Schindler's Ark

Oskar took part in a similar transaction when the Gestapo raided the apartment of a forger and discovered, among other false documents completed or near-completed, a set of Aryan papers for a family called the Wohlfeilers—mother, father, three adolescent children, all of them workers at Schindler’s camp. Two Gestapo men therefore came to Lipowa Street to collect the family for an interrogation which would lead, through Montelupich prison, to Chujowa G@orka. Three hours after entering Oskar’s office both men left, reeling on the stairs, beaming with the temporary bonhomie of cognac and, for all anyone knew, of a payoff. The confiscated papers now lay on Oskar’s desk, and he picked them up and put them in the fire.

Next, the brothers Danziger, who cracked a metal press one Friday. Honest, bemused men, semiskilled, looking up with staring shtetl eyes from the machine they had just loudly shattered. The Herr Direktor was away on business, and someone—a factory spy, Oskar would always say—denounced the Danzigers to the administration in P@lasz@ow. The brothers were taken from Emalia and their hanging advertised at the next morning’s roll call in P@lasz@ow. Tonight (it was announced), the people of P@lasz@ow will witness the execution of two saboteurs. What of course qualified the Danzigers above all for execution was their Orthodox aura.

Oskar returned from his business trip to Sosnowiec at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, three hours before the promised execution. News of the sentence was waiting on his desk. He drove out through the suburbs to P@lasz@ow at once, taking cognac with him and some fine kielbasa sausage. He parked by the Administration Building and found Goeth in his office. He was pleased not to have to rouse the Commandant from an afternoon nap. No one knows the extent of the deal that was struck in Goeth’s office that afternoon, in that office akin to Torquemada’s, where Goeth had had ringbolts attached to the wall from which to hang people for discipline or instruction. It is hard to believe, however, that Amon was satisfied simply with cognac and sausage. In any case, his concern for the integrity of the Reich’s metal presses was soothed by the interview, and at six o’clock, the hour of their execution, the Danziger brothers returned in the back seat of Oskar’s plush limousine to the sweet squalor of Emalia.

All these triumphs were, of course,

partial. It is an aspect of Caesars,

Oskar knew, to remit as irrationally as they

condemn. Emil Krautwirt, by day an engineer

in the radiator factory beyond the Emalia

barracks, was an inmate of Oskar’s SS

subcamp. He was young, having got his diploma

in the late Thirties. Krautwirt, like the

others in Emalia, called the place

Schindler’s camp, but by taking Krautwirt away to P@lasz@ow for an exemplary hanging, the SS demonstrated whose camp it really was, at least for some aspects of its existence. For the fraction of P@lasz@ow people who would live on into the Peace, the hanging of engineer Krautwirt was the first story, other than their own intimate stories of pain and humiliation, which they would relate. The SS were ever economical with their scaffolds, and at P@lasz@ow the gallows resembled a long, low set of goalposts, lacking the majesty of the gibbets of history, of the Revolutionary guillotine, the Elizabethan scaffold, the tall solemnity of jailhouse gallows in the sheriff’s backyard. Seen in peacetime, the gallows of P@lasz@ow and Auschwitz would intimidate not by their solemnity but by their ordinariness. But as mothers of children would discover in P@lasz@ow, it was still possible, even with such a banal structure, for five-year-olds to see too much of an execution from within the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz. With Krautwirt, a sixteen-year-old boy named Haubenstock was also to be hanged. Krautwirt had been condemned for some letters he had written to seditious persons in the city of Cracow. But with Haubenstock, it was that he had been heard singing “Volga, Volga,”

“Kalinka Maya,” and other banned Russian songs with the intention, according to his death sentence, of winning the Ukrainian guards over to Bolshevism. The rules for the rite of execution inside P@lasz@ow involved silence. Unlike the festive hangings of earlier times, the drop was performed in utter stillness. The prisoners stood in phalanxes, and were patrolled by men and women who knew the extent of their power: by Hujar and John; by Scheidt and Gr@un; by the NCO’S Landsdorfer, Amthor, and Grimm, Ritschek and Schreiber; and by the SS women supervisors recently assigned to P@lasz@ow, both of them accomplished with the truncheon—Alice Orlowski and Luise Danz. Under such supervision, the pleadings of the condemned were heard in silence. Engineer Krautwirt himself seemed at first stunned and had nothing to say, but the boy was vocal. In an uneven voice he reasoned with the Hauptsturmf@uhrer, who stood beside the scaffold. “I am not a Communist, Herr Commandant. I hate Communism. They were just songs. Ordinary songs.” The hangman, a Jewish butcher of Cracow, pardoned for some earlier crime on condition that he undertake this work, stood Haubenstock on a stool and placed the noose around his neck. He could tell Amon wanted the boy hanged first, didn’t want the debate to drag on. When the butcher kicked the support out from beneath Haubenstock, the rope broke, and the boy, purple and gagging, noose around his neck, crawled on his hands and knees to Goeth, continuing his pleadings, ramming his head against the Commandant’s ankles and hugging his legs. It was the most extreme submission; it conferred on Goeth again the kingship he’d been exercising these fevered months past. Amon, in an Appellplatz of gaping mouths uttering no sound but a low hiss, a susurrus like a wind in sand dunes, took his pistol from his holster, kicked the boy away, and shot him through the head.

When poor engineer Krautwirt saw the

horror of the boy’s execution, he took a

razor blade that he’d concealed in his pocket and slashed his wrists. Those prisoners at the front could tell that Krautwirt had injured himself fatally in both arms. But Goeth ordered the hangman to proceed in any case, and splashed with the gore from Krautwirt’s injuries, two Ukrainians lifted him to the scaffold, where, gushing from both wrists, he strangled in front of the Jews of southern Poland.

It was natural to believe with one part of the mind that each such barbarous exhibition might be the last, that there might be a reversal of methods and attitudes even in Amon, or if not in him, then in those unseen officials who in some high office with French windows and waxed floors, overlooking a square where old women sold flowers, must formulate half of what happened in P@lasz@ow and condone the rest. On the second visit of Dr. Sedlacek from Budapest to Cracow, Oskar and the dentist devised a scheme which might to a more introverted man than Schindler have seemed naive. Oskar suggested to Sedlacek that perhaps one of the reasons Amon Goeth behaved so savagely was the bad liquor he drank, the gallons of local so-called cognac which weakened even further Amon’s faulty sense of ultimate consequences. With a portion of the Reichsmarks Dr. Sedlacek had just brought to Emalia and handed to Oskar, a crate of first-rate cognac should be bought—not such an easy or inexpensive item in postStalingrad Poland. Oskar should deliver it to Amon, and in the progress of conversation suggest to Goeth that one way or another the war would end at some time, and that there would be investigations into the actions of individuals. That perhaps even Amon’s friends would remember the times he’d been too zealous. It was Oskar’s nature to believe that you could drink with the devil and adjust the balance of evil over a snifter of cognac. It was not that he found more radical methods frightening. It was that they did not occur to him. He’d always been a man of transactions.

Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko, who had earlier had control of the ghetto perimeter, was, in contrast, a man of ideas. It had become impossible for him to work within the SS scheme, passing a bribe here, a forged paper there, placing a dozen children under the patronage of his rank while a hundred more were marched out the ghetto gate. Bosko had absconded from his police station in Podg@orze and vanished into the partisan forests of Niepolomice. In the People’s Army he would try to expiate the callow enthusiasm he’d felt for Nazism in the summer of 1938. Dressed as a Polish farmer, he’d be recognized in the end in a village west of Cracow and shot for treason. Bosko would therefore become a martyour. Bosko had gone to the forest because he had no other option. He lacked the financial resources with which Oskar greased the system. But it accorded with the natures of both men that one be found with nothing but a cast-off rank and uniform, that the other would make certain he had cash and trade goods. It is not to praise Bosko or denigrate Schindler that one says that if ever Oskar suffered martyrdom, it would be by accident, because some business he was transacting had turned sour on him. But there were people who still drew breath—the Wohlfeilers, the Danziger brothers, Lamus—because Oskar worked that way. Because Oskar worked that way, the unlikely camp of Emalia stood in Lipowa Street, and there, on most days, a thousand were safe from seizure, and the SS

stayed outside the wire. No one was beaten there, and the soup was thick enough to sustain life. In proportion to their natures, the moral disgust of both Party members, Bosko and Schindler, was equal, even if Bosko manifested his by leaving his empty uniform on a coat hanger in Podg@orze, while Oskar put on his big Party pin and went to deliver high-class liquor to mad Amon Goeth in P@lasz@ow.

It was late afternoon, and Oskar and Goeth sat in the salon of Goeth’s white villa. Goeth’s girlfriend Majola looked in, a small-boned woman, a secretary at the Wagner factory in town. She did not spend her days amid the excesses of P@lasz@ow. She had sensitive manners, and this delicacy helped a rumor to emerge that Majola had threatened not to sleep with Goeth if he continued arbitrarily gunning people down. But no one knew whether that was the truth or just one of those therapeutic interpretations which arise in the minds of prisoners desperate to make the earth habitable. Majola did not stay long with Amon and Oskar that afternoon. She could tell there would be a drinking session. Helen Hirsch, the pale girl in black who was Amon’s maid, brought them the necessary accompaniments—cakes, canap‘es, sausage. She reeled with exhaustion. Last night Amon had beaten her for preparing food for Majola without his permission; this morning he had made her run up and down the villa’s three flights of stairs fifty times on the double because of a flyspeck on one of the paintings in the corridor. She had heard certain rumors about Herr Schindler but had not met him until now. This afternoon she took no comfort from the sight of these two big men, seated either side of the low table, fraternal and in apparent concord. There was nothing here to interest her, for the certainty of her own death was a first premise. She thought only about the survival of her young sister, who worked in the camp’s general kitchen. She kept a sum of money hidden in the hope that it would effect her sister’s survival. There was no sum, she believed, no deal, that could influence her own prospects. So they drank through the camp’s twilight and into the dark. Long after the prisoner Tosia Lieberman’s nightly rendition of Brahms’s “Lullaby” had calmed the women’s camp and insinuated itself between the timbers of the men’s, the two big men sat on. Their prodigious livers glowed hot as furnaces. And at the right hour, Oskar leaned across the table and, acting out of an amity which, even with this much cognac aboard, did not go beyond the surface of the skin ... Oskar, leaning toward Amon and cunning as a demon, began to tempt him toward restraint.

Amon took it well. It seemed to Oskar that

he was attracted by the thought of moderation—a

temptation worthy of an emperor. Amon could

imagine a sick slave on the trolleys, a

returning prisoner from the cable factory, staggering

--in that put-upon way one found so hard to tolerate—under a load of clothing or lumber picked up at the prison gate. And the fantasy ran with a strange warmth in Amon’s belly that he would forgive that laggard, that pathetic actor. As Caligula might have been tempted to see himself as Caligula the Good, so the image of Amon the Good exercised the Commandant’s imagination for a time. He would, in fact, always have a weakness for it. Tonight, his blood running golden with cognac and nearly all the camp asleep beyond his steps, Amon was more definitely seduced by mercy than by the fear of reprisal. But in the morning he would remember Oskar’s warning and combine it with the day’s news that Russian threats were developing on the Front at Kiev. Stalingrad had been an inconceivable distance from P@lasz@ow. But the distance to Kiev was imaginable. For some days after Oskar’s bout with Amon, news came to Emalia that the dual temptation was having its result with the Commandant. Dr. Sedlacek, going back to Budapest, would report to Samu Springmann that Amon had given up, for the time being at least, arbitrarily murdering people. And gentle Samu, among the diverse cares he had in the list of places from Dachau and Drancy in the west to Sobibor and Bel@zec in the east, hoped for a time that the hole at P@lasz@ow had been plugged. But the allure of clemency vanished quickly.

If there was a brief respite, those who were

to survive and give testimony of their days in

P@lasz@ow would not be aware of it. The summary

assassinations would seem continual to them. If

Amon did not appear on his balcony this morning

or the next, it did not mean he would not appear the

morning after that. It took much more than Goeth’s

temporary absence to give even the most deluded

prisoner some hope of a fundamental change in the

Commandant’s nature. And then, in any case,

there he would be, on the steps in the

Austrian-style cap he wore to murders,

looking through his binoculars for a culprit.

Dr. Sedlacek would return to Budapest not

only with overly hopeful news of a reform in

Amon but with more reliable data on the camp at

P@lasz@ow. One afternoon a guard from Emalia

turned up at P@lasz@ow to summon Stern

to Zablocie. Once Stern arrived at the

front gate, he was led upstairs into Oskar’s

new apartment. There Oskar introduced him to two

men in good suits. One was Sedlacek; the other a

Jew—equipped with a Swiss passport—who

introduced himself as Babar. “My dear

friend,” Oskar told Stern, “I want you

to write as full a report on the situation in P@lasz@ow as you can manage in an afternoon.” Stern had never seen Sedlacek or Babar before this and thought that Oskar was being indiscreet. He bent over his hands, murmuring that before he undertook a task like that he would like a word in private with the Herr Direktor. Oskar used to say that Itzhak Stern could never make a straight statement or request unless it arrived smuggled under a baggage of talk of the Babylonian Talmud and purification rites. But now he was more direct. “Tell me, please, Herr Schindler,” he asked, “don’t you believe this is a dreadful risk?”

Oskar exploded. Before he got control of himself, the strangers would have heard him in the other room. “Do you think I’d ask you, if there was a risk?” Then he calmed and said,

“There’s always risk, as you know better than I. But not with these two men. These two are safe.”

In the end, Stern spent all afternoon on his report. He was a scholar and accustomed to writing in exact prose. The rescue organization in Budapest, the Zionists in Istanbul would receive from Stern a report they could rely on.

Multiply Stern’s summary by the 1,700 large and small forced-labor camps of Poland, and then you had a tapestry to stun the world!

Sedlacek and Oskar wanted more than that of

Stern. On the morning after the Amon-Oskar

binge, Oskar dragged his heroic liver back out

to P@lasz@ow before office-opening time. In between the

suggestions of tolerance Oskar had tried to drop

into Amon’s ear the night before, he’d also got a

written permit to take two “brother

industrialists” on a tour of this model

industrial community. Oskar brought the two into the gray Administration Building that morning and demanded the services of H@aftling (prisoner) Itzhak Stern for a tour of the camp. Sedlacek’s friend Babar had some sort of miniature camera, but he carried it openly in his hand. It was almost possible to believe that if an SS man had challenged him, he would have welcomed the chance to stand and boast for five minutes about this little gadget he’d got on a recent business trip to Brussels or Stockholm. As Oskar and the visitors from Budapest emerged from the Administration Building, Oskar took the thin, clerkly Stern by the shoulder. His friends would be happy to see the workshops and the living quarters, said Oskar. But if there was anything Stern thought they were missing out on, he was just to bend down and tie his shoestring. On Goeth’s great road paved with fractured gravestones, they moved past the SS

barracks. Here, almost at once, prisoner Stern’s shoestring needed tying. Sedlacek’s associate snapped the teams hauling truckloads of rock up from the quarry, while Stern murmured, “Forgive me, gentlemen.” Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859-1927); of Matylde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of 90 in 1912; of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911; of Rozia Groder, a thirteenyear-old who had passed on in 1931; of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honorable dead had been made into paving stones.

Moving on, they passed the Puffhaus, the SS and Ukrainian brothel staffed by Polish girls, before reaching the quarry, the excavations running back into the limestone cliff. Stern’s shoelaces required reef knots here; he wanted this recorded. They destroyed men at this rock face, working them on the hammers and wedges. None of the scarred men of the quarry parties showed any curiosity about their visitors this morning. Ivan, Amon Goeth’s Ukrainian driver, was on duty here, and the supervisor was a bullet-headed German criminal named Erik.

Erik had already demonstrated a capacity for

murdering families, having killed his own mother,

father, sister. He might by now have been hanged or

at least been put in a dungeon if the SS

had not realized that there were worse criminals still

than patricides and that Erik should be employed as

a stick to beat them with. As Stern had mentioned in his

report, a Cracow physician named Edward

Goldblatt had been sent here from the clinic

by SS Dr. Blancke and his Jewish

prot@eg‘e, Dr. Leon Gross. Erik

loved to see a man of culture and speciality enter the quarry and report soft-handed for work, and the beatings began in Goldblatt’s case with the first display of uncertainty in handling the hammer and spikes. Over a period of days, Erik and sundry SS and Ukrainian enlisted men beat Goldblatt. The doctor was forced to work with a ballooning face, now half again its normal size, with one eye sealed up. No one knew what error of quarry technique set Erik to give Dr. Goldblatt his final beating. Long after the doctor lost consciousness, Erik

permitted him to be carried to the

Krankenstube, where Dr. Leon Gross

refused to admit him. With this medical sanction Erik and an SS enlisted man continued to kick the dying Goldblatt as he lay, rejected for treatment, on the threshold of the hospital. Stern bent and tied his shoelace at the quarry because, like Oskar and some others in the P@lasz@ow complex, he believed in a future of judges who might ask, Where—in a word—did this act occur?

Oskar was able to give his colleagues an overview of the camp, taking them up to Chujowa G@orka and the Austrian mound, where the bloodied wheelbarrows used to transport the dead to the woods stood unabashedly at the mouth of the fort. Already thousands were buried down there in mass graves in or on the verges of those eastern pinewoods. When the Russians came from the east, that wood with its population of victims would fall to them before living and half-dying P@lasz@ow. As for P@lasz@ow as an industrial wonder, it was bound to disappoint any serious observer.

Amon, Bosch, Leo John, Josef

Neuschel all thought it a model city on the ground that it was making them rich. It would have shocked them to find that one of the reasons their sweet billet in P@lasz@ow continued was not any delight on the part of the Armaments Inspectorate with the economic miracles they were performing.

