Our house at the beach, and my downstairs office, proved a good place to write a book on the Holocaust. Looking down the slope I could see each day, from the pool table on which I spread all the documents, surfboard riders born long after the cataclysm, children to whom Hitler was a mere rumor. I had so much material to stock my awesome tale, and the great thing about the mass of research documents was that they convinced me the writing of the book would be easy. There was also that certain obsession from which writers suffer—that somehow the world needs to hear this story. The writer is the ancient mariner who distracts the guests at the wedding feast, and is hell-bent on wrenching their imaginations in a direction they had not necessarily intended to take them.
Like many writers, I thought that I could tell this story swiftly, without being influenced by it at a profound, partially disabling level. That is ever the writer’s dream—to be a raider, straight in, straight out, leaving none of one’s soul behind as hostage. So I did not expect a chaos of dreams, I did not expect to be myself a target for Amon Goeth’s querulous, malign spirit.
Even so, Schindler would be the context for everything that happened, his career the lens through which everything was seen. I had decided that long ago, as a trick to give the book its unity. But it was much easier to propose up-front these tricks of narration than it was to fulfill them in reality. Poldek did what he could. He kept on calling and promising me that when the book was published I would win “the Novell Prize—I’ve already booked my seat to Oslo!”
“It’s Stockholm, Poldek.”
“Well, Stockholm. You mark my words.”
There were two weeks of utter despair in the middle of the writing, when I thought that I had lost my grasp of the material, and felt that the resources, imaginative and financial, I had put into the project had certainly been wasted. This is a common midbook experience for writers, but I took it all the more seriously in this case because of what I thought of as the gravity of the material, the gravity of the story. I knew that if I lost the capacity to tell this tale, I might be so damaged by defeat that it would be the end of me as a writer. With the added horror of having to find some $40,000, already expended, to compensate Simon & Schuster.
I found, too, that even in Australia people had set attitudes to the Holocaust. The old complaint came up about the Jews having been too passive. I remember ungraciously throwing my credit card at a friend who took the line of “They sold each other out,” and raging out of a restaurant. Not only was this a parody of the truth, but, as in so many cases of historic oppression, the Nazi system was designed to exploit collaboration. As if there hadn’t been French who sold out, and Ukrainians, and millions of others. My friend’s opinion, based merely on meeting Jewish clients in the rag trade, implied that I didn’t know any of this and needed enlightenment. Goldberg had sold out some on the list, the Judenräte sold out individuals. Were the Jews to be different from every other human subjugated race and behave with an inhuman perfection?
Anyhow, doubting the project, I had recourse to whiskey. There was a heater in my office and, blurred and depressed on a day of gales, I dropped beside it and slept. My folders of transcripts and documents lay heaped on the pool table. I had divided them into chronological dossiers. One dossier was labeled Oskar—Childhood, another Oskar—Young Manhood, then Adult Oskar to 1939. The others were named for portions of years and major events, including Oskar—Escape to the West, Oskar to 1957, Oskar to 1974. All this lush remembrance and these supporting documents were wasted on me that day. After a time, my wife entered the office to see how I was, saw me at what could politely be called “rest,” and—though I didn’t know my eyes were still partly open—was gratified to see that the anguish of the past couple of days had now given way to exhaustion.
I have since felt the need to apologize to my wife and daughters for such episodes. They rebuff the apologies with some amusement. I accuse them of being in denial; it was nasty and they were entitled to say so. Guilt persists over the times I have imposed my anguish about the progress of a book upon the household.
Before my crash, I had reached the stage when Oskar, having set up his factory in Lipowa Street, has acquired Jewish workers. One morning, after heavy sleep, it was all at once possible to begin again. It was possible to narrate in a manner which placed the reader within the chaotic and fearful experience of prisoners. The documents, the memories of individuals, became vivid to me again. Why does the capacity to write seem to suddenly vanish so utterly from a writer, and then so thoroughly return? It’s as if the conscious brain had to be disabled to allow all the sorting, classifying, arranging and selection that derives from the unconscious. In any case, the dangerous interlude was over.
