Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  After a time the friend’s mother motioned to her that she could sit if she wanted. So Danka crouched sideways and found a comfortable posture on the floor of the cavity. No rats troubled her. She heard no sound—not a word from her mother and the friend beyond the wall. Above everything else she felt unexpectedly safe. Andwiththe sensation of safety came displeasure at herself for obeying her mother’s order so woodenly, and then fear for her mother, who was out there in the world of Aktions.

  Mrs. Dresner did not leave the house at once. The SS were in Dabrowski Street now. She thought she might as well stay on. If she was taken, it was no loss to her friend. It might, in fact, be a positive help. If they took a woman from this room, it would probably increase their satisfaction with their task, exempt them from a sharper inspection of the state of the wallpaper.

  But the woman had convinced herself no one would survive the search if Mrs. Dresner stayed in the room; and, Mrs. Dresner could see, no one would if the woman remained in that state. Therefore she stood up, calmly despairing of herself, and left. They would find her on the steps or in the hall. Why not on the street? she wondered. It was so much an unwritten rule that ghetto natives must stay on quivering in their rooms until discovered that anyone found moving on the stairways was somehow guilty of defiance of the system.

  A figure in a cap prevented her from going out. He appeared on the front step, squinting down the dark corridor to the cold blue light of the courtyard beyond. Staring at her, he recognized her, as she did him. It was an acquaintance of her elder son’s; but you could not be sure that that counted for anything; you could not know what pressures they’d put on the OD boys. He stepped into the hall and approached her. “Pani Dresner,” he said. He pointed at the stairwell. “They’ll be gone in ten minutes. You stay under the stairs. Go on. Get under the stairs.”

  As numbly as her daughter had obeyed her, she now obeyed the OD youth. She crouched down under the stairs, but knew it was no good. The autumn light from the courtyard revealed her. If they wanted to look at the courtyard, or at the apartment door at the rear of the hallway, she would be seen. Since upright or cowering made no difference, she stood upright. From near the front door, the OD man urged her to stay there. Then he went. She heard yells, orders, and appeals, and it all seemed to be as close as next door.

  At last, he was back with others. She heard the boots at the front door. She heard him say in German that he’d searched the ground floor and no one was at home. There were occupied rooms upstairs, though. It was such a prosaic conversation he had with the SS men that it didn’t seem to her to do justice to the risk he was taking. He was staking his existence against the likelihood that having worked down Lw@owska and so far down Dabrowski they might by now be incompetent enough not to search the ground floor themselves and therefore not to find Mrs. Dresner, whom he dimly knew, beneath the stairs.

  In the end they took his word. She heard them on the stairs, opening and slamming doors on the first landing, their boots clattering on the floor in the room of the cavity. She heard her friend’s raised, shrewish voice ... of course I have a work permit, I work over at the Gestapo mess, I know all the gentlemen. She heard them come down from the second floor with someone; with more than one; a couple, a family. Substitutes for me, she would later think. A middle-aged male voice with an edge of bronchitis to it said, “But surely, gentlemen, we can take some clothing.” And in a tone as indifferent as that of a railway porter asked for timetable information, the SS man telling him in Polish, “There’s no need for it. At these places they provide everything.”

  The sound receded. Mrs. Dresner waited. There was no second sweep. The second sweep would be tomorrow or the day after. They would return again and again now, culling the ghetto. What in June had been seen as a culminating horror had become by October a daily process. And as grateful as she was to the OD boy, it was clear as she went upstairs to get Danka that when murder is as scheduled, habitual, industrial as it was here in Cracow you could scarcely, with tentative heroism, redirect the overriding energy of the system. The more Orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan—“An hour of life is still life.” The OD boy had given her that hour. She knew there was no one who could give her more.

  Upstairs, the woman was a little shamefaced.

  “The girl can come whenever she wishes,” she said. That is, I didn’t exclude you out of cowardice, but as a matter of policy. And the policy stands. You can’t be accepted, but the girl can.

