Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Oskar tried to imagine the partisans invading Plaszów, letting all the Poles and Jews pour out, making of them an instant army. It was a daydream, and who could believe it? But there was Amon, straining to convince them all that he believed it. It had a purpose, this little act. Oskar was sure of that.

  Bosch said, “If the partisans are coming out to your place, Amon, I hope it’s not a night when I’ve been invited.”

  “Amen, amen,” murmured Schindler.

  After the meeting, whatever it meant, Oskar took Amon to his car, which was parked outside the Administration Block. He opened the boot. Inside lay a richly tooled saddle worked with designs characteristic of the Zakopane region in the mountains south of Cracow. It was necessary for Oskar to keep priming Amon with these little gifts, now that payment for the forced labour of Deutsche Email Fabrik no longer went anywhere near Hauptsturmführer Goeth but, instead, was sent directly to the Cracow area representative of General Pohl’s Oranienburg headquarters.

  Oskar offered to drive both Amon and his saddle down to the commandant’s villa.

  On such a blistering day, some of the trolley-pushers were showing a little less than the required zeal. But the saddle had sweetened Amon and, in any case, it was no longer permitted for him to jump from a car and shoot people dead. The car rolled past the garrison barracks and came to the siding where stood a string of guarded cattle wagons. Oskar could tell by the haze hanging above the rolling stock and blending with and wavering in the heat rebounding from the roofs that they were full. Even above the sound of the engine, you could hear the mourning from inside, and the pleas for water.

  Oskar braked his car and listened. This was permitted him, in view of the splendid multi-zloty saddle in the trunk. Amon smiled indulgently at his sentimental friend. “They’re partly Plaszów people,” said Amon, “and people from the work camp at Szebnia. And Poles and Jews from Montelupich. They’re going to Mauthausen.” Amon gave the name of the destination teasingly. “They’re complaining now? They don’t know what complaint is yet . . .”

  The roofs of the wagons were bronzed with heat. “You have no objection,” said Oskar, “if I call out your fire brigade?”

  Amon gave a What-will-you-think-of-next? sort of laugh. He implied that he wouldn’t let anyone else summon the firemen, but he’d tolerate Oskar because Oskar was such a character and the whole business would make a good dinner-party anecdote.

  But as Oskar sent Ukrainian guards to ring the bell for the Jewish firemen, Amon was genuinely bemused. He knew that Oskar knew what Mauthausen meant. If you hosed the wagons for people, you were making them promises about a future. And would not such promises constitute, in anyone’s code, a true cruelty? So disbelief mingled with tolerant amusement in Amon as the hoses were run out and jets of water fell hissing on the scalding rooftops. Neuschel also came down from the office to shake his head and smile as the people inside the wagons moaned and roared with gratitude. Grün, Amon’s bodyguard, stood chatting with Untersturmführer John and clapped his side and hooted as the water rained down. Even fully run out and at full pressure, the jets reached only halfway down the line of rolling stock. Next, Oskar was asking Amon for the loan of a truck or cart and of a few Ukrainians to drive into Zablocie and fetch the fire hoses from Deutsche Email Fabrik. They were two hundred-metre hoses, Oskar said. Amon, for some reason, found that side-splitting. Of course I’m willing to authorise a lorry, said Amon. Amon was willing to do anything for the sake of the comedy of life.

  Oskar gave the Ukrainians a note for Bankier and Garde. While they were gone, Amon was so willing to enter the spirit of the event that he permitted the doors of the wagons to be opened and buckets of water to be passed in and the dead, with their pink, swollen faces, to be lifted out. And still, all around the railway siding stood amused SS officers and NCOs. “What does he think he’s saving them from?”

  When the large hoses from DEF arrived and all the wagons had been drenched, the joke took on new dimensions. Oskar, in his note to Bankier, had instructed that, besides providing the hoses, the manager should go into Oskar’s apartment on the top floor of the office block and fill a hamper with drink and cigarettes, some good cheeses and sausages, and so on. Oskar now handed the hamper to the NCO at the rear of the train. It was an open transaction, and the man seemed a little embarrassed at the largesse, shoving the hamper quickly into the rear van in case one of the officers of KL Plaszów reported him. Yet Oskar seemed to be in such curious favour with the commandant that the NCO listened to him respectfully. When you stop near stations, said Oskar, will you open the wagon doors?

