Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  “I’m getting them out,” Schindler rumbled.

  He did not go into explanations. He did not

  publicly surmise that the SS in Auschwitz

  might need to be bribed. He did not say that he

  had sent the list of women to Colonel

  Erich Lange, or that he and Lange both

  intended to get them to Brinnlitz according to the list.

  Nothing of that. Simply “I’m getting them out.” The SS garrison who moved into Brinnlitz in those days gave Oskar some cause to hope. They were middle-aged reservists called up to allow younger SS men a place in the front line. There were not so many lunatics as at P@lasz@ow, and Oskar would always keep them gentle with the specialties of his kitchen—plain food, but plenty. In a visit to their barracks, he made his usual speech about the unique skills of his prisoners, the importance of his manufacturing activities. Antitank shells, he said, and casings for a projectile still on the secret list. He asked that there be no intrusion by the garrison into the factory itself, for that would disturb the workers.

  He could see it in their eyes. It suited them, this quiet town. They could imagine themselves lasting out the cataclysm here. They did not want to rampage round the workshops like a Goeth or a Hujar. They didn’t want the Herr Direktor to complain about them.

  Their commanding officer, however, had not yet arrived. He was on his way from his previous post, the labor camp at Budzyn, which had, until the recent Russian advances, manufactured Heinkel bomber parts. He would be younger, sharper, more intrusive, Oskar knew. He might not readily take to being denied access to the camp. Among all this pouring of cement floors, the knocking of holes in the roof so that the vast Hilos would fit, the softening of NCO’S, amid the private uneasiness of settling into married life with Emilie again, Oskar was arrested a third time.

  The Gestapo turned up at lunchtime. Oskar

  was not in his office, in fact had driven to Brno

  on some business earlier in the morning. A truck

  had just arrived at the camp from Cracow laden with

  some of the Herr Direktor’s portable wealth

  --cigarettes, cases of vodka, cognac,

  champagne. Some would later claim that this was Goeth’s property, that Oskar had agreed to bring it into Moravia in return for Goeth’s backing of his Brinnlitz plans. Since Goeth had now been a prisoner for a month and had no more authority, the luxuries on the truck could just as well be considered Oskar’s.

  The men doing the unloading thought so and became nervous at the sight of the Gestapo men in the courtyard. They had mechanics’ privileges and so were permitted to drive the truck to a stream down the hill, where they threw the liquor into the water by the caseful. The two hundred thousand cigarettes on the truck were hidden more retrievably under the cover of the large transformer in the power plant.

  It is significant that there were so many cigarettes and so much liquor in the truck: a sign that Oskar, always keen on trade goods, intended now to make his living on the black market.

  They got the truck back to the garage as the siren for midday soup was blown. In past days the Herr Direktor had eaten with the prisoners, and the mechanics hoped that today he would do so again; they could then explain what had happened to such an expensive truckload.

  He did in fact return from Brno soon after, but was stopped at the inner gate by one of the Gestapo men who stood there with his hand raised. The Gestapo man ordered him to leave his car at once.

  “This is my factory,” a prisoner heard

  Oskar growl back. “If you want to talk

  to me, you’re welcome to jump in the car.

  Otherwise follow me to my office.”

  He drove into the courtyard, the two Gestapo men walking quickly on either side of the vehicle. In his office, they asked him about his connections with Goeth, with Goeth’s loot. I do have a few suitcases here, he told them. They belong to Herr Goeth. He asked me to keep them for him until his release.

  The Gestapo men asked to see them, and Oskar took them through to the apartment. He made formal and cold introductions between Frau Schindler and the men from Bureau V. Then he brought out the suitcases and opened them. They were full of Amon’s civilian clothing, and old uniforms from the days when Amon had been a slim SS NCO. When they’d been through them and found nothing, they made the arrest.

  Emilie grew aggressive now. They had no right, she said, to take her husband unless they could say what they were taking him for. The people in Berlin will not be happy about this, she said. Oskar advised her to be silent. But you will have to call my friend Klonowska, he told her, and cancel my appointments.

  Emilie knew what that meant. Klonowska would do her trick with the telephone again, calling Martin Plathe in Breslau, the General Schindler people, all the big guns. One of the Bureau V men took out handcuffs and put them on Oskar’s wrists. They took him to their car, drove him to the station in Zwittau, and escorted him by train to Cracow.

  The impression is that this arrest scared him more

  than the previous two. There are no stories of

  lovelorn SS colonels who shared a cell with

  him and drank his vodka. Oskar did later

  record some details, however. As the Bureau

  V men escorted him across the grand neoclassic

  loggia of the Cracow central station, a man named

  Huth approached them. He had been a

  civilian engineer in P@lasz@ow. He had

  always been obsequious to Amon, but had a

  reputation for many secret kindnesses. It may have

  been an accidental meeting, but suggests that Huth

  may have been working with Klonowska. Huth insisted

  on shaking Oskar by his shackled hand. One of the

  Bureau V men objected. “Do you really want

  to go around shaking hands with prisoners?” he asked

  Huth. The engineer at once made a speech, a

  testimonial to Oskar. This was the Herr

  Direktor Schindler, a man greatly

  respected throughout Cracow, an important industrialist. “I can never think of him as a prisoner,” said Huth.

