Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  They apologized and left, shaking their heads, whistling softly, laughing like schoolboys. Above their heads, Oskar dallied like Zeus.

  When the epidemic did not develop, Biberstein thanked the Brinnlitz delousing unit. When the dysentery faded, he thanked the food. In a testimony in the archives of the Yad Vashem, Biberstein declares that at the beginning of the camp, the daily ration was in excess of 2,000 calories. In all the miserable winter-bound continent, only the Jews of Brinnlitz were fed this living meal. Among the millions, only the soup of the Schindler thousand had body.

  There was porridge too. Down the road from the camp, by the stream into which Oskar’s mechanics had recently thrown black-market liquor, stood a mill. Armed with a work pass, a prisoner could stroll down there on an errand from one or another department of DEF. Mundek Korn remembers coming back to the camp loaded with food. At the mill you simply tied your trousers at the ankles and loosened your belt. Your friend then shoveled your pants full of oatmeal. You belted up again and returned to the camp— a grand repository, priceless as you walked, a little bandy-legged, past the sentries into the annex. Inside, people loosened your cuffs and let the oatmeal run out into pots.

  In the drafting department, young Moshe Bejski and Josef Bau had already begun forging prison passes of the type that allowed people to make the mill run. Oskar wandered in one day and showed Bejski documents stamped with the seal of the rationing authority of the Government General. Oskar’s best contacts for black-market food were still in the Cracow area. He could arrange shipments by telephone. But at the Moravian border, you had to show clearance documents from the Food and Agriculture Department of the Government General. Oskar pointed to the stamp on the papers in his hand. Could you make a stamp like that? he asked Bejski. Bejski was a craftsman. He could work on little sleep. Now he turned out for Oskar the first of the many official stamps he would craft. His tools were razor blades and various small cutting instruments. His stamps became the emblems of Brinnlitz’ own outrageous bureaucracy.

  He cut seals of the Government General, of the

  Governor of Moravia, seals to adorn false

  travel permits so that prisoners could drive

  by truck to Brno or Olomouc to collect

  loads of bread, of black-market gasoline, of

  flour or fabric or cigarettes. Leon

  Salpeter, a Cracow pharmacist, once a

  member of Marek Biberstein’s Judenrat,

  kept the storehouse in Brinnlitz. Here the miserable supplies sent down from Gr@oss-Rosen by Hassebroeck were kept, together with the supplementary vegetables, flour, cereals bought by Oskar under Bejski’s minutely careful rubber stamps, the eagle and the hooked cross of the regime precisely crafted on them.

  “You have to remember,” said an inmate of Oskar’s camp, “that Brinnlitz was hard. But beside any other—paradise!” Prisoners seem to have been aware that food was scarce everywhere; even on the outside, few were sated.

  And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of the prisoners?

  The answer is indulgent laughter. “Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?” And then a frown, in case you think this attitude too serflike. “You don’t understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be.”

  As in his early marriage, Oskar was still temperamentally an absentee, was away from Brinnlitz for stretches of time. Sometimes Stern, purveyor of the day’s requests, would wait up all night for him. In Oskar’s apartment Itzhak and Emilie were the keepers of vigils.

  The scholarly accountant would always put the most

  loyal interpretation on Oskar’s wanderings around

  Moravia. In a speech years after, Stern would

  say, “He rode day and night, not only

  to purchase food for the Jews in Brinnlitz

  camp—by means of forged papers made by one of the

  prisoners—but to buy us arms and ammunition in

  case the SS conceived of killing us during their

  retreats.” The picture of a restlessly

  provident Herr Direktor does credit

  to Itzhak’s love and loyalty. But Emilie

  would have understood that not all the absences had to do with Oskar’s brand of humane racketeering.

  During one of Oskar’s furloughs, nineteen-year-old Janek Dresner was accused of sabotage. In fact Dresner was ignorant of metalwork. He had spent his time in P@lasz@ow in the delousing works, handing towels to the SS who came for a shower and sauna, and boiling lice-ridden clothes taken from prisoners. (from the bite of a louse he’d suffered typhus, and survived only because his cousin, Dr. Schindel, passed him off in the clinic as an angina case.)

  The supposed sabotage occurred because engineer Schoenbrun, the German supervisor, transferred him from his lathe to one of the larger metal presses. It had taken a week for the engineers to set the metrics for this machine, and the first time Dresner pressed the start button and began to use it, he shorted the wiring and cracked one of the plates. Schoenbrun harangued the boy and went into the office to write a damning report. Copies of Schoenbrun’s complaint were typed up and addressed to Sections D and W in Oranienburg, to Hassebroeck at Gr@oss-Rosen, and to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold in his office at the factory gate.

