Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

think of—local, provincial, Berlin-based—

  complaining about him, his morals, his connections, his

  breaches of race and penal law. Sussmuth let

  him know about the barrage of letters arriving at

  Troppau. So Oskar invited Ernst Hahn

  down to Brinnlitz. Hahn was second in command

  of the bureau of the Berlin main office devoted

  to services for SS families. “He was,”

  says Oskar with customary reprobate’s

  primness, “a notorious drunkard.” With him Hahn brought his boyhood friend Franz Bosch. Bosch, as Oskar has already remarked in this narrative, was also “an impenetrable drunkard.” He was also the murderer of the Gutter family. Oskar, however, swallowing his contempt, welcomed him for his public-relations value. When Hahn arrived in town, he was wearing exactly the splendid, untarnished uniform Oskar had hoped he would. It was festooned with ribbons and orders, for Hahn was an old-time SS man from the early glory days of the Party. With this dazzling Standartenf@uhrer came an equally glittering adjutant.

  Liepold was invited in, from his rented house outside camp walls, to dine with the visitors. From the start of the evening, he was out of his depth. For Hahn loved Oskar; drunks always did.

  Later Oskar would describe the men and the uniforms as “pompous.” But at least Liepold was convinced now that if he wrote complaining letters to distant authorities, they were likely to land on the desk of some old drinking friend of the Herr Direktor’s, and that this could well be perilous to himself.

  In the morning, Oskar was seen driving through Zwittau, laughing with these glamorous men from Berlin. The local Nazis stood on the pavements and saluted all this Reich splendor as it passed.

  Hoffman was not as easily quelled as the rest. The three hundred women of Brinnlitz had, in Oskar’s own words, “no employment possibility.” It has already been said that many of them spent their days knitting. In the winter of 1944, for people whose only cover was the striped uniform, knitting was no idle hobby. Hoffman, however, made a formal complaint to the SS about the wool the Schindler women had stolen from the cases in the annex. He thought it scandalous, and that it showed up the true activities of the so-called Schindler munitions works.

  When Oskar visited Hoffman, he found the old man in a triumphant mood. “We’ve petitioned Berlin to remove you,” said Hoffman. “This time we’ve included sworn statements declaring that your factory is running in contravention of economic and race law. We’ve nominated an invalided Wehrmacht engineer from Brno to take over the factory and turn it into something decent.”

  Oskar listened to Hoffman, apologized, tried to appear penitent. Then he telephoned Colonel Erich Lange in Berlin and asked him to sit on the petition from the Hoffman clique in Zwittau. The out-of-court settlement still cost Oskar 8,000 RM., and all winter the Zwittau town authorities, civil and Party, plagued him, calling him in to the town hall to acquaint him with the complaints of various citizens about his prisoners, or the state of his drains.

  Lusia the optimist had a personal experience of SS inspectors that typifies the Schindler method.

  Lusia was still in the cellar—she would be there for the entire winter. The other girls had got better and had moved upstairs to recuperate. But it seemed to Lusia that Birkenau had filled her with a limitless poison. Her fevers recurred again and again. Her joints became inflamed. Carbuncles broke out in her armpits. When one burst and healed, another would form. Dr. Handler, against the advice of Dr. Biberstein, lanced some of them with a kitchen knife. She remained in the cellar, well fed, ghost-white, infectious. In all the great square mileage of Europe, it was the only space in which she could have lived. She was aware of that even then, and hoped that the enormous conflict would roll by above her head.

  In that warm hole under the factory, night and day were irrelevant. The time the door at the top of the cellar stairs burst open could have been either. She was used to quieter visits from Emilie Schindler. She heard boots on the stairs and tensed in her bed. It sounded to her like an old-fashioned Aktion.

  It was in fact the Herr Direktor with two officers from Gr@oss-Rosen. Their boots clattered on the steps as if to stampede over her. Oskar stood with them as they looked around in the gloom at the boilers and at her. It came to Lusia that perhaps she was it for today. The sacrificial offering you had to give them so that they would go away satisfied. She was partially hidden by a boiler, but Oskar made no attempt to conceal her, actually came to the foot of her bed.

