Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Pfefferberg amused Schindler with stories of the tutorial sessions at Symche’s house. The police chief was one of the few Jews to have an entire floor to himself. There, amidst two-dimensional paintings of nineteenth century rabbis, Symche paced, listening to the instruction Pfefferberg gave, seeming to want to see knowledge, like petunias, sprout from his children’s ears. A man of destiny with his hand hooked inside his jacket, he believed that this Napoleonic mannerism was a gesture universal to men of influence.

  Symche’s wife was a shadowy woman, a little bemused by her husband’s unexpected power, perhaps a little excluded by old friends. The children, a boy of about twelve and a girl of fourteen, were biddable but no great scholars.

  When Pfefferberg went to the Polish Savings Bank he expected to be given the Blauschein without any trouble. He was sure his labour with the Spira children would be counted as essential work. His yellow card identified him as a High School Professor, and in a rational world as yet only partly turned upside down it was an honourable label.

  The clerks refused to give him the sticker. He argued with them and wondered if he should appeal to Oskar or to Herr Szepessi, the Austrian bureaucrat who ran the German Labour Office down the street. Oskar had been asking him for a year to come to Emalia, but Pfefferberg had always thought it would be too constricting to have such full-time work.

  As he emerged from the Bank building, details of German Security Police, the Polish Blue Police, and the political detail of the OD were at work on the pavements, inspecting everyone’s card and arresting those who did not have the sticker. A line of rejects, hangdog men and women, already stood in the middle of Józefińska Street. Pfefferberg affected his Polish military bearing and explained that of course he had a number of trades. But the policeman he spoke to shook his head, saying, Don’t argue with me. No Blauschein? You join that line. Understand, Jew?

  Pfefferberg went and joined the line. The delicate, pretty wife he’d married eighteen months earlier worked for Madritsch and already had her Blauschein. So there was that.

  When the line had grown to more than a hundred, it was marched around the corner, past the hospital and into the yard of the old Optima confectionery works. Hundreds were already waiting. The early comers had taken the shady areas of what used to be the stables, where the Optima horses had once been harnessed between the shafts of drays laden with crêmes and liqueur chocolates. It was not a rowdy group. There were professional men, bankers, pharmacists and dentists. They stood in clusters, talking calmly. The young pharmacist Bachner stood speaking to an old couple called Wohl. There were many old people in here. The old and poor who depended on the Judenrat ration. This summer the Judenrat itself, the distributor of food and even of space, had been less equitable than it had been last.

  Nurses from the ghetto hospital moved among these detainees with buckets of water, which was said to be good for stress and disorientation. It was, in any case, just about the only specific medicine, other than some black-market cyanide, that the hospital had to give. The old, the poor families from the Shtetls, took the water in restive silence.

  Throughout the day, police of three varieties would enter the yard with lists, and lines of people would be formed to be met at the gate of the yard by SS details and moved out to Prokocim railway station. In some people the urge rose to evade this next movement by keeping to the far corners of the yard. But it was Pfefferberg’s style to hang around the gate, looking for some official to whom he could make a claim. Perhaps Spira would be there, dressed up like a movie actor and willing – with a little leaden irony – to release him. In fact there stood by the gatekeeper’s hut a sad-faced boy in an OD hat studying a list, holding the corner of the page in delicate fingers. Not only had Pfefferberg served briefly with the boy in the OD but in the first year of his teaching career at Kosciuszko high school in Podgórze he had taught his sister.

  The boy looked up. Professor Pfefferberg, he murmured with a respect from those vanished days at the high school just over there by the park. As if the yard were full of practised criminals, he asked what Professor Pfefferberg was doing here.

  It’s nonsense, said Pfefferberg, but I haven’t got a Blauschein yet.

  The boy shook his head. Follow me, he said. He walked Pfefferberg to a senior uniformed Schupo at the gate and gave a salute. He did not look heroic in his funny cap and with his skinny vulnerable neck. Later, Pfefferberg supposed that that had given him greater credibility. He saluted the Schupo. “This is Herr Pfefferberg from the Judenrat,” he lied with a deft combination of respect and authority. “He has been visiting some relatives.” The Schupo seemed bored by the mass of police work proceeding in the yard. Negligently he waved Pfefferberg out of the gate. Pfefferberg had no leisure to thank the boy or to reflect on the mystery of why a child with a skinny neck will lie for you even unto death just because you taught his sister how to use the vaulting horse.

  Pfefferberg rushed straight to the Labour Office and jumped the queues. Behind the desk were Fraüleins Skoda and Knosalla, the two hearty Sudeten German girls. Liebchen, Liebchen, he told Skoda, they want to take me away because I don’t have the sticker. Look at me, I ask you. Aren’t I exactly the sort of fellow you’d like to keep around here?

