Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  Spielberg told me about the sundry former prisoners he had had on set, and whom he would soon be seeing in Jerusalem for the shooting of the scene in which various survivors place a stone on Schindler’s grave. He had typically questioned them at length. When pressed to comment on the footage, they told him that everyone among the actors playing prisoners looked too well-dressed and too well-fed, except that they knew that if he reproduced the reality of their camp life, the viewer would be appalled and alienated. The thing he couldn’t reproduce anyhow, they said, was the stench of the camp, of their own starved bodies, of the latrines too, and of the bodies moldering close to the surface of the soil on Chujowa Górka, Prick Hill.

  That afternoon, in a small building near the Liban chalk quarry, the scene was shot in which Schindler goes to the Jewish family who were his partners but who had, in his opinion, taken too much merchandise. Only Kaminski and his crew and the actors could fit into the room. The rest of us, Spielberg included, watched the scene on monitors in the open. It was one which richly illustrated the ambiguity of Oskar’s character early in the war; but in the end, purely for the needs of brevity, it would not make the film’s final cut.

  Next we went to the Liban chalk quarry above which had been built Starski’s version of Amon Goeth’s villa. One descended by stairwells into the chalk pit, which had been transformed into the Plaszów camp. During the war, this quarry had been a penal camp, and still felt like it. All the unused industrial iron hoppers and other equipment kept station, along with Amon, on that merciless shelf above the camp. It was, in its own right, a wonderful set.

  I realized that I had used too much film taking snapshots and would run out, but the location photographer, David James, an Englishman who had taken stills on many film sets, gave my daughter and me one of his rolls of black and white so that we could take photographs on the same terms as Janusz Kaminski was filming. Indeed, most of the filming my daughter Jane and I saw occurred here, at this all too credible version of Plaszów. We saw the scene of a conference between Amon Goeth and Itzhak Stern, and a brutal encounter between Lisiek, the servant boy and groom, and Goeth over Lisiek’s supposed mistreatment of a saddle. We would see Lisiek shot, as had happened in the real Plaszów, by the sniper rifle of Amon Goeth, firing from his balcony, bare-chested, a cigarette in his mouth. The scene was just like a photo the Austrian factory manager Raimund Titsch had taken of Goeth during the war, a photo bought from Titsch by Poldek in 1963. The mother of young Wojciech Klata, the actor playing Lisiek, was very upset about a splinter of gravel which went into the boy’s eye from an explosion set off among the dirt on the floor of the pit, but it would happily prove to be an insignificant injury.

  The assistant cameraman’s mother from Boston turned up and glowed at her son’s success, so proud that he was shooting this film.

  There was a luxury coach that served as a sort of club bus, to which the producers, the executive producer, the director, Bonnie Curtis and others could have access, and where they could rest free from harassment. A little jet-lagged, I had recourse to the club bus during the afternoon, and fell into conversation with Jerry Molen, a genial man who looked like a wise uncle in a Western. Molen, this gentle but firm and experienced man, was Steven’s gatekeeper. He did not lie, nor did he mind the task. In his view, it was important that Steven concentrate on the job.

  Eighteen

  * * *

  Among the actors my daughter Jane and I met was the greatly talented Caroline Goodall, whose role was that of Emilie Schindler. Caroline and her husband were also remarkably fine company. We took to going to a restaurant in Slawkowska Street, just off the town center and obviously the former town-house of a noble family. The restaurant combined excellent food with rough Bulgarian wine. Ben Kingsley and his English girlfriend often joined Jane and myself, and Caroline and her husband. Neither Kingsley nor Goodall put on thespian airs, and Kingsley loved conversation and ideas. On one of our visits to the old palais which housed the restaurant, students from the Kraków Conservatorium came in and performed the music of the now vanished ghetto of Kazimierz.

  I tried to watch the rushes each night before setting off to the town square. Ralph Fiennes, accompanying us one night, told us that during a forthcoming long weekend he had Steven’s permission to fly to New York, his first visit there, and audition for the role of the young Charles Van Doren in Quiz Show, a film about the quiz scandals which ruined the Van Doren name in the late 1950s.

