Now, with the authority of his lucrative Armaments Inspectorate contracts, Oskar was permitted to expand his plant. There was room. Beyond the entryway and offices of DEF stood two large industrial hangars. Some of the floor space in the building on the left as you emerged from the DEF entryway into the interior of the factory was occupied by present production. The other building was totally empty.
He bought new machinery, some locally, some from the homeland. Apart from the military demand, there was the all-devouring black market to serve. Oskar knew now that he could be a magnate. By the mid-summer of 1940 he would be employing two hundred and fifty Poles and would be faced with instituting a nightshift. Herr Hans Schindler’s agricultural machinery plant in Zwittau had at the best of times employed fifty. It is a sweet thing to outstrip a father whom you haven’t forgiven.
At times throughout the year, Stern would call on Schindler to arrange employment for some young Jew – a special case, an orphan from Lódź, the daughter of a clerk in one of the departments of the Judenrat. Within a few months Oskar was employing one hundred and fifty Jewish workers and his factory had a minor reputation as a haven.
It was a year when, like each succeeding year for the rest of the war, Jews would be looking for some employment considered essential to the war effort. In April, Governor General Frank had decreed an evacuation of Jews from his capital Cracow. It was a curious decision, since the Reich authorities were still moving Jews and Poles back into Frank’s Government General at the rate of nearly ten thousand a day. Yet conditions in Cracow, Frank told his cabinet, were scandalous. He knew of German divisional commanders who had to live in apartment buildings that contained Jewish tenants. Higher officials were also subjected to the same quite scandalous indignity. Over the next six months, he promised, he would make Cracow judenfrei. There would be a permitted remnant of five to six thousand skilled Jewish workers. All the rest were to be moved into other cities in the Government General, into Warsaw or Radom, Lublin or Czestochowa. Jews could emigrate voluntarily to the city of their choice as long as they did it before August 15th. Those still left in the city after that date would be trucked out with a small amount of luggage to whatever place suited the administration. From November 1st, said Hans Frank, it would be possible for the Germans of Cracow to breathe ‘good German air’, to walk abroad without seeing the streets and lanes ‘crawling with Jews’.
That year Frank would not manage to reduce the Jewish population of the city to quite so low a level. But when his plans were first announced, there was a rush among the Jewish population of Cracow, especially among the young, to acquire skilled qualifications. Men like lean Itzhak Stern, official and unofficial agents of the Judenrat, had already developed a list of sympathisers, Germans to whom they could appeal. Schindler was on that list, so was the Viennese Julius Madritsch, who had recently managed to get himself released from the Wehrmacht and taken up the post of Treuhänder of the Optima Uniform Works. Madritsch could see the benefits of Armaments Inspectorate’s contracts and now intended to open a uniform factory of his own in the suburb of Podgórze. In the end he would make an even larger fortune than Schindler, but in the annus mirabilis of 1940 he was still on a salary. He was known to be humane, that was all.
By November 1st, 1940, Frank had managed to move twenty-three thousand Jewish volunteers out of Cracow. Some of them went to the new ghettos in Warsaw and Lódź. The gaps at table, the grieving on railway stations can be imagined, but people took it meekly, thinking, We’ll do this, and that will be the brunt of what they ask. Oskar knew it was happening, but, like the Jews themselves, hoped it was a temporary excess.
That year would very likely be the most industrious of Oskar’s life – a year of building the place up from a bankrupt manufactory to a company government agencies could take seriously. As the first snows fell, Schindler noticed and was irritated when, on any given day, sixty or more of his Jewish employees would be absentees. They would have been detained by SS squads on the way to work and employed in clearing snow. Schindler visited his friend Toffel at SS headquarters in Pomorska to complain. On one day, he told Toffel, he had a hundred and twenty-five absentees.
Toffel confided in him. “You’ve got to understand that some of these fellows here don’t give a damn about production. To them it’s a matter of national priority that Jews be made to shovel snow. I don’t understand it myself . . . it’s got a ritual significance for them, Jews shovelling snow. And it’s not just you, it’s happening to everyone.”
