Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  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.

  Photo Insert Two

  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.

  A Titsch picture of German and Ukranian soldiers marching through Plaszów concentration camp.

  The camp was rather chillingly re-created for the film Schindler’s List on the site of the nearby quarry, where, during the Holocaust, Jewish prisoners from Plaszów were put to work.

  The all-too-real Plaszów camp commandant, Amon Goeth, on the balcony of his residence overlooking the camp. From here he would fire random shots at prisoners with his sniper rifle.

  Amon Goeth, a nightmare figure to prisoners, fully uniformed and mounted.

  Majola, Goeth’s mistress, on the balcony of his residence at Plaszów.

  Historic photos like those on the facing page allowed Spielberg and actor Ralph Fiennes to re-create with some authenticity the brutal character of Goeth. Spielberg spoke to Tom of how Fiennes, in his uniform as Goeth, was embarrassed when one of the Jewish women survivors visiting the set had backed away from him on trembling legs.

  The film reenactment of the scene in which Goeth’s house-and-stable boy, Lisiek, is shot dead by his master’s sniper rifle for supposedly mishandling a saddle.

  Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth.

  Goeth’s residence as re-created for the film Schindler’s List.

  A still from the film of Jews at a checkpoint during an Aktion in the ghetto in Kraków. Those with work permits were allowed to work at Oskar’s and other factories, while many others—children, the aged and those without labor documents—were gassed in carbon monoxide chambers at the Belzec camp.

  The scene in the film in which the Schindler women are mistakenly taken to Auschwitz. They are later rescued as a result of Schindler’s intervention and taken to Brinnlitz to work at his factory.

  From the film, the women arriving at Schindler’s factory after their Auschwitz ordeal.

  The famous speech made by Schindler (Liam Neeson) in front of his Jewish factory workers and the SS garrison on the eve of Allied liberation, appealing to the German soldiers to ignore orders to exterminate all prisoners.

  Schindler (Neeson) breaks down as he bids farewell to his factory workers, distraught that he was not able to save more Jews. In reality his camp was already crowded beyond its authorized limits.

  Tom in front of Spielberg’s specially built set of the Plaszów concentration camp. Tom is standing on a re-creation of the path made from the gravestone fragments taken in the war from the nearby Jerozolimska Synagogue, and used by the Germans to pave the entrance to the camp.

  Tom in 1993 at 4 Lipowa Street, where Schindler had his office, works and, ultimately, the barracks of DEF, Deutsche Email Fabrik (German Enamel Company), in Kraków.

  Tom and his daughter Jane at the monument of Chujowa Górka (Prick Hill), originally the site of an ancient Austro-Hungarian hill fort used by the SS as a screened enclosure in which to slaughter and bury Jews, partisans and people living on forged documents. As the Russians approached Kraków, the bodies were dug up by the SS and burned in a horrifying attempt to destroy the evidence of their atrocities.

  Officers of the Kraków fire department making “snow” outside a local parish church. It was for a scene (not used in the film) in which Schindler asks a priest to sell him church ground for the Goleszów cattle-truck people to be buried as Jews.

  Sixteen

  * * *

  Whenever we left for the United States, I was aware that my father’s health was declining, even though he was only in his mid-eighties and thus considered himself young. He profoundly disbelieved in the medical process, and so all medical and hospital ritual was an agony to him. He had got the idea, perhaps from his Irish parents, that whiskey toddies for congestive illness, and methylated spirits and friar’s balsam applied to abrasions or wounds, were God’s own pharmacy and sovereign cures. Despite hip problems he was robust and drank his whiskey in the evenings, commenting with a vigorous gift for language on politics, world and Australian. He was beloved by all his grandchildren, for whom his interest, his willingness to encourage, and his tendency to sing profane World War II ditties were limitless.

  There were no signs of imminent trouble for him, however, when we returned to UCI in September. In the previous Californian winter we had often visited Death Valley, when there would be snow on Dante’s View and dry, temperate air down in the valley’s big sump below sea level. We would drive out there on
Friday evening, and return on Sunday night. I had to take work with me, because I was that sort of obsessive fellow, and in any case my graduate workshop was normally on Mondays. But what always astounded us was that at Bad Water Basin, one looked up from 282 feet below sea level to snowy Telescope Peak, 11,000 feet up in the Panamint Mountains to the west.

  One Sunday morning we were out at Death Valley when we got a call from Australia. It was my brother’s opinion, one which as a doctor he was competent to make, that my father was dying in the Repatriation Hospital, the hospital for war veterans, and I should come home. I would need to catch that all-too-familiar plane that night from Los Angeles to Sydney. Looking at the map, I attempted to drive out of Death Valley via the shortest route—Emigrant Canyon Road—and to our amazement, in the pleasant hills just beyond Stovepipe Wells and its dunes, we were stopped by snow, and had to retrace our way back to the more accustomed north-south route, the California 374.

  The threat to my father’s life passed—he recovered as he always seemed to. There was a promise of his immortality in the way he recovered from illness, and in the racy lines he fed us as he was recuperating. In the Repatriation Hospital the morning after I got back, I was delighted to hear him swear at the trouble he was having trying to connect with a bedpan.

  “Get in there, you little bastard,” he urged. It was a symptom of survival that he began to speak in profane terms again. I commiserated with him from beyond the curtain. “Oh,” he said, “the useless bloody thing’s like a baby concertina!”

  One tale he had told me about the war was of the time he and a dozen or so other men were traveling somewhere in the Indian Ocean on a Norwegian freighter. The Japanese had just entered the war, and at night he and the others would sleep on the deck in life preservers outside the radio shack, listening to distress calls coming in from nearby ships being downed by Japanese submarines and, under orders of radio silence, being unable to answer, and waiting to be torpedoed themselves. The torpedo did not come. The child in me thought they would never make the bullet that could get my father.

