Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 33

This camp, like Emalia, had been equipped at Oskar’s expense. According to the bureaucratic theory, all factory camps were built at the owner’s cost. It was thought that any industrialist got sufficient incentive from the cheap prison labor to justify a small expenditure on wire and lumber. In fact, Germany’s darling industrialists, such as Krupp and Farben, built their camps with materials donated from SS enterprises andwitha wealth of labor lent to them. Oskar was no darling and got nothing. He had been able to pry some wagonloads of SS cement out of Bosch at what Bosch would have considered a discount black-market price. From the same source he got two to three tons of gasoline and fuel oil for use in the production and delivery of his goods. He had brought some of the camp fencing wire from Emalia.

But around the bare premises of the Hoffman annex, he was required to provide hightension fences, latrines, a guard barracks for 100 SS personnel, attached SS offices, a sickroom, and kitchens. Adding to the expense, Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck had already been down from Gr@oss-Rosen for an inspection and gone away with a supply of cognac and porcelainware, and what Oskar described as “tea by the kilogram.”

Hassebroeck had also taken away inspection fees and compulsory Winter Aid contributions levied by Section D, and no receipt had been given. “His car had a considerable capacity for these things,” Oskar would later declare. He had no doubt in October 1944 that Hassebroeck was already doctoring the Brinnlitz books. Inspectors sent directly by Oranienburg had also to be satisfied. As for the goods and equipment of DEF, much of it still in transit, it would require 250 freight cars before it had all arrived. It was astounding, said Oskar, how in a crumbling state, Ostbahn officials could, if properly encouraged, find such a number of rail cars.

And the unique aspect of all this, of Oskar himself, jaunty in his mountain hat, as he emerged from that frosty courtyard, is that unlike Krupp and Farben and all the other entrepreneurs who kept Jewish slaves, he had no serious industrial intention at all. He had no hopes of production; there were no sales graphs in his head. Though four years ago he had come to Cracow to get rich, he now had no manufacturing ambitions left. It was a hectic industrial situation there in Brinnlitz. Many of the presses, drills, and lathes had not yet arrived, and new cement floors would have to be poured to take their weight. The annex was still full of Hoffman’s old machinery. Even so, for these 800

supposed munitions workers who had just moved through the gate, Oskar was paying 7.50 RM. each day per skilled worker, 6 RM. per laborer. This would amount to nearly

$14,000 U.s. each week for male labor; when the women arrived, the bill would top

$18,000. Oskar was therefore committing a grand business folly, but celebrated it in a Tyrolean hat.

Some of Oskar’s attachments had shifted too. Mrs. Emilie Schindler had come from Zwittau to live with him in his downstairs apartment. Brinnlitz, unlike Cracow, was too close to home to permit her to excuse their separation. For a Catholic like her, it was now a matter of either formalizing the rift or living together again. There seemed to be at least a tolerance between them, a thorough mutual respect. At first sight she might have looked like a marital cipher, an abused wife who did not know how to get out. Some of the men wondered at first what she would think when she found the sort of factory Oskar kept, the sort of camp. They did not know yet that Emilie would make her own discrete contribution, that it would be based not on conjugal obedience but on her own ideas. Ingrid had come with Oskar to Brinnlitz to work in the new plant, but she had taken lodgings outside the camp and was there only for office hours. There was a definite cooling in that relationship, and she would never live with Oskar again. But she would show no animosity, and throughout the coming months Oskar would frequently visit her in her apartment. The racy Klonowska, that chic Polish patriot, stayed behind in Cracow, but again there was no apparent bitterness. Oskar would have contact with her during visits to Cracow, and she would again help him when the SS caused trouble. The truth was that though his attachments to Klonowska and Ingrid were winding down in the most fortunate way, without any bitterness, it would have been a mistake to believe that he was turning conjugal.

He told the men, that day of their arrival, that the women could be confidently expected. He believed they would arrive after scarcely more delay than there had been with the men. The women’s journey would, however, be different. After a short trip from P@lasz@ow, their locomotive backed them, with some hundreds of other P@lasz@ow women, through the arched gatehouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the car doors opened, they found themselves in that immense concourse bisecting the camp, and practiced SS men and women, speaking calmly, began to grade them. The sorting of the people went on with a terrifying detachment. When a woman was slow in moving, she was hit with a truncheon, but the blow had no personal edge to it. It was all a matter of getting the numbers through. For the SS sections at the railside of Birkenau, it was all dutiful tedium. They had already heard every plea, every story. They knew every dodge anyone was ever likely to pull.

Under the floodlights, the women numbly asked each other what it meant. But even in their daze, their shoes already filling with the mud that was Birkenau’s element, they were aware of SS women pointing to them, and telling uniformed doctors who showed any interest, “Schindlergruppe!” And the spruce young physicians would turn away and leave them alone for a time.

Feet sticking in the mud, they were marched to the delousing plant and stripped by order of tough young SS women with truncheons in their hands. Mila Pfefferberg was troubled by rumors of the type most prisoners of the Reich had by now heard—that some shower nozzles gave out a killing gas.

These, she was delighted to find, gave mere icy water.

After their wash, some of them expected to be tattooed. They knew as much as that about Auschwitz. The SS tattooed your arm if they wanted to use you. If they intended to feed you into the machine, however, they did not bother. The same train that had brought the women of the list had brought also some 2,000 others who, not being Schindlerfrauen, were put through the normal selections. Rebecca Bau, excluded from the Schindler list, had passed and been given a number, and Josef Bau’s robust mother had also won a tattoo in that preposterous Birkenau lottery. Another P@lasz@ow girl, fifteen years old, had looked at the tattoo she’d been given and been delighted that it had two fives, a three, and two sevens—numbers enshrined in the Tashlag, or Jewish calendar. With a tattoo, you could leave Birkenau and go to one of the Auschwitz labor camps, where there was at least a chance.

But the Schindler women, left untattooed, were told to dress again and taken to a windowless hut in the women’s camp. There, in the center of the floor, stood a sheet-iron stove housed in bricks. It was the only comfort. There were no bunks. The Schindlerfrauen were to sleep two or three to a thin straw pallet. The clay floor was damp, and water would rise from it like a tide and drench the pallets, the ragged blankets. It was a death house at the heart of Birkenau. They lay there and dozed, frozen and uneasy in that enormous acreage of mud.

It confounded their imaginings of an intimate

location, a village in Moravia. This was a

great, if ephemeral, city. On a given day more

than a quarter of a million Poles,

Gypsies, and Jews kept brief residence

here. There were thousands more over in Auschwitz I, the first but smaller camp where Commandant Rudolf H@oss lived. And in the great industrial area named Auschwitz III, some tens of thousands worked while they could. The Schindler women had not been precisely informed of the statistics of Birkenau or of the Auschwitz duchy in itself. They could see, though, beyond birch trees at the western end of the enormous settlement, constant smoke rising from the four crematoria and the numerous pyres. They believed they were adrift now, and that the tide would take them down there. But not with all the capacity for making and believing rumors that characterizes a life in prison would they have guessed how many people could be gassed there on a day when the system worked well. The number was—according to H@oss—nine thousand. The women were equally unaware that they had arrived in Auschwitz at a time when the progress of the war and certain secret negotiations between Himmler and the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte were imposing a new direction on it. The secret of the extermination centers had not been kept, for the Russians had excavated the Lublin camp and found the furnaces containing human bones and more than five hundred drums of Zyklon B.

News of this was published throughout the world, and

Himmler, who wanted to be treated seriously as

obvious postwar successor to the F@uhrer, was

willing to make promises to the Allies that the

gassing of Jews would stop. He did not, however,

issue an order on the matter until some time in

October—the date is not certain. One copy

went to General Pohl in Oranienburg; the

other, to Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Reich

Security. Both of them ignored the

directive, and so did Adolf Eichmann.

Jews from P@lasz@ow, Theresienstadt, and Italy continued to be gassed up to the middle of November. The last selection for the gas chambers is believed, however, to have been made on October 30.

For the first eight days of their stay in

Auschwitz, the Schindler women were in enormous danger of death by gassing. And even after that, as the last victims of the chambers continued to file throughout November toward the western end of Birkenau, and as the ovens and pyres worked on their backlog of corpses, they would not be aware of any change in the essential nature of the camp. All their anxieties would in any case be well founded, for most of those left after the gassing ceased would be shot --as happened to all the crematorium workers—or allowed to die of disease.

In any case, the Schindler women went through

frequent mass medical inspections in both

October and November. Some of them had been

separated out in the first days and sent off to the huts

reserved for the terminally ill. The doctors of

Auschwitz—Josef Mengele,

Fritz Klein, Doctors Konig and Thilo

--not only worked on the Birkenau platform but roamed the camp, turning up at roll calls, invading the showers, asking with a smile, “How old are you, Mother?” Mrs. Clara Sternberg found herself put aside in a hut for older women. Sixty-year-old Mrs. Lola Krumholz was also cut out of the Schindlergruppe and put into a barracks for the aged where she was meant to die at no expense to the administration. Mrs. Horowitz, believing that her fragile daughter of eleven years, Niusia, could not survive a

“bathhouse” inspection, hustled her into an empty sauna boiler. One of the SS girls who’d been appointed to the Schindler women—the pretty one, the blonde—saw her do it but did not give her away. She was a puncher, that one, short-tempered, and later she would ask Mrs. Horowitz for a bribe and get a brooch which Regina had somehow concealed till then. Regina handed it over philosophically. There was another, heavier, gentler one who made lesbian advances and may have required a more personal payoff. Sometimes at roll call, one or more of the doctors would appear in front of the barracks. Seeing the medical gentlemen, women rubbed clay into their cheeks to induce a little bogus color. At one such inspection, Regina found stones for her daughter, Niusia, to stand on, and silver-haired young Mengele came to her and asked her a soft-voiced question concerning her daughter’s age and punched her for lying. Women felled like this at inspection were meant to be picked up by the guards while still semiconscious, dragged to the electrified fence at the edge of the women’s camp, and thrown onto it. They had Regina halfway there when she revived and begged them not to fry her alive, to let her return to her line. They released her, and when she crept back into the ranks, there was her bird-boned, speechless daughter still, frozen to the pile of stone. These inspections could occur at any hour. The Schindler women were called out one night to stand in the mud while their barracks was searched. Mrs.

Dresner, who had once been saved by a vanished

OD boy, came out with her tall teen-age

daughter, Danka. They stood there in that

eccentric mire of Auschwitz which, like the fabled

mud of Flanders, would not freeze when everything

else had frozen—the roads, the

rooftops, the human traveler.

Both Danka and Mrs. Dresner had left

P@lasz@ow in the summer clothing that was all they had left. Danka wore a blouse, a light jacket, a maroon skirt. Since it had begun snowing earlier in the evening, Mrs. Dresner had suggested that Danka tear a strip off her blanket and wear it beneath the skirt. Now, in the course of the barracks inspection, the SS discovered the ripped blanket. The officer who stood before the Schindler women called out the barracks Alteste—a Dutch woman whom, until yesterday, none of them had known—and said that she was to be shot, together with any other prisoner found with a blanket strip under her dress. Mrs. Dresner began whispering to Danka.

“Take it off and I’ll slip it back into the

barracks.” It was a credible idea. The

barracks stood at ground level and no step led up to them. A woman in the rear line might slip backward through the door. As Danka had obeyed her mother once before in the matter of the wall cavity in Dabrowski Street, Cracow, she obeyed her now, slipping from beneath her dress that strip of Europe’s poorest blanket. In fact, while Mrs. Dresner was in the hut, the SS officer passed by and idly extracted a woman of Mrs. Dresner’s age—it was probably Mrs. Sternberg—and had her taken away to some worse part of the camp, some place where there was no Moravian illusion.

Perhaps the other women in line did not let themselves understand what this simple act of weeding out meant. It was in fact a statement that no reserved group of so-called

“industrial prisoners” was safe in Auschwitz. No cry of “Schindlerfrauen!” would keep them immune for long. There had been other groups of “industrial prisoners” who had vanished in Auschwitz. General Pohl’s Section W had sent some trainloads of skilled Jewish workers from Berlin the year before. I. G. Farben had needed labor and was told by Section W to select its workers from these transports. In fact, Section W had suggested to Commandant H@oss that the trains should be unloaded in the I. G. Farben works, not near the crematoria in

Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of 1,750

prisoners, all male, in the first

train, 1,000 were immediately gassed. Of 4,000 in the next four trainloads, 2,500 went at once to the “bathhouses.” If the Auschwitz administration would not stay its hand for I. G. Farben and Department W, it was not going to be finicky about the women of some obscure German potmaker.

In barracks like those of the Schindler women, it was like living outdoors. The windows had no glass and served only to put an edge on the blasts of cold air out of Russia. Most of the girls had dysentery. Crippled with cramp, they limped in their clogs to the steel waste drum out in the mud. The woman who tended it did so for an extra bowl of soup. Mila Pfefferberg staggered out one evening, seized with dysentery, and the woman on duty—not a bad woman, a woman Mila had known as a girl—insisted that she could not use the drum but had to wait for the next girl out and then empty it with her help. Mila argued but could not shake the woman. Beneath the hungry stars this tending of the drum had become something like a profession, and there were rules. With the drum as pretext, the woman had come to believe that order, hygiene, sanity were possible. The next girl out arrived at Mila’s side, gasping and bent and desperate. But she too was young and, in peaceful days in @l@od@z, had known the woman on the can as a respectable married woman. So the two girls were obedient and lugged the thing 300

meters through the mud. The girl who shared the burden asked Mila, “Where’s Schindler now?”

Not everyone in the barracks asked that question, or asked it in that fierce, ironic way. There was an Emalia girl named Lusia, a widow of twenty-two, who kept saying, “You’ll see, it will all come out. We’ll end up somewhere warm with Schindler’s soup in us.” She did not know herself why she kept repeating such statements. In Emalia she had never been the type to make projections. She’d worked her shift, drunk her soup, and slept. She had never predicted grandiose events. Sufficient to her day had always been the survival thereof. Now she was ill and there was no reason for her to be prophetic. The cold and hunger were wasting her, and she too bore the vast obsessions of her hunger. Yet she amazed herself by repeating Oskar’s promises.

Later in their stay in Auschwitz, when they had been moved to a hut closer to the crematoria and did not know if they were to go to the showers or the chambers, Lusia continued pushing the glad message. Even so, the tide of the camp having washed them to this geographic limit of the earth, this pole, this pit, despair wasn’t quite the fashion for the Schindlerfrauen. You would still find women huddled in recipe talk and dreams of prewar kitchens.

In Brinnlitz when the men arrived, there was only the shell. There were no bunks yet; straw was strewn in the dormitories upstairs. But it was warm, with steam heat from the boilers. There were no cooks that first day. Bags of turnips lay around what would be the cookhouse, and men devoured them raw. Later, soup was brewed and bread baked, and the engineer Finder began the allocating of jobs. But from the start, unless there were SS

men looking on, it was all slow. It is mysterious how a body of prisoners could sense that the Herr Direktor was no longer a party to any war effort. The pace of work grew very canny in Brinnlitz. Since Oskar was detached from the question of production, slow work became the prisoners’ vengeance, their declaration.

It was a heady thing to withhold your labor. Everywhere else in Europe, the slaves worked to the limit of their 600 calories per day, hoping to impress some foreman and delay the transfer to the death camp. But here in Brinnlitz was the intoxicating freedom to use the shovel at half-pace and still survive.

None of this unconscious policy-making was evident in the first days. There were still too many prisoners anxious for their women. Dolek Horowitz had a wife and daughter in Auschwitz. The Rosner brothers had their wives. Pfefferberg knew the shock which something as vast, as appalling as Auschwitz would have on Mila. Jacob Sternberg and his teen-age son were concerned about Mrs. Clara Sternberg. Pfefferberg remembers the men clustering around Schindler on the factory floor and asking him again where the women were.

“I’m getting them out,” Schindler rumbled.

He did not go into explanations. He did not

publicly surmise that the SS in Auschwitz

might need to be bribed. He did not say that he

had sent the list of women to Colonel

Erich Lange, or that he and Lange both

intended to get them to Brinnlitz according to the list.

Nothing of that. Simply “I’m getting them out.” The SS garrison who moved into Brinnlitz in those days gave Oskar some cause to hope. They were middle-aged reservists called up to allow younger SS men a place in the front line. There were not so many lunatics as at P@lasz@ow, and Oskar would always keep them gentle with the specialties of his kitchen—plain food, but plenty. In a visit to their barracks, he made his usual speech about the unique skills of his prisoners, the importance of his manufacturing activities. Antitank shells, he said, and casings for a projectile still on the secret list. He asked that there be no intrusion by the garrison into the factory itself, for that would disturb the workers.

He could see it in their eyes. It suited them, this quiet town. They could imagine themselves lasting out the cataclysm here. They did not want to rampage round the workshops like a Goeth or a Hujar. They didn’t want the Herr Direktor to complain about them.

Their commanding officer, however, had not yet arrived. He was on his way from his previous post, the labor camp at Budzyn, which had, until the recent Russian advances, manufactured Heinkel bomber parts. He would be younger, sharper, more intrusive, Oskar knew. He might not readily take to being denied access to the camp. Among all this pouring of cement floors, the knocking of holes in the roof so that the vast Hilos would fit, the softening of NCO’S, amid the private uneasiness of settling into married life with Emilie again, Oskar was arrested a third time.

The Gestapo turned up at lunchtime. Oskar

was not in his office, in fact had driven to Brno

on some business earlier in the morning. A truck

had just arrived at the camp from Cracow laden with

some of the Herr Direktor’s portable wealth

--cigarettes, cases of vodka, cognac,

champagne. Some would later claim that this was Goeth’s property, that Oskar had agreed to bring it into Moravia in return for Goeth’s backing of his Brinnlitz plans. Since Goeth had now been a prisoner for a month and had no more authority, the luxuries on the truck could just as well be considered Oskar’s.

The men doing the unloading thought so and became nervous at the sight of the Gestapo men in the courtyard. They had mechanics’ privileges and so were permitted to drive the truck to a stream down the hill, where they threw the liquor into the water by the caseful. The two hundred thousand cigarettes on the truck were hidden more retrievably under the cover of the large transformer in the power plant.

