Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 23

Among prisoners who knew, there was already competition to get into Emalia. Prisoner Dolek Horowitz, a purchasing officer inside the Płaszów camp, knew that he would not be allowed to go to Schindler’s place himself. But he had a wife and two children.

Richard, the younger of the children, woke up early these spring mornings as the earth gave off its last winter humor in mist, got down from his mother’s bunk in the women’s quarters, and ran down the hillside to the men’s camp, his mind on the coarse morning bread. He had to be with his father for morning roll call on the Appellplatz. His path took him past Chilowicz’ Jewish Police post and, even on foggy mornings, within sight of two watchtowers. But he was safe because he was known. He was a Horowitz child. His father was considered invaluable by Herr Bosch, who in turn was a drinking companion of the Commandant’s. Richard’s unself-conscious freedom of movement derived from his father’s expertise; he moved charmed under the eyes in the towers, finding his father’s barracks and climbing to his cot and waking him with questions. Why is there mist in the mornings and not in the afternoons? Will there be trucks? Will it take long on the Appellplatz today? Will there be floggings?

Through Richard’s morning questions, Dolek Horowitz had it borne in on him that Płaszów was unfit even for privileged children. Perhaps he could contact Schindler—Schindler came out here now and then and walked around the Administration Building and the workshops, under the guise of doing business, to leave small gifts and exchange news with old friends like Stern and Roman Ginter and Poldek Pfefferberg. When Dolek did not seem to be able to make contact this way, it struck him that perhaps Schindler could be approached through Bosch. Dolek believed they met a lot. Not out here so much, but perhaps in offices in town and at parties. You could tell they were not friends, but were bound together by dealings, by mutual favors.

It was not only, and perhaps not mainly, Richard whom Dolek wanted to get into Schindler’s compound. Richard could diffuse his terror in clouds of questions. It was his ten-year-old daughter, Niusia, who no longer asked questions; who was just another thin child past the age of frankness; who—from a window in the brushworks shop where she sewed the bristles into the wooden backs—saw the daily truckloads arriving at the Austrian hill fort and carried her terror insupportably, the way adults will, unable to climb onto a parental chest and transfer the fear. To soothe her hunger in Płaszów, Niusia had taken to smoking onion leaves in newspaper wrappings. The solid rumors about Emalia were that such precocious methods weren’t necessary there. So Dolek appealed to Bosch during one of his tours of the clothing warehouse. He presumed on Bosch’s earlier kindnesses, he said, to beg him to talk to Herr Schindler. He repeated his pleadings and repeated the children’s names again, so that Bosch, whose memory was eroded by schnapps, might still remember. Herr Schindler is probably my best friend, said Bosch. He’d do anything for me.

Dolek expected little from the talk. His wife, Regina, had no experience of making shells or enamelware. Bosch himself never mentioned the request again. Yet within the week they marched out on the next Emalia list, cleared by Commandant Goeth in return for a little envelope of jewelry.

Niusia looked like a thin, reserved adult in the women’s barracks at Emalia, and Richard moved as he had in Płaszów, everyone knowing him in the munitions section and the enamel shops, the guards accepting his familiarity. Regina kept expecting Oskar to come up to her in the enamel factory and say, “So you’re Dolek Horowitz’ wife?” Then the only question would be how to frame her thanks. But he never did. She was delighted to find that she was not very visible at Lipowa Street, and neither was her daughter. They understood that Oskar knew who they were, since he often chatted with Richard by name. They knew, too, by the altered nature of Richard’s questions, the extent of what they had been given.

The Emalia camp had no resident commandant to tyrannize the inmates. There were no permanent guards. The garrison was changed every two days, two truckloads of SS and Ukrainians coming up to Zablocie from Płaszów to take over the security of the subcamp. The Płaszów soldiers liked their occasional duty at Emalia. The Herr Direktor’s kitchens, more primitive even than Płaszów’s, turned out better meals.

Since the Herr Direktor started raging and making phone calls to Oberführer Scherner if any guard, instead of just patrolling the perimeter, entered the camp, the garrison kept to their side of the fence. Duty in Zablocie was pleasurably dull.

Except for inspection by senior SS men, the prisoners who worked at DEF rarely got a close view of their guards. One barbed-wire passageway took the inmates to their work in the enamel plant; another ran to the door of the munitions section. Those Emalia Jews who worked at the box factory, the radiator plant, the garrison office were marched to work and back by Ukrainians—different Ukrainians every second day. No guard had the time to develop a fatal grudge against a prisoner.

