Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  At the end of Oskar’s list, therefore, Titsch now typed in above the official signatures the names of Madritsch prisoners whose faces he was able to summon up. Almost seventy names were added, written in by Titsch from his own and Oskar’s memories. Among these names were those of the Feigenbaum family, the adolescent daughter who suffered from incurable bone cancer, the teenage son Lutek with his shaky expertise in repairing sewing machines. Now they were all transformed, as Titsch scribbled, into skilled armaments workers. There was singing in the apartment, loud talk and laughter, a fog of cigarette smoke and, in a corner, Oskar and Titsch quizzing each other over people’s names, straining for a clue to the spelling of Polish patronyms.

  In the end, Oskar had to put his hand on Titsch’s wrist. We’re over the limit, he said. They’ll baulk at the number we have already. Titsch continued to strain for names, and tomorrow morning would wake damning himself because one had come to him too late. But now he was at the limit, wrung out by this work. He was blasphemously close to creating people anew just by thinking of them. He did not begrudge doing it. It was what it said of the world – that’s what made the heavy air of Schindler’s apartment so hard for Titsch to breathe.

  The integrity of the list was vulnerable, however, through the personnel clerk, Marcel Goldberg. Büscher, the new commandant, himself could not have cared, within certain numerical limits, who went on the list. Therefore Goldberg had the power to tinker with its edges. It was known to prisoners already that Goldberg would take bribes. The Dresners knew it. Juda Dresner – uncle of red Genia, husband of the Mrs Dresner who’d once been refused a hiding place in a wall, and father of Janek and of young Danka – Juda Dresner knew it. “He paid Goldberg,” the family would simply say to explain how they got on the Schindler list. They never knew what was given. Wulkan the jeweller presumably got himself, his wife, his son on the list in the same manner. Poldek Pfefferberg, one-time trader in black-market rugs, poodles and diamond rings for Oskar, was told about the list by an SS NCO named Hans Schreiber. Schreiber, a young man in his mid-twenties, had as evil a name as any other SS man in Plaszów, but Pfefferberg had become something of a mild favourite of his in the way that was common to relationships – throughout the system – between individual prisoners and SS personnel. It had begun one day when Pfefferberg, as a group leader in his barracks, had had responsibility for window cleaning. Schreiber inspected the glass and found a smudge, and began browbeating Poldek in the style that was often a prelude to execution. Pfefferberg lost his temper and told Schreiber that both of them knew the windows were perfectly polished and if Schreiber wanted a reason to shoot him, he ought to do it without any more delay. The outburst had, in a contradictory way, amused Schreiber, who afterwards used occasionally to stop Pfefferberg and ask him how he and his wife were, and sometimes even gave Poldek an apple for Mila. In the summer of 1944, Poldek had appealed to him dementedly to extricate Mila from a trainload of women being sent from Plaszów to the evil camp at Stutthof on the Baltic. Mila was already in the lines boarding the cattle wagons when Schreiber came waving a piece of paper and calling her name. Another time, a Sunday, he turned up drunk at Pfefferberg’s barracks and, in front of Poldek and a few other prisoners, began to weep for what he called “the dreadful things” he had done in Plaszów. He intended, he said, to expiate them on the Eastern Front. In the end, he would.

  Now he told Poldek that Schindler had a list and that Poldek should do everything he could to get himself on it. Poldek went down to the Administration Block to beg Goldberg to add his and Mila’s names to the list. Schindler had in the past year and a half often visited Poldek in the camp garage and had always promised rescue. Poldek had become such an accomplished welder however that the garage supervisors, who had for their lives’ sake to produce high standard work, would never let him go. Now Goldberg sat with his hand on the list – he had already added his own name to it – and this old friend of Oskar’s, once a frequent guest in the apartment in Straszewskiego, expected to have himself written down for sentiment’s sake. “Do you have any diamonds?” Goldberg asked Pfefferberg.

  “Are you serious?” said Poldek.

  “For this list,” said Goldberg, pressing the pages with his index finger, a man of prodigious and accidental power, “it takes diamonds.”

