It was late afternoon, and Oskar and Goeth sat in the salon of Goeth’s white villa. Goeth’s girlfriend Majola looked in, a small-boned woman, a secretary at the Wagner factory in town. She did not spend her days amid the excesses of P@lasz@ow. She had sensitive manners, and this delicacy helped a rumor to emerge that Majola had threatened not to sleep with Goeth if he continued arbitrarily gunning people down. But no one knew whether that was the truth or just one of those therapeutic interpretations which arise in the minds of prisoners desperate to make the earth habitable.
Majola did not stay long with Amon and Oskar that afternoon. She could tell there would be a drinking session. Helen Hirsch, the pale girl in black who was Amon’s maid, brought them the necessary accompaniments—cakes, canap‘es, sausage. She reeled with exhaustion. Last night Amon had beaten her for preparing food for Majola without his permission; this morning he had made her run up and down the villa’s three flights of stairs fifty times on the double because of a flyspeck on one of the paintings in the corridor. She had heard certain rumors about Herr Schindler but had not met him until now. This afternoon she took no comfort from the sight of these two big men, seated either side of the low table, fraternal and in apparent concord. There was nothing here to interest her, for the certainty of her own death was a first premise. She thought only about the survival of her young sister, who worked in the camp’s general kitchen. She kept a sum of money hidden in the hope that it would effect her sister’s survival. There was no sum, she believed, no deal, that could influence her own prospects.
So they drank through the camp’s twilight and into the dark. Long after the prisoner Tosia Lieberman’s nightly rendition of Brahms’s “Lullaby” had calmed the women’s camp and insinuated itself between the timbers of the men’s, the two big men sat on. Their prodigious livers glowed hot as furnaces. And at the right hour, Oskar leaned across the table and, acting out of an amity which, even with this much cognac aboard, did not go beyond the surface of the skin ... Oskar, leaning toward Amon and cunning as a demon, began to tempt him toward restraint.
Amon took it well. It seemed to Oskar that
he was attracted by the thought of moderation—a
temptation worthy of an emperor. Amon could
imagine a sick slave on the trolleys, a
returning prisoner from the cable factory, staggering
--in that put-upon way one found so hard to tolerate—under a load of clothing or lumber picked up at the prison gate. And the fantasy ran with a strange warmth in Amon’s belly that he would forgive that laggard, that pathetic actor. As Caligula might have been tempted to see himself as Caligula the Good, so the image of Amon the Good exercised the Commandant’s imagination for a time. He would, in fact, always have a weakness for it. Tonight, his blood running golden with cognac and nearly all the camp asleep beyond his steps, Amon was more definitely seduced by mercy than by the fear of reprisal. But in the morning he would remember Oskar’s warning and combine it with the day’s news that Russian threats were developing on the Front at Kiev. Stalingrad had been an inconceivable distance from P@lasz@ow. But the distance to Kiev was imaginable.
For some days after Oskar’s bout with Amon, news came to Emalia that the dual temptation was having its result with the Commandant. Dr. Sedlacek, going back to Budapest, would report to Samu Springmann that Amon had given up, for the time being at least, arbitrarily murdering people. And gentle Samu, among the diverse cares he had in the list of places from Dachau and Drancy in the west to Sobibor and Bel@zec in the east, hoped for a time that the hole at P@lasz@ow had been plugged.
But the allure of clemency vanished quickly.
If there was a brief respite, those who were
to survive and give testimony of their days in
P@lasz@ow would not be aware of it. The summary
assassinations would seem continual to them. If
Amon did not appear on his balcony this morning
or the next, it did not mean he would not appear the
morning after that. It took much more than Goeth’s
temporary absence to give even the most deluded
prisoner some hope of a fundamental change in the
Commandant’s nature. And then, in any case,
there he would be, on the steps in the
Austrian-style cap he wore to murders,
looking through his binoculars for a culprit.
Dr. Sedlacek would return to Budapest not
only with overly hopeful news of a reform in
Amon but with more reliable data on the camp at
P@lasz@ow. One afternoon a guard from Emalia
turned up at P@lasz@ow to summon Stern
to Zablocie. Once Stern arrived at the
front gate, he was led upstairs into Oskar’s
new apartment. There Oskar introduced him to two
men in good suits. One was Sedlacek; the other a
Jew—equipped with a Swiss passport—who
introduced himself as Babar. “My dear
friend,” Oskar told Stern, “I want you
to write as full a report on the situation in P@lasz@ow as you can manage in an afternoon.” Stern had never seen Sedlacek or Babar before this and thought that Oskar was being indiscreet. He bent over his hands, murmuring that before he undertook a task like that he would like a word in private with the Herr Direktor.
Oskar used to say that Itzhak Stern could never make a straight statement or request unless it arrived smuggled under a baggage of talk of the Babylonian Talmud and purification rites. But now he was more direct. “Tell me, please, Herr Schindler,” he asked, “don’t you believe this is a dreadful risk?”
Oskar exploded. Before he got control of himself, the strangers would have heard him in the other room. “Do you think I’d ask you, if there was a risk?” Then he calmed and said, “There’s always risk, as you know better than I. But not with these two men. These two are safe.”