Therefore, though the SS may have set the limits to the life people led in Emalia, Oskar set its tone. The tone was one of fragile permanence. There were no dogs. There were no beatings. The soup and the bread were better and more plentiful than in Płaszów—about 2,000 calories a day, according to a doctor who worked in Emalia as a factory hand. The shifts were long, often twelve hours, for Oskar was still a businessman with war contracts to fill and a conventional desire for profit. It must be said, though, that no shift was arduous and that many of his prisoners seem to have believed at the time that their labor was making a contribution in measurable terms to their survival.

According to accounts Oskar presented after the war to the Joint Distribution Committee, he spent 1,800,000 złoty ($360,000) on food for the Emalia camp. Cosmetic entries could be found, written off to similar expenditure, in the books of Farben and Krupp—though nowhere near as high a percentage of the profit as in Oskar’s accounts. The truth is, though, that no one collapsed and died of overwork, beatings, or hunger in Emalia. Whereas at I. G. Farben’s Buna plant alone, 25,000 prisoners out of a work force of 35,000 would perish at their labor.

Long afterward, Emalia people would call the Schindler camp a paradise. Since they were by then widely scattered, it cannot have been a description they decided on after the fact. The term must have had some currency while they were in Emalia. It was, of course, only a relative paradise, a heaven by contrast with Płaszów. What it inspired in its people was a sense of almost surreal deliverance, something preposterous which they didn’t want to look at too closely for fear it would evaporate. New DEF hands knew of Oskar only by report. They did not want to put themselves in the Herr Direktor’s path or risk speaking to him.

They needed time for recovery and for adjustment to Schindler’s unorthodox prison system. A girl named Lusia, for example. Her husband had recently been separated out from the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz at Płaszów and shipped off with others to Mauthausen. With what would turn out to be mere realism, she grieved like a widow. Grieving, she’d been marched to Emalia. She worked at carrying dipped enamelware to the furnaces. You were permitted to heat up water on the warm surfaces of machinery, and the floor was warm. For her, hot water was Emalia’s first beneficence.

She saw Oskar at first only as a large shape moving down an aisle of metal presses or traversing a catwalk. It was somehow not a threatening shape. She sensed that if she were noticed, the nature of the place—the lack of beatings, the food, the absence of guards in the camp—might somehow reverse itself. She wanted only unobtrusively to work her shift and return down the barbed-wire tunnel to her hut in the compound.

After a while she found herself giving an answering nod to Oskar and even telling him that, yes, thank you, Herr Direktor, she was quite well.

Once he gave her some cigarettes, better than gold both as a comfort and as a means of trading with the Polish workers. Since she knew friends vanished, she feared his friendship; she wanted him to continue to be a presence, a magical parent. A paradise run by a friend was too fragile. To manage an enduring heaven, you needed someone both more authoritative and more mysterious than that.

Many of the Emalia prisoners felt the same. There was a girl named Regina Perlman living, at the time Oskar’s factory subcamp came into existence, in the city of Cracow on forged South American papers. Her dark complexion made the papers credible, and under them she worked as an Aryan in the office of a factory in Podgórze. She would have been safer from blackmailers if she’d gone to Warsaw, Łódź, or Gdansk. But her parents were in Płaszów, and she carried forged papers for their sakes too, so that she could supply them with food, comforts, medicine. She knew from the days in the ghetto that it was an adage in the Jewish mythology of Cracow that Herr Schindler could be expected to take extreme pains. She also knew the reports from Płaszów, from the quarry, the Commandant’s balcony. She would have to break cover to do it, but she believed it essential that she get her parents into Schindler’s backyard camp.

The first time she visited DEF she wore a safely anonymous faded floral dress and no stockings. The Polish gateman went through the business of calling Herr Schindler’s office upstairs, and through the glass she could see him disapproving of her. It’s nobody—some grubby girl from one of the other factories. She had the normal fear of people on Aryan papers that a hostile Pole would somehow spot her Jewishness. This one looked hostile.

It’s of no great importance, she told him when he returned shaking his head. She wanted to put him off her track. But the Pole did not even bother to lie to her. “He won’t see you,” he said. The hood of a BMW glowered in the factory yard, she could see, and it could belong only to Herr Schindler. He was in, but not to visitors who couldn’t afford stockings. She went away trembling at her escape. She’d been saved from making to Herr Schindler a confession which, even in her sleep, she feared making to anyone.

