Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  In the midst of explaining the distinction between extermination camps and those for forced labour, Schindler suddenly sidestepped towards the door, wrenched it open, and looked up and down the empty hallway. I know the reputation of this city for eavesdropping, he explained. Little Mr Springmann rose and came to his elbow. “The Pannonia isn’t so bad,” he told Oskar in a low voice. “It’s the Victoria that’s the Gestapo hotbed.”

  Schindler surveyed the hallway once more, closed the door and returned across the room. He stood by the windows and continued his grim report. The forced labour camps would be run by men appointed for their severity and efficiency in clearing the ghettos. There would be sporadic murders and beatings, and there would certainly be corruption involving food and therefore short rations for the prisoners. But that was preferable to the assured death of the Vernichtungslagers. People in the labour camps could get access to extra comforts, and individuals could be taken out and smuggled to Hungary.

  These SS men are as corruptible as any other police force then? the gentleman of the Budapest rescue committee asked Oskar. “In my experience,” growled Oskar, “there isn’t one of them that isn’t.”

  When Oskar finished there was silence. Kastner and Springmann were not readily astounded. All their lives they’d lived under the intimidation of the secret police. Their present activities were both vaguely suspected by the Hungarian police – rendered safe only by Samu’s contacts and bribes – and at the same time disdained by respectable Jewry. Samuel Stern, for example, president of the Jewish council, member of the Hungarian senate, would dismiss this afternoon’s report by Oskar Schindler as pernicious fantasy, an insult to German culture, a reflection on the decency of the intentions of the Hungarian government. So it was not that Springmann and Kastner were unmanned by Schindler’s testimony as much as that their minds were painfully expanding. Their resources seemed minute now that they knew what they were set against: not just any average and predictable Philistine giant but the behemoth itself. Perhaps already they were reaching for the idea that as well as individual bargaining – some extra food for this camp, rescue for this intellectual, a bribe to temper the professional ardour of this SS man – some vaster rescue scheme would have to be arranged at breathtaking expense.

  Schindler threw himself into a chair. Samu Springmann looked across at the now reposeful industrialist. He had made an enormous impression on them, said Springmann. They would of course send a report to Istanbul on all Oskar had told them. It would be used to stir the Palestinian Zionists and the Joint Distribution Committee to greater action. At the same time it would be fed to the governments of Churchill and Roosevelt. Springmann said that he thought Oskar was right to worry about people’s belief in what he’d say, he was right to say it was all incredible. “Therefore,” said Samu Springmann, “I urge you to go to Istanbul yourself and speak to the people there.”

  After a little hesitation – whether to do with the demands of the enamelware business or with the dangers of crossing so many borders – Schindler agreed. Towards the end of the year, said Springmann. “In the meantime you will see Dr Sedlacek in Cracow regularly.”

  They stood up, and Oskar could see that they were changed men. They thanked him and left, becoming simply, on the way downstairs, two pensive Budapest professional men who’d heard disturbing news of mismanagement in the branch offices.

  That night Dr Sedlacek called at Oskar’s hotel and took him out into the brisk streets to dinner at the Hotel Gellert. From their table they could see the Danube, its illuminated barges, the city glowing on the far side of the water. It was like a pre-war city, and Schindler began to feel like a tourist again. After his afternoon’s temperance, he drank the dense, native burgundy, Bull’s Blood, with a slow, assiduous thirst, and created a series of empty bottles at their table.

  Halfway through their meal they were joined by an Austrian journalist, Dr Schmidt, who’d brought with him his mistress, an exquisite, golden Hungarian girl. Schindler admired the girl’s jewellery and told her that he was a great fancier of jewellery himself. But over apricot brandy he became less friendly. He sat with a mild frown, listening to Schmidt talk of real estate prices and car dealings and horse races. The girl listened raptly to Schmidt, since she wore the results of his business coups around her neck and at her wrists. But Oskar’s surprising disapproval was clear. Dr Sedlacek was secretly amused: perhaps Oskar was seeing a partial reflection of his own new wealth, his own tendencies towards trading on the fringes.

  When the dinner was over, Schmidt and his girl left for some nightclub, and Sedlacek made sure he took Schindler to a different one. They sat drinking unwise further quantities of brandy and watching the floor show.

  “That Schmidt,” said Schindler, wanting to clear up the question so that he could enjoy the small hours. “Do you use him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you ought to use men like that,” said Oskar. “He’s a thief.”

  Dr Sedlacek turned his face, and its half smile, away.

  “How can you be sure he delivers any of the money you give him?” Oskar asked.

  “We let him keep a percentage,” said Dr Sedlacek.

  Oskar thought about it for a full half minute. Then he murmured, “I don’t want a damned percentage. I don’t want to be offered one.”

  “Very well,” said Sedlacek.

  “Let’s watch the girls,” said Oskar.

