Oskar Schindler

DURING HIS TIME IN KRAKÓW, OSKAR SCHINDLER BECAME AN incredibly successful businessman, in part because of the genius of Abraham Bankier. But Oskar’s success was shadowed by the growing horror of the German occupation of Kraków and the desperate lives of the Jewish workers with whom he came in contact every day. From 1941 to 1943, they suffered from the threat of deportation to the growing collection of death camps such as nearby Auschwitz, which was the principal killing center of the Final Solution. Oskar’s principal Kraków factory, Emalia, was only a few blocks from the ghetto, and he was able to observe firsthand the horrors and degradation of ghetto life. He responded by treating his Jewish workers with kindness and dignity, which in turn attracted the glare of the Gestapo.

Yet how successful was Oskar Schindler as a businessman in Kraków from 1939 to 1944? According to the detailed financial statement that he prepared immediately after the war in Konstanz, Germany, at the insistence of one of his Schindlerjude, Rabbi Menachem Levertov, Oskar estimated that the revenue from his kitchenware products at Emalia was about RM 15 million ($6 million) and another RM 0.5 million ($200,000) from Emalia’s modest armaments production facility. In a document filed with German authorities from Buenos Aires in 1954, Oskar broke down his annual revenues for enamelware sales from 1940 through 1944. He said that he sold Zł 2.2 million ($687,500) in enamelware in 1940, Zł 2.6 million ($812,500) in 1941, Zł 3 million ($937,600) in 1942, Zł 3.5 million ($1,093,750) in 1943, and Zł 2.6 million ($812,500) in 1944, his last year of production in Emalia. These figures, which Oskar submitted in 1954, are considerably smaller than the figures that he put into his 1945 financial report, which he admitted he had created “out of my memory, without documents or files.”¹

One document in Oskar’s Lastenausgleich file provides a more in-depth look at Emalia’s financial affairs. The firm’s 1943 year-end report, completed on May 15, 1944, and signed by Schindler himself, showed that Emalia had a year-end balance of Zł 7,601,054.98 ($2,375,329.60) and net proceeds of Zł 6,744,532.25 ($2,107,666.30). Oskar had undertaken an ambitious expansion program when he took over Emalia in 1939 and it showed up on his ledgers. By the end of 1943, Schindler was heavily in debt. He owed various banks, creditors, and other lenders Zł 3,849,411.11 ($1,202,940.90). He also had other debts totaling almost Zł 1.5 million ($468,750). A good portion of this was simply listed as part of his “Privatkonto” (private account). He also had other obligations, including debts to the “SS u. Polizeiführer” (Zł 118,360; $36,987.50) and the SS-run “Judenfonds” (Zł 35,832.61; $11,558.93). These were payments owed the SS for Jewish labor and support for 1943.²

It is difficult to get a clear picture of Emalia’s revenues, debts and other expenses because most records for its operations no longer exist. Moreover, Emalia, like all other businesses in the General Government, operated under two sets of books. Those used for Emalia’s 1943 report were the “legal” books; another set existed for the black market economy, the principal source of revenue for Schindler. These “legal” books do tell that Schindler bore tremendous costs and obligations. Some of these are listed in his 1943 report, but because this file is incomplete, there is nothing to indicate the salaries he paid his Polish workers. He used Polish laborers almost exclusively to produce his enamelware and Jewish workers in Emalia’s armaments shop. This meant that Polish workers were far more valuable to Oskar than his Jewish workers. He used his profits from the production of enamelware to pay the RM 2.64 million ($1,056,000) and “the Jews of [his] factory, in order to secure their survival and to ease their painful fate.”³

It is also hard to determine how much Schindler spent on his Polish workers. Remember that he continued to operate his Emalia factory exclusively with 650 Polish workers until the Soviets occupied Kraków in January 1945. At his peak of operations in 1944, Oskar employed from 700 to 750 Polish workers at Emalia. He used another 350 Polish workers at his Proksziner vodka bottle plant across the street from Emalia until it closed in 1943. We have no record of what Schindler paid his Polish workers because there were two wage scales for Polish workers in the General Government. Official wage scales were frozen at prewar levels of Zł 200 to Zł 300 ($62.50 to $93.75) a month, though unofficial wages, which were the ones probably paid by Schindler, ranged from Zł 8 to Zł 35 ($2.50 to $10.94) an hour. It took Schindler three months to get Emalia up and running after he acquired it in November 1939. He initially employed seven Jews and 250 Poles, though he increased the size of both work forces substantially over the next few years.⁴

Given the importance of his Polish workers to his initial financial success, it should come as no surprise that some of his harshest conflicts with General Government officialdom at first concerned his Polish workers. He told Fritz Lang, for example, that he constantly complained about the lack of adequate food and consumer goods for his Polish workers. He wrote detailed letters of complaint to SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe, who replaced Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger as the HSSPF (Höhreren SS- und Polizeiführer; Higher SS and Police Leader) for the General Government in 1943. According to Oskar, he complained about the growing “superman” syndrome among the General Government’s bureaucrats; they “would soon ruin the economy” with regulations that would “murder the cow they intend to milk.” Koppe later told Oskar that he would not tolerate continued “crass criticism of his agents and their actions,” and the only thing that kept him from putting Oskar in a concentration camp were his “well-known positive contributions to the economy.”⁵

Evidently such a warning did little to deter Schindler, who continued to protest labor conditions for his Polish workers and the deportation of Polish workers to the Reich. He also helped some of his “Aryan” Polish workers or their friends obtain their freedom from detention or POW camps, helped stop their deportation to Germany as forced laborers, and was even able to persuade German authorities to return some of their apartments. Oskar thought he was protected not only by his own fearlessness and impudence but also by his expertise, which had helped get him elected head of the sheet metal processing industries organization (Fachgruppe Blechverarbeitenden Industrien).⁶

In many ways, it would seem foolish openly to criticize the SS, particularly as the Gestapo arrested him three times during the war for bribery and “fraternization” with Poles and Jews. His last arrest in 1944 was the most serious because it involved substantiated charges that Oskar had bribed “the SS leader with a sum that exceeded two hundred thousand słoty [sic].” In his 1945 financial statement, Oskar said that he spent about Zł 550,000 ($171,875) bribing SS officials such as Göth, SS-Oberführer Julian Scherner, the HSSPF in the Kraków District, SS-Obersturmführer Rolf Czurda of the SD, and SS-Untersturmführer Leonhard John, the deputy commandant of the Płaszów camp. Göth received about half the Zł 550,000 ($171,875), so it is quite possible that Scherner, as Kraków’s HSSPF, was the unnamed “SS leader” who took in excess of Zł 200,000 ($62,500) in bribes from Oskar.⁷

Yet Oskar seemed fearless when it came to confronting Koppe or Krüger about matters that affected the financial well-being of his factories. This is probably why he got away with it. He evidently knew his boundaries when he wrote his letters of protest, and he likely wrote them in the context of worrying about policies that hurt the economy and thus the war effort. And there is probably a good chance that Koppe and Krüger both received bribes from Schindler. Though he never mentions Koppe or Krüger by name, Oskar does say that in addition to the Zł 550,000 he spent to bribe Göth and others, he also spent “several hundred thousand Zł [złotys]” for “‘smaller’ presents and countless compensations, which were demanded by SS-officials in exchange for small favors.” For these small favors he gave out watches, cameras, saddles, boots, and shoes, though in three instances he gave SS officials a BMW sports car, an Adler limousine, and a Mercedes Benz convertible. It is doubtful that the cars went to lower-level SS officials.⁸

Emalia

Oskar Schindler operated Emalia (Deutsche Emailwarenfabrick Oskar Schindler) from November 1939 until January 1945. Oskar made few references to the running and production of the factory after the war except in the context of his various claims for compensation. But one can piece together something about the nature of the factory and its complex from these claims as well as in documents and factory plans found in the Lastenausgleich archives in Bayreuth, the famed Schindler Koffer (suitcase files) at the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. There is also documentation on Emalia in Polish court records in the Archiwum Pavstwowe in Kraków and the Schindler files in the archives of the Joint in New York. Though there are still parts of Emalia on its old site on ul. Lipowa 4 in Kraków, not much of the old factory remains except for the storied front gate and upstairs office complex. The original factory smokestack was taken down in the late 1990s and many of Emalia’s buildings were torn down and replaced by newer structures after World War II.

When Oskar acquired the lease on the bankrupt Jewish factory, Rekord, Ltd., on November 14, 1939, two buildings stood on the site: the factory itself, which included a separate 45-meter-high brick smokestack, and a warehouse. The original complex, all built in 1935, fronted ul. Lipowa. During the next four years, Schindler enlarged his factory. In 1940, he built a pay office and a medical-dental outpatient clinic, a canteen and workers’ eating room, and a joint garage-stable. In 1941 and 1942, he erected a large building for stamping and pressing and for storing sheet metal and tools. In 1942, Oskar added the office complex with its gated factory entranceway and glass-enclosed staircase. This complex is about all that remains of the original Schindler factory. The new administration building included Emalia’s central office, a small guard and porter room just inside the gate, the central telephone office, the factory co-op, a chemical storage room, a showroom, a new pay office, the employees’ kitchen and dining room, the director’s office, a conference room, and an apartment for Oskar.⁹

In 1942 and 1943, Schindler added a building for two new low-pressure boilers. During this time he also signed a contract with Siemens Bauunion G.m.b.H. to begin constructing a large hangar-style stamping facility. Siemens began work on the facility in the fall of 1943 and completed it the following summer at a cost of Zł 248,071 ($77,522).¹⁰ As the tide of war changed, Schindler became more concerned about protecting his considerable investment. In 1949, he prepared a report as part of his ongoing efforts to obtain compensation for his lost factories and personal wealth. He based the estimates in this report on another document he completed on May 6, 1945, just two days before he fled Brünnlitz to avoid capture by the Red Army. He estimated the value of Emalia at DM 1,910,000 ($573,573.57).¹¹

On July 10, 1943, he took out two insurance policies with Die Versicherungs-Gesellschaft “Silesia” A.G. for Zł 4,110,000 ($1,284,375) to protect his factory from “Brand, Blitzschlag und Explosion” (fire, lightning, and explosion). One policy ran from June 7, 1943, to the same date in 1950; the second provided coverage from 1943 to 1953. His annual premium for both policies was Zł 16,113.60 ($5,035.50). On February 11, 1944, Schindler increased his coverage on both policies to Zł 5,137,500 ($1,605,469). However, reflecting the uncertainty of the times, the premiums, Zł 2,167.49 ($677.31), covered only from January 15, 1944 to June 7, 1944.¹²

