The Other Schindlers

by Agnes Grunwald-Spier

  She refers to Oskar’s self-knowledge of his impulsiveness, again in response to Bejski, who asked: ‘Why did you do what you did, why did you risk your life for us?’ Schindler replied:

  If you would cross the street, and there was a dog in danger of being run over by a car, wouldn’t you try to help?’ This reply is revealing. Schindler apparently thought of his rescue actions as direct and human responses to the sight of suffering; he thought them so normal that it did not occur to him that they needed an explanation; hence the challenging question at the end: ‘wouldn’t you try to help?’ One almost senses a certain impatience at being asked something so obvious. There is also an endearing innocence in this reply, as if, even after the Holocaust, he still did not realize that most people do not try to help another creature in danger, if by doing so they endanger themselves.16

  This view is corroborated to some extent by a woman called Ingrid, who was saved by Schindler. She claimed: ‘he could not take the suffering. He did not expect it would come to what it did.’ Her husband added:

  Look, he was a Nazi, but he was working for the Abwehr [military intelligence] and they despised the SS. But you know, he made a lot of money; he could have taken it all. Every cent he made, he put in to save these people. He had nothing at the end.17

  Some years later, Judge Bejski added: ‘Schindler was different for two reasons. His exploits were on a very large scale, and he carried them on for a very long time.’18 In that long time he was supported by his wife Emilie, who was shrewder about the Nazis than Oskar. She later wrote that she tried to persuade him that the Nazis were planning ‘to impose National Socialism by force of arms and ruthless domination … But my protests to Oskar, repeated over and over again, were of no use. By the time he realized what was happening, the war had already claimed most of its victims.’19

  Schindler had married Emilie in 1928 when they were both very young – he was 20 and she was 21. She was educated in a convent where her best friend was Jewish. The marriage seems to have been unhappy from the start – perhaps matters were not helped by the fact that they lived with Oskar’s drunken father and invalid mother.20 There were no children; however, she was extremely supportive to Schindler in his work to help Jews, even though he was not particularly loyal to her:

  I saw these unfortunate Jewish people reduced to slavery, treated like animals deprived of everything – including the use of underwear, regardless of the season, under their uniforms. Seeing them that way, with all their possessions and even their families taken away from them, and without the right to a dignified death, I could not but feel sorrow for their terrible fate.21

  The incident of the Golleschau/Goleszów Jews demonstrates not only the barbarity of the Nazis but also Emilie and Oskar’s courage and humanity in dealing with such a horror.

  Emilie wrote her memoir to counteract the way her husband ‘was bathed in all the light that history accorded him and I feel that is not entirely fair. I am doing this not for him but for the sake of truth.’22 She gives an insight into their motivation:

  Steven Spielberg’s film, Thomas Keneally’s book and all the rivers of ink spilled fifty years after the facts depict my husband as a hero for this century. This is not true. He was not a hero, and neither was I. We only did what we had to. In times of war our souls wander aimlessly adrift. I was one of those fleeting shadows affected by atrocity, by all its misery and vehemence, suspicion and contradiction, which have left an indelible mark in my memory.23

  Her book concluded with a simple statement:

  The moral of my story is simple: a fellow human being always has the right to life. Like so many others during the war, I think I have experienced in my own flesh that ‘Love one another’ is not an empty phrase but a maxim worth living by, even in the worst of circumstances. The descendants of those on Schindler’s list have shown this to be true; they are living, having children, remembering.24

  In 2001 Emilie undertook a lawsuit to obtain the original copy of Schindler’s list.25 She died that same year.

