Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  By 1943, when Rudolf Höss left Auschwitz to do a stint as Deputy Chief of Section D in Oranienburg, the place was already something more than a camp. It was even more than a wonder of organisation. It was a phenomenon. The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth’s malice – a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporised, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named ‘disinfection cellars’, the above-ground chambers ‘bathhouses’. Oberscharführer Moll, whose task it was to order the insertion of the blue crystals into the roofs of the cellars, the walls of the bathhouses, customarily cried to his assistants, “All right, let’s give them something to chew on.”

  Höss had returned to Auschwitz in May 1944 and presided over the entire camp at the time the Schindler women occupied a barracks in Birkenau, so close to the whimsical Oberscharführer Moll. According to the Schindler mythology, it was Höss himself with whom Oskar wrestled for his three hundred women. Certainly Oskar had telephone conversations and other commerce with Höss. But he also had to deal with Sturmbannführer Fritz Hartjenstein, commandant of Auschwitz II, that is, of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and with Untersturmführer Franz Hössler, the young man in charge – in that great city – of the women’s suburb.

  What is certain is that Oskar now sent a young woman with a suitcase full of drink, ham and diamonds, to make a deal with these functionaries. Some say that Oskar then followed up the girl’s visit in person, taking with him an associate, an influential officer in the SA (the Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troops), Standartenführer Peltze, who, according to what Oskar later told his friends, was a British agent. Others claimed that Oskar stayed away from Auschwitz himself as a matter of strategy and went to Oranienburg instead, and to the Armaments Inspectorate in Berlin, to try to put pressure on Höss and his associates from that end.

  The story as Stern would tell it years later in a public speech in Tel Aviv is as follows. After Oskar’s release from prison, Stern approached Schindler and – “under the pressure of some of my comrades” – begged Oskar to do something decisive about the women ensnared in Auschwitz. During this conference, one of Oskar’s secretaries came in – Stern does not say which one. Schindler considered the girl and pointed to one of his fingers, which sported a large diamond ring. He asked the girl whether she would like this rather hefty piece of jewellery. According to Stern, the girl became very excited. Stern quotes Oskar as saying, “Take the list of the women, pack a suitcase with the best food and drink you can find in my kitchen. Then go to Auschwitz. You know the commandant has a penchant for pretty women. If you bring it off, you’ll get this diamond. And more still.”

  It is a scene, a speech worthy of one of those events in the Old Testament when for the good of the tribe a woman is offered to the invader. It is also a Central European scene, with its gross, coruscating diamonds and its proposed transaction of the flesh.

  According to Stern, the secretary went. When she did not return within two days, Schindler himself – in the company of the obscure Peltze – went to settle the matter.

  According to Schindler mythology, Oskar did send a girlfriend of his to sleep with the commandant – be that Höss, Hartjenstein or Hössler – and leave diamonds on the pillow. While some, like Stern, say it was ‘one of his secretaries’, others nominate a pretty blonde SS girl, ultimately a girlfriend of Oskar and part of the Brinnlitz garrison. But the blonde may have been still at Auschwitz, together with the Schindlerfrauen.

  According to Emilie Schindler herself, the emissary was a girl of twenty-two or twenty-three years. She was a native of Zwittau, and her father was an old friend of the Schindler family. She had recently returned from occupied Russia, where she’d worked as a secretary in the German administration. She was a good friend of Emilie, and volunteered for the task. It is unlikely that Oskar would demand a sexual sacrifice of a friend of the family. Even though he was a brigand in these matters, that side of the story is certainly mythical. We do not know the extent of the girl’s transactions with the officers of Auschwitz. We know only that she approached the dreadful kingdom and dealt courageously.

  Oskar later said that in his own dealings with the rulers of megalopolis Auschwitz, he was offered the old bait. The women have been here some weeks now. They won’t be worth much as labour any more. Why don’t you forget these three hundred? We’ll cut out another three hundred for you, from the endless herd. In 1942, an SS NCO at Prokocim station had pushed the same idea at Oskar. Don’t get stuck on these particular names, Herr Direktor.

  Now as at Prokocim, Oskar pursued his usual line. These are irreplaceable skilled munitions workers. I have trained them myself over a period of years. They represent skills I cannot quickly replace. The names I know, that is, are the names I know.

  A moment, said his tempter. I see listed here a nine-year-old, daughter of one Phila Rath. I see an eleven-year-old, daughter of one Regina Horowitz. Are you telling me that a nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old are skilled munitions workers?

  They polish the 45mm shells, said Oskar. They were selected for their long fingers, which can reach the interior of the shell in a way that is beyond most adults.

