Schindler's List Part 2

Left alone with Stern, Schindler murmured that he'd be grateful if the accountant could tell him what he knew about some of the local businesses. Testing Oskar, Stern suggested that perhaps Herr Schindler should speak to the officials of the Trust Agency.

"They're thieves," said Herr Schindler genially. "They're bureaucrats too. I would like some lat.i.tude." He shrugged. "I am a capitalist by temperament and I don't like being regulated."

So Stern and the self-declared capitalist began to talk. And Stern was quite a source; he seemed to have friends or relatives in every factory in Cracow-textiles, garments, confectionery, cabinet-making, metalwork. Herr Schindler was impressed and took an envelope from the breast pocket of his suit. "Do you know a company called Rekord?" he asked.

Itzhak Stern did. It was in bankruptcy, he said. It had made enamelware. Since it had gone bankrupt some of the metal-press machinery had been confiscated, and now it was largely a sh.e.l.l, producing-under the management of one of the former owners' relatives-a mere fraction of its capacity. His own brother, said Stern, represented a Swiss company that was one of Rekord's major creditors. Stern knew that it was permitted to reveal a small degree of fraternal pride and then to deprecate it. "The place was very badly managed," said Stern.

Schindler dropped the envelope into Stern's lap. "This is their balance sheet. Tell me what you think."

Itzhak said that Herr Schindler should of course ask others as well as himself. Of course, Oskar told him. But I would value your opinion.

Stern read the balance sheets quickly; then, after some three minutes of study, all at once felt the strange silence of the office and looked up, finding Herr Oskar Schindler's eyes full on him.

There was, of course, in men like Stern an ancestral gift for sniffing out the just Goy, who could be used as buffer or partial refuge against the savageries of the others. It was a sense for where a safe house might be, a potential zone of shelter. And from now on the possibility of Herr Schindler as sanctuary would color the conversation as might a half-glimpsed, intangible s.e.xual promise color the talk between a man and a woman at a party. It was a suggestion Stern was more aware of than Schindler, and nothing explicit would be said for fear of damaging the tender connection.

"It's a perfectly good business," said Stern. "You could speak to my brother. And, of course, now there's the possibility of military contracts . . . ."

"Exactly," murmured Herr Schindler.

For almost instantly after the fall of Cracow, even before Warsaw's siege ended, an Armaments Inspectorate had been set up in the Government General of Poland, its mandate being to enter into contracts with suitable manufacturers for the supply of army equipment. In a plant like Rekord, mess kits and field kitchenware could be turned out. The Armaments Inspectorate, Stern knew, was headed by a Major General Julius Schindler of the Wehrmacht. Was the general a relative of Herr Oskar Schindler's? Stern asked. No, I'm afraid not, said Schindler, but as if he wanted Stern to keep his nonrelationship a secret.

In any case, said Stern, even the skeleton production at Rekord was grossing more than a half-million zoty a year, and new metal-pressing plant and furnaces could be acquired relatively easily. It depended on Herr Schindler's access to credit.

Enamelware, said Schindler, was closer to his line than textiles. His background was in farm machinery, and he understood steam presses and so forth.

It did not any longer occur to Stern to ask why an elegant German entrepreneur wished to talk to him about business options. Meetings like this one had occurred throughout the history of his tribe, and the normal exchanges of business did not quite explain them. He talked on at some length, explaining how the Commercial Court would set the fee for the leasing of the bankrupt estate. Leasing with an option to buy-it was better than being a Treuhnder. As a Treuhnder, only a supervisor, you were completely under the control of the Economics Ministry.

Stern lowered his voice then and risked saying it: "You will find you are restricted in the people you'll be allowed to employ . . . ."

Schindler was amused. "How do you know all this? About ultimate intentions?"

"I read it in a copy of the Berliner Tageblatt. A Jew is still permitted to read German newspapers."

Schindler continued to laugh, reached out a hand, and let it fall on Stern's shoulder. "Is that so?" he asked.

In fact, Stern knew these things because Aue had received a directive from Reich Secretary of State Eberhard von Jagwitz of the Economics Ministry outlining the policies to be adopted in Aryanizing businesses. Aue had left it to Stern to make a digest of the memorandum. Von Jagwitz had indicated, more in sadness than in anger, that there would be pressure from other government and Party agencies, such as Heydrich's RHSA, the Reich Security Main Office, to Aryanize not just the ownership of companies, but also the management and work force. The sooner Treuhnders filtered out the skilled Jewish employees the better-always, of course, bearing in mind the maintenance of production at an acceptable level.

