“I know a wonderful story. It is not a story for Jews, but for everyone. A
story of humanity, man to man. I tell all the writers I get through here.
Sitcom guys. Reporters for the LA Times. I get famous producers or their
wives…“
Speaking is Poldek Pfefferberg, a Polish Jew who survived the Nazis and moved
to Los Angeles after the war. It is 1980, and Poldek, the owner of a Beverly
Hills leatherwear shop, is exuberantly trying to sell a yarn to a customer,
the Australian writer Thomas Keneally.
Neither man realised it at the time, but this chance meeting would become,
over the next 15 years, one of the greatest literary partnerships of the
20th century. Keneally had entered Poldek’s shop to buy a briefcase. But
soon he felt compelled to listen to the extraordinary claims of this
excitable Slav. Poldek’s story, from which so many hardened LA writers had
politely excused themselves, was indeed great – a story of compassion,
redemption and superhuman courage. In years to come it would leave readers
and cinema audiences weeping, drained and exhausted. And in all particulars,
it was true.
Together Keneally and Poldek set out to rediscover the life of Oskar
Schindler, the charming, womanising, Sudeten-German industrialist who wore a
swastika pin on his shirt and dined and drank with the worst of the SS,
beneath whose casually savage gaze he contrived to save at least 1,972
Jewish employees from certain death in Nazi concentration camps during the
second world war.
At the time of their meeting, the 45-year-old Keneally had already found fame
with his novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and
Confederates, all three of which were shortlisted for the (then-named)
Booker prize. Poldek, who had read a review of Confederates in Newsweek,
needed no further encouragement – here was a “famous writer” who, being a
non-Jew and Australian, had “no axe to grind”.
In the ensuing months, Poldek virtually took Keneally by the scruff of the
neck and hastened him to Europe and Israel to interview the Schindlerjuden,
the Jews on Schindler’s list who owed their lives to Oskar’s courage.
Schindler’s list. It was the name Steven Spielberg would choose for the 1993
film based on Keneally’s book. The list exists in a glass case in a museum
in Israel, where it enjoys a hallowed place among the grim memorabilia of
20th-century Jewish history. It gives the names of those given a chance in
hell, Oskar’s preferred workers whom the notorious “Jew lover” chose to save
from the cattle trucks bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau and the gas chamber.
In 1945, Schindler’s list exerted a near-magical hold on the minds of the Jews
in his employ: to be on it promised salvation in the warm hearth of his
enamel-pot and armaments factory, where, in between cigars, women and
cognac, Oskar paid lip service to Nazi production quotas and bribed and
charmed his way around the immense Nazi bureaucracy to protect “his” Jews.
To be off the list meant dispatch to Auschwitz or summary execution.
In the last year of the Reich, Oskar’s Jews worshipped him; years later one or
two would begrudge him for enriching himself at their expense, and remark on
his louche morals. Yet Oskar was no mere rake, no ordinary capitalist. Yes,
he schmoozed with the most loathsome reptiles in the Nazi apparatus (and
cheated several times on his long-suffering, strict Catholic wife, Emilie).
Yet, though he made a fortune at his Jews’ expense, he then spent it on
bribes to secure their protection and health, leading to his bankruptcy. In
the end, virtually all of his employees saw Oskar as a godsend.
Keneally swiftly saw the power of Oskar’s story, thanks in no small part to
Poldek’s phenomenal energy and determination, and his book, Schindler’s Ark,
won the Booker prize in 1982. A year later, Steven Spielberg snapped up the
film rights. His 1993 film, Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson and Ralph
Fiennes, respectively playing Oskar Schindler and Amon Göth, the repulsive
Nazi commandant, won seven Oscars, including best picture and best director.
Keneally retraces the incredible journey in Searching for Schindler, his
latest book, in which Poldek leads him back into the heart of darkness: the
Krakow ghetto, the Plaszow camp and Auschwitz.
The duo met dozens of Schindlerjuden, such as the gentle Helen Hirsch, Amon
Göth’s housekeeper, who became “his slave and butt of his unreliable fury”.
To save her, Schindler wagered her life in a hand of blackjack against Göth;
Schindler won, and Hirsch lived.
Without Poldek bickering away at his side, Keneally may not have written
Schindler’s Ark; certainly it wouldn’t have had the depth and grit. Their
friendship was eccentric, comic, exasperating and inspiring: Schindler had,
after all, saved Poldek and his wife from the gas chambers. And here he was,
like a mock-Virgil, guiding his author into the lower circles of the
Holocaust he had lived through 40 years earlier.
