Schindler's Ark

She had an excellent jacket of her own and

bought a lacquered straw hat with a veil. She

made up her face, achieving a dark radiance

appropriate to a woman living beyond threat. In

the mirror she looked like her prewar

self, an elegant Cracovienne of exotic

racial derivation—Hungarian businessman father, perhaps, and a mother from Rio. This time, as she had intended, the Pole in the

gatehouse did not even recognize her. He

let her inside while he rang Miss

Klonowska, the Herr Direktor’s

secretary, and then was put on to speak to Schindler himself. Herr Direktor, said the Pole, there is a lady here to see you on important business. Herr Schindler seemed to want details. A very well-dressed young lady, said the Pole, and then, bowing while holding the telephone, a very beautiful young lady, he said. As if he had a hunger to see her, or perhaps as if she might be some forgotten girl who’d embarrass him in the outer office, Schindler met her on the steps. He smiled when he saw he did not know her. He was very pleased to meet her, this Fraulein Rodriguez. She could see that he had a respect for pretty women, that it was at the same time childlike and yet sophisticated. With flourishes like those of a matinee idol, he indicated she should follow him upstairs. She wanted to talk to him in confidence? Of course she should. He led her past Klonowska. Klonowska took it calmly. The girl could mean anything— black-market or currency business. She could even be a chic partisan. Love might be the least of motivations. In any case, a worldly girl like Klonowska didn’t expect to own Oskar, or to be owned in return. Inside the office, Schindler placed a chair for her and walked behind his desk beneath the ritual portrait of the F@uhrer. Would she like a cigarette? Perhaps a Pernod or a cognac?

No, she said, but he must, of course, feel free to take a drink. He poured himself one from his cocktail cabinet. What’s this very important business? he asked, not quite with that crisp grace he’d shown on the stairs. For her manner had changed now the door to the outer office was closed.

He could tell she’d come to do hard business. She

leaned forward. For a second it seemed

ridiculous for her, a girl whose father had paid

50,000 z@l. for Aryan papers, to say it without

a pause, to give it all away to a

half-ironic, half-worried

Sudetendeutscher with a snifter of cognac in his hand. Yet in some ways it was the easiest thing she’d ever done.

I have to tell you, Herr Schindler, I’m not a Polish Aryan. My real name is Perlman. My parents are in P@lasz@ow. They say, and I believe it, that coming to Emalia is the same as being given a Lebenskarte—a card of life. I have nothing I can give you; I borrowed clothes to get inside your factory. Will you bring them here for me?

Schindler put down his drink and stood up. You want to make a secret arrangement? I don’t make secret arrangements. What you suggest, Fraulein, is illegal. I have a factory here in Zablocie and the only question I ask is whether or not a person has certain skills. If you care to leave your Aryan name and address, it might be possible to write to you at some stage and inform you that I need your parents for their work skills. But not now, and not on any other ground. But they can’t come as skilled workers, said Fraulein Perlman. My father’s an importer, not a metalworker.

We have an office staff, said Schindler. But mainly we need skills on the factory floor. She was defeated. Half-blind with tears, she wrote her false name and real address—he could do with it whatever he wanted. But on the street she understood and began to revive. Maybe Schindler thought she might be an agent, that she might have been there for entrapment. Just the same, he’d been cold. There hadn’t even been an ambiguous, nonindictable gesture of kindness in the manner in which he’d thrown her out of his office.

Within a month Mr. and Mrs. Perlman came to Emalia from P@lasz@ow. Not on their own, as Regina Perlman had imagined it would happen should Herr Oskar Schindler decide to be merciful, but as part of a new detail of 30 workers. Sometimes she would go around to Lipowa Street and

bribe her way onto the factory floor to see

them. Her father worked dipping the enamel, shoveling

coal, clearing the floor of scrap. “But he

talks again,” said Mrs. Perlman to her

daughter. For in P@lasz@ow he’d gone

silent.

In fact, despite the drafty huts, the

plumbing, here at Emalia there was a certain mood, a fragile confidence, a presumption of permanence such as she, living on risky papers in sullen Cracow, could not hope to feel until the day the madness stopped.

Miss Perlman-Rodriguez did not complicate Herr Schindler’s life by storming his office in gratitude or writing effusive letters. Yet she always left the yellow gate of DEF with an unquenchable envy for those who stayed inside.

