Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Herr Schindler shook his head at the idea of putting two hundred thousand zloty on such a fragile hope. “Reichert is a crook,” he murmured. Just ten minutes earlier they had been discussing whether he and the Cs were crooks and had let the question stand. But there was no doubt about Reichert. “I could have told them Reichert was a crook,” he kept insisting.

  Stern commented – as a philosophic principle – that there were times when the only people left to do business with were crooks.

  Schindler laughed at that. A wide, toothy, almost rustic laugh. “Thank you very much, my friend,” he told Stern.

  EIGHT

  It wasn’t such a bad Christmas that year. But there was a wistfulness and snow lay like a question in the parkland across from Schindler’s apartment, like something posed, watchful and eternal on the roof of the Wawel up the road and under the ancient façades of Kanonicza Street. No one believed any more in a quick resolution, neither the soldiery nor the Poles nor the Jews on either side of the river.

  Schindler bought a poodle, a ridiculous Parisienne thing acquired by Pfefferberg for his Polish secretary, Klonowska, that Christmas. For Ingrid he bought jewellery and sent some also to gentle Emilie down in Zwittau. Poodles were hard to find, Leopold Pfefferberg reported. But jewellery was no trouble. Because of the times, gems were in a high state of movement.

  Oskar seems to have pursued his simultaneous attachments to three women and sundry casual friendships with others, all without suffering the normal penalties which beset the womaniser. Visitors to his apartment cannot remember ever finding Ingrid sulking. She seems to have been a generous and complaisant girl. Emilie, with even more grounds for complaint, had too much dignity to make the scenes Oskar richly deserved. If Klonowska had any resentment, it does not seem to have affected her manner in the front office of DEF nor her loyalty to the Herr Direktor. One could expect that in a life like Oskar’s, public confrontations between angry women would be common events. But no one among Oskar’s friends and workers – witnesses willing enough to admit and even in some cases chuckle over Oskar’s sins of the flesh – remembers such painful confrontations, so often the fate of much more restrained philanderers than Oskar.

  To suggest as some have that any woman would be pleased with partial possession of Oskar is to demean the women involved. The problem was, perhaps, that if you wanted to talk to Oskar about fidelity, a look of childlike and authentic bewilderment entered his eyes, as if you were proposing some concept like relativity which could be understood only if the listener had five hours to sit still and concentrate. Oskar never had five hours and never understood.

  Except in his mother’s case. That Christmas morning, for his dead mother’s sake, Oskar went to Mass at St Mary’s. There was a space above the high altar where Wit Stwosz’s wooden triptych had until weeks ago diverted worshippers with its crowd of jostling divinities. The vacancy, the pallor of the stone where the triptych’s fixings had been, distracted and abashed Herr Schindler. Someone had stolen the triptych. It had been shipped to Nuremberg. What an improbable world it had become!

  Business was wonderful that winter just the same. In the new year his friends in the Rustungsinspektion began to talk to Oskar about the possibility of opening an armaments division to manufacture anti-tank shells. Oskar was not as interested in shells as in pots and pans. Pots and pans were easy engineering. You cut out and pressed the metal, dipped it in the tubs, fired it at the right temperature. You didn’t have to calibrate instruments: the work was nowhere near as exacting as it would be for arms. Also, there was no under-the-counter trade in shell casings, and Oskar liked under-the-counter, liked the sport of it, the disrepute, the fast returns, the lack of paperwork.

  But, because it was good politics, he established a munitions section, installing in one gallery of his Number Two workshop a few immense Hilo machines, for the precision pressing and tooling of shell casings. The munitions section was so far developmental; it would take some months of planning, measuring and test production before any shells appeared. The big Hilos however gave the Schindler works, as a hedge against the questionable future, at least the appearance of essential industry.