At last Herr Schindler put the accounts of Rekord back into his breast pocket, stood up, and led Itzhak Stern out into the main office. They stood there for a time, among the typists and clerks, growing philosophical, as Oskar liked to do. It was here that Oskar brought up the matter of Christianity's having its base in Judaism, a subject which for some reason, perhaps even because of his boyhood friendship with the Kantors in Zwittau, interested him. Stern spoke softly, at length, learnedly. He had published articles in journals of comparative religion. Oskar, who wrongly fancied himself a philosopher, had found an expert. The scholar himself, Stern, whom some thought a pedant, found Oskar's understanding shallow, a mind genial by nature but without much conceptual deftness. Not that Stern was about to complain. An ill-a.s.sorted friendship was firmly established. So that Stern found himself drawing an a.n.a.logy, as Oskar's own father had, from previous empires and giving his own reasons why Adolf Hitler could not succeed.

The opinion slipped out before Stern could withdraw it. The other Jews in the office bowed their heads and stared fixedly at their worksheets. Schindler did not seem disturbed.

Near the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He'd hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.

"Of course, of course," said Oskar Schindler.

Itzhak, rightly or wrongly, always believed that it was at that moment that he had dropped the right seed in the furrow.

THERE IS ANOTHER CRACOW JEW who gives an account of meeting Schindler that autumn-and of coming close to killing him. This man's name was Leopold (Poldek) Pfefferberg. He had been a company commander in the Polish Army during the recent tragic campaign. After suffering a leg wound during the battle for the river San, he'd limped around the Polish hospital in Przemyl, helping with the other wounded. He was no doctor, but a high school physical-education teacher who had graduated from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow and so had some knowledge of anatomy. He was resilient; he was self-confident, twenty-seven years old, and built like a wedge.

With some hundreds of other captured Polish officers from Przemyl, Pfefferberg was on his way to Germany when his train drew into his home city of Cracow and the prisoners were herded into the first-cla.s.s waiting room, to remain there until new transport could be provided. His home was ten blocks away. To a practical young man, it seemed outrageous that he could not go out into Pawia Street and catch a No. I trolley home. The bucolic-looking Wehrmacht guard at the door seemed a provocation.

Pfefferberg had in his breast pocket a doc.u.ment signed by the German hospital authority of Przemyl indicating that he was free to move about the city with ambulance details tending to the wounded of both armies. It was spectacularly formal, stamped and signed. He took it out now and, going up to the guard, thrust it at him.

"Can you read German?" Pfefferberg demanded.

This sort of ploy had to be done right, of course. You had to be young; you had to be persuasive; you had to have retained, undiminished by summary defeat, a confident bearing of a particularly Polish nature-something disseminated to the Polish officer corps, even to those rare members of it who were Jewish, by its plentiful aristocrats.

The man had blinked. "Of course I can read German," he said. But after he'd taken the doc.u.ment he held it like a man who couldn't read at all-held it like a slice of bread. Pfefferberg explained in German how the doc.u.ment declared his right to go out and attend to the ill. All the guard could see was a proliferation of official stamps. Quite a doc.u.ment. With a wave of the head, he indicated the door.

Pfefferberg was the only pa.s.senger on the No. I trolley that morning. It was not even 6 A.M. The conductor took his fare without a fuss, for in the city there were still many Polish troops not yet processed by the Wehrmacht. The officers had to register, that was all.

The trolley swung around the Barbakan, through the gate in the ancient wall, down Floriaska to the Church of St. Mary, across the central square, and so within five minutes into Grodzka Street. Nearing his parents' apartment at No. 48, as he had as a boy he jumped from the car before the air brakes went on and let the momentum of the jump, enhanced by that of the trolley, bring him up with a soft thud against the doorjamb.

After his escape, he had lived not too uncomfortably in the apartments of friends, visiting Grodzka 48 now and then. The Jewish schools opened briefly-they would be closed again within six weeks-and he even returned to his teaching job. He was sure the Gestapo would take some time to come looking for him, and so he applied for ration books. He began to dispose of jewelry-as an agent and in his own right-on the black market that operated in Cracow's central square, in the arcades of the Sukiennice and beneath the two unequal spires of St. Mary's Church. Trade was brisk, among the Poles themselves but more so for the Polish Jews. Their ration books, full of precancelled coupons, ent.i.tled them to only two-thirds of the meat and half of the b.u.t.ter allowance that went to Aryan citizens, while all the cocoa and rice coupons were cancelled. And so the black market which had operated through centuries of occupation and the few decades of Polish autonomy became the food and income source and the readiest means of resistance for respectable bourgeois citizens, especially those who, like Leopold Pfefferberg, were street-wise.

