Schindler's Ark

Marcel Zellinger, Ignacy Diamond,

David Gutter the salesman, Forster and

Gr@uner and Landau. They settled in to a career of extortion and of making out for the SS lists of unsatisfactory or seditious ghetto dwellers.

Poldek Pfefferberg now wanted to escape the force. There was a rumor that the Gestapo would make all OD men swear an oath to the F@uhrer, after which they would have no grounds for disobedience. Poldek did not want to share a profession with gray-shirted Spira or with Spitz and Zellinger, the makers of lists. He went down the street to the hospital at the corner of Wegierska to speak to a gentle physician named Alexander Biberstein, the official physician to the Judenrat. The doctor’s brother Marek had been that first president of the Council and was presently doing time in mournful Montelupich prison for currency violations and attempting to bribe officials. Pfefferberg begged Biberstein to give him a medical certificate so that he could leave the OD. It was difficult, Biberstein said.

Pfefferberg did not even look sick. It would be impossible for him to feign high blood pressure. Dr. Biberstein instructed him in the symptoms of a bad back. Pfefferberg took to reporting for duty severely stooped and using a cane.

Spira was outraged. When Pfefferberg had first asked him about leaving the OD, the police chief had pronounced—like a commander of some palace guard --that the only way out was on your shield. Inside the ghetto, Spira and his infantile friends were playing a game of Elite Corps. They were the Foreign Legion; they were the praetorians.

“We’ll send you to the Gestapo doctor,”

screamed Spira.

Biberstein, who had been aware of the shame in young Pfefferberg, had tutored him well. Poldek survived the Gestapo doctor’s inspection and was discharged from the OD

as suffering from an ailment likely to inhibit his good performance in crowd control. Spira, saying goodbye to officer Pfefferberg, expressed a contemptuous enmity. The next day, Germany invaded Russia.

Oskar heard the news illicitly on the BBC and knew that the Madagascar Plan was finished now. It would be years before there were ships for a solution like that. Oskar sensed that the event changed the essence of SS planning, for everywhere now the economists, the engineers, the planners of movements of people, the policemen of every stripe put on the mental habits appropriate not only to a long war, but to a more systematic pursuit of a racially impeccable empire.

CHAPTER 11

In an alley off Lipowa, its rear pointing toward the workshop of Schindler’s enamel plant, stood the German Box Factory. Oskar Schindler, always restless and hungry for company, used to stroll over there sometimes and chat with the Treuh@ander, Ernst Kuhnpast, or to the former owner and unofficial manager, Szymon Jereth. Jereth’s Box Factory had become the German Box Factory two years back according to the usual arrangement—no fees being paid, no documents to which he was signatory having been drawn up.

The injustice of that did not particularly worry Jereth anymore. It had happened to most of the people he knew. What worried him was the ghetto. The fights in the kitchens, the pitiless communality of life there, the stench of bodies, the lice that jumped onto your suit from the greasy jacket of the man whose shoulder you brushed on the stairs. Mrs. Jereth, he told Oskar, was deeply depressed. She’d always been used to nice things; she’d come from a good family in Kleparz, north of Cracow. And when you think, he told Oskar, that with all the pineboard I could build myself a place there. He pointed to the wasteland behind his factory. Workers played football there, vast, hard-running games in plentiful space. Most of it belonged to Oskar’s factory, the rest to a Polish couple named Bielski. But Oskar did not point that out to poor Jereth, or say either that he too had been preoccupied by that vacant space. Oskar was more interested in the implied offer of lumber. You can “alienate” as much pineboard as that? You know, said Jereth, it’s only a matter of paperwork.

They stood together at Jereth’s office window, considering the wasteland. From the workshop came the sound of hammering and whining power saws. I would hate to lose contact with this place, Jereth told Oskar. I would hate just to vanish into some labor camp and have to wonder from a distance what the damn fools were doing here. You can understand that, surely, Herr Schindler?

