How silent was the Vatican?
Newsday, October 15, 1997
The book’s subject seems obscure: the story behind a draft papal encyclical, commissioned nearly 60 years ago by a Pope who did not live long enough to publish it. The style of the book’s authors is scholarly and dry—hardly best-seller material.
But the new Harcourt Brace book, The Hidden Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, written by a Benedictine monk and a Jewish historian, arrives at an opportune time to become fuel in an incendiary, persistent debate: Did the Vatican remain “silent” in the face of the Holocaust, and why? In recent months and weeks, that painful, haunting question has continued to make news: The April 7 issue of the The New Yorker carried a caustic article by James Carroll, a former priest, condemning what he characterizes as the silence of the church’s wartime leader, Pope Pius XII. In the June issue of Inside the Vatican, an independent, conservative magazine, a cover story defended Pius XII and reported that the cause of his canonization is moving ahead smoothly. In August, the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation wrote a letter asking the Vatican to open to scholars its entire wartime archives. At the end of September, the Catholic bishops of France publicly apologized for the silence of the wartime church while the Nazis sent French Jews to death camps. “Today we confess this silence was wrong,” the bishops said. At the start of October, Pope John Paul II said that a new document about the church and the Holocaust is still not ready.
A Vatican official first mentioned this document to Jewish leaders in 1987, during a furor over John Paul’s meeting with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi. “Now it’s ten years, and we’re waiting,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.
All these events underscore the persistence of the “silence” issue, despite the passage of 50 years since the end of World War II. Now, the book by Georges Passelecq, the monk, and Bernard Suchecky, the historian, returns to the prewar roots of the whole question.
Its primary subject is Achille Ratti, a scholar who rose to prefect of the Vatican Library before he became Pope Pius XI in 1922. As Pope, he signed a landmark 1929 treaty with the Italian government that set up the Vatican City State, then a 1933 agreement with the Nazis to protect the church in Germany. In 1938, Pius XI commissioned the draft of an encyclical on the evils of racism and anti-Semitism.
The book also sheds some light on Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, a frail, austere career diplomat who served Pius XI as secretary of state and played a key role in the 1933 agreement with the Nazis. When Pius XI died in 1939, Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, but he did not publish the encyclical that his predecessor had commissioned.
That document, with all its implications for understanding the church’s conduct during the Holocaust, remained virtually unknown for three decades. Its story didn’t begin to emerge until 1967, when a Jesuit seminarian started examining a collection of old papers.
The task for that seminarian, Thomas Breslin, was to explore the papers of the late Rev. John LaFarge, a beloved Jesuit advocate of interracial justice, and get them ready for some future biographer. The papers sat in a room at America House, the Manhattan headquarters of the Jesuit magazine, America, where LaFarge had worked for nearly four decades, including a period as its top editor. “The Jesuits at America House called him Uncle John, and the affection they had for him was palpable,” Breslin said. “They loved him.”
In the pages of America, beginning in 1926, LaFarge had written thousands of words on racial justice. Before 1926, he had worked for 15 years in predominantly African-American parishes in rural Maryland, which helped to shape his thought on the evil of segregation. LaFarge’s 1937 book, Interracial Justice, a sharp critique of segregation laws, helped build his reputation as a Catholic leader on racial justice issues.
“LaFarge was not afraid to put out a really broad hand to as many people as he could, white or black, Catholic or Protestant, to effect reconciliation between whites and blacks,” Breslin said.
LaFarge’s father was John, a well-known painter whose circle included the novelists Edith Wharton and Henry James and the soldier-politician Theodore Roosevelt. Despite his family’s connections, his Harvard education and his scholarly accomplishments, the younger LaFarge displayed an engagingly down-to-earth style, reflected in the title of his autobiography, The Manner Is Ordinary. Still, he sensed that his work had been important, and his papers reflected that perception. “He saved everything,” Breslin said.
In the summer of 1963, the seriously ill LaFarge summoned enough energy to participate in the march on Washington led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Three months later, just after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, LaFarge died.
Though Breslin had entered the Society of Jesus only a year before LaFarge died, and the two men never met, Breslin had read about him and knew his background. But he knew absolutely nothing about a long document in French that he found among the LaFarge papers in 1967—except that it was clearly important, because it was marked as a draft encyclical.
Nowhere in his reading had Breslin learned of any connection between LaFarge and an encyclical, the most influential form of communication between Popes and the universal church. Nor did he understand immediately the mysterious references to “Fisher Senior” and “Fisher Junior” that he found in an accompanying series of letters, written in a high, literary German style, by the Rev. Gustav Gundlach, a German Jesuit.
Not long after he came upon the draft and the letters, Breslin was meditating on the Gospel passage in which Jesus invites Simon (later Peter), a fisherman, to fish for people. It dawned on him that the “Fisher” in the letters referred to a Pope. That enabled him to figure out that Fisher Senior was Pius XI and Fisher Junior was his successor, Pius XII.
First at America House, and later at the Jesuit seminary in Shrub Oak in Westchester County, Breslin worked on the papers through 1967 and into 1968, while continuing his studies. In 1968, he won a history fellowship at the University of Virginia. Breslin soon became enmeshed in his studies there, including the difficult task of learning Chinese so that he could study American-Chinese diplomacy. He wanted to write a scholarly article on the encyclical, but he simply had no time.
The issue came to a head in 1972. That summer, as he prepared to defend his doctoral dissertation on American Catholic missionaries in China, Breslin read an article in the National Catholic Reporter about Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, the prefect of the Vatican Library, who had just died. Tisserant’s secretary took the cardinal’s papers back to France, in a break with Vatican protocol, and asserted that they contained some intriguing information.
“It had two things in it which were bombshells,” Breslin recalled. One was the assertion that Pius XI had arranged for the drafting of an encyclical against anti-Semitism. The other claim, sensational but unproven, was that Mussolini had arranged to have the Pope murdered to keep him from publishing it.
Breslin has no inside information on the death of Pius XI, officially attributed to a heart attack. But looking back on it now, he reasons that, if Tisserant was right about the murder, and Eugenio Pacelli knew that Pius XI had been killed, that could help explain the “silence” of Pacelli when he became Pius XII. Pacelli, a lifelong diplomat accustomed to working quietly in the background, was the closest aide to Pius XI. “If he suspected or knew that there had been a murder, when he was made Pope, if Pius XI could have been murdered, why not Pius XII?”
A few weeks after that first article in 1972, the National Catholic Reporter carried a story about the Vatican sending forth a Jesuit historian to deny both parts of the Tisserant story. “That infuriated me,” Breslin said. So he wrote a letter to the newspaper, saying that the draft encyclical existed, and he had a microfilmed copy.
In response, Jim Castelli of the National Catholic Reporter called Breslin and paid his expenses to fly to the paper’s offices in Kansas City, Mo. There, the staff asked him “hundreds of questions.” Later, Breslin helped the newspaper by translating the Gundlach letters. The story broke in December, 1972, including a small part of the encyclical. “The Vatican basically kind of pooh-poohed it,” said Breslin, who by then had resigned from the Society of Jesus without reaching ordination, for reasons unrelated to the encyclical. Breslin is now acting vice president for research at Florida International University in Miami. After the story broke, Passelecq, the Benedictine monk from Belgium, decided to investigate. But he made little progress. In 1987, he joined forces with Suchecky to work on a history of the encyclical. That year, Suchecky asked Breslin for help, and Breslin gave them microfilm of the draft encyclical and accompanying documents.
The two European scholars got little real cooperation from church officials and had no luck in gathering further primary documents. “They weren’t able to uncover very much more than I uncovered,” Breslin said. But he added that they did develop background information that helped to put the encyclical in context.
One element of the context was the history of other public statements by Pius XI. In 1937, he issued an encyclical, written in German and read from every Catholic pulpit in the Nazi Reich. His secretary of state, Pacelli, led the drafting of the encyclical, “Mit Brennender Sorge,” “With Burning Sorrow.”
The encyclical criticizes anyone who “exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State . . . and divinizes them to an idolatrous level,” which is what the Nazis were doing. Still, the document’s primary concern was not racism, but Nazi violations of their 1933 concordat, or agreement, with the Vatican.
“It was a very strong approach of Pius XI as Pope to push all these concordats,” said Eugene Fisher, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In later years, critics of Pacelli as Pius XII called him a Germanophile, too cozy with the Nazis. But he was in Germany to protect the church’s interests. “That was his job,” Fisher said. “The Pope sent him over there to make a concordat. So he did.”
It was the violation of that concordat that caused “burning sorrow” for Pius XI. “In short, Mit Brennender Sorge was neither a condemnation of Nazism as a whole nor the expression of solidarity with all its victims,” the book says. “Neither was it a protest against anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews in Germany, which the text does not mention at all.”
The next year, 1938, the Italian government began to impose racial legislation on Jews. That summer, Pius XI spoke out publicly against anti-Semitism, in a September speech to a group of pilgrims.
“It is a deplorable movement, a movement in which we, as Christians, must have no part,” Pius XI said. “We recognize that anyone has the right to defend himself, to take steps to protect himself against anything that threatens his legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.”
Shortly before that speech, Pius XI had also acted privately to commission the drafting of a full-fledged encyclical on the subject. The man he chose for this task was John LaFarge, because he had read LaFarge’s work on interracial justice and found it impressive.
During a European trip, LaFarge attended a general audience with the Pope, and later received a message that the Pope wanted to see him. When they met privately, Pius XI asked him to draft an encyclical on racism.
In a 1938 memo to a Jesuit official in New York, LaFarge reported the Pope’s instructions to him: “ Say simply,’ he told me, what you would say if you yourself were Pope.’ “ The command hit LaFarge hard. “Frankly, I am simply stunned, and all I can say is that the Rock of Peter has fallen on my head.”
That summer, in the oppressive heat of Paris, LaFarge worked on the draft with two other Jesuits: Gundlach, and a Frenchman, the Rev. Gustave Desbuquois. A fourth, the Rev. Heinrich Bacht, translated it into Latin. Late in the year, they finished the draft, called Humani Generis Unitas, “The Unity of the Human Race.” LaFarge traveled from Paris to Rome to deliver it to the Rev. Wladimir Ledochowski, the Jesuit superior general. But a few weeks later, on Feb. 9, 1939, Pius XI died.
