The party were without their own transport, but a train ran south in the direction of Kaplice, and they caught it, dressed still in their stripes. Heuberger says that they took the train “as far as the forest, and then walked”. Somewhere in that forested border region, well to the north of Linz, they could expect to encounter the Americans.
They were hiking down a wooded road when they met two young Americans sitting by a machine gun. One of Oskar’s prisoners began to speak with them in English. “Our orders are not to let anyone pass on this road,” one of them said.
“Is it forbidden to circle round through the woods?” asked Oskar.
The boy chewed. This strange chewing race!
“Guess not,” said the GI at last.
So they swung through the woods and, back on the road half an hour later, ran into an infantry company marching north in double column. Through the English speaker once more, they began to talk to the unit’s forward scouts. The commanding officer himself drew up in a jeep, dismounted, interrogated them. They were frank with him, telling him that Oskar was the Herr Direktor, that they were Jews. They believed they were on safe ground, for they knew from the BBC that the US army included many Americans of both German and Jewish origin. “Don’t move,” said the captain. He drove away without explanation, leaving them in the half embarrassed command of the young infantry men, who offered them cigarettes, the Virginia kind, which had that almost glossy look – like the jeep, the uniforms, the equipment – of coming from a grand, brash, unfettered and un-ersatz manufactory.
Though Emilie and the prisoners were uneasy that Oskar might be arrested, he himself sat on the grass without seeming concerned and took in the spring scene in these high woods. He had his Hebrew letter, and New York, he knew, was ethnically a city where Hebrew was not unknown. Half an hour passed and some soldiers appeared, coming down the road in an informal bunch, not strung out in the infantry manner. They were a group of Jewish infantrymen and included a field rabbi. They were very effusive. They embraced all the party, Emilie and Oskar as well. For these, the party was told, were the first concentration camp survivors the battalion had met.
When the greetings were over, Oskar brought out his Hebrew reference, and the rabbi read it and began to weep. He relayed the details to the other Americans. There was more applause, more handshaking, more embraces. The young GIs seemed so open, so loud, so childlike. Though one or two generations out of Central Europe, they had been so marked by America that the Schindlers and the prisoners looked at them with as much amazement as was returned.
The result was that the Schindler party spent two days on the Austrian frontier as guests of the regimental commander and the rabbi. They drank excellent coffee, such as the authentic prisoners in the group had not tasted since before the founding of the ghetto. They ate opulently.
After two days, the rabbi presented them with a captured ambulance in which they drove to the ruined city of Linz in Upper Austria.
On the second day of peace in Brinnlitz, the Russians still had not appeared. The commando group worried about the necessity of hanging on to the camp for longer than they had thought they’d have to. One thing they remembered was that the only time they’d seen the SS show fear – apart from the anxiety of Motzek and his colleagues in the past few days – had been when typhus broke out. So they hung typhus signs all over the wire.
Three Czech partisans turned up at the gate in the afternoon and talked through the fence to the men on sentry duty. It’s all over now, they said. You’re free to walk out whenever you want.
When the Russians arrive, said the prison commandos. Until then we’re keeping everyone in.
Their answer exhibited some of the pathology of the prisoner, the suspicion you got after a time that the world beyond the fence was perilous and had to be re-entered by stages. It also showed their canniness. They were not convinced yet that the last German unit had gone.
The Czechs shrugged and went away.
That night, when Poldek Pfefferberg was part of the guard at the main gate, motorcycle engines were heard on the road. They did not pass by as the Panzers had done, but could be heard turning in towards the camp itself. Five cycles marked with the Death’s Head corps symbol of the SS appeared out of the dark and drew up noisily by the front fence. As the SS men – very young, Poldek remembers – switched off their engines, dismounted, and approached the gate, a debate raged among the armed men inside as to whether the visitors ought to be shot out of hand.
The NCO in charge of the motorcycle party seemed to sense a threat. He stood a little way from the wire with his hands extended. They needed petrol, he said. He presumed that being a factory camp they would have some petrol.
