The Other Schindlers (20 page)
Read The Other Schindlers Online
Authors: Agnes Grunwald-Spier
137
. John Schoen, telephone conversation with the author, 14 March 2001.
138
. Ibid., 17 January 2001.
139
. John Schoen’s notes about Suze, sent to the author with a letter, 20 May 2001.
140
. Ed van Rijswijk, notes of 1 January and e-mail of 2 January 2010.
141
. Dutch Famine of 1944, http://everything2.com/title/Dutch+Famine+of+1944, accessed 2 January 2010.
142
. Ria Sanders, notes of 2 April and letter of 8 April 2002 sent to the author.
143
. Richard Evans, ‘I want Spielberg to tell how we hid little Suze from Nazis’ in
Wales on Sunday
, 12 September 1999, p. 8.
144
. John’s notes, 20 May 2001, p. 1.
145
. Richard Evans, ‘I want Spielberg to tell how we hid little Suze from Nazis’, p. 8.
146
. Conversation with Josie Martin in London, 17 November 2003.
147
. John Schoen, telephone conversation with the author, 14 March 2001.
148
. John’s notes, 20 May 2001.
149
. John Schoen, ‘Life Under the Nazis’ in the
Cardiff Post
, 15 May 1986.
150
. Ed van Rijswijk, notes of 1 January 2010.
151
. Richard Evans, ‘I want Spielberg to tell how we hid little Suze from Nazis’, p. 9.
152
. Arnold Brown, telephone conversation with the author, 22 November 2001.
153
. Peter Schoen, notes to the author and e-mail dated 2 January 2010.
154
. Peter Schoen, telephone conversation with the author, 17 December 2009.
155
. Van Rijswijk, notes of 1 January 2010.
156
. Van Rijswijk, e-mail to the author, 2 January 2010.
157
. Ibid., 8 January 2010.
158
. Bert Jan Flim,
Saving the Children: History of the Organized Effort to Rescue Jewish Children in the Netherlands
1942–1945
(Bethesda, Maryland: CDL Press), pp. 40–2; sent by Ed van Rijswijk, 8 January 2010. Bert Flim’s family was involved in these Resistance groups.
159
. Arleen Kennedy, e-mail to the author, 4 January 2010 (14:46).
160
. Van Rijswijk, notes of 1 January 2010.
161
. Arleen Kennedy, e-mails of 4 January 2010 (14:46, 15:14 and 16:08).
Oskar Schindler (1908–74)
, who became known across the world through Stephen Spielberg’s 1994 film, did not live to see his surname become a generic term for non-Jewish rescuers in the Holocaust. Other rescuers are referred to as Schindlers of various types: Varian Fry was described as the ‘Artists’ Schindler’;
1
Henk Huffener was called ‘Surrey’s own Oscar Schindler’;
2
Chiune Sugihara was described as ‘Japan’s Schindler’;
3
Dr Ho was called the ‘Oskar Schindler of China’;
4
and the British Ambassador to Lisbon in 1940, Sir Ronald Hugh Campbell, has been called the ‘British Schindler’.
5
However, Oskar’s complex personality and motives exemplify many of the aspects of all rescuers and therefore a study of his role as a rescuer is necessary before other rescuers’ motives are discussed.
At the end of the war, Oskar Schindler wrote about his efforts to move his factory, together with his 1,000 Jewish employees, from Krakow to Brinlitz in the Sudetenland. Hoffman, the owner of the factory, objected and as a good Nazi tried every possible way of stopping the transfer. ‘He went to the Gestapo, to the Landrat, to the district governor, urging that Schindler not be allowed to fill the area with his Jews, who are liable to bring smallpox, attract the
attention
of enemy bombers etc.’ But Schindler succeeded in getting permission from SS Headquarters:
It is impossible for a person from the outside to imagine how hard I had to work before I succeeded in carrying out my decision to transfer the Jews, before I saw the 1,000 people lodged in their new place. The general confusion which reigned at that period, the bureaucracy, the envy and the malevolence of various people brought me at times to the brink of despair. I was sustained, however, by a burning desire to save the Jews, some of whom had become close, loyal friends of mine during the preceding 5–6 years, from the crematoriums of Auschwitz or some other place, after
I had succeeded in protecting them for so many years, and at the cost of so much personal effort, from the clutches of the S.S.
6
Oskar Schindler was not a religious person but he was humane. Victor Dortheimer, No 385 on Schindler’s list, one of the Jews who got to know Oskar best, said he knew Schindler would look after him from the first time he met him: ‘It wasn’t anything he said – it was just that he was polite to me, and spoke to me like I was a normal human being. None of the other Germans treated me like a human being.’
