Oskar Schindler

MARCEL GOLDBERG IS CERTAINLY ONE OF THE MOST MYSTERIOUS yet important figures in the Schindler story. When I began my research for this book, I had a sense of his importance but could find few people who knew anything about him. Thomas Keneally seemed aware of Goldberg’s significance to the creation of the “list,” but could only conclude that he “had the power to tinker with its edges.”¹ From Keneally’s perspective, Oskar Schindler was the principal author of his famous “list.” He claimed that Schindler brought a “preparatory list” with more than a thousand names on it to Płaszów and that Goldberg and Raimund Titsch, the manager of Julius Madritsch’s sewing factory, made slight changes before it was submitted to the SS for final approval. But Keneally also said that there was a “haziness suitable to a legend about the precise chronology of Oskar’s list.” He added that this haziness didn’t “attach to the existence of the list” because there was a copy of it in Yad Vashem’s archives.²

In reality, Oskar Schindler had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of his famous transport list. He admitted as much to Dr. Stanley Robbin after the war. Dr. Robbin, a Jewish physician at Emalia, was one of those Schindlerjuden taken directly from Emalia during the first week of August 1944 and put on the transport for Mauthausen. Dr. Robbin met Oskar in Germany several years later and asked him why so many longtime Emalia workers did not make it onto the list: “He told me he was not responsible for it. He never arranged this, and he apologized.”³

Moreover, the supposed original list at Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and in the Schindler “Koffer” collection in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz is dated April 18, 1945. This is the list that Marcel Goldberg is carrying in one scene in Schindler’s List. The original lists (one for men and one for women), which I discovered during my research, are dated October 21, 1944 (seven hundred men) and November 12, 1944 (three hundred women). The reason it is important to differentiate between the lists created in the spring of 1945 (there were several) is that the names were changing constantly from the time Goldberg created the list in the fall of 1944 to the date of the liberation of Brünnlitz on May 8, 1945, the date of the final “Schindler’s List.” To speak of one “Schindler’s List” is inaccurate and misleading because it clouds the issues surrounding the constantly changing nature of the list. The final lists that were written on May 8, 1945, were different from those created by Goldberg in Płaszów. Some names that had appeared on the list in the fall were unceremoniously removed and replaced by others during the transit to Brünnlitz via Groß Rosen and Auschwitz. At Brünnlitz, new names were added to the male and female lists as small transports from other camps made their way to Schindler’s sub-camp in the Sudetenland. As we have each of these transit lists, we can also consider them part of the collection of “Schindler’s Lists.”

Finally, though Marcel Goldberg was certainly the most important figure in the creation of the male and female lists in Płaszów and played a decisive role in the removal and replacement of certain Schindler men during the transit to Brünnlitz, he lost his authority when he arrived at Schindler’s new factory in the Sudetenland. The difference here is that when Goldberg was in charge of the lists in Płaszów, and had at least some influence over the male list in Groß Rosen, greed and personal contacts played a role in who was put on and who was taken off. When the seven hundred men and three hundred women arrived at Brünnlitz, Mietek Pemper and Itzhak Stern were put in charge and things changed. Moreover, Oskar and Emilie Schindler would now play a more direct role in the lives of their Jewish workers. And because Marcel Goldberg had lost his influence and credibility, Jews added to Oskar Schindler’s list were on there purely for humanitarian reasons.

But who was Marcel Goldberg and why was he so important to the creation of the original “Schindler’s List?” Keneally and Spielberg both seemed to have some sense of his importance to the creation of the famous list. Keneally described him as a “personnel clerk” who took advantage of the fact that Płaszów’s new commandant, Büscher, “could not have cared, within certain numerical limits, who went on the list.”⁴ But Keneally still saw Schindler, and to a lesser degree, Raimund Titsch, as the principal authors of the list. Spielberg picked up on this and dropped Titsch and Madritsch from the story. Why? Madritsch and Titsch were both considered good Germans (or, more accurately, good Austrians), so it is possible that he thought it would be simpler to identify with one hero instead of several. This is the reason he chose to make Itzhak Stern a composite of Stern, Pemper, and Bankier. It is also possible that no one had investigated Madritsch and Titsch’s stories. The Schindler story was promoted by Leopold Page and a small group of extremely dedicated Schindlerjuden. Though many of them knew extensively about Madritsch and Titsch, they did not consider either of them in Schindler’s league.

Unfortunately, the result of all of this is two mythical stories about the creation of “Schindler’s List.” Keneally did the best he could with the resources at hand; he also did not make the list’s creation the centerpiece of his historical novel. When his original book on Schindler came out in Great Britain in 1982, it was titled Schindler’s Ark. Keneally correctly understood that the significance of what Oskar Schindler did during the Holocaust took place over several years and involved some very special relationships with Jews. Schindler’s Ark, and its American literary twin, Schindler’s List, is about the special relationship that Oskar Schindler developed with some of his Jewish workers and acquaintances over a six-year period. Oskar Schindler’s story is carefully intertwined with the testimonies of the Jews he came to befriend and help, not just in the fall of 1944 but throughout the war. Spielberg chose to take a much more simplistic approach to the Schindler story.

On the other hand, Spielberg, while admitting Goldberg’s corruption, chose to give the audience a more wholesome story that fits with his theme of Oskar Schindler’s moral evolution through the film. And how better to do this than link him in authorship of the list with the film’s moral touchstone, Itzhak Stern. Telling the truth would have paired Schindler, a heavy drinker and womanizer, with a corrupt Jew, Marcel Goldberg. And if Spielberg had taken Schindler completely out of this phase of the film, he would have robbed it of its heart. If he had linked Schindler with Goldberg, he would simply have strengthened the sense that what really drove Oskar Schindler in all of this was money. But Spielberg did not leave Marcel Goldberg completely out of the story; he created a mini-story within a story through which he traced Goldberg’s moral degeneration through the film. So though Spielberg dared not link Goldberg directly to Schindler when it came to the authorship of the list, he at least had enough sense of history to discuss Goldberg’s moral failings elsewhere.

The List

Thomas Keneally was carefully guided in his research and interviews by Leopold Page, who was probably uncomfortable with the Goldberg story because it did not fit with his idealistic image of Oskar. This had more to do, at least from Page’s viewpoint, with protecting the image of someone he deeply cared for than with anything else. And despite his balanced approach to the Schindler story, there is no question that Thomas Keneally, a kind person in his own right, was affected by Page’s adoring attitude. But it is also possible that the Schindler Jews that Keneally interviewed simply did not know much about Goldberg and his role in the creation of the list. Itzhak Stern, who knew everything, was dead, and Keneally had spent only a few hours with Mietek Pemper, these in the Munich airport. Keneally had more time with Dr. Moshe Bejski, by then the acknowledged “dean” of Schindler Jews in Israel. But if I had not spent a lot of time with Bejski and Pemper, and asked specific questions about Goldberg, they probably would not have brought him up.

In the early stages of my research, I asked Dr. Bejski, a retired justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, and Mietek Pemper about Marcel Goldberg. Dr. Bejski simply told me that “Marcel Goldberg prepared the list.” He added that if there were vacancies on the list, then people could bribe Goldberg to get on one of them.⁵ Mietek Pemper and I talked extensively about Goldberg during my interviews with him in 1999 and 2000. He told me that Goldberg “had a free hand in choosing what people to put on the list.” Goldberg’s superior, Franz Müller, “did not care what he did.”⁶ The only other direct witness to all this, Itzhak Stern, did not even mention Goldberg in his 1956 report to Yad Vashem. But in his memoirs, Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein attributed the authorship of “Schindler’s List” to Marcel Goldberg.⁷

In fact, most of the Schindlerjuden I interviewed knew or had heard that Marcel Goldberg was the author of “Schindler’s List,” though many of them were fuzzy about details.

But feelings and attitudes towards Goldberg varied. Like Wilek Chilowicz, Marcel Goldberg had supporters, though most Schindler Jews were extremely critical of him. Some were outraged about his efforts to sell places on the lists; others were bitter because he either did not put them on the lists or at some point took them off. Rena Ferber Finder was one of the Schindler Jews who saw firsthand some of Goldberg’s treachery. Rena’s father, Moniek (Moses) Ferber, had been an OD man in the ghetto and helped Goldberg get a job on the Jewish police force. Rena’s family even shared space with the Goldberg family in a ghetto apartment. On December 31, 1942, Moses Ferber and Marcel Goldberg were arrested together. Later, Marcel Goldberg was released, but Moses Ferber was sent to Auschwitz, where he was killed. Rena did not learn of his death until after the war.⁸

Rena told me that she thought that Goldberg was jealous of her father and she was, needless to say, suspicious about why one of the two Jewish OD men arrested on New Year’s Eve, 1942, was sent to Auschwitz and death and not the other. Here, she said, we begin to see the real Goldberg. Several months after her father’s arrest and disappearance, Rena went to see Goldberg, who by this time was working in Płaszów for Amon Göth, and asked Goldberg to put her and her mother on a list to Schindler’s factory. Rena said that as early as 1943 she knew of people who were bribing Goldberg to send them to Emalia. Rena ultimately got a job at Emalia working on a lathe.⁹

Moshe Bejski said that Goldberg was principally interested in diamonds, which he brought with him to Brünnlitz. Sol Urbach said, though, that it was hard for him to imagine anyone having any sort of wealth at this point in the Holocaust. He talked about the strict body searches conducted by the SS before entering Płaszów and explained that the only people he knew who were able to bring valuables into the camp were those who had placed condoms filled with valuables deep inside their rectums.¹⁰ But some people had managed to hide valuables when they entered Płaszów. Roman Ferber’s mother, Malia, had two diamonds “drilled into her teeth,” as well as other valuables that enabled the family to survive the Holocaust.¹¹

Chaskel Schlesinger managed to take several gold rings with him to Płaszów and Brünnlitz, and Pola Gerner Yogev’s family spent a fortune in hidden money to keep their elderly grandmother alive. “Everybody tried to save themselves and their families. Some did it by ‘ethical’ means, some by ‘unethical’ means.”¹² Lola Feldman Orzech kept a 500 złoty ($156.25) note hidden in her hair bun; Roman Ferber carried a $100 bill with him throughout the Holocaust. Moses Goldberg managed to sneak a 1,000-złoty ($312.50) bill into Płaszów, which he used to bribe a Kapo to keep him off the Kommando 1005 exhumation and burning detail.¹³ Sam Wertheim turned some valuables into cash just before he was sent to Płaszów, and then Mauthausen, in August 1944. He asked Leopold Page to give the money to his wife, Edith, who in turn was to give it to Sam’s father; Page gave Edith “every single penny,” which she hid in a loaf of bread under straw in Płaszów.¹⁴

By the time that Schindlerjude Sam Birenzweig (Zimich Birnzweig) became a prisoner in Płaszów in the early fall of 1944, it was almost empty. The camp, he said, had a vibrant black market fueled by a “Płaszów-area store that still stocked luxury items like vodka and salami.” Sam said the store was for “show” because the Germans still wanted “to maintain the illusion that they were winning the war.” These luxury items “were like diamonds. I didn’t eat good food like this for three or four years! I brought [sic] it inside Płaszów. People there had money. This was terrific!”¹⁵ It is also important to remember Hans Stauber’s comments to Heinrich Himmler at about the same time. Stauber, the chief treasurer of the Army Post Administration in Kraków, had complained to the Reichsführer SS in early September 1944 about the active black market trading between guards and Jewish prisoners in Płaszów.¹⁶ So there were valuables in Płaszów to buy almost anything, even a human life. It is doubtful, though, that more than a handful of the remaining inmates had anything significant to trade. If they did, it was usually used to buy bread or other foodstuffs to supplement their meager diet.

