Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Schindler noticed, too, that in Wegierska Street two lines were continually forming. One was stable, but the other, as it lengthened, was regularly marched away in sections around the corner into Józefińska and out of sight. It was not hard to interpret this assembling and movement, since Schindler and Ingrid, fringed by pine trees and elevated above the ghetto, were a distance of only two or three short blocks from the action.

  As families were routed out of the apartments, they were separated forcibly into two lines without regard for family considerations. Adolescent daughters with the proper papers went to the static line, from which they called out to their middle-aged mothers in the other. A nightshift worker, still sullen from disturbed sleep, was pointed to one line, his wife and child to the other. In the middle of the street, the young man argued with the OD policeman. The man was saying, Sod the Blauschein! I want to go with Eva and the kid.

  An armed SS man intervened. Beside the nondescript mass of Ghettomenschen, such a being, in his freshly pressed summer uniform, looked superbly fed and fresh. And from the hill you could see the oil on the machine pistol in his hand. The SS man hit the Jew on the ear and was talking to him, loudly and harshly. Schindler, though he could not hear, was sure it was a speech he’d encountered before, at Prokocim station. It doesn’t make any difference to me. If you want to go with your frigging Jewish whore, go! The man was led from one line to another. Schindler saw him edge along it to embrace his wife, and under cover of this act of conjugal loyalty, another woman crept back indoors and was not seen by the SS Sonderkommando.

  Oskar and Ingrid wheeled their horses, crossed a deserted avenue and, after a few metres, rode out on to a limestone platform facing directly down Krakusa.

  In its closer reaches, this street was not as hectic as Wegierska. A line of women and children, not so long, was being led away towards Piwna Street. A guard walked in front, another strolled behind. There was an imbalance in the line: far more children than the few women in it themselves could have borne. At the rear, dawdling, was a toddler, boy or girl, dressed in a small scarlet coat and cap. It compelled Schindler’s interest because it made a statement, the way the argumentative shiftworker in Wegierska had. The statement had to do, of course, with a passion for red.

  Schindler consulted Ingrid. It was definitely a girl, said Ingrid. Little girls got obsessed by colour, especially a bright colour like that.

  As they watched, the Waffen SS man at the rear of the column would occasionally put out his hand and correct the drift of this scarlet node. He did not do it harshly – he could have been an elder brother. Had he been asked by his officers to do something to allay the sentimental concern of watching civilians, he could not have done better. So the moral anxiety of the two riders in Bednarskiego Park was, for an impulsive second, irrationally allayed. But it was brief comfort. For behind the departing column of women and children, to which the scarlet toddler placed a meandering full stop, SS teams with dogs worked north along either side of the street.

  They rampaged through the fetid apartments – as a symptom of their rush, a suitcase flew from a second storey window and split open on the pavement. And, running before the dogs, the men and women and children who had hidden in attics or cupboards, inside drawerless dressers, the evaders of the first wave of search, jolted out into the pavement, yelling and gasping in terror of the Dobermanns. Everything seemed speeded-up, difficult for the viewers on the hill to keep pace with. Those who had emerged were shot where they stood on the pavement, flying out over the gutters from the impact of the bullets, gushing blood into the drains. A mother and a boy, perhaps eight, perhaps a scrawny ten, had retreated under a windowsill on the western side of Krakusa Street. Schindler felt an intolerable fear for them, a terror in his own blood which loosened his thighs from the saddle and threatened to unhorse him. He looked at Ingrid and saw her hands knotted on the reins. He could hear her exclaiming and begging beside him.

  His eyes slewed up Krakusa Street to the scarlet child. They were doing it within half a block of her: they hadn’t waited for her column to turn out of sight into Józefińska. Schindler could not have explained at first how that compounded the murders on the pavement. Yet somehow it proved, in a way no one could ignore, their serious intent. While the scarlet child stopped in her column and turned to watch, they shot the woman beneath the windowsill in the neck, and one of them, when the boy slid down the wall whimpering, jammed a boot down on his head as if to hold it still and put the barrel against the back of the neck – the recommended SS target – and fired.