Pfefferberg advised, during a muttered dispute, that it was better to supply them and send them packing than to create problems by opening fire. Other elements of their regiment might be in the region, and be drawn by an outburst of gunshots.
So in the end the SS were let through the gate, and some of the prisoners went to the garage for petrol. The SS NCO was careful to convey to the camp commandos – who had put on blue overalls in an attempt to look like informal guards, or at least like German Kapos – that he did not find anything peculiar in the idea of armed prisoners defending their camp from within.
“I hope you realise there’s typhus here,” said Pfefferberg in German, pointing to the signs.
The SS men looked at each other.
“We’ve already lost two dozen people,” said Pfefferberg. “We have another fifty isolated in the cellar.”
This claim seemed to impress the gentlemen of the Death’s Head. They were tired. They were fleeing. That was enough for them. They didn’t want any bacterial perils on top of the others.
When the petrol arrived in carrying cans, they expressed their thanks, bowed, and left through the gate. The prisoners watched them fill their tanks and considerately leave by the wire any cans they could not fit into their sidecars. They put on their gloves, started their engines, and left without too much revving of the motors, careful not to waste their new tankfuls on flourishes. Their clatter faded south-west through the village. For the men at the gate, this polite encounter would be their last with anyone wearing the uniform of Heinrich Himmler’s strange legion.
When on the third day the camp was liberated it was by a single Russian officer. Riding a horse, he emerged through the defile through which the road and the railway siding approached the Brinnlitz gate. As he drew closer it became apparent that the horse was a mere pony, the officer’s thin feet in the stirrups nearly touching the road and his legs bent in comically underneath the animal’s skinny abdomen. He seemed to be bringing to Brinnlitz a personal, hard-won deliverance, for his uniform was worn, the leather strap of his rifle so withered by sweat and winter and campaigning that it had had to be replaced by rope. The reins of the pony were also of rope. The officer was fair-complexioned and, as Russians always look to Poles, immensely alien, immensely familiar.
After a short conversation in hybrid Polish-Russian, the commando at the gate let him in. Around the balconies of the second floor, the rumour of his arrival spread. As he dismounted he was kissed by Mrs Krumholz. He smiled and called, in two languages, for a chair. One of the younger men brought it.
Standing on it to give himself a height advantage which, in relation to most of the prisoners, he did not need, he made what sounded like a standard liberation speech in Russian. Moshe Bejski could catch its gist. They had been liberated by the glorious Soviets. They were free to go to town, to move in the direction of their choosing. For under the Soviets, as in the mythical heaven, there was neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, bond nor free. They were not to take any cheap revenge in the town. Their allies would find their oppressors, and subject them to solemn and appropriate punishment. The fact of their freedom should, to them, outweigh any other consideration.
He got down from his chair and smiled, as if he was saying that now he had finished as a spokesman a
nd was prepared to answer questions. Bejski and some of the others began to speak to him, and he pointed to himself and said in creaky Belorussian Yiddish, the sort you pick up from your grandparents rather than your parents, that he was Jewish.
Now the conversation took on a new intimacy.
“Have you been in Poland?” Bejski asked him.
“Yes,” the officer admitted. “I’ve come from Poland now.”
“Are there any Jews left up there?”
“I saw none.”
Prisoners were crowding round, translating and relaying the conversation to each other.
“Where are you from?” the officer asked Bejski.
“Cracow.”
“I was in Cracow two weeks ago.”
“Auschwitz? What about Auschwitz?”
“I heard that at Auschwitz there are still a few Jews.”
The prisoners grew thoughtful. The Russian made Poland sound like a vacuum now, and if they returned to Cracow they’d rattle round in it bleakly like dried peas in a jar.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” the officer asked.
There were cries for food. He thought he could get them a cartload of bread, and perhaps some horsemeat. It should arrive before dusk. “But you should see what they have in town here,” the officer suggested.
It was a radical idea – that they ought to just go out of the gate and begin shopping in Brinnlitz. For some of them it was still an unimaginable option.
