When Oskar took over the Rekord works,
renaming it Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik,
there were forty-five employees involved in a
modest output of kitchenware. Early in the new
year he received his first Army contracts. They were
no surprise. He had cultivated various
influential Wehrmacht engineers who sat on
the Main Armaments Board of General
Schindler’s Armaments Inspectorate. He had
gone to the same parties and taken them to dinner at the
Cracovia Hotel. There are photographs of
Oskar sitting with them at expensive tables,
everyone smiling urbanely at the camera, everyone
well fed, generously liquored, and the officers
elegantly uniformed. Some of them put the right
stamps on his bids, and wrote the crucial letters
of recommendation to General Schindler, merely out
of friendship and because they believed Oskar had the
plant and would deliver. Others were influenced
by gifts, the sort of gifts Oskar would always
proffer to officials—cognac and carpets,
jewelry and furniture and hampers of
luxury food. As well as that, it became known that General Schindler was acquainted withand liked very much his enamelware-producing namesake. Now, with the authority of his lucrative Armaments Inspectorate contracts, Oskar was permitted to expand his plant. There was room. Beyond the lobby and offices of DEF stood two large industrial lofts. Some of the floor space in the building on the left as you emerged from the lobby into the interior of the factory was occupied by present production. The other building was totally empty. He bought new machinery, some locally, some from the homeland. Apart from the military demand, there was the all-devouring black market to serve. Oskar knew now that he could be a magnate.
By midsummer of 1940 he would be employing 250 Poles and would be faced with instituting a night shift. Herr Hans Schindler’s farm-machinery plant in Zwittau had at the best of times employed 50. It is a sweet thing to outstrip a father whom you haven’t forgiven. At times throughout the year, Itzhak Stern would call on Schindler to arrange employment for some young Jew—a special case; an orphan from @l@od@z; the daughter of a clerk in one of the departments of the Judenrat (jewish Council). Within a few months, Oskar was employing 150 Jewish workers and his factory had a minor reputation as a haven.
It was a year, like each succeeding year for the rest of the war, when Jews would be looking for some employment considered essential to the war effort. In April, Governor General Frank had decreed an evacuation of Jews from his capital, Cracow. It was a curious decision, since the Reich authorities were still moving Jews and Poles back into the Government General at the rate of nearly 10,000 a day. Yet conditions in Cracow, Frank told his cabinet, were scandalous. He knew of German divisional commanders who had to live in apartment buildings that contained Jewish tenants. Higher officials were also subjected to the same scandalous indignity. Over the next six months, he promised, he would make Cracow judenfrei (free of Jews). There would be a permitted remnant of 5,000 to 6,000 skilled Jewish workers.
All the rest were to be moved into other cities in the Government General, into Warsaw or Radom, Lublin, or Czestochowa. Jews could immigrate voluntarily to the city of their choice as long as they did it before August 15. Those still left in the city after that date would be trucked out with a small amount of luggage to whatever place suited the administration. From November 1, said Hans Frank, it would be possible for the Germans of Cracow to breathe “good German air,” to walk abroad without seeing the streets and lanes “crawling with Jews.”
Frank would not manage that year to reduce the Jewish population to quite so low a level; but when his plans were first announced, there was a rush among the Jews of Cracow, especially among the young, to acquire skilled qualifications. Men like Itzhak Stern, official and unofficial agents of the Judenrat, had already developed a list of sympathizers, Germans to whom they could appeal. Schindler was on that list; so was Julius Madritsch, a Viennese who had recently managed to get himself released from the Wehrmacht and taken up the post of Treuh@ander of a plant manufacturing military uniforms.
