Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Bosko had gone to the forest because he had no other option. He lacked the financial resources with which Oskar greased the system. But it accorded with the natures of both men that one be found with nothing but a cast-off rank and uniform and the other would make certain he had cash and trade goods. It is not to praise Bosko or denigrate Schindler that one says that if ever Oskar suffered martyrdom, it would be by accident, because some business he had on hand had turned sour on him. But there were people who still drew breath – the Wohlfeilers, the Danziger brothers, Lamus – because Oskar worked that way. Because Oskar worked that way, the unlikely camp of Emalia stood in Lipowa Street, and there, on most days, a thousand were safe from seizure, and the SS stayed outside the wire. No one was beaten there, and the soup was thick enough to sustain life. In proportion to their natures, the moral disgust of both Party members, Bosko and Schindler, was equal, even if Bosko manifested his by leaving his empty uniform on a coat-hanger in Podgórze, while Oskar put on his big Party pin and went to deliver high-class booze to mad Amon in Plaszów.

  It was late afternoon, and Oskar and Goeth sat in the salon of Goeth’s white villa. Goeth’s girlfriend Majola looked in, a small-boned woman, a secretary at the Wagner factory in town. She did not spend all her days in the excessive air of Plaszów. She had sensitive manners, and this delicacy helped a rumour to emerge, that Majola had threatened not to sleep with Goeth if he continued gunning people down. But no one knew whether that was the truth or just one of those therapeutic interpretations that arise in the minds of prisoners desperate to make the earth habitable.

  Majola did not stay long with Amon and Oskar that afternoon. She could tell there would be a drinking session. Helen Hirsch, pale and in black, brought them the necessary accompaniments – cakes, canapés, sausage. She reeled with exhaustion. Last night Amon had beaten her for preparing food for Majola without his permission, this morning he had made her run up and down the villa’s three flights of stairs fifty times on the double because of a fly speck on one of the pictures in the corridor. She had heard certain rumours about Herr Schindler but had not met him until now. This afternoon she took no comfort from the sight of these two big men, seated either side of the low table, fraternal and in apparent concord. There was nothing here to interest her, for the certainty of her own death was a first premise. She thought only about the survival of her young sister, who worked in the camp’s general kitchen. She kept a sum of money hidden in the hope that it would effect her sister’s survival. There was no sum, she believed, no deal, that could influence her own prospects.

  So they drank through the camp’s twilight and into the dark. Long after the prisoner Tosia Lieberman’s nightly rendition of Brahms’s Lullaby had calmed the women’s camp and insinuated itself between the timbers of the men’s, the two big men sat on. Their prodigious livers glowed hot as furnaces. And at the right hour, Oskar leaned across the table and acting out of an amity which, even with this much cognac aboard, did not go beyond the surface of the skin, was merely a sort of frisson, a phantom shiver of brotherhood running along the pores, nothing more – Oskar, leaning towards Amon and cunning as a demon, began to tempt him towards restraint.

  Amon took it well. It seemed to Oskar that he was attracted by the thought of moderation – a temptation worthy of an emperor. Amon could imagine a sick slave on the trolleys, a returning prisoner from Kabelwerke, staggering – in that put-upon way one found so hard to tolerate – under a load of clothing or timber picked up at the prison gate. And the fantasy ran with a strange warmth in Amon’s belly that he would forgive that laggard, that pathetic actor. As Caligula might have been tempted to see himself as Caligula the Good, so the image of Amon the Good exercised the commandant’s imagination for a time. He would, in fact, always have a weakness for it. Tonight, his blood running golden with cognac and nearly all the camp asleep beyond his steps, Amon was more definitely seduced by mercy than by the fear of reprisal. But in the morning he would remember Oskar’s warning and combine it with the day’s news, that Russian threats were developing to the front at Kiev. Stalingrad had been an inconceivable distance from Plaszów. But the distance to Kiev was imaginable.