  Years later, two survivors of the transport, Doctors Rubinstein and Feldstein, would let Oskar know that the NCO had ordered the doors frequently opened and the water buckets regularly filled on the tedious journey to Mauthausen. For most of the transport, of course, that was no more than a comfort before dying.

  As Oskar moves down the line, under the laughter of the SS, bringing a mercy which is in large terms futile, it can be seen that he’s not so much reckless any more but possessed. Even Amon can tell that his friend has shifted into a new gear. All this frenzy about getting the hoses right to the farthest wagon, the bribing of an SS man in full view of the SS personnel – it would take just a slight shift in degree of the laughter of Scheidt or John or Hujar to bring about a mass denunciation of Oskar, a piece of information the Gestapo could not ignore. And then Oskar would go into Montelupich and, in view of previous racial charges against him, probably on to Auschwitz. So Amon was horrified by the way Oskar insisted on treating those dead as if they were poor relations travelling third class but bound for a genuine destination.

  Some time after two, a locomotive hauled the whole miserable string of cattle wagons away towards the mainline, and all the hoses could again be wound up. Schindler delivered Amon and his saddle to the Goeth villa. Amon could see that Oskar was still preoccupied and, for the first time in their association, gave his friend some advice about living. “You have to relax,” said Amon. “You can’t go running after every trainload that leaves this place.”

  The engineer, Adam Garde, also saw symptoms of this shift in Oskar. On the night of July 20th, an SS man had come into Garde’s barracks and roused him. The Herr Direktor had called the guardhouse and said it was necessary to see engineer Garde, professionally, in his office.

  Garde found Oskar listening to the radio, his face flushed, a bottle and two glasses in front of him on the table. Behind the desk these days a relief map of Europe adorned the wall. It had never been there in the days of German expansion, but Oskar seemed to take a sharp interest in the shrinkage of the German fronts. Tonight he had the radio tuned to the Deutschlandsender, not – as was usually the case – to the BBC. Inspirational music was being played, as it often was as a prelude to important announcements.

  Oskar seemed to be listening avidly. When Garde came in, he stood up and hustled the young engineer to a seat. He poured cognac and passed it hurriedly across the desk. There’s been an attempt on Hitler’s life, said Oskar. It had been announced earlier in the evening, and the story then was that Hitler had survived. They’d promised that he would soon be speaking to the German people. But it hadn’t happened. Hours had passed and they hadn’t been able to produce him. And they kept playing a lot of Beethoven, the way they had when Stalingrad fell.

  Oskar and Garde sat together for hours. A seditious event, a Jew and a German listening together – all night if necessary – to discover if the Führer had died. Adam Garde, of course, suffered that same breathless surge of hope. He noticed that Oskar kept gesturing limply, as if the possibility that the Leader was dead had unstrung his muscles. He drank devoutly and urged Garde to drink up. If it’s true, said Oskar, then Germans, ordinary Germans like himself, could begin to redeem themselves. Purely because someone close to Hitler had had the guts to remove him from the earth. It’s the end of the SS, said Oskar. Himmler will be in jail by morning.

  Oskar blew clouds of smok
e. Oh my God, he said, the relief to see the end of this system.

  The 10 p.m. news brought only the earlier statement. There had been an attempt on the Führer’s life but it had failed, and the Führer would be broadcasting in a few minutes. When, as the hour passed, Hitler did not speak, Oskar turned to a fantasy which would be popular with many Germans as the war drew to a close. Our troubles are over, he said. The world’s sane again. Germany can ally itself with the West against the Russians.

  Garde’s hopes were more modest. At worst, he hoped for a ghetto which was a ghetto in the old Franz Josef sense.

  And as they drank and the music played, it seemed more and more reasonable that Europe would yield them that night the death essential for the restoration of its sanity. They were citizens of the continent again, they were not the prisoner and the Herr Direktor. The radio’s promises to produce a message from the Führer recurred, and every time Oskar laughed with increasing point.

