Schindler's Ark

Pfefferberg went and joined the line. Mila, the delicate, pretty wife he’d married eighteen months before, worked for Madritsch and already had her Blauschein. So there was that. When the line had grown to more than a hundred, it was marched around the corner, past the hospital, and into the yard of the old Optima confectionery plant. There hundreds were already waiting. The early comers had taken the shady areas of what used to be the stable, where the Optima horses used to be harnessed between the shafts of drays laden with cr@emes and liqueur chocolates. It was not a rowdy group. There were professional men, bankers like the Holzers, pharmacists and dentists. They stood in clusters, talking quietly. The young pharmacist Bachner stood speaking to an old couple named Wohl. There were many old people in here. The old and poor who depended on the Judenrat ration. This summer the Judenrat itself, the distributor of food and even of space, had been less equitable than it had been last. Nurses from the ghetto hospital moved among these detainees with buckets of water, which was said to be good for stress and disorientation. It was, in any case, just about the only medicine, other than some blackmarket cyanide, that the hospital had to give. The old, the poor families from the shtetls, took the water in restive silence.

Throughout the day, police of three varieties would enter the yard with lists, and lines of people would be formed to be met at the gate of the yard by SS details and moved out to the Prokocim Railway Station. In some people the urge rose to evade this next movement by keeping to the far corners of the yard. But it was Pfefferberg’s style to hang around the gate, looking for some official to whom he could make a claim. Perhaps Spira would be there, dressed up like a movie actor and willing—with a little heavy-handed irony—to release him. In fact there stood by the gatekeeper’s hut a sad-faced boy in an OD hat studying a list, holding the corner of the page in delicate fingers. Pfefferberg not only had served briefly with the

boy in the OD, but in the first year of his teaching

career at Kosciuszko High School in

Podg@orze had taught his sister.

The boy looked up. Panie Pfefferberg,

he murmured with a respect from those vanished days. As if the yard were full of practiced criminals, he asked what Panie Pfefferberg was doing here. It’s nonsense, said Pfefferberg, but I

haven’t got a Blauschein yet.

The boy shook his head. Follow me, he said. He walked Pfefferberg to a senior uniformed Schupo at the gate and saluted. He did not look heroic in his funny OD cap and with his skinny, vulnerable neck. Later, Pfefferberg supposed that that had given him greater credibility.

“This is Herr Pfefferberg from the

Judenrat,” he lied with a deft combination of respect and authority. “He has been visiting some relatives.” The Schupo seemed bored by the mass of police work proceeding in the yard. Negligently he waved Pfefferberg out the gate. Pfefferberg had no time to thank the boy or to reflect on the mystery of why a child with a skinny neck will lie for you even unto death just because you taught his sister how to use the Roman rings. Pfefferberg rushed straight to the Labor

Office and broke into the waiting line. Behind the desk were Frauleins Skoda and Knosalla, two hearty Sudeten German girls.

“Liebchen, Liebchen,” he told

Skoda, “they want to take me away because I don’t have the sticker. Look at me, I ask you.” (he was built like a bull, and had played hockey for his country and belonged to the Polish ski team.) “Am I not exactly the sort of fellow you’d like to keep around here?”

In spite of the crowds who’d given her no

rest all day, Skoda raised her eyebrows and

failed to suppress a smile. She took his

Kennkarte. “I can’t help you, Herr

Pfefferberg,” she told him. “They didn’t

give it to you, so I can’t. A pity. ...”

“But you can give it to me, Liebchen,” he

insisted in a loud, seductive, soap-opera

voice. “I have trades, Liebchen, I have

trades.”

Skoda said that only Herr Szepessi could help him, and it was impossible to get Pfefferberg in to see Szepessi. It would take days. “But you will get me in, Liebchen,”

Pfefferberg insisted. And she did. That is where her reputation as a decent girl came from, because she abstracted from the massive drift of policy and could, even on a crowded day, respond to the individual face. A warty old man might not have done so well with her, however.

Herr Szepessi, who also had a humane reputation even though he serviced the monstrous machine, looked quickly at Pfefferberg’s permit, murmuring, “But we don’t need gym teachers.”

Pfefferberg had always refused Oskar’s offers

of employment because he saw himself as an operator,

an individualist. He didn’t want to work

long shifts for small pay over in dreary

Zablocie. But he could see now that the

era of individuality was vanishing. People needed, as a staple of life, a trade. “I’m a metal polisher,” he told Szepessi. He had worked for short periods with a Podg@orze uncle of his who ran a small metal factory in Rekawka.

Herr Szepessi eyed Pfefferberg from behind

spectacles. “Now,” he said, “that’s a

profession.” He took a pen, thoroughly

crossing out HIGH SCHOOL PROFESSOR, cancelling the Jagiellonian education of which Pfefferberg was so proud, and over the top he wrote METAL POLISHER. He reached for a rubber stamp and a pot of paste and took from his desk a blue sticker.

“Now,” he said, handing the document back to Pfefferberg—“now should you meet a Schupo, you can assure him that you’re a useful member of society.”

Later in the year they would send poor

Szepessi to Auschwitz for being so persuadable.

CHAPTER 14

From diverse sources—from the policeman

Toffel as well as drunken Bosch of

Ostfaser, the SS textile operation,

Oskar Schindler heard rumors that “procedures in the ghetto” (whatever that meant) were growing more intense. The SS were moving into Cracow some tough Sonderkommando units from Lublin, where they had already done sterling work in matters of racial purification. Toffel had suggested that unless Oskar wanted a break in production, he ought to set up some camp beds for his night shift until after the first Sabbath in June. So Oskar set up dormitories in the offices and upstairs in the munitions section. Some of the night shift were happy to bed down there. Others had wives, children, parents waiting back in the ghetto. Besides, they had the Blauschein, the holy blue sticker, on their Kennkartes.

On June 3, Abraham Bankier,

Oskar’s office manager, didn’t turn up

at Lipowa Street. Schindler was still at home, drinking coffee in Straszewskiego Street, when he got a call from one of his secretaries. She’d seen Bankier marched out of the ghetto, not even stopping at Optima, straight to the Prokocim depot. There’d been other Emalia workers in the group too. There’d been Reich, Leser ... as many as a dozen. Oskar called for his car to be brought to him from the garage. He drove over the river and down Lw@owska toward Prokocim. There he showed his pass to the guards at the gate. The depot yard itself was full of strings of cattle cars, the station crowded with the ghetto’s dispensable citizens standing in orderly lines, convinced still—and perhaps they were right— of the value of passive and orderly response. It was the first time Oskar had seen this juxtaposition of humans and cattle cars, and it was a greater shock than hearing of it; it made him pause on the edge of the platform. Then he saw a jeweler he knew. Seen Bankier? he asked. “He’s already in one of the cars, Herr Schindler,” said the jeweler. “Where are they taking you?” Oskar asked the man. “We’re going to a labor camp, they say. Near Lublin. Probably no worse than ...” The man waved a hand toward distant Cracow.

Schindler took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, found some 10-z@loty bills and handed the pack and the notes to the jeweler, who thanked him. They had made them leave home without anything this time. They said they’d be forwarding the baggage. Late the previous year, Schindler had seen in the SS Bulletin of Budget and Construction an invitation for bids for the construction of some crematoria in a camp southeast of Lublin. Bel@zec. Schindler considered the jeweler. Sixty-three or comfour. A little thin; had probably had pneumonia last winter. Worn pin-striped suit, too warm for the day. And in the clear, knowing eyes a capacity to bear finite suffering. Even in the summer of 1942 it was impossible to guess at the connections between such a man as this and those ovens of extraordinary cubic capacity. Did they intend to start epidemics among the prisoners? Was that to be the method? Beginning from the engine, Schindler moved along the line of more than twenty cattle cars, calling Bankier’s name to the faces peering down at him from the open grillwork high above the slats of the cars. It was fortunate for Abraham that Oskar did not ask himself why it was Bankier’s name he called, that he did not pause and consider that Bankier’s had only equal value to all the other names loaded aboard the Ostbahn rolling stock. An existentialist might have been defeated by the numbers at Prokocim, stunned by the equal appeal of all the names and voices. But Schindler was a philosophic innocent. He

knew the people he knew. He knew the name of

Bankier. “Bankier! Bankier!” he

continued to call.

He was intercepted by a young SS

Oberscharf@uhrer, an expert railroad

shipper from Lublin. He asked for Schindler’s pass. Oskar could see in the man’s left hand an enormous list—pages of names.

My workers, said Schindler. Essential industrial workers. My office manager. It’s idiocy. I have Armaments Inspectorate contracts, and here you are taking the workers I need to fulfill them.

You can’t have them back, said the young man. They’re on the list. ... The SS NCO

knew from experience that the list conferred an equal destination on all its members. Oskar dropped his voice to that hard murmur, the growl of a reasonable man, well connected, who wasn’t going to bring up all his heavy guns yet. Did the Herr Oberscharf@uhrer know how long it would take to train experts to replace those on the list? At my works, Deutsche Email Fabrik, I have a munitions section under the special protection of General Schindler, my namesake. Not only would the Oberscharf@uhrer’s comrades on the Russian Front be affected by the disruption of production, but the office of the Armaments Inspectorate would demand explanations as well. The young man shook his head—just a harassed transit official. “I’ve heard that kind of story before, sir,”

he said. But he was worried. Oskar could tell it and kept leaning over him and speaking softly with an edge of menace. “It’s not my place to argue with the list,” said Oskar.

“Where is your superior officer?”

The young man nodded toward an SS officer, a man in his thirties wearing a frown above his spectacles. “May I have your name, Herr Untersturmf@uhrer?” Oskar asked him, already pulling a notebook from his suit pocket. The officer also made a statement about the holiness of the list. For this man it was the secure, rational, and sole basis for all this milling of Jews and movement of rail cars. But Schindler got crisper now. He’d heard about the list, he said. What he had asked was what the Untersturmf@uhrer’s name was. He intended to appeal directly to Oberf@uhrer Scherner and to General Schindler of the Armaments Inspectorate.

“Schindler?” asked the officer. For the first time he took a careful look at Oskar. The man was dressed like a tycoon, wore the right badge, had generals in the family. “I believe I can guarantee you, Herr Untersturmf@uhrer,” said Schindler in his benign grumble, “that you’ll be in southern Russia within the week.”

The NCO going ahead, Herr Schindler and the officer marched side by side between the ranks of prisoners and the loaded cattle cars. The locomotive was already steaming and the engineer leaning from his cabin, looking down the length of the train, waiting to be dispatched. The officer called to Ostbahn officials they passed on the platform to hold up. At last they reached one of the rear cars. There were a dozen workers in there with Bankier; they had all boarded together as if expecting a joint deliverance. The door was unlocked and they jumped down—Bankier and Frankel from the office; Reich, Leser, and the others from the factory. They were restrained, not wanting to permit anyone to detect their pleasure at being saved the journey. Those left inside began chattering merrily, as if they were fortunate to be traveling with so much extra room, while with emphasis in his pen strokes, the officer removed the Emalia workers one at a time from the list and required Oskar to initial the pages.

As Schindler thanked the officer and turned to follow his workers away, the man detained him by the elbow of his suit coat. “Sir,” he said, “it makes no difference to us, you understand. We don’t care whether it’s this dozen or that.”

The officer, who had been frowning when Oskar first saw him, now seemed calm, as if he had discovered the theorem behind the situation. You think your thirteen little tinsmiths are important? We’ll replace them with another thirteen little tinsmiths and all your sentimentality for these will be defeated. “It’s the inconvenience to the list, that’s all,” the officer explained.

Plump little Bankier admitted that the group of them had neglected to pick up Blauscheins from the old Polish Savings Bank. Schindler, suddenly testy, said to attend to it. But what his curtness covered was dismay at those crowds at Prokocim who, for want of a blue sticker, stood waiting for the new and decisive symbol of their status, the cattle car, to be hauled by heavy engine across their range of vision. Now, the cattle cars told them, we are all beasts together.

CHAPTER 15

From the faces of his own workers, Oskar could read something of the ghetto’s torment. For a person had no time to catch his breath there, no room to dig in, assert one’s habits or set up family rituals. Many took refuge and a sort of comfort in suspicion of everyone—of the people in the same room as much as of the OD man in the street. But then, even the sanest were not sure whom to trust. “Each tenant,” a young artist named Josef Bau wrote of a ghetto house, “has his own world of secrets and mysteries.”

Children suddenly stopped talking at a creaking in the stairwell. Adults woke from dreams of exile and dispossession to find themselves exiled and dispossessed in a crowded room in Podg@orze—the events of their dreams, the very taste of fear in dreams, finding continuity in the fears of the day. Fierce rumors beset them in their room, on the street, on the factory floor.

Spira had another list and it was either twice or three times as long as the last. All children would go to Tarnow to be shot, to Stutthof to be drowned, to Breslau to be indoctrinated, deracinated, operated upon. Do you have an elderly parent? They are taking everyone over fifty to the Wieliczka salt mines. To work? No. To seal them up in disused chambers.

All this hearsay, much of which reached Oskar, was based on a human instinct to prevent the evil by voicing it—to forestall the Fates by showing them that you could be as imaginative as they. But that June, all the worst of the dreams and whispers took concrete form, and the most unimaginable rumor became a fact.

South of the ghetto, beyond Rekawka Street, rose a hilly parkland. There was an intimacy, like that of medieval siege paintings, about the way you could look down over the ghetto’s southern wall. As you rode along the brow of the hills, the ghetto’s map was revealed, and you could see, as you passed them, what was happening in the streets below. Schindler had noticed this advantage while riding here with Ingrid in the spring. Now, shocked by the sights of the Prokocim depot, he decided to go riding again. The morning after the rescue of Bankier, he rented horses from the stables in Park Bednarskiego. They were impeccably turned out, he and Ingrid, in long hacking jackets, riding breeches, and dazzling boots. Two Sudeten blonds high above the disturbed ant heap of the ghetto.

They rode up through the woods and had a short gallop over open meadows. From their saddles they could now see Wegierska Street, crowds of people around the hospital corner and, closer, a squad of SS working with dogs, entering houses, families pouring forth into the street, pulling on coats in spite of the heat, anticipating a long absence. Ingrid and Oskar reined in their horses in the shade of trees and considered this sight, beginning to notice refinements of the scene. OD men armed with truncheons worked with the SS. Some of these Jewish police seemed enthusiastic, for in a few minutes’ view from the hill Oskar saw three reluctant women beaten across the shoulders. At first there was a naive anger in him. The SS were using Jews to flog Jews. It would become clear during the day, however, that some of the OD bludgeoned people to save them from worse things. And there was a new rule for the OD anyhow: if you failed to deliver a family into the street, your own family was forfeit.

Schindler noticed too that in Wegierska

Street two lines were continually forming. One was stable, but the other, as it lengthened, was regularly marched away in segments around the corner into J@ozefi@nska and out of sight. It was not hard to interpret this assembling and movement, since Schindler and Ingrid, fringed by pine trees and elevated above the ghetto, were a distance of only two or three short blocks from the Aktion. As families were routed out of the apartments, they were separated forcibly into two lines without regard to family considerations. Adolescent daughters with the proper papers went to the static line, from which they called out to their middle-aged mothers in the other. A night-shift worker, still sullen from disturbed sleep, was pointed to one line, his wife and child to the other. In the middle of the street, the young man argued with an OD policeman. The man was saying, Screw the Blauschein! I want to go with Eva and the kid.

An armed SS man intervened. Beside the nondescript mass of Ghettomenschen, such a being, in his freshly pressed summer uniform, looked superbly fed and fresh. And from the hill you could see the oil on the automatic pistol in his hand. The SS man hit the Jew on the ear and was talking to him, loudly and harshly. Schindler, though he could not hear, was sure it was a speech he’d encountered before, at Prokocim Station. It doesn’t make any difference to me. If you want to go with your frigging Jewish whore, go! The man was led from one line to another. Schindler saw him edge along it to embrace his wife, and under cover of this act of conjugal loyalty, another woman crept back indoors and was not seen by the SS Sonderkommando. Oskar and Ingrid turned their horses, crossed a deserted avenue, and after a few meters, rode out onto a limestone platform facing directly down Krakusa. In its closer reaches, this street was not as hectic as Wegierska. A line of women and children, not so long, was being led away toward Piwna Street. A guard walked in front, another strolled behind. There was an imbalance in the line: far more children than the few women in it could themselves have borne. At the rear, dawdling, was a toddler, boy or girl, dressed in a small scarlet coat and cap. The reason it compelled Schindler’s interest was that it made a statement, the way the argumentative shift worker in Wegierska had. The statement had to do, of course, with a passion for red.

Schindler consulted Ingrid. It was definitely a little girl, said Ingrid. Girls got obsessed by a color, especially a color like that. As they watched, the Waffen SS man at the rear of the column would occasionally put out his hand and correct the drift of this scarlet node. He did not do it harshly—he could have been an elder brother. Had he been asked by his officers to do something to allay the sentimental concern of watching civilians, he could not have done better. So the moral anxiety of the two riders in Bednarskiego Park was, for a second, irrationally allayed. But it was brief comfort. For behind the departing column of women and children, to which the scarlet toddler placed a meandering period, SS teams with dogs worked north along either side of the street.

They rampaged through the fetid apartments; as a symptom of their rush, a suitcase flew from a second-story window and split open on the sidewalk. And, running before the dogs, the men and women and children who had hidden in attics or closets, inside drawerless dressers, the evaders of the first wave of search, jolted out onto the pavement, yelling and gasping in terror of the Doberman pinschers. Everything seemed speeded-up, difficult for the viewers on the hill to track. Those who had emerged were shot where they stood on the sidewalk, flying out over the gutters at the impact of the bullets, gushing blood into the drains. A mother and a boy, perhaps eight, perhaps a scrawny ten, had retreated under a windowsill on the western side of Krakusa Street. Schindler felt an intolerable fear for them, a terror in his own blood which loosened his thighs from the saddle and threatened to unhorse him.

He looked at Ingrid and saw her hands knotted on the reins. He could hear her exclaiming and begging beside him.

His eyes slewed up Krakusa to the scarlet child. They were doing it within half a block of her; they hadn’t waited for her column to turn out of sight into J@ozefi@nska. Schindler could not have explained at first how that compounded the murders on the sidewalk. Yet somehow it proved, in a way no one could ignore, their serious intent. While the scarlet child stopped in her column and turned to watch, they shot the woman in the neck, and one of them, when the boy slid down the wall whimpering, jammed a boot down on his head as if to hold it still and put the barrel against the back of the neck—the recommended SS stance—and fired.

