Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Perhaps the other women in line did not let themselves understand what this simple act of weeding out meant. It was in fact a statement that no reserved group of so-called ‘industrial prisoners’ was safe in Auschwitz. No cry of Schindlerfrauen! would keep them immune for long. There had been other groups of ‘industrial prisoners’ who had vanished in Auschwitz. General Pohl’s Section W had sent last year some trainloads of skilled Jewish workers from Berlin. I. G. Farben had been in need of labour and was told by Section W to select its workers from these transports. In fact, Section W had suggested to Commandant Höss that the trains should be unloaded in the I. G. Farben works, not near the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of seventeen hundred and fifty male prisoners in the first train, one thousand were immediately gassed. Of four thousand in the next four trainloads, two and a half thousand went at once to the ‘bathhouses’. If the Auschwitz administration would not stay its hand for I. G. Farben and Department W, it was not going to be finicky about the women of some obscure German potmaker.

  In barracks like those the Schindler women lived in, it was like living outdoors. The windows had no glass and served only to put an edge on the blasts of cold air from Russia. Most of the girls had dysentery. Crippled with cramp, they limped in their clogs to the steel drum out in the mud. The woman who tended it did so for an extra bowl of soup. Mila Pfefferberg staggered out one evening, seized with dysentery, and the woman on duty, not a bad woman, a woman Mila had known as a girl, insisted that she could not use the drum but had to wait for the next girl out and then empty it with her help. Mila argued but could not shake the woman. Beneath the hungry stars this tending of the drum had become something like a profession, and there were rules. With the drum as pretext, the woman had come to believe that order, hygiene, sanity were possible.

  The next girl out arrived at Mila’s side, gasping and bent and desperate. But she too was young and, in peaceful days in Lódź, had known the woman at the can as a respectable married woman. So the two girls were obedient and lugged the thing three hundred yards through the mud. The girl who shared the burden asked Mila, “Where’s Schindler now?”

  Not everyone in the barracks asked that question, or asked in that fierce, ironic way. There was twenty-two-year-old Lusia, the widow whose first experience of Schindler beneficence had been hot water from the factory floor of Emalia. She kept saying, “You’ll see, it will all come out. We’ll end up somewhere warm with Schindler’s soup in us.” She did not know herself why she kept repeating such statements. In Emalia she had never been the type to make projections. She’d done her shift, drunk her soup, and slept. She had never predicted grandiose events. Sufficient to her day had always been the survival thereof. Now she was ill and there was no reason for her to be prophetic. The cold and hunger were wasting her, and she too bore the vast obsessions of her hunger. Yet she amazed herself by repeating Oskar’s promises.

  Later in their stay in Auschwitz, when they had been moved to a hut closer to the crematoria and, making their lines of five outside the barracks, did not know if they were to go to the showers or the chambers, Lusia continued pushing the glad message. Even so, the tide of the camp having washed them to this geographic limit of the earth, this pole, this pit, despair wasn’t quite the fashion for the Schindlerfrauen. You would still find women huddled in recipe talk and dreams of pre-war kitchens.

  In Brinnlitz when the men arrived there was only the shell. There were no bunks yet, straw was strewn in the dormitories upstairs. But it was warm, with steam heat from the boilers. There were no cooks that first day. Bags of turnips lay around what would be the cookhouse, and men devoured them raw. Later, soup was brewed and bread baked, and the engineer Finder began the allocating of jobs. But from the start, unless there were SS men looking on, it was all slow. It is mysterious how a body of prisoners could sense that the Herr Direktor was no longer a party to any war effort. The pace of work grew very canny in Brinnlitz. Since Oskar was detached from the question of production, slow work became the prisoners’ vengeance, their declaration.

  It was a heady thing to withhold your labour. Everywhere else in Europe, the slaves worked to the limit of their six hundred calories per day, hoping to impress some foreman and delay the transfer to the death camp. But here in Brinnlitz was the intoxicating freedom to use the shovel at half pace and still survive.

  None of this unconscious policy-making was evident in the first days. There were still too many prisoners fretting for their women. Dolek Horowitz, for example, with a wife and daughter in Auschwitz. The Rosner brothers with their wives. Pfefferberg knew the shock which something as vast, as appalling as Auschwitz would have on Mila. Jacob Sternberg and his teenage son were concerned about Mrs Clara Sternberg. Pfefferberg remembers the men clustering around Schindler on the factory floor and asking him again where the women were.

