Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  In fact by the December feast of Hanukkah the German police would, on the orders of the housing office, get around to the Pfefferbergs, arriving at their door and then ordering them, shivering in the cold, downstairs on to the pavement of Grodzka. When Mrs Pfefferberg asked to go back for a coat she would be refused, when Mr Pfefferberg made for a bureau to fetch an ancestral gold watch he would be punched on the jaw. “I have witnessed terrible things in the past,” Hermann Göring had said, “little chauffeurs and Gauleiters have profited so much from these transactions that they now have about half a million.” The effect of such easy pickings as Mr Pfefferberg’s gold watch on the moral fibre of the Party might distress Göring. But in Poland that year, it was the style of the Gestapo to be unaccountable for the contents of apartments.

  When Herr Schindler first came to the Pfefferbergs’ second-floor apartment, however, the family were still in tenuous occupation.

  Mrs Pfefferberg and her more or less on-the-run son were talking among the samples and bolts of fabric and wallpaper when Herr Schindler knocked. Leopold was not too alarmed. There were two front entrances to the flat – the business door and the kitchen door faced each other across a landing. Leopold retreated to the kitchen and looked through the crack in the door at the visitor. He saw the formidable size of the man, the fashionable cut of his suit. He returned to his mother in the living room. He had the feeling, he said, that the man was Gestapo. When you let him in at the office door, I can always slip out through the back.

  Mrs Mina Pfefferberg was trembling. She opened the office door. She was of course listening for sounds along the corridor.

  Pfefferberg had in fact picked up the pistol and put it in his belt and intended to wed the sound of his exit to the sound of Herr Schindler’s entry. But it seemed folly to go without knowing what the German official wanted. There was a chance that the man would have to be killed, and then there would need to be some concerted family flight into Rumania.

  If the magnetic drift to the event had drawn Pfefferberg to fire, the death, the flight, the reprisals would have been considered unexceptional and appropriate to the history of the month. Herr Schindler would have been briefly mourned and summarily avenged. And this would have been, of course, the brisk ending to all Oskar’s potentialities. And back in Zwittau they would have said, “Was it someone’s husband?”

  The voice surprised the Pfefferbergs. It was calmly modulated, suited to the doing of business, even to the asking of favours. In six weeks they had got used to the tone of decree and summary expropriation. This man sounded fraternal. That was somehow worse. But it intrigued you, too.

  Pfefferberg had slipped through from the kitchen and concealed himself behind the double doors of the dining room. He could see a sliver of the German. You’re Mrs Pfefferberg? the German asked. You were recommended to me by Herr Nussbaum. I have just taken over an apartment in Straszewskiego Street and I would like to have it redecorated.

  Mina Pfefferberg kept the man at the door. She spoke so incoherently that the son took pity on her and appeared in the doorway, his jacket buttoned up over the weapon. He asked the visitor in and at the same time whispered reassurances in Polish to his mother.

  Now Oskar Schindler gave his name. There was some measuring up, for Schindler could tell that the young man had appeared to perform an act of primal protection. Pfefferberg was a Slavic blockhouse of a figure. Schindler showed his respect by talking now through the son as through an interpreter.

  “My wife is coming up from Czechoslovakia,” he said, “and I’d like the place redone closer to the sort of thing she goes for.” He said the Nussbaums had maintained the place excellently, but they went in for rather heavy drapes and sombre colours. Frau Schindler’s tastes were more lively – a little French, a little Swedish.

  Mrs Pfefferberg had recovered enough to say that she didn’t know – it was a busy time with Christmas coming up. Leopold could feel an instinctive resistance in her to developing a German clientele, but the Germans might be the only race this season with enough confidence in the future to go in for interior design. And Mrs Pfefferberg needed a fat contract – her husband had been removed from his job and worked now for a pittance in the housing office of the Gemeinde, the Jewish self-help and welfare bureau.