Oskar looked again for the small red girl. She had stopped and turned and seen the boot descend. A gap had already widened between her and the next to last in the column. Again the SS guard corrected her drift fraternally, nudged her back into line. Herr Schindler could not see why he did not bludgeon her with his rifle butt, since at the other end of Krakusa Street, mercy had been cancelled.

At last Schindler slipped from his horse, tripped, and found himself on his knees hugging the trunk of a pine tree. The urge to throw up his excellent breakfast was, he sensed, to be suppressed, for he suspected it meant that all his cunning body was doing was making room to digest the horrors of Krakusa Street.

Their lack of shame, as men who had been born of women and had to write letters home (what did they put in them?), wasn’t the worst aspect of what he’d seen. He knew they had no shame, since the guard at the base of the column had not felt any need to stop the red child from seeing things. But worst of all, if there was no shame, it meant there was official sanction. No one could find refuge anymore behind the idea of German culture, nor behind those pronouncements uttered by leaders to exempt anonymous men from stepping beyond their gardens, from looking out their office windows at the realities on the sidewalk. Oskar had seen in Krakusa Street a statement of his government’s policy which could not be written off as a temporary aberration. The SS men were, Oskar believed, fulfilling there the orders of the leader, for otherwise their colleague at the rear of the column would not have let a child watch. Later in the day, after he had absorbed a ration of brandy, Oskar understood the proposition in its clearest terms. They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed the witnesses all would perish too.

In the corner of Plac Zgody (peace

Square) stood an Apotheke run

by Tadeus Pankiewicz. It was a pharmacy in

the old style. Porcelain amphoras with the

Latin names of ancient remedies marked on them,

and a few hundred delicate and highly varnished

drawers, hid the complexity of the pharmacopoeia

from the citizens of Podg@orze. Magister

Pankiewicz lived above the shop by permission of the

authorities and at the request of the doctors in

the ghetto clinics. He was the only Pole

permitted to remain within the ghetto walls. He was

a quiet man in his early forties and had

intellectual interests. The Polish

impressionist Abraham Neumann, the composer Mordche Gebirtig, philosophical Leon Steinberg, and the scientist and philosopher Dr. Rappaport were all regular visitors at Pankiewicz’. The house was also a link, a mail drop for information and messages running between the Jewish Combat Organization (Zob) and the partisans of the Polish People’s Army. Young Dolek Liebeskind and Shimon and Gusta Dranger, organizers of the Cracow ZOB, would sometimes call there, but discreetly. It was important not to implicate Tadeus Pankiewicz by their projects, which—unlike the cooperative policies of the Judenrat— involved furious and unequivocal resistance. The square in front of Pankiewicz’ pharmacy became in those first days of June a marshaling yard. “It beggared belief,” Pankiewicz would always thereafter say of Peace Square. In the parkland in the middle, people were graded again and told to leave their baggage—No, no, it will be sent on to you! Against the blank wall at the western end of the square, those who resisted or were found carrying the secret option of Aryan papers in their pockets were shot without any explanation or excuses to the people in the middle. The astounding thunder of the rifles fractured conversation and hope. Yet in spite of the screams and wailing of those related to the victims, some people—shocked or focusing desperately on life—seemed almost unaware of the heap of corpses. Once the trucks rolled up, and details of Jewish men loaded the dead into the back, those left in the square would begin at once to talk of their futures again. And Pankiewicz would hear what he had been hearing all day from SS NCO’S. “I assure you, madam, you Jews are going to work. Do you think we can afford to squander you?” Frantic desire to believe would show blatantly on the faces of those women. And the SS rank and file, fresh from the executions against the wall, strolled among the crowd and advised people on how to label their luggage. From Bednarskiego, Oskar Schindler had not

been able to see into Plac Zgody. But

Pankiewicz in the square, like Schindler on the

hill, had never witnessed such dispassionate

horror. Like Oskar, he was plagued by nausea,

and his ears were full of an unreal sibilance, as

if he had been struck on the head. He was so

confused by the mass of noise and savagery, he

did not know that among the dead in the square were his

friends Gebirtig, composer of that famed song

“Burn City, Burn,” and gentle Neumann

the artist. Doctors began to stumble into the

pharmacy, panting, having run the two

blocks from the hospital. They wanted bandages

--they had dragged the wounded in from the streets. A doctor came in and asked for emetics. For in the crowd a dozen people were gagging or comatose from swallowing cyanide. An engineer Pankiewicz knew had slipped it into his mouth when his wife wasn’t looking.

Young Dr. Idek Schindel, working at the ghetto hospital on the corner of Wegierska, heard from a woman who came in hysterical that they were taking the children. She’d seen the children lined up in Krakusa Street, Genia among them.

Schindel had left Genia that morning with neighbors—he was her guardian in the ghetto; her parents were still hiding in the countryside, intending to slip back into the ghetto, which had been, until today, less perilous. This morning Genia, always her own woman, had wandered away from the woman who was minding her back to the house where she lived with her uncle. There she had been arrested. It was in this way that Oskar Schindler, from the park, had been drawn by her motherless presence in the column in Krakusa Street.

Taking off his surgical coat, Dr.

Schindel rushed to the square and saw her almost at once, sitting on the grass, affecting composure within the wall of guards. Dr. Schindel knew how faked the performance was, having had to get up often enough to soothe her night terrors.

He moved around the periphery of the square and she

saw him. Don’t call out, he wanted

to say; I’ll work it out. He didn’t want

a scene because it could end badly for both of them. But he didn’t need to be concerned, for he could see her eyes grow mute and unknowing. He stopped, transfixed by her pitiably admirable cunning. She knew well enough at the age of three years not to take the short-term comfort of calling out to uncles. She knew that there was no salvation in engaging the interest of the SS in Uncle Idek. He was composing a speech he intended to make to the large Oberscharf@uhrer who stood by the execution wall. It was better not to approach the authorities too humbly or through anyone of lesser rank. Looking back again to the child, he saw the suspicion of a flutter of her eyes, and then, with a dazzling speculator’s coolness, she stepped between the two guards nearest to her and out of the cordon. She moved with an aching slowness which, of course, galvanized her uncle’s vision, so that afterward he would often see behind his closed eyes the image of her among the forest of gleaming SS knee boots. In Plac Zgody, no one saw her. She maintained her part-stumbling, part-ceremonial bluffer’s pace all the way to Pankiewicz’

corner and around it, keeping to the blind side of the street. Dr. Schindel repressed the urge he had to applaud. Though the performance deserved an audience, it would by its nature be destroyed by one.

He felt he could not move directly behind her without disclosing her feat. Against all his usual impulses, he believed that the instinct which had taken her infallibly out of Plac Zgody would provide her with a hiding place. He returned to the hospital by the alternative route to give her time.

Genia returned to the front bedroom in Krakusa Street that she shared with her uncle. The street was deserted now, or, if a few were by cunning or false walls still there, they did not declare themselves. She entered the house and hid under the bed. From the corner of the street, Idek, returning to the house, saw the SS, in a last sweep, come knocking. But Genia did not answer. She would not answer him when he arrived himself. It was just that he knew where to look, in the gap between curtain and window sash, and saw, shining in the drabness of the room, her red shoe beneath the hem of the bedspread. By this time, of course, Schindler had returned his horse to the stable. He was not on the hill to see the small but significant triumph of red Genia’s return to the place where the SS had first found her. He was already in his office at DEF, shut away for a time, finding the news too heavy to share with the day shift. Much later, in terms uncharacteristic of jovial Herr Schindler, Cracow’s favorite party guest, Zablocie’s big spender, in terms, that is, which showed—behind the playboy facade—an implacable judge, Oskar would lay special weight on this day. “Beyond this day,” he would claim, “no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”

CHAPTER 16

The SS kept at work in the ghetto until

Saturday evening. They operated with that efficiency which Oskar had observed in the executions in Krakusa Street. Their thrusts were hard to predict, and people who had escaped on Friday were caught on Saturday. Genia survived the week, however, through her precocious gift for maintaining silence and for being imperceptible in scarlet. Over in Zablocie, Schindler did not dare believe that this red child had survived the Aktion process. He knew from talking to Toffel and other acquaintances from police headquarters in Pomorska Street that 7,000 people had been cleared from the ghetto. A Gestapo official from the Jewish Affairs Office was delighted to confirm the clearance. Up in Pomorska Street, among the paper pushers, the June Aktion was voted a triumph. Oskar had now become more exact about this sort

of information. He knew, for example, that the

Aktion had been under the overall management of

one Wilhelm Kunde but had been led by SS

Obersturmf@uhrer Otto von

Mallotke. Oskar kept no dossier, but he

was preparing for another era when he would make a

full report to either Canaris or the world. It would

be made earlier than he expected. For the moment,

he inquired after matters which he had in the past

treated as temporary lunacies. He got his

hard news from police contacts, but also from

clearheaded Jews like Stern. Intelligence from

other parts of Poland was piped into the ghetto, in part

through Pankiewicz’ pharmacy, by the partisans of the

People’s Army. Dolek Liebeskind, leader of the

Akiva Halutz Resistance Group, also

brought in information from other ghettos as a result of

his official traveling job with the Jewish

Communal Self-Help, an organization which the

Germans—with half an eye on the Red Cross

--permitted to exist.

It was no use bringing such tidings to the

Judenrat. The Judenrat Council did

not consider it civilly advisable to tell the

ghetto dwellers anything about the camps. People would

merely be distressed; there would be disorder in the

streets, and it would not go unpunished. It was always

better to let people hear wild rumors, decide

they were exaggerated, fall back on

hope. This had been the attitude of most

Jewish Councillors even under decent Artur Rosenzweig. But Rosenzweig was gone. The salesman David Gutter, helped by his Germanic name, would soon become president of the Judenrat. Food rations were now diverted not only by certain SS officials but by Gutter and the new Councillors, whose vicar in the streets was high-booted Symche Spira. The Judenrat therefore had no interest anymore in informing the ghetto people about their probable destinations, since they were confident that they themselves would not be made to travel.

The beginning of knowledge for the ghetto, and the clinching news for Oskar, was the return to Cracow—eight days after he’d been shipped off from Prokocim—of the young pharmacist Bachner. No one knew how he had got back inside the ghetto, or the mystery of why he returned to a place from which the SS would simply send him off on another journey. But it was, of course, the pull of the known that brought Bachner home. All the way down Lw@owska and into the streets behind Plac Zgody he carried his story. He had seen the final horror, he said.

He was mad-eyed, and in his brief absence his

hair had silvered. All the Cracow people who had

been rounded up in early June had been taken

nearly to Russia, he said, to the camp of

Bel@zec. When the trains arrived at the

railway station, the people were driven out by Ukrainians with clubs. There was a frightful stench about the place, but an SS man had kindly told people that that was due to the use of disinfectant. The people were lined up in front of two large warehouses, one marked “CLOAK ROOM” and the other “VALUABLES.” The new arrivals were made to undress, and a small Jewish boy passed among the crowd handing out lengths of string with which to tie their shoes together. Spectacles and rings were removed. So, naked, the prisoners had their heads shaved in the hairdresser’s, an SS NCO telling them that their hair was needed to make something special for U-boat crews. It would grow again, he said, maintaining the myth of their continued usefulness. At last the victims were driven down a barbed-wire passage to bunkers which had copper Stars of David on their roofs and were labeled BATHS AND INHALATION ROOMS. SS men reassured them all the way, telling them to breathe deeply, that it was an excellent means of disinfection. Bachner saw a little girl drop a bracelet on the ground, and a boy of three picked it up and went into the bunker playing with it. In the bunkers, said Bachner, they were all gassed. And afterward, squads were sent in to disentangle the pyramid of corpses and take the bodies away for burial. It had taken barely two days, he said, before they were all dead, except for him. While waiting in an enclosure for his turn, he’d somehow got to a latrine and lowered himself into the pit. He’d stayed there three days, the human waste up to his neck. His face, he said, had been a hive of flies.

He’d slept standing, wedged in the hole for fear of drowning there. At last he’d crawled out at night.

Somehow he’d walked out of Bel@zec, following the railway tracks. Everyone understood that he had got out precisely because he was beyond reason. Likewise, he’d been cleaned by someone’s hand—a peasant woman’s, perhaps—and put into fresh clothes for his journey back to the starting point.

Even then there were people in Cracow who thought Bachner’s story a dangerous rumor. Postcards had come to relatives from prisoners in Auschwitz. So if it was true of Bel@zec, it couldn’t be true of Auschwitz. And was it credible? On the short emotional rations of the ghetto, one got by through sticking to the credible. The chambers of Bel@zec, Schindler found out from his sources, had been completed by March of that year under the supervision of a Hamburg engineering firm and of SS engineers from Oranienburg. From Bachner’s testimony, it seemed that 3,000 killings a day were not beyond their capacity.

Crematoria were under construction, lest

old-fashioned means of disposal of corpses

put a brake on the new killing method. The

same company involved in Bel@zec had installed

identical facilities at Sobibor, also in

the Lublin district. Bids had been accepted,

and construction was well advanced, for a similar

installation at Treblinka, near Warsaw. And

chambers and ovens were both in operation at the

Auschwitz main camp and at the vast

Auschwitz II camp a few kilometers

away at Birkenau. The resistance claimed that 10,000 murders on a given day were within the capacity of Auschwitz II. Then, for the @l@od@z area, there was the camp at Chelmno, also equipped according to the new technology. To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept. Throughout Europe that summer some millions of people, Oskar among them, and the ghetto dwellers of Cracow too, tortuously adjusted the economies of their souls to the idea of Bel@zec or of like enclosures in the Polish forests. That summer also Schindler wound up the bankrupt estate of Rekord and, under the provisions of the Polish Commercial Court, acquired by a species of pro forma auction ownership of the property. Though the German armies were over the Don and on their way to the Caucasus oil fields, Oskar discerned by the evidence of what had happened in Krakusa Street that they could not finally succeed. Therefore it was a good season to legitimize to the limit his possession of the factory in Lipowa Street. He still hoped, in a way that was almost childlike and to which history would pay no regard, that the fall of the evil king would not bear away that legitimacy—that in the new era he would go on being Hans Schindler’s successful boy from Zwittau. Jereth of the box factory went on pressing him about building a hut—a refuge—on his patch of wasteland. Oskar got the necessary approvals from the bureaucrats. A rest area for the night shift was his story. He had the lumber for it—it had been donated by Jereth himself. When finished in the autumn, it seemed a slight and comfortless structure. The planking had that crate-wood greenness and looked as if it would shrink as it got darker, and let in the slanting snow. But during an Aktion in October it was a haven for Mr. and Mrs. Jereth, for the workers from the box factory and the radiator works, and for Oskar’s night shift.

The Oskar Schindler who comes down from his office on the frosty mornings of an Aktion to speak to the SS man, to the Ukrainian auxiliary, to the Blue Police, and to OD

details who would have marched across from Podg@orze to escort his night shift home; the Oskar Schindler who, drinking coffee, calls Wachtmeister Bosko’s office near the ghetto and tells some lie about why his night shift must stay in Lipowa Street this morning—that Oskar Schindler has endangered himself now beyond the limit of cautious business practice. The men of influence who have twice sprung him from prison cannot do it indefinitely even if he is generous to them on their birthdays. This year they are putting men of influence in Auschwitz. If they die there, their widows get a terse and unregretful telegram from the Commandant. “YOUR HUSBAND HAS DIED IN

KONZENTRATIONSLAGER AUSCHWITZ.”

Bosko himself was lanky, thinner than Oskar.

Gruff-voiced, and like him a German Czech.

His family, like Oskar’s, was conservative and

looked to the old Germanic values. He had,

for a brief season, felt a pan-Germanic

anticipation at the rise of Hitler, exactly

the way Beethoven had felt a grand European fervor for Napoleon. In Vienna, where he had been studying theology, he’d joined the SS— partly as an alternative to conscription into the Wehrmacht, partly from an evanescent ardor. He regretted that ardor now and was, more fully than Oskar knew, expiating it. All that Oskar understood about him at the time was that he was always pleased to undermine an Aktion. His responsibility was the perimeter of the ghetto, and from his office beyond the walls he looked inward at the Aktion with a precise horror, for he, like Oskar, considered himself a potential witness. Oskar did not know that in the October Aktion, Bosko had smuggled some dozens of children out of the ghetto in cardboard boxes. Oskar did not know either that the Wachtmeister provided, ten at a time, general passes for the underground. The Jewish Combat Organization (Zob) was strong in Cracow. It was made up mainly of youth-club members, especially of members of Akiva—a club named after the legendary Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, scholar of the Mishna. The ZOB was led by a married couple, Shimon and Gusta Dranger—her diary would become a classic of the Resistance—and by Dolek Liebeskind. Its members needed to pass freely into and out of the ghetto, for purposes of recruitment and to carry currency, forged documents, and copies of the underground newspaper. They had contacts with the left-wing Polish People’s Army, which was based in the forests around Cracow, and which also needed the documents Bosko provided. Bosko’s contacts with ZOB and the People’s Army were therefore sufficient to hang him; but still he secretly mocked and despised himself and had contempt for partial rescues. For Bosko wanted to save everyone, and would soon try to, and would perish because of it. Danka Dresner, cousin of red Genia, was fourteen years old and had by then outgrown the sure infantile instincts which had led her small relative safely out of the cordon in Plac Zgody. Though she had work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe base, the truth was that by autumn any woman under fifteen or more than forty could be taken away to the camps anyhow. Therefore, on the morning an SS Sonderkommando and squads of Security Police rolled into Lw@owska Street, Mrs. Dresner took Danka with her down to Dabrowski, to the house of a neighbor who had a false wall. The neighbor was a woman in her late thirties, a servant at the Gestapo mess near the Wawel, who could therefore expect some preferential treatment. But she had elderly parents who were automatic risks. So she had bricked up a 60-centimeter cavity for her parents, a costly project, since bricks had to be smuggled into the ghetto in barrows under heaps of legal goods—rags, firewood, disinfectant.

God knew what her bricked-up secret

space had cost her—maybe 5,000 z@l.,

maybe 10,000.

She’d mentioned it a number of times to Mrs.

Dresner. If there was an Aktion, Mrs.

Dresner could bring Danka and come herself. Therefore,

on the morning Danka and Mrs. Dresner heard

from around the corner of Dabrowski the startling

noise, the bark of Dalmatians and

Dobermans, the megaphoned roaring of

Oberscharf@uhrers, they hurried to their friend’s place.

When the Dresners had gone up the stairs and found the right room, they could see that the clamor had had an effect on their friend. “It sounds bad,” said the woman. “I have my parents in there already. I can fit the girl in. But not you.”