  “I’m getting them out,” Schindler rumbled. He did not go into explanations. He did not publicly surmise that the SS in Auschwitz might need to be bribed. He did not say that he had sent the list of women to Colonel Erich Lange, or that he and Lange both intended to get them to Brinnlitz according to the list. Nothing of that. Simply, “I’m getting them out.”

  The SS garrison who moved into Brinnlitz in those days gave Oskar some cause to hope. They were middle-aged reservists called up to allow younger SS men a place in the front line. There were not so many lunatics as at Plaszów, and Oskar would always keep them gentle with the specialities of his kitchen – plain food, but plenty. In a visit to their barracks, he made his usual speech about the unique skills of his prisoners, the importance of his manufacturing activities. Anti-tank shells, he said, and casings for a projectile still on the secret list. He asked that there be no intrusion by the garrison into the factory itself, for that would disturb the workers.

  He could see it in their eyes. It suited them, this quiet town. They could imagine themselves lasting out the cataclysm there. They did not want to rampage round the workshops like a Goeth or a Hujar. They didn’t want the Herr Direktor to complain about them.

  Their commanding officer, however, had not yet arrived. He was on his way from the labour camp at Budzyn which had, until the recent Russian advances, manufactured Heinkel bomber parts. He would be younger, sharper, more intrusive, Oskar knew. He might not readily take to being denied access to the camp.

  Among all this pouring of cement floor, the knocking of holes in the roof so that the vast Hilos would fit, the softening of NCOs, amidst the private uneasiness of settling back to married life with Emilie, Oskar was arrested a third time.

  The Gestapo turned up at lunchtime. Oskar was not in his office, in fact had driven to Brno on some business earlier in the morning. A lorry had just arrived at the camp from Cracow laden with some of the Herr Direktor’s portable wealth – cigarettes, cases of vodka, cognac, champagne. Some would later claim that this was Goeth’s property, that Oskar had agreed to bring it into Moravia in return for Goeth’s backing of his Brinnlitz plans. Since Goeth had now been a prisoner for a month and had no more authority, the luxuries on the truck could just as well be considered Oskar’s.

  The men doing the unloading thought so and became nervous at the sight of the Gestapo men in the courtyard. They had mechanics’ privileges and so were able to drive the truck to a stream down the hill, where they threw the drink into the water by the caseful. The two hundred thousand cigarettes on the lorry were hidden more retrievably under the cover of the large transformer in the power plant.

  It is significant that there were so many cigarettes and so much drink in the truck, a sign that Oskar, always keen on trade goods, intended now to make his living on the black market.

  They got the truck back to the garage as the siren for midday soup was blown. In past days the Herr Direktor had eaten with the prisoners, and the mechanics hoped that today he would do so again; they could then explain what had happened to such an expensive truckload.

  He did in fact return from Brno soon after, but was stop
ped at the inner gate by one of the Gestapo men who stood there with his hand raised. The Gestapo men ordered him to leave his car at once.

  “This is my factory,” a prisoner heard Oskar growl back. “If you want to talk to me, you’re welcome to jump in the car. Otherwise follow me to my office.”

  He drove into the courtyard, the two Gestapo men walking quickly on either side of the vehicle.

  In his office, they asked him about his connections with Goeth, with Goeth’s loot. I do have a few suitcases here, he told them. They belong to Herr Goeth. He asked me to keep them for him until his release from prison.

  The Gestapo men asked to see the cases and Oskar took them through to the apartment. He made formal and cold introductions between Frau Schindler and the men from Bureau V. Then he brought out the suitcases and opened them. They were full of Amon’s civilian clothing, and old uniforms from the days when Amon had been a slim SS NCO. When they’d been through them and found nothing, they made the arrest. Emilie became aggressive now. They had no right, she said, to take her husband, unless they could say what they were taking him for. The people in Berlin will not be happy about this, she said.

  Oskar advised her to be silent. But you will have to call my friend Klonowska, he told her, and cancel my appointments.

