Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  The last dun afternoon of their life in Number 2 Józefińska refused, in spite of its darkness, to end. The light in fact was poor enough, thought Poldek, for them to try for the sewer earlier than dusk. He wanted, now that it was quiet, to go and consult with Dr D. Please, said Mila. But he soothed her. He would keep off the streets, moving through the network of holes that connected one building with another. He piled up the reassurances. The streets at this end would seem to be clear of patrols. He would evade the occasional OD or wandering SS man at the intersections, and be back within five minutes. Darling, darling, he told her, I have to check with D.

  He went down the back stairs and into the yard through the hole in the stables’ wall, not emerging into the open street until he’d reached the Labour Office. There he risked crossing the broad carriageway, entering the warren of the triangular block of houses opposite, meeting occasional groups of confused men conveying rumours and discussing options in kitchens, sheds, yards and corridors. He came out into Krakusa Street just across from the doctor’s place. He crossed unnoticed by a patrol working down near the southern limit of the ghetto, three blocks away, in the area where Schindler had witnessed his first demonstration of the extremities of Reich racial policy.

  D’s building was empty, but in the yard Poldek met a dazed middle-aged man who told him that the Sonderkommandos had already visited the place and that D and his wife had first hidden, and then gone for the sewers. Perhaps it’s the right thing to do, said the man. They’ll be back, the SS. Poldek nodded; he knew now the tactics of the Aktion, having already survived so many.

  He went back the way he’d come and again was able to cross the road. But he found Number 2 empty, Mila vanished with their baggage, all doors opened, all rooms vacant. He wondered if in fact they were not all hidden down at the hospital – Dr D, Mrs D, Mila. Perhaps the Ds had called for her out of respect for her anxiety and her long medical lineage.

  Poldek hurried out through the stables again, and by alternative passageways reached the hospital courtyard. Like disregarded flags of surrender, bloodied bedding hung from the balconies of both the upper floors. On the cobblestones was a mound of victims. They lay, some of them, with their heads split open, their limbs crooked. They were not of course the terminal patients of Doctors B and D. They were people who had been detained here during the day and then executed. Some of them must have been imprisoned upstairs, shot, then tumbled into the yard.

  Always thereafter, when questioned about the corpses in the ghetto hospital yard, Poldek would say sixty to seventy, though he had no time to count that tangled pyramid. Cracow being a provincial town and Poldek having been raised as a very sociable child in Podgórze and then in the Centrum, visiting with his mother the affluent and distinguished people of the city, he recognised in that heap familiar faces, old clients of his mother’s, people who had asked him about school at the Kosciuszko gymnasium, got precocious answers in reply and fed him cake and sweets for his looks and his charm. Now they were shamefully exposed and jumbled in that blood-red courtyard.

  Somehow it did not occur to Pfefferberg to look for the body of his wife and the Ds in that frightful heap. He sensed why he had been placed there. He believed unshakeably in better years to come, years of just tribunals. He had that sense of being a witness which Schindler had experienced on the hill beyond Rekawka.

  He was distracted by the sight of a wash of people in Wegierska Street beyond the courtyard. They moved towards the Rekawka gate with the dull but not desperate languor of factory workers on a Monday morning or even of supporters of a defeated football team. Among this wave of people he noticed neighbours from Józefińska Street. He walked out of the yard, carrying like a weapon up his sleeve his memory of it all. What had happened to Mila? Did any of them know? She’d already left, they said. The Sonderkommandos had been through. She’d already be out of the gate, on her way to the place. To Plaszów.

  He and Mila of course had a contingency plan for an impasse like this. If one of them ended up in Plaszów, it would be better for the other to attempt to stay out. He knew that Mila had her gift for unobtrusiveness, a good gift for prisoners, but also she could be racked by extraordinary hunger. He’d be her purveyor on the outside. He was sure these things could be managed. It was no soft decision, though – the bemused crowds, barely guarded by the SS, now making for the south gate and the barbed-wire factories of Plaszów, were an indication of where most people, probably quite correctly, considered that long-term safety lay.

