Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  So he was returned to her. But after what he had seen of the scaffolds of P@lasz@ow and Auschwitz, she could never take him to a children’s playground without his growing hysterical at the sight of the swing frames.

  At Linz, Oskar’s group reported to the American authorities, were relieved of their unreliable ambulance, and were taken by truck north to Nuremberg, to a large holding center for wandering concentration-camp prisoners. They were discovering that, as they had suspected, liberation wasn’t a straightforward business.

  Richard Rechen had an aunt in Constanz, by the lake on the Swiss border. When the Americans asked the group if there was anywhere they could go, they nominated this aunt. The intent of the eight young prisoners from Brinnlitz was to deliver the Schindlers, if possible, across the Swiss border, in case vengeance against Germany erupted suddenly and, even in the American zone, the Schindlers were unjustly punished. Additionally, all eight of them were potential emigrants and believed that these matters would be easier to arrange from Switzerland.

  Reubinski remembers that their relationship with the

  American commandant in Nuremberg was cordial,

  but the man would not spare them any transport

  to take them south to Constanz. They made the

  journey through the Black Forest as best they could,

  some of it on foot, some of it by train. Near

  Ravensburg they went to the local prison camp

  and spoke to the U.s. commandant. Here again they

  stayed as guests for some days, resting and living high

  on Army rations. In return, they sat up

  late with the commandant, who was of Jewish descent,

  and told him their stories of Amon and

  P@lasz@ow, of Gr@oss-Rosen,

  Auschwitz, Brinnlitz. They hoped he would give them transport to Constanz, possibly a truck. He could not spare a truck, but gave them a bus instead, together with some provisions for the journey. Though Oskar still carried diamonds worth over 1,000 RM. as well as some currency, the bus does not appear to have been bought but was instead given freely. After his dealings with the German bureaucrats, it must have been difficult for Oskar to adjust to that sort of transaction. West of Constanz, on the Swiss border and in the French Occupied zone, they parked the bus in the village of Kreuzlingen. Rechen went to the town hardware store and bought a pair of wire cutters. It seems that the party were still wearing their prison uniforms when the wire cutters were purchased. Perhaps the man behind the counter was influenced by one of two considerations: (a) this was a prisoner, and if thwarted might call his French protectors; (b) this was in fact a German officer escaping in disguise and perhaps should be helped.

  The border fence ran through the middle of

  Kreuzlingen and was guarded on the German side

  by French sentries of the S@uret‘e

  Militaire. The group approached this barrier

  on the edge of the village and, snipping the wires,

  waited for the sentry to near the end of his beat before

  slipping through to Switzerland. Unhappily, a

  woman from the village observed them from a bend of the

  road and rushed to the border to alert the French and

  Swiss. In a quiet Swiss village

  square, a mirror image of the one on

  the German side, the Swiss police surrounded the party, but Richard and Anka Rechen broke away and had to be chased and apprehended by a patrol car. The party was, within half an hour, passed back to the French, who at once searched their possessions, discovering jewels and currency; drove them to the former German prison; and locked them in separate cells.

  It was clear to Reubinski that they were under suspicion of having been concentration-camp guards. In that sense the weight they had put on as guests of the Americans boomeranged, for they did not look as deprived as when they’d first left Brinnlitz. They were interrogated separately about their journey, about the valuables they were carrying. Each of them could tell a plausible story, but did not know if the others were telling the same one. They seem to have been afraid, in a way that had not applied with the Americans, that if the French discovered Oskar’s identity and his function in Brinnlitz, they would arraign him as a matter of course.

  Prevaricating for Oskar’s sake and Emilie’s, they remained there a week. The Schindlers themselves now knew enough about Judaism to pass the obvious cultural tests. But Oskar’s manner and physical condition didn’t make his posture of recent-prisoner-of-the-Ss very credible. Unhappily, his Hebrew letter was over in Linz, in the files of the Americans. Edek Reubinski, as the leader of the eight, was questioned most regularly, and on the seventh day of his imprisonment was brought into the interrogation room to find a second person there, a man in civilian clothes, a speaker of Polish, brought in to test Reubinski’s claim that he came from Cracow. For some reason—because the Pole played a compassionate role in the questioning that followed, or because of the familiarity of the language—Reubinski broke down, began to weep, and told the full story in fluent Polish. The rest were called one by one, were shown Reubinski, were told he had confessed, and then were ordered to recite their version of the truth in Polish. When at the end of the morning the versions matched, the whole group, the Schindlers included, were gathered in the interrogation room and embraced by both interrogators. The Frenchman, says Reubinski, was weeping. Everyone was delighted at that phenomenon—a weeping interrogator. When he managed to compose himself, he called for lunch to be brought in for himself, his colleague, the Schindlers, the eight. That afternoon he had them transferred to a lakeside hotel in Constanz, where they stayed for some days at the expense of the French military government.

