Oskar Schindler

AS STEVEN SPIELBERG’S FILM SCHINDLER’S LIST NEARS ITS climax, an impassive Itzhak Stern sits just in front of Brünnlitz’s open gate; behind him the camp’s Jews lie or sit slumped over like quiet sheep in a pasture. In the distance, Stern sees a soldier coming towards him on a mule. As he draws closer, we see that it is a Soviet army officer. The officer stops just in front of Stern and proclaims loudly, “You have been liberated by the Soviet Army!” At this point, the Schindler Jews sit up in unison, and some stand up. Stern asks the officer, “Have you been to Poland?” The officer responds, “I just came from Poland.” Stern then asks, “Are there any Jews left?” And from the crowd, someone asks, “Where should we go?” The officer replies, “Don’t go east, that’s for sure, they hate you there!” He adds, “I wouldn’t go west either if I were you.” From the crowd another voice says, “We could use some food.” The officer sits up on his mule and then points in the distance. “Isn’t there a town over there?” This was Steven Spielberg’s version of the liberation of Brünnlitz on May 9, 1945. This scene had little to do with reality.¹

The Red Army did officially liberate Brünnlitz on May 9, 1945, as part of its occupation of that part of Czechoslovakia, but the first contact the Schindlerjuden had with the outside world was with the nearby villagers in the Czech village of Brnĕnec days earlier. Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein wrote in his memoirs that at 6:00 A.M. on the morning of May 7, five members of the town council in Brnĕnec approached him to ask whether there were any communicable diseases in the camp. The delegates had ventured into the camp when they realized that its gates were open. Dr. Bieberstein assured them that there were no contractible diseases in Brünnlitz. The delegation was glad to see the inmates were free and that afternoon returned with gifts of meat, milk, and other food. Over the next few weeks, this act of Czech kindness set the standard for relations between Brünnlitz’s recently freed Jews and the Czechs living near the camp.²

The following day, a young female Czech partisan rode up to the front gate. She became for Henry Wiener the “harbinger of freedom.” Formal liberation came the following day before noon, when a lone Soviet soldier rode up on his horse. Each of the Schindler Jews has a different memory of that important moment in the camp’s history. Leon Leyson said that Spielberg “missed a bet” when he failed to depict the Russian soldier’s first words to the gathered Jews once he realized who they were. He said that they were free and told them to rip the numbers from their prison uniforms. Cantor Moshe Taubé said that the Russian soldier was a Jew who spoke Yiddish. When the inmates learned he was Jewish, “he was mobbed. He was kissed from head to toe.”³

The moment the inmates learned that the camp was officially liberated, some of them insisted that Kapo Willi, Leipold’s favorite, be punished for his crimes. With the Soviet soldier presiding, Dawid Schlang, an attorney, helped draw up the charges against Willi. Bernard Goldberg said that some of the inmates wanted to hang Willi without a trial. But others insisted that he be given a trial. Later that day, he was hanged with thin wire from one of the factory’s pipes. Needless to say, his death was ghastly. Later, when the prisoners told other Russians that they had executed a Nazi, the Russians asked, “Only one?”⁴ But not all the Soviet troops who passed by Brünnlitz were as friendly. Soon after liberation, a gang of drunken Red soldiers entered the camp and began to rape some of the former female prisoners. Drunken rape became a hallmark of the Soviet conquest and occupation of German portions of the Third Reich. The soldiers often did not discriminate between Germans and non-Germans. Estimates are that as they occupied former German territory, the Russians raped 2 million German women. Some were raped many times. This happened to a friend of Bronia Gunz (Betty [Bronia] Groß Gunz), who was raped three times by Soviet soldiers in Brünnlitz. From the perspective of Soviet soldiers, this was their “casual right of conquest.”⁵

Once the situation in the camp had stabilized, the Red Army set up a field kitchen to feed the former inmates and imposed a two-week quarantine of the camp. Bernard Goldberg remembered one Jewish officer in the Red army, Misha, who helped the inmates obtain clothes and food. Misha also helped organize a train for many of the inmates back to Kraków. After the war, Goldberg met Misha in Montreal, where the former Soviet officer had married and settled. The quarantine was not effective, and many of the inmates began gingerly to leave the camp to explore the village of Brnĕnec, which sat just across the main railroad tracks from the camp. Henry Blum (Hersch Blumenfrucht) and his nephew, Hersz Pomeranz, crept out of camp and went to Brnĕnec, where they met two German soldiers. The two Jews frightened both soldiers, who fled, leaving behind their backpacks. Harry and Hersz opened the packs and found honey inside. Harry told me they ate so much honey that day that they became sick. The only prisoner who immediately fled the camp was Marcel Goldberg, who escaped through a window and disappeared. It is not certain whether this was before or after the execution of Kapo Willi.⁶

The most distinctive thing that many Schindler Jews remembered after liberation was the kindness of the Czechs. Cantor Moshe Taubé called the Czechs “angels.” He went on, “The goodness of their hearts is indescribable. They didn’t have much, but they shared whatever they had with us: food, clothing. They are wonderful, warm people by nature. But the Slovaks were more like the Poles, the majority were hateful.”⁷ Several days after liberation, Margot Schlesinger ventured out of the camp and across the railroad tracks to the village of Brnĕnec, where she met a German woman. The woman, who seemed to like Margot, asked her to come live in her apartment. The woman was afraid that the Soviets would put people in her apartment. Margot explained that she had to ask her husband, Chaskel, if it would be all right to move in. She also told the woman that she had a brother-in-law. Margot, like the other Schindler Jews, had the fabric that Schindler had asked be distributed to all inmates after liberation. The German woman told Margot that she could use her sewing machine to make clothes. Margot made herself a skirt and blouse, and said she now felt “like a person again. Like a mensch.” She was also surprised by the “wonderful food” that the woman had in her apartment. She excitedly baked a cake to share with her friends in the factory, only to discover that no one could eat it because it was too rich for their weakened digestive systems. But this newfound life ended after a week when Margot asked the woman about the photograph of a man in an SS uniform in her living room. The German housewife told Margot it was her husband. She explained that she had no idea where he was or whether he was ever coming back from the war. Needless to say, Margot quickly left the apartment, never to return.⁸

Each of the inmates reacted differently to news of liberation. Many were cautiously optimistic, but remembered the Soviet warning to be careful because German units were still operating in the area.⁹ Most, though, were determined to return to Poland to try to find their families. But first they had to regain their strength and find transport. During this interval, Sol Urbach’s close friend and fellow carpenter, Max Blasenstein, presented Sol with a handmade autograph book. The small book had a hand-carved wooden cover with Sol’s initials and the date, May 7, 1945, carved on the front. On the back, Blasenstein had carved a picture of a Jewish inmate working in a carpentry shop. During the first days of liberation, Sol had some of his closest friends in Brünnlitz sign the book and write their comments about liberation.

Needless to say, one is struck by the tenderness and hopefulness of most of the farewells and remembrances in Sol Urbach’s autograph book.

Most of the Schindler Jews were from the Kraków area and returned there in the months after liberation to try to find their families. Some, such as Abraham Bankier, Itzhak Stern and Mietek Pemper, tried to re-establish their lives there but ultimately fled abroad. Stella Müller-Madej and Niusia (Bronisława) Karakulska (Niusia Horowitz) were able to rebuild their lives in Kraków. What ultimately drove most Schindler Jews from Poland was the rising tide of post war anti-Semitism. Prewar Poland had a Jewish population of almost 3.3 million, of which almost 87 percent would die during the Holocaust. By the summer of 1946, there were 244,000 Jews in Poland. This figure included 86,000 Jews who had somehow managed to survive in Poland as well as 100,000 more who had been repatriated as a result of a Polish-Soviet repatriation agreement.¹¹

What the Schindler and other Jews faced when they returned to or surfaced in Poland was a virulent outburst of nation-wide anti-Semitism that saw between 1,500 to 2,000 Jews murdered in Poland between 1944 and 1947. The worst of the violence took place in Kielce in the summer of 1946, when a mob attacked a home for Holocaust survivors. Forty-two Jews were murdered in the Kielce pogrom and more than a hundred were injured by the mob. It became apparent to many Holocaust survivors that Poland was no longer a place to try to re-establish a postwar home, particularly after the creation of Israel in 1948. By 1951, fewer than 80,000 Jews lived in Poland.¹² Many had emigrated to Israel, including almost three hundred Schindlerjuden.