Danka stared, captivated, at the end wall, at its stained wallpaper. In there, sandwiched in brick, rats perhaps worrying at their feet, their senses stretched by darkness, were this woman’s elderly mother and father.

Mrs. Dresner could tell that the woman wasn’t rational. The girl, but not you, she kept saying. It was as if she thought that should the SS penetrate the wall they would be more forgiving on account of Danka’s lesser poundage. Mrs.

Dresner explained that she was scarcely obese,

that the Aktion seemed to be concentrating on this

side of Lw@owska Street, and that she had

nowhere else to go. And that she could fit. Danka was

a reliable girl, said Mrs. Dresner, but she

would feel safer with her mother in there. You could see

by measuring the wall with your eyes that four people could

fit abreast in the cavity. But shots from two

blocks distant swept away the last of the

woman’s reason. “I can fit the girl!” she

screamed. “I want you to go!”

Mrs. Dresner turned to Danka and told

her to go into the wall. Later Danka would not know why she had obeyed her mother and gone so mutely into hiding. The woman took her to the attic, removed a rug from the floor, then lifted a raft of floorboards. Then Danka descended into the cavity. It wasn’t black in there; the parents were burning a stub of candle. Danka found herself beside the woman—someone else’s mother but, beyond the unwashed smell, with the same warm, protective musk of motherhood. The woman smiled at her briefly. The husband stood on the far side of his wife, keeping his eyes closed, not to be distracted from signals from outside.

After a time the friend’s mother motioned to her that she could sit if she wanted. So Danka crouched sideways and found a comfortable posture on the floor of the cavity. No rats troubled her. She heard no sound—not a word from her mother and the friend beyond the wall. Above everything else she felt unexpectedly safe. Andwiththe sensation of safety came displeasure at herself for obeying her mother’s order so woodenly, and then fear for her mother, who was out there in the world of Aktions.

Mrs. Dresner did not leave the house at once. The SS were in Dabrowski Street now. She thought she might as well stay on. If she was taken, it was no loss to her friend. It might, in fact, be a positive help. If they took a woman from this room, it would probably increase their satisfaction with their task, exempt them from a sharper inspection of the state of the wallpaper.

But the woman had convinced herself no one would survive the search if Mrs. Dresner stayed in the room; and, Mrs. Dresner could see, no one would if the woman remained in that state. Therefore she stood up, calmly despairing of herself, and left. They would find her on the steps or in the hall. Why not on the street? she wondered. It was so much an unwritten rule that ghetto natives must stay on quivering in their rooms until discovered that anyone found moving on the stairways was somehow guilty of defiance of the system.

A figure in a cap prevented her from going out. He appeared on the front step, squinting down the dark corridor to the cold blue light of the courtyard beyond. Staring at her, he recognized her, as she did him. It was an acquaintance of her elder son’s; but you could not be sure that that counted for anything; you could not know what pressures they’d put on the OD boys. He stepped into the hall and approached her. “Pani Dresner,” he said. He pointed at the stairwell. “They’ll be gone in ten minutes. You stay under the stairs. Go on. Get under the stairs.”

As numbly as her daughter had obeyed her, she now obeyed the OD youth. She crouched down under the stairs, but knew it was no good. The autumn light from the courtyard revealed her. If they wanted to look at the courtyard, or at the apartment door at the rear of the hallway, she would be seen. Since upright or cowering made no difference, she stood upright. From near the front door, the OD man urged her to stay there. Then he went. She heard yells, orders, and appeals, and it all seemed to be as close as next door. At last, he was back with others. She heard the boots at the front door. She heard him say in German that he’d searched the ground floor and no one was at home. There were occupied rooms upstairs, though. It was such a prosaic conversation he had with the SS

men that it didn’t seem to her to do justice to the risk he was taking. He was staking his existence against the likelihood that having worked down Lw@owska and so far down Dabrowski they might by now be incompetent enough not to search the ground floor themselves and therefore not to find Mrs. Dresner, whom he dimly knew, beneath the stairs.

In the end they took his word. She heard them on the stairs, opening and slamming doors on the first landing, their boots clattering on the floor in the room of the cavity. She heard her friend’s raised, shrewish voice ... of course I have a work permit, I work over at the Gestapo mess, I know all the gentlemen. She heard them come down from the second floor with someone; with more than one; a couple, a family. Substitutes for me, she would later think. A middle-aged male voice with an edge of bronchitis to it said, “But surely, gentlemen, we can take some clothing.” And in a tone as indifferent as that of a railway porter asked for timetable information, the SS man telling him in Polish, “There’s no need for it. At these places they provide everything.”

The sound receded. Mrs. Dresner waited. There was no second sweep. The second sweep would be tomorrow or the day after. They would return again and again now, culling the ghetto. What in June had been seen as a culminating horror had become by October a daily process. And as grateful as she was to the OD boy, it was clear as she went upstairs to get Danka that when murder is as scheduled, habitual, industrial as it was here in Cracow you could scarcely, with tentative heroism, redirect the overriding energy of the system. The more Orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan—“An hour of life is still life.” The OD boy had given her that hour. She knew there was no one who could give her more. Upstairs, the woman was a little shamefaced.

“The girl can come whenever she wishes,” she said. That is, I didn’t exclude you out of cowardice, but as a matter of policy. And the policy stands. You can’t be accepted, but the girl can.

Mrs. Dresner did not argue—she had a sense that the woman’s stance was part of the same equation that had saved her in the downstairs hall. She thanked the woman. Danka might need to accept her hospitality again.

From now on, since she looked young for her forty-two years and still had her health, Mrs.

Dresner would attempt to survive on that basis

--the economic one, the putative value of her strength to the Armaments Inspectorate or to some other wing of the war effort. She wasn’t confident of the idea. These days anyone with half a grasp on truth could tell that the SS believed the death of the socially unappeasable Jew outbalanced any value he might have as an item of labor. And the question is, in such an era, Who saves Juda Dresner, factory purchasing officer? Who saves Janek Dresner, auto

mechanic at the Wehrmacht garage? Who saves Danka Dresner, Luftwaffe cleaning woman, on the morning the SS finally choose to ignore their economic value?

While the OD man was arranging Mrs.

Dresner’s survival in the hallway of the house in Dabrowski, the young Zionists of the Halutz Youth and the ZOB were preparing a more visible act of resistance. They had acquired uniforms of the Waffen SS and, with them, the entitlement to visit the SS’RESERVED Cyganeria Restaurant in @sw Ducha Plac, across the square from the S@lowacki Theater. In the Cyganeria they left a bomb which blew the tables through the roof, tore seven SS men to fragments, and injured some forty more. When Oskar heard about it, he knew he could have been there, buttering up some official. It was the deliberate intent of Shimon and

Gusta Dranger and their colleagues to run against

the ancient pacifism of the ghetto, to convert it

to universal rebellion. They bombed the

SS’-ONLY Bagatella Cinema in

Karmelicka Street. In the dark, Leni

Riefenstahl flickered the promise of German womanhood to the wandering soldier frayed from performing the nation’s works in the barbarous ghetto or on the increasingly risky streets of Polish Cracow, and the next second a vast yellow spear of flame extinguished the sight.

The ZOB would in a few months sink patrol

boats on the Vistula, fire-bomb sundry

military garages throughout the city, arrange

Passierscheins for people who were not supposed to have

them, smuggle passport photographs out

to centers where they could be used in the forging of Aryan

papers, derail the elegant Army-only train

that ran between Cracow and Bochnia, and get their

underground newspaper into circulation. They would also

arrange for two of OD Chief Spira’s

lieutenants, Spitz and Forster, who

had drawn up lists for the imprisonment of thousands, to walk into a Gestapo ambush. It was a variation of an old undergraduate trick. One of the underground, posing as an informer, made an appointment to meet the two policemen in a village near Cracow. At the same time, a separate supposed informer told the Gestapo that two leaders of the Jewish partisan movement could be found at a particular rendezvous point. Spitz and Forster were both mown down while running from the Gestapo.

Still, the style of resistance for the ghetto dwellers remained that of Artur Rosenzweig, who, when asked in June to make a list of thousands for deportation, had placed his own name, his wife’s, his daughter’s at the top.

Over in Zablocie, in the backyard of Emalia, Mr. Jereth and Oskar Schindler were pursuing their own species of resistance by planning a second barracks.

CHAPTER 17

An Austrian dentist named Sedlacek had now arrived in Cracow and was making wary enquiries about Schindler. He had come by train from Budapest and carried a list of possible Cracow contacts and, in a false-bottomed suitcase, a quantity of Occupation z@loty, which, since Governor General Frank had abolished the major denominations of Polish money, took up an unconscionable space.

Though he pretended to be traveling on business, he was a courier for a Zionist rescue organization in Budapest.

Even in the autumn of 1942, the Zionists of Palestine, let alone the population of the world, knew nothing but rumors of what was happening in Europe. They had set up a bureau in Istanbul to gather hard information. From an apartment in the Beyoglu section of the city, three agents sent out postcards addressed to every Zionist body in German Europe. The postcards read:

“Please let me know how you are. Eretz is longing for you.” Eretz meant the “land” and, to any Zionist, Israel. Each of the postcards was signed by one of the three, a girl named Sarka Mandelblatt, who had a convenient Turkish citizenship.

The postcards had gone into the void. No one answered. It meant that the addressees were in prison, or in the forest, or at labor in some camp, or in a ghetto, or dead. All the Zionists of Istanbul had was the ominous negative evidence of silence. In the late autumn of 1942, they at last received one reply, a postcard with a view of the Belvaros of Budapest. The message on it read: “Encouraged by your interest in my situation.

Rahamim maher [urgent help] is much

needed. Please keep in touch.”

This reply had been composed by a Budapest jeweler named Samu Springmann, who’d first received and then puzzled out the message on Sarka Mandelblatt’s postcard. Samu was a slight man, jockey size, in the prime of his thirties. Since the age of thirteen, despite an inalienable probity, he had been oiling officials, doing favors for the diplomatic corps, bribing the heavy-handed Hungarian Secret Police. Now the Istanbul people let him know that they wanted to use him to pipe rescue money into the German empire and to transmit through them to the world some definite intelligence on what was happening to European Jewry.

In the German-allied Hungary of General Horthy, Samu Springmann and his Zionist colleagues were as bereft of solid news from beyond the Polish border as the people in Istanbul. But he began to recruit couriers who, for a percentage of the bag or else out of conviction, would be willing to penetrate the German territories. One of his couriers was a diamond dealer, Erich Popescu, an agent of the Hungarian Secret Police. Another was an underworld carpet smuggler, Bandi Grosz, who had also assisted the secret police, but who began to work for Springmann to expiate all the grief he had caused his late mother. A third was Rudi Schulz, an Austrian safecracker, an agent for the Gestapo Management Bureau in Stuttgart. Springmann had a gift for playing with double agents such as Popescu, Grosz, and Schulz, by touching their sentimentality, their greed, and, if any, their principles.

Some of his couriers were idealists, working from firm premises. Sedlacek, who asked after Herr Schindler in Cracow near the end of 1942, belonged to that species. He had a successful dental practice in Vienna and, in his mid-forties, did not need to lug falsebottomed suitcases into Poland. But here he was, with a list in his pocket, the list having come from Istanbul. And the second name on the list, Oskar’s!

It meant that someone—Itzhak Stern, the

businessman Ginter, Dr. Alexander Biberstein

--had forwarded Schindler’s name to the Zionists in Palestine. Without knowing it, Herr Schindler had been nominated for the post of righteous person.

Dr. Sedlacek had a friend in the Cracow

garrison, a fellow Viennese, a patient

he’d got to know in his practice. It was Major Franz Von Korab of the Wehrmacht. On his first evening in Cracow, the dentist met Major Von Korab at the Hotel Cracovia for a drink. Sedlacek had had a miserable day; had gone to the gray Vistula and looked across at Podg@orze, the cold fortress of barbed wire and lofty gravestoned walls, a cloud of a special dimness above it this mean winter’s day, a sharper rain falling there beyond the fake eastern gate where even the policemen looked accursed. When it was time to go and meet Von Korab, he went gratefully.

In the suburbs of Vienna it had always been rumored that Von Korab had a Jewish grandmother. Patients would idly say so—in the Reich, genealogical gossip was as acceptable small talk as was the weather. People would seriously speculate over drinks whether it was true that Reinhard Heydrich’s grandmother had married a Jew named Suss. Once, against all good sense but for the sake of friendship, Von Korab had confessed to Sedlacek that the rumor was true in his case. This confession had been a gesture of trust, which it would now be safe to return. Sedlacek therefore asked the major about some of the people on the Istanbul list. To Schindler’s name, Von Korab responded with an indulgent laugh. He knew Herr Schindler, had dined with him. He was physically impressive, said the major, and made money hand over fist. He was much brighter than he pretended to be. I can call him right now and make an appointment, said Von Korab. At ten the next morning they entered the Emalia office. Schindler accepted Sedlacek politely but watched Major Von Korab, measuring .his trust of the dentist. After a time Oskar warmed to the stranger, and the major excused himself and would not stay for morning coffee. “Very well,” said Sedlacek, when Von Korab was gone, “I’ll tell you exactly where I come from.”

He did not mention the money he had brought, nor the likelihood that in the future trusted contacts in Poland would be handed small fortunes in Jewish Joint Distribution Committee cash. What the dentist wanted to know, without any financial coloring, was what Herr Schindler knew and thought about the war against Jewry in Poland. Once Sedlacek had the question out, Schindler hesitated. In that second, Sedlacek expected a refusal. Schindler’s expanding workshop employed 550 Jews at the SS rental rate. The Armaments Inspectorate guaranteed a man like Schindler a continuity of rich contracts; the SS promised him, for no more than 7.50 Reichsmarks a day per person, a continuity of slaves. It should not be a surprise if he sat back in his padded leather chair and claimed ignorance.

“There is one problem, Herr Sedlacek,” he growled. “It’s this. What they are doing to people in this country is beyond belief.”

“You mean,” said Dr. Sedlacek, “that you’re concerned my principals won’t believe you?”

Schindler said, “Since I scarcely believe

it myself.” He rose, went to the liquor

cabinet, poured two snifters of cognac and brought one for Dr. Sedlacek. Returning to his own side of the desk with the other, he took a swallow, frowned at an invoice, picked it up, went to the door on the balls of his feet and swung it open as if to trap an eavesdropper. For a while he stood there framed. Then Sedlacek heard him talking calmly to his Polish secretary about the invoice. In a few minutes, closing the door, he returned to Sedlacek, took a seat behind the desk, and after another deep swallow, began to talk.

Even among Sedlacek’s own small cell,

his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not

imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite

so systematic. Not only was the story

Schindler told him startling simply in moral

terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a

desperate battle, the National Socialists

would devote thousands of men, the resources of

precious railroads, an enormous cubic

footage of cargo space, expensive

techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their

research-and-development scientists, a

substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of

automatic weapons, whole magazines of

ammunition, all to an extermination which had no

military or economic meaning but merely a

psychological one. Dr. Sedlacek had

expected mere horror stories—hunger,

economic strictures, violent pogroms in this city or that, violations of ownership—all the historically accustomed things.

Oskar’s summary of events in Poland convinced

Sedlacek precisely because of the sort of man

Oskar was. He had done well from the

Occupation; he sat at the heart of his own hive,

a brandy snifter in his hand. There were both an

impressive surface calm and a fundamental

anger in him. He was like a man who had, to his

regret, found it impossible to disbelieve the

worst. He showed no tendency to be

extravagant in the facts he relayed.

If I can arrange your visa, said

Sedlacek, would you come to Budapest and pass on what you just told me to my principals and the others? Schindler seemed momentarily surprised. You can write a report, he said. And surely you’ve heard this sort of thing from other sources. But Sedlacek told him no; there had been individual stories, details of this incident and that. No comprehensive picture. Come to Budapest, said Sedlacek. Mind you, it might be uncomfortable traveling.

Do you mean, asked Schindler, that I have to cross the border on foot?

Not as bad as that, said the dentist. You might have to travel in a freight train. I’ll come, said Oskar Schindler.

Dr. Sedlacek asked him about the other names

on the Istanbul list. At the top of the list, for

instance, stood a Cracow dentist. Dentists were

always easy to visit, said Sedlacek, since

everyone on earth has at least one bona fide

cavity. No, said Herr Schindler. Don’t

visit this man. He’s been compromised

by the SS.

Before he left Cracow to return to Mr.

Springmann in Budapest, Dr. Sedlacek

arranged another meeting with Schindler. In Oskar’s office at DEF, he handed over nearly all the currency Springmann had given him to bring to Poland. There was always some risk, in view of Schindler’s hedonistic taste, that he would spend it on black-market jewelry. But neither Springmann nor Istanbul required any assurances. They could never hope to play the auditor.

It must be stated that Oskar behaved impeccably and gave the cash to his contacts in the Jewish community to spend according to their judgment. Mordecai Wulkan, who like Mrs.

Dresner would in time come to know Herr Oskar Schindler, was a jeweler by trade. Now, late in the year, he was visited at home by one of Spira’s political OD. This wasn’t trouble, the OD man said. Certainly Wulkan had a record. A year before, he had been picked up by the OD for selling currency on the black market. When he had refused to work as an agent for the Currency Control Bureau, he had been beaten up by the SS, and Mrs. Wulkan had had to visit Wachtmeister Beck in the ghetto police office and pay a bribe for his release.

This June he’d been seized for transport to Bel@zec, but an OD man he’d known had arrived to pick him up and led him straight out of the Optima yard. For there were Zionists in the OD, however small their chances of ever beholding Jerusalem might be. The OD man who visited him this time was no

Zionist. The SS, he told Wulkan,

urgently needed four jewelers. Symche

Spira had been given three hours to find them. In this way Herzog, Friedner, Gr@uner, and Wulkan, four jewelers, were assembled at the OD station and marched out of the ghetto to the old Technical Academy, now a warehouse for the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office.

It was obvious to Wulkan as he entered the Academy that a great security operated here. At every door stood a guard. In the front hall, an SS officer told the four jewelers that should they speak to anyone about their work here, they could expect to be sent to a labor camp. They were to bring with them, he said, every day, their diamond-grading kits, their equipment for assessing the karat value of gold.