A man like Jereth could not foresee any deliverance. The German armies seemed to be enjoying limitless success in Russia, and even the BBC was having trouble believing that they were advancing into a fatal salient. The Armament Inspectorate orders for field kitchenware kept turning up on Oskar’s desk, sent on with the compliments of General Julius Schindler scribbled at the bottom of the covering letters, accompanied by the telephoned best wishes of sundry junior officers. Oskar accepted the orders and the congratulations in their own right, but took a contradictory joy from the rash letters his father was writing to him to celebrate their reconciliation. It won’t last, said Schindler senior. The man [Hitler] isn’t meant to last. America will come down on him in the end. And the Russians? My God, did anyone ever take the trouble to point out to the dictator just how many godless barbarians there are over there? Oskar, smiling over the letters, was not troubled by the conflicting pleasures—the commercial exhilaration of the Armaments Inspectorate contracts and the more intimate delight of his father’s subversive letters. Oskar sent Hans a monthly bank draft of 1,000 RM. in honor of filial love and sedition, and for the joy of largesse.

It was a fast and, still, almost a painless year. Longer hours than Schindler had ever worked, parties at the Cracovia, drinking bouts at the jazz club, visits to the gorgeous Klonowska’s apartment. When the leaves began to fall, he wondered where the year had gone. The impression of vanished time was augmented by the late summer and now by autumn rains earlier than usual. The asymmetric seasons would, by favoring the Soviets, affect the lives of all Europeans. But to Herr Oskar Schindler in Lipowa Street, weather was still simply weather. Then, in the butt end of 1941, Oskar found himself under arrest. Someone—one of the Polish shipping clerks, one of the German technicians in the munitions section, you couldn’t tell—had denounced him, had gone to Pomorska Street and given information. Two plainclothes Gestapo men drove up Lipowa Street one morning and blocked the entrance with their Mercedes as if they intended to bring all commerce at Emalia to an end. Upstairs, facing Oskar, they produced warrants entitling them to take all his business records with them. But they did not seem to have any commercial training. “Exactly what books do you want?” Schindler asked them.

“Cashbooks,” said one.

“Your main ledgers,” said the other.

It was a relaxed arrest; they chatted to Klonowska while Oskar himself went to get his cash journal and accounts ledger. Oskar was permitted time to scribble down a few names on a pad, supposedly the names of associates with whom Oskar had appointments which must now be cancelled. Klonowska understood, though, that they were a list of people to be approached for help in bailing him out.

The first name on the list was that of

Oberf@uhrer Julian Scherner; the

second, that of Martin Plathe of the Abwehr in Breslau. That would be a long-distance call. The third name belonged to the supervisor of the Ostfaser works, the drunken Army veteran Franz Bosch on whom Schindler had settled quantities of illegal kitchenware. Leaning over Klonowska’s shoulder, over her piled-up flaxen hair, he underlined Bosch’s name. A man of influence, Bosch knew and advised every high official who played the black market in Cracow. And Oskar knew that this arrest had to do with the black market, whose danger was that you could always find officials ready to be bribed, but you could never predict the jealousy of one of your employees.

The fourth name on the list was that of the German chairman of Ferrum AG of Sosnowiec, the company from which Herr Schindler bought his steel. These names were a comfort to him as the Gestapo Mercedes carried him to Pomorska Street, a kilometer or so west of the Centrum. They were a guarantee that he would not vanish into the system without a trace. He was not, therefore, as defenseless as the 1,000 ghetto dwellers who had been rounded up according to Symche Spira’s lists and marched beneath the frosty stars of Advent to the cattle cars at Prokocim Station. Oskar knew some heavy guns. The SS complex in Cracow was an

immense modern building, humorless, but not as

portentous as the Montelupich prison. Yet

even if you disbelieved the rumors of torture

attached to the place, the building confused the

arrestee as soon as he entered by its size, its

Kafkaesque corridors, by the numb threat of the

departmental names painted on the doors. Here you

could find the SS Main Office, the headquarters

of the Order Police, of Kripo, Sipo and

Gestapo, of SS Economy and Administration,

of Personnel, of Jewish Affairs, of Race

and Resettlement, of the SS Court, of

Operations, of SS Service, of the

Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom, of the Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans.

Somewhere in that hive a middle-aged Gestapo man, who seemed to have a more exact knowledge of accountancy than the arresting officers, began interviewing Oskar. The man’s manner was half-amused, like a customs official who finds that a passenger suspected of currency smuggling is really smuggling house plants for an aunt. He told Oskar that all the enterprises involved in war production were under scrutiny. Oskar did not believe it but said nothing. Herr Schindler could understand, the Gestapo man told him, that businesses supplying the war effort had a moral duty to devote all their product to that great enterprise—and to desist from undermining the economy of the Government General by irregular dealings.

