Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  In the corner of a huge office, and beneath great moldings and decorative paintings, we were greeted by Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, a dark-haired, good-looking man in early middle-age. He led us to a low table there and we all sat down around it. He talked to us about the way the war had been followed by the mythology that the Holocaust was all a German work, and how the issue of Austrian participation was suppressed, since to utter it would be to divide citizens. He had written a graduate thesis on this, to the chagrin of some of his academic advisers.

  We were all encouraged to talk, and when it was my turn I spoke of the patterns of replies to the queries I had made of Schindlerjuden. I remarked it was also a matter of amazement that Schindler’s behavior had not been more influenced by the state’s conditioning of German opinion. The license to hate was writ very broadly, and one would normally have expected someone like Oskar, no philosopher, to have adopted it un-critically. Better qualified, more intellectual men than himself had done so. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded one of the Einsatzgruppen, had studied jurisprudence and economics at Leipzig, Göttingen and Padua. Ernst Biberstein, another officer, was a Protestant pastor. Another a physician, another an opera singer. I felt I was struggling in my remarks—the recent timetable hadn’t been good for thinking—and I believed that I had let Spielberg down a bit by having little to say that was original. Everything I said here was either in the book or in articles I had written.

  When we had all spoken, the genial chancellor told his story of the rise of neo-Nazism in Austria, assured us of our safety, and then asked, “Would you like to see the room where the Congress of Vienna occurred?” And by the shortest of corridors, we now entered a glittering hall of mirrors and brocaded and embellished surfaces. Here, after the Napoleonic Wars, a conservative peace had been made which had sustained the Austro-Hungarian Empire for another hundred years and produced the so-called Pax Britannica, the British Peace, in which there were no European wars, though many others were fought in the acquisition and retention of colonies.

  It was late afternoon by now, and we enjoyed another car chase to the American embassy in Boltzmanngasse. The splendor of this eighteenth-century house seemed like a more warmly decorated continuation of the chancellory. We met Swanee Grace Hunt, the then U.S. ambassador and a member of the fabled Texas Hunt family, who at one stage—so I seem to remember—had cornered the world silver market and so, unlike the Keneallys, had never been short of a dollar. Spielberg approached me once we were all in the room where cocktails were served. He said, “Will you do me a favor? You were good at the chancellory. Will you make the speech for me?” The idea scared me less than had the impromptu speech at the chancellory. Once I got up I simply told our story, the story of all the film’s progenitors, including Poldek. Thanks to generations of talkative Keneallys, the speech was made, and I could have a scotch.

  I fell into conversation with Mrs. Bankier and her daughter. Bankier himself, now deceased, was the man who had run Rekord, as it was called before it became Schindler’s Emalia and DEF. Abraham Bankier was either a part-owner or related to the owners, and was a hero as universally beloved as Stern or Pemper. But in the film these three characters had been coalesced into Stern, and a wistfulness over that—I would not say a resentment—possessed Mrs. Bankier as she and her daughter spoke of ways to make some appropriate gesture to her husband’s memory. I told her to quote anything from the book that she wished to. “I realize that this is what movies do,” said the daughter.

  The cinema, when we got there for the premiere, was in chaos, and Judy, Jane and I were manhandled to our seats by a muscular security woman yelling, “Der Buchautor!” Spielberg spoke briefly onstage, then Wiesenthal, and as the film began we departed from the back row of the cinema—we were by now familiar with the film—along an obscure corridor again, and off for a splendid dinner in a traditional Austrian restaurant. One of the members of the party was Béatrice Macola, who had played Schindler’s girlfriend Ingrid in the film. Spielberg, no wine drinker, asked Jane, Béatrice and myself for help choosing the wine; a boy from barbarous Sydney helping a boy from Cleveland with the high vintages of Europe.

  For us, that dinner was one of farewell. The Spielberg team were pulling out for Frankfurt the next morning. Spielberg embraced Jane as we came to the service lift in the basement of the Sacher, and to my amazement Judy, too, asked to be hugged—it was rarely she asked such a gesture of film people. I told Spielberg to feel honored.