They were led down into the basement. Around the walls stood racks laden with suitcases and towering layers of briefcases, each with a name studiously and futilely printed on it by its past owner. Beneath the high windows stood a line of wooden crates. As the four jewelers squatted in the center of the floor, two SS men took down a suitcase, labored across the cellar with it, and emptied it in front of Herzog. They returned to the rack for another, which they emptied in front of Gr@uner. Then they brought a cascade of gold for Friedner, then for Wulkan. It was old gold—rings, brooches, bracelets, watches, lorgnettes, cigarette holders.

The jewelers were to grade the gold, separate the gold plate from the solid. Diamonds and pearls were to be valued. They were to classify everything, according to value and karat weight, in separate heaps.

At first they picked up individual pieces

tentatively, but then worked faster as old

professional habits asserted themselves. As the

gold and jewelry went into their piles, the SS

men loaded the stuff into its appropriate

crate. Every time a crate was filled, it was

labeled in black paint—SS

REICHSF@UHRER BERLIN. The SS

Reichsf@uhrer was Himmler himself, in whose name the confiscated jewelry of Europe was deposited in the Reichsbank. There were quantities of children’s rings, and one had to keep a cool rational control of one’s knowledge of their provenance. Only once did the jewelers falter: when the SS men opened a suitcase and out of it tumbled gold teeth still smeared with blood. There in a pile at Wulkan’s knees, the mouths of a thousand dead were represented, each one calling for him to join them by standing and flinging his grading stone across the room and declaring the tainted origin of all this precious stuff. Then, after the hiatus, Herzog and Gr@uner, Wulkan and Friedner commenced to grade again, aware now, of course, of the radiant value of whatever gold they themselves carried in their mouths, fearful that the SS would come prospecting for it. It took six weeks for them to work through the

treasures of the Technical Academy. After they

had finished there, they were taken to a disused garage which

had been converted to a silver warehouse. The

lubrication pits were filled to spilling over with

solid silver—rings, pendants, Passover

platters, yad pointers, breastplates,

crowns, candelabra. They separated the solid silver from the silver plate; they weighed it all. The SS officer in charge complained that some of these objects were awkward to pack, and Mordecai Wulkan suggested that perhaps they might consider melting them down. It seemed to Wulkan, though he was not pious, that it would be somehow better, a minor triumph, if the Reich inherited silver from which the Judaic form had been removed. But for some reason the SS officer refused. Perhaps the objects were intended for some didactic museum inside the Reich. Or perhaps the SS liked the artistry of synagogue silverware.

When this appraisal work ran out, Wulkan was again at a loss for employment. He needed to leave the ghetto regularly to find enough food for his family, especially for his bronchitic daughter. For a time he worked at a metal factory in Kazimierz, getting to know an SS moderate, Oberscharf@uhrer Gola. Gola found him work as a maintenance man at the SA barracks near Wawel. As Wulkan entered the mess with his wrenches, he saw above the door the inscription, F@UR JUDEN UND HUNDE EINTRITT

VERBOTEN: Entrance forbidden to Jews and dogs. This sign, together with the hundred thousand teeth he had appraised at the Technical Academy, convinced him that deliverance could not in the end be expected from the offhand favor of Oberscharf@uhrer Gola. Gola drank here without noticing the sign; and neither would he notice the absence of the Wulkan family on the day they were taken to Bel@zec or some place of equal efficiency. Therefore Wulkan, like Mrs. Dresner and some fifteen thousand other dwellers in the ghetto, knew that what was needed was a special and startling deliverance. They did not believe for a moment that it would be provided.

CHAPTER 18

Dr. Sedlacek had promised an uncomfortable journey, and so it was. Oskar traveled in a good overcoat with a suitcase and a bag full of various comforts which he badly needed by the end of the trip. Though he had the appropriate travel documents, he did not want to have to use them. It was considered better if he did not have to present them at the border. He could always then deny that he had been to Hungary that December. He rode in a freight van filled with bundles of the Party newspaper, V@olkischer Beobachter, for sale in Hungary. Closeted with the redolence of printer’s ink and among the heavy Gothic print of Germany’s official newspaper, he was rocked south over the winter-sharp mountains of Slovakia, across the Hungarian border, and down to the valley of the Danube.

A reservation had been made for him at the Pannonia, near the University, and on the afternoon of his arrival, little Samu Springmann and an associate of his, Dr. Rezso Kastner, came to see him. The two men who rose to Schindler’s floor in the elevator had heard fragments of news from refugees. But refugees could give you little but threads. The fact that they had avoided the threat meant that they knew little of its geography, its intimate functioning, the numbers it ran to. Kastner and Springmann were full of anticipation, since—if Sedlacek could be believed—the Sudeten German upstairs could give them the whole cloth, the first full-bodied report on the Polish havoc. In the room the introductions were brief, for

Springmann and Kastner had come to listen and they could tell that Schindler was anxious to talk. There was no effort, in this city obsessed with coffee, to formalize the event by calling Room Service for coffee and cakes. Kastner and Springmann, after shaking the enormous German by the hand, sat down. But Schindler paced. It seemed that far from Cracow and the realities of Aktion and ghetto, his knowledge disturbed him more than it had when he’d briefly informed Sedlacek. He rampaged across the carpet. They would have heard his steps in the room below—their chandelier would have shaken when he stamped his foot, miming the action of the SS man in the execution squad in Krakusa, the one who’d pinned his victim’s head down with a boot in full sight of the red child at the tail of the departing column.

He began with personal images of the cruel parishes of Cracow, what he had beheld in the streets or heard from either side of the wall, from Jews and from the SS. In that connection, he said, he was carrying letters from members of the ghetto, from the physician Chaim Hilfstein, from Dr. Leon Salpeter, from Itzhak Stern. Dr. Hilfstein’s letter, said Schindler, was a report on hunger. “Once the body fat’s gone,” said Oskar, “it starts to work on the brain.”

The ghettos were being wound down, Oskar told them. It was true equally of Warsaw as of @l@od@z and of Cracow. The population of the Warsaw ghetto had been reduced by four-fifths, @l@od@z by two-thirds, Cracow by half. Where were the people who had been transferred? Some were in work camps; but the gentlemen here this afternoon had to accept that at least three-fifths of them had disappeared into camps that used the new scientific methods. Such camps were not exceptional. They had an official SS name—

Vernichtungslager:

Extermination Camp.

In the past few weeks, said Oskar, some

2,000 Cracow ghetto dwellers had been

rounded up and sent not to the chambers of Bel@zec, but to labor camps near the city. One was at Wieliczka, one at Prokocim, both of these being railway stations on the Ostbahn line which ran toward the Russian front. From Wieliczka and Prokocim, these prisoners were being marched every day to a site at the village of P@lasz@ow, on the edge of the city, where the foundations for a vast labor camp were being laid. Their life in such a labor camp, said

Schindler, would be no holiday—the barracks of Wieliczka and Prokocim were under the command of an SS NCO named Horst Pilarzik who had earned a reputation last June when he had helped clear from the ghetto some 7,000 people, of whom only one, a chemist, had returned. The proposed camp at P@lasz@ow would be under a man of the same caliber. What was in favor of the labor camps was that they lacked the technical apparatus for methodical slaughter. There was a different rationale behind them. They had economic reasons for existing—prisoners from Wieliczka and Prokocim were marched out every day to work on various projects, just as they were from the ghetto. Wieliczka, Prokocim, and the proposed camp

at P@lasz@ow were under the control of the chiefs of

police for Cracow, Julian Scherner and

Rolf Czurda, whereas the

Vernichtungslagers were run by the central management of the SS Administrative and Economic Main Office at Oranienburg near Berlin. The Vernichtungslagers also used people as labor for a time, but their ultimate industry was death and its by-products—the recycling of the clothes, of remaining jewelry or spectacles, of toys, and even of the skin and hair of the dead.

In the midst of explaining the distinction between extermination camps and those for forced labor, Schindler suddenly stepped toward the door, wrenched it open, and looked up and down the empty hallway. “I know the reputation of this city for eavesdropping,”

he explained. Little Mr. Springmann rose and came to his elbow. “The Pannonia isn’t so bad,” he told Oskar in a low voice. “It’s the Victoria that’s the Gestapo hotbed.”

Schindler surveyed the hallway once more, closed the door, and returned across the room. He stood by the windows and continued his grim report. The forced-labor camps would be run by men appointed for their severity and efficiency in clearing the ghettos. There would be sporadic murders and beatings, and there would certainly be corruption involving food and therefore short rations for the prisoners. But that was preferable to the assured death of the Vernichtungslagers. People in the labor camps could get access to extra comforts, and individuals could be taken out and smuggled to Hungary. These SS men are as corruptible as any other police force, then? the gentleman of the Budapest rescue committee asked Oskar. “In my experience,” growled Oskar, “there isn’t one of them who isn’t.”

When Oskar finished, there was, of course,

silence. Kastner and Springmann were not readily

astounded. All their lives they’d lived under the

intimidation of the Secret Police. Their

present activities were both vaguely

suspected by the Hungarian police—rendered

safe only by Samu’s contacts and bribes—and

at the same time disdained by respectable

Jewry. Samuel Stern, for example,

president of the Jewish Council, member of the

Hungarian Senate, would dismiss this afternoon’s

report by Oskar Schindler as pernicious

fantasy, an insult to German culture, a

reflection on the decency of the intentions of the Hungarian Government. These two were used to hearing the worst.

So it was not that Springmann and Kastner were

unmanned by Schindler’s testimony as much as that

their minds were painfully expanding. Their resources

seemed minute now that they knew what they were set

against—not just any average and predictable

Philistine giant, but Behemoth itself. Perhaps

already they were reaching for the idea that as well as

individual bargaining—some extra food for this

camp, rescue for this intellectual, a bribe

to temper the professional ardor of this SS man

--some vaster rescue scheme would have to be arranged at breathtaking expense. Schindler threw himself into a chair. Samu Springmann looked across at the exhausted industrialist. He had made an enormous impression on them, said Springmann. They would, of course, send a report to Istanbul on all Oskar had told them. It would be used to stir the Palestinian Zionists and the Joint Distribution Committee to greater action. At the same time it would be transmitted to the governments of Churchill and Roosevelt. Springmann said that he thought Oskar was right to worry about people’s belief in what he’d say; he was right to say it was all incredible. “Therefore,” said Samu Springmann,

“I urge you to go to Istanbul yourself and speak to the people there.” After a little hesitation—whether to do with the demands of the enamelware business or with the dangers of crossing so many borders—Schindler agreed. Toward the end of the year, said Springmann. “In the meantime you will see Dr. Sedlacek in Cracow regularly.”

They stood up, and Oskar could see that they were changed men. They thanked him and left, becoming simply, on the way downstairs, two pensive Budapest professional men who’d heard disturbing news of mismanagement in the branch offices. That night Dr. Sedlacek called at

Oskar’s hotel and took him out into the brisk streets to dinner at the Hotel Gellert. From their table they could see the Danube, its illuminated barges, the city glowing on the far side of the water. It was like a prewar city, and Schindler began to feel like a tourist again. After his afternoon’s temperance, he drank the dense Hungarian burgundy called Bull’s Blood with a slow, assiduous thirst, and created a rank of empty bottles at their table.

Halfway through their meal they were joined by an Austrian journalist, Dr. Schmidt, who’d brought with him his mistress, an exquisite, golden Hungarian girl. Schindler admired the girl’s jewelry and told her that he was a great fancier of gems himself. But over apricot brandy, he became less friendly. He sat with a mild frown, listening to Schmidt talk of real estate prices and automobile dealings and horse races. The girl listened raptly to Schmidt, since she wore the results of his business coups around her neck and at her wrists. But Oskar’s unexpected disapproval was clear. Dr. Sedlacek was secretly amused: perhaps Oskar was seeing a partial reflection of his own new wealth, his own tendencies toward trading on the fringes.

When the dinner was over, Schmidt and his girl left for some nightclub, and Sedlacek made sure he took Schindler to a different one. They sat drinking unwise further quantities of barack and watching the floor show.

“That Schmidt,” said Schindler, wanting to clear up the question so that he could enjoy the small hours. “Do you use him?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t think you ought to use men like that,” said Oskar. “He’s a thief.”

Dr. Sedlacek turned his face, and its

half-smile, away.

“How can you be sure he delivers any of the money you give him?” Oskar asked.

“We let him keep a percentage,” said

Dr. Sedlacek.

Oskar thought about it for a full half-minute. Then he murmured, “I don’t want a damned percentage. I don’t want to be offered one.” “Very well,” said Sedlacek.

“Let’s watch the girls,” said Oskar.

CHAPTER 19

Even as Oskar Schindler returned by freight

car from Budapest, where he’d predicted that the

ghetto would soon be closed, an SS

Untersturmf@uhrer named Amon Goeth was

on his way from Lublin to bring about that liquidation,

and to take command of the resultant Forced Labor

Camp (Zwangsarbeitslager) at

P@lasz@ow. Goeth was some eight months younger

than Schindler, but shared more with him than the mere

year of birth. Like Oskar he had been raised a

Catholic and had ceased observing the rites of the

Church as late as 1938, when his first marriage

had broken up. Like Oskar too, he had

graduated from high school in the

Realgymnasium—Engineering, Physics,

Math. He was therefore a practical man, no thinker, but considered himself a philosopher. A Viennese, he had joined the National

Socialist Party early, in 1930. When the

nervous Austrian Republic banned the party in 1933, he was already a member of its security force, the SS. Driven underground, he had emerged onto the streets of Vienna after the Anschluss of 1938 in the uniform of an SS noncommissioned officer. In 1940 he had been raised to the rank of SS Oberscharf@uhrer and in 1941 achieved the honor of commissioned rank, immensely harder to come by in the SS than in Wehrmacht units. After training in infantry tactics, he was put in charge of Sonderkommandos during Aktionen in the populous ghetto of Lublin and, by his performance there, earned the right to liquidate Cracow.

Untersturmf@uhrer Amon Goeth then, speeding on the Wehrmacht special between Lublin and Cracow, there to take command of well-tried Sonderkommandos, shared with Oskar not only his year of birth, his religion, his weakness for liquor, but a massive physique as well. Goeth’s face was open and pleasant, rather longer than Schindler’s. His hands, though large and muscular, were long-fingered. He was sentimental about his children, the children of his second marriage whom, because of his foreign service, he had not seen often in the past three years. As a substitute, he was sometimes attentive to the children of brother officers. He could be a sentimental lover too, but though he resembled Oskar in terms of general sexual voraciousness, his tastes were less conventional, running sometimes to his brother SS men, frequently to the beating of women. Both his former wives could have testified that once the first blaze of infatuation had died, he could become physically abusive. He considered himself a sensitive man, and thought that his family’s trade proved it. His father and grandfather were Viennese printers and binders of books on military and economic history, and he liked to list himself on official papers as a Literat: a man of letters. And though, at this moment, he would have told you that he looked forward to his taking of control of the liquidation operation—that this was the major chance of his career and carried with it the promise of promotion— his service in Special Actions seemed to him to have altered the flow of his nervous energies. He had been plagued with insomnia for two years now and, if he had his way, stayed up till three or four and slept late in the mornings. He had become a reckless drinker and believed he held his liquor with an ease he had not known in his youth. Again like Oskar, he never suffered the hangovers he deserved. He thanked his hardworking kidneys for this benefit.

His orders, entrusting him with the extinction of the ghetto and the kingship of the P@lasz@ow camp, were dated February 12, 1943. He hoped that after consulting with his senior NCO’S, with Wilhelm Kunde, commander of the SS guard detail for the ghetto, and with Willi Haase, Scherner’s deputy, it would be possible to begin the clearing of the ghetto within a month of the date on his commission. Commandant Goeth was met at the Cracow Central Station by Kunde himself and by the tall young SS man Horst Pilarzik, who was temporarily in charge of the work camps at Prokocim and Wieliczka. They piled into the back of a Mercedes and were driven off for a reconnaissance of the ghetto and the site of the new camp. It was a bitter day, and snow began to fall as they crossed the Vistula.

Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth was pleased for a pull on a flask of schnapps Pilarzik carried with him. They passed through the fake-Oriental portals and down the trolley lines of Lw@owska Street, which cut the ghetto into two icy portions. The dapper Kunde, who had been a customs agent in civilian life and was adept at reporting to superiors, gave a deft sketch of the ghetto. The portion on their left was Ghetto B, said Kunde. Its inhabitants, about 2,000 of them, had

escaped earlier Aktionen or had been

previously employed in industry. But new

identification cards had been issued since then,

with appropriate initials—either W for Army

employees, Z for employees of the civil

authorities, or R for workers in essential

industries. The inhabitants of Ghetto B

lacked these new cards and were to be shipped away for Sonderbehandlung (special Treatment).

In clearing the ghetto, it might be preferable to start on that side first, though that sort of tactical decision was entirely up to the Herr Commandant.

The greater portion of the ghetto stood to the right and contained some 10,000 people still. They would of course be the initial labor force for the factories of the P@lasz@ow camp. It was expected that the German entrepreneurs and supervisors—

Bosch, Madritsch, Beckmann, the

Sudetenlander Oskar Schindler—would want to move all or part of their operations out of town into the camp. As well as that there was a cable-making plant no more than half a mile from the proposed camp, and laborers would be marched there and back each day. Would the Herr Commandant, asked Kunde, care to continue down the road a few kilometers and have a look at the campsite itself?

Oh, yes, said Amon, I think that would be advisable.

They turned off the highway where the cable-factory yard, snow lying on the giant spools, marked the beginning of Jerozolimska Street. Amon Goeth had a glimpse of a few groups of hunched and bescarved women dragging segments of huts—a wall panel, an eaves section—across the highway and up Jerozolimska from the direction of the railway station at Cracow-P@lasz@ow. They were women from the Prokocim camp, Pilarzik explained. When P@lasz@ow was ready, Prokocim would of course be disbanded and these laboring women would come under the management of the Herr Commandant. Goeth estimated the distance the women had to carry the frames to be some threequarters of a kilometer. “All uphill,” said Kunde, putting his head on one shoulder, then on the other, as if to say, So it’s a satisfactory form of discipline, but it slows up construction.

The camp would need a railway spur, said Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth. He would make an approach to Ostbahn.

They passed on the right a synagogue and its mortuary buildings, and a half-tumbled wall showed gravestones like teeth in the cruelly exposed mouth of winter. Part of the campsite had been until this month a Jewish cemetery. “Quite extensive,” said Wilhelm Kunde. The Herr Commandant uttered a witticism which would come to his lips often during his residency at P@lasz@ow. “They won’t have to go far to get buried.”

