Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  It was a Shabbat, which was apt, because the Brinnlitz people would always remember it as a festival. Early in the morning, about the time Oskar had begun celebrating with Martell cognac in his office and flourishing that insulting telegram from the engineers at Brno, two truckloads of white bread rolled into the courtyard. Some went to the garrison, even to the hungover Liepold sleeping late in his house in the village. That much was necessary to stop the SS from grumbling about the way the Herr Direktor favoured prisoners. The prisoners themselves were issued with three-quarters of a kilo of the bread. They inspected it as they ate and savoured it. There was some speculation about where Oskar had got it. Perhaps it could be partially explained by the good will of the local mill manager, Daubek, the one who turned away while Brinnlitz prisoners filled their trousers with oatmeal. But it was not so much in terms of its history, of what bakery was used and the origins of the white flour, that the bread was discussed that Saturday. It was more in terms of the magic of the event, of the wonder-working.

  Though the day is remembered as jubilant, there was in fact not so much cause for festive feeling. Some time in the past week, a long telegram had been directed from Herr Commandant Hassebroeck of Gröss-Rosen to Liepold of Brinnlitz giving him instructions about the disposal of the population in the event of the Russians drawing near. There was to be a final selection, said Hassebroeck’s telegram. The aged and the halt were to be shot immediately, and the healthy were to be marched out in the direction of Mauthausen.

  Though the prisoners on the factory floor knew nothing of this telegram, they still had an unspecified fear of something like it. All that week there had been rumours that Poles had been brought in to dig mass graves in the woods beyond Brinnlitz. The white bread seemed to have come as an antidote to that rumour, a warranty of all their futures. Yet everyone seemed to know that an era of dangers more subtle than those of the past had begun.

  If Oskar’s factory hands knew nothing of the telegram, neither did Herr Commandant Liepold himself. The cable was delivered first to Mietek Pemper in Liepold’s outer office. Pemper had steamed it open, resealed it and taken the news of its contents straight to Oskar. Schindler stood at his desk reading it, then turned to Mietek. “All right then,” growled Oskar. “We have to say goodbye to Untersturmführer Liepold.”

  For it seemed both to Oskar and to Pemper that Liepold was the only SS man in the garrison capable of obeying such a telegram. The commandant’s deputy was a man in his forties, an SS Oberscharführer called Motzek. While Motzek might be capable of some sort of panic slaughter, to administer the cool murder of thirteen hundred humans was beyond him.

  In the days before his birthday, Oskar made a number of confidential complaints to Hassebroeck about the excessive behaviour of Herr Commandant Liepold. He called on the influential police chief, Rasch, and lodged the same sort of charges against Liepold. He showed both Hassebroeck and Rasch copies of letters he had written to the office of General Glücks in Oranienburg. Oskar was gambling that Hassebroeck would remember Oskar’s past generosities and the promise of future ones, that he would take note of the pressure for Liepold’s removal now being built up by Oskar in Oranienburg and Brno, that he would transfer Liepold without bothering to investigate the Untersturmführer’s behaviour towards the inmates of Brinnlitz.

  It was a characteristic Schindler bid, the Amon-Oskar game of blackjack writ large. All the Brinnlitz men were in the stake, from Hirsch Krischer, Prisoner No. 68821, a forty-eight-year-old car mechanic, to Jarum Kiaf, Prisoner No. 77196, a twenty-seven-year-old unskilled worker and survivor of the Goleszów carriages. And all the Brinnlitz women were counted in as well, from 76201, twenty-nine-year-old metalworker Berta Aftergut, to 76500, thirty-six-year-old Jenta Zwetschenstiel.

