Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  That execution had shocked Oskar because it showed that there was no obedience or obeisance a Jew could make to guarantee survival. And now they were burning the Spiras as anonymously, as ungratefully, as they had executed them.

  Even the Gutters! It had happened after a dinner at Amon’s the year before. Oskar had gone home early, but later heard what had happened after he left. John and Neuschel had started in on Bosch. They thought he was squeamish. He’d made a fuss about being a veteran of the trenches. But they had not seen him perform any executions. They kept it going for hours – the joke of the evening. In the end, Bosch had ordered David Gutter and his son roused in their barracks and Mrs Gutter and the Gutter girl fetched from theirs. Again, it was a matter of faithful servants. David Gutter had been the last president of the Judenrat and had cooperated in everything, had never gone to Pomorska Street and tried to start any argument over the scope of the SS Aktions or the size of transports sent to Belzec. Gutter had signed everything and thought every German demand reasonable. Besides that, Bosch had used Gutter as an agent inside and outside Plaszów, sending him up to Cracow with truckloads of newly upholstered furniture or pocketfuls of jewellery to sell on the black market. And Gutter had done it partly because he was a scoundrel anyhow, but mainly because he believed it would make his wife and children immune.

  At two o’clock that polar morning, a Jewish policeman, Zauder, a friend of Pfefferberg and of Stern, later to be shot by Pilarzik during one of that officer’s drunken rampages, on duty at the women’s gate that night, heard it – Bosch ordering the Gutters into position in a depression in the ground near the women’s camp, the children pleading, but David and Mrs Gutter taking it calmly, knowing there was no argument. And now as Oskar watched, all of that evidence – the Gutters, the Spiras, the rebels, the priests, the children, the pretty girls found on Aryan papers – all of it was returning to that mad hill to be obliterated in case the Russians came to Plaszów and made too much of it.

  Care, said Oranienburg in a letter to Amon, is to be taken in the future over the disposal of all bodies, and for that purpose they were sending a representative of a Hamburg engineering firm to survey the site for crematoria. In the meantime, the dead were to be kept, awaiting retrieval, at well-marked burial sites.

  When, on that second visit, Oskar saw the extent of the fires on Chujowa Górka, his first impulse was to stay in the car, that sane German mechanism, and drive home. Instead he went calling on friends of his in the workshop, and then visited Stern’s office. He thought that with all that grit falling on the windows, it wasn’t out of the question that people inside Plaszów would consider suicide. Yet he was the one who seemed depressed. He didn’t ask any of his usual questions, such as, “All right, Herr Stern, if God made man in his image, which race is most like him? Is a Pole more like him than a Czech?” There was none of that whimsy today. Instead he growled, “What does everyone think?” Stern told him that the prisoners were like prisoners. They did their work and hoped for survival.

  “I’m going to get you out,” Oskar grunted all at once. He put a balled fist on the desk. “I’m going to get you all out.”

  “All?” asked Stern. He couldn’t help himself. Such massive biblical rescues didn’t suit the era.

  “You, anyhow,” said Oskar. “You.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  In Amon’s office in the Administration Block there were two typists. One was a German girl called Frau Kochmann, the other the studious young prisoner, Mietek Pemper. Pemper would one day become secretary to Oskar, but in the summer of 1944 he still worked with Amon, and like anyone else in that situation was not too sanguine about his chances.

  He first came into close contact with Amon as accidentally as had Helen Hirsch the maid. Pemper was summoned to Amon’s office after someone had recommended him to the commandant. The young prisoner was a student of accounting, a touch typist, and could take dictation in both Polish and German. His powers of memory were said to be prodigious. Therefore, captive of his own skills, Pemper found himself in Plaszów’s main office with Amon, and would also sometimes go to the villa to take dictation from the commandant there.

  The irony was that, in the end – out of all the prisoners’ testimony – it would be Pemper’s photographic memory that would most effectively bring about Amon’s hanging.

