Oskar Schindler, page 17
After this incident, Oskar took Natan Wurzel aside and told him, in front of witnesses, not to incite Emalia’s customers against Bankier. This did little to stop Wurzel, who told several of the German trustees whom Oskar did business with that Bankier was “in cahoots” with another Jewish worker, Samuel Kempler, who worked for Frantiåek Turek. Turek had been Oskar’s right-hand man in the Abwehr office in Moravská Os-trava before the war and was now the trustee of a factory in Kraków. Turek was furious with Bankier and fired Kempler. When Turek visited Emalia, he insulted and humiliated Bankier. Oskar periodically stepped in to “slow Turek down.” But Wurzel’s criticism of Bankier continued. If there was anything wrong at the factory, whether it be not enough vodka or too few promotions, Wurzel would always say “[w]vinna Bankiera (guilty Bankier).”69
Though Wurzel was tough on the other Jews who worked for Schindler, he got along well with Emalia’s German customers, Wehrmacht officers, and members of the SS. He even had a good relationship with SS-Hauptsturmführer Rolf Czurda, the head of the SD’s foreign defense division in Kraków; because of this, Oskar said, Wurzel developed a sense of false security that led to his dismissal. But it was Wurzel’s allies at Emalia who told Oskar that Wurzel had taken money from a German client in Tarnów named Baytscher. These funds were meant to pay for furniture and transportation. Instead, Wurzel took the money he received from Baytscher and spent it. Schindler informed the Labor Office of Wurzel’s dismissal but did not inform the Gestapo or the police of his crime. But this was not the end of Natan Wurzel. For several months after his dismissal, he would drop by Emalia and ask for handouts so he would not go hungry. Often the naive Bankier would intercede for him.70
This was a mistake. Whatever positive relationship Wurzel had with Schindler and Czurda now changed. Czurda was the SD’s liaison with the Armaments Inspectorate and would visit Emalia three or more times a week to collect the “significant” gifts that Oskar would give him. Though Czurda had nothing to do with Jewish labor issues, Schindler saw him as a potential “business confidant” because of his ties to the Armaments Inspectorate. Czurda was always driven to Emalia in a private car and usually arrived drunk. During one visit after Wurzel’s dismissal, Czurda ran into Wurzel at Emalia. During their conversation, the drunk Czurda took offense at something Wurzel said to him. He then slapped him twice in the face in front of Oskar and his secretary, Elisabeth Kühne. Oskar and Ms. Kühne stepped between the two to prevent further harm to Wurzel. Wurzel later claimed that Schindler had ordered Czurda to hit him. Esther Schwartz, a Jewish clerk who knew Wurzel and worked for Oskar in one of his subsidiary business in Kraków until 1943, testified in Israel in 1963 that news of Wurzel’s beating caused quite an uproar in the Kraków ghetto. After she heard the story, she recalled that she had heard Oskar tell Marta, who ran the subsidiary business for him, “After I gave him [Wurzel] the ‘hairdo,’ he finally agreed to sign.” Esther concluded that Oskar was talking about Natan Wurzel.71
Julius Wiener testified after the war that he learned of Wurzel’s beating after he heard people talking about it near the entrance to the ghetto. After the beating, which took place in the summer of 1941, Wurzel was taken to an apartment on Limanowskiego Bolesława Street, one of the main thoroughfares running through the ghetto. When Julius entered the room, he saw Wurzel lying unconscious on the bed. Wiener, who also claimed to have been beaten on Schindler’s orders, was shocked by what he saw. Wurzel, he testified, “looked like one blue mass of flesh with blood trickling down.” Natan’s brother told Julius that Schindler had ordered Wurzel to come to the factory. Once inside, Schindler told him to sign a document stating that he had earlier sold the factory to a Christian. When Natan refused, Schindler told him to wait. After a few minutes, several SS men took Wurzel into a separate room, where they brutally beat him. Frantic with pain, Wurzel begged for mercy. The SS men then asked whether he was prepared to sign Schindler’s document. He agreed. Wurzel then stumbled into Schindler’s office and signed the required document without reading it. Before he left, he was told not to say anything about the “incident.” If he did, he was reminded, there was nearby Auschwitz. Natan could barely walk when he left the factory. His brother hired a carriage to take him back to the ghetto.72
