Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Somehow he’d walked out of Belzec, following the railway line. Everyone understood that he had got out precisely because he was beyond reason. He’d been cleaned by someone’s hand – a peasant woman’s perhaps – and put into fresh clothes for his journey back to the starting point.

  Even then, there were people in Cracow who thought Bachner’s story was a dangerous rumour. Postcards had come to relatives from prisoners in Auschwitz. So if it was true of Belzec, it couldn’t be true of Auschwitz. And was it credible? On the short emotional rations of the ghetto, one got by through sticking to the credible.

  The chambers of Belzec, Herr Schindler found out from his sources, had been completed by March that year under the supervision of a Hamburg engineering firm and of SS engineers from Oranienburg. From Bachner’s testimony, it seemed that three thousand killings a day were not beyond their capacity. Crematoria were under construction, lest old-fashioned means of disposal of corpses should put a brake on the new killing method. The same company involved in Belzec had installed identical facilities at Sobibor, also in the Lublin district. Bids had been accepted and construction was well advanced for a similar installation at Treblinka near Warsaw. And both chambers and ovens were in operation at Auschwitz main camp and at vast Auschwitz Number Two camp a few kilometres away at Birkenau. The resistance claimed that ten thousand murders on a given day were within the capacity of Auschwitz Two. Then, for the Lódź area, there was the camp at Chelmno, also equipped according to the new technology.

  To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept. Throughout Europe that summer some millions of people, Oskar among them, and the ghetto dwellers of Cracow too, tortuously adjusted the economies of their souls to the idea of Belzec-like enclosures in the Polish forests.

  That summer, Schindler also wound up the bankrupt estate of Rekord and, under the provisions of the Polish Commercial Court, acquired by a species of pro forma auction, ownership of the property. Though the German armies were over the Don and on their way to the Caucasus oil fields, Oskar discerned by the evidence of what had happened in Krakusa Street that they could not finally succeed. Therefore it was a good season to legitimise to the limit his possession of the factory in Lipowa Street. He still hoped, in a way that was almost childlike and to which history would pay no regard, that the fall of the evil king would not bear away that legitimacy, that in the new era he would go on being Hans Schindler’s successful boy from Zwittau.

  Jereth of the box factory went on pressing him about building huts, refuges, on his patch of waste land. Oskar got the necessary approvals from the bureaucrats. A rest area for the nightshift was his story. He had the timber for it – it had been donated by Jereth himself.

  When finished in the autumn, it seemed a slight and comfortless structure. The planking had that crate-wood greenness and looked as if it would shrink as it got darker and let in the slanting snow. But during an Aktion in October it was a haven for Mr and Mrs Jereth, for the workers from the box factory and the radiator works, and for Oskar’s nightshift.

  The Oskar Schindler who comes down from his office on the frosty mornings of an Aktion to speak to the SS man, to the Ukrainian auxiliary, to the Blue Police and to OD details who would have marched across from Podgórze to escort his nightshift home; the Oskar Schindler who, drinking coffee, rings Wachtmeister Bosko’s office near the ghetto and tells some lie about why his nightshift must stay in Lipowa Street this morning – that Oskar Schindler has endangered himself now beyond the limit of cautious business practice. The men of influence who have twice sprung him from prison cannot do it indefinitely even if he is generous to them on their birthdays. This year they are putting men of influence in Auschwitz. If they die there, their widows get a terse and unregretful telegram from the commandant. “Your husband has died in Konzentrationslager Auschwitz.”

  Bosko himself was lanky, thinner than Oskar. Gruff-voiced and, like him, a German Czech. His family, like Oskar’s, was conservative and looked to the old Germanic values. He had, for a brief season, felt a pan-Germanic anticipation at the rise of Hitler, exactly the way Beethoven had felt a grand European fervour for Napoleon. In Vienna, where he had been studying his theology, he’d joined the SS, partly as an alternative to conscription into the Wehrmacht, partly from an evanescent ardour. He regretted that ardour now and was, more fully than Oskar knew, expiating it. All that Oskar understood about him at the time was that he was always pleased to undermine an Aktion. His responsibility was the perimeter of the ghetto and from his office beyond the walls he looked inwards at the Aktion with a precise horror; for he, like Oskar, considered himself a potential witness.

