Oskar Schindler, page 58
As the Red Army moved deeper into Poland in early 1945, Golleschau was liquidated. Between January 18 and January 22, 1945, most of the sub-camp’s remaining 900 to 1,008 prisoners were marched or shipped by rail to the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps. Auschwitz records state that one of the last transports to leave Golleschau contained one train car “with ninety-six sick and exhausted prisoners and the corpses of four prisoners, who die[d] during the transport, [were] put in a sealed freight car and transferred to the Freudenthal A.C. (Auxiliary Camp] in Czechoslovakia.”44 Other than this note in the Auschwitz archives, the only documentation I could initially locate on this particular Golleschau transport was a two-page Frachtbrief (bill of lading) in the archives at Yad Vashem. During my research, I found the actual Namenliste (list of names or roll) of the eighty-one Jewish prisoners on the Golleschau transport that was created after they arrived in Brünnlitz on January 29, 1945. The bill of lading says that the Golleschau Jews were on car number 113264, which was originally built in France. We can trace the week-long odyssey of car number 113264 after it left Golleschau by looking at the station stamps on it. After it left Golleschau on January 22, it passed through Teschen, Oder-berg, and Schönnbrunn before it reached Freudenthal (Bruntál), the site of another Auschwitz sub-camp, three days later. However, because Freuden-thal was in the process of being liquidated, the Golleschau car was sent on to Zwittau (Svitavy), where it arrived on January 29. 45
In a 1956 letter to Itzhak Stern, Oskar added more details about the transport’s journey from Golleschau to Brünnlitz. He insisted that Stern share these details with Dr. Ball-Kaduri, who was investigating stories about Schindler’s efforts to save Jews. First of all, Oskar told Stern, it was important to note that the Golleschau transport had taken ten days, not eight, to get to Brünnlitz. He said that the bill of lading was predated to January 22, but had a stamp on the back that showed that its first stop after it left Golleshau was in Teschen on January 21. He added that the bill of lading indicated that the Golleschau transport had been sent to Zwittau twice on January 29. It stood in the Zwittau station for eight hours before it was sent on to Brünnlitz. The transport spent another fourteen hours in Zwittau after Josef Leipold refused to accept it. The transport finally returned to Brünnlitz on the morning of January 30. 46
In 1955, Oskar gave more details about events surrounding the Golleschau transport. According to Oskar, a friend of his with the Reichs-bahn (the German or Reich national railway), called him to tell him that “several wagons with Jewish inmates, some of which were already dead, stood at the Zwittau railway station.” Oskar said that no one wanted these Jews and the two cars were “like a ship without a harbor.” It was minus 16 degrees Celsius (c. 0 Fahrenheit) outside and Oskar called the station master in Zwittau and told him to send the wagons to Brünnlitz. Josef Leipold strongly objected to this action because the camp did not have a sanitarium to quarantine the Golleschau Jews. Oskar told Leipold that he would pay the SS the lost wages for the men on the transport, which Schindler explained was made up of men who had worked in Golleschau’s stone quarries.47
The only problem with Oskar’s accounts of what happened is that he was not there until the morning of the transport’s arrival on January 29 or 30; indeed, Emilie Schindler and Itzhak Stern agree that Oskar was not at Brünnlitz when they first learned that the Golleschau car was sitting in the Zwittau train station. Stern said that Oskar was in Mauthausen trying to get extra workers for his factory. Emilie said that “he had not returned from one of his trips to Cracow,” though this would have been unlikely because the Red Army had occupied the city ten days earlier.48 Stern added that the transport had been made up not of Jewish prisoners from Golleschau but of inmates from a hospital in Buna (Auschwitz III-Buna at Monowitz) who had initially been left behind when Auschwitz was liquidated. At the last minute, though, they had been put on a transport before the Red Army occupied Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Stern said that because Reichsbahn officials in Zwittau “believed that all Jewish transports were designated for Schindler,” the station master in Zwittau called Brünnlitz to inform Oskar that there was a small transport awaiting him in the Zwittau station. As Schindler was away, Stern was asked about the transport; he said that it was “a transport Schindler had ordered.” At this point, he said, the transport was accidentally sent back to Zwittau, though Oskar later told Stern it was ordered back to Zwittau by Leipold. Stern said that it was Emilie who ordered the transport back to Brünnlitz after she had learned of its return to Zwittau. By the time it finally arrived in Brünnlitz, Oskar had returned from his trip.49
