Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  “The unconditional surrender of Germany,” he said, “has just been announced. After six years of the cruel murder of human beings, victims are being mourned, and Europe is now trying to return to peace and order. I would like to turn to you for unconditional order and discipline – to all of you who together with me have worried through many hard years – in order that you can live through the present and within a few days go back to your destroyed and plundered homes, looking for survivors from your families. You will thus prevent panic, the results of which cannot be foreseen.”

  He did not, of course, mean panic in the prisoners. He meant panic among the garrison, among the men lining the walls. He was inviting the SS to leave, and the prisoners to let them do so. Field Marshal Montgomery, the commander of the Allied land forces, had, he said, proclaimed that one should act in a human way towards the conquered, and everyone – in judging the Germans – had to distinguish between guilt and duty. “The soldiers at the front, as well as the little man who has done his duty everywhere, shall not be responsible for what a group, calling itself German, has done.”

  Schindler was uttering a defence of his countrymen which every prisoner who survived the night would hear reiterated a thousand times in the era to come. Yet if anyone had earned the right to proffer that defence and have it listened to with – at least – tolerance, it was surely Herr Oskar Schindler.

  “The fact that millions among you, your parents, children and brothers, have been liquidated, has been disapproved by thousands of Germans, and even today there are millions of them who do not know the extent of these horrors.” The documents and records found in Dachau and Buchenwald earlier in the year, their details broadcast by the BBC, were the first, said Oskar, that many a German had heard of “this most monstrous destruction”. He therefore begged them once again to act in a humane and just way, to leave justice to those authorised. “If you have to accuse a person, do it in the right place. Because in the new Europe there will be judges, incorruptible judges, who will listen to you.”

  Next he began to speak about his association with the prisoners in the past year. In some ways he sounded almost nostalgic, but he feared as well being judged in a lump with the Goeths and the Hassebroecks.

  “Many of you know the persecutions, the chicanery and obstacles which, in order to keep my workers, I had to overcome through many years. If it was already difficult to defend the small rights of the Polish worker, to maintain work for him and to prevent him from being sent by force to the Reich, to defend the workers’ apartments and their modest property, then the struggle to defend the Jewish workers has often seemed insurmountable.”

  He described some of the difficulties, and thanked them for their help in satisfying the demands of the armaments authorities. In view of the lack of output from Brinnlitz, the thanks may have sounded ironic. But they were not offered in an ironic way. What the Herr Direktor was saying in a quite literal sense was: Thank you for helping me make a fool of the system.

  He went on to appeal for the local people. “If after a few days of staying here, the doors of freedom are opened to you, think of what many of the people in the neighbourhood of the factory have done to help you with additional food and clothing. I have done everything and spent every effort in getting you additional food, and I pledge to do the utmost in the future to protect you and safeguard your daily bread. I shall continue doing everything I can for you until five minutes past midnight.

  “Don’t go into the neighbouring houses to rob and plunder. Prove yourselves worthy of the millions of victims among you and refrain from any individual acts of revenge and terror.”

  He confessed that the prisoners had never been welcome in the area. “The Schindler Jews were taboo in Brinnlitz.” But there were higher concerns than local vengeance. “I entrust your Kapos and foremen to continue keeping up order and continued understanding. Therefore tell your people of it, because this is in the interest of your safety. Thank the mill of Daubek, whose help in getting you food went beyond the realms of possibility. On behalf of you, I shall now thank the brave director Daubek, who has done everything to get food for you.

  “Don’t thank me for your survival. Thank your people who worked day and night to save you from extermination. Thank your fearless Stern and Pemper and a few others, who, thinking of you and worrying about you, especially in Cracow, have faced death every moment. The hour of honour makes it our duty to watch and keep order, as long as we stay here together. I beg of you, even among yourselves, to make nothing but human and just decisions. I wish to thank my personal collaborators for their complete sacrifice in connection with my work.”

