Schindler's List Part 16

In this town, southeast of Prague and on the road to Austria, there was still the likelihood of meeting disgruntled units. The partisans directed Oskar and the others to the Czech Red Cross office in the town square. There they could safely bunk down for the rest of the night.

But when they reached town, the Red Cross officials suggested to them that given the uncertainty of the peace, they would probably be safest in the town jail. The vehicles were left in the square, in sight of the Red Cross office, and Oskar, Emilie, and their eight companions carried their few pieces of baggage and slept in the unlocked cells of the police station.

When they returned to the square in the morning, they found that both vehicles had been stripped. All the upholstery had been torn from the Mercedes, the diamonds were gone, the tires had been taken from the truck, and the engines had been plundered. The Czechs were philosophical about it. We all have to expect to lose something in times like these. Perhaps they may even have suspected Oskar, with his fair complexion and his blue eyes, of being a fugitive SS man.

The party were without their own transport, but a train ran south in the direction of Kaplice, and they caught it, dressed still in their stripes. Reubinski says that they took the train "as far as the forest, and then walked." Somewhere in that forested border region, well to the north of Linz, they could expect to encounter the Americans.

They were hiking down a wooded road when they met two young gum-chewing Americans sitting by a machine gun. One of Oskar's prisoners began to speak with them in English. "Our orders are not to let anyone pa.s.s on this road," one of them said.

"Is it forbidden to circle around through the woods?" asked the prisoner.

The GI chewed. This strange chewing race!

"Guess not," said the GI at last.

So they swung through the woods and, back on the road half an hour later, ran into an infantry company marching north in double column. Through the English speaker once more, they began to talk to the unit's reconnaissance men. The commanding officer himself drew up in a jeep, dismounted, interrogated them. They were frank with him, telling him that Oskar was the Herr Direktor, that they were Jews. They believed they were on safe ground, for they knew from the BBC that the U.S. forces included many Americans of both German and Jewish origins. "Don't move," said the captain. He drove away without explanation, leaving them in the half-embarra.s.sed command of the young infantrymen, who offered them cigarettes, the Virginia kind, which had that almost glossy look-like the jeep, the uniforms, the equipment-of coming from a grand, brash, unfettered, and un-ersatz manufactory.

Though Emilie and the prisoners were uneasy that Oskar might be arrested, he himself sat on the gra.s.s apparently unconcerned and breathed in the spring air in these high woods. He had his Hebrew letter, and New York, he knew, was ethnically a city where Hebrew was not unknown. Half an hour pa.s.sed and some soldiers appeared, coming down the road in an informal bunch, not strung out in the infantry manner. They were a group of Jewish infantrymen and included a field rabbi. They were very effusive. They embraced all the party, Emilie and Oskar as well. For these, the party was told, were the first concentration-camp survivors the battalion had met.

When the greetings were over, Oskar brought out his Hebrew reference, and the rabbi read it and began to weep. He relayed the details to the other Americans. There was more applause, more hand shaking, more embraces. The young GIs seemed so open, so loud, so childlike. Though one or two generations out of Central Europe, they had been so marked by America that the Schindlers and the prisoners looked at them with as much amazement as was returned.

The result was that the Schindler party spent two days on the Austrian frontier as guests of the regimental commander and the rabbi. They drank excellent coffee, such as the authentic prisoners in the group had not tasted since before the founding of the ghetto. They ate opulently.

After two days, the rabbi presented them with a captured ambulance, in which they drove to the ruined city of Linz in Upper Austria.

- On the second day of peace in Brinnlitz, the Russians still had not appeared. The commando group worried about the necessity of hanging on to the camp for longer than they had thought they'd have to. One thing they remembered was that the only time they'd seen the SS show fear-apart from the anxiety of Motzek and his colleagues in the past few days-had been when typhus broke out. So they hung typhus signs all over the wire.

Three Czech partisans turned up at the gate in the afternoon and talked through the fence to the men on sentry duty. It's all over now, they said. You're free to walk out whenever you want.

When the Russians arrive, said the prison commandos. Until then we're keeping everyone in.

