Oskar Schindler, page 43
At some point in this part of the conversation, at least according to Oskar, Dr. Kasztner told Oskar that his efforts to help Jews were well known in “Israel.” Oskar said in his 1955 report to Yad Vashem that Dr. Kasztner suggested that he should try to “take even more Jews into [his] protection without shying away from material sacrifices.” When Oskar returned to Kraków, Dr. Kasztner sent him lists of names of prominent Jews, “who, upon the wish of Israeli organizations, should be looked for in the camps and brought to [his] factory and be placed under [his] protection.” Oskar was proud of his success in fulfilling Dr. Kasztner’s wish, and had managed to find sixteen to eighteen people on these lists, whom he brought to Emalia.144
Kasztner and Springmann ended their lengthy meeting with Schindler by asking questions about the Jewish Warsaw ghetto uprising that took place from April 19 to May 16, 1943. Oskar said he had heard that a Jewish self-defense organization had been created that “had let wagons with cement derail, built themselves bunkers, bought guns from Italian and German soldiers, and executed suspicious Jews that might betray them.”145 He estimated that 120,000 to 150,000 Jews were still living in the ghetto when the uprising took place. The uprising, Oskar said, lasted two to three weeks. He described it as a “heroic chapter in [the history] of Polish Jewry.” He added: “In their desperation they wanted to salvage the honor of the Polish Jews, when everything else already seemed hopeless.” 146 He told Springmann and Kasztner that 50,000 Jews escaped from the ghetto along the canals of the Vistula river during the fighting. He did not know what happened to those who escaped. Oskar had heard, though, that Jewish girls had fired at tanks using 0.8 caliber revolvers. Tens of thousand of Jews died in the uprising and the ghetto was burned to the ground, along with “an immense amount of valuables.” He noted that an international commission [Polish Red Cross] on its way to Katyv to investigate the Soviet massacre reported that it could hear the shootings in the distance and see the fires from the ghetto.147
Needless to say, Oskar’s account of the uprising is not completely accurate, though it does show that he continued to have good contacts with the SS and the Wehrmacht. It is possible that he got his information on the Warsaw uprising from a security conference held in Kraków on May 31, 1943, where the Jewish revolt was discussed. Evidently, there were those in the General Government who were concerned about the loss of the Warsaw ghetto’s sizable work force. The Warsaw ghetto was the largest in the General Government and at its peak in the spring of 1941 contained 450,000 Jews crammed into an area of about 760 acres. In the summer of 1942, the Germans began clearing the Warsaw ghetto of Jews and between July and September shipped 300,000 of its residents to nearby Tre-blinka and death. By the time the uprising took place the following spring, there were only about 60,000 Jews left in the Warsaw ghetto. The uprising was led by the Jewish Fighting Organization (¢OB; ¢ydowska Orga-nizacja Bojowa), which drew its membership from twenty-two other Jewish groups. Seven hundred to 750 Jewish young people, armed with pistols, ten rifles, a few machines guns, 2,000 Molotov cocktails, and unbridled courage, took part in the rebellion. They faced the best military power the SS could throw at them, and they kept Himmler’s best troops at bay for almost a month. The commander of the SS operation, SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop, a specialist in antipartisan warfare, said in his final report on May 24, 1943, to the General Government’s HSSPF Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, that his units had apprehended 56,065 Jews, which included 7,000 who had been killed in the uprising and a similar number sent to Treblinka. More than likely, these estimates are exaggerated, as were Stroop’s estimates of the number of Germans killed and wounded in the ghetto’s rebellion. Stroop added that his units had destroyed 631 bunkers, and captured eight rifles, fifty-nine pistols, a few hundred hand grenades and Molotov cocktails, some homemade weapons, and a large amount of ammunition.148
At some point in the lengthy discussion about ways to help the Jews in Poland, Springmann and Kasztner asked Oskar about the prospect of going to Turkey to work with the Jewish Agency there and “informing prominent people about the situation of the Jews in Poland and the terrible consequences of the SS policies (liquidation of ghettos, opening of death camps) [on them].”149 In particular, they mentioned a possible meeting with the American ambassador to Turkey, Lawrence Steinhardt, himself Jewish. Though Steinhardt, American’s wartime ambassador to Ankara, “had been rather hesitant on Jewish matters before 1944, once President Roosevelt ordered the creation of the War Refugee Board (WRB) in early 1944,” Steinhardt became a “staunch supporter of any serious rescue plan put forward” by Jewish organizations interested in rescuing Jews.150