And though some people bribed Marcel Goldberg to get onto “Schindler’s List,” most were on it for other reasons. Many of the places, for example, were already predetermined. Mietek Pemper told me, for example, that although Oskar Schindler had little to do with the actual creation of the list, he gave Franz Müller several general guidelines for who he wanted on the list. He first wanted “my people,” meaning the remaining Emalia Jews, Madritsch’s list of workers, and specially trained metal workers.¹⁷ Beyond this, Goldberg had to add to the list the workers who had accompanied Brünnlitz’s new commandant, Josef Leipold, from the aviation factory in Wieliczka. The Jews chosen by Madritsch, or, more precisely, his manager, Raimund Titsch, were the most prominent Jews from his factory. The same was true with the Jews chosen by Leipold.

After the war, Oskar was bitter about what he saw as Julius Madritsch’s failure to do more to put a substantial number of his Jewish workers on the list. Oskar first alluded to this in his 1945 financial report. He mentioned as part of his discussion about the transfer of his armaments operations from Emalia to Brünnlitz that Raimund Titsch had been able to rescue “at least part of his Jews to my relocated factory in Bruennlitz. This was a task that in my opinion should have been Mr. Madritsch’s obligation.” He added that Titsch visited Brünnlitz several times to make sure that his Jews were “not living in danger and also to give them the support and mail of foreign friends.”¹⁸

Oskar was more pointed in his criticism of Madritsch in several letters he wrote to Dr. K. J. Ball-Kaduri, who was investigating the Schindler story in the summer and fall of 1956. On August 24, 1956, Dr. Ball-Kaduri had written Itzhak Stern in Israel and asked him to talk about his experiences in Poland during the Holocaust. Stern let Oskar read the letter and suggested that he also share his experiences with Dr. Ball-Kaduri. Over the next few months, Oskar and Dr. Ball-Kaduri corresponded about Oskar’s wartime experiences. In one of his letters, Dr. Ball-Kaduri asked Oskar whether he had a copy of Madritsch’s wartime memoirs, Menschen in Not! (People in Distress). Oskar had already told Dr. Ball-Kaduri of his frustration with Madritsch, though he did not initially mention him by name. In his letter to the Yad Vashem researcher on September 9, 1956, Oskar talked of being urged during his last months in Emalia “to emigrate to Switzerland in order to save myself and my financial possessions.” This would have meant, Oskar explained, “to leave everything to its predestined fate (extermination).” Oskar also admitted that “it took quite a bit of moral strength to say ‘no.’” Yet, he wondered, “who would have dared condemn me, if I had left for Switzerland after being imprisoned by the dangerous Gestapo?”¹⁹

Five and a half weeks later, Oskar sent Dr. Ball-Kaduri a copy of Madritsch’s wartime memoirs and told him that he felt “somewhat biased regarding the case of Madritsch, since the greed of this man prevented me from the certain rescue of 300 people, mainly women, from the Madritsch factory.” Schindler added that all Madritsch seemed interested in was five wagons of “rickety and rusty sewing machines and questionable textiles,” which had already been transferred to Bregenz, Austria, on Lake Constance (or Bodensee, which rests on the Swiss, German, and Austrian borders). Oskar said that Madritsch’s machinery and textiles seemed more important to him than “the fate of the people entrusted to him.” Titsch was more pointed in his criticism of Madritsch, who, he said, “was content in his safe, secure position, and had no intention of endangering himself, the amount of money that he had made, his position, and his security in general by taking this dangerous step.”²⁰

For Oskar, the real hero in this story was Titsch who, he thought, deserved “an Iron Cross for humaneness.” He said that “Titsch alone was the motor and it was because of his selfless, undaunted actions when Jewish people were helped at the Madritsch factory.”²¹ Titsch felt the same way about Schindler. After the war, he said, “I look upon Schindler as the greatest adventurer I have ever known; the bravest man I have ever known.”²² Oskar told Dr. Ball-Kaduri that he had discussed the three hundred or so Jewish workers with Madritsch one evening at a party at Büscher’s villa. According to Schindler, when he asked Madritsch about putting some of his Jews on the list, Madritsch seemed uninterested. Oskar continued to press him on the matter until Madritsch said, “Dear Oskar, spare yourself your words; it is a lost cause. I am not investing another dime in it.” Titsch, who was also at the party, spoke with Oskar later that evening and hastily put together a list with sixty-two names on it. Titsch later admitted that it was difficult to come up with so many names at a loud, drunken party. Oskar said that he was then able to persuade Büscher, who was in a good mood, to sign it. He explained that the Jews on the list would be “factory tailors.”²³

But the hand-written note that Titsch gave to Oskar that night was not the final Madritsch list. I found it in Schindler’s “Koffer” files, which Chris Staehr discovered in the attic of his father’s home in Hildesheim in 1997 and later gave to Yad Vashem. At Chris’s insistence, the Bundesarchiv was permitted to make a copy of this large collection before it was sent to Israel. The carefully typed Madritsch list had the names of forty men and twenty women with their camp identification numbers and is dated October 1944. Titsch wrote by hand the following: “Verzeichnis der von den to Schindler über unser besuchen über nommenen Leute unserer Betriebes.” This is really poor German which indicates it was written in haste. Essentially it says that “this is the list for Schindler based on our discussion about the people from our closed factories.” The typed list was on an outdated letterhead that read Julius Madritsch, Krakauer Konfektion, Krakau-Podgorze, Ringplatz 3. Marcel Goldberg signed his name at the bottom of the Madritsch list. According to Martin Gosch and Howard Koch, who interviewed Titsch for a film project they were working on in 1964, “Julius Madritsch, who now lives in Vienna, carries the original copy of this list in his pocket always.”²⁴

Several interesting things can be learned from this list, particularly when it is tied to Oskar’s discussions with Madritsch and Titsch in October 1944. Schindler’s list was prepared just after he got permission from the Armaments Inspectorate and the SS to move his armaments operations to Brünnlitz. We know from Oskar’s comments that this matter was uncertain until the last minute. And from the time Oskar received his orders to shut down his armaments production at Emalia, Göth and his successor, Büscher, were emptying Płaszów of its Jewish prisoners. With the transport of 4,000 prisoners to the Stutthof concentration camp in Germany in late July 1944, there were still about 20,000 prisoners in Płaszów. On August 6, Göth shipped 7,500 Jewish women to Auschwitz and four days later 4,589 Jewish men to Mauthausen, which reduced the camp’s population by almost half. On August 10, another 1,446 Jewish women were sent from Płaszów to Auschwitz; and in September, the SS closed the Polish section of the camp. Only about 7,000 Jews now remained in Płaszów.²⁵

They would be shipped out of Płaszów in October in two major transports; when they were gone, all that remained of the former camp population were six or seven hundred prisoners and a skeleton staff of forty to complete the final liquidation of the camp. On October 15, 4,500 men were sent to Groß Rosen; a week later, Büscher sent 2,000 women to Auschwitz. The transports of October 15 and October 22 included the seven hundred men and three hundred women, who were to be sent ultimately to Brünnlitz.²⁶ Schindler’s seemingly last-minute request to Madritsch for three hundred names, principally women, is revealing because he appeared desperate to find names to fill the women’s list. One would have presumed that when Oskar told Franz Müller that his first priority was “my people,” he meant the men and women who had worked for him at Emalia. We have no idea how many women worked for Oskar at Emalia, but given the 700:300 ration of his 1944 list, one would presume that this was about how many women worked for him in his Kraków factory. But if Oskar was asking Madritsch to fill his female quota almost completely, then little must have been done to protect his former female workers. This probably had less to do with Oskar’s concern over the fate of his Emalia workers than his inability to win approval for his move to Brünnlitz until the eve of the next to last liquidation stage for Płaszów. If that was so, there was probably little he could do to keep his individual workers off the ongoing transports out of Płaszów. A case in point, of course, was the Mauthausen transport of August 10. All that Oskar could do in that situation was help make the trip to Austria a little more comfortable for his former Jewish workers. Because Madritsch and Titsch were able to come up with only sixty names at the last minute, Marcel Goldberg had to fill the remaining places for women bound for Brünnlitz. Complicating the matter further, Mietek Pemper told me that the three hundred women on the female Płaszów-Auschwitz-Brünnlitz list “were mainly women who had worked for Oskar Schindler in Emalia.” Goldberg, of course, was on the October 15 transport to Groß Rosen, so there is no way to tell whether changes were made on the female list during the next week.²⁷

After the war, Madritsch explained what seemed to be his hesitancy to join Schindler in Brünnlitz. He had planned for some time to move his operations to Lower Austria and reopen his factory in Drosendorf. These plans fell through, he explained, because the fields where he wanted to build his barracks for his Jewish workers had not been harvested. Local officials then rejected his application for the move. One wonders whether the real reason for local Austrian disapproval was similar to the one Schindler encountered when he tried to move his armaments factory to the Sudetenland. At this juncture, Madritsch wrote, he accepted Oskar Schindler’s offer to move his sewing factory to Brünnlitz. He was given the permission of economic officials in the General Government and the HSSPF Ost for the move but failed to get approval from Maurer’s D2 Office. Madritsch made several trips to Berlin to argue his case but was finally told that “uniforms are not an essential production item for the war effort. Fighting is possible in civilian clothes, too. Jewish work forces are to be used in the production of ammunition only!”²⁸

Actually, Madritsch should not have been surprised by D2’s rejection of his application for the move. He had difficulty getting approval to keep his factory open earlier in the year and only received a six-month contract from Maurer’s office in February 1944 to keep his sewing factory open in Płaszów. Consequently, D2’s rejection of his application to move with Schindler to Brünnlitz was in line with its earlier decisions.²⁹ But Madritsch did not know that a good part of the vast factory complex where Schindler would open his small armaments factory in Brünnlitz already housed a large SS uniform factory. Mietek Pemper shared this information with me when I interviewed him for a second time in early 2000. I had excitedly brought with me a factory plan that the archives of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., identified as Brünnlitz. Mr. Pemper explained that this was a plan for the SS uniform factory in the larger factory complex where Schindler had his factory. But it was not a plan for Oskar’s factory.³⁰ Maurer’s D2 office knew this, which was probably one of the reasons it rejected Madritsch’s application. Moreover, given the difficulties Oskar encountered in persuading local officials in the Sudetenland to support his move there, Madritsch’s efforts to join Schindler with his large Jewish workforce there could easily have torpedoed Schindler’s planned move.