  Because the two gentlemen of the SS seemed flushed

  and unsteady, Oskar had a chance to speak to her. His

  were words of wonderful banality, and she would never

  forget them: “Don’t worry. Everything’s all

  right.” He stood close, as if to emphasize

  to the inspectors that this was not an

  infectious case.

  “This is a Jewish girl,” he said flatly.

  “I didn’t want to put her in the

  Krankenstube. Inflammation of the joints. She’s finished anyway. They don’t give her more than thirty-six hours.”

  Then he rambled on about the hot water, where it came from, and the steam for the delousing. He pointed to gauges, piping, cylinders. He edged around her bed as if it too were neutral, part of the mechanism. Lusia did not know where to look, whether to open or close her eyes. She tried to appear comatose. It might seem a touch too much, but Lusia did not think so at the time, that as he ushered the SS men back to the base of the stairs, Oskar flashed her a cautious smile. She would stay there for six months and hobble upstairs in the spring to resume her womanhood in an altered world.

  During the winter, Oskar built up an independent arsenal. Again there are the legends:

  Some say that the weapons were bought at the end of

  winter from the Czech underground. But Oskar had been

  an obvious National Socialist in 1938 and

  1939 and may have been wary of dealing with the

  Czechs. Most of the weapons, in any case,

  came from a flawless source, from

  Obersturmbannf@uhrer Rasch, SS and

  police chief of Moravia. The small cache included carbines and automatic weapons, some pistols, some hand grenades. Oskar would later describe the transaction offhandedly. He acquired the arms, he would say, “under the pretense of protecting my factory, for the price of the gift of a brilliant ring to his [Rasch’s] wife.”

  Oskar does not detail his performance in Rasch’s office in Brno’s Spilberk Castle. It is not hard to imagine, though. The Herr Direktor, concerned about a possible slave uprising as the war grinds on, is willing to die expensively at his desk, automatic weapon in hand, having mercifully dispatched his wife with a bullet to save her from something worse. The Herr Direktor also touches on the chance that the Russians might turn up at the gate.

  My civilian engineers, Fuchs and

  Schoenbrun, my honest technicians, my

  German-speaking secretary, all of them

  deserve to have the means of resistance. It’s gloomy talk, of course. I’d rather speak of issues closer to our hearts, Herr Obersturmbannf@uhrer. I know your passion for good jewelry. May I show you this example I found last week?

  And so the ring appeared on the edge of Rasch’s blotter, Oskar murmuring, “As soon as I saw it, I thought of Frau Rasch.”

  Once Oskar had the weapons, he appointed Uri Bejski, brother of the rubber-stamp maker, keeper of the arsenal. Uri was small, handsome, lively. People noticed that he wandered into and out of the Schindlers’ private quarters like a son. He was a favorite, too, with Emilie, who gave him keys to the apartment. Frau Schindler enjoyed a similar maternal relationship with the surviving Spira boy. She took him regularly into her kitchen and fed him up on slices of bread and margarine.

  Having selected the small body of prisoners for training, Uri took one at a time into Salpeter’s storehouse to teach them the mechanisms of the Geweh
r 41 W’s. Three commando squads of five men each had been formed. Some of Bejski’s trainees were boys like Lutek Feigenbaum. Others were Polish veterans such as Pfefferberg and those other prisoners whom the Schindler prisoners called the “Budzyn people.”

  The Budzyn people were Jewish officers and men of the Polish Army. They had lived through the liquidation of the Budzyn labor camp, which had been under the administration of Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold. Liepold had brought them into his new command in Brinnlitz. There were about 50 of them, and they worked in Oskar’s kitchens. People remember them as very political. They had learned Marxism during their imprisonment in Budzyn, and looked forward to a Communist Poland. It was an irony that in Brinnlitz they lived in the warm kitchens of that most apolitical of capitalists, Herr Oskar Schindler.

  Their rapport with the bulk of the prisoners, who,

  apart from the Zionists, merely followed the

  politics of survival, was good. A number of

  them took private lessons on Uri

  Bejski’s automatics, for in the Polish

  Army of the Thirties they had never held such sophisticated weapons.

  If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest

  days of her husband’s power in Brno, had idly

  --during a party, say; a musical recital

  at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her F@uhrer’s. An armed Marxist Jew.