  Steinhouse’s article rested in a trunk for forty years, because in the immediate post-war period no one wanted to publish it. When Schindler’s List was released in December 1993, he dug it out and it was snapped up. He brought it up to date with Schindler’s departure for Argentina in the summer of 1949 funded by an American Jewish charity (JDC). Schindler was treated generously, with enough money (around $15,000) to start a fur business, but it failed and then he tried being a farmer but that was unsuccessful too. ‘He was optimistic and hopeful – as he always was.’ According to his wife, ‘in Argentina he was just lying in bed’, though he got up in the afternoons to see his girlfriend. He owed 500,000 pesos when he left Emilie in Argentina in 1958 and returned to Germany. She paid the debt off herself and was left with nothing.26 In Germany, too, he failed and again lost his benefactors’ money – this time in a cement factory. His wife said he was ‘a salesman, a dreamer and a very bad honest businessman’:

  He knew how to play the black market and he had known how to become a millionaire. Under wartime conditions of bribery and gifts he made money. But as a straightforward entrepreneur he apparently made a mess of things, in Argentina and back in Germany.27

  His story was told briefly on German television in the early 1960s. He was living in Frankfurt and someone recognised him in the street and spat into his face calling him a ‘Jew kisser’. Although Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first Chancellor, gave him a medal and a small pension he was miserable. He lived in one room near the station in Frankfurt and was still living on handouts from the Schindlerjuden (Schindler’s Jews). Although he was recognised by Yad Vashem and feted by Jews in Israel when he visited each year, he was drinking too much. He died in 1974, aged only 66, of ‘poverty and alcoholism’ according to Steinhouse. Unfortunately for him, this was six years before Thomas Keneally entered Poldek Pfefferberg’s luggage shop in Beverly Hills in 1980 and heard the story of a lifetime.

  Trude Simonsohn had known Schindler when he moved to Frankfurt in 1958. She was active in the Frankfurt Friends of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Aged 73 she told a Reuters’ journalist: ‘He was a burned-out soul. It was as if all the energy which he had in his life was exhausted in this rescue action … You could sense this from him. A person who had so much strength in those terrible times couldn’t find his feet again.’28

  Yitzhak Stern, who worked with Schindler all through his rescue, gave testimony in May 1962 at a meeting of survivors with Schindler. He said:

  I met Schindler on 18 November 1939 … when he extended his hand to me, I said, ‘I’m a Jew’ because a Jew had to announce he was a Jew when talking to a German. Schindler dismissed this and said ‘nonsense. Why do you remind me that I’m a German. Don’t I already know it?’

  On 4 December 1939 Oskar rushed in and told them about the creation of the Ghetto and the rounding-up of Jews, but no one listened to him. Later they remembered: ‘Schindler had told us about the plans, and we, stupid people, didn’t pay attention.’ Stern’s testimony even covered Schindler’s respect for Jewish traditions: he created a special Jewish cemetery when a Mrs Hofstater died and she was buried with all appropriate ritual. As Stern said: ‘It was the only establishment of a Jewish cemetery in occupied Europe …’

  After describing the horrors of the Goleszów train rescue, Stern concluded: ‘In the Hebrew language there are three terms, three grades: person, man, human being. I believe there is a fourth one – Schindler.’29

  The final word on Schindler should be given to someone who knew him well over a long period: Dr Moshe Bejski, who described him with a Yiddish word, mensch. This is usually translated as ‘a decent fellow’ or ‘a good person’.30 He said Schindler had been brought up as a bon vivant and liked the good life. Born in 1912, he was only in his early thirties when he came to Poland to make money, but when he saw the way the Jews were suffering, he felt he should do something:

  He was a true human being and very sensitive to human
suffering. At the Brinlitz factory there was an infirmary in the camp. There was a young Jewish girl aged 22/23 who was terminally ill with TB. Schindler went to see her and asked if she wanted anything. She said she would like an apple. This was the winter of 1944/45 but he went to Zwittau and came back with a bag of apples for her.31

  Dr Bejski said this was an example of his great kindness, but he admitted that he treated his wife badly. ‘He was very cruel to her.’ Bejski told me he was the only German he did not fear. Bejski worked doing technical drawings in the office:

  ‘When Schindler visited he would sometimes light a cigarette and then leave the rest of the packet on my desk. They were extremely valuable. Two cigarettes could buy half a loaf of bread in the camp.’

  Schindler was a man of complex motivations like many of the rescuers. He found his niche during the war but his life after it was a disaster, and in fact he was bailed out by the Jews he had rescued for the rest of his life. Nevertheless, at the crucial moment in his life he was a benevolent and true rescuer to his 1,100 Jews.