  Mrs. Dresner did not argue—she had a sense that the woman’s stance was part of the same equation that had saved her in the downstairs hall. She thanked the woman. Danka might need to accept her hospitality again.

  From now on, since she looked young for her forty-two years and still had her health, Mrs.

  Dresner would attempt to survive on that basis

  --the economic one, the putative value of her strength to the Armaments Inspectorate or to some other wing of the war effort. She wasn’t confident of the idea. These days anyone with half a grasp on truth could tell that the SS believed the death of the socially unappeasable Jew outbalanced any value he might have as an item of labor. And the question is, in such an era, Who saves Juda Dresner, factory purchasing officer? Who saves Janek Dresner, auto

  mechanic at the Wehrmacht garage? Who saves Danka Dresner, Luftwaffe cleaning woman, on the morning the SS finally choose to ignore their economic value?

  While the OD man was arranging Mrs.

  Dresner’s survival in the hallway of the house in Dabrowski, the young Zionists of the Halutz Youth and the ZOB were preparing a more visible act of resistance. They had acquired uniforms of the Waffen SS and, with them, the entitlement to visit the SS’-RESERVED Cyganeria Restaurant in @sw Ducha Plac, across the square from the S@lowacki Theater. In the Cyganeria they left a bomb which blew the tables through the roof, tore seven SS men to fragments, and injured some forty more.

  When Oskar heard about it, he knew he could have been there, buttering up some official.

  It was the deliberate intent of Shimon and

  Gusta Dranger and their colleagues to run against

  the ancient pacifism of the ghetto, to convert it

  to universal rebellion. They bombed the

  SS’-ONLY Bagatella Cinema in

  Karmelicka Street. In the dark, Leni

  Riefenstahl flickered the promise of German womanhood to the wandering soldier frayed from performing the nation’s works in the barbarous ghetto or on the increasingly risky streets of Polish Cracow, and the next second a vast yellow spear of flame extinguished the sight.

  The ZOB would in a few months sink patrol

  boats on the Vistula, fire-bomb sundry

  military garages throughout the city, arrange

  Passierscheins for people who were not supposed to have

  them, smuggle passport photographs out

  to centers where they could be used in the forging of Aryan

  papers, derail the elegant Army-only train

  that ran between Cracow and Bochnia, and get their

  underground newspaper into circulation. They would also

  arrange for two of OD Chief Spira’s

  lieutenants, Spitz and Forster, who

  had drawn up lists for the imprisonment of thousands, to walk into a Gestapo ambush. It was a variation of an old undergraduate trick. One of the underground, posing as an informer, made an appointment to meet the two policemen in a village near Cracow. At the same time, a separate supposed informer told the Gestapo that two leaders of the Jewish partisan movement could be found at a particular rendezvous point. Spitz and Forster were both mown down while running from the Gestapo.

  Still, the style of resistance for the ghetto dwellers remained that of Artur Rosenzweig, who, when asked in June to make a list of thousands for deportation, had placed his own name, his wife’s, his daughter’s at the top.

  Over in Zablocie, in the backyard of Emalia, Mr. Jereth and Oskar Schindler were pursuing their own
species of resistance by planning a second barracks.

  CHAPTER 17

  An Austrian dentist named Sedlacek had now arrived in Cracow and was making wary enquiries about Schindler. He had come by train from Budapest and carried a list of possible Cracow contacts and, in a false-bottomed suitcase, a quantity of Occupation z@loty, which, since Governor General Frank had abolished the major denominations of Polish money, took up an unconscionable space.

  Though he pretended to be traveling on business, he was a courier for a Zionist rescue organization in Budapest.

  Even in the autumn of 1942, the Zionists of Palestine, let alone the population of the world, knew nothing but rumors of what was happening in Europe. They had set up a bureau in Istanbul to gather hard information. From an apartment in the Beyoglu section of the city, three agents sent out postcards addressed to every Zionist body in German Europe. The postcards read:

  “Please let me know how you are. Eretz is longing for you.” Eretz meant the “land” and, to any Zionist, Israel. Each of the postcards was signed by one of the three, a girl named Sarka Mandelblatt, who had a convenient Turkish citizenship.

