Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 20

Two days after the visit of the factory heads to Płaszów, Schindler turned up at Commandant Goeth’s temporary office in the city, bringing with him the compliments of a bottle of brandy. The news of Diana Reiter’s assassination had by this time reached the front office of Emalia and was the sort of item that confirmed Oskar in his intention to keep his factory outside Płaszów.

The two big men sat opposite each other and there was a mutual knowingness in them too, just as there had been in the brief relationship between Amon and Miss Reiter. What they knew was that each of them was in Cracow to make a fortune; that therefore Oskar would pay for favors. At that level Oskar and the Commandant understood each other well. Oskar had the characteristic salesman’s gift of treating men he abhorred as if they were spiritual brothers, and it would deceive the Herr Commandant so completely that Amon would always believe Oskar a friend.

But from the evidence of Stern and others it is obvious that, from the time of their earlier contacts, Oskar abominated Goeth as a man who went to the work of murder as calmly as a clerk goes to his office. Oskar could speak to Amon the administrator, Amon the speculator, but knew at the same time that nine-tenths of the Commandant’s being lay beyond the normal rational processes of humans. The business and social connections between Oskar and Amon worked well enough to tempt the supposition that Oskar was somehow and despite himself fascinated by the evil of the man. In fact, no one who knew Oskar at this time or later saw a sign of any such enthrallment. Oskar despised Goeth in the simplest and most passionate terms. His contempt would grow without limit, and his career would dramatically demonstrate it. Just the same, the reflection can hardly be avoided that Amon was Oskar’s dark brother, was the berserk and fanatic executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appetites, have become.

With a bottle of brandy between them, Oskar explained to Amon why it was impossible for him to move into Płaszów. His plant was too substantial to be shifted. He believed his friend Madritsch intended to move his Jewish workers in, but Madritsch’s machinery was more easily transferred—it was basically a series of sewing machines. There were different problems involved in moving heavy metal presses, each of which, as a sophisticated machine will, had developed special quirks. His skilled workers had become accustomed to these quirks. But on a new factory floor the machines would display an entirely new set of eccentricities. There’d be delays; the settling-in period would take longer than it would for his esteemed friend Julius Madritsch. The Untersturmführer would understand that with important war contracts to fulfill, DEF could not spare such a lapse of time. Herr Beckmann, who had the same sort of problem, was firing all his Jews over at the Corona works. He didn’t want the fuss of the Jews marching out from Płaszów to the factory in the morning and back in the evenings.

Unfortunately, he, Schindler, had hundreds more skilled Jewish workers than Beckmann did. If he got rid of them, Poles would have to be trained in their place and there would again be a production delay, an even greater one than if he accepted Goeth’s attractive offer and moved into Płaszów.

Amon secretly thought that Oskar might be worried that a move into Płaszów would impinge on any sweetly running little deals he had going in Cracow. The Commandant therefore hurried to reassure Herr Schindler that there’d be no interference in the management of the enamel factory. “It’s purely the industrial problems that worry me,” said Schindler piously. He didn’t want to inconvenience the Commandant, but he would be grateful, and he was sure the Armaments Inspectorate would also be grateful, if DEF were permitted to stay in its present location.

Among men like Goeth and Oskar, the word “gratitude” did not have an abstract meaning. Gratitude was a payoff. Gratitude was liquor and diamonds. I understand your problems, Herr Schindler, said Amon. I shall be happy, once the ghetto is liquidated, to provide a guard to escort your workers from Płaszów to Zablocie.