  Pemper was meant to be the second typist. For confidential documents, Amon was to use his German secretary, Frau Kochmann, a girl not nearly as competent as Mietek and slow at dictation. Sometimes Amon would break the rule and let young Pemper take confidential dictation. And Mietek, even while he sat across Amon’s desk with the pad on his knee, could not stop contradictory suspicions from distracting him. The first was that all these inside reports and memoranda, whose details he was storing in his remarkable mind, would make him a prime witness on the remote day when he and Amon stood before a tribunal. The other suspicion was that Amon would, in the end, have to erase him as one would a classified tape.

  Nonetheless, each morning Mietek prepared not only his own sets of typing paper, carbons and duplicates, but a dozen for the German girl. After the girl had done her typing, Pemper would undertake to destroy the carbons but, in fact, would keep and read them. He kept no written records, but he had had this reputation for memory since schooldays. He knew that if that tribunal ever met, if he and Amon sat in the body of the court, he would astound the commandant with the exact dating of his evidence.

  Pemper saw some astonishing and classified documents. He read, for example, memoranda on the flogging of women. Camp commanders were to be reminded that it should be done to maximum effect. It was demeaning to involve SS personnel, and therefore Czech women were to be flogged by Slovak women, Slovaks by Czechs. Russians and Poles were to be bracketed for the same purposes. Commandants were to use their imagination in exploiting other national and cultural differences.

  Another bulletin reminded them that they did not hold in their own persons the right to impose the death sentence. Commandants could seek authorisation by telegram or letter to the Reich Security Main Office. Amon had done this in the spring with two Jews who’d escaped from the subcamp at Wieliczka and whom he had proposed to hang. A telegram signifying permission had returned from Berlin, signed, Pemper noticed, by Dr Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office.

  Now, in April, Pemper read a memorandum from Gerhard Maurer, the Labour Allocation Chief of General Glücks’s Section D. Maurer wanted Amon to tell him how many Hungarians could be held temporarily at Plaszów. They were meant ultimately to go to the German Armament Works, DAW, which was a subsidiary of Krupp making artillery shell fuses in the enormous complex at Auschwitz. Given that Hungary had only recently been taken over as a German Protectorate, these Hungarian Jews and dissidents were in a better state of health than those who had had years of ghetto-isation and prison life. They were therefore a windfall for the factories in Auschwitz. Unfortunately, accommodation at DAW was not yet ready for them, and if the commandant of Plaszów would take up to seven thousand, pending the proper arrangements, Section D would be extremely grateful.

  Goeth’s answer, either seen or typed by Pemper, was that Plaszów was up to capacity and that there was no building space left inside the electric fences. However, Amon could accept up to ten thousand transit prisoners if (A) he were permitted to liquidate the unproductive element inside the camp; and (B) he were at the same time to impose double-bunking, the crowding of two sleepers into one bed space. Maurer wrote in reply that double-bunking could not be permitted in summer for fear of typhus, and that, ideally, according to the regulations, each prisoner should have a minimum three cubic metres of air per person. But he was willing to authorise Goeth to undertake the first option. Section D would advise Auschwitz-Birkenau – or at least the extermination wing of that great enterprise – to expect a shipment of reject prisoners from Plaszów. At the same time, transport would be arranged with the Ostbahn, which would run cattle wagons up the spur from
the main line to the very gate of Plaszów.

  Amon therefore had to conduct a sorting out process inside his camp.

  With the blessing of Maurer and Section D, he would in a day abolish as many lives as Oskar Schindler was, by wit and hectic spending, harbouring in Emalia. Amon named his selection session Die Gesundheitaktion, the Health Action.

  He managed it as one would manage a county fair. When it began, on the morning of Sunday, May 7th, the Appellplatz was hung with banners: For Every Prisoner, Appropriate Work! Loudspeakers played ballads and Strauss and love songs. Beneath them was set a table where Dr Blancke, the SS physician, sat with Dr Leon Gross and a number of clerks. Blancke’s concept of health was as eccentric as that of any doctor in the SS. He had rid the prison clinic of the chronically ill by injecting benzine into the bloodstream. These injections could not by anyone’s definition be called mercy killings. The patient was seized by convulsions which ended in a choking death after a quarter of an hour. Marek Biberstein, once president of the Judenrat and now, after his two years’ imprisonment, a citizen of Plaszów, had suffered heart failure and been brought to the Krankenstube. Before Blancke could get to him with a syringe of benzine, Dr Idek Schindel, uncle of that Genia whose distant figure had galvanised Schindler two years past, had come to Biberstein’s bedside with a number of colleagues. One had injected a more merciful dose of cyanide.

