Searching for Schindler (4 page)

Poldek had acquired all the associated speeches, official and extemporaneous, given by former prisoners during Oskar’s Israeli travels. All the 1963 ceremonies, and the pictures taken by survivors and by Oskar, themselves added to Poldek’s ultimate archive, the one I was encountering seventeen years later in his repair shop.

Eventually MGM bought the rights to Oskar’s story for $50,000. In the reasonable hope of prolonging Oskar’s life, or imposing a saner shape on it, Martin Gosch had written to Schindler, “I hope the fact that you have taken an apartment in Frankfurt does not mean that you are carrying on with too many women. (One is enough! Remember, dear friend, we are no longer as young as we used to be!)”

Poldek would later claim he made a paternalistic decision to give $20,000 from Oskar’s film deal to Mrs. Emilie Schindler, whom Oskar had left and who was living on limited funds in Buenos Aires, and send it to her—I have no reason to believe he was lying—and that he gave the remaining $30,000 to Oskar. Poldek and the Gosches flew to Paris from Los Angeles, Oskar flew from Frankfurt, and they all met in the Hotel George V.

Poldek’s version of what happened then was credible only if one had met Poldek and had at least heard tales of Schindler. Here, in 1963, when $30,000 could support even a halfway frugal middle-class family for six years, a sane, single man might have taken the weekend to decide what to do with such a windfall. And, unlike Glendale Savings, the Paris banks closed at midday anyway, and Poldek did not meet up with Oskar till the afternoon. Poldek and his former Herr Direktor/captor, Oskar Schindler, began to track down the names of bank managers. They found one in Clichy. They turned up at the poor man’s door as he was preparing for his weekend. They asked him to reopen his bank and cash their check. Of course, his immediate response was no. According to Poldek, they were so persuasive that the man left his suburban home and came into central Paris, and did as they asked. And then Poldek, the former prisoner-cum-welder, and Schindler, the former Herr Direktor of Zwangsarbeitslager Brinnlitz, went swinging down the Champs, Schindler in an inflammatory, transformed monetary condition.

He paused before a
chocolatier
’s store, where there was an enormous heart-shaped box of chocolates in the window. This was, clearly, not a box for sale—it was the
chocolatier
’s trademark. But Schindler, with characteristic exuberance, could not see the distinction. “I would like to get that for dear Mrs. Gosch,” he said.

Even for Poldek, this was too much. “You don’t have to, Oskar. This is a box for display. You don’t have to get this for anyone. It was enough what you did in 1944.”

But Schindler entered the shop and, to the bemusement of its employees, demanded the enormous heart-shaped box in the window. He paid for it, and took it back to Mrs. Gosch in her hotel. Mrs. Gosch did not know what to do with this avalanche of chocolates. But since Oskar was delighted with the gift, so must she appear to be.

The haul of documents Leopold had put together for MGM were what preoccupied and fascinated me that Saturday afternoon in Beverly Hills. For the film had never been made by MGM, and the tale was thus still unknown to the wider world. I had not, as some readers would later kindly see it, fought my way to the center of a maze to emerge with one of the essential tales of an awful century. I had stumbled upon it. I had not grasped it. It had grasped me.

About five o’clock,
Poldek called to invite me out with Misia and himself, and with Schindler’s lawyer Irving Glovin, for dinner that night. I agreed, a little nervously, like someone who was being moved too fast. I told him the material was fascinating but gave him the reasons I couldn’t write it. Even as I spoke there was a secret recklessness in me which was open to attempting the thing, for my quite reasonable timidity sat cheek by jowl with my excitement at the challenge and richness of this tale. I had already drawn up a plan of how the book could be achieved. I had just recently been talking to a commissioning senior editor at Simon & Schuster, Nan Talese, who had expressed a desire to publish something by me. I thought that I could approach her, perhaps. It would require a considerable amount to pay for a research journey, for the events of the story had occurred in Poland and the survivors lived in Germany, Austria, the United States, Australia, Argentina and Israel.

