Schindler's Ark

PROLOGUE

Autumn, 1943

In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and—in the lapel of the dinner jacket—a large ornamental goldon-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine. “Watch the pavement, Herr Schindler,” said the chauffeur. “It’s as icy as a widow’s heart.” In observing this small winter scene, we are on safe ground. The tall young man would to the end of his days wear doublebreasted suits, would—being something of an engineer—always be gratified by large dazzling vehicles, would—though a German and at this point in history a German of some influence— always be the sort of man with whom a Polish chauffeur could safely crack a lame, comradely joke.

But it will not be possible to see the whole story under such easy character headings. For this is the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms. When you work from the other end of the beast—

when you chronicle the predictable and measurable success evil generally achieves—it is easy to be wise, wry, piercing, to avoid bathos. It is easy to show the inevitability by which evil acquires all of what you could call the real estate of the story, even though good might finish up with a few imponderables like dignity and self-knowledge. Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.

“Virtue” in fact is such a dangerous word that we have to rush to explain; Herr Oskar Schindler, risking his glimmering shoes on the icy pavement in this old and elegant quarter of Cracow, was not a virtuous young man in the customary sense. In this city he kept house with his German mistress and maintained a long affair with his Polish secretary. His wife, Emilie, chose to live most of the time at home in Moravia, though she sometimes came to Poland to visit him. There’s this to be said for him: that to all his women he was a well-mannered and generous lover. But under the normal interpretation of “virtue,” that’s no excuse.

Likewise, he was a drinker. Some of the time he drank for the pure glow of it, at other times with associates, bureaucrats, SS men for more palpable results. Like few others, he was capable of staying canny while drinking, of keeping his head. That again, though—

under the narrow interpretation of morality—has never been an excuse for carousing. And although Herr Schindler’s merit is well documented, it is a feature of his ambiguity that he worked within or, at least, on the strength of a corrupt and savage scheme, one that filled Europe with camps of varying but consistent inhumanity and created a submerged, unspoken-of nation of prisoners. The best thing, therefore, may be to begin with a tentative instance of Herr Schindler’s strange virtue and of the places and associates to which it brought him.

At the end of Straszewskiego Street, the car moved beneath the black bulk of Wawel Castle, from which the National Socialist Party’s darling lawyer Hans Frank ruled the Government General of Poland. As from the palace of any evil giant, no light showed. Neither Herr Schindler nor the driver glanced up at the ramparts as the car turned southeast toward the river. At the Podg@orze Bridge, the guards, placed above the freezing Vistula to prevent the transit of partisans and other curfew-breakers between Podg@orze and Cracow, were used to the vehicle, to Herr Schindler’s face, to the Passierschein presented by the chauffeur. Herr Schindler passed this checkpoint frequently, traveling either from his factory (where he also had an apartment) to the city on business, or else from his Straszewskiego Street apartment to his plant in the suburb of Zablocie. They were used to seeing him after dark

too, attired formally or semiformally, passing one way or another to a dinner, a party, a bedroom; perhaps, as was the case tonight, on his way ten kilometers out of town to the forced-labor camp at P@lasz@ow, to dine there with SS Hauptsturmf@uhrer Amon Goeth, that highly placed sensualist. Herr Schindler had a reputation for being generous with gifts of liquor at Christmas, and so the car was permitted to pass over into the suburb of Podg@orze without much delay.

It is certain that by this stage of his history, in spite of his liking for good food and wine, Herr Schindler approached tonight’s dinner at Commandant Goeth’s more with loathing than with anticipation. There had in fact never been a time when to sit and drink with Amon had not been a repellent business. Yet the revulsion Herr Schindler felt was of a piquant kind, an ancient, exultant sense of abomination—of the same sort as, in a medieval painting, the just show for the damned. An emotion, that is, which stung Oskar rather than unmanned him. In the black leather interior of the Adler as it raced along the trolley tracks in what had been until recently the Jewish ghetto, Herr Schindler—as always—chain-smoked. But it was composed chain smoking. There was never tension in the hands; he was stylish. His manner implied that he knew where the next cigarette was coming from and the next bottle of cognac. Only he could have told us whether he had to succor himself from a flask as he passed by the mute, black village of Prokocim and saw, on the line to Lw@ow, a string of stalled cattle cars, which might hold infantry or prisoners or even—though the odds were against it—cattle.

Out in the countryside, perhaps ten kilometers from the center of town, the Adler turned right at a street named—by an irony—Jerozolimska. This night of sharp frosty outlines, Herr Schindler saw beneath the hill first a ruined synagogue, and then the bare shapes of what passed these days as the city of Jerusalem, Forced Labor Camp P@lasz@ow, barracks town of 20,000 unquiet Jews. The Ukrainian and Waffen SS men at the gate greeted Herr Schindler courteously, for he was known at least as well here as on the Podg@orze Bridge.

When level with the Administration Building, the Adler moved onto a prison road paved with Jewish gravestones. The campsite had been till two years before a Jewish cemetery. Commandant Goeth, who claimed to be a poet, had used in the construction of his camp whatever metaphors were to hand. This metaphor of shattered gravestones ran the length of the camp, splitting it in two, but did not extend eastward to the villa occupied by Commandant Goeth himself. On the right, past the guard barracks, stood a former Jewish mortuary building. It seemed to declare that here all death was natural and by attrition, that all the dead were laid out. In fact the place was now used as the Commandant’s stables. Though Herr Schindler was used to the sight, it is possible that he still reacted with a small ironic cough. Admittedly, if you reacted to every little irony of the new Europe, you took it into you, it became part of your baggage. But Herr Schindler possessed an immense capacity for carrying that sort of luggage.

A prisoner named Poldek Pfefferberg was also on his way to the Commandant’s villa that evening. Lisiek, the Commandant’s nineteen-year-old orderly, had come to Pfefferberg’s barracks with passes signed by an SS NCO. The boy’s problem was that the Commandant’s bathtub had a stubborn ring around it, and Lisiek feared that he would be beaten for it when Commandant Goeth came to take his morning bath. Pfefferberg, who had been Lisiek’s teacher in high school in Podg@orze, worked in the camp garage and had access to solvents. So in company with Lisiek he went to the garage and picked up a stick with a swab on the end and a can of cleaning fluid. To approach the Commandant’s villa was always a dubious business, but involved the chance that you would be given food by Helen Hirsch, Goeth’s mistreated Jewish maid, a generous girl who had also been a student of Pfefferberg’s.

When Herr Schindler’s Adler was still 100 meters from the villa, it set the dogs barking—the Great Dane, the wolfhound and all the others Amon kept in the kennels beyond the house. The villa itself was square-built, with an attic. The upper windows gave onto a balcony. All around the walls was a terraced patio with a balustrade. Amon Goeth liked sitting out of doors in the summer. Since he’d come to P@lasz@ow, he’d put on weight. Next summer he’d make a fat sun-worshiper. But in this particular version of Jerusalem, he’d be safe from mockery.

An SS Unterscharf@uhrer (sergeant) in white gloves had been put on the door tonight. Saluting, he admitted Herr Schindler to the house. In the hallway, the Ukrainian orderly Ivan took Herr Schindler’s coat and homburg. Schindler patted the breast pocket of his suit to be sure he had the gift for his host: a gold-plated cigarette case, black-market. Amon was doing so well on the side, especially with confiscated jewelry, that he would be offended by anything less than gold plate.

At the double doors opening onto the dining room, the Rosner brothers were playing, Henry on violin, Leo on accordion. At Goeth’s demand, they had put aside the tattered clothing of the camp paint shop where they worked in the daytime and adopted the evening clothes they kept in their barracks for such events. Oskar Schindler knew that although the Commandant admired their music, the Rosners never played at ease in the villa. They had seen too much of Amon. They knew he was erratic and given to ex tempore executions. They played studiously and hoped that their music would not suddenly, inexplicably, give offense.

At Goeth’s table that night there would be seven men. Apart from Schindler himself and the host, the guests included Julian Scherner, head of the SS for the Cracow region, and Rolf Czurda, chief of the Cracow branch of the SD, the late Heydrich’s Security Service. Scherner was an Oberf@uhrer—an SS rank between colonel and brigadier general, for which there is no army equivalent; Czurda, an Obersturmbannf@uhrer, equivalent to lieutenant colonel. Goeth himself held the rank of Hauptsturmf@uhrer, or captain. Scherner and Czurda were the guests of highest honor, for this camp was under their authority. They were years older than Commandant Goeth, and SS police chief Scherner looked definitely middle-aged with his glasses and bald head and slight obesity. Even so, in view of his prot@eg‘e’s profligate living habits, the age difference between himself and Amon didn’t seem so great.

The oldest of the company was Herr Franz Bosch, a veteran of the first war, manager of various workshops, legal and illegal, inside P@lasz@ow. He was also an “economic adviser” to Julian Scherner and had business interests in the city. Oskar despised Bosch and the two police chiefs, Scherner and Czurda. Their cooperation, however, was essential to the existence of his own peculiar plant in Zablocie, and so he regularly sent them gifts. The only guests with whom Oskar shared any fellow feeling were Julius Madritsch, owner of the Madritsch uniform factory inside this camp of P@lasz@ow, and Madritsch’s manager, Raimund Titsch. Madritsch was a year or so younger than Oskar and Herr Commandant Goeth.

He was an enterprising but humane man, and if asked to justify the existence of his profitable factory inside the camp, would have argued that it kept nearly four thousand prisoners employed and therefore safe from the death mills. Raimund Titsch, a man in his early forties, slight and private and likely to leave the party early, was Madritsch’s manager, smuggled in truckloads of food for his prisoners (an enterprise that could have earned him a fatal stay in Montelupich prison, the SS jail, or else Auschwitz) and agreed with Madritsch. Such was the regular roster of dinner companions at Herr Commandant Goeth’s villa.

The four women guests, their hair elaborately coiffed and their gowns expensive, were younger than any of the men. They were better-class whores, German and Polish, from Cracow. Some of them were regular dinner guests here. Their number permitted a range of gentlemanly choice for the two field-grade officers. Goeth’s German mistress, Majola, usually stayed at her apartment in the city during these feasts of Amon’s. She looked on Goeth’s dinners as male occasions and thus offensive to her sensibilities. There is no doubt that in their fashion the police chiefs and the Commandant liked Oskar. There was, however, something odd about him. They might have been willing to write it off in part as stemming from his origins. He was Sudeten German --Arkansas to their Manhattan, Liverpool to their Cambridge. There were signs that he wasn’t right-minded, though he paid well, was a good source of scarce commodities, could hold his liquor and had a slow and sometimes rowdy sense of humor. He was the sort of man you smiled and nodded at across the room, but it was not necessary or even wise to jump up and make a fuss over him. It is most likely that the SS men noticed Oskar Schindler’s entrance because of a frisson among the four girls. Those who knew Oskar in those years speak of his easy magnetic charm, exercised particularly over women, with whom he was unremittingly and improperly successful. The two police chiefs, Czurda and Scherner, now probably paid attention to Herr Schindler as a means of keeping the attention of the women. Goeth also came forward to take his hand. The Commandant was as tall as Schindler, and the impression that he was abnormally fat for a man in his early thirties was enhanced by this height, an athletic height onto which the obesity seemed unnaturally grafted. The face seemed scarcely flawed at all, except that there was a vinous light in the eyes. The Commandant drank indecent quantities of the local brandy. He was not, however, as far gone as Herr Bosch, P@lasz@ow’s and the SS’ economic genius. Herr Bosch was purple-nosed; the oxygen which by rights belonged to the veins of his face had for years gone to feed the sharp blue flame of all that liquor. Schindler, nodding to the man, knew that tonight Bosch would, as usual, put in an order for goods.

“A welcome to our industrialist,” boomed Goeth, and then he made a formal introduction to the girls around the room. The Rosner brothers played Strauss melodies through this, Henry’s eyes wandering only between his strings and the emptiest corner of the room, Leo smiling down at his accordion keys.

Herr Schindler was now introduced to the women. While Herr Schindler kissed the proffered hands, he felt some pity for these Cracow working girls, since he knew that later—when the slap-and-tickle began—the slap might leave welts and the tickle gouge the flesh. But for the present, Hauptsturmf@uhrer Amon Goeth, a sadist when drunk, was an exemplary Viennese gentleman.

The predinner conversation was unexceptional. There was talk of the war, and while SD

chief Czurda took it upon himself to assure a tall German girl that the Crimea was securely held, SS chief Scherner informed one of the other women that a boy he knew from Hamburg days, a decent chap, Oberscharf@uhrer in the

SS, had had his legs blown off when the partisans bombed a restaurant in Czestochowa. Schindler talked factory business with Madritsch and his manager Titsch. There was a genuine friendship between these three entrepreneurs. Herr Schindler knew that little Titsch procured illegal quantities of black-market bread for the prisoners of the Madritsch uniform factory, and that much of the money for the purpose was put up by Madritsch. This was the merest humanity, since the profits in Poland were large enough, in Herr Schindler’s opinion, to satisfy the most inveterate capitalist and justify some illegal outlay for extra bread. In Schindler’s case, the contracts of the Rustungsinspektion, the Armaments Inspectorate—the body that solicited bids and awarded contracts for the manufacture of every commodity the German forces needed—had been so rich that he had exceeded his desire to be successful in the eyes of his father. Unhappily, Madritsch and Titsch and he, Oskar Schindler, were the only ones he knew who regularly spent money on black-market bread.

Near the time when Goeth would call them to the dinner table, Herr Bosch approached Schindler, predictably took him by the elbow and led him over by the door where the musicians played, as if he expected the Rosners’ impeccable melodies to cover the conversation. “Business good, I see,” said Bosch.

Schindler smiled at the man. “You see that, do you, Herr Bosch?”

“I do,” said Bosch. And of course Bosch would have read the official bulletins of the Main Armaments Board, announcing contracts awarded to the Schindler factory.

“I was wondering,” said Bosch, inclining his head, “if in view of the present boom, founded, after all, on our general successes on a series of Fronts ... I was wondering if you might wish to make a generous gesture. Nothing big. Just a gesture.”

“Of course,” said Schindler. He felt the nausea that goes with being used, and at the same time a sensation close to joy. The office of police chief Scherner had twice used its influence to get Oskar Schindler out of jail. His staff were willing now to build up the obligation of having to do it again.

“My aunt in Bremen’s been bombed out, poor old dear,” said Bosch. “Everything! The marriage bed. The sideboards—all her Meissen and crockery. I wondered could you spare some kitchenware for her. And perhaps a pot or two --those big tureen things you turn out at DEF.” Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik (german

Enamelware Factory) was the name of Herr Schindler’s booming business. Germans called it DEF for short, but the Poles and the Jews had a different sort of shorthand, calling it Emalia.

Herr Schindler said, “I think that can be managed. Do you want the goods consigned direct to her or through you?”

Bosch did not even smile. “Through me, Oskar. I’d like to enclose a little card.”

“Of course.”

“So it’s settled. We’ll say half a gross of everything—soup bowls, plates, coffee mugs. And half a dozen of those stewpots.” Herr Schindler, raising his jaw, laughed frankly, though with weariness. But when he spoke he sounded complaisant. As indeed he was. He was always reckless with gifts. It was simply that Bosch seemed to suffer constantly from bombed-out kinfolk.

Oskar murmured, “Does your aunt run an orphanage?”

Bosch looked him in the eye again; nothing furtive about this drunk. “She’s an old woman with no resources. She can barter what she doesn’t need.”

“I’ll tell my secretary to see to it.”

“That Polish girl?” said Bosch. “The looker?”

“The looker,” Schindler agreed.

Bosch tried to whistle, but the tension of his lips had been destroyed by the overproof brandy and the sound emerged as a low raspberry. “Your wife,” he said, man to man,

“must be a saint.”

“She is,” Herr Schindler admitted curtly. Bosch was welcome to his kitchenware, but Schindler didn’t want him talking about his wife.

“Tell me,” said Bosch. “How do you keep her off your back? She must know ... yet you seem to be able to control her very well.” All the humor left Schindler’s face now. Anyone could have seen frank distaste there. The small potent growl that arose from him, however, was not unlike Schindler’s normal voice.

“I never discuss private matters,” he said.

Bosch rushed in. “Forgive me. I didn’t

...” He went on incoherently begging pardon. Herr Schindler did not like Herr Bosch enough to explain to him at this advanced night of his life that it wasn’t a matter of controlling anyone, that the Schindler marital disaster was instead a case of an ascetic temperament—Frau Emilie Schindler’s—and a hedonistic temperament—Herr Oskar Schindler’s—willingly and against good advice binding themselves together. But Oskar’s anger at Bosch was more profound than even he would have admitted. Emilie was very like Oskar’s late mother, Frau Louisa Schindler. Herr Schindler senior had left Louisa in 1935. So Oskar had a visceral feeling that in making light of the Emilie-Oskar marriage, Bosch was also demeaning the marriage of the Schindlers senior. The man was still rushing out apologies. Bosch, a hand in every till in Cracow, was now in a sweating panic at the chance of losing six dozen sets of kitchenware.

The guests were summoned to the table. An onion soup was carried in and served by the maid. While the guests ate and chatted, the Rosner brothers continued to play, moving in closer to the diners, but not so close as to impede the movements of the maid or of Ivan and Petr, Goeth’s two Ukrainian orderlies. Herr Schindler, sitting between the tall girl whom Scherner had appropriated and a sweet-faced, small-boned Pole who spoke German, saw that both girls watched this maid. She wore the traditional domestic uniform, black dress and white apron. She bore no Jewish star on her arm, no stripe of yellow paint on her back. She was Jewish just the same. What drew the attention of the other women was the condition of her face. There was bruising along the jawline, and you would have thought that Goeth had too much shame to display a servant in that condition in front of the guests from Cracow. Both the women and Herr Schindler could see, as well as the injury to her face, a more alarming purple, not always covered by her collar, at the junction where her thin neck met her shoulder. Not only did Amon Goeth refuse to leave the girl unexplained in the background, but he turned his chair toward her, gesturing at her with a hand, displaying her to the assembled company. Herr Schindler had not been at this house for six weeks now, but his informants told him the relationship between Goeth and the girl had taken this twisted path. When with friends, he used her as a conversation piece. He hid her only when senior officers from beyond the Cracow region were visiting.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he called, mimicking the tones of a mock-drunken cabaret master of ceremonies, “may I introduce Lena. After five months with me she is now doing well in cuisine and deportment.”

