Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  For both of them, the arrival at Brinnlitz had that same surreal, delightful and frightening quality it had had for Henigman. Wilner was put in the clinic, under the care of the doctors Handler, Lewkowicz, Hilfstein and Biberstein. Wrozlavski was put in a sort of convalescent area which had been set up – for extraordinary reasons soon to be explained – in a corner of the factory floor downstairs. The Herr Direktor visited them and asked how they felt. The preposterous question scared Wrozlavski; so did the surroundings. He feared, as he would put it years later, “the way from the hospital would lead to execution, as was the case in other camps.” He was fed with the rich Brinnlitz porridge, and saw Schindler frequently. But, as he confesses, he was still confused, and found the phenomenon of Brinnlitz hard to grasp.

  By the arrangement Oskar had with the provincial Gestapo, eleven escapees were added to the crammed-in camp population. Each one of them had wandered away from a column or jumped from a wagon. In their stinking stripes, they had tried to stay at large. By rights, they should all have been shot.

  In 1963, Dr Steinberg of Tel Aviv testifies to yet another instance of Oskar’s wild, contagious and unquestioning largesse. Steinberg was the physician in a small work camp in the Sudeten hills. The Gauleiter in Liberec was less able, as Silesia fell to the Russians, to keep labour camps out of his wholesome province of Moravia. The camp in which Steinberg was imprisoned was one of the many new Lagers scattered among the mountains. It was a Luftwaffe camp devoted to the manufacture of some aircraft component which Steinberg does not specify. Four hundred prisoners lived there. The food was poor, says Steinberg, and the work loads savage.

  Pursuing a rumour about the Brinnlitz camp, Steinberg managed to get a pass and the loan of a factory truck to go and see Oskar. He described the desperate conditions in the Luftwaffe camp to him. He says that Oskar quite lightly agreed to allocate him part of the Brinnlitz stores. One main question preoccupied Oskar: on what grounds could Steinberg regularly come to Brinnlitz to pick up the supplies? It was arranged that he would use some excuse to do with getting regular medical aid from the doctors in the camp clinic.

  Twice a week thereafter, says Steinberg, he visited Brinnlitz and took back to his own camp quantities of bread, semolina, potatoes and cigarettes. If Schindler were around the storehouse on the day that Steinberg was loading up, he would turn his back and walk away.

  Steinberg does not give any exact poundage of food, but he offers it as a medical opinion that if the Brinnlitz supplies had not been available, at least fifty of the prisoners in the Luftwaffe camp would have died by the spring.

  Apart from the ransoming of the women in Auschwitz, however, the most astounding salvage of all was that of the Goleszów people. Goleszów was a quarry and cement plant inside Auschwitz III itself, home of the SS-owned German Earth and Stone Works. As has been seen with the thirty metalsmiths, throughout January 1945 the dread fiefdoms of Auschwitz were being disbanded, and in the middle of the month a hundred and twenty quarry workers from Goleszów were thrown into two cattle wagons. Their journey would be as bitter as any, but would end better than most. It is worth remembering that, like the Goleszów men, nearly everyone else in the Auschwitz area was on the move that month. Dolek Horowitz was shipped away to Mauthausen. Young Richard was however kept behind with other small children. The Russians would find him later in the month in an Auschwitz abandoned by the SS and would claim, quite correctly, that he and the others had been detained for medical experiments. Henry Rosner and the nine-year-old Olek (apparently no longer considered necessary for the laboratories) were marched away from Auschwitz in a column for thirty miles, and those who fell behind were shot. In Sosnowiec they were packed into freight cars. As a special kindness, an SS guard who was supposed to separate the children let Olek and Henry go into the same wagon. It was so crowded that everyone had to stand, but as men died of cold and thirst a gentleman whom Henry described as “a smart Jew” would suspend them in their blankets from horse hooks near the roof. In this way there was more floor space for the living. For the sake of the boy’s comfort, Henry got the idea of slinging Olek in his blanket in exactly the same way from the horse hooks. This not only gave the child an easier ride: when the train stopped at stations and sidings, he would call to Germans by the rails to throw snowballs up to the wire gratings. The snow would shatter and spray the interior of the wagon with moisture, and men would struggle for a few ice crystals.