  Oskar got fuel for further complaints about Liepold by inviting the commandant to dinner at the apartment inside the works. It was April 27th, the eve of Schindler’s birthday. About 11 p.m. that night, the prisoners at work on the floor of the plant were startled to see a drunken commandant reeling across the factory floor, assisted on his way by a steadier Herr Direktor. In the course of his passage, Liepold attempted to focus on individual workers. He raged, pointing at the great roof beams above the machinery. The Herr Direktor had always kept him off the factory floor, but here he was, the final and punishing authority. You fucking Jews, he was roaring. See that beam, see it! That’s what I’ll hang you from. Every one of you!

  Oskar eased him along, directing him by the shoulder, murmuring at him, That’s right, that’s right. But not tonight, eh? Some other time.

  The next day Oskar called Hassebroeck and others with predictable accusations. The man rages round the factory, drunk, making threats about immediate executions. They’re not labourers! They’re sophisticated technicians engaged on secret weapons, etc., etc. And although Hassebroeck was responsible for the deaths of thousands of quarry workers, although he believed that all Jewish labour should be liquidated when the Russians were close, he did agree that until then Herr Schindler’s factory should be treated as a special case.

  Liepold, said Oskar, kept stating that he’d like at last to go into combat. He’s young, he’s healthy, he’s willing. Well, Hassebroeck told Oskar, we’ll see what can be done.

  Commandant Liepold himself, meanwhile, spent Oskar’s birthday sleeping off the dinner of the night before.

  In his absence, Oskar made an astounding birthday speech. He had been celebrating all day, yet no one remembers his delivery being unsteady. We do not have the text of what he said, but there is another speech, made ten days later, on the evening of May 8th, of which we do have a copy. According to those who listened, both speeches pursued similar lines. Both were, that is, promises of continuing life.

  To call either of them speeches is to demean their effect. What Oskar was instinctively attempting was to adjust reality, to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the SS. Long ago, with stubborn certainty, he’d told a group of shiftworkers, Edith Liebgold among them, that they would last the war. He’d flourished the same gift for prophecy when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on the morning they arrived last November, and told them, “You’re safe now, you’re with me.” It can’t be ignored that in another age and condition, the Herr Direktor could have become a demagogue of the style of Huey Long of Louisiana or John Lang of Australia, whose gift was to convince the listener that they and he were bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil devised by other men.

  Oskar’s birthday speech was delivered in German at night on the workshop floor to the assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the German civilian personnel were present as well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek Pfefferberg felt the short hairs growing back along his lice promenade stand up. He looked around at the mute faces of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and at the SS men with their automatics. They will kill this man, he thought. And then everything will fall apart.

  The speech pursued two main promises. First, the great tyranny was coming to a close. He spoke of the SS men around the walls as if they too were imprisoned and yearned for liberation. Many of them, Oskar explained to the prisoners, had been conscripted from other units and without their consent into the Waffen SS. His second promise was that he would stay at Brinnlitz until the end of the hostilities was announced. “And five minutes longer,” he said. For the prisoners, the speech, like past pronouncements of Oskar’s, promised a future. It stated his vigorous intent that they should not go into graves in the woods. It reminded them of his investment in them, and it enlivened them.

  One can only guess how it bedevilled the SS men who heard it. He had genially insulted their corps. How they protested, or whether they swallowed it, he would learn from their reaction. He had also warned them that he would stay in Brinnlitz at least as long as they would, and that therefore he was a witness.

  But Oskar did not feel as blithe as he sounded. Later he confessed that at the time he was concerned abo
ut actions retreating military units in the Zwittau area might take in regard to Brinnlitz. He was to write, “We were in a panic, because we were afraid of the despairing actions of the SS guards.” It must have been a quiet panic, for no prisoner, eating his white bread on Oskar’s birthday, seems to have caught a whiff of it. Oskar was also concerned about some Vlasov units which had been stationed on the edges of Brinnlitz. These troops were members of the ROA, the Russian Army of Liberation, formed the year before on the authority of Himmler from the vast ranks of Russian prisoners in the Reich and commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, a former Soviet General captured in front of Moscow three years before. They were a dangerous corps for the Brinnlitz people, for they knew Stalin would want them for a special punishment and feared that the Allies would give them back to him. Vlasov units everywhere were therefore in a state of violent Slavic despair, which they stoked with vodka. When they withdrew, seeking the American lines farther west, they might do anything.

