She turned and found her mother and pulled at her uniform. Then Regina looked, went through the same cruel cycle of identification, and began to wail. The door of the car had been shut by now; they were all packed close in near darkness, and every gesture, every scent of hope or panic, was contagious. All the others took up the wailing too. Manci Rosner, standing near her sister-in-law, eased her away from the opening, looked, saw her son waving, and began keening too.
The door slid open again and a burly NCO asked who was making all the noise. No one else had any motive to come forward, but Manci and Regina struggled through the crush to the man. “It’s my child over there,” they both said. “My boy,” said Manci. “I want to show him that I’m still alive.”
He ordered them down onto the concourse. When they stood before him, they began to wonder what his purpose was. “Your name?” he asked Regina. She told him and saw him reach behind his back and fumble under his leather belt. She expected to see his hand appear holding a pistol. What it held, however, was a letter for her from her husband. He had a similar letter from Henry Rosner, too. He gave a brief summary of the journey he’d made from Brinnlitz with their husbands. Manci suggested he might be willing to let them get down under the car, between the tracks, as if to urinate. It was sometimes permitted if trains were long delayed. He consented.
As soon as Manci was down there under the carriage, she let out the piercing Rosner whistle she had used on the Appellplatz of P@lasz@ow to guide Henry and Olek to her. Olek heard it and began waving. He took Richard’s head and pointed it toward their mothers, peering out between the wheels of the train. After wild waving, Olek held his arm aloft and pulled back his sleeve to show a tattoo like a varicose scrawl along the flesh of his upper arm. And of course the women waved, nodded, applauded, young Richard also holding up his tattooed arm for applause. Look, the children were saying by their rolled-up sleeves. We have permanence.
But between the wheels, the women were in a frenzy.
“What’s happened to them?” they asked each other. “In God’s name, what are they doing here?” They understood that there would be a fuller explanation in the letters. They tore them open and read them, then put them away and went on waving.
Next, Olek opened his hand and showed that he had a few pelletlike potatoes in his palm.
“There,” he called, and Manci could hear him distinctly. “You don’t have to worry about me being hungry.”
“Where’s your father?” Manci shouted.
“At work,” said Olek. “He’ll be back from work soon. I’m saving these potatoes for him.”
“Oh, God,” Manci murmured to her
sister-in-law. So much for the food in his hand. Young
Richard told it straighter. “Mamushka,
Mamushka, Mamushka,” he yelled,
“I’m so hungry!”
But he too held up a few potatoes.
He was keeping them for Dolek, he said. Dolek and Rosner the violinist were working at the rock quarry.
Henry Rosner arrived first. He too stood at the wire, his left arm bared and raised. “The tattoo,” he called in triumph. She could see, though, that he was shivering, sweating and cold at the same time. It had not been a soft life in P@lasz@ow, but he’d been allowed to sleep off in the paint shop the hours of work he’d put in playing Lehar at the villa. Here, in the band which sometimes accompanied the lines marching to the “bathhouses,” they didn’t play Rosner’s brand of music.
When Dolek turned up, he was led to the wire by Richard. He could see the pretty, hollow-faced women peering out from the undercarriage. What he and Henry dreaded most was that the women would offer to stay. They could not be with their sons in the male camp. They were in the most hopeful situation in Auschwitz there, hunkered under a train that was certain to move before the day was over. The idea of a clan reunion here was illusory, but the fear of the men at the Birkenau wire was that the women would opt to die for it. Therefore Dolek and Henry talked with false cheer—like peacetime fathers who’d decided to take the kids up to the Baltic that summer so that the girls could go to Carlsbad on their own. “Look after Niusia,” Dolek kept calling, reminding his wife that they had another child, that she was in the car above Regina’s head.
At last some merciful siren sounded in the men’s camp. The men and boys now had to leave the wire. Manci and Regina climbed limply back into the train and the door was locked. They were still. Nothing could surprise them anymore.