“I can see from her face,” said the tall girl, “that she’s had a collision with the kitchen furniture.”

“And the bitch could have another,” said Goeth with a genial gurgle. “Yes. Another. Couldn’t you, Lena?”

“He’s hard on women,” the SS chief boasted, winking at his tall consort. Scherner’s intention might not have been unkind, since he did not refer to Jewish women but to women in general. It was when Goeth was reminded of Lena’s Jewishness that she took more punishment, either publicly, in front of dinner guests, or later when the Commandant’s friends had gone home. Scherner, being Goeth’s superior, could have ordered the Commandant to stop beating the girl. But that would have been bad form, would have soured the friendly parties at Amon’s villa. Scherner came here not as a superior, but as a friend, an associate, a carouser, a savorer of women. Amon was a strange fellow, but no one could produce parties the way he could. Next there was herring in sauce, then pork knuckles, superbly cooked and garnished by Lena. They were drinking a heavy Hungarian red wine with the meat, the Rosner brothers moved in with a torrid czardas, and the air in the dining room thickened, all the officers removing their uniform jackets. There was more gossip about war contracts. Madritsch, the uniform manufacturer, was asked about his Tarnow factory. Was it doing as well with Armaments Inspectorate contracts as was his factory inside P@lasz@ow? Madritsch referred to Titsch, his lean, ascetic manager. Goeth seemed suddenly preoccupied, like a man who has remembered in the middle of dinner some urgent business detail he should have cleared up that afternoon and which now calls out to him from the darkness of his office.

The girls from Cracow were bored, the small-boned Pole, glossy-lipped, perhaps twenty, probably eighteen, placing a hand on Herr Schindler’s right sleeve. “You’re not a soldier?” she murmured. “You’d look dashing in uniform.” Everyone began to chuckle—

Madritsch too. He’d spent a while in uniform in 1940 until released because his managerial talents were so essential to the war effort. But Herr Schindler was so influential that he had never been threatened with the Wehrmacht. Madritsch laughed knowingly. “Did you hear that?” Oberf@uhrer Scherner asked the table at large. “The little lady’s got a picture of our industrialist as a soldier. Private Schindler, eh? Eating out of one of his own mess kits with a blanket around his shoulders. Over in Kharkov.”

In view of Herr Schindler’s well-tailored elegance it did make a strange picture, and Schindler himself laughed at it.

“Happened to ...” said Bosch, trying to snap his fingers; “happened to ... what’s his name up in Warsaw?”

“Toebbens,” said Goeth, reviving without warning. “Happened to Toebbens. Almost.”

The SD chief, Czurda, said,

“Oh, yes. Near thing for Toebbens.” Toebbens was a Warsaw industrialist. Bigger than Schindler, bigger than Madritsch. Quite a success. “Heini,” said Czurda (heini being Heinrich Himmler), “went to Warsaw and told the armaments man up there, Get the fucking Jews out of Toebbens’ factory and put Toebbens in the Army and ... and send him to the Front. I mean, the Front! And then Heini told my associate up there, he said, Go over his books with a microscope!”

Toebbens was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, which had favored him with war contracts and which he had favored in return with gifts. The Armaments Inspectorate’s protests had managed to save Toebbens, Scherner told the table solemnly, and then leaned over his plate to wink broadly at Schindler. “Never happen in Cracow, Oskar. We all love you too much.”

All at once, perhaps to indicate the warmth the whole table felt for Herr Schindler the industrialist, Goeth climbed to his feet and sang a wordless tune in unison with the theme from Madame Butterfly which the dapper brothers Rosner were working on as industriously as any artisan in any threatened factory in any threatened ghetto. By now Pfefferberg and Lisiek, the orderly, were upstairs in Goeth’s bathroom, scrubbing away at the heavy bathtub ring. They could hear the Rosners’ music and the bursts of laughter and conversation. It was coffee time down there, and the battered girl Lena had brought the tray in to the dinner guests and retreated unmolested back to the kitchen.

Madritsch and Titsch drank their coffee quickly and excused themselves. Schindler prepared to do the same. The little Polish girl seemed to protest, but this was the wrong house for him. Anything was permitted at the Goethhaus, but Oskar found that his inside knowledge of the limits of SS behavior in Poland threw sickening light on every word you spoke here, every glass you drank, not to mention any proposed sexual exchange. Even if you took a girl upstairs, you could not forget that Bosch and Scherner and Goeth were your brothers in pleasure, were—on the stairs or in a bathroom or bedroom—going through the same motions. Herr Schindler, no monk, would rather .be a monk than have a woman at chez Goeth. He spoke across the girl to Scherner, talking about war news, Polish bandits, the likelihood of a bad winter. Letting the girl know that Scherner was a brother and that he would never take a girl from a brother. Saying good night, though, he kissed her on the hand. He saw that Goeth, in his shirt sleeves, was disappearing out the dining-room door, heading for the stairwell, supported by one of the girls who had flanked him at dinner. Oskar excused himself and caught up with the Commandant. He reached out and laid a hand on Goeth’s shoulder. The eyes Goeth turned on him struggled for focus. “Oh,” he muttered. “Going, Oskar?”

“I have to be home,” said Oskar. At home was Ingrid, his German mistress.

“You’re a bloody stallion,” said Goeth.

“Not in your class,” said Schindler.

“No, you’re right. I’m a frigging

Olympian. We’re going ... where’re we going?” He turned his head to the girl but answered the question himself. “We’re going to the kitchen to see that Lena’s clearing up properly.”

“No,” said the girl, laughing. “We aren’t doing that.” She steered him to the stairs. It was decent of her—the sorority in operation— to protect the thin, bruised girl in the kitchen. Schindler watched them—the hulking officer, the slight, supporting girl—staggering crookedly up the staircase. Goeth looked like a man who would have to sleep at least till lunchtime, but Oskar knew the Commandant’s amazing constitution and the clock that ran in him. By 3 A.m. Goeth might even decide to rise and write a letter to his father in Vienna. By seven, after only an hour’s sleep, he’d be on the balcony, infantry rifle in hand, ready to shoot any dilatory prisoners.

When the girl and Goeth reached the first landing, Schindler sidled down the hallway toward the back of the house.

Pfefferberg and Lisiek heard the Commandant, considerably earlier than they had expected him, entering the bedroom and mumbling to the girl he’d brought upstairs. In silence they picked up their cleaning equipment, crept into the bedroom and tried to slip out a side door. Still standing and able to see them on their line of escape, Goeth recoiled at the sight of the cleaning stick, suspecting the two men might be assassins. When Lisiek stepped forward, however, and began a tremulous report, the Commandant understood that they were merely prisoners.

“Herr Commandant,” said Lisiek, panting with justified fear, “I wish to report that there has been a ring in your bathtub. ...”

“Oh,” said Amon. “So you called in an expert.” He beckoned to the boy. “Come here, darling.”

Lisiek edged forward and was struck so savagely that he went sprawling halfway under the bed. Amon again uttered his invitation, as if it might amuse the girl to see him speaking endearments to prisoners. Young Lisiek rose and tottered toward the Commandant again for another round. As the boy picked himself up the second time, Pfefferberg, an experienced prisoner, expected anything—that they’d be marched down to the garden and summarily shot by Ivan. Instead the Commandant simply raged at them to leave, which they did at once.

When Pfefferberg heard a few days later that Lisiek was dead, shot by Amon, he presumed it was over the bathroom incident. In fact it was for a different matter alt—

Lisiek’s offense had been to harness a horse and buggy for Herr Bosch without first asking the Commandant’s permission. In the kitchen of the villa, the maid, whose real name was Helen Hirsch (goeth called her Lena out of laziness, she would always say), looked up to see one of the dinner guests in the doorway. She put down the dish of meat scraps she’d been holding and stood at attention with a jerky suddenness. “Herr ...” She looked at his dinner jacket and sought the word for him. “Herr Direktor, I was just putting aside the bones for the Herr Commandant’s dogs.”

“Please, please,” said Herr Schindler.

“You don’t have to report to me, Fraulein Hirsch.”

He moved around the table. He did not seem to be stalking her, but she feared his intentions. Even though Amon enjoyed beating her, her Jewishness always saved her from overt sexual attack. But there were Germans who were not as fastidious on racial matters as Amon. This one’s tone of voice, however, was one to which she was not accustomed, even from the SS officers and NCO’S who came to the kitchen to complain about Amon.

“Don’t you know me?” he asked, just like a man --a football star or a violinist—whose sense of his own celebrity has been hurt by a stranger’s failure to recognize him. “I’m Schindler.”

She bowed her head. “Herr Direktor,” she said. “Of course, I’ve heard ... and you’ve been here before. I remember ...”

He put his arm around her. He could surely feel the tensing of her body as he touched her cheek with his lips.

He murmured, “It’s not that sort of kiss.

I’m kissing you out of pity, if you must know.”

She couldn’t avoid weeping. Herr Direktor Schindler kissed her hard now in the middle of the forehead, in the manner of Polish farewells in railway stations, a resounding Eastern European smack of the lips. She saw that he had begun to weep too. “That kiss is something I bring you from ...” He waved his hand, indicating some honest tribe of men out in the dark, sleeping in tiered bunks or hiding in forests, people for whom—by absorbing punishment from Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth—she was in part a buffer.

Herr Schindler released her and reached into his side pocket, bringing out a large candy bar. In its substance it too seemed prewar.

“Keep that somewhere,” he advised her.

“I get extra food here,” she told him, as if it were a matter of pride that he not assume she was starving. Food, in fact, was the least of her worries. She knew she would not survive Amon’s house, but it wouldn’t be for lack of food.

“If you don’t want to eat it, trade it,” Herr Schindler told her. “Or why not build yourself up?” He stood back and surveyed her. “Itzhak Stern told me about you.”

“Herr Schindler,” murmured the girl. She put her head down and wept neatly, economically for a few seconds. “Herr Schindler, he likes to beat me in front of those women. On my first day here, he beat me because I threw out the bones from dinner. He came down to the basement at midnight and asked me where they were. For his dogs, you understand. That was the first beating. I said to him ... I don’t know why I said it; I’d never say it now ... Why are you beating me? He said, The reason I’m beating you now is you asked me why I’m beating you.”

She shook her head and shrugged, as if reproving herself for talking so much. She didn’t want to say any more; she couldn’t convey the history of her punishments, her repeated experience of the Hauptsturmf@uhrer’s fists. Herr Schindler bent his head to her confidingly. “Your circumstances are appalling, Helen,” he told her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve accepted it.”

“Accepted it?”

“One day he’ll shoot me.”

Schindler shook his head, and she thought it was too glib an encouragement to her to hope. Suddenly, the good cloth and the pampered flesh of Herr Schindler were a provocation. “For God’s sake, Herr Direktor, I see things. We were up on the roof on Monday, chipping off the ice, young Lisiek and I. And we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio, right below us. And there on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn’t seem fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else. I couldn’t guess what she’d done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see that there’s no set of rules you can keep to. You can’t say to yourself, If I follow these rules, I’ll be safe.

...”

Schindler took her hand and wrung it for emphasis. “Listen, my dear Fraulein Helen Hirsch, in spite of all that, it’s still better than Majdanek or Auschwitz. If you can keep your health ...”

She said, “I thought it would be easy to do that in the Commandant’s kitchen. When I was assigned here, from the camp kitchen, the other girls were jealous.” A pitiful smile spread on her lips.

Schindler raised his voice now. He was like a man enunciating a principle of physics.

“He won’t kill you, because he enjoys you too much, my dear Helen. He enjoys you so much he won’t even let you wear the Star. He doesn’t want anyone to know it’s a Jew he’s enjoying. He shot the woman from the steps because she meant nothing to him, she was one of a series, she neither offended nor pleased him. You understand that. But you

... it’s not decent, Helen. But it’s life.”

Someone else had said that to her. Leo John, the Commandant’s deputy. John was an SS

Untersturmf@uhrer—equivalent to second lieutenant. “He won’t kill you,” John had said,

“till the end, Lena, because he gets too much of a kick out of you.” Coming from John, it hadn’t had the same effect. Herr Schindler had just condemned her to a painful survival. He seemed to understand that she was stunned. He murmured encouragement. He’d see her again. He’d try to get her out. Out? she asked. Out of the villa, he explained; into my factory, he said. Surely you have heard of my factory. I have an enamelware factory.

“Oh, yes,” she said like a slum child speaking of the Riviera. “”Schindler’s Emalia.”

I’ve heard of it.”

“Keep your health,” he said again. He seemed to know it would be the key. He seemed to draw on a knowledge of future intentions—Himmler’s, Frank’s

--when he said it. “All right,” she conceded.

She turned her back on him and went to a china closet, dragging it forward from the wall, an exercise of strength which in such a diminished girl amazed Herr Schindler. She removed a brick from the section of wall the closet had previously covered. She brought out a wad of money—

“I have a sister in the camp kitchen,” she said. “She’s younger than I am. I want you to spend this buying her back if ever she’s put on the cattle cars. I believe you often find out about these things beforehand.”

“I’ll make it my business,” Schindler told her, but with ease, not like a solemn promise.

“How much is it?”

“Four thousand z@loty.”

He took it negligently, her nest egg, and shoved it into a side pocket. It was still safer with him than in a niche behind Amon Goeth’s china closet.

So the story of Oskar Schindler is begun perilously, with Gothic Nazis, with SS

hedonism, with a thin and brutalized girl, andwitha figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.

On one hand, Oskar has made it his business to know the full face of the system, the rabid face behind the veil of bureaucratic decency. He knows, that is, earlier than most would dare know it, what Sonderbehandlung means; that though it says “Special Treatment,” it means pyramids of cyanotic corpses in

Bel@zec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and in that complex west of Cracow known to the Poles as O@swi@ecim-Brzezinka but which will be known to the West by its German name, Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On the other hand, he is a businessman, a dealer by temperament, and he does not openly spit in the system’s eye. He has already reduced the pyramids, and though he does not know how this year and next they will grow in size and number and overtop the Matterhorn, he knows the mountain is coming. Though he cannot predict what bureaucratic shifts will occur in its construction, he still presumes there will always be room and need for Jewish labor. Therefore, during his visit

to Helen Hirsch, he insists, “Keep your health.” He is sure, and out in the darkened Arbeitslager (work camp) of P@lasz@ow, wakeful Jews stir and promise themselves, that no regime—the tide set against it—can afford to do away with a plentiful source of free labor. It’s the ones who break down, spit blood, fall to dysentery who are put on the Auschwitz transports. Herr Schindler himself has heard prisoners, out on the Appellplatz of the P@lasz@ow labor camp, summoned for morning roll call, murmur, “At least I still have my health,” in a tone which in normal life only the aged use.

So, this winter night, it is both early days and late days for Herr Schindler’s practical engagement in the salvage of certain human lives. He is in deep; he has broken Reich laws to an extent that would earn him a multiplicity of hangings, beheadings, consignments to the drafty huts of Auschwitz or Gr@oss-Rosen. But he does not know yet how much it will really cost. Though he has spent a fortune already, he does not know the extent of payments still to be made.

Not to stretch belief so early, the story begins with a quotidian act of kindness—a kiss, a soft voice, a bar of chocolate. Helen Hirsch would never see her 4,000 zaloty again --not in a form in which they could be counted and held in the hand. But to this day she considers it a matter of small importance that Oskar was so inexact with sums of money.

CHAPTER 1

General Sigmund List’s armored divisions, driving north from the Sudetenland, had taken the sweet south Polish jewel of Cracow from both flanks on September 6, 1939. And it was in their wake that Oskar Schindler entered the city which, for the next five years, would be his oyster. Though within the month he would show that he was disaffected from National Socialism, he could still see that Cracow, with its railroad junction and its as yet modest industries, would be a boomtown of the new regime. He wasn’t going to be a salesman anymore. Now he was going to be a tycoon. It is not immediately easy to find in Oskar’s family’s history the origins of his impulse toward rescue. He was born on April 28, 1908, into the Austrian Empire of Franz Josef, into the hilly Moravian province of that ancient Austrian realm. His hometown was the industrial city of Zwittau, to which some commercial opening had brought the Schindler ancestors from Vienna at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

Herr Hans Schindler, Oskar’s father, approved of the imperial arrangement, considered himself culturally an Austrian, and spoke German at the table, on the telephone, in business, in moments of tenderness. Yet when in 1918 Herr Schindler and the members of his family found themselves citizens of the Czechoslovak republic of Masaryk and Bene@s, it did not seem to cause any fundamental distress to the father, and even less still to his ten-year-old son. The child Hitler, according to the man Hitler, was tormented even as a boy by the gulf between the mystical unity of Austria and Germany and their political separation. No such

neurosis of disinheritance soured Oskar Schindler’s childhood. Czechoslovakia was such a bosky, unravished little dumpling of a republic that the German-speakers took their minority stature with some grace, even if the Depression and some minor governmental follies would later put a certain strain on the relationship.