There was a house to the right which would be suitable as a temporary residence for the Commandant, and then a large new building to serve as an administration center. The synagogue mortuary, already partly dynamited, would become the camp stable. Kunde pointed out that the two limestone quarries within the camp area could be seen from here. One stood in the bottom of the little valley, the other up on the hill behind the synagogue. The Herr Commandant might be able to notice the tracks being laid for trolleys which would be used in hauling stones. Once the heavy weather let up, the construction of the track would continue.

They drove to the southeast end of the proposed camp, and a trail, just passable in the snow, took them along the skyline. The trail ended at what had once been an Austrian military earthwork, a circular mound surrounding a deep and broad indentation. To an artilleryman it would have appeared an important redoubt from which cannon could be sighted to enfilade the road from Russia. To Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth it was a place suited for disciplinary punishment. From up here, the camp area could be seen whole. It was a rural stretch, graced with the Jewish

cemetery, and folded between two hills. It was in

this weather two pages of a largely blank book

opened and held at an angle, sideways, to the

observer on the fort hill. A gray, stone

country dwelling was stuck at the entrance to the

valley, and past it, along the far slope and

among the few finished barracks, moved teams of

women, black as bunches of musical

notations, in the strange darkling luminescence of a

snowy evening. Emerging from the icy alleys beyond

Jerozolimska, they toiled up the white slope

under the urgings of Ukrainian guards and dropped

the sections of frames where the SS engineers,

wearing homburgs and civilian clothes,

instructed them.

Their rate of work was a limitation,

Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth remarked. The ghetto people could not, of course, be moved here until the barracks were up and the watchtowers and fences completed. He had no complaints about the pace at which the prisoners on the far hill were working, he told them, confidingly. He was in fact secretly impressed that so late on a biting day, the SS

men and Ukrainians on the far slope were not letting the thought of supper and warm barracks slow the pace of operations.

Horst Pilarzik assured him that it was all closer to completion than it looked: the land had been terraced, the foundations dug despite the cold, and a great quantity of prefabricated sections carried up from the railway station. The Herr Untersturmf@uhrer would be able to consult with the entrepreneurs tomorrow—a meeting had been arranged for 10 A.m. But modern methods combined with a copious supply of labor meant that these places could be put up almost overnight, weather permitting. Pilarzik seemed to believe that Goeth was in genuine danger of demoralization. In fact Amon was exhilarated. From what he could see here, he could discern the final shape of the place. Nor was he worried about fences. The fences would be a mental comfort to the prisoners rather than an essential precaution. For after the established methodology of SS liquidation had been applied to the Podg@orze ghetto, people would be grateful for the barracks of P@lasz@ow. Even those with Aryan papers would come crawling in here, seeking an obscure berth high up in the green, hoarfrosted rooftrees. For most of them, the wire was needed only as a prop, so that they might reassure themselves that they were prisoners against their will.

The meeting with the local factory owners and

Treuh@anders took place in Julian

Scherner’s office in central Cracow early the

following day. Amon Goeth arrived smiling

fraternally and, in his freshly tailored

Waffen SS uniform, designed precisely

for his enormous frame, seemed to dominate the

room. He was sure he could charm the

independents, Bosch and Madritsch and

Schindler, into transferring their Jewish labor

behind camp wire. Besides that, an investigation of the

skills available among the ghetto dwellers

helped him to see that P@lasz@ow could become quite

a business. There were jewelers, upholsterers,

tailors who could be used for special

enterprises under the Commandant’s direction,

filling orders for the SS, the Wehrmacht, the

wealthy German officialdom. There would be the

clothing workshops of Madritsch, the enamel

factory of Schindler, a proposed metal

plant, a brush factory, a warehouse for

recycling used, damaged, or stained

Wehrmacht uniforms from the Russian

Front, a further warehouse for recycling

Jewish clothing from the ghettos and dispatching it for the

use of bombed-out families at home. He

knew from his experiences of the SS jewelry and

fur warehouses of Lublin, having seen his

superiors at work there and taken his proper cut,

that from most of these prison enterprises he could

expect a personal percentage. He had reached

that happy point in his career at which duty and

financial opportunity coincided. The

convivial SS police chief, Julian

Scherner, over dinner last night, had talked to Amon about what a great opportunity P@lasz@ow would be for a young officer—for them both. Scherner opened the meeting with the factory people. He spoke solemnly about the “concentration of labor,” as if it were a great economic principle new-hatched by the SS bureaucracy. You’ll have your labor on site, said Scherner. All factory maintenance will be undertaken at no cost to you, and there will be no rent. All the gentlemen were invited to inspect the workshop sites inside P@lasz@ow that afternoon.

The new Commandant was introduced. He said how pleased he was to be associated with these businessmen whose valuable contributions to the war effort were already widely known.

Amon pointed out on a map of the camp area the section set aside for the factories. It was next to the men’s camp; the women—he told them with an easy and quite charming smile—would have to walk a little farther, one or two hundred meters downhill, to reach the workshops. He assured the gentlemen that his main task was to oversee the smooth functioning of the camp and that he had no wish to interfere with their factory policies or to alter the managerial autonomy they enjoyed here in Cracow. His orders, as Oberf@uhrer Scherner could verify, forbade in so many words that sort of intrusion. But the Oberf@uhrer had been correct in pointing out the mutual advantages of moving an industry inside the camp perimeter. The factory owners did not have to pay for the premises, and he, the Commandant, did not have to provide a guard to march the prisoners to town and back. They could understand how the length of the journey and the hostility of the Poles to a column of Jews would erode the worth of the workers. Throughout this speech, Commandant Goeth glanced frequently at Madritsch and Schindler, the two he particularly wished to win over. He knew he could already depend on Bosch’s local knowledge and advice. But Herr Schindler, for example, had a munitions section, small and merely in the developmental stage as yet. It would, however, if transferred, give P@lasz@ow a great respectability with the Armaments Inspectorate.

Herr Madritsch listened with a considered frown, and Herr Schindler watched the speaker with an acquiescent half-smile. Commandant Goeth could tell instinctively, even before he’d finished speaking, that Madritsch would be reasonable and move in, that Schindler would refuse. It was hard to judge by these separate decisions which one of the two felt more paternal toward his Jews—

Madritsch, who wanted to be inside

P@lasz@ow with them, or Schindler, who wanted to have his with him in Emalia. Oskar Schindler, wearing that same face of avid tolerance, went with the party to inspect the campsite. P@lasz@ow had the form of a camp now—an improvement in the weather had permitted the assembly of barracks; a thawing of the ground permitted the digging of latrines and postholes. A Polish construction company had installed the miles of perimeter fence. Thick-legged watchtowers were going up along the skyline toward Cracow, and also at the mouth of the valley down toward Wieliczka Street, away at the far end of the camp, and up here on this eastern hill where the official party, in the shadow of the Austrian hill fort, watched the fast work of this new creation. Off to the right, Oskar noticed, women were hustling up muddy tracks in the direction of the railway, heavy sections of barracks tilted between them. Below, from the lowest point of the valley and all the way up the far side, the terraced barracks ran, assembled by male prisoners who raised and slotted and hammered with an energy which at this distance resembled willingness.

On the choicest, most level ground beneath the official party, a number of long wooden structures were available for industrial occupation. Cement floors could be poured should heavy machinery need to be installed. The transfer of all plant machinery would be handled by the SS. The road that serviced the area was admittedly little more than a country track, but the engineering firm of Klug had been approached to build a central street for the camp, and the Ostbahn had promised to provide a spur to the camp gate itself, to the quarry down there on the right. Limestone from the quarries and some of what Goeth called “Polish-defaced” gravestones from over in the cemetery would be broken up to provide other interior roads. The gentlemen should not worry about roads, said Goeth, for he intended to maintain a permanently strong quarrying and road-building team.

A small railroad had been laid for the rock trolleys. It ran from the quarry up past the Administration Building and the large stone barracks that were being built for the SS and Ukrainian garrison. Trolleys of limestone, each weighing six tons, were hauled by teams of women, thirty-five or forty of them to a team, dragging on cables set either side of the rock truck, to compensate for the unevenness in the rail line. Those who tripped or stumbled were trampled or else rolled out of the way, for the teams had their own organic momentum and no individual could abdicate from it. Watching this insidious Egyptianlooking industry, Oskar felt the same surge of nausea, the same prickling of the blood he had experienced on the hill above Krakusa Street. Goeth had assumed the businessmen were a safe audience, that they were all spiritual kinfolk of his. He was not embarrassed by that savage hauling down there. The question arose, as it had in Krakusa Street: What could embarrass the SS? What could embarrass Amon?

The energy of the barracks builders had, even to an informed observer like Oskar, the specious appearance of men working hard to put up shelter for their women. But though Oskar had not yet heard the rumor of it, Amon had performed a summary execution in front of those men this morning, so that now they knew what the full terms of their labor were. After the early-morning meeting with the engineers, Amon had been strolling down Jerozolimska and had come to the SS barracks where the work was under the supervision of an excellent NCO, soon to be promoted to officer rank, named Albert Hujar. Hujar had marched up and made his report. A section of the foundations of the barracks had collapsed, said Hujar, his face flushed. At the same time, Amon had noticed a girl walking around the half-finished building, speaking to teams of men, pointing, directing. Who was that? he asked Hujar. She was a prisoner named Diana Reiter, said Hujar, an architectural engineer who had been assigned to the construction of the barracks. She was claiming that the foundations hadn’t been correctly excavated, and she wanted all the stone and cement dug up and the work on that section of the building to begin again from scratch. Goeth had been able to tell from the color of Hujar’s face that he had had a tough argument with the woman. Hujar had, in fact, been reduced to screaming at her,

“You’re building barracks, not the frigging Hotel Europa!”

Now Amon half-smiled at Hujar.

We’re not going to have arguments with these people, he said, as if it were a promise. Bring me the girl.

Amon could tell, from the way she walked toward

him, the bogus elegance with which her middle-class

parents had raised her, the European manners

they had imbued her with, sending her—when the honest

Poles wouldn’t take her in their universities

--off to Vienna or Milan to give her a

profession and a heightened protective coloration. She walked toward him as if his rank and hers would bind them in the battle against oafish NCO’S and the inferior craft of whichever SS engineer had supervised the digging of the foundations. She did not know that he hated her the worst—the type who thought, even against the evidence of his SS

uniform, of these rising structures, that their Jewishness was not visible.

“You’ve had occasion to quarrel with

Oberscharf@uhrer Hujar,” Goeth told

her as a fact. She nodded firmly. The Herr

Commandant would understand, the nod suggested, even though that idiot Hujar couldn’t. The entire foundations at that end must be redug, she told him energetically. Of course, Amon knew “they” were like that, they liked to string out tasks and so ensure that the labor force was safe for the duration of the project. If everything is not redug, she told him, there will be at least subsidence at the southern end of the barracks. There could be collapse. She went on arguing the case, and Amon nodded and presumed she must be lying. It was a first principle that you never listened to a Jewish specialist. Jewish specialists were in the mold of Marx, whose theories were aimed at the integrity of government, and of Freud, who had assaulted the integrity of the Aryan mind. Amon felt that this girl’s argument threatened his personal integrity.

He called Hujar. The NCO returned

uneasily. He thought he was going to be told

to take the girl’s advice. The girl did

too. Shoot her, Amon told Hujar. There

was, of course, a pause while Hujar

digested the order. Shoot her, Amon repeated. Hujar took the girl’s elbow to lead her away to some place of private execution. Here! said Amon. Shoot her here! On my authority, said Amon.

Hujar knew how it was done. He gripped her by the elbow, pushed her a little to his front, took the Mauser from his holster, and shot her in the back of the neck. The sound appalled everyone on the work site, except—it seemed—the executioners and the dying Miss Diana Reiter herself. She knelt and looked up once. It will take more than that, she was saying. The knowingness in her eyes frightened Amon, justified him, elevated him. He had no idea and would not have believed that these reactions had clinical labels. He believed, in fact, that he was being awarded the inevitable exaltation that follows an act of political, racial, and moral justice. Even so, a man paid for that, for by evening the fullness of this hour would be followed by such emptiness that he would need, to avoid being blown away like a husk, to augment his size and permanence by food, liquor, contact with a woman.

Apart from these considerations, the shooting of this

Diana Reiter, the cancelling of her Western

European diploma, had this practical

value: that no erector of huts or roads in

P@lasz@ow would consider himself essential to the task—that if Miss Diana Reiter could not save herself with all her professional skill, the only chance of the others was prompt and anonymous labor. Therefore the women lugging frames up from the CracowP@lasz@ow railway station, the quarry teams, the men assembling the huts all worked with an energy appropriate to what they’d learned from Miss Reiter’s assassination. As for Hujar and his colleagues, they knew now that instantaneous execution was to be the permitted style of P@lasz@ow.

CHAPTER 20

Two days after the visit of the factory heads to P@lasz@ow, Schindler turned up at Commandant Goeth’s temporary office in the city, bringing with him the compliments of a bottle of brandy. The news of Diana Reiter’s assassination had by this time reached the front office of Emalia and was the sort of item that confirmed Oskar in his intention to keep his factory outside P@lasz@ow.

The two big men sat opposite each other and there was a mutual knowingness in them too, just as there had been in the brief relationship between Amon and Miss Reiter. What they knew was that each of them was in Cracow to make a fortune; that therefore Oskar would pay for favors. At that level Oskar and the Commandant understood each other well. Oskar had the characteristic salesman’s gift of treating men he abhorred as if they were spiritual brothers, and it would deceive the Herr Commandant so completely that Amon would always believe Oskar a friend.

But from the evidence of Stern and others it is

obvious that, from the time of their earlier contacts,

Oskar abominated Goeth as a man who went to the

work of murder as calmly as a clerk goes to his

office. Oskar could speak to Amon the

administrator, Amon the speculator, but

knew at the same time that nine-tenths of the Commandant’s being lay beyond the normal rational processes of humans. The business and social connections between Oskar and Amon worked well enough to tempt the supposition that Oskar was somehow and despite himself fascinated by the evil of the man. In fact, no one who knew Oskar at this time or later saw a sign of any such enthrallment. Oskar despised Goeth in the simplest and most passionate terms. His contempt would grow without limit, and his career would dramatically demonstrate it. Just the same, the reflection can hardly be avoided that Amon was Oskar’s dark brother, was the berserk and fanatic executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appetites, have become.

With a bottle of brandy between them, Oskar explained to Amon why it was impossible for him to move into P@lasz@ow. His plant was too substantial to be shifted. He believed his friend Madritsch intended to move his Jewish workers in, but Madritsch’s machinery was more easily transferred—it was basically a series of sewing machines. There were different problems involved in moving heavy metal presses, each of which, as a sophisticated machine will, had developed special quirks. His skilled workers had become accustomed to these quirks. But on a new factory floor the machines would display an entirely new set of eccentricities. There’d be delays; the settling-in period would take longer than it would for his esteemed friend Julius Madritsch. The Untersturmf@uhrer would understand that with important war contracts to fulfill, DEF

could not spare such a lapse of time. Herr Beckmann, who had the same sort of problem, was firing all his Jews over at the Corona works. He didn’t want the fuss of the Jews marching out from P@lasz@ow to the factory in the morning and back in the evenings. Unfortunately, he, Schindler, had hundreds more skilled Jewish workers than Beckmann did. If he got rid of them, Poles would have to be trained in their place and there would again be a production delay, an even greater one than if he accepted Goeth’s attractive offer and moved into P@lasz@ow.

Amon secretly thought that Oskar might be worried that a move into P@lasz@ow would impinge on any sweetly running little deals he had going in Cracow. The Commandant therefore hurried to reassure Herr Schindler that there’d be no interference in the management of the enamel factory. “It’s purely the industrial problems that worry me,”

said Schindler piously. He didn’t want to inconvenience the Commandant, but he would be grateful, and he was sure the Armaments Inspectorate would also be grateful, if DEF

were permitted to stay in its present location.

Among men like Goeth and Oskar, the word “gratitude” did not have an abstract meaning. Gratitude was a payoff. Gratitude was liquor and diamonds. I understand your problems, Herr Schindler, said Amon. I shall be happy, once the ghetto is liquidated, to provide a guard to escort your workers from P@lasz@ow to Zablocie. Itzhak Stern, coming to Zablocie one afternoon on business for the Progress factory, found Oskar depressed and sensed in him a dangerous feeling of impotence. After Klonowska had brought in the coffee, which the Herr Direktor drank as always with a shot of cognac, Oskar told Stern that he’d been to P@lasz@ow again: ostensibly to look at the facilities; in fact to gauge when it would be ready for the Ghettomenschen. “I took a count,” said Oskar. He’d counted the terraced barracks on the far hill and found that if Amon intended to cram 200 women into each, as was likely, there was now room for some 6,000 women up there in the top compound. The men’s sector down the hill did not have so many finished buildings, but at the rate things were done in P@lasz@ow it could be finished in days. Everyone on the factory floor knows what’s going to happen, said Oskar. And it’s no use keeping the night shift on the premises here, because after this one, there’ll be no ghetto to go back to. All I can tell them, said Oskar, taking a second slug of cognac, is that they shouldn’t try to hide unless they’re sure of the hiding place. He’d heard that the pattern was to tear the ghetto apart after it had been cleared. Every wall cavity would be probed, every attic carpet taken up, every niche revealed, every cellar plumbed.

All I can tell them, said Oskar, is not

to resist.

So it happened oddly that Stern, one of the targets of the coming Aktion, sat comforting Herr Direktor Schindler, a mere witness.

Oskar’s attention to his Jewish laborers was being diffused, tempted away by the wider tragedy of the ghetto’s coming end. P@lasz@ow was a labor institution, said Stern. Like all institutions, it could be outlived. It wasn’t like Bel@zec, where they made death in the same manner in which Henry Ford made cars. It was degrading to have to line up for P@lasz@ow on orders, but it wasn’t the end of things. When Stern had finished arguing, Oskar put both thumbs under the beveled top of his desk and seemed for a few seconds to want to tear it off. You know, Stern, he said, that that’s damn well not good enough! It is, said Stern. It’s the only course.

And he went on arguing, quoting and hairsplitting, and was himself frightened. For Oskar seemed to be in crisis. If Oskar lost hope, Stern knew, all the Jewish workers of Emalia would be fired, for Oskar would wish to be purified of the entire dirty business. There’ll be time to do something more positive, said Stern. But not yet. Abandoning the attempt to tear the lid from his desk, Oskar sat back in his chair and resumed his depression. “You know that Amon Goeth,” he said. “He’s got charm. He could come in here now and charm you. But he’s a lunatic.”

