Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  Among the testimonies in Polish and English in the extensive Schindler archive were ones I would mention in the book, minority reports more or less, written by the father and son of a Kraków Jewish family, prewar owners of a hardware company, who had entered into a business arrangement with Oskar, putting up capital for Emalia in return for supplies of the product. Both father and son claimed that in 1940 Oskar had beaten them up during a physical dispute over merchandise. Oskar’s own complaint against them was that they arrived at the loading dock of Emalia and bullied the workers into loading unauthorized amounts of enamelware. Their argument was that the quantities had already been agreed upon. Even though the father and son remained under Oskar’s care in Brinnlitz, they never forgot their earlier disagreement. I spoke about these documents with Bejski, and also with Poldek. With varying degrees of emphasis—Poldek with raucous affront on behalf of his friend Schindler, and Bejski in a more measured way—both complained about the family in question, and neither of them thought it unlikely that Oskar had thrown some punches. “But after all,” said Bejski, “Schindler saved their lives!”

  When Schindler decided that he was going to make a second camp in Czechoslovakia after the closure of the Lipowa Street factory, a list of his current workers was assembled by Stern and others and sent off to Plaszów. There, sadly, it fell into the hands of a Jewish clerk named Marcel Goldberg, who is notorious among survivors for having said that it would take jewels to get on the list. My friend Poldek offered a bottle of vodka—presented to him by a guilt-stricken SS NCO, the same one who had begun by beating him—and it helped get himself and Misia on the list. But the truth was that between the list prepared by Schindler and his people, and the one ultimately drawn up over several drafts by Marcel Goldberg, there was a difference; and some of Schindler’s original workers, in their testimonies in Yad Vashem, blamed Oskar when they found themselves sent somewhere crueler—Mauthausen, for example.

  I was fascinated to find these further potential flaws in the man, and knew that the contrary account of father and son needed to be included to round out the picture of Oskar—not that either Bejski or Poldek spent any time trying to dissuade me from doing so.

  Due to the influence of Moshe Bejski and the insistence of Poldek, who kept on announcing to the Yad Vashem archivists that we were about to produce the book, the chief archivist gave us a special dispensation to take documents back to the hotel with us for copying. Scholarly women were flattered on their bone structure by Poldek, and scholarly men were blinded by his power of reminiscence of the towns and villages their grandfathers had come from in Poland. Judy went through the newspaper archives and made notes from them, and spent hours transcribing my tapes in the business center at the hotel. The names she transcribed took on a mythic dimension in our minds, so that when we met a particular Schindler prisoner, his or her record and general tale were known to us, and we felt we were meeting a legendary figure.

  In between spates of work, Judy and I wandered around the old city on our own, knelt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, inside a minute oil lamp–lit chapel within the church which my father had visited on a World War II Australian air force jaunt from Egypt, and were blessed many times by a fervent old Coptic priest.

  A photocopying bill arrived at our door one morning. It was not exorbitant, and Judy and I entered the lift to go down and pay it. Already about was Poldek, whose room was on the floor above.

  After morning compliments, he asked, “You have an invoice there?”

  Judy told him it was a bill for all the photocopying of documents, Bejski’s and Yad Vashem’s.

  “They sent you an invoice?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yes, and it’s pretty reasonable too,” I told Poldek. Indeed, a few such invoices for earlier copying had arrived at our door, and I had simply paid them.

  “They can’t ask you to pay. What are they thinking? Judy darling, let me see the invoice.”

  I said, “Listen, Poldek, it’s fine. I’m looking after this.”

  Judy had no choice but to show him the invoice.

  “Come with me to the desk,” he ordered us as the lift reached the ground floor.

  We argued, but our reasoning was washed away by the full tide of his outrage. We followed him to the front desk. My wife was better at handling him than I was, but I believe she came along to see the show—Poldek in action. He presented the bill as if it were something that had slipped through a gap in management’s general omniscience. I watched a pale Ashkenazi reception clerk bend over the desk patiently to look at the bill Poldek presented to his gaze and say, “That’s right, Mr. Pfefferberg. You see, we copied…at so many shekels per ten pages…”

  Poldek growled, stood back and adopted the sort of pose rarely seen in those days except on opera stages and old newsreels of vanished potentates. He pointed heavenward. It should have been ridiculous, except for the authority of his rage, the certainty of his vision.

  “One day,” he said, “there will be a plaque over this reception desk, and it will say that here Thomas Keneally and Leopold Pfefferberg researched the story of Oskar Schindler and his Schindlerjuden! And you want to charge us for lousy photostatic copies? Can you imagine what my friend Justice Moshe Bejski of the Israeli Supreme Court would think of that?”

  I stood some yards behind Poldek, and would, in my timorous Gentile way, have been happy to pay the bill and end the dramatics right there. But a duty manager arrived to reason with Poldek, looking as optimistic as an uninformed conscript going into battle against elite troops. He could not match the hypnotic conviction of which Poldek was capable. Poldek could see the coming plaque above the desk. The bill was, to my acute discomfort, forgiven us, and no one in the business office bothered sending us photocopying invoices anymore.

