Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Towards 11 a.m. the next morning, they were taken to the showers. Poldek Pfefferberg, crowded in with the others, considered the nozzle above his head with suspicion, wondering if gas or water would rain down. It would ultimately be water, but before it was turned on, Ukrainian barbers passed among them, shaving their heads, their pubic hair, their armpits. You stood straight, eyes front, while the Ukrainian worked at you with his unhoned razor. “It’s too blunt,” one of the prisoners complained. “No,” said the Ukrainian, and slashed the prisoner’s leg to show that the blade still held a cutting edge.

  After the showers, they were issued with their striped prison clothes and crowded into barracks. The SS sat them in lines, like galley slaves, one man backed up between the legs of the man behind him, his own opened legs giving support to the man in front. By this method, the two thousand men were crammed into three huts. German Kapos, armed with truncheons, sat on chairs against the wall and watched. Men were wedged so tightly – every inch of the floor space covered – that to leave their rows for the latrines, even if the Kapos permitted it, meant walking on heads and shoulders and being cursed for it.

  In the middle of one hut was a kitchen where turnip soup was being made and bread baked. Poldek Pfefferberg, coming back from an unpopular visit to the latrines, found the kitchen was under the supervision of a Polish army NCO he had known at the beginning of the war. The NCO gave Poldek some bread and permitted him to sleep by the kitchen fire. The others however spent their nights wedged in the human chain.

  Each day they were stood at attention on the Appellplatz and remained there in silence for ten hours. In the evenings, however, after the issue of thin soup, they were allowed to walk around the hut, to talk to each other. The blast of a whistle at 9 p.m. was the signal for them to take up their curious positions for the night.

  On the second day, an SS officer came to the Appellplatz looking for the clerk who had drawn up the Schindler list. It had not been sent off from Plaszów, it seemed. Shivering in his coarse prison clothes, Goldberg was led off to an office and asked to type out the list from memory. By the end of the day he had not finished the work and, back in the barracks, was surrounded by a spate of final pleas for inclusion. Here, in the bitter dusk, the list still enticed and tormented, even if all it had done so far for those on it was to bring them to Gröss-Rosen. Pemper and others, moving in on Goldberg, began to pressure him to type Dr Alexander Biberstein’s name on the sheet in the morning. Biberstein was a respected physician, brother of the Marek Biberstein who had once been that first optimistic president of the Cracow Judenrat. Earlier in the week Goldberg had confused Biberstein, telling him that he was on the list. It was not till the trucks were loaded that the doctor found out he was not in the Schindler group. Even in such a place as Gröss-Rosen, Mietek Pemper was sure enough of a future to threaten Goldberg with postwar reprisals if Biberstein were not added.

  Then, on the third day, the eight hundred men of Schindler’s revised list were separated out from the mass on the Appellplatz, taken to the delousing station for yet another wash, permitted to sit a few hours, speculating and chatting like villagers in front of their huts, and marched out once more to the siding. With a small ration of bread, they climbed up into cattle wagons. None of the guards who loaded them admitted to knowing where they were going. They squatted on the floorboards in the galley-slave fashion. They kept fixed before their minds the map of Central Europe, and made continual judgments about the passage of the sun, gauging their direction by glimpses of light through the small wire ventilators near the roofs of the wagons. Olek Rosner was lifted to the ventilator in his wagon and said that he could see forests and mountains. The navigation experts claimed the train was travelling generally south-east. It all indicated a Czech destination, but no one wanted to say.

  This journey of a hundred miles took nearly two days. When the doors opened, it was early morning on the second day. They were at the Zwittau depot. They dismounted and were marched through a town not yet awake, an untouched town, a town frozen in the late 1930s. Even the graffiti on the walls – KEEP THE JEWS OUT OF BRINNLITZ – looked strangely pre-war to them. They had been living in a world where their breath was begrudged. It seemed almost endearingly naïve for the people of Zwittau to begrudge them a mere location.

  Three or four miles out into the hills, following a rail siding, they came to the industrial hamlet of Brinnlitz, and saw ahead in thin morning light the solid bulk of the Hoffman annexe transformed into Arbeitslager (Labour Camp) Brinnlitz, with watchtowers, a wire fence encircling it, a guard barracks inside the wire, and beyond that the gate to the factory and the prisoners’ dormitories.

