Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  Henry told Oskar that night that it had been this attitude of Amon’s—that the Rosners were immune because of their musical talent—which had persuaded him and Manci to bring their eight-year-old son, Olek, into the camp. He had been hiding with friends in Cracow, but that was becoming a less and less secure business every day. Once inside, Olek could blend into that small crowd of children, many unregistered in the prison records, whose presence in P@lasz@ow was connived at by prisoners and tolerated by some of the junior camp officials. Getting Olek into the place, however, had been the risky part.

  Poldek Pfefferberg, who’d had to drive a truck to town to pick up toolboxes, had smuggled the boy in. The Ukrainians had nearly discovered him at the gate, while he was still an outsider and living in contravention of every racial statute of the Reich Government General. His feet had burst out of the end of the box that lay between Pfefferberg’s ankles. “Mr. Pfefferberg, Mr. Pfefferberg,” Poldek had heard while the Ukrainians searched the back of the truck. “My feet are sticking out.”

  Henry could laugh at that now, though warily, since there were still rivers to be crossed. But Schindler reacted dramatically, with a gesture that seemed to grow from the slightly alcoholic melancholy which had beset him on this evening of his birthday. He lifted his office chair by its back and raised it to the portrait of the F@uhrer. It seemed for a second that he was about to lash into the icon. But he spun again on his heel, lowered the chair deliberately until its four legs hung equidistant from the floor, and rammed them into the carpet, shaking the wall. Then he said, “They’re burning bodies out there, aren’t they?”

  Henry grimaced as if the stench were in the room.

  “They’ve started,” he admitted.

  Now that P@lasz@ow was—in the language

  of the bureaucrats—a Concentration Camp, its

  inmates found that it was safer to encounter Amon. The

  chiefs in Oranienburg did not permit summary

  execution. The days when slow potato-peelers

  could be expunged on the spot were gone. They could

  now be destroyed only by due process. There had

  to be a hearing, a record sent in triplicate

  to Oranienburg. The sentence had to be confirmed not

  only by General Gl@ucks’s office but also

  by General Pohl’s Department W (economic

  Enterprises). For if a commandant killed

  essential workers, Department W could find itself

  hit with claims for compensation. Allach-Munich,

  Ltd., for example, porcelain

  manufacturers using slave labor from Dachau,

  had recently filed a claim for 31,800

  RM. because “as a result of the typhoid

  epidemic which broke out in January 1943, we

  had no prison labor at our disposal from

  January 26, 1943, until March 3,

  1943. In our opinion we are entitled

  to compensation under Clause 2 of the Businesses Compensation Settlement Fund ...”

  Department W was all the more liable for compensation if the loss of skilled labor arose from the zeal of a trigger-happy SS officer.

  So, to avoid the paperwork and the departmental complications, Amon held his hand on most days.

  The people who appeared within his range in the spring and

  early summer of ‘44 somehow understood it was

  safer, though they knew nothing of Department W and

  Generals Pohl and Gl@ucks. It was to them a

  remission as mysterious as Amon’s

  madness itself.

  Yet, as Oskar had mentioned to Henry

  Rosner, they were now burning bodies at P@lasz@ow. In preparation for the Russian offensive, the SS was abolishing its institutions in the East. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bel@zec had been evacuated the previous autumn. The Waffen SS who had run them had been ordered to dynamite the chambers and the crematoria, to leave no recognizable trace, and had then been posted to Italy to fight partisans. The immense complex at Auschwitz, in its safe ground in Upper Silesia, would complete the great task in the East, and once that was concluded, the crematoria would be plowed under the earth. For without the evidence of the crematoria, the dead could offer no witness, were a whisper behind the wind, an inconsequential dust on the aspen leaves.

  P@lasz@ow was not as simple a case, for its dead lay everywhere around it. In the enthusiasm of the spring of 1943, bodies—notably the bodies of those killed in the ghetto’s last two days— were thrown randomly into mass graves in the woods. Now Department D charged Amon with finding them all.

