Schindler's List

by Thomas Keneally

  It was a Shabbat, which was apt, because the Brinnlitz people would always remember it as a festival. Early in the morning, about the time Oskar had begun celebrating with Martell cognac in his office and flourishing that insulting telegram from the engineers at Brno, two truckloads of white bread rolled into the courtyard. Some went to the garrison, even to the hung-over Liepold sleeping late in his house in the village. That much was necessary to stop the SS from grumbling about the way the Herr Direktor favored prisoners. The prisoners themselves were issued three-quarters of a kilo of the bread. They inspected it as they ate and savored it. There was some speculation about where Oskar had got it. Perhaps it could be partially explained by the goodwill of the local mill manager, Daubek, the one who turned away while Brinnlitz prisoners filled their pants with oatmeal. But that Saturday bread was truly celebrated more in terms of the magic of the event, of the wonder-working. Though the day is remembered as jubilant, there was in fact not so much cause for festive feeling. Sometime in the past week, a long telegram had been directed from Herr Commandant Hassebroeck of Gr@oss-Rosen to Liepold of Brinnlitz giving him instructions about the disposal of the population in the event the Russians drew near. There was to be a final selection, said Hassebroeck’s telegram. The aged and the halt were to be shot immediately, and the healthy were to be marched out in the direction of Mauthausen. Though the prisoners on the factory floor knew nothing of this telegram, they still had an unspecified fear of something like it. All that week there had been rumors that Poles had been brought in to dig mass graves in the woods beyond Brinnlitz. The white bread seemed to have come as an antidote to that rumor, a warranty of all their futures. Yet everyone seemed to know that an era of dangers more subtle than those of the past had begun.

  If Oskar’s factory hands knew nothing of the telegram, neither did Herr Commandant Liepold himself. The cable was delivered first to Mietek Pemper in Liepold’s outer office. Pemper had steamed it open and resealed it and taken the news of its contents straight to Oskar. Schindler stood at his desk reading it, then turned to Mietek. “All right, then,” growled Oskar. “We have to say goodbye to Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold.”

  For it seemed both to Oskar and to Pemper that Liepold was the only SS man in the garrison capable of obeying such a telegram. The Commandant’s deputy was a man in his forties, an SS Oberscharf@uhrer named Motzek.

  While Motzek might be capable of some sort of panic slaughter, to administer the cool murder of 1,300 humans was beyond him.

  In the days before his birthday, Oskar made a number of confidential complaints to Hassebroeck about the excessive behavior of Herr Commandant Liepold. He visited the influential Brno police chief, Rasch, and lodged the same sort of charges against Liepold. He showed both Hassebroeck and Rasch copies of letters he had written to the office of General Gl@ucks in Oranienburg. Oskar was gambling that Hassebroeck would remember Oskar’s past generosities and the promise of future ones, that he would take note of the pressure for Liepold’s removal now being built up by Oskar in Oranienburg and Brno, that he would transfer Liepold without bothering to investigate the Untersturmf@uhrer’s behavior toward the inmates of Brinnlitz.

  It was a characteristic Schindler maneuver—the

  Amon-Oskar game of blackjack writ

  large. All the Brinnlitz men were in the

  stake, from Hirsch Krischer, Prisoner

  No. 68821, a forty-eight-year-old

  auto mechanic, to Jarum Kiaf,

  Prisoner No. 77196, a twenty-

  seven-year-old unskilled worker and

  survivor of the Golesz@ow carriages. And

  all the Brinnlitz women were counted in as well,

  from No. 76201, twenty-nine-year-

  old metalworker Berta Aftergut, to No.

  76500, thirty-six-year-old Jenta

  Zwetschenstiel.

  Oskar got fuel for further complaints about

  Liepold by inviting the Commandant to dinner at the

  apartment inside the factory. It was April

  27, the eve of Schindler’s birthday. About

  eleven o’clock that night, the prisoners at work on

  the floor of the plant were startled to see a drunken

  Commandant reeling across the factory floor,

  assisted on his way by a steadier Herr

  Direktor. In the course of his passage,

  Liepold attempted to focus on individual

  workers. He raged, pointing at the great roof

  beams above the machinery. The Herr

  Direktor had so far kept him off the

  factory floor, but here he was, the final and punishing authority. “You fucking Jews,” he was roaring. “See that beam, see it! That’s what I’ll hang you from. Every one of you!”

  Oskar eased him along, directing him by the shoulder, murmuring at him, “That’s right, that’s right. But not tonight, eh? Some other time.” The next day Oskar called Hassebroeck and others with predictable accusations. The man rages around the factory drunk, making threats about immediate executions. They’re not laborers! They’re sophisticated technicians engaged in secret-weapons manufacture, and so on. And although Hassebroeck was responsible for the deaths of thousands of quarry workers, although he believed that all Jewish labor should be liquidated when the Russians were close, he did agree that until then Herr Schindler’s factory should be treated as a special case.