Oskar murmured away in that peculiar rumble of his which could at the same time contain threat and bonhomie. “Do you imply, Herr Wachtmeister, that there are reports that my factory does not fulfill its quotas?”

“You live very well,” said the man, but with a concessive smile, and as if that were all right, it was acceptable for important industrialists to live well. And anyone who lives well, he pointed out ... well, we have to be sure that his standard of living derives entirely from legitimate contracts.

Oskar beamed at the Gestapo man. “Whoever gave you my name,” he said, “is a fool and is wasting your time.”

“Who’s the plant manager of DEF?” asked the Gestapo man, ignoring this.

“Abraham Bankier.”

“A Jew?”

“Of course. The business used to belong to relatives of his.”

These records might be adequate, said the Gestapo man. But if they wanted more, he presumed Herr Bankier could supply it.

“You mean you’re going to detain me?” asked Oskar. He began to laugh. “I want to tell you now,” he said, “when Oberf@uhrer Scherner and I are laughing about all this over a drink, I’ll tell him that you treated me with the utmost courtesy.”

The two who had made the arrest took him to the second floor, where he was searched and permitted to keep cigarettes and 100 z@l. to buy small luxuries. Then he was locked in a bedroom— one of the best they had, Oskar surmised, equipped with a washbasin and toilet and dusty draperies at the barred window—the sort of room they kept dignitaries in while interrogating them. If the dignitary was released, he could not complain about a room like this, any more than he could enthuse over it. And if he was found to be treacherous, seditious, or an economic criminal, then, as if the floor of this room opened like a trapdoor, he’d find himself waiting in an interrogation cell in the basement, sitting motionless and bleeding in one of the series of stalls they called tramways, looking ahead to Montelupich, where prisoners were hanged in their cells. Oskar considered the door. Whoever lays a hand on me, he promised himself, I’ll have him sent to Russia. He was bad at waiting. After an hour he knocked at the door from the inside and gave the Waffen SS man who answered 50 z@l. to buy him a bottle of vodka. It was, of course, three times the price of liquor, but that was Oskar’s method. Later in the day, by arrangement between Klonowska and Ingrid, a bag of toiletries, books, and pajamas arrived. An excellent meal was brought to him with a half-bottle of Hungarian wine, and no one came to disturb him or ask him a question. He presumed that the accountant was still slaving over the Emalia books. He would have enjoyed a radio on which to listen to the BBC news from Russia, the Far East, and the newly combatant United States, and he had the feeling that if he asked his jailers they might bring him one. He hoped the Gestapo had not moved into his apartment on Straszewskiego, to assess the furnishings and Ingrid’s jewelry. But by the time he fell asleep, he’d got to the stage where he was looking forward to facing interrogators.

In the morning he was brought a good breakfast— herring, cheese, eggs, rolls, coffee—

and still no one bothered him. And then the middle-aged SS auditor, holding both the cash journal and the accounts ledger, came to visit him.

The auditor wished him good morning. He hoped he had had a comfortable night. There had not been time to conduct more than a cursory examination of Herr Schindler’s records, but it had been decided that a gentleman who stood so high in the opinion of so many people influential in the war effort need not be too closely looked at for the moment. We have, said the SS man, received certain telephone calls. ... Oskar was convinced, as he thanked the man, that the acquittal was temporary. He received the ledgers and got his money handed back in full at the reception desk. Downstairs, Klonowska was waiting for him, radiant. Her liaison work had yielded this result, Schindler coming forth from the death house in his double-breasted suit and without a scratch. She led him to the Adler, which they had let her park inside the gate. Her ridiculous poodle sat on the back seat.

CHAPTER 12

The child arrived at the Dresners’, on the eastern side of the ghetto, late in the afternoon. She had been returned to Cracow by the Polish couple who had been taking care of her in the country. They had been able to talk the Polish Blue Police at the ghetto gate into allowing them entry on business, and the child passed as theirs.

They were decent people, and shamefaced at having brought her up to Cracow and the ghetto from the countryside. She was a dear girl; they were attached to her. But you couldn’t keep a Jewish child in the countryside anymore. The municipal authorities—

never mind the SS—WERE offering sums of 500 z@l. and upward for every Jew betrayed. It was one’s neighbors. You couldn’t trust your neighbors. And then not only would the child be in trouble, we’d all be. My God, there were areas where the peasants went out hunting Jews with scythes and sickles.