In his charges against Schindler after the war, Wurzel agreed that he was forced to sign false statements on the day of the beating about Rekord, Ltd.’s former owners and about the factory’s bankruptcy proceedings. Later, he claimed that the Gestapo, working with Dr. Zawisza, forced him to sign other documents about Rekord, Ltd. in Brzesko. What is interesting about this claim is that Oskar’s version of the story, told from memory ten years after the war, is more in line with the events recorded in the Polish trade court records than Wurzel’s account. According to Oskar, it was Dr. Zawisza and another attorney, J. Hrycan, who visited Wurzel in Brzesko on May 27, 1942. Wurzel said he was forced to sign the “false documents in terror,” a claim that Oskar disputed. He said that Hrycan was an elderly white-haired man and Dr. Zawisza was a passive invalid who had lost an arm in World War I. Both men worked for Emalia to earn a living and had always been extremely polite in their dealings with Wurzel.73
Oskar said that Natan Wurzel was able to turn the slapping incident with Czurda into “a quite profitable collaboration” between himself, Czurda, and the SD. This new relationship also enhanced Wurzel’s “chance for escape.” Oskar learned from a business acquaintance, a Baltic German trustee from Riga, Herr Sommer, that Wurzel occasionally visited Czurda in his Kraków apartment. Czurda in turn met with Wurzel in Brzesko. Sommer periodically worked as a translator in Czurda’s office. Moreover, Czurda’s secretary, Frau Schürz, confirmed all this when Oskar asked her about these stories. She added that Czurda even got Wurzel a job working for a German Jew, Alexander Förster, a known SD agent. Oskar stated that Förster used Wurzel as a driver in an escape scheme for wealthy Jews. After they paid the appropriate bribes, these Jews would be driven to the border, where they would be picked up by the SS, robbed, and murdered. According to Oskar, at this point, “the famous buddies Förster and Wurzel cashed in on their fees and Lapuvka (bribe) in any case.”74
Förster and Wurzel’s efforts seriously affected the Jewish Agency’s smuggling routes in and out of Poland from Hungary. Dr. Chaim Hilf-stein, who worked for the JSS (Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe; Jewish Self- Help Association), the only Jewish aid society allowed to work in the General Government, prepared a report on the phony smuggling ring. Oskar took this report to Budapest on one of his first missions for the Jewish Agency and handed it over to Dr. Resz~e (Rudolf or Israel) Kasztner, the vice chairman of the Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest (Va’ada; Va’adat ha-Ezra ve-ha-Hatsala be-Budapest), which, among other things, helped smuggle Jews into Hungary from Poland, Germany, and Slovakia. Va’ada considered the report serious enough to change its smuggling routes into Hungary.75
Dr. Rudi Sedlacek, an Austrian dentist from Vienna who worked with the Jewish Agency, gave further information about Förster’s activities to an old friend, Major Franz von Korab. He in turned shared Sedlacek’s report with an SS officer, Kraus, who responded, “Hands off Förster.” According to Oskar, the SD left Förster alone as long as they needed him. When the German Jew was no longer useful to them, he was überstellt (handed over). Oskar claimed that he had been told that Förster had been murdered by some of his victims just after the war ended.76
Förster is discussed in some depth in the memoirs of Malvina Graf, a survivor of the Kraków ghetto and Płaszów, and Tadeusz Pankiewicz, a Righteous Gentile who ran a pharmacy in the Kraków ghetto. The son of a piano maker from Leipzig, Förster spied for the Germans throughout the war. The forty-year-old-Förster was a dancer appearing in a Kraków café, the Feniks, when the war broke out. Though Jewish, he never wore the required white arm band with the blue Star of David, even if he went outside of the ghetto. Because of his privileged position, Förster was able to leave the ghetto whenever he wanted. Pankiewicz and Graf said Förster had a three-bedroom apartment near the entrance to the ghetto and ran a restaurant-dance bar in the same building. He kept a second apartment at the Hotel Royale in Kraków, which Malvina Graf’s relatives had once owned.77
Pankiewicz said that Förster was on personal terms with several Gestapo agents. He would greet some of them with the personal Du (thou or you); they would then shake his hand after he had raised it in salute. One of Förster’s duties was to arrange private all-night parties at his nightclub for high-ranking Gestapo officers. As the drunken Gestapo officers left Förster’s parties, they would fire their revolvers in the air. Some Jews believed that Förster had a private office in Gestapo headquarters on Pomorska Street and “would sit there in a German uniform.” Other rumors had him writing the Gestapo’s Stimmungs-Berichte (opinion polls), publications that analyzed the mood of the ghetto’s population.78
