Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 5

Victoria Klonowska, a Polish secretary, was the beauty of Oskar’s front office, and he immediately began a long affair with her. Ingrid, his German mistress, must have known, as surely as Emilie Schindler knew about Ingrid. For Oskar would never be a surreptitious lover. He had a childlike sexual frankness. It wasn’t that he boasted. It was that he never saw any need to lie, to creep into hotels by the back stairs, to knock quietly on any girl’s door in the small hours.

Since Oskar would not seriously try to tell his women lies, their options were reduced; traditional lovers’ arguments were difficult.

Blond hair piled up above her pretty, foxy, vividly made-up face, Victoria Klonowska looked like one of those lighthearted girls to whom the inconveniences of history are a temporary intrusion into the real business of life. This autumn of simple clothes, Klonowska was frivolous in her jacket and frilled blouse and slim skirt. Yet she was hardheaded, efficient, and adroit. She was a nationalist too, in the robust Polish style. She would in the end negotiate with the German dignitaries for her Sudeten lover’s release from SS institutions. But for the moment Oskar had a less risky job for her.

He mentioned that he would like to find a good bar or cabaret in Cracow where he could take friends. Not contacts, not senior people from the Armaments Inspectorate. Genuine friends. Somewhere lively where middle-aged officials would not turn up. Did Klonowska know of such a place?

She discovered an excellent jazz cellar in the narrow streets north of the Rynek, the city square. It was a place that had always been popular with the students and younger staff of the university, but Victoria herself had never been there before. The middle-aged men who had pursued her in peacetime would never want to go to a student dive.

If you wished to, it was possible to rent an alcove behind a curtain for private parties under cover of the tribal rhythms of the band. For finding this music club, Oskar nicknamed Klonowska “Columbus.” The Party line on jazz was that it not only was artistically decadent but expressed an African, a subhuman animality. The ump-pa-pa of Viennese waltzes was the preferred beat of the SS and of Party officials, and they earnestly avoided jazz clubs.

Round about Christmas in 1939, Oskar got together a party at the club for a number of his friends. Like any instinctive cultivator of contacts, he would never have any trouble drinking with men he didn’t like. But that night the guests were men he did. Additionally, of course, they were all useful, junior but not uninfluential members of sundry agencies of Occupation; and all of them more or less double exiles—not only were they away from home, but home or abroad, they were all variously uneasy under the regime.

There was, for example, a young German surveyor from the Government General’s Division of the Interior. He had marked out the boundaries of Oskar’s enamel factory in Zablocie. At the back of Oskar’s plant, Deutsche Email Fabrik (Def), stood a vacant area where two other manufactories abutted, a box factory and a radiator plant. Schindler had been delighted to find that most of the waste area belonged, according to the surveyor, to DEF. Visions of economic expansion danced in his head. The surveyor had, of course, been invited because he was a decent fellow, because you could talk to him, because he might be handy to know for future building permits.

The policeman Herman Toffel was there also, and the SD man Reeder, as well as a young officer—also a surveyor, named Steinhauser—from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar had met and taken to these men while seeking the permits he needed to start his plant. He had already enjoyed drinking bouts with them. He would always believe that the best way to untie bureaucracy’s Gordian knot, short of bribery, was booze. Finally there were two Abwehr men. The first was Eberhard Gebauer, the lieutenant who had recruited Oskar into the Abwehr the year before. The second was Leutnant Martin Plathe of Canaris’ headquarters in Breslau. It had been through his friend Gebauer’s recruitment that Herr Oskar Schindler had first discovered what a city of opportunity Cracow was.

There would be a by-product from the presence of Gebauer and Plathe. Oskar was still on the Abwehr’s books as an agent and, in his years in Cracow, would keep the staff of Canaris’ Breslau office satisfied by passing on to them reports on the behavior of their rivals in the SS. Gebauer and Plathe would consider his bringing along of a more-or-less disaffected gendarme like Toffel, and of Reeder of the SD, as an intelligence favor, a gift quite apart from the good company and the liquor.

Though it is not possible to say exactly what the members of the party talked about that night, it is possible from what Oskar said later of each of these men to make a plausible reconstruction.

It was Gebauer, of course, who would have made the toast, saying he would not give them governments, armies or potentates: instead he would give them the enamel factory of their good friend Oskar Schindler. He did so because if the factory prospered, there would be more parties, parties in the Schindler style, the best parties you could imagine.

But after the toast had been drunk, the talk turned naturally to the subject that bemused or obsessed all levels of the civil bureaucracy. The Jews.