  Toward the end of our stint in Yad Vashem I watched the archival film of Oskar’s German television documentary, filmed in Frankfurt not long before his death. Oskar spoke in a profound rumble in which cognac and cigars had induced an attractive rawness. When asked about his motivation, he spoke of “fellow feeling and compassion” for people who were being treated with “brutality you could not imagine.” Long-faced, balding and overcoated, one could well imagine that face belonging both to hero and criminal, masking a thousand sins and generosities. In other words, his face seemed to me very European, a face that could have fitted splendidly on a land-grave or freebooter in a painting of some important incident during the Thirty Years’ War.

  We had accumulated a mass of material. Poldek planned to go on to Italy and Hong Kong to buy new stock for his warehouse and the Handbag Studio. By now, of course, he was well-known to the hotel staff, a terror to the front desk, a friend to other guests, a generous fellow to the Sephardic maids. When Poldek took his place in one of the so-called charabancs, Mercedes cars which ran passengers down to Tel Aviv, he wept and wished us well. “We are brothers to the grave!” he asserted.

  Yet there was something in Judy and me which yelped with relief when his car drove away through the garden of the King David down to the road. We would not be worked so hard now! We had a holiday of three days before we had to go to Tel Aviv ourselves.

  It was a relief to do more normal things. We took a long bus trip, down past Qumran, and the caves in the cold and arid hills where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. We climbed Masada, scene of a mass suicide of Israeli Zealots, men, women and children who were about to be overrun by the Romans. The Roman engineering works and ramps were visible to us and sad in their mute acknowledgment that the capture of Masada had availed the generals little in the long run. The remaining quarters and the ritual baths atop Masada gave immediacy to the lives of the Jews who once held out there.

  I wondered why ancient fundamentalist sects were often historically revered. There was some justification for the mass suicide on Masada, since the Zealots believed that they would be put to the sword, their wives misused and slaughtered, their children sold into slavery. Their actions had thus become
part of the Israeli myth, even though many urbane Israelis nonetheless despised modern fundamentalism, and all the more so for its power in modern Israeli politics.

  We bathed in the Dead Sea, as my father had. Hiring a car—an exercise of considerable expense in Israel to this day—we went along the coast to the remarkable Roman port of Caesarea and to the crusaders’ port of Acre, on up to the Golan Heights, past many a kibbutz, and then down to Galilee.

  Briefly back in Tel Aviv, I saw the Dresners for the last time, and took Judy for a meal in what we thought of as Oskar’s Romanian restaurant. Then, with our mass of tapes and transcripts and photocopies, we set off to Greece and Australia. The Zakopanean ice pick survived both Greek and Australian customs, and holding it in my hand I made, fairly enough, an object of amusement for my teenage daughters; the bewildered father returned with strange implements from overly portentous adventures.

  Eleven

  * * *

  Our house at the beach, and my downstairs office, proved a good place to write a book on the Holocaust. Looking down the slope I could see each day, from the pool table on which I spread all the documents, surfboard riders born long after the cataclysm, children to whom Hitler was a mere rumor. I had so much material to stock my awesome tale, and the great thing about the mass of research documents was that they convinced me the writing of the book would be easy. There was also that certain obsession from which writers suffer—that somehow the world needs to hear this story. The writer is the ancient mariner who distracts the guests at the wedding feast, and is hell-bent on wrenching their imaginations in a direction they had not necessarily intended to take them.

  Like many writers, I thought that I could tell this story swiftly, without being influenced by it at a profound, partially disabling level. That is ever the writer’s dream—to be a raider, straight in, straight out, leaving none of one’s soul behind as hostage. So I did not expect a chaos of dreams, I did not expect to be myself a target for Amon Goeth’s querulous, malign spirit.

  Even so, Schindler would be the context for everything that happened, his career the lens through which everything was seen. I had decided that long ago, as a trick to give the book its unity. But it was much easier to propose up-front these tricks of narration than it was to fulfill them in reality. Poldek did what he could. He kept on calling and promising me that when the book was published I would win “the Novell Prize—I’ve already booked my seat to Oslo!”

  “It’s Stockholm, Poldek.”

  “Well, Stockholm. You mark my words.”

  There were two weeks of utter despair in the middle of the writing, when I thought that I had lost my grasp of the material, and felt that the resources, imaginative and financial, I had put into the project had certainly been wasted. This is a common midbook experience for writers, but I took it all the more seriously in this case because of what I thought of as the gravity of the material, the gravity of the story. I knew that if I lost the capacity to tell this tale, I might be so damaged by defeat that it would be the end of me as a writer. With the added horror of having to find some $40,000, already expended, to compensate Simon & Schuster.

  I found, too, that even in Australia people had set attitudes to the Holocaust. The old complaint came up about the Jews having been too passive. I remember ungraciously throwing my credit card at a friend who took the line of “They sold each other out,” and raging out of a restaurant. Not only was this a parody of the truth, but, as in so many cases of historic oppression, the Nazi system was designed to exploit collaboration. As if there hadn’t been French who sold out, and Ukrainians, and millions of others. My friend’s opinion, based merely on meeting Jewish clients in the rag trade, implied that I didn’t know any of this and needed enlightenment. Goldberg had sold out some on the list, the Judenräte sold out individuals. Were the Jews to be different from every other human subjugated race and behave with an inhuman perfection?