Young men like Pemper and Bejski pursued the officer as he left. If there were no Jews in Poland, there was nowhere to go. They didn’t want him to give them instructions but felt he ought to discuss their quandary with them. The Russian paused in untying the reins of his pony from a railing.
“I don’t know,” he said looking them in the face. “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east – that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” His fingers returned to untying the knot. “They don’t like us anywhere.”
As the Russian officer had urged them, the Brinnlitz prisoners moved out of the gate at last to make their first tentative contact with the outer world. The young were the first to try it. Danka Dresner went out the day after the liberation and climbed the wooded hill behind the camp. Lilies and anemones were beginning to bud, and birds were arriving from Africa. Danka sat on the hill for a while, savouring the day, then rolled down it and lay in the grass at the bottom, inhaling the fragrances and looking at the sky. She was there for so long that her parents presumed she had come to grief in the village, either at the hands of the townspeople or the Russians.
Goldberg left early too, was perhaps the first to go, on his way to pick up his riches from Cracow. He would emigrate, as quickly as he could arrange it, to Brazil.
Most of the older prisoners stayed in camp. The Russians had now moved into Brinnlitz, occupying as an officers’ quarters a villa on a hill above the village. They brought to the camp a butchered horse, which the prisoners ate ravenously, some of them finding it too rich after their diet of bread and vegetables and Emilie Schindler’s porridge.
Lutek Feigenbaum, Janek Dresner and young Sternberg went foraging in town. The village was patrolled by the Czech underground, and Brinnlitz folk of German descent were therefore wary of the liberated prisoners. A grocer indicated to the boys that they were welcome to a bag of sugar he’d been keeping in his storeroom. Young Sternberg found the sugar irresistible, lowering his face to it and swallowing it by the handful. It made him cruelly ill. He discovered therefore what the Schindler group were finding in Nuremberg and Ravensburg – that liberty and the day of plenty had to be approached gradually.
The main purpose of Feigenbaum’s expedition to town had been to get bread. As a member of the Brinnlitz commandos, he was armed with a pistol and a rifle, and when the baker insisted there was no bread, one of the others said to him, “Threaten him with a rifle.” The man, after all, was Sudetendeutsch and in theory had condoned their misery. Feigenbaum pointed the weapon at the baker and moved through the shop into the residence beyond, looking for hidden flour. He found the baker’s wife and two daughters seated in the parlour and huddled in shock. In their terror, they were indistinguishable from any Cracow family during an Aktion. A great shame overwhelmed him. He nodded to the women as if he were on a social visit, and left.
The same shame overtook Mila Pfefferberg on her first visit to the village. As she entered the square, a Czech partisan stopped two Sudeten girls and made them take off their shoes so that Mila, who had only clogs, could select the pair which fitted her best. This sort of dominance made her flush, and she sat on the pavement making her embarrassed choice. The partisan gave the clogs to the Sudeten girl and passed on. Mila then turned in her tracks, ran up behind the girl and gave the shoes back. The Sudetendeutsch, Mila remembers, was not even gracious.
In the evenings, the Russians came to the camp looking for women. Pfefferberg had to put a pistol to the head of a soldier who penetrated the women’s quarters and grabbed Mrs Krumholz. (Mrs Krumholz would for years later chide Pfefferberg, pointing at him and accusing him. “Whatever chance I had of getting off with a younger man, that scoundrel prevented it!”) Three girls were taken away – more or less voluntarily – to a Russian party, and came back after three days and, they claimed, a good time.
The hold of Brinnlitz was a negative one, and within a week the prisoners began to move out. Some, whose families had been consumed, went directly to the West, never wishing to see Poland again. The Bejski boys, using their cloth and vodka to pay their way, travelled to Italy and boarded a Zionist boat to Palestine. The Dresners walked across Moravia and Bohemia and into Germany, where Janek was among the first ten students to enrol in the Bavarian University of Erlangen when it opened later in the year.
