This, his thirty-fourth birthday, began early at Emalia – Schindler signalled it by walking through the outer office carrying three bottles of cognac under his arm to share with the engineers, the accountants, the draughtsmen. Office workers in accounts and personnel had handfuls of cigarettes pushed at them, and by mid-morning the handouts had spread to the factory floor. A cake was brought in from a patisserie and he cut it up on Klonowska’s desk. Delegations of Jewish and Polish workers began to enter the office to congratulate him and he heartily kissed a girl called Kucharska, whose father had figured in the Polish parliament before the war. And then the Jewish girls came up, and the men shaking hands, even Stern getting there somehow from the Progress Works where he was now employed to take Oskar’s hand formally and find himself wrapped up in a rib-cracking embrace.
That afternoon someone, perhaps the same malcontent as before, contacted Pomorska and denounced Schindler for his racial improprieties. His ledgers might stand up to scrutiny, but no one could deny he was a Jew-kisser.
The manner of his arrest seemed more professional than the first time. On the morning of April 29th, a Mercedes blocked the factory entrance and two Gestapo men, seeming somehow surer of their ground than the last two, met him crossing the factory yard. He was charged, they told him, with breaking the provisions of the Race and Resettlement Act. They wanted him to come with them. And, no, there was no need for him to visit his office first.
“Do you have a warrant?” he asked them.
“We don’t need one,” they told him.
He began to grin at them. The gentlemen should understand that if they took him away without a warrant they would come to regret it.
He said it lightly, but he could tell by their demeanour that the level of threat in them had firmed and focused since last year’s half-comic detention. Last time the conversation at Pomorska had been about economic laws and whether they had been breached. This time you were dealing with grotesque law, the law of the lower guts, edicts from the black side of the brain. Serious stuff.
“We will have to risk regret,” one of the two told him.
He assessed their assurance, their perilous indifference to him, a man of assets, newly turned thirty-four. “On a spring morning,” he told them, “I can spare a few hours for driving.”
He comforted himself that he would again be put into one of those urbane cells at Pomorska. But when they turned right up Kolejowa he knew that this time it would be Montelupich prison.
“I shall wish to speak to a lawyer,” he told them.
“In time,” said the driver.
Oskar had it on the reasonable word of one of his drinking friends that the Jagiellonian Institute of Anatomy received corpses from Montelupich.
The wall of the place stretched a long block and the ominous sameness of the windows of the third and fourth floors could be seen from the back seat of the Gestapo Mercedes. Inside the front gate and through the archway, they came to an office where the SS clerk spoke in whispers, as if raised voices would set up head-splitting echoes in the narrow corridors. They took his cash but told him it would be given to him during his imprisonment at a rate of fifty zloty a day. No, the arresting officers told him, it was not yet time for him to call a lawyer.
Then they left and in the corridor, under guard, he listened for the traces of screams which might, in this convent hush, spill out through the cracks of the Judas windows in the walls.
He was led down a flight of stairs into a claustrophobic tunnel and past a string of locked cells, one with an open grille. Some half dozen prisoners in shirt sleeves sat there, each in a separate stall, facing the rear wall so that their features could not be seen. Oskar noticed a torn ear. And someone was sniffling but knew better than to wipe his nose. Klonowska, Klonowska, are you making your telephone calls, my love?
They opened a cell for him and he went in. He had felt a minor anxiety that the place might be crowded. But there was only one other prisoner in the cell, a soldier wearing his greatcoat up around his ears for warmth and seated on one of the two low wooden bed frames, each with its pallet. There were no washbasins of course. A water bucket and a waste bucket. And what proved to be a Waffen SS Standartenführer wearing a slight stubble, a stale unbuttoned shirt under the overcoat, and muddy boots.
“Welcome, sir,” said the officer with a crooked grin, raising one hand to Oskar. He was a handsome fellow, a few years older than Oskar. The odds were in favour of his being a plant. But one wondered why they had put him in uniform and provided him with such exalted rank.
