Searching for Schindler (23 page)

Seventeen

According to Franciszek Palowski, Spielberg arrived in Poland to initiate the project on the morning of February 24, 1993, and had rented a house in the Wola Justowska suburb of Kraków which contained an editing suite where he could continue to work on
Jurassic Park
. Steve Zaillian was with him and was put to work on copious rewrites provoked by the authenticity of the film locations and other factors.

The first scene was to be of ghetto inhabitants shoveling snow on Poselska Street. Tons of snow had been ordered from various locations, including mountainous Zakopane, but it turned out that it was not needed, for overnight on March 1, 1993, the first day of filming, snow had been plenteously dumped from the sky and the air was full of ice crystals. The designer, Allan Starski, had merely to cover a modern awning of a grocery store and add a few period signs to make the scene work. Thus Scene 75 was shot, the hardy Polish extras bravely shoveling snow with their bare hands until Spielberg called, “Cut!” at 8:30 a.m. Then cameras, crew and actors moved to the ancient ghetto of Kazimierz and spent the afternoon filming ghetto scenes.

Lew Rywin, the Polish producer, was wary of the lack of success films on the Holocaust had previously had. He also feared that the cost would be driven up because everyone in Poland who cooperated with Spielberg would expect huge payments. Branko Lustig, the hearty and highly efficient Slav who had executive-produced and coproduced so many renowned films, and Spielberg’s habitual producer Jerry Molen—Utah-born, a Mormon, and a man of exceptional generosity of soul—were good at damping down this expectation.

Poldek himself was in hospital in LA at this time. Routine stuff, he told us. A stent or shunt had been inserted in one of his heart vessels. But he was back working by the day filming started. His early return to the office seemed to support the idea that the procedure was minor. But his heart problems were not simple matters, as it turned out.

In Australia again,
Judy and I received an invitation to be observers at Eritrea’s independence-from-Ethiopia referendum. Judy was just as anxious as I was to attend this great fete of Eritrean survival, whereas she considered herself too busy to go on to the set in Kraków—unlike the rest of the world, she did not much admire film people. My daughter Jane, an economics graduate from the University of New South Wales who wished to become a producer, was willing to come along. Jane is a smallish, handsome woman, very voluble like her father, but far ahead of me in her gifts of organization. As a result, of course, Poldek and she had always got on extremely well. She could bedazzle and confuse officials nearly as well as Poldek.

I did not go straight to Poland from that East African electoral festival. I had a night’s buffer in Rome between the exaltation of referendum Eritrea and Kraków. Exhausted, I fought the normal impulse to wake myself up with liquor, and envied those fortunate souls upon whom whiskey and gin had a soporific, not an arousing, effect.

Kraków airport had changed, I saw upon landing from Rome, since the night Poldek had snowed the Polish official over our exchange documents. There were no Kalashnikovs in sight anymore. Advertising for fruit juices or the unavoidable Coca-Cola filled the airport with their ersatz glitter.
Ski Zakopane!
I was exhorted. The sort of dread and anxiety my financial imbalance had imbued in me seemed to belong to a planet far removed from this sunny Polish afternoon.

By the Planty, the green verges on the south bank of the Vistula, a new Hotel Forum rose and was largely occupied by the actors and crew of the Schindler movie. I was driven to it in a Mercedes by a Pole named Jerzy who told me that he was my driver for the extent of my visit. After he had dropped me at the hotel, he said, he would be going out to the airport again to meet my daughter Jane’s flight from America.

