Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  The border fence ran through the middle of Kreuzlingen and was guarded on the German side by French sentries of the Sûreté Militaire. The group approached this barrier on the edge of the village and, snipping the wires, waited for the sentry to near the end of his beat before scurrying through to Switzerland. Unhappily, a woman from the village observed them from a bend of the road and rushed to the border to alert the French and Swiss. In a quiet Swiss village square, a mirror image of one on the German side, the Swiss police surrounded the party, but Richard and Anka Rechen broke away and had to be chased and apprehended by a patrol car. The party was, within half an hour, passed back to the French, who at once searched their possessions and, discovering jewels and currency, drove them to the former German prison and locked them in separate cells.

  It was clear to Heuberger that they were under suspicion of having been concentration camp guards. In that sense the weight they had put on as guests of the Americans rebounded on them, for they did not look as deprived as when they’d first left Brinnlitz. They were interrogated separately about their journey, about the valuables they were carrying. Each of them could tell a plausible story, but did not know if the others were telling the same one. They seem to have been afraid, in a way that had not applied with the Americans, that if the French discovered Oskar’s identity and his function in Brinnlitz, they would arraign him as a matter of course.

  Prevaricating for Oskar’s sake and Emilie’s, they remained a week there. The Schindlers themselves now knew enough about Judaism to pass the obvious cultural tests. But Oskar’s manner and physical condition didn’t make his posture of recent-prisoner-of-the-SS very credible. Unhappily his Hebrew letter was over in Linz, on the files of the Americans.

  Edek Heuberger, as the doyen of the eight, was interrogated most regularly, and on the seventh day of his imprisonment was brought into the interrogation room to find a second person there, a man in civilian clothes, a speaker of Polish, brought in to test Heuberger’s claim that he came from Cracow. For some reason, because the Pole played the compassionate rôle in the questioning that followed, or because of the familiarity of the language, Heuberger broke down, began to weep, and told the full story in fluent Polish. The rest were called one by one, were shown Heuberger, were told he had confessed, and then ordered to recite their version of the truth in Polish. When at the end of the morning the versions matched, the whole group, the Schindlers included, were gathered in the interrogation room and embraced by both interrogators. The Frenchman, says Heuberger, was weeping. Everyone was delighted at the phenomenon – a weeping interrogator. When he managed to compose himself, he called for lunch to be brought in for himself, his colleagues, the Schindlers, the eight.

  That afternoon he had them transferred to a lakeside hotel in Constanz, where they stayed for some days at the expense of the French military government.

  By the time he sat down to dinner that evening at the hotel with Emilie, Heuberger, the Rechens and the others, Oskar’s property had passed to the Soviets, and his last few jewels and currency were lost in the interstices of the liberating bureaucracy. He was as good as penniless, but was eating as well as could be managed in a good hotel with a number of his ‘family’. All of which would be the pattern of his future.

  EPILOGUE

  Oskar’s high season ended now. The peace would never exalt him as had the war. Oskar and Emilie came to Munich. For a time they shared lodgings with the Rosners, for Henry and his brother had been engaged to play at a Munich restaurant and had achieved a modest prosperity. One of his former prisoners, meeting him at the Rosners’ cramped apartment, was shocked by his torn coat. His property in Cracow and Moravia had of course been confiscated by the Russians, and his remaining jewellery had been traded for food and drink.

  When the Feigenbaums arrived in Munich, they met his latest mistress, a Jewish girl, a survivor not of Brinnlitz but of worse camps than that. Many of the visitors to Oskar’s rented rooms, indulgent as they were towards Oskar’s heroic weaknesses, felt ashamed for Emilie’s sake.

  He was still a wildly generous friend and a great discoverer of unprocurables. Henry Rosner remembers that he unearthed a source of chickens in the midst of chickenless Munich. He clung to the company of those of his Jews who had come to Germany – the Rosners, the Pfefferbergs, the Dresners, the Feigenbaums, the Sternbergs. Some cynics would later say that at the time it was wise of anyone involved in concentration camps to stay close to Jewish friends as protective colouring. But his dependence went beyond that sort of instinctive cunning. The Schindlerjuden had become his family.