Oskar looked at his watch, sat, stood, looked up at the high windows. A little light from the exercise yards filtered in but it was not the sort of window you could lean against and relieve the intimacy of the two close bunks, of sitting hands on knees facing each other.
In the end they began to talk. Oskar was very wary, but the Standartenführer chattered wildly. What was his name? Philip was his name. He didn’t think gentlemen should give their second names in prison. Besides, it was time people got down to first names. If we’d all got down to first names earlier, we’d be a happier race now.
Oskar concluded that if the man was not a plant, then he had had some sort of breakdown, was perhaps suffering from shellshock. He’d been campaigning in southern Russia, and his battalion had helped hang on to Novgorod all winter. Then he had got leave to visit a Polish girlfriend in Cracow and they had, in his words, “lost themselves in each other,” and he had been arrested in her apartment three days after his leave expired.
“I suppose I decided,” said Philip, “not to be too damn exact about dates when I saw the way the other bastards” – he waved a hand at the roof, indicating the structure around him, the SS planners, the accountants, the bureaucrats – “when I saw the way they lived. It wasn’t as if I deliberately decided to go absent. But I just felt I was owed a certain damn latitude.”
Oskar asked him would he rather be in Pomorska Street. No, said Philip, I’d rather be here. Pomorska looked more like a hotel. But the bastards had a death cell there, full of shining chromium bars. But, that aside, what had Herr Oskar done?
“I kissed a Jewish girl,” said Oskar. “An employee of mine. So it’s alleged.”
Philip began to hoot at this. “Oh, oh! Did your prick drop off?”
All afternoon Standartenführer Philip continued to condemn the SS. Thieves and orgiasts, he said. He couldn’t believe it. The money some of the bastards made. They started so sea-green incorruptible, too. They would kill some poor bloody Pole for smuggling a kilo of bacon while they lived like goddam Hanseatic barons.
Oskar behaved as if it were all news to him, as if the idea of venality among the Reichsführers was a painful assault on his commercial innocence, on the provincial Sudetendeutsch innocence which had caused him to forget himself and caress a Jewish girl. At last Philip, worn out by his outrage, took a nap.
Oskar wanted a drink. A certain measure of alcohol would help speed time, make the Standartenführer better company if he were not a plant and more fallible if he were. Oskar took out a ten zloty note and wrote down names on it and telephone numbers, more names than last time, a dozen. He took out another four notes, crumpled them in his hands and went to the door and knocked at the Judas window. An SS NCO turned up – a grave middle-aged face staring in at him. He didn’t look like a man who exercised Poles to death or ruptured kidneys with his boots, but of course, that was one of the strengths of torture, you didn’t expect it from a man whose features were those of someone’s country uncle.
Was it possible to order five bottles of vodka? Oskar asked. Five bottles, sir? said the NCO. He might have been advising a young callow drinker uncertain of quantities. He was also pensive, however, as if he were considering reporting Oskar to his superiors. The colonel and I, said Oskar, would appreciate a bottle apiece to stimulate conversation. You and your colleagues please accept the rest with my compliments. I presume also, said Oskar, that a man of your authority has power to ma
ke routine telephone calls on behalf of a prisoner. You’ll see the telephone numbers there . . . yes, on the notes. You don’t have to call them all yourself. But give them to my secretary, eh? Yes, she’s the first on the list.
These are very influential people, murmured the SS NCO.
You’re a damn fool, Philip told Oskar. They’ll shoot you for trying to corrupt their guards.
Oskar slumped, apparently casual. It’s as stupid as kissing a Jewess, said Philip. We’ll see, said Oskar. But he was frightened.
At last the NCO came back and brought, together with the two bottles, a parcel of clean shirts and underwear, some books and a bottle of wine, packed at the apartment in Straszewskiego Street by Ingrid and delivered to the Montelupich gate. Philip and Oskar had a pleasant evening together, although at one time a guard pounded on the steel door and demanded that they stop singing. And even then, as the drink added spaciousness to the cell and an unexpected cogency to the Standartenführer’s ravings, Schindler was listening for remote screams from upstairs or for the button-clicking morse of some hopeless prisoner in the next cell. Only once did the true nature of the place dilute the effectiveness of the vodka. By his cot, partially obscured by the pallet, Philip discovered a minute statement in red pencil. He spent some idle moments deciphering it, not well, his Polish much slower than Oskar’s.
