Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  It had its strong connection with Schindler, too. Itzhak Stern, the accountant, would later say that Schindler had given him prior warning of the first SS outrage in Kazimierz. An SS party from an Einsatzgruppe—an elite “Special Duty Squad”—and policemen of the SD, the Sicherheitsdienst or security police, who were also the Party’s intelligence wing, moved in to lead the first large raid on the old Jewish ghetto in December 1939. Jewish apartments were plundered, but since this was the first raid of all, people thought that they had the right of protest against such confiscations. It was the hour of prayer at the Old Synagogue, and a number of Jewish householders and families who were not engaged in the prayers in the synagogue were driven there. All were shot, and then the synagogue was set fire to, but was not burned down.

  Further up the market square, still in Szeroka Street, Poldek led me to the sixteenth-century Remuh Synagogue. This synagogue was also deserted except for the supervision of one aged Orthodox Jew. In the shaded cemetery, the headstones of Jews from 1551 to about 1800 are crowded in, inscribed with Hebrew. Lining the pathways and shrubbery were cracked gravestones shot up by the Nazis that evening in December 1939, or recovered from the old Jerozolimska Synagogue in Plaszów. The gravestone fragments from Jerozolimska had been used with both symbolic and engineering intent by the SS to pave the road which led into Plaszów concentration camp. Brought back here after the war, the fragments which could not be fitted together made a wall for a circular wooded shrubbery. Similar pieces leaned round the inside of the high walls of the little cemetery, which had the air of a place unvisited, of deaths forgotten, of gravestones unread.

  Kraków. This wonderful city had been Schindler’s World War II oyster. He did not go to the market square, however, for its beautiful 700-year-old cloth hall, but to visit the hotels and bars, as well as jazz cellars operating despite official Nazi condemnation of the genre as decadent and Negroid.

  Many of Schindler’s German peers in Kraków, including Ingrid, whom I had interviewed on Long Island, were Treuhänder, German managers put in place to run confiscated Jewish businesses. Schindler, however, always boasted to survivors, and stated in a document written in the late 1950s, that he had taken over a bankrupt enamel business named Rekord, choosing not to be restricted by managing a business as a Treuhänder under the regulatory and corrupt German Trust Agency.

  I have wondered since, more than I did when writing the book, if all the money Schindler gathered to acquire and crank up the business came secretly from Jewish parties whose cash was officially frozen. We know from a number of testimonies that at least a good deal of it did come from these sources. But some might also have come from the Abwehr, German military intelligence.

  According to an excellent documentary directed by the Englishman John Blair, sparked by the book and appearing after it, as an Abwehr agent Oskar had played a large part in providing a pretext for the Germans to invade Poland. Blair had managed to find Majola, Goeth’s mistress, something Poldek and I did not accomplish. She was dying of emphysema at the time Blair made his documentary, 1983, and comes across on screen as a piteous figure, gasping before the camera. “We were all good Nazis,” she wheezed, so close to death that she was not afraid to state these things. “Oskar was a good Nazi.” She claimed that in the weeks before the outbreak of war, a memo was sent around to all Abwehr offices asking whether it was possible for anyone to acquire Polish army uniforms. There were no specifics, of course, about the reason for which they were needed, but Schindler—who as a tractor sales rep traveled over the border into Poland all the time, and was based anyhow right on the border at the Abwehr office in Ostrava in Sudetenland—undertook to acquire some. These, claimed Majola, rightly or wrongly, were the Polish uniforms German soldiers wore when they attacked an ethnic German radio station just over the German-Polish border and killed its volksdeutsch—ethnic German—staff. These murders were used by Dr. Goebbels and Hitler to justify the German army’s advance into Poland to protect their fellow Germans.

  If Majola was right, then Schindler had a lot of credit with the Abwehr, and his industrial career would have been partly underwritten by them. Indeed, his Abwehr handlers, Lieutenant Eberhard Gebauer and Lieutenant Martin Plathe, were often in Schindler’s company, and he considered them very decent fellows, as indeed they seem to have been. Now Oskar, as an agent-cum-businessman in Kraków, passed on to the Abwehr’s Breslau office reports on the plans and behavior of their rivals in the SS, including what he knew about the development of extermination programs. Oskar’s Kraków was a complicated place, but he relished it.