Their answer exhibited some of the pathology of the prisoner, the suspicion you got after a time that the world outside the fence was perilous and had to be reentered in stages. It also showed their wisdom. They were not convinced yet that the last German unit had gone.

The Czechs shrugged and went away.

That night, when Poldek Pfefferberg was part of the guard at the main gate, motorcycle engines were heard on the road. They did not pa.s.s by, as the Panzers had done, but could be heard turning in toward the camp itself. Five cycles marked with the SS death's-head materialized out of the dark and drew up noisily by the front fence. As the SS men-very young, Poldek remembers-switched off their engines, dismounted, and approached the gate, a debate raged among the armed men inside as to whether the visitors ought to be immediately shot.

The NCO in charge of the motorcycle party seemed to understand the risk inherent in the situation. He stood a little way from the wire with his hands extended. They needed gasoline, he said. He presumed that being a factory camp, Brinnlitz would have gasoline.

Pfefferberg advised that it was better to supply them and send them packing than to create problems by opening fire on them. Other elements of their regiment might be in the region, and be drawn by an outburst of gunfire.

So in the end the SS men were let in through the gate, and some of the prisoners went to the garage and drew gasoline. The SS NCO was careful to convey to the camp commandos-who had put on blue coveralls in an attempt to look like informal guards, or at least like German Kapos-that he did not find anything peculiar in the idea of armed prisoners' defending their camps from within.

"I hope you realize there's typhus here," said Pfefferberg in German, pointing to the signs.

The SS men looked at each other.

"We've already lost two dozen people," said Pfefferberg. "We have another fifty isolated in the cellar."

This claim seemed to impress the gentlemen of the death's-head. They were tired. They were fleeing. That was enough for them. They didn't want any bacterial perils on top of the others.

When the gasoline arrived in 5-gallon cans, they expressed their thanks, bowed, and left through the gate. The prisoners watched them fill their tanks and considerately leave by the wire any cans they could not fit into their sidecars. They put on their gloves, started their engines, and left without too much revving of the motors, being too careful to waste their new tankfuls on flourishes. Their roar faded southwest through the village. For the men at the gate, this polite encounter would be their last with anyone wearing the uniform of Heinrich Himmler's foul legion.

- When on the third day the camp was liberated, it was by a single Russian officer. Riding a horse, he emerged through the defile through which the road and the railway siding approached the Brinnlitz gate. As he drew closer it became apparent that the horse was a mere pony, the officer's thin feet in the stirrups nearly touching the road and his legs bent in comically underneath the horse's skinny abdomen. He seemed to be bringing to Brinnlitz a personal, hard-won deliverance, for his uniform was worn, the leather strap of his rifle so withered by sweat and winter and campaigning that it had had to be replaced by rope. The reins of the horse were also of rope. The officer was fair-complexioned and, as Russians always look to Poles, immensely alien, immensely familiar.

After a short conversation in hybrid Polish-Russian, the commando at the gate let him in. Around the balconies of the second floor, the rumor of his arrival spread. As he dismounted he was kissed by Mrs. Krumholz. He smiled and called, in two languages, for a chair. One of the younger men brought it.

Standing on it to give himself a height advantage which, in relation to most of the prisoners, he did not need, he made what sounded like a standard liberation speech in Russian. Moshe Bejski could catch its gist. They had been liberated by the glorious Soviets. They were free to go to town, to move in the direction of their choosing. For under the Soviets, as in the mythical heaven, there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, bond nor free. They were not to take any cheap revenge in the town. Their Allies would find their oppressors, and subject them to solemn and appropriate punishment. The fact of their freedom should, to them, outweigh any other consideration.

He got down from his chair and smiled, as if saying that now he had finished as a spokesman and was prepared to answer questions. Bejski and some of the others began to speak to him, and he pointed to himself and said in creaky Belorussian Yiddish-the sort you pick up from your grandparents rather than your parents-that he was Jewish.

Now the conversation took on a new intimacy.

"Have you been in Poland?" Bejski asked him.

"Yes," the officer admitted. "I've come from Poland now."

"Are there any Jews left up there?"

"I saw none."