  Before the Hilos had even been properly calibrated, Oskar began to get hints from his SS contacts at Pomorska Street that there was to be a ghetto for Jews. He mentioned the rumour to Stern, not wanting to create alarm. Oh yes, said Stern, the word was around. Some people were even looking forward to it. We’ll be inside, the enemy will be outside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us, no one stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.

  The edict, named Gen. Gub. 44/91, posted on March 3rd, 1941, was published in the Cracow dailies and blared forth from loudspeakers on trucks in Kazimierz. Walking through his munitions department, Oskar heard one of his German technicians comment on the news. “Won’t they be better off in there?” asked the technician. “The Poles hate them, you know.”

  The edict used the same excuse. As a means of reducing racial conflict in the Government General a closed Jewish quarter would be set up. Enclosure in the ghetto would be compulsory for all Jews, but those with the proper labour card could travel from the ghetto to work, returning in the evening. The ghetto would be located in the suburb of Podgórze just over the river. The deadline for entering it would be March 20th. Once in, you would be allocated housing by the Judenrat, but Poles presently living in the area of the ghetto and who therefore had to shift were to apply to their own housing office for apartments in other parts of town.

  A map of the new ghetto was appended to the edict. The north side would be bounded by the river, the east end by the railway line to Lwów, the south side by the hills beyond Rekawka, the west by Podgórze Place. It would be crowded in there.

  But there was hope that repression would take definite form now and provide people with a basis on which to plan their restricted futures. For a man such as Juda Dresner, a textile wholesaler of Stradom Street who would come to know Oskar, the past year and a half had brought a bewildering succession of decrees, intrusions and confiscations. The Trust Agency had taken his business, he had lost his car, his apartment. His bank account had been frozen. His children’s schools had been closed, or else they had been expelled from them. The family’s jewellery had been seized, and their family radio. He and his family were forbidden entry to the centre of Cracow, denied any travel by train. They could use only segregated trolley cars. His wife and daughter and sons were subject to intermittent round-ups for snow shovelling or other compulsory labour. You never knew, when you were forced into the back of a truck, if the absence would be a short or long one, or what sort of hair-trigger madman might be supervising the work you would be forced to. Under this sort of regimen you felt that life offered no footholds, that you were slithering into a pit which had no bottom. But perhaps the ghetto was the bottom, the point at which it was possible to take organised thought.

  Besides, the Jews of Cracow were accustomed – in a way that could best be described as congenital – to the idea of a ghetto. And now that it had been decided, the very word had a soothing and ancestral ring. Their grandfathers had not been permitted to emerge from the ghetto of Kazimierz until 1867, when Franz Josef signed a decree permitting them to live wherever they wished in the city. Cynics said that the Austrians had needed to open up Kazimierz, socketed as it was in the elbow of the river so close to Cracow, so that Polish labourers could find accommodation close to their places of work. But Franz Josef was nonetheless revered by the older people from Kazimierz as energetically as he was in the childhood household of Oskar Schindler.

  Although their liberty had come so late, there was at the same time among the older Cracow Jews a nostalgia for the old ghetto of Kazimierz. A ghetto implied certain squalors, a crowding in tenements, a sharing of taps and water closets, disputes over drying space on clothes lines. Yet it also consecrated the Jews to their own specialness, to a richness
of shared scholarship, to songs and Zionist talk, elbow to elbow, in coffee houses rich in ideas if not in cream. Evil rumours emanated from the ghettos of Lódź and Warsaw, but the Podgórze ghetto as planned was more generous with space, for if you superimposed it on a map of the Centrum, you found that the ghetto was in an area about half the size of the Old City – by no means enough space, but not quite strangulation.