  In spite of the crowds who’d given her no rest all day, Skoda raised her eyebrows and failed to suppress a smile. She took his Kennkarte. I can’t help you, Herr Pfefferberg, she told him. They didn’t give it to you, so I can’t. A pity . . .

  But you can give it to me, Liebchen, he insisted in a loud, syrupy, soap-opera voice. I have trades, Liebchen, I have trades.

  Skoda said that only Herr Szepessi could help him and it was impossible to get Pfefferberg in to see Szepessi. It would take days. But you will get me in, Liebchen, Pfefferberg insisted. And she did. That is where her reputation as a decent girl came from, because she abstracted from the massive drift of policy and could, even on a crowded day, respond to the individual face. A warty old man might not have done so well with her however.

  Herr Szepessi, who also had a humane reputation even though he serviced the monstrous machine, looked quickly at Pfefferberg’s permit, murmuring, “But we don’t need gym teachers.”

  Pfefferberg had always refused Oskar’s offers of employment because he saw himself as an operator, an individualist. He didn’t want to work long shifts for meagre pay over in dreary Zablocie. But he could see now that the era of individuality was vanishing. People needed, as a staple of life, a trade. I’m a metal polisher, he told Szepessi. He had worked for short periods with a Podgórze uncle of his who ran a small metalworks in Rekawka.

  Herr Szepessi eyed Pfefferberg from behind spectacles. Now, he said, that’s a profession. He took a pen, thoroughly crossing out High School Professor, and in the process the Jagiellonian education of which Pfefferberg was so proud, and over the top he wrote Metal Polisher. He reached for a rubber stamp and a pot of paste and took from his desk a blue sticker. Now, he said, handing the document back to Pfefferberg, now should you meet a Schupo, you can assure him that you’re a useful member of society.

  Later in the year they would send poor Szepessi to Auschwitz for being so persuadable.

  FOURTEEN

  From diverse sources – from the policeman Toffel as well as drunken Bosch of Ostfaser (the SS textile company) – Oskar Schindler heard rumours that ‘procedures in the ghetto’ were growing more intense. The SS were moving into Cracow some tough Sonderkommando units from Lublin, where they had already done sterling work in matters of racial purification. Toffel had suggested that unless Oskar wanted a break in production, he ought to set up some campbeds for his nightshift until after the first Sabbath in June.

  So Oskar set up dormitories in the offices and upstairs in the munitions hall. Some of the nightshift were happy to bed down there. Others had wives, children, parents waiting in the ghetto. Besides, they had the Blauschein, the holy blue sticker, on their Kennkartes.

  On June 3rd, Abraham Bankier, Oskar’s
office manager, didn’t turn up at Lipowa Street. Schindler was still at home, drinking coffee in Straszewskiego Street, when he got a call from one of his office girls. She’d seen Bankier marched out of the ghetto, not even stopping at Optima, straight to Prokocim depot. There’d been other Emalia workers in the group, too. There’d been Reich, Leser . . . as many as a dozen.

  Oskar called for his car to be brought to him from the garage. He drove over the river and down Lwówska towards Prokocim. There he showed his pass to the guards at the gate. The depot yard itself was full of strings of livestock wagons, the station crowded with the ghetto’s dispensable citizens standing in orderly lines, convinced still – and perhaps they were right – of the value of passive and orderly response. It was the first time Oskar had seen this juxtaposition of humans and livestock wagons, and it was a greater shock than hearing of it; it made him pause on the edge of the platform. Then he saw a jeweller he knew. “Seen Bankier?” he asked. “He’s already in one of the wagons, Herr Schindler,” said the jeweller. “Where are they taking you?” Oskar asked the man. “We’re going to a labour camp, they say. Near Lublin. Probably no worse than . . .” The man waved a hand towards Cracow.

  Schindler took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket, found some ten zloty notes and handed the packet and the money to the jeweller, who thanked him. They had made them leave home without anything this time. They said they’d be sending on the baggage.

  Late the previous year, Schindler had seen in the SS Bulletin of Budget and Construction an invitation for bids for the construction of some crematoria in a camp south east of Lublin. Belzec. Schindler considered the jeweller. Sixty-three or four. A little thin, had probably had pneumonia last winter. Worn pinstriped suit, too warm for the day. And in the clear knowing eyes a capacity to bear finite suffering. Even in the summer of 1942 it was impossible to guess at the connections between such a man as this and those ovens of extraordinary cubic capacity. Did they intend to start epidemics among the prisoners? Was that to be the method?

  Beginning from the locomotive, Schindler moved along the line of more than twenty cattle wagons, calling Bankier’s name to the faces peering down at him from the open grillework high above the slats of the cars. It was fortunate for Abraham that Oskar did not ask himself why it was Bankier’s name he called, that he did not pause and consider that Bankier’s had only equal value to all the other names loaded aboard the Ostbahn rolling stock. An existentialist might have been defeated by the numbers at Prokocim, stunned by the equal appeal of all the names and voices. But Herr Schindler was a philosophic innocent. He knew the people he knew. He knew the name of Bankier. Bankier, Bankier, he continued to call.

