Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Biberstein did not have to give Oskar too much home instruction in the facts of typhus. Typhus was carried by louse bite. The prisoners were infested by uncontrollable populations of lice. The disease took perhaps two weeks to incubate. It might be incubating now in a dozen, a hundred prisoners. Even with the new bunks installed, people still lay too close. Lovers passed the virulent lice to each other when they joined, fast and secret, in some hidden corner of the factory. The typhus lice were wildly migratory. It seemed now that their energy would put paid to Oskar’s.

  So that when Oskar ordered a delousing unit – showers, a laundry to boil clothes, a disinfection plant – to be built upstairs, it was no idle administrative order. The unit was to run on hot steam piped up from the cellars. The welders were to work double shifts on the project. They did it with a will, for willingness characterised the secret industries of Brinnlitz. Official industry might be symbolised by the Hilo machines rising from the new-poured workshop floor. It was in the prisoners’ interests and in Oskar’s, as Moshe Bejski later observed, that these machines be properly erected, since it gave the camp a convincing front. But the uncertified industries of Brinnlitz were the ones that counted. The women knitted clothing with wool looted from Hoffman’s left-behind bags. They paused and began to look industrial only when an SS officer or NCO passed through the factory on his way to the Herr Direktor’s office, or when Fuchs and Schoenbrun, the inept civilian engineers (“Not up to the weight of our engineers,” a prisoner would later say) came out of their offices.

  The Brinnlitz Oskar was still the Oskar old Emalia hands remembered. A bon vivant, a man of wild habits. Mandel and Pfefferberg, at the end of their shift and overheated from working on the pipe fittings for the steam, visited a water tank high up near the workshop ceiling. Ladders and a catwalk took them to it. The water was warm up there, and once you climbed in, you could not be seen from the floor. Dragging themselves up, the two welders were amazed to find the tub already taken. Oskar floated, naked and enormous. A blonde SS girl, the one Regina Horowitz had bribed with a brooch, her naked breasts buoyant at the surface, shared the water with him. Oskar became aware of them, looked up at them frankly. To him sexual shame was a concept, something like existentialism, very worthy but hard to grasp. Stripped, the welders noticed, the girl was delicious.

  They apologised and left, shaking their heads, expelling their breath, laughing like schoolboys. Above their heads, Oskar dallied like Zeus.

  When the epidemic did not develop, Biberstein thanked the Brinnlitz delousing unit. When the dysentery faded, he thanked the food. In a testimony in the archives of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, Biberstein declares that at the beginning of the camp, the daily ration was in excess of two thousand calories. In all the miserable winter-bound continent, only the Jews of Brinnlitz were fed this living meal. Among the millions, only the soup of the Schindler thousand had body.

  There was porridge too. Down the road from the camp, by the stream into which Oskar’s mechanics had recently dumped black-market drink, stood a mill. Armed with a work pass, a prisoner could stroll down there on an errand from one or other department of Deutsche Email Fabrik. Mundek Korn remembers coming back to the camp loaded with food. At the mill you simply tied your trousers at the ankles and loosened your belt. Your friend then shovelled your trousers full of oatmeal. You belted up again and returned to the camp – a grand repository, priceless as you walked, a little bandylegged, past the sentries into the annexe. Inside, people loosened your ankles and let the oatmeal run out into pots.

  In the draughting department, young Moshe Bejski and Josef Bau had already begun forging prison passes that permitted people to go down to the mill. Oskar wandered in one day and showed Bejski documents stamped with the seal of the rationing authority of the Government General. Oskar’s best contracts for black-market food were still in the Cracow area. He could arrange shipments by telephone. But at the Moravian border, you had to show clearance documents from the Food and Agriculture Department of the Government General. Oskar pointed to the stamp on the papers in his hands. “Could you make a stamp like that?” he asked Bejski.