On the ghetto’s last morning—a

Shabbat, as it happened, March 13--Amon Goeth arrived in Plac Zgody, Peace Square, at an hour which officially preceded dawn. Low clouds obscured any sharp distinctions between night and day. He saw that the men of the Sonderkommando had already arrived and stood about on the frozen earth of the small park in the middle, smoking and laughing quietly, keeping their presence a secret from the ghetto dwellers in the streets beyond Herr Pankiewicz’ pharmacy. The roads down which they’d move were clear, as in a model of a town. The remaining snow lay heaped and tarnished in gutters and against walls. It is safe to guess that sentimental Goeth felt paternal as he looked out at the orderly scene and saw the young men, comradely before action, in the middle of the square.

Amon took a pull of cognac while he

waited there for the middle-aged

Sturmbannf@uhrer Willi Haase, who

would have strategic, though not tactical, control of today’s Aktion. Today Ghetto A, from Plac Zgody westward, the major section of the ghetto, the one where all the working (healthy, hoping, opinionated) Jews dwelt, would be emptied. Ghetto B, a small compound a few blocks square at the eastern end of the ghetto, contained the old, the last of the unemployable. They would be uprooted overnight, or tomorrow. They were slated for Commandant Rudolf H@oss’s greatly expanded extermination camp at Auschwitz. Ghetto B was straightforward, honest work. Ghetto A was the challenge. Everyone wanted to be here today, for today was

history. There had been for more than seven

centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening—

or at least by tomorrow—those seven centuries would have

become a rumor, and Cracow would be

judenrein (clean of Jews). And every petty

SS official wanted to be able to say that he had

seen it happen. Even Unkelbach, the

Treuh@ander of the Progress cutlery

factory, having some sort of reserve SS

rank, would put on his NCO’S uniform today and move through the ghetto with one of the squads. Therefore the distinguished Willi Haase, being of field rank and involved in the planning, had every right to be counted in.

Amon would be suffering his customary minor headache and be feeling a little drained from the feverish insomnia in which he’d spent the small hours. Now he was here, though, he felt a certain professional exhilaration. It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honor without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at. Psychological impunity had been harder to achieve. Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide. SS training documents, written to combat these futile casualties, pointed out the simplemindedness of believing that because the Jew bore no visible weapons he was bereft of social, economic, or political arms. He was, in fact, armed to the teeth. Steel yourself, said the documents, for the Jewish child is a cultural time bomb, the Jewish woman a biology of treasons, the Jewish male a more incontrovertible enemy than any Russian could hope to be. Amon Goeth was steeled. He knew he could not be touched, and the very thought of that gave him the same delicious excitement a long-distance runner might have before an event he feels sure about. Amon despised in a genial sort of way those officers who fastidiously left the act itself to their men and NCO’S. He sensed that in some way that might be more dangerous than lending a hand yourself. He would show the way, as he had with Diana Reiter. He knew the euphoria that would build during the day, the gratification that would grow, along with a taste for liquor, as noon came and the pace picked up. Even under the low squalor of those clouds, he knew that this was one of the best days, that when he was old and the race extinct, the young would ask with wonder about days like this.

Less than a kilometer away, a doctor of the ghetto’s convalescent hospital, Dr. H, sat among his last patients, in darkness, grateful that they were isolated like this on the hospital’s top floor, high above the street, alone with their pain and fever. For at street level everyone knew what had

happened at the epidemic hospital near

Plac Zgody. An SS detachment under

Oberscharf@uhrer Albert Hujar had

entered the hospital to close it down and had found

Dr. Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of

her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients,

who, she said, should not be moved. The whooping cough

children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet

fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for

their own sakes and for the community’s, and the

tuberculosis cases were simply too sick

to walk out.

Since scarlet fever is an adolescent

disease, many of Dr. Blau’s patients were girls between the age of twelve and sixteen. Faced with Albert Hujar, Dr. Blau pointed, as warranty for her professional judgment, to these wide-eyed, feverish girls. Hujar himself, acting on the mandate he’d received the week before from Amon Goeth, shot Dr.

Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some

trying to rise in their beds, some detached in their own

delirium, were executed in a rage of

automatic fire. When Hujar’s squad had

finished, a detail of ghetto men was sent up the stairs to deal with the dead, to pile the bloodied linen, and to wash down the walls.

The convalescent hospital was situated in what had been before the war a Polish police station. Throughout the life of the ghetto, its three floors had been cluttered with the sick. Its director was a respected physician named Dr. B. By the bleak morning of March 13, Doctors B and H had reduced its population to four, all of them immovable. One was a young workman with galloping consumption; the second, a talented musician with terminal kidney disease. It seemed important to Dr. H that they somehow be spared the final panic of a mad volley of fire. Even more so the blind man afflicted by a stroke, and the old gentleman whose earlier surgery for an intestinal tumor had left him weakened and burdened with a colostomy. The medical staff here, Dr. H included, were of the highest caliber. From this ill-equipped ghetto hospital would derive the first Polish accounts of Weil’s erythroblastic disease, a condition of the bone marrow, and of the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. This morning, though, Dr. H was concerned with the question of cyanide. With an eye to the option of suicide, H had acquired a supply of cyanic acid solution. He knew that other doctors had too. This past year depression had been endemic to the ghetto. It had infected Dr. H. He was young; he was formidably healthy. Yet history itself seemed to have gone malignant. To know he had access to cyanide had been a comfort for Dr. H on his worst days. By this late stage of the ghetto’s history, it was the one pharmaceutical left to him and to the other doctors in quantity. There had rarely been any sulfa. Emetics, ether, and even aspirin were used up. Cyanide was the single sophisticated drug remaining.

This morning before five, Dr. H had been awakened in his room in Wit Stwosz Street by the noise of trucks pulling up beyond the wall. Looking down from his window, he saw the Sonderkommandos assembling by the river and knew that they had come to take some decisive action in the ghetto. He rushed to the hospital and found Dr. B and the nursing staff already working there on the same premise, arranging for every patient who could move to be taken downstairs and brought home by relatives or friends. When all except the four had gone, Dr. B told the nurses to leave, and all of them obeyed except for one senior nurse. Now she and Doctors B and H remained with the last four patients in the nearly deserted hospital.

Doctors B and H did not speak much as they waited. They each had access to the cyanide, and soon H would be aware that Dr. B’s mind was also sadly preoccupied with it. There was suicide, yes. But there was euthanasia as well. The concept terrified H. He had a sensitive face and a marked delicacy about the eyes. He suffered painfully from a set of ethics as intimate to him as the organs of his own body. He knew that a physician with common sense and a syringe and little else to guide him could add up like a shopping list the values of either course—to inject the cyanide, or to abandon the patients to the Sonderkommando. But H knew that these things were never a matter of calculating sums, that ethics was higher and more tortuous than algebra.

Sometimes Dr. B would go to the window, look out to see if the Aktion had begun in the streets, and turn back to H with a level, professional calm in his eyes. Dr. B, H could tell, was also running through the options, flicking the faces of the problem like the faces of riffled cards, then starting again. Suicide. Euthanasia.

Hydrocyanic acid. One appealing concept:

Stand and be found among the beds like Rosalia Blau. Another: Use the cyanide on oneself as well as on the sick. The second idea appealed to H, seeming not as passive as the first. As well as that, waking depressed these past three nights, he’d felt something like a physical desire for the fast poison, as if it were merely the drug or stiff drink that every victim needed to soften the final hour.

To a serious man like Dr. H, this allure was a compelling reason not to take the stuff. For him the precedents for suicide had been set in his scholarly childhood, when his father had read to him in Josephus the account of the Dead Sea Zealots’ mass suicide on the eve of capture by the Romans. The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender. Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing. But H was a man of principle. And he had a wife. He and his wife had another escape route, and he knew it. It led through the sewers near the corner of Piwna and Krakusa Streets. The sewers and a risky escape to the forest of Ojc@ow. He feared that more than the easy oblivion of cyanide. If Blue Police or Germans stopped him, however, and dragged his trousers down, he would pass the test, thanks to Dr. Lachs. Lachs was a distinguished plastic surgeon who had taught a number of young Cracow Jews how to lengthen their foreskins bloodlessly by sleeping with a weight—a bottle containing a gradually increasing volume of water—

attached to themselves. It was, said Lachs, a device that had been used by Jews in periods of Roman persecution, and the intensity of SS action in Cracow had caused Lachs to revive its use in the past eighteen months. Lachs had taught his young colleague Dr. H

the method, and the fact that it had worked with some success allowed H even less ground for suicide.

At dawn the nurse, a calm woman about

forty years old, came to Dr. H and made a

morning report. The young man was resting well, but

the blind man with the stroke-affected speech was in a

state of anxiety. The musician and the

anal-fistula case had both had a painful

night. It was all very quiet in the convalescent hospital now, however; the patients snuffled in the last of their sleep or the intimacy of their pain; and Dr. H went out onto the freezing balcony above the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and once more examine the question. Last year Dr. H had been at the old epidemic hospital in Rekawka when the SS

decided to close that section of the ghetto and relocate the hospital. They had lined the staff up against the wall and dragged the patients downstairs. H had seen old Mrs. Reisman’s leg caught between the balusters, and an SS man hauling her by the other leg did not stop and extricate her but pulled until the trapped limb snapped with an audible crack. That was how patients were moved in the ghetto. But last year no one had thought of mercy-killing. Everyone had still hoped at that stage that things might improve. Now, even if he and Dr. B made their decision, H didn’t know if he had the rigor to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispassion. It was absurdly like the argument, in one’s youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you’d decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.

Out there on the balcony he heard the first

noise. It began early and came from the eastern

end of the ghetto. The Raus, raus! of

megaphones, the customary lie about baggage which

some people still chose to believe. In the deserted

streets, and among the tenements in which no one

moved, you could hear all the way from the cobblestones

of Plac Zgody and up by the river in

Nadwi@slanska Street an indefinite

terror-sick murmur which made H himself tremble.

Then he heard the first volley, loud enough to wake the patients. And a sudden stridency after the firing, a bull megaphone raging at some plangent feminine voice; and then the wailing snapped off by a further burst of fire, and a different wailing succeeding, the bereaved being hurried along by the SS bullhorns, by anxious OD men, and by neighbors, unreasonable grief fading into the far corner of the ghetto where there was a gate. He knew that it all might well have cut through even the precomatose state of the musician with the failed kidneys.

When he returned to the ward, he could see that they were watching him—even the musician. He could sense rather than see the way their bodies stiffened in their beds, and the old man with the colostomy cried out with the muscular exertion. “Doctor, doctor!”

someone said. “Please!” answered Dr. H, by which he meant, I’m here and they’re a long way off yet. He looked at Dr. B, who narrowed his eyes as the noise of evictions broke out again three blocks away. Dr. B nodded at him, walked to the small locked pharmaceutical chest at the end of the ward, and came back with the bottle of hydrocyanic acid. After a pause, H moved to his colleague’s side. He could have stood and left it to Dr. B. He guessed that the man had the strength to do it alone, without the approval of colleagues. But it would be shameful, H thought, not to cast his own vote, not to take some of the burden. Dr. H, though younger than Dr. B, had been associated with the Jagiellonian University, was a specialist, a thinker. He wanted to give Dr. B the backing of all that.

“Well,” said Dr. B, displaying the

bottle briefly to H. The word was

nearly obscured by a woman’s screaming and

ranting official orders from the far end of

J@ozefi@nska Street. Dr. B called the

nurse. “Give each patient forty drops in

water.” “Forty drops,” she repeated. She

knew what the medication was. “That’s right,” said Dr. B. Dr. H also looked at her. Yes, he wanted to say. I’m strong now; I could give it myself. But if I did, it would alarm them. Every patient knows that nurses bring the medicine around.

As the nurse prepared the mixture, H wandered down the ward and laid his hand on the old man’s. “I have something to help you, Roman,” he told him. Dr. H sensed with amazement the old man’s history through the touch of skin. For a second, like a surge of flame, the young man Roman was there, growing up in Franz Josef’s Galicia, a ladykiller in the sweet little nougat of a city, the petit Wien, the jewel of the Vistula, Cracow. Wearing Franz Josef’s uniform and going to the mountains for spring maneuvers. Chocolate-soldiering in Rynek Glowny with the girls of Kazimierz, in a city of lace and patisseries. Climbing the Kosciuszko Mound and stealing a kiss among the shrubbery. How could the world have come so far in one manhood? asked the young man in old Roman. From Franz Josef to the NCO who had had a sanction to put Rosalia Blau and the scarlet fever girls to death?

“Please, Roman,” said the doctor, meaning that the old man should unclench his body. He believed the Sonderkommando was coming within the hour. Dr. H felt, but resisted, a temptation to let him in on the secret. Dr. B had been liberal with the dosage. A few seconds of breathlessness and a minor amazement would be no new or intolerable sensation to old Roman. When the nurse came with four medicine glasses, none of them even asked her what she was bringing them. Dr. H would never know if any of them understood. He turned away and looked at his watch. He feared that when they drank it, some noise would begin, something worse than the normal hospital gasps and gaggings. He heard the nurse murmuring, “Here’s something for you.” He heard an intake of breath. He didn’t know if it was patient or nurse. The woman is the hero of this, he thought.

When he looked again, the nurse was waking the kidney patient, the sleepy musician, and offering him the glass. From the far end of the ward, Dr. B looked on in a clean white coat.

Dr. H moved to old Roman and took his pulse. There was none. In a bed at the far end of the ward, the musician forced the almond-smelling mixture down.

It was all as gentle as H had hoped. He looked at them—their mouths agape, but not obscenely so, their eyes glazed and immune, their heads back, their chins pointed at the ceiling—with the envy any ghetto dweller would feel for escapees.

CHAPTER 21

Poldek Pfefferberg shared a room on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house at the end of J@ozefi@nska Street. Its windows looked down over the ghetto wall at the Vistula, where Polish barges passed upstream and down in ignorance of the ghetto’s last day and SS patrol boats puttered as casually as pleasure craft. Here Pfefferberg waited with his wife, Mila, for the Sonderkommando to arrive and order them out into the street. Mila was a small, nervous girl of twenty-two, a refugee from @l@od@z whom Poldek had married in the first days of the ghetto. She came from generations of physicians, her father having been a surgeon who had died young in 1937, her mother a dermatologist who, during an Aktion in the ghetto of Tarnow last year, had suffered the same death as Rosalia Blau of the epidemic hospital, being cut down by automatic fire while standing among her patients.

Mila had lived a sweet childhood, even in Jew-baiting @l@od@z, and had begun her own medical education in Vienna the year before the war. She had met Poldek when

@l@od@z people were shipped down to Cracow in 1939. Mila had found herself billeted in the same apartment as the lively Poldek Pfefferberg.

Now he was already, like Mila, the last of his family. His mother, who had once redecorated Schindler’s Straszewskiego Street apartment, had been shipped with his father to the ghetto of Tarnow. From there, it would be discovered in the end, they were taken to Bel@zec and murdered. His sister and brother-in-law, on Aryan papers, had vanished in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. He and Mila had only each other. There was a temperamental gulf between them: Poldek was a neighborhood boy, a leader, an organizer; the type who, when authority appeared and asked what in God’s name was happening, would step forward and speak up. Mila was quieter, rendered more so by the unspeakable destiny that had swallowed her family. In a peaceable era, the mix between them would have been excellent. She was not only clever but wise; she was a quiet center. She had a gift for irony, and Poldek Pfefferberg often needed her to restrain his torrents of oratory. Today, however, on this impossible day, they were in conflict. Though Mila was willing, should the chance come, to leave the ghetto, even to entertain a mental image of herself and Poldek as partisans in the forest, she feared the sewers. Poldek had used them more than once as a means of leaving the ghetto, even though the police were sometimes to be found at one end or the other. His friend and former lecturer, Dr.

H, had also mentioned the sewers recently as an

escape route which might not be guarded on the day the

Sonderkommando moved in. The thing would be

to wait for the early winter dusk. The door of the

doctor’s house was mere meters from a manhole

cover. Once down in there, you took the left-hand

tunnel, which brought you beneath the streets of

nonghetto Podg@orze to an outlet on the

embankment of the Vistula near the Zatorska

Street canal. Yesterday Dr. H had given

him the definite news. The doctor and his wife

would attempt the sewer exit, and the Pfefferbergs

were welcome to join them. Poldek could not at that

stage commit Mila and himself. Mila had a fear,

a reasonable one, that the SS might flood the

sewers with gas or might resolve the matter

anyhow by arriving early at the Pfefferbergs’

room at the far end of J@ozefi@nska

Street.

It was a slow, tense day up in the attic

room, waiting to find out which way to jump. Neighbors must also have been waiting. Perhaps some of them, not wanting to deal with the delay, had marched up the road already with their packages and hopeful suitcases, for in a way it was a mix of sounds fit to draw you down the stairs—violent noise dimly heard from blocks away, and here a silence in which you could hear the ancient, indifferent timbers of the house ticking away the last and worst hours of your tenancy. At murky noon Poldek and Mila chewed on their brown bread, the 300g each they had in stock. The recurrent noises of the Aktion swept up to the corner of Wegierska, a long block away, and then, toward midafternoon, receded again. There was near-silence then. Someone tried uselessly to flush the recalcitrant toilet on the first-floor landing. It was nearly possible at that hour to believe that they had been overlooked.

The last dun afternoon of their life in No. 2 J@ozefi@nska refused, in spite of its darkness, to end. The light, in fact, was poor enough, thought Poldek, for them to try for the sewer earlier than dusk. He wanted, now that it was quiet, to go and consult with Dr. H.

Please, said Mila. But he soothed her.

He would keep off the streets, moving through the network of holes that connected one building with another. He piled up the reassurances. The streets at this end seemed to be clear of patrols. He would evade the occasional OD or wandering SS man at the intersections, and be back within five minutes. Darling, darling, he told her, I have to check with Dr. H.

He went down the back stairs and into the yard

through the hole in the stable wall, not emerging into the

open street until he’d reached the Labor

Office. There he risked crossing the broad

carriageway, entering the warrens of the triangular

block of houses opposite, meeting occasional

groups of confused men conveying rumors and discussing

options in kitchens, sheds, yards, and

corridors. He came out into Krakusa

Street just across from the doctor’s place. He crossed unnoticed by a patrol working down near the southern limit of the ghetto, three blocks away, in the area where Schindler had witnessed his first demonstration of the extremities of Reich racial policy. Dr. H’s building was empty, but in the yard Poldek met a dazed middle-aged man who told him that the Sonderkommando had already visited the place and that the doctor and his wife had first hidden, then gone for the sewers. Perhaps it’s the right thing to do, said the man. They’ll be back, the SS. Poldek nodded; he knew now the tactics of the Aktion, having already survived so many.

