NED KELLY AND THE CITY OF BEES THOMAS KENEALLY was born in 1935 and was educated in Sydney, Australia. In addition to Schindler�s List, which won the Booker Prize and the L.a. Times Book Award for fiction, his books include To Asmara, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, and Flying Hero Class, which was shortlisted for the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award. He presently teaches in the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine, where he holds a Distinguished Professorship. He is also Chairman of the Australian Republican Movement, which seeks to end Australia�s constitutional connections with Great Britain.

TO THE MEMORY OF

OSKAR SCHINDLER,

AND TO LEOPOLD PFEFFERBERG,

WHO BY ZEAL AND PERSISTENCE

CAUSED THIS BOOK

TO BE WRITTEN

SCHINDLER�S LIST

AUTHOR�S NOTE

In 1980 I visited a luggage store in

Beverly Hills, California, and inquired the

prices of briefcases. The store belonged

to Leopold Pfefferberg, a Schindler

survivor. It was beneath Pfefferberg�s shelves of

imported Italian leather goods that I first heard

of Oskar Schindler, the German bon

vivant, speculator, charmer, and sign of

contradiction, and of his salvage of a cross section of a condemned race during those years now known by the generic name Holocaust.

This account of Oskar�s astonishing history is based in the first place on interviews with 50 Schindler survivors from seven nations�

Australia, Israel, West Germany, Austria, the United States, Argentina, and Brazil. It is enriched by a visit, in the company of Leopold Pfefferberg, to locations that prominently figure in the book: Cracow, Oskar�s adopted city; P@lasz@ow, the scene of Amon Goeth�s foul labor c& Lipowa Street, Zablocie, where Oskar�s factory still stands; Auschwitz-Birkenau, from which Oskar extracted his women prisoners. But the narration depends also on documentary and other information

supplied by those few wartime associates of Oskar�s who can still be reached, as well as by the large body of his postwar friends. Many of the plentiful testimonies regarding Oskar deposited by Schindler Jews at Yad Vashem, The Martyrs� and Heroes�

Remembrance Authority, further enriched the record, as did written testimonies from private sources and a body of Schindler papers and letters, some supplied by Yad Vashem, some by Oskar�s friends.

To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course that has frequently been followed in modern writing. It is the one I chose to follow here�both because the novelist�s craft is the only one I can lay claim to, and because the novel�s techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar. I have attempted, however, to avoid all fiction, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar�s stature. It has sometimes been necessary to make reasonable constructs of conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. But most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindlerjuden (schindler Jews), of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar�s acts of outrageous rescue.

I would like to thank first three Schindler survivors�Leopold Pfefferberg, Justice Moshe Bejski of the Israeli Supreme Court, and Mieczyslaw Pemper�who not only passed on their memories of Oskar to the author and gave him certain documents which have contributed to the accuracy of the narrative, but also read the early draft of the book and suggested corrections.

Many others, whether Schindler survivors or Oskar�s postwar associates, gave interviews and generously contributed information through letters and documents. These include Frau Emilie Schindler, Mrs. Ludmila Pfefferberg, Dr. Sophia Stern, Mrs. Helen Horowitz, Dr. Jonas Dresner, Mr. and Mrs. Henry and Mariana Rosner, Leopold Rosner, Dr. Alex Rosner, Dr. Idek Schindel, Dr. Danuta Schindel, Mrs. Regina Horowitz, Mrs. Bronislawa Karakulska, Mr. Richard Horowitz, Mr. Shmuel Springmann, the late Mr. Jakob Sternberg, Mr. Jerzy Sternberg, Mr. and Mrs. Lewis Fagen, Mr. Henry Kinstlinger, Mrs. Rebecca Bau, Mr. Edward Heuberger, Mr. and Mrs. M. Hirschfeld, Mr. and Mrs. Irving Glovin, and many others. In my home city, Mr. and Mrs. E. Korn not only gave of their memories of Oskar but were a constant support. At Yad Vashem, Dr. Josef Kermisz, Dr. Shmuel Krakowski, Vera Prausnitz, Chana Abells, and Hadassah M�odlinger provided generous access to the testimonies of Schindler survivors and to video and photographic material.

Lastly, I would like to honor the efforts which the late Mr. Martin Gosch expended on bringing the name of Oskar Schindler to the world�s notice, and to signify my thanks to his widow, Mrs. Lucille Gaynes, for her cooperation with this project. Through the assistance of all these people, Oskar Schindler�s astonishing history appears for the first time in extended form.

CHAPTER 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In what then he assumed was the last lap, Oskar passed Henkelmann and both the DKW�S, crossed the line and slowed. There must have been some deceptive sign from officials, because the crowd also believed the race was over. By the time Oskar knew it wasn�t�that he had made some amateur mistake�Walfried Winkler and Mita Vychodil had passed him, and even the exhausted Henkelmann was able to nudge him out of third place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

When his mother died, he rushed back to Zwittau and stood beside his aunts; his sister, Elfriede; and his wife, Emilie, on one side of the grave, while treacherous Hans stood solitary� except, of course, for the parish priest�at the head of the coffin. Louisa�s death had consecrated the enmity between Oskar and Hans. Oskar couldn�t see it�only the women could�that Hans and Oskar were in fact two brothers separated by the accident of paternity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 15

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

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

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

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

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

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

Schindler noticed too that in Wegierska

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the corner of Plac Zgody (peace

Square) stood an Apotheke run

by Tadeus Pankiewicz. It was a pharmacy in

the old style. Porcelain amphoras with the

Latin names of ancient remedies marked on them,

and a few hundred delicate and highly varnished

drawers, hid the complexity of the pharmacopoeia

from the citizens of Podg@orze. Magister

Pankiewicz lived above the shop by permission of the

authorities and at the request of the doctors in

the ghetto clinics. He was the only Pole

permitted to remain within the ghetto walls. He was

a quiet man in his early forties and had

intellectual interests. The Polish

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

been able to see into Plac Zgody. But

Pankiewicz in the square, like Schindler on the

hill, had never witnessed such dispassionate

horror. Like Oskar, he was plagued by nausea,

and his ears were full of an unreal sibilance, as

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

confused by the mass of noise and savagery, he

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

friends Gebirtig, composer of that famed song

�Burn City, Burn,� and gentle Neumann

the artist. Doctors began to stumble into the

pharmacy, panting, having run the two

blocks from the hospital. They wanted bandages

--they had dragged the wounded in from the streets. A doctor came in and asked for emetics. For in the crowd a dozen people were gagging or comatose from swallowing cyanide. An engineer Pankiewicz knew had slipped it into his mouth when his wife wasn�t looking.

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

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

Taking off his surgical coat, Dr.

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

He moved around the periphery of the square and she

saw him. Don�t call out, he wanted

to say; I�ll work it out. He didn�t want

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER 16

The SS kept at work in the ghetto until

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

of information. He knew, for example, that the

Aktion had been under the overall management of

one Wilhelm Kunde but had been led by SS

Obersturmf@uhrer Otto von

Mallotke. Oskar kept no dossier, but he

was preparing for another era when he would make a

full report to either Canaris or the world. It would

be made earlier than he expected. For the moment,

he inquired after matters which he had in the past

treated as temporary lunacies. He got his

hard news from police contacts, but also from

clearheaded Jews like Stern. Intelligence from

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

through Pankiewicz� pharmacy, by the partisans of the

People�s Army. Dolek Liebeskind, leader of the

Akiva Halutz Resistance Group, also

brought in information from other ghettos as a result of

his official traveling job with the Jewish

Communal Self-Help, an organization which the

Germans�with half an eye on the Red Cross

--permitted to exist.

It was no use bringing such tidings to the

Judenrat. The Judenrat Council did

not consider it civilly advisable to tell the

ghetto dwellers anything about the camps. People would

merely be distressed; there would be disorder in the

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

better to let people hear wild rumors, decide

they were exaggerated, fall back on

hope. This had been the attitude of most

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

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

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

hair had silvered. All the Cracow people who had

been rounded up in early June had been taken

nearly to Russia, he said, to the camp of

Bel@zec. When the trains arrived at the

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

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

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

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

Crematoria were under construction, lest

old-fashioned means of disposal of corpses

put a brake on the new killing method. The

same company involved in Bel@zec had installed

identical facilities at Sobibor, also in

the Lublin district. Bids had been accepted,

and construction was well advanced, for a similar

installation at Treblinka, near Warsaw. And

chambers and ovens were both in operation at the

Auschwitz main camp and at the vast

Auschwitz II camp a few kilometers

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

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

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

KONZENTRATIONSLAGER AUSCHWITZ.�

Bosko himself was lanky, thinner than Oskar.

Gruff-voiced, and like him a German Czech.

His family, like Oskar�s, was conservative and

looked to the old Germanic values. He had,

for a brief season, felt a pan-Germanic

anticipation at the rise of Hitler, exactly

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

God knew what her bricked-up secret

space had cost her�maybe 5,000 z@l.,

maybe 10,000.

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

Dresner. If there was an Aktion, Mrs.

Dresner could bring Danka and come herself. Therefore,

on the morning Danka and Mrs. Dresner heard

from around the corner of Dabrowski the startling

noise, the bark of Dalmatians and

Dobermans, the megaphoned roaring of

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

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

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

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

Dresner explained that she was scarcely obese,

that the Aktion seemed to be concentrating on this

side of Lw@owska Street, and that she had

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

a reliable girl, said Mrs. Dresner, but she

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

by measuring the wall with your eyes that four people could

fit abreast in the cavity. But shots from two

blocks distant swept away the last of the

woman�s reason. �I can fit the girl!� she

screamed. �I want you to go!�

Mrs. Dresner turned to Danka and told

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

�The girl can come whenever she wishes,� she said. That is, I didn�t exclude you out of cowardice, but as a matter of policy. And the policy stands. You can�t be accepted, but the girl can.

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

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

Dresner would attempt to survive on that basis

--the economic one, the putative value of her strength to the Armaments Inspectorate or to some other wing of the war effort. She wasn�t confident of the idea. These days anyone with half a grasp on truth could tell that the SS believed the death of the socially unappeasable Jew outbalanced any value he might have as an item of labor. And the question is, in such an era, Who saves Juda Dresner, factory purchasing officer? Who saves Janek Dresner, auto

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

While the OD man was arranging Mrs.

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

Gusta Dranger and their colleagues to run against

the ancient pacifism of the ghetto, to convert it

to universal rebellion. They bombed the

SS�-ONLY Bagatella Cinema in

Karmelicka Street. In the dark, Leni

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

The ZOB would in a few months sink patrol

boats on the Vistula, fire-bomb sundry

military garages throughout the city, arrange

Passierscheins for people who were not supposed to have

them, smuggle passport photographs out

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

papers, derail the elegant Army-only train

that ran between Cracow and Bochnia, and get their

underground newspaper into circulation. They would also

arrange for two of OD Chief Spira�s

lieutenants, Spitz and Forster, who

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

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

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

CHAPTER 17

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

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

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

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

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

Rahamim maher [urgent help] is much

needed. Please keep in touch.�

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

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

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

It meant that someone�Itzhak Stern, the

businessman Ginter, Dr. Alexander Biberstein

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

Dr. Sedlacek had a friend in the Cracow

garrison, a fellow Viennese, a patient

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

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

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

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

�You mean,� said Dr. Sedlacek, �that you�re concerned my principals won�t believe you?�

Schindler said, �Since I scarcely believe

it myself.� He rose, went to the liquor

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

Even among Sedlacek�s own small cell,

his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not

imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite

so systematic. Not only was the story

Schindler told him startling simply in moral

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

desperate battle, the National Socialists

would devote thousands of men, the resources of

precious railroads, an enormous cubic

footage of cargo space, expensive

techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their

research-and-development scientists, a

substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of

automatic weapons, whole magazines of

ammunition, all to an extermination which had no

military or economic meaning but merely a

psychological one. Dr. Sedlacek had

expected mere horror stories�hunger,

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

Oskar�s summary of events in Poland convinced

Sedlacek precisely because of the sort of man

Oskar was. He had done well from the

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

a brandy snifter in his hand. There were both an

impressive surface calm and a fundamental

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

regret, found it impossible to disbelieve the

worst. He showed no tendency to be

extravagant in the facts he relayed.

If I can arrange your visa, said

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

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

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

Dr. Sedlacek asked him about the other names

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

instance, stood a Cracow dentist. Dentists were

always easy to visit, said Sedlacek, since

everyone on earth has at least one bona fide

cavity. No, said Herr Schindler. Don�t

visit this man. He�s been compromised

by the SS.

Before he left Cracow to return to Mr.

Springmann in Budapest, Dr. Sedlacek

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

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

Dresner would in time come to know Herr Oskar Schindler, was a jeweler by trade. Now, late in the year, he was visited at home by one of Spira�s political OD. This wasn�t trouble, the OD man said. Certainly Wulkan had a record. A year before, he had been picked up by the OD for selling currency on the black market. When he had refused to work as an agent for the Currency Control Bureau, he had been beaten up by the SS, and Mrs. Wulkan had had to visit Wachtmeister Beck in the ghetto police office and pay a bribe for his release.

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

Zionist. The SS, he told Wulkan,

urgently needed four jewelers. Symche

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

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

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

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

At first they picked up individual pieces

tentatively, but then worked faster as old

professional habits asserted themselves. As the

gold and jewelry went into their piles, the SS

men loaded the stuff into its appropriate

crate. Every time a crate was filled, it was

labeled in black paint�SS

REICHSF@UHRER BERLIN. The SS

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

treasures of the Technical Academy. After they

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

had been converted to a silver warehouse. The

lubrication pits were filled to spilling over with

solid silver�rings, pendants, Passover

platters, yad pointers, breastplates,

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

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

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

CHAPTER 18

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

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

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

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

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

Vernichtungslager:

Extermination Camp.

In the past few weeks, said Oskar, some

2,000 Cracow ghetto dwellers had been

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

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

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

police for Cracow, Julian Scherner and

Rolf Czurda, whereas the

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

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

he explained. Little Mr. Springmann rose and came to his elbow. �The Pannonia isn�t so bad,� he told Oskar in a low voice. �It�s the Victoria that�s the Gestapo hotbed.�

Schindler surveyed the hallway once more, closed the door, and returned across the room. He stood by the windows and continued his grim report. The forced-labor camps would be run by men appointed for their severity and efficiency in clearing the ghettos. There would be sporadic murders and beatings, and there would certainly be corruption involving food and therefore short rations for the prisoners. But that was preferable to the assured death of the Vernichtungslagers. People in the labor camps could get access to extra comforts, and individuals could be taken out and smuggled to Hungary. These SS men are as corruptible as any other police force, then? the gentleman of the Budapest rescue committee asked Oskar. �In my experience,� growled Oskar, �there isn�t one of them who isn�t.�

When Oskar finished, there was, of course,

silence. Kastner and Springmann were not readily

astounded. All their lives they�d lived under the

intimidation of the Secret Police. Their

present activities were both vaguely

suspected by the Hungarian police�rendered

safe only by Samu�s contacts and bribes�and

at the same time disdained by respectable

Jewry. Samuel Stern, for example,

president of the Jewish Council, member of the

Hungarian Senate, would dismiss this afternoon�s

report by Oskar Schindler as pernicious

fantasy, an insult to German culture, a

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

So it was not that Springmann and Kastner were

unmanned by Schindler�s testimony as much as that

their minds were painfully expanding. Their resources

seemed minute now that they knew what they were set

against�not just any average and predictable

Philistine giant, but Behemoth itself. Perhaps

already they were reaching for the idea that as well as

individual bargaining�some extra food for this

camp, rescue for this intellectual, a bribe

to temper the professional ardor of this SS man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

�Yes.�

�I don�t think you ought to use men like that,� said Oskar. �He�s a thief.�

Dr. Sedlacek turned his face, and its

half-smile, away.

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

�We let him keep a percentage,� said

Dr. Sedlacek.

Oskar thought about it for a full half-minute. Then he murmured, �I don�t want a damned percentage. I don�t want to be offered one.� �Very well,� said Sedlacek.

�Let�s watch the girls,� said Oskar.

CHAPTER 19

Even as Oskar Schindler returned by freight

car from Budapest, where he�d predicted that the

ghetto would soon be closed, an SS

Untersturmf@uhrer named Amon Goeth was

on his way from Lublin to bring about that liquidation,

and to take command of the resultant Forced Labor

Camp (Zwangsarbeitslager) at

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

than Schindler, but shared more with him than the mere

year of birth. Like Oskar he had been raised a

Catholic and had ceased observing the rites of the

Church as late as 1938, when his first marriage

had broken up. Like Oskar too, he had

graduated from high school in the

Realgymnasium�Engineering, Physics,

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

Socialist Party early, in 1930. When the

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

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

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

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

escaped earlier Aktionen or had been

previously employed in industry. But new

identification cards had been issued since then,

with appropriate initials�either W for Army

employees, Z for employees of the civil

authorities, or R for workers in essential

industries. The inhabitants of Ghetto B

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

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

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

Bosch, Madritsch, Beckmann, the

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

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

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

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

They passed on the right a synagogue and its mortuary buildings, and a half-tumbled wall showed gravestones like teeth in the cruelly exposed mouth of winter. Part of the campsite had been until this month a Jewish cemetery. �Quite extensive,� said Wilhelm Kunde. The Herr Commandant uttered a witticism which would come to his lips often during his residency at P@lasz@ow. �They won�t have to go far to get buried.�

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

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

cemetery, and folded between two hills. It was in

this weather two pages of a largely blank book

opened and held at an angle, sideways, to the

observer on the fort hill. A gray, stone

country dwelling was stuck at the entrance to the

valley, and past it, along the far slope and

among the few finished barracks, moved teams of

women, black as bunches of musical

notations, in the strange darkling luminescence of a

snowy evening. Emerging from the icy alleys beyond

Jerozolimska, they toiled up the white slope

under the urgings of Ukrainian guards and dropped

the sections of frames where the SS engineers,

wearing homburgs and civilian clothes,

instructed them.

Their rate of work was a limitation,

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

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

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

The meeting with the local factory owners and

Treuh@anders took place in Julian

Scherner�s office in central Cracow early the

following day. Amon Goeth arrived smiling

fraternally and, in his freshly tailored

Waffen SS uniform, designed precisely

for his enormous frame, seemed to dominate the

room. He was sure he could charm the

independents, Bosch and Madritsch and

Schindler, into transferring their Jewish labor

behind camp wire. Besides that, an investigation of the

skills available among the ghetto dwellers

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

a business. There were jewelers, upholsterers,

tailors who could be used for special

enterprises under the Commandant�s direction,

filling orders for the SS, the Wehrmacht, the

wealthy German officialdom. There would be the

clothing workshops of Madritsch, the enamel

factory of Schindler, a proposed metal

plant, a brush factory, a warehouse for

recycling used, damaged, or stained

Wehrmacht uniforms from the Russian

Front, a further warehouse for recycling

Jewish clothing from the ghettos and dispatching it for the

use of bombed-out families at home. He

knew from his experiences of the SS jewelry and

fur warehouses of Lublin, having seen his

superiors at work there and taken his proper cut,

that from most of these prison enterprises he could

expect a personal percentage. He had reached

that happy point in his career at which duty and

financial opportunity coincided. The

convivial SS police chief, Julian

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

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

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

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

Madritsch, who wanted to be inside

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

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

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

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

�You�re building barracks, not the frigging Hotel Europa!�

Now Amon half-smiled at Hujar.

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

Amon could tell, from the way she walked toward

him, the bogus elegance with which her middle-class

parents had raised her, the European manners

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

Poles wouldn�t take her in their universities

--off to Vienna or Milan to give her a

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

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

�You�ve had occasion to quarrel with

Oberscharf@uhrer Hujar,� Goeth told

her as a fact. She nodded firmly. The Herr

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

He called Hujar. The NCO returned

uneasily. He thought he was going to be told

to take the girl�s advice. The girl did

too. Shoot her, Amon told Hujar. There

was, of course, a pause while Hujar

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

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

Apart from these considerations, the shooting of this

Diana Reiter, the cancelling of her Western

European diploma, had this practical

value: that no erector of huts or roads in

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

CHAPTER 20

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

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

But from the evidence of Stern and others it is

obvious that, from the time of their earlier contacts,

Oskar abominated Goeth as a man who went to the

work of murder as calmly as a clerk goes to his

office. Oskar could speak to Amon the

administrator, Amon the speculator, but

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

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

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

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

said Schindler piously. He didn�t want to inconvenience the Commandant, but he would be grateful, and he was sure the Armaments Inspectorate would also be grateful, if DEF

were permitted to stay in its present location.

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

All I can tell them, said Oskar, is not

to resist.

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

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

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

On the ghetto�s last morning�a

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

Amon took a pull of cognac while he

waited there for the middle-aged

Sturmbannf@uhrer Willi Haase, who

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

history. There had been for more than seven

centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening�

or at least by tomorrow�those seven centuries would have

become a rumor, and Cracow would be

judenrein (clean of Jews). And every petty

SS official wanted to be able to say that he had

seen it happen. Even Unkelbach, the

Treuh@ander of the Progress cutlery

factory, having some sort of reserve SS

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

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

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

happened at the epidemic hospital near

Plac Zgody. An SS detachment under

Oberscharf@uhrer Albert Hujar had

entered the hospital to close it down and had found

Dr. Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of

her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients,

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

children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet

fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for

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

tuberculosis cases were simply too sick

to walk out.

Since scarlet fever is an adolescent

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

Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some

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

delirium, were executed in a rage of

automatic fire. When Hujar�s squad had

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

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

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

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

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

Hydrocyanic acid. One appealing concept:

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

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

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

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

At dawn the nurse, a calm woman about

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

morning report. The young man was resting well, but

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

state of anxiety. The musician and the

anal-fistula case had both had a painful

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

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

Out there on the balcony he heard the first

noise. It began early and came from the eastern

end of the ghetto. The Raus, raus! of

megaphones, the customary lie about baggage which

some people still chose to believe. In the deserted

streets, and among the tenements in which no one

moved, you could hear all the way from the cobblestones

of Plac Zgody and up by the river in

Nadwi@slanska Street an indefinite

terror-sick murmur which made H himself tremble.

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

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

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

�Well,� said Dr. B, displaying the

bottle briefly to H. The word was

nearly obscured by a woman�s screaming and

ranting official orders from the far end of

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

nurse. �Give each patient forty drops in

water.� �Forty drops,� she repeated. She

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

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

�Please, Roman,� said the doctor, meaning that the old man should unclench his body. He believed the Sonderkommando was coming within the hour. Dr. H felt, but resisted, a temptation to let him in on the secret. Dr. B had been liberal with the dosage. A few seconds of breathlessness and a minor amazement would be no new or intolerable sensation to old Roman. When the nurse came with four medicine glasses, none of them even asked her what she was bringing them. Dr. H would never know if any of them understood. He turned away and looked at his watch. He feared that when they drank it, some noise would begin, something worse than the normal hospital gasps and gaggings. He heard the nurse murmuring, �Here�s something for you.� He heard an intake of breath. He didn�t know if it was patient or nurse. The woman is the hero of this, he thought.

