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independent director named Robert Solo, who wanted to make a film of my book
Confederates
, had taken me out to see a Paramount executive just a month or so before I met Poldek. The executive had picked the book up from his desk, weighed it in his hand and said, “Kinda thick, isn’t it?” Then he’d commissioned a team of two screenwriters to turn out a screenplay for him—just, it seemed, to deal with his own reading incapacities. The screenplay was written—a good one—but joined the great majority of scripts that are never made into films.
    Poldek, of course, insisted on taking me to the airport that night, and also insisted we go to a kosher restaurant on the way, where, engorged already with overrich Californian food, I choked back some latkes on the grounds, stated by Poldek, that “airline food is poison!” I did not yet realize that if you did not agree to something Leopold said, the only way out was to exclaim as fast and hard and loudly as him. I should have said, “You want I should have indigestion all the way to Australia?” Modest resistance, however, and what Anglo-Celts thought of as politeness, never had a chance against him.
    “I doubt Irving Glovin is comfortable with me,” I said over the kosher food. “He already finds my approach too irreverent.”
    “Irreverent? What does he know from irreverent? Listen, I saw Schindler screwing SS girls in the water reservoirs at Brinnlitz’s factory. That’s irreverent.”
    The flight to Australia leaves Los Angeles late in the evening, and a small technical problem will, and often has, nudge the departure back to after midnight. But that night we took off more or less on time. Poldek’s last words to me at the gate were: “Thomas, who will do it if not you? You think I have them queued up?”
             
    The plane taxied past the sign on the runway that says NO TURN BEFORE THE OCEAN —a sign which always rather disturbed me, since I thought that any pilot worth his salt might already know that. Then we travelers were shot straight out over the Pacific, encountering at various times of the night the customary Pacific Ocean turbulence, the great cones of air and cloud which could rise higher than the track of a 747. Tiredness, light-headedness and the prospect of meeting my girls, Judy and my daughters, in some thirteen hours permitted me to achieve some optimism.
    It occurred to me on that flight through darkness and quirky columns of air that there was a novelistic neatness to the tale. During the war, Poldek and others had been utterly dependent on Oskar. By the late 1950s, when he abandoned his wife in Argentina, he became dependent upon them, on men like Zuckermann, Number 585, and Pantirer, Number 205, New Jersey real estate developers who peppered the New Jersey suburbs they would develop with Schindler Streets and Schindler Plazas. They had once been the children and he the father, but then, postwar, he became the promising but perpetually erratic child who could never seem to make a go of anything, and who must have found some of the people he had saved a little tiresomely bourgeois. And so, as I had discovered, after times with them in Israel or California, back he went for a season in Frankfurt, in his poor apartment near the Hauptbahnhof, a zone of garish bars, prostitutes and lost souls. “Ah,” his survivors would say in documents I now possessed, “the Herr Direktor hasn’t changed.”
    I was in fact so excited by what I had heard from Poldek and Misia and by the documentation I carried with me—even though it constituted a fraction of the material which would be needed to make the book—that when we came in over the coast and the familiar red roofs of Sydney, and I survived the baggage hall and customs and was met by my wife and two teenage daughters, I told them, “Look, before we go home, can we have a cup of coffee? I’ve got a wonderful story to tell you. See this briefcase—I’m sorry, I had to leave the one