The train rolled out in the afternoon. There were the
usual speculations. Mila Pfefferberg
believed that if the destination was not Schindler’s
place, half the women crammed in the cars would not
live another week. She herself expected that she
had only days left. The girl Lusia had
scarlet fever. Mrs. Dresner, tended
by Danka but leached by dysentery, seemed to be dying.
But in Niusia Horowitz’ car, the women saw mountains and pine trees through the broken slat. Some of them had come to these mountains in their childhood, and to see the distinctive hills even from the floor of these putrid wagons gave them an unwarranted sense of holiday. They shook the girls who sat in the muck staring. “Nearly there,” they promised. But where? Another false arrival would finish them all.
At cold dawn on the second day, they were ordered out. The locomotive could be heard hissing somewhere in the mist. Beards of dirty ice hung from the understructures of the train, and the air pierced them. But it was not the heavy, acrid air of Auschwitz. It was a rustic siding, somewhere. They marched, their feet numb in clogs, and everybody coughing. Soon they saw ahead of them a large gate and, behind it, a great bulk of masonry from which chimneys rose; they looked like brothers to the ones left behind in Auschwitz. A party of SS men waited by the gate, clapping their hands in the cold. The group at the gate, the chimneys—it all looked like part of that sickening continuum. A girl beside Mila Pfefferberg began to weep. “They’ve brought us all this way to send us up the chimney anyhow.”
“No,” said Mila, “they wouldn’t waste their time. They could have done all that at Auschwitz.” Her optimism was, however, like that of the girl Lusia—she couldn’t tell where it came from. As they got closer to the gate, they became aware that Herr Schindler was standing in the midst of the SS men. They could tell at first by his memorable height and bulk. Then they could see his features under the Tyrolean hat which he’d been wearing lately to celebrate his return to his home mountains. A short, dark SS officer stood beside him. It was the Commandant of Brinnlitz, Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold. Oskar had already discovered—the women would discover it soon—that Liepold, unlike his middle-aged garrison, had not yet lost faith in that proposition called “the Final Solution.” Yet though he was the respected deputy of Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck and the supposed incarnation of authority in this place, it was Oskar who stepped forward as the lines of women stopped. They stared at him. A phenomenon in the mist. Only some of them smiled. Mila Pfefferberg, like others of the girls in the column that morning, remembers that it was an instant of the most basic and devout gratitude, and quite unutterable. Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. “He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.”
Then Oskar began to talk. It was another of his outrageous speeches, full of dazzling promises. “We knew you were coming,” he said. “They called us from Zwittau. When you go inside the building, you’ll find soup and bread waiting for you.” And then, lightly and with pontifical assurance, he said it: “You have nothing more to worry about. You’re with me now.”
It was the sort of address against which the
Untersturmf@uhrer was powerless. Though
Liepold was angry at it, Oskar was
oblivious. As the Herr Direktor moved
with the prisoners into the courtyard, there was not
hing Liepold could do to break into that certainty.
The men knew. They were on the balcony of their
dormitory looking down. Sternberg and his son
searching for Mrs. Clara Sternberg,
Feigenbaum senior and Lutek Feigenbaum
looking out for Nocha Feigenbaum and her
delicate daughter. Juda Dresner and his son
Janek, old Mr. Jereth, Rabbi
Levartov, Ginter, Garde, even Marcel
Goldberg all strained for a sight of their women. Mundek Korn looked not only for his mother and sister but for Lusia the optimist, in whom he’d developed an interest. Bau now fell into a melancholy from which he might never fully emerge. He knew definitively, for the first time, that his mother and wife would not arrive in Brinnlitz. But Wulkan the jeweler, seeing Chaja Wulkan below him in the factory courtyard, knew with astonishment now that there were individuals who intervened and offered astounding rescue.
