world itself came to believe in 1939, that Poland was being punished for its very gallantry and dash by a cruel totalitarian machine not playing by the rules of gallantry.

  When we strolled back from the old town to the less exuberant atmosphere of our hotel, the doorman and everyone in the reception area saluted Poldek’s Orbis badge.

  Six

  * * *

  During our Warsaw time, as leaden autumn dawns led to days full of ambiguous light under which a frightened populace kept their heads down, Poldek took me, for the sake of my education, to the Pawiak prison. The Pawiak, a series of cellars converted into dim interrogation cells, had housed thousands of captured Polish partisans, Jews masquerading as Aryans, and similar perceived threats to the balance of civilization. There was once a tall structure on top of the cellars, a more conventional prison, but it had been dynamited by the Nazis, and Polish nationalist zeal had not yet been applied to its restoration.

  Doomed prisoners’ near-last thoughts remained scrawled on the walls of Pawiak, and were interpreted in English in a visitors’ guide. Many who were either killed here or were sent on from here to concentration camps were, like Poldek, Poland’s most passionate children. Scrawled sentiments such as “Poland is deathless!” were common, as were defiant remarks that it would take more than bullets to defeat the Polish people. The one I remember best, however, was the one that said, “Oh God, how they beat me!”