  Oskar’s camp, the Jewish ghetto site and Plaszów were beyond the Vistula and to the south. Poldek and I made our way by tram down Lwowska Street, which had once bisected the Jewish ghetto. Getting off, we walked by way of a few dismal, semi-industrial streets very unlike the glory of the Stare Miasto area near the town square. So we came to undistinguished 4 Lipowa Street, where Schindler had had his office, works and, ultimately, the barracks of DEF, Deutsche Email Fabrik, German Enamel Company, commonly called Emalia by the Jews of Kraków. I recognized the building at once from a photograph Poldek had acquired and shown me—one of Oskar and his office staff standing in front of the entryway of DEF. Oskar stands in the middle of the group, nearly side-on. One can see the front office windows upstairs, from which DEF was run. The staff ranged around him includes Victoria Klonowska, his Polish secretary and red-haired beauty of his front office, with whom he conducted a close relationship simultaneously with his association with Ingrid. Some of his Jewish accountants are there too. A Nazi flag swings from either side of the factory’s roofed gateway behind him. Above the entryway, adequate to admit and send forth truckloads of enamelware, someone has painted 4 JAHRE D.E.F. (Four Years of DEF). This impressive and well-grouped picture was taken in the spring of 1944, the last spring of Emalia, and ultimately Spielberg decided to restage it, as he would restage others of Oskar’s and Titsch’s photographs, in the ultimate, undreamt-of except by Poldek, film.

  In the picture, we can sense behind the faces in this entryway, behind Oskar’s huge frame, the presence and industry of the Emalia slave laborers working within, occupying the barracks which Oskar had by now set up behind the factory to save his workers from the risks of being marched back and forth from Commandant Goeth’s notorious Plaszów, out in the countryside four miles south.

  In gritty Lipowa Street, Poldek and I took in the facade of the building—it was, as Oskar himself said, influenced by the style of Walter Gropius, with large windows fronting the street. Now it was a telephone components factory. The only really vociferous man in Poland, Poldek, entered the building with me and argued at length with a doorman on the lower ground floor, at the base of the stairs which led to what had once been Oskar’s office. These stairs Schindler had ascended and descended on business. So had Itzhak Stern, Oskar’s accountant, and Abraham Bankier, who was related to the family connected with the bankrupt factory Schindler had acquired. These characters were becoming mythic to me, and yet familiar, and their former occupancy gave the banal building a legendary status.

  Poldek at last concluded his argument with the doorman, who picked up the phone and called upstairs. It was in this exact place that, in reality and in the film, Miss Regina Perlman, a good-looking Jewish girl trying to survive on faked Aryan papers, had come to beg Schindler for her parents to be rescued from Plaszów and brought to DEF.

  Poldek demanded to speak to the management. An official descended from the upper floor, and Poldek introduced himself and me. The man spoke English with an American accent. We could not possibly be admitted into the manufacturing plant, he said, for among other things the factory was turning out components for the Polish and Soviet army. Poldek now argued with a flattering note of subservience and respect in his voice. He told the man that we were engaged in research into the factory’s use in World War II, and could we please just see the main office? At last he consented. We followed him upstairs to a large waiting
room where shoddy-looking conductors and pieces of cable were on display, the nonsecret portion of the company’s manufacturing. High windows looked down onto the factory floor, where workers did not seem to be imbued with any sense of urgency to turn out the materials needed by the Warsaw Pact armies. The lack of spirit, the dearth of energy which arose from poor diet and crimping of the soul, pervaded the place, and Poldek told me that the Emalia people willingly worked much harder.

  In this office, Oskar had, like the true male chauvinist he was, selected only the most lustrous of Polish secretaries. Ever expansive, he had provided them with Christmas and Easter hams and other black-market luxuries, so that even in the picture taken in 1944, at the height of Polish want, they looked healthy. And to this office, too, Itzhak Stern brought the names of old men, maidens and children who needed particular rescue from Plaszów.