  Within two minutes the men were chatting like friends. The pistol in Pfefferberg’s belt had now been relegated to the status of armament for some future remote emergency. There was no doubt that Mrs Pfefferberg was going to do the Schindler apartment, no expense spared, and when that was settled, Schindler mentioned that Leopold Pfefferberg might like to come around to the apartment to discuss other business. “There is the possibility that you can advise me on acquiring local merchandise,” Herr Schindler said. “For example, your very elegant blue shirt. I don’t know where to begin to look for that kind of thing myself.” His ingenuousness was a ploy, but Pfefferberg appreciated it. “The stores, as you know, are empty,” murmured Oskar like a hint.

  Leopold Pfefferberg was the sort of young man who survived by raising the stakes. “Herr Schindler, these shirts are extremely expensive, I hope you understand. They cost twenty-five zloty each.”

  He had multiplied the price by five. There was all at once an amused knowingness in Herr Schindler – not enough though to imperil the tenuous friendship or remind Pfefferberg that he was armed.

  “I could probably get you some,” said Leopold Pfefferberg, “if you give me your size. But I’m afraid my contacts will require money in advance.”

  Herr Schindler, still wearing that knowingness in the corners of the mouth and the eyes, took out his wallet and handed Pfefferberg two hundred Reichsmarks. The sum was flamboyantly too much and, even at Pfefferberg’s inflated price, would have bought shirts for a dozen tycoons. But Pfefferberg knew the game and did not blink. “You must give me your measurements,” he said.

  A week later, Pfefferberg brought a dozen silk shirts to Schindler’s apartment on Straszewskiego Street. There was a pretty German woman in the apartment who was introduced to Pfefferberg as Treuhänder of a Cracow hardware business. Then, one evening, Pfefferberg saw Oskar in the company of a blonde and large-eyed Polish beauty. If there was a Frau Schindler, she did not appear, even after Mrs Pfefferberg had transformed the place. Pfefferberg himself became one of Schindler’s most regular connections to that market in luxuries – silk, furnishings, jewellery – which flourished in the ancient town of Cracow.

  FOUR

  The next time Itzhak Stern met Oskar Schindler was on a morning in early December. Schindler’s application to the Polish Commercial Court of Cracow had already been filed, yet Oskar had the leisure to visit the offices of Buchheister and, after conferring with Aue, to stand near Stern’s desk in the outer office, clap his hands, and announce in a voice which sounded already tipsy, “Tomorrow, it’s going to start. Józefa and Izaaka Streets are going to know all about it!”

  There were in Kazimierz a Józefa Street and an Izaaka Street. There were in every ghetto, and Kazimierz was the site of the old ghetto of Cracow, once an island ceded to the Jewish community by Kazimier the Great, now a neat suburb nestled in an elbow of the Vistula River.

  Herr Schindler bent over Stern, and Stern felt his brandy-warm breath and considered this question: Did Herr Schindler know something would happen in Józefa Street and Izaaka Street, Kazimierz? Or was he just brandishing the names?

  In any case, Stern suffered a nauseating sense of disappointment. Herr Schindler was whistling up a pogrom, boasting inexactly about it, as if to put Stern in his place.

  It was December 3rd. When Oskar said ‘tomorrow’, Stern presumed he was using the term not in the sense of December 4th, but in the terms in which drunks and prophets always used it, as something that either would, or damn well should, happen soon. Only a few of those who heard, or heard about, Herr Schindler’s half-boozed warning took it literally. Some packed an overnight bag and moved their families across the river to Podgórze.

  As for Os
kar, he felt he had passed on hard news at some risk. He had got it from at least two sources, new friends of his. One, a police officer attached to SS Oberführer Scherner’s staff, was a sergeant, Wachtmeister Herman Toffel. The other, Dieter Reeder, belonged to the staff of SD chief Czurda. Both these contacts were characteristic of the sympathetic officers Oskar always managed to sniff out.

  He was never good though at explaining his motives for speaking to Stern that December. He would say later that in the period of the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia he had seen enough seizure of Jewish and Czech property, and forcible removal of Jews and Czechs from those Sudeten areas considered German, to cure him of any zeal for the new order. His leaking of the news to Stern, far more than the unconfirmed Nussbaum story, goes some way towards proving his case.

