Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  A fence now stood between Mrs Krumholz, Mrs Sternberg, and the rest of the Schindler women. It was not an electrified perimeter fence. It was nonetheless built, according to the rulings of Section D, of at least eighteen strands of wire. The strands ran closest together at the top of the fence. Farther down they were stretched in twos, in parallel strands about six inches apart. But between each set of parallels, there was a gap of less than a foot. That day, according to the testimony of witnesses and of the women themselves, both Mrs Krumholz and Mrs Sternberg somehow tore their way through the fence to rejoin the Schindler women in whatever daydream of rescue they were enjoying. Dragging themselves through the perhaps nine inch gap, stretching the wire, ripping their clothes and tearing their flesh on the barbs, they put themselves back in the Schindler squad. No one stopped them because no one believed it possible. To the other women of Auschwitz, it was in any case an irrelevant example. For any other escapee, the breaching of that fence brought you only to another, and then another, and so to the outer voltage of the place. Whereas for Sternberg and Krumholz, this fence was the only one. The clothing they’d brought with them from the ghetto and kept in repair in muddy Plaszów hung now on the wire. Naked and streaked with blood, they ran in among the Schindler women.

  Mrs Rachela Korn, condemned to a hospital hut at the age of forty-four, had also been dragged out of the window of the place by her daughter, who now held her upright in the Schindler column. For her as for the other two, it was a birthday. Everyone in the line seemed to be congratulating them.

  In the washhouse, the Schindler women were barbered. Latvian girls sheared a lice promenade down the length of their skulls and shaved their armpits and pubes. After their shower they were marched naked to a quartermaster’s hut, where the clothes of the dead were issued to them. When they saw themselves shaven and in oddments of clothing, they broke into laughter – the hilarity of the very young. The sight of little Mila Pfefferberg, down to seventy pounds, occupying garments cut for the big-boned and well-fleshed, had them reeling with hilarity. Half dead and dressed in their paint-coded rags, they pranced, modelled, mimed, and giggled like schoolgirls.

  “What’s Schindler going to do with all the old women?” Clara Sternberg heard an SS girl ask a colleague.

  “It’s no one’s business,” the colleague said. “Let him open an old people’s home if he wants.”

  No matter what your expectations, it was always a horrifying thing to go into the trains. Even in cold weather, there was a sense of suffocation. It was compounded by blackness. On entering a wagon, the children always pushed themselves towards any sliver of light. That morning, Niusia Horowitz did that, positioning herself against the far wall at a place where a slat had come loose. When she looked out through the gap, she could see across the railway lines to the wires of the men’s camp. She noticed that there were a straggle of children over there, staring at the train and waving. There seemed to be a very personal insistence to their movements. She thought it strange that one of them resembled her six-year-old brother, who was safe with Schindler. And the boy at his side was a double for their cousin Olek Rosner. Then, of course, she understood. It was Richard. It was Olek.

  She turned and found her mother and pulled at her uniform. Then Regina looked, went through the same cruel cycle of identification and began to wail. The door of the car had been shut by now, they were all packed close in near darkness, and every gesture, every scent of hope or panic, was contagious. All the others took up the wailing too. Manci Rosner, standing near her sister-in-law, eased her away from the opening, looked, saw her son waving, and began keening too.

  The door slid open again and a burly NCO asked in a flat voice who was making all the noise. No one else had any motive to come forward, but Manci and Regina struggled through the crush to present themselves to the man. It’s my child over there, they both said. My boy, said Manci. I want to show him that I’m still alive.

  He ordered them down on to the concourse. When they stood before him, they began to wonder what his purpose was. Your name? he asked Regina.

  She told him and saw him reach behind his back and fumble under his leather belt. She expected to see his hand appear grasping a pistol. What it held however was a letter for her from her husband. He had a similar letter from Henry Rosner, too. He gave a brief summary of the journey he’d made from Brinnlitz with their husbands. Manci suggested he might be willing to let them get down under the car, between the lines, as if to urinate. It was sometimes permitted if trains were long delayed. He consented.

