Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  Pfefferberg’s greatest coup had been last year, when Governor Frank had withdrawn 100- and 500-z@loty notes from circulation and demanded that existing notes of those denominations be deposited with the Reich Credit Fund. Since a Jew could exchange only 2,000 z@l., it meant that all notes held secretly—in excess of 2,000 and against the regulations—would no longer have any value. Unless you could find someone with Aryan looks and no armband who was willing on your behalf to join the long lines of Poles in front of the Reich Credit Bank.

  Pfefferberg and a young Zionist friend gathered from ghetto residents some hundreds of thousands of z@loty in the proscribed denominations, went off with a suitcase full of notes, and came back with the approved Occupation currency, minus only the bribes they’d had to pay to the Polish Blue Police at the gate.

  That was the sort of policeman Pfefferberg was. Excellent by the standards of Chairman Artur Rosenzweig; deplorable by the standards of Pomorska.

  Oskar visited the ghetto in April—both from curiosity and to speak to a jeweler he had commissioned to make two rings. He found it crammed beyond what he had imagined—two families to a room unless you were lucky enough to know someone in the Judenrat. There was a smell of clogged plumbing, but the women held off typhus by arduous scrubbing and by boiling clothes in courtyards. “Things are changing,” the jeweler confided in Oskar. “The OD have been issued truncheons.” As the administration of the ghetto, like that of all ghettos in Poland, had passed from the control of Governor Frank to that of Gestapo Section 4B, the final authority for all Jewish matters in Cracow was now SS Oberf@uhrer Julian Scherner, a hearty man of somewhere between forty-five and fifty, who in civilian clothes and with his baldness and thick lenses looked like a nondescript bureaucrat. Oskar had met him at German cocktail parties. Scherner talked a great deal—not about the war but about business and investment. He was the sort of functionary who abounded in the middle ranks of the SS, a sport, interested in liquor, women, and confiscated goods. He could sometimes be discovered wearing the smirk of his unexpected power like a childish jam stain in the corner of the mouth. He was always convivial and dependably heartless. Oskar could tell that Scherner favored working the Jews rather than killing them, that he would bend rules for the sake of profit, but that he would fulfill the general drift of SS policy, however that might develop.

  Oskar had remembered the police chief last Christmas, sending him half a dozen bottles of cognac. Now that the man’s power had expanded, he would rate more this year.

  It was because of this shift of power—the SS becoming

  not simply the arm of policy but the makers of it as

  well—that beneath the high June sun the OD was

  taking on a new nature. Oskar, merely

  by driving past the ghetto, became familiar with a

  new figure, a former glazier named Symche

  Spira, the new force in the OD. Spira was of

  Orthodox background and by personal history as

  well as temperament despised the Europeanized

  Jewish liberals who were still found on the

  Judenrat Council. He took his orders not

  from Artur Rosenzweig but from

  Untersturmf@uhrer Brandt and SS

  headquarters across the river. From his conferences with Brandt, he returned to the ghetto with increased knowingness and power. Brandt had asked him to set up and lead a Political Section OD, and he recruited various of his friends for it. Their uniform ceased to be the cap and armband and became instead gray shirt, cavalry breeches, Sam Browne belt, and shiny SS boots.

  Spira’s Political Section would go beyond the demands of grudging cooperation and would be full of venal men, men with complexes, with close-held grudges about the social and intellectual slights they’d received in earlier days from respectable middle-class Jewry.

  Apart from Spira, there were Szymon Spitz and

  Marcel Zellinger, Ignacy Diamond,

  David Gutter the salesman, Forster and

  Gr@uner and Landau. They settled in to a career of extortion and of making out for the SS lists of unsatisfactory or seditious ghetto dwellers.

