Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 8

It wasn’t such a bad Christmas that year. But there was a wistfulness, and snow lay like a question in the parkland across from Schindler’s apartment, like something posed, watchful and eternal, on the roof of the Wawel up the road and under the ancient facades of Kanonicza Street. No one believed anymore in a quick resolution—neither the soldiery nor the Poles nor the Jews on either side of the river.

For his Polish secretary Klonowska, that Christmas, Schindler bought a poodle, a ridiculous Parisian thing, acquired by Pfefferberg. For Ingrid he bought jewelry and sent some also to gentle Emilie down in Zwittau. Poodles were hard to find, Leopold Pfefferberg reported. But jewelry was a snap. Because of the times, gems were in a high state of movement.

Oskar seems to have pursued his simultaneous attachments to three women and sundry casual friendships with others, all without suffering the normal penalties that beset the womanizer. Visitors to his apartment cannot remember ever finding Ingrid sulking. She seems to have been a generous and complaisant girl. Emilie, with even greater grounds for complaint, had too much dignity to make the scenes Oskar richly deserved. If Klonowska had any resentment, it does not seem to have affected her manner in the front office of DEF nor her loyalty to the Herr Direktor. One could expect that in a life like Oskar’s, public confrontations between angry women would be commonplace. But no one among Oskar’s friends and workers—witnesses willing enough to admit and even in some cases chuckle over his sins of the flesh—remembers such painful confrontations, so often the fate of far more restrained philanderers than Oskar.

To suggest as some have that any woman would be pleased with partial possession of Oskar is to demean the women involved. The problem was, perhaps, that if you wanted to talk to Oskar about fidelity, a look of childlike and authentic bewilderment entered his eyes, as if you were proposing some concept like Relativity which could be understood only if the listener had five hours to sit still and concentrate. Oskar never had five hours and never understood.

Except in his mother’s case. That Christmas morning, for his dead mother’s sake, Oskar went to Mass at the Church of St. Mary. There was a space above the high altar where Wit Stwosz’s wooden tryptych had until weeks ago diverted worshipers with its crowd of jostling divinities. The vacancy, the pallor of the stone where the tryptych’s fixings had been, distracted and abashed Herr Schindler. Someone had stolen the tryptych. It had been shipped to Nuremberg. What an improbable world it had become!

Business was wonderful that winter just the same. In the next year his friends in the Armaments Inspectorate began to talk to Oskar about the possibility of opening a munitions division to manufacture antitank shells. Oskar was not as interested in shells as in pots and pans. Pots and pans were easy engineering. You cut out and pressed the metal, dipped it in the tubs, fired it at the right temperature. You didn’t have to calibrate instruments; the work was nowhere near as exacting as it would be for arms. There was no under-the-counter trade in shell casings, and Oskar liked under-the-counter—liked the sport of it, the disrepute, the fast returns, the lack of paperwork.

But because it was good politics, he established a munitions section, installing a few immense Hilo machines, for the precision pressing and tooling of shell casings, in one gallery of his No. 2 workshop. The munitions section was so far developmental; it would take some months of planning, measuring, and test production before any shells appeared. The big Hilos, however, gave the Schindler works, as a hedge against the questionable future, at least the appearance of essential industry.

Before the Hilos had even been properly calibrated, Oskar began to get hints from his SS contacts at Pomorska Street that there was to be a ghetto for Jews. He mentioned the rumor to Stern, not wanting to arouse alarm. Oh, yes, said Stern, the word was out. Some people were even looking forward to it. We’ll be inside, the enemy will be outside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us, no one stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.

The edict, “Gen. Gub. 44/91,” posted on March 3, was published in the Cracow dailies and blared forth from loudspeakers on trucks in Kazimierz. Walking through his munitions department, Oskar heard one of his German technicians comment on the news. “Won’t they be better off in there?” asked the technician. “The Poles hate them, you know.”

The edict used the same excuse. As a means of reducing racial conflict in the Government General, a closed Jewish quarter would be set up. Enclosure in the ghetto would be compulsory for all Jews, but those with the proper labor card could travel from the ghetto to work, returning in the evening. The ghetto would be located in the suburb of Podgórze just across the river. The deadline for entering it would be March 20. Once in, you would be allocated housing by the Judenrat, but Poles presently living in the area of the ghetto and who therefore had to move were to apply to their own housing office for apartments in other parts of town.

A map of the new ghetto was appended to the edict. The north side would be bounded by the river, the east end by the railway line to Lwów, the south side by the hills beyond Rekawka, the west by Podgórze Place. It would be crowded in there.