Lewis Fagen was one of those who experienced Polish anti-Semitism firsthand. Several months after liberation, Lewis was walking towards his parents’ apartment in Kraków. A woman stopped him on the street and asked him whether he was Jewish. When he said yes, she told him that “down the street they were beating up Jews.” He could hear the mob as it shouted, “Kill the Jews!” A few minutes later, four policemen and a civilian appeared at his door and wanted to know who had been shooting a gun out of the apartment’s window. Lewis told them that the family did not have a gun. The Feigenbaums (Fagens) were then taken into the street where they were surrounded by a screaming mob shouting, “Kill the Jews! Beat the Jews!” Lewis said that he was convinced the mob intended to lynch them. At that moment, he saw a militiaman and told him that he was the friend of an important militia official. The militia man told the police officers to protect the Feigenbaums. In the meantime, someone in the crowd shouted that they had “caught a Jew on the next block,” and left. What Lewis Fagen witnessed was the beginning of the August 11, 1945, pogrom in Kraków that saw rioting anti-Semites initiate a mass assault on the city’s Jews that resulted in many injuries and deaths as well as attacks against Jewish institutions and homes. The Polish army had to be called in to put down the anti-Jewish riots. The pogroms continued throughout Poland for several more years until the government stepped in and tried to end them.¹³

Stella Müller-Madej’s family stayed in Kraków because of her father’s deep love for Poland. Though they certainly experienced Poland’s new wave of anti-Semitism firsthand, Stella also remembered the kindness of Poles after their return to Kraków. Stella, her brother, Adam, and their parents, Stella and Zygmunt, arrived in Kraków after a long journey in open coal trucks to Brno (Brün), where they boarded a train for Kraków. Each of the Müllers carried documents from the Brnĕnec city council that stated they had been political prisoners in the local Groß Rosen sub-camp and were “entitled to transportation from Brnĕnec to Kraków.” The travel document asked that “all official bodies render any necessary help.”¹⁴

Several days later, Stella and her family arrived at the Kraków-Płaszów train station, where they caught a tram to where they thought some of their family members might still be living. After they boarded the tram, the conductor wanted to know whether they had tickets. Stella’s father, Zygmunt, explained that they were returning home from a concentration camp and had no money. The conductor responded, “No money for tickets, and as soon as they get off they buy a bottle of vodka.” The Müllers were filthy and wearing ragged clothes. It was Pentecost, and the other passengers on the tram were dressed in their Sunday best. As a tear ran down Zygmunt’s face, an elegantly dressed man stood up and told the conductor: “You animal. How dare you! Look at these people. Haven’t you learned anything from the war?” He then turned to the Müllers: “With your permission, I will pay.”¹⁵ The kind Polish gentleman then suggested that the family share a cab with him. He later told them that he had been in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and had lost his family in the war. As the cab neared the center of the city, he asked the driver to stop in front of a restaurant, where he bought the Müllers a meal. When they reached the house where Stella’s family had once lived, they found it destroyed. Fortunately, neighbors had their new address and the Polish gentleman insisted on taking them there by cab. To everyone’s delight, Stella’s grandmother and other relatives were at their new home on Kolberg Street. After a wonderful doorstep reunion, Zygmunt went back to the cab to thank the Polish gentleman. But he had already left.¹⁶

Niusia (Bronisława) Horowitz Karakulska also returned to Kraków after the war and rebuilt her life there. Niusia was fortunate that there were eleven members of her family on “Schindler’s List,” though others died in the Holocaust. In addition, she was also closely related to the Rosner family. Niusia is best known as the young Jewish girl that Oskar Schindler kissed at his birthday party in the film Schindler’s List. In reality, Niusia presented Oskar with a birthday cake at his party on April 28, 1945, but never kissed him. Steven Spielberg combined this occasion with another incident that took place earlier to create the birthday party scene for his film. Today, Niusia is a hairdresser at the Salon Kosmetyczny in the Hotel Forum in Kraków.¹⁷

One of the most mysterious figures to survive the war was Marcel Goldberg. It became apparent early in my research that Goldberg was an important figure in the Schindler story. And though I was in time able to clarify the important role he played in helping create the famous “Schindler’s List,” I could find no one who knew anything about what happened to him after the war. Dr. Moshe Bejski, certainly one of the most respected specialists on the Schindler story and a close friend of Oskar’s after the war, told me that he had heard that Goldberg had fled to South America and had died soon thereafter. By the time that I left for Argentina in May 2001 to interview Emilie Schindler, I had pretty much concluded that the postwar fate of Marcel Goldberg would simply be one of the book’s mysteries. Fortunately, Francisco Wichter was able to change all that. And with the story of Bronia Gunz’s accidental sighting of Goldberg in Curaçao, I have been able to piece together a modest portrait of one of the most despised figures in the Schindler story.

When I first mentioned Goldberg to Francisco Wichter, he immediately knew who he was. But there was also someone else who knew more about him, though this source chose to remain anonymous. Francisco and I spent a lot of time together in Buenos Aires, and after each of our discussions he would call his friend for further information about Goldberg. After the war, Goldberg arrived in Argentina with his two sisters and his wartime gains. He settled about eighty miles outside Buenos Aires. He evidently kept his own name and became a builder. Later, he also owned a factory that employed about 120 people. His wife helped run the factory. According to Adolfo Smolarz, who helped Bronia Gunz track down Goldberg in Argentina, Goldberg was “loved” by his workers because he paid them a “very good salary.”¹⁸

Bronia Gunz saw Goldberg and his wife in a linen shop one day in Curaçao, an island in the Netherlands Antilles. He was casually leaning on a counter while his wife looked at linens. Stunned, Betty did not know what to do. If she told her husband, Roman, she was certain he would kill him! Betty pulled Roman out of the shop as a friend, who was shopping with her, wondered what was going on. As she looked back into the shop, she saw that Goldberg’s face had turned blood red. He must, she thought, “have been very grateful” that she had not confronted him. Betty realized almost immediately that she had made a mistake by not confronting Goldberg. For days she could not eat or sleep because of the guilt. Several months later, she went on a business trip with Roman to Argentina and stayed with the Smolarzs, the couple who had vacationed with them in Curaçao. After she told them about seeing Goldberg, Adolfo Smolarz told her she had been wrong not to confront Goldberg.¹⁹

But Adolfo decided he was going to do something. He informed Argentine Jewish organizations about Goldberg and reported his crimes to the Argentine authorities. He told Bronia to gather as many signatures as she could on a document that detailed Goldberg’s crimes during the Holocaust. Adolfo took the document, which had the signatures of sixty-five Schindler Jews on it, to the authorities, who told him: “He is an Argentine citizen. He gives bread and butter to one hundred families. His behavior is excellent. We don’t give up a person like that!” Later, Bronia heard that Goldberg had suffered a heart attack and died. From her perspective, they “should have cut him up in little pieces! Hung him! Most of the Kapos ran to Germany, and better stay there.”²⁰

But the story of Marcel Goldberg does not end there. Goldberg died in 1975 or 1976 and was buried in the vast Cemetario de Tablada run by the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina (AMIA; Israeli Mutual Association of Argentina) in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. After his death, Goldberg’s family paid AMIA $100,000 Argentine to have him buried in one the cemetery’s most prominent places near its Holocaust memorial. Francisco Wichter’s anonymous friend was at the cemetery on the day Goldberg was buried and was struck by the presence of the many Argentine military officers at his graveside, the implication being that Goldberg had strong connections with Argentina’s military dictatorship. According to Wichter’s anonymous source, about a month later, an American Holocaust survivor, presumably a Schindler Jew, was walking through the cemetery and saw Goldberg’s headstone. According to Francisco, this person complained so strongly about Goldberg’s burial in such a prominent place in the cemetery that AMIA returned the $100,000 Argentine to Goldberg’s family and reburied him in the section of the cemetery reserved for Jewish “rufianes”—pimps and prostitutes. More than likely, his disinterment and reburial was somehow linked to the efforts of Bronia Gunz and Adolfo Smolarz to bring charges against Goldberg.²¹

One afternoon, Adriana Brodsky, my research assistant, and I decided to try to find Goldberg’s grave to see whether we could determine his exact date of death. The AMIA cemetery is huge, though with the help of several of the caretakers we were able to find the small, walled off “rufianes” section next to a public bathroom. Though some of the graves were unmarked, others had broken headstones. But we could not find the name of Marcel Goldberg on any of them. We then went to the cemetery office to ask whether they had a record of Goldberg or of a disinterment in 1975 or 1976. They said that disinterments were extremely rare because they violated Jewish law and they had no record of one during those two years. They added that though their records were quite complete, it was possible that a disinterment could have taken place and not been recorded. They also had no information about the burial of a Marcel Goldberg in the “rufianes” section of the cemetery. There are scores of Goldbergs in the Buenos Aires area, both in Jewish community records and in the local telephone book. Presumably some of them are related to Marcel Goldberg and know the whereabouts of his final resting place.

The Escape of Oskar and Emilie Schindler

More than likely, Oskar and Emilie Schindler never knew that Marcel Goldberg had settled near them in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Francisco Wichter told me, for example, that he did not know that the Schindlers had lived there and did not meet Emilie until 1994. On the other hand, Francisco and the Schindlers both came to Argentina with the help of the Joint, Wichter in 1947 and the Schindlers two years later. But their paths never crossed; indeed, Oskar and Emilie would never have imagined four years earlier that they would wind up in Argentina. And one suspects that there were moments after they left Brünnlitz on May 9, 1945, when they doubted they would even survive their flight to the American zone.

Oskar discussed their harrowing journey in his 1951 letter to Fritz Lang, and Emilie spends quite a bit of time on it in her memoirs, Where Light and Shadow Meet. Unfortunately, parts of her account are at odds with her husband’s recollections as well as Richard Rechen’s. Esther Rechen, the wife of Richard (Ryszard) Rechen, the driver of the truck that accompanied the Schindler party, shared her memories with me. Kurt Klein, who would be responsible for insuring that the Schindler party reached the American zone safely, gave me a letter that Richard Rechen sent him in 1987 about the Schindlers’ odyssey. Finally, Dr. Marjorie Zerin, a prominent journalist, sent me the notes of the interview she did with Emilie Schindler, Kurt Klein, and Marta (Eva “Marta” Kisza (Kisch) Scheuer) in 1994. These sources provide a confusing picture of what the Schindlers and others in their party went through before they reached the American lines.