  Oskar looked again for the small red girl. She had stopped and turned and seen the boot descend. A gap had already widened between her and the next last in the column. Again the SS guard fraternally corrected her drift, nudged her back into line. Herr Schindler could not see why he did not bludgeon her with his rifle butt, since at the other end of Krakusa Street mercy had been cancelled.

  At last Schindler slithered from his horse, tripped, and found himself on his knees hugging the trunk of a pine tree. The urge to throw up his excellent breakfast was, he sensed, to be suppressed, for he suspected it meant that all his cunning body was doing was making room to digest the horrors of Krakusa Street.

  Their lack of shame, as men who had been born of women and had to write letters home (What did they put in them?), wasn’t the worst aspect of what he’d seen. He knew they had no shame, since the guard at the base of the column had not felt any need to stop the red child from seeing things. But, worst of all, if there was no shame, it meant there was official sanction. No one could find refuge any more behind the idea of German culture, nor behind those pronouncements uttered by leaders to exempt anonymous men from stepping beyond their garden, from looking out of their office windows at the realities on the pavement. Oskar had seen in Krakusa Street a statement of his government’s policy which could not be written off as a temporary aberration. The SS men in Krakusa Street were, Oskar believed, fulfilling the orders of the leader, for otherwise their colleague at the rear of the column would not have let a child watch.

  Later in the day, after he had absorbed a ration of brandy, Oskar understood the proposition in its clearest terms. They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed all the witnesses would perish too.

  In the corner of Plac Zgody stood the Apotheke run by Tadeusz Pankiewicz. It was a pharmacy in the old style. Porcelain amphorae with the Latin names of ancient remedies marked on them and a few hundred delicate and highly varnished drawers hid the complexity of the pharmacopoeia from the citizens of Podgórze. Magister Pankiewicz lived above the shop by permission of the authorities and at the request of the doctors in the ghetto clinics. He was the only Pole permitted to remain within the walls. He was a quiet man in his early forties and had intellectual interests. The Polish impressionist Abraham Neumann, the composer Mordche Gebirtig, philosophical Leon Steinberg and the scientist and philosopher Dr Rappaport were all regular visitors at Pankiewicz’s. The house was also a link, a postal drop for information and messages running between the Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) and the partisans of the Polish People’s Army. Young Dolek Liebeskind and Shimon and Gusta Dranger, organisers of the Cracow ZOB, would sometimes call there, but discreetly. It was important not to implicate Tadeusz Pankiewicz by their projects, which, unlike the cooperative policies of the Judenrat, involved furious and unequivocal resistance.

  The square in front of Pankiewicz’s pharmacy became in those first days of June a marshalling yard. “It beggared belief,” Pankiewicz would always say thereafter of Plac Zgody. In the parkland in the middle, people were graded again and told to leave their luggage – No, no, it will be sent on to you! Against the blank wall at the western end of the square, those who resisted or were found carrying the secret option of Aryan papers in their pockets were shot without any explanation or excuses to the people in the middle. The astounding thunder of rifles fractured conversation and hope. Yet in spite of the screams and waili
ng of those related to the victims, some people, shocked or focusing desperately on life, seemed almost unaware of the heap of corpses. Once the trucks rolled up, and details of Jewish males loaded the dead into the back, those left in the square would begin at once to talk of their futures again. And Pankiewicz would hear what he had been hearing all day from SS NCOs. “I assure you, madam, you Jews are going to work. Do you think we can afford to squander you?” Frantic desire to believe would show blatantly on the faces of those women. And the SS rank and file, fresh from the executions against the wall, strolled among the crowd and advised people how to label their luggage.

  From Bednarskiego, Oskar Schindler had not been able to see into Plac Zgody. But Pankiewicz in the square, like Schindler on the hill, had never witnessed such dispassionate horror. Like Oskar, he was plagued by nausea and his ears were full of an unreal sibilance, as if he had been struck on the head. He was so confused by the mass of noise and savagery, he did not know that among the dead in the square were his friends Gebirtig, composer of that famed song, Burn City, Burn, and gentle Neumann the artist. Doctors began to tumble into the pharmacy, panting, having run the two blocks from the hospital. They wanted bandages – they had dragged the wounded in from the streets. A doctor came in and asked for emetics. For in the crowd a dozen people were gagging or comatose from swallowing cyanide. An engineer Pankiewicz knew had slipped it in his mouth when his wife was not looking.

