Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Amon pointed out on a map of the camp area the section set aside for the factories. It was next to the men’s camp; the women – he told them with an easy and quite charming smile – would have to walk a little further, one or two hundred metres downhill, to reach the workshops. He assured the gentlemen that his main task was to oversee the smooth functioning of the camp and that he had no wish to interfere with their factory policies or to alter the managerial autonomy which they enjoyed here in Cracow. His orders, as Oberführer Scherner could verify, forbade in so many words that sort of intrusion. But the Oberführer had been correct in pointing out the mutual advantages of moving an industry inside the camp perimeter. The factory owners did not have to pay for the premises and he, the commandant, did not have to provide a guard to march the prisoners to town and back. They could understand how the length of the journey and the hostility of the Poles to a column of Jews would erode the worth of the workers.

  Throughout this speech, Commandant Goeth glanced frequently at Madritsch and Schindler, the two he particularly wished to win over. He knew he could already depend on Bosch’s local knowledge and advice. But Herr Schindler, for example, had a munitions section, small and merely in the developmental stage as yet. It would, however, if transferred, give Plaszów a respectability with the Armaments Inspectorate.

  Herr Madritsch listened with a considered frown, and Herr Schindler, head on side, watched the speaker with an acquiescent half smile. Commandant Goeth could tell instinctively, even before he’d finished speaking, that Madritsch would be reasonable and move in, that Schindler would refuse. It was hard to judge by these separate decisions which one of the two felt more paternal towards his Jews – Madritsch who wanted to be inside Plaszów with them, or Schindler who wanted to have his with him in Emalia.

  Oskar Schindler, wearing that same face of avid tolerance, went with the party to inspect the camp site. Plaszów had the form of a camp now – an improvement in the weather had allowed the assembly of barracks, a thawing of the ground permitted the digging of latrines and post holes. A Polish construction company had installed the kilometres of perimeter fence. Thick-legged watchtowers were going up along the skyline towards Cracow, and also at the mouth of the valley down towards Wieliczka Street, away at the far end of the camp, and up here on this eastern hill where the official party, in the shadow of the Austrian hill fort, watched the fast work of this new creation. Away to the right, Oskar noticed, women were hustling up muddy tracks in the direction of the railway, heavy sections of barracks tilted between them. Below, from the lowest point of the valley and all the way up the far side, the terraced barracks ran, assembled by male prisoners who raised and slotted and hammered with an energy which at this distance resembled willingness.

  On the choicest, most level ground beneath the official party, a number of long wooden structures were available for industrial occupation. Cement floors could be poured should heavy machinery need to be installed. The transfer of all plant would be handled by the SS. The road that serviced the area was admittedly little more than a country track, but the engineering firm of Klug had been approached to build a central street for the camp, and the Ostbahn had promised to provide a spur to the camp gate itself, to the quarry down there on the right. Limestone from the quarries and some of what Goeth called “Polish-defaced” gravestones from over in the cemetery would be broken up to provide other interior roads. The gentlemen should not worry about roads, said Goeth, for he intended to maintain a permanently strong quarrying and road-building team.

  A small railway ran from the quarry up past the administration building and the large stone barracks that were being built for the SS and Ukrainian garrison. Trolleys of limestone, each weighing six tonnes, were hauled by teams of women, thirty-five or forty of them to a team, dragging on cables set either side of the rock truck, doubled up to compensate for the unevenness in the railway track. Those who tripped or stumbled were trampled or else rolled out of the way, for the teams had their own organic momentum and no individual could deviate from it. Watching this insidious Egyptian looking industry, Oskar felt the same surge of nausea, the same prickling of the blood he had experienced on the hill above Krakusa Street. Goeth had assumed the businessmen were a safe audience, that they were all kinsfolk of his. He was not embarrassed by that savage hauling down there. The question arose, as it had in Krakusa Street. What could embarrass the SS? What could embarrass Amon?

