Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Spira’s Political Section would go beyond the demands of grudging cooperation and would be full of venal men, men with complexes, with puerile grudges about the social and intellectual slights they’d received in earlier days from respectable middle-class Jewry. Apart from Symche, there were Szymon Spitz and Marcel Zellinger, Ignacy Diamond, David Gutter the salesman, Forster and Grüner and Landau. They settled in to a career of extortion and of making out for the SS lists of unsatisfactory or seditious ghetto dwellers.

  Poldek Pfefferberg now wanted to escape the force. There was a rumour that the Gestapo would make all OD men swear an oath to the Führer, after which they would have no grounds for disobedience. Poldek did not want to share a profession with grey-shirted Spira or with Spitz and Zellinger, the makers of lists. He went down the street to the hospital at the corner of Wegierska to speak to the official physician to the Judenrat, a gentle, slightly buck-toothed man called Alexander Biberstein, whose brother, Marek, the first president of the council, was still doing time in mournful Montelupich prison for currency violations and attempting to bribe officials.

  Pfefferberg begged Biberstein to give him a medical certificate so that he could leave the OD. It was difficult, Biberstein said. Pfefferberg did not even look sick. It would be impossible for him to feign high blood pressure. Dr Biberstein instructed him in the symptoms of a bad back. Pfefferberg took to reporting for duty severely stooped and supporting himself with a cane.

  Spira was outraged. When Pfefferberg had first asked him about leaving the OD, the police chief had pronounced – like a commander of some palace guard – that the only way out was on your shield. Inside the ghetto, Spira and his infantile friends were playing a game of élite corps. They were the Foreign Legion, they were the praetorians. “We’ll send you to the Gestapo doctor,” screamed Spira.

  Biberstein, who had been aware of the shame in young Pfefferberg, had tutored him well. Poldek survived the Gestapo doctor’s inspection and was invalided out of the OD suffering from an ailment likely to inhibit his good performance in matters of crowd control. Spira, saying goodbye to officer Pfefferberg, expressed a contemptuous enmity.

  The next day Germany invaded Russia. Oskar heard the news illicitly on the BBC and knew that the Madagascar plan was finished now. It would be years before there were ships for a solution like that. Oskar sensed that the event changed the essence of SS planning, for everywhere now the economists, the engineers, the planners of movements of people, the policemen of every stripe put on the mental habits appropriate not only to a long war, but to a systematic pursuit of a racially impeccable empire.

  ELEVEN

  In an alley off Lipowa, its rear pointing towards the workshop of Schindler’s enamel plant, stood the German Box Factory. Oskar Schindler, always restless and hungry for company, used to stroll over there sometimes and chat with the Treuhänder, Ernst Kuhnpast, or to the former owner and unofficial manager, Mr Szymon Jereth. Jereth’s Box Factory had become the German Box Factory two years back according to the usual arrangement – no fees being paid, no documents to which he was signatory having been drawn up. The injustice of that did not particularly worry Jereth any more. It had happened to most of the people he knew. What worried him was the ghetto. The fights in the kitchens, the pitiless communality of life there, the stench of bodies, the lice that jumped on to your suit from the greasy jacket of the man whose shoulder you brushed on the stairs. Mrs Jereth, he told Oskar, was very low. She’d always been used to nice things, she’d come from a good family in Kleparz, north of Cracow. And when you think, he told Oskar, that with all the pineboard I could build myself a place there. He pointed to the waste land behind his factory. Workers played football there, vast, hard-running games in plentiful space. Most of it belonged to Oskar’s factory, the rest to a Polish couple called Bielski. But Oskar did not point that out to poor Jereth or say that he too had been preoccupied by that vacant space. Oskar was more interested in the implied offer of lumber. You can ‘alienate’ as much pineboard as that? You know, said Jereth, it’s only a matter of paperwork.

  They stood together at Jereth’s office window, considering the waste land. From the workshop came the sound of hammering and incessant power saws. I would hate to lose contact with this place, Jereth told Oskar. I would hate just to vanish into some labour camp and have to wonder from a distance what the damn fools were doing here. You can understand that, surely, Herr Schindler?