7
Victor believed Schindler’s motives for helping the Jews were his sense of adventure and morality: ‘He was always a little bit drunk and always with a beautiful woman. He was a gentleman gangster, but I think when he saw what was happening to the Jews he knew he had to help us.’
Victor was a decorator and was chosen to decorate SS Commandant Amon Goethe’s villa, and was then seconded to paint in Schindler’s factory. He got to know Schindler as they sat drinking vodka in Oskar’s flat. They exchanged
confidences
and Victor asked him for favours for his co-workers. Victor described him as a skilful wheeler-dealer. ‘He made a fortune which he spent on protecting us, his Jews. If the Germans had found out, he would have been shot.’
8
In 1995 Victor Dortheimer was the subject of a television documentary in which Schindler’s actions were described. He had saved, among others, two women from Auschwitz who had Victor’s surname – one was his wife Helena and the other was his brother’s wife – they were Nos 28 and 29 on the list. Victor said the factory was a huge deception. It did not produce anything:
We did not produce even one cartridge. The company acted as a camouflage to protect us. What is more, Schindler allowed us to listen to BBC on the car radio in the garage. We knew what was happening on the front even earlier than our German guards. If they had caught us, we would have been shot.
9
Another perspective was offered by Herbert Steinhouse, a Canadian journalist, who knew Oskar in the immediate post-war period in Germany. He had met a neighbour of the Schindlers from Svitavy,
10
Schindler’s hometown, whose father had been the local Rabbi. He told Steinhouse:
This fellow said that as a man who was a Sudetenland Fascist, was a member of the Henlein party which was later absorbed into the Greater Germany’s Nazi party, Schindler apparently had been a true believer in everything but one. That was the racial policy. He had been friendly with several of the Sudetenland Jews. He’d speak with his neighbor and the neighbor’s father, the Rabbi. They’d talk about the sophisticated Yiddish literature in Poland and Czechoslovakia, about the folk
tales and the mythology and the anecdotes and the ancient Jewish traditions of the villages of eastern Poland, or Moldova.
11
Herbert kept a record of meetings in Munich in 1948 with Oskar and Emilie Schindler. The subsequent article was only published in 1994. He speculated on Schindler’s motives, noting that Ifo Zwicker, whom Schindler had also saved, knew him from their hometown: ‘As a Zwittau citizen I never would have
considered
him capable of all these wonderful deeds. Before the war, you know, everyone here called him Gauner (swindler or sharper).’
12
Oskar himself used a specific German word to describe himself –
‘maßlos’
– which means literally ‘without moderation or restraint, but it has the additional connotation of the presence of an irresistable inner force that drives a person beyond what is
considered
acceptable behavior’.
13
Schindler was a good judge of character – he chose a future Israeli Supreme Court judge to produce forged documents. Moshe Bejski described Schindler ‘warts and all’:
Schindler was a drunkard, Schindler was a womanizer. His relations with his wife were rather bad. Each time he had not one but several girlfriends. After the war, he was quite unable to run a normal business …
You had to take him as he was. Schindler was a very complex person. Schindler was a good human being. He was against evil. He acted spontaneously. He was adventurous, someone who takes risks, but I am not sure he enjoyed taking them. He did things because people asked him to do them. He loved children. He saw all the children and grandchildren of those he had rescued as his own family. He was very, very sensitive. If Schindler had been a normal man, he would not have done what he did. Everything he did put him in danger …
One day in the late 1960s I asked Schindler why he did all this. His answer was very simple: ‘I knew the people who worked for me. When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings …’ That was Schindler.
14
The psychotherapist Luitgard Wundheiler wrote a long article about Schindler’s moral development during the Holocaust in 1986, long before Spielberg’s film. She herself is of interest because her father was a judge in Germany. In 1936, in common with all German civil servants, he was asked to join the Nazi Party by signing a loyalty oath. He discussed the issue with his 14-year-old daughter Luitgard, and explained the possible consequences which included his death. In fact, although he did not sign and was dismissed as a judge, he got a job as a court messenger for the duration of the war and they survived living in poverty. Fifty years later her article discussed how Schindler changed from being an
impulsive and opportunistic helper, to a compassionate person and finally a principled altruist, and also from a man whose concern was limited to people he knew, to many he did not know.
15
She refers to Oskar’s self-knowledge of his impulsiveness, again in response to Bejski, who asked: ‘Why did you do what you did, why did you risk your life for us?’ Schindler replied:
If you would cross the street, and there was a dog in danger of being run over by a car, wouldn’t you try to help?’ This reply is revealing. Schindler apparently thought of his rescue actions as direct and human responses to the sight of suffering; he thought them so normal that it did not occur to him that they needed an
explanation
; hence the challenging question at the end: ‘wouldn’t you try to help?’ One almost senses a certain impatience at being asked something so obvious. There is also an endearing innocence in this reply, as if, even after the Holocaust, he still did not realize that most people do not try to help another creature in danger, if by doing so they endanger themselves.