The child didn’t seem to suffer too much from whatever squalors the ghetto now imposed on her. She sat at a little table among screens of damp clothing and fastidiously ate the heel of bread Mrs. Dresner gave her. She accepted whatever endearments the women sharing the kitchen happened to utter. Mrs. Dresner noticed how strangely guarded the child was in all her answers.

She had her vanities, though, and like most

three-year-olds a passionately preferred

color. Red. She sat there in red cap, red

coat, small red boots. The peasants had

indulged her passion.

Mrs. Dresner made conversation by talking about the child’s real parents. They too had been living— in fact, hiding—in the countryside. But, said Mrs. Dresner, they were going to come and join everyone here in Cracow soon. The child nodded, but it didn’t seem to be shyness that kept her quiet.

In January her parents had been rounded up

according to a list supplied to the SS by Spira, and

while being marched to Prokocim Station had passed

a crowd of jeering Poles—“Bye-bye,

Jews.” They had dodged out of the column just like

two decent Polish citizens crossing the

street to watch the deportation of social

enemies, and had joined the crowd, jeered a little themselves, and then strolled off into the countryside around that outer suburb.

Now they too were finding life no safer out there and intended to sneak back into Cracow during the summer. The mother of “Redcap,” as the Dresner boys nicknamed her as soon as they got home with the work details from the city, was a first cousin of Mrs. Dresner’s. Soon Mrs. Dresner’s daughter, young

Danka, also got home from her work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe air base. Danka was going on fourteen, tall enough to have the Kennkarte (labor card) enabling her to work outside the ghetto. She enthused over the noncommittal child. “Genia, I know your mother, Eva. She and I used to go shopping for dresses together, and she’d buy me cakes at the patisserie in Bracka Street.”

The child kept to her seat, did not smile, looked ahead. “Madam, you’re mistaken. My mother’s name is not Eva. It’s Jasha.” She went on naming the names in the fictional Polish genealogy in which her parents and the peasants had schooled her in case the Blue Police or the SS ever questioned her. The family frowned at each other, brought to a standstill by the unusual cunning of the child, finding it obscene but not wanting to undermine it, since it might, before the week was out, be essential survival equipment. At suppertime Idek Schindel, the child’s uncle, a young doctor at the ghetto hospital in Wegierska Street, arrived. He was the sort of whimsical, half-teasing, and infatuated uncle a child needs. At the sight of him, Genia became a child, getting down off her chair to rush at him. If he were here, calling these people cousins, then they were cousins. You could admit now that you had a mother named Eva and that your grandparents weren’t really named Ludwik and Sophia.

Then Mr. Juda Dresner, purchasing officer of the Bosch plant, arrived home and the company was complete.

April 28 was Schindler’s birthday, and in

1942 he celebrated it like a child of the spring,

loudly, profligately. It was a big day at

DEF. The Herr Direktor brought in rare

white bread, regardless of expense, to be served with the noonday soup. The festivity spread into the outer office and to the workshops out back. Oskar Schindler, industrialist, was celebrating the general succulence of life. This, his thirty-fourth birthday, began early at Emalia. Schindler signaled it by walking through the outer office carrying three bottles of cognac under his arm to share with the engineers, the accountants, the draftsmen. Office workers in Accounts and Personnel had handfuls of cigarettes thrust at them, and by midmorning the handouts had spread to the factory floor. A cake was brought in from a patisserie, and Oskar cut it on Klonowska’s desk. Delegations of Jewish and Polish workers began to enter the office to congratulate him, and he heartily kissed a girl named Kucharska, whose father had figured in the Polish parliament before the war. And then the Jewish girls came up, and the men shaking hands, even Stern getting there somehow from the Progress Works where he was now employed, to take Oskar’s hand formally and find himself wrapped up in a rib-cracking embrace. That afternoon someone, perhaps the same malcontent as last time, contacted Pomorska and denounced Schindler for his racial improprieties. His ledgers might stand up to scrutiny, but no one could deny he was a “Jew-kisser.”

