Schindler's List Part 7

So it was not that Springmann and Kastner were unmanned by Schindler's testimony as much as that their minds were painfully expanding. Their resources seemed minute now that they knew what they were set against-not just any average and predictable Philistine giant, but Behemoth itself. Perhaps already they were reaching for the idea that as well as individual bargaining-some extra food for this camp, rescue for this intellectual, a bribe to temper the professional ardor of this SS man-some vaster rescue scheme would have to be arranged at breathtaking expense.

Schindler threw himself into a chair. Samu Springmann looked across at the exhausted industrialist. He had made an enormous impression on them, said Springmann. They would, of course, send a report to Istanbul on all Oskar had told them. It would be used to stir the Palestinian Zionists and the Joint Distribution Committee to greater action. At the same time it would be transmitted to the governments of Churchill and Roosevelt. Springmann said that he thought Oskar was right to worry about people's belief in what he'd say; he was right to say it was all incredible. "Therefore," said Samu Springmann, "I urge you to go to Istanbul yourself and speak to the people there."

After a little hesitation-whether to do with the demands of the enamelware business or with the dangers of crossing so many borders-Schindler agreed. Toward the end of the year, said Springmann. "In the meantime you will see Dr. Sedlacek in Cracow regularly."

They stood up, and Oskar could see that they were changed men. They thanked him and left, becoming simply, on the way downstairs, two pensive Budapest professional men who'd heard disturbing news of mismanagement in the branch offices.

That night Dr. Sedlacek called at Oskar's hotel and took him out into the brisk streets to dinner at the Hotel Gellert. From their table they could see the Danube, its illuminated barges, the city glowing on the far side of the water. It was like a prewar city, and Schindler began to feel like a tourist again. After his afternoon's temperance, he drank the dense Hungarian burgundy called Bull's Blood with a slow, a.s.siduous thirst, and created a rank of empty bottles at their table.

Halfway through their meal they were joined by an Austrian journalist, Dr. Schmidt, who'd brought with him his mistress, an exquisite, golden Hungarian girl. Schindler admired the girl's jewelry and told her that he was a great fancier of gems himself. But over apricot brandy, he became less friendly. He sat with a mild frown, listening to Schmidt talk of real estate prices and automobile dealings and horse races. The girl listened raptly to Schmidt, since she wore the results of his business coups around her neck and at her wrists. But Oskar's unexpected disapproval was clear. Dr. Sedlacek was secretly amused: perhaps Oskar was seeing a partial reflection of his own new wealth, his own tendencies toward trading on the fringes.

When the dinner was over, Schmidt and his girl left for some nightclub, and Sedlacek made sure he took Schindler to a different one. They sat drinking unwise further quant.i.ties of barack and watching the floor show.

"That Schmidt," said Schindler, wanting to clear up the question so that he could enjoy the small hours. "Do you use him?"

"Yes."

"I don't think you ought to use men like that," said Oskar. "He's a thief."

Dr. Sedlacek turned his face, and its half-smile, away.

"How can you be sure he delivers any of the money you give him?" Oskar asked.

"We let him keep a percentage," said Dr. Sedlacek.

Oskar thought about it for a full half-minute. Then he murmured, "I don't want a d.a.m.ned percentage. I don't want to be offered one."

"Very well," said Sedlacek.

"Let's watch the girls," said Oskar.

EVEN AS OSKAR SCHINDLER returned by freight car from Budapest, where he'd predicted that the ghetto would soon be closed, an SS Untersturmfhrer named Amon Goeth was on his way from Lublin to bring about that liquidation, and to take command of the resultant Forced Labor Camp (Zw.a.n.gsarbeitslager) at Paszw. Goeth was some eight months younger than Schindler, but shared more with him than the mere year of birth. Like Oskar he had been raised a Catholic and had ceased observing the rites of the Church as late as 1938, when his first marriage had broken up. Like Oskar too, he had graduated from high school in the Realgymnasium-Engineering, Physics, Math. He was therefore a practical man, no thinker, but considered himself a philosopher.

A Viennese, he had joined the National Socialist Party early, in 1930. When the nervous Austrian Republic banned the party in 1933, he was already a member of its security force, the SS. Driven underground, he had emerged onto the streets of Vienna after the Anschluss of 1938 in the uniform of an SS noncommissioned officer. In 1940 he had been raised to the rank of SS Oberscharfhrer and in 1941 achieved the honor of commissioned rank, immensely harder to come by in the SS than in Wehrmacht units. After training in infantry tactics, he was put in charge of Sonderkommandos during Aktionen in the populous ghetto of Lublin and, by his performance there, earned the right to liquidate Cracow.

Untersturmfhrer Amon Goeth then, speeding on the Wehrmacht special between Lublin and Cracow, there to take command of well-tried Sonderkommandos, shared with Oskar not only his year of birth, his religion, his weakness for liquor, but a ma.s.sive physique as well. Goeth's face was open and pleasant, rather longer than Schindler's. His hands, though large and muscular, were long-fingered. He was sentimental about his children, the children of his second marriage whom, because of his foreign service, he had not seen often in the past three years. As a subst.i.tute, he was sometimes attentive to the children of brother officers. He could be a sentimental lover too, but though he resembled Oskar in terms of general s.e.xual voraciousness, his tastes were less conventional, running sometimes to his brother SS men, frequently to the beating of women. Both his former wives could have testified that once the first blaze of infatuation had died, he could become physically abusive. He considered himself a sensitive man, and thought that his family's trade proved it. His father and grandfather were Viennese printers and binders of books on military and economic history, and he liked to list himself on official papers as a Literat: a man of letters. And though, at this moment, he would have told you that he looked forward to his taking of control of the liquidation operation-that this was the major chance of his career and carried with it the promise of promotion-his service in Special Actions seemed to him to have altered the flow of his nervous energies. He had been plagued with insomnia for two years now and, if he had his way, stayed up till three or four and slept late in the mornings. He had become a reckless drinker and believed he held his liquor with an ease he had not known in his youth. Again like Oskar, he never suffered the hangovers he deserved. He thanked his hardworking kidneys for this benefit.

