BOOKS


A Scholar's Book Adds Layers of Complexity to the Schindler Legend


An authoritative new biography of Oskar Schindler, the
German businessman who saved more than 1,000 Jews from the
Nazis, clashes sharply with his idealized portrayal in the
Oscar-winning 1993 Steven Spielberg movie "Schindler's
List" and the 1982 historical novel by Thomas Keneally that
inspired it. The Schindler who emerges in this latest
account - based on interviews with Holocaust survivors and
newly discovered papers, including letters stored in a
suitcase by a mistress - is far more flawed than the one
depicted in the movie and novel. Even so, scholars say, the
fresh revelations about Schindler's darker side cast his
moral transformation and heroism into starker relief.

To begin with, there was no Schindler's List.

"Schindler had almost nothing to do with the list," said David M.
Crowe, a Holocaust historian and professor at Elon
University in North Carolina, whose book, "Oskar Schindler:
The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities and the
True Story Behind the List," was published this fall by
Westview Press.

In the film, Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, is shown in
1944 giving the Jewish manager of his enamelware and arms
factory in Krakow, Poland, the names of Jewish workers to
be taken to the relative safety of what is now the Czech
Republic. But at the time, Mr. Crowe said in a telephone
interview, Schindler was in jail for bribing Amon Gth, the
brutal SS commandant played by Ralph Fiennes in the film.
And the manager, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), was not even
working for Schindler then.

Mr. Crowe said that there were nine lists. The first four
were drawn up primarily by Marcel Goldberg, a corrupt
Jewish security police officer and assistant to an SS
officer in charge of transporting Jews. (Goldberg was later
accused of accepting bribes and of favoritism.) Schindler
suggested a few names, Mr. Crowe said, but did not know
most of the people on the lists. The authors of the other
five lists are unknown.

Mr. Crowe said the legend of "the list" arose partly from
Schindler himself, to embellish his heroism. He was trying
to win reparations for his wartime losses, and Yad Vashem,
the Jewish Holocaust memorial organization in Jerusalem,
was considering naming him a "righteous gentile," an honor
given to someone who risked death to save Jews.

Those he saved further enhanced the legend because "they
adored him," Mr. Crowe said, "and they protected him."

No one doubts that Schindler, an ethnic German born in what
was then Austria-Hungary, was a moral hero, but the
revelations add deeper texture to his story.

It has long been known that Schindler was a spy for German
counterintelligence in the late 1930's, but he played down
those activities. Yet Mr. Crowe said that Czech secret
police archives refer to Schindler as "a spy of big caliber
and an especially dangerous type." Mr. Crowe also said that
Schindler compromised Czechoslovak security before the Nazi
invasion and was imprisoned. Later, the Czechoslovak
government tried to prosecute him for war crimes. Schindler
was also the de facto head of a unit that planned the Nazi
invasion of Poland.

Schindler, a big, charming man, was a drinker and
womanizer, as depicted in the novel and film. But Mr. Crowe
said that he also had two illegitimate children whom he
ignored.

There were also rumors, briefly mentioned in the book and
film, that after Schindler moved to Krakow in 1939 as a
carpetbagger following the Nazi invasion, he stole Jewish
property and ordered Jews beaten. Although the charges were
unproven, Mr. Crowe discovered that Yad Vashem was so
concerned that it delayed designating Schindler a righteous
gentile. The film's epilogue says Schindler was named in
1958, 16 years before his death in 1974. But Mr. Crowe
found that he was officially named in 1993, after Yad
Vashem learned that Schindler's widow, Emilie, who also
behaved heroically, was coming to Jerusalem to participate
in the film. Both received the honor, he posthumously.

There are many books about Schindler, including accounts by
survivors and Emilie's memoirs, but Mr. Crowe's is the
first comprehensive biography to draw on newly available
records. Mr. Crowe is a member of the education committee
of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in
Washington, and the author of a history of the Gypsies of
Russia and Eastern Europe.