  He was intercepted by a young SS man, an Oberscharführer, an expert railway shipper from Lublin. He asked for Schindler’s pass. Oskar could see in the man’s left hand an enormous list, pages of names.

  “My workers,” said Schindler. “Essential industrial workers. My office manager. It’s idiocy. I have Armaments Inspectorate contracts, and here you are taking the workers I need to fulfil them.”

  “You can’t have them back,” said the young man. “They’re on the list.” The SS NCO knew from experience that the list conferred an equal destination on all its members.

  Oskar dropped his voice to that hard murmur, the growl of a reasonable man, well connected, who wasn’t going to bring up all his cannon yet. “Did the Herr Oberscharführer know how long it would take to train experts to replace those on the list? At my works, Deutsche Email Fabrik, I have a munitions section under the special protection of General Schindler, my namesake.” Not only would the Oberscharführer’s comrades on the Russian front be affected by the disruption of production, but the office of the Armaments Inspectorate would demand explanations as well.

  The young man shook his head – he was just a harassed transit official, he was trying to say. “I’ve heard that sort of story before, sir,” he said. But he was worried. Oskar could tell it and kept leaning over him and speaking softly with an edge of menace. “It’s not my place to argue with the list,” said Oskar. “Where is your superior officer?”

  The boy nodded towards an SS officer, a man in his thirties carrying a frown above his spectacles. “May I have your name, Herr Untersturmführer?” Oskar asked him, already pulling a notebook from his suit pocket.

  The officer also made a statement about the holiness of the list. For this man it was the secure, rational and sole basis for all this milling of Jews and movement of locomotives. But Schindler got crisper now. He’d heard about the list, he said. What he had asked was what the Untersturmführer’s name was. He intended to appeal directly to Oberführer Scherner and to General Schindler of the Armaments Inspectorate.

  “Schindler?” asked the officer. For the first time he took a careful look at Oskar. The man was dressed like a tycoon, wore the right badge, had Generals in the family. “I believe I can guarantee you, Herr Untersturmführer,” said Schindler in his benign grumble, “that you’ll be in southern Russia within a week.”

  The NCO going ahead, Herr Schindler and the officer marched side by side between the ranks of prisoners and the loaded wagons. The locomotive was already steaming and the engine driver leaning from his cab, looking down the length of the train, waiting to be despatched. The officer called to Ostbahn officials they passed on the platform to hold things. At last they reached one of the rear wagons. There were a dozen workers in there with Bankier; they had all boarded together as if expecting a joint deliverance. The door was unlocked and they jumped down – Bankier and Frankel from the office, Reich, Leser and the others from the factory. They were restrained, not wanting to permit anyone to detect their pleasure in being saved the journey. Those left inside began chattering merrily as if they were fortunate to be travelling with so much extra room. While, with emphasis in his pen strokes, the officer removed the Emalia workers one at a time from the list and required Oskar to initial the page.

  As Schindler thanked the officer and turned to follow his workers away, the man detained him by the elbow of his suit coat. “Sir,” he said, “it makes no difference to us, you understand. We don’t care whether it’s this dozen or that.”

  The officer had been frowning when Oskar first saw him, but now seemed calm as if he had discovered the theorem behind the situation. You think your thirteen little tinsmiths are important? We’ll replace them with another thirteen little tinsmiths and all your sentimentality for these will be defeated. “It’s the inconvenience to the list, that’s all,” the officer explained in the end.

  Plump little Bankier admitted that the group had neglected to pick up Blauscheins from the old Polish Savings Bank. Schindler, suddenly testy, said to attend to it. But what his curtness covered was a dismay at those crowds at Prokocim who, for want of a blue tab, stood waiting for the new and decisive symbol of their status, the cattle wagon, to be hauled by heavy engines across their range of vision. Now, the cattle transports told them, we are all beasts together.

  FIFTEEN

  From the faces of his own workers, Oskar could read something of the ghetto’s torment. For people had no time to catch their breath there, no room to dig in, assert their 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 any sound from the stairwell. Adults woke from dreams of exile and dispossession to find themselves exiled and dispossessed in a crowded room in Podgórze, the events of their dreams, the very taste of fear in dreams, finding continuity in the fears of the day. Fierce rumours 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, d
eracinated, 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 rumour 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 Prokocim, he decided to go riding again. The morning after the rescue of Bankier, he hired horses from the stables in Bednarskiego Park. They were impeccably turned out, he and Ingrid, in long hacking jackets, riding britches and dazzling boots. Two Sudeten blonds high above the disturbed antheap 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 gushing 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 batons worked with the SS. Some of these Jewish police seemed enthusiastic, for in the space of a few minutes’ viewing from the hill Oskar saw three reluctant women beaten over the shoulders. At first there was a naïve 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.