It is significant that there were so many cigarettes and so much liquor in the truck: a sign that Oskar, always keen on trade goods, intended now to make his living on the black market.

They got the truck back to the garage as the siren for midday soup was blown. In past days the Herr Direktor had eaten with the prisoners, and the mechanics hoped that today he would do so again; they could then explain what had happened to such an expensive truckload.

He did in fact return from Brno soon after, but was stopped at the inner gate by one of the Gestapo men who stood there with his hand raised. The Gestapo man ordered him to leave his car at once.

“This is my factory,” a prisoner heard

Oskar growl back. “If you want to talk

to me, you’re welcome to jump in the car.

Otherwise follow me to my office.”

He drove into the courtyard, the two Gestapo men walking quickly on either side of the vehicle. In his office, they asked him about his connections with Goeth, with Goeth’s loot. I do have a few suitcases here, he told them. They belong to Herr Goeth. He asked me to keep them for him until his release.

The Gestapo men asked to see them, and Oskar took them through to the apartment. He made formal and cold introductions between Frau Schindler and the men from Bureau V. Then he brought out the suitcases and opened them. They were full of Amon’s civilian clothing, and old uniforms from the days when Amon had been a slim SS NCO. When they’d been through them and found nothing, they made the arrest. Emilie grew aggressive now. They had no right, she said, to take her husband unless they could say what they were taking him for. The people in Berlin will not be happy about this, she said. Oskar advised her to be silent. But you will have to call my friend Klonowska, he told her, and cancel my appointments.

Emilie knew what that meant. Klonowska would do her trick with the telephone again, calling Martin Plathe in Breslau, the General Schindler people, all the big guns. One of the Bureau V men took out handcuffs and put them on Oskar’s wrists. They took him to their car, drove him to the station in Zwittau, and escorted him by train to Cracow. The impression is that this arrest scared him more

than the previous two. There are no stories of

lovelorn SS colonels who shared a cell with

him and drank his vodka. Oskar did later

record some details, however. As the Bureau

V men escorted him across the grand neoclassic

loggia of the Cracow central station, a man named

Huth approached them. He had been a

civilian engineer in P@lasz@ow. He had

always been obsequious to Amon, but had a

reputation for many secret kindnesses. It may have

been an accidental meeting, but suggests that Huth

may have been working with Klonowska. Huth insisted

on shaking Oskar by his shackled hand. One of the

Bureau V men objected. “Do you really want

to go around shaking hands with prisoners?” he asked

Huth. The engineer at once made a speech, a

testimonial to Oskar. This was the Herr

Direktor Schindler, a man greatly

respected throughout Cracow, an important industrialist. “I can never think of him as a prisoner,” said Huth.

Whatever the significance of this meeting, Oskar was put into a car and taken across the familiar city to Pomorska Street again. They put him in a room like the one he had occupied during his first arrest, a room with a bed and a chair and a washbasin but with bars on the window. He was not easy there, even though his manner was one of bearlike tranquillity. In 1942, when they had arrested him the day after his thirty-fourth birthday, the rumor that there were torture chambers in the Pomorska cellars had been terrifying and indefinite. It wasn’t indefinite anymore.

He knew that Bureau V would torture him if they wanted Amon badly enough. That evening Herr Huth came as a visitor, bringing with him a dinner tray and a bottle of wine. Huth had spoken to Klonowska. Oskar himself would never clarify whether or not Klonowska had prearranged that “chance encounter.” Whichever it was, Huth told him now that Klonowska was rallying his old friends.

The next day he was interrogated by a panel of twelve SS investigators, one a judge of the SS Court. Oskar denied that he had given any money to ensure that the Commandant would, in the words of the transcript of Amon’s evidence, “go easy on the Jews.” I may have given him the money as a loan, Oskar admitted at one stage. Why would you give him a loan? they wanted to know. I run an essential war industry, said Oskar, playing the old tune. I have a body of skilled labor. If it is disturbed, there is loss to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate, to the war effort. If I found that in the mass of prisoners in P@lasz@ow there was a skilled metalworker of a category I needed, then of course I asked the Herr Commandant for him. I wanted him fast, I wanted him without red tape. My interest was production, its value to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate. In consideration of the Herr Commandant’s help in these matters, I may have given him a loan.

This defense involved some disloyalty to his old host, Amon. But Oskar would not have hesitated. His eyes gleaming with transparent frankness, his tone low, his emphasis discreet, Oskar—without saying it in so many words—let the investigators know that the money had been extorted. It didn’t impress them. They locked him away again. The interrogation went into a second, third, and fourth day. No one did him harm, but they were steely. At last he had to deny any friendship with Amon at all. It was no great task: he loathed the man profoundly anyhow. “I’m not a fairy,” he growled at the gentlemen of Bureau V, falling back on rumors he’d heard about Goeth and his young orderlies.

Amon himself would never understand that Oskar despised him and was willing to help the case Bureau V had against him. Amon was always deluded about friendship. In sentimental moods, he believed that Mietek Pemper and Helen Hirsch were loving servants. The investigators probably would not have let him know that Oskar was in Pomorska and would have listened mutely to Amon urging them, “Call in my old friend Schindler. He’ll vouch for me.”

What helped Oskar most when he faced the investigators was that he had had few actual business connections with the man. Though he had sometimes given Amon advice or contacts, he had never had a share in any deal, never made a z@loty out of Amon’s sales of prison rations, of rings from the jewelry shop, of garments from the custom-tailoring plant or furniture from the upholstery section. It must also have helped him that his lies were disarming even to policemen, and that when he told the truth he was positively seductive. He never gave the impression that he was grateful for being believed. For example, when the gentlemen of Bureau V looked as if they might at least give standing room to the idea that the 80,000 RM. was a “loan,” a sum extorted, Oskar asked them whether in the end the money might be returned to him, to Herr Direktor Schindler, the impeccable industrialist.

A third factor in Oskar’s favor was that his

credentials checked out. Colonel Erich

Lange, when telephoned by Bureau V,

stressed Schindler’s importance to the conduct of the war. Sussmuth, called in Troppau, said that Oskar’s plant was involved in the production of “secret weapons.” It was not, as we will see, an untrue statement. But when said bluntly, it was misleading and carried a distorted weight. For the F@uhrer had promised “secret weapons.” The phrase itself was charismatic and extended its protection now to Oskar. Against a phrase like “secret weapons,” any confetti of protest from the burghers of Zwittau did not count. But even to Oskar it did not seem that the

imprisonment was going well. About the fourth day,

one of his interrogators visited him not to question him

but to spit at him. The spittle streaked the left

lapel of his suit. The man ranted at him,

calling him a Jew-lover, a fucker of

Jewesses. It was a departure from the strange

legalism of the interrogations. But Oskar wasn’t

sure that it was not planned, that it did not

represent the true impetus behind his

imprisonment.

After a week, Oskar sent a message,

by way of Huth and Klonowska,

to Oberf@uhrer Scherner. Bureau V was putting such pressure on him, the message went, that he did not believe he could protect the former police chief much longer. Scherner left his counterinsurgency work (it was soon to kill him) and arrived in Oskar’s cell within a day. It was a scandal what they were doing, said Scherner. What about Amon?

Oskar asked, expecting Scherner to say that that was a scandal too. He deserves all he gets, said Scherner. It seemed that everyone was deserting Amon. Don’t worry, said Scherner before leaving, we intend to get you out.

On the morning of the eighth day, they let Oskar out onto the street. Oskar did not delay his going—nor did he, this time, demand transport. Enough to be deposited on the cold sidewalk.

He traveled across Cracow by streetcar and

walked to his old factory in Zablocie. A

few Polish caretakers were still there, and from the

upstairs office he called Brinnlitz and

told Emilie that he was free.

Moshe Bejski, a Brinnlitz

draftsman, remembers the confusion while Oskar was away—the rumors, all the questions about what it meant. But Stern and Maurice Finder, Adam Garde and others had consulted Emilie about food, about work arrangements, about the provision of bunks. They were the first to discover that Emilie was no mere passenger. She was not a happy woman, and her unhappiness was compounded by Bureau V’s arrest of Oskar. It must have seemed cruel that the SS should intrude on this reunion before it had got properly started. But it was clear to Stern and the others that she was not there, keeping house in that little apartment on the ground floor, purely out of wifely duty. There was what you could call an ideological commitment too. A picture of Jesus with His heart exposed and in flames hung on a wall of the apartment. Stern had seen the same design in the houses of Polish Catholics. But there had been no ornament of that kind in either of Oskar’s Cracow apartments. The Jesus of the exposed heart did not always reassure when you saw it in Polish kitchens. In Emilie’s apartment, however, it hung like a promise, a personal one. Emilie’s.

Early in November, her husband came back by train. He was unshaven and smelly from his imprisonment. He was amazed to find that the women were still in AuschwitzBirkenau. In planet Auschwitz, where the Schindler women moved as warily, as full of dread as any space travelers, Rudolf H@oss ruled as founder, builder, presiding genius. Readers of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice encountered him as the master of Sophie— a very different sort of master than Amon was to Helen Hirsch; a more detached, mannerly, and sane man; yet still the unflagging priest of that cannibal province. Though in the 1920’s he had murdered a Ruhr schoolteacher for informing on a German activist and had done time for the crime, he never murdered any Auschwitz prisoner by his own hand. He saw himself instead as a technician. As champion of Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide pellets which gave off fumes when exposed to air, he had engaged in a long personal and scientific conflict with his rival, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who had jurisdiction over the Bel@zec camp and who was the head of the carbon monoxide school. There had been an awful day at Bel@zec, which the SS chemical officer Kurt Gerstein had witnessed, when Kommissar Wirth’s method took three hours to finish a party of Jewish males packed into the chambers. That H@oss had backed the more efficient technology is partially attested to by the continuous growth of Auschwitz and the decline of Bel@zec. By 1943, when Rudolf H@oss left Auschwitz to do a stint as Deputy Chief of Section D in Oranienburg, the place was already something more than a camp. It was even more than a wonder of organization. It was a phenomenon. The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth’s malice—a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named

“disinfection cellars,” the aboveground chambers “bathhouses,” and Oberscharf@uhrer Moll, whose task it was to order the insertion of the blue crystals into the roofs of the

“cellars,” the walls of the “bathhouses,” customarily cried to his assistants, “All right, let’s give them something to chew on.” H@oss had returned to Auschwitz in May 1944

and presided over the entire camp at the time the Schindler women occupied a barracks in Birkenau, so close to the whimsical Oberscharf@uhrer Moll. According to the Schindler mythology, it was H@oss himself with whom Oskar wrestled for his 300 women. Certainly Oskar had telephone conversations and other commerce with H@oss. But he also had to deal with Sturmbannf@uhrer Fritz Hartjenstein, Commandant of Auschwitz II—THAT is, of Auschwitz-Birkenau—and with Untersturmf@uhrer Franz H@ossler, the young man in charge, in that great city, of the suburb of women. What is certain is that Oskar now sent a young

woman with a suitcase full of liquor, ham,

and diamonds to make a deal with these

functionaries. Some say that Oskar then followed

up the girl’s visit in person, taking with him

an associate, an influential officer in the

S.a. (the Sturmabteilung, or Storm

Troops), Standartenf@uhrer Peltze,

who, according to what Oskar later told his friends, was a British agent. Others claim that Oskar stayed away from Auschwitz himself as a matter of strategy and went to Oranienburg instead, and to the Armaments Inspectorate in Berlin, to try to put pressure on H@oss and his associates from that end.

The story as Stern would tell it years later in a public speech in Tel Aviv is as follows. After Oskar’s release from prison, Stern approached Schindler and—“under the pressure of some of my comrades”—begged Oskar to do something decisive about the women ensnared in Auschwitz. During this conference, one of Oskar’s secretaries came in—

Stern does not say which one. Schindler considered the girl and pointed to one of his fingers, which sported a large diamond ring. He asked the girl whether she would like this rather hefty piece of jewelry. According to Stern, the girl got very excited. Stern quotes Oskar as saying, “Take the list of the women; pack a suitcase with the best food and liquor you can find in my kitchen. Then go to Auschwitz. You know the Commandant has a penchant for pretty women. If you bring it off, you’ll get this diamond. And more still.”

It is a scene, a speech worthy of one of

those events in the Old Testament when for the good of the

tribe a woman is offered to the invader. It is

also a Central European scene, with its

gross, corruscating diamonds and its

proposed transaction of the flesh.

According to Stern, the secretary went. When she did not return within two days, Schindler himself— in the company of the obscure Peltze—went to settle the matter. According to Schindler mythology, Oskar did

send a girlfriend of his to sleep with the Commandant—be

that H@oss, Hartjenstein, or H@ossler—and

leave diamonds on the pillow. While some, like

Stern, say it was “one of his secretaries,”

others name an Aufseher, a pretty blond

SS girl, ultimately a girlfriend of

Oskar’s and part of the Brinnlitz garrison. But this girl, it seems, was still in Auschwitz anyhow, together with the Schindlerfrauen. According to Emilie Schindler herself, the emissary was a girl of twenty-two or twenty-three. She was a native of Zwittau, and her father was an old friend of the Schindler family. She had recently returned from occupied Russia, where she’d worked as a secretary in the German administration. She was a good friend of Emilie’s, and volunteered for the task. It is unlikely that Oskar would demand a sexual sacrifice of a friend of the family. Even though he was a brigand in these matters, that side of the story is certainly myth. We do not know the extent of the girl’s transactions with the officers of Auschwitz. We know only that she approached the dreadful kingdom and dealt courageously.

Oskar later said that in his own dealings with the rulers of necropolis Auschwitz, he was offered the old temptation. The women have been here some weeks now. They won’t be worth much as labor anymore. Why don’t you forget these three hundred? We’ll cut another three hundred for you, out of the endless herd. In 1942, an SS NCO at Prokocim station had pushed the same idea at Oskar. Don’t get stuck on these particular names, Herr Direktor. Now as at Prokocim, Oskar pursued his usual line. There are irreplaceable skilled munitions workers. I have trained them myself over a period of years. They represent skills I cannot quickly replace. The names I know, that is, are the names I know.

A moment, said his tempter. I see listed here

a nine-year-old, daughter of one Phila

Rath. I see an eleven-year-old, daughter

of one Regina Horowitz. Are you

telling me that a nine-year-old and an

eleven-year-old are skilled munitions workers? They polish the forty-five-millimeter shells, said Oskar. They were selected for their long fingers, which can reach the interior of the shell in a way that is beyond most adults.

Such conversation in support of the girl who was a friend of the family took place, conducted by Oskar either in person or by telephone. Oskar would relay news of the negotiations to the inner circle of male prisoners, and from them the details were passed on to the men on the workshop floor. Oskar’s claim that he needed children so that the innards of antitank shells could be buffed was outrageous nonsense. But he had already used it more than once. An orphan named Anita Lampel had been called to the Appellplatz in P@lasz@ow one night in 1943 to find Oskar arguing with a middle-aged woman, the Alteste of the women’s camp. The Alteste was saying more or less what H@oss/h@ossler would say later in Auschwitz. “You can’t tell me you need a fourteenyear-old for Emalia. You cannot tell me that Commandant Goeth has allowed you to put a fourteen-year-old on your roster for Emalia.” (the Alteste was worried, of course, that if the list of prisoners for Emalia had been doctored, she would be made to pay for it.) That night in 1943, Anita Lampel had listened flabbergasted as Oskar, a man who had never even seen her hands, claimed that he had chosen her for the industrial value of her long fingers and that the Herr Commandant had given his approval.

Anita Lampel was herself in Auschwitz now, but had grown tall and no longer needed the long-fingered ploy. So it was transferred to the benefit of the daughters of Mrs. Horowitz and Mrs. Rath.

Schindler’s contact had been correct in saying that the women had lost nearly all their industrial value. At inspections, young women like Mila Pfefferberg, Helen Hirsch, and her sister could not prevent the cramps of dysentery from bowing and aging them. Mrs. Dresner had lost all appetite, even for the ersatz soup. Danka could not force the mean warmth of it down her mother’s throat. It meant that she would soon become a Mussulman. The term was camp slang, based on people’s memory of newsreels of famine in Muslim countries, for a prisoner who had crossed the borderline that separated the ravenous living from the good-as-dead.

Clara Sternberg, in her early forties, was isolated from the main Schindler group into what could be described as a Mussulman hut. Here, each morning, the dying women were lined up in front of the door and a selection was made. Sometimes it was Mengele leaning toward you. Of the 500 women in this new group of Clara Sternberg’s, 100 might be detailed off on a given morning. On another, 50. You rouged yourself with Auschwitz clay; you kept a straight back if that could be managed. You choked where you stood rather than cough. It was after such an inspection that Clara found herself with no further reserves left for the waiting, the daily risk. She had a husband and a teen-age son in Brinnlitz, but now they seemed more remote than the canals of the planet Mars. She could not imagine Brinnlitz, or them in it. She staggered through the women’s camp looking for the electric wires. When she had first arrived, they’d seemed to be everywhere. Now that they were needed, she could not find them. Each turn took her into another quagmire street, and frustrated her with a view of identically miserable huts. When she saw an acquaintance from P@lasz@ow, a Cracow woman like herself, Clara propped in front of her. “Where’s the electric fence?” Clara asked the woman. To her distraught mind, it was a reasonable question to ask, and Clara had no doubt that the friend, if she had any sisterly feeling, would point the exact way to the wires. The answer the woman gave Clara was just as crazed, but it was one that had a fixed point of view, a balance, a perversely sane core.

“Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.”

It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had—by her reply --somehow cut her off from suicide as an option. Something awful had happened at Brinnlitz. Oskar, the Moravian traveler, was away. He was trading in kitchenware and diamonds, liquor and cigars, all over the province. Some of it was crucial business. Biberstein speaks of the drugs and medical instruments that came into the Krankenstube at Brinnlitz. None of it was standard issue. Oskar must have traded for medicines at the depots of the Wehrmacht, or perhaps in the pharmacy of one of the big hospitals in Brno.