Poldek from the start showed an unflinching faith in this story of “humanity,
man to man”. He told anyone who would listen of the greatness of Schindler,
that the book would win the “Novell prize” (this, to Keneally’s US
publisher, Simon & Schuster, whose executive replied airily, “Oh,
possibly; Simon & Schuster publish many Nobel prize contenders”) and
constantly told Spielberg that the film would win “an Oscar for Oskar”.
When the publishers said they only planned to print 35,000 copies of
Keneally’s book, Poldek snapped: “Only 35,000? … you’re going to need more
than that. Print 150,000 copies and they’ll go in a week.” His hopeful
prophecy would, in fact, prove accurate. Indeed, all of Poldek’s prophecies
would come true – except the “Novell prize”. (There is still time for that.)
The duo’s first meeting with Spielberg, in 1983, captured the comic nature of
their friendship: “The message had come through,” Keneally writes, “that
Steven Spielberg, whose ET was flickering from cinema screens throughout the
world, wanted to see me on the following Saturday at the house of Sid
Sheinberg (the head of Universal Pictures) in Bel Air.
“ ‘I’ll go too,’ Poldek told me, when he heard.
“ ‘I think I’m the only one invited, Poldek.'
“ ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I know Spielberg’s mother. I eat at her restaurant all
the time. She’s a beautiful woman. A tiny woman, but gracious.’ ”
Later, when they were about to be summoned to the Spielberg presence, Poldek
boomed: “All right. Let’s go and meet the wonder boychickel!’ ”
At the meeting, Poldek even presumed to lecture “Steven”: “Steven, I was
talking to your mother the other day, and she says you’re doing very well.”
Keneally noted the suspicion in his voice that Mrs Adler (Spielberg’s
mother) might have been exaggerating, with a sort of implied addendum – “If
you’d only studied harder in high school like your cousin Leon, you could
have been a chartered accountant too.” Thus, Keneally noted, did old Jews
always put successful younger Jews in their place.
It would take a decade for the film to be made. Keneally was paid handsomely
for the rights to his book, which he shared with Poldek, Schindler’s lawyer
and others. He made an attempt at the screenplay, which Spielberg
courteously rejected. Through much of the 1980s, Poldek kept calling
Spielberg’s office and telling him: “Just make Thomas’s script, Steven, and
you will have an Oscar for Oskar!” In the early 1990s, at the time of
Jurassic Park, “Steven” was told to “stop playing around with dinosaurs” and
make the film of Thomas’s book.
) ) ) ) )
Twenty-six years after Keneally wrote Schindler’s Ark, most people have heard
of Schindler – Krakow even has a Schindler Tour. But the dynamic duo who
brought this extraordinary story to light seem forgotten. Where are Keneally
and Poldek today?
We met as far from the Nazi death camps as can be imagined, in a cafe by Manly
Beach on Sydney Harbour, with the smell of sea salt in our nostrils and loud
Australian banter in the air. At first glance, Keneally seems an unlikely
amanuensis for the stories of the Jews on Schindler’s list. He is an Irish
Catholic Australian – “the boy from Homebush” (a working-class Sydney
suburb) – who trained for the priesthood, lost his faith, and then lapsed
happily into the obscure, ruffian world of 1960s Sydney bohemia. His first
book, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – about an Aborigine who married a
white woman – was published in 1972 to universal acclaim. He went on to
publish 23 novels and several works of nonfiction, and has the rare
distinction of being nominated for the Man Booker prize four times.
He’s in raucous good humour as he contends with the first question: why did he
write a book about why he wrote Schindler’s Ark?
Searching for Schindler cries out for an answer, largely because the book
fails in one respect – as Keneally readily admits: to find Schindler. The
big German’s motives for saving the Jews remain as elusive after we finish
reading as before we began. Just as intriguingly, we learn very little about
Keneally’s motives. Just why did he take on the Schindler story? Did he have
a moral interest in the fate of the Jews, or was he simply seduced by “a
great story”?
The two men seem curiously to share this central ambiguity. At a superficial
level, money seems a prime incentive for Schindler’s and Keneally’s actions:
respectively, to enrich themselves by exploiting cheap Jewish labour and a
bestselling book opportunity. In this sense, and in profoundly different
ways, both arguably exploited a Jewish tragedy for financial gain.