His orders, entrusting him with the extinction of the ghetto and the kingship of the Paszw camp, were dated February 12, 1943. He hoped that after consulting with his senior NCOs, with Wilhelm Kunde, commander of the SS guard detail for the ghetto, and with Willi Haase, Schemer's deputy, it would be possible to begin the clearing of the ghetto within a month of the date on his commission.

Commandant Goeth was met at the Cracow Central Station by Kunde himself and by the tall young SS man Horst Pilarzik, who was temporarily in charge of the work camps at Prokocim and Wieliczka. They piled into the back of a Mercedes and were driven off for a reconnaissance of the ghetto and the site of the new camp. It was a bitter day, and snow began to fall as they crossed the Vistula. Untersturmfhrer Goeth was pleased for a pull on a flask of schnapps Pilarzik carried with him. They pa.s.sed through the fake-Oriental portals and down the trolley lines of Lwwska Street, which cut the ghetto into two icy portions. The dapper Kunde, who had been a customs agent in civilian life and was adept at reporting to superiors, gave a deft sketch of the ghetto. The portion on their left was Ghetto B, said Kunde. Its inhabitants, about 2,000 of them, had escaped earlier Aktionen or had been previously employed in industry. But new identification cards had been issued since then, with appropriate initials-either W for Army employees, Z for employees of the civil authorities, or R for workers in essential industries. The inhabitants of Ghetto B lacked these new cards and were to be shipped away for Sonderbehandlung (Special Treatment). In clearing the ghetto, it might be preferable to start on that side first, though that sort of tactical decision was entirely up to the Herr Commandant.

The greater portion of the ghetto stood to the right and contained some 10,000 people still. They would of course be the initial labor force for the factories of the Paszw camp. It was expected that the German entrepreneurs and supervisors-Bosch, Madritsch, Beckmann, the Sudetenlander Oskar Schindler-would want to move all or part of their operations out of town into the camp. As well as that there was a cable-making plant no more than half a mile from the proposed camp, and laborers would be marched there and back each day.

Would the Herr Commandant, asked Kunde, care to continue down the road a few kilometers and have a look at the campsite itself?

Oh, yes, said Amon, I think that would be advisable.

They turned off the highway where the cable-factory yard, snow lying on the giant spools, marked the beginning of Jerozolimska Street. Amon Goeth had a glimpse of a few groups of hunched and bescarved women dragging segments of huts-a wall panel, an eaves section-across the highway and up Jerozolimska from the direction of the railway station at Cracow-Paszw. They were women from the Prokocim camp, Pilarzik explained. When Paszw was ready, Prokocim would of course be disbanded and these laboring women would come under the management of the Herr Commandant.

Goeth estimated the distance the women had to carry the frames to be some three-quarters of a kilometer. "All uphill," said Kunde, putting his head on one shoulder, then on the other, as if to say, So it's a satisfactory form of discipline, but it slows up construction.

The camp would need a railway spur, said Untersturmfhrer Goeth. He would make an approach to Ostbahn.

They pa.s.sed on the right a synagogue and its mortuary buildings, and a half-tumbled wall showed gravestones like teeth in the cruelly exposed mouth of winter. Part of the campsite had been until this month a Jewish cemetery. "Quite extensive," said Wilhelm Kunde. The Herr Commandant uttered a witticism which would come to his lips often during his residency at Paszw. "They won't have to go far to get buried."

There was a house to the right which would be suitable as a temporary residence for the Commandant, and then a large new building to serve as an administration center. The synagogue mortuary, already partly dynamited, would become the camp stable. Kunde pointed out that the two limestone quarries within the camp area could be seen from here. One stood in the bottom of the little valley, the other up on the hill behind the synagogue. The Herr Commandant might be able to notice the tracks being laid for trolleys which would be used in hauling stones. Once the heavy weather let up, the construction of the track would continue.

They drove to the southeast end of the proposed camp, and a trail, just pa.s.sable in the snow, took them along the skyline. The trail ended at what had once been an Austrian military earthwork, a circular mound surrounding a deep and broad indentation. To an artilleryman it would have appeared an important redoubt from which cannon could be sighted to enfilade the road from Russia. To Untersturmfhrer Goeth it was a place suited for disciplinary punishment.

From up here, the camp area could be seen whole. It was a rural stretch, graced with the Jewish cemetery, and folded between two hills. It was in this weather two pages of a largely blank book opened and held at an angle, sideways, to the observer on the fort hill. A gray, stone country dwelling was stuck at the entrance to the valley, and past it, along the far slope and among the few finished barracks, moved teams of women, black as bunches of musical notations, in the strange darkling luminescence of a snowy evening. Emerging from the icy alleys beyond Jerozolimska, they toiled up the white slope under the urgings of Ukrainian guards and dropped the sections of frames where the SS engineers, wearing homburgs and civilian clothes, instructed them.

