That night we were all back at the same cinema, in suits. Our workaday look acknowledged the frightful deaths, the years of terror that had gone into making the tale. The same mixture of dizziness and dread possessed me. Nonetheless, I reenacted with Branko Lustig the early scene of the movie in which Liam Neeson hands Branko a roll of money, offering him a fold of dollars while Judy took a picture. The president and his wife came and shook hands with everyone vigorously and in rapid order, speaking in low tones. Though not always popular in America, he was much admired in the outer world and extremely popular in Australia. Hillary Clinton mentioned to me a book Nan Talese had sent her—Woman of the Inner Sea—for which she claimed an enthusiasm. The Clintons were clearly close friends of Spielberg, who was an energetic supporter of their broader politics. At the end of the screening, people did not know whether to clap or gasp. Once the applause began, it became a frenzy.
It fell to Judy, the great-granddaughter of an Irish political prisoner and a Limerick shoplifter, to approach the manager, standing in place to bow to the departing president in the quickly emptying foyer, and ask what was going to happen to the film poster in the display case at the front of the cinema. He said calmly, “I just take it down for now. Would you like it?” Hence, as an afterthought, the Keneallys acquired that premiere poster.
Then we all went back to the hotel. We sat reflectively over some wine. No post-premiere bash had been staged to mute the impact. Steven Spielberg signed a copy of the book for me. Jerry Molen spoke softly. He had seen many nights like this. Murmuring reverentially, we relived the black and white polarities of terror and deliverance, and the grays of ghetto-style and camp squalor. Even by now, midnight on Monday, November 26, 1993, the film was a triumph.
But despite its success in translating the icons of the Holocaust into accessible form, there was that in me which still said, “Film is just so limited.” I was, of course, delighted that within the terms of popular cinema, Spielberg had portrayed so successfully the tale the survivors had once told me. Yet there was also something in me which remained, and indeed still remains, fundamentally unimpressed by cinema as compared to writing. Needless to say, this is more my problem than the cinema’s.
It was clear that though the film was destined for broad approval, it raised passionate questions too. How could the Holocaust be adequately depicted in a “Hollywood” film? asked some historians and film critics. Was it decent to try to do so? Wasn’t the Holocaust untranslatable in conventional film terms? Some declared the film to be a form of Nazi gangster movie which was far outshone by Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 documentary Shoah. The reaction of African American students at Castlemont High School in Oakland who laughed at the execution of a woman engineer—they believed a body shot in such a way would fall otherwise than it did—was gleefully reported in the media. In those early days it seemed that the world was trying to make up its mind whether it would award Schindler the full laurels.
In a symposium reproduced in the Village Voice involving Art Spiegelman, the creator of the brilliant Maus cartoons; filmmaker Ken Jacobs; and the admirable Philip Gourevitch, who would later tell the story of the Rwandan hecatomb, there were a lot of harsh opinions uttered about the film, even by those who defended Spielberg’s right to make it. It is probably worth quoting Spiegelman’s both extreme and contradictory view:
These Jews are slightly gentrified versions of Julius Streicher’s Der Stürmer caricatures: the juiceless Jewish accountant, the Jewish seductress, and, most egregiously, the Jews bargaining and doing business inside a church. It’s one of the few scenes that wasn’t even borrowed from the novel. Spielberg has long had a Jewish problem. The Jewish “magic” which leaped out of the Lost Ark at the end of his first Raiders movie was all the wrath of God melting down the villains with a supernatural nuclear bomb. Schindler’s List refracts the Holocaust through the central image of a righteous Gentile in a world of Jewish bit players and extras. The Jews function as an occasion for Christian redemption.
One critic argued that to have the music score relate to the burning of bodies on Chujowa Górka was a form of manipulation. It was as if Spielberg had been the only filmmaker ever to employ a composer, and stood condemned for doing so. Others asked, with more justice, Why would there not be a score? There is always a score in movies. And why, in such a scene, was it manipulative? Yet, as another critic said, “It’s all done in movie terms…It’s saturated with movieness…It seems a little strange to attack him for fulfilling that function, where if he did something else you would be ignoring him.”
