Oskar Schindler

SCHINDLERJUDE ROMAN FERBER ONCE REMARKED AFTER THE war that the arrival of the Schindler men at Brünnlitz was anticlimactic.¹ This was certainly not so with the Schindler women. Their weeks in Auschwitz had been terrifying and their mysterious trip to Brünnlitz was equally frightening. Stella Müller-Madej has written the most complete account of that journey in her memoirs, A Girl from Schindler’s List. Stella had been put in Birkenau’s Krankenstube (sick room) several days before the Brünnlitz transport left Auschwitz. Two friends, Bronia and Mira, managed to delude the SS into thinking that Stella was well and got her out of the sick room. All her clothes had been taken from her, so they carefully re-dressed her before they took her before the reporting officer (Rapportführer) to try to convince him to put Stella on the Brünnlitz transport. Their efforts were successful and Stella was ordered to join the other Schindler women.²

As the Aufseherinnen marched the Schindler women past the crematorium to the train, they decided to give them a “farewell flogging” with their whips. As soon as the cars were loaded, the train began to move. But uncertainty and fear continued to haunt the women as the train stopped and started time and again during what seemed an eternity. At one of the stops, the women called out to ask where they where. The response from outside was “Meskoslovensko.” The Schindler women then asked why the train was not moving. The voice outside responded that there was no locomotive to pull the cars. It had been taken by the Wehrmacht. Panic swept through the cars and many of the Schindler women were convinced they would be “taken out and finished off.” Stella said that some women began to pray; others wailed “in a language I could not understand.” She thought the wailing was going to drive her mad and pleaded with her mother and friends to make it stop.³

But soon another locomotive was found and the train again began its journey to Brünnlitz. Hunger and thirst now swept through the cars and some women feared they would starve to death. When the train stopped again, another voice from outside asked whether there was anyone in the cars. In unison, the women on Stella’s car shouted, “We’re here. Why have we stopped?” A person outside replied, “They want to take you back to Auschwitz.” Stella said that everyone “went crazy. Anything except that. Let them kill us here.”⁴ After a while, the women heard more voices outside and asked for food and water. “I can’t,” was the reply. As the women debated about whether to use one corner of the car as a toilet, the train began moving. Were they returning to Auschwitz? No one knew. Even the stronger women now began to lose hope. Natka Feigenbaum tried to reassure everyone in Stella’s car that “if Schindler doesn’t save us, that means he’s dead himself.” Several women told her to “stop blabbering about your wonderful Schindler.” Natka replied simply, “God will help. God will help.”⁵

The train stopped again and Stella was convinced the SS was going to kill them all. For her, “to stand still and wait like this was horrible.” The train stopped once more and everyone seemed certain this was the last stop. No one heard dogs barking and no guards were shouting from below. Someone did give instructions in German but spoke “calmly and without shouting.” The women were filled with “a mixture of amazement and horror.” No one beat them or hit them with rifle butts as they jumped out of the cars. Stella wondered how it was possible the Germans could have had “become so mild just before the end.” As the women were being lined up, a car drove up and two tall Germans got out. One was dressed in an SS uniform; the other wore a “different uniform.” The biggest of the two men, whom Stella described as “massive,” was Oskar Schindler. Natka muttered, “on your knees, on your knees before him.”⁶

Stella says the SS guards were offended by the women’s smell, and one of them said, “O, wie die Frauen stinken” (Oh, how the women stink). Stella asked her mother whether she had noticed that the guards called them women and not swine as they did in Auschwitz and Płaszów. As Schindler walked along the rows and rows of dirty, lice-ridden, emaciated women, Stella wrote, he had a strange expression on his face, one of “horror, pity and benevolence.”⁷ Emilie Schindler, who saw the women a few minutes later, said that they were “in disastrous condition—fragile, emaciated, weak.”⁸

As they marched the short distance to Schindler’s factory, Stella began to wonder about the Schindler males. Were they in the factory? Once inside the two story main factory building, Stella and the other women saw the men in the distance on the other side of a screen on the ground floor. Men and women began to shout to each other or call out each other’s name. An emotional tidal wave swept over the thousand women and men. In the midst of this tearful celebration, soup was brought in for the women. Afterwards, they were taken upstairs to the segregated living quarters. The bunks had not yet arrived and straw had been spread on the floor for sleeping.⁹

And then Oskar Schindler appeared in the doorway. He said in a powerful “but very gentle” voice:

But their fear and suffering was not over. Hunger and disease remained a serious problem, and Dr. Chaim Hilfstein, one of the Jewish physicians, told Stella and her parents that Brünnlitz’s commandant, Josef Leipold, “was dangerous and had to be watched.” Schindler was “doing everything he could to keep Leipold in line, but we should be careful.”¹¹

The small collection of factory buildings at one end of the sprawling Hoffmann factory complex in Brünnlitz (Czech, Brněnec) that Oskar Schindler took over for his Emalia operations in the Sudetenland could best be described as shabby and unused. The buildings were completely empty. Oskar would have to start from scratch and rebuild his factory from the ground up. He would use the machinery, tools, and raw materials sent from Kraków to Brünnlitz in 250 train cars to do this. But in addition to transferring and rebuilding his small Kraków armaments operations, he also had to construct a small concentration camp overseen by SS engineers from Hans Kammler’s WVHA construction Office Group C in Oranienburg. He got no help from Reich authorities for this and had to pay the full construction costs from his own pocket. As Oskar explained after the war, the “owner was free to decide on the equipment and design; he solely had to comply with the safety and security standards of the SS” in the construction of his factory camps. This involved the construction of “watch towers, barb wire, high voltage lines, toilets, watch blocks, housing, separate quarters for the sick, a camp kitchen.”¹² After the war, Oskar estimated that he spent RM 100,000 ($40,000) relocating his armaments factory to Brünnlitz and another RM 200,000 ($80,000) building the new camp.¹³

To help run the camp, Oskar had a staff of twenty Germans and fifty Polish volunteers who came with him from Kraków. The SS provided a hundred SS guards under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Josef Leipold. This figure was in line with SS statistics released in January 1945 that showed an average of seventy-four guards concentration camp-wide for every 1,000 male prisoners. Over time, this contingent would probably have grown in size because Hassebroek prepared a memorandum in November 1944 that discussed increasing the size of Brünnlitz’s inmate population to 1,400 women and eight hundred men. Needless to say, the vicissitudes of war prevented the expansion from taking place. Schindler never mentioned these plans after the war but it is hard to imagine, given his relationship with Hassebroek, that he would not have been privy to them. But this might explain why he was allowed to take in extra Jews without question in 1945.¹⁴

Oskar was responsible for housing and feeding the SS contingent as his sub-camp. He also had to pay the SS a daily fee for each of his Jewish workers. In the General Government, Schindler had paid the SS via the Armaments Inspectorate Zł 5 ($1.56) a day for his male Jewish workers and Zł 4 ($1.25) a day for his female Jewish workers. Businesses there were allowed to deduct up to Zł 1.60 a day for “maintenance.” By the time Schindler moved his armaments factory and its Jewish workers to the Sudetenland Region (Gauleitung Sudetenland), which was an integral part of the Greater German Reich, the fees he had to pay the SS to “rent” his Jewish laborers had gone up. And because his Brünnlitz factory was in Greater Germany, he would have to pay the SS in Reichsmarks. It now cost Oskar RM 4 to RM 8 ($1.60 to $3.20) for skilled workers and RM 3 to RM 4 ($1.29 to $1.60) a day for unskilled workers. As each of his 1,000 Jewish workers had a specific trade listed by their names on the two “Schindler’s Lists,” we can presume that Oskar was paying the SS RM 4,000 ($1,600) to RM 6,000 ($2,400) a day to “rent” his workers. His costs would later increase after he added another ninety-eight names to his list of 1,000 Jewish laborers during the last four months that he operated his factory in Brünnlitz. After the war, Oskar noted that he always employed far more Jews than he needed in Kraków and Brünnlitz. In the latter camp, he had no work for the three hundred women, who spent most of their time knitting or sewing for their families. Yet he still had to pay the SS a daily fee for their skilled “services.” After the war, he estimated that he paid the SS RM 250,000 ($59,524) during the “seven months” his three hundred female Jewish workers were in Brünnlitz. He added that he had had “no practical use” for these women but had to list them “as productive laborers” to insure their survival.¹⁵

When Oskar first prepared an estimated cost of what he had spent directly and indirectly to save his Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz just after the end of the war, he said he had “invested” RM 1,935,000 ($774,000) in Poland and RM 705,000 ($282,000) for similar expenses in the Sudetenland. He added that he did not include in his estimates the “several hundred thousand Zl [złótys]” he paid to the SS “for small favors.” In other words, Oskar claimed after the war that it cost him more than RM 2,640,000 ($1,056,000) to save his Jews. This included the fees he paid to the SS to “rent” his Jewish workers, the costs of constructing two small concentration camps at both factories, his expenses for black market food and feeding his SS contingents, and bribes to Reich officials and the SS. He admitted in his 1945 statement that these estimates were not meant to be “a balance sheet but instead it is intended to give an illustration of abstract and tangible values that were sacrificed.”¹⁶

But beyond these figures were the greater costs of transferring a portion of his factory from Kraków to Brünnlitz and then building a new factory and camp in the Sudetenland. This was far more expensive than opening Emalia in Kraków. It should also be remembered that Schindler lost two factories at the end of the war. These losses traumatized him and he would devote half his postwar life to seeking compensation for them from the West German government. German authorities carefully but slowly investigated his claims and ultimately compensated Oskar for his losses. The detailed statistics compiled by Schindler after the war as part of his Lastenausgleich (equalization of burdens) compensation quest give us insight into the totality of his losses. He estimated, for example, that his Emalia losses in Kraków totaled DM 1,910,000 ($454,762) and those in Brünnlitz DM 4,246,400 ($1,011,047). Part of these losses were tied to helping his Jewish workers. He spent, for example, DM 270,000 ($64,285) for workers’ quarters and facilities in Kraków. His losses for such facilities in Brünnlitz were even greater. He estimated that he had spent DM 293,700 ($69,928) to build an “installation” for his Jewish workers there and another 48,000 DM ($11,428) for similar facilities for his fifty Polish workers. He also had to spend another DM 39,950 ($9,512) in Brünnlitz on SS faciliites. Oskar also included in his Brünnlitz losses DM 320,000 ($76,190) for his “private quarters and fortune” and DM 300,000 ($71,428) in the Deutsche Bank in Zwittau.¹⁷

The difference between his Kraków losses and those in Brünnlitz was that Schindler was always able to counterbalance what he spent in Kraków on his Jewish workers with excess enamelware production that was then used to trade on the black market. During his years in Kraków, Oskar estimated that he produced about RM 15,000,000 ($6,000,000) in enamelware and RM 500,000 ($200,000) in armaments. His factory in Brünnlitz produced one wagon load of ammunition parts worth RM 35,000 ($14,000). In other words, Schindler had to dip into the profits he made from his Kraków operations to pay the expenses for his factory in Brünnlitz. Needless to say, whatever “fortune” he had made in Kraków was reduced significantly during his months in the Sudetenland at the end of the war.¹⁸

Bribery and black marketeering remained an integral part of Schindler’s operations in Brünnlitz. The single greatest problem that Oskar faced was the shortage of food and medicines. But, as Oskar explained, there was a difference. In Poland, “one had to pay a lot of money but was able to get large amounts [of food].” There was simply little food available in the Sudetenland and “one sack of flour could potentially result in the death penalty.” Yet Oskar needed “tens of thousands of kg [kilograms] of various food products every month in order to save many hundreds of people from dying of hunger and becoming skeletons.” Oskar was determined that his “Schindler Jews would not become ‘Muselmenen’ [Muslims],” the term commonly used in the concentration camps to describe inmates on the verge of death from malnutrition, disease, or both. But Oskar also had to feed the one hundred SS men who served as guards at Brünnlitz. Oskar saw their well-being, at least when it came to keeping his SS contingent well supplied with alcohol, tobacco, and food, as essential to the health and well-being of his Schindlerjuden. In fact, soon after the opening of the Brünnlitz factory camp, Oskar said, he “had the guards and supervisors under control, which primarily guaranteed humane treatment of my inmates, often against the will of the camp commandant.”¹⁹

Oskar had to do more than keep his SS contingent well supplied with food, drink, and tobacco to insure the well-being of his Jewish workers. He also had to pay considerable bribes to SS and Reich officials in the Sudetenland to help him counter local opposition to his move there. After the war, he estimated that he had spent RM 75,000 ($17,857) to bribe SS and Reich officials during his eight months in the Sudetenland. Oskar wrote Fritz Lang in 1951 that local officials continued to protest his move to Brünnlitz even after he had already won final approval from Berlin. They were quite angry when his 250 train cars of factory goods tied up the town’s small train station upon arrival. But local authorities were particularly afraid of disease when Schindler’s 1,000 Jews arrived in Brünnlitz.²⁰ Johannes Hassebroek, Groß Rosen’s commandant, was an occasional visitor to Brünnlitz and the recipient of regular bribes from Schindler. Another person who regularly took bribes from Schindler in return for his support of Oskar’s operations in Kraków and Brünnlitz was Karl Heinz Bigell, a textile specialist who had once served as economic adviser to SS-Oberführer Julian Scherner, the HSSPF in Kraków from 1941 to 1944. Oskar said that Bigell as “an obscure figure, a drunkard,” who was “always out of money.” On the other hand, he had “very good connections to the highest SS circles in Krakow and Berlin.” Oskar found Bigell useful when it came to questions about permits or items vital to Emalia’s operations. In “exchange for small ‘loans,’ Bigell repeatedly took care of things like construction permits, wood-contingents, prison releases, wagons of SS cement, or 2–3 tons of Diesel oil or gasoline.”²¹

