Where Are They Buried? (99 page)

Soon, Oskar had convinced officials to allow him to house part of the Plazow labor camp in his factory by deeming the detainees “necessary” workers. The old were registered as twenty years younger and the children were registered as adults. Lawyers, doctors, and artists were registered as metal workers and mechanics, all so they might survive.

By the fall of 1944 the Germans were frantically trying to complete their extermination of Poland’s Jews before the Russians arrived to liberate them, and it seemed certain that Schindler’s Jews’ time had run out. But instead of giving them up, Oskar desperately exerted his influence on contacts from Krakow to Warsaw to Berlin in an effort to spare his factory and, most importantly, his workers. And, where no one would have believed it possible, he succeeded. Oskar was granted permission to move the whole of his factory to occupied Bruennlitz, Czechoslovakia, and to take all his workers with him. The 1,098 workers who had been written on Schindler’s list of employees avoided the fate of countless others who were sent to the Nazi gas chambers.

In May 1945 it was all over. The Russians moved into Bruennlitz, but in an ironic twist, though Schindler’s Jews were now free, Schindler, himself a Nazi, became a fugitive. With his wife and a handful of workers, Schindler fled to Argentina, where he lived until 1958 before returning to Germany. He spent the remaining years of his life dividing his time between Germany and
Israel, where he was honored and taken care of by his “
Schindlerjuden
”—Schindler Jews. Pressed for an explanation of his heroism, Schindler later offered, “I am the conscience of all those who knew something, but did nothing.”

In 1962, Schindler was recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial located on the Hill of Remembrance near Mount Herzl on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. Along the avenue of trees where “Righteous Gentiles” are remembered, he was invited to plant a carob tree and, in 1967 when Schindler finally planted the tree, it was adorned with a Talmudic inscription: “Whoever saves a single soul, it is as if he saved the whole world.”

In 1993 Steven Spielberg directed an adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s award-winning 1982 book,
Schindler’s Ark
, into a film that riveted audiences and popularized the story of Oskar Schindler.

Schindler died of liver failure in Hildersheim, Germany, at the age of 66. He was buried in the Catholic section of the Mount Zion Cemetery in Jerusalem. Located atop Mount Zion, the cemetery and grave are easy to locate.

FEBRUARY 28, 1906 – JUNE 20, 1947

Though Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel didn’t invent Las Vegas (and, contrary to popular belief, he didn’t even build its first casino), the Las Vegas narrative will be forever linked to the Bugsy Siegel legend.

Beginning around 1920, Bugsy and his childhood pal Meyer Lansky headed a small Brooklyn gang that specialized in shakedowns and bookmaking and, after moving into bootlegging with the help of Lansky’s business acumen, they amassed a minor fortune. The lucrative liquor revenue stream dried up when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, and Lansky (who by this time had emerged as the boss) sought to help replace the income by expanding into Nevada, where gambling had been recently legalized.

In 1945, Bugsy, who for the past five years had been establishing a new arm of the Lansky crime syndicate in California, was tapped to develop a casino operation in the dusty, two-track, railroad junction town of Las Vegas. Bugsy tried to buy a couple of existing gambling joints in the downtown area and, failing that, eventually bought a controlling interest in a venture headed by Billy Wilkerson, who had a vision of a luxurious gaming paradise in the desert six miles outside of town. Wilkerson soon ran out of
money and was pushed out, and the Flamingo Hotel and Casino became Bugsy’s baby.

Bugsy had estimated that it would cost just over a million dollars to build the lavish facility, but the costs inevitably escalated and Lansky was forced to seek fellow racketeer investors. The price tag topped $6 million before the hotel section was completed, and Lansky’s investor buddies were convinced that Bugsy had skimmed money from the construction funds. They voted for a contract on Bugsy’s life. However, Lansky recommended that the execution of his childhood friend be stayed until after the casino opened. If Bugsy’s desert dream proved as successful as had been promised, there would be ways for him to repay the money. If not, the contract could be fulfilled.

On the day after Christmas 1946, the Flamingo opened and flopped. A tremendous West Coast storm grounded flights that Bugsy had chartered for his Hollywood friends and, because there were yet no rooms to stay in, regular customers who trekked to the gala shortly left. Lansky’s cronies again called for Bugsy’s execution, but Lansky was convinced that the casino would become profitable and won his old friend another stay. Meanwhile, Bugsy remained ignorant of the ongoing scheme and devoted all of his waking hours to turning the operation around.

The Flamingo Hotel was completed in March 1947, and within two months the business was in the black—but by then it was too late. On a June evening, Bugsy was reading the evening papers on the sofa of his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills home when, at about 10:30 p.m., eight bullets flew through the living-room window. Five of them hit their marks, and Bugsy was killed.

Even though his gangland slaying was front-page news, Bugsy’s funeral was attended by only five people, all of them relatives. Neither his old buddy Meyer Lansky nor any of his Hollywood acquaintances, not even his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, made time for the service.