Madritsch said that by August 6, 1944, he had given up hope of ever moving his factory. Gradually, many of Madritsch’s 2,000 workers were sent to Auschwitz and Mauthausen. He was initially allowed to keep about three hundred men and two hundred women for cleanup work. They would be placed on the final October transports to Groß Rosen and Auschwitz in October. He said he provided Oskar with a hundred names for his list and also gave him “several hundred meters of textiles from his Krakow stock piles.”³¹

But Madritsch’s story did not end there. In early September, he visited his family in Vienna, where he and his wife “were buried alive in my mother’s house after an air raid on Vienna.” But his troubles were only beginning. On November 3, 1944, the SD arrested him in Kraków and put him in the city’s infamous Montelupich prison. Three days later, he was transferred to a prison in Berlin. The SD explained that his name had been found on a list of the resistance movement in Poland: “I was supposed to have spread gruesome stories about Plaszow. That’s all?” The SD released him after twelve days.³²

Given all this, why did Oskar feel so betrayed by Madritsch? There is no reason to doubt Madritsch’s version of the story. The Jews who worked for him considered him Schindler’s equal when it came to the treatment of his Jewish workers. Just after the war, Irvin (Izak) and Phyllis (Feiga Wittenberg) Karp, both Schindler Jews, went to Vienna to testify in support of Madritsch and Titsch’s efforts during the Holocaust. Madritsch had taken over their business, Hogo, and Irvin helped run the business for Madritsch. Celina Karp Biniaz, Irvin and Phyllis’s daughter, described Madritsch as “more elegant and classy than Schindler.” He was, she added, “a good human being with a heart.” She was equally complimentary of Titsch, whom she considered “a wonderful man who got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.” During the war, Jakub Feigenbaum gave Titsch some diamonds to keep for him. When the war ended, he went to Vienna to find Titsch, who returned the diamonds.³³

Julius Madritsch and Oskar Schindler were very different people. Madritsch had a good working relationship with Amon Göth, yet he never felt the need to cross the line when it came to sharing Göth’s passion for wild parties and drinking. Helen Sternlicht-Rosenzweig, one of Amon Göth’s two Jewish maids, said that, unlike Oskar, Madritsch was not a womanizer.³⁴ Madritsch’s virtuous ways and kind treatment of his Jewish workers made him, along with Titsch, a prime candidate for nomination as a Righteous Among the Nations in Israel after the war. It is quite possible that Oskar was jealous of Madritsch, who prospered after the war, though this would not explain why he criticized Madritsch just after the war ended. After their escape to Germany, Oskar and Emilie became very close to some of the Jews they had cared for and protected during the Shoah. In this unguarded environment, questions must have been asked about why certain people made the list and others did not. Given Madritsch’s reputation as someone friendly and helpful to Jews, some Schindlerjuden must have wondered why some of their friends and relatives who worked for Madritsch were not on the list. Given the inconsistencies, favoritism, luck, bribery, and other factors that went into the creation of the list by Goldberg, it would have been easier to blame questions about the “missing” on Madritsch rather than Oskar Schindler, who was gradually emerging as a saint to many of his former Jewish workers.

But there is no doubt that jealousy was a factor once the issue of Madritsch and Schindler came to the attention of Yad Vashem in the mid-1950s. By this time, Oskar had failed in his business ventures in Argentina, and his efforts to save Jews during the war became an important part of his identity. To suddenly have to share it with Julius Madritsch, a successful man of seeming impeccable character, was probably a little more than Oskar could handle. From Schindler’s perspective, Madritsch owed his postwar success to the money he made during the war, and this only added to Schindler’s dislike of him. Raimund Titsch, on the other hand, was a different matter. He was not a factory owner and therefore not as threatening to Schindler as Madritsch. Oskar had read Madritsch’s memoirs, Menschen in Not! but said little about it. He never questioned the accuracy of Madritsch’s account, which was filled with countless, daring tales of efforts to help Jews throughout the war. Perhaps Oskar, whose own account of his wartime efforts to save Jews was published in Germany in 1957, was uncomfortable about sharing the limelight with someone whom some Schindlerjuden considered Oskar Schindler’s equal.³⁵

Finally, there is the matter of how many Jews were on the Madritsch-Titsch list. Madritsch said in Menschen in Not! that he gave Oskar 100 names while the list that Titsch sent to Goldberg only had sixty names on it. Moreover, only fifty-three of the Madritsch Jews on the Titsch-Goldberg list made it to Brünnlitz. The shifting numbers can only be explained by the whims of Marcel Goldberg. People were desperate to get on the list at the last minute. One of the remarkable things about the two “Schindler’s Lists” is the many family groupings. If you had no connections, money, or significant family ties, it was possible you could be replaced by someone who had the money to bribe Goldberg. As Schindler, Madritsch, and Titsch had little say over the actual creation of the two lists, there was no guarantee you would get on it just because one of them suggested your name. Goldberg was smart enough to know that he had to put the important Schindler and Madritsch people on his lists. Margot Schlesinger said that Goldberg was afraid of Titsch, though this was probably not enough to insure that one would finally be put on Goldberg’s lists for Płaszów-Groß Rosen-Brünnlitz and Płaszów-Auschwitz-Brünnlitz.³⁶

This was probably because Titsch, like Schindler and Madritsch, had developed a special relationship with Göth. Płaszów’s commandant was an avid chess player, as was Titsch. One day, Göth asked Titsch to play a game with him, which Titsch won handily. Göth flew into a rage, turned the chess table over, and “stormed out of his office, with his guns on him, and was ready,” according to Titsch, “to kill any Jew in sight.” After this outburst, Titsch decided to lose to Göth to prevent similar incidents. But he decided to do it very carefully and slowly. Over time, he was able to convince Göth, after losing to him many times, that the commandant was the superior chess player. Titsch made certain that each losing game lasted from three to four hours so that “the camp, and the Jewish people in the camp could breathe easily” during the hours they were playing. And though Titsch and Göth did not play every day, Titsch tried “to engage Goeth in a game of chess whenever possible, because it was in a way his kind of Christian duty [Titsch was a Roman Catholic] to contribute to the welfare of his brother fellow men.”³⁷ Goldberg knew of Titsch’s “chess” relationship with Göth as well as their Viennese ties, which is probably the reason he feared Titsch.

Regardless, Goldberg had his own favorites when it came to whom he wanted on his lists and he could be quite bold when he made his choices. He removed Noah Stockman, the top Jewish leader among the “Budzyner” Jews favored by Brünnlitz’s new commandant, SS-Obersturmführer Josef Leipold, while the men were in Groß Rosen. Leipold, who had been commandant of the Heinkel aircraft factory camps at Budzyvń and Wieliczka (Wilhelmsburg), trusted Stockman and wanted him to play the same role in Brünnlitz that he had at Budzyvń and Wieliczka. The group of about fifty to sixty “Budzyners” saw themselves as something special, though they were not powerful enough to prevent Goldberg from removing Stockman from the list in Groß Rosen. This insured continued friction between the Kraków Jewish leadership and the “Budzyners” throughout the rest of the war.³⁸

The Budzyvń concentration camp was built on the site of a former Polish military industrial complex that included an aircraft factory. The Budzyvń military factories were located just north of Kraśsnik, which was thirty-five miles southwest of Lublin. After the Germans conquered Poland, the military factories at Budzyvń became part of the Hermann Göring Works (Reichswerke Hermann Göring) and the Ernst Heinkel Aircraft Company (Ernst Heinkel Flugzeugwerke A.G.) took over the Polish aircraft factory. Heinkel had begun to use slave laborers at its new aircraft factory in Oranienburg in 1941. During the next four years, Heinkel-Oranienburg became one of the principal employers of concentration camp labor and a “model for slave labor,” complete with a satellite camp of its own in Oranienburg. It also used slave labor in aircraft factories elsewhere. In early 1944, Heinkel reported that it was employing 2,065 prisoners in its factory in Mauthausen-Schwechat and 5,939 in Sachsenhausen. The Germans set up a forced labor camp at Budzyvń in 1942 and initially used 500 Jews as slave laborers there. Within a year, 3,000 Jews were working at the various factories at Budzyvń. About 10 percent of them were women and children. On October 22, 1942, the SS declared Budzyvń a concentration camp and made it a part of the Majdanek network of camps.³⁹

In early May 1944, the Heinkel operations at Budzyvń were moved to Mielec, about a hundred miles northeast of Kraków. Schindler Jew Francisco Wichter said that about 950 Jews worked at Heinkel’s “United East” Flugzeugwerk in Mielec. He was not certain about the components he helped manufacture, but speculated they might have been for V-1 and V-2 rockets. On the other hand, Schindlerjude Sam Birenzweig remembered helping install windshields on aircraft at Mielec.⁴⁰ But Wichter and the other Heinkel Jewish workers would soon move again as part of Hermann Göring’s “Fighter Staff” plan to shift vital aircraft production to bomb-proof underground factories. Though run by Karl Otto Saur, the head of the Technical Office in Albert Speer’s Ministry for Armaments and Munitions, WVHA’s Hans Kammler oversaw the construction of the new aircraft factories. Kammler worked closely with Gerhard Maurer, who supplied the new Fighter Staff factories with concentration camp labor.⁴¹

Soon after the move to Mielec, the Fighter Staff coordinators began to make plans to transfer Heinkel’s Aircraft Company/Works (Flugzeugwerk) operations to the Fighter Staff’s new underground factory in the Wieliczka salt mines, about ten miles miles east of Kraków. Jewish workers would be drawn from the Flugzeugwerk and Płaszów to build the camp, which was named Wilhelmsburg, and then the factory below it. By early June 1944, workers in Wieliczka had constructed the first parts of the Heinkel He 219 Uhu (Owl), one of the most versatile but underproduced aircraft in the Luftwaffe. But by August, with the increased threat of bomb attacks from the U.S. Fifteenth Air Force and the advance of the Red Army, the factory was closed. But even if Wieliczka had not been threatened by the Americans and the Russians, there were serious questions about the wisdom of putting an aircraft factory in a former salt mine. Francisco Wichter and Sam Birenzweig commented on the damage that the salt did to aircraft and machine metal. Some of Wieliczka’s Jewish workers were sent to Płaszów, Groß Rosen, Mauthausen, and other camps. The factory itself was moved to Austria, along with some of the other skilled workers.⁴²

Josef Leipold was in charge of the Jewish labor camps at the Heinkel operations in Budzyvń and Wielizcka. When the Fighter Staff shut down its operations at the salt mines, Leipold joined Göth’s staff in Płaszów as an adjutant, though he was still involved with tearing down the barracks and packing up the machinery at Wieliczka. Noah Stockmann remained with Leipold to oversee Jewish workers at the salt mines. Before he came to Płaszów, Stockmann had gained quite a reputation for kindness. Originally from Brest Litovsk, Stockmann was a former Polish army officer who, along with sixty other captured POWs, were permitted to wear their uniforms at Budzyvń. Leipold thought this would enable him to distinguish the former POWs from other prisoners.⁴³ Stockmann did everything he could to make living conditions tolerable in Budzyvń. He was, for example, able to arrange for the prisoners to get unleavened bread for a Seder ceremony during Pesach (Passover) in the spring of 1944.⁴⁴

Sam Birenzweig, who worked briefly for Stockmann at Wieliczka, remembered him as “a marvelous guy.” Stockmann was uncomfortable selecting workers for life and death, so he told them the truth. The work at Wieliczka would really be hard. If someone was too sick or old to work, he said, they would be put on one of the frequent transports that left the camp. In this way, Birenzweig explained, Stockmann put the burden of life and death on the shoulders of each prisoner. But Stockmann’s popularity was probably the cause of his downfall. Once the group of Schindler males arrived at Groß Rosen, Marcel Goldberg found a way to have Stockmann taken off of the list.⁴⁵

Questions of Favoritism and Schindler’s Lists

But before any of this happened, Goldberg had to prepare for the final departures of the 1,000 Jews originally on “Schindler’s Lists.” By the second week of October 1944, only about 7,000 Jews remained in Płaszów. And though Oskar Schindler had only just received final permission to open his factory in Brünnlitz and to move seven hundred men and three hundred women from Płaszów, the two lists indicate that Goldberg had given quite a lot of thought to who would be on them. For one thing, the lists are unusual in that there are so many similar surname groupings on it. Though Oskar did not get permission for the move until late September or early October, Goldberg must have known about his general plans well before this. This is the only way to explain his success in putting certain individuals, their families, and their friends on the list. In little more than two months, Płaszów’s inmate population had been reduced by almost 13,000 people. To protect the people he wanted on the list, Goldberg had to take great care to keep them off the large transports that were leaving Płaszów. It was one thing to protect the random OD man, Kapo, or Blockälteste; it was quite another matter to protect his or her family or friends.