Their rate of work was a limitation, Untersturmfhrer Goeth remarked. The ghetto people could not, of course, be moved here until the barracks were up and the watchtowers and fences completed. He had no complaints about the pace at which the prisoners on the far hill were working, he told them, confidingly. He was in fact secretly impressed that so late on a biting day, the SS men and Ukrainians on the far slope were not letting the thought of supper and warm barracks slow the pace of operations.

Horst Pilarzik a.s.sured him that it was all closer to completion than it looked: the land had been terraced, the foundations dug despite the cold, and a great quant.i.ty of prefabricated sections carried up from the railway station. The Herr Untersturmfhrer would be able to consult with the entrepreneurs tomorrow-a meeting had been arranged for 10 A.M. But modern methods combined with a copious supply of labor meant that these places could be put up almost overnight, weather permitting.

Pilarzik seemed to believe that Goeth was in genuine danger of demoralization. In fact Amon was exhilarated. From what he could see here, he could discern the final shape of the place. Nor was he worried about fences. The fences would be a mental comfort to the prisoners rather than an essential precaution. For after the established methodology of SS liquidation had been applied to the Podgrze ghetto, people would be grateful for the barracks of Paszw. Even those with Aryan papers would come crawling in here, seeking an obscure berth high up in the green, h.o.a.rfrosted rooftrees. For most of them, the wire was needed only as a prop, so that they might rea.s.sure themselves that they were prisoners against their will.

- The meeting with the local factory owners and Treuhnders took place in Julian Scherner's office in central Cracow early the following day. Amon Goeth arrived smiling fraternally and, in his freshly tailored Waffen SS uniform, designed precisely for his enormous frame, seemed to dominate the room. He was sure he could charm the independents, Bosch and Madritsch and Schindler, into transferring their Jewish labor behind camp wire. Besides that, an investigation of the skills available among the ghetto dwellers helped him to see that Paszw could become quite a business. There were jewelers, upholsterers, tailors who could be used for special enterprises under the Commandant's direction, filling orders for the SS, the Wehrmacht, the wealthy German officialdom. There would be the clothing workshops of Madritsch, the enamel factory of Schindler, a proposed metal plant, a brush factory, a warehouse for recycling used, damaged, or stained Wehrmacht uniforms from the Russian Front, a further warehouse for recycling Jewish clothing from the ghettos and dispatching it for the use of bombed-out families at home. He knew from his experiences of the SS jewelry and fur warehouses of Lublin, having seen his superiors at work there and taken his proper cut, that from most of these prison enterprises he could expect a personal percentage. He had reached that happy point in his career at which duty and financial opportunity coincided. The convivial SS police chief, Julian Scherner, over dinner last night, had talked to Amon about what a great opportunity Paszw would be for a young officer-for them both.

Scherner opened the meeting with the factory people. He spoke solemnly about the "concentration of labor," as if it were a great economic principle new-hatched by the SS bureaucracy. You'll have your labor on site, said Scherner. All factory maintenance will be undertaken at no cost to you, and there will be no rent. All the gentlemen were invited to inspect the workshop sites inside Paszw that afternoon.

The new Commandant was introduced. He said how pleased he was to be a.s.sociated with these businessmen whose valuable contributions to the war effort were already widely known.

Amon pointed out on a map of the camp area the section set aside for the factories. It was next to the men's camp; the women-he told them with an easy and quite charming smile-would have to walk a little farther, one or two hundred meters downhill, to reach the workshops. He a.s.sured the gentlemen that his main task was to oversee the smooth functioning of the camp and that he had no wish to interfere with their factory policies or to alter the managerial autonomy they enjoyed here in Cracow. His orders, as Oberfhrer Schemer could verify, forbade in so many words that sort of intrusion. But the Oberfhrer had been correct in pointing out the mutual advantages of moving an industry inside the camp perimeter. The factory owners did not have to pay for the premises, and he, the Commandant, did not have to provide a guard to march the prisoners to town and back. They could understand how the length of the journey and the hostility of the Poles to a column of Jews would erode the worth of the workers.

Throughout this speech, Commandant Goeth glanced frequently at Madritsch and Schindler, the two he particularly wished to win over. He knew he could already depend on Bosch's local knowledge and advice. But Herr Schindler, for example, had a munitions section, small and merely in the developmental stage as yet. It would, however, if transferred, give Paszw a great respectability with the Armaments Inspectorate.

Herr Madritsch listened with a considered frown, and Herr Schindler watched the speaker with an acquiescent half-smile. Commandant Goeth could tell instinctively, even before he'd finished speaking, that Madritsch would be reasonable and move in, that Schindler would refuse. It was hard to judge by these separate decisions which one of the two felt more paternal toward his Jews-Madritsch, who wanted to be inside Paszw with them, or Schindler, who wanted to have his with him in Emalia.

Oskar Schindler, wearing that same face of avid tolerance, went with the party to inspect the campsite. Paszw had the form of a camp now-an improvement in the weather had permitted the a.s.sembly of barracks; a thawing of the ground permitted the digging of latrines and postholes. A Polish construction company had installed the miles of perimeter fence. Thick-legged watchtowers were going up along the skyline toward Cracow, and also at the mouth of the valley down toward Wieliczka Street, away at the far end of the camp, and up here on this eastern hill where the official party, in the shadow of the Austrian hill fort, watched the fast work of this new creation. Off to the right, Oskar noticed, women were hustling up muddy tracks in the direction of the railway, heavy sections of barracks tilted between them. Below, from the lowest point of the valley and all the way up the far side, the terraced barracks ran, a.s.sembled by male prisoners who raised and slotted and hammered with an energy which at this distance resembled willingness.

