Even in 1981, the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was considered mildly dangerous, transporting people through former battlefields where the wreckage of tanks and trucks still lay beside the road. This had been the route Oskar had taken every year for a decade to meet his Jerusalem survivors, and it was also the track his corpse took to its burial place on Mount Zion in 1974. I was very pleased to be taking that road myself. Judy would be coming to Jerusalem in a day or so. Our teenage daughters were to be minded by my mother, loving but percipient, and by their overindulgent grandfather, who had spent time himself in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem during the war as an Australian soldier on leave from Egypt and Libya. My mother would not be susceptible to my daughters’ excuses about avoiding school or study. Not to study, said my mother, was the same as stealing from your parents. I was delighted the girls would be exposed to such a vigorous message.
We were booked into the excellent King David Hotel, on the western side of Jerusalem. I had first heard of the King David from my father—as an NCO, he had needed to borrow an Australian officer’s uniform to get in there for a drink. Then, in 1946, during the British Mandate’s rule in Palestine, at which time it housed many British officers, the Jewish underground had famously bombed it, killing ninety guests. I remember my father coming home from work with his Daily Mirror, and saying. “They’ve blown up the King David!”
Poldek had demanded rooms which looked directly out upon the walls of the ancient city. I could see the eighth-century Al-Aqsa Mosque, the glittering Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall where Jews prayed to lament the final destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Roman emperor Titus.
Moshe Bejski, a distinguished moderate of the Israeli Supreme Court, a man who would write on issues of forgetting and forgiveness, who believed the survival of the Jewish state could not justify torture, and bemoaned later backsliding over justifiable compensation to former prisoners by the Swiss banks, had also been an eighteen-year-old prisoner in Oskar’s Brinnlitz camp. His brother, who had been killed in the early Arab-Israeli conflict, had been in Oskar’s Brinnlitz camp too. In the factory-camp, which produced no shells but was run almost entirely by the black-market operations of the Herr Direktor, Oskar would come to the young Bejski with German documents bearing official German stamps, and ask him if he could produce such a stamp. Oskar needed forged documents in order to move the merchandise he had acquired—liquor, cigarettes, fabric, food luxuries—up to Poland where they could be sold at a high price on the black market.
Bejski, a scholar, a man of serious intent and more than a little worried about the projected book, now warned me against accepting all of Poldek’s exuberant tales unless they were corroborated by other prisoners. At the same time, he told his own fantastic but accurate stories. For example, he laughed and shook his head as he told the story of how he had been asked to make forged stamps for the documents which enabled Schindler to loot a bomb-damaged factory, Egyptsie Cigaretten, in Brno to the south of the Brinnlitz camp, and then ship the products by truck into Kraków. Bejski himself drove one of the trucks, and confessed that even he was astonished by the style with which Oskar sailed through the task of looting and then transporting the plunder for sale.
In his serene garden in Jerusalem, Bejski took me through all the documentation he had, which included many testimonies and a German magazine article on Oskar’s motorbike racing career. By now I was acquiring a working knowledge of German and, with the help of dictionaries and grammar books, was able to translate this article into English for my own use, and the results are recorded (accurately, I hope and believe) in the pages on Oskar’s motorbike craze which would appear in the book.
One of the more substantive documents Bejski had was a long copy—twenty to thirty foolscap pages, typed single-spaced—of a report Oskar wrote for the Joint Distribution Committee in 1957. In it, he accounted for the monies provided by Sedlacek from Jewish Relief and Rescue, and went on to what he had spent in his Kraków camp on extra food and SS bribes, then on maintaining his second camp, in Brinnlitz, and on the rescue of the Goleszów quarrymen who turned up half-dead on his doorstep.
Even Oskar’s first Emalia camp at 4 Lipowa Street, Kraków, generously accommodated Jewish workers not only from Emalia, but from the box factory next door, the radiator plant and the garrison office. Since the required SS and Ukrainian guards came from Plaszów and were changed every two days, Emalia was not least a paradise because no guard had time to develop a grudge against any particular prisoner. Emalia also offered dignifying little mercies not permitted elsewhere. My Sydney friend Leosia Korn remembered that prisoners were allowed to heat up water on the surface of machinery, a luxury considered illegal in the SS-run workshops inside Plaszów. But mercy was also more direct. According to Dr. Biberstein, who worked in Emalia as a factory hand, the daily diet was roughly two thousand calories, as against half that in Plaszów.