Itzhak Stern, coming to Zablocie one afternoon on business for the Progress factory, found Oskar depressed and sensed in him a dangerous feeling of impotence. After Klonowska had brought in the coffee, which the Herr Direktor drank as always with a shot of cognac, Oskar told Stern that he’d been to Płaszów again: ostensibly to look at the facilities; in fact to gauge when it would be ready for the Ghettomenschen. “I took a count,” said Oskar. He’d counted the terraced barracks on the far hill and found that if Amon intended to cram 200 women into each, as was likely, there was now room for some 6,000 women up there in the top compound. The men’s sector down the hill did not have so many finished buildings, but at the rate things were done in Płaszów it could be finished in days. Everyone on the factory floor knows what’s going to happen, said Oskar. And it’s no use keeping the night shift on the premises here, because after this one, there’ll be no ghetto to go back to. All I can tell them, said Oskar, taking a second slug of cognac, is that they shouldn’t try to hide unless they’re sure of the hiding place. He’d heard that the pattern was to tear the ghetto apart after it had been cleared. Every wall cavity would be probed, every attic carpet taken up, every niche revealed, every cellar plumbed.

All I can tell them, said Oskar, is not to resist.

So it happened oddly that Stern, one of the targets of the coming Aktion, sat comforting Herr Direktor Schindler, a mere witness.

Oskar’s attention to his Jewish laborers was being diffused, tempted away by the wider tragedy of the ghetto’s coming end. Płaszów was a labor institution, said Stern. Like all institutions, it could be outlived. It wasn’t like Bełżec, where they made death in the same manner in which Henry Ford made cars. It was degrading to have to line up for Płaszów on orders, but it wasn’t the end of things. When Stern had finished arguing, Oskar put both thumbs under the beveled top of his desk and seemed for a few seconds to want to tear it off. You know, Stern, he said, that that’s damn well not good enough! It is, said Stern. It’s the only course.

And he went on arguing, quoting and hairsplitting, and was himself frightened. For Oskar seemed to be in crisis. If Oskar lost hope, Stern knew, all the Jewish workers of Emalia would be fired, for Oskar would wish to be purified of the entire dirty business.

There’ll be time to do something more positive, said Stern. But not yet.

Abandoning the attempt to tear the lid from his desk, Oskar sat back in his chair and resumed his depression. “You know that Amon Goeth,” he said. “He’s got charm. He could come in here now and charm you. But he’s a lunatic.”

On the ghetto’s last morning—a Shabbat, as it happened, March 13—Amon Goeth arrived in Plac Zgody, Peace Square, at an hour which officially preceded dawn. Low clouds obscured any sharp distinctions between night and day. He saw that the men of the Sonderkommando had already arrived and stood about on the frozen earth of the small park in the middle, smoking and laughing quietly, keeping their presence a secret from the ghetto dwellers in the streets beyond Herr Pankiewicz’ pharmacy. The roads down which they’d move were clear, as in a model of a town. The remaining snow lay heaped and tarnished in gutters and against walls. It is safe to guess that sentimental Goeth felt paternal as he looked out at the orderly scene and saw the young men, comradely before action, in the middle of the square.

Amon took a pull of cognac while he waited there for the middle-aged Sturmbannführer Willi Haase, who would have strategic, though not tactical, control of today’s Aktion. Today Ghetto A, from Plac Zgody westward, the major section of the ghetto, the one where all the working (healthy, hoping, opinionated) Jews dwelt, would be emptied. Ghetto B, a small compound a few blocks square at the eastern end of the ghetto, contained the old, the last of the unemployable. They would be uprooted overnight, or tomorrow. They were slated for Commandant Rudolf Hóss’s greatly expanded extermination camp at Auschwitz. Ghetto B was straightforward, honest work. Ghetto A was the challenge.

Everyone wanted to be here today, for today was history. There had been for more than seven centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening—or at least by tomorrow—those seven centuries would have become a rumor, and Cracow would be judenrein (clean of Jews). And every petty SS official wanted to be able to say that he had seen it happen. Even Unkelbach, the Treuhänder of the Progress cutlery factory, having some sort of reserve SS rank, would put on his NCO’S uniform today and move through the ghetto with one of the squads. Therefore the distinguished Willi Haase, being of field rank and involved in the planning, had every right to be counted in.

