Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 27

On April 28, 1944, Oskar—by looking sideways at himself in a mirror—was able to tell that his waist had thickened for his thirty-sixth birthday. But at least today, when he embraced the girls, no one bothered to denounce him. Any informer among the German technicians must have been demoralized, since the SS had let Oskar out of Pomorska and Montelupich, both of them centers supposed impregnable to influence.

To mark the day, Emilie sent the usual greetings from Czechoslovakia, and Ingrid and Klonowska gave him gifts. His domestic arrangements had scarcely changed in the four and a half years he had spent in Cracow. Ingrid was still a consort, Klonowska a girlfriend, Emilie an understandably absent wife. Whatever grievances and bewilderment each suffered goes unrecorded, but it would become obvious in this, his thirty-seventh, year that some coolness had entered his relations with Ingrid; that Klonowska, always a loyal friend, was content with a merely sporadic liaison; and that Emilie still considered their marriage indissoluble. For the moment, they gave their presents and kept their counsel.

Others took a hand in the celebration. Amon permitted Henry Rosner to bring his violin to Lipowa Street in the evening under the guard of the best baritone in the Ukrainian garrison.

Amon was, at this stage, very pleased with his association with Schindler. In return for his continuing support for the Emalia camp, Amon had one day recently requested and got the permanent use of Oskar’s Mercedes—not the jalopy Oskar had bought from John for a day, but the most elegant car in the Emalia garage.

The recital took place in Oskar’s office. No one attended except Oskar. It was as if he were tired of company.

When the Ukrainian went to the lavatory, Oskar revealed his depression to Henry. He was upset about the war news. His birthday had come in a hiatus. The Russian armies had halted behind the Pripet Marshes in Belorussia and in front of Lwów. Oskar’s fears puzzled Henry. Doesn’t he understand, he wondered, that if the Russians aren’t held off, it’s the end of his operation here?

“I’ve often asked Amon to let you come here permanently,” Oskar told Rosner. “You and your wife and child. He won’t hear of it. He appreciates you too much. But eventually…” Henry was grateful. But he felt he had to point out that his family might be as safe as any in Płaszów. His sister-in-law, for example, had been discovered by Goeth smoking at work, and he had ordered her execution. But one of the NCO’S had begged to put before the Herr Commandant’s notice the fact that this woman was Mrs. Rosner, wife of Rosner the accordionist. “Oh,” Amon had said, pardoning her. “Well, remember, girl, I won’t have smoking on the job.”

Henry told Oskar that night that it had been this attitude of Amon’s—that the Rosners were immune because of their musical talent—which had persuaded him and Manci to bring their eight-year-old son, Olek, into the camp. He had been hiding with friends in Cracow, but that was becoming a less and less secure business every day. Once inside, Olek could blend into that small crowd of children, many unregistered in the prison records, whose presence in Płaszów was connived at by prisoners and tolerated by some of the junior camp officials. Getting Olek into the place, however, had been the risky part.

Poldek Pfefferberg, who’d had to drive a truck to town to pick up toolboxes, had smuggled the boy in. The Ukrainians had nearly discovered him at the gate, while he was still an outsider and living in contravention of every racial statute of the Reich Government General. His feet had burst out of the end of the box that lay between Pfefferberg’s ankles. “Mr. Pfefferberg, Mr. Pfefferberg,” Poldek had heard while the Ukrainians searched the back of the truck. “My feet are sticking out.”

Henry could laugh at that now, though warily, since there were still rivers to be crossed. But Schindler reacted dramatically, with a gesture that seemed to grow from the slightly alcoholic melancholy which had beset him on this evening of his birthday. He lifted his office chair by its back and raised it to the portrait of the Führer. It seemed for a second that he was about to lash into the icon. But he spun again on his heel, lowered the chair deliberately until its four legs hung equidistant from the floor, and rammed them into the carpet, shaking the wall. Then he said, “They’re burning bodies out there, aren’t they?”

Henry grimaced as if the stench were in the room.

“They’ve started,” he admitted.