Whatever the cause of his absence, he was away

when an inspector from Gr@oss-Rosen arrived and

walked through the workshop with Untersturmf@uhrer

Josef Liepold, the new Commandant, who was

always happy for a chance to intrude inside the

factory. The inspector’s orders, originating

from Oranienburg, were that the Gr@oss-Rosen

subcamps should be scoured for children to be used in

Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments

in Auschwitz. Olek Rosner and his small

cousin Richard Horowitz, who’d believed they

had no need of a hiding place here, were spotted

racing around the annex, chasing each other

upstairs, playing among the abandoned spinning

machines. So was the son of Dr. Leon

Gross, who had nursed Amon’s recently

developed diabetes, who had helped Dr.

Blancke with the Health Aktion, and who had other crimes still to answer for. The inspector remarked to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold that these were clearly not essential munitions workers.

Liepold—short, dark, not as crazy as Amon

--was still a convinced SS officer and did not bother to defend the brats. Further on in the inspection Roman Ginter’s nine-year-old was discovered. Ginter had known Oskar from the time the ghetto was founded, had supplied the metalworks at P@lasz@ow with scrap from DEF. But Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold and the inspector did not recognize any special relationships. The Ginter boy was sent under escort to the gate with the other children. Frances Spira’s boy, ten and a half years old, but tall and on the books as fourteen, was working on top of a long ladder that day, polishing the high windows. He survived the raid.

The orders required the rounding up of the children’s parents as well, perhaps because this would obviate the risk of parents beginning demented revolutions on the subcamp premises. Therefore Rosner the violinist, Horowitz, and Roman Ginter were arrested. Dr. Leon Gross rushed down from the clinic to negotiate with the SS. He was flushed. The effort was to show this inspector from Gr@oss-Rosen that he was dealing with a really responsible sort of prisoner, a friend of the system. The effort counted for nothing. An SS

Unterscharf@uhrer, armed with an automatic weapon, was given the mission of escorting them to Auschwitz.

The party of fathers and sons traveled from

Zwittau as far as Katowice, in Upper

Silesia, by ordinary passenger train. Henry

Rosner expected other passengers to be

hostile. Instead, one woman walked down the

aisle looking defiant and gave Olek and the

others a heel of bread and an apple, all the

while staring the sergeant in the face, daring him

to react. The Unterscharf@uhrer was

polite to her, however, and nodded formally. Later,

when the train stopped at Usti, he left the

prisoners under the guard of his assistant and went

to the station cafeteria, bringing back biscuits and

coffee paid for from his own pocket. He and Rosner

and Horowitz got talking. The more the

Unterscharf@uhrer chatted, the less he

seemed to belong to that same police force as Amon, Hujar, John, and all those others.

“I’m taking you to Auschwitz,” he said, “and then I have to collect some women and bring them back to Brinnlitz.”

So, ironically, the first Brinnlitz men to discover that the women might be let out of Auschwitz were Rosner and Horowitz, themselves on their way there. Rosner and Horowitz were ecstatic. They told their sons: This good gentleman is bringing your mother back to Brinnlitz. Rosner asked the Unterscharf@uhrer if he would give a letter to Manci, and Horowitz pleaded to be able to write to Regina. The two letters were written on pieces of paper the Unterscharf@uhrer gave them, the same stuff the man used to write to his own wife. In his letter, Rosner made arrangements with Manci to meet at an address in Podg@orze if they both survived.

When Rosner and Horowitz had finished writing, the SS man put the letters in his jacket. Where have you been these past years?

Rosner wondered. Did you start out as a

fanatic? Did you cheer when the gods

on the rostrum screamed, “The Jews are our misfortune”?

Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry’s arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag Henry off to Auschwitz. “To die just because of me,” he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn’t have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them. The Unterscharf@uhrer leaned over.

Surely he had not heard, but there were tears in his eyes. Olek seemed astonished by them—the way another child might be astounded by a cycling circus animal. He stared at the man. What was startling was that they looked like fraternal tears, the tears of a fellow prisoner. “I know what will happen,” said the Unterscharf@uhrer. “We’ve lost the war. You’ll get the tattoo. You’ll survive.”

Henry got the impression that the man was making promises not to the child but to himself, arming himself with an assurance which—in five years’ time perhaps, when he remembered this train journey—he could use to soothe himself.

On the afternoon of her attempt to find the wires, Clara Sternberg heard the calling of names and the sound of women’s laughter from the direction of the Schindlerfrauen barracks. She crawled from her own damp hut and saw the Schindler women lined up beyond an inner fence of the women’s camp. Some of them were dressed only in blouses and long drawers. Skeleton women, without a chance. But they were chattering like girls. Even the blond SS girl seemed delighted, for she too would be liberated from Auschwitz if they were.

“Schindlergruppe,” she called, “you’re going to the sauna and then to the trains.” She seemed to have a sense of the uniqueness of the event. Doomed women from the barracks all around looked blankly out through the wire at the celebratory girls. They compelled you to watch, those list women, because they were so suddenly out of balance with the rest of the city. It meant nothing, of course. It was an eccentric event; it had no bearing on the majority’s life; it did not reverse the process or lighten the smoky air. But for Clara Sternberg, the sight was intolerable. As it was also for sixty-year-old Mrs. Krumholz, also half-dead in a hut assigned to the older women. Mrs. Krumholz began to argue with the Dutch Kapo at the door of her barracks. I’m going out to join them, she said. The Dutch Kapo put up a mist of arguments. In the end, she said, you’re better off here. If you go, you’ll die in the cattle cars. Besides that, I’ll have to explain why you aren’t here. You can tell them, said Mrs. Krumholz, that it’s because I’m on the Schindler list. It’s all fixed.

The books will balance. There’s no question about it. They argued for five minutes and in the process talked of their families, finding out about each other’s origins, perhaps looking for a vulnerable point outside the strict logic of the dispute. It turned out that the Dutch woman’s name was also Krumholz. The two of them began discussing the whereabouts of their families. My husband is in Sachsenhausen, I think, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. The Cracow Mrs. Krumholz said, My husband and grown son have gone somewhere.

I think Mauthausen. I’m meant to be in the

Schindler camp in Moravia. Those women beyond the fence, that’s where they’re going. They’re not going anywhere, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. Believe me. No one goes anywhere, except in one direction. The Cracow Mrs.

Krumholz said, They think they’re going somewhere. Please! For even if the Schindlerfrauen were deluded, Mrs. Krumholz from Cracow wanted to share the delusion. The Dutch Kapo understood this and at last opened the door of the barracks, for whatever it was worth.

For a fence now stood between Mrs. Krumholz, Mrs. Sternberg, and the rest of the Schindler women. It was not an electrified perimeter fence. It was nonetheless built, according to the rulings of Section D, of at least eighteen strands of wire. The strands ran closest together at the top. Farther down, they were stretched in parallel strands about six inches apart. But between each set of parallels and the next there was a gap of less than a foot. That day, according to the testimony of witnesses and of the women themselves, both Mrs. Krumholz and Mrs. Sternberg somehow tore their way through the fence to rejoin the Schindler women in whatever daydream of rescue they were enjoying. Dragging themselves through the perhaps nine-inch gap, stretching the wire, ripping their clothes off and tearing their flesh on the barbs, they put themselves back on the Schindler list. No one stopped them because no one believed it possible. To the other women of Auschwitz, it was in any case an irrelevant example. For any other escapee, the breaching of that fence brought you only to another, and then another, and so to the outer voltage of the place. Whereas for Sternberg and Krumholz, this fence was the only one. The clothing they’d brought with them from the ghetto and kept in repair in muddy P@lasz@ow hung now on the wire. Naked and streaked with blood, they ran in among the Schindler women.

Mrs. Rachela Korn, condemned to a hospital hut at the age of forty-four, had also been dragged out the window of the place by her daughter, who now held her upright in the Schindler column. For her as for the other two, it was a birthday. Everyone in the line seemed to be congratulating them.

In the washhouse, the Schindler women were barbered. Latvian girls sheared a lice promenade down the length of their skulls and shaved their armpits and pubes. After their shower they were marched naked to the quartermaster’s hut, where the clothes of the dead were issued to them. When they saw themselves shaven and in odds and ends of clothing, they broke into laughter—the hilarity of the very young. The sight of little Mila Pfefferberg, down to 70 pounds, occupying garments cut for a fat lady had them reeling with hilarity. Half-dead and dressed in their paint-coded rags, they pranced, modeled, mimed, and giggled like schoolgirls.

“What’s Schindler going to do with all the old women?” Clara Sternberg heard an SS girl ask a colleague.

“It’s no one’s business,” the colleague said. “Let him open an old people’s home if he wants.”

No matter what your expectations, it was always a horrifying thing to go into the trains. Even in cold weather, there was a sense of smothering, compounded by blackness. On entering a car, the children always pushed themselves toward any sliver of light. That morning, Niusia Horowitz did that, positioning herself against the far wall at a place where a slat had come loose. When she looked out through the gap, she could see across the railway lines to the wires of the men’s camp. She noticed a straggle of children over there, staring at the train and waving. There seemed to be a very personal insistence to their movements. She thought it strange that one of them resembled her six-year-old brother, who was safe with Schindler. And the boy at his side was a double for their cousin Olek Rosner. Then, of course, she understood. It was Richard. It was Olek. She turned and found her mother and pulled at her uniform. Then Regina looked, went through the same cruel cycle of identification, and began to wail. The door of the car had been shut by now; they were all packed close in near darkness, and every gesture, every scent of hope or panic, was contagious. All the others took up the wailing too. Manci Rosner, standing near her sister-in-law, eased her away from the opening, looked, saw her son waving, and began keening too.

The door slid open again and a burly NCO asked who was making all the noise. No one else had any motive to come forward, but Manci and Regina struggled through the crush to the man. “It’s my child over there,” they both said. “My boy,” said Manci. “I want to show him that I’m still alive.”

He ordered them down onto the concourse. When they stood before him, they began to wonder what his purpose was. “Your name?” he asked Regina. She told him and saw him reach behind his back and fumble under his leather belt. She expected to see his hand appear holding a pistol. What it held, however, was a letter for her from her husband. He had a similar letter from Henry Rosner, too. He gave a brief summary of the journey he’d made from Brinnlitz with their husbands. Manci suggested he might be willing to let them get down under the car, between the tracks, as if to urinate. It was sometimes permitted if trains were long delayed. He consented.

As soon as Manci was down there under the carriage, she let out the piercing Rosner whistle she had used on the Appellplatz of P@lasz@ow to guide Henry and Olek to her. Olek heard it and began waving. He took Richard’s head and pointed it toward their mothers, peering out between the wheels of the train. After wild waving, Olek held his arm aloft and pulled back his sleeve to show a tattoo like a varicose scrawl along the flesh of his upper arm. And of course the women waved, nodded, applauded, young Richard also holding up his tattooed arm for applause. Look, the children were saying by their rolled-up sleeves. We have permanence.

But between the wheels, the women were in a frenzy.

“What’s happened to them?” they asked each other. “In God’s name, what are they doing here?” They understood that there would be a fuller explanation in the letters. They tore them open and read them, then put them away and went on waving. Next, Olek opened his hand and showed that he had a few pelletlike potatoes in his palm.

“There,” he called, and Manci could hear him distinctly. “You don’t have to worry about me being hungry.”

“Where’s your father?” Manci shouted.

“At work,” said Olek. “He’ll be back from work soon. I’m saving these potatoes for him.”

“Oh, God,” Manci murmured to her

sister-in-law. So much for the food in his hand. Young

Richard told it straighter. “Mamushka,

Mamushka, Mamushka,” he yelled,

“I’m so hungry!”

But he too held up a few potatoes.

He was keeping them for Dolek, he said. Dolek and Rosner the violinist were working at the rock quarry.

Henry Rosner arrived first. He too stood at the wire, his left arm bared and raised. “The tattoo,” he called in triumph. She could see, though, that he was shivering, sweating and cold at the same time. It had not been a soft life in P@lasz@ow, but he’d been allowed to sleep off in the paint shop the hours of work he’d put in playing Lehar at the villa. Here, in the band which sometimes accompanied the lines marching to the “bathhouses,” they didn’t play Rosner’s brand of music.

When Dolek turned up, he was led to the wire by Richard. He could see the pretty, hollow-faced women peering out from the undercarriage. What he and Henry dreaded most was that the women would offer to stay. They could not be with their sons in the male camp. They were in the most hopeful situation in Auschwitz there, hunkered under a train that was certain to move before the day was over. The idea of a clan reunion here was illusory, but the fear of the men at the Birkenau wire was that the women would opt to die for it. Therefore Dolek and Henry talked with false cheer—like peacetime fathers who’d decided to take the kids up to the Baltic that summer so that the girls could go to Carlsbad on their own. “Look after Niusia,” Dolek kept calling, reminding his wife that they had another child, that she was in the car above Regina’s head. At last some merciful siren sounded in the men’s camp. The men and boys now had to leave the wire. Manci and Regina climbed limply back into the train and the door was locked. They were still. Nothing could surprise them anymore.

The train rolled out in the afternoon. There were the

usual speculations. Mila Pfefferberg

believed that if the destination was not Schindler’s

place, half the women crammed in the cars would not

live another week. She herself expected that she

had only days left. The girl Lusia had

scarlet fever. Mrs. Dresner, tended

by Danka but leached by dysentery, seemed to be dying.

But in Niusia Horowitz’ car, the women saw mountains and pine trees through the broken slat. Some of them had come to these mountains in their childhood, and to see the distinctive hills even from the floor of these putrid wagons gave them an unwarranted sense of holiday. They shook the girls who sat in the muck staring. “Nearly there,” they promised. But where? Another false arrival would finish them all. At cold dawn on the second day, they were ordered out. The locomotive could be heard hissing somewhere in the mist. Beards of dirty ice hung from the understructures of the train, and the air pierced them. But it was not the heavy, acrid air of Auschwitz. It was a rustic siding, somewhere. They marched, their feet numb in clogs, and everybody coughing. Soon they saw ahead of them a large gate and, behind it, a great bulk of masonry from which chimneys rose; they looked like brothers to the ones left behind in Auschwitz. A party of SS men waited by the gate, clapping their hands in the cold. The group at the gate, the chimneys—it all looked like part of that sickening continuum. A girl beside Mila Pfefferberg began to weep. “They’ve brought us all this way to send us up the chimney anyhow.”

“No,” said Mila, “they wouldn’t waste their time. They could have done all that at Auschwitz.” Her optimism was, however, like that of the girl Lusia—she couldn’t tell where it came from. As they got closer to the gate, they became aware that Herr Schindler was standing in the midst of the SS men. They could tell at first by his memorable height and bulk. Then they could see his features under the Tyrolean hat which he’d been wearing lately to celebrate his return to his home mountains. A short, dark SS officer stood beside him. It was the Commandant of Brinnlitz, Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold. Oskar had already discovered—the women would discover it soon—that Liepold, unlike his middle-aged garrison, had not yet lost faith in that proposition called “the Final Solution.” Yet though he was the respected deputy of Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck and the supposed incarnation of authority in this place, it was Oskar who stepped forward as the lines of women stopped. They stared at him. A phenomenon in the mist. Only some of them smiled. Mila Pfefferberg, like others of the girls in the column that morning, remembers that it was an instant of the most basic and devout gratitude, and quite unutterable. Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. “He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.”

Then Oskar began to talk. It was another of his outrageous speeches, full of dazzling promises. “We knew you were coming,” he said. “They called us from Zwittau. When you go inside the building, you’ll find soup and bread waiting for you.” And then, lightly and with pontifical assurance, he said it: “You have nothing more to worry about. You’re with me now.”

It was the sort of address against which the

Untersturmf@uhrer was powerless. Though

Liepold was angry at it, Oskar was

oblivious. As the Herr Direktor moved

with the prisoners into the courtyard, there was nothing Liepold could do to break into that certainty.

The men knew. They were on the balcony of their

dormitory looking down. Sternberg and his son

searching for Mrs. Clara Sternberg,

Feigenbaum senior and Lutek Feigenbaum

looking out for Nocha Feigenbaum and her

delicate daughter. Juda Dresner and his son

Janek, old Mr. Jereth, Rabbi

Levartov, Ginter, Garde, even Marcel

Goldberg all strained for a sight of their women. Mundek Korn looked not only for his mother and sister but for Lusia the optimist, in whom he’d developed an interest. Bau now fell into a melancholy from which he might never fully emerge. He knew definitively, for the first time, that his mother and wife would not arrive in Brinnlitz. But Wulkan the jeweler, seeing Chaja Wulkan below him in the factory courtyard, knew with astonishment now that there were individuals who intervened and offered astounding rescue.

Pfefferberg waved at Mila a package he

had kept for her arrival—a hank of wool

stolen from one of the cases Hoffman had left behind, and a steel needle he had made in the welding department. Frances Spira’s ten-year-old son also looked down from the balcony. To stop himself from calling out, he had jammed his fist into his mouth, since there were so many SS men in the yard. The women staggered across the cobbles in their Auschwitz tatters. Their heads were cropped. Some of them were too ill, too hollowed out to be easily recognized. Yet it was an astounding assembly. It would not surprise anyone to find out later that no such reunion occurred anywhere else in stricken Europe. That there had never been, and would not be, any other Auschwitz rescue like this one. The women were then led up into their separate dormitory. There was straw on the floor—no bunks yet. From a large DEF tureen, an SS girl served them the soup Oskar had spoken about at the gate. It was rich. There were lumps of nutrient in it. In its fragrance, it was the outward sign of the value of the other imponderable promises. “You have nothing more to worry about.” But they could not touch their men. The women’s dormitory was for the moment quarantined. Even Oskar, on the advice of his medical staff, was concerned about what they might have brought with them from Auschwitz. There were, however, three points at which their isolation could be breached. One was the loose brick above young Moshe Bejski’s bunk. Men would spend the coming nights kneeling on Bejski’s mattress, passing messages through the wall. Likewise, on the factory floor there was a small fanlight which gave into the women’s latrines. Pfefferberg stacked crates there, making a cubicle where a man could sit and call messages. Finally, for early morning and late evening, there was a crowded wire barrier between the men’s balcony and the women’s. The Jereths met there: old Mr. Jereth, from whose wood the first Emalia barracks had been built; his wife, who had needed a refuge from the Aktions in the ghetto. Prisoners used to joke about the exchanges between Mr. and Mrs. Jereth.

“Have your bowels moved today, dear?” Mr. Jereth would somberly ask his wife, who had just come from the dysentery-ridden huts of Birkenau.