Soon after he opened his new Brünnlitz factory, Oskar had occasion to call on Bigell after his problems with local Reich and SS officials “became unbearable.” One day, Bigell showed up in Brünnlitz with SS-Standartenführer Ernst Hahn and an adjutant. Bigell evidently brought Hahn, who wore a “pompous uniform,” not because he had anything to do with Jewish labor questions but because he simply worked for one of the most prominent men in Himmler’s organization, SS-Obergruppenführer August Heissmeyer, who oversaw SS political education matters. Heissmeyer was also married to Reich’s Women’s Führerin (Reichsfrauenführerin), Gertrud Schlotz-Klink, who headed the National Socialist Women’s Union (DFW; Nationalsozialistisches Frauenschaft) and the National Socialist Women’s German Womens Organization (Deutsches Frauenwerk), making her one of the most powerful women in Nazi Germany. Hahn’s visit seemed to impress everyone involved and Oskar reported afterwards that “the local administrators and also my camp commandant, SS-Obersturmführer Leipold, out of respect immediately stopped the intrigues against me; at least there were fewer denunciations against my firm due to my high-up connections.”²²

But this event did not end the need to bribe Reich officials. One of the principal recipients of Schindler’s largess was SS-Obersturmbannführer Max Rausch, the HSSPF in Moravia and the former head of Kripo (Kriminalpolizei) in Kattowitz (Katowice) in East Upper Silesia. Schindler was introduced to Rausch by Josef Lasotta, whom Oskar described as a “Gestapo-Konfidentan” in Kattowitz who later then became director of security for Ferrum A. G. in Sossanowitz (Sosnowiec or Sosnowice). Oskar said that Rausch was “the highest SS official within 250 km (160 miles) of Brünnlitz” and was particularly helpful to Schindler during the latter days of the war in the face of “the renewed danger of liquidating Brünnlitz due to Russian advances.” In return for Rausch’s help in keeping Brünnlitz open and supplying Oskar with arms for the factory’s defense, Oskar gave Rausch a diamond ring for his wife. Little did Rausch know, whose headquarters were in Brünn (Brno), that Oskar used the weapons to arm an illegal Jewish defense force.²³

The factory itself was not particularly large or impressive. For all practical purposes, Oskar had one large factory building to house his armaments operation and his 1,000-plus Jews as well as several smaller buildings. He used the ground floor of the main factory building, which is still standing and is used today by the factory’s current owner, Vitka Brněnec, as his armaments making facility. The second floor was divided into segregated living quarters for his male and female inmates. To call Brněnec (Brünnlitz) a factory town would be an understatement. Oskar Schindler leased about a quarter of the vast, sprawling factory complex that even today dominates the lush, heavily wooded valley basin of the Svitava River that flows beside the edge of the complex. Today, the center of the small village of Brněnec rests just across the railroad tracks that run beside Vitka’s main gate. The rest of this sleepy hamlet covers the hills that overlook the town and the Vitka factory. It’s small but attractive Catholic church is closed, and worshipers have to travel several miles into the hills to worship on Sundays. They also bury their dead in the Bela cemetery, also the resting place of the few Jews who died in Schindler’s factory. The main road that runs between Svitavy, Schindler’s hometown, and Brno to the south cuts through the middle of Brněnec. But it is doubtful whether the passing traveler would stop in village’s few bars or restaurants unless she or he is familiar with the story of Oskar Schindler. But this very bucolic remoteness is one of the charms of Brněnec. And there is no doubt that Oskar Schindler was taken by its isolation, which at the end of the war offered some protection from snooping officials and Allied air raids.²⁴

I was unable to find the official plans for Oskar Schindler’s armaments factory in Brünnlitz during my research. There was a reference to such plans in his huge Lastenausgleich file in Bayreuth, but I was unable to find copies of his Brünnlitz factory plans there. The same is true for his Koffer (suitcase) files in the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. I did locate what appeared to be a complete set of Brünnlitz plans in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, D.C. Museum archivists told me these were Schindler’s factory plans, though I was confused by their title: SS-Bekleidungslager (Clothing Warehouse). Regardless, I decided that it was important to acquire a hard copy for my research, no easy task because they were on microfilm. I had to reproduce small parts of the plan and then carefully piece them together into several larger plans. Yet I remained uncertain that I had found the plans for Schindler’s Brünnlitz factory.²⁵

I did wonder whether the plans had somehow been mistitled because they had been drawn up in Kraków in September 1944, when Oskar was making final plans for his move to the Sudetenland. So I took copies to Augsburg, Germany, and asked Mietek Pemper to look at them. He told me they were not the plans for Oskar’s factory but for the nearby SS uniform factory, which shared the Brünnlitz complex with Schindler. His analysis was, as usual, correct. As we were talking, I remembered a small plan of the Brünnlitz complex that Petr Henzl, the former deputy director of Vitka, gave me during my first visit to Brněnec during the summer of 1998. It was titled Textilní továrna Arona-Jakub Löw Beera (Textile Factory of Jakub and Aron Löw-Beer [the former Jewish owners of the factory]). The Henzl plan was a one-page, detailed plan of the factory complex during what it described as the “German occupation.” When I returned home, I discovered that the detailed plans of the SS clothing factory I discovered in the USHMM archives fit perfectly over one side of the full complex plan given me by Mr. Henzl. The buildings, river, bridges, and other details on the SS master plan were a perfect match for that segment of the Henzl plan, which included details on Schindler’s factory. After he had given me his plan, Mr. Henzl walked with me around the perimeter of the factory complex, showing me the location of the sub-camp’s guard towers and other outlying buildings. He also pointed out which buildings had been built or replaced since the end of the war.²⁶

Unfortunately, the Henzl plan does not give us any idea about the size of the buildings. Fortunately, Oskar Schindler supplied detailed information about the size and number of factory buildings, as well as the equipment and goods in each of them, in his initial Lastenausgleich application in the spring of 1957. He noted, for example, that he leased a 300 by 400 meters tract of land with buildings from the Hoffmann brothers. The Schindler factory camp rested at the north end of the Hoffmann complex. The three buildings already on the site were the main factory building (160 x 60 meters), a storehouse (80 x 15 meters), and an administrative building (40 x 40 meters). He also used one of these buildings to house his German staff. Schindler had six barracks built after he opened Brünnlitz to house his Polish workers and to use for further storage. Four of the barracks had been taken apart at Emalia and put back together in Brünnlitz; he filled these with machinery, raw materials, and others items shipped in from Kraków in 250 rail cars as well as food and black market trade goods. He prepared a detailed, eight-page list of everything he had shipped from Emalia to Brünnlitz or had acquired upon his arrival in the Sudetenland. Oskar also leased a beautiful villa near his factory that had once belonged to J. F. Daubek, the owner of a local grain mill. Schindler chose not to live in the villa. Instead, he kept the apartment, discussed earlier in this work, in the main factory building. Evidently, though, he intended to move into the villa after the war because Sol Urbach worked there to restore it to its former grandeur. The villa, which was torn down after the war, would have made Oskar and Emilie a fine home.²⁷

For all practical purposes, the main factory building was the sub-camp. Oskar had concluded that if he built all the facilities for the prisoners here he would eliminate the necessity of building a camp outside the factory, which would require the inmates to be marched to work under SS guard. The living quarters for the workers were on the second floor of the main building. A screen ran through the middle of the large room separating the female living quarters from those of the Schindler men. A kitchen was built on the second floor where meals for both groups were prepared. The living, washing, and toilet facilities for the men and women were built at separate times because of the uncertainty about when the women would arrive. Soon after the men got to Brünnlitz, a latrine was built just outside the front entrance to the main factory building. Washing facilities remained a problem until proper bath facilities were constructed. By the time the women arrived, though, SS-approved washing, laundry, and disinfection facilities had been constructed by the men. Bunk beds also arrived during this period, and the inmates no longer had to sleep on straw thrown on the floor. Now they slept on traditional SS bunks equipped with straw mattresses. And though it was almost winter when the inmates arrived, the heat from the factory on the ground floor was enough to keep the living quarters warm.²⁸

Beyond concern over adequate food, Schindler and the inmates had to worry about disease and illness. Wolfgang Sofsky said that “camp society was a society of the sick.”²⁹ Leipold, like most SS commandants, was paranoid about the spread of infectious diseases; an outbreak of disease would not only cost him workers but also reflect negatively on his administrative skills. Consequently, Leipold set a strict limit of eighteen inmates who could be excused from work, though Stern said that many more were ill. When Leipold did complain to Schindler about the number of sick workers, Schindler reassured him: “I am also going to pay for the sick workers. I’ll give you the money, don’t worry about it.”³⁰ Traditionally, illness in a concentration camp, particularly an infectious disease such as typhus, meant death. In larger camps, sick prisoners were put into quarantine barracks and those who were extremely ill were taken out and shot or gassed. It is obvious why inmates did everything they could to keep from being sent to a camp’s infirmary or quarantine barracks. The SS was fearful of disease not only because of health reasons but also because it reflected badly on camp administration. Because most camps lacked adequate medical facilities and medicines, a variety of crude medicines and remedies were used by the inmate physicians and prisoners to keep serious ill-health at bay. Some prisoners would eat charcoal made from wood or dried bread crusts to fight diarrhea. Others used paper or linen suppositories to stop anal bleeding, or put urine or a cream made of lime and oil on scabies. Soap was a rare commodity in the camps and inmates often used herbs to clean their underwear.³¹

Most of the major concentration camps at one time or another were ravaged by typhoid fever, malaria, and other diseases. The first major wave of serious concentration camp epidemics took place in 1941–1942. As the SS gained better control over how to prevent and fight such outbreaks, the situation seemed to improve. However, the epidemics spread again in 1944 as the SS began to close camps and put inmates in the remaining overcrowded camps. One of the most feared epidemics was typhus, which was spread by the ever-present lice found in the prisoners’ used and dirty clothing. If left unchecked, lice spread to bedding and even to food. Soon after Schindler’s Jews arrived in Brünnlitz, a typhus epidemic swept through Dachau that killed thousands of prisoners.³²

Though all the Schindler Jews had been disinfected in Groß Rosen and Auschwitz, they were covered with lice when they reached Brünnlitz; this infestation led to several cases of typhus. The only way to rid inmates of lice was through a “mass delousing,” which involved all prisoners, their clothing, and their living quarters. This was a time-consuming process that meant disinfecting everything and then monitoring each prisoner for lice.³³ At Brünnlitz, a clinic and a sick room were set up on the first floor of the factory under Dr. Chaim Hilfstein, who oversaw the bathing and disinfection of the workers. Fortunately, Brünnlitz was blessed with excellent inmate physicians and they worked twenty-four hours a day to bathe and disinfect each of the Schindler Jews. Within three days, the inmates were “lice free.” Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein reported only five cases of typhus at Brünnlitz during the time he was there.³⁴

In addition to Dr. Hilfstein, there were six other physicians and one dentist at Brünnlitz, though it is uncertain how many of them worked in the camp clinic, which was under SS-Obersturmführer Streithof’s control. Dr. Hilfstein, Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein, Dr. Juda Katz, Dr. Szaja Händler, and Dr. Matylda Löw were general practitioners; Dr. Ferdinand Lewkowicz was a surgeon. Dr. Aleksander Schubert was the camp’s only dentist. There was another physician at Brünnlitz, Dr. Mirko Konowitsch, though it is a mystery when he arrived at the camp. Originally from Yugoslavia, Dr. Konowitsch was not on the October 21, 1944, Groß Rosen-Brünnlitz list; neither was he on the Golleschau, Landskron, or Geppersdorf lists. On the other hand, Dr. Konowitz is on the two final “Schindler’s Lists” in April and May, 1945. Given the circumstances, Dr. Hilfstein and the other Jewish physicians played a key role in helping keep the Jewish prisoners alive. This was no easy task, given the serious lack of medical supplies. What little they had Oskar somehow acquired on the black market.³⁵

Cantor Moshe Taubé remembered the infections covering his body from lack of nourishment while at Brünnlitz. When they filled with pus, Dr. Hilfstein’s staff had to open them without anaesthesia and drain them. Few of the original Schindler Jews died in Brünnlitz. One who did was Janka (Janina) Feigenbaum, though there are questions about how she actually died. Janka, the sister of Lewis Fagen (Feigenbaum), had been ill for three years before she arrived at Brünnlitz. She had serious back problems, and by the time she got to Schindler’s Sudeten sub-camp, she was completely bedridden. But Lewis Fagen and his parents, Jakub and Natalja, thought that if they could keep her alive until the end of the war, they would get her “the best medical care the West had to offer, and she’d live.” Lew Fagen went to Emilie Schindler, who had begun to work with sick patients, and asked her to give Janka extra food. But two weeks before the end of the war, Dr. Hilfstein gave Janka a mysterious shot without consulting the family and she died soon afterwards. The family was devastated. Oskar Schindler gave them permission to bury Janka in an unmarked grave. Lew vividly remembered marking the exact site of her burial. After the war, her family exhumed Janka’s body and reburied it in the New Jewish Cemetery in Prague.³⁶

Oskar and Emilie played active roles in providing their Schindler Jews with the best medicines and medical care they could under the circumstances. And unlike Kraków, where Emilie was only a peripheral figure in Oskar’s life, Emilie was constantly present and lived with her husband in their factory complex apartment. Occasionally, there were medical emergencies that only Oskar could resolve. On one occasion, he learned that one of the married Schindler women had become pregnant. This could mean a death sentence for the mother and child. A Hungarian Jew, Dr. Gisella Perl, ran a women’s ward in Auschwitz and performed numerous illegal abortions to save the mothers’ lives. An obstetrician and gynecologist by training, she was ethically repulsed by the need to do this, but knew that if she did not, “both mother and child would have been cruelly murdered.”³⁷