  Such conversation backing up the girl who was a friend of the family took place, conducted by Oskar either in person or by telephone. Oskar would relay news of the negotiations to the inner circle of male prisoners, and from them the details were passed on to the men on the workshop floor. Oskar’s claim that he needed children so that the innards of anti-tank shells could be buffed was outrageous nonsense. But he had already used it more than once. An orphan named Anita Lampel had been called to the Appellplatz in Plaszów one night in 1943 to find Oskar arguing with a middle-aged woman, the Alteste of the women’s camp. The Alteste was saying more or less what Höss/Hössler would say later in Auschwitz. You can’t tell me you need a fourteen-year-old for Emalia. You cannot tell me that Commandant Goeth has allowed you to put a fourteen-year-old on your roster for Emalia. (The Alteste was worried of course that if the list of prisoners for Emalia had been doctored, she would be made to pay for it.) That night in 1943, Anita Lampel had listened flabbergasted as Oskar, a man who had never even seen her hands, claimed that he had chosen her for the industrial value of her long fingers and that the Herr Commandant had given his approval.

  Anita Lampel was herself in Auschwitz now, but had grown tall and no longer needed the long-fingered ploy. So it was transferred to the benefit of the daughters of Mrs Horowitz and Mrs Rath.

  Schindler’s contact had been correct in saying that the women had lost nearly all their industrial value. At inspections, young women like Mila Pfefferberg, Helen Hirsch and her sister, could not prevent the cramps of dysentery from bowing and ageing them. Mrs Dresner had lost all appetite, even for the ersatz soup. Danka could not force the mean warmth of it down her mother’s throat. It meant that she would soon become a ‘Mussulman’. The term was camp jargon, based on people’s memory of newsreels of famine in Muslim countries, for a prisoner who had crossed the borderline that separated the ravenous living from the good-as-dead.

  Clara Sternberg, in her early forties, was isolated from the main Schindler group in what could be described as a ‘Mussulman’ hut. Here, each morning, the dying women were lined up in front of the door and a selection was made. Sometimes it was Mengele leaning towards you. Of the five hundred women in this new group of Clara Sternberg’s a hundred might be detailed off on a given morning. On another, fifty. You rouged yourself with Auschwitz clay, you kept a straight back if that could be managed. You choked where you stood rather than cough.

  It was after such an inspection that Clara found herself with no reserves left for the waiting, the daily risk. She had a husband and a teenage son in Brinnlitz, but now they were remoter than the canals of the planet Mars. She could not imagine Brinnlitz, or them in it. She staggered through the women’s camp, looking for the electric wires. When she had first arrived, t
hey’d seemed to be everywhere. Now that they were needed, she could not find them. Each turn took her into another quagmire street, and frustrated her with a view of identically miserable huts. When she saw an acquaintance from Plaszów, a Cracow woman like herself, Clara propped in front of her. “Where’s the electric fence?” Clara asked the woman. In her disarrayed mind, it was a reasonable question to ask, and Clara had no doubt that the friend, if she had any sisterly feeling, would point the exact way to the wires. The answer the woman gave Clara was just as crazed, but it was one that had a fixed point of view, a balance, a perversely sane core.

  “Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.”

  It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had – by her reply – somehow cut her off from suicide as an option.

  Something awful had happened at Brinnlitz. Oskar, the Moravian traveller, was away. He was trading in kitchenware and diamonds, liquor and cigars, all over the province. Some of it was crucial business. Biberstein speaks of the drugs and medical instruments that came into the Krankenstube at Brinnlitz. None of it was standard issue. Oskar must have traded for medicines at the depots of the Wehrmacht, or perhaps in the pharmacy of one of the big hospitals in Brno.

  Whatever the cause of his absence, he was away when an inspector from Gröss-Rosen arrived and walked through the workshop with Untersturmführer Josef Liepold, the new commandant, who was always happy for a chance to intrude inside the factory. The inspector’s orders, originating from Oranienburg, were that subcamps should be scoured for children to be used in Dr Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz. Olek Rosner and his small cousin Richard Horowitz, who’d believed they had no need of a hiding place here, were spotted racing round the annexe, chasing each other upstairs, playing among the disused spinning machines. So also was the son of Dr Leon Gross, who had detected and nursed Amon’s recently developed diabetes, who had helped Dr Blancke with the Health Aktion, and who had other crimes still to answer for. The inspector remarked to Untersturmführer Liepold that these were clearly not essential munitions workers. Liepold – short, dark, not as crazy as Amon – was still a convinced SS officer and did not bother to argue for the brats.

  Further on in the inspection Roman Ginter’s nine-year-old was discovered. Ginter had known Oskar from the time the ghetto was founded and had supplied the metalworks at Plaszów with scrap from Deutsche Email Fabrik. But Untersturmführer Liepold and the inspector did not recognise any special relationships. The Ginter boy was sent under escort to the gate with the other children. Frances Spira’s boy, ten and a half years old, but tall and on the books as fourteen, was working on top of a long ladder that day, polishing the high windows. He survived the raid.

  The orders required the rounding up of the children’s parents as well, possibly because this step would obviate the risk of parents beginning a demented rebellion on the subcamp premises. Therefore, Rosner the violinist, Horowitz and Ginter were arrested. Leon Gross rushed down from the clinic to negotiate with the SS. He was flushed. The effort was to show this inspector from Gröss-Rosen that he was dealing with a really responsible sort of prisoner, a friend of the system. The effort counted for nothing. An SS Unterscharführer armed with an automatic weapon was given the mission of escorting them to Auschwitz.

