Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  But around the bare premises of the Hoffman annex, he was required to provide high-tension fences, latrines, a guard barracks for 100 SS personnel, attached SS offices, a sickroom, and kitchens. Adding to the expense, Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck had already been down from Gr@oss-Rosen for an inspection and gone away with a supply of cognac and porcelainware, and what Oskar described as “tea by the kilogram.” Hassebroeck had also taken away inspection fees and compulsory Winter Aid contributions levied by Section D, and no receipt had been given. “His car had a considerable capacity for these things,” Oskar would later declare. He had no doubt in October 1944 that Hassebroeck was already doctoring the Brinnlitz books.

  Inspectors sent directly by Oranienburg had also to be satisfied. As for the goods and equipment of DEF, much of it still in transit, it would require 250 freight cars before it had all arrived. It was astounding, said Oskar, how in a crumbling state, Ostbahn officials could, if properly encouraged, find such a number of rail cars.

  And the unique aspect of all this, of Oskar himself, jaunty in his mountain hat, as he emerged from that frosty courtyard, is that unlike Krupp and Farben and all the other entrepreneurs who kept Jewish slaves, he had no serious industrial intention at all. He had no hopes of production; there were no sales graphs in his head. Though four years ago he had come to Cracow to get rich, he now had no manufacturing ambitions left.

  It was a hectic industrial situation there in Brinnlitz. Many of the presses, drills, and lathes had not yet arrived, and new cement floors would have to be poured to take their weight. The annex was still full of Hoffman’s old machinery. Even so, for these 800 supposed munitions workers who had just moved through the gate, Oskar was paying 7.50 RM. each day per skilled worker, 6 RM. per laborer. This would amount to nearly $14,000 U.s. each week for male labor; when the women arrived, the bill would top $18,000. Oskar was therefore committing a grand business folly, but celebrated it in a Tyrolean hat.

  Some of Oskar’s attachments had shifted too. Mrs. Emilie Schindler had come from Zwittau to live with him in his downstairs apartment. Brinnlitz, unlike Cracow, was too close to home to permit her to excuse their separation. For a Catholic like her, it was now a matter of either formalizing the rift or living together again. There seemed to be at least a tolerance between them, a thorough mutual respect. At first sight she might have looked like a marital cipher, an abused wife who did not know how to get out. Some of the men wondered at first what she would think when she found the sort of factory Oskar kept, the sort of camp. They did not know yet that Emilie would make her own discrete contribution, that it would be based not on conjugal obedience but on her own ideas.

  Ingrid had come with Oskar to Brinnlitz to work in the new plant, but she had taken lodgings outside the camp and was there only for office hours. There was a definite cooling in that relationship, and she would never live with Oskar again. But she would show no animosity, and throughout the coming months Oskar would frequently visit her in her apartment. The racy Klonowska, that chic Polish patriot, stayed behind in Cracow, but again there was no apparent bitterness. Oskar would have contact with her during visits to Cracow, and she would again help him when the SS caused trouble. The truth was that though his attachments to Klonowska and Ingrid were winding down in the most fortunate way, without any bitterness, it would have been a mistake to believe that he was turning conjugal.

  He told the men, that day of their arrival, that the women could be confidently expected. He believed they would arrive after scarcely more delay than there had been with the men. The women’s journey would, however, be different. After a short trip from P@lasz@ow, their locomotive backed them, with some hundreds of other P@lasz@ow women, through the arched gatehouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the car doors opened, they found themselves in that immense concourse bisecting the camp, and practiced SS men and women, speaking calmly, began to grade them. The sorting of the people went on with a terrifying detachment. When a woman was slow in moving, she was hit with a truncheon, but the blow had no personal edge to it. It was all a matter of getting the numbers through. For the SS sections at the railside of Birkenau, it was all dutiful tedium. They had already heard every plea, every story. They knew every dodge anyone was ever likely to pull.

