Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  During the first week of October, Oskar and Bankier visited P@lasz@ow for some reason and went as usual to see Stern in the Construction Office. Stern’s desk was down the hallway from the vanished Amon’s office. It was possible to speak more freely here than ever before. Stern told Schindler about the inflated price of rye bread.

  Oskar turned to Bankier. “Make sure

  Weichert gets fifty thousand z@loty,”

  murmured Oskar.

  Dr. Michael Weichert was chairman of the former Jewish Communal Self-Help, now renamed Jewish Relief Office. He and his office were permitted to operate for cosmetic reasons and, in part, because of Weichert’s powerful connections in the German Red Cross. Though many Polish Jews within the camps would treat him with understandable suspicion, and though this suspicion would bring him to trial after the war—he would be exonerated—Weichert was exactly the man to find 50,000 z@l. worth of bread quickly and introduce it into P@lasz@ow.

  The conversation of Stern and Oskar moved on. The 50,000 z@loty were a mere obiter dicta of their talk about the unsettled times and about how Amon might be enjoying his cell in Breslau. Later in the week black-market bread from town was smuggled into camp hidden beneath cargoes of cloth, coal, or scrap iron. Within a day, the price had fallen to its accustomed level.

  It was a nice case of connivance between Oskar and Stern, and would be followed by other instances.

  CHAPTER 32

  At least one of the Emalia people crossed off by Goldberg to make room for others—for relatives, Zionists, specialists, or payers—would blame Oskar for it.

  In 1963, the Martin Buber Society would receive a pitiable letter from a New Yorker, a former Emalia prisoner. In Emalia, he said, Oskar had promised deliverance. In return, the people had made him wealthy with their labor. Yet some found themselves off the edge of the list. This man saw his own omission as a very personal betrayal and—with all the fury of someone who has been made to travel through the flames to pay for another man’s lie—blamed Oskar for all that had happened afterward: for Gr@oss-Rosen, and for the frightful cliff at Mauthausen from which prisoners were thrown, and last of all for the death march with which the war would end. Strangely, the letter, radiant with just anger, shows most graphically that life on the list was a feasible matter, while life off it was unutterable. But it seems unjust to condemn Oskar for Goldberg’s fiddling with names. The camp authorities would, in the chaos of those last days, sign any list Goldberg gave them as long as it did not exceed too drastically the 1,100 prisoners Oskar had been granted. Oskar himself could not police Goldberg by the hour. His own day was spent speaking to bureaucrats, his evenings in buttering them up.

  He had, for example, to receive shipment authorizations for his Hilo machines and metal presses from old friends in the office of General Schindler, some of whom delayed the paperwork, finding small problems which could confound the idea of Oskar’s salvage of his 1,100.

  One of these Inspectorate men had raised the problem that Oskar’s armament machines had come to him by way of the procurement section of the Berlin Inspectorate, and under approval from its licensing section, specifically for use in Poland. Neither of these sections had been notified of the proposed move to Moravia. They would need to be. It could be a month before they gave their authorization. Oskar did not have a month. P@lasz@ow would be empty by the end of October;

  everyone would be in Gr@oss-Rosen or

  Auschwitz. In the end, the problem was

  cleared away by the accustomed gifts.

  As well as such preoccupations, Oskar was concerned about the SS investigators who had arrested Amon. He half-expected to be arrested or—which was the same thing—heavily interrogated about his relationship with the former Commandant. He was wise to anticipate it, for one of the explanations Amon had offered for the 80,000 RM. the SS had found among his belongings was “Oskar Schindler gave it to me so I’d go easy on the Jews.” Oskar therefore had to keep in contact with friends of his at Pomorska Street who might be able to tell him the direction Bureau V’s investigation of Amon was taking. Finally, since his camp at Brinnlitz would be under the ultimate supervision of KL Gr@oss-Rosen, he was already dealing with the Commandant of Gr@oss-Rosen, Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck. Under Hassebroeck’s management, 100,000 would die in the Gr@oss-Rosen system, but when Oskar conferred with him on the telephone and drove across into Lower Silesia to meet him, he seemed the least of all Oskar’s worries. Schindler was used by now to meeting charming killers and noticed that Hassebroeck even seemed grateful to him for extending the Gr@oss-Rosen empire into Moravia. For Hassebroeck did think in terms of empire. He controlled one hundred and three subcamps. (brinnlitz would be one hundred and four and—with its more than 1,000 inmates and its sophisticated industry—a major addition.) Seventy-eight of Hassebroeck’s camps were located in Poland, sixteen in Czechoslovakia, ten in the Reich. It was much bigger cheese than anything Amon had managed.