  Within two days of Oskar’s birthday speech, a set of movement orders arrived on Liepold’s desk. They announced that Untersturmführer Liepold had been transferred to a Waffen SS infantry battalion near Prague. Though Liepold could not have been delighted with them, he seems to have quietly packed and left. He had often said at dinners at Oskar’s, particularly after the second bottle of red wine, that he would prefer to be in a combat unit. Lately there had been a number of field-rank officers, Wehrmacht and SS, from the retreating forces invited to dinner in the Herr Direktor’s apartment, and their table talk had always been to stir Liepold’s itch to seek combat. He had never been faced with as much evidence as the other guests that the cause was finished.

  It is unlikely that he called Hassebroeck’s office before packing his kit. Telephone communications were not sound, for the Russians had encircled Breslau and were within a walk of Gröss-Rosen itself. But the transfer would not have surprised anyone in Hassebroeck’s office, since Liepold had often made patriotic sounds to them too. So, leaving Oberscharführer Motzek in command of Brinnlitz, Josef Liepold drove off to battle, a hard-liner who had got his wish.

  With Oskar, there was no mute waiting for the close. During the first days of May, he discovered somehow, perhaps even by telephone calls to Brno where lines were still operating, that one of the warehouses with which he regularly dealt had been abandoned. With half a dozen prisoners, he drove off by truck to loot it. There were a number of road blocks on the way south, but at each of them they flashed their dazzling papers, forged, as Oskar would write, with the stamps and signatures “of the highest SS police authorities in Moravia and Bohemia”. When they arrived at the warehouse, they found it encircled by fire. Military storehouses in the neighbourhood had been set alight, and there had been incendiary bombing raids as well. From the direction of the inner city, where the Czechoslovak underground were fighting door to door with the garrison, they could hear firing. Herr Schindler ordered the truck to back into the loading bay of the warehouse, broke the door open and discovered that the interior was full of a brand of cigarettes called Egipski.

  In spite of such light-hearted piracy, Oskar was frightened by rumours from Slovakia that the Russians were uncritically and informally executing German civilians. From listening to the BBC news each night, he was comforted to find that the war might end before any Russian reached the Zwittau area.

  The prisoners also had indirect access to the BBC and knew what the realities were. Throughout the history of Brinnlitz the radio technicians, Zenon Szenwic and Artur Rabner, continuously repaired one or other radio of Oskar’s. In the welding shop, Zenon listened with an earphone to the 2 p.m. news, from the Voice of London. During the nightshift, the welders plugged into the 2 a.m. broadcast. An SS man, in the factory one night to take a message to the office, discovered three of them around the radio. We’ve been working on it for the Herr Direktor, they told the man, and just got it going a minute ago.

  Earlier in the year, prisoners had expected that Moravia would be taken by the Americans. Since Eisenhower had baulked at the Elbe, they now knew that it would be the Russians. The circle of prisoners closest to Oskar were composing a letter in Hebrew, explaining what Oskar’s record was. It might do some good if presented to American forces, with their considerable Jewish component, including field rabbis. Stern, and Oskar himself, therefore considered it vital that the Herr Direktor somehow be got to the Americans. In part, Oskar’s decision was influenced by the characteristic Central European idea of the Russians as barbarians, men of strange religion and uncertain humanity. But apart from that, if some of the reports from the east could be believed, he had grounds for rational fear.

  But he was not debilitated by it. He was awake and in a state of hectic expectation when the news of the German surrender came to him through the BBC in the small hours of May 7th. The war in Europe was to cease at midnight on the following night, the night of Tuesday May 8th. Oskar woke Emilie, and the sleepless Stern was summoned into the office to help the Herr Direktor celebrate. Stern could tell that Oskar now felt confident about the SS garrison, but would have been alarmed if he could have guessed how Oskar’s certitude would be demonstrated that day.