Emilie tells a somewhat different story. One night, while a “terrible storm was raging outside,” she heard “heavy pounding” on her door. She put on a robe and went downstairs to answer the door. When she asked who it was, she heard a male voice: “Please open up, Frau Schindler, I have to talk with you. It is important.” She said it was the man in charge of the Golleschau transport. He asked her “to accept the two hundred and fifty Jews, crowded into four wagons.” The man explained that the workers had been sent to a plant that had rejected them because Russian troops were nearby. Emilie said she knew that if she “rejected them, they were going to be shot.” She then called Oskar and asked him whether it was all right to accept the transport. He agreed and Emilie then asked Brünnlitz’s chief engineer, Willi Schöneborn, to help her unload the transport.50
So why such different stories? There is no question that Oskar probably investigated the matter of the Golleschau’s transport’s odyssey quite thoroughly when he returned to Brünnlitz. But why would he claim that he was there when he was not? He did not say much about the Golleschau transport in his immediate postwar account of his efforts to save Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz. He said only that there were a hundred Jews on the transport and that seventeen were found dead when the train’s doors were opened.51 As this report was prepared just six months after the Golleschau Jews arrived in Brünnlitz, one would expect that someone actively involved in getting the transport to his own factory would have been more accurate about the number of people on the train. But in fairness to Oskar, the Golleschau transport was just one more dramatic episode in his daily Herculean efforts to keep his Brünnlitz Jews alive. But over time, at least among the Schindler-juden closest to Oskar in Brünnlitz, the story of the Golleschau transport became a concrete example of the legendary deeds he performed there. And Oskar knew this. Yet it would have been far less heroic if Oskar had been absent when the transport was shuttling back and forth between Zwittau and Brünnlitz. In his own mind, Oskar probably thought that he had played an active role in efforts to bring the transport to Brünnlitz through his phone conversations with Emilie and others. And by the time he penned his more detailed accounts about the Golleschau transport a decade after the war, his efforts to save Jews had come to mean much, much more. By the mid-1950s, Oskar’s efforts to start life anew in Argentina had failed, and he was thinking of returning to West Germany to push his claim for compensation for his lost factories. It was now extremely important, particularly in light of Yad Vashem’s interest in his story, to make certain that he remained at the center of the growing Schindler legend. In some ways, the same thing can be said about Emilie. During the later years of her life, she desperately sought the recognition that Oskar had received decades earlier, particularly in the aftermath of the release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The Golleschau story became a centerpiece of her 1996 memoirs and was one way for her to underscore the important role she played in this period of Oskar’s life. So in the end, as in most situations in which accounts vary, the truth lies somewhere in between.
Regardless of the different stories about the Golleschau transport’s odyssey, we have fairly consistent information about what happened once it finally reached Brünnlitz. It was pulled onto the rail siding that ran directly into Schindler’s sub-camp. It was dawn and snow was falling heavily. Voices were heard inside and efforts were made to open the frozen doors with long iron bars. When this did not work, some thought was given to opening them with a hand grenade. Victor Lewis said that straw-filled mattresses were burned underneath the car to try to melt the ice on the doors and locks.52 A blow torch was then used to open the car’s doors. Leipold, who stood watching everything with his two dogs, said to Emilie: “Stay away, Frau Schindler, it’s a terrible sight. You’ll never be able to erase it from your mind.”53 Itzhak Stern said that when he first looked into the car, he thought it must be a female transport because they all “looked so small and thin.”54 Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein, who helped open the frozen doors, described what he saw as “terrifying.” Inside the car were “tens of human shadows in dirty clothes, lying cold in freezing urine and excrement.” The car was filled with the stench of human excrement and dead bodies. Stella Müller-Madej said the bodies were frozen to the human waste inside. Murray Pantirer was assigned to help take the bodies out of the cars. He told me that their skin was frozen to the floor and when he tried to pick up a body, the skin came off. They then used hot water to thaw out the bodies before they removed them.55 Victor Lewis said that one lone German guard was in the car with the prisoners. Later, he would be hanged by the Brünnlitz prisoners “on a pipe.”56