Now that Płaszów was—in the language of the bureaucrats—a Concentration Camp, its inmates found that it was safer to encounter Amon. The chiefs in Oranienburg did not permit summary execution. The days when slow potato-peelers could be expunged on the spot were gone. They could now be destroyed only by due process. There had to be a hearing, a record sent in triplicate to Oranienburg. The sentence had to be confirmed not only by General Glücks’s office but also by General Pohl’s Department W (economic Enterprises). For if a commandant killed essential workers, Department W could find itself hit with claims for compensation. Allach-Munich, Ltd., for example, porcelain manufacturers using slave labor from Dachau, had recently filed a claim for 31,800 RM. because “as a result of the typhoid epidemic which broke out in January 1943, we had no prison labor at our disposal from January 26, 1943, until March 3, 1943. In our opinion we are entitled to compensation under Clause 2 of the Businesses Compensation Settlement Fund…”

Department W was all the more liable for compensation if the loss of skilled labor arose from the zeal of a trigger-happy SS officer.

So, to avoid the paperwork and the departmental complications, Amon held his hand on most days.

The people who appeared within his range in the spring and early summer of ’44 somehow understood it was safer, though they knew nothing of Department W and Generals Pohl and Glücks. It was to them a remission as mysterious as Amon’s madness itself.

Yet, as Oskar had mentioned to Henry Rosner, they were now burning bodies at Płaszów. In preparation for the Russian offensive, the SS was abolishing its institutions in the East. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bełżec had been evacuated the previous autumn. The Waffen SS who had run them had been ordered to dynamite the chambers and the crematoria, to leave no recognizable trace, and had then been posted to Italy to fight partisans. The immense complex at Auschwitz, in its safe ground in Upper Silesia, would complete the great task in the East, and once that was concluded, the crematoria would be plowed under the earth. For without the evidence of the crematoria, the dead could offer no witness, were a whisper behind the wind, an inconsequential dust on the aspen leaves.

Płaszów was not as simple a case, for its dead lay everywhere around it. In the enthusiasm of the spring of 1943, bodies—notably the bodies of those killed in the ghetto’s last two days— were thrown randomly into mass graves in the woods. Now Department D charged Amon with finding them all.

Estimates of the numbers of bodies vary widely. Polish publications, based on the work of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland and on other sources, claim that 150,000 prisoners, many of them in transit to other places, went through Płaszów and its five subcamps. Of these, the Poles believe that 80,000 died there, mainly in mass executions inside Chujowa Górka or else in epidemics.

These figures baffle the surviving Płaszów inmates who remember the fearsome work of burning the dead. They say the number they exhumed was somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000—1 multitude frightful in itself and which they have no desire to exaggerate. The distance between the two estimates looks narrower when it is remembered that executions of Poles, Gypsies, and Jews would continue at Chujowa Górka and at other points around Płaszów throughout most of that year, and that the SS themselves took up the practice of burning bodies immediately after mass killings in the Austrian hill fort. Besides, Amon would not succeed in his intention of removing all bodies from the woods. Some thousands more would be found in postwar exhumations, and today, as the suburbs of Cracow close Płaszów in, bones are still discovered during the digging of foundations. Oskar saw the line of pyres on the ridge above the workshops during a visit just before his birthday. When he came back a week later, the activity had increased. The bodies were dug up by male prisoners who worked masked and gagging. On blankets and barrows and litters the dead were brought to the burning site and laid on log frames. So the pyre was built, layer by layer, and when it reached the height of a man’s shoulder, was doused in fuel and lit. Pfefferberg was horrified to see the temporary life the flames gave to the dead, the way the corpses sat forward, throwing the burning logs away, their limbs reaching, their mouths opening for a last cry. A young SS man from the delousing station ran among the pyres waving a pistol and roaring frenetic orders. The dust of the dead fell in hair and on the clothing hung in the back gardens of junior officers’ villas. Oskar was bemused to see the way the personnel took the smoke as if the grit in the air were some sort of honest and inevitable industrial fallout. And through the fogs, Amon went riding with Majola, both of them calm in the saddle. Leo John took his twelve-year-old son off to catch tadpoles in the marshy ground in the wood. The flames and the stench did not distract them from their daily lives.

