Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  Sussmuth had in his office a list of sites suitable to receive plants evacuated from the war zone. Near Oskar’s hometown of Zwittau, on the edge of a village called Brinnlitz, was a great textile plant owned by the Viennese brothers Hoffman. They’d been in butter and cheese in their home city, but had come to the Sudetenland behind the legions (just as Oskar had gone to Cracow) and become textile magnates. An entire annex of their plant lay idle, used as a storehouse for obsolete spinning machines. A site like that was served from the rail depot at Zwittau, where Schindler’s brother-in-law was in charge of the freight yard. And a railway loop ran close to the gates. The brothers are profiteers, said Sussmuth, smiling. They have some local party backing—the County Council and the District Leader are in their pockets. But you have Colonel Lange behind you.

  I will write to Berlin at once,

  Sussmuth promised, and recommend the use of the Hoffman annex.

  Oskar knew the Germanic village of

  Brinnlitz from his childhood. Its racial character was in its name, since the Czechs would have called it Brnenec, just as a Czech Zwittau would have become Zvitava. The Brinnlitz citizens would not fancy a thousand or more Jews in their neighborhood. The Zwittau people, from whom some of Hoffman’s workers were recruited, would not like it either, this contamination, so late in the war, of their rustic-industrial backwater.

  In any case, Oskar drove down to take a quick look at the site. He did not approach Hoffman Brothers’ front office, since that would give the tougher Hoffman brother, the one who chaired the company, too much warning. But he was able to wander into the annex without being challenged. It was an old-fashioned two-story industrial barracks built around a courtyard. The ground floor was high-ceilinged and full of old machines and crates of wool. The upper floor must have been intended as offices and for lighter equipment. Its floor would not stand the weight of the big pressing machines. Downstairs would do for the new workshops of DEF, as offices and, in one corner, the Herr Direktor’s apartment. Upstairs would be barracks for the prisoners.

  He was delighted with the place. He drove

  back to Cracow yearning to get started, to spend the

  necessary money, to talk to Madritsch again. For

  Sussmuth could find a site for Madritsch too

  --perhaps even floor space in Brinnlitz.

  When he got back, he found that an Allied bomber, shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter, had crashed on the two end barracks in the backyard prison. Its blackened fuselage sat crookedly across the wreckage of the flattened huts. Only a small squad of prisoners had been left behind in Emalia to wind up production and maintain the plant. They had seen it come down, flaming. There had been two men inside, and their bodies had burned. The Luftwaffe people who came to take them away had told Adam Garde that the bomber was a Stirling and that the men were Australian. One, who was holding the charred remnants of an English Bible, must have crashed with it in his hand. Two others had parachuted in the suburbs. One had been found, dead of wounds, still in his harness. The partisans had got to the other one first and were hiding him somewhere.

  What these Australians had been doing was

  dropping supplies to the partisans in the

  primeval forest east of Cracow.

  If Oskar had wanted some sort of

  confirmation, this was it. That men should come all this way from unimaginable little towns in the Australian Outback to hasten the end in Cracow. He put a call through at once to the official in charge of rolling stock in the office of Ostbahn President Gerteis and invited him to dinner to talk about DEF’S potential need of flatcars.

  A week after Oskar spoke to Sussmuth, the

  gentlemen of the Berlin Armaments Board instructed

  the Governor of Moravia that Oskar’s armaments

  company was to be allocated the annex of

  Hoffman’s spinning mill in Brinnlitz. The

  Governor’s bureaucrats could do nothing more,

  Sussmuth told Oskar by telephone, than slow

  the paperwork down. But Hoffman and other Party men

  in the Zwittau area were already conferring and passing

  resolutions against Oskar’s intrusion

  into Moravia. The Party Kreisleiter in

  Zwittau wrote to Berlin complaining that Jewish prisoners from Poland would be a peril to the health of Moravian Germans. Spotted fever would very likely appear in the region for the first time in modern history, and Oskar’s small armaments factory, of dubious value to the war effort, would also attract Allied bombers, with resultant damage to the important Hoffman mills. The population of Jewish criminals in the proposed Schindler camp would outweigh the small and decent population of Brinnlitz and be a cancer on the honest flank of Zwittau.

  A protest of that kind didn’t have a chance, since it went straight to the office of Erich Lange in Berlin. Appeals to Troppau were quashed by honest Sussmuth. Nonetheless, the posters went up on walls in Oskar’s hometown:

  “KEEP THE JEWISH CRIMINALS OU.”

  And Oskar was paying. He was paying the

  Evacuation Committee in Cracow to help speed

  up the permits for the transfer of his machinery. The

  Department of the Economy in Cracow had to be

  encouraged to provide the clearances of bank

  holdings. Currency wasn’t favored these days,

  so he paid in goods—in kilos of tea,

  in pairs of leather shoes, in carpets, in

  coffee, in canned fish. He spent his afternoons in the little streets off the market square of Cracow haggling at staggering prices for whatever the bureaucrats desired. Otherwise, he was sure, they would keep him waiting till his last Jew had gone to Auschwitz.

