Spielberg’s List: Polish Catholics Cast as WWII Jews : Movies: Those frightened, sad faces in ‘Schindler’s’ formed a milelong line in the rain in hopes of getting a part in the film.

Of the many haunting images in “Schindler’s List,” the frightened, sad, Jewish faces always in the background add a disturbing realism to Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust movie.

What is perhaps most curious is that most of them aren’t Jewish. But that didn’t matter to the director much. They just needed to appear Jewish, and Eastern European. Who they absolutely could not resemble was anyone from Central Casting.

These extras of “Schindler’s List” were all Poles from Krakow, most of them Catholic. Five hundred were Schindler’s “Jewish worker family”--the ones who’d be in the foreground--seen from when they were forced by Nazis from their Krakow ghetto till the day of liberation. Another group, of women, had their heads shaved for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp scene. Yet another group of male and female extras appeared naked on camera during a medical inspection at the Plaszow forced labor camp.

“We were like Schindler in many ways . . . feeding people . . . paying them money they wouldn’t ordinarily make, giving them something worthwhile to do,” said Branko Lustig, one of the movie’s producers and unit production manager in Krakow. “We had to organize to know who our people were . . . just like he did.”

With all the attention focused on Spielberg, and the plaudits and awards his black-and-white Holocaust movie is continuing to garner as Oscar season approaches, the thousands of Poles who benefited directly from its production have faded into the background.

These are people who in October, 1992, formed a milelong line in the rain to answer an open casting call four months before shooting was to begin last February. Some of them were unemployed and needed the money. Others had had relatives in Auschwitz-Birkenau (the Nazis imprisoned Poles as well as Jews in their camps) and wanted, for personal reasons, to participate. A minority was intrigued by the dual pull of Hollywood and Spielberg.

On the first day, 5,000 showed up. Lustig, who is Jewish, said he walked down the line with a photographer and took pictures of those who “looked the most Jewish,” those with dark features like Sephardic Jews rather than the fairer Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews. Since many of them did not have telephones, callbacks were arranged through local intermediaries.

Lustig had conducted a similar open call in Riga, Latvia--the closest former communist-bloc city with a sizable (18,000) Jewish population. There, a separate portfolio of faces was assembled. In a blind test held back in Hollywood, Spielberg picked the Poles over the Latvians--to both men’s surprise.

What the Poles won was not unlike what extras working in Hollywood would experience--pre-dawn casting calls, miserable winter weather with a lot of standing around and, as compared to the stars, relatively low pay.

But, as Lustig is quick to point out, $22 a day plus hot meals (prepared by the Polish Army) was considered by Poles to be extremely generous. Those who were selected to be “Schindler’s family” worked 72 days, averaging at least $1,600. On the down side, they had to constantly diet to stay true to their characters’ emaciation. (As anyone who’s been on a catered movie set knows, this takes extra effort.)

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Women who would play those threatened with being gassed in the Auschwitz shower scene, shown in close-ups nude with mottled razor haircuts, received an additional 2 million zlotys (about $150), or about one month’s wages for a Polish factory worker.

Also, special auditions were held from those willing to be seen naked (they were recruited from local Krakow spas) running around in the labor camp yard. For those chosen (they had to be skinny), it meant 1.5 million zlotys, or $120. On particularly frigid nights when some of the regular extras didn’t show up for their 2 a.m. call, Lustig said he would send buses around to Krakow’s homeless shelters to recruit extras.

“We served three meals a day. . . soup, kielbasa, bread . . . plus pay. The economy is still pretty poor there,” Lustig said.

There were as many as 2,000 extras on any given day, and coordinating them was a complex task. This is reflected in the movie’s credits, which lists six casting directors: Lucky Englander, Fritz Fleischhacker, Magdelena Szwarcbart, Tova Cypin, Liat Meiron and Juliet Taylor.

Additional fees were offered to extras who would sell 1940s period clothes and accessories to the production. Of the many poignant, spontaneous encounters between the locals and the crew, Lustig remembers a Krakow woman in her 60s selling items from her bridal trousseau to the production: a hat, an old coat and a pair of gloves for about $20. One of the costumers was so moved, after several moments she ran after the woman and returned them “with a hug and a kiss”--without asking for reimbursement. They both cried.

“Schindler’s List” will have its Krakow premiere March 13, the anniversary of the day Jews were forced from the closed Podgorze Jewish quarter to the labor camps.

Spielberg and company will be on hand, and the extras of the movie will be invited to special screenings.

As Gerald R. Molen, another of the movie’s producers who has worked on three other Spielberg films, said: “You think that extras all around the world are the same . . . and in some ways, they are. But there was something very special about these people. They made the (movie-making) experience even that much more special too.”