Prisoners were crowding around, translating and relaying the conversation to one another.

"Where are you from?" the officer asked Bejski.

"Cracow."

"I was in Cracow two weeks ago."

"Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz?"

"I heard that at Auschwitz there are still a few Jews."

The prisoners grew thoughtful. The Russian made Poland sound like a vacuum now, and if they returned to Cracow they'd rattle around in it bleakly like dried peas in a jar.

"Is there anything I can do for you?" the officer asked.

There were cries for food. He thought he could get them a cartload of bread, and perhaps some horsemeat. It should arrive before dusk. "But you should see what they have in town here," the officer suggested.

It was a radical idea-that they ought to just go out the gate and begin shopping in Brinnlitz. For some of them it was still an unimaginable option.

Young men like Pemper and Bejski pursued the officer as he left. If there were no Jews in Poland, there was nowhere to go. They didn't want him to give them instructions, but felt he ought to discuss their quandary with them. The Russian paused in untying the reins of his pony from a railing.

"I don't know," he said, looking them in the face. "I don't know where you ought to go. Don't go east-that much I can tell you. But don't go west either." His fingers returned to untying the knot. "They don't like us anywhere."

- As the Russian officer had urged them, the Brinnlitz prisoners moved out the gate at last to make their first tentative contact with the outer world. The young were the first to try it. Danka Schindel went out the day after the liberation and climbed the wooded hill behind the camp. Lilies and anemones were beginning to bud, and migratory birds were arriving from Africa. Danka sat on the hill for a while, savoring the day, then rolled down it and lay in the gra.s.s at the bottom, inhaling the fragrances and looking at the sky. She was there for so long that her parents presumed she had come to grief in the village, with either the townspeople or the Russians.

Goldberg left early too, was perhaps the first to go, on his way to pick up his riches in Cracow. He would emigrate, as quickly as he could arrange it, to Brazil.

Most of the older prisoners stayed in camp. The Russians had now moved into Brinnlitz, occupying as an officers' quarters a villa on a hill above the village. They brought to the camp a butchered horse, which the prisoners ate ravenously, some of them finding it too rich after their diet of bread and vegetables and Emilie Schindler's porridge.

Lutek Feigenbaum, Janek Dresner, and young Sternberg went foraging in town. The village was patrolled by the Czech underground, and Brinnlitz folk of German descent were therefore wary of the liberated prisoners. A grocer indicated to the boys that they were welcome to a bag of sugar he'd been keeping in his storeroom. Young Sternberg found the sugar irresistible, lowering his face to it and swallowing it by the handful. It made him cruelly ill. He discovered what the Schindler group were finding in Nuremburg and Ravensburg-that liberty and the day of plenty had to be approached gradually.

The main purpose of this expedition to town had been to get bread. Feigenbaum was armed, as a member of the Brinnlitz commandos, with a pistol and a rifle, and when the baker insisted there was no bread, one of the others said to him, "Threaten him with the rifle." The man, after all, was Sudetendeutsch and in theory an approver of all their misery. Feigenbaum pointed the weapon at the baker and moved through the shop into the residence beyond, looking for hidden flour. In the parlor, he found the baker's wife and two daughters huddled in shock. They looked so frightened, indistinguishable from any Cracow family during an Aktion, that a great shame overwhelmed him. He nodded to the women as if he were on a social visit, and left.

The same shame overtook Mila Pfefferberg on her first visit to the village. As she entered the square, a Czech partisan stopped two Sudeten girls and made them take off their shoes so that Mila, who had only clogs, could select the pair that fitted her better. This sort of dominance made her flush, and she sat on the pavement making her embarra.s.sed choice. The partisan gave the clogs to the Sudeten girl and pa.s.sed on. Mila then turned in her tracks, ran up behind the girl, and gave the shoes back. The Sudetendeutscherin, Mila remembers, was not even gracious.

In the evenings, the Russians came to the camp looking for women. Pfefferberg had to put a pistol to the head of a soldier who penetrated the women's quarters and grabbed Mrs. Krumholz. (Mrs. Krumholz would for years later chide Pfefferberg, pointing at him and accusing him. "Whatever chance I had of running off with a younger man, that scoundrel prevented it!") Three girls were taken away-more or less voluntarily-to a Russian party, and came back after three days and, they claimed, a good time.

