Oskar Schindler, page 16
The question is what effect, if any, economic anti-Semitism had on Rekord, Ltd., which filed for bankruptcy in the summer of 1939. Polish court records reveal little about the reasons for the company’s failure except to say that it was in bad financial shape. The factory was making goods for the Polish military and was operating under military mobilization orders by this time. The owners somehow thought that if they could find a way to come up with extra cash to pay their creditors, they could keep the factory running. This is what led to the controversy with Natan Wurzel.49
The controversy between Rekord, Ltd.’s primary owners and Natan Wurzel initially had nothing to do with Oskar Schindler. He was drawn into it after he leased the factory in the fall of 1939. Though the factory had trouble paying its bills, it had tremendous assets in its machines, buildings, and other factory property. A detailed financial report prepared on March 17, 1939, in preparation for the sale of Rekord, Ltd.’s property before its official declaration of bankruptcy showed fixed and liquid assets valued at Zł 681,559 ($128,596). The company owed almost as much to its creditors and was only able to break even because of the original Zł 100,000 investment of its owners. The value of its machinery and dies was Zł 223,309 ($42,293). It was the machinery and its ownership that was the center of the controversy between Natan Wurzel, Michał Gutman, and Wolf Luzer Glajtman. The sources on this disagreement are the letters of both sides in Polish trade court records. Each party tells his side differently, which means the truth is somewhere in between these accounts.50
The problem began with the sale of Rekord, Ltd.’s machines to Natan Wurzel during the company’s auction of the factory’s possessions. According to Gutman and Glajtman, the auction was just a formality designed to keep the factory running by selling the machines to Wurzel, who would take the machines in pawn to satisfy the money loaned to Rekord, Ltd. by his brother-in-law, Herman Hirsch. Gutman and Glajt-man thought Wurzel would keep the machines in trust until the factory was back on its feet. The controversy arose when Wurzel tried to take possession of the machines and sell them to someone else. Wurzel bought the machines and dies at the auction for Zł 46,000 ($8,679), though they were worth more. As part of this deal, Gutman and Glajt-man also gave Wurzel an additional Zł 10,000 ($1,887) to buy the machines for Rekord, Ltd’s use. When Wurzel tried to take possession of the machines, Gutman and Glajtman stopped him. By early August, it seemed as though both sides had come to an agreement. Gutman and Glajtman found a buyer for the factory, who agreed to pay Wurzel Zł 60,000 ($11,321) for the machines and dies. When this deal fell through, the controversy reignited.51
By this time, both sides were using lawyers and the courts. It does not appear that Gutman and Glajtman denied Wurzel’s technical ownership of the equipment, but they disagreed with him about his intent. According to them, Wurzel, who handled the negotiations for himself and his brother-in-law, Herman Hirsch, reneged on an under-the-table arrangement that would have kept the factory under Gutman, Glajtman, and Bankier’s control.52 When the war began, Wurzel’s charges shifted to Oskar Schindler and centered around not only ownership of the machines and the factory but also claims that Schindler had physically abused one of Wurzel’s partners, Julius Weiner.
But what about Natan Wurzel’s initial dispute with Gutman and Glajt-man? It remained in the Polish courts, which continued to operate after Germany conquered Poland. Only in 1942, as Oskar prepared to buy the former Rekord, Ltd. factory, was the controversy revisited by the Polish regional trade court’s legal representative (syndyk), attorney (Adwokat) Dr. Bolesław Zawisza, who oversaw affairs for the former Rekord, Ltd. In the spring of 1942, Dr. Zawisza contacted Natan Wurzel in an effort to clarify the ownership before the so-called auction of June 26, 1942, where Oskar Schindler bought the former Rekord, Ltd. At the time, Wurzel was living in the ghetto of a Polish town, Brzesko, about forty miles east of Kraków. Wurzel sent Dr. Zawisza a letter on April 20, 1942, giving his side of the controversy. Among other things, Wurzel renounced his claims to the controversial machines. Dr. Zawisza went to Brzesko on May 27, 1942, to confirm Wurzel’s statement. During this meeting, Wurzel stated that he did receive money from the two factory owners not only to buy the machines in the fictitious auction but also to buy Rekord, Ltd.’s considerable holdings of enamel pots and pans. He added that Gutman and Glajtman gave him Zł 10,000 ($1,887) to do this. He borrowed the additional Zł 36,000 ($6,792) from Israel Kohn. On July 24 and August 3, 1942, Wurzel sent Dr. Zawisza two more letters in which he changed his story again and claimed that he had sold the machines on the eve of the war to an engineer named Brulivski. Wurzel added in his final letter that he had made a statement in August 1939 renouncing his claim to the machines, which he had bought for Rekord, Ltd. He explained that he decided to make this final statement because he had heard the factory was about to be sold.53
