Searching for Schindler Read online

  “Otherwise,” said Freddy, “I wouldn’t be here, would I, Ma?”

  “Exactly right, Freddy darlink.”

  Misia had, like her husband and many Polish-Jewish characters, the tendency to put a k on the end of darling. Who was I to talk? My Irish granny, Katie Keneally, had been unable to pronounce a th and spoke of t’roat (throat) and cat’edrals. As for Australians, as a friend would say, our five vowels were i, i, i, i and u. So Mrs. Misia Page’s verbal mannerism had no low-humor effect on me, emerging as it did from the mouth of a woman who had seen the great necro-manufactory of Auschwitz.

  Poldek said, “And I wouldn’t have had my darling Misia. She is so cute this lady. Too clever for me. She was meant to be a surgeon.”

  “I’m a surgeon on handbags now,” she reasoned. “And I love it here. Beverly Hills people—some are huffy, you know—but mostly so nice. Excuse me, sir, a second.” She moved to Poldek and muttered a few words to him, about problems with a Mrs. Gerschler’s handbag and how Poldek might have to replace the whole thing.

  “She’s got other handbags,” Poldek rumbled.

  “No, Poldek,” Misia said softly. “The poor woman has to take the bag she wants to take. She’s been a customer twenty years.”

  “I suffered every one of them, ai! Si Gerschler…such a nice guy married to that shiksa. Tell her, I’m trying to get a replacement one out of the manufacturers. It’s on the way.”

  “Poldek, how can she wear it to the Century City Plaza tonight if it’s in a boat somewhere?” asked small-boned Misia, descending into her own guttural range. “I called Mason’s wholesale. They have one in stock. They’re sending it over to us.”

  “Misia, darling, that’s so expensive and a big write-down.”

  “We don’t have a choice, Poldek.”

  Misia turned to me and said, “Forgive me. Business, you see.” But now it had obviously been settled in the well-practiced way they had.

  “Come and see, Thomas, if I may call you,” Poldek boomed. “Come and see what I have here.”

  He led me toward two filing cabinets that stood by the desk at the back of the storeroom, and as he went he settled at top voice with Misia and Freddy the issue of a Bel Air woman’s handbag and who would deliver it. Poldek was brought to a pause by the crisis and stopped walking. He sounded bearishly reasonable. “Misia, I have the gentleman here. He’s a very famous writer. In Newsweek I see his review. If you can call Mason’s and get them to deliver it straight to—”

  “Poldek, they only deliver retail. You know that. Where’s Sol?”

  “Sol’s on the phone with some MasterCard nebbish. Besides, he’s a lousy driver.”

  “I’ll get it there, Pop,” said Freddy. “On the way home.”

  “Could you, Freddy darling? You see, Misia, what a fine boy we made?” And Poldek parted his lips and made a kissing noise, first toward Freddy and then toward his wife.

  He opened the two filing cabinets, selecting documents—a piece on Oskar Schindler from the Los Angeles Examiner, copies of postwar speeches by former Jewish prisoners made in Oskar Schindler’s honor, carbon copies of letters in German, and documents partly yellowed, old enough for the staples in them to have rusted somewhat even in Southern California’s desert climate. There was a notice of Schindler’s death in 1974, and the reburial of his body a month later in Jerusalem. There were also photographs of scenes from a prison camp. I would discover they had been taken by one Raimund Titsch, a World War I veteran with a limp, the brave Austrian manager of a factory in the terrible camp of Plaszów, southeast of the city of Kraków, from which Schindler drew the laborers for his kindlier small camp within the city.

  As Poldek extracted documentation from this drawer and then another, opening and shutting them with gusto, he went on commentating: “This guy Oskar Schindler was a big master-race sort of guy. Tall and smooth and his suits…the cloth! He drank cognac like water. And I remember, when I met him the first time, he was wearing a huge black and red Hakenkreuz, you know, the Nazi pin.”

  He riffled through a folder full of photographs and pulled one out, and there was his younger self, very snappy in his four-cornered Polish officer’s cap, a stocky boy in a lieutenant’s uniform, wearing the same confident, half-smiling face that he now directed at me.