16
This view is corroborated to some extent by a woman called Ingrid, who was saved by Schindler. She claimed: ‘he could not take the suffering. He did not expect it would come to what it did.’ Her husband added:
Look, he was a Nazi, but he was working for the Abwehr [military intelligence] and they despised the SS. But you know, he made a lot of money; he could have taken it all. Every cent he made, he put in to save these people. He had nothing at the end.
17
Some years later, Judge Bejski added: ‘Schindler was different for two reasons. His exploits were on a very large scale, and he carried them on for a very long time.’
18
In that long time he was supported by his wife Emilie, who was shrewder about the Nazis than Oskar. She later wrote that she tried to persuade him that the Nazis were planning ‘to impose National Socialism by force of arms and ruthless domination … But my protests to Oskar, repeated over and over again, were of no use. By the time he realized what was happening, the war had already claimed most of its victims.’
19
Schindler had married Emilie in 1928 when they were both very young – he was 20 and she was 21. She was educated in a convent where her best friend was Jewish. The marriage seems to have been unhappy from the start – perhaps matters were not helped by the fact that they lived with Oskar’s drunken father and invalid mother.
20
There were no children; however, she was extremely
supportive
to Schindler in his work to help Jews, even though he was not particularly loyal to her:
I saw these unfortunate Jewish people reduced to slavery, treated like animals deprived of everything – including the use of underwear, regardless of the season, under their uniforms. Seeing them that way, with all their possessions and even their families taken away from them, and without the right to a dignified death, I could not but feel sorrow for their terrible fate.
21
The incident of the Golleschau/Goleszów Jews demonstrates not only the
barbarity
of the Nazis but also Emilie and Oskar’s courage and humanity in dealing with such a horror.
Emilie wrote her memoir to counteract the way her husband ‘was bathed in all the light that history accorded him and I feel that is not entirely fair. I am doing this not for him but for the sake of truth.’
22
She gives an insight into their motivation:
Steven Spielberg’s film, Thomas Keneally’s book and all the rivers of ink spilled fifty years after the facts depict my husband as a hero for this century. This is not true. He was not a hero, and neither was I. We only did what we had to. In times of war our souls wander aimlessly adrift. I was one of those fleeting shadows affected by
atrocity
, by all its misery and vehemence, suspicion and contradiction, which have left an indelible mark in my memory.
23
Her book concluded with a simple statement:
The moral of my story is simple: a fellow human being always has the right to life. Like so many others during the war, I think I have experienced in my own flesh that ‘Love one another’ is not an empty phrase but a maxim worth living by, even in the worst of circumstances. The descendants of those on Schindler’s list have shown this to be true; they are living, having children, remembering.
24
In 2001 Emilie undertook a lawsuit to obtain the original copy of Schindler’s list.
25
She died that same year.
Steinhouse’s article rested in a trunk for forty years, because in the immediate post-war period no one wanted to publish it. When
Schindler’s List
was released in December 1993, he dug it out and it was snapped up. He brought it up to date with Schindler’s departure for Argentina in the summer of 1949 funded by an American Jewish charity (JDC). Schindler was treated generously, with enough money (around $15,000) to start a fur business, but it failed and then he tried being a farmer but that was unsuccessful too. ‘He was optimistic and hopeful – as he always was.’ According to his wife, ‘in Argentina he was just lying in bed’, though he got up in the afternoons to see his girlfriend. He owed 500,000 pesos when he left Emilie in Argentina in 1958 and returned to Germany. She paid the
debt off herself and was left with nothing.
26
In Germany, too, he failed and again lost his benefactors’ money – this time in a cement factory. His wife said he was ‘a salesman, a dreamer and a very bad honest businessman’:
He knew how to play the black market and he had known how to become a millionaire. Under wartime conditions of bribery and gifts he made money. But as a straightforward entrepreneur he apparently made a mess of things, in Argentina and back in Germany.
27
His story was told briefly on German television in the early 1960s. He was living in Frankfurt and someone recognised him in the street and spat into his face calling him a ‘Jew kisser’. Although Konrad Adenauer, West Germany’s first Chancellor, gave him a medal and a small pension he was miserable. He lived in one room near the station in Frankfurt and was still living on handouts from the
Schindlerjuden
(Schindler’s Jews). Although he was recognised by Yad Vashem and feted by Jews in Israel when he visited each year, he was drinking too much. He died in 1974, aged only 66, of ‘poverty and alcoholism’ according to Steinhouse. Unfortunately for him, this was six years before Thomas Keneally entered Poldek Pfefferberg’s luggage shop in Beverly Hills in 1980 and heard the story of a lifetime.
