The postcards had gone into the void. No one answered. It meant that the addressees were in prison, or in the forest, or at labour in some camp, or in a ghetto, or dead. All the Zionists of Istanbul had was the ominous evidence of silence.
In the late autumn of 1942, they at last received one reply, a postcard with a view of the Belvaros of Budapest. The message on it read, “Encouraged by your interest in my situation. Rahamin maher (urgent help) is much needed. Please keep in touch.”
This reply had been composed by a Budapest jeweller called Samu Springmann, who’d first received and then puzzled out the message on Sarka Mandelblatt’s postcard. Samu was a slight man, jockey size, in the prime of his thirties. Since the age of thirteen, despite an inalienable probity, he had been oiling officials, doing favours for the diplomatic corps, bribing the heavy-handed Hungarian secret police. Now the Istanbul people let him know that they wanted to use him to pipe rescue money into the German empire and to transmit through them to the world some definite intelligence on what was happening to European Jewry.
In the German-allied Hungary of General Horthy, Samu Springmann and his Zionist colleagues were as bereft of solid news from beyond the Polish border as were the people in Istanbul. But he began to recruit couriers who, for a percentage of the bag or else out of conviction, would be willing to penetrate the German territories. One of his couriers was a diamond dealer, Erich Popescu, an agent of the Hungarian secret police. Another was an underworld carpet smuggler, Bandi Grosz, who had also assisted the secret police. A third was Rudi Schulz, an Austrian safe-cracker, an agent for the Gestapo Management Bureau in Stuttgart. Springmann had a gift for playing with double agents such as Popescu, Grosz and Schulz, by touching their sentimentality, their greed, and, if any, their principles.
Some of his couriers were idealists, working from firm premises. Sedlacek, who asked after Herr Schindler in Cracow towards the end of 1942, belonged to that species. He had a flourishing dental practice in Vienna and, in his mid forties, did not need to lug false-bottomed suitcases into Poland. But here he was, with a list in his pocket, the list having come from Istanbul. And the second name on the list, Oskar’s.
It meant that someone – Itzhak Stern, the businessman Ginter, Dr Alexander Biberstein – had forwarded Schindler’s name to the Zionists in Palestine. Without knowing it, Herr Schindler had been nominated for the post of righteous person.
Dr Sedlacek had a friend in the Cracow garrison, a fellow Viennese, a patient he’d got to know in his surgery. This was Major Franz von Korab of the Wehrmacht. On his first evening in Cracow, the dentist was to meet Major von Korab at the Hotel Cracovia for a drink. Sedlacek had had a miserable day, had gone to the grey Vistula and looked across at Podgórze, the cold fortress of barbed wire and lofty gravestoned walls, a cloud of a special dimness above it this mean winter’s day, a sharper rain falling there beyond the fake eastern gate where even the policemen looked accursed. When it was time to go and meet von Korab he went gratefully.
In the suburbs of Vienna it had always been rumoured that von Korab had a Jewish grandmother. Patients would idly say so – in the Reich, genealogical gossip was as acceptable small talk as was the weather. People would seriously speculate over drinks whether it was true that Reinhard Heydrich’s grandmother had married a Jew called Suss. Once, against all good sense but for the sake of friendship, von Korab had confessed to Sedlacek that the rumour was true in his case. This confession had been a gesture of trust which it would now be safe to return. Sedlacek therefore asked the major about some of the people on the Istanbul list. To Schindler’s name, von Korab responded with an indulgent laugh. He knew Herr Schindler, had dined with him. He was physically impressive, said the major, and made money hand over fist. He was much brighter than he pretended to be. I can call him right now and make an appointment, said von Korab.
At ten the next morning they entered the Emalia office. Schindler accepted Sedlacek politely but watched Major von Korab, measuring his trust of the dentist. After a time Oskar warmed to the stranger and the major excused himself and would not be detained for morning coffee. “Very well,” said Sedlacek, when von Korab was gone, “I’ll tell you exactly where I come from.”
He did not mention the money he had brought, nor the likelihood that in the future trusted contacts in Poland would be handed small fortunes in Jewish Joint Distribution Committee cash. What the dentist wanted to know, without any financial colouring, was what Herr Schindler knew and thought about the war against Jewry in Poland.