The manner of his arrest seemed more professional than the last. On the morning of the 29th, a Mercedes blocked the factory entrance and two Gestapo men, seeming somehow surer of their ground than the last two, met him crossing the factory yard. He was charged, they told him, with breaking the provisions of the Race and Resettlement Act. They wanted him to come with them. And no, there was no need for him to visit his office first.

“Do you have a warrant?” he asked them.

“We don’t need one,” they told him.

He smiled at them. The gentlemen should understand that if they took him away without a warrant, they would come to regret it.

He said it lightly, but he could tell by their demeanor that the level of threat in them had firmed and focused since last year’s half-comic detention. Last time the conversation at Pomorska had been about economic matters and whether they had been breached. This time you were dealing with grotesque law, the law of the lower guts, edicts from the black side of the brain. Serious stuff.

“We will have to risk regret,” one of the two told him.

He assessed their assurance, their perilous indifference to him, a man of assets, newly turned thirty-four. “On a spring morning,” he told them, “I can spare a few hours for driving.”

He comforted himself that he would again be put into one of those urbane cells at Pomorska. But when they turned right up Kolejowa, he knew that this time it would be Montelupich prison.

“I shall wish to speak to a lawyer,” he told them.

“In time,” said the driver.

Oskar had it on the reasonable word of one of his drinking companions that the Jagiellonian Institute of Anatomy received corpses from Montelupich. The wall of the place stretched a long block, and the ominous sameness of the windows of the third and fourth floors could be seen from the back seat of the Gestapo Mercedes. Inside the front gate and through the archway they came to an office where the SS clerk spoke in whispers, as if raised voices would set up head-splitting echoes along the narrow corridors. They took his cash, but told him it would be given to him during his imprisonment at a rate of 50 z@l. a day. No, the arresting officers told him, it was not yet time for him to call a lawyer.

Then they left, and in the corridor, under guard, he listened for the traces of screams which might, in this convent hush, spill out through the cracks of the Judas windows in the walls. He was led down a flight of stairs into a claustrophobic tunnel and past a string of locked cells, one with an open grille. Some half-dozen prisoners in shirt sleeves sat there, each in a separate stall, facing the rear wall so that their features could not be seen. Oskar noticed a torn ear. And someone was sniffling but knew better than to wipe his nose.

Klonowska, Klonowska, are you making your telephone calls, my love?

They opened a cell for him and he went in.

He had felt a minor anxiety that the place

might be crowded. But there was only one other

prisoner in the cell, a soldier wearing his

greatcoat up around his ears for warmth and seated on

one of the two low wooden bed frames, each with its

pallet. There were no washbasins, of course. A

water bucket and a waste bucket. And what

proved to be a Waffen SS

Standartenf@uhrer (an SS rank

equivalent to colonel) wearing a slight stubble, a stale, unbuttoned shirt under the overcoat, and muddy boots.

“Welcome, sir,” said the officer with a crooked grin, raising one hand to Oskar. He was a handsome fellow, a few years older than Oskar. The odds were in favor of his being a plant. But one wondered why they had put him in uniform and provided him with such exalted rank. Oskar looked at his watch, sat, stood, looked up at the high windows. A little light from the exercise yards filtered in, but it was not the sort of window you could lean against and relieve the intimacy of the two close bunks, of sitting hands on knees facing each other.

In the end they began to talk. Oskar was very wary, but the Standartenf@uhrer chattered wildly. What was his name? Philip was his name. He didn’t think gentlemen should give their second names in prison. Besides, it was time people got down to first names. If we’d all got down to first names earlier, we’d be a happier race now.

Oskar concluded that if the man was not a plant, then he had had some sort of breakdown, was perhaps suffering shell shock. He’d been campaigning in southern Russia, and his battalion had helped hang on to Novgorod all winter. Then he had got leave to visit a Polish girlfriend in Cracow and they had, in his words, “lost themselves in each other,” and he had been arrested in her apartment three days after his leave expired.

“I suppose I decided,” said Philip,

“not to be too damn exact about dates when I

saw the way the other bastards”—he waved a hand

at the roof, indicating the structure around him, the

SS planners, the accountants, the bureaucrats

--“when I saw the way they lived. It wasn’t as if I deliberately decided to go absent without leave. But I just felt I was owed a certain damn latitude.”

