Searching for Schindler

by Thomas Keneally

  In the film’s narrative, Oskar’s career developed effortlessly from these beginnings; the filmmakers lacked the leisure to explore Emilie’s own motivations in detail. Under the necessities of editing, the latter part of the film, in which the story of Schindler’s second camp in Brinnlitz is told, seemed inevitably foreshortened. The fact that the camp produced no munitions could, on film, tell only half the story. The other half was that the camp operated entirely and profitably on the black market.

  The Schindler film was the first Holocaust film up to that time, with the possible exception of Europa Europa, to deliver the viewer safe at the end. By comparison with Schindler’s List, the later Life Is Beautiful seemed to me nothing but an extended and fairly tasteless joke. If the Nazis could be survived by looking at them under the rubric of comedy, a race with a gift for comedy would have done it and survived.

  The performances in the Schindler film were such as to make me forget that I had once broken bread, or the seals on bottles of rough Bulgarian red wine, with these folk. I felt that the emphatically ambiguous Schindler of the early part of the film was exactly the Schindler Spielberg needed to create, stressing his opportunism strongly to make the point that this man had not come to Kraków in the first place to save anyone. Spielberg once told me that movies were required to take account of the bladders of filmgoers. His did not, but it was almost as if his film had the power to suspend human limits of concentration for the time it ran.

  Late in the film, on the point of departure from his prisoners, Schindler speaks of how he might have saved more had he thought to sell a badge or a Mercedes. The reality was that, as many of his former prisoners testified, they were already concerned that the camp had reached full capacity—he had taken in the Goleszów people, for example. And although the departure scene made infallible movie sense, it seemed to undermine his own rationality, as if the idea of saving more prisoners had only just come to him then, in the last hours of war. I later mentioned this reservation to the Time journalist, when he asked me what I thought of the film, and he made rather a lot of it. Overall, it was obvious that the picture was an extraordinary piece of film craft, and that it took people as close to the reality of regimented racism and its results as one could without losing a mass audience. Indeed, it was not until the lights came up that I remembered where we were, that we were in a Washington cinema toward noon on an overcast Monday, with my daughter whispering, “Wasn’t that great?” I had not remembered that once I wrote this material as a book. The length of time had distanced me, made me forget much. Now it was all back.

  I had enjoyed in a particular, personal way seeing those I had interviewed long ago making their way past Schindler’s grave, laying their stones there, and Mrs. Schindler with the actress who played her, my friend Caroline Goodall. The survivors who had been young when I wrote the book were now middle-aged, and the middle-aged now elderly, and for some inexpressible reason I found the passage of time, and how it had left them, touching and triumphant despite all the blood and despoliation of the Second World War. That morning I was at the same time both daunted and excited that I would see the film again soon. Indeed, that very evening.

  Altogether, the fact that I had been permitted to view the film prior to the premiere seemed to me a symbol of how casually generous Spielberg could be; for all he knew, I might have denounced the film beforehand and produced a small scandal, which would have affected the film neither one way nor the other ultimately, but which could have been fatuously wounding in the short term. In any case, I could not help but be cheered that he knew that would not happen.

  Nineteen

  * * *

  That night we were all back at the same cinema, in suits. Our workaday look acknowledged the frightful deaths, the years of terror that had gone into making the tale. The same mixture of dizziness and dread possessed me. Nonetheless, I reenacted with Branko Lustig the early scene of the movie in which Liam Neeson hands Branko a roll of money, offering him a fold of dollars while Judy took a picture. The president and his wife came and shook hands with everyone vigorously and in rapid order, speaking in low tones. Though not always popular in America, he was much admired in the outer world and extremely popular in Australia. Hillary Clinton mentioned to me a book Nan Talese had sent her—Woman of the Inner Sea—for which she claimed an enthusiasm. The Clintons were clearly close friends of Spielberg, who was an energetic supporter of their broader politics. At the end of the screening, people did not know whether to clap or gasp. Once the applause began, it became a frenzy.

