Black Forest as best they could, some of it on foot, some of it by train. Near Ravensburg they went to the local prison camp and spoke to the U.S. commandant. Here again they stayed as guests for some days, resting and living high on Army rations. In return, they sat up late with the commandant, who was of Jewish descent, and told him their stories of Amon and Plaszow, of Gross-Rosen, Auschwitz, Brinnlitz. They hoped he would give them transport to Constanz, possibly a truck. He could not spare a truck, but gave them a bus instead, together with some provisions for the journey. Though Oskar still carried diamonds worth over 1,000 RM. as well as some currency, the bus does not appear to have been bought but was instead given freely. After his dealings with the German bureaucrats, it must have been difficult for Oskar to adjust to that sort of transaction. West of Constanz, on the Swiss border and in the French Occupied zone, they parked the bus in the village of Kreuzlingen. Rechen went to the town hardware store and bought a pair of wire cutters. It seems that the party were still wearing their prison uniforms when the wire cutters were purchased. Perhaps the man behind the counter was influenced by one of two considerations: (a) this was a prisoner, and if thwarted might call his French protectors; (b) this was in fact a German officer escaping in disguise and perhaps should be helped.
The border fence ran through the middle of Kreuzlingen and was guarded on the German side by French sentries of the Suret’e Militaire. The group approached this barrier on the edge of the village and, snipping the wires, waited for the sentry to near the end of his beat before slipping through to Switzerland. Unhappily, a woman from the village observed them from a bend of the road and rushed to the border to alert the French and Swiss. In a quiet Swiss village square, a mirror image of the one on the German side, the Swiss police surrounded the party, but Richard and Anka Rechen broke away and had to be chased and apprehended by a patrol car. The party was, within half an hour, passed back to the French, who at once searched their possessions, discovering jewels and currency; drove them to the former German prison; and locked them in separate cells.
It was clear to Reubinski that they were under suspicion of having been concentration-camp guards. In that sense the weight they had put on as guests of the Americans boomeranged, for they did not look as deprived as when they’d first left Brinnlitz. They were interrogated separately about their journey, about the valuables they were carrying. Each of them could tell a plausible story, but did not know if the others were telling the same one. They seem to have been afraid, in a way that had not applied with the Americans, that if the French discovered Oskar’s identity and his function in Brinnlitz, they would arraign him as a matter of course.
Prevaricating for Oskar’s sake and Emilie’s, they remained there a week. The Schindlers themselves now knew enough about Judaism to pass the obvious cultural tests. But Oskar’s manner and physical condition didn’t make his posture of recent-prisoner-of-the-Ss very credible. Unhappily, his Hebrew letter was over in Linz, in the files of the Americans. Edek Reubinski, as the leader of the eight, was questioned most regularly, and on the seventh day of his imprisonment was brought into the interrogation room to find a second person there, a man in civilian clothes, a speaker of Polish, brought in to test Reubinski’s claim that he came from Cracow. For some reason—because the Pole played a compassionate role in the questioning that followed, or because of the familiarity of the language—Reubinski broke down, began to weep, and told the full story in fluent Polish. The rest were called one by one, were shown Reubinski, were told he had confessed, and then were ordered to recite their version of the truth in Polish. When at the end of the morning the versions matched, the whole group, the Schindlers included, were gathered in the interrogation room and embraced by both interrogators. The Frenchman, says Reubinski, was weeping. Everyone was delighted at that phenomenon—a weeping interrogator. When he managed to compose himself, he called for lunch to be brought in for himself, his colleague, the Schindlers, the eight. That afternoon he had them transferred to a lakeside hotel in Constanz, where they stayed for some days at the expense of the French military government.
By the time he sat down to dinner that evening at the hotel with Emilie, Reubinski, the Rechens, and the others, Oskar’s property had passed to the Soviets, and his last few jewels and currency were lost in the interstices of the liberating bureaucracy. He was as good as penniless, but was eating as well as could be managed in a good hotel with a number of his “family.” All of which would be the pattern of his future.
