Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  Back across the Pacific again, the lights of Sydney soon lost, there was nothing to see until, with morning and sunshine falling on Catalina Island off one wing, we inserted ourselves into the great air jam around Los Angeles airport.

  There was time for a last few interviews in Los Angeles before Poldek and I took to our journey. I now met a middle-aged woman, a radio journalist and survivor who made a particular point to me. She insisted that she was one of Schindler’s Jews too, even though she hadn’t been to Brinnlitz. She was a Schindler Jew, she said, in the sense that the Czechoslovakian province of Moravia had been kept free of Jewish labor camps for nearly five years of the war. It was the Reich’s concession to the wishes of the local Sudeten German population, and it was also the wish of the Moravian police chief, Otto Rasch. The prisoners all seemed to take it for granted that Schindler had offered inducements to Rasch to persuade him to permit the opening of his labor camp in the province. Once the precedent had been created, there was room for other camps.

  According to this woman, many young Jews whose lives would have been lost one way or another in the liquidation of Auschwitz, as the Russian army drew near the Vistula and the German factories were moved out of Auschwitz-Monowitz, were now sent to labor in a sequence of new Moravian work camps. This woman, very Californian, well-coiffed, expensively dressed, told me that she had been a prisoner in a Luftwaffe manufacturing plant in Moravia that would never have been opened had Schindler not broken the ground first by founding his own plant. Later I read the same argument in some documents written by Oskar’s accountant Itzhak Stern, and supplied to me by his widow. Itzhak would make the claim that up to twenty thousand Jewish prisoners were saved by Oskar’s initiative in Moravia.

  As well as introducing me to Holocaust survivors in the 1939 Club—a Beverly Hills survivors’ club Poldek had helped found, whose members had not necessarily been in Oskar’s camp but who had known him postwar in California and Israel—Poldek talked to me endlessly about Goeth and Oskar and the SS and prisoners he knew, and answered my questions. I made notes on paper or by tape recorder. On the streets of Beverly Hills, his flow was interrupted only by ornate nods to friends or conversations with them, many being either former prisoners or people who had met Oskar or both.

  In Gelson’s Supermarket in Beverly Hills on a Sunday morning, he stopped suddenly in front of the fruit section like a man struck by an intuition and reached out his hand to an elderly woman who seemed to be considering buying a melon. “Janka, darling. How did you get even more beautiful than to start with?” They kissed each other on both cheeks, Eastern European style, and Leopold introduced me. “Yes, there is going to be a book, darling. And a film. Sure, this will be a film. Why wouldn’t it be? Such a story of humanity man to man,” etc., etc., After asking her to raise her chin and proclaiming “Ageless, darling! Such bone structure!” a number of times, and making kissing sounds, he bade the woman good-bye, completed his purchases, and led me back to his car.

  Apart from the fact that the woman was magnificent despite her years, Poldek’s flattery worked not because it was mere flattery. He believed his own exuberant claims. To him, beauty was a regularly encountered commodity.

  “Do you know,” he asked me, “that gorgeous woman killed the son-of-bitch Gauleiter of Riga?” The Gauleiter were the provincial governors of the Reich. “She was living on Aryan papers. Seduced the son-of-bitch, and let the underground into the bedroom to finish him! Such a looker!”

  This question of “Aryan papers” would arise again and again. Young middle-class Jewish women were generally the ones who had used this stratagem of obtaining by whatever means, money or charm, fake papers that declared them Volksdeutsche—ethnic Germans—or at least Gentile Poles. There were women still in Europe, Leopold believed, who had never come out after the war from the deep cover of their Aryan identity. “Why should they,” Poldek asked, “the way they were hated in Europe?” Some men had done so as well, but it was harder for men—if you were circumcised and pretending to be an Aryan, you needed a certificate that said doctors had been forced to circumcise you because of your having contracted gonorrhea.