  The party of fathers and sons travelled from Zwittau as far as Katowice in Upper Silesia by ordinary passenger train. Henry Rosner expected other passengers to be hostile. Instead, one woman walked down the aisle looking defiant and gave Olek and the others a heel of bread and an apple, all the while staring the sergeant in the face, daring him to react. The Unterscharführer was polite to her, however, and nodded formally. Later, when the train stopped at Usti, he left the prisoners under the guard of his assistant and went to the station cafeteria, bringing back biscuits and coffee paid for from his own pocket. He and Rosner and Horowitz got talking. (Regina, Horowitz’s wife, was Rosner’s sister, so there were grounds for friendship there.) The more the Unterscharführer chatted, the less he seemed to belong to that same police force as Amon, Hujar, John, and all those others. I’m taking you to Auschwitz, he said, and then I have to collect some women and bring them back to Brinnlitz.

  So, ironically, the first Brinnlitz men to discover that the women might be let out of Auschwitz were Rosner and Horowitz, themselves on their way there.

  Rosner and Horowitz were ecstatic. They told their sons, This good gentlemen is bringing your mother back to Brinnlitz. Rosner asked the Unterscharführer if he would give a letter to Manci and Horowitz pleaded to be able to write to Regina. The two letters were written on pieces of paper the Unterscharführer gave them, the same stuff the man used to write to his own wife. In his letter, Rosner made arrangements with Manci to meet at an address in Podgórze if they both survived.

  When Rosner and Horowitz had finished writing, the SS man put the letters in his jacket. Where have you been these past years? Rosner wondered. Did you begin as a fire-eater? Did you applaud when the gods on the rostrum screamed, “The Jews are our misfortune!”

  Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry’s arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag his father off to Auschwitz. “To die just because of me,” he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn’t have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them.

  The Unterscharführer leaned over. Surely he had not heard, but there were tears in his eyes. Olek seemed astounded by them – the way another child might be astounded by a cycling circus animal. He stared at the man. What was startling was that they looked like fraternal tears, the tears of a fellow prisoner. “I know what will happen,” said the Unterscharführer. “We’ve lost the war. You’ll get the tattoo. You’ll live through.”

  Henry got the impression that the man was making promises not to the child but to himself, arming himself with an assurance which – in five years’ time perhaps, when he remembered this train journey – he could use to soothe himself.

  On the afternoon of her attempt to find the wires, Clara Sternberg heard the calling of names and the sound of women’s laughter from the direction of the Schindlerfrauen barracks. She crawled from her own damp hut and saw the Schindler women lined up beyond an inner fence of the women’s camp. Some of them were dressed only in blouses and long drawers. Skeleton women, without a chance. But they were chattering like girls. Even the blonde SS girl seemed delighted, for she too would be liberated from Auschwitz if they were. Schindlergruppe, she called, you’re going to the sauna and then to the trains. She seemed to have a sense of the uniqueness of the event.

  Doomed women from the barracks all around looked blankly out through the wire at the celebratory girls. They compelled you to watch, those list women, because they were so suddenly out of balance with the rest of the city. It meant nothing of course. It was an eccentric event, it had no bearing on the majority life, it did not reverse the process nor lighten the smoky air.

  But for Clara Sternberg, the sight was intolerable. As it was also for old Mrs Krumholz, now half dead in the hut assigned to the older women. Mrs Krumholz began to argue with the Dutch Kapo at the door of her barracks. I’m going out to join them, she said. The Dutch Kapo put up a mist of arguments. In the end, she said, You’re better off here. If you go, you’ll die in the cattle wagons. Besides that, I’ll have to explain why you aren’t here. You can tell them, said Mrs Krumholz, that it’s because I’m on the Schindler list. It’s all fixed. The books will balance. There’s no question about it.
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br />   They argued for five minutes and in the process talked of their families, finding out about each other’s origins, perhaps looking for a vulnerable point outside the strict logic of the dispute. It turned out the Dutch woman’s name was also Krumholz. The two of them began discussing the whereabouts of their families. My husband is in Sachsenhausen, I think, said the Dutch Mrs Krumholz. The Cracow Mrs Krumholz said, My husband and grown son have gone somewhere. I think Mauthausen. I’m meant to be in the Schindler camp in Moravia. Those women beyond the fence, that’s where they’re going. They’re not going anywhere, said the Dutch Mrs Krumholz. Believe me. No one goes anywhere, except in one direction. The Cracow Mrs Krumholz said, “They think they’re going somewhere. Please!” For even if the Schindlerfrauen were deluded, Mrs Krumholz from Cracow wanted to share the delusion. The Dutch Kapo understood this and at last opened the door of the barracks, for whatever it was worth.