  Anyhow, doubting the project, I had recourse to whiskey. There was a heater in my office and, blurred and depressed on a day of gales, I dropped beside it and slept. My folders of transcripts and documents lay heaped on the pool table. I had divided them into chronological dossiers. One dossier was labeled Oskar—Childhood, another Oskar—Young Manhood, then Adult Oskar to 1939. The others were named for portions of years and major events, including Oskar—Escape to the West, Oskar to 1957, Oskar to 1974. All this lush remembrance and these supporting documents were wasted on me that day. After a time, my wife entered the office to see how I was, saw me at what could politely be called “rest,” and—though I didn’t know my eyes were still partly open—was gratified to see that the anguish of the past couple of days had now given way to exhaustion.

  I have since felt the need to apologize to my wife and daughters for such episodes. They rebuff the apologies with some amusement. I accuse them of being in denial; it was nasty and they were entitled to say so. Guilt persists over the times I have imposed my anguish about the progress of a book upon the household.

  Before my crash, I had reached the stage when Oskar, having set up his factory in Lipowa Street, has acquired Jewish workers. One morning, after heavy sleep, it was all at once possible to begin again. It was possible to narrate in a manner which placed the reader within the chaotic and fearful experience of prisoners. The documents, the memories of individuals, became vivid to me again. Why does the capacity to write seem to suddenly vanish so utterly from a writer, and then so thoroughly return? It’s as if the conscious brain had to be disabled to allow all the sorting, classifying, arranging and selection that derives from the unconscious. In any case, the dangerous interlude was over.

  One factor that prevented my total disappearance into the book was that my days were enlivened and redeemed by demands from my daughters—for help with interpretation of a poem set for homework, a request that they be driven here or there in Sydney, or driven to school when through artful delay it became too late for them to catch the bus. They had the normal teenage desire not to be associated with their unfashionable parents, and frequently asked not to be taken to the front of the school. But as intense as their sibling fights could be, it was Judy’s and my good fortune that they had not gone through any thoroughgoing alienation from their parents which characterized many adolescents we knew, and which created chronic conflict in some homes. There were few slammed doors and few attempts to destroy the souls of parents in our house by the Pacific, and Judy and I always considered that the purest good luck. Sometimes it must have seemed as though I was the only child to be dealt with. And to start the day, however unwillingly, with an outing became a useful form of mental refreshment.

  Another diversion was that my younger daughter and I followed the local rugby league team, Manly-Warringah, in those days perhaps the most famous of all Australian teams and the most resented. Every game day at Brookvale Oval, we took our position behind the goalposts, she fully clothed in team colors and waving a massive maroon and white flag. At such moments I was far removed from the Holocaust, and the pernicious referee was always a vastly more minor villain than Amon Goeth. Thus an Australian winter passed and the team kept winning, to be defeated by the Parramatta Eels (Parramatta, or Burramatta, meaning “the Place of the Eels” in the Aboriginal tongue of the Sydney basin). The Eels, sadly, had the best backline in the history of the game.

  And amid all the concern about team injuries and the perfidy of referees and the suddenness with which other teams could spring ambushes, the written tale took on substance. I had always been the sort of writer who writes an entire draft of a book, from start to finish, then returns to it and rewrites it entirely again, and then again. At that stage I had not acquired a computer, so that I wrote everything in longhand, then dictated it, with punctuation marks included, onto tape. The tapes were typed up by a woman named Barbara who ran an office service in Avalon, a beachside suburb near ours. By the warm December of 1981 she was already typing parts of the earliest, rough version.

  When the whole t
hing was done, and I had the complete typescript from her, I began rewriting in longhand, totally reworking or rejecting the passages which did not pass muster but retaining the sections of the typescript which were still usable, making corrections on them, and then gluing the new handwritten revised sections to the surviving fragments of the typescript. I ended up with huge screeds, rather like Roman scrolls, stiffened, typescript-to-longhand, by glue. This was then typed again by Barbara, given a final edit and occasional rewrite, and served as a first draft. It went off to the publishers in Britain and America, maybe a little under a year after Poldek and I had set out on our research journey.

  Complicated publishing events had in the meantime occurred in America. Nan Talese, the editor who had put up the advance for Schindler and had been enthusiastic about the book, had left Simon & Schuster to take a higher post elsewhere. It is always disappointing for a writer when the commissioning editor departs, since it can be touch-and-go whether the new editor will be imbued with a similar affection for the project. The editor who inherited me was Patricia Solomon. She did everything we could have asked, but could not influence the scale of the print run—the numbers of copies printed, that is. That was my impression, in any case; publishing is a business in which editors often keep the truth of such issues from the writer for the sake of politeness, a desire to avoid conflict, or a kind wish not to bruise the author’s ego.

  There is a strange stillness in a writer’s household after a book has been posted off. The atmosphere is a little like that of a school the day after breakup. The research is idly packed into boxes, and the reference books put in their own section of the shelves, some of them never to be consulted again.