COVER STORY : It’s the Story of a Hero in Hell : The author of ‘Schindler’s List’ tells how a chance encounter with a Holocaust survivor enabled him to bring an unlikely saga of heroism to the world’s--and Steven Spielberg’s--attention. It all began with a broken briefcase . . .

Thirteen years ago, I was returning to Australia from a film festival in Sorrento, Italy, where Fred Schepisi’s film of my novel “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith” had been shown. In those days Australia wasn’t quite the glamour destination it is now. There were only two flights a week from Los Angeles to Sydney. Between planes, my publisher got me to do some book promotion, and I found myself staying in the splendid Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Among my luggage was a briefcase with a sprung hinge, caused by packing in too much film festival bumf.

On a hot Saturday morning I went looking for a new, reasonably priced briefcase. There was a leather goods store a block or so down Beverly Boulevard that looked like the sort of place where real people bought real briefcases and handbags. The owner, a genial block of a man, came out as I inspected the goods in the window. His name was Leopold (Poldek) Page. He asked me inside to the air conditioning.

Australians like to think that they have an international reputation for party-going, good films, frontiers and genial sexism. But one of their reputes is for credit-card fraud, and it took some time for my credit-card clearance to be called back to Mr. Page. In the course of the conversation he found out I was a novelist. I thought his excitement on hearing this was the normal layman’s excitement at meeting such an odd fish as a novelist.

In fact, there was a purpose to it all. He told me that he had the best story of the century, one he was always talking about to writers and producers who came to his store.

“I was saved by a big, good-looking Nazi named Oskar Schindler. Not only was I saved from Gross-Rosen, but my wife, Mila, was saved from Auschwitz itself. So as far as I’m concerned Oskar is Jesus Christ. But though he was Jesus Christ, he wasn’t a saint. He was all-drinking, all-black-marketeering, all-screwing.”

It was hard not to be drawn instantly by such paradoxes. Poldek took me out the back of the store and introduced me to Mila, a small, slim, elegant grandmother rescued from the furnace. She was the first survivor of Auschwitz, that huge Nazi destruction factory in Poland, that I had met.

Poldek extracted files from two cabinets from the back of the store that were full of Oskar Schindler photographs and documents. So I had both a briefcase, and something to do with my Saturday afternoon!

The documents I read that afternoon were an extraordinary window on aspects of the Holocaust that I had never before thought of: the industrial side, the side to do with property and production. Oskar Schindler was an industrialist. The photographs showed him as tall, blond, bearlike. When he came to Krakow with the invading Germans in 1939, he was a youngish man, in his early 30s, a bon vivant, an aspiring capitalist and an agent of Abwehr (German military intelligence). One of the most inveigling pictures showed him at a German party in Krakow during the war. He was singing to dancing German officials and SS men and their women, while an accordionist wearing a Nazi Party pin played. The picture was berserk with Schindler’s energy. He was the focus of the party.

There were also among Poldek’s documents a number of copies of interviews with former survivors that had been done under the aegis of MGM in the early 1960s, when Schindler was still alive and when a feature film was planned.

Then there were SS lists of Oskar’s prisoners, who came from Swangsarbeitslager (forced labor camp) Plaszow, near Krakow, to work in his enamel factory in town, and further lists from Brinnlitz in Moravia, his second camp. A document I particularly remember was the transcript two young women prisoners made in shorthand of the speech Schindler gave on the factory floor of Brinnlitz at the end of World War II--a crazed and inspired speech that seems to have had a crucial influence on the survival of the prisoners.

It was obvious that Schindler was a great rescuer, but his motivations and his character were as ambiguous as any novelist could want. His connection with Polish Jews grew out of the initiating fact that they were cheap labor for him. The Jewish population of Krakow provided him too with the sorts of managers he needed to run his enamelware factory and his armaments establishment. Their expertise allowed him to go off doing the irregular business that was more to his taste, but also gave them a claim on him.

I was delighted that the Spielberg film, especially for its first half, looked so consistently for its tension to this extremely human mutual interest between the prisoners and the Herr Direktor, and that it exploited in particular the sympathetic but pragmatic resonances that existed between Oskar and the late Itzhak Stern, a prisoner-accountant.

Stern looked after one kind of business, Schindler after another. If Stern asked Schindler for a favor, it was often done friend to friend. On this basis an elderly rabbi named Levartov, a Plaszow prisoner of no industrial skills, whose murder at the hands of the SS man Amon Goeth seemed imminent, was rescued by Schindler. Similarly a string of industrially useless children, adolescents and older people.