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

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

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

CHAPTER 21

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

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

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

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

H, had also mentioned the sewers recently as an

escape route which might not be guarded on the day the

Sonderkommando moved in. The thing would be

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

doctor�s house was mere meters from a manhole

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

tunnel, which brought you beneath the streets of

nonghetto Podg@orze to an outlet on the

embankment of the Vistula near the Zatorska

Street canal. Yesterday Dr. H had given

him the definite news. The doctor and his wife

would attempt the sewer exit, and the Pfefferbergs

were welcome to join them. Poldek could not at that

stage commit Mila and himself. Mila had a fear,

a reasonable one, that the SS might flood the

sewers with gas or might resolve the matter

anyhow by arriving early at the Pfefferbergs�

room at the far end of J@ozefi@nska

Street.

It was a slow, tense day up in the attic

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

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

Please, said Mila. But he soothed her.

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

He went down the back stairs and into the yard

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

open street until he�d reached the Labor

Office. There he risked crossing the broad

carriageway, entering the warrens of the triangular

block of houses opposite, meeting occasional

groups of confused men conveying rumors and discussing

options in kitchens, sheds, yards, and

corridors. He came out into Krakusa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth said, �We�re

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

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

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

wife and son. Wulkan had been working these past

months in the Progress factory and, knowing what

was to happen, had approached Treuh@ander

Unkelbach with a large diamond concealed for two

years in the lining of a coat. �Herr

Unkelbach,� he told the supervisor,

�I�ll go wherever I�m sent, but my wife

isn�t up to all that noise and violence.�

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

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

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

Wulkan gave it up and returned to his wife. She kept saying, �Why don�t you talk to him?

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

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

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

CHAPTER 22

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

found out from the prisoners that

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

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

to decorate the houses of the SS, the few small

country villas that flanked the lane on the north

side of the camp. Like any especially valued

artisan he had more freedom of movement, and one

afternoon that spring he had been walking from the villa of

Untersturmf@uhrer Leo John up the

track toward the hill called Chujowa

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

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

Now living in Vienna, the man does

not want his real name used.

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

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

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

The idea amused the engineer. Where would you put them, old man? he asked. You don�t have much room.

If I can acquire the space, said Oskar,

would you write a supporting letter?

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

generals approve,� he said, �you can expect my cooperation. As long as you don�t want my musicians or my maid.�

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

The requirements of Obergruppenf@uhrer

Friedrich-Wilhelm Kr@uger, police chief

of the Government General and superior of Scherner

and Czurda, were based on the regulations set

down by the Concentration Camp Section of General

Oswald Pohl�s SS Main

Administrative and Economic Office, even

though as yet P@lasz@ow was run independently

of Pohl�s bureau. The basic stipulations for

an SS Forced Labor Subcamp involved the

erection of fences nine feet tall, of

watchtowers at given intervals according to the length of the

camp perimeter, of latrines, barracks, a

clinic, a dental office, a bathhouse and

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

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

Dr. Alexander Biberstein, now a

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

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

�Who wants this piece? Who wants this one?� At midday a soup was distributed�

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

That spring, it was not only the police chiefs

of the Cracow region whom Oskar had to talk

to. He went into his backyard, persuading the

neighbors. Beyond the two shabby huts constructed

of Jereth�s pineboard, he came to the radiator

factory run by Kurt Hoderman. It

employed a horde of Poles and about

100 P@lasz@ow inmates. In the other

direction was Jereth�s box factory,

supervised by the German engineer Kuhnpast. Since the P@lasz@ow people were such a small part of their staff, they didn�t take to the idea with any passion, but they weren�t against it. For Oskar was offering to house their Jews 50 meters from work instead of 5

kilometers.

Next Oskar moved out into the neighborhood

to talk to engineer Schmilewski at the

Wehrmacht garrison office a few streets

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

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

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

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

of a young engineer named Adam Garde. Garde was still

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

leaving instructions for the barracks builders, would be

marched under individual guard from P@lasz@ow

to Lipowa Street to supervise the setting up of

Oskar�s compound. When Garde first turned up in

Zablocie, he found two rudimentary huts

already occupied by close to 400 prisoners. There

was a fence patrolled by an SS squad, but the

inmates told Garde that Oskar did not let the

SS into the encampment or onto the factory

floor, except, of course, when senior

inspectors came to look over the place.

Oskar, they said, kept the small SS

garrison of the Emalia factory well

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

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

Oskar asked him to come up to the office and look

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

people. The cookhouse at this end, the SS barracks

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

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

One prisoner, one guard, he observed.

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

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

�firemen,� as they were called. Symche Spira, recently the Napoleon of the ghetto, still lived there and spent each day supervising the searching out and the digging up of the diamonds, gold, and cash hidden away and unrecorded by people who were now ashes on the pine needles of Bel@zec. In P@lasz@ow, however, Spira had no power, the center of prison power being Chilowicz. No one knew where Chilowicz� authority came from. Perhaps Willi Kunde had mentioned his name to Amon; perhaps Amon had recognized and liked his style. But all at once, here he was chief of firemen in P@lasz@ow, handerout of the caps and armbands of authority in that debased kingdom and, like Symche, limited enough in imagination to equate his power with that of tsars. Goeth approached Chilowicz and said that he had better send Adam Garde to Schindler full-time and get it over with. We have engineers to burn, said Goeth with distaste. He meant that engineering had been a soft option for Jews who weren�t allowed into the medical faculties of the Polish universities. First, though, said Amon, before he goes to Emalia, he has to finish the work on my conservatory.

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

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

beam was lifted to its place in the rooftree of

Amon�s conservatory. As he worked, Adam

Garde could hear the Commandant�s two dogs, named

Rolf and Ralf, names from a newspaper cartoon

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

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

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

CHAPTER 23

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

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

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

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

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

The Emalia camp had no resident commandant

to tyrannize the inmates. There were no permanent

guards. The garrison was changed every two days,

two truckloads of SS and Ukrainians coming

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

security of the subcamp. The P@lasz@ow

soldiers liked their occasional duty at

Emalia. The Herr Direktor�s

kitchens, more primitive even than

P@lasz@ow�s, turned out better meals.

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

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

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

Joint Distribution Committee, he spent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She had an excellent jacket of her own and

bought a lacquered straw hat with a veil. She

made up her face, achieving a dark radiance

appropriate to a woman living beyond threat. In

the mirror she looked like her prewar

self, an elegant Cracovienne of exotic

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

gatehouse did not even recognize her. He

let her inside while he rang Miss

Klonowska, the Herr Direktor�s

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

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

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

leaned forward. For a second it seemed

ridiculous for her, a girl whose father had paid

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

a pause, to give it all away to a

half-ironic, half-worried

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

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

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

We have an office staff, said Schindler. But mainly we need skills on the factory floor. She was defeated. Half-blind with tears, she wrote her false name and real address�he could do with it whatever he wanted. But on the street she understood and began to revive. Maybe Schindler thought she might be an agent, that she might have been there for entrapment. Just the same, he�d been cold. There hadn�t even been an ambiguous, nonindictable gesture of kindness in the manner in which he�d thrown her out of his office.

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

bribe her way onto the factory floor to see

them. Her father worked dipping the enamel, shoveling

coal, clearing the floor of scrap. �But he

talks again,� said Mrs. Perlman to her

daughter. For in P@lasz@ow he�d gone

silent.

In fact, despite the drafty huts, the

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

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

Then there was a campaign to get Rabbi

Menasha Levartov, masquerading as a

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

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

Amon Goeth�s camp now held more than

30,000 people. On the near side of the

Appellplatz, near the Jewish

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

grades to the rank of Hauptsturmf@uhrer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days had passed, Stern told

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

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

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

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

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

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

Privately, he murmured the Shema

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

Goeth began cursing prosaically.

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

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

the firing pins are filed down,

Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth will fall

back on more primitive weapons.

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

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

When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory subcamp in the summer of �43, he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler�s little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov operated a lathe, Schindler would say, �You shouldn�t be here, Rabbi.

You should be preparing for Shabbat.� But when

Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in

the ceremonies, Levartov knew that the Herr

Direktor was not joking. Before dusk

on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his

workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in

the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of

sourly drying laundry, he would recite

Kiddush over a cup of wine among the

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

CHAPTER 24

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

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

Bread shipments from the bakery at P@lasz@ow

to the factory camp in Lipowa Street,

Zablocie, were a few hundred loaves

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

officers from the parent camp, or Lager, paid a

visit to ensure that the energy of the slave laborers

was stimulated in the most radical and exemplary

manner. It is not certain exactly which members

of P@lasz@ow�s senior staff visited

Emalia, but some prisoners and Oskar himself would

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

Goeth it was Leo John, or Scheidt. Or

else Josef Neuschel, Goeth�s

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

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

So Gr@un made the arrest, and the inspectors continued on into other parts of the factory camp. It was someone from the metal hall who rushed up to the Herr Direktor�s office and alerted Schindler. Oskar came roaring down the stairs even faster than on the day Miss Regina Perlman had visited, and reached the yard just as Gr@un was positioning Lamus against the wall. Oskar called out, You can�t do that here. I won�t get work out of my people if you start shooting. I�ve got high-priority war contracts, et cetera. It was the standard Schindler argument and carried the suggestion that there were senior officers known to Oskar to whom Gr@un�s name would be given if he impeded production in Emalia.

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

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

�I don�t see the bottle,� he said. Herr

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

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

CHAPTER 33

This camp, like Emalia, had been equipped at Oskar�s expense. According to the bureaucratic theory, all factory camps were built at the owner�s cost. It was thought that any industrialist got sufficient incentive from the cheap prison labor to justify a small expenditure on wire and lumber. In fact, Germany�s darling industrialists, such as Krupp and Farben, built their camps with materials donated from SS enterprises andwitha wealth of labor lent to them. Oskar was no darling and got nothing. He had been able to pry some wagonloads of SS cement out of Bosch at what Bosch would have considered a discount black-market price. From the same source he got two to three tons of gasoline and fuel oil for use in the production and delivery of his goods. He had brought some of the camp fencing wire from Emalia.

But around the bare premises of the Hoffman annex, he was required to provide hightension fences, latrines, a guard barracks for 100 SS personnel, attached SS offices, a sickroom, and kitchens. Adding to the expense, Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck had already been down from Gr@oss-Rosen for an inspection and gone away with a supply of cognac and porcelainware, and what Oskar described as �tea by the kilogram.�

Hassebroeck had also taken away inspection fees and compulsory Winter Aid contributions levied by Section D, and no receipt had been given. �His car had a considerable capacity for these things,� Oskar would later declare. He had no doubt in October 1944 that Hassebroeck was already doctoring the Brinnlitz books. Inspectors sent directly by Oranienburg had also to be satisfied. As for the goods and equipment of DEF, much of it still in transit, it would require 250 freight cars before it had all arrived. It was astounding, said Oskar, how in a crumbling state, Ostbahn officials could, if properly encouraged, find such a number of rail cars.

And the unique aspect of all this, of Oskar himself, jaunty in his mountain hat, as he emerged from that frosty courtyard, is that unlike Krupp and Farben and all the other entrepreneurs who kept Jewish slaves, he had no serious industrial intention at all. He had no hopes of production; there were no sales graphs in his head. Though four years ago he had come to Cracow to get rich, he now had no manufacturing ambitions left. It was a hectic industrial situation there in Brinnlitz. Many of the presses, drills, and lathes had not yet arrived, and new cement floors would have to be poured to take their weight. The annex was still full of Hoffman�s old machinery. Even so, for these 800

supposed munitions workers who had just moved through the gate, Oskar was paying 7.50 RM. each day per skilled worker, 6 RM. per laborer. This would amount to nearly

$14,000 U.s. each week for male labor; when the women arrived, the bill would top

$18,000. Oskar was therefore committing a grand business folly, but celebrated it in a Tyrolean hat.

Some of Oskar�s attachments had shifted too. Mrs. Emilie Schindler had come from Zwittau to live with him in his downstairs apartment. Brinnlitz, unlike Cracow, was too close to home to permit her to excuse their separation. For a Catholic like her, it was now a matter of either formalizing the rift or living together again. There seemed to be at least a tolerance between them, a thorough mutual respect. At first sight she might have looked like a marital cipher, an abused wife who did not know how to get out. Some of the men wondered at first what she would think when she found the sort of factory Oskar kept, the sort of camp. They did not know yet that Emilie would make her own discrete contribution, that it would be based not on conjugal obedience but on her own ideas. Ingrid had come with Oskar to Brinnlitz to work in the new plant, but she had taken lodgings outside the camp and was there only for office hours. There was a definite cooling in that relationship, and she would never live with Oskar again. But she would show no animosity, and throughout the coming months Oskar would frequently visit her in her apartment. The racy Klonowska, that chic Polish patriot, stayed behind in Cracow, but again there was no apparent bitterness. Oskar would have contact with her during visits to Cracow, and she would again help him when the SS caused trouble. The truth was that though his attachments to Klonowska and Ingrid were winding down in the most fortunate way, without any bitterness, it would have been a mistake to believe that he was turning conjugal.

He told the men, that day of their arrival, that the women could be confidently expected. He believed they would arrive after scarcely more delay than there had been with the men. The women�s journey would, however, be different. After a short trip from P@lasz@ow, their locomotive backed them, with some hundreds of other P@lasz@ow women, through the arched gatehouse of Auschwitz-Birkenau. When the car doors opened, they found themselves in that immense concourse bisecting the camp, and practiced SS men and women, speaking calmly, began to grade them. The sorting of the people went on with a terrifying detachment. When a woman was slow in moving, she was hit with a truncheon, but the blow had no personal edge to it. It was all a matter of getting the numbers through. For the SS sections at the railside of Birkenau, it was all dutiful tedium. They had already heard every plea, every story. They knew every dodge anyone was ever likely to pull.

Under the floodlights, the women numbly asked each other what it meant. But even in their daze, their shoes already filling with the mud that was Birkenau�s element, they were aware of SS women pointing to them, and telling uniformed doctors who showed any interest, �Schindlergruppe!� And the spruce young physicians would turn away and leave them alone for a time.

Feet sticking in the mud, they were marched to the delousing plant and stripped by order of tough young SS women with truncheons in their hands. Mila Pfefferberg was troubled by rumors of the type most prisoners of the Reich had by now heard�that some shower nozzles gave out a killing gas.

These, she was delighted to find, gave mere icy water.

After their wash, some of them expected to be tattooed. They knew as much as that about Auschwitz. The SS tattooed your arm if they wanted to use you. If they intended to feed you into the machine, however, they did not bother. The same train that had brought the women of the list had brought also some 2,000 others who, not being Schindlerfrauen, were put through the normal selections. Rebecca Bau, excluded from the Schindler list, had passed and been given a number, and Josef Bau�s robust mother had also won a tattoo in that preposterous Birkenau lottery. Another P@lasz@ow girl, fifteen years old, had looked at the tattoo she�d been given and been delighted that it had two fives, a three, and two sevens�numbers enshrined in the Tashlag, or Jewish calendar. With a tattoo, you could leave Birkenau and go to one of the Auschwitz labor camps, where there was at least a chance.

But the Schindler women, left untattooed, were told to dress again and taken to a windowless hut in the women�s camp. There, in the center of the floor, stood a sheet-iron stove housed in bricks. It was the only comfort. There were no bunks. The Schindlerfrauen were to sleep two or three to a thin straw pallet. The clay floor was damp, and water would rise from it like a tide and drench the pallets, the ragged blankets. It was a death house at the heart of Birkenau. They lay there and dozed, frozen and uneasy in that enormous acreage of mud.

It confounded their imaginings of an intimate

location, a village in Moravia. This was a

great, if ephemeral, city. On a given day more

than a quarter of a million Poles,

Gypsies, and Jews kept brief residence

here. There were thousands more over in Auschwitz I, the first but smaller camp where Commandant Rudolf H@oss lived. And in the great industrial area named Auschwitz III, some tens of thousands worked while they could. The Schindler women had not been precisely informed of the statistics of Birkenau or of the Auschwitz duchy in itself. They could see, though, beyond birch trees at the western end of the enormous settlement, constant smoke rising from the four crematoria and the numerous pyres. They believed they were adrift now, and that the tide would take them down there. But not with all the capacity for making and believing rumors that characterizes a life in prison would they have guessed how many people could be gassed there on a day when the system worked well. The number was�according to H@oss�nine thousand. The women were equally unaware that they had arrived in Auschwitz at a time when the progress of the war and certain secret negotiations between Himmler and the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte were imposing a new direction on it. The secret of the extermination centers had not been kept, for the Russians had excavated the Lublin camp and found the furnaces containing human bones and more than five hundred drums of Zyklon B.

News of this was published throughout the world, and

Himmler, who wanted to be treated seriously as

obvious postwar successor to the F@uhrer, was

willing to make promises to the Allies that the

gassing of Jews would stop. He did not, however,

issue an order on the matter until some time in

October�the date is not certain. One copy

went to General Pohl in Oranienburg; the

other, to Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Reich

Security. Both of them ignored the

directive, and so did Adolf Eichmann.

Jews from P@lasz@ow, Theresienstadt, and Italy continued to be gassed up to the middle of November. The last selection for the gas chambers is believed, however, to have been made on October 30.

For the first eight days of their stay in

Auschwitz, the Schindler women were in enormous danger of death by gassing. And even after that, as the last victims of the chambers continued to file throughout November toward the western end of Birkenau, and as the ovens and pyres worked on their backlog of corpses, they would not be aware of any change in the essential nature of the camp. All their anxieties would in any case be well founded, for most of those left after the gassing ceased would be shot --as happened to all the crematorium workers�or allowed to die of disease.

In any case, the Schindler women went through

frequent mass medical inspections in both

October and November. Some of them had been

separated out in the first days and sent off to the huts

reserved for the terminally ill. The doctors of

Auschwitz�Josef Mengele,

Fritz Klein, Doctors Konig and Thilo

--not only worked on the Birkenau platform but roamed the camp, turning up at roll calls, invading the showers, asking with a smile, �How old are you, Mother?� Mrs. Clara Sternberg found herself put aside in a hut for older women. Sixty-year-old Mrs. Lola Krumholz was also cut out of the Schindlergruppe and put into a barracks for the aged where she was meant to die at no expense to the administration. Mrs. Horowitz, believing that her fragile daughter of eleven years, Niusia, could not survive a

�bathhouse� inspection, hustled her into an empty sauna boiler. One of the SS girls who�d been appointed to the Schindler women�the pretty one, the blonde�saw her do it but did not give her away. She was a puncher, that one, short-tempered, and later she would ask Mrs. Horowitz for a bribe and get a brooch which Regina had somehow concealed till then. Regina handed it over philosophically. There was another, heavier, gentler one who made lesbian advances and may have required a more personal payoff. Sometimes at roll call, one or more of the doctors would appear in front of the barracks. Seeing the medical gentlemen, women rubbed clay into their cheeks to induce a little bogus color. At one such inspection, Regina found stones for her daughter, Niusia, to stand on, and silver-haired young Mengele came to her and asked her a soft-voiced question concerning her daughter�s age and punched her for lying. Women felled like this at inspection were meant to be picked up by the guards while still semiconscious, dragged to the electrified fence at the edge of the women�s camp, and thrown onto it. They had Regina halfway there when she revived and begged them not to fry her alive, to let her return to her line. They released her, and when she crept back into the ranks, there was her bird-boned, speechless daughter still, frozen to the pile of stone. These inspections could occur at any hour. The Schindler women were called out one night to stand in the mud while their barracks was searched. Mrs.

Dresner, who had once been saved by a vanished

OD boy, came out with her tall teen-age

daughter, Danka. They stood there in that

eccentric mire of Auschwitz which, like the fabled

mud of Flanders, would not freeze when everything

else had frozen�the roads, the

rooftops, the human traveler.

Both Danka and Mrs. Dresner had left

P@lasz@ow in the summer clothing that was all they had left. Danka wore a blouse, a light jacket, a maroon skirt. Since it had begun snowing earlier in the evening, Mrs. Dresner had suggested that Danka tear a strip off her blanket and wear it beneath the skirt. Now, in the course of the barracks inspection, the SS discovered the ripped blanket. The officer who stood before the Schindler women called out the barracks Alteste�a Dutch woman whom, until yesterday, none of them had known�and said that she was to be shot, together with any other prisoner found with a blanket strip under her dress. Mrs. Dresner began whispering to Danka.

�Take it off and I�ll slip it back into the

barracks.� It was a credible idea. The

barracks stood at ground level and no step led up to them. A woman in the rear line might slip backward through the door. As Danka had obeyed her mother once before in the matter of the wall cavity in Dabrowski Street, Cracow, she obeyed her now, slipping from beneath her dress that strip of Europe�s poorest blanket. In fact, while Mrs. Dresner was in the hut, the SS officer passed by and idly extracted a woman of Mrs. Dresner�s age�it was probably Mrs. Sternberg�and had her taken away to some worse part of the camp, some place where there was no Moravian illusion.

Perhaps the other women in line did not let themselves understand what this simple act of weeding out meant. It was in fact a statement that no reserved group of so-called

�industrial prisoners� was safe in Auschwitz. No cry of �Schindlerfrauen!� would keep them immune for long. There had been other groups of �industrial prisoners� who had vanished in Auschwitz. General Pohl�s Section W had sent some trainloads of skilled Jewish workers from Berlin the year before. I. G. Farben had needed labor and was told by Section W to select its workers from these transports. In fact, Section W had suggested to Commandant H@oss that the trains should be unloaded in the I. G. Farben works, not near the crematoria in

Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of 1,750

prisoners, all male, in the first

train, 1,000 were immediately gassed. Of 4,000 in the next four trainloads, 2,500 went at once to the �bathhouses.� If the Auschwitz administration would not stay its hand for I. G. Farben and Department W, it was not going to be finicky about the women of some obscure German potmaker.

In barracks like those of the Schindler women, it was like living outdoors. The windows had no glass and served only to put an edge on the blasts of cold air out of Russia. Most of the girls had dysentery. Crippled with cramp, they limped in their clogs to the steel waste drum out in the mud. The woman who tended it did so for an extra bowl of soup. Mila Pfefferberg staggered out one evening, seized with dysentery, and the woman on duty�not a bad woman, a woman Mila had known as a girl�insisted that she could not use the drum but had to wait for the next girl out and then empty it with her help. Mila argued but could not shake the woman. Beneath the hungry stars this tending of the drum had become something like a profession, and there were rules. With the drum as pretext, the woman had come to believe that order, hygiene, sanity were possible. The next girl out arrived at Mila�s side, gasping and bent and desperate. But she too was young and, in peaceful days in @l@od@z, had known the woman on the can as a respectable married woman. So the two girls were obedient and lugged the thing 300

meters through the mud. The girl who shared the burden asked Mila, �Where�s Schindler now?�

Not everyone in the barracks asked that question, or asked it in that fierce, ironic way. There was an Emalia girl named Lusia, a widow of twenty-two, who kept saying, �You�ll see, it will all come out. We�ll end up somewhere warm with Schindler�s soup in us.� She did not know herself why she kept repeating such statements. In Emalia she had never been the type to make projections. She�d worked her shift, drunk her soup, and slept. She had never predicted grandiose events. Sufficient to her day had always been the survival thereof. Now she was ill and there was no reason for her to be prophetic. The cold and hunger were wasting her, and she too bore the vast obsessions of her hunger. Yet she amazed herself by repeating Oskar�s promises.

Later in their stay in Auschwitz, when they had been moved to a hut closer to the crematoria and did not know if they were to go to the showers or the chambers, Lusia continued pushing the glad message. Even so, the tide of the camp having washed them to this geographic limit of the earth, this pole, this pit, despair wasn�t quite the fashion for the Schindlerfrauen. You would still find women huddled in recipe talk and dreams of prewar kitchens.

