gross, corruscating diamonds and its
proposed transaction of the flesh.
According to Stern, the secretary went. When she did not return within two days, Schindler himself— in the company of the obscure Peltze—went to settle the matter.
According to Schindler mythology, Oskar did
send a girlfriend of his to sleep with the Commandant—be
that H@oss, Hartjenstein, or H@ossler—and
leave diamonds on the pillow. While some, like
Stern, say it was “one of his secretaries,”
others name an Aufseher, a pretty blond
SS girl, ultimately a girlfriend of
Oskar’s and part of the Brinnlitz garrison. But this girl, it seems, was still in Auschwitz anyhow, together with the Schindlerfrauen. According to Emilie Schindler herself, the emissary was a girl of twenty-two or twenty-three. She was a native of Zwittau, and her father was an old friend of the Schindler family. She had recently returned from occupied Russia, where she’d worked as a secretary in the German administration. She was a good friend of Emilie’s, and volunteered for the task. It is unlikely that Oskar would demand a sexual sacrifice of a friend of the family. Even though he was a brigand in these matters, that side of the story is certainly myth. We do not know the extent of the girl’s transactions with the officers of Auschwitz. We know only that she approached the dreadful kingdom and dealt courageously.
Oskar later said that in his own dealings with the rulers of necropolis Auschwitz, he was offered the old temptation. The women have been here some weeks now. They won’t be worth much as labor anymore. Why don’t you forget these three hundred? We’ll cut another three hundred for you, out of the endless herd. In 1942, an SS NCO at Prokocim station had pushed the same idea at Oskar. Don’t get stuck on these particular names, Herr Direktor. Now as at Prokocim, Oskar pursued his usual line. There are irreplaceable skilled munitions workers. I have trained them myself over a period of years. They represent skills I cannot quickly replace. The names I know, that is, are the names I know.
A moment, said his tempter. I see listed here
a nine-year-old, daughter of one Phila
Rath. I see an eleven-year-old, daughter
of one Regina Horowitz. Are you
telling me that a nine-year-old and an
eleven-year-old are skilled munitions workers? They polish the forty-five-millimeter shells, said Oskar. They were selected for their long fingers, which can reach the interior of the shell in a way that is beyond most adults.
Such conversation in support of the girl who was a friend of the family took place, conducted by Oskar either in person or by telephone. Oskar would relay news of the negotiations to the inner circle of male prisoners, and from them the details were passed on to the men on the workshop floor. Oskar’s claim that he needed children so that the innards of antitank shells could be buffed was outrageous nonsense. But he had already used it more than once. An orphan named Anita Lampel had been called to the Appellplatz in P@lasz@ow one night in 1943 to find Oskar arguing with a middle-aged woman, the Alteste of the women’s camp. The Alteste was saying more or less what H@oss/h@ossler would say later in Auschwitz. “You can’t tell me you need a fourteen-year-old for Emalia. You cannot tell me that Commandant Goeth has allowed you to put a fourteen-year-old on your roster for Emalia.” (the Alteste was worried, of course, that if the list of prisoners for Emalia had been doctored, she would be made to pay for it.) That night in 1943, Anita Lampel had listened flabbergasted as Oskar, a man who had never even seen her hands, claimed that he had chosen her for the industrial value of her long fingers and that the Herr Commandant had given his approval.
Anita Lampel was herself in Auschwitz now, but had grown tall and no longer needed the long-fingered ploy. So it was transferred to the benefit of the daughters of Mrs. Horowitz and Mrs. Rath.
Schindler’s contact had been correct in saying that the women had lost nearly all their industrial value. At inspections, young women like Mila Pfefferberg, Helen Hirsch, and her sister could not prevent the cramps of dysentery from bowing and aging them. Mrs. Dresner had lost all appetite, even for the ersatz soup. Danka could not force the mean warmth of it down her mother’s throat. It meant that she would soon become a Mussulman. The term was camp slang, based on people’s memory of newsreels of famine in Muslim countries, for a prisoner who had crossed the borderline that separated the ravenous living from the good-as-dead.
Clara Sternberg, in her early forties, was isolated from the main Schindler group into what could be described as a Mussulman hut. Here, each morning, the dying women were lined up in front of the door and a selection was made. Sometimes it was Mengele leaning toward you. Of the 500 women in this new group of Clara Sternberg’s, 100 might be detailed off on a given morning. On another, 50. You rouged yourself with Auschwitz clay; you kept a straight back if that could be managed. You choked where you stood rather than cough. It was after such an inspection that Clara found herself with no further reserves left for the waiting, the daily risk. She had a husband and a teen-age son in Brinnlitz, but now they seemed more remote than the canals of the planet Mars. She could not imagine Brinnlitz, or them in it. She staggered through the women’s camp looking for the electric wires. When she had first arrived, they’d seemed to be everywhere. Now that they were needed, she could not find them. Each turn took her into another quagmire street, and frustrated her with a view of identically miserable huts. When she saw an acquaintance from P@lasz@ow, a Cracow woman like herself, Clara propped in front of her. “Where’s the electric fence?” Clara asked the woman. To her distraught mind, it was a reasonable question to ask, and Clara had no doubt that the friend, if she had any sisterly feeling, would point the exact way to the wires. The answer the woman gave Clara was just as crazed, but it was one that had a fixed point of view, a balance, a perversely sane core.
“Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.”
It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had—by her reply --somehow cut her off from suicide as an option. Something awful had happened at Brinnlitz. Oskar, the Moravian traveler, was away. He was trading in kitchenware and diamonds, liquor and cigars, all over the province. Some of it was crucial business. Biberstein speaks of the drugs and medical instruments that came into the Krankenstube at Brinnlitz. None of it was standard issue.
Oskar must have traded for medicines at the depots of the Wehrmacht, or perhaps in the pharmacy of one of the big hospitals in Brno.
Whatever the cause of his absence, he was away
when an inspector from Gr@oss-Rosen arrived and
walked through the workshop with Untersturmf@uhrer
Josef Liepold, the new Commandant, who was
always happy for a chance to intrude inside the
factory. The inspector’s orders, originating
from Oranienburg, were that the Gr@oss-Rosen
subcamps should be scoured for children to be used in
Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments
in Auschwitz. Olek Rosner and his small
cousin Richard Horowitz, who’d believed they
had no need of a hiding place here, were spotted
racing around the annex, chasing each other
upstairs, playing among the abandoned spinning
machines. So was the son of Dr. Leon
Gross, who had nursed Amon’s recently
developed diabetes, who had helped Dr.
Blancke with the Health Aktion, and who had other crimes still to answer for. The inspector remarked to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold that these were clearly
not essential munitions workers.
Liepold—short, dark, not as crazy as Amon
--was still a convinced SS officer and did not bother to defend the brats.
Further on in the inspection Roman Ginter’s nine-year-old was discovered. Ginter had known Oskar from the time the ghetto was founded, had supplied the metalworks at P@lasz@ow with scrap from DEF. But Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold and the inspector did not recognize any special relationships. The Ginter boy was sent under escort to the gate with the other children. Frances Spira’s boy, ten and a half years old, but tall and on the books as fourteen, was working on top of a long ladder that day, polishing the high windows. He survived the raid.
The orders required the rounding up of the children’s parents as well, perhaps because this would obviate the risk of parents beginning demented revolutions on the subcamp premises. Therefore Rosner the violinist, Horowitz, and Roman Ginter were arrested. Dr. Leon Gross rushed down from the clinic to negotiate with the SS. He was flushed. The effort was to show this inspector from Gr@oss-Rosen that he was dealing with a really responsible sort of prisoner, a friend of the system. The effort counted for nothing. An SS Unterscharf@uhrer, armed with an automatic weapon, was given the mission of escorting them to Auschwitz.
The party of fathers and sons traveled from
Zwittau as far as Katowice, in Upper
Silesia, by ordinary passenger train. Henry
Rosner expected other passengers to be
hostile. Instead, one woman walked down the
aisle looking defiant and gave Olek and the
others a heel of bread and an apple, all the
while staring the sergeant in the face, daring him
to react. The Unterscharf@uhrer was
polite to her, however, and nodded formally. Later,
when the train stopped at Usti, he left the
prisoners under the guard of his assistant and went
to the station cafeteria, bringing back biscuits and
coffee paid for from his own pocket. He and Rosner
and Horowitz got talking. The more the
Unterscharf@uhrer chatted, the less he
seemed to belong to that same police force as Amon, Hujar, John, and all those others. “I’m taking you to Auschwitz,” he said, “and then I have to collect some women and bring them back to Brinnlitz.”
So, ironically, the first Brinnlitz men to discover that the women might be let out of Auschwitz were Rosner and Horowitz, themselves on their way there.
Rosner and Horowitz were ecstatic. They told their sons: This good gentleman is bringing your mother back to Brinnlitz. Rosner asked the Unterscharf@uhrer if he would give a letter to Manci, and Horowitz pleaded to be able to write to Regina. The two letters were written on pieces of paper the Unterscharf@uhrer gave them, the same stuff the man used to write to his own wife. In his letter, Rosner made arrangements with Manci to meet at an address in Podg@orze if they both survived.
When Rosner and Horowitz had finished writing, the SS man put the letters in his jacket. Where have you been these past years?
Rosner wondered. Did you start out as a
fanatic? Did you cheer when the gods
on the rostrum screamed, “The Jews are our misfortune”?
Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry’s arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag Henry off to Auschwitz. “To die just because of me,” he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn’t have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them.
The Unterscharf@uhrer leaned over.
Surely he had not heard, but there were tears in his eyes. Olek seemed astonished by them—the way another child might be astounded by a cycling circus animal. He stared at the man. What was startling was that they looked like fraternal tears, the tears of a fellow prisoner. “I know what will happen,” said the Unterscharf@uhrer. “We’ve lost the war. You’ll get the tattoo. You’ll survive.”
Henry got the impression that the man was making promises not to the child but to himself, arming himself with an assurance which—in five years’ time perhaps, when he remembered this train journey—he could use to soothe himself.
