Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  The officer seemed to think that Oskar carried around with him half the peacetime produce of Poland. Instead, to get together a gift parcel for the gentlemen of the board, Oskar had to buy luxuries at the Berlin black-market rate. An old gentleman on the desk at the Adler was able to acquire good schnaps for Herr Schindler at a discount price of about eighty Reichsmarks a bottle. And you couldn’t send the gentlemen of the board less than a dozen. Coffee, however, was like gold, and Havanas were an insane price. Oskar bought them in quantity and included them in the hamper. The gentlemen might need a head of steam if they were to bring the Governor of Moravia round.

  In the midst of Oskar’s negotiations, Amon Goeth was arrested.

  Someone must have informed on him. Some jealous junior officer, or a concerned citizen who’d visited the villa and been shocked by Amon’s sybaritic style. A senior SS investigator named Eckert began to look at Amon’s financial dealings. The shots Amon had taken from the balcony were not germane to Eckert’s enquiry. But the embezzlements and the black-market dealings were, as were complaints from some of his SS inferiors that he had treated them severely.

  Amon was on leave in Vienna, staying with his father, Amon Franz Goeth the publisher, when the SS arrested him. They also raided an apartment Hauptsturmführer Goeth kept in the city and discovered a cache of money, some eighty thousand Reichsmarks, which Amon could not explain to their satisfaction. They found as well, stacked to the ceiling, close to a million cigarettes. It seemed that Amon’s Viennese apartment was more of a warehouse than a pied à terre.

  It might be at first sight surprising that the SS – or rather the officers of Bureau V of the Reich Security Main Office – should want to arrest such an effective servant as Hauptsturmführer Goeth. But they had already investigated irregularities in Buchenwald and tried to pin the commandant, Koch. They had even attempted to find evidence for the arrest of the renowned Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, and had questioned a Viennese Jewess who, they suspected, was pregnant by this star of the camp system. So Amon, raging in his apartment while they ransacked it, had no cause to hope for much immunity.

  They took him to Breslau and put him in an SS prison to await investigation and trial. They showed their innocence of the way affairs were run in Plaszów by going to the villa and questioning Helen Hirsch on suspicion of her being involved in Amon’s swindles. Twice in coming months she would be taken to the cells beneath the SS barracks of Plaszów for interrogation. They fired questions at her about Amon’s contacts on the black market, who his agents were, how he worked the jewellery shop at Plaszów, the custom tailoring shop, the upholstery works. No one hit her or threatened her. But it was their conviction that she was a member of a gang that tormented her. If Helen had ever thought of an unlikely and glorious salvation, she would not have dared dream that Amon would be arrested by his own people. But she felt her sanity going now in the interrogation room, when under their law they tried to shackle her to Amon.

  Chilowicz might have been able to help you, she told them. But Chilowicz is dead.

  They were policemen by trade, and after a time would decide she could give them nothing except a little information about the sumptuous cuisine at the villa Goeth. They could have asked her about her scars, but they knew they couldn’t get Amon on grounds of sadism. Investigating sadism in the camp at Sachsenhausen, they’d been forced off the premises by armed guards. In Buchenwald they had found a material witness, an NCO, to testify against the commandant, but the informer had been found dead in his cell. The head of that SS investigating team ordered samples of a poison found in the NCO’s stomach to be administered to four Russian prisoners. He watched them die, and so had his proof against the commandant and camp doctor. Even though he got prosecutions for murder and sadistic practice, it was a strange justice. Above all, it made the camp personnel close ranks and dispose of living evidence. So the men of Bureau V did not question Helen about her injuries. They stuck to embezzlement, and in the end stopped troubling her.

  They investigated Mietek Pemper too. He was wise enough not to tell them much about Amon, certainly not about his crimes against humans. He knew little but rumours of Amon’s frauds. He played the neutral and well-mannered typist of non-classified material. “The Herr Commandant would never discuss such matters with me,” he pleaded continuously. But beneath his performance, he too must have suffered the same howling disbelief as Helen Hirsch. If there was one event most likely to guarantee him a chance of life, it was Amon’s arrest. For there had been no more certain limit to his life than this: that when the Russians reached Tarnow, Amon would dictate his last letters and then assassinate the typist. What worried Mietek, therefore, was that they would release Amon too soon.