The morning after the premiere, we visited as a group the recently opened Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Mrs. Schindler, whom I had seen only on film and communicated with only by mail, was a member of the group, seated in a wheelchair and accompanied by her companion, the Argentinian woman Erika Rosenberg. She looked frail but retained her handsome face—she, too, had participated in what Poldek had thought of as the bounty of bone structure. She wore a grandmotherly half-smile and glittering eyes. I went up to her and complimented her in rudimentary German for being there, in the foyer of the museum which commemorated the massive events in which she had had an heroic part. The vigor in her eyes could be attributed in part to the fact that she was still fighting her corner of her ruinous marriage to Oskar. The new eminence the rascal had acquired was hard for her to bear; that much was apparent. To an extent, and even understandably, she would never stop disliking Poldek for running with the story, me for writing it, Spielberg for exalting it on film.
We toured the museum and looked at the photographs and exhibits and, on video screens, the survivors invoking Sobibor, Mauthausen, Treblinka, Auschwitz. Exhibitions showed the interiors of Eastern European Jewish homes, and one told the story of a Jewish child’s experience of the Holocaust, related in a way which had gained the approval, an attendant told us, of three child psychiatrists.
We experienced the inside of a cattle truck, and it fascinated me to see people who were all familiar with the insides of such rough transport peering in and frowning. Emilie herself knew from the Goleszów men what the inside of a truck was like. Poldek and Misia certainly knew, and Misia graciously saved us from the news that experiences suffered on the lip of the grave might be only faintly reproduced in a Washington museum.
At some stage about now, Spielberg got the idea of raising a team of volunteers throughout the world to interview all remaining survivors of the Holocaust, and to record their experiences on a database archive. It would be an extraordinary database, where one could both listen to and look at live testimonies of survivors, but also cross-reference them to build a picture of particular aspects of ghetto and camp life, from ghetto police to food rations to SS NCOs. It would be a repository for future generations. The value of such a database for researchers would be prodigious. I couldn’t help asking myself what it would be like to have such a database of Irish Famine survivors, or of victims of the slave trade to North America and the West Indies. But Spielberg also wanted to lay the remaining testimony down for the reason that the Holocaust had happened to what he now saw as his people.
He intended to call this operation the Shoah Foundation, and it soon began its life in prefabricated offices close to Amblin and Universal’s car park.
Poldek and I visited the place a number of times, as it grew and took on a gradually more formal appearance.
Using the database, one could not only access the story of any given survivor, but if one wanted to check, for example, on the population of rats in the Lodz ghetto, one had only to type in the request and the search engine would surrender everything survivors could tell you about the unsanitary conditions of Lodz.
The day after the Washington premiere, the film was to be shown in New York to raise money for Glovin’s Schindler Foundation. This had been a condition of Glovin’s signature to the contract all those years before. The entire Schindler entourage, including the leading actors, were to be at this event. Thus Emilie was in New York too, and appeared on a number of television shows. And always, the handsome, middle-aged Erika Rosenberg pushed the idea that here was the true source of Oskar’s altruism. And yet she’d been cut out of everything and gone utterly uncompensated! Rosenberg would tell the world, “She [Emilie] was cut out of the film and the book in a very humiliating and offensive way.” Since Spielberg had expressed great admiration for Emilie, I knew she had not been treated offensively. I got an impression of tranquillity from Emilie, while Rosenberg fibrillated around her, making claims of which the world would, in months to come, take notice.
The afternoon of the New York premiere, Judy and I called at Simon & Schuster, who were so pleased with the book that they intended to bring out a new hardcover edition, a kind of special-occasion presentation volume. To celebrate, like a suddenly flush miner from the Australian gold rushes, I bought Judy a gold bracelet with Amor Vincit Omnia engraved on it.