  “You see, there! I was Phys Ed Professor Magister at the Kociuszko Gymnasium in Podgórze. The girls loved me. I got wounded on the San River and my Catholic orderly saved my life and carried me to a field hospital. I never forget. I send his family food parcels. Then, after Hitler gave half of Poland to Stalin, we officers had to decide to go east or west. I decided not to go east, even though I was Jewish. If I had, I would have been shot by the Russians with all the other poor guys in Katyn Forest.”

  Back in Kraków as a prisoner, Poldek had used a German-issued document, which originally had been intended to enable him to visit his soldiers in a military hospital further east, to bamboozle a barely literate German guard. So he slipped out of the railway waiting-room yard and caught a tram and went home to his mother. “And here’s this big German guy, handsome, and he’s discussing with her that she’ll decorate his apartment at Straszewskiego Street. That’s how I first met this Oskar Schindler.”

  By now, Sol had appeared in the doorway of the repair room.

  “They came through. The card turns out okay.”

  “Thanks God,” said Poldek. “Now, would you like the briefcase wrapped, sir?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll carry it with me.”

  Leopold turned to his patient son. “Stay with the store a while, Freddy. I’m taking Mr. Thomas up to make some photostatic copies.”

  “Where will you get photocopies this time of day on a Saturday, Pop?”

  “The Glendale Savings. They owe me.”

  “Wow!” said Freddy, shaking his head.

  I said good-bye to Misia Page/Pfefferberg, and we reemerged into the store. On Poldek’s instructions, I left my briefcase there for the time being. I could carry the copies we got made back to the hotel in it. I said good-bye to Sol and Freddy.

  We crossed the road and made for the Glendale Savings Bank on the corner of Wilshire. Arriving there at a brisk pace, we queued a time in front of the Enquiries and Transactions counter of the busy Saturday noon bank. At last we reached the counter and a young man attended to us. He called my friend “Mr. Page,” confirming that Poldek was indeed well-known at this branch. Poldek handed over his considerable wad of papers. “I need photostatic copies of these, please.”

  The young man’s eyes looked blank. “Mr. Page, you can see it’s a very, very busy time.”

  Leopold did what he would always do when thwarted. He stepped back and raised his hands in a gesture invoking forces greater than this mere transaction.

  “So I have lunch with the president every second Tuesday, and you don’t have time to give me a few lousy photostatic copies? Is this what you want me to tell your boss? This is an important gentleman.” He pointed to me. I had begun the morning as a furtive shopper and was now the center of the gaze of many customers. “He is a famous writer from Australia.” Was there such a thing? I looked around in discomfort. “He is here for only one day and a half. So we’ll wait.” It was clear to the young man that the copies needed, under the pressure of history, to be done now.

  Cowed by Leopold’s portentousness, he said it might take a little time. As I watched the clerk pass on the problem to two women even younger and more flustered than himself, Poldek stepped aside with me to await the copies, and filled me in on more of his history.

  Misia had been deported from Lodz in 1939 with her mother, Dr. Maria Lewinson, founder of one of the first institutes of medical cosmetology in Poland. Misia herself had earlier been a medical student in Vienna, and had seen the Führer’s triumphal entry into Vienna, and came home to Poland when war began.

  “She saw the son-of-bitch, and then he ruined her life. This is how I come to meet a beautiful girl like Misia. And smart. I
mean, we were from a good family, my sister and me. But my God, Misia’s parents had brains you wouldn’t believe. The Nazis deported her mother to Belzec death camp in 1942 and we never saw her again. Why? She had a brain and she was a Jew!

  He had longed for Misia, he said, but another Jewish ghetto dweller and former officer had a prior interest, and an officer and a gentleman did not try to court a comrade’s girl. But the other man relinquished her and Poldek set out to the Lewinsons’ little room in the ghetto to persuade her mother, who considered him a braggart. It took many hours of relentless talk. And then her mother was shipped away and never seen again, and Misia married him.

  I asked how he had come to America. After Schindler’s factory camp had been liberated by a Russian officer riding a donkey, he and Misia came west into a displaced persons’ camp, and he worked for the United Nations Rehabilitation and Repatriation Agency. He had a uniform given him by an American officer, and indeed one could imagine some officer surveying the lines of edgy, fearful former prisoners and seeing something undefeated in Poldek, and putting him into uniform.