The hold of Brinnlitz was a negative one, and within a week the prisoners began to move out. Some whose families had been consumed went directly to the West, never wis.h.i.+ng to see Poland again. The Bejski boys, using their cloth and vodka to pay their way, traveled to Italy and boarded a Zionist s.h.i.+p to Palestine. The Dresners walked across Moravia and Bohemia and into Germany, where Janek was among the first ten students to enroll in the Bavarian University of Erlangen when it opened later in the year.

Manci Rosner returned to Podgrze, where Henry had agreed to meet her. Henry Rosner himself, liberated from Dachau with Olek, was in a p.i.s.soir in Munich one day and saw another client of the place wearing prison-camp stripes. He asked the man where he had been imprisoned. "Brinnlitz," said the man. Everyone except an old lady, the man told him (inaccurately, as it turned out), had survived Brinnlitz. Manci herself would hear of Henry's survival through a cousin who came to the room in Podgrze where Manci was waiting and waved the Polish paper in which were listed the names of Poles liberated from Dachau. "Manci," said the cousin, "give me a kiss. Henry's alive, and so is Olek."

Regina Horowitz had a similar rendezvous. It took her three weeks to travel from Brinnlitz to Cracow with her daughter Niusia. She rented a room-the handout from the Navy store made that possible-and waited for Dolek. When he arrived, they sought to make inquiries of Richard, but there was no news. One day that summer Regina saw the film of Auschwitz which the Russians had made and were showing free of charge to the Polish population. She saw the famous frames involving the camp children, who looked out from behind the wire or were escorted by nuns past the electrified fence of Auschwitz I. Being so small and so engaging, Richard figured in most of the frames. Regina got up screaming and left the theater. The manager and a number of pa.s.sing citizens tried to soothe her in the street. "It's my son, it's my son!" she kept screaming. Now that she knew he was alive, she was able to discover that Richard had been released by the Russians into the hands of one of the Jewish rescue organizations. Thinking both his parents dead, the rescue body had had him adopted by some old acquaintances of the Horowitzes', people named Liebling. Regina was given the address, and when she arrived at the Lieblings' apartment could hear Richard inside, banging on a saucepan and calling, "Today there'll be soup for everyone!" When she knocked on the door, he called to Mrs. Liebling to answer it.

So he was returned to her. But after what he had seen of the scaffolds of Paszw and Auschwitz, she could never take him to a children's playground without his growing hysterical at the sight of the swing frames.

- At Linz, Oskar's group reported to the American authorities, were relieved of their unreliable ambulance, and were taken by truck north to Nuremberg, to a large holding center for wandering concentration-camp prisoners. They were discovering that, as they had suspected, liberation wasn't a straightforward business.

Richard Rechen had an aunt in Constanz, by the lake on the Swiss border. When the Americans asked the group if there was anywhere they could go, they nominated this aunt. The intent of the eight young prisoners from Brinnlitz was to deliver the Schindlers, if possible, across the Swiss border, in case vengeance against Germany erupted suddenly and, even in the American zone, the Schindlers were unjustly punished. Additionally, all eight of them were potential emigrants and believed that these matters would be easier to arrange from Switzerland.

Reubinski remembers that their relations.h.i.+p with the American commandant in Nuremburg was cordial, but the man would not spare them any transport to take them south to Constanz. They made the journey through the Black Forest as best they could, some of it on foot, some of it by train. Near Ravensburg they went to the local prison camp and spoke to the U.S. commandant. Here again they stayed as guests for some days, resting and living high on Army rations. In return, they sat up late with the commandant, who was of Jewish descent, and told him their stories of Amon and Paszw, of Grss-Rosen, Auschwitz, Brinnlitz. They hoped he would give them transport to Constanz, possibly a truck. He could not spare a truck, but gave them a bus instead, together with some provisions for the journey. Though Oskar still carried diamonds worth over 1,000 RM. as well as some currency, the bus does not appear to have been bought but was instead given freely. After his dealings with the German bureaucrats, it must have been difficult for Oskar to adjust to that sort of transaction.

