Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  When the girl and Goeth reached the first landing, Schindler sidled down the hallway towards the back of the house.

  Pfefferberg and Lisiek heard the commandant, earlier than they had expected him, entering the bedroom and mumbling at the girl he’d brought upstairs. In silence they picked up the swab and the solvent can, crept through into the bedroom and tried to slide out by a side door. Still standing and able to see them on their line of escape, Goeth blanched and recoiled at the sight of the cleaning stick, suspecting that the two men might be assassins. When Lisiek stepped forward, however, and began a tremulous report, the commandant understood that they were merely prisoners.

  “Herr Commandant,” said Lisiek, panting with justified fear, “I wish to report that there has been a ring around your bath . . .”

  “Oh,” said Amon. “So you called in an expert?” He beckoned to the boy. “Come here, darling.”

  Lisiek edged forward and was struck so savagely that he went sprawling, skidding halfway under the bed. Amon again uttered his invitation, as if it might amuse the girl to see him speaking endearments to prisoners. Young Lisiek rose and tottered towards the commandant again, to receive another assault. As the boy picked himself up the second time, Pfefferberg, an experienced prisoner, prepared himself for anything – that they’d be marched down to the garden and shot by Ivan. Instead the commandant simply raged at them to leave, which they did at once.

  When Pfefferberg heard a few days later that Lisiek was dead, shot by Amon, he presumed it was over the bathroom incident. In fact it was for a different matter altogether – Lisiek had harnessed a horse and buggy for Herr Bosch without first asking the commandant’s permission.

  In the kitchen of the villa, the maid, Helen Hirsch (Goeth called her Lena out of laziness she would always say) looked up to see one of the dinner guests in the doorway. She put down the dish of meat scraps she’d been holding and stood to attention with a jerky suddenness. “Herr . . .” She looked at his dinner jacket and sought the word for him. “Herr Direktor, I was just putting aside the leftovers for the Herr Commandant’s dogs.”

  “Please, please,” said Herr Schindler. “You don’t have to report to me, Fräulein Hirsch.”

  He moved around the table. He did not seem to be stalking her, but she feared his intentions. Even though Amon enjoyed beating her, her Jewishness always saved her from overt sexual attack. But there were Germans who were not as fastidious on racial matters as Amon.

  This one’s tone of voice, however, was that of ordinary social exchange. It was a tone to which she was not accustomed, even from the SS officers and NCOs who came to the kitchen to complain about Amon.

  “Don’t you know me?” he asked, just like a man, a soccer star or actor, whose sense of his own celebrity has been hurt by a stranger’s failure to recognise him. “I’m Schindler.”

  She bowed her head. “Herr Direktor,” she said. “Of course, I’ve heard . . . And you’ve been here before. I remember . . .”

  He put his arm around her. He could surely feel the clenching of her body as he touched her cheek with his lips.

  He murmured, “It’s not that sort of kiss. I’m kissing you out of pity, if you want to know.”

  She couldn’t avoid starting to weep. Herr Direktor Schindler bussed her hard now in the middle of the forehead, in the manner of Polish farewells at railway stations, a resounding Eastern European smack of the lips. She saw that he had begun to weep too. “That kiss is something I bring you from . . .” He waved his hand, indicating some honest tribe of men out in the dark, sleeping in tiered bunks or hiding in forests, people for whom by absorbing punishment from Hauptsturmführer Goeth she was in part a buffer.

  Herr Schindler released her and reached into the side pocket of his jacket, bringing out a large confectionery bar. In its substance it too seemed pre-war.

  “Keep that somewhere,” he advised her.

  “I get extra food here,” she told him, as if it were a matter of pride that he wouldn’t presume she was starving. Food, in fact, was the least of her worries. She knew she would not survive Amon’s house, but it wouldn’t be for lack of food.

  “If you don’t want to eat it, trade it,” Herr Schindler told her. “Or why not build yourself up?” He stood back and surveyed her. “Itzhak Stern told me about you.”