One can only speculate about why Wurzel decided to change his stories. By this time, Wurzel said, he had already had some pretty nasty encounters with Oskar Schindler; more important, Jews were trying to avoid drawing attention to themselves. The Final Solution was in its early stages and Brzesko’s Jews were particularly vulnerable. About 4,000 Jews lived in the Brzesko ghetto, which the Germans had opened in 1940. Over the next two years, the Germans would send another 1,000–1,500 Jews there. In September 1942, 2,000 Brzesko Jews were sent to the Bełżec death camp 150 miles to the northeast. A year later, the Germans ordered the Brzesko ghetto closed and sent its remaining 3,000 Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. In the midst of these horrors, the Germans also massacred another 500 Brzesko Jews. Today, a monument in the Jewish cemetery marks the site of their mass grave.54
Consequently, fear influenced Wurzel’s statements in 1942. It is possible to clarify what really happened by comparing the statements of Glajt-man, Gutman, Wurzel, and Schindler in the Polish court records before and during the war with their comments after the war. The information must be then linked to the next part of Natan Wurzel’s claims, which centered around charges of brutality and theft against Oskar Schindler. These events, if they took place, occurred in the early months of the war when Oskar Schindler took over Rekord, Ltd.
Oskar Schindler Acquires Rekord, Ltd.
Itzhak Stern said in his Yad Vashem testimony that he did not meet Oskar Schindler until November 19 or 20, 1939. According to Polish court records, by that time Oskar had already taken possession of the factory. On November 13, the HTO’s Trustees for Trade and Industry (Treuhänder für Handel und Gewerbe) in Kraków approved Oskar’s lease of Rekord, Ltd. The next day, Schindler signed a hastily prepared handwritten document acknowledging his lease; he took the keys, but did not sign a formal lease until January 15, 1940. Dr. Roland Goryczko, who acted as the Polish trade court’s legal representative, handled the legalities for the lease agreement. Oskar bought Rekord, Ltd.’s equipment for Zł 28,000 ($8,750) and paid the court a quarterly rent of Zł 2,400 ($750). This hasty arrangement was made to prevent Rekord, Ltd. from being seized by the German Trustee Office as a formerly owned Jewish factory.55
According to the lease agreement, Oskar Schindler was “obliged to run the factory in an efficient way according to its social and technical requirements. Also, he is supposed to use all means possible to produce enamelware vessels and hire as many workers as possible.” The lease also stipulated that Oskar was to compensate his employees in a just and appropriate way. He could not change the type of goods that he produced without the permission of the trade court judge responsible for the leased factory. Oskar could also use the name of the former factory, though he decided to rename it the Deutsche Emailwarenfabrick Oskar Schindler (German Enamelware Factory Oskar Schindler). For convenience, Schindler and his workers referred to the renamed German factory simply as Emalia. The address of Emalia remained the same as Rekord, Ltd., ul. Lipowa 4. Because Oskar was only leasing the former company, a different address would be used in all Polish court matters dealing with the former Jewish factory; that address was ul. Romanowicza Tadeusza 9, a street running adjacent to the factory.56
Dr. Goryczko was appointed the trade court’s legal representative several weeks earlier to look into its financial state, particularly charges of property theft. On his first visit on October 20, he found several former workers living in the company’s offices. One of them, Jozef Janda, was a guard and was paid four times the normal salary for a guard. Dr. Goryczko found no evidence of theft. While there he took the keys to the company’s storeroom and also got the keys for the machines from Natan Wurzel, who, Goryczko noted, owned the machines. He also took the company’s records. Goryczko prepared a list of the company’s creditors in anticipation of a sale of the company’s finished enamelware. The sale was announced for November 6, though it never took place because Oskar Schindler began negotiations with Goryczko for the lease of Rekord, Ltd. Six days after Oskar took control of the factory, Dr. Goryczko completed a detailed, twenty-seven-page inventory of the factory’s machinery and stores. Presumably Oskar saw a rough draft of the inventory before he signed the preliminary lease agreement.57
Schindler’s factory was located in Podgórze, a suburb of Kraków. The factory was equidistant from Kazimierz, the historic Jewish quarter of Kraków just across the Vistula (Wisla) River, and two Jewish cemeteries two miles to the south on Jerozolimska Street. Though Oskar could not know it, his factory would sit at the edge of the Kraków Jewish ghetto after it was opened in the spring of 1941. The following year, the SS would open the infamous Płaszów Forced Labor Camp (Zwangsarbeits-lager Plaszow des SS- und Polizeiführers im Distrikt Krakau) on the site of the Jewish cemeteries on Jerozolimska Street. All Schindler’s Jewish workers would initially live here when the camp opened.