He presumed that he would soon be traveling over the ski routes around Zakopane in the Tatras, across Slovakia's slender neck into Hungary or Rumania. He was equipped for the journey: he had been a member of the Polish national ski team. On one of the high shelves of the porcelain stove in his mother's apartment he kept an elegant little .22 pistol-armory both for the proposed escape and in case he was ever trapped inside the apartment by the Gestapo.

With this pearl-handled semitoy, Pfefferberg came close to killing Oskar Schindler one chilly day in November. Schindler, in double-breasted suit, Party badge on the lapel, decided to call on Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg, Poldek's mother, to offer her a commission. He had been given by the Reich housing authorities a fine modern apartment in Straszewskiego Street. It had previously been the property of a Jewish family by the name of Nussbaum. Such allocations were carried out without any compensation to the previous occupant. On the day Oskar came calling, Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg herself was worried that it would happen to her apartment in Grodzka.

A number of Schindler's friends would claim later-though it is not possible to prove it-that Oskar had gone looking for the dispossessed Nussbaums at their lodgings in Podgrze and had given them a sum close to 50,000 zoty in compensation. With this sum, it is said, the Nussbaums bought themselves an escape to Yugoslavia. Fifty thousand zoty signified substantial dissent; but there would be other similar acts of dissent by Oskar before Christmas. Some friends would in fact come to say that generosity was a disease in Oskar, a frantic thing, one of his pa.s.sions. He would tip taxi drivers twice the fare on the meter. But this has to be said too-that he thought the Reich housing authorities were unjust and told Stern so, not when the regime got into trouble but even in that, its sweetest autumn.

In any case, Mrs. Pfefferberg had no idea what the tall, well-tailored German was doing at her door. He could have been there to ask for her son, who happened to be in the kitchen just then. He could have been there to commandeer her apartment, and her decorating business, and her antiques, and her French tapestry.

In fact, by the December feast of Hanukkah the German police would, on the orders of the housing office, get around to the Pfefferbergs, arriving at their door and then ordering them, shivering in the cold, downstairs onto the pavement of Grodzka. When Mrs. Pfefferberg asked to go back for a coat, she would be refused; when Mr. Pfefferberg made for a bureau to get an ancestral gold watch, he would be punched in the jaw. "I have witnessed terrible things in the past," Hermann Gring had said; "little chauffeurs and Gauleiters have profited so much from these transactions that they now have about half a million." The effect of such easy pickings as Mr. Pfefferberg's gold watch on the moral fiber of the Party might distress Gring. But in Poland that year, it was the style of the Gestapo to be unaccountable for the contents of apartments.

When Schindler first came to the Pfefferbergs' second-floor apartment, however, the family were still in tenuous occupation. Mrs. Pfefferberg and her son were talking among the samples and bolts of fabric and wallpaper when Herr Schindler knocked. Leopold was not worried. There were two front entrances to the apartment-the business door and the kitchen door faced each other across a landing. Leopold retreated to the kitchen and looked through the crack in the door at the visitor. He saw the formidable size of the man, the fashionable cut of his suit. He returned to his mother in the living room. He had the feeling, he said, that the man was Gestapo. When you let him in at the office door, I can always slip out through the kitchen.

Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg was trembling. She opened the office door. She was, of course, listening for sounds along the corridor. Pfefferberg had in fact picked up the pistol and put it into his belt and intended to wed the sound of his exit to the sound of Herr Schindler's entry. But it seemed folly to go without knowing what the German official wanted. There was a chance the man would have to be killed, and then there would need to be a concerted family flight into Rumania.

If the magnetic drift to the event had drawn Pfefferberg to take out his pistol and fire, the death, the flight, the reprisals would have been considered unexceptional and appropriate to the history of the month. Herr Schindler would have been briefly mourned and summarily avenged. And this would have been, of course, the brisk ending to all Oskar's potentialities. And back in Zwittau they would have said, "Was it someone's husband?"

