Schindler's List
Page 22
Therefore shifts would arrive hours late at the Madritsch clothing factory inside the P@lasz@ow camp, and an hour later still at Oskar’s place in Lipowa Street. They would arrive shocked, too, unable to concentrate, muttering stories of what Amon or John or Scheidt or some other officer had done that morning. Oskar complained to an engineer he knew at the Armaments Inspectorate. It’s no use complaining to the police chiefs, said the engineer. They’re not involved in the same war we are. What I ought to do, said Oskar, is keep the people on the premises. Make my own camp.
The idea amused the engineer. Where would you put them, old man? he asked. You don’t have much room.
If I can acquire the space, said Oskar,
would you write a supporting letter?
When the engineer agreed, Oskar called an elderly couple named Bielski who lived in Stradom Street. He wondered if they would consider an offer for the land abutting his factory. He drove across the river to see them. They were delighted by his manner. Because he had always been bored by the rituals of haggling, he began by offering them a boom-time price. They gave him tea and, in a state of high excitement, called their lawyer to draw up the papers while Oskar was still on the premises. From their apartment, Oskar drove out, as a courtesy, and told Amon that he intended to make a subcamp of P@lasz@ow in his own factory yard. Amon was quite taken with the idea. “If the SS generals approve,” he said, “you can expect my cooperation. As long as you don’t want my musicians or my maid.”
The next day a full-scale appointment was arranged with Oberf@uhrer Scherner at Pomorska Street. Somehow both Amon and General Scherner knew that Oskar could be made to foot the whole bill for a new camp. They could detect that when Oskar pushed the industrial argument—“I want my workers on the premises so that their labor can be more fully exploited”—he was at the same time pushing some other intimate craze of his in which expense was no question. They thought of him as a good enough fellow who’d been stricken with a form of Jew-love as with a virus. It was a corollary to SS theory that the Jewish genius so pervaded the world, could achieve such magical effects, that Herr Oskar Schindler was to be pitied as much as was a prince turned into a frog. But he would have to pay for his disease.
The requirements of Obergruppenf@uhrer
Friedrich-Wilhelm Kr@uger, police chief
of the Government General and superior of Scherner
and Czurda, were based on the regulations set
down by the Concentration Camp Section of General
Oswald Pohl’s SS Main
Administrative and Economic Office, even
though as yet P@lasz@ow was run independently
of Pohl’s bureau. The basic stipulations for
an SS Forced Labor Subcamp involved the
erection of fences nine feet tall, of
watchtowers at given intervals according to the length of the
camp perimeter, of latrines, barracks, a
clinic, a dental office, a bathhouse and
delousing complex, a barbershop, a food store, a laundry, a barracks office, a guard block of somewhat better construction than the barracks themselves, and all the accessories. What had occurred to Amon, Scherner, and Czurda was that Oskar, as was only proper, would meet the expenses either out of economic motives or because of the cabalistic enchantment he lay under. And even though they would make Oskar pay, his proposal suited them. There was still a ghetto in Tarnow, forty-five miles east, and when it was abolished the population would need to be absorbed into P@lasz@ow. Likewise the thousands of Jews now arriving at P@lasz@ow from the shtetls of southern Poland. A subcamp in Lipowa Street would ease that pressure.
Amon also understood, though he would never say it aloud to the police chiefs, that there would be no need to supply a Lipowa Street camp too precisely with the minimum food requirements as laid down in General Pohl’s directive. Amon—who could hurl thunderbolts from his doorstep without meeting protest, who believed in any case in the official idea that a certain attrition should take place in P@lasz@ow—was already selling a percentage of the prison rations on the open market in Cracow through an agent of his, a Jew named Wilek Chilowicz, who had contacts with factory managements, merchants, and even restaurants in Cracow.