  Young Dr Idek Schindel, working at the ghetto hospital on the corner of Wegierska, heard from a woman who came in hysterical that they were taking the children. She’d seen the children lined up in Krakusa Street, Genia with them. Schindel had left Genia that morning with neighbours: he was her guardian in the ghetto, her parents were still hiding in the country, intending to slip back into the – until today – relative safety of the ghetto. This morning Genia, in accordance with her general air of being her own woman, had wandered away from the woman who was minding her back to the house where she lived with her uncle. There she had been arrested. It was in this way that Oskar Schindler, from the park, had been drawn by her motherless presence in the column in Krakusa Street.

  Taking off his surgical coat, Dr Schindel rushed to the square and saw her almost at once, sitting on the grass, affecting composure within the wall of guards. Dr Schindel knew how faked the performance was, having had to get up often enough to hush her night screams.

  He moved around the periphery of the square and she saw him. Don’t call out, he wanted to say, I’ll work it out. He didn’t want a scene because it could end badly for both of them. But he didn’t need to be concerned, for he could see her eyes grow mute and unknowing. He stopped, transfixed by her pitiably admirable cunning. She knew well enough at the age of three years not to take the short-term comfort of calling out to uncles. She knew that there was no salvation in engaging the interest of the SS in Uncle Idek.

  He was composing a speech he intended to make to the large Oberscharführer who stood by the execution wall. It was better not to approach the authorities too humbly or through anyone of lesser rank. Looking back again to the child, he saw the suspicion of a flutter of her eyes and then, with a dazzling speculator’s coolness, she stepped between the two guards nearest to her and out of the cordon. She moved with an aching slowness which, of course, galvanised her uncle’s vision, so that afterwards he would often see behind his closed eyes the image of her among the forest of gleaming SS knee boots. No one saw her. She maintained her part-stumbling, part-ceremonial bluffer’s pace all the way to Pankiewicz’s corner and round it, keeping to the blind side of the street. Dr Schindel repressed the urge he had to applaud. Though the performance deserved an audience, it would by its nature be destroyed by one.

  He felt he could not move behind her straight away without disclosing her feat by his adult clumsiness. Against all his usual impulses, he believed that the instinct which had taken her infallibly out of Plac Zgody would provide her with a hiding place. He returned to the hospital by the other way to give her time.

  Genia returned to the front bedroom in Krakusa Street that she shared with her uncle. The street was deserted now, or if by cunning or false walls anyone was still there they did not declare themselves. She entered the house and hid under the bed. From the corner of the street, Idek, returning to the house, saw the SS, in a last sweep, come knocking. But Genia did not answer. She would not answer him when he arrived himself. It was just that he knew where to look, in the gap between curtain and window sash, and saw, shining in the drabness of the room, her red shoe beneath the hem.

  By this time Schindler had returned his horse to the stable. He was not on the hill to see the small but significant triumph of red Genia’s return to the place where the SS had first found her. He was already in his office at DEF, shut away for a time, finding the news too heavy to share with the dayshift. Much later, in terms uncharacteristic of jovial Herr Schindler, Cracow’s favourite party guest, Zablocie’s big spender, in terms that is which showed, behind the playboy exterior, an implacable judge, Oskar would lay special weight on this day. “Beyond this day,” he would claim, “no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”

  SIXTEEN

  The SS kept at work in the ghetto until Saturday evening. They operated with that crispness which Oskar had observed in the executions in Krakusa Street. Their thrusts were hard to predict, and people who had escaped on Friday were caught on Saturday. Genia survived the week, however, through her precocious gift for maintaining silence and for being invisible in scarlet.