  Bejski was a craftsman. He could work on little sleep. Now he turned out for Oskar the first of many official stamps he would craft. His tools were razorblades and various small cutting instruments. His stamps became the emblems of Brinnlitz’s own outrageous bureaucracy. He cut seals of the Government General, of the Governor of Moravia, seals to adorn false travel permits so that prisoners could drive by truck to Brno or Olomouc to collect loads of bread, of black-market petrol, of flour or fabric or cigarettes. Leon Salpeter, the Cracow pharmacist, once a member of Marek Biberstein’s Judenrat, kept the storehouse in Brinnlitz. Here the miserable supplies sent down from Gröss-Rosen by Hassebroeck were kept, together with the supplementary vegetables, flour, cereals bought by Oskar under Bejski’s minutely careful rubber stamps, the eagle and the hooked cross of the régime painstakingly crafted on them.

  “You have to remember,” said an inmate of Oskar’s camp, “that Brinnlitz was hard. But beside any other – paradise!” Prisoners seemed to have been aware that food was scarce everywhere; even on the outside, few were sated.

  And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of the prisoners?

  The answer is indulgent laughter. “Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?” And then a frown, in case you think this attitude too serf-like. “You don’t understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be.”

  As in his early marriage, Oskar was still temperamentally an absentee, away from Brinnlitz for stretches of time. Sometimes Stern would wait up all night for him, for Stern was always the purveyor of the day’s requests. In Oskar’s apartment, Itzhak and Emilie were the keepers of vigils. The scholarly accountant would always put the most loyal interpretation on Oskar’s wanderings around Moravia. In a speech years after, Stern would say, “He rode day and night, not only to purchase food for the Jews in Brinnlitz camp – by means of forged papers made by one of the prisoners – but to buy us arms and ammunition in case the SS conceived of killing us during their retreats.” The picture of a restlessly provident Herr Direktor does credit to Itzhak’s love and loyalty. But Emilie would have understood that not all the absences had to do with Oskar’s brand of humane racketeering.

  During one of Oskar’s furloughs, nineteen-year-old Janek Dresner was accused of sabotage. In fact Dresner was ignorant of metalwork. He had spent his time in Plaszów in the delousing works, handing towels to the SS who came for a shower and sauna, and boiling lice-ridden clothes taken from prisoners. (From the bite of a louse he’d suffered typhus, and survived only because his cousin, Dr Schindel, passed him off in the clinic as an angina case.)

  The supposed sabotage occurred because engineer Schoenbrun, the German supervisor, transferred him from his lathe to one of the larger metal presses. It had taken a week for the engineers to set the metrics for this machine, and the first time Dresner pressed the power button and began to use it he shorted the wiring and cracked one of the plates. Schoenbrun harangued the boy and went into the office to write a report in which he defined Dresner’s action as sabotage. Copies of Schoenbrun’s complaint were typed up and addressed to Sections D and W in Oranienburg, to Hassebroeck at Gröss-Rosen, and to Untersturmführer Liepold in his office at the factory gate.

  In the morning, Oskar had still not come home. So, rather than post the reports, Stern took them out of the office mailbag and hid them. The complaint addressed to Liepold had already been hand delivered, but Liepold was correct at least in the terms of the organisation he served and could not hang the boy until he had heard from Oranienburg and Hassebroeck. Two days later, Oskar had still not appeared. “It must be some party!” the whimsical ones on the shop floor told each other. Somehow Schoenbrun discovered that Itzhak was sitting on the letters. He raged through the office, telling Stern that his name would be added to the
reports. Stern seemed to be a man of limitless calm, and when Schoenbrun finished he told the engineer that he had removed the reports from the mailbag because he thought the Herr Direktor should, as a matter of courtesy, be appraised of their contents before they were posted. The Herr Direktor, said Stern, would of course be appalled to find out that a prisoner had done ten thousand Reichsmarks’ worth of damage to one of his machines. It seemed only just, said Stern, that Herr Schindler be given the chance to add his own remarks to the report.