  It fell to Judy, the great-granddaughter of an Irish political prisoner and a Limerick shoplifter, to approach the manager, standing in place to bow to the departing president in the quickly emptying foyer, and ask what was going to happen to the film poster in the display case at the front of the cinema. He said calmly, “I just take it down for now. Would you like it?” Hence, as an afterthought, the Keneallys acquired that premiere poster.

  Then we all went back to the hotel. We sat reflectively over some wine. No post-premiere bash had been staged to mute the impact. Steven Spielberg signed a copy of the book for me. Jerry Molen spoke softly. He had seen many nights like this. Murmuring reverentially, we relived the black and white polarities of terror and deliverance, and the grays of ghetto-style and camp squalor. Even by now, midnight on Monday, November 26, 1993, the film was a triumph.

  But despite its success in translating the icons of the Holocaust into accessible form, there was that in me which still said, “Film is just so limited.” I was, of course, delighted that within the terms of popular cinema, Spielberg had portrayed so successfully the tale the survivors had once told me. Yet there was also something in me which remained, and indeed still remains, fundamentally unimpressed by cinema as compared to writing. Needless to say, this is more my problem than the cinema’s.

  It was clear that though the film was destined for broad approval, it raised passionate questions too. How could the Holocaust be adequately depicted in a “Hollywood” film? asked some historians and film critics. Was it decent to try to do so? Wasn’t the Holocaust untranslatable in conventional film terms? Some declared the film to be a form of Nazi gangster movie which was far outshone by Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah. The reaction of African American students at Castlemont High School in Oakland who laughed at the execution of a woman engineer—they believed a body shot in such a way would fall otherwise than it did—was gleefully reported in the media. In those early days it seemed that the world was trying to make up its mind whether it would award Schindler the full laurels.

  In a symposium reproduced in the Village Voice involving Art Spiegelman, the creator of the brilliant Maus cartoons; filmmaker Ken Jacobs; and the admirable Philip Gourevitch, who would later tell the story of the Rwandan hecatomb, there were a lot of harsh opinions uttered about the film, even by those who defended Spielberg’s right to make it. It is probably worth quoting Spiegelman’s both extreme and contradictory view:

  These Jews are slightly gentrified versions of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer caricatures: the juiceless Jewish accountant, the Jewish seductress, and, most egregiously, the Jews bargaining and doing business inside a church. It’s one of the few scenes that wasn’t even borrowed from the novel. Spielberg has long had a Jewish problem. The Jewish “magic” which leaped out of the Lost Ark at the end of his first Raiders movie was all the wrath of God melting down the villains with a supernatural nuclear bomb. Schindler’s List refracts the Holocaust through the central image of a righteous Gentile in a world of Jewish bit players and extras. The Jews function as an occasion for Christian redemption.

  One critic argued that to have the music score relate to the burning of bodies on Chujowa Górka was a form of manipulation. It was as if Spielberg had been the only filmmaker ever to employ a composer, and stood condemned for doing so. Others asked, with more justice, Why would there not be a score? There is always a score in movies. And why, in such a scene, was it manipu
lative? Yet, as another critic said, “It’s all done in movie terms…It’s saturated with movieness…It seems a little strange to attack him for fulfilling that function, where if he did something else you would be ignoring him.”

  The morning after the premiere, we visited as a group the recently opened Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Mrs. Schindler, whom I had seen only on film and communicated with only by mail, was a member of the group, seated in a wheelchair and accompanied by her companion, the Argentinian woman Erika Rosenberg. She looked frail but retained her handsome face—she, too, had participated in what Poldek had thought of as the bounty of bone structure. She wore a grandmotherly half-smile and glittering eyes. I went up to her and complimented her in rudimentary German for being there, in the foyer of the museum which commemorated the massive events in which she had had an heroic part. The vigor in her eyes could be attributed in part to the fact that she was still fighting her corner of her ruinous marriage to Oskar. The new eminence the rascal had acquired was hard for her to bear; that much was apparent. To an extent, and even understandably, she would never stop disliking Poldek for running with the story, me for writing it, Spielberg for exalting it on film.

