Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  One reason Brinnlitz passed the inspections was the relentless trickery of Oskar’s skilled workers. The furnace gauges were rigged by the electricians. The needle registered the correct temperature when the interior of the furnace was in fact hundreds of degrees cooler. “I’ve written to the manufacturers,” Oskar would tell the armaments inspectors. He would play the sombre, baffled manufacturer whose profits were being eroded. He would blame the floor, the inferior German supervisors. He spoke yet again of ‘teething troubles’, implying future tonnages of munitions once the problems faded.

  In the machine tool departments, as at the furnaces, everything looked normal. Machines seemed perfectly calibrated but were in fact a micro-millimetre off. Most of the inspectors who walked through seem to have left not only with a gift of cigarettes and cognac, but with a faint sympathy for the thorny problems this decent fellow was enduring.

  Stern would always say in the end that Oskar bought boxes of shells from other Czech manufacturers and passed them off as his own during inspections. Pfefferberg makes the same claim. In any case Brinnlitz lasted, whatever sleight-of-hand Oskar used.

  There were times when, to impress the hostile locals, he invited important officials in for a tour of the factory and a good dinner. But they were always men whose expertise did not run to engineering and munitions production. After the Herr Direktor’s stay in Pomorska Street, Liepold, with Hoffman and the local Party Kreisleiter, wrote to every official they could think of, local, provincial, Berlin-based, complaining about him, his morals, his connections, his breaches of race and penal law. Sussmuth let him know about the barrage of letters arriving at Troppau. Oskar invited Ernst Hahn down to Brinnlitz. Hahn was second in command of the bureau of the Berlin main office devoted to services for SS families. “He was,” says Oskar with a customary toper’s primness, “a notorious drunkard.” Hahn brought his boyhood friend, Franz Bosch, with him – the Bosch whom Oskar had known through Amon. Bosch, as Oskar has already remarked in this narrative, was ‘an impenetrable drunkard’, as well as the murderer of the Gutter family. However, swallowing his contempt, Oskar welcomed him for his public relations value.

  When Hahn arrived in town, he was wearing exactly the splendid, untarnished uniform Oskar expected. It was festooned with ribbons and orders, for Hahn was an old-time SS man from the glorious early days of the Party. With this dazzling Standartenführer came an equally glittering adjutant.

  Liepold was invited in, from his rented house outside the camp, to dine with the visitors. From the start of the evening, he was out of his depth. For Hahn loved Oskar, drunks always did. Later Oskar would describe the men and the uniforms as ‘pompous’. But at least Liepold was convinced now that if he wrote complaining letters to distant authorities, they were likely to land on the desk of some old drinking friend of the Herr Direktor, and that this could well prove perilous for Untersturmführer Liepold.

  In the morning, Oskar was seen driving through Zwittau, laughing with these glamorous men from Berlin. The local Nazis stood on the pavements and saluted all this Reich splendour as it passed.

  Hoffman was not as easily stilled as the rest. The three hundred women of Brinnlitz had, in Oskar’s own words, “no employment possibility”. It has already been said that many of them spent their days knitting. In the winter of 1944, for people whose only cover was the striped uniform, knitting was no idle hobby. Hoffman, however, made a formal complaint to the SS about the wool the Schindler women had stolen from the cases in the annexe. He thought it scandalous, and that it showed up the true activities of the so-called Schindler armaments works.

  When Oskar visited Hoffman, he found the old man in a triumphant mood. We’ve petitioned Berlin to remove you, said Hoffman. This time we’ve included sworn statements declaring that your factory is running in contravention of economic and race law. We’ve nominated an invalided Wehrmacht engineer from Brno to take over the factory and turn it into something decent.

  Oskar listened to Hoffman, apologised, tried to appear penitent. Then he rang Colonel Erich Lange in Berlin and asked him to sit on the petition from the Hoffman clique in Zwittau. The out-of-court settlement still cost Oskar eight thousand Reichsmarks, and all winter the Zwittau town authorities, civil and Party, plagued him, calling him in to the town hall to acquaint him with the complaints of various citizens about his prisoners, or the state of his drains.