Amon would be suffering his customary minor headache and be feeling a little drained from the feverish insomnia in which he’d spent the small hours. Now he was here, though, he felt a certain professional exhilaration. It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honor without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at. Psychological impunity had been harder to achieve. Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide. SS training documents, written to combat these futile casualties, pointed out the simplemindedness of believing that because the Jew bore no visible weapons he was bereft of social, economic, or political arms. He was, in fact, armed to the teeth. Steel yourself, said the documents, for the Jewish child is a cultural time bomb, the Jewish woman a biology of treasons, the Jewish male a more incontrovertible enemy than any Russian could hope to be.

Amon Goeth was steeled. He knew he could not be touched, and the very thought of that gave him the same delicious excitement a long-distance runner might have before an event he feels sure about. Amon despised in a genial sort of way those officers who fastidiously left the act itself to their men and NCO’S. He sensed that in some way that might be more dangerous than lending a hand yourself. He would show the way, as he had with Diana Reiter. He knew the euphoria that would build during the day, the gratification that would grow, along with a taste for liquor, as noon came and the pace picked up. Even under the low squalor of those clouds, he knew that this was one of the best days, that when he was old and the race extinct, the young would ask with wonder about days like this.

Less than a kilometer away, a doctor of the ghetto’s convalescent hospital, Dr. H, sat among his last patients, in darkness, grateful that they were isolated like this on the hospital’s top floor, high above the street, alone with their pain and fever.

For at street level everyone knew what had happened at the epidemic hospital near Plac Zgody. An SS detachment under Oberscharführer Albert Hujar had entered the hospital to close it down and had found Dr. Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients, who, she said, should not be moved. The whooping cough children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for their own sakes and for the community’s, and the tuberculosis cases were simply too sick to walk out.

Since scarlet fever is an adolescent disease, many of Dr. Blau’s patients were girls between the age of twelve and sixteen. Faced with Albert Hujar, Dr. Blau pointed, as warranty for her professional judgment, to these wide-eyed, feverish girls. Hujar himself, acting on the mandate he’d received the week before from Amon Goeth, shot Dr. Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some trying to rise in their beds, some detached in their own delirium, were executed in a rage of automatic fire. When Hujar’s squad had finished, a detail of ghetto men was sent up the stairs to deal with the dead, to pile the bloodied linen, and to wash down the walls.

The convalescent hospital was situated in what had been before the war a Polish police station. Throughout the life of the ghetto, its three floors had been cluttered with the sick. Its director was a respected physician named Dr. B. By the bleak morning of March 13, Doctors B and H had reduced its population to four, all of them immovable. One was a young workman with galloping consumption; the second, a talented musician with terminal kidney disease. It seemed important to Dr. H that they somehow be spared the final panic of a mad volley of fire. Even more so the blind man afflicted by a stroke, and the old gentleman whose earlier surgery for an intestinal tumor had left him weakened and burdened with a colostomy. The medical staff here, Dr. H included, were of the highest caliber. From this ill-equipped ghetto hospital would derive the first Polish accounts of Weil’s erythroblastic disease, a condition of the bone marrow, and of the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. This morning, though, Dr. H was concerned with the question of cyanide. With an eye to the option of suicide, H had acquired a supply of cyanic acid solution. He knew that other doctors had too. This past year depression had been endemic to the ghetto. It had infected Dr. H. He was young; he was formidably healthy. Yet history itself seemed to have gone malignant. To know he had access to cyanide had been a comfort for Dr. H on his worst days. By this late stage of the ghetto’s history, it was the one pharmaceutical left to him and to the other doctors in quantity. There had rarely been any sulfa. Emetics, ether, and even aspirin were used up. Cyanide was the single sophisticated drug remaining.

This morning before five, Dr. H had been awakened in his room in Wit Stwosz Street by the noise of trucks pulling up beyond the wall. Looking down from his window, he saw the Sonderkommandos assembling by the river and knew that they had come to take some decisive action in the ghetto. He rushed to the hospital and found Dr. B and the nursing staff already working there on the same premise, arranging for every patient who could move to be taken downstairs and brought home by relatives or friends. When all except the four had gone, Dr. B told the nurses to leave, and all of them obeyed except for one senior nurse. Now she and Doctors B and H remained with the last four patients in the nearly deserted hospital.