In some ways, the list that Raimund Tisch gave Marcel Goldberg typifies the lumping together of families that appeared on the larger Schindler transport lists. At one point, Madritsch had 3,000 Jews working for him at Płaszów, and when Schindler asked Madritsch and Titsch for a last-minute list of names, they named the people they were most familiar with: their supervisors and other Jews they had relied upon to help administer the large Madritsch sewing concern in the camp. Moreover, in comparing the Madritsch list with the two “Schindler’s Lists,” it is apparent that there was a concerted effort to put the names of the families of the sixty Madritsch workers on these larger lists. Leib and Estera Hudes, for example, were on Madritsch’s list; two other family members, Izak and Naftali Hudes, joined them on “Schindler’s Lists.” Natan and Leontyna Stern were on Madritsch’s list; Aszer, Henryk, and Sala Stern joined them on the larger lists. This meant that the original Madritsch list of sixty was expanded to sixty-eight once extra family members were added. And if you subtract the seven people on the original Madritsch list who did not make it to Brünnlitz, then over 20 percent of those on the Madritsch list were put together with other family members on “Schindler’s List.”⁴⁶

These family ties were extremely important for survival in Płaszów. Time and again, Schindlerjuden told me how they were given better jobs or other special considerations because of their family or personal connections, though they often did not word it quite this way. Personal connections of even the most modest sort could ultimately translate into survival and life for many Schindler Jews. This does not mean that everyone who ultimately got on “Schindler’s Lists” had such ties or influence. Many were just lucky. Dr. Moshe Bejski, for example, told me that he had no idea how he got on the list. He learned at the last minute that he was on it but not his two brothers, Izrael and Urysz. He told Goldberg to take him off the list if they were not on it. Later that evening, Goldberg told him to bring his two brothers with him to the train.⁴⁷ On the other hand, Ryszard Horowitz admitted that his family were put on the list because “they were well connected.”⁴⁸

Ties to Marcel Goldberg were also important. Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein said in his memoirs that though he, his wife, and his daughter were on the lists, Goldberg took them off, despite efforts by Mietek Pemper to change Goldberg’s mind. Instead, Dr. Bieberstein said, they were replaced by people who had bribed Goldberg. Dr. Bieberstein was put back on the male list in Groß Rosen after the intervention of Pemper and Itzhak Stern. His wife and daughter were not so lucky. He was also unable to save his nephew, Dr. Artur Bieberstein, from being deported to Flossenbürg.⁴⁹ With the exception of one young relative, Emalia’s Abraham Bankier was also alone on the list.

The same was true of Josef Bau. But he was alone on it because his wife, Rebecca, who had done manicures for Amon Göth, went to Mietek Pemper and arranged to have herself taken off the female “list” so that her husband, Josef, could be put on the male list. Some time earlier, Rebecca had intervened to save Pemper’s mother from being shot by SS-Rottenführer Franz Grün. Rebecca was walking through the camp and saw Grün about to shoot Pemper’s mother. Rebecca told Grün that if Göth found out he had killed Pemper’s mother, the commandant would probably have Grün executed. Rebecca Bau later explained that she had made this sacrifice because “my husband was more important to me than I was, and I wasn’t afraid.”⁵⁰ Josef did not learn of Rebecca’s sacrifice until he reached Groß Rosen. In 1971, Josef Bau testified against Grün at a trial in Vienna. The Austrian court sentenced the brutal Płaszów guard to nine years imprisonment for the murder of Bau’s father, Abraham, and other Jews. Fourteen years earlier, a Polish court in Kraków had sentenced Grün to life imprisonment.⁵¹

Aleksander Bieberstein stated bitterly in his memoirs that many of Emalia and Płaszów’s most prominent physicians were put on the list because they were friends of Goldberg. This included Dr. Chaim Hilfstein, a Jewish physician at Emalia; Dr. Leon Groß, Dr. Szaja Händler, Dr. Ferdinand Lewkowicz, and Dr. Matylda Löw. On a practical basis, it would seem wise to have as many experienced physicians as you could on any list for a labor camp, particularly in light of SS concern with hygiene. But favoritism did have an impact here. There were eleven members of the Groß family on the list, six Lewkowicz family members, and three Hilfsteins. On the other hand, Dr. Händler was alone on the list and there were only two members of the Löw family on it. Power and influence could not totally protect a family from the killings and murders that had occurred constantly in Kraków and Płaszów since the war began. In other words, even if one was in some sort of leadership or supervisory position at Płaszów, this did not guarantee your survival or that of your family. The vast majority of the Jews on the two “Schindler’s Lists” were either there alone or paired with someone else with the same surname. Most of their relatives had already been murdered in the Holocaust.⁵²

But this perception of favoritism and corruption surrounding the creation of “Schindler’s List” angered a lot of Jews. Aleksander Bieberstein said that “through Goldberg rich OD men and prominent prisoners got on the list.”⁵³ Richard and Lola Krumholz, who had been with Oskar Schindler “since the beginning,” presumed they would be on the “list.” But Goldberg gave their places to others. Maurice Markheim thought he got on the list at the last minute because his cousin, Herman Feldman, “knew some bigshots.” Henry Salmovich never understood how he got on the list. “Usually, the people from Kraków got on it because they had a lot of pull. All those bigshots from the camp—the Jewish police—were from Kraków. I didn’t have money or connections.”⁵⁴

Jack Mintz was particularly critical of Goldberg, and even Oskar Schindler, about this. He said that many people thought that “Schindler was almighty God, but he wasn’t.” Though he thought Oskar was “a nice guy,” once he got to Brünnlitz, Mintz realized that some of those selected for the list were less than desirable people. “I would say if you selected from the eleven hundred, maybe three hundred should go in a concentration camp after the war. There were a lot of crooks and Kapos [on the list].” He blamed Goldberg for this, who had “more power [over the list] than Schindler. Schindler asked for the people he knew, but the rest he didn’t know.”⁵⁵ Such judgements are harsh, but they reflect the frustrations of some of the Schindlerjuden who felt so powerless in this critical life-and-death situation.

Yet how truthful are these accusations? In other words, is it possible to determine how many people were on the list because of influence or bribery? It is possible to have some idea of the most important Jews in Płaszów from the more detailed published testimonies such as Aleksander Bieberstein’s Zagłda Żydów w Krakowie (Extermination of the Jews of Kraków), Stella Müller-Madej’s A Girl on Schindler’s List, and Elinor Brecher’s excellent collection of Schindlerjuden testimony, Schindler’s Legacy. There is also an interesting index of postwar testimony collected by the Polish Ministry of the Interior’s Main Commission for the Investigation of Hitlerite Crimes in Poland (Głownej Komisji Badania Zbroni Hitlerowakich w Polsce) by Magdalena Kunicka-Wyrzykowska, Indek Imienny Więżniów obpzu w Płaszowie (Name Index of the Prison Camp in Płaszów). It contains the names of a number of Schindler Jews and a brief history of their experiences during the Holocaust, including the role they played in Płaszów or elsewhere. If you combine these sources with the individual interviews I did with Schindler survivors, it is possible to come up with a pretty good list of the most important Jewish figures in Płaszów. But here the situation gets tricky. For one thing, it would be incorrect to assume that there was something wrong with being on the list because one was in a position of some influence at Płaszów. For every unsavory character like Marcel Goldberg, there were many, many caring Jewish “Prominents” in Płaszów who used their positions to help others. On the other hand, it is also easy to understand the anger and frustration of those who did not make it on to one of Oskar Schindler’s lists because, at least from their perspective, they did not have the power or valuables to get themselves or their loved ones on them.⁵⁶

Yet it is possible to identify certain groupings of people on the list and at least determine whether some of them were people of influence. But the multiple, changing “Schindler’s Lists” are what make such an analysis difficult beyond even the vaguest implication that to be part of such a surname grouping implied family connections or something immoral. Marcel Goldberg drew up two separate lists for the seven hundred men and the three hundred women who were to be sent to Brünnlitz in the fall of 1944. During my research I discovered several “Schindler’s Lists” from the fall of 1944 through the spring of 1945 in the Auschwitz State Museum. These include the original transport list for the men, dated October 21, 1944, from Groß Rosen to Brünnlitz, and two separate female lists for three hundred women dated October 22 (the date the women arrived at Auschwitz from Płaszów) and a separate female Auschwitz to Brünnlitz list dated November 12, 1944. The problem with each of these lists is some of the Schindler men on the Płaszów-Groß Rosen list were taken off by Goldberg and replaced when the seven hundred men arrived at Groß Rosen. The same is true for the list of three hundred women on the Płaszów-Auschwitz transport. In other words, though the number of people removed from the male and female “Schindler’s Lists” while in transit to Brünnlitz via Groß Rosen and Auschwitz probably numbered no more than twenty to thirty, the fact remains that the lists drawn up by Marcel Goldberg in Płaszów were different from the lists of men and women who finally reached Schindler’s camp in the Sudetenland in October and November 1944.

Further complicating matters, the only two alphabetized lists we have are based on two April 18, 1945, lists that contain the names of 801 men and 297 women. Between the fall of 1944 and the spring of 1945, ninety-eight new people were added to Schindler’s lists. The archives and individuals who claim to have the original “Schindler’s List” in reality just have the April 18, 1945, list. This is the “list” that Marcel Goldberg has on a clipboard in one scene from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. But why the difference in numbers between the fall 1944 lists and the April 18, 1945, lists? Between January 29, 1945, and April 11, 1945, three transports arrived at Brünnlitz from German camps at Golleschau (eighty-one Jews), Landskron (six Jews), and Geppersdorf (thirty Jews). Some of the Jews on these transports were either dead when they arrived at Brünnlitz or died a few days later. In addition, several Schindler Jews died while in Brünnlitz or were sent to other camps. Beyond this, there were several Jews, such as Wrozlavsky (Benjamin) Breslauer and Alfred Schonfeld, who simply “trickled” into Brünnlitz during the latter months of the war. But the April 18, 1945, list is not the final “Schindler’s List.” There was a final list made up on May 8, 1945, the last day before Oskar and Emilie Schindler fled Brünnlitz. It is identical to the April 18 list though quite messy, indicating that it was probably done in haste. The April 18 and May 8 women’s lists are alphabetized while the male lists for these dates was not. Fortunately, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s (USHMM) archives has alphabetized the male and female lists of April 18, 1945, and blended them into one list. Aleksandra Kobielec of the Groß Rosen Museum did the same for the male and female lists, but did not combine them into one list.⁵⁷

The USHMM list does enable us to look at one list and analyze its surname groupings. There were several large groupings on the list made up of families from prominent Jews, though they were more the exception than the rule. Most of the surname groupings on the list ranged from three to four individuals, and there is no way to know whether all the surname groupings were related. On the other hand, it is possible to determine from other sources which of these groupings were families and which were not. Regardless, it is interesting to note that of the 1,098 names on the April 18, 1945 lists, 545 were joined with those with identical surnames. We also know that the 98 new names added to the lists in 1945, as well as the 50 to 60 “Budzyners,” were all males without relatives in Płaszów. This means that close to 60 percent of the individuals on “Schindler’s List” were joined together with people, male and female, with identical surnames. Many of them were paired with someone with an identical surname, though there were also some very large surname groupings, many of them families. There were two groupings of eleven identical surnames, two with nine identical surnames, and quite a few with four, five, or six individuals with the same surnames. There were also linkages other than surnames. Stella Müller-Madej’s extended family, for example, included the Grunbergs. So the prospect of even larger surname and/or family groupings on the list is probable. In the end, there is no doubt that there was a concentrated effort by Goldberg to save as many members of the same families as possible.⁵⁸