Dr. Alexander Biberstein, now a
P@lasz@ow prisoner himself, found that the daily ration varied between 700 and 1,100 calories. At breakfast a prisoner received a half-liter of black ersatz coffee, tasting of acorns, and a lump of rye bread weighing 175g, an eighth of one of the round loaves collected by barracks mess orderlies each morning at the bakery. Hunger being such a disruptive force, each mess orderly cut up the loaf with his back to the others and called, “Who wants this piece? Who wants this one?” At midday a soup was distributed—carrots, beets, sago substitute. Some days it had a fuller body than on others. Better food came in with the work parties who returned each evening. A small chicken could be carried under a coat, a French roll down a trouser leg. Yet Amon tried to prevent this by having the guards search returning details at dusk in front of the Administration Building. He did not want the work of natural wastage to be frustrated, nor the ideological wind to be taken out of his food dealings through Chilowicz. Since, therefore, he did not indulge his own prisoners, he felt that if Oskar chose to take a thousand Jews, he could indulge them at his own expense, without too regular a supply of bread and beets from the storerooms of P@lasz@ow.
That spring, it was not only the police chiefs
of the Cracow region whom Oskar had to talk
to. He went into his backyard, persuading the
neighbors. Beyond the two shabby huts constructed
of Jereth’s pineboard, he came to the radiator
factory run by Kurt Hoderman. It
employed a horde of Poles and about
100 P@lasz@ow inmates. In the other
direction was Jereth’s box factory,
supervised by the German engineer Kuhnpast. Since the P@lasz@ow people were such a small part of their staff, they didn’t take to the idea with any passion, but they weren’t against it. For Oskar was offering to house their Jews 50 meters from work instead of 5 kilometers.
Next Oskar moved out into the neighborhood
to talk to engineer Schmilewski at the
Wehrmacht garrison office a few streets
away. He employed a squad of P@lasz@ow prisoners. Schmilewski had no objections. His name, with Kuhnpast’s and Hoderman’s, was appended to the application Schindler sent off to Pomorska Street.
SS surveyors visited Emalia and conferred with surveyor Steinhauser, an old friend of Oskar’s from the Armaments Inspectorate. They stood and frowned at the site, as surveyors will, and asked questions about drainage. Oskar had them all into his office upstairs for a morning coffee and a cognac, and then everyone parted amiably. Within a few days the application to establish a Forced Labor Subcamp in the factory backyard was accepted.
That year DEF would enjoy a profit of 15.8 million Reichsmarks. It might be thought that the 300,000 RM. Oskar now spent on building materials for the Emalia camp was a large but not fatal overhead. The truth was though that he was only beginning to pay.
Oskar sent a plea to the Bauleitung, or
Construction Office, of P@lasz@ow for the help
of a young engineer named Adam Garde. Garde was still
working on the barracks of Amon’s camp and, after
leaving instructions for the barracks builders, would be
marched under individual guard from P@lasz@ow
to Lipowa Street to supervise the setting up of
Oskar’s compound. When Garde first turned up in
Zablocie, he found two rudimentary huts
already occupied by close to 400 prisoners. There
was a fence patrolled by an SS squad, but the
inmates told Garde that Oskar did not let the
SS into the encampment or onto the factory
floor, except, of course, when senior
Oskar, they said, kept the small SS
garrison of the Emalia factory well
liquored and happy with their lot. Garde could see that the Emalia prisoners themselves were content between the shrinking fragile boards of their two huts, the men’s and the women’s. Already they called themselves Schindlerjuden, using the term in a mood of cautious self-congratulation, the way a man recovering from a heart attack might describe himself as a lucky beggar.
They’d already dug some primitive latrines, which engineer Garde, much as he approved the impulse behind the work, could smell from the factory entrance. They washed at a pump in the DEF yard.
Oskar asked him to come up to the office and look
at the plans. Six barracks for up to 1,200
people. The cookhouse at this end, the SS barracks
--Oskar was temporarily accommodating the SS in a part of the factory—beyond the wire at the far end. I want a really first-rate shower block and laundry, Oskar told him. I have the welders who can put it together under your direction. Typhus, he growled, half-smiling at Garde. None of us wants typhus. The lice are already biting in P@lasz@ow. We need to be able to boil clothes.
