Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out of his front door and murdered a prisoner at random there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on the hill fort, as a one-off event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon’s morning routine.

  Wearing a shirt and riding britches and boots on which his orderly had put a high shine, he would emerge on the steps of his temporary villa. (They were renovating a better place for him down at the other end of the camp perimeter.) As the season wore on he would appear without his shirt, for he loved the sun. But for the moment he stood in the clothes in which he had eaten breakfast, a pair of binoculars in one hand and a sniper’s rifle in the other. He would scan the camp area, the work at the quarry, the prisoners pushing or hauling the quarry trucks on the rails which passed by his door. Those glancing up could see the smoke from the cigarette which he held clamped between his lips, the way a man smokes without hands when he is too busy to put down the tools of his trade. Within the first few days of the camp’s life he appeared thus at his front door and shot a prisoner who did not seem to be pushing hard enough at a cart loaded with limestone. No one knew Amon’s precise reason for settling on that prisoner – Amon certainly did not have to document his motives. With one blast from the doorstep, the man was plucked out of the group of pushing and pulling captives and hurled sideways in the road. The others stopped pushing of course, their muscles seized in expectation of a general slaughter. But Amon waved them on, frowning, as if to say that he was pleased for the moment with the standard of work he was getting from them.

  Apart from such excesses with prisoners, Amon was also breaking one of the promises he’d made to the entrepreneurs. Oskar got a telephone call from Madritsch, who wanted them both to complain. Amon had said he would not interfere in the business of the factories. At least, he was not interfering from within. But he held up shifts by detaining the prison population for hours on the Appellplatz at rollcall. Madritsch mentioned a case in which a potato had been found in a given hut, and therefore every prisoner from that barracks had to be publicly flogged in front of the thousands of inmates. It is no fast matter to have a few hundred people drag their trousers or knickers down, their shirts or dresses up and treat each of them to twenty-five lashes. It was Goeth’s rule that the flogged prisoner call out the numbers for the guidance of the Ukrainian orderlies who did the flogging. If the victim lost track of the count, it was to begin again. Commandant Goeth’s rollcalls on the Appellplatz were full of just such time-consuming trickery.

  Therefore shifts would arrive hours late at the Madritsch clothing works in Plaszów camp, and an hour later still at Oskar’s place in Lipowa Street. They would arrive shocked, too, unable to apply their minds, muttering stories of what Amon or John or Scheidt or some other officer had done that morning. Oskar complained to an engineer he knew at the Armaments Inspectorate. It’s no use complaining to the police chiefs, said the engineer. They’re not involved in the same war as us. What I ought to do, said Oskar, is keep the people on the premises. Make my own camp.

  The idea amused the engineer. Where would you put them, old man? he asked. You don’t have much room.

  If I can acquire the space, said Oskar, would you write a supporting letter?

  When the engineer agreed, Oskar telephoned the elderly Bielski couple who lived in Stradom Street. He wondered if they would consider an offer for the land abutting his factory. He drove across the river to see them. They were delighted by his manner. Because he had always been bored by the rituals of haggling, he began by offering them a boomtime price. They gave him tea and, in a state of high excitement, called their lawyer to draw up the papers while Oskar was still on the premises. From their apartment, Oskar drove out and told Amon, as a matter of courtesy, that he intended to make a subcamp of Plaszów in his own factory yard. Amon was quite taken with the idea. If the SS chiefs approved, he said, you can expect my cooperation. As long as you don’t want my musicians or my maid.

  The next day a full scale appointment was arranged with Oberführer Scherner at Pomorska Street. Somehow both Amon and General Scherner knew that Oskar could be made to foot the whole bill for a new camp. They could detect that when Oskar pushed the industrial argument – “I want my workers on the premises so that their labour can be more fully exploited” – he was at the same time pushing some other intimate craze of his of which expense was not a consideration. They thought of him as a good enough fellow who’d been stricken with a form of Jew-love as with a virus. It was a corollary to SS theory that the Jewish genius so pervaded the world, could achieve such magical effects, that Herr Schindler was to be pitied as much as was a prince turned into a frog. But he would have to pay for his disease.