  The postcards had gone into the void. No one answered. It meant that the addressees were in prison, or in the forest, or at labor in some camp, or in a ghetto, or dead. All the Zionists of Istanbul had was the ominous negative evidence of silence.

  In the late autumn of 1942, they at last received one reply, a postcard with a view of the Belvaros of Budapest. The message on it read: “Encouraged by your interest in my situation.

  Rahamim maher [urgent help] is much

  needed. Please keep in touch.”

  This reply had been composed by a Budapest jeweler named Samu Springmann, who’d first received and then puzzled out the message on Sarka Mandelblatt’s postcard. Samu was a slight man, jockey size, in the prime of his thirties. Since the age of thirteen, despite an inalienable probity, he had been oiling officials, doing favors for the diplomatic corps, bribing the heavy-handed Hungarian Secret Police. Now the Istanbul people let him know that they wanted to use him to pipe rescue money into the German empire and to transmit through them to the world some definite intelligence on what was happening to European Jewry.

  In the German-allied Hungary of General Horthy, Samu Springmann and his Zionist colleagues were as bereft of solid news from beyond the Polish border as the people in Istanbul. But he began to recruit couriers who, for a percentage of the bag or else out of conviction, would be willing to penetrate the German territories. One of his couriers was a diamond dealer, Erich Popescu, an agent of the Hungarian Secret Police. Another was an underworld carpet smuggler, Bandi Grosz, who had also assisted the secret police, but who began to work for Springmann to expiate all the grief he had caused his late mother. A third was Rudi Schulz, an Austrian safecracker, an agent for the Gestapo Management Bureau in Stuttgart. Springmann had a gift for playing with double agents such as Popescu, Grosz, and Schulz, by touching their sentimentality, their greed, and, if any, their principles.

  Some of his couriers were idealists, working from firm premises. Sedlacek, who asked after Herr Schindler in Cracow near the end of 1942, belonged to that species. He had a successful dental practice in Vienna and, in his mid-forties, did not need to lug false-bottomed suitcases into Poland. But here he was, with a list in his pocket, the list having come from Istanbul. And the second name on the list, Oskar’s!

  It meant that someone—Itzhak Stern, the

  businessman Ginter, Dr. Alexander Biberstein

  --had forwarded Schindler’s name to the Zionists in Palestine. Without knowing it, Herr Schindler had been nominated for the post of righteous person.

  Dr. Sedlacek had a friend in the Cracow

  garrison, a fellow Viennese, a patient

  he’d got to know in his practice. It was Major Franz Von Korab of the Wehrmacht. On his first evening in Cracow, the dentist met Major Von Korab at the Hotel Cracovia for a drink. Sedlacek had had a miserable day; had gone to the gray Vistula and looked across at Podg@orze, the cold fortress of barbed wire and lofty gravestoned walls, a cloud of a special dimness above it this mean winter’s day, a sharper rain falling there beyond the fake eastern gate where even the policemen looked accursed. When it was time to go and meet Von Korab, he went gratefully.

  In the suburbs of Vienna it had always been rumored that Von Korab had a Jewish grandmother. Patients would idly say so—in the Reich, genealogical gossip was as acceptable small talk as was the weather. People would seriously speculate over drinks whether it was true that Reinhard Heydrich’s grandmother had married a Jew named Suss. Once, against all good sense but for the sake of friendship, Von Korab had confessed to Sedlacek that the rumor was true in his case. This confession had been a gesture of trust, which it would now be safe to return. Sedlacek therefore asked the major about some of the people on the Istanbul list. To Schindler’s name, Von Korab responded with an indulgent laugh. He knew Herr Schindler, had dined with him. He was physically impressive, said the major, and made money hand over fist. He was much brighter than he pretended to be. I can call him right now and make an appointment, said Von Korab.

