Searching for Schindler (20 page)

In lunchtime conversation we revisited the issue of where in Oskar altruism ended and opportunism began. I made the claim that it was actually important that the question could not be answered, that the abiding attraction of Schindler’s character was wrapped up in the very conundrum.

Last of all, I asked Steven if he could possibly reverse my mistake of years before and name the film
Schindler’s Ark
. He said he would do it except that he wanted to use lists throughout. Lists were visible, metaphors weren’t. From start to finish it would be a matter of lists. I thought his reasons much better than Dan Green’s all those years before. All at once it was midafternoon, and Steven made an arrangement for one further meeting.

In the event, Steven himself would make an initial thirty-six-hour raid on Kraków in late winter–early spring of 1992. Spielberg, his assistant Bonnie Curtis, and his trusted, experienced and eternally calm coproducer Jerry Molen, along with the writer Steve Zaillian, met with the Polish film authorities in Kraków, especially with Lew Rywin, the head of Heritage Films, who would work with Steven as a coproducer. They visited all the places associated with the tale, including an excursion into the Nazi-established ghetto from the hill beyond it. Spielberg made a record of everything with an eight-millimeter video camera.

Then they raced out to Auschwitz. Concerned by the way the modern city was impinging upon camera angles at Plaszów, Spielberg decided to film the camp in the nearby Liban chalk quarry, a moonscape hole, notably atmospheric and stark on the black-and-white film Spielberg ultimately shot. The visit seems to have greatly stimulated Steven. Poldek’s friend Franciszek Palowski, who was part of the Polish group working with the production team, called up Poldek and related how Spielberg had told a Polish television crew that in Kraków he would make his “truest” film.

Branko Lustig, a bearish, efficient fellow, spent longer periods in Poland, and although there was some delay over demands that Polish extras be heavily insured, it was ultimately decided the film would go ahead there early the next year. That had pretty much become the plan by the time Judy and I went home to Australia in the North American spring, our autumn. I was kept informed of further developments by Amblin and by an exhilarated and hopeful Poldek.

But not everyone would be as tickled as Poldek to see Oskar’s name become a byword of “humanity man to man.” Poldek intimated to me he had lost some friends when the book was published—chiefly because people were afraid Oskar’s story would give the Nazis absolution for their crimes. And Emilie’s Argentinian minders had no affection for wife-abandoning Oskar either.

It was about June 1992 that Spielberg went again to Poland and spent a little longer in Kraków. The Hotel Cracovia, one of Oskar’s joy spots, was looked over, and a jazz café named Michael’s Cave in the Rynek. And places less associated with pleasure—the Pomorska and Montelupich prisons. On this June trip Spielberg stayed at the Hotel Forum near an old tannery building which he wanted to check out as a possible location for Schindler’s factory in Brinnlitz. It was a mere two minutes’ walk from the Hotel Forum, where Spielberg intended to house his cast and crew. As for the Plaszów camp, Spielberg told Lew Rywin to build a replica of it in the Liban quarry he had just revisited. The production designer who would ultimately do the job was Allan Starski, an expert in designing concentration camps, since he had been the designer for
Europa Europa
and
Escape from Sobibor
.

I still did not quite believe it would all happen. Poldek, however, was exultant. Though there was a rumor that others at Universal considered Steven’s intention to make the film a folly, Poldek saw it as plain sense.

Leopold (Poldek) Pfefferberg in Kraków in March 1939, age twenty-six.

Tom with Ben Kingsley. In the back left of the picture is Jonathan Sagall, who played the young Poldek, showing an uncanny likeness to the original subject.

Poldek in his uniform as First Lieutenant in the Polish Army, November 1938.

A much older Poldek pictured with Tom during their research trip to Poland in 1981, a year after their first fateful meeting in Poldek’s store in Beverly Hills, California.

Oskar Schindler in equestrian garb, ready to take a ride through the parklands of Kraków in June 1942. It was on one such excursion with his mistress that he was said to have witnessed one of the first and fiercest ghetto raids to round up those Jews seen to be unproductive, for the purpose of systematic extermination.

Schindler (top left) enjoying a German party in Kraków, circa 1940–41.

Schindler (left) with an Abwehr officer, said to be Lieutenant Martin Plathe, with whom Oskar collaborated against the rival SS officers.

Schindler charming friends and clients at a party in Kraków.

Historic photos of women hauling trolleys containing quarried stone at Plaszów concentration camp. These photos, with a number of others, were taken by the Austrian Raimund Titsch, a brave factory supervisor.