Oskar asked him would he rather be in Pomorska Street. No, said Philip, I’d rather be here. Pomorska looked more like a hotel. But the bastards had a death cell there, full of shining chromium bars. But that aside, what had Herr Oskar done?

“I kissed a Jewish girl,” said Oskar.

“An employee of mine. So it’s

alleged.”

Philip began to hoot at this. “Oh, oh!

Did your prick drop off?”

All afternoon Standartenf@uhrer Philip

continued to condemn the SS. Thieves and orgiasts, he said. He couldn’t believe it. The money some of the bastards made. They started so incorruptible too. They would kill some poor bloody Pole for smuggling a kilo of bacon while they lived like goddamn Hanseatic barons.

Oskar behaved as if it were all news to him, as if the idea of venality among the Reichf@uhrers was a painful assault on his provincial Sudetendeutsch innocence which had caused him to forget himself and caress a Jewish girl. At last Philip, worn out by his outrage, took a nap.

Oskar wanted a drink. A certain measure of liquor would help speed time, make the Standartenf@uhrer better company if he was not a plant and more fallible if he was. Oskar took out a 10-z@l. note and wrote down names on it and telephone numbers; more names than last time: a dozen. He took out another four notes, crumpled them in his hands and went to the door and knocked at the Judas window. An SS NCO turned up—a grave middle-aged face staring in at him. He didn’t look like a man who exercised Poles to death or ruptured kidneys with his boots, but of course, that was one of the strengths of torture: you didn’t expect it from a man whose features were those of someone’s country uncle.

Was it possible to order five bottles of

vodka? Oskar asked. Five bottles, sir?

said the NCO. He might have been advising a young, callow drinker uncertain of quantities. He was also pensive, however, as if he were considering reporting Oskar to his superiors. The general and I, said Oskar, would appreciate a bottle apiece to stimulate conversation. You and your colleagues please accept the rest with my compliments. I presume also, said Oskar, that a man of your authority has power to make routine telephone calls on behalf of a prisoner.

You’ll see the telephone numbers there ... yes, on the note. You don’t have to call them all yourself. But give them to my secretary, eh? Yes, she’s the first on the list. These are very influential people, murmured the SS NCO.

You’re a damn fool, Philip told

Oskar. They’ll shoot you for trying to corrupt their guards.

Oskar slumped, apparently casual.

It’s as stupid as kissing a Jewess, said

Philip.

We’ll see, said Oskar. But he was frightened. At last the NCO came back and brought, together with the two bottles, a parcel of clean shirts and underwear, some books, and a bottle of wine, packed at the apartment in Straszewskiego Street by Ingrid and delivered to the Montelupich gate. Philip and Oskar had a pleasant enough evening together, though at one time a guard pounded on the steel door and demanded that they stop singing. And even then, as the liquor added spaciousness to the cell and an unexpected cogency to the Standartenf@uhrer’s ravings, Schindler was listening for remote screams from upstairs or for the button-clicking Morse of some hopeless prisoner in the next cell. Only once did the true nature of the place dilute the effectiveness of the vodka. Next to his cot, partially obscured by the pallet, Philip discovered a minute statement in red pencil. He spent some idle moments deciphering it—not doing so well, his Polish much slower than Oskar’s.

“”My God,”” he translated,

“”how they beat me!” Well, it’s a

wonderful world, my friend Oskar. Isn’t it?”

In the morning Schindler woke clearheaded. Hangovers had never plagued him, and he wondered why other people made such a fuss about them. But Philip was white-faced and depressed. During the morning he was taken away and came back to collect his belongings. He was to face a court-martial that afternoon, but had been given a new assignment at a training school in Stutthof, so he presumed they didn’t intend to shoot him for desertion. He picked up his greatcoat from his cot and went off to explain his Polish dalliance.

Alone, Oskar spent the day reading a Karl

May book Ingrid had sent and, in the afternoon,

speaking to his lawyer, a Sudetendeutscher

who’d opened a practice in civil law in

Cracow two years before. Oskar was comforted by the

interview. The cause of the arrest was certainly as

stated; they weren’t using his

transracial caresses as a pretext to hold

him while they investigated his affairs. “But it will probably come to the SS Court and you’ll be asked why you aren’t in the Army.”

“The reason is obvious,” said Oskar.

“I’m an essential war producer. You can get General Schindler to say so.”