Doctors B and H did not speak much as they waited. They each had access to the cyanide, and soon H would be aware that Dr. B’s mind was also sadly preoccupied with it. There was suicide, yes. But there was euthanasia as well. The concept terrified H. He had a sensitive face and a marked delicacy about the eyes. He suffered painfully from a set of ethics as intimate to him as the organs of his own body. He knew that a physician with common sense and a syringe and little else to guide him could add up like a shopping list the values of either course—to inject the cyanide, or to abandon the patients to the Sonderkommando. But H knew that these things were never a matter of calculating sums, that ethics was higher and more tortuous than algebra.

Sometimes Dr. B would go to the window, look out to see if the Aktion had begun in the streets, and turn back to H with a level, professional calm in his eyes. Dr. B, H could tell, was also running through the options, flicking the faces of the problem like the faces of riffled cards, then starting again. Suicide. Euthanasia. Hydrocyanic acid. One appealing concept: Stand and be found among the beds like Rosalia Blau. Another: Use the cyanide on oneself as well as on the sick. The second idea appealed to H, seeming not as passive as the first. As well as that, waking depressed these past three nights, he’d felt something like a physical desire for the fast poison, as if it were merely the drug or stiff drink that every victim needed to soften the final hour.

To a serious man like Dr. H, this allure was a compelling reason not to take the stuff. For him the precedents for suicide had been set in his scholarly childhood, when his father had read to him in Josephus the account of the Dead Sea Zealots’ mass suicide on the eve of capture by the Romans. The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender. Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing. But H was a man of principle.

And he had a wife. He and his wife had another escape route, and he knew it. It led through the sewers near the corner of Piwna and Krakusa Streets. The sewers and a risky escape to the forest of Ojców. He feared that more than the easy oblivion of cyanide. If Blue Police or Germans stopped him, however, and dragged his trousers down, he would pass the test, thanks to Dr. Lachs. Lachs was a distinguished plastic surgeon who had taught a number of young Cracow Jews how to lengthen their foreskins bloodlessly by sleeping with a weight—a bottle containing a gradually increasing volume of water—attached to themselves. It was, said Lachs, a device that had been used by Jews in periods of Roman persecution, and the intensity of SS action in Cracow had caused Lachs to revive its use in the past eighteen months. Lachs had taught his young colleague Dr. H the method, and the fact that it had worked with some success allowed H even less ground for suicide.

At dawn the nurse, a calm woman about forty years old, came to Dr. H and made a morning report. The young man was resting well, but the blind man with the stroke-affected speech was in a state of anxiety. The musician and the anal-fistula case had both had a painful night. It was all very quiet in the convalescent hospital now, however; the patients snuffled in the last of their sleep or the intimacy of their pain; and Dr. H went out onto the freezing balcony above the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and once more examine the question. Last year Dr. H had been at the old epidemic hospital in Rekawka when the SS decided to close that section of the ghetto and relocate the hospital. They had lined the staff up against the wall and dragged the patients downstairs. H had seen old Mrs. Reisman’s leg caught between the balusters, and an SS man hauling her by the other leg did not stop and extricate her but pulled until the trapped limb snapped with an audible crack. That was how patients were moved in the ghetto. But last year no one had thought of mercy-killing. Everyone had still hoped at that stage that things might improve.

Now, even if he and Dr. B made their decision, H didn’t know if he had the rigor to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispassion. It was absurdly like the argument, in one’s youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you’d decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.

Out there on the balcony he heard the first noise. It began early and came from the eastern end of the ghetto. The Raus, raus! of megaphones, the customary lie about baggage which some people still chose to believe. In the deserted streets, and among the tenements in which no one moved, you could hear all the way from the cobblestones of Plac Zgody and up by the river in Nadwisłańska Street an indefinite terror-sick murmur which made H himself tremble.

