Schindler's List Part 8

Now he was already, like Mila, the last of his family. His mother, who had once redecorated Schindler's Straszewskiego Street apartment, had been shipped with his father to the ghetto of Tarnow. From there, it would be discovered in the end, they were taken to Belec and murdered. His sister and brother-in-law, on Aryan papers, had vanished in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. He and Mila had only each other. There was a temperamental gulf between them: Poldek was a neighborhood boy, a leader, an organizer; the type who, when authority appeared and asked what in G.o.d's name was happening, would step forward and speak up. Mila was quieter, rendered more so by the unspeakable destiny that had swallowed her family. In a peaceable era, the mix between them would have been excellent. She was not only clever but wise; she was a quiet center. She had a gift for irony, and Poldek Pfefferberg often needed her to restrain his torrents of oratory. Today, however, on this impossible day, they were in conflict.

Though Mila was willing, should the chance come, to leave the ghetto, even to entertain a mental image of herself and Poldek as partisans in the forest, she feared the sewers. Poldek had used them more than once as a means of leaving the ghetto, even though the police were sometimes to be found at one end or the other. His friend and former lecturer, Dr. H, had also mentioned the sewers recently as an escape route which might not be guarded on the day the Sonderkommando moved in. The thing would be to wait for the early winter dusk. The door of the doctor's house was mere meters from a manhole cover. Once down in there, you took the left-hand tunnel, which brought you beneath the streets of non-ghetto Podgrze to an outlet on the embankment of the Vistula near the Zatorska Street ca.n.a.l. Yesterday Dr. H had given him the definite news. The doctor and his wife would attempt the sewer exit, and the Pfefferbergs were welcome to join them. Poldek could not at that stage commit Mila and himself. Mila had a fear, a reasonable one, that the SS might flood the sewers with gas or might resolve the matter anyhow by arriving early at the Pfefferbergs' room at the far end of Jzefiska Street.

It was a slow, tense day up in the attic room, waiting to find out which way to jump. Neighbors must also have been waiting. Perhaps some of them, not wanting to deal with the delay, had marched up the road already with their packages and hopeful suitcases, for in a way it was a mix of sounds fit to draw you down the stairs-violent noise dimly heard from blocks away, and here a silence in which you could hear the ancient, indifferent timbers of the house ticking away the last and worst hours of your tenancy. At murky noon Poldek and Mila chewed on their brown bread, the 300g each they had in stock. The recurrent noises of the Aktion swept up to the corner of Wegierska, a long block away, and then, toward midafternoon, receded again. There was near-silence then. Someone tried uselessly to flush the recalcitrant toilet on the first-floor landing. It was nearly possible at that hour to believe that they had been overlooked.

The last dun afternoon of their life in No. 2 Jzefiska refused, in spite of its darkness, to end. The light, in fact, was poor enough, thought Poldek, for them to try for the sewer earlier than dusk. He wanted, now that it was quiet, to go and consult with Dr. H.

Please, said Mila. But he soothed her. He would keep off the streets, moving through the network of holes that connected one building with another. He piled up the rea.s.surances. The streets at this end seemed to be clear of patrols. He would evade the occasional OD or wandering SS man at the intersections, and be back within five minutes. Darling, darling, he told her, I have to check with Dr. H.

He went down the back stairs and into the yard through the hole in the stable wall, not emerging into the open street until he'd reached the Labor Office. There he risked crossing the broad carriageway, entering the warrens of the triangular block of houses opposite, meeting occasional groups of confused men conveying rumors and discussing options in kitchens, sheds, yards, and corridors. He came out into Krakusa Street just across from the doctor's place. He crossed unnoticed by a patrol working down near the southern limit of the ghetto, three blocks away, in the area where Schindler had witnessed his first demonstration of the extremities of Reich racial policy.