  Lusia had a personal experience of SS inspectors which is worth recording because it typifies the Schindler method.

  She was still in the cellar – would be there for the entire winter. The other girls had got better and had moved upstairs to recuperate. But it seemed to Lusia that Birkenau had filled her with a limitless poison. Her fevers recurred again and again. Her joints became inflamed and carbuncles broke out in her armpits. When one burst and healed, another would form. Dr Handler, against the advice of Dr Biberstein, lanced one of them with a kitchen knife. She remained in the cellar, well fed, ghost-white, infectious. In all the great acreage of Europe, it was the only space in which she could have lived. She was aware of that even then, and hoped that the enormous conflict would roll by above her head.

  In that warm hole under the factory camp of Brinnlitz, night and day were irrelevant. The time the door at the top of the cellar stairs burst open could have been either. She was used to quieter visits from Emilie Schindler. She heard boots on the stairs and tensed in her bed. It sounded to her like an old-fashioned Aktion.

  It was in fact the Herr Direktor with two officers from Gröss-Rosen. Their boots clattered on the steps as if they would sweep over her in a wave. Oskar stood with the SS men as they looked around in the gloom at the boilers and at her. It came to Lusia that perhaps she was it for today, the sacrificial offering you had to give them so that they would go away satisfied. She was partially screened by a boiler, but Oskar made no attempt to hide her, actually came to the foot of her bed. Because the gentlemen of the SS seemed flushed and unsteady, Oskar had a chance to speak to her, words of wonderful banality which she would never forget. “Don’t worry. Everything’s all right.” He stood close, as if at the same time to emphasise to the inspectors that this was not an infectious case.

  “This is a Jewish girl,” he said flatly. “I didn’t want to put her in the Krankenstube. Inflammation of the joints. She’s finished anyway. They don’t give her more than thirty-six hours.”

  Then he rambled on about the hot water, where it came from, and the steam for the delousing. He pointed to gauges, piping, cylinders. He edged around her bed as if it too were neutral, part of the mechanism. Lusia did not know where to look, whether to open or close her eyes. She tried to appear comatose. It might seem a touch too much, but Lusia did not think so at the time, when, as he ushered the SS men back to the base of the stairs, Oskar flashed her a cautious smile.

  She would stay there for six months and hobble upstairs in the spring to resume her womanhood in an altered world.

  During the winter, Oskar built up an independent arsenal. Again there are the legends. Some say that the weapons were bought at the end of winter from the Czech underground. But Oskar had been an obvious National Socialist in 1938 and 1939 and may have been wary of dealing with the Czechs. Most of the weapons, in any case, came from a flawless source, from Obersturmbannführer Rasch, SS and police chief of Moravia. The small cache included carbines and automatic weapons, some pistols, some hand grenades. Oskar would later describe the transaction offhandedly. He acquired the arms, he would say, “under the pretence of protecting my factory, for the price of a brilliant ring for his (Rasch’s) wife.”

  Oskar does not detail his performance in Rasch’s office in Brno’s Spilberk Castle. It is not hard to imagine though. The Herr Direktor, concerned about a possible slave uprising as the war grinds on, is willing to die expensively at his desk, automatic weapon in hand, having mercifully despatched his wife with a bullet to save her from something worse. The Herr Direktor also touches on the chance that the Russians might turn up
at the gate. My civilian engineers, Fuchs and Schoenbrun, my honest technicians, my German-speaking secretary, all of them deserve to have the means of resistance. It’s gloomy talk, of course. I’d rather speak of issues closer to our hearts, Herr Obersturmbannführer. I know your passion for good jewellery. May I show you this example I found last week?

  And so the ring appeared on the edge of Rasch’s blotter, Oskar murmuring, “As soon as I saw it, I thought of Frau Rasch.”

