Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Later, in the mid thirties, the rabbi would revise this happy estimation and make up his mind in the end that his sons could never buy off the National Socialists with a German language Ph.D., that there was no outcrop of twentieth century technology or secular scholarship behind which a Jew could find sanctuary, any more than there could ever be a species of rabbi acceptable to the new German legislators. In 1936 all the Kantors moved to Belgium. The Schindlers never heard of them again.

  Race, blood and soil meant little to the adolescent Oskar. He was one of those boys for whom a motorbike is the most compelling model of the universe. And his father – a mechanic by temperament – seems to have encouraged the boy’s zeal for red-hot machinery. In the last year of high school, Oskar was riding around Zwittau in a red 500cc Italian Galloni. A school friend, Erwin Tragatsch, watched with unspeakable desire as the red Galloni farted its way down the streets of the town and arrested the attention of promenaders on the square. Like the Kantor boys it too was a prodigy, not only the sole Galloni in Zwittau, not only the only 500cc Galloni in Moravia, but probably a unique machine in the whole of Czechoslovakia.

  In the spring of 1928, the last months of Oskar’s adolescence and prelude to a summer in which he would fall in love and decide to marry, he appeared in the town square on a 250cc Moto-Guzzi, of which there were only four others on the continent outside Italy, and those four owned by international racers – Giessler, Winkler, the Hungarian Joo and the Pole Kolaczkowski. There must have been townspeople who shook their heads and said that Herr Schindler was spoiling the boy.

  But it would be Oskar’s sweetest and most innocent summer. An apolitical boy in a skull-fitting leather helmet revving the engine of the Moto-Guzzi, racing against the works teams in the mountains of Moravia, son of a family for whom the height of political sophistication was to burn a candle for Franz Josef. Just around the pine-clad curve, an ambiguous marriage, an economic slump, seventeen years of fatal politics. But on the rider’s face no knowledge, just the wind-pressed grimace of a high speed mover who – because he is new, because he is no pro, because all his records are as yet unset – can afford the price better than the older ones, the pros, the racers with times to beat.

  His first contest was in May, the mountain race between Brno and Sobeslav. It was high-class competition, so that at least the expensive toy which prosperous Herr Hans Schindler had given his son was not rusting in a garage. He came third on his red Moto-Guzzi behind two Terrots which had been souped up with English Blackburne engines.

  For his next challenge he moved farther from home to the Altwater circuit in the hills on the Saxon border. The German 250cc champion Walfried Winkler was there for the race and his veteran rival Kurt Henkelmann on a water-cooled DKW. All the Saxon hotshots – Horowitz, Kocher and Kliwar – had entered, the Terrot-Blackburnes were back and some Coventry Eagles. There were three Moto-Guzzis, including Oskar Schindler’s, as well as the big guns from the 350cc class and a BMW 500cc team.

  It was nearly Oskar’s best and most unalloyed day. He kept within touch of the leaders during the first laps and watched to see what might happen. After an hour Winkler, Henkelmann and Oskar had left the Saxons behind, and the other Moto-Guzzis fell away with some mechanical flaw. In what Oskar believed was the second last lap he passed Winkler and must have felt, as palpably as the tar itself and the blur of pines, his imminent career as a works rider, and the travelling obsessed life it would permit him to lead.

  In what then he assumed was the last lap, Oskar passed Henkelmann and both the DKWs, crossed the line and slowed. There must have been some deceptive sign from officials because the crowd also believed the race was over. By the time Oskar knew it wasn’t, that he had made some amateur mistake, Walfried Winkler and Mita Vychodil had passed him, and even the exhausted Henkelmann was able to nudge him out of third place.

  He was fêted home. But for a technicality, he’d beaten Europe’s best.

  Tragatsch surmised that the reasons Oskar’s career as a motorbike racer ended there were economic. It was a fair guess. For that summer, after a courtship of only six weeks, he hurried into marriage with a farmer’s daughter, and so fell out of favour with his father, who happened also to be his employer.