Then there was a campaign to get Rabbi

Menasha Levartov, masquerading as a

metalworker in P@lasz@ow, into Emalia. Levartov was a scholarly city rabbi, young and black-bearded. He was more liberal than the rabbis from the shtetls of Poland, the ones who believed the Sabbath was more important even than life and who, throughout 1942 and 1943, were shot by the hundreds every Friday evening for refusing work in the forced-labor cantonments of Poland. He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible. Levartov had always been admired by Itzhak Stern, who worked in the Construction Office of Amon Goeth’s Administration Building. In the old days, Stern and Levartov would, if given the leisure, have sat together for hours over a glass of herbata, letting it grow cold while they talked about the influence of Zoroaster on Judaism, or the other way round, or the concept of the natural world in Taoism. Stern, when it came to comparative religion, got greater pleasure out of talking to Levartov than he could ever have received from bluff Oskar Schindler, who nonetheless had a fatal weakness for discoursing on the same subject.

During one of Oskar’s visits to P@lasz@ow, Stern told him that somehow Menasha Levartov had to be got into Emalia, or else Goeth would surely kill him. For Levartov had a sort of visibility—it was a matter of presence. Goeth was drawn to people of presence; they were, like idlers, another class with high target priority. Stern told Oskar how Goeth had attempted to murder Levartov.

Amon Goeth’s camp now held more than

30,000 people. On the near side of the

Appellplatz, near the Jewish

mortuary chapel which had now become a stable, stood a Polish compound which could hold some 1,200 prisoners. Obergruppenf@uhrer Kr@uger was so pleased by his inspection of the new, booming camp that he now promoted the Commandant two SS

grades to the rank of Hauptsturmf@uhrer.

As well as the crowd of Poles, Jews from the East and from Czechoslovakia would be held in P@lasz@ow while space was made for them farther west in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Gr@oss-Rosen. Sometimes the population rose above 35,000 and the Appellplatz teemed at roll call. Amon therefore often had to cull his early comers to make way for new prisoners. And Oskar knew that the Commandant’s quick method was to enter one of the camp offices or workshops, form up two lines, and march one of them away. The line marched away would be taken either to the Austrian hill fort, for execution by firing squads, or else to the cattle cars at the Cracow-P@lasz@ow Station or, when it was laid down in the autumn of 1943, to the railway siding by the fortified SS barracks. On just such a culling exercise, Stern told Oskar, Amon had entered the metalworks in the factory enclosure some days past. The supervisors had stood at attention like soldiers and made their eager reports, knowing that they could die for an unwise choice of words.

“I need twenty-five metalworkers,” Amon told the supervisors when the reports were finished. “Twenty-five and no more. Point out to me the ones who are skilled.”

One of the supervisors pointed to Levartov and the rabbi joined the line, though he could see that Amon took a special note of his selection. Of course, one never knew which line would be moved out or where it would be moved to, but it was in most cases a safer bet to be on the line of the skilled.

So the selection continued. Levartov had noticed that the metal shops were strangely empty that morning, since a number of those who worked or filled in time by the door had got forewarning of Goeth’s approach and had slipped over to the Madritsch garment factory to hide among the bolts of linen or appear to be mending sewing machines. The forty or so slow or inadvertent who had stayed on in the metalworks were now in two lines between the benches and the lathes. Everyone was fearful, but those in the smaller line were the more uneasy.

Then a boy of indeterminate age, perhaps as young as sixteen or as old as nineteen, had called from the midst of the shorter line, “But, Herr Commandant, I’m a metal specialist too.” “Yes, Liebchen?” murmured Amon, drawing his service revolver, stepping to the child and shooting him in the head. The enormous blast in this place of metal threw the boy against the wall. He was dead, the appalled Levartov believed, before he fell to the workshop floor.

The even shorter line was now marched out to the railroad depot, the boy’s corpse was taken over the hill in a barrow, the floor was washed, the lathes returned to operation. But Levartov, making gate hinges slowly at his bench, was aware of the recognition that had flashed for an instant in Amon’s eye—the look that had said, There’s one. It seemed to the rabbi that the boy had, by crying out, only temporarily distracted Amon from Levartov himself, the more obvious target.

A few days had passed, Stern told

Schindler, before Amon returned to the metalworks and found it crowded, and went around making his own selections for the hill or the transports. Then he’d halted by Levartov’s bench, as Levartov had known he would. Levartov could smell Amon’s aftershave lotion. He could see the starched cuff of Amon’s shirt. Amon was a splendid dresser.