  NINETEEN

  Even as Oskar Schindler returned by freight car from Budapest, where he’d predicted that the ghetto would soon be closed, Untersturmführer Amon Goeth was on his way from Lublin to bring about that liquidation, and to take command of the resultant Zwangsarbeitslager (Forced Labour Camp) at Plaszów. Goeth was some eight months younger than Schindler, but shared more with him than the mere year of birth. Like Oskar he had been raised a Catholic and had ceased observing the rites of the Church as late as 1938, when his first marriage had broken up. Like Oskar, too, he had graduated from high school in the Realgymnasium – Engineering, Physics, Maths. He was therefore a practical man, no thinker but considered himself a philosopher. A Viennese, he had joined the National Socialist Party early, in 1930. When the nervous Austrian Republic banned the party in 1933, he was already a member of its security force, the SS. Driven underground, he had emerged on to the streets of Vienna after the Anschluss of 1938 in the uniform of an SS non-commissioned officer. In 1940 he had been raised to the rank of SS Oberscharführer and in 1941 achieved the honour of commissioned rank, immensely harder to come by in the SS than in Wehrmacht units. After training in infantry tactics, he was put in charge of Sonderkommandos during Aktions in the populous ghetto of Lublin and, by his performance there, earned the right to liquidate Cracow.

  Untersturmführer Goeth, then, speeding on the Wehrmacht special between Lublin and Cracow, there to take command of well-tried Sonderkommandos, shared with Oskar not only his year of birth, his religion, his weakness for drink, but a massive physique as well. Goeth’s face was open and pleasant, rather longer than Schindler’s. His hands, though large but muscular, were long fingered. He was sentimental about his children, the children of his second marriage, whom he had not seen often in the past three years. As a substitute, he was sometimes attentive to the children of brother-officers. He could be a sentimental lover too, a cooer, but though he resembled Oskar in terms of general sexual voraciousness, his tastes were less conventional, running sometimes to his brother SS men, frequently to the beating of women. Once the first blaze of infatuation had died, he could start throwing punches. He considered himself a sensitive man, and thought that his family’s trade proved it. His father and grandfather were printers and binders of books in Vienna and he liked to list himself on official papers as a Literat, a man of letters. And though, at this moment, he would have told you that he looked forward to his taking control of the liquidation operation – that this was the major chance of his career and carried with it the promise of promotion – his service
in Special Actions seemed to him to have altered the flow of his nervous energies. He had been plagued with insomnia for two years now and, if he had his way, stayed up till three or four and slept late in the mornings. He had become a reckless drinker and believed he carried his drink with an ease he had not known in his youth. Again like Oskar, he never suffered the hangovers he deserved. He thanked his hard-working kidneys for this benefit.

  His orders, entrusting him with the extinction of the ghetto and the kingship of Plaszów camp, were dated February 12th, 1943. He hoped that after consulting with his senior NCOs, with Wilhelm Kunde, commander of the SS guard for the ghetto, and with Willi Haase, Scherner’s deputy, it would be possible to begin the clearing of the ghetto within a month of the date of his commission.

  Commandant Goeth was met at Cracow Central Station by Kunde himself and by the tall young SS man, Horst Pilarzik, who was temporarily in charge of the work camps at Prokocim and Wieliczka. They piled into the back of a Mercedes and were driven off for a reconnaissance of the ghetto and the site of the new camp. It was a bitter day and snow began to fall as they crossed the Vistula. Untersturmführer Goeth was pleased for a pull on a flask of schnaps Pilarzik carried with him. They passed through the fake Oriental portals and down the tramlines of Lwówska Street, which cut the ghetto into two icy portions. The dapper Kunde, who had been a Customs agent in civilian life and was adept at reporting to superiors, gave a deft sketch of the ghetto. The portion on their left was Ghetto B, said Kunde. Its inhabitants, about two thousand of them, had escaped earlier Aktions or had been previously employed in industry. But new identification cards had been issued since then, with appropriate initials – either W for army employees, Z for employees of the civil authorities, or R for workers in essential industries. The inhabitants of Ghetto B lacked these new cards and were to be shipped away for Sonderbehandlung. In clearing the ghetto, it might be preferable to start on that side first, though that sort of tactical decision was entirely up to the Herr Commandant.

  The greater portion of the ghetto stood to the right and contained some ten thousand people still. They would of course be the initial labour force for the factories of Plaszów camp. It was expected that the German entrepreneurs and supervisors, Bosch, Madritsch, Beckmann, the Sudetenlander Oskar Schindler, would want to move all or part of their operations out of town into the camp. As well as that there was a cable-making plant just over a kilometre from the proposed camp, and labourers would be marched there and back each day.

  Would the Herr Commandant, asked Kunde, care to continue down the road a few kilometres and have a look at the camp site itself?

  Oh yes, said Amon, I think that would be advisable.

  They turned off the highway where the cable factory yard, snow lying on the giant spools, marked the beginning of Jerozolimska Street. Amon Goeth had a glimpse of a few groups of hunched and bescarfed women dragging segments of huts – a wall panel, an eaves section – across the highway and up Jerozolimska from the direction of the railway station at Cracow-Plaszów. They were women from Prokocim camp, Pilarzik explained. When Plaszów was ready, Prokocim would of course be disbanded and these labouring women would come under the management of the Herr Commandant.