Poldek collected me at about 6:30 p.m. in his elegant two-door Cadillac. He was the sort of patriot who always bought American if he could. We were going to dine at a French restaurant in Brentwood.

Unlike Poldek, Glovin proved to have a solemn juridical air, but his wife, Jeannie, a former showbiz singer and dancer, bubbled with a goodwill characteristic of stage people. Glovin had become Schindler’s lawyer because he was Poldek’s, but unlike Leopold, as the dinner proceeded, with faux French waiters from Central America fussing over Jeannie, who loved it, and Misia, who didn’t, Glovin emerged as a determined guardian of the Schindler shrine. There was no doubt he had known and revered Schindler. But while Poldek’s Schindler seemed a man in the round, and thus credible, Glovin’s seemed a more two-dimensional creature, and Glovin became uneasy with talk about what I loved: Schindler’s ambiguity and rascality—the black-marketeering of the produce from his first camp in Poland, his womanizing, the heroic-scale black-marketeering that maintained the operation of the camp at Brinnlitz. He was taken, above all, by Oskar’s altruism, and thought it the dominant and only worthwhile aspect of the Schindler story, in the sense that if we could somehow distill what moved Oskar to behave with such goodwill, if we could find the formula for it, we might be able to inoculate the entire human race. Even though he had not been one of Schindler’s prisoners, it at once became apparent that he considered himself one of the few legal owners of the story.

Thus it was obvious, as we ate the good food and sipped the good wine, that some financial arrangement would need to be made, some consideration given by me for rights. Because of a strange impetuousness in my temperament, this made me more determined to write the tale, not less. The issue seemed too huge, the story too fascinating, to argue about money. We were discussing the history of the Holocaust, the most fantastical massacre of history, when death was reduced by technology to a manufactured item. I knew that between them, Glovin and Poldek had started a Schindler Foundation, to promote universal tolerance in Oskar’s name and to endow a chair and fund research studies into altruism. Whatever its merits, it was a good-faith enterprise. I believed that then and believe it now.

Poldek picked up the bill with cries of, “When we come to Sydney,
then
you can pay!” But for all his assumption that he could claim legal ownership of a story which was in the public arena, Glovin would also prove generous socially.

Already, after less than one day’s acquaintance, it was apparent that Leopold had invested much of himself, and his time and cash, promoting Oskar’s name and, during Oskar’s life, his wellbeing. Yet with Glovin I was convinced that if I told him what was obvious—that he might not be in a position to claim ownership of all aspects of Oskar’s life—he would take legal action to defend his position, and would dissuade Poldek from cooperation. As far as I was concerned, Poldek was entitled to some of the royalties, which I am now even more than then convinced he deserved. After all, he knew where all the contacts were. I was less willing to make a similar arrangement with Glovin, but knew that fighting him legally would be difficult and dispiriting. I was a writer. I did books, not lawsuits.

A wise man might have backed away from the idea of writing the book. I could generally find a viable excuse to avoid writing books I did not want to write anyhow, and that strategy had failed me only once—when Sir William Collins, chairman of the Collins publishing company, persuaded me to write a book to go with a miniseries of which one of the writers was the prolific, restless and brilliant Anthony Burgess. I did the job dutifully, but hated it earnestly. Ironically, it got better reviews than some of my more passionately wrought works.

But if I found a story that besotted me and made me rave to others about its details, and feel that profound determinism about the need to tell it to other humans, that impulse which is part of the writer’s temperament or, some would say, neurosis, then I could be reckless and philosophic about rights and royalties.

Two

In October 1980 when I met Leopold, I had been a writer for some seventeen years or so. I had been a late entrant in life’s hectic traffic, having spent six years in a Sydney seminary studying to be a priest. Having left after what I now realize was a crack-up, I was a lost soul teaching high school in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, living with my parents in Homebush, and writing during breaks from school. I was studying law too, and would always be something of a lawyer manqué, and as if to compensate for my ineptitude and shyness with women, I coached rugby.

