Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Amon would be suffering his customary minor headache and be feeling a little drained from the feverish insomnia in which he’d spent the small hours. Now he was here, though, he felt a certain professional exhilaration. It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honour without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at. Psychological impunity had been harder to achieve. Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide. SS training documents, written to combat these futile casualties, pointed out the simplemindedness of believing that because the Jew bore no visible weapons he was bereft of social, economic or political arms. He was in fact armed to the teeth. Steel yourself, said the documents, for the Jewish child is a cultural time bomb, the Jewish woman a biology of treasons, the Jewish male a more incontrovertible enemy than any Russian could hope to be.

  Amon Goeth was steeled. He knew he could not be touched, and the very thought of that gave him the same delicious excitement a long distance runner might have before an event he feels sure about. Amon despised in a genial sort of way those officers who fastidiously left the act itself to their men and NCOs. He sensed that in some way that might be more dangerous than taking a hand yourself. He would show the way, as he had with Diana Reiter. He knew the euphoria that would build during the day, the gratification that would grow, along with a taste for drink, as noon came and the pace hotted up. Even under the low squalor of those clouds, he knew that this was one of the best days, that when he was old and the race extinct, the young would ask with wonder about days like this.

  Less than a kilometre away, a doctor of the ghetto’s convalescent hospital, Dr D, was also up and in an active frame of mind this dull morning of the ghetto’s liquidation. The hospital’s top floor, where he sat among his last patients, was in darkness, and he was grateful they were isolated like this, high above the street, by pain and fever.

  For at street level everyone knew what had happened at the epidemic hospital near Plac Zgody. An SS detachment under Oberscharführer Albert Hujar had entered the hospital to close it down and had found Dr Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients, who, she said, should not be moved. The whooping-cough children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet-fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for their own sakes and for the community, and the tuberculosis cases were simply too sick to walk out.

  Since scarlet fever is an adolescent disease, many of Dr Blau’s patients were girls between the ages of twelve and sixteen. Faced with Albert Hujar, Dr Rosalia Blau pointed, as warranty for her professional judgment, to these wide-eyed, feverish girls.

  Hujar himself, acting on the mandate he’d received the previous week from Amon Goeth, shot Dr Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some trying to rise in their beds, some detached in their own delirium, were executed in a rage of automatic fire. When Hujar’s squad had finished, a detail of ghetto men was sent up the stairs to deal with the dead, to pile the bloodied linen and to sluice down the walls.

  The convalescent hospital was situated in what had been before the war a Polish police station. Throughout the life of the ghetto, its three floors had been cluttered with the sick. Its director was a respected physician named Dr B. By the dull morning of March 13th, Doctors B and D had reduced its population to four, all of them unmovable. One was a young workman with galloping consumption, the second a talented musician with terminal kidney disease. It seemed important to D that somehow they be spared the final great affright of a mad volley of fire. Even more so the blind man afflicted by a stroke, and the old gentleman whose earlier surgery for an intestinal tumour had left him weakened and burdened with a colostomy.

  The medical staff here, including Dr D, were of the highest calibre. From this ill-equipped ghetto hospital would come the first Polish account of Weil’s erythroblastic disease, a condition of the bone marrow, and of the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. This morning, though, D was concerned with the question of cyanide.

  With an eye to the option of suicide, D had acquired a supply of cyanic acid solution. He knew that other doctors had too. This past year, depression had been endemic to the ghetto. It had infected D. He was young, he had forearms like hams. Yet history itself seemed to have gone malignant. To know he had access to cyanide had been a comfort for D on his worst days. By this late stage of the ghetto’s history, it was the one pharmaceutical left to him and to the other doctors in quantity. There had rarely been any sulpha. Emetics, ether and even aspirin were used up. Cyanide was the single sophisticated drug remaining.