She waited a week before she could get more time off from the factory in Podgórze. She devoted an entire half-day to her approach. She bathed and got black-market stockings. From one of her few friends—a girl on Aryan papers could not risk having many—she borrowed a blouse.

She had an excellent jacket of her own and bought a lacquered straw hat with a veil. She made up her face, achieving a dark radiance appropriate to a woman living beyond threat. In the mirror she looked like her prewar self, an elegant Cracovienne of exotic racial derivation—Hungarian businessman father, perhaps, and a mother from Rio.

This time, as she had intended, the Pole in the gatehouse did not even recognize her. He let her inside while he rang Miss Klonowska, the Herr Direktor’s secretary, and then was put on to speak to Schindler himself. Herr Direktor, said the Pole, there is a lady here to see you on important business. Herr Schindler seemed to want details. A very well-dressed young lady, said the Pole, and then, bowing while holding the telephone, a very beautiful young lady, he said. As if he had a hunger to see her, or perhaps as if she might be some forgotten girl who’d embarrass him in the outer office, Schindler met her on the steps. He smiled when he saw he did not know her. He was very pleased to meet her, this Fraulein Rodriguez. She could see that he had a respect for pretty women, that it was at the same time childlike and yet sophisticated. With flourishes like those of a matinee idol, he indicated she should follow him upstairs. She wanted to talk to him in confidence? Of course she should. He led her past Klonowska. Klonowska took it calmly. The girl could mean anything— black-market or currency business. She could even be a chic partisan. Love might be the least of motivations. In any case, a worldly girl like Klonowska didn’t expect to own Oskar, or to be owned in return.

Inside the office, Schindler placed a chair for her and walked behind his desk beneath the ritual portrait of the Führer. Would she like a cigarette? Perhaps a Pernod or a cognac? No, she said, but he must, of course, feel free to take a drink. He poured himself one from his cocktail cabinet. What’s this very important business? he asked, not quite with that crisp grace he’d shown on the stairs. For her manner had changed now the door to the outer office was closed.

He could tell she’d come to do hard business. She leaned forward. For a second it seemed ridiculous for her, a girl whose father had paid 50,000 zł. for Aryan papers, to say it without a pause, to give it all away to a half-ironic, half-worried Sudetendeutscher with a snifter of cognac in his hand. Yet in some ways it was the easiest thing she’d ever done.

I have to tell you, Herr Schindler, I’m not a Polish Aryan. My real name is Perlman.

My parents are in Płaszów. They say, and I believe it, that coming to Emalia is the same as being given a Lebenskarte—a card of life. I have nothing I can give you; I borrowed clothes to get inside your factory. Will you bring them here for me?

Schindler put down his drink and stood up. You want to make a secret arrangement? I don’t make secret arrangements. What you suggest, Fraulein, is illegal. I have a factory here in Zablocie and the only question I ask is whether or not a person has certain skills. If you care to leave your Aryan name and address, it might be possible to write to you at some stage and inform you that I need your parents for their work skills. But not now, and not on any other ground. But they can’t come as skilled workers, said Fraulein Perlman. My father’s an importer, not a metalworker.

We have an office staff, said Schindler. But mainly we need skills on the factory floor.

She was defeated. Half-blind with tears, she wrote her false name and real address—he could do with it whatever he wanted. But on the street she understood and began to revive. Maybe Schindler thought she might be an agent, that she might have been there for entrapment. Just the same, he’d been cold. There hadn’t even been an ambiguous, nonindictable gesture of kindness in the manner in which he’d thrown her out of his office.

Within a month Mr. and Mrs. Perlman came to Emalia from Płaszów. Not on their own, as Regina Perlman had imagined it would happen should Herr Oskar Schindler decide to be merciful, but as part of a new detail of 30 workers.

Sometimes she would go around to Lipowa Street and bribe her way onto the factory floor to see them. Her father worked dipping the enamel, shoveling coal, clearing the floor of scrap. “But he talks again,” said Mrs. Perlman to her daughter. For in Płaszów he’d gone silent.

In fact, despite the drafty huts, the plumbing, here at Emalia there was a certain mood, a fragile confidence, a presumption of permanence such as she, living on risky papers in sullen Cracow, could not hope to feel until the day the madness stopped.

Miss Perlman-Rodriguez did not complicate Herr Schindler’s life by storming his office in gratitude or writing effusive letters. Yet she always left the yellow gate of DEF with an unquenchable envy for those who stayed inside.