Among other things in this document Bejski gave me, Schindler listed the amount paid to buy land from the parish priest of Brinnlitz for the burial of the dead among prisoners shipped from Goleszów. Apart from the standard payment owing to the SS—seven and a half reichsmarks each day per skilled worker and six RM per laborer—he claimed to have spent 1,800,000 zloty (U.S.$360,000) on food for the Emalia or DEF camp. None of his former prisoners disputed this estimate. He had also been forced to pay for the camp facilities at Brinnlitz and, before that, at Lipowa Street: the wire, the guards’ huts, the installation of a delousing boiler in Brinnlitz, the daily food. Brinnlitz cost him U.S.$18,000 a week.
Reading this document, one is still amazed that he was able to provide all this on such a scale that no one died of hunger or brutality. At the IG Farben Auschwitz-Monowitz plant alone, 25,000 prisoners—out of a workforce level maintained at 35,000—would die at their labor. Other reputable businessmen in some of Germany’s biggest businesses, including the great armament maker Krupp, and subsidiaries such as German Armament Works (DAW), also lost thousands of their workers through SS executions for supposed sabotage, and through beatings, starvation, overwork and disease. These were mainly young people originally in sustainable health at the time they were given the tattoo. By whatever means, Oskar reversed the rules and was able to keep most of the SS, except for inspectors, off the factory floor. Twenty-five years after publishing the book I finally wrote, I still respect his achievement, and the fact that it consisted not merely in abstaining from evil but in the positive and expensive exercise of generosity.
Josef Bau, a young draftsman and artist, had also had a hand in the forging of documents and stamps. He was one of the Schindlerjuden’s stars, like Ryszard Horowitz, in that he acquired an international reputation as an artist, especially for his terror-filled pen and ink drawings of the ghetto and Plaszów. His work seemed to say, “Look, here I am an artist, and the horror others brought to bear on me has kept me rooted there, under Amon Goeth’s sniper rifle sights, in Plaszów, forever.” His paintings are stark. He had never been able to escape into the fantastical cyber-universe where Ryszard worked against those laws of time and gravity which had kept him a child prisoner in Auschwitz.
In an improvised Jewish ceremonial in the women’s huts, Bau had married a delicate girl named Rebecca. I was able to interview the Baus at their house in Jerusalem, and they seemed still to carry a camp pallor, and to be fragile, so that even Poldek spoke in a soft rumble in their presence, before the ornate, Eastern European–style tea party Rebecca Bau had set. One could see in Rebecca the beauty which had attracted Josef, and here they were, two edgy children of Plaszów, still consoling each other for the things they had seen. Bau had been a draftsman in Goeth’s office and had needed to move about the camp, beholding as he walked, head down, many capricious savageries.
Though a visit to Oskar’s grave was on our agenda, it was the sort of thing that got put off for interviews. Poldek and I at last went there the day before my wife’s arrival, and it was a place I visited with her afterward. The Franciscan Church of the Dormition on Mount Zion is said to be near the site of the Last Supper, marking the place where the Apostles fell asleep when asked to keep a vigil with Christ. It was thus beautifully located, looking south over the Garden of Gethsemane, where Christ asked that he not be forced to drink his chalice of impending pain; then over the Valley of Gehenna, the garbage dump of ancient times and a synonym in the Bible for a burning hell; and finally over the Jordan, the far-off Dead Sea, and the austere, exquisite, naked mountains of Transjordan. Poldek and I reached the gates of the cemetery by the Franciscan church just after its closing time, but we called out to a Christian Arab watchman inside who approached the locked gate tentatively. Poldek indicated we would need the gates opened. Obviously a service fee would be required.
“I’ll give him shekels,” I whispered to Poldek, for I had a roll of notes in my pocket—courtesy, of course, of Poldek’s Polish dealings.
“Shekels, shmekels!” growled Poldek. “He’ll want dollars.”
So once again I was wrong-footed on currency issues. Nonetheless, we entered the hillside cemetery and found, down the slope and to the east, Schindler’s simple grave to which the Franciscans and the Schindlerjuden had led the corpse. The plain slab, apart from its bare Catholic iconography, mentioned little more than Oskar’s birth and death dates. For a member of the Nazi Party, however, Schindler had managed to find himself a magnificent grave in Israeli ground crammed with symbols.
Much later, Spielberg would be similarly impressed with the place and use it in the film.
Then Judy was with us. As always when freed from household arm-wrestles over tidy rooms, etc., she became an organizer of our research effort on a scale even Poldek admired. He made kissing noises in her direction. “Mwah! Mwah! Darling, you are such a cutie and you know how things work.”
“Better than me?” I asked.
“You’re an innocent, but that’s good sometimes!” He didn’t specify how.