  The girl he married was from a village to the east of Zwittau in the Hana Plain. She was convent-schooled and had the sort of reserve he admired in his mother. Her widowed father was no peasant, but a gentleman farmer. In the Thirty Years War, her Austrian ancestors had survived the recurrent campaigns and famines which had swept that fecund plain. Three centuries later, in a new era of risk, their daughter entered an ill-advised marriage with an unformed boy from Zwittau. Her father disapproved of it as much as Oskar’s had.

  Hans didn’t like it because he could see that Oskar had married in the pattern of his, Hans’s, own uneasy marriage. A sensual husband, a boy with a wild streak, looking too early in his life for some sort of peace from a nunlike, gracious, unsophisticated girl.

  Oskar had met the girl at a party in Zwittau. Her name was Emilie and she was visiting friends from her village of Alt-Molstein. Oskar knew the place, having sold tractors in the area.

  When the banns were announced in the parish churches of Zwittau, some people thought the couple so ill-matched that they began to look for motives other than love. It is possible that even that summer the Schindler machinery works were in trouble, for they were geared to the manufacture of steam-driven tractors of the type already going out of style with farmers. Oskar was pouring a large part of his wages back into the business, and now, with Emilie, came a dowry of half a million Reichsmarks, an honest and alleviating lump of capital in anyone’s language. The suspicion of the gossips was unfounded, though, for that summer Oskar was infatuated. And since Emilie’s father would never find grounds to believe the boy would settle down and be a good husband, only a fraction of the half million was ever paid.

  Emilie herself was delighted to escape torpid Alt-Molstein by marrying handsome Oskar Schindler. Her father’s closest friend had always been the dull parish priest, and Emilie had grown up serving the two of them tea and listening to their naïve opinions on politics and theology. If we are still seeking significant Jewish connections, there had been some in Emilie’s girlhood – the village doctor who treated her grandmother; and Rita, granddaughter of the storekeeper Reif. During one of his visits to the farmhouse, the parish priest told Emilie’s father that it was not good on principle for a Catholic child to have a particular friendship with a Jew. Out of the almost glandular stubbornness of girlhood, Emilie resisted the priest’s edict. The friendship with Rita Reif would survive till the day in 1942 when local Nazi officials executed Rita in front of the store.

  After the marriage, Oskar and Emilie settled in an apartment in Zwittau. For Oskar, the thirties must have seemed a mere epilogue to his glorious mistake on the Altwater circuit in the summer of 1928. He did his military service in the Czechoslovak army and, although it gave him the chance to drive a truck, found that he abhorred the military life – not on pacifist grounds but on grounds of discomfort. Home again in Zwittau, he neglected Emilie in the evenings, staying in cafés like a single man, talking to girls neither nunlike nor gracious. The family business went bankrupt in 1935, and that same year his father left Frau Louisa Schindler and took an apartment of his own. Oskar detested him for that and went and drank tea with his aunts and denounced Hans to them, and, even in cafés, made speeches about his father’s treachery to a good woman. He seems to have been blind to the resemblance between his own faltering marriage and his parents’ broken one.

  Because of his good business contacts, his conviviality, his gifts of salesmanship, his ability to hold drink, he had got a job even in the midst of the Depression as sales manager of Moravian Electrotechnic. Its head office was located in the grim provincial capital of Brno and Oskar commuted between Brno and Zwittau. He liked the travelling life of course. It was half the destiny he’d promised himself when he’d passed Winkler o
n the Altwater circuit.

  When his mother died he rushed back to Zwittau and stood beside his aunts, his sister Elfriede and his wife Emilie on one side of the grave, while treacherous Hans stood solitary – except, of course, for an unctuous parish priest – at the head of the coffin. Louisa’s death had consecrated the enmity between Oskar and Hans. Oskar couldn’t see – only the women could – that Hans and Oskar were in fact two brothers separated by the accident of paternity.

  By the time of that funeral, Oskar was wearing the Hakenkreuz, the swastika emblem of Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party. Neither Emilie nor the aunts approved, but they did not take it too hard; it was something young Czech Germans were wearing that season. Only the Social Democrats and the Communists did not sport the badge or subscribe to Henlein’s party, and, God knew, Oskar was neither a Communist nor a Social Democrat. Oskar was a salesman. All things being equal, when you went in to a German company manager wearing the badge, you got the order.