  The energy of the barrack builders had, even to an informed observer like Oskar, the specious appearance of men working hard to put up shelter for their women. But, though Oskar had not yet heard the rumour of it, Amon had performed a summary execution in front of those men this morning, so that now they knew what the terms of their labour were. After the early morning meeting with the engineers, Amon had been strolling down Jerozolimska and had come to the SS barracks where the work was under the supervision of an excellent NCO, soon to be promoted to officer rank, called Albert Hujar. Hujar had marched up and made his report. A section of the foundations of the barracks had collapsed, said Hujar, his face flushed. While Hujar spoke, Amon had noticed a girl walking around the half-finished building, speaking to teams of men, pointing, directing. Who was that? he asked Hujar. She was a prisoner named Diana Reiter, said Hujar, an architectural engineer who had been assigned to the construction of the barracks. She was claiming that the foundations hadn’t been correctly excavated, and she wanted all the stone and cement dug up and the work on that section of the building to begin again from scratch.

  Goeth had been able to tell from the colour of Hujar’s face that he had had a tough argument with the woman. Hujar had in fact been reduced to screaming at her, “You’re building barracks, not the sodding Hotel Europa!”

  Now Amon half smiled at Hujar. We’re not going to have arguments with these people, he said, as if it were a promise. Get the girl.

  Amon could tell, from the way she walked towards him, the bogus elegance with which her middle-class parents had raised her, the European manners they had imbued her with, sending her – when the honest Poles wouldn’t take her in their universities – off to Vienna or Milan to give her a profession and a heightened protective colouring. She walked towards him as if his rank and hers would bind them in the battle against oafish NCOs and against the inferior craft of whichever SS engineer had supervised the digging of the foundations. She did not know that he hated her the worst – the type who thought, even against the evidence of his SS uniform, of these rising structures, that their Jewishness was not visible.

  “You’ve had occasion to quarrel with Oberscharführer Hujar,” Goeth told her as a fact. She nodded firmly. The Herr Commandant would understand, the nod suggested, even though that idiot Hujar couldn’t. The entire foundations at that end must be re-dug, she told him energetically. Of course, Amon knew they were like that, they liked to string out tasks and so ensure that the labour force was safe for the duration of the project. If everything is not re-dug, she told him, there will be at least subsidence at the southern end of the barracks. There could be collapse.

  She went on arguing the case, and Amon nodded and presumed she must be lying. It was a first principle that you never listened to a Jewish specialist. Jewish specialists were in the mould of Marx, whose theories were aimed at the integrity of government, and of Freud, who had assaulted the integrity of the Aryan mind. Amon felt that this girl’s argument threatened his personal integrity.

  He called Hujar. The NCO returned uneasily. He thought he was going to be told to take the girl’s advice. The girl did too. Shoot her, Amon told Hujar. There was of course a pause while Hujar digested the order. Shoot her, Amon repeated.

  Hujar took the girl’s elbow to lead her away to some place of private execution.

  Here! said Amon. Shoot her here! On my authority, said Amon.

  Hujar knew how it was done. He gripped her by the elbow, pushed her a little to his front, took the Mauser from his holster and shot her in the back of the neck. />
  The sound appalled everyone on the work site, except – it seemed – the executioners and the dying Diana Reiter herself. She knelt and looked up from under her bowed head once. It will take more than that, she was saying. The knowingness of her eyes frightened Amon, justified him, elevated him. He had no idea and would not have believed that these reactions had clinical labels. He believed in fact that he was being awarded the inevitable exaltation that follows an act of political, racial and moral justice. Even so, a man must pay for that, for by evening the fullness of this hour would be followed by such emptiness that he would need, to avoid being blown away like a husk, to augment his size and permanence by food, booze, contact with a woman.

  Apart from these considerations, the shooting of this Diana Reiter, the cancelling of her Western European diploma, had this practical value, that no erector of huts or roads in Plaszów would consider himself essential to the task, that if Miss Diana Reiter could not save herself with all her professional skill, the only chance for the others was prompt and anonymous labour. Therefore the women lugging frames up from Cracow-Plaszów railway station, the quarry teams, the men assembling the huts, all worked with an energy appropriate to what they’d learned from Miss Reiter’s assassination.