Judy is a good-humored, forthright woman who had come from the same background as myself—even down to the fact that one of her great-grandparents had been a political prisoner transported to Australia in the nineteenth century, as had one of my great-uncles from Newmarket in North Cork. She had already had an experience of Poldek’s management and charm. Having been to Beverly Hills and made the mistake of calling it Los Angeles, she had been conducted by Poldek to one of the city limits where a sign announced its welcome to the city of Beverly Hills. Poldek gave her his standard lecture. “Beverly Hills is its own city with its own police and sanitation and fire brigade. Welcome to California, Beverly Hills!”
She had attended an event at one of the larger LA synagogues, at which Poldek insisted, against her own wishes, that she be given a place of honor. To each successive VIP marshal, he made a speech about the forthcoming book and her eminence as my wife! Thus she found herself sitting between the peace activist Tom Hayden and Governor Jerry Brown of California. She knew from that experience that Poldek could organize anything, whether it was necessary to do so or not.
Each morning, Judy and I caught the bus to the Yad Vashem, the monument itself and its library of archives. The buses seemed to be full of students—and soldiers, male and female, with semiautomatics. We would get off near the Avenue of the Righteous where in 1963 a tree had been planted in honor of Oskar and Emilie. Camera footage shot at Oskar’s requiem mass in the Church of the Dormition was available at Yad Vashem, but much more than that.
Among the testimonies in Polish and English in the extensive Schindler archive were ones I would mention in the book, minority reports more or less, written by the father and son of a Kraków Jewish family, prewar owners of a hardware company, who had entered into a business arrangement with Oskar, putting up capital for Emalia in return for supplies of the product. Both father and son claimed that in 1940 Oskar had beaten them up during a physical dispute over merchandise. Oskar’s own complaint against them was that they arrived at the loading dock of Emalia and bullied the workers into loading unauthorized amounts of enamelware. Their argument was that the quantities had already been agreed upon. Even though the father and son remained under Oskar’s care in Brinnlitz, they never forgot their earlier disagreement. I spoke about these documents with Bejski, and also with Poldek. With varying degrees of emphasis—Poldek with raucous affront on behalf of his friend Schindler, and Bejski in a more measured way—both complained about the family in question, and neither of them thought it unlikely that Oskar had thrown some punches. “But after all,” said Bejski, “Schindler saved their lives!”
When Schindler decided that he was going to make a second camp in Czechoslovakia after the closure of the Lipowa Street factory, a list of his current workers was assembled by Stern and others and sent off to Plaszów. There, sadly, it fell into the hands of a Jewish clerk named Marcel Goldberg, who is notorious among survivors for having said that it would take jewels to get on the list. My friend Poldek offered a bottle of vodka—presented to him by a guilt-stricken SS NCO, the same one who had begun by beating him—and it helped get himself and Misia on the list. But the truth was that between the list prepared by Schindler and his people, and the one ultimately drawn up over several drafts by Marcel Goldberg, there was a difference; and some of Schindler’s original workers, in their testimonies in Yad Vashem, blamed Oskar when they found themselves sent somewhere crueler—Mauthausen, for example.
I was fascinated to find these further potential flaws in the man, and knew that the contrary account of father and son needed to be included to round out the picture of Oskar—not that either Bejski or Poldek spent any time trying to dissuade me from doing so.
Due to the influence of Moshe Bejski and the insistence of Poldek, who kept on announcing to the Yad Vashem archivists that we were about to produce the book, the chief archivist gave us a special dispensation to take documents back to the hotel with us for copying. Scholarly women were flattered on their bone structure by Poldek, and scholarly men were blinded by his power of reminiscence of the towns and villages their grandfathers had come from in Poland. Judy went through the newspaper archives and made notes from them, and spent hours transcribing my tapes in the business center at the hotel. The names she transcribed took on a mythic dimension in our minds, so that when we met a particular Schindler prisoner, his or her record and general tale were known to us, and we felt we were meeting a legendary figure.
In between spates of work, Judy and I wandered around the old city on our own, knelt in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, inside a minute oil lamp–lit chapel within the church which my father had visited on a World War II Australian air force jaunt from Egypt, and were blessed many times by a fervent old Coptic priest.
A photocopying bill arrived at our door one morning. It was not exorbitant, and Judy and I entered the lift to go down and pay it. Already about was Poldek, whose room was on the floor above.
After morning compliments, he asked, “You have an invoice there?”
Judy told him it was a bill for all the photocopying of documents, Bejski’s and Yad Vashem’s.
“They sent you an invoice?” he asked incredulously.