Then there was a campaign to get Rabbi Menasha Levartov, masquerading as a metalworker in Płaszów, into Emalia. Levartov was a scholarly city rabbi, young and black-bearded. He was more liberal than the rabbis from the shtetls of Poland, the ones who believed the Sabbath was more important even than life and who, throughout 1942 and 1943, were shot by the hundreds every Friday evening for refusing work in the forced-labor cantonments of Poland. He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.

Levartov had always been admired by Itzhak Stern, who worked in the Construction Office of Amon Goeth’s Administration Building. In the old days, Stern and Levartov would, if given the leisure, have sat together for hours over a glass of herbata, letting it grow cold while they talked about the influence of Zoroaster on Judaism, or the other way round, or the concept of the natural world in Taoism. Stern, when it came to comparative religion, got greater pleasure out of talking to Levartov than he could ever have received from bluff Oskar Schindler, who nonetheless had a fatal weakness for discoursing on the same subject.

During one of Oskar’s visits to Płaszów, Stern told him that somehow Menasha Levartov had to be got into Emalia, or else Goeth would surely kill him. For Levartov had a sort of visibility—it was a matter of presence. Goeth was drawn to people of presence; they were, like idlers, another class with high target priority. Stern told Oskar how Goeth had attempted to murder Levartov.

Amon Goeth’s camp now held more than 30,000 people. On the near side of the Appellplatz, near the Jewish mortuary chapel which had now become a stable, stood a Polish compound which could hold some 1,200 prisoners. Obergruppenführer Krüger was so pleased by his inspection of the new, booming camp that he now promoted the Commandant two SS grades to the rank of Hauptsturmführer.

As well as the crowd of Poles, Jews from the East and from Czechoslovakia would be held in Płaszów while space was made for them farther west in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Gróss-Rosen. Sometimes the population rose above 35,000 and the Appellplatz teemed at roll call. Amon therefore often had to cull his early comers to make way for new prisoners. And Oskar knew that the Commandant’s quick method was to enter one of the camp offices or workshops, form up two lines, and march one of them away. The line marched away would be taken either to the Austrian hill fort, for execution by firing squads, or else to the cattle cars at the Cracow-Płaszów Station or, when it was laid down in the autumn of 1943, to the railway siding by the fortified SS barracks.

On just such a culling exercise, Stern told Oskar, Amon had entered the metalworks in the factory enclosure some days past. The supervisors had stood at attention like soldiers and made their eager reports, knowing that they could die for an unwise choice of words. “I need twenty-five metalworkers,” Amon told the supervisors when the reports were finished. “Twenty-five and no more. Point out to me the ones who are skilled.”

One of the supervisors pointed to Levartov and the rabbi joined the line, though he could see that Amon took a special note of his selection. Of course, one never knew which line would be moved out or where it would be moved to, but it was in most cases a safer bet to be on the line of the skilled.

So the selection continued. Levartov had noticed that the metal shops were strangely empty that morning, since a number of those who worked or filled in time by the door had got forewarning of Goeth’s approach and had slipped over to the Madritsch garment factory to hide among the bolts of linen or appear to be mending sewing machines. The forty or so slow or inadvertent who had stayed on in the metalworks were now in two lines between the benches and the lathes. Everyone was fearful, but those in the smaller line were the more uneasy.

Then a boy of indeterminate age, perhaps as young as sixteen or as old as nineteen, had called from the midst of the shorter line, “But, Herr Commandant, I’m a metal specialist too.” “Yes, Liebchen?” murmured Amon, drawing his service revolver, stepping to the child and shooting him in the head. The enormous blast in this place of metal threw the boy against the wall. He was dead, the appalled Levartov believed, before he fell to the workshop floor.

The even shorter line was now marched out to the railroad depot, the boy’s corpse was taken over the hill in a barrow, the floor was washed, the lathes returned to operation. But Levartov, making gate hinges slowly at his bench, was aware of the recognition that had flashed for an instant in Amon’s eye—the look that had said, There’s one. It seemed to the rabbi that the boy had, by crying out, only temporarily distracted Amon from Levartov himself, the more obvious target.

A few days had passed, Stern told Schindler, before Amon returned to the metalworks and found it crowded, and went around making his own selections for the hill or the transports. Then he’d halted by Levartov’s bench, as Levartov had known he would. Levartov could smell Amon’s after-shave lotion. He could see the starched cuff of Amon’s shirt. Amon was a splendid dresser.

“What are you making?” asked the Commandant. “Herr Commandant,” said Levartov, “I am making hinges.” The rabbi pointed, in fact, to the small heap of hinges on the floor.