Oskar’s building program intensified after he formally bought Emalia in 1942. And this was no easy task, given the nature of the German bureaucracy. Emalia was the property of the Polish regional trade court in Kraków. Schindler, who initially leased the factory in November 1939, worked with the court’s legal representatives, first Dr. Roland Goryczko and later Dr. Bolesław Zawisza. As part of his original lease deal, Oskar bought the former Rekord, Ltd.’s original equipment in early 1940 for Zł 28,000 ($8,750) and paid the court a quarterly rent of Zł 2,400 ($750).¹³

At first, Oskar seemed satisfied with his lease agreement, though when he began to enjoy considerable profits from his investment he became interested in owning Emalia outright. Oskar had cleverly leased Emalia from the Polish trade court just two months before a law requiring the compulsory seizure of Jewish property went into effect. Consequently, Oskar, but more precisely, the court’s legal representative, then Dr. Goryczko, could argue that because Rekord, Ltd., once a Jewish business, had gone bankrupt in the summer of 1939 and was now being leased by a German, it could never legally fall under the requirements of the January 15, 1940, compulsory Jewish property seizure law.¹⁴

Oskar signed a new lease with the Polish trade court on January 31, 1942, but within a few months moved to buy Emalia outright. This was to be done at a public auction, which was announced first for April 21, 1942, but was delayed until June 26, 1942. The reason for the change in date was to insure that all appropriate documents were in place indicating that the factory was not eligible for seizure as a Jewish factory by the Trustee Office. Fortunately, Dr. Zawisza, now the Polish trade court’s Emalia representative, had already recommended to the court that Oskar be allowed to buy the property. This meant securing statements from Nathan Wurzel that he was not the former owner of the factory and had no claims against it. Once Zawisza secured these statements, the auction could go forward. Everything was prearranged, obviously with the help of some well-placed bribes, and Oskar Schindler bought Emalia from the Polish trade court for Zł 254,674.66 ($79,585.83) in cash on September 16, 1942. Given that he insured Emalia for over Zł 4 million ($1.25 million) the following year, the purchase would seem like quite a bargain. But remember that by the time that Oskar bought the factory outright in 1942, he had already invested heavily in new equipment and buildings. The funds from the sale of the former Rekord, Ltd. to Oskar Schindler were deposited into a bank in Kraków. Rekord, Ltd.’s creditors could then apply to the court for payment of the company’s debts.¹⁵

Origins of the Schindler Legend

But Oskar Schindler did more than build a factory to make enamelware. After the closing of the Kraków ghetto in 1943, he arranged with Amon Göth, the commandant of Płaszów, the new forced labor camp just two miles from Emalia in the outskirts of Kraków, to build a Płaszów sub-camp at Emalia. But why and how? Embedded in the answers to these questions is a relationship between two men that came to represent opposite moral touchstones in the Holocaust-Oskar Schindler, the “angel” of Emalia and Brünnlitz, and Amon Göth, one of the true monsters in Nazi Germany’s devastating war against the Jews. The question of why Oskar Schindler went to the great trouble of building, at his own expense, a large sub-camp with barracks and other facilities not only for his own Jewish workers but also for Jews who worked in neighboring factories lies at the center of the Schindler story. The seed for the Schindler legend took root at Emalia. By the time Oskar Schindler began to plan the transfer of part of his factory and its Jewish workers to Brünnlitz in the summer and fall of 1944, he was fully committed not only to saving his Jewish workers but those from other factories.

But when did Schindler make the decision to undertake the salvation of his Jewish workers? After the war, Oskar remained very close to his former Schindlerjuden; in some ways it seemed, particularly in the immediate years after the war, that he could not function without their support and protection. The most important immediate postwar document about this is Schindler’s July 1945 financial statement, in which he talks extensively about his efforts to save his Jewish workers. Written at the prodding of Rabbi Levertov, one of his most prominent Schindlerjuden, Oskar was no doubt trying to depict himself as someone deeply committed to an ongoing campaign to help Jews from 1939 onward. And though there is no question that Emalia’s success was linked to the genius of Abraham Bankier and others, it is difficult to pinpoint a moment when Oskar Schindler decided to work solely to save his Jewish workers. More than likely, it was a gradual decision. Nonetheless, Oskar was motivated for business as well as moral reasons. At the end of the war, he told Mietek Pemper, one of his closest Jewish associates during and after the war, that when the war ended, he hoped the Allies would create a Czechoslovakian state as they had done after World War I. Oskar’s dream was that his factory at Brünnlitz could supply a war-devastated Europe with pots and pans, his Jewish workers at the core of his labor force.¹⁶ So in the end, Oskar Schindler combined his ethical concern over the fate of Jews in the Holocaust with some impractical business dreams.

It should be remembered that the use of Jewish labor in Kraków was good business. A factory owner had to pay Jewish workers much less than their Polish counterparts. Moreover, Jewish workers were more dependable and willing to work longer hours. But when did Oskar really begin to use large numbers of Jewish workers? He would have us believe that the large-scale use of Jews at Emalia began in 1940 and that by late 1942 almost half of his work force were Jews. But Sol Urbach said that when he was rounded up by the SS and transported to Schindler’s nearby factory in the fall of 1942, only a handful of Jews worked at Emalia, not the 550 claimed by Oskar. Edith Wertheim said that when Schindler opened his sub-camp at Emalia in 1943, only about thirty women were working for him. However, Oskar probably included 450 Jews from neighboring factories in the figures he cited for the number of Jews he housed in his sub-camp. Consequently, it is possible that he mistakenly thought of these numbers as his own workers because he housed and fed them, though their expenses were paid by other factory owners. This could possibly explain the discrepancy between Sol Urbach’s estimate and Oskar’s estimate of the number of Jews working at Emalia in 1942–1943.¹⁷

But more important than this question is the motivation behind Schindler’s efforts to help Jewish workers. By the time Sol Urbach came to work for Oskar in 1942, there were already signs of Oskar’s sympathy for his Jewish workers. According to Sol, with the exception of being forced to walk to and from Emalia under SS guard, everything was relatively normal there. Sol and the other Jews rounded up at Plac Zgody continued to live in the ghetto, which was only a few blocks from Emalia’s entrance, until it was closed on March 13–14, 1943. Each morning, Sol’s team of Schindlerjuden, armed with their Kennkarten (identity cards) and their precious work permits, the Blauscheine, would meet at the Podgórze Square gate at about seven to await the two-man SS team that would escort them to Emalia. In December 1942, the SS replaced the Kennkarten with a Judenkarte. Each Jewish worker leaving the ghetto also had to wear a large, prominently displayed “W,” “R,” or “Z” patch on their outer clothing. The large patches, which were triangular, had SS and police stamps on them. The “W” patch stood for Wehrmacht, indicating that the wearer worked in a factory that produced goods for the military. The “R” stood for Rüstung, meaning labor for an armaments-producing firm, and the “Z” for Zivil, which indicated that the wearer worked in a civilian industry or in agriculture.¹⁸

Sol and his fellow Jewish laborers worked long twelve-hour shifts. They were given periodic breaks and their meals, which they ate at their work site alongside Polish workers. The meals consisted of soup and bread. Emalia’s Jews were integrated into the larger Polish work force but, with the exception of Bankier and a few others, worked as common laborers supervised by Poles. There were no SS guards at Emalia when the ghetto was open. Sol, working as a carpenter’s assistant, moved freely about the Emalia complex, which, he said, did not initially have a “camp-like atmosphere.” Emalia’s main item of production was a ten-inch round pot. The pots began as long sheets of steel that were then cut into large round circles and pressed into pots. Handles were added to the pots, which were then dipped into enamel and baked in an oven.¹⁹

This healthy atmosphere in Oskar’s factory is the first sign we have of Schindler’s attitudes towards his Jewish workers. They were treated with dignity. But it could also be argued that, from a business point of view, a well-treated worker will produce more. Were there other factors that might have affected Schindler’s drift into a more protective attitude toward his Jewish workers, particularly in 1942? As we shall see, several developments had a direct and indirect impact on Oskar’s thinking about the fate of his Schindlerjuden.

Oskar and the Gestapo

The first was Oskar’s arrest by the Gestapo in late 1941 or early 1942. Oskar had already run afoul of the Gestapo a year earlier because of the break-in to his apartment in Mährisch Ostrau by a Polish thief in 1939. As we have seen, the Gestapo questioned Schindler extensively about this in 1940 and arrested him three times from 1941 to 1944. Oskar never said much about his arrests, which he referred to as “unpleasantries,” but he considered the last one the worst. His third incarceration is also the only one mentioned by Emilie in her memoirs. According to Janina Olszewska, the office manager at Oskar’s enamelware showroom, Schindler was first arrested by the Gestapo at the end of 1941 and taken to Gestapo headquarters on ul. Pomorska 2, which is in Nowa Wies, several miles from Schindler’s factory. The building that housed the hated Gestapo was reopened as the Museum of the Fight and Martyrdom of the Poles in 1939–1945 (Walka i M\czevstwo Polakow w latach 1939–1945) in 1982. On the outside of the building, which must be entered from the rear, is a simple but graphic flower-bedecked memorial to the Poles tortured and murdered there during the war. In the basement are the three cells for those who were about to be interrogated by Gestapo agents. Their walls are covered with the names, prayers, and pleadings of the Gestapo’s victims.²⁰

Oskar said he was arrested because he was “fraternizing with Jews and Poles”; Janina added that he got into trouble because of his “strange contacts with the attaché of the German embassy in Turkey,” and other matters. Oskar had warned Janina that something might happen to him and told her that that if he ever was arrested, she should go immediately to his apartment and hide the contents in the upper right-hand drawer of his desk. Immediately after the Gestapo agents took him away, Janina went to his elegant apartment on Straszewskiego 7/2 and hid the drawer’s contents in his sofa. Oskar was released a few days later and laughed when he learned where Janina had hidden his secret documents.²¹