According to Oskar, he and Emilie left with seven Jewish workers who wanted to find relatives in France or Switzerland. In addition, Marta, Schindler’s mistress, and her brother, were with the rest of the Schindler party in the truck. Richard drove the truck and Esther and Marta rode with him in the cab. Oskar drove the two-seated Horch with Emilie by his side. Emilie said that ten German soldiers rode on the roof or the running boards of the Horch until the Soviets took it from them. As they moved westward, they were slowed down by “clogged roads” and the truck, which had trouble keeping up with the Horch. The Schindler convoy was stopped by Soviet troops once it reached the village of Havličův Brod (Deutsch Brod), which is about 180 miles west of Brnĕnec. This was about 50 miles south of Pardubice, where Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner had commanded the last major pocket of German resistance to the Allies. Five days before Schindler’s departure, General Dwight David Eisenhower had ordered that Allied forces halt at a line running between Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), Plzeń (Pilsen), and Česky Budějovice (Budweis), which allowed the Soviets to take over most of Czechoslovakia. The region between the Eisenhower line in Czechoslovakia and Brünnlitz was extremely unstable and explains why the Schindler party had such difficulty reaching the American zone.²²

Oskar was shocked that the Russians had already taken Havličův Brod. At the first checkpoint into the city, a Russian guard took their watches. When they reached the center of Havličův Brod, the Soviets took everything else from them, including the Horch. Inside was a large diamond that Emilie had discovered in the glove compartment soon after they left Brünnlitz and had then hidden under her seat. In the confusion, Oskar and Emilie lost contact with Richard Rechen and the other Jews in the truck. What followed on the night of May 9 was, according to Oskar “increasing sadism, rapes, and shootings” by the drunken Russian soldiers in the village. Emilie struggled to maintain her composure and Oskar seemed to be “in a trance.”²³

That night, Emilie wrote, she and Oskar met several people they had known before or during the war. The first person was “Annelie,” who, Emilie said, had been Oskar’s lover when he worked for Abwehr. This was probably Gritt Schwarzer, who played a key role in recruiting Oskar for Abwehr and carried on a three-year relationship with him.²⁴ Next to “Annelie” was another Sudeten German family with two children also named Schindler. Bewildered, Oskar and Emilie were not certain what to do in the midst of the growing chaos that night. Suddenly, Emilie heard someone call her name. It was a Russian cook who had once worked for her at Brünnlitz. The cook arranged for Oskar and Emilie to sleep in a truck that night. According to Emilie, Oskar befriended several Russian soldiers and drank with them through the night. This was Oskar’s way of protecting Emilie from the Russians. But he was unable to protect one of the female Schindler Jews riding in the truck with Richard Rechen. Russian soldiers had taken her and evidently gang-raped her; when she showed up in Prague several months later, she was pregnant. The Russians had also tried to take Esther, but Marta was somehow able to hide her. Unknown to Oskar and Emilie, the Czech Red Cross had hidden the Schindlerjuden in the local jail for the night.²⁵

The next morning, the Soviets began to separate the Germans into Sudeten, Austrian, and German groupings. Emilie said that Oskar knew that if he was put with the other Sudeten Germans, the two of them would spend months in a concentration camp. Consequently, they put on the concentration camp uniforms that Oskar had hidden in the truck and threw all their identification papers away. They got new travel documents from one of the Czech underground groups operating in the area. Oskar took these new documents to the Czech Red Cross in Havličův Brod, which issued the Schindlers new travel documents.²⁶ While they were in the Red Cross tent, a group of Czech soldiers began searching the contents of everyone’s bags and found a German Luger in the handbag of one of the other Czech Germans in the tent, who was also named Schindler. Despite her husband’s pleas, the Czech soldiers took the woman outside and shot her in the head.²⁷

In the midst of the confusion, Oskar and Emilie worried about the rest of their party. Frantically, they began to search for them. Emilie said that at one point Oskar “almost went crazy, almost beserk” when he could not find them. Later, a Czech soldier approached them and inquired whether they were looking for the their companions. The Schindler Jews had told Czech authorities what the Schindlers had done for them during the war. But before they got very far, Emilie heard Oskar cry out, “They’re going to shoot me, they’re going to shoot me.” After Emilie calmed Oskar down, he told her that he had overheard two Russian soldiers “say that they were looking for a certain Schindler of Mährisch Ostrau who had been with the Counterintelligence Service [Abwehr].” At this moment, a stranger walked up to Oskar and Emilie and told them that if they wanted to stay alive, they should not speak German in front of strangers.²⁸

Oskar and Emilie soon found Richard Rechen, Marta, and the other Schindler Jews. The Red Cross put them up in a war-damaged hotel in Havličův Brod once used by traveling salesmen. Emilie, Gritt, Marta, and a new arrival, Emilie’s niece, Traude, stayed in one wing of the hotel and the men stayed in the hotel’s dining room. Emilie said that the party stayed in Havličův Brod for three days until the Czech Red Cross put them on a train bound for Plzew (Pilsen), which would bring them to the edge of the American zone. The Red Cross advised Oskar not to venture outside of the hotel until the train left. By this time, the Schindlers had no goal in mind except to reach the American zone. However, as Richard Rechen had relatives in Switzerland, they decided to follow him there. Emilie’s memoirs then state that they boarded a train for Plzew on the night of May 11. After they got underway, Oskar had a nightmare and jumped up and pulled the the train’s emergency cord. When the conductor chastised Oskar for his deed, Oskar explained that he had dreamed the train was hurtling down a steep grade and was about to crash. Emilie claimed that soon after this incident, the Schindler group had to change trains to go on to Plzew. As they traveled westward, they were haunted by the presence of Russian soldiers in the area.²⁹

Parts of Emilie’s account of their escape, particularly the journey by train to Plzew, are very different from the accounts by Oskar, Richard Rechen, and Kurt Klein. Oskar said nothing about a train trip but says that after the group left Havličův Brod they “moved along the road of the Bohemian Forest,” where SS units were struggling “to beat their way to the Americans.”³⁰ Richard Rechen never mentioned stopping in Havličův Brod but did say that they lost the truck somewhere near Meské Budějovice, where they later boarded a train. Kurt told me that he met the Schindler party just outside the village of Lenora, which is only about thirty miles from Meské Budějovice and more than seventy-five miles southeast of Plzew. Emilie wrote her memoirs when she was in her mid-eighties, so it is easy to understand why she got some of the details wrong about their escape. The accounts by Oskar, Reichard Rechen, and Kurt Klein are more believable because an escape route through Čéské Budějovice would have been much safer, particularly as Prague, a transit point for all trains traveling westward to Plzew, had been under siege just days before.³¹

As the train neared the Czech-German border, it stopped and the conductor told everyone that it was too dangerous to go any further because SS units were still operating in the area. At dawn on May 12, everyone was ordered out of the cars. Frustrated, the Schindler party began walking toward what they hoped were the American lines. Richard Rechen said that the group spent the next two hours “almost running” in their efforts to reach the Americans. At one point they came across a soldier making eggs for breakfast. They asked him to let them go through the checkpoint. He refused, but said they could go around to the next checkpoint. They managed to get through this checkpoint and made their way to a small village, which we now know was Lenora. The group, still dressed in their concentration camp uniforms, was dirty and hungry. They tried to hitch a ride on a local cart but did not have any money to pay the driver, so they continued walking. They were stopped again by American soldiers who then argued about what to do with them. Richard Rechen said the Americans wanted to send the Schindler group to a P.O.W. camp. At this point, an American lieutenant arrived in a Jeep. He asked the sergeant, “What’s wrong?” The sergeant replied, “I don’t know, they are some funny people refusing to go to the camp.” At this point, Richard Rechen spoke up and said, “Das wir sind Juden aus einem K.Z.” (We are Jews from a concentration camp). For a moment, the lieutenant was speechless, but then said, “I have no right to let you in but I’ll go and try to settle this matter. Don’t be afraid, I am a Jew and my name is Kurt Klein.” Unknown to the Schindlers, Klein was under strict orders not to let any German soldiers, some of whom had put on striped concentration camp uniforms to escape capture, into American-held territory. Yet twenty minutes later, Lt. Kurt Klein, himself a German Jew who had fled to the United States to escape Nazi persecution and had lost his parents in the Holocaust, returned with a pass that allowed everyone in the Oskar Schindler group to enter the American zone.³²

I got to know Kurt Klein soon after I began my work on this book and was struck by his kind, humble demeanor. Perhaps Sara J. Bloomfeld, the director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., best captured the special character of this man when she wrote, after his death on April 19, 2002, that “Kurt Klein was a remarkable person of exceptional character. Beneath his warm and gentle demeanor was a deeply humane man whose passion and compassion touched many lives.”³³ At the time he encountered the Schindler party, Kurt was part of several two-man surrender specialist teams operating in western Czechoslovakia. These teams came from the Second Regiment of the Fifth U.S. Infantry Division and were part of General George Patton’s Third Army. Kurt’s sensitivity to the plight of the Jews in the Schindler group was not isolated. Several days earlier he had begun to help the remnants of a group of female Jewish prisoners from Grünberg, a sub-camp of Groß Rosen. Kurt and his team had been operating near Volary, a town seven miles from Lenora, when he came across the 120 Jewish women who had survived a forced march that began with 2,000. Over the next few months, Kurt became enamored with one of the survivors, whom he met in Volary, a young Jewish woman from Bielitz, Poland, Gerda Weissmann. A year later, they would marry in Paris.³⁴

Kurt always downplayed the role he played in admitting the Schindler party into the American zone. Yet he told me that if he had not given the Schindlers and the others a pass to enter the zone, Oskar, Emilie, Traude, Marta, and her brother would have been separated from the Jews in the group and put in a special camp for Germans.³⁵ Kurt’s job in the U.S. Army was “to interrogate and segregate Germans caught fleeing from the Russian and Czech guns.”³⁶ If this had happened, it is uncertain what would have happened to Oskar and the Germans in his group. If the Soviets were looking for Oskar, and the Americans had turned him over to them, then he could have faced imprisonment or execution. When I interviewed Kurt, I asked him whether Oskar’s height and striking looks had made him stand out from the other members of the group. Kurt replied that neither Oskar nor Emilie stood out, though several other members of the Schindler group did. He did, however, notice that all the members of the group were in much better shape than the Jewish women he had encountered several days earlier in Volary. After the war, Richard Rechen tried to find Kurt, and finally located him in Scottsdale, Arizona. They corresponded and the Rechens later visited the Kleins in the United States. After Schindler’s List came out, Kurt met with Emilie and Marta in Los Angeles.³⁷