Manci Rosner returned to Podgórze, where Henry had agreed to meet her. Henry Rosner himself, liberated from Dachau with Olek, was in a pissoir in Munich one day and saw another client of the place wearing prison-camp stripes. He asked the man where he had been imprisoned. “Brinnlitz,” said the man. Everyone except an old lady, the man told him (inaccurately as it turned out), had survived Brinnlitz. Manci would come to hear of Henry’s survival through a cousin who turned up at the room in Podgórze where she was waiting, waving the Polish newspaper in which were listed the names of Poles liberated from Dachau. “Manci,” said the cousin, “give me a kiss. Henry’s alive and so is Olek.”
Regina Horowitz had a similar rendezvous. It took her three weeks to travel from Brinnlitz to Cracow with her daughter Niusia. She rented a room – the handout from the navy store made that possible – and waited for Dolek. When he arrived, they made enquiries after Richard, but there was no news. One day that summer Regina saw the film of Auschwitz which the Russians had made and were showing free of charge to the Polish population. She saw the famous frames involving the camp children, who looked out from behind the wire or were escorted by nuns past the electrified fence of Auschwitz I. Being so small and so engaging, Richard figured in most of the frames. Regina got up screaming and left the theatre. The manager and a number of passing citizens tried to soothe her in the street. “It’s my son, it’s my son!” she kept screaming. Now that she knew he was alive, she was able to discover that Richard had been released by the Russians into the hands of one of the Jewish rescue organisations. Thinking both his parents dead, the rescue body had had him adopted by some old acquaintances of the Horowitzes, people named Liebling. Regina was given the address, and when she arrived at the Lieblings’ apartment could hear Richard inside, banging on a saucepan and calling, “Today there’ll be soup for everyone!” When she knocked on the door, he called to Mrs Liebling to answer it.
So he was returned to her. But after what he had seen of the scaffolds of Plaszów and Auschwitz, she could never take him to a children’s playground without his growing hysterical at the sight of the swing frames.
From Linz, where Oskar’s group reported to the American authorities and were relie
ved of their unreliable ambulance, the party was taken by truck north to Nuremberg, to a large holding centre for wandering concentration camp prisoners. They were discovering that, as they had suspected, liberation wasn’t a straightforward business.
Richard Rechen had an aunt in Constanz, by the lake on the Swiss border. When the Americans asked the group if there was anywhere they could go, they nominated this aunt. The intent of the eight young prisoners from Brinnlitz was to deliver the Schindlers, if possible, across the Swiss border, in case vengeance against Germany erupted suddenly and, even in the American zone, the Schindlers were unjustly punished. Additionally, as all eight were potential emigrants they believed that such matters would be easier to arrange from Switzerland.
Heuberger recalls that their relationship with the American commandant in Nuremberg was cordial, but the man would not spare them any transport to take them south to Constanz. They made the journey through the Black Forest as best they could, some of it on foot, some of it by train. Near Ravensburg they went to the local prison camp and spoke to the US commandant. Here again they stayed as guests for some days, resting and living high on army rations. In return for the hospitality they sat up late with the commandant, who was of Jewish descent, and told him tales of Amon and Plaszów, of Gröss-Rosen, Auschwitz, Brinnlitz. They hoped he would give them transport to Constanz. He could not spare a truck, but gave them a bus instead, as well as some provisions for the journey. Though Oskar still carried some currency and diamonds worth over a thousand Reichsmarks, the bus does not appear to have been bought but was given freely. After his dealings with the German bureaucrats, it must have been difficult for Oskar to adjust to that sort of transaction.
West of Constanz, on the Swiss border and in the French-occupied zone, they parked the bus in the village of Kreuzlingen. Rechen went to the town hardware store and bought a pair of wire cutters. It seems that the party was still wearing their prison clothes when the wire cutters were frankly purchased by Rechen. Perhaps the man behind the counter was influenced by one of two considerations: (a) this was a prisoner, and if thwarted might call his French protectors; (b) this was in fact a German officer escaping in disguise and perhaps should be helped.
Schindler's Ark Page 42