  Oskar did not know that in the October Aktion Bosko had smuggled some dozens of children out of the ghetto in cardboard boxes. Oskar did not know either that the Wachtmeister provided, ten at a time, general passes for the underground. The Jewish Combat Organisation (ZOB) was strong in Cracow. It was made up mainly of youth club members, especially of members of Akiva, a club named after the legendary Rabbi Akiva, scholar of the Mishna. The ZOB was led by a married couple, Shimon and Gusta Dranger – her diary would become a classic of the Resistance – and by Dolek Liebeskind. Its members needed to pass in and out of the ghetto freely for purposes of recruitment, to carry currency, forged documents and copies of their underground newspaper. They had contacts with the left wing Polish People’s Army, which was based in the forests around Cracow and which also needed the documents Bosko provided. Even though Bosko’s contacts with the ZOB and the People’s Army were sufficient to hang him, he secretly despised himself and had contempt for partial rescues. Bosko wanted to save everyone, and would soon try to, and perish for it.

  At fourteen, Danka Dresner, cousin of Red Genia, had outgrown the sure infantile instincts which had led her small relative safely out of the cordon in Plac Zgody. Though she had her work as a cleaning woman over at the Luftwaffe base, the truth was that by autumn any woman under fifteen or over forty could be taken away, anyhow.

  Therefore, on the morning an SS Sonderkommando and squads of Security Police rolled into Lwówska Street, Mrs Dresner took Danka with her down to Dabrowski, to the house of a neighbour who had a false wall. The neighbour was a woman in her late thirties, a servant at the Gestapo mess near the Wawel, who could expect some preferential treatment. But she had elderly parents who were automatic risks. So she had bricked up a sixty-centimetre cavity for her parents, a costly project, since each brick had to be smuggled into the ghetto in barrows under heaps of permitted goods – rags, firewood, disinfectant. God knew what her bricked up secret space had cost her – five thousand zloty, maybe ten thousand.

  She’d mentioned it a number of times to Mrs Dresner. If there was an Aktion, Mrs Dresner could bring Danka and come herself. Therefore, on the morning Danka and Mrs Dresner heard from around the corner of Dabrowski the startling noise, the bark of Dalmatians and Dobermanns, the megaphoned roaring of Oberscharführers, they hurried to their friend’s place.

  When the Dresners had gone up the stairs and found the right room they could see that the clamour had had an effect on their friend. “It sounds bad,” said the woman. “I have my parents in there already. I can fit the girl in. But not you.”

  Danka stared, captivated, at the end wall, at its stained wallpaper. In there, sandwiched in brick, rats perhaps worrying at their feet, their senses stretched by darkness, were this woman’s elderly mother and father.

  Mrs Dresner could tell that the woman wasn’t rational. The girl, but not you, she kept saying. It was as if she thought that should the SS penetrate the wall they would be more forgiving on account of Danka’s lesser poundage. Mrs Dresner explained that she was scarcely obese, that the Aktion seemed to be concentrating on this side of Lwówska Street and that she had nowhere else to
go. And that she could fit. Danka was a reliable girl, said Mrs Dresner, but she would feel safer with her mother in there. You could see by measuring the wall with your eyes that four people could fit abreast in the cavity. But shots from two blocks distant swept away the last of the woman’s reason. I can fit the girl, she screamed. I want you to go.

  Mrs Dresner turned to Danka and told her to go into the wall. Later Danka would not know why she had obeyed her mother and gone so mutely into hiding. The woman took her to the attic, lifted a rug from the floor, then a raft of floorboards. Then Danka descended into the cavity. It wasn’t black in there: the parents were burning a stub of candle. Danka found herself beside the woman – someone else’s mother but, beyond the unwashed smell, the same warm protective mask of motherhood. The woman smiled at her briefly. The husband stood on the far side of his wife, keeping his eyes closed, not to be distracted from signals from outside.