  Estimates of the numbers of bodies vary widely. Polish publications, based on the work of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland and on other sources, claim that 150,000 prisoners, many of them in transit to other places, went through P@lasz@ow and its five subcamps. Of these, the Poles believe that 80,000 died there, mainly in mass executions inside Chujowa G@orka or else in epidemics.

  These figures baffle the surviving

  P@lasz@ow inmates who remember the fearsome work of burning the dead. They say the number they exhumed was somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000--1 multitude frightful in itself and which they have no desire to exaggerate. The distance between the two estimates looks narrower when it is remembered that executions of Poles, Gypsies, and Jews would continue at Chujowa G@orka and at other points around P@lasz@ow throughout most of that year, and that the SS themselves took up the practice of burning bodies immediately after mass killings in the Austrian hill fort. Besides, Amon would not succeed in his intention of removing all bodies from the woods. Some thousands more would be found in postwar exhumations, and today, as the suburbs of Cracow close P@lasz@ow in, bones are still discovered during the digging of foundations. Oskar saw the line of pyres on the ridge above the workshops during a visit just before his birthday. When he came back a week later, the activity had increased. The bodies were dug up by male prisoners who worked masked and gagging. On blankets and barrows and litters the dead were brought to the burning site and laid on log frames. So the pyre was built, layer by layer, and when it reached the height of a man’s shoulder, was doused in fuel and lit. Pfefferberg was horrified to see the temporary life the flames gave to the dead, the way the corpses sat forward, throwing the burning logs away, their limbs reaching, their mouths opening for a last cry. A young SS man from the delousing station ran among the pyres waving a pistol and roaring frenetic orders. The dust of the dead fell in hair and on the clothing hung in the back gardens of junior officers’ villas. Oskar was bemused to see the way the personnel took the smoke as if the grit in the air were some sort of honest and inevitable industrial fallout. And through the fogs, Amon went riding with Majola, both of them calm in the saddle. Leo John took his twelve-year-old son off to catch tadpoles in the marshy ground in the wood. The flames and the stench did not distract them from their daily lives.

  Oskar, leaning back in the driver’s seat of his

  BMW, the windows up and a handkerchief clamped

  over his mouth and nose, thought how they must be burning

  the Spiras with all the rest. He’d been astounded

  when they’d executed all the ghetto policemen and

  their families last Christmas, as soon as

  Symche Spira had finished directing the

  dismantling of the ghetto. They had brought them all, and their wives and children, up here on a gray afternoon and shot them as the cold sun vanished. They’d shot the most faithful (spira and Zellinger) as well as the most grudging. Spira and bashful Mrs. Spira and the ungifted Spira children whom Pfefferberg had patiently tutored—they’d all stood naked within a circle of rifles, shivering against each other’s flanks, Spira’s Napoleonic OD uniform now just a heap of clothing for recycling, flung down at the fort entrance. And Spira still assuring everyone that it could not happen.

  That execution had shocked Oskar because it showed that there was no obe
dience or obeisance a Jew could make to guarantee survival. And now they were burning the Spiras as anonymously, as ungratefully, as they had executed them. Even the Gutters! It had happened after a dinner at Amon’s the year before. Oskar had gone home early, but later heard what had happened after he left. John and Neuschel had started in on Bosch. They thought he was squeamish. He’d made a fuss about being a veteran of the trenches. But they had not seen him perform any executions.

  They kept it going for hours—the joke of the evening. In the end, Bosch had ordered David Gutter and his son roused in their barracks and Mrs. Gutter and the Gutter girl fetched from theirs.

  Again, it was a matter of faithful servants.