  Under the floodlights, the women numbly asked each other what it meant. But even in their daze, their shoes already filling with the mud that was Birkenau’s element, they were aware of SS women pointing to them, and telling uniformed doctors who showed any interest, “Schindlergruppe!” And the spruce young physicians would turn away and leave them alone for a time.

  Feet sticking in the mud, they were marched to the delousing plant and stripped by order of tough young SS women with truncheons in their hands. Mila Pfefferberg was troubled by rumors of the type most prisoners of the Reich had by now heard—that some shower nozzles gave out a killing gas.

  These, she was delighted to find, gave mere icy water.

  After their wash, some of them expected to be tattooed. They knew as much as that about Auschwitz. The SS tattooed your arm if they wanted to use you. If they intended to feed you into the machine, however, they did not bother. The same train that had brought the women of the list had brought also some 2,000 others who, not being Schindlerfrauen, were put through the normal selections. Rebecca Bau, excluded from the Schindler list, had passed and been given a number, and Josef Bau’s robust mother had also won a tattoo in that preposterous Birkenau lottery. Another P@lasz@ow girl, fifteen years old, had looked at the tattoo she’d been given and been delighted that it had two fives, a three, and two sevens—numbers enshrined in the Tashlag, or Jewish calendar. With a tattoo, you could leave Birkenau and go to one of the Auschwitz labor camps, where there was at least a chance.

  But the Schindler women, left untattooed, were told to dress again and taken to a windowless hut in the women’s camp. There, in the center of the floor, stood a sheet-iron stove housed in bricks. It was the only comfort. There were no bunks. The Schindlerfrauen were to sleep two or three to a thin straw pallet. The clay floor was damp, and water would rise from it like a tide and drench the pallets, the ragged blankets. It was a death house at the heart of Birkenau. They lay there and dozed, frozen and uneasy in that enormous acreage of mud.

  It confounded their imaginings of an intimate

  location, a village in Moravia. This was a

  great, if ephemeral, city. On a given day more

  than a quarter of a million Poles,

  Gypsies, and Jews kept brief residence

  here. There were thousands more over in Auschwitz I, the first but smaller camp where Commandant Rudolf H@oss lived. And in the great industrial area named Auschwitz III, some tens of thousands worked while they could. The Schindler women had not been precisely informed of the statistics of Birkenau or of the Auschwitz duchy in itself. They could see, though, beyond birch trees at the western end of the enormous settlement, constant smoke rising from the four crematoria and the numerous pyres. They believed they were adrift now, and that the tide would take them down there. But not with all the capacity for making and believing rumors that characterizes a life in prison would they have guessed how many people could be gassed there on a day when the system worked well. The number was—according to H@oss—nine thousand. The women were equally unaware that they had arrived in Auschwitz at a time when the progress of the war and certain secret negotiations between Himmler and the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte were imposing a new direction on it. The secret of the extermination centers had not been kept, for the Russians had excavated the Lublin camp and found the furnaces containing human bones and more than five hundred drums of Zyklon B.

  News of this was published throughout the world, and

  Himmler, who wanted to be treated seriously as

  obvious postwar successor to the F@uhrer, was

  willing to make promises to the Allies that the

  gassing of Jews would stop. He did not, however,

  issue an order on
the matter until some time in

  October—the date is not certain. One copy

  went to General Pohl in Oranienburg; the

  other, to Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Reich

  Security. Both of them ignored the

  directive, and so did Adolf Eichmann.

  Jews from P@lasz@ow, Theresienstadt, and Italy continued to be gassed up to the middle of November. The last selection for the gas chambers is believed, however, to have been made on October 30.

  For the first eight days of their stay in

  Auschwitz, the Schindler women were in enormous danger of death by gassing. And even after that, as the last victims of the chambers continued to file throughout November toward the western end of Birkenau, and as the ovens and pyres worked on their backlog of corpses, they would not be aware of any change in the essential nature of the camp. All their anxieties would in any case be well founded, for most of those left after the gassing ceased would be shot --as happened to all the crematorium workers—or allowed to die of disease.