  The train took seven days to get to Dachau and half the population of the Rosners’ car died. When it at last arrived and the door was opened, a dead body fell out and then Olek, who picked himself up in the snow, broke an icicle off the undercarriage and began to lick it ravenously. Such was travel in Europe in January 1945.

  For the Goleszów quarry prisoners it was even worse. The bill of lading for their two freight cars, preserved in the archives of the Yad Vashem, shows that they were travelling without food for more than ten days and with the doors frozen shut. R, a boy of sixteen, remembers that they scraped ice off the inside walls to quench their thirst. Even in Birkenau they weren’t unloaded. The killing process was in its last furious days. It had no time for them. They were abandoned in sidings, re-attached to locomotives, dragged for fifty miles, uncoupled again. They were shunted to the gates of camps whose commandants refused them on the clear grounds that by now they lacked industrial value, and because in any case facilities – bunks and rations – were everywhere at the limit.

  In the small hours of a morning at the end of January, they were uncoupled and abandoned in the railyards at Zwittau. Oskar says a friend of his telephoned from the depot to report human scratchings and cries from inside the cars. These pleadings were uttered in many tongues, for the trapped men were, according to the manifest, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Netherlanders and Serbians. The friend who made the call was very likely the brother-in-law who managed the freight yards at Zwittau. Oskar told him to shunt the two cars up the siding to Brinnlitz.

  It was a morning of gruesome cold – minus thirty degrees Celsius (minus twenty-two degrees Fahrenheit), says Stern. Even the exact Biberstein says that it was at least minus twenty degrees (minus four degrees Fahrenheit). Poldek Pfefferberg was summoned from his bunk, fetched his welding gear, and went out to the snowy siding to cut open the doors iced hard as iron. He too heard the unearthly complaints from within.

  It is hard to describe what they saw when the doors were at last opened. In each car, a pyramid of frozen corpses, their limbs madly contorted, occupied the centre of the floor. The hundred or more still living stank awesomely, were seared black by the cold, were skeletal. Not one of them would be found to weigh more than thirty-four kilos.

  Oskar was not at the siding. He was inside the factory, where a warm corner of the workshop floor was being made ready for the shipment from Goleszów. Prisoners dismantled the last of Hoffman’s dumped machinery and carried it to the garages. Straw was brought in and the floor strewn with it. Already Schindler had been out to the commandant’s office to speak to Liepold. The Untersturmführer didn’t want to take the Goleszów men – in that he resembled all the other commandants they had met in the past few weeks. Liepold pointedly remarked that no one could pretend that these people were munitions workers. Oskar admitted that, but guaranteed to put them on the books, and so to pay six Reichsmarks a day for each of them. I can use them after their recuperation, said Oskar. Liepold recognised two aspects of the case. First, that Oskar was unstoppable. Second, that an increase in the size of Brinnlitz and the labour fees paid by the Herr Direktor might well please Hassebroeck. Liepold would have them quickly enrolled on the books, and the entries backdated, so that even as the Goleszów men were carried in through the factory gate Oskar was paying for them.

  Inside the workshop, they were wrapped in blankets and laid down on the straw. Emilie came from her apartment, followed by two prisoners toting an enormous bucket of porridge. The doctors noted the frostbite and the need for frost oi
ntments. Dr Biberstein mentioned to Oskar that the Goleszów people would need vitamins, though he was sure there were none to be had in Moravia.

  In the meantime the sixteen frozen corpses were placed in a shed. Rabbi Levartov, looking at them, knew that with their limbs distorted by the cold they would be hard to bury in the orthodox manner, which permitted no breaking of bones. The matter, Levartov knew, would however have to be argued with the commandant. Liepold had on file from Section D a number of directives urging SS personnel to dispose of the dead by burning. In the boiler rooms were perfect facilities, industrial furnaces capable almost of vaporising a body. Yet Schindler had so far twice refused to permit the burning of the dead.

  The first time was when Janka Feigenbaum died in the Brinnlitz clinic. Liepold had at once ordered her body incinerated. Oskar heard through Stern that this was abhorrent to the Feigenbaums and to Levartov, and his resistance to the idea may have been fuelled also by the Catholic residue in his own soul. In those years the Catholic Church was firmly opposed to cremation. As well as refusing Liepold the use of the furnace, Oskar also ordered the carpenters to prepare a coffin, and himself supplied a horse and cart, allowing Levartov and the family to ride out under guard to bury the girl in the woods.