After Kurt gave Oskar and the nine other members of his group their temporary travel permit, he took them to an empty house in Lenora. An American Jewish military chaplain came by to offer the group his help and over the next few days Jewish soldiers dropped in to talk to the Schindler party. They explained that they wanted to meet the first concentration camp survivors to enter the American zone. Most left with tears in their eyes after they learned what the Schindlerjuden had gone through during the war.³⁸ What Emilie remembered most was the “wonderful soup,” the first thing they had eaten in three days.³⁹ But Oskar, Emilie, and the others were still not completely safe because the area they were in on the Czech-German border was about to be turned over to the Soviets. Consequently, the Jewish chaplain arranged to have a small busand driver take Oskar and the others in his party to Passau, in the official American zone, where they were put in a displaced persons (DP) camp, which was only about sixty miles from Lenora. He also advised Oskar and Emilie to continue wearing their concentration camp uniforms.⁴⁰

In Passau, another American Jewish officer, Colonel Cohen, helped them arrange train passage for Switzerland. When they reached Konstanz on the German-Swiss border, they ran into more difficulties trying to cross over to Kreuzlingen on the Swiss side. Frustrated by stubborn Swiss border guards, Oskar decided to slip through the “wire grill” that ran along the border; the next day he used wire cutters to cut his way into Switzerland when the guards changed at noon. In the meantime, two more people had joined the Schindler group. Oskar cut his way through the fence and then waited for everyone else in his group to come out of hiding and sneak through. One of the Jews who had joined the Schindlers before the “break-in” was a nephew of Helena Rubinstein, who insisted on shaving before he crossed the frontier “to please his aunt.”⁴¹

Unfortunately, it took a half an hour for everyone to cross through the fence and by this time the new Swiss border guard contingent had taken up its posts and spotted the Schindler group trying to cross into Switzerland. About two thirds of a mile inside Switzerland, Oskar, Emilie, and seven other members of their party were stopped by Swiss customs officials and taken to the border customs house, where they were harassed by a Swiss official “who gesticulated wildly with his pistol.” Five other members of the Schindler party had managed to escape after they crawled through the fence and were met by relatives and friends who took them away in cars. Oskar said the customs official was angry because the group had “disturbed his siesta” and was insulted by Oskar’s loud, contagious laugh. Oskar said he was laughing at the official, a “Bourgeois figure” with a “face as red as a lobster.” Oskar’s outburst seemed to undermine the custom official’s authority and he soon put his gun away. But he remained angry and snapped, “You bunch of Polish Jews, we have nothing to eat ourselves.” He then turned all nine over to the French occupation forces operating just across the frontier in Germany.⁴²

According to Oskar, the French detained those remaining in the Schindler party for two weeks in Konstanz. And when he had explained their situation to the French officials, he wrote Lang, they were put up in a local hotel and “given preferential treatment.” In fact, he claimed, the day after they were turned over to the French by the Swiss, they were guests “at a feast of the local [French] commander for his officers.”⁴³ In reality, the situation was much worse and Oskar remained in French custody for over three weeks. When the French realized that Schindler was a former Nazi Party member and factory owner they initiated an investigation into his background. What saved him were the detailed statements provided by three of the Schindler Jews still with him: Leopold Degen, Eduard Heuberger, and Adolf Grünhalt. Needless to say, their statements to the French police in Konstanz were detailed and profuse in their praise of Oskar and Emilie Schindler. At the end of his statement, Degen wrote: “[The] Brünnlitz camp was the one and only concentration camp in the entire Reich where not one case of unnatural death occurred. Today, men and women from Brünnlitz enjoy their new lives as free, proud Schindler-Juden.’”⁴⁴ These reports ultimately reached Captain Robert Monheit, a Jewish chaplain in the French army, who wrote in an August 27, 1945, memo that he had received “unanimous testimonies saying that Mr. Oskar SCHINDLER, director of a factory at KRAKOW, has rendered inestimable services to the allied cause.” Captain Monheit went on to say that Schindler had protected and saved the lives of “1,200 persons during the war, in spite of great difficulties.” His memo was meant as a notification “to Allied civilian and military authorities, that it may be examined with kindness.” He finished by noting that Schindler was accompanied by his wife, Emilie, and “his relative, Miss Eva Kisza.”⁴⁵

During the summer of 1945, the five remaining Schindlerjuden with Oskar and Emilie obtained travel permits and left Germany; Oskar, Emilie, Traude, and Marta remained in Konstantz.⁴⁶ Oskar told Fritz Lang that he lived in “a state of apathy” that summer but finally decided to move to the American zone in Bavaria because conditions in the French sector “were rather bad.” He also thought he would have better contacts abroad in Bavaria. But he did not completely waste his summer in the French zone. At the urging of a local rabbi, Oskar wrote the detailed financial report about his efforts to save Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz. He was well aware of the denazification program underway in the American zone and the need to document his aid to Jews during the war.⁴⁷

And though he never mentioned it, if he moved to Bavaria, he would be much closer to the Sudeten part of Czechoslovakia, where he hoped to rebuild his life as an industrialist making pots and pans for a war-torn Europe. But it did not take Emilie and Oskar long to realize that they could never return to Czechoslovakia.⁴⁸ In the midst of the collapse of Nazi power in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Böhren und Mähren), Sudeten Germans fled en masse in the face of the Soviet onslaught. Czech troops occupied the former Sudetenland and inexperienced administrators tried to restore order in the former Nazi territory. Almost immediately, some Czechs decided to take revenge on the former Sudeten Germans who unwisely chose to remain behind in a restored Czechoslovakia. The new National Front government of Edvard Beneå issued harsh regulations in the summer of 1945 that declared all members of the Nazi party, the SS, Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party (Sudetendeutsche Partei), and its Voluntary Defense Service (Freiwilliger Schutzdienst) to be criminals. In addition, anyone who “had supported the Nazi regime, or consented to or defended the Nazi government, was to be prosecuted” by special Extraordinary People’s Courts. Czech Germans who had acquired Reich German citizenship would automatically lose their Czechoslovak citizenship. The only Germans who could apply for the restoration of their Czechoslovak citizenship were those who could prove that they had “remained loyal to the Czechoslovak Republic,” had “never committed any offense against the Czech or Slovak people,” and had either “participated actively in the struggle against Nazism or suffered under Nazi terror.”⁴⁹

Needless to say, Oskar’s work for Abwehr before World War II, and Emilie’s support of his efforts, insured that they could never return to their former homeland or acquire Czechoslovak citizenship. More important, because of his Abwehr efforts to help destroy the Czechoslovak Republic between 1936 and 1938 and his membership in the Nazi Party, Oskar Schindler was now considered a war criminal in Czechoslovakia. And neither time nor Steven Spielberg’s film have in any way reduced Czech antipathy towards Oskar Schindler. Czech historian Jitka Gruntová has written two scathing books on Schindler, Oskar Schindler: Legenda a Fakta and Legendy a fakta o Oskar Schindlerovi, that deal with his war criminality; and in 2002, the Regional Assembly of Eastern Pardubice, which includes Schindler’s hometown of Svitavy, voted to exclude him from its list of outstanding personalities. The regional assembly’s advisory council said that Schindler had been a member of the Nazi Party and was simply “too controversial” to be included on the list of famed Eastern Pardubicians. No doubt their decision was affected by Gruntová’s works.⁵⁰

And if they had any doubts about Czechoslovak intentions when they moved to Bavaria in the fall of 1945, they were dispelled over the next year as they watched a wave of German expulsions from Czechoslovakia. Between May and July 1945, for example, an estimated 800,000 Germans were forced from their homes by the Czech military or local revolutionary committees. These “wildcat expulsions” involved “mob action, lynchings, rapes” and large-scale “mistreatment.” The most brutal of these expulsions took place in Brno (Brünn), where over 20,000 Germans were forced to try to walk to Vienna. When they were denied entry into Austria, they had to live in the open and many died of disease or malnutrition. To the north in KrásnZ Br51

But the expulsion of the Czech Germans not only meant that Oskar and Emilie could never return to Czechoslovakia. They would also find themselves increasingly resented and unwelcome in Bavaria, where many of the expelled Czech Germans were forced to settle. And if this was not bad enough, Oskar also had to face the possibility of denazification when he reached Bavaria. The denazification of Germany was an Allied policy aimed at bringing to justice all levels of the former Nazi leadership to insure that they played no significant role in its reconstruction. But as one U.S. Army intelligence officer noted just a month after the war ended, “The question who is a Nazi is often a dark riddle.” But, he added, “The question what is a Nazi is also not easy to answer.”⁵² The question of who was a Nazi plagued denazification efforts in Germany during the three-year Allied effort to root out and punish the former Nazi leadership. Initially, the Allies agreed that anyone who had joined the Nazi Party after Hitler’s accession to power and held some type of Party leadership role during the Hitler years was subject to denazification. The Allies were aided by the discovery of 12 million Party cards and photographs in Munich, which gave them some idea about the party’s multilevel leadership. But the Allies had to differentiate between those Party members who actively embraced and engaged in Nazi Party activities and those who had joined, particularly after 1937, because of employment reasons. By the end of 1945, the Allies required any German who was employed or had business in occupied Germany to fill out a 131-question Fragebogen (questionnaire), which was used to determine the extent of one’s relationship with the Nazi Party. What became most important in evaluating about 50 percent of the 1.4 million Fragebogen filled out by March 1946 was one’s actions as a Party member, not mere membership itself. This was particularly true in the American zone.⁵³

