Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  “What are you making?” asked the commandant.

  “Herr Commandant,” said Levartov, “I am making hinges.” The rabbi pointed in fact to the small heap of hinges on the floor.

  “Make me one now,” Amon ordered. He drew a watch from his pocket and began timing. Levartov earnestly cut a hinge, his fingers urging the metal, pressuring the lathe; convinced labouring fingers, delighted to be skilled. Keeping tremulous count in his head, he turned out a hinge in what he believed was fifty-eight seconds, and let it fall at his feet.

  “Another,” murmured Amon. After his speed trial, the rabbi was now more assured and worked with confidence. In perhaps another minute the second hinge slid to his feet.

  Amon considered the heap. “You’ve been working here since six this morning,” said Amon, not raising his eyes from the floor. “And can work at a rate you’ve just shown me and yet, such a mean little pile of hinges?” Levartov knew, of course, that he had crafted his own death. Amon walked him down the aisle, no one bothering or brave enough to look up from his bench. To see what? A death walk. Death walks were prosaic in Plaszów.

  Outside, in the midday air of spring, Amon stood Menasha Levartov against the workshop wall, adjusting him by the shoulder, and took out the pistol with which he’d slaughtered the boy two days ago.

  Levartov blinked and watched the other prisoners hurry by, wheeling and toting the raw materials of Plaszów camp, concerned to be out of range. The Cracovians among them thinking, My God, it’s Levartov’s turn. Privately he murmured the Shema Yisroel and heard the mechanisms of the pistol. But the small internal stirrings of metal ended not in a roar but in a click like that of a cigarette lighter which won’t give a flame. And like a dissatisfied smoker, with just such a banal level of annoyance, Amon Goeth extracted and replaced the magazine of bullets from the butt of the pistol, again took his aim, and fired. As the rabbi’s head swayed to the normal human suspicion that the impact of the bullet could be absorbed as could a punch, all that emerged from Goeth’s pistol was another click.

  Herr Commandant Goeth began cursing prosaically. “Donnerwetter! Zum-Teufel!” It seemed to Levartov that at any second Amon would begin to run down faulty modern workmanship, as if they were two tradesmen trying to bring off some simple effect, the threading of a pipe, a drill hole in the wall. Amon put the faulty pistol away in its black holster and withdrew from a jacket pocket a pearl-handled revolver, of a type Rabbi Levartov had only read of in the Westerns of his boyhood. Clearly, he thought, there are going to be no remissions due to technical failure. He’ll keep on. I’ll die by cowboy revolver, and even if all the firing pins are filed down, Hauptsturmführer Goeth will fall back on more primitive weapons.

  As Stern relayed it to Schindler, when Goeth aimed again and fired, Menasha Levartov had already begun to look about in case there was some object in the neighbourhood that could be used, together with these two astounding failures of Goeth’s service pistol, as a lever. By the corner of the wall stood a pile of coal, an unpromising item in itself. “Herr Commandant,” Levartov began to say, but he could already hear the small murderous hammers and springs of the bar-room pistol acting on each other. And again the click of a failing cigarette lighter. Amon, raging, seemed to be attempting to tear the barrel of the thing from its socket.

  Now Rabbi Levartov adopted the stance he had seen the supervisors in the metalworks assume. “Herr Commandant, I would beg to report that my heap of hinges was so unsatisfactory for the reason that the machines were being re-calibrated this morning. And therefore instead of hingework I was put on to shovelling that coal.”

  It seemed to Levartov that he had violated the rules of the game they had been playing together, the game that was to be closed by Levartov’s reasonable death just as surely as Snakes and Ladders ends with the throwing of a six. It was as if the rabbi had hidden the dice and now there could be no conclusion. Amon hit him on the face with a free left hand and Levartov tasted blood in his mouth, lying on the tongue like a guarantee.

  Hauptsturmführer Goeth then simply abandoned Levartov against the wall. The contest, however, as both Levartov and Stern could tell, had merely been suspended.

  Stern whispered this narrative to Oskar in the Building Office of Plaszów. Stern, stooping, eyes raised, hands joined, was as generous with detail as ever. “It’s no problem,” Oskar murmured. He liked to tease Stern. “Why the long story? There’s always room at Emalia for someone who can turn out a hinge in less than a minute.”

