Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  It was not only and perhaps not mainly Richard whom Dolek wanted to get into Schindler’s compound. Richard could diffuse his terror in clouds of questions. It was his ten-year-old daughter Niusia, who no longer asked questions, who was just another thin child past the age of frankness, who – from a window in the brushworks shop where she sewed the bristles into the wooden backs – saw the daily truckloads arriving at the Austrian hill fort and carried her terror insupportably, the way adults will, unable to climb on to a parental chest and transfer the fear. To soothe her hunger in Plaszów, Niusia had taken to smoking onion leaves in newspaper wrappings. According to solid rumours about Emalia such precocious methods were unnecessary there.

  So Dolek appealed to Herr Bosch during one of his tours of the clothing warehouse. He presumed on Herr Bosch’s earlier kindnesses, he said, to beg him to talk to Herr Schindler. He repeated his pleadings and repeated the children’s names again so that Bosch, whose memory was part atrophied by schnaps, might still remember. Herr Schindler is probably my best friend, said Bosch. He’ll do anything for me.

  Dolek expected little from the talk. His wife, Regina, had no experience of making shells or enamelware. Bosch himself never mentioned the request again. Yet within the week they marched out on the next Emalia list, cleared by Commandant Goeth in return for a little envelope of jewellery. Niusia looked like a thin and reserved adult in the women’s barracks in Zablocie, and Richard moved as he had in Plaszów, everyone knowing him in the munitions hall and the enamel shops, the guards accepting his familiarity. Regina kept expecting Oskar to come up to her in the enamelworks and say, “So you’re Dolek Horowitz’s wife?” Then the only question would be how to frame her thanks. But he never did. She was delighted to find that neither she nor Niusia was very visible at Lipowa Street. They understood that Oskar knew who they were, since he often chatted with Richard by name. They knew too by the altered nature of Richard’s questions the extent of what they had been given.

  The Emalia camp had no resident SS commandant to tyrannise the inmates. There were no permanent guards. The garrison was changed every two days, two truckloads of SS and Ukrainians coming up to Zablocie from Plaszów to take over the security of the subcamp. The Plaszów soldiers liked their occasional duty at Emalia. The Herr Direktor’s kitchens, more primitive even than Plaszów’s, turned out better meals. Since the Herr Direktor started raging and making phone calls to Oberführer Scherner if any guard entered the camp instead of just patrolling the perimeter, the garrison kept to their side of the fence. Duty in Zablocie was pleasurably dull.

  Except for inspection by senior SS men, the prisoners who worked at DEF rarely got a close view of their guards. One barbed-wire passageway took the inmates to their work in the enamel plant, another ran to the door of the armaments hall. Those Emalia Jews who worked at the box factory, the radiator plant, the garrison office, were marched to work and back by Ukrainians – different Ukrainians every second day. No guard had the time to develop a fatal grudge against a prisoner.

  Therefore, though the SS may have set the limits to the life people led in Emalia, Oskar set its tone. The tone was one of fragile permanence. There were no dogs. There were no beatings. The soup and the bread were better and more plentiful than in Plaszów – about two thousand calories a day according to a doctor who worked in Emalia as a factory hand. The shifts were long, often twelve hours, for Oskar was still a businessman with war contracts to fill and a conventional desire for profit. It must be said, though, that no shift was arduous and that many of his prisoners seem to have believed at the time that their labour was making a contribution in measurable terms to their survival. According to accounts Oskar presented after the war to the Joint Distribution Committee, he spent one million, eight-hundred thousand zloty (three hundred and sixty thousand dollars) on food for the Emalia camp. Cosmetic entries could be found, written off to similar expenditure, in the books of Farben and Krupp – though nowhere near as high a percentage of the profit as in Oskar’s accounts. In Emalia no one collapsed and died of overwork, beatings or hunger, whereas at I. G. Farben’s Buna plant alone, twenty-five thousand prisoners out of a work force of thirty-five thousand would perish at their labour.