  Now that the Viennese music lover Hauptsturmführer Goeth was in prison, the Rosner brothers, musicians to the court, were free to work their way on to the list. Dolek Horowitz also, he who had earlier got his wife and children out to Emalia, now persuaded Goldberg to include himself, his wife, his son, his young daughter. Horowitz had always worked in the central warehouse of Plaszów and had managed to put some small treasure away. Now it was paid to Marcel Goldberg.

  Among those included in the list were the Bejski brothers, Uri and Moshe, officially described as machine fitter and draughtsman respectively. Uri had a knowledge of weapons, and Moshe a gift for forging documents. The circumstances of the list are so clouded that it is not possible to say whether they were included for these talents or not.

  Josef Bau, the ceremonious bridegroom, would at some stage be included, but without his knowing it. It suited Goldberg to keep everyone in the dark about the list. Given his nature, it is possible to assume that if Bau made any personal approach to Goldberg it could only have been on the basis that his mother, his wife, himself should all be included. He would not find out until too late that he alone would be listed for Brinnlitz.

  As for Stern, the Herr Direktor had included him from the beginning. Stern was the only father confessor Oskar had ever had and Stern’s suggestions enjoyed a great authority with him. Since October 1st, no Jewish prisoner had been allowed out of Plaszów for any reason at all. At the same time the trusties in the Polish prison had begun to put guards on the barracks to stop Jewish prisoners from trading with the Poles for bread. The price of illegal bread reached a level it would be hard to express in zloty. In the past you could have bought a loaf for your second coat, two hundred and fifty grammes for a clean shirt. Now – as with Goldberg – it took diamonds.

  During the first week of October, Oskar and his squat manager Bankier visited Plaszów for some reason and as usual went to see Stern in the Construction Office. Stern’s desk was down the hallway from Amon’s old office. It was possible to speak more freely here than ever before. Stern told Herr Schindler about the inflated price of rye bread. Oskar turned to Bankier. “Make sure Weichert gets fifty thousand zloty,” murmured Oskar.

  Michael Weichert was the leader of JUS, a welfare organisation permitted by the Germans for the sake of their relationship with the International Red Cross. Though many Jews found his position ambiguous, and though the underground condemned him, he worked within the narrowing limits of his post to provide bread for many prisoners and forged papers for some. He never asked for any cash reward or consideration in kind, and after the war he would be exonerated by an Israeli court on charges of having collaborated with the Germans. He was exactly the right man to contact if you wanted a quantity of food introduced into a camp.

  The conversation of Stern and Oskar rapidly moved on. The fifty thousand zloty were a mere obiter dicta of their talk about the unsettled times and about how Amon might be enjoying his cell in Breslau.

  Later in the week, black-market bread from town was smuggled into the camp hidden underneath cargoes of cloth, coal or scrap iron. Within a day, the price had fallen to its accustomed level.

  It was a nice case of the connivance between Oskar and Stern, and would be followed by other instances.

  THIRTY-TWO

  At least one of the Emalia people crossed off by Goldberg to make room for others – for relatives, Zionists, specialists or payers – would blame Oskar.

  In 1963, the Martin Buber Society would receive a pitiable letter from a New Yorker, a former Emalia prisoner. In Emalia, he said, Oskar had promised deliverance. In return the people had made him wealthy with their labour. Yet some found themselves off the edge of t
he list. This man saw his own omission as a very personal betrayal and – with all the fury of someone who has been made to travel through the flames to pay for another man’s lie – blamed Oskar for all that had happened afterwards, for Gröss-Rosen and for the frightful cliff at Mauthausen from which prisoners were thrown, and last of all for the death march with which the war would end.

  The letter, radiant with just anger, shows most graphically that life on the list was a feasible matter, while life off it was unutterable. But it seems unjust to condemn Oskar for Goldberg’s fiddling with names. The camp authorities would, in the chaos of those last days, sign any list Goldberg gave them as long as it did not exceed too noticeably the eleven hundred prisoners Oskar had been granted. Oskar himself could not police Goldberg by the hour. His own day was spent speaking to bureaucrats, his evenings on buttering them up.

  He had, for example, to receive shipment authorisations for his Hilo machines and metal presses from old friends in the office of General Schindler, some of whom delayed with the paperwork, finding small problems which could finish the idea of Oskar’s salvage of his eleven hundred.