The Schindler Men and Brünnlitz via Groß Rosen

Oskar Schindler’s factory in Brünnlitz was formally known as Arbeitslager Brünnlitz and was a sub-camp of the Groß Rosen concentration camp. Groß Rosen (Polish, Rogożnica) had been opened in 1940 as a small forced labor camp because a nearby quarry contained a blue-gray granite favored by Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer for some of the Führer’s massive construction projects in Nuremberg and Berlin. In 1941, Groß Rosen became an independent concentration camp and its prisoners were sent to work in the nearby quarries owned by the SS German Earth and Stone Works (DEST; Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke, GmbH) or in the camp’s brick works. Initially, Groß Rosen had a relatively small prisoner population, though by 1942 their numbers had begun to increase substantially. At first, the SS also used Groß Rosen as a training camp for prisoners willing to become stonemasons. Himmler falsely promised them better living conditions and even the hope of freedom. After they completed their training, they would then be sent to other camps to teach other prisoners their skills. Himmler, as usual, was thinking not only of wartime needs but also of SS postwar economic plans.⁵⁹

Increased DEST demands for Groß Rosen’s granite and bricks saw the camp population grow dramatically between 1940 and the end of the war. There were slightly fewer than 1,500 prisoners in Groß Rosen in 1941. By the time the camp was liquidated in February 1945, there were 97,414 prisoners in the main and satellite camps. Towards the end of the war, Groß Rosen became an important transit camp for prisoners being shipped westward from camps being liquidated in the face of Soviet moves. Estimates are that about 125,000 prisoners, almost half of them Jews, passed through Groß Rosen during the war. About 40,000 prisoners died in Groß Rosen’s camps or in transports to or from them. Jews did not begin to arrive in Groß Rosen in significant numbers until 1943. Many of them would be forced to work not only in the main camp’s quarries and brick works but in the various SS-run factories in Groß Rosen’s hundred or so satellite camps in Poland, the Sudetenland, and Germany. Siemens Bauunion, for example, which had built a large factory building for Oskar Schindler at Emalia, ran a factory at Groß Rosen.⁶⁰

When Oskar Schindler’s seven hundred Jewish workers arrived for quarantine in Groß Rosen in mid-October 1944, the camp was under the command of SS-Sturmbannführer Johannes Hassebroek, a decorated Waf-fen SS officer who had once served with the SS Death’s Head Division. Schindler said that Hassebroek and his staff soon became regular customers of his Schnapsstorage, and from the moment Schindler opened his factory camp at Brünnlitz, Hassebroek was in constant need of “fish, kilos of tea, Schnaps, valuable porcelain, etcetera.” Groß Rosen’s commandant frequently drove the two hundred or so miles from Groß Rosen to Brünnlitz to pick up Oskar’s “donations and collections personally.” He was always in a large car with a lot of storage space. Oskar said that because of these “donations,” Hassebroek “became a benefactor of my camp, despite my Krakow reputation of friendliness towards Jews or even fraternity with Jews, the ‘enemies of the state.’”⁶¹

But Hassebroek’s later friendship with Schindler did little to help the seven hundred Schindler men when they arrived at Groß Rosen. The camp long had a reputation for brutality, and the death rate at its quarry was among the highest in DEST-run operations. But the SS at Groß Rosen did more than just work its prisoners to death. In early 1942, to reduce the camp’s population, 127 inmates were sent to Aktion T4 (the Nazi code word for its “euthanasia” program for the handicapped) “euthanasia” center at Bernburg, where they were murdered by injection. This was part of “Special Treatment 14f13,” the T4 program to murder concentration camp inmates.⁶²

The trip for the Schindler men to Groß Rosen began at Płaszów at 5:00 A.M. on the morning of October 15, 1944, when all the remaining Jews at Płaszów were called to attention on the Appellplatz. After the names of the 1,000 Jews to be sent to Brünnlitz were read out, the women were separated from the men. About 4,000 Jewish males were then loaded onto train cars bound for the Groß Rosen concentration camp. The seven hundred male Schindlerjuden were put into the first seven cars; the eighth car carried Brünnlitz and non-Brünnlitz prisoners such as Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein. SS-Hauptscharführer Lorenz Landstorfer was in charge of the transport. The trip from Płaszów to Groß Rosen took about twenty hours.⁶³

The prisoners got an inkling of what they were about to experience in Groß Rosen during the trip. The conditions in the cattle cars were so tense and overcrowded that Cantor Moshe Taubé’s father, Emanuel, had a nervous breakdown. An SS guard sat in a corner of the car Emanuel was riding in. The guard drew an invisible circle around his chair and told the inmates that “whoever comes here to this chair where I sit will be shot.” The prisoners dared not approach the guard; instead, they sat on top of each other. If they had to heed their bodily needs, they did so where they were sitting. Needless to say, the train car smelled of human excrement and body odor during the trip to Groß Rosen. But Taubé’s father tried to reassure his son that wherever they were going, they would “be under the protection of Schindler.”⁶⁴

Groß Rosen terrified Leon Leyson, and Henry Wiener considered his time there “hell on earth.” Leyson was so overwhelmed by his experience that he had no idea how long he was in the camp. On the other hand, Francisco Wichter told me that he was “treated generally well” while he was in Groß Rosen. But most Schindler Jews did not share his positive view of their time at Hassebroek’s camp.⁶⁵ They arrived at Groß Rosen at about 3:00 P.M. on October 16. One inmate noted upon arrival that it was “a nice, large, graveled place and everywhere great barracks and green areas [met] the eye.” The SS immediately began to unload the cars, putting the prisoners in columns of a hundred. The first seven columns were made up of the Brünnlitz men; the eighth column was mixed. Almost immediately, men in the eighth column tried to blend in with the Schindler columns in front of them. The SS immediately intervened and forced them back into the eighth column.⁶⁶

As the new arrivals were being marched into the camp, Marcel Goldberg tried negotiating bribes with SS guards over the seven hundred places on the male “Schindler’s List.” According to Aleksander Bieberstein, Goldberg did this from memory because the written list had not arrived from Płaszów. Goldberg told the SS guards which men were supposed to be on the “list” and who was not on it. Goldberg was able verbally to remove about two dozen people from the male “list” made up in Płaszów, though it is unclear whether he was able to replace them with new men who had the resources to bribe him or their guards. And some of the bribes were significant. Sam Birenzweig, for example, remembered being approached by “a rich guy” who offered him “five thousand dollars American” for his place on the “list.” Sam did not budge from his place in line, even after the inmate showed him the money in cash. Dr. Bieberstein was later put back on the list because of efforts by Mietek Pemper and Itzhak Stern. But most of the other men on the October 15 Płaszów to Groß Rosen transport were not as lucky. Mietek Pemper told me that most of the non-Schindler men on the transport would later die in forced death marches from other camps.⁶⁷

Once in the camp, the SS marched the Brünnlitz men to the Appellplatz and ordered them to undress. They were also told to get rid of anything they had brought with them. These items, which included “a lot of valuables and currencies,” were then taken to the camp’s storehouse. The weather was freezing and the Schindler men had to stand naked for long periods for body searches, showers, disinfection, and clothing distribution. The individual body searches included a forced bowel movement to check for hidden valuables. Russian barbers then shaved each inmate’s body hair, beginning with a “louse promenade” down the center of the head. The Schindler men were then forced to bathe in a sink, followed by a delousing with a caustic disinfectant. Still naked, they had to run to a distant storehouse, where they were given used shirts and pants, wooden or leather shoes, and a cap for the cold. They were also given a registration number on a wax disk that they had to wear around their necks.⁶⁸

But the worst was yet to come. After spending hours in the cold, the Schindler men were then forced into rooms A and B of Block 9 (9/10). It was heated by one stove in the middle of the room. The windows were covered with tar paper and, when combined with natural body heat and the stove, made the room unbearable to live in. They were given fifty bowls to share at meal time. As they stood in line for food, the Schindler males had to pass the bowl from one man to another; if they did not do this quickly enough, the guards would knock the bowl from their hands and beat them. In fact, beatings by the Stubendienst, the German criminal prisoners assigned to guard the Schindler men, took place constantly. Few of the Schindler men escaped beatings by these sadists.⁶⁹

For the next few days, the SS established a strict regimen of military-style calisthenics for the prisoners. After roll call at 8:00 A.M., they were taken to a ditch; here they had two minutes to relieve themselves, their only chance to do this. At other times, they had to soil their pants. After breakfast, they exercised until noon and then had an hour for lunch. They had calisthenics again in the afternoon and were then locked in their barracks for the night.⁷⁰ On October 20, the typewritten “Schindler’s List” arrived from Płaszów, but was now out of date because Goldberg had verbally removed about twenty-four of the men from it. Most of them had been sent to some of Groß Rosen’s sub-camps. The SS guards seemed unaware of this and began a frantic search of the camp for the missing men until they realized that most of them had already been sent elsewhere. To fill the void, Dr. Bieberstein and others were now added to the list to make up the full contingent of seven hundred. But Dr. Bieberstein is the only person we know of who was able to get on the list because of his personal ties to Stern and Pemper. A few of the men removed initially by Goldberg were put back on the list. Presumably, the other places were filled by inmates who bribed Goldberg or the SS guards.⁷¹

Thomas Keneally, who interviewed some of the Schindler men for his historical novel, said that the list never arrived from Płaszów. Consequently, Keneally wrote that, on October 20, the day before the Schindler men were to be shipped to Brünnlitz, the SS forced Goldberg to retype the original list from memory. It was supposedly at this point, says Keneally, that new alterations were made to the list. Dr. Bieberstein, though, says that Goldberg’s original list arrived in Groß Rosen on October 20. But regardless of which of these stories is true, the first copy of the male “Schindler’s List” we have is dated October 21, 1944. So whether the original list was lost or arrived late, the fact remains that Goldberg or someone else had to type a new list to take care of the new deletions and additions.⁷²

This list, which is simply titled “Konzentrationslager Groß-Rosen-Arbeitslager Brünnlitz,” contained the names of seven hundred men. Unlike the women’s list, which is alphabetized, the male list is organized according to prisoner numbers. The men are listed last name first followed by their date of birth. Their individual wartime occupations are the last item listed by each man’s name. There are some intriguing markings on the list. Someone, presumably Goldberg, went through and changed the occupations of twenty-seven of the men, mainly to Bau (construction). Ten more had their occupations typed on the list with a different typewriter, and the names of fifteen men were completely scratched out.⁷³ We know what happened to some of the males in this group. Soon after they arrived in Brünnlitz, it was discovered that four of them were children. Josef Leipold, Brünnlitz’s commandant, ordered that the boys and their fathers be sent to Auschwitz. Those transferred were Dawid and Ryszard Horowitz, Abraham and Zugenusz Ginter, Leo and Zbigniew Groß, and Hermann and Aleksander Rosner. They were taken under SS guard to Auschwitz on a regular train and arrived in time for a few of the boys to see their mothers.⁷⁴

The other seven names scratched out—Seriasz Fajszmann, Leon Ferber, Roman Ferber, Josef Isak Garde, Izak Gerstner, Wilhelm Schnitzer, and Zafel Naftali—never appeared on any of the later “Schindler’s Lists,” which means that they were never taken off the list, were removed from it soon after their arrival at Brünnlitz, or were no longer alive when it was created. Roman Ferber was one of the children hidden in Płaszów after the May 14, 1944, Aktion. So it is possible that he and his father, Leon, were also sent with the other group of fathers and sons to Auschwitz. Zafel Naftali was replaced by Szmul Cajg, and “blieber” (stay) was written beside Izak Gerstner’s name. Wilhelm (Wilek) Schnitzer, a prominent OD man whom Amon Göth had killed months earlier as part of the Chilowicz murders, was also on the list. Why a dead man was on the list is a mystery, though it is possible that Goldberg created a few false places on the list for last-minute bribes. But regardless of what happened to those mentioned above on male list, it is apparent that the October 21, 1944, list was used as the official “Schindler’s List” when the men got to Brünnlitz.⁷⁵