  Today, flanked by the filing cabinets of the entire prison population, Blancke would assess the health of the prisoners a barrack at a time, and when he finished with one battery of cards it would be taken away and replaced by the next.

  As they reached the Appellplatz, prisoners were told to strip. They were lined up naked and run back and forth in front of the doctors. Blancke and Leon Gross, the collaborating Jewish physician, would make notations on the cards, point at this prisoner, call on that one to verify his name. Back the prisoners would run, the physicians looking for signs of disease or muscular weakness. It was an odd and humiliating exercise. Men with dislocated backs (Pfefferberg, for example, whose back Hujar had thrown out with the blow of a whip handle), women with chronic diarrhoea, red cabbage rubbed into their cheeks to give them colour – all of them running for their lives and understanding that it was so. Young Mrs Kinstlinger, who’d sprinted for Poland at the Berlin Olympics, knew that all that had been just a game. This was the true contest. With your stomach turning and your breath thin, you ran – beneath the throb of the lying music – for your golden life.

  No prisoner found out the results until the following Sunday when, under the same banners and band music, the mass of inmates was again assembled. As names were read out and the rejects of the Gesundheitaktion were marched to the eastern end of the square, there were cries of outrage and bewilderment. Amon had expected a riot and had sought the help of the Wehrmacht garrison of Cracow, who were on stand-by in case of a prison uprising. Nearly three hundred children had been discovered during the inspection the previous Sunday, and as they were now dragged away the protests and wailings of parents were so loud that most of the garrison, together with security police detachments called in from Cracow, had to be thrown into the cordon separating the two groups. This confrontation lasted for hours, the guards forcing back surges of demented parents and telling the usual lies to those who had relatives among the rejects. Nothing had been announced, but everyone knew that those down there had failed the test and had no future. Blurred by waltzes and comic songs from the loudspeakers, a pitiable babel of messages was shouted from one group to the other. Henry Rosner, himself in torment, his son Olek in fact hidden somewhere in the camp, had the bizarre experience of facing a young SS man who, with tears in his eyes, denounced what was happening and made a pledge to volunteer for the Eastern Front. But officers yelled that unless people showed a little discipline, they would order their men to open fire. Perhaps Amon hoped that a justifiable outbreak of shooting would further reduce overcrowding.

  At the end of the process, one thousand, four hundred adults and two hundred and sixty-eight children stood, fenced by weapons, at the eastern rim of the Appellplatz, ready for speedy shipment to Auschwitz. Pemper would see and memorise the figures, which Amon would consider disappointing. Though it was not the number for which Amon had hoped, it would create immediate room for a large temporary intake of Hungarians.

  In Dr Blancke’s card index system, the children of Plaszów had not been as precisely registered as the adults. Many of them chose to spend both these Sundays in hiding, both they and their parents knowing instinctively that their age and the absence of their names and other details from the camp’s documentation would make them obvious targets of the selection process.

  Olek Rosner hid in the ceiling of a hut on the second Sunday. There were two other children with him all day above the rafters, and all day they kept the discipline of silence, all day held their bladders among the lice and the little packages of prisoners’ belongings and the rooftop rats. For the children knew as well as any adult that the SS and the Ukrainians were wary of the spaces above the ceiling. They believed them typhus-ridden, and had been informed by Dr Blancke that it took but a fragment of louse faeces in a crack in your skin to bring on epidemic typhus. Some of Plaszów’s children had been housed for months near the men’s prison in the hut marked ‘Achtung Typhus’. This Sunday, for Olek Rosner, Amon’s health Aktion was far more perilous than typhus-bearing lice.

