Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  To P@lasz@ow.

  He and Mila, of course, had had a contingency plan for an impasse like this. If one of them ended up in P@lasz@ow, it would be better for the other to attempt to stay out. He knew that Mila had her gift for unobtrusiveness, a good gift for prisoners; but also she could be racked by extraordinary hunger. He’d be her supplier from the outside. He was sure these things could be managed. It was no easy decision, though—the bemused crowds, barely guarded by the SS, now making for the south gate and the barbed-wire factories of P@lasz@ow were an indication of where most people, probably quite correctly, considered that long-term safety lay.

  The light, though late now, was sharp, as if snow were coming on. Poldek was able to cross the road and enter the empty apartments beyond the pavement. He wondered whether they were in fact empty or full of ghetto dwellers concealed cunningly or naively—those who believed that wherever the SS took you, it led in the end to the extermination chambers.

  Poldek was looking for a first-class hiding place. He came by back passages to the lumberyard on J@ozefi@nska. Lumber was a scarce commodity. There were no great structures of cut timber to hide behind. The place that looked best was behind the iron gates at the yard entrance. Their size and blackness seemed a promise of the coming night. Later he would not be able to believe that he’d chosen them with such enthusiasm.

  He hunched in behind the one that was pushed back against the wall of the abandoned office. Through the crack left between the gate and the gatepost, he could see up J@ozefi@nska in the direction he’d come from. Behind that freezing iron leaf he watched the slice of cold evening, a luminous gray, and pulled his coat across his chest. A man and his wife hurried past, rushing for the gate, dodging among the dropped bundles, the suitcases labeled with futile large letters. KLEINFELD, they proclaimed in the evening light. LEHRER, BAUME, WEINBERG, SMOLAR, STRUS, ROSENTHAL, BIRMAN, ZEITLIN.

  Names against which no receipts would be issued. “Heaps of goods laden with memories,” the young artist Josef Bau had written of such scenes. “Where are my treasures?”

  From beyond this battleground of fallen luggage he could hear the aggressive baying of dogs. Then into J@ozefi@nska Street, striding on the far pavement, came three SS men, one of them dragged along by a canine flurry which proved to be two large police dogs. The dogs hauled their handler into No. 41 J@ozefi@nska, but the other two men waited on the pavement. Poldek had paid most of his attention to the dogs. They looked like a cross between Dalmatians and German shepherds. Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they’d been brought in from some other and harsher ghetto. For even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last assumption was wiped away in the next half-minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack of the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lw@ow or Warsaw, as you thought. It was at the north side of J@ozefi@nska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes, and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman’s howling protest.

  Just as Pfefferberg would think of the pile of bodies in the hospital yard as 60 or 70, he would always testify that the child was two or three years of age.

  Perhaps before she was even dead, certainly before he himself even knew he had moved, as if the decision had came from some mettlesome gland behind his forehead, Pfefferberg gave up the freezing iron gate, since it would not protect him from the dogs, and found himself in the open yard. He adopted at once the military bearing he’d learned in the Polish Army. He emerged from the lumberyard like a man on a ceremonial assignment, and bent and began lifting the bundles of luggage out of the carriageway and heaping them against the walls of the yard. He could hear the three SS men approaching; the dogs’ snarling breath was palpable, and the whole evening was stretched to breaking by the tension in their leashes. When he believed they were some ten paces off, he straightened and permitted himself, playing the biddable Jew of some European background, to notice them. He saw that their boots and riding breeches were splashed with blood, but they were not abashed to appear before other humans dressed that way. The officer in the middle was tallest. He did not look like a murderer; there was a sensitivity to the large face and a subtle line to the mouth.

  Pfefferberg in his shabby suit clicked his cardboard heels in the Polish style and saluted this tall one in the middle. He had no knowledge of SS ranks and did not know what to call the man. “Herr,” he said. “Herr Commandant!”

  It was a term his brain, under threat of its extinction, had thrown forth with electric energy. It proved to be the precise word, for the tall man was Amon Goeth in the full vitality of his afternoon, elated at the day’s progress and as capable of instant and instinctive exercises of power as Poldek Pfefferberg was of instant and instinctive subterfuge.

  “Herr Commandant, I respectfully report to you that I received an order to put all the bundles together to one side of the road so that there will be no obstruction of the thoroughfare.”

  The dogs were craning toward him through their collars. They expected, on the basis of their black training and the rhythm of today’s Aktion, to be let fly at Pfefferberg’s wrist and groin. Their snarls were not simply feral, but full of a frightful confidence in the outcome, and the question was whether the SS man on the Herr Commandant’s left had enough strength to restrain them. Pfefferberg didn’t expect much. He would not be surprised to be buried by dogs and after a time to be delivered from their ravages by a bullet. If the woman hadn’t got away with pleading her motherhood, he stood little chance with stories of bundles, of clearing a street in which human traffic had in any case been abolished.