Oskar was a slow reader and savored the Karl May book—the hunter and the Indian sage in the American wilderness—a relationship of decency. He did not rush the reading, in any case. It could be a week before he came to court. The lawyer expected that there would be a speech by the president of the court about conduct unbecoming a member of the German race and then there would be a substantial fine. So be it. He’d leave court a more cautious man.

On the fifth morning, he had already drunk the half-liter of black ersatz coffee they’d given him for breakfast when an NCO and two guards came for him. Past the mute doors he was taken upstairs to one of the front offices. He found there a man he’d met at cocktail parties, Obersturmbannf@uhrer Rolf Czurda, head of the Cracow SD. Czurda looked like a businessman in his good suit. “Oskar, Oskar,” said Czurda like an old friend reproving. “We give you those Jewish girls at five marks a day. You should kiss us, not them.”

Oskar explained that it had been his birthday.

He’d been impetuous. He’d been drinking. Czurda shook his head. “I never knew you were such a big-timer, Oskar,” he said. “Calls from as far away as Breslau, from our friends in the Abwehr. Of course it would be ridiculous to keep you from your work just because you felt up some Jewess.”

“You’re very understanding, Herr

Obersturmbannf@uhrer,” said Oskar,

feeling the request for some sort of gratuity building up in Czurda. “If ever I’m in a position to return your liberal gesture ...” “As a matter of fact,” said Czurda, “I have an old aunt whose flat has been bombed out.”

Yet another old aunt. Schindler made a

compassionate click with his tongue and said that a

representative of chief Czurda would be

welcome any time in Lipowa Street

to make a selection from the range of products turned out there. But it did not do to let men like Czurda think of his release as an absolute favor—and of the kitchenware as the least that the luckily released prisoner could offer. When Czurda said he could go, Oskar objected.

“I can’t very well just call my car, Herr

Obersturmbannf@uhrer. After all, my

fuel resources are limited.”

Czurda asked if Herr Schindler expected the SD to take him home.

Oskar shrugged. He did live on the far side of the city, he said. It was a long way to walk. Czurda laughed. “Oskar, I’ll have one of

my own drivers take you back.”

But when the limousine was ready, engine running, at the bottom of the main steps, and Schindler, glancing at the blank windows above him, wanted a sign from that other republic, the realm of torture, of unconditional imprisonment—the hell beyond bars of those who had no pots and pans to barter—Rolf Czurda detained him by the elbow.

“Jokes aside, Oskar, my dear fellow.

You’d be a fool if you got a real taste for some little Jewish skirt. They don’t have a future, Oskar. That’s not just old-fashioned Jew-hate talking, I assure you. It’s policy.”

CHAPTER 13

Even that summer, people inside the walls were clinging to the idea of the ghetto as a small but permanent realm. The idea had been easy enough to credit during 1941. There had been a post office; there had even been ghetto postage stamps. There had been a ghetto newspaper, even though it contained little else than edicts from the Wawel and Pomorska Street. A restaurant had been permitted in Lw@owska Street: Foerster’s Restaurant, where the Rosner brothers, back from the perils of the countryside and the changeable passions of the peasants, played the violin and the accordion. It had seemed for a brief time that schooling would proceed here in formal classrooms, that orchestras would gather and regularly perform, that Jewish life would be communicated like a benign organism along the streets, from artisan to artisan, from scholar to scholar. It had not yet been demonstrated finally by the SS bureaucrats of Pomorska Street that the idea of that sort of ghetto was to be considered not simply a whimsy but an insult to the rational direction of history.

So when Untersturmf@uhrer Brandt had Judenrat president Artur Rosenzweig around to Pomorska for a beating with the handle of a riding crop, he was trying to correct the man’s incurable vision of the ghetto as a region of permanent residence. The ghetto was a depot, a siding, a walled bus station. Anything that would have encouraged the opposite view had, by 1942, been abolished.

So it was different here from the ghettos old people remembered even affectionately. Music was no profession here. There were no professions. Henry Rosner went to work in the Luftwaffe mess at the air base. There he met a young German chefstmanager named Richard, a laughing boy hiding, as a chef can, from the history of the twentieth century among the elements of cuisine and bar management. He and Henry Rosner got on so well that Richard would send the violinist across town to pick up the Luftwaffe Catering Corps pay—you couldn’t trust a German, said Richard; the last one had run off to Hungary with the payroll.