In the draft that Pius XI had commissioned, the authors deplored “a struggle for racial purity” that was clearly aimed at the Jews. “Save for its systematic cruelty, this struggle is no different in true motives and methods from persecutions everywhere carried out against the Jews since antiquity,” the draft says. “As a result of such persecution, millions of persons are deprived of the most elementary rights and privileges of citizens in the very land of their birth.”
But the draft condones “the authentic basis of the social separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity,” based on religious differences. It also cites “the spiritual dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls.”
The book explores other Catholic expressions of support for religion-based separation of Jews, such as articles in the Jesuit periodical, La Civiltà Cattolica, and even the words of one of the encyclical’s drafters, Gundlach, who wrote, “The Church as always protected Jews against anti-Semitic practices….On the other hand, it has inspired and supported measures opposing the unjust and harmful influence of economic and intellectual Judaism….”
So the draft was flawed. “It allows for a certain type of restrictions on Jews that we would never allow in this country,” Fisher said. Its “theology of condemnation” is far from the approach that the Church adopted at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), he said, and if either Pope had published it, the document would have made Catholic-Jewish dialogue trickier.
“It’s probably just as well that it never did get out,” Fisher said. “It probably would not have had much effect on the course of history in the period.” The Rev. John Morley, a professor at Seton Hall University and author of “Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust 1939-1943,” added, “When all is said and done, it doesn’t say that much.”
Some argue that it would only have enraged the Germans and brought further reprisals down on the Jews. That later happened in the Netherlands, when Catholic bishops spoke out publicly against Nazi repression of the Jews, and the Nazis responded by rounding up baptized Jews—including Edith Stein, a German Jew who had become a Carmelite nun, and is to be canonized a saint next year.
But for all the document’s faults, Rudin, of the American Jewish Committee, still wishes it had been published. “Of course it would have helped,” he said. “If one person had been saved, then it would have been worth it. And how much more angry would it have made the German Nazis?”
If either Pope, Ratti or Pacelli, had published it, the document could have helped, Breslin argued. “I think that, in the hands of a person like Ratti, or even an invigorated Pius XII, it could have thrown confusion into the ranks of the Nazis,” he said. “I think, basically, this would have been enough to have saved hundreds of thousands, or millions, of peoples’ lives.”
In tapping LaFarge to draft the encyclical, Pius XI had temporarily bypassed the Jesuit superior general, Ledochowski. The book hints that Ledochowski may have slowed delivery of the draft to Pius XI. “I do know that Ledochowski deliberately delayed it getting to his desk,” Breslin said. “Gundlach believed that Ledochowski wanted to keep the Germans friendly to the church, because they were a bulwark against Bolshevism.”
Though it may be that Ledochowski delayed it so long that Pius XI was finally too sick to deal with it, that may never be known. But it seems clear that, when Pacelli became Pius XII, he knew about the draft, because he used some of its language in his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, on the unity of human society. For reasons that no one yet knows, he did not promulgate the entire draft.
That omission had no bearing on the view of Pius XII for many years after the war. “Between the collapse of the Nazi empire and 1962, there was no prominent world leader that I’m aware of that had any criticism of Pius XII,” said Thomas Dennelly, a retired social studies teacher from Baldwin who has spoken and written in defense of Pius XII.
It was not until 1963 that public criticism of Pius XII began to spread. The catalyst was a new play by West German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, “The Deputy,” which opened in Europe that year. “Nature abhors a void, and they’re trying to find a culprit,” Dennelly said. “No individual did as much for the people who were victims of the Holocaust as Pius XII.”
In fact, right after the war and at the time of his death in 1958, many Jewish leaders showered praise on Pius XII, including such influential figures as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Rome. In a 1967 book, Three Popes and the Jews, an Israeli diplomat and journalist named Pinchas Lapide wrote that “no Pope in history has ever been thanked more heartily by Jews for having saved or helped their brethren in distress….”
One of those grateful Jews, in Lapide’s view, was the wartime chief rabbi of Rome, Israele Zolli, who converted to Catholicism and took the name Eugenio, after Pacelli. As a result, Lapide wrote, “Most Roman Jews were convinced that his conversion was an act of gratitude for wartime succour to Jewish refugees….” (In a book-length study, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Holocaust, Robert Weisbord and Wallace Sillanpoa describe Zolli as a cold, abrasive character who lost his job as chief rabbi and converted out of pique.)
Lapide’s defense of Pacelli also includes a long account of Catholic actions to save Jews. One rescuer was a papal envoy, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII). In 1957, when Lapide was an Israeli diplomat, he thanked Roncalli, then a cardinal and the Patriarch of Venice. But Roncalli minimized his role, insisting: “I referred to the Holy See and afterwards I simply carried out the Pope’s orders: first and foremost to save human lives.”
In all, Lapide calculated, Catholics saved as many as 800,000 Jews from the Nazis. Morley questioned that number, and his book blamed Pius XII for focusing too much on diplomatic niceties and not enough on saving lives. “It must be concluded that Vatican diplomacy failed the Jews during the Holocaust by not doing all that it was possible for it to do on their behalf,” the book said.
The controversy about Pius XII seems likely to continue as long as there is unknown information. After the Hochhuth play, the Vatican did release a large amount of papal diplomatic correspondence from that era, despite its usual rule of waiting 75 years to make documents public.
But there are still documents that scholars have not seen. The American Jewish Committee, which has also been waiting for the new Vatican document on the church and the Holocaust, wants all the World War II archives to be made available to teams of scholars, both Jewish and Catholic.
“That would put an end to all the charges and countercharges that are swirling,” Rudin said. “This is a good time to do it. It’s time for a final reckoning of the Holocaust period.”
The book’s subject seems obscure: the story behind a draft papal encyclical, commissioned nearly 60 years ago by a Pope who did not live long enough to publish it. The style of the book’s authors is scholarly and dry—hardly best-seller material.
But the new Harcourt Brace book, The Hidden Encyclical of Pope Pius XI, written by a Benedictine monk and a Jewish historian, arrives at an opportune time to become fuel in an incendiary, persistent debate: Did the Vatican remain “silent” in the face of the Holocaust, and why? In recent months and weeks, that painful, haunting question has continued to make news: The April 7 issue of the The New Yorker carried a caustic article by James Carroll, a former priest, condemning what he characterizes as the silence of the church’s wartime leader, Pope Pius XII. In the June issue of Inside the Vatican, an independent, conservative magazine, a cover story defended Pius XII and reported that the cause of his canonization is moving ahead smoothly. In August, the International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultation wrote a letter asking the Vatican to open to scholars its entire wartime archives. At the end of September, the Catholic bishops of France publicly apologized for the silence of the wartime church while the Nazis sent French Jews to death camps. “Today we confess this silence was wrong,” the bishops said. At the start of October, Pope John Paul II said that a new document about the church and the Holocaust is still not ready.
A Vatican official first mentioned this document to Jewish leaders in 1987, during a furor over John Paul’s meeting with Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi. “Now it’s ten years, and we’re waiting,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee.
All these events underscore the persistence of the “silence” issue, despite the passage of 50 years since the end of World War II. Now, the book by Georges Passelecq, the monk, and Bernard Suchecky, the historian, returns to the prewar roots of the whole question.
Its primary subject is Achille Ratti, a scholar who rose to prefect of the Vatican Library before he became Pope Pius XI in 1922. As Pope, he signed a landmark 1929 treaty with the Italian government that set up the Vatican City State, then a 1933 agreement with the Nazis to protect the church in Germany. In 1938, Pius XI commissioned the draft of an encyclical on the evils of racism and anti-Semitism.
The book also sheds some light on Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, a frail, austere career diplomat who served Pius XI as secretary of state and played a key role in the 1933 agreement with the Nazis. When Pius XI died in 1939, Pacelli became Pope Pius XII, but he did not publish the encyclical that his predecessor had commissioned.
That document, with all its implications for understanding the church’s conduct during the Holocaust, remained virtually unknown for three decades. Its story didn’t begin to emerge until 1967, when a Jesuit seminarian started examining a collection of old papers.
The task for that seminarian, Thomas Breslin, was to explore the papers of the late Rev. John LaFarge, a beloved Jesuit advocate of interracial justice, and get them ready for some future biographer. The papers sat in a room at America House, the Manhattan headquarters of the Jesuit magazine, America, where LaFarge had worked for nearly four decades, including a period as its top editor. “The Jesuits at America House called him Uncle John, and the affection they had for him was palpable,” Breslin said. “They loved him.”
In the pages of America, beginning in 1926, LaFarge had written thousands of words on racial justice. Before 1926, he had worked for 15 years in predominantly African-American parishes in rural Maryland, which helped to shape his thought on the evil of segregation. LaFarge’s 1937 book, Interracial Justice, a sharp critique of segregation laws, helped build his reputation as a Catholic leader on racial justice issues.
“LaFarge was not afraid to put out a really broad hand to as many people as he could, white or black, Catholic or Protestant, to effect reconciliation between whites and blacks,” Breslin said.
LaFarge’s father was John, a well-known painter whose circle included the novelists Edith Wharton and Henry James and the soldier-politician Theodore Roosevelt. Despite his family’s connections, his Harvard education and his scholarly accomplishments, the younger LaFarge displayed an engagingly down-to-earth style, reflected in the title of his autobiography, The Manner Is Ordinary. Still, he sensed that his work had been important, and his papers reflected that perception. “He saved everything,” Breslin said.
In the summer of 1963, the seriously ill LaFarge summoned enough energy to participate in the march on Washington led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Three months later, just after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, LaFarge died.
Though Breslin had entered the Society of Jesus only a year before LaFarge died, and the two men never met, Breslin had read about him and knew his background. But he knew absolutely nothing about a long document in French that he found among the LaFarge papers in 1967—except that it was clearly important, because it was marked as a draft encyclical.
Nowhere in his reading had Breslin learned of any connection between LaFarge and an encyclical, the most influential form of communication between Popes and the universal church. Nor did he understand immediately the mysterious references to “Fisher Senior” and “Fisher Junior” that he found in an accompanying series of letters, written in a high, literary German style, by the Rev. Gustav Gundlach, a German Jesuit.