  Indeed, this was the only long weekend break of the shoot, and actors and technicians were making plans for it. On the location at the Liban quarry, the Croatian caterer told me that he was going to use the weekend to go home to Zagreb. It astonished me once again that Europe was so intimately small. If I journeyed westward from Sydney for the same time as he was going to be driving overnight from Kraków, I would still not be out of the state of New South Wales. On the Friday before the weekend, I mentioned to Spielberg what a shock it was for me to find that it was worthwhile driving from Kraków to Zagreb for a long weekend, as the caterer intended to do.

  The Balkans were in the news then; another instance of Europe’s capacity for great hate in little space. Spielberg said that this was a good time to be making the film—it was the first time since World War II that the term “ethnic cleansing” was being unapologetically used, by, among other people, Slobodan Miloševi, then president of Serbia. Authors and filmmakers sometimes like to add these genuine, more elevated hopes to what they do. In reality, it is proven over and over that, although we can identify with historic injustice, under present racial pressures it is the vomit most of us can’t wait to get back to, and that’s the human tragedy.

  That weekend my daughter Jane and I decided we would go to Auschwitz, which she had never seen. Jerzy was willing to drive us there in the car the producers had kindly provided. My daughter in particular had made friends with Geno Lechner, the young, angular German who played the role of Amon’s mistress, Majola. (There was within the villa a bedroom set up where, in one scene, we had seen her and Amon lie together languidly and from which Amon emerged, in his underwear, to bring down summary judgment on some poor creature in the camp.) Geno wanted to come to Auschwitz too. In bright spring daylight Jerzy drove us out through farmland and forests to the town of Katowice, and then through the somewhat smaller but equally normal-looking town of Owicim which had given its German transliteration, Auschwitz, to the notorious camp. I had been this way before, but for Geno and Jane it was a new road. They took in the landscape with particular interest and, on such a pleasing day, the chatter with Jerzy was jokey and lightly teasing. Then, in the midst of grass and woods and wildflowers, we encountered the grim gate and walls of Auschwitz 1, which declared that work would make its inmates free.

  I found it all the harder a place to enter in this vivid spring than it had been when I visited it last time with Poldek in a dour late winter. The contrast between the intensity of the season and the deathliness of the place shocked us profoundly. In Auschwitz 1 they used to hang and beat people, confine prisoners in boxes and hutches barely big enough for a human to breathe within, and experiment with human organs. It was one of the compression cells, where the prisoner had barely room to move or air to breathe, which set Geno weeping.

  But she insisted she wanted to see all of it, and so we went on to tour Auschwitz 2, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the full-scale, vast Vernichtungslager. Here, within the deal-thin walls of the prison huts, we felt the suddenly penetrative air, even of the spring. We extended our journey into the gas chambers, an experience I had found most testing last time I was here. After we had put ourselves through it, we strolled out that infamous railway gate, part of the iconography of twentieth-century horror, and got in Jerzy’s car and rolled back pensively between green pastures toward Kraków, trying to make small talk to a stark-eyed Geno.

  The climatic luck didn’t always work for Steven. Since spring was now quite advanced, he needed to get the Kraków fire department to make foam
for a scene requiring snow. The location is meant to be Brinnlitz, the site of Oskar’s second camp. Oskar goes to the local parish church, outside a beautiful Austro-Hungarian Empire church with a reredos and elegant dome, to ask the priest to sell him the ground for the Goleszów cattle-truck people to be buried in as Jews. Jane and I stood by banks of foam, visited the church, lit a candle for my parents—they were consoled by candles lit for them anywhere in strange and remote places. But this scene would not make the final cut. It was one of Oskar’s subtler mercies and in the end was seen as a side issue to the general forward thrust of the man.

  Jane and I had a last dinner with the splendid Ben Kingsley and his girlfriend, then prepared to leave Kraków after two weeks on the set. I was grateful we had not been made to feel marginal to the film, and we had been treated as germane members of the tribe of filmmakers through the habitual courtesy of Spielberg, Bonnie Curtis and Jerry Molen. From London I caught the plane back to California and another seminar, another workshop. But very soon UCI commencement arrived in the leafy, clear-aired Southern California spring, and so we were packing again, a process that was getting to be tedious. Back to Australia after all that excitement, I brought my rather astonishing melange of photographs of Eritrean polling booths, and of film sets in Kazimierz and Plaszów.