  This morning before five, Dr D had been awakened in his room in Wit Stwosz Street by the noise of trucks pulling up beyond the wall. Looking down from his window, he saw the Sonderkommandos assembling by the river and knew that they had come to take some decisive action in the ghetto. He rushed to the hospital and found Dr B and the nursing staff already working there on the same premise, arranging for every patient who could move to be taken downstairs and fetched home by relatives or friends. When all except the four had gone, Dr B told the nurses to leave, and all of them obeyed except for one senior nurse. Now she and Doctors B and D remained with the last four patients in the nearly deserted hospital.

  B and D did not speak much as they waited. They each had access to the cyanide, and soon D would be aware that Dr B’s mind was also sadly preoccupied with it.

  There was suicide, yes. But there was euthanasia as well. The concept terrified D. He had a sensitive face and a marked delicacy about the eyes. He suffered painfully from a set of ethics as intimate to him as the organs of his own body. He knew that a physician with commonsense and a syringe and little else to guide him could add up like a shopping list the values of either course – to inject the cyanide, or to abandon the patients to the Sonderkommandos. But D knew these things were never a matter of totting up columns, that ethics was higher and more tortuous than algebra.

  Sometimes Dr B would go to the window, look out to see if anything had begun in the streets, and turn back to D with a level, professional calm in his eyes. B, D could tell, was also running through the options, flicking the faces of the problem like the faces of riffled cards; then starting again. Suicide. Euthanasia. Hydrocyanic acid. One appealing concept: stand and be found among the beds like Rosalia Blau. Another: use the cyanide on oneself as well as on the sick. The second idea appealed to D, seeming not as passive as the first. As well as that, waking depressed these past three nights, he’d felt something like a physical desire for the fast poison, as if it were merely the drug or stiff drink that every victim needed to soften the final hour.

  To a serious man like D, this allure was a compelling reason not to take the stuff. For him the precedents for suicide had been set in his scholarly childhood, when his father had read to him in Josephus the account of the Dead Sea Zealots’ mass suicide on the eve of capture by the Romans. The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbour. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender. Principle is principle, of course, and terror in a grey morning is another thing. But D was a man of principle.

  And he had a wife. He and his wife could find another exit, and he knew it. It led through the sewers near the corner of Piwna and Krakusa Streets. The sewers and a chancy escape to the forest of Ojców. He feared that more than the easy oblivion of cyanide. If Blue Police or Germans stopped him, however, and dragged his trousers down, he would pass the test, thanks to Dr Lachs. Lachs was a distinguished plastic surgeon who had taught a number of young Cracow Jews how to lengthen their foreskins bloodlessly by sleeping with a weight – a bottle containing a gradually increasing volume of water – attached to themselves. It was, said Lachs, a device that had been used by Jews in periods of Roman persecution, and the intensity of SS action in Cracow had caused Lachs to revive its use in the past eighteen months. Lachs had taught his young colleague D the method, and the fact that it h
ad worked with some success allowed D even fewer grounds for suicide.

  At dawn the nurse, a calm woman of about forty, came to D and made a morning report. The young man was resting well, but the blind man with the stroke-affected speech was in a state of anxiety. The musician and the intestinal tumour case had both had a painful night. It was all very quiet in the convalescent hospital now, however. The patients snuffled in the last of their sleep or the intimacy of their pain, and Dr D went out on to the freezing balcony above the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and chew over the question once more.

  Last year D had been at the old epidemic hospital in Rekawka when the SS decided to close that section of the ghetto and relocate the hospital. They had lined the staff up against the wall and dragged the patients downstairs. D had seen old Mrs Reisman’s leg caught between the balusters, and an SS man hauling her by the other leg did not stop and extricate her but pulled until the trapped limb snapped with an audible thud. That was how patients were moved in the ghetto. But last year no one thought of mercy-killing. At that stage everyone still hoped that things might improve.

  Now, even if he and Dr B made their decision, D didn’t know if he had the rigour to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispassion. It was absurdly like the argument in one’s youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you’d decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.