Irvin Glovin, in a splendid dinner suit which fitted his tennis player’s form magnificently, and Jeannie, with her California tan and cocktail dress, made impressive figures that night in the foyer of the theater. They gave us a warm welcome. They told us that there was a party back in their suite at the Waldorf-Astoria that night, but genuinely enough we claimed exhaustion. I had recently resigned from the board of the Schindler Foundation, rendered uneasy by Glovin’s intentions to endow researchers to find from the study of Schindler’s life a virtual inoculation for interracial cruelty. They seemed very disappointed, and I promised them I would visit them the next day and have a drink with them. I was not surprised that the Schindler Foundation failed to ever set up its research project. It may have been that presidents and vice-chancellors of universities were as disturbed as I was by the fixity of Glovin’s ideas.
Now, at Steven’s invitation, we were flown to London for the premiere there. It possessed more of the character of an accustomed premiere, with a carpet outside the cinema in Leicester Square, and a large cocktail party beforehand. Here I saw among the crowd the lively Australian Kathy Lette and her extraordinary husband, also an Australian, the human rights advocate and brilliant lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, one of the most remarkable fellows, the most learned, the most logically gifted advocates one could meet. And there was their embattled friend and mine, Salman Rushdie, whom Judy and I had first met when we attended the Booker Prize ceremony the year after Schindler’s Ark had won it.
Spielberg had also invited Judy, Jane and myself to the Viennese premiere; indeed, to the Frankfurt and Tel Aviv premieres as well, if we wished to accompany him. But my seminar and lecture responsibilities limited us to Vienna.
There was some anxiety among the Spielberg camp about Vienna. A neo-Nazi letter bomb had recently blown off part of the Mayor of Vienna’s hand. And when Judy, Jane and I arrived at the Hotel Sacher a little later than the rest of the Spielberg group, and tried to register at the normal check-in desk, the studio’s security people descended upon us, surrounded us like sheepdogs and urged us to come with them and not to loiter in reception. We were given badges to identify us—in this case the badge of the day represented the Great Seal of the State of California. We were to wear it at all times. Anyone who did not have such a badge would be kept separate from us by phalanxes of security. The third floor was devoted entirely to Spielberg’s party, and a guard with a semiautomatic sat before the two ornate lifts which serviced the floor.
That afternoon we assembled and were led via service lifts through the kitchen into a basement corridor, up steps and then into an ornate hall which had been set up for a press conference. Among us was Simon Wiesenthal, the Nazi hunter, who had come to join us on the rostrum and with whom I had a little time to chat, with appropriate awe. At that time Wiesenthal was elderly but unstooped, and looked much younger than his years. I knew that he was aware of Oskar’s case, and he told me he had met both Poldek and Oskar earlier in the century.
On the rostrum I sat with Spielberg, Branko Lustig and Simon Wiesenthal during the press conference, in the midst of which one irate Austrian journalist asked Spielberg why he had called the film Schindler’s List rather than Schindler’s Ark. Because Schindler’s List is the title I bought, he answered with justifiable bemusement. When the reporters inquired about Oskar, Wiesenthal confirmed that he had met him and had admired his work, and lamented that resistance to the process of extermination had not been more widespread. He approved of Oskar’s Righteous Persons status.
Jane and Judy had watched the conference in progress from the back of the hall. When, after a considerable time, a halt was called, a stampede of press, uncharacteristic of Austrians, came pressing forward, seeking further interviews. A fighting phalanx of American and Austrian security men—themselves adorned with the Great Seal badge—ruthlessly pushed aside the press to enable the members of our party at the back of the room to reach us at the front. It was an extraordinarily powerful performance and reminded me of the rolling maul in rugby. And so we escaped by a further door, down staff corridors and offices and through more kitchens, until we arrived in a laneway behind the Sacher, where three Mercedes and a number of other vehicles waited for us to make up a convoy.
