Schindler's Ark

EPILOGUE

Oskar’s high season ended now. The peace would

never exalt him as had the war. Oskar and

Emilie came to Munich. For a time they shared

lodgings with the Rosners, for Henry and his brother

had been engaged to play at a Munich

restaurant and had achieved a modest

prosperity. One of his former prisoners, meeting him at the Rosners’ small, cramped apartment, was shocked by his torn coat. His property in Cracow and Moravia had, of course, been confiscated by the Russians, and his remaining jewelry had been traded for food and liquor. When the Feigenbaums arrived in Munich, they met his latest mistress, a Jewish girl, a survivor not of Brinnlitz but of worse camps than that. Many of the visitors to Oskar’s rented rooms, as indulgent as they were toward Oskar’s heroic weaknesses, felt shamed for Emilie’s sake.

He was still a wildly generous friend and a great discoverer of unprocurables. Henry Rosner remembers that he found a source of chickens in the midst of chickenless Munich. He clung to the company of those of his Jews who had come to Germany— the Rosners, the Pfefferbergs, the Dresners, the Feigenbaums, the Sternbergs. Some cynics would later say that at the time it was wise of anyone involved in concentration camps to stay close to Jewish friends as protective coloration. But his dependence went beyond that sort of instinctive cunning. The Schindlerjuden had become his family.

In common with them, he heard that Amon Goeth had been captured by Patton’s Americans the previous February, while a patient in an SS sanitarium at Bad Tolz; imprisoned in Dachau; and at the close of the war handed over to the new Polish government. Amon was in fact one of the first Germans dispatched to Poland for judgment. A number of former prisoners were invited to attend the trial as witnesses, and among the defense witnesses a deluded Amon considered calling were Helen Hirsch and Oskar Schindler. Oskar himself did not go to Cracow for the trials. Those who did found that Goeth, lean as a result of his diabetes, offered a subdued but unrepentant defense. All the orders for his acts of execution and transportation had been signed by superiors, he claimed, and were therefore their crimes, not his. Witnesses who told of murders committed by the Commandant’s own hand were, said Amon, maliciously exaggerating. There had been some prisoners executed as saboteurs, but there were always saboteurs in wartime.

Mietek Pemper, waiting in the body of the

court to be called to give evidence, sat beside

another P@lasz@ow graduate who stared at

Amon in the dock and whispered, “That man still

terrifies me.” But Pemper himself, as first

witness for the prosecution, delivered an exact

catalogue of Amon’s crimes. He was

followed by others, among them Dr. Biberstein and

Helen Hirsch, who had precise and painful

memories. Amon was condemned to death and hanged

in Cracow on September 13, 1946. It was

two years to the day since his arrest by the SS in

Vienna on black-marketeering charges. According to the

Cracow press, he went to the gallows without

remorse and gave the National Socialist

salute before dying.

In Munich, Oskar himself identified

Liepold, who had been detained by the

Americans. A Brinnlitz prisoner

accompanied Oskar at the lineup, and says that Oskar asked the protesting Liepold, “Do you want me to do it, or would you rather leave it to the fifty angry Jews who are waiting downstairs in the street?” Liepold would also be hanged—not for his crimes in Brinnlitz, but for earlier murders in Budzyn.

Oskar had probably already conceived the scheme of becoming a farmer in Argentina; a breeder of nutria, the large South American aquatic rodents considered precious for their skins. Oskar presumed that the same excellent commercial instincts which had brought him to Cracow in 1939 were now urging him to cross the Atlantic. He was penniless, but the Joint Distribution Committee, the international Jewish relief organization to whom Oskar had made reports during the war and to whom his record was known, were willing to help him. In 1949 they made him an ex gratia payment of $15,000 and gave a reference (“To Whom It May Concern”) signed by M. W. Beckelman, the vice chairman of the “Joint’s” Executive Council. It said:

The American Joint Distribution

Committee has thoroughly investigated the wartime and Occupation activities of Mr. Schindler. ... We recommend wholeheartedly that all organizations and individuals contacted by Mr. Schindler do their utmost to help him, in recognition of his outstanding service. ... Under the guise of operating a Nazi labor factory first in Poland and then in the Sudetenland, Mr. Schindler managed to take in as employees and protect Jewish men and women destined for death in Auschwitz or other infamous concentration camps. ...

