Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 24

The Oskar Schindler who dismounted from his horse these days in the factory yard of Emalia was still the prototypical tycoon. He looked sleekly handsome in the style of the film stars George Sanders and Curt Jürgens, to both of whom people would always compare him. His hacking jacket and jodhpurs were tailored; his riding boots had a high shine. He looked like a man to whom it was profit all the way.

Yet he would return from his rural rides and go upstairs to face the sort of bills novel even to the history of an eccentric enterprise like DEF.

Bread shipments from the bakery at Płaszów to the factory camp in Lipowa Street, Zablocie, were a few hundred loaves delivered twice a week and an occasional token half-truckload of turnips. These few high-backed and lightly laden trucks were no doubt written large and multiplied in Commandant Goeth’s books, and such trusties as Chilowicz sold off on behalf of the Herr Hauptsturmführer the difference between the mean supplies that arrived at Lipowa Street and the plenteous and phantom convoys that Goeth put down on paper. If Oskar had depended on Amon for prison food, his 900 internees would each have been fed perhaps three-quarters of a kilo of bread a week and soup every third day. On missions of his own and through his manager, Oskar was spending 50,000 zł. a month on black-market food for his camp kitchen. Some weeks he had to find more than three thousand round loaves. He went to town and spoke to the German supervisors in the big bakeries, and had in his briefcase Reichsmarks and two or three bottles.

Oskar did not seem to realize that throughout Poland that summer of 1943, he was one of the champion illicit feeders of prisoners; that the malign pall of hunger which should by SS policy hang over the great death factories and over every one of the little, barbed-wired forced-labor slums was lacking in Lipowa Street in a way that was dangerously visible. That summer a host of incidents occurred which augmented the Schindler mythology, the almost religious supposition among many prisoners of Płaszów and the entire population of Emalia that Oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation.

Early in the career of every subcamp, senior officers from the parent camp, or Lager, paid a visit to ensure that the energy of the slave laborers was stimulated in the most radical and exemplary manner. It is not certain exactly which members of Płaszów’s senior staff visited Emalia, but some prisoners and Oskar himself would always say that Goeth was one of them. And if not Goeth it was Leo John, or Scheidt. Or else Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s protégé. It is no injustice to mention any of their names in connection with “stimulating energy in a radical and exemplary manner.” Whoever they were, they had already in the history of Płaszów taken or condoned fierce action. And now, visiting Emalia, they spotted in the yard a prisoner named Lamus pushing a barrow too slowly across the factory yard. Oskar himself later declared that it was Goeth who was there that day and saw Lamus’ slow trundling and turned to a young NCO named Grün—Grün being another Goeth protégé, his bodyguard, a former wrestler. It was certainly Grün who was ordered to execute Lamus.

So Grün made the arrest, and the inspectors continued on into other parts of the factory camp. It was someone from the metal hall who rushed up to the Herr Direktor’s office and alerted Schindler. Oskar came roaring down the stairs even faster than on the day Miss Regina Perlman had visited, and reached the yard just as Grün was positioning Lamus against the wall. Oskar called out, You can’t do that here. I won’t get work out of my people if you start shooting. I’ve got high-priority war contracts, et cetera. It was the standard Schindler argument and carried the suggestion that there were senior officers known to Oskar to whom Grün’s name would be given if he impeded production in Emalia.

Grün was cunning. He knew the other inspectors had passed on to the workshops, where the whumping of metal presses and the roaring of lathes would cover any noise he chose, or failed, to make. Lamus was such a small concern to men like Goeth and John that no investigation would be made afterward. “What’s in it for me?” the SS man asked Oskar. “Would vodka do?” said Oskar.

To Grün it was a substantial prize. For working all day behind the machine guns during Aktions, the massed and daily executions in the East—for shooting hundreds—you were given half a liter of vodka. The boys lined up to be on the squad so that they could take that prize of liquor back to their messes in the evening. And here the Herr Direktor offered him three times that for one act of omission.

“I don’t see the bottle,” he said. Herr Schindler was already nudging Lamus away from the wall and pushing him out of range. “Disappear!” Grün yelled at the wheelbarrow man. “You may collect the bottle,” said Oskar, “from my office at the end of the inspection.”