  Once Oskar took delivery of the weapons, he appointed Uri Bejski, brother of the rubber-stamp maker, as keeper of the arsenal. Uri was small, handsome, lively. People noticed that he wandered in and out of the Schindlers’ apartment like a son. He was a favourite, too, with Emilie, who gave him keys to the apartment. Frau Schindler enjoyed a similar maternal relationship with the surviving Spira boy. She took him regularly into her kitchen and fed him up on slices of bread and margarine.

  One at a time, Uri took the small body of prisoners selected for training into Salpeter’s storehouse to teach them the mechanism of the Gewehr 41 Ws. Three commando squads of five men each had been formed. Some of Bejski’s trainees were boys like Lutek Feigenbaum. Others were Polish veterans such as Poldek Pfefferberg and those other prisoners whom the Schindler prisoners called the ‘Budzyn people’.

  The Budzyn people were Jewish officers and men of the Polish army. They had lived through the liquidation of the Budzyn labour camp, which had been under the governance of Untersturmführer Liepold. Liepold had brought them into his new command in Brinnlitz. There were about fifty of them, and they worked in Oskar’s kitchens. People remember them as very political. They had learned Marxism during their imprisonment in Budzyn, and looked forward to a Communist Poland. It was an irony that in Brinnlitz they lived in the warm kitchens of that most apolitical of capitalists, Herr Oskar Schindler.

  Their rapport with the bulk of the prisoners, who, apart from the Zionists, merely followed the politics of survival, was good. A number of them took private lessons on Uri Bejski’s automatics, for in the Polish army of the thirties they had never held such sophisticated weapons.

  If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband’s power in Brno, had idly – during a party say, a musical recital at the Castle – gazed into the core of the gem that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer’s. An armed Marxist Jew.

  THIRTY-SIX

  Old drinking friends of Oskar’s, Amon and Bosch among them, had sometimes thought of him as the victim of a Jewish virus. It was no metaphor. They believed it in literal terms and attached no blame to the sufferer. They’d seen it happen to other good men. Some area of the brain fell under a thrall that was half bacterium, half magic. If they’d been asked whether it was infectious, they would have said, yes, highly. They would have seen the case of Oberleutenant Sussmuth as an example of conspicuous contagion.

  Over the winter of 1944–45, Oskar and Sussmuth connived to get a further three thousand women out of Auschwitz in groups of three hundred to five hundred at a time and into small camps in Moravia. Oskar supplied the influence, the sales talk, the palm-greasing for these operations. Sussmuth did the paperwork. In the textile mills of Moravia there was a labour shortage, and not all the owners abhorred the Jewish presence as sharply as Hoffman. At least five German factories in Moravia – at Freudenthal and Jagerndorf, at Liebau, Grulich and Trautenau – took these drafts of women and supplied a camp on the premises. Any such camp was never paradise, and in its management the SS were permitted to be more dominant than Liepold could ever hope to be. Oskar would later describe these women in the little camps as “living under endurable treatment”. But the very smallness of the textile camps was an aid to their survival, for the garrisons were older, slacker, less fanatical men. There was typhus to be side-stepped, and hunger to be carried like a weight beneath the ribs. But such tiny, almost countrified establishments would escape, for the main part, the extermination orders that would come to the bigger camps in the spring.

  But if the Jewish sepsis had infected Sussmuth, for Oskar Schindler it galloped. Through Sussmuth, Oskar had applied for another thirty metalworkers. It is simple fact that he had lost interest in production. But he saw, with the detached side of his mind, that if his plant was ever to validate its existence in terms of Section D, he would need more qualified hands. When you look at other events of that mad winter, you can see that Oskar wanted the extra thirty not because they were used to lathes and machine tools, but simply because they were an extra thirty. It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of the Jesus that hung on Emilie’s wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.