On the choicest, most level ground beneath the official party, a number of long wooden structures were available for industrial occupation. Cement floors could be poured should heavy machinery need to be installed. The transfer of all plant machinery would be handled by the SS. The road that serviced the area was admittedly little more than a country track, but the engineering firm of Klug had been approached to build a central street for the camp, and the Ostbahn had promised to provide a spur to the camp gate itself, to the quarry down there on the right. Limestone from the quarries and some of what Goeth called "Polish-defaced" gravestones from over in the cemetery would be broken up to provide other interior roads. The gentlemen should not worry about roads, said Goeth, for he intended to maintain a permanently strong quarrying and road-building team.

A small railroad had been laid for the rock trolleys. It ran from the quarry up past the Administration Building and the large stone barracks that were being built for the SS and Ukrainian garrison. Trolleys of limestone, each weighing six tons, were hauled by teams of women, thirty-five or forty of them to a team, dragging on cables set either side of the rock truck, to compensate for the unevenness in the rail line. Those who tripped or stumbled were trampled or else rolled out of the way, for the teams had their own organic momentum and no individual could abdicate from it. Watching this insidious Egyptian-looking industry, Oskar felt the same surge of nausea, the same p.r.i.c.kling of the blood he had experienced on the hill above Krakusa Street. Goeth had a.s.sumed the businessmen were a safe audience, that they were all spiritual kinfolk of his. He was not embarra.s.sed by that savage hauling down there. The question arose, as it had in Krakusa Street: What could embarra.s.s the SS? What could embarra.s.s Amon?

The energy of the barracks builders had, even to an informed observer like Oskar, the specious appearance of men working hard to put up shelter for their women. But though Oskar had not yet heard the rumor of it, Amon had performed a summary execution in front of those men this morning, so that now they knew what the full terms of their labor were. After the early-morning meeting with the engineers, Amon had been strolling down Jerozolimska and had come to the SS barracks where the work was under the supervision of an excellent NCO, soon to be promoted to officer rank, named Albert Hujar. Hujar had marched up and made his report. A section of the foundations of the barracks had collapsed, said Hujar, his face flushed. At the same time, Amon had noticed a girl walking around the half-finished building, speaking to teams of men, pointing, directing. Who was that? he asked Hujar. She was a prisoner named Diana Reiter, said Hujar, an architectural engineer who had been a.s.signed to the construction of the barracks. She was claiming that the foundations hadn't been correctly excavated, and she wanted all the stone and cement dug up and the work on that section of the building to begin again from scratch.

Goeth had been able to tell from the color of Hujar's face that he had had a tough argument with the woman. Hujar had, in fact, been reduced to screaming at her, "You're building barracks, not the frigging Hotel Europa!"

Now Amon half-smiled at Hujar. We're not going to have arguments with these people, he said, as if it were a promise. Bring me the girl.

Amon could tell, from the way she walked toward him, the bogus elegance with which her middle-cla.s.s parents had raised her, the European manners they had imbued her with, sending her-when the honest Poles wouldn't take her in their universities-off to Vienna or Milan to give her a profession and a heightened protective coloration. She walked toward him as if his rank and hers would bind them in the battle against oafish NCOs and the inferior craft of whichever SS engineer had supervised the digging of the foundations. She did not know that he hated her the worst-the type who thought, even against the evidence of his SS uniform, of these rising structures, that their Jewishness was not visible.

"You've had occasion to quarrel with Oberscharfhrer Hujar," Goeth told her as a fact. She nodded firmly. The Herr Commandant would understand, the nod suggested, even though that idiot Hujar couldn't. The entire foundations at that end must be redug, she told him energetically. Of course, Amon knew "they" were like that, they liked to string out tasks and so ensure that the labor force was safe for the duration of the project. If everything is not redug, she told him, there will be at least subsidence at the southern end of the barracks. There could be collapse.

She went on arguing the case, and Amon nodded and presumed she must be lying. It was a first principle that you never listened to a Jewish specialist. Jewish specialists were in the mold of Marx, whose theories were aimed at the integrity of government, and of Freud, who had a.s.saulted the integrity of the Aryan mind. Amon felt that this girl's argument threatened his personal integrity.

He called Hujar. The NCO returned uneasily. He thought he was going to be told to take the girl's advice. The girl did too. Shoot her, Amon told Hujar. There was, of course, a pause while Hujar digested the order. Shoot her, Amon repeated.

Hujar took the girl's elbow to lead her away to some place of private execution.

Here! said Amon. Shoot her here! On my authority, said Amon.

Hujar knew how it was done. He gripped her by the elbow, pushed her a little to his front, took the Mauser from his holster, and shot her in the back of the neck.

The sound appalled everyone on the work site, except-it seemed-the executioners and the dying Miss Diana Reiter herself. She knelt and looked up once. It will take more than that, she was saying. The knowingness in her eyes frightened Amon, justified him, elevated him. He had no idea and would not have believed that these reactions had clinical labels. He believed, in fact, that he was being awarded the inevitable exaltation that follows an act of political, racial, and moral justice. Even so, a man paid for that, for by evening the fullness of this hour would be followed by such emptiness that he would need, to avoid being blown away like a husk, to augment his size and permanence by food, liquor, contact with a woman.