But there was hope that repression would take definite form now and provide people with a basis on which to plan their restricted futures. For a man like Juda Dresner, a textile wholesaler of Stradom Street who would come to know Oskar, the past year and a half had brought a bewildering succession of decrees, intrusions, and confiscations. He had lost his business to the Trust Agency, his car, his apartment. His bank account had been frozen. His children’s schools had been closed, or else they had been expelled from them.

The family’s jewelry had been seized, and their radio. He and his family were forbidden entry to the center of Cracow, denied any travel by train. They could use only segregated trolley cars. His wife and daughter and sons were subject to intermittent roundups for snow shoveling or other compulsory labor. You never knew, when you were forced into the back of a truck, if the absence would be a short or long one, or what sort of hair-trigger madmen might be supervising the work you would be forced to. Under this sort of regimen you felt that life offered no footholds, that you were slithering into a pit which had no bottom. But perhaps the ghetto was the bottom, the point at which it was possible to take organized thought.

Besides, the Jews of Cracow were accustomed—in a way that could best be described as congenital— to the idea of a ghetto. And now that it had been decided, the very word had a soothing, ancestral ring. Their grandfathers had not been permitted to emerge from the ghetto of Kazimierz until 1867, when Franz Josef signed a decree permitting them to live wherever they wished in the city. Cynics said that the Austrians had needed to open up Kazimierz, socketed as it was in the elbow of the river so close to Cracow, so that Polish laborers could find accommodation close to their places of work. But Franz Josef was nonetheless revered by the older people from Kazimierz as energetically as he had been in the childhood household of Oskar Schindler.

Although their liberty had come so late, there was at the same time among the older Cracow Jews a nostalgia for the old ghetto of Kazimierz. A ghetto implied certain squalors, a crowding in tenements, a sharing of bathroom facilities, disputes over drying space on clotheslines. Yet it also consecrated the Jews to their own specialness, to a richness of shared scholarship, to songs and Zionist talk, elbow to elbow, in coffeehouses rich in ideas if not in cream. Evil rumors emanated from the ghettos of Łódź and Warsaw, but the Podgórze ghetto as planned was more generous with space, for if you superimposed it on a map of the Centrum, you found that the ghetto was in area about half the size of the Old City—by no means enough space, but not quite strangulation.

There was also in the edict a sedative clause that promised to protect the Jews from their Polish countrymen. Since the early 1930’s, a willfully orchestrated racial contest had prevailed in Poland. When the Depression began and farm prices fell, the Polish government had sanctioned a range of anti-Semitic political groups of the kind that saw the Jews as the base of all their economic troubles.

Sanacja, Marshal Pilsudski’s Moral Cleansing Party, made an alliance after the old man’s death with the Camp of National Unity, a right-wing Jew-baiting group. Prime Minister Skladkowski, on the floor of the Parliament in Warsaw, declared, “Economic war on the Jews? All right!” Rather than give the peasants land reform, Sanacja encouraged them to look at the Jewish stalls on market day as the symbol and total explanation of Polish rural poverty. There were pogroms against the Jewish population in a series of towns, beginning in Grodno in 1935. The Polish legislators also entered the struggle, and Jewish industries were starved under new laws on bank credit. Craft guilds closed their lists to Jewish artisans, and the universities introduced a quota, or what they themselves—strong in the classics—called numerus clausus aut nullus (a closed number or nil), on the entry of Jewish students. Faculties gave way to National Unity insistence that Jews be appointed special benches in the quadrangle and be exiled to the left side of the lecture halls. Commonly enough in Polish universities, the pretty and brilliant daughters of city Jewry emerged from lecture halls to have their faces savaged by a quick razor stroke delivered by a lean, serious youth from the Camp of National Unity.

In the first days of the German Occupation, the conquerors had been astounded by the willingness of Poles to point out Jewish households, to hold a prayer-locked Jew still while a German docked the Orthodox beard with scissors or, pinking the facial flesh as well, with an infantry bayonet. In March 1941, therefore, the promise to protect the ghetto dwellers from Polish national excess fell on the ear almost credibly.

Although there was no great spontaneous joy among the Jews of Cracow as they packed for the move to Podgórze, there were strange elements of homecoming to it, as well as that sense of arriving at a limit beyond which, with any luck, you wouldn’t be further uprooted or tyrannized. Enough so that even some people from the villages around Cracow, from Wieliczka, from Niepolomice, from Lipnica, Murowana, and Tyniec hurried to town lest they be locked out on March 20 and find themselves in a comfortless landscape. For the ghetto was by its nature, almost by definition, habitable, even if subject to intermittent attack. The ghetto represented stasis instead of flux.

