The Handbag Studio

I was not the only customer to the Handbag Studio to have been fraternally ambushed by Poldek. In the early 1960s, when Oskar was still alive, the wife of the renowned and controversial producer Marvin Gosch had brought her handbag into Leopold’s store for repair. No doubt with many loving poutings of lips and praises of Mrs Gosch’s beauty, and with the handbag as hostage, Poldek had insisted that she set up an appointment for him with her husband. For a while Mrs Gosch found this eminently refusable, but Poldek’s powers of perseverance and undentable charm wore her down. Poldek told me that when Marvin Gosch invited him to MGM Studios for an interview, the producer at first chided him for being so importunate with his wife.

‘You must forgive me,’ said Poldek, ‘but I am bringing you the greatest story of humanity man to man.’

Gosch had been a Broadway producer in the 1940s, had produced, improbably, Abbott and Costello in Hollywood (1945), and most recently had tried to make a film about Lucky Luciano. Hearing the Schindler tale from the lips of a survivor, Gosch was enthused and got together a team including the screenwriter Howard Koch, famous for his involvement in the screenplay of Casablanca and for having been blacklisted during the McCarthy era. His best-known credits included Sergeant York, Rhapsody in Blue, and the telemovie about Orson Welles’s famous broadcast about Martian invasion, The Night that Panicked America.

Gosch and Koch began to interview Schindler survivors around the Los Angeles area. Both of them wanted to meet Oskar too, who was at the time largely broke apart from contributions from his former prisoners. I would later see in Poldek’s storeroom archives a photograph of Gosch, Koch, Poldek and big, bear-like Oskar, sitting around a table, conferring. Oskar’s small Frankfurt cement works, funded by the Joint Distribution Committee, a Jewish charity based in New York, had gone broke in the severe winter of 1962–63, so that the idea of film rights must have seemed then like rescue. Gosch, Koch and MGM decided that they must ultimately take Poldek and Oskar to meet and gather information from Schindler survivors in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Poldek became de facto archivist for all that was gathered, for every testimony and every document he could corral.

In the reasonable hope of prolonging Oskar’s life, or imposing a more reasonable shape on it, Gosch wrote to him, ‘I hope the fact that you have taken an apartment in Frankfurt does not mean that you are carrying on with too many women. (One is enough! Remember, dear friend, we are no longer as young as we used to be!)’

Eventually MGM bought the rights to Oskar’s story for $50,000. Poldek would later claim he made a paternalistic decision to take out $20,000 from Oskar’s film deal for Mrs Emilie Schindler and send it to her — I have no reason to believe he was lying — and that he took the remaining $30,000 to Oskar. Poldek and Mischa flew to Paris from Los Angeles, Oskar flew from Frankfurt, and they all met in the Hotel Georges Cinq.

Poldek’s version of what happened then was credible only if one had met Poldek and at least heard tales of Schindler. In 1963, when $30,000 could support even a halfway frugal middle-class family for six years, a sane man might have taken the weekend to decide what to do with such a windfall. And, unlike the Glendale Savings, the Paris banks closed at midday anyway, and Poldek did not meet up with Oskar till afternoon. Poldek and Schindler began to track down the names of bank managers. They found one in Clichy. They turned up at the poor man’s door as he prepared for his weekend. They asked him to reopen his bank and cash their cheque. At first he said no, but then, according to Poldek, gave in to their persuasion and came back to the city centre to give them their money. Then Poldek and Schindler set off down the Champs-Elysées where Schindler shopped in front of a chocolatier’s store that had an enormous heart-shaped box of chocolates in the window. This was, clearly, not a box for sale — it was the chocolatier’s trademark. But Schindler, with characteristic exuberance, could not see the distinction. ‘I would like to get that for dear Mischa,’ he said.

Even for Poldek, this was too much.

‘You don’t have to, Oskar. This is display. You don’t have to get this for Mischa. It was enough what you did in 1944.’

But Schindler entered the shop, and to the bemusement of its employees, demanded the enormous heart-shaped box in the window. He paid for it, and took it back to Mischa in her hotel. Mischa did not know what to do with this avalanche of chocolates. But since Oskar was delighted with the gift, so must she appear to be.