Then he heard the first volley, loud enough to wake the patients. And a sudden stridency after the firing, a bull megaphone raging at some plangent feminine voice; and then the wailing snapped off by a further burst of fire, and a different wailing succeeding, the bereaved being hurried along by the SS bullhorns, by anxious OD men, and by neighbors, unreasonable grief fading into the far corner of the ghetto where there was a gate. He knew that it all might well have cut through even the precomatose state of the musician with the failed kidneys.

When he returned to the ward, he could see that they were watching him—even the musician. He could sense rather than see the way their bodies stiffened in their beds, and the old man with the colostomy cried out with the muscular exertion. “Doctor, doctor!” someone said. “Please!” answered Dr. H, by which he meant, I’m here and they’re a long way off yet. He looked at Dr. B, who narrowed his eyes as the noise of evictions broke out again three blocks away. Dr. B nodded at him, walked to the small locked pharmaceutical chest at the end of the ward, and came back with the bottle of hydrocyanic acid. After a pause, H moved to his colleague’s side. He could have stood and left it to Dr. B. He guessed that the man had the strength to do it alone, without the approval of colleagues. But it would be shameful, H thought, not to cast his own vote, not to take some of the burden. Dr. H, though younger than Dr. B, had been associated with the Jagiellonian University, was a specialist, a thinker. He wanted to give Dr. B the backing of all that.

“Well,” said Dr. B, displaying the bottle briefly to H. The word was nearly obscured by a woman’s screaming and ranting official orders from the far end of Józefińska Street. Dr. B called the nurse. “Give each patient forty drops in water.” “Forty drops,” she repeated. She knew what the medication was. “That’s right,” said Dr. B. Dr. H also looked at her.

Yes, he wanted to say. I’m strong now; I could give it myself. But if I did, it would alarm them. Every patient knows that nurses bring the medicine around.

As the nurse prepared the mixture, H wandered down the ward and laid his hand on the old man’s. “I have something to help you, Roman,” he told him. Dr. H sensed with amazement the old man’s history through the touch of skin. For a second, like a surge of flame, the young man Roman was there, growing up in Franz Josef’s Galicia, a lady-killer in the sweet little nougat of a city, the petit Wien, the jewel of the Vistula, Cracow. Wearing Franz Josef’s uniform and going to the mountains for spring maneuvers. Chocolate-soldiering in Rynek Glowny with the girls of Kazimierz, in a city of lace and patisseries. Climbing the Kosciuszko Mound and stealing a kiss among the shrubbery. How could the world have come so far in one manhood? asked the young man in old Roman. From Franz Josef to the NCO who had had a sanction to put Rosalia Blau and the scarlet fever girls to death?

“Please, Roman,” said the doctor, meaning that the old man should unclench his body. He believed the Sonderkommando was coming within the hour. Dr. H felt, but resisted, a temptation to let him in on the secret. Dr. B had been liberal with the dosage. A few seconds of breathlessness and a minor amazement would be no new or intolerable sensation to old Roman. When the nurse came with four medicine glasses, none of them even asked her what she was bringing them. Dr. H would never know if any of them understood. He turned away and looked at his watch. He feared that when they drank it, some noise would begin, something worse than the normal hospital gasps and gaggings. He heard the nurse murmuring, “Here’s something for you.” He heard an intake of breath. He didn’t know if it was patient or nurse. The woman is the hero of this, he thought.

When he looked again, the nurse was waking the kidney patient, the sleepy musician, and offering him the glass. From the far end of the ward, Dr. B looked on in a clean white coat.

Dr. H moved to old Roman and took his pulse. There was none. In a bed at the far end of the ward, the musician forced the almond-smelling mixture down.

It was all as gentle as H had hoped. He looked at them—their mouths agape, but not obscenely so, their eyes glazed and immune, their heads back, their chins pointed at the ceiling—with the envy any ghetto dweller would feel for escapees.