On principle, no one wanted to be put in the clinic. In P@lasz@ow it had been a dangerous place where you were made to take Dr. Blancke’s terminal benzine treatment. Even here in Brinnlitz, there was always a risk of sudden inspections, of the type that had already taken the boy children. According to the memos of Oranienburg, a labor-camp clinic should not have any patients with serious illnesses. It was not meant to be a mercy home. It was there to offer industrial first aid. But whether they wanted it or not, the clinic at Brinnlitz was full of women. The teen-age Janka Feigenbaum was put in there. She had cancer and might die in any case, even in the best of places. She had at least come to the best of places left to her. Mrs. Dresner was brought in, as were dozens of others who could not eat or keep food in their stomachs. Lusia the optimist and two other girls were suffering from scarlet fever and could not be kept in the clinic. They were put in beds in the cellar, down amid the warmth of the boilers. Even in the haze of her cold fever, Lusia was aware of the prodigious warmth of that cellar ward. Emilie worked as quiet as a nun in the clinic. Those who were well in Brinnlitz, the men who were disassembling the Hoffman machines and putting them in storehouses down the road, scarcely noticed her. One of them later said that she was just a quiet and submissive wife. For the healthy in Brinnlitz stayed hostage to Oskar’s flamboyance, to this great Brinnlitz confidence trick. Even the women who were still standing had their attention taken by the grand, magical, omniprovident Oskar.

Manci Rosner, for example. A little later in Brinnlitz’ history, Oskar would come to the lathes where she worked the night shift and hand her Henry’s violin. Somehow, during a journey to see Hassebroeck at Gr@oss-Rosen, he’d got the time to go into the warehouse there and find the fiddle. It had cost him 100 RM. to redeem it. As he handed it to her, he smiled in a way that seemed to promise her the ultimate return of the violinist to go with the violin. “Same instrument,” he murmured. “But—for the moment— different tune.”

It was hard for Manci, faced by Oskar and the miraculous violin, to see behind the Herr Direktor to the quiet wife. But to the dying, Emilie was more visible. She fed them semolina, which she got God knows where, prepared in her own kitchen and carried up to the Krankenstube. Dr. Alexander Biberstein believed that Mrs. Dresner was finished. Emilie spooned the semolina into her for seven days in a row, and the dysentery abated. Mrs. Dresner’s case seemed to verify Mila Pfefferberg’s claim that if Oskar had failed to rescue them from Birkenau, most of them would not have lived another week. Emilie tended Janka Feigenbaum also, the nineteen-year-old with bone cancer. Lutek Feigenbaum, Janka’s brother, at work on the factory floor, sometimes noticed Emilie moving out of her ground-floor apartment with a canister of soup boiled up in her own kitchen for the dying Janka. “She was dominated by Oskar,” Lutek would say. “As we all were. Yet she was her own woman.”

When Feigenbaum’s glasses were broken, she arranged for them to be repaired. The prescription lay in some doctor’s office in Cracow, had lain there since before the ghetto days. Emilie arranged for someone who was visiting Cracow to get the prescription and bring back the glasses made up. Young Feigenbaum considered this more than an average kindness, especially in a system which positively desired his myopia, which aimed to take the spectacles off all the Jews of Europe. There are many stories about Oskar providing new glasses for various prisoners. One wonders if some of Emilie’s kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood.

CHAPTER 34

The doctors in the Krankenstube were Doctors Hilfstein, Handler, Lewkowicz, and Biberstein. They were all concerned about the likelihood of a typhus outbreak. For typhus was not only a hazard to health. It was, by edict, a cause to close down Brinnlitz, to put the infested back into cattle cars and ship them to die in the ACHTUNG TYPHUS!

barracks of Birkenau. On one of Oskar’s morning visits to the clinic, about a week after the women arrived, Biberstein told him that there were two more possible cases among the women. Headache, fever, malaise, general pains throughout the whole body—all that had begun. Biberstein expected the characteristic typhoid rash to appear within a few days. These two would need to be isolated somewhere in the factory. Biberstein did not have to give Oskar too much home instruction in the facts of typhus. Typhus was carried by louse bite. The prisoners were infested by uncontrollable populations of lice. The disease took perhaps two weeks to incubate. It might be incubating now in a dozen, a hundred prisoners. Even with the new bunks installed, people still lay too close. Lovers passed the virulent lice to each other when they met, fast and secretly, in some hidden corner of the factory. The typhus lice were wildly migratory. It seemed now that their energy could checkmate Oskar’s. So that when Oskar ordered a delousing unit—

showers, a laundry to boil clothes, a disinfection

plant—built upstairs, it was no idle

administrative order. The unit was to run on

hot steam piped up from the cellars. The welders

were to work double shifts on the project. They did

it with a will, for willingness characterized the secret

industries of Brinnlitz. Official industry

might be symbolized by the Hilo machines rising

from the new-poured workshop floor. It was in the

prisoners’ interest and in Oskar’s, as Moshe

Bejski later observed, that these machines be

properly erected, since it gave the camp a

convincing front. But the uncertified industries of

Brinnlitz were the ones that counted. The women

knitted clothing with wool looted from Hoffman’s

left-behind bags. They paused and began to look

industrial only when an SS officer or

NCO passed through the factory on his

way to the Herr Direktor’s office, or

when Fuchs and Schoenbrun, the inept civil engineers (“Not up to the weight of our engineers,” a prisoner would later say) came out of their offices. The Brinnlitz Oskar was still the Oskar old Emalia hands remembered. A bon vivant, a man of wild habits. Mandel and Pfefferberg, at the end of their shift and overheated from working on the pipe fittings for the steam, visited a water tank high up near the workshop ceiling. Ladders and a catwalk took them to it. The water was warm up there, and once you climbed in, you could not be seen from the floor. Dragging themselves up, the two welders were amazed to find the tub already taken. Oskar floated, naked and enormous. A blond SS girl, the one Regina Horowitz had bribed with a brooch, her naked breasts buoyant at the surface, shared the water with him. Oskar became aware of them, looked up at them frankly. Sexual shame was, to him, a concept something like existentialism, very worthy but hard to grasp. Stripped, the welders noticed, the girl was delicious. They apologized and left, shaking their heads, whistling softly, laughing like schoolboys. Above their heads, Oskar dallied like Zeus.

When the epidemic did not develop, Biberstein thanked the Brinnlitz delousing unit. When the dysentery faded, he thanked the food. In a testimony in the archives of the Yad Vashem, Biberstein declares that at the beginning of the camp, the daily ration was in excess of 2,000 calories. In all the miserable winter-bound continent, only the Jews of Brinnlitz were fed this living meal. Among the millions, only the soup of the Schindler thousand had body.

There was porridge too. Down the road from the camp, by the stream into which Oskar’s mechanics had recently thrown black-market liquor, stood a mill. Armed with a work pass, a prisoner could stroll down there on an errand from one or another department of DEF. Mundek Korn remembers coming back to the camp loaded with food. At the mill you simply tied your trousers at the ankles and loosened your belt. Your friend then shoveled your pants full of oatmeal. You belted up again and returned to the camp— a grand repository, priceless as you walked, a little bandy-legged, past the sentries into the annex. Inside, people loosened your cuffs and let the oatmeal run out into pots. In the drafting department, young Moshe Bejski and Josef Bau had already begun forging prison passes of the type that allowed people to make the mill run. Oskar wandered in one day and showed Bejski documents stamped with the seal of the rationing authority of the Government General. Oskar’s best contacts for black-market food were still in the Cracow area. He could arrange shipments by telephone. But at the Moravian border, you had to show clearance documents from the Food and Agriculture Department of the Government General. Oskar pointed to the stamp on the papers in his hand. Could you make a stamp like that? he asked Bejski. Bejski was a craftsman. He could work on little sleep. Now he turned out for Oskar the first of the many official stamps he would craft. His tools were razor blades and various small cutting instruments. His stamps became the emblems of Brinnlitz’ own outrageous bureaucracy.

He cut seals of the Government General, of the

Governor of Moravia, seals to adorn false

travel permits so that prisoners could drive

by truck to Brno or Olomouc to collect

loads of bread, of black-market gasoline, of

flour or fabric or cigarettes. Leon

Salpeter, a Cracow pharmacist, once a

member of Marek Biberstein’s Judenrat,

kept the storehouse in Brinnlitz. Here the miserable supplies sent down from Gr@ossRosen by Hassebroeck were kept, together with the supplementary vegetables, flour, cereals bought by Oskar under Bejski’s minutely careful rubber stamps, the eagle and the hooked cross of the regime precisely crafted on them.

“You have to remember,” said an inmate of Oskar’s camp, “that Brinnlitz was hard. But beside any other—paradise!” Prisoners seem to have been aware that food was scarce everywhere; even on the outside, few were sated.

And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of the prisoners?

The answer is indulgent laughter. “Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?” And then a frown, in case you think this attitude too serflike. “You don’t understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be.”

As in his early marriage, Oskar was still temperamentally an absentee, was away from Brinnlitz for stretches of time. Sometimes Stern, purveyor of the day’s requests, would wait up all night for him. In Oskar’s apartment Itzhak and Emilie were the keepers of vigils.

The scholarly accountant would always put the most

loyal interpretation on Oskar’s wanderings around

Moravia. In a speech years after, Stern would

say, “He rode day and night, not only

to purchase food for the Jews in Brinnlitz

camp—by means of forged papers made by one of the

prisoners—but to buy us arms and ammunition in

case the SS conceived of killing us during their

retreats.” The picture of a restlessly

provident Herr Direktor does credit

to Itzhak’s love and loyalty. But Emilie

would have understood that not all the absences had to do with Oskar’s brand of humane racketeering.

During one of Oskar’s furloughs, nineteen-year-old Janek Dresner was accused of sabotage. In fact Dresner was ignorant of metalwork. He had spent his time in P@lasz@ow in the delousing works, handing towels to the SS who came for a shower and sauna, and boiling lice-ridden clothes taken from prisoners. (from the bite of a louse he’d suffered typhus, and survived only because his cousin, Dr. Schindel, passed him off in the clinic as an angina case.)

The supposed sabotage occurred because engineer Schoenbrun, the German supervisor, transferred him from his lathe to one of the larger metal presses. It had taken a week for the engineers to set the metrics for this machine, and the first time Dresner pressed the start button and began to use it, he shorted the wiring and cracked one of the plates. Schoenbrun harangued the boy and went into the office to write a damning report. Copies of Schoenbrun’s complaint were typed up and addressed to Sections D and W in Oranienburg, to Hassebroeck at Gr@oss-Rosen, and to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold in his office at the factory gate.

In the morning, Oskar had still not come home. So rather than mail the reports, Stern took them out of the office mailbag and hid them. The complaint addressed to Liepold had already been hand-delivered, but Liepold was at least correct in the terms of the organization he served and could not hang the boy until he had heard from Oranienburg and Hassebroeck. Two days later, Oskar had still not appeared. “It must be some party!”

the whimsical ones on the shop floor told each other. Somehow Schoenbrun discovered that Itzhak was sitting on the letters. He raged through the office, telling Stern that .his name would be added to the reports. Stern seemed to be a man of limitless calm, and when Schoenbrun finished he told the engineer that he had removed the reports from the mailbag because he thought the Herr Direktor should, as a matter of courtesy, be apprised of their contents before they were mailed. The Herr Direktor, said Stern, would of course be appalled to find out that a prisoner had done 10,000 RM. worth of damage to one of his machines. It seemed only just, said Stern, that Herr Schindler be given the chance to add his own remarks to the report.

At last Oskar drove in through the gate.

Stern intercepted him and told him about Schoenbrun’s charges.

Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had been waiting to see Schindler too and was eager to push his authority inside the factory, to use the Janek Dresner case as a pretext. I will preside over the hearing, Liepold told Oskar. You, Herr Direktor, will supply a signed statement attesting to the extent of the damage. Wait a minute, Oskar told him. It’s my machine that’s broken. I’m the one who’ll preside.

Liepold argued that the prisoner was under the jurisdiction of Section D. But the machine, replied Oskar, came under the authority of the Armaments Inspectorate. Besides, he really couldn’t permit a trial on the shop floor.

If Brinnlitz had been a garment or chemical factory, then perhaps it wouldn’t have much impact on production. But this was a munitions factory engaged in the manufacture of secret components. “I won’t have my work force disturbed,” said Oskar. It was an argument Oskar won, perhaps because Liepold gave in. The Untersturmf@uhrer was afraid of Oskar’s contacts. So the court was convened at night in the machine-tool section of DEF, and its members were Herr Oskar Schindler as president, Herr Schoenbrun, and Herr Fuchs. A young German girl sat at the side of the judicial table to keep a record, and when young Dresner was brought in, he saw in front of him a solemn and fully constituted court. According to a Section D edict of April 11, 1944, what Janek faced was the first and crucial stage of a process which should, after a report to Hassebroeck and a reply from Oranienburg, end in his hanging on the workshop floor in front of all the Brinnlitz people, his parents and sister among them. Janek noticed that tonight there was none of that shop-floor familiarity to Oskar. The Herr Direktor read aloud Schoenbrun’s report of the sabotage. Janek knew about Oskar mainly from the reports of others, particularly from his father, and couldn’t tell now what Oskar’s straight-faced reading of Schoenbrun’s accusations meant. Was Oskar really grieving for the cracked machine? Or was it all just theatrics?

When the reading was finished, the Herr Direktor began to ask questions. There was not much Dresner could say in answer. He pleaded that he was unfamiliar with the machine. There had been trouble setting it, he explained. He had been too anxious and had made a mistake. He assured the Herr Direktor that he had no reason to wish to sabotage the machinery. If you are not skilled at armaments work, said Schoenbrun, you shouldn’t be here. The Herr Direktor has assured me that all you prisoners have had experience in the armaments industry. Yet here you are, H@aftling Dresner, claiming ignorance. With an angry gesture, Schindler ordered the prisoner to detail exactly what he had done on the night of the offense. Dresner began to talk about the preparations for starting up the machine, the setting of it, the dry run at the controls, the switching on of the power, the sudden racing of the engine, the splitting of the mechanism. Herr Schindler became more and more restless as Dresner talked, and began to pace the floor glowering at the boy. Dresner was describing some alteration he had made to one of the controls when Schindler stopped, ham fists clenched, his eyes glaring. What did you say? he asked the boy.

Dresner repeated what he had said: I adjusted the pressure control, Herr Direktor. Oskar walked up to him and hit him across the side of the jaw. Dresner’s head sang, but in triumph, for Oskar—his back to his fellow judges—had winked at Dresner in a way that could not be mistaken. Then he began waving his great arms, dismissing the boy.

“The stupidity of you damned people!” he was bellowing all the while. “I can’t believe it!”

He turned and appealed to Schoenbrun and Fuchs, as if they were his only allies. “I wish they were intelligent enough to sabotage a machine. Then at least I’d have their goddamned hides! But what can you do with these people? They’re an utter waste of time.”

Oskar’s fist clenched again, and Dresner recoiled at the idea of another roundhouse punch. “Clear out!” yelled Oskar.

As Dresner went out through the door, he heard Oskar tell the others that it was better to forget all this. “I have some good Martell upstairs,” he said.

This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity. Dresner’s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners’ lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.

CHAPTER 35

For the factory produced nothing. “Not a shell,” Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing. Oskar himself contrasts the output of DEF in the Cracow years with the Brinnlitz record. In Zablocie, enamelware was manufactured to the value of 16,000,000 RM. During the same time, the munitions section of

Emalia produced shells worth 500,000

RM. Oskar explains that at Brinnlitz,

however, “as a consequence of the falling off of the enamel production,” there was no output to speak of. The armaments production, he says, encountered “start-up difficulties.” But in fact he did manage to ship one truckful of “ammunition parts,”

valued at 35,000 RM., during the Brinnlitz months. “These parts,” said Oskar later, “had been transferred to Brinnlitz already half-fabricated. To supply still less [to the war effort] was impossible, and the excuse of “start-up difficulties” became more and more dangerous for me and my Jews, because Armaments Minister Albert Speer raised his demands from month to month.”

The danger of Oskar’s policy of nonproduction was not only that it gave him a bad name at the Armaments Ministry. It made other managements angry. For the factory system was fragmented, one workshop producing the shells, another the fuses, a third packing in the high explosives and assembling the components. In this way, it was reasoned, an air raid on any one factory could not substantially destroy the flow of arms. Oskar’s shells, dispatched by freight to factories farther down the line, were inspected there by engineers Oskar did not know and could not reach. The Brinnlitz items always failed quality control. Oskar would show the complaining letters to Stern, to Finder, to Pemper or Garde. He would laugh uproariously, as if the men writing the reprimands were comicopera bureaucrats. Later in the camp’s history one such case occurred. Stern and Mietek Pemper were in Oskar’s office on the morning of April 28, 1945, a morning when the prisoners stood at an extremity of danger, having been, as will be seen, all condemned to death by Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck. The day was Oskar’s thirty-seventh birthday, and a bottle of cognac had already been opened to mark it. And on the desk lay a telegram from the armaments assembly plant near Brno. It said that Oskar’s antitank shells were so badly produced that they failed all quality-control tests. They were imprecisely calibrated, and because they had not been tempered at the right heat they split under testing.