Madritsch could see the benefits of Armaments Inspectorate’s contracts and now intended to open a uniform factory of his own in the suburb of Podg@orze. In the end he would make an even larger fortune than Schindler, but in the annus mirabilis of 1940 he was still on a salary. He was known to be humane—that was all. By November 1, 1940, Frank had managed to move 23,000 Jewish volunteers out of Cracow. Some of them went to the new ghettos in Warsaw and @l@od@z. The gaps at table, the grieving at railway stations can be imagined, but people took it meekly, thinking, We’ll do this, and that will be the brunt of what they ask. Oskar knew it was happening, but, like the Jews themselves, hoped it was a temporary excess.
That year would very likely be the most industrious of Oskar’s life—a year spent building the place up from a bankrupt manufactory to a company government agencies could take seriously. As the first snows fell, Schindler noticed and was irritated when, on any given day, 60 or more of his Jewish employees would be absentees. They would have been detained by SS squads on the way to work and employed in clearing snow. Herr Schindler visited his friend Toffel at SS headquarters in Pomorska Street to complain.
On one day, he told Toffel, he
had 125 absentees.
Toffel confided in him. “You’ve got to understand that some of these fellows here don’t give a damn about production. To them it’s a matter of national priority that Jews be made to shovel snow. I don’t understand it myself ... it’s got a ritual significance for them, Jews shoveling snow. And it’s not just you, it’s happening to everyone.” Oskar asked if all the others were complaining too. Yes, said Toffel. However, he said, an economic big shot from the SS Budget and Construction Office had come for lunch in Pomorska and said that to believe the Jewish skilled worker had a place in Reich economics was treasonable. “I think you’re going to have to put up with a lot of snow shoveling yet, Oskar.”
Oskar, for the moment, assumed the stance of the outraged patriot, or perhaps of the outraged profiteer. “If they want to win the war,” said Oskar, “they’d have to get rid of SS men like that.”
“Get rid of them?” asked Toffel. “For Christ’s sake, they’re the bastards who’re on top.”
As a result of such conversations, Oskar became an advocate of the principle that a factory owner should have unimpeded access to his own workers, that these workers should have access to the plant, that they should not be detained or tyrannized on their way to and from the factory. It was, in Oskar’s eyes, a moral axiom as much as an industrial one. In the end, he would apply it to its limit at Deutsche Email Fabrik.
CHAPTER 7
Some people from the big cities—from Warsaw and @l@od@z with their ghettos and Cracow with Frank’s commitment to making it judenfrei— went to the countryside to lose themselves among the peasants. The Rosner brothers, Cracovian musicians who would come to know Oskar well, settled in the old village of Tyniec. It was on a pretty bend of the Vistula, and an old Benedictine abbey on a limestone cliff hung above it. It was anonymous enough for the Rosners, though. It had a few Jewish storekeepers and Orthodox artisans, with whom nightclub musicians had little to converse about. But the peasants, busy with the tedium of the harvest, were as pleased as the Rosners could have hoped to find musicians in their midst.
They’d come to Tyniec not from Cracow, not from that
great marshaling point outside the botanical
gardens in Mogilska Street where young SS men
pushed people onto trucks and called out bland and lying
promises about the later delivery of all
adequately labeled baggage. They had come in
fact from Warsaw, where they had been enjoying an
&nbs
p; engagement at the Basilisk. They had left the
day before the Germans sealed up the Warsaw ghetto
--Henry and Leopold and Henry’s wife, Manci, and five-year-old son, Olek. The idea of a south Polish village like
Tyniec, not far from their native Cracow, appealed to the brothers. It offered the option, should conditions improve, of catching a bus into Cracow and finding work. Manci Rosner, an Austrian girl, had brought with her her sewing machine, and the Rosners set up a little clothing business in Tyniec. In the evenings they played in the taverns and became a sensation in a town like that. Villages welcome and support occasional wonders, even Jewish ones. And the fiddle was, of all instruments, most venerated in Poland.
One evening a traveling Volksdeutscher
(german-speaking Pole) from Poznan heard the
brothers playing outside the inn. The
Volksdeutscher was a municipal official
from Cracow, one of those Polish Germans in whose
name Hitler had taken the country in the first
place. The Volksdeutscher told Henry
that the mayor of Cracow,
Obersturmbannf@uhrer Pavlu, and his
deputy, the renowned skier Sepp R@ohre, would be visiting the countryside at harvest time, and he would like to arrange for them to hear such an accomplished pair as the Rosners.
