Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  And as they drank and the music played, it seemed more and more reasonable that Europe would yield them that night the death vital to its sanity. They were citizens of the continent again; they were not the prisoner and the Herr Direktor. The radio’s promises to produce a message from the F@uhrer recurred, and every time, Oskar laughed with increasing point.

  Midnight came and they paid no attention anymore to the promises. Their very breath was lighter in this new post-F@uhrer Cracow.

  By morning, they surmised, there would be dancing in every

  square, and it would go unpunished. The

  Wehrmacht would arrest Frank in the Wawel

  and encircle the SS complex in

  Pomorska Street.

  A little before 1 A.m., Hitler was heard

  broadcasting from Rastenberg. Oskar had been so convinced that that voice was a voice he would never need to hear again that for a few seconds he did not recognize the sound, in spite of its familiarity, thinking it just another temporizing Party spokesman. But Garde heard the speech from its first word, and knew whose voice it was. “My German comrades!” it began. “If I speak to you today, it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know that I am unhurt and well, and, second, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history.”

  The speech ended four minutes later with a

  reference to the conspirators. “This time we shall

  settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed.”

  Adam Garde had never quite bought the fantasy Oskar had been pushing all evening. For Hitler was more than a man: he was a system with ramifications. Even if he died, it was no guarantee the system would alter its character. Besides, it was not in the nature of a phenomenon such as Hitler to perish in the space of a single evening. But Oskar had been believing in the death with a feverish conviction for hours now, and when it turned out to be an illusion, it was young Garde who found himself cast as the comforter, while Oskar spoke with an almost operatic grief. “All our vision of deliverance is futile,” he said. He poured another glass of cognac each, then pushed the bottle across the desk, opening his cigarette box. “Take the cognac and some cigarettes and get some sleep,” he said. “We’ll have to wait a little longer for our freedom.”

  In the confusion of the cognac, of the news and of its sudden reversal in the small hours, Garde did not think it strange that Oskar was talking about “our freedom,” as if they had an equivalent need, were both prisoners who had to wait passively to be liberated. But back in his bunk Garde thought, It’s amazing that Herr Direktor should have talked like that, like someone easily given to fantasies and fits of depression. Usually, he was so pragmatic.

  Pomorska Street and the camps around Cracow crawled with rumors that late summer, of some imminent rearrangement of prisoners.

  The rumors troubled Oskar in Zablocie, and at P@lasz@ow, Amon got unofficial word that the camps would be disbanded.

  In fact that meeting about security had to do not with

  saving P@lasz@ow from partisans, but with the coming

  closure of the camp. Amon had called

  Madritsch and Oskar and Bosch out

  to P@lasz@ow and held the meeting just to give himself protective coloration. It then became plausible for him to drive into Cracow and call on Wilhelm Koppe, the new SS police chief of the Government General. Amon sat on the far side of Koppe’s desk wearing a fake frown, cracking his knuckles as if from the stress of a besieged P@lasz@ow. He told Koppe the same story he’d given Oskar and the others—that partisan organizations had sprung up inside the camp, that Zionists within the wire had had communication with radicals of the Polish People’s Army and the Jewish Combat Organization. As the Obergruppenf@uhrer could appreciate, that sort of communication was difficult to stamp out—messages could come in in a smuggled loaf of bread. But at the first sign of active rebellion, he—Amon Goeth—as Commandant, would need to be able to take summary action. The question Amon wanted to ask was, if he fired first and did the paperwork for Oranienburg afterward, would the distinguished Obergruppenf@uhrer Koppe stand by him?

  No problem, said Koppe. He didn’t really approve of bureaucrats either. In years past, as police chief of the Wartheland, he’d commanded the fleet of extermination trucks which carried Untermenschen out into the countryside and which then, running the engines at full throttle, pumped the exhaust back into the locked interior. That too was an off-the-cuff operation, not permitting precise paperwork. Of course, you have to use your judgment, he told Amon. And if you do, I’ll back you.