Kraków’s industrial quarter, Podgórze, was substantially working class and still retains that flavor. Unlike the neighborhoods just across the Vistula surrounding Stare Mesto, Podgórze is a bit run down. Schindler’s factory at 4 Lipowa is several blocks away from the Plac Zgody (Peace Square) in a subdistrict of Podgórze, Kraków Zabłocie. Oskar would occasionally tell people that Emalia was located in Zabłocie. A major rail line runs through Podgórze and trains stop at the station there, Kraków Zabłocie. The railroad tracks through Podgórze also separate the industrial part of the district from its residential area. Today, Schindler’s factory rests in the middle of a complex of factories just as it did during the war.
From a distance, little seems to have changed at Emalia. The old gated entranceway is still there as is the striking glass stairway leading to the former Schindler offices. The sign over the entrance now reads Krakowskie Zakłady Elektroniczne “Telpod” (Kraków Electronic Works “Telpod”). Several firms now have offices in the buildings that once housed Schindler’s factory. New buildings have been built on the site and the old brick smokestack was torn down in the late 1990s. Security is modestly tight there, particularly if one tries to go upstairs to find Schindler and Bankier’s offices. I was once able to sneak upstairs, only to discover that no one in the various firms on the top floor of Emalia’s former business quarters had any idea where Oskar had his elegant offices. Sol Urbach, that rare Schindlerjude who worked for Oskar in Kraków and Brünnlitz, often worked in Schindler’s office at Emalia as a carpenter. He said that Schindler’s office was just at the top of the stairs. Abraham Bankier’s office was behind Schindler’s office. Because so much had changed at 4 Lipowa, Steven Spielberg used only the gated entrance and the glass stairway in his film. The factory interior shots were done at an enamelware factory in Olkusz about thirty miles northwest of Kraków.58 Though Spielberg was probably not aware of it, Olkusz was the hometown of Wolf Luzer Glajtman, the principal founder of Rekord, Ltd.
The Wurzel-Wiener Affair Continues
The controversy between Oskar Schindler and Natan Wurzel became quite ugly in the 1950s and deeply troubled Oskar. Here was the acknowledged German “savior” of almost 1,100 Jews being accused by a Jew of theft and physical abuse. Wurzel, who after the war moved to Israel and changed his name to Antoni Korzeniowski, found an ally in Schindlerjude Julius Wiener. In 1955, both men mounted publicity and legal campaigns against Oskar Schindler that centered around charges of physical abuse and theft. Wiener’s charges of physical abuse were the most serious. Yet Julius Wiener was also the more timid of the two. In a letter to Wiener on May 21, 1955, Wurzel told him that he “must not be like the young woman who, after her first disappointment in love, decides to enter a monastery.”59
It is not clear what prompted Natan Wurzel/Antoni Korzeniowski to bring his charges against Schindler. On October 30, 1951, he wrote the Tel Aviv office of the Joint requesting information on the whereabouts of Oskar Schindler. He explained, in Polish, that Schindler knew the fate of his family and that he wanted to contact him “in order to obtain full information about my lost relatives.” Ten days later, Helen Fink, an administrative assistant at the Joint, responded that she believed Schindler had moved to Argentina. She suggested he write their office in Buenos Aires for further information.60
Whatever his intentions, he did not follow through on them for another four years, when he wrote letters to various Jewish organizations in Israel charging Schindler with theft and brutality. Wurzel told Wiener that “it is our duty to find a good and conscientious lawyer, maybe in Tel Aviv, who will take it on himself to conduct the trial. We must offer this lawyer a share in the proceeds of the trial as payment for his work.” Wurzel was partly motivated by the desire to be compensated for what he claimed was his stolen factory, Rekord, Ltd. And perhaps this is the key to Wurzel and Wiener’s charges against Oskar Schindler. Like many Holocaust survivors struggling to rebuild a life in Israel, a young and poor country, they were driven by a desire for some type of compensation for their losses; indeed, Wurzel and Wiener had not only lost family members in the Holocaust but also their worldly possessions. In his May 21, 1955, letter to Wiener, Wurzel told him that Schindler “lives well, with wealth, without worries.” But little did they know that at the time that Oskar Schindler was also in poor financial shape.61