One factor that prevented my total disappearance into the book was that my days were enlivened and redeemed by demands from my daughters—for help with interpretation of a poem set for homework, a request that they be driven here or there in Sydney, or driven to school when through artful delay it became too late for them to catch the bus. They had the normal teenage desire not to be associated with their unfashionable parents, and frequently asked not to be taken to the front of the school. But as intense as their sibling fights could be, it was Judy’s and my good fortune that they had not gone through any thoroughgoing alienation from their parents which characterized many adolescents we knew, and which created chronic conflict in some homes. There were few slammed doors and few attempts to destroy the souls of parents in our house by the Pacific, and Judy and I always considered that the purest good luck. Sometimes it must have seemed as though I was the only child to be dealt with. And to start the day, however unwillingly, with an outing became a useful form of mental refreshment.
Another diversion was that my younger daughter and I followed the local rugby league team, Manly-Warringah, in those days perhaps the most famous of all Australian teams and the most resented. Every game day at Brookvale Oval, we took our position behind the goalposts, she fully clothed in team colors and waving a massive maroon and white flag. At such moments I was far removed from the Holocaust, and the pernicious referee was always a vastly more minor villain than Amon Goeth. Thus an Australian winter passed and the team kept winning, to be defeated by the Parramatta Eels (Parramatta, or Burramatta, meaning “the Place of the Eels” in the Aboriginal tongue of the Sydney basin). The Eels, sadly, had the best backline in the history of the game.
And amid all the concern about team injuries and the perfidy of referees and the suddenness with which other teams could spring ambushes, the written tale took on substance. I had always been the sort of writer who writes an entire draft of a book, from start to finish, then returns to it and rewrites it entirely again, and then again. At that stage I had not acquired a computer, so that I wrote everything in longhand, then dictated it, with punctuation marks included, onto tape. The tapes were typed up by a woman named Barbara who ran an office service in Avalon, a beachside suburb near ours. By the warm December of 1981 she was already typing parts of the earliest, rough version.
When the whole thing was done, and I had the complete typescript from her, I began rewriting in longhand, totally reworking or rejecting the passages which did not pass muster but retaining the sections of the typescript which were still usable, making corrections on them, and then gluing the new handwritten revised sections to the surviving fragments of the typescript. I ended up with huge screeds, rather like Roman scrolls, stiffened, typescript-to-longhand, by glue. This was then typed again by Barbara, given a final edit and occasional rewrite, and served as a first draft. It went off to the publishers in Britain and America, maybe a little under a year after Poldek and I had set out on our research journey.
Complicated publishing events had in the meantime occurred in America. Nan Talese, the editor who had put up the advance for Schindler and had been enthusiastic about the book, had left Simon & Schuster to take a higher post elsewhere. It is always disappointing for a writer when the commissioning editor departs, since it can be touch-and-go whether the new editor will be imbued with a similar affection for the project. The editor who inherited me was Patricia Solomon. She did everything we could have asked, but could not influence the scale of the print run—the numbers of copies printed, that is. That was my impression, in any case; publishing is a business in which editors often keep the truth of such issues from the writer for the sake of politeness, a desire to avoid conflict, or a kind wish not to bruise the author’s ego.
There is a strange stillness in a writer’s household after a book has been posted off. The atmosphere is a little like that of a school the day after breakup. The research is idly packed into boxes, and the reference books put in their own section of the shelves, some of them never to be consulted again.
The reactions of Patricia Solomon and my UK editor, Ion Trewin, to the book were positive. But the fact that Nan Talese, the initial enthusiast, was gone remained a shadow over it. In those days I had not reached the sort of maturity which I have tried to achieve in later life. The beginning of sanity for a writer is to see the beloved work as an item on a conveyor, a listing in a catalogue, holding a position, probably not too high a position, in the plans of a publisher who has a season’s worth of books to produce and sell to the public. The woman who would be, as its commissioner, its best advocate was through no fault of hers missing from that whole process. The writer should simply celebrate the miracle that someone as plain as most of us are could have produced anything halfway worth reading. But seeing things that way is a hard thing to do if the writer depends on the book for his living and for a measure of who he is.