  Yet, even with his order book wide open and his pencil flying, Oskar – in the months in 1938 before the German divisions entered the Sudeten – also felt a sense of a grand shift in history, and was seduced by the itch to be party to it.

  Whatever his motives for running with Henlein, it seems that as soon as the divisions entered Moravia he suffered an instant disillusionment with National Socialism, as thorough and as quick as the disillusionment that had set in after marriage. He seems to have expected that the invading power would allow some brotherly Sudeten Republic to be founded. In a later statement he said he was appalled by the new régime’s bullying of the Czech population, by the seizure of Czech property. His first documented acts of rebellion would occur very early in the coming world conflict, and there is no need to doubt that the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, proclaimed by Hitler from Hradschin Castle in March 1939, surprised him with its early showing of tyranny.

  Besides that, the two people whose opinions he most respected – Emilie, and his estranged father – were not taken in by the grand Teutonic hour and both claimed to know Hitler could not succeed. Their opinions were not sophisticated, but neither were Oskar’s. Emilie believed, with a straightforward country fixity, that the man would be punished for making himself God. Herr Schindler senior, as his position was relayed to Oskar by an aunt, fell back on basic historical principles. Just outside Brno was the stretch of river where Napoleon had won the battle of Austerlitz. And what had befallen this triumphant Napoleon? He’d become a nobody, growing potatoes on an island in the mid-Atlantic. The same would happen to this fellow. Destiny, said Herr Schindler senior, was not a limitless rope. It was a piece of elastic. The harder you went forward, the more fiercely you were jerked back to your starting point. That was what life, marriage, and the economic slump had taught Herr Hans Schindler, failed husband and gentle worldling.

  But perhaps his son Oskar was not yet a clear enemy of the new system. One evening that autumn, young Herr Schindler attended a party at a sanatorium in the hills outside Ostrava, up near the Polish border. The hostess was the sanatorium manager, a client and friend Oskar had acquired on the road. She introduced him to a thin and personable German, Eberhard Gebauer. They talked about business and what jumps France and Britain and Russia might make. Then they went off with a bottle to a spare room so that, as Gebauer suggested, they could talk more frankly. There Gebauer identified himself as an officer of Admiral Canaris’s Abwehr intelligence and offered his new drinking companion the chance to work for the Foreign Section of the Abwehr. Oskar had accounts over the border in Poland, throughout its south and Upper Silesia. Would he undertake to supply the Abwehr with military intelligence from that region? Gebauer said he knew from his friend the hostess that Oskar was intelligent and convivial. With these gifts, he could make use not only of his own observations of industrial and military installations in the area but of those of any German Poles he might happen to recruit in restaurants, bars, or during business meetings.

  Again, apologists for the young Oskar would say that he agreed to work for Canaris because, as an Abwehr agent, he was exempt from army service. That was a large part of the proposal’s charm. But he must also have believed that a German advance into Poland would be appropriate. Like the slim officer sitting on the bed with him and plying the bottle, he must still have approved of the national business though he did not like the management. For Oskar, Gebauer may have possessed a moral allure, for he and his colleagues of the Abwehr considered themselves a decent Christian élite. Though it did not prevent their planning for a military intrusion into Poland, it gave them a contempt for Himmler and the SS, with whom, they believed high-handedly, they were in competition for the control of Germany’s soul.

  Later, a very different intelligence-gathering body would find Oskar’s reports to be full and praiseworthy. On his Polish journeys for the Abwehr, he showed a gift for charming news out of people, especially in a social context, at the dinner table, over cocktails. We do not know the exact nature or importance of what he found out for Gebauer and Canaris, but he came to like the city of Cracow very well, however, and to discover that though it was no grand industrial metropolis, it was an exquisite medieval town with a fringe of metal, textile and chemical plants.

  As for the unmotorised Polish army, its secrets were rather too apparent.

