Oskar’s party traveled for the first hours of their
escape at the tail of a column of
Wehrmacht trucks. At midnight feats of
this nature had become feasible, and no one pestered
them. Behind them they could hear German engineers
dynamiting installations, and occasionally there was the
clamor of a distant ambush arranged by the Czech
underground. Near the town of Havl@i@ck@uv
Brod they must have fallen behind, because they were stopped
by Czech partisans who stood in the middle of the
road. Oskar went on impersonating a
prisoner. “These good people and I are escapees from
a labor camp. The SS fled, and the Herr
Direktor. This is the Herr
Direktor’s automobile.”
The Czechs asked them if they had weapons. Reubinski had come from the truck and joined the discussion. He confessed that he had a rifle. All right, said the Czechs, you’d better give us what you have. If the Russians intercepted you and found that you had weapons, they might not understand why. Your defense is your prison uniforms.
In this town, southeast of Prague and on the road to Austria, there was still the likelihood of meeting disgruntled units. The partisans directed Oskar and the others to the Czech Red Cross office in the town square. There they could safely bunk down for the rest of the night. But when they reached town, the Red Cross officials suggested to them that given the uncertainty of the peace, they would probably be safest in the town jail. The vehicles were left in the square, in sight of the Red Cross office, and Oskar, Emilie, and their eight companions carried their few pieces of baggage and slept in the unlocked cells of the police station.
When they returned to the square in the morning, they found that both vehicles had been stripped.
All the upholstery had been torn from the
Mercedes, the diamonds were gone, the tires had
been taken from the truck, and the engines had been
plundered. The Czechs were
philosophical about it. We all have
to expect to lose something in times like these. Perhaps they may even have suspected Oskar, with his fair complexion and his blue eyes, of being a fugitive SS man.
The party were without their own transport, but a train ran south in the direction of Kaplice, and they caught it, dressed still in their stripes. Reubinski says that they took the train “as far as the forest, and then walked.” Somewhere in that forested border region, well to the north of Linz, they could expect to encounter the Americans. They were hiking down a wooded road when they met two young gum-chewing Americans sitting by a machine gun. One of Oskar’s prisoners began to speak with them in English. “Our orders are not to let anyone pass on this road,” one of them said.
“Is it forbidden to circle around through the woods?” asked the prisoner.
The GI chewed. This strange chewing race!
“Guess not,” said the GI at last.
So they swung through the woods and, back on the road half an hour later, ran into an infantry company marching north in double column. Through the English speaker once more, they began to talk to the unit’s reconnaissance men. The commanding officer himself drew up in a jeep, dismounted, interrogated them. They were frank with him, telling him that Oskar was the Herr Direktor, that they were Jews. They believed they were on safe ground, for they knew from the BBC that the U.s. forces included many Americans of both German and Jewish origins. “Don’t move,” said the captain. He drove away without explanation, leaving them in the half-embarrassed command of the young infantrymen, who offered them cigarettes, the Virginia kind, which had that almost glossy look—like the jeep, the uniforms, the equipment—of coming from a grand, brash, unfettered, and un-ersatz manufactory.
Though Emilie and the prisoners were uneasy that Oskar might be arrested, he himself sat on the grass apparently unconcerned and breathed in the spring air in these high woods. He had his Hebrew letter, and New York, he knew, was ethnically a city where Hebrew was not unknown. Half an hour passed and some soldiers appeared, coming down the road in an informal bunch, not strung out in the infantry manner.
They were a group of Jewish infantrymen and included a field rabbi. They were very effusive. They embraced all the party, Emilie and Oskar as well. For these, the party was told, were the first concentration-camp survivors the battalion had met.
When the greetings were over, Oskar brought out his Hebrew reference, and the rabbi read it and began to weep. He relayed the details to the other Americans. There was more applause, more hand shaking, more embraces. The young GI’S seemed so open, so loud, so childlike. Though one or two generations out of Central Europe, they had been so marked by America that the Schindlers and the prisoners looked at them with as much amazement as was returned.