All prisoners knew that pregnancy was among the greatest crimes they could commit in the camps because it violated core Nazi ideals about Jewish “race” propagation and could result in transport to a death camp. Moreover, given the tenuousness of life, even in Brünnlitz, it was uncertain whether a pregnant woman could survive in the face of growing food shortages and the constant oversight of the SS. So Oskar arranged to have one of the Jewish camp physicians perform an abortion, which was also illegal. Because the physicians did not have the proper instruments, Oskar went to Kraków to buy them. Oskar later reported that the instruments cost him Zł 16,000 ($5,000) on the black market. Oskar willingly paid this price for the instruments because, if he had not, “the woman would have been murdered.”³⁸ But lack of proper instruments was not the only problem they faced. They would have to hide the abortion from the ever present SS. Indeed, as the abortion was being performed, an SS Lagerführer, probably SS-Obersturmführer Streithof, walked into the factory’s small sick room. Fortunately, Oskar had prepared for this eventuality and had posted someone to watch out for impromptu SS inspections. Consequently, the moment the Lagerführer walked into the sick room, the lights went out. Streithof left the factory building quite unaware that a successful abortion was taking place.³⁹

The Golleschau and Landskron Transports

But the arrival of the Golleschau transport on January 29, 1945, and the Landskron transport on February 2, 1945, were the greatest of the medical challenges for Oskar, Emilie, and the camp’s physicians. Thomas Keneally said that next to the “ransoming of the women in Auschwitz… the most astounding salvage of all was that of the Goleszów people.”⁴⁰ He was right. Golleschau was an Auschwitz sub-camp located in the Polish village of Goleszów just across the border from Českü Tĕšín in today’s Czech Republic. In July 1942, an SS-owned company, the Ostdeutsche Baustoffwerke GmbH opened the Golleschauer Portland-Zement AG plant in Goleszów and began to use slave labor to operate it. In time, it became one of Auschwitz’s most important factories.⁴¹ About 70 percent of the workers at Goleszów, which was a sub-camp of Auschwitz III-Monowitz, were Jewish slave laborers. The camp opened with a Jewish labor force of about 350 workers. This number rose to 450 a year later and, by 1944, Golleschau employed about 1,000 Jewish workers. Sub-camps such as Golleschau were run by a Kommandoführer (labor supervisor) who had the unofficial title of Lagerführer (camp leader). Golleschau had three Lagerführers during its two-and-a-half-year history: SS-Oberscharführer Hans Picklapp, SS-Oberscharführer Hans Mirbeth, and SS-Unterscharführer Horst Czerwiřski.⁴²

Prisoners at Golleschau worked in the cement factory or in the nearby quarries. They were involved in the actual production of cement as well as its packing and distribution. They also helped build the railroad tracks and cable car lines in the plant or helped make its wooden shipment cases. Conditions in Golleschau were “harsh,” and prisoners who tried to escape were shot or hanged in public. We also know that when Hans Picklapp served as Golleschau’s Lagerführer, he killed prisoners with a lethal injection of phenol, something favored in the Auschwitz main camp. Such injections were normally used for prisoners “exhausted to the point of physical collapse,” and were part of the broader “euthanasia” experiment program at Auschwitz.⁴³

As the Red Army moved deeper into Poland in early 1945, Golleschau was liquidated. Between January 18 and January 22, 1945, most of the sub-camp’s remaining 900 to 1,008 prisoners were marched or shipped by rail to the Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg concentration camps. Auschwitz records state that one of the last transports to leave Golleschau contained one train car “with ninety-six sick and exhausted prisoners and the corpses of four prisoners, who die[d] during the transport, [were] put in a sealed freight car and transferred to the Freudenthal A.C. (Auxiliary Camp] in Czechoslovakia.”⁴⁴ Other than this note in the Auschwitz archives, the only documentation I could initially locate on this particular Golleschau transport was a two-page Frachtbrief (bill of lading) in the archives at Yad Vashem. During my research, I found the actual Namenliste (list of names or roll) of the eighty-one Jewish prisoners on the Golleschau transport that was created after they arrived in Brünnlitz on January 29, 1945. The bill of lading says that the Golleschau Jews were on car number 113264, which was originally built in France. We can trace the week-long odyssey of car number 113264 after it left Golleschau by looking at the station stamps on it. After it left Golleschau on January 22, it passed through Teschen, Oderberg, and Schönnbrunn before it reached Freudenthal (Bruntál), the site of another Auschwitz sub-camp, three days later. However, because Freudenthal was in the process of being liquidated, the Golleschau car was sent on to Zwittau (Svitavy), where it arrived on January 29.⁴⁵

In a 1956 letter to Itzhak Stern, Oskar added more details about the transport’s journey from Golleschau to Brünnlitz. He insisted that Stern share these details with Dr. Ball-Kaduri, who was investigating stories about Schindler’s efforts to save Jews. First of all, Oskar told Stern, it was important to note that the Golleschau transport had taken ten days, not eight, to get to Brünnlitz. He said that the bill of lading was predated to January 22, but had a stamp on the back that showed that its first stop after it left Golleshau was in Teschen on January 21. He added that the bill of lading indicated that the Golleschau transport had been sent to Zwittau twice on January 29. It stood in the Zwittau station for eight hours before it was sent on to Brünnlitz. The transport spent another fourteen hours in Zwittau after Josef Leipold refused to accept it. The transport finally returned to Brünnlitz on the morning of January 30.⁴⁶

In 1955, Oskar gave more details about events surrounding the Golleschau transport. According to Oskar, a friend of his with the Reichsbahn (the German or Reich national railway), called him to tell him that “several wagons with Jewish inmates, some of which were already dead, stood at the Zwittau railway station.” Oskar said that no one wanted these Jews and the two cars were “like a ship without a harbor.” It was minus 16 degrees Celsius (c. 0° Fahrenheit) outside and Oskar called the station master in Zwittau and told him to send the wagons to Brünnlitz. Josef Leipold strongly objected to this action because the camp did not have a sanitarium to quarantine the Golleschau Jews. Oskar told Leipold that he would pay the SS the lost wages for the men on the transport, which Schindler explained was made up of men who had worked in Golleschau’s stone quarries.⁴⁷

The only problem with Oskar’s accounts of what happened is that he was not there until the morning of the transport’s arrival on January 29 or 30; indeed, Emilie Schindler and Itzhak Stern agree that Oskar was not at Brünnlitz when they first learned that the Golleschau car was sitting in the Zwittau train station. Stern said that Oskar was in Mauthausen trying to get extra workers for his factory. Emilie said that “he had not returned from one of his trips to Cracow,” though this would have been unlikely because the Red Army had occupied the city ten days earlier.⁴⁸ Stern added that the transport had been made up not of Jewish prisoners from Golleschau but of inmates from a hospital in Buna (Auschwitz III-Buna at Monowitz) who had initially been left behind when Auschwitz was liquidated. At the last minute, though, they had been put on a transport before the Red Army occupied Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. Stern said that because Reichsbahn officials in Zwittau “believed that all Jewish transports were designated for Schindler,” the station master in Zwittau called Brünnlitz to inform Oskar that there was a small transport awaiting him in the Zwittau station. As Schindler was away, Stern was asked about the transport; he said that it was “a transport Schindler had ordered.” At this point, he said, the transport was accidentally sent back to Zwittau, though Oskar later told Stern it was ordered back to Zwittau by Leipold. Stern said that it was Emilie who ordered the transport back to Brünnlitz after she had learned of its return to Zwittau. By the time it finally arrived in Brünnlitz, Oskar had returned from his trip.⁴⁹

Emilie tells a somewhat different story. One night, while a “terrible storm was raging outside,” she heard “heavy pounding” on her door. She put on a robe and went downstairs to answer the door. When she asked who it was, she heard a male voice: “Please open up, Frau Schindler, I have to talk with you. It is important.” She said it was the man in charge of the Golleschau transport. He asked her “to accept the two hundred and fifty Jews, crowded into four wagons.” The man explained that the workers had been sent to a plant that had rejected them because Russian troops were nearby. Emilie said she knew that if she “rejected them, they were going to be shot.” She then called Oskar and asked him whether it was all right to accept the transport. He agreed and Emilie then asked Brünnlitz’s chief engineer, Willi Schöneborn, to help her unload the transport.⁵⁰

So why such different stories? There is no question that Oskar probably investigated the matter of the Golleschau’s transport’s odyssey quite thoroughly when he returned to Brünnlitz. But why would he claim that he was there when he was not? He did not say much about the Golleschau transport in his immediate postwar account of his efforts to save Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz. He said only that there were a hundred Jews on the transport and that seventeen were found dead when the train’s doors were opened.⁵¹ As this report was prepared just six months after the Golleschau Jews arrived in Brünnlitz, one would expect that someone actively involved in getting the transport to his own factory would have been more accurate about the number of people on the train. But in fairness to Oskar, the Golleschau transport was just one more dramatic episode in his daily Herculean efforts to keep his Brünnlitz Jews alive. But over time, at least among the Schindlerjuden closest to Oskar in Brünnlitz, the story of the Golleschau transport became a concrete example of the legendary deeds he performed there. And Oskar knew this. Yet it would have been far less heroic if Oskar had been absent when the transport was shuttling back and forth between Zwittau and Brünnlitz. In his own mind, Oskar probably thought that he had played an active role in efforts to bring the transport to Brünnlitz through his phone conversations with Emilie and others. And by the time he penned his more detailed accounts about the Golleschau transport a decade after the war, his efforts to save Jews had come to mean much, much more. By the mid-1950s, Oskar’s efforts to start life anew in Argentina had failed, and he was thinking of returning to West Germany to push his claim for compensation for his lost factories. It was now extremely important, particularly in light of Yad Vashem’s interest in his story, to make certain that he remained at the center of the growing Schindler legend. In some ways, the same thing can be said about Emilie. During the later years of her life, she desperately sought the recognition that Oskar had received decades earlier, particularly in the aftermath of the release of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. The Golleschau story became a centerpiece of her 1996 memoirs and was one way for her to underscore the important role she played in this period of Oskar’s life. So in the end, as in most situations in which accounts vary, the truth lies somewhere in between.

Regardless of the different stories about the Golleschau transport’s odyssey, we have fairly consistent information about what happened once it finally reached Brünnlitz. It was pulled onto the rail siding that ran directly into Schindler’s sub-camp. It was dawn and snow was falling heavily. Voices were heard inside and efforts were made to open the frozen doors with long iron bars. When this did not work, some thought was given to opening them with a hand grenade. Victor Lewis said that straw-filled mattresses were burned underneath the car to try to melt the ice on the doors and locks.⁵² A blow torch was then used to open the car’s doors. Leipold, who stood watching everything with his two dogs, said to Emilie: “Stay away, Frau Schindler, it’s a terrible sight. You’ll never be able to erase it from your mind.”⁵³ Itzhak Stern said that when he first looked into the car, he thought it must be a female transport because they all “looked so small and thin.”⁵⁴ Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein, who helped open the frozen doors, described what he saw as “terrifying.” Inside the car were “tens of human shadows in dirty clothes, lying cold in freezing urine and excrement.” The car was filled with the stench of human excrement and dead bodies. Stella Müller-Madej said the bodies were frozen to the human waste inside. Murray Pantirer was assigned to help take the bodies out of the cars. He told me that their skin was frozen to the floor and when he tried to pick up a body, the skin came off. They then used hot water to thaw out the bodies before they removed them.⁵⁵ Victor Lewis said that one lone German guard was in the car with the prisoners. Later, he would be hanged by the Brünnlitz prisoners “on a pipe.”⁵⁶

Estimates vary about the number of inmates on the Golleschau transport and whether they were in one or two cars. Auschwitz records state that there were a hundred inmates on the car when it left Golleschau and that four died en route to Brünnlitz. Half the prisoners froze or starved to death; another twelve died within days of their arrival in Brünnlitz. Oskar also said that there were a hundred prisoners on the transport. But in one report he said that seventeen died in transit; in another, the number changed to sixteen. Emilie says the Golleschau transport had 250 prisoners on it. Mietek Pemper told me that there were eighty-six men on the transport when it arrived in Brünnlitz. Twelve were dead on arrival and another four died within a few days. He added that the Golleschau transport was made up of two train cars and that the men came from the Netherlands, Hungary, Belgium, France, and Germany. Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein said that there were eighty-six Jews on the Golleschau transport and that twelve of them were dead on arrival in Brünnlitz. Itzhak Stern never mentioned the number of Jews on the Golleschau transport, but did say that twelve or eighteen of the Jews on board were dead when it arrived in Brünnlitz.⁵⁷

During my research, I discovered the Namenliste des Häftlingszuganges vom Al Golleschau (KL Auschwitz) am 29. Januar 1945 (List of Names/Roll of the Prisoners from the Work Camp Golleschau [Concentration Lager Auschwitz] on 29 January 1945) with the names of eighty-one Jewish workers on it. Over time, ten of the names were scratched out after they had died, and the dates of their deaths were penciled in. As no one has ever before seen this list, I should like to list the names below in case there are families interested in the fate of their loved ones. I have listed their names exactly as they appeared on the January 29, 1945 list, which included their prisoner and camp registration numbers, their nationality, their full name, their date of birth, their date of death, and their occupation. They are buried in the cemetery at Bělá nad Svitavou, about two miles from Brněnec.

Five days after the arrival of the Golleschau transport, another train car was brought into the camp with six Jews on it from the small Landskron forced labor camp twenty-four miles northeast of Brünnlitz, and this could be the reason for the different figures given by various observers about how many prisoners were on the Golleschau transport and the number of cars they were in. Two of the six Jews on the Landskron transport died within a month after their arrival in Brünnlitz and were buried with full Jewish rituals in the Bělá cemetery. If you add up the figures from the Golleschau and Landskron transports drawn from their official Namenliste, it totals eighty-seven Jews with twelve dying within a month or so of their arrival. These figures are almost identical to those cited by Dr. Bieberstein and Mietek Pemper. Moreover, the fact that both lists indicate that the eighty-seven Jews on these transports came from Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, the Czech lands, Slovakia, and the Netherlands supports Mietek Pemper’s comments about the Golleschau transport. It also means that he and Dr. Bieberstein were probably including the Golleschau and Landskron transports together in their general comments about the January 29, 1945, transport. As few people have ever seen the Landskron list and do not know about the burials at Bělá cemetery, I should like to list the names of the Landskron prisoners buried there:

One clue might help clarify the matter of how many Jews were on the Golleschau and Landskron transports, and it concerns the number of bodies in the burial plot that Oskar bought at the local cemetery in Bělá nad Svitavou in early February 1945. Oskar said little about this after the war, but he did comment that he was able to let Rabbi Jakob Levertov (Lewertow) bury the Golleschau dead in the cemetery with full Jewish rites. He thought this was the “only such case during the war in Germany.”⁶⁰ But were the Golleschau and Landskron dead buried inside the grounds of the small cemetery or in a plot just beyond it?