He dismissed some scenes in the film and book that are part
of Schindler's legend. For instance, in the film Schindler
is shown riding with his mistress on Lasota Hill in Krakow
and watching the clearing of the ghetto in March 1943, when
he sees a little girl seeking shelter. The scene depicts
Schindler's moral awakening, but Mr. Crowe called it
"totally fictitious." He said that it would have been
impossible to see that part of the ghetto from the hill,
and that Schindler never saw the girl. Schindler's
transformation was more gradual, Mr. Crowe said, and even
before the ghetto was cleared he was appalled by the
mistreatment of the Jews.

"Steve is a very wonderful, tender man," Mr. Crowe said of
Mr. Spielberg, "but 'Schindler's List' was theater and not
in an historically accurate way. The film simplifies the
story almost to the point of ridiculousness." Mr. Crowe
also said that he admired Mr. Keneally's novel.

Mr. Keneally, who interviewed 50 survivors and used
available archives for his novel, said it was
understandable that Mr. Spielberg and the screenwriter
Steven Zaillian would take dramatic license with some
events. "I believe Steven behaved with integrity," he said.
"And he does make Schindler ambiguous."

Mr. Spielberg is filming a movie and could not be reached
for comment, but a spokesman, Marvin Levy, said in an
e-mail message that "Schindler was such an enigmatic figure
in life, it is not totally surprising that other
information or alleged information could continue to
surface in death." Michael Berenbaum, former president of
the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation,
established by Mr. Spielberg to record survivors' memories,
made a distinction between the craft of the historian and
the artist.

"It does neither an injustice to the novel, the film or to
history to say that the story is more complex," he said.

Mr. Crowe "is not even altering the story," Elie Wiesel,
the author and Holocaust survivor, said. "He's complicated
it. He's made Schindler more human, and also more
extraordinary."

After Schindler moved his factory to Brnnlitz in the
present-day Czech Republic, a period dealt with only
briefly in the film, he stalled the manufacture of weapons,
and none were ever made for the Nazis. He also bribed Nazi
officers and distracted them with alcohol to save his
workers. Mr. Keneally describes his heroism. In Krakow, Mr.
Crowe said, "he could use the black market to supply his
workers with food and health care." But by the time he
arrived in Brnnlitz the Russians were advancing, making
conditions harsher. "He risks his life and takes all the
money he made in Krakow and spends every bit trying to feed
his Jews and keep them healthy," Mr. Crowe said. In an
episode known as the Golleschau transport, which is
depicted in the book but not the film, two boxcars arrived
in Brnnlitz filled with Jewish prisoners, some frozen to
death. Schindler and his wife were able to save many of the
prisoners.

Amid the chaos, Schindler also tried to accommodate Jewish
religious law, getting SS officers drunk so that Jews could
be properly buried.

Mr. Crowe said that the only part of the film that angered
him was the ending, in which Schindler flees as the
Russians advance. The Jews are shown as defeated, but in
fact, Mr. Crowe said, Schindler had created "an armed
guerilla group of Jews."

"They were armed to the teeth, ready to fight till the
death," he said. Hours after Schindler left, they hung a
Jew who worked for the Nazis.

In the film, Schindler gives a speech and breaks into tears
because he did not do more. But Mr. Crowe obtained a
transcript in which Schindler, always a wily pragmatist,
also reminded the Jews of how much he had done for them,
possibly to protect himself from prosecution for war
crimes.

After the war Schindler was a failure. He squandered money
given to him by the American Jewish Joint Distribution
Committee and moved to Argentina, where he attempted to
breed nutria. He then returned to Germany and bought a
concrete factory, where workers attacked him for saving
Jews during the war. That factory went bankrupt. Schindler
continued drinking, and begged Jews he had saved to help
him financially. He died from alcoholism and heavy smoking,
Mr. Crowe said.

Mordecai Paldiel, director of the Righteous Among the
Nations department at Yad Vashem, said the new revelations
show that "even people with all these characteristics can
do a great, saintly deed."

"It seems we all have a little angel sitting inside us and
just waiting to be allowed to go to the surface, to expose
himself," he said. "A little, saving angel."

(source: New York Times)