The result was that the Schindler party spent two days on the Austrian frontier as guests of the regimental commander and the rabbi. They drank excellent coffee, such as the authentic prisoners in the group had not tasted since before the founding of the ghetto. They ate opulently. After two days, the rabbi presented them with a captured ambulance, in which they drove to the ruined city of Linz in Upper Austria.
On the second day of peace in Brinnlitz, the Russians still had not appeared. The commando group worried about the necessity of hanging on to the camp for longer than they had thought they’d have to. One thing they remembered was that the only time they’d seen the SS show fear—apart from the anxiety of Motzek and his colleagues in the past few days—had been when typhus broke out.
So they hung typhus signs all over the
wire.
Three Czech partisans turned up at the
gate in the afternoon and talked through the fence to the men on sentry duty. It’s all over now, they said.
You’re free to walk out whenever you want. When the Russians arrive, said the prison commandos. Until then we’re keeping everyone in. Their answer exhibited some of the pathology of the prisoner, the suspicion you got after a time that the world outside the fence was perilous and had to be reentered in stages. It also showed their wisdom. They were not convinced yet that the last German unit had gone.
The Czechs shrugged and went away.
That night, when Poldek Pfefferberg was part of the guard at the main gate, motorcycle engines were heard on the road. They did not pass by, as the Panzers had done, but could be heard turning in toward the camp itself. Five cycles marked with the SS death’s-head materialized out of the dark and drew up noisily by the front fence. As the SS men—very young, Poldek remembers— switched off their engines, dismounted, and approached the gate, a debate raged among the armed men inside as to whether the visitors ought to be immediately shot.
The NCO in charge of the motorcycle party seemed to understand the risk inherent in the situation. He stood a little way from the wire with his hands extended. They needed gasoline, he said. He presumed that being a factory camp, Brinnlitz would have gasoline.
Pfefferberg advised that it was better to supply them and send them packing than to create problems by opening fire on them. Other elements of their regiment might be in the region, and be drawn by an outburst of gunfire.
So in the end the SS men were let in through the gate, and some of the prisoners went to the garage and drew gasoline. The SS NCO was careful to convey to the camp commandos—who had put on blue coveralls in an attempt to look like informal guards, or at least like German Kapos—that he did not find anything peculiar in the idea of armed prisoners’ defending their camps from within. “I hope you realize there’s typhus here,” said Pfefferberg in German, pointing to the signs. The SS men looked at each other.
“We’ve already lost two dozen people,” said Pfefferberg. “We have another fifty isolated in the cellar.”
This claim seemed to impress the gentlemen of the death’s-head. They were tired. They were fleeing. That was enough for them. Th
ey didn’t want any bacterial perils on top of the others.
When the gasoline arrived in 5-gallon cans, they expressed their thanks, bowed, and left through the gate. The prisoners watched them fill their tanks and considerately leave by the wire any cans they could not fit into their sidecars. They put on their gloves, started their engines, and left without too much revving of the motors, being too careful to waste their new tankfuls on flourishes. Their roar faded southwest through the village. For the men at the gate, this polite encounter would be their last with anyone wearing the uniform of Heinrich Himmler’s foul legion.
When on the third day the camp was liberated, it was by a single Russian officer. Riding a horse, he emerged through the defile through which the road and the railway siding approached the Brinnlitz gate. As he drew closer it became apparent that the horse was a mere pony, the officer’s thin feet in the stirrups nearly touching the road and his legs bent in comically underneath the horse’s skinny abdomen. He seemed to be bringing to Brinnlitz a personal, hard-won deliverance, for his uniform was worn, the leather strap of his rifle so withered by sweat and winter and campaigning that it had had to be replaced by rope. The reins of the horse were also of rope. The officer was fair-complexioned and, as Russians always look to Poles, immensely alien, immensely familiar.