  There was as well in the edict a sedative clause that promised to protect the Jews from their Polish countrymen. Since the early thirties, a wilfully orchestrated racial contest had prevailed in Poland. When the Depression began and farm prices fell, the Polish government had sanctioned a range of anti-Semitic political groups of the kind who saw the Jews as the base of all their economic troubles. Sanacja, Marshal Pilsudski’s Moral Cleansing Party, made an alliance after his death with the Camp of National Unity, a right wing Jew-baiting group. Prime Minister Skladkowski, on the floor of Parliament in Warsaw, declared, “Economic war on the Jews? All right!” Rather than give the peasants land reform, Sanacja encouraged them to look at the Jewish stalls on market day as the symbol and total explanation of Polish rural poverty. There were pogroms against the Jewish population in a roster of towns, beginning in Grodno in 1935. The Polish legislators also entered the struggle and Jewish industries were starved under new laws on bank credit. Craft guilds closed their lists to Jewish artisans, and the universities introduced a quota, or what they themselves, strong in classics, called numerus clausus aut nullus (a closed number or nil) on the entry of Jewish students. Faculties gave way to National Unity insistence that Jews be appointed special benches in the quadrangle and be exiled to the left side of the lecture halls. Commonly enough in Polish universities, the pretty and brilliant daughters of city Jewry emerged from lecture halls to have their faces savaged by a quick razor stroke delivered by a lean, serious youth from the Camp of National Unity.

  In the first days of the German occupation, the conquerors had been astounded by the willingness of Poles to point out Jewish households, to hold a prayer-locked Jew still while a German docked the orthodox beard with scissors – or, pinking the face flesh also, with an infantry bayonet. In March, 1941, therefore, the promise to protect the ghetto dwellers from the Polish national excess fell on the ear almost credibly.

  Although there was no great spontaneous joy among the Jews of Cracow as they packed for the shift to Podgórze, there were strange elements of homecoming to it, as well as that sense of arriving at a limit beyond which, with any luck, you wouldn’t be further uprooted or tyrannised. Enough so that even some people from the villages around Cracow, from Wieliczka, from Niepolomice, from Lipnica Murowana and Tyniec hurried to town lest they be locked out on March 20th and find themselves in a comfortless landscape. For the ghetto was, by its nature, almost by definition, habitable even if subject to intermittent attack. The ghetto represented stasis instead of flux.

  The ghetto would introduce a minor inconvenience in Oskar Schindler’s life. It was usual for him to leave his stylish apartment in Straszewskiego, pass the limestone lump of the Wawel stuck in the mouth of the city like a cork in a bottle, and so roll down through Kazimierz, over the Kosciuszko Bridge and left towards his factory in Zablocie. Now that route would be blocked by the ghetto walls. It was a minor problem, but it made the idea of maintaining an apartment on the top floor of his office block in Lipowa Street more reasonable. It wasn’t such a bad place, built in the style of Walter Gropius. Lots of glass and light, fashionable cubic bricks in the entranceway.

  Whenever he did travel between the city and Zablocie in those March days before the deadline, he would see the Jews of Kazimierz packing; and on Stradom Street would pass, early in the period of grace, families pushing barrows piled high with chairs, mattresses and clocks towards the ghetto. Their families had lived in Kazimierz since the time it was an island separated from the Centrum by a stream called Stara Wisla. In fact, since the time Kazimier the Great had invited them to Cracow when, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death. Oskar surmised that their ancestors would have turned up in Cracow like that, pushing a barrowful of bedding, over five hundred years ago. Now they were leaving, it seemed, with the same barrowful. Kazimier’s invitation had been cancelled.

  During those morning journeys across town. Oskar noticed that the plan was for the city trams to go on rolling down Lwówska Street, through the middle of the ghetto. All walls facing the tramline were being bricked up by Polish workmen, and where there had been open spaces, cement walls were raised. As well, the trams would have their doors closed as they entered the ghetto and would not stop until they emerged again in the Umwelt, the Aryan world, at the corner of Lwówska and ś.w. Kingi Street. Oskar knew people would catch that tram, anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls – it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable about these things. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, a fast-moving athletic young man such as Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or occupation zloty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, moving at speed between mute walls, its doors locked shut.