What further complicates this issue is the confusing testimony that Rabbi Levertov gave to Howard Koch and Martin Gosch in New York in 1964 while they were collecting testimony for their proposed film on Schindler. After the arrival of the Golleschau transport, Schindler told Levertov, “Rabbi, we have these people from Golleschau… . Do everything your religion demands.” Levertov told Oskar that he needed boards to put the bodies on, which was required by Jewish law. As Jewish law forbade breaking the bones of the dead, the bodies were placed on the boards in awkward positions. Levertov said that he and Schindler “looked over several places (within the factory grounds, not in a cemetery)” to bury the dead. After two days, they buried the first bodies from the Golleschau transport in graves lined with boards. Most important, the burials took place with a Minyan, a prayer quorum of at least ten males older than thirteen. Levertov conducted the service and led the burial Kaddish. The process took several days, during which Oskar kept Leipold and his officers drunk to keep them from finding out about the funerals.⁶¹ What is confusing about Levertov’s testimony is the time frame and the question of location. There was no place on Brünnlitz’s grounds to bury bodies, so it had to be outside the camp. And though he states the burials took place over several days, Levertov said nothing about when they took place. We have to rely on others’ testimony to supply us with information about the time and place for the Golleschau burials.

Peter Henzl took me to the small cemetery during my first visit to Brněnec and showed me two burial sites. The Schindler plot, he said, was originally outside the cemetery walls just beyond the mortuary. According to Thomas Keneally, one of the stories he heard about the Golleschau burials was that when Schindler tried to buy land within the cemetery, the priest instead offered him land just outside the cemetery walls usually reserved for suicides. Keneally said that Oskar told the priest that these were not suicides but “victims of a great murder.” But they were also Jews and not Christians, and even given the wonderful stories of Czech kindness to the Brünnlitz prisoners, it is quite possible that the best Oskar could do was get land just outside the cemetery walls.⁶²

Francisco Wichter worked on one of the details that buried the Jewish dead from the two transports. However, it was unlikely, because of the weather, that any of the dead on the two transports were buried soon after their arrival in Brünnlitz. The winter of 1944–1945 had been brutal and did not begin to moderate until mid-February. This meant that it would take some time for the ground to thaw before graves could be dug at Bělá cemetery. Though Jewish law stipulates that burial should take place as soon as possible after death, it also provides for extenuating circumstances. Francisco said the detail that he worked on, which was accompanied by an SS guard, took place at night without a rabbi or rituals. Keneally said that Oskar paid an SS-Unterscharführer to take care of the grave plot. During one of my visits with Francisco in Buenos Aires, I drew a diagram of the cemetery for him and described it in detail. I wanted to know whether he could remember where the bodies were originally buried. He said they were buried, without a tombstone, just in front of the mortuary.⁶³

In 1946, a Czech commission under Dr. Josef AndZl and a physician, Dr. Eduard Knobloch, exhumed the bodies in two mass graves in Bělá cemetery. The two grave sites measured 9 x 5 x 0.6 meters and 2.5 x 4 x 1 meters. According to Jitka Gruntová, a Czech specialist who has published several books on Schindler, the smaller mass grave contained the bodies of sixteen Golleschau Jews and the other mass grave contained the bodies of twenty-six Jews who died elsewhere. This would tend to confirm estimates that sixteen Jews on both transports died while en route to Brünnlitz or sometime after they arrived. Gruntová and Radoslav Fikejz, a curator at the city museum in Svitavy who has also researched Schindler, told me that both grave sites rested outside the cemetery’s walls; however, they disagreed on the location of these sites. After the Czech commission completed the autopsies of the bodies, they were respectfully re-buried within the cemetery’s walls, though the graves remained unmarked. After he finished filming in Brněnec, Steven Spielberg had a small memorial plaque put on the wall overlooking the new burial site inside the cemetery’s walls. He also had a large Star of David placed on the ground below the plaque. Bushes have been tastefully planted on either side of the memorial. The small plaque reads: Památce Żidovskym ObZtem 2 SvZtové Války (In Memory of the Jewish Victims of the Second War).⁶⁴

But even this does not fully clarify questions surrounding the number of Jews who died on the two transports because other Jews also died in Brünnlitz. In addition to Janka Feigenbaum, Keneally mentioned a Mrs. Hofstatter. Unfortunately, there is no Hofstatter on the two female lists from the fall of 1944. When the Polish historian Aleksandra Kobielec looked at the October 22, 1944, female list, she compared it to the April 18, 1945, list and noted that three women were missing from the latter list. Her conclusion was that the three Schindler women who died in Brünnlitz were Janina (Janka) Feigenbaum, Elisabeth Chotimer, and Anna Laufer. We do know that Elisabeth Chotimer and Anna Laufer died either in Brünnlitz or while in transit from Auschwitz because they are listed as verstorben (deceased) on the November 12, 1944, female list.⁶⁵ I have already mentioned the death of Janka Feigenbaum and her family’s burial of her body. But we do not know what happened to the bodies of the other two women. Oskar did not acquire his burial plot until February 1945. Thomas Keneally said that Josef Leipold insisted initially that the bodies of the dead be cremated in the camp’s furnace, so this is possible, though Keneally also makes the point that from the outset of the first deaths in Brünnlitz, Oskar insisted on ritual burials for his Schindlerjuden.⁶⁶

Food and the Struggle for Survival

Oskar returned to Brünnlitz soon after the arrival of the Golleschau transport and ordered emergency hospital facilities to be set up in the factory to care for the Jews who were still alive. The dramatic efforts of Oskar, Emilie, and the camp’s physicians to save the survivors of the Golleschau and Landskron transports is nothing short of miraculous. And though the Golleschau and Landskron Jews suffered from a variety of ailments, their greatest problem was malnutrition. Lack of food, unfortunately, was becoming a problem for the entire camp.

Emilie was in charge of caring for the transports’ survivors and she did a remarkable job. A special clinic was set up in a large storage space on the main factory building’s second floor. Dr. Chaim Hilfstein, Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein, and Dr. Szaja Händler were assigned to help Emilie care for the patients, each of whom required specialized care. The physicians needed certain medicines as well as frost cream and vitamins to restore them to good health. Brünnlitz had few medical supplies, so Oskar sent Emilie on a dangerous winter trip to Mährisch Ostrau (formerly Moravská Ostrava, Moravian Ostrava; today Ostrava) with suitcases full of vodka to trade for medical supplies. Emilie said that she obtained these goods from the Czechs, Poles, and Germans who arrived daily on the morning train in Mährisch Ostrau, “desperately trying to escape and not knowing where to go.”⁶⁷ Emilie added that all the Golleschau and Landskron Jews “required extremely special attention and even had to be spoon-fed to prevent their choking to death. After not eating for so long, they had forgotten how.” Emilie prepared them a special porridge and helped feed them this special diet until they were able to feed themselves. She used up the camp’s reserves of grits, butter, milk, and other foodstuffs for this purpose.⁶⁸

Emilie’s need to use up the camp’s small food surplus to feed the Golleschau and Landskron Jews underscored the serious problems that Oskar faced in obtaining food for his Jews, his staff, and the SS contingent. It was the biggest problem Schindler faced at Brünnlitz. Food had been readily available for the right price in Kraków, which was certainly not so in the Sudetenland. Johann Kompan, an old school friend of Oskar’s in Zwittau and later a wholesale grocer there, wrote after the war that severe rationing and the attitude of local officials made it difficult for Schindler even to use the ration cards he had to obtain food for Brünnlitz.⁶⁹ Dr. Bieberstein said that when Brünnlitz first opened, Oskar was able to supply each worker with about 2,000 calories a day. Oskar had only brought a few wagon loads of food with him from Kraków, and this was not enough to feed his factory workers and staff for more than a week.⁷⁰

In a much more personal way, Oskar Schindler’s effort to keep his growing Jewish inmate population alive in Brünnlitz was as significant as the creation of the “list of life” that brought them to the Sudetenland. That was one miracle. Now he had to find a way to insure that they would survive until the end of the war. Oskar was well aware of the challenges he faced in finding food for the camp before he made the move to the Sudetenland. Once there, he did everything humanly possible to locate extra food for Brünnlitz. On November 1, 1944, for example, he rented a 3,000-square-meter tract of land from a family for RM 47 ($18.80) a year for “as long as the war lasted.” The idea was to use the land to grow food for the factory.⁷¹

But the leasing of the farm plot was only one aspect of Oskar’s efforts to supply his camp with food. More often than not, Oskar could be found traveling with illegal truckloads of goods that he traded for bread and other foodstuffs, tobacco, and other necessities. Tobacco was a highly prized trade commodity since cigarettes were simply unavailable in the Sudetenland. He estimated that he was able to obtain 12,000 tobacco packets for his workers, which they, in turn, could trade for food. By the end of the war, he estimated that he still had a month’s supply of food as well as twenty animals for slaughter.⁷²

But he did more than trade for food and other necessities. Sometimes he had to pay cash for it. Soon after the war ended, Oskar estimated that he had spent RM 80,000 ($32,000) on food and medicine for the camp. But sometimes he had to travel as far as 150 miles to find it. He often carried with him illegal papers with official-looking stamps made by Moshe Bejski, later a judge on the Israeli Supreme Court. The most useful stamp was the one that read Der Höhere SS und Polizei Führer für Böhmen und Mähren (Higher SS and Police Leader of Bohemia and Moravia), which permitted his trucks to pass through roadblocks without inspection. Dr. Bejski told me that he began his work as a forger during the war while still in Kraków, where he prepared illegal identity cards for Jewish girls who were to be sent to Germany. He began to make illegal documents for Oskar after Itzhak Stern told him that Schindler was going to Poland to buy food on the black market but needed forged documents to show that the food was bought legally from the Poles.⁷³

If Oskar had a local benefactor, it was J. F. Daubek, the owner of the grain mill that was next to Oskar’s factory. Oskar and Emilie quickly established good relations with Daubek and his wife. One afternoon, Emilie went to talk to the mill’s manager to see if he could set up an interview with Frau Daubek. She soon received an invitation for tea, but she wondered how she could make a case for extra food for her workers given the serious food shortages in the region. In the end, she simply told Frau Daubek the truth. There was not enough food for Brünnlitz’s Jewish workers and she “could not stand seeing our workers getting weaker by the day because of hunger.” Emilie found Mrs. Daubek extremely warm and gracious. Over tea and a tray of delicacies, Emile told Mrs. Daubek that she urgently needed grain from her mill. Mrs. Daubek then asked her the reason for her request. Emilie replied, “I only want to help our Jews and the rest of the workers, so that they will not starve to death.” Mrs. Daubek thought for a few moments and then said, “I understand your situation perfectly and realize we are going through unfortunate and difficult times. Anyway, I would like to help if I can. Please go to the mill and speak to the manager. Tell him from me that he is to give you whatever you need for your people.” Later that afternoon, Emilie returned to the factory “with a veritable treasure in grains and semolina flour.”⁷⁴

There is no reason to doubt Emilie’s story, though it is interesting that Oskar did not mention Daubek as a benefactor after the war. All he ever said about him was that he and Emilie had acquired the villa of this particular “local baron.” The one specific thing we know about the relationship between Schindler and Daubek is that the mill owner allowed Schindler’s Jews to steal grain quite freely from the mill. Sol Urbach and a friend, Max (Henryk) Blasenstein, worked as carpenters in the Daubek villa that Oskar was having renovated. Whenever he could, Sol would sneak into the Daubek mill and steal grain. He would fill his tool box and pockets with grain and then bring it back to the camp to share with others. Victor Lewis did the same thing. He worked as an electrician on the villa’s renovations. “I was putting oatmeal in my toolbox and my tool belt, and bringing it [to the Brinnlitz camp]. My friends were cooking it. That is how Schindler saved my life.”⁷⁵

But Daubek must have done more than simply allow Brünnlitz’s Jews to steal grain. After the war, many of them felt they owed Daubek a special thanks for the grain he had given them. About ten days after Oskar and Emilie had fled the camp in 1945, Alfred Rozenfryd (Alfred Rosenfried) wrote J. F. Daubek a letter in the name of all of Brünnlitz’s Jews thanking him for providing them with flour, oatmeal, and semolina, which he said often saved them from hunger. Aleksander Bieberstein was equally complimentary of the mill owner, particularly his willingness to allow Jews to steal grain from the mill.⁷⁶

Oskar also had another benefactor in the area, Johann Kompan, a wholesale grocer in Zwittau and a representative of the J. F. Daubek mill. He had been a schoolfriend of Oskar’s before the war and they renewed their friendship after they met at the mill. According to Kompan, he did everything that he could to supply Oskar with more food, particularly bread, than Oskar’s ration cards allowed. He said in a letter to the “Religo” Comité pour la assistance la Populaston juife papée per la guerre (RELICO-Relief Committee for the War-Stricken Jewish Population) in Geneva that Leib Salpeter, who was in charge of food storage in the camp, and picked up the food from Kompan’s warehouse, could attest to this. Kompan estimated that he supplied Brünnlitz with extra weekly deliveries of 1,000 to 1,500 kilograms (2,200 to 3,300 pounds) of bread as well as 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of grits, oats, and groats. He also supplied extra rations of vegetables, carrots, flour, and cheese. He also mentioned that he delivered 2,000 Weizenmehlstriezel wheat loaves for Christmas 1944.⁷⁷