Oskar’s second arrest was in the spring of 1942 or 1943. A birthday celebration was held on the factory floor for Oskar, and several of his female workers, Christians and Jews, kissed him in front of everyone. Someone present at the April 28 birthday party reported the incident to the SS and the Gestapo. Several days later, two plainclothes Gestapo agents drove up to the factory and encountered Schindler as he crossed Emalia’s courtyard. “Are you Herr Schindler?” they asked. Oskar responded, “Who are you?” The two agents said nothing. Instead, one of them then showed Oskar his badge and said, “We would like to have you come with us for a little ride.” Oskar then asked the two men whether they had an arrest order. They said, “You can see about that later. Just come with us now.” Oskar warned the agents that if they took him without an arrest warrant, “it could turn out to be pretty unpleasant.” They replied, “We’ll take our chances on that.” To which Oskar countered, “Well, in that case, it’s a very nice day, and I feel like a ride, so I’ll go with you.” As the Gestapo car drove out of Emalia’s front gate, Oskar heard one of the German engineers who was a loyal Nazi sing a phrase from a German song that went “Well, all good things come to an end.”²²

Schindler was taken to the Gestapo’s Montelupich prison, one of the most feared in Poland. After a body search, Oskar was briefly interrogated and then thrown into a jail cell. Schindler concluded, based on the innocuous question the SS officer asked him during the brief interrogation, that they were simply holding him, “apparently for some higher-ups.” Oskar asked for an attorney and was told that they “would see about that later.” He shared a cell with a high-ranking SS officer and initially suspected that the officer was placed there as a spy, particularly when the officer explained that he was there because he had gone AWOL and had spent two days with a Polish girl. Oskar was suspicious and therefore very careful about what he said to his cell mate. Oskar later found out that the SS officer had been a legitimate prisoner and not a spy.²³

That evening, Oskar devised a plan to alert his friends about his plight and gain his release. Schindler, who had some money on him, asked the guard to buy him five bottles of vodka. He wrote the telephone numbers of several important Nazi officials on the money he gave the guard and told him that he could have three of the bottles if he telephoned each person on the bills. The guard was to bring back two bottles for Oskar and his cell mate to help them “pass the time” in their dirty cell. The guard evidently did what he was told and called the three names on Oskar’s list: Abwehr Major Plathe, General Maximillian Schindler of the Armaments Inspectorate, and Oskar’s secretary, Viktoria Klonowska, whom Schindler called Columbus. She was given the nickname because she had found a place in Kraków where Oskar and his friends “could go and drink and raise hell.”²⁴

The next day, HSSPF Julian Scherner called Schindler into his office and said, “You must be a very important man, Oskar, to have seventeen people call me in the course of the night to vouch for you, and to let you go free. I’ve been doing particularly nothing else but answering calls. What do you do that’s so useful, that you have all these friends?” Oskar responded, “Well, you know, none of us can really answer that.” Scherner told Schindler that he was free to go and that he could call for his car to pick him up. Oskar, however, “wanted a little revenge for this detention.” He said, “Oh, I couldn’t use the camp car, the gasoline for this purpose [his own car]—that wouldn’t be the right use of it, under the law. You brought me here, you’ll have to take me back. I want to go back the same way I came.” Scherner then ordered the same Gestapo agents who had brought Oskar to Montelupich to drive him back to Emalia in their Mercedes.²⁵

Though it would be hard to prove that his problems with the Gestapo had a major impact on his decision later to help his Jewish workers, there is no question that, particularly when combined with other developments in 1942 and 1943, it helped move him along this path. The Gestapo represented everything that Oskar disliked about the Nazi police state system. Presuming that his growing disaffection with Nazi Germany, particularly in relationship with his ties to Abwehr, affected his decision to work more aggressively to aid his Jewish workers, then his mistreatment by the Gestapo probably only strengthened his resolve to do this. Moreover, his arrests and brief incarcerations only intensified his own sensitivity towards the plight of his Schindlerjuden, who suffered from brutal SS abuse and imprisonment. Because the Gestapo and the SS were simply part of the same police state network, it is possible that Schindler cast his aid to Jews partly as a form of resistance to this system.

The May–June 1942 Aktion in the Kraków Ghetto

Other developments that probably affected Oskar’s attitudes towards the plight of Kraków’s Jews centered around the brutal SS roundups and transport of Kraków’s Jews to recently opened death camps in 1942. The first operation, which took place in March 1942, involved the roundup of about fifty Jewish intellectuals, who were deported to Auschwitz and death. But a much more thorough and brutally insidious Aktion took place between May 28 and June 8, 1942. In late May, the Germans sealed off the ghetto and, working with the members of the JSS (Jewish Self-Help Society; Jüdische Soziale Selbsthilfe), the only Jewish aid organization allowed to operate in the ghetto, began randomly to put a new labor stamp on the Kennkarten. The Gestapo then set up tables inside a former savings bank (Kasa Oszczednosci) and, working side-by-side with JSS representatives, decided who would have their Kennkarten stamped. People with specific trades theoretically got the stamp, though many of these decisions were made arbitrarily. Bribery and favoritism also played a role in who got a stamp and who did not. For the most part, people over fifty-five did not get a stamp. Those who did not receive the new stamp were to be deported to the recently opened Bełżec death camp, though the Germans were secretive about this aspect of their plan. Rumors quickly spread among Kraków’s Jews about open labor camps in the Ukraine where the deported would work on farms or “newly erected barrack towns where there were restaurants, libraries, and cinemas, accessible to all.” Moreover, so the rumor went, Jews were even paid in the new barrack towns.²⁶

By this time, there were a little more than 17,000 Jews in the ghetto, and another 2,000 lived there illegally without the Kennkarte. Part of the upcoming German Aktion was designed to reduce the size of the ghetto population and address the overcrowding situation. On June 1, the Gestapo ordered the Jewish OD under Symche Spira to go to each apartment in the ghetto and bring those without the new labor stamps to Plac Zgody in the early morning hours of June 2. Those who heeded the OD’s orders brought all their personal belongs with them in suitcases, bundles, and packages. They sweltered in the summer heat and many were overcome with fear about their fate.²⁷

As those selected for deportation arrived in the square, an SS film crew climbed to a balcony overlooking the square and began to film the scene. The Gestapo, aided by the Schutzpolizei and members of a Waffen SS unit, marched the group to the Kraków Płaszów rail station two miles away, where they were shipped to the Bełżec death camp seventy-five miles northeast of Kraków.²⁸

The Germans, however, were dissatisfied with the numbers deported on June 2, and began a much more brutal roundup on June 4. Armed German troops and police lined Plac Zgody, which looked more like a war zone than a gathering spot for deportees. For the first time, the Germans were joined by members of the Polish police (Polnische Polizei), or Blue police (Granatowa policija), who wore dark blue uniforms, and members of the Baudienst, a labor unit made up of Poles forced into labor by the Germans.²⁹ Pankiewicz described the roundup:

To insure greater compliance from the ghetto’s Jewish leadership during the June 4 roundup, the Germans dismissed and publicly humiliated the new head of the Judenrat, Dr. Artur Rosenzweig. He and his family were then forced to join the group of Jews about to be deported. Dr. Rosenzweig was replaced by David Gutter, a former magazine salesman. This put him in constant conflict with the most powerful figure in the ghetto, Symche Spira, a favorite of the Gestapo.³¹

What followed for those Jews gathered at Plac Zgody was a slow, brutal march to the Kraków-Płaszów rail station. The Germans kicked and beat them along the way and shot those who were too slow or feeble to make the two-mile march in the summer heat. According to Tadeusz Pankiewicz, their route was covered with dead bodies and blood. Because the march took place in broad daylight and followed ul. Wielicka, the only road to Płaszów, it was difficult to hide the tragedy that was unfolding along this long boulevard. When the new group of Jewish deportees reached the rail station, they were sent to Bełżec, where the Germans murdered them.³²

Two days later, the Germans ordered all Jews remaining in the ghetto to report to the offices of the JSS on Józefińska 18 to receive a new identity card, the Blauschein. The Gestapo oversaw the process and decided who would receive the new work card. Their decisions were arbitrary and had nothing to do with the recipients’ skills. The only thing that seemed to affect the Gestapo’s decisions were bribes funneled through Jewish cohorts such as Aleksander Förster and Symche Spira, or efforts by German factory owners to protect their skilled Jewish workers.³³

Jews who did not receive the Blauschein were then taken to the grounds of the Optima factory two blocks away. The Germans followed this up with a new decree that stated that anyone caught without a Blauschein would be shot on the spot. On the morning of June 8, the Germans began to march all the Jews at the Optima factory grounds to the Prokocim rail station two miles north of the Płaszów depot. Like Płaszów, the Prokocim station was then in a remote suburb of Kraków, which helped the Germans keep the deportation out of full public scrutiny. When the Kraków Jews got to the trains, they found other Jews from nearby towns already on board. The Gestapo took about thirty younger Jews off of the train cars before it left for Bełżec. These Jews were sent to the just-opened Julag I slave labor camp in nearby Płaszów.³⁴

All total, the Germans shipped 7,000 Jews to Bełżec from June 2 to 8, 1942. Though operational only since March 17, 1942, about 80,000 Jews had already been murdered at Bełżec by the time Kraków’s Jews arrived there in June. Ultimately, about 600,000 Jews, over a quarter of them from the Kraków region, would die at Bełżec before it closed at the end of 1942.³⁵

What impact did these deportations have on Oskar Schindler? For one thing, he was able to save Abraham Bankier and thirteen of his other Jewish workers from certain death on June 8. This event is depicted in one of the most poignant scenes in Schindler’s List, though Spielberg chose to have Liam Neeson save Itzhak Stern, the composite film character played by Ben Kingsley, instead of Bankier. Thomas Keneally more accurately portrayed this scene as well as the full horror of the June 1942 deportations. Basing his portrayal on Schindler’s account of these events, Keneally seems to have expanded greatly Schindler’s comments about what actually took place. According to Keneally, Bankier told Schindler that he and the other Schindlerjuden had forgotten to pick up their new Blauscheine from the Gestapo.³⁶ One did not “pick up” the Blauschein from the Gestapo. You stood in line and hoped you would get one. The only thing that helped one receive a Blauschein was bribery, close ties with the Jewish OD’s leadership, or intervention by a German factory owner. And it is hard to imagine that Oskar did not intervene to insure that Bankier got the Blauschein from the Gestapo.

