Fensch Oskar Schindler and His List

The Man, The Book, The Film, The Holocaust and Its Survivors
1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9963154-0-1
Verlag: New Century Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 240 Seiten

Canadian Journalist Herbert Steinhouse met Oskar Schindler in 1946; Schindler told Steinhouse his story. At first Steinhouse didn't believe Schindler's story, but by 1949, Steinhouse did believe Schindler and wrote an article 'The Man Who Saved 1,000 Lives.' That article pre-dates -- and validates all other Schindler research. That 1949 article and an interview with Steinhouse opens the book; there are sections devoted to Schindler, the book 'Schindler's List,' the award-winning film, and aspects of the Holocaust. This is a major contribution to Holocaust studies.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fensch, Thomas

Leseproben

The Journalist Who Knew Oskar Schindler

by Thomas Fensch

Montreal, December 19, 1994.

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, Schindler’s List.

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, The Time of the Juggernaut .

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“…by 1948, Itzhak Stern was surviving in Paris with his brother and their wives, and along with many others. They finally had got out of Germany and were all in a holding pattern, waiting for the American Joint Distribution Committee to help get them immigration papers to … anywhere. Canada … South America … Israel….”

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“Yes. I worked there for about a year. My artist bride and I had gone completely broke. I had first freelanced—covered the ‘48 Italian elections, done a lot of feature writing. I was trying to avoid political writing then, and was doing positive stories on Europe’s reconstruction and so forth. I remember Salzburg, and a piece on Mozart. The Bavarian Alps and a feature on Richard Strauss. One of the last interviews done with Strauss, who died two weeks later. On France’s first ambitious plans to harness the Rhone and provide an economic infrastructure ….

“Finally I saw an advertisement. Two of us were short-listed, Art Buchwald and me. I got it and Buchwald was turned down, for insufficient press experience. I had never even worked on a newspaper—although I had done a lot of work similar to the AJDC’s for UNRRA and so on, and I had been the editor of my college daily. Whereas Buchwald, as I recall, had been the editor of the Pacific edition of , with ten times my newspaper experience. He went across the Seine to the old Paris with a couple of sample pieces—humorous articles—and he became famous, the most popular feature on the paper. They finally had to start paying him. He was very, very funny from the start. Later, I told him that he owed his entire career to me ….

“So working for the European headquarters of ‘the Joint’ on the Left Bank, one day I heard about this unusual man, always hanging around the waiting room all day over at our Emigration Department on the Champs Elysees. His name, it seemed, was Itzhak Stern.

“I was running the AJDC’s public relations and information department. We were putting out nice little feature stories and photos aimed especially at the American, British and Canadian media. I guess I was curious about this Mr. Stern.

“But first—it just came to me—I was told this year by an old friend from Chicago, when he read my article, that he had briefly introduced me to the Schindlers in Austria in 1946, and I have absolutely no memory of that. Absolutely none.

“But back then, when I was working with UNRRA, James Rice headed the Joint Distribution Committee in Austria. The Schindler party came down from the hills, where they had been hiding, into Linz, and tried to get help through him. October, 1945. Rice was, as I was eventually to be, very skeptical. We all met so very many of, in quotes, ‘The Good German.’ Each told what could well have been a true story with proof of having saved a man, a family, a Communist or Socialist, a Russian, Pole, Jew, foreigner, an escapee from a transport—whatever. Jim Rice met Oskar and his wife Emilie then, who presented documents through the , their so-called bodyguards, three of whom were musicians. I met them in ‘48 and was convinced that they had never held a gun in their lives. Jim said he introduced me to the Schindler party in 1946 when I came through Linz. He later got them all to Munich and pleaded their case. All of them were underweight still—this was barely six months after they got out of the camps and the factory. The musicians had lived in the Plaszow camp, and worked in Schindler’s factory and played music for Amon Goeth ….”

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“Which kept them alive. Violins and accordion for those SS parties. And also informed Schindler, when he had not attended.

“So when James Rice met up with the Schindler group, Oskar did not say: ‘I saved a Jew.’ …He simply said: ‘I saved twelve hundred Jews.’ How could you possibly believe it? The Schindler figure was anything between eleven hundred, which is what I think Spielberg settled on—Keneally, if I am not mistaken, says twelve hundred—and what some later claimed could have been fifteen hundred, sixteen hundred, as there was a lot of going and coming ….

“But the famous Schindler list was eleven hundred. I have a copy. I think I once counted off the names, eleven hundred.”

“How did I first get a copy of the list? I don’t remember. I suppose through Schindler.”

“Well, he carried things around with him. He carried photocopies. He carried documentation. He was working hard to get out of Germany and find a country to accept him ….”

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“He’d go anywhere. He had applied to Canada. For him and his wife. The Canadians already had started to secretly ‘park’—as favors to the CIA, or I guess even for the old OSS, top-ranking Gestapo officers and SS ‘sources of information’—all sorts of murderous people …. But the ‘bright lads’ who ran immigration policy including the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) who controlled the first stamp, the security clearance—they went mainly by the book. Which said that anybody who had been a Nazi … and they had the records. Schindler might even have been with Germany Military Intelligence, the Abwehr, in 1939. Maybe the SS, too, though that I still doubt. So that was the end of that. Forget it. For Canadian immigration back then, no case was analyzed on its merits. Blanket condemnation, blanket decision.”

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“Yes, but this is where I’m a little hazy about which came first—because I was living in Paris where my office was, but was making so many trips into Germany, where the new material was, where I was taking pictures, where I was writing the stories, and then back to Paris, do the office assignments, run the lives of the others … then back to Germany to do something else.

And to get back to Stern: who was this unusual man who hung about our Emigration Department?

“The JDC was providing fundamental help only to Jews, which was its mandate, and because the funds it raised in England or Canada and, above all, in the United States, were strictly for this welfare organization to feed and to help Jewish survivors. That was the basis of their Schindler dilemma, of the...