By now Steven had overcome a number of challenges to his intentions. Preparing to film the five scenes set in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Spielberg had got an initial approval from the World Jewish Congress. But one of its vice presidents fought the proposal, and a story broke as early as mid-January 1993 that they were now trying to prevent Spielberg’s filming inside the camp. Branko Lustig, who had been a prisoner in Auschwitz, felt deeply offended at having his and Steven’s intentions questioned, but now the International Council of the State Museum in Auschwitz joined the World Jewish Congress in opposition. Although Spielberg went to New York to argue his case in a meeting with both these bodies, and to work out the strict criteria for his filming, in the end he decided it was better not to film inside Auschwitz itself but more or less on its doorstep; to build replicas of huts
outside
the gates of Auschwitz, and to have only the trains placed inside, so that when these steamed out through Auschwitz-Birkenau’s famous gates the camera would be placed to catch them. For the filming at Auschwitz, the weather had been ferociously cold and snowy, and all this added to the desperation of extras, guards and actors playing prisoners.

In these early days, Steve Zaillian was frequently working late, attending to the expansion and revision of his screenplay. By the time of my arrival, Spielberg had filmed some of Schindler’s office scenes in the building that had once been DEF/Emalia, and which the Telpod corporation now occupied. Telpod was having business difficulties at the time, and the company was probably happy to let Spielberg use the premises for a fee.

Poldek had been at the set the week before. He had by now turned eighty—his birthday was celebrated the week before he packed to go to Kraków. On arrival in his home city, he had left his luggage at the hotel to come straight on to Kazimierz, which was serving as the Nazi ghetto for the film. He and Misia had a Polish painting they had brought to give to Steven, a sort of midway good luck token. There is a picture of Poldek, as dapper as when we walked these streets together in 1981, his arm through Ralph Fiennes’s, shoulder to shoulder with Ben Kingsley, as everyone gets ready to shoot the liquidation of the ghetto. Poldek is looking around with a faint frown of incredulity on his face, at the masses of extras, the reincarnations of prisoners and SS guards. He made this happen, but now he seems a little astounded. His hair still has color, and if some of it derived from a bottle, then that is, I know, merely part of the duty of being well-groomed. He does not look an old man. He looks as young as when I first met him. From the animation of his face, one would judge him a fellow upon whom death has no designs.

Thirty thousand extras were used for this scene of the ghetto liquidation, and for production purposes many TV antennae had to be removed from roofs. Poldek must have been gradually overwhelmed by immediacy and by memory. But this did not show at all when he met the Israeli actor Jonathan Sagalle, slated to play him in the film. “Jonathan, I love you. You’re a good-looking guy, but you’re nowhere near as good-looking as I was at your age.” He would be embarrassed, however, when the film, for the sake of artistic license, showed Poldek black-marketeering inside the great Church of the Virgin Mary in the market square of Kraków. He assured a number of his Gentile friends, including myself, Judy, Kathy Kennedy and Jerry Molen, “You know, I would never black-marketeer in that beautiful church.”

During filming on the first day that Poldek was on the set, the small four-year-old Polish girl Oliwia Dabrowska had the task of playing Genia, the little girl in the red coat. She walked with brave purposefulness along the streets, while extras all about reacted to Steven’s orders to create a melee of panic and savagery. Steven had once mentioned at a meeting that he intended her to be one of the few patches of color in the film. I never got the chance to ask him why he wanted this vivid dot at the film’s center, but I presumed he saw it in terms of a shift to a greater intensity in Oskar’s motivation, for the film would have Oskar witnessing this scene from a hill outside the ghetto. I presumed also that Steven wished to honor all the hopeful yet slaughtered children who had perished in the sundry ethnic hysterias of the twentieth, bloodiest of centuries.

The director of photography was a pleasant and talented Pole, Janusz Kaminski, and in filming such scenes he used a conventionally fixed camera together with a handheld camera, since Spielberg wanted cinema verité. Much later, he would famously use the same method in the opening sequences of
Saving Private Ryan
.

Misia, who had been resting and gathering her courage, came with Poldek to the next day’s filming. Arriving on the set, she was introduced by Steven to the young Israeli actress Adi Nitzan, who would play her part, and exclaimed, “You are so beautiful.” Poldek cried, “But, Misia, you also are very beautiful. Would I give up all those students who were in love with me for a plain woman?”

