From her end window Edith Liebgold could see the Vistula through the barbed-wire barricade, but her path to other parts of the ghetto, especially to the hospital in Wegierska Street, took her through Plac Zgody, the Place of Peace, the ghetto’s only square. Here on the second day of her life inside the walls she missed by twenty seconds being hustled into an SS truck and taken to shovel coal or snow in the city. It was not just that work details often, according to rumour, returned to the ghetto with one or more fewer members than when they left. More than these sort of odds, Edith feared being forced into a truck when, half a minute earlier, you thought you were going to Pankiewicz’s pharmacy, and your baby was due to be fed in twenty minutes.
Therefore she went with friends to the Jewish Employment Office. If she could get shiftwork, her mother would mind the baby at night.
The office in those first days was crowded. The Judenrat had its own police force now, the Ordnungdienst expanded and regularised to keep order in the ghetto, and a boy with a cap and an armband organised queues in front of the office.
Edith Liebgold’s group were just inside the door, making lots of noise to pass the time, when a small middle-aged man wearing a brown suit and a tie approached her. They could tell that they’d attracted him with their racket, their brightness. At first they thought he intended to pick Edith up.
“Look,” he said, “rather than wait, there is an enamel factory over in Zablocie.”
He let the address have its effect. Zablocie is outside the ghetto, he was telling them. You can barter with the Polish workers there. He needed ten healthy women for the nightshift.
The girls pulled faces, as if they could afford to choose work and might even turn him down. Not heavy, he assured them. And they’ll teach you on the job. His name, he said, was Mr Abraham Bankier. He was the manager. There was a German owner, of course. What sort of German? they asked. Bankier grinned as if he suddenly wanted to fulfil all their hopes. Not a bad sort, he told them.
That night Edith Liebgold met the other members of the enamel works nightshift and marched across the ghetto towards Zablocie under the guard of a Jewish OD, a policeman of the ghetto Order Service. In the column she asked questions about this Deutsche Email Fabrik. They serve a soup with plenty of body, she was told. Beatings? she asked. It’s not that sort of place, they said. It’s not like Beckmann’s razorblade factory, more like Madritsch’s. Madritsch’s is all right and Schindler’s too.
At the entrance to the factory, the new nightshift workers were called out of the column by Bankier and taken upstairs and past vacant desks to a door marked Herr Direktor. Edith Liebgold heard a deep voice tell them all to come in. They found the Herr Direktor seated on the corner of his desk, smoking a cigarette. His hair, somewhere between blond and light brown, looked freshly brushed; he wore a double-breasted suit and a silk tie. He looked exactly like a man who had a dinner to go to but had waited especially to have a word with them. He was immense, he was still young. From such a Hitlerite dream, Edith expected a lecture on the war effort and production norms.
“I wanted to welcome you,” he told them in Polish. “You’re part of the expansion of these works.” He looked away, it was even possible he was thinking, Don’t tell them that, they’ve got no stake in the place.
Then, without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, “You’ll be safe working here. If you work here, then you’ll live through the war.” Then he said good night and left the office with them, allowing Bankier to hold them back at the head of the stairs so that the Herr Direktor could go down first and get behind the wheel of his car.
The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so much because she wanted to, not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.
The new women of Deutsche Email Fabrik took their job instruction in a pleasant daze. It was as if some mad old gypsy with nothing to gain had told them they would marry a count. The promise had forever altered Edith Liebgold’s expectation of life. If ever they did shoot her, she would probably stand there protesting, “But the Herr Direktor said this couldn’t happen.”
The work made no mental demands. Edith carried the enamel-dipped pots, hanging by hooks from a long stick, to the furnaces. And all the time she pondered Herr Schindler’s promise. Only madmen made promises as absolute as that. Without blinking. Yet he wasn’t mad. For he was a businessman with a dinner to go to. Therefore, he must know. But that meant some second sight, some profound contact with god or devil or the pattern of things. But again, his appearance, his hand with the gold signet ring, wasn’t the hand of a visionary. It was a hand that reached for the wine, it was a hand in which you could somehow sense the latent caresses. And so she came back to the idea of his madness again, to drunkenness, to mystical explanations, to the technique by which the Herr Direktor had infected her with certainty.
Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succour. There were of course only odds, and the odds weren’t good.
NINE
That spring Schindler left his factory in Cracow and drove west in a BMW over the border and through the awakening spring forests to Zwittau. He had Emilie to see, and his aunts and sister. They had all been his allies against his father, they were all tenders of the flame of his mother’s martyrdom. If there was a parallel between his late mother’s misery and his wife’s, Oskar Schindler – in his coat with the fur lapels, guiding the custom-made wheel with kid gloved hands, reaching for another Turkish cigarette on the straight stretches of thawing road in the Jeseniks – did not see it. It was not a child’s business to see these things. His father was a god and subject to tougher laws.
He liked visiting the aunts – the way they raised their hands palm upwards in admiration of the cut of his suit. His younger sister had married a railway official and lived in a pleasant apartment provided by the rail authorities. Her husband was an important man in Zwittau, for it was a railway junction and had large freight yards. Oskar drank tea with his sister and her husband, and then some schnaps. There was a faint sense of mutual congratulation in the room – the Schindler children hadn’t turned out so badly.