  But they were not interested solely in the question of Amon’s speculations. The SS judge who questioned Pemper had been told by Oberscharführer Lorenz Landsdorfer that Hauptsturmführer Goeth had let his Jewish stenographer type up the directives and plans to be followed by the Plaszów garrison in the case of an assault on the camp by partisans. Amon, in explaining to Pemper how the typing of these plans should be set out, had even shown him copies of similar plans for other concentration camps. The judge was so alarmed by this disclosure of secret documents to a Jewish prisoner that he ordered Pemper’s arrest.

  Pemper spent two miserable weeks in a cell beneath the SS barracks. He was not beaten, but was questioned regularly by a series of Bureau V investigators and by two SS judges. He thought he could read in their eyes the conclusion that the safest thing was to shoot him. One day during questioning about Plaszów’s emergency plans, Pemper asked his interrogators, “Why keep me here? A prison is a prison. I have a life sentence anyhow.” It was an argument calculated to bring a resolution, either release from the cells or else a bullet. After the session ended, Pemper spent some hours of anxiety until his cell door opened again. He was marched out and returned to his hut in the camp. It was not the last time however that he would be questioned on subjects relating to Commandant Goeth.

  It seemed that, following his arrest, Amon’s juniors did not rush to give him references. They were careful. They waited. Bosch, who’d drunk so much of the commandant’s liquor, told Untersturmführer John that it was dangerous to try to bribe these fixated investigators from Bureau V. As for Amon’s seniors, Scherner was gone, assigned to hunting partisans, and would in the end be killed in an ambush in the forests of Niepolomice. Amon was in the hands of men from Oranienburg who’d never dined at the Goethhaus. Or, if they had, had been either shocked or touched by envy.

  After her release by the SS, Helen Hirsch, now working for the new commandant, Hauptsturmführer Büscher, received a friendly note from Amon asking her to get together a parcel of clothes, some romances and detective novels, and some alcohol to comfort him in his cell. It was, she thought, like a letter from a relative. “Would you kindly gather for me the following,” it said, and ended with, “Hoping to see you again soon.”

  Meanwhile Oskar had been down to the market city of Troppau to see engineer Sussmuth. He’d brought along drink and diamonds, but they weren’t needed in this case. Sussmuth told Oskar that he had already proposed that some small Jewish work camps be set up in the border towns of Moravia to turn out goods for the Armaments Inspectorate. Such camps would of course be under the central control of either Auschwitz or Gröss-Rosen, for the areas of influence of the big concentration camps crossed the Polish-Czechoslovak border. But there was more safety for prisoners in little work camps than could be found in the grand necropolis of Auschwitz itself. Sussmuth had got nowhere, of course. The Castle at Liberec had trampled on the proposal. He had never had a lever. Oskar – the support Oskar had from Lange and the gentlemen of the Evacuation Board – that could be the lever.

  Sussmuth had in his office a list of premises suitable to receive plant evacuated from the war zone. Near Oskar’s home town of Zwittau, on the edge of a village called Brinnlitz, was a great textile plant owned by the Viennese brothe
rs Hoffman. They’d been in butter and cheese in their home city, but had come to the Sudetenland behind the legions (just as Oskar had gone to Cracow) and become textile magnates. An entire annexe of their plant lay idle, used as a storehouse for obsolete spinning machines. A site like that was served from the rail depot at Zwittau, where Schindler’s brother-in-law was in charge of the goods yard. And a loop ran close to the gates. The brothers are profiteers, said Sussmuth smiling. They have some local party backing – the County Council and the District Leader are in their pockets. But you have Colonel Lange behind you. I will write to Berlin at once, Sussmuth promised, and recommend the use of the Hoffman annexe.