Not long after he came upon the draft and the letters, Breslin was meditating on the Gospel passage in which Jesus invites Simon (later Peter), a fisherman, to fish for people. It dawned on him that the “Fisher” in the letters referred to a Pope. That enabled him to figure out that Fisher Senior was Pius XI and Fisher Junior was his successor, Pius XII.
First at America House, and later at the Jesuit seminary in Shrub Oak in Westchester County, Breslin worked on the papers through 1967 and into 1968, while continuing his studies. In 1968, he won a history fellowship at the University of Virginia. Breslin soon became enmeshed in his studies there, including the difficult task of learning Chinese so that he could study American-Chinese diplomacy. He wanted to write a scholarly article on the encyclical, but he simply had no time.
The issue came to a head in 1972. That summer, as he prepared to defend his doctoral dissertation on American Catholic missionaries in China, Breslin read an article in the National Catholic Reporter about Cardinal Eugene Tisserant, the prefect of the Vatican Library, who had just died. Tisserant’s secretary took the cardinal’s papers back to France, in a break with Vatican protocol, and asserted that they contained some intriguing information.
“It had two things in it which were bombshells,” Breslin recalled. One was the assertion that Pius XI had arranged for the drafting of an encyclical against anti-Semitism. The other claim, sensational but unproven, was that Mussolini had arranged to have the Pope murdered to keep him from publishing it.
Breslin has no inside information on the death of Pius XI, officially attributed to a heart attack. But looking back on it now, he reasons that, if Tisserant was right about the murder, and Eugenio Pacelli knew that Pius XI had been killed, that could help explain the “silence” of Pacelli when he became Pius XII. Pacelli, a lifelong diplomat accustomed to working quietly in the background, was the closest aide to Pius XI. “If he suspected or knew that there had been a murder, when he was made Pope, if Pius XI could have been murdered, why not Pius XII?”
A few weeks after that first article in 1972, the National Catholic Reporter carried a story about the Vatican sending forth a Jesuit historian to deny both parts of the Tisserant story. “That infuriated me,” Breslin said. So he wrote a letter to the newspaper, saying that the draft encyclical existed, and he had a microfilmed copy.
In response, Jim Castelli of the National Catholic Reporter called Breslin and paid his expenses to fly to the paper’s offices in Kansas City, Mo. There, the staff asked him “hundreds of questions.” Later, Breslin helped the newspaper by translating the Gundlach letters. The story broke in December, 1972, including a small part of the encyclical. “The Vatican basically kind of pooh-poohed it,” said Breslin, who by then had resigned from the Society of Jesus without reaching ordination, for reasons unrelated to the encyclical. Breslin is now acting vice president for research at Florida International University in Miami. After the story broke, Passelecq, the Benedictine monk from Belgium, decided to investigate. But he made little progress. In 1987, he joined forces with Suchecky to work on a history of the encyclical. That year, Suchecky asked Breslin for help, and Breslin gave them microfilm of the draft encyclical and accompanying documents.
The two European scholars got little real cooperation from church officials and had no luck in gathering further primary documents. “They weren’t able to uncover very much more than I uncovered,” Breslin said. But he added that they did develop background information that helped to put the encyclical in context.
One element of the context was the history of other public statements by Pius XI. In 1937, he issued an encyclical, written in German and read from every Catholic pulpit in the Nazi Reich. His secretary of state, Pacelli, led the drafting of the encyclical, “Mit Brennender Sorge,” “With Burning Sorrow.”
The encyclical criticizes anyone who “exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State . . . and divinizes them to an idolatrous level,” which is what the Nazis were doing. Still, the document’s primary concern was not racism, but Nazi violations of their 1933 concordat, or agreement, with the Vatican.
“It was a very strong approach of Pius XI as Pope to push all these concordats,” said Eugene Fisher, associate director of the Secretariat for Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs at the National Conference of Catholic Bishops.
In later years, critics of Pacelli as Pius XII called him a Germanophile, too cozy with the Nazis. But he was in Germany to protect the church’s interests. “That was his job,” Fisher said. “The Pope sent him over there to make a concordat. So he did.”
It was the violation of that concordat that caused “burning sorrow” for Pius XI. “In short, Mit Brennender Sorge was neither a condemnation of Nazism as a whole nor the expression of solidarity with all its victims,” the book says. “Neither was it a protest against anti-Semitism and the persecution of the Jews in Germany, which the text does not mention at all.”
The next year, 1938, the Italian government began to impose racial legislation on Jews. That summer, Pius XI spoke out publicly against anti-Semitism, in a September speech to a group of pilgrims.
“It is a deplorable movement, a movement in which we, as Christians, must have no part,” Pius XI said. “We recognize that anyone has the right to defend himself, to take steps to protect himself against anything that threatens his legitimate interests. But anti-Semitism is inadmissible. We are spiritually Semites.”
Shortly before that speech, Pius XI had also acted privately to commission the drafting of a full-fledged encyclical on the subject. The man he chose for this task was John LaFarge, because he had read LaFarge’s work on interracial justice and found it impressive.
During a European trip, LaFarge attended a general audience with the Pope, and later received a message that the Pope wanted to see him. When they met privately, Pius XI asked him to draft an encyclical on racism.
In a 1938 memo to a Jesuit official in New York, LaFarge reported the Pope’s instructions to him: “ Say simply,’ he told me, what you would say if you yourself were Pope.’ “ The command hit LaFarge hard. “Frankly, I am simply stunned, and all I can say is that the Rock of Peter has fallen on my head.”
That summer, in the oppressive heat of Paris, LaFarge worked on the draft with two other Jesuits: Gundlach, and a Frenchman, the Rev. Gustave Desbuquois. A fourth, the Rev. Heinrich Bacht, translated it into Latin. Late in the year, they finished the draft, called Humani Generis Unitas, “The Unity of the Human Race.” LaFarge traveled from Paris to Rome to deliver it to the Rev. Wladimir Ledochowski, the Jesuit superior general. But a few weeks later, on Feb. 9, 1939, Pius XI died.
In the draft that Pius XI had commissioned, the authors deplored “a struggle for racial purity” that was clearly aimed at the Jews. “Save for its systematic cruelty, this struggle is no different in true motives and methods from persecutions everywhere carried out against the Jews since antiquity,” the draft says. “As a result of such persecution, millions of persons are deprived of the most elementary rights and privileges of citizens in the very land of their birth.”
But the draft condones “the authentic basis of the social separation of the Jews from the rest of humanity,” based on religious differences. It also cites “the spiritual dangers to which contact with Jews can expose souls.”
The book explores other Catholic expressions of support for religion-based separation of Jews, such as articles in the Jesuit periodical, La Civiltà Cattolica, and even the words of one of the encyclical’s drafters, Gundlach, who wrote, “The Church as always protected Jews against anti-Semitic practices….On the other hand, it has inspired and supported measures opposing the unjust and harmful influence of economic and intellectual Judaism….”
So the draft was flawed. “It allows for a certain type of restrictions on Jews that we would never allow in this country,” Fisher said. Its “theology of condemnation” is far from the approach that the Church adopted at the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), he said, and if either Pope had published it, the document would have made Catholic-Jewish dialogue trickier.
“It’s probably just as well that it never did get out,” Fisher said. “It probably would not have had much effect on the course of history in the period.” The Rev. John Morley, a professor at Seton Hall University and author of “Vatican Diplomacy and the Jews During the Holocaust 1939-1943,” added, “When all is said and done, it doesn’t say that much.”
Some argue that it would only have enraged the Germans and brought further reprisals down on the Jews. That later happened in the Netherlands, when Catholic bishops spoke out publicly against Nazi repression of the Jews, and the Nazis responded by rounding up baptized Jews—including Edith Stein, a German Jew who had become a Carmelite nun, and is to be canonized a saint next year.
But for all the document’s faults, Rudin, of the American Jewish Committee, still wishes it had been published. “Of course it would have helped,” he said. “If one person had been saved, then it would have been worth it. And how much more angry would it have made the German Nazis?”
If either Pope, Ratti or Pacelli, had published it, the document could have helped, Breslin argued. “I think that, in the hands of a person like Ratti, or even an invigorated Pius XII, it could have thrown confusion into the ranks of the Nazis,” he said. “I think, basically, this would have been enough to have saved hundreds of thousands, or millions, of peoples’ lives.”
In tapping LaFarge to draft the encyclical, Pius XI had temporarily bypassed the Jesuit superior general, Ledochowski. The book hints that Ledochowski may have slowed delivery of the draft to Pius XI. “I do know that Ledochowski deliberately delayed it getting to his desk,” Breslin said. “Gundlach believed that Ledochowski wanted to keep the Germans friendly to the church, because they were a bulwark against Bolshevism.”
Though it may be that Ledochowski delayed it so long that Pius XI was finally too sick to deal with it, that may never be known. But it seems clear that, when Pacelli became Pius XII, he knew about the draft, because he used some of its language in his first encyclical, Summi Pontificatus, on the unity of human society. For reasons that no one yet knows, he did not promulgate the entire draft.
That omission had no bearing on the view of Pius XII for many years after the war. “Between the collapse of the Nazi empire and 1962, there was no prominent world leader that I’m aware of that had any criticism of Pius XII,” said Thomas Dennelly, a retired social studies teacher from Baldwin who has spoken and written in defense of Pius XII.
It was not until 1963 that public criticism of Pius XII began to spread. The catalyst was a new play by West German playwright Rolf Hochhuth, “The Deputy,” which opened in Europe that year. “Nature abhors a void, and they’re trying to find a culprit,” Dennelly said. “No individual did as much for the people who were victims of the Holocaust as Pius XII.”
In fact, right after the war and at the time of his death in 1958, many Jewish leaders showered praise on Pius XII, including such influential figures as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and Elio Toaff, the chief rabbi of Rome. In a 1967 book, Three Popes and the Jews, an Israeli diplomat and journalist named Pinchas Lapide wrote that “no Pope in history has ever been thanked more heartily by Jews for having saved or helped their brethren in distress….”
One of those grateful Jews, in Lapide’s view, was the wartime chief rabbi of Rome, Israele Zolli, who converted to Catholicism and took the name Eugenio, after Pacelli. As a result, Lapide wrote, “Most Roman Jews were convinced that his conversion was an act of gratitude for wartime succour to Jewish refugees….” (In a book-length study, The Chief Rabbi, the Pope and the Holocaust, Robert Weisbord and Wallace Sillanpoa describe Zolli as a cold, abrasive character who lost his job as chief rabbi and converted out of pique.)