In fact the only economic miracles within

P@lasz@ow were the personal fortunes made

by Amon and his clique. It was a surprise

to any calm outsider that war contracts came to the

workshops of P@lasz@ow at all, considering that

their plant was so poor and old-fashioned. But

shrewd Zionist prisoners inside

P@lasz@ow put pressure on convinced

outsiders, people like Oskar and Madritsch, who could

in turn put pressure on the Armaments

Inspectorate. On the ground that the

hunger and sporadic murders of P@lasz@ow were still to be preferred to the assured annihilations of Auschwitz and Bel@zec, Oskar was willing to sit down with the purchasing officers and engineers of General Schindler’s Arms Inspectorate. These gentlemen would make faces and say, “Come

on, Oskar! Are you serious?” But in the end they

would find contracts for Amon Goeth’s camp,

orders for shovels manufactured from the

collected scrap iron of Oskar’s Lipowa

Street factory, orders for funnels turned

out of offcuts of tin from a jam factory in Podg@orze. The chances of full delivery of the shovels and their handles ever being made to the Wehrmacht were small. Many of Oskar’s friends among the officers of the Armaments Inspectorate understood what they were doing, that prolonging the life of the slave-labor camp of P@lasz@ow was the same thing as prolonging the life of a number of the slaves. With some of them it stuck in the craw, because they knew what a crook Goeth was, and their serious and old-fashioned patriotism was affronted by Amon’s sybaritic life out there in the countryside. The divine irony of Forced Labor Camp

P@lasz@ow—that some of the slaves were conspiring for their own purposes to maintain Amon’s kingdom— can be seen in the case of Roman Ginter. Ginter, former entrepreneur and now one of the supervisors in the metalworks from which Rabbi Levartov had already been rescued, was summoned to Goeth’s office one morning and, as he closed the door, took the first of a number of blows. While he beat Ginter, Amon raged incoherently. Then he dragged him out-of-doors and down the steps to a stretch of wall by the front entrance. May I ask something? said Ginter against the wall, spitting out two teeth, offhandedly, lest Amon think him an actor, a self-pitier. You bastard, roared Goeth, you haven’t delivered the handcuffs I ordered! My desk calendar tells me that, you pig’s-ass. But Herr Commandant, said Ginter, I beg to report that the order for handcuffs was filled yesterday. I asked Herr Oberscharf@uhrer Neuschel what I should do with them and he told me to deliver them to your office, which I did. Amon dragged bleeding Ginter back to the office and called the SS man Neuschel. Why, yes, said young Neuschel. Look in your second-top drawer on the left, Herr Commandant. Goeth looked and found the manacles. I almost killed him, he complained to his young and not-so-gifted Viennese prot@eg‘e.

This same Roman Ginter, complaisantly

spitting up his teeth against the foundation of Amon’s

gray Administration Building—this Jewish

cipher whose accidental murder would have caused

Amon to blame Neuschel—this Ginter is the

man who under special pass goes to Herr

Schindler’s DEF to talk to Oskar about workshop

supplies for P@lasz@ow, about large scrap

metal without which the whole metal-shop crew would be

railroaded off to Auschwitz. Therefore, while the

pistol-waving Amon Goeth believes he

maintains P@lasz@ow by his special

administrative genius, it is as much the

bloody-mouthed prisoners who keep it running.

CHAPTER 25

To some people it now seemed that Oskar was spending like a compulsive gambler. Even from the little they knew of him, his prisoners could sense that he would ruin himself for them if that was the price. Later—not now, for now they accepted his mercies in the same spirit in which a child accepts Christmas presents from its parents—they would say, Thank God he was more faithful to us than to his wife. And like the prisoners, sundry officials could also ferret Oskar’s passion out.

One such official, a Dr. Sopp,

physician to the SS prisons in Cracow and

to the SS Court [The SS had its own

judiciary section.] in Pomorska, let

Herr Schindler know through a Polish messenger that

he was willing to do a brand of business. In

Montelupich prison was a woman named Frau

Helene Schindler. Dr. Sopp knew she was

no relative of Oskar’s, but her husband had

invested some money in Emalia. She had questionable

Aryan papers. Dr. Sopp did not need to say

that for Mrs. Schindler this portended a truck

ride to Chujowa G@orka. But if Oskar would

put up certain amounts, said Sopp, the

doctor was willing to issue a medical

certificate saying that, in view of her condition, Mrs. Schindler should be permitted to take the cure indefinitely at Marienbad, down in Bohemia.

Oskar went to Sopp’s office, where he found out that the doctor wanted 50,000 z@l. for the certificate. It was no use arguing. After three years of practice, a man like Sopp could tell to within a few z@loty the price to put on favors. During the afternoon, Oskar raised the money. Sopp knew he could, knew that Oskar was the sort of man who had blackmarket money stashed, money with no recorded history. Before making the payment, Oskar set some conditions. He would need to go to Montelupich with Dr. Sopp to collect the woman from her cell. He would himself deliver her to mutual friends in the city. Sopp did not object. Under a bare light bulb in freezing Montelupich, Mrs. Schindler was handed her costly documents. A more careful man, a man with an accountant’s mind, might reasonably have repaid himself for his trouble from the money Sedlacek brought from Budapest. All together, Oskar would be handed nearly 150,000 Reichsmarks carried to Cracow in false-bottomed suitcases and in the lining of clothes. But Oskar, partly because his sense of money (whether owed or owing) was so inexact, partly because of his sense of honor, passed on to his Jewish contacts all the money he ever received from Sedlacek, except for the sum spent on Amon’s cognac.

It was not always a straightforward business. When in the summer of ‘43 Sedlacek arrived in Cracow with 50,000 RM., the Zionists inside P@lasz@ow to whom Oskar offered the cash feared it might be a setup.

Oskar first approached Henry Mandel, a welder in the P@lasz@ow metal shop and a member of Hitach Dut, a Zionist youth and labor movement. Mandel did not want to touch the money. Look, said Schindler, I’ve got a letter in Hebrew to go with it, a letter from Palestine. But of course, if it was a setup, if Oskar had been compromised and was being used, he would have a letter from Palestine. And when you hadn’t enough bread for breakfast, it was quite a sum to be offered: 50,000 RM.--100,000 z@loty. To be offered that for your discretionary use. It just wasn’t credible.

Schindler then tried to pass the money, which was sitting there, inside the boundary of P@lasz@ow in the trunk of his car, to another member of Hitach Dut, a woman named Alta Rubner. She had some contacts, through prisoners who went to work in the cable factory, through some of the Poles in the Polish prison, with the underground in Sosnowiec. Perhaps, she said to Mandel, it would be best to refer the whole business to the underground, and let them decide on the provenance of the money Herr Oskar Schindler was offering.

Oskar kept trying to persuade her, raising his voice at her under cover of Madritsch’s chattering sewing machines. “I guarantee with all my heart that this isn’t a trap!” With all my heart. Exactly the sentiment one would expect from an agent provocateur!

Yet after Oskar had gone away and Mandel had spoken to Stern, who declared the letter authentic, and then conferred again with the girl, a decision was made to take the money. They knew now, however, that Oskar wouldn’t be back with it. Mandel went to Marcel Goldberg at the Administration Office. Goldberg had also been a member of Hitach Dut, but after becoming the clerk in charge of lists—of labor lists and transport lists, of the lists of living and dead—he had begun taking bribes. Mandel could put pressure on him, though. One of the lists Goldberg could draw up—or at least, add to and subtract from—

was the list of those who went to Emalia to collect scrap metal for use in the workshops of P@lasz@ow. For old times’ sake, and without having to disclose his reason for wanting to visit Emalia, Mandel was put on this list.

But arriving in Zablocie and sneaking away from the scrap-metal detail to get to Oskar, he’d been blocked in the front office by Bankier. Herr Schindler was too busy, said Bankier. A week later Mandel was back. Again Bankier wouldn’t let him in to speak to Oskar. The third time, Bankier was more specific. You want that Zionist money? You didn’t want it before. And now you want it. Well, you can’t have it. That’s the way life goes, Mr. Mandel!

Mandel nodded and left. He presumed wrongly that Bankier had already lifted at least a segment of the cash. In fact, however, Bankier was being careful. The money did finish in the hands of Zionist prisoners in P@lasz@ow, for Alta Rubner’s receipt for the funds was delivered to Springmann by Sedlacek. It seems that the amount was used in part to help Jews who came from other cities than Cracow and therefore had no local sources of support.

Whether the funds that came to Oskar and were

passed on by him were spent mainly on food, as

Stern would have preferred, or largely on underground

resistance—the purchase of passes or weapons

--is a question Oskar never investigated. None of this money, however, went to buy Mrs. Schindler out of Montelupich prison or to save the lives of such people as the Danziger brothers. Nor was the Sedlacek money used to replace the 30,000-kilogram bribes of enamelware

Oskar would pay out to major and minor SS officials during 1943 to prevent them from recommending the closure of the Emalia camp. None of it was spent on the 16,000-z@l. set of gynecological instruments Oskar had to buy on the black market when one of the Emalia girls got pregnant—pregnancy being, of course, an immediate ticket to Auschwitz. Nor did any of it go to purchase the broken-down Mercedes from Untersturmf@uhrer John. John offered Oskar the Mercedes for sale at the same time as Oskar presented a request for 30 P@lasz@ow people to be transferred to Emalia. The car, bought by Oskar one day for 12,000

z@l., was requisitioned the next by Leo

John’s friend and brother officer,

Untersturmf@uhrer Scheidt, to be used in the construction of fieldworks on the camp perimeter. Perhaps they’ll carry soil in the trunk, Oskar raged to Ingrid at the supper table. In a later informal account of the incident, he commented that he was glad to be of assistance to both gentlemen.

CHAPTER 26

Raimund Titsch was making payments of a different order. Titsch was a quiet, clerkly Austrian Catholic with a limp some said came from the first war and others from a childhood accident.

He was ten years or more older than either Amon

or Oskar. Inside the P@lasz@ow camp, he

managed Julius Madritsch’s uniform

factory, a business of 3,000

seamstresses and mechanics.

One way he paid was through his chess matches with Amon Goeth. The Administration Building was connected with the Madritsch works by telephone, and Amon would often call Titsch up to his office for a game. The first time Raimund had played Amon, the game had ended in half an hour and not in the Hauptsturmf@uhrer’s favor. Titsch, with the restrained and not so very triumphal “Mate!” dying on his lips, had been amazed at the tantrum Amon had thrown. The Commandant had grabbed for his coat and gun belt, buttoning and buckling them on, ramming his cap on his head. Raimund Titsch, appalled, believed that

Amon was about to go down to the trolley line looking for a prisoner to chastise for his—

for Raimund Titsch’s—minor victory at chess. Since that first afternoon, Titsch had taken a new direction. Now he could take as long as three hours to lose to the Commandant. When workers in the Administration Building saw Titsch limping up Jerozolimska to do this chess duty, they knew the afternoon would be saner for it. A modest sense of security spread from them down to the workshops and even to the miserable trolley pushers. But Raimund Titsch did not only play

preventive chess. Independently of Dr.

Sedlacek and of the man with the pocket camera whom Oskar had brought to P@lasz@ow, Titsch had begun photographing. Sometimes from his office window, sometimes from the corners of workshops, he photographed the stripe-uniformed prisoners in the trolley line, the distribution of bread and soup, the digging of drains and foundations. Some of these photographs of Titsch’s are probably of the illegal supply of bread to the Madritsch workshop. Certainly round brown loaves were bought by Raimund himself, with Julius Madritsch’s consent and money, and delivered to P@lasz@ow by truck beneath bales of rags and bolts of cloth. Titsch photographed round rye being hurried from hand to hand into Madritsch’s storeroom, on the side away from the towers and screened from the main access road by the bulk of the camp stationery plant.

He photographed the SS and the Ukrainians

marching, at play, at work. He photographed

a work party under the supervision of engineer Karp,

who was soon to be set on by the killer dogs, his

thigh ripped open, his genitals torn

off. In a long shot of P@lasz@ow, he

intimated the size of the camp, its desolation. It seems that on Amon’s sun deck he even took close-ups of the Commandant at rest in a deck chair, a hefty Amon approaching now the 120 kg at which newly arrived SS Dr.

Blancke would say to him, “Enough, Amon; you have to take some weight off.” Titsch photographed Rolf and Ralf loping and sunning, and Majola holding one of the dogs by the collar and pretending to enjoy it. He also took Amon in full majesty on his big white horse.

As the reels were shot, Titsch did not have them developed. As an archive, they were safer and more portable in roll form. He hid them in a steel box in his Cracow apartment. There also he kept some of the remaining goods of the Madritsch Jews. Throughout P@lasz@ow you found people who had a final treasure; something to offer—at the moment of greatest danger—to the man with the list, the man who opened and closed the doors on the cattle cars. Titsch understood that only the desperate deposited goods with him. That prison minority who had a stock of rings and watches and jewelry hidden somewhere in P@lasz@ow didn’t need him. They traded regularly for favors and comforts. But into the same hiding as Titsch’s photographs went the final resources of a dozen families—Auntie Yanka’s brooch, Uncle Mordche’s watch. In fact, when the P@lasz@ow regimen passed, when Scherner and Czurda had fled, and when the impeccable files of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office had been baled up in trucks and moved away as evidence, Titsch had no need to develop the photographs, and every reason not to. In the files of ODESSA, the postwar secret society of former SS

men, he would be listed as a traitor. For the fact that he’d supplied the Madritsch people with some 30,000 loaves of bread, as well as many chickens and some kilos of butter, and that for his humanity he had been honored by the Israeli Government, had received some publicity in the press. Some people made threats and hissed at him as he passed in the streets of Vienna. “Jew-kisser.” So the P@lasz@ow reels would lie for twenty years in the soil of a small park in the suburbs of Vienna where Titsch had buried them, and might well have stayed there forever, the emulsion drying on the dark and secret images of Amon’s love Majola, his killing dogs, his nameless slave laborers. It might therefore have been seen as a sort of triumph for the population of P@lasz@ow when, in November 1963, a Schindler survivor (leopold Pfefferberg) secretly bought the box and its contents for $500 from Raimund Titsch, who was then suffering from terminal heart disease. Even then, Raimund didn’t want the rolls developed until after his death. The nameless shadow of ODESSA frightened him more than had the names of Amon Goeth, of Scherner, of Auschwitz, in the days of P@lasz@ow.

After his burial, the reels were developed.

Nearly all the pictures came out.

Not one of that small body of P@lasz@ow inmates who would survive Amon and the camp itself would ever have anything accusatory to say of Raimund Titsch. But he was never the sort of man concerning whom mythologies arose. Oskar was. From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself. Through listening to such stories, one can see that to the P@lasz@ow people, while Titsch may have been the good hermit, Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double-faced—in the Greek manner—as any small god; endowed with all the human vices; many-handed; subtly powerful; capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation. One story concerns the time when the SS police chiefs were under pressure to close P@lasz@ow, as its reputation as an efficient industrial complex was not high with the Armaments Inspectorate.

Helen Hirsch, Goeth’s maid, often encountered

officers, dinner guests, who wandered into the

hallway or kitchen of the villa to escape

Amon for a while and to shake their heads. An

SS officer named Tibritsch, turning up in the

kitchen, had said to Helen, “Doesn’t he know

there are men giving their lives?” He meant on the

Eastern Front, of course, not out there in the dark

of P@lasz@ow. Officers with less imperial

lives than Amon were becoming outraged by what they

saw at the villa or, perhaps more

dangerously, envious.

As the legend has it, it was on a Sunday

evening that General Julius Schindler himself visited P@lasz@ow to decide whether its existence was of any real value to the war effort. It was an odd hour for a grand bureaucrat to be visiting a plant, but perhaps the Armaments Inspectorate, in view of the perilous winter now falling on the Eastern Front, were working desperate hours. The inspection had been preceded by dinner at Emalia, at which wine and cognac flowed, for Oskar is associated like Bacchus with the Dionysian line of gods. Because of the dinner, the inspection party rolling out to P@lasz@ow in their Mercedeses were in a mood of less than professional detachment. In making this claim, the story ignores the fact that Schindler and his officers were all production experts and engineers with nearly four years of detachment behind them. But Oscar would be the last to be awed by that fact. The inspection started at the Madritsch clothing factory. This was P@lasz@ow’s showplace. During 1943, it had produced Wehrmacht uniforms at a monthly rate of better than twenty thousand. But the question was whether Herr Madritsch would do better to forget P@lasz@ow, to spend his capital on expanding his more efficient and better-supplied Polish factories in Podg@orze and Tarnow. The ramshackle conditions of P@lasz@ow were no encouragement to Madritsch or any other investor to install the sort of machinery a sophisticated factory would need.

The official party had just begun its inspection when all the lights in all the workshops went out, the power circuit broken by friends of Itzhak Stern’s in the P@lasz@ow generator shed. To the handicaps of drink and indigestion which Oskar had imposed on the gentlemen of the Armaments Inspectorate were now added the limitations of bad light. The inspection went ahead by flashlight, in fact, and the machinery on the benches remained inoperative and therefore less of a provocation to the inspectors’ professional feelings.

As General Schindler squinted along the beam of a flashlight at the presses and lathes in the metalworks, 30,000 P@lasz@owians, restless in tiered bunks, waited on his word. Even on the overladen lines of the

Ostbahn, they knew, the higher technology of Auschwitz was but a few hours’ journey west. They understood that they could not expect from General Schindler compassion as such. Production was his specialty. For him, Production was meant to be an overriding value.

Because of Schindler’s dinner and the power failure, says the myth, the people of P@lasz@ow were saved. It is a generous fable, because in fact only a tenth of P@lasz@ow people would be alive at the end. But Stern and others would later celebrate the story, and most of its details are probably true. For Oskar always had recourse to liquor when puzzled as to how to treat officials, and he would have liked the trickery of plunging them into darkness. “You have to remember,” said a boy whom Oskar would later save, “that Oskar had a German side but a Czech side too. He was the good soldier Schweik. He loved to foul up the system.”

It is ungracious to the myth to ask what the exacting Amon Goeth thought when the lights went out. Maybe, even on the level of literal event, he was drunk or dining elsewhere. The question is whether P@lasz@ow survived because General Schindler was deceived by dim light and alcohol-dimmed vision, or whether it continued because it was such an excellent holding center for those weeks when the great terminus at Auschwitz-Birkenau was overcrowded. But the story says more of people’s expectations of Oskar than it does of the frightful compound of P@lasz@ow or the final end of most of its inmates. And while the SS and the Armaments

Inspectorate considered the future of

P@lasz@ow, Josef Bau—a young artist from Cracow, whom Oskar would in the end come to know well—was falling into conspicuous and unconditional love with a girl named Rebecca Tannenbaum. Bau worked in the Construction Office as a draftsman. He was a solemn boy with an artist’s sense of destiny. He had, so to speak, escaped into P@lasz@ow, because he had never held the correct ghetto papers. Since he had had no trade of use to the ghetto factories, he had been hidden by his mother and by friends. During the liquidation in March 1943, he’d escaped out of the walls and attached himself to the tail of a labor detail going to P@lasz@ow. For in P@lasz@ow there was a new industry which had had no place in the ghetto. Construction. In the same somber twowinged building in which Amon had his office, Josef Bau worked on blueprints. He was a prot@eg‘e of Itzhak Stern’s, and Stern had mentioned him to Oskar as an accomplished draftsman and as a boy who had, potentially at least, skills as a forger. He was lucky not to come into too much contact with Amon, because he displayed the air of genuine sensibility which had, before today, caused Amon to reach for his revolver. Bau’s office was on the far side of the building from Amon’s. Some prisoners worked on the ground floor, with offices near the Commandant’s. There were the purchasing officers; the clerks; Mietek Pemper, the stenographer. They faced not only a daily risk of an unexpected bullet but, more certainly than that, assaults on their sense of outrage. Mundek Korn, for example, who had been a buyer for a string of Rothschild subsidiaries before the war and who now bought the fabrics, sea grass, lumber, and iron for the prison workshops, had to work not only in the Administration Building but in the same wing where Amon had his office. One morning Korn looked up from his desk and saw through the window, across Jerozolimska Street and by the SS barracks, a boy of twenty or so years, a Cracovian of his acquaintance, urinating against the base of one of the stacks of lumber there. At the same time he saw white-shirted arms and two ham fists appear through the bathroom window at the end of the wing. The right hand held a revolver. There were two quick shots, at least one of which entered the boy’s head and drove him forward against the pile of cut wood. When Korn looked once more at the bathroom window, one white-shirted arm and free hand were engaged in closing the window. On Korn’s desk that morning were requisition

forms signed with Amon’s open-voweled but not

deranged scrawl. His gaze ranged from the

signature to the unbuttoned corpse at the box

of lumber. Not only did he wonder if he had

seen what he had seen. He sensed the

seductive concept inherent in Amon’s

methods. That is, the temptation to agree that if murder was no more than a visit to the bathroom, a mere pulse in the monotony of form signing, then perhaps all death should now be accepted— with whatever despair—as routine.

