Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  At the end of winter, Josef, wearing the armband of the Construction Office, went out into the strangely immaculate snow in the strip between the inner fence and the electrified barrier and, steel measure in hand, under the eyes of the domed watchtowers, pretended to be sizing up no man’s land for some architectural reason.

  At the base of the concrete stanchions studded with porcelain insulators grew the first pigmy flowers of that year. Flashing his steel ruler, he picked them and shoved them into his jacket. He brought the flowers across the camp, up Jerozolimska Street. He was passing Amon’s villa, his chest stuffed with blossoms, when Amon himself appeared from the front door and advanced, towering, down the steps. Josef Bau stopped. It was most dangerous to stop, to appear to be in arrested motion in front of Amon. But having stopped, he seemed frozen there. He feared that the heart he’d so energetically and honestly signed over to the orphan Rebecca would likely now become just another of Amon’s targets.

  But when Amon walked past him, not noticing him, not objecting to his standing there with an idle ruler in his hands, Josef Bau concluded that it meant some kind of guarantee. No one escaped Amon unless it was a sort of destiny. All dolled up in his shooting uniform, Amon had entered the camp unexpectedly one day through the back gate and had found the Warrenhaupt girl lolling in a limousine at the garage, staring at herself in the rear-view mirror. The car windows she’d been assigned to clean were still smudged. He had killed her for that. And there was that mother and daughter Amon had noticed through a kitchen window. They had been peeling potatoes too slowly. So he’d leaned in on the sill and shot both of them. Yet here at his steps was something he hated, a stockstill Jewish lover and draughtsman, steel rule dangling in his hands. And Amon had walked by. Bau felt the urge to confirm this outrageous good luck by some emphatic act. Marriage was, of course, the most emphatic act of all.

  He got back to the Administration Block, climbed the stairs to Stern’s office and, finding Rebecca, asked her to marry him. Urgency, Rebecca was pleased and concerned to notice, had entered the business now.

  That evening, in the dead woman’s dress, he visited his mother again and the council of chaperones in hut 57. They awaited only the arrival of a rabbi. But if rabbis came, they remained only a few days on their way to Auschwitz, not long enough for people requiring the rites of kiddushin and nissuin, to locate them and ask them, before they stepped into the furnace, for a final exercise of their priesthood.

  Josef married Rebecca on a Sunday night of fierce cold in February. There was no rabbi. Mrs Bau, Josef’s mother, officiated. They were Reformed Jews, so that they could do without a ketubbah written in Aramaic. In the workshop of Wulkan the jeweller someone had made up two rings out of a silver spoon Mrs Bau had had hidden in the rafters. On the barrack floor, Rebecca circled Josef seven times and Josef crushed glass – a spent light bulb from the Construction Office – beneath his heel.

  The couple had been given the top bunk of the tier. For the sake of privacy, it had been hung with blankets. In darkness Josef and Rebecca climbed to it, and all around them the earthy jokes were running. At weddings in Poland there was always a period of truce where profane love was given its chance to speak. If the wedding guests didn’t wish to voice the traditional double entendres themselves, they could get in a professional wedding jester. Women who might in the twenties and thirties have sat up at weddings making disapproving faces at the risqué hired jester and the belly-laughing men, only now and then permitting themselves – as mature women – to be overcome with amusement, stepped tonight into the place of all the absent and dead wedding jesters of southern Poland.

  Josef and Rebecca had not been together more than ten minutes on the upper bunk when the barrack lights came on. Looking through the blankets, Josef saw Untersturmführer Scheidt patrolling the tiers of bunks. The same old fearful sense of destiny overcame Josef. They’d found he was missing from his barracks, of course, and sent one of the worst of the officers to look for him in his mother’s hut. Amon had been blinded to him that day outside the villa only so that Scheidt, who was quick on the trigger, could come and kill him on his wedding night!