“What are you making?” asked the Commandant. “Herr Commandant,” said Levartov, “I am making hinges.” The rabbi pointed, in fact, to the small heap of hinges on the floor.

“Make me one now,” Amon ordered. He took a watch from his pocket and began timing. Levartov earnestly cut a hinge, his fingers urging the metal, pressuring the lathe; convinced laboring fingers, delighted to be skilled.

Keeping tremulous count in his head, he turned out a hinge in what he believed was fiftyeight seconds, and let it fall at his feet.

“Another,” murmured Amon. After his speed trial, the rabbi was now more assured and worked confidently. In perhaps another minute the second hinge slid to his feet. Amon considered the heap. “You’ve been working here since six this morning,” said Amon, not raising his eyes from the floor. “And you can work at a rate you’ve just shown me—and yet, such a tiny little pile of hinges?”

Levartov knew, of course, that he had crafted his own death. Amon walked him down the aisle, no one bothering or brave enough to look up from his bench. To see what? A death walk. Death walks were commonplace in P@lasz@ow. Outside, in the midday air of spring, Amon stood Menasha Levartov against the workshop wall, adjusting him by the shoulder, and took out the pistol with which he’d slaughtered the child two days before. Levartov blinked and watched the other prisoners hurry by, wheeling and toting the raw materials of the P@lasz@ow camp, eager to be out of range, the Cracovians among them thinking, My God, it’s Levartov’s turn.

Privately, he murmured the Shema

Yisroel and heard the mechanisms of the pistol. But the small internal stirrings of metal ended not in a roar but in a click like that of a cigarette lighter which won’t give a flame. And like a dissatisfied smoker, with just such a trivial level of annoyance, Amon Goeth extracted and replaced the magazine of bullets from the butt of the pistol, again took his aim, and fired. As the rabbi’s head swayed to the normal human suspicion that the impact of the bullet could be absorbed as could a punch, all that emerged from Goeth’s pistol was another click.

Goeth began cursing prosaically.

“Donnerwetter! Zum Teufel!” It seemed to Levartov that at any second Amon would begin to run down faulty modern workmanship, as if they were two tradesmen trying to bring off some simple effect—the threading of a pipe, a drill hole in the wall. Amon put the faulty pistol away in its black holster and withdrew from a jacket pocket a pearlhandled revolver, of a type Rabbi Levartov had only read of in the Westerns of his boyhood. Clearly, he thought, there are going to be no remissions due to technical failure. He’ll keep on.

I’ll die by cowboy revolver, and even if all

the firing pins are filed down,

Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth will fall

back on more primitive weapons.

As Stern relayed it to Schindler, when Goeth aimed again and fired, Menasha Levartov had already begun to look about in case there was some object in the neighborhood that could be used, together with these two astounding failures of Goeth’s service pistol, as a lever. By the corner of the wall stood a pile of coal, an unpromising item in itself. “Herr Commandant,” Levartov began to say, but he could already hear the small murderous hammers and springs of the barroom pistol acting on each other. And again the click of a defective cigarette lighter. Amon, raging, seemed to be attempting to tear the barrel of the thing from its socket.

Now Rabbi Levartov adopted the stance he had seen the supervisors in the metalworks assume. “Herr Commandant, I would beg to report that my heap of hinges was so unsatisfactory for the reason that the machines were being recalibrated this morning. And therefore instead of hinge-work I was put on to shoveling that coal.” It seemed to Levartov that he had violated the rules of the game they had been playing together, the game that was to be closed by Levartov’s reasonable death just as surely as Snakes and Ladders ends with the throwing of a six. It was as if the rabbi had hidden the dice and now there could be no conclusion. Amon hit him on the face with a free left hand, and Levartov tasted blood in his mouth, lying on the tongue like a guarantee. Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth then simply abandoned Levartov against the wall. The contest, however, as both Levartov and Stern could tell, had merely been suspended. Stern whispered this narrative to Oskar in the Building Office of P@lasz@ow. Stern, stooping, eyes raised, hands joined, was as generous with detail as ever. “It’s no problem,” Oskar murmured. He liked to tease Stern. “Why the long story? There’s always room at Emalia for someone who can turn out a hinge in less than a minute.”

When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory subcamp in the summer of ‘43, he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler’s little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov operated a lathe, Schindler would say, “You shouldn’t be here, Rabbi.

You should be preparing for Shabbat.” But when

Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in

the ceremonies, Levartov knew that the Herr

Direktor was not joking. Before dusk

on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his

workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in

the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of

sourly drying laundry, he would recite

Kiddush over a cup of wine among the

roof-high tiers of bunks. Under, of course, the shadow of an SS watchtower.