  By the time he sat down to dinner that evening at the hotel with Emilie, Reubinski, the Rechens, and the others, Oskar’s property had passed to the Soviets, and his last few jewels and currency were lost in the interstices of the liberating bureaucracy. He was as good as penniless, but was eating as well as could be managed in a good hotel with a number of his “family.” All of which would be the pattern of his future.

  EPILOGUE

  Oskar’s high season ended now. The peace would

  never exalt him as had the war. Oskar and

  Emilie came to Munich. For a time they shared

  lodgings with the Rosners, for Henry and his brother

  had been engaged to play at a Munich

  restaurant and had achieved a modest

  prosperity. One of his former prisoners, meeting him at the Rosners’ small, cramped apartment, was shocked by his torn coat. His property in Cracow and Moravia had, of course, been confiscated by the Russians, and his remaining jewelry had been traded for food and liquor. When the Feigenbaums arrived in Munich, they met his latest mistress, a Jewish girl, a survivor not of Brinnlitz but of worse camps than that. Many of the visitors to Oskar’s rented rooms, as indulgent as they were toward Oskar’s heroic weaknesses, felt shamed for Emilie’s sake.

  He was still a wildly generous friend and a great discoverer of unprocurables. Henry Rosner remembers that he found a source of chickens in the midst of chickenless Munich. He clung to the company of those of his Jews who had come to Germany— the Rosners, the Pfefferbergs, the Dresners, the Feigenbaums, the Sternbergs. Some cynics would later say that at the time it was wise of anyone involved in concentration camps to stay close to Jewish friends as protective coloration. But his dependence went beyond that sort of instinctive cunning. The Schindlerjuden had become his family.

  In common with them, he heard that Amon Goeth had been captured by Patton’s Americans the previous February, while a patient in an SS sanitarium at Bad Tolz;

  imprisoned in Dachau; and at the close of the war handed over to the new Polish government. Amon was in fact one of the first Germans dispatched to Poland for judgment. A number of former prisoners were invited to attend the trial as witnesses, and among the defense witnesses a deluded Amon considered calling were Helen Hirsch an
d Oskar Schindler. Oskar himself did not go to Cracow for the trials. Those who did found that Goeth, lean as a result of his diabetes, offered a subdued but unrepentant defense. All the orders for his acts of execution and transportation had been signed by superiors, he claimed, and were therefore their crimes, not his. Witnesses who told of murders committed by the Commandant’s own hand were, said Amon, maliciously exaggerating. There had been some prisoners executed as saboteurs, but there were always saboteurs in wartime.

  Mietek Pemper, waiting in the body of the

  court to be called to give evidence, sat beside

  another P@lasz@ow graduate who stared at

  Amon in the dock and whispered, “That man still

  terrifies me.” But Pemper himself, as first

  witness for the prosecution, delivered an exact

  catalogue of Amon’s crimes. He was

  followed by others, among them Dr. Biberstein and

  Helen Hirsch, who had precise and painful

  memories. Amon was condemned to death and hanged

  in Cracow on September 13, 1946. It was

  two years to the day since his arrest by the SS in

  Vienna on black-marketeering charges. According to the

  Cracow press, he went to the gallows without

  remorse and gave the National Socialist

  salute before dying.

  In Munich, Oskar himself identified

  Liepold, who had been detained by the

  Americans. A Brinnlitz prisoner

  accompanied Oskar at the lineup, and says that Oskar asked the protesting Liepold, “Do you want me to do it, or would you rather leave it to the fifty angry Jews who are waiting downstairs in the street?” Liepold would also be hanged—not for his crimes in Brinnlitz, but for earlier murders in Budzyn.

  Oskar had probably already conceived the scheme of becoming a farmer in Argentina; a breeder of nutria, the large South American aquatic rodents considered precious for their skins. Oskar presumed that the same excellent commercial instincts which had brought him to Cracow in 1939 were now urging him to cross the Atlantic. He was penniless, but the Joint Distribution Committee, the international Jewish relief organization to whom Oskar had made reports during the war and to whom his record was known, were willing to help him. In 1949 they made him an ex gratia payment of $15,000 and gave a reference (“To Whom It May Concern”) signed by M. W. Beckelman, the vice chairman of the “Joint’s” Executive Council. It said:

  The American Joint Distribution

  Committee has thoroughly investigated the wartime and Occupation activities of Mr. Schindler. ... We recommend wholeheartedly that all organizations and individuals contacted by Mr. Schindler do their utmost to help him, in recognition of his outstanding service. ... Under the guise of operating a Nazi labor factory first in Poland and then in the Sudetenland, Mr. Schindler managed to take in as employees and protect Jewish men and women destined for death in Auschwitz or other infamous concentration camps. ... “Schindler’s camp in Brinnlitz,” witnesses have told the Joint Distribution Committee, “was the only camp in the Nazi-occupied territories where a Jew was never killed, or even beaten, but was always treated as a human being.”

  Now that he is about to begin his life anew, let us help him as once he helped our brethren.