  Misia and Poldek, having survived and given Schindler the credit for that survival, came to the United States in 1947 and rented a tiny room on Long Island which they shared with other survivors. Poldek saw another Polish refugee repairing handbags in a little temporary store on the pavement. He got talking to the man, and watched him at work, and went home to tell Misia they were now in the handbag business. They did well enough in New York to move out to California in the 1950s, to start importing and to own a few outlets, like the one I had wandered into. That was it. Poldek moved like a man who believed luck was on his side.

  The young bank clerk had returned to the counter with the photocopies. He waved to Poldek that they were ready. “I’ll pay for these,” I offered.

  Poldek said, “Are you mad, Thomas? I give this bank all my good business.” He accepted the copies from the young man and took his hand for a brief, passionate clasp, as if they had both been into battle together. He waved to the fraught female juniors who were catching their breath further back in the office. “Young ladies! (Aren’t they beautiful Beverly Hills girls, Thomas?) Thank you, darlings.”

  I went back to my cool hotel room with the pile of photocopied papers in my new briefcase. I switched the television to that day’s Notre Dame game—I don’t remember who they were playing, but I did know vaguely that my grandfather’s brother, a great-uncle who settled in Brooklyn, had a son named Patrick Keneally who had gone to Notre Dame on a football scholarship, and this was enough to imbue my viewing with a tinge of partisanship.

  With the sound low, I began reading the papers Poldek had given me. It was instantly engrossing material. There was a speech that one of Oskar Schindler’s Jewish accountants, Itzhak Stern, made in Tel Aviv in 1963, about his experience working with, as well as for, this Nazi who had been a factory owner. There were a number of other such speeches translated into English from Schindler survivors living all over Europe and the United States. Then there was a series of affidavit-like testimonies from a range of former prisoners, Poldek and Misia among them.

  For those who do not know the tale of Schindler, it is briefly stated thus. A young, hulking, genial but not quite respectable ethnic German came to conquered Kraków in 1939 from his native Sudetenland, a part of northern Czechoslovakia where many other ethnic Germans lived. He looked around for business opportunities in Kraków and acquired a factory which he named Deutsche Email Fabrik (DEF), German Enamel Factory. Its nickname among the prisoners who would work there would be Emalia.

  As well as sincerely desiring wealth, Schindler was an agent of Abwehr, German military intelligence, an arrangement which saved him from conscription. At DEF he manufactured both for the war effort and for the black market, and developed a symbiotic relationship with his Jews. But to acquire labor, he had to deal with the commandant of the chief labor camp of the area, Plaszów. That is, he bought his labor, at a cheap price, from the SS.

  Plaszów concentration camp, on the northern edge of Kraków, was run by the SS man Amon Goeth. Amon was a man very like Oskar, it seemed; of like age, a drinker, a womanizer. In different circumstances, they might have seemed the same sort of man—unsatisfactory husbands, shifty businessmen. The resemblance stopped there, however, for Amon was a killer who pot-shotted Plaszów prisoners with a sniper rifle from his balcony. Where Amon was a figure of terror in the dreams of all the people whose memoirs I read that Saturday afternoon, Oskar was the improbable savior. His motives were hard to define, and there were ambiguities to be teased out. But his prisoners didn’t care. And neither did I.

  Then when the Russian advance of 1944 led to the closure of Plaszów and DEF, Oskar went to the trouble of founding another camp, near his hometown in Moravia, in northeastern Czechoslovakia, where his own black-marketeering and the morally ambiguous deliverance of Jewish prisoners continued.

  And so I came across the typewritten list of workers for Schindler’s camp in Moravia, Zwangsarbeitslager Brinnlitz—that is, Forced Labor Camp Brinnlitz, which was theoretically under the control of a mother camp, the infamous Gross-Rosen. Searching through the list, I came upon the names of Poldek and Misia Pfefferberg. Misia, prisoner 195 on the list, was recorded as having been born in 1920 and was marked down as a Metallarbeiterin, a metalworker, though she had never worked with metal until then. Leopold Pfefferberg, another “Ju. Po.”—Polish Jew—was number 173 and a Schweisser—welder. He had not used a welding iron until then, but was confident he could learn. This document, seen by the television glow, representing an acre of safety in the midst of the huge square mileage of horror that was the Holocaust, would achieve an international renown as Schindler’s list. The list was life, I would one day write and actor Ben Kingsley would say, and all around it lay the pit.