CHAPTER 24

The Oskar Schindler who dismounted from his horse these days in the factory yard of Emalia was still the prototypical tycoon. He looked sleekly handsome in the style of the film stars George Sanders and Curt J@urgens, to both of whom people would always compare him. His hacking jacket and jodhpurs were tailored; his riding boots had a high shine. He looked like a man to whom it was profit all the way.

Yet he would return from his rural rides and go upstairs to face the sort of bills novel even to the history of an eccentric enterprise like DEF.

Bread shipments from the bakery at P@lasz@ow

to the factory camp in Lipowa Street,

Zablocie, were a few hundred loaves

delivered twice a week and an occasional token half-truckload of turnips. These few high-backed and lightly laden trucks were no doubt written large and multiplied in Commandant Goeth’s books, and such trusties as Chilowicz sold off on behalf of the Herr Hauptsturmf@uhrer the difference between the mean supplies that arrived at Lipowa Street and the plenteous and phantom convoys that Goeth put down on paper. If Oskar had depended on Amon for prison food, his 900 internees would each have been fed perhaps three-quarters of a kilo of bread a week and soup every third day. On missions of his own and through his manager, Oskar was spending 50,000 z@l. a month on black-market food for his camp kitchen. Some weeks he had to find more than three thousand round loaves. He went to town and spoke to the German supervisors in the big bakeries, and had in his briefcase Reichsmarks and two or three bottles. Oskar did not seem to realize that throughout Poland that summer of 1943, he was one of the champion illicit feeders of prisoners; that the malign pall of hunger which should by SS policy hang over the great death factories and over every one of the little, barbedwired forced-labor slums was lacking in Lipowa Street in a way that was dangerously visible. That summer a host of incidents occurred which augmented the Schindler mythology, the almost religious supposition among many prisoners of P@lasz@ow and the entire population of Emalia that Oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation. Early in the career of every subcamp, senior

officers from the parent camp, or Lager, paid a

visit to ensure that the energy of the slave laborers

was stimulated in the most radical and exemplary

manner. It is not certain exactly which members

of P@lasz@ow’s senior staff visited

Emalia, but some prisoners and Oskar himself would

always say that Goeth was one of them. And if not

Goeth it was Leo John, or Scheidt. Or

else Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s

prot@eg‘e. It is no injustice to mention any of their names in connection with

“stimulating energy in a radical and exemplary manner.” Whoever they were, they had already in the history of P@lasz@ow taken or condoned fierce action. And now, visiting Emalia, they spotted in the yard a prisoner named Lamus pushing a barrow too slowly across the factory yard. Oskar himself later declared that it was Goeth who was there that day and saw Lamus’ slow trundling and turned to a young NCO named Gr@un—Gr@un being another Goeth prot@eg‘e, his bodyguard, a former wrestler. It was certainly Gr@un who was ordered to execute Lamus.

So Gr@un made the arrest, and the inspectors continued on into other parts of the factory camp. It was someone from the metal hall who rushed up to the Herr Direktor’s office and alerted Schindler. Oskar came roaring down the stairs even faster than on the day Miss Regina Perlman had visited, and reached the yard just as Gr@un was positioning Lamus against the wall. Oskar called out, You can’t do that here. I won’t get work out of my people if you start shooting. I’ve got high-priority war contracts, et cetera. It was the standard Schindler argument and carried the suggestion that there were senior officers known to Oskar to whom Gr@un’s name would be given if he impeded production in Emalia.

Gr@un was cunning. He knew the other inspectors had passed on to the workshops, where the whumping of metal presses and the roaring of lathes would cover any noise he chose, or failed, to make. Lamus was such a small concern to men like Goeth and John that no investigation would be made afterward. “What’s in it for me?” the SS man asked Oskar. “Would vodka do?” said Oskar.

To Gr@un it was a substantial prize. For working all day behind the machine guns during Aktions, the massed and daily executions in the East—for shooting hundreds—you were given half a liter of vodka. The boys lined up to be on the squad so that they could take that prize of liquor back to their messes in the evening. And here the Herr Direktor offered him three times that for one act of omission.

“I don’t see the bottle,” he said. Herr

Schindler was already nudging Lamus away from the wall and pushing him out of range.

“Disappear!” Gr@un yelled at the wheelbarrow man. “You may collect the bottle,” said Oskar, “from my office at the end of the inspection.”