Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  Poldek was predictably delighted to be reunited with these people, breathing and laughing despite the intentions of the Reich. He amply praised the agelessness of the Dresner women and of Dr. Stern, and I could see he meant it all, since he loved them all, those girls who’d been young when he was young and whose survival shone in them. Like many monogamous men, he liked women, whereas the “liking” extended by Schindler, though it obviously brought fond memories to many women other than his wife, was not as reliable a commodity.

  We were rarely at our hotel. We were out continuously, talking about Schindler. In one house a former prisoner said, “Remember all the jokes in Plaszów?” Shut in at night, the subhumans had room for laughter. And then another said, “And remember how much screwing there was! People screwed like crazy in the camp.” A defiance of death, I guessed, never having been on the edge of the pit like these people. A defiance of Amon on his balcony with his sniper’s rifle.

  When not dining at survivors’ houses, Poldek and I liked to go to the Romanian restaurant up by Ben Yehuda Street where Oskar was well remembered and where he had always dined free of charge, and lingered over Martell and Metaxa brandies. In the Romanian restaurant, Poldek mentioned to me an elderly fellow named Shmuel or Samuel Springmann who lived in Ramat Gan, a northeastern suburb of the city. Springmann had been one of the founders of the Jewish Relief and Rescue Organization which operated from Istanbul. He had sent his agents into Europe to get information from well-placed people about the situation in Poland and Germany. One of his agents was a Dr. Sedlacek, a dentist, who went to Kraków and made contact with Oskar at the factory in Lipowa Street. As authorized by Springmann’s organization, Sedlacek passed on to Oskar money supplied ultimately from New York, for the purchase of fake passports and other documents for various Jews. After the war, Oskar always boasted that he had used Relief and Rescue money impeccably, though he wasn’t sure about some of the other people Relief and Rescue used. Some of them were semi-criminal operators, he complained to Sedlacek. He felt very prudish about them, Sedlacek would later report.

  Since Oskar was still an agent of the Abwehr, he had plenty to tell Sedlacek about the destruction camps, which had begun their work in 1942 with carbon monoxide gassing. Within the chambers of Belzec, it had taken an hour or more to kill the scrambling, writhing mass. The SS were trying to find a more “humane” and faster method. At Sedlacek’s urging, Oskar agreed to go to Budapest, which was then not directly under Nazi control, and meet with Springmann and others. It was to find out what happened at that meeting that we wished to visit the aging Mr. Springmann.

  We took a cab out to Ramat Gan and, in a park, met up with him. He had nominated the park because he said his apartment was not spacious enough to entertain people. Springmann’s mind seemed sharp but his general health was in clear decline. He was accompanied by a slightly younger man. Both of them were dressed formally for the interview, in suits with vests; very much two European gentlemen. Springmann told us as we walked—he did not want to sit—about the information on the new destruction camps that Oskar brought to the meeting in Budapest. To confer with Springmann, Oskar had smuggled himself into Budapest from Kraków in a railway truck full of newspapers. He was very careful to be sure he had not been followed to the rendezvous hotel, was anxious about listening devices and, once inside, opened the door suddenly a few times to catch potential eavesdroppers. Then he sat down and began to speak to Springmann and his associate.

  The death camps had been established, he told them. Belzec was one of them, but there were new camps at Treblinka and Maidanek and Sobibor too, and they were beginning the construction of a new area at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which would be the mother of camps. The SS were dissatisfied with the carbon monoxide gassing, even though that method was capable of killing thousands a day, and even though the commandant of Belzec, Christian Wirth, was a great promoter of carbon monoxide. Other chemicals had, however, been tested with more success. But whatever gas was used, disposal of corpses was a big problem too.