  He knew too that all the women were compromised – his mother, his bride, the witnesses, the ones who’d uttered the most exquisitely embarrassing jokes. He began murmuring apologies, pleas to be forgiven. Rebecca told him to be quiet. She took down the screen of blankets. At this time of night, she reasoned, Scheidt wasn’t going to climb to a top bunk unless provoked. The women on the lower bunks were passing their small straw-filled pillows to her. Josef might well have orchestrated the courtship, but he was now the child to be concealed. Rebecca pushed him hard up into the corner of the bunk and covered him with pillows. She watched Scheidt pass below her, leave the barracks by its back door. The lights went out. Among a last spatter of dark, earthy jokes, the Baus were restored to their privacy.

  Within minutes, the sirens began to sound. Everyone sat up in the darkness. The noise meant to Bau that yes, they were determined to crush this ritual marriage. They had found his empty bunk over in the men’s quarters and were now seriously hunting him.

  In the dark aisle, the women were milling. They knew it too. From the top bunk he could hear them saying it. His old-fashioned love would kill them all. The barrack Alteste, who’d been so decent about the whole thing, would be shot first once the lights came on and they found a bridegroom there in token female rags.

  Josef Bau grabbed his clothes. He kissed his wife perfunctorily, slid to the floor and ran from the hut. In the darkness outside, the wail of the sirens pierced him. He ran in dirty snow, with his jacket and old dress bundled up under his armpits. When the lights came on, he would be seen by the towers. But he had the berserk idea that he could beat the lights over the fence, that he could even climb it between the alternations of its current. Once back in the men’s camp, he could make up some story about diarrhoea, about having gone to the latrines and collapsed on the floor, being brought back to consciousness by the noise of sirens.

  If electrocuted, he understood as he sprinted, he could not then confess what woman he was visiting. Racing for the immolatory wire he did not understand that there would have to be a classroom-like scene on the Appellplatz and that Rebecca would be made, one way or another, to step forward.

  In the fence between the men’s and women’s camps in Plaszów ran nine electrified strands. Josef Bau launched himself high, so that his feet would find purchase on the third of the strands and his hands, at the stretch, might reach the second top. He imagined himself then as racing over the strands with a ratlike quickness. In fact he landed in the mesh of wire and simply hung there. He thought the coldness of the metal in his hands was the first message of the current. But there was no current. There were no lights. Josef Bau, stretched on the fence, did not speculate on the reason there wasn’t any voltage. He got to the top and vaulted into the men’s camp. You’re a married man, he told himself. He slid into the latrines by the wash houses. “A frightful diarrhoea, Herr Oberscharführer.” He stood gasping in the stench. Amon’s blindness on the day of the flowers . . . the consummation, waited for with an untoward patience, twice interrupted . . . Scheidt and the sirens . . . a problem with the lights and the wire. Staggering and gagging, he wondered if he could support the ambiguity of his life. Like others, he wanted a more definite rescue.

  He wandered out to be one of the last to join the lines in front of his hut. He was trembling but sure the Alteste would cover up for him. “Yes, Herr Untersturmführer, I gave Haftling Bau permission to visit the latrines.”

  They weren’t looking for him at all. They were looking for three young Zionists who’d escaped in a truckload of products from the upholstery works, where they made Wehrmacht mattresses out of seagrass.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  On April 28th, 1944, Oskar – by looking sideways at himself in a mirror – was able to tell that his waist had thickened for his thirty-sixth birthday. But at least today, when he embraced
the girls, no one bothered to denounce him. Any informer among the German technicians must have been demoralised, since the SS had let Oskar out of Pomorska and Montelupich, both centres supposedly impregnable to influence.

  To mark the day, Emilie sent the usual greetings from Czechoslovakia, and Ingrid and Klonowska gave him gifts. His domestic arrangements had scarcely changed in the four and a half years he had spent in Cracow. Ingrid was still a consort, Klonowska a girlfriend, Emilie an understandably absent wife. Whatever grievances and bewilderment each suffered goes unrecorded, but it would become obvious in this his thirty-seventh year that some coolness had entered his relations with Ingrid, that Klonowska, always a loyal friend, was content with a merely sporadic liaison, and that Emilie still considered their marriage indissoluble. For the moment, they gave their presents and kept their counsel.