  The requirements of Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, police chief of the Government General and superior of Scherner and Czurda, were based on the regulations set down by the Concentration Camp Section of General Oswald Pohl’s SS Main Administrative and Economic Office, even though as yet Plaszów was run independently of Pohl’s bureau. The basic stipulations for an SS Forced Labour Subcamp involved the erection of fences nine feet tall, of watchtowers at given intervals according to the length of the camp perimeter, of latrines, barracks, a clinic, a dental surgery, a bath house and delousing complex, a barber shop, a food store, a laundry, a barracks office, a guard block of somewhat better construction than the barracks themselves, and all the accessories. What had occurred to Amon, Scherner and Czurda was that Oskar, as was only proper, would meet the expenses either out of economic motives or because of the cabalistic enchantment he lay under.

  And even though they would make Oskar pay, his proposal suited them. There was still a ghetto in Tarnow, forty-five miles east, and when it was abolished the population would need to be absorbed into Plaszów. Likewise the thousands of Jews now arriving at Plaszów from the shtetls of south Poland. A subcamp in Lipowa Street would ease that pressure.

  Amon also understood, though he would never say it aloud to the police chiefs, that there would be no need to supply a Lipowa Street camp too precisely with the minimum food requirements as laid down in General Pohl’s directive. Amon, who could hurl thunderbolts from his doorstep without meeting protest, who believed in any case in the official idea that a certain attrition should take place in Plaszów, was already selling a percentage of the prison rations on the open market in Cracow through an agent of his, a Jew called Wilek Chilowicz who had contacts with factory managements, merchants and even restaurants in Cracow.

  Dr Alexander Biberstein, now a Plaszów prisoner himself, found that the daily ration varied between seven hundred and eleven hundred calories. At breakfast a prisoner received a half litre of black coffee, tasting of acorns, and a lump of rye bread weighing a hundred and seventy-five grammes, an eighth of one of the round loaves collected by barracks mess orderlies each morning at the bakery. Hunger being such a disruptive force, each mess orderly cut up the loaf with his back to the others and called, “Who wants this piece? Who wants that?” At midday a soup was distributed – carrots, beets, sago substitute. Some days it had a fuller body than on others. Better food came in with the work parties who returned each evening. A small chicken could be carried under a coat, a french roll down a trouser leg. Yet Amon tried to prevent this by having the guards search returning details at dusk in front of the Administration Block. He did not want the work of natural wastage to be frustrated, nor the ideological wind to be taken out of his food dealings through Chilowicz. Since, therefore, he did not indulge his own prisoners, he felt that if Oskar chose to take a thousand Jews, he could indulge them at his own expense, without too regular a supply of bread and beets from the food stores of Plaszów.

  That spring, it was not only the police chiefs of the Cracow region whom Oskar had to talk to. He went into his backyard, persuading the neighbours. Beyond the two shabby huts constructed of Jereth
’s wood, he came to the radiator factory run by Kurt Hoderman. It employed a horde of Poles and about a hundred Plaszów inmates. In the other direction was Jereth’s box works, supervised by the German engineer Kuhnpast. Since the Plaszów people were such a small part of their staff, they didn’t take to the idea with any passion, but they weren’t against it. For Oskar was offering to house their Jews fifty metres from work instead of five kilometres.

  Next Oskar moved out into the neighbourhood to talk to Engineer Schmilewski at the Wehrmacht garrison office a few streets away. He employed a squad of Plaszów prisoners. Schmilewski had no objections. His name, with Kuhnpast’s and Hoderman’s, was appended to the application Schindler sent off to Pomorska Street.