“My God,” he translated, “how they beat me! Well, it’s a wonderful world, my friend Oskar. Isn’t it?”
In the morning Schindler woke clear-headed. Hangovers had never plagued him and he wondered why other people made such a fuss about them. But Philip was liverish and depressed. During the morning he was taken away and came back to collect his belongings. He was to face a court martial that afternoon but had been given a new posting at a training school in Stutthof, so he presumed they didn’t intend to shoot him. He picked up his greatcoat from his cot and went off to explain his Polish dalliance. Alone, Oskar spent the day reading a book by Karl May that Ingrid had sent and, in the afternoon, speaking to his lawyer, a Sudetendeutscher who’d set up a practice in civil law in Cracow two years ago. Oskar was comforted by the interview. The cause of the arrest was certainly as stated; they weren’t using his trans-racial caresses as a pretext to hold him while they investigated his affairs. “But it will probably come to the SS court and you’ll be asked why you aren’t in the army.”
“The reason is obvious,” said Oskar. “I’m an essential war producer. You can get General Schindler to say so.”
Oskar was a slow reader and savoured the Karl May story, the hunter and the Indian sage in the American wilderness – a relationship of decency. He did not rush the reading, in any case. It could be a week before he came to court. The lawyer expected that there would be a speech by the president of the court about conduct unbecoming to a member of the German race and then there would be a substantial fine. So be it. He’d leave court a more cautious man.
On the fifth morning he had already drunk the half litre of black ersatz coffee they’d given him for breakfast when an NCO and two guards came for him. Past the mute doors he was taken upstairs to one of the front offices. He found there a man he’d met at cocktail parties, Obersturmbannführer Rolf Czurda, head of the Cracow SD. Czurda looked rather like a businessman in his good suit.
“Oskar, Oskar,” said Czurda like an old friend reproving. “We give you those Jewish girls at five Marks a day. You should kiss us, not them.”
Oskar explained that it had been his birthday. He’d been impetuous. He’d been drinking.
Czurda shook his head. I never knew you were such a big timer, Oskar, he said. Calls from as far away as Breslau, from our friends in the Abwehr. Of course it would be ridiculous to keep you from your work just because you touched up some Jewess.
You’re very understanding, Herr Obersturmbannführer, said Oskar, feeling the request for some sort of gratuity building up in Czurda. If ever I’m in a position to return your liberal gesture.
As a matter of fact, said Czurda, I have an old aunt whose flat has been bombed out.
Yet another old aunt. Schindler made a compassionate click with his tongue and said that a representative of Chief Czurda would be welcome any time in Lipowa Street to make a selection from the range of products turned out there.
But it did not do to let men like Czurda think of his release as an absolute favour, and of the kitchenware as the least that the luckily released prisoner could offer. When Czurda said he could go, Oskar objected. I can’t very well just call my car, Herr Obersturmbannführer. After all, my fuel resources are limited.
Czurda asked if Herr Schindler expected the SD to take him home.
Oskar shrugged. He did live on the far side of the city, he said. It was a long way to walk.
Czurda laughed. Oskar, I’ll have one of my own drivers take you back.
But when the limousine was ready, engine running, at the bottom of the main steps, Herr Schindler glancing at the blank windows above him, wanting a sign from that other republic, the realm of torture, of unconditional imprisonment, the hell beyond bars for those who had no pots and pans to barter, Rolf Czurda detained him by the elbow.
“Jokes aside, Oskar, my dear fellow, you’d be a fool if you got a real taste for some little Jewish skirt. They don’t have a future, Oskar. That’s not just old-fashioned Jew-hate talking, I assure you. It’s policy.”