  In any case, the Schindler women went through

  frequent mass medical inspections in both

  October and November. Some of them had been

  separated out in the first days and sent off to the huts

  reserved for the terminally ill. The doctors of

  Auschwitz—Josef Mengele,

  Fritz Klein, Doctors Konig and Thilo

  --not only worked on the Birkenau platform but roamed the camp, turning up at roll calls, invading the showers, asking with a smile, “How old are you, Mother?” Mrs. Clara Sternberg found herself put aside in a hut for older women. Sixty-year-old Mrs. Lola Krumholz was also cut out of the Schindlergruppe and put into a barracks for the aged where she was meant to die at no expense to the administration. Mrs. Horowitz, believing that her fragile daughter of eleven years, Niusia, could not survive a “bathhouse” inspection, hustled her into an empty sauna boiler. One of the SS girls who’d been appointed to the Schindler women—the pretty one, the blonde—saw her do it but did not give her away. She was a puncher, that one, short-tempered, and later she would ask Mrs. Horowitz for a bribe and get a brooch which Regina had somehow concealed till then. Regina handed it over philosophically. There was another, heavier, gentler one who made lesbian advances and may have required a more personal payoff. Sometimes at roll call, one or more of the doctors would appear in front of the barracks. Seeing the medical gentlemen, women rubbed clay into their cheeks to induce a little bogus color. At one such inspection, Regina found stones for her daughter, Niusia, to stand on, and silver-haired young Mengele came to her and asked her a soft-voiced question concerning her daughter’s age and punched her for lying. Women felled like this at inspection were meant to be picked up by the guards while still semiconscious, dragged to the electrified fence at the edge of the women’s camp, and thrown onto it. They had Regina halfway there when she revived and begged them not to fry her alive, to let her return to her line. They released her, and when she crept back into the ranks, there was her bird-boned, speechless daughter still, frozen to the pile of stone. These inspections could occur at any hour. The Schindler women were called out one night to stand in the mud while their barracks was searched. Mrs.

  Dresner, who had once been saved by a vanished

  OD boy, came out with her tall teen-age

  daughter, Danka. They stood there in that

  eccentric mire of Auschwitz which, like the fabled

  mud of Flanders, would not freeze when everything

  else had frozen—the roads, the

  rooftops, the human traveler.

  Both Danka and Mrs. Dresner had left

  P@lasz@ow in the summer clothing that was all they had left. Danka wore a blouse, a light jacket, a maroon skirt. Since it had begun snowing earlier in the evening, Mrs. Dresner had suggested that Danka tear a strip off her blanket and wear it beneath the skirt. Now, in the course of the barracks inspection, the SS discovered the ripped blanket.

  The officer who stood before the Schindler women called out the barracks Alteste—a Dutch woman whom, until yesterday, none of them had known—and said that she was to be shot, together with any other prisoner found with a blanket strip under her dress.

  Mrs. Dresner began whispering to Danka.

  “Take it off and I’ll slip it back into the

  barracks.” It was a credible idea. The

  barracks stood at ground level and no step led up to them. A woman in the rear line might slip backward through the door. As Danka had obeyed her mother once before in the matter of the wall cavity in Dabrowski Street, Cracow, she obeyed her now, slipping from beneath her dress that strip of Europe’s poorest blanket. In fact, while Mrs. Dresner was in the hut, the SS officer passed by and idly extracted a woman of Mrs. Dresner’s age—it was probably Mrs. Sternberg—and had her taken away to some worse part of the camp, some place where there was no Moravian illusion.

  Perhaps the other women in line did not let themselves understand what this simple act of weeding out meant. It was in fact a statement that no reserved group of so-called “industrial prisoners” was safe in Auschwitz. No cry of “Schindlerfrauen!” would keep them immune for long. There had been other groups of “industrial prisoners” who had vanished in Auschwitz. General Pohl’s Section W had sent some trainloads of skilled Jewish workers from Berlin the year before. I. G. Farben had needed labor and was told by Section W to select its workers from these transports. In fact, Section W had suggested to Commandant H@oss that the trains should be unloaded in the I.