Oskar was ecstatic at this telegram, pushing it toward Stern and Pemper, making them read it. Pemper remembers that he made another of his outrageous statements. “It’s the best birthday present I could have got. Because I know now that no poor bastard has been killed by my product.” This incident says something about two contrasting frenzies. There is some madness in a manufacturer like Oskar who rejoices when he does not manufacture. But there is also a cool lunacy in the German technocrat who, Vienna having fallen, Marshal Koniev’s men having embraced the Americans on the Elbe, still takes it for granted that an arms factory up in the hills has time to tidy up its performance and make a condign offering to the grand principles of discipline and output. But the main question that arises from the birthday telegram is how Oskar lasted those months, the seven months up to the date of his birthday. The Brinnlitz people remember a whole series of inspections and checks. Men from Section D stalked the factory, checklists in their hands. So did engineers from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar always lunched or dined these officials,

softened them up with ham and cognac. In the Reich

there were no longer so many good lunches and dinners

to be had. The prisoners at the lathes, the

furnaces, the metal presses would state that the

uniformed inspectors reeked of liquor and

reeled on the factory floor. There is a

story all the inmates tell of an official who

boasted, on one of the final inspections of the war, that

Schindler would not seduce him with camaraderie,

with a lunch and liquor. On the stairs leading from the

dormitories down to the workshop floor, the

legend has it, Oskar tripped the man, sending

him to the bottom of the stairs, a journey that

split the man’s head and broke his leg. The

Brinnlitz people are, however, generally unable to say

who the SS hard case was. One claims that it

was Rasch, SS and police chief of

Moravia. Oskar himself never made any

recorded claim about it. The anecdote is one

of those stories that reflect on people’s picture of

Oskar as a provider who covers all

possibilities. And one has to admit, in

natural justice, that the inmates had the right to spread this sort of fable. They were the ones in deepest jeopardy. If the fable let them down, they would pay for it most bitterly. One reason Brinnlitz passed the inspections was the relentless trickery of Oskar’s skilled workers. The furnace gauges were rigged by the electricians. The needle registered the correct temperature when the interior of the furnace was in fact hundreds of degrees cooler. “I’ve written to the manufacturers,” Oskar would tell the armaments inspectors. He would play the somber, baffled manufacturer whose profits were being eroded. He would blame the floor, the inferior German supervisors. He spoke yet again of “start-up difficulties,” implying future tonnages of munitions once the problems faded. In the machine-tool departments, as at the furnaces, everything looked normal. Machines seemed perfectly calibrated, but were in fact a micromillimeter off. Most of the arms inspectors who walked through seem to have left not only with a gift of cigarettes and cognac, but with a faint sympathy for the thorny problems this decent fellow was enduring.

Stern would always say in the end that Oskar bought boxes of shells from other Czech manufacturers and passed them off as his own during inspections. Pfefferberg makes the same claim. In any case, Brinnlitz lasted, whatever sleight-of-hand Oskar used. There were times when, to impress the hostile

locals, he invited important officials in

for a tour of the factory and a good dinner. But they were

always men whose expertise did not run to engineering and

munitions production. After the Herr

Direktor’s stay in Pomorska Street,

Liepold, Hoffman, and the local Party

Kreisleiter wrote to every official they could

think of—local, provincial, Berlin-based—

complaining about him, his morals, his connections, his

breaches of race and penal law. Sussmuth let

him know about the barrage of letters arriving at

Troppau. So Oskar invited Ernst Hahn

down to Brinnlitz. Hahn was second in command

of the bureau of the Berlin main office devoted

to services for SS families. “He was,”

says Oskar with customary reprobate’s

primness, “a notorious drunkard.” With him Hahn brought his boyhood friend Franz Bosch. Bosch, as Oskar has already remarked in this narrative, was also “an impenetrable drunkard.” He was also the murderer of the Gutter family. Oskar, however, swallowing his contempt, welcomed him for his public-relations value. When Hahn arrived in town, he was wearing exactly the splendid, untarnished uniform Oskar had hoped he would. It was festooned with ribbons and orders, for Hahn was an old-time SS

man from the early glory days of the Party. With this dazzling Standartenf@uhrer came an equally glittering adjutant.

Liepold was invited in, from his rented house outside camp walls, to dine with the visitors. From the start of the evening, he was out of his depth. For Hahn loved Oskar; drunks always did.

Later Oskar would describe the men and the uniforms as “pompous.” But at least Liepold was convinced now that if he wrote complaining letters to distant authorities, they were likely to land on the desk of some old drinking friend of the Herr Direktor’s, and that this could well be perilous to himself.

In the morning, Oskar was seen driving through Zwittau, laughing with these glamorous men from Berlin. The local Nazis stood on the pavements and saluted all this Reich splendor as it passed.

Hoffman was not as easily quelled as the rest. The three hundred women of Brinnlitz had, in Oskar’s own words, “no employment possibility.” It has already been said that many of them spent their days knitting. In the winter of 1944, for people whose only cover was the striped uniform, knitting was no idle hobby. Hoffman, however, made a formal complaint to the SS about the wool the Schindler women had stolen from the cases in the annex. He thought it scandalous, and that it showed up the true activities of the so-called Schindler munitions works.

When Oskar visited Hoffman, he found the old man in a triumphant mood. “We’ve petitioned Berlin to remove you,” said Hoffman. “This time we’ve included sworn statements declaring that your factory is running in contravention of economic and race law. We’ve nominated an invalided Wehrmacht engineer from Brno to take over the factory and turn it into something decent.”

Oskar listened to Hoffman, apologized, tried to appear penitent. Then he telephoned Colonel Erich Lange in Berlin and asked him to sit on the petition from the Hoffman clique in Zwittau. The out-of-court settlement still cost Oskar 8,000 RM., and all winter the Zwittau town authorities, civil and Party, plagued him, calling him in to the town hall to acquaint him with the complaints of various citizens about his prisoners, or the state of his drains.

Lusia the optimist had a personal experience of SS inspectors that typifies the Schindler method.

Lusia was still in the cellar—she would be there for the entire winter. The other girls had got better and had moved upstairs to recuperate. But it seemed to Lusia that Birkenau had filled her with a limitless poison. Her fevers recurred again and again. Her joints became inflamed. Carbuncles broke out in her armpits. When one burst and healed, another would form. Dr. Handler, against the advice of Dr. Biberstein, lanced some of them with a kitchen knife. She remained in the cellar, well fed, ghost-white, infectious. In all the great square mileage of Europe, it was the only space in which she could have lived. She was aware of that even then, and hoped that the enormous conflict would roll by above her head.

In that warm hole under the factory, night and day were irrelevant. The time the door at the top of the cellar stairs burst open could have been either. She was used to quieter visits from Emilie Schindler. She heard boots on the stairs and tensed in her bed. It sounded to her like an old-fashioned Aktion.

It was in fact the Herr Direktor with two officers from Gr@oss-Rosen. Their boots clattered on the steps as if to stampede over her. Oskar stood with them as they looked around in the gloom at the boilers and at her. It came to Lusia that perhaps she was it for today. The sacrificial offering you had to give them so that they would go away satisfied. She was partially hidden by a boiler, but Oskar made no attempt to conceal her, actually came to the foot of her bed.

Because the two gentlemen of the SS seemed flushed

and unsteady, Oskar had a chance to speak to her. His

were words of wonderful banality, and she would never

forget them: “Don’t worry. Everything’s all

right.” He stood close, as if to emphasize

to the inspectors that this was not an

infectious case.

“This is a Jewish girl,” he said flatly.

“I didn’t want to put her in the

Krankenstube. Inflammation of the joints. She’s finished anyway. They don’t give her more than thirty-six hours.”

Then he rambled on about the hot water, where it came from, and the steam for the delousing. He pointed to gauges, piping, cylinders. He edged around her bed as if it too were neutral, part of the mechanism. Lusia did not know where to look, whether to open or close her eyes. She tried to appear comatose. It might seem a touch too much, but Lusia did not think so at the time, that as he ushered the SS men back to the base of the stairs, Oskar flashed her a cautious smile. She would stay there for six months and hobble upstairs in the spring to resume her womanhood in an altered world. During the winter, Oskar built up an independent arsenal. Again there are the legends: Some say that the weapons were bought at the end of

winter from the Czech underground. But Oskar had been

an obvious National Socialist in 1938 and

1939 and may have been wary of dealing with the

Czechs. Most of the weapons, in any case,

came from a flawless source, from

Obersturmbannf@uhrer Rasch, SS and

police chief of Moravia. The small cache included carbines and automatic weapons, some pistols, some hand grenades. Oskar would later describe the transaction offhandedly. He acquired the arms, he would say, “under the pretense of protecting my factory, for the price of the gift of a brilliant ring to his [Rasch’s] wife.”

Oskar does not detail his performance in Rasch’s office in Brno’s Spilberk Castle. It is not hard to imagine, though. The Herr Direktor, concerned about a possible slave uprising as the war grinds on, is willing to die expensively at his desk, automatic weapon in hand, having mercifully dispatched his wife with a bullet to save her from something worse. The Herr Direktor also touches on the chance that the Russians might turn up at the gate. My civilian engineers, Fuchs and

Schoenbrun, my honest technicians, my

German-speaking secretary, all of them

deserve to have the means of resistance. It’s gloomy talk, of course. I’d rather speak of issues closer to our hearts, Herr Obersturmbannf@uhrer. I know your passion for good jewelry. May I show you this example I found last week?

And so the ring appeared on the edge of Rasch’s blotter, Oskar murmuring, “As soon as I saw it, I thought of Frau Rasch.”

Once Oskar had the weapons, he appointed Uri Bejski, brother of the rubber-stamp maker, keeper of the arsenal. Uri was small, handsome, lively. People noticed that he wandered into and out of the Schindlers’ private quarters like a son. He was a favorite, too, with Emilie, who gave him keys to the apartment. Frau Schindler enjoyed a similar maternal relationship with the surviving Spira boy. She took him regularly into her kitchen and fed him up on slices of bread and margarine.

Having selected the small body of prisoners for training, Uri took one at a time into Salpeter’s storehouse to teach them the mechanisms of the Gewehr 41 W’s. Three commando squads of five men each had been formed. Some of Bejski’s trainees were boys like Lutek Feigenbaum. Others were Polish veterans such as Pfefferberg and those other prisoners whom the Schindler prisoners called the “Budzyn people.”

The Budzyn people were Jewish officers and men of the Polish Army. They had lived through the liquidation of the Budzyn labor camp, which had been under the administration of Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold. Liepold had brought them into his new command in Brinnlitz. There were about 50 of them, and they worked in Oskar’s kitchens. People remember them as very political. They had learned Marxism during their imprisonment in Budzyn, and looked forward to a Communist Poland. It was an irony that in Brinnlitz they lived in the warm kitchens of that most apolitical of capitalists, Herr Oskar Schindler.

Their rapport with the bulk of the prisoners, who,

apart from the Zionists, merely followed the

politics of survival, was good. A number of

them took private lessons on Uri

Bejski’s automatics, for in the Polish

Army of the Thirties they had never held such sophisticated weapons. If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest

days of her husband’s power in Brno, had idly

--during a party, say; a musical recital

at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her F@uhrer’s. An armed Marxist Jew.

CHAPTER 36

Old drinking friends of Oskar’s, Amon and

Bosch among them, had sometimes thought of him as the

victim of a Jewish virus. It was no

metaphor. They believed it in virtually

literal terms and attached no blame to the sufferer. They’d seen it happen to other good men. Some area of the brain fell under a thrall that was half-bacterium, half-magic. If they’d been asked whether it was infectious, they would have said, yes, highly. They would have seen the case of Oberleutnant Sussmuth as an example of conspicuous contagion.

For Oskar and Sussmuth connived over the winter

of 1944-45 to get a further 3,000 women out

of Auschwitz in groups of 300 to 500 at a

time into small camps in Moravia. Oskar

supplied the influence, the sales talk, the

palm-greasing for these operations. Sussmuth did the

paperwork. In the textile mills of Moravia

there was a labor shortage, and not all the owners

abhorred the Jewish presence as sharply as

Hoffman. At least five German factories

in Moravia—at Freudenthal and

Jagerndorf, at Liebau, Grulich, and

Trautenau—took these drafts of women and supplied a camp on the premises. Any such camp was never paradise, and in its management the SS were permitted to be more dominant than Liepold could ever hope to be. Oskar would later describe these women in the little camps as “living under endurable treatment.” But the very smallness of the textile camps was an aid to their survival, for the SS garrisons were older, slacker, less fanatical men. There was typhus to be eluded, and hunger to be carried like a weight beneath the ribs. But such tiny, almost countrified establishments would for the most part escape the extermination orders that would come to the bigger camps in the spring. But if the Jewish sepsis had infected Sussmuth, for Oskar Schindler it galloped. Through Sussmuth, Oskar had applied for another 30 metalworkers. It is simple fact that he had lost interest in production. But he saw, with the detached side of his mind, that if his plant was ever to validate its existence to Section D, he would need more qualified hands. When you look at other events of that mad winter, you can see that Oskar wanted the extra 30 not because they were used to lathes and machine tools, but because they were simply an extra 30. It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterized the exposed and flaming heart of the Jesus which hung on Emilie’s wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonization of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved. One of these 30 metalworkers, a man named Moshe Henigman, left a public account of their unlikely deliverance. A little after Christmas, 10,000 prisoners from the quarries of Auschwitz III—FROM such establishments as the Krupp Weschel-Union armaments factory and from German Earth and Stone, from the Farben synthetic-petroleum plant and the airplane-dismantling enterprise—were put in a column and marched away toward Gr@oss-Rosen. Perhaps some planner believed that once they arrived in Lower Silesia, they would be distributed among the area’s factory camps. If that was the scheme, it escaped the SS officers and men who marched with the prisoners. It ignored also the devouring cold of the merciless turning of the year, and it did not inquire how the column would be fed. The limpers, the coughers were culled out at the beginning of each stage and executed. Of 10,000, says Henigman, there were within ten days only 1,200 left alive. To the north, Koniev’s Russians had burst across the Vistula south of Warsaw and seized all the roads on the column’s northwesterly route. The diminished group was therefore put in an SS compound somewhere near Opole. The Commandant of the place had the prisoners interviewed, and lists made of the skilled workers. But each day the weary selections continued, and the rejects were shot. A man whose name was called out never knew what to expect, a lump of bread or a bullet. When Henigman’s name was called, however, he was put in a railway car with 30 others and, under the care of an SS

man and a Kapo, was shunted south. “We were given food for the trip,” Henigman recalls. “Something unheard of.”

Henigman later spoke of the exquisite unreality of arriving at Brinnlitz. “We could not believe that there was a camp left where men and women worked together, where there were no beatings, no Kapo.” His reaction is marked by a little hyperbole, since there was segregation in Brinnlitz. Occasionally, too, Oskar’s blond girlfriend let fly with an open palm, and once when a boy stole a potato from the kitchen and was reported to Liepold, the Commandant made him stand on a stool all day in the courtyard, the potato clamped in his open mouth, saliva running down his chin, and the placard “I AM A POTATO

THIEF!” hung around his neck. But to Henigman this sort of thing was not worthy of report. “How can one describe,” he asks, “the change from hell to paradise?”

When he met Oskar, he was told to build himself up. Tell the supervisors when you’re ready to work, said the Herr Direktor. And Henigman, faced with this strange reversal of policy, felt not simply that he’d come to a quiet pasture, but that he had gone through the mirror.

Since 30 tinsmiths were merely a fragment of the 10,000, it must be said again that Oskar was only a minor god of rescue. But like any tutelary spirit, he saved equally Goldberg and Helen Hirsch, and equally he tried to save Dr. Leon Gross and Olek Rosner. With this same gratuitous equality, he made a costly deal with the Gestapo in the Moravia region. We know that the contract was struck, but we do not know how expensive it was. That it cost a fortune is certain.

A prisoner named Benjamin Wrozlawski became one subject of this deal. Wrozlawski was formerly an inmate of the labor camp at Gliwice. Unlike Henigman’s camp, Gliwice was not in the Auschwitz region, but was close enough to be one of the Auschwitz subsidiary camps. By January 12, when Koniev and Zhukov launched their offensive, H@oss’s awesome realm and all its close satellites were in danger of instant capture. The Gliwice prisoners were put in Ostbahn cars and shipped toward Fernwald. Somehow Wrozlawski and a friend named Roman Wilner jumped from the train. One popular form of escape was through loosened ventilators in the cars’ ceilings. But prisoners who tried it were often shot by guards stationed on the roofs. Wilner was wounded during this escape, but he was able to travel, and he and his friend Wrozlawski fled through the high quiet towns of the Moravian border. They were at last arrested in one of these villages and taken to the Gestapo offices in Troppau.

As soon as they had arrived and been searched and put in a cell, one of the gentlemen of the Gestapo walked in and told them that nothing bad would happen. They had no reason to believe him. The officer said further that he would not transfer Wilner to a hospital, in spite of the wound, for he would simply be collected and fed back into the system. Wrozlawski and Wilner were locked away for nearly two weeks. Oskar had to be contacted and a price had to be settled. During that time, the officer kept talking to them as if they were in protective custody, and the prisoners continued to find the idea absurd. When the door was opened and the two of them were taken out, they presumed they were about to be shot. Instead, they were led to the railway station by an SS man who escorted them on a train southeast toward Brno.

For both of them, the arrival at Brinnlitz had that same surreal, delightful and frightening quality it had had for Henigman. Wilner was put in the clinic, under the care of Doctors Handler, Lewkowicz, Hilfstein, Biberstein. Wrozlawski was put in a sort of convalescent area which had been set up—for extraordinary reasons soon to be explained—in a corner of the factory floor downstairs. The Herr Direktor visited them and asked how they felt. The preposterous question scared Wrozlawski; so did the surroundings. He feared, as he would put it years later, “the way from the hospital would lead to execution, as was the case in other camps.” He was fed with the rich Brinnlitz porridge, and saw Schindler frequently. But as he confesses, he was still confused, and found the phenomenon of Brinnlitz hard to grasp.

By the arrangement Oskar had with the provincial

Gestapo, 11 escapees were added to the

crammed-in camp population. Each one

of them had wandered away from a column or jumped from a cattle car. In their stinking stripes, they had tried to stay at large. By rights, they should all have been shot. In 1963, Dr. Steinberg of Tel Aviv testified to yet another instance of Oskar’s wild, contagious, and unquestioning largesse. Steinberg was the physician in a small work camp in the Sudeten hills. The Gauleiter in Liberec was less able, as Silesia fell to the Russians, to keep labor camps out of his wholesome province of Moravia. The camp in which Steinberg was imprisoned was one of the many new ones scattered among the mountains. It was a Luftwaffe camp devoted to the manufacture of some unspecified aircraft component. Four hundred prisoners lived there. The food was poor, said Steinberg, and the workload savage. Pursuing a rumor about the Brinnlitz camp, Steinberg managed to get a pass and the loan of a factory truck to go and see Oskar. He described to him the desperate conditions in the Luftwaffe camp. He says that Oskar quite lightly agreed to allocate him part of the Brinnlitz stores. The main question that preoccupied Oskar was, On what grounds could Steinberg regularly come to Brinnlitz to pick up supplies? It was arranged that he would use some excuse to do with getting regular medical aid from the doctors in the camp clinic.