  For some days after Oskar’s bout with Amon, news came to Emalia that the double temptation of mercy and discretion was having its result with the commandant. Dr Sedlacek, going back to Budapest, would report to Samu Springmann that Amon had given up, for the time being at least, arbitrarily murdering people. And gentle Samu, among the diverse cares he had in the list of places from Dachau and Drancy in the west to Sobibor and Belzec in the east, hoped for a time that the hole at Plaszów had been plugged. But the allure of clemency vanished quickly. If there was a brief respite, those who were to survive and give testimony of their days in Plaszów would not be aware of it. The summary assassinations would seem continual to them. If Amon did not appear on his balcony this morning or the next, it did not mean he would not appear the morning after that. It took much more than Goeth’s temporary non-appearance to give even the most deluded prisoner some hope of a fundamental change in the commandant’s nature. And then, in any case, there he would be, on the steps in the Austrian-style cap he wore to murders, looking through his binoculars for a culprit.

  Dr Sedlacek would return to Budapest not only with overly hopeful news of a reform in Amon but with more reliable data on the camp at Plaszów.

  One afternoon a guard from Emalia turned up at Plaszów to summon Stern to Zablocie. Once Stern arrived at the front gate, he was led upstairs into Oskar’s new apartment. There Oskar introduced him to two men in good suits. One was Dr Sedlacek, the other a Jew – equipped with a Swiss passport – who introduced himself as Babar. My dear friend, Oskar told Stern, I want you to write as full a report on the situation in Plaszów as you can manage in an afternoon. Stern had never seen Sedlacek or Babar before this and thought that Oskar was being indiscreet. He bent over his hands, murmuring that before he undertook a task like that he would like a word in private with the Herr Direktor.

  Oskar used to say that Itzhak Stern could never make a straight statement or request unless it arrived smuggled under a baggage of talk of the Babylonian Talmud and purification rites. But now he was more direct. “Tell me please, Herr Schindler,” he asked, “don’t you believe this is a dreadful risk?”

  Oskar exploded. Before he got control of himself, the strangers would have heard him in the other room. “Do you think I’d ask you, if there was a risk?” Then he calmed and said, “There’s always risk, as you know better than I. But not with these two men. These two are safe.”

  In the end Stern spent all afternoon on his report. He was a scholar and accustomed to writing in exact prose. The rescue organisation in Budapest, the Zionists in Istanbul would receive from Stern a report they could rely on. Multiply Stern’s summary by the seventeen hundred large and small forced labour camps of Poland and then you had a tapestry to stun the world.

  Sedlacek and Oskar wanted more than that of Stern. On the morning after his binge with Amon, Oskar dragged his heroic liver back out to Plaszów before office-opening time. In between the suggestions of tolerance Oskar had tried to drop in Amon’s ear the night before, he’d also got a written permit to take two ‘brother-industrialists’ on a tour of this model industrialist community. Oskar brought the two captains of manufacture into the grey Administration Building that morning and demanded the services of Haftling (prisoner) Itzhak Stern for a tour of the camp. Sedlacek’s friend Babar had some sort of miniature camera, but he carried it openly in his hand. It was almost possible to believe that if an SS man had challenged him, he would have welcomed the chance to stand and boast for five minutes about this little gadget he’d got on a recent business trip to Brussels or Stockholm.

  As Oskar and the visitors from Budapest emerged from the Administration Building, Oskar took the thin clerkly Stern by the shoulder. His friends would be happy to see the workshops and the living quarters, said Oskar. But if there was anything Stern thought t
hey were missing out on, he was just to bend down and tie his shoestring.

  On Goeth’s great road they moved past the SS barracks. Here, almost at once, prisoner Stern’s shoestring needed tying. Sedlacek’s associate snapped the teams hauling truckloads of rock up from the quarry, while Stern murmured, “Forgive me, gentlemen.” Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments that paved the road. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859–1927), of Matylde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of ninety in 1912, of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911, of Rozia Groder, a thirteen-year-old who had passed on in 1931, of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honourable dead had been made into paving stones.