Toffel and Reeder had spent the day at Mogilska Station supervising the unloading of Poles and Jews from eastbound trains. These people had been shipped in from the Incorporated Territories, newly conquered regions which had been German in the past. Toffel wasn’t making a point about the comfort of the passengers in the Ostbahn cattle cars, although he confessed that the weather had been cold. But the transport of populations in livestock carriages was new to everyone, and the cars were not as yet inhumanly crowded. What confused Toffel was the policy behind it all.

There is a persistent rumor, said Toffel, that we are at war. And in the midst of it the Incorporated Territories are too damn simon-pure to put up with a few Poles and a half-million Jews. “The whole Ostbahn system,” said Toffel, “has to be turned over to delivering them to us.”

The Abwehr men listened, slight smiles on their faces. To the SS the enemy within might be the Jew, but to the Canaris the enemy within was the SS.

The SS, Toffel said, had reserved the entire rail system from November 15 on.

Across his desk in Pomorska Street, he said, had crossed copies of angry SS memoranda addressed to Army officials and complaining that the Army was welching on its deal, had gone two weeks over schedule in its use of the Ostbahn. For Christ’s sake, Toffel asked, shouldn’t the Army have first use, for as long as it liked, of the railway system? How else is it to deploy east and west? Toffel asked, drinking excitedly. On bicycles?

Oskar was half-amused to see that the Abwehr men did not comment. They suspected Toffel might be a plant instead of simply being drunk. The surveyor and the man from the Armaments Inspectorate asked Toffel some questions about these remarkable trains arriving at Mogilska.

Soon such shipments wouldn’t be worth talking about: transports of humans would become a clich’e of resettlement policy. But on the evening of Oskar’s Christmas party, they were still a novelty.

“They call it,” said Toffel, “concentration. That’s the word you find in the documents. Concentration. I call it bloody obsession.”

The owner of the jazz club brought in plates of herring and sauce. The fish went down well with the fiery liquor, and as they wolfed it, Gebauer spoke about the Judenrats, the Jewish councils set up in each community on the order of Governor Frank. In cities like Warsaw and Cracow the Judenrat had twenty-four elected members personally responsible for the fulfillment of the orders of the regime. The Judenrat of Cracow had been in existence for less than a month; Marek Biberstein, a respected municipal authority, had been appointed its president. But, Gebauer remarked, he had heard that it had already approached Wawel Castle with a plan for a roster of Jewish labor. The Judenrat would supply the labor details for digging ditches and latrines and clearing snow. Didn’t everyone find that excessively cooperative of them?

Not at all, said engineer Steinhauser of the Armaments Inspectorate. They thought that if they supplied the labor squads it would stop random press-ganging. Press-ganging led to beatings and the occasional bullet in the head.

Martin Plathe agreed. They’ll be cooperative for the sake of avoiding something worse, he said. It’s their method—you have to understand that. They’d always bought the civil authorities off by cooperating with them and then negotiating.

Gebauer seemed to be out to mislead Toffel and Reeder by pushing the point, by seeming more passionately analytic about Jews than he really was. “I’ll tell you what I mean by cooperation,” he said. “Frank passes an edict demanding that every Jew in the Government General wear a star. That edict’s only a few weeks old. In Warsaw you’ve got a Jewish manufacturer churning them out in washable plastic at three złoty each. It’s as if they’ve got no idea what sort of law it is. It’s as if the thing were an emblem of a bicycle club.”

It was suggested then that since Schindler was in the enamel business, it might be possible to press a deluxe enamel badge at the Schindler plant and retail it through the hardware outlet his girlfriend Ingrid supervised. Someone remarked that the star was their national insigne, the insigne of a state that had been destroyed by the Romans and that now existed only in the minds of Zionists. So perhaps people were proud to wear the star.

“The thing is,” said Gebauer, “they don’t have any organization for saving themselves. They’ve got weathering-the-storm sorts of organizations. But this one’s going to be different. This storm will be managed by the SS.” Gebauer, again, sounded as if without being too florid about it, he approved of the professional thoroughness of the SS. “Come on,” said Plathe; “the worst that can happen to them is that they’ll get sent to Madagascar, where the weather is better than it is in Cracow.”

“I don’t believe they’ll ever see Madagascar,” said Gebauer.

Oskar demanded a change of subject.

Wasn’t it his party?

In fact, Oskar had already seen Gebauer hand over forged papers for a flight to Hungary to a Jewish businessman in the bar of the Hotel Cracovia. Maybe Gebauer was taking a fee, though he seemed too morally sensitive to deal in papers, to sell a signature, a rubber stamp. But it was certain, in spite of his act in front of Toffel, that he was no abominator of Jews. Nor was any of them. At Christmas 1939 Oskar found them simply a relief from the orotund official line.

Later they would have more positive uses.