  “Herr Schindler,” murmured the girl. She put her head down and wept neatly, economically, for a few seconds. “Herr Schindler, he likes to beat me in front of those women. On my first day here, he beat me because I threw out the bones from dinner. He came down to the basement at midnight and asked me where they were. For his dogs, you understand. That was the first beating . . . I said to him . . . I don’t know why I said it, I’d never say it now . . . Why are you beating me? He said, The reason I’m beating you now is you asked me why I’m beating you.”

  She shook her head and shrugged, as if reproving herself for talking so much. She didn’t want to say any more, she couldn’t convey the history of her punishments, her repeated experience of the Hauptsturmführer’s knuckles.

  Herr Schindler bent his head to her and became even more confidential. “Your circumstances are appalling, Helen,” he told her.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve accepted it.”

  “Accepted it?”

  “One day he’ll shoot me.”

  Schindler shook his head and she thought it was too glib an encouragement to her to hope. Suddenly, the good cloth and the cosseted flesh of Herr Schindler were a provocation. “For God’s sake, Herr Schindler, I see things. We were up on the roof on Monday, chipping off the ice, me and young Lisiek. And we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio, right below us. And, there on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn’t seem fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else. I couldn’t guess what she’d done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see that there’s no set of rules you can keep to. You can’t say to yourself, If I keep these rules, I’ll be safe . . .”

  Schindler took her hand and wrung it for emphasis. “Listen, my dear Fräulein Helen Hirsch, for all that, it’s still better than Majdanek or Auschwitz. If you can keep your health . . .”

  She said, “I thought it would be easy to keep my health in the commandant’s kitchen. When I was sent here, from the camp kitchen, the other girls were jealous.”

  A pitiful smile spread on her lips.

  Schindler raised his voice now. He was like a man enunciating a principle of physics. “He won’t kill you, because he enjoys you too much, my dear Helen. He enjoys you so much he won’t even let you wear the Star. He doesn’t want anyone to know it’s a Jew he’s enjoying. He shot the woman from the steps because she meant nothing to him; she was one of a series, she neither offended nor pleased him. You understand that. But you . . . it’s not decent, Helen. But it’s life.”

  Someone else had said that to her. Untersturmführer Leo John, a second lieutenant, the commandant’s deputy. John had said, “He won’t kill you till the end, Lena, because he gets too much of a kick out of you.” But coming from John it hadn’t had the same effect. Herr Schindler had just condemned her to a painful survival.

  He seemed to understand that she was stunned. He murmured encouragement. He’d see her again. He’d try to get her out. Out? she asked. Out of the villa, he explained, into my factory. Surely you have heard of my factory. I have an enamelware factory.

  “Oh yes,” she said like a slum child speaking of the Riviera. “Schindler’s Emalia. I’ve heard of it.”

  “Keep your health,” he repeated. He seemed to know it would be the key. He seemed to draw on a knowledge of future intentions – Himmler’s, Frank’s – when he said it.

  “All right,” she conceded.

  She turned her back on him and went to a dresser, levering it forward from the wall, an exercise of
strength which in such a diminished girl amazed Herr Schindler. She removed a brick from the section of wall the dresser had previously covered. She brought out a wad of money, occupation zloty.

  “I have a sister in the camp kitchen,” she said. “She’s younger than me. I want you to spend this buying her back if ever she’s put on the cattle wagons. I believe you often find out about these things beforehand.”

  “I’ll make it my business,” Schindler told her, but with ease, not like a solemn promise. “How much is it?”

  “Four thousand zloty.”

  He took it negligently, her nest egg, and shoved it in a side pocket. It was still safer with him than in a niche behind Amon Goeth’s dresser.

  So the story of Oskar Schindler is begun perilously, with Gothic Nazis, with SS hedonism, with the thin and brutalised girl, and with a figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.