  Others took a hand in the celebration. Amon permitted Henry Rosner to bring his violin to Lipowa Street in the evening under the guard of the best baritone in the Ukrainian garrison. Amon was, at this stage, very pleased with his association with Schindler. In return for his continuing support for the Emalia camp, Amon had one day recently requested and got the permanent use of Oskar’s Mercedes – not the jalopy Oskar had bought from John for a day, but the most elegant car in the Emalia garage.

  The recital took place in Oskar’s office. No one attended except Oskar. It was as if the rowdy tycoon was tired of company.

  When the Ukrainian went to the lavatory, Oskar exposed his depression to Henry. He was upset about the war news. His birthday had come in a hiatus. The Russian armies had halted behind the Pripet Marshes in Belorussia and in front of Lwów. Oskar’s fears puzzled Henry a little. Doesn’t he understand, he wondered, that if the Russians aren’t held up, it’s the end of his operation here?

  I’ve often asked Amon to let you come here permanently, Oskar told Rosner. You and your wife and child. He won’t hear of it. He appreciates you too much. But eventually . . .

  Henry was grateful. But he felt he had to point out that his family might be as safe as any in Plaszów. His sister-in-law, for example, had been discovered by Goeth smoking at work, and he had ordered her execution. But one of the NCOs had begged to put before the Herr Commandant’s notice the fact that this woman was Mrs Rosner, wife of Rosner the accordionist. Oh, Amon had said, pardoning her. Well, remember, girl, I won’t have smoking on the job.

  Henry told Oskar that night that it had been this attitude of Amon’s – that the Rosners were immune because of their musical talent – which had persuaded Manci and himself to bring their eight-year-old son, Olek, into the camp. He had been hiding with friends in Cracow, but that was daily becoming a less and less secure business. Once inside, Olek could blend into that small crowd of children, many unregistered in the prison records, whose presence in Plaszów was connived at by prisoners and tolerated by some of the junior camp officials. Getting Olek into the place, however, had been the risky part. Poldek Pfefferberg, who’d had to drive a truck to town to pick up toolboxes, had smuggled the boy in. The Ukrainians had nearly discovered him at the gate while he was still an outsider and living in contravention of every racial statute of the Reich Government General. His feet had burst out of the end of the box that lay between Pfefferberg’s ankles. “Mr Pfefferberg, Mr Pfefferberg,” Poldek had heard while the Ukrainians searched the back of the truck. “My feet are sticking out.”

  Henry could laugh at that now, though warily, since there were still rivers to be crossed. But Schindler reacted dramatically with a gesture that seemed to grow from the slightly alcoholic melancholy which had beset him on this evening of his birthday. He lifted his office chair by its back and raised it to the portrait of the Führer. It seemed for a second that he was about to lash into the icon. But he spun again on his heel, lowered the chair deliberately until its four legs hung equidistant from the floor, and rammed them down into the carpet at a rate which shook the wall.

  Then he said, “They’re burning bodies out there, aren’t they?”

  Henry grimaced as if the stench were in the room. “They’ve started,” he admitted.

  Now that Plaszów was – in the language of the bureaucrats – a KL (Konzentrationslager) its inmates found that it was safer to encounter Amon. The chiefs in Oranienburg did not permit summary execution. The days when slow potato-peelers could be expunged on the spot were gone. They could now only be destroyed by due process. There had to be a hearing, the record of which was to be sent in triplicate to Oranienburg. The sentence had to be confirmed not only by General Glücks’s office but also by General Pohl’s Department W (Economic Enterprises). For if a commandant killed essential workers, Department W could find itself hit with claims for compensation. Allach-Munich Ltd, for example, porcelain manufacturers using slave labour from Dachau, had recently filed a claim for thirty-one thousand, eight hundred Reichsmarks because “as a result of the typhoid epidemic which broke out in January 1943, we had no prison labour at our disposal from January 26th, 1943, until March 3rd, 1943. In our opinion we are entitled to compensation under Clause 2 of the Businesses Compensation Settlement Fund . . .”

  Department W was all the more liable for compensation if the loss of skilled labour arose from the zeal of a trigger-happy SS officer.