This is, of course, harsh and simplistic. Motives usually involve a pleasing
mix of self-interest and selflessness, although it is true that the Jewish
tragedy eventually consumed Oskar until by the end he seemed driven purely
by selfless courage and compassion.
“Yes, Oskar sincerely wanted to be rich,” said Keneally. “But the very fact
that you can’t place the point between his opportunism and altruism, the
fact that it’s impossible, attracted me to his story.”
So just why did this paid-up Nazi Sudetenlander risk his life to save his
Jewish employees? One theory is that, as a businessman (and not a very good
one), Schindler saw all too clearly, through his clandestine role in the
Abwehr, German intelligence, the terrible fate that awaited “his” Jewish
slaves, many of whom he had befriended. In fact, Schindler, unlike most
German industrialists, paid his Jewish workers (after the war, the survivors
gave Oskar $50,000 to start afresh; he lost it all, as well as his Argentine
farm, and died in 1974, bankrupt).
Some Jewish survivors complain that “Schindler made a fortune out of us”. But
they acknowledge that he saved their lives. As such, Schindler emerges as a
more appealing figure than, say, the golden-hearted bores of history. For
Schindler, the accidental hero, goodness began as a distraction and became a
compulsion.
“That’s true, haw haw,” laughs Keneally. “Oskar’s actually more noble than
those who despise him, and that’s part of the paradox of dignity and lack of
dignity; virtue and vice.” But still: he risked his life. Surely there was a
deeper compulsion? I raise the issue of Schindler’s wife, the obscure
Emilie, and the years of infidelity she endured. Emilie felt great
compassion for the Jews, and surely made her feelings known to her husband.
Perhaps his compassion for the Jews began as a sop to his wife’s concerns?
Could it be that Emilie made Oskar see the Jews as humans? Erika Rosenberg,
a friend of Emilie’s in her last years, has claimed Oskar’s wife was a true
source of his altruism.
“It is an interesting theory,” Keneally submits, “but I have never heard it
before.” Even so, he concedes that he should have examined the relationship
more deeply: “I have a great respect for Emilie. She emerges as the wronged
wife.”
If Searching for Schindler fails adequately to find Oskar’s motives, it
strangely compels the reader to embark on a parallel hunt for Keneally’s, to
apply the same blow torch that the author turns on Schindler: “Where does
altruism end and opportunism begin?” Put more brutally, does Keneally give a
stuff about the Jews, or simply the appeal of a good story? And should it
matter – Poldek, after all, applauded Keneally, a lapsed Catholic, as a man
“with no axe to grind”.
Keneally readily admits his ignorance of Jewish affairs when he started
Schindler’s Ark, and the burden of delivering this immense story seems at
times to have overwhelmed him. “It did change me to the extent that every
book that followed was compared with Schindler’s Ark,” he said. “And so I
choose to take as a positive challenge the job of knocking it off its
perch.” Yet it galls him to admit that he cannot summon up a fictional work
that matches its greatness.
Keneally threw himself at the job. He wrote in longhand, at a desk overlooking
Manly Beach, which “proved a good place to write a book on the Holocaust”.
He dictated the result into a tape recorder, which he gave to his typist (he
did not have a computer in 1982).
It became a haunting fixation: “There was also that certain obsession from
which writers suffer – that somehow the world needs to hear this story. The
writer is the ancient mariner who distracts the guests at the wedding feast,
and is hellbent on wrenching their imaginations in a direction they had not
necessarily intended to take them. Like many writers, I thought I could tell
this story swiftly, without being influenced by it at a profound, partially
disabling level… I did not expect a chaos of dreams. I did not expect
to be myself a target for Amon Göth’s querulous, malign spirit.”
He worked with an intensity that clearly put a strain on his family. Helping
his daughters with their homework was the one factor “that prevented my
total disappearance into the book”. Some nights, stricken by doubt, he had
recourse to whisky: “There was a heater in my office and, blurred and
depressed on a day of gales, I dropped beside it and slept. My folders of
transcripts and documents lay heaped on the pool table.”
These days and nights of total absorption in his subject seem to clash,
however, with the impression Keneally seeks to present over lunch: of the
fastidiously detached author who is simply fascinated by the Schindler
story, another subject that he must raid for its literary qualities and
retreat.