The voice surprised the Pfefferbergs. It was calm, quiet, suited to the doing of business, even to the asking of favors. They had got used in past weeks to the tone of decree and summary expropriation. This man sounded fraternal. That was somehow worse. But it intrigued you too.

Pfefferberg had slipped from the kitchen and concealed himself behind the double doors of the dining room. He could see a sliver of the German. You're Mrs. Pfefferberg? the German asked. You were recommended to me by Herr Nussbaum. I have just taken over an apartment in Straszewskiego Street, and I would like to have it redecorated.

Mina Pfefferberg kept the man at the door. She spoke so incoherently that the son took pity on her and appeared in the doorway, his jacket b.u.t.toned up over the weapon. He asked the visitor in and at the same time whispered a.s.surances in Polish to his mother.

Now Oskar Schindler gave his name. There was some measuring up, for Schindler could tell that Pfefferberg had appeared to perform an act of primal protection. Schindler showed his respect by talking now through the son as through an interpreter.

"My wife is coming up from Czechoslovakia," he said, "and I'd like the place redone in her style." He said the Nussbaums had maintained the place excellently, but they went in for heavy furniture and somber colors. Mrs. Schindler's tastes were livelier-a little French, a little Swedish.

Mrs. Pfefferberg had recovered enough to say that she didn't know-it was a busy time with Christmas coming up. Leopold could tell there might be an instinctive resistance in her to developing a German clientele; but the Germans might be the only race this season with enough confidence in the future to go in for interior design. And Mrs. Pfefferberg needed a good contract-her husband had been removed from his job and worked now for a pittance in the housing office of the Gemeinde, the Jewish welfare bureau.

Within two minutes the men were chatting like friends. The pistol in Pfefferberg's belt had now been relegated to the status of armament for some future, remote emergency. There was no doubt that Mrs. Pfefferberg was going to do the Schindler apartment, no expense spared, and when that was settled, Schindler mentioned that Leopold Pfefferberg might like to come around to the apartment to discuss other business. "There is the possibility that you can advise me on acquiring local merchandise," Herr Schindler said. "For example, your very elegant blue shirt . . . I don't know where to begin to look for that kind of thing myself." His ingenuousness was a ploy, but Pfefferberg appreciated it. "The stores, as you know, are empty," murmured Oskar like a hint.

Leopold Pfefferberg was the sort of young man who survived by raising the stakes. "Herr Schindler, these shirts are extremely expensive, I hope you understand. They cost twenty-five zoty each."

He had multiplied the price by five. There was all at once an amused knowingness in Herr Schindler-not enough, though, to imperil the tenuous friendship or remind Pfefferberg that he was armed.

"I could probably get you some," said Pfefferberg, "if you give me your size. But I'm afraid my contacts will require money in advance."

Herr Schindler, still with that knowingness in his eyes, took out his wallet and handed Pfefferberg 200 Reichsmarks. The sum was flamboyantly too much and even at Pfefferberg's inflated price would have bought shirts for a dozen tyc.o.o.ns. But Pfefferberg knew the game and did not blink. "You must give me your measurements," he said.

A week later, Pfefferberg brought a dozen silk shirts to Schindler's apartment on Straszewskiego Street. There was a pretty German woman in the apartment who was introduced to Pfefferberg as Treuhnder of a Cracow hardware business. Then, one evening, Pfefferberg saw Oskar in the company of a blond and large-eyed Polish beauty. If there was a Frau Schindler, she did not appear even after Mrs. Pfefferberg had redecorated the place. Pfefferberg himself became one of Schindler's most regular connections to that market in luxuries-silk, furnishings, jewelry-which flourished in the ancient town of Cracow.

THE NEXT TIME ITZHAK STERN met Oskar Schindler was on a morning in early December. Schindler's application to the Polish Commercial Court of Cracow had already been filed, yet Oskar had the leisure to visit the offices of Buchheister and, after conferring with Aue, to stand near Stern's desk in the outer office, clap his hands, and announce in a voice that sounded already tipsy, "Tomorrow, it's going to start. Jzefa and Izaaka Streets are going to know all about it!"

There were in Kazimierz a Jzefa Street and an Izaaka Street. There were in every ghetto, and Kazimierz was the site of the old ghetto of Cracow, once an island ceded to the Jewish community by Kazimier the Great, now a near suburb nestled in an elbow of the Vistula River.

