Free Searching for Schindler by Thomas Keneally Page A

miraculous midwinter gift—an apple. Understandably enough, Emilie had not mentioned either of these gifts in her replies to my questions. For Fagen, they constituted one of the major humane gestures of his war. For her it was all probably lost among the memories of more conspicuous favors done.
    One night in New York, soon after meeting Lutek and then his elegant, stylish wife, we traveled on the frequently unreliable evening commuter train to Long Island with a New York engineer, a former Holocaust survivor who had married Oskar’s mistress Ingrid. This man had survived Mauthausen and then a death march of prisoners to the west. Escaping the line one day, reaching a fringe of trees and finding a farmhouse ahead, he was caught in a barn by a young SS man who had been sent after him. The young soldier, one of the less than utterly Hitlerite conscripts the SS had had to fall back upon in the last months of the Reich, said to him, “The war’s nearly over and it’s too late for me to start killing people. Make damn sure you lie low here for a long time after we’ve gone.” And with that he went outside and discharged his rifle into the air, and walked off to rejoin the death column. Many of the friends of the
Schindlerjuden
were saved by such individual acts of clemency, though a vaster number were not.
    When we got to the engineer’s prosperous suburban bungalow on Long Island, I was fascinated to meet his wife, whom so many prisoners had mentioned as a kindly and cooperative presence. Oskar had had an ongoing affair with her all through his years in Kraków, and took her south with him to his new camp, even though it was located on the home turf of Emilie Schindler, and Emilie lived with Oskar in his quarters, an arrangement that had not prevailed in Kraków. Even after the war, when he had fled to Munich, Oskar’s household consisted of himself, Emilie and Ingrid. Ingrid’s husband, this Jewish man who had survived the Mauthausen death march on the moral whim of an SS conscript and also fetched up in Munich, had met Oskar and his ménage, and he claimed that one night Oskar had said to him, “Why don’t you marry Ingrid? Emilie’s getting sick of this arrangement.”
    Since everyone seemed to do what Oskar wanted in the end, Ingrid
did
eventually marry the former prisoner, quite a departure for the strapping Aryan girl who had been Oskar’s helpmeet. She was now a very generous but nervous grandmother. She had prepared a Polish meal for us, but was anxious, by the time I met her, lest her children and grandchildren should hear too much concerning her liaison with the racy Oskar Schindler. That is why I still use “Ingrid” as a pseudonym for her.
    Interestingly, this couple had also played a considerable part in Emilie’s life, and had kept in contact to the extent that later, when Emilie visited New York, she stayed with them. It was as if Oskar’s intentions, not always honorable, had been rendered benign by the parties themselves.
    In New York in particular, under the aegis of Uncle Poldek, I began to encounter my first
Schindlerkinder
, children who had an association with the huge, bluff Aryan Oskar. It became apparent immediately that the children had been the most deeply marked and haunted by the war. I met a highly successful former child victim, Ryszard Horowitz, one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, at his studio in Manhattan. After the war, before the family moved to America, he had graduated from the Academy of Fine Art in Kraków, along with his childhood friend, Roman Polanski. “The most important heritage I got from my country,” he once said of Poland, “is an understanding of art, painting in particular.”
    His surreal and vivid pictures show a great hunger for pushing at the walls of the normal, three-dimensional world, to make fantastic escapes. One might glibly think that this is his triumph over the savage walls placed around his freedom in childhood. In any case, Ryszard