  When he sailed for Argentina, he took with him half a dozen families of Schindlerjuden, paying the passage for many of them. With Emilie, he settled on a farm in Buenos Aires province and worked it for nearly ten years. Those of Oskar’s survivors who did not see him in those years find it hard now to imagine him as a farmer, since he was never a man for steady routine. Some say, and there is some truth to it, that Emalia and Brinnlitz succeeded in their eccentric way because of the acumen of men like Stern and Bankier. In Argentina, Oskar had no such support, apart, of course, from the good sense and rural industriousness of his wife. The decade in which Oskar farmed nutria, however, was the period in which it was demonstrated that breeding, as distinct from trapping, did not produce pelts of adequate quality. Many other nutria enterprises failed in that time, and in 1957 the Schindlers’ farm went bankrupt. Emilie and Oskar moved into a house provided by B’nai B’rith in San Vicente, a southern suburb of Buenos Aires, and for a time Oskar sought work as a sales representative. Within a year, however, he left for Germany. Emilie remained behind.

  Living in a small apartment in Frankfurt, he sought capital to buy a cement factory, and pursued the possibility of major compensation from the West German Ministry of Finance for the loss of his Polish and Czechoslovakian properties.

  Little came of this effort. Some of Oskar’s

  survivors considered that the failure of the German

  government to pay him his due arose from lingering

  Hitlerism in the middle ranks of the civil

  service. But Oskar’s claim probably

  failed for technical reasons, and it is not

  possible to detect bureaucratic malice in the correspondence addressed to Oskar from the ministry.

  The Schindler cement enterprise was launched on capital from the Joint Distribution Committee and “loans” from a number of Schindler Jews who had done well in postwar Germany. It had a brief history. By 1961, Oskar was bankrupt again. His factory had been hurt by a series of harsh winters in which the construction industry had closed down; but some of the Schindler survivors believe the company’s failure was abetted by Oskar’s restlessness and low tolerance for routine.

  That year, hearing that he was in trouble, the Schindlerjuden in Israel invited him to visit them at their expense. An advertisement appeared in Israel’s Polish-language press asking that all former inmates of Concentration Camp Brinnlitz who had known “Oskar Schindler the German” contact the newspaper. In Tel Aviv, Oskar was welcomed ecstatically. The postwar children of his survivors mobbed him. He had grown heavier and his features had thickened. But at the parties and receptions, those who had known him saw that he was the same indomitable Oskar. The growling deft wit, the outrageous Charles Boyer charm, the voracious thirst had all survived his two bankruptcies.

  It was the year of the Adolf Eichmann trial, and Oskar’s visit to Israel aroused some interest in the international press. On the eve of the opening of Eichmann’s trial, the correspondent of the London Daily Mail wrote a feature on the contrast between the records of the two men, and quoted the preamble of an appeal the Schindlerjuden had opened to assist Oskar. “We do not forget the sorrows of Egypt, we do not forget Haman, we do not forget Hitler. Thus, among the unjust, we do not forget the just.

  Remember Oskar Schindler.”

  There was some incredulity among Holocaust survivors about the idea of a beneficent labor camp such as Oskar’s, and this disbelief found its voice through a journalist at a press conference with Schindler in Jerusalem. “How do you explain,” he asked, “that you knew all the senior SS men in the Cracow region and had regular dealings with them?” “At that stage in history,” Oskar answered, “it was rather difficult to discuss the fate of Jews with the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.” The Department of Testimonies of the Yad Vashem had, near the end of Oskar’s Argentine residence, sought and been given by him a general statement of his activities in Cracow and Brinnlitz. Now, on their own initiative and under the influence of Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Moshe Bejski (once Oskar’s forger of official stamps, now a respected and scholarly lawyer), the Board of Trustees of Yad Vashem began to consider the question of an official tribute to Oskar. The chairman of the board was Justice Landau, the presiding judge at the Eichmann trial. Yad Vashem sought and received a mass of testimonies concerning Oskar. Of this large collection of statements, four are critical of him. Though these four witnesses all state that without Oskar they would have perished, they criticize his business methods in the early months of the war. Two of the four disparaging testimonies are written by a father and son, called earlier in this account the C’s. In their enamelware outlet in Cracow, Oskar had installed his
mistress Ingrid as Treuh@ander. A third statement is by the C’s’ secretary and repeats the allegations of punching and bullying, rumors of which Stern had reported back to Oskar in 1940. The fourth comes from a man who claims to have had a prewar interest in Oskar’s enamel factory under its former name, Rekord—an interest, he claimed, that Oskar had ignored.

  Justice Landau and his board must have considered these four statements insignificant when set against the massed testimony of other Schindlerjuden, and they made no comment on them. Since all four stated that Oskar was their savior in any case, it is said to have occurred to the board to ask why, if Oskar had committed crimes against these people, he went to such extravagant pains to save them.

  The municipality of Tel Aviv was the first

  body to honor Oskar. On his fifty-third

  birthday he unveiled a plaque in the Park of

  Heroes. The inscription describes him as

  savior of 1,200 prisoners of AL