  We toured the museum and looked at the photographs and exhibits and, on video screens, the survivors invoking Sobibor, Mauthausen, Treblinka, Auschwitz. Exhibitions showed the interiors of Eastern European Jewish homes, and one told the story of a Jewish child’s experience of the Holocaust, related in a way which had gained the approval, an attendant told us, of three child psychiatrists.

  We experienced the inside of a cattle truck, and it fascinated me to see people who were all familiar with the insides of such rough transport peering in and frowning. Emilie herself knew from the Goleszów men what the inside of a truck was like. Poldek and Misia certainly knew, and Misia graciously saved us from the news that experiences suffered on the lip of the grave might be only faintly reproduced in a Washington museum.

  At some stage about now, Spielberg got the idea of raising a team of volunteers throughout the world to interview all remaining survivors of the Holocaust, and to record their experiences on a database archive. It would be an extraordinary database, where one could both listen to and look at live testimonies of survivors, but also cross-reference them to build a picture of particular aspects of ghetto and camp life, from ghetto police to food rations to SS NCOs. It would be a repository for future generations. The value of such a database for researchers would be prodigious. I couldn’t help asking myself what it would be like to have such a database of Irish Famine survivors, or of victims of the slave trade to North America and the West Indies. But Spielberg also wanted to lay the remaining testimony down for the reason that the Holocaust had happened to what he now saw as his people.

  He intended to call this operation the Shoah Foundation, and it soon began its life in prefabricated offices close to Amblin and Universal’s car park.

  Poldek and I visited the place a number of times, as it grew and took on a gradually more formal appearance.

  Using the database, one could not only access the story of any given survivor, but if one wanted to check, for example, on the population of rats in the Lodz ghetto, one had only to type in the request and the search engine would surrender everything survivors could tell you about the unsanitary conditions of Lodz.

  The day after the Washington premiere, the film was to be shown in New York to raise money for Glovin’s Schindler Foundation. This had been a condition of Glovin’s signature to the contract all those years before. The entire Schindler entourage, including the leading actors, were to be at this event. Thus Emilie was in New York too, and appeared on a number of television shows. And always, the handsome, middle-aged Erika Rosenberg pushed the idea that here was the true source of Oskar’s altruism. And yet she’d been cut out of everything and gone utterly uncompensated! Rosenberg would tell the world, “She [Emilie] was cut out of the film and the book in a very humiliating and offensive way.” Since Spielberg had expressed great admiration for Emilie, I knew she had not been treated offensively. I got an impression of tranquillity from Emilie, while Rosenberg fibrillated around her, making claims of which the world would, in months to come, take notice.

  The afternoon of the New York premiere, Judy and I called at Simon & Schuster, who were so pleased with the book that they intended to bring out a new hardcover edition, a kind of special-occasion presentation volume. To celebrate, like a suddenly flush miner from the Australian gold rushes, I bought Judy a gold bracelet with Amor Vincit Omnia engraved on it.

  Irvin Glovin, in a splendid dinner suit which fitted his tennis player’s form magnificently, and Jeannie, with her California tan and cocktail dress, made impressive figures that night in the foyer of the theater. They gave us a warm welcome. They told us that there was a party back in their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria that night, but genuinely enough we claimed exhaustion. I had recently resigned from the board of the Schindler Foundation, rendered uneasy by Glovin’s intentions to endow researchers to find from the study of Schindler’s life a virtual inoculation for interracial cruelty. They seemed very disappointed, and I promised them I would visit them the next day and have a drink with them. I was not surprised that the Schindler Foundation failed to ever set up its research project. It may have been that presidents and vice-chancellors of universities were as disturbed as I was by the fixity of Glovin’s ideas.