Oskar said the trip to Turkey never took place, though he fretted because Dr. Sedlacek had taken his passport to get him a visa but had never returned it. Given the time frame of the invitation in relation to the creation of the War Refugee Board and increased American efforts to do more to aid Europe’s Jews, Oskar’s trip probably became less valuable than originally thought, particularly considering the risks involved to the entire Jewish Agency network across Central and Eastern Europe. And it was not as though there was not already ample evidence about the atrocities being committed by the Germans and their collaborators against the Jews. In his Official Secrets: What the Nazis Planned, What the British and the American Knew, Richard Breitman has provided documentation showing that a steady flow of such information to the American and British governments took place well before Schindler met Springmann and Kasztner in Budapest in late 1943. The failure of the United States and Great Britain to give these reports serious consideration is a matter unrelated to Oskar Schindler.151
Yet one always wonders a little bit about the veracity of some aspects of Schindler’s accounts of his wartime activities. There is no doubt that Oskar, often at the instigation of those Schindlerjuden closest to him, tried to put the best light possible on his actions during the war. For the most part, though, his accounts hold up pretty well to what historical documents we have that relate to his activities. Itzhak Stern talks about Oskar’s relationship with Dr. Sedlacek, and even remembered the latter’s visits to Kraków. Joseph Brand and Resz~e Kasztner also mentioned Schindler’s visit to Budapest in their postwar accounts. And there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of their report, “The Confessions of Mr. X,” particularly in light of some of the blunt statements made by Oskar during their meeting. “The Confessions of Mr. X” does not try to sugarcoat the ideas and feelings of Oskar Schindler, no matter how insensitive they might have been. But the report also showed how well connected Oskar was to the SS, particularly when it came to policies towards Jews in the General Government.152
The meeting with Kasztner and Springmann was not the only one that Oskar had during his brief stay in Budapest in late 1943. One evening, Dr. Sedlacek took Oskar to meet one of Abwehr’s more infamous agents in the Hungarian capital, Dr. Schmidt, the head of Admiral Canaris’s operations there. Joel Brand had first met Dr. Schmidt in a private room in the Moulin Rouge, a well-known night club in Budapest. Joseph Winniger, another Abwehr agent in Budapest, introduced Brand to Schmidt. “So you are Herr Brand, are you?” Schmidt said when he met Brand. “You want to help the ‘children,’ and I am ready to work with you in this. But we’ll always refer to them as ‘children’ and nothing else. You understand?” 153 “Children” was often the word Oskar Schindler used to describe his Jews.
But Schmidt and his agents did not work for nothing; in fact, according to Brand, money was all they were interested in. They “paid scant heed to humane considerations.”154 But Va’ada, and later the JRC, would pay the Abwehr agents only for results, which often created problems. When Oskar met Dr. Schmidt on one of his visits to Budapest, he came away with the same negative impression of him as Joel Brand. In fact, Joel Brand’s memoirs and the “Confessions of Mr. X” suggest that Oskar was not considered part of Dr. Schmidt’s greedy Abwehr entourage. This was because Dr. Sedlacek, Oskar’s contact with JRC representatives in Budapest, was ashamed of Dr. Schmidt and men like him. He appealed simply to Oskar Schindler’s humanity, and this became the key to Oskar’s willingness to work with the JRC.155
Oskar said that Dr. Sedlacek told him that Schmidt, a journalist, was an Austrian emigrant who had settled in Hungary. Schindler, Sedlacek, and Schmidt had dinner one evening in the Gellert Hotel in Budapest. All Schmidt wanted to talk about was “construction parts purchases, housing projects, and horse races.”156 To Oskar, Schmidt “seemed like an imposter.” He said that Dr. Sedlacek told him that Dr. Schmidt had already made a lot of money exchanging money from Jewish aid agencies in Turkey and Palestine. The Gestapo finally caught up with Schmidt and arrested him. The Gestapo found “various quarter-kilo blocks of platinum and jewelry,” all derived from the “embezzlement of Jewish money,” in the apartment of Schmidt’s girlfriend.157