  In the morning, Oskar had still not come home. So rather than mail the reports, Stern took them out of the office mailbag and hid them. The complaint addressed to Liepold had already been hand-delivered, but Liepold was at least correct in the terms of the organization he served and could not hang the boy until he had heard from Oranienburg and Hassebroeck. Two days later, Oskar had still not appeared. “It must be some party!” the whimsical ones on the shop floor told each other. Somehow Schoenbrun discovered that Itzhak was sitting on the letters. He raged through the office, telling Stern that .his name would be added to the reports. Stern seemed to be a man of limitless calm, and when Schoenbrun finished he told the engineer that he had removed the reports from the mailbag because he thought the Herr Direktor should, as a matter of courtesy, be apprised of their contents before they were mailed. The Herr Direktor, said Stern, would of course be appalled to find out that a prisoner had done 10,000 RM. worth of damage to one of his machines. It seemed only just, said Stern, that Herr Schindler be given the chance to add his own remarks to the report.

  At last Oskar drove in through the gate.

  Stern intercepted him and told him about Schoenbrun’s charges.

  Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had been waiting to see Schindler too and was eager to push his authority inside the factory, to use the Janek Dresner case as a pretext. I will preside over the hearing, Liepold told Oskar. You, Herr Direktor, will supply a signed statement attesting to the extent of the damage. Wait a minute, Oskar told him. It’s my machine that’s broken. I’m the one who’ll preside.

  Liepold argued that the prisoner was under the jurisdiction of Section D. But the machine, replied Oskar, came under the authority of the Armaments Inspectorate. Besides, he really couldn’t permit a trial on the shop floor.

  If Brinnlitz had been a garment or chemical factory, then perhaps it wouldn’t have much impact on production. But this was a munitions factory engaged in the manufacture of secret components. “I won’t have my work force disturbed,” said Oskar.

  It was an argument Oskar won, perhaps because Liepold gave in. The Untersturmf@uhrer was afraid of Oskar’s contacts. So the court was convened at night in the machine-tool section of DEF, and its members were Herr Oskar Schindler as president, Herr Schoenbrun, and Herr Fuchs. A young German girl sat at the side of the judicial table to keep a record, and when young Dresner was brought in, he saw in front of him a solemn and fully constituted court. According to a Section D edict of April 11, 1944, what Janek faced was the first and crucial stage of a process which should, after a report to Hassebroeck and a reply from Oranienburg, end in his hanging on the workshop floor in front of all the
Brinnlitz people, his parents and sister among them. Janek noticed that tonight there was none of that shop-floor familiarity to Oskar. The Herr Direktor read aloud Schoenbrun’s report of the sabotage. Janek knew about Oskar mainly from the reports of others, particularly from his father, and couldn’t tell now what Oskar’s straight-faced reading of Schoenbrun’s accusations meant. Was Oskar really grieving for the cracked machine? Or was it all just theatrics?

  When the reading was finished, the Herr Direktor began to ask questions. There was not much Dresner could say in answer. He pleaded that he was unfamiliar with the machine. There had been trouble setting it, he explained. He had been too anxious and had made a mistake. He assured the Herr Direktor that he had no reason to wish to sabotage the machinery. If you are not skilled at armaments work, said Schoenbrun, you shouldn’t be here. The Herr Direktor has assured me that all you prisoners have had experience in the armaments industry. Yet here you are, H@aftling Dresner, claiming ignorance.

  With an angry gesture, Schindler ordered the prisoner to detail exactly what he had done on the night of the offense. Dresner began to talk about the preparations for starting up the machine, the setting of it, the dry run at the controls, the switching on of the power, the sudden racing of the engine, the splitting of the mechanism. Herr Schindler became more and more restless as Dresner talked, and began to pace the floor glowering at the boy. Dresner was describing some alteration he had made to one of the controls when Schindler stopped, ham fists clenched, his eyes glaring. What did you say? he asked the boy.

  Dresner repeated what he had said: I adjusted the pressure control, Herr Direktor.

  Oskar walked up to him and hit him across the side of the jaw. Dresner’s head sang, but in triumph, for Oskar—his back to his fellow judges—had winked at Dresner in a way that could not be mistaken. Then he began waving his great arms, dismissing the boy. “The stupidity of you damned people!” he was bellowing all the while. “I can’t believe it!”

  He turned and appealed to Schoenbrun and Fuchs, as if they were his only allies. “I wish they were intelligent enough to sabotage a machine. Then at least I’d have their goddamned hides! But what can you do with these people? They’re an utter waste of time.”

  Oskar’s fist clenched again, and Dresner recoiled at the idea of another roundhouse punch. “Clear out!” yelled Oskar.

  As Dresner went out through the door, he heard Oskar tell the others that it was better to forget all this. “I have some good Martell upstairs,” he said.

  This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity. Dresner’s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners’ lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.

  CHAPTER 35

  For the factory produced nothing. “Not a shell,” Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing. Oskar himself contrasts the output of DEF in the Cracow years with the Brinnlitz record. In Zablocie, enamelware was manufactured to the value of 16,000,000 RM.