Zwittau, Oskar’s hometown, was a small, coal-dusted city in the southern reaches of the mountain range known as the Jeseniks. Its surrounding hills stood partly ravaged by industry and partly forested with larch and spruce and fir. Because of its community of German-speaking Sudetendeutschen, it maintained a German

grammar school, which Oskar attended. There he took the Realgymnasium Course which was meant to produce engineers—mining, mechanical, civil

--to suit the area’s industrial landscape. Herr Schindler himself owned a farm-machinery plant, and Oskar’s education was a preparation for this inheritance. The family Schindler was Catholic. So too was the family of young Amon Goeth, by this time also completing the Science Course and sitting for the Matura examinations in Vienna. Oskar’s mother, Louisa, practiced her faith with energy, her clothes redolent all Sunday of the incense burned in clouds at High Mass in the Church of St. Maurice. Hans Schindler was the sort of husband who drives a woman to religion. He liked cognac; he liked coffeehouses. A redolence of brandy-warm breath, good tobacco, and confirmed earthiness came from the direction of that good monarchist, Mr. Hans Schindler. The family lived in a modern villa, set in its own gardens, across the city from the industrial section. There were two children, Oskar and his sister, Elfriede. But there are not witnesses left to the dynamics of that household, except in the most general terms. We know, for example, that it distressed Frau Schindler that her son, like his father, was a negligent Catholic.

But it cannot have been too bitter a household. From the little that Oskar would say of his childhood, there was no darkness there. Sunlight shines among the fir trees in the garden. There are ripe plums in the corner of those early summers. If he spends a part of some June morning at Mass, he does not bring back to the villa much of a sense of sin. He runs his father’s car out into the sun in front of the garage and begins tinkering inside its motor. Or else he sits on a

side step of the house, filing away at the carburetor of the motorcycle he is building. Oskar had a few middle-class Jewish friends, whose parents also sent them to the German grammar school. These children were not village Ashkenazim—quirky, Yiddishspeaking, Orthodox—but multilingual and not-so-ritual sons of Jewish businessmen. Across the Hana Plain and in the Beskidy Hills, Sigmund Freud had been born of just such a Jewish family, and that not so long before Hans Schindler himself was born to solid German stock in Zwittau.

Oskar’s later history seems to call out for some set piece in his childhood. The young Oskar should defend some bullied Jewish boy on the way home from school. It is a safe bet it didn’t happen, and we are happier not knowing, since the event would seem too pat. Besides, one Jewish child saved from a bloody nose proves nothing. For Himmler himself would complain, in a speech to one of his Einsatzgruppen, that every German had a Jewish friend. “”The Jewish people are going to be annihilated,” says every Party member. “Sure, it’s in our program: elimination of the Jews, annihilation—we’ll take care of it.” And then they all come trudging, eighty million worthy Germans, and each one has his one decent Jew. Sure, the others are swine, but this one is an A-One Jew.”

Trying still to find, in the shadow of Himmler, some hint of Oskar’s later enthusiasms, we encounter the Schindlers’ next-door neighbor, a liberal rabbi named Dr. Felix Kantor. Rabbi Kantor was a disciple of Abraham Geiger, the German liberalizer of Judaism who claimed that it was no crime, in fact was praiseworthy, to be a German as well as a Jew. Rabbi Kantor was no rigid village scholar. He dressed in the modern mode and spoke German in the house. He called his place of worship a “temple” and not by that older name, “synagogue.” His temple was attended by Jewish doctors, engineers, and proprietors of textile mills in Zwittau. When they traveled, they told other businessmen,

“Our rabbi is Dr. Kantor—he writes articles not only for the Jewish journals in Prague and Brno, but for the dailies as well.”

Rabbi Kantor’s two sons went to the same school as the son of his German neighbor Schindler. Both boys were bright enough eventually, perhaps, to become two of the rare Jewish professors at the German University of Prague. These crew-cut German-speaking prodigies raced in knee pants around the summer gardens. Chasing the Schindler children and being chased. And Kantor, watching them flash in and out among the yew hedges, might have thought it was all working as Geiger and Graetz and Lazarus and all those other nineteenth-century German-Jewish liberals had predicted. We lead enlightened lives, we are greeted by German neighbors—

Mr. Schindler will even make snide remarks about Czech statesmen in our hearing. We are secular scholars as well as sensible interpreters of the Talmud. We belong both to the twentieth century and to an ancient tribal race. We are neither offensive nor offended against. Later, in the mid-1930’s, the rabbi would revise this happy estimation and make up his mind in the end that his sons could never buy off the National Socialists with a German-language Ph.d.

--that there was no outcrop of twentieth-century technology or secular scholarship behind which a Jew could find sanctuary, any more than there could ever be a species of rabbi acceptable to the new

German legislators. In 1936 all the Kantors moved to Belgium. The Schindlers never heard of them again. Race, blood, and soil meant little to the adolescent Oskar. He was one of those boys for whom a motorcycle is the most compelling model of the universe. And his father—a mechanic by temperament—seems to have encouraged the boy’s zeal for red-hot machinery. In the last year of high school, Oskar was riding around Zwittau on a red 500cc Galloni. A school friend,

Erwin Tragatsch, watched with unspeakable desire as the red Galloni farted its way down the streets of the town and arrested the attention of promenaders on the square. Like the Kantor boys, it too was a prodigy—not only the sole Galloni in Zwittau, not only the only 500cc Italian Galloni in Moravia, but probably a unique machine in all Czechoslovakia.

In the spring of 1928, the last months of Oskar’s adolescence and prelude to a summer in which he would fall in love and decide to marry, he appeared in the town square on a 250cc Moto-Guzzi, of which there were only four others on the Continent outside Italy, and those four owned by international racers—Giessler, Hans Winkler, the Hungarian Joo and the Pole Kolaczkowski. There must have been townspeople who shook their heads and said that Herr Schindler was spoiling the boy.

But it would be Oskar’s sweetest and most innocent summer. An apolitical boy in a skullfitting leather helmet revving the motor of the Moto-Guzzi, racing against the local factory teams in the mountains of Moravia, son of a family for whom the height of political sophistication was to burn a candle for Franz Josef. Just around the pine-clad curve, an ambiguous marriage, an economic slump, seventeen years of fatal politics. But on the rider’s face no knowledge, just the wind-flattened grimace of a high-speed biker who—because he is new, because he is no pro, because all his records are as yet unset—

can afford the price better than the older ones, the pros, the racers with times to beat.

His first contest was in May, the mountain race between Brno and Sobeslav. It was highclass competition, so that at least the expensive toy prosperous Herr Hans Schindler had given his son was not rusting in a garage. He came in third on his red Moto-Guzzi, behind two Terrots which had been souped up with English Blackburne motors. For his next challenge he moved farther from home to the Altvater circuit, in the hills on the Saxon border. The German 250cc champion Walfried Winkler was there for the race, and his veteran rival Kurt Henkelmann, on a water-cooled DKW. All the Saxon hotshots—Horowitz, Kocher, and Kliwar—had entered; the Terrot-Blackburnes were back and some Coventry Eagles. There were three Moto-Guzzis, including Oskar Schindler’s, as well as the big guns from the 350cc class and a BMW 500cc team. It was nearly Oskar’s best, most unalloyed day. He kept within touch of the leaders during the first laps and watched to see what might happen. After an hour, Winkler, Henkelmann, and Oskar had left the Saxons behind, and the other Moto-Guzzis fell away with some mechanical flaw. In what Oskar believed was the second-to-last lap he passed Winkler and must have felt, as palpably as the tar itself and the blur of pines, his imminent career as a factory-team rider, and the travel-obsessed life it would permit him to lead.

In what then he assumed was the last lap, Oskar passed Henkelmann and both the DKW’S, crossed the line and slowed. There must have been some deceptive sign from officials, because the crowd also believed the race was over. By the time Oskar knew it wasn’t—that he had made some amateur mistake—Walfried Winkler and Mita Vychodil had passed him, and even the exhausted Henkelmann was able to nudge him out of third place.

He was feted home. Except for a technicality, he’d beaten Europe’s best.

Tragatsch surmised that the reasons Oskar’s career as a motorcycle racer ended there were economic. It was a fair guess. For that summer, after a courtship of only six weeks, he hurried into marriage with a farmer’s daughter, and so fell out of favor with his father, who happened also to be his employer.

The girl he married was from a village to the east of Zwittau in the Hana Plain. She was convent-schooled and had the sort of reserve he admired in his mother. Her widowed father was no peasant but a gentleman farmer. In the Thirty Years War, her Austrian ancestors had survived the recurrent campaigns and famines which had swept that fertile plain. Three centuries later, in a new era of risk, their daughter entered an ill-advised marriage with an unformed boy from Zwittau. Her father disapproved of it as deeply as Oskar’s.

Hans didn’t like it because he could see that Oskar had married in the pattern of his, Hans’s, own uneasy marriage. A sensual husband, a boy with a wild streak, looking too early in his life for some sort of peace from a nunlike, gracious, unsophisticated girl. Oskar had met Emilie at a party in Zwittau. She was visiting friends from her village of Alt-Molstein. Oskar knew the place, of course; he’d sold tractors in the area. When the banns were announced in the parish churches of Zwittau, some people thought the couple so ill-matched that they began to look for motives other than love. It is possible that even that summer the Schindler farm-machinery factory was in trouble, for it was geared to the manufacture of steam-driven tractors of a type already going out of style with farmers. Oskar was pouring a large part of his wages back into the business, and now—with Emilie—came a dowry of half a million Reichsmarks, an honest and alleviating lump of capital in anyone’s language. The suspicion of the gossips was unfounded, though, for that summer Oskar was infatuated. And since Emilie’s father would never find grounds to believe the boy would settle down and be a good husband, only a fraction of the half-million was ever paid. Emilie herself was delighted to escape stultifying Alt-Molstein by marrying handsome Oskar Schindler. Her father’s closest friend had always been the dull parish priest, and Emilie had grown up pouring the two of them tea and listening to their naive opinions on politics and theology. If we are still seeking significant Jewish connections, there had been some in Emilie’s girlhood—the village doctor who treated her grandmother, and Rita, granddaughter of the storekeeper Reif. During one of his visits to the farmhouse, the parish priest told Emilie’s father that it was not good on principle for a Catholic child to have a particular friendship with a Jew.

Out of the almost glandular stubbornness of girlhood, Emilie resisted the priest’s edict. The friendship with Rita Reif would survive till the day in 1942 when local Nazi officials executed Rita in front of the store. After the marriage, Oskar and Emilie settled in an apartment in Zwittau. For Oskar, the Thirties must have seemed a mere epilogue to his glorious mistake on the Altvater circuit in the summer of ‘28. He did his military service in the Czechoslovak Army and, although it gave him the chance to drive a truck, found that he abhorred the military life --not on pacifist grounds but on grounds of discomfort. Home again in Zwittau, he neglected Emilie in the evenings, staying late in caf‘es like a single man, talking to girls neither nunlike nor gracious. The family business went bankrupt in 1935, and that same year his father left Frau Louisa Schindler and took an apartment of his own. Oskar hated him for that and went and drank tea with his aunts and denounced Hans to them and, even in caf‘es, made speeches about his father’s treachery to a good woman. He seems to have been blind to the resemblance between his own faltering marriage and his parents’ broken one.

Because of his good business contacts, his conviviality, his gifts of salesmanship, his ability to hold his liquor, he got a job even in the midst of the Depression as sales manager of Moravian Electrotechnic. Its head office was located in the grim provincial capital of Brno, and Oskar commuted between Brno and Zwittau. He liked the traveling life. It was half the destiny he’d promised himself when he’d passed Winkler on the Altvater circuit.

When his mother died, he rushed back to Zwittau and stood beside his aunts; his sister, Elfriede; and his wife, Emilie, on one side of the grave, while treacherous Hans stood solitary— except, of course, for the parish priest—at the head of the coffin. Louisa’s death had consecrated the enmity between Oskar and Hans. Oskar couldn’t see it—only the women could—that Hans and Oskar were in fact two brothers separated by the accident of paternity.

By the time of that funeral, Oskar was wearing the Hakenkreuz emblem of Konrad Henlein’s Sudeten German Party. Neither Emilie nor the aunts approved, but they did not take it too hard—it was something young Czech Germans were wearing that season. Only the Social Democrats and the Communists did not sport the badge or subscribe to Henlein’s Party, and God knew Oskar was neither a Communist nor a Social Democrat. Oskar was a salesman. All things being equal, when you went in to a German company manager wearing the badge, you got the order.

Yet even with his order book wide open and his pencil flying, Oskar also—in the months in 1938 before the German divisions entered the Sudetenland—felt a sense of a grand shift in history, and was seduced by the itch to be party to it. Whatever his motives for running with Henlein, it seems that as soon as the divisions entered Moravia he suffered an instant disillusionment with National Socialism, as thorough and as quick as the disillusionment that had set in after marriage. He seems to have expected that the invading power would allow some brotherly Sudeten Republic to be founded. In a later statement, he said he was appalled by the new regime’s bullying of the Czech population, by the seizure of Czech property. His first documented acts of rebellion would occur very early in the coming world conflict, and there is no need to doubt that the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, proclaimed by Hitler from Hradschin Castle in March 1939, surprised him with its early showing of tyranny.

Besides that, the two people whose opinions he most respected—Emilie, and his estranged father—were not taken in by the grand Teutonic hour and both claimed to know Hitler could not succeed. Their opinions were not sophisticated, but neither were Oskar’s. Emilie believed simply that the man would be punished for making himself God. Herr Schindler senior, as his position was relayed to Oskar by an aunt, fell back on basic historical principles. Just outside Brno was the stretch of river where Napoleon had won the battle of Austerlitz. And what had befallen this triumphant Napoleon? He’d become a nobody, growing potatoes on an island in the mid-Atlantic. The same would happen to this fellow. Destiny, said Herr Schindler senior, was not a limitless rope. It was a piece of elastic. The harder you went forward, the more fiercely you were jerked back to your starting point. That was what life, a failed marriage, and the economic slump had taught Herr Hans Schindler.

But perhaps his son, Oskar, was not yet a clear enemy of the new system. One evening that autumn, young Herr Schindler attended a party at a sanitarium in the hills outside Ostrava, up near the Polish border. The hostess was the sanitarium manager, a client and friend Oskar had acquired on the road. She introduced him to a personable German named Eberhard Gebauer. They talked about business and what moves France and Britain and Russia might make. Then they went off with a bottle to a spare room so that, as Gebauer suggested, they could talk more frankly. There Gebauer identified himself as an officer of Admiral Canaris’ Abwehr intelligence and offered his new drinking companion the chance to work for the Foreign Section of the Abwehr. Oskar had accounts across the border in Poland, throughout Galicia and Upper Silesia. Would he agree to supply the Abwehr with military intelligence from that region? Gebauer said he knew from his friend the hostess that Oskar was intelligent and gregarious. With these gifts, he could make use not only of his own observations of industrial and military installations in the area but of those of any German Poles he might happen to recruit in restaurants or bars, or during business meetings.

Again, apologists for the young Oskar would say that he agreed to work for Canaris because, as an Abwehr agent, he was exempt from army service. That was a large part of the proposal’s charm. But he must also have believed that a German advance into Poland would be appropriate. Like the slim officer sitting drinking on the bed with him, he must still have approved of the national business, though he did not like the management. For Oskar, Gebauer may have possessed a moral allure, for he and his Abwehr colleagues considered themselves a decent Christian elite. Though it did not prevent their planning for a military intrusion into Poland, it gave them a contempt for Himmler and the SS, with whom, they believed high-handedly, they were in competition for the control of Germany’s soul.

Later, a very different intelligence-gathering body would find Oskar’s reports to be full and praiseworthy. On his Polish journeys for the Abwehr, he showed a gift for charming news out of people, especially in a social setting—at the dinner table, over cocktails. We do not know the exact nature or importance of what he found out for Gebauer and Canaris, but he came to like the city of Cracow very well, and to discover that though it was no great industrial metropolis, it was an exquisite medieval city surrounded with a fringe of metal, textile, and chemical plants.

As for the unmotorized Polish Army, its secrets were all too apparent.

CHAPTER 2

In late October 1939, two young German NCO’S entered the showroom of J. C. Buchheister and Company in Stradom Street , Cracow, and insisted on buying some expensive bolts of cloth to send home. The Jewish clerk behind the counter, a yellow star sewn to his breast, explained that Buchheister’s did not sell direct to the public but supplied garment factories and retail outlets. The soldiers would not be dissuaded. When it was time to settle their bill, they did it whimsically with a Bavarian banknote of 1858

and a piece of German Army Occupation scrip dated 1914.

“Perfectly good currency,” one of them told the Jewish bookkeeper. They were healthylooking young men who had spent all spring and summer on maneuvers, the early autumn yielding them an easy triumph and, later, all the latitude of conquerors in a sweet city. The bookkeeper agreed to the transaction and got them out of the shop before ringing up a sale on the cash register. Later in the day, a young German accounts manager, an official appointed by the deftly named East Trust Agency to take over and run Jewish businesses, visited the showroom. He was one of two German officials assigned to Buchheister. The first was Sepp Aue, the supervisor, a middle-aged, unambitious man, and the second, this young go-getter. The young man inspected the books and the till. He took out the valueless currency. What did it mean, this comic-opera money?

The Jewish bookkeeper told his story; the accounts manager accused him of substituting the antique notes for hard z@loty. Later in the day, in Buchheister’s warehouse upstairs, the go-getter reported to Sepp Aue and said they should call in the Schutzpolizei. Herr Aue and the young accountant both knew that such an act would lead to the imprisonment of the bookkeeper in the SS jail in Montelupich Street. The accountant thought that this would set an excellent example for Buchheister’s remaining Jewish staff. But the idea distressed Aue, who had a secret liability of his own, his grandmother having been Jewish, though no one had yet found that out.

Aue sent an office boy with a message to the company’s original accountant, a Polish Jew named Itzhak Stern, who was at home with influenza. Aue was a political appointee with little accounting experience. He wanted Stern to come into the office and resolve the impasse over the bolts of linen. He had just sent the message off to Stern’s house in Podg@orze when his secretary came into the office and announced that a Herr Oskar Schindler was waiting outside, claiming to have an appointment. Aue went into the outer room and saw a tall young man, placid as a large dog, tranquilly smoking. The two had met at a party the night before. Oskar had been there with a Sudeten German girl named Ingrid, Treuh@ander, or supervisor, of a Jewish hardware company, just as Aue was Treuh@ander of Buchheister’s. They were a glamorous couple, Oskar and this Ingrid, frankly in love, stylish, with lots of friends in the Abwehr.