  After a time the friend’s mother motioned to her that she could sit if she wanted. So Danka crouched sideways and found a comfortable posture on the floor of the cavity. No rats troubled her. She heard no sound – not a word from her mother and the friend beyond the wall. Above everything else she felt unexpectedly safe. And with the sensation of safety came displeasure at herself for obeying her mother’s order so woodenly, and then fear for her mother, who was out there in the world of Aktions.

  Mrs Dresner did not leave the house at once. The SS were in Dabrowski Street now. She thought she might as well stay on. If she was taken, it was no loss to her friend. It might, in fact, be a positive help. If they took a woman from this room, it would probably increase their satisfaction with their task, exempt them from a sharper inspection of the state of the wallpaper.

  But the woman had convinced herself no one would survive the search if Mrs Dresner stayed in the room and, Mrs Dresner could see, no one would if the woman remained in that state. Therefore she stood up, calmly despairing of herself, and left. They would find her on the steps or in the hall. Why not on the street? she wondered. It was so much an unwritten rule that ghetto natives must stay on quivering in their rooms until discovered that anyone found moving on the stairways was somehow guilty of defiance of the system.

  A figure in a cap prevented her from going out. He appeared on the front step, squinting down the dark corridor to the cold blue light of the courtyard beyond. He recognised her, as she did him. He was an acquaintance of her elder son, but you could not be sure that that counted for anything: you could not know what pressures they’d put on the OD boys. He stepped into the hall and approached her. “Mrs Dresner,” he said. He pointed at the stairwell. “They’ll be gone in ten minutes. You stay under the stairs. Go on. Get under the stairs.”

  As numbly as her daughter had obeyed her, she now obeyed the OD youth. She crouched in under the stairs, but knew it was no good. The autumn light from the courtyard showed her up. If they wanted to look at the courtyard, or at the apartment door at the rear of the hallway, she would be seen. Since upright or cowering made no difference, she stood upright. From near the front door, the OD man urged her again to stay there. Then he went. She heard yells, orders and appeals, and it all seemed to be as close as next door.

  At last, he was back with others. She heard the boots at the front door. She heard him say in German that he’d searched the ground floor and no one was at home. There were occupied rooms upstairs, though. It was such a prosaic conversation he had with the SS men that it didn’t seem to her to do justice to the risk he was taking. He was staking his existence against the likelihood that having worked down Lwówska and so far down Dabrowski they might by now be incompetent enough not to search the ground floor themselves and so not find Mrs Dresner, whom he dimly knew, beneath the stairs.

  As it turned out, they proved equable enough to take the word of the OD man. She heard them on the stairs, opening and slamming doors on the first landing, their boots clattering on the floor in the room of the cavity. She heard her friend’s raised, shrewish voice. Of course I have a work permit, I work over at the Gestapo mess, I know all the gentlemen. She heard them come down from the second floor with someone, with more than one, a couple, a family. Substitutes for me, she would later think. A middle-aged male voice with an edge of bronchitis to it said, “But surely, gentlemen, we can take some clothing.” And in a tone as indifferent as that of a railway porter asked for timetable information, the SS man telling him in Polish, “There’s no need for it. At these places they provide everything.”

  The sound receded. Mrs Dresner waited. There was no second sweep. They would return again and again now, culling the ghetto. What in June had been seen as a culminating horror had become by October a daily process. And grateful as she was to the OD boy, it was clear as she went upstairs to get Danka that when murder is as scheduled, habitual, industrial as it was here in Cracow you could scarcely, with tentative heroism, redirect the overriding energy of the system. The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan – “An hour of life is still life.” The OD boy had given her that hour. She knew there was no one who could give her more.

  Upstairs, the woman was a little shamefaced. “The girl can come whenever she wishes,” she said. That is, I didn’t exclude you out of cowardice, but as a matter of policy. And the policy stands. You can’t be accepted, but the girl can.