  David Gutter had been the last president of the

  Judenrat and had cooperated in everything—had

  never gone to Pomorska Street and tried to start

  any argument over the scope of the SS

  Aktions or the size of transports sent

  to Bel@zec. Gutter had signed everything and thought every demand reasonable. Besides that, Bosch had used Gutter as an agent inside and outside P@lasz@ow, sending him up to Cracow with truckloads of newly upholstered furniture or pocketfuls of jewelry to sell on the black market. And Gutter had done it because he was a scoundrel anyhow, but mainly because he believed it would make his wife and children immune. At two o’clock that polar morning, a Jewish policeman, Zauder, a friend of Pfefferberg’s and of Stern’s, later to be shot by Pilarzik during one of that officer’s drunken rampages, but on duty at the women’s gate that night, heard it—Bosch ordering the Gutters into position in a depression in the ground near the women’s camp. The children pleading, but David and Mrs. Gutter taking it calmly, knowing there was no argument. And now as Oskar watched, all of that evidence—the Gutters, the Spiras, the rebels, the priests, the children, the pretty girls found on Aryan papers—all of it was returning to that mad hill to be obliterated in case the Russians came to P@lasz@ow and made too much of it. Care, said Oranienburg in a letter to Amon, is to be taken with the future disposal of all bodies, and for that purpose they were sending a representative of a Hamburg engineering firm to survey the site for crematoria. In the meantime, the dead were to be kept, awaiting retrieval, at well-marked burial sites.

  When, on that second visit, Oskar saw the extent of the fires on Chujowa G@orka, his first impulse was to stay in the car, that sane German mechanism, and drive home. Instead he went calling on friends of his in the workshop, and then visited Stern’s office. He thought that with all that grit falling on the windows, it wasn’t out of the question that people inside P@lasz@ow would consider suicide. Yet he was the one who seemed depressed. He didn’t ask any of his usual questions, such as “All right, Herr Stern, if God made man in His image, which race is most like Him? Is a Pole more like Him than a Czech?” There was none of that whimsy today. Instead he growled, “What does everyone think?” Stern told him that the prisoners were like prisoners. They did their work and hoped for survival.

  “I’m going to get you out,” Oskar grunted

  all at once. He put a balled fist on the

  desk. “I’m going to get you all out.”

  “All?” asked Stern. He couldn’t help

  himself. Such massive Biblical rescues

  didn’t suit the era.

  “You, anyhow,” said Oskar. “Y.”

  CHAPTER 28

  In Amon’s office in the Administration

  Building there were two typists. One was a young German woman, a Frau Kochmann; the other, a studious young prisoner, Mietek Pemper. Pemper would one day become secretary to Oskar, but in the summer of ‘44 he worked with Amon, and like anyone else in that situation was not too sanguine about his chances.

  He first came into close contact with Amon as accidentally as had Helen Hirsch, the maid. Pemper was summoned to Amon’s office after someone had recommended him to the Commandant. The young prisoner was a student of accounting, a touch typist, and could take dictation in both Polish and German shorthand. His powers of memory were said to be a byword. So, a prisoner of his skills, Pemper found himself in P@lasz@ow’s main office with Amon, and would also sometimes take dictation from Amon at the villa.

  The irony was that Pemper’s photographic memory would in the end, more than the memory of any other prisoner, bring about the hanging of Amon in Cracow. But Pemper did not believe such an era would come. In 1944, if he’d had to guess who’d be the most likely victim of his near-perfect recall, he would have had to say Mietek Pemper himself.

  Pemper was meant to be the backup typist. For confidential documents, Amon was to use Frau Kochmann, a woman not nearly as competent as Mietek and slow at dictation. Sometimes Amon would break the rule and let young Pemper take confidential dictation. And Mietek, even while he sat across Amon’s desk with the pad on his knee, could not stop contradictory suspicions from distracting him. The first was that all these inside reports and memoranda, whose details he was retaining, would make him a prime witness on the remote day when he and Amon stood before a tribunal. The other suspicion was that Amon would, in the end, have to erase him as one later would a classified tape.

  Nonetheless, Mietek prepared each morning not only his own sets of typing paper, carbons, and duplicates, but a dozen for the German girl. After the girl had done her typing, Pemper would pretend to destroy the carbons, but in fact would keep and read them. He kept no written records, but he had had this reputation for memory since school days. He knew that if that tribunal ever met, if he and Amon sat in the body of the court, he would astound the Commandant with the precise dating of his evidence.

