The year after the film came out, Friedman gave in, watched it and discovered that his wife and sons had been right. His mother Frieda was not one of the Jews saved by Schindler, but her life mapped the film’s trajectory closely.
She had first been imprisoned in Krakow Ghetto, then in Plaszow labour camp just outside it, and had witnessed Goeth shoot Jews from the balcony of his villa. “My mother would tell us how you’d be standing next to someone, hear the crack of a rifle, and then see them to fall with a thud to the ground.”
The courtyard at 12 Jozefa Street, where Max's mother lived and a central location in Schindler’s List
For the next four years the film “sort of sat” in his head, he said. He didn’t try to find out any more about his mother’s past.
But when his mother died in 1998, finding out more suddenly felt urgent for the New Yorker, then 48. “I told my little grandson that his grandmother had been a Holocaust survivor and I felt ashamed that I couldn’t tell him much more, that the details I had about her life were so modest.
“It was the same story with my father, Szlama, also a survivor who had died five years earlier with Alzheimer’s, probably, I now know, caused by the beatings he suffered in concentration camps.
“Unlike my mother, he never talked about the Shoah, but I knew nothing about him either.
Steven Spielberg (Getty Images)
“All my sister and I really knew was that our parents were a mess, that as children we’d had to wake them up when they had nightmares, and that they fought with each other constantly, mostly about money.”
Determined to rectify this lack of knowledge about his parents, Friedman spent the next five years researching Frieda and Szlama’s lives in pre-war and wartime Poland.
His research led to the family memoir Painful Joy, published on Yom HaShoah in 2022, and took him from New York, where he’s spent most of his adult life, to Sweden, where his parents went after their liberation from Bergen-Belsen, and to Poland, where they were born.
The Friedman family in Sweden
“Everywhere in Poland where my father had lived had been raised to the ground. But when I found the building in Krakow’s historic Jewish quarter Kazmierz, where my mother and her family set up home in 1919 and where she lived after she married her first husband, I stopped dead in my tracks,” he said.
“It was called 12 Jozefa Street and not only was it still standing, but it was also the central location in Schindler’s List.”
What’s more, after the film came out, the building, now familiar to millions of viewers, assumed almost iconic status and became a must-visit destination on Shoah education trips to Poland.
In 2018, Friedman went to see 12 Jozefa Street for himself. The impact it had on him was profound.
“My mother was a fantasist who made up whole chunks of her life. I assume because she hadn’t lived the one she wanted to. She said her first husband had his own studio, but it wasn’t true.
She pretended she’d come from money, but she hadn’t. She used these stories to blame my father for not earning more, for not being more ambitious.
But the truth was her first husband, who had been murdered in Auschwitz, had made a very modest living making luggage and they were so poor she’d had to take in other people’s washing so they could eat.”
But she hadn’t fabricated 12 Jozefa Street and when Friedman saw the building for the first time, he sat on the steps outside it and watched Schindler’s List, for a second time, on his laptop. And he cried and cried and cried.
“Apart from Auschwitz it was the only place where I could be sure my mother had lived, somewhere that wasn’t a figment of her imagination. In a strange way, it was a place I could call home.”
Frieda and Szalama Friedman in their later years
Were he to meet Spielberg, he says he would thank him for “creating a film about the Holocaust to which a mass audience can relate, and that’s relatable to me in a very intimate way”.
And were she still with us, he says his mother would thank him too. “For all her losses and suffering, she’d have loved being able to say she’d lived in a building that had starred in a film.
“She thought she was beautiful and popular and a dancer, but in reality she was none of those things. But she did live at 12 Jozefa Street.”