Almost immediately, Allied efforts to remove prominent Nazis from important positions in business and government began to cause problems. General George Patton, the Military Governor of Bavaria, was quite public in his criticisms of denazification. On August 11, 1945, he wrote General Dwight David Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, that “it is no more possible for a man to be a civil servant in Germany and not to have paid lip service to nazism than it is for a man to be a postmaster in America and not to have paid lip service to the Democratic Party or Republican Party when it is in power.” Eisenhower reminded the controversial Patton that the “obliteration of nazism was a major U.S. war aim” and that the guidelines he was to follow were dictated by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.⁵⁴

By the spring of 1946, the Allies had to shift responsibility for denazification to German authorities. Germany’s new provincial assemblies (Länderrat) passed new Laws for Liberation that laid out five categories of Germans for denazification consideration: major offenders, offenders, lesser offenders, followers, and nonoffenders. All Nazi Party members were minimally considered followers. In time, 13 million Germans filled out the Fragebogen and 3 million were selected for appearances before denazification courts. How did these changing regulations affect Oskar Schindler? Oskar had applied for Nazi Party membership on November 1, 1938, about a month after the Sudetenland became a formal part of the Third Reich. And though his Nazi Party card is devoid of information about his Party activities, he was still hypothetically vulnerable to investigation and possible formal denazification proceedings because of his work for Abwehr and his role as an industrialist. But the key to determining one’s potential criminality was Party leadership, and as there was nothing in his file to indicate significant leadership in the Nazi Party from 1938 to 1945, he probably had little to worry about. But at the time he was planning to move to Bavaria, the Americans were aggressively interning and interrogating tens of thousands of former Party members. Consequently, to deal with the possibility that he would be investigated as a former Nazi Party member, Oskar began to gather as many affidavits as he could from Schindler Jews to document what could be perceived as anti-Nazi activity. These documents would serve several purposes. They would underscore his impressive efforts to save more than a thousand of his Jewish workers and help open doors of opportunity for him because of this track record of anti-Nazi activity. Finally, Oskar would use these documents to try to recover professionally and economically.⁵⁵

The first of these documents, of course, was the May 8, 1945, statement from Itzhak Stern, Abraham Bankier, and other prominent Schindler Jews attesting to his efforts to save his Jewish workers in Kraków and Brünnlitz. He also had a copy of the June 9, 1945, French interrogation reports of three of the Schindler Jews traveling with Oskar, as well as Captain Monheit’s note to Allied authorities about these statements. Oskar prepared his detailed financial report in July 1945, and, on September 3, French authorities issued him a document based on Captain Monheit’s recommendation that was addressed to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), which was responsible for aiding refugees and displaced persons. Later that month, Schindlerjude Leib Salpeter, now the head of the Zionist Democratic Union (Zjednoczenie Sionistów-Demokratow) in Kraków, sent a letter to “all Zionist Organizations and Societies” asking for “support to O. Schindler and his wife wherever they are in need.” In the fall of 1946, Salpeter would send Oskar a more detailed account of his wartime efforts. This letter of support was signed by Salpeter and a representative of the Mizrachi Tora Waawoda in Kraków. On October 12, 1945, Oskar received another letter of support from twenty-four Schindlerjuden interned in a DP camp in Hert, Austria.⁵⁶

There is no question that the letters helped keep Oskar from being forced to undergo one of the more serious denazification proceedings, and they also possibly led to an offer from the Bavarian government of a Privy Councillorship after he inquired about leasing a closed metal factory. Oskar told Fritz Lang that he turned down the government offer because it would condemn him to “a new idleness, even if it had a title.”⁵⁷ The letters also helped him get a job in 1947 as an importer of metal ware and machines in the Munich office of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. However, in 1948, the Jewish Agency closed its office in Munich and Oskar was out of a job. Frustrated with what he later described as his idle, unproductive years in Germany, he began to consider emigration. Herbert Steinhouse, a Canadian journalist who befriended Schindler in the late 1940s before his emigration to Argentina, described Oskar as “stifled, bored, humiliated, desperate, worried—and obliged to live again as a virtual prisoner of Emilie, in too small and seedy a place. Oskar was too spoiled a high-flyer, and too intelligent and energetic a man to suffer poverty, but at the time had had little else but his charm to trade.”⁵⁸

Life in Regensburg, Germany: 1945–1949

But it was not just frustration over the lack of available employment that depressed Oskar and Emilie. After they arrived in Bavaria in the fall of 1945, Oskar and Emilie settled in Regensburg, a beautiful medieval Bavarian city on the Danube that was relatively untouched by the war. They ultimately moved into an apartment at 25 Nürnbergstraße, which remained their official residence until they left for Argentina in 1949. However, according to Herbert Steinhouse, sometime after they arrived in Regensburg, Oskar, Emilie, and many of their self-styled “Jewish bodyguards” moved into “bleak flats near the more interesting black markets of the Munich Zentrum,” which is an hour south of Regensburg. They maintained their official addresses in Regensburg, Steinhouse explained, to get Joint and UNRRA rations from the nearby Regensburg DP camp.

But life in Regensburg was hard for the Schindlers. Emilie wrote in her memoirs that the Regensburgers went out of their way to let them know that they were unwelcome. She sensed that the people of Regensburg considered the Sudeten Germans “second-class Germans.” She recalled one episode in which someone dumped a pail of “foul-smelling liquid” on her while she was walking down the street. She was rebuffed again and again when she tried to purchase or trade scarce goods in the city’s shops and markets; in fact, the only shops willing to do business with her were those owned by Jews. Finally, Emilie decided to go to a vineyard in the countryside and buy grapes to sell on the black market. After a long, crowded train ride, she approached a vineyard owner and asked whether she could buy some grapes. He told her that his grapes left his vineyard only as wine. And from the window of his nearby home, his wife cried out, “Hans, they are not Germans, don’t sell them wine either.” Frustrated, that night, Emilie stole two bags of grapes from the irate farmer and his wife. But by the time she got back to Regensburg, most of the grapes had turned to raisins.⁵⁹

On the other hand, Emilie said that for a while the romance had returned to their marriage. Oskar once again became the caring lover he had once been. But just as quickly as romance seemed to return to their marriage, it again disappeared. One evening at the movies, Emilie felt a terrible pain in the lower part of her stomach. Though she tried to put it out of her mind, the pains grew severe and Oskar had to rush her to the hospital. The next day, surgeons discovered a dead baby inside Emilie. This would be the last and worst of Emilie’s four miscarriages, and she later blamed them on “the disappointments with Schindler.”⁶⁰ But as she was coming out of the anaesthesia, she would suffer another loss that left her weeping inconsolably and deeply depressed. Above her, she saw Oskar’s “smiling face.” And just behind him stood his new lover, Gisa (Gisella Schein), who would later accompany Oskar, Emilie, and several others to Argentina. She now realized that Oskar would never change and remembered the rumors before the war about his two illegitimate children.⁶¹

In the meantime, Oskar began actively to seek the aid of various Jewish organizations because all they had to live on initially were monthly CARE packages. Emilie often traded the sugar, powdered eggs and milk, coffee, tea, and other items in the CARE packages on the black market for other goods. Oskar’s first significant contact with a Jewish agency came in September 1945, when he sought help from James P. Rice, a representative of the Joint in Linz, Austria. Oskar was accompanied by some Schindler Jews who vouched for him and gave Rice a copy of the May 8, 1945, statement of support from the Jewish leaders at Brünnlitz. Two American Jewish soldiers, Corporal Jack Katzman and Lt. George Hillman, also verified Oskar’s account of his wartime efforts to help Jews. Rice described Oskar as “quiet, modest, letting the survivors speak for him. He was, in fact, completely powerless,” a person “completely dependent on others for his well-being and future.” Rice wrote a letter of introduction for Oskar to Eli Rock at the Joint’s office in Munich. He described Schindler as a man who had been of “great assistance to hundreds of Jews during the Nazi reign of terror.” He knew that Rock, like other Jewish aid workers in Europe after the war, would be skeptical of such claims and made note of the various Jews who had verified these “incredible” claims. He asked Rock to do what he could to find Oskar work with the Joint in Bavaria or with UNRRA.⁶²

Armed with this letter and the substantial affidavits that he had gathered from various Schindlerjuden and others, Oskar began to seek whatever support he could to rebuild his life in Bavaria. Initially, he seemed occupied with finding a job with German authorities, though he seemed unwilling to take just any job. In August 1946, Oskar read an account of the Amon Göth trial in Kraków in a local newspaper, which noted that Mietek Pemper was the main witness. Oskar sent a letter to the court in Kraków addressed simply to “Witness Pemper.” He told Pemper that he and Emilie were in terrible shape in Regensburg and needed his help. Pemper went to see Lieb Salpeter in Kraków. On October 5, Salpeter sent a letter to Jewish organizations throughout West Germany asking them to do what they could to help Schindler. He went into detail about Oskar’s wartime efforts to help and save Jews and noted his terrible plight in postwar Germany. During the war, Salpeter wrote, Schindler “did so much for us.” Now it was time for the world’s Jewish organizations to do what they could to help him.⁶³

Several months later, Oskar wrote Dr. Resz~e Kasztner, whom he had met in Budapest in the fall of 1943, asking for his support in getting some type of compensation for his efforts to save Jews during the war. Dr. Kasztner, who coauthored a detailed report on his meeting with Schindler, Die Bekenntnisse des Herrn X (The Confessions of Mr. X) as well as a more comprehensive report on the activities of the Jewish Agency in Budapest during the war, Der Bericht des jüdischen Rettungskomitees aus Budapest, 1942–1945 (A Report on the Jewish Rescue Committee in Budapest, 1942–1945), barely mentioned Schindler in his second report because he knew so little about Oskar’s overall wartime activities. Consequently, though he expressed sincere gratitude for all Oskar had done to save Jews during the war, Dr. Kasztner asked Schindler to provide him with more details about when he began using Jewish workers in Kraków, his relationship with Dr. Rudi Sedlacek, the names of his Jewish workers, and what happened to the Jewish workers in nearby factories. In other words, could they have been rescued, and, if so, he wanted to know why they had not been. Kasztner assured Oskar that he wanted to do everything he could to help someone who had risked so much to help Jews during the war.⁶⁴