Pfefferberg waved at Mila a package he
had kept for her arrival—a hank of wool
stolen from one of the cases Hoffman had left behind, and a steel needle he had made in the welding department. Frances Spira’s ten-year-old son also looked down from the balcony. To stop himself from calling out, he had jammed his fist into his mouth, since there were so many SS men in the yard. The women staggered across the cobbles in their Auschwitz tatters. Their heads were cropped. Some of them were too ill, too hollowed out to be easily recognized. Yet it was an astounding assembly. It would not surprise anyone to find out later that no such reunion occurred anywhere else in stricken Europe. That there had never been, and would not be, any other Auschwitz rescue like this one.
The women were then led up into their separate dormitory. There was straw on the floor—no bunks yet. From a large DEF tureen, an SS girl served them the soup Oskar had spoken about at the gate. It was rich. There were lumps of nutrient in it. In its fragrance, it was the outward sign of the value of the other imponderable promises. “You have nothing more to worry about.” But they could not touch their men. The women’s dormitory was for the moment quarantined. Even Oskar, on the advice of his medical staff, was concerned about what they might have brought with them from Auschwitz.
There were, however, three points at which their isolation could be breached. One was the loose brick above young Moshe Bejski’s bunk. Men would spend the coming nights kneeling on Bejski’s mattress, passing messages through the wall. Likewise, on the factory floor there was a small fanlight which gave into the women’s latrines. Pfefferberg stacked crates there, making a cubicle where a man could sit and call messages. Finally, for early morning and late evening, there was a crowded wire barrier between the men’s balcony and the women’s. The Jereths met there: old Mr. Jereth, from whose wood the first Emalia barracks had been built; his wife, who had needed a refuge from the Aktions in the ghetto. Prisoners used to joke about the exchanges between Mr. and Mrs. Jereth. “Have your bowels moved today, dear?” Mr. Jereth would somberly ask his wife, who had just come from the dysentery-ridden huts of Birkenau.
On principle, no one wanted to be put in the clinic. In P@lasz@ow it had been a dangerous place where you were made to take Dr. Blancke’s terminal benzine treatment. Even here in Brinnlitz, there was always a risk of sudden inspections, of the type that had already taken the boy children. According to the memos of Oranienburg, a labor-camp clinic should not have any patients with serious illnesses. It was not meant to be a mercy home. It was there to offer industrial first aid. But whether they wanted it or not, the clinic at Brinnlitz was full of women. The teen-age Janka Feigenbaum was put in there. She had cancer and might die in any case, even in the best of places. She had at least come to the best of places left to her. Mrs. Dresner was brought in, as were dozens of others who could not eat or keep food in their stomachs. Lusia the optimist and two other girls were suffering from scarlet fever and could not be kept in the clinic. They were put in beds in the cellar, down amid the warmth of the boilers. Even in the haze of her cold fever, Lusia was aware of the prodigious warmth of that cellar ward.
Emilie worked as quiet as a nun in the clinic. Those who were well in Brinnlitz, the men who were disassembling the Hoffman machines and putting them in storehouses down the road, scarcely noticed her. One of them later said that she was just a quiet and submissive wife. For the healthy in Brinnlitz stayed hostage to Oskar’s flamboyance, to this great Brinnlitz confidence trick. Even the women who were still standing had their attention taken by the grand, magical, omniprovident Oskar.
Manci Rosner, for example. A little later in Brinnlitz’ history, Oskar would come to the lathes where she worked the night shift and hand her Henry’s violin. Somehow, during a journey to see Hassebroeck at Gr@oss-Rosen, he’d got the time to go into the warehouse there and find the fiddle. It had cost him 100 RM. to redeem it. As he handed it to her, he smiled in a way that seemed to promise her the ultimate return of the violinist to go with the violin. “Same instrument,” he murmured. “But—for the moment— different tune.”
It was hard for Manci, faced by Oskar and the miraculous violin, to see behind the Herr Direktor to the quiet wife. But to the dying, Emilie was more visible. She fed them semolina, which she got God knows where, prepared in her own kitchen and carried up to the Krankenstube. Dr. Alexander Biberstein believed that Mrs. Dresner was finished. Emilie spooned the semolina into her for seven days in a row, and the dysentery abated. Mrs. Dresner’s case seemed to verify Mila Pfefferberg’s claim that if Oskar had failed to rescue them from Birkenau, most of them would not have lived another week.