  SS surveyors visited Emalia and conferred with Surveyor Steinhauser, an old friend of Oskar’s from the Armaments Inspectorate. They stood and frowned at the site, as surveyors will, and asked questions about drainage. Oskar had them all into his office upstairs for a morning coffee and a cognac, and then everyone parted amiably. Within a few days the application to establish a Forced Labour Camp in the factory backyard was accepted.

  That year Deutsche Email Fabrik would enjoy a turnover of 15.8 million Reichsmarks. It might be thought that the three-hundred thousand Reichsmarks Oskar now spent on building materials for the Emalia camp was a large but not fatal overhead. The truth was, though, that he was only beginning to pay.

  Oskar sent a plea to the Bauleitung or Construction Office of Plaszów for the help of a young engineer called Adam Garde. Garde was still working on the barracks of Amon’s camp and, after leaving instructions for the barrack builders, would be marched under individual guard from Plaszów to Lipowa Street to supervise the setting up of Oskar’s compound. When Garde first turned up in Zablocie, he found two rudimentary huts already occupied by close to four hundred prisoners. There was a fence patrolled by an SS squad, but the inmates told Garde that Oskar did not let the SS into the encampment or on to the factory floor, except of course when senior inspectors came to look over the place. Oskar, they said, kept the small SS garrison of the Emalia factory well liquored and happy with their lot. Garde could see that the Emalia prisoners themselves were content between the shrinking fragile boards of their two huts, the men’s and the women’s. Already they called themselves Schindlerjuden using the term in a mood of cautious self-congratulation, the way a man recovering from a heart attack might describe himself as a lucky beggar.

  They’d already dug some primitive latrines which engineer Garde, much as he approved the impulse behind the work, could smell from the factory entrance. They washed at a pump in the DEF yard.

  Oskar asked him to come up to the office and look at the plans. Six barracks for up to twelve hundred people. The cookhouse at this end, the SS barracks – Oskar was temporarily accommodating the SS in a part of the factory – beyond the wire at the far end. I want a really first-class shower block and laundry, Oskar told him. I have the welders who can put it together under your direction. Typhus, he growled, half smiling at Garde. None of us wants typhus. The lice are already biting in Plaszów. We need to be able to boil up clothes.

  Adam Garde was delighted to go to Lipowa Street each day. Two engineers had already been punished at Plaszów for possessing diplomas, but at Deutsche Email Fabrik experts were still experts. One morning, as he was marching up Wieliczka Street towards Zablocie, neither he nor the Ukrainian pushing the pace and only peasant carts apparent on the road, a black limousine materialised, braking hard at their heels. From it emerged Untersturmführer Goeth. He had that look about him, as if he would not be slothful in his enquiries.

  One prisoner, one guard, he observed. What does it mean? The Ukrainian begged to inform the Herr Commandant that he had orders to escort this prisoner each morning to Herr Oskar Schindler’s Emalia. They both hoped, Garde and the Ukrainian, that the mention of Oskar’s name would give them immunity. One guard, one prisoner? asked the commandant again, but he was appeased and got back into his car without resolving the matter in any radical way.

  Later in the day he approached Wilek Chilowicz, who besides being his agent was also chief of the Jewish camp police or ‘firemen’, as they were called. Symche Spira, recently the Napoleon of the ghetto, still lived there and spent each day supervising the searching out and the digging up of the diamonds, gold and cash hidden away and unrecorded by people who were now ashes on the pineneedles of Belzec. In Plaszów, however, Spira had no power, the centre of prison power being Chilowicz, although no one knew from where his authority derived. Perhaps Willi Kunde had mentioned his name to Amon, perhaps Amon had recognised and liked his style. But, all at once, here he was chief of firemen in Plaszów, hander-out of the caps and armbands of authority in that debased kingdom and, like Symche, limited enough in imagination to equate his power with that of tsars.

  Goeth approached this cut-rate Sejanus and said that he had better send Adam Garde to Schindler full time and be done with it. We have engineers to burn, said Goeth with distaste. He meant that engineering had been a soft option for Jews who weren’t allowed into the medical faculties of the Polish universities. First, though, said Amon, before he goes to Emalia, he has to finish the work on my conservatory.