  With so much sweetening, cajoling, and form-filling to occupy him in the week P@lasz@ow was wound down, Oskar could not have found the time to monitor Goldberg, even if he had had the power. In any case, the account the prisoners give of the camp in its last day and night is one of milling and chaos, Goldberg—Lord of the Lists—at its center, still holding out for offers.

  Dr. Idek Schindel, for example, approached Goldberg to get himself and his two young brothers into Brinnlitz. Goldberg would not give an answer, and Schindel would not find out until the evening of October 15, when the male prisoners were marshaled for the cattle cars, that he and his brothers were not listed for the Schindler camp. They joined the line of Schindler people anyway. It is a scene from a cautionary engraving of Judgment Day—the ones without the right mark attempting to creep onto the line of the justified and being spotted by an angel of retribution, in this case Oberscharf@uhrer M‘uller, who came up to the doctor with his whip and slapped him, left cheek, right cheek, left and right again with the leather butt, while asking amusedly, “Why would you want to get on that line?”

  Schindel would be made to stay on with the small

  party involved in liquidating P@lasz@ow and would

  then travel with a carload of sick women

  to Auschwitz. They would be placed in a hut in

  some corner of Birkenau and left to die. Yet

  most of them, overlooked by camp officials and

  exempt from the usual regimen of the place, would

  live. Schindel himself would be sent

  to Flossenburg and then—with his brothers—on a

  death march. He would survive by a layer of skin,

  but the youngest Schindel boy would be shot on the march

  on the next-to-last day of the war. That is an

  image of the way the Schindler list, without any

  malice on Oskar’s side, with adequate

  malice on Goldberg’s, still tantalizes

  survivors, and tantalized them in those

  desperate October days.

  Everyone has a story about the list. Henry

  Rosner lined up with the Schindler people, but an NCO

  spotted his violin and, knowing that Amon would

  require music should he be released from prison,

  sent Rosner back. Rosner then hid his violin

  under his coat, against his side, tucking the node of the

  sound post under his armpit. He lined up again and was

  let through to the Schindler cars. Rosner had been

  one of those to whom Oskar had made promises, and

  so had always been on the list. It was the same with the

  Jereths: old Mr. Jereth of the box factory

  and Mrs. Chaja Jereth, described in the list

  inexactly and hopefully as a

  Metallarbeiterin—a metalworker. The

  Perlmans were also on as old Emalia hands, and the Levartovs as well. In fact, in spite of Goldberg, Oskar got for the most part the people he had asked for, though there may
have been some surprises among them. A man as worldly as Oskar could not have been amazed to find Goldberg himself among the inhabitants of Brinnlitz.

  But there were more welcome additions than that. Poldek Pfefferberg, for example, accidentally overlooked and rejected by Goldberg for lack of diamonds, let it be known that he wanted to buy vodka—he could pay in clothing or bread. When he’d acquired the bottle, he got permission to take it down to the orderly building in Jerozolimska where Schreiber was on duty. He gave Schreiber the bottle and pleaded with him to force Goldberg to include Mila and himself. “Schindler,” he said, “would have written us down if he’d remembered.” Poldek had no doubt that he was negotiating for his life. “Yes,” Schreiber agreed. “The two of you must get on it.” It is a human puzzle why men like Schreiber didn’t in such moments ask themselves, If this man and his wife were worth saving, why weren’t the rest?

  The Pfefferbergs would find themselves on the Schindler line when the time came. And so, to their surprise, would Helen Hirsch and the younger sister whose survival had always been Helen’s own obsession.