  It was Sussmuth who told him that people from

  Zwittau were writing to the Armaments

  Inspectorate accusing Oskar of

  black-marketeering. If they’re writing to me, said Sussmuth, you can bet the same letters are going to the police chief of Moravia, Obersturmf@uhrer Otto Rasch. You should introduce yourself to Rasch and show him what a charming fellow you are.

  Oskar had known Rasch when he was SS

  police chief of Katowice. Rasch was,

  by happy chance, a friend of the chairman of Ferrum

  AG at Sosnowiec, from which Oskar had bought his

  steel. But in rushing down to Brno to head off

  informers, Oskar didn’t rely on anything as

  flimsy as mutual friendships. He took a

  diamond cut in the brilliant style which,

  somehow, he introduced into the meeting. When it crossed the table and ended on Rasch’s side of the desk, it secured Oskar’s Brno front.

  Oskar later estimated that he spent

  100,000 RM.—NEARLY $40,000--to grease the transfer to Brinnlitz. Few of his survivors would ever find the figure unlikely, though there were those who shook their heads and said, “No, more! It would have to have been more than that.”

  He had drawn up what he called a

  preparatory list and delivered it to the

  Administration Building. There were more than a thousand names on it—the names of all the prisoners of the backyard prison camp of Emalia, as well as new names. Helen Hirsch’s name was freshly on the list, and Amon was not there to argue about it. And the list would expand if Madritsch agreed to go to Moravia with Oskar. So Oskar kept working on Titsch, his ally at Julius Madritsch’s ear. Those Madritsch prisoners who were closest to Titsch knew the list was under compilation, that they could have access to it. Titsch told them without any ambiguity: You must get on it. In all the reams of P@lasz@ow paperwork, Oskar’s dozen pages of names were the only pages with access to the future.

  But Madritsch still could not decide whether he wanted an alliance with Oskar, whether he would add his 3,000 to the total.

  There is again a haziness suitable to a legend about the precise chronology of Oskar’s list. The haziness doesn’t attach to the existence
of the list—a copy can be seen today in the archives of the Yad Vashem. There is no uncertainty as we shall see about the names remembered by Oskar and Titsch at the last minute and attached to the end of the official paper. The names on the list are definite. But the circumstances encourage legends. The problem is that the list is remembered with an intensity which, by its very heat, blurs. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf.

  Some of those whose names appeared on the list say

  that there was a party at Goeth’s villa, a

  reunion of SS men and entrepreneurs

  to celebrate the times they’d had there. Some even believe that Goeth was there, but since the SS did not release on bail, that is impossible. Others believe that the party was held at Oskar’s own apartment above his factory. Oskar had for more than two years given excellent parties there. One Emalia prisoner remembers the early hours of 1944 when he was on night watch duty and Oskar had wandered down from his apartment at one o’clock, escaping the noise upstairs and bringing with him two cakes, two hundred cigarettes, and a bottle for his friend the watchman.

  At the P@lasz@ow graduation party, wherever it took place, the guests included Dr.

  Blancke, Franz Bosch, and, by some

  reports, Oberf@uhrer Julian Scherner,

  on vacation from his partisan-hunting. Madritsch was there too, and Titsch. Titsch would later say that at it Madritsch informed Oskar for the first time that he would not be going to Moravia with him. “I’ve done everything I can for the Jews,” Madritsch told him. It was a reasonable claim; he would not be persuaded although he said Titsch had been at him for days.

  Madritsch was a just man. Later he would be honored as such. He simply did not believe that Moravia would work. If he had, the indications are that he would have attempted it.

  What else is known about the party is that an urgency operated there, because the Schindler list had to be handed in that evening. This is an element in all the versions of the story survivors tell. The survivors could tell and expand upon it only if they had heard it in the first place from Oskar, a man with a taste for embellishing a story. But in the early 1960’s, Titsch himself attested to the substantial truth of this one. Perhaps the new and temporary Commandant of P@lasz@ow, a Hauptsturmf@uhrer B@uscher, had said to Oskar, “Enough fooling around, Oskar! We have to finalize the paperwork and the transportation.” Perhaps there was some other form of deadline imposed by the Ostbahn, by the availability of transport. At the end of Oskar’s list, therefore, Titsch now typed in, above the official signatures, the names of Madritsch prisoners. Almost seventy names were added, written in by Titsch from his own and Oskar’s memories. Among them were those of the Feigenbaum family—the adolescent daughter who suffered from incurable bone cancer; the teen-age son Lutek with his shaky expertise in repairing sewing machines. Now they were all transformed, as Titsch scribbled, into skilled munitions workers. There was singing in the apartment, loud talk and laughter, a fog of cigarette smoke, and, in a corner, Oskar and Titsch quizzing each other over people’s names, straining for a clue to the spelling of Polish patronyms.

