It was the year of the Adolf Eichmann trial, and Oskar’s visit to Israel aroused some interest in the international press. On the eve of the opening of Eichmann’s trial, the correspondent of the London Daily Mail wrote a feature on the contrast between the records of the two men, and quoted the preamble of an appeal the Schindlerjuden had opened to assist Oskar. “We do not forget the sorrows of Egypt, we do not forget Haman, we do not forget Hitler. Thus, among the unjust, we do not forget the just. Remember Oskar Schindler.”
There was some incredulity among Holocaust survivors about the idea of a beneficent labor camp such as Oskar’s, and this disbelief found its voice through a journalist at a press conference with Schindler in Jerusalem. “How do you explain,” he asked, “that you knew all the senior SS men in the Cracow region and had regular dealings with them?” “At that stage in history,” Oskar answered, “it was rather difficult to discuss the fate of Jews with the Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem.” The Department of Testimonies of the Yad Vashem had, near the end of Oskar’s Argentine residence, sought and been given by him a general statement of his activities in Cracow and Brinnlitz. Now, on their own initiative and under the influence of Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Moshe Bejski (once Oskar’s forger of official stamps, now a respected and scholarly lawyer), the Board of Trustees of Yad Vashem began to consider the question of an official tribute to Oskar. The chairman of the board was Justice Landau, the presiding judge at the Eichmann trial. Yad Vashem sought and received a mass of testimonies concerning Oskar. Of this large collection of statements, four are critical of him. Though these four witnesses all state that without Oskar they would have perished, they criticize his business methods in the early months of the war. Two of the four disparaging testimonies are written by a father and son, called earlier in this account the C’s. In their enamelware outlet in Cracow, Oskar had installed his mistress Ingrid as Treuhänder. A third statement is by the C’s‘ secretary and repeats the allegations of punching and bullying, rumors of which Stern had reported back to Oskar in 1940. The fourth comes from a man who claims to have had a prewar interest in Oskar’s enamel factory under its former name, Rekord—an interest, he claimed, that Oskar had ignored.
Justice Landau and his board must have considered these four statements insignificant when set against the massed testimony of other Schindlerjuden, and they made no comment on them. Since all four stated that Oskar was their savior in any case, it is said to have occurred to the board to ask why, if Oskar had committed crimes against these people, he went to such extravagant pains to save them.
The municipality of Tel Aviv was the first body to honor Oskar. On his fifty-third birthday he unveiled a plaque in the Park of Heroes. The inscription describes him as savior of 1,200 prisoners of AL Brinnlitz, and though it understates numerically the extent of his rescue, it declares that it has been erected in love and gratitude. Ten days later in Jerusalem, he was declared a Righteous Person, this title being a peculiarly Israeli honor based on an ancient tribal assumption that in the mass of Gentiles, the God of Israel would always provide a leavening of just men. Oskar was invited also to plant a carob tree in the Avenue of the Righteous leading to the Yad Vashem Museum. The tree is still there, marked by a plaque, in a grove which contains trees planted in the name of all the other Righteous. A tree for Julius Madritsch, who had illicitly fed and protected his workers in a manner quite unheard of among the Krupps and the Farbens, stands there also, and a tree for Raimund Titsch, the Madritsch supervisor in Płaszów. On that stony ridge, few of the memorial trees have grown to more than 10 feet.
The German press carried stories of Oskar’s wartime rescues and of the Yad Vashem ceremonies. These reports, always laudatory, did not make his life easier.
He was hissed on the streets of Frankfurt, stones were thrown, a group of workmen jeered him and called out that he ought to have been burned with the Jews. In 1963 he punched a factory worker who’d called him a “Jew-kisser,” and the man lodged a charge of assault. In the local court, the lowest level of the German judiciary, Oskar received a lecture from the judge and was ordered to pay damages. “I would kill myself,” he wrote to Henry Rosner in Queens, New York, “if it wouldn’t give them so much satisfaction.”
These humiliations increased his dependence on the survivors. They were his only emotional and financial surety. For the rest of his life he would spend some months of every year with them, living honored and well in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, eating free of charge at a Rumanian restaurant in Ben Yehudah Street, Tel Aviv, though subject sometimes to Moshe Bejski’s filial efforts to limit his drinking to three double cognacs a night. In the end, he would always return to the other half of his souclass="underline" the disinherited self; the mean, cramped apartment a few hundred meters from Frankfurt’s central railway station.
Writing from Los Angeles to other Schindlerjuden in the United States that year, Poldek Pfefferberg urged all survivors to donate at least a day’s pay a year to Oskar Schindler, whose state he described as “discouragement, loneliness, disillusion.”
Oskar’s contacts with the Schindlerjuden continued on a yearly basis. It was a seasonal matter—half the year as the Israeli butterfly, half the year as the Frankfurt grub. He was continually short of money. A Tel Aviv committee of which Itzhak Stern, Jakob Sternberg, and Moshe Bejski were again members continued to lobby the West German government for an adequate pension for Oskar. The grounds for their appeal were his wartime heroism, the property he had lost, and the by-now-fragile state of his health. The first official reaction from the German government was, however, the award of the Cross of Merit in 1966, in a ceremony at which Konrad Adenauer presided. It was not till July 1, 1968, that the Ministry of Finance was happy to report that from that date it would pay him a pension of 200 marks per month. Three months later, pensioner Schindler received the Papal Knighthood of St. Sylvester from the hands of the Bishop of Limburg.
Oskar was still willing to cooperate with the Federal Justice Department in the pursuit of war criminals. In this matter he seems to have been implacable. On his birthday in 1967, he gave confidential information concerning many of the personnel of KL Płaszów. The transcript of his evidence of that date shows that he does not hesitate to testify, but also that he is a scrupulous witness. If he knows nothing or little of a particular SS man, he says so.
He says it of Amthor; of the SS man Zugsburger; of Fraulein Ohnesorge, one of the quick-tempered women supervisors. He does not hesitate, however, to call Bosch a murderer and an exploiter, and says that he recognized Bosch at a railway station in Munich in 1946, approached him, and asked him if—after Płaszów—he could manage to sleep.
Bosch, says Oskar, was at that point living under an East German passport. A supervisor named Mohwinkel, representative in Płaszów of the German Armaments Works, is also roundly condemned; “intelligent but brutal,” Oskar says of him. Of Goeth’s bodyguard, Grün, he tells the story of the attempted execution of the Emalia prisoner Lamus, which he himself prevented by a gift of vodka. (it is a story to which a great number of prisoners also testify in their statements in Yad Vashem.) Of the NCO Ritschek, Oskar says that he has a bad reputation but that he himself knows nothing of his crimes. He is also uncertain whether the photograph the Justice Department showed him is in fact Ritschek. There is only one person on the Justice Department list for whom Oskar is willing to give an unqualified commendation. That is the engineer Huth, who had helped him during his last arrest. Huth, he says, was highly respected and highly spoken of by the prisoners themselves.