“Make me one now,” Amon ordered. He took a watch from his pocket and began timing. Levartov earnestly cut a hinge, his fingers urging the metal, pressuring the lathe; convinced laboring fingers, delighted to be skilled.

Keeping tremulous count in his head, he turned out a hinge in what he believed was fifty-eight seconds, and let it fall at his feet.

“Another,” murmured Amon. After his speed trial, the rabbi was now more assured and worked confidently. In perhaps another minute the second hinge slid to his feet.

Amon considered the heap. “You’ve been working here since six this morning,” said Amon, not raising his eyes from the floor. “And you can work at a rate you’ve just shown me—and yet, such a tiny little pile of hinges?”

Levartov knew, of course, that he had crafted his own death. Amon walked him down the aisle, no one bothering or brave enough to look up from his bench. To see what? A death walk. Death walks were commonplace in Płaszów. Outside, in the midday air of spring, Amon stood Menasha Levartov against the workshop wall, adjusting him by the shoulder, and took out the pistol with which he’d slaughtered the child two days before. Levartov blinked and watched the other prisoners hurry by, wheeling and toting the raw materials of the Płaszów camp, eager to be out of range, the Cracovians among them thinking, My God, it’s Levartov’s turn.

Privately, he murmured the Shema Yisroel and heard the mechanisms of the pistol. But the small internal stirrings of metal ended not in a roar but in a click like that of a cigarette lighter which won’t give a flame. And like a dissatisfied smoker, with just such a trivial level of annoyance, Amon Goeth extracted and replaced the magazine of bullets from the butt of the pistol, again took his aim, and fired. As the rabbi’s head swayed to the normal human suspicion that the impact of the bullet could be absorbed as could a punch, all that emerged from Goeth’s pistol was another click.

Goeth began cursing prosaically.

“Donnerwetter! Zum Teufel!” It seemed to Levartov that at any second Amon would begin to run down faulty modern workmanship, as if they were two tradesmen trying to bring off some simple effect—the threading of a pipe, a drill hole in the wall. Amon put the faulty pistol away in its black holster and withdrew from a jacket pocket a pearl-handled revolver, of a type Rabbi Levartov had only read of in the Westerns of his boyhood. Clearly, he thought, there are going to be no remissions due to technical failure. He’ll keep on.

I’ll die by cowboy revolver, and even if all the firing pins are filed down, Hauptsturmführer Goeth will fall back on more primitive weapons.

As Stern relayed it to Schindler, when Goeth aimed again and fired, Menasha Levartov had already begun to look about in case there was some object in the neighborhood that could be used, together with these two astounding failures of Goeth’s service pistol, as a lever. By the corner of the wall stood a pile of coal, an unpromising item in itself. “Herr Commandant,” Levartov began to say, but he could already hear the small murderous hammers and springs of the barroom pistol acting on each other. And again the click of a defective cigarette lighter. Amon, raging, seemed to be attempting to tear the barrel of the thing from its socket.

Now Rabbi Levartov adopted the stance he had seen the supervisors in the metalworks assume. “Herr Commandant, I would beg to report that my heap of hinges was so unsatisfactory for the reason that the machines were being recalibrated this morning. And therefore instead of hinge-work I was put on to shoveling that coal.” It seemed to Levartov that he had violated the rules of the game they had been playing together, the game that was to be closed by Levartov’s reasonable death just as surely as Snakes and Ladders ends with the throwing of a six. It was as if the rabbi had hidden the dice and now there could be no conclusion. Amon hit him on the face with a free left hand, and Levartov tasted blood in his mouth, lying on the tongue like a guarantee.

Hauptsturmführer Goeth then simply abandoned Levartov against the wall. The contest, however, as both Levartov and Stern could tell, had merely been suspended.

Stern whispered this narrative to Oskar in the Building Office of Płaszów. Stern, stooping, eyes raised, hands joined, was as generous with detail as ever. “It’s no problem,” Oskar murmured. He liked to tease Stern. “Why the long story? There’s always room at Emalia for someone who can turn out a hinge in less than a minute.”

When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory subcamp in the summer of ‘43, he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler’s little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov operated a lathe, Schindler would say, “You shouldn’t be here, Rabbi.

You should be preparing for Shabbat.” But when Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in the ceremonies, Levartov knew that the Herr Direktor was not joking. Before dusk on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of sourly drying laundry, he would recite Kiddush over a cup of wine among the roof-high tiers of bunks. Under, of course, the shadow of an SS watchtower.