Twice a week thereafter, says Steinberg, he visited Brinnlitz and took back to his own camp quantities of bread, semolina, potatoes, and cigarettes. If Schindler was around the storehouse on the day that Steinberg was loading up, he would turn his back and walk away.

Steinberg does not give any exact poundage of food, but he offers it as a medical opinion that if the Brinnlitz supplies had not been available, at least 50 of the prisoners in the Luftwaffe camp would have died by the spring. Apart from the ransoming of the women in Auschwitz, however, the most astounding salvage of all was that of the Golesz@ow people. Golesz@ow was a quarry and cement plant inside Auschwitz III itself, home of the SS’-OWNED German Earth and Stone Works. As has been seen with the 30

metalsmiths, throughout January 1945 the dread fiefdoms of Auschwitz were being disbanded, and in mid-month 120 quarry workers from Golesz@ow were thrown into two cattle cars. Their journey would be as bitter as any, but would end better than most. It is worth remarking that, like the Golesz@ow men, nearly everyone else in the Auschwitz area was on the move that month. Dolek Horowitz was shipped away to Mauthausen. Young Richard, however, was kept behind with other small children. The Russians would find him later in the month in an Auschwitz abandoned by the SS and would claim quite correctly that he and the others had been detained for medical experiments. Henry Rosner and nine-year-old Olek

(apparently no longer considered necessary for the laboratories) were marched away from Auschwitz in a column for thirty miles, and those who fell behind were shot. In Sosnowiec they were packed into freight cars. As a special kindness, an SS guard who was supposed to separate the children let Olek and Henry go into the same car. It was so crowded that everyone had to stand, but as men died of cold and thirst a gentleman whom Henry described as “a smart Jew” would suspend them in their blankets from horse hooks near the roof. In this way there was more floor space for the living. For the sake of the boy’s comfort, Henry got the idea of slinging Olek in his blanket in exactly the same way from the horse hooks. This not only gave the child an easier ride; when the train stopped at stations and sidings, he would call to Germans by the rails to throw snowballs up to the wire gratings. The snow would shatter and spray the interior of the wagon with moisture, and men would struggle for a few ice crystals.

The train took seven days to get to Dachau, and half the population of the Rosners’ car died. When it at last arrived and the door was opened, a dead body fell out, and then Olek, who picked himself up in the snow, broke an icicle off the undercarriage and began to lick it ravenously. Such was travel in Europe in January 1945. For the Golesz@ow quarry prisoners it was

even worse. The bill of lading for their two

freight cars, preserved in the archives of the

Yad Vashem, shows that they were traveling without

food for more than ten days andwiththe doors frozen

shut. R, a boy of sixteen, remembers that

they scraped ice off the inside walls to quench

their thirst. Even in Birkenau they

weren’t unloaded. The killing process was in its

last furious days. It had no time for them. They

were abandoned on sidings, reattached

to locomotives, dragged for 50 miles,

uncoupled again. They were shunted to the gates of

camps, whose commandants refused them on the clear

ground that by now they lacked industrial value, and

because in any case facilities—bunks and rations

--were everywhere at the limit.

In the small hours of a morning at the end of January, they were uncoupled and abandoned in the rail yards at Zwittau. Oskar says a friend of his telephoned from the depot to report human scratchings and cries from inside the cars. These pleadings were uttered in many tongues, for the trapped men were, according to the manifest, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Netherlanders, and Serbians. The friend who made the call was very likely Oskar’s brother-in-law. Oskar told him to shunt the two cars up the siding to Brinnlitz.

It was a morning of gruesome cold—minus 30

degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees

Fahrenheit), says Stern. Even the exact

Biberstein says that it was at least minus 20 degrees (minus 4 degrees F). Poldek Pfefferberg was summoned from his bunk, fetched his welding gear, and went out to the snowy siding to cut open the doors iced hard as iron. He too heard the unearthly complaints from within.

It is hard to describe what they saw when the

doors were at last opened. In each car, a

pyramid of frozen corpses, their limbs

madly contorted, occupied the center. The hundred or more still living stank awesomely, were seared black by the cold, were skeletal. Not one of them would be found to weigh more than 75 pounds.

Oskar was not at the siding. He was inside the factory, where a warm corner of the workshop floor was being made ready for the shipment from Golesz@ow. Prisoners dismantled the last of Hoffman’s dumped machinery and carried it to the garages. Straw was brought in and the floor strewn with it.

Already Schindler had been out to the Commandant’s

office to speak to Liepold. The

Untersturmf@uhrer didn’t want to take

the Golesz@ow men; in that, he resembled all the other commandants they had met in the past few weeks. Liepold remarked pointedly that no one could pretend that these people were munitions workers. Oskar admitted that, but guaranteed to put them on the books, and so to pay 6 RM. a day for each of them. “I can use them after their recuperation,”

said Oskar. Liepold recognized two aspects of the case. First, that Oskar was unstoppable. Second, that an increase in the size of Brinnlitz and the labor fees paid might well please Hassebroeck. Liepold would have them quickly enrolled on the books and the entries back-dated, so that even as the Golesz@ow men were carried in through the factory gate, Oskar was paying for them.

Inside the workshop, they were wrapped in blankets and laid down on the straw. Emilie came from her apartment, followed by two prisoners toting an enormous bucket of porridge. The doctors noted the frostbite and the need for frost ointments. Dr. Biberstein mentioned to Oskar that the Golesz@ow people would need vitamins, though he was sure there were none to be had in Moravia. In the meantime the 16 frozen corpses were placed in a shed. Rabbi Levartov, looking at them, knew that with their limbs twisted by the cold they would be hard to bury in the Orthodox manner, which permitted no breaking of bones. The matter, Levartov knew, would, however, have to be argued with the Commandant. Liepold had on file from Section D a number of directives urging SS

personnel to dispose of the dead by burning. In the boiler rooms were perfect facilities, industrial furnaces capable almost of vaporizing a body. Yet Schindler had so far twice refused to permit the burning of the dead.

The first time was when Janka Feigenbaum died

in the Brinnlitz clinic. Liepold had at

once ordered her body incinerated. Oskar heard

through Stern that this was abhorrent to the Feigenbaums

and to Levartov, and his resistance to the idea may have

been fueled also by the Catholic residue in his

own soul. In those years the Catholic Church was

firmly opposed to cremation. As well as

refusing Liepold the use of the furnace,

Oskar also ordered the carpenters to prepare a coffin, and himself supplied a horse and wagon, allowing Levartov and the family to ride out under guard to bury the girl in the woods.

Feigenbaum father and son had walked behind the wagon, counting the steps from the gate so that when the war ended they could reclaim Janka’s body. Witnesses say that Liepold was furious at this sort of pandering to the prisoners. Some Brinnlitz people even comment that Oskar could show toward Levartov and the Feigenbaums a more exacting delicacy and courtesy than he usually managed with Emilie. The second time Liepold wanted the furnaces used was when old Mrs. Hofstatter died. Oskar, at Stern’s request, had another coffin prepared, allowing a metal plaque on which Mrs. Hofstatter’s vital statistics were marked to be included in the coffin. Levartov and a minyan, the quorum of ten males who recite Kaddish over the dead, were permitted to leave camp and attend the funeral.

Stern says that it was for Mrs. Hofstatter’s sake that Oskar established a Jewish cemetery in the Catholic parish of Deutsch-Bielau, a nearby village. According to him, Oskar went to the parish church on the Sunday Mrs. Hofstatter died and made the priest a proposition. A quickly convened parish council agreed to sell him a small parcel of land just beyond the Catholic cemetery. There is nothing surer than that some of the council resisted, for it was an era when Canon Law was interpreted narrowly in its provisions as to who could and who could not be buried in consecrated ground.

Other prisoners of some authority say, however, that the Jewish cemetery plot was bought by Oskar at the time of the arrival of the Golesz@ow cars with their tithe of twisted dead. In a later report, Oskar himself implies that it was the Golesz@ow dead who caused him to buy the land. By one account, when the parish priest pointed out the area beyond the church wall reserved for the burial of suicides and suggested that the Golesz@ow people be buried there, Oskar answered that these weren’t suicides. These were victims of a great murder. The Golesz@ow deaths and the death of Mrs. Hofstatter must have come close together in any case, and were both marked with full ritual in the unique Jewish cemetery of Deutsch-Bielau.

It is clear from the way all Brinnlitz prisoners spoke of it that this interment had enormous moral force within the camp. The distorted corpses who were unloaded from the freight cars had seemed less than human. Looking at them, you became frightened for your own precarious humanity. The inhuman thing was beyond feeding, washing, warming. The one way left to restore it—as well as yourself—to humanity was through ritual. Levartov’s rites, therefore, the exalted plainchant of Kaddish, had a far larger gravity for the Brinnlitz prisoners than such ceremonies could ever have had in the relative tranquillity of prewar Cracow.

To keep the Jewish burial ground tidy in

case of future deaths, Oskar employed a

middle-aged SS Unterscharf@uhrer and

paid him a retainer.

Emilie Schindler had transactions of her

own to make. Carrying a clutch of false papers supplied by Bejski, she had two prisoners load up one of the plant trucks with vodka and cigarettes, and ordered them to drive her to the large mining town of Ostrava up near the border of the Government General. At the military hospital she was able to make an arrangement with various of Oskar’s contacts and to bring back frostbite ointments, sulfa, and the vitamins Biberstein had thought beyond procuring. Such journeys now became regular events for Emilie. She was growing to be a traveler, like her husband.

After the first deaths, there were no others. The

Golesz@ow people were Mussulmen, and it was a first

principle that the condition of Mussulmen could not

be reversed. But there was some intractability in

Emilie which would not accept it. She harried them with

her bucketfuls of farina. “Out of those rescued from

Golesz@ow,” said Dr. Biberstein, “not one

would have stayed alive without her treatment.” The men

began to be seen, trying to look useful, on the

factory floor. One day a Jewish storeman

asked one of them to carry a box out to a machine on

the workshop floor. “The box weighs

thirty-five kilos,” said the boy, “and I

weigh thirty-two. How in the hell can I carry it?”

To this factory of ineffective machines, its floor strewn with scarecrows, Herr Amon Goeth came that winter, following his release from prison, to pay his respects to the Schindlers. The SS court had let him out of prison in Breslau because of his diabetes. He was dressed in an old suit that may have been a uniform with the markings stripped off. There are rumors about the meaning of this visit, and they persist to this day. Some thought that Goeth was looking for a handout, others that Oskar was holding something for him—cash or kind from one of Amon’s last Cracow deals in which Oskar had perhaps served as Amon’s agent. Some who worked close to Oskar’s office believe that Amon even asked for a managerial post at Brinnlitz. No one could say that he did not have the experience. In fact, all three versions of Amon’s motives in coming down to Brinnlitz are possibly correct, though it is unlikely that Oskar ever acted as Amon’s agent.

As Amon stepped through the gate of the camp, it could be seen that prison and tribulation had thinned him down. The fleshiness had vanished from his face. His features were more like those of the Amon who had come to Cracow in the New Year of 1943 to liquidate the ghetto, yet they were different too, for they were jaundice-yellow and prison-gray. And if you had the eyes for it, if you dared to look, you saw a new passivity there. Some prisoners, however, glancing up from their lathes, glimpsed that figure from the pit of their foulest dreams, there unannounced, passing by the doors and windows, proceeding through the factory yard toward Herr Schindler’s office. Helen Hirsch sat galvanized, wanting nothing except that he should vanish again. But others hissed him as he passed, and men bent at their machines and spat. More mature women lifted their knitting toward him like a challenge. For that was vengeance— to show that in spite of all his terror, Adam still delved and Eve span.

If Amon wanted a job at Brinnlitz— and there were few other places a Hauptsturmf@uhrer under suspension could go—Oskar either talked him out of it or bought him off. In that way, this meeting was like all their others. As a courtesy the Herr Direktor took

Amon on a tour of the plant, and on this

circuit of the workshop floor, the reaction against him was stronger still. Back in the office, Amon was overheard demanding that Oskar punish the inmates for their disrespect, and Oskar was heard rumbling away, pledging that he would do something about the pernicious Jews and expressing his own undiminished respect for Herr Goeth. Though the SS had let him out of prison, the investigation of his affairs was still in progress. A judge of the SS Court had come to Brinnlitz in the past few weeks to question Mietek Pemper again about Amon’s managerial procedures.

Before the interrogation began, Commandant Liepold had muttered to Pemper that he’d better be careful, that the judge would want to take him to Dachau for execution after he’d been drained of evidence. Wisely, Pemper had done all he could to convince the judge of the unimportance of his work in the main office at P@lasz@ow. Somehow, Amon had heard that the SS investigators had been pursuing Pemper. Soon after he arrived in Brinnlitz, he cornered his ci-devant typist in Oskar’s outer office and wanted to know what questions the judge had asked. Pemper believed, reasonably enough, that he could detect in Amon’s eyes resentment that his onetime prisoner was still a breathing source of evidence for the SS Court. Surely Amon was powerless here, thinned down, looking doleful in an old suit, washed up in Oskar’s office? But you couldn’t be sure. It was still Amon, and he had the habit of authority. Pemper said, “The judge told me I was not to talk to anyone about my interrogation.” Goeth was outraged and threatened to complain to Herr Schindler. That, if you like, was a measure of Amon’s new impotence. He had never had to go to Oskar before to appeal for the chastisement of a prisoner.

By the second night of Amon’s visit, the women were feeling more triumphant. He couldn’t touch them. They persuaded even Helen Hirsch of this. Yet her sleep was uneasy.

The last time Amon passed within sight of prisoners, it was on his way to be taken by car to the station at Zwittau. He had never in the past made three visits to any space without bringing some poor bastard’s world crashing down. It was clear now that he had no power at all. Yet still not everyone could look him in the face as he left. Thirty years later, in the sleep of P@lasz@ow veterans from Buenos Aires to Sydney, from New York to Cracow, from Los Angeles to Jerusalem, Amon would still be rampaging. “When you saw Goeth,” said Poldek Pfefferberg, “you saw death.”

So, in his own terms, he was never an utter failure.

CHAPTER 37

Oskar’s thirty-seventh birthday was celebrated by Oskar himself and all the prisoners. One of the metalworkers had crafted a small box

suitable for holding studs or cuff links, and when

the Herr Direktor appeared on the workshop

floor, the twelve-year-old Niusia

Horowitz was pushed toward him to make a

rehearsed speech in German. “Herr

Direktor,” she said in a voice he had

to stoop to hear. “All the prisoners wish you the very best for this your birthday.”

It was a Shabbat, which was apt, because the Brinnlitz people would always remember it as a festival. Early in the morning, about the time Oskar had begun celebrating with Martell cognac in his office and flourishing that insulting telegram from the engineers at Brno, two truckloads of white bread rolled into the courtyard. Some went to the garrison, even to the hung-over Liepold sleeping late in his house in the village. That much was necessary to stop the SS from grumbling about the way the Herr Direktor favored prisoners. The prisoners themselves were issued three-quarters of a kilo of the bread. They inspected it as they ate and savored it. There was some speculation about where Oskar had got it. Perhaps it could be partially explained by the goodwill of the local mill manager, Daubek, the one who turned away while Brinnlitz prisoners filled their pants with oatmeal. But that Saturday bread was truly celebrated more in terms of the magic of the event, of the wonder-working. Though the day is remembered as jubilant, there was in fact not so much cause for festive feeling. Sometime in the past week, a long telegram had been directed from Herr Commandant Hassebroeck of Gr@oss-Rosen to Liepold of Brinnlitz giving him instructions about the disposal of the population in the event the Russians drew near. There was to be a final selection, said Hassebroeck’s telegram. The aged and the halt were to be shot immediately, and the healthy were to be marched out in the direction of Mauthausen. Though the prisoners on the factory floor knew nothing of this telegram, they still had an unspecified fear of something like it. All that week there had been rumors that Poles had been brought in to dig mass graves in the woods beyond Brinnlitz. The white bread seemed to have come as an antidote to that rumor, a warranty of all their futures. Yet everyone seemed to know that an era of dangers more subtle than those of the past had begun.

If Oskar’s factory hands knew nothing of the telegram, neither did Herr Commandant Liepold himself. The cable was delivered first to Mietek Pemper in Liepold’s outer office. Pemper had steamed it open and resealed it and taken the news of its contents straight to Oskar. Schindler stood at his desk reading it, then turned to Mietek. “All right, then,” growled Oskar. “We have to say goodbye to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold.”

For it seemed both to Oskar and to Pemper that Liepold was the only SS man in the garrison capable of obeying such a telegram. The Commandant’s deputy was a man in his forties, an SS Oberscharf@uhrer named Motzek.

While Motzek might be capable of some sort of panic slaughter, to administer the cool murder of 1,300 humans was beyond him.

In the days before his birthday, Oskar made a number of confidential complaints to Hassebroeck about the excessive behavior of Herr Commandant Liepold. He visited the influential Brno police chief, Rasch, and lodged the same sort of charges against Liepold. He showed both Hassebroeck and Rasch copies of letters he had written to the office of General Gl@ucks in Oranienburg. Oskar was gambling that Hassebroeck would remember Oskar’s past generosities and the promise of future ones, that he would take note of the pressure for Liepold’s removal now being built up by Oskar in Oranienburg and Brno, that he would transfer Liepold without bothering to investigate the Untersturmf@uhrer’s behavior toward the inmates of Brinnlitz.

It was a characteristic Schindler maneuver—the

Amon-Oskar game of blackjack writ

large. All the Brinnlitz men were in the

stake, from Hirsch Krischer, Prisoner

No. 68821, a forty-eight-year-old

auto mechanic, to Jarum Kiaf,

Prisoner No. 77196, a twenty-seven-year-old unskilled worker and

survivor of the Golesz@ow carriages. And

all the Brinnlitz women were counted in as well,

from No. 76201, twenty-nine-year-old metalworker Berta Aftergut, to No. 76500, thirty-six-year-old Jenta

Zwetschenstiel.