  In common with them, he heard that Amon Goeth had been captured by Patton’s Americans the previous February, while a patient in an SS sanatorium at Bad Tolz, imprisoned in Dachau, and at the close of the war handed over to the new Polish government. Amon was in fact one of the first Germans despatched to Poland for judgment. A number of former prisoners were invited to attend the trial as witnesses; a deluded Amon even considered calling Helen Hirsch and Oskar Schindler for the defence. Oskar himself did not go to Cracow for the trials. Those who did, found that Goeth, lean from his diabetes, offered a subdued but unrepentant defence. All the orders for each of his acts of execution and transportation had been signed by superiors, he claimed, and were therefore their crimes, not his. Witnesses who told of murders committed by the commandant’s own hand were, said Amon, maliciously exaggerating. There had been some prisoners executed as saboteurs, but there were always saboteurs in war.

  Mietek Pemper, waiting in the body of the court to be called to give evidence, sat beside another Plaszów graduate who stared at Amon in the dock and whispered, “That man still terrifies me.” But Pemper himself, as first witness for the prosecution, delivered an exact catalogue of Amon’s crimes. He was followed by others, among them Dr Biberstein and Helen Hirsch, who had precise and painful memories. Amon was condemned to death and hanged in Cracow on September 13th, 1946. It was two years to the day since his arrest by the SS in Vienna on black-marketeering charges. According to the Cracow press, he went to the gallows without compunction and gave the National Socialist salute before dying.

  In Munich, Oskar himself identified Liepold, who had been detained by the Americans. A Brinnlitz prisoner accompanied Oskar at the line-up, and says that Oskar asked the protesting Liepold, “Do you want me to do it, or would you rather leave it to the fifty angry Jews who are waiting downstairs in the street?” Liepold would also be hanged – not for his crimes in Brinnlitz, but for earlier murders in Budzyn.

  Oskar had probably already conceived the scheme of becoming a farmer in Argentina, a breeder of nutria, the large South American aquatic rodents considered precious for their skins. Oskar presumed that the same excellent commercial instincts which had brought him to Cracow in 1939 were now urging him to cross the Atlantic. He was penniless, but the Joint Distribution Committee, the international Jewish relief organisation to whom Oskar had made reports during the war and to whom his record was known, were willing to help him. In 1949 they made him an ex gratia payment of fifteen thousand dollars and gave a reference (To whom it may concern) signed by M. W. Beckelman, the Vice Chairman of the ‘Joint’s’ Executive Council. It said,

  The American Joint Distribution Committee has thoroughly investigated the wartime and occupation activities of Mr Schindler . . . We recommend wholeheartedly that all organisations and individuals contacted by Mr Schindler do their utmost to help him, in recognition of his outstanding service . . . Under the guise of operating a Nazi labour factory first in Poland and then in the Sudetenland, Mr Schindler managed to take in as employees and protect Jewish men and women destined for death in Auschwitz or other infamous concentration camps . . . “Schindler’s camp in Brinnlitz,” witnesses have told the Joint Distribution Committee, “was the only camp in the Nazi-occupied territories where a Jew was never killed, or even beaten, but was always treated as a human being.” Now that he is about to begin his life anew, let us help him as once he helped o
ur brethren.

  When he sailed for Argentina, he took with him half a dozen families of Schindlerjuden, paying the passage for many of them. With Emilie, he settled on a farm in Buenos Aires province and worked it for nearly ten years. Those of Oskar’s survivors who did not see him in those years find it hard now to imagine him as a farmer, since he was never a man of steady routine. It is said, and there is some truth in it, that Emalia and Brinnlitz succeeded in their eccentric way because of the acumen of men like Stern and Bankier. In Argentina, Oskar had no such support, apart, of course, from the good sense and rural industriousness of his wife.

  The decade in which Oskar farmed nutria, however, was the period in which it was demonstrated that breeding, as distinct from trapping, did not produce pelts of adequate quality. Many other nutria enterprises failed in that time, and in 1957 the Schindlers’ farm went bankrupt. Emilie and Oskar moved into a house provided by B’nai B’rith in San Vicente, a southern suburb of Buenos Aires, and for a time Oskar looked for work as a sales representative. Within a year, however, he left for Germany. He would never live with Emilie again.