Apart from these considerations, the shooting of this Diana Reiter, the cancelling of her Western European diploma, had this practical value: that no erector of huts or roads in Paszw would consider himself essential to the task-that if Miss Diana Reiter could not save herself with all her professional skill, the only chance of the others was prompt and anonymous labor. Therefore the women lugging frames up from the Cracow-Paszw railway station, the quarry teams, the men a.s.sembling the huts all worked with an energy appropriate to what they'd learned from Miss Reiter's a.s.sa.s.sination.

As for Hujar and his colleagues, they knew now that instantaneous execution was to be the permitted style of Paszw.

TWO DAYS AFTER THE VISIT of the factory heads to Paszw, Schindler turned up at Commandant Goeth's temporary office in the city, bringing with him the compliments of a bottle of brandy. The news of Diana Reiter's a.s.sa.s.sination had by this time reached the front office of Emalia and was the sort of item that confirmed Oskar in his intention to keep his factory outside Paszw.

The two big men sat opposite each other and there was a mutual knowingness in them too, just as there had been in the brief relationship between Amon and Miss Reiter. What they knew was that each of them was in Cracow to make a fortune; that therefore Oskar would pay for favors. At that level Oskar and the Commandant understood each other well. Oskar had the characteristic salesman's gift of treating men he abhorred as if they were spiritual brothers, and it would deceive the Herr Commandant so completely that Amon would always believe Oskar a friend.

But from the evidence of Stern and others it is obvious that, from the time of their earlier contacts, Oskar abominated Goeth as a man who went to the work of murder as calmly as a clerk goes to his office. Oskar could speak to Amon the administrator, Amon the speculator, but knew at the same time that nine-tenths of the Commandant's being lay beyond the normal rational processes of humans. The business and social connections between Oskar and Amon worked well enough to tempt the supposition that Oskar was somehow and despite himself fascinated by the evil of the man. In fact, no one who knew Oskar at this time or later saw a sign of any such enthrallment. Oskar despised Goeth in the simplest and most pa.s.sionate terms. His contempt would grow without limit, and his career would dramatically demonstrate it. Just the same, the reflection can hardly be avoided that Amon was Oskar's dark brother, was the berserk and fanatic executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appet.i.tes, have become.

With a bottle of brandy between them, Oskar explained to Amon why it was impossible for him to move into Paszw. His plant was too substantial to be shifted. He believed his friend Madritsch intended to move his Jewish workers in, but Madritsch's machinery was more easily transferred-it was basically a series of sewing machines. There were different problems involved in moving heavy metal presses, each of which, as a sophisticated machine will, had developed special quirks. His skilled workers had become accustomed to these quirks. But on a new factory floor the machines would display an entirely new set of eccentricities. There'd be delays; the settling-in period would take longer than it would for his esteemed friend Julius Madritsch. The Untersturmfhrer would understand that with important war contracts to fulfill, DEF could not spare such a lapse of time. Herr Beckmann, who had the same sort of problem, was firing all his Jews over at the Corona works. He didn't want the fuss of the Jews marching out from Paszw to the factory in the morning and back in the evenings. Unfortunately, he, Schindler, had hundreds more skilled Jewish workers than Beckmann did. If he got rid of them, Poles would have to be trained in their place and there would again be a production delay, an even greater one than if he accepted Goeth's attractive offer and moved into Paszw.

Amon secretly thought that Oskar might be worried that a move into Paszw would impinge on any sweetly running little deals he had going in Cracow. The Commandant therefore hurried to rea.s.sure Herr Schindler that there'd be no interference in the management of the enamel factory.

"It's purely the industrial problems that worry me," said Schindler piously. He didn't want to inconvenience the Commandant, but he would be grateful, and he was sure the Armaments Inspectorate would also be grateful, if DEF were permitted to stay in its present location.

Among men like Goeth and Oskar, the word "grat.i.tude" did not have an abstract meaning. Grat.i.tude was a payoff. Grat.i.tude was liquor and diamonds. I understand your problems, Herr Schindler, said Amon. I shall be happy, once the ghetto is liquidated, to provide a guard to escort your workers from Paszw to Zablocie.

- Itzhak Stern, coming to Zablocie one afternoon on business for the Progress factory, found Oskar depressed and sensed in him a dangerous feeling of impotence. After Klonowska had brought in the coffee, which the Herr Direktor drank as always with a shot of cognac, Oskar told Stern that he'd been to Paszw again: ostensibly to look at the facilities; in fact to gauge when it would be ready for the Ghettomenschen. "I took a count," said Oskar. He'd counted the terraced barracks on the far hill and found that if Amon intended to cram 200 women into each, as was likely, there was now room for some 6,000 women up there in the top compound. The men's sector down the hill did not have so many finished buildings, but at the rate things were done in Paszw it could be finished in days.

Everyone on the factory floor knows what's going to happen, said Oskar. And it's no use keeping the night shift on the premises here, because after this one, there'll be no ghetto to go back to. All I can tell them, said Oskar, taking a second slug of cognac, is that they shouldn't try to hide unless they're sure of the hiding place. He'd heard that the pattern was to tear the ghetto apart after it had been cleared. Every wall cavity would be probed, every attic carpet taken up, every niche revealed, every cellar plumbed. All I can tell them, said Oskar, is not to resist.