He went back the way he’d come and again was able to cross the road. But he found No. 2 empty, Mila vanished with their baggage, all doors opened, all rooms vacant. He wondered if in fact they were not all hidden down at the hospital—Dr. H and his wife; Mila. Perhaps the H’s had called for her out of respect for her anxiety and her long medical lineage.

Poldek hurried out through the stable again, and by alternative passageways reached the hospital courtyard. Like disregarded flags of surrender, bloodied bedding hung from the balconies of both the upper floors. On the cobblestones was a pile of victims. They lay, some of them, with their heads split open, their limbs twisted. They were not, of course, the terminal patients of Doctors B and H. They were people who had been detained here during the day and then executed. Some of them must have been imprisoned upstairs, shot, then tumbled into the yard. Always thereafter, when questioned about the corpses in the ghetto hospital yard, Poldek would say 60 to 70, though he had no time to count that tangled pyramid. Cracow being a provincial town and Poldek having been raised as a very sociable child in Podg@orze and then in the Centrum, visiting with his mother the affluent and distinguished people of the city, he recognized in that heap familiar faces: old clients of his mother’s; people who had asked him about school at the Kosciuszko High School, got precocious answers in reply, and fed him cake and candy for his looks and charm. Now they were shamefully exposed and jumbled in that blood-red courtyard. Somehow it did not occur to Pfefferberg to look for the bodies of his wife and the H’s. He sensed why he had been placed there. He believed unshakably in better years to come, years of just tribunals. He had that sense of being a witness which Schindler had experienced on the hill beyond Rekawka.

He was distracted by the sight of a crowd of people in Wegierska Street beyond the courtyard. They moved toward the Rekawka gate with the dull but not desperate languor of factory workers on a Monday morning, or even of supporters of a defeated football team. Among this wave of people he noticed neighbors from J@ozefi@nska Street. He walked out of the yard, carrying like a weapon up his sleeve his memory of it all. What had happened to Mila? Did any of them know? She’d already left, they said. The Sonderkommando’s been through. She’d already be out the gate, on her way to the place. To P@lasz@ow.

He and Mila, of course, had had a contingency plan for an impasse like this. If one of them ended up in P@lasz@ow, it would be better for the other to attempt to stay out. He knew that Mila had her gift for unobtrusiveness, a good gift for prisoners; but also she could be racked by extraordinary hunger. He’d be her supplier from the outside. He was sure these things could be managed. It was no easy decision, though—the bemused crowds, barely guarded by the SS, now making for the south gate and the barbed-wire factories of P@lasz@ow were an indication of where most people, probably quite correctly, considered that long-term safety lay.

The light, though late now, was sharp, as if snow were coming on. Poldek was able to cross the road and enter the empty apartments beyond the pavement. He wondered whether they were in fact empty or full of ghetto dwellers concealed cunningly or naively—those who believed that wherever the SS took you, it led in the end to the extermination chambers.

Poldek was looking for a first-class hiding place. He came by back passages to the lumberyard on J@ozefi@nska. Lumber was a scarce commodity. There were no great structures of cut timber to hide behind. The place that looked best was behind the iron gates at the yard entrance. Their size and blackness seemed a promise of the coming night. Later he would not be able to believe that he’d chosen them with such enthusiasm. He hunched in behind the one that was pushed back against the wall of the abandoned office. Through the crack left between the gate and the gatepost, he could see up J@ozefi@nska in the direction he’d come from. Behind that freezing iron leaf he watched the slice of cold evening, a luminous gray, and pulled his coat across his chest. A man and his wife hurried past, rushing for the gate, dodging among the dropped bundles, the suitcases labeled with futile large letters. KLEINFELD, they proclaimed in the evening light. LEHRER, BAUME, WEINBERG, SMOLAR, STRUS, ROSENTHAL, BIRMAN, ZEITLIN.

Names against which no receipts would be issued. “Heaps of goods laden with memories,” the young artist Josef Bau had written of such scenes. “Where are my treasures?”

From beyond this battleground of fallen luggage he could hear the aggressive baying of dogs. Then into J@ozefi@nska Street, striding on the far pavement, came three SS men, one of them dragged along by a canine flurry which proved to be two large police dogs. The dogs hauled their handler into No. 41 J@ozefi@nska, but the other two men waited on the pavement. Poldek had paid most of his attention to the dogs. They looked like a cross between Dalmatians and German shepherds. Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they’d been brought in from some other and harsher ghetto. For even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last assumption was wiped away in the next half-minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack of the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lw@ow or Warsaw, as you thought. It was at the north side of J@ozefi@nska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes, and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman’s howling protest.

Just as Pfefferberg would think of the pile of bodies in the hospital yard as 60 or 70, he would always testify that the child was two or three years of age. Perhaps before she was even dead, certainly before he himself even knew he had moved, as if the decision had came from some mettlesome gland behind his forehead, Pfefferberg gave up the freezing iron gate, since it would not protect him from the dogs, and found himself in the open yard. He adopted at once the military bearing he’d learned in the Polish Army. He emerged from the lumberyard like a man on a ceremonial assignment, and bent and began lifting the bundles of luggage out of the carriageway and heaping them against the walls of the yard. He could hear the three SS men approaching; the dogs’ snarling breath was palpable, and the whole evening was stretched to breaking by the tension in their leashes. When he believed they were some ten paces off, he straightened and permitted himself, playing the biddable Jew of some European background, to notice them. He saw that their boots and riding breeches were splashed with blood, but they were not abashed to appear before other humans dressed that way. The officer in the middle was tallest. He did not look like a murderer; there was a sensitivity to the large face and a subtle line to the mouth.

Pfefferberg in his shabby suit clicked his cardboard heels in the Polish style and saluted this tall one in the middle. He had no knowledge of SS ranks and did not know what to call the man. “Herr,” he said. “Herr Commandant!”

It was a term his brain, under threat of its extinction, had thrown forth with electric energy. It proved to be the precise word, for the tall man was Amon Goeth in the full vitality of his afternoon, elated at the day’s progress and as capable of instant and instinctive exercises of power as Poldek Pfefferberg was of instant and instinctive subterfuge.

“Herr Commandant, I respectfully report to you that I received an order to put all the bundles together to one side of the road so that there will be no obstruction of the thoroughfare.”

The dogs were craning toward him through their collars. They expected, on the basis of their black training and the rhythm of today’s Aktion, to be let fly at Pfefferberg’s wrist and groin. Their snarls were not simply feral, but full of a frightful confidence in the outcome, and the question was whether the SS man on the Herr Commandant’s left had enough strength to restrain them. Pfefferberg didn’t expect much. He would not be surprised to be buried by dogs and after a time to be delivered from their ravages by a bullet. If the woman hadn’t got away with pleading her motherhood, he stood little chance with stories of bundles, of clearing a street in which human traffic had in any case been abolished.

But the Commandant was more amused by Pfefferberg than he had been by the mother. Here was a Ghettomensch playing soldier in front of three SS officers and making his report, servile if true, and almost endearing if not. His manner was, above all, a break in style for a victim. Of all today’s doomed, not one other had tried heel-clicking. The Herr Commandant could therefore exercise the kingly right to show irrational and unexpected amusement. His head went back; his long upper lip retracted. It was a broad, honest laugh, and his colleagues smiled and shook their heads at its extent. In his excellent baritone,

Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth said, “We’re

looking after everything. The last group is leaving the ghetto. Verschwinde!” That is, Disappear, little Polish clicking soldier!

Pfefferberg began to run, not looking back, and it would not have surprised him if he had been felled from behind. Running, he got to the corner of Wegierska and turned it, past the hospital yard where some hours ago he had been a witness. The dark came down as he neared the gate, and the ghetto’s last familiar alleys faded. In Podg@orze Square, the last official huddle of prisoners stood in a loose cordon of SS men and Ukrainians.

“I must be the last one out alive,” he told people in that crowd. Or if not he it was Wulkan the jeweler and his

wife and son. Wulkan had been working these past

months in the Progress factory and, knowing what

was to happen, had approached Treuh@ander

Unkelbach with a large diamond concealed for two

years in the lining of a coat. “Herr

Unkelbach,” he told the supervisor,

“I’ll go wherever I’m sent, but my wife

isn’t up to all that noise and violence.”

Wulkan and his wife and son would wait at the OD police station under the protection of a Jewish policeman they knew, and then perhaps during the day Herr Unkelbach would come and convey them bloodlessly to P@lasz@ow.

Since this morning they had sat in a cubicle in the police station, but it had been as frightful a wait as if they’d stayed in their kitchen, the boy alternately terrified and bored, and his wife continuing to hiss her reproaches. Where is he? Is he going to come at all?

These people, these people! Early in the afternoon, Unkelbach did in fact appear, came into the Ordnungsdienst to use the lavatory and have coffee. Wulkan, emerging from the office in which he’d been waiting, saw a Treuh@ander Unkelbach he had never known before: a man in the uniform of an SS NCO, smoking and exchanging animated conversation with another SS man; using one hand to take hungry mouthfuls of coffee, to bite off mouthfuls of smoke, to savage a lump of brown bread while his pistol, still held in the left hand, lay like a resting animal on the police-station counter and dark spatters of blood ran across the breast of his uniform. The eyes he turned to meet Wulkan’s did not see the jeweler. Wulkan knew at once that Unkelbach was not backing out of the deal, he simply did not remember it. The man was drunk, and not on liquor. If Wulkan had called to him, the answer would have been a stare of ecstatic incomprehension. Followed, very likely, by something worse.

Wulkan gave it up and returned to his wife. She kept saying, “Why don’t you talk to him?

I’ll talk to him if he’s still there.” But then she saw the shadow in Wulkan’s eyes and sneaked a look around the edge of the door. Unkelbach was getting ready to leave. She saw the unaccustomed uniform, the blood of small traders and their wives splashed across its front. She uttered a whimper and returned to her seat. Like her husband, she now fell into a well-founded despair, and the waiting became somehow easier. The OD man they knew restored them to the usual pulse of hope and anxiety. He told them that all the OD, apart from Spira’s praetorians, had to be out of the ghetto by 6 P.m. and on the Wieliczka Road to P@lasz@ow. He would see if there was a way of getting the Wulkans into one of the vehicles. After dark had fallen in the wake of Pfefferberg’s passage up Wegierska, after the last party of prisoners had assembled at the gate into Podg@orze Square, while Dr.

H and his wife were moving eastward in the company and under the cover of a group of rowdy Polish drunks, and while the squads of the Sonderkommando were resting and taking a smoke before the last search of the tenements, two horse-drawn wagons came to the door of the police station. The Wulkan family were hidden by the OD men under cartons of paperwork and bundles of clothing. Symche Spira and his associates were not in sight, were on the job somewhere in the streets, drinking coffee with NCO’S, celebrating their permanence within the system.

But before the wagons had turned out of the ghetto gate, the Wulkans, flattened to the boards, heard the nearly continuous sound of rifle and small-arms fire from the streets behind them. It meant that Amon Goeth and Willi Haase, Albert Hujar, Horst Pilarzik, and some hundreds of others were bursting into the attic niches, the false ceilings, the crates in cellars, and finding those who all day had maintained a hopeful silence. More than 4,000 such people were discovered overnight and executed in the streets. In the next two days their bodies were taken to P@lasz@ow on open-platform trucks and buried in two mass graves in the woods beyond the new camp.

CHAPTER 22

We do not know in what condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13, the ghetto’s last and worst day. But by the time his workers returned to him under guard from P@lasz@ow, he was back in the mood for collecting data to pass on to Dr. Sedlacek on the dentist’s next visit. He

found out from the prisoners that

Zwangsarbeitslager P@lasz@ow—as it was known in SS bureaucratese—was to be no rational kingdom. Goeth had already pursued his passion against engineers by letting the guards beat Zygmunt Gr@unberg into a coma and bring him so late to the clinic up near the women’s camp that his death was assured. From the prisoners who ate their hearty noonday soup at DEF, Oskar heard also that P@lasz@ow was being used not only as a work camp but as a place of execution as well. Though all the camp could hear the executions, some of the prisoners had been witnesses.

The prisoner M, for example, who had had a prewar decorating business in Cracow. In the first days of the camp he was in demand

to decorate the houses of the SS, the few small

country villas that flanked the lane on the north

side of the camp. Like any especially valued

artisan he had more freedom of movement, and one

afternoon that spring he had been walking from the villa of

Untersturmf@uhrer Leo John up the

track toward the hill called Chujowa

G@orka, on whose crest stood the Austrian fort. Before he was ready to turn back down the slope to the factory yard, he had to pause to let an Army truck grind past him uphill. M had noticed that beneath its canopy were women under the care of white-coveralled Ukrainian guards. He had hidden between stacks of lumber and got an incomplete view of the women, disembarked and marched inside the fort, refusing to undress. The man yelling the orders in there was the SS man Edmund Sdrojewski. Ukrainian NCO’S

marched among the women hitting them with whip handles. M presumed they were Jewish, probably women caught with Aryan papers, brought here from Montelupich prison. Some cried out at the blows, but others were silent, as if to refuse the Ukrainians that much satisfaction. One of them began to intone the Shema Yisroel, and the others took it up. The verses rose vigorously above the mound, as if it had just occurred to the girls—who till yesterday had played straight Aryans—that now the pressure was off, they were freer than anyone to celebrate their tribal difference in the faces of Sdrojewski and the Ukrainians. Then, huddling for modesty and the bite of the spring air, they were all shot. At night the Ukrainians took them away in wheelbarrows and buried them in the woods on the far side of Chujowa G@orka.

Now living in Vienna, the man does

not want his real name used.

People in the camp below had also heard that first execution on the hill now profanely nicknamed “Prick Hill.” Some told themselves that it was partisans being shot up there, intractable Marxists or crazy nationalists. It was another country up there. If you obeyed the ordinances within the wire, you need never visit it. But the more clearheaded of Schindler’s workers, marched up Wieliczka Street past the cable factory and over to Zablocie to work at DEF—THEY knew why prisoners from Montelupich were being shot at the Austrian hill fort, why the SS did not seem alarmed if the truckloads were seen arriving or the noise was heard throughout P@lasz@ow. The reason was that the SS did not look on the prison population as ultimate witnesses. If there had been concern about a time in court, a mass of future testimony, they would have taken the women deeper into the woods. The conclusion to be drawn, Oskar decided, was not that Chujowa G@orka was a separate world from P@lasz@ow, but that all of them, those brought to the mound fort by truck and those behind the wire down the hill, were under sentence. The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out his front door and murdered a prisoner at random, there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on Chujowa G@orka, as a unique event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon’s morning routine. Wearing a shirt and riding breeches and boots on which his orderly had put a high shine, he would emerge on the steps of his temporary villa. (they were renovating a better place for him down at the other end of the camp perimeter.) As the season wore on he would appear without his shirt, for he loved the sun. But for the moment he stood in the clothes in which he had eaten breakfast, a pair of binoculars in one hand and a sniper’s rifle in the other. He would scan the camp area, the work at the quarry, the prisoners pushing or hauling the quarry trucks on the rails which passed by his door. Those glancing up could see the smoke from the cigarette which he held clamped between his lips, the way a man smokes without hands when he is too busy to put down the tools of his trade. Within the first few days of the camp’s life he appeared thus at his front door and shot a prisoner who did not seem to be pushing hard enough at a cart loaded with limestone. No one knew Amon’s precise reason for settling on that prisoner—

Amon certainly did not have to document his motives. With one blast from the doorstep, the man was plucked from the group of pushing and pulling captives and hurled sideways in the road. The others stopped pushing, of course, their muscles frozen in expectation of a general slaughter. But Amon waved them on, frowning, as if to say that he was pleased for the moment with the standard of work he was getting from them. Apart from such excesses with prisoners, Amon was also breaking one of the promises he’d made to the entrepreneurs. Oskar got a telephone call from Madritsch—Madritsch wanted them both to complain. Amon had said he would not interfere in the business of the factories. At least, he was not interfering from within. But he held up shifts by detaining the prison population for hours on the Appellplatz (parade ground) at roll call. Madritsch mentioned a case in which a potato had been found in a given hut, and therefore every prisoner from that barracks had to be publicly flogged in front of the thousands of inmates. It is no fast matter to have a few hundred people drag their pants and underwear down, their shirts or dresses up, and treat each of them to twenty-five lashes. It was Goeth’s rule that the flogged prisoner call out the numbers for the guidance of the Ukrainian orderlies who did the flogging. If the victim lost track of the count, it was to begin again. Commandant Goeth’s roll calls on the Appellplatz were full of just such time-consuming trickery.

Therefore shifts would arrive hours late at the Madritsch clothing factory inside the P@lasz@ow camp, and an hour later still at Oskar’s place in Lipowa Street. They would arrive shocked, too, unable to concentrate, muttering stories of what Amon or John or Scheidt or some other officer had done that morning. Oskar complained to an engineer he knew at the Armaments Inspectorate. It’s no use complaining to the police chiefs, said the engineer. They’re not involved in the same war we are. What I ought to do, said Oskar, is keep the people on the premises. Make my own camp.

The idea amused the engineer. Where would you put them, old man? he asked. You don’t have much room.

If I can acquire the space, said Oskar,

would you write a supporting letter?

When the engineer agreed, Oskar called an elderly couple named Bielski who lived in Stradom Street. He wondered if they would consider an offer for the land abutting his factory. He drove across the river to see them. They were delighted by his manner. Because he had always been bored by the rituals of haggling, he began by offering them a boom-time price. They gave him tea and, in a state of high excitement, called their lawyer to draw up the papers while Oskar was still on the premises. From their apartment, Oskar drove out, as a courtesy, and told Amon that he intended to make a subcamp of P@lasz@ow in his own factory yard. Amon was quite taken with the idea. “If the SS

generals approve,” he said, “you can expect my cooperation. As long as you don’t want my musicians or my maid.”

The next day a full-scale appointment was arranged with Oberf@uhrer Scherner at Pomorska Street. Somehow both Amon and General Scherner knew that Oskar could be made to foot the whole bill for a new camp. They could detect that when Oskar pushed the industrial argument—“I want my workers on the premises so that their labor can be more fully exploited”—he was at the same time pushing some other intimate craze of his in which expense was no question. They thought of him as a good enough fellow who’d been stricken with a form of Jew-love as with a virus. It was a corollary to SS theory that the Jewish genius so pervaded the world, could achieve such magical effects, that Herr Oskar Schindler was to be pitied as much as was a prince turned into a frog. But he would have to pay for his disease.