  I found as well a translation of Schindler’s speech, taken down by two of his secretaries, made on the last day of the war, addressed to prisoners and to the SS garrison of the camp at Brinnlitz. The sentiments expressed by the tall Herr Direktor of the camp in this speech were extraordinary, with Schindler telling his former laborers that they would now inherit the shattered world, and at the same time pleading with the SS guards who had been ordered to exterminate the camp to depart in honor, and not with blood on their hands. Poldek would tell me that while Schindler gave this finely balanced speech, the hairs were standing up on people’s necks. Schindler was playing poker against the SS garrison of his factory-camp, and all the prisoners knew it. But it had worked. The SS drifted away, and left the factory and compound of Brinnlitz, and fled west toward the Americans in Austria.

  From these documents concerning Herr Oskar Schindler, I gathered he was a ruined hedonist Catholic. As a former seminarian, and a struggling Catholic myself, I had some time for fellows like Oskar, and little for the over-formal, over-legalistic mediators of Christ who too often asserted that they stood for the real thing. Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, had been a good practicing Catholic by legalistic standards and made a lengthy confession before his death. Oskar did not. But Höss was a devourer of souls and bodies, and Oskar, the reportedly lecherous bad husband, was the deliverer. Oskar showed that virtue emerged where it would, and the sort of churchy observance bishops called for was not a guarantee of genuine humanity in a person. Catholic legalism on matters of sexuality evoked sexual neuroses in some men. In others, it produced a dancing-on-the-lip-of-hell exuberance. Schindler was obviously of the latter type, if one can believe the testimonies of all the prisoners who had known him.

  Among the testimonies which Poldek had given me, one woman prisoner uttered a sentiment I would later hear from many of his women prisoners. “He was so good-looking and so well-dressed, and he looked you in the eye, and I think if he had asked me for favors, I could not resist. But why should he ask for favors from me, who weighed forty-five kilos, when he was surrounded by beautiful German and Polish girls in the pink of health?”

  Some people
have always been troubled by Oskar’s ambiguity. To me it was from the start the whole point of the tale. Paradox is beloved of novelists. The despised savior, the humane whore, the selfish man suddenly munificent, the wise fool, and the cowardly hero. Most writers spend their lives writing about unexpected malice in the supposedly virtuous, and unexpected virtue in the supposedly sinful. On top of that, the times in which Oskar operated were morally inverted, and so was language. Plain terms—health action, special treatment, final solution, Aryanization, resettlement, blood protection—often meant the opposite of what they implied.

  But I doubted I could write a book on this. I was not a Jew. I was a kind of European, but from the rim of the earth. Après nous les penguins, I sometimes said in bastard French and as a joke. My father had served in the Middle East in World War II and had sent back Nazi memorabilia—Afrika Korps Feldwebel stripes, Very pistols marked with the swastika, a Luger holster similarly stamped—just like the ones the Nazis wore in the Saturday afternoon pictures in the Vogue Cinema in Homebush, Australia.

  I remembered, too, the Saturday evening when Aunt Annie minded my little brother, and my mother and I went to the show at the Vogue—at the time, this was the most sophisticated activity possible according to my horizons. It was May 1945, my father was still away and, as far as we knew, about to be shipped to some location in the Pacific’s ongoing war. And there on the screen was the newsreel footage of Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the horrified Allies. There were the corpses, thin and rigid as planks, stacked like so much timber. I could remember the combined shock of the women of that western suburb of war-remote Sydney. The question that hung in the air was: How could anyone have gone to such extremes?

  All this was the barest of qualifications to write the book. But then the wonderful aspect of the material, which I saw at once, was that Oskar and his Jews reduced the Holocaust to an understandable, almost personal scale. He had been there, in Kraków and then in Brinnlitz, for every stage of the process—for the confiscation of Jewish property and business, for the creation and liquidation of the ghettos, and the building of labor camps, Arbeitslager, to contain labor forces. The Vernichtungslager, the destruction camps, had cast their shadow over him and, for a time, subsumed three hundred of his women. It was apparent at once that if one looked at the Holocaust using Oskar as a lens, one got an idea of the whole machinery at work on an intimate scale and, of course, of how that machinery made its impact on people with names and faces. A terrible thing to say—but one was not defeated by sheer numbers.