  So, to avoid the paperwork and the departmental complications, Amon held his hand on most days. The people who appeared within his range in the spring and early summer of 1944 somehow understood it was safer, though they knew nothing of Department W and Generals Pohl and Glücks. It was to them a remission as mysterious as Amon’s madness itself.

  Yet, as Oskar had mentioned to Henry Rosner, they were now burning bodies at Plaszów. In preparation for the Russian offensive, the SS was abolishing its institutions in the East. Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec had been evacuated the previous autumn. The Waffen SS who had run them had been ordered to dynamite the chambers and the crematoria, to leave no recognisable trace, and had then been posted to Italy to fight partisans. The immense complex at Auschwitz, in its safe ground in Upper Silesia, would complete the great task in the East, and, once that was concluded, the crematoria would be ploughed under the earth. For without the evidence of the crematoria, the dead could offer no witness, were a whisper behind the wind, an inconsequential dust on the aspen leaves.

  Plaszów was not as simple a case, for its dead lay everywhere around it. In the enthusiasm of the spring of 1943, bodies – notably the bodies of those killed in the ghetto’s last two days – were thrown randomly into mass graves in the wood. Now Department D charged Amon with finding them all.

  Estimates of the numbers of bodies vary widely. Polish publications, based on the work of the Main Commission for the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in Poland and on other sources, claim that a hundred and fifty thousand prisoners, many of them in transit to other places, went through Plaszów and its five subcamps. Of these, the Poles believe that eighty thousand died there, mainly in mass executions on Chujowa Górka or else in epidemics.

  These figures baffle the surviving Plaszów inmates who remember the fearsome work of burning the dead. They say the number they exhumed was somewhere between eight and ten thousand, a multitude frightful in itself and which they have no desire to exaggerate. The distance between the two estimates looks narrower when it is remembered that executions of Poles, Gypsies and Jews would continue at Chujowa Górka and at other points around Plaszów throughout most of that year, and that the SS themselves took up the practice of burning bodies immediately after mass killings in the Austrian hill fort. Besides, Amon would not succeed in his intention of removing all the bodies from the woods. Some thousands more would be found in postwar exhumations, and today, as the suburbs of Cracow close Plaszów in, bones are still discovered during the digging of foundations.

  Oskar saw the line of pyres on the ridge above the workshops during a visit he made to Plaszów just before his birthday. When he came back a week later the activity had increased. The bodies were dug up by male p
risoners who worked masked and gagging. On blankets and barrows and litters the dead were brought to the burning site and laid on log frames. So the pyre was built, layer by layer, and when it reached the height of a man’s shoulder was doused in fuel and lit. Pfefferberg was horrified to see the temporary life the flames gave to the dead, the way the corpses sat forward, throwing the burning logs away, their limbs reaching, their mouths opening for a last utterance. A young SS man from the delousing station ran among the pyres waving a pistol and roaring frenetic orders. The dust of the dead fell in hair and on the clothing hung in the back gardens of junior officers’ villas. Oskar was bemused to see the way the personnel reacted to the smoke, as if the grit in the air were some sort of inevitable industrial fallout. And through the fogs caused by the pyres, Amon went riding with Majola, both of them calm in the saddle. Leo John took his twelve-year-old boy off to catch tadpoles in the marshy ground in the wood. The flames and the stench did not distract them from their daily lives.

  Oskar, leaning back in the driver’s seat of his BMW, the windows up and a handkerchief clamped over his mouth and nose, thought how they must be burning the Spiras with all the rest. He’d been astounded when they’d executed all the ghetto policemen and their families last Christmas, as soon as Symche Spira had finished directing the dismantling of the ghetto. They had brought them all, and their wives and children, up here in the afternoon and shot them as the cold sun vanished. They’d shot the most faithful (Spira and Zellinger) as well as the most grudging. Spira and bashful Mrs Spira and the ungifted Spira children whom Pfefferberg had tutored – they’d all stood naked amid a circle of rifles, shivering against each other’s flanks; Spira’s Napoleonic OD uniform now just a heap of clothing for recycling, flung down at the fort entrance. And Spira still assuring everyone that it could not happen.