Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  FIVE

  Victoria Klonowska, a Polish secretary, was the beauty of Oskar’s front office, and he immediately began a long affair with her. Ingrid, his German mistress, must have known, as surely as Emilie Schindler knew about Ingrid. For Oskar would never be a surreptitious lover. He had a childlike sexual frankness. It wasn’t that he boasted. It was that he never saw any need to lie, to creep into hotels by the back stairs, to knock furtively on any girl’s door in the small hours. Since Oskar would not seriously try to tell his women lies, their options were reduced; traditional lovers’ arguments were not possible.

  Blonde hair piled up, her pretty foxy face vividly made up, Victoria Klonowska looked like one of those good-time girls to whom the inconveniences of history are a temporary intrusion into the real business of life. This autumn of simple clothes, Klonowska was luxuriant in her jacket, frilled blouse and flat-bellied skirt. Yet she was hard-headed, efficient, and adroit. She was a nationalist, too, in the robust Polish style. She would eventually negotiate with the German dignitaries for her Sudeten lover’s release from SS institutions. But for the moment Oskar had a less chancy job for her.

  He mentioned that he would like to find a good bar or cabaret in Cracow where he could take friends. Not contacts, not senior people from the Armaments Inspectorate. Genuine friends. Somewhere lively where middle-aged officials would not turn up.

  Did Klonowska know of such a place?

  She found an excellent jazz cellar in the narrow streets north of the Rynek, the city square. It was a place that had always been popular with the students and younger staff of the university, but Victoria herself had never been there before. The sort of middle-aged man who had pursued her in peacetime would never want to go to a place like that. If you wished to, it was possible to rent an alcove and so hold private parties behind a curtain, under cover of the Afro-pulsations of the band. For finding this music club, Oskar nicknamed Klonowska ‘Columbus’. The Party line on jazz was that it not only was artistically decadent but expressed an African, a subhuman animality. The Ump-pa-pa of Viennese waltzes was the preferred beat of the SS and of Party officials, and they scrupulously avoided jazz dives.

  Round about Christmas in 1939, Oskar got together a party at the club for a number of his friends. Like any instinctive cultivator of contacts, he would never have any trouble drinking with men he didn’t like. But that night the guests were men he did. Additionally, of course, they were all useful, junior but not uninfluential members of sundry organs of the occupation; and all of them more or less double exiles – not only were they away from home but, home or abroad, they were all variously uneasy under the régime.

  There was, for example, a young German surveyor from the Government General’s Division of the Interior. He had marked out the boundaries of Oskar’s enamel factory in Zablocie. At the back of Oskar’s works, Deutsche Email Fabrik, stood a vacant area on which two other plants abutted, a box factory and a radiator works. Schindler had been delighted to find that most of the waste area belonged, according to the surveyor, to DEF. Visions of economic expansion swam before him. The surveyor had, of course, been invited because he was a decent fellow, because you could talk to him, because he might be handy to know for future building permits.

  The policeman, Herman Toffel, was there too and the SD man Reeder, as well as a young officer – also a surveyor, named Steinhauser – from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar had met and taken to these men while seeking the permits he needed to start his plant. He had already enjoyed drinking bouts with them. He would always believe that the best way to untie bureaucracy’s Gordian knot, short of straight-out bribery, was booze.

  Finally there were two Abwehr men. The first was Eberhard Gebauer, the lieutenant who had recruited Oskar into the Abwehr the year before. The second one was Lieutenant Martin Plathe of Canaris’s headquarters in Breslau. It had been through his friend Gebauer’s recruitment, through an accidental comradeship that ran through the bed of the sanatorium supervisor, that Herr Oskar Schindler had discovered what a city of opportunity Cracow was.

  There would be a by-product from the presence of Gebauer and Plathe. Oskar was still on the Abwehr’s books as an agent and, in his years in Cracow, would keep the Breslau office of Canaris satisfied by passing on to them reports on the behaviour of their rivals in the SS. Gebauer and Plathe would consider his bringing along of more or less disaffected men like Toffel of the SS and Reeder of the SD as an intelligence favour, a gift quite apart from the good company and the drink.