Herr Schindler was looking for a career in Cracow. Textiles? Aue had suggested. “It isn’t just uniforms. The Polish domestic market itself is large enough and inflated enough to support us all. You’re welcome to look Buchheister’s over,” he’d urged Oskar, not knowing how he might regret his tipsy camaraderie at 2 P.m. the next day. Schindler could see that Herr Aue had possible second thoughts about his invitation. If it’s not convenient, Herr Treuh@ander, Oskar suggested ...

Herr Aue said not at all and took Schindler through the warehouse and across a yard to the spinning division, where great rolls of golden fabric were running off the machines. Schindler asked if the Treuh@ander had had trouble with the Poles. No, said Sepp, they’re cooperative.

Stunned, if anything. After all, it’s not

exactly a munitions factory.

Schindler so obviously had the air of a man with connections that Aue could not resist the temptation to test the point. Did Oskar know the people at the Main Armaments Board?

Did he know General Julius Schindler, for example. Perhaps General Schindler was a relative.

That makes no difference, said Herr Schindler disarmingly. (in fact General Schindler was unrelated to him.) The General wasn’t such a bad fellow, compared with some, said Oskar. Aue agreed. But he himself would never dine with General Schindler or meet him for drinks; that was the difference.

They returned to the office, encountering on the

way Itzhak Stern, Buchheister’s Jewish

accountant, waiting on a chair provided

by Aue’s secretary, blowing his nose and coughing harshly. He stood up, joined his hands one on top of the other in front of his chest, and with immense eyes watched both conquerors approach, pass him, and enter the office. There Aue offered Schindler a drink and then, excusing himself, left Oskar by the fire and went out to interview Stern. He was so thin, and there was a scholarly dryness to him. He had the manners of a Talmudic scholar, but also of a European intellectual. Aue told him the story of the bookkeeper and the NCO’S and the assumptions the young German accountant had made. He produced from the safe the currency: the 1858 Bavarian, the 1914 Occupation. “I thought you might have instituted an accounting procedure to deal with just this situation,” said Aue.

“It must be happening a great deal in Cracow just now.”

Itzhak Stern took the notes and studied them. He had indeed developed a procedure, he told the Herr Treuh@ander. Without a smile or a wink, he moved to the open fire at the end of the room and dropped both notes into it.

“I write these transactions off to profit and loss, under “free samples,”” he said. There had been a lot of free samples since September. Aue liked Stern’s dry, effective style with the legal evidence. He began to laugh, seeing in the accountant’s lean features the complexities of Cracow itself, the parochial canniness of a small city. Only a local knew the ropes.

In the inner office Herr Schindler sat in need of local information. Aue led Stern through into the manager’s office to meet Herr Schindler, who stood staring at the fire, an unstoppered hip flask held absently in one hand. The first thing Itzhak Stern thought was, This isn’t a manageable German. Aue wore the badge of his F@uhrer, a miniature Hakenkreuz, as negligently as a man might wear the badge of a cycling club. But big Schindler’s coin-sized emblem took the light from the fire in its black enamel. It, and the young man’s general affluence, were all the more the symbols of Stern’s autumn griefs as a Polish Jew with a cold. Aue made the introductions. According to the edict already issued by Governor Frank, Stern made his statement: “I have to tell you, sir, that I am a Jew.”

“Well,” Herr Schindler growled at him

.

“I’m a German. So there we are!”

All very well, Stern almost intoned privately behind his sodden handkerchief. In that case, lift the edict.

For Itzhak Stern was a man—even now, in only the seventh week of the New Order in Poland—not under one edict but already under many.

Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, had already initiated and signed six restrictive edicts, leaving others to his district governor, Dr. Otto W@achter, an SS

Gruppenf@uhrer (equivalent to major general), to implement. Stern, besides declaring his origins, had also to carry a distinctive registration card marked by a yellow stripe. The Orders-in-Council forbidding kosher preparation of meats and commanding forced labor for Jews were three weeks old when Stern stood coughing in Schindler’s presence. And Stern’s official ration as an Untermensch (subhuman) was little more than half that of a non-Jewish Pole, the latter being tainted by Untermensch’-hood himself. Finally, by an edict of November 8, a general registration of all Cracovian Jews had begun and was required to be completed by the 24th.

Stern, with his calm and abstract cast of mind, knew that the edicts would continue, would circumscribe his living and breathing further still. Most Cracow Jews expected such a rash of edicts. There would be some disruption of life—

Jews from the shtetls being brought to town to shovel coal, intellectuals being sent into the countryside to hoe beets. There would also be sporadic slaughters for a time, like the one over at Tursk where an SS artillery unit had kept people working on a bridge all day and then driven them into the village synagogue in the evening and shot them. There would always be such intermittent instances. But the situation would settle; the race would survive by petitioning, by buying off the authorities—it was the old method, it had been working since the Roman Empire, it would work again. In the end the civil authorities needed Jews, especially in a nation where they were one in every eleven. Stern, however, wasn’t one of the sanguine ones. He didn’t presume that the legislation would soon achieve a plateau of negotiable severity. For these were the worst of times. So though he did not know that the coming fire would be different in substance as well as degree, he was already resentful enough of the future to think, All very well for you, Herr Schindler, to make generous little gestures of equality.

This man, said Aue, introducing Itzhak

Stern, was Buchheister’s right-hand man. He had good connections in the business community here in Cracow.

It was not Stern’s place to argue with Aue about that. Even so, he wondered if the Treuh@ander wasn’t gilding the lily for the distinguished visitor. Aue excused himself.

Left alone with Stern, Schindler murmured that he’d be grateful if the accountant could tell him what he knew about some of the local businesses. Testing Oskar, Stern suggested that perhaps Herr Schindler should speak to the officials of the Trust Agency.

“They’re thieves,” said Herr Schindler genially. “They’re bureaucrats too. I would like some latitude.” He shrugged. “I am a capitalist by temperament and I don’t like being regulated.”

So Stern and the self-declared capitalist began to talk. And Stern was quite a source; he seemed to have friends or relatives in every factory in Cracow—textiles, garments, confectionery, cabinetmaking, metalwork. Herr Schindler was impressed and took an envelope from the breast pocket of his suit. “Do you know a company called Rekord?” he asked.

Itzhak Stern did. It was in bankruptcy, he said. It had made enamelware. Since it had gone bankrupt some of the metal-press machinery had been confiscated, and now it was largely a shell, producing—under the management of one of the former owners’

relatives—a mere fraction of its capacity. His own brother, said Stern, represented a Swiss company that was one of Rekord’s major creditors. Stern knew that it was permitted to reveal a small degree of fraternal pride and then to deprecate it. “The place was very badly managed,” said Stern.

Schindler dropped the envelope into Stern’s lap. “This is their balance sheet. Tell me what you think.”

Itzhak said that Herr Schindler should of course ask others as well as himself. Of course, Oskar told him. But I would value your opinion. Stern read the balance sheets quickly; then, after some three minutes of study, all at once felt the strange silence of the office and looked up, finding Herr Oskar Schindler’s eyes full on him.

There was, of course, in men like Stern an ancestral gift for sniffing out the just Goy, who could be used as buffer or partial refuge against the savageries of the others. It was a sense for where a safe house might be, a potential zone of shelter. And from now on the possibility of Herr Schindler as sanctuary would color the conversation as might a halfglimpsed, intangible sexual promise color the talk between a man and a woman at a party. It was a suggestion Stern was more aware of than Schindler, and nothing explicit would be said for fear of damaging the tender connection.

“It’s a perfectly good business,” said

Stern. “You could speak to my brother. And, of course, now there’s the possibility of military contracts. ...”

“Exactly,” murmured Herr Schindler.

For almost instantly after the fall of Cracow, even before Warsaw’s siege ended, an Armaments Inspectorate had been set up in the Government General of Poland, its mandate being to enter into contracts with suitable manufacturers for the supply of army equipment. In a plant like Rekord, mess kits and field kitchenware could be turned out. The Armaments Inspectorate, Stern knew, was headed by a Major General Julius Schindler of the Wehrmacht. Was the

general a relative of Herr Oskar Schindler’s? Stern asked. No, I’m afraid not, said Schindler, but as if he wanted Stern to keep his nonrelationship a secret.

In any case, said Stern, even the skeleton production at Rekord was grossing more than a half-million z@loty a year, and new metal-pressing plant and furnaces could be acquired relatively easily. It depended on Herr Schindler’s access to credit.

Enamelware, said Schindler, was closer to his line than textiles. His background was in farm machinery, and he understood steam presses and so forth.

It did not any longer occur to Stern to ask why an elegant German entrepreneur wished to talk to him about business options. Meetings like this one had occurred throughout the history of his tribe, and the normal exchanges of business did not quite explain them. He talked on at some length, explaining how the Commercial Court would set the fee for the leasing of the bankrupt estate. Leasing with an option to buy—it was better than being a Treuh@ander. As a Treuh@ander, only a supervisor, you were completely under the control of the Economics Ministry.

Stern lowered his voice then and risked saying it:

“You will find you are restricted in the people you’ll be allowed to employ. ...”

Schindler was amused. “How do you know all this?

About ultimate intentions?”

“I read it in a copy of the Berliner Tageblatt. A Jew is still permitted to read German newspapers.”

Schindler continued to laugh, reached out a hand, and let it fall on Stern’s shoulder. “Is that so?” he asked.

In fact, Stern knew these things because Aue had received a directive from Reich Secretary of State Eberhard von Jagwitz of the Economics Ministry outlining the policies to be adopted in Aryanizing businesses. Aue had left it to Stern to make a digest of the memorandum. Von Jagwitz had indicated, more in sadness than in anger, that there would be pressure from other government and Party agencies, such as Heydrich’s RHSA, the Reich Security Main Office, to Aryanize not just the ownership of companies, but also the management and work force. The sooner Treuh@anders filtered out the skilled Jewish employees the better—always, of course, bearing in mind the maintenance of production at an acceptable level.

At last Herr Schindler put the accounts of Rekord back into his breast pocket, stood up, and led Itzhak Stern out into the main office. They stood there for a time, among the typists and clerks, growing philosophical, as Oskar liked to do. It was here that Oskar brought up the matter of Christianity’s having its base in Judaism, a subject which for some reason, perhaps even because of his boyhood friendship with the Kantors in Zwittau, interested him. Stern spoke softly, at length, learnedly. He had published articles in journals of comparative religion. Oskar, who wrongly fancied himself a philosopher, had found an expert. The scholar himself, Stern, whom some thought a pedant, found Oskar’s understanding shallow, a mind genial by nature but without much conceptual deftness. Not that Stern was about to complain. An ill-assorted friendship was firmly established. So that Stern found himself drawing an analogy, as Oskar’s own father had, from previous empires and giving his own reasons why Adolf Hitler could not succeed. The opinion slipped out before Stern could withdraw it. The other Jews in the office bowed their heads and stared fixedly at their worksheets. Schindler did not seem disturbed.

Near the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He’d hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.

“Of course, of course,” said Oskar

Schindler.

Itzhak, rightly or wrongly, always believed that it was at that moment that he had dropped the right seed in the furrow.

CHAPTER 3

There is another Cracow Jew who gives an account of meeting Schindler that autumn—

and of coming close to killing him. This man’s name was Leopold (poldek) Pfefferberg. He had been a company commander in the Polish Army during the recent tragic campaign. After suffering a leg wound during the battle for the river San, he’d limped around the Polish hospital in Przemy@sl, helping with the other wounded. He was no doctor, but a high school physical-education teacher who had graduated from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow and so had some knowledge of anatomy. He was resilient; he was self-confident, twenty-seven years old, and built like a wedge. With some hundreds of other captured Polish officers from Przemy@sl, Pfefferberg was on his way to Germany when his train drew into his home city of Cracow and the prisoners were herded into the first-class waiting room, to remain there until new transport could be provided. His home was ten blocks away. To a practical young man, it seemed outrageous that he could not go out into Pawia Street and catch a No. 1 trolley home. The bucolic-looking Wehrmacht guard at the door seemed a provocation. Pfefferberg had in his breast pocket a document signed by the German hospital authority of Przemy@sl indicating that he was free to move about the city with ambulance details tending to the wounded of both armies. It was spectacularly formal, stamped and signed. He took it out now and, going up to the guard, thrust it at him.

“Can you read German?” Pfefferberg demanded. This sort of ploy had to be done right, of course. You had to be young; you had to be persuasive; you had to have retained, undiminished by summary defeat, a confident bearing of a particularly Polish nature—

something disseminated to the Polish officer corps, even to those rare members of it who were Jewish, by its plentiful aristocrats.

The man had blinked. “Of course I can read German,” he said. But after he’d taken the document he held it like a man who couldn’t read at all—held it like a slice of bread. Pfefferberg explained in German how the document declared his right to go out and attend to the ill. All the guard could see was a proliferation of official stamps. Quite a document. With a wave of the head, he indicated the door.

Pfefferberg was the only passenger on the No. 1 trolley that morning. It was not even 6

A.m. The conductor took his fare without a fuss, for in the city there were still many Polish troops not yet processed by the Wehrmacht. The officers had to register, that was all. The trolley swung around the Barbakan, through the gate in the ancient wall, down Floria@nska to the Church of St. Mary, across the central square, and so within five minutes into Grodzka Street. Nearing his parents’ apartment at No. 48, as he had as a boy he jumped from the car before the air brakes went on and let the momentum of the jump, enhanced by that of the trolley, bring him up with a soft thud against the doorjamb. After his escape, he had lived not too uncomfortably in the apartments of friends, visiting Grodzka 48 now and then. The Jewish schools opened briefly—they would be closed again within six weeks—and he even returned to his teaching job. He was sure the Gestapo would take some time to come looking for him, and so he applied for ration books. He began to dispose of jewelry—as an agent and in his own right—on the black market that operated in Cracow’s central square, in the arcades of the Sukiennice and beneath the two unequal spires of St. Mary’s Church. Trade was brisk, among the Poles themselves but more so for the Polish Jews. Their ration books, full of precancelled coupons, entitled them to only two-thirds of the meat and half of the butter allowance that went to Aryan citizens, while all the cocoa and rice coupons were cancelled. And so the black market which had operated through centuries of occupation and the few decades of Polish autonomy became the food and income source and the readiest means of resistance for respectable bourgeois citizens, especially those who, like Leopold Pfefferberg, were street-wise.

He presumed that he would soon be traveling over the ski routes around Zakopane in the Tatras, across Slovakia’s slender neck into Hungary or Rumania. He was equipped for the journey: he had been a member of the Polish national ski team. On one of the high shelves of the porcelain stove in his mother’s apartment he kept an elegant little .22

pistol—armory both for the proposed escape and in case he was ever trapped inside the apartment by the Gestapo.

With this pearl-handled semitoy, Pfefferberg came close to killing Oskar Schindler one chilly day in November. Schindler, in double-breasted suit, Party badge on the lapel, decided to call on Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg, Poldek’s mother, to offer her a commission. He had been given by the Reich housing

authorities a fine modern apartment in

Straszewskiego Street. It had previously

been the property of a Jewish family by the name of Nussbaum. Such allocations were carried out without any compensation to the previous occupant. On the day Oskar came calling, Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg herself was worried that it would happen to her apartment in Grodzka.

A number of Schindler’s friends would claim later—though it is not possible to prove it—that Oskar had gone looking for the dispossessed Nussbaums at their lodgings in Podg@orze and had given them a sum close to 50,000 z@loty in compensation. With this sum, it is said, the Nussbaums bought themselves an escape to Yugoslavia. Fifty thousand z@loty signified substantial dissent; but there would be other similar acts of dissent by Oskar before Christmas. Some friends would in fact come to say that generosity was a disease in Oskar, a frantic thing, one of his passions. He would tip taxi drivers twice the fare on the meter. But this has to be said too—that he thought the Reich housing authorities were unjust and told Stern so, not when the regime got into trouble but even in that, its sweetest autumn.

In any case, Mrs. Pfefferberg had no idea what the tall, well-tailored German was doing at her door. He could have been there to ask for her son, who happened to be in the kitchen just then. He could have been there to commandeer her apartment, and her decorating business, and her antiques, and her French tapestry.

In fact, by the December feast of Hanukkah the German police would, on the orders of the housing office, get around to the Pfefferbergs, arriving at their door and then ordering them, shivering in the cold, downstairs onto the pavement of Grodzka. When Mrs. Pfefferberg asked to go back for a coat, she would be refused; when Mr. Pfefferberg made for a bureau to get an ancestral gold watch, he would be punched in the jaw. “I have witnessed terrible things in the past,” Hermann G@oring had said; “little chauffeurs and Gauleiters have profited so much from these transactions that they now have about half a million.” The effect of such easy pickings as Mr. Pfefferberg’s gold watch on the moral fiber of the Party might distress G@oring. But in Poland that year, it was the style of the Gestapo to be unaccountable for the contents of apartments. When Schindler first came to the Pfefferbergs’ second-floor apartment, however, the family were still in tenuous occupation. Mrs. Pfefferberg and her son were talking among the samples and bolts of fabric and wallpaper when Herr Schindler knocked. Leopold was not worried. There were two front entrances to the apartment—the business door and the kitchen door faced each other across a landing. Leopold retreated to the kitchen and looked through the crack in the door at the visitor. He saw the formidable size of the man, the fashionable cut of his suit. He returned to his mother in the living room. He had the feeling, he said, that the man was Gestapo. When you let him in at the office door, I can always slip out through the kitchen. Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg was trembling. She opened the office door. She was, of course, listening for sounds along the corridor. Pfefferberg had in fact picked up the pistol and put it into his belt and intended to wed the sound of his exit to the sound of Herr Schindler’s entry. But it seemed folly to go without knowing what the German official wanted. There was a chance the man would have to be killed, and then there would need to be a concerted family flight into Rumania. If the magnetic drift to the event had drawn Pfefferberg to take out his pistol and fire, the death, the flight, the reprisals would have been considered unexceptional and appropriate to the history of the month. Herr Schindler would have been briefly mourned and summarily avenged. And this would have been, of course, the brisk ending to all Oskar’s potentialities. And back in Zwittau they would have said, “Was it someone’s husband?”