Oskar asked if all the others were complaining too. Yes, said Toffel. However, he said, an economic big shot from the SS Budget and Construction Office had come for lunch in Pomorska and said that to believe the Jewish skilled worker had a place in Reich economics was treasonable. “I think you’re going to have to put up with a lot of snow shovelling yet, Oskar.”
Oskar, for the moment, assumed the stance of the outraged patriot, or perhaps of the outraged profiteer. “If they want to win the war,” said Oskar, “they’d have to get rid of SS men like that.”
“Get rid of them?” asked Toffel. “For Christ’s sake, they’re the bastards who’re on top.”
As a result of such conversations, Oskar became an advocate of the principle that a factory owner should have unimpeded access to his own workers, that these workers should have access to the plant, that they should not be detained or tyrannised on their way to and from the factory. It was, in Oskar’s eyes, a moral axiom as much as an industrial one. In the end, he would apply it to its limit at Deutsche Email Fabrik.
SEVEN
Some people from the big cities – from Warsaw and Lódź with their ghettos and Cracow with Frank’s judenfrei ambitions – went to the countryside to lose themselves among the peasants. The Rosner brothers settled in the old village of Tyniec on a pretty bend of the Vistula with an old Benedictine abbey on a limestone cliff above. It was anonymous enough for the Rosners. It had a few Jewish storekeepers and orthodox artisans with whom nightclub musicians had little to converse about. But the peasants, busy with the tedium of the harvest, were as genial as the Rosners could have hoped, finding musicians in their midst.
They’d come to Tyniec not from Cracow, not from that great marshalling point outside the botanical gardens in Mogilska Street where young SS men pushed people on trucks and called out bland and lying promises about the later delivery of all adequately labelled baggage. They had come in fact from Warsaw, where they had been enjoying an engagement at the Basilisk. They had left the day before the Germans sealed up the Warsaw ghetto. Henry and Leopold and Henry’s wife Manci and five-year-old son Olek.
The idea of a south Polish village like Tyniec, not far from their native Cracow, appealed to the Rosner brothers. It offered the option, should conditions improve, of catching a bus into Cracow and finding work. Manci Rosner, an Austrian girl, had brought with her her sewing machine and the Rosners set up a little clothing business in Tyniec. In the evenings they played in the taverns and became a sensation in a town like that. Villages welcome and support occasional wonders, even Jewish ones. And the fiddle was, of all instruments, most venerated in Poland.
One evening a travelling Volksdeutscher, a German-speaking Pole, from Poznan, heard the brothers Rosner playing outside the inn. The Volksdeutscher was a municipal official from Cracow, one of those Polish Germans in whose name Hitler had taken Poland in the first place. The Volksdeutscher told Henry that the Mayor of Cracow, Obersturmbannführer Pavlu, and his deputy, the renowned skier Sepp Röhrl, would be visiting the countryside at harvest time, and he would like to arrange for them to hear such an accomplished pair as the Rosners.
On an afternoon when the bound sheaves lay drowsing in fields as quiet and as abandoned as on Sunday, a convoy of limousines ground through Tyniec and up a rise to the villa of an absentee Polish aristocrat. The Rosner brothers waited on the terrace, and when all the ladies and gentlemen had been seated in a room which might once have been used for balls, they were invited to per
form. Henry and Leopold felt both exaltation and fear at the seriousness with which Obersturmbannführer Pavlu’s party had geared themselves for their playing. The women wore white dresses and gloves, the military officials full dress, the bureaucrats their winged collars. When people went to such trouble, it was easier to disappoint them. For a Jew, even to impose a cultural disappointment on the régime was a serious crime.
But the audience loved them. They were a characteristic gemütlich crowd, they loved Strauss, the confections of Offenbach and Lehár, André Messager and Leo Fall. At request time they grew mawkish.
And as Henry and Leopold performed, the ladies and gentlemen drank champagne from long-stemmed glasses brought in by hamper.
Once the official recital had finished, the brothers were taken down the hill to where the peasants and the soldiers of the escort had been gathered. If there was to be some crude racial demonstration, it would take place here. But, again, once the brothers had climbed on to a wagon and looked the crowd in the eye, Henry knew they would be safe. The pride of the peasants, partly a national thing, the Rosners being for the night a credit to Polish culture – all that protected them. It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Manci, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.