His greatest effort, he told the Swiss committee, was to help Schindler’s Jews in the weeks after Oskar and Emilie had fled to the West. Some of Brünnlitz’s Jews remained in the camp and Kompan continued to supply them with food. He said that he did this because no one seemed to care for “these forced laborers” and “they had to eat.” This all proved quite costly to Mr. Kompan, particularly as Oskar did not pay him for the last five weeks of food at the end of the war “because Schindler could not be reached in the then upheaval.” Stefan Pemper, Mietek Pemper’s brother, verified Kompan’s account in the summer of 1945. In a statement prepared in Brněnec on July 14, he said that Kompan “supported us all during the entire time of our stay in Brněnec (Brünnlitz) by delivery of groceries in larger volume than our ration.” He went on to explain how this was done. Kompan established a separate warehouse in Zwittau for delivery of these goods for Brünnlitz. All the foodstuffs that Kompan supplied Schindler were paid for except the last deliveries, including one on May 8, 1945, the last day of the camp’s operation. The cost of the unpaid goods was RM 12,800 ($5,120). Pemper explained that he was sent to help pick up the food during this period, which included bread, flour, vegetables, asparagus, and carrots. His brother, Mietek, was then responsible for distributing the food. He concluded by stating that Johann Kompan “rendered us a great service and it is known to all of us that he put himself in great danger by making these deliveries.”⁷⁸

Kompan also had letters of support from other Schindler Jews. At the same time he prepared a thank-you letter for J. F. Daubek, Alfred Rosenfryd prepared a similar letter for Kompan that he later had translated into English and certified by a notary in Vienna. It stated that “H. Johann Kompan, resident of Zwickau, has given aid to the inmates of the concentration camp, Groß-Rosen, section Brünnlitz, materially by delivery of provisions outside the prescribed contingents.”⁷⁹

The following year, Kompan and his wife, Aloisia, who by this time were in Vienna, received two statements of support from another Schindler Jew, Alexander Goldwasser, and, in turn, the Jewish Committee (Jüdisches Komitee) in Vienna. Goldwasser befriended the Kompans after the war and was the one that suggested that they contact RELICO, an aid organization that had been created in the fall of 1939 by the World Jewish Congress to help Jews in Europe. Goldwasser assured the Kompans that once they identified themselves properly to the Geneva-based committee, they would receive the “most extensive support” because it was headed by Dr. Adolf Silberschein, a former member of the Polish Diet from Lemberg. Goldwasser wrote a statement in which he said that he saw with his “own eyes how Mr. Johann Kompan from Zwitau unselfishly and with the greatest danger to his life delivered to the KZ camp Brünnlitz in most ample measure amidst the greatest food difficulties, and we are therefore obliged to give him thanks for his efforts.” The letter from the Jewish Committee in Vienna was addressed to the Jewish Committee in Innsbruck and was meant as part of the Kompans’ request for food prompted by Mrs. Kompan’s serious health problems. The letter said that the Kompans were to be regarded as “helpers of Jews.”⁸⁰

Oskar was equally grateful to Kompan for all he had done for the camp; before he left Brünnlitz, Kompan told Oskar that “the entire concentration camp feels obliged to thank me [Kompan] because of my steady, dangerous deliveries.” Oskar added that when the war ended, Kompan’s deeds would be “registered at the Jewish-American division of the International Red Cross [ICRC/IRC-International Committee for the Red Cross] in Geneva” under his full name. This would be done by “confidential Cracow people.” Kompan would also have a special number, KZ 24, and if he needed help, he should “introduce himself at this location of the I.R.T. [I.R.C.] with this stated number.”⁸¹ It is unclear whether Oskar meant American Red Cross representatives in Geneva or the Joint, the principal source of ICRC funding for efforts to aid Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe.⁸²

While Oskar’s instructions to Kompan sound a little far-fetched, it should be remembered that Oskar still had the mind of an Abwehr agent and, based on his immediate postwar efforts to seek aid from various Jewish groups, he probably thought that Kompan should do the same thing. And Oskar, who seemed to have planned his escape for some time, initially headed for Switzerland. So there was some logic, therefore, to his thoughts about registering Kompan with the ICRC there.

The foodstuffs and other goods that Oskar got from Daubek, Kompan, and others was meant for the camp’s kitchen. Initially, the inmates were given three meals a day, though by the spring of 1945 they were reduced to two meals a day. The camp schedule was built around work and meals. Each prisoner received 25 dkg (1 dekagram = 0.353 ounces) of bread and coffee, and lunch consisted of a liter of “not very nourishing soup.” For dinner, each inmate was given more bread and soup.⁸³ This was not sufficient for adults working nine-hour shifts and the workers were constantly scrounging for extra food. Cantor Moshe Taubé remembered thinking constantly about food. He and another bunk mate, Jerzy Sternberg, “dreamed about it: challah, cake, and fish, and pieces of wonderful meat, and roasted ducks, and goose livers! There was a sensual satisfaction just speaking about it.”⁸⁴

Oskar took particular pity on “Little” Leon Leyson and ordered extra rations for him. On another occasion, Oskar gave Leon a “hunk of bread,” which Leyson described as “the most exciting thing” he had been given “in a long time.” Leon immediately hid it and later shared it with his father and brother. The Budzyners controlled the inmate kitchen and they allowed Leon to take whatever scraps of food he could find after they had “swished water around” in the large soup kettles. He took the water that remained in the kettles, boiled it, and then ate what scraps were left after evaporation. When Oskar learned that several inmates had tuberculosis and that a few of the younger boys were losing weight, he ordered that they be given portions of Emilie’s “magic” porridge.⁸⁵

Stella Müller-Madej remembered Mietek Pemper sharing some baked beets with her family, “which were wonderful”; other men who worked outside the factory were occasionally able to find potatoes and extra grain in the Daubek mill. The inmates would grind the grain between two bricks and mix it with grain husks and water. This mixture was then baked into little cakes that “took a long time to chew and swallow. They looked like sawdust.”⁸⁶ Polda Hirschfeld got a job in the kitchen that prepared food for the German staff. Whenever possible, she would take food scraps such as the heads of carp for her family. Igor Kling worked putting up the high SS-regulation fences around the perimeter of the camp. He and other Schindler Jews would steal potatoes from the fields surrounding the camp and bury them in a small hole under the fire they had built for their SS guards. They would cover the potatoes with a small sheet of tin and later enjoy a “feast” of baked potatoes.⁸⁷

Iser Mintz was assigned to the Punishment Squad (Strafkommando) for four weeks, where he broke up rocks because he had stolen a turnip. And though the workers on the SS punishment squad were supposed to receive half rations only, Mintz ate well because he always managed to find potatoes hidden in the fields outside the camp. In time, Mintz learned to spot the ditches the Czech farmers had filled with potatoes and covered with straw. One day Iser decided to ask his SS guard, a sergeant, why they could not take some potatoes from the ditch. The sergeant said, “I can’t. I’m afraid. It’s against the order.” But Iser sensed that the guard was a good man and in desperation decided to steal some of the potatoes. The next time they walked past the hidden potatoes, Iser told members of his squad to grab all they could while he held onto the guard with a big “bear hug.” When the Strafkommando unit reached the hills overlooking Brünnlitz, they sat down and baked the potatoes. “This sergeant ate more than anyone, because he was hungry, too.” And each day, Iser brought his brother, Jack Mintz, a baked potato.⁸⁸

Such food shortages were not just a problem for Brünnlitz. One day Oskar was approached by Dr. Sternberg, a Jewish physician in a nearby camp, who had heard that there was food in Brünnlitz. Dr. Sternberg, who was allowed by his commandant, a Luftwaffe officer, to meet with Schindler, explained that the conditions in the Luftwaffe camp were “horrible,” the work “very hard,” and the food “very poor.” Oskar immediately agreed to help supply the Luftwaffe camp with extra food and worked out a plan for Sternberg to get it from Brünnlitz’s storehouses. Twice a week, Dr. Sternberg would come to Brünnlitz and, while Oskar looked the other way, he picked up extra supplies of “bread, cigarettes and other foodstuffs” for the nearby camp.⁸⁹

Over time, food shortages became so serious that Oskar called a meeting of the entire camp in February 1945 to discuss the problem. He told everyone that they would have to limit their intake of food because he was having more and more difficulty finding provisions for the camp. The local landowners, he explained, had none to spare because they were “feeding the partisans.” Some inmates began to contract scurvy and others lost their teeth. Leon Leyson told me that because of the food problems, the situation in Brünnlitz was much worse than it had been at Emalia. He said that if the war had lasted much longer, he was uncertain whether he would have survived. He recalled that he was “beginning to get double vision” and that his brother had “sores on his legs that weren’t healing.”⁹⁰ By late spring, rations were cut to two meals a day. The inmates were now given “a sort of paste made of flour,” which was “good, hot and filling.” They also got turnip soup, which “was doled out with a pharmacists’s precision,” though each bowl contained only few pieces of turnip. Stella Müller-Madej said that by this time she and her family had learned not to eat everything at once and they always tried to save some of their rations. But by early May, there was little food left. Stella remembered thinking that “if the liberators didn’t come in a few days,” they would all “die of hunger.”⁹¹

The Challenges of Camp Work and Life in Brünnlitz

The chronic food problems in Brünnlitz were constant reminders that, despite the presence of Oskar Schindler, the Jews were still in a concentration camp. But what was different was the way that they were treated as prisoners and workers in the midst of an SS-regulated environment. Schindler’s reputation was built less on how well he fed his workers than on how his prisoners were treated by the SS staff. Every Schindler Jew in Brünnlitz had suffered terribly from the random brutality and violence of the SS elsewhere. Most had spent some time in Płaszów under Amon Göth. Relatively speaking, Brünnlitz was a calm island in a sea of SS madness. And the person solely responsible for this was Oskar Schindler.

One of the few times this calm seemed to be really shaken was when Amon Göth showed up in the spring of 1945 to visit Oskar and check on the status of the sixty boxes of personal goods that Oskar had agreed to store for him at Brünnlitz. Göth had been released from prison in October 1944 on his own recognizance, though he remained under investigation by the SS. Ultimately, Oskar shipped Göth’s war “booty” to his home in Vienna.⁹² Stella Müller-Madej remembered the panic that swept through the women’s quarters as news of Göth’s visit spread among the inmates. Some of the prisoners were convinced that the former Płaszów commandant had come to liquidate Brünnlitz, and others talked of a mass escape.⁹³ But Rena Ferber Finder added that Göth did not look quite as threatening as he had in Płaszów because he was dressed in civilian clothes and was quite thin.⁹⁴ Victor Lewis said that several prisoners who saw him became angry and shouted, “What [do] you think, you are in Płaszów?” Göth, Lewis said, yelled back, “I’m gonna kill you guys!”⁹⁵ In reality, Göth did not stay very long in Brünnlitz because he was desperate to get back to Vienna. In addition to a brief meeting with Oskar, Göth also spent a few moments talking with Mietek Pemper. He wanted to know what the SS judges had asked Pemper when they interrogated him in 1944 and 1945. Dr. Aleksander Bieberstein also saw Göth in the camp’s infirmary. Göth was suffering from heartburn and asked Dr. Bieberstein for some medicine which he gave him after examining the former Płaszów commandant.⁹⁶

Göth’s surprise visit to Brünnlitz was a reminder that Schindler still had to play the role of Nazi party loyalist and serious industrialist, whether it be with Göth or what seemed to be the incessant visits of SS and Wehrmacht teams to inspect his armament facilities. Several Schindlerjuden who came to adore Oskar after the war for what he did to save them admitted that even in Brünnlitz they were suspicious of him. Some found it hard to accept that this blond, tall German and Nazi Party member truly cared for them despite everything he did for them. Part of the problem centered around Oskar’s ability to play the tough Nazi Party stalwart whenever one of the SS or Wehrmacht teams visited the factory. Perhaps one of the reasons for the frequent visits was Oskar’s endless supply of alcohol. Every visit seemed to end in loud drinking parties in Oskar’s factory apartment.⁹⁷ During one of these parties towards the end of the war, some of the inmates heard the following exchange:

But perhaps they were tears of pain for having to say such awful things about people he cared for so much.