  Poldek Pfefferberg now wanted to escape the force. There was a rumor that the Gestapo would make all OD men swear an oath to the F@uhrer, after which they would have no grounds for disobedience. Poldek did not want to share a profession with gray-shirted Spira or with Spitz and Zellinger, the makers of lists. He went down the street to the hospital at the corner of Wegierska to speak to a gentle physician named Alexander Biberstein, the official physician to the Judenrat. The doctor’s brother Marek had been that first president of the Council and was presently doing time in mournful Montelupich prison for currency violations and attempting to bribe officials.

  Pfefferberg begged Biberstein to give him a medical certificate so that he could leave the OD. It was difficult, Biberstein said.

  Pfefferberg did not even look sick. It would be impossible for him to feign high blood pressure. Dr. Biberstein instructed him in the symptoms of a bad back. Pfefferberg took to reporting for duty severely stooped and using a cane.

  Spira was outraged. When Pfefferberg had first asked him about leaving the OD, the police chief had pronounced—like a commander of some palace guard --that the only way out was on your shield. Inside the ghetto, Spira and his infantile friends were playing a game of Elite Corps. They were the Foreign Legion; they were the praetorians.

  “We’ll send you to the Gestapo doctor,”

  screamed Spira.

  Biberstein, who had been aware of the shame in young Pfefferberg, had tutored him well. Poldek survived the Gestapo doctor’s inspection and was discharged from the OD as suffering from an ailment likely to inhibit his good performance in crowd control. Spira, saying goodbye to officer Pfefferberg, expressed a contemptuous enmity. The next day, Germany invaded Russia.

  Oskar heard the news illicitly on the BBC and knew that the Madagascar Plan was finished now. It would be years before there were ships for a solution like that. Oskar sensed that the event changed the essence of SS planning, for everywhere now the economists, the engineers, the planners of movements of people, the policemen of every stripe put on the mental habits appropriate not only to a long war, but to a more systematic pursuit of a racially impeccable empire.

  CHAPTER 11

  In an alley off Lipowa, its rear pointing toward the workshop of Schindler’s enamel plant, stood the German Box Factory. Oskar Schindler, always restless and hungry for company, used to stroll over there sometimes and chat with the Treuh@ander, Ernst Kuhnpast, or to the former owner and unofficial manager, Szymon Jereth. Jereth’s Box Factory had become the German Box Factory two years back according to the usual arrangement—no fees being paid, no documents to which he was signatory having been drawn up.

  The injustice of that did not particularly worry Jereth anymore. It had happened to most of the people he knew. What worried him was the ghetto. The fights in the kitchens, the pitiless communality of life there, the stench of bodies, the lice that jumped onto your suit from the greasy jacket of the man whose shoulder you brushed on the stairs. Mrs. Jereth, he told Oskar, was deeply depressed. She’d always been used to nice things; she’d come from a good family in Kleparz, north of Cracow. And when you think, he told Oskar, that with all the pineboard I could build myself a place there. He pointed to the wasteland behind his factory. Workers played football there, vast, hard-running games in plentiful space. Most of it belonged to Oskar’s factory, the rest to a Polish couple named Bielski. But Oskar did not point that out to poor Jereth, or say either that he too had been preoccupied by that vacant space. Oskar was more interested in the implied offer of lumber. You can “alienate” as much pineboard as that? You know, said Jereth, it’s only a matter of paperwork.

  They stood together at Jereth’s office window, considering the wasteland. From the workshop came the sound of hammering and whining power saws. I would hate to lose contact with this place, Jereth told Oskar. I would
hate just to vanish into some labor camp and have to wonder from a distance what the damn fools were doing here. You can understand that, surely, Herr Schindler?

  A man like Jereth could not foresee any deliverance. The German armies seemed to be enjoying limitless success in Russia, and even the BBC was having trouble believing that they were advancing into a fatal salient. The Armament Inspectorate orders for field kitchenware kept turning up on Oskar’s desk, sent on with the compliments of General Julius Schindler scribbled at the bottom of the covering letters, accompanied by the telephoned best wishes of sundry junior officers. Oskar accepted the orders and the congratulations in their own right, but took a contradictory joy from the rash letters his father was writing to him to celebrate their reconciliation. It won’t last, said Schindler senior. The man [Hitler] isn’t meant to last. America will come down on him in the end. And the Russians? My God, did anyone ever take the trouble to point out to the dictator just how many godless barbarians there are over there? Oskar, smiling over the letters, was not troubled by the conflicting pleasures—the commercial exhilaration of the Armaments Inspectorate contracts and the more intimate delight of his father’s subversive letters. Oskar sent Hans a monthly bank draft of 1,000 RM. in honor of filial love and sedition, and for the joy of largesse.