When it was finished, a middle-aged SS NCO – a Rottenführer perhaps, Henry not being as familiar as he might become with the gradations of SS rank – approached the two men as they stood by the wagon receiving congratulations. He nodded to them and barely smiled. “I hope you have a nice harvest holiday,” he said, bowed, and left.
The brothers stared at each other. As soon as the SS man was out of hearing, they gave in to the temptation to discuss the meaning of his statement. Leopold was convinced. “It’s a threat,” he said. It went to prove what they had feared in their marrow when the Volksdeutsch official first spoke to them – that these days it didn’t do to stand out, to acquire a distinctive face.
But the harvest holiday came and went and the Rosners were left alone in Tyniec.
That was life in the country in 1940. The curtailment of a career, the rustic tedium, the scratching out of a trade, the occasional terror, the pull of that bright core called Cracow. To that, the Rosners knew, they would eventually return.
Emilie had returned home in the autumn, and when Stern next came to Schindler’s apartment on business it was Ingrid who brought in the coffee. Oskar made no secret of his weaknesses, and never seemed to think that ascetic Itzhak Stern needed any apologia for the presence of Ingrid in the apartment in Straszewskiego. Similarly, when the coffee was finished, Oskar went to the drink cupboard and brought back a fresh bottle of brandy, plumping it down on the table between his seat and Stern’s, as if Stern were really likely to help him drink it.
Stern had come that evening to tell Oskar that a family whom we shall call the Cs were spreading stories about him. Old David and young Leon C. Saying even on the streets in Kazimierz, let alone in parlours, that Oskar was a German gangster, a thug. When Stern passed on these accusations to Oskar, he didn’t use terms that were quite as vivid as that.
Oskar knew Stern wasn’t looking for a response, that he was just passing on intelligence. But he would have felt he had to answer anyway.
“I could spread stories about them,” said Oskar. “They’re robbing me blind. Ask Ingrid if you like.”
Ingrid worked at the Cs’ hardware outlet in Stradom Street. She was a benign Treuhänder and, being only in her twenties, commercially inexperienced. The rumour was that Schindler himself had got the girl appointed so that he would have an assured outlet for his kitchenware. The Cs, however, still did pretty well what they wanted with their company. If they resented the idea that it was held in trust by the occupying power, no one could blame them for that.
Stern waved his hand. Who was he to want to grill Ingrid? It wasn’t much use to compare notes with the girl anyhow.
“They run rings around Ingrid,” said Oskar. They turned up at Lipowa Street to take delivery of their orders and altered the invoices on the spot and took away more than they had paid for. “She says it’s all right,” they’d tell Schindler employees. “He’s arranged it with Ingrid.”
The son had in fact been gathering crowds and telling them that Schindler had had the SS beat him up. But this story varied – the beating was supposed to have occurred at Schindler’s factory, in a storeroom from which young C emerged with a swollen head and broken teeth. Then it was supposed to have occurred on Limanowskiego, in front of witnesses. A man called H, an employee of Oskar’s and a friend of the Cs, had said he’d heard Oskar stamping up and down in his office in Lipowa Street and threatening to kill old David C. Then Oskar was said to have driven round to Stradom and raided the C cash register, and to have stuffed his pockets with currency and told them that there was a new order in Europe, and then to have beaten up old David in his office.
It was no defence for Oskar to explain that he paid the Cs a monthly executive salary of seven hundred and fifty zloty. In both Oskar’s eyes and Stern’s, the business belonged to the Cs anyhow.
Was it possible that Oskar could let fly at old David C and land him in bed with bruises? Was it likely he would call on friends in the police to assault Leon? On one level Oskar and the Cs were gangsters, selling tons of kitchenware illegally, without sending records of sales to the Transferstelle, without use of the required merchandising coupons called the Bezugschein. On the black market, the dialogue was primitive and tempers were short. Oskar admitted he’d raged into the Cs’ showroom and called father and son thieves and indemnified himself out of the till for the kitchenware the Cs had taken without authorisation. Oskar admitted he’d punched young Leon. But that was the limit of his admissions.