  Pemper saw some astonishing classified documents. He read, for example, memoranda on the flogging of women. Camp commanders were to be reminded that it should be done to maximum effect. It was demeaning to involve SS personnel, and therefore Czech women were to be flogged by Slovak women, Slovaks by Czechs. Russians and Poles were to be bracketed for the same purposes.

  Commandants were to use their imagination in exploiting other national and cultural differences.

  Another bulletin reminded them that they did not hold in their own persons the right to impose the death sentence. Commandants could seek authorization by telegram or letter to the Reich Security Main Office. Amon had done this in the spring with two Jews who’d escaped from the subcamp at Wieliczka and whom he proposed to hang. A telegram of permission had returned from Berlin, signed, Pemper noticed, by Dr.

  Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich

  Security Main Office.

  Now, in April, Pemper read a memorandum from Gerhard Maurer, the Labor Allocation Chief of General Gl@ucks’s Section D.

  Maurer wanted Amon to tell him how many Hungarians could be held temporarily at P@lasz@ow. They were meant ultimately to go to the German Armament Works, DAW, which was a subsidiary of Krupp making artillery-shell fuses in the enormous complex at Auschwitz. Given that Hungary had only recently been taken over as a German Protectorate, these Hungarian Jews and dissidents were in a better state of health than those who had had years of ghettoization and prison life. They were therefore a windfall for the factories of Auschwitz.

  Unfortunately, accommodation at DAW was not yet ready for them, and if the commandant of P@lasz@ow would take up to 7,000, pending the proper arrangements, Section D would be extremely grateful.

  Goeth’s answer, either seen or typed by Pemper, was that P@lasz@ow was up to capacity and that there was no building space left inside the electric fences. However, Amon could accept up to 10,000 transit prisoners if (a) he were permitted to liquidate the unproductive element inside the camp; and (b) he were at the same time to impose double bunking. Maurer wrote in reply that double bunking could not be permitted in summer for fear of typhus, and that ideally, according to the regulations, there should be a minimum 3 cubic meters of air per person.

  But he was willing to authorize Goeth to undertake

  the first option. Section D would advise

 
Auschwitz-Birkenau—or at least, the

  extermination wing of that great enterprise—to expect a shipment of reject prisoners from P@lasz@ow. At the same time, Ostbahn transport would be arranged with cattle cars, of course, run up the spur from the main line to the very gate of P@lasz@ow.

  Amon therefore had to conduct a sorting-out process inside his camp.

  With the blessing of Maurer and Section D, he would in a day abolish as many lives as Oskar Schindler was, by wit and reckless spending, harboring in Emalia. Amon named his selection session Die Gesundheitaktion, the Health Action.

  He managed it as one would manage a country

  fair. When it began, on the morning of Sunday,

  May 7, the Appellplatz was hung with

  banners: “FOR EVERY PRISONER,

  APPROPRIATE WORK!” Loudspeakers played

  ballads and Strauss and love songs. Beneath them

  was set a table where Dr. Blancke, the SS

  physician, sat with Dr. Leon Gross and a

  number of clerks. Blancke’s concept of

  “health” was as eccentric as that of any doctor in

  the SS. He had rid the prison clinic of the

  chronically ill by injecting benzine into their

  bloodstreams. These injections could not by anyone’s

  definition be called mercy killings. The patient

  was seized by convulsions which ended in a choking death after

  a quarter of an hour. Marek Biberstein, once

  president of the Judenrat and now, after his

  two-year imprisonment in Montelupich

  Street, a citizen of P@lasz@ow, had

  suffered heart failure and been brought to the Krankenstube. Before Blancke could get to him with a benzine syringe, Dr. Idek Schindel, uncle of that Genia whose distant figure had galvanized Schindler two years before, had come to Biberstein’s bedside with a number of colleagues. One had injected a more merciful dose of cyanide.