In Brinnlitz when the men arrived, there was only the shell. There were no bunks yet; straw was strewn in the dormitories upstairs. But it was warm, with steam heat from the boilers. There were no cooks that first day. Bags of turnips lay around what would be the cookhouse, and men devoured them raw. Later, soup was brewed and bread baked, and the engineer Finder began the allocating of jobs. But from the start, unless there were SS

men looking on, it was all slow. It is mysterious how a body of prisoners could sense that the Herr Direktor was no longer a party to any war effort. The pace of work grew very canny in Brinnlitz. Since Oskar was detached from the question of production, slow work became the prisoners� vengeance, their declaration.

It was a heady thing to withhold your labor. Everywhere else in Europe, the slaves worked to the limit of their 600 calories per day, hoping to impress some foreman and delay the transfer to the death camp. But here in Brinnlitz was the intoxicating freedom to use the shovel at half-pace and still survive.

None of this unconscious policy-making was evident in the first days. There were still too many prisoners anxious for their women. Dolek Horowitz had a wife and daughter in Auschwitz. The Rosner brothers had their wives. Pfefferberg knew the shock which something as vast, as appalling as Auschwitz would have on Mila. Jacob Sternberg and his teen-age son were concerned about Mrs. Clara Sternberg. Pfefferberg remembers the men clustering around Schindler on the factory floor and asking him again where the women were.

�I�m getting them out,� Schindler rumbled.

He did not go into explanations. He did not

publicly surmise that the SS in Auschwitz

might need to be bribed. He did not say that he

had sent the list of women to Colonel

Erich Lange, or that he and Lange both

intended to get them to Brinnlitz according to the list.

Nothing of that. Simply �I�m getting them out.� The SS garrison who moved into Brinnlitz in those days gave Oskar some cause to hope. They were middle-aged reservists called up to allow younger SS men a place in the front line. There were not so many lunatics as at P@lasz@ow, and Oskar would always keep them gentle with the specialties of his kitchen�plain food, but plenty. In a visit to their barracks, he made his usual speech about the unique skills of his prisoners, the importance of his manufacturing activities. Antitank shells, he said, and casings for a projectile still on the secret list. He asked that there be no intrusion by the garrison into the factory itself, for that would disturb the workers.

He could see it in their eyes. It suited them, this quiet town. They could imagine themselves lasting out the cataclysm here. They did not want to rampage round the workshops like a Goeth or a Hujar. They didn�t want the Herr Direktor to complain about them.

Their commanding officer, however, had not yet arrived. He was on his way from his previous post, the labor camp at Budzyn, which had, until the recent Russian advances, manufactured Heinkel bomber parts. He would be younger, sharper, more intrusive, Oskar knew. He might not readily take to being denied access to the camp. Among all this pouring of cement floors, the knocking of holes in the roof so that the vast Hilos would fit, the softening of NCO�S, amid the private uneasiness of settling into married life with Emilie again, Oskar was arrested a third time.

The Gestapo turned up at lunchtime. Oskar

was not in his office, in fact had driven to Brno

on some business earlier in the morning. A truck

had just arrived at the camp from Cracow laden with

some of the Herr Direktor�s portable wealth

--cigarettes, cases of vodka, cognac,

champagne. Some would later claim that this was Goeth�s property, that Oskar had agreed to bring it into Moravia in return for Goeth�s backing of his Brinnlitz plans. Since Goeth had now been a prisoner for a month and had no more authority, the luxuries on the truck could just as well be considered Oskar�s.

The men doing the unloading thought so and became nervous at the sight of the Gestapo men in the courtyard. They had mechanics� privileges and so were permitted to drive the truck to a stream down the hill, where they threw the liquor into the water by the caseful. The two hundred thousand cigarettes on the truck were hidden more retrievably under the cover of the large transformer in the power plant.

It is significant that there were so many cigarettes and so much liquor in the truck: a sign that Oskar, always keen on trade goods, intended now to make his living on the black market.

They got the truck back to the garage as the siren for midday soup was blown. In past days the Herr Direktor had eaten with the prisoners, and the mechanics hoped that today he would do so again; they could then explain what had happened to such an expensive truckload.

He did in fact return from Brno soon after, but was stopped at the inner gate by one of the Gestapo men who stood there with his hand raised. The Gestapo man ordered him to leave his car at once.

�This is my factory,� a prisoner heard

Oskar growl back. �If you want to talk

to me, you�re welcome to jump in the car.

Otherwise follow me to my office.�

He drove into the courtyard, the two Gestapo men walking quickly on either side of the vehicle. In his office, they asked him about his connections with Goeth, with Goeth�s loot. I do have a few suitcases here, he told them. They belong to Herr Goeth. He asked me to keep them for him until his release.

The Gestapo men asked to see them, and Oskar took them through to the apartment. He made formal and cold introductions between Frau Schindler and the men from Bureau V. Then he brought out the suitcases and opened them. They were full of Amon�s civilian clothing, and old uniforms from the days when Amon had been a slim SS NCO. When they�d been through them and found nothing, they made the arrest. Emilie grew aggressive now. They had no right, she said, to take her husband unless they could say what they were taking him for. The people in Berlin will not be happy about this, she said. Oskar advised her to be silent. But you will have to call my friend Klonowska, he told her, and cancel my appointments.

Emilie knew what that meant. Klonowska would do her trick with the telephone again, calling Martin Plathe in Breslau, the General Schindler people, all the big guns. One of the Bureau V men took out handcuffs and put them on Oskar�s wrists. They took him to their car, drove him to the station in Zwittau, and escorted him by train to Cracow. The impression is that this arrest scared him more

than the previous two. There are no stories of

lovelorn SS colonels who shared a cell with

him and drank his vodka. Oskar did later

record some details, however. As the Bureau

V men escorted him across the grand neoclassic

loggia of the Cracow central station, a man named

Huth approached them. He had been a

civilian engineer in P@lasz@ow. He had

always been obsequious to Amon, but had a

reputation for many secret kindnesses. It may have

been an accidental meeting, but suggests that Huth

may have been working with Klonowska. Huth insisted

on shaking Oskar by his shackled hand. One of the

Bureau V men objected. �Do you really want

to go around shaking hands with prisoners?� he asked

Huth. The engineer at once made a speech, a

testimonial to Oskar. This was the Herr

Direktor Schindler, a man greatly

respected throughout Cracow, an important industrialist. �I can never think of him as a prisoner,� said Huth.

Whatever the significance of this meeting, Oskar was put into a car and taken across the familiar city to Pomorska Street again. They put him in a room like the one he had occupied during his first arrest, a room with a bed and a chair and a washbasin but with bars on the window. He was not easy there, even though his manner was one of bearlike tranquillity. In 1942, when they had arrested him the day after his thirty-fourth birthday, the rumor that there were torture chambers in the Pomorska cellars had been terrifying and indefinite. It wasn�t indefinite anymore.

He knew that Bureau V would torture him if they wanted Amon badly enough. That evening Herr Huth came as a visitor, bringing with him a dinner tray and a bottle of wine. Huth had spoken to Klonowska. Oskar himself would never clarify whether or not Klonowska had prearranged that �chance encounter.� Whichever it was, Huth told him now that Klonowska was rallying his old friends.

The next day he was interrogated by a panel of twelve SS investigators, one a judge of the SS Court. Oskar denied that he had given any money to ensure that the Commandant would, in the words of the transcript of Amon�s evidence, �go easy on the Jews.� I may have given him the money as a loan, Oskar admitted at one stage. Why would you give him a loan? they wanted to know. I run an essential war industry, said Oskar, playing the old tune. I have a body of skilled labor. If it is disturbed, there is loss to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate, to the war effort. If I found that in the mass of prisoners in P@lasz@ow there was a skilled metalworker of a category I needed, then of course I asked the Herr Commandant for him. I wanted him fast, I wanted him without red tape. My interest was production, its value to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate. In consideration of the Herr Commandant�s help in these matters, I may have given him a loan.

This defense involved some disloyalty to his old host, Amon. But Oskar would not have hesitated. His eyes gleaming with transparent frankness, his tone low, his emphasis discreet, Oskar�without saying it in so many words�let the investigators know that the money had been extorted. It didn�t impress them. They locked him away again. The interrogation went into a second, third, and fourth day. No one did him harm, but they were steely. At last he had to deny any friendship with Amon at all. It was no great task: he loathed the man profoundly anyhow. �I�m not a fairy,� he growled at the gentlemen of Bureau V, falling back on rumors he�d heard about Goeth and his young orderlies.

Amon himself would never understand that Oskar despised him and was willing to help the case Bureau V had against him. Amon was always deluded about friendship. In sentimental moods, he believed that Mietek Pemper and Helen Hirsch were loving servants. The investigators probably would not have let him know that Oskar was in Pomorska and would have listened mutely to Amon urging them, �Call in my old friend Schindler. He�ll vouch for me.�

What helped Oskar most when he faced the investigators was that he had had few actual business connections with the man. Though he had sometimes given Amon advice or contacts, he had never had a share in any deal, never made a z@loty out of Amon�s sales of prison rations, of rings from the jewelry shop, of garments from the custom-tailoring plant or furniture from the upholstery section. It must also have helped him that his lies were disarming even to policemen, and that when he told the truth he was positively seductive. He never gave the impression that he was grateful for being believed. For example, when the gentlemen of Bureau V looked as if they might at least give standing room to the idea that the 80,000 RM. was a �loan,� a sum extorted, Oskar asked them whether in the end the money might be returned to him, to Herr Direktor Schindler, the impeccable industrialist.

A third factor in Oskar�s favor was that his

credentials checked out. Colonel Erich

Lange, when telephoned by Bureau V,

stressed Schindler�s importance to the conduct of the war. Sussmuth, called in Troppau, said that Oskar�s plant was involved in the production of �secret weapons.� It was not, as we will see, an untrue statement. But when said bluntly, it was misleading and carried a distorted weight. For the F@uhrer had promised �secret weapons.� The phrase itself was charismatic and extended its protection now to Oskar. Against a phrase like �secret weapons,� any confetti of protest from the burghers of Zwittau did not count. But even to Oskar it did not seem that the

imprisonment was going well. About the fourth day,

one of his interrogators visited him not to question him

but to spit at him. The spittle streaked the left

lapel of his suit. The man ranted at him,

calling him a Jew-lover, a fucker of

Jewesses. It was a departure from the strange

legalism of the interrogations. But Oskar wasn�t

sure that it was not planned, that it did not

represent the true impetus behind his

imprisonment.

After a week, Oskar sent a message,

by way of Huth and Klonowska,

to Oberf@uhrer Scherner. Bureau V was putting such pressure on him, the message went, that he did not believe he could protect the former police chief much longer. Scherner left his counterinsurgency work (it was soon to kill him) and arrived in Oskar�s cell within a day. It was a scandal what they were doing, said Scherner. What about Amon?

Oskar asked, expecting Scherner to say that that was a scandal too. He deserves all he gets, said Scherner. It seemed that everyone was deserting Amon. Don�t worry, said Scherner before leaving, we intend to get you out.

On the morning of the eighth day, they let Oskar out onto the street. Oskar did not delay his going�nor did he, this time, demand transport. Enough to be deposited on the cold sidewalk.

He traveled across Cracow by streetcar and

walked to his old factory in Zablocie. A

few Polish caretakers were still there, and from the

upstairs office he called Brinnlitz and

told Emilie that he was free.

Moshe Bejski, a Brinnlitz

draftsman, remembers the confusion while Oskar was away�the rumors, all the questions about what it meant. But Stern and Maurice Finder, Adam Garde and others had consulted Emilie about food, about work arrangements, about the provision of bunks. They were the first to discover that Emilie was no mere passenger. She was not a happy woman, and her unhappiness was compounded by Bureau V�s arrest of Oskar. It must have seemed cruel that the SS should intrude on this reunion before it had got properly started. But it was clear to Stern and the others that she was not there, keeping house in that little apartment on the ground floor, purely out of wifely duty. There was what you could call an ideological commitment too. A picture of Jesus with His heart exposed and in flames hung on a wall of the apartment. Stern had seen the same design in the houses of Polish Catholics. But there had been no ornament of that kind in either of Oskar�s Cracow apartments. The Jesus of the exposed heart did not always reassure when you saw it in Polish kitchens. In Emilie�s apartment, however, it hung like a promise, a personal one. Emilie�s.

Early in November, her husband came back by train. He was unshaven and smelly from his imprisonment. He was amazed to find that the women were still in AuschwitzBirkenau. In planet Auschwitz, where the Schindler women moved as warily, as full of dread as any space travelers, Rudolf H@oss ruled as founder, builder, presiding genius. Readers of William Styron�s novel Sophie�s Choice encountered him as the master of Sophie� a very different sort of master than Amon was to Helen Hirsch; a more detached, mannerly, and sane man; yet still the unflagging priest of that cannibal province. Though in the 1920�s he had murdered a Ruhr schoolteacher for informing on a German activist and had done time for the crime, he never murdered any Auschwitz prisoner by his own hand. He saw himself instead as a technician. As champion of Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide pellets which gave off fumes when exposed to air, he had engaged in a long personal and scientific conflict with his rival, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who had jurisdiction over the Bel@zec camp and who was the head of the carbon monoxide school. There had been an awful day at Bel@zec, which the SS chemical officer Kurt Gerstein had witnessed, when Kommissar Wirth�s method took three hours to finish a party of Jewish males packed into the chambers. That H@oss had backed the more efficient technology is partially attested to by the continuous growth of Auschwitz and the decline of Bel@zec. By 1943, when Rudolf H@oss left Auschwitz to do a stint as Deputy Chief of Section D in Oranienburg, the place was already something more than a camp. It was even more than a wonder of organization. It was a phenomenon. The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth�s malice�a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named

�disinfection cellars,� the aboveground chambers �bathhouses,� and Oberscharf@uhrer Moll, whose task it was to order the insertion of the blue crystals into the roofs of the

�cellars,� the walls of the �bathhouses,� customarily cried to his assistants, �All right, let�s give them something to chew on.� H@oss had returned to Auschwitz in May 1944

and presided over the entire camp at the time the Schindler women occupied a barracks in Birkenau, so close to the whimsical Oberscharf@uhrer Moll. According to the Schindler mythology, it was H@oss himself with whom Oskar wrestled for his 300 women. Certainly Oskar had telephone conversations and other commerce with H@oss. But he also had to deal with Sturmbannf@uhrer Fritz Hartjenstein, Commandant of Auschwitz II�THAT is, of Auschwitz-Birkenau�and with Untersturmf@uhrer Franz H@ossler, the young man in charge, in that great city, of the suburb of women. What is certain is that Oskar now sent a young

woman with a suitcase full of liquor, ham,

and diamonds to make a deal with these

functionaries. Some say that Oskar then followed

up the girl�s visit in person, taking with him

an associate, an influential officer in the

S.a. (the Sturmabteilung, or Storm

Troops), Standartenf@uhrer Peltze,

who, according to what Oskar later told his friends, was a British agent. Others claim that Oskar stayed away from Auschwitz himself as a matter of strategy and went to Oranienburg instead, and to the Armaments Inspectorate in Berlin, to try to put pressure on H@oss and his associates from that end.

The story as Stern would tell it years later in a public speech in Tel Aviv is as follows. After Oskar�s release from prison, Stern approached Schindler and��under the pressure of some of my comrades��begged Oskar to do something decisive about the women ensnared in Auschwitz. During this conference, one of Oskar�s secretaries came in�

Stern does not say which one. Schindler considered the girl and pointed to one of his fingers, which sported a large diamond ring. He asked the girl whether she would like this rather hefty piece of jewelry. According to Stern, the girl got very excited. Stern quotes Oskar as saying, �Take the list of the women; pack a suitcase with the best food and liquor you can find in my kitchen. Then go to Auschwitz. You know the Commandant has a penchant for pretty women. If you bring it off, you�ll get this diamond. And more still.�

It is a scene, a speech worthy of one of

those events in the Old Testament when for the good of the

tribe a woman is offered to the invader. It is

also a Central European scene, with its

gross, corruscating diamonds and its

proposed transaction of the flesh.

According to Stern, the secretary went. When she did not return within two days, Schindler himself� in the company of the obscure Peltze�went to settle the matter. According to Schindler mythology, Oskar did

send a girlfriend of his to sleep with the Commandant�be

that H@oss, Hartjenstein, or H@ossler�and

leave diamonds on the pillow. While some, like

Stern, say it was �one of his secretaries,�

others name an Aufseher, a pretty blond

SS girl, ultimately a girlfriend of

Oskar�s and part of the Brinnlitz garrison. But this girl, it seems, was still in Auschwitz anyhow, together with the Schindlerfrauen. According to Emilie Schindler herself, the emissary was a girl of twenty-two or twenty-three. She was a native of Zwittau, and her father was an old friend of the Schindler family. She had recently returned from occupied Russia, where she�d worked as a secretary in the German administration. She was a good friend of Emilie�s, and volunteered for the task. It is unlikely that Oskar would demand a sexual sacrifice of a friend of the family. Even though he was a brigand in these matters, that side of the story is certainly myth. We do not know the extent of the girl�s transactions with the officers of Auschwitz. We know only that she approached the dreadful kingdom and dealt courageously.

Oskar later said that in his own dealings with the rulers of necropolis Auschwitz, he was offered the old temptation. The women have been here some weeks now. They won�t be worth much as labor anymore. Why don�t you forget these three hundred? We�ll cut another three hundred for you, out of the endless herd. In 1942, an SS NCO at Prokocim station had pushed the same idea at Oskar. Don�t get stuck on these particular names, Herr Direktor. Now as at Prokocim, Oskar pursued his usual line. There are irreplaceable skilled munitions workers. I have trained them myself over a period of years. They represent skills I cannot quickly replace. The names I know, that is, are the names I know.

A moment, said his tempter. I see listed here

a nine-year-old, daughter of one Phila

Rath. I see an eleven-year-old, daughter

of one Regina Horowitz. Are you

telling me that a nine-year-old and an

eleven-year-old are skilled munitions workers? They polish the forty-five-millimeter shells, said Oskar. They were selected for their long fingers, which can reach the interior of the shell in a way that is beyond most adults.

Such conversation in support of the girl who was a friend of the family took place, conducted by Oskar either in person or by telephone. Oskar would relay news of the negotiations to the inner circle of male prisoners, and from them the details were passed on to the men on the workshop floor. Oskar�s claim that he needed children so that the innards of antitank shells could be buffed was outrageous nonsense. But he had already used it more than once. An orphan named Anita Lampel had been called to the Appellplatz in P@lasz@ow one night in 1943 to find Oskar arguing with a middle-aged woman, the Alteste of the women�s camp. The Alteste was saying more or less what H@oss/h@ossler would say later in Auschwitz. �You can�t tell me you need a fourteenyear-old for Emalia. You cannot tell me that Commandant Goeth has allowed you to put a fourteen-year-old on your roster for Emalia.� (the Alteste was worried, of course, that if the list of prisoners for Emalia had been doctored, she would be made to pay for it.) That night in 1943, Anita Lampel had listened flabbergasted as Oskar, a man who had never even seen her hands, claimed that he had chosen her for the industrial value of her long fingers and that the Herr Commandant had given his approval.

Anita Lampel was herself in Auschwitz now, but had grown tall and no longer needed the long-fingered ploy. So it was transferred to the benefit of the daughters of Mrs. Horowitz and Mrs. Rath.

Schindler�s contact had been correct in saying that the women had lost nearly all their industrial value. At inspections, young women like Mila Pfefferberg, Helen Hirsch, and her sister could not prevent the cramps of dysentery from bowing and aging them. Mrs. Dresner had lost all appetite, even for the ersatz soup. Danka could not force the mean warmth of it down her mother�s throat. It meant that she would soon become a Mussulman. The term was camp slang, based on people�s memory of newsreels of famine in Muslim countries, for a prisoner who had crossed the borderline that separated the ravenous living from the good-as-dead.

Clara Sternberg, in her early forties, was isolated from the main Schindler group into what could be described as a Mussulman hut. Here, each morning, the dying women were lined up in front of the door and a selection was made. Sometimes it was Mengele leaning toward you. Of the 500 women in this new group of Clara Sternberg�s, 100 might be detailed off on a given morning. On another, 50. You rouged yourself with Auschwitz clay; you kept a straight back if that could be managed. You choked where you stood rather than cough. It was after such an inspection that Clara found herself with no further reserves left for the waiting, the daily risk. She had a husband and a teen-age son in Brinnlitz, but now they seemed more remote than the canals of the planet Mars. She could not imagine Brinnlitz, or them in it. She staggered through the women�s camp looking for the electric wires. When she had first arrived, they�d seemed to be everywhere. Now that they were needed, she could not find them. Each turn took her into another quagmire street, and frustrated her with a view of identically miserable huts. When she saw an acquaintance from P@lasz@ow, a Cracow woman like herself, Clara propped in front of her. �Where�s the electric fence?� Clara asked the woman. To her distraught mind, it was a reasonable question to ask, and Clara had no doubt that the friend, if she had any sisterly feeling, would point the exact way to the wires. The answer the woman gave Clara was just as crazed, but it was one that had a fixed point of view, a balance, a perversely sane core.

�Don�t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,� the woman urged her. �If you do that, you�ll never know what happened to you.�

It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you�ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she�d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had�by her reply --somehow cut her off from suicide as an option. Something awful had happened at Brinnlitz. Oskar, the Moravian traveler, was away. He was trading in kitchenware and diamonds, liquor and cigars, all over the province. Some of it was crucial business. Biberstein speaks of the drugs and medical instruments that came into the Krankenstube at Brinnlitz. None of it was standard issue. Oskar must have traded for medicines at the depots of the Wehrmacht, or perhaps in the pharmacy of one of the big hospitals in Brno.

Whatever the cause of his absence, he was away

when an inspector from Gr@oss-Rosen arrived and

walked through the workshop with Untersturmf@uhrer

Josef Liepold, the new Commandant, who was

always happy for a chance to intrude inside the

factory. The inspector�s orders, originating

from Oranienburg, were that the Gr@oss-Rosen

subcamps should be scoured for children to be used in

Dr. Josef Mengele�s medical experiments

in Auschwitz. Olek Rosner and his small

cousin Richard Horowitz, who�d believed they

had no need of a hiding place here, were spotted

racing around the annex, chasing each other

upstairs, playing among the abandoned spinning

machines. So was the son of Dr. Leon

Gross, who had nursed Amon�s recently

developed diabetes, who had helped Dr.

Blancke with the Health Aktion, and who had other crimes still to answer for. The inspector remarked to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold that these were clearly not essential munitions workers.

Liepold�short, dark, not as crazy as Amon

--was still a convinced SS officer and did not bother to defend the brats. Further on in the inspection Roman Ginter�s nine-year-old was discovered. Ginter had known Oskar from the time the ghetto was founded, had supplied the metalworks at P@lasz@ow with scrap from DEF. But Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold and the inspector did not recognize any special relationships. The Ginter boy was sent under escort to the gate with the other children. Frances Spira�s boy, ten and a half years old, but tall and on the books as fourteen, was working on top of a long ladder that day, polishing the high windows. He survived the raid.