  Long afterwards, Emalia people would call the Schindler camp a paradise. Since they were by then widely scattered, it cannot have been a description they decided on after the fact. The term must have had some currency while they were in Emalia. It was of course only a relative paradise, a heaven by contrast to Plaszów. What it inspired in its people was a sense of almost surreal deliverance, something preposterous which they didn’t want to look at too closely for fear it would evaporate. New DEF hands knew of Oskar only by report. They did not want to put themselves in the Herr Direktor’s path or risk speaking to him. They needed time for recovery and for adjustment to Schindler’s unorthodox prison system.

  A girl named Lusia, for example. Her husband had recently been picked out from the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz at Plaszów and shipped off with others to Mauthausen. With what would turn out to be mere realism, she grieved like a widow. Grieving, she’d been marched to Emalia. She worked at carrying dipped enamelware to the furnaces. You were permitted to heat up water on the warm surfaces of machinery, and the floor was warm. For her, hot water was Emalia’s first beneficence.

  She saw Oskar at first only as a large shape moving down an aisle of metal presses or traversing a catwalk. It was somehow not a threatening shape. She sensed that if she were noticed the nature of the place – the lack of beatings, the food, the absence of guards in the camp – might somehow reverse itself. She wanted only to work her shift unobtrusively and return down the barbed-wire tunnel to her hut in the compound.

  After a while she found herself giving an answering nod of the head to Oskar and even telling him that, Yes thank you, Herr Direktor, she was quite well. Once he gave her some cigarettes, better than gold both as a comfort and as a means of trading with the Polish workers. Since she knew that friends vanished, she feared his friendship; she wanted him to continue to be a presence, a magical parent. A paradise run by a friend was too fragile. To manage an enduring heaven, you needed someone both more authoritative and more mysterious than that.

  Many of the Emalia prisoners felt the same.

  There was a girl called Regina Perlman living, at the time Oskar’s factory camp came into existence, in the city of Cracow on forged South American papers. Her dark complexion made the papers credible, and under them she worked as an Aryan in the office of a factory in Podgórze. She would have been safer from blackmailers if she’d gone to Warsaw, Lódź or Gdansk. But her parents were in Plaszów and she carried forged papers for their sakes too, so that she could supply them with food, comforts, medicine. She knew from the days in the ghetto that it was an adage in the Jewish mythology of Cracow that Herr Schindler could be expected to take extreme pains. She also knew the reports from Plaszów, from the quarry, the commandant’s front steps. She would have to break cover to do it, but she believed it essential that she get her parents into Schindler’s backyard camp.

  The first time she visited Deutsche Email Fabrik she wore a safely anonymous faded floral dress and no stockings. The Polish gateman went through the business of calling Herr Schindler’s office upstairs, and through the glass she could see him disapproving of her. It’s nobody – some grubby girl from one of the other factories. She had the normal fear of people on Aryan papers, that a hostile Pole would somehow spot her Jewishness. This one looked hostile.

  It’s of no great importance, she told him when he returned shaking his head. She wanted to put him off her track. But the Pole did not even bother to lie to her. He won’t see you, he said. The hood of a BMW glowered in the factory yard, she could see it, and it could only belong to Herr Schindler. He was in, but not to visitors who couldn’t afford stockings. She went away trembling at her escape. She’d been saved from making to Herr Schindler a confession which, even in her sleep, she feared making to anyo
ne.

  She waited a week before she could get more time off from the factory in Podgórze. She devoted an entire half day to her approach. She bathed and got black-market stockings. From one of her few friends – a Jewish girl on Aryan papers could not risk having many friends – she borrowed a blouse. She had an excellent jacket of her own and bought a lacquered straw hat with a veil. She made up her face, achieving a dark radiance appropriate to a woman living beyond threat. In the mirror she looked like her pre-war self, an elegant Cracovienne of exotic racial derivation, Hungarian businessman father perhaps and a mother from Rio.