The filming that morning was on the hill named Bednarskiego where Schindler, out riding in 1942, observed a Nazi
Aktion
in the ghetto. During a pause in filming Poldek took the trouble to point out to Steven the roof of the Ko
ciuszko Gymnasium, the high school where he had been a glamorous young teacher. He and Misia had been billeted in the ghetto at 2 Jósefinska Street, and Poldek pointed that out also.

After some hours of repetitive technical tests with film, Misia and Poldek had to flee the penetrating, damp cold of the hill above the ghetto where Liam Neeson and the Italian actress Béatrice Macola, both splendid on horseback, both suffused with the glow of good living, looked down amazed on the savagery in the ghetto.

By the time I got to Poland and settled into the Hotel Forum, Poldek had left—he would be meeting up with Spielberg in Jerusalem at a later time, when it was intended that the survivors should place grieving stones on Oskar’s grave. The hotel seemed quiet until the cast and crew began to turn up at the end of the day’s filming. I expected to be meeting strangers, but Bonnie Curtis, Steven’s urbane assistant whom I’d met many times before, arrived at my door and welcomed me, telling me that—after a shower—people met up in the bar downstairs, if I wanted to join them. She also showed me an editing suite at the end of the floor I was on, where some sort of initial editing was done every night—there seemed to be editing suites all over Kraków that Steven used, and I did not quite understand where each of them fitted into the process. Later that night, said Bonnie, there would be a screening of the dailies—the edited takes that had been shot the day before.

Down in the bar, the film people were distinguishable from the Mittel-European businessmen by their manner and high quotient of handsomeness or presence. I sat at a long table at which there were Polish, British and American actors and technicians. Bonnie pointed out young Ralph Fiennes, sitting on his own at the bar. She suggested I should maybe go and sign a book of mine he had been hanging on to and ask him to join our table. She told me that his performance as Amon Goeth was so overpowering that even when he changed out of his SS uniform and let his remarkable eyes unclench, people were a little timid to approach him.

I went up and tentatively introduced myself. I found that nobody could be more reticent than Fiennes, with his lost-child aura. He was a quietly whimsical Hiberno-Englishman, with passions for various writers and for rugby. The strange and enchanting way his smile broke over his face is well known to the world by now, and everything Poldek had said to the men and women of the world about bone structure applied in his case. He produced the book, a travel book I had written on the Southwest of the United States, an area for which I had a great passion. It had once been roundly condemned by the
New York Times Book Review
. Because people all around me pronounced
Ralph
in the English way—
Rafe
, a usage which would become famous when he did—I misheard it as
Ray
, and wrote the inscription as such, and he made no complaint. Later I went and apologized frankly for my gaucherie.

When my daughter Jane arrived from Frankfurt a little later in the evening, she was as confident and full of chatter as ever, much more suited to the scene than her father. We went down to the basement with Bonnie to watch the dailies. Even Liam Neeson himself came into the viewing room with Natasha Richardson. He carried a bottle of red wine and two glasses. There were few other viewers. The lights went out. It can’t have been a warm day, the one on which the scene on screen was filmed, but as shot it seemed boiling—there was considerable heat haze implied in the way the film was exposed. We were on a railway siding where a train stood loaded with the result of a gleaning of Plaszów’s people. Hands reached out through the gratings of the stationary cattle trucks, and Schindler, in a white suit, arrived and exchanged pleasantries with the lineup of SS men, who were complaining of the heat and waiting for the locomotive to haul the trucks away. Oskar suggested that the trucks be hosed down, a concept which amused Goeth, John and Hujar, the SS men. Since the camp hoses did not reach many of the trucks, Oskar offered to bring some from his own factory. Then followed many takes of water streaming through the grates of the cattle trucks under shirt-sleeved Oskar’s instructions. And again, such is the lighting of the scene that one feels in one’s own cortex the relief from heat and thirst, even while Goeth wondered why Oskar bothered, given that the people in the trucks were going to die.