These efforts finally began to pay off in 1947, though Emilie attributed the momentary improvement in their condition more to the announcement of the Marshall Plan, the four-year U.S. effort to invest heavily in the rebuilding of Europe, than to the job that Oskar got with the Jewish Agency in Munich.⁶⁵ Even with his job with the Jewish Agency, the Schindlers still seemed to struggle to make ends meet. In fact, Dr. Akiva Kohane wrote Samuel L. Haber, the director of the Joint’s office in Munich, that during a visit to Kraków in May 1947, he attended a meeting of Zionist representatives during which the Schindler case was discussed. Attending the meeting were Leib Salpeter, Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, Hersch Licht, Markus Wulkan, and other Schindlerjuden then living in Kraków. Dr. Kohane, who had never heard of Oskar Schindler, was surprised by the stories of the gathered Schindler Jews. He was also taken aback by their “bitter resentment” over Oskar’s postwar existence in Germany. They told Dr. Kohane that it angered them that while “many Nazis [were] living comfortable lives,” Oskar was going hungry. They asked Dr. Kohane to inform Joint headquarters in Paris to see what they could do to help Oskar and Emilie.⁶⁶

In the meantime, an article appeared in the Jewish Chronicle in London that described Schindler’s wartime efforts to save his Jewish workers and the large sum he had spent to save them. The article also discussed his desperate plight in Germany. The British Jewish Refugee Association decided to contact the Jewish Kultusgemeinde (religious association) in Munich about Schindler because it was the largest Jewish community in the Regensburg area. The idea was to help him by sending him food parcels. In the meantime, Maria Rosner and Ludmilla Pfefferberg-Page, who were close to Oskar, gave Dr. I. Schwarzbart, a prominent Jewish leader in New York, a letter that Oskar had written in April 1947 asking for help. Dr. Schwarzbart had also heard stories about Oskar from another Schindler Jew, Mrs. Gerner-Schenk. Dr. Schwarzbart discussed Oskar’s case with a prominent Joint leader in New York, who told him that the Joint was already considering Oskar’s case “along with a number of similar claims in a special commission.” Dr. Schwarzbart later wrote Oskar that though he was not in a position to help him financially, he wanted to thank him for what he had done during the war. He added, “Your deed shines like a star on the backdrop of the horizon of the horrible calamity which German men and women brought on the Jewish people.”⁶⁷

These developments ultimately led to Oskar’s meeting with Ted Feder, the deputy director of Joint operations in Munich, to discuss his situation. The meeting, which took place in late 1947 or early 1948, marked the beginning of Schindler’s long relationship with the Joint in Germany and Argentina. Over the next two years, Ted Feder would serve essentially as the Joint’s “paymaster” for Oskar Schindler, distributing the various grants awarded to him. But it would take a while for the Joint to begin to help him because doubts about his story still lingered.⁶⁸

In April 1948, Leib Salpeter sent Dr. Kohane a letter desperately asking him to do something for Schindler. Soon thereafter, Oskar visited Dr. Kohane in Munich, where he met Samuel Haber. Oskar showed both men the various affidavits, documents, and newspaper articles relating to his case. Oskar told them that he and his family were starving and that “he did not have a penny in his pocket. He could not afford a decent meal. Literally, he was hungry.” Dr. Kohane immediately granted Oskar a substantial Joint monthly food allotment for himself, Emilie, Traude, and several others living with the Schindlers. Samuel Haber later noted that this allotment was more than sufficient to give him “a very decent living” in Germany at that time. Over the next few months, the Joint also gave Oskar $500 in Deutschmarks and found him a job in the Joint’s nearby warehouse. As Haber noted, Oskar deserved “everything we can do for him.”⁶⁹

Once the Joint became Schindler’s benefactor, he then decided to press his claims for full compensation for the funds he had spent saving his Jewish workers in Kraków and Brünnlitz. Oskar based his claim on the detailed financial report he had prepared in the summer of 1945, in which he estimated that he had spent RM 2,640,000 ($1,056,000) to save his Jewish workers. Oskar claimed that he had received instructions from Dr. Kasztner “to pay out any amount of money necessary to save Jewish lives.”⁷⁰ Oskar also claimed that he always had the approval of Lieb Salpeter, Dr. Chaim Hilfstein, Natan Stern, or Itzhak Stern before he spent such funds. Unfortunately, he had no documentation to prove this. Moreover, though Oskar later claimed that Dr. Kasztner had sent him a list of prominent Jews, which, “upon the wish of Israeli organizations, should be looked for in the camps and brought to [his] factory and placed under [his] protection,” there is nothing in the detailed report of the 1943 Budapest meeting prepared by Kasztner or Shmuel Springmann, who also attended the meeting with Schindler, or in Dr. Kasztner’s postwar report, that would support Oskar’s contention. And though Oskar did act as a conduit for funds from the Jewish Agency into Płaszów, there is nothing to indicate that he used any to compensate himself for his own expenses; and Dr. Hilstein wrote after the war that Oskar always promptly turned these funds over to Jewish representatives in Płaszów.⁷¹

Dr. Joseph J. Schwartz, the European director of the Joint in Paris, was not certain what to do about Schindler’s claim, and decided to seek the legal advice of Dr. Kurt Wehle from the Joint’s General Counsel Office in Paris. Dr. Wehle wrote a detailed memorandum on the entire Schindler claim based on some of the information gathered by the Joint in Paris and Munich. He also had the statement of Ignacy Schwebe (Izak Schweber) who enthusiastically confirmed the general details of the Schindler story, though Wehle admitted that he did not have the May 8, 1945, statement from the Jewish leaders in Brünnlitz. Dr. Wehle knew of Schindler’s claim that he spent RM 2.6 million saving his Jewish workers but did not have a copy of Schindler’s detailed 1945 financial report about his wartime expenses.⁷²

Dr. Wehle analyzed the Schindler claim for compensation as an attorney and generally accepted the idea that he had done a great deal to help save the lives of between 1,100 to 1,500 Jews. He had the testimony from Schwebe and other survivors in Munich, though Dr. Wehle wondered whether some of the statements were based on hearsay evidence. The key question for Dr. Wehle was: whose money did Schindler spend in the process of saving his Jewish workers in Kraków and Brünnlitz? Schindler, he wrote, acquired his factories “through the arianization of Jewish factories.” In addition, he made a great deal of money during the war in part because he paid little or nothing for the labor of his Jewish workers. Dr. Wehle assumed after reading Kasztner’s postwar report on Jewish Agency operations in Budapest that Oskar was partially compensated for the money he spent to help his Jewish workers by the funds he was given by Dr. Sedlacek in Kraków, though we now know that this was not so. He estimated that Oskar probably received about RM 200,000 ($80,000) in compensation from Kasztner, though Oskar said in his 1945 financial report, which Wehle never saw, that Sedlacek brought him a little more than RM 125,000 ($50,000) during his three trips to Kraków, funds that were promptly turned over to Jewish leaders in Emalia and Płaszów. Wehle never saw Kasztner’s more detailed report on his meeting with Schindler in Budapest and simply assumed that if money was sent by the Jewish Agency to help Jews in Kraków, then Schindler must have received some of it.⁷³

Wehle’s statement, based upon the documentation he had seen, read in part: “So far no proof has been given that Schindler’s alleged expenses have been made out of his private means.” The money Schindler made during the war either came from the property he had acquired through the Aryanization of Jewish property, from the labor of Jews, or from funds received from the Jewish Agency. Wehle, who had been in three concentration camps during the war, also thought that some of the stories about Schindler were exaggerated. He accepted that notion that Schindler had treated his Jews “very satisfactorily.” However, he would need more evidence to accept fully “the intensity and extent of his action in favor of the Jewish prisoners.”⁷⁴

Dr. Wehle also wanted to know about Schindler’s attitudes towards Nazism. He assumed he had been a member of the Nazi Party and was possibly a member of the SA, given his ties to the SS. Such allegiances were important in light of Schindler’s claim that he had been forced to flee Czechoslovakia after the war because he was “threatened by the Czechs.” If Schindler had indeed helped Jews during the war, then Wehle concluded that the Czechs should have treated him as an “antifascist.” But Schindler’s Nazi connections and activities were also important in determining the depth of his commitment to helping Jews. Wehle knew, for example, Germans who had helped “‘their’ Jews” but did “indescribable harm to other Jews.” Finally, Oskar claimed after the war that he was penniless. Wehle wanted to know whether he had enjoyed “any means”before the war or whether he had acquired the wealth for which he now sought compensation during the war.⁷⁵

Finally, Dr. Wehle evaluated the Joint’s legal responsibilities to Schindler, who claimed that Dr. Kasztner gave him instructions to spend whatever he had to in order to save Jews in Brünnlitz and Płaszów. He questioned, of course, whether the Joint had indeed given Kasztner such authority; if it had, he argued, then the Joint might have some legal responsibilities towards Schindler. However, he concluded that there was no evidence to support Schindler’s contention. He reminded Dr. Schwartz that the Joint was a “welfare organization whose duty was to help Jews and to lessen Jewish needs.” It was not the Joint’s responsibility “to reimburse individuals or organizations for their activities in the same field” regardless of the circumstances or reasons. If it did, then the Joint’s welfare activities might become “ad absurdum.” He added that the effort by Schindler and his friends to be reimbursed by the Joint was not the first request for such claims and certainly would not be the last. He added that the situation was complicated by Schindler’s nationality. Was it, he asked, the Joint’s moral responsibility “to indemnify a German who behaved decently with Jews?” Given what happened during the war, he thought not.⁷⁶