  When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory camp in the summer of 1943 he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler’s little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov worked a lathe, Schindler would say, “You shouldn’t be here, Rabbi. You should be preparing for Shabbat.” But when Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in the ceremonies, Levartov knew that the Herr Direktor was not joking. Before dusk on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of sourly drying laundry, he would recite Kiddush over a cup of wine among the roof-high tiers of bunks. Under, of course, the bulk of an SS watchtower.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  The Oskar Schindler who dismounted from his horse these days in the factory yard of Emalia was still a boomtime businessman. He looked sleekly handsome in the style of the film stars George Sanders and Curt Jurgens, to both of whom he would always be compared. His hacking jacket and jodhpurs were tailored, his riding boots had a high shine. He looked like a man to whom it was profit all the way.

  Yet he would return from his rural rides and go upstairs to face the sort of bills novel even to the history of an eccentric enterprise such as Deutsche Email Fabrik.

  Bread shipments from the bakery at Plaszów to the factory camp in Lipowa Street Zablocie were a few hundred loaves delivered twice a week and an occasional token half truckload of turnips. These few high-backed and lightly laden trucks were no doubt written large and multiplied in Commandant Goeth’s books, and such trusties as Chilowicz sold off on behalf of the Herr Hauptsturmführer the difference between the mean supplies that arrived at Lipowa Street and the plenteous and phantom convoys which Goeth put down on paper. If Oskar had depended on Amon for prison food, his nine hundred internees would each have been fed perhaps three-quarters of a kilo of bread a week and soup every third day. On missions of his own and through his manager Oskar was spending fifty thousand zloty a month on black-market food for his camp kitchen. Some weeks he had to find over three thousand round loaves. He went to town and spoke to the German supervisors in the big bakeries, and had Reichsmarks and two or three bottles in his briefcase.

  Oskar did not seem to realise that throughout Poland that summer of 1943 he was one of the champion illicit feeders of prisoners, that the pall of hunger which should by SS policy hang over the great death factories and over every one of the little, barbed-wire forced-labour slums was lacking in Lipowa Street in a way that was dangerously visible.

  That summer a host of incidents occurred which augmented the Schindler mythology, the almost religious supposition among many prisoners of Plaszów and the entire population of Emalia that Oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation.

  Early in the career of every subcamp, senior officers from the parent Lager paid a visit to ensure that the energy of the slave labourers was stimulated in the most radical and exemplary manner. It is not certain exactly which members of Plaszów’s senior staff visited Emalia, but some prisoners and Oskar himself would always say that Goeth was one of them. And if not Goeth it was Leo John, or Scheidt. Or else Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s protégé. It is no injustice to mention any of their names in connection with ‘stimulating energy in a radical and exemplary manner’. Whoever they were, they had already in the history of Plaszów taken or condoned fierce action. And now, visiting Emalia, they spotted in the yard a prisoner called Lamus pushing a barrow too slowly across the fa
ctory yard. Oskar himself later declared that it was Goeth who was there that day and saw Lamus’s slow trundling and turned to a young NCO called Grün – Grün being another Goeth protégé, his bodyguard, a former wrestler. It was certainly Grün who was ordered to execute Lamus.

  So Grün made the arrest and the inspectors continued on into other parts of the factory camp. It was someone from the metal hall who rushed up to the Herr Direktor’s office and alerted Schindler. Oskar came roaring down the stairs even faster than on the day Miss Regina Perlman had visited, and reached the yard just as Grün was positioning Lamus against the wall.

  Oskar called out. You can’t do that here. I won’t get work out of my people if you start shooting. I’ve got high priority war contracts, etc. etc. It was the standard Schindler argument and carried the suggestion that there were senior officers known to Oskar to whom Grün’s name would be given if he impeded production in Emalia.

  Grün was cunning. He knew the other inspectors had passed on to the workshops where the whumping of metal presses and the roaring of lathes would cover any noise he chose, or failed, to make. Lamus was such a small concern to men like Goeth and John that no enquiry would be made afterwards. What’s in it for me? the SS youth asked Oskar. Would vodka do? said Oskar. A litre and a half?