We were hustled into the Mercedes and whisked away at a great pace—no gradual takeoff. The security men in each vehicle communicated via the radios in their sleeves as we sped beneath the wan sun toward the Austrian chancellory. We drew up in a baroque archway and were urgently told to leave the cars. I followed my daughter Jane up a stone spiral staircase, the type the servants of Count Metternich or Talleyrand had once used—the tradesmen’s entrance. A bulky bodyguard in front of my daughter dropped a huge, squarish semiautomatic pistol out of his suit onto the step. It made a metallic clunk and lay on the step ahead like a suddenly assertive animal. “Scusi,” said the man, and he scooped it up, concealed it back in his suit again with one smooth movement, and continued to climb the stairs.
In the corner of a huge office, and beneath great moldings and decorative paintings, we were greeted by Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, a dark-haired, good-looking man in early middle-age. He led us to a low table there and we all sat down around it. He talked to us about the way the war had been followed by the mythology that the Holocaust was all a German work, and how the issue of Austrian participation was suppressed, since to utter it would be to divide citizens. He had written a graduate thesis on this, to the chagrin of some of his academic advisers.
We were all encouraged to talk, and when it was my turn I spoke of the patterns of replies to the queries I had made of Schindlerjuden. I remarked it was also a matter of amazement that Schindler’s behavior had not been more influenced by the state’s conditioning of German opinion. The license to hate was writ very broadly, and one would normally have expected someone like Oskar, no philosopher, to have adopted it un-critically. Better qualified, more intellectual men than himself had done so. Otto Ohlendorf, who commanded one of the Einsatzgruppen, had studied jurisprudence and economics at Leipzig, Göttingen and Padua. Ernst Biberstein, another officer, was a Protestant pastor. Another a physician, another an opera singer. I felt I was struggling in my remarks—the recent timetable hadn’t been good for thinking—and I believed that I had let Spielberg down a bit by having little to say that was original. Everything I said here was either in the book or in articles I had written.
When we had all spoken, the genial chancellor told his story of the rise of neo-Nazism in Austria, assured us of our safety, and then asked, “Would you like to see the room where the Congress of Vienna occurred?” And by the shortest of corridors, we now entered a glittering hall of mirrors and brocaded and embellished surfaces. Here, after the Napoleonic Wars, a conservative peace had been made which had sustained the Austro-Hungarian Empire for another hundred years and produced the so-called Pax Britannica, the British Peace, in which there were no European wars, though many others were fought in the acquisition and retention of colonies.
It was late afternoon by now, and we enjoyed another car chase to the American embassy in Boltzmanngasse. The splendor of this eighteenth-century house seemed like a more warmly decorated continuation of the chancellory. We met Swanee Grace Hunt, the then U.S. ambassador and a member of the fabled Texas Hunt family, who at one stage—so I seem to remember—had cornered the world silver market and so, unlike the Keneallys, had never been short of a dollar. Spielberg approached me once we were all in the room where cocktails were served. He said, “Will you do me a favor? You were good at the chancellory. Will you make the speech for me?” The idea scared me less than had the impromptu speech at the chancellory. Once I got up I simply told our story, the story of all the film’s progenitors, including Poldek. Thanks to generations of talkative Keneallys, the speech was made, and I could have a scotch.
I fell into conversation with Mrs. Bankier and her daughter. Bankier himself, now deceased, was the man who had run Rekord, as it was called before it became Schindler’s Emalia and DEF. Abraham Bankier was either a part-owner or related to the owners, and was a hero as universally beloved as Stern or Pemper. But in the film these three characters had been coalesced into Stern, and a wistfulness over that—I would not say a resentment—possessed Mrs. Bankier as she and her daughter spoke of ways to make some appropriate gesture to her husband’s memory. I told her to quote anything from the book that she wished to. “I realize that this is what movies do,” said the daughter.
The cinema, when we got there for the premiere, was in chaos, and Judy, Jane and I were manhandled to our seats by a muscular security woman yelling, “Der Buchautor!” Spielberg spoke briefly onstage, then Wiesenthal, and as the film began we departed from the back row of the cinema—we were by now familiar with the film—along an obscure corridor again, and off for a splendid dinner in a traditional Austrian restaurant. One of the members of the party was Béatrice Macola, who had played Schindler’s girlfriend Ingrid in the film. Spielberg, no wine drinker, asked Jane, Béatrice and myself for help choosing the wine; a boy from barbarous Sydney helping a boy from Cleveland with the high vintages of Europe.