It does not seem that Josef Bau was exposed to such radical persuasion. He missed too the purge of the administrative staff on the ground floor right and center. It had begun when Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s prot@eg‘e, complained to the Commandant that a girl in the office had acquired a rind of bacon. Amon had come raging down the corridor from his office. “You’re all getting fat!” he had screamed. He had divided the office staff into two lines then. It had been, to Korn, like a scene from the Podg@orze High School: the girls in the other line so familiar to him, daughters of families he’d grown up with, Podg@orze families. It could have been that a teacher was sorting them out into those who would visit the Kosciuszko Monument and those for the museum at the Wawel. In fact, the girls in the other line were taken straight from their desks to Chujowa G@orka and, for the decadence of that bacon rind, gunned down by one of Pilarzik’s squads. Though Josef Bau was not involved in such office turmoil, no one could have said that he was leading a sheltered life in P@lasz@ow. But it had been less perilous than the experience of the girl of his choice. Rebecca Tannenbaum was an orphan, though in the clannish life of Jewish Cracow, she had not been bereft of kindly aunts and uncles. She was nineteen, sweet-faced, and neatly built. She could speak German well and made pleasant and generous conversation. Recently she’d begun to work in Stern’s office behind the Administration Building, away from the most immediate environs of the Commandant’s berserk interference. But her job in the Construction Office was only half her labor. She was a manicurist. She treated Amon weekly; she tended the hands of Untersturmf@uhrer Leo John, those of Dr. Blancke and of his lover, the harsh Alice Orlowski. Taking Amon’s hands, she had found them long and well made, with tapering fingers—not a fat man’s hands at all; certainly not those of a savage. When a prisoner had first come to her and told her

that the Herr Commandant wanted to see her, she had

begun to run away, fleeing among the desks and

down the back stairs. The prisoner had followed

and cried after her, “For God’s sake,

don’t! He’ll punish me if I don’t

bring you back.”

So she had followed the man down to Goeth’s villa. But before going into the salon, she first visited the stinking cellar—this was in Goeth’s first residence, and the cellar had been dug down into the boundaries of an ancient Jewish graveyard. Down amid the grave soil, Rebecca’s friend Helen Hirsch had been nursing bruises. You have a problem, Helen admitted. But just do the job and see. That’s all you can do. Some people he likes a professional manner from, some people he doesn’t. And I’ll give you cake and sausage when you come. But don’t just take food; ask me first. Some people take food without asking, and I don’t know what I have to cover up for.

Amon did accept Rebecca’s professional manner, presenting his fingers and chatting in German. It could have been the Hotel Cracovia again, and Amon a crisp-shirted, overweight young German tycoon come to Cracow to sell textiles or steel or chemicals. There were, however, two aspects to these meetings that detracted from their air of timeless geniality. The Commandant always kept his service revolver at his right elbow, and frequently one or the other of the dogs drowsed in the salon. She had seen them, on the Appellplatz, tear the flesh of engineer Karp. Yet sometimes, as the dogs snuffled in sleep and she and Amon compared notes on prewar visits to the spa at Carlsbad, the rollcall horrors seemed remote and beyond belief. One day she felt confident enough to ask him why the revolver was always at his elbow. His answer chilled the back of her neck as she bent over his hand. “That’s in case you ever nick me,” he told her. If she ever needed proof that a chat about spas was all the same to Amon as an act of madness, she had it the day she entered the hallway and saw him dragging her friend Helen Hirsch out of the salon by the hair—Helen striving to keep her balance and her auburn hair coming out by the roots, and Amon, if he lost his grip one second, regaining it the next in his giant, well-tended hands. And further proof came on the evening she entered the salon and one of those dogs—Rolf or Ralf— materialized, leaped at her, and, holding her by the shoulders, opened its jaw on her breast. She looked across the room and saw Amon lolling on the sofa and smiling. “Stop shaking, you stupid girl,” he told her, “or I won’t be able to save you from the hound.”

During the time she tended the Commandant’s hands, he would shoot his shoeshine boy for faulty work; hang his fifteen-year-old orderly, Poldek Deresiewicz, from the ringbolts in his office because a flea had been found on one of the dogs; and execute his servant Lisiek for lending a dr@o@zka and horse to Bosch without first checking. Yet twice a week, the pretty orphan entered the salon and philosophically took the beast by the hand. She met Josef Bau one gray morning when he stood outside the Bauleitung holding up a blueprint frame toward the low autumn cloud. His thin body seemed overburdened by the weight. She asked if she could help him. “No,” he said. “I’m just waiting for the sunshine.” “Why?” she asked. He explained how his transparency drawings for a new building were clamped in the frame beside sensitized blueprint paper. If the sun, he said, were only to shine harder, a mysterious chemical union would transfer the drawing from the transparency to the blueprint. Then he said, “Why don’t you be my magical sunshine?”

Pretty girls weren’t used to delicacy from boys in P@lasz@ow. Sexuality there took its harsh impetus from the volleys heard on Chujowa G@orka, the executions on the Appellplatz. Imagine a day, for instance, when a chicken is found among the work party returning from the cable factory on Wieliczka. Amon is ranting on the Appellplatz, for the chicken was discovered lying in a bag in front of the camp gate during a spot check. Whose bag was it? Amon wants to know. Whose chicken? Since no one on the Appellplatz will admit anything, Amon takes a rifle from an SS man and shoots the prisoner at the head of the line. The bullet, passing through the body, also fells the man behind. No one speaks, though. “How you love one another!” roars Amon, and prepares to execute the next man in line. A boy of fourteen steps out of the line. He is shuddering and weeping. He can say who brought the chicken in, he tells the Herr Commandant.

“Who, then?” The boy points to one of the two dead men. “That one!” the boy screams. Amon astonishes the entire Appellplatz by believing the boy, and puts his head back and laughs with the sort of classroom incredulity teachers like to exhibit. These people ... can’t they understand now why they’re all forfeit?

After an evening like that, in the hours of free movement between 7 and 9 P.m. most prisoners felt that there was no time for leisurely courtship. The lice plaguing your groin and armpits made a mockery of formality. Young males mounted girls without ceremony. In the women’s camp they sang a song which asked the virgin why she’d bound herself up with string and for whom she thought she was saving herself. The atmosphere was not as desperate at Emalia. In the enamel workshop, niches had been designed among the machinery on the factory floor to permit lovers to meet at greater length. There was only a theoretical segregation in the cramped barracks. The absence of daily fear, the fuller ration of daily bread made for a little less frenzy. Besides, Oskar still maintained that he would not let the SS garrison go inside the prison without his permission. One prisoner recalls wiring installed in

Oskar’s office in case any SS official

did demand entry to the barracks. While the SS man was on his way downstairs, Oskar could punch a button connected to a bell inside the camp. It warned men and women, first, to stub out the illicit cigarettes supplied daily by Oskar. (“Go to my apartment,” he would tell someone on the factory floor almost daily, “and fill this cigarette case.” He would wink significantly.) The bell also warned men and women to get back to their appointed bunks. To Rebecca, it was something close to a shock, a remembrance of a vanished culture, to meet in P@lasz@ow a boy who courted as if he’d met her in a patisserie in the Rynek.

Another morning when she came downstairs from Stern’s office, Josef showed her his work desk. He was drawing plans for yet more barracks. What’s your barrack number, and who’s your barrack Alteste? She let him know with the correct reluctance. She had seen Helen Hirsch dragged down the hallway by the hair and would die if she accidentally jabbed the cuticle of Amon’s thumb. Yet this boy had restored her to coyness, to girlhood. I’ll come and speak to your mother, he promised. I don’t have a mother, said Rebecca. Then I’ll speak to the Alteste.

That was how the courting began—with the permission of elders and as if there were world enough and time. Because he was such a fantastical and ceremonious boy, they did not kiss. It was, in fact, under Amon’s roof that they first managed a proper embrace. It was after a manicure session. Rebecca had got hot water and soap from Helen and crept up to the top floor, vacant because of renovations pending, to wash her blouse and her change of underwear. Her washtub was her mess can. It would be needed tomorrow to hold her soup.

She was working away on that small bucket of suds when Josef appeared. Why are you here? she asked him. I’m measuring for my drawings, for the renovations, he told her. And why are you here yourself? You can see, she told him. And please don’t talk too loudly.

He danced around the room, flashing the tape measure up walls and along moldings. Do it carefully, she told him, anxious because she was aware of Amon’s exacting standards. While I’m here, he told her, I might as well measure you. He ran the tape along her arms and down her back from the nape of her neck to the small of her spine. She did not resist the way his thumb touched her, marking her dimensions. But when they had embraced each other thoroughly for a while, she ordered him out. This was no place for a languorous afternoon.

There were other desperate romances in P@lasz@ow, even among the SS, but they proceeded less sunnily than this very proper romance between Josef Bau and the manicurist. Oberscharf@uhrer Albert Hujar, for example, who had shot Dr. Rosalia Blau in the ghetto and Diana Reiter after the foundations of the barracks collapsed, had fallen in love with a Jewish prisoner. Madritsch’s daughter had been captivated by a Jewish boy from the Tarnow ghetto—he had, of course, worked in Madritsch’s Tarnow plant until the expert ghetto-liquidator Amon had been brought in at the end of the summer to close down Tarnow as he had Cracow. Now he was in the Madritsch workshop inside P@lasz@ow; the girl could visit him there. But nothing could come of it. The prisoners themselves had niches and shelters where lovers and spouses could meet. But everything—the law of the Reich and the strange code of the prisoners—resisted the affair between Fraulein Madritsch and her young man.

Similarly, honest Raimund Titsch had

fallen in love with one of his machinists. That too

was a gentle, secretive, and largely

abortive love. As for Oberscharf@uhrer

Hujar, he was ordered by Amon himself to stop being a fool. So Albert took the girl for a walk in the woods and with fondest regrets shot her through the nape of the neck. It seemed, in fact, that death hung over the

passions of the SS. Henry Rosner, the

violinist, and his brother Leopold, the

accordionist, spreading Viennese melodies

around Goeth’s dinner table, were aware of it. One

night a tall, slim, gray officer in the

Waffen SS had visited Amon for dinner

and, drinking a lot, had kept asking the Rosners for the Hungarian song “Gloomy Sunday.” The song is an emotional outpouring in which a young man is about to commit suicide for love. It had exactly the sort of excessive feeling which, Henry had noticed, appealed to SS men at their leisure. It had, in fact, enjoyed notoriety in the Thirties—

governments in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia had considered banning it because its popularity had brought on a rash of thwarted-love suicides. Young men about to blow their heads off would sometimes quote its lyrics in their suicide notes. It had long been a song proscribed by the Reich Propaganda Office. Now this tall, elegant guest, old enough to have teen-age sons and daughters, themselves caught up in the excesses of puppy love, kept walking up to the Rosner boys and saying, “Play “Gloomy Sunday.”” And though Dr. Goebbels would not have permitted it, no one in the wilds of southern Poland was going to argue with an SS field officer with unhappy memories of an affair. After the guest had demanded the song four or five times, an unearthly conviction took hold of Henry Rosner. In its tribal origins, music was always magic. And no one in Europe had a better sense of the potency of the violin than a Cracovian Jew like Henry, who came from the sort of family in which music is not so much learned as inherited, in the same way as the status of cohen, or hereditary priest. It came to Henry now that, as he would say later—

“God, if I have the power, maybe this

son-of-a-bitch will kill himself.”

The proscribed music of “Gloomy

Sunday” had gained legitimacy in Amon’s dining room through being repeated, and now Henry declared war with it, Leopold playing with him and reassured by the stares of almost grateful melancholy the handsome officer directed at them. Henry sweated, believing that he was so visibly

fiddling up the SS man’s death that at any

moment Amon would notice and come and take him out

behind the villa for execution. As for Henry’s

performance, it is not relevant to ask was it good or

bad. It was possessed. And only one man, the

officer, noticed and assented and, across the hubbub

of drunken Bosch and Scherner, Czurda and

Amon, continued to look up from his chair

directly into Henry’s eyes, as if he were going

to jump up at any second and say, “Of

course, gentlemen. The violinist is

absolutely right. There’s no sense in enduring a grief like this.”

The Rosners went on repeating the song beyond the limit at which Amon would normally have shouted, “Enough!” At last the guest stood up and went out onto the balcony. Henry knew at once that everything he could do to the man had been done. He and his brother slid into some Von Supp‘e and Lehar, covering their tracks with full-bodied operetta. The guest remained alone on the balcony and after half an hour interrupted a good party by shooting himself through the head.

Such was sex in P@lasz@ow. Lice,

crabs, and urgency inside the wire; murder and

lunacy on its fringes. And in its midst

Josef Bau and Rebecca Tannenbaum

pursued their ritual dance of courtship.

In the midst of the snows that year, P@lasz@ow

underwent a change of status adverse to all

lovers inside the wire. In the early days of

January 1944, it was designated a

Konzentrationslager (concentration Camp)

under the central authority of General Oswald

Pohl’s SS Main Economic and

Administrative Office in Oranienburg, on

the outskirts of Berlin. Subcamps of

P@lasz@ow—such as Oskar Schindler’s

Emalia—now also came under

Oranienburg’s control. Police chiefs

Scherner and Czurda lost their direct

authority. The labor fees of all those

prisoners employed by Oskar and Madritsch no longer went to Pomorska Street, but to the office of General Richard Gl@ucks, head of Pohl’s Section D (concentration Camps). Oskar, if he wanted favors now, had not only to drive out to P@lasz@ow and sweeten Amon, not only to have Julian Scherner to dinner, but also to reach certain officials in the grand bureaucratic complex of Oranienburg.

Oskar made an early opportunity

to travel to Berlin and meet the people who would be dealing

with his files. Oranienburg had begun as a

concentration camp. Now it had become a sprawl

of administrative barracks. From the offices of

Section D, every aspect of prison life and

death was regulated. Its chief, Richard

Gl@ucks, had responsibility as well, in

consultation with Pohl, for establishing the balance between laborers and candidates for the chambers, for the equation in which X represented slave labor and y represented the more immediately condemned. Gl@ucks had laid down procedures for every event, and from his department came memos drafted in the anesthetic jargon of the planner, the paper shuffler, the detached specialist.

SS Main Office of Economics and

Administration

Section Chief D (concentration Camps)

D1-AZCC14fl-Ot-S-GEH TGB NO 453-44

To the Commandants of Concentration Camps Da,

Sah, Bu, Mau, Slo, Neu, Au

1-III, Gr-Ro, Natz, Stu, Rav,

Herz, A-Like-Bels, Gruppenl.

D.riga, Gruppenl. D.cracow

(p@lasz@ow).

Applications from Camp Commandants for punishment by flogging in cases of sabotage by prisoners in the war production industries are increasing.

I request that in future in all proved

cases of sabotage (a report from the

management must be enclosed), an application for execution by hanging should be made. The execution should take place before the assembled members of the work detachment concerned. The reason for the execution is to be made known so as to act as a deterrent. (signed)

SS Obersturmf@uhrer

In this eerie chancellory, some files discussed the length a prisoner’s hair should be before it was considered of economic use for “the manufacture of hair-yarn socks for Uboat crews and hair-felt footwear for the Reichs railway,” while others debated whether the form registering “death cases” should be filed by eight departments or merely covered by letter and appended to the personnel records as soon as the index card had been brought up to date. And here Herr Oskar Schindler of Cracow came to talk about his little industrial compound in Zablocie. They appointed someone of middle status to handle him, a personnel officer of field rank.

Oskar wasn’t distressed. There were larger employers of Jewish prison labor than he. There were the megaliths, Krupp, of course, and I. G. Farben. There was the Cable Works at P@lasz@ow. Walter C. Toebbens, the Warsaw industrialist whom Himmler had tried to force into the Wehrmacht, was a heavier employer of labor than Herr Schindler. Then there were the steelworks at Stalowa Wola, the aircraft factories at Budzyn and Zakopane, the Steyour-Daimler-Puch works at Radom.

The personnel officer had the plans of

Emalia on his desk. I hope, he said

curtly, you don’t want to increase the size of your camp. It would be impossible to do it without courting a typhus epidemic.

Oskar waved that suggestion aside. He was interested in the permanence of his labor force, he said. He had had a talk on that matter, he told the officer, with a friend of his, Colonel Erich Lange. The name, Oskar could tell, meant something to the SS man. Oskar produced a letter from the Colonel, and the personnel officer sat back reading it. The office was silent—all you could hear from other rooms was pen-scratch and the whisper of papers and quiet, earnest talk, as if none here knew that they lay at the core of a network of screams.

Colonel Lange was a man of

influence, Chief of Staff of the Armaments

Inspectorate at Army Headquarters,

Berlin. Oskar had met him at a party at

General Schindler’s office in Cracow. They had liked each other almost at once. It happened a lot at parties that two people could sense in each other a certain resistance to the regime and might retire to a corner to test each other out and perhaps establish friendship. Erich Lange had been appalled by the factory camps of Poland—by the I. G. Farben works at Buna, for example, where foremen adopted the SS “work tempo” and made prisoners unload cement on the run; where the corpses of the starved, the broken were hurled into ditches built for cables and covered, together with the cables, with cement. “You are not here to live but to perish in concrete,” a plant manager had told newcomers, and Lange had heard the speech and felt damned.

His letter to Oranienburg had been preceded by some phone calls, and calls and letter both promoted the same proposition: Herr Schindler, with his mess kits and his 45mm antitank shells, is considered by this Inspectorate to be a major contributor to the struggle for our national survival. He has built up a staff of skilled specialists, and nothing should be done to disrupt the work they perform under the Herr Direktor Schindler’s supervision.

The personnel officer was impressed and said he would speak frankly to Herr Schindler. There were no plans to alter the status or interfere with the population of the camp in Zablocie. However, the Herr Direktor had to understand that the situation of Jews, even skilled armaments workers, was always risky. Take the case of our own SS enterprises. Ostindustrie, the SS company, employs prisoners in a peat works, a brush factory and iron foundry in Lublin, equipment factories in Radom, a fur works in Trawniki. But other branches of the SS shoot the work force continually, and now Osti is for all practical purposes out of business.