The only recourse to this problem was a “revenge” for Schindler, which Wehle thought he certainly deserved. But who should be responsible for this? He thought it was the obligation of the Jews whom he saved to help him. He did not think the Joint should be directly involved in the “revenge,” though it could help indirectly. He did not think the food and clothing the Joint had been supplying Schindler and his family for months should be included in this new indirect aid “revenge.” He suggested that the Joint work through Dr. Chaim Hilfstein to aid Schindler to avoid any legal responsibility towards him.⁷⁷

Given the times and the lack of information that Dr. Wehle and other Joint representatives had on Schindler, Dr. Wehle’s points were reasonable. Oskar’s contention that he had spent more than $1 million (RM 2,640,000) was incredible; even close friends such as Dr. Moshe Bejski, an attorney and Israeli Supreme Court Justice, told me the sum was probably exaggerated. Moreover, Oskar’s claim that somehow Dr. Kasztner had authorized him to spend whatever necessary to save Jews with the promise of later Joint compensation is simply not true. There is nothing in Kasztner and Springmann’s Die Bekenntnisse des Herrn X, the transcript of their 1943 meeting with Schindler in Budapest, to suggest this. Moreover, Schindler is barely mentioned in Kasztner’s more detailed postwar report on the Jewish Rescue Committee or in Alex Weissberg’s biography on Joel Brand, the head of the Rescue Committee (Va’adah) in Budapest. Kasztner has one paragraph in his detailed study on Schindler and describes briefly his meeting with Springmann and Kasztner in Budapest and his dealings with Sedlacek, who brought Oskar “several hundred thousand Reichsmarks” during his trips to Kraków. Weissberg verifies much of what Kasztner said and underscores Oskar’s honesty.⁷⁸

In his 1945 financial report, Oskar spent a lot of time on his work with Dr. Sedlacek, whom he claimed was working for the Joint. Though there is no doubt that some of the money Oskar received from Sedlacek came from the Joint, Sedlacek was working for the Jewish Agency, not the Joint. Oskar knew this, though immediately after the war he made a point of writing that Sedlacek was a Joint agent. This became the seed for his later claim. By the time he approached the Joint in Munich about compensation, he had convinced himself and others that he had been working directly for the Joint during the war and that it owed him more than $1 million. He was even able to convince Regensburg’s small Jewish community to issue him a statement in the spring of 1948 certifying that during the war he had served as an “agent between Polish Jewry and the American Joint in Budapest.”⁷⁹

And there is no doubt that some of the Schindler Jews whom Oskar lived with or remained close to in Germany encouraged him to press his claim with the Joint. From their perspective, the Joint must have appeared to be a powerful, wealthy American Jewish organization with unlimited resources. It was certainly the most important Jewish welfare organization in Europe after the war, and its commitment to aid Holocaust survivors impressed other relief groups. Between 1946 and 1950, for example, the Joint spent $280 million to help Jewish survivors in Europe. It used its funds to deal with every aspect of rebuilding Jewish lives and later became involved in helping many of them emigrate to Palestine, later Israel, the United States, and other parts of the globe. The Joint remained active in Europe until 1957, when the last DP camp was closed. It was also involved in efforts to help survivors win reparations from West Germany. Given the extensive demands on the Joint’s resources, Joint leaders were wise to be as careful as they could with their funds to insure that they could help as many survivors as possible. As Yehuda Bauer has noted, without the Joint, “the survivors’ fate would have been much harder than it was.”⁸⁰

In light of all this, it is not surprising that Dr. Wehle took the position he did on Schindler’s claim. The ultimate problem with it, of course, was that Schindler had absolutely no documentation to back up his demand for compensation; Dr. Wehle saw Schindler only as a German and Nazi Party member. This is in direct contrast with Schindler’s later Lastenausgleich claim in West Germany, where, at the insistence of very particular German bureaucrats, Oskar was able to come up with an impressive collection of documents.

Schindler’s claim for compensation centered around the bribes he had paid various officials, the daily fees he had paid the SS for his Jewish workers, extra food costs, and relocation expenses when he moved from Kraków to Brünnlitz. Bribery was so commonplace in the General Government that it was considered a normal part of doing business. Whether one did or did not use Jewish workers made no difference. It is a bit shocking to learn that Schindler insisted on including the fees he paid the SS for his “slave” laborers in his list of wartime costs. Schindler began to use Jewish workers early in the war because he needed the expertise of men such as Abraham Bankier or because they were cheaper than Polish workers. This was the standard practice followed by factory owners throughout the General Government, particularly later in the war when authorities encouraged this because of growing labor shortages. Many factories in Kraków used Jewish workers, and some of the factory owners treated them quite well. In other words, Schindler would have paid these fees to the SS whether he helped his workers or not. These fees went beyond normal labor expenses when he hired “useless” workers simply at their families’ request.

The extra funds that Oskar spent for food for his Jewish and Polish workers was another matter, though, because he sacrificed a lot to insure that his workers were adequately fed. But his well-nourished workers were also more productive and the reason he made the kind of money he did during his years in Kraków. He also spent a lot of money relocating his factory to the Sudentenland, though part of the reason he did this was to insure himself a future in postwar Europe. He never dreamed that he would be driven out of Czechoslovakia, never to return. And though he did spend most of the money he made in Kraków keeping his Jewish workers alive in Brünnlitz, the fact remains that both the factories he acquired during the war had once been Jewish-owned. He came to Poland in 1939 essentially as a German carpetbagger, and took advantage, both there and in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, of Nazi Germany’s Aryanization policies. Moreover, he used Jewish slave labor in each of them partially to keep production costs low and profits high. When he left Brünnlitz, he still had some of the profits he had made during the war in his two factories, but they were lost within days after his flight began. Given all this, no reasonable Jewish organization involved deeply in the rebuilding of post-Holocaust Jewish lives could overlook Oskar Schindler’s wartime membership in the German Nazi Party; neither could it ignore the vast amounts of money Schindler made by using Jewish slave laborers and the advantage Schindler took of German Aryanization policies to acquire property formerly owned by Jews.

Yet given all this and the questionable nature of some of Schindler’s compensation claims, the Joint finally decided to award him a grant of $15,000, a substantial sum in postwar Germany. Dr. Schwartz suggested this amount to the Joint’s Organization Committee in Paris in January 1949, and the grant was readily approved. Needless to say, Oskar was quite disappointed with the amount of the award. But once he learned of the grant, he quickly revealed plans to move to Argentina. He asked the Joint to give him $5,000 immediately and to pay him the rest when he reached Argentina.⁸¹

On January 29, 1949, Moses Beckelman, the vice chair of Joint operations in Paris, wrote a detailed letter of introduction for Schindler to Jacob Lightman, the head of the Joint office in Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital. Though Oskar would not arrive in Argentina until November 1949, the Joint offered to do everything it could to help the man who at “the constant risk of his own life and that of his wife… carried out his humanitarian work at considerable financial and material sacrifice.” Beckelman went into details about Oskar’s efforts to save Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz and told Lightman, with whom he had once worked in South America, that now Schindler was about to begin life anew, they should help him, “as once he helped our brethren.”⁸²

But why Argentina? In a letter to Lightman a month later, Beckelman explained that once it had become known publicly that Schindler had helped Jews during the war, there was no chance for him to rebuild his life there. It was now unhealthy for him to remain in Germany. Beckelman wrote that the Joint would give him $5,000 in Germany to buy tools and machinery for an automobile radiator factory that Oskar planned to open in Argentina. The Joint would give him $10,000 more for upstart costs and other expenses when he got to South America.⁸³

But there is nothing to indicate that he ever bought anything substantial with the $5,000 he received in Germany. Emilie was critical of how Oskar handled the Joint funds because, she said, he spent it “on small pleasures and on objects for which [the couple] had not the slightest need.” In fact, she claimed, she never “received a penny of what he received.” After he received the first Joint payment, he took his mistress, Gisa, who would also accompany him to Argentina, on a holiday in the Alps, while Emilie and her niece “had to perform miracles in order to obtain enough food on the black market.” On the other hand, Emilie wrote, though Oskar continued “like a child, to follow his whims,” he also clung to her, his “refuge in times of crisis,” when “it came to important decisions.”⁸⁴

It soon became apparent to Joint officials in Europe that Oskar planned to take six other people with him to Argentina besides Emilie. In the spring of 1949, he told Moses Beckelman that he intended to divorce Emilie before he left Germany and marry Roma Horowitz. But he also wanted to arrange for Emilie’s emigration to Argentina.⁸⁵ The question of divorce would come up again and again over the next two decades. Emilie said in her memoirs that she had often thought of leaving Oskar and beginning a new life in which she would be free of “his lies… his repeated deceits and constant insincere repenting.” But her strong Catholic faith and her postwar impoverishment kept her with Oskar. She had briefly reunited with her brother, Franz, after the war, who disappeared again in 1946. So she decided to stay with Oskar in a loveless marriage. But she later told a German reporter after Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List came out that her “wedding ring was good insurance against the claims of his many mistresses.”⁸⁶ When Oskar returned to Germany in 1957, he talked occasionally of divorce, though finally decided it might complicate his Lastenausgleich claims and his new business dealings. Needless to say, he never married Roma Horowitz.⁸⁷