  He must have hoped also, as did the Jews of Cracow, that after its initial fury the régime would relax and let people breathe. If the SS raids and incursions of the next few months could be mitigated by the leaking of advance information, then perhaps sanity would reassert itself in the spring. After all, both Oskar and the Jews told themselves, the Germans were a civilised nation.

  The SS invasion of Kazimierz would, however, arouse in Oskar a fundamental disgust; not yet one which would impinge too visibly on the level at which he made his money, entertained women or dined with friends, but one that would, the clearer the intentions of the reigning power became, lead, obsess, imperil and exalt him. The operation was meant in part to be a raid for jewellery and furs. There’d be some evictions from houses and apartments in the better off borderland between Cracow and Kazimierz. But apart from these practical results, that first Aktion was also meant to serve a form of notice to the dismayed people of the old Jewish quarter. For that purpose, Reeder told Oskar, a small detachment of Einsatzgruppe men would drive down Stradom and into Kazimierz in the same trucks as the boys of the local SS and the Field Police.

  Six Einsatzgruppen had come to Poland with the invading army. Their name had subtle meanings. ‘Special duty groups’ is a close translation. But the amorphous word ‘Einsatz’ had another shade of meaning, to do with challenge, with picking up a gauntlet, with knightliness. These squads were recruited from Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst (hence, SD). They already knew their mandate was broad. Their supreme leader had six weeks ago told General Keitel that “in the Government General of Poland there will have to be a tough struggle for national existence which will permit of no legal restraints.” In the lofty rhetoric of their leaders, as the Einsatz soldiers knew, a struggle for national existence meant racial warfare, just as Einsatz itself, Special Chivalrous Duty, meant the hot barrel of a gun.

  The Einsatz squad destined for action in Kazimierz that evening were an élite. They would leave to the piece-workers of the Cracow SS the task of searching the tenements for diamond rings and fur-trimmed coats. They themselves would take part in some more radically symbolic activity to do with the very instruments of Jewish culture, that is with the ancient synagogues of Cracow.

  They had for some weeks been waiting to exercise Einsatz, as had the local SS Sonderkommandos (or Special Squads) and the Security Police of SD chief Czurda, also assigned to this first Cracow Aktion. The army had negotiated with Heydrich and the higher police chiefs a stay of operations until Poland passed from military to civil rule. This passage of authority had now taken place, and throughout the country the Knights of Einsatz and the Sonderkommandos were unleashed to advance with an appropriate sense of racial history and professional detachment into the old Judaic ghettos.

  At the end of the street in which stood Oskar’s apartment rose the fortified rock outcrop of Wawel from which Hans Frank ruled. And if Oskar’s Polish future is to be understood, there is a need to look at the linkage between Frank and the young field operatives of the SS and SD, and then between Frank and the Jews of Cracow.

  In the first place, Hans Frank had no direct kingship over these boys moving into Kazimierz. Heinrich Himmler’s police forces, wherever they worked, would always be their own lawmakers. As well as resenting their independent power, Frank also disagreed with them on practical grounds. He had as refined an abomination of the Jewish population as anyone in the Party and found the sweet city of Cracow intolerable because of its manifold Jews. In past weeks he’d complained when the authorities tried to use the Government General, and especially Cracow with its railway junction, as a dumping ground for Jews from the cities of the Wartheland, from Lódź and Poznan. But he did not believe the Einsatzgruppen or the Sonderkommandos could really make a dent in the problem using current methods. It was Frank’s belief, shared with Himmler in some stages of Heini’s mental vagaries, that there should be a single vast concentration camp for Jews, that it should at least be the city of Lublin and the surrounding countryside, or even more desirably, the island of Madagascar. The Poles themselves had always believed in Madagascar. In 1937 the Polish government had sent a commission to study that high-spined island so far from the coasts of their European sensibilities. The French Colonial Office, to which Madagascar belonged, was willing to make a deal, government to government, on such a resettlement; for a Madagascar crowded with Europe’s Jews would make a grand export market. The South African Defence Minister, Oswald Pirow, had acted for a time as negotiator between Hitler and France in the matter of the island. Therefore Madagascar, as a solution, had an honourable pedigree. Hans Frank had his money on it and not on the Einsatzgruppen. For their sporadic raids and massacres could not cut down the subhuman population of Eastern Europe. During the time of the campaign around Warsaw, the Einsatzgruppen had strung up Jews in the synagogues of Silesia, ruptured their systems with water torture, raided their homes on Sabbath evenings or feast days, cut off their prayer locks, set their prayer shawls alight, stood them against a wall. It had barely counted. There were many indications from history, Frank proposed, that threatened races generally outbred the genocides. The phallus was faster than the gun.