Lapide’s defense of Pacelli also includes a long account of Catholic actions to save Jews. One rescuer was a papal envoy, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII). In 1957, when Lapide was an Israeli diplomat, he thanked Roncalli, then a cardinal and the Patriarch of Venice. But Roncalli minimized his role, insisting: “I referred to the Holy See and afterwards I simply carried out the Pope’s orders: first and foremost to save human lives.”
In all, Lapide calculated, Catholics saved as many as 800,000 Jews from the Nazis. Morley questioned that number, and his book blamed Pius XII for focusing too much on diplomatic niceties and not enough on saving lives. “It must be concluded that Vatican diplomacy failed the Jews during the Holocaust by not doing all that it was possible for it to do on their behalf,” the book said.
The controversy about Pius XII seems likely to continue as long as there is unknown information. After the Hochhuth play, the Vatican did release a large amount of papal diplomatic correspondence from that era, despite its usual rule of waiting 75 years to make documents public.
But there are still documents that scholars have not seen. The American Jewish Committee, which has also been waiting for the new Vatican document on the church and the Holocaust, wants all the World War II archives to be made available to teams of scholars, both Jewish and Catholic.
“That would put an end to all the charges and countercharges that are swirling,” Rudin said. “This is a good time to do it. It’s time for a final reckoning of the Holocaust period.”
A historic Holocaust concert
Newsday, April 8, 1994
Vatican City—The long, difficult relationship of Catholics and Jews, 2,000 years of frequent dissonance and mutual suspicion, rose in a triumphant crescendo of harmony last night at a history-making concert in the halls of the Vatican.
Gathered at the very heart of Catholicism, Pope John Paul II and the leaders of Italian and world Jewry together observed Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust commemoration day, marking the Nazi slaughter of 6 million European Jews. The audience included a group of Long Islanders who helped bring about the event. Together they listened to a program that included the Hebrew words of Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” and his “Kaddish” Symphony, named for the traditional Jewish prayer in memory of the dead.
“To say Kaddish inside the Vatican means for me that Jews no longer have to consider themselves outsiders and that there is a shared spirituality,” said actor Richard Dreyfuss, who narrated the symphony.
Along with about 100 others who contributed financially and otherwise to the concert, including Holocaust survivors, Dreyfuss attended a special audience with the Pope earlier in the day.
At that audience the Pope listened thoughtfully to Jewish leaders and survivors, then responded with a ringing condemnation of anti-Semitism. At times some in the audience wept quietly, like Donna Bojarsky of Los Angeles, who cried as she listened to the words of reconciliation and thought of her mother, a Holocaust survivor whose birthday was yesterday. “It was moving,” she said.
As a young man, John Paul saw for himself the ferocity of the Nazis, and in recent years he has made pilgrimages to Auschwitz and Dachau.
“I welcome the survivors of the terrible experience of the concentration camps who honor us with their presence,” the Pope said. “The concert this evening is a commemoration of those horrifying events. The candles which we burn as we listen to the music will keep before us the long history of anti-Semitism which culminated in the Shoah….Humanity cannot permit all that to happen again.”
Yesterday’s events capped a series of recent developments that have helped to ease 2,000-year-old frictions and to heal the hurt that Jews felt over what they considered the timid response of Pope Pius XII to the Nazi extermination program at the time of the Holocaust.
Pope John XXIII began changing all that at an emotional appearance in 1960 before Jewish leaders honoring him for his role in saving 1,000 Jewish children in Turkey during World War II.
In 1962, John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, which set in motion a chain of events that erased from the church’s liturgy a Good Friday prayer for the “perfidious Jews” and brought about “Nostra Aetate,” a key document making it clear that Catholics should not blame Jews for the death of Jesus.
At the end of last year, the Vatican and Israel reached agreement on diplomatic relations. In a recent interview John Paul strongly expressed his support for the right of Jews to their homeland in Israel, called the Jews the “elder brothers” of Catholics and repeated his desire to visit Jerusalem.
“John XXIII started the process; John Paul II is pushing the process further,” said Rabbi Herbert Friedman of Manhattan, who attended the meeting with John XXIII in 1960 and the papal audience yesterday.
That audience and last night’s concert placed an emotional seal on the progress of the past 30 years.
“This is a unique, an extraordinary moment in the long and complicated history of our two ancient faith communities,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, inter-religious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee. “It is a moment that will not come our way ever again….Because words and weeping fail us, as finite human beings who believe in an infinite God, we must turn to the divine gift of music to form a mystical bond of remembrance between heaven and earth, between life and death, between past and future.”
Roger Tilles, the Long Island developer who was a prime fund-raiser and organizer of the concert, told the Pope: “Thank you for bringing the power of your commitment to commemorate the Shoah together with the unique power of music.”
The day was especially moving for concentration-camp survivors such as Jack Eisner of Manhattan, whose own life embodies the epochal changes that the audience and concert signal.
“As a young boy growing up in pre-war Warsaw, I feared crossing the sidewalk next to a church,” Eisner told John Paul. “Now, some 50 years later, the unthinkable is happening. The most influential and powerful church in the world and its majestic spiritual leader of a billion souls is extending its hand of friendship to me, the Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto.”
The day was filled with warm gestures. The Pope greeted each of the survivors and others at the private audience one by one, then posed for a group photo with them. Later, at a lunch hosted by Tilles, the developer presented a shofar, the ram’s horn that Jews use at the Jewish New Year, to Cardinal Edward Cassidy of Australia, president of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.
“Together we can do so much to heal,” Cassidy said, “but we have first of all to be healed ourselves.”
The process that led to the concert began with a suggestion from Gilbert Levine, who conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London last night. Tilles became involved as a principal fund raiser, and his Tilles Center at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University did much of the musical organizing.
“When I started the process, I had no idea of what the significance of the event was, and it’s been building and building and building,” Tilles said. “This is revolutionary for the Jewish community and for the Catholic community.”
The concert worked so well that Tilles and Monsignor Thomas Hartman, who runs TeLIcare, the television arm of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, have plans for more. “We’re going to bring this concert back to the Tilles Center,” said Hartman, who works closely with Tilles on a program that every year sends six Jewish and six Catholic high school students to Israel. “We’re going to use it as a forum for an endowment for this Operation Understanding for kids.”
Last night many of the leaders of Italy’s 40,000-member Jewish community, with Jewish and Catholic leaders from around the world, gathered for the concert in the 7,500-seat Pope Paul VI hall, in the shadow of St. Peter’s Basilica.
As Eisner and other survivors finished lighting six candles for the 6 million slain Jews, the two honored guests walked in together: the Pope and the chief rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff. In addition to the Bernstein works, the hauntingly emotional program offered Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre” concerto, the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and a Franz Schubert setting of Psalm 92.
What was missing from the program was as telling about the Vatican’s attitude as what was in it. For one thing, Tilles said, the Vatican removed for the concert a huge cross that usually hangs in the hall. For another, the Vatican rejected a Gustav Mahler piece, apparently fearing that his presence on the program might offend Jews, since he eventually converted to Catholicism. “Their sensitivity has been amazing,” Tilles said.
At the close of the concert, John Paul spoke feelingly about the Holocaust, first in Italian, then in English. “I wish to invite all of you to observe a moment of silence in order to praise the Lord with the words which He will suggest to our hearts,” the Pope said, “and to hear once more the plea, ‘Do not forget us!’ ”
The whole day had tremendous significance. “I really think that it’s going to be a turning point,” Hartman said.
“Now at the top, the policy of the church is clear,” Friedman said. “The thing that has to be done is for the declaration at the top to filter down through all of the layers and levels of bureaucracy in the church, down to the bottom.”
Vatican City—The long, difficult relationship of Catholics and Jews, 2,000 years of frequent dissonance and mutual suspicion, rose in a triumphant crescendo of harmony last night at a history-making concert in the halls of the Vatican.
Gathered at the very heart of Catholicism, Pope John Paul II and the leaders of Italian and world Jewry together observed Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust commemoration day, marking the Nazi slaughter of 6 million European Jews. The audience included a group of Long Islanders who helped bring about the event. Together they listened to a program that included the Hebrew words of Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” and his “Kaddish” Symphony, named for the traditional Jewish prayer in memory of the dead.
“To say Kaddish inside the Vatican means for me that Jews no longer have to consider themselves outsiders and that there is a shared spirituality,” said actor Richard Dreyfuss, who narrated the symphony.
Along with about 100 others who contributed financially and otherwise to the concert, including Holocaust survivors, Dreyfuss attended a special audience with the Pope earlier in the day.
At that audience the Pope listened thoughtfully to Jewish leaders and survivors, then responded with a ringing condemnation of anti-Semitism. At times some in the audience wept quietly, like Donna Bojarsky of Los Angeles, who cried as she listened to the words of reconciliation and thought of her mother, a Holocaust survivor whose birthday was yesterday. “It was moving,” she said.
As a young man, John Paul saw for himself the ferocity of the Nazis, and in recent years he has made pilgrimages to Auschwitz and Dachau.
“I welcome the survivors of the terrible experience of the concentration camps who honor us with their presence,” the Pope said. “The concert this evening is a commemoration of those horrifying events. The candles which we burn as we listen to the music will keep before us the long history of anti-Semitism which culminated in the Shoah….Humanity cannot permit all that to happen again.”
Yesterday’s events capped a series of recent developments that have helped to ease 2,000-year-old frictions and to heal the hurt that Jews felt over what they considered the timid response of Pope Pius XII to the Nazi extermination program at the time of the Holocaust.
Pope John XXIII began changing all that at an emotional appearance in 1960 before Jewish leaders honoring him for his role in saving 1,000 Jewish children in Turkey during World War II.
In 1962, John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council, which set in motion a chain of events that erased from the church’s liturgy a Good Friday prayer for the “perfidious Jews” and brought about “Nostra Aetate,” a key document making it clear that Catholics should not blame Jews for the death of Jesus.
At the end of last year, the Vatican and Israel reached agreement on diplomatic relations. In a recent interview John Paul strongly expressed his support for the right of Jews to their homeland in Israel, called the Jews the “elder brothers” of Catholics and repeated his desire to visit Jerusalem.