A dear New York friend of mine, Irv Bauer, was then enthusiastically promoting one of my failed plays, Bullie’s House. It was about the plunder of holy totemic items from Aboriginals. It was as predictably wordy as any novelist’s play, but Irv loved that. Plays were incarnations of ideas to him, and a wealth of ideas could justify some lack of technique. Judy and I went from Sydney to New York for the workshopping of the play at New Dramatists in an old church in Hell’s Kitchen.
We were to occupy a flat at the top of the studio, a lonely place at night, when the entire building was darkened except for our little hutch. A Hell’s Kitchen local, employed because, as a reformed thief, he was good at retrieving stolen items (including New Dramatists’ coffeemaker), would knock on our door about ten-thirty every night to check that we were well.
It was during this journey that the Simon & Schuster legal department got to work on the dramatis personae of the book. They wanted all the former associates of Schindler and Schindlerjuden mentioned in the book to sign a legal release. They wanted me to seek a release even from SS men who had long since died or migrated to remote places—maybe Australia, Canada, Argentina. And they sought and got a release from Mrs. Schindler as well, based on what I had written about her part in the rescue.
To help ensure that these releases of the former prisoners and the many others were signed, I enlisted the help of Poldek again, whom we had seen in California on the way through to New York from Sydney. Schindler’s lawyer, Irving Glovin, also helped, though he was a little edgy at the way the raucous, riotous, subversive aspect of Oskar had been depicted. To him the question was still the nature of altruism, as if it were almost a glandular, chemical entity. Glovin called the British and American publishers for reassurance. Poldek rang them to ask them in detail what their plans for publication were, and to urge them along. In any case, thanks to Poldek, the clearances drawn up by Simon & Schuster’s lawyers were signed.
In this period, too, I met up again with Oskar’s former lover, Ingrid, and her husband, and made a last attempt to organize an interview—since there was still time to write a few things into the book—with a very successful shipping executive who was a Schindler survivor, and indeed had been one of the younger prisoners who escaped westward with Poldek in the small hours of the first morning of peace. He was sympathetic to the project, but very tense about being asked to re visit the pain of those years. Poldek was, of course, dismissive of the man’s decision, but I could by now sympathize with his reluctance. It was not a matter of ingratitude, as Poldek perceived it, but trepidation at opening the box of disabling horror. The man did not want to look back and be ossified by what he saw.
Poldek was coming through New York on his way to Italy and Hong Kong to buy leather goods for his wholesale business and the store. He insisted on meeting the urbane Patricia Solomon at Simon & Schuster. Patricia was eager to have the meeting since she had heard all my Poldek stories. First of all, Poldek praised Patricia’s features, the old bone structure stuff. It was surprisingly not a tiresome act. Then he told her I was fussy when he mentioned the “Novell Prize” and asked her to convince me we were bound to win it with this book. “Oh, possibly,” Patricia indulged him. “Simon & Schuster publishes many Nobel Prize contenders.”
He seemed appeased. Then he asked her how many copies she would print for the first run.
She replied, “Somewhere around thirty-three to thirty-five thousand copies. This is in hardcover.”
“Only thirty-five thousand? Patricia, my darling, you’re going to need more than that. Print one hundred and fifty thousand copies and they’ll go in a week.”
“Hardcover?” asked Patricia.
“Of course, hardcover,” said Poldek, from the depths of his expertise in the publishing industry. “You’ll be a legend by the next weekend. Your bosses will love you, and why shouldn’t they? Beauty and brains!”
His hopeful prophecy would in fact prove closer to what the demand would be, though it would certainly take more than a mere week to sell that number. He did not understand that the decision would not have been made by Patricia alone. Patricia laughed nervously, and I wished Poldek would just stop extolling the book.
“We can always go back to print,” she said.
This was an assurance publishers often gave, but in those days going back to print meant three lost weeks. When writers meet in bars, they always trade horrifying tales of a book’s momentum stalled when the first printing was snapped up early because of radiant reviews, and the second printing came too late to revive the initial impact.