In May 1942, the Germans began to transport Jews from the Kraków ghetto to death camps. During the roundups, Förster would always stand beside the Gestapo and supervise the Aktionen. He would occasionally intervene to prevent certain Jews from being put on the transports. It was known that Förster took bribes and gifts to help Jews, though sometimes he helped them for humanitarian reasons. Graf stated in her memoirs that he helped many, many Jews get the appropriate work stamps on their identity cards (Kennkarten) and in so doing saved them from the transports.79
Förster’s ties to the SS and the Gestapo did not protect him from mistreatment and jail. On one occasion, he was arrested and sent to the Jewish Security Police (OD; Jüdischer Ordnungsdienst) jail. The OD was a Jewish police force in the Kraków ghetto headed by Symcha Spira. Tadeusz Pankiewicz said that Leutnant Oswald Bousko, the vice commandant of the Schutzpolizei (municipal police, or gendarmes) that guarded the ghetto and often helped Jews, explained to him the reason for Förster’s arrest. The day before his arrest, Förster had sent Hermann Heinrich a bouquet of roses to celebrate Heinrich’s promotion. Heinrich opened Förster’s gift at a celebration party at Gestapo headquarters. As a joke, Heinrich called the OD and told them to arrest Förster. Some felt that Heinrich also wanted to let Förster know that he was still a member of an “inferior race,” regardless of his ties to the Gestapo. The morning after Förster’s arrest, Heinrich went to the OD jail and ordered Förster released. Both men left the jail laughing and joking.80
After the Germans closed the ghetto in the spring of 1943, Förster stayed in Kraków. Rumor had it that he was sent on a three-week “secret mission” to Hungary and later charged with working for the British. Förster left Kraków again and was arrested and imprisoned in Mon-telupich prison. Pankiewicz said that Förster was probably liquidated by the Gestapo. Afterwards, the Gestapo spread rumors that the charges against Förster had no merit and that he had been released. Some stories had him parachuting into Great Britain on a secret mission. Two Schindler Jews, the musicians Hermann and Henry Rosner, wrote to Pankiewicz after the war from the United States and told him that they knew someone who had been jailed with Förster. According to this witness, the Gestapo had clubbed Förster to death.81 Though it is difficult to verify the stories about Förster’s activities after the Kraków ghetto closed, it is interesting that he went to Hungary on several “missions” at about the same time as Oskar Schindler. Was there a connection? We will never know.
Oskar Schindler’s charge that Wurzel was involved with Förster in an illegal escape scam is extremely serious. In his 1955 letter to several Schindlerjuden in Israel, Oskar told them of a story that he had heard from Janina (“Janka”) Pithard-Olszewska, a secretary for the enamelware wholesale company, Shlomo Wiener Ltd., that sold Emalia’s products. Janka said that one evening she paid a visit to a Polish friend who had an apartment near Gestapo headquarters. Wurzel and Förster were at the apartment and Janka heard them work out plans for the escape of seven young rabbis to Hungary. At some point in the planning, Janka told Oskar, SS-Hauptsturmführer Heinrich Hamann and another SS officer joined in the discussions. Janka was shocked by the cold-bloodied cynicism of the discussions, particularly Wurzel and Förster’s concern about the amount of money they would make. She was also disturbed by Wurzel’s criticism of Oskar and his efforts to aid his Jewish workers.82
Janka Olszewska was from the Vilnius (Wilno) region of Poland. A month after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, Stalin transferred Vilnius, which many Lithuanians claimed as their historic capital, to Lithuania. Janka’s husband was drafted into the Polish army soon after the war began and disappeared. With her husband gone and their estate destroyed, Janka decided to go to Kraków and live with her father. She did not know that her father had died while a prisoner of the Germans. After several months in a German transit camp, Janka reached Kraków. Germans now lived in her father’s apartment, so she stayed with her in-laws. This was where she met Oskar Schindler. Schindler was interested in renting an apartment in one of the homes owned by Janka’s in-laws. She was struck by the fact that Oskar offered to pay for the apartment, whereas most Germans in Kraków simply “requisitioned” the apartments they wanted.83