  As for Hujar and his colleagues, they knew now that instantaneous execution was to be the permitted style of Plaszów.

  TWENTY

  Two days after the visit of the factory heads to Plaszów, Schindler turned up at Commandant Goeth’s temporary office in the city, bringing with him the compliments of a bottle of brandy. The news of Diana Reiter’s assassination had by this time reached the front office of Emalia and was the sort of item that confirmed Oskar in his intention to keep his factory clear of Plaszów.

  The two big men sat opposite each other and there was a mutual knowingness between them too, just as there had been in the brief relationship between Amon and Miss Reiter. What they knew was that each of them was in Cracow to make a fortune; that Oskar would therefore pay for favours. At that level Oskar and the commandant understood each other. Oskar had the characteristic salesman’s gift of treating men he abhorred as if they were soul brothers, and it would deceive the Herr Commandant so completely that Amon would always believe Oskar a friend.

  But from the evidence of Stern and others it is obvious that, from the time of their earlier contacts, Oskar abominated Goeth as a man who went to the work of murder as calmly as a clerk goes to his office. Oskar could speak to Amon the administrator, Amon the speculator, but knew at the same time that nine-tenths of the commandant’s being lay beyond the normal rationalities of humans. The business and social connections between Oskar and Amon worked well enough to tempt the supposition that Oskar was somehow and despite himself fascinated by the evil of the man. In fact, no one who knew Oskar at this time or later saw a sign of any such enthralment. Oskar despised Goeth in the simplest and most passionate terms. His contempt would grow without limit and his career would dramatically demonstrate it. Just the same, the reflection can hardly be avoided that Amon was Oskar’s dark brother, was the berserk and fanatic executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appetites, have become.

  With a bottle of brandy between them, Oskar explained to Amon why it was impossible for him to move into Plaszów. His plant was too substantial to be shifted. He believed his friend Madritsch intended to move his Jewish workers in, but Madritsch’s machinery was more easily transferred – it was basically a series of sewing machines. There were different problems involved in moving heavy metal presses, each of which, as a sophisticated machine will, had developed special quirks. His skilled workers had become accustomed to these quirks. But on a new factory floor the machines would display an entirely new set of eccentricities. There’d be delays, the settling-in period would take longer than it would for his esteemed friend Julian Madritsch. The Untersturmführer would understand that with important war contracts to fulfil, DEF could not spare such a lapse of time. Herr Beckmann, who had the same sort of problem, was sacking all his Jews over at the Corona works. He didn’t want the fuss of the Jews marching out from Plaszów to the factory in the morning and back in the evenings. Unfortunately he, Schindler, had hundreds more skilled Jewish workers than Beckmann did. If he got rid of them, Poles would have to be trained in their place and there would again be a delay in production, an even greater one than if he accepted Goeth’s attractive offer and moved into Plaszów.

  Amon secretly thought that Oskar might be worried that a move into Plaszów would impinge on any sweetly running little deals he had set up in Cracow. The commandant therefore hurried to reassure Herr Schindler that there’d be no interference in the management of the enamelworks. “It’s purely the industrial problems that worry me,” said Schindler piously. He didn’t want to inconvenience the commandant, but he would be grateful, and he was sure the Armaments Inspectorate would also be grateful, if DEF were permitted to stay in its present location.

  Among men like Goeth and Oskar the word gratitude did not have an abstract meaning. Gratitude was a pay-off. Gratitude was drink and diamonds. I understand your problems, Herr Schindler, said Amon. I shall be happy, once the ghetto is liquidated, to provide a guard to escort your workers from Plaszów to Zablocie.