So what really happened? Here is Oskar’s account:

This was all Oskar ever said about the incident. The key to what probably happened centers around one word in Oskar’s statement: arbitrary. There was no science to the last roundup in the Kraków ghetto in the summer of 1942. It is quite possible that Bankier and the other Schindlerjuden were picked up by the Germans even though they had the Blauschein. Given Oskar’s earlier problems with the Gestapo, it is possible that the Gestapo picked up Bankier and the other Schindler Jews as a warning to Schindler. It is also possible that Oskar was out of town at the time because he traveled frequently. However, given the severity of the Germans moves into the ghetto, his staff would have gotten in touch with him and warned him of the problems some of his Jewish workers were facing. Whatever prompted the attempted deportation of Schindler’s fourteen Jewish workers, his dramatic intervention at the Prokocim train station on June 8 saved them from certain death.

But Oskar also tried to save the son and brother of two of his Jewish workers when he arrived at the Prokocim railway station on that hot June day in 1942. According to Leon Leyson (Leib Lejzon), a retired educator who lives in Fullerton, California, Oskar spotted one of Leon’s older brothers, Tsalig (Betsalil), in one of the train cars. Leon’s father, Moshe, and another of Leon’s brothers, David, worked at Emalia. Though Tsalig did not work for Oskar, the German factory owner knew who he was and had seen him at Emalia with Moshe. Oskar offered to take Tsalig off of the train with Bankier and his other Jewish workers. Tsalig, though, refused because he wanted to stay with his girlfriend. This loving gesture cost Tsalig Leyson his life.³⁸

Almost losing the irreplaceable Abraham Bankier to the Gestapo must have had a tremendous impact on Oskar. But even if Oskar was involved in saving some of his Jews, what impact did the June 1942 deportations have on his decision to commit his resources totally to this effort? It is hard to say. Oskar had seen war and death in 1938, and he probably saw some anti-Jewish and anti-Polish atrocities in the fall of 1939. But by 1942, such horrors touched him in a more personal way. Initially, though, he probably thought like most Jews that the deportees were being sent to the rumored barrack camps. He had already been involved in trying to help some of his Polish workers from being sent to Germany as forced laborers, so it is quite possible that he believed the rumors about the Jewish barrack towns. In time, though, new stories crept back into Kraków that told not of barrack towns, but of death camps. They were told by a Kraków dentist, Dr. Brachner, who had escaped when one of the transports arrived in Bełżec and hid in a latrine filled with human excrement for several days. One night, he slowly made his way back to the Kraków ghetto. Dr. Brachner told anyone who would listen of the horrors of Bełżec and its three (later six) carbon monoxide-fed gas chambers.³⁹

Several months later, Pankiewicz received a letter from a woman who had fled the ghetto on the eve of the October 1942 Aktion. Her escape route took her to Bełżec, where she saw first-hand the horrors taking place there. When the trains arrived, she noted, the Germans occasionally kept cars on sidings until they were ready to murder the Jews on them. The cars were carefully guarded by Germans, and the Jews were given no water or food. When it was time for them to be gassed, German guards took the Jews still alive off the train cars and forced them to undress. They were then sent to the gas chambers. Afterwards, their bodies were cremated. The letter ended with an appeal to anyone reading it to spread the word about what was really happening to the Jews at Bełżec and not to believe German lies about the fate of Jews on any future transport to this particular death camp.⁴⁰

Months before Pankiewicz read this letter, the Germans had unsealed the ghetto, but had also reduced its size. The northeastern part of the ghetto running from Podgórski Square between ul. Limanowskiego and ul. R\kawaka was now returned to Polish-German control. The Germans ordered that the walls in this portion of the old ghetto be torn down and barbed wire erected along the new boundaries. The ghetto was no longer as well-hidden from the Aryan side as it had once been. But the reduction in the size of the ghetto made it much more difficult to see into the ghetto from Lasota Hill, the highest point above Podgórze. In Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, this was the point where Oskar Schindler and his mistress, Eva Schauer (“Ingrid”), supposedly saw Amon Göth’s brutal closing of the Kraków ghetto on March 13 and 14, 1943. The eastern boundary of the ghetto, which was just on the other side of Rekawa Street, had been deliberately kept away from the foot of Lasota Hill when it first opened because it would have been easy to see into the streets of the ghetto. With the constriction of the ghetto in June 1942, it was even more difficult to see into the ghetto. Though one could probably have seen some things from Lasota Hill with binoculars, the view would have been severely restricted by the buildings outside and within the ghetto. More than likely, the story about Oskar and Eva (“Ingrid”) is apocryphal. But, even more important, Oskar had already seen enough brutality before the closing of the ghetto to convince him to commit himself and his resources to helping save Jewish lives.⁴¹

The October 28, 1942, Aktion in the Kraków Ghetto

Two other things happened in 1942 that helped push Oskar along this path: more deportations from the ghetto in October 1942 and a visit from Abwehr friends interested in recruiting him in their efforts to help and save Jews. The gradual reduction in the size of the Kraków ghetto came in the midst of the greatest killing period of the Final Solution from 1942 through 1943. Making the Germans’ task easy was their control of more than half of Europe’s Jews in occupied parts of Poland and Russia. And because all six of the death camps, where about one half of the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died, were located in occupied Poland, the pace of mass murder was made easier. The Germans were so successful in their murderous campaign against the Jews that by the time Amon Göth was sent to close the Kraków ghetto, Heinrich Himmler had decided to shut down the remaining death camps opened as part of “Operation Reinhard” a year earlier. In little more than a year, the Germans had murdered 1,650,000 Jews in Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Auschwitz, Kulmhof (Chełmno), and Majdanek remained open.⁴²

The demands of the Final Solution drove the periodic German actions and deportations in the Kraków ghetto and elsewhere. The next Aktion came on October 28, 1942. The day before, Spira, Gutter, and other Jewish leaders were informed of the coming German moves in the ghetto. Though Gutter and Spira were pledged to secrecy, word spread quickly that a new wave of deportations would start on October 28. Some ghetto residents prepared hiding places while others sought refuge with friends outside of Kraków. By 9:00 P.M., October 27, armed Sonderdienst (Special Service) police under Orpo, the German Order Police, had surrounded the ghetto. The Sonderdienst units were made up of Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians who had volunteered for German service. At the same time, the Judenrat ordered all ghetto workers to gather at the ghetto’s main entrance at W\gierska and Limanowskiego streets early on October 28.⁴³

At 6:00 A.M. the next morning, SS-Sturmbannführer Willi Haase arrived to take personal charge of the deportation. As in the past, high-ranking SS and SD officers came to watch the roundup. But what was different about this Aktion was that German factory and business owners did everything possible to protect their most valuable Jewish specialists from deportation. Only weeks before, the SS and the Armaments Inspectorate had worked out their agreement whereby the SS supplied Jewish slave labor to companies doing business with the Armaments Inspectorate for a set daily rate. Ultimately, these factories were to move their operations to SS-run concentration and labor camps. In one sense, if a German factory owner could now prove that his factory produced goods important to the war effort, it strengthened his ability to protect his more valuable Jewish workers. From Himmler’s perspective, of course, even these protected Jews “[would] disappear some day.”⁴⁴

Oskar never eluded to this particular Aktion in his postwar writings, though he does claim to have known about the “opening of the extermination camps in the Polish territory” in 1942. Given his contacts, he was also probably well versed on the recent agreement between the Armaments Inspectorate and the SS. Consequently, it is hard to imagine that he was not at the entrance to the ghetto at 6:00 A.M. on October 28.⁴⁵ Similarly, Julius Madritsch never referred specifically to the October 28 Aktion in his wartime memoirs, Menschen im Not!, though he does state that

As Madritsch’s factory was just a half block from the ghetto’s entrance, it is probable that Madritsch or his factory manager, Raimund Titsch, were also at the October 28 roundup.

The first phase of the selection centered around the random choice of workers to be deported and those to remain in the ghetto. The Germans ordered all other Jews remaining in the ghetto to gather by 10:00 A.M. along ul. Józefińska near OD headquarters. The Germans added that everyone should leave their apartments unlocked before they left for the gathering point on Józefińska. Once again, the Germans’ decision about who would remain and who would be deported was made capriciously. Even physicians, who wore special armbands to protect them from deportation, were ordered to line up for transport. When it became apparent that some Jews were hiding, Haase shouted so all could hear, “Alle Männer und Frauen gehen ruhig nach Hause” (All men and women can now return to their homes). Relieved, the Jews left their hiding places. But Haase was not finished. To draw more Jews into his net, he later announced that the “Ghetto ist Judenrein!” (The ghetto is free of Jews). Though many hidden Jews were not taken in by Haase’s latest ruse, others were, and they were bloodily driven to the deportation point by the German, Latvian, and Lithuanian guards who had spread throughout the ghetto.⁴⁷

Soon after 10:00 A.M. on the 28th, the SS and the Sonderdienst began to search for Jews hidden throughout the ghetto. Some began desperately to prepare hiding places in their apartments, attics, and basements. Tadeusz Pankiewicz recalled how a friend hid her parents in a pantry in the foyer of their apartment. She took out the shelves and built a hidden space in the back of the pantry to conceal her parents. She then put hooks at the front of the pantry and hung coats on it. The Germans thoroughly searched the apartment, but never discovered the two elderly people hidden behind the coats.⁴⁸

Those found hiding were shot on the spot or beaten as they were being driven to the collection point. By this point, most of the ghetto’s Jews were huddled in terror in Plac Zgody. As the day progressed, the roundup became more violent and deadly. At noon, the Germans went into the Jewish Hospital at 14 Józefińska and shot all the bedridden patients. One woman who was in labor was thrown into a deportation truck; other patients were shot as they tried to flee. Haase was ever present, surrounded by his assistants. Gutter, Förster, Spira, and other Jewish collaborators, who did everything they could to please their SS masters. When one frantic woman begged Gutter for help, he kicked her and turned away. She then turned to Spira, who walked away while one of his Jewish OD men beat her with his riding crop.⁴⁹

Children and the elderly were singled out during this action and murdered in large numbers. At the Hospital for the Chronically Ill (Szpitala dla przewlekle Chorych) at ul. 15 Limanowska, the Germans beat the patients as they forced them down the stairs and into the street. Those on crutches were tripped and forced to crawl on their knees. Once outside, the Germans ordered the elderly patients to climb onto a courtyard wall and jump off. As they fell, the Germans shot them. By 5:00 P.M. on the 28th, the Germans had completed the roundup and were moving the new deportees to the Płaszów train station. They had murdered 600 Jews during the Aktion and sent 6,000 to 7,000 to Bełżec. But not all the Jewish victims were murdered by the Germans and their allies; some committed suicide to escape the horror of the ghetto Aktion and deportation.⁵⁰