  Feigenbaum father and son had walked behind the cart, counting the steps from the gate so that when the war ended they could reclaim Janka’s body.

  Witnesses say that Liepold was furious at this sort of pandering to the prisoners. Some Brinnlitz people even comment that Oskar could show towards Levartov and the Feigenbaums a more exacting delicacy and courtesy than he usually managed with Emilie.

  The second time that Liepold wanted the furnaces used was when old Mrs Hofstatter died. Oskar, at Stern’s request, had another coffin prepared, allowing a metal plaque on which Mrs Hofstatter’s vital statistics were marked to be included in the coffin. Levartov and a minyan, the quorum of ten males who recite Kaddish over the dead, were permitted to leave camp and attend the funeral.

  Stern says that it was for Mrs Hofstatter’s sake that Oskar established a Jewish cemetery in the Catholic parish of Deutsch-Bielau, a nearby village. According to him, Oskar went to the parish church on the Sunday Mrs Hofstatter died and put a proposition to the priest. A quickly convened parish council agreed to sell him a small parcel of land just beyond the Catholic cemetery. There is nothing surer than that some of the council resisted, for it was an era when Canon Law was interpreted narrowly in its provisions as to who could and who could not be buried in consecrated ground.

  Other prisoners of some authority say, however, that the Jewish cemetery plot was bought by Oskar at the time of the arrival of the Goleszów cars with their tithe of twisted dead. In a later report, Oskar himself implies that it was the Goleszów dead who caused him to buy the land. By one account, when the parish priest pointed out the area beyond the church wall reserved for the burial of suicides and suggested that the Goleszów people be buried there, Oskar answered that these weren’t suicides. These were victims of a great murder.

  The Goleszów deaths and the death of Mrs Hofstatter must, nevertheless, have come close together, and both were marked with full ritual in the unique Jewish cemetery of Deutsch-Bielau.

  It is clear from the recollections of all Brinnlitz prisoners that this internment had enormous moral force within the camp. The distorted corpses unloaded from the freight cars had seemed less than human. Looking at them, you became frightened for your own precarious humanity. The inhuman thing was beyond feeding, washing, warming. The one way left to restore it – as well as yourself – to humanity was through ritual. Levartov’s rites therefore, the exalted plain-chant of Kaddish, had a far larger gravity for the Brinnlitz prisoners than such ceremonies could ever have had in the relative tranquillity of pre-war Cracow.

  To keep the Jewish burial ground tidy in case of future deaths, Oskar employed a middle-aged SS Unterscharführer and paid him a retainer.

  Emilie Schindler had transactions of her own to see to. Carrying a clutch of false papers supplied by Bejski, she had two prisoners load up one of the plant trucks with vodka and cigarettes, and ordered them to drive her to the large mining town of Ostrava up near the border of the Government General. At the military hospital she was able to make an arrangement with a number of Oskar’s contacts and to bring back frostbite ointments, sulpha, and the vitamins Biberstein had thought impossible to procure. Such journeys now became regular events for Emilie. She was growing to be a traveller, like her husband.

  After the first deaths, there were no others. The Goleszów people were Mussulmen, and it was a first principle that the condition of Mussulmen could not be reversed. But there was some intractability in Emilie which would not accept it. She harried them with her bucketfuls of farina. “Out of those rescued from Goleszów,” said Dr Biberstein, “not one would have stayed alive without her treatment.” The men began to be seen, trying to look useful on the factory floor. One day a Jewish storeman asked one of them to carry a box out to a machine on the workshop floor. “The box weighs thirty-five kilos,” said the boy, “and I weigh thirty-two. How the hell can I carry it?”