  His speech, weaving from issue to issue, exhausting some ideas, returning tangentially to others, reached the centre of its temerity. Oskar turned to the SS garrison and thanked them for resisting the barbarity of their calling. Some prisoners on the floor thought, He’s asked us not to provoke them? What is he doing himself? For the SS was the SS, the corps of Goeth and John and Hujar and Scheidt. There were things an SS man was taught, things he did and saw, which marked the limits of his humanity. Oskar, they felt, was dangerously pushing the limits.

  “I would like,” he said, “to thank the assembled SS guards, who without being asked were ordered from the army and navy into this service. As heads of families, they have realised for a long time the contemptibility and senselessness of their task. They have acted here in an extraordinarily human and correct manner.”

  What the prisoners did not see, aghast if a little exalted by the Herr Direktor’s nerve, was that Oskar was finishing the work he’d begun on the night of his birthday. He was destroying the SS as combatants. For if they stood there and swallowed his version of what was “human and correct”, then there was nothing left to them but to walk away.

  “In the end,” he said, “I request you all to keep a three minute silence, in memory of the countless victims among you who have died in these cruel years.”

  They obeyed him. Oberscharführer Motzek and Helen Hirsch, Lusia (who had come up from the cellar only in the past week) and Schoenbrun, Emilie and Goldberg. Those itching for time to pass, those itching to flee. Keeping silent among the giant Hilo machines at the limit of the noisiest of wars.

  When it was over, the SS left the hall quickly. The prisoners remained. They looked around and wondered if they were at last the possessors. As Oskar and Emilie moved towards their apartment to pack, prisoners waylaid them. Licht’s ring was presented. Oskar spent some time admiring it, he showed the inscription to Emilie and asked Stern for a translation. When he asked where they had got the gold from and discovered it was Jereth’s bridgework, they expected him to laugh – Jereth was among the presentation committee, ready to be teased and already flashing the little points of his stripped teeth. But Oskar became very solemn and slowly placed the ring on his finger. Though nobody quite understood it, it was the instant in which they became themselves again, in which Oskar Schindler became dependent on gifts of theirs.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  In the hours following Oskar’s speech the SS garrison began to desert. Inside the factory, the commandos selected from the Budzyn people and from other elements of the prison population had already been issued with the weapons Oskar had provided. It was hoped to disarm the SS rather than wage a ritual battle with them. It was not wise, as Oskar had explained, to attract any retreating and embittered units to the gate. But unless something as outlandish as a treaty was arrived at, the towers would ultimately have to be stormed with grenades.

  In truth, however, the commandos had only to formalise the disarming described in Oskar’s speech. The guards at the main gate gave up their weapons almost gratefully. On the darkened steps leading up to the SS barracks, Poldek Pfefferberg and a prisoner named Jusek Horn disarmed Commandant Motzek, Pfefferberg putting his finger in the man’s back and Motzek, like any sane man over forty with a home to go to, begging them to spare him. Pfefferberg took the commandant’s pistol and Motzek, after a s
hort detention during which he cried out for the Herr Direktor to save him, was released and began to walk home.

  The towers, about which Uri and the other irregulars must have spent hours of speculation and scheming, were discovered abandoned. Some prisoners, newly armed with the garrison’s weapons, were stationed up there to indicate to anyone who passed that the old order still held sway.

  When midnight came, there were no SS men or women in the camp. Oskar called Bankier to the office and gave him the key to a particular storeroom. It was a naval supply store and had been situated, until the Russian offensive into Silesia, somewhere in the Katowice area. It must have existed to supply the crews of river and canal patrol boats, and Oskar had found out that the Armaments Inspectorate wanted to rent storage space for it in some less threatened area. Oskar got the storage contract – “with the help of some gifts,” he said later. And so eighteen trucks loaded with coat, uniform and underwear fabric, with worsted yarn and wool, as well as with half a million reels of thread and a range of shoes, had entered the Brinnlitz gate and been unloaded and stored. Stern and others would aver that Oskar knew the stores would remain with him at the end of the war and that he intended the material to provide a starting stake for his prisoners. In a later document, Oskar claims the same thing. He had sought the storage contract, he says, “with the intention of supplying my Jewish protégés at the end of the war with clothing . . . Jewish textile experts estimated the value of my clothing store at more than a hundred and fifty thousand US dollars (peace currency).”