Estimates vary about the number of inmates on the Golleschau transport and whether they were in one or two cars. Auschwitz records state that there were a hundred inmates on the car when it left Golleschau and that four died en route to Brünnlitz. Half the prisoners froze or starved to death; another twelve died within days of their arrival in Brünnlitz. Oskar also said that there were a hundred prisoners on the transport. But in one report he said that seventeen died in transit; in another, the number changed to sixteen. Emilie says the Golleschau transport had 250 prisoners on it. Mietek Pemper told me that there were eighty-six men on the transport when it arrived in Brünnlitz. Twelve were dead on arrival and another four died within a few days. He added that the Golleschau transport was made up of two train cars and that the men came from the Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, France, and Germany. Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein said that there were eighty-six Jews on the Golleschau transport and that twelve of them were dead on arrival in Brünnlitz. Itzhak Stern never mentioned the number of Jews on the Golleschau transport, but did say that twelve or eighteen of the Jews on board were dead when it arrived in Brünnlitz.57
During my research, I discovered the Namenliste des Häftlingszuganges vom Al Golleschau (KL Auschwitz) am 29. Januar 1945 (List of Names/Roll of the Prisoners from the Work Camp Golleschau [Concentration Lager Auschwitz] on 29 January 1945) with the names of eighty-one Jewish workers on it. Over time, ten of the names were scratched out after they had died, and the dates of their deaths were penciled in. As no one has ever before seen this list, I should like to list the names below in case there are families interested in the fate of their loved ones. I have listed their names exactly as they appeared on the January 29, 1945 list, which included their prisoner and camp registration numbers, their nationality, their full name, their date of birth, their date of death, and their occupation. They are buried in the cemetery at Bělá nad Svitavou, about two miles from Brněnec.
77101 15857 Hungarian Aorias, Ladislaus d. 12.III.45 Geb. 26.8.23. Schneider
77102 B11108 Hungarian Friedman, Jenö d. 9.II.45 Geb. 5.12.99. Chemiker
77130 B11185 Czech Gellner, Artur d. 1.III.45 Geb. 1.5.95 Kilfsarb.
77131 B11193 Czech Hase, Josef d. 18.II.45 Geb. 9.7.04 Schreibkraft
77139 B5771 Hungarian Ilowicz, Moses d. 8.II.45 Geb. 23.4.22. Weber.
77148 B5774 Hungarian Kowatsch, Istewar d. 4.II.45 Geb. 19.5.09 Sattler
77152 B11257 Czech Löwy, Rudolf d. 2.II.45 Geb. 13.12.21 Hilfsarb.
77169 B5638 Hungarian Schwarz, Alexander d. 4.II.45 Geb. 19.12.19 Hilfsarb.
77170 B15965 Hungarian Schwarz, Bela d. 7.II.45 Geb. 18.11.04 Bachhalter
77178 A16003 Hungarian Török, Joseph d. 6.III.45 Geb. 6.4.93 Bebenarb58
Five days after the arrival of the Golleschau transport, another train car was brought into the camp with six Jews on it from the small Lands-kron forced labor camp twenty-four miles northeast of Brünnlitz, and this could be the reason for the different figures given by various observers about how many prisoners were on the Golleschau transport and the number of cars they were in. Two of the six Jews on the Landskron transport died within a month after their arrival in Brünnlitz and were buried with full Jewish rituals in the Bělá cemetery. If you add up the figures from the Golleschau and Landskron transports drawn from their official Namenliste, it totals eighty-seven Jews with twelve dying within a month or so of their arrival. These figures are almost identical to those cited by Dr. Bieberstein and Mietek Pemper. Moreover, the fact that both lists indicate that the eighty-seven Jews on these transports came from Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, the Czech lands, Slovakia, and the Netherlands supports Mietek Pemper’s comments about the Golleschau transport. It also means that he and Dr. Bieberstein were probably including the Golleschau and Landskron transports together in their general comments about the January 29, 1945, transport. As few people have ever seen the Landskron list and do not know about the burials at Bělá cemetery, I should like to list the names of the Landskron prisoners buried there:
77185 13382 Polish Schonfelt Alfred 14.III.45 26.3.22 Tech.Zeicher
77187 B53356 Polish Willner Abraham 1.III.45 5.6.11 Zimmermann59
One clue might help clarify the matter of how many Jews were on the Golleschau and Landskron transports, and it concerns the number of bodies in the burial plot that Oskar bought at the local cemetery in Bělá nad Svitavou in early February 1945. Oskar said little about this after the war, but he did comment that he was able to let Rabbi Jakob Levertov (Lew-ertow) bury the Golleschau dead in the cemetery with full Jewish rites. He thought this was the “only such case during the war in Germany.”60 But were the Golleschau and Landskron dead buried inside the grounds of the small cemetery or in a plot just beyond it?