Oskar’s ability to wine and dine SS and Wehrmacht big shots was not enough to convince Josef Leipold of his commitment to Nazi racial ideals or SS camp regulations. There was constant friction between both men over the treatment of prisoners. Though Leipold certainly could not be put in the same league as Amon Göth when it came to raw brutality, he still was a career SS man who had a certain mindset over how a camp should be run and how prisoners should be treated. Oskar bragged after the war that he “had the guards and supervisors under his control” at Brünnlitz, which assured that his Jews would be treated well. But, Schindler added, this was “often against the will” of Leipold.⁹⁹

Like Schindler, SS-Obersturmführer Josef Leipold was a Sudeten German who was born in 1913 in Alt-Rohlau (Stará Role) in the western Sudetenland. A hairdresser by trade, he joined the Waffen-SS in 1938 and the Nazi Party the following year. He began his career in concentration camp administration in Mauthausen and also served in Lublin, Budzyv, Wieliczka, and Płaszów before he came to Brünnlitz. Leipold fled to Deggendorf, Germany, at the end of the war. In 1946, Henry Slamovich and several other Schindlerjuden living in Deggendorf’s displaced persons (DP) camp, went to the Deggendorf Christmas fair, where they spotted Leipold. Slamovich and his friends surrounded Leipold while another told a nearby American MP that they had captured a former concentration camp commander. The MP asked Leipold for his identification, only to discover that he had changed his name. The MP told Slamovich and the others that there was nothing he could do. In the meantime, Slamovich noticed a Jewish officer in the U.S. Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) standing nearby who had attended religious services in the DP camp. Slamovich told him about Leipold and the CIC officer arrested the former Brünnlitz commandant. The CIC officer told Slamovich to find as many Brünnlitz Jews as possible and bring them to the DP camp to identify Leipold.¹⁰⁰

Slamovich contacted various Schindler Jews in the area and told them that he needed them to help identify Leipold. One of those he got in touch with was Ryszard Lax, who, along with Oskar and Emilie, was living with Schindler Jews Gunther Singer and Hersch Licht in an apartment in Regensburg, which was only about thirty-five miles from Deggendorf. Oskar and about fifteen to twenty Schindler Jews showed up at the Deggendorf DP camp, where Leipold was being detained. During the line-up, Oskar went up to Leipold and said, “You are Leipold, and do not try to deny it. If you continue to deny it, downstairs there are three hundred Jews who will devour you.” Leipold then admitted his true identity. Later, Schindlerjude Hersch Licht walked up to Leipold, who was now in a cell, and told him that he had “better not think” they wouldn’t “prove all his deeds.” Leipold was later deported to Poland, where he was tried for war crimes in Lublin and condemned to death on November 9, 1948.¹⁰¹

Itzhak Stern considered Leipold a “beast,” and Dr. Chaim Hilfstein warned Stella Müller-Madej’s family that the commandant “was dangerous and had to be watched.”¹⁰² Aleksander Bieberstein said that Leipold’s goal was to destroy the camp and “kill the Jews.” Yet somehow Oskar was able to maintain a good “diplomatic relationship with the commandant.” Bieberstein wrote that “Schindler knew how to use the weak points and stupidity of Leipold, especially in moments of danger for the Jews. With bribes and parties he tempered his [Leipold’s] determination.”¹⁰³ Schindler often did this by intervening in situations that he thought would be harmful to the prisoners. One bitterly cold day in early January 1945, Leipold ordered everyone in the factory outside for roll call. Oskar stormed into the factory from his apartment and told Leipold that he needed healthy people to operate his machines, not “frozen dummies.” This, Oskar told Leipold, “was what the Führer demanded of him.” Needless to say, the roll call was held inside the factory.¹⁰⁴ Oskar again “outfoxed” Leipold when he convinced the Armaments Inspectorate that if they approved his use of the “highly skilled” Golleschau and Landskron workers, he could double his production output. Needless to say, Schindler was allowed to use these workers, even though some of them had limbs amputated because of frostbite.¹⁰⁵ There was no doubt that Leipold saw through this charade but seemed incapable of doing much about it.

Schindler had less trouble with the SS guards, most of whom, he said, had been released from the Waffen-SS “as unfit.” Oskar attributed their fairly decent treatment of the prisoners to the ample supply of food, alcohol, and tobacco that he supplied his SS contingent. Emilie also played a role in helping temper the violence of the SS guards, particularly the Aufseherinnen or female guards. Whenever Oskar was away, Emilie would invite the female guards to tea in her apartment. Stella Müller-Madej said this permitted the women to go to the toilet as they pleased. When the Aufseherinnen were around, they strictly regulated trips to the bathroom.¹⁰⁶ But this did not mean that there were not problems, particularly with some of the Kapos. The inmates nicknamed one Kapo, Müller, “Avanti” because he constantly shouted “Avanti” with whip in hand to get his workers to move faster. But the most feared Kapo was Willi, who wandered into camp in March 1945 with a few other Jews. Though stories about Willi varied, they all agreed on two points—he was very brutal and he quickly became Leipold’s favorite Kapo. Willi had left with a hundred other prisoners from a nearby camp but by the time they reached Brünnlitz, only a handful were alive. Rumor had it that Willi had taken a steel club and beaten most of the Jews in his group to death before they got to Brünnlitz.¹⁰⁷

On his first day as a Brünnlitz Kapo, Willi viciously beat one of the prisoners with his whip. He “cracked his head open with one blow, and then made him do squats until he fainted.” Oskar was away at the time and Mietek Pemper reported the incident to Emilie. She told Pemper that there was nothing she could do about it because she “wasn’t allowed to interfere” with the SS. Oskar returned to camp the next day and Mietek Pemper overheard his conversation with Willi. Oskar told the Kapo that he was now working in an armaments factory and that brave German soldiers depended on the work done at Brünnlitz. Consequently, it was important that everyone “be fit for work, not injured.” He warned Willi that if he ever struck a prisoner again, Oskar would have him arrested for “sabotage and hampering the war effort.”¹⁰⁸

But during the eight months that he operated his factory sub camp, Oskar had more to deal with than simply Leipold, the SS, and the well-being of his workers. He also had to maintain the façade of a viable armaments factory operation. Though there was no question that Oskar had considerable contacts in the Armaments Inspectorate and the Wehrmacht, he certainly would not have been permitted to keep his factory open if he had not shown evidence of considerable arms production. Needless to say, it is absolutely remarkable that Schindler could produce only one wagon-load of the 3.7 cm Steilgranate 41 (Aufsteck Geschoß) shells for the Panzerabwehrkanone 36 and continue to operate his factory, particularly in the context of Germany’s desperate need for armaments. Oskar later explained that this wagonload of antitank shells was worth no more than RM 35,000 ($14,000) and that even these shells had been half completed in Kraków before he moved his factory to Brünnlitz.¹⁰⁹

How did he get away with it? Itzhak Stern said that they did it by “falsifying production charts,” a skill that Mietek Pemper had mastered in Płaszów. Schindler’s office staff made it appear that they were “working and producing but simply not making finished products.”¹¹⁰ When questioned about the lack of production, Schindler always fell back on the explanation that his factory was having “starting difficulties.” But after a while, this excuse began to wear thin and Oskar feared for the safety of his workers, particularly in light of the increased demands from Albert Speer’s Ministry for Armaments and Munitions.¹¹¹ This deception troubled some of Schindler’s German staff. Stern recalled, for example, that Oskar had to get a fox fur coat in Poland as a Christmas present for the wife of one of the head German engineers “to ease his severe intentions.”¹¹²

This also might explain why some of the German civilian staff were unkind to some of Schindler’s Jews. One of the German engineers, for example, always refused to look or speak to his Jewish workers. But one day just before the war ended, the engineer tried to shake Dr. Ferdinand Lewkowicz’s hand; but Dr. Lewkowicz said, “Yesterday you wouldn’t shake hands with me; tonight I don’t want to shake hands with you.” The engineer “left with his head down.” Victor Lewis remembered another incident in which a German foreman mistreated him after he had accidentally shorted out the lighting system in the factory while trying to hook up a welding machine. Though several electricians quickly fixed the problem, the German kicked Victor, called him a “son of a gun,” and told him to go to his shop. Instead, Victor went to Oskar’s office, where he ran into Emilie. He explained the situation to her and she told Oskar about the incident. Schindler told Victor to go back to the factory and wait for him. A few minutes later, Oskar went to see the German foreman and told him that he needed an electrician, specifically Victor Lewis. The foreman explained that Lewis was not an electrician. Oskar replied simply, “I want him.” But there were other German staff members who were much kinder. Polda Hirschfeld remembers cleaning the office of a German engineer who would occasionally say, “Before you throw anything away from the wastebasket, you might want to look inside.” When he said this, she always found several pieces of bread and jam in the wastebasket.¹¹³ The lack of significant armaments production did not mean that the prisoners did not work hard. They did, though it was often at things made to look as if they were producing antitank shells. Some of the men worked setting up the large collection of machines that had been shipped from Emalia. In fact, Henry Weiner said, “We never finished. Schindler saw to it we never were.” But no one worked as hard as they did at Emalia or Płaszów. In fact, Pola Gerner Yogev thought that comparatively speaking “we had easy jobs.” Sam Birenzweig had similar memories. He described himself as “just a plain worker” who “didn’t work too hard.” His main job was to help make the cement that was used in the installation of the factory’s machines.¹¹⁴ Moshe Bejski said when they had free time, each of the men working on the factory floor made himself “a razor, spoons and other eating utensils, and even cigarette lighters.”¹¹⁵

Camp life was built around a strict daily work schedule dictated by Leipold:

The women spent their free time knitting wool sweaters and underwear for the entire camp from wool that had been stolen from the Hoffmann mills next door. When Wilhelm Hoffmann, one of the owners, learned of the thefts, he threatened to call the Gestapo to investigate. Oskar stepped in and got Hoffmann to agree not to make an official complaint in return of a payment of RM 8,000 ($3,200) for the wool.¹¹⁷ It was not particularly good wool. Stella Müller-Madej described it as “a strange kind of thick, springy wool” that was “so stiff that you could almost cut your fingers on it.” Needless to say, the wool was also very scratchy and uncomfortable to wear. But it helped keep many of the workers warm in the chilly factory. More important, the knit goods “were life savers for those who left the camp to work in the open air.”¹¹⁸

One of the most difficult aspects of Brünnlitz life was the living conditions. More than a thousand men and women were forced to live in extremely cramped conditions in the upper floor of the factory. Initially, the men had to sleep on straw until the standard three-tiered SS bunks arrived. Conditions were so tight for the women in the bunks that they had to turn over from one side to another in unison. And it was impossible to walk through the crowded living space. Stella Müller-Madej said that “there was bedlam when one woman got a stomach ache and couldn’t make to it through the crowd in time.” Some of the more ill-tempered women would scream out that she was a “pig.” Very often such problems were caused by typhus.¹¹⁹

But some of the inmates tried to balance the harshness of camp life with adherence to traditional religious values and beliefs. Oskar acquired a Teffilin for Simon Jeret. The Teffilin are two small leather boxes worn by a male adult Jew on his head and forearm during morning prayer. Each leather box contains passages from the Jewish scriptures. Jeret kindly shared his Teffilin with anyone who wanted to use them. Each day, a line of men would gather near Jeret’s bunk waiting to put on the Teffilin and then say the Sh’ma, the basic statement of Jewish faith from Deuteronomy 6:4:¹²⁰

As each man finished the Sh’ma, he would take off the Teffilin and Jeret would say, “Next one.” Rabbi Moshe Taubé called it “a Sh’ma assembly line.”¹²²

During Passover, some of Brünnlitz’s most observant Jews would literally “put their lives on the line” by not eating bread. Instead, “they ate the roots of the grass” because Jewish law prohibited eating leavened bread, or hamets, during Passover. Rabbi Moshe Taubé struggled with this question and finally decided to fast during the Seder, the special meal on the first night of Passover. As he explained, “We had to do everything possible in spite of ourselves to show that physical needs and deprivation would not annul the commitment to the Torah. When you are committed to your way of life and the past of your people and the continuance of your people your personal needs do not take precedence over the larger picture.”¹²³

Moses Goldberg remembered cooking rice for Abraham Bankier and Rabbi Jakob Lewertow during Passover because they also refused to eat hamets. He said the rice was not Kosher, meaning that it did not meet the standards of Jewish religious dietary laws, but it was better than eating hamets. Goldberg said that Schindler knew about the oven in the warehouse that he used to cook the rice for Passover; whenever Oskar smelled something cooking in the warehouse, he would ask, “What’s cooking?”¹²⁴ Henry Slamovich was able to get potatoes for his friend, Josl (Josek) Ryba, who also did not want to eat hamets during Passover. But Henry chose not to observe his faith during his imprisonment. He said that he had seen too much violence and evil during the Holocaust and had lost his faith. He particularly remembered the taunts of German soldiers in Kraków, who would abuse and mock Orthodox Jews in their prayer shawls and beards and then ask, “Where is your God? Why doesn’t he help you now?” After the war, Henry settled in San Francisco and became active in synagogue life there.¹²⁵

Brünnlitz: The Final Weeks

By the middle of March 1945, Mährisch Ostrau, which was about 136 miles northeast of Brünnlitz, was the center of an assault led by the Soviet Fourth Ukrainian Front (Group) as part of its effort to break into the Sudetenland in its drive towards Dresden. By the end of March, German forces had momentarily halted the Soviet advance towards Mährisch Ostrau and Opava, both considered essential to Soviet efforts to enter the Sudetenland. The Germans put up staunch resistance and units of the Fourth Ukrainian Front did not reach the Brünnlitz area until May 8. Some Schindlerjuden reported hearing the fighting in the distance. What they did not know, of course, was that Czechoslovakia had become the last battleground of World War II. German forces under Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schörner, a fanatical Nazi whom Hitler had designated his military heir, staged a last-stand defense with his Army Group Center about halfway between Prague and Brünnlitz. Though the German High Command surrendered on May 7, Schörner’s forces continued to fight for four days. Needless to say, the situation in the Brünnlitz area was extremely unstable, particularly in light of a Czech uprising in Prague on May 5.¹²⁶

Schindler’s greatest concern as the front moved closer to Brünnlitz was the safety of his Jewish workers. He knew that Leipold would probably receive orders to liquidate the camp, but he was not certain whether this would simply mean moving the workers westward. There were instances where inmates were murdered as part of the liquidation process. His worries intensified after the arrival of thirty prisoners from Geppersdorf, another Groß Rosen sub-camp in southern Poland, on April 11, 1946. According to Henry Weiner, the prisoners from Geppersdorf were in “bad shape,” though their condition was much better than that of the men on the Golleschau transport. It was at about this time that Schindler and Leipold had a big argument about how to deal with some of the prisoners who continued to arrive in Brünnlitz. Leipold wanted to take those in bad physical condition and shoot them in the nearby woods. Oskar told Leipold that if he did this he would have the SS men involved in the killings sent to the front as malingerers. Leipold said he would hold off on the executions because he needed the SS men.¹²⁷

But this was not the end of Schindler’s concerns over Leipold’s eagerness to liquidate the camp. This is probably the reason for the April 18, 1945, list, which was drawn up to include all the Jews who were now in Brünnlitz. Groß Rosen had closed two months earlier, so any orders that Leipold received about an evacuation of the camp would come from WVHA D2 in Oranienburg. Oskar was also concerned about the presence in the area of units under General Andrei Vlasov, a Russian defector who had created, with the blessing of the Germans, two Russian Liberation Army divisions in the Wehrmacht. Only one became fully operational, and it was involved in the German defense of the Oder River line. Its most meaningful action was the aid it gave to Czech partisans in the Prague uprising on May 6, 1945. Actually, Schindler was wrong about the presence of Vlasov’s units in the area. Though now theoretically under Field Marshal Schörner’s command, Vlasov’s units were trying to flee to the American lines and did not enter Czechoslovakia until late April. By then, they were well to the northwest of Brünnlitz.¹²⁸