Oskar took part in a similar transaction when the Gestapo raided the apartment of a forger and discovered, among other false documents completed or near-completed, a set of Aryan papers for a family called the Wohlfeilers—mother, father, three adolescent children, all of them workers at Schindler’s camp. Two Gestapo men therefore came to Lipowa Street to collect the family for an interrogation which would lead, through Montelupich prison, to Chujowa Górka. Three hours after entering Oskar’s office both men left, reeling on the stairs, beaming with the temporary bonhomie of cognac and, for all anyone knew, of a payoff. The confiscated papers now lay on Oskar’s desk, and he picked them up and put them in the fire.

Next, the brothers Danziger, who cracked a metal press one Friday. Honest, bemused men, semiskilled, looking up with staring shtetl eyes from the machine they had just loudly shattered. The Herr Direktor was away on business, and someone—a factory spy, Oskar would always say—denounced the Danzigers to the administration in Płaszów. The brothers were taken from Emalia and their hanging advertised at the next morning’s roll call in Płaszów. Tonight (it was announced), the people of Płaszów will witness the execution of two saboteurs. What of course qualified the Danzigers above all for execution was their Orthodox aura.

Oskar returned from his business trip to Sosnowiec at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, three hours before the promised execution. News of the sentence was waiting on his desk. He drove out through the suburbs to Płaszów at once, taking cognac with him and some fine kielbasa sausage. He parked by the Administration Building and found Goeth in his office. He was pleased not to have to rouse the Commandant from an afternoon nap. No one knows the extent of the deal that was struck in Goeth’s office that afternoon, in that office akin to Torquemada’s, where Goeth had had ringbolts attached to the wall from which to hang people for discipline or instruction. It is hard to believe, however, that Amon was satisfied simply with cognac and sausage. In any case, his concern for the integrity of the Reich’s metal presses was soothed by the interview, and at six o’clock, the hour of their execution, the Danziger brothers returned in the back seat of Oskar’s plush limousine to the sweet squalor of Emalia.

All these triumphs were, of course, partial. It is an aspect of Caesars, Oskar knew, to remit as irrationally as they condemn. Emil Krautwirt, by day an engineer in the radiator factory beyond the Emalia barracks, was an inmate of Oskar’s SS subcamp. He was young, having got his diploma in the late Thirties. Krautwirt, like the others in Emalia, called the place Schindler’s camp, but by taking Krautwirt away to Płaszów for an exemplary hanging, the SS demonstrated whose camp it really was, at least for some aspects of its existence. For the fraction of Płaszów people who would live on into the Peace, the hanging of engineer Krautwirt was the first story, other than their own intimate stories of pain and humiliation, which they would relate. The SS were ever economical with their scaffolds, and at Płaszów the gallows resembled a long, low set of goalposts, lacking the majesty of the gibbets of history, of the Revolutionary guillotine, the Elizabethan scaffold, the tall solemnity of jailhouse gallows in the sheriff’s backyard.

Seen in peacetime, the gallows of Płaszów and Auschwitz would intimidate not by their solemnity but by their ordinariness. But as mothers of children would discover in Płaszów, it was still possible, even with such a banal structure, for five-year-olds to see too much of an execution from within the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz. With Krautwirt, a sixteen-year-old boy named Haubenstock was also to be hanged. Krautwirt had been condemned for some letters he had written to seditious persons in the city of Cracow. But with Haubenstock, it was that he had been heard singing “Volga, Volga,” “Kalinka Maya,” and other banned Russian songs with the intention, according to his death sentence, of winning the Ukrainian guards over to Bolshevism.