Schindler, of course, denied that Wurzel had ever owned the factory. The charges prompted Oskar to send a detailed letter in response to several Schindler Jews in Israel in April 1955. This was followed by a detailed, well-thought-out Bericht (report) on October 30, 1955, that discussed his efforts to save Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz from 1939 to 1945.62 Particularly important about these letters is their view into the “office politics” of the Jews who first began to work for Schindler after he leased Rekord, Ltd. Because Wurzel’s statements lack the detail of Oskar’s letters and statements, much of the following story is drawn from Schindler’s perspective. Schindler’s account of how he acquired Rekord, Ltd. follows pretty closely that found in the Polish trade court records. The biggest flaw in his story is the claim that he acquired his factory “legally.” Certainly he followed a proper “legal” course with the Polish trade court, but nonetheless Oskar Schindler was able to lease a former Jewish factory for a pittance of what it was worth. Moreover, even though Rekord, Ltd. had gone bankrupt just before the war began, it remained the confiscated property of Poland’s new German rulers after the outbreak of World War II. So buried in Wurzel’s charges, and to a lesser degree Wiener’s, was the pain of these humiliating losses.63
According to Oskar, he decided to lease Rekord, Ltd. only after lengthy discussions with various wholesale suppliers, among them Samuel Wiener (Julius’s father), Samuel Kempler, and the Landaus. They all assured Oskar that they would have no trouble moving the goods he produced in his newly acquired factory. Oskar said that he had been offered several factories but that the promises of the Jewish wholesalers had prompted him to lease Rekord, Ltd.64 This Jewish connection is important because Schindler would come to rely on Rekord, Ltd.’s former Jewish owners to help run Emalia. When he reopened the factory, he hired seven Jewish workers, among them Wolf Luzer Glajtman, Uszer Glajtman, Natan Wurzel, and Abraham Bankier, and 250 non-Jewish Polish employees.65
Natan Wurzel worked for Schindler for about eighteen months. According to Oskar, Wurzel became an active player in an “egotistical power struggle among the top group of my employees” that centered around efforts “to gain my favor and to win influence over me.”66 Wurzel, like all Polish workers, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, had to register with the Labor Exchange (Arbeitsamt) for a work assignment. Schindler, who initially trusted Wurzel, used his influence with the corrupt Labor Exchange to secure him a job at Emalia. And then the trouble began. According to Oskar, Wurzel was responsible for Wolf Luser Glajtman’s dismissal after he told Schindler that Glajtman had embezzled Zł 4,000 ($1,250) when he brought sheet metal from the Synger Sosnowitz factory. Oskar investigated the matter and discovered that Glajtman had sent the money to his wife in Olkusz to help his family. Oskar fired Glajtman and informed the Labor Exchange of his dismissal. But this was not the end of the Glajtman affair. Soon after Wolf Glajtman’s dismissal, Wurzel told Schindler that Wolf’s brother, Uszer Glajtman, an ammunition maker at Emalia, was making mistakes. Wurzel added that Uszer was also taking advice from Wolf. Oskar did not fire Uszer but transferred him to the warehouse.67
It began to dawn on Schindler that Natan Wurzel was a bit of a manipulator. Oskar now began to rely on Abraham Bankier more and more because he thought Bankier was “more decent.” By this time, Wurzel had succeeded in having his rivals for Schindler’s favor neutralized or fired. Only Bankier remained in the “top group.” If Oskar is to be believed, Wurzel now set out to destroy Bankier. On one occasion, he personally attacked Bankier in front of the chief purchasing agent for the Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF, Der Höhere SS-und Polizeiführer), Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger. For one Jew to attack another Jew in front of an SS officer was dangerous and potentially deadly. The buyer, whom Oskar never identified, persecuted Bankier for months after Wurzel’s attack. On one occasion, the drunken buyer came to Emalia to find and shoot Bankier. Fortunately, he could not find him.68