Likewise, at the killing centers, the staff

never retains a sufficient percentage of

prisoners for factory work. This has been a matter of frequent correspondence, but they’re intransigent, those people in the field. “Of course,” said the personnel officer, tapping the letter, “I’ll do what I can for you.”

“I understand the problem,” said Oskar, looking up at the SS man with that radiant smile.

“If there is any way I can express my

gratitude ....”

In the end, Oskar left Oranienburg with at least some guarantees about the continuity of his backyard camp in Cracow.

The manner in which the new status of

P@lasz@ow impinged on lovers was that a proper penal separation of the sexes—such as was provided for in a series of SS Main Office of Economics and Administration memos—was created. The fences between the men’s prison and the women’s, the perimeter fence, the fence around the industrial sector were all electrified. The voltage, the spacing of wires, the number of electrified strands and insulators were all provided for by Main Office directives.

Amon and his officers were not slow to notice the disciplinary possibilities involved. Now you could stand people for twenty-four hours at a time between the electrified outer fence and the inner, neutral, original fence. If they staggered with weariness, they knew that inches behind their backs ran the hundreds of volts. Mundek Korn, for example, found himself, on returning to camp with a work party from which one prisoner was missing, standing in that narrow gulf for a day and a night.

But perhaps worse than the risk of falling against the wire was the way the current ran, from the end of evening roll call to reveille in the morning, like a moat between man and woman. Time for contact was now reduced to the short phase of milling on the Appellplatz, before the orders for falling into line were shouted. Each couple devised a tune, whistling it among the crowds, straining to pick up the answering refrain amid a forest of sibilance. Rebecca Tannenbaum also settled on a code tune. The requirements of General Pohl’s Main SS Office had forced the prisoners of P@lasz@ow to adopt the mating stratagems of birds. And by these means, the formal romance of Rebecca and Josef went forward.

Then Josef somehow got a dead woman’s

dress from the clothing warehouse. Often, after roll

call in the men’s lines, he would go to the

latrines, put on the long gown, and place an

Orthodox bonnet on his hair. Then he would

come out and join the women’s lines. His

short hair would not have amazed any SS guard,

since most of the women had been shorn because of

lice. So, with 13,000 women prisoners, he

would pass into the women’s compound and spend the night

sitting up in Hut 57 keeping Rebecca

company.

In Rebecca’s barracks, the older women

took Josef at his word. If Josef

required a traditional courtship, they would fall into their traditional roles as chaperones. Josef was therefore a gift to them too, a license to play their prewar ceremonious selves. From their four-tiered bunks they looked down on the two children until everyone fell asleep. If any one of them thought, Let’s not be too fussy in times like these about what the children get up to in the dead of night, it was never said. In fact, two of the older women would crowd onto one narrow ledge so that Josef could have a bunk of his own. The discomfort, the smell of the other body, the risk of the migration of lice from your friend to yourself—none of that was as important, as crucial to self-respect as that the courtship should be fulfilled according to the norms. At the end of winter, Josef, wearing the armband of the Construction Office, went out into the strangely immaculate snow in the strip between the inner fence and the electrified barrier and, steel measure in hand, under the eyes of the domed watchtowers, pretended to be sizing up no-man’s-land for some architectural reason.

At the base of the concrete stanchions studded with porcelain insulators grew the first tiny flowers of that year. Flashing his steel ruler, he picked them and shoved them into his jacket. He brought the flowers across the camp, up Jerozolimska Street. He was passing Amon’s villa, his chest stuffed with blossoms, when Amon himself appeared from the front door and advanced, towering, down the steps. Josef Bau stopped. It was most dangerous to stop, to appear to be in arrested motion in front of Amon. But having stopped, he seemed frozen there. He feared that the heart he’d so energetically and honestly signed over to the orphan Rebecca would likely now become just another of Amon’s targets.

But when Amon walked past him, not noticing him, not objecting to his standing there with an idle ruler in his hands, Josef Bau concluded that it meant some kind of guarantee. No one escaped Amon unless it was a sort of destiny.

All dolled up in his shooting uniform, Amon had entered the camp unexpectedly one day through the back gate and had found the Warrenhaupt girl lolling in a limousine at the garage, staring at herself in the rearview mirror. The car windows she’d been assigned to clean were still smudged. He had killed her for that. And there was that mother and daughter Amon had noticed through a kitchen window. They had been peeling potatoes too slowly. So he’d leaned in on the sill and shot both of them. Yet here at his steps was something he hated, a stock-still Jewish lover and draftsman, steel ruler dangling in his hands. And Amon had walked by. Bau felt the urge to confirm this outrageous good luck by some emphatic act. Marriage was, of course, the most emphatic act of all. He got back to the Administration Building, climbed the stairs to Stern’s office and, finding Rebecca, asked her to marry him. Urgency, Rebecca was pleased and concerned to notice, had entered the business now.

That evening, in the dead woman’s dress, he visited his mother again and the council of chaperones in Hut 57. They awaited only the arrival of a rabbi. But if rabbis came, they remained only a few days on their way to Auschwitz—not long enough for people requiring the rites of kiddushin and nissuin to locate them and ask them, before they stepped into the furnace, for a final exercise of their priesthood. Josef married Rebecca on a Sunday night of fierce cold in February. There was no rabbi. Mrs. Bau, Josef’s mother, officiated. They were Reformed Jews, so that they could do without a ketubbah written in Aramaic. In the workshop of Wulkan the jeweler someone had made up two rings out of a silver spoon Mrs. Bau had had hidden in the rafters. On the barracks floor, Rebecca circled Josef seven times and Josef crushed glass—a spent light bulb from the Construction Office—beneath his heel.

The couple had been given the top bunk of the tier. For the sake of privacy, it had been hung with blankets. In darkness Josef and Rebecca climbed to it, and all around them the earthy jokes were running. At weddings in Poland there was always a period of truce when profane love was given its chance to speak. If the wedding guests didn’t wish to voice the traditional double entendres themselves, they could bring in a professional wedding jester. Women who might in the Twenties and Thirties have sat up at weddings making disapproving faces at the risqu‘e hired jester and the belly-laughing men, only now and then permitting themselves, as mature women, to be overcome with amusement, stepped tonight into the place of all the absent and dead wedding jesters of southern Poland.

Josef and Rebecca had not been together more than ten minutes on the upper bunk when the barracks lights came on. Looking through the blankets, Josef saw Untersturmf@uhrer Scheidt patrolling the canyons of bunks. The same old fearful sense of destiny overcame Josef. They’d found he was missing from his barracks, of course, and sent one of the worst of the officers to look for him in his mother’s hut. Amon had been blinded to him that day outside the villa only so that Scheidt, who was quick on the trigger, could come and kill him on his wedding night!

He knew too that all the women were compromised

--his mother, his bride, the witnesses, the ones who’d uttered the most exquisitely embarrassing jokes. He began murmuring apologies, pleas to be forgiven. Rebecca told him to be quiet. She took down the screen of blankets. At this time of night, she reasoned, Scheidt wasn’t going to climb to a top bunk unless provoked. The women on the lower bunks were passing their small straw-filled pillows to her. Josef might well have orchestrated the courtship, but he was now the child to be concealed. Rebecca pushed him hard up into the corner of the bunk and covered him with pillows. She watched Scheidt pass below her, leave the barracks by its back door. The lights went out. Among a last spatter of dark, earthy jokes, the Baus were restored to their privacy. Within minutes, the sirens began to sound. Everyone sat up in the darkness. The noise meant to Bau that yes, they were determined to stamp out this ritual marriage. They had found his empty bunk over in the men’s quarters and were now seriously hunting him. In the dark aisle, the women were milling. They knew it too. From the top bunk he could hear them saying it. His old-fashioned love would kill them all. The barracks Alteste, who’d been so decent about the whole thing, would be shot first once the lights came on and they found a bridegroom there in token female rags.

Josef Bau grabbed his clothes. He kissed his wife perfunctorily, slid to the floor, and ran from the hut. In the darkness outside, the wail of the sirens pierced him. He ran in dirty snow, with his jacket and old dress bundled up under his armpits. When the lights came on, he would be seen by the towers. But he had the berserk idea that he could beat the lights over the fence, that he could even climb it between the alternations of its current. Once back in the men’s camp, he could make up some story about diarrhea, about having gone to the latrines and collapsed on the floor, being brought back to consciousness by the noise of sirens.

But even if electrocuted, he understood as he sprinted, he could not then confess what woman he was visiting. Racing for the fatal wire, he did not understand that there would have to be a classroomlike scene on the Appellplatz and that Rebecca would be made, one way or another, to step forward.

In the fence between the men’s and women’s camps in P@lasz@ow ran nine electrified strands. Josef Bau launched himself high, so that his feet would find purchase on the third of the strands and his hands, at the stretch, might reach the second from the top. He imagined himself then as racing over the strands with a ratlike quickness. In fact he landed in the mesh of wire and simply hung there. He thought the coldness of the metal in his hands was the first message of the current. But there was no current. There were no lights. Josef Bau, stretched on

the fence, did not speculate on the reason there

wasn’t any voltage. He got to the top and

vaulted into the men’s camp. You’re a married

man, he told himself. He slid into the

latrines by the washhouses. “A frightful

diarrhea. Herr Oberscharf@uhrer.”

He stood gasping in the stench. Amon’s blindness on the day of the flowers ... the consummation, waited forwith an untoward patience, twice interrupted ... Scheidt and the sirens ... a problem with the lights and the wire—staggering and gagging, he wondered if he could support the ambiguity of his life. Like others, he wanted a more definite rescue. He wandered out to be one of the last to join the lines in front of his hut. He was trembling, but sure the Alteste would cover up for him. “Yes, Herr Untersturmf@uhrer, I gave H@aftling Bau permission to visit the latrines.”

They weren’t looking for him at all. They were looking for three young Zionists who’d escaped in a truckload of product from the upholstery works, where they made Wehrmacht mattresses out of sea grass.

CHAPTER 27

On April 28, 1944, Oskar—by looking sideways at himself in a mirror—was able to tell that his waist had thickened for his thirty-sixth birthday. But at least today, when he embraced the girls, no one bothered to denounce him. Any informer among the German technicians must have been demoralized, since the SS had let Oskar out of Pomorska and Montelupich, both of them centers supposed impregnable to influence. To mark the day, Emilie sent the usual greetings from Czechoslovakia, and Ingrid and Klonowska gave him gifts. His domestic arrangements had scarcely changed in the four and a half years he had spent in Cracow. Ingrid was still a consort, Klonowska a girlfriend, Emilie an understandably absent wife. Whatever grievances and bewilderment each suffered goes unrecorded, but it would become obvious in this, his thirty-seventh, year that some coolness had entered his relations with Ingrid; that Klonowska, always a loyal friend, was content with a merely sporadic liaison; and that Emilie still considered their marriage indissoluble. For the moment, they gave their presents and kept their counsel.

Others took a hand in the celebration. Amon permitted Henry Rosner to bring his violin to Lipowa Street in the evening under the guard of the best baritone in the Ukrainian garrison.

Amon was, at this stage, very pleased with his association with Schindler. In return for his continuing support for the Emalia camp, Amon had one day recently requested and got the permanent use of Oskar’s Mercedes—not the jalopy Oskar had bought from John for a day, but the most elegant car in the Emalia garage.

The recital took place in Oskar’s

office. No one attended except

Oskar. It was as if he were tired of company.

When the Ukrainian went to the lavatory, Oskar

revealed his depression to Henry. He was upset

about the war news. His birthday had come in a

hiatus. The Russian armies had halted behind

the Pripet Marshes in Belorussia and in

front of Lw@ow. Oskar’s fears puzzled

Henry. Doesn’t he understand, he wondered, that if the Russians aren’t held off, it’s the end of his operation here?

“I’ve often asked Amon to let you come here permanently,” Oskar told Rosner. “You and your wife and child. He won’t hear of it. He appreciates you too much. But eventually ...”

Henry was grateful. But he felt he had to point out that his family might be as safe as any in P@lasz@ow. His sister-in-law, for example, had been discovered by Goeth smoking at work, and he had ordered her execution. But one of the NCO’S had begged to put before the Herr Commandant’s notice the fact that this woman was Mrs. Rosner, wife of Rosner the accordionist. “Oh,” Amon had said, pardoning her. “Well, remember, girl, I won’t have smoking on the job.”

Henry told Oskar that night that it had been this attitude of Amon’s—that the Rosners were immune because of their musical talent—which had persuaded him and Manci to bring their eight-year-old son, Olek, into the camp. He had been hiding with friends in Cracow, but that was becoming a less and less secure business every day. Once inside, Olek could blend into that small crowd of children, many unregistered in the prison records, whose presence in P@lasz@ow was connived at by prisoners and tolerated by some of the junior camp officials. Getting Olek into the place, however, had been the risky part.

Poldek Pfefferberg, who’d had to drive a truck to town to pick up toolboxes, had smuggled the boy in. The Ukrainians had nearly discovered him at the gate, while he was still an outsider and living in contravention of every racial statute of the Reich Government General. His feet had burst out of the end of the box that lay between Pfefferberg’s ankles. “Mr. Pfefferberg, Mr. Pfefferberg,” Poldek had heard while the Ukrainians searched the back of the truck. “My feet are sticking out.”

Henry could laugh at that now, though warily, since there were still rivers to be crossed. But Schindler reacted dramatically, with a gesture that seemed to grow from the slightly alcoholic melancholy which had beset him on this evening of his birthday. He lifted his office chair by its back and raised it to the portrait of the F@uhrer. It seemed for a second that he was about to lash into the icon. But he spun again on his heel, lowered the chair deliberately until its four legs hung equidistant from the floor, and rammed them into the carpet, shaking the wall. Then he said, “They’re burning bodies out there, aren’t they?”

Henry grimaced as if the stench were in the room.

“They’ve started,” he admitted.

Now that P@lasz@ow was—in the language

of the bureaucrats—a Concentration Camp, its

inmates found that it was safer to encounter Amon. The

chiefs in Oranienburg did not permit summary

execution. The days when slow potato-peelers

could be expunged on the spot were gone. They could

now be destroyed only by due process. There had

to be a hearing, a record sent in triplicate

to Oranienburg. The sentence had to be confirmed not

only by General Gl@ucks’s office but also

by General Pohl’s Department W (economic

Enterprises). For if a commandant killed

essential workers, Department W could find itself

hit with claims for compensation. Allach-Munich,

Ltd., for example, porcelain

manufacturers using slave labor from Dachau,

had recently filed a claim for 31,800

RM. because “as a result of the typhoid

epidemic which broke out in January 1943, we

had no prison labor at our disposal from

January 26, 1943, until March 3,

1943. In our opinion we are entitled

to compensation under Clause 2 of the Businesses Compensation Settlement Fund ...”

Department W was all the more liable for compensation if the loss of skilled labor arose from the zeal of a trigger-happy SS officer.

So, to avoid the paperwork and the departmental complications, Amon held his hand on most days.

The people who appeared within his range in the spring and

early summer of ‘44 somehow understood it was

safer, though they knew nothing of Department W and

Generals Pohl and Gl@ucks. It was to them a

remission as mysterious as Amon’s

madness itself.

Yet, as Oskar had mentioned to Henry

Rosner, they were now burning bodies at P@lasz@ow. In preparation for the Russian offensive, the SS was abolishing its institutions in the East. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bel@zec had been evacuated the previous autumn. The Waffen SS who had run them had been ordered to dynamite the chambers and the crematoria, to leave no recognizable trace, and had then been posted to Italy to fight partisans. The immense complex at Auschwitz, in its safe ground in Upper Silesia, would complete the great task in the East, and once that was concluded, the crematoria would be plowed under the earth. For without the evidence of the crematoria, the dead could offer no witness, were a whisper behind the wind, an inconsequential dust on the aspen leaves.

P@lasz@ow was not as simple a case, for its dead lay everywhere around it. In the enthusiasm of the spring of 1943, bodies—notably the bodies of those killed in the ghetto’s last two days— were thrown randomly into mass graves in the woods. Now Department D charged Amon with finding them all.

Estimates of the numbers of bodies vary widely. Polish publications, based on the work of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland and on other sources, claim that 150,000 prisoners, many of them in transit to other places, went through P@lasz@ow and its five subcamps. Of these, the Poles believe that 80,000 died there, mainly in mass executions inside Chujowa G@orka or else in epidemics. These figures baffle the surviving

P@lasz@ow inmates who remember the fearsome work of burning the dead. They say the number they exhumed was somewhere between 8,000 and 10,000--1 multitude frightful in itself and which they have no desire to exaggerate. The distance between the two estimates looks narrower when it is remembered that executions of Poles, Gypsies, and Jews would continue at Chujowa G@orka and at other points around P@lasz@ow throughout most of that year, and that the SS themselves took up the practice of burning bodies immediately after mass killings in the Austrian hill fort. Besides, Amon would not succeed in his intention of removing all bodies from the woods. Some thousands more would be found in postwar exhumations, and today, as the suburbs of Cracow close P@lasz@ow in, bones are still discovered during the digging of foundations. Oskar saw the line of pyres on the ridge above the workshops during a visit just before his birthday. When he came back a week later, the activity had increased. The bodies were dug up by male prisoners who worked masked and gagging. On blankets and barrows and litters the dead were brought to the burning site and laid on log frames. So the pyre was built, layer by layer, and when it reached the height of a man’s shoulder, was doused in fuel and lit. Pfefferberg was horrified to see the temporary life the flames gave to the dead, the way the corpses sat forward, throwing the burning logs away, their limbs reaching, their mouths opening for a last cry. A young SS man from the delousing station ran among the pyres waving a pistol and roaring frenetic orders. The dust of the dead fell in hair and on the clothing hung in the back gardens of junior officers’ villas. Oskar was bemused to see the way the personnel took the smoke as if the grit in the air were some sort of honest and inevitable industrial fallout. And through the fogs, Amon went riding with Majola, both of them calm in the saddle. Leo John took his twelve-year-old son off to catch tadpoles in the marshy ground in the wood. The flames and the stench did not distract them from their daily lives.

Oskar, leaning back in the driver’s seat of his

BMW, the windows up and a handkerchief clamped

over his mouth and nose, thought how they must be burning

the Spiras with all the rest. He’d been astounded

when they’d executed all the ghetto policemen and

their families last Christmas, as soon as

Symche Spira had finished directing the

dismantling of the ghetto. They had brought them all, and their wives and children, up here on a gray afternoon and shot them as the cold sun vanished. They’d shot the most faithful (spira and Zellinger) as well as the most grudging. Spira and bashful Mrs. Spira and the ungifted Spira children whom Pfefferberg had patiently tutored—they’d all stood naked within a circle of rifles, shivering against each other’s flanks, Spira’s Napoleonic OD uniform now just a heap of clothing for recycling, flung down at the fort entrance. And Spira still assuring everyone that it could not happen.