  During the same time, the munitions section of

  Emalia produced shells worth 500,000

  RM. Oskar explains that at Brinnlitz,

  however, “as a consequence of the falling off of the enamel production,” there was no output to speak of. The armaments production, he says, encountered “start-up difficulties.” But in fact he did manage to ship one truckful of “ammunition parts,” valued at 35,000 RM., during the Brinnlitz months. “These parts,” said Oskar later, “had been transferred to Brinnlitz already half-fabricated. To supply still less [to the war effort] was impossible, and the excuse of “start-up difficulties” became more and more dangerous for me and my Jews, because Armaments Minister Albert Speer raised his demands from month to month.”

  The danger of Oskar’s policy of nonproduction was not only that it gave him a bad name at the Armaments Ministry. It made other managements angry. For the factory system was fragmented, one workshop producing the shells, another the fuses, a third packing in the high explosives and assembling the components. In this way, it was reasoned, an air raid on any one factory could not substantially destroy the flow of arms. Oskar’s shells, dispatched by freight to factories farther down the line, were inspected there by engineers Oskar did not know and could not reach. The Brinnlitz items always failed quality control. Oskar would show the complaining letters to Stern, to Finder, to Pemper or Garde. He would laugh uproariously, as if the men writing the reprimands were comic-opera bureaucrats.

  Later in the camp’s history one such case occurred. Stern and Mietek Pemper were in Oskar’s office on the morning of April 28, 1945, a morning when the prisoners stood at an extremity of danger, having been, as will be seen, all condemned to death by Sturmbannf@uhrer Hassebroeck. The day was Oskar’s thirty-seventh birthday, and a bottle of cognac had already been opened to mark it. And on the desk lay a telegram from the armaments assembly plant near Brno. It said that Oskar’s antitank shells were so badly produced that they failed all quality-control tests. They were imprecisely calibrated, and because they had not been tempered at the right heat they split under testing.

  Oskar was ecstatic at this telegram, pushing it toward Stern and Pemper, making them read it. Pemper remembers that he made another of his outrageous statements. “It’s the best birthday present I could have got. Because I know now that no poor bastard has been killed by my product.” This incident says something about two contrasting frenzies. There is some madness in a manufacturer like Oskar who rejoices when he does not manufacture. But there is also a cool lunacy in the German technocrat who, Vienna having fallen, Marshal Koniev’s men having embraced the Americans on the Elbe, still takes it for granted that an arms factory up in the hills has time to tidy up its performance and make a condign offering to the grand principles of discipline and output.

  But the main question that arises from the birthday telegram is how Oskar lasted those months, the seven months up to the date of his birthday. The Brinnlitz people remember a whole series of inspections and checks. Men from Section D stalked the factory, checklists in their hands. So did engineers from the Armaments Inspectorate.

  Oskar always lunched or dined these officials,

  softened them up with ham and cognac. In the Reich

  there were no longer so many good lunches and dinners

  to be had. The prisoners at the lathes, the

  furnaces, the metal presses would state that the

  uniformed inspectors reeked of liquor and

  reeled on the factory floor. There is a

  story all the inmates tell of an official who

  boasted, on one of the final inspections of the war, that

  Schindler would not seduce him with camaraderie,

  with a lunch and liquor. On the stairs leading from the

  dormitories down to the workshop floor, the

  legend has it, Oskar tripped the man, sending

  him to the bottom of the stairs, a journey that

  split the man’s head and broke his leg. The

  Brinnlitz people are, however, generally unable to say

  who the SS hard case was. One claims that it

  was Rasch, SS and police chief of

  Moravia. Oskar himself never made any

  recorded claim about it. The anecdote is one

  of those stories that reflect on people’s picture of

  Oskar as a provider who covers all

  possibilities. And one has to admit, in

  natural justice, that the inmates had the right to spread this sort of fable. They were the ones
in deepest jeopardy. If the fable let them down, they would pay for it most bitterly. One reason Brinnlitz passed the inspections was the relentless trickery of Oskar’s skilled workers. The furnace gauges were rigged by the electricians. The needle registered the correct temperature when the interior of the furnace was in fact hundreds of degrees cooler. “I’ve written to the manufacturers,” Oskar would tell the armaments inspectors. He would play the somber, baffled manufacturer whose profits were being eroded. He would blame the floor, the inferior German supervisors. He spoke yet again of “start-up difficulties,” implying future tonnages of munitions once the problems faded.

  In the machine-tool departments, as at the furnaces, everything looked normal. Machines seemed perfectly calibrated, but were in fact a micromillimeter off. Most of the arms inspectors who walked through seem to have left not only with a gift of cigarettes and cognac, but with a faint sympathy for the thorny problems this decent fellow was enduring.

  Stern would always say in the end that Oskar bought boxes of shells from other Czech manufacturers and passed them off as his own during inspections. Pfefferberg makes the same claim. In any case, Brinnlitz lasted, whatever sleight-of-hand Oskar used.

  There were times when, to impress the hostile

  locals, he invited important officials in

  for a tour of the factory and a good dinner. But they were

  always men whose expertise did not run to engineering and

  munitions production. After the Herr

  Direktor’s stay in Pomorska Street,

  Liepold, Hoffman, and the local Party

  Kreisleiter wrote to every official they could