What is peculiar about all of this is that, at least according to Emilie, Oskar’s mistress during this period was not Roma Horowitz but Gisa Schein. All three women, Emilie, Roma, and Gisa, would accompany Oskar to Argentina. And it was Gisa, not Roma, who was Oskar’s mistress during his years in Argentina. Oskar met Gisa in Munich while staying with some of the Schindlerjuden who lived there after the war. Their mutual friends gave them a room in their apartment for the liaison, and Oskar made frequent trips to Munich to see Gisa. Emilie was shocked to learn that Oskar intended to take Gisa with them to Argentina and said she “did not have the energy for futile reproaches anymore.” She continued to hope that once they got to Argentina she would again be Oskar’s “only woman.” But Emilie went on to say that when they reached Argentina, the affair between Oskar and Gisa continued, even though the Schindlers lived in San Vicente, a small town more than an hour away from Buenos Aires. In fact, from what I could gather by talking to several Schindler neighbors in San Vicente, Oskar spent little time there, instead preferring life with Gisa in the Belgrano district of Buenos Aires. Emilie claimed that Gisa “used [her] husband for all he was worth” because he gave her jewelry and an otter-skin coat. Gisa felt abandoned when Oskar left for Germany in 1957 and wrote him some very critical letters, somehow hoping to persuade him to return. Oskar wrote Emilie and asked her to call Gisa and tell her that if she did not stop the insulting letters, he would “never come back to her.”⁸⁸

So why did Oskar tell Joint officials that he planned to marry Roma Horowitz? In two letters to Joint officials in early 1949, Herbert Steinhouse, a Canadian journalist who befriended Oskar at this time, wrote Joint officials in Paris about Edmund and Roma Horowitz, who hoped to accompany Oskar and Emilie to Argentina. Steinhouse had received several letters from Alex Madanes, the Paris correspondent for the Jewish Chronicle in London, who was a cousin of Roma and Edmund Horowitz. The Horowitzs, who lived in Munich, seemed desperate to join the Schindler party, but were uncertain of Joint support. Steinhouse told Dr. Joseph J. Schwartz that he had visited the Horowitzs in Munich and found them in a “fearful state of mind.” Several weeks later, Oskar told Moses Beckelman that he intended to marry Roma Horowitz and divorce Emilie. Did Oskar tell Beckelman this to insure that Roma and Edmund would have a place on the new Argentine “Schindler’s List,” or was he also having an affair with Roma? We will never know. But what is interesting is that Moses Beckelman thought that Emilie was Jewish and that at least some of the people who traveled with her and Oskar to Argentina were members of her family.⁸⁹

The Joint agreed to arrange Oskar’s travel plans for the party of eight that planned to travel to Argentina with him and to deduct the costs of the trip from his $15,000 grant, though ultimately only Oskar and Emilie’s fares and related expenses were paid from Joint funds. Once it was determined that everyone except the Schindlers were war refugees, the costs of the others were paid for by the United Nations International Refugee Organization. There seems to be some confusion about who actually joined Oskar and Emilie on the voyage. We know that the group initially consisted of Oskar, Emilie, Roma Horowitz and her brother, Edmund Horowitz, Gisa Schein, Jakob Goldfarb and his wife, Fanny Goldfarb, and Isaak Korczyn. At the last minute, Jakob Goldfarb became ill and could not make the trip. When the Schindler party arrived in Buenos Aires, Joint officials informed its offices in New York that an additional person had traveled with the Schindlers, Alois Tutsch, a Sudeten German. Presumably he replaced Jakob Goldfarb. Later, though, Oskar told Joint officials in Buenos Aires that there had been more last-minute changes before his party left Genoa, and did not list Tutsch as one of the group. None of the Jews in Oskar’s party was a Schindler Jew.⁹⁰

If it is true that Oskar was partially driven to emigrate to Argentina because of his growing fame as a “savior” of Jews during the war, there is certainly evidence to support this. In early 1948, Oskar contacted Jacob Levy, a Jewish wine merchant in Manchester, England, about helping him out of his dire straits and advising on the possibility of emigrating to England. Levy sent Schindler a Lebensmittelpackete (food packet) and later offered to send Oskar £50 ($12.50) when he learned that he planned to emigrate to Argentina.⁹¹

What followed was a fascinating exchange of letters between Levy and Schindler that, at least on Oskar’s part, were remarkable for their blunt, bitter tone. Oskar wrote the most interesting one to Levy on November 16, 1948. He thanked Levy for his “copious food package” of September 7. He told Levy that his letters were very important to him and had “strengthened [his] optimism and chased away [his] apocalyptic mood.” In one of his letters, Levy had mentioned how difficult it must be for someone like Oskar to live in Germany. Schindler agreed, and decried the neo-Nazism developing in Germany that was taking the form of a “Nazi-Communism trickling through from the Eastern [Soviet] zone.” In addition, Oskar wrote Levy, anti-Semitism was now stronger in Germany than during the war. He attributed this to the same “superman spirit” that was spreading quite openly in government circles and universities by unemployed war veterans and others. This spirit, Oskar argued, was leading to a sense of “collective innocence” among the German people.”⁹²

Oskar was particularly bitter over the fate of the millions of ethnic German refugees who were now forced to undergo denazification while more prominent Nazis “were hardly being reached by the law” or were only being modestly punished. When questions of “guilt, compensation, and penitence” arose, no one took responsibility. So where were the real Nazis, the real criminals? They were, Oskar told Levy, continuing to hold “influential positions” as they prepared Germany to “destroy Europe” in the next [international] dispute. And once again, the German people seemed ready to “run after the infallible supermen as cannon fodder.” The current political strife between the East and the West helped protect the actual “guilty ones.”⁹³

Now, with a new threat of war hanging over Europe, Oskar thought it was important “to get out of Germany as quickly as possible.” He would prefer going to Israel because he had so many friends there and thought that Israel would soon become a very prosperous country. But as Israel was “in the strategic line of attack of the Russians,” he could not risk once again losing his “life’s work and family assets to the red Czars.” He ended his letter by asking Levy to help him with his compensation claim with the Joint. Once again, Oskar claimed that everything he spent during the war was approved by the Joint. Such a repayment would give him “an assured livelihood overseas.” Finally, he thanked Levy for all his sacrifices as Oskar’s advocate.⁹⁴

A more significant relationship developed with Herbert Steinhouse, a Canadian journalist who became chief of the Paris bureau of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in 1949. Before he assumed his post in Paris, Steinhouse met Itzhak Stern, who began to tell him about Schindler. Steinhouse, who had worked for UNRRA before he joined CBC, was initially skeptical of any stories about a “good German,” but was intrigued by Stern’s tales. After six sessions with Stern, he finally met Oskar and Emilie at their modest apartment in Regensburg in late 1948, though according to Tobe Steinhouse, Oskar had an apartment in Munich as well. Their wives “hit it off” and over several weeks, Steinhouse recorded Schindler’s account of his wartime efforts to save “his” Jews. Tobe Steinhouse told me that she remembered Oskar as an extremely charming though manipulative person. On one occasion, he insisted on taking her to a local factory to buy her a special tea set, which she was hesitant to accept. Herbert Steinhouse returned to Paris and wrote an article about Oskar that he tried to get published. But his agent told him that magazines were no longer interested in stories about “good Germans” and that readers were tired of articles about the Holocaust. Steinhouse did not publish his account of his meetings with Schindler until 1994.⁹⁵

After Schindler’s List came out in 1993, Steinhouse wrote Steven Spielberg and Thomas Keneally a letter describing his relationship and views on Oskar Schindler in the late 1940s. Schindler’s “Jewish bodyguard” deliberately tried to befriend Steinhouse because they thought he, as a journalist, could “help get Oskar and Emilie and perhaps themselves to Canada or the USA, where ex-Party member Oskar was automatically denied entry, by publicizing their story in America.” Over the course of many months, Steinhouse and his wife Tobe became quite close to Oskar and Emilie and spent a great deal of time with them. In fact, it was Herbert Steinhouse who arranged a banquet in Paris for Oskar and a number of Schindler Jews in early 1949. Since Oskar could not legally enter France, Steinhouse smuggled him into Paris for the banquet. The banquet, which was attended by more than thirty-five Schindler Jews, was held in the Aux Armes de Colmar, an Alsatian restaurant in Paris. The Jewish Chronicle likened the gathering to that “of an English school speech day with Herr Schindler as the headmaster greeting former pupils.” Schindler, the article continued, was quite interested in the “welfare of his protégés” even though they were now scattered around the globe. In turn, the Schindlerjuden “are deeply conscious that only his efforts saved them from the gas-chambers.”⁹⁶

The banquet was a very festive occasion. Steinhouse wrote that Oskar was toasted again and again for his efforts during the war. As they raised glasses of white wine, the gathered survivors sang “Sto Lat” (May you live a hundred years), a song that they had once sung for Oskar in Brünnlitz. The toasts and singing were followed by tributes to Schindler. One Schindler Jew proclaimed that “it was known throughout Poland that whoever went to Schindler’s factory was safe.” Another said they were sneered at as Schindlerjuden in Brünnlitz; but today, he boasted, they were “proud of that name.” Oskar had tears in his eyes when it came time for him to speak. “Germans today seem to share a collective innocence,” he said, “not the collective guilt they should.” When he finished, Oskar went from table to table, hugging each of his beloved Schindler Jews.⁹⁷

At the end of August 1949, Oskar, Emilie, and the six other members of their party left Munich for Genoa, where they made final preparations for their voyage to Argentina. On October 5, everyone except Edmund Horowitz, who had become ill, set sail on the SS Genoa for what became an “infernal” twenty-eight day voyage to Argentina. The ship docked in Buenos Aires on November 3, 1950. The trip across the Atlantic had been dreadful and everyone had suffered from sea-sickness. Though it was fall in Genoa, it was spring in Argentina. Hopefully Oskar and Emilie would now have a chance to begin life anew without the stigmas of the past haunting them. Perhaps they would be able to re-create the idyllic life that they had so hoped for in Germany.