  What no one knew – neither the parties to the debate, the well-educated Einsatzgruppen boys in the back of one truck, the not-so-refined SS boys in the back of another, the evening worshippers in the synagogues, nor Herr Oskar Schindler on his way home to Straszewskiego Street to dress for dinner – what none of them knew and many a Party planner scarcely hoped for was that a technological answer would be found, that a disinfectant chemical compound named Zyklon B would supplant Madagascar as the solution.

  There had been an incident involving Hitler’s pet actress and director, Leni Riefenstahl. She had come to Lódź with a roving camera crew soon after the city fell and seen a line of Jews, visible Jews, the prayer-locked variety, executed with automatic weapons. She had gone straight to the Führer who was staying at Southern Army headquarters and made a scene. That was it – the logistics, the weight of numbers, the considerations of public relations, they made the Einsatz boys look silly. But Madagascar, too, would look ridiculous once means were discovered to make substantial inroads into the subhuman population of central Europe at fixed sites with adequate disposal facilities which no fashionable moviemaker was likely to stumble upon.

  As Oskar had forewarned Stern in the front office of Buchheister’s, the SS carried economic warfare from door to door in Jakoba and Izaaka and Józefa. They broke into apartments, dragged out the contents of cupboards, smashed the locks on desks and dressers. They took valuables off fingers and throats and out of watch-fobs. A girl who would not give up her fur coat had her arm broken, a boy from Ciemna Street who wanted to keep his skis was shot.

  Some of those whose goods were taken – unaware that the SS were operating outside legal restraint – would complain at police stations tomorrow. Somewhere, history told them, was a senior officer with a little integrity who would be embarrassed and might even discipline some of these fellows. There would have to be an enquiry into the business of the boy in Ciemna and the wife whose nose was broken with a baton.

  While the SS were working the apartment buildings,
the Einsatz squad moved against the fourteenth century synagogue of Stara Bozníca. As they expected, they found at prayer there a congregation of traditional Jews with beards and sidelocks and prayer shawls. They collected a number of the less orthodox from surrounding apartments and drove them in as well, as if they wanted to measure the reaction of one group to the other.

  Among those pushed across the threshold of Stara Bozníca was the gangster Max Redlicht, who would not otherwise have entered an ancient temple or been invited to do so.

  They stood in front of the Ark, these two poles of the same tribe who would on a normal day have found each other’s company offensive. An Einsatz NCO opened the Ark and took out the parchment Torah scroll. The disparate congregation on the synagogue floor were to file past and spit at it. There was to be no faking – the spittle was to be visible on the calligraphy.

  The traditional people were more rational about it than those others, the agnostics, the liberals, the self-styled Europeans. It was apparent to the Einsatz men that the modern ones baulked in front of the scroll and even tried to engage your eye as if to say, Come on, we’re all too sophisticated for this nonsense. The SD men had been told in their training that the European character of liberal Jews was a tissue-thin façade, and in Stara Bozníca the backsliding reluctance of the ones who wore short haircuts and contemporary clothes went to prove it.

  Everyone spat in the end except Max Redlicht. The Einsatzgruppe men may have seen that this was a test worth their time, to make a man who visibly does not believe, renounce with spittle a book which he sees with his intellect to be antique tribal drivel but which his blood tells him is still sacred. Could a Jew be retrieved from the persuasions of his ridiculous blood? Could he think as clearly as Kant? That was the test.

  Redlicht would not pass it. He made a little speech. “I’ve done a lot. But I won’t do that.” They shot him first, and then shot the rest anyway and set fire to the place, making a shell of the oldest of all Polish synagogues.