  Emilie knew what it meant. Klonowska would do her trick with the telephone again, calling Martin Plathe in Breslau, the General Schindler people, all the big guns. One of the Bureau V men took out handcuffs and put them on Oskar’s wrists. They took him to their car, drove him to the station in Zwittau, and escorted him by train to Cracow.

  The impression is that this arrest scared him more than the previous two. There are no stories of lovelorn, handsome SS colonels who shared a cell with him and drank his vodka. Oskar did later record some details, however. As the Bureau V men escorted him from the train across the grand neo-classical loggia of Cracow Central Station, a man named Huth approached them. He had been a civilian engineer in Plaszów. He had always been obsequious in front of Amon, but had a reputation for many secret kindnesses. It may have been an accidental meeting, but suggests that Huth may have been working with Klonowska. Huth insisted on shaking Oskar by his shackled hand. One of the Bureau V men objected. Do you really want to go round shaking hands with prisoners? he asked Huth. The engineer at once made a speech, a testimonial to Oskar. This was the Herr Direktor Schindler, a man greatly respected throughout Cracow, an important industrialist. I can never think of him as a prisoner, said Huth.

  Whatever the significance of this meeting, Oskar was put in a car and taken across the familiar city to Pomorska Street again. They put him in a room like the one he had occupied during his first arrest, a room with a bed and a chair and a washbasin, but with bars on the window. He was not easy there, even though his manner was one of bearlike tranquillity. In 1942, when they had arrested him the day after his thirty-fourth birthday, the rumour that there were torture chambers in the Pomorska cells had been terrifying but indefinite. It wasn’t indefinite any more. He knew that Bureau V would torture him if they wanted Amon badly enough.

  That evening Herr Huth came as a visitor, bringing with him a dinner tray and a bottle of wine. Huth had spoken to Klonowska. Oskar himself would never clarify whether or not Klonowska had pre-arranged that ‘chance’ encounter.

  Whichever it was, Huth now told him that Klonowska was rallying all his old friends.

  The next day he was interrogated by a panel of twelve SS investigators, one of them a judge of the SS Court. Oskar denied that he had given any money to ensure that the commandant would, in the words of the transcript of Amon’s evidence, “go easy on the Jews”. I may have given him the money as a loan, Oskar admitted at one stage. Why would you give him a loan? they wanted to know. “I run an essential war industry,” said Oskar, playing the old tune. “I have a body of skilled labour. If it is disturbed, there is loss to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate, to the war effort. If I found that in the mass of prisoners in Plaszów there was a skilled metalworker of a category I needed, then of course I asked the Herr Commandant for him. I wanted him fast, I wanted him without red tape. My interest was production, its value to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate. In consideration of the Herr Commandant’s help in these matters, I may have given him a loan.”

  This defence involved some disloyalty to his old dinner host, Amon. But Oskar would not have hesitated. His eyes gleaming with transparent frankness, his tone low, his emphasis discreet, Oskar – without saying it in words – let the investigators know that the money had been extorted. It didn’t impress them. They locked him away again.

  The interrogation went into a second, third and fourth day. No one did him harm, but they were steely. At last he had to deny any friendship with Amon at all. It was no great task: he loathed the man profoundly anyhow. “I am not a fairy,” he growled at the gentlemen of Bureau V, falling back on rumours he’d heard about Goeth and his young orderlies.

  Amon himself would never understand that Oskar despised him and was willing to help the case Bureau V had against him. Amon was always deluded about friendship. In sentimental moods, he believed that Mietek Pemper and Helen Hirsch were loving servants. The investigators probably would not have let him know that Oskar was in Pomorska and would have listened mutely to Amon urging them, “Call in my old friend Schindler. He’ll vouch for me.”

  What helped Oskar most when he faced the investigators of Bureau V was that he had had few actual business connections with the man. Though he had sometimes given Amon advice about contacts, he had never had a share in any deal, never made a zloty out of Amon’s sales of prison rations, of rings from the jewellery shop, of garments from the custom tailoring works or furniture from the upholstery section. It must also have helped him that his lies were disarming even to policemen, and that when he told the truth he was positively seductive. He never gave the impression that he was grateful for being believed. For example, when the gentlemen of Bureau V looked as if they might at least give standing room to the idea that the eighty thousand Reichsmarks was a ‘loan’, a sum extorted, Oskar asked them whether in the end the money would be returned to him, to Herr Direktor Schindler, the impeccable industrialist.