“John XXIII started the process; John Paul II is pushing the process further,” said Rabbi Herbert Friedman of Manhattan, who attended the meeting with John XXIII in 1960 and the papal audience yesterday.
That audience and last night’s concert placed an emotional seal on the progress of the past 30 years.
“This is a unique, an extraordinary moment in the long and complicated history of our two ancient faith communities,” said Rabbi A. James Rudin, inter-religious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee. “It is a moment that will not come our way ever again….Because words and weeping fail us, as finite human beings who believe in an infinite God, we must turn to the divine gift of music to form a mystical bond of remembrance between heaven and earth, between life and death, between past and future.”
Roger Tilles, the Long Island developer who was a prime fund-raiser and organizer of the concert, told the Pope: “Thank you for bringing the power of your commitment to commemorate the Shoah together with the unique power of music.”
The day was especially moving for concentration-camp survivors such as Jack Eisner of Manhattan, whose own life embodies the epochal changes that the audience and concert signal.
“As a young boy growing up in pre-war Warsaw, I feared crossing the sidewalk next to a church,” Eisner told John Paul. “Now, some 50 years later, the unthinkable is happening. The most influential and powerful church in the world and its majestic spiritual leader of a billion souls is extending its hand of friendship to me, the Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto.”
The day was filled with warm gestures. The Pope greeted each of the survivors and others at the private audience one by one, then posed for a group photo with them. Later, at a lunch hosted by Tilles, the developer presented a shofar, the ram’s horn that Jews use at the Jewish New Year, to Cardinal Edward Cassidy of Australia, president of the Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews.
“Together we can do so much to heal,” Cassidy said, “but we have first of all to be healed ourselves.”
The process that led to the concert began with a suggestion from Gilbert Levine, who conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of London last night. Tilles became involved as a principal fund raiser, and his Tilles Center at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University did much of the musical organizing.
“When I started the process, I had no idea of what the significance of the event was, and it’s been building and building and building,” Tilles said. “This is revolutionary for the Jewish community and for the Catholic community.”
The concert worked so well that Tilles and Monsignor Thomas Hartman, who runs TeLIcare, the television arm of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, have plans for more. “We’re going to bring this concert back to the Tilles Center,” said Hartman, who works closely with Tilles on a program that every year sends six Jewish and six Catholic high school students to Israel. “We’re going to use it as a forum for an endowment for this Operation Understanding for kids.”
Last night many of the leaders of Italy’s 40,000-member Jewish community, with Jewish and Catholic leaders from around the world, gathered for the concert in the 7,500-seat Pope Paul VI hall, in the shadow of St. Peter’s Basilica.
As Eisner and other survivors finished lighting six candles for the 6 million slain Jews, the two honored guests walked in together: the Pope and the chief rabbi of Rome, Elio Toaff. In addition to the Bernstein works, the hauntingly emotional program offered Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre” concerto, the third movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, and a Franz Schubert setting of Psalm 92.
What was missing from the program was as telling about the Vatican’s attitude as what was in it. For one thing, Tilles said, the Vatican removed for the concert a huge cross that usually hangs in the hall. For another, the Vatican rejected a Gustav Mahler piece, apparently fearing that his presence on the program might offend Jews, since he eventually converted to Catholicism. “Their sensitivity has been amazing,” Tilles said.
At the close of the concert, John Paul spoke feelingly about the Holocaust, first in Italian, then in English. “I wish to invite all of you to observe a moment of silence in order to praise the Lord with the words which He will suggest to our hearts,” the Pope said, “and to hear once more the plea, ‘Do not forget us!’ ”
The whole day had tremendous significance. “I really think that it’s going to be a turning point,” Hartman said.
“Now at the top, the policy of the church is clear,” Friedman said. “The thing that has to be done is for the declaration at the top to filter down through all of the layers and levels of bureaucracy in the church, down to the bottom.”
Spielberg and Schindler
One day, as I drove into the parking lot at Newsday, I finished listening to a powerful audio book about Oskar Schindler. I remember thinking to myself that, of all the books I'd read, this is the one I most wished I had written. I went upstairs and checked stories about Schindler. To my surprise, I discovered that Steven Spielberg was planning to make a film based on Thomas Keneally's book. That seemed odd, given Spielberg's reputation for very different films, such as "Jurassic Park" and the Indiana Jones series. A film on such a dark subject seemed a stretch for him. So I became fascinated with his process for turning Keneally's book into a film. In the reporting, I met Leopold Page, one of my most memorable people, who was one of Oskar Schindler's key collaborators in rescuing so many Jews. This story, written before Spielberg had even begun principal photography on the film, is the story of how he made "Schindler's List."
Newsday, February 8, 1993
Long before Steven Spielberg thought of making a career of putting images on film, he acquired an early-childhood image so vivid that it has remained part of his consciousness for 40 years and inspired him to make his next movie.
It was about 1950, and Spielberg was not yet 3 years old. In his grandmother’s Cincinnati home, he was sitting around a long table, watching her teach English to a group of what he later learned were Jewish Holocaust survivors.
“I just have this very, very vivid memory,” Spielberg recalls, “and that is of a man leaning over the table during this English lesson and rolling up his sleeve.” What the man showed him was a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm, which he used to teach the boy about numbers.
“He would show me a three and a two and a five and a seven,” Spielberg says. “Then he said, ‘I’m going to show you a magic trick.’ He said, ‘Here’s a six.’ Then he moved his forearm up, and then he said, ‘Now it’s a nine.’ And he moved it back down to the full length of his arm, and he said: ‘Now it’s a six again.’ So very, very early on—as not even an adult, as a kid—I began asking questions about the numbers and those people. My grandparents never used the word ‘Holocaust.’ They used the word ‘murder,’ and murder was a word that I could understand, because it was a word that you saw on television sometimes. So they would always talk about ‘The Great Murder.’ ”
Now, Spielberg is about to start making a long-delayed film about an improbable hero of that great murder: a Nazi Party member named Oskar Schindler who rescued 1,300 Jews from death and whose story was barely known in this country until 35 years after the war ended. It is an unusual film for Spielberg, who made his reputation primarily with fantasy movies, but it has a strong hold on his imagination. “This is something that I had a hunger to do a few months after ‘E.T.’ opened,” Spielberg says.
“E.T.” opened just before the publication of a best-selling book on Schindler in 1982, but it has taken a decade to develop the film, primarily because of delays in the script. Now, however, Spielberg crews are finishing construction of a replica of a Nazi concentration camp near the heart of the ancient Polish city of Krakow, and his representatives are hiring hundreds of extras. Next month, Spielberg is scheduled to start filming, with the Irish actor Liam Neeson in the role of Schindler.
As a result of all the delay, the production of the movie comes at an appropriate moment: Neo-Nazi demonstrations are making headlines in Germany. A new study ascribes strongly anti-Semitic views to one American in five. More Holocaust survivors, nearing the end of their years and fearful the modern world will forget or deny The Final Solution, are giving testimony. And in the spring, while Spielberg is filming, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will open in Washington.
“I think fate had a hand in staying my hand in making this picture ten years ago, when it wouldn’t have had much of an effect,” Spielberg says. “I think that today, with the rise of the ugliness re-emerging in Eastern Europe and basically all over Europe—they call it anti-Semitism without Jews—I think it’s a good time for this movie to be seen, and it’s a good time for another major remembrance.”
To Sidney Sheinberg, president of MCA-Universal, who first brought the Schindler story to Spielberg’s attention, this film is in a category of its own. “There’s everything [else] that’s being developed, and then there’s ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” he says. “I am very excited that it looks like it’s going to finally get done.”
The decade-long gestation period for the movie is actually brief compared to the time it took for the story to become a book. The culminating event in that long wait took place on an oppressively hot October day in 1980 when Australian novelist Thomas Keneally walked up to the Beverly Hills Handbag Studio, carrying a broken briefcase.
As he scanned the price tags in the window, Keneally was standing, unknowingly, at the convergence of two irresistible forces: the pull of a story that cried out to be told and the persistence of a witness who ached to tell it. The witness was the owner of the shop, a muscular, forceful man in his late 60s named Leopold Page. As Keneally recalls, Page approached him and said in a thick Eastern European accent: “You’d rather die of heat out here than come into my air-conditioned shop? Do you think I’d eat you? Come in, come in.”
Keneally was not the first writer, director or producer to enter Page’s shop, a short walk from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Over the years, whenever someone from the entertainment or publishing industry had walked in, Page had told his story. But nothing had come of it. Now, a promotional tour for Keneally’s new novel, The Confederates, had brought him to Los Angeles, and his broken briefcase had brought him to Page’s shop.
Page wasted no time getting to his point. “I said to him, ‘You know, I have a story for you,’ ” Page recalls. For the next half hour, while they waited for a telephoned purchase approval for Keneally’s American Express card from Australia, Page told him about Oskar Schindler’s rescue of 1,300 Jews, including Page and his wife.
Schindler, nominally a Catholic, was a member of the Nazi Party. He was also a womanizer and a heavy drinker. But after taking over a factory in Krakow once owned by Jews, he built a benevolent work camp next door to it and employed hundreds of Jews there, under conditions far better than at the nearby Nazi concentration camp, Plaszow.
One of Schindler’s chief allies in protecting his Jewish workers was Page, a former high school professor and Polish Army officer originally named Leopold Pfefferberg, who used his contacts to buy jewelry, furs and other fancy goods—some of which Schindler used to bribe Nazis. In addition to bribery, Schindler also outwitted Nazis by absorbing stupendous quantities of liquor, remaining sober while SS officers fell all around him, too drunk to act on their murderous designs.
“He was an Olympic-class boozer,” Keneally says. “If he hadn’t had a liver like a furnace, he wouldn’t have been able to deliver them. This paradox of a man delivering people through his vices, that’s what got me in. Having been raised an orthodox Catholic, I was very interested in the paradoxes between good and evil.”
Toward the end of the war, the Nazis liquidated Plaszow and ordered Schindler to disband his factory. To rescue his Jewish workers, he created a new factory at Brinnlitz, near his hometown in what had been Czechoslovakia. He persuaded the Nazis to let him draw up a list of Jews to work at the camp, claiming they were essential munitions workers.