  Over in Zablocie, Schindler did not dare believe that this red child had survived the Aktion process. He knew from talking to Toffel and other acquaintances from the police headquarters in Pomorska Street that seven thousand people had been cleared from the ghetto. A Gestapo official from the Jewish Affairs Office was delighted to confirm the clearance. Up in Pomorska Street, among the paper shufflers, the Aktion was voted a triumph.

  Oskar had now become more exact about this sort of information. He knew, for example, that the Aktion had been led by large SS Obersturmführer Otto von Mallotke. Oskar kept no dossier, but he was preparing for another era when he would make a full report to either Canaris or the world. It would be made earlier than he expected. For the moment, he enquired after matters which in the past he had treated as temporary lunacies. He got his hard news from police contacts, but also from clear-headed Jews like Stern. Intelligence from other parts of Poland was piped into the ghetto, in part through Pankiewicz’s pharmacy, by the partisans of the People’s Army. Dolek Liebeskind, leader of the Akiva Halutz Resistance Group, also brought in information from other ghettos as a result of his official travelling job with the Jewish Communal Self-Help, an organisation which the Germans – with half an eye on the International Red Cross – permitted to exist.

  It was no use bringing such tidings to the Judenrat. The Judenrat council did not consider it civilly advisable to tell the ghetto dwellers anything about the camps. People would merely be distressed, there would be disorder in the streets and it would not go unpunished. It was always better to let people hear wild rumours, decide they were exaggerated, fall back on hope. This had been the attitude of most Jewish councillors even under decent Artur Rosenzweig. But Rosenzweig was gone. The salesman David Gutter, helped by his Germanic name, would soon become president of the Judenrat. Food rations were diverted not only by certain SS officials but by Gutter and the new councillors, whose vicar in the streets was high-booted Symche Spira, chief of the OD. The Judenrat therefore had no interest any more in informing the ghetto people about their probable destinations, since they were confident that they themselves would not be made to travel.

  The beginning of knowledge for the ghetto, and the clinching news for Oskar, was the return to Cracow – eight days after he’d been shipped off from Prokocim – of the young pharmacist Bachner. No one knew how he had got back inside the ghetto, or the mystery
of why he returned to a place from which the SS would simply send him off on another journey. But it was, of course, the pull of the known that brought Bachner home.

  All the way down Lwówska and into the streets behind Plac Zgody he carried his story. He had seen the final horror, he said. He was mad-eyed and his hair had silvered in his brief absence. All the Cracow people who had been rounded up in early June had been taken nearly to Russia, he said, to the camp of Belzec. When the trains arrived at the railway station the people were driven out by Ukrainians with clubs. There was a frightful stench about the place, but an SS man had kindly told people that that was due to the use of disinfectant. The people were lined up in front of two large warehouses, one marked ‘Cloak Room’ and the other ‘Valuables’. The new arrivals were made to undress and a small Jewish boy passed among the crowd handing out lengths of string with which to tie their shoes together. Spectacles and rings were removed. So, naked, the prisoners had their heads shaved in the hairdresser’s, an SS NCO telling them that their hair was needed to make something special for U-boat crews. It would grow again, he said, maintaining the myth of their continued usefulness. At last the victims were driven down a barbed-wire corridor to bunkers which had copper Stars of David on their roofs and were labelled ‘Baths and Inhalation Rooms’. SS men reassured them all the way, telling them to breathe deeply, that it was an excellent means of disinfection. Bachner saw a little girl drop a bracelet on the ground, and a boy of three picked it up and went into the bunker playing with it.

  In the bunkers, said Bachner, they were all gassed. And afterwards squads were sent in to disentangle the pyramid of corpses and take the bodies away for burial. It had taken barely two days, he said, before they were all dead, except for him. While waiting in a great enclosure for his turn, he’d become alarmed by the tone of the reassurances issuing from the SS, and, somehow getting to a latrine, had lowered himself into the pit. He’d stayed there three days, the human waste up to his neck. His face, he said, had been a hive of flies. He’d slept standing, wedged in the hole for fear of drowning there. At last he’d crawled out at night.