  Though it is not possible to say exactly what the members of the party talked about that night, it is possible from what Oskar said later of each of these men to make a plausible reconstruction.

  It would have been Gebauer who made the toast – saying he would not give them governments, armies or potentates; instead he would give them the enamel works of their good friend Oskar Schindler. He did so because if the enamel works prospered then there would be more parties, parties in the Schindler style, the best parties you could imagine.

  But after the toast had been drunk, the talk turned naturally to the subject that bemused or obsessed all levels of the civil bureaucracy. The Jews.

  Toffel and Reeder had spent the day at Mogilska Station supervising the unloading of Poles and Jews from eastbound trains. These people had been shipped in from the Incorporated Territories, newly conquered regions which had been German in the past, and which now were being restored to a state of unalloyed Aryan purity. Toffel wasn’t making a point about the comfort of the passengers in the rolling stock of the Ostbahn, although he confessed that the weather had been cold. The transport of populations in livestock carriages was new to everyone and the wagons were not as yet too inhumanly crowded. What confused Toffel was the policy behind it all.

  There is a persistent rumour, said Toffel, that we are at war. And in the midst of it the Incorporated Territories are too damn simon-pure to put up with a few Poles and a half million Jews. “The whole Ostbahn system,” said Toffel, “has to be turned over to delivering them to us.”

  The Abwehr men listened, slight smiles on their faces. To the SS the enemy within might be the Jew, but to the Canaris the enemy within was the SS.

  The SS, Toffel said, had reserved the entire rail system from November 15th on. Across his desk in Pomorska Street, he said, had crossed copies of angry SS memoranda addressed to army officials and complaining that the army was welching on its arrangement, had gone two weeks over schedule in its use of the Ostbahn. For Christ’s sake, Toffel asked, shouldn’t the army have first use, for as long as it liked, of the railway system? How else is it to deploy east and west? Toffel asked, drinking excitedly. On bicycles?

  Oskar was half amused to see that the Abwehr men did not comment. They suspected Toffel might be a plant instead of simply being drunk.

  The surveyor and the man from the Armaments Inspectorate asked Toffel some questions about these remarkable trains that were arriving at Mogilska. Soon such shipments wouldn’t be worth talking about: transports of humans would become a cliché of resettlement policy. But on the evening of Oskar’s Christmas party, they were still a novelty.

  “They call it,” said Toffel, “concentration. That’s the word you find in the documents. Concentration. I call it bloody obsession.”

  The owner of the music club brought in plates of herring and sauce. The fish went down well with the fiery liquor, and as they wolfed it Gebauer spoke about the Judenrats, the Jewish councils set up in each Jewish community on the order of Governor Frank. In cities like Warsaw and Cracow the Judenrat had twenty-four elected members personally responsible for the fulfilment of the orders of the régime. The Judenrat of Cracow had been in existence for less than a month; Marek Biberstein, a respected municipal authority, had been appointed its president. But, Gebauer remarked, he had heard that it had already approached Wawel Castle with a plan for a roster of Jewish labour. The Judenrat would supply the labour details for digging ditches and latrines and clearing
snow. Didn’t everyone find that excessively cooperative of them?

  Not at all, said engineer Steinhauser of the Armaments Inspectorate. They thought that if they supplied the labour squads it would stop random pressganging. Pressganging led to beatings and the occasional bullet in the head.

  Martin Plathe agreed. They’ll be cooperative for the sake of avoiding something worse, he said. It’s their method, you have to understand that. They’d always bought the civil authorities off by cooperating with them, and then negotiating.

  Gebauer seemed to be out to mislead Toffel and Reeder by pushing the point, by seeming more passionately analytic about Jews than he really was. “I’ll tell you what I mean by cooperation,” he said. “Frank passes an edict demanding that every Jew in the Government General wears a star. That edict’s only a few weeks old. In Warsaw you’ve got a Jewish manufacturer churning them out in washable bakelite, at three zloty each. It’s as if they’ve got no idea what sort of law it is. It’s as if the thing were an insignia of a bicycle club.”