Oskar got fuel for further complaints about

Liepold by inviting the Commandant to dinner at the

apartment inside the factory. It was April

27, the eve of Schindler’s birthday. About

eleven o’clock that night, the prisoners at work on

the floor of the plant were startled to see a drunken

Commandant reeling across the factory floor,

assisted on his way by a steadier Herr

Direktor. In the course of his passage,

Liepold attempted to focus on individual

workers. He raged, pointing at the great roof

beams above the machinery. The Herr

Direktor had so far kept him off the

factory floor, but here he was, the final and punishing authority. “You fucking Jews,” he was roaring. “See that beam, see it! That’s what I’ll hang you from. Every one of you!”

Oskar eased him along, directing him by the shoulder, murmuring at him, “That’s right, that’s right. But not tonight, eh? Some other time.” The next day Oskar called Hassebroeck and others with predictable accusations. The man rages around the factory drunk, making threats about immediate executions. They’re not laborers! They’re sophisticated technicians engaged in secret-weapons manufacture, and so on. And although Hassebroeck was responsible for the deaths of thousands of quarry workers, although he believed that all Jewish labor should be liquidated when the Russians were close, he did agree that until then Herr Schindler’s factory should be treated as a special case.

Liepold, said Oskar, kept stating that he’d like at last to go into combat. He’s young, he’s healthy, he’s willing. Well, Hassebroeck told Oskar, we’ll see what can be done. Commandant Liepold himself, meanwhile, spent Oskar’s birthday sleeping off the dinner of the night before.

In his absence, Oskar made an astounding

birthday speech. He had been celebrating all

day, yet no one remembers his delivery being

unsteady. We do not have the text of what he said,

but there is another speech, made ten days later

on the evening of May 8, of which we do have a

copy. According to those who listened, both speeches

pursued similar lines. Both were, that is,

promises of continuing life.

To call either of them a speech, however, is

to demean their effect. What Oskar was

instinctively attempting was to adjust reality,

to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the SS. Long before, with pertinacious certainty,

he’d told a group of shift workers, Edith

Liebgold among them, that they would last the war.

He’d flourished the same gift for prophecy

when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on their

morning of arrival the previous November, and

told them, “You’re safe now; you’re with me.”

It can’t be ignored that in another age and condition, the Herr Direktor could have become a

demagogue of the style of Huey Long of

Louisiana or John Lang of Australia,

whose gift was to convince the listeners that they and he were bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil

devised by other men.

Oskar’s birthday speech was delivered in

German at night on the workshop floor to the

assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had

to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the German civilian personnel were present as

well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek

Pfefferberg felt the hairs on his lice stand

to attention. He looked around at the mute faces

of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and of the SS men with their automatics. They will kill this man, he

thought. And then everything will fall apart.

The speech pursued two main promises.

First, the great tyranny was coming to a close. He

spoke of the SS men around the walls as if they

too were imprisoned and yearned for liberation. Many

of them, Oskar explained to the prisoners, had

been conscripted from other units and without their consent into the Waffen SS. His second promise was

that he would stay at Brinnlitz until the end of the

hostilities was announced. “And five minutes

longer,” he said. For the prisoners, the speech, like past pronouncements of Oskar’s, promised a

future. It stated his vigorous intent that they should not go into graves in the woods. It reminded them of

his investment in them, and it enlivened them.

One can only guess, however, how it bedeviled

the SS men who heard it. He had genially

insulted their corps. How they protested, or

whether they swallowed it, he would learn from their

reaction. He had also warned them that he would stay

in Brinnlitz at least as long as they would, and that therefore he was a witness.

But Oskar did not feel as blithe as he

sounded. Later he confessed that at the time he was

concerned about actions retreating military units in

the Zwittau area might take in regard

to Brinnlitz. He even says, “We were in a

panic, because we were afraid of the despairing

actions of the SS guards.” It must have been a

quiet panic, for no prisoner, eating his white

bread on Oskar’s birthday, seems to have caught

a whiff of it. Oskar was also concerned about some

Vlasov units which had been stationed on the edges

of Brinnlitz. These troops were members of the

ROA, the Russian Army of Liberation, formed

the year before on the authority of Himmler from the

vast ranks of Russian prisoners in the

Reich and commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, a

former Soviet general captured in front of

Moscow three years past. They were a dangerous

corps for the Brinnlitz people, for they knew Stalin

would want them for a special punishment and feared that the Allies would give them back to him. Vlasov

units everywhere were therefore in a state of violent Slavic despair, which they stoked with vodka.

When they withdrew, seeking the American lines

farther west, they might do anything.

Within two days of Oskar’s birthday speech,

a set of orders arrived on Liepold’s

desk. They announced that

Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had been

transferred to a Waffen SS infantry

battalion near Prague. Though Liepold

could not have been delighted with them, he seems to have packed quietly and left. He had often said at

dinners at Oskar’s, particularly after the

second bottle of red wine, that he would prefer

to be in a combat unit. Lately there had been a

number of field-rank officers, Wehrmacht

and SS, from the retreating forces invited to dinner in the Herr Direktor’s apartment, and their table

talk had always been to stir Liepold’s itch

to seek combat. He had never been faced with as much

evidence as the other guests that the cause was

finished.

It is unlikely that he called

Hassebroeck’s office before packing his bags.

Telephone communications were not sound, for the

Russians had encircled Breslau and were within a

walk of Gr@oss-Rosen itself. But the transfer

would not have surprised anyone in Hassebroeck’s

office, since Liepold had often

made patriotic sounds to them too. So, leaving

Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek in command of

Brinnlitz, Josef Liepold drove off

to battle, a hard-liner who had got his wish.

With Oskar, there was no mute waiting for the

close. During the first days of May, he

discovered somehow—perhaps even by telephone calls

to Brno, where lines were still operating—that one of the warehouses with which he regularly dealt had been

abandoned. With half a dozen prisoners, he

drove off by truck to loot it. There were a number

of roadblocks on the way south, but at each of

them they flashed their dazzling papers, forged, as

Oskar would write, with the stamps and signatures

“of the highest SS police authorities in Moravia and Bohemia.” When they arrived at the warehouse, they found it encircled by fire. Military storehouses in the neighborhood had been set alight, and there had been incendiary bombing raids as well. From the direction of the inner city, where the Czechoslovak underground was fighting door to door with the garrison, they could hear firing. Herr Schindler ordered the truck to back into the loading dock of the warehouse, broke the door open, and discovered that the interior was full of a brand of cigarettes called Egipski.

In spite of such lighthearted piracy,

Oskar was frightened by rumors from Slovakia that the Russians were uncritically and informally executing German civilians. From listening to the BBC news each night, he was comforted to find that the war might end before any Russian reached the Zwittau area.

The prisoners also had indirect access to the

BBC and knew what the realities were. Throughout

the history of Brinnlitz the radio

technicians, Zenon Szenwich and Artur

Rabner, had continually repaired one or another radio of Oskar’s. In the welding shop, Zenon listened with an earphone to the 2 P.m. news from the Voice of London. During the night shift, the welders plugged into the 2 A.m. broadcast. An SS man, in the factory one night to take a message to the office, discovered three of them around the radio.

“We’ve been working on it for the Herr Direktor,” they told the man, “and just got it going a minute ago.”

Earlier in the year, prisoners had expected that Moravia would be taken by the Americans. Since Eisenhower had stood fast at the Elbe, they now knew that it would be the Russians. The circle of prisoners closest to Oskar were composing a letter in Hebrew, explaining what Oskar’s record was. It might do some good if presented to American forces, which had not only a considerable Jewish component, but field rabbis. Stern and Oskar himself therefore considered it vital that the Herr Direktor somehow be got to the Americans. In part Oskar’s decision was influenced by the characteristic Central European idea of the Russians as barbarians, men of strange religion and uncertain humanity. But apart from that, if some of the reports from the east could be believed, he had grounds for rational fear.

But he was not debilitated by it. He was awake

and in a state of hectic expectation when the news

of the German surrender came to him through the BBC

in the small hours of May 7. The war in

Europe was to cease at midnight on the following

night, the night of Tuesday, May 8. Oskar

woke Emilie, and the sleepless Stern was

summoned into the office to help the Herr

Direktor celebrate. Stern could tell that

Oskar now felt confident about the SS

garrison, but would have been alarmed if he could have guessed how Oskar’s certitude would be demonstrated that day.

On the shop floor, the prisoners maintained

the usual routines. If anything, they worked

better than on other days. Yet about noon, the

Herr Direktor destroyed the pretense of

business as usual by piping Churchill’s

victory speech by loudspeaker throughout the camp.

Lutek Feigenbaum, who understood English,

stood by his machine flabbergasted. For others, the

honking and grunting voice of Churchill was the first

they’d heard in years of a language they would

speak in the New World. The idiosyncratic

voice, as familiar in its way as that of the dead

F@uhrer, carried to the gates and assailed the

watchtowers, but the SS took it soberly. They

were no longer turning inward toward the camp. Their

eyes, like Oskar’s, were focused—but far more

sharply—on the Russians. According

to Hassebroeck’s earlier telegram, they should

have been busy in the rich green woods. Instead,

clock-watching for midnight, they looked at the

black face of the forest, speculating whether

partisans were there. A fretful

Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek kept them at

their posts, and duty kept them there also. For duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius.

In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweler named Licht, had been making a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box he’d been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. It had been supplied by old Mr. Jereth of the box factory. It was established— even the Budzyn men, devout Marxists, knew it—that Oskar would have to flee after midnight. The urge to mark that flight with a small ceremony was the preoccupation of the group—Stern, Finder, Garde, the Bejskis, Pemper—close to Oskar. It is remarkable, at a time when they were not sure themselves that they would see the peace, that they should worry about going-away presents. All that was handy to make a gift with, however, was base metals. It was Mr. Jereth who suggested a source of something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework. Without Oskar, he said, the SS would have the damned stuff anyway. My teeth would be in a heap in some SS warehouse, along with the golden fangs of strangers from Lublin, @l@od@z, and Lw@ow.

It was, of course, an appropriate offering, and Jereth was insistent. He had the bridgework dragged out by a prisoner who had once had a dental practice in Cracow. Licht melted the gold down and by noon on May 8 was engraving an inscription on the inner circle in Hebrew. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheister’s in October 1939. “He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”

In one of the factory garages that afternoon, two

prisoners were engaged in removing the upholstery from

the ceiling and inner doors of Oskar’s Mercedes,

inserting small sacks of the Herr

Direktor’s diamonds and replacing the

leatherwork without, they hoped, leaving any bulges. For them too it was a strange day. When they came out of the garage, the sun was setting behind the towers where the Spandaus sat loaded yet weirdly ineffectual. It was as if all the world were waiting for a decisive word.

Words of that nature seem to have come in the evening. Again, as on his birthday, Oskar instructed the Commandant to gather the prisoners on the factory floor. Again the German engineers and the secretaries, their escape plans already made, were present. Among them stood Ingrid, his old flame. She would not be leaving Brinnlitz in Schindler’s company. She would make her escape with her brother, a young war veteran, lame from a wound. Given that Oskar went to so much trouble to provide his prisoners with trade goods, it is unlikely that he would let an old love like Ingrid leave Brinnlitz without anything to barter for survival. Surely they would meet on friendly terms later, somewhere in the West.

As at Oskar’s birthday speech, armed guards stood around the great hall. The war had nearly six hours to run, and the SS were sworn never to abandon it in any case. Looking at them, the prisoners tried to gauge their states of soul. When it was announced that the Herr Direktor would make another address, two women prisoners who knew shorthand, Miss Waidmann and Mrs. Berger, had each fetched a pencil and prepared to take down what was said. Because it was an ex tempore speech, given by a man who knew he would soon become a fugitive, it was more compelling as spoken than it is on the page in the Waidmann-Berger version. It continued the themes of his birthday address, but it seemed to make them conclusive for both the prisoners and the Germans. It declared the prisoners the inheritors of the new era; it confirmed that everyone else there—the SS, himself, Emilie, Fuchs, Schoenbrun—was now in need of rescue.

“The unconditional surrender of Germany,” he said, “has just been announced. After six years of the cruel murder of human beings, victims are being mourned, and Europe is now trying to return to peace and order. I would like to turn to you for unconditional order and discipline—to all of you who together with me have worried through many hard years— in order that you can live through the present and within a few days go back to your destroyed and plundered homes, looking for survivors from your families. You will thus prevent panic, whose results cannot be foreseen.”

He did not, of course, mean panic in the

prisoners. He meant panic among the

garrison, among the men lining the walls. He was inviting the SS to leave, and the prisoners to let them do so. General Montgomery, he said, the commander of the Allied land forces, had proclaimed that one should act in a humane way toward the conquered, and everyone—in judging the Germans—had to distinguish between guilt and duty. “The soldiers at the front, as well as the little man who has done his duty everywhere, shall not be responsible for what a group calling itself German has done.” He was uttering a defense of his countrymen which every prisoner who survived the night would hear reiterated a thousand times in the era to come. Yet if anyone had earned the right to make that defense and have it listened to with—at least—tolerance, it was surely Herr Oskar Schindler.

“The fact that millions among you, your parents, children, and brothers, have been liquidated has been disapproved by thousands of Germans, and even today there are millions of them who do not know the extent of these horrors.” The documents and records found in Dachau and Buchenwald earlier in the year, their details broadcast by the BBC, were the first, said Oskar, that many a German had heard of “this most monstrous destruction.” He therefore begged them once again to act in a humane and just way, to leave justice to those authorized. “If you have to accuse a person, do it in the right place. Because in the new Europe there will be judges, incorruptible judges, who will listen to you.” Next he began to speak about his association with the prisoners in the past year. In some ways he sounded almost nostalgic, but he feared as well being judged in a lump with the Goeths and the Hassebroecks.

“Many of you know the persecutions, the chicanery and obstacles which, in order to keep my workers, I had to overcome through many years. If it was already difficult to defend the small rights of the Polish worker, to maintain work for him and to prevent him from being sent by force to the Reich, to defend the workers’ homes and their modest property, then the struggle to defend the Jewish workers has often seemed insurmountable.”

He described some of the difficulties, and thanked them for their help in satisfying the demands of the armaments authorities. In view of the lack of output from Brinnlitz, the thanks may have sounded ironic. But they were not offered in an ironic way. What the Herr Direktor was saying in a quite literal sense was Thank you for helping me make a fool of the system.

He went on to appeal for the local people. “If after a few days here the doors of freedom are opened to you, think of what many of the people in the neighborhood of the factory have done to help you with additional food and clothing. I have done everything and spent every effort in getting you additional food, and I pledge to do the utmost in the future to protect you and safeguard your daily bread. I shall continue doing everything I can for you until five minutes past midnight.

“Don’t go into the neighboring houses to rob and plunder. Prove yourselves worthy of the millions of victims among you and refrain from any individual acts of revenge and terror.”

He confessed that the prisoners had never been welcome in the area. “The Schindler Jews were taboo in Brinnlitz.” But there were higher concerns than local vengeance. “I entrust your Kapos and foremen to continue keeping up order and continued understanding. Therefore tell your people of it, because this is in the interest of your safety. Thank the mill of Daubek, whose help in getting you food went beyond the realms of possibility. On behalf of you, I shall now thank the brave director Daubek, who has done everything to get food for you. “Don’t thank me for your survival. Thank your people who worked day and night to save you from extermination. Thank your fearless Stern and Pemper and a few others who, thinking of you and worrying about you, especially in Cracow, have faced death every moment. The hour of honor makes it our duty to watch and keep order, as long as we stay here together. I beg of you, even among yourselves, to make nothing but humane and just decisions. I wish to thank my personal collaborators for their complete sacrifice in connection with my work.” His speech, weaving from issue to issue, exhausting some ideas, returning tangentially to others, reached the center of its temerity. Oskar turned to the SS garrison and thanked them for resisting the barbarity of their calling. Some prisoners on the floor thought, He’s asked us not to provoke them? What is he doing himself! For the SS was the SS, the corps of Goeth and John and Hujar and Scheidt. There were things an SS man was taught, things he did and saw, which marked the limits of his humanity.

Oskar, they felt, was dangerously pushing the limits.

“I would like,” he said, “to thank the assembled

SS guards, who without being asked were ordered from the Army and Navy into this service. As heads of families, they have realized for a long time the contemptibility and senselessness of their task. They have acted here in an extraordinarily humane and correct manner.”

What the prisoners did not see, aghast if a little exalted by the Herr Direktor’s nerve, was that Oskar was finishing the work he’d begun on the night of his birthday. He was destroying the SS as combatants. For if they stood there and swallowed his version of what was “humane and correct,” then there was nothing more left to them but to walk away. “In the end,” he said, “I request you all to keep a three-minute silence, in memory of the countless victims among you who have died in these cruel years.”

They obeyed him. Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek and Helen Hirsch; Lusia, who had come up from the cellar only in the past week; and Schoenbrun, Emilie, and Goldberg. Those itching for time to pass, those itching to flee. Keeping silent among the giant Hilo machines at the limit of the noisiest of wars.

When it was over, the SS left the hall quickly. The prisoners remained. They looked around and wondered if they were at last the possessors. As Oskar and Emilie moved toward their apartment to pack, prisoners waylaid them. Licht’s ring was presented. Oskar spent some time admiring it; he showed the inscription to Emilie and asked Stern for a translation. When he asked where they had got the gold and discovered it was Jereth’s bridgework, they expected him to laugh; Jereth was among the presentation committee, ready to be teased and already flashing the little points of his stripped teeth. But Oskar became very solemn and slowly placed the ring on his finger. Though nobody quite understood it, it was the instant in which they became themselves again, in which Oskar Schindler became dependent on gifts of theirs.

CHAPTER 38

In the hours following Oskar’s speech the SS garrison began to desert. Inside the factory, the commandos selected from the Budzyn people and from other elements of the prison population had already been issued the weapons Oskar had provided. It was hoped to disarm the SS rather than wage a ritual battle with them. It would not be wise, as Oskar had explained, to attract any retreating and embittered units to the gate. But unless something as outlandish as a treaty was arrived at, the towers would ultimately have to be stormed with grenades.

The truth, however, was that the commandos had only to formalize the disarming described in Oskar’s speech. The guards at the main gate gave up their weapons almost gratefully. On the darkened steps leading up to the SS barracks, Poldek Pfefferberg and a prisoner named Jusek Horn disarmed Commandant Motzek, Pfefferberg putting his finger in the man’s back and Motzek, like any sane man over forty with a home to go to, begging them to spare him. Pfefferberg took the Commandant’s pistol, and Motzek, after a short detention during which he cried out for the Herr Direktor to save him, was released and began to walk home.