“Schindler’s camp in Brinnlitz,” witnesses have told the Joint Distribution Committee,

“was the only camp in the Nazi-occupied territories where a Jew was never killed, or even beaten, but was always treated as a human being.”

Now that he is about to begin his life anew, let us help him as once he helped our brethren.

When he sailed for Argentina, he took with him half a dozen families of Schindlerjuden, paying the passage for many of them. With Emilie, he settled on a farm in Buenos Aires province and worked it for nearly ten years. Those of Oskar’s survivors who did not see him in those years find it hard now to imagine him as a farmer, since he was never a man for steady routine. Some say, and there is some truth to it, that Emalia and Brinnlitz succeeded in their eccentric way because of the acumen of men like Stern and Bankier. In Argentina, Oskar had no such support, apart, of course, from the good sense and rural industriousness of his wife. The decade in which Oskar farmed nutria, however, was the period in which it was demonstrated that breeding, as distinct from trapping, did not produce pelts of adequate quality. Many other nutria enterprises failed in that time, and in 1957 the Schindlers’ farm went bankrupt. Emilie and Oskar moved into a house provided by B’nai B’rith in San Vicente, a southern suburb of Buenos Aires, and for a time Oskar sought work as a sales representative. Within a year, however, he left for Germany. Emilie remained behind.

Living in a small apartment in Frankfurt, he sought capital to buy a cement factory, and pursued the possibility of major compensation from the West German Ministry of Finance for the loss of his Polish and Czechoslovakian properties. Little came of this effort. Some of Oskar’s

survivors considered that the failure of the German

government to pay him his due arose from lingering

Hitlerism in the middle ranks of the civil

service. But Oskar’s claim probably

failed for technical reasons, and it is not

possible to detect bureaucratic malice in the correspondence addressed to Oskar from the ministry.

The Schindler cement enterprise was launched on capital from the Joint Distribution Committee and “loans” from a number of Schindler Jews who had done well in postwar Germany. It had a brief history. By 1961, Oskar was bankrupt again. His factory had been hurt by a series of harsh winters in which the construction industry had closed down; but some of the Schindler survivors believe the company’s failure was abetted by Oskar’s restlessness and low tolerance for routine.

That year, hearing that he was in trouble, the Schindlerjuden in Israel invited him to visit them at their expense. An advertisement appeared in Israel’s Polish-language press asking that all former inmates of Concentration Camp Brinnlitz who had known “Oskar Schindler the German” contact the newspaper. In Tel Aviv, Oskar was welcomed ecstatically. The postwar children of his survivors mobbed him. He had grown heavier and his features had thickened. But at the parties and receptions, those who had known him saw that he was the same indomitable Oskar. The growling deft wit, the outrageous Charles Boyer charm, the voracious thirst had all survived his two bankruptcies. It was the year of the Adolf Eichmann trial, and Oskar’s visit to Israel aroused some interest in the international press. On the eve of the opening of Eichmann’s trial, the correspondent of the London Daily Mail wrote a feature on the contrast between the records of the two men, and quoted the preamble of an appeal the Schindlerjuden had opened to assist Oskar. “We do not forget the sorrows of Egypt, we do not forget Haman, we do not forget Hitler. Thus, among the unjust, we do not forget the just. Remember Oskar Schindler.”

There was some incredulity among Holocaust survivors about the idea of a beneficent labor camp such as Oskar’s, and this disbelief found its voice through a journalist at a press conference with Schindler in Jerusalem. “How do you explain,” he asked, “that you knew all the senior SS men in the Cracow region and had regular dealings with them?”