His detachment doesn’t quite convince. For one thing, his books display a
passionate concern for the downtrodden. He equates the lot of European Jewry
with the Irish and the Africans. Many of the Irish were transported Down
Under as convicts and had second-class status in Australia in the 1950s and
60s.
Another link to Schindler is rooted in Keneally’s own loss of faith. Dismayed
by the doctrinaire insistence on obedience in the church, Keneally embraced
secular humanism, and has always wondered how a Christian could be both
compassionate and “legalistic”: “Legalistically you can be a good Christian
– you go to church, etc – but in Schindler we have an absolutely flawed
bloke who sort of busted the envelope of what a good Christian should be.”
So where did his opportunism end and his altruism begin? Keneally replied with
extraordinary candour: “My opportunism for a particularly fascinating story
like this was very high. It’s not 50:50, not 60:40. I’d say 85:15 – I
was more attracted to the story in itself, as a literary opportunity to
write a book that was like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, or Tom
Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, and to try to write it as well as those books.”
Keneally’s brand of opportunism is not simply material. Schindler’s story
posed a great literary challenge: to find a narrative voice that matched the
power of the subject.
But was he morally involved in the book? “No, it’s more a fascination,” he
repeated. This rings a little hollow when you consider his passionate
involvement in moral issues: “I’ve always been interested in stories of
fraternity or cruelty across the line of racism,” he said. “I was a frequent
critic of the detention centres in Australia under John Howard. Those evil
places caused great human misery.” His defence of Aboriginal rights is also
well known.
As we lunge into a plate of oysters by the beach, Keneally sighs at the memory
of Schindler and Poldek: they may have cast a great shadow over his life,
yet he certainly enjoyed those few years’ captive to the twin sirens of fame
and (a little) fortune. He won’t disclose how much money he made, but it was
a decent sum.
In 2000, Keneally’s exhausting schedule caught up with him. His beloved
father, who fought the Nazis in the Middle East in 1941, died. Keneally’s
grief, combined with overwork, sent him to the wall for two months; he
received constant antibiotics and medical care. “I was useless and finished,
physically and mentally.”
He has since bounced back. Then, in 2001, aged 87, the seemingly
indestructible Poldek Pfefferberg died. He deserves an equal share with
Keneally in Spielberg’s accolade: “I owe you so much. The world
owes you more.”
Yet both men would have felt acute discomfort at being owed anything: the
revelation of Oskar’s story was their finest reward.
Searching for Schindler, by Thomas Keneally (Hodder & Stoughton, £20), is
published on Thursday. It will be available at the BooksFirst price of £18,
including postage & packing. Tel: 0870 165 8585
A write of passage
Schindler’s List might never have been made if Thomas Keneally hadn’t gone
shopping for a briefcase one day in Los Angeles. In the following abridged
book extract, he recalls his first encounter with the man who was to change
his life
It was late October 1980. The heat and bearing of the wind swept me along
Wilshire Boulevard as I went out to shop, looking for a modestly priced
briefcase in Beverly Hills, unsure I was in a zone where such banal things
were sold. Passing exorbitant Rodeo Drive, one block from the hotel, I saw,
stretching away south, a street that seemed to have normal shops, and family
cars bearing the scuffs of suburban use.
I had not gone far when I encountered a store named the Handbag Studio. Its
goods looked out at me through the glass, past banners that declared Handbag
Studio’s autumn sale. On these placards, kidskin, cowhide, pigskin,
snakeskin and crocodile were mentioned.
I hesitated, always a nervous shopper. But the shopkeeper soon appeared beside
me, having stepped out from within. He had a stocky Slavic look — a touch of
Tartar in the cheeks, a barrel chest, powerful arms, a wrestler’s neck.
There was a glitter of fraternal amusement in his eyes. Even then I believe I
perceived that he had dealt in markets beyond my knowing.
He said: “So it’s a hundred and five degrees out here and you don’t want to
come into my air-conditioned store. Do you think I’ll eat you?”
“I was just looking for a briefcase,” I said, defensively.
“I have the best, young man. Hong Kong and Italy. The best!”
I let myself be led into the store, which — as he had promised — was cool.
“I have a good case,” I told him earnestly. My wife and daughters had given it
to me. But one of its hinges had gone, and the other hinge was tearing too.
