Oskar Schindler, page 29
Though the scene with Genia is probably fictitious, Thomas Keneally used it to try to explain why Oskar Schindler ultimately went to such efforts to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler was not a complex man. Moreover, the simple explanation given by Keneally fits with Oskar’s explanations after the war about why he did what he did. His answers were plain and simple. He helped Jews because what the Germans were doing to them was wrong. In an impromptu speech in Tel Aviv to a large gathering on May 2, 1962, Oskar said that he “tried to do what I had to do.”88 But beyond this, there were other issues that helped transform Oskar into the person that became a “savior” to almost 1,100 Jews. Several years earlier, Oskar gave a more detailed explanation to Kurt Grossmann, who published Oskar’s account of his efforts to save Jews during the war in Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen (The Unsung Heroes: People in Germany’s Dark Days). Oskar told Grossmann that the
driving motives for my actions and my inner change were the daily witnessing of the unbearable suffering of Jewish people and the brutal operations of the Prussian Übermenschen (superior human beings) in the occupied territories—a bunch of lying hypocrites, sadistic murderers, who with good propaganda had promised to liberate my homeland, the Sude-tenland, and in reality degraded it into a colony and plundered it. My trips into foreign countries helped me to form the true and complete picture of “Großdeutschland,” thanks to the open criticism and the recognition of facts, all of which was kept secret in the Reich. Additionally there was the hatred which existed between the SS and the SD on the one hand and the Canaris officers, among whom I had honest friends. An essential driving force for my actions was the feeling of a moral duty toward my numerous Jewish classmates and friends, with whom I had experienced a wonderful youth, free of racial problems.89
For Schindler, then, there was not only disgust with the brutality and moral dishonesty of the Germans but also something deeper that went back to his Sudeten German roots. And after the war, Emilie and Oskar both told stories about their childhood friendships with Jews. When Emilie was fifteen, her parents sent her to an agricultural school after an unsuccessful year at a Catholic boarding school for girls. During her three years at the agricultural school, Emilie’s best friend was a Jew, Rita Gross.90 Thomas Keneally tells a similar story about Oskar, whose next door neighbor in Svi-tavy was “a liberal rabbi named Felix Kantor,” a Reform or liberal rabbi who believed that “it was no crime, in fact praiseworthy, to be a German as well as a Jew.”91 In 1936, Rabbi Kantor, who is listed in a 1935 German language information book on Zwittau (Svitavy) as Rabbi Felix Kantner, moved his family, which included two sons, to Belgium because of the growing anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia. In addition, Oskar was also supposed to have had “a few middle-class Jewish friends.”92
Keneally’s stories about Oskar’s early friendships with Jews might seem a little self-serving, and even a bit fabricated, but they were confirmed after the war by Herbert Steinhouse, a Canadian journalist who met Oskar in Munich in 1949 and later interviewed him in Paris about his wartime efforts to help Jews. But before Steinhouse was willing to move ahead with his account of the Schindler story, he gathered a large body of testimony from Schindlerjuden and others to corroborate what Oskar had told him. One of the people who wrote to Steinhouse said that in addition to being a Schindler Jew who worked for Oskar at Emalia, he was also one of the sons of Rabbi Kantner. Before the war, he told Steinhouse, Oskar was a “true believer,” a loyal Sudeten Nazi who accepted everything except the party’s ideas on race. He said that Oskar had “been friendly with several of the Sudetenland Jews” in Svitavy and occasionally talked with Rabbi Kantner about Yiddish literature, folktales, and Jewish traditions in eastern Poland. Rabbi Kantner’s “Rabbinat,” which was located on Brunoplatz 11, oversaw a small Jewish Temple and cemetery. Census figures from 1930 indicate that there were only 168 Jews in Svi-tavy out of a total population of 10,466. 93
There is no reason not to accept these stories as being true, though it is hard to verify whether anyone named Kantner worked at Emalia. There is no Kantner on the first “Schindler-type” list from late 1943 nor on the Mauthausen transport lists of August 10, 1944, which included hundreds of male Schindlerjuden. The same is true for the original “Schindler’s List” of males for October 21, 1944, and the two final “Schindler’s Lists” of April 18, 1945 and May 8, 1945. But this proves nothing because the lists kept by the SS for Emalia’s Jewish workers have disappeared, probably destroyed in the war or hidden away in some obscure Polish archive.