  The men of the Schindler list entrained at the P@lasz@ow siding on a Sunday, October 15. It would be another full week before the women left. Though the 800 were kept separate during the loading of the train and were pushed into freight cars kept exclusively for Schindler personnel, they were coupled to cars containing 1,300 other prisoners all bound for Gr@oss-Rosen. It seems that some half-expected to have to pass through Gr@oss-Rosen on their way to Schindler’s camp; but many others believed that the journey would be direct. They were prepared to endure a slow trip to Moravia—they accepted that they would be made to spend time sitting in the cars at junctions and on sidings. They might wait half a day at a time for traffic with higher priority to pass. The first snow had fallen in the last week, and it would be cold. Each prisoner had been issued only 300 gm. of bread to last the journey, and each car had been provided with a single water bucket. For their natural functions, the travelers would have to use a corner of the floor, or if packed too tightly, urinate and defecate where they stood. But in the end, despite all their griefs they would tumble out at a Schindler establishment.

  The 300 women of the list would enter the cars the following Sunday in the same sanguine state of mind.

  Other prisoners noticed that Goldberg traveled as lightly as any of them. He must have had contacts outside P@lasz@ow to hold his diamonds for him. Those who still hoped to influence him on behalf of an uncle, a brother, a sister allowed him enough space to sit in comfort. The others squatted, their knees pushed into their chins. Dolek Horowitz held six-year-old Richard in his arms. Henry Rosner made a nest of clothing on the floor for nine-year-old Olek.

  It took three days. Sometimes, at sidings, their breath froze on the walls. Air was always scarce, but when you got a mouthful it was icy and fetid. The train halted at last on the dusk of a comfortless autumn day. The doors were unlocked, and passengers were expected to alight as quickly as businessmen with appointments to keep. SS guards ran among them shouting directions and blaming them for smelling. “Take everything off!” the NCO’S were roaring. “Everything for disinfection!” They piled their clothing and marched naked into the camp. By six in the evening they stood in naked lines on the Appellplatz of this bitter destination. Snow stood in the surrounding woods; the surface of the parade ground was iced. It was not a Schindler camp. It was Gr@oss-Rosen. Those who had paid Goldberg glared at him, threatening murder, while SS men in overcoats walked along the lines, lashing the buttocks of those who openly shivered.

  They kept the men on the Appellplatz all night, for there were no huts available. It was not until midmorning the next day that they would be put under cover. In speaking of that seventeen hours of exposure, of ineffable cold dragging down on the heart, survivors do not mention any deaths.

  Perhaps life under the SS, or even at

  Emalia, had tempered them for a night like this one. Though it was a milder evening than those earlier in the week, it was still murderous enough. Some of them, of course, were too distracted by the possibility of Brinnlitz to drift away with cold.

  Later, Oskar would meet prisoners who had survived an even longer exposure to cold and frostbite. Certainly elderly Mr. Garde, the father of Adam Garde, lived through this night, as did little Olek Rosner and Richard Horowitz.

  Toward eleven o’clock the next morning, they were taken to the showers. Poldek Pfefferberg, crowded in with the others, considered the nozzle above his head with suspicion, wondering if water or gas would rain down. It was water; but before it was turned on, Ukrainian barbers passed among them, shaving their heads, their pubic hair, their armpits. You stood straight, eyes front, while the Ukrainian worked at you with his unhoned razor. “It’s too dull,” one of the prisoners complained. “No,” said the Ukrainian, and slashed the prisoner’s leg to show that the blade still held a cutting edge.

  After the showers, they were issued striped prison uniforms and crowded into barracks. The SS sat them in lines, like galley oarsmen, one man backed up between the legs of the man behind him, his own opened legs affording support to the man in front. By this method, 2,000 men were crammed into three huts. German Kapos armed with truncheons sat on chairs against the wall and watched. Men were wedged so tightly—every inch of the floor space covered—that to leave their rows for the latrines, even if the Kapos permitted it, meant walking on heads and shoulders and being cursed for it.