  When our breakfast arrived the next morning, we found the floor very quiet, in an unearthly silence now that the solemn circus had departed. We still possessed our now irrelevant badges, sans man with semiautomatic, and, since I was to do a book-signing that morning, I still had an excursion to make in a town which was reputedly full of neo-Nazis. We descended to the concierge and asked the way to the bookstore, and thus walked out into a biting morning and urbane streets full of fascinating stores, past the huge Plague memorial, toward the bookshop we were to visit. It was a brilliant movie-set of a Buch handlung, suffused with the amber light from gleaming windows. The restrained and artful spines of European books displayed themselves so gracefully. The proprietor and I spoke of the Australian writer Europeans liked best, Patrick White, the great Nobel Prize–winning novelist.

  A few people arrived, and were shy, but at last there formed a queue which grew apace. But when I began to sign, it was not a case of combative neo-Nazis, but of young Viennese coming forward, university students and young couples who, to my astonishment, wept when I signed. I mentioned the tears to the bookshop proprietor. “They’ve never heard about it in accessible form before,” he said. “Their parents never talked about it.”

  I made the obvious point to him that these young readers were not to blame.

  “It’s the shock of knowing we were in it too. We tended to put it off on the Germans.”

  Having unwittingly generated such reactions in Austrian youth, I was pleased not to have to face the test of Frankfurt.

  In the months to come, my skepticism about whether the film might influence people was allayed, in part at least, particularly by the young who wanted their books signed. I found that Hispanic, ethnic Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans and Californian Japanese related strongly to the book. They had a memory of being stereotyped in childhood, as did the subcontinental Indian community in America, presenting the book for signature at this or that Barnes & Noble, from Thousand Oaks to the Mexican border.

  There is very little of narrative value in the consequent honors that come a writer’s way purely on the basis that a good film has been made of a book the writer has written, but I remember one of them with particular affection. It was a collegial event, the Scripter Awards, in the library of the University of Southern California, attended by Spielberg and the other producers, at which Zaillian and I accepted a prize conjointly. I remember the appearance of Poldek on Larry King. Poldek showed he had learned something about television since our days with Jane Pauley. I remember, too, a pre-Oscars party hosted by Joe Segal, a Century City magnate, and Kaye Kimberly-Clark, his Australian-born wife and legendary beauty. They wanted the centerpiece to be a huge Oskar cake. The cast of Schindler flocked to the party, as did Jane Campion, who had been nominated for the Academy Award for her film The Piano, and Toni Colette of Muriel’s Wedding, and other Australians. The artwork which astonished us all was not the cake, but the pictures on Joe Segal’s walls—the Légers, the Picassos and, as Liam Neeson said, “The fookin’ Cézannes, man! Have you seen the fookin’ Cézannes?” Liam similarly appreciated the deeply gold-plated lavatory seat, washbasin and taps. But what astonished me was to meet one of the Segals’ neighbors, Rhonda Fleming, star in my childhood of The Spiral Staircase, and of Hitchcock’s Spellbound. She was so agelessly beautiful in her early seventies that the question of whether knives had played any part seemed utterly improper. Poldek and I took home the chocolate Oscars we had been allotted, and deposited them in our refrigerators, where even in Australia mine st
ill resides.

  But then, among the most memorable contingent honors of the season, came an invitation to the White House for dinner. Judy drove up from University Hills to the Newport Beach mall to buy me an Armani dinner suit at Neiman Marcus, which the people at the university generally referred to as “Needless Markup.” I would look swish in the White House, or so my wife’s theory went. Judy and Jane flew to Washington and booked earlier in the day into the Willard Hotel, the most resonatingly famous of all Washington hotels, where Thomas Francis Meagher, one of the Australian convicts I was researching, had always stayed. In the meantime I gave my afternoon seminar.