  But the Commandant was more amused by Pfefferberg than he had been by the mother. Here was a Ghettomensch playing soldier in front of three SS officers and making his report, servile if true, and almost endearing if not. His manner was, above all, a break in style for a victim. Of all today’s doomed, not one other had tried heel-clicking. The Herr Commandant could therefore exercise the kingly right to show irrational and unexpected amusement. His head went back; his long upper lip retracted. It was a broad, honest laugh, and his colleagues smiled and shook their heads at its extent.

  In his excellent baritone,

  Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth said, “We’re

  looking after everything. The last group is leaving the ghetto. Verschwinde!” That is, Disappear, little Polish clicking soldier!

  Pfefferberg began to run, not looking back, and it would not have surprised him if he had been felled from behind. Running, he got to the corner of Wegierska and turned it, past the hospital yard where some hours ago he had been a witness. The dark came down as he neared the gate, and the ghetto’s last familiar alleys faded. In Podg@orze Square, the last official huddle of prisoners stood in a loose cordon of SS men and Ukrainians.

  “I must be the last one out alive,” he told people in that crowd.

  Or if not he it was Wulkan the jeweler and his

  wife and son. Wulkan had been working these past

  months in the Progress factory and, knowing what

  was to happen, had approached Treuh@ander

  Unkelbach with a large diamond concealed for two

  years in the lining of a coat. “Herr

  Unkelbach,” he told the supervisor,

  “I’ll go wherever I’m sent, but my wife

  isn’t up to all that noise and violence.”

  Wulkan and his wife and son would wait at the OD police station under the protection of a Jewish policeman they knew, and then perhaps during the day Herr Unkelbach would come
and convey them bloodlessly to P@lasz@ow.

  Since this morning they had sat in a cubicle in the police station, but it had been as frightful a wait as if they’d stayed in their kitchen, the boy alternately terrified and bored, and his wife continuing to hiss her reproaches. Where is he? Is he going to come at all? These people, these people! Early in the afternoon, Unkelbach did in fact appear, came into the Ordnungsdienst to use the lavatory and have coffee. Wulkan, emerging from the office in which he’d been waiting, saw a Treuh@ander Unkelbach he had never known before: a man in the uniform of an SS NCO, smoking and exchanging animated conversation with another SS man; using one hand to take hungry mouthfuls of coffee, to bite off mouthfuls of smoke, to savage a lump of brown bread while his pistol, still held in the left hand, lay like a resting animal on the police-station counter and dark spatters of blood ran across the breast of his uniform. The eyes he turned to meet Wulkan’s did not see the jeweler. Wulkan knew at once that Unkelbach was not backing out of the deal, he simply did not remember it. The man was drunk, and not on liquor. If Wulkan had called to him, the answer would have been a stare of ecstatic incomprehension. Followed, very likely, by something worse.

  Wulkan gave it up and returned to his wife. She kept saying, “Why don’t you talk to him? I’ll talk to him if he’s still there.” But then she saw the shadow in Wulkan’s eyes and sneaked a look around the edge of the door. Unkelbach was getting ready to leave. She saw the unaccustomed uniform, the blood of small traders and their wives splashed across its front. She uttered a whimper and returned to her seat. Like her husband, she now fell into a well-founded despair, and the waiting became somehow easier. The OD man they knew restored them to the usual pulse of hope and anxiety. He told them that all the OD, apart from Spira’s praetorians, had to be out of the ghetto by 6 P.m. and on the Wieliczka Road to P@lasz@ow. He would see if there was a way of getting the Wulkans into one of the vehicles. After dark had fallen in the wake of Pfefferberg’s passage up Wegierska, after the last party of prisoners had assembled at the gate into Podg@orze Square, while Dr.

  H and his wife were moving eastward in the company and under the cover of a group of rowdy Polish drunks, and while the squads of the Sonderkommando were resting and taking a smoke before the last search of the tenements, two horse-drawn wagons came to the door of the police station. The Wulkan family were hidden by the OD men under cartons of paperwork and bundles of clothing. Symche Spira and his associates were not in sight, were on the job somewhere in the streets, drinking coffee with NCO’S, celebrating their permanence within the system.

  But before the wagons had turned out of the ghetto gate, the Wulkans, flattened to the boards, heard the nearly continuous sound of rifle and small-arms fire from the streets behind them. It meant that Amon Goeth and Willi Haase, Albert Hujar, Horst Pilarzik, and some hundreds of others were bursting into the attic niches, the false ceilings, the crates in cellars, and finding those who all day had maintained a hopeful silence.

  More than 4,000 such people were discovered overnight and executed in the streets. In the next two days their bodies were taken to P@lasz@ow on open-platform trucks and buried in two mass graves in the woods beyond the new camp.

  CHAPTER 22

  We do not know in what condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13, the ghetto’s last and worst day. But by the time his workers returned to him under guard from P@lasz@ow, he was back in the mood for collecting data to pass on to Dr.