The storekeeper respected my sentimental attachment to the old one, but
pointed out that such an accident was unlikely to befall what he was
offering me. “You just can’t put everything in them. A truck? They’re not a
truck, you know!” And his wide-set Tartar eyes glimmered. He introduced
himself as Leopold Page. I had not long been calling him Mr Page when he
told me he somewhat regretted the name. It had been foisted on him at Ellis
Island in 1947, where he said they had scared him by telling him Americans
couldn’t pronounce his Polish name, but that if he wanted to change it
later, it would cost him $500. He quickly invited me to call him Leopold;
then somehow, in a short time, I took to using the diminutive, Poldek. His
true family name from Krakow, that beautiful Galician city, being
Pfefferberg — pepper mountain — I would come to think it a name that suited
his exorbitant energy, his feisty goodwill.
Having been insistent about getting me into his shop, Poldek seemed more
curious about me than interested in a sale. This was scarcely an act. It
would prove to be the way he was.
As we talked, Poldek showed me a simple lock-up black briefcase, with nicely
patterned calfskin. I said I’d take it. I was grateful that the shopping had
been uncomplicated and unexpectedly pleasant, and in between chatting, the
deal-making had probably taken no more than two or three minutes.
I had a book out in the US, I told him. Poldek asked me the name.
Confederates, I said. “So,” he said reflectively. “A writer. What a
wonderful thing! I was a teacher before the war. A professor in the
gymnasium! But a writer! Do you know Mr Irving Stone? Irving Stone came to
this store once. We have a good reputation.”
As Freddy, his son, stood by, awaiting any aphorism I chose to utter, Poldek
took me aside, towards the curtain that led into the store’s back room.
At the curtain, he talked.
“Here’s what I wanted to pointed out…” he said in a usage he had made his own.
“I know a wonderful story. It is not a story for Jews but for everyone.
A story of humanity, man to man. I tell all the writers I get through here.
Sitcom guys. Reporters for the LA Times. I get famous producers or their
wives. Did you know Howard Koch? Howard Koch co-wrote Casablanca. A really
nice guy. You see, everyone needs a handbag, everyone needs an attaché case.
So I tell everyone I know the greatest story of humanity, man to man. Some
listen — an article there, a news item here. A young man I know, executive
producer at Paramount… he does what he can. But it’s a story for you, I
swear.”
Every writer hears that exhortation. People without any idea of how long a
book takes pass on the tale of an amusing uncle or aunt, alone with the
strange addendum: I could write it if I had nothing else to do. He waited
for me to put up resistance, but I did not yet.
He said: “I was saved, and my wife was saved, by a Nazi. I was a Jew
imprisoned with Jews. So a Nazi saves me and, more important, saves Misia,
my young wife. So although he’s a Nazi, to me he’s Jesus Christ. Not that he
was a saint. He was all-drinking, all-black-marketing, all-screwing, okay?
But he got Misia out of Auschwitz, so to me he is God.”
Freddy was listening to this with a minor nod. It was the family story, as
central as a book of the Pentateuch.
“Come back into the repair shop, I’ll show you.”
Poldek led me through the curtained door, Freddy followed. We came into a
spacious room with an open office at the rear. The light was factory-dim. A
slim, well-dressed woman in advanced middle age was working at a repair
table running lengthwise along the room, covered with expensive handbags
with broken clasps or hinges, and with pliers and receipt books.
“Misia, darling!” Poldek boomed. The woman looked up with a faint,
even timid frown, like a wife used to having her husband’s extravagant
enthusiasms imposed on her. Poldek introduced me. I was a writer and he’s
been telling me about Schindler. This was the first time I heard that name.
“Oh.” She smiled. “Oskar. Oskar was a god. But Oskar was Oskar as well.” She
gave me the sort of smile I would get used to from people who had been under
Oskar Schindler’s control in one of his two camps. The smile of those
somewhat baffled by a phenomenon.
“Schindler was a big guy, beautiful suits, the best,” she said. “He was very
tall and women loved him. Poldek and I were in his camp.”
“But your husband tells me you were also in Auschwitz?” I asked. She admitted
it with a dolorous nod. “Oh, dear sir, I was. It was an accident: they sent
our train the wrong way. When one of the girls reached up to the window of
the cattle truck to break off ice, she saw the sun was in the wrong place
for us to be going south to Schindler’s camp. We were going west. Oswiecim.
Auschwitz. It broke our hearts!”
Freddy, the good son, said: “But Oskar got you out, Ma.”