  It was suggested then that since Schindler was in the enamel business, it might be possible to press a deluxe enamel badge at the Schindler works and retail it through the hardware outlet which his girlfriend Ingrid supervised. Someone remarked that the star was their national insignia, the insignia of a state which had been destroyed by the Romans and which existed now only in the minds of Zionists. Perhaps people were proud to wear the star.

  “The thing is,” said Gebauer, “they don’t have any organisation for saving themselves. They’ve got weathering-the-storm sorts of organisations. But this one’s going to be different. This storm will be managed by the SS.” Gebauer, again, sounded as if, without being too florid about it, he approved of the professional thoroughness of the SS.

  “Come on,” said Plathe, “the worst that can happen to them is that they’ll get sent to Madagascar, where the weather is better than it is in Cracow.”

  “I don’t believe they’ll ever see Madagascar,” said Gebauer.

  Oskar demanded a change of subject. Wasn’t it his party?

  In the bar of the Hotel Cracovia, in fact, Oskar had already seen Gebauer hand over forged papers to a Jewish businessman for a flight to Hungary. Maybe Gebauer was taking a fee, though he seemed too morally sensitive to deal in papers, to sell a signature, a rubber stamp. But it was certain, in spite of his act in front of Toffel, that he was no abominator of the tribe. Nor were any of them. At Christmas 1939 Oskar found them simply a relief from the orotund official line. Later they would have more positive uses.

  SIX

  The Aktion of the night of December 4th had convinced Stern that Oskar Schindler was, that rarity, the just Goy. There is the Talmudic legend of the Hasidei Ummot Ha-olam, the Righteous of the Nations, of whom there are said to be – at any point in the earth’s history – thirty-six. Stern did not believe literally in the mystical number, but the legend was psychologically true for him and he believed it a decent and wise course to try to make of the German a living and breathing sanctuary.

  Schindler, after all, needed capital – the Rekord plant had been partially stripped of machinery, except for one small gallery of metal presses, enamel bins, furnaces, lathes. While Stern might be a substantial spiritual influence on Oskar, the man who could put him in touch with capital on good terms was Abraham Bankier, the office manager of Rekord, whom Oskar had won over.

  The two of them – big sensual Oskar and the squat Bankier – went visiting possible investors. By a decree of November 23rd, the bank and safe deposits of all Jews were held by the German administration in fixed trust, without allowing the owner any right of access or interest. Some of the wealthier Jewish businessmen, those who knew anything about history, kept secret funds in hard currencies. But they could tell that for a few years under Governor Hans Frank currencies would be risky; portable wealth – diamonds, gold, trade goods – would be desirable.

  Around Cracow there were a number of men Bankier knew who were willing to put up investment money in return for a guaranteed quantity of product. The deal might be an investment of fifty thousand zloty in return for so many kilos of pots and pans a month, delivery to begin July, 1940, and to continue for a year. For a Cracow Jew, given Hans Frank in the Wawel, kitchenware was safer and more disposable than zloty.

  The parties to these contracts, Oskar, the investor, Bankier as middleman, brought away from these arrangements nothing, not even minutes of agreement. Full-fledged contracts were of no use and could not be enforced anyhow. Nothing could be enforced. It all depended on Bankier’s accurate judgment of this Sudeten manufacturer of enamelware.

  The meetings would take place, perhaps, in the investor’s apartment in the Centrum of Cracow, the old inner city. The Polish landscapes which the investor’s wife adored, the French novels his bright and fragile daughters savoured, would glow in the light of the transaction. Or else the investing gentleman had already been thrown out of his apartment and lived in poorer quarters in Podgórze. And he would be a man already in shock, his apartment gone and himself now an employee in his own business, and all this in a few months, the year not over yet.

  At first sight it seems a heroic embellishment of the story to say that Oskar was never accused of welching on these informal contracts. He would in the new year have a fight with one Jewish retailer over the quantity of product the man was entitled to take from Deutsche Email Fabrik’s loading dock in Lipowa Street. And the gentleman would be accusatory of Oskar on those grounds to the end of his life. But that Oskar did not fulfil deals – that was never said.