  Midnight came and they paid no attention any more to the promises. Their very breath was lighter in this new post-Führer Cracow. By morning, they surmised, there would be dancing in every square, and it would go unpunished. The Wehrmacht would arrest Frank in the Wawel and encircle the SS complex in Pomorska Street.

  A little before 1 a.m., Hitler was heard broadcasting from Rastenberg. Oskar had been so convinced that that voice was a voice he would never need to hear again that for a few seconds he did not recognise the sound, in spite of its familiarity, thinking instead that it was just another temporising Party spokesman. But engineer Garde heard the speech from its first word, and knew whose voice it was.

  “My German comrades!” it began. “If I speak to you today, it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know that I am unhurt and well, and, second, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history.”

  The speech ended four minutes later with a reference to the conspirators. “This time we shall settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed.”

  Adam Garde had never quite bought the fantasy Oskar had been pushing all evening. For Hitler was more than a man: he was a system with ramifications. Even if he died, it was no guarantee the system would alter its character. Besides, it was not in the nature of a phenomenon such as Hitler to perish in the space of an evening.

  But Oskar had been believing in the death with a feverish conviction for hours now, and when it turned out to be an illusion, it was young Garde who found himself cast as the comforter, while Oskar spoke with an almost operatic grief. “All our vision of deliverance is futile,” he said. He poured another glass of cognac each, then pushed the bottle across the desk, opening his cigarette box. “Take the cognac and some cigarettes and get some sleep,” he said. “We’ll have to wait a little longer for our freedom.”

  In the confusion of the cognac, of the news, and of its sudden reversal in the small hours, Garde did not think it amazing that Oskar was talking about ‘our freedom’, as if they had an equivalent need, were both prisoners who had to wait passively to be liberated. But back in his bunk Garde thought, It’s strange the Herr Direktor should talk like that, like someone easily given to fantasies and fits of depression. Usually, he was so pragmatic.

  Pomorska and the camps around Cracow crawled with rumours that late summer of some imminent rearrangement of prisoners. The rumours troubled Oskar in Zablocie, and at Plaszów Amon got unofficial word that the camps would be disbanded.

  In fact that meeting over security had to do not with saving Plaszów from partisans, but with the coming closure of the camp. Amon had called Madritsch and Oskar and Bosch out to Plaszów and held the meeting just to give himself protective colouring. It then became plausible for him to drive into Cracow and call on Wilhelm Koppe, the new SS police chief of the Government General. Amon sat on the far side of Koppe’s desk wearing a fake frown, his long fingers opening and clenching erratically, as if from the stress of a besieged Plaszów. He told Koppe the same story he’d given Oskar and the others. That partisan organisations had sprung up inside the camp, that Zionists within the wire had had communications with radicals of the Polish People’s Army and the Jewish Combat Organisation. As the Obergruppenführer could appreciate, that sort of communication was difficult to stamp out – messages could come in in a smuggled loaf of bread. But at the first sign of active rebellion, he – Amon Goeth – as commandant, would need to be able to take summary action. The question Amon wanted to ask was, if he fired first and did the paperwork for Oranienburg afterwards, would the distinguished Obergruppenführer Koppe stand by him?

  No problem, said Koppe. He didn’t really approve of bureaucrats either. In years past, as police chief of the Wartheland, he’d commanded the fleet of extermination lorries which carried Untermenschen out into the countryside and which then, running the engines at full throttle, pumped the exhaust back into the locked interior. That too was an off-the-cuff operation, not permitting immaculate paperwork. Of course, you have to use your judgment, he told Amon. And if you do, I’ll back you.

