Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  He was so thin, with a scholarly dryness to him; he had the manners of a Talmudic scholar but also of a European intellectual. Aue told him the story of the book-keeper and the NCOs and the assumptions the young German accountant had made. He produced from the safe the currency, the 1858 Bavarian, the 1914 occupation. “I thought you might have instituted an accounting procedure to deal with just this situation,” said Aue. “It must be happening a great deal in Cracow just now.”

  Itzhak Stern took the notes and studied them. He had developed a procedure, he told the Herr Treuhänder. Without a smile or a wink, he moved to the open fire at the end of the room and dropped both notes into it, then coughed and worked at the coals with a poker.

  “I write these transactions off to profit and loss, under free samples,” he said. There had been a lot of free samples since September.

  Aue liked Stern’s dry, effective style with the legal evidence. He began to laugh, seeing in the accountant’s lean features the complexities of Cracow itself, the parochial canniness of a small city. Only a local knew the ropes. In the inner office Herr Schindler sat in need of local information.

  Aue led Stern through into the manager’s office to meet Herr Schindler. The tall, heavy German was standing staring at the fire, an unstoppered hip flask held absently in one hand. The first thing Itzhak Stern thought was, This isn’t a manageable German. Aue wore the badge of his Führer, a miniature Hakenkreuz, as negligently as a man might wear the badge of a cycling club. But big Schindler’s coin-sized emblem took the light from the fire in its black enamel. It, and the young man’s general affluence, were all the more the symbols of Stern’s autumn griefs as a Polish Jew with a cold.

  Aue made the introductions. According to the edict already issued by Governor Frank, Stern made his statement, “I have to tell you, sir, that I am a Jew.”

  “Well,” Herr Schindler growled at him, “I’m a German. So there we are!”

  All very well, Stern almost intoned privately behind his sodden handkerchief. In that case, lift the edict.

  For, even now, in only the seventh week of the new order in Poland, Itzhak Stern was a man under not one edict but already under many. Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, had already initiated and signed six restrictive edicts, leaving others to his district governor, SS Gruppenführer (Major General) Dr Wächter, to implement. Stern, besides declaring his origins, had also to carry a distinctive registration card marked by a yellow stripe. The Orders-in-Council forbidding kosher preparation of meats and commanding forced labour for Jews were three weeks old when Stern stood coughing in Schindler’s presence. And Stern’s official ration as an Untermensch (subhuman) was little more than half that of a non-Jewish Pole, the latter being tainted by Untermenschen-ship himself.

  Finally, by an edict of November 8th, a general registration of all Cracovian Jews was required to be completed by November 24th.

  Stern with his calm and abstract cast of thought knew that the edicts would continue, would circumscribe his living and breathing further still. Most Cracow Jews expected such a rash of edicts. There would be some disruption of life – Jews from the shtetls (villages inhabited almost exclusively by Jews) being brought to town to shovel coal, intellectuals being sent into the countryside to hoe beet. There would also be sporadic slaughters for a time, like the one over at Tursk where an SS artillery unit had kept people working on a bridge all day and then herded them into the village synagogue in the evening and shot them. There would always be such intermittent instances. But the situations would settle, the race would survive by petitioning, by buying off the authorities – it was the old method, it had been working since the Roman Empire, it would work again. In the end the civil authorities needed Jews, especially in a nation where they were one in every eleven.

  Stern, however, wasn’t one of the sanguine ones. He didn’t presume the legislation would soon achieve a plateau of negotiable severity. For these were the worst of times. So, though he did not know that the coming fire would be different in substance as well as degree, he was already resentful enough for the future to think, All very well for you, Herr Schindler, to make generous little gestures of equality.

  This man, said Aue, introducing Stern, was Buchheister’s righthand man. He had good connections in the business community here in Cracow.

  It was not Stern’s place to argue with Aue about that. Even so, he wondered if the Treuhänder wasn’t gilding the lily for the distinguished visitor.

  Aue excused himself.

  Left alone with Stern, Schindler murmured that he’d be grateful if the accountant could tell him what he knew about some of the local businesses. Testing Oskar, Stern suggested that perhaps Herr Schindler should speak to the officials of the Trust Agency.

  “They’re thieves,” said Herr Schindler genially. “They’re bureaucrats too. I would like some latitude.” He shrugged. “I am a capitalist by temperament and I don’t like being regulated.”

  So Stern and the self-declared capitalist began to talk. And Stern was quite a source, he seemed to have friends or relatives in every factory in Cracow – textiles, garments, confectionery, joinery, metalwork. Herr Schindler was impressed and took an envelope from the breast pocket of his suit. “Do you know a company called Rekord?” he asked.

  Itzhak Stern did. It was a bankrupt estate, he said. It had made enamelware. Since it had gone bankrupt some of the metal press machinery had been confiscated and now it was largely a shell, producing – under the management of one of the former owners’ relatives – a fraction of its capacity. His own brother, said Stern, represented a Swiss company who were major creditors of Rekord. Stern knew that it was permitted to reveal a small degree of fraternal pride and then to make a noise of mild disgust. “The place was very badly managed,” said Stern.