  CHAPTER 36

  Old drinking friends of Oskar’s, Amon and

  Bosch among them, had sometimes thought of him as the

  victim of a Jewish virus. It was no

  metaphor. They believed it in virtually

  literal terms and attached no blame to the sufferer. They’d seen it happen to other good men. Some area of the brain fell under a thrall that was half-bacterium, half-magic. If they’d been asked whether it was infectious, they would have said, yes, highly. They would have seen the case of Oberleutnant Sussmuth as an example of conspicuous contagion.

  For Oskar and Sussmuth connived over the winter

  of 1944-45 to get a further 3,000 women out

  of Auschwitz in groups of 300 to 500 at a

  time into small camps in Moravia. Oskar

  supplied the influence, the sales talk, the

  palm-greasing for these operations. Sussmuth did the

  paperwork. In the textile mills of Moravia

  there was a labor shortage, and not all the owners

  abhorred the Jewish presence as sharply as

  Hoffman. At least five German factories

  in Moravia—at Freudenthal and

  Jagerndorf, at Liebau, Grulich, and

  Trautenau—took these drafts of women and supplied a camp on the premises. Any such camp was never paradise, and in its management the SS were permitted to be more dominant than Liepold could ever hope to be. Oskar would later describe these women in the little camps as “living under endurable treatment.” But the very smallness of the textile camps was an aid to their survival, for the SS garrisons were older, slacker, less fanatical men. There was typhus to be eluded, and hunger to be carried like a weight beneath the ribs. But such tiny, almost countrified establishments would for the most part escape the extermination orders that would come to the bigger camps in the spring.

  But if the Jewish sepsis had infected Sussmuth, for Oskar Schindler it galloped. Through Sussmuth, Oskar had applied for another 30 metalworkers. It is simple fact that he had lost interest in production. But he saw, with the detached side of his mind, that if his plant was ever to validate its existence to Section D, he would need more qualified hands. When you look at other events of that mad winter, you can see that Oskar wanted the extra 30 not because they were used to lathes and machine tools, but because they were simply an extra 30. It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterized the exposed and flaming heart of the Jesus which hung on Emilie’s wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonization of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.

  One of these 30 metalworkers, a man named Moshe Henigman, left a public account of their unlikely deliverance. A little after Christmas, 10,000 prisoners from the quarries of Auschwitz III—FROM such establishments as the Krupp Weschel-Union armaments factory and from German Earth and Stone, from the Farben synthetic-petroleum plant and the airplane-dismantling enterprise—were put in a column and marched away toward Gr@oss-Rosen. Perhaps some planner believed that once they arrived in Lower Silesia, they would be distributed among the area’s factory camps. If that was the scheme, it escaped the SS officers and men who marched with the prisoners. It ignored also the devouring cold of the merciless turning of the year, and it did not inquire how the column would be fed. The limpers, the coughers were culled out at the beginning of each stage and executed. Of 10,000, says Henigman, there were within ten days only 1,200 left alive. To the north, Koniev’s Russians had burst across the Vistula south of Warsaw and seized all the roads on the column’s northwesterly route. The diminished group was therefore put in an SS compound somewhere near Opole. The Commandant of the place had the prisoners interviewed, and lists made of the skilled workers. But each day the weary selections continued, and the rejects were shot. A man whose name was called out never knew what to expect, a lump of bread or a bullet. When Henigman’s name was called, however, he was put in a railway car with 30 others and, under the care of an SS man and a Kapo, was shunted south. “We were given food for the trip,” Henigman recalls. “Something unheard of.”

  Henigman later spoke of the exquisite unreality of arriving at Brinnlitz. “We could not believe that there was a camp left where men and women worked together, where there were no beatings, no Kapo.” His reaction is marked by a little hyperbole, since there was segregation in Brinnlitz. Occasionally, too, Oskar’s blond girlfriend let fly with an open palm, and once when a boy stole a potato from the kitchen and was reported to Liepold, the Commandant made him stand on a stool all day in the courtyard, the potato clamped in his open mouth, saliva running down his chin, and the placard “I AM A POTATO THIEF!” hung around his neck. But to Henigman this sort of thing was not worthy of report. “How can one describe,” he asks, “the change from hell to paradise?”