On an afternoon when the bound sheaves lay drowsing in fields as quiet and as abandoned as on Sunday, a convoy of limousines wound through Tyniec and up a rise to the villa of an absentee Polish aristocrat. On the terrace, the dapper Rosner brothers waited, and when all the ladies and gentlemen had been seated in a room that might once have been used for balls, they were invited to perform. Henry and Leopold felt both exultation and fear at the seriousness with which Obersturmbannf@uhrer Pavlu’s party had geared themselves for their playing. The women wore white dresses and gloves, the military officials full dress, the bureaucrats their winged collars. When people went to such trouble, it was easier to disappoint them. For a Jew, even to impose a cultural disappointment on the regime was a serious crime.
But the audience loved them. They were a characteristically gem@utlich crowd; they loved Strauss, the confections of Offenbach and Lehar, Andr‘e Messager and Leo Fall. At request time they grew mawkish.
And as Henry and Leopold performed, the ladies and gentlemen drank champagne from long-stemmed flutes brought in by hamper. Once the official recital had finished, the brothers were taken down the hill to where the peasants and the soldiers of the escort had been gathered. If there was to be some crude racial demonstration, it would take place here. But again, once the brothers had climbed onto a wagon and looked the crowd in the eye, Henry knew they would be safe. The pride of the peasants, partly a national thing—the Rosners being for the night a credit to Polish culture—all that protected them. It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Manci, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.
When it was finished, a middle-aged SS
NCO—A Rottenf@uhrer (a junior
noncommissioned SS rank) perhaps—Henry not being as familiar as he might become with the gradations of SS rank—approached them as they stood by the wagon receiving congratulations. He nodded to them and barely smiled. “I hope you have a nice harvest holiday,” he said, bowed, and left.
The brothers stared at each other. As soon as the SS man was out of hearing, they gave in to the temptation to discuss his meaning. Leopold was convinced. “It’s a threat,” he said. It went to show what they had feared in their marrow when the Volksdeutsche official first spoke to them— that these days it didn’t do to stand out, to acquire a distinctive face.
That was life in the country in 1940. The curtailment of a career, the rustic tedium, the scratching out of a trade, the occasional terror, the pull of that bright core called Cracow.
To that, the Rosners knew, they would eventually return.
Emilie had returned home in the autumn, and when Stern next came to Schindler’s apartment it was Ingrid who brought the coffee. Oskar made no secret of his weaknesses, and never seemed to think that ascetic Itzhak Stern needed any apologia for Ingrid’s presence. Similarly, when the coffee was finished, Oskar went to the liquor cabinet and brought back a fresh bottle of brandy, setting it down on the table between his seat and Stern’s, as if Stern were really likely to help him drink it.
Stern had come that evening to tell Oskar that a family whom we shall call the C’s were spreading stories about him, old David and young Leon C, saying even on the streets in Kazimierz—let alone in parlors—that Oskar was a German gangster, a thug. When Stern passed on these accusations to Oskar, he didn’t use terms quite as vivid as that.
The reason an initial is employed here instead of a fictionalized name is that in Cracow the whole range of Polish Jewish names were found, and that to employ any name other than the C’s’ real one might cause offense to the memory of some vanished family or to some living friend of Oskar’s. Oskar knew Stern wasn’t looking for a response, that he was just passing on intelligence.
But of course he felt he had to respond
anyway.
“I could spread stories about them,” said Oskar. “They’re robbing me blind. Ask Ingrid if you like.”