The towers, about which Uri and the other irregulars must have spent hours of speculation and scheming, were discovered abandoned. Some prisoners, newly armed with the garrison’s weapons, were put up there to indicate to anyone passing by that the old order still held sway here.

When midnight came, there were no SS men or women visible in the camp. Oskar called Bankier to the office and gave him the key to a particular storeroom. It was a naval supply store and had been situated, until the Russian offensive into Silesia, somewhere in the Katowice area. It must have existed to supply the crews of river and canal patrol boats, and Oskar had found out that the Armaments Inspectorate wanted to rent storage space for it in some less threatened area. Oskar got the storage contract—“with the help of some gifts,” he said later. And so eighteen trucks loaded with coat, uniform, and underwear fabric, with worsted yarn and wool, as well as with a half a million reels of thread and a range of shoes, had entered the Brinnlitz gate and been unloaded and stored. Stern and others would declare that Oskar knew the stores would remain with him at the end of the war and that he intended the material to provide a starting stake for his prisoners. In a later document, Oskar claims the same thing. He had sought the storage contract, he says, “with the intention of supplying my Jewish prot@eg‘es at the end of the war with clothing. ... Jewish textile experts estimated the value of my clothing store at more than $150,000 U.s. (peace currency).”

He had in Brinnlitz men capable of making such a judgment—Juda Dresner, for example, who had owned his own textile business in Stradom Street; Itzhak Stern, who had worked in a textile company across the road. For the rite of passing over this expensive key to Bankier, Oskar was dressed in prisoner’s stripes, as was his wife, Emilie. The reversal toward which he’d been working since the early days of DEF was visibly complete. When he appeared in the courtyard to say goodbye, everyone thought it a lightly put on disguise, which would be lightly taken off again once he encountered the Americans. The wearing of the coarse cloth was, however, an act that would never completely be laughed off. He would in a most thorough sense always remain a hostage to Brinnlitz and Emalia. Eight prisoners had volunteered to travel with Oskar and Emilie. They were all very young, but they included a couple, Richard and Anka Rechen. The oldest was an engineer named Edek Reubinski, but he was still nearly ten years younger than the Schindlers. Later, he would supply the details of their eccentric journey.

Emilie, Oskar, and a driver were meant to occupy the Mercedes. The others would follow in a truck loaded with food and with cigarettes and liquor for barter. Oskar seemed anxious to be away. One arm of Russian threat, the Vlasovs, was gone. They had marched out in the past few days. But the other, it was presumed, would be in Brinnlitz by the next morning, or even sooner. From the back seat of the Mercedes, where Emilie and Oskar sat in their prison uniforms—not, it had to be admitted, much like prisoners; more like bourgeoisie off to a masquerade ball—Oskar still rumbled out advice for Stern, orders to Bankier and Salpeter. But you could tell he wanted to be off. Yet when the driver, Dolek Gr@unhaut, tried to start the Mercedes, the engine was dead. Oskar climbed out of the back seat to look under the hood. He was alarmed—a different man from the one who’d given the commanding speech a few hours before. “What is it?” he kept asking. But it was hard for Gr@unhaut to say in the shadows. It took him a little time to find the fault, for it was not one he expected. Someone, frightened by the idea of Oskar’s departure, had cut the wiring.

Pfefferberg, part of the crowd gathered to wave the Herr Direktor off, rushed to the welding shop, brought back his gear, and went to work. He was sweating and his hands seemed clumsy, for he was rattled by the urgency he could sense in Oskar. Schindler kept looking at the gate as if the Russians might at any second materialize. It was not an improbable fear— others in the courtyard were tormented by the same ironic possibility—and Pfefferberg worked too hard and took too long. But at last the engine caught to Gr@unhaut’s frantic turning of the key.

Once the engine turned over, the Mercedes left, the truck following it. Everyone was too unnerved to make formal goodbyes, but a letter, signed by Hilfstein and Stern and Salpeter, attesting to Oskar’s and Emilie’s record, was handed to the Schindlers. The Schindler convoy rolled out the gate and, at the road by the siding, turned left toward Havl@i@ck@uv Brod and toward what was for Oskar the safer end of Europe. There was something nuptial about it, for Oskar, who had come to Brinnlitz with so many women, was leaving with his wife. Stern and the others remained standing in the courtyard. After so many promises, they were their own people. The weight and uncertainty of that must now be borne.

The hiatus lasted three days and had its history and its dangers. Once the SS left, the only representative of the killing machine left in Brinnlitz was a German Kapo who had come from Gr@oss-Rosen with the Schindler men. He was a man with a murderous record in Gr@oss-Rosen itself, but one who had also made enemies in Brinnlitz. A pack of male prisoners now dragged him from his bunk down to the factory hall and enthusiastically and mercilessly hanged him from one of the same beams with which Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had recently threatened the prison population. Some inmates tried to intervene, but the executioners were in a rage and could not be stopped. It was an event, this first homicide of the peace, which many Brinnlitz people would forever abhor. They had seen Amon hang poor engineer Krautwirt on the Appellplatz at P@lasz@ow, and this hanging, though for different reasons, sickened them as profoundly. For Amon was Amon and beyond altering. But these hangmen were their brothers. When the Kapo ceased his twitching, he was left suspended above the silenced machines. He perplexed people, though. He was supposed to gladden them, but he threw doubt. At last some men who had not hanged him cut him down and incinerated him. It showed what an eccentric camp Brinnlitz was, that the only body fed into the furnaces which, by decree, should have been employed to burn the Jewish dead was the corpse of an Aryan. The distribution of the goods in the Navy store went on throughout the next day. Lengths of worsted material had to be cut from the great bolts of fabric. Moshe Bejski said that each prisoner was given three yards, together with a complete set of underwear and some reels of cotton. Some women began that very day to make the suits in which they would travel home. Others kept the fabric intact so that, traded, it would keep them alive in the confused days to come.

A ration of the Egipski cigarettes which Oskar had plundered from burning Brno was also issued, and each prisoner was given a bottle of vodka from Salpeter’s storehouse. Few would drink it.

It was, of course, simply too precious

to drink.

After dark on that second night, a Panzer unit came down the road from the direction of Zwittau. Lutek Feigenbaum, behind a bush near the gate and armed with a rifle, had the urge to fire as soon as the first tank passed within sight of the camp. But he considered it rash. The vehicles rattled past. A gunner in one of the rear tanks in the column, understanding that the fence and the watchtowers meant that Jewish criminals might be lying low in there, swiveled his gun and sent two shells into the camp. One exploded in the courtyard, the other on the women’s balcony. It was a random exhibition of spite, and through wisdom or astonishment none of the armed prisoners answered it. When the last tank had vanished, the men of the commandos could hear mourning from the courtyard and from the women’s dormitory upstairs. A girl had been wounded by shell fragments. She herself was in shock, but the sight of her injuries had released in the women all the barely expressed grief of the past years. While the women mourned, the Brinnlitz doctors examined the girl and found that her wounds were superficial. Oskar’s party traveled for the first hours of their

escape at the tail of a column of

Wehrmacht trucks. At midnight feats of

this nature had become feasible, and no one pestered

them. Behind them they could hear German engineers

dynamiting installations, and occasionally there was the

clamor of a distant ambush arranged by the Czech

underground. Near the town of Havl@i@ck@uv

Brod they must have fallen behind, because they were stopped

by Czech partisans who stood in the middle of the

road. Oskar went on impersonating a

prisoner. “These good people and I are escapees from

a labor camp. The SS fled, and the Herr

Direktor. This is the Herr

Direktor’s automobile.”

The Czechs asked them if they had weapons. Reubinski had come from the truck and joined the discussion. He confessed that he had a rifle. All right, said the Czechs, you’d better give us what you have. If the Russians intercepted you and found that you had weapons, they might not understand why. Your defense is your prison uniforms. In this town, southeast of Prague and on the road to Austria, there was still the likelihood of meeting disgruntled units. The partisans directed Oskar and the others to the Czech Red Cross office in the town square. There they could safely bunk down for the rest of the night. But when they reached town, the Red Cross officials suggested to them that given the uncertainty of the peace, they would probably be safest in the town jail. The vehicles were left in the square, in sight of the Red Cross office, and Oskar, Emilie, and their eight companions carried their few pieces of baggage and slept in the unlocked cells of the police station.

When they returned to the square in the morning, they found that both vehicles had been stripped.

All the upholstery had been torn from the

Mercedes, the diamonds were gone, the tires had

been taken from the truck, and the engines had been

plundered. The Czechs were

philosophical about it. We all have

to expect to lose something in times like these. Perhaps they may even have suspected Oskar, with his fair complexion and his blue eyes, of being a fugitive SS man. The party were without their own transport, but a train ran south in the direction of Kaplice, and they caught it, dressed still in their stripes. Reubinski says that they took the train “as far as the forest, and then walked.” Somewhere in that forested border region, well to the north of Linz, they could expect to encounter the Americans. They were hiking down a wooded road when they met two young gum-chewing Americans sitting by a machine gun. One of Oskar’s prisoners began to speak with them in English. “Our orders are not to let anyone pass on this road,” one of them said.

“Is it forbidden to circle around through the woods?” asked the prisoner. The GI chewed. This strange chewing race!

“Guess not,” said the GI at last.

So they swung through the woods and, back on the road half an hour later, ran into an infantry company marching north in double column. Through the English speaker once more, they began to talk to the unit’s reconnaissance men. The commanding officer himself drew up in a jeep, dismounted, interrogated them. They were frank with him, telling him that Oskar was the Herr Direktor, that they were Jews. They believed they were on safe ground, for they knew from the BBC that the U.s. forces included many Americans of both German and Jewish origins. “Don’t move,” said the captain. He drove away without explanation, leaving them in the half-embarrassed command of the young infantrymen, who offered them cigarettes, the Virginia kind, which had that almost glossy look—like the jeep, the uniforms, the equipment—of coming from a grand, brash, unfettered, and un-ersatz manufactory.

Though Emilie and the prisoners were uneasy that Oskar might be arrested, he himself sat on the grass apparently unconcerned and breathed in the spring air in these high woods. He had his Hebrew letter, and New York, he knew, was ethnically a city where Hebrew was not unknown. Half an hour passed and some soldiers appeared, coming down the road in an informal bunch, not strung out in the infantry manner. They were a group of Jewish infantrymen and included a field rabbi. They were very effusive. They embraced all the party, Emilie and Oskar as well. For these, the party was told, were the first concentration-camp survivors the battalion had met. When the greetings were over, Oskar brought out his Hebrew reference, and the rabbi read it and began to weep. He relayed the details to the other Americans. There was more applause, more hand shaking, more embraces. The young GI’S seemed so open, so loud, so childlike. Though one or two generations out of Central Europe, they had been so marked by America that the Schindlers and the prisoners looked at them with as much amazement as was returned.

The result was that the Schindler party spent two days on the Austrian frontier as guests of the regimental commander and the rabbi. They drank excellent coffee, such as the authentic prisoners in the group had not tasted since before the founding of the ghetto. They ate opulently. After two days, the rabbi presented them with a captured ambulance, in which they drove to the ruined city of Linz in Upper Austria.

On the second day of peace in Brinnlitz, the Russians still had not appeared. The commando group worried about the necessity of hanging on to the camp for longer than they had thought they’d have to. One thing they remembered was that the only time they’d seen the SS show fear—apart from the anxiety of Motzek and his colleagues in the past few days—had been when typhus broke out.

So they hung typhus signs all over the

wire.

Three Czech partisans turned up at the

gate in the afternoon and talked through the fence to the men on sentry duty. It’s all over now, they said.

You’re free to walk out whenever you want. When the Russians arrive, said the prison commandos. Until then we’re keeping everyone in. Their answer exhibited some of the pathology of the prisoner, the suspicion you got after a time that the world outside the fence was perilous and had to be reentered in stages. It also showed their wisdom. They were not convinced yet that the last German unit had gone.

The Czechs shrugged and went away.

That night, when Poldek Pfefferberg was part of the guard at the main gate, motorcycle engines were heard on the road. They did not pass by, as the Panzers had done, but could be heard turning in toward the camp itself. Five cycles marked with the SS death’s-head materialized out of the dark and drew up noisily by the front fence. As the SS men—very young, Poldek remembers— switched off their engines, dismounted, and approached the gate, a debate raged among the armed men inside as to whether the visitors ought to be immediately shot.

The NCO in charge of the motorcycle party seemed to understand the risk inherent in the situation. He stood a little way from the wire with his hands extended. They needed gasoline, he said. He presumed that being a factory camp, Brinnlitz would have gasoline. Pfefferberg advised that it was better to supply them and send them packing than to create problems by opening fire on them. Other elements of their regiment might be in the region, and be drawn by an outburst of gunfire.

So in the end the SS men were let in through the gate, and some of the prisoners went to the garage and drew gasoline. The SS NCO was careful to convey to the camp commandos—who had put on blue coveralls in an attempt to look like informal guards, or at least like German Kapos—that he did not find anything peculiar in the idea of armed prisoners’ defending their camps from within. “I hope you realize there’s typhus here,”

said Pfefferberg in German, pointing to the signs. The SS men looked at each other.

“We’ve already lost two dozen people,” said Pfefferberg. “We have another fifty isolated in the cellar.”

This claim seemed to impress the gentlemen of the death’s-head. They were tired. They were fleeing. That was enough for them. They didn’t want any bacterial perils on top of the others.

When the gasoline arrived in 5-gallon cans, they expressed their thanks, bowed, and left through the gate. The prisoners watched them fill their tanks and considerately leave by the wire any cans they could not fit into their sidecars. They put on their gloves, started their engines, and left without too much revving of the motors, being too careful to waste their new tankfuls on flourishes. Their roar faded southwest through the village. For the men at the gate, this polite encounter would be their last with anyone wearing the uniform of Heinrich Himmler’s foul legion.

When on the third day the camp was liberated, it was by a single Russian officer. Riding a horse, he emerged through the defile through which the road and the railway siding approached the Brinnlitz gate. As he drew closer it became apparent that the horse was a mere pony, the officer’s thin feet in the stirrups nearly touching the road and his legs bent in comically underneath the horse’s skinny abdomen. He seemed to be bringing to Brinnlitz a personal, hard-won deliverance, for his uniform was worn, the leather strap of his rifle so withered by sweat and winter and campaigning that it had had to be replaced by rope. The reins of the horse were also of rope. The officer was fair-complexioned and, as Russians always look to Poles, immensely alien, immensely familiar. After a short conversation in hybrid Polish-Russian, the commando at the gate let him in. Around the balconies of the second floor, the rumor of his arrival spread. As he dismounted he was kissed by Mrs. Krumholz. He smiled and called, in two languages, for a chair. One of the younger men brought it.

Standing on it to give himself a height

advantage which, in relation to most of the prisoners,

he did not need, he made what sounded like a

standard liberation speech in Russian. Moshe

Bejski could catch its gist. They had been

liberated by the glorious Soviets. They were

free to go to town, to move in the direction of their

choosing. For under the Soviets, as in the mythical

heaven, there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male

nor female, bond nor free. They were not

to take any cheap revenge in the town. Their

Allies would find their oppressors, and

subject them to solemn and appropriate

punishment. The fact of their freedom should, to them, outweigh any other consideration. He got down from his chair and smiled, as if saying that now he had finished as a spokesman and was prepared to answer questions. Bejski and some of the others began to speak to him, and he pointed to himself and said in creaky Belorussian Yiddish—the sort you pick up from your grandparents rather than your parents --that he was Jewish. Now the conversation took on a new intimacy.

“Have you been in Poland?” Bejski asked him. “Yes,” the officer admitted. “I’ve come from Poland now.”

“Are there any Jews left up there?”

“I saw none.”

Prisoners were crowding around, translating and relaying the conversation to one another. “Where are you from?” the officer asked Bejski.

“Cracow.”

“I was in Cracow two weeks ago.”

“Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz?”

“I heard that at Auschwitz there are still a few Jews.”

The prisoners grew thoughtful. The Russian made Poland sound like a vacuum now, and if they returned to Cracow they’d rattle around in it bleakly like dried peas in a jar.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” the officer asked.

There were cries for food. He thought he could get them a cartload of bread, and perhaps some horsemeat. It should arrive before dusk. “But you should see what they have in town here,” the officer suggested.

It was a radical idea—that they ought to just go out the gate and begin shopping in Brinnlitz. For some of them it was still an unimaginable option. Young men like Pemper and Bejski pursued the officer as he left. If there were no Jews in Poland, there was nowhere to go. They didn’t want him to give them instructions, but felt he ought to discuss their quandary with them. The Russian paused in untying the reins of his pony from a railing.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking them in the face. “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east—that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” His fingers returned to untying the knot. “They don’t like us anywhere.”

As the Russian officer had urged them, the Brinnlitz prisoners moved out the gate at last to make their first tentative contact with the outer world. The young were the first to try it. Danka Schindel went out the day after the liberation and climbed the wooded hill behind the camp. Lilies and anemones were beginning to bud, and migratory birds were arriving from Africa. Danka sat on the hill for a while, savoring the day, then rolled down it and lay in the grass at the bottom, inhaling the fragrances and looking at the sky. She was there for so long that her parents presumed she had come to grief in the village, with either the townspeople or the Russians.

Goldberg left early too, was perhaps the first to go, on his way to pick up his riches in Cracow. He would emigrate, as quickly as he could arrange it, to Brazil. Most of the older prisoners stayed in camp.

The Russians had now moved into Brinnlitz,

occupying as an officers’ quarters a villa on

a hill above the village. They brought to the camp

a butchered horse, which the prisoners ate

ravenously, some of them finding it too rich after their

diet of bread and vegetables and Emilie

Schindler’s porridge.

Lutek Feigenbaum, Janek Dresner, and

young Sternberg went foraging in town. The village was patrolled by the Czech underground, and Brinnlitz folk of German descent were therefore wary of the liberated prisoners. A grocer indicated to the boys that they were welcome to a bag of sugar he’d been keeping in his storeroom. Young Sternberg found the sugar irresistible, lowering his face to it and swallowing it by the handful. It made him cruelly ill. He discovered what the Schindler group were finding in Nuremberg and Ravensburg—that liberty and the day of plenty had to be approached gradually.