West of Constanz, on the Swiss border and in the French Occupied zone, they parked the bus in the village of Kreuzlingen. Rechen went to the town hardware store and bought a pair of wire cutters. It seems that the party were still wearing their prison uniforms when the wire cutters were purchased. Perhaps the man behind the counter was influenced by one of two considerations: (a) this was a prisoner, and if thwarted might call his French protectors; (b) this was in fact a German officer escaping in disguise and perhaps should be helped.

The border fence ran through the middle of Kreuzlingen and was guarded on the German side by French sentries of the Srete 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 slipping 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 the 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, pa.s.sed back to the French, who at once searched their possessions, discovering jewels and currency; drove them to the former German prison; and locked them in separate cells.

It was clear to Reubinski 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 boomeranged, 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 ident.i.ty and his function in Brinnlitz, they would arraign him as a matter of course.

Prevaricating for Oskar's sake and Emilie's, they remained there a week. The Schindlers themselves now knew enough about Judaism to pa.s.s 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, in the files of the Americans.

Edek Reubinski, as the leader of the eight, was questioned 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 Reubinski's claim that he came from Cracow. For some reason-because the Pole played a compa.s.sionate role in the questioning that followed, or because of the familiarity of the language-Reubinski broke down, began to weep, and told the full story in fluent Polish. The rest were called one by one, were shown Reubinski, were told he had confessed, and then were 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 Reubinski, was weeping. Everyone was delighted at that phenomenon-a weeping interrogator. When he managed to compose himself, he called for lunch to be brought in for himself, his colleague, 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, Reubinski, the Rechens, and the others, Oskar's property had pa.s.sed 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.

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' small, 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 jewelry had been traded for food and liquor.

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, as indulgent as they were toward Oskar's heroic weaknesses, felt shamed for Emilie's sake.

He was still a wildly generous friend and a great discoverer of unprocurables. Henry Rosner remembers that he found 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 coloration. 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 sanitarium 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 dispatched to Poland for judgment. A number of former prisoners were invited to attend the trial as witnesses, and among the defense witnesses a deluded Amon considered calling were Helen Hirsch and Oskar Schindler. Oskar himself did not go to Cracow for the trials. Those who did found that Goeth, lean as a result of his diabetes, offered a subdued but unrepentant defense. All the orders for 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 wartime.

Mietek Pemper, waiting in the body of the court to be called to give evidence, sat beside another Paszw 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 13, 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 remorse 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 lineup, 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 organization 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 $15,000 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 organizations and individuals contacted by Mr. Schindler do their utmost to help him, in recognition of his outstanding service . . . .

Under the guise of operating a n.a.z.i labor 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 n.a.z.i-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 our brethren.

When he sailed for Argentina, he took with him half a dozen families of Schindlerjuden, paying the pa.s.sage 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 for steady routine. Some say, and there is some truth to it, that Emalia and Brinnlitz succeeded in their eccentric way because of the ac.u.men 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 sought work as a sales representative. Within a year, however, he left for Germany. Emilie remained behind.