  In the middle of one hut was a kitchen where turnip soup was being made and bread baked. Poldek Pfefferberg, coming back from a visit to the latrines, found the kitchen under the supervision of a Polish Army NCO he had known at the beginning of the war. The NCO gave Poldek some bread and permitted him to sleep by the kitchen fire. The others, however, spent their nights wedged in the human chain.

  Each day they were stood at attention in the Appellplatz and remained there in silence for ten hours. In the evenings, however, after the issue of thin soup, they were allowed to walk around the hut, to talk to each other. The blast of a whistle at 9 P.m. was the signal for them to take up their curious positions for the night.

  On the second day, an SS officer came

  to the Appellplatz looking for the clerk who had

  drawn up the Schindler list. It had not been

  sent off from P@lasz@ow, it seemed. Shivering in

  his coarse prison uniform, Goldberg was led off

  to an office and asked to type out the list

  from memory. By the end of the day he had not finished the

  work and, back in the barracks, was surrounded by a

  spate of final pleas for inclusion. Here, in the

  bitter dusk, the list still enticed and tormented,

  even if all it had done so far for those on it was

  bring them to Gr@oss-Rosen. Pemper and others,

  moving in on Goldberg, began to pressure him

  to type Dr. Alexander Biberstein’s name on the

  sheet in the morning. Biberstein was brother of the

  Marek Biberstein who had been that first,

  optimistic president of the Cracow

  Judenrat. Earlier in the week Goldberg

  had confused Biberstein, telling him that he was on the list. It was not till the trucks were loaded that the doctor found out he was not in the Schindler group. Even in such a place as Gr@oss-Rosen, Mietek Pemper was sure enough of a future to threaten Goldberg with postwar reprisals if Biberstein were not added.

  Then, on the third day, the 800 men of Schindler’s now revised list were separated out; taken to the delousing station for yet another wash; permitted to sit a few hours, speculating and chatting like villagers in front of their huts; and marched out once more to the siding. With a small ration of bread, they climbed up into cattle cars. None of the guards who loaded them admitted to knowing where they were going. They squatted on the floorboards in the prescribed manner. They kept fixed in their minds the map of Central Europe, and made continual
judgments about the passage of the sun, gauging their direction by glimpses of light through small wire ventilators near the roofs of the cars. Olek Rosner was lifted to the ventilator in his car and said that he could see forests and mountains. The navigation experts claimed the train was traveling generally southeast. It all indicated a Czech destination, but no one wanted to say so.

  This journey of a hundred miles took nearly

  two days; when the doors opened, it was early

  morning on the second day. They were at the

  Zwittau depot. They dismounted and were marched through

  a town not yet awake, a town frozen in the

  late Thirties. Even the graffiti on the

  walls—“KEEP THE JEWS OUT OF

  BRINNLITZ”—LOOKED strangely prewar to them. They had been living in a world where their very breath was begrudged. It seemed almost endearingly naive for the people of Zwittau to begrudge them a mere location. Three or four miles out into the hills, following a rail siding, they came to the industrial hamlet of Brinnlitz, and saw ahead in thin morning light the solid bulk of the Hoffman annex transformed into Arbeitslager (labor Camp)

  Brinnlitz, with watchtowers, a wire fence encircling it, a guard barracks inside the wire, and beyond that the gate to the factory and the prisoners’ dormitories.

  As they marched in through the outer gate, Oskar appeared from the factory courtyard, wearing a Tyrolean hat.

  CHAPTER 33

  This camp, like Emalia, had been equipped at Oskar’s expense. According to the bureaucratic theory, all factory camps were built at the owner’s cost. It was thought that any industrialist got sufficient incentive from the cheap prison labor to justify a small expenditure on wire and lumber. In fact, Germany’s darling industrialists, such as Krupp and Farben, built their camps with materials donated from SS enterprises andwitha wealth of labor lent to them. Oskar was no darling and got nothing. He had been able to pry some wagonloads of SS cement out of Bosch at what Bosch would have considered a discount black-market price. From the same source he got two to three tons of gasoline and fuel oil for use in the production and delivery of his goods. He had brought some of the camp fencing wire from Emalia.