  G. Farben works, not near the crematoria in

  Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of 1,750

  prisoners, all male, in the first

  train, 1,000 were immediately gassed. Of 4,000 in the next four trainloads, 2,500 went at once to the “bathhouses.” If the Auschwitz administration would not stay its hand for I. G. Farben and Department W, it was not going to be finicky about the women of some obscure German potmaker.

  In barracks like those of the Schindler women, it was like living outdoors. The windows had no glass and served only to put an edge on the blasts of cold air out of Russia. Most of the girls had dysentery. Crippled with cramp, they limped in their clogs to the steel waste drum out in the mud. The woman who tended it did so for an extra bowl of soup. Mila Pfefferberg staggered out one evening, seized with dysentery, and the woman on duty—not a bad woman, a woman Mila had known as a girl—insisted that she could not use the drum but had to wait for the next girl out and then empty it with her help. Mila argued but could not shake the woman. Beneath the hungry stars this tending of the drum had become something like a profession, and there were rules. With the drum as pretext, the woman had come to believe that order, hygiene, sanity were possible.

  The next girl out arrived at Mila’s side, gasping and bent and desperate. But she too was young and, in peaceful days in @l@od@z, had known the woman on the can as a respectable married woman. So the two girls were obedient and lugged the thing 300 meters through the mud. The girl who shared the burden asked Mila, “Where’s Schindler now?”

  Not everyone in the barracks asked that question, or asked it in that fierce, ironic way. There was an Emalia girl named Lusia, a widow of twenty-two, who kept saying, “You’ll see, it will all come out. We’ll end up somewhere warm with Schindler’s soup in us.” She did not know herself why she kept repeating such statements. In Emalia she had never been the type to make projections. She’d worked her shift, drunk her soup, and slept. She had never predicted grandiose events. Sufficient to her day had always been the survival thereof. Now she was ill and there was no reason for her to be prophetic. The cold and hunger were wasting her, and she too bore the vast obsessions of her hunger. Yet she amazed herself by repeating Oskar’s promises.

  Later in their stay in Auschwitz, when they had been moved to a hut closer to the crematoria and did not know if they were to go to the showers or the chambers, Lusia continued pushing the glad message. Even so, the tide of the
camp having washed them to this geographic limit of the earth, this pole, this pit, despair wasn’t quite the fashion for the Schindlerfrauen. You would still find women huddled in recipe talk and dreams of prewar kitchens.

  In Brinnlitz when the men arrived, there was only the shell. There were no bunks yet; straw was strewn in the dormitories upstairs. But it was warm, with steam heat from the boilers. There were no cooks that first day. Bags of turnips lay around what would be the cookhouse, and men devoured them raw. Later, soup was brewed and bread baked, and the engineer Finder began the allocating of jobs. But from the start, unless there were SS men looking on, it was all slow. It is mysterious how a body of prisoners could sense that the Herr Direktor was no longer a party to any war effort. The pace of work grew very canny in Brinnlitz. Since Oskar was detached from the question of production, slow work became the prisoners’ vengeance, their declaration.

  It was a heady thing to withhold your labor. Everywhere else in Europe, the slaves worked to the limit of their 600 calories per day, hoping to impress some foreman and delay the transfer to the death camp. But here in Brinnlitz was the intoxicating freedom to use the shovel at half-pace and still survive.

  None of this unconscious policy-making was evident in the first days. There were still too many prisoners anxious for their women. Dolek Horowitz had a wife and daughter in Auschwitz. The Rosner brothers had their wives. Pfefferberg knew the shock which something as vast, as appalling as Auschwitz would have on Mila. Jacob Sternberg and his teen-age son were concerned about Mrs. Clara Sternberg. Pfefferberg remembers the men clustering around Schindler on the factory floor and asking him again where the women were.