But ideology played hardly any role in Schindler’s benevolence. Convenience played some role, and then valor and decency. For some of the incidents of Schindler’s career have the color of expediency. But the bulk of his crucial gestures have the color of flamboyant heroism.

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After I’d read some of the documents on the Saturday I bought the briefcase, I proposed going to a publisher with the story in the hope that the company might finance a research journey. Poldek Page the leather goods merchant told me that he would come with me and introduce me to survivors the world over.

Back in Australia I had the joy of speaking to certain Australian Schindler survivors in Sydney and Melbourne. They asked me what all Jews ask me--why, as a Gentile, was I interested? In a recent survey, it was found that Sydney’s second- and third-most-common languages these days are Cantonese and Arabic. But in the “British” Sydney of my childhood, nearly everyone was of British or Irish descent, and the sectarian passions of the place would have rivaled those of Glasgow and Belfast. Coming from Irish immigrant stock, I was acutely conscious of this.

Under pressures of immigration, these old sectarian attitudes entirely evaporated. But the irrationality of racism, especially racism raised as never before to a system and industry of the Reich, was always going to be of interest to someone who had experienced mild echoes of discrimination in his childhood.

Among the former Schindler prisoners who were now my fellow Australians was one of the two Rosner boys, Leopold. With his brother Henry (who is now a New Yorker), Leopold had been made each day to don formal wear and play their instruments for the infamous young commandant of Plaszow camp, Goeth, an Austrian music lover. The two brothers would both end up on Schindler’s famed list.

The Schindlerjuden , as the Schindler survivors were collectively referred to, were still very numerous in the early 1980s. Many of them were successful people in America, Europe, Israel and elsewhere. They did not necessarily want to be quizzed about the days when by the Reich’s decree they were subhumans. A number spoke to me on trust purely for Schindler’s sake. Others were corralled into it by the persuasive Poldek Page. I felt sorry for them--how were they to know that this Gentile writer from Australia really intended to write the book? How could he--with the best will--understand?

It was clear very soon that it was the ones who had been children who found it most painful to talk. The terrible ironies and impermanencies had operated in their case. In survivor Nuisia Horowitz still ran the terrors of the ghetto clearance, of arriving in Auschwitz and knowing from the faces of the older women that she was damned. The Rosner and Horowitz boys, cousins, were shipped to Auschwitz even as their mothers were being rescued by Schindler. As Manci Rosner, now a grandmother in Queens, and her sister-in-law Regina were loaded onto a train out of Auschwitz-Birkenau, they saw their sons behind the wire across the railway concourse of that huge camp.

“Look, Mummy, I have the tattoo,” young Olek Rosner called to his mother. But tiny Richard Horowitz yelled, “Mamushka, I’m so hungry.” When I spoke to them, both these bewildered children had become apparently successful Americans in their late 30s, early 40s. It’s not too fanciful to say, though, that the hunted child was still present in each of them.

Helen Hirsch had been Commandant Goeth’s young maid. She remembered Oskar most vividly and swears that he played cards with the commandant to get her out. Her ear still rings from one of Goeth’s blows.

Mietek Pemper, a scholarly man from Munich who this year would be much affected by his visit to the set of the film, told me of working as a secretary for Goeth. While dictating correspondence, Goeth assassinated prisoners randomly with a sniper rifle. Pemper lived to work for Schindler’s somewhat different regime.

A grandmother from Long Island who had been a Polish sprinter in the Berlin Olympics of 1936 remembered running for her life as a human wreck during a so-called health aktion --a weeding-out of the weak--in Plaszow in 1944. The sprightly Moshe Bejski, an Israeli Supreme Court judge who had been Schindler’s forger of documents in Brinnlitz, showed me his collection of Schindleriana. Among his mementos: the forged seals for all the permits and licenses necessary for Schindler to run a vast black-market operation out of the camp.

I remember meeting Josef Bau, a haunted Israeli artist, who married his beloved Rebecca in the terrible Plaszow camp. Both of them were put on Schindler’s list for the camp in Brinnlitz. The brilliant grimness of Bau’s work was honored at an exhibition in Krakow this year, while across the Vistula, Spielberg’s film was being shot.

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What these and other people told me, together with the testimony left by deceased witnesses and Schindlerjuden , contribute to Schindler’s astounding tale. I won’t preempt it here. But I have to comment on the almost symmetrical reversal of roles in Schindler’s postwar life.