For us, that dinner was one of farewell. The Spielberg team were pulling out for Frankfurt the next morning. Spielberg embraced Jane as we came to the service lift in the basement of the Sacher, and to my amazement Judy, too, asked to be hugged—it was rarely she asked such a gesture of film people. I told Spielberg to feel honored.
When our breakfast arrived the next morning, we found the floor very quiet, in an unearthly silence now that the solemn circus had departed. We still possessed our now irrelevant badges, sans man with semiautomatic, and, since I was to do a book-signing that morning, I still had an excursion to make in a town which was reputedly full of neo-Nazis. We descended to the concierge and asked the way to the bookstore, and thus walked out into a biting morning and urbane streets full of fascinating stores, past the huge Plague memorial, toward the bookshop we were to visit. It was a brilliant movie-set of a Buch handlung, suffused with the amber light from gleaming windows. The restrained and artful spines of European books displayed themselves so gracefully. The proprietor and I spoke of the Australian writer Europeans liked best, Patrick White, the great Nobel Prize–winning novelist.
A few people arrived, and were shy, but at last there formed a queue which grew apace. But when I began to sign, it was not a case of combative neo-Nazis, but of young Viennese coming forward, university students and young couples who, to my astonishment, wept when I signed. I mentioned the tears to the bookshop proprietor. “They’ve never heard about it in accessible form before,” he said. “Their parents never talked about it.”
I made the obvious point to him that these young readers were not to blame.
“It’s the shock of knowing we were in it too. We tended to put it off on the Germans.”
Having unwittingly generated such reactions in Austrian youth, I was pleased not to have to face the test of Frankfurt.
In the months to come, my skepticism about whether the film might influence people was allayed, in part at least, particularly by the young who wanted their books signed. I found that Hispanic, ethnic Chinese, Filipinos, Koreans and Californian Japanese related strongly to the book. They had a memory of being stereotyped in childhood, as did the subcontinental Indian community in America, presenting the book for signature at this or that Barnes & Noble, from Thousand Oaks to the Mexican border.
There is very little of narrative value in the consequent honors that come a writer’s way purely on the basis that a good film has been made of a book the writer has written, but I remember one of them with particular affection. It was a collegial event, the Scripter Awards, in the library of the University of Southern California, attended by Spielberg and the other producers, at which Zaillian and I accepted a prize conjointly. I remember the appearance of Poldek on Larry King. Poldek showed he had learned something about television since our days with Jane Pauley. I remember, too, a pre-Oscars party hosted by Joe Segal, a Century City magnate, and Kaye Kimberly-Clark, his Australian-born wife and legendary beauty. They wanted the centerpiece to be a huge Oskar cake. The cast of Schindler flocked to the party, as did Jane Campion, who had been nominated for the Academy Award for her film The Piano, and Toni Colette of Muriel’s Wedding, and other Australians. The artwork which astonished us all was not the cake, but the pictures on Joe Segal’s walls—the Légers, the Picassos and, as Liam Neeson said, “The fookin’ Cézannes, man! Have you seen the fookin’ Cézannes?” Liam similarly appreciated the deeply gold-plated lavatory seat, washbasin and taps. But what astonished me was to meet one of the Segals’ neighbors, Rhonda Fleming, star in my childhood of The Spiral Staircase, and of Hitchcock’s Spellbound. She was so agelessly beautiful in her early seventies that the question of whether knives had played any part seemed utterly improper. Poldek and I took home the chocolate Oscars we had been allotted, and deposited them in our refrigerators, where even in Australia mine still resides.