Several weeks after the October 28 deportations, the Germans slightly reduced the size of the ghetto. The eliminated sections, which were to the west of Plac Zgody, were those closest to Schindler’s factory at 4 Lipowa. According to a decree issued by Frank on November 14, 1942, there were now to be five closed ghettos in the General Government in Kraków, Warsaw, Lwow, Radom, and Cz\stochowa. The rest of the General Government was now declared “Judenrein.” Jews living outside one of these ghettos were ordered to return to one of them.⁵¹

Five thousand Jews remained in the Kraków ghetto. On December 6, 1942, the SS divided it into two sections. Ghetto A was to be for Jews with jobs; Ghetto B was for those without work. The SS also used Ghetto B as a dumping place for another 2,000 Jews from surrounding areas. Ghetto A was subdivided into three specific labor sections corresponding to the “R,” “W,” or “Z” now worn by Jewish laborers. After a few days, each section of the ghetto was sealed off. All that remained of the former Kraków ghetto was a four-square-block area less than half of the original ghetto’s size.⁵²

The brutal roundup triggered a reaction from the recently formed ŻOB (Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa; Jewish Fighting Organization), which in Kraków drew its membership from two Jewish resistance movements in the Kraków ghetto, Akiba, and Hashomir Hatzair. Both were associated with prewar Zionist youth movements in Kraków. Before the 1942 roundups, Akiba and Hashomir had been involved in various underground activities to help Kraków’s Jews. However, in 1942, they began to shift their efforts to armed resistance, often in league with the PPR (Polska Partia Robotnicza; Polish Workers Party), and its armed wing, the Gwardia Ludowa (GL; People’s Guard). Working in and outside the ghetto, the Jewish rebels initially committed small acts of sabotage and assassinations of Germans in Kraków and Jewish informers in the ghetto. They also stole German uniforms from Madritsch’s Optima factory in the ghetto. However, their most daring raids took place on December 22, 1942, in response to the October 28 Aktion in the ghetto.⁵³

The goals of the forty young rebels involved in the attacks were to create confusion among the Germans and raise the spirits of the Jews in the ghetto. They also hoped “to shock the apathetic elements in the Polish society.”⁵⁴ They wanted to kill as many Germans as possible as they attacked cafes, theatres, German military vehicles, and naval vessels on the Vistula. They also planned to raise Polish flags on the city’s bridges and lay a wreath at the site of a statue to Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet, which the Germans had torn down.⁵⁵

Operating in squads of three, ŻOB teams struck simultaneously at three cafés in Kraków favored by the SS and other Germans, the Cyganeria, the Esplanada, and the Zakopianka officers club, as well as the officers’ casino housed at the National Museum, and the Scala, one of Kraków’s most prominent movie theatres on Reichsstraße 4. The most successful raid was on the Cyganeria, which was full at the time of the 7:00 P.M. attack. About eleven Germans died from the hand grenade attack, and many others were injured. Symbolically, ŻOB could have chosen no better site because the Cyganeria was just across the street from the famed City Theatre (today the Słowacki Theatre) and the nearby Church of the Holy Cross (Kośióļśw. Krzyża). Moreover, it was just before Christmas, and the streets were filled with Germans preparing to celebrate the holidays. The choice of a Christian religious holiday was particularly ironic because the Germans were quite fond of initiating Aktionen against Jews during some of their holiest religious days.⁵⁶

The other attacks were less successful or simply did not take place. The German response to the attacks was swift and brutal. They quickly surrounded ŻOB’s hiding place in the old Jewish quarter at ul. 24 Skawinska and arrested many of the operation’s leaders. At a bar on ul. 3 Żuławeskiego, Adolf Liebeskind, one of the raid’s leaders, had a shootout with the Gestapo as they tried to arrest him. He killed two Germans before committing suicide. Hitler was informed of the attack on Christmas Day; but nothing was made public until the end of March 1943, when HSSPF Krüger announced in a meeting in Kraków that the raid on the Cyganeria had been carried out by an underground Zionist youth organization. According to Krüger, it operated out of the Kraków ghetto using false documents and identity cards.⁵⁷

Today, a plaque commemorates the attack at the site of the former Cyganeria Café. It reads:

Jewish sources claim the raids took place on December 22; Polish sources insist it took place on December 24.⁵⁹

But what impact did the raids have on Oskar Schindler? By late December 1942, Schindler had already seen the horror of the German roundups and probably knew something about the mass murders at the death camps in Poland. Remember that everything suffered by his workers, from the attempted deportation of Bankier and the other thirteen Schindlerjuden to beatings and murder, was only the tip of the iceberg for Oskar when it came to what he saw and heard about the suffering of the Jews in the Kraków ghetto. As an employer of Jews, he had to keep abreast of the delays and losses suffered when his workers were detained or deported. His factory was only an earshot away from the violence that took place in the ghetto. And each morning as he left his apartment at 7/2 Straszewskiego and drove along the Vistula before crossing it on the bridge at the end of Alle Weichselstraße (today Most PowstavcowzjeżdzieślHskich), he could see, and probably smell, the decay and horror of the ghetto. And as his driver made his quick left turn on ul. Zabłocie that would take him to T. Romaninowicza and then right to 4 Lipowa, Oskar could glance briefly into the ghetto. His constant complaining to the SS about the problems suffered by his Jewish workers underscored the difficulties that the roundups caused Schindler. And these were issues that Oskar shared and discussed with other factory owners such as Madritsch and those who owned factories next to Emalia. These businessmen included Kurt Hodemann, who ran N.K.F. (Neue Kühler u. Flugzeugteile-Fabrik), an aircraft radiator factory; Kucharski, who owned the Krakauer Drahtgitter Fabrik, a wire netting factory; Ernst Kühnpast, who operated a box factory; and Chmielewski, who ran a Barackenwerk, or barracks factory. What drew them together, beyond the desire to make a lot of money, was their Jewish workers. The first known “Schindler’s List” still in existence was dated May 25, 1943, and it deals with the joint transfer of 191 Jewish workers to Emalia, NKF, Kühnpast’s box factory, and Chmielewski’s barracks factory from, presumably, Płaszów.⁶⁰

The Closing of the Kraków Ghetto

The SS decision to close the Kraków ghetto in March 1943 was part of a broader effort to eliminate all ghettos in the General Government and send their inmates to death or slave labor camps. Though Heinrich Himmler’s decree of July 19, 1942, ordered this process completed by December 31, 1942, it took much longer. At the time, Himmler also ordered that, after this date, the General Government was to be free of Jews with the exception of those living in camps in Cz\stochowa, Kraków, Lublin, Radom, or Warsaw. As the SS gradually emptied each ghetto of its Jews and sent them to one of five death camps in the General Government, it also opened or expanded slave labor camps for Jews chosen to live a few more months. This is what the SS did in Kraków, where a slave labor camp was opened at Płaszów while the Germans slowly destroyed the ghetto and its population.⁶¹

The closing of the Kraków ghetto in Podgórze by Amon Göth on March 13–14, 1943, was, at least as depicted by Steven Spielberg in Schindler’s List, a dramatic, transforming moment for Oskar Schindler. While watching Oskar and his mistress, Eva (“Ingrid”), look down upon the ghetto as it is being cleared by the SS, one senses his shock and surprise. From that moment on, Oskar Schindler was never the same man. The seed for this scene was a similar one in Thomas Keneally’s novel; both portrayals were probably drawn from the notes that Martin Gosch and Howard Koch put together after their lengthy interviews with Schindler in 1964 in preparation for writing a script for a proposed MGM movie about Schindler, To the Last Hour. According to them, Schindler was on horseback on a hill overlooking the Jewish ghetto when it was closed in 1941, two years earlier than it really happened. According to Gosch and Koch, Schindler, who was alone, was “affected… profoundly” by what he saw.⁶² Itzhak Stern’s comments about the impact of the closing of the ghetto on Oskar was probably another source for this mythical story. According to Stern, the murder of the children in the ghetto’s Kinderheim (children’s home) during the brutal closing of the Kraków ghetto on March 13–14, 1943, prompted Oskar’s firm commitment to do everything he could to save as many Jews as possible. Stern said that this was the “crucial incident that unsettled Schindler’s mind. Schindler had changed overnight and was never the same man again.”⁶³ Though Oskar would undoubtedly be shocked by the murder of the Kinderheim children, other evidence suggests that he had already chosen his path sometime before this tragedy. The Kinderheim horror simply made him more determined to help as many Jews as he could.

But the vivid scene described by Keneally that centered around not only the violent Aktion in the ghetto and the little girl in the red coat dealt with the violent roundup of Jews on June 8–10, 1942, not the closing of the ghetto on March 13–14, 1943. Spielberg took Keneally’s description of this roundup, which centered around the little girl in red, and put her in the context of Amon Göth’s closing of the ghetto in 1943. Unfortunately, lost in all this were Itzhak Stern’s comments about what most affected Schindler during the closing of the ghetto—the murder of the children in the Kinderheim orphanage—not shock at the sight of Göth’s brutal Aktion from atop Lasota Hill. Perhaps Keneally, who barely touched on the closing of the ghetto in his historical novel, best captures this moment, particularly as it relates to Oskar Schindler, when he admits that “we do not know in what condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13, the ghetto’s last and worst day.”⁶⁴

There is nothing to indicate that Oskar and his mistress were ever on Lasota Hill on March 13th or 14th. He was well aware of the coming Aktion and was more concerned about the fate of his Jewish workers; in fact, Oskar was so well informed about the forthcoming ghetto liquidation that he told Sol Urbach and his other Jewish workers on March 12 to remain at Emalia until the Aktion was over. Julius Madritsch confirmed this and said that the “total evacuation of the ghetto did not come as a surprise. For a long time it had been discussed.” Before an Aktion, the Germans surrounded the ghetto and outlying areas with various paramilitary units. Given the seriousness of the closing of the ghetto, Oskar probably stayed in his apartment at the factory; it would have been difficult for him to go to the factory once the Aktion began because the back streets to it ran beside the ghetto. The idea that Oskar somehow took all this so casually that he took two horses from his stable and then somehow made his way with Eva around the ghetto to Lasota Hill as it was being besieged by the SS is simply not realistic.⁶⁵

This decision, to keep his Jewish workers at Emalia for several days until the March 1943 Aktion was over, was one of the first instances we have of Oskar Schindler aggressively working to save Jewish lives. And although it could be argued that this was simply good business, it was a daring, potentially dangerous move. The SS was careful about keeping tabs on its slave laborers, and for someone to order his workers not to go back to camp with their SS escorts was dangerous. It is possible, of course, that Schindler had arranged this earlier with Göth, but this is difficult to prove because Göth had just taken over command of Płaszów in February 1943 and had his hands full not only completing the construction of a large slave labor camp but also eliminating the Kraków ghetto. It would take time for Oskar to develop the special relationship he had with Göth and it is doubtful that he had enough time before the ghetto’s liquidation to do this.