In a room I shared with my brother, a medical student, I had written my first book during the summer school holidays of 1962–63. It was a time when Australians still felt a certain post-colonial sense of cultural unworthiness and yearning. The arts didn’t seem to belong much to us. I knew no writers. If there were any, why would they hang around Homebush? Unknown to me, a number of heroic writers, including Dal Stivens and Morris West, were at the time establishing the Australian Society of Authors, but that was a poorly reported event.

We Australians didn’t think of ourselves as viable practitioners of writing, for the arts were something which happened elsewhere, in western Europe. Nearly all the literature I had read came from elsewhere, from landscapes foreign to me, from seasons which were the reverse of seasons in Australia. The term “Australian literature” would—if uttered in London by a comedian like Barry Humphries/Dame Edna—draw fits of hilarity from a British audience, and would be considered amusing even in Australia, like the idea of a dog riding a bicycle. However, I finished my summer novel in April 1963. These things can be done while holding down a job if a person is desperate enough, and I was desperate to find a place in the world I had once renounced to enter the seminary and was now anxious to re-find.

I got the name of a publisher’s office in London from the copyright page of a book, bundled up the manuscript as typed for me by a young woman who lived on the corner of our block in Loftus Crescent, Homebush, and posted it off. Ten weeks later I was called out of teaching a class to take a message from my mother. A telegram had arrived in Homebush from London with the startling news that the publisher wanted to publish me. He (in those days publishers were always
he
), Sir Cedric Flower of Cassell’s, was willing to give me £150 sterling.

In my post-colonial naivety, this was like the finger of the deity emerging from clouds and yelling, “You!” My more urbane British contemporaries would not have seen their own experience of getting published by a trade publisher quite in the same terms—they came from cultivated backgrounds where people did them the favor of telling them that it was impossible to make a living as a writer. But beneath the great dome of the Commonwealth of Australia’s then apathy toward writing, I had no one to save me from myself, and I clung to the idea that I would write and survive. This novel was to be my deck chair from the
Titanic
, and I never doubted that, clinging to it, I would be washed to unimaginable places.

So the “profession” of the novel (£150 and all) was my deliverance from a clumsy start in life. That first contract would give me the confidence to reenter the normal, squalling, striving, aspiring world. Among other manifestations of liberation, I would take out and ultimately propose marriage to a splendid and exceptionally beautiful nurse from the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt, who generously considered that my intention to become a full-time novelist made perfect sense. Her name was Judith Martin, and I met her when she was nursing my mother in Lewisham Hospital after surgery. It astonished me that she harbored a preference for me over the doctors and bookmakers who generally took her out. She later said my patter was superior.

We were married in 1965, and in our small house in West Ryde, between Sydney and Parramatta, I began to keep writer’s hours, eight to one, two to five, and struggled with the reality that in a suburban house at eight on a weekday morning, writing could seem stupendously difficult, like making a model of Buckingham Palace out of playing cards. I was fortunate that, because of my parents’ influence, I was—in the term smart people would ultimately adopt—“task-driven.” Now that I was a novelist, I could not face the ignominy of failing to produce novels.

There were a number of factors which enforced discipline on me. One was that the Australian federal government gave me four thousand dollars, then a living wage, as a literary grant for 1966. Coming from a background where men and women viewed industriousness as a prime marker of their existence, I saw that money as coming from taxpayers in hard-pressed homes, and believed a sacred trust had been imposed upon me. It demanded that I consider my new experiment in life as a profession, a daily commitment from me. I must confess I have always tended to have an industrial approach to writing. I knew that if I was to survive I would need to be published as widely as I could manage—a pittance from England, a pittance from America, a pittance from Australia, all adding up to a living.