The orders required the rounding up of the children�s parents as well, perhaps because this would obviate the risk of parents beginning demented revolutions on the subcamp premises. Therefore Rosner the violinist, Horowitz, and Roman Ginter were arrested. Dr. Leon Gross rushed down from the clinic to negotiate with the SS. He was flushed. The effort was to show this inspector from Gr@oss-Rosen that he was dealing with a really responsible sort of prisoner, a friend of the system. The effort counted for nothing. An SS

Unterscharf@uhrer, armed with an automatic weapon, was given the mission of escorting them to Auschwitz.

The party of fathers and sons traveled from

Zwittau as far as Katowice, in Upper

Silesia, by ordinary passenger train. Henry

Rosner expected other passengers to be

hostile. Instead, one woman walked down the

aisle looking defiant and gave Olek and the

others a heel of bread and an apple, all the

while staring the sergeant in the face, daring him

to react. The Unterscharf@uhrer was

polite to her, however, and nodded formally. Later,

when the train stopped at Usti, he left the

prisoners under the guard of his assistant and went

to the station cafeteria, bringing back biscuits and

coffee paid for from his own pocket. He and Rosner

and Horowitz got talking. The more the

Unterscharf@uhrer chatted, the less he

seemed to belong to that same police force as Amon, Hujar, John, and all those others.

�I�m taking you to Auschwitz,� he said, �and then I have to collect some women and bring them back to Brinnlitz.�

So, ironically, the first Brinnlitz men to discover that the women might be let out of Auschwitz were Rosner and Horowitz, themselves on their way there. Rosner and Horowitz were ecstatic. They told their sons: This good gentleman is bringing your mother back to Brinnlitz. Rosner asked the Unterscharf@uhrer if he would give a letter to Manci, and Horowitz pleaded to be able to write to Regina. The two letters were written on pieces of paper the Unterscharf@uhrer gave them, the same stuff the man used to write to his own wife. In his letter, Rosner made arrangements with Manci to meet at an address in Podg@orze if they both survived.

When Rosner and Horowitz had finished writing, the SS man put the letters in his jacket. Where have you been these past years?

Rosner wondered. Did you start out as a

fanatic? Did you cheer when the gods

on the rostrum screamed, �The Jews are our misfortune�?

Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry�s arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag Henry off to Auschwitz. �To die just because of me,� he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn�t have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them. The Unterscharf@uhrer leaned over.

Surely he had not heard, but there were tears in his eyes. Olek seemed astonished by them�the way another child might be astounded by a cycling circus animal. He stared at the man. What was startling was that they looked like fraternal tears, the tears of a fellow prisoner. �I know what will happen,� said the Unterscharf@uhrer. �We�ve lost the war. You�ll get the tattoo. You�ll survive.�

Henry got the impression that the man was making promises not to the child but to himself, arming himself with an assurance which�in five years� time perhaps, when he remembered this train journey�he could use to soothe himself.

On the afternoon of her attempt to find the wires, Clara Sternberg heard the calling of names and the sound of women�s laughter from the direction of the Schindlerfrauen barracks. She crawled from her own damp hut and saw the Schindler women lined up beyond an inner fence of the women�s camp. Some of them were dressed only in blouses and long drawers. Skeleton women, without a chance. But they were chattering like girls. Even the blond SS girl seemed delighted, for she too would be liberated from Auschwitz if they were.

�Schindlergruppe,� she called, �you�re going to the sauna and then to the trains.� She seemed to have a sense of the uniqueness of the event. Doomed women from the barracks all around looked blankly out through the wire at the celebratory girls. They compelled you to watch, those list women, because they were so suddenly out of balance with the rest of the city. It meant nothing, of course. It was an eccentric event; it had no bearing on the majority�s life; it did not reverse the process or lighten the smoky air. But for Clara Sternberg, the sight was intolerable. As it was also for sixty-year-old Mrs. Krumholz, also half-dead in a hut assigned to the older women. Mrs. Krumholz began to argue with the Dutch Kapo at the door of her barracks. I�m going out to join them, she said. The Dutch Kapo put up a mist of arguments. In the end, she said, you�re better off here. If you go, you�ll die in the cattle cars. Besides that, I�ll have to explain why you aren�t here. You can tell them, said Mrs. Krumholz, that it�s because I�m on the Schindler list. It�s all fixed.

The books will balance. There�s no question about it. They argued for five minutes and in the process talked of their families, finding out about each other�s origins, perhaps looking for a vulnerable point outside the strict logic of the dispute. It turned out that the Dutch woman�s name was also Krumholz. The two of them began discussing the whereabouts of their families. My husband is in Sachsenhausen, I think, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. The Cracow Mrs. Krumholz said, My husband and grown son have gone somewhere.

I think Mauthausen. I�m meant to be in the

Schindler camp in Moravia. Those women beyond the fence, that�s where they�re going. They�re not going anywhere, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. Believe me. No one goes anywhere, except in one direction. The Cracow Mrs.

Krumholz said, They think they�re going somewhere. Please! For even if the Schindlerfrauen were deluded, Mrs. Krumholz from Cracow wanted to share the delusion. The Dutch Kapo understood this and at last opened the door of the barracks, for whatever it was worth.

For a fence now stood between Mrs. Krumholz, Mrs. Sternberg, and the rest of the Schindler women. It was not an electrified perimeter fence. It was nonetheless built, according to the rulings of Section D, of at least eighteen strands of wire. The strands ran closest together at the top. Farther down, they were stretched in parallel strands about six inches apart. But between each set of parallels and the next there was a gap of less than a foot. That day, according to the testimony of witnesses and of the women themselves, both Mrs. Krumholz and Mrs. Sternberg somehow tore their way through the fence to rejoin the Schindler women in whatever daydream of rescue they were enjoying. Dragging themselves through the perhaps nine-inch gap, stretching the wire, ripping their clothes off and tearing their flesh on the barbs, they put themselves back on the Schindler list. No one stopped them because no one believed it possible. To the other women of Auschwitz, it was in any case an irrelevant example. For any other escapee, the breaching of that fence brought you only to another, and then another, and so to the outer voltage of the place. Whereas for Sternberg and Krumholz, this fence was the only one. The clothing they�d brought with them from the ghetto and kept in repair in muddy P@lasz@ow hung now on the wire. Naked and streaked with blood, they ran in among the Schindler women.

Mrs. Rachela Korn, condemned to a hospital hut at the age of forty-four, had also been dragged out the window of the place by her daughter, who now held her upright in the Schindler column. For her as for the other two, it was a birthday. Everyone in the line seemed to be congratulating them.

In the washhouse, the Schindler women were barbered. Latvian girls sheared a lice promenade down the length of their skulls and shaved their armpits and pubes. After their shower they were marched naked to the quartermaster�s hut, where the clothes of the dead were issued to them. When they saw themselves shaven and in odds and ends of clothing, they broke into laughter�the hilarity of the very young. The sight of little Mila Pfefferberg, down to 70 pounds, occupying garments cut for a fat lady had them reeling with hilarity. Half-dead and dressed in their paint-coded rags, they pranced, modeled, mimed, and giggled like schoolgirls.

�What�s Schindler going to do with all the old women?� Clara Sternberg heard an SS girl ask a colleague.

�It�s no one�s business,� the colleague said. �Let him open an old people�s home if he wants.�

No matter what your expectations, it was always a horrifying thing to go into the trains. Even in cold weather, there was a sense of smothering, compounded by blackness. On entering a car, the children always pushed themselves toward any sliver of light. That morning, Niusia Horowitz did that, positioning herself against the far wall at a place where a slat had come loose. When she looked out through the gap, she could see across the railway lines to the wires of the men�s camp. She noticed a straggle of children over there, staring at the train and waving. There seemed to be a very personal insistence to their movements. She thought it strange that one of them resembled her six-year-old brother, who was safe with Schindler. And the boy at his side was a double for their cousin Olek Rosner. Then, of course, she understood. It was Richard. It was Olek. She turned and found her mother and pulled at her uniform. Then Regina looked, went through the same cruel cycle of identification, and began to wail. The door of the car had been shut by now; they were all packed close in near darkness, and every gesture, every scent of hope or panic, was contagious. All the others took up the wailing too. Manci Rosner, standing near her sister-in-law, eased her away from the opening, looked, saw her son waving, and began keening too.

The door slid open again and a burly NCO asked who was making all the noise. No one else had any motive to come forward, but Manci and Regina struggled through the crush to the man. �It�s my child over there,� they both said. �My boy,� said Manci. �I want to show him that I�m still alive.�

He ordered them down onto the concourse. When they stood before him, they began to wonder what his purpose was. �Your name?� he asked Regina. She told him and saw him reach behind his back and fumble under his leather belt. She expected to see his hand appear holding a pistol. What it held, however, was a letter for her from her husband. He had a similar letter from Henry Rosner, too. He gave a brief summary of the journey he�d made from Brinnlitz with their husbands. Manci suggested he might be willing to let them get down under the car, between the tracks, as if to urinate. It was sometimes permitted if trains were long delayed. He consented.

As soon as Manci was down there under the carriage, she let out the piercing Rosner whistle she had used on the Appellplatz of P@lasz@ow to guide Henry and Olek to her. Olek heard it and began waving. He took Richard�s head and pointed it toward their mothers, peering out between the wheels of the train. After wild waving, Olek held his arm aloft and pulled back his sleeve to show a tattoo like a varicose scrawl along the flesh of his upper arm. And of course the women waved, nodded, applauded, young Richard also holding up his tattooed arm for applause. Look, the children were saying by their rolled-up sleeves. We have permanence.

But between the wheels, the women were in a frenzy.

�What�s happened to them?� they asked each other. �In God�s name, what are they doing here?� They understood that there would be a fuller explanation in the letters. They tore them open and read them, then put them away and went on waving. Next, Olek opened his hand and showed that he had a few pelletlike potatoes in his palm.

�There,� he called, and Manci could hear him distinctly. �You don�t have to worry about me being hungry.�

�Where�s your father?� Manci shouted.

�At work,� said Olek. �He�ll be back from work soon. I�m saving these potatoes for him.�

�Oh, God,� Manci murmured to her

sister-in-law. So much for the food in his hand. Young

Richard told it straighter. �Mamushka,

Mamushka, Mamushka,� he yelled,

�I�m so hungry!�

But he too held up a few potatoes.

He was keeping them for Dolek, he said. Dolek and Rosner the violinist were working at the rock quarry.

Henry Rosner arrived first. He too stood at the wire, his left arm bared and raised. �The tattoo,� he called in triumph. She could see, though, that he was shivering, sweating and cold at the same time. It had not been a soft life in P@lasz@ow, but he�d been allowed to sleep off in the paint shop the hours of work he�d put in playing Lehar at the villa. Here, in the band which sometimes accompanied the lines marching to the �bathhouses,� they didn�t play Rosner�s brand of music.

When Dolek turned up, he was led to the wire by Richard. He could see the pretty, hollow-faced women peering out from the undercarriage. What he and Henry dreaded most was that the women would offer to stay. They could not be with their sons in the male camp. They were in the most hopeful situation in Auschwitz there, hunkered under a train that was certain to move before the day was over. The idea of a clan reunion here was illusory, but the fear of the men at the Birkenau wire was that the women would opt to die for it. Therefore Dolek and Henry talked with false cheer�like peacetime fathers who�d decided to take the kids up to the Baltic that summer so that the girls could go to Carlsbad on their own. �Look after Niusia,� Dolek kept calling, reminding his wife that they had another child, that she was in the car above Regina�s head. At last some merciful siren sounded in the men�s camp. The men and boys now had to leave the wire. Manci and Regina climbed limply back into the train and the door was locked. They were still. Nothing could surprise them anymore.

The train rolled out in the afternoon. There were the

usual speculations. Mila Pfefferberg

believed that if the destination was not Schindler�s

place, half the women crammed in the cars would not

live another week. She herself expected that she

had only days left. The girl Lusia had

scarlet fever. Mrs. Dresner, tended

by Danka but leached by dysentery, seemed to be dying.

But in Niusia Horowitz� car, the women saw mountains and pine trees through the broken slat. Some of them had come to these mountains in their childhood, and to see the distinctive hills even from the floor of these putrid wagons gave them an unwarranted sense of holiday. They shook the girls who sat in the muck staring. �Nearly there,� they promised. But where? Another false arrival would finish them all. At cold dawn on the second day, they were ordered out. The locomotive could be heard hissing somewhere in the mist. Beards of dirty ice hung from the understructures of the train, and the air pierced them. But it was not the heavy, acrid air of Auschwitz. It was a rustic siding, somewhere. They marched, their feet numb in clogs, and everybody coughing. Soon they saw ahead of them a large gate and, behind it, a great bulk of masonry from which chimneys rose; they looked like brothers to the ones left behind in Auschwitz. A party of SS men waited by the gate, clapping their hands in the cold. The group at the gate, the chimneys�it all looked like part of that sickening continuum. A girl beside Mila Pfefferberg began to weep. �They�ve brought us all this way to send us up the chimney anyhow.�

�No,� said Mila, �they wouldn�t waste their time. They could have done all that at Auschwitz.� Her optimism was, however, like that of the girl Lusia�she couldn�t tell where it came from. As they got closer to the gate, they became aware that Herr Schindler was standing in the midst of the SS men. They could tell at first by his memorable height and bulk. Then they could see his features under the Tyrolean hat which he�d been wearing lately to celebrate his return to his home mountains. A short, dark SS officer stood beside him. It was the Commandant of Brinnlitz, Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold. Oskar had already discovered�the women would discover it soon�that Liepold, unlike his middle-aged garrison, had not yet lost faith in that proposition called �the Final Solution.� Yet though he was the respected deputy of Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck and the supposed incarnation of authority in this place, it was Oskar who stepped forward as the lines of women stopped. They stared at him. A phenomenon in the mist. Only some of them smiled. Mila Pfefferberg, like others of the girls in the column that morning, remembers that it was an instant of the most basic and devout gratitude, and quite unutterable. Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. �He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.�

Then Oskar began to talk. It was another of his outrageous speeches, full of dazzling promises. �We knew you were coming,� he said. �They called us from Zwittau. When you go inside the building, you�ll find soup and bread waiting for you.� And then, lightly and with pontifical assurance, he said it: �You have nothing more to worry about. You�re with me now.�

It was the sort of address against which the

Untersturmf@uhrer was powerless. Though

Liepold was angry at it, Oskar was

oblivious. As the Herr Direktor moved

with the prisoners into the courtyard, there was nothing Liepold could do to break into that certainty.

The men knew. They were on the balcony of their

dormitory looking down. Sternberg and his son

searching for Mrs. Clara Sternberg,

Feigenbaum senior and Lutek Feigenbaum

looking out for Nocha Feigenbaum and her

delicate daughter. Juda Dresner and his son

Janek, old Mr. Jereth, Rabbi

Levartov, Ginter, Garde, even Marcel

Goldberg all strained for a sight of their women. Mundek Korn looked not only for his mother and sister but for Lusia the optimist, in whom he�d developed an interest. Bau now fell into a melancholy from which he might never fully emerge. He knew definitively, for the first time, that his mother and wife would not arrive in Brinnlitz. But Wulkan the jeweler, seeing Chaja Wulkan below him in the factory courtyard, knew with astonishment now that there were individuals who intervened and offered astounding rescue.

Pfefferberg waved at Mila a package he

had kept for her arrival�a hank of wool

stolen from one of the cases Hoffman had left behind, and a steel needle he had made in the welding department. Frances Spira�s ten-year-old son also looked down from the balcony. To stop himself from calling out, he had jammed his fist into his mouth, since there were so many SS men in the yard. The women staggered across the cobbles in their Auschwitz tatters. Their heads were cropped. Some of them were too ill, too hollowed out to be easily recognized. Yet it was an astounding assembly. It would not surprise anyone to find out later that no such reunion occurred anywhere else in stricken Europe. That there had never been, and would not be, any other Auschwitz rescue like this one. The women were then led up into their separate dormitory. There was straw on the floor�no bunks yet. From a large DEF tureen, an SS girl served them the soup Oskar had spoken about at the gate. It was rich. There were lumps of nutrient in it. In its fragrance, it was the outward sign of the value of the other imponderable promises. �You have nothing more to worry about.� But they could not touch their men. The women�s dormitory was for the moment quarantined. Even Oskar, on the advice of his medical staff, was concerned about what they might have brought with them from Auschwitz. There were, however, three points at which their isolation could be breached. One was the loose brick above young Moshe Bejski�s bunk. Men would spend the coming nights kneeling on Bejski�s mattress, passing messages through the wall. Likewise, on the factory floor there was a small fanlight which gave into the women�s latrines. Pfefferberg stacked crates there, making a cubicle where a man could sit and call messages. Finally, for early morning and late evening, there was a crowded wire barrier between the men�s balcony and the women�s. The Jereths met there: old Mr. Jereth, from whose wood the first Emalia barracks had been built; his wife, who had needed a refuge from the Aktions in the ghetto. Prisoners used to joke about the exchanges between Mr. and Mrs. Jereth.

�Have your bowels moved today, dear?� Mr. Jereth would somberly ask his wife, who had just come from the dysentery-ridden huts of Birkenau.

On principle, no one wanted to be put in the clinic. In P@lasz@ow it had been a dangerous place where you were made to take Dr. Blancke�s terminal benzine treatment. Even here in Brinnlitz, there was always a risk of sudden inspections, of the type that had already taken the boy children. According to the memos of Oranienburg, a labor-camp clinic should not have any patients with serious illnesses. It was not meant to be a mercy home. It was there to offer industrial first aid. But whether they wanted it or not, the clinic at Brinnlitz was full of women. The teen-age Janka Feigenbaum was put in there. She had cancer and might die in any case, even in the best of places. She had at least come to the best of places left to her. Mrs. Dresner was brought in, as were dozens of others who could not eat or keep food in their stomachs. Lusia the optimist and two other girls were suffering from scarlet fever and could not be kept in the clinic. They were put in beds in the cellar, down amid the warmth of the boilers. Even in the haze of her cold fever, Lusia was aware of the prodigious warmth of that cellar ward. Emilie worked as quiet as a nun in the clinic. Those who were well in Brinnlitz, the men who were disassembling the Hoffman machines and putting them in storehouses down the road, scarcely noticed her. One of them later said that she was just a quiet and submissive wife. For the healthy in Brinnlitz stayed hostage to Oskar�s flamboyance, to this great Brinnlitz confidence trick. Even the women who were still standing had their attention taken by the grand, magical, omniprovident Oskar.

Manci Rosner, for example. A little later in Brinnlitz� history, Oskar would come to the lathes where she worked the night shift and hand her Henry�s violin. Somehow, during a journey to see Hassebroeck at Gr@oss-Rosen, he�d got the time to go into the warehouse there and find the fiddle. It had cost him 100 RM. to redeem it. As he handed it to her, he smiled in a way that seemed to promise her the ultimate return of the violinist to go with the violin. �Same instrument,� he murmured. �But�for the moment� different tune.�

It was hard for Manci, faced by Oskar and the miraculous violin, to see behind the Herr Direktor to the quiet wife. But to the dying, Emilie was more visible. She fed them semolina, which she got God knows where, prepared in her own kitchen and carried up to the Krankenstube. Dr. Alexander Biberstein believed that Mrs. Dresner was finished. Emilie spooned the semolina into her for seven days in a row, and the dysentery abated. Mrs. Dresner�s case seemed to verify Mila Pfefferberg�s claim that if Oskar had failed to rescue them from Birkenau, most of them would not have lived another week. Emilie tended Janka Feigenbaum also, the nineteen-year-old with bone cancer. Lutek Feigenbaum, Janka�s brother, at work on the factory floor, sometimes noticed Emilie moving out of her ground-floor apartment with a canister of soup boiled up in her own kitchen for the dying Janka. �She was dominated by Oskar,� Lutek would say. �As we all were. Yet she was her own woman.�

When Feigenbaum�s glasses were broken, she arranged for them to be repaired. The prescription lay in some doctor�s office in Cracow, had lain there since before the ghetto days. Emilie arranged for someone who was visiting Cracow to get the prescription and bring back the glasses made up. Young Feigenbaum considered this more than an average kindness, especially in a system which positively desired his myopia, which aimed to take the spectacles off all the Jews of Europe. There are many stories about Oskar providing new glasses for various prisoners. One wonders if some of Emilie�s kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood.

CHAPTER 34

The doctors in the Krankenstube were Doctors Hilfstein, Handler, Lewkowicz, and Biberstein. They were all concerned about the likelihood of a typhus outbreak. For typhus was not only a hazard to health. It was, by edict, a cause to close down Brinnlitz, to put the infested back into cattle cars and ship them to die in the ACHTUNG TYPHUS!

barracks of Birkenau. On one of Oskar�s morning visits to the clinic, about a week after the women arrived, Biberstein told him that there were two more possible cases among the women. Headache, fever, malaise, general pains throughout the whole body�all that had begun. Biberstein expected the characteristic typhoid rash to appear within a few days. These two would need to be isolated somewhere in the factory. Biberstein did not have to give Oskar too much home instruction in the facts of typhus. Typhus was carried by louse bite. The prisoners were infested by uncontrollable populations of lice. The disease took perhaps two weeks to incubate. It might be incubating now in a dozen, a hundred prisoners. Even with the new bunks installed, people still lay too close. Lovers passed the virulent lice to each other when they met, fast and secretly, in some hidden corner of the factory. The typhus lice were wildly migratory. It seemed now that their energy could checkmate Oskar�s. So that when Oskar ordered a delousing unit�

showers, a laundry to boil clothes, a disinfection

plant�built upstairs, it was no idle

administrative order. The unit was to run on

hot steam piped up from the cellars. The welders

were to work double shifts on the project. They did

it with a will, for willingness characterized the secret

industries of Brinnlitz. Official industry

might be symbolized by the Hilo machines rising

from the new-poured workshop floor. It was in the

prisoners� interest and in Oskar�s, as Moshe

Bejski later observed, that these machines be

properly erected, since it gave the camp a

convincing front. But the uncertified industries of

Brinnlitz were the ones that counted. The women

knitted clothing with wool looted from Hoffman�s

left-behind bags. They paused and began to look

industrial only when an SS officer or

NCO passed through the factory on his

way to the Herr Direktor�s office, or

when Fuchs and Schoenbrun, the inept civil engineers (�Not up to the weight of our engineers,� a prisoner would later say) came out of their offices. The Brinnlitz Oskar was still the Oskar old Emalia hands remembered. A bon vivant, a man of wild habits. Mandel and Pfefferberg, at the end of their shift and overheated from working on the pipe fittings for the steam, visited a water tank high up near the workshop ceiling. Ladders and a catwalk took them to it. The water was warm up there, and once you climbed in, you could not be seen from the floor. Dragging themselves up, the two welders were amazed to find the tub already taken. Oskar floated, naked and enormous. A blond SS girl, the one Regina Horowitz had bribed with a brooch, her naked breasts buoyant at the surface, shared the water with him. Oskar became aware of them, looked up at them frankly. Sexual shame was, to him, a concept something like existentialism, very worthy but hard to grasp. Stripped, the welders noticed, the girl was delicious. They apologized and left, shaking their heads, whistling softly, laughing like schoolboys. Above their heads, Oskar dallied like Zeus.

When the epidemic did not develop, Biberstein thanked the Brinnlitz delousing unit. When the dysentery faded, he thanked the food. In a testimony in the archives of the Yad Vashem, Biberstein declares that at the beginning of the camp, the daily ration was in excess of 2,000 calories. In all the miserable winter-bound continent, only the Jews of Brinnlitz were fed this living meal. Among the millions, only the soup of the Schindler thousand had body.