  At last Oskar drove in through the gate. Stern intercepted him and told him about the machine, about Schoenbrun’s charges. Untersturmführer Liepold had been waiting to see Schindler too and was eager to push his authority inside the factory, to use the Janek Dresner case as a pretext. I will preside over the hearing, Liepold told Oskar. You, Herr Direktor, will supply a signed statement testifying to the extent of the damage.

  Oskar told him to wait a minute. It’s my machine that’s broken. I’m the one who will preside.

  Liepold argued that the prisoner was under the jurisdiction of Section D. But the machine, replied Oskar, came under the authority of the Armaments Inspectorate. Besides, he really couldn’t permit trials on the shop floor. If Brinnlitz had been a garment or chemical factory, then perhaps it wouldn’t have much impact on production. But this was an armaments works, engaged in the manufacture of secret components. “I won’t have my work force disturbed,” said Oskar.

  It was an argument that Oskar won, perhaps because Liepold gave in. The Untersturmführer was afraid of Oskar’s contacts. So the court was convened at night in the machine tool section of DEF, and its members were Herr Oskar Schindler as president, Herr Schoenbrun and Herr Fuchs. A young German girl sat at the side of the judicial table to keep a record, and when young Dresner was brought in he saw in front of him a solemn and fully constituted court. According to a Section D edict of April 11th, 1944, what Janek faced was the first and crucial stage of a process which should, after a report to Hassebroeck and a reply from Oranienburg, end in his hanging on the workshop floor in front of all the Brinnlitz people, his parents and sister among them.

  Janek noticed that tonight there was none of that shop floor familiarity about Oskar. The Herr Direktor read aloud Schoenbrun’s report of the sabotage. Janek knew about Oskar mainly from the reports of other people, particularly from his father, and couldn’t tell now what Oskar’s strait-laced reading of Schoenbrun’s accusations meant. Was Oskar really grieving for the cracked machine? Or was it all just showmanship?

  When the reading was finished, the Herr Direktor began to ask questions. There was not much Dresner could say in answer. He pleaded that he was unfamiliar with the machine. There had been trouble setting it, he explained. He had been too anxious and had made a mistake. He assured the Herr Direktor that he had no reason to wish to sabotage the machinery. If you are not skilled at armaments work, said Schoenbrun, you shouldn’t be here. The Herr Direktor has assured me that all you prisoners have had experience in the armaments industry. Yet here you are, Haftling Dresner, claiming ignorance.

  With an angry gesture Schindler ordered the prisoner to detail exactly what he had done on the night of the offence. Dresner began to talk about the preparations for starting up the machine, the setting of it, the dry rehearsal at the controls, the switching on of the power, the sudden racing of the engine, the splitting of the mechanism. Herr Schindler became more and more restless as Dresner talked, and began to prowl the floor glowering at the boy. Dresner was describing some alteration he had made to one of the controls when Schindler stopped, hamfists clenched, eyes glaring.

  “What did you say?” he asked the boy. Dresner repeated what he had said. I adjusted the pressure control, Herr Direktor.

  Oskar raged up to him and hit him across the side of the jaw. Dresner’s head sang, but in triumph, for Oskar – his back to his fellow judges – had fluttered an eyelid at Dresner in a way that could not be mistaken. Then he began waving his great arms, dismissing the boy. “The stupidity of you damned people!” he was bellowing all the while. “I can’t believe it!”

  He turned and appealed to Schoenbrun and Fuchs, as if they were his only allies. “I wish they were intelligent enough to sabotage a machine. Then at least I’d have their goddammed hides! But what can you do with these people? They’re an utter waste of time.”

  Oskar’s fist clenched again, and Dresner recoiled at the idea of another acquitting punch. “Clear out!” yelled Oskar.

  As Dresner went out through the door, he heard Oskar tell the others that it was better to forget all this. “I have some good Martell upstairs,” he said.

  This deft subversion of the trial might not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion, it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity.