Yet given all this, the closing of the Kraków ghetto is still a defining moment in the Schindler story. Oskar had never been around viciousness and bloodshed on such a large scale, particularly so close to his prosperous world. And now, all his Jewish workers and friends were being forced to live in a much more rigid and deadly environment than the ghetto. And each day, their lives were at the mercy of a madman: Amon Göth. All I interviewed who had worked for Göth in Płaszów said that they lived in constant fear for their lives. They were absolutely convinced that someday Göth would kill them on a whim. Oskar Schindler, directly or indirectly, was their island of hope and life.

If anything came to symbolize the evil that Schindler and his Jews had to contend with over the next eighteen months, it was the massacre of the ghetto Kinderheim children during the March 13–14, 1943 Aktion. The last few months in the ghetto were a time of terror and uncertainty. The approximately 7,000 Jews who remained were often beaten, harassed, and threatened with deportation by the SS and their subordinates. If there was a safe haven, it seemed to be in the Kinderheim (children’s home) or one of the ghetto’s remaining hospitals. The Germans had ordered the Judenrat to open a Kinderheim in early 1943. David Gutter and Symche Spira took part in the ceremonies celebrating its opening. By this time, the SS was sending a growing number of Jewish workers to work at Płaszów, which was still under construction, or to factories outside the ghetto. The Kinderheim was designed as a daycare facility where parents could leave their children while they worked for the SS or factory owners. For many children and their parents, the Jewish-run Kinderheim, with its staff of caring professionals, was an island in a sea of terror. But it, too, would be overwhelmed by the same horror that was engulfing most Jews in Poland.⁶⁶

The Kinderheim was placed in Ghetto B, a subtle hint of its future. Ghetto B was the SS dumping ground for Jews deemed unfit for labor and earmarked for deportation to death camps once the Germans closed the ghetto. And though the Jews in the ghetto did not learn of plans to close the ghetto until 11:00 A.M. on March 13, 1943, all signs had pointed to its ultimate liquidation weeks before. The Germans had been rounding up workers for months to help build one of three Julags (Jüdischelager; Jewish camps) in Płaszów (Julag I), Prokocim (Julag II), and Bieżanów (Julag III) in the suburbs of Kraków. Most of those taken to build the Julags or to work in factories outside the ghetto were housed in Julag I at Płaszów. As the population in the ghetto dwindled, stores began to shut and basic foodstuffs disappeared. On March 13, David Gutter issued a decree from Julian Scherner, the HSSPF in the Kraków district, that all residents in Ghetto A had four hours to prepare for a move to Płaszów. Scherner’s decree added that on March 14 everyone in Ghetto B should be prepared to board trains for deportation.⁶⁷

Scherner’s simple orders were a cover for the terror about to be unleashed by the Gestapo and the SS. It would be overseen by SS-Sturmführer Amon Leopold Göth, a thirty-five-year-old Austrian who had joined the Nazi Party in 1930 and the SS two years later; as commandant of the new Płaszów forced labor camp, he was in charge of closing both ghettos. Tadeusz Pankiewicz described Göth as a tall, handsome, overweight, blue-eyed German who had already gained a reputation for brutality during the brief period he had served as Płaszów’s commandant. Göth entered the ghetto on the morning of March 13 wearing a long black leather coat. He carried a riding crop in one hand and a small automatic rifle in the other. His large vicious dogs, Rolf and Ralf, walked beside him.⁶⁸

As they prepared for transfer or deportation, the Jews were most concerned about the fate of their children. Most realized that the Germans would not permit parents to take their children to Płaszów even though the Germans said they were building a children’s barracks there. When it was completed, they promised, the children would be moved from the Kinderheim to Płaszów. Some parents refused to believe another German lie and prepared hiding places. Others fled the ghetto to save their children and even crossed over from Ghetto A to Ghetto B to buy their children a little more time. But some parents in Ghetto A tried to sneak their children into Płaszów by hiding them in bundles or squeezing them in the transfer line at the ghetto’s entrance on the afternoon of March 13. Pankiewicz provided many parents with drugs to help their children sleep while in hiding. Göth, however, was determined to keep all children out of Płaszów; he carefully searched the bags and clothing of the departing Jews in search of hidden children. When he found one, he wrenched the unfortunate child from his or her hiding place and beat the parents if they resisted him. The children usually fled in terror and were then forced into the Kinderheim. By late afternoon, Ghetto A was empty but for the children and a few members of the Judenrat.⁶⁹

Though there was considerable violence in the clearing of Ghetto A, it was nothing compared to what was about to take place in Ghetto B. To the Germans, the residents of Ghetto B were expendable. As the sun rose on March 14, the terrified Jews of Ghetto B began to fill Plac Zgody. They carried all their worldly possessions. As they gathered in the square, heavily armed SS, Gestapo, and Sonderdienst surrounded them. As they had done the day before, top German officials watched the deportation. What followed was an orgy of blood and death. The first to die were the patients in the main Jewish Hospital on Józefińska Street. As they had done the day before in Ghetto A’s hospital, the Germans, led by SS-Oberscharführer Albert Hujar, began to murder the patients in their beds. When one visitor, Dr. Katia Blau, refused to leave the bedside of one of her friends, Hujar told her to stand up and turn around. She told Hujar that she was not afraid to die; Hujar then shot her in the back of the head. The Germans also murdered several of the hospitals physicians. Lola Feldman Orzech, a Schindler Jew, said that the Germans also threw her grandmother out of the hospital’s third floor window to her death.⁷⁰

The favorite killing place for the German executioners was an alley near Plac Zgody. Tadeusz Pankiewicz watched the shootings from the back window of his pharmacy. The principal victims were the elderly and children. They were taken from the crowd on Plac Zgody or from hiding places in Ghetto B. The Germans, Latvians, Lithuanians, and Ukrainians involved in the Aktion went from apartment to apartment looking for Jews in hiding. Those not shot on the spot were often murdered when they arrived at Plac Zgody. When the Germans entered the Kinderheim, they put the smallest children into baskets and loaded them on wagons. Older children were taken to Plac Zgody and shot.⁷¹

Those not murdered by the Germans and their collaborators were lined up in Plac Zgody and separated according to gender and fitness for work. Elderly males were forced to race to prove their fitness for labor. What transpired was a humiliating scene of elderly males running as fast as they could for their lives. As they ran, they were taunted by jeers from the crowd of Germans and others in the square. And though these elderly males were told they would live if they won, more often than not their “reward” was a shot in the back of the head. Göth personally selected 150 men for a work detail at Płaszów, though Willi Haase, Göth’s boss, said that was too many and ordered seventy-five members of Göth’s Jewish detail executed on the spot. The other seventy-five Jews were forced to strip the bodies of the recently murdered ghetto Jews and put them on wagons for transport to Płaszów for burial. Schindlerjuden Victor Dortheimer and Murray Pantirer were put on one of the burial details. Dortheimer was ordered to “dig mass graves.” As the wagons filled with dead bodies covered with branches arrived from Ghetto B, Pantirer and Dortheimer had to bury or burn them in the newly dug graves. According to Pantirer: “In one case we asked a German to give a ‘kindness’ shot to a young kid who was still alive. The German told us it was a shame to waste a bullet on a Jew.”⁷²

Sol Urbach and Murray Pantirer both lost close family members in the March 1943 Aktion. Sol’s brother, Samuel, was shot in the deportation line; Murray’s father, Lezur, was murdered when he refused to leave his wife, who was holding the hand of a child. Jews who had managed to survive the brutal roundup in Ghetto B were placed onto large trucks brought to the ghetto’s entrance. They were forced to leave their bundles in the square; children discovered hidden in bundles or among the adults were taken from their parents and shot behind Pankiewicz’s pharmacy. The SS and the Sonderdienst beat the Jews as they left the square and tried to board the trucks. When the trucks were loaded, all that remained in Plac Zgody were children and abandoned bundles. Some were in prams; others stood alone and bewildered among the scattered bundles and luggage. The SS took the children by the hands and calmly led them to the execution spot behind Pankiewicz’s phamarcy. To save ammunition, the SS would occasionally line up several children and murder them with one shot; sometimes they put several children in a baby carriage and killed them with one bullet.⁷³

The only shadow of humanity in all this were the efforts of Oswald Bousko (an Austrian policeman), Julius Madritsch and Raimund Titsch to save as many lives as they could before and during the March 13–14 Aktion in the ghetto. In his memoir, Tadeusz Pankiewicz talks at length about Bousko’s efforts to help Jews. Julius Madritsch also brings up Bousko’s efforts in Menschen in Not!; and Schindlerjude Aleksander Bieberstein discusses Bousko’s efforts to save Jews in his memoir-history, Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie. Thomas Keneally mentions him periodically in his historical novel.