There was porridge too. Down the road from the camp, by the stream into which Oskar�s mechanics had recently thrown black-market liquor, stood a mill. Armed with a work pass, a prisoner could stroll down there on an errand from one or another department of DEF. Mundek Korn remembers coming back to the camp loaded with food. At the mill you simply tied your trousers at the ankles and loosened your belt. Your friend then shoveled your pants full of oatmeal. You belted up again and returned to the camp� a grand repository, priceless as you walked, a little bandy-legged, past the sentries into the annex. Inside, people loosened your cuffs and let the oatmeal run out into pots. In the drafting department, young Moshe Bejski and Josef Bau had already begun forging prison passes of the type that allowed people to make the mill run. Oskar wandered in one day and showed Bejski documents stamped with the seal of the rationing authority of the Government General. Oskar�s best contacts for black-market food were still in the Cracow area. He could arrange shipments by telephone. But at the Moravian border, you had to show clearance documents from the Food and Agriculture Department of the Government General. Oskar pointed to the stamp on the papers in his hand. Could you make a stamp like that? he asked Bejski. Bejski was a craftsman. He could work on little sleep. Now he turned out for Oskar the first of the many official stamps he would craft. His tools were razor blades and various small cutting instruments. His stamps became the emblems of Brinnlitz� own outrageous bureaucracy.

He cut seals of the Government General, of the

Governor of Moravia, seals to adorn false

travel permits so that prisoners could drive

by truck to Brno or Olomouc to collect

loads of bread, of black-market gasoline, of

flour or fabric or cigarettes. Leon

Salpeter, a Cracow pharmacist, once a

member of Marek Biberstein�s Judenrat,

kept the storehouse in Brinnlitz. Here the miserable supplies sent down from Gr@ossRosen by Hassebroeck were kept, together with the supplementary vegetables, flour, cereals bought by Oskar under Bejski�s minutely careful rubber stamps, the eagle and the hooked cross of the regime precisely crafted on them.

�You have to remember,� said an inmate of Oskar�s camp, �that Brinnlitz was hard. But beside any other�paradise!� Prisoners seem to have been aware that food was scarce everywhere; even on the outside, few were sated.

And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of the prisoners?

The answer is indulgent laughter. �Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?� And then a frown, in case you think this attitude too serflike. �You don�t understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be.�

As in his early marriage, Oskar was still temperamentally an absentee, was away from Brinnlitz for stretches of time. Sometimes Stern, purveyor of the day�s requests, would wait up all night for him. In Oskar�s apartment Itzhak and Emilie were the keepers of vigils.

The scholarly accountant would always put the most

loyal interpretation on Oskar�s wanderings around

Moravia. In a speech years after, Stern would

say, �He rode day and night, not only

to purchase food for the Jews in Brinnlitz

camp�by means of forged papers made by one of the

prisoners�but to buy us arms and ammunition in

case the SS conceived of killing us during their

retreats.� The picture of a restlessly

provident Herr Direktor does credit

to Itzhak�s love and loyalty. But Emilie

would have understood that not all the absences had to do with Oskar�s brand of humane racketeering.

During one of Oskar�s furloughs, nineteen-year-old Janek Dresner was accused of sabotage. In fact Dresner was ignorant of metalwork. He had spent his time in P@lasz@ow in the delousing works, handing towels to the SS who came for a shower and sauna, and boiling lice-ridden clothes taken from prisoners. (from the bite of a louse he�d suffered typhus, and survived only because his cousin, Dr. Schindel, passed him off in the clinic as an angina case.)

The supposed sabotage occurred because engineer Schoenbrun, the German supervisor, transferred him from his lathe to one of the larger metal presses. It had taken a week for the engineers to set the metrics for this machine, and the first time Dresner pressed the start button and began to use it, he shorted the wiring and cracked one of the plates. Schoenbrun harangued the boy and went into the office to write a damning report. Copies of Schoenbrun�s complaint were typed up and addressed to Sections D and W in Oranienburg, to Hassebroeck at Gr@oss-Rosen, and to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold in his office at the factory gate.

In the morning, Oskar had still not come home. So rather than mail the reports, Stern took them out of the office mailbag and hid them. The complaint addressed to Liepold had already been hand-delivered, but Liepold was at least correct in the terms of the organization he served and could not hang the boy until he had heard from Oranienburg and Hassebroeck. Two days later, Oskar had still not appeared. �It must be some party!�

the whimsical ones on the shop floor told each other. Somehow Schoenbrun discovered that Itzhak was sitting on the letters. He raged through the office, telling Stern that .his name would be added to the reports. Stern seemed to be a man of limitless calm, and when Schoenbrun finished he told the engineer that he had removed the reports from the mailbag because he thought the Herr Direktor should, as a matter of courtesy, be apprised of their contents before they were mailed. The Herr Direktor, said Stern, would of course be appalled to find out that a prisoner had done 10,000 RM. worth of damage to one of his machines. It seemed only just, said Stern, that Herr Schindler be given the chance to add his own remarks to the report.

At last Oskar drove in through the gate.

Stern intercepted him and told him about Schoenbrun�s charges.

Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had been waiting to see Schindler too and was eager to push his authority inside the factory, to use the Janek Dresner case as a pretext. I will preside over the hearing, Liepold told Oskar. You, Herr Direktor, will supply a signed statement attesting to the extent of the damage. Wait a minute, Oskar told him. It�s my machine that�s broken. I�m the one who�ll preside.

Liepold argued that the prisoner was under the jurisdiction of Section D. But the machine, replied Oskar, came under the authority of the Armaments Inspectorate. Besides, he really couldn�t permit a trial on the shop floor.

If Brinnlitz had been a garment or chemical factory, then perhaps it wouldn�t have much impact on production. But this was a munitions factory engaged in the manufacture of secret components. �I won�t have my work force disturbed,� said Oskar. It was an argument Oskar won, perhaps because Liepold gave in. The Untersturmf@uhrer was afraid of Oskar�s contacts. So the court was convened at night in the machine-tool section of DEF, and its members were Herr Oskar Schindler as president, Herr Schoenbrun, and Herr Fuchs. A young German girl sat at the side of the judicial table to keep a record, and when young Dresner was brought in, he saw in front of him a solemn and fully constituted court. According to a Section D edict of April 11, 1944, what Janek faced was the first and crucial stage of a process which should, after a report to Hassebroeck and a reply from Oranienburg, end in his hanging on the workshop floor in front of all the Brinnlitz people, his parents and sister among them. Janek noticed that tonight there was none of that shop-floor familiarity to Oskar. The Herr Direktor read aloud Schoenbrun�s report of the sabotage. Janek knew about Oskar mainly from the reports of others, particularly from his father, and couldn�t tell now what Oskar�s straight-faced reading of Schoenbrun�s accusations meant. Was Oskar really grieving for the cracked machine? Or was it all just theatrics?

When the reading was finished, the Herr Direktor began to ask questions. There was not much Dresner could say in answer. He pleaded that he was unfamiliar with the machine. There had been trouble setting it, he explained. He had been too anxious and had made a mistake. He assured the Herr Direktor that he had no reason to wish to sabotage the machinery. If you are not skilled at armaments work, said Schoenbrun, you shouldn�t be here. The Herr Direktor has assured me that all you prisoners have had experience in the armaments industry. Yet here you are, H@aftling Dresner, claiming ignorance. With an angry gesture, Schindler ordered the prisoner to detail exactly what he had done on the night of the offense. Dresner began to talk about the preparations for starting up the machine, the setting of it, the dry run at the controls, the switching on of the power, the sudden racing of the engine, the splitting of the mechanism. Herr Schindler became more and more restless as Dresner talked, and began to pace the floor glowering at the boy. Dresner was describing some alteration he had made to one of the controls when Schindler stopped, ham fists clenched, his eyes glaring. What did you say? he asked the boy.

Dresner repeated what he had said: I adjusted the pressure control, Herr Direktor. Oskar walked up to him and hit him across the side of the jaw. Dresner�s head sang, but in triumph, for Oskar�his back to his fellow judges�had winked at Dresner in a way that could not be mistaken. Then he began waving his great arms, dismissing the boy.

�The stupidity of you damned people!� he was bellowing all the while. �I can�t believe it!�

He turned and appealed to Schoenbrun and Fuchs, as if they were his only allies. �I wish they were intelligent enough to sabotage a machine. Then at least I�d have their goddamned hides! But what can you do with these people? They�re an utter waste of time.�

Oskar�s fist clenched again, and Dresner recoiled at the idea of another roundhouse punch. �Clear out!� yelled Oskar.

As Dresner went out through the door, he heard Oskar tell the others that it was better to forget all this. �I have some good Martell upstairs,� he said.

This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity. Dresner�s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners� lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.

CHAPTER 35

For the factory produced nothing. �Not a shell,� Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing. Oskar himself contrasts the output of DEF in the Cracow years with the Brinnlitz record. In Zablocie, enamelware was manufactured to the value of 16,000,000 RM. During the same time, the munitions section of

Emalia produced shells worth 500,000

RM. Oskar explains that at Brinnlitz,

however, �as a consequence of the falling off of the enamel production,� there was no output to speak of. The armaments production, he says, encountered �start-up difficulties.� But in fact he did manage to ship one truckful of �ammunition parts,�

valued at 35,000 RM., during the Brinnlitz months. �These parts,� said Oskar later, �had been transferred to Brinnlitz already half-fabricated. To supply still less [to the war effort] was impossible, and the excuse of �start-up difficulties� became more and more dangerous for me and my Jews, because Armaments Minister Albert Speer raised his demands from month to month.�

The danger of Oskar�s policy of nonproduction was not only that it gave him a bad name at the Armaments Ministry. It made other managements angry. For the factory system was fragmented, one workshop producing the shells, another the fuses, a third packing in the high explosives and assembling the components. In this way, it was reasoned, an air raid on any one factory could not substantially destroy the flow of arms. Oskar�s shells, dispatched by freight to factories farther down the line, were inspected there by engineers Oskar did not know and could not reach. The Brinnlitz items always failed quality control. Oskar would show the complaining letters to Stern, to Finder, to Pemper or Garde. He would laugh uproariously, as if the men writing the reprimands were comicopera bureaucrats. Later in the camp�s history one such case occurred. Stern and Mietek Pemper were in Oskar�s office on the morning of April 28, 1945, a morning when the prisoners stood at an extremity of danger, having been, as will be seen, all condemned to death by Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck. The day was Oskar�s thirty-seventh birthday, and a bottle of cognac had already been opened to mark it. And on the desk lay a telegram from the armaments assembly plant near Brno. It said that Oskar�s antitank shells were so badly produced that they failed all quality-control tests. They were imprecisely calibrated, and because they had not been tempered at the right heat they split under testing.

Oskar was ecstatic at this telegram, pushing it toward Stern and Pemper, making them read it. Pemper remembers that he made another of his outrageous statements. �It�s the best birthday present I could have got. Because I know now that no poor bastard has been killed by my product.� This incident says something about two contrasting frenzies. There is some madness in a manufacturer like Oskar who rejoices when he does not manufacture. But there is also a cool lunacy in the German technocrat who, Vienna having fallen, Marshal Koniev�s men having embraced the Americans on the Elbe, still takes it for granted that an arms factory up in the hills has time to tidy up its performance and make a condign offering to the grand principles of discipline and output. But the main question that arises from the birthday telegram is how Oskar lasted those months, the seven months up to the date of his birthday. The Brinnlitz people remember a whole series of inspections and checks. Men from Section D stalked the factory, checklists in their hands. So did engineers from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar always lunched or dined these officials,

softened them up with ham and cognac. In the Reich

there were no longer so many good lunches and dinners

to be had. The prisoners at the lathes, the

furnaces, the metal presses would state that the

uniformed inspectors reeked of liquor and

reeled on the factory floor. There is a

story all the inmates tell of an official who

boasted, on one of the final inspections of the war, that

Schindler would not seduce him with camaraderie,

with a lunch and liquor. On the stairs leading from the

dormitories down to the workshop floor, the

legend has it, Oskar tripped the man, sending

him to the bottom of the stairs, a journey that

split the man�s head and broke his leg. The

Brinnlitz people are, however, generally unable to say

who the SS hard case was. One claims that it

was Rasch, SS and police chief of

Moravia. Oskar himself never made any

recorded claim about it. The anecdote is one

of those stories that reflect on people�s picture of

Oskar as a provider who covers all

possibilities. And one has to admit, in

natural justice, that the inmates had the right to spread this sort of fable. They were the ones in deepest jeopardy. If the fable let them down, they would pay for it most bitterly. One reason Brinnlitz passed the inspections was the relentless trickery of Oskar�s skilled workers. The furnace gauges were rigged by the electricians. The needle registered the correct temperature when the interior of the furnace was in fact hundreds of degrees cooler. �I�ve written to the manufacturers,� Oskar would tell the armaments inspectors. He would play the somber, baffled manufacturer whose profits were being eroded. He would blame the floor, the inferior German supervisors. He spoke yet again of �start-up difficulties,� implying future tonnages of munitions once the problems faded. In the machine-tool departments, as at the furnaces, everything looked normal. Machines seemed perfectly calibrated, but were in fact a micromillimeter off. Most of the arms inspectors who walked through seem to have left not only with a gift of cigarettes and cognac, but with a faint sympathy for the thorny problems this decent fellow was enduring.

Stern would always say in the end that Oskar bought boxes of shells from other Czech manufacturers and passed them off as his own during inspections. Pfefferberg makes the same claim. In any case, Brinnlitz lasted, whatever sleight-of-hand Oskar used. There were times when, to impress the hostile

locals, he invited important officials in

for a tour of the factory and a good dinner. But they were

always men whose expertise did not run to engineering and

munitions production. After the Herr

Direktor�s stay in Pomorska Street,

Liepold, Hoffman, and the local Party

Kreisleiter wrote to every official they could

think of�local, provincial, Berlin-based�

complaining about him, his morals, his connections, his

breaches of race and penal law. Sussmuth let

him know about the barrage of letters arriving at

Troppau. So Oskar invited Ernst Hahn

down to Brinnlitz. Hahn was second in command

of the bureau of the Berlin main office devoted

to services for SS families. �He was,�

says Oskar with customary reprobate�s

primness, �a notorious drunkard.� With him Hahn brought his boyhood friend Franz Bosch. Bosch, as Oskar has already remarked in this narrative, was also �an impenetrable drunkard.� He was also the murderer of the Gutter family. Oskar, however, swallowing his contempt, welcomed him for his public-relations value. When Hahn arrived in town, he was wearing exactly the splendid, untarnished uniform Oskar had hoped he would. It was festooned with ribbons and orders, for Hahn was an old-time SS

man from the early glory days of the Party. With this dazzling Standartenf@uhrer came an equally glittering adjutant.

Liepold was invited in, from his rented house outside camp walls, to dine with the visitors. From the start of the evening, he was out of his depth. For Hahn loved Oskar; drunks always did.

Later Oskar would describe the men and the uniforms as �pompous.� But at least Liepold was convinced now that if he wrote complaining letters to distant authorities, they were likely to land on the desk of some old drinking friend of the Herr Direktor�s, and that this could well be perilous to himself.

In the morning, Oskar was seen driving through Zwittau, laughing with these glamorous men from Berlin. The local Nazis stood on the pavements and saluted all this Reich splendor as it passed.

Hoffman was not as easily quelled as the rest. The three hundred women of Brinnlitz had, in Oskar�s own words, �no employment possibility.� It has already been said that many of them spent their days knitting. In the winter of 1944, for people whose only cover was the striped uniform, knitting was no idle hobby. Hoffman, however, made a formal complaint to the SS about the wool the Schindler women had stolen from the cases in the annex. He thought it scandalous, and that it showed up the true activities of the so-called Schindler munitions works.

When Oskar visited Hoffman, he found the old man in a triumphant mood. �We�ve petitioned Berlin to remove you,� said Hoffman. �This time we�ve included sworn statements declaring that your factory is running in contravention of economic and race law. We�ve nominated an invalided Wehrmacht engineer from Brno to take over the factory and turn it into something decent.�

Oskar listened to Hoffman, apologized, tried to appear penitent. Then he telephoned Colonel Erich Lange in Berlin and asked him to sit on the petition from the Hoffman clique in Zwittau. The out-of-court settlement still cost Oskar 8,000 RM., and all winter the Zwittau town authorities, civil and Party, plagued him, calling him in to the town hall to acquaint him with the complaints of various citizens about his prisoners, or the state of his drains.

Lusia the optimist had a personal experience of SS inspectors that typifies the Schindler method.

Lusia was still in the cellar�she would be there for the entire winter. The other girls had got better and had moved upstairs to recuperate. But it seemed to Lusia that Birkenau had filled her with a limitless poison. Her fevers recurred again and again. Her joints became inflamed. Carbuncles broke out in her armpits. When one burst and healed, another would form. Dr. Handler, against the advice of Dr. Biberstein, lanced some of them with a kitchen knife. She remained in the cellar, well fed, ghost-white, infectious. In all the great square mileage of Europe, it was the only space in which she could have lived. She was aware of that even then, and hoped that the enormous conflict would roll by above her head.

In that warm hole under the factory, night and day were irrelevant. The time the door at the top of the cellar stairs burst open could have been either. She was used to quieter visits from Emilie Schindler. She heard boots on the stairs and tensed in her bed. It sounded to her like an old-fashioned Aktion.

It was in fact the Herr Direktor with two officers from Gr@oss-Rosen. Their boots clattered on the steps as if to stampede over her. Oskar stood with them as they looked around in the gloom at the boilers and at her. It came to Lusia that perhaps she was it for today. The sacrificial offering you had to give them so that they would go away satisfied. She was partially hidden by a boiler, but Oskar made no attempt to conceal her, actually came to the foot of her bed.

Because the two gentlemen of the SS seemed flushed

and unsteady, Oskar had a chance to speak to her. His

were words of wonderful banality, and she would never

forget them: �Don�t worry. Everything�s all

right.� He stood close, as if to emphasize

to the inspectors that this was not an

infectious case.

�This is a Jewish girl,� he said flatly.

�I didn�t want to put her in the

Krankenstube. Inflammation of the joints. She�s finished anyway. They don�t give her more than thirty-six hours.�

Then he rambled on about the hot water, where it came from, and the steam for the delousing. He pointed to gauges, piping, cylinders. He edged around her bed as if it too were neutral, part of the mechanism. Lusia did not know where to look, whether to open or close her eyes. She tried to appear comatose. It might seem a touch too much, but Lusia did not think so at the time, that as he ushered the SS men back to the base of the stairs, Oskar flashed her a cautious smile. She would stay there for six months and hobble upstairs in the spring to resume her womanhood in an altered world. During the winter, Oskar built up an independent arsenal. Again there are the legends: Some say that the weapons were bought at the end of

winter from the Czech underground. But Oskar had been

an obvious National Socialist in 1938 and

1939 and may have been wary of dealing with the

Czechs. Most of the weapons, in any case,

came from a flawless source, from

Obersturmbannf@uhrer Rasch, SS and

police chief of Moravia. The small cache included carbines and automatic weapons, some pistols, some hand grenades. Oskar would later describe the transaction offhandedly. He acquired the arms, he would say, �under the pretense of protecting my factory, for the price of the gift of a brilliant ring to his [Rasch�s] wife.�

Oskar does not detail his performance in Rasch�s office in Brno�s Spilberk Castle. It is not hard to imagine, though. The Herr Direktor, concerned about a possible slave uprising as the war grinds on, is willing to die expensively at his desk, automatic weapon in hand, having mercifully dispatched his wife with a bullet to save her from something worse. The Herr Direktor also touches on the chance that the Russians might turn up at the gate. My civilian engineers, Fuchs and

Schoenbrun, my honest technicians, my

German-speaking secretary, all of them

deserve to have the means of resistance. It�s gloomy talk, of course. I�d rather speak of issues closer to our hearts, Herr Obersturmbannf@uhrer. I know your passion for good jewelry. May I show you this example I found last week?

And so the ring appeared on the edge of Rasch�s blotter, Oskar murmuring, �As soon as I saw it, I thought of Frau Rasch.�

Once Oskar had the weapons, he appointed Uri Bejski, brother of the rubber-stamp maker, keeper of the arsenal. Uri was small, handsome, lively. People noticed that he wandered into and out of the Schindlers� private quarters like a son. He was a favorite, too, with Emilie, who gave him keys to the apartment. Frau Schindler enjoyed a similar maternal relationship with the surviving Spira boy. She took him regularly into her kitchen and fed him up on slices of bread and margarine.

Having selected the small body of prisoners for training, Uri took one at a time into Salpeter�s storehouse to teach them the mechanisms of the Gewehr 41 W�s. Three commando squads of five men each had been formed. Some of Bejski�s trainees were boys like Lutek Feigenbaum. Others were Polish veterans such as Pfefferberg and those other prisoners whom the Schindler prisoners called the �Budzyn people.�

The Budzyn people were Jewish officers and men of the Polish Army. They had lived through the liquidation of the Budzyn labor camp, which had been under the administration of Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold. Liepold had brought them into his new command in Brinnlitz. There were about 50 of them, and they worked in Oskar�s kitchens. People remember them as very political. They had learned Marxism during their imprisonment in Budzyn, and looked forward to a Communist Poland. It was an irony that in Brinnlitz they lived in the warm kitchens of that most apolitical of capitalists, Herr Oskar Schindler.

Their rapport with the bulk of the prisoners, who,

apart from the Zionists, merely followed the

politics of survival, was good. A number of

them took private lessons on Uri

Bejski�s automatics, for in the Polish

Army of the Thirties they had never held such sophisticated weapons. If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest

days of her husband�s power in Brno, had idly

--during a party, say; a musical recital

at the castle�gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her F@uhrer�s. An armed Marxist Jew.

CHAPTER 36

Old drinking friends of Oskar�s, Amon and

Bosch among them, had sometimes thought of him as the

victim of a Jewish virus. It was no

metaphor. They believed it in virtually

literal terms and attached no blame to the sufferer. They�d seen it happen to other good men. Some area of the brain fell under a thrall that was half-bacterium, half-magic. If they�d been asked whether it was infectious, they would have said, yes, highly. They would have seen the case of Oberleutnant Sussmuth as an example of conspicuous contagion.