The voice surprised the Pfefferbergs. It was calm, quiet, suited to the doing of business, even to the asking of favors. They had got used in past weeks to the tone of decree and summary expropriation. This man sounded fraternal. That was somehow worse. But it intrigued you too. Pfefferberg had slipped from the kitchen and concealed himself behind the double doors of the dining room. He could see a sliver of the German. You’re Mrs. Pfefferberg? the German asked. You were recommended to me by Herr Nussbaum. I have just taken over an apartment in Straszewskiego Street, and I would like to have it redecorated.

Mina Pfefferberg kept the man at the door. She spoke so incoherently that the son took pity on her and appeared in the doorway, his jacket buttoned up over the weapon. He asked the visitor in and at the same time whispered assurances in Polish to his mother. Now Oskar Schindler gave his name. There was some measuring up, for Schindler could tell that Pfefferberg had appeared to perform an act of primal protection. Schindler showed his respect by talking now through the son as through an interpreter.

“My wife is coming up from

Czechoslovakia,” he said, “and I’d like the

place redone in her style.” He said the

Nussbaums had maintained the place

excellently, but they went in for heavy

furniture and somber colors. Mrs.

Schindler’s tastes were livelier—a little French, a little Swedish. Mrs. Pfefferberg had recovered enough to say that she didn’t know—it was a busy time with Christmas coming up. Leopold could tell there might be an instinctive resistance in her to developing a German clientele; but the Germans might be the only race this season with enough confidence in the future to go in for interior design. And Mrs. Pfefferberg needed a good contract—her husband had been removed from his job and worked now for a pittance in the housing office of the Gemeinde, the Jewish welfare bureau. Within two minutes the men were chatting like friends. The pistol in Pfefferberg’s belt had now been relegated to the status of armament for some future, remote emergency. There was no doubt that Mrs. Pfefferberg was going to do the Schindler apartment, no expense spared, and when that was settled, Schindler mentioned that Leopold Pfefferberg might like to come around to the apartment to discuss other business. “There is the possibility that you can advise me on acquiring local merchandise,” Herr Schindler said.

“For example, your very elegant blue shirt ... I don’t know where to begin to look for that kind of thing myself.” His ingenuousness was a ploy, but Pfefferberg appreciated it. “The stores, as you know, are empty,” murmured Oskar like a hint.

Leopold Pfefferberg was the sort of young man who survived by raising the stakes. “Herr Schindler, these shirts are extremely expensive, I hope you understand. They cost twentyfive z@loty each.”

He had multiplied the price by five. There was all at once an amused knowingness in Herr Schindler—not enough, though, to imperil the tenuous friendship or remind Pfefferberg that he was armed. “I could probably get you some,” said Pfefferberg, “if you give me your size. But I’m afraid my contacts will require money in advance.”

Herr Schindler, still with that knowingness in his eyes, took out his wallet and handed Pfefferberg 200 Reichsmarks. The sum was flamboyantly too much and even at Pfefferberg’s inflated price would have bought shirts for a dozen tycoons. But Pfefferberg knew the game and did not blink. “You must give me your measurements,”

he said. A week later, Pfefferberg brought a dozen silk shirts to Schindler’s apartment on Straszewskiego Street. There was a pretty German woman in the apartment who was introduced to Pfefferberg as Treuh@ander of a Cracow hardware business. Then, one evening, Pfefferberg saw Oskar in the company of a blond and large-eyed Polish beauty. If there was a Frau Schindler, she did not appear even after Mrs. Pfefferberg had redecorated the place. Pfefferberg himself became one of Schindler’s most regular connections to that market in luxuries— silk, furnishings, jewelry—which flourished in the ancient town of Cracow.

CHAPTER 4

The next time Itzhak Stern met Oskar Schindler was on a morning in early December. Schindler’s application to the Polish Commercial Court of Cracow had already been filed, yet Oskar had the leisure to visit the offices of Buchheister and, after conferring with Aue, to stand near Stern’s desk in the outer office, clap his hands, and announce in a voice that sounded already tipsy, “Tomorrow, it’s going to start. J@ozefa and Izaaka Streets are going to know all about it!”

There were in Kazimierz a J@ozefa Street and an Izaaka Street. There were in every ghetto, and Kazimierz was the site of the old ghetto of Cracow, once an island ceded to the Jewish community by Kazimier the Great, now a near suburb nestled in an elbow of the Vistula River.

Herr Schindler bent over Stern, and Stern felt his brandy-warm breath and considered this question:

Did Herr Schindler know something would happen in J@ozefa Street and Izaaka Street?

Or was he just brandishing the names? In any case, Stern suffered a nauseating sense of disappointment. Herr Schindler was whistling up a pogrom, boasting inexactly about it, as if to put Stern in his place.

It was December 3. When Oskar said “tomorrow,” Stern presumed he was using the term not in the sense of December 4, but in the terms in which drunks and prophets always used it, as something that either would or damn well should happen soon. Only a few of those who heard, or heard about, Herr Schindler’s boozy warning took it literally. Some packed an overnight bag and moved their families across the river to Podg@orze. As for Oskar, he felt he had passed on hard news at some risk. He had got it from at least two sources, new friends of his. One, an officer attached to the SS police chief’s staff, was a policeman named Wachtmeister (sergeant) Herman Toffel. The other, Dieter Reeder, belonged to the staff of SD chief Czurda. Both these contacts were characteristic of the sympathetic officers Oskar always managed to sniff out.

He was never good, though, at explaining his motives for speaking to Stern that December. He would say later that in the period of the German Occupation of Bohemia and Moravia he had seen enough seizure of Jewish and Czech property, and forcible removal of Jews and Czechs from those Sudeten areas considered German, to cure him of any zeal for the New Order. His leaking of the news to Stern, far more than the unconfirmed Nussbaum story, goes some way toward proving his case. He must have hoped also, as the Jews of Cracow did, that after its initial fury the regime would relax and let people breathe. If the SS raids and incursions of the next few months could be mitigated by the leaking of advance information, then perhaps sanity would reassert itself in the spring. After all, both Oskar and the Jews told themselves, the Germans were a civilized nation.

The SS invasion of Kazimierz would, however, arouse in Oskar a fundamental disgust—

not one that impinged too directly yet on the level at which he made his money, entertained women or dined with friends, but one that would, the clearer the intentions of the reigning power became, lead, obsess, imperil, and exalt him. The operation was meant in part to be a raid for jewelry and furs. There’d be some evictions from houses and apartments in the wealthier borderland between Cracow and Kazimierz. But beyond these practical results, that first Aktion was also meant to serve dramatic notice to the dismayed people of the old Jewish quarter. For that purpose, Reeder told Oskar, a small detachment of Einsatzgruppe men would drive down Stradom and into Kazimierz in the same trucks as the boys of the local SS and the Field Police.

Six Einsatzgruppen had come to Poland with the invading army. Their name had subtle meanings.

“Special-duty groups” is a close

translation. But the amorphous word Einsatz was

also rich with a nuance—of challenge, of picking up

a gauntlet, of knightliness. These squads were

recruited from Heydrich’s

Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security

Service). They already knew their mandate was broad. Their supreme leader had six weeks ago told General Wilhelm Keitel that “in the Government General of Poland there will have to be a tough struggle for national existence which will permit of no legal restraints.” In the high rhetoric of their leaders, the Einsatz soldiers knew, a struggle for national existence meant race warfare, just as Einsatz itself, Special Chivalrous Duty, meant the hot barrel of a gun.

The Einsatz squad destined for action in

Kazimierz that evening were an elite. They would leave to the pieceworkers of the Cracow SS the sordid task of searching the tenements for diamond rings and fur-trimmed coats. They themselves would take part in some more radically symbolic activity to do with the very instruments of Jewish culture—that is, with the ancient synagogues of Cracow.

They had for some weeks been waiting to exercise

Einsatz, as had the local SS

Sonderkommandos (or Special

Squads), also assigned to this first Cracow Aktion, and the Security Police of SD chief Czurda. The Army had negotiated with Heydrich and the higher police chiefs a stay of operations until Poland passed from military to civil rule. This passage of authority had now taken place, and throughout the country the Knights of Einsatz and the Sonderkommandos were unleashed to advance with an appropriate sense of racial history and professional detachment into the old Judaic ghettos.

At the end of the street where Oskar’s apartment stood rose the fortified rock outcrop of Wawel Castle from which Hans Frank ruled. And if Oskar’s Polish future is to be understood, there is a need to look at the linkage between Frank and the young field operatives of SS and SD, and then between Frank and the Jews of Cracow. In the first place, Hans Frank had no direct kingship over these special squads moving into Kazimierz. Heinrich Himmler’s police forces, wherever they worked, would always be their own lawmakers. As well as resenting their independent power, Frank also disagreed with them on practical grounds. He had as refined an abomination of the Jewish population as anyone in the Party and found the sweet city of Cracow intolerable because of its manifold Jews. In past weeks he’d complained when the authorities tried to use the Government General, and especially Cracow with its railway junction, as a dumping ground for Jews from the cities of the Wartheland, from @l@od@z and Poznan. But he did not believe the Einsatzgruppen or the Sonderkommandos, using current methods, could really make a dent in the problem. It was Frank’s belief, shared with Himmler in some stages of “Heini’s” mental vagaries, that there should be a single vast concentration camp for Jews, that it should at least be the city of Lublin and the surrounding countryside, or even more desirably, the island of Madagascar. The Poles themselves had always believed in

Madagascar. In 1937 the Polish Government

had sent a commission to study that high-spined island

so far from the coasts of their European

sensibilities. The French Colonial

Office, to which Madagascar belonged, was willing to make a deal, government to government, on such a resettlement, for a Madagascar crowded with Europe’s Jews would make a grand export market. The South African Defense Minister, Oswald Pirow, had acted for a time as negotiator between Hitler and France in the matter of the island. Therefore Madagascar, as a solution, had an honorable pedigree. Hans Frank had his money on it and not on the Einsatzgruppen.

For their sporadic raids and massacres could not

cut down the subhuman population of Eastern

Europe. During the time of the campaign around

Warsaw, the Einsatzgruppen had hung

Jews up in the synagogues of Silesia,

ruptured their systems with water torture, raided their homes on Sabbath evenings or feast days, cut off their prayer locks, set their prayer shawls afire, stood them against a wall. It had barely counted. There were many indications from history, Frank proposed, that threatened races generally outbred the genocides. The phallus was faster than the gun. What no one knew—neither the parties to the debate, the well-educated Einsatzgruppe boys in the back of one truck, the not-so-refined SS boys in the back of another, the evening worshipers in the synagogues, Herr Oskar Schindler on his way home to Straszewskiego to dress for dinner—what none of them knew and many a Party planner scarce hoped for was that a technological answer would be found—that a disinfectant chemical compound, Zyklon B, would supplant Madagascar as the solution. There had been an incident involving Hitler’s pet actress and director, Leni Riefenstahl. She had come to @L@od@z with a roving camera crew soon after the city fell and had seen a line of Jews—visible Jews, the prayer-locked variety—executed with automatic weapons. She had gone straight to the F@uhrer, who was staying at Southern Army headquarters, and made a scene. That was it—the logistics, the weight of numbers, the considerations of public relations; they made the Einsatz boys look silly. But Madagascar too would look ridiculous once means were discovered to make substantial inroads into the subhuman population of Central Europe at fixed sites with adequate disposal facilities which no fashionable moviemaker was likely to stumble upon.

As Oskar had forewarned Stern in the front office of Buchheister’s, the SS carried economic warfare from door to door in Jakoba and Izaaka and J@ozefa. They broke into apartments, dragged out the contents of closets, smashed the locks on desks and dressers. They took valuables off fingers and throats and out of watch fobs. A girl who would not give up her fur coat had her arm broken; a boy from Ciemna Street who wanted to keep his skis was shot.

Some of those whose goods were taken—unaware that the SS were operating outside legal restraint—would tomorrow complain at police stations. Somewhere, history told them, was a senior officer with a little integrity who would be embarrassed and might even discipline some of these unruly fellows. There would have to be an investigation into the business of the boy in Ciemna and the wife whose nose was broken with a truncheon. While the SS were working the apartment buildings, the Einsatzgruppe squad moved against the fourteenth-century synagogue of Stara Bo@zn@ica. As they expected, they found at prayer there a congregation of traditional Jews with beards and sidelocks and prayer shawls. They collected a number of the less Orthodox from surrounding apartments and drove them in as well, as if they wanted to measure the reaction of one group to the other.

Among those pushed across the threshold of Stara Bo@zn@ica was the gangster Max Redlicht, who would not otherwise have entered an ancient temple or been invited to do so. They stood in front of the Ark, these two poles of the same tribe who would on a normal day have found each other’s company offensive. An Einsatz NCO opened the Ark and took out the parchment Torah scroll. The disparate congregation on the synagogue floor were to file past and spit at it. There was to be no faking—the spittle was to be visible on the calligraphy.

The Orthodox Jews were more rational about it than

those others, the agnostics, the liberals, the

self-styled Europeans. It was apparent to the

Einsatz men that the modern ones balked in

front of the scroll and even tried to catch their

eye as if to say, Come on, we’re all too

sophisticated for this nonsense. The SS men had

been told in their training that the European character of

liberal Jews was a tissue-thin facade, and in

Stara Bo@zn@ica the backsliding reluctance

of the ones who wore short haircuts and

contemporary clothes went to prove it.

Everyone spat in the end except Max

Redlicht. The Einsatzgruppe men may have

seen this as a test worth their time—to make a man

who visibly does not believe renounce with

spittle a book he views intellectually as

antique tribal drivel but which his blood

tells him is still sacred. Could a Jew be

retrieved from the persuasions of his ridiculous blood? Could he think as clearly as Kant?

That was the test.

Redlicht would not pass it. He made a little speech. “I’ve done a lot. But I won’t do that.”

They shot him first, and then shot the rest anyway and set fire to the place, making a shell of the oldest of all Polish synagogues.

CHAPTER 5

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

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

Blond hair piled up above her pretty,

foxy, vividly made-up face, Victoria

Klonowska looked like one of those lighthearted girls to whom the inconveniences of history are a temporary intrusion into the real business of life. This autumn of simple clothes, Klonowska was frivolous in her jacket and frilled blouse and slim skirt. Yet she was hardheaded, efficient, and adroit. She was a nationalist too, in the robust Polish style. She would in the end negotiate with the German dignitaries for her Sudeten lover’s release from SS institutions. But for the moment Oskar had a less risky job for her. He mentioned that he would like to find a good bar or cabaret in Cracow where he could take friends. Not contacts, not senior people from the Armaments Inspectorate. Genuine friends. Somewhere lively where middle-aged officials would not turn up. Did Klonowska know of such a place?

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

alcove behind a curtain for private parties under

cover of the tribal rhythms of the band. For finding this

music club, Oskar nicknamed Klonowska

“Columbus.” The Party line on jazz was that it

not only was artistically decadent but expressed

an African, a subhuman animality. The

ump-pa-pa of Viennese waltzes was the

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

surveyor from the Government General’s Division

of the Interior. He had marked out the boundaries of

Oskar’s enamel factory in Zablocie. At

the back of Oskar’s plant, Deutsche

Email Fabrik (Def), stood a vacant

area where two other manufactories abutted, a box factory and a radiator plant. Schindler had been delighted to find that most of the waste area belonged, according to the surveyor, to DEF. Visions of economic expansion danced in his head. The surveyor had, of course, been invited because he was a decent fellow, because you could talk to him, because he might be handy to know for future building permits.

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

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

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

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

turned naturally to the subject that bemused or

obsessed all levels of the civil

bureaucracy. The Jews.

Toffel and Reeder had spent the day at

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

There is a persistent rumor, said Toffel, that

we are at war. And in the midst of it the

Incorporated Territories are too damn

simon-pure to put up with a few Poles and a half-million Jews. “The whole Ostbahn system,” said Toffel, “has to be turned over to delivering them to us.”

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

The SS, Toffel said, had reserved the entire rail system from November 15 on. Across his desk in Pomorska Street, he said,

had crossed copies of angry SS memoranda

addressed to Army officials and complaining that the

Army was welching on its deal, had gone two

weeks over schedule in its use of the

Ostbahn. For Christ’s sake, Toffel

asked, shouldn’t the Army have first use, for as long as it liked, of the railway system?

How else is it to deploy east and west? Toffel asked, drinking excitedly. On bicycles?

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

Soon such shipments wouldn’t be worth talking about:

transports of humans would become a clich‘e of resettlement policy. But on the evening of Oskar’s Christmas party, they were still a novelty.

“They call it,” said Toffel, “concentration.

That’s the word you find in the documents.

Concentration. I call it bloody obsession.”

The owner of the jazz club brought in plates of

herring and sauce. The fish went down well with the

fiery liquor, and as they wolfed it, Gebauer

spoke about the Judenrats, the Jewish

councils set up in each community on the order

of Governor Frank. In cities like Warsaw

and Cracow the Judenrat had twenty-four

elected members personally responsible for the

fulfillment of the orders of the regime. The

Judenrat of Cracow had been in existence for

less than a month; Marek

Biberstein, a respected municipal

authority, had been appointed its president. But, Gebauer remarked, he had heard that it had already approached Wawel Castle with a plan for a roster of Jewish labor. The Judenrat would supply the labor details for digging ditches and latrines and clearing snow. Didn’t everyone find that excessively cooperative of them?

