Searching for Schindler: A Memoir by Thomas Keneally

Author:Thomas Keneally [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Film & Video, Performing Arts, Schindler's List (Motion Picture), Authors; Australian - 21st Century, 20th Century, Holocaust, 21st Century, General, Literary, Personal Memoirs, Keneally; Thomas, Biography, Historical, Biography & Autobiography, History & Criticism, Authors; Australian - 20th Century, Authors; Australian, History
ISBN: 9780385526173
Google: d3ks-SLlwmUC
Amazon: B001I8QVGU
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Published: 2007-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

Ten

* * *

Even in 1981, the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was considered mildly dangerous, transporting people through former battlefields where the wreckage of tanks and trucks still lay beside the road. This had been the route Oskar had taken every year for a decade to meet his Jerusalem survivors, and it was also the track his corpse took to its burial place on Mount Zion in 1974. I was very pleased to be taking that road myself. Judy would be coming to Jerusalem in a day or so. Our teenage daughters were to be minded by my mother, loving but percipient, and by their overindulgent grandfather, who had spent time himself in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem during the war as an Australian soldier on leave from Egypt and Libya. My mother would not be susceptible to my daughters’ excuses about avoiding school or study. Not to study, said my mother, was the same as stealing from your parents. I was delighted the girls would be exposed to such a vigorous message.

We were booked into the excellent King David Hotel, on the western side of Jerusalem. I had first heard of the King David from my father—as an NCO, he had needed to borrow an Australian officer’s uniform to get in there for a drink. Then, in 1946, during the British Mandate’s rule in Palestine, at which time it housed many British officers, the Jewish underground had famously bombed it, killing ninety guests. I remember my father coming home from work with his Daily Mirror, and saying. “They’ve blown up the King David!”

Poldek had demanded rooms which looked directly out upon the walls of the ancient city. I could see the eighth-century Al-Aqsa Mosque, the glittering Dome of the Rock, and the Wailing Wall where Jews prayed to lament the final destruction of Solomon’s Temple by the Roman emperor Titus.

Moshe Bejski, a distinguished moderate of the Israeli Supreme Court, a man who would write on issues of forgetting and forgiveness, who believed the survival of the Jewish state could not justify torture, and bemoaned later backsliding over justifiable compensation to former prisoners by the Swiss banks, had also been an eighteen-year-old prisoner in Oskar’s Brinnlitz camp. His brother, who had been killed in the early Arab-Israeli conflict, had been in Oskar’s Brinnlitz camp too. In the factory-camp, which produced no shells but was run almost entirely by the black-market operations of the Herr Direktor, Oskar would come to the young Bejski with German documents bearing official German stamps, and ask him if he could produce such a stamp. Oskar needed forged documents in order to move the merchandise he had acquired—liquor, cigarettes, fabric, food luxuries—up to Poland where they could be sold at a high price on the black market.

Bejski, a scholar, a man of serious intent and more than a little worried about the projected book, now warned me against accepting all of Poldek’s exuberant tales unless they were corroborated by other prisoners. At the same time, he told his own fantastic but accurate stories.

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