  A third factor in Oskar’s favour was that his credentials checked out. Colonel Erich Lange, when telephoned by Bureau V, stressed Schindler’s importance to the conduct of the war. Sussmuth, called in Troppau, said that Oskar’s plant was involved in the production of ‘secret weapons’. It was not, as we will see, an untrue statement. But when said bluntly, it was misleading and carried a distorted weight. For the Führer had promised ‘secret weapons’. The phrase itself was charismatic and extended its protection now to Oskar. Against a phrase like ‘secret weapons’, any confetti of protest from the burghers of Zwittau did not count.

  But even to Oskar it did not seem that the imprisonment was going well. About the fourth day, one of his interrogators visited him, not to question him but to spit at him. The spittle streaked the left breast of his suit. The man ranted at him, calling him a Jew-lover, a fucker of Jewesses. It was a departure from the strange legalism of the interrogations. But Oskar wasn’t sure that it was not planned, that it did not represent the true impetus behind his imprisonment.

  After a week, Oskar sent a message – by way of Huth and Klonowska – to Oberführer Scherner. Bureau V was putting such pressure on him, the message went, that he did not believe he could protect the former police chief much longer. Scherner left his counter-insurgency work (it was soon to kill him) and arrived in Oskar’s cell within a day. It was a scandal what they were doing, said Scherner. What about Amon? Oskar asked, expecting Scherner to say that that was a scandal too. He deserves all he gets, said Scherner. It seemed that everyone was deserting Amon.

  Don’t worry, said Scherner before leaving, we intend to get you out.

  On the morning of the eighth day, they let Oskar out on the street. Oskar did not delay his going nor – for once – did he demand transport. It
was enough to be deposited on the cold pavement. He travelled across Cracow by tram and walked to his old factory premises in Zablocie. A few Polish caretakers were still there, and from the upstairs office he called Brinnlitz and told Emilie that he was free.

  Moshe Bejski, a Brinnlitz draughtsman, remembers the confusion while Oskar was away, the rumours, all the questions about what it meant. But Stern and Maurice Finder, Adam Garde and others had consulted Emilie about food, about work arrangements, about the provision of bunks. They were the first to discover that Emilie was no mere passenger. She was not a happy woman, and her unhappiness was compounded by Bureau V’s arrest of Oskar. It must have seemed cruel that the SS should intrude on this reunion before it had got properly started. But it was clear to Stern and the others that she was not there, keeping house in that little apartment on the ground floor, purely out of wifely duty. There was what you could call an ideological commitment too. A picture of Jesus with his heart exposed and in flames hung on a wall of the apartment. Stern had seen the same design in the houses of Polish Catholics. But there had been no ornament of that kind in either of Oskar’s Cracow apartments. The Jesus of the exposed heart did not always reassure when you saw it in Polish kitchens. In Emilie’s apartment, however, it hung like a promise, a personal one. Emilie’s.

  Early in November, her husband came back by train. He was unshaven and smelly from his imprisonment. He was amazed to find that the women were still in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  In planet Auschwitz, where the Schindler women moved as warily, as full of dread as any space travellers, the commandant was still Rudolf Höss. He was its founder, its builder, its presiding genius. Readers of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice encountered him as the master of Sophie, a very different sort of master than Amon was to Helen Hirsch, a more detached, mannerly and sane man, yet still the unflagging priest of that cannibal province. Though in the 1920s he had murdered a Ruhr schoolteacher for informing on a German activist and had done time for the crime, he never murdered any Auschwitz prisoner by his own hand. He saw himself instead as a technician. As the champion of Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide pellets which gave off fumes when exposed to air, he had engaged in a long personal and scientific conflict with his rival, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who had jurisdiction over Belzec camp and who was the head of the carbon-monoxide school. There had been an awful day at Belzec, which the SS chemical officer Kurt Gerstein had witnessed, when Kommissar Wirth’s method took three hours to finish a party of Jewish males packed into the chambers. That Höss had backed the apposite technology is partially attested to by the continuous growth of Auschwitz and the decline of Belzec.