  Itzhak Stern, coming to Zablocie one afternoon on business for the Progress factory, found Oskar depressed and sensed in him a dangerous feeling of impotence. After Klonowska had brought in the coffee, which the Herr Direktor drank as always with a shot of cognac, Oskar told Stern that he’d been to Plaszów again, ostensibly to look at the facilities, in fact to gauge when it would be ready for the Ghettomenschen. “I made a count,” said Oskar. He’d counted the terraced barracks on the far hill and found that if Amon intended to cram two hundred women into each, as was likely, there was now room for some six thousand women up there in the top compound. The men’s sector down the hill did not have so many finished buildings, but at the rate things were done at Plaszów it could be finished in days.

  Everyone on the factory floor knows what’s going to happen, said Oskar. And it’s no use keeping the nightshift on the premises here, because after this one, there’ll be no ghetto to go back to. All I can tell them, said Oskar, taking a second slug of cognac, is that they shouldn’t try to hide unless they’re sure of the hiding place. He’d heard that the pattern was to tear the ghetto apart after it had been cleared. Every wall cavity would be probed, every attic carpet taken up, every niche revealed, every cellar plumbed. All I can tell them, said Oskar, is not to resist.

  So it happened oddly that Stern, one of the targets of the coming Aktion, sat comforting Herr Direktor Schindler, a mere witness. Oskar’s attention to his Jewish labourers was being diffused, tempted away by the wider tragedy of the ghetto’s coming end. Plaszów was a labour institution, said Stern. Like all institutions, it could be outlived. It wasn’t like Belzec where they made death in the same manner in which Henry Ford made cars. It was degrading to have to line up for Plaszów on orders, but it wasn’t the end of things. When Stern had finished arguing, Oskar put both thumbs under the bevelled top of his desk and seemed for a few seconds to want to tear it off, by the nails, like a lid. You know, Stern, he said, that that’s not damn well good enough!

  It is, said Stern. It’s the only course. And he went on arguing, quoting and hairsplitting, and was himself frightened. For Oskar seemed to be in crisis. If Oskar lost hope, Stern knew, all the Jewish workers of Emalia would be sacked, for Oskar would wish to be purified of the entire dirty business.

  There’ll be time to do something more positive, said Stern. But not yet.

  Abandoning the attempt to tear the lid from his desk, Oskar sat back in his chair and resumed his depression. You know that Amon Goeth, he said. He’s got charm. He could come in here now and charm you. But he’s a lunatic.

  On the ghetto’s last morning – a Shabbat, as it happened, March 13th, 1943 – Amon Goeth arrived in Plac Zgody, the Square of Peace, at an hour which officially p
receded dawn. Low clouds obscured any sharp distinctions between night and day. He saw that the men of the Sonderkommando had already arrived and stood about on the frozen earth of the small park in the middle, smoking and laughing low, keeping their presence a secret from the ghetto dwellers in the streets beyond Herr Pankiewicz’s pharmacy. The roads down which they’d move were clear, as in a model municipality. The remaining snow lay heaped and tarnished in gutters and against walls. It is safe to guess that sentimental Goeth felt paternal as he looked out at the orderly scene and saw the young men, comradely before action, in the middle of the square.

  Amon took a pull of cognac while he waited there for the middle-aged Sturmbannführer Wilhelm Haase, who would have strategic though not tactical control of today’s Aktion. Today Ghetto A, from Plac Zgody westwards, the major section of the ghetto, the one where all the working (healthy, hoping, opinionated) Jews dwelt, would be emptied. Ghetto B, the small compound a few blocks square at the eastern end of the ghetto containing the old, the last of the employable, would be uprooted overnight, or tomorrow. They were slated for Commandant Rudolf Höss’s greatly expanded extermination camp at Auschwitz. Ghetto B was straightforward, honest work. Ghetto A was the challenge.

  Everyone wanted to be here today, for today was history. There had been for more than seven centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening – or at least by tomorrow – those seven centuries would have become a rumour, and Cracow would be judenfrei. And every petty SS official wanted to be able to say that he had seen it happen. Even Unkelbach, the Treuhänder of the Progress cutlery factory, having some sort of reserve SS rank, would put on his NCO’s uniform today and move through the ghetto with one of the squads. Therefore the distinguished Willi Haase, being of field rank and involved in the planning, had every right to be counted in.