  Whatever the significance of this meeting, Oskar was put into a car and taken across the familiar city to Pomorska Street again. They put him in a room like the one he had occupied during his first arrest, a room with a bed and a chair and a washbasin but with bars on the window. He was not easy there, even though his manner was one of bearlike tranquillity. In 1942, when they had arrested him the day after his thirty-fourth birthday, the rumor that there were torture chambers in the Pomorska cellars had been terrifying and indefinite. It wasn’t indefinite anymore.

  He knew that Bureau V would torture him if they wanted Amon badly enough.

  That evening Herr Huth came as a visitor, bringing with him a dinner tray and a bottle of wine. Huth had spoken to Klonowska. Oskar himself would never clarify whether or not Klonowska had prearranged that “chance encounter.” Whichever it was, Huth told him now that Klonowska was rallying his old friends.

  The next day he was interrogated by a panel of twelve SS investigators, one a judge of the SS Court. Oskar denied that he had given any money to ensure that the Commandant would, in the words of the transcript of Amon’s evidence, “go easy on the Jews.” I may have given him the money as a loan, Oskar admitted at one stage. Why would you give him a loan? they wanted to know. I run an essential war industry, said Oskar, playing the old tune. I have a body of skilled labor. If it is disturbed, there is loss to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate, to the war effort. If I found that in the mass of prisoners in P@lasz@ow there was a skilled metalworker of a category I needed, then of course I asked the Herr Commandant for him. I wanted him fast, I wanted him without red tape. My interest was production, its value to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate. In consideration of the Herr Commandant’s help in these matters, I may have given him a loan.

  This defense involved some
disloyalty to his old host, Amon. But Oskar would not have hesitated. His eyes gleaming with transparent frankness, his tone low, his emphasis discreet, Oskar—without saying it in so many words—let the investigators know that the money had been extorted. It didn’t impress them. They locked him away again.

  The interrogation went into a second, third, and fourth day. No one did him harm, but they were steely. At last he had to deny any friendship with Amon at all. It was no great task: he loathed the man profoundly anyhow. “I’m not a fairy,” he growled at the gentlemen of Bureau V, falling back on rumors he’d heard about Goeth and his young orderlies.

  Amon himself would never understand that Oskar despised him and was willing to help the case Bureau V had against him. Amon was always deluded about friendship. In sentimental moods, he believed that Mietek Pemper and Helen Hirsch were loving servants. The investigators probably would not have let him know that Oskar was in Pomorska and would have listened mutely to Amon urging them, “Call in my old friend Schindler. He’ll vouch for me.”

  What helped Oskar most when he faced the investigators was that he had had few actual business connections with the man. Though he had sometimes given Amon advice or contacts, he had never had a share in any deal, never made a z@loty out of Amon’s sales of prison rations, of rings from the jewelry shop, of garments from the custom-tailoring plant or furniture from the upholstery section. It must also have helped him that his lies were disarming even to policemen, and that when he told the truth he was positively seductive. He never gave the impression that he was grateful for being believed. For example, when the gentlemen of Bureau V looked as if they might at least give standing room to the idea that the 80,000 RM. was a “loan,” a sum extorted, Oskar asked them whether in the end the money might be returned to him, to Herr Direktor Schindler, the impeccable industrialist.

  A third factor in Oskar’s favor was that his

  credentials checked out. Colonel Erich

  Lange, when telephoned by Bureau V,

  stressed Schindler’s importance to the conduct of the war. Sussmuth, called in Troppau, said that Oskar’s plant was involved in the production of “secret weapons.” It was not, as we will see, an untrue statement. But when said bluntly, it was misleading and carried a distorted weight. For the F@uhrer had promised “secret weapons.” The phrase itself was charismatic and extended its protection now to Oskar. Against a phrase like “secret weapons,” any confetti of protest from the burghers of Zwittau did not count.

  But even to Oskar it did not seem that the

  imprisonment was going well. About the fourth day,

  one of his interrogators visited him not to question him

  but to spit at him. The spittle streaked the left

  lapel of his suit. The man ranted at him,

  calling him a Jew-lover, a fucker of

  Jewesses. It was a departure from the strange

  legalism of the interrogations. But Oskar wasn’t

  sure that it was not planned, that it did not

  represent the true impetus behind his

  imprisonment.

  After a week, Oskar sent a message,

  by way of Huth and Klonowska,

  to Oberf@uhrer Scherner. Bureau V was putting such pressure on him, the message went, that he did not believe he could protect the former police chief much longer. Scherner left his counterinsurgency work (it was soon to kill him) and arrived in Oskar’s cell within a day. It was a scandal what they were doing, said Scherner. What about Amon? Oskar asked, expecting Scherner to say that that was a scandal too. He deserves all he gets, said Scherner. It seemed that everyone was deserting Amon. Don’t worry, said Scherner before leaving, we intend to get you out.