After a short conversation in hybrid Polish-Russian, the commando at the gate let him in. Around the balconies of the second floor, the rumor of his arrival spread. As he dismounted he was kissed by Mrs. Krumholz. He smiled and called, in two languages, for a chair. One of the younger men brought it.
Standing on it to give himself a height
advantage which, in relation to most of the prisoners,
he did not need, he made what sounded like a
standard liberation speech in Russian. Moshe
Bejski could catch its gist. They had been
liberated by the glorious Soviets. They were
free to go to town, to move in the direction of their
choosing. For under the Soviets, as in the mythical
heaven, there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male
nor female, bond nor free. They were not
to take any cheap revenge in the town. Their
Allies would find their oppressors, and
subject them to solemn and appropriate
punishment. The fact of their freedom should, to them, outweigh any other consideration.
He got down from his chair and smiled, as if saying that now he had finished as a spokesman and was prepared to answer questions. Bejski and some of the others began to speak to him, and he pointed to himself and said in creaky Belorussian Yiddish—the sort you pick up from your grandparents rather than your parents --that he was Jewish.
Now the conversation took on a new intimacy.
“Have you been in Poland?” Bejski asked him. “Yes,” the officer admitted. “I’ve come from Poland now.”
“Are there any Jews left up there?”
“I saw none.”
Prisoners were crowding around, translating and relaying the conversation to one another. “Where are you from?” the officer asked Bejski.
“Cracow.”
“I was in Cracow two weeks ago.”
“Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz?”
“I heard that at Auschwitz there are still a few Jews.”
The prisoners grew thoughtful. The Russian made Poland sound like a vacuum now, and if they returned to Cracow they’d rattle around in it bleakly like dried peas in a jar.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” the officer asked.
There were cries for food. He thought he could get them a cartload of bread, and perhaps some horsemeat. It should arrive before dusk. “But you should see what they have in town here,” the officer suggested.
It was a radical idea—that they ought to just go out the gate and begin shopping in Brinnlitz. For some of them it was still an unimaginable option. Young men like Pemper and Bejski pursued the officer as he left. If there were no Jews in Poland, there was nowhere to go. They didn’t want him to give them instructions, but felt he ought to discuss their quandary with them. The Russian paused in untying the reins of his pony from a railing.
“I don’t know,” he said, looking them in the face. “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east—that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” His fingers returned to untying the knot. “They don’t like us anywhere.”
As the Russian officer had urged them, the Brinnlitz prisoners moved out the gate at last to make their first tentative contact with the outer world. The young were the first to try it. Danka Schindel went out the day after the liberation and climbed the wooded hill behind the camp. Lilies and anemones were beginning to bud, and migratory birds were arriving from Africa. Danka sat on the hill for a while, savoring the day, then rolled down it and lay in the grass at the bottom, inhaling the fragrances and looking at the sky. She was there for so long that her parents presumed she had come to grief in the village, with either the townspeople or the Russians.
Goldberg left early too, was perhaps the first to go, on his way to pick up his riches in Cracow. He would emigrate, as quickly as he could arrange it, to Brazil.
Most of the older prisoners stayed in camp.
The Russians had now moved into Brinnlitz,
occupying as an officers’ quarters a villa on
a hill above the village. They brought to the camp
a butchered horse, which the prisoners ate
ravenously, some of them finding it too rich after their
diet of bread and vegetables and Emilie
Schindler’s porridge.
Lutek Feigenbaum, Janek Dresner, and
young Sternberg went foraging in town. The village was patrolled by the Czech underground, and Brinnlitz folk of German descent were therefore wary of the liberated prisoners. A grocer indicated to the boys that they were welcome to a bag of sugar he’d been keeping in his storeroom. Young Sternberg found the sugar irresistible, lowering his face to it and swallowing it by the handful. It made him cruelly ill. He discovered what the Schindler group were finding in Nuremberg and Ravensburg—that liberty and the day of plenty had to be approached gradually.