  As they marched in through the outer gate, Oskar appeared from the factory courtyard, wearing a Tyrolean hat.

  THIRTY-THREE

  This camp, like Emalia, had been equipped at Oskar’s expense. According to the bureaucratic theory, all factory camps were built at the owner’s cost. It was thought that any industrialist got sufficient incentive from the cheap prison labour to justify a small expenditure on wire and timber. In fact, Germany’s darling industrialists, such as Krupp and Farben, built their camps with materials donated from SS enterprises and with a wealth of loaned labour. Oskar was no darling and got nothing. He had been able to lever some wagonloads of SS cement out of Bosch at what Bosch would have considered a discount black-market price. From the same source he got two to three tonnes of petrol and fuel oil for use in the production and delivery of his goods. He had also brought some of the camp fencing wire from Emalia.

  But around the bare premises of the Hoffman annexe, he was required to provide high-tension fences, latrines, a guard barracks for a hundred SS personnel, attached SS offices, a sickroom and kitchens. Adding to the expense, Sturmbannführer Hassebroeck had already been down from Gröss-Rosen for an inspection and gone away with a supply of cognac and porcelainware, and what Oskar described as “tea by the kilogram”. Hassebroeck had also taken away inspection fees and compulsory Winter Aid contributions levied by Section D, and no receipt had been given. “His car had a considerable capacity for these things,” Oskar would later declare. He had no doubt in October 1944 that Hassebroeck was already doctoring the Brinnlitz books.

  Inspectors sent directly by Oranienburg had also to be satisfied. As for the goods and equipment of Deutsche Email Fabrik, much of it still in transit, two hundred and fifty freight cars would be needed before it had all arrived. It was astounding, said Oskar, how in a crumbling state, the Ostbahn officials could, if properly encouraged, find such a number of wagons.

  And the unique aspect of all this, of Oskar himself, jaunty in his mountain hat as he emerged from that frosty courtyard, is that unlike Krupp and Farben and all the other entrepreneurs who kept Jewish slaves, he had no serious industrial intention at all. He had no hopes of production, there were no sales graphs in his head. Though four years ago he had come to Cracow to get rich, he now had no manufacturing ambitions left.

  It was a hectic industrial situation there in Brinnlitz. Many of the presses, drills and lathes had not yet arrived, and new cement floors would have to be poured to take their weight. The annexe was still full of Hoffman’s old machinery. Even so, for these eight hundred supposed armaments workers who had just moved through the gate, Oskar was paying seven and a half Reichsmarks each day per skilled worker, six Reichsmarks per labourer. This would amount to nearly $14,000 US each week for male labour; when the women arrived the bill would top $18,000. Oskar was therefore committing a grand business folly, but celebrated it in a Tyrolean hat.

  Some of Oskar’s attachments had shifted too. Mrs Emilie Schindler had come from Zwittau to live with him in his downstairs apartment. Brinnlitz, unlike Cracow, was too close to home to permit her to excuse their separation. For a Catholic like her, it was now a matter either of formalising the rift or cohabiting again. There seemed to be at least a tolerance between them, a thorough mutual respect. At first sight she might have looked like a marital cipher
, an abused wife who did not know how to get out. Some of the men wondered at first what she would think when she found the sort of factory Oskar kept, the sort of camp. They did not know yet that Emilie would make her own discreet contribution, that it would be based not on conjugal obedience but on her own ideas.

  Ingrid had come with Oskar to Brinnlitz to work in the new plant, but she had taken lodgings outside the camp and was at AL Brinnlitz only for office hours. There was a definite cooling in that relationship, and she would never live with Oskar again. But she would show no animosity, and throughout the coming months Oskar would frequently visit her in the apartment. The racy Klonowska, that chic Polish patriot, stayed behind in Cracow, but again there was no apparent bitterness. Oskar would have contact with her during visits to Cracow and she would again help him when the SS caused trouble. The truth was that though his attachments to Klonowska and Ingrid were winding down in the most fortunate way, without any bitterness, it would have been a mistake to believe that he was turning conjugal.