  On the one hand, Oskar has made it his business to know the full face of the system, the rabid face behind the veil of bureaucratic decency. He knows, that is, earlier than most would dare know it, what Sonderbehandlung means, that though it says Special Treatment it means pyramids of cyanosed corpses in Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and in that complex west of Cracow known to the Poles as Os̀wiecim-Brzezinka but which will be known to the West by its German name, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  On the other hand he is a businessman, a dealer by temperament, and he does not openly spit in the system’s eye. He has already reduced the pyramids and, though he does not know how this year and the next they will grow in size and number and overtop the Matterhorn, he knows the mountain is coming. Though he cannot predict what bureaucratic shifts will occur in its construction, he still presumes there will always be room and need for Jewish labour. Therefore, during his charitable visit to Helen Hirsch, he insists, “Keep your health.” He is sure, and out in the darkened Arbeitslager of Plaszów wakeful Jews stir and promise themselves that no régime, the tide set against it, can afford to do away with a plentiful source of free labour. It’s the ones who break down, spit blood, fall to dysentery who are put on the Auschwitz transports. Herr Schindler himself has heard prisoners, out on the Appellplatz – parade ground – of Plaszów labour camp, murmur, “At least I still have my health,” in a tone which in normal life only the aged use.

  So, this winter night, it is both early days and late days for Herr Schindler’s practical engagement in the salvage of certain human lives. He is in deep, he has broken Reich laws to an extent that would earn him a multiplicity of hangings, beheadings, consignments to the draughty huts of Auschwitz or Gröss-Rosen. But he does not know yet how much it will really cost. Though he has spent a fortune already, he does not know the extent of payments still to be made.

  Not to stretch belief so early, the story begins with a quotidian act of kindness, a kiss, a soft voice, a sugared bar. Helen Hirsch would never see her four thousand zloty again – not in a form in which they could be counted and held in the hand. But to this day she considers it a matter of small importance that Oskar was so inexact with sums of money.

  ∗ An SS rank, higher than colonel, lower than brigadier, for which there is no army equivalent.

  ONE

  General Sigmund List’s armoured divisions, driving north from the Sudetenland, had taken the sweet south Polish jewel of Cracow from both flanks on September 6th, 1939. And it was in their wake that Oskar Schindler entered the city which, for the next five years, would be his oyster. Though within the month he would show that he was disaffected with National Socialism, he could still see that Cracow, with its railway junction and its as yet modest industries, would be a boom town of the new dispensation. He wasn’t going to be a salesman any more. Now he was going to be his own tycoon.

  It is not immediately easy to find in Oskar’s family’s history the origins of his impulse towards rescue. He was born on April 28th, 1908, into the Austrian Empire of Franz Josef, into the hilly Moravian province of that ancient Austrian realm. His home town was the industrial city of Zwittau, to which some commercial opening had brought the Schindler ancestors from Vienna at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

  Herr Hans Schindler, Oskar’s father, approved of the imperial arrangement, considered himself culturally an Austrian, and spoke German at table, on the telephone, in business, in moments of tenderness. Yet when in 1918 Herr Schindler and the members of his family found themselves citizens of the Czechoslovak republic of Masaryk and Beneš, it did not seem to cause any fundamental distress to the father, and still less to his ten-year-old son. The child Hitler, according to the man Hitler, was tormented even as a boy by the gulf between the mystical unity of Austria and Germany and their political separation. No such neurosis of disinheritance soured Oskar Schindler’s childhood. Czechoslovakia was such a bosky, unravished little dumpling of a republic that the German-speakers took their minority stature with some grace, even if the Depression and some minor governmental follies would later put a certain strain on the relationship.

  Zwittau, Oskar’s native town, was a small, coal-dusted city in the southern reaches of the mountain range known as the Jeseniks. Its surrounding hills stood partly ravaged by industry and partly forested with larch and spruce and fir. Because of its community of German-speaking Sudetendeutschen it maintained a German grammar school which Oskar attended. There he took the Realgymnasium Course, which was meant to produce engineers – mining, mechanical, civil – to suit the industrial landscape of the area. Herr Schindler himself owned a farm machinery plant, and Oskar’s education was a preparation for this inheritance.