The ghetto would introduce a minor inconvenience in Oskar Schindler’s life. It was usual for him to leave his luxury apartment in Straszewskiego, pass the limestone lump of the Wawel stuck in the mouth of the city like a cork in a bottle, and so roll down through Kazimierz, over the Kosciuszko bridge and left toward his factory in Zablocie. Now that route would be blocked by the ghetto walls. It was a minor problem, but it made the idea of maintaining an apartment on the top floor of his office building in Lipowa Street more reasonable. It wasn’t such a bad place, built in the style of Walter Gropius. Lots of glass and light, fashionable cubic bricks in the entranceway. Whenever he did travel between the city and Zablocie in those March days before the deadline, he would see the Jews of Kazimierz packing, and on Stradom Street would pass, early in the grace period, families pushing barrows piled with chairs, mattresses, and clocks toward the ghetto. Their families had lived in Kazimierz since the time it was an island separated from the Centrum by a stream called Stara Wisła. Since, in fact, the time Kazimier the Great had invited them to Cracow when, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death. Oskar surmised that their ancestors would have turned up in Cracow like that, pushing a barrowful of bedding, more than five hundred years before. Now they were leaving, it seemed, with the same barrowful. Kazimier’s invitation had been cancelled. During those morning journeys across town, Oskar noticed that the plan was for the city trolleys to go on rolling down Lwówska Street, through the middle of the ghetto. All walls facing the trolley line were being bricked up by Polish workmen, and where there had been open spaces, cement walls were raised. As well, the trolleys would have their doors closed as they entered the ghetto and could not stop until they emerged again in the Umwelt, the Aryan world, at the corner of Lwówska and Św Kingi Street. Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation złoty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.

From March 20, Oskar’s Jewish workers would not receive any wages and were meant to live entirely by their rations. Instead he would pay a fee to SS headquarters in Cracow. Both Oskar and Madritsch were uneasy about that, for they knew the war would end and the slaveholders, just as in America, would be shamed and stripped naked. The dues he would pay to the police chiefs were the standard SS Main Administrative and Economic Office fees—7.50 Reichsmarks per day for a skilled worker, 5 RM. for unskilled and women. They were, by a margin, cheaper rates than those which operated on the open labor market. But for Oskar and Julius Madritsch both, the moral discomfort outweighed the economic advantage. The meeting of his wage bill was the least of Oskar’s worries that year. Besides, he was never an ideal capitalist. His father had accused him often in his youth of being reckless with money. While he was a mere sales manager, he’d maintained two cars, hoping that Hans would get to hear of it and be shocked. Now, in Cracow, he could afford to keep a stableful—a Belgian Minerva, a Maybach, an Adler cabriolet, a BMW.

To be a prodigal and still be wealthier than your more careful father—that was one of the triumphs Schindler wanted out of life. In boom times the cost of labor was beside the point.

It was that way for Madritsch too. Julius Madritsch’s uniform mill stood on the western side of the ghetto, a mile or so from Oskar’s enamelworks. He was doing so well that he was negotiating to open a similar plant in Tarnow. He too was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, and his credit was so good that he had received a loan of a million złoty from the Bank Emisyjny (issue Bank).

Whatever ethical queasiness they felt, it is not likely that either entrepreneur, Oskar or Julius, felt a moral obligation to avoid employing additional Jews. That was a stance, and since they were pragmatists, stances weren’t their style. In any case, Itzhak Stern as well as Roman Ginter, a businessman and representative of the Relief Office of the Judenrat, called on Oskar and Julius both and begged them to employ more Jews, as many as could be fitted in. The objective was to give the ghetto an economic permanence. It was almost axiomatic, Stern and Ginter considered at that stage, that a Jew who had an economic value in a precocious empire hungry for skilled workers was safe from worse things. And Oskar and Madritsch agreed.

So for two weeks the Jews trundled their barrows through Kazimierz and over the bridge into Podgórze. Middle-class families whose Polish servants had come with them to help push the cart. At the bottom of the barrows lay the remaining brooches, the fur coats, under mattresses and kettles and skillets.

Crowds of Poles on Stradom and Starovislna Streets jeered and hurled mud. “The Jews are going, the Jews are going. Goodbye, Jews.”

Beyond the bridge a fancy wooden gate greeted the new citizens of the ghetto. White with scalloped ramparts which gave it an Arabesque look, it had two wide arches for the trolleys coming from and going to Cracow, and at the side was a white sentry box. Above the arches, a title in Hebrew sought to reassure. JEWISH TOWN, it proclaimed. High barbed-wire fences had been strung along the front of the ghetto, facing the river, and open spaces were sealed with round-topped cement slabs nine feet tall, resembling strings of gravestones for the anonymous. At the ghetto gate the trundling Jew was met by a representative of the Judenrat Housing Office. If he had a wife and large family, a man might be assigned two rooms and have the use of a kitchen. Even so, after the good living of the Twenties and Thirties, it was painful to have to share your private life with families of different rituals, of another, distasteful musk and habits. Mothers screamed, and fathers said things could be worse and sucked on hollow teeth and shook their heads. In the one room, the Orthodox found the liberals an abomination. On March 20, the movement was complete. Everyone outside the ghetto was forfeit and in jeopardy. Inside, for the moment, there was living space.