In this new location, Schindler took pride in running a plant that produced artillery shell casings so defective that not a single one was usable. But when the Nazis came around to inspect the plant, Schindler often simply out-drank the inspectors, who became too drunk to crack down on his plant. With help from his long-suffering wife, Emilie, Schindler provided a camp where people could eat well and get health care in the perilous final days of the war.
In the process of bribing Nazis and feeding Jews, Schindler spent most of his fortune by the time he was 37. After the war he was so poor that Page had to put together a drive to gather money to support him. “He was a powerful personality, vital and strong and resourceful, and now he found himself as a pauper,” says Page, who changed his name from Pfefferberg when he arrived in this country in 1947, on the advice of an immigration official. “He spent close to four million marks—that’s a tremendous amount of money—to save us.”
The war had been Schindler’s only shining moment, as his wife pointed out in a documentary 20 years ago. “Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since,” Keneally wrote. “He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.”
It was not surprising that his postwar efforts to make money failed. “For a period of four years or so, this man is playing God,” says Irving Glovin, a Los Angeles attorney who represented Schindler in the postwar years and sold the rights to his story to MGM in the 1960s. “Once he has played at that level, he can’t go back to just an ordinary job, for money.”
But during the war, in his unlikely battle against the Nazis, Schindler rose to what Page calls “the highest level of humanity.” In recognition of that, Israel designated Schindler a “Righteous Gentile” and honored him at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Schindler died in 1974.
Those are the basic outlines of the story that Page told Keneally. By the time the author left for Australia the next day, Page had given him a pile of documents, plus the names of Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) in Australia. Page later accompanied Keneally on a research trip through Europe and Israel, helping the author gain access to the people he needed to interview.
In 1982, only two years after the meeting in the luggage shop, Simon and Schuster published Keneally’s novelized account, called “Schindler’s List” in America and “Schindler’s Ark” in Europe. It became a best seller and won the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, which had narrowly eluded Keneally three times earlier.
In publishing the book, Simon and Schuster bought the rights from Glovin, who had re-acquired them after MGM shelved the project. Soon after publication, Glovin sold the movie rights to Sheinberg at MCA-Universal. Glovin retained rights to profits from several premiere showings, which will go to the Oskar Schindler Humanity Foundation, designed to study and reward others who have performed Schindlerian deeds of standing up to evil.
Despite all the movement in acquisition of rights, until now the Schindlerjuden have seen little progress toward filming. “I heard about the movie since Oskar was still alive,” says Manci Rosner of Rego Park, one of those rescued by Schindler. “When I’m going to see the movie, I’m going to believe.”
The problem all along has been the development of a suitable script. “It’s really the only script [idea] that I have sent to Steven personally,” Sheinberg says. “So I have been very frustrated at the fact that we have not been able to come up with a script that we can all get excited about [until now].”
The complexity of the events and the character made a good script elusive. Gerald Molen, who is producing the film with Spielberg, says: “Any time you take a book, there’s always going to be things that people are going to say: ‘Why don’t they say this? Why don’t they tell that part of the story?’ You hire a great writer, and you put him to task.”
The first writer to attempt a script was Keneally himself. “I wrote an early draft, and I was just sacked, and I went back to Australia and watched the rugby league,” Keneally says. The next writer was Kurt Luedtke, a former journalist who had written such successful screenplays as “Absence of Malice” and the Oscar-winning “Out of Africa.”
Luedtke toiled over Schindler assiduously. “I gave Kurt Luedtke almost four years to do his draft, and I did a lot of movies in between, and I forgot about ‘Schindler’s List,’ and I came back to it, and I forgot about it and came back to it,” says Spielberg, who credits Luedtke for great loyalty to the story, even though he produced only a first act in four years. “He was so dedicated he didn’t take other jobs. He just did this. I was amazed at how he ate over those years. Then he just came to me, and he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ “
At one point, Spielberg approached playwright Tom Stoppard about “Schindler’s List,” but Stoppard was busy on another project and couldn’t do it. Finally, Spielberg got a workable script from Steve Zaillian, who wrote the highly regarded screenplay for “Awakenings,” among others. “I found that what Steve contributed to the movie was a point of view,” Spielberg says. “The story bounced around a lot, a la ‘Rashomon.’ He gave it a point of view.”
With a script done, Spielberg traveled to Poland early last year to look for filming locations. Then, while Spielberg finished “Jurassic Park,” which is due out this summer, Molen and the other producer on the project, Branko Lustig, worked at setting up the filming in Krakow—constructing the concentration camp and hiring the extras.
The Polish government has been “friendly” to the project, Lustig says. But some Jewish leaders have been less than friendly to Spielberg’s plan to make part of the film at Auschwitz. The World Jewish Congress expressed concern that he would disturb the site by erecting sets there, such as a gas chamber. Spielberg’s representatives say he has no intention of doing that, and the Auschwitz filming will be limited to a small scene of people entering the camp. Spielberg is expected to repeat these assurances when he meets with officials of the congress this week in New York.
In putting together the sets, Lustig had a fairly easy time representing the Brinnlitz plant, with a series of factories on the Polish-Czechoslovakian border 128 kilometers from Krakow. “We found some factories that are standing there with the machines from 1942-43,” Lustig says.
The task of recreating the Plaszow concentration camp has been more difficult. One obstacle is a monument to Plaszow’s victims, which stands on the actual site of the camp. “You cannot build it there, because you turn around, you see all the modern buildings,” Lustig says. “The monument is in the middle, and you can never turn around toward the monument.”
Instead, they are building the camp at a quarry in Krakow, using the plans for the original camp. In addition to the barracks, they are also building a replica of the villa occupied by the monstrous commandant of Plaszow, Amon Goeth. The original villa still exists on the actual site of the camp.
It was in that villa that Manci Rosner’s husband, Henry Rosner, a violinist, and his brother, Poldek, who played the accordion, entertained Goeth and his guests. One of those guests, an SS officer saddened by a love affair, asked the Rosners to play a melancholy tune that had led to suicides across Europe. They played it repeatedly, and the officer went to the balcony and shot himself. How did Rosner feel? “Terrific!” he says.
Goeth’s love of music helped the Rosners survive Plaszow, before they got on Schindler’s list for Brinnlitz. “He was so musical, he could recognize which violin I played,” Rosner says. “Ten dogs, he knew which was barking.”
But Goeth would kill people without provocation - with no more thought, Rosner demonstrates with a gesture in his apartment in Rego Park, than flicking a cigarette ash into an ashtray. “He was a devil,” Manci Rosner says. “He was just the opposite from Oskar.” A close friend of the Rosners, Bronia Gunz, recalls: “When he was shooting people, he had always a smile on his face.”
Another survivor of Plaszow, now a physician in Manhattan who asked that his name not be used, recalls bringing cough medicine to Goeth’s villa. When the commandant asked the young orderly how long it would take to stop his coughing, the teenager guessed a half hour. “He said, ‘Go down and stay in the cellar. If I don’t stop coughing, I’ll kill you,’ ” recalls the survivor, who left the villa when one of Goeth’s servants warned him off.
That terrifying life at Plaszow contrasted sharply with conditions in the camp at Schindler’s enamelware factory in Krakow, which the Jews called Emalia. The building still stands and will be used in the movie. In his book, “A Voice in the Chorus,” a former Emalia worker named Abraham Zuckerman writes: “Most important, I was never hungry. When you’re not hungry, somehow life is bearable….There was a real infirmary. If anyone was sick, Herr Schindler saw to it that he was given good medical care….” After the war, Zuckerman and another Schindler survivor, Murray Pantirer, developers in New Jersey, named several streets after Schindler, who was able to see those streets when he visited New Jersey.
Another key moment in the story occurs at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, where the women from the Emalia plant spent a horrifying time en route to Schindler’s new factory at Brinnlitz. “We never expected to survive,” says Page’s wife, Ludmila.
Somehow, Schindler bribed the right people, and the Nazis loaded the women on a train and sent them on to Brinnlitz. When they arrived their husbands waved from the balcony, and Schindler met them in the courtyard. Surrounded by SS guards, he gave them an unforgettable guarantee. “He said, ‘Now you are finally with me, and don’t worry, you are safe now. Don’t be afraid of anything,’ ” Ludmila Page recalls. “We were absolutely like being reborn again.”
Though Schindler laughed about the plant’s incredibly bad production record and managed to fend off the Nazi bureaucrats who were angry about it, Bronia Gunz remembers a terrifying occasion when the Nazis wanted the commandant to close it down and execute the workers.
Schindler told the prisoners to dig graves, Gunz recalls, apparently to deceive the Nazis. But he assured them he could save them, and then he disappeared for days. “We were digging the graves and thinking, ‘All right, then. This is the end,’ “ Gunz says. Then Schindler returned. “One day, this beautiful, gorgeous man shows up with a piece of paper, and he says, ‘Saved! No digging anymore. We’re going to work.’ ”
In the film version of these events, the actor who will try to bring the enigmatic Schindler to life is Liam Neeson, currently appearing in “Anna Christie” on Broadway. “He did a brilliant test for me,” Spielberg says. “Liam, in a sense, certainly has the spirit of Schindler. His face doesn’t look exactly like Schindler’s, but he’s physically a lot like Schindler. He has another quality which Schindler possessed, which was a lot of naive optimism.”
The cast also includes Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, a Jewish bookkeeper in Krakow who helped influence Schindler to save Jews. With Neeson, Kingsley and the other actors, Spielberg will explore the mystery that confronted him when he read the book.
“I was struck by the great what I call Rosebud question: Why did he do this?” Spielberg says, referring to the mysterious word at the heart of “Citizen Kane,” the classic Orson Welles film. “That is going to be my whole approach in making the movie. It’s going to be a question that the actors and I discuss every day, and it’s going to be, in a way, the mystery of the process for me. That’s what I’m looking forward to. I don’t expect to solve it, because Oskar isn’t here to tell us his side, and the survivors have various opinions.”
A large part of the fascination of Schindler is that not even those who admire him most can figure out his motives for saving Jews. “The truth of the matter is, I don’t think we really understand this guy,” says Arnold Band, a comparative literature professor at UCLA who uses Schindler’s List in his Holocaust courses. “What makes the book exciting is that the man himself is so interesting . . . When you put it down, you say, ‘What made this man tick?’ ”
In weighing that question, the Schindlerjuden observed not only the outrageous rescue that Schindler provided, but his outrageous behavior. After the war, for example, several Schindler survivors recall seeing Schindler occupy the same room with both his wife and his girlfriend. “He was not faithful,” Manci Rosner says, “but he was good to her. He was always a gentleman.”