What further complicates this issue is the confusing testimony that Rabbi Levertov gave to Howard Koch and Martin Gosch in New York in 1964 while they were collecting testimony for their proposed film on Schindler. After the arrival of the Golleschau transport, Schindler told Levertov, “Rabbi, we have these people from Golleschau. . . . Do everything your religion demands.” Levertov told Oskar that he needed boards to put the bodies on, which was required by Jewish law. As Jewish law forbade breaking the bones of the dead, the bodies were placed on the boards in awkward positions. Levertov said that he and Schindler “looked over several places (within the factory grounds, not in a cemetery)” to bury the dead. After two days, they buried the first bodies from the Golleschau transport in graves lined with boards. Most important, the burials took place with a Minyan, a prayer quorum of at least ten males older than thirteen. Levertov conducted the service and led the burial Kaddish. The process took several days, during which Oskar kept Leipold and his officers drunk to keep them from finding out about the funerals.61 What is confusing about Levertov’s testimony is the time frame and the question of location. There was no place on Brünnlitz’s grounds to bury bodies, so it had to be outside the camp. And though he states the burials took place over several days, Levertov said nothing about when they took place. We have to rely on others’ testimony to supply us with information about the time and place for the Golleschau burials.
Peter Henzl took me to the small cemetery during my first visit to Brněnec and showed me two burial sites. The Schindler plot, he said, was originally outside the cemetery walls just beyond the mortuary. According to Thomas Keneally, one of the stories he heard about the Golleschau burials was that when Schindler tried to buy land within the cemetery, the priest instead offered him land just outside the cemetery walls usually reserved for suicides. Keneally said that Oskar told the priest that these were not suicides but “victims of a great murder.” But they were also Jews and not Christians, and even given the wonderful stories of Czech kindness to the Brünnlitz prisoners, it is quite possible that the best Oskar could do was get land just outside the cemetery walls.62
Francisco Wichter worked on one of the details that buried the Jewish dead from the two transports. However, it was unlikely, because of the weather, that any of the dead on the two transports were buried soon after their arrival in Brünnlitz. The winter of 1944–1945 had been brutal and did not begin to moderate until mid-February. This meant that it would take some time for the ground to thaw before graves could be dug at Bělá cemetery. Though Jewish law stipulates that burial should take place as soon as possible after death, it also provides for extenuating circumstances. Francisco said the detail that he worked on, which was accompanied by an SS guard, took place at night without a rabbi or rituals. Keneally said that Oskar paid an SS-Unterscharführer to take care of the grave plot. During one of my visits with Francisco in Buenos Aires, I drew a diagram of the cemetery for him and described it in detail. I wanted to know whether he could remember where the bodies were originally buried. He said they were buried, without a tombstone, just in front of the mortuary.63
In 1946, a Czech commission under Dr. Josef AndZl and a physician, Dr. Eduard Knobloch, exhumed the bodies in two mass graves in Bělá cemetery. The two grave sites measured 9 x 5 x 0.6 meters and 2.5 x 4 x 1 meters. According to Jitka Gruntová, a Czech specialist who has published several books on Schindler, the smaller mass grave contained the bodies of sixteen Golleschau Jews and the other mass grave contained the bodies of twenty-six Jews who died elsewhere. This would tend to confirm estimates that sixteen Jews on both transports died while en route to Brünnlitz or sometime after they arrived. Gruntová and Radoslav Fikejz, a curator at the city museum in Svitavy who has also researched Schindler, told me that both grave sites rested outside the cemetery’s walls; however, they disagreed on the location of these sites. After the Czech commission completed the autopsies of the bodies, they were respectfully re-buried within the cemetery’s walls, though the graves remained unmarked. After he finished filming in Brněnec, Steven Spielberg had a small memorial plaque put on the wall overlooking the new burial site inside the cemetery’s walls. He also had a large Star of David placed on the ground below the plaque. Bushes have been tastefully planted on either side of the memorial. The small plaque reads: Památce idovskym ObZtem 2 SvZtové Války (In Memory of the Jewish Victims of the Second War).64