  Now, at Steven’s invitation, we were flown to London for the premiere there. It possessed more of the character of an accustomed premiere, with a carpet outside the cinema in Leicester Square, and a large cocktail party beforehand. Here I saw among the crowd the lively Australian Kathy Lette and her extraordinary husband, also an Australian, the human rights advocate and brilliant lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, one of the most remarkable fellows, the most learned, the most logically gifted advocates one could meet. And there was their embattled friend and mine, Salman Rushdie, whom Judy and I had first met when we attended the Booker Prize ceremony the year after Schindler’s Ark had won it.

  Spielberg had also invited Judy, Jane and myself to the Viennese premiere; indeed, to the Frankfurt and Tel Aviv premieres as well, if we wished to accompany him. But my seminar and lecture responsibilities limited us to Vienna.

  There was some anxiety among the Spielberg camp about Vienna. A neo-Nazi letter bomb had recently blown off part of the Mayor of Vienna’s hand. And when Judy, Jane and I arrived at the Hotel Sacher a little later than the rest of the Spielberg group, and tried to register at the normal check-in desk, the studio’s security people descended upon us, surrounded us like sheepdogs and urged us to come with them and not to loiter in reception. We were given badges to identify us—in this case the badge of the day represented the Great Seal of the State of California. We were to wear it at all times. Anyone who did not have such a badge would be kept separate from us by phalanxes of security. The third floor was devoted entirely to Spielberg’s party, and a guard with a semiautomatic sat before the two ornate lifts which serviced the floor.

  That afternoon we assembled and were led via service lifts through the kitchen into a basement corridor, up steps and then into an ornate hall which had been set up for a press conference. Among us was Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, who had come to join us on the rostrum and with whom I had a little time to chat, with appropriate awe. At that time Wiesenthal was elderly but unstooped, and looked much younger than his years. I knew that he was aware of Oskar’s case, and he told me he had met both Poldek and Oskar earlier in the century.

  On the rostrum I sat with Spielberg, Branko Lustig and Simon Wiesenthal during the press conference, in the midst of which one irate Austrian journalist asked Spielberg why he had called the film Schindler’s List rather than Schindler’s Ark. Because Schindler’s List is the title I bought, he answered with justifiable bemusement. When the reporters inquired about Oskar, Wiesenthal confirmed that he had met him and had admired his work, and lamented that resistance to the pro
cess of extermination had not been more widespread. He approved of Oskar’s Righteous Persons status.

  Jane and Judy had watched the conference in progress from the back of the hall. When, after a considerable time, a halt was called, a stampede of press, uncharacteristic of Austrians, came pressing forward, seeking further interviews. A fighting phalanx of American and Austrian security men—themselves adorned with the Great Seal badge—ruthlessly pushed aside the press to enable the members of our party at the back of the room to reach us at the front. It was an extraordinarily powerful performance and reminded me of the rolling maul in rugby. And so we escaped by a further door, down staff corridors and offices and through more kitchens, until we arrived in a laneway behind the Sacher, where three Mercedes and a number of other vehicles waited for us to make up a convoy.

  We were hustled into the Mercedes and whisked away at a great pace—no gradual takeoff. The security men in each vehicle communicated via the radios in their sleeves as we sped beneath the wan sun toward the Austrian chancellory. We drew up in a baroque archway and were urgently told to leave the cars. I followed my daughter Jane up a stone spiral staircase, the type the servants of Count Metternich or Talleyrand had once used—the tradesmen’s entrance. A bulky bodyguard in front of my daughter dropped a huge, squarish semiautomatic pistol out of his suit onto the step. It made a metallic clunk and lay on the step ahead like a suddenly assertive animal. “Scusi,” said the man, and he scooped it up, concealed it back in his suit again with one smooth movement, and continued to climb the stairs.