  Out there on the balcony he heard the first noise. It began early and came from the eastern end of the ghetto. The Raus! Raus! of megaphones, the customary lie about luggage which some people still chose to believe. In the deserted streets, and among the tenements in which no one moved, you could hear all the way from the cobblestones of Plac Zgody and up by the river in Nadwislanska Street an indefinite terror-sick murmur which made D himself tremble.

  Then he heard the first volley, loud enough to wake the patients. And a sudden stridency after the firing, a bull megaphone raging at some plangent feminine voice; and then the wailing snapped off by a further burst of fire, and a different wailing succeeding, the bereaved being hurried along by the SS bullhorns, by anxious OD men and by neighbours, unreasonable grief fading into the far corner of the ghetto where there was a gate. He knew that it might all have cut through even the precomatose state of the musician with the failed kidneys.

  When he returned to the ward, he could see that they were watching him – even the musician. He could sense rather than see the way their bodies stiffened in their beds, and the old man with the colostomy cried out with the muscular exertion. “Doctor, doctor!” someone said. “Please!” answered D, by which he meant, I’m here and they’re a long way off yet. He looked at Dr B who narrowed his eyes as the noise of evictions broke out again three blocks away. Dr B nodded at him, walked to the small locked pharmaceutical chest at the end of the ward, and came back with the bottle of hydrocyanic acid. After a pause, D moved to his colleague’s side. He could have stood and left it to B. He guessed that the man had the strength to do it alone, without the approval of colleagues. But it would be shameful, D thought, not to cast his own vote, not to take some of the burden. D, though younger than B, had been associated with the Jagiellonian University, was a specialist, a thinker. He wanted to give B the backing of all that.

  “Well,” said B, displaying the bottle briefly to D. The word was nearly obscured by a woman’s screaming and ranting official orders from the far end of Józefińska Street. B called the nurse. “Give each patient forty drops in water.” “Forty drops,” she repeated. She knew what the medication was. “That’s right,” said B. D also looked at her. Yes, he wanted to say. I’m strong now, I could give it myself. But if I did it would alarm them. Every patient knows that nurses bring the medicine round.

  As the nurse prepared the mixture, D wandered down the ward and laid his hand on the old man’s. I have something to help you, Roman, he told him. D sensed with amazement the old man’s history through the touch of skin. For a second, like a surge of flame, the young man Roman was there, growing up in Franz Josef’s southern Poland, a ladykiller in the sweet little nougat of a city, the petit Wien, the jewel of the Vistula, Cracow. Wearing Franz Josef’s uniform and going to the mountains for spring manoeuvres. Chocolate-soldiering in Rynek Glowny with the girls of Kazimierz, in a city of lace and patisseries. Climbing the Kosciuszko Mound and stealing a kiss among the shrubs. How could the world have come so far in one manhood? asked the young man in old Roman. From Franz Josef to the NCO who had had a sanction to put Rosalie Blau and the scarlet-fever girls to death?

  “Please, Roman,” said the doctor, meaning that the old man should unclench his body. He believed the Sonderkommandos were coming within the hour. D felt, but resisted, a temptation to let him into the secret. Dr B had been liberal with the dosage. A few seconds of breathlessness and a minor amazement would be no new or intolerable sensation to old Roman.

  When the nurse came with four medicine glasses, none of them even asked her what she was bringing them. D would never know if any of them understood. He turned away and looked at his watch. He feared that when they drank it, some noise would begin, something worse than the normal hospital gasps and gaggings. He heard the nurse murmuring, “Here’s something for you.” He heard an intake of breath. He didn’t know if it was patient or nurse. The woman is the hero of this, he thought.

  When he looked again, the nurse was waking the kidney patient, the sleepy musician, and offering him the glass. From the far end of the ward, Dr B looked on in a clean white coat. D moved to old Roman and took his pulse. There was none. In a bed at the far end of the ward, the musician forced the almond-smelling mixture down.