“At that stage in history,” Oskar answered, “it was rather difficult to discuss the fate of Jews with the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.” The Department of Testimonies of the Yad Vashem had, near the end of Oskar’s Argentine residence, sought and been given by him a general statement of his activities in Cracow and Brinnlitz. Now, on their own initiative and under the influence of Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Moshe Bejski (once Oskar’s forger of official stamps, now a respected and scholarly lawyer), the Board of Trustees of Yad Vashem began to consider the question of an official tribute to Oskar. The chairman of the board was Justice Landau, the presiding judge at the Eichmann trial. Yad Vashem sought and received a mass of testimonies concerning Oskar. Of this large collection of statements, four are critical of him. Though these four witnesses all state that without Oskar they would have perished, they criticize his business methods in the early months of the war. Two of the four disparaging testimonies are written by a father and son, called earlier in this account the C’s. In their enamelware outlet in Cracow, Oskar had installed his mistress Ingrid as Treuh@ander. A third statement is by the C’s’

secretary and repeats the allegations of punching and bullying, rumors of which Stern had reported back to Oskar in 1940. The fourth comes from a man who claims to have had a prewar interest in Oskar’s enamel factory under its former name, Rekord—an interest, he claimed, that Oskar had ignored.

Justice Landau and his board must have considered these four statements insignificant when set against the massed testimony of other Schindlerjuden, and they made no comment on them. Since all four stated that Oskar was their savior in any case, it is said to have occurred to the board to ask why, if Oskar had committed crimes against these people, he went to such extravagant pains to save them.

The municipality of Tel Aviv was the first

body to honor Oskar. On his fifty-third

birthday he unveiled a plaque in the Park of

Heroes. The inscription describes him as

savior of 1,200 prisoners of AL

Brinnlitz, and though it understates numerically the

extent of his rescue, it declares that it has been

erected in love and gratitude. Ten days

later in Jerusalem, he was declared a Righteous

Person, this title being a peculiarly

Israeli honor based on an ancient

tribal assumption that in the mass of Gentiles, the God of Israel would always provide a leavening of just men. Oskar was invited also to plant a carob tree in the Avenue of the Righteous leading to the Yad Vashem Museum. The tree is still there, marked by a plaque, in a grove which contains trees planted in the name of all the other Righteous. A tree for Julius Madritsch, who had illicitly fed and protected his workers in a manner quite unheard of among the Krupps and the Farbens, stands there also, and a tree for Raimund Titsch, the Madritsch supervisor in P@lasz@ow. On that stony ridge, few of the memorial trees have grown to more than 10 feet.

The German press carried stories of

Oskar’s wartime rescues and of the Yad

Vashem ceremonies. These reports, always laudatory, did not make his life easier. He was hissed on the streets of Frankfurt, stones were thrown, a group of workmen jeered him and called out that he ought to have been burned with the Jews. In 1963 he punched a factory worker who’d called him a “Jew-kisser,” and the man lodged a charge of assault. In the local court, the lowest level of the German judiciary, Oskar received a lecture from the judge and was ordered to pay damages. “I would kill myself,” he wrote to Henry Rosner in Queens, New York, “if it wouldn’t give them so much satisfaction.”

These humiliations increased his dependence on the

survivors. They were his only emotional and

financial surety. For the rest of his life he

would spend some months of every year with them, living

honored and well in Tel Aviv and

Jerusalem, eating free of charge at a

Rumanian restaurant in Ben Yehudah

Street, Tel Aviv, though subject sometimes

to Moshe Bejski’s filial efforts to limit his

drinking to three double cognacs a night. In the

end, he would always return to the other half of his

soul: the disinherited self; the mean, cramped

apartment a few hundred meters from

Frankfurt’s central railway station.

Writing from Los Angeles to other

Schindlerjuden in the United States that

year, Poldek Pfefferberg urged all

survivors to donate at least a day’s pay a

year to Oskar Schindler, whose state he

described as “discouragement, loneliness, disillusion.”

Oskar’s contacts with the Schindlerjuden

continued on a yearly basis. It was a seasonal

matter—half the year as the Israeli

butterfly, half the year as the Frankfurt

grub. He was continually short of money. A Tel Aviv committee of which Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Moshe Bejski were again members continued to lobby the West German government for an adequate pension for Oskar. The grounds for their appeal were his wartime heroism, the property he had lost, and the by-now-fragile state of his health. The first official reaction from the German government was, however, the award of the Cross of Merit in 1966, in a ceremony at which Konrad Adenauer presided. It was not till July 1, 1968, that the Ministry of Finance was happy to report that from that date it would pay him a pension of 200 marks per month. Three months later, pensioner Schindler received the Papal Knighthood of St. Sylvester from the hands of the Bishop of Limburg.