  At ten the next morning they entered the Emalia office. Schindler accepted Sedlacek politely but watched Major Von Korab, measuring .his trust of the dentist. After a time Oskar warmed to the stranger, and the major excused himself and would not stay for morning coffee. “Very well,” said Sedlacek, when Von Korab was gone, “I’ll tell you exactly where I come from.”

  He did not mention the money he had brought, nor the likelihood that in the future trusted contacts in Poland would be handed small fortunes in Jewish Joint Distribution Committee cash. What the dentist wanted to know, without any financial coloring, was what Herr Schindler knew and thought about the war against Jewry in Poland. Once Sedlacek had the question out, Schindler hesitated. In that second, Sedlacek expected a refusal. Schindler’s expanding workshop employed 550 Jews at the SS rental rate. The Armaments Inspectorate guaranteed a man like Schindler a continuity of rich contracts; the SS promised him, for no more than 7.50 Reichsmarks a day per person, a continuity of slaves. It should not be a surprise if he sat back in his padded leather chair and claimed ignorance.

  “There is one problem, Herr Sedlacek,” he growled. “It’s this. What they are doing to people in this country is beyond belief.”

  “You mean,” said Dr. Sedlacek, “that you’re concerned my principals won’t believe you?”

  Schindler said, “Since I scarcely believe

  it myself.” He rose, went to the liquor

  cabinet, poured two snifters of cognac and brought one for Dr. Sedlacek. Returning to his own side of the desk with the other, he took a swallow, frowned at an invoice, picked it up, went to the door on the balls of his feet and swung it open as if to trap an eavesdropper. For a while he stood there framed. Then Sedlacek heard him talking calmly to his Polish secretary about the invoice. In a few minutes, closing the door, he returned to Sedlacek, took a seat behind the desk, and after another deep swallow, began to talk.

  Even among Sedlacek’s own small cell,

  his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not

  imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite

  so systematic. Not only was the story

  Schindler told him startling simply in moral

  terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a

  desperate battle, the National Socialists

  would devote thousands of men, the resources of

  precious railroads, an enormous cubic

  footage of cargo space, expensive

  techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their

  research-and-development scientists, a

  substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of

  automatic weapons, whole magazines of

  ammunition, all to an extermination which had no

  military or economic meaning but merely a

  psychological one. Dr. Sedlacek h
ad

  expected mere horror stories—hunger,

  economic strictures, violent pogroms in this city or that, violations of ownership—all the historically accustomed things.

  Oskar’s summary of events in Poland convinced

  Sedlacek precisely because of the sort of man

  Oskar was. He had done well from the

  Occupation; he sat at the heart of his own hive,

  a brandy snifter in his hand. There were both an

  impressive surface calm and a fundamental

  anger in him. He was like a man who had, to his

  regret, found it impossible to disbelieve the

  worst. He showed no tendency to be

  extravagant in the facts he relayed.

  If I can arrange your visa, said

  Sedlacek, would you come to Budapest and pass on what you just told me to my principals and the others? Schindler seemed momentarily surprised. You can write a report, he said. And surely you’ve heard this sort of thing from other sources. But Sedlacek told him no; there had been individual stories, details of this incident and that. No comprehensive picture. Come to Budapest, said Sedlacek. Mind you, it might be uncomfortable traveling.

  Do you mean, asked Schindler, that I have to cross the border on foot?

  Not as bad as that, said the dentist. You might have to travel in a freight train.

  I’ll come, said Oskar Schindler.

  Dr. Sedlacek asked him about the other names

  on the Istanbul list. At the top of the list, for

  instance, stood a Cracow dentist. Dentists were

  always easy to visit, said Sedlacek, since

  everyone on earth has at least one bona fide

  cavity. No, said Herr Schindler. Don’t

  visit this man. He’s been compromised

  by the SS.

  Before he left Cracow to return to Mr.