EPILOGUE
Oskar’s high season ended now. The peace would never exalt him as had the war. Oskar and Emilie came to Munich. For a time they shared lodgings with the Rosners, for Henry and his brother had been engaged to play at a Munich restaurant and had achieved a modest prosperity. One of his former prisoners, meeting him at the Rosners’ small, cramped apartment, was shocked by his torn coat. His property in Cracow and Moravia had, of course, been confiscated by the Russians, and his remaining jewelry had been traded for food and liquor. When the Feigenbaums arrived in Munich, they met his latest mistress, a Jewish girl, a survivor not of Brinnlitz but of worse camps than that. Many of the visitors to Oskar’s rented rooms, as indulgent as they were toward Oskar’s heroic weaknesses, felt shamed for Emilie’s sake.
He was still a wildly generous friend and a great discoverer of unprocurables. Henry Rosner remembers that he found a source of chickens in the midst of chickenless Munich. He clung to the company of those of his Jews who had come to Germany— the Rosners, the Pfefferbergs, the Dresners, the Feigenbaums, the Sternbergs. Some cynics would later say that at the time it was wise of anyone involved in concentration camps to stay close to Jewish friends as protective coloration. But his dependence went beyond that sort of instinctive cunning. The Schindlerjuden had become his family.
In common with them, he heard that Amon Goeth had been captured by Patton’s Americans the previous February, while a patient in an SS sanitarium at Bad Tolz; imprisoned in Dachau; and at the close of the war handed over to the new Polish government. Amon was in fact one of the first Germans dispatched to Poland for judgment. A number of former prisoners were invited to attend the trial as witnesses, and among the defense witnesses a deluded Amon considered calling were Helen Hirsch and Oskar Schindler. Oskar himself did not go to Cracow for the trials. Those who did found that Goeth, lean as a result of his diabetes, offered a subdued but unrepentant defense. All the orders for his acts of execution and transportation had been signed by superiors, he claimed, and were therefore their crimes, not his. Witnesses who told of murders committed by the Commandant’s own hand were, said Amon, maliciously exaggerating. There had been some prisoners executed as saboteurs, but there were always saboteurs in wartime.
Mietek Pemper, waiting in the body of the court to be called to give evidence, sat beside another Plaszow graduate who stared at Amon in the dock and whispered, “That man still terrifies me.” But Pemper himself, as first witness for the prosecution, delivered an exact catalogue of Amon’s crimes. He was followed by others, among them Dr. Biberstein and Helen Hirsch, who had precise and painful memories. Amon was condemned to death and hanged in Cracow on September 13, 1946. It was two years to the day since his arrest by the SS in Vienna on black-marketeering charges. According to the Cracow press, he went to the gallows without remorse and gave the National Socialist salute before dying.
In Munich, Oskar himself identified Liepold, who had been detained by the Americans. A Brinnlitz prisoner accompanied Oskar at the lineup, and says that Oskar asked the protesting Liepold, “Do you want me to do it, or would you rather leave it to the fifty angry Jews who are waiting downstairs in the street?” Liepold would also be hanged—not for his crimes in Brinnlitz, but for earlier murders in Budzyn.
Oskar had probably already conceived the scheme of becoming a farmer in Argentina; a breeder of nutria, the large South American aquatic rodents considered precious for their skins. Oskar presumed that the same excellent commercial instincts which had brought him to Cracow in 1939 were now urging him to cross the Atlantic. He was penniless, but the Joint Distribution Committee, the international Jewish relief organization to whom Oskar had made reports during the war and to whom his record was known, were willing to help him. In 1949 they made him an ex gratia payment of $15,000 and gave a reference (“To Whom It May Concern”) signed by M.W. Beckelman, the vice chairman of the “Joint’s” Executive Council. It said:
The American Joint Distribution Committee has thoroughly investigated the wartime and Occupation activities of Mr. Schindler…. We recommend wholeheartedly that all organizations and individuals contacted by Mr. Schindler do their utmost to help him, in recognition of his outstanding service…. Under the guise of operating a Nazi labor factory first in Poland and then in the Sudetenland, Mr. Schindler managed to take in as employees and protect Jewish men and women destined for death in Auschwitz or other infamous concentration camps….