But one other point should be made about the various factors that ultimately convinced Oskar Schindler to become more aggressive in his efforts to save Jews, and that is the tide of war.
According to Ian Kershaw, the defeat at Stalingrad barely six weeks before the closing of the Kraków ghetto in 1943 had now convinced those “with any sense of realism” who previously held onto “dwindling hopes of victory” that “ultimate defeat” was now a certainty. Though Hitler’s power remained strong, loyalty to the Nazi state and Hitler himself began to decline considerably.94 And although evidence suggests that Schindler had already gained quite a reputation as someone who was kind towards his Jewish workers, it was probably not coincidental that he became more aggressive in his efforts to help Jews after the Stalingrad debacle; in fact, general German disillusionment with Hitler’s regime probably helped Schindler. Moreover, as Oskar and others began to think of a postwar Europe without Hitler, some thought had to be given to questions about criminality and responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. And beyond this was the practical question of a return to normal life. We do know that at the end of the war, Oskar naively thought he could transform his factory in Brünnlitz into an Emalia-type plant that would produce enamelware for a war-torn Europe in desperate need of bare necessities such as pots and pans. And during his escape westward, this former German spy and armaments manufacturer carried with him a document prepared by his Schindlerjuden attesting to his kindness and good treatment of them. His decision to settle in Regensburg, Germany after the war, which was only an hour or two away from the Czech border, indicates that he probably had dreams of returning to his homeland. The forced expulsion of the Sudeten Germans by Czech authorities in the immediate years after the end of World War II insured, though, that Oskar and Emilie Schindler would never be able to return to Czechoslovakia. What Oskar Schindler never counted on was that, after the war, he, like his Schindlerjuden, would become a Displaced Person without a homeland.
6.
AMON GÖTH , OSKAR SCHINDLER , AND PŁASZÓW
ONE OF THE GREAT MYSTERIES OF THE OSKAR SCHINDLER STORY was his relationship with Amon Göth, who was played brilliantly by Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List. In 1983, Monika Christiane Knauss, Göth’s daughter, wrote a letter to the German magazine, Der Spiegel, in response to the publication in Germany of Thomas Keneally’s Schindlers Liste. She was particularly critical of Keneally’s portrayal of her father as “einen Idioten.” She claimed that Schindler and her father were the best of friends, though she admitted that Schindler later denied this. She said that after the war Oskar visited her mother, Ruth, and said nothing negative about her father during the visit. Because Monika was only ten months old when her father was executed for war crimes in 1946, she obviously received this information secondhand. She also told Der Spiegel that without her father it would have been impossible for Schindler to have saved some of Płaszów’s Jews. She ended her 1983 letter by saying that her father’s silence also saved Oskar Schindler’s life.1
Monika’s tone was very different in a rambling, forty-eight-hour interview with Matthias Kessler in the spring of 2001, published the following year as Ich muß doch meinen Vater lieben, oder? (I Have to Love My Father, or Do I?) And though the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung titled its review of the book a “Biographische Freakshow,” in reality, the book-length interview was part of an ongoing and painful attempt by a middle-aged woman to come to grips with the monstrous legacy of her father.2
Monika, who used the surname Göth for the book, only slowly discovered the truth surrounding her father’s brutal past. Her mother, Ruth Irene Kalder, an actress from Breslau (today Wrocław, Poland), had begun to work for Oskar Schindler as a secretary at Emalia in 1942. One evening, Oskar took her to one of the lavish parties put on by Amon Göth at his villa at Płaszów, where the Viennese camp commandant fell head over heels for Ruth, who, some thought, resembled Elizabeth Taylor. Ruth soon moved in with Göth, who had a wife, Anni, and two children, Werner and Inge, in Vienna. Göth told Ruth that she could live with him but that he could never divorce his wife because of his children.3