  I was still working on my novel set in my grandparents’ Australia, 1900, when my lanky, dreamy grandfather and small dumpling-esque grandmother had settled on the north coast of New South Wales in a river valley. I was also deeply involved in research on Irish convicts, and their world of crimes that the occupying British authority saw merely as crimes against property, but which were, in fact, crimes of politics, however inchoate.

  These stories now occupied my days, as I heard little of the Oskar film, of how it had edited up. Poldek called and told me in an appalled voice that he had heard from Sid Sheinberg that Universal intended to release the film in twenty-nine screens throughout the United States. “I said to him, Sid, I ask you: Twenty-nine screens? He said to me, Holocaust films are hard, so we’re going to get good word of mouth going on this film, that’s why. I said, Word of mouth? For a Steven Spielberg film?” But Sheinberg had told Poldek that Holocaust films had to work that way. It had never been otherwise. They weren’t popular. Poldek answered him, “So The Diary of Anne Frank isn’t popular? So Judgment at Nuremberg is Donald Duck? I told Sid,” continued Poldek, “that this was the great story of humanity man to man, and the world is ready to hear it and see it. But he said, If that’s the way it is, Poldek, the people will find it. A crazy way of doing business!”

  I have to say that having seen something of the quality of the film, this news was a little disappointing. In all the multiplexes from Maine to Louisiana, from Washington State to the East Coast, it would have no place. In all the small residual town cinemas that showed “art house” films, a term generally reserved for British or European or Australian films, or for esoteric American ones or the latest Hungarian or Czech hit—even in these places, it would have a limited and muted voice.

  By the time the Australian winter ended, I had returned to the University of California and found, as soon as I arrived, that Poldek’s concerns about limited release had been largely allayed. The word was out in the film community and among the media that Schindler’s List was a startling film. I did my interview for the current affairs show 20/20’s tribute to Poldek, itself an index of the intense prerelease interest, which extended even to the story of how Poldek and I had met, and how Poldek’s stalwart soul had got things going. “So you’d never heard of this guy Schindler before?” interviewers always asked me. A new edition of Schindler’s Ark/List made an appearance and, happily for the Keneallys, it became a habitual presence on the New York Times Book Review paperback bestseller list in its far-from-cheap trade paperback edition.

  My mother was about to turn eighty, and in November 1993 we dashed back to Sydney for the celebration at my brother Johnny’s place in Gladesville. My mother had been a potent force in both our lives; she had been ambitious for us and always undaunted in the years my father was absent in Africa. By the date of her birthday, I had not yet seen the final cut, the cinema-exhibition version, of the film, but the brilliant trailer, with no commentary, produced awe in viewers, and indeed in me, while also filling me with an obscure fear that I might not be able to handle, accommodate, absorb the scale of it when I saw it.

  We got an amused call the day before my mother’s party from Bonnie Curtis, Spielberg’s aide. “Where are you guys?” she asked. “We’ve been looking for you all over California. We want to fly you to the premiere in Washington on Monday night. The president’s coming.”

  My mother’s party was to be an afternoon-to-early-evening affair, and it was worked out that if Judy and I flew to America on the Sunday evening of the party—our daughter Jane insisted on coming too—we would be in Washington late on the American Sunday. The dateline gave us that bonus. Thus, we would have to leave my mother’s party just before it came to a close—the talkative and boozy nature of our clan ensured that all parties went late into the night—but after the tribal ceremonials and greetings to which she was entitled. The only thing was, we would have to take our luggage with us to the party.

  On this exceptional Sabbath, Universal sent a car to transport us to the party and then the airport, and since my parents also lived on the northern beaches of Sydney, we could collect them on the way through. So my mother arrived at her party in an unaccustomed stretch limo, an improbable form of delivery for a girl from the bush—as she still saw herself. There was a mass of relatives in Johnny’s backyard and in the rooms that faced it on that overcast afternoon. In the late afternoon, after the cake had been cut and presents given, the relatives all waved us off in the exorbitance of the hired car.