Stella Müller-Madej said that each day Leipold would take Oskar into the woods “to show off how carefully and precisely he had the ditches dug” that would hold the remains of the Schindlerjuden.¹²⁹ Betty (Bronia) Groß Gunz told a somewhat different story. She said that after Oskar received the order to close the factory and “execute all of us,” he decided to dig graves to “deceive the Nazis.” Bronia said that she helped dig the phony graves for two days until Oskar showed up with some documents with a red seal on them that he had gotten while on a trip to Germany. He walked into the factory and said, “Children, you are safe. You are going to make it. The war will not be forever.”¹³⁰ On the other hand, another Schindler Jew, Ignacy (Israel) Falk, said that Leipold had “ordered Russian inmates of a neighboring camp to dig graves.”¹³¹ Thomas Keneally wrote that during the second half of April Leipold received a telegram from Hassebroek, Groß Rosen’s commandant, ordering him to prepare to march Brünnlitz’s Jews to Mauthausen. But first he was to execute the elderly and the sick. But Leipold never saw the deadly telegram because Mietek Pemper, who worked in Leipold’s office and served as liaison between Schindler and the commandant, intercepted it. He steamed it open and immediately told Oskar about its contents.¹³²

According to Keneally, Schindler had already laid the groundwork for what would happen next. He lodged complaints with Richard Glücks, the head of WVHA Office Group D in Oranienburg about Leipold’s treatment of the prisoners. He shared copies of these reports with Hassebroek and Max Rausch, the regional HSSPF in Brno. Then, Keneally says, on April 27, the day before Schindler’s birthday, Oskar put his scheme into motion. He invited Leipold to a party and got him very drunk. Around 11:00 P.M., Oskar brought Leipold onto the factory floor where the commandant raged against the camp’s Jewish workers and cried out, “You fucking Jews. See that beam, see it! That’s what I’ll hang you from. Every one of you!” The next day, Oskar called Hassebroek “and others” to complain about Leipold’s most recent outburst. His workers, Oskar proclaimed, were “not laborers!” They were “sophisticated technicians engaged in secret-weapons manufacture.” Two days later, Keneally wrote, Leipold was transferred to a Waffen SS unit near Prague.¹³³

Accounts by Stella Müller-Madej and Itzhak Stern tell a very different story. Moreover, there are some serious inconsistencies in Keneally’s version of Leipold’s departure. For one thing, Groß Rosen was closed in February 1945 and, though quite a bit has been written about Hassebroek, there is a mystery surrounding his last months in the SS. So it is doubtful that Oskar would or could have contacted the former Groß Rosen commandant. And there is no way he could have contacted Glück’s office on April 28 in Oranienburg, on the outskirts of Berlin, because Soviet tanks had entered the suburb on April 24. So we have to look elsewhere to find out how Oskar Schindler managed to get rid of Josef Leipold and his SS contingent.¹³⁴

Fortunately, Stella Müller-Madej and Itzhak Stern have given us more reliable testimony about how Oskar Schindler finally got rid of Leipold. Stella got her information from Mietek Pemper, who was close to her family in Brünnlitz. On April 27, Oskar invited Leipold to a party in his apartment, where he got the commandant drunk. Beforehand, Oskar had prepared forged documents that said Leipold and his SS men were requested “as great patriots who believe in the victory of the Third Reich and its great leader, to be transferred together to the front line.” When Leipold was drunk, Oskar put the document in front of him and told him to sign it. It was, Oskar explained, the order “to liquidate the camp.” Leipold, who had longed for this moment, signed willingly. Oskar then had someone in his office take the document to SS headquarters.¹³⁵

Stern’s account of how Oskar got rid of Leipold is much more complex. In mid-April, 1945, he and Mietek Pemper were working on the top floor in the Brünnlitz office building next to the factory. Only a glass partition separated their office from that of the German civilians who worked for Schindler. The Germans would listen three times a day to the radio, trying to find out the location of the front. As it moved closer and closer, the German staff became more nervous. One day, Stern was looking out the window and saw an SS-Scharführer walk over to Leipold’s house. A few minutes later he came out with a letter in his hand. As he mounted his horse, he put the letter in his pocket. Stern asked Pemper, who served as “Leipold’s unofficial secretary,” how they could find out what was in the letter. Pemper said he had not written anything for Leipold that was important, so Stern concluded that there was something in the letter about the Jews because Pemper “would write all secret letters for Leipold.” Stern and Pemper decided that it must have been written by Leipold’s official secretary, a young SS officer.¹³⁶

They agreed that they should talk to the young SS officer to see whether they could find out what was in the letter. But they needed an excuse to enter the SS offices on the floor below them. As they walked downstairs, they decided they would ask the officer’s permission to see the sheets that were used to determine whether workers were to receive “so-called work bonuses.” They explained that there were some errors on the sheets. The young officer became angry and began yelling at the two Jews. He said it was essential that these lists be correct. When he got up to check on the lists, Stern opened the notebook on his desk and found a copy of the letter Leipold had recently sent out with the SS courier. Stern took the letter out of the notebook and took it to Schindler. The letter “was a request by Leipold about what to do with the Jews.”¹³⁷

In the meantime, Leipold had received a response from the SS about the liquidation of the camp and called Schindler in to talk about it. His new orders were as follows:

Schindler quickly paid a visit to the regional Armaments Inspectorate office and then came back to talk with Leipold. He took the commandant to one of the storage rooms, where he noticed several large bottles on the shelves. Though Oskar knew what was in them, he asked Leib Salpeter, who was in charge of the storage room, what they contained. Salpeter said that they contained Slibowitz, a plum liqueur. Oskar told Leipold that they needed to find out what was in the bottles. Oskar gave Leipold glass after glass of Slibowitz and then walked him through the camp. While they were walking, Oskar put a velour cover on the commandant’s head, which “made him look like a Chassidic Jew.” Oskar then took Leipold into Emalia’s office, where he introduced him to his staff. Afterwards, Oskar took Leipold on a drive to Brno, where he convinced Leipold to volunteer to join the fight at the nearby front.¹³⁹

But Leipold changed his mind when he actually received his orders to report to the front. During their drive to Brno, Leipold told Oskar that he did not know how to use hand grenades and this was evidently the excuse he used to avoid joining the Waffen SS in the field. Schindler told him that he had a secret cache of hand grenades to protect the factory against the Russians and said he would teach Leipold how to use them. Emilie, Stern, and a few others criticized Oskar for telling Leipold about the secret weapons. But Oskar thought it was important for Leipold to know about them. One night, Oskar told Stern not to become concerned if he heard some explosions. He wanted the workers to go to their living quarters and remain quiet. He explained that he was going to show Leipold how to use hand grenades.¹⁴⁰

Schindler later told Stern what happened next. The noise from the exploding hand grenades was extremely loud and, according to Oskar, they disturbed Generalfeldmarschall Ferdinand Schörner, the head of Army Group Central, whose headquarters were nearby. Schörner came to the factory and asked what was going on. Oskar told him that Leipold was “playing around with the grenades instead of going to the front.” Schörner immediately ordered Leipold to report to his SS unit at the front. But Leipold still refused to go. So once again Oskar had to come up with a new scheme to force Leipold out of Brünnlitz.¹⁴¹

Several days later, Schindler had a party for some of the SS big shots from Brno. And as usual, everyone got drunk except Oskar. One of Schindler’s secretaries, Ms. Hoffmann, then blurted out that Oskar had talked Leipold, “who had fought against the Jews, into going to the front.” This, she said, was “a scandal.” Someone else at the party suggested that it would “be a good idea to send the Jews to the Russians with white flags.” When another SS officer began to criticize Schindler’s actions, Oskar pushed him down a steep flight of stairs. As he was falling, the SS officer shouted, “Oskar shot me.” One of the Jewish physicians was called in to tend to the fallen SS officer. Emilie, who was present at the party, was concerned about Oskar’s behavior, though an officer from the Armaments Inspectorate pulled Oskar aside and told him that now that the war was, for all practical purposes, over, nothing must happen to him (Schindler) because he had “done so much for the Jews.” At the end of the party, Oskar drove Leipold to the front. Stern concluded by saying that Leipold was replaced by a man of sixty-eight who was “a very calm and decent fellow.” The rest of Leipold’s SS contingent followed him to the front and was replaced with older SS men who were also “calm and decent.”¹⁴²

Stella Müller-Madej remembered the departure of Leipold and the SS men a bit differently. According to Stella, Oskar did drive Leipold to the front followed by the camp’s SS contingent in a truck. Several hours later, Oskar returned to Brünnlitz with a new group of “older, jumpy” SS men who carried their “rifles under their arms like useless parcels.” Oskar told two of them to guard the front gate and the rest were put up in Leipold’s house. About an hour after he returned to Brünnlitz, Stella wrote, Schindler entered the factory wearing his Nazi Party uniform. He sat on a crate and slowly began to laugh like “a madman.” He said to anyone who wanted to hear that “the man had not yet been born who could outfox Oskar.” Schindler was finally in charge of the camp. The new SS contingent seemed bewildered by their fate, particularly after Oskar ordered them not to let any German vehicles into the camp because they could be partisans wearing German uniforms. And whenever he walked by, “they [the new SS men] stood at attention before him as if he were Hitler himself.” Oskar also ordered the machinery shutdown. He told his Schindlerjuden to act as though the camp were empty.¹⁴³

Yet how believable are these accounts? Though there will always be inconsistencies in any survivor’s account, there is general agreement that Oskar was desperate to rid himself of Leipold and the loyal SS unit that guarded Brünnlitz for fear of what they might do to the inmates if they were ordered to liquidate the camp. Itzhak Stern said that everyone in Brünnlitz was convinced that the “German leadership would attempt to liquidate them just before the end in some way or another.”¹⁴⁴ Moreover, some of Schindler’s Jews gave accounts of Schindler’s role in the removal of Leipold that agree with the general thrust of the story provided by Stern and Müller-Madej. And as strange as it sounds, the story about Generalfeldmarschall Schörner is not that far-fetched. By the end of April or early May 1945, when Leipold and the original SS detachment finally left for the front, Brünnlitz sat at the edge of a German salient into the Russian lines that would have provided Schörner with a logical, protected place for his command headquarters. Though Soviet forces would ultimately force him westward to an enclave between Pardubice and Prague, it is quite possible that the ruthless and aggressive Schörner, worried and angered over explosions so near to his mobile command post, might very well have stormed into Schindler’s factory to see what was going on. And what about Oskar’s showing up on the factory floor in his Nazi Party uniform? Schindler occasionally wore the standard four-pocketed brown gabardine Nazi Party uniform to impress German military, SS, and government officials. If he put it on after he returned from delivering Leipold and his SS team to the nearby front, it was probably to give the new SS contingent, which was now under the command of a lowly SS-Scharführer, Motzek, a sense of Oskar’s newfound authority.¹⁴⁵

But getting rid of Leipold and Brünnlitz’s original SS contingent was not the only thing that Oskar did to protect his Jews during the final weeks of the war. He also created and armed a secret Jewish underground force within the camp. Well before liberation, Schindler began to stockpile illegal arms. He got the weapons from HSSPF Max Rausch in return for a diamond for Rausch’s wife. Schindler’s arsenal consisted of rifles, machine guns, a few pistols, and some hand grenades. The idea was to build a secret camp defense force around workers and inmates who had military service. According to Itzhak Stern, Oskar created a committee that included Schindler, Stern, Hildegest, an Austrian who worked for Oskar and had once been in Dachau for his anti-Nazi writings, and a Polish engineer, Pawlink, to plan and lead the underground group. Uri (Urysz) Bejski, the younger brother of Moshe Bejski, was in charge of storing the arms. Stern said that the secret group planned a coup centered around dressing the underground members in SA uniforms. They would then enter the village of Brünnlitz and cut off all communications with the factory. Their biggest problem, Stern said, was finding shoes to fit each underground team member.¹⁴⁶

Victor Lewis, who was a member of Schindler’s Brünnlitz defense force, said the unit had contacts with the Czech underground, which also supplied the Jews with weapons. Lewis said the initial goal of this group was to shoot Leipold when he tried to liquidate the camp. The Czechs said they would try to help the Brünnlitz defense unit if the camp was attacked but that for the most part the Schindler Jews would have to defend themselves.¹⁴⁷ Lewis said that the secret Brünnlitz defense squad consisted of thirty men subdivided into units of five men each. As new men were brought into the unit they were asked to recommend others. Lewis suggested Joe (Josef) Lipshutz and Joe (Josef) Jonas; Richard (Ryyszard) Rechen, who would later help the Schindlers escape, recruited Lewis Fagen into the Brünnlitz underground. Victor Lewis explained that Schindler wanted people in the unit who were “mentally tough” to insure that if they were caught, they would not reveal the names of the other members of the group. Everything was kept very secret and few people knew the names of the members of the six squads. In fact, Victor Lewis said he did not know who was in charge of his particular squad until the end of the war, when he learned it was Leopold “Poldek” Page. For the most part, Lewis said, “I was with strangers.” To insure the strength and health of the unit, Oskar made sure that no one in the unit was malnourished. When things became desperate, Schindler brought a horse into the camp for the underground group to eat.¹⁴⁸

Lewis Fagen was responsible for safeguarding some of the unit’s weapons, which were stored “under huge bales of wire in an electrical transformer station.” His job was to make sure the German staff did not find the arms. And because one of the German supervisors lived in the transformer station with his wife and child, Fagen’s job was made doubly hard. Fagen said that every time the German supervisor got near the bales of wire, his “heart stopped.” As the war drew to a close, the Czechs told the Brünnlitz squad to began their armed uprising. Once it started, the Czechs promised, they would come in and help. Schindler, who was coordinating these efforts, took out ten rifles and lined them up against the wall for dispersal to the Brünnlitz underground.¹⁴⁹ Leopold “Poldek” Page said that Oskar told the leaders of the unit, “Look, when this moment comes, you have to stand up, maybe you will get killed,” but added that they could not execute everyone in the camp. It would, he said, be “physically impossible” because when the SS began the executions, the Jewish prisoners would fight back. Some Jews would die in the fighting, but not everyone.¹⁵⁰ Fortunately, an uprising never took place because the SS guards left before the Russians took over the camp. When they had gone, the Brünnlitz underground took control of the camp and ordered everyone to stay inside because German units were still operating in the area. The underground group was now in charge of camp security.¹⁵¹