Emilie tended Janka Feigenbaum also, the nineteen-year-old with bone cancer. Lutek Feigenbaum, Janka’s brother, at work on the factory floor, sometimes noticed Emilie moving out of her ground-floor apartment with a canister of soup boiled up in her own kitchen for the dying Janka. “She was dominated by Oskar,” Lutek would say. “As we all were. Yet she was her own woman.”
When Feigenbaum’s glasses were broken, she arranged for them to be repaired. The prescription lay in some doctor’s office in Cracow, had lain there since before the ghetto days. Emilie arranged for someone who was visiting Cracow to get the prescription and bring back the glasses made up. Young Feigenbaum considered this more than an average kindness, especially in a system which positively desired his myopia, which aimed to take the spectacles off all the Jews of Europe. There are many stories about Oskar providing new glasses for various prisoners. One wonders if some of Emilie’s kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood.
CHAPTER 34
The doctors in the Krankenstube were Doctors Hilfstein, Handler, Lewkowicz, and Biberstein. They were all concerned about the likelihood of a typhus outbreak. For typhus was not only a hazard to health. It was, by edict, a cause to close down Brinnlitz, to put the infested back into cattle cars and ship them to die in the ACHTUNG TYPHUS! barracks of Birkenau. On one of Oskar’s morning visits to the clinic, about a week after the women arrived, Biberstein told him that there were two more possible cases among the women. Headache, fever, malaise, general pains throughout the whole body—all that had begun. Biberstein expected the characteristic typhoid rash to appear within a few days. These two would need to be isolated somewhere in the factory.
Biberstein did not have to give Oskar too much home instruction in the facts of typhus.
Typhus was carried by louse bite. The prisoners were infested by uncontrollable populations of lice. The disease took perhaps two weeks to incubate. It might be incubating now in a dozen, a hundred prisoners. Even with the new bunks installed, people still lay too close. Lovers passed the virulent lice to each other when they met, fast and secretly, in some hidden corner of the factory. The typhus lice were wildly migratory. It seemed now that their energy could checkmate Oskar’s.
So that when Oskar ordered a delousing unit—
showers,
a laundry to boil clothes, a disinfection
plant—built upstairs, it was no idle
administrative order. The unit was to run on
hot steam piped up from the cellars. The welders
were to work double shifts on the project. They did
it with a will, for willingness characterized the secret
industries of Brinnlitz. Official industry
might be symbolized by the Hilo machines rising
from the new-poured workshop floor. It was in the
prisoners’ interest and in Oskar’s, as Moshe
Bejski later observed, that these machines be
properly erected, since it gave the camp a
convincing front. But the uncertified industries of
Brinnlitz were the ones that counted. The women
knitted clothing with wool looted from Hoffman’s
left-behind bags. They paused and began to look
industrial only when an SS officer or
NCO passed through the factory on his
way to the Herr Direktor’s office, or
when Fuchs and Schoenbrun, the inept civil engineers (“Not up to the weight of our engineers,” a prisoner would later say) came out of their offices.
The Brinnlitz Oskar was still the Oskar old Emalia hands remembered. A bon vivant, a man of wild habits. Mandel and Pfefferberg, at the end of their shift and overheated from working on the pipe fittings for the steam, visited a water tank high up near the workshop ceiling. Ladders and a catwalk took them to it. The water was warm up there, and once you climbed in, you could not be seen from the floor. Dragging themselves up, the two welders were amazed to find the tub already taken. Oskar floated, naked and enormous. A blond SS girl, the one Regina Horowitz had bribed with a brooch, her naked breasts buoyant at the surface, shared the water with him. Oskar became aware of them, looked up at them frankly. Sexual shame was, to him, a concept something like existentialism, very worthy but hard to grasp. Stripped, the welders noticed, the girl was delicious.
Schindler's List Page 38