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

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

Gebauer seemed to be out to mislead Toffel and

Reeder by pushing the point, by seeming more

passionately analytic about Jews than he

really was. “I’ll tell you what I mean

by cooperation,” he said. “Frank passes an

edict demanding that every Jew in the Government

General wear a star. That edict’s only a

few weeks old. In Warsaw you’ve got a

Jewish manufacturer churning them out in washable plastic at three z@loty each. It’s as if they’ve got no idea what sort of law it is. It’s as if the thing were an emblem of a bicycle club.”

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

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

“I don’t believe they’ll ever see

Madagascar,” said Gebauer.

Oskar demanded a change of subject.

Wasn’t it .his party?

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

Later they would have more positive uses.

CHAPTER 6

The Aktion of the night of December 4 had convinced Stern that Oskar Schindler was that rarity, the just Goy. There is the Talmudic legend of the Hasidei Ummot Ha-olam, the Righteous of the Nations, of whom there are said to be—at any point in the world’s history—thirty-six. Stern did not believe literally in the mystical number, but the legend was psychologically true for him, and he believed it a decent and wise course to try to make of Schindler a living and breathing sanctuary.

The German needed capital—the Rekord plant had been partially stripped of machinery, except for one small gallery of metal presses, enamel bins, lathes, and furnaces. While Stern might be a substantial spiritual influence on Oskar, the man who put him in touch with capital on good terms was Abraham Bankier, the office manager of Rekord, whom Oskar had won over.

The two of them—big, sensual Oskar and squat, elfin Bankier—went visiting possible investors. By a decree of November 23, the bank and safe deposits of all Jews were held by the German administration, in fixed trust, without allowing the owner any right of access or interest. Some of the wealthier Jewish businessmen, those who knew anything about history, kept secret funds in hard currencies. But they could tell that for a few years under Governor Hans Frank, currencies would be risky;

portable wealth—diamonds, gold, trade goods

--would be desirable.

Around Cracow there were a number of men Bankier knew who were willing to put up investment capital in return for a guaranteed quantity of product. The deal might be an investment of 50,000 z@loty in return for so many kilos of pots and pans a month, delivery to begin July 1940 and to continue for a year. For a Cracow Jew, given Hans Frank in the Wawel, kitchenware was safer and more disposable than z@loty. The parties to these contracts—Oskar, the investor, Bankier as middleman—brought away from these arrangements nothing, not even deal memoranda. Full-fledged contracts were of no use and could not be enforced anyhow. Nothing could be enforced. It all depended on Bankier’s accurate judgment of this Sudeten manufacturer of enamelware. The meetings would take place perhaps in the investor’s apartment in the Centrum of Cracow, the old inner city. The Polish landscapists the investor’s wife adored, the French novels his bright and fragile daughters savored would glow in the light of the transaction. Or else the investing gentleman had already been thrown out of his apartment and lived in poorer quarters in Podg@orze. And he would be a man already in shock—his apartment gone and himself now an employee in his own business --and all this in a few months, the year not over yet.

At first sight, it seems a heroic embellishment of the story to say that Oskar was never accused of welching on these informal contracts. He would in the new year have a fight with one Jewish retailer over the quantity of product the man was entitled to take from DEF’S loading dock in Lipowa Street. And the gentleman would be critical of Oskar on those grounds to the end of his life. But that Oskar did not fulfill deals— that was never said.

For Oskar was by nature a payer, who somehow gave the impression that he could make limitless repayments out of limitless resources. In any case, Oskar and other German opportunists would make so much in the next four years that only a man consumed by the profit motive would have failed to repay what Oskar’s father would have called a debt of honor.

Emilie Schindler came up to Cracow, to visit her husband there for the first time, in the new year. She thought the city was the most delightful she had ever been in, so much more gracious and pleasant and old-fashioned than Brno with its clouds of industrial smoke.

She was impressed with her husband’s new apartment. The front windows looked across at the Planty, an elegant ring of parkland that ran right around the city following the route of the ancient walls long since knocked down. At the bottom of the street the great fortress of Wawel rose, and amidst all this antiquity was Oskar’s modern apartment. She looked around at Mrs. Pfefferberg’s fabrics and wall hangings. His new success was tangible in them.

“You’ve done very well in Poland,” she said. Oskar knew that she was really talking about the matter of the dowry, the one her father had refused to pay a dozen years back when travelers from Zwittau had rushed into the village of Alt-Molstein with news that his son-in-law was living and loving like an unmarried man. His daughter’s marriage had become exactly the marriage he had feared it would, and he was damned if he’d pay. And though the absence of the 400,000 RM. had altered Oskar’s prospects a little, the gentleman farmer of Alt-Molstein did not know how the nonpayment would pain his daughter, make her even more defensive, nor that twelve years later, when it no longer counted for Oskar, it would be still at the front of Emilie’s mind.

“My dear,” Oskar was always growling, “I never needed the damn money.”

Emilie’s intermittent relations with Oskar seem to have been those of a woman who knows her husband is not and will not be faithful, but who nonetheless doesn’t want evidence of his affairs thrust under her nose. She must have moved warily in Cracow, going to parties where Oskar’s friends would surely know the truth, would know the names of the other women, the names she did not really want to hear. One day a young Pole—it was Poldek

Pfefferberg, who had nearly shot her husband, but

she could not know that—arrived at the door of the apartment

with a rolled-up rug over his shoulder. It was a

black-market rug from Istanbul via

Hungary, and Pfefferberg had been

given the job of finding it by Ingrid, who had moved out for the duration of Emilie’s visit.

“Is Frau Schindler in?” asked

Pfefferberg. He always referred to Ingrid as Frau Schindler because he thought it was less offensive.

“I am Frau Schindler,” said Emilie,

knowing what the question meant.

Pfefferberg showed some sensitivity in covering up. Actually he did not need to see Frau Schindler, though he’d heard so much about her from Herr Schindler. He had to see Herr Schindler about some business matter.

Herr Schindler wasn’t in, said Emilie.

She offered Pfefferberg a drink, but he hastily refused. Emilie knew what that meant too. That the young man was just a little shocked by Oskar’s personal life and thought it indecent to sit and drink with the victim.

The factory Oskar had leased was across the river in Zablocie at No. 4 Lipowa Street. The offices, which faced the street, were modern in design, and Oskar thought it might be possible and convenient for him to move in at some time, to have an apartment on the third floor, even though the surroundings were industrial and not as exhilarating as Straszewskiego Street.

When Oskar took over the Rekord works,

renaming it Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik,

there were forty-five employees involved in a

modest output of kitchenware. Early in the new

year he received his first Army contracts. They were

no surprise. He had cultivated various

influential Wehrmacht engineers who sat on

the Main Armaments Board of General

Schindler’s Armaments Inspectorate. He had

gone to the same parties and taken them to dinner at the

Cracovia Hotel. There are photographs of

Oskar sitting with them at expensive tables,

everyone smiling urbanely at the camera, everyone

well fed, generously liquored, and the officers

elegantly uniformed. Some of them put the right

stamps on his bids, and wrote the crucial letters

of recommendation to General Schindler, merely out

of friendship and because they believed Oskar had the

plant and would deliver. Others were influenced

by gifts, the sort of gifts Oskar would always

proffer to officials—cognac and carpets,

jewelry and furniture and hampers of

luxury food. As well as that, it became known that General Schindler was acquainted withand liked very much his enamelware-producing namesake. Now, with the authority of his lucrative Armaments Inspectorate contracts, Oskar was permitted to expand his plant. There was room. Beyond the lobby and offices of DEF stood two large industrial lofts. Some of the floor space in the building on the left as you emerged from the lobby into the interior of the factory was occupied by present production. The other building was totally empty. He bought new machinery, some locally, some from the homeland. Apart from the military demand, there was the all-devouring black market to serve. Oskar knew now that he could be a magnate.

By midsummer of 1940 he would be employing 250 Poles and would be faced with instituting a night shift. Herr Hans Schindler’s farm-machinery plant in Zwittau had at the best of times employed 50. It is a sweet thing to outstrip a father whom you haven’t forgiven. At times throughout the year, Itzhak Stern would call on Schindler to arrange employment for some young Jew—a special case; an orphan from @l@od@z; the daughter of a clerk in one of the departments of the Judenrat (jewish Council). Within a few months, Oskar was employing 150 Jewish workers and his factory had a minor reputation as a haven.

It was a year, like each succeeding year for the rest of the war, when Jews would be looking for some employment considered essential to the war effort. In April, Governor General Frank had decreed an evacuation of Jews from his capital, Cracow. It was a curious decision, since the Reich authorities were still moving Jews and Poles back into the Government General at the rate of nearly 10,000 a day. Yet conditions in Cracow, Frank told his cabinet, were scandalous. He knew of German divisional commanders who had to live in apartment buildings that contained Jewish tenants. Higher officials were also subjected to the same scandalous indignity. Over the next six months, he promised, he would make Cracow judenfrei (free of Jews). There would be a permitted remnant of 5,000 to 6,000 skilled Jewish workers.

All the rest were to be moved into other cities in the Government General, into Warsaw or Radom, Lublin, or Czestochowa. Jews could immigrate voluntarily to the city of their choice as long as they did it before August 15. Those still left in the city after that date would be trucked out with a small amount of luggage to whatever place suited the administration. From November 1, said Hans Frank, it would be possible for the Germans of Cracow to breathe “good German air,” to walk abroad without seeing the streets and lanes “crawling with Jews.”

Frank would not manage that year to reduce the Jewish population to quite so low a level; but when his plans were first announced, there was a rush among the Jews of Cracow, especially among the young, to acquire skilled qualifications. Men like Itzhak Stern, official and unofficial agents of the Judenrat, had already developed a list of sympathizers, Germans to whom they could appeal. Schindler was on that list; so was Julius Madritsch, a Viennese who had recently managed to get himself released from the Wehrmacht and taken up the post of Treuh@ander of a plant manufacturing military uniforms.

Madritsch could see the benefits of Armaments Inspectorate’s contracts and now intended to open a uniform factory of his own in the suburb of Podg@orze. In the end he would make an even larger fortune than Schindler, but in the annus mirabilis of 1940 he was still on a salary. He was known to be humane—that was all. By November 1, 1940, Frank had managed to move 23,000 Jewish volunteers out of Cracow. Some of them went to the new ghettos in Warsaw and @l@od@z. The gaps at table, the grieving at railway stations can be imagined, but people took it meekly, thinking, We’ll do this, and that will be the brunt of what they ask. Oskar knew it was happening, but, like the Jews themselves, hoped it was a temporary excess.

That year would very likely be the most industrious of Oskar’s life—a year spent building the place up from a bankrupt manufactory to a company government agencies could take seriously. As the first snows fell, Schindler noticed and was irritated when, on any given day, 60 or more of his Jewish employees would be absentees. They would have been detained by SS squads on the way to work and employed in clearing snow. Herr Schindler visited his friend Toffel at SS headquarters in Pomorska Street to complain.

On one day, he told Toffel, he

had 125 absentees.

Toffel confided in him. “You’ve got to understand that some of these fellows here don’t give a damn about production. To them it’s a matter of national priority that Jews be made to shovel snow. I don’t understand it myself ... it’s got a ritual significance for them, Jews shoveling snow. And it’s not just you, it’s happening to everyone.” Oskar asked if all the others were complaining too. Yes, said Toffel. However, he said, an economic big shot from the SS Budget and Construction Office had come for lunch in Pomorska and said that to believe the Jewish skilled worker had a place in Reich economics was treasonable. “I think you’re going to have to put up with a lot of snow shoveling yet, Oskar.”

Oskar, for the moment, assumed the stance of the outraged patriot, or perhaps of the outraged profiteer. “If they want to win the war,” said Oskar, “they’d have to get rid of SS men like that.”

“Get rid of them?” asked Toffel. “For Christ’s sake, they’re the bastards who’re on top.”

As a result of such conversations, Oskar became an advocate of the principle that a factory owner should have unimpeded access to his own workers, that these workers should have access to the plant, that they should not be detained or tyrannized on their way to and from the factory. It was, in Oskar’s eyes, a moral axiom as much as an industrial one. In the end, he would apply it to its limit at Deutsche Email Fabrik.

CHAPTER 7

Some people from the big cities—from Warsaw and @l@od@z with their ghettos and Cracow with Frank’s commitment to making it judenfrei— went to the countryside to lose themselves among the peasants. The Rosner brothers, Cracovian musicians who would come to know Oskar well, settled in the old village of Tyniec. It was on a pretty bend of the Vistula, and an old Benedictine abbey on a limestone cliff hung above it. It was anonymous enough for the Rosners, though. It had a few Jewish storekeepers and Orthodox artisans, with whom nightclub musicians had little to converse about. But the peasants, busy with the tedium of the harvest, were as pleased as the Rosners could have hoped to find musicians in their midst.

They’d come to Tyniec not from Cracow, not from that

great marshaling point outside the botanical

gardens in Mogilska Street where young SS men

pushed people onto trucks and called out bland and lying

promises about the later delivery of all

adequately labeled baggage. They had come in

fact from Warsaw, where they had been enjoying an

engagement at the Basilisk. They had left the

day before the Germans sealed up the Warsaw ghetto

--Henry and Leopold and Henry’s wife, Manci, and five-year-old son, Olek. The idea of a south Polish village like

Tyniec, not far from their native Cracow, appealed to the brothers. It offered the option, should conditions improve, of catching a bus into Cracow and finding work. Manci Rosner, an Austrian girl, had brought with her her sewing machine, and the Rosners set up a little clothing business in Tyniec. In the evenings they played in the taverns and became a sensation in a town like that. Villages welcome and support occasional wonders, even Jewish ones. And the fiddle was, of all instruments, most venerated in Poland.

One evening a traveling Volksdeutscher

(german-speaking Pole) from Poznan heard the

brothers playing outside the inn. The

Volksdeutscher was a municipal official

from Cracow, one of those Polish Germans in whose

name Hitler had taken the country in the first

place. The Volksdeutscher told Henry

that the mayor of Cracow,

Obersturmbannf@uhrer Pavlu, and his

deputy, the renowned skier Sepp R@ohre, would be visiting the countryside at harvest time, and he would like to arrange for them to hear such an accomplished pair as the Rosners.

On an afternoon when the bound sheaves lay drowsing in fields as quiet and as abandoned as on Sunday, a convoy of limousines wound through Tyniec and up a rise to the villa of an absentee Polish aristocrat. On the terrace, the dapper Rosner brothers waited, and when all the ladies and gentlemen had been seated in a room that might once have been used for balls, they were invited to perform. Henry and Leopold felt both exultation and fear at the seriousness with which Obersturmbannf@uhrer Pavlu’s party had geared themselves for their playing. The women wore white dresses and gloves, the military officials full dress, the bureaucrats their winged collars. When people went to such trouble, it was easier to disappoint them. For a Jew, even to impose a cultural disappointment on the regime was a serious crime.

But the audience loved them. They were a characteristically gem@utlich crowd; they loved Strauss, the confections of Offenbach and Lehar, Andr‘e Messager and Leo Fall. At request time they grew mawkish.

And as Henry and Leopold performed, the ladies and gentlemen drank champagne from long-stemmed flutes brought in by hamper. Once the official recital had finished, the brothers were taken down the hill to where the peasants and the soldiers of the escort had been gathered. If there was to be some crude racial demonstration, it would take place here. But again, once the brothers had climbed onto a wagon and looked the crowd in the eye, Henry knew they would be safe. The pride of the peasants, partly a national thing—

the Rosners being for the night a credit to Polish culture—all that protected them. It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Manci, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.

When it was finished, a middle-aged SS

NCO—A Rottenf@uhrer (a junior

noncommissioned SS rank) perhaps—Henry not being as familiar as he might become with the gradations of SS rank—approached them as they stood by the wagon receiving congratulations. He nodded to them and barely smiled. “I hope you have a nice harvest holiday,” he said, bowed, and left.

The brothers stared at each other. As soon as the SS man was out of hearing, they gave in to the temptation to discuss his meaning. Leopold was convinced. “It’s a threat,” he said. It went to show what they had feared in their marrow when the Volksdeutsche official first spoke to them— that these days it didn’t do to stand out, to acquire a distinctive face. That was life in the country in 1940. The curtailment of a career, the rustic tedium, the scratching out of a trade, the occasional terror, the pull of that bright core called Cracow. To that, the Rosners knew, they would eventually return.

Emilie had returned home in the autumn, and when Stern next came to Schindler’s apartment it was Ingrid who brought the coffee. Oskar made no secret of his weaknesses, and never seemed to think that ascetic Itzhak Stern needed any apologia for Ingrid’s presence. Similarly, when the coffee was finished, Oskar went to the liquor cabinet and brought back a fresh bottle of brandy, setting it down on the table between his seat and Stern’s, as if Stern were really likely to help him drink it.

Stern had come that evening to tell Oskar that a family whom we shall call the C’s were spreading stories about him, old David and young Leon C, saying even on the streets in Kazimierz—let alone in parlors—that Oskar was a German gangster, a thug. When Stern passed on these accusations to Oskar, he didn’t use terms quite as vivid as that. The reason an initial is employed here instead of a fictionalized name is that in Cracow the whole range of Polish Jewish names were found, and that to employ any name other than the C’s’ real one might cause offense to the memory of some vanished family or to some living friend of Oskar’s. Oskar knew Stern wasn’t looking for a response, that he was just passing on intelligence.

But of course he felt he had to respond

anyway.

“I could spread stories about them,” said Oskar. “They’re robbing me blind. Ask Ingrid if you like.”