  It was the winter of 1942–43, Springmann told us in the park, and the world knew something about the mass slaughters which were occurring under the Nazi regime, but he himself had been unaware, until Schindler spoke to him in that hotel room in Budapest, of the technical experiments aimed at mass extermination. In the early twenty-first century, we are accustomed to the concept that these things happened in World War II, but in 1942–43, to an outsider who had not yet heard the tidings, what Schindler had to say would have seemed like science fiction. Springmann, a German Jew, felt himself an inheritor of a European identity as well as a Jewish one. Could these things be envisaged and carried out by Germans?

  While Oskar was briefly in Hungary, Springmann told us, Sedlacek the dentist took him to dinner with a shady character called Dr. Schmidt, the sort of man about whom Oskar was always very judgmental, just as he had been judgmental about his own father. Oskar warned Sedlacek and Springmann that they shouldn’t give money for Jewish relief and rescue to someone like Schmidt. Sedlacek remarked that there was an understanding that an operative could keep 10 percent of the money he was given, but Oskar, the enthusiastic black-marketeer, passionately disapproved of that.

  Because the SS destruction system was so pervasive, so unlike anything else that had happened before in history, Springmann’s noble operation could produce a merely partial salvation. Sometimes it was a matter of bribing an official to let an individual Jew live, or smuggling out a crucial figure with false papers. Oskar paid some tens of thousands of Springmann’s funds to get a particular woman out of Montelupich Prison in Kraków and equipped with travel documents.

  The heroic old man finished his story by saying he had had reunions with Oskar in the 1960s, and praising him as a whistle-blower.

  Ten

  * * *

  Even in 1981, the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was considered mildly dangerous, transporting people through former battlefields where the wreckage of tanks and trucks still lay beside the road. This had been the route Oskar had taken every year for a decade to meet his Jerusalem survivors, and it was also the track his corpse took to its burial place on Mount Zion in 1974. I was very pleased to be taking that road myself. Judy would be coming to Jerusalem in a day or so. Our teenage daughters were to be minded by my mother, loving but percipient, and by their overindulgent grandfather, who had spent time himself in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem during the war as an Australian soldier on leave from Egypt and Libya. My mother would not be susceptible to my daughters’ excuses about avoiding school or study. Not to study, said my mother, was the same as stealing from your parents. I was delighted the girls would be exposed to such a vigorous message.

  We were booked into the excellent King David Hotel, on the western side of Jerusalem. I had first heard of the King David from my father—as an NCO, he had needed to borrow an Australian officer’s uniform to get in there for a drink. Then, in 1946, during the British Mandate’s rule in Palestine, at which time it housed many British officers, the Jewish underground had famously bombed it, killing ninety guests. I remember my father coming home from work with his Daily Mirror, and saying. “They’ve blown up the King David!”

  Poldek had demanded rooms which looked directly out upon the walls of the ancient city. I could see the eighth-century Al-Aqsa Mosque, the glittering Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall where Jews prayed to lament the final destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Roman emperor Titus.

  Moshe Bejski, a distinguished moderate of the Israeli Supreme Court, a man who would write on issues of forgetting and forgiveness, who believed the survival of the Jewish state could not justify torture, and bemoaned later backsliding over justifiable compensation to former prisoners by the Swiss banks, had also been an eighteen-year-old prisoner in Oskar’s Brinnlitz camp. His brother, who had been killed in the early Arab-Israeli conflict, had been in Oskar’s Brinnlitz camp too. In the factory-camp, which produced no shells but was run almost entirely by the black-market op
erations of the Herr Direktor, Oskar would come to the young Bejski with German documents bearing official German stamps, and ask him if he could produce such a stamp. Oskar needed forged documents in order to move the merchandise he had acquired—liquor, cigarettes, fabric, food luxuries—up to Poland where they could be sold at a high price on the black market.

  Bejski, a scholar, a man of serious intent and more than a little worried about the projected book, now warned me against accepting all of Poldek’s exuberant tales unless they were corroborated by other prisoners. At the same time, he told his own fantastic but accurate stories. For example, he laughed and shook his head as he told the story of how he had been asked to make forged stamps for the documents which enabled Schindler to loot a bomb-damaged factory, Egyptsie Cigaretten, in Brno to the south of the Brinnlitz camp, and then ship the products by truck into Kraków. Bejski himself drove one of the trucks, and confessed that even he was astonished by the style with which Oskar sailed through the task of looting and then transporting the plunder for sale.