Janka met Oskar several times when he came by her in-laws’ apartment to pay the rent. On one visit, Schindler brought his girlfriend, Marta G. (Eva Kisch Scheuer), a Czech from Silesia (Šląsk) who now lives near New York. Marta G. was born in Zaolzie, Czechoslovakia, which was taken over by Poland in 1938. She lost her job as a teacher and began to smuggle goods across the Polish-Czech border to make a living. Though engaged, she also developed a relationship with Oskar Schindler. The Polish police became suspicious of her trips across the frontier, and particularly of her relationship with Oskar. To avoid arrest, she decided to escape to Czechoslovakia with her fiancé. Evidently, the Polish border police spotted them trying to cross the frontier and shot her fiancé to death. They arrested Marta and imprisoned her in Lvov. When Oskar arrived in Kraków, he began to look for Marta. During his search he went to Mon-telupich prison, where he would later be incarcerated. When she was released from prison, Marta went to Kraków and lived with Oskar; later, she moved into her own apartment on ul. Ujejskiego Kornela.84
Schindler set Marta up in business. She ran a small shop at ul. 51 Krakówska, near Kazimierz, that sold Oskar’s enamelware. The former Jewish business has once been owned by Shlomo Wiener. When she learned that Janka was unemployed, Marta offered her a job as a bookkeeper. In the office with Marta and Janka were four Jews and an ethnic German (Volksdeutscher). Janka had no background in business and learned everything she needed to know from a bookkeeping textbook. Janka handled all Marta’s business negotiations with Bankier and Schindler. She negotiated her deals with Bankier and settled all financial matters with Oskar. She got to know the factory and its Jewish and Polish workers quite well. On one occasion, the Polish underground (Armia Kra-jowa) approached Janka about acquiring specially made kettles and bowls for its field kitchens. When she went to pay Oskar, he refused to take her money because, he said, it was “all for the Polish ‘bandits’ in the woods— the partisans.” On another occasion, Oskar asked Janka to help him conduct the roll call of his Jewish workers for Amon Göth, the dreaded commandant of the Płaszów forced labor camp. After Göth left, Schindler told Janka that, because of her, Göth had decided not to kill any of his Jewish workers that day.85
This was not all that Oskar had to say about Wurzel in his 1955 letter to his Schindlerjuden friends in Israel. He was particularly offended by Wurzel’s accusation that Oskar ordered an official from the Foreign Exchange (Devisen), Werner, to take a 14-carat diamond from Wurzel. Oskar, of course, denied this charge and said that he doubted Wurzel ever had such an expensive diamond. The problem with this charge, Oskar said, was that Werner and Wurzel worked together, often in league with Frantiåek Turek. Oskar constantly warned his workers to be wary of Turek, who would often try to swindle anyone selling him their valuables. On one occasion, a young Jewish worker named Weil came to the factory to buy scrap metal. Weil used the money from the sale of the scrap dishes to care for his mother in the ghetto. When he got to Emalia, Weil called Wurzel from the guard’s office at the front entrance. Later, Abraham Bankier told Oskar that on this particular day Weil had 150 grams of Bruchgold (broken gold) to sell. Wurzel advised Weil to sell it to Turek. When Bankier learned of this, he tried to reach Weil by phone at Turek’s factory, but was too late; Weil had already lost his gold. When Weil arrived at Turek’s factory, he was made to wait until Werner showed up. He identified himself as an agent of the Foreign Exchange Office and took the gold from Weil. Oskar did not know whether Wurzel received a commission for the “transaction.”86
Julius Weiner and Charges of Brutality Against Oskar Schindler
Oskar’s charges against Natan Wurzel were in direct response to Wurzel and Weiner’s claims of theft, brutality, and other crimes against him. One of their claims, which Oskar never denied but always kept under wraps, was his work for Abwehr. He told his friends in Israel in 1955 that all his acquaintances knew of his ties to Abwehr. In fact, Oskar explained, it “was precisely these friendly connections [with Abwehr] which in situations of no escape created help and often enabled my work of rescue.”87
But the charges that Oskar never adequately dealt with were those made by Julius Weiner, Natan Wurzel’s hesitant partner in the campaign against Oskar Schindler. Details about Julius Wiener’s charges against Oskar Schindler did not surface in any detail until 1962, when Schindler was nominated to be included in the first group of the Righteous Among the Nations (Righteous Gentiles) honored at Yad Vashem in Israel. Because of the controversy, the Designation of the Righteous Commission, chaired by Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau, investigated Wurzel and Wiener’s charges.