  This news came to Adam Garde in his barracks, at his place in the four-tiered bunks of hut 21. He would be delivered to Zablocie at the end of a trial. He would be building at Goeth’s back door where, as Reiter and Grünberg might have told him, the rules were unpredictable.

  In the midst of his work for the commandant, a large beam was lifted to its place in the roof tree of Amon’s conservatory. As he worked Adam Garde could hear the commandant’s two dogs, named Rolf and Ralf, names from a newspaper cartoon – laughable, except that Amon had permitted them in the past week to rip the breast from a female prisoner suspected of idling. Amon himself, with his half-completed technical education, would return again and again to take a professional stance and watch the roof beams lifted by pulley. He came to ask questions when the centrebeam was being slotted into place. It was an immense length of heavy pine and across it Goeth called his question. Adam Garde could not catch the meaning and put his hand to his ear. Again Goeth asked it and, worse than not hearing it, Garde could not understand it. I don’t understand, Herr Commandant, he admitted. Amon grabbed the rising beam with both long fingered hands, dragged back the end of it and swung it towards the engineer. Garde saw the massive swatting timber spinning towards his head and understood that it was a mortal instrument. He lifted his right hand and the beam took it, shattering the knuckles and the metacarpi and hurling him to the ground. When he could see again through the fog of pain and nausea, Amon had turned and walked away. Perhaps he would come again tomorrow for a satisfactory answer.

  Lest he be seen as deformed and unfit, engineer Garde avoided favouring his shattered hand on the way to the Krankenstube, or clinic. Carried normally, it weighed at his side, a bladder of torment. He let Dr Hilfstein talk him into accepting a plaster cast. So he continued to supervise the construction of the conservatory and each day marched to the Emalia works, hoping that the long sleeve of his coat helped conceal the plaster cast. When he was unsure about this, he cut his hand free. Let the hand mend crookedly. He wanted to ensure his transfer to Schindler’s subcamp by presenting an unmaimed appearance.

  Within a week, carrying a shirt and some books in a bundle, he was marched to Lipowa Street for good.

  ∗ Now living in Vienna, the man does not want his real name used.

  TWENTY-THREE

  Among prisoners who knew, there was already competition to get into Emalia. Prisoner Dolek Horowitz, a purchasing officer inside the Plaszów camp, knew that he would not be allowed to go to Schindler’s place himself. But he had a wife and two children.

  Richard, the younger of the children, woke up early these spring mornings as the earth gave off its last winter humour in vapour, got down from his mother’s bunk in the women’s quarters, and ran down the hillside to the men’s camp, hi
s mind on the coarse morning bread. He had to be with his father for morning rollcall on the Appellplatz. His path took him past Chilowicz’s Jewish police post and, even on foggy mornings, within sight of two watchtowers. But he was safe because he was known. He was a Horowitz child. His father was considered invaluable by Herr Bosch, who in turn was a drinking companion of the commandant’s. Richard’s unselfconscious freedom of movement derived from his father’s expertise, he moved charmed under the eyes in the towers, finding his father’s barracks and climbing to his cot and waking him with questions. Why is there mist in the mornings and not in the afternoons? Will there be trucks? Will it take long on the Appellplatz today? Will there be floggings? Floggings delayed mess call.

  Through Richard’s morning questions, Dolek Horowitz had it borne in on him that Plaszów was unfit even for privileged children. Perhaps he could contact Schindler – Schindler came out here now and then and walked around the Administrative Block and workshops, under the guise of doing business, to leave small gifts and exchange news with old friends like Stern and Roman Ginter and Poldek Pfefferberg. When Dolek did not seem to be able to make contact this way, it struck him that perhaps Schindler could be approached through Bosch. Dolek believed they met a lot. Not out here so much, but perhaps in offices in town and at parties. You could tell they were not friends, but were bound together by dealings, by mutual favours.