WHEN MURRAY STERNBERG DIED IN 1981, Jules sent a letter of condolence telling Faye that he would say Kaddish for a year, thanking them for their help in getting him and Edith and Helen out of Nazi Germany by asking that once-in-a-lifetime favor of Harry. “Although on every occasion we paid tribute for saving our lives, it cannot be uttered often enough,” he wrote, “as it was written ‘he who saves a life’ is as if he has saved the whole world.”
The following year, the Piccadilly Hotel was knocked down, its ballroom reduced to rubble.
One of Jules’s final missions was battling a huge development that was going up in the early 1980s a few doors down from him. The thirty-six-story building, a planned mix of retail and luxury co-ops costing up to a million dollars each on the corner of Sixty-First Street and Third Avenue, was completely out of scale with the rest of the neighborhood—the brownstones, the doll hospital, and the townhouse right across the street, where Marilyn had filmed that first scene for The Seven Year Itch. Jules led the charge against the megadevelopment with his neighbors at community and planning-board meetings. But the young developer of the building had the money and the muscle behind him to win the fight.
The $125 million building was completed in 1984, built by workers controlled by Fat Tony Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family, who was later indicted by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York—Rudy Giuliani. Salerno was convicted of bid-rigging on the project.
The co-op was so high it blocked out the sun in the Garden of Edith. But that was the least of the neighborhood’s problems. During construction, a stone derrick rigger from Staten Island working on the project fell thirty-three floors, bouncing off the building, his body parts landing in the backyards of Jules’s neighbors. A group of co-op owners eventually sued the developer for over $10 million for shoddy workmanship and building materials after cement from its curved, cracked balconies also fell into the neighborhood. They also asked the judge to force the developer to take his name off the building.
The young developer’s name was Donald Trump.
Clear across the country, Billy Wilder was fighting his own battles. Wilder didn’t speak of his mother in public, but his failure to get her out of Europe became a private obsession. He assumed she was sent to Auschwitz, but never learned the details of her death. Around 1992, seeking some closure, the eighty-five-year-old legendary director visited fellow director Steven Spielberg in an effort to purchase the rights he held to a novel by Australian writer Thomas Keneally. But Spielberg was about to travel to Poland to start filming. He apologized to his idol but said he had come knocking a little too late. The book was called Schindler’s Ark.
Though Wilder never knew it, Eugenia’s half brother, Michael, submitted testimony to the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in the 1950s about Eugenia’s fate. She had indeed been moved to the Kraków ghetto, whose first death transports began in 1941. But like Golda, she was able to stay in the ghetto for an extended period. Because her husband, Bernard, supplied bottle stoppers to the German military, they were left alone in their small one-bedroom apartment with the bathroom in the hall. But two years later, in 1943, the ghetto was liquidated.
Eugenia was moved not to Auschwitz, but to the notorious Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, which had been built atop two Jewish cemeteries. Those who were too old for forced labor were shot on-site. The camp was run by Amon Goth, an especially sadistic Nazi who was known to release his two Great Danes on prisoners and would not have breakfast each morning until he shot at least one person himself from his balcony. Some prisoners from Płaszów were sent to Czechoslovakia to work at an enamel factory, where conditions were good. The factory, which also produced ammunition to guarantee it remained open during the war, was owned by a man named Oskar Schindler. But Wilder’s mother never made it to Schindler’s factory. She was sixty-one years old and unwell, with gallbladder problems and nerve damage in her right hand. She was immediately shot or was quickly worked to death at Płaszów, one of about eight thousand prisoners murdered there.
One of the main characters of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was Amon Goth, played by Ralph Fiennes, and the camp in the film was the same one where Eugenia was murdered. It was a terrible coincidence.
After the film’s release, Wilder wrote an essay for a German magazine lamenting the fact that younger generations were growing more and more ignorant of the Holocaust. Some were even doubting that it had happened at all. “If the concentration camps and the gas chambers were all in my imagination, then please tell me, where is my mother?” he asked.
Billy Wilder died at the turn of the new century without knowing exactly what had happened to Eugenia.
The secret location of the original footage from The Seven Year Itch also died with Wilder. He was buried in the same cemetery as his friend Marilyn Monroe. His tombstone, partially quoting the last line of Some Like It Hot, reads:
I’M A WRITER
BUT THEN
NOBODY’S PERFECT
When Hugh Hefner passed away, he was buried in the same cemetery, in a crypt right next to Marilyn’s, which he had bought for $75,000, even though he had never even met her. Hefner’s comics were never published.
In 1992, right around the time that Joe Shuster died, DC Comics killed off Superman, a publicity stunt to draw attention to the superhero amid declining comic book sales. Of course, once sales shot back up that year with six million sold, Superman would be resurrected in 1993. Jerry Siegel died four years later, still bitter about his treatment at the hands of Harry and Jack. Jerry’s daughter, Laura, would continue the legal battle against Warner Bros., once again claiming ownership of the copyright. “Just like the Gestapo,” she dramatically wrote to DC, “your company wants to strip us naked of our legal rights.” Harry, meanwhile, would remain conspicuously absent from the official history of DC Comics and Superman, his name not even a whisper on its website.
His name was not even mentioned by those he had saved from the Holocaust, sworn to secrecy by Harry himself. But those original seven—Jules, Edith, Helen, Mollie, David, and their sons, Bob and Fred—and their two generations of children and grandchildren—twenty-one people in all—owed him their lives.