  As soon as Manci was down there under the suspension, she let out the piercing Rosner whistle she had used on the Appellplatz of Plaszów to guide Henry and Olek to her. Olek heard it and began waving. He took Richard’s head and pointed it towards their mothers, peering out between the wheels of the train.

  After a spate of waving, Olek held his arm aloft and pulled back his sleeve to show a tattoo like a varicose scrawl along the flesh of his upper arm. And of course the women waved, nodded, applauded, young Richard also holding up his tattooed arm for applause. Look, the children were saying by their rolled-up sleeves. We have permanence.

  But between the wheels, the women were in a frenzy. What’s happened to them? they asked each other. In God’s name, what are they doing here? They understood that there would be a fuller explanation in the letters. They tore them open and read them, then put them away and went on waving.

  Next, Olek opened his hand and showed that he had a few pellet-like potatoes in his palm. “There,” he called, and Manci could hear him distinctly. “You don’t have to worry about me being hungry.”

  “Where’s your father?” Manci shouted.

  “At work,” said Olek. “He’ll be back from work soon. I’m saving these potatoes for him.”

  Oh God, Manci murmured to her sister-in-law. So much for the food in his hand. Young Richard told it straighter. “Mamushka, Mamushka, Mamushka,” he yelled, “I’m so hungry.”

  But he too held up a few potatoes. He was keeping them for Dolek, he said. Dolek and Rosner the violinist were working at the rock quarry.

  Henry Rosner arrived first. He too stood at the wire, his left arm bared and raised. “The tattoo,” he called in triumph. She could see, though, that he was shivering, sweating and cold at the same time. It had not been a soft life in Plaszów, but he’d been allowed to sleep off in the paint shop the hours of work he’d put in playing Lehar at the villa. Here, in the band which sometimes accompanied the lines marching to the bathhouses, they didn’t play Rosner’s sort of music.

  When Dolek turned up, he was led to the wire by Richard. He could see the pretty, hollow-faced women peering out from the undercarriage. What he and Henry dreaded most was that the women would offer to stay. They could not be with their sons in the male camp. They were in the most hopeful situation in Auschwitz there, hunkered under a train that was certain to move before the day was out. The idea of a clan reunion here was illusory, but the fear of the men at the Birkenau wire was that the women would opt to die for it. Therefore Dolek and Henry talked with a false cheerfulness – like peacetime fathers who’d decided to take the kids up to the Baltic that summer so that the girls could go to Carlsbad on their own. “Look after Niusia,” Dolek kept calling, reminding his wife that they had another child, that she was in the car above Regina’s head.

  At last some merciful siren sounded in the men’s camp. The men and boys now had to leave the wire. Manci and Regina climbed limply back into the train and the door was locked. They were still. Nothing could surprise them any more.

  The train rolled out in the afternoon. There were the usual speculations. Mila Pfefferberg believed that if the destination was not Schindler’s place, half the women crammed in the cars would not live another week. She herself considered she had only days left. The girl Lusia had scarlet fever. Mrs Dresner, tended by Danka but leached by dysentery, seemed to be dying.

  But in Niusia Horowitz’s car, the women saw mountains
and pine trees through the broken slat. Some of them had come to these mountains in their childhood, and to see the distinctive hills even from the floor of these putrid wagons gave them an unwarranted sense of holiday. They shook the girls who sat in the muck staring. “Nearly there,” they promised. But where? Another false arrival would finish them all.

  At cold dawn on the second day, they were ordered out. The locomotive could be heard hissing somewhere in the mist. Beards of dirty ice hung from the understructures of the train, and the air pierced them. But it was not the heavy, acrid air of Auschwitz. It was a rustic siding, somewhere. They marched, their feet numb in clogs, and everybody coughing. Soon they saw ahead of them a large gate and, behind it, a great bulk of masonry from which chimneys rose. In their black, two-dimensional contour, they looked like brothers to the ones left behind in Auschwitz. A party of SS men waited by the gate, clapping their hands against the cold. The group at the gate, the chimneys – it all looked part of that sickening continuum. A girl beside Mila Pfefferberg began to weep. “They’ve brought us all this way to send us up the chimney anyhow.”

