Free Searching for Schindler by Thomas Keneally Page B

emerged as one of the great photographers of this age. Again, one could look at his open, well-tanned yet profoundly private face and wonder what it was about him as an infant that the Reich should try to kill him.
    Even to please Uncle Poldek, it was difficult for him to speak about his memories of the process to which his family and he had been subjected. He left one in no doubt that he believed his daily existence had been cramped and limited by that savage experience, by the merciless flux during which people in whom you made a hopeful investment of love vanished almost at once without explanation or, again without explanation, were butchered in front of you.
    Gradually we met other members of Ryszard’s family who were also
Schindlerjuden
: his parents, Regina and Dolek Horowitz, and his aunt and uncle, Manci and Henry Rosner. Regina and Manci were sisters, while Henry’s brother was the Melbourne accordionist Leo Rosner, mentioned earlier. The Horowitzes were welded to the Rosners by marriage, by the sociability of the parents, and by shared grief and peril. And so we met the other of Amon Goeth’s camp musicians, Henry Rosner, compact and jolly, with impish eyes, the violinist from Queens who these days catered to a less lethal clientele at the Sign of the Dove.
    Henry’s wife, Manci, was impressively articulate, and her robust capacity to talk about the past helped vastly. Even in the moment of their redemption she and Regina suffered an astounding sorrow. Taken out of the slaughter yards of Auschwitz with all the other Schindler women, and awaiting a train to Brinnlitz in the Auschwitz railway concourse, the sisters spotted young Ryszard Horowitz, Regina’s son, and his older cousin, Olek (Alec), Manci’s cherished boy, waving to their mothers from behind the wire of the men’s compound. Both these children were meant to be in Brinnlitz with their fathers! The women hid under a truck to talk to them. “What are you doing here, little darlings?” they called.
    It had happened that on one occasion when Oskar was absent from Brinnlitz, the toddler Ryszard was seen playing on the factory floor by an SS inspector on a visit from Gross-Rosen camp. Ryszard was gathered for shipment to Auschwitz with his cousin Olek, who was discovered in the prisoners’ quarters. Both their fathers, Dolek Horowitz and Henry Rosner the violinist, volunteered to go with them. They traveled under guard by passenger train, and were amazed at the strained looks on the other passengers’ faces, by which they interpreted the war to be going well for the Allies. Then, on arrival at Auschwitz, they were all given the tattoo, meaning they were saved from immediate extinction. The boys proudly displayed their tattoos to the women under the trucks. Then the women were forced by guards to board and to leave their children behind, believing them consigned to death now.
    For most child survivors the horror of childhood hung over all the connections and potential happiness of adult life. Ryszard’s cousin Olek, a successful sound engineer who owned his own company, the former little boy who hid in the pit of a latrine to escape a
Hilfsaktion
(health selection) in Plaszów, reiterated the same idea: “We grew up not trusting anyone. No sooner did we become attached to someone than they were taken from us. Even our fathers were taken from us, when we were moved to the children’s huts in Auschwitz 1.” The young fathers nevertheless survived the war, being ordered to labor in Auschwitz 2 rather than sent to the gas chambers.
    After the war, the Red Cross and UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) were able to reunite Olek with his parents, the Rosners, but could provide no information about Ryszard for the Horowitzes. Regina Horowitz was watching a newsreel of the liberation of Auschwitz in a Kraków cinema when she saw Ryszard (in footage destined to appear in every documentary on Auschwitz) being shunted by a