Oskar, leaning back in the driver’s seat of his BMW, the windows up and a handkerchief clamped over his mouth and nose, thought how they must be burning the Spiras with all the rest. He’d been astounded when they’d executed all the ghetto policemen and their families last Christmas, as soon as Symche Spira had finished directing the dismantling of the ghetto. They had brought them all, and their wives and children, up here on a gray afternoon and shot them as the cold sun vanished. They’d shot the most faithful (spira and Zellinger) as well as the most grudging. Spira and bashful Mrs. Spira and the ungifted Spira children whom Pfefferberg had patiently tutored—they’d all stood naked within a circle of rifles, shivering against each other’s flanks, Spira’s Napoleonic OD uniform now just a heap of clothing for recycling, flung down at the fort entrance. And Spira still assuring everyone that it could not happen.

That execution had shocked Oskar because it showed that there was no obedience or obeisance a Jew could make to guarantee survival. And now they were burning the Spiras as anonymously, as ungratefully, as they had executed them. Even the Gutters! It had happened after a dinner at Amon’s the year before. Oskar had gone home early, but later heard what had happened after he left. John and Neuschel had started in on Bosch. They thought he was squeamish. He’d made a fuss about being a veteran of the trenches. But they had not seen him perform any executions.

They kept it going for hours—the joke of the evening. In the end, Bosch had ordered David Gutter and his son roused in their barracks and Mrs. Gutter and the Gutter girl fetched from theirs.

Again, it was a matter of faithful servants.

David Gutter had been the last president of the Judenrat and had cooperated in everything—had never gone to Pomorska Street and tried to start any argument over the scope of the SS Aktions or the size of transports sent to Bełżec. Gutter had signed everything and thought every demand reasonable. Besides that, Bosch had used Gutter as an agent inside and outside Płaszów, sending him up to Cracow with truckloads of newly upholstered furniture or pocketfuls of jewelry to sell on the black market. And Gutter had done it because he was a scoundrel anyhow, but mainly because he believed it would make his wife and children immune. At two o’clock that polar morning, a Jewish policeman, Zauder, a friend of Pfefferberg’s and of Stern’s, later to be shot by Pilarzik during one of that officer’s drunken rampages, but on duty at the women’s gate that night, heard it—Bosch ordering the Gutters into position in a depression in the ground near the women’s camp. The children pleading, but David and Mrs. Gutter taking it calmly, knowing there was no argument. And now as Oskar watched, all of that evidence—the Gutters, the Spiras, the rebels, the priests, the children, the pretty girls found on Aryan papers—all of it was returning to that mad hill to be obliterated in case the Russians came to Płaszów and made too much of it. Care, said Oranienburg in a letter to Amon, is to be taken with the future disposal of all bodies, and for that purpose they were sending a representative of a Hamburg engineering firm to survey the site for crematoria. In the meantime, the dead were to be kept, awaiting retrieval, at well-marked burial sites.

When, on that second visit, Oskar saw the extent of the fires on Chujowa Górka, his first impulse was to stay in the car, that sane German mechanism, and drive home. Instead he went calling on friends of his in the workshop, and then visited Stern’s office. He thought that with all that grit falling on the windows, it wasn’t out of the question that people inside Płaszów would consider suicide. Yet he was the one who seemed depressed. He didn’t ask any of his usual questions, such as “All right, Herr Stern, if God made man in His image, which race is most like Him? Is a Pole more like Him than a Czech?” There was none of that whimsy today. Instead he growled, “What does everyone think?” Stern told him that the prisoners were like prisoners. They did their work and hoped for survival.

“I’m going to get you out,” Oskar grunted all at once. He put a balled fist on the desk. “I’m going to get you all out.”

“All?” asked Stern. He couldn’t help himself. Such massive Biblical rescues didn’t suit the era.

“You, anyhow,” said Oskar. “Y.”