Dan Green, Simon & Schuster’s head of publishing, had made his repute by publishing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Pumping Iron and The Jane Fonda Workout Book. He took an unexpected stand on the title of the book. I had suggested two titles—Schindler’s Arkand Schindler’s List—indicating to Ion Trewin in London that I liked Ark better than List. It was not only the question of evoking Noah’s Ark, but also the Ark of the Covenant, a symbol of the contract between Yahweh and the tribe of Israel. A similar though very rough compact existed between Oskar and his people. If they did their work properly—if the accountant kept the books well, if the engineers and the people on the floor produced, or, later in the war, if they appeared to be producing for the sake of covering his black-market operations—then he would rescue them. I call it a “rough compact” because of those people who were lost to the list through factors Schindler could not control. His behavior in regard to the three hundred women sent to Auschwitz, however, indicates that in all probability he did what he could to keep his list intact.
Patricia now took us along to see Dan Green himself. He was an athletic-looking man and seemed to have benefited from the advice of Arnold himself. He adopted something of a tough-guy air. He raised the issue of the title.
“I’ve discussed it with the Brits,” I told him. “Hodder’s are going with Schindler’s Ark rather than Schindler’s List. And I prefer Ark too.”
Green said that it was impossible to have Ark. I asked him why. He said that American Jewry was very sensitive to the accusation that the Jews had been somehow passive in the face of their destruction. And Ark implied passivity, the prisoners entering two by two.
I told him there was no way that I wanted to offend Jewish people in America, but the issue had not been raised in Britain. He said the Jewish community in Britain was more diffuse, less focused on apparent slights.
“But what about the Ark of the Covenant?” I asked. “The idea that there had been a covenant between Schindler and his people?”
“No,” said Green. “People wouldn’t get that. They’d only get this passive thing, and see it as a slur.”
For once Poldek didn’t have an opinion. As long as they printed one hundred and fifty thousand copies as a first print run, he was happy, and that was his objective with Dan Green. “It is the great story of humanity man to man,” as his mantra went and as he now told Green. “You’re printing too few. But whatever you call it, you and Thomas should subtitle it A Great Story of Humanity Man to Man.”
Green thought that such a subtitle was “clunky,” and I had already told Poldek as much. I argued with Green, though, that the British proofs were about to arrive at my place in Australia, and that as soon as I got home I had to correct them. Not only that, but the book had already appeared in Hodder’s autumn catalogue as Schindler’s Ark. A change now was impossible for them. Naturally, Pat Solomon did not buy into my debate with Green, but I could see that what British publishers were doing was always something of a minor matter with their Manhattan counterparts.
In between arguments with Green, I asked a few of the Jewish kids, young playwrights and directors who hung around New Dramatists in Hell’s Kitchen, whether they would be offended by the title Dan Green abominated. They had certainly heard of the issue: the accusation of some supposed endemic passivity in Jews was raised by many Gentiles. Others, including Poldek, were not so fussed.
After a week, rightly or wrongly, I consented to Green’s proposition. I did not have quite Poldek’s scale of confidence in the story. I certainly had no sense that this would be my best-known book, and that the two-title issue would haunt me and generate questions for the next twenty years and more. Ultimately, I thought that I couldn’t take the risk of offending American Jewry, not only because I wanted to sell them books, but also for Green’s reasons. And I had other things to concentrate on, being still busy with legal and other matters. I had also sent the full text for correction to Poldek, Pemper, Bejski, Mrs. Stern and the Dresners. I had sent sections of the text to the Fagens, the Korns, the Rosners, the Horowitzes, Dr. Schindel, and so on. I would incorporate their corrections.
Now came the question of whether the book should be categorized as fiction in the Library of Congress classification system. For both commercial reasons and reasons of passion, I didn’t want this book stuck in that section against the back wall of most American bookstores labeled JUDAICA. Books classified as such are often splendid works, but I feared that Gentiles might feel they need not apply. Poldek agreed with me on that. I felt that in Schindler I had written as a novelist, with a novelist’s narrative pace and graphicness, though not in the sense of a fictionalizer. If three or four people told me that Schindler had more or less said certain things, I certainly put them in quotation marks, but otherwise the manuscript was largely innocent of dialogue.
Dan Green agreed on this proposition. People would ever afterward ask why it was classified as fiction—apparently deniers would later point to that classification to undermine the book’s clear faith in the Holocaust’s reality. I was convinced at the time that this “documentary novel” qualified as fiction, though was at the extreme end of the phylum or genus. I might have made both of these decisions the same way if I had them to make again, but I would certainly not defend them to the death.