  Oskar Schindler dropped the envelope on to Stern’s lap. “This is their balance sheet. Tell me what you think.”

  Itzhak said that Herr Schindler should of course ask others as well as himself. Of course, Oskar told him. But I would value your opinion.

  Stern read the balance sheet quickly, then, after some three minutes of study, felt all at once the strange silence of the office and looked up, finding Herr Oskar Schindler’s eyes full on him.

  There was, of course, in men like Stern an ancestral gift for sniffing out the just Goy, who could be used as a buffer or a partial refuge against the savageries of the others. It was a sense for where a safe house might be, a zone of potential shelter. And from now on the possibility of Herr Schindler as sanctuary would colour the conversation as might a half glimpsed, intangible sexual promise colour the talk between a man and a woman at a party. It was a suggestion of which Stern was more aware than Schindler, and nothing explicit would be said for fear of damaging the tender connection.

  “It’s a perfectly good business,” said Stern. “You could speak to my brother. And, of course, now there’s the possibility of military contracts . . .”

  “Exactly,” murmured Herr Schindler.

  For almost instantly after the fall of Cracow, even before Warsaw’s siege ended, an Armaments Inspectorate had been set up in the Government General of Poland, its mandate being to enter into contracts with suitable manufacturers for the supply of army equipment. In a place like Rekord, mess-kits and field-kitchenware could be turned out. The Armaments Inspectorate was headed, Stern knew, by a Major General Julius Schindler of the Wehrmacht. Was the General a relative of Herr Oskar Schindler’s? Stern asked. No, I’m afraid not, said Schindler, but as if he wanted Stern to keep his non-relationship a secret.

  In any case, said Stern, even the skeleton production at Rekord was grossing more than half a million zloty a year, and new metal pressing plant and furnaces could be acquired relatively easily. It depended on Herr Schindler’s access to credit.

  Enamelware, said Herr Schindler, was closer to his line than textiles. His background was in farm machinery and he understood steam presses and so forth.

  It did not any
longer occur to Stern to ask why an elegant German entrepreneur wished to talk to him about business options. Meetings like this one had occurred throughout the history of his tribe, and the normal exchanges of business did not quite explain them. He talked on at some length, explaining how the Commercial Court would set the fee for the leasing of the bankrupt estate. Leasing with an option to buy – it was better than being a Treuhänder. As a Treuhänder, you were completely under the control of the Economics Ministry.

  Stern lowered his voice then and risked saying it. “You will find you are restricted in the people you’ll be allowed to employ . . .”

  Schindler was amused. “How do you know all this? About ultimate intentions?”

  “I read it in a copy of the Berliner Tagblatt. A Jew is still permitted to read German newspapers.”

  Schindler continued to laugh, reached out a hand and let it fall on Stern’s shoulder. “Is that so?” he asked.

  In fact, Stern knew these things because Aue had received a long directive from Reich Secretary of State Eberhard von Jagwitz of the Economics Ministry, outlining the policies to be adopted in Aryanising businesses. Aue had left it to Stern to make a digest of the document. Von Jagwitz had indicated more in sadness than in anger that there would be pressure from other government and party agencies, such as Heydrich’s RHSA, the Reich Security Main Office, to Aryanise not just the ownership of companies, but also the management and workforce. The sooner Treuhänders filtered out the skilled Jewish employees the better – always, of course, bearing in mind the maintenance of production at an acceptable level.

  At last Herr Schindler put the accounts of Rekord back in his breast pocket, stood up and led Itzhak Stern out into the main office. They stood there for a time, among the typists and clerks, growing philosophical, as Oskar liked to do. It was here that Oskar brought up the matter of Christianity having its base in Judaism, a subject which for some reason, perhaps even because of his boyhood friendship with the Kantors in Zwittau, exercised his mind. Stern spoke softly, at length, learnedly. He had published articles in journals of comparative religion. Oskar, who wrongly fancied himself a philosopher, had found an expert. The scholar, Stern, whom some thought a pedant, found Oskar’s understanding shallow, a mind genial by nature but without much conceptual deftness. Not that Itzhak Stern was about to complain. An ill-assorted friendship was firmly established. So that Stern found himself drawing an analogy, as Oskar’s own father had, from previous empires and giving his reasons why Adolf Hitler could not succeed.

  The opinion slipped out before Stern could withdraw it. The other Jews in the office bowed their heads and burrowed their eyes into worksheets. Herr Schindler did not seem to be disturbed.

  Towards the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He’d hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a packet of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man, saves the entire world.

  “Of course, of course,” said Oskar Schindler. Rightly or wrongly, Itzhak always believed that it was then that he had dropped the right stone in the well, that the crucial dictum had been deposited.

  THREE

  There is another Cracow Jew who gives an account of meeting Schindler that autumn of 1939 as well as coming close to killing him. This man’s name was Leopold (Poldek) Pfefferberg. He had been a lieutenant, a company commander in the Polish army during the recent tragic campaign. After suffering a leg wound during the battle for the river San, he’d limped around the Polish hospital in Przemysl, helping with the other casualties. He was no doctor but had graduated from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow with a degree in physical education and so had some knowledge of anatomy. He was resilient, he was self-confident, twenty-seven years old and built like a wedge.