At 41, Bugsy was buried at Hollywood Forever in Hollywood, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
This cemetery is easy to find at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd., just west of Highway 101.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, turn right after the information booth, then make a left and go all the way to the end of the drive, parking in front of the Beth Olam Mausoleum. Walk into the mausoleum and turn right at the second hall, which is
labeled “M2.” Bugsy’s crypt is about halfway down this hall, on the left-hand side, third row from the bottom, Number 3087.

Say what you will about Bugsy Siegel, but he must have done something right. God knows I’ve seen a lot of celebrity resting places, but his crypt is the first I’ve ever seen peppered with lipstick impressions.

The Las Vegas that Bugsy knew doesn’t really exist anymore, and in 1993 the last of the original Flamingo buildings were torn down. Today, the only homage to Bugsy is a plaque in the garden near the Flamingo’s pool.

1820 (?) – MARCH 10, 1913

Harriet Tubman’s ancestors had been brought from Africa in shackles to slave over the broad farmlands of eastern Maryland, but Harriet escaped to the freedom of Pennsylvania in 1849 after learning that she was to be sold to a slave-owner in the Deep South. Upon reaching Philadelphia, where Harriet later reflected, “I was free, but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom,” she was directed to the abolitionist William Still, who ran the General Vigilance Committee. Still disclosed to Harriet the existence of the underground railroad, a loose network of safe houses maintained by antislavery sympathizers that constituted a route to freedom in the North. For the next sixteen years, until the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 freed blacks from indenture, Harriet made at least eighteen trips to the South and led some 300 slaves, including seven members of her family, along the underground railroad, becoming its most
celebrated “conductor.” By Harriet’s own admission, “I never run my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Harriet spent two of the Civil War years in South Carolina working for the Union Army as a nurse and helping blacks organize for their impending freedom. After the war, she settled in Auburn, New York, where the state government assisted her in acquiring a home. In 1896, when she was well into her 70s, Harriet acquired additional acreage and established the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged, which provided shelter and services for the indigent freed blacks.

Harriet’s last two years were spent as an in-patient of her own home for the aged, and she died there of pneumonia.

At about 93, Harriet was buried at Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-90, take Exit 40 and follow Route 34 south for nine miles into the center of Auburn. Turn right onto Genesse Street and, after a half-mile, turn left onto Fort Street, which leads directly to the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery by turning right immediately before the stone fort building. Follow the drive along the cemetery’s chain-link fence perimeter and, a hundred feet after the drive turns hard to the left, look to the left for a big spruce tree. Just in front of the spruce tree, Harriet’s gravestone is flanked by a pair of shrubs.

If you’re interested, the Harriet Tubman home is now a museum, just 1½ miles farther south on Route 34.

APRIL 16, 1867 – MAY 30, 1912

AUGUST 19, 1871 – JANUARY 30, 1948

In the late 1800s Wilbur and Orville Wright took an interest in flying, which at that time only meant gliding, and within a short time they read all that had been written on the subject. Disagreeing with the manner in which most flying-machine tinkerers were approaching the problem, Wilbur started anew and defined what he felt were the essential elements of a flying machine. To wit, it would need wings to provide lift, a power source for propulsion, and a system of control. Of all the early aviators, Wilbur was the first to recognize that a flying machine must be controlled in all three axes of rotation, now known as pitch, roll, and yaw, and it seems that simple abstraction was his key advantage. This, and their dogged perseverance, led the brothers to build the first successful flying machine.

By 1902 the brothers had built a controllable glider, but to graduate to a self-propelled flying machine they’d need a lightweight internal combustion engine, which did not exist. Undaunted, within a year they had built a four-cylinder, twelve-horsepower engine in their bicycle shop and fitted it with a propeller whose design was based on the same aeronautical principle as their wings. Orville and Wilbur understood that a propeller is essentially a rotating wing.

In the autumn of 1903 the brothers’ flying machine was complete. They shipped it to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and, after winning a coin toss, Wilbur attempted to fly it. He stalled the engine on takeoff and caused some minor damage, so the next attempt would be Orville’s. Three days later, on December 17, 1903, Orville Wright did for twelve seconds what no person had ever done before. He flew.

After two more years of fine tuning their Flyer, they could stay aloft for as long as they liked, or until their fuel ran out, and their 1905 Wright Flyer became the world’s first practical airplane.
Surprisingly, their airplane was not an immediate commercial success. The Wrights contacted the United States War Department, as well as foreign governments, and offered to sell them a flying machine, but they were turned down time and time again. Government bureaucrats thought they were crackpots, and others thought that if two Ohio bicycle mechanics could build an airplane, they could do it themselves. But the Wrights persisted and finally, in 1908, they sold their first aircraft to the United States government.

Unfortunately, Wilbur never witnessed the tremendous strides made in aviation over the next decades, as he died in 1912 of typhoid fever. He was 45. Orville lived to be 76, expiring of a heart attack while fixing the doorbell at his home in 1948.

Both lifelong bachelors, the brothers are buried together at Woodland Cemetery in Dayton, Ohio.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-75, take Exit 52 and follow Route 35 east to the Jefferson Street exit. Turn south on Jefferson, which will become Warren Street and then Brown Street. After about a half-mile, turn left onto Woodland Avenue and the cemetery is a short distance ahead.