  From March 20th, Oskar’s Jewish workers would not receive any wages and were meant to live entirely on their rations. Instead he would pay a fee to SS headquarters in Cracow. Both Oskar and Madritsch were uneasy about that, for they knew the war would end eventually and the slaveholders, just as in America, would be shamed and stripped naked. The dues he would pay to the police chiefs were the standard SS Main Administrative and Economic Office fees – seven and a half Reichsmarks per day for a skilled worker, five Reichsmarks for unskilled and women. They were, by a margin, cheaper rates than those which operated in the open labour market. But for Oskar and Julius Madritsch both, the moral discomfort outweighed the economic advantage. The meeting of his wage bill was the least of Oskar’s worries that year. Besides, he was never an ideal capitalist. His father had accused him often in his youth of being reckless with money. While he was a mere sales manager, he’d maintained two cars, hoping that Hans would get to hear of it and be shocked. Now, in Cracow, he could afford to keep a stableful – a Belgian Minerva, a Maybach, an Adler cabriolet, a BMW.

  To be a prodigal and still be wealthier than your more careful father, that was one of the triumphs Schindler wanted from life. In boom times the cost of labour was beside the point.

  It was that way for Madritsch, too. Julius Madritsch’s uniform mill stood on the western side of the ghetto, a mile or so from Oskar’s enamelworks. He was doing so well that he was negotiating to open a similar plant in Tarnow. He too was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, and his credit was so good that he had received a loan of a million zloty from the Bank Emisyjny (Issue Bank)

  Whatever ethical queasiness they felt, it is not likely that either entrepreneur, Oskar or Julius, felt a moral obligation to avoid employing any more Jews. That was a stance, and since they were pragmatists, stances weren’t their style. In any case Itzhak Stern as well as Roman Ginter, a businessman and representative of the Relief Office of the Judenrat, called on Oskar and Julius both and begged them to employ more Jews, as many as could be fitted in. The objective was to give the ghetto an economic permanence. It was almost axiomatic, Stern and Ginter considered at that stage, that a Jew who had an economic value in a precocious empire hungry for skilled workers was safe from worse things. And Oskar and Madritsch agreed.

  For two weeks they trundled their barrows through Kazimierz and over the bridge into Podgórze, middle-class families whose Polish servants had come with them to help push the cart. At the bottom of the barrows lay the remaining brooches, the fur coats; under mattresses and kettles and skillets. Crowds of Poles on Stradom and Starovislna Streets jeered and hurled mud. “The Jews are going, the Jews are going. Goodbye Jews.”

  Beyond the bridge, a fancy wooden gate greeted the new citizens of the ghetto. White with scal
loped ramparts which gave it an Arabesque look, it had two wide arches for the trams going from and coming to Cracow, and at the side was a white sentry box. Above the arches, a title in Hebrew sought to reassure. Jewish Town, it proclaimed. High barbed-wire fences had been strung along the front of the ghetto, facing the river, and open spaces were sealed with round-topped cement slabs ninefeettall, resembling strings of gravestones for the anonymous.

  At the ghetto gate the trundling Jew was met by a representative of the Judenrat Housing Office. If he had a wife and large family, a man might be assigned two rooms and have the use of a kitchen. Even so, after the good living of the twenties and thirties, it was painful to have to share your private life with families of different rituals and habits, of another, distasteful musk. Mothers screamed and fathers said things could be worse and sucked on hollow teeth and shook their heads. In the one room, the orthodox found the liberals an abomination.

  On March 20th the movement was complete. Everyone outside the ghetto was forfeit and at risk. Inside, for the moment, the ghetto dwellers were at rest.

  Twenty-three-year-old Edith Liebgold was assigned a first-floor room to share with her mother and her baby. The fall of Cracow eighteen months back had put her husband into a mood verging on despair. He’d wandered away from home as if he wanted to look into the courses open to him. He had ideas about the forests, about finding a safe clearing. He had never returned.