  I was becoming aware that many Jewish survivors believed, rightly or wrongly, that the Nazis placed so many concentration camps in Poland because of the ripe streak of anti-Semitism in its Catholic community. But Poldek did not make any assertions of that kind. He had remained a Polish nationalist in the Kociuszko tradition, to an extent which annoyed some of his fellow survivors. He was a patriotic supporter of Polish Solidarity, loved Lech Walesa, and supplied food packages to a number of Solidarity families via a packager in Chicago. He was also outrageously proud of “the Polish Pope,” a pope who made many Catholics I knew—indeed, many clergy—uneasy, and who seemed to be steering the Church back to the doctrinal severity and legalism which had prevailed before the Second Vatican Council and John XXIII.

  “I was commissioned an officer in the Polish army,” he told me, “in the Rynek of Warsaw in 1938 by Marshal Pilsudski himself.” He had also completed his physical education degree at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, for which he had a passionate love, boasting of its massive history—it had been founded in 1364. “Beside the Jagiellonian,” he chuckled, “Yale and Harvard are juniors, nothing but boychickels.” Yet when he attended there, in Pilsudski’s Poland, the university featured a number of well-placed benches on which Jews were not permitted to sit.

  Four

  * * *

  Flying by night to save time, Poldek and I arrived in New York with a long list of interviewees to cover, all of whom had no need to cooperate except on Poldek’s say-so. The city’s freezing air seemed the polar opposite of the sweltering Australian February, and yet felt more appropriate for research purposes of this nature. It was less beach-crazed than Sydney, less air-headed than Los Angeles, and in this weather I didn’t need, for example, to plot a time in the day when I could go swimming.

  In the Diamond District of New York, on an upper floor of a building right on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, a family of Schindler survivors now named the Fagens (Feigenbaums, as they appear on Schindler’s list) ran a splendid wholesale diamond and jewelry business. The Diamond District was and always would be intriguing to me, with its lines of retail jewelers at street level and wholesalers like the Fagens on the floors above, and every potential design to be had. I had from some obscure genetic gift a love of jewelry, one ever restricted by lack of means. I had in my time bought nearly all the jewelry my wife and daughters said they needed, and sometimes items they didn’t. Yet I wore none myself. I came from a painfully unflamboyant Australian male tradition.

  On Forty-seventh Street I was fascinated to see Hasidic Jews in their black hats moving about the streets, selling the retailers diamonds they had taken on consignment. It seemed to me that in dangerous New York the Hasidim were exceptionally safe traveling around with their pocketed diamonds, and this was a mystery I thought I might one day enquire into. Perhaps understandably, I never quite got the full tale of the relationship between upstairs, the Hasidim, and the street-level stores. Even these days, though the Diamond District website acknowledges the place of the Hasidim, their precise role is not explained.

  Upstairs, admitted to the Fagens’ office via electronic doors, I met the younger Fagen, Lewis, or—as Poldek called him—Lutek, a slim, likeable fellow, elegantly dressed, who had spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Schindler’s two camps. His parents, Necha and Jakob, were also on the list, and his cancer-stricken sister was taken along to Brinnlitz too, and died there in humane dignity, safe from molestation.

  On the list in Schindler’s Brinnlitz camp, Lutek Fagen was described as capable of working a lathe and of calibrating, but the machine he labored at confounded him. Fagen was charged by the head of the SS garrison, Untersturmführer Liepold, with sabotaging a calibrated metal press. Schindler had laughed the matter off—“striking me over the face, to save my life. I had two kinds
of tears in my eyes. Gratitude and because he was strong.” He then fobbed Liepold off with some blather or other about how they were all incompetent but could not all be shot.

  One of the most important aspects of his imprisonment involved Mrs. Schindler. He had broken his glasses on the factory floor, and Emilie Schindler had said, “Give them to me, and next time I’m up in Kraków, I’ll go and see your eye doctor and have them made up again to prescription.” This had been a salient moment for Lutek. Here was a boy who, ever since reaching adolescence, had been by decree a subhuman, an Untermensch. And yet a Sudeten German woman was willing to recognize him as a young man with a history of prescription glasses, and give him the dignity of a replacement pair. While the SS had heaped up the confiscated lenses and frames of Europe’s Jews, dissenters, gypsies and other innocents, Mrs. Schindler was willing to supply at least one set of spectacles to counterbalance a little the pyramids of general confiscation. She would also appear at the side of his sister, as she was dying of cancer, with what seemed to be a miraculous midwinter gift—an apple. Understandably enough, Emilie had not mentioned either of these gifts in her replies to my questions. For Fagen, they constituted one of the major humane gestures of his war. For her it was all probably lost among the memories of more conspicuous favors done.