And the Cs whom Stern had known since childhood – they had one of those reputations. Not exactly criminal but sharp in dealing. And, significant in this case, a name for squealing when caught.
Stern knew Leon C’s bruises did exist. Leon wore them down the street and was willing to elaborate on them. The SS beating did take place somewhere or other, but it could have had a dozen causes. Stern not only did not believe but also had the feeling that to believe or disbelieve what was said to have happened in this case was irrelevant to his own wider purposes. It would become relevant only when and if Schindler established a brutal pattern. For Stern’s purposes, occasional lapses did not count. Had Oskar been without sin, this apartment would not exist in its present form, and neither would Ingrid be waiting in the bedroom.
And it is yet again one of those things which must be said, that Oskar would save all of them – Mr and Mrs C, Leon C, Mr H, Miss M, old C’s secretary – and that they would always admit that, but that they would also and always stick to their story of the bruises.
That evening Itzhak Stern also brought news of Marek Biberstein’s jail sentence. He had got two years in the prison in Montelupich Street, this Marek Biberstein who was the president of the Judenrat – or who had been until his arrest. In other cities the Judenrat was already cursed by the general Jewish population, for its main work had become the drawing up of lists for forced labour, for transfers to camps. The Judenrats were regarded by the German administration as organs of its will, but in Cracow Marek Biberstein and his cabinet still saw themselves as buffers between the offices of Frank and Wächter and Pavlu and police chiefs Scherner and Czurda on one hand, and the Jewish inhabitants of the city on the other. In the Cracow German newspaper Cracower Zeitung of March 13th, 1940, a Dr Dietrich Redecker said that on a visit to the Judenrat office he was struck by the contrast between its carpet and plush chairs and the poverty and squalor of the Jewish quarters in Kazimierz. But Jewish survivors do not remember the early members of Cracow Judenrat as men who insulated themselves from the people. Hungry for revenue, however, they had made the mistake the Judenrats of Lódź and Warsaw had made before them, permitting the affluent to buy
their way off forced labour lists, compelling the poor on to the roster in return for soup and bread. But even later, in 1941, Biberstein and his council still had the respect of the Jews of Cracow.
That first membership of the Judenrat was made up of twenty-four men, most of them intellectuals. Each day, on his way to Zablocie, Oskar passed their corner office in Podgórze into which were crowded a number of secretariats. In the manner of a cabinet each member of the council took care of a different aspect of government. Mr Schenker had charge of taxes, Mr Steinberg of buildings, an essential job in a society where people drifted in and out, this week trying the option of refuge in some small village, next week walking back to town surfeited with the narrowness of the peasants. Leon Salpeter, a pharmacist by profession, had care of one of the social welfare portfolios. There were secretariats for food, cemeteries, health, travel documentation, economic affairs, administrative services, culture, even – in the face of the ban on schooling – of education.
Biberstein and his council believed on principle that the Jews who were expelled from Cracow would end up in worse places and so they decided to fall back on an ancient stratagem: bribery. The hard-up Judenrat treasury allocated two hundred thousand zloty for the purpose. Biberstein and the Housing Secretary, Chaim Goldfluss, had sought out an intermediary, in this case a Volksdeutsch called Reichert, a man who had contacts in the SS and on the Wawel. Reichert’s task was to pass on the money to a series of officials beginning with Obersturmführer – first lieutenant – Seibert, the liaison officer between the Judenrat and the Government General. In return for the money, the administration was to permit another ten thousand Jews of the Cracow community to remain at home despite Frank’s orders. Whether Reichert had insulted officials by retaining too large a margin for himself and making too low an offer, or whether the gentlemen involved felt that Governor Frank’s most cherished ambition to render his city judenfrei made the taking of bribes too perilous, no one could tell from the court proceedings. But Biberstein had got two years in Montelupich, Goldfluss six months in Auschwitz. Reichert himself had got eight years. Yet everyone knew he would have a softer time of it than the other two.
Schindler's Ark Page 8