Herr Schindler bent over Stern, and Stern felt his brandy-warm breath and considered this question: Did Herr Schindler know something would happen in Jzefa Street and Izaaka Street? Or was he just brandishing the names? In any case, Stern suffered a nauseating sense of disappointment. Herr Schindler was whistling up a pogrom, boasting inexactly about it, as if to put Stern in his place.

It was December 3. When Oskar said "tomorrow," Stern presumed he was using the term not in the sense of December 4, but in the terms in which drunks and prophets always used it, as something that either would or d.a.m.n well should happen soon. Only a few of those who heard, or heard about, Herr Schindler's boozy warning took it literally. Some packed an overnight bag and moved their families across the river to Podgrze.

As for Oskar, he felt he had pa.s.sed on hard news at some risk. He had got it from at least two sources, new friends of his. One, an officer attached to the SS police chief's staff, was a policeman named Wachtmeister (sergeant) Herman Toffel. The other, Dieter Reeder, belonged to the staff of SD chief Czurda. Both these contacts were characteristic of the sympathetic officers Oskar always managed to sniff out.

He was never good, though, at explaining his motives for speaking to Stern that December. He would say later that in the period of the German Occupation of Bohemia and Moravia he had seen enough seizure of Jewish and Czech property, and forcible removal of Jews and Czechs from those Sudeten areas considered German, to cure him of any zeal for the New Order. His leaking of the news to Stern, far more than the unconfirmed Nussbaum story, goes some way toward proving his case.

He must have hoped also, as the Jews of Cracow did, that after its initial fury the regime would relax and let people breathe. If the SS raids and incursions of the next few months could be mitigated by the leaking of advance information, then perhaps sanity would rea.s.sert itself in the spring. After all, both Oskar and the Jews told themselves, the Germans were a civilized nation.

The SS invasion of Kazimierz would, however, arouse in Oskar a fundamental disgust-not one that impinged too directly yet on the level at which he made his money, entertained women or dined with friends, but one that would, the clearer the intentions of the reigning power became, lead, obsess, imperil, and exalt him. The operation was meant in part to be a raid for jewelry and furs. There'd be some evictions from houses and apartments in the wealthier borderland between Cracow and Kazimierz. But beyond these practical results, that first Aktion was also meant to serve dramatic notice to the dismayed people of the old Jewish quarter. For that purpose, Reeder told Oskar, a small detachment of Einsatzgruppe men would drive down Stradom and into Kazimierz in the same trucks as the boys of the local SS and the Field Police.

Six Einsatzgruppen had come to Poland with the invading army. Their name had subtle meanings. "Special-duty groups" is a close translation. But the amorphous word Einsatz was also rich with a nuance-of challenge, of picking up a gauntlet, of knightliness. These squads were recruited from Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service). They already knew their mandate was broad. Their supreme leader had six weeks ago told General Wilhelm Keitel that "in the Government General of Poland there will have to be a tough struggle for national existence which will permit of no legal restraints." In the high rhetoric of their leaders, the Einsatz soldiers knew, a struggle for national existence meant race warfare, just as Einsatz itself, Special Chivalrous Duty, meant the hot barrel of a gun.

The Einsatz squad destined for action in Kazimierz that evening were an elite. They would leave to the pieceworkers of the Cracow SS the sordid task of searching the tenements for diamond rings and fur-trimmed coats. They themselves would take part in some more radically symbolic activity to do with the very instruments of Jewish culture-that is, with the ancient synagogues of Cracow.

They had for some weeks been waiting to exercise Einsatz, as had the local SS Sonderkommandos (or Special Squads), also a.s.signed to this first Cracow Aktion, and the Security Police of SD chief Czurda. The Army had negotiated with Heydrich and the higher police chiefs a stay of operations until Poland pa.s.sed from military to civil rule. This pa.s.sage of authority had now taken place, and throughout the country the Knights of Einsatz and the Sonderkommandos were unleashed to advance with an appropriate sense of racial history and professional detachment into the old Judaic ghettos.

At the end of the street where Oskar's apartment stood rose the fortified rock outcrop of Wawel Castle from which Hans Frank ruled. And if Oskar's Polish future is to be understood, there is a need to look at the linkage between Frank and the young field operatives of SS and SD, and then between Frank and the Jews of Cracow.