Pankiewicz, who is the principal source of our information on Bousko, first met the Viennese policeman during the June 1942 Aktion as he walked out of the Kraków ghetto. Bousko, tall and blond, looked at Pankiewicz’s papers and then screamed at him, wanting to know why the Polish pharmacist was leaving the ghetto without a police escort. Bousko told Pankiewicz that he could be shot on the spot without such protection. In future, Bousko suggested, the pharmacist should call him at the Schupo station, and he would personally provide Pankiewicz with an escort home. Over time, Pankiewicz learned that Bousko was the son of an unimportant Austrian government official who had once studied to be a Catholic monk. Bousko left the monastery and joined the Nazi Party in Austria. When Engelbert Dollfuß, Austria’s chancellor, outlawed the Nazi Party in the summer of 1933, Bousko joined an illegal SS unit set up by Himmler to act as a fifth column against the Austrian government. After the German conquest of Austria in 1938, Bousko became an opponent of the Nazis.⁷⁴

Once in Kraków in the summer of 1942, Bousko did everything possible to help the ghetto’s Jews. He used his loud scream to hide his deeper intentions. He not only helped Jews escape from the ghetto but supplied them with food. Occasionally, he would accept bribes for some of his efforts and, when he fled Kraków in the summer of 1944, he carried a suitcase full of his ill-gotten contraband with him. These actions did nothing, though, to lessen the legend of his deeds. It also did not prevent Yad Vashem from naming him, along with Madritsch and Titsch, a Righteous Among the Nations (Righteous Gentile) in 1964. Bousko’s file is kept with the files of Julius Madritsch and Raimund Titsch in the Department of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, which reviews nominations for Righteous Among the Nations recognition. In addition to a few documents citing Bousko’s efforts, Yad Vashem also has a copy of Madritch’s memoir. There is nothing, though, to indicate that the Department of the Righteous was aware of Pankiewicz’s Apteka w Getcie Krakowskim, which was first published in Poland in 1947 and in Israel in 1985. If so, Yad Vashem might have had second thoughts about naming Bousko a Righteous Gentile; one of its criteria for consideration of this great honor is that the “rescuer did not exact any material reward or compensation at the time of the rescue, and did not require any promise of compensation, either oral or in writing, as a condition for the aid he was giving.” Regardless, Pankiewicz, Bieberstein, Madritsch, and Keneally all agree that many Jews and Poles owed their lives to Oswald Bousko.⁷⁵

Just before the closing of the ghetto in March 1943, Bousko worked with Julius Madritsch to help save more Jews from death. He led many families, particularly those with children, out of the front gate and into Madritsch’s nearby factory. The youngest children were given something to make them sleep and were carried into Madritsch’s factory in backpacks. In the meantime, Madritsch arranged to have the children placed in the homes of Poles in the city. Madritsch also convinced some Wehrmacht soldiers driving to Tarnow to take some of the Jewish escapees to a factory he owned there. Several weeks later, Madritsch got permission from the SS to transfer three hundred Jews from his Kraków factory to a similar one in Tarnow, sixty miles east of Kraków. Madritsch’s factory in Tarnow was very similar to the one in Kraków. Each employed about eight hundred workers and had three hundred sewing machines. After the war, Madritsch turned the sewing machines over to the Joint, asking the American Jewish relief organization to return them to his former workers. On March 25–26, 1943, 232 Jewish men, women, and children left Kraków by rail for Madritsch’s factory in Tarnow. Each one was protected by an SS “acceleration of an urgent armaments order.”⁷⁶

Oswald Bousko remained in Kraków until the summer of 1944, when he injected himself with a drug that made him severely ill to avoid being sent to the Eastern Front. After several weeks in a German hospital, Bousko disappeared with two Jewish children and a Polish mistress. His Schupo boss suspected he had been kidnapped by Polish partisans and began a search for his subordinate. Bousko wrote to his commander and claimed that indeed he had been captured by partisans. After a further investigation, Schupo concluded that Bousko was lying. The police intensified their search and captured him as he tried to make his way back to Germany. He was put in Montelupich prison in Kraków and then transferred to Danzig, where Bousko tried to feign insanity. He was courtmartialed and executed on October 18, 1944. Afterwards, German officials in Kraków blamed many of their earlier problems with Jews, whether it be escape, black marketering, bribery, or other things, on Bousko and his non-Jewish accomplices.⁷⁷

When the Ghetto B Aktion was over, the Germans had murdered 1,000 Jews in the roundup and deported another 4,000. About half this numbered were shipped immediately to Auschwitz via Płaszów. The Germans murdered 1,492 in Crematorium II in Auschwitz II-Birkenau; 484 men and 24 women were integrated into the Auschwitz slave labor force. On March 16, the SS shipped another thousand Ghetto B Jews to Auschwitz. Fifteen men and 26 women became slave laborers; the rest were gassed in Birkenau. Approximately 150 Jews were shot by Ukrainian guards in Płaszów because there was no room for them on the Auschwitz transports. Among those murdered by the Germans and their collaborators in the Kraków ghetto on March 13–14, 1943, were the beloved relatives of many Schindlerjuden.⁷⁸

Oskar did not mention the March 13 and 14 actions in his postwar writings. He knew enough, though, about Göth’s plans to tell his Jewish workers from Płaszów on the evening of March 12 to stay at Emalia until the closing of the ghetto was complete. He was also stunned by the murders of the Kinderheim children. Though Oskar was never much of a father to his two illegitimate children, after the war he drew very close to the children of his Schindler Jews. The testimony of those who knew him after the war suggests that he had a soft spot for children. It is not surprising, then, that he should have been particularly shocked by the mass murder of so many of Kraków’s Jewish children during the brutal closing of the ghetto on March 13 and 14, 1943.

The Little Girl in Red

Oskar’s love of children provided the basis for the story of the famous little girl in red in Keneally’s novel and Spielberg’s film. The little girl in the red coat, the only color in the black-and-white portions of the film save for a candle at the beginning, stood out in Schindler’s List not only during her naive search for safety during the closing of the ghetto but also in a later scene where her dead body was found among others about to be burned. Because the little girl in red was based on a real person, if she was buried in one of the mass graves at Płaszów, her body would have been exhumed and burned in the fall of 1944 by a secret Aktion 1005 Kommando unit.

The first of these highly secret squads, known as Sonderkommando 1005, was created on orders from Heinrich Müller, the head of the Gestapo, in the summer of 1942 and placed under the command of SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, a seasoned SD officer and Einsatzgruppe commander who had already gained quite a reputation for thoroughness and brutality at Babi Yar and elsewhere. Blobel’s task was to oversee an Enterdungsaktion (Exhumation Action) throughout German-occupied Russia, and later Poland, to eliminate the traces of mass murder victims. The units were made up of members of the SD and Sipo who oversaw a small squad of Ordnungspolizei (Orpo; Order police). They supervised the Jewish and other slave laborers who exhumed the bodies, put them on large pyres for burning, and then collected the ashes for disposal. During the final phase of these operations, the slave laborers crushed all remaining bones and looked through the ashes for valuables not discovered in earlier searches. When an Aktion 1005 unit had completed a particular operation, it cleared the site and murdered all the slave laborers involved in the exhumation and cremation work. In the summer of 1944, Wilhelm Koppe, the HSSPF in the General Government, held a meeting in Kraków with the commanders of SD, Sipo, and the Order Police from the General Government’s five districts. Each district was to create its own Aktion 1005 unit and begin operations as soon as possible. The Kraków district’s Aktion 1005 unit cleared the mass graves of Płaszów, which contained about 8,000 bodies, in the fall of 1944. Though the Aktion 1005 units had been created initially because of concern for health problems related to the mass grave sites, fear of discovery by the nearby Red Army later drove the German efforts. One of the bodies possibly exhumed and cremated in the fall 1944 Enterdungsaktion in Płaszów was that of the little girl in red.⁷⁹

According to Douglas Brode, Steven Spielberg and his scriptwriter, Steven Zaillian, used the little girl in red as their “Rosebud,” a reference to the symbolic last word in Citizen Kane. The little girl in the red dress would serve as the “Rosebud” symbol in Schindler’s List and be the emotional prism through which Oskar Schindler would truly awaken to the horrors of the Holocaust all around him. Three writers, Keneally, then Kurt Luedtke, and finally Zaillian, tried their hands at transforming Keneally’s novel into a script for television or a movie. Luedtke had difficulty unlocking the mystery behind Schindler’s reasons for helping Jews during the Holocaust. Spielberg felt that Zaillian could resolve this dilemma. The key was the little girl in the red dress. In some ways, the innocent child was like Oskar Schindler. As she walks through the ghetto she seems oblivious to the violence and death around her. Later, she becomes a victim of its horror. From Spielberg’s perspective, the closing of the ghetto was a transforming moment for Oskar Schindler: He is no longer able to deny the mass murder taking place before his very eyes.⁸⁰

As I have already discussed, Oskar Schindler was probably never on Lasota Hill with Eva, his mistress, whom Keneally and Spielberg incorrectly called Ingrid, either on June 9, 1942, the date that Keneally used to describe this scene, or on March 13 or 14, 1943, the dates most similar time frame-wise to Spielberg’s depiction of Ingrid and Oskar watching Genia, the little girl in red, from atop Lasota Hill. Franciszek Palowski, a prominent Polish journalist who served as Spielberg’s technical consultant and adviser during the filming of Schindler’s List in Kraków in 1993, said that “it is not certain that it [the scene on Lasota Hill] really happened.” Moreover, there seems to be some question about the identity of Schindler’s mistress at the time. This is not an unimportant issue because it seems as though his Kraków girlfriends had ties to Abwehr and the Gestapo that were useful to Oskar. Keneally’s novel and Spielberg’s film both center on one Schindler girlfriend, Ingrid. Emilie said in her memoirs, Where Light and Shadow Meet, that Keneally got this wrong in his book. Emilie said that, in reality, Ingrid was really Amelia, an Abwehr agent. But later, in her second set of memoirs, Ich, Emilie Schindler, Emilie said that Ingrid was really “Marta Eva.” Keneally said that “Ingrid” was a Sudeten German Treuhänder with ties to Abwehr; Viktoria Klonowska was “a Polish secretary” and “the beauty of Oskar’s front office.” Oskar “immediately began a long affair” with Viktoria. Both sets of Emilie’s memoirs agree that Viktoria Klonowska, who had ties to the Gestapo, was Oskar’s Polish girlfriend. And according to Keneally, Viktoria was responsible for arranging Oskar’s release from Gestapo custody in 1942, 1943, and 1944. So in addition to Emilie, Oskar had a German mistress in Kraków, “Ingrid” or Eva, and a Polish lover, Viktoria. But in the end it was Eva who was closest to Oskar, and she was the model for “Ingrid” in Keneally’s novel and Spielberg’s film. She went with Oskar and Emilie to Brünnlitz in 1944 and in time became close friends with Emilie. So who was Eva, or “Ingrid”? Her real name today is Eva Kisch Scheuer and she ran a small showroom in Kraków for Emalia’s enamelware.⁸¹