His dependence on his inmates began in the first days of the peace, when a body of younger male and female prisoners decided to get him to the Americans. He went with heaps of diamonds, and references from various prison leaders. The diamonds were confiscated by Czech partisans. Schindler lived in poor conditions in Germany, and some of his former prisoners who remember visiting him there felt bound to report his past kindnesses and his present hardships to the Joint Distribution Committee in New York. With funds from the committee, he emigrated with a group of Schindlerjuden to Argentina.

In 1957 he left his wife, Emilie, and returned to Germany, where a cement business he started went broke. He no longer had Stern and Pemper to keep his business orderly. A number of his former prisoners wanted to help him. He began to visit Poldek Page in Beverly Hills and made an occasional speech in Temple Beth Am.

He went to Israel too, where Yad Vashem dedicated a tree to him in the Avenue of the Righteous. His former prisoners tried to curb his drinking and his tendency to pick up women. But they couldn’t stop him meeting the last great love of his life, the wife of a German doctor, in the lobby of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem.

At the same time that they tried to straighten Schindler out, former prisoners reflected on the fact that his heroic liver had allowed him to drink SS officials from Gross-Rosen under the table at lunch, so that they were unfit for camp and factory inspections. Even the scale of his vices had helped in their survival.

Schindler quickly spent the money MGM had given him in the early 1960s for the rights to his life story. In 1974, he died in his little apartment near the Frankfurt railway station. The death certificate shows hardening of the arteries. Soon thereafter, his former prisoners arranged for his body to be taken to Jerusalem. There they followed it to one of the finest burial places on Earth, the Catholic cemetery on Mt. Zion. From his graveside a visitor can look over Gehenna to the mountains of Jordan. As far as I can discover, Schindler is the only member of the Nazi Party to be buried in Zion. The final scenes of the remarkable Spielberg film are shot here.

During the writing of the book, I wanted to go to Buenos Aires to speak to Emilie Schindler. She was a devout Sudetan-German Catholic who put up with Oskar’s outrageous style and who was left behind, close to broke, when he returned to Europe. Some of the women who arrived in Brinnlitz from Auschwitz in 1944 remember that she spoon-fed them semolina as they lay on the factory floor. Later when Schindler accepted into his camp two truckloads of Hungarian near-cadavers, she was active with them also.

When I wanted to visit her, her lawyer said that her health was not good enough for her to bear the distress of a visit. If I sent him a list of questions, he would pass them on to her and transcribe her answers. Her answers accorded with other accounts and were very helpful. After the book was published she became more visible, coming to New York to be interviewed by Thames Television.

Oskar, she said, was a force of nature. A woman could compete with one other woman or with 10, but not with a hundred or a thousand. This year, frail but still surviving, she was declared a “Righteous Gentile” and was given a plaque in the Avenue of the Righteous in Yad Vashem. At the National Holocaust Museum in Washington recently, she accepted a medal in Oskar’s name. Schindler’s World War II German mistress, now an American grandmother, sat beside me murmuring, “What a woman she is! Eighty-six years old, in a wheelchair, but making a clear speech in perfect German!”

During my visit to the filming in Poland in early May, Spielberg apologized genially a few times about the delay in making the film, but said that this was a better era to make it in than the dumb, greedy ‘80s. This was the first year since 1945 that terms like racial cleansing had reappeared in Europe. And it was a year too when Palestinians and Israelis were talking, both sides re-examining their belief in the extent to which the Holocaust empowers Israeli policy. I think Spielberg is right to cast this as a tale for the present world at large, a fable of race hate, and of the occasional unexpected fraternal compassion.

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Poldek Page himself is 80 years old now, and his courage, and the commitment of Schindler’s lawyer, Irving Glovin, are among the chief elements that have led to the recording of Schindler’s story. With the film the cycle of narration is complete at last, and all in good time to see some of the aging former prisoners walk to Schindler’s grave and renew the flowers on it. All in good time too to see Schindler’s middle-aged child-prisoners and aging contemporaries at the premieres in Washington and New York.

Among them were two Schindlerjuden from New Jersey who, in partnership with another of Schindler’s prisoners recently deceased, have since the late 1950s named nine streets in honor of Schindler in New Jersey suburbs they developed. Like them, Poldek Page has fulfilled the onus of friendship to that huge, bluff Aryan called Oskar. This above all is a cause for affirmation and joy.