Ingrid was the C’s’ supervisor. She was a benign Treuh@ander and, being only in her twenties, commercially inexperienced. The rumor was that Schindler himself had got the girl appointed so that he would have an assured outlet for his kitchenware. The C’s, however, still did pretty well what they wanted with their company. If they resented the idea that it was held in trust by the occupying power, no one could blame them for that. Stern waved Oskar’s suggestion away. Who was he to want to grill Ingrid? It wasn’t much use to compare notes with the girl anyhow. “They run rings around Ingrid,” said Oskar. They turned up at Lipowa Street for delivery of their orders and altered the invoices on the spot and took away more than they had paid for. “She says it’s all right,”

they’d tell the Schindler employees. “He’s arranged it with Ingrid.”

The son had in fact been gathering crowds and

telling them that Schindler had had the SS beat him

up. But his story varied—the beating was supposed

to have occurred at Schindler’s factory, in a

storeroom from which young C emerged with a black eye

and broken teeth. Then it was supposed to have

occurred on Limanowskiego, in front of

witnesses. A man called F, an employee

of Oskar’s and a friend of the C’s, had said he’d heard Oskar stamping up and down in his office in Lipowa Street and threatening to kill old David C. Then Oskar was said to have driven around to Stradom and raided the C cash register, to have stuffed his pockets with currency and told them that there was a New Order in Europe, and then to have beaten up old David in his office.

Was it possible that Oskar could let fly at old David C and land him in bed with bruises?

Was it likely he would call on friends in the

police to assault Leon? On one level

Oskar and the C’s were gangsters, selling tons of

kitchenware illegally, without sending records of

sales to the Transferstelle, without use of the

required merchandizing coupons called

Bezugschein. On the black market, the

dialogue was primitive and tempers were short. Oskar admitted he’d raged into the C’s’

showroom and called father and son thieves and indemnified himself out of the till for the kitchenware the C’s had taken without authorization. Oskar admitted he’d punched young Leon. But that was the limit of his admissions.

And the C’s, whom Stern had known since childhood—they had one of those reputations. Not exactly criminal, but sharp in dealing and, significant in this case, with a reputation for squealing when caught.

Stern knew Leon C’s bruises did exist. Leon wore them down the street and was willing to elaborate on them. The SS beating did take place somewhere or other, but it could have had a dozen causes. Stern not only did not believe that Oskar had begun asking the SS for that sort of favor, but also had the sense that to believe or disbelieve what was said to have happened in this case was irrelevant to his own wider purposes. It would become relevant only when and if Herr Schindler established a brutal pattern. For Stern’s purposes, occasional lapses did not count. Had Oskar been without sin, this apartment would not exist in its present form, and neither would Ingrid be waiting in the bedroom. And it is yet again one of those things which must be said, that Oskar would save all of them—Mr. and Mrs. C, Leon C, Mr. H, Miss M, old C’s secretary—and that they would always admit that, but that they would also and always stick to their story of the bruises. That evening Itzhak Stern also brought news of Marek Biberstein’s jail sentence. He had got two years in the prison in Montelupich Street, this Marek Biberstein who was the president of the Judenrat, or who had been until his arrest. In other cities the Judenrat was already cursed by the general Jewish population, for its main work had become the drawing up of lists for forced labor, for transfers to camps. The Judenrats were regarded by the German administration as organs of its will, but in Cracow, Marek Biberstein and his cabinet still saw themselves as buffers between the office of the military mayor of Cracow, Schmid and later Pavlu, on one hand, and the Jewish inhabitants of the city on the other. In the Cracow German newspaper of March 13, 1940, a Dr. Dietrich Redecker said that on a visit to the Judenrat office he was struck by the contrast between its carpet and plush chairs and the poverty and squalor of the Jewish quarter in Kazimierz. But Jewish survivors do not remember the first Cracow Judenrat as men who cut themselves off from the people. Hungry for revenue, however, they had made the mistake the Judenrats of @l@od@z and Warsaw had made before them, permitting the affluent to buy their way off forced-labor lists, forcing the poor onto the roster in return for soup and bread. But even later, in 1941, Biberstein and his council still had the respect of the Jews of Cracow.

That first membership of the Judenrat consisted of twenty-four men, most of them intellectuals. Each day, on his way to Zablocie, Oskar passed their corner office in Podg@orze into which were crowded a number of secretariats.

In the manner of a cabinet, each member of the council took care of a different aspect of government. Mr. Schenker had charge of taxes, Mr. Steinberg of buildings—an essential job in a society where people drifted in and out, this week trying the option of refuge in some small village, next week walking back to town surfeited with the narrowness of the peasants. Leon Salpeter, a pharmacist by profession, had charge of one of the socialwelfare agencies. There were secretariats for food, cemeteries,

health, travel documentation, economic

affairs, administrative services, culture,

even—in the face of the ban on schooling—of education.

Biberstein and his council believed on principle that the Jews who were expelled from Cracow would end up in worse places, and so they decided to fall back on an ancient stratagem: bribery. The hard-up Judenrat treasury allocated 200,000 z@loty for the purpose. Biberstein and the Housing Secretary, Chaim Goldfluss, had sought out an intermediary, in this case a Volksdeutscher named Reichert, a man who had contacts in the SS and the city administration. Reichert’s task was to pass on the money to a series of officials beginning with Obersturmf@uhrer (an SS rank equivalent to first lieutenant) Seibert, the liaison officer between the Judenrat and the city government. In return for the money, the officials were to permit another 10,000 Jews of the Cracow community to remain at home, despite Frank’s order. Whether Reichert had insulted officials by retaining too large a percentage for himself and making too low an offer, or whether the gentlemen involved felt that Governor Frank’s most cherished ambition to render his city judenfrei made the taking of bribes too perilous, no one could tell from the court proceedings. But Biberstein had got two years in Montelupich, Goldfluss six months in Auschwitz. Reichert himself had got eight years. Yet everyone knew he would have a softer time of it than the other two.

Schindler shook his head at the idea of putting 200,000 z@loty on such a fragile hope.

“Reichert is a crook,” he murmured. Just ten minutes before, they had been discussing whether he and the C’s were crooks and had let the question stand. But there was no doubt about Reichert. “I could have told them Reichert was a crook,” he kept insisting. Stern commented—as a philosophic principle

--that there were times when the only people left to do business with were crooks. Schindler laughed at that—a wide, toothy, almost rustic laugh. “Thank you very much, my friend,” he told Stern.

CHAPTER 8

It wasn’t such a bad Christmas that year. But there was a wistfulness, and snow lay like a question in the parkland across from Schindler’s apartment, like something posed, watchful and eternal, on the roof of the Wawel up the road and under the ancient facades of Kanonicza Street. No one believed anymore in a quick resolution—neither the soldiery nor the Poles nor the Jews on either side of the river.

For his Polish secretary Klonowska, that

Christmas, Schindler bought a poodle, a

ridiculous Parisian thing, acquired

by Pfefferberg. For Ingrid he bought jewelry and

sent some also to gentle Emilie down in

Zwittau. Poodles were hard to find,

Leopold Pfefferberg reported. But jewelry was a snap. Because of the times, gems were in a high state of movement.

Oskar seems to have pursued his simultaneous attachments to three women and sundry casual friendships with others, all without suffering the normal penalties that beset the womanizer. Visitors to his apartment cannot remember ever finding Ingrid sulking. She seems to have been a generous and complaisant girl. Emilie, with even greater grounds for complaint, had too much dignity to make the scenes Oskar richly deserved. If Klonowska had any resentment, it does not seem to have affected her manner in the front office of DEF nor her loyalty to the Herr Direktor. One could expect that in a life like Oskar’s, public confrontations between angry women would be commonplace. But no one among Oskar’s friends and workers—witnesses willing enough to admit and even in some cases chuckle over his sins of the flesh—remembers such painful confrontations, so often the fate of far more restrained philanderers than Oskar.

To suggest as some have that any woman would be pleased with partial possession of Oskar is to demean the women involved. The problem was, perhaps, that if you wanted to talk to Oskar about fidelity, a look of childlike and authentic bewilderment entered his eyes, as if you were proposing some concept like Relativity which could be understood only if the listener had five hours to sit still and concentrate. Oskar never had five hours and never understood.

Except in his mother’s case. That Christmas morning, for his dead mother’s sake, Oskar went to Mass at the Church of St. Mary. There was a space above the high altar where Wit Stwosz’s wooden tryptych had until weeks ago diverted worshipers with its crowd of jostling divinities. The vacancy, the pallor of the stone where the tryptych’s fixings had been, distracted and abashed Herr Schindler. Someone had stolen the tryptych. It had been shipped to Nuremberg. What an improbable world it had become!

Business was wonderful that winter just the same. In the next year his friends in the Armaments Inspectorate began to talk to Oskar about the possibility of opening a munitions division to manufacture antitank shells. Oskar was not as interested in shells as in pots and pans. Pots and pans were easy engineering. You cut out and pressed the metal, dipped it in the tubs, fired it at the right temperature. You didn’t have to calibrate instruments; the work was nowhere near as exacting as it would be for arms. There was no under-the-counter trade in shell casings, and Oskar liked under-the-counter—liked the sport of it, the disrepute, the fast returns, the lack of paperwork. But because it was good politics, he established a munitions section, installing a few immense Hilo machines, for the precision pressing and tooling of shell casings, in one gallery of his No. 2 workshop. The munitions section was so far developmental; it would take some months of planning, measuring, and test production before any shells appeared. The big Hilos, however, gave the Schindler works, as a hedge against the questionable future, at least the appearance of essential industry. Before the Hilos had even been properly calibrated, Oskar began to get hints from his SS

contacts at Pomorska Street that there was to be a ghetto for Jews. He mentioned the rumor to Stern, not wanting to arouse alarm. Oh, yes, said Stern, the word was out. Some people were even looking forward to it. We’ll be inside, the enemy will be outside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us, no one stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe. The edict, “Gen. Gub. 44/91,” posted on March 3, was published in the Cracow dailies and blared forth from loudspeakers on trucks in Kazimierz. Walking through his munitions department, Oskar heard one of his German technicians comment on the news. “Won’t they be better off in there?” asked the technician. “The Poles hate them, you know.”

The edict used the same excuse. As a

means of reducing racial conflict in the

Government General, a closed Jewish quarter would be set up. Enclosure in the ghetto would be compulsory for all Jews, but those with the proper labor card could travel from the ghetto to work, returning in the evening. The ghetto would be located in the suburb of Podg@orze just across the river. The deadline for entering it would be March 20. Once in, you would be allocated housing by the Judenrat, but Poles presently living in the area of the ghetto and who therefore had to move were to apply to their own housing office for apartments in other parts of town.

A map of the new ghetto was appended to the edict. The north side would be bounded by the river, the east end by the railway line to Lw@ow, the south side by the hills beyond Rekawka, the west by Podg@orze Place. It would be crowded in there. But there was hope that repression would take definite form now and provide people with a basis on which to plan their restricted futures. For a man like Juda Dresner, a textile wholesaler of Stradom Street who would come to know Oskar, the past year and a half had brought a bewildering succession of decrees, intrusions, and confiscations. He had lost his business to the Trust Agency, his car, his apartment. His bank account had been frozen. His children’s schools had been closed, or else they had been expelled from them. The family’s jewelry had been

seized, and their radio. He and his family were

forbidden entry to the center of Cracow, denied any

travel by train. They could use only

segregated trolley cars. His wife and

daughter and sons were subject to intermittent roundups for snow shoveling or other compulsory labor. You never knew, when you were forced into the back of a truck, if the absence would be a short or long one, or what sort of hair-trigger madmen might be supervising the work you would be forced to. Under this sort of regimen you felt that life offered no footholds, that you were slithering into a pit which had no bottom. But perhaps the ghetto was the bottom, the point at which it was possible to take organized thought. Besides, the Jews of Cracow were accustomed—in a way that could best be described as congenital— to the idea of a ghetto. And now that it had been decided, the very word had a soothing, ancestral ring. Their grandfathers had not been permitted to emerge from the ghetto of Kazimierz until 1867, when Franz Josef signed a decree permitting them to live wherever they wished in the city. Cynics said that the Austrians had needed to open up Kazimierz, socketed as it was in the elbow of the river so close to Cracow, so that Polish laborers could find accommodation close to their places of work. But Franz Josef was nonetheless revered by the older people from Kazimierz as energetically as he had been in the childhood household of Oskar Schindler.

Although their liberty had come so late, there was at the same time among the older Cracow Jews a nostalgia for the old ghetto of Kazimierz. A ghetto implied certain squalors, a crowding in tenements, a sharing of bathroom facilities, disputes over drying space on clotheslines. Yet it also consecrated the Jews to their own specialness, to a richness of shared scholarship, to songs and Zionist talk, elbow to elbow, in coffeehouses rich in ideas if not in cream. Evil rumors emanated from the ghettos of @l@od@z and Warsaw, but the Podg@orze ghetto as planned was more generous with space, for if you superimposed it on a map of the Centrum, you found that the ghetto was in area about half the size of the Old City—by no means enough space, but not quite strangulation. There was also in the edict a sedative clause that promised to protect the Jews from their Polish countrymen. Since the early 1930’s, a willfully orchestrated racial contest had prevailed in Poland. When the Depression began and farm prices fell, the Polish government had sanctioned a range of anti-Semitic political groups of the kind that saw the Jews as the base of all their economic troubles.

Sanacja, Marshal Pilsudski’s Moral

Cleansing Party, made an alliance after the old

man’s death with the Camp of National Unity, a

right-wing Jew-baiting group. Prime Minister

Skladkowski, on the floor of the Parliament in

Warsaw, declared, “Economic war on the

Jews? All right!” Rather than give the peasants

land reform, Sanacja encouraged them to look at

the Jewish stalls on market day as the symbol

and total explanation of Polish rural

poverty. There were pogroms against the Jewish

population in a series of towns, beginning in

Grodno in 1935. The Polish legislators

also entered the struggle, and Jewish industries were

starved under new laws on bank credit. Craft

guilds closed their lists to Jewish artisans,

and the universities introduced a quota, or

what they themselves—strong in the classics—called

numerus clausus aut nullus (a closed

number or nil), on the entry of Jewish

students. Faculties gave way to National Unity insistence that Jews be appointed special benches in the quadrangle and be exiled to the left side of the lecture halls. Commonly enough in Polish universities, the pretty and brilliant daughters of city Jewry emerged from lecture halls to have their faces savaged by a quick razor stroke delivered by a lean, serious youth from the Camp of National Unity.

In the first days of the German Occupation, the conquerors had been astounded by the willingness of Poles to point out Jewish households, to hold a prayer-locked Jew still while a German docked the Orthodox beard with scissors or, pinking the facial flesh as well, with an infantry bayonet. In March 1941, therefore, the promise to protect the ghetto dwellers from Polish national excess fell on the ear almost credibly. Although there was no great spontaneous joy among the Jews of Cracow as they packed for the move to Podg@orze, there were strange elements of homecoming to it, as well as that sense of arriving at a limit beyond which, with any luck, you wouldn’t be further uprooted or tyrannized. Enough so that even some people from the villages around Cracow, from Wieliczka, from Niepolomice, from Lipnica, Murowana, and Tyniec hurried to town lest they be locked out on March 20 and find themselves in a comfortless landscape. For the ghetto was by its nature, almost by definition, habitable, even if subject to intermittent attack. The ghetto represented stasis instead of flux. The ghetto would introduce a minor

inconvenience in Oskar Schindler’s life. It was

usual for him to leave his luxury apartment in

Straszewskiego, pass the limestone lump of the

Wawel stuck in the mouth of the city like a cork in

a bottle, and so roll down through Kazimierz,

over the Kosciuszko bridge and left toward his

factory in Zablocie. Now that route would be

blocked by the ghetto walls. It was a minor

problem, but it made the idea of maintaining an

apartment on the top floor of his office building

in Lipowa Street more reasonable. It wasn’t

such a bad place, built in the style of

Walter Gropius. Lots of glass and light,

fashionable cubic bricks in the entranceway. Whenever he did travel between the city and Zablocie in those March days before the deadline, he would see the Jews of Kazimierz packing, and on Stradom Street would pass, early in the grace period, families pushing barrows piled with chairs, mattresses, and clocks toward the ghetto. Their families had lived in Kazimierz since the time it was an island separated from the Centrum by a stream called Stara Wis@la. Since, in fact, the time Kazimier the Great had invited them to Cracow when, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death. Oskar surmised that their ancestors would have turned up in Cracow like that, pushing a barrowful of bedding, more than five hundred years before. Now they were leaving, it seemed, with the same barrowful. Kazimier’s invitation had been cancelled. During those morning journeys across town, Oskar noticed that the plan was for the city trolleys to go on rolling down Lw@owska Street, through the middle of the ghetto. All walls facing the trolley line were being bricked up by Polish workmen, and where there had been open spaces, cement walls were raised. As well, the trolleys would have their doors closed as they entered the ghetto and could not stop until they emerged again in the Umwelt, the Aryan world, at the corner of Lw@owska and @sw Kingi Street. Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation z@loty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.

From March 20, Oskar’s Jewish workers would

not receive any wages and were meant to live entirely

by their rations. Instead he would pay a fee to SS

headquarters in Cracow. Both Oskar and

Madritsch were uneasy about that, for they knew the

war would end and the slaveholders, just as in

America, would be shamed and stripped naked. The

dues he would pay to the police chiefs were the

standard SS Main Administrative and

Economic Office fees--7.50

Reichsmarks per day for a skilled worker, 5 RM. for unskilled and women. They were, by a margin, cheaper rates than those which operated on the open labor market. But for Oskar and Julius Madritsch both, the moral discomfort outweighed the economic advantage. The meeting of his wage bill was the least of Oskar’s worries that year. Besides, he was never an ideal capitalist. His father had accused him often in his youth of being reckless with money. While he was a mere sales manager, he’d maintained two cars, hoping that Hans would get to hear of it and be shocked. Now, in Cracow, he could afford to keep a stableful—a Belgian Minerva, a Maybach, an Adler cabriolet, a BMW. To be a prodigal and still be wealthier than your more careful father—that was one of the triumphs Schindler wanted out of life. In boom times the cost of labor was beside the point.