In the end, Stern spent all afternoon on his report. He was a scholar and accustomed to writing in exact prose. The rescue organization in Budapest, the Zionists in Istanbul would receive from Stern a report they could rely on.
Multiply Stern’s summary by the 1,700 large and small forced-labor camps of Poland, and then you had a tapestry to stun the world!
Sedlacek and Oskar wanted more than that of
Stern. On the morning after the Amon-Oskar
binge, Oskar dragged his heroic liver back out
to P@lasz@ow before office-opening time. In between the
suggestions of tolerance Oskar had tried to drop
into Amon’s ear the night before, he’d also got a
written permit to take two “brother
industrialists” on a tour of this model
industrial community. Oskar brought the two into the gray Administration Building that morning and demanded the services of H@aftling (prisoner) Itzhak Stern for a tour of the camp. Sedlacek’s friend Babar had some sort of miniature camera, but he carried it openly in his hand. It was almost possible to believe that if an SS man had challenged him, he would have welcomed the chance to stand and boast for five minutes about this little gadget he’d got on a recent business trip to Brussels or Stockholm.
As Oskar and the visitors from Budapest emerged from the Administration Building, Oskar took the thin, clerkly Stern by the shoulder. His friends would be happy to see the workshops and the living quarters, said Oskar. But if there was anything Stern thought they were missing out on, he was just to bend down and tie his shoestring.
On Goeth’s great road paved with fractured gravestones, they moved past the SS barracks. Here, almost at once, prisoner Stern’s shoestring needed tying. Sedlacek’s associate snapped the teams hauling truckloads of rock up from the quarry, while Stern murmured, “Forgive me, gentlemen.” Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859-1927); of Maty
lde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of 90 in 1912; of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911; of Rozia Groder, a thirteen-year-old who had passed on in 1931; of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honorable dead had been made into paving stones.
Moving on, they passed the Puffhaus, the SS and Ukrainian brothel staffed by Polish girls, before reaching the quarry, the excavations running back into the limestone cliff. Stern’s shoelaces required reef knots here; he wanted this recorded. They destroyed men at this rock face, working them on the hammers and wedges. None of the scarred men of the quarry parties showed any curiosity about their visitors this morning. Ivan, Amon Goeth’s Ukrainian driver, was on duty here, and the supervisor was a bullet-headed German criminal named Erik.
Erik had already demonstrated a capacity for
murdering families, having killed his own mother,
father, sister. He might by now have been hanged or
at least been put in a dungeon if the SS
had not realized that there were worse criminals still
than patricides and that Erik should be employed as
a stick to beat them with. As Stern had mentioned in his
report, a Cracow physician named Edward
Goldblatt had been sent here from the clinic
by SS Dr. Blancke and his Jewish
prot@eg‘e, Dr. Leon Gross. Erik
loved to see a man of culture and speciality enter the quarry and report soft-handed for work, and the beatings began in Goldblatt’s case with the first display of uncertainty in handling the hammer and spikes. Over a period of days, Erik and sundry SS and Ukrainian enlisted men beat Goldblatt. The doctor was forced to work with a ballooning face, now half again its normal size, with one eye sealed up. No one knew what error of quarry technique set Erik to give Dr. Goldblatt his final beating.
Long after the doctor lost consciousness, Erik
permitted him to be carried to the
Krankenstube, where Dr. Leon Gross
refused to admit him. With this medical sanction Erik and an SS enlisted man continued to kick the dying Goldblatt as he lay, rejected for treatment, on the threshold of the hospital. Stern bent and tied his shoelace at the quarry because, like Oskar and some others in the P@lasz@ow complex, he believed in a future of judges who might ask, Where—in a word—did this act occur?
Oskar was able to give his colleagues an overview of the camp, taking them up to Chujowa G@orka and the Austrian mound, where the bloodied wheelbarrows used to transport the dead to the woods stood unabashedly at the mouth of the fort. Already thousands were buried down there in mass graves in or on the verges of those eastern pinewoods. When the Russians came from the east, that wood with its population of victims would fall to them before living and half-dying P@lasz@ow.
As for P@lasz@ow as an industrial wonder, it was bound to disappoint any serious observer.
Amon, Bosch, Leo John, Josef
Neuschel all thought it a model city on the ground that it was making them rich. It would have shocked them to find that one of the reasons their sweet billet in P@lasz@ow continued was not any delight on the part of the Armaments Inspectorate with the economic miracles they were performing.
In fact the only economic miracles within
P@lasz@ow were the personal fortunes made
by Amon and his clique. It was a surprise
to any calm outsider that war contracts came to the
workshops of P@lasz@ow at all, considering that
their plant was so poor and old-fashioned. But
shrewd Zionist prisoners inside
P@lasz@ow put pressure on convinced
outsiders, people like Oskar and Madritsch, who could
in turn put pressure on the Armaments
Inspectorate. On the ground that the
hunger and sporadic murders of P@lasz@ow were still to be preferred to the assured annihilations of Auschwitz and Bel@zec, Oskar was willing to sit down with the purchasing officers and engineers of General Schindler’s Arms Inspectorate.