  On the shop floor, the prisoners maintained the usual routines. If anything, they worked better than on other days. Yet, about noon, the Herr Direktor destroyed the pretence of business as usual by piping Churchill’s victory speech by loudspeaker throughout the camp. Lutek Feigenbaum, who could understand English, stood by his machine flabbergasted. For others, the honking and grunting voice of Churchill was the first they’d heard in years of a language they would speak in the New World. The idiosyncratic voice, as familiar in its way as that of the dead Führer, carried to the gates and assailed the watchtowers, but the SS took it soberly. They were no longer turning inwards towards the camp. Their eyes, like Oskar’s, were focused – but far more sharply – on the Russians. According to Hassebroeck’s earlier telegram, they should have been busy in the rich green woods. Instead, clock-watching for midnight, they looked at the black face of the forest, speculating as to whether partisans were there. A fretful Oberscharführer Motzek kept them at their posts, and duty kept them there also. For duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius.

  In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweller named Licht, had been crafting a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box he’d been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. It had been supplied by old Mr Jereth of the box factory.

  It was established – even the Budzyn men, devout Marxists, knew it – that Oskar would have to flee after midnight. The urge to mark that flight with a small ceremony was the preoccupation of the group – Stern, Finder, Garde, the Bejskis, Pemper – close to Oskar. It is remarkable at a time when they were not sure that they themselves would see the peace, that they should worry about going-away presents.

  All that was readily to hand to make a gift with, however, was base metal. It was Mr Jereth who had suggested a source of something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework. Without Oskar, he said, the SS would have the damned stuff anyway. My teeth would be in a heap in some SS warehouse, along with the golden fangs of strangers from Lublin, Lódź and Lwów.

  It was, of course, an appropriate offering and Jereth was insistent. He had the bridgework dragged out by a prisoner who had once had a dental practice in Cracow. Licht the jeweller melted the gold down and by noon on May 8th was engraving a Hebrew inscription on the inner circle of a ring. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheister’s in October 1939. “He who saves a single life, saves the world entire.”

  In one of the factory garages that afternoon, two prisoners were engaged in removing the upholstery from the ceiling and inner doors of Oskar’s Mercedes, inserting small sachets of the Herr Direktor’s diamonds and replacing the leather work without, they h
oped, leaving any bulges. For them too it was a strange day. When they came out of the garage, the sun was setting behind the towers where the Spandaus sat loaded yet weirdly ineffectual. It was as if all the world were waiting for a decisive word.

  Words of that nature seem to have come in the evening. Again, as on his birthday, Oskar instructed the commandant to assemble the prisoners on the factory floor. Again the German engineers and the secretaries, their escape plans already made, were present. Among them stood Ingrid, his old flame. She would not be leaving Brinnlitz in Schindler’s company. She would make her escape with her brother, a young war veteran, lame from a wound. Given that Oskar went to so much trouble to provide his prisoners with trade goods, it is unlikely that he would let an old love like Ingrid leave Brinnlitz without anything to barter for survival. Surely they would meet on friendly terms later, somewhere in the West.

  As at Oskar’s birthday speech, armed guards stood around the great hall. The war had nearly six hours to run and the SS were sworn never to abandon it in any case. Looking at them, the prisoners tried to gauge their states of soul.

  When it was announced that the Herr Direktor would make another address, two women prisoners who had shorthand, Miss Waidmann and Mrs Berger, had each fetched a pencil and prepared to take down what was said. Because it was an ex tempore speech, given by a man who knew he would soon become a fugitive, it was more compelling as spoken than it is on the page in the Waidmann-Berger version. It continued the themes of his birthday address, but it seemed to make them conclusive for both the prisoners and the Germans. It declared the prisoners the inheritors of the new era, it confirmed that everyone else there – the SS, himself, Emilie, Fuchs, Schoenbrun – were now in need of rescue.