On October 21, the prisoners were again deloused before boarding the trains for Brünnlitz. Igor Kling was uncertain of the destination until he “saw all the big shots from Płaszów.” Just before the Schindler men boarded the train, they were given soup made of grass and water, which some of them refused, and a “sandwich wrapped in paper.” The SS guards warned them, though, that they would be shot if they ate the sandwich before they got on the train. Once the car doors were locked, they all tore open the sandwich wrappings and discovered “two slices of bread with jam in the middle.” At 3:00 P.M., the Brünnlitz transport left Groß Rosen for the twenty-one-hour trip to Schindler’s factory camp in the Sudetenland.⁷⁶

As the train left Groß Rosen, Igor Kling sensed that, other than the presence of the “big shots” on the transport, something was different. He saw a difference in the behavior of the SS guards. By this time, of course, the SS, like the rest of Germany’s military and paramilitary forces, was suffering severe manpower shortages. The guards on the Brünnlitz transport were middle-aged “leftovers.” Kling noted that the “viciousness from their faces had disappeared. The behavior we saw was completely different than in Płaszów.”⁷⁷ Perhaps this easing of tension explains the almost anti-climatic arrival of the Schindler men at Brünnlitz at noon the next day. But more than likely, the men were simply too exhausted from their harsh treatment at Groß Rosen to appreciate fully their arrival at Schindler’s sub-camp. Several of the Schindler men remembered Oskar waiting for them when they arrived; others also saw Emilie, and Commandant Josef Leipold, when the train pulled into the new camp. But they remembered little else.⁷⁸

Steven Spielberg paints a far different picture of their journey and arrival in Schindler’s List. He begins by showing the men riding in a frozen transport with icicles hanging from the windows, even though it is just late October. Outside, snow covers the ground. As the train pulled into Brünnlitz, a caption appears on the screen that reads, “Zwittau-Brinnlitz Schindler’s Hometown.” Zwittau, the German name for Oskar’s birthplace, Svitavy, is about eight and a half miles north of BrnZnec, or Brünnlitz, where Schindler’s factory was located. Spielberg has the men dressed in normal street clothes, though in reality they wore shabby, used, ill-fitting clothing. When the SS guards have unloaded the seven hundred Schindler men from the transport, Oskar makes a short speech. “The train with the women has already left Płaszów, and will be arriving very shortly. I know you’ve had a long journey. But it is only a short walk to the factory where hot soup and bread is waiting for you. Welcome to Brinnlitz.” If the men were arriving in “Zwittau-Brinnlitz,” then it could not be a “short walk to the factory.” Perhaps this confusion over geography comes from Keneally, who said that the men “dismounted” at the Zwittau depot and were then marched three or four miles to the industrial hamlet of Brinnlitz. While marching through Zwittau, Keneally wrote, the Schindler men saw graffiti on the walls that read, “KEEP THE JEWS OUT OF BRINNLITZ.” Perhaps Keneally intended such graffiti to symbolize the general administrative opposition to the move of Jews into the Sudetenland. Such sentiments, though, were not reflective of the general population, which at the end of the war treated the Schindler Jews with great kindness.⁷⁹

None of the Schindler men I interviewed ever talked about being marched eight miles or more from Svitavy (Zwittau) to BrnZnec. In reality, it is hard to imagine such a march given the hilly terrain between the two towns. Moreover, there was an extensive network of rail lines running directly beside the factory’s main gate. There was also a spur line that went into Schindler’s sub-camp at one corner of this complex. So the idea that Oskar forced his new workers to march so many miles from Zwittau to Brünnlitz is illogical. Once they got to Schindler’s sub-camp, what they found was an empty factory with no beds. Oskar had sent 250 wagonloads of goods from Emalia to Brünnlitz, and it was now the job of his new workers to construct a factory there. Oskar did not completely close Emalia. The enamelware portion of his factory in Kraków continued to operate with Polish workers until early 1945. But for the seven hundred Schindler men, there was a more serious problem than the reconstruction of Schindler’s armaments factory: the whereabouts and safety of their wives, mothers, and daughters.⁸⁰

The Schindler Women and Brünnlitz via Auschwitz

Aleksander Bieberstein states in his memoirs that a transport of 1,000 females, including the three hundred Schindler women, left Płaszów for Auschwitz on October 21, 1944. On the other hand, Auschwitz records state that more than 2,000 female Jews arrived from Płaszów on the evening of October 22. Because of space problems, they had to “spend the night in the so-called sauna.” The “Sauna” was the nickname for the disinfection bath in Auschwitz II-Birkenau located near the “Kanada” warehouse for goods taken from the prisoners. Several of Birkenau’s gas chambers were located nearby. But why were the women sent to Auschwitz instead of Groß Rosen? The myth is that they were sent to Auschwitz by mistake. But according to Mietek Pemper, this was not true. SS regulations required that the women, like the men, had to be quarantined, which involved intimate body searches, shaving, and delousing as part of their transfer to another camp. But as women had to do this to female prisoners, Groß Rosen simply did not have the personnel or facilities to handle the three hundred Schindler women.⁸¹

No one, of course, had informed the women that they would first be sent to Auschwitz, which was only thirty miles west of Płaszów on a direct rail link from Kraków. Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig seemed to be the only one who knew precisely that they would go to Auschwitz before their final transfer to Brünnlitz. Before his arrest, Oskar Schindler had taken Helen aside in the commandant’s villa in Płaszów and told her that he was opening a factory in Czechoslovakia. He said he had a list of names of people he wanted to take with him and that Helen would be on it. He asked whether she had family members. Helen told him she had two sisters, and Oskar wanted to know their names. He also asked whether she had personal items she wanted to take with her. Helen said she had a small suitcase and Oskar advised her to give it to him. He explained that his female workers would be sent to Auschwitz for a while before being sent to Brünnlitz and that the SS would take the suitcase from her when she arrived. Oskar then promised Helen that “she would be with him.” When Helen got to Brünnlitz, she asked Oskar several times about her suitcase. He told her that it had been lost.⁸²

Rena Finder told me that the Schindler women thought they were being sent to Brünnlitz, though Stella Müller-Madej remembered one woman in her train car telling her mother that Auschwitz was their real destination. But whether they knew about their temporary stopover in Auschwitz or not, the arrival of the Schindler women in Auschwitz on the evening of October 22, 1944, was terrifying. In fact, some of the Schindler women told me that the scene in Schindler’s List about their arrival in Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the sprawling complex’s killing center, was extremely realistic. Most of them also remembered the brutality and vulgarity of the female SS guards and Kapos. As they forced the women off of the train cars, they yelled “Raus, raus, macht schnell” (Get off quickly). The SS guards beat them with whips and rifle butts and “beautiful Alsatians” lunged at them. Rena also remembered the terrible stench of burning bodies and the ashes from the nearby crematory chimneys that fell on them like snow. And several of the Schindler women remembered Josef Mengele, Auschwitz’s “Angel of Death,” whom some would meet again before they left the death camp.⁸³

The women’s facilities at Auschwitz had been opened in the main camp (later Auschwitz I) in 1942 to help meet its growing labor needs. The women’s camp was later moved to Birkenau and expanded considerably. By the time the Schindler women arrived in Auschwitz’s death camp, Birkenau (Auschwitz II-Birkenau), women lived in many of the barracks just inside the “gate of death,” Birkenau’s infamous arched entranceway. Upon their arrival, the Schindler women were given temporary registration numbers to sew on their clothing. They were initially housed in B-IIc, the Hungarian women’s transit camp. When the Schindler women arrived at Auschwitz, it was under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, who was soon transferred to Bergen-Belsen. Though Auschwitz records are a bit confusing on this next point, the women’s camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau was under the command of Austrian-born SS-Lagerführerin (camp supervisor) Maria Mandl (Mandel). She blended a passion for classical music with extreme cruelty towards her female prisoners. She was executed for war crimes in Kraków in 1947.⁸⁴

When they arrived at Auschwitz in late October 1944, the Schindler women did not realize that it was normal to put newly arrived prisoners not designated for the nearby gas chambers in the “Sauna” for all aspects of the quarantine. After stripping, they were subjected to “gynecological examinations,” the full shaving of all body hair with a dull razor and scissors, and a bath “under streams of boiling hot or freezing water.” Occasionally, new inmates were subjected to a hot steam disinfection bath, though Stella Müller-Madej said that the delousing consisted of hitting each woman on her newly bald head with a “stinking rag that made every shaved place burn, whatever it was, carbolic acid or something.”⁸⁵

Stella remembered one of the Aufseherinnen (female SS guards) calling the Schindler women “whores” and “Płaszów scum.” One shouted, “Why the hell do they order us to waste our time on this carrion?” And though only women could shave women, there were plenty of male Kapos working in the “Sauna.” After the shaving and delousing, Stella’s mother tried to reassure her daughter that if they intended to gas the Schindler women, they would not have shaved and deloused them. Next the Aufseherin forced the Schindler women into a large shower room.⁸⁶ Stella described the scene:

Each of the Schindler women I interviewed remembered this scene a little differently. Rena Finder, for example, told me that the water from the shower heads was cold. But everyone I talked to said the shower scene from Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was quite accurate. Helen Rosenzweig, though, told me that the scene in the film immediately afterwards was ridiculous. By 1942, Auschwitz authorities had begun to issue female prisoners used civilian clothing with red stripes painted on the back and crude wooden clogs. Stella, Rena, and Helen all remembered that the clothing was extremely mis-sized. But Halina Brunnengraber Silber remembered thinking there was “no room for miracles at Auschwitz.” She believed there was no hope: “It is just a question of how or when it would be my turn [to die] in Auschwitz.”⁸⁸

The Schindler women were in Auschwitz from October 22 until either November 10 or November 12, 1944. Auschwitz records state that on November 10, a transport of three hundred women was sent from Auschwitz II-Birkenau to Groß Rosen’s “Brünnlitz auxiliary camp in Czechoslovakia.”⁸⁹ On the other hand, the official transport list for the women is dated November 12, 1944.⁹⁰ But whether they were in Nazi Germany’s most horrific death camp for twenty-two or twenty-four days, it was far too long, even though they sensed they were only there temporarily. Word spread quickly that the Schindler group was bound for a favored labor camp and there were efforts by other inmates, particularly “Prominents,” to somehow get on the Brünnlitz list. Mietek Pemper told me that only two women were taken off of the list in Auschwitz and replaced by others: his mother and Itzhak Stern’s mother. Stern’s mother contracted typhus and died; Mietek Pemper’s mother, who survived Auschwitz and the war, was partially paralyzed. However, Aleksandra Kobeliec, who wrote a brief history of Brünnlitz for the Groß Rosen museum, said that five women were taken off the Brünnlitz list during selections at Auschwitz. On the other hand, Tushia Nusbaum Zilbering testified after the war that she and nine other Schindler women from Płaszów were removed from the list in Auschwitz and remained there until liberation.⁹¹

Stella Mülle-Madej became very ill at Auschwitz and was taken to the hospital. Like most of the Schindler girls and women, Stella’s physical condition deteriorated rapidly at Auschwitz because of the harsh treatment and inadequate food. Genia Weinstein said their condition deteriorated further after the Germans insisted that each of the Schindler women donate half a liter of blood. The Aufseherinnen seemed to resent the Schindler women because they were to be transferred out, and did everything they could to make their lives miserable. They punished them if they violated one of the complex camp rules. If a Schindler woman had not properly sewn her number onto her ragged dress, an Aufseherin would dump crushed bricks on the floor and force the guilty prisoner to crawl over the bricks on her hands and knees. The Aufseherinnen would also withhold food for the slightest infraction and, one day, while Stella was standing in line for bread and marmalade, the Blockälteste (Senior prisoner block leader) threw Stella’s portion of marmalade in her face and called her “an elegant whore” because she had absentmindedly offered her bread for the marmalade instead of her hand.⁹²