It was that way for Madritsch too. Julius Madritsch’s uniform mill stood on the western side of the ghetto, a mile or so from Oskar’s enamelworks. He was doing so well that he was negotiating to open a similar plant in Tarnow. He too was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, and his credit was so good that he had received a loan of a million z@loty from the Bank Emisyjny (issue Bank).

Whatever ethical queasiness they felt, it is

not likely that either entrepreneur, Oskar or

Julius, felt a moral obligation to avoid

employing additional Jews. That was a stance, and

since they were pragmatists, stances weren’t their

style. In any case, Itzhak Stern as well

as Roman Ginter, a businessman and

representative of the Relief Office of the Judenrat, called on Oskar and Julius both and begged them to employ more Jews, as many as could be fitted in. The objective was to give the ghetto an economic permanence. It was almost axiomatic, Stern and Ginter considered at that stage, that a Jew who had an economic value in a precocious empire hungry for skilled workers was safe from worse things. And Oskar and Madritsch agreed. So for two weeks the Jews trundled their barrows through Kazimierz and over the bridge into Podg@orze. Middle-class families whose Polish servants had come with them to help push the cart. At the bottom of the barrows lay the remaining brooches, the fur coats, under mattresses and kettles and skillets.

Crowds of Poles on Stradom and Starovislna Streets jeered and hurled mud. “The Jews are going, the Jews are going.

Goodbye, Jews.”

Beyond the bridge a fancy wooden gate greeted the new citizens of the ghetto. White with scalloped ramparts which gave it an Arabesque look, it had two wide arches for the trolleys coming from and going to Cracow, and at the side was a white sentry box. Above the arches, a title in Hebrew sought to reassure. JEWISH TOWN, it proclaimed. High barbed-wire fences had been strung along the front of the ghetto, facing the river, and open spaces were sealed with round-topped cement slabs nine feet tall, resembling strings of gravestones for the anonymous. At the ghetto gate the trundling Jew was met by a representative of the Judenrat Housing Office. If he had a wife and large family, a man might be assigned two rooms and have the use of a kitchen. Even so, after the good living of the Twenties and Thirties, it was painful to have to share your private life with families of different rituals, of another, distasteful musk and habits. Mothers screamed, and fathers said things could be worse and sucked on hollow teeth and shook their heads. In the one room, the Orthodox found the liberals an abomination. On March 20, the movement was complete. Everyone outside the ghetto was forfeit and in jeopardy. Inside, for the moment, there was living space.

Twenty-three-year-old Edith Liebgold was assigned a first-floor room to share with her mother and her baby. The fall of Cracow eighteen months back had put her husband into a mood verging on despair. He’d wandered away from home as if he wanted to look into the courses open to him. He had ideas about the forests, about finding a safe clearing. He had never returned.

From her end window Edith Liebgold could see

the Vistula through the barbed-wire barricade, but

her path to other parts of the ghetto, especially to the

hospital in Wegierska Street, took her

through Plac Zgody, Peace Square, the

ghetto’s only square. Here, on the second day of her life inside the walls, she missed by twenty seconds being ordered into an SS truck and taken to shovel coal or snow in the city. It was not just that work details often, according to rumor, returned to the ghetto with one or more fewer members than when they had left. More than this sort of odds, Edith feared being forced into a truck when, half a minute earlier, you’d thought you were going to Pankiewicz’ pharmacy, and your baby was due to be fed in twenty minutes. Therefore she went with friends to the Jewish Employment Office. If she could get shift work, her mother would mind the baby at night.

The office in those first days was crowded. The Judenrat had its own police force now, the Ordnungsdienst (or OD), expanded and regularized to keep order in the ghetto, and a boy with a cap and an armband organized waiting lines in front of the office. Edith Liebgold’s group were just inside the door, making lots of noise to pass the time, when a small middle-aged man wearing a brown suit and a tie approached her. They could tell that they’d attracted him with their racket, their brightness. At first they thought he intended to pick Edith up.

“Look,” he said, “rather than wait ... there is an enamel factory over in Zablocie.”

He let the address have its effect.

Zablocie was outside the ghetto, he was telling them. You could barter with the Polish workers there. He needed ten healthy women for the night shift. The girls made faces, as if they could afford to choose work and might even turn him down. Not heavy, he assured them. And they’ll teach you on the job. His name, he said, was Abraham Bankier. He was the manager. There was a German owner, of course. What sort of German? they asked. Bankier grinned as if he suddenly wanted to fulfill all their hopes. Not a bad sort, he told them.

That night Edith Liebgold met the other members of the enamel-factory night shift and marched across the ghetto toward Zablocie under the guard of a Jewish OD. In the column she asked questions about this Deutsche Email Fabrik. They serve a soup with plenty of body, she was told. Beatings? she asked. It’s not that sort of place, they said. It’s not like Beckmann’s razor-blade factory; more like Madritsch. Madritsch is all right, and Schindler too. At the entrance to the factory, the new night-shift workers were called out of the column by Bankier and taken upstairs and past vacant desks to a door marked HERR DIREKTOR. Edith Liebgold heard a deep voice tell them all to come in. They found the Herr Direktor seated on the corner of his desk, smoking a cigarette. His hair, somewhere between blond and light brown, looked freshly brushed; he wore a doublebreasted suit and a silk tie. He looked exactly like a man who had a dinner to go to but had waited specially to have a word with them. He was immense; he was still young. From such a Hitlerite dream, Edith expected a lecture on the war effort and increasing production quotas. “I wanted to welcome you,” he told them in Polish. “You’re part of the expansion of this factory.” He looked away; it was even possible he was thinking, Don’t tell them that—they’ve got no stake in the place.

Then, without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, “You’ll be safe working here. If you work here, then you’ll live through the war.” Then he said good night and left the office with them, allowing Bankier to hold them back at the head of the stairs so that the Herr Direktor could go down first and get behind the wheel of his automobile. The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.

The new women of DEF took their job instruction in a pleasant daze. It was as if some mad old Gypsy with nothing to gain had told them they would marry a count. The promise had forever altered Edith Liebgold’s expectation of life. If ever they did shoot her, she would probably stand there protesting, “But the Herr Direktor said this couldn’t happen.”

The work made no mental demands. Edith carried the enamel-dipped pots, hanging by hooks from a long stick, to the furnaces. And all the time she pondered Herr Schindler’s promise.

Only madmen made promises as absolute as that. Without blinking. Yet he wasn’t mad. For he was a businessman with a dinner to go to. Therefore, he must know. But that meant some second sight, some profound contact with god or devil or the pattern of things. But again, his appearance, his hand with the gold signet ring, wasn’t the hand of a visionary. It was a hand that reached for the wine; it was a hand in which you could somehow sense the latent caresses. And so she came back to the idea of his madness again, to drunkenness, to mystical explanations, to the technique by which the Herr Direktor had infected her with certainty.

Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and the odds weren’t good.

CHAPTER 9

That spring Schindler left his factory in Cracow and drove west in a BMW over the border and through the awakening spring forests to Zwittau. He had Emilie to see, and his aunts and sister. They had all been allies against his father; they were all tenders of the flame of his mother’s martyrdom. If there was a parallel between his late mother’s misery and his wife’s, Oskar Schindler—in his coat with the fur lapels, guiding the custom-made wheel with kid-gloved hands, reaching for another Turkish cigarette on the straight stretches of thawing road in the Jeseniks—did not see it. It was not a child’s business to see these things. His father was a god and subject to tougher laws. He liked visiting the aunts—the way they raised their hands palm upward in admiration of the cut of his suit. His younger sister had married a railway official and lived in a pleasant apartment provided by the rail authorities. Her husband was an important man in Zwittau, for it was a rail-junction town and had large freight yards. Oskar drank tea with his sister and her husband, and then some schnapps. There was a faint sense of mutual congratulation: the Schindler children hadn’t turned out so badly. It was, of course, Oskar’s sister who had nursed Frau Schindler in her last illness and who had now been visiting and speaking to their father in secret. She could do no more than make certain hints in the direction of a reconciliation. She did that over the tea and was answered by growls. Later, Oskar dined at home with Emilie. She was excited to have him there for the holiday. They could attend the Easter ceremonies together like an oldfashioned couple. Ceremonies was right, for they danced around each other ceremoniously all evening, attending to each other at table like polite strangers. And in their hearts and minds, both Emilie and Oskar were amazed by this strange marriage disability—that he could offer and deliver more to strangers, to workers on his factory floor than he could to her.

The question that lay between them was whether Emilie should join him in Cracow. If she gave up the apartment in Zwittau and put in other tenants, she would have no escape at all from Cracow. She believed it her duty to be with Oskar; in the language of Catholic moral theology, his absence from her house was a “proximate occasion of sin.” Yet life with him in a foreign city would be tolerable only if he was careful and guarded and sensitive to her feelings. The trouble with Oskar was that you could not depend on him to keep his lapses to himself. Careless, half-tipsy, half-smiling, he seemed sometimes to think that if he really liked some girl, you had to like her too. The unresolved question about her going to Cracow lay so oppressively between them that when dinner was finished he excused himself and went to a caf‘e in the main square. It was a place frequented by mining engineers, small businessmen, the occasional salesman turned Army officer. Gratefully he saw some of his biker friends there, most of them wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. He began drinking cognac with them. Some expressed surprise that a big husky chap like Oskar was not in uniform.

“Essential industry,” he growled.

“Essential industry.”

They reminisced about their motorcycle days.

There were jokes about the one he’d put together out of

spare parts when he was in high school. Its

explosive effects. The explosive effects

of his big 500cc Galloni. The noise

level in the caf‘e mounted; more cognac was being shouted for. From the dining annex old school friends appeared, that look on their faces as if they had recognized a forgotten laugh, as in fact they had.

Then one of them got serious. “Oskar, listen.

Your father’s having dinner in there, all by himself.” Oskar Schindler looked into his cognac. His face burned, but he shrugged.

“You ought to talk to him,” said someone. “He’s a shadow, the poor old bastard.”

Oskar said that he had better go home. He began to stand, but their hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down again. “He knows you’re here,” they said. Two of them had already gone through to the annex and were persuading old Hans Schindler over the remnants of his dinner. Oskar, in a panic, was already standing, searching in his pocket for the checkroom disk, when Herr Hans Schindler, his expression pained, appeared from the dining room propelled gently along by two young men. Oskar was halted by the sight. In spite of his anger at his father, he’d always imagined that if any ground was covered between himself and Hans, he’d be the one who’d have to cover it. The old man was so proud. Yet here he was letting himself be dragged to his son.

As the two of them were pushed toward each other, the

old man’s first gesture was an apologetic

half-grin and a sort of shrug of the eyebrows. The

gesture, by its familiarity, took Oskar

by storm. I couldn’t help it, Hans was

saying. The marriage and everything, your mother and me, it all went according to laws of its own. The idea behind the gesture might have been an ordinary one, but Oskar had seen an identical expression on someone’s face already that evening—on his own, as he shrugged to himself, facing the mirror in the hallway of Emilie’s apartment. The marriage and everything, it’s all going according to laws of its own. He had shared that look with himself, and here—three cognacs later—his father was sharing it with him.

“How are you, Oskar?” asked Hans

Schindler. There was a dangerous wheeze along the edge of the words. His father’s health was worse than he remembered it.

So Oskar decided that even Herr Hans Schindler was human—a proposition he had not been able to swallow at teatime at his sister’s; and he embraced the old man, kissing him on the cheek three times, feeling the impact of his father’s bristles, and beginning to weep as the corps of engineers and soldiers and past motorcyclists applauded the gratifying scene.

CHAPTER 10

The councilmen of Artur Rosenzweig’s

Judenrat, who still saw themselves as guardians of the breath and health and bread ration of the internees of the ghetto, impressed upon the Jewish ghetto police that they were also public servants. They tended to sign up young men of compassion and some education. Though at SS headquarters the OD was regarded as just another auxiliary police force which would take orders like any police force, that was not the picture most OD men lived by in the summer of ‘41.

It cannot be denied that as the ghettos grew older, the OD man became increasingly a figure of suspicion, a supposed collaborator. Some OD men fed information to the underground and challenged the system, but perhaps a majority of them found that their existence and that of their families depended increasingly on the cooperation they gave the SS. To honest men, the OD would become a corrupter. To crooks it was an opportunity.

But in its early months in Cracow, it seemed

a benign force. Leopold Pfefferberg could stand

as a token of the ambiguity of being a member. When

all education for Jews, even that organized by the

Judenrat, was abolished in December

1940, Poldek had been offered a job

managing the waiting lines and keeping the appointment book in the Judenrat housing office. It was a part-time job, but gave him a cover under which he could travel around Cracow with some freedom. In March 1941, the OD itself was founded with the stated purpose of protecting the Jews entering the Podg@orze ghetto from other parts of the city. Poldek accepted the invitation to put on the cap of the OD. He believed he understood its purpose—that it was not only to ensure rational behavior inside the walls but also to achieve that correct degree of grudging tribal obedience which, in the history of European Jewry, has tended to ensure that the oppressors will go away more quickly, will become forgetful so that, in the interstices of their forgetfulness, life may again become feasible.

At the same time Pfefferberg wore his OD

cap, he ran illegal goods—leatherwork,

jewelry, furs, currency—in and out of the

ghetto gate. He knew the Wachtmeister

at the gate, Oswald Bosko, a policeman

who had become so rebellious against the regime that he let raw materials into the ghetto to be made up into goods—garments, wine, hardware—and then let the goods out again to be sold in Cracow, all without even asking for a bribe.

On leaving the ghetto, the officials at the gate, the lounging schmalzownicks, or informers, Pfefferberg would take off the Judaic armband in some quiet alley before moving on to business in Kazimierz or the Centrum.

On the city walls, above fellow passengers’

heads in the trolleys, he would read the posters

of the day: the razor-blade advertisements, the

latest Wawel edicts on the harboring of

Polish bandits, the slogan “JEWS—LICE

--TYPHUS,” the billboard depicting a

virginal Polish girl handing food to a

hook-nosed Jew whose shadow was the shadow of the

Devil. “WHOEVER HELPS A JEW

HELPS SATAN.” Outside groceries

hung pictures of Jews mincing rats

into pies, watering milk, pouring lice into pastry, kneading dough with filthy feet. The fact of the ghetto was being validated in the streets of Cracow by poster art, by copywriters from the Propaganda Ministry. And Pfefferberg, with his Aryan looks, would move calmly beneath the artwork, carrying a suitcase full of garments or jewelry or currency.

Pfefferberg’s greatest coup had been last year, when Governor Frank had withdrawn 100-and 500-z@loty notes from circulation and demanded that existing notes of those denominations be deposited with the Reich Credit Fund. Since a Jew could exchange only 2,000 z@l., it meant that all notes held secretly—in excess of 2,000 and against the regulations—would no longer have any value. Unless you could find someone with Aryan looks and no armband who was willing on your behalf to join the long lines of Poles in front of the Reich Credit Bank.

Pfefferberg and a young Zionist friend gathered from ghetto residents some hundreds of thousands of z@loty in the proscribed denominations, went off with a suitcase full of notes, and came back with the approved Occupation currency, minus only the bribes they’d had to pay to the Polish Blue Police at the gate.

That was the sort of policeman Pfefferberg was. Excellent by the standards of Chairman Artur Rosenzweig; deplorable by the standards of Pomorska.

Oskar visited the ghetto in April—both from curiosity and to speak to a jeweler he had commissioned to make two rings. He found it crammed beyond what he had imagined—

two families to a room unless you were lucky enough to know someone in the Judenrat. There was a smell of clogged plumbing, but the women held off typhus by arduous scrubbing and by boiling clothes in courtyards. “Things are changing,” the jeweler confided in Oskar. “The OD have been issued truncheons.” As the administration of the ghetto, like that of all ghettos in Poland, had passed from the control of Governor Frank to that of Gestapo Section 4B, the final authority for all Jewish matters in Cracow was now SS Oberf@uhrer Julian Scherner, a hearty man of somewhere between forty-five and fifty, who in civilian clothes and with his baldness and thick lenses looked like a nondescript bureaucrat. Oskar had met him at German cocktail parties. Scherner talked a great deal—not about the war but about business and investment. He was the sort of functionary who abounded in the middle ranks of the SS, a sport, interested in liquor, women, and confiscated goods. He could sometimes be discovered wearing the smirk of his unexpected power like a childish jam stain in the corner of the mouth. He was always convivial and dependably heartless. Oskar could tell that Scherner favored working the Jews rather than killing them, that he would bend rules for the sake of profit, but that he would fulfill the general drift of SS policy, however that might develop. Oskar had remembered the police chief last Christmas, sending him half a dozen bottles of cognac. Now that the man’s power had expanded, he would rate more this year. It was because of this shift of power—the SS becoming

not simply the arm of policy but the makers of it as

well—that beneath the high June sun the OD was

taking on a new nature. Oskar, merely

by driving past the ghetto, became familiar with a

new figure, a former glazier named Symche

Spira, the new force in the OD. Spira was of

Orthodox background and by personal history as

well as temperament despised the Europeanized

Jewish liberals who were still found on the

Judenrat Council. He took his orders not

from Artur Rosenzweig but from

Untersturmf@uhrer Brandt and SS

headquarters across the river. From his conferences with Brandt, he returned to the ghetto with increased knowingness and power. Brandt had asked him to set up and lead a Political Section OD, and he recruited various of his friends for it. Their uniform ceased to be the cap and armband and became instead gray shirt, cavalry breeches, Sam Browne belt, and shiny SS boots.

Spira’s Political Section would go beyond the demands of grudging cooperation and would be full of venal men, men with complexes, with close-held grudges about the social and intellectual slights they’d received in earlier days from respectable middleclass Jewry. Apart from Spira, there were Szymon Spitz and