  A man like Jereth could not foresee any deliverance. The German armies seemed to be enjoying limitless success in Russia, and even the BBC was having trouble believing that they were advancing into a fatal salient. The Armament Inspectorate orders for field kitchenware kept turning up on Oskar’s desk, sent on with the compliments of General Julius Schindler scribbled at the bottom of the covering letters, accompanied by the telephoned best wishes of sundry junior officers. Oskar accepted the orders and the congratulations in their own right but took a contradictory joy from the rash letters his father was writing to him to celebrate their reconciliation. It won’t last, said Schindler senior. The man – Hitler – isn’t meant to last. America will come down on him in the end. And the Russians? My God, did anyone ever take the trouble to point out to the dictator just how many godless barbarians there are over there? Oskar, smiling over the letters, was not too fussed by the conflicting pleasures – the commercial exhilaration of the Armaments Inspectorate contracts and the more intimate delight of his father’s subversive letters. Oskar sent Hans a monthly bank draft of a thousand Reichsmarks in honour of filial love and sedition, and for the joy of largesse.

  It was a fast and, still, almost a painless year. Longer hours than Herr Oskar Schindler had ever worked, parties at the Cracovia, boozing sessions at the jazz club, visits to the gorgeous Klonowska’s apartment. When the leaves began to fall, he wondered where the year had gone. The impression of vanished time was augmented by the late summer and now by autumn rains earlier than usual. The asymmetric seasons would, by favouring the Soviets, affect the lives of all Europeans. But to Herr Oskar Schindler in Lipowa Street, weather was still simply weather.

  Then, in the butt-end of 1941, Oskar found himself under arrest. Someone – one of the Polish shipping clerks, one of the German technicians in the munitions hall, you couldn’t tell – had denounced him, had gone to Pomorska Street and given information. Two plainclothes Gestapo men drove up Lipowa Street one morning and blocked the entrance with their Mercedes as if they intended to bring all commerce at Emalia to an end. Upstairs, facing Oskar, they produced warrants entitling them to take all his business records with them. But they did not seem to have any commercial training. “Exactly what books do you want?” Schindler asked them.

  “Cash books,” said one.

  “Your main ledgers,” said the other.

  It was a relaxed arrest: they chatted to Klonowska while Oskar himself went to get his cash journal and accounts ledger. Oskar was permitted time to scribble down a few names on a pad, supposedly the names of associates with whom Oskar had appointments which must now be cancelled. Klonowska understood, though, that they were a list of people to be approached for help in bailing Oskar out.

  The first name on the list was that of Oberführer Julian Scherner, the second that of Martin Plathe of the Abwehr in Breslau. That would be a long-distance trunk call. The third name belonged to the supervisor of the Ostfaser works, the drunken army veteran Franz Bosch on whom Schindler had settled some quantities of illicit kitchenware. Leaning over Klonowska’s shoulder, over her piled-up flaxen hair, his finger emphasised Bosch’s name. A man of influence: Bosch knew and advised every high official who played the black market in Cracow. And Oskar knew that this arrest had to do with the black market, whose danger was that you could always find officials ready to be bribed but you could never predict the jealousy of one of your employees.

  The fourth name on the list was that of the German chairman of Ferrum AG of Sosnowiec, the company from which Herr Schindler bought his steel.
These names were a comfort to him as the Gestapo Mercedes carried him to Pomorska Street, a kilometre or so west of the Centrum. They were a guarantee that he would not vanish into the system without trace. He was not therefore as defenceless as the thousand ghetto dwellers who had been rounded up according to Symche Spira’s lists and marched beneath the frosty stars of Advent to the cattle wagons at Prokocim station. Oskar knew some heavy guns.

  The SS complex in Cracow was an immense modern building, humourless but not as portentous as the Montelupich prison. Yet, even if you disbelieved the rumours of torture attached to the place, the building confused the arrestee as soon as he entered by its size, its Kafka-esque corridors, by the numb threat of the departmental names painted on the doors. Here you could find the SS Main Office, the headquarters of the Order Police, of Kripo, Sipo and Gestapo, of SS Economy and Administration, of Personnel, of Jewish Affairs, of Race and Resettlement, of the SS Court, of Operations, of SS Service, of the Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom, of the Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans.