  I thought that all this, the two first-class air tickets and the rest, was characteristic of Steven’s generosity of soul. There was no necessity to have Judy and me there in Washington. In my role as a crazy workaholic, I can remember writing up some of my Irish files for the big book on prisoners and their world, even as we flew at the kinder end of the aircraft. But sleep claimed us too. Perhaps among the most discombobulating air journeys in the world is the one from Sydney to the East Coast of the United States. Hours of lost time zones are so scattered in the plane’s wake that morning becomes night in short order, and night morning.

  The dusk arrival from Dulles airport in Washington at the Four Seasons in Georgetown was nonetheless like a homecoming. Liam Neeson was there, Janusz Kaminski was wearing a suit. Jerry Molen, Branko Lustig, the shy and now famous Ralph Fiennes, and Poldek and Misia—they had all arrived earlier in the day. We grabbed a light evening meal in the coffee shop with Misia and Poldek, and Poldek was, justifiably enough, glowing with his success. “So he tells me twenty-nine screens. It was always going to be a thousand times twenty-nine!”

  “You two did it,” said Misia. “Before the actors, before Steven, you two were there.”

  Misia’s compliment was too great a claim for me to bear. I had not seen the film. I did not even know what the time was. I was still both delighted and very afraid.

  As for Poldek, he made an appreciative growl. There were some in his own community who said he’d done it all along for the money, but his rewards had been modest in reality, and had taken him away from his business, which had frequently been in a perilous condition. Whatever admixture of vanity there was in his loyalty to Schindler—and there is in every good act such an admixture—his stubborn resistance to letting the tale die seemed genuinely heroic. He had now done the job which had been perhaps his chief agenda item since he first settled in Beverly Hills nearly forty years before. There was a little more of the banter: “Well, it’s your determination, Poldek.” “Yes, Thomas, but determination on its own is nothing.” Such was the nervous conversational tennis of a wonderful, edgy evening. Misia softly rejoiced in both our credits and said, in her quiet but authoritative way, “It’s a ver
y, very good film, Tom.” It was only much later that I thought, She must know. She was, after all, a woman who had suffered through it in her young life, culminating in the six to eight hundred calories of Auschwitz cuisine, and the intimacy of death. She must know.

  The premiere would be the following night at a theater in Georgetown. No one would wear dinner suits, searchlights would not probe the sky, lasers would not dart, and the normal red-carpet traipse would be eschewed. President Clinton and his remarkable, much admired and much maligned wife would attend, but there would be no formal lineup of stars with an exultant public looking on.

  On the morning of the premiere, a Monday, a special screening had been arranged for Judy, Jane, me and a journalist from Time magazine. We met up in the empty foyer, and then sat ourselves in the middle of the empty cinema, two thirds of the way back from the screen in an immense vacancy of seats. The emptiness made me uneasy about the coming viewing, and the fact that the Time man would ask me questions. It was a long time since I had written the book, and thus a long time since I had read it, and in terms of images and brutality I was both familiar but also unfamiliar with the material.

  As the film ran and reached the scenes of the liquidation of the ghetto, I was, in a way, gasping for breath. The people I watched on the screen were in a terrible flux of history, in a mincer, a shredder of dreams and attachments. And at the climax of the night massacre of those who hid during the liquidation, an officer finds an old piano and plays Mozart. The question was always this: Why was this barbarity enacted by the agents of Europe’s high culture? Why were the SS Einsatzgruppen full of philosophy and theology graduates, pastors? At first sight the brutality of the SS seems a denial of Europe’s cultural triumph and of the value of its urbanity. And yet the higher a culture is, the more refined its identity, the easier it becomes to deny any value to other identities. High Europe always played at ethnic contempt because it was High Europe, and so had the strength, the authority, to make the racial rules. We great unwashed of the outer world, on the coasts of new continents, though we might ourselves have behaved atrociously to indigenes, were baffled by the determination with which Europe returned to the frenzies of racial myth. Nice boys and not-so-nice boys took up the theme, put on the uniform, did the dirty work.