  TWO

  In late October 1939 two German NCOs of a grenadier regiment entered the showroom of J. C. Buchheister & Company in Stradom Street, Cracow, and insisted on buying some expensive bolts of cloth to send home. The Jewish employee behind the counter, a yellow star sewn to his breast, explained that Buchheister’s did not sell direct to the public but supplied garment factories and retail outlets. The boys could not be dissuaded from taking the fabric. When it was time to settle their bill, they did it whimsically with a Bavarian banknote of 1858 and a piece of German army occupation scrip dated 1914. “Perfectly good currency,” one of them told the Jewish book-keeper they were dealing with. They were healthy looking young men who had spent all spring and summer on manoeuvres, the early autumn yielding them an easy triumph and then all the latitude of conquerors in a sweet city. The book-keeper agreed to the transaction and got them out of the shop before ringing up a sale on the cash register.

  Later in the day the young German accounts manager, an official appointed by the deftly named East Trust Agency to take over and run Jewish businesses, visited the showroom. He was one of two German officials assigned to Buchheister. The first was Sepp Aue, the supervisor, a middle-aged unambitious man, and the second this young world beater. The young man inspected the books and the till. He took out the valueless currency. What did it mean, this comic opera money?

  When the Jewish book-keeper told his story, the accounts manager accused him of substituting the antique notes for hard zloty. Later in the day, in Buchheister’s warehouse upstairs, the world beater reported to Sepp Aue and said they should call in the Schutzpolizei.

  Herr Aue and the young accountant both knew that such an act would lead to the imprisonment of the book-keeper in the jail in Montelupich Street. The accountant thought that this would set an excellent example for Buchheister’s remaining Jewish staff. But the idea distressed Aue, who had a secret liability of his own, his grandmother having been Jewish, though no one had yet found out.

  Aue sent an office boy with a message to the company’s original accountant, a Polish Jew called Itzhak Stern who was at home with influenza. Aue was something of a political appointment and had little accounting experience. Now he wanted Stern to come into the office and look into the impasse over the bolts of linen. He had just sent the message off to Stern’s house in Podgórze when his secretary came into the office and announced that a Herr Oskar Schindler was waiting outside, claiming to have an appointment. Aue went into the outer room and saw a tall young man, placid as a large dog, tranquilly smoking. The two had met at a party the night before. Oskar had been there with a Sudeten German girl, Ingrid, Treuhänder – supervisor
– of a Jewish hardware company called Cs’, just as Aue was Treuhänder of Buchheister’s. They were a glamorous couple, Oskar and this Ingrid, frankly in love, stylish, with lots of friends in the Abwehr.

  Herr Schindler was looking for a career in Cracow. Textiles? Aue had suggested. It isn’t just uniforms. The Polish domestic market itself is large enough and inflated enough to support us all. You’re welcome to look Buchheister’s over, he’d urged big Oskar, not knowing how he might regret this tipsy camaraderie at 2 p.m. the next day.

  Schindler could see that Herr Aue had possible second thoughts about his invitation. If it’s not convenient, Herr Treuhänder, Oskar suggested.

  Herr Aue said not at all and took Schindler through the warehouse and across the yard to the spinning division, where great rolls of golden fabric were running off the machines. Schindler asked if the Treuhänder had had trouble with the Poles. No, said Sepp, they’re cooperative. Stunned if anything. After all, it’s not exactly a munitions factory.

  Herr Oskar Schindler had so much the air of a man with good connections that Aue could not resist the temptation to test the point. Did Oskar know the people at the Main Armaments Board? Did he know General Julius Schindler, for example? Perhaps General Schindler was a relative?

  That makes no difference, said Herr Schindler disarmingly. (In fact General Schindler was no relative of his.) The General wasn’t such a bad fellow, compared to some, said Oskar.

  Aue agreed. But he himself would never dine with General Schindler or meet him for drinks, that was the difference.

  They returned to the office, encountering on the way Itzhak Stern, Buchheister’s Jewish accountant, waiting on a chair provided by Aue’s secretary, plying a handkerchief and coughing cruelly. He stood up, joined his hands one on top of the other in front of his chest and with immense eyes watched both conquerors approach, pass him and enter the office. There Aue offered Schindler a drink and then, excusing himself, left Oskar by the fire and went out to interview Stern.