  The light, though late now, was sharp, as if snow were coming on. Poldek was able to cross the road and enter the empty apartments beyond the pavement. He wondered whether they were in fact empty or full of ghetto dwellers concealed cunningly or naïvely, those who believed that wherever the SS took you, it led in the end to the gas chambers.

  Poldek was looking for a first-class hiding place. He came by back passages to the timber yard on Józefińska. Timber was a scarce commodity. There were no great structures of sawn planks to hide behind. The place that looked best was behind the iron gates at the yard entrance. Their size and blackness seemed a promise of the coming night. Later he would not be able to believe that he’d chosen them with such enthusiasm.

  He hunched in behind the one that was pushed back against the wall of the abandoned office. Through the crack left between the gate and the gatepost, he could see up Józefińska in the direction he’d come from. Behind that freezing iron leaf he watched the slice of cold evening, a luminous grey, and pulled his coat across his chest. A man and his wife hurried past, rushing for the gate, dodging among the dropped bundles, the suitcases labelled with futile large letters. Kleinfeld, they proclaimed in the evening light. Lehrer, Baume, Weinberg, Smolar, Strus, Rosenthal, Birman, Zeitlin. Names against which no receipts would be issued. “Heaps of goods laden with memories,” the young artist Bau had written of such scenes. “Where are my treasures?”

  From beyond this battleground of fallen luggage he could hear the aggressive baying of dogs. Then into Józefińska Street, striding on the far pavement, came three SS men, one of them dragged along by a canine flurry which proved to be two large police dogs. The dogs dragged their handler into Number 41 Józefińska, but the other two waited on the pavement. Poldek had paid most of his attention to the dogs. They looked like a lean cross between Dalmatians and German Shepherds. Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they’d been brought in from some other and more savage ghetto. For, even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last assumption was wiped away in the next half minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack in the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lwów or Warsaw as you thought. It was at the north side of Józefińska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman’s howling protest.

  Just as Pfefferberg would think of the pile of bodies in the hospital yard as sixty or seventy, he would always testify that the child was two or three years of age.

  Perhaps before she was even dead, certainly before he himself even knew he had moved, as if the decision had come from some mettlesome gland behind his forehead, Pfefferberg gave up the freezing iron gate, since it would not protect him from the dogs, and found himself in the open yard. He adopted at once the military bearing he’d learned in the Polish army. He emerged from the timber yard like a man on a ceremonial assignment, and bent and began lifting the bundles of luggage out of the carriageway and heaping them against the walls of the yard. He could hear the three SS me
n approaching, the dogs’ snarling breath was palpable and the whole evening was stretched to breaking by the tension in their leashes. When he believed they were some ten paces off, he straightened and permitted himself, playing the biddable Jew of some European background, to notice them. He saw that their boots and riding britches were splashed with blood, but they were not abashed to appear before other humans dressed that way. The officer in the middle was the tallest. He did not look like a murderer, there was a sensitivity to the large face and a subtle line to the mouth.

  Pfefferberg in his shabby suit clicked his cardboard heels in the Polish manner and saluted this tall one in the middle. He had no knowledge of SS ranks and did not know what to call the man. “Herr,” he said. “Herr Commandant!”

  It was a term his brain, under threat of its extinction, had thrown forth with electric energy. It proved to be the precise word, for the tall man was Amon Goeth in the full vitality of his afternoon, elated at the day’s progress and as capable of instant and instinctive exercises of power as Poldek Pfefferberg was of instant and instinctive subterfuge.

  “Herr Commandant, I respectfully report to you that I received an order to put all the bundles together to one side of the road so that there will be no obstruction of the thoroughfare.”

  The dogs were craning towards him through their collars. They expected, on the basis of their black training and the rhythm of today’s Aktion, to be let fly at Pfefferberg’s wrist and groin. Their snarls were not simply feral, but full of a frightful confidence in the outcome, and the question was whether the SS man on the Herr Commandant’s left had enough strength to restrain them. Pfefferberg didn’t expect much. He would not be surprised to be buried by dogs and after a time to be delivered from their teeth by a bullet. If the woman hadn’t got away with pleading her motherhood, he stood little chance with stories of bundles, of clearing a street in which human traffic had, in any case, been abolished.