  Oskar told the men, that day of their arrival, that the women could be confidently expected. He believed they would arrive after scarcely more delay than there had been with the men. The women’s journey was, however, to be different. After a short trip from Plaszów, their locomotive backed them, with some hundreds of other Plaszów women, through the arched gatehouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the car doors opened, they found themselves in that immense concourse bisecting the camp, and practised SS men and women, speaking in neutral tones, began to grade them. The sorting of the people went on with a terrifying detachment. When a woman was slow in moving, she was hit with a truncheon, but the blow had no personal edge to it. It was all a matter of getting the numbers through. For the SS sections at the railside of Birkenau, it was all dutiful tedium. They had already heard every plea, every story. They knew every dodge anyone was ever likely to pull.

  Under the floodlights, the women numbly asked each other what it meant. But even in their daze, their shoes already filling with the mud that was Birkenau’s element, they were aware of SS women pointing to them, and telling uniformed doctors who showed any interest, “Schindlergruppe!” And the spruce young physicians would turn away and leave them alone for a time.

  Feet sticking in the mud, they were marched to the delousing plant and stripped by order of hefty young SS women with truncheons in their hands. Mila Pfefferberg was troubled by rumours of the type most prisoners of the Reich had by now heard – that some shower nozzles gave out a killing gas. These, she was delighted to find, merely produced icy water.

  After their wash, some of them expected to be tattooed. They knew as much as that about Auschwitz. The SS tattooed your arm if they wanted to use you. If they intended to feed you into the machine, however, they did not take the trouble. The same train that had brought the women of the list had brought also some two thousand others who, not being Schindlerfrauen, were put through the normal selections. Rebecca Bau, excluded from the Schindler list, had passed and been given a number, and Josef Bau’s robust mother had also won a tattoo in that preposterous Birkenau lottery. Another Plaszów girl, fifteen years old, had looked at the tattoo she’d been given and been delighted that it had two fives, a three, and two sevens, numbers enshrined in the Tashlag, or Jewish calendar. With a tattoo, you could leave Birkenau and go to one of the Auschwitz labour camps, where there was at least a chance.

  But the Schindler women, left untattooed, were told to dress again and taken to a windowless hut in the women’s camp. There, in the centre of the floor, stood a sheet-iron stove housed in bricks. It was the only comfort. There were no bunks. The Schindlerfrauen were to sleep two or three to a thin straw pallet. The clay floor was damp and water would rise from it like a tide and drench the pallets, the ragged blankets. It was a death house at the heart of Birkenau. They lay there and dozed, frozen and uneasy in that enormous acreage of mud.

  It confounded their imaginings of an intimate location, a village in Moravia. This was a great if unlasting city. On a given day more than a quarter of a million Poles, Gypsies and Jews kept brief residence here. There were thousands more over in Auschwitz I, the first but smaller camp where Commandant Rudolf Höss lived. And in the great industrial area named Auschwitz III, some tens of thousands worked while they could. The Schindler women had not been exactly informed of the statistics of Birkenau or of the Auschwitz duchy in itself. They could see, though, beyond birch trees at the western end of the enormous settlement, constant smoke rising from the four crematoria and the numerous pyres. They believed they were adrift now, and that the tide would take them down there. But not with all the capacity for making and believing rumours that characterises a life in prison would they have guessed how many people could be gassed there on a day the system worked well. According to Höss himself, the number was nine thousand.

  The women were equally unaware that they had arrived in Auschwitz at a time when the progress of the war and certain secret negotiations between Himmler and the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte were imposing a new direction on it. The secret of the extermination centres had not been kept, for the Russians had excavated the Lublin camp and found the furnaces containing human bones, and over five hundred drums of Zyklon B. News of this was published throughout the world, and Himmler, who wanted to be treated seriously as the obvious postwar successor to the Führer, was willing to convey promises to the Allies that the gassing of Jews would stop. He did not, however, issue an order on the matter until some time in October – the date is not certain. One copy went to General Oswald Pohl in Oranienburg, the other to Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Reich Security. Both of them ignored the directive, and so did Adolf Eichmann. Jews from Plaszów, Theresienstadt and Italy continued to be gassed up to the middle of November. The last selection for the gas chambers is believed to have been made on October 30th.