But the most frightening moments for a few of the Schindler women were their encounters with Josef Mengele. As chief physician at Birkenau, Mengele had been to Płaszów in the spring of 1944 to conduct a Selektion of male Jewish prisoners for shipment to Auschwitz. The day after the Schindler women arrived in Auschwitz, Mengele conducted a two-hour Selektion of the 2,000 or so women who had arrived on the Płaszów transport. He sent 1,765 women, including the Schindlerjuden, to Transit Camp B-IIc. The remaining women were sent to the gas chambers.⁹³ But this was not the last time the Schindler women encountered Mengele. Celina Karp Biniaz was part of a Selektion that involved everyone in her barracks. As the women walked past Mengele, he pushed those he chose to be gassed or shot to the left and those he wanted to live to the right. Celina was put into the left line. But for some reason, Mengele decided to go through the “death line” once more. As Celina walked past him, she blurted out, “Lassen Sie mich gehen” (Let me go). Mengele then pushed her into the right line.⁹⁴

Margot Schlesinger had a similar experience during another selection. During the first Selektion, Celina’s Biniaz’s mother, Phyllis, had broken her promise to always stay with Celina when she volunteered to peel potatoes. Phyllis thought she could scrounge some extra food for both of them and left Celina in the barracks. While she was gone, a Mengele Selektion took place, and Phyllis almost lost her daughter. When yet another Selektion took place, Phyllis asked Margot to switch places so that she could be next to Celina. Mengele saw the women do this and put Margot in a group of four women about to be murdered. Margot, who spoke perfect German, then explained to Mengele that she was “young and frightened, and had made a mistake.” Mengele let her live.⁹⁵

The Schindler women also experienced other small miracles at Auschwitz. According to Elinor Brecher, Betty Bronia Groß Gunz was probably the only Schindler woman who looked forward to going to Auschwitz because she thought that her beloved husband, Roman, was there. Three months after their marriage in 1942, Roman had been taken in a roundup and sent to Auschwitz. Betty soon learned that she was pregnant and had an abortion because she knew that pregnancy was a “sure death sentence for mother and child.”⁹⁶ One day while at Płaszów, a Jewish laborer who had spent a month at Auschwitz handed Betty a handkerchief with Roman’s name on it. The worker told Betty that Roman wanted to let her know that he loved her. Later, some barrels were brought to Płaszów from Auschwitz. Written on the outside of one of them was “ROMAN GUNZ. I love you. I hope we will be together soon.”⁹⁷ Betty reached Auschwitz full of hope and fear. “I was dreaming of it, if he aged, if he still loved me.” But she soon learned that Roman had been sent to another part of the vast camp, and they did not reunite until they were in Kraków after the war.⁹⁸

But Roman Gunz did play a important part in another small miracle at Auschwitz. He helped save the sons of the fathers who had been sent to Auschwitz from Brünnlitz soon after they had arrived in Schindler’s sub-camp. By this time, Roman was an Auschwitz “old timer.” Consequently, he was one of the Kapos who met the male Brünnlitz group when they arrived in Birkenau in late October. But Roman also knew that children did not live long at Auschwitz; he told Henry Rosner: “Listen, if you want to live, try to save yourself, because about children, I don’t know.”⁹⁹ None of the fathers, though, was willing to sacrifice a son, so Roman put the children in “a bunker the Germans had prepared for themselves, and took care of them.” Ryszard Horowitz said it was actually a barracks that had been set aside to quarantine typhus patients.¹⁰⁰

But Ryszard was soon separated from his father, Dawid. After they arrived at Auschwitz, there was a small Selektion for the newly arrived Brünnlitz group. When they had lined up, one of the SS men ordered the sons to step back. But the officer winked at Henry Rosner, who took this to mean that he did not want his son, Alexander (Dolek), to step back. Just after the group had arrived at Auschwitz, one of the guards had given Dolek an accordion, which he played for the guards. All of Auschwitz’s musicians were now dead, so Olek’s musical skills probably saved his life. But Olek’s cousin, Ryszard, was not as lucky. He was separated from his father, who was sent to Dachau along with Henry and Olek Rosner. After the selection, another miracle took place—some of the Brünnlitz boys were able to see their mothers briefly at Auschwitz just before they were shipped to Brünnlitz. On the day the Schindler women were being loaded onto the cattle cars for transport to Brünnlitz, Regina Horowitz, Manci Rosner’s sister-in-law, looked through a peephole and saw her son, Ryszard, and Manci’s son, Alex, with a group of other children. The guard who had escorted the Brünnlitz males to Auschwitz told Manci that they were in the camp. After Regina and Manci spotted their sons, they convinced the guard on their train car to pass a note to them. The guard then let Manci and Regina get out of the car to urinate beneath it. As they squatted down, they were “able to exchange a few words” with their sons, who lifted up their sleeves to show their mothers the new tattoos on their arms.¹⁰¹

The actual transfer of the Schindler women from Auschwitz to Brünnlitz is a story wrapped in mystery and myth. In Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, when Oskar Schindler learns to his surprise that the women are in Auschwitz, he dashes out of his office, telling his mistress and Stern as he goes, “They’re in Auschwitz, the train was never routed here—a paperwork mistake.” As Schindler’s chauffered limousine races out of the factory grounds, Spielberg shifts back to the famous shower scene and an inspection by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz. Then we see Oskar Schindler in the office of Auschwitz’s Lagerkommandant, at that time SS-Sturmbannführer Richard Baer. As Baer looks over a copy of the April 18, 1945, female list, he says,

Oskar responds by slowly emptying a small pouch of six or seven large diamonds on Baer’s desk. As he does this, he reassures Baer: “Allow me to express the reason. I’m not making any judgements about you. It’s that I know in the coming months that we all are going to need portable wealth.”¹⁰³ Baer responds by telling Oskar that he could have him arrested for this. Oskar explains that he is “protected by powerful friends,” something he is sure the commandant knows.¹⁰⁴

Baer now becomes less defensive and tells Oskar, “I do not say I’m accepting them. All I say is I am uncomfortable with them on the table.” As Baer slides the precious gems into the top drawer of his desk, he offers Schindler a different group of Jewish women. “I have a shipment coming in tomorrow. I’ll cut you three hundred units from it. New ones. These are fresh. The train comes, we turn it around. These are yours.”¹⁰⁵ Needless to say, Oskar will have none of this. “Yes, yes, I understand. I want these.”¹⁰⁶ Baer, who now begins to prepare himself a bicarbonate, tells Oskar that he “shouldn’t get stuck on names.”¹⁰⁷ Oskar, sitting stone-faced, says nothing. As Baer prepares to drink his bicarbonate, he explains to Schindler, “That’s right, it creates a lot of paperwork.”¹⁰⁸

The scene then shifts to the rail lines just inside Birkenau’s archway. The Schindler women are lined up for a final roll call just before they board the train for Brünnlitz. As they move towards the train cars, a male SS guard drags two of the young girls out of line. Suddenly, out of nowhere, Oskar Schindler appears. “Hey, hey, hey,” he shouts, “What are you doing? These are mine. These are my workers. They should be on my train. They are skilled munitions workers. They’re essential, essential girls. Their fingers polish the inside of shell metal casings. How else can I polish the inside of a 45 mm metal casing. You tell me?”¹⁰⁹ The dumbfounded guard now shouts, “Back on the train!”¹¹⁰ In the next scene, the women are seen marching slowly into Brünnlitz as their husbands, fathers, and sons peer thankfully through the factory’s windows. Leading them into the camp is their savior, Oskar Schindler.¹¹¹

The myth of Schindler’s personally saving the women in Auschwitz seems to have begun during the interviews that Oskar did with Martin Gosch and Howard Koch in 1964. According to the written summary of their discussions with Schindler, when Oskar learned that his three hundred women were in Auschwitz, he drove there and told the commandant, “Look, if you give me three hundred other women, I have to begin training them again, and this is pretty late to do this—the war effort needs the things that we are going to make, and you take away from me the women who are already skilled, the women I’ve already trained, and this is going to hurt our production there, so it doesn’t make any sense.” The commandant finally agreed to release the three hundred women to Schindler in return for a modest bribe.¹¹²

None of this took place. Oskar Schindler did not go to Auschwitz to save his female workers. He knew they were initially to be sent to Auschwitz before their ultimate transfer to Brünnlitz and did take action when they failed to show up soon after the arrival of his male workers. But what really happened was quite different from the Spielberg version of the story. So what was the basis for the dramatic scene surrounding Schindler’s efforts to save his women in Auschwitz? The information certainly did not come from Schindler, who in his postwar accounts went into little detail about what happened. All he said about his women in Auschwitz in his 1945 report on his wartime activities was that the “men had been in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp for three days, while the women had been in Auschwitz for three weeks. Plundered, almost naked, they finally arrived, wearing old, striped uniforms; we had to adjust to ‘Old Reich’ methods.”¹¹³

A decade later, he explained in a report to Yad Vashem that the biggest problem he faced when he tried to move his factory to the Sudetenland was local opposition. “The next great difficulty,” he explained, “concerned my 1,100 Jewish inmates, who meanwhile had been assigned to the KZ [Konzentrationslager] camps Auschwitz and Groß Rosen, as to how to obtain them for my Brünnlitz plant. After several visits to Berlin, and with the support of Ob. Ing. Lange from the OKH military armament office Berlin, I succeeded in obtaining a telegraphed order from the superintendancy of the concentration camps Amtsgruppe D Oranienburg, the Reich leader SS, to take over my people by name from the KZ GroßRosen and Auschwitz and to transport them to Brünnlitz.”¹¹⁴ At no point in either of these accounts does Oskar discuss anything similar to the accounts found in Spielberg’s film.

So what was the basis of Spielberg’s dramatic scenes involving the saving of the Schindler women? He drew it from Thomas Keneally, who admitted that it was part of the “Schindler mythology.”¹¹⁵ Keneally, who tried to be careful about the facts he used in his historical novel, made a few errors in this part of the book. He claimed, for example, that “according to the Schindler mythology,” Oskar negotiated with Rudolf Höss, who “presided over the entire camp at the time the Schindler women occupied a barracks in Birkenau.”¹¹⁶ SS-Obersturmbannführer Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss was Auschwitz’s first commandant. In the aftermath of Dr. Konrad Morgen’s investigations into concentration camp corruption, the highly-decorated, well-thought-of Höss was transferred to WVHA’s Office Group D1 office in Oranienburg, where he served as Deputy Inspector of Concentration Camps under Richard Glücks. He returned to Auschwitz for a few months in 1944 to oversee the murder of Hungarian Jews in operation Aktion Höss but returned to his post in Oranienburg in late summer. So, unless Oskar contacted Höss directly in Oranienburg, it was doubtful that he had any dealings with Auschwitz’s former commandant about the release of three hundred women in the fall of 1944.¹¹⁷

Keneally, who interviewed Schindlerjuden for his historical novel, carefully discusses the various myths about Schindler and his female workers at Auschwitz. But he gives most credibility to a speech made by Itzhak Stern “years later.”¹¹⁸ Actually, Stern’s remarks were part of a series of spontaneous testimonies given by Schindler Jews at a banquet to honor Oskar, who had recently been nominated as a Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem in Tel Aviv on May 2, 1962. Dr. Moshe Bejski told me that the testimonies were not part of the evening’s plans. But as various Schindler Jews stood up to praise Oskar, it occurred to Dr. Bejski that someone should take notes. He began furiously to write down everything that was being said on scraps of paper and napkins. He later organized his scribbled notes into a Hebrew transcript that he gave to Yad Vashem. He graciously shared an English translation with me.¹¹⁹

This is what Stern said:

This is a much more expansive account than the one Stern gave Dr. Ball-Kaduri in his interview with him in 1956.