  But the commandant was more amused by Pfefferberg than he had been by the mother. Here was a little wedge of a Ghettomensch playing soldier in front of three SS officers and making his report, servile if true, and almost endearing if not. His manner was above all a break in style for a victim. Of all today’s doomed, not one other had tried heel-clicking. The Herr Commandant could therefore exercise the kingly right to show irrational and unexpected amusement. His head went back, his long upper lip retracted. It was a broad honest laugh and his colleagues smiled and shook their heads at its extent.

  In his excellent baritone, Untersturmführer Goeth said, “We’re looking after everything. The last group is leaving the ghetto. Verschwinde!” That is, Disappear, little Polish clicking soldier!

  Pfefferberg began to run, not looking back, and it would not have surprised him if he had been felled from behind. Running, he got to the corner of Wegierska and rounded it, past the hospital yard where some hours ago he had been a witness. The dark came down as he neared the gate, and the ghetto’s last familiar alleys faded. In Podgórze Place, the last official huddle of prisoners stood in a loose cordon of SS men and Ukrainians.

  “I must be the last one out alive,” he told people in that crowd.

  Or if not he it was Wulkan the jeweller and his wife and son. Wulkan had been working these past months in the Progress factory and, knowing what was to happen, had approached Treuhänder Unkelbach with a large diamond concealed for two years in the lining of a coat. Herr Unkelbach, he told the supervisor, I’ll go wherever I’m sent, but my wife isn’t up to all that noise and violence. Wulkan and his wife and son would wait at the OD police station under the protection of a Jewish policeman they knew and then perhaps during the day Herr Unkelbach would come and convey them bloodlessly to Plaszów.

  Since this morning they had sat in a cubicle in the police station, but it had been as frightful a wait as if they’d stayed in their kitchen, the boy alternately bored and terrified, his wife continuing to hiss her reproaches. Where is he? Is he going to come at all? These people, these people! Early in the afternoon, Unkelbach did in fact appear, came into the Ordnungsdienst to use the lavatory and have coffee. Wulkan, emerging from the office in which he’d been waiting, saw a Treuhänder Unkelbach he had never known before, a man in the uniform of an SS NCO, smoking and exchanging sharp animated sentences with another SS man; using one hand to take hungry gulps of coffee, to bite off mouthfuls of smoke, to savage a lump of brown bread while his pistol, still held in the left hand, lay like a resting animal on the police station counter and dark spatters of blood ran across the breast of his uniform. The eyes he turned to meet Wulkan’s did not see the jeweller. Wulkan knew at once that Unkelbach was not backing out of the deal, he simply did not remember it. The man was drunk, and not on alcohol. If Wulkan had called to him, the answer would have been a stare of ecstatic incomprehension. Followed, very likely, by something worse.

  Wulkan gave it up and returned to his wife. She kept saying, Why don’t you talk to him, I’ll talk to him if he’s still there. But then she saw the shadow in Wulkan’s eyes and sneaked a look around the edge of the door. Unkelbach was getting ready to leave. She saw the unaccustomed uniform, the blood of small traders and their wives splashed across its front. She uttered a whimper and returned to her seat.

  Like her husband, she now fell into a well-founded despair, and the waiting became somehow easier. The OD man they knew restored them to the usual pulse of hope and anxiety. He told them that all the OD, apart from Spira’s praetorians, had to be out of the ghetto by 6 p.m. and on the Wieliczka Road to Plaszów. He would see if there was a way of getting the Wulkans into one of the vehicles.