  Somewhere in that hive a middle-aged Gestapo man, who seemed to have a more exact knowledge of accountancy than the two policemen who made the arrest, began interviewing Oskar. The man’s manner was half amused, like that of a Customs official who finds that a passenger suspected of currency smuggling is really smuggling house plants for an aunt. He told Oskar that all the enterprises involved in war production were under scrutiny. Oskar did not believe it but said nothing. Herr Schindler could understand, the Gestapo man told him, that businesses supplying the war effort had a moral duty to devote all their product to that great enterprise. And to desist from undermining the economy of the Government General by irregular dealings.

  Oskar murmured away in that peculiar rumble of his which could at the one time contain threat and bonhomie. Do you imply, Herr Wachtmeister, that there are reports that my factory does not fulfil its quotas?

  “You live very well,” said the man, but with a concessive smile, as if that was all right, it was acceptable for important industrialists to live well. And anyone who lives well, he pointed out . . . well, we have to be sure that his standard of living derives entirely from legitimate contracts.

  Oskar beamed at the Gestapo man. “Whoever gave you my name,” he said, “is a fool and is wasting your time.”

  “Who’s the plant manager of Deutsche Email Fabrik?” asked the Gestapo man, ignoring this.

  “Abraham Bankier.”

  “A Jew?”

  “Of course. The business used to belong to relatives of his.”

  These records might be adequate, said the Gestapo man. But if they wanted more, he presumed Herr Bankier could supply it.

  “You mean you’re going to detain me?” asked Oskar. He began to laugh. “I want to tell you now,” he said, “when Oberführer Scherner and I are laughing about all this over a drink, I’ll tell him that you treated me with the utmost courtesy.”

  The two who had made the arrest took him to the second floor where he was searched and permitted to keep cigarettes and a hundred zloty to buy small luxuries. Then he was locked in a bedroom, one of the best places they had, Oskar surmised. Equipped with a washbasin and water closet and dusty drapes at the barred window. The sort of room they kept dignitaries in while interrogating them. If the dignitary was released, he could not complain about a room like this, any more than he could enthuse over it. And if he were found to be treacherous, seditious or an economic criminal, then, as if the floor of this room opened like a trapdoor, he’d find himself waiting in an interrogation cell in the basement, sitting motionless and bleeding in one of the series of stalls they called tramways, looking forward to Montelupich where they hanged people in their cells. Oskar considered the door. Whoever lays a hand on me, he promised it, I’ll have him sent to Russia.

  He was bad at waiting. After an hour he knocked at the door from the inside and gave the Waffen SS man who answered fifty zloty to buy him a bottle of vodka. It was of course three times the price of the drink but that was Oskar’s method. Later in the day, by arrangement between Klonowska and Ingrid, a bag of toiletries, books and pyjamas arrived. An excellent meal was brought to him with a half bottle of Hungarian wine, and no one came to disturb him or ask him a question. He presumed that the accountant was still slaving at the Emalia books. He would have enjoyed a radio on which to listen to the BBC news from Russia, the Far East and the newly combatant United States, and he had the feeling that if he asked his jailers they might bring him one.

  He hoped the Gestapo had not moved into his apartment on Straszewskiego, to value the furnishings and Ingrid’s jewellery. But by the time he fell asleep, he’d got to the stage where he was looking forward to facing interrogators.

  In the morning he was brought a good breakfast – herring, cheese, eggs, rolls, coffee – and still no one bothered him. And then, the middle-aged SS auditor, holding both the cash journal and the accounts ledger, came to visit him.

  The auditor wished him good morning. He hoped he had had a comfortable night. There had not been time to conduct more than a cursory examination of Herr Schindler’s records, but it had been decided that a gentleman who stands so high in the opinion of so many people influential in the war effort need not be too closely looked at for the moment. We have, said the SS man, received certain telephone calls. Oskar was convinced, as he thanked the man, that the acquittal was temporary. He received the ledgers and got his money handed back in full at the reception desk.