  Liepold, said Oskar, kept stating that he’d like at last to go into combat. He’s young, he’s healthy, he’s willing. Well, Hassebroeck told Oskar, we’ll see what can be done.

  Commandant Liepold himself, meanwhile, spent Oskar’s birthday sleeping off the dinner of the night before.

  In his absence, Oskar made an astounding

  birthday speech. He had been celebrating all

  day, yet no one remembers his delivery being

  unsteady. We do not have the text of what he said,

  but there is another speech, made ten days later

  on the evening of May 8, of which we do have a

  copy. According to those who listened, both speeches

  pursued similar lines. Both were, that is,

  promises of continuing life.

  To call either of them a speech, however, is

  to demean their effect. What Oskar was

  instinctively attempting was to adjust reality,

  to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the

  SS. Long before, with pertinacious certainty,

  he’d told a group of shift workers, Edith

  Liebgold among them, that they would last the war.

  He’d flourished the same gift for prophecy

  when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on their

  morning of arrival the previous November, and

  told them, “You’re safe now; you’re with me.”

  It can’t be ignored that in another age and condition,

  the Herr Direktor could have become a

  demagogue of the style of Huey Long of

  Louisiana or John Lang of Australia,

  whose gift was to convince the listeners that they and he were

  bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil

  devised by other men.

  Oskar’s birthday speech was delivered in

  German at night on the workshop floor to the

  assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had

  to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the

  German civilian personnel were present as

  well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek

  Pfefferberg felt the hairs on his lice stand

  to attention. He looked around at the mute faces

  of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and of the SS men with their

  automatics. They will kill this man, he

  thought. And then everything will fall apart.

  The speech pursued two main promises.

  First, the great tyranny was coming to a close. He


  spoke of the SS men around the walls as if they

  too were imprisoned and yearned for liberation. Many

  of them, Oskar explained to the prisoners, had

  been conscripted from other units and without their consent

  into the Waffen SS. His second promise was

  that he would stay at Brinnlitz until the end of the

  hostilities was announced. “And five minutes

  longer,” he said. For the prisoners, the speech, like

  past pronouncements of Oskar’s, promised a

  future. It stated his vigorous intent that they should

  not go into graves in the woods. It reminded them of

  his investment in them, and it enlivened them.

  One can only guess, however, how it bedeviled

  the SS men who heard it. He had genially

  insulted their corps. How they protested, or

  whether they swallowed it, he would learn from their

  reaction. He had also warned them that he would stay

  in Brinnlitz at least as long as they would, and that

  therefore he was a witness.

  But Oskar did not feel as blithe as he

  sounded. Later he confessed that at the time he was

  concerned about actions retreating military units in

  the Zwittau area might take in regard

  to Brinnlitz. He even says, “We were in a

  panic, because we were afraid of the despairing

  actions of the SS guards.” It must have been a

  quiet panic, for no prisoner, eating his white

  bread on Oskar’s birthday, seems to have caught

  a whiff of it. Oskar was also concerned about some

  Vlasov units which had been stationed on the edges

  of Brinnlitz. These troops were members of the

  ROA, the Russian Army of Liberation, formed

  the year before on the authority of Himmler from the

  vast ranks of Russian prisoners in the

  Reich and commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, a

  former Soviet general captured in front of

  Moscow three years past. They were a dangerous

  corps for the Brinnlitz people, for they knew Stalin

  would want them for a special punishment and feared that

  the Allies would give them back to him. Vlasov

  units everywhere were therefore in a state of violent

  Slavic despair, which they stoked with vodka.

  When they withdrew, seeking the American lines

  farther west, they might do anything.

  Within two days of Oskar’s birthday speech,

  a set of orders arrived on Liepold’s

  desk. They announced that

  Untersturmf@uhrer Liepold had been

  transferred to a Waffen SS infantry

  battalion near Prague. Though Liepold

  could not have been delighted with them, he seems to have

  packed quietly and left. He had often said at

  dinners at Oskar’s, particularly after the

  second bottle of red wine, that he would prefer

  to be in a combat unit. Lately there had been a

  number of field-rank officers, Wehrmacht

  and SS, from the retreating forces invited to dinner in

  the Herr Direktor’s apartment, and their table

  talk had always been to stir Liepold’s itch

  to seek combat. He had never been faced with as much

  evidence as the other guests that the cause was

  finished.

  It is unlikely that he called

  Hassebroeck’s office before packing his bags.

  Telephone communications were not sound, for the

  Russians had encircled Breslau and were within a

  walk of Gr@oss-Rosen itself. But the transfer

  would not have surprised anyone in Hassebroeck’s

  office, since Liepold had often

  made patriotic sounds to them too. So, leaving

  Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek in command of

  Brinnlitz, Josef Liepold drove off

  to battle, a hard-liner who had got his wish.