So it happened oddly that Stern, one of the targets of the coming Aktion, sat comforting Herr Direktor Schindler, a mere witness. Oskar's attention to his Jewish laborers was being diffused, tempted away by the wider tragedy of the ghetto's coming end. Paszw was a labor inst.i.tution, said Stern. Like all inst.i.tutions, it could be outlived. It wasn't like Belec, where they made death in the same manner in which Henry Ford made cars. It was degrading to have to line up for Paszw on orders, but it wasn't the end of things. When Stern had finished arguing, Oskar put both thumbs under the beveled top of his desk and seemed for a few seconds to want to tear it off. You know, Stern, he said, that that's d.a.m.n well not good enough!

It is, said Stern. It's the only course. And he went on arguing, quoting and hairsplitting, and was himself frightened. For Oskar seemed to be in crisis. If Oskar lost hope, Stern knew, all the Jewish workers of Emalia would be fired, for Oskar would wish to be purified of the entire dirty business.

There'll be time to do something more positive, said Stern. But not yet.

Abandoning the attempt to tear the lid from his desk, Oskar sat back in his chair and resumed his depression. "You know that Amon Goeth," he said. "He's got charm. He could come in here now and charm you. But he's a lunatic."

- On the ghetto's last morning-a Shabbat, as it happened, March 13-Amon Goeth arrived in Plac ZG.o.dy, Peace Square, at an hour which officially preceded dawn. Low clouds obscured any sharp distinctions between night and day. He saw that the men of the Sonderkommando had already arrived and stood about on the frozen earth of the small park in the middle, smoking and laughing quietly, keeping their presence a secret from the ghetto dwellers in the streets beyond Herr Pankiewicz' pharmacy. The roads down which they'd move were clear, as in a model of a town. The remaining snow lay heaped and tarnished in gutters and against walls. It is safe to guess that sentimental Goeth felt paternal as he looked out at the orderly scene and saw the young men, comradely before action, in the middle of the square.

Amon took a pull of cognac while he waited there for the middle-aged Sturmbannfhrer Willi Haase, who would have strategic, though not tactical, control of today's Aktion. Today Ghetto A, from Plac ZG.o.dy westward, the major section of the ghetto, the one where all the working (healthy, hoping, opinionated) Jews dwelt, would be emptied. Ghetto B, a small compound a few blocks square at the eastern end of the ghetto, contained the old, the last of the unemployable. They would be uprooted overnight, or tomorrow. They were slated for Commandant Rudolf Hss's greatly expanded extermination camp at Auschwitz. Ghetto B was straightforward, honest work. Ghetto A was the challenge.

Everyone wanted to be here today, for today was history. There had been for more than seven centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening-or at least by tomorrow-those seven centuries would have become a rumor, and Cracow would be judenrein (clean of Jews). And every petty SS official wanted to be able to say that he had seen it happen. Even Unkelbach, the Treuhnder of the Progress cutlery factory, having some sort of reserve SS rank, would put on his NCO's uniform today and move through the ghetto with one of the squads. Therefore the distinguished Willi Haase, being of field rank and involved in the planning, had every right to be counted in.

Amon would be suffering his customary minor headache and be feeling a little drained from the feverish insomnia in which he'd spent the small hours. Now he was here, though, he felt a certain professional exhilaration. It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honor without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at. Psychological impunity had been harder to achieve. Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide. SS training doc.u.ments, written to combat these futile casualties, pointed out the simplemindedness of believing that because the Jew bore no visible weapons he was bereft of social, economic, or political arms. He was, in fact, armed to the teeth. Steel yourself, said the doc.u.ments, for the Jewish child is a cultural time bomb, the Jewish woman a biology of treasons, the Jewish male a more incontrovertible enemy than any Russian could hope to be.

Amon Goeth was steeled. He knew he could not be touched, and the very thought of that gave him the same delicious excitement a long-distance runner might have before an event he feels sure about. Amon despised in a genial sort of way those officers who fastidiously left the act itself to their men and NCOs. He sensed that in some way that might be more dangerous than lending a hand yourself. He would show the way, as he had with Diana Reiter. He knew the euphoria that would build during the day, the gratification that would grow, along with a taste for liquor, as noon came and the pace picked up. Even under the low squalor of those clouds, he knew that this was one of the best days, that when he was old and the race extinct, the young would ask with wonder about days like this.

Less than a kilometer away, a doctor of the ghetto's convalescent hospital, Dr. H, sat among his last patients, in darkness, grateful that they were isolated like this on the hospital's top floor, high above the street, alone with their pain and fever.

For at street level everyone knew what had happened at the epidemic hospital near Plac ZG.o.dy. An SS detachment under Oberscharfhrer Albert Hujar had entered the hospital to close it down and had found Dr. Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients, who, she said, should not be moved. The whooping cough children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for their own sakes and for the community's, and the tuberculosis cases were simply too sick to walk out.

Since scarlet fever is an adolescent disease, many of Dr. Blau's patients were girls between the age of twelve and sixteen. Faced with Albert Hujar, Dr. Blau pointed, as warranty for her professional judgment, to these wide-eyed, feverish girls.

Hujar himself, acting on the mandate he'd received the week before from Amon Goeth, shot Dr. Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some trying to rise in their beds, some detached in their own delirium, were executed in a rage of automatic fire. When Hujar's squad had finished, a detail of ghetto men was sent up the stairs to deal with the dead, to pile the bloodied linen, and to wash down the walls.