  One of these Inspectorate men had raised the problem that Oskar’s armament machines had come to him by way of the procurement section of the Berlin Inspectorate, and under approval from its licensing section, specifically for use in Poland. Neither of these sections had been notified of the proposed move to Moravia. They would need to be. It could be a month before they gave their authorisation. Oskar did not have a month. Plaszów would be empty by the end of October, everyone would be in Gröss-Rosen or Auschwitz. In the end, the problem was cleared away by the accustomed gifts.

  As well as such preoccupations, Oskar was concerned about the SS investigators who had arrested Amon. He half expected to be arrested or, what was the same thing, heavily interrogated about his relationship with the former commandant. He was wise to anticipate it, for one of the explanations Amon had offered for the eighty thousand Reichsmarks the SS had found among his belongings was, “Oskar Schindler gave it to me so I’d go easy on the Jews.” Oskar therefore had to keep contact with friends of his at Pomorska Street who might be able to tell him the direction Bureau V’s investigation of Amon was taking.

  Finally, since his camp at Brinnlitz would be under the ultimate supervision of KL Gröss-Rosen, he was already dealing with the commandant of Gröss-Rosen, Sturmbannführer Hassebroeck. Under Hassebroeck’s management, a hundred thousand would die in the Gröss-Rosen system, but when Oskar conferred with him on the telephone and drove across into Lower Silesia to meet him, he seemed the least of all Oskar’s worries. Schindler was used by now to meeting charming killers and noticed that Hassebroeck even seemed grateful to him for extending the Gröss-Rosen empire into Moravia. For Hassebroeck did think in terms of empire. He controlled one hundred and three subcamps. (Brinnlitz would make it a hundred and four and – with its more than a thousand inmates and its sophisticated industry – a major addition.) Seventy-eight of Hassebroeck’s camps were located in Poland, sixteen in Czechoslovakia, ten in the Reich. It was much bigger cheese than anything Amon had managed.

  With so much sweetening, cajoling and form-filling to occupy him in the week Plaszów was wound down, Oskar could not have found the time to monitor Goldberg, even if he had had the power. In any case, the account the prisoners give of the camp in its last day and night is one of milling and chaos, Goldberg – Lord of the Lists – at its centre, still holding out for offers.

  Dr Idek Schindel, for example, approached Goldberg to get himself and his two young brothers into Brinnlitz. Goldberg would not give an answer, and Schindel would not find out until the evening of October 15th, when the male prisoners were marshalled for the cattle wagons, that he and his brothers were not listed for the Schindler camp. They joined the line of Schindler people anyway. It is a scene from a cautionary engraving of Judgment Day – the ones without the right mark attempting to creep on to the line of the justified and being spotted by an angel of retribution, in this case Oberscharführer Müller, who came up to the doctor with his whip and slapped him, left cheek, right cheek, left and right again with the leather butt, while asking in an amused voice, “Why would you want to get on that line?”

  Schindel would be made to stay on with the small party involved in liquidating Plaszów and would then travel with a wagonload of sick women to Auschwitz. The women would be placed in a hut in some corner of Birkenau and left to die. Yet most of them, overlooked by camp officials and exempt from the usual regimen of the place, would live. Schindel himself would be sent to Flossenburg and then – with his brothers – on a death march. He would survive by a layer of skin, but the youngest Schindel boy would be shot on the march on the second last day of the war. That is an image of the way the Schindler list, without any malice on Oskar’s side, with adequate malice on Goldberg’s, still tantalises survivors, and tantalised them in those desperate October days.

  Everyone has a story about the list. Henry Rosner lined up with the Schindler people, but an NCO spotted his violin and, knowing that Amon would require music should he be released from prison, sent Rosner back. Rosner then hid his violin under his coat, against his side, tucking the node of the sound-post under his armpit. He lined up again and was let through to the Schindler wagons.