  It was a fast and, still, almost a painless year. Longer hours than Schindler had ever worked, parties at the Cracovia, drinking bouts at the jazz club, visits to the gorgeous Klonowska’s apartment. When the leaves began to fall, he wondered where the year had gone. The impression of vanished time was augmented by the late summer and now by autumn rains earlier than usual. The asymmetric seasons would, by favoring the Soviets, affect the lives of all Europeans. But to Herr Oskar Schindler in Lipowa Street, weather was still simply weather. Then, in the butt end of 1941, Oskar found himself under arrest. Someone—one of the Polish shipping clerks, one of the German technicians in the munitions section, you couldn’t tell—had denounced him, had gone to Pomorska Street and given information. Two plainclothes Gestapo men drove up Lipowa Street one morning and blocked the entrance with their Mercedes as if they intended to bring all commerce at Emalia to an end. Upstairs, facing Oskar, they produced warrants entitling them to take all his business records with them. But they did not seem to have any commercial training. “Exactly what books do you want?” Schindler asked them. “Cashbooks,” said one.

  “Your main ledgers,” said the other.

  It was a relaxed arrest; they chatted to Klonowska while Oskar himself went to get his cash journal and accounts ledger. Oskar was permitted time to scribble down a few names on a pad, supposedly the names of associates with whom Oskar had appointments which must now be cancelled. Klonowska understood, though, that they were a list of people to be approached for help in bailing him out.

  The first name on the list was that of

  Oberf@uhrer Julian Scherner; the

  second, that of Martin Plathe of the Abwehr in Breslau. That would be a long-distance call. The third name belonged to the supervisor of the Ostfaser works, the drunken Army veteran Franz Bosch on whom Schindler had settled quantities of illegal kitchenware. Leaning over Klonowska’s shoulder, over her piled-up flaxen hair, he underlined Bosch’s name. A man of influence, Bosch knew and advised every high official who played the black market in Cracow. And Oskar knew that this arrest had to do with the black market, whose danger was that you could always find officials ready to be bribed, but you could never predict the jealousy of one of your employees.

  The fourth name on the list was that of the German chairman of Ferrum AG of Sosnowiec, the company from which Herr Schindler bought his steel. These names were a comfort to him as the Gestapo Mercedes carried him to Pomorska Street, a kilometer or so west of the Centrum. They were a guarantee that he would not vanish into the system without a trace. He was not, therefore, as defenseless as the 1,000 ghetto dwellers who had been rounded up according to Symche Spira’s lists and marched beneath the frosty stars of Advent to the cattle cars at Prokocim Station. Oskar knew some heavy guns.

  The SS complex in Cracow was an

  immense modern building, humorless, but not as

  portentous as the Montelupich prison. Yet

  even if you disbelieved the rumors of torture

  attached to the place, the building confused the

  arrestee as soon as he entered by its size, its

  Kafkaesque corridors, by the numb threat of the

  departmental names painted on the doors. Here you

  could find the SS Main Office, the headquarters

  of the Order Police, of Kripo, Sipo and

  Gestapo, of SS Economy and Administration,

  of Personnel, of Jewish Affairs, of Race

  and Resettlement, of the SS Court, of

  Operations, of SS Service, of the

  Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom, of the Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans.