  It was all as gentle as D had hoped. He looked at them – their mouths agape, but not obscenely so, their eyes glazed and immune, their heads back, their chins pointed at the ceiling – with the envy any ghetto dweller would feel for escapees.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Poldek Pfefferberg shared a room on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house at the end of Józefińska Street. Its windows looked down over the ghetto wall at the Vistula, where Polish barges passed up stream and down in ignorance of the ghetto’s last day and SS patrol boats puttered as casually as pleasure craft. Here Pfefferberg waited with his wife Mila for the Sonderkommandos to arrive and order them out into the street. Mila was a small, nervous girl of twenty-two years, a refugee from Lódź whom Poldek had married in the first days of the ghetto. She came from generations of physicians, her father being a surgeon who had died young in 1937, her mother a dermatologist who, during an Aktion in the ghetto of Tarnow last year, had suffered the same death as Rosalia Blau of the epidemic hospital, being cut down with automatic fire while standing amid her patients.

  Mila had lived a sweet childhood, even in Jew-baiting Lódź, and had begun her own medical education in Vienna the year before the war. They had met when Lódź people were shipped down to Cracow in 1939. Mila had found herself billeted in the same apartment as the lively Poldek Pfefferberg.

  Now he was already, like Mila, the last of his family. His mother, who had once redecorated Schindler’s Straszewskiego Street apartment, had been shipped with his father to the ghetto of Tarnow. From there, it would be discovered in the end, they were taken to Belzec and murdered. His sister and brother-in-law, on Aryan papers, had vanished in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. He and Mila had only each other. There was a temperamental gulf between them: Poldek was a neighbourhood boy, a leader, an organiser; the type who, when authority appeared and asked what in God’s name was happening, would step forward and speak up. Mila was quieter, rendered more so by the unspeakable destiny that had swallowed her family. In a peaceable era, the mix between them would have been excellent. She was not only clever but wise; she was a quiet centre. She had a gift for irony, and Poldek Pfefferberg often needed her to restrain his torrents of oratory. Today, however, on this impossible day, they were in conflict.

  Thou
gh Mila was willing, should the chance come, to leave the ghetto, even to entertain a mental image of herself and Poldek as partisans in the forest, she feared the sewers. Poldek had used them more than once as a means of leaving the ghetto, even though the police were sometimes to be found at one end or the other. His friend and former lecturer, Dr D, had also mentioned the sewers recently as an escape route which might not be guarded on the day the Sonderkommandos moved in. The thing would be to wait for the early winter dusk. The door of the doctor’s house was mere metres from a manhole cover. Once down in there, you took the lefthand tunnel which brought you beneath the streets of non-ghetto Podgórze to an outlet on the embankment of the Vistula near the Zatorska Street canal. Yesterday D had given him the definite news. D and his wife would attempt the sewers exit and the Pfefferbergs were welcome to join them. Poldek could not at that stage commit Mila and himself. Mila had a fear, a reasonable one, that the SS might flood the sewers with gas or might resolve the matter anyhow by arriving early at the Pfefferbergs’ room at the far end of Józefińska Street.

  It was a slow, tense day up in the attic room, waiting to find out which way to jump. Neighbours must also have been waiting. Perhaps some of them, not wanting to deal with the delay, had marched up the road already with their packages and hopeful suitcases, for in a way it was a mix of sounds fit to draw you down the stairs – violent noise dimly heard from blocks away, and here a silence in which you could hear the ancient, indifferent timbers of the house ticking away the last and worst hours of your tenancy. At murky noon Poldek and Mila chewed on their brown bread, the three-hundred grammes each they had in stock. The recurrent noises of the Aktion swept up to the corner of Wegierska, a long block away, and then, towards mid-afternoon, receded again. There was near silence then. Someone tried uselessly to flush the recalcitrant toilet on the first-floor landing. It was nearly possible at that hour to believe that they had been overlooked.