  Rosner had been one of those to whom Oskar had made promises, and so had always been on the list. It was the same with the Jereths, old Mr Jereth of the box factory and Mrs Chaja Jereth, described in the list inexactly and hopefully as a Metallarbeiterin, a metal worker. The Perlmans were also included as old Emalia hands, and the Levartovs as well. In fact, in spite of Goldberg, Oskar got for the great part the people he had asked for, though there may have been some unexpected names among them. A man as worldly as Oskar could not have been amazed to find Goldberg himself among the inhabitants of Brinnlitz.

  But there were more welcome additions than that. Poldek Pfefferberg, for example, accidentally overlooked and rejected by Goldberg for lack of diamonds, let it be known that he wanted to buy vodka – he could pay in clothing or bread. When he acquired the bottle, he got permission to take it down to the orderly building in Jerozolimska where Schreiber was on duty. He gave Schreiber the bottle and pleaded with him to force Goldberg to include Mila and himself. Oskar Schindler, he said, would have written us down if he’d remembered. Poldek had no doubt that he was negotiating for his life. “Yes,” Schreiber agreed, “the two of you must get on it.” It is a human puzzle why men like Schreiber didn’t in such moments ask themselves, If this man and his wife were worth saving, why weren’t the rest?

  The Pfefferbergs would find themselves on the Schindler list when the time came. And so, to their surprise, would Helen Hirsch and the younger sister whose survival had always been Helen’s main concern.

  The men of the Schindler list entrained at the Plaszów siding on a Sunday, October 15th. It would be another full week before the women left. Though the eight hundred were kept separate during the loading of the train and were pushed into goods wagons kept exclusively for Schindler personnel, they were coupled to a train containing thirteen hundred other prisoners all bound for Gröss-Rosen. It seems that some half expected to have to pass through Gröss-Rosen on their way to Schindler’s camp, but many others believed that the journey would be direct. They were prepared to endure a slow trip to Moravia – they accepted that they would be made to spend time stationary at junctions and in sidings. They might wait half a day at a time for traffic with higher priority to pass. The first snow had fallen in the last week and it would be cold. Each prisoner had been issued only three hundred grammes of bread to last the journey, and each wagon had been provided with a single water bucket. For their natural functions, the travellers would have to use a corner of the floor, or if packed too tightly, urinate and defecate where they stood. But in the end, despite all their griefs, they would tumble out at a Schindler establishment. The three hundred women of the list would enter the wagons the following Sunday i
n the same sanguine state of mind.

  Other prisoners noticed that Goldberg travelled as lightly as any of them. He must have had contacts outside Plaszów to hold his diamonds for him. Those who still hoped to influence him on behalf of an uncle, a brother, a sister, allowed him enough space to sit in comfort. The others squatted, their knees pushed into their chins. Dolek Horowitz held the six-year-old Richard in his arms. Henry Rosner made a nest of clothing on the floor for nine-year-old Olek.

  It took three days. Sometimes, at sidings, their breath froze on the walls. Air was always scarce, but when you got a mouthful it was icy and fetid. The train halted at last on the dusk of a comfortless autumn day. The doors were unlocked and passengers were expected to alight as quickly as businessmen with appointments to keep. SS guards ran among them shouting directions and blaming them for smelling. “Take everything off,” the NCOs were roaring. “Everything for disinfection.” They piled their clothing and marched naked into the camp. By six in the evening they stood in naked lines on the Appellplatz of this bitter destination. Snow stood in the surrounding woods, the surface of the Appellplatz was iced. It was not a Schindler camp. It was Gröss-Rosen. Those who had paid Goldberg glared at him, threatening murder, while SS men in overcoats walked along the lines, lashing the behinds of those who openly shivered.

  They kept the men on the Appellplatz all night, for there were no huts available. It was not until mid-morning the next day that they would be put under cover. In speaking of that seventeen hours of exposure, of ineffable cold dragging down on the heart, survivors do not mention any deaths. Perhaps life under the SS, or even at Emalia, had tempered them for a night like this one. Though it was a milder evening than those earlier in the week, it was still murderous enough. Some of them of course were too distracted by the possibility of Brinnlitz to drift away with cold.

  Later, Oskar would meet prisoners who had survived an even longer exposure to cold and frostbite. Certainly elderly Mr Garde, the father of Adam, lived through this night, as did Olek Rosner and Richard Horowitz.