  To Grün it was a substantial prize. For working all day behind the machine guns during Einsatzaktions, the massed and daily executions in the East – for shooting hundreds, that is – you were given half a litre of vodka. The boys lined up to be on the squad so that they could take that prize of liquor back to their messes in the evening. And here the Herr Direktor offered him three times that for one act of omission.

  I don’t see the bottle, he said nonetheless. Herr Schindler was already nudging Lamus away from the wall and pushing him out of range. Disappear, Grün yelled at the wheelbarrow man. You may collect the bottle, said Oskar, from my office at the end of the inspection.

  Oskar took part in a similar transaction when the Gestapo raided the apartment of a forger and discovered, among other false documents completed or near completed, a set of Aryan papers for a family called the Wohlfeilers, mother, father, three adolescent children, all of them workers at Schindler’s camp. Two Gestapo men therefore came to Lipowa Street to collect the family for an interrogation which would lead, through Montelupich prison, to that grim hill fort. Three hours after entering Oskar’s office both men left Deutsche Email Fabrik, reeling on the stairs, beaming with the temporary bonhomie of cognac and, for all anyone knew, of a pay-off. The confiscated papers now lay on Oskar’s desk and he picked them up and put them in the fire.

  Next, the brothers Danziger, who cracked a metal press one Friday. Honest bemused men, half skilled, looking up with staring shtetl eyes from the machine they had just loudly shattered. The Herr Direktor was away on business and someone – a factory spy, Oskar would always say – denounced the Danzigers to the administration in Plaszów. The brothers were taken from Emalia and their hanging advertised in the next morning’s rollcall in Plaszów. Tonight, (it was announced) the people of Plaszów will witness the execution of two saboteurs. What of course qualified the Danzigers above all for execution was their orthodox aura.

  Oskar returned from his business trip to Sosnowiec at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, three hours before the promised execution. News of the sentence was waiting on his desk. He drove out through the suburbs to Plaszów at once, taking cognac with him and some fine kielbasa sausage. He parked by the Administration Block of Plaszów and found Goeth in his office. He was pleased not to have to rouse the commandant from an afternoon nap. No one knows the extent of the deal that was struck in Goeth’s office that afternoon, in that office akin to Torquemada’s, where Goeth had had ringbolts attached to the wall from which people could be hanged for discipline or instruction. It is hard to believe, though, that Amon was satisfied simply with cognac and sausage. In any case, his concern for the integrity of the Reich’s metal presses was soothed by the interview, and at six o’clock, the hour of their execution, the Danziger brothers returned in the back seat of Oskar’s plush limousine to the sweet squalor of Emalia.

  All these triumphs were, of course, partial. It is an aspect of Caesars, Oskar knew, to remit as irrationally as they condemn. Emil Krautwirt, by day an engineer in the radiator factory beyond the Emalia barracks, was an inmate of Oskar’s SS subcamp. He was young, having got his diploma in the late 1930s. Krautwirt, like other natives of Emalia, called the place Schindler’s camp, but by taking Krautwirt away to Plaszów for an exemplary hanging the SS demonstrated whose camp it really was, at least for some aspects of its existence.

  For the fraction of the Plaszów people who would live on into the peace, the hanging of engineer Krautwirt was the first story, other than their own intimate stories of pain and humiliation, which they would relate. The SS were ever economical with their scaffolds, and at Plaszów the gallows resembled a long low set of goalposts, lacking the majesty of the gibbets of history, of the Revolutionary guillotine, the Elizabethan scaffold, the tall solemnity of jailhouse gallows in the sheriff’s backyard. Seen in peacetime, the gallows of Plaszów and Auschwitz would intimidate not by their solemnity but by their ordinariness. But as mothers would discover in Plaszów, it was still possible, even with such a banal structure, for their children to see too much of an execution from within the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz. A sixteen-year-old boy called Haubenstock was to be hanged with Krautwirt. Krautwirt had been condemned for some letters he had written to seditious persons in the city of Cracow. But with Haubenstock it was that he had been heard singing Volga, Volga, Kalinka Maya, and other banned Russian songs with the intention – according to his death sentence – of winning the Ukrainian guards over to Bolshevism.