  Steven was about to make Jurassic Park, even in the teeth of Poldek’s disapproval. “Stop playing around with dinosaurs, Steven. I promise you, you’ll get an Oscar for Oskar.” At a further meeting before heading off to film his dinosaurs, Steven had let me know that the English actor Ralph Fiennes had been bulking up for the role of sensual, brutal Amon Goeth. At first sight, Fiennes seemed better suited to playing, say, the tragic young poet Rupert Brooke in a British film about World War I, but Spielberg had seen the possibility of coldness and menace in those gentle eyes. Steven also very warmly invited me to visit the set whenever I could. To just let Amblin know.

  To a director, having the writer of the original work on a film set is rather like having a mother-in-law on the honeymoon. I feared that I would be a bit of a spare tire in Kraków, but there was a powerful attraction to the invitation. I began to clear a space between my obligations to UCI. As for Poldek, he was going too, as the hub of the crowd of survivors whom Spielberg welcomed to the set, or whom he would film at Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem. Secretly, Poldek did not feel well, and it was something to do with his heart again. He would need to go to the hospital soon, but he kept it pretty quiet. He still had a fair amount of stress from his business, too. “I’m still in a two-way squeeze,” he told me once, because the big chains in the nearby Beverly Center made the small dealers he supplied close down, often owing him money. By the late 1980s, he had made a decision to close down the Handbag Studio. His genial son, Freddy, stuck by him in the warehouse side of the business, and though Poldek still showed energetic concern for the Schindler project, at one meeting he cried, “The business is not what it was. People don’t pay what they owe like they did when I first came out here.”

  Personal finances are like people’s personal health, crucial and tragic to the sufferer but tedious to the listener. In Australia, many thought I was a radical for my republican stance. In fact there was as much petit bourgeois in me as in any lucky working-class boy. I thought it was time to secure my own old age, but due to normal mug-punter’s unwise attempts at investment, I was not traveling too well financially myself. The film did not seem to offer any certain deliverance from that, since some thought of it as Spielberg’s folly. I was relieved, therefore, to hear from my American agent, Amanda Urban, that International Creative Management, the company in which she was something of a fabled literary agent, had a lecture department.

  The agent who managed lectures for a number of writers and quasi-writers, including General Schwarzkopf, hero of the Gulf War, was Carol Bruckner, who liked to say she was as “Jewish as Paddy’s pigs.” She was a splendid woman, somewhere between thirty-five and forty-five, with a rich New York sense of humor, along with suspicions of the way Zionism had gone at the end of the twentieth century. I would find that she looked after her lecturers like a mother. Every possible convenience and comfort was placed in their way, so if there was a doubt about what awaited them, she simply canceled. She did not have to cancel often, because those she dealt with knew what she expected for her boys and girls.

  It was the lecture circuit, after-dinner and occasional speaking all over the United States, from Detroit to Louisiana, which would in the end pay off all my debts. I would simply talk. Poldek was often the hero of the lecture. When the inevitable query arose during question time—“Have you met Steven Spielberg?”—I was able to tell with mock grief the tale of my dismissal as screenwriter.

  I delighted in and enjoyed it, and with Carol Bruckner in charge, I did not face too many unexpected ambushes or demands. At a well-known liberal arts college in the Midwest, Poldek and I did our old double-act to a basketball stadium full of people, and we signed copies of the Schindler book until two a.m., Poldek inscribing every book with his extensive legend about humanity man to man, and still signing himself Professor Magister Leopold Pfefferberg.

  The year 1992 ended without any huge sense of anticipation that the film would grasp the world’s attention. Poldek was the only man of certainty in all this. When he went on predicting the Academy Award, everyone indulged him and chuckled. Steven had been editing Jurassic Park, and its release was the sensation Universal wanted it to be. By contrast, the marketing budget for Schindler was minuscule.

  After the release of Schindler’s List, ill-informed or anti-Semitic people would opine that this was exactly the sort of film you’d expect from Hollywood. After all, the Jews out there pushed the idea of the Holocaust against all the evidence of such scholars as David Irving! So naturally they’d make a movie like this! If that were so, they were very, very slow to do so, and intended to be very wary in promoting it. Poldek asked our old friend Sid Sheinberg, with whom he had been in regular contact since our lunch ten years past, about its release. “We’ll have to see about that, Poldek,” said Sid. Poldek told me, “Thomas, they’re not getting ready at all.” Misia, more composed, declared, “Poldek thinks people are going to want to see this story as if it were a big adventure with dinosaurs. He can’t understand that people might not want to see what happened to us.”

  By Christmas 1992, my father’s health had got much better. The Australian summer helped. He sat on the balcony of his flat and soaked up the sun. In California, I had almost finished the novel about my grandparents in their general store in northern New South Wales. But first, Woman of the Inner Sea came out, a book of mine based on a tale I’d heard some years earlier from an American woman, about the loss of her children, but set in Sydney and the Australian bush. I was doing a series of interviews, and Malachy McCourt, the ultimately famous Frank McCourt’s brother, visited us briefly in Orange County with the Irish film director Jim Sheridan. We kept some sedate Orange County waiters up late one night with a medley of disreputable Irish and Australian songs. Malachy told me that if Woman was ever to be made into a film, he wanted to play the not-so-Reverend Frank, the heroine’s starting-price bookmaker and priest-uncle. Woman of the Inner Sea loo
ked to me a pretty long chance as a film. But weren’t they all?

  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.