Ruth loved her luxurious life with Amon Göth in Płaszów. Every morning before breakfast, and again in the afternoon, she would go horseback riding. During warm weather, Ruth could be seen sun bathing on the infamous balcony of Göth’s villa overlooking the camp. When she was not sunbathing or horseback riding, she could be found on a nearby tennis court. And then, of course, there were the incredible parties given by Göth in the evenings. Ruth Irene Kalder lived a life of luxury and comfort during her two-year relationship with Amon Göth, though she claims she never visited the concentration camp below the villa.4
Ruth remained faithful to Göth after his execution; in 1948, with the backing of his father, Franz Amon Göth, she changed her name to Göth after Franz legally affirmed that his son had been engaged to Ruth at the end of the war. The reason there was no wedding, Franz claimed, was the “chaos at the end of the war.”5 Ruth spoke adoringly of Amon Göth, whom she called by his childhood nickname, “Mony.” In fact, she named Monika for him. Ruth told Monika very little about her father when she was a child, but when she did it was always in glowing terms. Ruth told her daughter that Amon Göth was a handsome ladies’ man who had a beautiful singing voice and threw lavish parties. Ruth once told Monika: “He was my king and I was his queen.” She said that Monika should love her father as deeply as her mother. And for a while she did.6
But as she grew older, something continued to nag Monika about her father. Even before she became aware of the mysterious dark shadow that surrounded her father’s name, someone attacked her when she was in her pram, possibly because she was Amon Göth’s child. Then, when Monika was eight years old, an aunt criticized her for crying and told her that if her father could see her, he would “jump out of the Weichsel.”7 What Monika did not know was that the aunt was alluding to the disposal of Amon Göth’s ashes in the Weichsel River in Poland after his execution in 1946. Three years later, when Monika failed to clean a bathroom, she had a terrible fight with her mother. Ruth, who was fanatical about a clean bathroom, said, “You are like your father and will end up like him.”8 The next day, Monika asked her grandmother, who for all practical purposes raised her, what had really happened to her father during the war. Her grandmother told her that her father had been executed because he had killed some Jews in Poland. She added that he had also run a labor camp and killed the Jews for “sanitation” reasons.9
When Monika was twelve, she wanted to get to know a Jewish classmate, Ernestine Silber, who was new to her school. One day, Monika followed Ernestine home and was impressed when Ernestine’s father hugged her warmly. She remembered wondering what was so bad about Jews because she liked the way Jews treated their children, and remembered wondering what was so bad about Jewish people. That evening, Monika told her mother about Ernestine and her interest in becoming her friend. Ruth replied, “Oh God, I hope Ernestine does not mention your name at home.” Monika responded, “Do you think every Jew knows about Amon Göth and the work camp at Płaszów?” Ruth said that the Jews knew the name of Amon Göth. Monika quickly lost interest in becoming Ernestine’s friend. “What could I say? I’m the daughter of someone who killed your relatives?”10
Monika’s struggle with the memory of her father continued into adulthood. After her marriage to a man that abused her, she wondered why she had married “such a brute.” Was she, she later asked herself, trying to replicate her father in her marriage or was she punishing herself?11 She now felt that she had a drawer in her mind called “Amon Göth” and “could keep it closed” if she wanted to.12
When she was twenty-five, she met a Jewish survivor from Płaszów, Manfred, in a Munich bar. When Monika noticed the tattoo on his arm, she asked if he was a Jew. She then wanted to know whether he had been in a concentration camp and, if so, where. “In Poland,” Manfred responded. But where in Poland, Monika wanted to know. Manfred, who was becoming uncomfortable with the thrust of the conversation, told her it was probably a camp she had never heard of. But she persisted and he told her he had been a prisoner at Płaszów. Monika said she was glad to hear he was in a labor camp instead of a concentration camp. She then asked whether Manfred knew her father. “Who was he?” Manfred replied. “Göth,” said Monika. Manfred, who was Polish, evidently did not understand Monika’s pronunciation of her father’s name and said he knew no one by that name. Shocked, Monika said that Manfred must have known him because her father had been the commandant at Płaszów. She pronounced her father’s name again, first as “Gätt,” then as “Gööth,” and finally as “Amon Gätt.” At that point, Manfred turned white and screamed, “That murderer! That swine!” Stunned, Monika tried to argue that Płaszów was a labor camp, not a concentration camp. That was the end of the conversation. Several days later, Manfred and Monika met again. Manfred refused to talk about the matter any further, saying that Monika was too young to discuss such things.13