  “No,” said Mila, “they wouldn’t waste their time. They could have done all that at Auschwitz.”

  Her optimism was like that of the girl Lusia – she couldn’t tell where it came from.

  As they got closer to the gate, they became aware that Herr Schindler was standing in the midst of the SS men. They could tell at first by his memorable height and bulk. Then they could see his features under the Tyrolean hat which he’d been wearing so much lately to celebrate his return to his home mountains. A short, dark SS officer stood beside him. It was the commandant of Brinnlitz, Untersturmführer Liepold. Oskar had already discovered – the women would discover it soon – that Liepold, unlike his middle-aged garrison, had not yet lost faith in that proposition called The Final Solution. Yet though he was the respected deputy of Sturmbannführer Hassebroeck and the supposed incarnation of authority in this place, it was Oskar who stepped forward as the lines of women stopped. They stared at him. A phenomenon in the mist. Only some of them smiled. Mila Pfefferberg, like others of the girls in the column that morning, remembers that it was an instant of the most basic and devout gratitude, and quite unutterable. Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. “He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.”

  Then Oskar began to talk. It was another of his outrageous speeches, full of dazzling promises. “We knew you were coming,” he said. “They called us from Zwittau. When you go inside the building, you’ll find soup and bread waiting for you.” And then, lightly and with pontifical assurance, he said it. “You have nothing more to worry about. You’re with me now.”

  It was the sort of address against which the Untersturmführer was powerless. Though Liepold was angry at it, Oskar was oblivious. As the Herr Direktor moved with the prisoners into the courtyard, there was nothing Liepold could do to break into that certainty.

  The men knew. They were on the balcony of their dormitory looking down. Sternberg and his son searching for Mrs Clara Sternberg, Feigenbaum senior and young Lutek looking out for Nocha Feigenbaum and her delicate daughter. Juda Dresner and his son Janek, old Mr Jereth, Rabbi Levartov, Ginter, Garde, even Marcel Goldberg, all strained for a sight of their women. Mundek Korn looked not only for his mother and sister but for Lusia the optimist, in whom he’d developed an interest. Bau now fell into a melancholy from which he might never fully emerge. He knew definitively, for the first time, that his mother and wife would not arrive in Brinnlitz. But Wulkan the jeweller, seeing Chaja Wulkan below him in the factory courtyard, knew with astonishment now that there were individuals who intervened and offered astounding rescue.

  Pfefferberg waved at Mila a package he had kept for her arrival – a hank of wool stolen from one of the cases Hoffman had left behind, and a steel needle he had made in the welding department. Frances Spira’s ten-year-old son also looked down from the balcony. To stop himself from calling out, he had jammed his fist into his mouth, since there were so many SS men in the yard.

  The women staggered across the cobbles in their tattered Auschwitz clothes. Their heads were cropped. Some of them were too ill, too hollowed out, to be easily recognised. Yet it was an astounding assembly. It would not surprise anyone to find out later that no such reunion occurred anywhere else in stricken Europe. That there had never been, and would not be, any other Auschwitz rescue like this one.

  The women were then led up into their separate dormitory. There was straw on the floor – no bunks yet. From a large DEF tureen, an SS girl served them the soup Oskar had spoken about at the gate. It was so rich. There were lumps of nutrient in it. In its fragrance, it was the outward sign of the value of the other imponderable promises. “You have nothing more to worry about.”

  But they could not touch their men. The women’s dormitory was for the moment an isolation ward. Even Oskar, on the advice of his medical staff, was concerned about what they might have brought with them from Auschwitz.

  There were however three points at which their isolation could be breached. One was the loose brick above young Moshe Bejski’s bunk. Men would spend the coming nights kneeling on Bejski’s mattress, passing messages through the wall. Likewise, on the factory floor there was a small fanlight which gave into the women’s latrines. Pfefferberg stacked crates there, making a cubicle where a man could sit and call messages. Finally, for early morning and late evening, there was a crowded wire barrier between the men’s balcony and the women’s. The Jereths met there, old Mr Jereth from whose wood the first Emalia barracks had been built; his wife who had needed a refuge from the Aktions in the ghetto. Prisoners used to joke about the exchanges between Mr and Mrs Jereth. “Have your bowels moved today, dear?” Mr Jereth would sombrely ask his wife, fresh from the dysentery-ridden huts of Birkenau.