By 1980, when I met Poldek, I was in mid-career. Some of the early bloom had gone off my repute, at least in the eyes of Australian commentators. By the time I went into Poldek’s store, I had two adolescent daughters, Margaret and Jane, and I lived with them and my wife in a house above a beach north of Sydney. I had had the ill grace to forget I had still been fortunate beyond belief—fortunate in the early generosity and openness of readers and, as any writer will tell you, fortunate in survival. I suffered the self-absorbed and symptomatic discontent and restlessness of the writer, which were no doubt more wearing on my family than on me. But we were happy and we had come through. And to have a tale before you which you believed, with whatever degree of self-delusion, that the world needed to hear, was a splendid, euphoric, ever-renewing experience.

By the time I walked into Poldek’s store I had, through being published in the United Kingdom and the United States, something of what was called “a cult following,” and of course, ambition still burned and I selfishly yearned for more. Only as an older writer would I ask, “Who, what god, what destiny, ever guaranteed that someone who came from Homebush on the earth’s left buttock would grow up to write something people tolerated reading?” I considered the arrival of Schindler’s tale to be part of the sequence of that good fortune. And since I tried to write more or less a book a year, I was now gripped by the yearly euphoria that people who did more useful, routine, albeit more profitable, jobs never had the chance to feel. However, by the light of a gritty, glaring dawn the morning after I bought my briefcase from Poldek, doubt struck me. How could I consider myself qualified for this subject matter?

I had read a certain amount about Jewish culture, but I had only once attended Shabbat in a Jewish house. I knew that Australia’s first Passover had been celebrated with a special ration of flour and wine in 1788 by Cockney Jewish convicts, as a result of a Scottish officer in the marines being in love with one of the young criminals, one Esther Abrahams. That was a historical curiosity. But Poldek and Misia were the first Holocaust survivors I had knowingly met.

About ten in the morning, Poldek called from downstairs. He had come to take me to brunch. Over the eggs I told him I was a colonial naïf living in a country where one might have expected to find Indonesian settlement if not for its exquisite aridity. It was a place which had been the platform for convicts, minor British officials, gold-seeking British and Irish refugees and postwar displaced persons trying to get as far from pernicious Europe as they could. I knew about Jews chiefly from books—Roth, Malamud, Bellow. Though European by heritage, how could I interpret that full-throated and disordered side of the European soul, full-throated anti-Semitism?

After every objection, Poldek said, “That’s good, Thomas, that’s good. It means you don’t have an ax to grind.” And then he’d repeat (constantly), “This is not a book for Jews, this is a book for Gentiles. This is a great story of humanity man to man. An Australian is perfect to write it. What should you know? You know about humans. I’ll travel with you, Thomas!”

But the research task suddenly seemed more forbidding than it had the day before.

By Sunday lunchtime, Glovin, Poldek and I were discussing this golden and redemptive tale and the more banal question of who had legal rights, and in what sense, to the Schindler material. Things were getting complex, but were not yet set in concrete. It was agreed that I should go home that night with whatever photocopied documents Leopold had given me, and the addresses of various Australian Schindler survivors and others who knew Schindler. It excited me to think that, through the tragedies of history, there were such people in my own remote country.

I would make contact with the Australian survivors, add what they told me into the mix, and produce—this was my own suggestion—two documents: a fifteen-to twenty-page treatment of the material for my friend the Simon & Schuster editor Nan Talese, and a shorter, two-page abstract in case others didn’t have the patience for a full document. After all, Paramount Studios had acquired Simon & Schuster, and I was aware there were executives involved who, ironically, preferred a short précis to a full manuscript. An independent director named Robert Solo, who wanted to make a film of my book
Confederates
, had taken me out to see a Paramount executive just a month or so before I met Poldek. The executive had picked the book up from his desk, weighed it in his hand and said, “Kinda thick, isn’t it?” Then he’d commissioned a team of two screenwriters to turn out a screenplay for him—just, it seemed, to deal with his own reading incapacities. The screenplay was written—a good one—but joined the great majority of scripts that are never made into films.