That execution had shocked Oskar because it showed that there was no obedience or obeisance a Jew could make to guarantee survival. And now they were burning the Spiras as anonymously, as ungratefully, as they had executed them. Even the Gutters! It had happened after a dinner at Amon’s the year before. Oskar had gone home early, but later heard what had happened after he left. John and Neuschel had started in on Bosch. They thought he was squeamish. He’d made a fuss about being a veteran of the trenches. But they had not seen him perform any executions.

They kept it going for hours—the joke of the evening. In the end, Bosch had ordered David Gutter and his son roused in their barracks and Mrs. Gutter and the Gutter girl fetched from theirs.

Again, it was a matter of faithful servants.

David Gutter had been the last president of the

Judenrat and had cooperated in everything—had

never gone to Pomorska Street and tried to start

any argument over the scope of the SS

Aktions or the size of transports sent

to Bel@zec. Gutter had signed everything and thought every demand reasonable. Besides that, Bosch had used Gutter as an agent inside and outside P@lasz@ow, sending him up to Cracow with truckloads of newly upholstered furniture or pocketfuls of jewelry to sell on the black market. And Gutter had done it because he was a scoundrel anyhow, but mainly because he believed it would make his wife and children immune. At two o’clock that polar morning, a Jewish policeman, Zauder, a friend of Pfefferberg’s and of Stern’s, later to be shot by Pilarzik during one of that officer’s drunken rampages, but on duty at the women’s gate that night, heard it—Bosch ordering the Gutters into position in a depression in the ground near the women’s camp. The children pleading, but David and Mrs. Gutter taking it calmly, knowing there was no argument. And now as Oskar watched, all of that evidence—the Gutters, the Spiras, the rebels, the priests, the children, the pretty girls found on Aryan papers—all of it was returning to that mad hill to be obliterated in case the Russians came to P@lasz@ow and made too much of it. Care, said Oranienburg in a letter to Amon, is to be taken with the future disposal of all bodies, and for that purpose they were sending a representative of a Hamburg engineering firm to survey the site for crematoria. In the meantime, the dead were to be kept, awaiting retrieval, at well-marked burial sites.

When, on that second visit, Oskar saw the extent of the fires on Chujowa G@orka, his first impulse was to stay in the car, that sane German mechanism, and drive home. Instead he went calling on friends of his in the workshop, and then visited Stern’s office. He thought that with all that grit falling on the windows, it wasn’t out of the question that people inside P@lasz@ow would consider suicide. Yet he was the one who seemed depressed. He didn’t ask any of his usual questions, such as “All right, Herr Stern, if God made man in His image, which race is most like Him? Is a Pole more like Him than a Czech?” There was none of that whimsy today. Instead he growled, “What does everyone think?” Stern told him that the prisoners were like prisoners. They did their work and hoped for survival.

“I’m going to get you out,” Oskar grunted

all at once. He put a balled fist on the

desk. “I’m going to get you all out.”

“All?” asked Stern. He couldn’t help

himself. Such massive Biblical rescues

didn’t suit the era.

“You, anyhow,” said Oskar. “Y.”

CHAPTER 28

In Amon’s office in the Administration

Building there were two typists. One was a young German woman, a Frau Kochmann; the other, a studious young prisoner, Mietek Pemper. Pemper would one day become secretary to Oskar, but in the summer of ‘44 he worked with Amon, and like anyone else in that situation was not too sanguine about his chances.

He first came into close contact with Amon as accidentally as had Helen Hirsch, the maid. Pemper was summoned to Amon’s office after someone had recommended him to the Commandant. The young prisoner was a student of accounting, a touch typist, and could take dictation in both Polish and German shorthand. His powers of memory were said to be a byword. So, a prisoner of his skills, Pemper found himself in P@lasz@ow’s main office with Amon, and would also sometimes take dictation from Amon at the villa. The irony was that Pemper’s photographic memory would in the end, more than the memory of any other prisoner, bring about the hanging of Amon in Cracow. But Pemper did not believe such an era would come. In 1944, if he’d had to guess who’d be the most likely victim of his near-perfect recall, he would have had to say Mietek Pemper himself. Pemper was meant to be the backup typist. For confidential documents, Amon was to use Frau Kochmann, a woman not nearly as competent as Mietek and slow at dictation. Sometimes Amon would break the rule and let young Pemper take confidential dictation. And Mietek, even while he sat across Amon’s desk with the pad on his knee, could not stop contradictory suspicions from distracting him. The first was that all these inside reports and memoranda, whose details he was retaining, would make him a prime witness on the remote day when he and Amon stood before a tribunal. The other suspicion was that Amon would, in the end, have to erase him as one later would a classified tape. Nonetheless, Mietek prepared each morning not only his own sets of typing paper, carbons, and duplicates, but a dozen for the German girl. After the girl had done her typing, Pemper would pretend to destroy the carbons, but in fact would keep and read them. He kept no written records, but he had had this reputation for memory since school days. He knew that if that tribunal ever met, if he and Amon sat in the body of the court, he would astound the Commandant with the precise dating of his evidence. Pemper saw some astonishing classified documents. He read, for example, memoranda on the flogging of women. Camp commanders were to be reminded that it should be done to maximum effect. It was demeaning to involve SS personnel, and therefore Czech women were to be flogged by Slovak women, Slovaks by Czechs. Russians and Poles were to be bracketed for the same purposes.

Commandants were to use their imagination in exploiting other national and cultural differences.

Another bulletin reminded them that they did not hold in their own persons the right to impose the death sentence. Commandants could seek authorization by telegram or letter to the Reich Security Main Office. Amon had done this in the spring with two Jews who’d escaped from the subcamp at Wieliczka and whom he proposed to hang. A telegram of permission had returned from Berlin, signed, Pemper noticed, by Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich

Security Main Office.

Now, in April, Pemper read a memorandum from Gerhard Maurer, the Labor Allocation Chief of General Gl@ucks’s Section D.

Maurer wanted Amon to tell him how many Hungarians could be held temporarily at P@lasz@ow. They were meant ultimately to go to the German Armament Works, DAW, which was a subsidiary of Krupp making artillery-shell fuses in the enormous complex at Auschwitz. Given that Hungary had only recently been taken over as a German Protectorate, these Hungarian Jews and dissidents were in a better state of health than those who had had years of ghettoization and prison life. They were therefore a windfall for the factories of Auschwitz.

Unfortunately, accommodation at DAW was not yet ready for them, and if the commandant of P@lasz@ow would take up to 7,000, pending the proper arrangements, Section D would be extremely grateful.

Goeth’s answer, either seen or typed by Pemper, was that P@lasz@ow was up to capacity and that there was no building space left inside the electric fences. However, Amon could accept up to 10,000 transit prisoners if (a) he were permitted to liquidate the unproductive element inside the camp; and (b) he were at the same time to impose double bunking. Maurer wrote in reply that double bunking could not be permitted in summer for fear of typhus, and that ideally, according to the regulations, there should be a minimum 3 cubic meters of air per person.

But he was willing to authorize Goeth to undertake

the first option. Section D would advise

Auschwitz-Birkenau—or at least, the

extermination wing of that great enterprise—to expect a shipment of reject prisoners from P@lasz@ow. At the same time, Ostbahn transport would be arranged with cattle cars, of course, run up the spur from the main line to the very gate of P@lasz@ow. Amon therefore had to conduct a sorting-out process inside his camp. With the blessing of Maurer and Section D, he would in a day abolish as many lives as Oskar Schindler was, by wit and reckless spending, harboring in Emalia. Amon named his selection session Die Gesundheitaktion, the Health Action.

He managed it as one would manage a country

fair. When it began, on the morning of Sunday,

May 7, the Appellplatz was hung with

banners: “FOR EVERY PRISONER,

APPROPRIATE WORK!” Loudspeakers played

ballads and Strauss and love songs. Beneath them

was set a table where Dr. Blancke, the SS

physician, sat with Dr. Leon Gross and a

number of clerks. Blancke’s concept of

“health” was as eccentric as that of any doctor in

the SS. He had rid the prison clinic of the

chronically ill by injecting benzine into their

bloodstreams. These injections could not by anyone’s

definition be called mercy killings. The patient

was seized by convulsions which ended in a choking death after

a quarter of an hour. Marek Biberstein, once

president of the Judenrat and now, after his

two-year imprisonment in Montelupich

Street, a citizen of P@lasz@ow, had

suffered heart failure and been brought to the Krankenstube. Before Blancke could get to him with a benzine syringe, Dr. Idek Schindel, uncle of that Genia whose distant figure had galvanized Schindler two years before, had come to Biberstein’s bedside with a number of colleagues. One had injected a more merciful dose of cyanide. Today, flanked by the filing cabinets of the entire prison population, Blancke would deal with the prisoners a barracks at a time, and when he finished with one battery of cards it would be taken away and replaced by the next.

As they reached the Appellplatz, prisoners were told to strip. They were lined up naked and run back and forth in front of the doctors. Blancke and Leon Gross, the collaborating Jewish physician, would make notations on the card, point at this prisoner, call on that one to verify his name. Back the prisoners would run, the physicians looking for signs of disease or muscular weakness. It was an odd and humiliating exercise. Men with dislocated backs (pfefferberg, for example, whose back Hujar had thrown out with the blow of a whip handle); women with chronic diarrhea, red cabbage rubbed into their cheeks to give them color—all of them running for their lives and understanding that it was so. Young Mrs. Kinstlinger, who’d sprinted for Poland at the Berlin Olympics, knew that all that had been just a game. This was the true contest. With your stomach turning and your breath thin, you ran—beneath the throb of the lying music—for your golden life. No prisoner found out the results until the following Sunday when, under the same banners and band music, the mass of inmates was again assembled. As names were read out and the rejects of the Gesundheitaktion were marched to the eastern end of the square, there were cries of outrage and bewilderment. Amon had expected a riot and had sought the help of the Wehrmacht garrison of Cracow, who were on standby in case of a prisoner uprising. Nearly 300 children had been discovered during the inspection the previous Sunday, and as they were now dragged away, the protests and wailings of parents were so loud that most of the garrison, together with Security Police detachments called in from Cracow, had to be thrown into the cordon separating the two groups. This confrontation lasted for hours, the guards forcing back surges of demented parents and telling the usual lies to those who had relatives among the rejects. Nothing had been announced, but everyone knew that those down there had failed the test and had no future. Blurred by waltzes and comic songs from the loudspeakers, a pitiable babel of messages was shouted from one group to the other. Henry Rosner, himself in torment, his son, Olek, in fact hidden somewhere in the camp, had the bizarre experience of facing a young SS man who, with tears in his eyes, denounced what was happening and made a pledge to volunteer for the Eastern Front. But officers shouted that unless people showed a little discipline, they would order their men to open fire. Perhaps Amon hoped that a justifiable outbreak of shooting would further reduce the overcrowding.

At the end of the process, 1,400 adults and 268 children stood, hedged in by weapons, at the eastern rim of the Appellplatz, ready for fast shipment to Auschwitz. Pemper would see and memorize the figures, which Amon would consider disappointing. Though it was not the number for which Amon had hoped, it would create immediate room for a large temporary intake of Hungarians.

In Dr. Blancke’s card-file system, the children of P@lasz@ow had not been as precisely registered as the adults. Many of them chose to spend both these Sundays in hiding, both they and their parents knowing instinctively that their age and the absence of their names and other details from the camp’s documentation would make them obvious targets of the selection process.

Olek Rosner hid in the ceiling of a hut on

the second Sunday. There were two other children with him

all day above the rafters, and all day they kept

the discipline of silence, all day held their

bladders among the lice and the little packages of

prisoners’ belongings and the rooftop rats. For the

children knew as well as any adult that the SS and the

Ukrainians were wary of the spaces above the

ceiling. They believed them typhus-ridden, and had

been informed by Dr. Blancke that it took but a

fragment of louse feces in a crack in your skin

to bring on epidemic typhus. Some of

P@lasz@ow’s children had been housed for months

near the men’s prison in the hut marked

ACHTUNG TYPHUS.

This Sunday, for Olek Rosner, Amon’s

health Aktion was far more perilous than typhus-bearing lice. Other children, some of the 268 separated out of the mass that day, had in fact begun the Aktion in hiding. Each P@lasz@ow child, with that same toughness of mind, had chosen a favorite hiding place. Some favored depressions beneath huts, some the laundry, some a shed behind the garage. Many of these hideouts had been discovered either this Sunday or last, and no longer offered refuge.

A further group had been brought without suspicion to the Appellplatz. There were parents who knew this or that NCO. It was as Himmler had once complained, for even SS

Oberscharf@uhrers who did not flinch in the act of execution had their favorites, as if the place were a school playground. If there was a question about the children, some parents thought, you could appeal to an SS man who knew you.

The previous Sunday a thirteen-year-old orphan thought he’d be safe because he had, at other roll calls, passed for a young man. But naked, he wasn’t able to argue away the childlikeness of his body. He had been told to dress and been marked down for the children’s group.

Now, as parents at the other end of the

Appellplatz cried out for their rounded-up children and

while the loudspeakers brayed forth a sentimental

song called “Mammi, kauf mir

ein Pferdchen” (mummy, buy me a

pony), the boy simply passed from one group to another, moved with that infallible instinct which had once characterized the movement of the red-capped child in Plac Zgody. And as with Redcap, no one had seen him. He stood, a plausible adult among the others, as the hateful music roared and his heart sought to beat its way through his rib cage. Then, faking the cramps of diarrhea, he asked a guard to let him go to the latrine. The long latrines lay beyond the men’s camp, and arriving there the boy stepped over the plank on which men sat while defecating. An arm either side of the pit, he lowered himself, trying to find knee-and toeholds in either wall. The stench blinded him, and flies invaded his mouth and ears and nostrils. As he entered the larger foulness and touched the bottom of the pit, he seemed to hear what he believed to be a hallucinatory murmur of voices behind the rage of flies. were they behind you? said one voice. And another said, Dammit, this is our place!

There were ten children in there with him. Amon’s report made use of the compound word Sonderbehandlung—Special Treatment.

It was a term that would become famous in later years, but this was the first time that Pemper had come across it. Of course, it had a sedative, even medical ring, but Mietek could tell by now that medicine was not involved.

A telegram Amon dictated that morning to be transmitted to Auschwitz gave more than a hint of its meaning. Amon explained that to make escape more difficult he had insisted that those selected for Special Treatment should drop any remnants of civilian clothing they still possessed at the rail siding and should put on striped prison clothes there. Since a great shortage of such garments prevailed, the stripes in which the P@lasz@ow candidates for Special Treatment turned up at Auschwitz should be sent back at once to Concentration Camp P@lasz@ow for reuse.

And all the children left in P@lasz@ow, of whom the greatest number were those who shared the latrine with the tall orphan, hid out or impersonated adults until later searches discovered them and took them to the Ostbahn for the slow day’s journey 60 kilometers to Auschwitz. The cattle cars were used that way all through high summer, taking troops and supplies east to the stalemated lines near Lw@ow and, on the return trip, wasting time at sidings while SS doctors watched ceaseless lines of the naked run before them.

CHAPTER 29

Oskar, sitting in Amon’s office, the windows flung open to a breathless summer’s day, had the impression from the start that this meeting was a fake. Perhaps Madritsch and Bosch felt the same, for their gaze kept drifting away from Amon toward the limestone trolleys outside the window, toward any passing truck or wagon.

Only Untersturmf@uhrer Leo John,

who took notes, felt the need to sit up

straight and keep his top button done up. Amon had described it as a security conference. Though the Front had now been stabilized, he said, the advance of the Russian center to the suburbs of Warsaw had encouraged partisan activity all over the Government General. Jews who heard of it were encouraged to attempt escapes. They did not know, of course, Amon pointed out, that they were better off behind the wire than exposed to those Jew-killers among the Polish partisans. In any case, everyone had to beware of partisan attack from outside and, worst of all, of collusion between the partisans and the prisoners. Oskar tried to imagine the partisans invading P@lasz@ow, letting all the Poles and Jews pour out, making of them an instant army. It was a daydream, and who could believe it?

But there was Amon, straining to convince them all that he believed it. It had a purpose, this little act. Oskar was sure of that.

Bosch said, “If the partisans are coming out to your place, Amon, I hope it’s not a night when I’ve been invited.”

“Amen, amen,” murmured Schindler.

After the meeting, whatever it meant, Oskar took Amon to his car, parked outside the Administration Building. He opened the trunk. Inside lay a richly tooled saddle worked with designs characteristic of the Zakopane region in the mountains south of Cracow. It was necessary for Oskar to keep priming Amon with such gifts even now that payment for the forced labor of DEF no longer went anywhere near Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth but, instead, was sent directly to the Cracow area representative of General Pohl’s Oranienburg headquarters.

Oskar offered to drive both Amon and his saddle down to the Commandant’s villa. On such a blistering day, some of the trolley-pushers were showing a little less than the required zeal. But the saddle had mollified Amon, and in any case, it was no longer permitted for him to jump from a car and shoot people down in their tracks. The car rolled past the garrison barracks and came to the siding where a string of cattle cars stood. Oskar could tell, by the haze hanging above the cars and blending withand wavering in the heat rebounding from the roofs, that they were full. Even above the sound of the engine, you could hear the mourning from inside, the pleas for water. Oskar braked his car and listened. This was

permitted him, in view of the splendid

multiz@loty saddle in the trunk. Amon

smiled indulgently at his sentimental friend. They’re partly P@lasz@ow people, said Amon, and people from the work camp at Szebnie. And Poles and Jews from Montelupich. They’re going to Mauthausen, Amon said whimsically. They’re complaining now? They don’t know what complaint is.

...

The roofs of the cars were bronzed with heat. You have no objection, said Oskar, if I call out your fire brigade?

Amon gave a What-will-you-think-of-next? sort of laugh. He implied that he wouldn’t let anyone else summon the firemen, but he’d tolerate Oskar because Oskar was such a character and the whole business would make a good dinner-party anecdote. But as Oskar sent Ukrainian guards to ring the bell for the Jewish firemen, Amon was bemused.

He knew that Oskar knew what Mauthausen

meant. If you hosed the cars for people, you were making

them promises about a future. And would not such

promises constitute, in anyone’s code, a

true cruelty? So disbelief mingled with

tolerant amusement in Amon as the hoses were

run out and jets of water fell hissing on the

scalding cartops. Neuschel also came down from

the office to shake his head and smile as the people

inside the cars moaned and roared with

gratitude. Gr@un, Amon’s bodyguard,

stood chatting with Untersturmf@uhrer John

and clapped his side and hooted as the water rained

down. Even at full extension the hoses reached

only halfway down the line of cars. Next,

Oskar was asking Amon for the loan of a truck or

wagon andofa few Ukrainians to drive

into Zablocie and fetch the fire hoses from

DEF. They were 200-meter hoses, Oskar

said. Amon, for some reason, found that

sidesplitting. “Of course I’ll authorize

a truck,” said Amon. Amon was willing to do anything for the sake of the comedy of life. Oskar gave the Ukrainians a note for

Bankier and Garde. While they were gone, Amon

was so willing to enter the spirit of the event that he

permitted the doors of the cars to be opened and

buckets of water to be passed in and the dead, with

their pink, swollen faces, to be lifted out. And

still, all around the railway siding stood amused

SS officers and NCO’S. “What does he

think he’s saving them from?”