  RESCUERS INVOLVED IN THE RESISTANCE

  Henk Huffener (1923–2006). Henk’s family were all involved in the Resistance. His father, Hendrik, who was an active anti-fascist from 1935, began holding Resistance meetings at their home in 1941. ‘My father was an incredibly kind, brave person. He never showed any anxiety at all.’32 The family consisted of Hendrik, his nine children and their stepmother. Their own mother, Wilhelmina Huffener-Merks, had died in 1932. The family were Catholics, which Henk said has no significance for him.33 They lived in a remote area in Bilthoven on the edge of a very large estate because his father became site manager for a hospital and sanatorium for TB patients. Its isolation was invaluable for the Resistance work.34

  Henk’s family was musical and at weekends they gave chamber concerts with friends who joined their Resistance group. However, their first exploit in 1941 was disastrous, when a Dr Browser, who had established radio contact with the Dutch government in exile in London, asked Henk and his younger brother Joep to report on German military establishments and troop movements. Henk admitted:

  I was 18 but I looked 14 and I’d chat to the soldiers. I’d be cheerful and gormless and say ‘gosh, are you really going in that direction?’ The Germans eventually detected the doctor’s aerial and stormed his house. They caught him red-handed; he was taken away and shot.35

  Henk, who was born in Utrecht on 24 February 1923, says he was a precocious youth and by the age of 15 already had a mix of friends which included Jews, atheists, Quakers and Protestants.36 His formal education ended when he was 17, when the Germans occupied the Netherlands. He was very close to his older sister Ann and brother Joep who were the most involved in the Resistance.

  Henk has also written of the great influence on him of Betty Cadbury, a Quaker from Birmingham who married Kees Boeke, who ran the Werkpaats School – ‘an eccentric, progressive boarding school’. Betty introduced him to several interesting people – Victor Gollancz, the publisher; Fenner Brockway MP; and Corder Catchpole, another Quaker who was actively involved in alleviating distress caused by the Nazis and who was very clear about the fate of the Jews. He, like the Boekes, had been interned during the First World War for pacifist activities. However, in Europe in the 1930s, ‘Quakers decided to avoid the word “pacifist” and described themselves as “Friends of Peace”, because the Nazis assumed that pacifism demonstrated a political involvement with the Communists, who were regarded as traitors’.37

  Henk wrote: ‘Because of her [Betty] I became an ardent pacifist and saw little point in armed resistance. Armed resistance was mainly counter-productive and at the time cost countless lives.’38 The Boekes had employed two German Jewish teachers in their school in 1940, but at the end of 1941 it became forbidden to employ Jews. Betty, as an English woman, had already attracted the Nazis’ interest and as she had considerable incriminating material at the school, such as the addresses of German Jews and books written by them, Henk offered to move the stuff to a safe hiding place, in case the Nazis came searching. He wrote: ‘I filled up a handcart with boxes not knowing what was in them.’39 But not all their work involved helping Jews: his sister Ann, with her husband Jeff Le Jeuneand brother Joep, ran a ‘Swiss road’ escape route which:

  was primarily intended with getting former Dutch parliamentarian figures back to London via Geneva and Dr V. Hooft, Head of the International Council of Churches, smuggled micro-photographs of material – mainly secret documents – military installations went the same way. The official London agreed organization involving over 50 couriers working in relays began in Holland where Ann managed a safe house, where a lot of material was gathered and packed in safety razors, fountain pens and hair brushes etc. Finally I know that about 50 baled out aircrew were sent to route 2 to Spain and Portugal. In 1942 I persuaded her and her Swiss route courier husband to help Jews get at least to Belgium. Jews were the exception not the rule.40

  In 1942 the group had their first major challenge when they were asked to evacuate a kibbutz of German Zionists, known as the Hachshara home, in Loosdrecht:

  The resistance group received a tip-off that the Germans would raid the Kibbutz and send its occupants to concentration camps. The group dispersed the Kibbutz in just a few weeks. They were spirited out in small groups, some dressed as hikers and cyclists. Mr Huffener and his sister moved all the Jews to secure permanent accommodation. Mr Huffener even managed to place a Down’s Syndrome girl in a home for mentally handicapped children. He took her to the home by train and bicycle.41