Ingrid was the C’s’ supervisor. She was a benign Treuh@ander and, being only in her twenties, commercially inexperienced. The rumor was that Schindler himself had got the girl appointed so that he would have an assured outlet for his kitchenware. The C’s, however, still did pretty well what they wanted with their company. If they resented the idea that it was held in trust by the occupying power, no one could blame them for that. Stern waved Oskar’s suggestion away. Who was he to want to grill Ingrid? It wasn’t much use to compare notes with the girl anyhow. “They run rings around Ingrid,” said Oskar. They turned up at Lipowa Street for delivery of their orders and altered the invoices on the spot and took away more than they had paid for. “She says it’s all right,” they’d tell the Schindler employees. “He’s arranged it with Ingrid.”
The son had in fact been gathering crowds and
telling them that Schindler had had the SS beat him
up. But his story varied—the beating was supposed
to have occurred at Schindler’s factory, in a
storeroom from which young C emerged with a black eye
and broken teeth. Then it was supposed to have
occurred on Limanowskiego, in front of
witnesses. A man called F, an employee
of Oskar’s and a friend of the C’s, had said he’d heard Oskar stamping up and down in his office in Lipowa Street and threatening to kill old David C. Then Oskar was said to have driven around to Stradom and raided the C cash register, to have stuffed his pockets with currency and told them that there was a New Order in Europe, and then to have beaten up old David in his office.
Was it possible that Oskar could let fly at old David C and land him in bed with bruises?
Was it likely he would call on friends in the
police to assault Leon? On one level
Oskar and the C’s were gangsters, selling tons of
kitchenware illegally, without sending records of
sales to the Transferstelle, without use of the
required merchandizing coupons called
Bezugschein. On the black market, the
dialogue was primitive and tempers were short. Oskar admitted he’d raged into the C’s’ showroom and called father and son thieves and indemnified himself out of the till for the kitchenware the C’s had taken without authorization. Oskar admitted he’d punched young Leon. But that was the limit of his admissions.
And the C’s, whom Stern had known since childhood—they had one of those reputations. Not exactly criminal, but sharp in dealing and, significant in this case, with a reputation for squealing when caught.
Stern knew L
eon C’s bruises did exist. Leon wore them down the street and was willing to elaborate on them. The SS beating did take place somewhere or other, but it could have had a dozen causes. Stern not only did not believe that Oskar had begun asking the SS for that sort of favor, but also had the sense that to believe or disbelieve what was said to have happened in this case was irrelevant to his own wider purposes. It would become relevant only when and if Herr Schindler established a brutal pattern. For Stern’s purposes, occasional lapses did not count. Had Oskar been without sin, this apartment would not exist in its present form, and neither would Ingrid be waiting in the bedroom.
And it is yet again one of those things which must be said, that Oskar would save all of them—Mr. and Mrs. C, Leon C, Mr. H, Miss M, old C’s secretary—and that they would always admit that, but that they would also and always stick to their story of the bruises.
That evening Itzhak Stern also brought news of Marek Biberstein’s jail sentence. He had got two years in the prison in Montelupich Street, this Marek Biberstein who was the president of the Judenrat, or who had been until his arrest. In other cities the Judenrat was already cursed by the general Jewish population, for its main work had become the drawing up of lists for forced labor, for transfers to camps. The Judenrats were regarded by the German administration as organs of its will, but in Cracow, Marek Biberstein and his cabinet still saw themselves as buffers between the office of the military mayor of Cracow, Schmid and later Pavlu, on one hand, and the Jewish inhabitants of the city on the other. In the Cracow German newspaper of March 13, 1940, a Dr. Dietrich Redecker said that on a visit to the Judenrat office he was struck by the contrast between its carpet and plush chairs and the poverty and squalor of the Jewish quarter in Kazimierz. But Jewish survivors do not remember the first Cracow Judenrat as men who cut themselves off from the people. Hungry for revenue, however, they had made the mistake the Judenrats of @l@od@z and Warsaw had made before them, permitting the affluent to buy their way off forced-labor lists, forcing the poor onto the roster in return for soup and bread. But even later, in 1941, Biberstein and his council still had the respect of the Jews of Cracow.
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