“Yes, and it’s pretty reasonable too,” I told Poldek. Indeed, a few such invoices for earlier copying had arrived at our door, and I had simply paid them.
“They can’t ask you to pay. What are they thinking? Judy darling, let me see the invoice.”
I said, “Listen, Poldek, it’s fine. I’m looking after this.”
Judy had no choice but to show him the invoice.
“Come with me to the desk,” he ordered us as the lift reached the ground floor.
We argued, but our reasoning was washed away by the full tide of his outrage. We followed him to the front desk. My wife was better at handling him than I was, but I believe she came along to see the show—Poldek in action. He presented the bill as if it were something that had slipped through a gap in management’s general omniscience. I watched a pale Ashkenazi reception clerk bend over the desk patiently to look at the bill Poldek presented to his gaze and say, “That’s right, Mr. Pfefferberg. You see, we copied…at so many shekels per ten pages…”
Poldek growled, stood back and adopted the sort of pose rarely seen in those days except on opera stages and old newsreels of vanished potentates. He pointed heavenward. It should have been ridiculous, except for the authority of his rage, the certainty of his vision.
“One day,” he said, “there will be a plaque over this reception desk, and it will say that here Thomas Keneally and Leopold Pfefferberg researched the story of Oskar Schindler and his Schindlerjuden! And you want to charge us for lousy photostatic copies? Can you imagine what my friend Justice Moshe Bejski of the Israeli Supreme Court would think of that?”
I stood some yards behind Poldek, and would, in my timorous Gentile way, have been happy to pay the bill and end the dramatics right there. But a duty manager arrived to reason with Poldek, looking as optimistic as an uninformed conscript going into battle against elite troops. He could not match the hypnotic conviction of which Poldek was capable. Poldek could see the coming plaque above the desk. The bill was, to my acute discomfort, forgiven us, and no one in the business office bothered sending us photocopying invoices anymore.
Toward the end of our stint in Yad Vashem I watched the archival film of Oskar’s German television documentary, filmed in Frankfurt not long before his death. Oskar spoke in a profound rumble in which cognac and cigars had induced an attractive rawness. When asked about his motivation, he spoke of “fellow feeling and compassion” for people who were being treated with “brutality you could not imagine.” Long-faced, balding and overcoated, one could well imagine that face belonging both to hero and criminal, masking a thousand sins and generosities. In other words, his face seemed to me very European, a face that could have fitted splendidly on a land-grave or freebooter in a painting of some important incident during the Thirty Years’ War.
We had accumulated a mass of material. Poldek planned to go on to Italy and Hong Kong to buy new stock for his warehouse and the Handbag Studio. By now, of course, he was well-known to the hotel staff, a terror to the front desk, a friend to other guests, a generous fellow to the Sephardic maids. When Poldek took his place in one of the so-called charabancs, Mercedes cars which ran passengers down to Tel Aviv, he wept and wished us well. “We are brothers to the grave!” he asserted.
Yet there was something in Judy and me which yelped with relief when his car drove away through the garden of the King David down to the road. We would not be worked so hard now! We had a holiday of three days before we had to go to Tel Aviv ourselves.
It was a relief to do more normal things. We took a long bus trip, down past Qumran, and the caves in the cold and arid hills where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found. We climbed Masada, scene of a mass suicide of Israeli Zealots, men, women and children who were about to be overrun by the Romans. The Roman engineering works and ramps were visible to us and sad in their mute acknowledgment that the capture of Masada had availed the generals little in the long run. The remaining quarters and the ritual baths atop Masada gave immediacy to the lives of the Jews who once held out there.
I wondered why ancient fundamentalist sects were often historically revered. There was some justification for the mass suicide on Masada, since the Zealots believed that they would be put to the sword, their wives misused and slaughtered, their children sold into slavery. Their actions had thus become part of the Israeli myth, even though many urbane Israelis nonetheless despised modern fundamentalism, and all the more so for its power in modern Israeli politics.
We bathed in the Dead Sea, as my father had. Hiring a car—an exercise of considerable expense in Israel to this day—we went along the coast to the remarkable Roman port of Caesarea and to the crusaders’ port of Acre, on up to the Golan Heights, past many a kibbutz, and then down to Galilee.
Briefly back in Tel Aviv, I saw the Dresners for the last time, and took Judy for a meal in what we thought of as Oskar’s Romanian restaurant. Then, with our mass of tapes and transcripts and photocopies, we set off to Greece and Australia. The Zakopanean ice pick survived both Greek and Australian customs, and holding it in my hand I made, fairly enough, an object of amusement for my teenage daughters; the bewildered father returned with strange implements from overly portentous adventures.