  When he met Oskar, he was told to build himself up. Tell the supervisors when you’re ready to work, said the Herr Direktor. And Henigman, faced with this strange reversal of policy, felt not simply that he’d come to a quiet pasture, but that he had gone through the mirror.

  Since 30 tinsmiths were merely a fragment of the 10,000, it must be said again that Oskar was only a minor god of rescue. But like any tutelary spirit, he saved equally Goldberg and Helen Hirsch, and equally he tried to save Dr. Leon Gross and Olek Rosner. With this same gratuitous equality, he made a costly deal with the Gestapo in the Moravia region. We know that the contract was struck, but we do not know how expensive it was. That it cost a fortune is certain.

  A prisoner named Benjamin Wrozlawski became one subject of this deal. Wrozlawski was formerly an inmate of the labor camp at Gliwice. Unlike Henigman’s camp, Gliwice was not in the Auschwitz region, but was close enough to be one of the Auschwitz subsidiary camps. By January 12, when Koniev and Zhukov launched their offensive, H@oss’s awesome realm and all its close satellites were in danger of instant capture. The Gliwice prisoners were put in Ostbahn cars and shipped toward Fernwald. Somehow Wrozlawski and a friend named Roman Wilner jumped from the train. One popular form of escape was through loosened ventilators in the cars’ ceilings. But prisoners who tried it were often shot by guards stationed on the roofs. Wilner was wounded during this escape, but he was able to travel, and he and his friend Wrozlawski fled through the high quiet towns of the Moravian border. They were at last arrested in one of these villages and taken to the Gestapo offices in Troppau.

  As s
oon as they had arrived and been searched and put in a cell, one of the gentlemen of the Gestapo walked in and told them that nothing bad would happen. They had no reason to believe him. The officer said further that he would not transfer Wilner to a hospital, in spite of the wound, for he would simply be collected and fed back into the system. Wrozlawski and Wilner were locked away for nearly two weeks. Oskar had to be contacted and a price had to be settled. During that time, the officer kept talking to them as if they were in protective custody, and the prisoners continued to find the idea absurd. When the door was opened and the two of them were taken out, they presumed they were about to be shot. Instead, they were led to the railway station by an SS man who escorted them on a train southeast toward Brno.

  For both of them, the arrival at Brinnlitz had that same surreal, delightful and frightening quality it had had for Henigman. Wilner was put in the clinic, under the care of Doctors Handler, Lewkowicz, Hilfstein, Biberstein. Wrozlawski was put in a sort of convalescent area which had been set up—for extraordinary reasons soon to be explained—in a corner of the factory floor downstairs. The Herr Direktor visited them and asked how they felt. The preposterous question scared Wrozlawski; so did the surroundings. He feared, as he would put it years later, “the way from the hospital would lead to execution, as was the case in other camps.” He was fed with the rich Brinnlitz porridge, and saw Schindler frequently. But as he confesses, he was still confused, and found the phenomenon of Brinnlitz hard to grasp.

  By the arrangement Oskar had with the provincial

  Gestapo, 11 escapees were added to the

  crammed-in camp population. Each one

  of them had wandered away from a column or jumped from a cattle car. In their stinking stripes, they had tried to stay at large. By rights, they should all have been shot.

  In 1963, Dr. Steinberg of Tel Aviv testified to yet another instance of Oskar’s wild, contagious, and unquestioning largesse. Steinberg was the physician in a small work camp in the Sudeten hills. The Gauleiter in Liberec was less able, as Silesia fell to the Russians, to keep labor camps out of his wholesome province of Moravia. The camp in which Steinberg was imprisoned was one of the many new ones scattered among the mountains. It was a Luftwaffe camp devoted to the manufacture of some unspecified aircraft component. Four hundred prisoners lived there. The food was poor, said Steinberg, and the workload savage. Pursuing a rumor about the Brinnlitz camp, Steinberg managed to get a pass and the loan of a factory truck to go and see Oskar. He described to him the desperate conditions in the Luftwaffe camp. He says that Oskar quite lightly agreed to allocate him part of the Brinnlitz stores. The main question that preoccupied Oskar was, On what grounds could Steinberg regularly come to Brinnlitz to pick up supplies? It was arranged that he would use some excuse to do with getting regular medical aid from the doctors in the camp clinic.