The rules for the rite of execution inside Płaszów involved silence. Unlike the festive hangings of earlier times, the drop was performed in utter stillness. The prisoners stood in phalanxes, and were patrolled by men and women who knew the extent of their power: by Hujar and John; by Scheidt and Grün; by the NCO’S Landsdorfer, Amthor, and Grimm, Ritschek and Schreiber; and by the SS women supervisors recently assigned to Płaszów, both of them accomplished with the truncheon—Alice Orlowski and Luise Danz. Under such supervision, the pleadings of the condemned were heard in silence. Engineer Krautwirt himself seemed at first stunned and had nothing to say, but the boy was vocal. In an uneven voice he reasoned with the Hauptsturmführer, who stood beside the scaffold. “I am not a Communist, Herr Commandant. I hate Communism. They were just songs. Ordinary songs.” The hangman, a Jewish butcher of Cracow, pardoned for some earlier crime on condition that he undertake this work, stood Haubenstock on a stool and placed the noose around his neck. He could tell Amon wanted the boy hanged first, didn’t want the debate to drag on. When the butcher kicked the support out from beneath Haubenstock, the rope broke, and the boy, purple and gagging, noose around his neck, crawled on his hands and knees to Goeth, continuing his pleadings, ramming his head against the Commandant’s ankles and hugging his legs. It was the most extreme submission; it conferred on Goeth again the kingship he’d been exercising these fevered months past. Amon, in an Appellplatz of gaping mouths uttering no sound but a low hiss, a susurrus like a wind in sand dunes, took his pistol from his holster, kicked the boy away, and shot him through the head.

When poor engineer Krautwirt saw the horror of the boy’s execution, he took a razor blade that he’d concealed in his pocket and slashed his wrists. Those prisoners at the front could tell that Krautwirt had injured himself fatally in both arms. But Goeth ordered the hangman to proceed in any case, and splashed with the gore from Krautwirt’s injuries, two Ukrainians lifted him to the scaffold, where, gushing from both wrists, he strangled in front of the Jews of southern Poland.

It was natural to believe with one part of the mind that each such barbarous exhibition might be the last, that there might be a reversal of methods and attitudes even in Amon, or if not in him, then in those unseen officials who in some high office with French windows and waxed floors, overlooking a square where old women sold flowers, must formulate half of what happened in Płaszów and condone the rest.

On the second visit of Dr. Sedlacek from Budapest to Cracow, Oskar and the dentist devised a scheme which might to a more introverted man than Schindler have seemed naive. Oskar suggested to Sedlacek that perhaps one of the reasons Amon Goeth behaved so savagely was the bad liquor he drank, the gallons of local so-called cognac which weakened even further Amon’s faulty sense of ultimate consequences. With a portion of the Reichsmarks Dr. Sedlacek had just brought to Emalia and handed to Oskar, a crate of first-rate cognac should be bought—not such an easy or inexpensive item in post-Stalingrad Poland. Oskar should deliver it to Amon, and in the progress of conversation suggest to Goeth that one way or another the war would end at some time, and that there would be investigations into the actions of individuals. That perhaps even Amon’s friends would remember the times he’d been too zealous. It was Oskar’s nature to believe that you could drink with the devil and adjust the balance of evil over a snifter of cognac. It was not that he found more radical methods frightening. It was that they did not occur to him. He’d always been a man of transactions.

Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko, who had earlier had control of the ghetto perimeter, was, in contrast, a man of ideas. It had become impossible for him to work within the SS scheme, passing a bribe here, a forged paper there, placing a dozen children under the patronage of his rank while a hundred more were marched out the ghetto gate. Bosko had absconded from his police station in Podgórze and vanished into the partisan forests of Niepolomice. In the People’s Army he would try to expiate the callow enthusiasm he’d felt for Nazism in the summer of 1938. Dressed as a Polish farmer, he’d be recognized in the end in a village west of Cracow and shot for treason. Bosko would therefore become a martyour. Bosko had gone to the forest because he had no other option. He lacked the financial resources with which Oskar greased the system. But it accorded with the natures of both men that one be found with nothing but a cast-off rank and uniform, that the other would make certain he had cash and trade goods. It is not to praise Bosko or denigrate Schindler that one says that if ever Oskar suffered martyrdom, it would be by accident, because some business he was transacting had turned sour on him. But there were people who still drew breath—the Wohlfeilers, the Danziger brothers, Lamus—because Oskar worked that way. Because Oskar worked that way, the unlikely camp of Emalia stood in Lipowa Street, and there, on most days, a thousand were safe from seizure, and the SS stayed outside the wire. No one was beaten there, and the soup was thick enough to sustain life. In proportion to their natures, the moral disgust of both Party members, Bosko and Schindler, was equal, even if Bosko manifested his by leaving his empty uniform on a coat hanger in Podgórze, while Oskar put on his big Party pin and went to deliver high-class liquor to mad Amon Goeth in Płaszów.