It was also during this period that Monika met Oskar Schindler. She was, of course, too young to have remembered Oskar’s first visit with her mother soon after the war. Monika was now a teenager and Oskar had returned from Argentina several years earlier. They met in a rundown neighborhood near the Central Train Station in Frankfurt. Oskar was too embarrassed by his shabby living conditions to invite Monika and Ruth to his apartment. Instead, they met at a restaurant. Monika recalled that he appeared to be unemployed and broke and that her mother had to pay for the drinks at the restaurant. This is striking because it was not the custom then for women to pay the bill in a restaurant. Moreover, Oskar consumed quite a few schnapps and cups of coffee. As Monika later told an Israeli newspaper reporter: “I’ve never seen anyone drink like Oskar, although he had no money.”14
Oskar, who also borrowed cigarettes from Monika, told her that she looked just like her father. Monika came away from the meeting thinking that he liked her father. She remembered that her mother told her that her father had once gotten Schindler out of prison, so she felt no compunction asking Oskar why he did not go to Kraków to help her father when he learned that Göth had been captured by the Allies. “Monika,” Oskar replied, “it was impossible; they would have hanged me as well even if I had saved 10,000 Jews.”15 This was the last time that Monika would see Oskar Schindler.
The publication of Thomas Keneally’s Schindlers Liste in Germany in 1983 reopened new wounds for Monika and her mother. In the decade or so since she had met the Płaszów survivor, Manfred, and the appearance of Keneally’s novel, Monika had married and given birth to a daughter, Yvette. After Keneally’s novel came out, Ruth was contacted by the London- based, South African-born film maker Jon Blair, who told Ruth that he was preparing a documentary on the life of Oskar Schindler. In 1982, he visited Steven Spielberg at Universal Studios to see whether he could get permission for the rights to the Schindler story, which Universal owned. According to Blair, Universal was hesitant to give him permission to make the documentary and only did so under pressure from Spielberg, who was not yet ready to make a film about Oskar Schindler. Blair said that Spielberg later told him that “letting [him] make the documentary . . . would be a cheap way for Universal to have their research done for them, and he [Spielberg] of course would have access to [the] film once he came to make his.” Blair feels that he wound up “doing a lot of the leg work for him [Spielberg].”16 Though it is difficult to determine the impact of Blair’s eighty-two-minute documentary, Schindler: His Story as Told by the Actual People He Saved (Thames Television) on Spielberg, Blair’s research is first rate. Moreover, he captured on film interviews of some of the most important people involved in the Schindler story.
Ruth agreed to do the interview with Jon Blair because she thought it would be about Oskar. Instead, at least from her perspective, all Blair wanted to talk about was Amon Göth. This troubled her. Ruth, who spoke excellent English, was, according to Blair, dying from emphysema. It is obvious from watching the interview that Ruth was ill. Yet she chose her words carefully, particularly when she was asked about Amon Göth. She told Blair that Amon Göth was not a brute, at least no more than others in the SS. He did not, she asserted, “kill for the fun of it.” Göth’s views towards Jews, Ruth said, were similar to those of others in the SS: “They were there to work.” But she admitted that Göth “did kill some Jews,” though he did not hate them. She also claimed that she told the two Jewish maids who worked for her, whom Göth called “Lena,” (Helen Stern-licht; today Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig) and “Susanna,” (Helen Hirsch), that if she could, she “would have saved them [the Jews] all.” Helen Rosenzweig, or “Lena,” says that Ruth once did make such a statement to both maids.17