  On principle, no one wanted to be put in the clinic. In Plaszów it had been a dangerous place where you were made to take Dr Blancke’s terminal benzine treatment. Even here in Brinnlitz, there was always a risk of sudden inspections, of the type that had already taken the boy children. According to the memos of Oranienburg, a labour camp clinic should not have any patients with serious illnesses. It was not meant to be a mercy home. It was there to offer industrial first aid. But whether they wanted it or not, the clinic at Brinnlitz was full of women. The teenage Janka Feigenbaum was put in there, she who had bone cancer and would die in any case, even in the best of places. She had at least come to the best of places left to her. Mrs Dresner was brought in, as were dozens of others who could not eat or keep food down. Two girls as well as Lusia the optimist were suffering from scarlet fever. They could not be kept in the clinic and were put in beds in the cellar, down among the warmth of the boilers. Even in the haze of her cold fever, Lusia was aware of the prodigious warmth of that cellar ward.

  Emilie worked as quiet as a nun in the clinic. Those who were well in Brinnlitz, the men who were disassembling the Hoffman machines and putting them in storehouses down the road, scarcely noticed her. One of them later said that she was just a quiet and submissive wife. The healthy in Brinnlitz stayed hostage to Oskar’s flamboyance, to this great Brinnlitz trick. Even the women who were still standing had their attention taken by the grand, magical, omni-provident Oskar.

  Manci Rosner, for example. A little later in Brinnlitz’s history, Oskar would come to the lathes where she worked the nightshift and hand her Henry’s violin. Somehow, during a journey to see Hassebroeck at Gröss-Rosen, he’d got the time to go into the warehouse there and find the fiddle. It had cost him a hundred Reichsmarks to redeem it. As he handed it to her, he smiled in a way that seemed to promise her the ultimate return of the violinist to go with the violin. “Same instrument,” he murmured. “But – for the moment – different tune.”

  It was hard for Manci, faced by hefty Oskar and the miraculous violin, to see behind the H
err Direktor to the quiet wife. But to the dying, Emilie was more visible. She fed them semolina, which she got God knows where, prepared in her own kitchen, and carried up to the Krankenstube. Dr Alexander Biberstein believed that Mrs Dresner was finished. Emilie spooned the semolina into her for seven days in a row, and the dysentery abated. Mrs Dresner’s case seemed to verify Mila Pfefferberg’s claim that if Oskar had failed to rescue them from Birkenau, most of them would not have lived another week.

  Emilie tended nineteen-year-old Janka Feigenbaum also. Lutek, Janka’s brother, at work on the factory floor, sometimes noticed Emilie moving out of her ground-floor apartment with a canister of soup boiled up in her own kitchen for the dying Janka. “She was dominated by Oskar,” Lutek would say. “As we all were. Yet she was her own woman.”

  When Lutek’s glasses were broken, she arranged for them to be repaired. The prescription lay in some doctor’s surgery in Cracow, had lain there since before the ghetto days. Emilie arranged for someone who was visiting Cracow to fetch the prescription and bring back the glasses made up. Young Lutek considered this more than an average kindness especially in a system that positively desired his myopia, that aimed to take the spectacles off all the Jews of Europe. There are many stories about Oskar providing new glasses for various prisoners. One wonders if some of Emilie’s kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The doctors in the Krankenstube were Hilfstein, Handler, Lewkowicz and Biberstein. They were all concerned about the likelihood of a typhus outbreak. For typhus was not only a hazard to health. It was, by edict, a cause to close down Brinnlitz, to put the infested back in cattle wagons and ship them to die in the Achtung Typhus! barracks of Birkenau. On one of Oskar’s morning visits to the clinic, about a week after the women arrived, Biberstein told him that there were two more possible cases among the women. Headache, fever, malaise, general pains throughout the whole body, all that had begun. Biberstein expected the characteristic typhoid rash to appear within a few days. These two would need to be isolated in a special room.