In the first place, Hans Frank had no direct kingship over these special squads moving into Kazimierz. Heinrich Himmler's police forces, wherever they worked, would always be their own lawmakers. As well as resenting their independent power, Frank also disagreed with them on practical grounds. He had as refined an abomination of the Jewish population as anyone in the Party and found the sweet city of Cracow intolerable because of its manifold Jews. In past weeks he'd complained when the authorities tried to use the Government General, and especially Cracow with its railway junction, as a dumping ground for Jews from the cities of the Wartheland, from d and Poznan. But he did not believe the Einsatzgruppen or the Sonderkommandos, using current methods, could really make a dent in the problem. It was Frank's belief, shared with Himmler in some stages of "Heini's" mental vagaries, that there should be a single vast concentration camp for Jews, that it should at least be the city of Lublin and the surrounding countryside, or even more desirably, the island of Madagascar.

The Poles themselves had always believed in Madagascar. In 1937 the Polish Government had sent a commission to study that high-spined island so far from the coasts of their European sensibilities. The French Colonial Office, to which Madagascar belonged, was willing to make a deal, government to government, on such a resettlement, for a Madagascar crowded with Europe's Jews would make a grand export market. The South African Defense Minister, Oswald Pirow, had acted for a time as negotiator between Hitler and France in the matter of the island. Therefore Madagascar, as a solution, had an honorable pedigree. Hans Frank had his money on it and not on the Einsatzgruppen. For their sporadic raids and ma.s.sacres could not cut down the subhuman population of Eastern Europe. During the time of the campaign around Warsaw, the Einsatzgruppen had hung Jews up in the synagogues of Silesia, ruptured their systems with water torture, raided their homes on Sabbath evenings or feast days, cut off their prayer locks, set their prayer shawls afire, stood them against a wall. It had barely counted. There were many indications from history, Frank proposed, that threatened races generally outbred the genocides. The phallus was faster than the gun.

What no one knew-neither the parties to the debate, the well-educated Einsatzgruppe boys in the back of one truck, the not-so-refined SS boys in the back of another, the evening worshipers in the synagogues, Herr Oskar Schindler on his way home to Straszewskiego to dress for dinner-what none of them knew and many a Party planner scarce hoped for was that a technological answer would be found-that a disinfectant chemical compound, Zyklon B, would supplant Madagascar as the solution.

There had been an incident involving Hitler's pet actress and director, Leni Riefenstahl. She had come to d with a roving camera crew soon after the city fell and had seen a line of Jews-visible Jews, the prayer-locked variety-executed with automatic weapons. She had gone straight to the Fhrer, who was staying at Southern Army headquarters, and made a scene. That was it-the logistics, the weight of numbers, the considerations of public relations; they made the Einsatz boys look silly. But Madagascar too would look ridiculous once means were discovered to make substantial inroads into the subhuman population of Central Europe at fixed sites with adequate disposal facilities which no fashionable moviemaker was likely to stumble upon.

- As Oskar had forewarned Stern in the front office of Buchheister's, the SS carried economic warfare from door to door in Jakoba and Izaaka and Jzefa. They broke into apartments, dragged out the contents of closets, smashed the locks on desks and dressers. They took valuables off fingers and throats and out of watch fobs. A girl who would not give up her fur coat had her arm broken; a boy from Ciemna Street who wanted to keep his skis was shot.

Some of those whose goods were taken-unaware that the SS were operating outside legal restraint-would tomorrow complain at police stations. Somewhere, history told them, was a senior officer with a little integrity who would be embarra.s.sed and might even discipline some of these unruly fellows. There would have to be an investigation into the business of the boy in Ciemna and the wife whose nose was broken with a truncheon.

While the SS were working the apartment buildings, the Einsatzgruppe squad moved against the fourteenth-century synagogue of Stara Boznca. As they expected, they found at prayer there a congregation of traditional Jews with beards and sidelocks and prayer shawls. They collected a number of the less Orthodox from surrounding apartments and drove them in as well, as if they wanted to measure the reaction of one group to the other.

Among those pushed across the threshold of Stara Bonca was the gangster Max Redlicht, who would not otherwise have entered an ancient temple or been invited to do so. They stood in front of the Ark, these two poles of the same tribe who would on a normal day have found each other's company offensive. An Einsatz NCO opened the Ark and took out the parchment Torah scroll. The disparate congregation on the synagogue floor were to file past and spit at it. There was to be no faking-the spittle was to be visible on the calligraphy.

