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When Thomas met Poldek

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Monday, 29 October 2007

In his new memoir, Searching for Schindler, author Thomas Keneally pays tribute to Leopold Page, a Holocaust survivor who inspired his Booker Prize-winning novel Schindler’s Ark and the film Schindler’s List. He speaks to DARREN LEVIN. GREAT stories, explains acclaimed author Tom Keneally, simply walk up one day and devour you whole. For Keneally, it was a hot, windy day in Los Angeles in 1980, where the air was imbued with a sort of “strange, malign electricity”. He was in search of a banal thing – a briefcase – in that great hotbed of banal things, Beverly Hills, when he stumbled upon Handbag Studio, a store with luggage and accessories at discount prices. It was there, in that air-conditioned Beverly Hills store, among the cowhide, crocskins and pigskins, that he encountered Leopold Pfefferberg, or Leopold Page as he was unceremoniously christened at Ellis Island in the late ’40s. Keneally would later refer to him simply by the Polish diminutive, Poldek. Poldek was not the first Holocaust survivor Keneally had encountered, but he was the first he “really met”. “He collided with me like a whiz-bang express train full of special effects,” recalls Keneally. While Poldek mistook Keneally for an Englishman, he recognised the author’s name from a review of his latest novel, Confederates, published in Newsweek. The inevitable pitch ensued. “I know a wonderful story,” Poldek told the writer. “It is not a story for Jews but for everyone. A story of humanity, man to man.” It was a story Poldek had recounted to dozens of customers before – from sitcom writers to reporters to Hollywood producers – but he saw something in Keneally that he didn’t see in the others. “It is a story for you, Thomas,” he implored. “It’s a story for you, I swear.” History would prove him correct. Poldek’s story of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, a Nazi, who saved hundreds of Jews in the Holocaust, would later form the basis of Keneally’s Schindler’s Ark, which won the Booker Prize (curiously for fiction) in 1982. It would gain even more international accolades in the early 1990s when Steven Spielberg adapted the novel into an Oscar-winning feature film, Schindler’s List, starring Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes and Sir Ben Kingsley. “Poldek was a bloke who knew nothing about publishing, nothing about the movie industry, but he was a torchbearer,” says Keneally. Keneally’s tribute to his old friend, Searching for Schindler: A memoir, released through Random House Australia last month, recalls Poldek as a fast-talking charmer who cared little for Hollywood pedigree. When Schindler’s List was in pre-production, he’d religiously call Spielberg’s office and tell the already famous director how to win an “Oscar for Oskar”. “He said, ‘I just called Steven and said I’m only up to page 50 [of the script] and already 70 mistakes,’” jokes Keneally, embodying Poldek right down to his endearing Polish inflections. His was the kind of accent, Keneally notes in the book, that puts a “k” on the end of “darling”. “Not only was he funny, sometimes unconsciously, but his persiflage, his bullshit if you like, always worked because he believed it,” Keneally says. “He loved humans which, after what he had been through, is quite extraordinary. I couldn’t have done that if I’d been in the Holocaust. Mind you, I wouldn’t have survived. He [Poldek] used to say to me, ‘You wouldn’t have lasted two weeks with the Nazis, you explain too much.’” Keneally grew up worlds away from the Holocaust in Homebush, a working-class suburb in Sydney that would, years later, become synonymous with the Olympic Games. However, the war still touched the Keneallys. His father, who served in the Middle East, sent back Nazi memorabilia to his young family – Afrika Korps feldwebel stripes, Very pistols and Luger holsters marked with swastikas. “Though I was a brat in western Sydney, the Nazis still impinged vastly on my life in that my father was missing for so long,” Keneally says. “At the end of the book I call him and Poldek the two heroes of World War II.” It was his 94-year-old mother, however, a staunch Irish Catholic, who he credits for instilling within him a strong social conscience. She’d make a good Jewish mother, he says, “She has her son, the doctor, and her son, the author,” Keneally jokes. “She was only a girl from the bush, but she was always a very progressive woman. For example, she’s cranky at [Archdiocese of Sydney] Cardinal George Pell for refusing communion to gays, but she says the rosary every night. She thinks [Opposition Leader Kevin] Rudd is too right wing, but she hopes he’ll win.” Keneally first became aware of the Holocaust through the newsreel footage he had watched with his mother at the Vogue theatre in Sydney. He remembers the corpses stacked like planks of timber at Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. All this, he says, gave him the “barest qualifications” to write the book. But it was Poldek, with all his charisma and unwavering love of humanity, that spurred him on. “The book that I wrote would be Holocaust gossip if it wasn’t for Poldek. He was the one who put it all together,” Keneally says. “He was such a force of nature that no-one I had met until then, had put to me so forcibly, the question: Why did the Europeans engage in this grand delusion? That question has always fascinated me. It fascinates me with Aborigines, with Eritreans, with all minorities.” His involvement with Eritrea’s struggle for independence from Ethiopia forms part of Searching for Schindler, along with a few “home truths” that the author, now 72, doesn’t mind revealing about himself. “On the other hand,” he says, chuckling, “I try to make myself seem as cuddly as possible. Somewhere between the sins and frailties that I confess to in the book and the devil lies the true me.” Keneally is, however, uncomfortable with being labelled as a champion for Holocaust survivors. “To be treated as someone who’s done something to help people is something I don’t feel I quite deserve. However, people then say to me I was open to the subject. “So I’m a half, I’m a demi, I’m a squirt, I’m a pony halfway full of good intentions because race has always been an obsession of mine. And race hysteria has always been an obsession of mine.” A guest at the Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre earlier this month, where he fielded questions from SBS broadcaster Alex Dafner, Keneally was filled with a “great triumphant thought” when he was reunited with Schindler survivor, accordionist Leo Rosner. “It was great to see him because at this stage Hitler is 62 years dead, and Leo, whose death according to Hitler and his cohorts was necessary for the future of European civilisation, is alive, well and playing the accordion in Melbourne.” Comments Add New Search RSS Only registered users can write comments!

Last Updated ( Monday, 29 October 2007 )

 

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