  After dark had fallen in the wake of Pfefferberg’s passage up Wegierska, after the last party of prisoners had assembled at the gate into Podgórze Place, while Dr D and his wife were moving eastward in the company and under the cover of a group of rowdy Polish drunks, and while the squads of the Sonderkommandos were resting and taking a smoke before the last search of the tenements, two horsedrawn carts came to the door of the police station. The Wulkan family were hidden by the OD men under cartons of paperwork and bundles of clothing. Symche Spira and his OD associates were not in sight, were on the job somewhere in the streets, drinking coffee with NCOs, celebrating their permanence within the system.

  But before the carts had turned out of the ghetto gate, the Wulkans, flattened to the boards, heard the nearly continuous sound of rifle and small arms fire from the streets behind them. It meant that Amon Goeth and Willi Haase, Albert Hujar, Horst Pilarzik and some hundreds of others were bursting into the attic niches, the false ceilings, the crates in cellars, and finding those who all day had maintained a hopeful silence.

  More than four thousand such people were discovered overnight and executed in the streets. In the next two days their bodies were taken to Plaszów on open platformed trucks and buried in two mass graves in the woods beyond the new camp.

  TWENTY-TWO

  We do not know in what condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13th, the ghetto’s last and worst day. But by the time his workers returned to him under guard from Plaszów he was back in the mood for collecting data to pass on to Dr Sedlacek on the dentist’s next visit. He found out from the prisoners that Zwangsarbeitslager Plaszów – as it was known in SS bureaucratese – was to be no rational kingdom. Goeth had already pursued his passion against engineers by letting the guards beat Zygmunt Grünberg into a coma and bring him so late to the clinic up near the women’s camp that his death was assured. From the prisoners who ate their hearty noonday soup at Deutsche Email Fabrik, Oskar heard also that Plaszów was being used not only as a work camp but as a place of execution as well. Though all the camp could hear these executions, some of the prisoners had also been witnesses.

  The prisoner M∗, for example, who had had a pre-war decorating business in Cracow. In the first days of the camp he was in demand to decorate the houses of the SS, the few small country villas that flanked the lane on the north side of the camp. Like any especial
ly valued artisan he had more freedom of movement, and one afternoon that spring he had been walking from the villa of Untersturmführer Leo John up the track towards the hill called Chujowa Górka on whose crest stood the Austrian fort.

  Before he was ready to turn back down the slope towards the factory yard, he had to pause to let an army truck grind past him uphill. M had noticed that beneath its canopy were women under the care of white overalled Ukrainian guards. He had hidden between stacks of timber and got, through the gap in the mound walls, an incomplete view of the women, disembarked and marched inside the fort, refusing to undress. The man yelling the orders in there was the SS man Edmund Sdrojewski. Ukrainian NCOs marched among the women hitting them with whip handles. M presumed they were Jewish, probably women caught with Aryan papers, brought here from Montelupich prison. Some cried out at the blows, but others were silent, as if to refuse the Ukrainians that much satisfaction. One of them began to intone the Shema Yisroel, and the others took it up. The verses rose vigorously above the mound, as if it had just occurred to the girls – who till yesterday had played straight Aryans – that now the pressure was off they were freer than anyone to celebrate their tribal difference in the faces of Sdrojewski and the Ukrainians. Then, huddling for modesty and the bite of the spring air, they were all shot. At night the Ukrainians took them away in barrows and buried them in the woods on the far side.

  People in the camp below had also heard that first execution on the hill, now profanely nicknamed Prick Hill. Some told themselves that it was partisans being shot up there, intractable Marxists or crazy nationalists. It was another country up there. If you kept the ordinances within the wire, you need never visit it. But the more clear-headed of Schindler’s workers, marched up Wieliczka Street past the cable works and over to Zablocie to work at DEF, they knew why prisoners from Montelupich were being shot at the Austrian hill fort, why the SS did not seem alarmed if the truckloads were seen arriving or the noise was heard throughout Plaszów. The reason was that the SS did not look on the prison population as ultimate witnesses. If there had been concern about a time in court, a mass of future testimony, they would have taken the women deeper into the woods. The conclusion to be drawn, Oskar decided, was not that the mound fort was a separate world from Plaszów, but that all of them were under sentence.