THIRTEEN
Even that summer, people inside the walls were clinging to the idea of the ghetto as a small but permanent realm. The idea had been easy enough to credit during 1941. There had been a post office, there had even been ghetto postage stamps. There had been a ghetto newspaper, even though it contained little other than edicts from the Wawel and Pomorska Street. A restaurant had been permitted in Lwówska Street, Foerster’s Restaurant where the Rosner brothers, back from the perils of the countryside and the changeable passions of the peasants, played the violin and the accordion. It had seemed for a brief time that schooling would proceed here in formal classrooms, that orchestras would gather and regularly perform, that Jewish life would be communicated like a benign organism along the streets, from artisan to artisan, from scholar to scholar. It had not yet been demonstrated finally by the SS bureaucrats of Pomorska Street that the idea of that sort of ghetto was to be considered not simply a whimsy but an insult to the rational direction of history.
So when Untersturmführer Brandt had Judenrat president, Artur Rosenzweig, round to Pomorska for a beating with the handle of a riding crop, he was trying to correct the man’s incurable vision of the ghetto as a region of permanent residence. The ghetto was a depot, a siding, a walled bus station. Anything that would have encouraged the opposite view had, by 1942, been abolished.
So it was different here from the ghettos old people remembered, even affectionately. Music was no profession here. There were no professions. Henry Rosner went to work in the Luftwaffe mess at the airbase. There he met a young German chef-manager called Richard, a laughing boy hiding, as a chef can, from the history of the twentieth century among the elements of cuisine and bar management. He and dapper Henry Rosner got on so well that Richard would send the violinist across town to take receipt of the Luftwaffe Catering Corps pay – You couldn’t trust a German, said Richard; the last one had run off to Hungary with the proceeds.
Richard, like any barman worthy of his station, heard things and attracted the affection of officials. On the first day of June, he came to the ghetto with his girlfriend, a Volksdeutsche girl wearing a sweeping cape which, on account of the June showers, didn’t seem too excessive a garment. Through his profession, Richard knew a number of policemen including Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko and had no trouble in being admitted to the ghetto, even though it was officially out-of-bounds to him. Once inside the gate, Richard crossed Plac Zgody and found Henry Rosner’s address. Henry was surprised to see them. He had left Richard at the Luftwaffe mess only a few hours before, yet here he was with his girl, both of them dressed as for a formal visit. It
reinforced for Henry the strangeness of the season. For the past two days, ghetto people had been queueing at the old Polish Savings Bank building in Józefińska Street for the new identity cards. To your yellow Kennkarte with its sepia passport photograph and its large blue J, the German clerks now attached – if you were lucky – a blue sticker. People could be seen to leave the Bank waving their cards with the Blauschein attached as if it proved their right to breathe, their permanent validity. Workers at the Luftwaffe mess, the Wehrmacht garage, at the Madritsch works, at Oskar Schindler’s Emalia, at the Progress factory, all had no trouble getting the Blauschein. But those who were refused it felt that their citizenship of even the ghetto was under question.
Richard said that Henry’s son, Olek, should come and stay with his girlfriend at her apartment. You could tell that he’d heard something in the mess. He can’t just walk out of the gate, said Henry. It’s fixed with Bosko, said Richard.
Henry and Manci were hesitant and consulted with each other as the girl in the cape promised to feed Olek up on chocolate. An Aktion? Henry Rosner asked in a murmur. Is there going to be an Aktion?
Richard answered with a question. You’ve got your Blauschein? he asked. Of course, said Henry. And Manci? Manci too. But Olek hasn’t, said Richard. In the drizzling dusk, Olek Rosner, only child, newly six years old, walked out of the ghetto under the cape of Richard the chef’s girlfriend. Had some policeman bothered to lift the cape, both Richard and the girl could have been shot for their friendly subterfuge. Olek would vanish too. In the childless corner of their room, the Rosners hoped they’d been wise.
Poldek Pfefferberg, runner for Oskar Schindler, had earlier in the year been ordered to begin tutoring the children of Symche Spira, exalted glazier, chief of the OD.
It was a contemptuous summons, as if Spira were saying, “Yes, we know you’re not fit for man’s work, but at least you can pass on to my kids some of the benefits of your education.”
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