It was late afternoon, and Oskar and Goeth sat in the salon of Goeth’s white villa. Goeth’s girlfriend Majola looked in, a small-boned woman, a secretary at the Wagner factory in town. She did not spend her days amid the excesses of Płaszów. She had sensitive manners, and this delicacy helped a rumor to emerge that Majola had threatened not to sleep with Goeth if he continued arbitrarily gunning people down. But no one knew whether that was the truth or just one of those therapeutic interpretations which arise in the minds of prisoners desperate to make the earth habitable.

Majola did not stay long with Amon and Oskar that afternoon. She could tell there would be a drinking session. Helen Hirsch, the pale girl in black who was Amon’s maid, brought them the necessary accompaniments—cakes, canap’es, sausage. She reeled with exhaustion. Last night Amon had beaten her for preparing food for Majola without his permission; this morning he had made her run up and down the villa’s three flights of stairs fifty times on the double because of a flyspeck on one of the paintings in the corridor. She had heard certain rumors about Herr Schindler but had not met him until now. This afternoon she took no comfort from the sight of these two big men, seated either side of the low table, fraternal and in apparent concord. There was nothing here to interest her, for the certainty of her own death was a first premise. She thought only about the survival of her young sister, who worked in the camp’s general kitchen. She kept a sum of money hidden in the hope that it would effect her sister’s survival. There was no sum, she believed, no deal, that could influence her own prospects.

So they drank through the camp’s twilight and into the dark. Long after the prisoner Tosia Lieberman’s nightly rendition of Brahms’s “Lullaby” had calmed the women’s camp and insinuated itself between the timbers of the men’s, the two big men sat on. Their prodigious livers glowed hot as furnaces. And at the right hour, Oskar leaned across the table and, acting out of an amity which, even with this much cognac aboard, did not go beyond the surface of the skin… Oskar, leaning toward Amon and cunning as a demon, began to tempt him toward restraint.

Amon took it well. It seemed to Oskar that he was attracted by the thought of moderation—a temptation worthy of an emperor. Amon could imagine a sick slave on the trolleys, a returning prisoner from the cable factory, staggering—in that put-upon way one found so hard to tolerate—under a load of clothing or lumber picked up at the prison gate. And the fantasy ran with a strange warmth in Amon’s belly that he would forgive that laggard, that pathetic actor. As Caligula might have been tempted to see himself as Caligula the Good, so the image of Amon the Good exercised the Commandant’s imagination for a time. He would, in fact, always have a weakness for it. Tonight, his blood running golden with cognac and nearly all the camp asleep beyond his steps, Amon was more definitely seduced by mercy than by the fear of reprisal. But in the morning he would remember Oskar’s warning and combine it with the day’s news that Russian threats were developing on the Front at Kiev. Stalingrad had been an inconceivable distance from Płaszów. But the distance to Kiev was imaginable.

For some days after Oskar’s bout with Amon, news came to Emalia that the dual temptation was having its result with the Commandant. Dr. Sedlacek, going back to Budapest, would report to Samu Springmann that Amon had given up, for the time being at least, arbitrarily murdering people. And gentle Samu, among the diverse cares he had in the list of places from Dachau and Drancy in the west to Sobibor and Bełżec in the east, hoped for a time that the hole at Płaszów had been plugged.

But the allure of clemency vanished quickly.

If there was a brief respite, those who were to survive and give testimony of their days in Płaszów would not be aware of it. The summary assassinations would seem continual to them. If Amon did not appear on his balcony this morning or the next, it did not mean he would not appear the morning after that. It took much more than Goeth’s temporary absence to give even the most deluded prisoner some hope of a fundamental change in the Commandant’s nature. And then, in any case, there he would be, on the steps in the Austrian-style cap he wore to murders, looking through his binoculars for a culprit.