On the afternoon of her attempt to find the wires, Clara Sternberg heard the calling of names and the sound of women’s laughter from the direction of the Schindlerfrauen barracks. She crawled from her own damp hut and saw the Schindler women lined up beyond an inner fence of the women’s camp. Some of them were dressed only in blouses and long drawers. Skeleton women, without a chance. But they were chattering like girls. Even the blond SS girl seemed delighted, for she too would be liberated from Auschwitz if they were.
“Schindlergruppe,” she called, “you’re going to the sauna and then to the trains.” She seemed to have a sense of the uniqueness of the event. Doomed women from the barracks all around looked blankly out through the wire at the celebratory girls. They compelled you to watch, those list women, because they were so suddenly out of balance with the rest of the city. It meant nothing, of course. It was an eccentric event; it had no bearing on the majority’s life; it did not reverse the process or lighten the smoky air. But for Clara Sternberg, the sight was intolerable. As it was also for sixty-year-old Mrs. Krumholz, also half-dead in a hut assigned to the older women. Mrs. Krumholz began to argue with the Dutch Kapo at the door of her barracks. I’m going out to join them, she said. The Dutch Kapo put up a mist of arguments. In the end, she said, you’re better off here. If you go, you’ll die in the cattle cars. Besides that, I’ll have to explain why you aren’t here. You can tell them, said Mrs. Krumholz, that it’s because I’m on the Schindler list. It’s all fixed.
The books will balance. There’s no question about it. They argued for five minutes and in the process talked of their families, finding out about each other’s origins, perhaps looking for a vulnerable point outside the strict logic of the dispute. It turned out that the Dutch woman’s name was also Krumholz. The two of them began discussing the whereabouts of their families. My husband is in Sachsenhausen, I think, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. The Cracow Mrs. Krumholz said, My husband and grown son have gone somewhere.
I think Mauthausen. I’m meant to be in the
Schindler camp in Moravia. Those women beyond the fence, that’s where they’re going. They’re not going anywhere, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. Believe me. No one goes anywhere, except in one direction. The Cracow Mrs.
Krumholz said, They think they’re going somewhere. Please! For even if the Schindlerfrauen were deluded, Mrs. Krumholz from Cracow wanted to share the delusion. The Dutch Kapo understood this and at last opened the door of the barracks, for whatever it was worth.
For a fence now stood between Mrs. Krumholz, Mrs. Sternberg, and the rest of the Schindler women. It was not an electrified perimeter fence. It was nonetheless built, according to the rulings of Section D, of at least eighteen strands of wire. The strands ran closest together at the top. Farther down, they were stretched in parallel strands about six inches apart. But between each set of parallels and the next there was a gap of less than a foot. That day, according to the testimony of witnesses and of the women themselves, both Mrs. Krumholz and Mrs. Sternberg somehow tore their way through the fence to rejoin the Schindler women in whatever daydream of rescue they were enjoying. Dragging themselves through the perhaps nine-inch gap, stretching the wire, ripping their clothes off and tearing their flesh on the barbs, they put themselves back on the Schindler list. No one stopped them because no one believed it possible. To the other women of Auschwitz, it was in any case an irrelevant example. For any other escapee, the breaching of that fence brought you only to another, and then another, and so to the outer voltage of the place. Whereas for Sternberg and Krumholz, this fence was the only one. The clothing they’d brought with them from the ghetto and kept in repair in mu
ddy P@lasz@ow hung now on the wire. Naked and streaked with blood, they ran in among the Schindler women.
Mrs. Rachela Korn, condemned to a hospital hut at the age of forty-four, had also been dragged out the window of the place by her daughter, who now held her upright in the Schindler column. For her as for the other two, it was a birthday. Everyone in the line seemed to be congratulating them.
In the washhouse, the Schindler women were barbered. Latvian girls sheared a lice promenade down the length of their skulls and shaved their armpits and pubes. After their shower they were marched naked to the quartermaster’s hut, where the clothes of the dead were issued to them. When they saw themselves shaven and in odds and ends of clothing, they broke into laughter—the hilarity of the very young. The sight of little Mila Pfefferberg, down to 70 pounds, occupying garments cut for a fat lady had them reeling with hilarity. Half-dead and dressed in their paint-coded rags, they pranced, modeled, mimed, and giggled like schoolgirls.
“What’s Schindler going to do with all the old women?” Clara Sternberg heard an SS girl ask a colleague.
“It’s no one’s business,” the colleague said. “Let him open an old people’s home if he wants.”
No matter what your expectations, it was always a horrifying thing to go into the trains. Even in cold weather, there was a sense of smothering, compounded by blackness. On entering a car, the children always pushed themselves toward any sliver of light. That morning, Niusia Horowitz did that, positioning herself against the far wall at a place where a slat had come loose. When she looked out through the gap, she could see across the railway lines to the wires of the men’s camp. She noticed a straggle of children over there, staring at the train and waving. There seemed to be a very personal insistence to their movements. She thought it strange that one of them resembled her six-year-old brother, who was safe with Schindler. And the boy at his side was a double for their cousin Olek Rosner. Then, of course, she understood. It was Richard. It was Olek.
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