  This time, as she had intended, the Pole in the gatehouse did not even recognise her. He let her inside while he rang Miss Klonowska, the Herr Direktor’s secretary, and then was put on to speak to the Herr Direktor himself. Herr Direktor, said the Pole, there is a lady here to see you on important business. Herr Schindler seemed to want details. A very well-dressed young lady, said the Pole, and then, bowing while holding the telephone, a very beautiful young lady, he said. As if he had a hunger to see her, or perhaps as if she might be some forgotten girl who’d embarrass him in the outer office, Schindler met her on the steps. He smiled when he saw he did not know her. He was very pleased to meet her, this Miss Rodriguez. She could see that he had a respect for pretty women, that it was at the same time childlike and yet sophisticated. With flourishes like those of a matinee idol, he indicated she should follow him upstairs. She wanted to talk to him in confidence? Of course she should. He led her past Klonowska. Klonowska took it calmly. The girl could mean anything – black market or currency business. She could even be a chic partisan. Love might be the least of motivations. In any case, a worldly girl such as Klonowska didn’t expect to own Oskar, or to be owned in return.

  Inside the office, Schindler placed a chair for her and walked behind his desk beneath the ritual portrait of the Führer. Would she like a cigarette? Perhaps a Pernod or a cognac? No, she said, but he must of course feel free to take a drink. He poured himself one from his cocktail cabinet. What’s this very important business? he asked, not quite with that crisp grace he’d shown on the stairs. For her demeanour had changed now the door to the outer office was closed. He could tell she’d come to do hard business. She leaned forward. For a second it seemed ridiculous for her, a girl whose father had paid fifty thousand zloty for Aryan papers, to say it without a pause, to give it all away to a half ironic, half worried Sudetendeutscher with a glass of cognac in his hand. Yet in some ways it was the easiest thing she’d ever done.

  I have to tell you, Herr Schindler, I’m not a Polish Aryan. My real name is Perlman. My parents are in Plaszów. They say, and I believe it, that coming here is the same as being given a Lebenskarte – a card of life. I have nothing I can give you, I borrowed clothes to get inside your factory. Will you bring them here for me?

  Schindler put down his drink and stood up. You want to make a secret arrangement? I don’t make secret arrangements. What you suggest, Miss Perlman, is illegal. I have a factory here in Zablocie and the only question I ask is whether or not a person has certain skills. If you care to leave your Aryan name and address it might be possible to write to you at some stage and inform you that I need your parents for their work skills. But not now and not on any other grounds.

  But they can’t come as skilled workers, she said. My father’s an importer, not a metalworker.

  We have an office staff, said Schindler. But mainly we need skills on the factory floor.

  She was defeated. Half blind with tears, she wrote her false name and real address – he could do with it whatever he wanted. But on the street she understood and began to revive. Maybe Schindler thought she might be an agent, that she might have been there for entrapment. Just the same, he’d been cold. There hadn’t even been an ambiguous non-indictable gesture of kindness in the manner with which he’d thrown her out of his office.

  Within a month Mr and Mrs Perlman came to Emalia from Plaszów. Not on their own, as Regina Perlman had imagined it would happen should Herr Oskar Schindler decide to be merciful, but as part of a new detail of thirty workers. Sometimes she would go around to Lipowa Street and bribe her way on to the factory floor to see them. Her father worked dipping the enamel, shovelling coal, clearing the floor of scrap. But he talks again, said Mrs Perlman to her daughter. For in Plaszów he’d grown silent.

  In fact, despite the draughty huts, the plumbing, here at Emalia there was a certain mood, a fragile confidence, a presumption of permanence such as she, living on risky papers in sullen Cracow, could not hope to feel until the day the madness stopped.

  Miss Perlman-Rodriguez did not complicate Herr Schindler’s life by storming his office in gratitude or writing effusive letters. Yet she always left the yellow gate of Deutsche Email Fabrik with an unquenchable envy for those who stayed inside.

  Then there was a campaign to get Rabbi Menasha Levartov, masquerading as a metalworker in Plaszów, into Emalia. Levartov was a scholarly city rabbi, young and black-bearded. He was more liberal than the rabbis from the shtetls of Poland, the ones who believed the Sabbath was more important even than life and who, throughout 1942 and 1943, were shot by the hundreds every Friday evening for refusing to work in the forced labour cantonments of Poland. He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honoured by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honoured by the flexibility of the sensible.