  Downstairs Klonowska was waiting for him, radiant. Her liaison work had yielded this result – Schindler coming forth from the death house in his double-breasted suit and without a scratch. She led him to the Adler, which they had let her park inside the gate. Her ridiculous poodle sat on the back seat.

  TWELVE

  The child arrived at the Dresners’ on the eastern side of the ghetto late in the afternoon. She had been returned to Cracow by the Polish couple who had been minding her in the country. They had been able to talk the Polish Blue Police at the ghetto gate into allowing them entry on business, and the child passed as theirs.

  They were decent people, and shamefaced at having brought her up to Cracow and the ghetto from the countryside. She was a dear girl, they were attached to her. But you couldn’t keep a Jewish child in the countryside any more. The municipal authorities – let alone the SS – were offering sums of five hundred zloty and upwards for every Jew betrayed. It was one’s neighbours. You couldn’t trust your neighbours. And then not only would the child be in trouble, we’d all be. My God, there were areas where the peasants went out hunting Jews with scythes and sickles.

  The child didn’t seem to suffer too much from whatever squalors the ghetto now imposed on her. She sat at a little table among screens of damp clothing and fastidiously ate the heel of bread Mrs Dresner gave her. She accepted whatever endearments the women sharing the kitchen happened to utter. Mrs Dresner noticed how strangely guarded the child was in all her answers. She had her vanities, though, and – like most three-year-olds – a passionately preferred colour. Red. She sat there in red cap, red coat, small red boots. The peasants had indulged her passion.

  Mrs Dresner made conversation by talking about the child’s real parents. They too had been living, in fact hiding in the countryside. But, said Mrs Dresner, they were going to come and join everyone here in Cracow soon. The child nodded but it didn’t seem to be shyness that kept her quiet.

  In January her parents had been rounded up according to a list supplied to the SS by Spira, and while being marched to Prokocim station had passed a crowd of jeering Poles – “Bye-bye Jews.” They had dodged out from the column just like two decent Polish citizens crossing the street to watch the deportation of social enemies, and had joined the crowd, jeered a little themselves, and then strolled off into the countryside around that outer suburb.

  Now they too were finding life no safer out there and intended to sneak back into Cracow during the summer. The mother of Redcap,
as the Dresner boys named her as soon as they got home with the work details from the city, was a first cousin of Mrs Dresner.

  Soon Mrs Dresner’s daughter, young Danka, also got home from her work as a cleaning woman and servant at the Luftwaffe Air Base. Danka was going on fourteen, tall enough to have the Kennkarte (labour card) enabling her to work outside the ghetto. She enthused over the noncommittal child. “Genia, I know your mother, Eva. She and I used to go shopping for dresses together and she’d buy me cakes at the patisserie in Bracka Street.”

  The child kept to her seat, did not smile, looked ahead. “Madam, you’re mistaken. My mother’s name is not Eva. It’s Jasha.” She went on naming the names in the fictional Polish genealogy in which her parents and the peasants had schooled her in case the Blue Police or the SS ever questioned her. The family frowned at each other, brought to a standstill by the untoward cunning of the child, finding it obscene but not wanting to undermine it, since it might, before the week was out, be essential survival equipment.

  At suppertime, Idek Schindel, the child’s uncle, a young doctor at the ghetto hospital in Wegierska Street, arrived. He was the sort of whimsical, half teasing and infatuated uncle a child needs. At the sight of him, Genia became a child, getting down off her chair to rush at him. If he were here, calling these people cousins, then they were cousins. You could admit now that you had a mother named Eva and that your grandparents weren’t really called Ludwik and Sophia.

  Then Mr Juda Dresner, purchasing officer of the Bosch plant, arrived home and the company was complete.

  April 28th was Herr Schindler’s birthday, and in 1942 he celebrated it like a child of the spring, loudly, profligately. It was a big day at Deutsche Email Fabrik. The Herr Direktor brought in rare white bread, regardless of expense, to be served with the noonday soup. The festivity spread into the outer office and to the workshops out at the back. Oskar Schindler, industrialist, was celebrating the general succulence of life.