For Oskar and Sussmuth connived over the winter

of 1944-45 to get a further 3,000 women out

of Auschwitz in groups of 300 to 500 at a

time into small camps in Moravia. Oskar

supplied the influence, the sales talk, the

palm-greasing for these operations. Sussmuth did the

paperwork. In the textile mills of Moravia

there was a labor shortage, and not all the owners

abhorred the Jewish presence as sharply as

Hoffman. At least five German factories

in Moravia�at Freudenthal and

Jagerndorf, at Liebau, Grulich, and

Trautenau�took these drafts of women and supplied a camp on the premises. Any such camp was never paradise, and in its management the SS were permitted to be more dominant than Liepold could ever hope to be. Oskar would later describe these women in the little camps as �living under endurable treatment.� But the very smallness of the textile camps was an aid to their survival, for the SS garrisons were older, slacker, less fanatical men. There was typhus to be eluded, and hunger to be carried like a weight beneath the ribs. But such tiny, almost countrified establishments would for the most part escape the extermination orders that would come to the bigger camps in the spring. But if the Jewish sepsis had infected Sussmuth, for Oskar Schindler it galloped. Through Sussmuth, Oskar had applied for another 30 metalworkers. It is simple fact that he had lost interest in production. But he saw, with the detached side of his mind, that if his plant was ever to validate its existence to Section D, he would need more qualified hands. When you look at other events of that mad winter, you can see that Oskar wanted the extra 30 not because they were used to lathes and machine tools, but because they were simply an extra 30. It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterized the exposed and flaming heart of the Jesus which hung on Emilie�s wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonization of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved. One of these 30 metalworkers, a man named Moshe Henigman, left a public account of their unlikely deliverance. A little after Christmas, 10,000 prisoners from the quarries of Auschwitz III�FROM such establishments as the Krupp Weschel-Union armaments factory and from German Earth and Stone, from the Farben synthetic-petroleum plant and the airplane-dismantling enterprise�were put in a column and marched away toward Gr@oss-Rosen. Perhaps some planner believed that once they arrived in Lower Silesia, they would be distributed among the area�s factory camps. If that was the scheme, it escaped the SS officers and men who marched with the prisoners. It ignored also the devouring cold of the merciless turning of the year, and it did not inquire how the column would be fed. The limpers, the coughers were culled out at the beginning of each stage and executed. Of 10,000, says Henigman, there were within ten days only 1,200 left alive. To the north, Koniev�s Russians had burst across the Vistula south of Warsaw and seized all the roads on the column�s northwesterly route. The diminished group was therefore put in an SS compound somewhere near Opole. The Commandant of the place had the prisoners interviewed, and lists made of the skilled workers. But each day the weary selections continued, and the rejects were shot. A man whose name was called out never knew what to expect, a lump of bread or a bullet. When Henigman�s name was called, however, he was put in a railway car with 30 others and, under the care of an SS

man and a Kapo, was shunted south. �We were given food for the trip,� Henigman recalls. �Something unheard of.�

Henigman later spoke of the exquisite unreality of arriving at Brinnlitz. �We could not believe that there was a camp left where men and women worked together, where there were no beatings, no Kapo.� His reaction is marked by a little hyperbole, since there was segregation in Brinnlitz. Occasionally, too, Oskar�s blond girlfriend let fly with an open palm, and once when a boy stole a potato from the kitchen and was reported to Liepold, the Commandant made him stand on a stool all day in the courtyard, the potato clamped in his open mouth, saliva running down his chin, and the placard �I AM A POTATO

THIEF!� hung around his neck. But to Henigman this sort of thing was not worthy of report. �How can one describe,� he asks, �the change from hell to paradise?�

When he met Oskar, he was told to build himself up. Tell the supervisors when you�re ready to work, said the Herr Direktor. And Henigman, faced with this strange reversal of policy, felt not simply that he�d come to a quiet pasture, but that he had gone through the mirror.

Since 30 tinsmiths were merely a fragment of the 10,000, it must be said again that Oskar was only a minor god of rescue. But like any tutelary spirit, he saved equally Goldberg and Helen Hirsch, and equally he tried to save Dr. Leon Gross and Olek Rosner. With this same gratuitous equality, he made a costly deal with the Gestapo in the Moravia region. We know that the contract was struck, but we do not know how expensive it was. That it cost a fortune is certain.

A prisoner named Benjamin Wrozlawski became one subject of this deal. Wrozlawski was formerly an inmate of the labor camp at Gliwice. Unlike Henigman�s camp, Gliwice was not in the Auschwitz region, but was close enough to be one of the Auschwitz subsidiary camps. By January 12, when Koniev and Zhukov launched their offensive, H@oss�s awesome realm and all its close satellites were in danger of instant capture. The Gliwice prisoners were put in Ostbahn cars and shipped toward Fernwald. Somehow Wrozlawski and a friend named Roman Wilner jumped from the train. One popular form of escape was through loosened ventilators in the cars� ceilings. But prisoners who tried it were often shot by guards stationed on the roofs. Wilner was wounded during this escape, but he was able to travel, and he and his friend Wrozlawski fled through the high quiet towns of the Moravian border. They were at last arrested in one of these villages and taken to the Gestapo offices in Troppau.

As soon as they had arrived and been searched and put in a cell, one of the gentlemen of the Gestapo walked in and told them that nothing bad would happen. They had no reason to believe him. The officer said further that he would not transfer Wilner to a hospital, in spite of the wound, for he would simply be collected and fed back into the system. Wrozlawski and Wilner were locked away for nearly two weeks. Oskar had to be contacted and a price had to be settled. During that time, the officer kept talking to them as if they were in protective custody, and the prisoners continued to find the idea absurd. When the door was opened and the two of them were taken out, they presumed they were about to be shot. Instead, they were led to the railway station by an SS man who escorted them on a train southeast toward Brno.

For both of them, the arrival at Brinnlitz had that same surreal, delightful and frightening quality it had had for Henigman. Wilner was put in the clinic, under the care of Doctors Handler, Lewkowicz, Hilfstein, Biberstein. Wrozlawski was put in a sort of convalescent area which had been set up�for extraordinary reasons soon to be explained�in a corner of the factory floor downstairs. The Herr Direktor visited them and asked how they felt. The preposterous question scared Wrozlawski; so did the surroundings. He feared, as he would put it years later, �the way from the hospital would lead to execution, as was the case in other camps.� He was fed with the rich Brinnlitz porridge, and saw Schindler frequently. But as he confesses, he was still confused, and found the phenomenon of Brinnlitz hard to grasp.

By the arrangement Oskar had with the provincial

Gestapo, 11 escapees were added to the

crammed-in camp population. Each one

of them had wandered away from a column or jumped from a cattle car. In their stinking stripes, they had tried to stay at large. By rights, they should all have been shot. In 1963, Dr. Steinberg of Tel Aviv testified to yet another instance of Oskar�s wild, contagious, and unquestioning largesse. Steinberg was the physician in a small work camp in the Sudeten hills. The Gauleiter in Liberec was less able, as Silesia fell to the Russians, to keep labor camps out of his wholesome province of Moravia. The camp in which Steinberg was imprisoned was one of the many new ones scattered among the mountains. It was a Luftwaffe camp devoted to the manufacture of some unspecified aircraft component. Four hundred prisoners lived there. The food was poor, said Steinberg, and the workload savage. Pursuing a rumor about the Brinnlitz camp, Steinberg managed to get a pass and the loan of a factory truck to go and see Oskar. He described to him the desperate conditions in the Luftwaffe camp. He says that Oskar quite lightly agreed to allocate him part of the Brinnlitz stores. The main question that preoccupied Oskar was, On what grounds could Steinberg regularly come to Brinnlitz to pick up supplies? It was arranged that he would use some excuse to do with getting regular medical aid from the doctors in the camp clinic.

Twice a week thereafter, says Steinberg, he visited Brinnlitz and took back to his own camp quantities of bread, semolina, potatoes, and cigarettes. If Schindler was around the storehouse on the day that Steinberg was loading up, he would turn his back and walk away.

Steinberg does not give any exact poundage of food, but he offers it as a medical opinion that if the Brinnlitz supplies had not been available, at least 50 of the prisoners in the Luftwaffe camp would have died by the spring. Apart from the ransoming of the women in Auschwitz, however, the most astounding salvage of all was that of the Golesz@ow people. Golesz@ow was a quarry and cement plant inside Auschwitz III itself, home of the SS�-OWNED German Earth and Stone Works. As has been seen with the 30

metalsmiths, throughout January 1945 the dread fiefdoms of Auschwitz were being disbanded, and in mid-month 120 quarry workers from Golesz@ow were thrown into two cattle cars. Their journey would be as bitter as any, but would end better than most. It is worth remarking that, like the Golesz@ow men, nearly everyone else in the Auschwitz area was on the move that month. Dolek Horowitz was shipped away to Mauthausen. Young Richard, however, was kept behind with other small children. The Russians would find him later in the month in an Auschwitz abandoned by the SS and would claim quite correctly that he and the others had been detained for medical experiments. Henry Rosner and nine-year-old Olek

(apparently no longer considered necessary for the laboratories) were marched away from Auschwitz in a column for thirty miles, and those who fell behind were shot. In Sosnowiec they were packed into freight cars. As a special kindness, an SS guard who was supposed to separate the children let Olek and Henry go into the same car. It was so crowded that everyone had to stand, but as men died of cold and thirst a gentleman whom Henry described as �a smart Jew� would suspend them in their blankets from horse hooks near the roof. In this way there was more floor space for the living. For the sake of the boy�s comfort, Henry got the idea of slinging Olek in his blanket in exactly the same way from the horse hooks. This not only gave the child an easier ride; when the train stopped at stations and sidings, he would call to Germans by the rails to throw snowballs up to the wire gratings. The snow would shatter and spray the interior of the wagon with moisture, and men would struggle for a few ice crystals.

The train took seven days to get to Dachau, and half the population of the Rosners� car died. When it at last arrived and the door was opened, a dead body fell out, and then Olek, who picked himself up in the snow, broke an icicle off the undercarriage and began to lick it ravenously. Such was travel in Europe in January 1945. For the Golesz@ow quarry prisoners it was

even worse. The bill of lading for their two

freight cars, preserved in the archives of the

Yad Vashem, shows that they were traveling without

food for more than ten days andwiththe doors frozen

shut. R, a boy of sixteen, remembers that

they scraped ice off the inside walls to quench

their thirst. Even in Birkenau they

weren�t unloaded. The killing process was in its

last furious days. It had no time for them. They

were abandoned on sidings, reattached

to locomotives, dragged for 50 miles,

uncoupled again. They were shunted to the gates of

camps, whose commandants refused them on the clear

ground that by now they lacked industrial value, and

because in any case facilities�bunks and rations

--were everywhere at the limit.

In the small hours of a morning at the end of January, they were uncoupled and abandoned in the rail yards at Zwittau. Oskar says a friend of his telephoned from the depot to report human scratchings and cries from inside the cars. These pleadings were uttered in many tongues, for the trapped men were, according to the manifest, Slovenes, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Netherlanders, and Serbians. The friend who made the call was very likely Oskar�s brother-in-law. Oskar told him to shunt the two cars up the siding to Brinnlitz.

It was a morning of gruesome cold�minus 30

degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees

Fahrenheit), says Stern. Even the exact

Biberstein says that it was at least minus 20 degrees (minus 4 degrees F). Poldek Pfefferberg was summoned from his bunk, fetched his welding gear, and went out to the snowy siding to cut open the doors iced hard as iron. He too heard the unearthly complaints from within.

It is hard to describe what they saw when the

doors were at last opened. In each car, a

pyramid of frozen corpses, their limbs

madly contorted, occupied the center. The hundred or more still living stank awesomely, were seared black by the cold, were skeletal. Not one of them would be found to weigh more than 75 pounds.

Oskar was not at the siding. He was inside the factory, where a warm corner of the workshop floor was being made ready for the shipment from Golesz@ow. Prisoners dismantled the last of Hoffman�s dumped machinery and carried it to the garages. Straw was brought in and the floor strewn with it.

Already Schindler had been out to the Commandant�s

office to speak to Liepold. The

Untersturmf@uhrer didn�t want to take

the Golesz@ow men; in that, he resembled all the other commandants they had met in the past few weeks. Liepold remarked pointedly that no one could pretend that these people were munitions workers. Oskar admitted that, but guaranteed to put them on the books, and so to pay 6 RM. a day for each of them. �I can use them after their recuperation,�

said Oskar. Liepold recognized two aspects of the case. First, that Oskar was unstoppable. Second, that an increase in the size of Brinnlitz and the labor fees paid might well please Hassebroeck. Liepold would have them quickly enrolled on the books and the entries back-dated, so that even as the Golesz@ow men were carried in through the factory gate, Oskar was paying for them.

Inside the workshop, they were wrapped in blankets and laid down on the straw. Emilie came from her apartment, followed by two prisoners toting an enormous bucket of porridge. The doctors noted the frostbite and the need for frost ointments. Dr. Biberstein mentioned to Oskar that the Golesz@ow people would need vitamins, though he was sure there were none to be had in Moravia. In the meantime the 16 frozen corpses were placed in a shed. Rabbi Levartov, looking at them, knew that with their limbs twisted by the cold they would be hard to bury in the Orthodox manner, which permitted no breaking of bones. The matter, Levartov knew, would, however, have to be argued with the Commandant. Liepold had on file from Section D a number of directives urging SS

personnel to dispose of the dead by burning. In the boiler rooms were perfect facilities, industrial furnaces capable almost of vaporizing a body. Yet Schindler had so far twice refused to permit the burning of the dead.

The first time was when Janka Feigenbaum died

in the Brinnlitz clinic. Liepold had at

once ordered her body incinerated. Oskar heard

through Stern that this was abhorrent to the Feigenbaums

and to Levartov, and his resistance to the idea may have

been fueled also by the Catholic residue in his

own soul. In those years the Catholic Church was

firmly opposed to cremation. As well as

refusing Liepold the use of the furnace,

Oskar also ordered the carpenters to prepare a coffin, and himself supplied a horse and wagon, allowing Levartov and the family to ride out under guard to bury the girl in the woods.

Feigenbaum father and son had walked behind the wagon, counting the steps from the gate so that when the war ended they could reclaim Janka�s body. Witnesses say that Liepold was furious at this sort of pandering to the prisoners. Some Brinnlitz people even comment that Oskar could show toward Levartov and the Feigenbaums a more exacting delicacy and courtesy than he usually managed with Emilie. The second time Liepold wanted the furnaces used was when old Mrs. Hofstatter died. Oskar, at Stern�s request, had another coffin prepared, allowing a metal plaque on which Mrs. Hofstatter�s vital statistics were marked to be included in the coffin. Levartov and a minyan, the quorum of ten males who recite Kaddish over the dead, were permitted to leave camp and attend the funeral.

Stern says that it was for Mrs. Hofstatter�s sake that Oskar established a Jewish cemetery in the Catholic parish of Deutsch-Bielau, a nearby village. According to him, Oskar went to the parish church on the Sunday Mrs. Hofstatter died and made the priest a proposition. A quickly convened parish council agreed to sell him a small parcel of land just beyond the Catholic cemetery. There is nothing surer than that some of the council resisted, for it was an era when Canon Law was interpreted narrowly in its provisions as to who could and who could not be buried in consecrated ground.

Other prisoners of some authority say, however, that the Jewish cemetery plot was bought by Oskar at the time of the arrival of the Golesz@ow cars with their tithe of twisted dead. In a later report, Oskar himself implies that it was the Golesz@ow dead who caused him to buy the land. By one account, when the parish priest pointed out the area beyond the church wall reserved for the burial of suicides and suggested that the Golesz@ow people be buried there, Oskar answered that these weren�t suicides. These were victims of a great murder. The Golesz@ow deaths and the death of Mrs. Hofstatter must have come close together in any case, and were both marked with full ritual in the unique Jewish cemetery of Deutsch-Bielau.

It is clear from the way all Brinnlitz prisoners spoke of it that this interment had enormous moral force within the camp. The distorted corpses who were unloaded from the freight cars had seemed less than human. Looking at them, you became frightened for your own precarious humanity. The inhuman thing was beyond feeding, washing, warming. The one way left to restore it�as well as yourself�to humanity was through ritual. Levartov�s rites, therefore, the exalted plainchant of Kaddish, had a far larger gravity for the Brinnlitz prisoners than such ceremonies could ever have had in the relative tranquillity of prewar Cracow.

To keep the Jewish burial ground tidy in

case of future deaths, Oskar employed a

middle-aged SS Unterscharf@uhrer and

paid him a retainer.

Emilie Schindler had transactions of her

own to make. Carrying a clutch of false papers supplied by Bejski, she had two prisoners load up one of the plant trucks with vodka and cigarettes, and ordered them to drive her to the large mining town of Ostrava up near the border of the Government General. At the military hospital she was able to make an arrangement with various of Oskar�s contacts and to bring back frostbite ointments, sulfa, and the vitamins Biberstein had thought beyond procuring. Such journeys now became regular events for Emilie. She was growing to be a traveler, like her husband.

After the first deaths, there were no others. The

Golesz@ow people were Mussulmen, and it was a first

principle that the condition of Mussulmen could not

be reversed. But there was some intractability in

Emilie which would not accept it. She harried them with

her bucketfuls of farina. �Out of those rescued from

Golesz@ow,� said Dr. Biberstein, �not one

would have stayed alive without her treatment.� The men

began to be seen, trying to look useful, on the

factory floor. One day a Jewish storeman

asked one of them to carry a box out to a machine on

the workshop floor. �The box weighs

thirty-five kilos,� said the boy, �and I

weigh thirty-two. How in the hell can I carry it?�

To this factory of ineffective machines, its floor strewn with scarecrows, Herr Amon Goeth came that winter, following his release from prison, to pay his respects to the Schindlers. The SS court had let him out of prison in Breslau because of his diabetes. He was dressed in an old suit that may have been a uniform with the markings stripped off. There are rumors about the meaning of this visit, and they persist to this day. Some thought that Goeth was looking for a handout, others that Oskar was holding something for him�cash or kind from one of Amon�s last Cracow deals in which Oskar had perhaps served as Amon�s agent. Some who worked close to Oskar�s office believe that Amon even asked for a managerial post at Brinnlitz. No one could say that he did not have the experience. In fact, all three versions of Amon�s motives in coming down to Brinnlitz are possibly correct, though it is unlikely that Oskar ever acted as Amon�s agent.

As Amon stepped through the gate of the camp, it could be seen that prison and tribulation had thinned him down. The fleshiness had vanished from his face. His features were more like those of the Amon who had come to Cracow in the New Year of 1943 to liquidate the ghetto, yet they were different too, for they were jaundice-yellow and prison-gray. And if you had the eyes for it, if you dared to look, you saw a new passivity there. Some prisoners, however, glancing up from their lathes, glimpsed that figure from the pit of their foulest dreams, there unannounced, passing by the doors and windows, proceeding through the factory yard toward Herr Schindler�s office. Helen Hirsch sat galvanized, wanting nothing except that he should vanish again. But others hissed him as he passed, and men bent at their machines and spat. More mature women lifted their knitting toward him like a challenge. For that was vengeance� to show that in spite of all his terror, Adam still delved and Eve span.

If Amon wanted a job at Brinnlitz� and there were few other places a Hauptsturmf@uhrer under suspension could go�Oskar either talked him out of it or bought him off. In that way, this meeting was like all their others. As a courtesy the Herr Direktor took

Amon on a tour of the plant, and on this

circuit of the workshop floor, the reaction against him was stronger still. Back in the office, Amon was overheard demanding that Oskar punish the inmates for their disrespect, and Oskar was heard rumbling away, pledging that he would do something about the pernicious Jews and expressing his own undiminished respect for Herr Goeth. Though the SS had let him out of prison, the investigation of his affairs was still in progress. A judge of the SS Court had come to Brinnlitz in the past few weeks to question Mietek Pemper again about Amon�s managerial procedures.

Before the interrogation began, Commandant Liepold had muttered to Pemper that he�d better be careful, that the judge would want to take him to Dachau for execution after he�d been drained of evidence. Wisely, Pemper had done all he could to convince the judge of the unimportance of his work in the main office at P@lasz@ow. Somehow, Amon had heard that the SS investigators had been pursuing Pemper. Soon after he arrived in Brinnlitz, he cornered his ci-devant typist in Oskar�s outer office and wanted to know what questions the judge had asked. Pemper believed, reasonably enough, that he could detect in Amon�s eyes resentment that his onetime prisoner was still a breathing source of evidence for the SS Court. Surely Amon was powerless here, thinned down, looking doleful in an old suit, washed up in Oskar�s office? But you couldn�t be sure. It was still Amon, and he had the habit of authority. Pemper said, �The judge told me I was not to talk to anyone about my interrogation.� Goeth was outraged and threatened to complain to Herr Schindler. That, if you like, was a measure of Amon�s new impotence. He had never had to go to Oskar before to appeal for the chastisement of a prisoner.

By the second night of Amon�s visit, the women were feeling more triumphant. He couldn�t touch them. They persuaded even Helen Hirsch of this. Yet her sleep was uneasy.

The last time Amon passed within sight of prisoners, it was on his way to be taken by car to the station at Zwittau. He had never in the past made three visits to any space without bringing some poor bastard�s world crashing down. It was clear now that he had no power at all. Yet still not everyone could look him in the face as he left. Thirty years later, in the sleep of P@lasz@ow veterans from Buenos Aires to Sydney, from New York to Cracow, from Los Angeles to Jerusalem, Amon would still be rampaging. �When you saw Goeth,� said Poldek Pfefferberg, �you saw death.�

So, in his own terms, he was never an utter failure.

CHAPTER 37

Oskar�s thirty-seventh birthday was celebrated by Oskar himself and all the prisoners. One of the metalworkers had crafted a small box

suitable for holding studs or cuff links, and when

the Herr Direktor appeared on the workshop

floor, the twelve-year-old Niusia

Horowitz was pushed toward him to make a

rehearsed speech in German. �Herr

Direktor,� she said in a voice he had

to stoop to hear. �All the prisoners wish you the very best for this your birthday.�

It was a Shabbat, which was apt, because the Brinnlitz people would always remember it as a festival. Early in the morning, about the time Oskar had begun celebrating with Martell cognac in his office and flourishing that insulting telegram from the engineers at Brno, two truckloads of white bread rolled into the courtyard. Some went to the garrison, even to the hung-over Liepold sleeping late in his house in the village. That much was necessary to stop the SS from grumbling about the way the Herr Direktor favored prisoners. The prisoners themselves were issued three-quarters of a kilo of the bread. They inspected it as they ate and savored it. There was some speculation about where Oskar had got it. Perhaps it could be partially explained by the goodwill of the local mill manager, Daubek, the one who turned away while Brinnlitz prisoners filled their pants with oatmeal. But that Saturday bread was truly celebrated more in terms of the magic of the event, of the wonder-working. Though the day is remembered as jubilant, there was in fact not so much cause for festive feeling. Sometime in the past week, a long telegram had been directed from Herr Commandant Hassebroeck of Gr@oss-Rosen to Liepold of Brinnlitz giving him instructions about the disposal of the population in the event the Russians drew near. There was to be a final selection, said Hassebroeck�s telegram. The aged and the halt were to be shot immediately, and the healthy were to be marched out in the direction of Mauthausen. Though the prisoners on the factory floor knew nothing of this telegram, they still had an unspecified fear of something like it. All that week there had been rumors that Poles had been brought in to dig mass graves in the woods beyond Brinnlitz. The white bread seemed to have come as an antidote to that rumor, a warranty of all their futures. Yet everyone seemed to know that an era of dangers more subtle than those of the past had begun.

If Oskar�s factory hands knew nothing of the telegram, neither did Herr Commandant Liepold himself. The cable was delivered first to Mietek Pemper in Liepold�s outer office. Pemper had steamed it open and resealed it and taken the news of its contents straight to Oskar. Schindler stood at his desk reading it, then turned to Mietek. �All right, then,� growled Oskar. �We have to say goodbye to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold.�

For it seemed both to Oskar and to Pemper that Liepold was the only SS man in the garrison capable of obeying such a telegram. The Commandant�s deputy was a man in his forties, an SS Oberscharf@uhrer named Motzek.

While Motzek might be capable of some sort of panic slaughter, to administer the cool murder of 1,300 humans was beyond him.