  Oskar had sensed at the meeting that Amon was not really worried about partisans. Had he known at the time that Plaszów was to be liquidated, he would have understood the deeper meaning of Amon’s performance. For Amon was worried about Wilek Chilowicz, his Jewish chief of camp police, whom he had often used as an agent on the black market. Chilowicz knew Cracow. He knew where he could sell the flour, rice, butter the commandant held back from the camp supplies. He knew the dealers who would be interested in products from the custom jewellery shop staffed by interns such as Wulkan. Amon was worried about the whole Chilowicz clique, Mrs Marysia Chilowicz, who enjoyed conjugal privileges, Mietek Finkelstein (Chilowicz’s deputy), Chilowicz’s sister Mrs Ferber, and Mr Ferber. If there had been an aristocracy inside Plaszów, it had been the Chilowiczes. They had had power over prisoners, but their knowledge was double-edged: they knew as much about Amon as they did about some miserable machinist in the Madritsch works. If, when Plaszów closed, they were shipped to another camp, Amon knew that as soon as they found themselves in the wrong line they would try to barter their inside knowledge of his rackets. Or, more likely, as soon as they were hungry.

  Of course, Chilowicz was uneasy too, and Amon could sense in him the doubt that he would be allowed to leave Plaszów. Amon decided to use Chilowicz’s very concern as a lever. He called Sowinski, an SS auxiliary recruited from the High Tatras of Czechoslovakia, into his office for a conference. Sowinski was to approach Chilowicz and pretend to offer him an escape deal. Amon was sure that Chilowicz would be eager to negotiate.

  Sowinski went and did it well. He told Chilowicz he could get the whole clan out of the camp in one of the large fuel-burning trucks. You could sit half a dozen people in the wooden furnace if you were running on petrol.

  Chilowicz was interested in the proposition. Sowinski would of course need to deliver a note to friends on the outside, who would provide a vehicle. Sowinski would deliver the clan to the rendezvous point in the truck. Chilowicz was willing to pay in diamonds. But, said Chilowicz, as a sign of mutual trust, Sowinski must provide a weapon.

  Sowinski reported the meeting to the commandant, and Amon gave him a .38mm pistol with the pin filed down. This was passed to Chilowicz, who, of course, had no opportunity to test-fire it. Yet Amon would be able to swear to both Koppe and Oranienburg that he had found a weapon on the prisoner.

  It was a Sunday in mid-August when Sowinski met the Chilowiczes in the building-material shed and hid them in the truck. Then he drove down Jerozolimska to the gate. There should be routine formalities there, then the truck could roll out into the countryside. In the empty furnace, in the pulses of the five escapees, was the febrile, almost insupportable hope of leaving Amon behind.

  At the gate, however, were Amon and Amthor and Hujar, and the Ukrainian Ivan Scharujew. A leisurely inspection was made. Lumbering with half smiles across the bed of the truck, the gentlemen of the SS saved the wood furnace
till last. They mimed surprise when they discovered the pitiable Chilowicz clan sardine-tight in the wood hole. As soon as Chilowicz had been dragged out, Amon ‘found’ the illegal gun tucked into his boots. Chilowicz’s pockets were laden with diamonds, bribes paid him by desperate inmates of the camp.

  Prisoners at their day of rest heard that Chilowicz was under sentence down there at the gate. The news made for the same awe, the confusion of emotions, that had operated the night last year when Symche Spira and his OD had been executed. Nor could any prisoner decipher what it boded for his own chances.

  The Chilowicz crowd were executed one at a time with pistols. Amon, very yellow now from liver disease and incumbent diabetes, at the height of his obesity, wheezing like an elderly uncle, put the muzzle to Chilowicz’s neck. Later the corpses were displayed in the Appellplatz with placards tied to their chests. Those who violate just laws can expect a similar death.

  That, of course, was not the moral the prisoners of KL Plaszów took from the sight.

  Amon spent the afternoon drafting two long reports, one to Koppe, one to General Glücks’s Section D (Concentration Camps), explaining how he had saved KL Plaszów from an insurgency in its first phase – the one in which a group of key conspirators escaped from the camp – by executing the plot’s leaders. He did not finish revising either draft till 11 p.m. Frau Kochmann was too slow for such late work, and so the commandant had Mietek Pemper roused from his barracks and brought to the villa. In the front parlour, Amon stated in a level voice that he believed the young man was party to Chilowicz’s escape attempt. Pemper was astounded and did not know how to answer. Looking around him for some sort of inspiration, he saw the seam of his trouser leg, which had come unsewn. How could I pass on the outside in this sort of clothing? he asked.