  Somewhere in that hive a middle-aged Gestapo man, who seemed to have a more exact knowledge of accountancy than the arresting officers, began interviewing Oskar. The man’s manner was half-amused, like a customs official who finds that a passenger suspected of currency smuggling is really smuggling house plants for an aunt. He told Oskar that all the enterprises involved in war production were under scrutiny. Oskar did not believe it but said nothing. Herr Schindler could understand, the Gestapo man told him, that businesses supplying the war effort had a moral duty to devote all their product to that great enterprise—and to desist from undermining the economy of the Government General by irregular dealings.

  Oskar murmured away in that peculiar rumble of his which could at the same time contain threat and bonhomie. “Do you imply, Herr Wachtmeister, that there are reports that my factory does not fulfill its quotas?”

  “You live very well,” said the man, but with a concessive smile, and as if that were all right, it was acceptable for important industrialists to live well. And anyone who lives well, he pointed out ... well, we have to be sure that his standard of living derives entirely from legitimate contracts.

  Oskar beamed at the Gestapo man. “Whoever gave you my name,” he said, “is a fool and is wasting your time.”

  “Who’s the plant manager of DEF?” asked the Gestapo man, ignoring this.

  “Abraham Bankier.”

  “A Jew?”

  “Of course. The business used to belong to relatives of his.”

  These records might be adequate, said the Gestapo man. But if they wanted more, he presumed Herr Bankier could supply it.

  “You mean you’re going to detain me?” asked Oskar. He began to laugh. “I want to tell you now,” he said, “when Oberf@uhrer Scherner and I are laughing about all this over a drink, I’ll tell him that you treated me with the utmost courtesy.”

  The two who had made the arrest took him to the second floor, where he was searched and permitted to keep cigarettes and 100 z@l. to buy small luxuries. Then he was locked in a bedroom— one of the best they had, Oskar surmised, equipped with a washbasin and toilet and dusty draperies at the barred window—the sort of room they kept dignitaries in while interrogating them. If the dignitary was released, he could not complain about a room like this, any more than he could enthuse over it. And if he was found to be treacherous, seditious, or an economic criminal, then, as if the floor of this room opened like a trapdoor, he’d find himself waiting in an interrogation cell in the basement, sitting motionless and bleeding in one of the series of stalls they called tramways, looking ahead to Montelupich, where prisoners were hanged in their cells. Oskar considered the door. Whoever lays a hand on me, he promised himself, I’ll have him sent to Russia.

  He was bad at waiting. After an hour he knocked at the door from the inside and gave the Waffen SS man who answered 50 z@l. to buy him a bottle of vodka. It was, of course, three times the price of liquor, but that was Oskar’s method. Later in the day, by arrangement between Klonowska and Ingrid, a bag of toiletries, books, and paj
amas arrived. An excellent meal was brought to him with a half-bottle of Hungarian wine, and no one came to disturb him or ask him a question. He presumed that the accountant was still slaving over the Emalia books. He would have enjoyed a radio on which to listen to the BBC news from Russia, the Far East, and the newly combatant United States, and he had the feeling that if he asked his jailers they might bring him one. He hoped the Gestapo had not moved into his apartment on Straszewskiego, to assess the furnishings and Ingrid’s jewelry. But by the time he fell asleep, he’d got to the stage where he was looking forward to facing interrogators.

  In the morning he was brought a good breakfast— herring, cheese, eggs, rolls, coffee—and still no one bothered him. And then the middle-aged SS auditor, holding both the cash journal and the accounts ledger, came to visit him.

  The auditor wished him good morning. He hoped he had had a comfortable night. There had not been time to conduct more than a cursory examination of Herr Schindler’s records, but it had been decided that a gentleman who stood so high in the opinion of so many people influential in the war effort need not be too closely looked at for the moment. We have, said the SS man, received certain telephone calls. ... Oskar was convinced, as he thanked the man, that the acquittal was temporary. He received the ledgers and got his money handed back in full at the reception desk.

  Downstairs, Klonowska was waiting for him, radiant. Her liaison work had yielded this result, Schindler coming forth from the death house in his double-breasted suit and without a scratch. She led him to the Adler, which they had let her park inside the gate. Her ridiculous poodle sat on the back seat.