  One night in New York, soon after meeting Lutek and then his elegant, stylish wife, we traveled on the frequently unreliable evening commuter train to Long Island with a New York engineer, a former Holocaust survivor who had married Oskar’s mistress Ingrid. This man had survived Mauthausen and then a death march of prisoners to the west. Escaping the line one day, reaching a fringe of trees and finding a farmhouse ahead, he was caught in a barn by a young SS man who had been sent after him. The young soldier, one of the less than utterly Hitlerite conscripts the SS had had to fall back upon in the last months of the Reich, said to him, “The war’s nearly over and it’s too late for me to start killing people. Make damn sure you lie low here for a long time after we’ve gone.” And with that he went outside and discharged his rifle into the air, and walked off to rejoin the death column. Many of the friends of the Schindlerjuden were saved by such individual acts of clemency, though a vaster number were not.

  When we got to the engineer’s prosperous suburban bungalow on Long Island, I was fascinated to meet his wife, whom so many prisoners had mentioned as a kindly and cooperative presence. Oskar had had an ongoing affair with her all through his years in Kraków, and took her south with him to his new camp, even though it was located on the home turf of Emilie Schindler, and Emilie lived with Oskar in his quarters, an arrangement that had not prevailed in Kraków. Even after the war, when he had fled to Munich, Oskar’s household consisted of himself, Emilie and Ingrid. Ingrid’s husband, this Jewish man who had survived the Mauthausen death march on the moral whim of an SS conscript and also fetched up in Munich, had met Oskar and his ménage, and he claimed that one night Oskar had said to him, “Why don’t you marry Ingrid? Emilie’s getting sick of this arrangement.”

  Since everyone seemed to do what Oskar wanted in the end, Ingrid did eventually marry the former prisoner, quite a departure for the strapping Aryan girl who had been Oskar’s helpmeet. She was now a very generous but nervous grandmother. She had prepared a Polish meal for us, but was anxious, by the time I met her, lest her children and grandchildren should hear too much concerning her liaison with the racy Oskar Schindler. That is why I still use “Ingrid” as a pseudonym for her.

  Interestingly, this couple had also played a considerable part in Emilie’s life, and had kept in contact to the extent that later, when Emilie visited New York, she stayed with them. It was as if Oskar’s intentions, not always honorable, had been rendered benign by the parties themselves.

  In New York in particular, under the aegis of Uncle Poldek, I began to encounter my first Schindlerkinder, children who had an association with the huge, bluff Aryan Oskar. It became apparent immediately that the children had been the most deeply marked and haunted by the war. I met a highly successful former child victim, Ryszard Horowitz, one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, at his studio in Manhattan. After the war, before the family moved to America, he had graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Kraków, along with his childhood friend, Roman Polanski. “The most important heritage I got from my country,” he once said of Poland, “is an understanding of art, painting in particular.”

  His surreal and vivid pictures show a great hunger for pushing at the walls of the normal, three-dimensional world, to make fantastic escapes. One might glibly think that this is his triumph over the savage walls placed around his freedom in childhood. In any case, Ryszard emerged as one of the great photographers of this age. Again, one could look at his open, well-tanned yet profoundly private face and wonder what it was about him as an infant that the Reich should try to kill him.

  Even to please Uncle Poldek, it was difficult for him to speak about his memories of the process to which his family and he had been subjected. He left one in no doubt that he believed his daily existence had been cramped and limited by that savage experience, by the merciless flux during which people in whom you made a hopeful investment of love vanished almost at once without explanation or, again without explanation, were butchered in front of you.