Once Sedlacek had the question out, Schindler hesitated. In that second, Sedlacek expected a refusal. Schindler’s expanding workshop employed five hundred and fifty Jews at the SS rental rate. The Armaments Inspectorate guaranteed a man like Schindler a continuity of rich contracts, the SS promised him, for no more than seven and a half Reichsmarks a day per person, a continuity of slaves. It should not be a surprise if he sat back in his padded leather chair and claimed ignorance.
“There is one problem, Herr Sedlacek,” he growled. “It’s this. What they are doing to people in this country is beyond belief.”
“You mean,” asked Dr Sedlacek, “that you’re concerned my principals won’t believe you?”
Schindler said, “Since I scarcely believe it myself.”
He rose, went to the cabinet, poured two tumblers of cognac and brought one for Dr Sedlacek. Returning to his own side of the desk with the other, he took a swallow, frowned at an invoice, picked it up, went to the door on the balls of his feet and swung it open as if to trap an eavesdropper. For a while he stood there framed. Then Sedlacek heard him talking in easy tones to his Polish secretary about the invoice. In a few minutes, closing the door, he returned to Sedlacek, took a seat behind the desk and, after another deep swallow, began to talk.
Even among Sedlacek’s own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. The story Schindler told him was not startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railways, an enormous cubic footage of cargo space, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research and development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one. Dr Sedlacek had expected mere horror stories – hunger, economic strictures, violent pogroms in this city or that, violations of ownership – all the historically accustomed things.
Oskar’s summary of events in Poland convinced Sedlacek precisely because of the sort of man Oskar was. He had done well from the occupation, he sat at the heart of his own hive with a glass of brandy in his hand. There was both an impressive surface calm and a fundamental anger in him. He was like a man who had, to his regret, found it impossible to disbelieve the worst. He showed no tendency to be extravagant in the facts he relayed.
“If I can arrange your visa,” said Sedlacek, “would you come to Budapest and pass on what you have just told me to my principal and the others?”
Schindler seemed momentarily surprised. “You can write a report,” he said. “And surely you’ve heard this sort of thing from other sources.” But Sedlacek told him no, there had been individual stories, details of this incident and that. No comprehensive picture. “Come to Budapest,” said Sedlacek. “Mind you, it might be uncomfortable travelling.”
“Do you mean,” asked Schindler, “that I have to cross the border on foot?”
“Not as bad as that,” said the dentist. “You might have to travel in a goods train.”
“I’ll come,” said Oskar Schindler.
Dr Sedlacek asked him about the other names on the Istanbul list. At the head of the list, for instance, stood a Cracow dentist. Dentists were always easy to visit, said Sedlacek, since everyone on earth has at least one bona fide cavity. “No,” said Her
r Schindler. “Don’t visit this man. He’s been compromised by the SS.”
Before he left Cracow to return to Mr Springmann in Budapest, Dr Sedlacek arranged another meeting with Schindler. In Oskar’s office at DEF, he handed over nearly all the currency Springmann had given him to bring to Poland. There was always some risk, in view of Schindler’s hedonist taste, that he would spend it on black-market jewellery. But neither Springmann nor Istanbul required any assurances. They could never hope to play the auditor.
It must be stated that Oskar behaved impeccably and gave the cash to his contacts in the Jewish community to spend according to their judgment.
Mordecai Wulkan, who like Mrs Dresner would come to know Herr Oskar Schindler in time, was a jeweller by trade. Now, late in the year, he was visited at home by one of Spira’s political OD. This wasn’t trouble, the OD man said. Certainly Wulkan had a record. A year ago he had been picked up by the OD for selling currency on the black market. When he had refused to work as an agent for the Currency Control Bureau, he had been beaten up by the SS, and Mrs Wulkan had had to visit Wachtmeister Beck in the ghetto police office and pay a bribe for his release.
This June he’d been rounded up for transport to Belzec, but an OD man he’d known had led him straight back out of the Optima yard. Even in the OD there were Zionists, however small their chances of ever beholding Jerusalem might be.