Poldek said: “Oskar sent this bee-ourt-ee-ful Volksdeutsch secretary as a
bribe to the SS.”
“Poldek,” Misia chided. “That’s just what some people
say…”
“Darling Misia, Pemper told me!”
Just the same, one could tell she had her ideas about it.
“The best journey of my life,” she said. “Out of Auschwitz. Half of us
with scarlet fever or the typhus. And we turned up at Brinnlitz at dawn, a
freezing day, and we see Oskar standing in the courtyard of the factory in a
little hat… a… Poldek, help me.”
“In one of those Tyrolean hats, you know, with the feather on the side.”
“Yes, a Tyrolean hat. There was SS all about, but we had eyes just for him. He
was beautiful. And he told us there was soup.”
“Otherwise,” said Freddy, “I wouldn’t be here, would I, Ma?”
“Exactly, Freddy darlink.”
“Come and see, Thomas, if I may call you,” Poldek boomed. “See what I have
here.
He opened the two filing cabinets, selecting documents — a piece on Oskar
Schindler from the Los Angeles Examiner, copies of post-war speeches by
former Jewish prisoners in Schindler’s honour, carbon copies of letters in
German, and documents partly yellowed, old enough for the staples in them to
have rusted even in southern California’s desert climate. There was a notice
of Schindler’s death in 1974, and the reburial of his body a month later in
Jerusalem. There were also photographs of scenes from a prison camp.
As Poldek extracted documentation from this drawer and then another, he went
on: “This guy Oskar Schindler was a big master-race sort of guy. Tall and
smooth and his suits… The cloth! He drank cognac like water. And I remember,
when I met him the first time, he was wearing a huge black and red
Hackenkreuz, you know, the Nazi pin.”
He rifled through a folder full of photographs, pulled one out, and there was
his younger self, very snappy in his four-cornered Polish officer’s cap, a
stocky boy in a lieutenant’s uniform, wearing the same confident,
half-smiling face that he now directed at me.
Back in Krakow as a prisoner, Poldek had used a German-issued document, which
originally had been intended to enable him to visit his soldiers in a
military hospital further east, to bamboozle a barely literate German guard.
So he slipped out of the railway waiting room, caught a tram and went home
to his mother. “And here’s this big German guy, handsome, and he’s
discussing with her that she’ll decorate his apartment at Straszewskiego
Street. That’s how I first met this Oskar Schindler.”
Misia and Poldek came to the United States in 1947 and rented a tiny room in
Long Island, which they shared with other survivors. Poldek saw another
Polish refugee repairing handbags in a little temporary store on the
pavement. He got talking to the man, watched him at work, and went home to
tell Misia they were now in the handbag business. They did well enough in
New York to move out to California in the 1950s, to start importing and to
own a few outlets, like the one I had wandered into. Poldek moved like a man
who believed luck was on his side.
I went back to my hotel with the pile of photocopied papers in my new
briefcase and began reading; it was instantly engrossing. There was a speech
that one of Oskar Schindler’s Jewish accountants, Itzhak Stern, had made in
Tel Aviv in 1963, about his experience of working with, as well as for, this
Nazi who had been a factory owner. There were a number of other such
speeches from Schindler survivors living all over Europe and the United
States. Then there was a series of affidavit-like testimonies from a range
of former prisoners, Poldek and Misia among them.
I came across the typewritten list of workers for Schindler’s camp in Moravia,
Zwangsarbeitslager Brinnlitz — that is, Forced Labour Camp Brinnlitz — which
was theoretically under the control of a mother camp, the infamous
Gröss-Rosen. Searching the list, I came upon the names of Poldek and Misia
Pfefferberg. Misia, number 195 on the list, was recorded as having been born
in 1920 and was marked down as Metallarbeiter (a metalworker), though she
had never worked with metal until then. Leopold Pfefferberg, another “Ju.
Po.” — Polish Jew — was number 173, and a Schweisser — welder. He had not
used a welding iron until then, but was confident he could learn. This
document would achieve international renown as Schindler’s list. The list
was life, I would one day write and the actor Ben Kingsley would say, and
all around it lay the pit.
I had not, as some readers would later kindly see it, fought my way to the
centre of a maze to emerge with one of the essential tales of an awful
century. I had stumbled upon it. I had not grasped it. It had grasped me.
©Thomas Keneally, 2008