  In the end, Oskar had to put his hand on

  Titsch’s wrist. We’re over the limit, he

  said. They’ll balk at the number we already have. Titsch continued to strain for names, and tomorrow morning would wake damning himself because one had come to him too late. But now he was at the limit, wrung out by this work. It was blasphemously close to creating people anew just by thinking of them. He did not begrudge doing it. It was what it said of the world—that was what made the heavy air of Schindler’s apartment so hard for Titsch to breathe.

  The list was vulnerable, however, through the personnel clerk, Marcel Goldberg.

  B@uscher, the new Commandant, who was there merely

  to wind the camp down, himself could not have cared, within

  certain numerical limits, who went on the

  list. Therefore Goldberg had the power to tinker with

  its edges. It was known to prisoners already that

  Goldberg would take bribes. The Dresners

  knew it. Juda Dresner—uncle of red

  Genia, husband of the Mrs. Dresner

  who’d once been refused a hiding place in a wall, and father of Janek and of young Danka—

  Juda Dresner knew it. “He paid

  Goldberg,” the family would simply say

  to explain how they got on the Schindler list. They never knew what was given. Wulkan the jeweler presumably got himself, his wife, his son on the list in the same way.

  Poldek Pfefferberg was told about the list by an SS NCO named Hans Schreiber.

  Schreiber, a young man in his mid-twenties, had as evil a name as any other SS man in P@lasz@ow, but Pfefferberg had become something of a mild favorite of his in that way that was common to relationships—throughout the system—between individual prisoners and SS personnel. It had begun one day when Pfefferberg, as a group leader in his barracks, had had responsibility for window cleaning. Schreiber inspected the glass and found a smudge, and began browbeating Poldek in the style that was often a prelude to execution. Pfefferberg lost his temper and told Schreiber that both of them knew the windows were perfectly polished and if Schreiber wanted a reason to shoot him, he ought to do it without any more delay.

  The outburst had, in a contradictory way,

  amused Schreiber, who afterward occasionally used

  to stop Pfefferberg and ask him how he and his wife

  were, and sometimes even gave Poldek an apple

  for Mila. In the summer of 1944, Poldek

  had appealed to him desperately to extricate

  Mila from a trainload of women being sent from

  P@lasz@ow to the evil camp at Stutthof on

  the Baltic. Mila was already in the lines boarding

  the cattle cars when Schreiber came waving a

  piece of paper and calling her name. Another time,

  a Sunday, he turned up drunk at

  Pfefferberg’s barracks and, in front of

  Poldek and a few other prisoners, began

  to weep for what he called “the dreadful things” he had done in P@lasz@ow. He intended, he said, to expiate them on the Eastern Front. In the end, he would.

  Now he told Poldek that Schindler had a list and that Poldek should do everything he could to get on it. Poldek went down to the Administration Building to beg Goldberg to add his name and Mila’s to the list. Schindler had in the past year and a half often visited Poldek in the camp garage and had always promised rescue.

  Poldek had, however, become such an

  accomplished welder that the garage supervisors,

  who needed for their lives’ sake to produce

  high-standard work, would never let him go. Now

  Goldberg sat with his hand on the list—he had

  already added his own name to it—and this old friend of

  Oskar’s, once a frequent guest in the apartment

  in Straszewskiego, expected to have himself

  written down for sentiment’s sake. “Do you have

  any diamonds?” Goldberg asked

  Pfefferberg.

  “Are you serious?” asked Poldek.

  “For this list,” said Goldberg, a man of

  prodigious and accidental power, “it takes diamonds.”

  Now that the Viennese music lover Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth was in prison, the Rosner brothers, musicians to the court, were free to work their way onto the list. Dolek Horowitz also, who had earlier got his wife and children out to Emalia, now persuaded Goldberg to include him, his wife, his son, his young daughter. Horowitz had always worked in the central warehouse of P@lasz@ow and had managed to put some small treasure away. Now it was paid to Marcel Goldberg.

  Among those included in the list were the Bejski brothers, Uri and Moshe, officially described as machine fitter and draftsman. Uri had a knowledge of weapons, and Moshe a gift
for forging documents. The circumstances of the list are so clouded that it is not possible to say whether they were included for these talents or not.

  Josef Bau, the ceremonious bridegroom, would at some stage be included, but without his knowing it. It suited Goldberg to keep everyone in the dark about the list. Given his nature, it is possible to assume that if Bau made any personal approach to Goldberg it could only have been on the basis that his mother, his wife, himself should all be included. He would not find out until too late that he alone would be listed for Brinnlitz. As for Stern, the Herr Direktor had included him from the beginning. Stern was the only father confessor Oskar ever had, and Stern’s suggestions had a great authority with him. Since October 1, no Jewish prisoner had been allowed out of P@lasz@ow either to march to the cable factory or for any other purpose. At the same time, the trusties in the Polish prison had begun to put guards on the barracks to stop Jewish prisoners from trading with the Poles for bread. The price of illegal bread reached a level it would be hard to express in z@loty. In the past you could have bought a loaf for your second coat, 250 gm. for a clean undershirt. Now—as with Goldberg—it took diamonds.