The OD man who visited him this time was no Zionist. The SS, he told Wulkan, urgently needed four jewellers. Symche Spira had been given three hours to find them. In this way Herzog, Friedner, Grüner and Wulkan, four jewellers, were assembled at the OD station and marched out of the ghetto to the old Technical Academy, now a warehouse for the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office.
It was obvious to Wulkan as he entered the Academy that a great security operated here. At every door stood a guard. In the front hall an SS officer told the four jewellers that should they speak to anyone about their work here they could expect to be sent to a labour camp. They were to bring with them, he said, every day, their diamond-grading kits, their implements for assessing the karat value of gold.
They were led down into the basement. Around the walls stood racks laden with suitcases, and towering layers of portmanteaus, each with a name studiously and futilely printed on it by its past owner. Beneath the high-up windows stood a line of wooden crates. As the four jewellers squatted in a space cleared in the middle of the floor, two SS men took down a suitcase, laboured across the cellar with it and emptied it in front of Herzog. They returned to the rack for another, which they emptied in front of Grüner. Then they brought a cascade of gold for Friedner, then for Wulkan. It was old gold – rings, brooches, bracelets, watches, lorgnettes, cigarette holders. The jewellers were to grade the gold, separate the gold plate from the solid. Diamonds and pearls were to be valued. They were to classify everything, according to value and karat weight, in separate heaps.
At first they picked up individual pieces tentatively but then worked faster as old professional habits asserted themselves. As the gold and jewellery went into their heaps, the SS men loaded the stuff into its appropriate crate. Every time a crate was filled, it was labelled in black paint – ‘SS Reichsführer Berlin’. There were quantities of children’s rings and one had to keep a cool rational control of one’s knowledge of their provenance. Only once did the jewellers falter, when the SS men opened a suitcase and out of it tumbled gold teeth still smeared with blood. There in a pile at Wulkan’s knees, the mouths of a thousand dead were presented, each one calling for him to join them by standing and flinging his instruments and eye piece across the room and declaring the tainted origin of all this precious stuff. Then, after the hiatus, Herzog and Grüner, Wulkan and Friedner commenced to grade again, aware now of course of the radiant value of whatever gold they themselves carried in their mouths, fearful that the SS would come prospecting for it.
It took six weeks for them to work through the treasures of the Technical Academy. After they had finished there, they were taken to a disused garage which had been converted to a silver warehouse. The lubrication pits were filled to spilling over with solid silver – rings, pendants, Passover platters, yad pointers, breastplates, crowns, candelabra. They separated the solid silver from the silver plate, they weighed it all. The SS officer in charge complained that some of these objects were awkward to pack, and Mordecai Wulkan suggested that perhaps they might consider melting them down. It seemed to Wulkan, though he was not pious, that it would be somehow better, a minor triumph, if the Reich inherited silver from which the Judaic form had been removed. But for some reason the SS officer refused. Perhaps the objects were intended for some didactic museum inside the Reich. Or perhaps the SS liked the artistry of synagogue silverware.
When this valuing work ran out, Wulkan was again at a loss for employment. He needed to leave the ghetto regularly to find enough food for his family, especially for his bronchitic daughter. For a time he worked at a metalworks in Kazimierz, getting to know an SS moderate, Oberscharführer Gola. Gola found him work as a maintenance man at the SA barracks near Wawel. As Wulkan entered the mess with his wrenches, he saw above the door the inscription, Für Juden und Hunde Eintritt Verbotten – Entrance forbidden to Jews and dogs. This sign, together with the hundred thousand teeth he had valued at the Technical Academy, convinced him that deliverance could not in the end be expected from the offhand favour of Oberscharführer Gola. Gola drank here without noticing the sign and neither would he notice the absence of the Wulkan family on the day they were taken to Belzec or some place of like efficacy. Therefore Wulkan, like Mrs Dresner and some fifteen thousand other ghetto dwellers, knew that what was needed was a special and startling deliverance. They did not believe for a moment that it would be provided.
EIGHTEEN
Dr Sedlacek had promised an uncomfortable journey and so it was. Oskar journeyed in a good overcoat with a suitcase and a bag full of sundry comforts which he badly needed by the end of the trip. Though he had the appropriate travel documents, he did not want to have to use them. It was considered better if he did not have to present them at the border. He could always deny that he had been to Hungary that December.