  The rules for the rite of execution inside Plaszów involved silence. Unlike the festive hangings of earlier times, the drop was performed in a church stillness. The prisoners stood in phalanxes, and were patrolled by men and women who knew the extent of their power, by Hujar and John, Amthor and Scheidt, by Grimm and by Grün, by the SS women supervisors recently posted to Plaszów, both of them energetic with the baton – Alice Orlowski, and Luise Danz – and by Ritschek, and Schreiber. Under such supervision, the pleadings of the condemned were heard in silence.

  Engineer Krautwirt himself seemed at first stunned and had nothing to say, but the boy was vocal. In an uneven voice he reasoned with the Hauptsturmführer, who stood beside the scaffold. I am not a Communist, Herr Commandant. I hate Communism. They were just songs. Ordinary songs. The hangman, a Jewish butcher of Cracow, pardoned for some earlier crime on condition that he undertake this work, stood Haubenstock on a stool and placed the noose around his neck. He could tell Amon wanted the boy done first, didn’t want the debate to drag on. When the butcher kicked the support out from beneath Haubenstock, the rope broke and the boy, purple and gagging, noose around his neck, crawled on his hands and knees to Goeth, continuing his pleadings, ramming his head against the commandant’s ankles and hugging his legs. It was the most extreme submission, it conferred on Goeth again the kingship he’d been exercising these fevered months past. Amon, in an Appellplatz of gaping mouths uttering no sound but a low hiss, a susurrus like a wind in sand dunes, took his pistol from his holster, kicked the boy away and shot him through the head.

  When poor engineer Krautwirt saw the horror of the boy’s execution, he took a razor blade that he’d concealed in his pocket and slashed his wrists. Those prisoners at the front could tell that Krautwirt had injured himself terribly in both arms. But Goeth ordered the hangman to proceed in any case, and splashed with the gore from Krautwirt’s injuries, two Ukrainians lifted him to the scaffold, where, gushing from both wrists, he strangled in front of the Jews of southern Poland.

  It was natural for the internees of Plaszów to believe with one part of the mind that each such barbarous exhibition might be the last, that there might be a reversal of the methods and attitudes even in Amon, or i
f not in him, then in those unseen officials who, in some high office with French windows and waxed floors overlooking a square where old women sold flowers, must formulate half of what happened in Plaszów and condone the rest.

  On the second visit of Dr Sedlacek from Budapest to Cracow, Oskar and the dentist devised a scheme which might to a more introverted man than Schindler have seemed naïve. Oskar suggested to Sedlacek that perhaps one of the reasons Amon Goeth behaved so savagely was the bad alcohol he imbibed, the buckets of ninety-six per cent proof local so-called ‘cognac’ which further weakened Amon’s faulty sense of ultimate consequences. With a portion of the Reichsmarks Dr Sedlacek had just brought to Emalia and handed to Oskar, a crate of first-rate cognac should be bought – not such an easy or inexpensive item in post-Stalingrad Poland. Oskar should deliver it to Amon, and in the progress of conversation suggest to Goeth that one way or another the war would end at some time, and that there would be investigations into the actions of individuals. That perhaps even Amon’s friends would remember the times he’d been too zealous.

  It was Oskar’s nature to believe that you could drink with the devil and adjust the balance of evil over a tumbler of cognac. It was not that he found more radical methods frightening. It was that they did not occur to him. He’d always been a man of transactions.

  Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko who had earlier had control of the ghetto perimeter, was, by contrast, a man of ideas. It had become impossible for him to work within the SS scheme, passing a bribe here, a forged paper there, placing a dozen children under the patronage of his rank while a hundred more were marched out of the ghetto gate. Bosko had absconded from his police station in Podgórze and vanished into the partisan forests of Niepolomice. In the People’s Army he would try to expiate the callow enthusiasm he’d felt for Nazism in the summer of 1938. Dressed as a Polish farmer, he’d be recognised in the end in a village west of Cracow and shot for treason. Bosko would therefore become a martyr.