  From a small apartment in Frankfurt, he sought capital to buy a cement works, and pursued the possibility of major compensation from the West German Ministry of Finance for the loss of his Polish and Czechoslovakian properties. Little came of this effort. Some of Oskar’s survivors considered that the failure of the German government to pay him his due arose from lingering Hitlerism in the middle reaches of the civil service. But Oskar’s claim probably failed for technical reasons, and it is not possible to detect bureaucratic malice in the correspondence addressed to Oskar from the ministry.

  The Schindler cement enterprise was launched on capital from the Joint Distribution Committee and ‘loans’ from a number of Schindler Jews who had done well in postwar Germany. It had a brief history. By 1961, Oskar was insolvent again. His factory had been crippled by a series of harsh winters in which the construction industry had closed down, but some of the Schindler survivors believe the company’s failure was abetted by Oskar’s restlessness and low tolerance for routine.

  That year, hearing that he was in trouble, the Schindlerjuden in Israel invited him to visit them at their expense. An advertisement appeared in Israel’s Polish language press asking all former inmates of Concentration Camp Brinnlitz who had known “Oskar Schindler the German” to contact the newspaper. In Tel Aviv, Oskar was welcomed ecstatically. The postwar children of his survivors mobbed him. He had grown heavier and his features had thickened. But at the parties and receptions, those who had known him saw that he was the same indomitable Oskar. The growling deft wit, the outrageous Charles Boyer charm, the voracious thirst had all survived his two bankruptcies.

  It was the year of the Adolf Eichmann trial, and Oskar’s visit to Israel aroused some interest from the international press. On the eve of the opening of Eichmann’s trial, the correspondent of the London Daily Mail wrote a feature on the contrast between the records of the two men, and quoted the preamble of an appeal the Schindlerjuden had opened to assist Oskar. “We do not forget the sorrows of Egypt, we do not forget Haman, we do not forget Hitler. Thus, among the unjust, we do not forget the just. Remember Oskar Schindler.”

  There was some incredulity among Holocaust survivors about the idea of a beneficent labour camp such as Oskar’s, and this disbelief found its voice through a journalist at a press conference with Schindler in Jerusalem. “How do you explain,” he asked, “that you knew all the senior SS men in the Cracow region and had regular dealings with them?” “At that stage in history,” Oskar answered, “it was rather difficult to discuss the fate of Jews with the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.”

  The Department of Testimonies of the Yad Vashem had, near the end of Oskar’s Argentine residence, asked for and been given by him a general statement of his activities in Cracow and Brinnlitz. Now, on their own initiative and under the influence of Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg and Moshe Bejski (once Oskar’s forger of official stamps, now a respected and scholarly lawyer), the Board of Trustees of Yad Vashem began to consider the question of an official tribute to Oskar. The chairman of the board was Justice Landau, the presiding judge at the Eichmann trial. Yad Vashem sought and received a mass of testimonies concerning Oskar. Of this large body of statements, four are critical of him. Though these four all state that without Oskar they would have perished, they criticise his business methods in the early months of the war. Two of the four disparaging testimonies are written by a father and son, called, earlier in this account, the Cs. In their enamelware outlet in Cracow, Oskar had installed his mistress Ingrid as Treuhänder. A third statement is by the Cs’ secretary and repeats the allegations of punching and bullying, rumours of which Stern had reported back to Oskar in 1940. The fourth comes from a man who claims to have had a pre-war interest in Oskar’s enamel factory under its former name Rekord, an interest, he claimed, that Oskar had ignored.

  Justice Landau and his Board must have considered these four statements insignificant against the massed testimony of other Schindlerjuden, and they made no comment on them. Since all four stated that Oskar was their saviour in any case, it is said to have occurred to the board to ask why, if Oskar had committed crimes against these people, he went to such extravagant pains to save them?