He travelled in a goods van filled with bundles of the Party newspaper, Voelkischer Beobachter, for sale in Hungary. Closeted amidst the heavy Gothic print of Germany’s official newspaper, the reek of printer’s ink, he was rocked south over the winter-sharp mountains of Slovakia, across the Hungarian border and down to the valley of the Danube.
A reservation had been made for him at the Pannonia near the university, and on the afternoon of his arrival, little Samu Springmann and an associate of his, Dr Rezso Kastner, came to see him. The two men who rose to Schindler’s floor in the lift had heard fragments of news from refugees. But refugees could give you little but threads. The fact that they had avoided the threat meant that they knew little of its geography, its intimate functioning, the numbers it ran to. Kastner and Springmann were full of anticipation, since – if Sedlacek could be believed – the Sudeten German upstairs could give them the whole cloth, the first full-bodied report on the Polish havoc.
In the room the introductions were brief, for Springmann and Kastner had come to listen and they could tell that Schindler was anxious to talk. There was no effort, in this city obsessed with coffee, to formalise the event by calling room service for coffee and cakes. Kastner and Springmann, after shaking the enormous German by the hand, sat down. But Schindler paced. It seemed that far from Cracow and the realities of Aktion and ghetto, his knowledge disturbed him more than it had when he’d briefly informed Sedlacek. He rampaged across the carpet. They would have heard his steps in the room below, their chandelier would have shaken when he stamped his foot, miming the action of the SS man in the execution squad in Krakusa, the one who’d pinned his victim’s head down with a boot in full sight of the red innocent at the tail of the departing column.
He began with personal images of the cruel parishes of Cra
cow, what he had beheld in the streets or heard from either side of the wall, from Jews and from the SS. In that connection, he said, he was carrying letters from members of the ghetto, from the physician Chaim Hilfstein, from Dr Leon Salpeter, from Itzhak Stern. Dr Hilfstein’s letter, said Schindler, was a report on hunger. “Once the body fat’s gone,” said Oskar, “it starts to work on the brain.”
The ghettos were being wound down, Oskar told them. It was true equally of Warsaw as of Lódź and of Cracow. The population of the Warsaw ghetto had been reduced by four-fifths, Lódź by two-thirds, Cracow by half. Where were the people who had been transferred? Some were in work camps, but the gentlemen here this afternoon had to accept that at least three-fifths of them had disappeared into camps that used the new scientific methods. Such camps were not exceptional. They had an official name – Vernichtungslager, extermination camp.
In the past few weeks, said Oskar, some two thousand Cracow ghetto dwellers had been rounded up and sent, not to the chambers of Belzec, but to labour camps near the city. One was at Wieliczka, one at Prokocim, both of these being railway stations on the Ostbahn line which ran towards the Russian front. From Wieliczka and Prokocim these prisoners were being marched every day to a site at the village of Plaszów, on the edge of the city, where the foundations for a vast labour camp were being laid. Their life in such a labour camp, said Schindler, would be no holiday – the barracks of Wieliczka and Prokocim were under the command of an SS man called Horst Pilarzik who had earned a reputation last June when he had helped clear from the ghetto some seven thousand people, of whom only one, a chemist, returned. The proposed camp at Plaszów would be under a man of the same calibre. What was in favour of the labour camps was that they lacked the technical apparatus for methodical slaughter. There was a different rationale behind them. They had economic reasons for existing – prisoners from Wieliczka and Prokocim were marched out every day to work on various projects, just as they were from the ghetto. Wieliczka, Prokocim and the proposed camp at Plaszów were under the control of the chiefs of police for Cracow, Julian Scherner and Rolf Czurda, whereas the Vernichtungslagers were run by the central management of the SS Administrative and Economic Main Office at Oranienburg near Berlin. The Vernichtungslagers also used people as labour for a time, but their ultimate industry was death and its by-products – recycling of the clothes, the remaining jewellery or spectacles, the toys, and even the skin and hair of the dead.
Schindler's Ark Page 16