Twenty-three-year-old Edith Liebgold was assigned a first-floor room to share with her mother and her baby. The fall of Cracow eighteen months back had put her husband into a mood verging on despair. He’d wandered away from home as if he wanted to look into the courses open to him. He had ideas about the forests, about finding a safe clearing. He had never returned.

From her end window Edith Liebgold could see the Vistula through the barbed-wire barricade, but her path to other parts of the ghetto, especially to the hospital in Wegierska Street, took her through Plac Zgody, Peace Square, the ghetto’s only square. Here, on the second day of her life inside the walls, she missed by twenty seconds being ordered into an SS truck and taken to shovel coal or snow in the city. It was not just that work details often, according to rumor, returned to the ghetto with one or more fewer members than when they had left. More than this sort of odds, Edith feared being forced into a truck when, half a minute earlier, you’d thought you were going to Pankiewicz’ pharmacy, and your baby was due to be fed in twenty minutes. Therefore she went with friends to the Jewish Employment Office. If she could get shift work, her mother would mind the baby at night.

The office in those first days was crowded. The Judenrat had its own police force now, the Ordnungsdienst (or OD), expanded and regularized to keep order in the ghetto, and a boy with a cap and an armband organized waiting lines in front of the office.

Edith Liebgold’s group were just inside the door, making lots of noise to pass the time, when a small middle-aged man wearing a brown suit and a tie approached her. They could tell that they’d attracted him with their racket, their brightness. At first they thought he intended to pick Edith up.

“Look,” he said, “rather than wait… there is an enamel factory over in Zablocie.”

He let the address have its effect.

Zablocie was outside the ghetto, he was telling them. You could barter with the Polish workers there. He needed ten healthy women for the night shift. The girls made faces, as if they could afford to choose work and might even turn him down. Not heavy, he assured them. And they’ll teach you on the job. His name, he said, was Abraham Bankier. He was the manager. There was a German owner, of course. What sort of German? they asked. Bankier grinned as if he suddenly wanted to fulfill all their hopes. Not a bad sort, he told them.

That night Edith Liebgold met the other members of the enamel-factory night shift and marched across the ghetto toward Zablocie under the guard of a Jewish OD. In the column she asked questions about this Deutsche Email Fabrik. They serve a soup with plenty of body, she was told. Beatings? she asked. It’s not that sort of place, they said. It’s not like Beckmann’s razor-blade factory; more like Madritsch. Madritsch is all right, and Schindler too. At the entrance to the factory, the new night-shift workers were called out of the column by Bankier and taken upstairs and past vacant desks to a door marked HERR DIREKTOR. Edith Liebgold heard a deep voice tell them all to come in. They found the Herr Direktor seated on the corner of his desk, smoking a cigarette. His hair, somewhere between blond and light brown, looked freshly brushed; he wore a double-breasted suit and a silk tie. He looked exactly like a man who had a dinner to go to but had waited specially to have a word with them. He was immense; he was still young. From such a Hitlerite dream, Edith expected a lecture on the war effort and increasing production quotas. “I wanted to welcome you,” he told them in Polish. “You’re part of the expansion of this factory.” He looked away; it was even possible he was thinking, Don’t tell them that—they’ve got no stake in the place.

Then, without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, “You’ll be safe working here. If you work here, then you’ll live through the war.” Then he said good night and left the office with them, allowing Bankier to hold them back at the head of the stairs so that the Herr Direktor could go down first and get behind the wheel of his automobile. The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.

The new women of DEF took their job instruction in a pleasant daze. It was as if some mad old Gypsy with nothing to gain had told them they would marry a count. The promise had forever altered Edith Liebgold’s expectation of life. If ever they did shoot her, she would probably stand there protesting, “But the Herr Direktor said this couldn’t happen.”

The work made no mental demands. Edith carried the enamel-dipped pots, hanging by hooks from a long stick, to the furnaces. And all the time she pondered Herr Schindler’s promise.

Only madmen made promises as absolute as that. Without blinking. Yet he wasn’t mad. For he was a businessman with a dinner to go to. Therefore, he must know. But that meant some second sight, some profound contact with god or devil or the pattern of things. But again, his appearance, his hand with the gold signet ring, wasn’t the hand of a visionary. It was a hand that reached for the wine; it was a hand in which you could somehow sense the latent caresses. And so she came back to the idea of his madness again, to drunkenness, to mystical explanations, to the technique by which the Herr Direktor had infected her with certainty.

Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and the odds weren’t good.