  Having grown fraternal with our escort, Poldek now began making extravagant promises to all the officials in this upstairs office. There would be an extraordinary book on Polish wartime heroism! There would also be a film. Please, could he have a card from each of the senior staff? I had already noticed this propensity for card collecting, as if each name Poldek gathered gave him some increment of Polish authority.

  At my request we revisited Lipowa Street a number of times during our period in Kraków. Among the avenues of grim industrial Polish architecture, it retained the individuality of its cream color and its covered entryway, but otherwise had no distinction unless the passerby happened to know of its peculiar history.

  A relatively short walk eastward, we came to the suburb of Podgórze, site of the wartime Jewish ghetto, which had been set up by a decree of March 3, 1941. People were to enter it by March 20, and any Jew who did not could expect the worst. The Jews of Kraków and a number of other towns, including Tarnów and Lodz, had been crammed in progressively, a family or two or three or five per room, in an area approximately six blocks by four. Walls were erected along Lwowska Street so that trams could pass through without anyone seeing inside the ghetto. The walls of the ghetto were decorated with Middle Eastern–style scallops, rather Egyptian in appearance, to go with the Middle Eastern–style gate of the region the SS would call Judenstadt, Jewish Town. Even now, so long after the ghetto had been “liquidated,” some of these screening walls were still in place along Lwowska Street.

  As in Lodz, the allocation of lodging was under the administration of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council, which attempted to allay the situation by cooperating with the authorities, especially now that they believed the very worst, the confiscation of homes and businesses, had occurred. And again, as in Lodz, the Nazis’ demands that the Judenrat select people for transportation out of the ghetto were met, the Judenrat at first sacrificing a few for the many, and then acquiring greater and greater desperate knowledge that the system was a Moloch which wanted the lot. During successive deportations, the people to be transported Ost, to the East, were guarded on their way into the trucks by the Jewish ghetto police, the Ordnungsdienst (OD), who themselves made a journey from innocence to collaboration, and who liked to believe that their own turn for a journey to oblivion could be averted.

  On the day Poldek led me along Jósefinska Street in 1981, the former ghetto was populated chiefly by Catholic Poles. But it didn’t seem a place of any great civic joy. The Polish residents knew everything there was to know about the fatuity and dangers of history. Through the street-level entryways one could see courtyards in which muffled children breathed condensation into the air and played on wintry ground with antique tricycles as their mothers hung droopy washing. Poldek showed me the place at 2 Jósefinska Street where he and Misia had lived as a ghetto-bound young married couple. Here, too, was the timber yard where during the final ghetto liquidation in early 1943 he had hidden briefly from the SS, until he heard the bloodhounds on their way and emerged from hiding just in time to see the SS and their dogs round the corner toward him.

  He took me to a backyard in Limanowskiego Street where in a cellar during the ghetto days an old man had manufactured wine for seders and for general consumption, and who had been raided by the SS and the Polish Green Police and shot dead. Poldek was expatiating on the tragedy in his normal basso volume when, looking up, we saw people staring timidly down at us from gaps between their curtains. “They think we’re KGB or something,” Poldek told me. “We’re too well dressed.” But one of those who were drawing drapes across their windows he now recognized. He began shouting to her in Polish. “Regina darling! Dzien dobry. Przepraszam!” He turned to me. “It is a beautiful girl I knew when I was a boy,” he told me. “I went to the gymnasium with her.”

  And so we entered a stairwell with its redolence of piss, and ascended the steps at an earnest pace set by Poldek. We arrived at the head of the stairs, Poldek calling, “Regina, it’s me. Poldiu Pfefferberg.” And at last a door opened a slit. “Remember Poldek Pfefferberg, my dear friend? I became Professor Magister Leopold Pfefferberg at the gymnasium. But first we were kids together.” The door opened fully. We entered the room and Poldek looked fondly at the white-haired Polish woman who stood in the hallway, her demeanor marked by nervousness and dignity in equal measure. She stepped back to let us enter, and when we were inside, an older man wearing a yarmulke edged forward from the shadows of the apartment and closed the door behind us. We moved from the corridor into the drawing room. In happier times the apartment had been well designed to admit the sun in winter, but everything was curtained now. No one seemed to want to make eye contact with the treacherous sunlight. The lowered voices of Regina and the old man, and her restrained but friendly reception of Poldek, caused my traveling companion to lower his own voice to the level of what is sometimes called an Irish whisper.