  The municipality of Tel Aviv was the first body to honour Oskar. On his fifty-third birthday he unveiled a plaque in the Park of Heroes. The inscription describes him as saviour of twelve hundred prisoners of KL Brinnlitz, and though it understates numerically the extent of his rescue, it declares that it had been erected in love and gratitude. Ten days later in Jerusalem, he was declared a Righteous Person, this title being a peculiarly Israeli honour based on an ancient tribal assumption that in the mass of Gentiles, the God of Israel would always provide a leavening of just men. Oskar was invited also to plant a carob tree in the Avenue of the Righteous leading to the Yad Vashem Museum. The tree is still there, marked by a plaque, in a grove which contains trees planted in the name of all the other Righteous. A tree for Julius Madritsch, who had illicitly fed and protected his workers in a manner quite unheard of among the Krupps and the Farbens, stands there also, and a tree for Raimund Titsch, the Madritsch supervisor in Plaszów. On that stony ridge, few of the memorial trees have grown to more than ten feet.

  The German press carried stories of Oskar’s wartime rescues and of the Yad Vashem ceremonies. These reports, always laudatory, did not make his life easier. He was hissed on the streets of Frankfurt, stones were thrown, a group of workmen jeered him and called out that he ought to have been burned with the Jews. In 1963 he punched a factory worker who’d called him a Jew-kisser, and the man lodged a charge of assault. In the local court, the lowest level of the German judiciary, Oskar received a lecture from the judge and was ordered to pay damages. “I would kill myself,” he wrote to Henry Rosner in New York, “if it wouldn’t give them so much satisfaction.”

  These humiliations increased his dependence on the survivors. They were his only emotional and financial surety. For the rest of his life he would spend some months of every year with them, living honoured and well in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, eating free of charge at a Rumanian restaurant in Ben Yehudah Street, Tel Aviv, though subject sometimes to Moshe Bejski’s filial efforts to limit his drinking to three double cognacs a night. In the end, he would always return to the other half of his soul, the disinherited self, the mean, cramped apartment a few hundred yards from Frankfurt central railway station. Writing from Los Angeles to other Schindlerjuden in the United States that year, Poldek Pfefferberg urged all survivors to donate at least a day’s pay a year to Oskar Schindler, whose state he described as “discouragement, loneliness, disillusion”. Oskar’s contacts with the Schindlerjuden continued on a yearly basis. It was a seasonal matter – half the year as the Israeli butterfly, half the year as the Frankfurt grub. He was continually short of money.

  A Tel Aviv committee of which Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg and Moshe B
ejski were again members, continued to lobby the West German government for an adequate pension for Oskar. The grounds for their appeal were his wartime heroism, the property he had lost, and the by-now fragile state of his health. The first official reaction from the German government was however the award of the Cross of Merit in 1966, in a ceremony at which Konrad Adenauer presided. It was not till July 1st, 1968, that the Ministry of Finance was happy to report that from that date it would pay him a pension of two hundred Marks per month. Three months later, pensioner Schindler received the Papal Knighthood of St Sylvester from the hands of the Archbishop of Limburg.

  Oskar was still willing to cooperate with the Federal Justice Department in the pursuit of war criminals. In this matter he seems to have been implacable. On his birthday in 1967, he gave confidential information concerning many of the personnel of KL Plaszów. The transcript of his evidence of that date shows that he does not hesitate to testify, but also that he is a scrupulous witness. If he knows nothing or little of a particular SS man, he says so. He says it of Amthor, of the SS man Zugsburger, of Fraülein Ohnesorge, one of the quick-tempered women survivors. He does not hesitate, however, to call Bosch a murderer and an exploiter, and says that he recognised Bosch at a railway station in Munich in 1946 and approached him and asked him if – after Plaszów – he could manage to sleep. Bosch, says Oskar, was at that stage living under an East German passport. A supervisor called Mohwinkel, representative in Plaszów of the German Armaments Works, is also roundly condemned – “Intelligent but brutal,” says Oskar of him. Of Goeth’s bodyguard, Grün, he tells the story of the attempted execution of the Emalia prisoner, Lamus, which he himself prevented by a gift of vodka. (It is a story to which a great number of prisoners also testify in their statements in Yad Vashem.) Of the NCO Ritchek, Oskar says that he has a bad reputation but that he himself knows nothing of his crimes. He is also uncertain whether the photograph the Justice Department showed him is in fact Ritchek. There is only one person on the Justice Department list for whom Oskar is willing to give an unqualified commendation. That is the engineer Huth, who had helped him during his last arrest. Huth, he says, was highly respected and highly spoken of by the prisoners themselves.