Oskar Schindler’s first visit to Budapest during the war had not gone well and he returned to Kraków in a bad mood. According to Itzhak Stern, he was “furious because the Jews he had negotiated with did not yet believe what was happening in the camp.”158 But this did not keep him from continuing to work with Dr. Sedlacek and the Jewish Agency. Oskar made several trips to Budapest to visit Dr. Sedlacek and others working with the Jewish aid organization. Dr. Sedlacek, in turn, visited Oskar six or seven times in Kraków. According to Thomas Keneally, on one of these visits, Oskar managed to bring Sedlacek and a companion, Babar, who openly carried a small camera with him, into Płaszów. They were escorted by Amon Göth. Oskar did not mention this visit in any of his postwar accounts. Keneally got his information from Itzhak Stern’s 1956 report to Yad Vashem. It makes fascinating reading.159
According to Stern, in July 1943, an OD man told Stern that Oskar Schindler wanted him to see him at his office in Emalia. Stern said that he had an SS contact who periodically let him visit Schindler at his factory, so this request was not unique. But on this occasion, Stern had a high fever and told the OD man that he could not make it. Soon, though, word came back that Oskar desperately wanted to see him. When he arrived at Oskar’s upstairs office in Emalia, Stern was introduced to two men. Ke-neally said it was Sedlacek and the mysterious “Babar,” though Stern never identified them by name in his report. The two agents asked Stern about conditions in Płaszów, which made him suspicious of both of them. He took Oskar aside and asked who they were. Oskar told Stern that they were spies from Hungary and Turkey “working for both sides.”160 Stern said that he then gave them details about conditions in Płaszów.161
Oskar then called Amon Göth and told him that he was hosting guests for a few days and wanted to invite him to a party for them. During the party, which included, according to Stern, drunken women, Göth invited Oskar and his two mysterious guests to Płaszów to show them his workshops. Göth told Stern and others that it was important that everything worked well during the visit. The implication here is that somehow Göth thought Oskar’s guests were important dignitaries. Göth met the Schindler party at his office and escorted them as they walked through the camp. But before they left the administration building, Schindler told Göth that he needed to talk with Stern about one of his orders. Schindler and Stern decided that as soon as the visiting party walked out of the administration building, Stern would follow. At the point where Jewish gravestones had been used to pave one of the camp’s roads, Stern was to stop and tie his shoes. One of the visitors, who had a small camera, would then take pictures of the broken tombstones. In fact, “Babar” took pictures throughout the camp. Stern reported that both men were caught at the border as they tried to return to Hungary and the film was seized and destroyed, though he added that “some of the pictures did get through.”162
There is no reason to doubt Stern’s account of the visit of these mysterious guests to Emalia and Płaszów, though his dates do not coincide with Schindler’s initial contacts with Abwehr and the Jewish Agency. Possibly Stern was off a year and the visit took place in 1944 instead of 1943. Then there is the question of the identity of both men. If they were stopped at the border and discovered to have sensitive film or photographs on them, one would assume they were arrested for carrying such contraband. If this took place in the summer of 1944 instead of 1943, we cannot be certain that one of the visitors was Dr. Sedlacek because we can trace his activities in Budapest only through the spring of 1944. According to Joseph Brand, after the German occupation of Hungary, Sedlacek and other Abwehr agents tried to inject themselves into Brand’s negotiations with Adolf Eichmann in the spring of 1944 over the exchange of Jewish lives for 10,000 trucks, food, and selected war matériel. Brand said that Sedlacek and his cronies did this because they were “afraid they would be completely eliminated and unable to earn any more money if [their] group were to bargain directly with the security service of the SS and with Istanbul.”163 Brand, who had become frustrated with Abwehr, now considered them worse than the SS. His negotiations with Eichmann never bore fruit in part because of German insincerity and Allied opposition to any scheme that might strengthen the German war effort. In the meantime, Dr. Rudi Sedlacek disappeared.164