Adam Garde was delighted to go to Lipowa Street each day. Two engineers had already been punished at P@lasz@ow for their diplomas, but at DEF experts were still experts. One morning, as his guard was marching him up Wieliczka Street toward Zablocie, a black limousine materialized, braking hard at their heels. From it emerged Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth. He had that restless look about him.
One prisoner, one guard, he observed.
What does it mean? The Ukrainian begged to inform the Herr Commandant that he had orders to escort this prisoner each morning to Herr Oskar Schindler’s Emalia. They both hoped, Garde and the Ukrainian, that the mention of Oskar’s name would give them immunity. One guard, one prisoner? asked the Commandant again, but he was appeased and got back into his limousine without resolving the matter in any radical way.
Later in the day he approached Wilek
Chilowicz, who besides being his agent was also chief of the Jewish camp police—or “firemen,” as they were called. Symche Spira, recently the Napoleon of the ghetto, still lived there and spent each day supervising the searching out and the digging up of the diamonds, gold, and cash hidden away and unrecorded by people who were now ashes on the pine needles of Bel@zec. In P@lasz@ow, however, Spira had no power, the center of prison power being Chilowicz. No one knew where Chilowicz’ authority came from. Perhaps Willi Kunde had mentioned his name to Amon; perhaps Amon had recognized and liked his style. But all at once, here he was chief of firemen in P@lasz@ow, hander-out of the caps and armbands of authority in that debased kingdom and, like Symche, limited enough in imagination to equate his power with that of tsars.
Goeth approached Chilowicz and said that he had better send Adam Garde to Schindler full-time and get it over with. We have engineers to burn, said Goeth with distaste. He meant that engineering had been a soft option for Jews who weren’t allowed into the medical faculties of the Polish universities. First, though, said Amon, before he goes to Emalia, he has to finish the work on my conservatory.
This news came to Adam Garde in his barracks, at his place in the four-tiered bunks of Hut 21. He would be delivered to Zablocie at the end of a trial. He would be building at Goeth’s back door, where, as Reiter and Gr@unberg might have told him, the rules were unpredictable.
In the midst of his work for the Commandant, a large
beam was lifted to its place in the rooftree of
Amon’s conservatory. As he worked, Adam
Garde could hear the Commandant’s two dogs, named
Rolf and Ralf, names from a newspaper cartoon
--except that Amon had permitted them in the past week to rip the breast from a female prisoner suspected of idling. Amon himself, with his half-completed technical education, would return again and again to take a professional stance and watch the roof beams lifted by pulley. He came to ask questions when the center beam was being slotted into place. It was an immense length of heavy pine, and across it Goeth called his question. Adam Garde could not catch the meaning and put his hand to his ear. Again Goeth asked it, and worse than not hearing it, Garde could not understand it. “I don’t understand, Herr Commandant,” he admitted. Amon grabbed the rising beam with both long-fingered hands, dragged back the end of it, and swung it toward the engineer. Garde saw the massive timber spinning toward his head and understood that it was a mortal instrument. He lifted his right hand and the beam took it, shattering the knuckles and the metacarpals and hurling him to the ground. When Garde could see again through the fog of pain and nausea, Amon had turned and walked away. Perhaps he would come again tomorrow for a satisfactory answer ....
Lest he be seen as deformed and unfit, engineer Garde avoided favoring his shattered hand on the way to the Krankenstube (infirmary).
Carried normally, it weighed at his side, a bladder of torment. He let Dr. Hilfstein talk him into accepting a plaster cast. So he continued to supervise the construction of the conservatory and each day marched to the Emalia works, hoping that the long sleeve of his coat helped conceal the cast. When he was unsure about this, he cut his hand free of the thing. Let the hand mend crookedly. He wanted to ensure his transfer to Schindler’s subcamp by presenting an unmaimed appearance. Within a week, carrying a shirt and some books in a bundle, he was marched to Lipowa Street for good.