Richard, like any barman worthy of his station,

heard things and attracted the affection of

officials. On the first day of June, he came

to the ghetto with his girlfriend, a Volksdeutsche

girl wearing a sweeping cape—which, on account of the

June showers, didn’t seem too excessive

a garment. Through his profession, Richard knew a

number of policemen, including

Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko, and had no

trouble being admitted to the ghetto, even though it was

officially out-of-bounds to him. Once inside the

gate, Richard crossed Plac Zgody and found

Henry Rosner’s address. Henry was

surprised to see them. He had left Richard

at the mess only a few hours before, yet here

he was with his girl, both dressed as if for a formal

visit. It reinforced for Henry the strangeness of the

season. For the past two days, ghetto people had been

lining up at the old Polish Savings Bank

building in J@ozefi@nska Street for the new

identity cards. To your yellow

Kennkarte with its sepia passport

photograph and its large blue J, the

German clerks now attached—if you were lucky— a blue sticker. People could be seen to leave the bank waving their cards with the Blauschein attached as if it proved their right to breathe, their permanent validity. Workers at the Luftwaffe mess, the Wehrmacht garage, at the Madritsch works, at Oskar Schindler’s Emalia, at the Progress factory all had no trouble getting the Blauschein. But those who were refused it felt that their citizenship even of the ghetto was under question.

Richard said that young Olek Rosner should come and stay with his girlfriend at her apartment. You could tell that he’d heard something in the mess. He can’t just walk out the gate, said Henry. It’s fixed with Bosko, said Richard.

Henry and Manci were hesitant and consulted with

each other as the girl in the cape promised

to fatten Olek up on chocolate. An

Aktion? Henry Rosner asked in a

murmur. Is there going to be an Aktion? Richard answered with a question. You’ve got your Blauschein? he asked. Of course, said Henry. And Manci? Manci too. But Olek hasn’t, said Richard. In the drizzling dusk, Olek Rosner, only child, newly six years old, walked out of the ghetto under the cape of Richard the chef’s girlfriend. Had some policeman bothered to lift the cape, both Richard and the girl could have been shot for their friendly subterfuge. Olek too would vanish. In the childless corner of their room, the Rosners hoped they’d been wise.

Poldek Pfefferberg, runner for Oskar

Schindler, had earlier in the year been ordered to begin tutoring the children of Symche Spira, exalted glazier, chief of the OD.

It was a contemptuous summons, as if Spira were saying, “Yes, we know you’re not fit for man’s work, but at least you can pass on to my kids some of the benefits of your education.” Pfefferberg amused Schindler with stories of the tutorial sessions at Symche’s house. The police chief was one of the few Jews to have an entire floor to himself. There, amid two-dimensional paintings of nineteenth-century rabbis, Symche paced, listening to the instruction Pfefferberg gave, seeming to want to see knowledge, like petunias, sprout from his children’s ears. A man of destiny with his hand hooked inside his jacket, he believed that this Napoleonic mannerism was a gesture universal to men of influence.

Symche’s wife was a shadowy woman, a little bemused by her husband’s unexpected power, perhaps a little excluded by old friends. The children, a boy of about twelve and a girl of fourteen, were biddable but no great scholars.

In any case, when Pfefferberg went to the Polish Savings Bank he expected to be given the Blauschein without any trouble. He was sure his labor with the Spira children would be counted as essential work. His yellow card identified him as a HIGH SCHOOL

PROFESSOR, and in a rational world as yet only partly turned upside down, it was an honorable label.

The clerks refused to give him the sticker. He argued with them and wondered if he should appeal to Oskar or to Herr Szepessi, the Austrian bureaucrat who ran the German Labor Office down the street. Oskar had been asking him for a year to come to Emalia, but Pfefferberg had always thought it would be too constricting of his illegal activities to have full-time work.

As he emerged from the bank building, details of the German Security Police, the Polish Blue Police, and the political detail of the OD were at work on the pavements, inspecting everyone’s card and arresting those who did not have the sticker. A line of rejects, hangdog men and women, already stood in the middle of J@ozefi@nska Street. Pfefferberg affected his Polish military bearing and explained that of course, he had a number of trades. But the Schupo he spoke to shook his head, saying, “Don’t argue with me; no Blauschein; you join that line. Understand, Jew?”