  In his serene garden in Jerusalem, Bejski took me through all the documentation he had, which included many testimonies and a German magazine article on Oskar’s motorbike racing career. By now I was acquiring a working knowledge of German and, with the help of dictionaries and grammar books, was able to translate this article into English for my own use, and the results are recorded (accurately, I hope and believe) in the pages on Oskar’s motorbike craze which would appear in the book.

  One of the more substantive documents Bejski had was a long copy—twenty to thirty foolscap pages, typed single-spaced—of a report Oskar wrote for the Joint Distribution Committee in 1957. In it, he accounted for the monies provided by Sedlacek from Jewish Relief and Rescue, and went on to what he had spent in his Kraków camp on extra food and SS bribes, then on maintaining his second camp, in Brinnlitz, and on the rescue of the Goleszów quarrymen who turned up half-dead on his doorstep.

  Even Oskar’s first Emalia camp at 4 Lipowa Street, Kraków, generously accommodated Jewish workers not only from Emalia, but from the box factory next door, the radiator plant and the garrison office. Since the required SS and Ukrainian guards came from Plaszów and were changed every two days, Emalia was not least a paradise because no guard had time to develop a grudge against any particular prisoner. Emalia also offered dignifying little mercies not permitted elsewhere. My Sydney friend Leosia Korn remembered that prisoners were allowed to heat up water on the surface of machinery, a luxury considered illegal in the SS-run workshops inside Plaszów. But mercy was also more direct. According to Dr. Biberstein, who worked in Emalia as a factory hand, the daily diet was roughly two thousand calories, as against half that in Plaszów.

  Among other things in this document Bejski gave me, Schindler listed the amount paid to buy land from the parish priest of Brinnlitz for the burial of the dead among prisoners shipped from Goleszów. Apart from the standard payment owing to the SS—seven and a half reichsmarks each day per skilled worker and six RM per laborer—he claimed to have spent 1,800,000 zloty (U.S.$360,000) on food for the Emalia or DEF camp. None of his former prisoners disputed this estimate. He had also been forced to pay for the camp facilities at Brinnlitz and, before that, at Lipowa Street: the wire, the guards’ huts, the installation of a delousing boiler in Brinnlitz, the daily food. Brinnlitz cost him U.S.$18,000 a week.

  Reading this document, one is still amazed that he was able to provide all this on such a scale that no one died of hunger or brutality. At the IG Farben Auschwitz-Monowitz plant alone, 25,000 prisoners—out of a workforce level maintained at 35,000—would die at their labor. Other reputable businessmen in some of Germany’s biggest businesses, including the great armament maker Krupp, and subsidiaries such as German Armament Works (DAW), also lost thousands of their workers through SS executions for supposed sabotage, and through beatings, starvation, overwork and disease. These were mainly young people originally in sustainable health at the time they were given the tattoo. By whatever means, Oskar reversed the rules and was able to keep most of the SS, except for inspectors, off the factory floor. Twenty-five years after publishing the book I finally wrote, I still respect his achievement, and the fact that it consisted not merely in abstaining from evil but in the positive and expensive exercise of generosity.

  Josef Bau, a young draftsman and artist, had also had a hand in the forging of documents and stamps. He was one of the Schindlerjuden’s stars, like Ryszard Horowitz, in that he acquired an international reputation as an artist, especially for his terror-filled pen and ink drawings of the ghetto and Plaszów. His work seemed to say, “Look, here I am an artist, and the horror others brought to bear on me has kept me rooted there, under Amon Goeth’s sniper rifle sights, in Plaszów, forever.” His paintings are stark. He had never been able to escape into the fantastical cyber-universe where Ryszard worked against those laws of time and gravity which had kept him a child prisoner in Auschwitz.