When the large hoses from DEF arrived and all the cars had been drenched, the joke took on new dimensions. Oskar, in his note to Bankier, had instructed that the manager also go into Oskar’s own apartment and fill a hamper with liquor and cigarettes, some good cheeses and sausages, and so on. Oskar now handed the hamper to the NCO at the rear of the train. It was an open transaction, and the man seemed a little embarrassed at the largesse, shoving it quickly into the rear van in case one of the officers of KL

P@lasz@ow reported him. Yet Oskar seemed to be in such curious favor with the Commandant that the NCO listened to him respectfully. “When you stop near stations,”

said Oskar, “will you open the car doors?”

Years later, two survivors of the

transport, Doctors Rubinstein and

Feldstein, would let Oskar know that the NCO had

frequently ordered the doors opened and the water

buckets regularly filled on the tedious

journey to Mauthausen. For most of the

transport, of course, that was no more than a comfort before dying. As Oskar moves along the string of cars, accompanied by the laughter of the SS, bringing a mercy which is in large part futile, it can be seen that he’s not so much reckless anymore but possessed. Even Amon can tell that his friend has shifted into a new gear. All this frenzy about getting the hoses as far as the farthest car, then bribing an SS man in full view of the SS personnel—it would take just a shift in degree or so in the laughter of Scheidt or John or Hujar to bring about a mass denunciation of Oskar, a piece of information the Gestapo could not ignore. And then Oskar would go into Montelupich and, in view of previous racial charges against him, probably on to Auschwitz. So Amon was horrified by the way Oskar insisted on treating those dead as if they were poor relations traveling third class but bound for a genuine destination. Some time after two, a locomotive hauled the whole miserable string of cattle cars away toward the main line, and all the hoses could again be wound up. Schindler delivered Amon and his saddle to the Goeth villa. Amon could see that Oskar was still preoccupied and, for the first time in their association, gave his friend some advice about living. You have to relax, said Amon. You can’t go running after every trainload that leaves this place.

Adam Garde, engineer and prisoner of Emalia, also saw symptoms of this shift in Oskar. On the night of July 20, an SS man had come into Garde’s barracks and roused him. The Herr Direktor had called the guardhouse and said it was necessary to see engineer Garde, professionally, in his office.

Garde found Oskar listening to the radio, his face flushed, a bottle and two glasses in front of him on the table. Behind the desk these days was a relief map of Europe. It had never been there in the days of German expansion, but Oskar seemed to take a sharp interest in the shrinkage of the German Fronts. Tonight he had the radio tuned to the Deutschlandsender, not—as was usually the case—to the BBC. Inspirational music was being played, as it often was as prelude to important announcements. Oskar seemed to be listening avidly. When Garde came in, he stood up and hustled the young engineer to a seat. He poured cognac and passed it hurriedly across the desk.

“There’s been an attempt on Hitler’s life,” said Oskar.

It had been announced earlier in the evening, and the story then was that Hitler had survived. They’d promised that he would soon be speaking to the German people. But it hadn’t happened. Hours had passed and they hadn’t been able to produce him. And they kept playing a lot of Beethoven, the way they had when Stalingrad fell. Oskar and Garde sat together for hours. A seditious event, a Jew and a German listening together—all night if necessary—to discover if the F@uhrer had died. Adam Garde, of course, suffered that same breathless surge of hope. He noticed that Oskar kept gesturing limply, as if the possibility that the Leader was dead had unstrung his muscles. He drank devoutly and urged Garde to drink up. If it was true, said Oskar, then Germans, ordinary Germans like himself, could begin to redeem themselves.

Purely because someone close to Hitler had had the

guts to remove him from the earth. It’s the end of the

SS, said Oskar. Himmler will be in jail

by morning.

Oskar blew clouds of smoke. Oh, my

God, he said, the relief to see the end of this system!

The 10 P.m. news brought only the earlier statement. There had been an attempt on the F@uhrer’s life but it had failed and the F@uhrer would be broadcasting in a few minutes. When, as the hour passed, Hitler did not speak, Oskar turned to a fantasy which would be popular with many Germans as the war drew to a close. “Our troubles are over,” he said.

“The world’s sane again. Germany can ally itself with the West against the Russians.”

Garde’s hopes were more modest. At worst, he hoped for a ghetto which was a ghetto in the old Franz Josef sense.

And as they drank and the music played, it seemed more and more reasonable that Europe would yield them that night the death vital to its sanity. They were citizens of the continent again; they were not the prisoner and the Herr Direktor. The radio’s promises to produce a message from the F@uhrer recurred, and every time, Oskar laughed with increasing point.

Midnight came and they paid no attention anymore to the promises. Their very breath was lighter in this new post-F@uhrer Cracow.

By morning, they surmised, there would be dancing in every

square, and it would go unpunished. The

Wehrmacht would arrest Frank in the Wawel

and encircle the SS complex in

Pomorska Street.

A little before 1 A.m., Hitler was heard

broadcasting from Rastenberg. Oskar had been so convinced that that voice was a voice he would never need to hear again that for a few seconds he did not recognize the sound, in spite of its familiarity, thinking it just another temporizing Party spokesman. But Garde heard the speech from its first word, and knew whose voice it was. “My German comrades!” it began. “If I speak to you today, it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know that I am unhurt and well, and, second, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history.”

The speech ended four minutes later with a

reference to the conspirators. “This time we shall

settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed.”

Adam Garde had never quite bought the fantasy Oskar had been pushing all evening. For Hitler was more than a man: he was a system with ramifications. Even if he died, it was no guarantee the system would alter its character. Besides, it was not in the nature of a phenomenon such as Hitler to perish in the space of a single evening. But Oskar had been believing in the death with a feverish conviction for hours now, and when it turned out to be an illusion, it was young Garde who found himself cast as the comforter, while Oskar spoke with an almost operatic grief. “All our vision of deliverance is futile,” he said. He poured another glass of cognac each, then pushed the bottle across the desk, opening his cigarette box. “Take the cognac and some cigarettes and get some sleep,” he said. “We’ll have to wait a little longer for our freedom.”

In the confusion of the cognac, of the news and of its sudden reversal in the small hours, Garde did not think it strange that Oskar was talking about “our freedom,” as if they had an equivalent need, were both prisoners who had to wait passively to be liberated. But back in his bunk Garde thought, It’s amazing that Herr Direktor should have talked like that, like someone easily given to fantasies and fits of depression. Usually, he was so pragmatic.

Pomorska Street and the camps around Cracow crawled with rumors that late summer, of some imminent rearrangement of prisoners.

The rumors troubled Oskar in Zablocie, and at P@lasz@ow, Amon got unofficial word that the camps would be disbanded.

In fact that meeting about security had to do not with

saving P@lasz@ow from partisans, but with the coming

closure of the camp. Amon had called

Madritsch and Oskar and Bosch out

to P@lasz@ow and held the meeting just to give himself protective coloration. It then became plausible for him to drive into Cracow and call on Wilhelm Koppe, the new SS

police chief of the Government General. Amon sat on the far side of Koppe’s desk wearing a fake frown, cracking his knuckles as if from the stress of a besieged P@lasz@ow. He told Koppe the same story he’d given Oskar and the others—that partisan organizations had sprung up inside the camp, that Zionists within the wire had had communication with radicals of the Polish People’s Army and the Jewish Combat Organization. As the Obergruppenf@uhrer could appreciate, that sort of communication was difficult to stamp out—messages could come in in a smuggled loaf of bread. But at the first sign of active rebellion, he—Amon Goeth—as Commandant, would need to be able to take summary action. The question Amon wanted to ask was, if he fired first and did

the

paperwork

for

Oranienburg

afterward,

would

the

distinguished

Obergruppenf@uhrer Koppe stand by him?

No problem, said Koppe. He didn’t really approve of bureaucrats either. In years past, as police chief of the Wartheland, he’d commanded the fleet of extermination trucks which carried Untermenschen out into the countryside and which then, running the engines at full throttle, pumped the exhaust back into the locked interior. That too was an off-thecuff operation, not permitting precise paperwork. Of course, you have to use your judgment, he told Amon. And if you do, I’ll back you.

Oskar had sensed at the meeting that Amon was not really worried about partisans. Had he known then that P@lasz@ow was to be liquidated, he would have understood the deeper meaning of Amon’s performance. For Amon was worried about Wilek Chilowicz, his Jewish chief of camp police. Amon had often used Chilowicz as an agent on the black market. Chilowicz knew Cracow. He knew where he could sell the flour, rice, butter the Commandant held back from the camp supplies. He knew the dealers who would be interested in product from the custom jewelry shop staffed by interns like Wulkan. Amon was worried about the whole Chilowicz clique: Mrs.

Marysia Chilowicz, who enjoyed conjugal

privileges; Mietek Finkelstein, an

associate; Chilowicz’ sister Mrs. Ferber;

and Mr. Ferber. If there had been an

aristocracy inside P@lasz@ow, it had been the Chilowiczes. They had had power over prisoners, but their knowledge was double-edged: they knew as much about Amon as they did about some miserable machinist in the Madritsch factory. If, when P@lasz@ow closed, they were shipped to another camp, Amon knew they would try to barter their inside knowledge of his rackets as soon as they found themselves in the wrong line. Or more likely, as soon as they were hungry.

Of course, Chilowicz was uneasy too, and

Amon could sense in him the doubt that he would be

allowed to leave P@lasz@ow. Amon decided

to use Chilowicz’ very concern as a lever. He

called Sowinski, an SS auxiliary

recruited from the High Tatras of

Czechoslovakia, into his office for a conference. Sowinski was to approach Chilowicz and pretend to offer him an escape deal. Amon was sure that Chilowicz would be eager to negotiate.

Sowinski went and did it well. He told

Chilowicz he could get the whole clan out of the camp in one of the large fuel-burning trucks. You could sit half a dozen people in the wood furnace if you were running on gas.

Chilowicz was interested in the proposition. Sowinski would of course need to deliver a note to friends on the outside, who would provide a vehicle. Sowinski would deliver the clan to the rendezvous point in the truck. Chilowicz was willing to pay in diamonds. But, said Chilowicz, as an earnest of their mutual trust, Sowinski must provide a weapon. Sowinski reported the meeting to the Commandant, and Amon gave him a .38-caliber pistol with the pin filed down. This was passed to Chilowicz, who of course had neither need nor opportunity to test-fire it. Yet Amon would be able to swear to both Koppe and Oranienburg that he had found a weapon on the prisoner.

It was a Sunday in mid-August when

Sowinski met the Chilowiczes in the

building-material shed and hid them in the truck.

Then he drove down Jerozolimska to the gate. There should be routine formalities there; then the truck could roll out into the countryside. In the empty furnace, in the pulses of the five escapees was the febrile, almost insupportable hope of leaving Amon behind. At the gate, however, were Amon and Amthor and Hujar, and the Ukrainian Ivan Scharujew. A leisurely inspection was made. Lumbering with half-smiles across the bed of the truck, the gentlemen of the SS saved the wood furnace till last. They mimed surprise when they discovered the pitiable Chilowicz clan sardine-tight in the wood hole. As soon as Chilowicz had been dragged out, Amon “found” the illegal gun tucked into his boot.

Chilowicz’ pockets were laden with diamonds, bribes paid him by the desperate inmates of the camp.

Prisoners at their day of rest heard that

Chilowicz was under sentence down there at the gate. The news made for the same awe, the confusion of emotions that had operated the night the year before when Symche Spira and his OD had been executed. Nor could any prisoner decipher what it meant to his own chances.

The Chilowicz crowd were executed one at a time with pistols. Amon, very yellow now from liver disease, at the height of his obesity, wheezing like an elderly uncle, put the muzzle to Chilowicz’ neck. Later the corpses were displayed in the Appellplatz with placards tied to their chests: “THOSE WHO VIOLATE JUST LAWS CAN EXPECT A SIMILAR DEATH.”

That, of course, was not the moral the prisoners of P@lasz@ow took from the sight. Amon spent the afternoon drafting two long reports, one to Koppe, one to General Gl@ucks’s Section D, explaining how he had saved P@lasz@ow from an insurgency in its first phase—the one in which a group of key conspirators escaped from the camp—by executing the plot’s leaders. He did not finish revising either draft till 11 P.m. Frau Kochmann was too slow for such late work, and so the Commandant had Mietek Pemper roused from his barracks and brought to the villa. In the front parlor, Amon stated levelly that he believed the boy had been party to Chilowicz’ escape attempt. Pemper was astounded and did not know how to answer. Looking around him for some sort of inspiration, he saw the seam of his pants leg, which had come unsewn. How could I pass on the outside in this sort of clothing? he asked.

The balance of frank desperation in his answer satisfied Amon. He told the boy to sit down and instructed him how the typing was to be set out and the pages numbered. Amon hit the papers with his spatulate fingertips. “I want a first-class job done.” And Pemper thought, That’s the way of it—I can die now for being an escapee, or later in the year for having seen these justifications of Amon’s.

When Pemper was leaving the villa with the drafts in his hand, Goeth followed him out onto the patio and called a last order. “When you type the list of insurgents,” Amon called companionably, “I want you to leave room above my signature for another name to be inserted.”

Pemper nodded, discreet as any professional secretary. He stood just a half-second, trying for inspiration, some fast answer that would reverse Amon’s order about the extra space. The space for his name. Mietek Pemper. In that hateful torrid silence of Sunday evening in Jerozolimska, nothing plausible came to him. “Yes, Herr Commandant,” said Pemper. As Pemper stumbled up the road to the

Administration Building, he remembered a letter Amon had had him type earlier that summer. It had been addressed to Amon’s father, the Viennese publisher, and was full of filial concern for an allergy which had troubled the old man that spring. Amon hoped that it had lifted by now. The reason Pemper remembered that letter out of all the others was that half an hour before he’d been called into Amon’s office to take it down, the Commandant had dragged a girl filing clerk outside and executed her. The juxtaposition of the letter and the execution proved to Pemper that, for Amon, murder and allergies were events of equal weight. And if you told a tractable stenographer to leave a space for his name, it was a matter of course that he left it.

Pemper sat at the typewriter for more than an hour, but in the end left the space for himself. Not to do that would be even more suddenly fatal. There had been a rumor among Stern’s friends that Schindler had some movement of people in mind, some rescue or other, but tonight rumors from Zablocie meant nothing anymore. Mietek typed; Mietek left in each report the space for his own death. And all his remembrance of the Commandant’s criminal carbons which he’d so industriously memorized—all that was made futile by the space he left.

When both typescripts were word-perfect, he returned to the villa. Amon kept him waiting by the French windows while he himself sat in the parlor reading the documents. Pemper wondered if his own body would be displayed with some declamatory lettering:

“SO DIE ALL JEWISH BOLSHEVISTS!”

At last Amon appeared at the windows. “You may go to bed,” he said.

“Herr Commandant?”

“I said, you may go to bed.”

Pemper went. He walked less steadily now. After what he had seen, Amon could not let him live. But perhaps the Commandant believed there would be leisure to kill him later. In the meantime, life for a day was still life.

The space, as it proved, was for an elderly prisoner who, by unwise dealings with men like John and Hujar, had let it be known he had a cache of diamonds somewhere outside the camp. While Pemper sank into the sleep of the reprieved, Amon had the old man summoned to the villa, offered him his life for the diamonds’ location, was shown the place, and, of course, executed the old man and added his name to the reports to Koppe and Oranienburg—to his humble claim of having snuffed out the spark of rebellion.

CHAPTER 30

The orders, labeled OKH (Army HIGH

COMMAND), already sat on Oskar’s desk. Because of the war situation, the Director of Armaments told Oskar, KL P@lasz@ow and therefore the Emalia camp were to be disbanded. Prisoners from Emalia would be sent to P@lasz@ow, awaiting relocation. Oskar himself was to fold his Zablocie operation as quickly as possible, retaining on the premises only those technicians necessary for dismantling the plant. For further instructions, he should apply to the Evacuation Board, OKH, Berlin. Oskar’s initial reaction was a cool rage.

He resented the tone, the sense of a distant official trying to absolve him from further concern. There was a man in Berlin who, not knowing of the black-market bread that bound Oskar and his prisoners together, thought it was reasonable for a factory owner to open the gate and let the people be taken. But the worst arrogance was that the letter did not define “relocation.” Governor General Frank was more honest than that and had made a notorious speech a little earlier in the year. “When we ultimately win the war, then as far as I’m concerned, Poles, Ukrainians, and all that rabble idling around here can be made into mincemeat, into anything you like.” Frank had the courage to put an accurate name to the process. In Berlin, they wrote “relocation” and believed themselves excused. Amon knew what “relocation” meant and,

during Oskar’s next visit to P@lasz@ow,

freely told him so. All P@lasz@ow men

would be sent to Gr@oss-Rosen. The women would go

to Auschwitz. Gr@oss-Rosen was a vast

quarry camp in Lower Silesia. The German

Earth and Stone Works, an SS enterprise with

branches throughout Poland, Germany, and the conquered

territories, consumed the prisoners of

Gr@oss-Rosen. The processes at

Auschwitz were, of course, more direct and modern.

When the news of the abolition of Emalia reached the factory floor and ran through the barracks, some Schindler people thought it was the end of all sanctuary. The Perlmans, whose daughter had come out of Aryan cover to plead for them, packed their blankets and talked philosophically to their bunk neighbors. Emalia has given us a year’s rest, a year’s soup, a year’s sanity. Perhaps it might be enough. But they expected to die now. It was apparent from their voices.

Rabbi Levartov was resigned too. He was going back to unfinished business with Amon. Edith Liebgold, who’d been recruited by Bankier for the night shift in the first days of the ghetto, noticed that although Oskar spent hours talking solemnly with his Jewish supervisors, he did not come up to people and make dizzying promises. Perhaps he was as baffled and diminished by these orders from Berlin as the rest. So he wasn’t quite the prophet he’d been the night she’d first come here more than three years ago. Just the same, at the end of summer, as his prisoners packed their bundles and were marched back to P@lasz@ow, there was a rumor among them that Oskar had spoken of buying them back. He had said it to Garde; he had said it to Bankier. You could almost hear him saying it—that level certainty, the paternal rumble of the throat. But as you went up Jerozolimska Street, past the Administration Building, staring in newcomer’s disbelief at the hauling gangs from the quarry, the memory of Oskar’s promises was very nearly just another burden.

The Horowitz family were back in

P@lasz@ow. Their father, Dolek, had last year maneuvered them to Emalia, but here they were back. The six-year-old boy, Richard; the mother, Regina. Niusia, eleven now, was again sewing bristles onto brush paddles and watching, from the high windows, the trucks roll up to the Austrian hill fort, and the black cremation smoke rise over the hill. As P@lasz@ow was when she had left it last year, so it continued. It was impossible for her to believe that it would ever end. But her father believed that Oskar would make a list of people and extricate them. Oskar’s list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation. It was a List. It was a sweet chariot which might swing low. Oskar raised the idea of taking Jews away from Cracow with him one night at Amon’s villa. It was a still night at the end of summer. Amon seemed pleased to see him. Because of Amon’s health—both Doctors Blancke and Gross warning him that if he didn’t cut his eating and drinking he would die—there had not been so many visitors to the villa of late.