  Levartov had always been admired by Itzhak Stern, who now worked in the Building Office in Amon Goeth’s Administration Block. Stern and Levartov would, if given the leisure, have sat together for hours over a glass of herbata, letting it grow cold while they talked about the influence of Zoroaster on Judaism, or the other way round, or the concept of the natural world in Taoism. Stern, when it came to comparative religion, got greater pleasure out of talking to Levartov than he could ever have received from bluff Oskar Schindler, who nonetheless had a fatal weakness for vapouring on the same subject.

  During one of Oskar’s visits to Plaszów, Stern told him that somehow Menasha Levartov had to be got into Emalia, or else Goeth would surely kill him. For Levartov had a sort of visibility – it was a matter of presence. Goeth was drawn to people of presence, they were, like idlers, another class with high priority as targets. Stern told Oskar how Goeth had attempted to murder Levartov.

  Amon Goeth’s camp now held more than thirty thousand people. On the near side of the Appellplatz, near the stables made from the Jewish Mortuary Chapel, stood a Polish compound that could hold some twelve hundred prisoners. Obergruppenführer Krüger was so pleased by his inspection of the new, booming camp that he promoted the commandant two SS grades to the rank of Hauptsturmführer.

  As well as the crowd of Poles, Jews from the East and from Czechoslovakia would be held in Plaszów while space was made for them further west in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Gröss-Rosen. Sometimes the population rose above thirty-five thousand and the Appellplatz teemed at rollcall. Amon therefore had often to cull his early comers to make way for new prisoners. And Oskar knew that the commandant’s quick method was to enter one of the camp offices or workshops, form up two lines, and march one of them away. The line marched away would be taken either to the Austrian hill fort and executed by Horst Pilarzik’s firing squads, or else taken to the cattle wagons at Cracow Plaszów station or, when it was laid down in the autumn of 1943, to the railway siding by the fortified SS barracks.

  On just such a culling exercise, Stern told Oskar, Amon had entered the metalworks in the factory enclosure some days past. The supervisors had come to attention like soldiers and made their eager reports, knowing that they could die for an unwise choice of words. I need twenty-five metalworkers, Amon told the supervisors when the reports were finished. Twenty-five and no more. Point out to me the ones who are skilled.

  One of the supervisors pointed to Levartov and he joined the line, though he could see that Amon took a special note of his selectio
n. Of course one never knew which line would be moved out or where it would be moved to, but it was in most cases a safer bet to be on the line of the skilled.

  So the selection continued. Levartov had noticed that the metal shops were strangely empty that morning, since a number of those who worked or filled in time by the door had got forewarning of Goeth’s approach and had slipped over to the Madritsch garment factory to hide among the bolts of linen or appear to be mending sewing machines. The forty or so slow or inadvertent who had stayed on in the metalworks were now in two lines between the benches and the lathes. Everyone was fearful, but those in the smaller line were the more uneasy.

  Then a boy of indeterminate age, perhaps as young as sixteen or as old as nineteen, had called from the midst of the shorter line, “But Herr Commandant, I’m a metal specialist too.”

  “Yes, Liebchen?” murmured Amon, drawing his service revolver, stepping to the boy and shooting him in the head. The enormous blast in this place of metal threw the lad against the wall. He was dead, the appalled Levartov believed, before he fell to the workshop floor.

  The even shorter line was now marched out to the railway depot, the boy’s corpse was taken over the hill in a barrow, the floor was washed, the lathes returned to operation. But Levartov, making gate hinges slowly at his bench, was aware of the recognition that had flashed for an instant in Amon’s eye, the look that had said, there’s one. It seemed to the rabbi that the boy had, by crying out, distracted Amon from Levartov himself, the more obvious target. That the youngster’s pitiable death was not simply murder but a pledge that he, Levartov, would soon be likewise attended to.

  A few days passed, Stern told Schindler, before Amon returned to the metalworks and found it crowded, and went around making his own selections for the hill or the transports. Then he’d halted by Levartov’s bench, as Levartov knew he would. Levartov could smell Amon’s after-shave. He could see the starched cuff of Amon’s shirt. Amon was a splendid dresser.