In the days before his birthday, Oskar made a number of confidential complaints to Hassebroeck about the excessive behavior of Herr Commandant Liepold. He visited the influential Brno police chief, Rasch, and lodged the same sort of charges against Liepold. He showed both Hassebroeck and Rasch copies of letters he had written to the office of General Gl@ucks in Oranienburg. Oskar was gambling that Hassebroeck would remember Oskar�s past generosities and the promise of future ones, that he would take note of the pressure for Liepold�s removal now being built up by Oskar in Oranienburg and Brno, that he would transfer Liepold without bothering to investigate the Untersturmf@uhrer�s behavior toward the inmates of Brinnlitz.

It was a characteristic Schindler maneuver�the

Amon-Oskar game of blackjack writ

large. All the Brinnlitz men were in the

stake, from Hirsch Krischer, Prisoner

No. 68821, a forty-eight-year-old

auto mechanic, to Jarum Kiaf,

Prisoner No. 77196, a twenty-seven-year-old unskilled worker and

survivor of the Golesz@ow carriages. And

all the Brinnlitz women were counted in as well,

from No. 76201, twenty-nine-year-old metalworker Berta Aftergut, to No. 76500, thirty-six-year-old Jenta

Zwetschenstiel.

Oskar got fuel for further complaints about

Liepold by inviting the Commandant to dinner at the

apartment inside the factory. It was April

27, the eve of Schindler�s birthday. About

eleven o�clock that night, the prisoners at work on

the floor of the plant were startled to see a drunken

Commandant reeling across the factory floor,

assisted on his way by a steadier Herr

Direktor. In the course of his passage,

Liepold attempted to focus on individual

workers. He raged, pointing at the great roof

beams above the machinery. The Herr

Direktor had so far kept him off the

factory floor, but here he was, the final and punishing authority. �You fucking Jews,� he was roaring. �See that beam, see it! That�s what I�ll hang you from. Every one of you!�

Oskar eased him along, directing him by the shoulder, murmuring at him, �That�s right, that�s right. But not tonight, eh? Some other time.� The next day Oskar called Hassebroeck and others with predictable accusations. The man rages around the factory drunk, making threats about immediate executions. They�re not laborers! They�re sophisticated technicians engaged in secret-weapons manufacture, and so on. And although Hassebroeck was responsible for the deaths of thousands of quarry workers, although he believed that all Jewish labor should be liquidated when the Russians were close, he did agree that until then Herr Schindler�s factory should be treated as a special case.

Liepold, said Oskar, kept stating that he�d like at last to go into combat. He�s young, he�s healthy, he�s willing. Well, Hassebroeck told Oskar, we�ll see what can be done. Commandant Liepold himself, meanwhile, spent Oskar�s birthday sleeping off the dinner of the night before.

In his absence, Oskar made an astounding

birthday speech. He had been celebrating all

day, yet no one remembers his delivery being

unsteady. We do not have the text of what he said,

but there is another speech, made ten days later

on the evening of May 8, of which we do have a

copy. According to those who listened, both speeches

pursued similar lines. Both were, that is,

promises of continuing life.

To call either of them a speech, however, is

to demean their effect. What Oskar was

instinctively attempting was to adjust reality,

to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the SS. Long before, with pertinacious certainty,

he�d told a group of shift workers, Edith

Liebgold among them, that they would last the war.

He�d flourished the same gift for prophecy

when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on their

morning of arrival the previous November, and

told them, �You�re safe now; you�re with me.�

It can�t be ignored that in another age and condition, the Herr Direktor could have become a

demagogue of the style of Huey Long of

Louisiana or John Lang of Australia,

whose gift was to convince the listeners that they and he were bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil

devised by other men.

Oskar�s birthday speech was delivered in

German at night on the workshop floor to the

assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had

to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the German civilian personnel were present as

well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek

Pfefferberg felt the hairs on his lice stand

to attention. He looked around at the mute faces

of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and of the SS men with their automatics. They will kill this man, he

thought. And then everything will fall apart.

The speech pursued two main promises.

First, the great tyranny was coming to a close. He

spoke of the SS men around the walls as if they

too were imprisoned and yearned for liberation. Many

of them, Oskar explained to the prisoners, had

been conscripted from other units and without their consent into the Waffen SS. His second promise was

that he would stay at Brinnlitz until the end of the

hostilities was announced. �And five minutes

longer,� he said. For the prisoners, the speech, like past pronouncements of Oskar�s, promised a

future. It stated his vigorous intent that they should not go into graves in the woods. It reminded them of

his investment in them, and it enlivened them.

One can only guess, however, how it bedeviled

the SS men who heard it. He had genially

insulted their corps. How they protested, or

whether they swallowed it, he would learn from their

reaction. He had also warned them that he would stay

in Brinnlitz at least as long as they would, and that therefore he was a witness.

But Oskar did not feel as blithe as he

sounded. Later he confessed that at the time he was

concerned about actions retreating military units in

the Zwittau area might take in regard

to Brinnlitz. He even says, �We were in a

panic, because we were afraid of the despairing

actions of the SS guards.� It must have been a

quiet panic, for no prisoner, eating his white

bread on Oskar�s birthday, seems to have caught

a whiff of it. Oskar was also concerned about some

Vlasov units which had been stationed on the edges

of Brinnlitz. These troops were members of the

ROA, the Russian Army of Liberation, formed

the year before on the authority of Himmler from the

vast ranks of Russian prisoners in the

Reich and commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, a

former Soviet general captured in front of

Moscow three years past. They were a dangerous

corps for the Brinnlitz people, for they knew Stalin

would want them for a special punishment and feared that the Allies would give them back to him. Vlasov

units everywhere were therefore in a state of violent Slavic despair, which they stoked with vodka.

When they withdrew, seeking the American lines

farther west, they might do anything.

Within two days of Oskar�s birthday speech,

a set of orders arrived on Liepold�s

desk. They announced that

Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had been

transferred to a Waffen SS infantry

battalion near Prague. Though Liepold

could not have been delighted with them, he seems to have packed quietly and left. He had often said at

dinners at Oskar�s, particularly after the

second bottle of red wine, that he would prefer

to be in a combat unit. Lately there had been a

number of field-rank officers, Wehrmacht

and SS, from the retreating forces invited to dinner in the Herr Direktor�s apartment, and their table

talk had always been to stir Liepold�s itch

to seek combat. He had never been faced with as much

evidence as the other guests that the cause was

finished.

It is unlikely that he called

Hassebroeck�s office before packing his bags.

Telephone communications were not sound, for the

Russians had encircled Breslau and were within a

walk of Gr@oss-Rosen itself. But the transfer

would not have surprised anyone in Hassebroeck�s

office, since Liepold had often

made patriotic sounds to them too. So, leaving

Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek in command of

Brinnlitz, Josef Liepold drove off

to battle, a hard-liner who had got his wish.

With Oskar, there was no mute waiting for the

close. During the first days of May, he

discovered somehow�perhaps even by telephone calls

to Brno, where lines were still operating�that one of the warehouses with which he regularly dealt had been

abandoned. With half a dozen prisoners, he

drove off by truck to loot it. There were a number

of roadblocks on the way south, but at each of

them they flashed their dazzling papers, forged, as

Oskar would write, with the stamps and signatures

�of the highest SS police authorities in Moravia and Bohemia.� When they arrived at the warehouse, they found it encircled by fire. Military storehouses in the neighborhood had been set alight, and there had been incendiary bombing raids as well. From the direction of the inner city, where the Czechoslovak underground was fighting door to door with the garrison, they could hear firing. Herr Schindler ordered the truck to back into the loading dock of the warehouse, broke the door open, and discovered that the interior was full of a brand of cigarettes called Egipski.

In spite of such lighthearted piracy,

Oskar was frightened by rumors from Slovakia that the Russians were uncritically and informally executing German civilians. From listening to the BBC news each night, he was comforted to find that the war might end before any Russian reached the Zwittau area.

The prisoners also had indirect access to the

BBC and knew what the realities were. Throughout

the history of Brinnlitz the radio

technicians, Zenon Szenwich and Artur

Rabner, had continually repaired one or another radio of Oskar�s. In the welding shop, Zenon listened with an earphone to the 2 P.m. news from the Voice of London. During the night shift, the welders plugged into the 2 A.m. broadcast. An SS man, in the factory one night to take a message to the office, discovered three of them around the radio.

�We�ve been working on it for the Herr Direktor,� they told the man, �and just got it going a minute ago.�

Earlier in the year, prisoners had expected that Moravia would be taken by the Americans. Since Eisenhower had stood fast at the Elbe, they now knew that it would be the Russians. The circle of prisoners closest to Oskar were composing a letter in Hebrew, explaining what Oskar�s record was. It might do some good if presented to American forces, which had not only a considerable Jewish component, but field rabbis. Stern and Oskar himself therefore considered it vital that the Herr Direktor somehow be got to the Americans. In part Oskar�s decision was influenced by the characteristic Central European idea of the Russians as barbarians, men of strange religion and uncertain humanity. But apart from that, if some of the reports from the east could be believed, he had grounds for rational fear.

But he was not debilitated by it. He was awake

and in a state of hectic expectation when the news

of the German surrender came to him through the BBC

in the small hours of May 7. The war in

Europe was to cease at midnight on the following

night, the night of Tuesday, May 8. Oskar

woke Emilie, and the sleepless Stern was

summoned into the office to help the Herr

Direktor celebrate. Stern could tell that

Oskar now felt confident about the SS

garrison, but would have been alarmed if he could have guessed how Oskar�s certitude would be demonstrated that day.

On the shop floor, the prisoners maintained

the usual routines. If anything, they worked

better than on other days. Yet about noon, the

Herr Direktor destroyed the pretense of

business as usual by piping Churchill�s

victory speech by loudspeaker throughout the camp.

Lutek Feigenbaum, who understood English,

stood by his machine flabbergasted. For others, the

honking and grunting voice of Churchill was the first

they�d heard in years of a language they would

speak in the New World. The idiosyncratic

voice, as familiar in its way as that of the dead

F@uhrer, carried to the gates and assailed the

watchtowers, but the SS took it soberly. They

were no longer turning inward toward the camp. Their

eyes, like Oskar�s, were focused�but far more

sharply�on the Russians. According

to Hassebroeck�s earlier telegram, they should

have been busy in the rich green woods. Instead,

clock-watching for midnight, they looked at the

black face of the forest, speculating whether

partisans were there. A fretful

Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek kept them at

their posts, and duty kept them there also. For duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius.

In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweler named Licht, had been making a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box he�d been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. It had been supplied by old Mr. Jereth of the box factory. It was established� even the Budzyn men, devout Marxists, knew it�that Oskar would have to flee after midnight. The urge to mark that flight with a small ceremony was the preoccupation of the group�Stern, Finder, Garde, the Bejskis, Pemper�close to Oskar. It is remarkable, at a time when they were not sure themselves that they would see the peace, that they should worry about going-away presents. All that was handy to make a gift with, however, was base metals. It was Mr. Jereth who suggested a source of something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework. Without Oskar, he said, the SS would have the damned stuff anyway. My teeth would be in a heap in some SS warehouse, along with the golden fangs of strangers from Lublin, @l@od@z, and Lw@ow.

It was, of course, an appropriate offering, and Jereth was insistent. He had the bridgework dragged out by a prisoner who had once had a dental practice in Cracow. Licht melted the gold down and by noon on May 8 was engraving an inscription on the inner circle in Hebrew. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheister�s in October 1939. �He who saves a single life saves the world entire.�

In one of the factory garages that afternoon, two

prisoners were engaged in removing the upholstery from

the ceiling and inner doors of Oskar�s Mercedes,

inserting small sacks of the Herr

Direktor�s diamonds and replacing the

leatherwork without, they hoped, leaving any bulges. For them too it was a strange day. When they came out of the garage, the sun was setting behind the towers where the Spandaus sat loaded yet weirdly ineffectual. It was as if all the world were waiting for a decisive word.

Words of that nature seem to have come in the evening. Again, as on his birthday, Oskar instructed the Commandant to gather the prisoners on the factory floor. Again the German engineers and the secretaries, their escape plans already made, were present. Among them stood Ingrid, his old flame. She would not be leaving Brinnlitz in Schindler�s company. She would make her escape with her brother, a young war veteran, lame from a wound. Given that Oskar went to so much trouble to provide his prisoners with trade goods, it is unlikely that he would let an old love like Ingrid leave Brinnlitz without anything to barter for survival. Surely they would meet on friendly terms later, somewhere in the West.

As at Oskar�s birthday speech, armed guards stood around the great hall. The war had nearly six hours to run, and the SS were sworn never to abandon it in any case. Looking at them, the prisoners tried to gauge their states of soul. When it was announced that the Herr Direktor would make another address, two women prisoners who knew shorthand, Miss Waidmann and Mrs. Berger, had each fetched a pencil and prepared to take down what was said. Because it was an ex tempore speech, given by a man who knew he would soon become a fugitive, it was more compelling as spoken than it is on the page in the Waidmann-Berger version. It continued the themes of his birthday address, but it seemed to make them conclusive for both the prisoners and the Germans. It declared the prisoners the inheritors of the new era; it confirmed that everyone else there�the SS, himself, Emilie, Fuchs, Schoenbrun�was now in need of rescue.

�The unconditional surrender of Germany,� he said, �has just been announced. After six years of the cruel murder of human beings, victims are being mourned, and Europe is now trying to return to peace and order. I would like to turn to you for unconditional order and discipline�to all of you who together with me have worried through many hard years� in order that you can live through the present and within a few days go back to your destroyed and plundered homes, looking for survivors from your families. You will thus prevent panic, whose results cannot be foreseen.�

He did not, of course, mean panic in the

prisoners. He meant panic among the

garrison, among the men lining the walls. He was inviting the SS to leave, and the prisoners to let them do so. General Montgomery, he said, the commander of the Allied land forces, had proclaimed that one should act in a humane way toward the conquered, and everyone�in judging the Germans�had to distinguish between guilt and duty. �The soldiers at the front, as well as the little man who has done his duty everywhere, shall not be responsible for what a group calling itself German has done.� He was uttering a defense of his countrymen which every prisoner who survived the night would hear reiterated a thousand times in the era to come. Yet if anyone had earned the right to make that defense and have it listened to with�at least�tolerance, it was surely Herr Oskar Schindler.

�The fact that millions among you, your parents, children, and brothers, have been liquidated has been disapproved by thousands of Germans, and even today there are millions of them who do not know the extent of these horrors.� The documents and records found in Dachau and Buchenwald earlier in the year, their details broadcast by the BBC, were the first, said Oskar, that many a German had heard of �this most monstrous destruction.� He therefore begged them once again to act in a humane and just way, to leave justice to those authorized. �If you have to accuse a person, do it in the right place. Because in the new Europe there will be judges, incorruptible judges, who will listen to you.� Next he began to speak about his association with the prisoners in the past year. In some ways he sounded almost nostalgic, but he feared as well being judged in a lump with the Goeths and the Hassebroecks.

�Many of you know the persecutions, the chicanery and obstacles which, in order to keep my workers, I had to overcome through many years. If it was already difficult to defend the small rights of the Polish worker, to maintain work for him and to prevent him from being sent by force to the Reich, to defend the workers� homes and their modest property, then the struggle to defend the Jewish workers has often seemed insurmountable.�

He described some of the difficulties, and thanked them for their help in satisfying the demands of the armaments authorities. In view of the lack of output from Brinnlitz, the thanks may have sounded ironic. But they were not offered in an ironic way. What the Herr Direktor was saying in a quite literal sense was Thank you for helping me make a fool of the system.

He went on to appeal for the local people. �If after a few days here the doors of freedom are opened to you, think of what many of the people in the neighborhood of the factory have done to help you with additional food and clothing. I have done everything and spent every effort in getting you additional food, and I pledge to do the utmost in the future to protect you and safeguard your daily bread. I shall continue doing everything I can for you until five minutes past midnight.

�Don�t go into the neighboring houses to rob and plunder. Prove yourselves worthy of the millions of victims among you and refrain from any individual acts of revenge and terror.�

He confessed that the prisoners had never been welcome in the area. �The Schindler Jews were taboo in Brinnlitz.� But there were higher concerns than local vengeance. �I entrust your Kapos and foremen to continue keeping up order and continued understanding. Therefore tell your people of it, because this is in the interest of your safety. Thank the mill of Daubek, whose help in getting you food went beyond the realms of possibility. On behalf of you, I shall now thank the brave director Daubek, who has done everything to get food for you. �Don�t thank me for your survival. Thank your people who worked day and night to save you from extermination. Thank your fearless Stern and Pemper and a few others who, thinking of you and worrying about you, especially in Cracow, have faced death every moment. The hour of honor makes it our duty to watch and keep order, as long as we stay here together. I beg of you, even among yourselves, to make nothing but humane and just decisions. I wish to thank my personal collaborators for their complete sacrifice in connection with my work.� His speech, weaving from issue to issue, exhausting some ideas, returning tangentially to others, reached the center of its temerity. Oskar turned to the SS garrison and thanked them for resisting the barbarity of their calling. Some prisoners on the floor thought, He�s asked us not to provoke them? What is he doing himself! For the SS was the SS, the corps of Goeth and John and Hujar and Scheidt. There were things an SS man was taught, things he did and saw, which marked the limits of his humanity.

Oskar, they felt, was dangerously pushing the limits.

�I would like,� he said, �to thank the assembled

SS guards, who without being asked were ordered from the Army and Navy into this service. As heads of families, they have realized for a long time the contemptibility and senselessness of their task. They have acted here in an extraordinarily humane and correct manner.�

What the prisoners did not see, aghast if a little exalted by the Herr Direktor�s nerve, was that Oskar was finishing the work he�d begun on the night of his birthday. He was destroying the SS as combatants. For if they stood there and swallowed his version of what was �humane and correct,� then there was nothing more left to them but to walk away. �In the end,� he said, �I request you all to keep a three-minute silence, in memory of the countless victims among you who have died in these cruel years.�

They obeyed him. Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek and Helen Hirsch; Lusia, who had come up from the cellar only in the past week; and Schoenbrun, Emilie, and Goldberg. Those itching for time to pass, those itching to flee. Keeping silent among the giant Hilo machines at the limit of the noisiest of wars.

When it was over, the SS left the hall quickly. The prisoners remained. They looked around and wondered if they were at last the possessors. As Oskar and Emilie moved toward their apartment to pack, prisoners waylaid them. Licht�s ring was presented. Oskar spent some time admiring it; he showed the inscription to Emilie and asked Stern for a translation. When he asked where they had got the gold and discovered it was Jereth�s bridgework, they expected him to laugh; Jereth was among the presentation committee, ready to be teased and already flashing the little points of his stripped teeth. But Oskar became very solemn and slowly placed the ring on his finger. Though nobody quite understood it, it was the instant in which they became themselves again, in which Oskar Schindler became dependent on gifts of theirs.

CHAPTER 38

In the hours following Oskar�s speech the SS garrison began to desert. Inside the factory, the commandos selected from the Budzyn people and from other elements of the prison population had already been issued the weapons Oskar had provided. It was hoped to disarm the SS rather than wage a ritual battle with them. It would not be wise, as Oskar had explained, to attract any retreating and embittered units to the gate. But unless something as outlandish as a treaty was arrived at, the towers would ultimately have to be stormed with grenades.

The truth, however, was that the commandos had only to formalize the disarming described in Oskar�s speech. The guards at the main gate gave up their weapons almost gratefully. On the darkened steps leading up to the SS barracks, Poldek Pfefferberg and a prisoner named Jusek Horn disarmed Commandant Motzek, Pfefferberg putting his finger in the man�s back and Motzek, like any sane man over forty with a home to go to, begging them to spare him. Pfefferberg took the Commandant�s pistol, and Motzek, after a short detention during which he cried out for the Herr Direktor to save him, was released and began to walk home.

The towers, about which Uri and the other irregulars must have spent hours of speculation and scheming, were discovered abandoned. Some prisoners, newly armed with the garrison�s weapons, were put up there to indicate to anyone passing by that the old order still held sway here.

When midnight came, there were no SS men or women visible in the camp. Oskar called Bankier to the office and gave him the key to a particular storeroom. It was a naval supply store and had been situated, until the Russian offensive into Silesia, somewhere in the Katowice area. It must have existed to supply the crews of river and canal patrol boats, and Oskar had found out that the Armaments Inspectorate wanted to rent storage space for it in some less threatened area. Oskar got the storage contract��with the help of some gifts,� he said later. And so eighteen trucks loaded with coat, uniform, and underwear fabric, with worsted yarn and wool, as well as with a half a million reels of thread and a range of shoes, had entered the Brinnlitz gate and been unloaded and stored. Stern and others would declare that Oskar knew the stores would remain with him at the end of the war and that he intended the material to provide a starting stake for his prisoners. In a later document, Oskar claims the same thing. He had sought the storage contract, he says, �with the intention of supplying my Jewish prot@eg�es at the end of the war with clothing. ... Jewish textile experts estimated the value of my clothing store at more than $150,000 U.s. (peace currency).�

He had in Brinnlitz men capable of making such a judgment�Juda Dresner, for example, who had owned his own textile business in Stradom Street; Itzhak Stern, who had worked in a textile company across the road. For the rite of passing over this expensive key to Bankier, Oskar was dressed in prisoner�s stripes, as was his wife, Emilie. The reversal toward which he�d been working since the early days of DEF was visibly complete. When he appeared in the courtyard to say goodbye, everyone thought it a lightly put on disguise, which would be lightly taken off again once he encountered the Americans. The wearing of the coarse cloth was, however, an act that would never completely be laughed off. He would in a most thorough sense always remain a hostage to Brinnlitz and Emalia. Eight prisoners had volunteered to travel with Oskar and Emilie. They were all very young, but they included a couple, Richard and Anka Rechen. The oldest was an engineer named Edek Reubinski, but he was still nearly ten years younger than the Schindlers. Later, he would supply the details of their eccentric journey.

Emilie, Oskar, and a driver were meant to occupy the Mercedes. The others would follow in a truck loaded with food and with cigarettes and liquor for barter. Oskar seemed anxious to be away. One arm of Russian threat, the Vlasovs, was gone. They had marched out in the past few days. But the other, it was presumed, would be in Brinnlitz by the next morning, or even sooner. From the back seat of the Mercedes, where Emilie and Oskar sat in their prison uniforms�not, it had to be admitted, much like prisoners; more like bourgeoisie off to a masquerade ball�Oskar still rumbled out advice for Stern, orders to Bankier and Salpeter. But you could tell he wanted to be off. Yet when the driver, Dolek Gr@unhaut, tried to start the Mercedes, the engine was dead. Oskar climbed out of the back seat to look under the hood. He was alarmed�a different man from the one who�d given the commanding speech a few hours before. �What is it?� he kept asking. But it was hard for Gr@unhaut to say in the shadows. It took him a little time to find the fault, for it was not one he expected. Someone, frightened by the idea of Oskar�s departure, had cut the wiring.

Pfefferberg, part of the crowd gathered to wave the Herr Direktor off, rushed to the welding shop, brought back his gear, and went to work. He was sweating and his hands seemed clumsy, for he was rattled by the urgency he could sense in Oskar. Schindler kept looking at the gate as if the Russians might at any second materialize. It was not an improbable fear� others in the courtyard were tormented by the same ironic possibility�and Pfefferberg worked too hard and took too long. But at last the engine caught to Gr@unhaut�s frantic turning of the key.