  For Oskar was by nature a payer, a man who somehow gave the impression he could make limitless payments out of limitless resources. In any case, Oskar and other German opportunists would make so much in the next four years that only a man consumed by the profit motive would have failed to repay what Oskar’s father would have called a debt of honour.

  Emilie Schindler came up to Cracow, to visit her husband there for the first time, in the new year. She thought the city was the most delightful she had ever been in, so much more gracious and pleasant and old-fashioned than Moravia’s big city, Brno, with its clouds of industrial smoke.

  She was impressed with her husband’s new apartment. The front windows looked across at the Planty, an elegant ring of parkland that ran right around the city following the route of the ancient walls long since knocked down. At the bottom of the street the great fortress of Wawel rose and amidst all this antiquity was Oskar’s modern apartment. She looked around at Mrs Pfefferberg’s fabrics and wall hangings. His new success was palpable in them.

  “You’ve done very well in Poland,” she said.

  Oskar knew that she was really talking about the matter of the dowry, the one her father had refused to pay a dozen years back when travellers from Zwittau had rushed into the village of Alt-Molstein with news that his son-in-law was living and drinking like an unmarried man. His daughter’s marriage had become exactly the marriage he had feared it would and he was damned if he’d pay.

  And though the non-arrival of the four hundred thousand Reichsmarks had altered Oskar’s prospects a little, the farmer of Alt-Molstein did not know how the non-payment would pain his daughter, make her even more defensive, nor that twelve years later when it no longer counted for Oskar it would be still at the front of Emilie’s mind.

  “My dear,” Oskar was always growling, “I never needed the damn money.”

  Emilie’s intermittent relations with Oskar seem to have been those of a woman who knows her husband is not and will not be faithful, but who nonetheless doesn’t want evidence of his affairs shoved under her nose. She must have moved warily in Cracow, going to parties where Oskar’s friends would surely know the truth, would know the names of the other women, the names she did not really want to hear.

  One day a young Pole – it was Poldek Pfefferberg who had nearly shot her husband, but she could not know that – arrived at the door of the apartment with a rolled-up rug over his sho
ulder. It was a black-market rug from Istanbul via Hungary, and Pfefferberg had been given the job of finding it by Ingrid, who had moved out for the duration of Emilie’s visit.

  “Is Frau Schindler in?” asked Pfefferberg. He always referred to Ingrid as Frau Schindler because he thought it was less offensive.

  “I am Frau Schindler,” said Emilie, knowing what the question meant.

  Pfefferberg showed some sensitivity in covering up. Actually he did not need to see Frau Schindler, though he’d heard so much about her from Herr Schindler. He had to see Herr Schindler about some business matter.

  Herr Schindler wasn’t in, said Emilie. She offered young Pfefferberg a drink but he hastily refused. Emilie knew what that meant too. That he was just a little shocked by Oskar’s personal life and thought it indecent to sit and drink with the victim.

  The factory Oskar had leased was across the river in Zablocie at Number 4 Lipowa Street. The offices which faced the street were modern in design and Oskar thought it might be possible and convenient for him to move in at some time, to have an apartment on the third floor, even though the surroundings were industrial and not as exhilarating as Straszewskiego Street.

  When Oskar took over the Rekord works, renaming it Deutsche Email Fabrik, there were forty-five employees involved in a modest output of kitchenware. Early in the new year he received his first army contracts. They were no surprise. He had cultivated various influential Wehrmacht engineers who sat on the Main Armaments Board of General Schindler’s Armaments Inspectorate. He had gone to the same parties and taken them to dinner at the Cracovia Hotel. There are photographs of Oskar sitting with them at expensive tables, everyone smiling urbanely at the camera, everyone well-fed, generously liquored, and the officers elegantly uniformed. Some of them put the right stamps on his bids and wrote the crucial letters of recommendation to General Schindler merely out of friendship and because they believed Oskar had the plant and would deliver. Others were influenced by gifts, the sort of gifts Oskar would always proffer to officials, cognac and carpets, jewellery and furniture and hampers of luxury food. As well as that, it became known that General Schindler was acquainted with and liked very much his enamelware-producing namesake.