But then, among the most memorable contingent honors of the season, came an invitation to the White House for dinner. Judy drove up from University Hills to the Newport Beach mall to buy me an Armani dinner suit at Neiman Marcus, which the people at the university generally referred to as “Needless Markup.” I would look swish in the White House, or so my wife’s theory went. Judy and Jane flew to Washington and booked earlier in the day into the Willard Hotel, the most resonatingly famous of all Washington hotels, where Thomas Francis Meagher, one of the Australian convicts I was researching, had always stayed. In the meantime I gave my afternoon seminar.
Rushing back to University Hills, I packed, went to the airport and arrived at last at dusk in that hotel in Washington so closely associated with presidents, generals, writers and other riffraff. I took what I thought was the Armani out of its bag and said to Jane, “What do you think of my flash new suit?” Alas, I am color-blind. Navy blue had always been indistinguishable from black to my eyes, and I had packed not the Armani but a normal navy blue suit. In its long, indeed more than 150-year history, the Willard had had its quotient of similar dunces, and I went to the White House in a swiftly rented suit; the Armani was reserved for more mundane American and Sydney events, such as the formal evenings of the Manly-Warringah Rugby League Club.
Even so, this was an astonishing night for us. The president, being gunned-for over Arkansas real estate deals, possessed that astonishing, languid composure and the same sharpness of gaze he had had at the premiere. But it seemed both he and his wife had more time. The first lady again discussed with me my novel Woman of the Inner Sea. The president had, above all, a campaigner’s capacity to fix you with his eye and engage you—even among old friends of his such as Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward—as if you were somehow the focus of the room. He possessed a capacity, that is, to convince you of the special relationship he had with you. I had seen this in other men before. Bob Hawke, Australian prime minister, had the same talent.
As the evening progressed I had enough time to remember that another Australian, at least an Australian by convict sentence, General Thomas Francis Meagher, had stood as honor guard here over the body of Lincoln. Yet contemporary scandals intruded on reminiscence. During the dinner, George Stephanopoulos was frequently in the dining room and at the president’s ear. This was the sole sign that President Clinton and his elegant wife had enemies upon this earth.
Films, as well as being good for fancy invitations, can also produce a storm front of accusations. The story that Emilie Schindler had been shortchanged in the whole process, had been taken for granted and neglected, was still around. It happened that one of the speeches I made was at a fund-raiser in Miami-Dade County, at which Emilie also made an appearance. Before the event, we were all taken to lunch by the organizers. I found myself sitting next to Erika Rosenberg, and asked her if she really believed that Emilie had not been consulted on the book and film, and had not been paid anything. With obvious sincerity, she answered, “Not a penny.”
I asked her if she was sure about that; did she know a lawyer called Juan Caro? She knew Mr. Caro but still insisted, “Not a penny.”
“And not a penny from the film?”
Mrs. Schindler, observing our conversation, moved forward angrily in her chair and told Rosenberg to drop the subject. The next morning, on a plane back to California, I used the phone recessed into the seat to call Spielberg’s office and informed them that Rosenberg and, passively, Emilie were still pursuing the “not a penny” line. I told Steven’s assistant, Chris Kelly, that I knew Rosenberg was wrong, not least because I had recently sent Emilie a check myself. Chris told me that a sum had been paid Mrs. Schindler recently, and when I asked, admitting that it was none of my business, whether it was a settlement in the thousands or tens of thousands, Chris indicated the latter. Next, still in the air, I called Emilie’s old friend and Schindler’s lover Ingrid, and her husband, on Long Island. They were amused by Rosenberg. “Emilie is fine,” they told me.
I asked, “Should I send another check?”
“No. Rosenberg doesn’t know everything. Some things are looked after here.”
It seemed that Mrs. Schindler had a New York bank account which, if not sumptuous, was adequate. If so, it was simple justice to a splendid woman who strenuously maintained, in the face of the world, her rage against her miscreant husband.
Spielberg was content to ignore Rosenberg, however widely she was published. After all, he would soon be fighting off a murderous stalker of his own. But I always felt affronted by the ease with which the claim was made that Emilie had been unjustly treated. It was claimed, too, perhaps unreliably, that when Emilie died in Germany in 2001, a year of especial resonance in this account, she died impoverished.