  In an improvised Jewish ceremonial in the women’s huts, Bau had married a delicate girl named Rebecca. I was able to interview the Baus at their house in Jerusalem, and they seemed still to carry a camp pallor, and to be fragile, so that even Poldek spoke in a soft rumble in their presence, before the ornate, Eastern European–style tea party Rebecca Bau had set. One could see in Rebecca the beauty which had attracted Josef, and here they were, two edgy children of Plaszów, still consoling each other for the things they had seen. Bau had been a draftsman in Goeth’s office and had needed to move about the camp, beholding as he walked, head down, many capricious savageries.

  Though a visit to Oskar’s grave was on our agenda, it was the sort of thing that got put off for interviews. Poldek and I at last went there the day before my wife’s arrival, and it was a place I visited with her afterward. The Franciscan Church of the Dormition on Mount Zion is said to be near the site of the Last Supper, marking the place where the Apostles fell asleep when asked to keep a vigil with Christ. It was thus beautifully located, looking south over the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ asked that he not be forced to drink his chalice of impending pain; then over the Valley of Gehenna, the garbage dump of ancient times and a synonym in the Bible for a burning hell; and finally over the Jordan, the far-off Dead Sea, and the austere, exquisite, naked mountains of Transjordan. Poldek and I reached the gates of the cemetery by the Franciscan church just after its closing time, but we called out to a Christian Arab watchman inside who approached the locked gate tentatively. Poldek indicated we would need the gates opened. Obviously a service fee would be required.

  “I’ll give him shekels,” I whispered to Poldek, for I had a roll of notes in my pocket—courtesy, of course, of Poldek’s Polish dealings.

  “Shekels, shmekels!” growled Poldek. “He’ll want dollars.”

  So once again I was wrong-footed on currency issues. Nonetheless, we entered the hillside cemetery and found, down the slope and to the east, Schindler’s simple grave to which the Franciscans and the Schindlerjuden had led the corpse. The plain slab, apart from its bare Catholic iconography, mentioned little more than Oskar’s birth and death dates. For a member of the Nazi Party, however, Schindler had managed to find himself a magnificent grave in Israeli ground crammed with symbols.

  Much later, Spielberg would be similarly impressed with the place and use it in the film.

  Then Judy was with us. As always when freed from household arm-wrestles over tidy rooms, etc., she became an organizer of our research effort on a scale even Poldek admired. He made kissing noises in her direction. “Mwah! Mwah! Darling, you are such a cutie and you know how things work.”

  “Better than me?” I asked.

  “You’re an innocent, but that’s good sometimes!” He didn’t specify how.

  Judy is a good-humored, forthright woman who had come from the same background as myself—even down to the fact that one of her great-grandparents had been a political prisoner transported to Australia in the nineteenth century, as had one of my gre
at-uncles from Newmarket in North Cork. She had already had an experience of Poldek’s management and charm. Having been to Beverly Hills and made the mistake of calling it Los Angeles, she had been conducted by Poldek to one of the city limits where a sign announced its welcome to the city of Beverly Hills. Poldek gave her his standard lecture. “Beverly Hills is its own city with its own police and sanitation and fire brigade. Welcome to California, Beverly Hills!”

  She had attended an event at one of the larger LA synagogues, at which Poldek insisted, against her own wishes, that she be given a place of honor. To each successive VIP marshal, he made a speech about the forthcoming book and her eminence as my wife! Thus she found herself sitting between the peace activist Tom Hayden and Governor Jerry Brown of California. She knew from that experience that Poldek could organize anything, whether it was necessary to do so or not.

  Each morning, Judy and I caught the bus to the Yad Vashem, the monument itself and its library of archives. The buses seemed to be full of students—and soldiers, male and female, with semiautomatics. We would get off near the Avenue of the Righteous where in 1963 a tree had been planted in honor of Oskar and Emilie. Camera footage shot at Oskar’s requiem mass in the Church of the Dormition was available at Yad Vashem, but much more than that.