It was, of course, Oskar’s sister who had nursed Frau Schindler in her last illness and who had now been visiting and speaking to their father in secret. She could do no more than make certain hints in the direction of a reconcilation. She did that over the tea and was answered by growls.
Later, Oskar dined at home with Emilie. She was excited to have him there for the holiday. They could attend the Easter ceremonies together like an old-fashioned couple. Ceremonies was right, for they danced around each other ceremoniously all evening, attending to each other at table like polite strangers. And, in their hearts and minds, both Emilie and Oskar were amazed by this strange marriage disability – that he could offer and deliver more to strangers, to workers on his factory floor, than he could to her.
The question that lay between them was whether Emilie should join him in Cracow. If she gave up the apartment in Zwittau and put in other tenants, she would have no escape at all from Cracow. She believed it her duty to be with Oskar – in the language of Catholic moral theology, his absence from her house was a “proximate occasion of sin”. Yet life with him in a foreign city would be tolerable only if he was careful and guarded and sensitive to her feelings. The trouble with Oskar was that you could not depend on him to keep his lapses to himself. Careless, half tipsy, half smiling, he seemed sometimes to think that if he really liked some girl, you had to like her too.
The unresolved question about her g
oing to Cracow lay so oppressively between them that when dinner was finished he excused himself and went to a café in the main square. It was a place frequented by mining engineers, small businessmen, the occasional salesman turned army officer. Gratefully he saw some of his motorbike friends there, most of them wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. He began drinking cognac with them. Some expressed surprise that a hulking chap such as he was not in uniform.
“Essential industry,” he growled. “Essential industry.”
They reminisced about their motorbike days. There were jokes about the one he’d put together out of spare parts when he was in high school. Its explosive effects. The explosive effects of his big 500cc Galloni. The noise level in the café mounted, more cognac was being shouted for. From the dining annexe old school friends appeared, that look on their face as if they had recognised a forgotten laugh, as in fact they had.
Then one of them got serious. “Oskar, listen. Your father’s having dinner in there, all by himself.” Oskar Schindler looked into his cognac. His face burned but he shrugged.
“You ought to talk to him,” said someone. “He’s a shadow, the poor old bastard.”
Oskar said that he had better go home. He began to stand but their hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down again. He knows you’re here, they said. Two of them had already gone through to the annexe and were persuading old Hans Schindler over the remnants of his dinner. Oskar, in a panic, was already standing, hunting through his pocket for his cloakroom disc, when Herr Hans Schindler, his face in agony, appeared from the dining room propelled gently along by two young men. Oskar was halted by the sight. In spite of his hauteur towards his father, he’d always imagined that if any ground was covered between himself and Hans, he’d be the one who’d have to cover it. The old man was so proud. Yet here he was letting himself be dragged to his son.
As the two of them were pushed towards each other, the old man’s first gesture was an apologetic half grin and a sort of shrug of the eyebrows. The gesture, by its familiarity, took Oskar by storm. I couldn’t help it, Hans was saying. The marriage and everything, your mother and me, it all went according to laws of its own. The idea behind the gesture might have been an ordinary one, but Oskar had seen an identical expression on someone’s face already that evening. On his own, as, facing the mirror in the hallway of Emilie’s apartment, he put on his coat for his outing. The marriage and everything, it’s all going according to laws of its own. He had shared that look with himself, and here – three cognacs later – his father was sharing it with him.
“How are you, Oskar?” asked Hans Schindler. There was a dangerous wheeze along the edge of the words. His father’s health was worse than he remembered it.
So Oskar decided that even Herr Hans Schindler was human, a proposition he had not been able to swallow at teatime at his sister’s; and he embraced the old man, kissing him on the cheek three times, feeling the impact of his father’s bristles, and beginning to weep as the corps of engineers and soldiers and past motorbikers applauded the gratifying scene.
TEN
The council of new chairman Artur Rosenzweig’s Judenrat, who still saw themselves as guardians of the breath and health and bread ration of the internees of the ghetto, impressed upon the Jewish ghetto police, the Ordnungdienst, that they were also public servants. They tended to sign up young men of compassion and some education. Though at SS headquarters the OD was regarded as just another auxiliary police force which would take orders like any police force, that was not the picture most OD men lived by in the summer of 1941.
It cannot be denied that as the ghettos grew older the OD man became increasingly a figure of suspicion, a supposed collaborator. Some OD men fed information to the underground and challenged the system, but perhaps a majority of them found their existence and that of their families depended increasingly on the cooperation they gave the SS. To honest men, the OD would become a corrupter. To crooks it was an opportunity.