Once the engine turned over, the Mercedes left, the truck following it. Everyone was too unnerved to make formal goodbyes, but a letter, signed by Hilfstein and Stern and Salpeter, attesting to Oskar�s and Emilie�s record, was handed to the Schindlers. The Schindler convoy rolled out the gate and, at the road by the siding, turned left toward Havl@i@ck@uv Brod and toward what was for Oskar the safer end of Europe. There was something nuptial about it, for Oskar, who had come to Brinnlitz with so many women, was leaving with his wife. Stern and the others remained standing in the courtyard. After so many promises, they were their own people. The weight and uncertainty of that must now be borne.

The hiatus lasted three days and had its history and its dangers. Once the SS left, the only representative of the killing machine left in Brinnlitz was a German Kapo who had come from Gr@oss-Rosen with the Schindler men. He was a man with a murderous record in Gr@oss-Rosen itself, but one who had also made enemies in Brinnlitz. A pack of male prisoners now dragged him from his bunk down to the factory hall and enthusiastically and mercilessly hanged him from one of the same beams with which Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had recently threatened the prison population. Some inmates tried to intervene, but the executioners were in a rage and could not be stopped. It was an event, this first homicide of the peace, which many Brinnlitz people would forever abhor. They had seen Amon hang poor engineer Krautwirt on the Appellplatz at P@lasz@ow, and this hanging, though for different reasons, sickened them as profoundly. For Amon was Amon and beyond altering. But these hangmen were their brothers. When the Kapo ceased his twitching, he was left suspended above the silenced machines. He perplexed people, though. He was supposed to gladden them, but he threw doubt. At last some men who had not hanged him cut him down and incinerated him. It showed what an eccentric camp Brinnlitz was, that the only body fed into the furnaces which, by decree, should have been employed to burn the Jewish dead was the corpse of an Aryan. The distribution of the goods in the Navy store went on throughout the next day. Lengths of worsted material had to be cut from the great bolts of fabric. Moshe Bejski said that each prisoner was given three yards, together with a complete set of underwear and some reels of cotton. Some women began that very day to make the suits in which they would travel home. Others kept the fabric intact so that, traded, it would keep them alive in the confused days to come.

A ration of the Egipski cigarettes which Oskar had plundered from burning Brno was also issued, and each prisoner was given a bottle of vodka from Salpeter�s storehouse. Few would drink it.

It was, of course, simply too precious

to drink.

After dark on that second night, a Panzer unit came down the road from the direction of Zwittau. Lutek Feigenbaum, behind a bush near the gate and armed with a rifle, had the urge to fire as soon as the first tank passed within sight of the camp. But he considered it rash. The vehicles rattled past. A gunner in one of the rear tanks in the column, understanding that the fence and the watchtowers meant that Jewish criminals might be lying low in there, swiveled his gun and sent two shells into the camp. One exploded in the courtyard, the other on the women�s balcony. It was a random exhibition of spite, and through wisdom or astonishment none of the armed prisoners answered it. When the last tank had vanished, the men of the commandos could hear mourning from the courtyard and from the women�s dormitory upstairs. A girl had been wounded by shell fragments. She herself was in shock, but the sight of her injuries had released in the women all the barely expressed grief of the past years. While the women mourned, the Brinnlitz doctors examined the girl and found that her wounds were superficial. Oskar�s party traveled for the first hours of their

escape at the tail of a column of

Wehrmacht trucks. At midnight feats of

this nature had become feasible, and no one pestered

them. Behind them they could hear German engineers

dynamiting installations, and occasionally there was the

clamor of a distant ambush arranged by the Czech

underground. Near the town of Havl@i@ck@uv

Brod they must have fallen behind, because they were stopped

by Czech partisans who stood in the middle of the

road. Oskar went on impersonating a

prisoner. �These good people and I are escapees from

a labor camp. The SS fled, and the Herr

Direktor. This is the Herr

Direktor�s automobile.�

The Czechs asked them if they had weapons. Reubinski had come from the truck and joined the discussion. He confessed that he had a rifle. All right, said the Czechs, you�d better give us what you have. If the Russians intercepted you and found that you had weapons, they might not understand why. Your defense is your prison uniforms. In this town, southeast of Prague and on the road to Austria, there was still the likelihood of meeting disgruntled units. The partisans directed Oskar and the others to the Czech Red Cross office in the town square. There they could safely bunk down for the rest of the night. But when they reached town, the Red Cross officials suggested to them that given the uncertainty of the peace, they would probably be safest in the town jail. The vehicles were left in the square, in sight of the Red Cross office, and Oskar, Emilie, and their eight companions carried their few pieces of baggage and slept in the unlocked cells of the police station.

When they returned to the square in the morning, they found that both vehicles had been stripped.

All the upholstery had been torn from the

Mercedes, the diamonds were gone, the tires had

been taken from the truck, and the engines had been

plundered. The Czechs were

philosophical about it. We all have

to expect to lose something in times like these. Perhaps they may even have suspected Oskar, with his fair complexion and his blue eyes, of being a fugitive SS man. The party were without their own transport, but a train ran south in the direction of Kaplice, and they caught it, dressed still in their stripes. Reubinski says that they took the train �as far as the forest, and then walked.� Somewhere in that forested border region, well to the north of Linz, they could expect to encounter the Americans. They were hiking down a wooded road when they met two young gum-chewing Americans sitting by a machine gun. One of Oskar�s prisoners began to speak with them in English. �Our orders are not to let anyone pass on this road,� one of them said.

�Is it forbidden to circle around through the woods?� asked the prisoner. The GI chewed. This strange chewing race!

�Guess not,� said the GI at last.

So they swung through the woods and, back on the road half an hour later, ran into an infantry company marching north in double column. Through the English speaker once more, they began to talk to the unit�s reconnaissance men. The commanding officer himself drew up in a jeep, dismounted, interrogated them. They were frank with him, telling him that Oskar was the Herr Direktor, that they were Jews. They believed they were on safe ground, for they knew from the BBC that the U.s. forces included many Americans of both German and Jewish origins. �Don�t move,� said the captain. He drove away without explanation, leaving them in the half-embarrassed command of the young infantrymen, who offered them cigarettes, the Virginia kind, which had that almost glossy look�like the jeep, the uniforms, the equipment�of coming from a grand, brash, unfettered, and un-ersatz manufactory.

Though Emilie and the prisoners were uneasy that Oskar might be arrested, he himself sat on the grass apparently unconcerned and breathed in the spring air in these high woods. He had his Hebrew letter, and New York, he knew, was ethnically a city where Hebrew was not unknown. Half an hour passed and some soldiers appeared, coming down the road in an informal bunch, not strung out in the infantry manner. They were a group of Jewish infantrymen and included a field rabbi. They were very effusive. They embraced all the party, Emilie and Oskar as well. For these, the party was told, were the first concentration-camp survivors the battalion had met. When the greetings were over, Oskar brought out his Hebrew reference, and the rabbi read it and began to weep. He relayed the details to the other Americans. There was more applause, more hand shaking, more embraces. The young GI�S seemed so open, so loud, so childlike. Though one or two generations out of Central Europe, they had been so marked by America that the Schindlers and the prisoners looked at them with as much amazement as was returned.

The result was that the Schindler party spent two days on the Austrian frontier as guests of the regimental commander and the rabbi. They drank excellent coffee, such as the authentic prisoners in the group had not tasted since before the founding of the ghetto. They ate opulently. After two days, the rabbi presented them with a captured ambulance, in which they drove to the ruined city of Linz in Upper Austria.

On the second day of peace in Brinnlitz, the Russians still had not appeared. The commando group worried about the necessity of hanging on to the camp for longer than they had thought they�d have to. One thing they remembered was that the only time they�d seen the SS show fear�apart from the anxiety of Motzek and his colleagues in the past few days�had been when typhus broke out.

So they hung typhus signs all over the

wire.

Three Czech partisans turned up at the

gate in the afternoon and talked through the fence to the men on sentry duty. It�s all over now, they said.

You�re free to walk out whenever you want. When the Russians arrive, said the prison commandos. Until then we�re keeping everyone in. Their answer exhibited some of the pathology of the prisoner, the suspicion you got after a time that the world outside the fence was perilous and had to be reentered in stages. It also showed their wisdom. They were not convinced yet that the last German unit had gone.

The Czechs shrugged and went away.

That night, when Poldek Pfefferberg was part of the guard at the main gate, motorcycle engines were heard on the road. They did not pass by, as the Panzers had done, but could be heard turning in toward the camp itself. Five cycles marked with the SS death�s-head materialized out of the dark and drew up noisily by the front fence. As the SS men�very young, Poldek remembers� switched off their engines, dismounted, and approached the gate, a debate raged among the armed men inside as to whether the visitors ought to be immediately shot.

The NCO in charge of the motorcycle party seemed to understand the risk inherent in the situation. He stood a little way from the wire with his hands extended. They needed gasoline, he said. He presumed that being a factory camp, Brinnlitz would have gasoline. Pfefferberg advised that it was better to supply them and send them packing than to create problems by opening fire on them. Other elements of their regiment might be in the region, and be drawn by an outburst of gunfire.

So in the end the SS men were let in through the gate, and some of the prisoners went to the garage and drew gasoline. The SS NCO was careful to convey to the camp commandos�who had put on blue coveralls in an attempt to look like informal guards, or at least like German Kapos�that he did not find anything peculiar in the idea of armed prisoners� defending their camps from within. �I hope you realize there�s typhus here,�

said Pfefferberg in German, pointing to the signs. The SS men looked at each other.

�We�ve already lost two dozen people,� said Pfefferberg. �We have another fifty isolated in the cellar.�

This claim seemed to impress the gentlemen of the death�s-head. They were tired. They were fleeing. That was enough for them. They didn�t want any bacterial perils on top of the others.

When the gasoline arrived in 5-gallon cans, they expressed their thanks, bowed, and left through the gate. The prisoners watched them fill their tanks and considerately leave by the wire any cans they could not fit into their sidecars. They put on their gloves, started their engines, and left without too much revving of the motors, being too careful to waste their new tankfuls on flourishes. Their roar faded southwest through the village. For the men at the gate, this polite encounter would be their last with anyone wearing the uniform of Heinrich Himmler�s foul legion.

When on the third day the camp was liberated, it was by a single Russian officer. Riding a horse, he emerged through the defile through which the road and the railway siding approached the Brinnlitz gate. As he drew closer it became apparent that the horse was a mere pony, the officer�s thin feet in the stirrups nearly touching the road and his legs bent in comically underneath the horse�s skinny abdomen. He seemed to be bringing to Brinnlitz a personal, hard-won deliverance, for his uniform was worn, the leather strap of his rifle so withered by sweat and winter and campaigning that it had had to be replaced by rope. The reins of the horse were also of rope. The officer was fair-complexioned and, as Russians always look to Poles, immensely alien, immensely familiar. After a short conversation in hybrid Polish-Russian, the commando at the gate let him in. Around the balconies of the second floor, the rumor of his arrival spread. As he dismounted he was kissed by Mrs. Krumholz. He smiled and called, in two languages, for a chair. One of the younger men brought it.

Standing on it to give himself a height

advantage which, in relation to most of the prisoners,

he did not need, he made what sounded like a

standard liberation speech in Russian. Moshe

Bejski could catch its gist. They had been

liberated by the glorious Soviets. They were

free to go to town, to move in the direction of their

choosing. For under the Soviets, as in the mythical

heaven, there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male

nor female, bond nor free. They were not

to take any cheap revenge in the town. Their

Allies would find their oppressors, and

subject them to solemn and appropriate

punishment. The fact of their freedom should, to them, outweigh any other consideration. He got down from his chair and smiled, as if saying that now he had finished as a spokesman and was prepared to answer questions. Bejski and some of the others began to speak to him, and he pointed to himself and said in creaky Belorussian Yiddish�the sort you pick up from your grandparents rather than your parents --that he was Jewish. Now the conversation took on a new intimacy.

�Have you been in Poland?� Bejski asked him. �Yes,� the officer admitted. �I�ve come from Poland now.�

�Are there any Jews left up there?�

�I saw none.�

Prisoners were crowding around, translating and relaying the conversation to one another. �Where are you from?� the officer asked Bejski.

�Cracow.�

�I was in Cracow two weeks ago.�

�Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz?�

�I heard that at Auschwitz there are still a few Jews.�

The prisoners grew thoughtful. The Russian made Poland sound like a vacuum now, and if they returned to Cracow they�d rattle around in it bleakly like dried peas in a jar.

�Is there anything I can do for you?� the officer asked.

There were cries for food. He thought he could get them a cartload of bread, and perhaps some horsemeat. It should arrive before dusk. �But you should see what they have in town here,� the officer suggested.

It was a radical idea�that they ought to just go out the gate and begin shopping in Brinnlitz. For some of them it was still an unimaginable option. Young men like Pemper and Bejski pursued the officer as he left. If there were no Jews in Poland, there was nowhere to go. They didn�t want him to give them instructions, but felt he ought to discuss their quandary with them. The Russian paused in untying the reins of his pony from a railing.

�I don�t know,� he said, looking them in the face. �I don�t know where you ought to go. Don�t go east�that much I can tell you. But don�t go west either.� His fingers returned to untying the knot. �They don�t like us anywhere.�

As the Russian officer had urged them, the Brinnlitz prisoners moved out the gate at last to make their first tentative contact with the outer world. The young were the first to try it. Danka Schindel went out the day after the liberation and climbed the wooded hill behind the camp. Lilies and anemones were beginning to bud, and migratory birds were arriving from Africa. Danka sat on the hill for a while, savoring the day, then rolled down it and lay in the grass at the bottom, inhaling the fragrances and looking at the sky. She was there for so long that her parents presumed she had come to grief in the village, with either the townspeople or the Russians.

Goldberg left early too, was perhaps the first to go, on his way to pick up his riches in Cracow. He would emigrate, as quickly as he could arrange it, to Brazil. Most of the older prisoners stayed in camp.

The Russians had now moved into Brinnlitz,

occupying as an officers� quarters a villa on

a hill above the village. They brought to the camp

a butchered horse, which the prisoners ate

ravenously, some of them finding it too rich after their

diet of bread and vegetables and Emilie

Schindler�s porridge.

Lutek Feigenbaum, Janek Dresner, and

young Sternberg went foraging in town. The village was patrolled by the Czech underground, and Brinnlitz folk of German descent were therefore wary of the liberated prisoners. A grocer indicated to the boys that they were welcome to a bag of sugar he�d been keeping in his storeroom. Young Sternberg found the sugar irresistible, lowering his face to it and swallowing it by the handful. It made him cruelly ill. He discovered what the Schindler group were finding in Nuremberg and Ravensburg�that liberty and the day of plenty had to be approached gradually.

The main purpose of this expedition to town had been to get bread. Feigenbaum was armed, as a member of the Brinnlitz commandos, with a pistol and a rifle, and when the baker insisted there was no bread, one of the others said to him, �Threaten him with the rifle.� The man, after all, was Sudetendeutsch and in theory an approver of all their misery. Feigenbaum pointed the weapon at the baker and moved through the shop into the residence beyond, looking for hidden flour. In the parlor, he found the baker�s wife and two daughters huddled in shock. They looked so frightened, indistinguishable from any Cracow family during an Aktion, that a great shame overwhelmed him. He nodded to the women as if he were on a social visit, and left.

The same shame overtook Mila Pfefferberg

on her first visit to the village. As she entered

the square, a Czech partisan stopped two

Sudeten girls and made them take

off their shoes so that Mila, who had only

clogs, could select the pair that fitted her

better. This sort of dominance made her flush,

and she sat on the pavement making her embarrassed

choice. The partisan gave the clogs to the

Sudeten girl and passed on. Mila then

turned in her tracks, ran up behind the girl, and

gave the shoes back. The

Sudetendeutscherin, Mila remembers,

was not even gracious.

In the evenings, the Russians came to the camp looking for women. Pfefferberg had to put a pistol to the head of a soldier who penetrated the women�s quarters and grabbed Mrs. Krumholz. (mrs. Krumholz would for years later chide Pfefferberg, pointing at him and accusing him. �Whatever chance I had of running off with a younger man, that scoundrel prevented it!�) Three girls were taken away�more or less voluntarily�to a Russian party, and came back after three days and, they claimed, a good time. The hold of Brinnlitz was a negative one, and within a week the prisoners began to move out. Some whose families had been consumed went directly to the West, never wishing to see Poland again. The Bejski boys, using their cloth and vodka to pay their way, traveled to Italy and boarded a Zionist ship to Palestine. The Dresners walked across Moravia and Bohemia and into Germany, where Janek was among the first ten students to enroll in the Bavarian University of Erlangen when it opened later in the year. Manci Rosner returned to Podg@orze, where Henry had agreed to meet her. Henry Rosner himself, liberated from Dachau with Olek, was in a pissoir in Munich one day and saw another client of the place wearing prison-camp stripes. He asked the man where he had been imprisoned. �Brinnlitz,� said the man.

Everyone except an old lady, the man told

him (inaccurately, as it turned out), had

survived Brinnlitz. Manci herself would hear of

Henry�s survival through a cousin who came to the

room in Podg@orze where Manci was waiting and

waved the Polish paper in which were listed the names of

Poles liberated from Dachau. �Manci,� said

the cousin, �give me a kiss. Henry�s

alive, and so is Olek.�

Regina Horowitz had a similar

rendezvous. It took her three weeks

to travel from Brinnlitz to Cracow with her daughter Niusia. She rented a room�the handout from the Navy store made that possible�and waited for Dolek. When he arrived, they sought to make inquiries of Richard, but there was no news. One day that summer Regina saw the film of Auschwitz which the Russians had made and were showing free of charge to the Polish population. She saw the famous frames involving the camp children, who looked out from behind the wire or were escorted by nuns past the electrified fence of Auschwitz I. Being so small and so engaging, Richard figured in most of the frames. Regina got up screaming and left the theater. The manager and a number of passing citizens tried to soothe her in the street. �It�s my son, it�s my son!� she kept screaming. Now that she knew he was alive, she was able to discover that Richard had been released by the Russians into the hands of one of the Jewish rescue organizations. Thinking both his parents dead, the rescue body had had him adopted by some old acquaintances of the Horowitzes�, people named Liebling. Regina was given the address, and when she arrived at the Lieblings� apartment could hear Richard inside, banging on a saucepan and calling, �Today there�ll be soup for everyone!� When she knocked on the door, he called to Mrs. Liebling to answer it.

So he was returned to her. But after what he had seen of the scaffolds of P@lasz@ow and Auschwitz, she could never take him to a children�s playground without his growing hysterical at the sight of the swing frames.

At Linz, Oskar�s group reported to the American authorities, were relieved of their unreliable ambulance, and were taken by truck north to Nuremberg, to a large holding center for wandering concentration-camp prisoners. They were discovering that, as they had suspected, liberation wasn�t a straightforward business.

Richard Rechen had an aunt in Constanz, by the lake on the Swiss border. When the Americans asked the group if there was anywhere they could go, they nominated this aunt. The intent of the eight young prisoners from Brinnlitz was to deliver the Schindlers, if possible, across the Swiss border, in case vengeance against Germany erupted suddenly and, even in the American zone, the Schindlers were unjustly punished. Additionally, all eight of them were potential emigrants and believed that these matters would be easier to arrange from Switzerland.

Reubinski remembers that their relationship with the

American commandant in Nuremberg was cordial,

but the man would not spare them any transport

to take them south to Constanz. They made the

journey through the Black Forest as best they could,

some of it on foot, some of it by train. Near

Ravensburg they went to the local prison camp

and spoke to the U.s. commandant. Here again they

stayed as guests for some days, resting and living high

on Army rations. In return, they sat up

late with the commandant, who was of Jewish descent,

and told him their stories of Amon and

P@lasz@ow, of Gr@oss-Rosen,

Auschwitz, Brinnlitz. They hoped he would give them transport to Constanz, possibly a truck. He could not spare a truck, but gave them a bus instead, together with some provisions for the journey. Though Oskar still carried diamonds worth over 1,000 RM. as well as some currency, the bus does not appear to have been bought but was instead given freely. After his dealings with the German bureaucrats, it must have been difficult for Oskar to adjust to that sort of transaction. West of Constanz, on the Swiss border and in the French Occupied zone, they parked the bus in the village of Kreuzlingen. Rechen went to the town hardware store and bought a pair of wire cutters. It seems that the party were still wearing their prison uniforms when the wire cutters were purchased. Perhaps the man behind the counter was influenced by one of two considerations: (a) this was a prisoner, and if thwarted might call his French protectors; (b) this was in fact a German officer escaping in disguise and perhaps should be helped.

The border fence ran through the middle of

Kreuzlingen and was guarded on the German side

by French sentries of the S@uret�e

Militaire. The group approached this barrier

on the edge of the village and, snipping the wires,

waited for the sentry to near the end of his beat before

slipping through to Switzerland. Unhappily, a

woman from the village observed them from a bend of the

road and rushed to the border to alert the French and

Swiss. In a quiet Swiss village

square, a mirror image of the one on

the German side, the Swiss police surrounded the party, but Richard and Anka Rechen broke away and had to be chased and apprehended by a patrol car. The party was, within half an hour, passed back to the French, who at once searched their possessions, discovering jewels and currency; drove them to the former German prison; and locked them in separate cells.

It was clear to Reubinski that they were under suspicion of having been concentrationcamp guards. In that sense the weight they had put on as guests of the Americans boomeranged, for they did not look as deprived as when they�d first left Brinnlitz. They were interrogated separately about their journey, about the valuables they were carrying. Each of them could tell a plausible story, but did not know if the others were telling the same one. They seem to have been afraid, in a way that had not applied with the Americans, that if the French discovered Oskar�s identity and his function in Brinnlitz, they would arraign him as a matter of course.

Prevaricating for Oskar�s sake and Emilie�s, they remained there a week. The Schindlers themselves now knew enough about Judaism to pass the obvious cultural tests. But Oskar�s manner and physical condition didn�t make his posture of recent-prisoner-of-theSs very credible. Unhappily, his Hebrew letter was over in Linz, in the files of the Americans. Edek Reubinski, as the leader of the eight, was questioned most regularly, and on the seventh day of his imprisonment was brought into the interrogation room to find a second person there, a man in civilian clothes, a speaker of Polish, brought in to test Reubinski�s claim that he came from Cracow. For some reason�because the Pole played a compassionate role in the questioning that followed, or because of the familiarity of the language�Reubinski broke down, began to weep, and told the full story in fluent Polish. The rest were called one by one, were shown Reubinski, were told he had confessed, and then were ordered to recite their version of the truth in Polish. When at the end of the morning the versions matched, the whole group, the Schindlers included, were gathered in the interrogation room and embraced by both interrogators. The Frenchman, says Reubinski, was weeping. Everyone was delighted at that phenomenon�a weeping interrogator. When he managed to compose himself, he called for lunch to be brought in for himself, his colleague, the Schindlers, the eight. That afternoon he had them transferred to a lakeside hotel in Constanz, where they stayed for some days at the expense of the French military government.

By the time he sat down to dinner that evening at the hotel with Emilie, Reubinski, the Rechens, and the others, Oskar�s property had passed to the Soviets, and his last few jewels and currency were lost in the interstices of the liberating bureaucracy. He was as good as penniless, but was eating as well as could be managed in a good hotel with a number of his �family.� All of which would be the pattern of his future.