  The old man turned out to be not Regina’s husband but a fellow Jewish survivor. Regina and the old man were, indeed, two of Kraków’s two hundred remaining Jews. Governor General Frank, who had wanted Kraków judenrein—clean of Jews—had just about managed it.

  Regina switched the lights on in the dim room and it became apparent that this was a little museum. On tables around the edge of the room were ancient-looking kiddush cups, Shabbat candlesticks and trays. There were various silver implements with whose uses I was vaguely familiar—a dented Torah crown, a Havdalah tower. There were occasional parchment fragments of Torah scrolls and, in one case, a scroll in its entirety revealing an illuminated, anciently wrought text. There were fragments from the Torah ark as well, and those silver wands, yads, with a tiny hand at the end of them with which the rabbi traced the holy text.

  These artifacts have, by the time I’m writing this, probably been returned to the museum in the Old Synagogue of Kazimierz, a museum which did not exist in 1981. They were remnants from the Old Synagogue of 1570, the little seventeenth-century Remuh Synagogue, beside the extraordinary Remuh cemetery, and the Popov Synagogue, a later building—the three synagogues, that is, of the old Jewish sector named Kazimierz.

  Regina insisted now on making all of us herbata (tea), and laying out sugar and honey. A few days before, in Kraków, I had visited a state grocery store in which the only items for sale were pickles, soap and mineral water. When a stock of jam or sugar or tea came in, Regina told Poldek, she depended on the grapevine to tell her. Once you got there, you queued for hours. Nor were there any uncomplicated exchanges. Every item required a docket, the docket system being in theory a precaution against the black market. The old man in the yarmulke nodded in confirmation. Survival itself was a test.

  At last we left the apartment, Regina at the door trying to hush Poldek’s protestations of his abiding admiration of her beauty, and proudly trying to refuse the wad of dollars he passed to her for the museum’s upkeep and her own welfare.

  Eight

  * * *

  In Poldek’s picture collection was a photograph of Oskar, in appropriate equestrian garb, ready to mount a horse for an excursion through the parklands of Kraków. Oskar had told people after the
war that in June 1942 he and Ingrid, out riding in a small hilly park named Bednarskiego, south of the ghetto, witnessed one of the first and fiercest Aktionen, raids to round up ghetto Jews, children, the aged, and those without the labor documents, the Blauschein and Kennkarte, and take them away. (That was the day little Genia, a member of the Dresner family, was fruitlessly abroad in her brave red coat.)

  Oskar implied that he had had prior knowledge of this Aktion, and that he had deliberately placed himself on Bednarskiego. Though the claim that he could have witnessed the Aktion from there has been disputed by a subsequent historian, when Poldek took me up among the bare trees in 1981, I found that by walking along it on foot one did have a view of the north/ south-running streets of the ghetto (though not of its cross-streets), and I could well imagine the chaos and savagery visible to Oskar at every crossroads in 1942, when the young men of the SS, mothers’ sons perverted by the license which was permitted them, now found mothers trying to hide babies, and took the infants by the ankle and smashed them against walls.

  I have never believed that the SS were insane—indeed, Himmler said he was very careful to screen out men with murderous pathologies. To make his sane young men believe in the necessity and merit of murder, he changed the language, calling, for example, the corps consigned to the slaughter of Jews behind the front line Einsatzgruppen, Special Duty Squads, a sanctifying title.

  “That’s what I wanted to pointed out,” Poldek said after each stop on the ghetto’s stations of tears, and the story of each place rendered his little grammatical solecism irrelevant. Such intimacy of horror prevailed in the ghetto! It had been a cramped neighborhood. Poldek showed me the location of the fever hospital, where patients who could not rise were killed in their beds before the eyes of the medical staff, who were themselves about to die. In the general hospital, in the ghetto’s western border near the uniform factory of a kindly Austrian, Julius Madritsch, the doctors and nurses fed a merciful dose of strychnine to the patients, so that the SS found only corpses.