But in its early months in Cracow, it seemed a benign force. Leopold Pfefferberg could stand as a token of the ambiguity of being a member. When all education for Jews, even that organised by the Judenrat, was abolished in December 1940, Poldek had been offered a job managing the queues and keeping the appointment book in the Judenrat housing office. It was a part-time job, but gave him a cover under which he could travel around Cracow with some freedom. In March 1941, the OD itself was founded with the stated purpose of protecting the Jews entering the Podgórze ghetto from other parts of the city. Poldek accepted the invitation to put on the cap of the OD. He believed he understood its purpose, that it was not only to ensure rational behaviour inside the walls but also to achieve that correct degree of grudging tribal obedience which, in the history of European Jewry, has tended to ensure that the oppressors will go away more quickly, will become forgetful so that, in the interstices of their forgetfulness, life may again become feasible.
At the same time as Pfefferberg wore his OD cap, he ran illegal goods – leatherwork, jewellery, furs, currency – in and out of the ghetto gate. He knew the Wachtmeister at the gate, Oswald Bosko, a policeman who had become so rebellious against the régime that he let raw materials into the ghetto to be made up into goods – garments, wine, hardware – and then let the goods out again to be sold in Cracow, all without even asking for a bribe.
On leaving the ghetto, the officials at the gate, the lounging Schmalzownicks (or informers), Pfefferberg would take off the Judaic armband in some quiet alley, before moving on to business in Kazimierz or the Centrum.
On the city walls, above fellow passengers’ heads in the trams, he would read the posters of the day, the razorblade advertisements, the latest Wawel edicts on the harbouring of Polish bandits, the slogan “Jews – Lice – Typhus”, the billboard depicting a virginal Polish girl handing food to a hook-nosed Jew whose shadow was the shadow of the Devil. “Whoever helps a Jew helps Satan.” Outside grocers’ shops hung pictures of Jews mincing rats into pies, watering milk, pouring lice into pastry, kneading dough with filthy feet. The fact of the ghetto was being validated in the streets of Cracow by poster art, by copywriters from the Propaganda Ministry. And Pfefferberg, with his Aryan looks, would move calmly beneath the artwork, carrying a suitcase full of garments or jewellery or currency.
Pfefferberg’s greatest coup had been last year, when Governor Frank had withdrawn hundred and five-hundred zloty notes from circulation and demanded that existing notes of those denominations be deposited with the Reich Credit Fund. Since a Jew could exchange only two thousand zloty, it meant that all notes held secretly – in excess of two thousand and against the regulations – would no longer have any value, unless you could find someone with Aryan looks and no armband who was willing on your behalf to join the long lines of Poles in front of the Reich Credit Bank. Pfefferberg and a young Zionist friend gathered some hundreds of thousands of zloty in the proscribed denominations from friends, went off with a suitcase full of notes, and came back with the approved occupation currency, minus only the bribes they’d had to pay to the Polish Blue Police at the gate.
That was the sort of policeman Pfefferberg was. Excellent by the standards of Chairman Artur Rosenzweig, deplorable by the standards of Pomorska.
Oskar visited the ghetto in April – both from curiosity and to speak to a jeweller he had commissioned to make two rings. He found it crammed beyond what he had imagined – two families to a room unless you were lucky enough to know someone in the Judenrat. There was a smell of clogged waterclosets, but the women held off typhus by arduous scrubbing and by boiling clothes in courtyards. “Things are changing,” the jeweller confided in Oskar. “The OD have been issued with truncheons.” As the administration of the ghetto, like that of all ghettos in Poland, had passed from the control of Governor Frank to that of the Gestapo Section 4B, the final authority for all Jewish matters in Cracow was now SS Oberführer Julian Scherner, a hearty man of somewhere between forty-five and fifty, who in civilian clothes and with his bald
ness and thick lenses looked like a fairly nondescript bureaucrat. Oskar had met him at cocktail parties among the German community. Scherner talked a great deal – not about the war but about business and investment. He was the sort of functionary who abounded in the middle ranks of the SS, a sport, interested in booze, women and confiscated goods. He could sometimes be discovered wearing the smirk of his unexpected power like a childish jam-stain in the corner of the mouth. He was always convivial and dependably heartless. Oskar could tell that Scherner favoured working the Jews rather than killing them, that he would bend rules for the sake of profit but that he would fulfil the general drift of SS policy, however that might develop.
Oskar had remembered the police chief last Christmas, and sent him half a dozen bottles of cognac. Now that the man’s power had expanded, he would rate more this year.
It was because of this shift of power, the SS becoming not simply the arm of policy but the makers of it as well, that beneath the strengthening April sun the OD was taking on a new nature. Oskar, merely by driving past the ghetto, became familiar with a new figure, a former glazier called Symche Spira, the new force in the OD. Spira was of orthodox background and by personal history as well as temperament despised the Europeanised Jewish liberals who were still found on the Judenrat council. He took his orders not from Artur Rosenzweig but from Untersturmführer Brandt and SS headquarters across the river. From his conferences with Brandt, he returned to the ghetto with increased knowingness and power. Brandt had asked him to set up and lead a Political Section OD and he recruited various of his friends for it. Their uniform ceased to be the cap and armband of the street OD and became instead grey shirt, cavalry britches, Sam Browne belt and shiny SS boots.
Schindler's Ark Page 10