As part of his factory defense plan, Oskar also had radios put into the offices where his most prominent Jews worked. Stern said that this insured they were “always informed about the latest developments in the war.” Elsewhere in the camp, Oskar arranged to have his car radios periodically repaired. This insured that the camp’s two radio technicians, Zenon Senwic and Artur Rabner, could listen to one of the radios, particularly the illegal broadcasts of the BBC, and share what they heard with other prisoners. According to Dr. Moshe Bejski, each day Senwic would plug his earphone into Schindler’s radio and listen to the 2:00 P.M. BBC broadcast. After a while, Senwic was worried that he had kept the radio too long and told Schindler it was repaired. Oskar replied, “Don’t worry, I have another radio to repair.”¹⁵² A glass partition separated Stern’s office from the German civilian staff’s office. He and Pemper ran a wire from their office into the German office and hooked it up to the radio there. This enabled them to listen to German broadcasts. Stern also said in his 1956 report to Yad Vashem that the inmates began the construction of their own radio station in the final days of the war.¹⁵³ Sol Urbach remembered listening to the BBC while working on Schindler’s villa. Occasionally, he explained, their SS guard would fall asleep. Sol and his coworker, Max Blasenstein, would then sneak behind the radio and “fiddle with it until [they] got the BBC.”¹⁵⁴

But Oskar did more than just worry about protecting the lives of his Schindlerjuden during the confusing final days of the war. He also concerned himself with their wellbeing once the war was over. In the final months of the war, he arranged, through a series of bribes, to purchase eighteen truckloads of various types of wool and other goods from a nearby Kriegsmarine (navy) depot. The shipment included navy-colored wool and khaki material as well as thread, shoes, leather, and other materials. Oskar’s idea was to give each inmate enough material to make two suits, coats, underwear, and other clothing articles. The idea, he explained, was to have them “fitted out [properly] for their first steps as liberated people.” Rena Finder told me that after Oskar left Brünnlitz on May 9, each inmate was given 3 meters of fabric, a pair of men’s shoes, and a bottle of vodka. Each Schindler Jew found different uses for these goods. Victor Lewis added that the inmates were also given leather and scissors. It was apparent that Oskar wanted the prisoners not only to have new clothes but also items for trading and selling.¹⁵⁵

As Oskar Schindler made final preparations for the defense of the camp, the Third Reich imploded from within. At about 3:30 P.M. on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler and his mistress, Eva Braun, committed suicide in the Führerbunker in Berlin as Soviet artillery bombarded Hitler’s Reich Chancellery. The day before his suicide, Hitler appointed Großadmiral (Grand Admiral) Karl Dönitz to be his successor as head of state and the military with the title of Reich President. Dönitz, who was in Plön, near the Baltic Sea, did not learn of his appointment until early the next day. That evening, he broadcast the news of Hitler’s “heroic death” fighting to defend the capital. The following day, German forces in Berlin surrendered to the Russians. Dönitz, now headquartered in Flensburg, near the Danish border, hoped in the final days of the war to do as Germany had done at the end of World War I—preserve the territorial integrity of the Third Reich and the Wehrmacht. But the Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight David Eisenhower, refused to consider anything but unconditional surrender. On May 6, Dönitz sent Chief of the Wehrmacht Command Staff (Chef des Wehrmachtführungsstabs) Alfred Jodl to Reims, France, to negotiate with the Allied powers. Soon after Jodl arrived, Eisenhower insisted on an immediate unconditional German surrender. Eisenhower told Jodl that if he did not accept these terms, the Allies would begin new air raids over Germany. At 2:41 A.M. on May 7, 1945, Jodl signed an agreement accepting Eisenhower’s terms; a similar signing was held the next day for the Soviets in Berlin. Fighting was officially to cease at 12:01 P.M. on May 9. May 8 was declared V.E. (Victory in Europe) Day.¹⁵⁶

When news of the end of the war in Europe slowly trickled through the camp, it seemed to have little impact on most of Schindler’s Jews because they still worried about the heavy presence of Germans in the area. Stella Müller-Madej remembered the heavy rumble of German trucks and armor on the main road just outside the camp. Moreover, there was still heavy fighting nearby as Soviet forces pushed Schörner’s army to the west. The camp’s SS contingent became increasingly friendly with the prisoners and tried to explain to those who would listen that they had been drafted for guard service and had not harmed anyone. Thomas Keneally said that at noon on May 7, Schindler had Winston Churchill’s V.E. day speech piped into the factory over its loud speakers. Churchill did not make any speeches on May 7, though he did make two on May 8, V.E. day. The first was to the gathered crowds in front of the Houses of Parliament, and the second, a longer version of the public speech, was given later that day to the House of Commons. Few of the Schindler Jews understood English, so the speech did not seem to mean much to many of them.¹⁵⁷

But what did matter was the imminent departure of Oskar and Emilie Schindler. Mietek Pemper said that the Schindler Jews had to convince Oskar to leave and that he did not think the Soviets would hurt him. Oskar, though, told Fritz Lang that he was already familiar with “the methods of the Russians” because he had been one of the last people to leave Kraków amd Mährisch Ostrau before the Red Army took over. He explained that he was also “not keen on being pestered by that club [the Soviets].” But Oskar was also concerned about the Czechs. He said that he had already had a “small foretaste” of the “Czech way of doing things,” a reference to his 1938 arrest and imprisonment by Czech authorities, and had no desire to receive “further demonstrations of their kindness.”¹⁵⁸

What happened next is the stuff of film legend. In Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Oskar walks into Josef Leipold’s office as the commandant was listening to one of Winston Churchill’s May 8 speeches. By that time, of course, Leipold had been at the front for a week. Regardless, Oskar then supposedly says, “I think it is time the guards came into the factory.” From this moment on, just about everything in the film’s final scenes is fictional. Once the inmates were gathered on the factory floor, Oskar delivered his farewell speech. This was not the first time they had come together to celebrate something important with Oskar. On New Year’s day, the Schindler women had presented Oskar and Emilie with a hand-made steel bouquet and sung a Polish song, “Sto Lat” (A Hundred Years):

On April 28, 1945, the prisoners also had a birthday party for Oskar.¹⁶⁰ But the gathering on May 8 was a bittersweet victory celebration combined with a farewell to Oskar and Emilie.

Oskar’s real speech, which he wrote beforehand, was transcribed by two stenographers, Mrs. M. Waldmann and Frau Berger. The speech that Oskar actually gave that night and the one in Schindler’s List were as different as night and day. One of the few things they had in common was the opening line noting the unconditional surrender. In the real speech, Oskar emphasized the tone of humaneness and justice that Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, who had accepted the surrender of German forces in northern Europe four days earlier, asked to be observed towards the defeated Germans. If there was to be retribution, Oskar stated, it should be done “by those people who will be authorized to do so.” In the short speech, Oskar tried to assure the gathered Jews that not all Germans were responsible for their fate. And though he mentioned that they were about to begin searching for their families, he would have been far too sensitive to state, as he did in Schindler’s List, that in most cases [they would not] find them.”¹⁶¹

Oskar spent much of the rest of the real speech reminding the Schindler Jews of all that he had done for them during the war. He also thanked Itzhak Stern, Mietek Pemper, J. F. Daubek, and “a few others, who, by fulfilling their task… looked death in the eye” and “thought and cared about all.” At the end of his talk, Oskar reemphasized the importance of “vigilance and order” and reminded the Schindlerjuden again to make “humane and just decisions.” He then thanked his German coworkers “for their restless sacrifice for [his] efforts” as well as the current SS contingent, who had been “ordered to serve [there],” for their “extraordinary humanness and correctness.” The speech ended with a request for three minutes of silence for those “countless victims” who died during the war’s “atrocious years.”¹⁶²

Oskar also mentioned in the speech that he would leave Brünnlitz at 12:05 A.M. on May 9. But before he left, the Brünnlitz Jews presented Oskar with a gold ring and a statement. The statement, signed by Itzhak Stern, Abraham Bankier, Leib Salpeter, Dr. Dawid Schlang, Natan Stern, and Dr. Chaim Hilfsteim attested that from 1942 onwards, Oskar Schindler had done everything he could “to save the lives of the largest number of Jews possible.” The statement added that Schindler “took care of our subsistence and during the entire time in the factory not one person died an unnatural death.” It went into detail about the transfer of Oskar’s factory to Brünnlitz and stated that because of this they owed their lives “exclusively to Dir. [Director] Schindler’s efforts and humane treatment.” Bankier, Stern, and the other authors considered the successful transfer from Kraków to Brünnlitz “a unique case in the entire territory of the Reich.” The statement also explained in detail Schindler’s efforts to save the Jews on the Golleschau transport. The camp’s Jewish leaders ended their testimony by asking that those who read it “help Director Schindler in any way,” and especially requested that he be allowed “to build up a new existence” because he had sacrificed his wealth to help his Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz.¹⁶³

The Schindler Jews also gave Oskar a going away present—a solid gold ring which, according to Keneally, was inscribed with the following phrase from the Talmud:

In Schindler’s List, Itzhak Stern tells Oskar that the inscription, which was in Hebrew on the inside of the ring, read

The gold for the ring came from Simon Jeret, whom Cantor Mose Taubé described as an “extremely religious and wealthy lumber dealer who sacrificed a gold tooth for Schindler’s ring.”¹⁶⁶ Keneally said the gold tooth was extracted by Hersch Licht, who had been a dentist in Kraków, though the only dentist in the camp was Dr. Aleksander Schubert. Dr. Moshe Bejski said that Jeret had an entire gold bridge taken out of his mouth for the ring, which Licht made. Dr. Bejski added that “during the hardships which Schindler encountered after the war he lost the ring.” When the Israeli judge later asked Oskar what had happened to the ring, Schindler replied, “It went for schnaps.” In 1962, Licht made a copy of the ring, which was then “symbolically offered again to Schindler.”¹⁶⁷

Few of the Schindlerjuden that I interviewed remembered anything about Oskar’s departure. It was certainly nothing as dramatic as depicted in Schindler’s List. The idea that Oskar collapsed sobbing into Itzhak Stern’s arms and bemoaned his failure to save more Jews is preposterous. Oskar was proud of all he had done to save Brünnlitz’s Jews and said so in his speech earlier that evening. In fact, given the increasing problems he had in finding food for his camp complex, it is amazing that he continued to take Jews into Brünnlitz when he knew that this would diminish Brünnlitz’s tenuous food supply.¹⁶⁸

Thomas Keneally said that before Oskar left Brünnlitz, two prisoners spent the afternoon taking out the upholstery in the ceiling and door panels of Oskar’s Mercedes. When they had finished, they filled them with “small sacks of the Herr Direktor’s diamonds.” As midnight approached, Oskar gave Abraham Bankier the key to the storeroom containing the goods he wanted distributed to the workers. Then, Keneally wrote, Oskar and Emilie put on striped prisoners’ uniforms and got in their Mercedes, which was driven by one of the eight Jews who had volunteered to accompany them to the American zone.¹⁶⁹

If what Keneally wrote was true, it meant that by the end of the war, Oskar Schindler still had a great deal of money left, given the space in a Mercedes’ door panels and ceiling. This completely contradicts what Oskar said about his final assets immediately after the war. He claimed that he had to bear all the costs of running Brünnlitz, RM 705,000 ($282,000), which emptied his bank account. Moreover, he listed personal losses of RM 620,000 ($248,000) in his detailed Lastenausgleich claim filed after the war. Given the thorough investigations that Lastenausgleich officials did of such claims, these figures are probably accurate. Of this amount, Oskar listed a loss of RM 60,000 ($24,000) for the Daubek villa and its belongings, including clothes, a RM 10,000 ($4,000) loss from the three-room apartment in Mährisch Ostrau, and a RM 250,000 ($100,000) loss from the “private capital of the proprietor and his wife, jewels, etc.” In another part of his claim, he listed an additional loss of RM 300,000 ($120,000) from a “deposit in [his] favor” in the Deutsche Bank in Zwittau as a result of the blocking of this account on May 8, 1945. This means that counting the funds he spent to operate Brünnlitz from October 1944 until May 1945, Oskar Schindler lost or spent RM 1,325,000 ($530,000) during this period, a vast sum of money in those days. It is hard to imagine that he still had a collection of diamonds so large that it would fill the door and ceiling cavities of a Mercedes.¹⁷⁰

Emilie totally discounted the idea that the two of them left Brünnlitz with a “fortune in diamonds,” though she later admitted that Oskar did have a “huge diamond” hidden in the glove compartment of the Horch that they escaped in.¹⁷¹ Yet it is still possible that Oskar did escape with some diamonds, though not the amount described by Keneally. Moreover, given the uncertainty of their journey, it is hard to imagine that Oskar would have hidden the last of his wealth in such an obvious place. In all likelihood, Oskar was driving what remained of his wartime valuables, not a Mercedes but his beloved blue Horch.

The Schindler party that left Brünnlitz soon after midnight on May 9, 1945, included a truck driven by Schindlerjude Ryszard Rechen. In the cab with Rechen was his future wife, Esther, and Schindler’s mistress, Marta. Several other Schindler Jews, including Risha Grehen, Willim Schantz, Paul Degen and several German office workers, including Marta’s brother, rode in the back of the truck along with the group’s luggage and boxes full of cigarettes, vodka, and other trade goods. In fleeing from the Russians, the Schindler party faced a harrowing journey to the American zone. And if Oskar did leave Brünnlitz with any valuables, they were lost in the desperate effort to reach the American lines.¹⁷²