  To this factory of ineffective machines, its floor strewn with scarecrows, Herr Amon Goeth came that winter, following his release from prison, to pay his respects to the Schindlers. The SS court had let him out of prison in Breslau because of his diabetes. He was dressed in an old suit that may have been a uniform with the markings stripped off. There are rumours about the meaning of this visit, and they persist to this day. Some thought that Goeth was looking for a hand-out, others that Oskar was holding something for him, cash or kind from one of Amon’s last Cracow deals in which Oskar had perhaps acted as Amon’s agent. Some who worked close to Oskar’s office believed that Amon even asked for a managerial post at Brinnlitz. No one could say that he did not have the experience. In fact, all three versions of Amon’s motives in coming down to Brinnlitz are possibly correct, though it is unlikely that Oskar ever acted as Amon’s agent.

  As Amon stepped through the gate of the camp, it could be seen that prison and tribulation had thinned him down. The fleshiness had vanished from his face. His features were more like those of the Amon who had come to Cracow in the New Year of 1943 to liquidate the ghetto, yet they were different, too, for they were jaundice-yellow and prison-grey. And if you had the eyes for it, if you dared to look, you saw a new passivity there. Some prisoners, however, glancing up from their lathes, glimpsed that figure from the pit of their foulest dreams, there unannounced, passing by the doors and windows, through the factory yard, heading for Herr Schindler’s office. Helen Hirsch sat transfixed, wanting nothing except that he should vanish again. But others hissed him as he passed, and men bent from their machines and spat. Maturer women lifted their knitting towards him like a challenge. For that was vengeance, to show that in spite of all his terror, Adam still delved and Eve span. If Amon wanted a job at Brinnlitz – and there were few other places a Hauptsturmführer under suspension could go – Oskar either talked him out of it or bought him off. In that way, this meeting was like all their others. As a courtesy the Herr Direktor took Amon on a tour of the plant, and on this circuit of the workshop floor the reaction against him was stronger still. Back in the office, Amon was overheard demanding that Oskar punish the inmates for their disrespect, and Oskar was heard rumbling away, pledging that he would do something about the pernicious Jews and expressing his own undiminished respect for Herr Goeth.

  Though the SS had let him out of prison, the investigation of his affairs was still in progress. A judge of the SS court had come to Brinnlitz in the past few weeks to question Pemper again about Amon’s managerial procedures. Before the interrogation began, Commandant Liepold had muttered to Pemper that he’d better be careful, that the judge would want to take him to Dachau for execution after he’d been drained of evidence. Wisely, Pemper had done all he could to convince the judge of the unimportance of his work in the main office at Plaszów.

 
Somehow, Amon had heard that the SS investigators had been pursuing Mietek Pemper. Soon after he arrived in Brinnlitz, he cornered his former typist in Oskar’s outer office and wanted to know what questions the judge had asked. Pemper believed, reasonably enough, that he could detect in Amon’s eyes resentment that his former clerk was still a breathing source of evidence for the SS court. Surely Amon was powerless here, thinned down, looking doleful in an old suit, washed up in Oskar’s office? But you couldn’t be sure. It was still Amon, and he had a presence, a habit of authority. Pemper said, “The judge told me I was not to talk to anyone about my interrogation.” Goeth was outraged and threatened to complain to Herr Schindler. That, if you liked, was a measure of Amon’s new impotence. He had never had to go to Oskar before to appeal for the chastisement of a prisoner.

  By the second night of Amon’s visit, the women were feeling more triumphal. He couldn’t touch them. They persuaded even Helen Hirsch of this. Yet her sleep was fitful.

  The last time Amon crossed the factory, it was on his way to be taken by car to the station at Zwittau. He had never in the past made three visits to any space without bringing some poor bastard’s world crashing down. It was clear now that he had no power at all. Yet still not everyone could look him in the face as he left. Thirty years later, in the sleep of Plaszów veterans from Buenos Aires to Sydney, from New York to Cracow, from Los Angeles to Jerusalem, Amon would still be rampaging. “When you saw Goeth,” said Poldek Pfefferberg, “you saw death.”

  So, in his own terms, he was never an utter failure.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Oskar’s thirty-seventh birthday was celebrated that year by Oskar himself and all the prisoners. One of the metalworkers had crafted a small box suitable for holding cufflinks, and when the Herr Direktor appeared on the workshop floor, the twelve-year-old Niusia Horowitz was pushed towards him to make a rehearsed speech in German. “Herr Direktor,” she said in a voice he had to stoop to hear. “All the prisoners wish you the very best for this your birthday.”