  Rushing back to University Hills, I packed, went to the airport and arrived at last at dusk in that hotel in Washington so closely associated with presidents, generals, writers and other riffraff. I took what I thought was the Armani out of its bag and said to Jane, “What do you think of my flash new suit?” Alas, I am color-blind. Navy blue had always been indistinguishable from black to my eyes, and I had packed not the Armani but a normal navy blue suit. In its long, indeed more than 150-year history, the Willard had had its quotient of similar dunces, and I went to the White House in a swiftly rented suit; the Armani was reserved for more mundane American and Sydney events, such as the formal evenings of the Manly-Warringah Rugby League Club.

  Even so, this was an astonishing night for us. The president, being gunned-for over Arkansas real estate deals, possessed that astonishing, languid composure and the same sharpness of gaze he had had at the premiere. But it seemed both he and his wife had more time. The first lady again discussed with me my novel Woman of the Inner Sea. The president had, above all, a campaigner’s capacity to fix you with his eye and engage you—even among old friends of his such as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward—as if you were somehow the focus of the room. He possessed a capacity, that is, to convince you of the special relationship he had with you. I had seen this in other men before. Bob Hawke, Australian prime minister, had the same talent.

  As the evening progressed I had enough time to remember that another Australian, at least an Australian by convict sentence, General Thomas Francis Meagher, had stood as honor guard here over the body of Lincoln. Yet contemporary scandals intruded on reminiscence. During the dinner, George Stephanopoulos was frequently in the dining room and at the president’s ear. This was the sole sign that President Clinton and his elegant wife had enemies upon this earth.

  Films, as well as being good for fancy invitations, can also produce a storm front of accusations. The story that Emilie Schindler had been shortchanged in the whole process, had been taken for granted and neglected, was still around. It happened that one of the speeches I made was at a fund-raiser in Miami-Dade County, at which Emilie also made an appearance. Before the event, we were all taken to lunch by the organizers. I found myself sitting next to Erika Rosenberg, and asked her if she really believed that Emilie had not been consulted on the book and film, and had not been paid anything. With obvious sincerity, she answered, “Not a penny.”

  I asked her if she was sure about that; did she know a lawyer called Juan Caro? She knew Mr. Caro but still insisted, “Not a penny.”

  “And not a penny from the film?”

  Mrs. Schindler, observing our conversation, moved forward angrily in her chair and told Rosenberg to drop the subject. The next morning, on a plane back to California, I used the phone recessed into the seat to call Spielberg’s office and informed them that Rosenberg and, passively, Emilie were still pursuing the “not a penny” line. I told Steven’s assistant, Chris Kelly, that I knew Rosenberg was wrong, not least because I had recently sent Emilie a check myself. Chris told me that a sum had been paid Mrs. Schindler recently, and when I asked, admitting that it was none of my business, whether it was a settlement in the thousands or tens of thousands, Chris indicated the latter. Next, still in the air, I called Emilie’s old friend and Schindler’s lover Ingrid, and her husband, on Long Island. They were amused by Rosenberg. “Emilie is fine,” they told me.

  I asked, “Should I send another check?”

  “No. Rosenberg doesn’t know everything. Some things are looked after here.”

  It seemed that Mrs. Schindler had a New York bank account which, if not sumptuous, was adequate. If so, it was simple justice to a splendid woman who strenuously maintained, in the face of the world, her rage against her miscreant husband.

  Spielberg was content to ignore Rosenberg, however widely she was published. After all, he would soon be fighting off a murderous stalker of his own. But I always felt affronted by the ease with which the claim was made that Emilie had been unjustly treated. It was claimed, too, perhaps unreliably, that when Emilie died in Germany in 2001, a year of especial resonance in this account, she died impoverished.

  Twenty

  * * *

  Invited by Spielberg, Poldek and Misia, Judy and I attended the Academy Awards together. Poldek received a splendid tribute from Spielberg, and yet there was still an avuncular disapproval in Poldek of the time Steven had taken to “wise up” and make the film. As Spielberg entered the foyer for the Governor’s Ball after the awards, Poldek grabbed one of the two Oscars he’d won for direction and Best Film, an artifact of quite surprisingly heavy mass, and made as if to cuff him on the head. “What did I tell you?” demanded Poldek. “What did I tell you? An Oscar for Oskar.”