Living in a small apartment in Frankfurt, he sought capital to buy a cement factory, 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 ranks 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 bankrupt again. His factory had been hurt 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared in Israel's Polish-language press asking that all former inmates of Concentration Camp Brinnlitz who had known "Oskar Schindler the German" 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 in 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 a.s.sist 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 labor 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, sought 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 ma.s.s of testimonies concerning Oskar. Of this large collection of statements, four are critical of him. Though these four witnesses all state that without Oskar they would have perished, they criticize 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 Treuhnder. A third statement is by the Cs' secretary and repeats the allegations of punching and bullying, rumors of which Stern had reported back to Oskar in 1940. The fourth comes from a man who claims to have had a prewar 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 when set against the ma.s.sed testimony of other Schindlerjuden, and they made no comment on them. Since all four stated that Oskar was their savior 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 munic.i.p.ality of Tel Aviv was the first body to honor Oskar. On his fifty-third birthday he unveiled a plaque in the Park of Heroes. The inscription describes him as savior of 1,200 prisoners of AL Brinnlitz, and though it understates numerically the extent of his rescue, it declares that it has been erected in love and grat.i.tude. Ten days later in Jerusalem, he was declared a Righteous Person, this t.i.tle being a peculiarly Israeli honor based on an ancient tribal a.s.sumption that in the ma.s.s of Gentiles, the G.o.d 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 t.i.tsch, the Madritsch supervisor in Paszw. On that stony ridge, few of the memorial trees have grown to more than 10 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 "Jewkisser," and the man lodged a charge of a.s.sault. 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 Queens, 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 honored 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 meters from Frankfurt's 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 b.u.t.terfly, 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 Bejski 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 1, 1968, that the Ministry of Finance was happy to report that from that date it would pay him a pension of 200 marks per month. Three months later, pensioner Schindler received the Papal Knighthood of St. Sylvester from the hands of the Bishop 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 Paszw. 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 Fraulein Ohnesorge, one of the quick-tempered women supervisors. He does not hesitate, however, to call Bosch a murderer and an exploiter, and says that he recognized Bosch at a railway station in Munich in 1946, approached him, and asked him if-after Paszw-he could manage to sleep. Bosch, says Oskar, was at that point living under an East German pa.s.sport. A supervisor named Mohwinkel, representative in Paszw of the German Armaments Works, is also roundly condemned; "intelligent but brutal," Oskar says of him. Of Goeth's bodyguard, Grn, 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 Ritschek, 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 Ritschek. 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.

- As he entered his sixties, he began working for the German Friends of Hebrew University. This involvement resulted from the urgings of those Schindlerjuden who were concerned with restoring some new purpose to Oskar's life. He began to work raising funds in West Germany. His old capacity to inveigle and charm officials and businessmen was exercised once again. He also helped set up a scheme of exchanges between German and Israeli children.

Despite the precariousness of his health, he still lived and drank like a young man. He was in love with a German woman named Annemarie, whom he had met at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. She would become the emotional linchpin of his later life.

His wife, Emilie, still lived, without any financial help from him, in her little house in San Vicente, south of Buenos Aires. She lives there at the time of the writing of this book. As she was in Brinnlitz, she is a figure of quiet dignity. In a doc.u.mentary made by German television in 1973, she spoke-without any of the abandoned wife's bitterness or sense of grievance-about Oskar and Brinnlitz, about her own behavior in Brinnlitz. Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.

In 1972, during a visit by Oskar to the New York executive office of the American Friends of Hebrew University, three Schindlerjuden, partners in a large New Jersey construction company, led a group of seventy-five other Schindler prisoners in raising $120,000 to dedicate to Oskar a floor of the Truman Research Center at Hebrew University. The floor would house a Book of Life, containing an account of Oskar's rescues and a list of the rescued. Two of these partners, Murray Pantirer and Isak Levenstein, had been sixteen years old when Oskar brought them to Brinnlitz. Now Oskar's children had become his parents, his best recourse, his source of honor.

He was very ill. The men who had been physicians in Brinnlitz-Alexander Biberstein, for example-knew it. One of them warned Oskar's close friends, "The man should not be alive. His heart is working through pure stubbornness."

In October 1974, he collapsed at his small apartment near the railway station in Frankfurt and died in a hospital on October 9. His death certificate says that advanced hardening of the arteries of the brain and heart had caused the final seizure. His will declared a wish he had already expressed to a number of Schindlerjuden-that he be buried in Jerusalem. Within two weeks the Franciscan parish priest of Jerusalem had given his permission for Herr Oskar Schindler, one of the Church's least observant sons, to be buried in the Latin Cemetery of Jerusalem.

Another month pa.s.sed before Oskar's body was carried in a leaden casket through the crammed streets of the Old City of Jerusalem to the Catholic cemetery, which looks south over the Valley of Hinnom, called Gehenna in the New Testament. In the press photograph of the procession can be seen-amid a stream of other Schindler Jews-Itzhak Stern, Moshe Bejski, Helen Hirsch, Jakob Sternberg, Juda Dresner.