  One of these thirty metalworkers, a man called Moshe Henigman, left a public account of their unlikely deliverance. A little after Christmas, ten thousand prisoners from the quarries of Auschwitz III – from such establishments as the Krupp Weschel-Union armaments factory and from German Earth and Stone, from the Farben synthetic petrol plant and the aeroplane dismantling enterprise – were put in a column and marched away towards Gröss-Rosen. Perhaps some planner believed that once they arrived in Lower Silesia they would be distributed among the area’s factory camps. If that was the scheme, it escaped the SS officers and men who marched with the prisoners. It ignored also the devouring cold of the merciless turning of the year, and it did not enquire how the column would be fed. The limpers, the coughers, were culled at the beginning of each stage and executed. Of ten thousand, says Henigman, there were within ten days only twelve hundred left alive. To the north, Koniev’s Russians had burst across the Vistula south of Warsaw and seized all the roads on the column’s north-westerly route. The diminished group was therefore put in an SS compound somewhere near Opole. The commandant of the place had the prisoners interviewed, and lists made of the skilled workers. But each day the weary selections continued, and the rejects were shot. A man whose name was called out never knew what to expect, a lump of bread or a bullet. When Henigman’s name was called, however, he was put in a railway wagon with thirty others and, under the care of an SS man and a Kapo, was shunted south. “We were given food for the trip,” Henigman recalls. “Something unheard of.”

  Henigman later spoke of the exquisite unreality of arriving at Brinnlitz. “We could not believe that there was a camp left where men and women worked together, where there were no beatings, no Kapo.” His reaction is marked by a little hyperbole, since there was segregation in Brinnlitz. Occasionally too, Oskar’s blonde girlfriend let fly with an open palm, and once when a boy stole a potato from the kitchen and was reported to Liepold, the commandant made him stand on a stool all day in the courtyard, the potato clamped in his open mouth, saliva running down his chin, and the placard I am a potato thief! hung around his neck.

  But to Henigman this sort of thing was not worthy of report. “How can one describe,” he asks, “the change from hell to paradise?”

  When he met Oskar, he was told to build himself up. Tell the supervisors when you’re ready to work, said the Herr Direktor. And Henigman, faced with this strange reversal of policy, felt not just that he’d come to a quiet pasture, but that he had gone through the mirror.

  Since thirty tinsmiths were merely a fragment of the ten thousand, it must be said again that Oskar was only a minor god of rescue. But like any tutelary spirit, he saved equally Goldberg and Helen Hirsch, and equally he tried to save Dr Leon Gross and Olek Rosner. With this same gratuitous equality, he made a costly deal with the Gestapo in the Moravia region. We know that the bargain was struck, we do not know how expensive it was. That it cost a fortune is certain.

  A prisoner called Benjamin Wrozlavski became one subject of this deal. Wrozlavski was formerly an inmate of the labour camp at Gliwice. Unlike Henigman’s camp, Gliwice was not in
the Auschwitz region, but was close enough to be one of the Auschwitz subsidiary camps. By January 12th – when Koniev and Zhukov launched their offensive – Höss’s awesome realm and all its close satellites were in danger of instant capture. The Gliwice prisoners were put in Ostbahn wagons and shipped towards Fernwald. Somehow Wrozlavski and a friend named Roman Wilner jumped from the train. One popular form of escape was through loosened ventilators in the wagon ceilings. But prisoners who tried it were often shot by guards stationed on the roof. Wilner was hit during this escape, but he was still able to travel, and he and his friend Wrozlavski fled through the high quiet towns of the Moravian borders. They were at last arrested in one of these villages and taken to the Gestapo offices in Troppau.

  As soon as they had arrived and been searched and put in a cell, one of the gentlemen of the Gestapo walked in and told them that nothing bad would happen. They had no reason to believe him. The officer said further that he would not transfer Wilner to a hospital, in spite of the wound, for he would simply be collected and fed back into the system.

  Wrozlavski and Wilner were locked away for nearly two weeks. Oskar had to be contacted and a price had to be settled. During that time, the officer kept talking to them as if they were in protective custody, and the prisoners continued to find the idea absurd. When the door was opened and the two of them were taken out, they presumed they were about to be shot. Instead they were led by an SS man to the railway station, who escorted them on a train south-east toward Brno.