  I was most comfortable, of course, with the premieres in Australia—particularly the first, the Sydney premiere, to which Ben Kingsley came. A press conference was held in the Sydney Jewish Museum, a regional museum of the highest quality. I was fascinated that it commemorated the first Passover seder in Australia, in 1788, when a Jewish Cockney girl convict named Esther Abrahams was given a special ration of wine and bread to enable the Jewish convicts to observe the holiday.

  The third member at the press conference was my old friend Leo Rosner, the accordionist who, with his brother Henry, had once been forced to entertain Amon Goeth day after day. That evening there was a cocktail party at the Sydney Hilton to which Leo brought his accordion. He had never heard John Williams’s splendid film score before, but instantly picked up the dominant theme and played it with the orchestra there. Here was a Jew in a remote place—I don’t think Hitler thought much of Sydney or Australia in his career—and the Jew was playing an accordion in the Sydney night, affirming his survival.

  My father was by now elderly, and found it hard to walk from the Hilton to the cinema in Pitt Street. But to the very end of his life he remained too proud to use a wheelchair and so, painfully, we made our way across Pitt Street to the theater, aware of his pain as he asked, “How bloody far is it now?” Thus my father approached Steven Spielberg’s most remarkable rendition of the Nazi regime, against which the old man had certainly “done his bit.” I sat next to him in the cinema and was aware that though his eyesight was impaired and his bladder touchy, he was engrossed for three and a quarter hours.

  At the Melbourne premiere, while speaking before the film, Ben Kingsley, that wonderful traveling companion, took on the Melbourne Club, the focus of the Melbourne establishment, which still had not admitted a single Jew as a member. And in that city on the next somewhat hungover day, we said good-bye to each other.

  The last time I saw Poldek was in the spring of 2000. It was in his living room where Misia had always staged our high afternoon teas, with pastries and cakes and herbata. Poldek was suddenly having trouble walking, and that fact shocked me. He had always been such an emphatic walker, and not to have the power of locomotion stripped him of some of his purpose. “The computer is fine,” he told me, tapping his head. “But the machine—it needs replacing.”

  I had not expected Poldek to decline so young—he was eighty-seven, but that was young for him. I wondered whether having been a prisoner had any impact upon his health. Certainly he still received a payment from the German government as compensation for the back damage the Ober-scharführer who regularly beat him up in Plaszów had imposed on him.
A therapist says of Holocaust survivors that as they get older and their long-term memory increases, their helplessness in old age begins to reflect their former helplessness in the camps. Poldek still seemed a very positive-minded human being, but whether the stress, the fear, the hunger of the past, had affected that boiler of a heart of his is a question that, when he was alive and vivid, many of his friends forgot to ask.

  To what extent was he, too, haunted? Did he, in the delirium of his passing, think even for a moment that he was subject to Amon Goeth, and grist for the cruel laws which had once sought to take away his oxygen? Common sense would have to say that not even Poldek could have escaped some permanent damage, some abiding erosion. So that perhaps his greatest success, even greater than turning Schindler into a modern legend, was to be able to live a normal life in normal streets, such as South Elm Drive in “California, Beverly Hills.”

  That year in which Poldek was declining, my ninety-two-year-old father’s health was deteriorating too, in a slow collapse of the various functions of the body. But again it was impossible to believe that this amusingly profane, bush-eloquent patriarch could stop breathing.

  My father, as was natural to him, gave death a hard run. For weeks he fought. A young priest came to give him communion, and they said the Our Father together. A sad thing to see a larrikin, a boy from the bush, humbly uttering those ancient sentiments to the Deity! No sooner was “Amen” out of his mouth than he added, “Well, Father, I think I’m bloody rooted.” This was his Australian Nunc Dimittis, his version of “Now let Thy servant depart in peace…”