  Other children, some of the two hundred and sixty-eight separated out of the mass that day, had in fact begun the Aktion in hiding. Each Plaszów child, with that same toughness of mind which had kept Olek Rosner motionless and silent in the ceiling, had chosen favourite hiding places. Some favoured depressions beneath huts, some the laundry, some a shed behind a garage. Many of these hideouts had been discovered either this Sunday or last, and no longer offered refuge.

  A further group had been brought without suspicion to the Appellplatz. There were parents who knew this or that NCO. It was as Himmler had once complained, for even SS Oberscharführers who did not flinch in the act of execution, had their favourites, as if the place were a school playground. If there were a question about the children, some parents thought, you could appeal to an SS man who knew you.

  The previous Sunday a thirteen-year-old orphan thought he’d be safe because he had, at other rollcalls, passed for a young man. But naked, he wasn’t able to argue away the childlikeness of his body. He had been told to dress and been marked down for the children’s group. Now as parents at the other end of the Appellplatz keened for their rounded-up children, and while the loudspeakers brayed forth a sentimental song called Mammi, kauf mir ein Pferdchen (Mummy, buy me a pony), the boy simply passed from one group to another, moved with that infallible instinct which had once characterised the movement of the red-capped child in Plac Zgody. And as with Redcap, no one had seen him. He stood, a plausible adult among the others, as the hateful music roared and his heart sought to beat its way through his rib cage. Then, faking the cramps of diarrhoea, he asked a guard to let him go to the latrine.

  The long latrines lay beyond the men’s camp, and arriving there the boy stepped over the plank on which men sat while defecating. An arm either side of the pit, he lowered himself, trying to find knee and toe-holds in either wall. The stench blinded him and flies invaded his mouth and ears and nostrils. As he entered the larger foulness and touched the bottom of the pit, he seemed to hear what he believed to be a hallucinatory murmur of voices behind the rage of flies. Were they behind you? said one voice. And another said, Dammit, this is our place!

  There were ten children in there with him.

  Amon’s report, which Mietek Pemper saw over Frau Kochmann’s shoulder that Monday morning, made use of the compound word Sonderbehandlung – Special Treatment. It was a term that would become famous in later years, but this was the first time that Pemper had come across it. Of course, it had a sedative, even medical ring, but Mietek could tell by now that medicine was not involved.

&nbs
p; A telegram Amon dictated that morning to be transmitted to Auschwitz gave more than a hint of its meaning. Amon explained that to make escape more difficult he had insisted that those selected for Sonderbehandlung should drop any remnants of civilian clothing they still possessed at the rail siding and should put on striped prison clothes there. Since, throughout the system, a great shortage of such garments prevailed the stripes in which the Plaszów candidates for Sonderbehandlung turned up at Auschwitz should be sent back at once to KL Plaszów for re-use.

  And all the children left in Plaszów, of whom the greatest number were those who had shared the latrine with the tall orphan, hid out or impersonated adults until later searches discovered them and took them to the Ostbahn for the slow day’s journey sixty kilometres to Auschwitz. The rolling stock was used that way all through high summer, taking troops and supplies east to the stalemated lines near Lwów and, on the return trip, wasting time at sidings while SS doctors watched ceaseless lines of the naked run before them.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Oskar, sitting in Amon’s office, the windows flung open to a breathless summer’s day, had the impression from the start that this meeting was a fake. Perhaps Madritsch and Bosch felt the same, for their gaze kept drifting away from Amon towards the limestone trolleys outside the window, towards any passing truck or wagon. Only Untersturmführer Leo John, who took notes, felt the need to sit up straight and keep his top button done up.

  Amon had described it as a security conference. Though the front had now been stabilised, he said, the advance of the Russian centre to the suburbs of Warsaw had encouraged partisan activity all over the Government General. Jews who heard of it were encouraged to attempt escapes. Of course they did not know, Amon pointed out, that they were better off behind the wire than exposed to those Jew killers, the Polish partisans. In any case, everyone had to beware of partisan attack from outside and, worst of all, of collusion between the partisans and the prisoners.