  He had in Brinnlitz men capable of making such a judgment – Juda Dresner, for example, who had owned his own textile business in Stradom Street, Cracow; Itzhak Stern, who had worked in a textile company across the road.

  For the ritual passing over of this expensive key to Bankier, Oskar was already dressed in prisoner’s stripes, as was his wife, Emilie. The reversal towards which he’d been working since the early days of DEF was visibly complete. When he appeared in the courtyard to say goodbye, everyone thought it a lightly put on disguise, which would be lightly taken off again once he encountered the Americans. The wearing of the coarse cloth was, however, an act that would never completely be laughed off. He would in a most thorough sense always remain a hostage to Brinnlitz and Emalia.

  Eight prisoners had volunteered to travel with Oskar and Emilie. They were all very young, but they included a couple, Richard and Anka Rechen. The eldest of them was an engineer called Edek Heuberger, but he was still nearly ten years younger than the Schindlers. Later, he would supply the details of their eccentric journey.

  Emilie, Oskar and a driver were meant to occupy the Mercedes. The others would follow in a truck loaded with food, and with cigarettes and drink for bartering. Oskar seemed anxious to be away. One arm of the Russian threat, the Vlasovs, was gone. They had marched out in the past few days. But the other, it was presumed, would be in Brinnlitz by the next morning, or even sooner. From the back seat of the Mercedes, where Emilie and Oskar sat up in their prison uniforms, not, it had to be admitted, much like prisoners, more like bourgeoisie off to a fancy-dress ball – Oskar still rumbled out advice for Stern, orders to Bankier and Salpeter. But you could tell he wanted to be off. Yet when the driver, Dolek Grünhaut, tried to start the Mercedes, the engine was dead. Oskar climbed out of the back seat to look under the bonnet. He was alarmed, a different man from the one who’d given the commanding speech in the factory hall a few hours earlier. What is it? he kept asking. But it was hard for Grünhaut to tell without proper light. It took him a little time to find the fault, for it was not one he expected. Someone, frightened by the idea of Oskar’s departure, had cut the metal leads to the coil.

  Pfefferberg, part of the crowd gathered to wave the Herr Direktor off, rushed to the welding shop, brought back his gear, and went to work. He was sweating and his hands seemed clumsy, for he was rattled by the urgency he could sense in Oskar. Schindler kept looking at the gate as if the Russians might materialise at any second. It was not an improbable fear – others in the courtyard were tormented by the same ironic possibility – if Pfefferberg worked too hard and took too long. But at last the engine caught to Grünhaut’s turning of the key.

  The cut and then re-welded wires ensured one thing; once the engine turned, the Mercedes left, the truck following it. Everyone was too unnerved to make formal goodbyes, but a letter signed by Dr Hilfstein and Stern and Salpeter, attesting to Oskar’s and Emilie’s record, was handed to the Schindlers.

  The Schindler convoy rolled out the gate and, at the road by the siding, turned left towards Havlíčko̊v Brod and towards what was for Oskar the safer end of Europe. There was something nuptial about it: Oskar, who had come to Brinnlitz with so many women, was leaving with his wife. Stern and the others remained standing in the courtyard. After so many promises, they were their own people. The weight and uncertainty of that must now be borne.

  The hiatus lasted three days and had its history and its dangers. Once the SS left, the only representative of the killing machine left in Brinnlitz was a German Kapo who had come from Gröss-Rosen with the Schindler men. He was a man with a murderous record in Gröss-Rosen itself, and had also made enemies in Brinnlitz. A pack of male prisoners now dragged him from his bunk down to the factory hall and enthusiastically and mercilessly hanged him from one of the same beams with which Untersturmführer Liepold had recently threatened the prison population. Some inmates tried to intervene, but the executioners were in a rage and could not be stopped.