The convalescent hospital was situated in what had been before the war a Polish police station. Throughout the life of the ghetto, its three floors had been cluttered with the sick. Its director was a respected physician named Dr. B. By the bleak morning of March 13, Doctors B and H had reduced its population to four, all of them immovable. One was a young workman with galloping consumption; the second, a talented musician with terminal kidney disease. It seemed important to Dr. H that they somehow be spared the final panic of a mad volley of fire. Even more so the blind man afflicted by a stroke, and the old gentleman whose earlier surgery for an intestinal tumor had left him weakened and burdened with a colostomy.

The medical staff here, Dr. H included, were of the highest caliber. From this ill-equipped ghetto hospital would derive the first Polish accounts of Weil's erythroblastic disease, a condition of the bone marrow, and of the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. This morning, though, Dr. H was concerned with the question of cyanide.

With an eye to the option of suicide, H had acquired a supply of cyanic acid solution. He knew that other doctors had too. This past year depression had been endemic to the ghetto. It had infected Dr. H. He was young; he was formidably healthy. Yet history itself seemed to have gone malignant. To know he had access to cyanide had been a comfort for Dr. H on his worst days. By this late stage of the ghetto's history, it was the one pharmaceutical left to him and to the other doctors in quant.i.ty. There had rarely been any sulfa. Emetics, ether, and even aspirin were used up. Cyanide was the single sophisticated drug remaining.

This morning before five, Dr. H had been awakened in his room in Wit Stwosz Street by the noise of trucks pulling up beyond the wall. Looking down from his window, he saw the Sonderkommandos a.s.sembling by the river and knew that they had come to take some decisive action in the ghetto. He rushed to the hospital and found Dr. B and the nursing staff already working there on the same premise, arranging for every patient who could move to be taken downstairs and brought home by relatives or friends. When all except the four had gone, Dr. B told the nurses to leave, and all of them obeyed except for one senior nurse. Now she and Doctors B and H remained with the last four patients in the nearly deserted hospital.

Doctors B and H did not speak much as they waited. They each had access to the cyanide, and soon H would be aware that Dr. B's mind was also sadly preoccupied with it. There was suicide, yes. But there was euthanasia as well. The concept terrified H. He had a sensitive face and a marked delicacy about the eyes. He suffered painfully from a set of ethics as intimate to him as the organs of his own body. He knew that a physician with common sense and a syringe and little else to guide him could add up like a shopping list the values of either course-to inject the cyanide, or to abandon the patients to the Sonderkommando. But H knew that these things were never a matter of calculating sums, that ethics was higher and more tortuous than algebra.

Sometimes Dr. B would go to the window, look out to see if the Aktion had begun in the streets, and turn back to H with a level, professional calm in his eyes. Dr. B, H could tell, was also running through the options, flicking the faces of the problem like the faces of riffled cards, then starting again. Suicide. Euthanasia. Hydrocyanic acid. One appealing concept: Stand and be found among the beds like Rosalia Blau. Another: Use the cyanide on oneself as well as on the sick. The second idea appealed to H, seeming not as pa.s.sive as the first. As well as that, waking depressed these past three nights, he'd felt something like a physical desire for the fast poison, as if it were merely the drug or stiff drink that every victim needed to soften the final hour.

To a serious man like Dr. H, this allure was a compelling reason not to take the stuff. For him the precedents for suicide had been set in his scholarly childhood, when his father had read to him in Josephus the account of the Dead Sea Zealots' ma.s.s suicide on the eve of capture by the Romans. The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender. Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing. But H was a man of principle.

And he had a wife. He and his wife had another escape route, and he knew it. It led through the sewers near the corner of Piwna and Krakusa Streets. The sewers and a risky escape to the forest of Ojcw. He feared that more than the easy oblivion of cyanide. If Blue Police or Germans stopped him, however, and dragged his trousers down, he would pa.s.s the test, thanks to Dr. Lachs. Lachs was a distinguished plastic surgeon who had taught a number of young Cracow Jews how to lengthen their foreskins bloodlessly by sleeping with a weight-a bottle containing a gradually increasing volume of water-attached to themselves. It was, said Lachs, a device that had been used by Jews in periods of Roman persecution, and the intensity of SS action in Cracow had caused Lachs to revive its use in the past eighteen months. Lachs had taught his young colleague Dr. H the method, and the fact that it had worked with some success allowed H even less ground for suicide.

At dawn the nurse, a calm woman about forty years old, came to Dr. H and made a morning report. The young man was resting well, but the blind man with the stroke-affected speech was in a state of anxiety. The musician and the a.n.a.l-fistula case had both had a painful night. It was all very quiet in the convalescent hospital now, however; the patients snuffled in the last of their sleep or the intimacy of their pain; and Dr. H went out onto the freezing balcony above the courtyard to smoke a cigarette and once more examine the question.

Last year Dr. H had been at the old epidemic hospital in Rek.a.w.ka when the SS decided to close that section of the ghetto and relocate the hospital. They had lined the staff up against the wall and dragged the patients downstairs. H had seen old Mrs. Reisman's leg caught between the bal.u.s.ters, and an SS man hauling her by the other leg did not stop and extricate her but pulled until the trapped limb snapped with an audible crack. That was how patients were moved in the ghetto. But last year no one had thought of mercy-killing. Everyone had still hoped at that stage that things might improve.

