Searching for Schindler Read Free Page A

Freddy. “On the way home.”
    “Could you, Freddy darling? You see, Misia, what a fine boy we made?” And Poldek parted his lips and made a kissing noise, first toward Freddy and then toward his wife.
    He opened the two filing cabinets, selecting documents—a piece on Oskar Schindler from the
Los Angeles Examiner
, copies of postwar speeches by former Jewish prisoners made in Oskar Schindler’s honor, carbon copies of letters in German, and documents partly yellowed, old enough for the staples in them to have rusted somewhat even in Southern California’s desert climate. There was a notice of Schindler’s death in 1974, and the reburial of his body a month later in Jerusalem. There were also photographs of scenes from a prison camp. I would discover they had been taken by one Raimund Titsch, a World War I veteran with a limp, the brave Austrian manager of a factory in the terrible camp of Plaszów, southeast of the city of Kraków, from which Schindler drew the laborers for his kindlier small camp within the city.
    As Poldek extracted documentation from this drawer and then another, opening and shutting them with gusto, he went on commentating: “This guy Oskar Schindler was a big master-race sort of guy. Tall and smooth and his suits…the cloth! He drank cognac like water. And I remember, when I met him the first time, he was wearing a huge black and red
Hakenkreuz
, you know, the Nazi pin.”
    He riffled through a folder full of photographs and pulled one out, and there was his younger self, very snappy in his four-cornered Polish officer’s cap, a stocky boy in a lieutenant’s uniform, wearing the same confident, half-smiling face that he now directed at me.
    “You see, there! I was Phys Ed Professor Magister at the Kociuszko Gymnasium in Podgórze. The girls loved me. I got wounded on the San River and my Catholic orderly saved my life and carried me to a field hospital. I never forget. I send his family food parcels. Then, after Hitler gave half of Poland to Stalin, we officers had to decide to go east or west. I decided not to go east, even though I was Jewish. If I had, I would have been shot by the Russians with all the other poor guys in Katyn Forest.”
    Back in Kraków as a prisoner, Poldek had used a German-issued document, which originally had been intended to enable him to visit his soldiers in a military hospital further east, to bamboozle a barely literate German guard. So he slipped out of the railway waiting-room yard and caught a tram and went home to his mother. “And here’s this big German guy, handsome, and he’s discussing with her that she’ll decorate his apartment at Straszewskiego Street. That’s how I first met this Oskar Schindler.”
    By now, Sol had appeared in the doorway of the repair room.
    “They came through. The card turns out okay.”
    “Thanks God,” said Poldek. “Now, would you like the briefcase wrapped, sir?”
    “No,” I said. “I’ll carry it with me.”
    Leopold turned to his patient son. “Stay with the store a while, Freddy. I’m taking Mr. Thomas up to make some photostatic copies.”
    “Where will you get photocopies this time of day on a Saturday, Pop?”
    “The Glendale Savings. They owe me.”
    “Wow!” said Freddy, shaking his head.
    I said good-bye to Misia Page/Pfefferberg, and we reemerged into the store. On Poldek’s instructions, I left my briefcase there for the time being. I could carry the copies we got made back to the hotel in it. I said good-bye to Sol and Freddy.
    We crossed the road and made for the Glendale Savings Bank on the corner of Wilshire. Arriving there at a brisk pace, we queued a time in front of the Enquiries and Transactions counter of the busy Saturday noon bank. At last we reached the counter and a young man attended to us. He called my friend “Mr. Page,” confirming that Poldek was indeed well-known at this branch. Poldek handed over his considerable wad of papers. “I need photostatic copies of these,