  On the morning of the eighth day, they let Oskar out onto the street. Oskar did not delay his going—nor did he, this time, demand transport. Enough to be deposited on the cold sidewalk.

  He traveled across Cracow by streetcar and

  walked to his old factory in Zablocie. A

  few Polish caretakers were still there, and from the

  upstairs office he called Brinnlitz and

  told Emilie that he was free.

  Moshe Bejski, a Brinnlitz

  draftsman, remembers the confusion while Oskar was away—the rumors, all the questions about what it meant. But Stern and Maurice Finder, Adam Garde and others had consulted Emilie about food, about work arrangements, about the provision of bunks. They were the first to discover that Emilie was no mere passenger. She was not a happy woman, and her unhappiness was compounded by Bureau V’s arrest of Oskar. It must have seemed cruel that the SS should intrude on this reunion before it had got properly started. But it was clear to Stern and the others that she was not there, keeping house in that little apartment on the ground floor, purely out of wifely duty. There was what you could call an ideological commitment too. A picture of Jesus with His heart exposed and in flames hung on a wall of the apartment. Stern had seen the same design in the houses of Polish Catholics. But there had been no ornament of that kind in either of Oskar’s Cracow apartments. The Jesus of the exposed heart did not always reassure when you saw it in Polish kitchens. In Emilie’s apartment, however, it hung like a promise, a personal one. Emilie’s.

  Early in November, her husband came back by train. He was unshaven and smelly from his imprisonment. He was amazed to find that the women were still in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

  In planet Auschwitz, where the Schindler women moved as warily, as full of dread as any space travelers, Rudolf H@oss ruled as founder, builder, presiding genius. Readers of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice encountered him as the master of Sophie— a very different sort of master than Amon was to Helen Hirsch; a more detached, mannerly, and sane man; yet still the unflagging priest of that cannibal province. Though in the 1920’s he had murdered a Ruhr schoolteacher for informing on a German activist and had done time for the crime, he never murdered any Auschwitz prisoner by his own hand. He saw himself instead as a technician. As champion of Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide pellets which gave off fumes when exposed to air, he had engaged in a long personal and scientific conflict with his rival, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who had jurisdiction over the Bel@zec camp and who was the head of the carbon monoxide school. There had been an awful day at Bel@zec, which the SS chemical officer Kurt Gerstein had witnessed, when Kommissar Wirth’s method took three hours to finish a party of Jewish males packed into the chambers. That H@oss had backed the more efficient technology is partially attested to by the continuous growth of Auschwitz and the decline of Bel@zec. By 1943, when Rudolf H@oss left Auschwitz to do a stint as Deputy Chief of Section D in Oranienburg, the place was already something more than a camp. It was even more than a wonder of organization. It was a phenomenon. The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth’s malice—a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named “disinfection cellars,” the aboveground chambers “bathhouses,” and Oberscharf@uhrer Moll, whose task it was to order the insertion of the blue crystals into the roofs of the “cellars,” the walls of the “bathhouses,” customarily cried to his assistants, “All right, let’s give them something to chew on.” H@oss had returned to Auschwitz in May 1944 and presided over the entire camp at the time the Schindler women occupied a barracks in Birkenau, so close to the whimsical Oberscharf@uhrer Moll. According to the Schindler mythology, it was H@oss himself with whom Oskar wrestled for his 300 women. Certainly Oskar had telephone conversations and other commerce with H@oss. But he also had to deal with Sturmbannf@uhrer Fritz Hartjenstein, Commandant of Auschwitz II—THAT is, of Auschwitz-Birkenau—and with Untersturmf@uhrer Franz H@ossler, the young man in charge, in that great city, of the suburb of women.

  What is certain is that Oskar now sent a young

  woman with a suitcase full of liquor, ham,

  and diamonds to
make a deal with these

  functionaries. Some say that Oskar then followed

  up the girl’s visit in person, taking with him

  an associate, an influential officer in the

  S.a. (the Sturmabteilung, or Storm

  Troops), Standartenf@uhrer Peltze,

  who, according to what Oskar later told his friends, was a British agent. Others claim that Oskar stayed away from Auschwitz himself as a matter of strategy and went to Oranienburg instead, and to the Armaments Inspectorate in Berlin, to try to put pressure on H@oss and his associates from that end.

  The story as Stern would tell it years later in a public speech in Tel Aviv is as follows. After Oskar’s release from prison, Stern approached Schindler and—“under the pressure of some of my comrades”—begged Oskar to do something decisive about the women ensnared in Auschwitz. During this conference, one of Oskar’s secretaries came in—Stern does not say which one. Schindler considered the girl and pointed to one of his fingers, which sported a large diamond ring. He asked the girl whether she would like this rather hefty piece of jewelry. According to Stern, the girl got very excited. Stern quotes Oskar as saying, “Take the list of the women; pack a suitcase with the best food and liquor you can find in my kitchen. Then go to Auschwitz. You know the Commandant has a penchant for pretty women. If you bring it off, you’ll get this diamond. And more still.”

  It is a scene, a speech worthy of one of

  those events in the Old Testament when for the good of the

  tribe a woman is offered to the invader. It is

  also a Central European scene, with its