  The family Schindler was Catholic. So too was the family of young Amon Goeth, by this time also completing the Science Course and sitting for the Matura examinations in Vienna.

  Oskar’s mother, Louisa, practised her faith with energy, her clothes redolent all Sunday of the incense burned in clouds at High Mass in the church of St Maurice. Hans Schindler was the sort of husband who drives a woman to religion. He liked cognac, he liked coffee houses. A redolence of brandy-warm breath, good tobacco, and confirmed earthiness came from the direction of that good monarchist, Herr Hans Schindler.

  The family lived in a modern villa, set in its own gardens, across the city from the industrial section. There were two children, Oskar and his sister, Elfriede. But there are no witnesses left to the dynamics of that household, except in the most general terms. We know, for example, that it distressed Frau Schindler that her son, like his father, was a negligent Catholic.

  But it cannot have been too internecine a household. From the little that Oskar would say of his childhood, there was no darkness there. Sunlight shines among the fir trees in the garden. There are ripe plums in the corner of those early summers. If he spends a part of some summer morning at Mass, he does not bring back to the villa much of a sense of sin. He runs his father’s car out into the sun in front of the garage and begins ferreting inside its engine. Or else he sits on a side step of the house, filing away at the carburettor of the motorbike he is building.

  Oskar had a few middle-class Jewish friends, whose parents also sent them to the German grammar school. These children were not village Ashkenazim – quirky, Yiddish-speaking, orthodox – but multilingual and not-so-ritual sons of Jewish businessmen. Across the Hana Plain and in the Beskidy Hills, Sigmund Freud had been born of just such a Jewish family, and that not so long before Hans Schindler himself was born to solid German stock in Zwittau.

  Oskar’s later history seems to call out for some set piece in his childhood. The young Oskar should defend some bullied Jewish boy on the way home from school. It is a safe bet it didn’t happen, and we are happier not knowing, since the event would seem too pat. Besides, one Jewish child saved from a bloody nose proves nothing. For Himmler himself would complain, in a speech to one of his Einsatzgruppen, that every German had a Jewish friend. “This is one of those things that are easily said. ‘The Jewish people are going to be annihilated,’ says every Party
member. ‘Sure it’s in our programme, elimination of the Jews, annihilation – we’ll take care of it.’ And then they all come trudging, eighty million worthy Germans and each one has his one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-1 Jew.”

  Trying still to find, in the shadow of Himmler, some hint of Oskar’s later enthusiasms, we encounter the Schindlers’ next door neighbour, a liberal rabbi called Dr Felix Kantor. Rabbi Kantor was a good disciple of Abraham Geiger, the German liberaliser of Judaism who claimed that it was no crime, in fact was praiseworthy to be a German as well as a Jew. Rabbi Kantor was no rigid village scholar. He dressed in the modern mode and spoke German in the house. He called his place of worship by the pluralist term, Temple, and not by that older name, Synagogue. His Temple was attended by Jewish doctors, engineers and proprietors of textile mills in Zwittau. When they travelled, they told other businessmen, “Our rabbi is Doctor Kantor – he writes articles not only for the Jewish journals in Prague and Brno, but for the dailies as well.”

  Rabbi Kantor’s two sons went to the same school as the son of his German neighbour, Schindler. Perhaps both boys were bright enough to become two of the rare Jewish professors at the German University of Prague in later life. These close-cropped German-speaking prodigies raced in knee-length shorts around the summer garden of either house. Chasing the Schindler children and being chased. And Kantor, watching them flash in and out among the yew hedges, might have thought it was working as Geiger and Graetz and Lazarus and all those other nineteenth century German Jewish liberals had predicted. We lead enlightened lives, we are greeted by German neighbours – Herr Schindler will even make snide remarks about Czech statesmen in our hearing. We are secular scholars as well as sensible interpreters of the Talmud. We belong both to the twentieth century and to an ancient tribal race. We are neither offensive nor offended against.