These gentlemen would make faces and say, “Come
on, Oskar! Are you serious?” But in the end they
would find contracts for Amon Goeth’s camp,
orders for shovels manufactured from the
collected scrap iron of Oskar’s Lipowa
Street factory, orders for funnels turned
out of offcuts of tin from a jam factory in Podg@orze. The chances of full delivery of the shovels and their handles ever being made to the Wehrmacht were small. Many of Oskar’s friends among the officers of the Armaments Inspectorate understood what they were doing, that prolonging the life of the slave-labor camp of P@lasz@ow was the same thing as prolonging the life of a number of the slaves. With some of them it stuck in the craw, because they knew what a crook Goeth was, and their serious and old-fashioned patriotism was affronted by Amon’s sybaritic life out there in the countryside.
The divine irony of Forced Labor Camp
P@lasz@ow—that some of the slaves were conspiring for their own purposes to maintain Amon’s kingdom— can be seen in the case of Roman Ginter. Ginter, former entrepreneur and now one of the supervisors in the metalworks from which Rabbi Levartov had already been rescued, was summoned to Goeth’s office one morning and, as he closed the door, took the first of a number of blows. While he beat Ginter, Amon raged incoherently. Then he dragged him out-of-doors and down the steps to a stretch of wall by the front entrance. May I ask something? said Ginter against the wall, spitting out two teeth, offhandedly, lest Amon think him an actor, a self-pitier. You bastard, roared Goeth, you haven’t delivered the handcuffs I ordered! My desk calendar tells me that, you pig’s-ass. But Herr Commandant, said Ginter, I beg to report that the order for handcuffs was filled yesterday. I asked Herr Oberscharf@uhrer Neuschel what I should do with them and he told me to deliver them to your office, which I did.
Amon dragged bleeding Ginter back to the office and called the SS man Neuschel. Why, yes, said young Neuschel. Look in your second-top drawer on the left, Herr Commandant. Goeth looked and found the manacles. I almost killed him, he complained to his young and not-so-gifted Viennese prot@eg‘e.
This same Roman Ginter, complaisantly
spitting up his teeth against the foundation of Amon’s
gray Administration Building—this Jewish
cipher whose accidental murder would have caused
Amon to blame Neuschel—this Ginter is the
man who under special pass goes to Herr
Schindler’s DEF to talk to Oskar about workshop
supplies for P@lasz@ow, about large scrap
metal without which the whole metal-shop crew would be
railroaded off to Auschwitz. Therefore, while the
pistol-waving Amon Goeth believes he
maintains P@lasz@ow by his special
administrative genius, it is as much the
bloody-mouthed prisoners who keep it running.
CHAPTER 25
To some people it now seemed that Oskar was spending like a compulsive gambler. Even from the little they knew of him, his prisoners could sense that he would ruin himself for them if that was the price. Later—not now, for now they accepted his mercies in the same spirit in which a child accepts Christmas presents from its parents—they would say, Thank God he was more faithful to us than to his wife. And like the prisoners, sundry officials could also ferret Oskar’s passion out.
One such official, a Dr. Sopp,
physician to the SS prisons in Cracow and
to the SS Court [The SS had its own
judiciary section.] in Pomorska, let
Herr Schindler know through a Polish messenger that
he was willing to do a brand of business. In
Montelupich prison was a woman named Frau
Helene Schindler. Dr. Sopp knew she was
no relative of Oskar’s, but her hus
band had
invested some money in Emalia. She had questionable
Aryan papers. Dr. Sopp did not need to say
that for Mrs. Schindler this portended a truck
ride to Chujowa G@orka. But if Oskar would
put up certain amounts, said Sopp, the
doctor was willing to issue a medical
certificate saying that, in view of her condition, Mrs. Schindler should be permitted to take the cure indefinitely at Marienbad, down in Bohemia.
Oskar went to Sopp’s office, where he found out that the doctor wanted 50,000 z@l. for the certificate. It was no use arguing. After three years of practice, a man like Sopp could tell to within a few z@loty the price to put on favors. During the afternoon, Oskar raised the money. Sopp knew he could, knew that Oskar was the sort of man who had black-market money stashed, money with no recorded history. Before making the payment, Oskar set some conditions. He would need to go to Montelupich with Dr. Sopp to collect the woman from her cell. He would himself deliver her to mutual friends in the city. Sopp did not object. Under a bare light bulb in freezing Montelupich, Mrs. Schindler was handed her costly documents. A more careful man, a man with an accountant’s mind, might reasonably have repaid himself for his trouble from the money Sedlacek brought from Budapest. All together, Oskar would be handed nearly 150,000 Reichsmarks carried to Cracow in false-bottomed suitcases and in the lining of clothes. But Oskar, partly because his sense of money (whether owed or owing) was so inexact, partly because of his sense of honor, passed on to his Jewish contacts all the money he ever received from Sedlacek, except for the sum spent on Amon’s cognac.
It was not always a straightforward business. When in the summer of ‘43 Sedlacek arrived in Cracow with 50,000 RM., the Zionists inside P@lasz@ow to whom Oskar offered the cash feared it might be a setup.
Schindler's List Page 25