  Dresner’s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners’ lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth, though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  For the factory produced nothing. “Not a shell,” Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing. Oskar himself contrasts the turnover of DEF in the Cracow years with the Brinnlitz record. In Zablocie, enamelware was manufactured to the value of sixteen million Reichsmarks. During the same time, the armaments section of the Zablocie plant produced shells worth half a million Reichsmarks. Oskar explains that at Brinnlitz however “as a consequence of the falling off of the enamel production” there was no output to speak of. The armaments production, he says, encountered ‘starting difficulties’. But in fact he did manage to ship one truckful of ‘ammunition parts’, valued at thirty-five thousand Reichsmarks, during the Brinnlitz months. “These parts,” said Oskar later, “had been transferred to Brinnlitz already half made. To supply still less (to the war effort) was impossible, and the excuse of ‘teething troubles’ became more and more dangerous for me and my Jews, because Speer (the Armaments Minister) raised his demands from month to month.”

  The danger of Oskar’s policy of non-production was not only that it gave him a bad name at the Armaments Ministry. It made other managements angry. For the factory system was fragmented, one workshop producing the shells, another the fuses, a third packing in the high explosives and assembling the components. In this way, it was reasoned, an air raid on any one factory could not substantially destroy the flow of armaments. Oskar’s shells, despatched by freight to factories farther down the line, were inspected there by engineers Oskar did not know and could not reach. The Brinnlitz items always failed quality control. Oskar would show the complaining letters to Stern, to Finder, to Pemper or Garde. He would laugh uproariously, as if the men writing the reprimands were comic, fustian bureaucrats.

  Moving forward in time and taking one such case, Itzhak Stern and Mietek Pemper were in Oskar’s office on the morning of April 28th, 1945, a morning when the prisoners stood at an extremity of danger, having been, as will be seen, all condemned to death by Sturmbannführer Hassebroeck. The day was Oskar’s thirty-seventh birthday, and a bottle of cognac had already been opened to mark it. And on the desk lay a telegram from the armaments assembly plant near Brno. It said that Oskar’s anti-tank shells were so badly produced that they failed all quality control tests. They were imprecisely calibrated, and because they had not been tempered at the right heat they split under testing.

  Oskar was ecstatic at this telegram, pushing it towards Stern and Pemper, making them read it. Pemper remembers that he made another of his outrageous utterances. “It’s the best birthday present I could have got. Because I know now that no poor bastard has been killed by my product.”

  This incide
nt says something about two contrasting frenzies. There is some madness in a manufacturer such as Oskar, who rejoices when he does not manufacture. But there is also a cool lunacy in the German technocrat who, Vienna having fallen, Marshal Koniev’s men having embraced the Americans on the Elbe, still takes it for granted that an armaments factory up in the hills has time to tidy up its performance and make a worthy offering to the grand principles of discipline and output.

  But the main question that arises from the birthday telegram is how Oskar lasted those months, the seven months up to the date of his birthday.

  The Brinnlitz people remember a whole series of inspections and checks. Men from Section D stalked through the factory, checklists in their hands. So did engineers from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar always lunched or dined these officials, softened them up with ham and cognac. In the Reich there were no longer so many good lunches and dinners to be had. The prisoners at the lathes, the furnaces, the metal presses would state that the uniformed inspectors reeked of alcohol and reeled on the factory floor. There is a story all the inmates tell of an official who boasted, on one of the final inspections of the war, that Schindler would not seduce him with camaraderie, with a lunch and drink. On the stairs leading from the dormitories down to the workshop floor, the legend has it, Oskar tripped the man, sending him to the bottom of the stairs, a journey which split the man’s head and broke his leg. The Brinnlitz people are generally unable to identify this SS hardcase. One claims that it was Obersturmbannführer Rasch, SS and police chief of Moravia. Oskar himself never made any recorded claim about it. The anecdote is one of those stories that reflect people’s picture of Oskar as a bounteous avatar, a provider who covers all eventualities. Whether the SS man did cartwheel down the steps of Deutsche Email Fabrik shattering his shin and leg-bone is not in itself important. And one has to admit, in natural justice, that the inmates had the right to spread this sort of fable. They were the ones in deepest jeopardy. If the fable let them down, they would pay for it most bitterly.