  Oskar knew the Germanic village of Brinnlitz from his childhood. Its racial character was in its name, since the Czechs would have called it Brnenec, just as a Czech Zwittau would have become Zvitavy. The Brinnlitz citizens would not fancy a thousand or more Jews in their neighbourhood. The Zwittau people, from whom some of Hoffman’s workers were recruited, would not like it either, this contamination, so late in the war, of their rustic-industrial backwater.

  In any case, Oskar drove down to take a quick look at the site. He did not approach Hoffman Brothers’ front office, since that would give the tougher Hoffman brother, the one who chaired the company, too much warning. But he was able to wander into the annexe without being challenged. It was an old-fashioned two storey industrial barracks built around a courtyard. The ground floor was high-ceilinged and full of old machines and crates of wool. The upper floor must have been intended as offices and for lighter equipment. Its floor would not stand the weight of the big pressing machines. Downstairs would do for the new workshops of DEF, as offices and, in one corner, the Herr Direktor’s apartment. Upstairs would be barracks for the prisoners.

  He was delighted with the place. He drove back to Cracow yearning to get started, to spend the necessary money, to talk to Madritsch again. For Sussmuth could find a place for Madritsch too – perhaps even floor space in Brinnlitz.

  When he got back, he found that an Allied bomber, shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter, had crashed on the two end barracks in the backyard prison. Its blackened fuselage sat crookedly across the wreckage of the flattened huts. Only a small squad of prisoners had been left behind in Emalia to wind up production and maintain the plant. They had seen it come down, flaming. There had been two men inside it and their bodies had been burned. The Luftwaffe people who came to take them away had told Adam Garde that the bomber was a Stirling and that the men were Australian. One who was holding the charred remnants of an English Bible must have crashed with it in his hand. Two others had parachuted in the suburbs. One had been found, dead of wounds, in his harness. The partisans had got to the other one first and were hiding him somewhere. What these Australians had been doing was dropping supplies to the partisans in the primaeval forest east of Cracow.

  If Oskar had wanted some sort of confirmation, this was it. That men should come all this way from unimaginable little towns in Australia to hasten the end in Cracow. He put a call through at once to the official in charge of rolling stock in the office of Ostbahn president Gerteis and invited him to dinner to talk about DEF’s potential need of flat wagons.

  A week after Oskar spoke to Sussmuth, the gentlemen of the Berlin Armaments Board instructed the Governor of Moravia that Oskar’s armaments company was to be allocated the annexe of Hoffman’s spinning mills in Brinnlitz. The Governor’s bureaucrats could do nothing more, Sussmuth told Oskar by telephone, than slow down the paperwork. But Hoffman and other Party men in the Zwittau area were already conferring and passing resolutions against Oskar’s intrusion into Moravia. The Party Kreisleiter (district officer) in Zwittau wrote to Berlin complaining that Jewish prisoners from Poland would be a peril to the health of Moravian Germans. Spotted fever would very likely appear in the region for the first time in modern history, and Oskar’s small armaments works, of doubtful value to the war effort, would also attract Allied bombers, with resultant damage to the important Hoffman mills. The population of Jewish criminals in the proposed Schindler camp would outweigh the small and decent population of Brinnlitz and be a cancer on the honest flank of Zwittau.

  A protest of that kind didn’t have a chance, since it went straight to the office of Erich Lange in Berlin. Appeals to Troppau were quashed by honest Sussmuth. Nonetheless the posters went up on walls in Oskar’s home town. Keep the Jewish Criminals Out.

  And Oskar was paying. He was paying the Evacuation Committee in Cracow to help them speed up the permits for the transfer of his machinery. The Department of the Economy in Cracow had to be encouraged to provide the clearances of bank holdings. Currency wasn’t favoured these days, so he paid in goods – in kilos of tea, in pairs of leather shoes, in carpets, in coffee, in canned fish. He spent his afternoons in the little streets off the market square of Cracow haggling at staggering prices for whatever the bureaucrats desired. Otherwise, he was sure, they would keep him waiting until his last Jew had gone to Auschwitz.