If Oskar had been on Lasota Hill in 1942 or 1943 as the SS terrorized the ghetto below, probably Eva would have been with him. Moreover, the scene, at least as it was written by Keneally, would not have been as forceful or as meaningful without the presence of someone intimately close to Oskar. This poignant scene was taken directly from Thomas Keneally’s novel and is simply historical symbolism.⁸² But what inspired Keneally and Spielberg to create this scene? Spielberg and his scriptwriter, Steven Zaillian, got the idea from one of the chapters in Keneally’s novel. They compressed two historical events, the June 8–10, 1942, and March 13–14, 1943, Aktions in the Kraków ghetto into one scene and added details from Keneally’s chapter on Genia, the real little girl in red. Keneally wrote his short chapter on Genia after he interviewed members of the Dresner family, who had a niece, Genia, whom they nicknamed “red cap” because of her fondness for a red cap, coat, and boots, which she insisted on wearing everywhere. All the Dresners—Juda, Chaja, Jonas, and Danuta—would ultimately be saved by Oskar Schindler.⁸³

Spielberg’s use of the Keneally story about Genia in his film convinced one Polish woman, Roma Ligocka, a cousin of the Polish film maker, Roman Polanski, that she was the young girl in red. After she saw the film during its Kraków premiere, she decided to write her memoirs about her Holocaust experiences, The Girl in the Red Coat. If we accept Keneally’s research on this matter, it is doubtful if Roma Ligocka was the real girl in the red coat. On the other hand, her memoir, which partially deals with her life as a Jew in occupied Poland during the war, adds to our knowledge about the experiences of a child during the Holocaust.⁸⁴

According to Keneally, Genia’s parents had been in line for the June 8, 1942, deportation to Beŀźec but somehow managed to escape into the Polish countryside. Her parents hid Genia with a Polish family who, though very kind, later became afraid of being caught with a Jewish child in their home and somehow managed to send three-year-old Genia back into the ghetto to the Dresners. Genia’s parents planned to return to the ghetto to be with their daughter. Genia also had other relatives in the ghetto. One of the young child’s favorites was her young uncle, Dr. Judas “Idek” Schindel, an internist who survived the war and later settled in Tel Aviv, where he opened a laryngology clinic. Genia lived with Dr. Schindel in the ghetto. On the day of the June 8 roundup, Dr. Schindel asked some neighbors to watch Genia while he was working at the Jewish Hospital on W\gierska Street. When Genia managed to slip out of their apartment to look for Dr. Schindel, she was picked up by the SS and put in the deportation line. A family friend saw Genia in line and ran to the hospital to tell Dr. Schindel. Though Keneally says that Dr. Schindel found Genia at the deportation gathering site on Plac Zgody, the spot was really at the Optima factory site between Krakuska and W\gierska. This changes the scene described by Keneally, which centers around Oskar and Eva (“Ingrid”) watching Genia wander aimlessly in the crowd on Plac Zgody until an SS officer gently puts her in the deportation line. Yet if for some reason Oskar and Eva had been on Lasota Hill on June 9, it would have been impossible for them to have seen anything at Plac Zgody or the Optima factory grounds. The gathering site at the factory was in an enclosed courtyard and it is doubtful that Dr. Schindel could have had any contact with Genia. But Keneally is correct, at least according to Ludmilla Page, the wife of Poldek Page, when he says that Genia was able to sneak out of the deportation line and back to her uncle’s apartment. Ludmilla adds that though Genia survived “this deportation [June 8, 1942]” she probably “perished in the next one,” which was on October 28, 1942.⁸⁵

The scene created by Keneally, which Spielberg partially copied, took place the day after he saved Bankier, June 9, 1942. In this scene, Oskar and “Ingrid” rode to the top of Lasota Hill, where they saw the brutal roundup below. They were particularly moved by the figure of a small “toddler, boy or girl, dressed in a small scarlet coat and cap.” Oskar asked Ingrid about the gender of the child, and she confirmed that it was a girl. Keneally goes on to describe a violent roundup that conflicts with historical facts. The June 8–10, 1942, roundup had been extremely brutal, but the violent scenes described by Keneally do not fit the events of June 9. Moreover, given the summer foliage and the height of the buildings, it would have been difficult, even with binoculars, to have seen the figure of a little three-year-old-girl among the adults in any part of the ghetto.⁸⁶

What was the purpose of putting this scene in the book? Supposedly, Steven Spielberg and his writers did not think Keneally adequately explained the motives behind Schindler’s actions during the war. In many ways, though, Keneally did a better job of this than Spielberg and he did it in this long scene. As Oskar and Ingrid watched Genia search for a hiding place, oblivious to all of the pain and suffering around her, Ingrid pleaded with Oskar to do something. But Oskar could do nothing. He was so upset and sickened by what he saw he that he “slipped from his horse, tripped, and found himself on his knees hugging the trunk of a pine tree.” What troubled him most was the “lack of [German] shame.” He now understood that “no one could find refuge anymore behind the idea of German culture, nor behind those pronouncements uttered by leaders to exempt anonymous men from stepping behind their gardens, from looking out their office windows at the realities on the sidewalk.”⁸⁷

Though the scene with Genia is probably fictitious, Thomas Keneally used it to try to explain why Oskar Schindler ultimately went to such efforts to save Jewish lives during the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler was not a complex man. Moreover, the simple explanation given by Keneally fits with Oskar’s explanations after the war about why he did what he did. His answers were plain and simple. He helped Jews because what the Germans were doing to them was wrong. In an impromptu speech in Tel Aviv to a large gathering on May 2, 1962, Oskar said that he “tried to do what I had to do.”⁸⁸ But beyond this, there were other issues that helped transform Oskar into the person that became a “savior” to almost 1,100 Jews. Several years earlier, Oskar gave a more detailed explanation to Kurt Grossmann, who published Oskar’s account of his efforts to save Jews during the war in Die unbesungenen Helden: Menschen in Deutschlands dunklen Tagen (The Unsung Heroes: People in Germany’s Dark Days). Oskar told Grossmann that the

For Schindler, then, there was not only disgust with the brutality and moral dishonesty of the Germans but also something deeper that went back to his Sudeten German roots. And after the war, Emilie and Oskar both told stories about their childhood friendships with Jews. When Emilie was fifteen, her parents sent her to an agricultural school after an unsuccessful year at a Catholic boarding school for girls. During her three years at the agricultural school, Emilie’s best friend was a Jew, Rita Gross.⁹⁰ Thomas Keneally tells a similar story about Oskar, whose next door neighbor in Svitavy was “a liberal rabbi named Felix Kantor,” a Reform or liberal rabbi who believed that “it was no crime, in fact praiseworthy, to be a German as well as a Jew.”⁹¹ In 1936, Rabbi Kantor, who is listed in a 1935 German language information book on Zwittau (Svitavy) as Rabbi Felix Kantner, moved his family, which included two sons, to Belgium because of the growing anti-Semitism in Czechoslovakia. In addition, Oskar was also supposed to have had “a few middle-class Jewish friends.”⁹²

Keneally’s stories about Oskar’s early friendships with Jews might seem a little self-serving, and even a bit fabricated, but they were confirmed after the war by Herbert Steinhouse, a Canadian journalist who met Oskar in Munich in 1949 and later interviewed him in Paris about his wartime efforts to help Jews. But before Steinhouse was willing to move ahead with his account of the Schindler story, he gathered a large body of testimony from Schindlerjuden and others to corroborate what Oskar had told him. One of the people who wrote to Steinhouse said that in addition to being a Schindler Jew who worked for Oskar at Emalia, he was also one of the sons of Rabbi Kantner. Before the war, he told Steinhouse, Oskar was a “true believer,” a loyal Sudeten Nazi who accepted everything except the party’s ideas on race. He said that Oskar had “been friendly with several of the Sudetenland Jews” in Svitavy and occasionally talked with Rabbi Kantner about Yiddish literature, folktales, and Jewish traditions in eastern Poland. Rabbi Kantner’s “Rabbinat,” which was located on Brunoplatz 11, oversaw a small Jewish Temple and cemetery. Census figures from 1930 indicate that there were only 168 Jews in Svitavy out of a total population of 10,466.⁹³

There is no reason not to accept these stories as being true, though it is hard to verify whether anyone named Kantner worked at Emalia. There is no Kantner on the first “Schindler-type” list from late 1943 nor on the Mauthausen transport lists of August 10, 1944, which included hundreds of male Schindlerjuden. The same is true for the original “Schindler’s List” of males for October 21, 1944, and the two final “Schindler’s Lists” of April 18, 1945 and May 8, 1945. But this proves nothing because the lists kept by the SS for Emalia’s Jewish workers have disappeared, probably destroyed in the war or hidden away in some obscure Polish archive.

But one other point should be made about the various factors that ultimately convinced Oskar Schindler to become more aggressive in his efforts to save Jews, and that is the tide of war.

According to Ian Kershaw, the defeat at Stalingrad barely six weeks before the closing of the Kraków ghetto in 1943 had now convinced those “with any sense of realism” who previously held onto “dwindling hopes of victory” that “ultimate defeat” was now a certainty. Though Hitler’s power remained strong, loyalty to the Nazi state and Hitler himself began to decline considerably.⁹⁴ And although evidence suggests that Schindler had already gained quite a reputation as someone who was kind towards his Jewish workers, it was probably not coincidental that he became more aggressive in his efforts to help Jews after the Stalingrad debacle; in fact, general German disillusionment with Hitler’s regime probably helped Schindler. Moreover, as Oskar and others began to think of a postwar Europe without Hitler, some thought had to be given to questions about criminality and responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich. And beyond this was the practical question of a return to normal life. We do know that at the end of the war, Oskar naively thought he could transform his factory in Brünnlitz into an Emalia-type plant that would produce enamelware for a war-torn Europe in desperate need of bare necessities such as pots and pans. And during his escape westward, this former German spy and armaments manufacturer carried with him a document prepared by his Schindlerjuden attesting to his kindness and good treatment of them. His decision to settle in Regensburg, Germany after the war, which was only an hour or two away from the Czech border, indicates that he probably had dreams of returning to his homeland. The forced expulsion of the Sudeten Germans by Czech authorities in the immediate years after the end of World War II insured, though, that Oskar and Emilie Schindler would never be able to return to Czechoslovakia. What Oskar Schindler never counted on was that, after the war, he, like his Schindlerjuden, would become a Displaced Person without a homeland.