Poldek, of course, insisted on taking me to the airport that night, and also insisted we go to a kosher restaurant on the way, where, engorged already with overrich Californian food, I choked back some latkes on the grounds, stated by Poldek, that “airline food is poison!” I did not yet realize that if you did not agree to something Leopold said, the only way out was to exclaim as fast and hard and loudly as him. I should have said, “You want I should have indigestion all the way to Australia?” Modest resistance, however, and what Anglo-Celts thought of as politeness, never had a chance against him.

“I doubt Irving Glovin is comfortable with me,” I said over the kosher food. “He already finds my approach too irreverent.”

“Irreverent? What does he know from irreverent? Listen, I saw Schindler screwing SS girls in the water reservoirs at Brinnlitz’s factory. That’s irreverent.”

The flight to Australia leaves Los Angeles late in the evening, and a small technical problem will, and often has, nudge the departure back to after midnight. But that night we took off more or less on time. Poldek’s last words to me at the gate were: “Thomas, who will do it if not you? You think I have them queued up?”

The plane taxied
past the sign on the runway that says
NO TURN BEFORE THE OCEAN
—a sign which always rather disturbed me, since I thought that any pilot worth his salt might already know that. Then we travelers were shot straight out over the Pacific, encountering at various times of the night the customary Pacific Ocean turbulence, the great cones of air and cloud which could rise higher than the track of a 747. Tiredness, light-headedness and the prospect of meeting my girls, Judy and my daughters, in some thirteen hours permitted me to achieve some optimism.

It occurred to me on that flight through darkness and quirky columns of air that there was a novelistic neatness to the tale. During the war, Poldek and others had been utterly dependent on Oskar. By the late 1950s, when he abandoned his wife in Argentina, he became dependent upon them, on men like Zuckermann, Number 585, and Pantirer, Number 205, New Jersey real estate developers who peppered the New Jersey suburbs they would develop with Schindler Streets and Schindler Plazas. They had once been the children and he the father, but then, postwar, he became the promising but perpetually erratic child who could never seem to make a go of anything, and who must have found some of the people he had saved a little tiresomely bourgeois. And so, as I had discovered, after times with them in Israel or California, back he went for a season in Frankfurt, in his poor apartment near the Hauptbahnhof, a zone of garish bars, prostitutes and lost souls. “Ah,” his survivors would say in documents I now possessed, “the Herr Direktor hasn’t changed.”

I was in fact so excited by what I had heard from Poldek and Misia and by the documentation I carried with me—even though it constituted a fraction of the material which would be needed to make the book—that when we came in over the coast and the familiar red roofs of Sydney, and I survived the baggage hall and customs and was met by my wife and two teenage daughters, I told them, “Look, before we go home, can we have a cup of coffee? I’ve got a wonderful story to tell you. See this briefcase—I’m sorry, I had to leave the one you girls gave me behind, but I left it in a flash suite at the Beverly Wilshire.”

My daughters had taken to describing me condescendingly as “a funny old thing,” but accepted, and in some cases shared, their parents’ enthusiasms. And Sydney is an excellent city for coffee—a boon from considerable immigration from southern Europe. After we gave our order I told them, having caught the bug of hyperbole from Poldek, that I had encountered the most wonderful story imaginable, I didn’t know if I could write it, but I was thinking of having a try.

As that black coffee injected me with false wakefulness, I narrated everything. I opened my new briefcase—that was part of the story too—and showed them some of the Schindler documents. It was only later in life that I came to appreciate my wife’s acceptance of my projects. Judy was not a cat’s paw. She had robust Irish convicts in her background, and her elder brother had flown eighty-four missions before the age of twenty-three over Europe in the Second World War, and been multiply decorated. But it’s worth reiterating that she had never seen my profession, as economically perilous as it was, as an odd one. I showed them the list. Judy and the girls were captivated by it, its bureaucratic form, the fact that there were names on it belonging to people I had now met and spoken to at length.