  Mrs Dresner did not argue – she had a sense that the woman’s stance was part of the equation that had saved her in the downstairs hall. She thanked the woman. Danka might need to accept her hospitality in the future.

  From now on, since she looked young for her forty-two years and still had her health, Mrs Dresner would attempt to survive on that basis – the economic one, the putative value of her strength to the Armaments Inspectorate or to some other wing of the war effort. She wasn’t confident about the idea. These days anyone with half a grasp on truth could tell that the SS believed the death of the socially unappeasable Jew outbalanced any value he might have as an item of labour. And the question is, in such an era, Who saves Juda Dresner, factory purchasing officer? Who saves Janek Dresner, car mechanic at the Wehrmacht garage? Who saves Danka Dresner, Luftwaffe domestic, on the morning the SS finally choose to ignore their economic value?

  While the OD man was arranging Mrs Dresner’s survival in the hallway of the house in Dabrowski, the young Zionists of the Halutz Youth and the ZOB were preparing a more visible act of resistance. They had acquired uniforms of the Waffen SS and, with them, the entitlement to visit the SS-reserved Cyganeria Restaurant in Ś.W. Ducha Plac, across the square from the Slowacki Theatre. In the Cyganeria they left a bomb which blew the tables through the roof, tore seven SS men to fragments, and injured a further forty.

  When Oskar heard about it, he knew he could have been there, buttering up some official.

  It was the deliberate intent of Shimon and Gusta Dranger and their colleagues to run against the ancient pacifism of the ghetto, to convert it to a universal rebellion. They bombed the SS-only Bagatella Cinema in Karmelicka Street. In the dark Leni Riefenstahl flickered the promise of German womanhood to the wandering soldier frayed from performing the nation’s works in the barbarous ghetto or on the increasingly risky streets of Polish Cracow, and the next second a vast yellow spear of flame extinguished the sight.

  The ZOB would in a few months sink patrol boats on the Vistula, petrol-bomb sundry military garages throughout the city, arrange Passierscheine for people who were not supposed to have them, smuggle passport photographs out to centres where they could be used in the forging of Aryan papers, derail the elegant army-only train that ran between Cracow and Bochnia, and get their underground newspaper into circulation. They would also arrange for two of OD chief Spira’s lieutenants, Spitz and Forster, who had drawn up lists for the imprisonment of thousands, to walk into a Gestapo ambush. It was a variation of an old undergraduate trick. One of the underground, posing as an informer, made an appointment to meet the two policemen in a village near Cracow. At the same time, a separate supposed
informer told Pomorska Street that two leaders of the Jewish partisan movement could be found at a particular rendezvous point. Spitz and Forster were both mown down while running from the Gestapo.

  Still the style of resistance for the ghetto dwellers remained that of Artur Rosenzweig, who when asked in June to make a list of thousands for deportation, had placed his own name, his wife’s, his daughter’s at the top.

  Over in Zablocie, in the backyard of Emalia, Mr Jereth and Oskar Schindler were pursuing their own species of resistance by planning a second barracks.

  SEVENTEEN

  An Austrian dentist called Dr Sedlacek had now arrived in Cracow and was making wary enquiries about Schindler. He had come by train from Budapest and carried a list of possible Cracow contacts and, in a false-bottomed suitcase, a quantity of occupation zloty which, since Governor General Frank had abolished the major denominations of Polish money, took up an unconscionable space.

  Though he pretended to be travelling on business, he was a courier for a Zionist rescue organisation in Budapest.

  Even in the autumn of 1942, the Zionists of Palestine, let alone the population of the world, knew nothing but rumours of what was happening in Europe. They had set up a bureau in Istanbul to glean hard intelligence. From an apartment in the Beyoglu section of the city, three agents sent out postcards addressed to every Zionist body in German Europe. The postcards read: “Please let me know how you are. Eretz is longing for you.” Eretz meant ‘the land’ and, to any Zionist, Israel. Each of the postcards was signed by one of the three, a girl called Sarka Mandelblatt, who had a convenient Turkish citizenship.