They sat together, drinking at Amon’s new rate of moderation. Oskar sprang the news on him. He wanted to move his factory to Czechoslovakia. He wanted to take his skilled workers with him. He might need other skills from among the P@lasz@ow workers too. He would seek the help of the Evacuation Board in

finding an appropriate site, somewhere down in

Moravia, and of the Ostbahn in making the shift

southwest from Cracow. He let Amon know that

he’d be very grateful for any support. The

mention of gratitude always excited

Amon. Yes, he said, if Oskar could get

all the cooperation he needed from the boards involved, Amon would then allow a list of people to be drawn up.

When that was settled, Amon wanted a game of cards. He liked blackjack, a version of the French vingt-et-un. It was a hard game for junior officers to fake losing without being obvious. It did not permit of too much sycophancy. It was therefore true sport, and Amon preferred it. Besides, Oskar wasn’t interested in losing this evening. He would be paying enough to Amon for that list.

The Commandant began by betting modestly, in 100-z@loty bills, as if his doctors had advised moderation in this as well. He kept busting however, and when the beginning stake had been raised to 500 z@l., Oskar got a “natural,” an ace and a jack, which meant that Amon had to pay him double the stake.

Amon was disconsolate about that, but not too testy. He called for Helen Hirsch to bring coffee. She came in, a parody of a gentleman’s servant, crisply dressed still in black but her right eye blinded by swelling. She was so small that Amon would need to stoop to beat her up. The girl knew Oskar now, but did not look at him. Nearly a year past, he had promised to get her out. Whenever he came to the villa he managed to slip down the corridor to the kitchen and ask her how she was. It meant something, but it had not touched the substance of her life. A few weeks back, for example, when the soup hadn’t been the correct temperature—

Amon was pernickety about soup, flyspecks in the corridor, fleas on dogs—the Commandant had called for Ivan and Petr and told them to take her to the birch tree in the garden and shoot her.

He’d watched from the French windows as she walked

in front of Petr’s Mauser, pleading under her

breath with the young Ukrainian. “Petr, who’s this

you’re going to shoot? It’s Helen. Helen who

gives you cakes. You couldn’t shoot Helen, could

you?” And Petr answering in the same manner, through

clenched teeth, “I know, Helen. I don’t

want to. But if I don’t, he’ll kill

me.” She’d bent her head toward the spotted birch bark. Having often asked Amon why he wouldn’t kill her, she wanted to die simply, to hurt him by her willing acceptance. But it wasn’t possible. She was trembling so hard that he could have seen it. Her legs were shaking. And then she’d heard Amon call from the windows, “Bring the bitch back. There’s plenty of time to shoot her. In the meantime, it might still be possible to educate her.”

Insanely, in between his spates of savagery, there were brief phases in which he tried to play the benign master. He had said to her one morning, “You’re really a very welltrained servant. If after the war you need a reference, I shall be happy to give you one.”

She knew it was just talk, a daydream. She turned her deaf ear, the one whose eardrum he had perforated with a blow. Sooner or later, she knew, she would die of his customary fury.

In a life like hers, a smile from visitors was only a momentary comfort. Tonight she placed the enormous silver pot of coffee beside the Herr Commandant—he still drank it by the bucket in cups laden with sugar—made her obeisance, and left. Within an hour, when Amon was 3,700 z@l. in debt to Oskar and complaining sourly about his luck, Oskar suggested a variation on the betting. He would need a maid in Moravia, he said, when he moved to Czechoslovakia. There you couldn’t get them as intelligent and well trained as Helen Hirsch. They were all country girls. Oskar suggested therefore that he and Amon play one hand, double or nothing. If Amon won, Oskar would pay him 7,400

z@l. If he hit a “natural,” it would be 14,800 z@l. But if I win, said Oskar, then you give me Helen Hirsch for my list.

Amon wanted to think about that. Come on, said Oskar, she’s going to Auschwitz anyhow. But there was an attachment there. Amon was so used to Helen that he couldn’t easily wager her away.

When he’d thought of an end for her, it had

probably always been that he would finish her by his

own hand, with personal passion. If he played

cards for her and lost, he would be under pressure,

as a Viennese sportsman, to give up the

pleasure of intimate murder.

Much earlier in P@lasz@ow’s history,

Schindler had asked that Helen be assigned to Emalia. But Amon had refused. It seemed only a year ago that P@lasz@ow would exist for decades, and that the Commandant and his maid would grow old together, at least until some perceived fault in Helen brought about the abrupt end of the connection. This time a year ago, no one would have believed that the relationship would be resolved because the Russians were outside Lw@ow. As for Oskar’s part in this proposal, he had made it lightly. He did not seem to see, in his offer to Amon, any parallel with God and Satan playing cards for human souls. He did not ask himself by what right he made a bid for the girl. If he lost, his chance of extracting her some other way was slim. But all chances were slim that year. Even his own.

Oskar got up and bustled around the room, looking for stationery with an official letterhead on it. He wrote out the marker for Amon to sign should he lose: “I authorize that the name of prisoner Helen Hirsch be added to any list of skilled workers relocated with Herr Oskar Schindler’s DEF Works.”

Amon was dealer and gave Oskar an 8 and a 5. Oskar asked to be dealt more. He received a 5 and an ace. It would have to do. Then Amon dealt to himself. A 4 came up, and then a king.

God in heaven! said Amon. He was a

gentleman cusser; he seemed to be too

fastidious to use obscenities. I’m out. He laughed a little but was not really amused. My first cards, he explained, were a three and a five. With a four I should have been safe. Then I got this damned king.

In the end, he signed the marker. Oskar picked up all the chits he’d won that evening from Amon and returned them. Just look after the girl for me, he said, till it’s time for us all to leave.

Out in her kitchen, Helen Hirsch did not know she’d been saved over cards. Probably because Oskar reported his evening with Amon to Stern, rumors of Oskar’s plan were heard in the Administration Building and even in the workshops. There was a Schindler list. It was worth everything to be on it.

CHAPTER 31

At some point in any discussion of Schindler, the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will blink and shake their heads and begin the almost mathematical business of finding the sum of his motives. For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still “I don’t know why he did it.” It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which, in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia. And not only for them. In early September he drove to Podg@orze and visited Madritsch, who at that point employed more than 3,000 prisoners in his uniform factory. This plant would now be disbanded. Madritsch would get his sewing machines back, and his workers would vanish. If we made a combined approach, said Oskar, we could get more than four thousand out. Mine and yours as well. We could relocate them in something like safety. Down in Moravia.

Madritsch would always and justly be revered by his surviving prisoners. The bread and chickens smuggled into his factory were paid for from his pocket and at continuous risk. He would have been considered a more stable man than Oskar. Not as flamboyant, and not as subject to obsession. He had not suffered arrest. But he had been much more humane than was safe and, without wit and energy, would have ended in Auschwitz. Now Oskar presented to him a vision of a Madritsch-Schindler camp somewhere in the High Jeseniks; some smoky, safe little industrial hamlet.

Madritsch was attracted by the idea but did not rush to say yes. He could tell that though the war was lost, the SS system had become more instead of less implacable. He was correct in believing that, unhappily, the prisoners of P@lasz@ow would—in coming months—be consumed in death camps to the west. For if Oskar was stubborn and possessed, so were the SS Main Office and their prize field operatives, the commandants of the Concentration Camps.

He did not say no, however. He needed time to think about it. Though he couldn’t say it to Oskar, it is likely he was afraid of sharing factory premises with a rash, demonic fellow like Herr Schindler.

Without any clear word from Madritsch, Oskar

took to the road. He went to Berlin and bought

dinner for Colonel Erich Lange. I can go

completely over to the manufacture of shells,

Oskar told Lange. I can transfer my

heavy machinery.

Lange was crucial. He could guarantee

contracts; he could write the hearty

recommendations Oskar needed for the Evacuation Board and the German officials in Moravia. Later, Oskar would say of this shadowy staff officer that he had given consistent help. Lange was still in that state of exalted desperation and moral disgust characteristic of many who had worked inside the system but not always for it. We can do it, said Lange but it will take some money. Not for me. For others. Through Lange, Oskar talked with an officer of the Evacuation Board at OKH on Bendler Street. It was likely, said this officer, that the evacuation would be approved in principle. But there was a major obstacle. The Governor cum Gauleiter of Moravia, ruling from a castle at Liberec, had followed a policy of keeping Jewish labor camps out of his province.

Neither the SS nor the Armaments Inspectorate had so far persuaded him to change his attitude. A good man to discuss this impasse with, said the officer, would be a middleaged Wehrmacht engineer down in the Troppau office of the Armaments Inspectorate, a man named Sussmuth. Oskar could talk to Sussmuth too about what relocation sites were available in Moravia. Meanwhile, Herr Schindler could count on the support of the Main Evacuation Board. “But you can understand that in view of the pressure they are under, and the inroads the war has made on their personal comforts, they are more likely to give a quick answer if you could be considerate to them in some way. We poor city fellows are short of ham, cigars, liquor, cloth, coffee ... that sort of thing.”

The officer seemed to think that Oskar carried around with him half the peacetime produce of Poland. Instead, to get together a gift parcel for the gentlemen of the board, Oskar had to buy luxuries at the Berlin black-market rate.

An old gentleman on the desk at the Hotel Adlon was able to acquire excellent schnapps for Herr Schindler for a discount price of about 80 RM. a bottle. And you couldn’t send the gentlemen of the board less than a dozen. Coffee, however, was like gold, and Havanas were at an insane price. Oskar bought them in quantity and included them in the hamper. The gentlemen might need a head of steam if they were to bring the Governor of Moravia around. In the midst of Oskar’s negotiations, Amon Goeth was arrested. Someone must have informed on him. Some jealous junior officer, or a concerned citizen who’d visited the villa and been shocked by Amon’s sybaritic style. A senior SS

investigator named Eckert began to look at Amon’s financial dealings. The shots Amon had taken from the balcony were not germane to Eckert’s investigation. But the embezzlements and the black-market dealings were, as were complaints from some of his SS inferiors that he had treated them severely.

Amon was on leave in Vienna, staying with his father, the publisher, when the SS

arrested him. They also raided an apartment Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth kept in the city and discovered a cache of money, some 80,000 RM., which Amon could not explain to their satisfaction. They found as well, stacked to the ceiling, close to a million cigarettes. Amon’s Viennese apartment, it seemed, was more warehouse than pied @a terre. It might be at first sight surprising that the SS—OR rather, the officers of Bureau V of the Reich Security Main Office—should want to arrest such an effective servant as Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth. But they had already investigated irregularities in Buchenwald and tried to pin the Commandant, Koch. They had even attempted to find evidence for the arrest of the renowned Rudolf H@oss, and had questioned a Viennese Jewess who, they suspected, was pregnant by this star of the camp system. So Amon, raging in his apartment while they ransacked it, had no cause to hope for much immunity. They took him to Breslau and put him in an SS prison to await investigation and trial. They showed their innocence of the way affairs were run in P@lasz@ow by going to the villa and questioning Helen Hirsch on suspicion of her being involved in Amon’s swindles. Twice in coming months she would be taken to the cells beneath the SS

barracks of P@lasz@ow for interrogation. They fired questions at her about Amon’s contacts on the black market—who his agents were, how he worked the jewelry shop at P@lasz@ow, the custom-tailoring shop, the upholstery plant. No one hit her or threatened her. But it was their conviction that she was a member of a gang that tormented her. If Helen had ever thought of an unlikely and glorious salvation, she would not have dared dream that Amon would be arrested by his own people. But she felt her sanity going now in the interrogation room, when under their law they tried to shackle her to Amon. Chilowicz might have been able to help you, she told them. But Chilowicz is dead.

They were policemen by trade, and after a time would decide she could give them nothing except a little information about the sumptuous cuisine at the villa Goeth. They could have asked her about her scars, but they knew they couldn’t get Amon on grounds of sadism. Investigating sadism in the camp at Sachsenhausen, they’d been forced off the prem-ises by armed guards. In Buchenwald they had found a material witness, an NCO, to testify against the Commandant, but the informer had been found dead in his cell. The head of that SS investi-gating team ordered that samples of a poison found in the NCO’S

stomach be administered to four Russian prisoners. He watched them die, and so had his proof against the Commandant and the camp doctor. Even though he got prosecutions for murder and sadistic practice, it was a strange justice. Above all, it made the camp personnel close ranks and dispose of living evidence. So the men of Bureau V did not question Helen about her injuries. They stuck to embezzlement, and in the end stopped troubling her. They investigated Mietek Pemper too.

He was wise enough not to tell them much about Amon, certainly not about his crimes against humans. He knew little but rumors of Amon’s frauds.

He played the neutral and well-mannered

typist of nonclassified material. “The

Herr Commandant would never discuss such matters

with me,” he pleaded continually. But beneath his

performance, he must have suffered the same howling

disbelief as Helen Hirsch. If there was one

event most likely to guarantee him a chance

of life, it was Amon’s arrest. For there

had been no more certain limit to his

life than this: that when the Russians reached Tarnow, Amon would dictate his last letters and then assassinate the typist. What worried Mietek, therefore, was that they would release Amon too soon.

But they were not interested solely in the question of

Amon’s speculations. The SS judge who

questioned Pemper had been told

by Oberscharf@uhrer Lorenz Landsdorfer that

Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth had let his

Jewish stenographer type up the directives

and plans to be followed by the P@lasz@ow

garrison in the case of an assault on the

camp by partisans. Amon, in explaining

to Pemper how the typing of these plans should be set out, had even shown him copies of similar plans for other concentration camps. The judge was so alarmed by this disclosure of secret documents to a Jewish prisoner that he ordered Pemper’s arrest. Pemper spent two miserable weeks in a cell beneath the SS barracks. He was not beaten, but was questioned regularly by a series of Bureau V investigators and by two SS judges. He thought he could read in their eyes the conclusion that the safest thing was to shoot him. One day during questioning about P@lasz@ow’s emergency plans, Pemper asked his interrogators, “Why keep me here? A prison is a prison. I have a life sentence anyhow.” It was an argument calculated to bring a resolution, either release from the cells or else a bullet. After the session ended, Pemper spent some hours of anxiety until his cell door opened again. He was marched out and returned to his hut in the camp. It was not the last time, however, that he would be questioned on subjects relating to Commandant Goeth. It seemed that following his arrest, Amon’s juniors did not rush to give him references. They were careful. They waited. Bosch, who’d drunk so much of the Commandant’s liquor, told Untersturmf@uhrer John that it was dangerous to try to bribe these determined investigators from Bureau V. As for Amon’s seniors, Scherner was gone, assigned to hunting partisans, and would in the end be killed in an ambush in the forests of Niepolomice. Amon was in the hands of men from Oranienburg who’d never dined at the Goethhaus—or, if they had, had been either shocked or touched by envy. After her release by the SS, Helen Hirsch, now working for the new Commandant, Hauptsturmf@uhrer B@uscher, received a friendly note from Amon asking her to get together a parcel of clothes, some romances and detective novels, and some liquor to comfort him in his cell. It was, she thought, like a letter from a relative. “Would you kindly gather for me the following,” it said, and ended with “Hoping to see you again soon.” Meanwhile Oskar had been down to the market city of Troppau to see engineer Sussmuth. He’d brought along liquor and diamonds, but they weren’t needed in this case. Sussmuth told Oskar that he had already proposed that some small Jewish work camps be set up in the border towns of Moravia to turn out goods for the Armaments Inspectorate. Such camps would, of course, be under the central control of either Auschwitz or Gr@oss-Rosen, for the areas of influence of the big concentration camps crossed the Polish-Czechoslovak border. But there was more safety for prisoners in little work camps than could be found in the grand necropolis of Auschwitz itself. Sussmuth had got nowhere, of course. The Castle at Liberec had trampled on the proposal. He had never had a lever. Oskar— the support Oskar had from Colonel Lange and the gentlemen of the Evacuation Board—that could be the lever.

Sussmuth had in his office a list of sites suitable to receive plants evacuated from the war zone. Near Oskar’s hometown of Zwittau, on the edge of a village called Brinnlitz, was a great textile plant owned by the Viennese brothers Hoffman. They’d been in butter and cheese in their home city, but had come to the Sudetenland behind the legions (just as Oskar had gone to Cracow) and become textile magnates. An entire annex of their plant lay idle, used as a storehouse for obsolete spinning machines. A site like that was served from the rail depot at Zwittau, where Schindler’s brother-in-law was in charge of the freight yard. And a railway loop ran close to the gates. The brothers are profiteers, said Sussmuth, smiling. They have some local party backing—the County Council and the District Leader are in their pockets. But you have Colonel Lange behind you. I will write to Berlin at once,

Sussmuth promised, and recommend the use of the Hoffman annex.

Oskar knew the Germanic village of

Brinnlitz from his childhood. Its racial character was in its name, since the Czechs would have called it Brnenec, just as a Czech Zwittau would have become Zvitava. The Brinnlitz citizens would not fancy a thousand or more Jews in their neighborhood. The Zwittau people, from whom some of Hoffman’s workers were recruited, would not like it either, this contamination, so late in the war, of their rustic-industrial backwater. In any case, Oskar drove down to take a quick look at the site. He did not approach Hoffman Brothers’ front office, since that would give the tougher Hoffman brother, the one who chaired the company, too much warning. But he was able to wander into the annex without being challenged. It was an old-fashioned two-story industrial barracks built around a courtyard. The ground floor was high-ceilinged and full of old machines and crates of wool. The upper floor must have been intended as offices and for lighter equipment. Its floor would not stand the weight of the big pressing machines. Downstairs would do for the new workshops of DEF, as offices and, in one corner, the Herr Direktor’s apartment. Upstairs would be barracks for the prisoners. He was delighted with the place. He drove

back to Cracow yearning to get started, to spend the

necessary money, to talk to Madritsch again. For

Sussmuth could find a site for Madritsch too

--perhaps even floor space in Brinnlitz.

When he got back, he found that an Allied bomber, shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter, had crashed on the two end barracks in the backyard prison. Its blackened fuselage sat crookedly across the wreckage of the flattened huts. Only a small squad of prisoners had been left behind in Emalia to wind up production and maintain the plant. They had seen it come down, flaming. There had been two men inside, and their bodies had burned. The Luftwaffe people who came to take them away had told Adam Garde that the bomber was a Stirling and that the men were Australian. One, who was holding the charred remnants of an English Bible, must have crashed with it in his hand. Two others had parachuted in the suburbs. One had been found, dead of wounds, still in his harness. The partisans had got to the other one first and were hiding him somewhere. What these Australians had been doing was

dropping supplies to the partisans in the

primeval forest east of Cracow.