  It was an event, this first homicide of the peace, which many Brinnlitz people would forever abhor. They had seen Amon hang poor engineer Krautwirt on the Appellplatz at Plaszów, and this hanging – though for different reasons – sickened them as profoundly. For Amon was Amon and beyond altering. But these hangmen were their brothers.

  When the Kapo ceased his twitching, he was left suspended above the silenced machines. He perplexed people though. He was supposed to gladden them, but he threw doubt. At last some men who had not hanged him cut him down and incinerated him. It exemplified the eccentricity of Brinnlitz that the only body fed into the furnaces which, by decree, should have been employed to burn the Jewish dead, was the corpse of an Aryan.

  The distribution of the goods in the navy store went on throughout the next day. Lengths of worsted material had to be cut from the great bolts of fabric. Moshe Bejski said that each prisoner was given three yards, and a complete set of underwear and some reels of cotton. Some women began that very day to make the suits in which they would travel home. Others kept the fabric intact so that, traded, it would keep them alive in the confused days to come.

  A ration of the Egipski cigarettes which Oskar had plundered from burning Brno was also issued, and each prisoner was given a bottle of vodka from Salpeter’s storehouse. Few would drink it. It was, of course, simply too precious to drink.

  After dark on that second night, a Panzer unit came down the road from the direction of Zwittau. Lutek Feigenbaum, behind a bush near the gate and armed with a rifle, had the urge to fire as soon as the first tank passed within sight of the camp. But he considered it rash. The vehicles rattled and edged past. A gunner in one of the rear tanks in the column, understanding that the fence and the watchtowers meant that Jewish criminals might be lying low in there, swivelled his gun and sent two shells into the camp. One exploded in the courtyard, the other on the women’s balcony. It was a random exhibition of spite and, through wisdom or astonishment, none of the armed prisoners answered it.

  When the last tank had vanished, the men of the commandos could hear mourning from the courtyard and from the women’s dormitory upstairs. A girl had been wounded by shell fragments. She herself was in shock, but the sight of her injuries had released in the women all the barely expressed grief of the past years. While the women keened, the Brinnlitz doctors examined the girl and found that her wounds were superficial.

  Oskar’s party travelled for the first hours of their escape at the tail of a c
olumn of Wehrmacht trucks. At midnight feats of this nature had become feasible, and no one pestered them. Behind them they could hear German engineers dynamiting installations, and occasionally there was the clamour of a distant ambush arranged by the Czech underground. Near the town of Havlíčko̊v Brod they must have fallen behind, being stopped by Czech partisans who stood in the middle of the road. Oskar went on impersonating a prisoner. “These good people and myself are escapees from a labour camp. The SS fled, and the Herr Direktor. This is the Herr Direktor’s car.”

  The Czechs asked them if they had weapons. Heuberger had come from the truck and joined the discussion. He confessed that he had a rifle. All right, said the Czechs, you’d better give us what you have. If the Russians intercepted you and found that you had weapons, they might not understand why. Your defence is your prison clothes.

  In this town, south-east of Prague and on the road to Austria, there was still the likelihood of meeting disgruntled units. The partisans directed Oskar and the others to the Czech Red Cross office in the town square. There they could safely bunk down for the rest of the night.

  But when they reached town, the Red Cross officials suggested to them that, given the uncertainty of the peace, they would probably be safest in the town jail. The vehicles were left in the square, in sight of the Red Cross office, and Oskar, Emilie and their eight companions carried their few pieces of baggage and slept in the unlocked cells of the police station.

  When they returned to the square in the morning, they found that both vehicles had been stripped. All the upholstery had been torn from the interior of the Mercedes, and the diamonds were gone; the tyres had been taken from the truck, and the engines had been plundered. The Czechs were philosophic about it. We all have to expect to lose something in times like these. Perhaps they may have even suspected Oskar, with his fair complexion and his blue eyes, of being a fugitive SS man.