  With Oskar, there was no mute waiting for the

  close. During the first days of May, he

  discovered somehow—perhaps even by telephone calls

  to Brno, where lines were still operating—that one of the

  warehouses with which he regularly dealt had been

  abandoned. With half a dozen prisoners, he

  drove off by truck to loot it. There were a number

  of roadblocks on the way south, but at each of

  them they flashed their dazzling papers, forged, as

  Oskar would write, with the stamps and signatures

  “of the highest SS police authorities in Moravia and Bohemia.” When they arrived at the warehouse, they found it encircled by fire. Military storehouses in the neighborhood had been set alight, and there had been incendiary bombing raids as well. From the direction of the inner city, where the Czechoslovak underground was fighting door to door with the garrison, they could hear firing. Herr Schindler ordered the truck to back into the loading dock of the warehouse, broke the door open, and discovered that the interior was full of a brand of cigarettes called Egipski.

  In spite of such lighthearted piracy,

  Oskar was frightened by rumors from Slovakia that the Russians were uncritically and informally executing German civilians. From listening to the BBC news each night, he was comforted to find that the war might end before any Russian reached the Zwittau area.

  The prisoners also had indirect access to the

  BBC and knew what the realities were. Throughout

  the history of Brinnlitz the radio

  technicians, Zenon Szenwich and Artur

  Rabner, had continually repaired one or another radio of Oskar’s. In the welding shop, Zenon listened with an earphone to the 2 P.m. news from the Voice of London. During the night shift, the welders plugged into the 2 A.m. broadcast. An SS man, in the factory one night to take a message to the office, discovered three of them around the radio. “We’ve been working on it for the Herr Direktor,” they told the man, “and just got it going a minute ago.”

  Earlier in the year, prisoners had expected that Moravia would be taken by the Americans. Since Eisenhower had stood fast at the Elbe, they now knew that it would be the Russians. The circle of prisoners closest to Oskar were composing a letter in Hebrew, explaining what Oskar’s record was. It might do some good if presented to American forces, which had not only a considerable Jewish component, but field rabbis. Stern and Oskar himself therefore considered it vital that the Herr Direktor somehow be got to the Americans. In part Oskar’s decision was influenced by the characteristic Central European idea of the Russians as barbarians, men of strange religion and uncertain humanity. But apart from that, if some of the reports from the east could be believed, he had grounds for rational fear.

  But he was not debilitated by it. He was awake

  and in a state of hectic expectation when the news

  of the German surrender came to him through the BBC

  in the small hours of May 7. The war in

  Europe was to cease at midnight on the following

  night, the night of Tuesday, May 8. Oskar

  woke Emilie, and the sleepless Stern was

  summoned into the office to help the Herr

  Direktor celebrate. Stern could tell that

  Oskar now felt confident about the SS

  garrison, but would have been alarmed if he could have guessed how Oskar’s certitude would be demonstrated that day.

  On the shop floor, the prisoners maintained

  the usual routines. If anything, they worked

  better than on other days. Yet about noon, the

  Herr Direktor destroyed the pretense of

  business as usual by piping Churchill’s

&n
bsp; victory speech by loudspeaker throughout the camp.

  Lutek Feigenbaum, who understood English,

  stood by his machine flabbergasted. For others, the

  honking and grunting voice of Churchill was the first

  they’d heard in years of a language they would

  speak in the New World. The idiosyncratic

  voice, as familiar in its way as that of the dead

  F@uhrer, carried to the gates and assailed the

  watchtowers, but the SS took it soberly. They

  were no longer turning inward toward the camp. Their

  eyes, like Oskar’s, were focused—but far more

  sharply—on the Russians. According

  to Hassebroeck’s earlier telegram, they should

  have been busy in the rich green woods. Instead,

  clock-watching for midnight, they looked at the

  black face of the forest, speculating whether

  partisans were there. A fretful

  Oberscharf@uhrer Motzek kept them at

  their posts, and duty kept them there also. For duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius.

  In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweler named Licht, had been making a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box he’d been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. It had been supplied by old Mr.

  Jereth of the box factory. It was established— even the Budzyn men, devout Marxists, knew it—that Oskar would have to flee after midnight. The urge to mark that flight with a small ceremony was the preoccupation of the group—Stern, Finder, Garde, the Bejskis, Pemper—close to Oskar. It is remarkable, at a time when they were not sure themselves that they would see the peace, that they should worry about going-away presents.

  All that was handy to make a gift with, however, was base metals. It was Mr. Jereth who suggested a source of something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework. Without Oskar, he said, the SS would have the damned stuff anyway. My teeth would be in a heap in some SS warehouse, along with the golden fangs of strangers from Lublin, @l@od@z, and Lw@ow.

  It was, of course, an appropriate offering, and Jereth was insistent. He had the bridgework dragged out by a prisoner who had once had a dental practice in Cracow. Licht melted the gold down and by noon on May 8 was engraving an inscription on the inner circle in Hebrew. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheister’s in October 1939. “He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”