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survival. I suffered the self-absorbed and symptomatic discontent and restlessness of the writer, which were no doubt more wearing on my family than on me. But we were happy and we had come through. And to have a tale before you which you believed, with whatever degree of self-delusion, that the world needed to hear, was a splendid, euphoric, ever-renewing experience.
    By the time I walked into Poldek’s store I had, through being published in the United Kingdom and the United States, something of what was called “a cult following,” and of course, ambition still burned and I selfishly yearned for more. Only as an older writer would I ask, “Who, what god, what destiny, ever guaranteed that someone who came from Homebush on the earth’s left buttock would grow up to write something people tolerated reading?” I considered the arrival of Schindler’s tale to be part of the sequence of that good fortune. And since I tried to write more or less a book a year, I was now gripped by the yearly euphoria that people who did more useful, routine, albeit more profitable, jobs never had the chance to feel. However, by the light of a gritty, glaring dawn the morning after I bought my briefcase from Poldek, doubt struck me. How could I consider myself qualified for this subject matter?
    I had read a certain amount about Jewish culture, but I had only once attended Shabbat in a Jewish house. I knew that Australia’s first Passover had been celebrated with a special ration of flour and wine in 1788 by Cockney Jewish convicts, as a result of a Scottish officer in the marines being in love with one of the young criminals, one Esther Abrahams. That was a historical curiosity. But Poldek and Misia were the first Holocaust survivors I had knowingly met.
    About ten in the morning, Poldek called from downstairs. He had come to take me to brunch. Over the eggs I told him I was a colonial naïf living in a country where one might have expected to find Indonesian settlement if not for its exquisite aridity. It was a place which had been the platform for convicts, minor British officials, gold-seeking British and Irish refugees and postwar displaced persons trying to get as far from pernicious Europe as they could. I knew about Jews chiefly from books—Roth, Malamud, Bellow. Though European by heritage, how could I interpret that full-throated and disordered side of the European soul, full-throated anti-Semitism?
    After every objection, Poldek said, “That’s good, Thomas, that’s good. It means you don’t have an ax to grind.” And then he’d repeat (constantly), “This is not a book for Jews, this is a book for Gentiles. This is a great story of humanity man to man. An Australian is perfect to write it. What should you know? You know about humans. I’ll travel with you, Thomas!”
    But the research task suddenly seemed more forbidding than it had the day before.
    By Sunday lunchtime, Glovin, Poldek and I were discussing this golden and redemptive tale and the more banal question of who had legal rights, and in what sense, to the Schindler material. Things were getting complex, but were not yet set in concrete. It was agreed that I should go home that night with whatever photocopied documents Leopold had given me, and the addresses of various Australian Schindler survivors and others who knew Schindler. It excited me to think that, through the tragedies of history, there were such people in my own remote country.
    I would make contact with the Australian survivors, add what they told me into the mix, and produce—this was my own suggestion—two documents: a fifteen-to twenty-page treatment of the material for my friend the Simon & Schuster editor Nan Talese, and a shorter, two-page abstract in case others didn’t have the patience for a full document. After all, Paramount Studios had acquired Simon & Schuster, and I was aware there were executives involved who, ironically, preferred a short précis to a full manuscript. An