  Gradually we met other members of Ryszard’s family who were also Schindlerjuden: his parents, Regina and Dolek Horowitz, and his aunt and uncle, Manci and Henry Rosner. Regina and Manci were sisters, while Henry’s brother was the Melbourne accordionist Leo Rosner, mentioned earlier. The Horowitzes were welded to the Rosners by marriage, by the sociability of the parents, and by shared grief and peril. And so we met the other of Amon Goeth’s camp musicians, Henry Rosner, compact and jolly, with impish eyes, the violinist from Queens who these days catered to a less lethal clientele at the Sign of the Dove.

  Henry’s wife, Manci, was impressively articulate, and her robust capacity to talk about the past helped vastly. Even in the moment of their redemption she and Regina suffered an astounding sorrow. Taken out of the slaughter yards of Auschwitz with all the other Schindler women, and awaiting a train to Brinnlitz in the Auschwitz railway concourse, the sisters spotted young Ryszard Horowitz, Regina’s son, and his older cousin, Olek (Alec), Manci’s cherished boy, waving to their mothers from behind the wire of the men’s compound. Both these children were meant to be in Brinnlitz with their fathers! The women hid under a truck to talk to them. “What are you doing here, little darlings?” they called.

  It had happened that on one occasion when Oskar was absent from Brinnlitz, the toddler Ryszard was seen playing on the factory floor by an SS inspector on a visit from Gross-Rosen camp. Ryszard was gathered for shipment to Auschwitz with his cousin Olek, who was discovered in the prisoners’ quarters. Both their fathers, Dolek Horowitz and Henry Rosner the violinist, volunteered to go with them. They traveled under guard by passenger train, and were amazed at the strained looks on the other passengers’ faces, by which they interpreted the war to be going well for the Allies. Then, on arrival at Auschwitz, they were all given the tattoo, meaning they were saved from immediate extinction. The boys proudly displayed their tattoos to the women under the trucks. Then the women were forced by guards to board and to leave their children behind, believing them consigned to death now.

  For most child survivors the horror of childhood hung over all the connections and potential happiness of adult life. Ryszard’s cousin Olek, a successful sound engineer who owned his own company, the former little boy who hid in the pit of a latrine to escape a Hilfsaktion (health selection) in Plaszów, reiterated the same idea: “We grew up not trusting anyone. No sooner did we become attached to someone than they were taken from us. Even our fathers were taken from us, when we were moved to the children’s huts in Auschwitz 1.” The young fathers nevertheless survived the war, being ordered to labor in Auschwitz 2 rather than sent to the gas chambers.

  After the war, the Red Cross and UNRRA (the United Nations Rel
ief and Rehabilitation Administration) were able to reunite Olek with his parents, the Rosners, but could provide no information about Ryszard for the Horowitzes. Regina Horowitz was watching a newsreel of the liberation of Auschwitz in a Kraków cinema when she saw Ryszard (in footage destined to appear in every documentary on Auschwitz) being shunted by a Polish nun along the wire of Auschwitz 1 toward the gate. “He’s alive,” she screamed. She was forced to leave the cinema, but Ryszard was found.

  Questions such as how the boys felt when their mothers steamed out of Auschwitz—having no choice, of course, but children don’t necessarily understand that—were too grievous to ask either of these men, Ryszard and Olek. But generally, Poldek was willing to be insistent that people must give us an interview. He called another couple who lived on Long Island. The wife had been a sprinter who represented Poland in the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and then, some seven years later, found herself running up and down the muddy Appellplatz (parade ground) in Plaszów to prove that she had not broken down and was not yet ready for obliteration.

  I could well understand that these people who had once been Untermenschen by decree would not now wish to revisit those times for the sake of a supposed writer (non-Jewish) from the Antipodes who was going to re-create their stories. There were two questions they could ask: (1) What will he understand anyhow, whatever I tell him? (2) Why should I go back to those times for the convenience of some writer? Poldek neither encouraged nor permitted such refusals, though.

  “Thomas and I are in New York just two more days,” he said to the Long Island couple, the Kinstlingers, “and we can interview you at seven-thirty tomorrow night.”