CHAPTER 23
Among prisoners who knew, there was already competition to get into Emalia. Prisoner Dolek Horowitz, a purchasing officer inside the P@lasz@ow camp, knew that he would not be allowed to go to Schindler’s place himself. But he had a wife and two children.
Richard, the younger of the children, woke up early these spring mornings as the earth gave off its last winter humor in mist, got down from his mother’s bunk in the women’s quarters, and ran down the hillside to the men’s camp, his mind on the coarse morning bread. He had to be with his father for morning roll call on the Appellplatz. His path took him past Chilowicz’ Jewish Police post and, even on foggy mornings, within sight of two watchtowers. But he was safe because he was known. He was a Horowitz child. His father was considered invaluable by Herr Bosch, who in turn was a drinking companion of the Commandant’s. Richard’s unself-conscious freedom of movement derived from his father’s expertise; he moved charmed under the eyes in the towers, finding his father’s barracks and climbing to his cot and waking him with questions. Why is there mist in the mornings and not in the afternoons? Will there be trucks? Will it take long on the Appellplatz today? Will there be floggings?
Through Richard’s morning questions, Dolek Horowitz had it borne in on him that P@lasz@ow was unfit even for privileged children. Perhaps he could contact Schindler—Schindler came out here now and then and walked around the Administration Building and the workshops, under the guise of doing business, to leave small gifts and exchange news with old friends like Stern and Roman Ginter and Poldek Pfefferberg. When Dolek did not seem to be able to make contact this way, it struck him that perhaps Schindler could be approached through Bosch. Dolek believed they met a lot. Not out here so much, but perhaps in offices in town and at parties. You could tell they were not friends, but were bound together by dealings, by mutual favors.
It was not only, and perhaps not mainly, Richard whom Dolek wanted to get into Schindler’s compound. Richard could diffuse his terror in clouds of questions. It was his ten-year-old daughter, Niusia, who no longer asked questions; who was just another thin child past the age of frankness; who—from a window in the brushworks shop where she sewed the bristles into the wooden backs—saw the daily truckloads arriving at the Austrian hill fort and carried her terror insupportably, the way adults will, unable to climb onto a parental chest and transfer the fear. To soothe her hunger in P@lasz@ow, Niusia had taken to smoking onion leaves in newspaper wrappings. The solid rumors about Emalia w
ere that such precocious methods weren’t necessary there. So Dolek appealed to Bosch during one of his tours of the clothing warehouse. He presumed on Bosch’s earlier kindnesses, he said, to beg him to talk to Herr Schindler. He repeated his pleadings and repeated the children’s names again, so that Bosch, whose memory was eroded by schnapps, might still remember. Herr Schindler is probably my best friend, said Bosch. He’d do anything for me.
Dolek expected little from the talk. His wife, Regina, had no experience of making shells or enamelware. Bosch himself never mentioned the request again. Yet within the week they marched out on the next Emalia list, cleared by Commandant Goeth in return for a little envelope of jewelry.
Niusia looked like a thin, reserved adult in the women’s barracks at Emalia, and Richard moved as he had in P@lasz@ow, everyone knowing him in the munitions section and the enamel shops, the guards accepting his familiarity. Regina kept expecting Oskar to come up to her in the enamel factory and say, “So you’re Dolek Horowitz’ wife?” Then the only question would be how to frame her thanks. But he never did. She was delighted to find that she was not very visible at Lipowa Street, and neither was her daughter. They understood that Oskar knew who they were, since he often chatted with Richard by name. They knew, too, by the altered nature of Richard’s questions, the extent of what they had been given.
The Emalia camp had no resident commandant
to tyrannize the inmates. There were no permanent
guards. The garrison was changed every two days,
two truckloads of SS and Ukrainians coming
up to Zablocie from P@lasz@ow to take over the
security of the subcamp. The P@lasz@ow
soldiers liked their occasional duty at
Emalia. The Herr Direktor’s