The main purpose of this expedition to town had been to get bread. Feigenbaum was armed, as a member of the Brinnlitz commandos, with a pistol and a rifle, and when the baker insisted there was no bread, one of the others said to him, “Threaten him with the rifle.” The man, after all, was Sudetendeutsch and in theory an approver of all their misery. Feigenbaum pointed the weapon at the baker and moved through the shop into the residence beyond, looking for hidden flour. In the parlor, he found the baker’s wife and two daughters huddled in shock. They looked so frightened, indistinguishable from any Cracow family during an Aktion, that a great shame overwhelmed him. He nodded to the women as if he were on a social visit, and left.
The same shame overtook Mila Pfefferberg
on her first visit to the village. As she entered
the square, a Czech partisan stopped two
Sudeten girls and made them take
off their shoes so that Mila, who had only
clogs, could select the pair that fitted her
better. This sort of dominance made her flush,
and she sat on the pavement making her embarrassed
choice. The partisan gave the clogs to the
Sudeten girl and passed on. Mila then
turned in her tracks, ran up behind the girl, and
gave the shoes back. The
Sudetendeutscherin, Mila remembers,
was not even gracious.
In the evenings, the Russians came to the camp looking for women. Pfefferberg had to put a pistol to the head of a soldier who penetrated the women’s quarters and grabbed Mrs. Krumholz. (mrs. Krumholz would for years later chide Pfefferberg, pointing at him and accusing him. “Whatever chance I had of running off with a younger man, that scoundrel prevented it
!”) Three girls were taken away—more or less voluntarily—to a Russian party, and came back after three days and, they claimed, a good time.
The hold of Brinnlitz was a negative one, and within a week the prisoners began to move out. Some whose families had been consumed went directly to the West, never wishing to see Poland again. The Bejski boys, using their cloth and vodka to pay their way, traveled to Italy and boarded a Zionist ship to Palestine. The Dresners walked across Moravia and Bohemia and into Germany, where Janek was among the first ten students to enroll in the Bavarian University of Erlangen when it opened later in the year. Manci Rosner returned to Podg@orze, where Henry had agreed to meet her. Henry Rosner himself, liberated from Dachau with Olek, was in a pissoir in Munich one day and saw another client of the place wearing prison-camp stripes. He asked the man where he had been imprisoned. “Brinnlitz,” said the man.
Everyone except an old lady, the man told
him (inaccurately, as it turned out), had
survived Brinnlitz. Manci herself would hear of
Henry’s survival through a cousin who came to the
room in Podg@orze where Manci was waiting and
waved the Polish paper in which were listed the names of
Poles liberated from Dachau. “Manci,” said
the cousin, “give me a kiss. Henry’s
alive, and so is Olek.”
Regina Horowitz had a similar
rendezvous. It took her three weeks
to travel from Brinnlitz to Cracow with her daughter Niusia. She rented a room—the handout from the Navy store made that possible—and waited for Dolek. When he arrived, they sought to make inquiries of Richard, but there was no news. One day that summer Regina saw the film of Auschwitz which the Russians had made and were showing free of charge to the Polish population. She saw the famous frames involving the camp children, who looked out from behind the wire or were escorted by nuns past the electrified fence of Auschwitz I. Being so small and so engaging, Richard figured in most of the frames. Regina got up screaming and left the theater. The manager and a number of passing citizens tried to soothe her in the street. “It’s my son, it’s my son!” she kept screaming. Now that she knew he was alive, she was able to discover that Richard had been released by the Russians into the hands of one of the Jewish rescue organizations. Thinking both his parents dead, the rescue body had had him adopted by some old acquaintances of the Horowitzes’, people named Liebling. Regina was given the address, and when she arrived at the Lieblings’ apartment could hear Richard inside, banging on a saucepan and calling, “Today there’ll be soup for everyone!” When she knocked on the door, he called to Mrs. Liebling to answer it.
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