  It was of course very dangerous and on one occasion, when Henk was escorting a very Jewish-looking girl who spoke no Dutch, he was stopped by some German soldiers. ‘He kissed her, explained to the Germans that they must be off or they would be in trouble with their parents and got away with it.’ However, it was that girl’s father who subsequently showed Henk his First World War medal sitting on a black velvet cushion, with the words: ‘That is an Iron Cross First Class. I am exempted from deportation.’ Henk pleaded with him not to believe that, but unfortunately the advice went unheeded.42

  The question of Jews and the Iron Cross was of great significance, particularly amongst assimilated Jews. Jews who saw themselves as quite assimilated felt safe in many countries. At the start of the First World War, the main Jewish organisations encouraged Jews to sign up to the armed forces to show their commitment to their homeland. One hundred thousand Jews fought for Germany in the First World War, including Anne Frank’s father Otto and Wilfrid Israel’s uncle Richard and his cousin Ernst. They represented one-fifth of the Jewish population and, whilst 12,000 fell in battle, 30,000 were decorated and 2,000 became officers.43 The graves of those who fell can still be seen in the Weissensee cemetery in Berlin – the largest Jewish graveyard in Europe. ‘An entire section honours the fallen of 1914–18 with rows of little white headstones lined up with military precision.’ They were erected in 1927 when ‘it is still possible to honour German Jews for having died as patriots for the Fatherland’.44

  Those surviving soldiers, particularly those who had been decorated, felt very secure. But German Jews who regarded themselves as ‘Germans of the Mosaic Persuasion’, who had joined wholeheartedly in Prussian jingoism in 1914, were eventually to be disappointed.45 They had believed they were an integral part of German culture:

  After 1933, they were stunned to realize that they were targets of the Nazi racial laws – that Hitler’s diatribes were directed at them. Convinced that there had been some mistake, World War I veterans pinned on their medals and visited local Nazi officials to emphasize their patriotism. In March 1933, the Jewish congregation of Berlin sent a statement to Hitler affirming ‘the pledge that we belong to the German people; it is our sacred duty, our right and our deepest wish that we take an active part in its renewal and rise’. As late as 1936, the ‘Reich Association of Jewish Front Soldiers’ commemorated their fallen comrades from World War I with a ceremony in Berlin that stressed thei
r loyalty to the Fatherland.46

  Else Pintus described an incident in Danzig in the summer of 1941. Mr David, who owned a furniture store, was queuing for food when a woman told him it was just for Germans. He replied, ‘I’m just as German as you. I served four years on the German front.’ Someone must have reported this to the Gestapo, and although he was ill in bed, they dragged him off and eight days later he was dead.47

  Dr Arthur Arndt, who was hidden in Berlin with six other Jews throughout the war, had been awarded the Iron Cross for his services as an army doctor in the First World War. On 16 August 1935, one month before the Nuremberg Laws were passed, he was awarded a Cross of Honour certificate, again for his work during the First World War. In July 1938 he was told that Jewish doctors were being taken off the Medical Register and could no longer call themselves physicians or treat Aryan patients. The Jewish doctors were to be known as Krankenbehandler (healers for the Jewish infirm).48 Finally, in Hungary, all exemptions for Jews, even war heroes, were revoked on 15 October 1944 when the Szálasi government came to power.

  These proud soldiers would have done better to remember the events of 1 November 1916 when, as the war began to go against the Germans, the High Command – in the person of the Prussian War Minister, Adolf Wild von Hohenborn – thought the Jews would make a good scapegoat for the Germans’ lack of success. It was decided that a census of Jews would show that they were shirking their military duty for the Fatherland. However, because of the Jews’ earnest patriotism, the Judenzahlung (Jew Count or Jewish Census) demonstrated that not only were the Jews serving enthusiastically, but they were volunteering disproportionately for front-line duty. The results of the survey were never published because they did not serve the purpose for which the exercise had been intended.49