Who Really Is In The Details?
Friday, October 13, 2006
(Photo: Marlene Dietrich autographs the cast on the leg of Tec 4 Earl E. McFarland at a United States hospital in Belgium, November 24, 1944. )My play makes some mention of Oskar Schindler so I've been rereading David M. Crowe's Oskar Schindler: The Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List, published in October 2004.
With this book in hand you can't help but ask about Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List: How much license is too much license? And when are narrative demands too demanding? According to Crowe, a Columbia University history professor affiliated with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
- Oskar Schindler never compiled the list (more accurately: lists).
- There's no evidence he ever went to Auschwitz to save the women who were routed there.
- He fled for Switzerland five weeks before his factory in Czechoslovakia was liberated by the Russians, leaving others the burden of acquiring food for the more than 1000 "Schindler Jews".
- He was not just a German spy, a member of the Abwehr, but a German spy implicated in covert operations that helped to incite the invasion of Poland. (He helped start World War Two!!)
- He's so controversial, Vad Yashem, the Jewish memorial organization in Israel, did not name him among The Righteous Of All Nations -- until Steven Spielberg was about to arrive to shoot the film's epilogue.
I don't care if the film adds snow to events that actually occured in warm weather. I care about whether Steven Spielberg should have waited for the seven years of scholarly research Crowe undertook. (Would the movie have been made at all if Crowe's biography had preceded it?) And I've been thinking about the risks involved in presenting a composite hero.
Schindler was socially clever, and at times, brave. More than individual acts of bravery, every day tempted him with a loss of nerve that could have doomed those people. But so many more heros were necessary for the miraculous outcome. And often it was questionable whether one could really consider Schindler to be in the leadership role.
The months after the factory was moved to Brunnlitz in Czechoslovakia really offer the most heroic portrait of Schindler. (Keneally's original novel title was "Ark" not "List".) Yet here, his wife, Emilie, humiliated for years by her husband's infidelities, emerges as certainly a necessary condition for survival. For the dual tasks of throwing sand in the eyes of their Nazi overseers and procuring food for more than 1000 people in the Spring of 1945, Emilie Schindler has also been honored by Vad Yashem.
The Nazis perfected the cult of personality delivered via film. Has Steven Spielberg answered them powerfully, countering larger-than-life evil with larger than life goodness? Or is larger than life evil countered only by a consortium, with each member doing what small things they can, not waiting for a hero, not using the heroic paradigm which inevitably mirrors back that me, I, am not made of heroic stuff.(Photo: Amon Goeth with rifle. NARA.)
The story in Crowe's Schindler biography that caught my eye a couple of years ago was the rescue of the 300 women from Auschwitz. I don't care if it was routine to be sent there temporarily. They were in Auschwitz! And temporary was beginning to look like permanent. Yet someone did something to get them out -- a singular event in the history of the facility that has come to represent the greatest crime in modern history. Who?
From Crowe, according to Emilie Schindler:
So a few days later, Oskar went to Zwittau, and asked an old friend, Hilde, to go to Auschwitz "and personally take care of the release of the women." Hilde, at least according to Emilie, "was strikingly beautiful, slender, and graceful."In an interview with West German police in 1963, Schindler testified directly:
It is true that I sent my secretary Hilde Albrecht (fate unknown) to Auschwitz with gifts (jewelry and alcohol) in order to obtain the release of my female workers from the responsible labor supervisor Schwarz [SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Heinrich].In a letter Oskar Schindler wrote in 1956:
Who can feel my inner conflict, which I encountered when I sacrificed a dozen women to the orgies of the SS-Uebermenschen (superior human beings), where alcohol and gifts had already lost attraction.In the same letter:
I was throwing pearls before swine.Crowe does not take a decisive stand on how the women were released. But there's no case for Oskar Schindler personally going to Auschwitz.
Can you imagine at such a decisive point in "Schindler's List" the tall, dapper Oskar Schindler as portrayed by Liam Neeson turning to his former secretary and asking her to go to Auschwitz to save 300 women?
What's lost with a composite hero? Maybe nothing. Maybe the heroic meditation serves humanity.
But maybe everything. Maybe all the Hilde Albrechts of the story -- when the sadistic Nazi Amon Goeth is played by the handsome, ethereal Ralph Fiennes -- so attractive to women -- but the real Amon Goeth -- who needed so often to be placated and controlled -- was decidedly not attractive to women.
I notice Vad Yashem has titled the small biography supporting the Oskar Schindler tree on the Avenue of the Righteous "Oskar and Emilie Schindler". (Italics mine.) In the short biosketch they include the statement:
He then proceeded to send his personal German secretary to Auschwitz to negotiate the release of the women.I don't know what their website read like before Crowe's book was published.