Oskar was still willing to cooperate with the Federal Justice Department in the pursuit of war criminals. In this matter he seems to have been implacable. On his birthday in 1967, he gave confidential information concerning many of the personnel of KL P@lasz@ow. The transcript of his evidence of that date shows that he does not hesitate to testify, but also that he is a scrupulous witness. If he knows nothing or little of a particular SS man, he says so.

He says it of Amthor; of the SS man

Zugsburger; of Fraulein Ohnesorge, one

of the quick-tempered women supervisors. He does not hesitate, however, to call Bosch a murderer and an exploiter, and says that he recognized Bosch at a railway station in Munich in 1946, approached him, and asked him if—after P@lasz@ow—he could manage to sleep.

Bosch, says Oskar, was at that point living under

an East German passport. A supervisor

named Mohwinkel, representative in

P@lasz@ow of the German Armaments Works, is also roundly condemned; “intelligent but brutal,” Oskar says of him. Of Goeth’s bodyguard, Gr@un, he tells the story of the attempted execution of the Emalia prisoner Lamus, which he himself prevented by a gift of vodka. (it is a story to which a great number of prisoners also testify in their statements in Yad Vashem.) Of the NCO Ritschek, Oskar says that he has a bad reputation but that he himself knows nothing of his crimes. He is also uncertain whether the photograph the Justice Department showed him is in fact Ritschek. There is only one person on the Justice Department list for whom Oskar is willing to give an unqualified commendation. That is the engineer Huth, who had helped him during his last arrest. Huth, he says, was highly respected and highly spoken of by the prisoners themselves. As he entered his sixties, he began working for the German Friends of Hebrew University. This involvement resulted from the urgings of those Schindlerjuden who were concerned with restoring some new purpose to Oskar’s life. He began to work raising funds in West Germany. His old capacity to inveigle and charm officials and businessmen was exercised once again. He also helped set up a scheme of exchanges between German and Israeli children.

Despite the precariousness of his health, he still lived and drank like a young man. He was in love with a German woman named Annemarie, whom he had met at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. She would become the emotional linchpin of his later life. His wife, Emilie, still lived, without any

financial help from him, in her little house in

San Vicente, south of Buenos Aires. She

lives there at the time of the writing of this book. As

she was in Brinnlitz, she is a figure of

quiet dignity. In a documentary made

by German television in 1973, she spoke— without any of the abandoned wife’s bitterness or sense of grievance—about Oskar and Brinnlitz, about her own behavior in Brinnlitz.

Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents. In 1972, during a visit by Oskar to the

New York executive office of the American

Friends of Hebrew University, three

Schindlerjuden, partners in a large New

Jersey construction company, led a group of

seventy-five other Schindler prisoners in

raising $120,000 to dedicate to Oskar a

floor of the Truman Research Center at

Hebrew University. The floor would house a Book of Life, containing an account of Oskar’s rescues and a list of the rescued. Two of these partners, Murray Pantirer and Isak Levenstein, had been sixteen years old when Oskar brought them to Brinnlitz. Now Oskar’s children had become his parents, his best recourse, his source of honor. He was very ill. The men who had been

physicians in Brinnlitz—Alexander

Biberstein, for example—knew it. One of them

warned Oskar’s close friends, “The man should not be

alive. His heart is working through pure

stubbornness.”

In October 1974, he collapsed at his

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

Another month passed before Oskar’s body was

carried in a leaden casket through the crammed

streets of the Old City of Jerusalem to the

Catholic cemetery, which looks south over the

Valley of Hinnom, called Gehenna in the

New Testament. In the press photograph of the

procession can be seen—amid a stream of other

Schindler Jews—Itzhak Stern, Moshe

Bejski, Helen Hirsch, Jakob Sternberg,

Juda Dresner.

He was mourned on every continent.