  Moving on, they passed the Puffhaus, the SS and Ukrainian brothel staffed by Polish girls, before reaching the quarry, the excavations running back into the limestone cliff. Stern’s shoelaces required reef knots here; he wanted this recorded. They destroyed men at this rock face, working them on the hammers and wedges. None of the scarred men of the quarry parties showed any curiosity towards their visitors this morning. Ivan, Amon Goeth’s Ukrainian driver, was on duty here, and the supervisor was a bullet-headed German criminal called Erik. Erik had already demonstrated a capacity for murdering families, having killed his own mother, father, sister. He might by now have hanged or at least been put in a dungeon if the SS had not realised that there were worse criminals still than patricides and that Erik should be employed as a stick to beat them with. As Stern had mentioned in his report, a Cracow physician called Edward Goldblatt had been sent here from the clinic by SS Dr Blancke and his Jewish protégé, Dr Leon Gross. Erik loved to see a man of culture and speciality enter the quarry and report soft-handed for work, and in Goldblatt’s case the beatings began with the first display of uncertainty in handling the hammer and spikes. Over a period of days, Erik and sundry SS and Ukrainian rankers beat Goldblatt. The doctor was forced to work with a ballooning face, now half again its normal size, with one eye sealed up. No one knew what error of quarry technique set Erik to give Dr Goldblatt his final beating. Long after the doctor lost consciousness, Erik permitted him to be carried to the Krankenstube where Dr Leon Gross refused to admit him. With this medical sanction Erik and an SS enlisted man continued to boot the dying Goldblatt as he lay, rejected for treatment, on the threshold of the hospital.

  Stern bent and tied his shoelace at the quarry because, like Oskar and some others in the Plaszów complex, he believed in a future of judges who might ask, Where – in a word – did this act occur?

  That morning Oskar was able to give his colleagues an overview of the camp, taking them up to Chujowa Górka where the bloodied wheelbarrows used to transport the dead to the woods stood unabashedly at the mouth of the fort. Already thousands were buried down there in mass graves in or on the verges of those eastern pinewoods. When the Russians came from the east, that wood with its population of victims would fall to them before half-dying Plaszów.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  To some people it now seemed that Oskar was spending like a man with a gambling madness. Even from the little they knew of him, his prisoners could sense that he would ruin himself for them if that was the price. Later – not now, for now they accepted his mercies in the same spirit in which a child accepts Christmas presents from its parents – they would say, Thank God he was more faithful to us than to his wife. And like the prisoners, sundry officials could also sniff out Oskar’s passion.

  One such official, Dr Sopp, physician to the SS prisons in Cracow and to the SS Court in Pomorska, let Herr Schindler know through a Polish messenger that he was willing to do a brand of business. In Montelupich prison was a woman named Frau Helene Schindler. Dr Sopp knew she was no relative of Oskar’s, but her husband had invested some money in Emalia. She had questionable Aryan papers. Dr Sopp did not need to say that for Mrs Schindler this portended a truck ride to Chujowa Górka. But if Oskar would put up certain amounts, said Sopp, the doctor was willing to issue a medical certificate saying that, in view of her condition, Mrs Schindler should be permitted to take the cure indefinitely at Marienbad, down in Bohemia.

  Oskar went to Sopp’s office, where he found out that the doctor wanted fifty thousand zloty for the certificate. It was no use arguing. After three years of practice, a man like Sopp could tell to within a few zloty the price to put on favours. During the afternoon, Oskar found the money. Sopp knew he could, knew that Oskar was the sort of man who had black-market money stashed, money with no recorded history.

  Before making the payment, Oskar set some conditions. He would need to go to Montelupich with Dr Sopp to collect the woman from her cell. He would himself deliver her to mutual friends in the city. Sopp did not object. Under a bare light bulb in freezing Montelupich, Mrs Schindler was handed her costly documents.

  A more careful man, a man with an accountant’s mind, might reasonably have repaid himself for his trouble from the money Sedlacek brought from Budapest. Altogether, Oskar would be handed nearly a hundred and fifty thousand Reichsmarks carried to Cracow as before in false-bottomed suitcases and in the lining of clothes. But Oskar, partly because his sense of money (whether owed or owing) was so inexact, partly because of his sense of honour, passed on to his Jewish contacts all the money he ever received from Sedlacek, except for the sum spent on Amon’s cognac.

  It was not always a straightforward business. When in the summer of 1943 Sedlacek arrived in Cracow with fifty thousand Reichsmarks, the Zionists inside Plaszów to whom Oskar offered the cash feared it might be a frame-up.