  Sedlacek on the dentist’s next visit. He

  found out from the prisoners that

  Zwangsarbeitslager P@lasz@ow—as it was known in SS bureaucratese—was to be no rational kingdom. Goeth had already pursued his passion against engineers by letting the guards beat Zygmunt Gr@unberg into a coma and bring him so late to the clinic up near the women’s camp that his death was assured. From the prisoners who ate their hearty noonday soup at DEF, Oskar heard also that P@lasz@ow was being used not only as a work camp but as a place of execution as well. Though all the camp could hear the executions, some of the prisoners had been witnesses.

  The prisoner M, for example, who had had a prewar decorating business in Cracow.

  In the first days of the camp he was in demand

  to decorate the houses of the SS, the few small

  country villas that flanked the lane on the north

  side of the camp. Like any especially valued

  artisan he had more freedom of movement, and one

  afternoon that spring he had been walking from the villa of

  Untersturmf@uhrer Leo John up the

  track toward the hill called Chujowa

  G@orka, on whose crest stood the Austrian fort. Before he was ready to turn back down the slope to the factory yard, he had to pause to let an Army truck grind past him uphill. M had noticed that beneath its canopy were women under the care of white-coveralled Ukrainian guards. He had hidden between stacks of lumber and got an incomplete view of the women, disembarked and marched inside the fort, refusing to undress. The man yelling the orders in there was the SS man Edmund Sdrojewski. Ukrainian NCO’S marched among the women hitting them with whip handles. M presumed they were Jewish, probably women caught with Aryan papers, brought here from Montelupich prison. Some cried out at the blows, but others were silent, as if to refuse the Ukrainians that much satisfaction. One of them began to intone the Shema Yisroel, and the others took it up. The verses rose vigorously above the mound, as if it had just occurred to the girls—who till yesterday had played straight Aryans—that now the pressure was off, they were freer than anyone to celebrate their tribal difference in the faces of Sdrojewski and the Ukrainians. Then, huddling for modesty and the bite of the spring air, they were all shot. At night the Ukrainians took them away in wheelbarrows and buried them in the woods on the far side of Chujowa G@orka.

  Now living in Vienna, the man does

  not want his real name used.

  People in the camp below had also heard that first execution on the hill now profanely nicknamed “Prick Hill.” Some told themselves that it was partisans being shot up there, intractable Marxists or crazy nationalists. It was another country up there. If you obeyed the ordinances within the wire, you need never visit it. But the more clearheaded of Schindler’s workers, marched up Wieliczka Street past the cable factory and over to Zablocie to work at DEF—THEY knew why prisoners from Montelupich were being shot at the Austrian hill fort, why the SS did not seem alarmed if the truckloads were seen arriving or the noise was heard throughout P@lasz@ow. The reason was that the SS did not look on the prison population as ultimate witnesses. If there had been concern about a time in court, a mass of future testimony, they would have taken the women deeper into the woods. The conclusion to be drawn, Oskar decided, was not that Chujowa G@orka was a separate world from P@lasz@ow, but that all of them, those brought to the mound fort by truck and those behind the wire down the hill, were under sentence. The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out his front door and murdered a prisoner at random, there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on Chujowa G@orka, as a unique event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon’s morning routine. Wearing a shirt and riding breeches and boots on which his orderly had put a high shine, he would emerge on the steps of his temporary villa. (they were renovating a better place for him down at the other end of the camp perimeter.) As the season wore on he would appear without his shirt, for he loved the sun. But for the moment he stood in the clothes in which he had eaten breakfast, a pair of binoculars in one hand and a sniper’s rifle in the other. He would scan the camp area, the work at the quarry, the prisoners pushing or hauling the quarry trucks on the rails which passed by his door. Those glancing up could see the smoke from the cigarette which he held clamped between his lips, the way a man smokes without hands when he is too busy to put down the tools of his trade. Within the first few days of the ca
mp’s life he appeared thus at his front door and shot a prisoner who did not seem to be pushing hard enough at a cart loaded with limestone. No one knew Amon’s precise reason for settling on that prisoner—

  Amon certainly did not have to document his motives. With one blast from the doorstep, the man was plucked from the group of pushing and pulling captives and hurled sideways in the road. The others stopped pushing, of course, their muscles frozen in expectation of a general slaughter. But Amon waved them on, frowning, as if to say that he was pleased for the moment with the standard of work he was getting from them.

  Apart from such excesses with prisoners, Amon was also breaking one of the promises he’d made to the entrepreneurs. Oskar got a telephone call from Madritsch—Madritsch wanted them both to complain. Amon had said he would not interfere in the business of the factories. At least, he was not interfering from within. But he held up shifts by detaining the prison population for hours on the Appellplatz (parade ground) at roll call. Madritsch mentioned a case in which a potato had been found in a given hut, and therefore every prisoner from that barracks had to be publicly flogged in front of the thousands of inmates. It is no fast matter to have a few hundred people drag their pants and underwear down, their shirts or dresses up, and treat each of them to twenty-five lashes. It was Goeth’s rule that the flogged prisoner call out the numbers for the guidance of the Ukrainian orderlies who did the flogging. If the victim lost track of the count, it was to begin again. Commandant Goeth’s roll calls on the Appellplatz were full of just such time-consuming trickery.