Despite his faults, the women he saved found Schindler immensely attractive. “I thought if I would ever grow older and I can meet a guy and marry, I want him to be like Schindler,” Bronia Gunz says. The men looked up to him as well. “In my opinion, he was an angel dressed as a man,” Henry Rosner says. “He was sent by God.”
Still, some question his motives. Stanislaw Dobrowolski, a Polish author who wrote of his own feats in saving Jews, argues that Schindler only saved Jews because he was concerned about how he would look once the Nazis lost the war. “Not true,” Page says, insisting that Schindler began helping Jews long before the tide of war turned against the Nazis. “He risked his life,” Page says. “He was doing it from the first day.”
A similar assessment comes from Glovin, Schindler’s attorney. “The man rose to an occasion,” Glovin says. “Why the story is remarkable is that he did something when it appeared that the Germans were winning, and he did it over a long period of time, about four years, and he did it in the worst area, Poland, and he did it openly….He did it for strangers.”
Among the Schindlerjuden, one of those closest to Schindler was Page, who was so certain about the nobility of Schindler’s motives that he spent years working tirelessly to get the story told. Page is not particularly religious, but he looks back at that initial encounter in the luggage store and detects rustlings of the divine: Keneally’s appearance in Los Angeles, the sprung hinge on his briefcase, the long wait for the credit card authorization, time enough to tell the story.
“I said that dear God was making all these things,” Page says. Keneally, a former seminarian who calls himself a lapsed Catholic, also detects spiritual influences. “If you did believe in an affirmative force in the universe,” Keneally says, “this was an example of in what mysterious ways it works, working through such a broken vessel” as Schindler.
For the sake of memorializing that broken vessel, the Schindlerjuden are willing to speak out, despite the pain of their memories. In fact, Spielberg is considering whether to gather and film many of them for a final scene of the movie, to show Schindler’s living legacy. Like others, Manci Rosner finds discussing those times difficult, but she says: “I do it only for one certain reason, because I want to have the name Oskar Schindler should live forever.”
Newsday, February 8, 1993
Long before Steven Spielberg thought of making a career of putting images on film, he acquired an early-childhood image so vivid that it has remained part of his consciousness for 40 years and inspired him to make his next movie.
It was about 1950, and Spielberg was not yet 3 years old. In his grandmother’s Cincinnati home, he was sitting around a long table, watching her teach English to a group of what he later learned were Jewish Holocaust survivors.
“I just have this very, very vivid memory,” Spielberg recalls, “and that is of a man leaning over the table during this English lesson and rolling up his sleeve.” What the man showed him was a concentration camp number tattooed on his arm, which he used to teach the boy about numbers.
“He would show me a three and a two and a five and a seven,” Spielberg says. “Then he said, ‘I’m going to show you a magic trick.’ He said, ‘Here’s a six.’ Then he moved his forearm up, and then he said, ‘Now it’s a nine.’ And he moved it back down to the full length of his arm, and he said: ‘Now it’s a six again.’ So very, very early on—as not even an adult, as a kid—I began asking questions about the numbers and those people. My grandparents never used the word ‘Holocaust.’ They used the word ‘murder,’ and murder was a word that I could understand, because it was a word that you saw on television sometimes. So they would always talk about ‘The Great Murder.’ ”
Now, Spielberg is about to start making a long-delayed film about an improbable hero of that great murder: a Nazi Party member named Oskar Schindler who rescued 1,300 Jews from death and whose story was barely known in this country until 35 years after the war ended. It is an unusual film for Spielberg, who made his reputation primarily with fantasy movies, but it has a strong hold on his imagination. “This is something that I had a hunger to do a few months after ‘E.T.’ opened,” Spielberg says.
“E.T.” opened just before the publication of a best-selling book on Schindler in 1982, but it has taken a decade to develop the film, primarily because of delays in the script. Now, however, Spielberg crews are finishing construction of a replica of a Nazi concentration camp near the heart of the ancient Polish city of Krakow, and his representatives are hiring hundreds of extras. Next month, Spielberg is scheduled to start filming, with the Irish actor Liam Neeson in the role of Schindler.
As a result of all the delay, the production of the movie comes at an appropriate moment: Neo-Nazi demonstrations are making headlines in Germany. A new study ascribes strongly anti-Semitic views to one American in five. More Holocaust survivors, nearing the end of their years and fearful the modern world will forget or deny The Final Solution, are giving testimony. And in the spring, while Spielberg is filming, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum will open in Washington.
“I think fate had a hand in staying my hand in making this picture ten years ago, when it wouldn’t have had much of an effect,” Spielberg says. “I think that today, with the rise of the ugliness re-emerging in Eastern Europe and basically all over Europe—they call it anti-Semitism without Jews—I think it’s a good time for this movie to be seen, and it’s a good time for another major remembrance.”
To Sidney Sheinberg, president of MCA-Universal, who first brought the Schindler story to Spielberg’s attention, this film is in a category of its own. “There’s everything [else] that’s being developed, and then there’s ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” he says. “I am very excited that it looks like it’s going to finally get done.”
The decade-long gestation period for the movie is actually brief compared to the time it took for the story to become a book. The culminating event in that long wait took place on an oppressively hot October day in 1980 when Australian novelist Thomas Keneally walked up to the Beverly Hills Handbag Studio, carrying a broken briefcase.
As he scanned the price tags in the window, Keneally was standing, unknowingly, at the convergence of two irresistible forces: the pull of a story that cried out to be told and the persistence of a witness who ached to tell it. The witness was the owner of the shop, a muscular, forceful man in his late 60s named Leopold Page. As Keneally recalls, Page approached him and said in a thick Eastern European accent: “You’d rather die of heat out here than come into my air-conditioned shop? Do you think I’d eat you? Come in, come in.”
Keneally was not the first writer, director or producer to enter Page’s shop, a short walk from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Over the years, whenever someone from the entertainment or publishing industry had walked in, Page had told his story. But nothing had come of it. Now, a promotional tour for Keneally’s new novel, The Confederates, had brought him to Los Angeles, and his broken briefcase had brought him to Page’s shop.
Page wasted no time getting to his point. “I said to him, ‘You know, I have a story for you,’ ” Page recalls. For the next half hour, while they waited for a telephoned purchase approval for Keneally’s American Express card from Australia, Page told him about Oskar Schindler’s rescue of 1,300 Jews, including Page and his wife.
Schindler, nominally a Catholic, was a member of the Nazi Party. He was also a womanizer and a heavy drinker. But after taking over a factory in Krakow once owned by Jews, he built a benevolent work camp next door to it and employed hundreds of Jews there, under conditions far better than at the nearby Nazi concentration camp, Plaszow.
One of Schindler’s chief allies in protecting his Jewish workers was Page, a former high school professor and Polish Army officer originally named Leopold Pfefferberg, who used his contacts to buy jewelry, furs and other fancy goods—some of which Schindler used to bribe Nazis. In addition to bribery, Schindler also outwitted Nazis by absorbing stupendous quantities of liquor, remaining sober while SS officers fell all around him, too drunk to act on their murderous designs.
“He was an Olympic-class boozer,” Keneally says. “If he hadn’t had a liver like a furnace, he wouldn’t have been able to deliver them. This paradox of a man delivering people through his vices, that’s what got me in. Having been raised an orthodox Catholic, I was very interested in the paradoxes between good and evil.”
Toward the end of the war, the Nazis liquidated Plaszow and ordered Schindler to disband his factory. To rescue his Jewish workers, he created a new factory at Brinnlitz, near his hometown in what had been Czechoslovakia. He persuaded the Nazis to let him draw up a list of Jews to work at the camp, claiming they were essential munitions workers.
In this new location, Schindler took pride in running a plant that produced artillery shell casings so defective that not a single one was usable. But when the Nazis came around to inspect the plant, Schindler often simply out-drank the inspectors, who became too drunk to crack down on his plant. With help from his long-suffering wife, Emilie, Schindler provided a camp where people could eat well and get health care in the perilous final days of the war.
In the process of bribing Nazis and feeding Jews, Schindler spent most of his fortune by the time he was 37. After the war he was so poor that Page had to put together a drive to gather money to support him. “He was a powerful personality, vital and strong and resourceful, and now he found himself as a pauper,” says Page, who changed his name from Pfefferberg when he arrived in this country in 1947, on the advice of an immigration official. “He spent close to four million marks—that’s a tremendous amount of money—to save us.”
The war had been Schindler’s only shining moment, as his wife pointed out in a documentary 20 years ago. “Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since,” Keneally wrote. “He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.”
It was not surprising that his postwar efforts to make money failed. “For a period of four years or so, this man is playing God,” says Irving Glovin, a Los Angeles attorney who represented Schindler in the postwar years and sold the rights to his story to MGM in the 1960s. “Once he has played at that level, he can’t go back to just an ordinary job, for money.”
But during the war, in his unlikely battle against the Nazis, Schindler rose to what Page calls “the highest level of humanity.” In recognition of that, Israel designated Schindler a “Righteous Gentile” and honored him at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Schindler died in 1974.
Those are the basic outlines of the story that Page told Keneally. By the time the author left for Australia the next day, Page had given him a pile of documents, plus the names of Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) in Australia. Page later accompanied Keneally on a research trip through Europe and Israel, helping the author gain access to the people he needed to interview.
In 1982, only two years after the meeting in the luggage shop, Simon and Schuster published Keneally’s novelized account, called “Schindler’s List” in America and “Schindler’s Ark” in Europe. It became a best seller and won the Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, which had narrowly eluded Keneally three times earlier.
In publishing the book, Simon and Schuster bought the rights from Glovin, who had re-acquired them after MGM shelved the project. Soon after publication, Glovin sold the movie rights to Sheinberg at MCA-Universal. Glovin retained rights to profits from several premiere showings, which will go to the Oskar Schindler Humanity Foundation, designed to study and reward others who have performed Schindlerian deeds of standing up to evil.