  Oskar had sensed at the meeting that Amon was not really worried about partisans. Had he known then that P@lasz@ow was to be liquidated, he would have understood the deeper meaning of Amon’s performance. For Amon was worried about Wilek Chilowicz, his Jewish chief of camp police. Amon had often used Chilowicz as an agent on the black market. Chilowicz knew Cracow. He knew where he could sell the flour, rice, butter the Commandant held back from the camp supplies. He knew the dealers who would be interested in product from the custom jewelry shop staffed by interns like Wulkan. Amon was worried about the whole Chilowicz clique: Mrs.

  Marysia Chilowicz, who enjoyed conjugal

  privileges; Mietek Finkelstein, an

  associate; Chilowicz’ sister Mrs. Ferber;

  and Mr. Ferber. If there had been an

  aristocracy inside P@lasz@ow, it had been the Chilowiczes. They had had power over prisoners, but their knowledge was double-edged: they knew as much about Amon as they did about some miserable machinist in the Madritsch factory. If, when P@lasz@ow closed, they were shipped to another camp, Amon knew they would try to barter their inside knowledge of his rackets as soon as they found themselves in the wrong line. Or more likely, as soon as they were hungry.

  Of course, Chilowicz was uneasy too, and

  Amon could sense in him the doubt that he would be

  allowed to leave P@lasz@ow. Amon decided

  to use Chilowicz’ very concern as a lever. He

  called Sowinski, an SS auxiliary

  recruited from the High Tatras of

  Czechoslovakia, into his office for a conference. Sowinski was to approach Chilowicz and pretend to offer him an escape deal. Amon was sure that Chilowicz would be eager to negotiate.

  Sowinski went and did it well. He told

  Chilowicz he could get the whole clan out of the camp in one of the large fuel-burning trucks. You could sit half a dozen people in the wood furnace if you were running on gas.

  Chilowicz was interested in the proposition. Sowinski would of course need to deliver a note to friends on the outside, who would provide a vehicle. Sowinski would deliver the clan to the rendezvous point in the truck. Chilowicz was willing to pay in diamonds. But, said Chilowicz, as an earnest of their mutual trust, Sowinski must provide a weapon.

  Sowinski reported the meeting to the Commandant, and Amon gave him a .38-caliber pistol with the pin filed down. This was passed to Chilowicz, who of course had neither need nor opportunity to test-fire it. Yet Amon would be able to swear to both Koppe and Oranienburg that he had found a weapon on the prisoner.

  It was a Sunday in mid-August when

  Sowinski met the Chilowiczes in the

  building-material shed and hid them in the truck.

  Then he drove down Jerozolimska to the gate. There should be routine formalities there; then the truck could roll out into the countryside. In the empty furnace, in the pulses of the five escapees was the febrile, almost insupportable hope of leaving Amon behind.

  At the gate, however, were Amon and Amthor and Hujar, and the Ukrainian Ivan Scharujew. A leisurely inspection was made. Lumbering with half-smiles across the bed of the truck, the gentlemen of the SS saved the wood furnace till last. They mimed surprise when they discovered the pitiable Chilowicz clan sardine-tight in the wood hole. As soon as Chilowicz had been dragged out, Amon “found” the illegal gun tucked into his boot.
/>   Chilowicz’ pockets were laden with diamonds, bribes paid him by the desperate inmates of the camp.

  Prisoners at their day of rest heard that

  Chilowicz was under sentence down there at the gate. The news made for the same awe, the confusion of emotions that had operated the night the year before when Symche Spira and his OD had been executed. Nor could any prisoner decipher what it meant to his own chances.

  The Chilowicz crowd were executed one at a time with pistols. Amon, very yellow now from liver disease, at the height of his obesity, wheezing like an elderly uncle, put the muzzle to Chilowicz’ neck. Later the corpses were displayed in the Appellplatz with placards tied to their chests: “THOSE WHO VIOLATE JUST LAWS CAN EXPECT A SIMILAR DEATH.”