Oskar’s Schindler’s decision to become more directly involved in efforts to save his Jewish workers coincided with the decline of Germany’s military fortunes after the Battle of Stalingrad. By the time he made his first trip to Budapest for talks with Jewish Agency representatives, the Red Army had captured Kiev, the capital of the former Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. The Big Three, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, were about to meet in Teheran to approve plans for the invasion of France the following summer. By early 1944, Soviet forces had breached the old frontier with Poland. And though it would be another seventeen months before the war in Europe ended, Germans such as Oskar Schindler had to confront the likelihood of the collapse and defeat of the Third Reich. Most factory owners ultimately abandoned their operations in Kraków and made plans to return home with the money they had made in Poland. Oskar Schindler, though, followed a path that ultimately cost him his wartime fortune. As he slowly began to make plans in 1944 for the war’s end, he chose to flee, though not with Emilie or one of his mistresses. Instead, he decided to return to his homeland with as many Jewish workers as he could. If his efforts to help and protect his Jewish workers until this period were remarkable, what was about to happen in 1944 bordered on the miraculous; indeed, the idea that one person could save almost 1,100 Jews in the heart of the Holocaust’s principal killing fields can be seen in no other light. Yet the events leading up to the transfer of almost 1,100 Jews from various camps to Oskar Schindler’s factory camp in Brünnlitz near his hometown of Svitavy were neither simple nor purely moralistic. In fact, events, and the people who pushed Schindler’s Jews along the path to salvation, were often driven by less than ideal motives. The reality of the story of the famous “Schindler’s List” is very different from the one that has entered the popular history of the Holocaust.
8.
BEGINNING OF THE END IN KRAKÓW
IN ONE OF THE MORE MEMORABLE SCENES IN STEVEN SPIELBERG’S film Schindler’s List, Oskar Schindler slowly dictates the names he wants Itzhak Stern to type on to the famous “Schindler’s List.” Schindler seems to struggle to come up with the names of the thousand Jews he wants sent from Płaszów to his new sub-camp at Brünnlitz (BrnZnec), near his hometown of Svitavy, in what was then the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (Böhren und Mähren). As Stern nears the completion of the list, he asks Schindler whether he was buying the names on the list from Amon Göth. Schindler replies that the list was costing him a fortune.1 When Stern completes the list, Schindler takes it to Amon Göth, who says after looking it over that it contains one clerical error: the name Helen Hirsch. Göth tells Schindler that he cannot let Helen Hirsch go because he wants to take her back to Vienna with him. Schindler reminds Göth that he cannot take a Jew home with him after the war and Göth replies that perhaps he should take Helen to the woods and shoot her. Instead, Oskar offers to play a game of cards with Göth to win her freedom. Schindler suggests they play double or nothing. If Göth wins, Oskar will give him Zł 7,400 ($2,312.50); if Göth’s winning hand is a “natural,” Oskar will pay him Zł 14,800 ($4,625). But if Schindler wins, he can put Helen Hirsch on his list.2
This scene, which was taken from Thomas Keneally’s historical novel Schindler’s List, is pure fiction.3 For one thing, Oskar Schindler had no role in preparing the famous list other than giving SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Josef Müller, some general guidelines for the type of workers he wanted on the list. Moreover, Amon Göth was in prison in Breslau when the list was being prepared and played no role in its creation. In reality, the creation of the famous “Schindler’s List,” like so much of the Schindler story, is much more complex. Its author was not Oskar Schindler, Itzhak Stern, Mietek Pemper, Abraham Bankier, or even Amon Göth. Instead, the person responsible for the preparation of “Schindler’s List” was a corrupt Jewish OD man, Marcel Goldberg; he was the assistant of SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Müller, who was responsible for the transport lists. Spielberg’s version of the creation of the famed “Schindler’s List” certainly fits more comfortably with his efforts to underscore Oskar Schindler’s decency and concern for his Jewish workers, but the reality is that Schindler had very little to do with it and he admitted as much after the war. In fact, only about a third of the Jews on the list had worked for Oskar Schindler in Kraków before he was given permission to transfer part of his factory operations to Brünnlitz. And more often than not, many of those who were put on Goldberg’s list were prominent prewar Cracovian Jews or important Jewish officials in Płaszów. Some Jews were able to bribe their way onto the list, though this was more the exception than the rule. Others were on the list because they had worked for Julius Madritsch or had worked previously for Josef Leipold, Brünnlitz’s new SS commandant. And some were on the list just because they were lucky.