  Oskar first approached Henry Mandel, a welder in the Plaszów garage and a member of Hitach Dut, a Zionist youth and labour movement. Mandel did not want to touch the money. Look, said Schindler, I’ve got a letter in Hebrew to go with it, a letter from Palestine. But, of course, if it was a frame-up, if Oskar had been compromised and was being used, he would have a letter from Palestine; and when you hadn’t enough bread for breakfast, it was quite a sum to be offered, fifty thousand Reichsmarks, a hundred thousand zloty. To be offered that for your discretionary use. It just wasn’t credible.

  Schindler then tried to pass the money, which was sitting there, inside the boundary of Plaszów in the trunk of his car, to another member of Hitach Dut, a woman named Alta Rubner. She had some contacts, through prisoners who went to work in the cable factory, through some of the Poles in the Polish prison, with the underground in Sosnowiec. Perhaps, she said to Mandel, it would be best to refer the whole business to the underground, and let them decide on the provenance of the money Herr Oskar Schindler was offering.

  Oskar kept trying to persuade her, raising his voice at her under cover of the chattering sewing machines in the Madritsch factory. “I guarantee with all my heart that this isn’t a trap!” With all my heart. Exactly the sentiment one would expect from an agent provocateur!

  Yet after Oskar had gone away and Mandel had spoken to Stern, who declared the letter authentic, and then conferred again with the girl, a decision was made to take the money. They found now, however, that Oskar wouldn’t be back with it. Mandel went to Marcel Goldberg at the Administration Office. Goldberg had also been a member of Hitach Dut but, after becoming the clerk in charge of lists, of labour and transport lists, of the lists of living and dead, he had begun taking bribes. Mandel could put pressure on him, though. One of the lists Goldberg could draw up – or at least add to and subtract from – was the list of those who went to Emalia to collect scrap metal for use in the workshops of Plaszów. For old times’ sake, and without having to disclose his reasons for wanting to visit Emalia, Mandel was put on this list.

  But arriving in Zablocie and sneaking away from the scrap detail to get to Oskar, he’d been blocked in the front office by Bankier. Herr Schindler was too busy, said Bankier.

  A week later Mandel was back. Again Bankier wouldn’t let him in to speak to Oskar. The third time Bankie
r was more specific. You want that Zionist money? You didn’t want it before. And now you want it. Well, you can’t have it. That’s the way life goes, Mr Mandel!

  Mandel nodded and left. He presumed that Bankier had already lifted at least a fraction of the cash. In fact Bankier was being careful. The money did finish in the hands of Zionist prisoners in Plaszów – Alta Rubner’s receipt for the funds was delivered to Springmann by Sedlacek. It seems that the amount was used in part to help Jews from cities other than Cracow and who therefore had no local sources of support.

  Whether the funds that came to Oskar and were passed on by him were spent mainly on food, as Stern would have preferred, or largely on underground resistance – the purchase of passes or weapons – is a question that Oskar never examined. None of this money however went to buy Mrs Schindler out of Montelupich prison or to save the lives of such people as the Danziger brothers. Nor was the Sedlacek money used to replace the thirty thousand kilos of enamelware which Oskar would pay out to major and minor SS officials during 1943 to prevent them from recommending the closure of the Emalia camp.

  None of it was spent on the sixteen thousand zloty set of gynaecological instruments that Oskar had to buy on the black market when one of the Emalia girls fell pregnant, pregnancy being, of course, an immediate ticket to Auschwitz. Nor did any of it go to purchase the broken-down Mercedes from Untersturmführer John. John offered Oskar the Mercedes for sale at the same time as Oskar presented a request for thirty Plaszów people to be transferred to Emalia. The car, bought by Oskar one day for twelve thousand zloty, was requisitioned the next by Leo John’s friend and brother officer, Untersturmführer Scheidt, to be used in the construction of field works on the camp perimeter. Perhaps they’ll carry soil in the trunk, Oskar raged to Ingrid at the supper table. In a later informal account of the incident, he commented that he was glad to be of assistance to both gentlemen.