  That, of course, was not the moral the prisoners of P@lasz@ow took from the sight.

  Amon spent the afternoon drafting two long reports, one to Koppe, one to General Gl@ucks’s Section D, explaining how he had saved P@lasz@ow from an insurgency in its first phase—the one in which a group of key conspirators escaped from the camp—by executing the plot’s leaders. He did not finish revising either draft till 11 P.m. Frau Kochmann was too slow for such late work, and so the Commandant had Mietek Pemper roused from his barracks and brought to the villa. In the front parlor, Amon stated levelly that he believed the boy had been party to Chilowicz’ escape attempt. Pemper was astounded and did not know how to answer. Looking around him for some sort of inspiration, he saw the seam of his pants leg, which had come unsewn. How could I pass on the outside in this sort of clothing? he asked.

  The balance of frank desperation in his answer satisfied Amon. He told the boy to sit down and instructed him how the typing was to be set out and the pages numbered. Amon hit the papers with his spatulate fingertips. “I want a first-class job done.” And Pemper thought, That’s the way of it—I can die now for being an escapee, or later in the year for having seen these justifications of Amon’s.

  When Pemper was leaving the villa with the drafts in his hand, Goeth followed him out onto the patio and called a last order. “When you type the list of insurgents,” Amon called companionably, “I want you to leave room above my signature for another name to be inserted.”

  Pemper nodded, discreet as any professional secretary. He stood just a half-second, trying for inspiration, some fast answer that would reverse Amon’s order about the extra space. The space for his name. Mietek Pemper. In that hateful torrid silence of Sunday evening in Jerozolimska, nothing plausible came to him. “Yes, Herr Commandant,” said Pemper.

  As Pemper stumbled up the road to the

  Administration Building, he remembered a letter Amon had had him type earlier that summer. It had been addressed to Amon’s father, the Viennese publisher, and was full of filial concern for an allergy which had troubled the old man that spring. Amon hoped that it had lifted by now. The reason Pemper remembered that letter out of all the others was that half an hour before he’d been called into Amon’s office to take it down, the Commandant had dragged a girl filing clerk outside and executed her. The juxtaposition of the letter and the execution proved to Pemper that, for Amon, murder and allergies were events of equal weight. And if you told a tractable stenographer to leave a space for his name, it was a matter of course that he left it.

  Pemper sat at the typewriter for more than an hour, but in the end left the space for himself. Not to do that would be even more suddenly fatal. There had been a rumor among Stern’s friends that Schindler had some movement of people in mind, some rescue or other, but tonight rumors from Zablocie meant nothing anymore. Mietek typed;

  Mietek left in each report the space for his own death. And all his remembrance of the Commandant’s criminal carbons which he’d so industriously memorized—all that was made futile by the space he left.

  When both typescripts were word-perfect, he returned to the villa. Amon kept him waiting by the French windows while he himself sat in the parlor reading the documents. Pemper wondered if his own body would be displayed with some declamatory lettering: “SO DIE ALL JEWISH BOLSHEVISTS!”

  At last Amon appeared at the windows. “You may go to bed,” he said.

  “Herr Commandant?”

  “I said, you may go to bed.”

  Pemper went. He walked less steadily now. After what he had seen, Amon could not let him live. But perhaps the Commandant believed there would be leisure to kill him later. In the meantime, life for a day was still life.

  The space, as it proved, was for an elderly prisoner who, by unwise dealings with men like John and Hujar, had let it be known he had a cache of diamonds somewhere outside the camp. While Pemper sank into the sleep of the reprieved, Amon had the old man summoned to the villa, offered him his life for the diamonds’ location, was shown the place, and, of course, executed the old man and added his name to the reports to Koppe and Oranienburg—to his humble claim of having snuffed out the spark of rebellion.