Dr. Sedlacek would return to Budapest not only with overly hopeful news of a reform in Amon but with more reliable data on the camp at Płaszów. One afternoon a guard from Emalia turned up at Płaszów to summon Stern to Zablocie. Once Stern arrived at the front gate, he was led upstairs into Oskar’s new apartment. There Oskar introduced him to two men in good suits. One was Sedlacek; the other a Jew—equipped with a Swiss passport—who introduced himself as Babar. “My dear friend,” Oskar told Stern, “I want you to write as full a report on the situation in Płaszów as you can manage in an afternoon.” Stern had never seen Sedlacek or Babar before this and thought that Oskar was being indiscreet. He bent over his hands, murmuring that before he undertook a task like that he would like a word in private with the Herr Direktor.

Oskar used to say that Itzhak Stern could never make a straight statement or request unless it arrived smuggled under a baggage of talk of the Babylonian Talmud and purification rites. But now he was more direct. “Tell me, please, Herr Schindler,” he asked, “don’t you believe this is a dreadful risk?”

Oskar exploded. Before he got control of himself, the strangers would have heard him in the other room. “Do you think I’d ask you, if there was a risk?” Then he calmed and said, “There’s always risk, as you know better than I. But not with these two men. These two are safe.”

In the end, Stern spent all afternoon on his report. He was a scholar and accustomed to writing in exact prose. The rescue organization in Budapest, the Zionists in Istanbul would receive from Stern a report they could rely on.

Multiply Stern’s summary by the 1,700 large and small forced-labor camps of Poland, and then you had a tapestry to stun the world!

Sedlacek and Oskar wanted more than that of Stern. On the morning after the Amon-Oskar binge, Oskar dragged his heroic liver back out to Płaszów before office-opening time. In between the suggestions of tolerance Oskar had tried to drop into Amon’s ear the night before, he’d also got a written permit to take two “brother industrialists” on a tour of this model industrial community. Oskar brought the two into the gray Administration Building that morning and demanded the services of Häftling (prisoner) Itzhak Stern for a tour of the camp. Sedlacek’s friend Babar had some sort of miniature camera, but he carried it openly in his hand. It was almost possible to believe that if an SS man had challenged him, he would have welcomed the chance to stand and boast for five minutes about this little gadget he’d got on a recent business trip to Brussels or Stockholm.

As Oskar and the visitors from Budapest emerged from the Administration Building, Oskar took the thin, clerkly Stern by the shoulder. His friends would be happy to see the workshops and the living quarters, said Oskar. But if there was anything Stern thought they were missing out on, he was just to bend down and tie his shoestring.

On Goeth’s great road paved with fractured gravestones, they moved past the SS barracks. Here, almost at once, prisoner Stern’s shoestring needed tying. Sedlacek’s associate snapped the teams hauling truckloads of rock up from the quarry, while Stern murmured, “Forgive me, gentlemen.” Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859-1927); of Matylde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of 90 in 1912; of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911; of Rozia Groder, a thirteen-year-old who had passed on in 1931; of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honorable dead had been made into paving stones.

Moving on, they passed the Puffhaus, the SS and Ukrainian brothel staffed by Polish girls, before reaching the quarry, the excavations running back into the limestone cliff. Stern’s shoelaces required reef knots here; he wanted this recorded. They destroyed men at this rock face, working them on the hammers and wedges. None of the scarred men of the quarry parties showed any curiosity about their visitors this morning. Ivan, Amon Goeth’s Ukrainian driver, was on duty here, and the supervisor was a bullet-headed German criminal named Erik.

Erik had already demonstrated a capacity for murdering families, having killed his own mother, father, sister. He might by now have been hanged or at least been put in a dungeon if the SS had not realized that there were worse criminals still than patricides and that Erik should be employed as a stick to beat them with. As Stern had mentioned in his report, a Cracow physician named Edward Goldblatt had been sent here from the clinic by SS Dr. Blancke and his Jewish protégé, Dr. Leon Gross. Erik loved to see a man of culture and speciality enter the quarry and report soft-handed for work, and the beatings began in Goldblatt’s case with the first display of uncertainty in handling the hammer and spikes. Over a period of days, Erik and sundry SS and Ukrainian enlisted men beat Goldblatt. The doctor was forced to work with a ballooning face, now half again its normal size, with one eye sealed up. No one knew what error of quarry technique set Erik to give Dr. Goldblatt his final beating.