The requirements of Obergruppenf@uhrer

Friedrich-Wilhelm Kr@uger, police chief

of the Government General and superior of Scherner

and Czurda, were based on the regulations set

down by the Concentration Camp Section of General

Oswald Pohl’s SS Main

Administrative and Economic Office, even

though as yet P@lasz@ow was run independently

of Pohl’s bureau. The basic stipulations for

an SS Forced Labor Subcamp involved the

erection of fences nine feet tall, of

watchtowers at given intervals according to the length of the

camp perimeter, of latrines, barracks, a

clinic, a dental office, a bathhouse and

delousing complex, a barbershop, a food store, a laundry, a barracks office, a guard block of somewhat better construction than the barracks themselves, and all the accessories. What had occurred to Amon, Scherner, and Czurda was that Oskar, as was only proper, would meet the expenses either out of economic motives or because of the cabalistic enchantment he lay under. And even though they would make Oskar pay, his proposal suited them. There was still a ghetto in Tarnow, forty-five miles east, and when it was abolished the population would need to be absorbed into P@lasz@ow. Likewise the thousands of Jews now arriving at P@lasz@ow from the shtetls of southern Poland. A subcamp in Lipowa Street would ease that pressure.

Amon also understood, though he would never say it aloud to the police chiefs, that there would be no need to supply a Lipowa Street camp too precisely with the minimum food requirements as laid down in General Pohl’s directive. Amon—who could hurl thunderbolts from his doorstep without meeting protest, who believed in any case in the official idea that a certain attrition should take place in P@lasz@ow—was already selling a percentage of the prison rations on the open market in Cracow through an agent of his, a Jew named Wilek Chilowicz, who had contacts with factory managements, merchants, and even restaurants in Cracow.

Dr. Alexander Biberstein, now a

P@lasz@ow prisoner himself, found that the daily ration varied between 700 and 1,100

calories. At breakfast a prisoner received a half-liter of black ersatz coffee, tasting of acorns, and a lump of rye bread weighing 175g, an eighth of one of the round loaves collected by barracks mess orderlies each morning at the bakery. Hunger being such a disruptive force, each mess orderly cut up the loaf with his back to the others and called,

“Who wants this piece? Who wants this one?” At midday a soup was distributed—

carrots, beets, sago substitute. Some days it had a fuller body than on others. Better food came in with the work parties who returned each evening. A small chicken could be carried under a coat, a French roll down a trouser leg. Yet Amon tried to prevent this by having the guards search returning details at dusk in front of the Administration Building. He did not want the work of natural wastage to be frustrated, nor the ideological wind to be taken out of his food dealings through Chilowicz. Since, therefore, he did not indulge his own prisoners, he felt that if Oskar chose to take a thousand Jews, he could indulge them at his own expense, without too regular a supply of bread and beets from the storerooms of P@lasz@ow.

That spring, it was not only the police chiefs

of the Cracow region whom Oskar had to talk

to. He went into his backyard, persuading the

neighbors. Beyond the two shabby huts constructed

of Jereth’s pineboard, he came to the radiator

factory run by Kurt Hoderman. It

employed a horde of Poles and about

100 P@lasz@ow inmates. In the other

direction was Jereth’s box factory,

supervised by the German engineer Kuhnpast. Since the P@lasz@ow people were such a small part of their staff, they didn’t take to the idea with any passion, but they weren’t against it. For Oskar was offering to house their Jews 50 meters from work instead of 5

kilometers.

Next Oskar moved out into the neighborhood

to talk to engineer Schmilewski at the

Wehrmacht garrison office a few streets

away. He employed a squad of P@lasz@ow prisoners. Schmilewski had no objections. His name, with Kuhnpast’s and Hoderman’s, was appended to the application Schindler sent off to Pomorska Street.

SS surveyors visited Emalia and conferred with surveyor Steinhauser, an old friend of Oskar’s from the Armaments Inspectorate. They stood and frowned at the site, as surveyors will, and asked questions about drainage. Oskar had them all into his office upstairs for a morning coffee and a cognac, and then everyone parted amiably. Within a few days the application to establish a Forced Labor Subcamp in the factory backyard was accepted.

That year DEF would enjoy a profit of 15.8 million Reichsmarks. It might be thought that the 300,000 RM. Oskar now spent on building materials for the Emalia camp was a large but not fatal overhead. The truth was though that he was only beginning to pay. Oskar sent a plea to the Bauleitung, or

Construction Office, of P@lasz@ow for the help

of a young engineer named Adam Garde. Garde was still

working on the barracks of Amon’s camp and, after

leaving instructions for the barracks builders, would be

marched under individual guard from P@lasz@ow

to Lipowa Street to supervise the setting up of

Oskar’s compound. When Garde first turned up in

Zablocie, he found two rudimentary huts

already occupied by close to 400 prisoners. There

was a fence patrolled by an SS squad, but the

inmates told Garde that Oskar did not let the

SS into the encampment or onto the factory

floor, except, of course, when senior

inspectors came to look over the place.

Oskar, they said, kept the small SS

garrison of the Emalia factory well

liquored and happy with their lot. Garde could see that the Emalia prisoners themselves were content between the shrinking fragile boards of their two huts, the men’s and the women’s. Already they called themselves Schindlerjuden, using the term in a mood of cautious self-congratulation, the way a man recovering from a heart attack might describe himself as a lucky beggar.

They’d already dug some primitive latrines, which engineer Garde, much as he approved the impulse behind the work, could smell from the factory entrance. They washed at a pump in the DEF yard.

Oskar asked him to come up to the office and look

at the plans. Six barracks for up to 1,200

people. The cookhouse at this end, the SS barracks

--Oskar was temporarily accommodating the SS in a part of the factory—beyond the wire at the far end. I want a really first-rate shower block and laundry, Oskar told him. I have the welders who can put it together under your direction. Typhus, he growled, halfsmiling at Garde. None of us wants typhus. The lice are already biting in P@lasz@ow. We need to be able to boil clothes.

Adam Garde was delighted to go to Lipowa Street each day. Two engineers had already been punished at P@lasz@ow for their diplomas, but at DEF experts were still experts. One morning, as his guard was marching him up Wieliczka Street toward Zablocie, a black limousine materialized, braking hard at their heels. From it emerged Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth. He had that restless look about him.

One prisoner, one guard, he observed.

What does it mean? The Ukrainian begged to inform the Herr Commandant that he had orders to escort this prisoner each morning to Herr Oskar Schindler’s Emalia. They both hoped, Garde and the Ukrainian, that the mention of Oskar’s name would give them immunity. One guard, one prisoner? asked the Commandant again, but he was appeased and got back into his limousine without resolving the matter in any radical way. Later in the day he approached Wilek

Chilowicz, who besides being his agent was also chief of the Jewish camp police—or

“firemen,” as they were called. Symche Spira, recently the Napoleon of the ghetto, still lived there and spent each day supervising the searching out and the digging up of the diamonds, gold, and cash hidden away and unrecorded by people who were now ashes on the pine needles of Bel@zec. In P@lasz@ow, however, Spira had no power, the center of prison power being Chilowicz. No one knew where Chilowicz’ authority came from. Perhaps Willi Kunde had mentioned his name to Amon; perhaps Amon had recognized and liked his style. But all at once, here he was chief of firemen in P@lasz@ow, handerout of the caps and armbands of authority in that debased kingdom and, like Symche, limited enough in imagination to equate his power with that of tsars. Goeth approached Chilowicz and said that he had better send Adam Garde to Schindler full-time and get it over with. We have engineers to burn, said Goeth with distaste. He meant that engineering had been a soft option for Jews who weren’t allowed into the medical faculties of the Polish universities. First, though, said Amon, before he goes to Emalia, he has to finish the work on my conservatory.

This news came to Adam Garde in his barracks, at his place in the four-tiered bunks of Hut 21. He would be delivered to Zablocie at the end of a trial. He would be building at Goeth’s back door, where, as Reiter and Gr@unberg might have told him, the rules were unpredictable.

In the midst of his work for the Commandant, a large

beam was lifted to its place in the rooftree of

Amon’s conservatory. As he worked, Adam

Garde could hear the Commandant’s two dogs, named

Rolf and Ralf, names from a newspaper cartoon

--except that Amon had permitted them in the past week to rip the breast from a female prisoner suspected of idling. Amon himself, with his half-completed technical education, would return again and again to take a professional stance and watch the roof beams lifted by pulley. He came to ask questions when the center beam was being slotted into place. It was an immense length of heavy pine, and across it Goeth called his question. Adam Garde could not catch the meaning and put his hand to his ear. Again Goeth asked it, and worse than not hearing it, Garde could not understand it. “I don’t understand, Herr Commandant,” he admitted. Amon grabbed the rising beam with both long-fingered hands, dragged back the end of it, and swung it toward the engineer. Garde saw the massive timber spinning toward his head and understood that it was a mortal instrument. He lifted his right hand and the beam took it, shattering the knuckles and the metacarpals and hurling him to the ground. When Garde could see again through the fog of pain and nausea, Amon had turned and walked away. Perhaps he would come again tomorrow for a satisfactory answer ....

Lest he be seen as deformed and unfit, engineer Garde avoided favoring his shattered hand on the way to the Krankenstube (infirmary).

Carried normally, it weighed at his side, a bladder of torment. He let Dr. Hilfstein talk him into accepting a plaster cast. So he continued to supervise the construction of the conservatory and each day marched to the Emalia works, hoping that the long sleeve of his coat helped conceal the cast. When he was unsure about this, he cut his hand free of the thing. Let the hand mend crookedly. He wanted to ensure his transfer to Schindler’s subcamp by presenting an unmaimed appearance. Within a week, carrying a shirt and some books in a bundle, he was marched to Lipowa Street for good.

CHAPTER 23

Among prisoners who knew, there was already competition to get into Emalia. Prisoner Dolek Horowitz, a purchasing officer inside the P@lasz@ow camp, knew that he would not be allowed to go to Schindler’s place himself. But he had a wife and two children. Richard, the younger of the children, woke up early these spring mornings as the earth gave off its last winter humor in mist, got down from his mother’s bunk in the women’s quarters, and ran down the hillside to the men’s camp, his mind on the coarse morning bread. He had to be with his father for morning roll call on the Appellplatz. His path took him past Chilowicz’ Jewish Police post and, even on foggy mornings, within sight of two watchtowers. But he was safe because he was known. He was a Horowitz child. His father was considered invaluable by Herr Bosch, who in turn was a drinking companion of the Commandant’s. Richard’s unself-conscious freedom of movement derived from his father’s expertise; he moved charmed under the eyes in the towers, finding his father’s barracks and climbing to his cot and waking him with questions. Why is there mist in the mornings and not in the afternoons? Will there be trucks? Will it take long on the Appellplatz today? Will there be floggings?

Through Richard’s morning questions, Dolek Horowitz had it borne in on him that P@lasz@ow was unfit even for privileged children. Perhaps he could contact Schindler—Schindler came out here now and then and walked around the Administration Building and the workshops, under the guise of doing business, to leave small gifts and exchange news with old friends like Stern and Roman Ginter and Poldek Pfefferberg. When Dolek did not seem to be able to make contact this way, it struck him that perhaps Schindler could be approached through Bosch. Dolek believed they met a lot. Not out here so much, but perhaps in offices in town and at parties. You could tell they were not friends, but were bound together by dealings, by mutual favors.

It was not only, and perhaps not mainly, Richard whom Dolek wanted to get into Schindler’s compound. Richard could diffuse his terror in clouds of questions. It was his ten-year-old daughter, Niusia, who no longer asked questions; who was just another thin child past the age of frankness; who—from a window in the brushworks shop where she sewed the bristles into the wooden backs—saw the daily truckloads arriving at the Austrian hill fort and carried her terror insupportably, the way adults will, unable to climb onto a parental chest and transfer the fear. To soothe her hunger in P@lasz@ow, Niusia had taken to smoking onion leaves in newspaper wrappings. The solid rumors about Emalia were that such precocious methods weren’t necessary there. So Dolek appealed to Bosch during one of his tours of the clothing warehouse. He presumed on Bosch’s earlier kindnesses, he said, to beg him to talk to Herr Schindler. He repeated his pleadings and repeated the children’s names again, so that Bosch, whose memory was eroded by schnapps, might still remember. Herr Schindler is probably my best friend, said Bosch. He’d do anything for me.

Dolek expected little from the talk. His wife, Regina, had no experience of making shells or enamelware. Bosch himself never mentioned the request again. Yet within the week they marched out on the next Emalia list, cleared by Commandant Goeth in return for a little envelope of jewelry.

Niusia looked like a thin, reserved adult in the women’s barracks at Emalia, and Richard moved as he had in P@lasz@ow, everyone knowing him in the munitions section and the enamel shops, the guards accepting his familiarity. Regina kept expecting Oskar to come up to her in the enamel factory and say, “So you’re Dolek Horowitz’ wife?” Then the only question would be how to frame her thanks. But he never did. She was delighted to find that she was not very visible at Lipowa Street, and neither was her daughter. They understood that Oskar knew who they were, since he often chatted with Richard by name. They knew, too, by the altered nature of Richard’s questions, the extent of what they had been given.

The Emalia camp had no resident commandant

to tyrannize the inmates. There were no permanent

guards. The garrison was changed every two days,

two truckloads of SS and Ukrainians coming

up to Zablocie from P@lasz@ow to take over the

security of the subcamp. The P@lasz@ow

soldiers liked their occasional duty at

Emalia. The Herr Direktor’s

kitchens, more primitive even than

P@lasz@ow’s, turned out better meals.

Since the Herr Direktor started raging and making phone calls to Oberf@uhrer Scherner if any guard, instead of just patrolling the perimeter, entered the camp, the garrison kept to their side of the fence. Duty in Zablocie was pleasurably dull. Except for inspection by senior SS men, the prisoners who worked at DEF rarely got a close view of their guards. One barbed-wire passageway took the inmates to their work in the enamel plant; another ran to the door of the munitions section. Those Emalia Jews who worked at the box factory, the radiator plant, the garrison office were marched to work and back by Ukrainians—different Ukrainians every second day. No guard had the time to develop a fatal grudge against a prisoner.

Therefore, though the SS may have set the limits to the life people led in Emalia, Oskar set its tone. The tone was one of fragile permanence. There were no dogs. There were no beatings. The soup and the bread were better and more plentiful than in P@lasz@ow—

about 2,000 calories a day, according to a doctor who worked in Emalia as a factory hand. The shifts were long, often twelve hours, for Oskar was still a businessman with war contracts to fill and a conventional desire for profit. It must be said, though, that no shift was arduous and that many of his prisoners seem to have believed at the time that their labor was making a contribution in measurable terms to their survival. According to accounts Oskar presented after the war to the

Joint Distribution Committee, he spent

1,800,000 z@loty ($360,000) on food

for the Emalia camp. Cosmetic entries could be found, written off to similar expenditure, in the books of Farben and Krupp—though nowhere near as high a percentage of the profit as in Oskar’s accounts. The truth is, though, that no one collapsed and died of overwork, beatings, or hunger in Emalia. Whereas at I. G.

Farben’s Buna plant alone, 25,000 prisoners out of a work force of 35,000 would perish at their labor.

Long afterward, Emalia people would call the Schindler camp a paradise. Since they were by then widely scattered, it cannot have been a description they decided on after the fact. The term must have had some currency while they were in Emalia. It was, of course, only a relative paradise, a heaven by contrast with P@lasz@ow. What it inspired in its people was a sense of almost surreal deliverance, something preposterous which they didn’t want to look at too closely for fear it would evaporate. New DEF hands knew of Oskar only by report. They did not want to put themselves in the Herr Direktor’s path or risk speaking to him.

They needed time for recovery and for adjustment to Schindler’s unorthodox prison system. A girl named Lusia, for example. Her husband had recently been separated out from the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz at P@lasz@ow and shipped off with others to Mauthausen. With what would turn out to be mere realism, she grieved like a widow. Grieving, she’d been marched to Emalia. She worked at carrying dipped enamelware to the furnaces. You were permitted to heat up water on the warm surfaces of machinery, and the floor was warm. For her, hot water was Emalia’s first beneficence. She saw Oskar at first only as a large shape moving down an aisle of metal presses or traversing a catwalk. It was somehow not a threatening shape. She sensed that if she were noticed, the nature of the place—the lack of beatings, the food, the absence of guards in the camp—might somehow reverse itself. She wanted only unobtrusively to work her shift and return down the barbed-wire tunnel to her hut in the compound. After a while she found herself giving an answering nod to Oskar and even telling him that, yes, thank you, Herr Direktor, she was quite well.

Once he gave her some cigarettes, better than gold both as a comfort and as a means of trading with the Polish workers. Since she knew friends vanished, she feared his friendship; she wanted him to continue to be a presence, a magical parent. A paradise run by a friend was too fragile. To manage an enduring heaven, you needed someone both more authoritative and more mysterious than that.

Many of the Emalia prisoners felt the same. There was a girl named Regina Perlman living, at the time Oskar’s factory subcamp came into existence, in the city of Cracow on forged South American papers. Her dark complexion made the papers credible, and under them she worked as an Aryan in the office of a factory in Podg@orze. She would have been safer from blackmailers if she’d gone to Warsaw, @l@od@z, or Gdansk. But her parents were in P@lasz@ow, and she carried forged papers for their sakes too, so that she could supply them with food, comforts, medicine. She knew from the days in the ghetto that it was an adage in the Jewish mythology of Cracow that Herr Schindler could be expected to take extreme pains. She also knew the reports from P@lasz@ow, from the quarry, the Commandant’s balcony. She would have to break cover to do it, but she believed it essential that she get her parents into Schindler’s backyard camp. The first time she visited DEF she wore a safely anonymous faded floral dress and no stockings. The Polish gateman went through the business of calling Herr Schindler’s office upstairs, and through the glass she could see him disapproving of her. It’s nobody—some grubby girl from one of the other factories. She had the normal fear of people on Aryan papers that a hostile Pole would somehow spot her Jewishness. This one looked hostile.

It’s of no great importance, she told him when he returned shaking his head. She wanted to put him off her track. But the Pole did not even bother to lie to her. “He won’t see you,” he said. The hood of a BMW glowered in the factory yard, she could see, and it could belong only to Herr Schindler. He was in, but not to visitors who couldn’t afford stockings. She went away trembling at her escape. She’d been saved from making to Herr Schindler a confession which, even in her sleep, she feared making to anyone. She waited a week before she could get more time off from the factory in Podg@orze. She devoted an entire half-day to her approach. She bathed and got black-market stockings. From one of her few friends—a girl on Aryan papers could not risk having many—she borrowed a blouse.