The Orthodox Jews were more rational about it than those others, the agnostics, the liberals, the self-styled Europeans. It was apparent to the Einsatz men that the modern ones balked in front of the scroll and even tried to catch their eye as if to say, Come on, we're all too sophisticated for this nonsense. The SS men had been told in their training that the European character of liberal Jews was a tissue-thin facade, and in Stara Bonca the backsliding reluctance of the ones who wore short haircuts and contemporary clothes went to prove it.

Everyone spat in the end except Max Redlicht. The Einsatzgruppe men may have seen this as a test worth their time-to make a man who visibly does not believe renounce with spittle a book he views intellectually as antique tribal drivel but which his blood tells him is still sacred. Could a Jew be retrieved from the persuasions of his ridiculous blood? Could he think as clearly as Kant? That was the test.

Redlicht would not pa.s.s it. He made a little speech. "I've done a lot. But I won't do that." They shot him first, and then shot the rest anyway and set fire to the place, making a sh.e.l.l of the oldest of all Polish synagogues.

VICTORIA KLONOWSKA, a Polish secretary, was the beauty of Oskar's front office, and he immediately began a long affair with her. Ingrid, his German mistress, must have known, as surely as Emilie Schindler knew about Ingrid. For Oskar would never be a surrept.i.tious lover. He had a childlike s.e.xual frankness. It wasn't that he boasted. It was that he never saw any need to lie, to creep into hotels by the back stairs, to knock quietly on any girl's door in the small hours. Since Oskar would not seriously try to tell his women lies, their options were reduced; traditional lovers' arguments were difficult.

Blond hair piled up above her pretty, foxy, vividly made-up face, Victoria Klonowska looked like one of those lighthearted girls to whom the inconveniences of history are a temporary intrusion into the real business of life. This autumn of simple clothes, Klonowska was frivolous in her jacket and frilled blouse and slim skirt. Yet she was hardheaded, efficient, and adroit. She was a nationalist too, in the robust Polish style. She would in the end negotiate with the German dignitaries for her Sudeten lover's release from SS inst.i.tutions. But for the moment Oskar had a less risky job for her.

He mentioned that he would like to find a good bar or cabaret in Cracow where he could take friends. Not contacts, not senior people from the Armaments Inspectorate. Genuine friends. Somewhere lively where middle-aged officials would not turn up.

Did Klonowska know of such a place?

She discovered an excellent jazz cellar in the narrow streets north of the Rynek, the city square. It was a place that had always been popular with the students and younger staff of the university, but Victoria herself had never been there before. The middle-aged men who had pursued her in peacetime would never want to go to a student dive. If you wished to, it was possible to rent an alcove behind a curtain for private parties under cover of the tribal rhythms of the band. For finding this music club, Oskar nicknamed Klonowska "Columbus." The Party line on jazz was that it not only was artistically decadent but expressed an African, a subhuman animality. The ump-pa-pa of Viennese waltzes was the preferred beat of the SS and of Party officials, and they earnestly avoided jazz clubs.

Round about Christmas in 1939, Oskar got together a party at the club for a number of his friends. Like any instinctive cultivator of contacts, he would never have any trouble drinking with men he didn't like. But that night the guests were men he did. Additionally, of course, they were all useful, junior but not uninfluential members of sundry agencies of Occupation; and all of them more or less double exiles-not only were they away from home, but home or abroad, they were all variously uneasy under the regime.

There was, for example, a young German surveyor from the Government General's Division of the Interior. He had marked out the boundaries of Oskar's enamel factory in Zablocie. At the back of Oskar's plant, Deutsche Email Fabrik (DEF), stood a vacant area where two other manufactories ab.u.t.ted, a box factory and a radiator plant. Schindler had been delighted to find that most of the waste area belonged, according to the surveyor, to DEF. Visions of economic expansion danced in his head. The surveyor had, of course, been invited because he was a decent fellow, because you could talk to him, because he might be handy to know for future building permits.

The policeman Herman Toffel was there also, and the SD man Reeder, as well as a young officer-also a surveyor, named Steinhauser-from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar had met and taken to these men while seeking the permits he needed to start his plant. He had already enjoyed drinking bouts with them. He would always believe that the best way to untie bureaucracy's Gordian knot, short of bribery, was booze.

Finally there were two Abwehr men. The first was Eberhard Gebauer, the lieutenant who had recruited Oskar into the Abwehr the year before. The second was Leutnant Martin Plathe of Canaris' headquarters in Breslau. It had been through his friend Gebauer's recruitment that Herr Oskar Schindler had first discovered what a city of opportunity Cracow was.