Long after the doctor lost consciousness, Erik permitted him to be carried to the Krankenstube, where Dr. Leon Gross refused to admit him. With this medical sanction Erik and an SS enlisted man continued to kick the dying Goldblatt as he lay, rejected for treatment, on the threshold of the hospital. Stern bent and tied his shoelace at the quarry because, like Oskar and some others in the Płaszów complex, he believed in a future of judges who might ask, Where—in a word—did this act occur?

Oskar was able to give his colleagues an overview of the camp, taking them up to Chujowa Górka and the Austrian mound, where the bloodied wheelbarrows used to transport the dead to the woods stood unabashedly at the mouth of the fort. Already thousands were buried down there in mass graves in or on the verges of those eastern pinewoods. When the Russians came from the east, that wood with its population of victims would fall to them before living and half-dying Płaszów.

As for Płaszów as an industrial wonder, it was bound to disappoint any serious observer.

Amon, Bosch, Leo John, Josef Neuschel all thought it a model city on the ground that it was making them rich. It would have shocked them to find that one of the reasons their sweet billet in Płaszów continued was not any delight on the part of the Armaments Inspectorate with the economic miracles they were performing.

In fact the only economic miracles within Płaszów were the personal fortunes made by Amon and his clique. It was a surprise to any calm outsider that war contracts came to the workshops of Płaszów at all, considering that their plant was so poor and old-fashioned. But shrewd Zionist prisoners inside Płaszów put pressure on convinced outsiders, people like Oskar and Madritsch, who could in turn put pressure on the Armaments Inspectorate. On the ground that the hunger and sporadic murders of Płaszów were still to be preferred to the assured annihilations of Auschwitz and Bełżec, Oskar was willing to sit down with the purchasing officers and engineers of General Schindler’s Arms Inspectorate.

These gentlemen would make faces and say, “Come on, Oskar! Are you serious?” But in the end they would find contracts for Amon Goeth’s camp, orders for shovels manufactured from the collected scrap iron of Oskar’s Lipowa Street factory, orders for funnels turned out of offcuts of tin from a jam factory in Podgórze. The chances of full delivery of the shovels and their handles ever being made to the Wehrmacht were small. Many of Oskar’s friends among the officers of the Armaments Inspectorate understood what they were doing, that prolonging the life of the slave-labor camp of Płaszów was the same thing as prolonging the life of a number of the slaves. With some of them it stuck in the craw, because they knew what a crook Goeth was, and their serious and old-fashioned patriotism was affronted by Amon’s sybaritic life out there in the countryside.

The divine irony of Forced Labor Camp Płaszów—that some of the slaves were conspiring for their own purposes to maintain Amon’s kingdom— can be seen in the case of Roman Ginter. Ginter, former entrepreneur and now one of the supervisors in the metalworks from which Rabbi Levartov had already been rescued, was summoned to Goeth’s office one morning and, as he closed the door, took the first of a number of blows. While he beat Ginter, Amon raged incoherently. Then he dragged him out-of-doors and down the steps to a stretch of wall by the front entrance. May I ask something? said Ginter against the wall, spitting out two teeth, offhandedly, lest Amon think him an actor, a self-pitier. You bastard, roared Goeth, you haven’t delivered the handcuffs I ordered! My desk calendar tells me that, you pig’s-ass. But Herr Commandant, said Ginter, I beg to report that the order for handcuffs was filled yesterday. I asked Herr Oberscharführer Neuschel what I should do with them and he told me to deliver them to your office, which I did.

Amon dragged bleeding Ginter back to the office and called the SS man Neuschel. Why, yes, said young Neuschel. Look in your second-top drawer on the left, Herr Commandant. Goeth looked and found the manacles. I almost killed him, he complained to his young and not-so-gifted Viennese protégé.

This same Roman Ginter, complaisantly spitting up his teeth against the foundation of Amon’s gray Administration Building—this Jewish cipher whose accidental murder would have caused Amon to blame Neuschel—this Ginter is the man who under special pass goes to Herr Schindler’s DEF to talk to Oskar about workshop supplies for Płaszów, about large scrap metal without which the whole metal-shop crew would be railroaded off to Auschwitz. Therefore, while the pistol-waving Amon Goeth believes he maintains Płaszów by his special administrative genius, it is as much the bloody-mouthed prisoners who keep it running.