Stern added that Schindler spoke to his secretary in even more drastic words: “Bring these women to Bruennlitz, use all possible means to do that, even if you have to sleep with the Nazi big shots.”¹²²

Stern then referred to a letter that Oskar had sent to Dr. Ball-Kaduri on September 9, 1956, to underscore his willingness to urge his secretary to use sex, if necessary, to help free the Schindler women in Auschwitz.¹²³ In the letter, Oskar said this:

In reality, Oskar’s statement of guilt about his misuse of women does little to back up Stern’s account. But over time, Stern’s explanation became an integral part of the Schindler mythology. Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein accepted it and added his own twist in his memoirs. According to his account, it took Schindler’s secretary only two days to get the women out of Auschwitz and into Brünnlitz.¹²⁵

Emilie Schindler had a different version of the story about the Auschwitz women. The problem with Emilie’s story, though, is that she gets some of her basic facts wrong about events surrounding the Auschwitz controversy. She said that the Schindler women arrived in Brünnlitz in the spring of 1944 and that Oskar had “paid Goeth [Göth] a huge amount of money so he would let the thirteen hundred people named in the famous list leave without any problems.”¹²⁶ The transfer of the Schindler Jews involved 1,000 workers and took place in the fall of 1944. Göth, of course, was in jail during this period, though it is possible that Oskar initially bribed him during the early negotiations for the transfer. Emilie went on to say that when Oskar learned “the transport with the women had been diverted to Auschwitz,” he was “confused and nervous.” Regardless, Emilie explained, “he decided not to be cowed and to try to do something, whatever that might be. As ever, I was ready to help him.”¹²⁷

Oskar and Emilie then went to the office, where Oskar telephoned Willi Schöneborn, the chief technical engineer at Brünnlitz, a position he had also held at Emalia. Oskar told Schöneborn to come to the office; he then took a “small bag out of his pocket, the contents of which were very familiar” and said,

Schöneborn dutifully replied, “It will be done as you say, Herr Direktor,” and walked out of the office.¹²⁹

It is unclear what happened next. Emilie says that though she was sure Schöneborn gave the SS the “precious stones,” there was still no sign of the women. So a few days later, Oskar went to Zwittau (Svitavy), and asked an old friend, Hilde, to go to Auschwitz “and personally take care of the release of the women.” Hilde, at least according to Emilie, “was strikingly beautiful, slender, and graceful.” The daughter of a “wealthy German industrialist,” her parents had been friends of Oskar’s family before the war. During the war, Hilde worked for the Wehrmacht and had contacts with the “upper echelons of the Nazi bureaucracy.” A few days after she left for Auschwitz, “the train with the three hundred female prisoners arrived at the esplanade.” Emilie said that Hilde would never tell her what she did to free to the women, though Emilie suspected that “her great beauty played a decisive part.”¹³⁰

Mietek Pemper told me a different story. He said the idea that Oskar went personally to Auschwitz to save the women was simply not true. What really happened was much simpler. Oskar, of course, knew that the women had been sent to Auschwitz for quarantine. But when they did not show up, he called the Army Procurement Office (APO; Heeresbeschaffungsamt) in Berlin, which established production quotas and labor needs in Brünnlitz. The APO told Schindler to call Gerhard Maurer’s Office Group D2 office in Oranienburg. Oskar did this and told them that the female workers in Auschwitz were essential to his armaments production. The women were soon on their way to Brünnlitz. Pemper’s explanation fits closely with what Oskar said. He worked with his military contacts in Berlin to get Maurer’s D2 office to issue the release for the women.¹³¹

So which account is true? In 1963, Oskar Schindler was interviewed by the West German criminal police who were investigating war crimes charges against Johannes Hassebroek. He was questioned about Hassebroek’s corruption, random killings, and executions at Groß Rosen and Brünnlitz as well as Schindler’s efforts to move his female prisoners out of Auschwitz. Oskar told the police that though he had never been to Groß Rosen, Hassebroek had visited Brünnlitz two or three times to collect various “gifts” that were supposed to be used “for charitable purposes.” During the early part of the interview, Oskar told the investigators, who seemed to know about his efforts to rescue his female workers in Auschwitz, the specifics of his efforts:

It is hard to imagine that Schindler, who would testify or give evidence in various West German war crimes investigations and trials from 1962 to 1972, would have exaggerated under oath to criminal police investigators. At the same time, he made a point of underscoring his efforts to help save his Jewish workers in Kraków and Brünnlitz. He did err, though, when he told the investigators that he had 1,200 Jews working for him by the time he relocated his armaments factory to the Sudetenland in the fall of 1944. And unlike his 1955 report to Yad Vashem, in which he specifically mentioned the help of Erich Lange, this time Oskar mentioned the help of Lt. Colonel Plathe. More than likely, Schindler used his important contacts in the Wehrmacht to help free his female workers.¹³³

The idea that Oskar sent Hilde Albrecht to see Heinrich Schwarz is not that far-fetched, though by the fall of 1944, Schwarz was no longer head (Arbeitseinsatzführer; employment supervisor) of Auschwitz’s employment section (Arbeitseinsatz-IIIa). A year earlier, he had been promoted to commandant of Auschwitz III-Monowitz, where he was responsible for all Auschwitz’s sub-camps except for those engaged in forestry and agriculture. Schwarz remained in this position until the liquidation of Auschwitz in early 1945 and then became commandant of what remained of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp satellite network near Strasbourg. As American forces advanced on these remnant camps in the spring of 1945, Schwarz was ordered to retreat with what remained of his prisoners to Dachau. He was tried and executed for war crimes in 1947.¹³⁴

Schwarz was a very influential person at Auschwitz and had good contacts with Maurer’s Office Group D2 in Oranienburg. According to Rudolph Höss, Schwarz had been Maurer’s subordinate during the time he served as Auschwitz’s employment supervisor. The only problem with these ties, though, was that Maurer did not seem to think very highly of Schwarz because “Maurer truly gave him a hard time.” Höss, though, considered Schwarz “very conscientious and dependable.” He wrote in his memoirs that “even during the extermination of the Jews, I could relax when Schwarz was on duty.” But if Oskar Schindler did send Hilde Albrecht to Auschwitz III-Monowitz to try to convince Schwarz to release the three hundred Schindler women to Oskar’s care in the Sudetenland, she probably had a hard time convincing Schwarz of the need for the transfer. Höss said that Schwarz’s “particular frustration” was prisoners who were “transferred to other camps.” From Schwarz’s perspective, such transfers always caused headaches and incessant complaints from the receiving camps about the quality of the workers. These reports, which criticized Schwarz for being “undependable and incompetent,” were then sent by Maurer to Schwarz “to liven up the Kommando leader.”¹³⁵ The dedicated, serious-minded Schwarz was going to be suspicious of any request to send so many women out of Auschwitz to another camp not under his control. Why risk further criticism from Maurer? On the other hand, if he was pressured by Maurer’s office to help with the transfer of the Schindler women, there was little he could do but obey.

So how did Oskar Schindler get the women out of Auschwitz? In reality, it probably took all these efforts to get them released. Oskar probably did first call the Army Procurement Office to prod them to contact Maurer’s office because Schindler had a better relationship with the Wehrmacht than with the SS. It is evident from the information that Oskar earlier gave Jewish Agency representatives in Budapest that he was quite knowledgeable about SS operations in the concentration camps. Given all that he had gone through to win approval for his move to Sudetenland, he was well aware that Auschwitz was slowly closing down its operations and sending many inmates westward as slave laborers. The greatest danger to the Schindler women, who were housed first in a female transit camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau and later moved to its women’s camp, came from the changes Goldberg had made to the ages of the younger and older women on the list to make them more acceptable to the SS as “essential workers.” Several times the SS spotted such discrepancies, particularly those involving older Schindler women, and tried to send those women to their deaths. As gassing at Auschwitz had ended in early November, they would have been shot. Evidence shows that at least five Schindler women originally on the Płaszów-Auschwitz list were taken off while in Birkenau and replaced by other women.¹³⁶

But for the most part, the SS accepted the Schindler women’s transfer to the Sudetenland. The Auschwitz Labor Deployment List, for example, noted on November 3, 1944, that there were 1,156 “so-called transit Jews” in Auschwitz-Birkenau B-IIc, where the Schindler women were initially housed. Of this number, 320 were awaiting “transport to another camp,” and another 696 remained in the camp “until further notice.”¹³⁷ More than likely, most of the 320 women awaiting transport were part of the Schindler group. The following day, Birkenau B-IIc was liquidated and the women there were moved across the railroad tracks to Birkenau Ia, the Women’s Camp.¹³⁸ Auschwitz records for this period show that far more prisoners were being sent westward as slave laborers than were being murdered. Between August 1944 and January 1945, the SS moved 65,000 prisoners westward to other slave labor camps and an additional 67,000 prisoners remained in Auschwitz until the final days of liquidation. The biggest problem for the SS, though, was transportation, which was increasingly tied up to meet military needs. The delay in shipping the Schindler women to Brünnlitz was probably more of a transportation issue than secret SS designs to murder them. But this in no way reduced the threat to them as long as they remained there, and Oskar Schindler knew this. They were at least fortunate that they got there by train when they did. Many Auschwitz prisoners were evacuated westward on deadly forced marches, and many others died on frozen transports during the winter of 1944–1945.¹³⁹

Schindler must have known all this, which makes one wonder why he would have sent his chief engineer, Schöneborn, to Auschwitz at the very time he needed him at Brünnlitz to oversee the setting up of factory operations there. The idea that he sent a secretary or old girlfriend to get the women back with bribes and sex also seems a little farfetched, particularly in light of the dangers involved in such a venture. Allied air raids had intensified in the Auschwitz area and any such trip was going to be dangerous, particularly with Czech and Polish guerillas in the area and the Red Army only a hundred miles away.

On the other hand, given all the trouble that Oskar had gone through to set up the move to Brünnlitz, it seems unlikely that he would have simply sat around waiting for the women to arrive. If nothing else, Oskar Schindler was quite aggressive when it came to his factories and Jewish workers, which brings us back to Spielberg’s version of the story. Oskar continued to operate Emalia until the Soviets occupied Kraków in early 1945, so it would have been easy for him to pay a visit to Auschwitz. According to Emilie, he spent a lot of time in Kraków before the Soviets occupied in January 1945. She said he “could not let go of the old enamelware factory.”¹⁴⁰

But Oskar probably wanted nothing to do with Kraków or the SS in the aftermath of his recent detention as part of the SS investigation of Amon Göth. After the Soviets took over Kraków, Oskar seemed seldom to stray too far from Brünnlitz. And even though he had acquired a comfortable villa just outside the factory grounds, he had an apartment built in the principal factory building where he lived with Emilie. Why? Oskar had already lost one factory to the Soviets and he wanted to protect his second one as much as possible. He was also afraid that if he was not around to protect his workers, they would fall victim to the whims of the SS. So it is highly unlikely that Oskar Schindler would have risked a trip to Auschwitz to save his women unless this was the only option left open to him. He well understood the dangers of such a trip for himself and his male workers, who were essential to the operation of his new factory in Brünnlitz.