  It was Sussmuth who told him that people from Zwittau were writing to the Armaments Inspectorate accusing Oskar of black-marketeering. If they’re writing to me, said Sussmuth, you can bet the same letters are going to the police chief of Moravia, Obersturmführer Otto Rasch. You should introduce yourself to Rasch and show him what a charming fellow you are.

  Oskar had known Rasch when he was SS police chief of Katowice. Rasch was, by happy chance, a friend of the Chairman of Ferrum AG at Sosnowiec, from whom Oskar had purchased his steel. But in rushing down to Brno to head off informers, Oskar didn’t rely on anything as flimsy as mutual friendships. He took a diamond cut in the brilliant fashion which, somehow, he introduced into the meeting. When it crossed the table and ended on Rasch’s side of the desk, it secured Oskar’s Brno front.

  Oskar later estimated that he spent a hundred thousand Reichsmarks – nearly forty thousand dollars – to grease the transfer to Brinnlitz. Few of his survivors would ever find the figure unlikely, though there were those who shook their heads and said, “No, more! It would have had to be more than that.”

  Oskar had drawn up what he called a preparatory list and delivered it to the Administration Block. There were more than a thousand names on it – the names of all the prisoners of the backyard prison camp of Emalia, as well as new names. Helen Hirsch’s name was freshly on the list, and Amon was not there to argue about it.

  The list would expand if Madritsch agreed to go to Moravia with Oskar. So Oskar kept working on Titsch, his ally at Julius Madritsch’s ear. Those Madritsch prisoners who were closest to Titsch knew the list was under compilation, that they could have access to it. Titsch told them without any ambiguity: You must get on it. In all the reams of Plaszów paperwork, Oskar’s dozen pages of names were the only pages with a connection to the future.

  But Madritsch still could not decide whether he wanted an alliance with Oskar, whether he would add his three thousand to the total.

  There is again a haziness suitable to a legend about the precise chronology of Oskar’s list. The haziness doesn’t attach to the existence of the list – a copy can be seen today in the archives of the Yad Vashem. There is no uncertainty about the names thought up – as we shall see – by Oskar and Titsch at the last minute and attached to the end of the official paper. The names on the list are definite. But the circumstances encourage legends. The problem is that the list is remembered with an intensity which, by its very heat, blurs. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf.

  Some of those whose names appeared on the list say that there was a party at Goeth’s villa, a reunion of SS men and entrepreneurs to celebrate the times they’d had there. Some even believe that Goeth was there, but since the SS did not release on bail that was impossible. Others believe that the party was held at Oskar’s own apartment above his factory. Oskar had for more than two years given excellent parties there. One Emalia prisoner remembers the early hours of 1944 when he was on watch d
uty on the factory floor and Oskar had wandered down from his apartment at one o’clock, escaping the noise upstairs and bringing with him two cakes, two hundred cigarettes and a bottle for his friend the watchman.

  At the Plaszów graduation party, wherever it took place, the guests included Dr Blancke, Bosch, and – by some reports – Oberführer Scherner, on vacation from his partisan-hunting. Madritsch was also there, and Titsch. Titsch would later say that at it Madritsch told Oskar for the first time that he would not be going to Moravia with him. “I’ve done everything I can for the Jews,” Madritsch told him. It was a reasonable claim; he would not be persuaded, although he said Titsch had been at him for days.

  Madritsch was a just man. Later he would be honoured as such. He simply did not believe that Moravia would work. If he had, the indications are that he would have attempted it.

  What else is known about the party is that an urgency operated there, because the Schindler list had to be in that evening. This is an element in all the versions of the story survivors tell. The survivors could only tell and expand upon it if they had heard it in the first place from Oskar, a man with a taste for embellishing a story. But in the early 1960s, Titsch himself attested to the substantial truth of this one. Perhaps the new and temporary commandant of Plaszów, a Hauptsturmführer Büscher, had said to Oskar, Enough fooling around, Oskar! We have to finalise the paperwork and the transportation. Perhaps there was some other form of deadline imposed by the Ostbahn, by the availability of transport.