Despite all the movement in acquisition of rights, until now the Schindlerjuden have seen little progress toward filming. “I heard about the movie since Oskar was still alive,” says Manci Rosner of Rego Park, one of those rescued by Schindler. “When I’m going to see the movie, I’m going to believe.”
The problem all along has been the development of a suitable script. “It’s really the only script [idea] that I have sent to Steven personally,” Sheinberg says. “So I have been very frustrated at the fact that we have not been able to come up with a script that we can all get excited about [until now].”
The complexity of the events and the character made a good script elusive. Gerald Molen, who is producing the film with Spielberg, says: “Any time you take a book, there’s always going to be things that people are going to say: ‘Why don’t they say this? Why don’t they tell that part of the story?’ You hire a great writer, and you put him to task.”
The first writer to attempt a script was Keneally himself. “I wrote an early draft, and I was just sacked, and I went back to Australia and watched the rugby league,” Keneally says. The next writer was Kurt Luedtke, a former journalist who had written such successful screenplays as “Absence of Malice” and the Oscar-winning “Out of Africa.”
Luedtke toiled over Schindler assiduously. “I gave Kurt Luedtke almost four years to do his draft, and I did a lot of movies in between, and I forgot about ‘Schindler’s List,’ and I came back to it, and I forgot about it and came back to it,” says Spielberg, who credits Luedtke for great loyalty to the story, even though he produced only a first act in four years. “He was so dedicated he didn’t take other jobs. He just did this. I was amazed at how he ate over those years. Then he just came to me, and he said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ “
At one point, Spielberg approached playwright Tom Stoppard about “Schindler’s List,” but Stoppard was busy on another project and couldn’t do it. Finally, Spielberg got a workable script from Steve Zaillian, who wrote the highly regarded screenplay for “Awakenings,” among others. “I found that what Steve contributed to the movie was a point of view,” Spielberg says. “The story bounced around a lot, a la ‘Rashomon.’ He gave it a point of view.”
With a script done, Spielberg traveled to Poland early last year to look for filming locations. Then, while Spielberg finished “Jurassic Park,” which is due out this summer, Molen and the other producer on the project, Branko Lustig, worked at setting up the filming in Krakow—constructing the concentration camp and hiring the extras.
The Polish government has been “friendly” to the project, Lustig says. But some Jewish leaders have been less than friendly to Spielberg’s plan to make part of the film at Auschwitz. The World Jewish Congress expressed concern that he would disturb the site by erecting sets there, such as a gas chamber. Spielberg’s representatives say he has no intention of doing that, and the Auschwitz filming will be limited to a small scene of people entering the camp. Spielberg is expected to repeat these assurances when he meets with officials of the congress this week in New York.
In putting together the sets, Lustig had a fairly easy time representing the Brinnlitz plant, with a series of factories on the Polish-Czechoslovakian border 128 kilometers from Krakow. “We found some factories that are standing there with the machines from 1942-43,” Lustig says.
The task of recreating the Plaszow concentration camp has been more difficult. One obstacle is a monument to Plaszow’s victims, which stands on the actual site of the camp. “You cannot build it there, because you turn around, you see all the modern buildings,” Lustig says. “The monument is in the middle, and you can never turn around toward the monument.”
Instead, they are building the camp at a quarry in Krakow, using the plans for the original camp. In addition to the barracks, they are also building a replica of the villa occupied by the monstrous commandant of Plaszow, Amon Goeth. The original villa still exists on the actual site of the camp.
It was in that villa that Manci Rosner’s husband, Henry Rosner, a violinist, and his brother, Poldek, who played the accordion, entertained Goeth and his guests. One of those guests, an SS officer saddened by a love affair, asked the Rosners to play a melancholy tune that had led to suicides across Europe. They played it repeatedly, and the officer went to the balcony and shot himself. How did Rosner feel? “Terrific!” he says.
Goeth’s love of music helped the Rosners survive Plaszow, before they got on Schindler’s list for Brinnlitz. “He was so musical, he could recognize which violin I played,” Rosner says. “Ten dogs, he knew which was barking.”
But Goeth would kill people without provocation - with no more thought, Rosner demonstrates with a gesture in his apartment in Rego Park, than flicking a cigarette ash into an ashtray. “He was a devil,” Manci Rosner says. “He was just the opposite from Oskar.” A close friend of the Rosners, Bronia Gunz, recalls: “When he was shooting people, he had always a smile on his face.”
Another survivor of Plaszow, now a physician in Manhattan who asked that his name not be used, recalls bringing cough medicine to Goeth’s villa. When the commandant asked the young orderly how long it would take to stop his coughing, the teenager guessed a half hour. “He said, ‘Go down and stay in the cellar. If I don’t stop coughing, I’ll kill you,’ ” recalls the survivor, who left the villa when one of Goeth’s servants warned him off.
That terrifying life at Plaszow contrasted sharply with conditions in the camp at Schindler’s enamelware factory in Krakow, which the Jews called Emalia. The building still stands and will be used in the movie. In his book, “A Voice in the Chorus,” a former Emalia worker named Abraham Zuckerman writes: “Most important, I was never hungry. When you’re not hungry, somehow life is bearable….There was a real infirmary. If anyone was sick, Herr Schindler saw to it that he was given good medical care….” After the war, Zuckerman and another Schindler survivor, Murray Pantirer, developers in New Jersey, named several streets after Schindler, who was able to see those streets when he visited New Jersey.
Another key moment in the story occurs at the Nazi death camp at Auschwitz, where the women from the Emalia plant spent a horrifying time en route to Schindler’s new factory at Brinnlitz. “We never expected to survive,” says Page’s wife, Ludmila.
Somehow, Schindler bribed the right people, and the Nazis loaded the women on a train and sent them on to Brinnlitz. When they arrived their husbands waved from the balcony, and Schindler met them in the courtyard. Surrounded by SS guards, he gave them an unforgettable guarantee. “He said, ‘Now you are finally with me, and don’t worry, you are safe now. Don’t be afraid of anything,’ ” Ludmila Page recalls. “We were absolutely like being reborn again.”
Though Schindler laughed about the plant’s incredibly bad production record and managed to fend off the Nazi bureaucrats who were angry about it, Bronia Gunz remembers a terrifying occasion when the Nazis wanted the commandant to close it down and execute the workers.
Schindler told the prisoners to dig graves, Gunz recalls, apparently to deceive the Nazis. But he assured them he could save them, and then he disappeared for days. “We were digging the graves and thinking, ‘All right, then. This is the end,’ “ Gunz says. Then Schindler returned. “One day, this beautiful, gorgeous man shows up with a piece of paper, and he says, ‘Saved! No digging anymore. We’re going to work.’ ”
In the film version of these events, the actor who will try to bring the enigmatic Schindler to life is Liam Neeson, currently appearing in “Anna Christie” on Broadway. “He did a brilliant test for me,” Spielberg says. “Liam, in a sense, certainly has the spirit of Schindler. His face doesn’t look exactly like Schindler’s, but he’s physically a lot like Schindler. He has another quality which Schindler possessed, which was a lot of naive optimism.”
The cast also includes Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, a Jewish bookkeeper in Krakow who helped influence Schindler to save Jews. With Neeson, Kingsley and the other actors, Spielberg will explore the mystery that confronted him when he read the book.
“I was struck by the great what I call Rosebud question: Why did he do this?” Spielberg says, referring to the mysterious word at the heart of “Citizen Kane,” the classic Orson Welles film. “That is going to be my whole approach in making the movie. It’s going to be a question that the actors and I discuss every day, and it’s going to be, in a way, the mystery of the process for me. That’s what I’m looking forward to. I don’t expect to solve it, because Oskar isn’t here to tell us his side, and the survivors have various opinions.”
A large part of the fascination of Schindler is that not even those who admire him most can figure out his motives for saving Jews. “The truth of the matter is, I don’t think we really understand this guy,” says Arnold Band, a comparative literature professor at UCLA who uses Schindler’s List in his Holocaust courses. “What makes the book exciting is that the man himself is so interesting . . . When you put it down, you say, ‘What made this man tick?’ ”
In weighing that question, the Schindlerjuden observed not only the outrageous rescue that Schindler provided, but his outrageous behavior. After the war, for example, several Schindler survivors recall seeing Schindler occupy the same room with both his wife and his girlfriend. “He was not faithful,” Manci Rosner says, “but he was good to her. He was always a gentleman.”
Despite his faults, the women he saved found Schindler immensely attractive. “I thought if I would ever grow older and I can meet a guy and marry, I want him to be like Schindler,” Bronia Gunz says. The men looked up to him as well. “In my opinion, he was an angel dressed as a man,” Henry Rosner says. “He was sent by God.”
Still, some question his motives. Stanislaw Dobrowolski, a Polish author who wrote of his own feats in saving Jews, argues that Schindler only saved Jews because he was concerned about how he would look once the Nazis lost the war. “Not true,” Page says, insisting that Schindler began helping Jews long before the tide of war turned against the Nazis. “He risked his life,” Page says. “He was doing it from the first day.”
A similar assessment comes from Glovin, Schindler’s attorney. “The man rose to an occasion,” Glovin says. “Why the story is remarkable is that he did something when it appeared that the Germans were winning, and he did it over a long period of time, about four years, and he did it in the worst area, Poland, and he did it openly….He did it for strangers.”
Among the Schindlerjuden, one of those closest to Schindler was Page, who was so certain about the nobility of Schindler’s motives that he spent years working tirelessly to get the story told. Page is not particularly religious, but he looks back at that initial encounter in the luggage store and detects rustlings of the divine: Keneally’s appearance in Los Angeles, the sprung hinge on his briefcase, the long wait for the credit card authorization, time enough to tell the story.
“I said that dear God was making all these things,” Page says. Keneally, a former seminarian who calls himself a lapsed Catholic, also detects spiritual influences. “If you did believe in an affirmative force in the universe,” Keneally says, “this was an example of in what mysterious ways it works, working through such a broken vessel” as Schindler.
For the sake of memorializing that broken vessel, the Schindlerjuden are willing to speak out, despite the pain of their memories. In fact, Spielberg is considering whether to gather and film many of them for a final scene of the movie, to show Schindler’s living legacy. Like others, Manci Rosner finds discussing those times difficult, but she says: “I do it only for one certain reason, because I want to have the name Oskar Schindler should live forever.”