  For the first eight days of their stay in Auschwitz, the Schindler women were in imminent danger of death by gassing. And even after that, as the last victims of the chambers continued throughout November to file towards the western end of Birkenau, and as the ovens and pyres worked on their backlog of corpses, they would not be aware of any change in the essential nature of the camp. All their anxieties would anyway be well founded, for most of those left after the gassing ceased would be shot – as happened to all the crematoria workers – or allowed to die of disease.

  In any case, the Schindler women went through frequent mass medical inspections in both October and November. Some of them had been separated out in the first days and sent off to the huts reserved for the terminally ill. The doctors of Auschwitz – Josef Mengele, Fritz Klein, Dr Konig and Dr Thilo – worked not only on the Birkenau platform but roamed the camp, turning up at rollcalls, invading the showers, asking with a smile, “How old are you, mother?” Mrs Clara Sternberg found herself put aside in a hut for older women. Mrs Lola Krumholz (sixty years old but, until then, passing for much younger) was also cut out of the Schindlergruppe and put in a barracks for the aged where she was meant to die at no expense to the administration. Mrs Horowitz, believing that her thin daughter of eleven years, Niusia, could not survive a ‘bathhouse’ inspection, hustled her into an empty sauna boiler. One of the SS girls who’d been appointed to the Schindler women, the pretty one, the blonde, saw her do it but did not give her away. She was a puncher, that one, short-tempered, and later she would ask Mrs Horowitz for a bribe and get a brooch which Regina had somehow concealed till then. Regina handed it over philosophically. There was another, heavier, gentler one who made lesbian advances and may have required a more personal pay-off.

  Sometimes at rollcall, one or more of the doctors would appear in front of the barracks. Seeing the medical gentlemen, women rubbed clay into their cheeks to induce a little bogus colour. At one such inspection, Regina found stones for her daughter, Niusia, to stand on, and silver-haired young Mengele came to her and asked her a soft-voiced question concerning her daughter’s age and punched her for lying. Women felled lik
e this at inspection were meant to be picked up by the guards while still semi-conscious, dragged to the electrified fence at the edge of the women’s camp, and thrown on it. They had Regina halfway there when she revived and begged them not to fry her alive, to let her return to her line. They released her, and when she crept back into the ranks, there was her bird-boned speechless daughter still, frozen to the pile of stone.

  These inspections could occur at any hour. The Schindler women were called out one night to stand in the mud while their barracks were searched. Mrs Dresner, who had once been saved by a vanished OD boy, came out with her tall teenage daughter, Danka. They stood there in that eccentric mire of Auschwitz which, like the fabled mud of Flanders, would not freeze when everything else had frozen – the roads, the roof-tops, the human traveller.

  Both Danka and Mrs Dresner had left Plaszów in the summer clothing which was all they had left. Danka wore a blouse, a light jacket, a maroon skirt. Since it had begun snowing earlier in the evening, Mrs Dresner had suggested that Danka tear a strip off her blanket and wear it beneath the skirt. Now, in the course of the barrack inspection, the SS discovered the ripped blanket.

  The officer who stood before the Schindler women called out the barracks Alteste – a Dutch woman whom, until yesterday, none of them had known – and said that she was to be shot, together with any other prisoner found with a blanket strip under her dress.

  Mrs Dresner began whispering to Danka. Take it off and I’ll slip it back into the barracks. It was a credible idea. The barracks stood at ground level and no step led up to them. A woman in the rear line might slip backwards through the door. As Danka had obeyed her mother once before in the matter of the wall cavity in Dabrowski Street, Cracow, she obeyed her now, slipping from beneath her dress that strip of Europe’s poorest blanket. While Mrs Dresner was in the hut, the SS officer passed by and idly extracted a woman of Mrs Dresner’s age – it was probably Mrs Sternberg – and had her taken away to some worse part of the camp, some place where there was no Moravian illusion.