  Goeth estimated the distance the women had to carry the frames to be some three-quarters of a kilometre. “All uphill,” said Kunde, putting his head on one shoulder then on the other, as if to say, so it’s a satisfactory form of discipline, but it slows up construction.

  The camp would need a railway spur, said Untersturmführer Goeth. He would make an approach to the Ostbahn.

  They passed on the right a synagogue and its mortuary buildings, and a half-tumbled wall showed its gravestones like teeth in the cruelly exposed mouth of winter. Part of the camp site had been until last year a Jewish cemetery. “Quite extensive,” said Wilhelm Kunde. The Herr Commandant uttered a witticism which would come to his lips often during his residency at Plaszów. “They won’t have to go far to get buried.”

  There was a house to the right which would be suitable as a temporary residence for the commandant, and then a large new building to serve as an administration block. The synagogue mortuary, already partly dynamited, would become the camp stables. Kunde pointed out that the two limestone quarries within the camp area could be seen from here. One stood in the bottom of the little valley, the other up on the hill behind the synagogue. The Herr Commandant might be able to notice the tracks being laid for trolleys which would be used in hauling stones. Once the heavy weather let up, the construction of the track would continue.

  They drove to the south-east end of the proposed camp, and a track, just passable in the snow, took them along the skyline. The track ended at what had once been an Austrian earth fort. A circular mound surrounding a deep and broad indentation. To an artillery man it would have appeared an important redoubt from which cannon could be sighted to enfilade the road from Russia. To Untersturmführer Goeth it was a place suited for disciplinary punishment.

  From up here, the camp area could be seen whole. It was a rural stretch, graced with the Jewish cemetery, and folded between two hills. It was in this weather two pages of a largely blank book opened and held at an angle, sideways, to the observer on the fort hill. A grey stone country dwelling was stuck at the entrance to the valley and past it, along the far slope and among the few finished barracks, moved teams of women, black as bunches of musical notations, in the strange darkling luminescence of a snowy evening. Emerging from the icy alleys beyond Jerozolimska, they toiled up the white slope under the urgings of Ukrainian guards and dropped the sections of frames as instructed by the SS engineers in homburgs and civilian clothes.

  Untersturmführer Goeth remarked confidingly that he had no complaints about the pace at which the prisoners on the far hill were working. He was in fact secretly impressed that, so late on a biting day, the SS men and Ukrainians on the far slope were not letting the thought of supper and warm barracks slow the pace of operations.

  Horst Pilarzik assured him that it was all closer to completion than it looked: the land had been terraced, the foundations dug despite the cold, and a great quantity of prefabricated sections carried up from the railway station. The Herr Untersturmführer would be able to consult with the entrepreneurs tomorrow – a meeting had been arranged for 10 a.m. But modern methods combined with a copious supply of labour meant that these places could be put up almost overnight, weather permitting.

  Pilarzik seemed to believe that Goeth was in genuine danger of demoralisation. In fact Amon was exhilarated. From what he could see here, he could make out the final shape of the place. Nor was he worried about fences, which would be a mental comfort for the prisoners rather than an essential precaution. For after the established methodology of SS liquidation had been applied to the Podgórze ghetto, people would be grateful for the barracks of Plaszów. Even those with Aryan papers would come crawling in here, seeking an obscure berth high up in the green, hoar-frosted rooftrees. For most of them, the wire was needed only as a prop, so that they might reassure themselves that they were prisoners against their will.

  The meeting with the local factory owners and Treuhänders took place in Julian Scherner’s office in central Cracow early the following afternoon. Amon Goeth arrived smiling fraternally and, in his freshly tailored Waffen SS uniform, crafted precisely for his enormous frame, seemed to dominate the room. He was sure he could charm the independents, Bosch and Madritsch and Schindler, into transferring their Jewish labour behind the wire of Plaszów. Besides that, an investigation of the skills available among the ghetto dwellers helped him to see that Plaszów could become quite a business. There were jewellers, upholsterers, tailors who could be used for special enterprises under the commandant’s direction, filling orders for the SS, the Wehrmacht, the wealthy German officialdom. There would be the clothing workshops of Madritsch, the enamelworks of Schindler, a proposed metalworks, a brush factory, a warehouse for recycling used, damaged or stained Wehrmacht uniforms
from the Russian front, a further warehouse for recycling Jewish clothing from the ghettos and despatching it for the use of bombed-out families at home. He knew from his experiences of the SS jewellery and fur warehouses of Lublin, having seen his superiors at work there and taken his proper cut, that from most of these prison enterprises he could expect a personal percentage. He had reached that happy point in his career at which duty and financial opportunity coincide. The convivial SS police chief, Julian Scherner, over dinner last night, had talked to Amon about what a great opportunity Plaszów would be for a young officer – for them both.

  Scherner spoke solemnly about the ‘concentration of labour’, as if it were a great economic principle new-hatched by the SS bureaucracy. You’ll have your labour on site, said Scherner. All factory maintenance will be undertaken at no cost to you and there will be no rent. All the gentlemen were invited to inspect the workshop sites inside Plaszów that afternoon.

  The new commandant was introduced. He said how pleased he was to be associated with these businessmen whose valuable contributions to the war effort were already widely known.