  CHAPTER 30

  The orders, labeled OKH (Army HIGH

  COMMAND), already sat on Oskar’s desk. Because of the war situation, the Director of Armaments told Oskar, KL P@lasz@ow and therefore the Emalia camp were to be disbanded. Prisoners from Emalia would be sent to P@lasz@ow, awaiting relocation. Oskar himself was to fold his Zablocie operation as quickly as possible, retaining on the premises only those technicians necessary for dismantling the plant. For further instructions, he should apply to the Evacuation Board, OKH, Berlin.

  Oskar’s initial reaction was a cool rage.

  He resented the tone, the sense of a distant official trying to absolve him from further concern. There was a man in Berlin who, not knowing of the black-market bread that bound Oskar and his prisoners together, thought it was reasonable for a factory owner to open the gate and let the people be taken. But the worst arrogance was that the letter did not define “relocation.” Governor General Frank was more honest than that and had made a notorious speech a little earlier in the year. “When we ultimately win the war, then as far as I’m concerned, Poles, Ukrainians, and all that rabble idling around here can be made into mincemeat, into anything you like.” Frank had the courage to put an accurate name to the process. In Berlin, they wrote “relocation” and believed themselves excused.

  Amon knew what “relocation” meant and,

  during Oskar’s next visit to P@lasz@ow,

  freely told him so. All P@lasz@ow men

  would be sent to Gr@oss-Rosen. The women would go

  to Auschwitz. Gr@oss-Rosen was a vast

  quarry camp in Lower Silesia. The German

  Earth and Stone Works, an SS enterprise with

  branches throughout Poland, Germany, and the conquered

  territories, consumed the prisoners of

  Gr@oss-Rosen. The processes at

  Auschwitz were, of course, more direct and modern.

  When the news of the abolition of Emalia reached the factory floor and ran through the barracks, some Schindler people thought it was the end of all sanctuary. The Perlmans, whose daughter had come out of Aryan cover to plead for them, packed their blankets and talked philosophically to their bunk neighbors. Emalia has given us a year’s rest, a year’s soup, a year’s sanity. Perhaps it might be enough. But they expected to die now. It was apparent from their voices.

  Rabbi Levartov was resigned too. He was going back to unfinished business with Amon. Edith Liebgold, who’d been recruited by Bankier for the night shift in the first days of the ghetto, noticed that although Oskar spent hours talking solemnly with his Jewish supervisors, he did not come up to people and make dizzying promises. Perhaps he was as baffled and diminished by these orders from Berlin as the rest. So he wasn’t quite the prophet he’d been the night she’d first come here more than three years ago.

  Just the same, at the end of summer, as his prisoners packed their bundles and were marched back to P@lasz@ow, there was a rumor among them that Oskar had spoken of buying them back. He had said it to Garde; he had said it to Bankier. You
could almost hear him saying it—that level certainty, the paternal rumble of the throat. But as you went up Jerozolimska Street, past the Administration Building, staring in newcomer’s disbelief at the hauling gangs from the quarry, the memory of Oskar’s promises was very nearly just another burden.

  The Horowitz family were back in

  P@lasz@ow. Their father, Dolek, had last year maneuvered them to Emalia, but here they were back. The six-year-old boy, Richard; the mother, Regina. Niusia, eleven now, was again sewing bristles onto brush paddles and watching, from the high windows, the trucks roll up to the Austrian hill fort, and the black cremation smoke rise over the hill. As P@lasz@ow was when she had left it last year, so it continued. It was impossible for her to believe that it would ever end. But her father believed that Oskar would make a list of people and extricate them. Oskar’s list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation. It was a List. It was a sweet chariot which might swing low.

  Oskar raised the idea of taking Jews away from Cracow with him one night at Amon’s villa. It was a still night at the end of summer. Amon seemed pleased to see him. Because of Amon’s health—both Doctors Blancke and Gross warning him that if he didn’t cut his eating and drinking he would die—there had not been so many visitors to the villa of late.

  They sat together, drinking at Amon’s new rate of moderation. Oskar sprang the news on him. He wanted to move his factory to Czechoslovakia. He wanted to take his skilled workers with him. He might need other skills from among the P@lasz@ow workers too.

  He would seek the help of the Evacuation Board in