Free Searching for Schindler by Thomas Keneally

university featured a number of well-placed benches on which Jews were not permitted to sit.

Four
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    Flying by night to save time, Poldek and I arrived in New York with a long list of interviewees to cover, all of whom had no need to cooperate except on Poldek’s say-so. The city’s freezing air seemed the polar opposite of the sweltering Australian February, and yet felt more appropriate for research purposes of this nature. It was less beach-crazed than Sydney, less air-headed than Los Angeles, and in this weather I didn’t need, for example, to plot a time in the day when I could go swimming.
    In the Diamond District of New York, on an upper floor of a building right on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, a family of Schindler survivors now named the Fagens (Feigenbaums, as they appear on Schindler’s list) ran a splendid wholesale diamond and jewelry business. The Diamond District was and always would be intriguing to me, with its lines of retail jewelers at street level and wholesalers like the Fagens on the floors above, and every potential design to be had. I had from some obscure genetic gift a love of jewelry, one ever restricted by lack of means. I had in my time bought nearly all the jewelry my wife and daughters said they needed, and sometimes items they didn’t. Yet I wore none myself. I came from a painfully unflamboyant Australian male tradition.
    On Forty-seventh Street I was fascinated to see Hasidic Jews in their black hats moving about the streets, selling the retailers diamonds they had taken on consignment. It seemed to me that in dangerous New York the Hasidim were exceptionally safe traveling around with their pocketed diamonds, and this was a mystery I thought I might one day enquire into. Perhaps understandably, I never quite got the full tale of the relationship between upstairs, the Hasidim, and the street-level stores. Even these days, though the Diamond District website acknowledges the place of the Hasidim, their precise role is not explained.
    Upstairs, admitted to the Fagens’ office via electronic doors, I met the younger Fagen, Lewis, or—as Poldek called him—Lutek, a slim, likeable fellow, elegantly dressed, who had spent part of his childhood and adolescence in Schindler’s two camps. His parents, Necha and Jakob, were also on the list, and his cancer-stricken sister was taken along to Brinnlitz too, and died there in humane dignity, safe from molestation.
    On the list in Schindler’s Brinnlitz camp, Lutek Fagen was described as capable of working a lathe and of calibrating, but the machine he labored at confounded him. Fagen was charged by the head of the SS garrison, Untersturmführer Liepold, with sabotaging a calibrated metal press. Schindler had laughed the matter off—“striking me over the face, to save my life. I had two kinds of tears in my eyes. Gratitude and because he was strong.” He then fobbed Liepold off with some blather or other about how they were all incompetent but could not all be shot.
    One of the most important aspects of his imprisonment involved Mrs. Schindler. He had broken his glasses on the factory floor, and Emilie Schindler had said, “Give them to me, and next time I’m up in Kraków, I’ll go and see your eye doctor and have them made up again to prescription.” This had been a salient moment for Lutek. Here was a boy who, ever since reaching adolescence, had been by decree a subhuman, an
Untermensch.
And yet a Sudeten German woman was willing to recognize him as a young man with a history of prescription glasses, and give him the dignity of a replacement pair. While the SS had heaped up the confiscated lenses and frames of Europe’s Jews, dissenters, gypsies and other innocents, Mrs. Schindler was willing to supply at least one set of spectacles to counterbalance a little the pyramids of general confiscation. She would also appear at the side of his sister, as she was dying of cancer, with what seemed to be a