There would be a by-product from the presence of Gebauer and Plathe. Oskar was still on the Abwehr's books as an agent and, in his years in Cracow, would keep the staff of Canaris' Breslau office satisfied by pa.s.sing on to them reports on the behavior of their rivals in the SS. Gebauer and Plathe would consider his bringing along of a more-or-less disaffected gendarme like Toffel, and of Reeder of the SD, as an intelligence favor, a gift quite apart from the good company and the liquor.

Though it is not possible to say exactly what the members of the party talked about that night, it is possible from what Oskar said later of each of these men to make a plausible reconstruction.

It was Gebauer, of course, who would have made the toast, saying he would not give them governments, armies or potentates: instead he would give them the enamel factory of their good friend Oskar Schindler. He did so because if the factory prospered, there would be more parties, parties in the Schindler style, the best parties you could imagine.

But after the toast had been drunk, the talk turned naturally to the subject that bemused or obsessed all levels of the civil bureaucracy. The Jews.

Toffel and Reeder had spent the day at Mogilska Station supervising the unloading of Poles and Jews from eastbound trains. These people had been shipped in from the Incorporated Territories, newly conquered regions which had been German in the past. Toffel wasn't making a point about the comfort of the pa.s.sengers in the Ostbahn cattle cars, although he confessed that the weather had been cold. But the transport of populations in livestock carriages was new to everyone, and the cars were not as yet inhumanly crowded. What confused Toffel was the policy behind it all.

There is a persistent rumor, said Toffel, that we are at war. And in the midst of it the Incorporated Territories are too d.a.m.n simon-pure to put up with a few Poles and a half-million Jews. "The whole Ostbahn system," said Toffel, "has to be turned over to delivering them to us."

The Abwehr men listened, slight smiles on their faces. To the SS the enemy within might be the Jew, but to the Canaris the enemy within was the SS.

The SS, Toffel said, had reserved the entire rail system from November 15 on. Across his desk in Pomorska Street, he said, had crossed copies of angry SS memoranda addressed to Army officials and complaining that the Army was welching on its deal, had gone two weeks over schedule in its use of the Ostbahn. For Christ's sake, Toffel asked, shouldn't the Army have first use, for as long as it liked, of the railway system? How else is it to deploy east and west? Toffel asked, drinking excitedly. On bicycles?

Oskar was half-amused to see that the Abwehr men did not comment. They suspected Toffel might be a plant instead of simply being drunk.

The surveyor and the man from the Armaments Inspectorate asked Toffel some questions about these remarkable trains arriving at Mogilska. Soon such shipments wouldn't be worth talking about: transports of humans would become a cliche of resettlement policy. But on the evening of Oskar's Christmas party, they were still a novelty.

"They call it," said Toffel, "concentration. That's the word you find in the doc.u.ments. Concentration. I call it b.l.o.o.d.y obsession."

The owner of the jazz club brought in plates of herring and sauce. The fish went down well with the fiery liquor, and as they wolfed it, Gebauer spoke about the Judenrats, the Jewish councils set up in each community on the order of Governor Frank. In cities like Warsaw and Cracow the Judenrat had twenty-four elected members personally responsible for the fulfillment of the orders of the regime. The Judenrat of Cracow had been in existence for less than a month; Marek Biberstein, a respected munic.i.p.al authority, had been appointed its president. But, Gebauer remarked, he had heard that it had already approached Wawel Castle with a plan for a roster of Jewish labor. The Judenrat would supply the labor details for digging ditches and latrines and clearing snow. Didn't everyone find that excessively cooperative of them?

Not at all, said engineer Steinhauser of the Armaments Inspectorate. They thought that if they supplied the labor squads it would stop random press-ganging. Press-ganging led to beatings and the occasional bullet in the head.

Martin Plathe agreed. They'll be cooperative for the sake of avoiding something worse, he said. It's their method-you have to understand that. They'd always bought the civil authorities off by cooperating with them and then negotiating.

Gebauer seemed to be out to mislead Toffel and Reeder by pushing the point, by seeming more pa.s.sionately a.n.a.lytic about Jews than he really was. "I'll tell you what I mean by cooperation," he said. "Frank pa.s.ses an edict demanding that every Jew in the Government General wear a star. That edict's only a few weeks old. In Warsaw you've got a Jewish manufacturer churning them out in washable plastic at three zoty each. It's as if they've got no idea what sort of law it is. It's as if the thing were an emblem of a bicycle club."