Now, even if he and Dr. B made their decision, H didn't know if he had the rigor to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional dispa.s.sion. It was absurdly like the argument, in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decided, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.

Out there on the balcony he heard the first noise. It began early and came from the eastern end of the ghetto. The Raus, raus! of megaphones, the customary lie about baggage which some people still chose to believe. In the deserted streets, and among the tenements in which no one moved, you could hear all the way from the cobblestones of Plac ZG.o.dy and up by the river in Nadwilanska Street an indefinite terror-sick murmur which made H himself tremble.

Then he heard the first volley, loud enough to wake the patients. And a sudden stridency after the firing, a bull megaphone raging at some plangent feminine voice; and then the wailing snapped off by a further burst of fire, and a different wailing succeeding, the bereaved being hurried along by the SS bullhorns, by anxious OD men, and by neighbors, unreasonable grief fading into the far corner of the ghetto where there was a gate. He knew that it all might well have cut through even the precomatose state of the musician with the failed kidneys.

When he returned to the ward, he could see that they were watching him-even the musician. He could sense rather than see the way their bodies stiffened in their beds, and the old man with the colostomy cried out with the muscular exertion. "Doctor, doctor!" someone said. "Please!" answered Dr. H, by which he meant, I'm here and they're a long way off yet. He looked at Dr. B, who narrowed his eyes as the noise of evictions broke out again three blocks away. Dr. B nodded at him, walked to the small locked pharmaceutical chest at the end of the ward, and came back with the bottle of hydrocyanic acid. After a pause, H moved to his colleague's side. He could have stood and left it to Dr. B. He guessed that the man had the strength to do it alone, without the approval of colleagues. But it would be shameful, H thought, not to cast his own vote, not to take some of the burden. Dr. H, though younger than Dr. B, had been a.s.sociated with the Jagiellonian University, was a specialist, a thinker. He wanted to give Dr. B the backing of all that.

"Well," said Dr. B, displaying the bottle briefly to H. The word was nearly obscured by a woman's screaming and ranting official orders from the far end of Jzefiska Street. Dr. B called the nurse. "Give each patient forty drops in water." "Forty drops," she repeated. She knew what the medication was. "That's right," said Dr. B. Dr. H also looked at her. Yes, he wanted to say. I'm strong now; I could give it myself. But if I did, it would alarm them. Every patient knows that nurses bring the medicine around.

As the nurse prepared the mixture, H wandered down the ward and laid his hand on the old man's. "I have something to help you, Roman," he told him. Dr. H sensed with amazement the old man's history through the touch of skin. For a second, like a surge of flame, the young man Roman was there, growing up in Franz Josef's Galicia, a lady-killer in the sweet little nougat of a city, the pet.i.t Wien, the jewel of the Vistula, Cracow. Wearing Franz Josef's uniform and going to the mountains for spring maneuvers. Chocolate-soldiering in Rynek Glowny with the girls of Kazimierz, in a city of lace and patisseries. Climbing the Kosciuszko Mound and stealing a kiss among the shrubbery. How could the world have come so far in one manhood? asked the young man in old Roman. From Franz Josef to the NCO who had had a sanction to put Rosalia Blau and the scarlet fever girls to death?

"Please, Roman," said the doctor, meaning that the old man should unclench his body. He believed the Sonderkommando was coming within the hour. Dr. H felt, but resisted, a temptation to let him in on the secret. Dr. B had been liberal with the dosage. A few seconds of breathlessness and a minor amazement would be no new or intolerable sensation to old Roman.

When the nurse came with four medicine gla.s.ses, none of them even asked her what she was bringing them. Dr. H would never know if any of them understood. He turned away and looked at his watch. He feared that when they drank it, some noise would begin, something worse than the normal hospital gasps and gaggings. He heard the nurse murmuring, "Here's something for you." He heard an intake of breath. He didn't know if it was patient or nurse. The woman is the hero of this, he thought.

When he looked again, the nurse was waking the kidney patient, the sleepy musician, and offering him the gla.s.s. From the far end of the ward, Dr. B looked on in a clean white coat. Dr. H moved to old Roman and took his pulse. There was none. In a bed at the far end of the ward, the musician forced the almond-smelling mixture down.

It was all as gentle as H had hoped. He looked at them-their mouths agape, but not obscenely so, their eyes glazed and immune, their heads back, their chins pointed at the ceiling-with the envy any ghetto dweller would feel for escapees.

POLDEK PFEFFERBERG shared a room on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house at the end of Jzefiska Street. Its windows looked down over the ghetto wall at the Vistula, where Polish barges pa.s.sed upstream and down in ignorance of the ghetto's last day and SS patrol boats puttered as casually as pleasure craft. Here Pfefferberg waited with his wife, Mila, for the Sonderkommando to arrive and order them out into the street. Mila was a small, nervous girl of twenty-two, a refugee from d whom Poldek had married in the first days of the ghetto. She came from generations of physicians, her father having been a surgeon who had died young in 1937, her mother a dermatologist who, during an Aktion in the ghetto of Tarnow last year, had suffered the same death as Rosalia Blau of the epidemic hospital, being cut down by automatic fire while standing among her patients.

Mila had lived a sweet childhood, even in Jew-baiting d, and had begun her own medical education in Vienna the year before the war. She had met Poldek when d people were shipped down to Cracow in 1939. Mila had found herself billeted in the same apartment as the lively Poldek Pfefferberg.