If Oskar had wanted some sort of

confirmation, this was it. That men should come all this way from unimaginable little towns in the Australian Outback to hasten the end in Cracow. He put a call through at once to the official in charge of rolling stock in the office of Ostbahn President Gerteis and invited him to dinner to talk about DEF’S potential need of flatcars. A week after Oskar spoke to Sussmuth, the

gentlemen of the Berlin Armaments Board instructed

the Governor of Moravia that Oskar’s armaments

company was to be allocated the annex of

Hoffman’s spinning mill in Brinnlitz. The

Governor’s bureaucrats could do nothing more,

Sussmuth told Oskar by telephone, than slow

the paperwork down. But Hoffman and other Party men

in the Zwittau area were already conferring and passing

resolutions against Oskar’s intrusion

into Moravia. The Party Kreisleiter in

Zwittau wrote to Berlin complaining that Jewish prisoners from Poland would be a peril to the health of Moravian Germans. Spotted fever would very likely appear in the region for the first time in modern history, and Oskar’s small armaments factory, of dubious value to the war effort, would also attract Allied bombers, with resultant damage to the important Hoffman mills. The population of Jewish criminals in the proposed Schindler camp would outweigh the small and decent population of Brinnlitz and be a cancer on the honest flank of Zwittau.

A protest of that kind didn’t have a chance, since it went straight to the office of Erich Lange in Berlin. Appeals to Troppau were quashed by honest Sussmuth. Nonetheless, the posters went up on walls in Oskar’s hometown:

“KEEP THE JEWISH CRIMINALS OU.”

And Oskar was paying. He was paying the

Evacuation Committee in Cracow to help speed

up the permits for the transfer of his machinery. The

Department of the Economy in Cracow had to be

encouraged to provide the clearances of bank

holdings. Currency wasn’t favored these days,

so he paid in goods—in kilos of tea,

in pairs of leather shoes, in carpets, in

coffee, in canned fish. He spent his afternoons in the little streets off the market square of Cracow haggling at staggering prices for whatever the bureaucrats desired. Otherwise, he was sure, they would keep him waiting till his last Jew had gone to Auschwitz. It was Sussmuth who told him that people from

Zwittau were writing to the Armaments

Inspectorate accusing Oskar of

black-marketeering. If they’re writing to me, said Sussmuth, you can bet the same letters are going to the police chief of Moravia, Obersturmf@uhrer Otto Rasch. You should introduce yourself to Rasch and show him what a charming fellow you are. Oskar had known Rasch when he was SS

police chief of Katowice. Rasch was,

by happy chance, a friend of the chairman of Ferrum

AG at Sosnowiec, from which Oskar had bought his

steel. But in rushing down to Brno to head off

informers, Oskar didn’t rely on anything as

flimsy as mutual friendships. He took a

diamond cut in the brilliant style which,

somehow, he introduced into the meeting. When it crossed the table and ended on Rasch’s side of the desk, it secured Oskar’s Brno front.

Oskar later estimated that he spent

100,000 RM.—NEARLY $40,000--to grease the transfer to Brinnlitz. Few of his survivors would ever find the figure unlikely, though there were those who shook their heads and said, “No, more! It would have to have been more than that.”

He had drawn up what he called a

preparatory list and delivered it to the

Administration Building. There were more than a thousand names on it—the names of all the prisoners of the backyard prison camp of Emalia, as well as new names. Helen Hirsch’s name was freshly on the list, and Amon was not there to argue about it. And the list would expand if Madritsch agreed to go to Moravia with Oskar. So Oskar kept working on Titsch, his ally at Julius Madritsch’s ear. Those Madritsch prisoners who were closest to Titsch knew the list was under compilation, that they could have access to it. Titsch told them without any ambiguity: You must get on it. In all the reams of P@lasz@ow paperwork, Oskar’s dozen pages of names were the only pages with access to the future.

But Madritsch still could not decide whether he wanted an alliance with Oskar, whether he would add his 3,000 to the total.

There is again a haziness suitable to a legend about the precise chronology of Oskar’s list. The haziness doesn’t attach to the existence of the list—a copy can be seen today in the archives of the Yad Vashem. There is no uncertainty as we shall see about the names remembered by Oskar and Titsch at the last minute and attached to the end of the official paper. The names on the list are definite. But the circumstances encourage legends. The problem is that the list is remembered with an intensity which, by its very heat, blurs. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf. Some of those whose names appeared on the list say

that there was a party at Goeth’s villa, a

reunion of SS men and entrepreneurs

to celebrate the times they’d had there. Some even believe that Goeth was there, but since the SS did not release on bail, that is impossible. Others believe that the party was held at Oskar’s own apartment above his factory. Oskar had for more than two years given excellent parties there. One Emalia prisoner remembers the early hours of 1944 when he was on night watch duty and Oskar had wandered down from his apartment at one o’clock, escaping the noise upstairs and bringing with him two cakes, two hundred cigarettes, and a bottle for his friend the watchman.

At the P@lasz@ow graduation party, wherever it took place, the guests included Dr. Blancke, Franz Bosch, and, by some

reports, Oberf@uhrer Julian Scherner,

on vacation from his partisan-hunting. Madritsch was there too, and Titsch. Titsch would later say that at it Madritsch informed Oskar for the first time that he would not be going to Moravia with him. “I’ve done everything I can for the Jews,” Madritsch told him. It was a reasonable claim; he would not be persuaded although he said Titsch had been at him for days.

Madritsch was a just man. Later he would be honored as such. He simply did not believe that Moravia would work. If he had, the indications are that he would have attempted it. What else is known about the party is that an urgency operated there, because the Schindler list had to be handed in that evening. This is an element in all the versions of the story survivors tell. The survivors could tell and expand upon it only if they had heard it in the first place from Oskar, a man with a taste for embellishing a story. But in the early 1960’s, Titsch himself attested to the substantial truth of this one. Perhaps the new and temporary Commandant of P@lasz@ow, a Hauptsturmf@uhrer B@uscher, had said to Oskar, “Enough fooling around, Oskar! We have to finalize the paperwork and the transportation.” Perhaps there was some other form of deadline imposed by the Ostbahn, by the availability of transport. At the end of Oskar’s list, therefore, Titsch now typed in, above the official signatures, the names of Madritsch prisoners. Almost seventy names were added, written in by Titsch from his own and Oskar’s memories. Among them were those of the Feigenbaum family—the adolescent daughter who suffered from incurable bone cancer; the teen-age son Lutek with his shaky expertise in repairing sewing machines. Now they were all transformed, as Titsch scribbled, into skilled munitions workers. There was singing in the apartment, loud talk and laughter, a fog of cigarette smoke, and, in a corner, Oskar and Titsch quizzing each other over people’s names, straining for a clue to the spelling of Polish patronyms.

In the end, Oskar had to put his hand on

Titsch’s wrist. We’re over the limit, he

said. They’ll balk at the number we already have. Titsch continued to strain for names, and tomorrow morning would wake damning himself because one had come to him too late. But now he was at the limit, wrung out by this work. It was blasphemously close to creating people anew just by thinking of them. He did not begrudge doing it. It was what it said of the world—that was what made the heavy air of Schindler’s apartment so hard for Titsch to breathe.

The list was vulnerable, however, through the personnel clerk, Marcel Goldberg. B@uscher, the new Commandant, who was there merely

to wind the camp down, himself could not have cared, within

certain numerical limits, who went on the

list. Therefore Goldberg had the power to tinker with

its edges. It was known to prisoners already that

Goldberg would take bribes. The Dresners

knew it. Juda Dresner—uncle of red

Genia, husband of the Mrs. Dresner

who’d once been refused a hiding place in a wall, and father of Janek and of young Danka—

Juda Dresner knew it. “He paid

Goldberg,” the family would simply say

to explain how they got on the Schindler list. They never knew what was given. Wulkan the jeweler presumably got himself, his wife, his son on the list in the same way. Poldek Pfefferberg was told about the list by an SS NCO named Hans Schreiber. Schreiber, a young man in his mid-twenties, had as evil a name as any other SS man in P@lasz@ow, but Pfefferberg had become something of a mild favorite of his in that way that was common to relationships—throughout the system—between individual prisoners and SS personnel. It had begun one day when Pfefferberg, as a group leader in his barracks, had had responsibility for window cleaning. Schreiber inspected the glass and found a smudge, and began browbeating Poldek in the style that was often a prelude to execution. Pfefferberg lost his temper and told Schreiber that both of them knew the windows were perfectly polished and if Schreiber wanted a reason to shoot him, he ought to do it without any more delay.

The outburst had, in a contradictory way,

amused Schreiber, who afterward occasionally used

to stop Pfefferberg and ask him how he and his wife

were, and sometimes even gave Poldek an apple

for Mila. In the summer of 1944, Poldek

had appealed to him desperately to extricate

Mila from a trainload of women being sent from

P@lasz@ow to the evil camp at Stutthof on

the Baltic. Mila was already in the lines boarding

the cattle cars when Schreiber came waving a

piece of paper and calling her name. Another time,

a Sunday, he turned up drunk at

Pfefferberg’s barracks and, in front of

Poldek and a few other prisoners, began

to weep for what he called “the dreadful things” he had done in P@lasz@ow. He intended, he said, to expiate them on the Eastern Front. In the end, he would. Now he told Poldek that Schindler had a list and that Poldek should do everything he could to get on it. Poldek went down to the Administration Building to beg Goldberg to add his name and Mila’s to the list. Schindler had in the past year and a half often visited Poldek in the camp garage and had always promised rescue.

Poldek had, however, become such an

accomplished welder that the garage supervisors,

who needed for their lives’ sake to produce

high-standard work, would never let him go. Now

Goldberg sat with his hand on the list—he had

already added his own name to it—and this old friend of

Oskar’s, once a frequent guest in the apartment

in Straszewskiego, expected to have himself

written down for sentiment’s sake. “Do you have

any diamonds?” Goldberg asked

Pfefferberg.

“Are you serious?” asked Poldek.

“For this list,” said Goldberg, a man of

prodigious and accidental power, “it takes diamonds.”

Now that the Viennese music lover Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth was in prison, the Rosner brothers, musicians to the court, were free to work their way onto the list. Dolek Horowitz also, who had earlier got his wife and children out to Emalia, now persuaded Goldberg to include him, his wife, his son, his young daughter. Horowitz had always worked in the central warehouse of P@lasz@ow and had managed to put some small treasure away. Now it was paid to Marcel Goldberg.

Among those included in the list were the Bejski brothers, Uri and Moshe, officially described as machine fitter and draftsman. Uri had a knowledge of weapons, and Moshe a gift for forging documents. The circumstances of the list are so clouded that it is not possible to say whether they were included for these talents or not. Josef Bau, the ceremonious bridegroom, would at some stage be included, but without his knowing it. It suited Goldberg to keep everyone in the dark about the list. Given his nature, it is possible to assume that if Bau made any personal approach to Goldberg it could only have been on the basis that his mother, his wife, himself should all be included. He would not find out until too late that he alone would be listed for Brinnlitz. As for Stern, the Herr Direktor had included him from the beginning. Stern was the only father confessor Oskar ever had, and Stern’s suggestions had a great authority with him. Since October 1, no Jewish prisoner had been allowed out of P@lasz@ow either to march to the cable factory or for any other purpose. At the same time, the trusties in the Polish prison had begun to put guards on the barracks to stop Jewish prisoners from trading with the Poles for bread. The price of illegal bread reached a level it would be hard to express in z@loty. In the past you could have bought a loaf for your second coat, 250 gm. for a clean undershirt. Now—as with Goldberg—it took diamonds. During the first week of October, Oskar and Bankier visited P@lasz@ow for some reason and went as usual to see Stern in the Construction Office. Stern’s desk was down the hallway from the vanished Amon’s office. It was possible to speak more freely here than ever before. Stern told Schindler about the inflated price of rye bread. Oskar turned to Bankier. “Make sure

Weichert gets fifty thousand z@loty,”

murmured Oskar.

Dr. Michael Weichert was chairman of the former Jewish Communal Self-Help, now renamed Jewish Relief Office. He and his office were permitted to operate for cosmetic reasons and, in part, because of Weichert’s powerful connections in the German Red Cross. Though many Polish Jews within the camps would treat him with understandable suspicion, and though this suspicion would bring him to trial after the war—he would be exonerated—Weichert was exactly the man to find 50,000 z@l. worth of bread quickly and introduce it into P@lasz@ow.

The conversation of Stern and Oskar moved on. The 50,000 z@loty were a mere obiter dicta of their talk about the unsettled times and about how Amon might be enjoying his cell in Breslau. Later in the week black-market bread from town was smuggled into camp hidden beneath cargoes of cloth, coal, or scrap iron. Within a day, the price had fallen to its accustomed level.

It was a nice case of connivance between Oskar and Stern, and would be followed by other instances.

CHAPTER 32

At least one of the Emalia people crossed off by Goldberg to make room for others—for relatives, Zionists, specialists, or payers—would blame Oskar for it. In 1963, the Martin Buber Society would receive a pitiable letter from a New Yorker, a former Emalia prisoner. In Emalia, he said, Oskar had promised deliverance. In return, the people had made him wealthy with their labor. Yet some found themselves off the edge of the list. This man saw his own omission as a very personal betrayal and—with all the fury of someone who has been made to travel through the flames to pay for another man’s lie—blamed Oskar for all that had happened afterward: for Gr@oss-Rosen, and for the frightful cliff at Mauthausen from which prisoners were thrown, and last of all for the death march with which the war would end. Strangely, the letter, radiant with just anger, shows most graphically that life on the list was a feasible matter, while life off it was unutterable. But it seems unjust to condemn Oskar for Goldberg’s fiddling with names. The camp authorities would, in the chaos of those last days, sign any list Goldberg gave them as long as it did not exceed too drastically the 1,100 prisoners Oskar had been granted. Oskar himself could not police Goldberg by the hour. His own day was spent speaking to bureaucrats, his evenings in buttering them up.

He had, for example, to receive shipment authorizations for his Hilo machines and metal presses from old friends in the office of General Schindler, some of whom delayed the paperwork, finding small problems which could confound the idea of Oskar’s salvage of his 1,100.

One of these Inspectorate men had raised the problem that Oskar’s armament machines had come to him by way of the procurement section of the Berlin Inspectorate, and under approval from its licensing section, specifically for use in Poland. Neither of these sections had been notified of the proposed move to Moravia. They would need to be. It could be a month before they gave their authorization. Oskar did not have a month. P@lasz@ow would be empty by the end of October;

everyone would be in Gr@oss-Rosen or

Auschwitz. In the end, the problem was

cleared away by the accustomed gifts.

As well as such preoccupations, Oskar was concerned about the SS investigators who had arrested Amon. He half-expected to be arrested or—which was the same thing—heavily interrogated about his relationship with the former Commandant. He was wise to anticipate it, for one of the explanations Amon had offered for the 80,000 RM. the SS had found among his belongings was “Oskar Schindler gave it to me so I’d go easy on the Jews.” Oskar therefore had to keep in contact with friends of his at Pomorska Street who might be able to tell him the direction Bureau V’s investigation of Amon was taking. Finally, since his camp at Brinnlitz would be under the ultimate supervision of KL

Gr@oss-Rosen, he was already dealing with the Commandant of Gr@oss-Rosen, Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck. Under Hassebroeck’s management, 100,000 would die in the Gr@oss-Rosen system, but when Oskar conferred with him on the telephone and drove across into Lower Silesia to meet him, he seemed the least of all Oskar’s worries. Schindler was used by now to meeting charming killers and noticed that Hassebroeck even seemed grateful to him for extending the Gr@oss-Rosen empire into Moravia. For Hassebroeck did think in terms of empire. He controlled one hundred and three subcamps. (brinnlitz would be one hundred and four and—with its more than 1,000

inmates and its sophisticated industry—a major addition.) Seventy-eight of Hassebroeck’s camps were located in Poland, sixteen in Czechoslovakia, ten in the Reich. It was much bigger cheese than anything Amon had managed. With so much sweetening, cajoling, and form-filling to occupy him in the week P@lasz@ow was wound down, Oskar could not have found the time to monitor Goldberg, even if he had had the power. In any case, the account the prisoners give of the camp in its last day and night is one of milling and chaos, Goldberg—Lord of the Lists—

at its center, still holding out for offers.

Dr. Idek Schindel, for example, approached Goldberg to get himself and his two young brothers into Brinnlitz. Goldberg would not give an answer, and Schindel would not find out until the evening of October 15, when the male prisoners were marshaled for the cattle cars, that he and his brothers were not listed for the Schindler camp. They joined the line of Schindler people anyway. It is a scene from a cautionary engraving of Judgment Day—the ones without the right mark attempting to creep onto the line of the justified and being spotted by an angel of retribution, in this case Oberscharf@uhrer M‘uller, who came up to the doctor with his whip and slapped him, left cheek, right cheek, left and right again with the leather butt, while asking amusedly, “Why would you want to get on that line?”

Schindel would be made to stay on with the small

party involved in liquidating P@lasz@ow and would

then travel with a carload of sick women

to Auschwitz. They would be placed in a hut in

some corner of Birkenau and left to die. Yet

most of them, overlooked by camp officials and

exempt from the usual regimen of the place, would

live. Schindel himself would be sent

to Flossenburg and then—with his brothers—on a

death march. He would survive by a layer of skin,

but the youngest Schindel boy would be shot on the march

on the next-to-last day of the war. That is an

image of the way the Schindler list, without any

malice on Oskar’s side, with adequate

malice on Goldberg’s, still tantalizes

survivors, and tantalized them in those

desperate October days.

Everyone has a story about the list. Henry

Rosner lined up with the Schindler people, but an NCO

spotted his violin and, knowing that Amon would

require music should he be released from prison,

sent Rosner back. Rosner then hid his violin

under his coat, against his side, tucking the node of the

sound post under his armpit. He lined up again and was

let through to the Schindler cars. Rosner had been

one of those to whom Oskar had made promises, and

so had always been on the list. It was the same with the

Jereths: old Mr. Jereth of the box factory

and Mrs. Chaja Jereth, described in the list

inexactly and hopefully as a

Metallarbeiterin—a metalworker. The

Perlmans were also on as old Emalia hands, and the Levartovs as well. In fact, in spite of Goldberg, Oskar got for the most part the people he had asked for, though there may have been some surprises among them. A man as worldly as Oskar could not have been amazed to find Goldberg himself among the inhabitants of Brinnlitz. But there were more welcome additions than that. Poldek Pfefferberg, for example, accidentally overlooked and rejected by Goldberg for lack of diamonds, let it be known that he wanted to buy vodka—he could pay in clothing or bread. When he’d acquired the bottle, he got permission to take it down to the orderly building in Jerozolimska where Schreiber was on duty. He gave Schreiber the bottle and pleaded with him to force Goldberg to include Mila and himself. “Schindler,” he said, “would have written us down if he’d remembered.” Poldek had no doubt that he was negotiating for his life.