  With some hundreds of other captured Polish officers from Przemysl, Pfefferberg was on his way to Germany when his train drew into his home city of Cracow and the prisoners were herded into the first-class waiting room until new transport could be provided. His home was ten blocks away. To a practical young man, it seemed outrageous that he could not go out into Pawia Street and catch a Number 1 tram home. The bucolic looking Wehrmacht guard at the door seemed a provocation.

  Pfefferberg had in his breast pocket a document signed by the German hospital authority of Przemysl indicating that he was free to move about the city with ambulance details tending to the wounded of both armies. It was spectacularly formal, stamped and signed. He took it out now and, going up to the guard, thrust it at him.

  “Can you read German?” Pfefferberg demanded.

  This sort of ploy had to be done right of course. You had to be young, you had to be persuasive, you had to have retained, undiminished by summary defeat, a confident bearing of a particularly Polish nature, something disseminated by its plentiful aristocrats to the Polish officer corps, even to those rare members of it who were Jewish.

  The man had blinked. Of course I can read German, he said. But after he’d taken the document he held it like a man who couldn’t read at all – held it like a slice of bread. Pfefferberg explained in German how the document declared his right to go out and attend to the ill. All the guard could see was a proliferation of official stamps. It looked like quite a document to him. With a wave of the head, he indicated the door.

  Pfefferberg was the only passenger on the Number 1 tram that morning. It was not even six o’clock yet. The conductor took his fare without concern, for in the city there were still many Polish troops not yet processed by the Wehrmacht. The officers had to register, that was all.

  The tram swung round the Barbakan, through the gate in the ancient wall, down Floriańska to the church of St Mary, across the central square and so within five minutes into Grodzka Street. Near his parents’ apartment at Number 48, repeating a childish trick, he jumped from the moving vehicle before the air brakes went on, letting the momentum of the jump, combined with that of the tram, bring him up with a soft thud against the door jamb of his parents’ building.

  After his escape, he had lived not too uncomfortably in the apartments of friends, visiting Grodzka 48 now and then. The Jewish schools opened briefly – they would be closed again within six weeks – and he even returned to his job. He was sure the Gestapo would take some time to come looking for him, and so he applied for ration papers. He began to dispose of jewellery – as an agent and in his own right – on the black market which operated in Cracow’s central square, in the arcades of the Sukiennice and beneath the two unequal spires of St Mary’s church. Trade was brisk, even among the Poles themselves but more so for the Polish Jews. Their ration books, full of precancelled coupons, entitled them to only two-thirds of the meat and half of the butter allowance that went to Aryan citizens, while all the cocoa and rice coupons were cancelled. And so the black market which had operated through centuries of occupation and the few decades of Polish autonomy became the food and income source and the readiest means of resistance for respectable bourgeois citizens, especially those who like Professor Leopold Pfefferberg were streetwise.

  He presumed that he would, in the near future, travel over the ski routes around Zakopane in the Tatras, across Slovakia’s slender neck into Hungary or Rumania. He was equipped for the journey, he had been a member of the Polish national ski squad. On one of the high shelves of the porcelain stove in his mother’s apartment he kept an elegant little .22 pistol, armoury both for the proposed escape and in case he was ever trapped inside the apartment by the Gestapo.

  It was with this pearlhandled semi-toy, that Pfefferberg would come close to killing Herr Schindler one day in November. Schindler, double-breasted suit, party badge at the lapel, had decided to call
on Mrs Mina Pfefferberg, Poldek’s mother, to offer her a commission. He had been given a fine modern apartment in Straszewskiego Street by the Reich housing authorities. It had previously been the property of a Jewish family by the name of Nussbaum. These allocations of apartments were carried out without any compensation to the previous occupier. On the day Oskar came calling, Mrs Mina Pfefferberg was worried that it would happen to her apartment in Grodzka.

  A number of Schindler’s friends would claim later – though it is not possible to prove it – that Oskar had gone looking for the dispossessed family at their lodgings in Podgórze and had given them a sum close to fifty thousand zloty in compensation. With this sum, it is said, the Nussbaums bought themselves an escape to Yugoslavia. And however good a light this rumoured action places Oskar in, it has to be said that it is probable. Fifty thousand zloty signified substantial dissent, but there would be other similar acts of dissent by Oskar before Christmas. Some friends would in fact come to say that generosity was a disease in Oskar, a frantic thing, one of his passions. He would tip taxi drivers twice the fare on the meter. This has to be said, too – that he thought the Reich housing authorities were unjust and told Stern so, not when the régime got in trouble, but even in that, its sweetest autumn.

  In any case, Mrs Pfefferberg had no idea what the tall, well tailored German was doing at her door. He could have been there to ask after her son, who happened to be in the kitchen just then. He could have been there to commandeer her apartment, and her decorating business, and her antiques, and her French tapestry.