Dr. H's building was empty, but in the yard Poldek met a dazed middle-aged man who told him that the Sonderkommando had already visited the place and that the doctor and his wife had first hidden, then gone for the sewers. Perhaps it's the right thing to do, said the man. They'll be back, the SS. Poldek nodded; he knew now the tactics of the Aktion, having already survived so many.

He went back the way he'd come and again was able to cross the road. But he found No. 2 empty, Mila vanished with their baggage, all doors opened, all rooms vacant. He wondered if in fact they were not all hidden down at the hospital-Dr. H and his wife; Mila. Perhaps the Hs had called for her out of respect for her anxiety and her long medical lineage.

Poldek hurried out through the stable again, and by alternative pa.s.sageways reached the hospital courtyard. Like disregarded flags of surrender, bloodied bedding hung from the balconies of both the upper floors. On the cobblestones was a pile of victims. They lay, some of them, with their heads split open, their limbs twisted. They were not, of course, the terminal patients of Doctors B and H. They were people who had been detained here during the day and then executed. Some of them must have been imprisoned upstairs, shot, then tumbled into the yard.

Always thereafter, when questioned about the corpses in the ghetto hospital yard, Poldek would say 60 to 70, though he had no time to count that tangled pyramid. Cracow being a provincial town and Poldek having been raised as a very sociable child in Podgrze and then in the Centrum, visiting with his mother the affluent and distinguished people of the city, he recognized in that heap familiar faces: old clients of his mother's; people who had asked him about school at the Kosciuszko High School, got precocious answers in reply, and fed him cake and candy for his looks and charm. Now they were shamefully exposed and jumbled in that blood-red courtyard.

Somehow it did not occur to Pfefferberg to look for the bodies of his wife and the Hs. He sensed why he had been placed there. He believed unshakably in better years to come, years of just tribunals. He had that sense of being a witness which Schindler had experienced on the hill beyond Rek.a.w.ka.

He was distracted by the sight of a crowd of people in Wegierska Street beyond the courtyard. They moved toward the Rek.a.w.ka gate with the dull but not desperate languor of factory workers on a Monday morning, or even of supporters of a defeated football team. Among this wave of people he noticed neighbors from Jzefiska Street. He walked out of the yard, carrying like a weapon up his sleeve his memory of it all. What had happened to Mila? Did any of them know? She'd already left, they said. The Sonderkommando's been through. She'd already be out the gate, on her way to the place. To Paszw.

He and Mila, of course, had had a contingency plan for an impa.s.se like this. If one of them ended up in Paszw, it would be better for the other to attempt to stay out. He knew that Mila had her gift for un.o.btrusiveness, a good gift for prisoners; but also she could be racked by extraordinary hunger. He'd be her supplier from the outside. He was sure these things could be managed. It was no easy decision, though-the bemused crowds, barely guarded by the SS, now making for the south gate and the barbed-wire factories of Paszw were an indication of where most people, probably quite correctly, considered that long-term safety lay.

The light, though late now, was sharp, as if snow were coming on. Poldek was able to cross the road and enter the empty apartments beyond the pavement. He wondered whether they were in fact empty or full of ghetto dwellers concealed cunningly or naively-those who believed that wherever the SS took you, it led in the end to the extermination chambers.

Poldek was looking for a first-cla.s.s hiding place. He came by back pa.s.sages to the lumberyard on Jzefiska. Lumber was a scarce commodity. There were no great structures of cut timber to hide behind. The place that looked best was behind the iron gates at the yard entrance. Their size and blackness seemed a promise of the coming night. Later he would not be able to believe that he'd chosen them with such enthusiasm.

He hunched in behind the one that was pushed back against the wall of the abandoned office. Through the crack left between the gate and the gatepost, he could see up Jzefiska in the direction he'd come from. Behind that freezing iron leaf he watched the slice of cold evening, a luminous gray, and pulled his coat across his chest. A man and his wife hurried past, rushing for the gate, dodging among the dropped bundles, the suitcases labeled with futile large letters. KLEINFELD, they proclaimed in the evening light. LEHRER, BAUME, WEINBERG, SMOLAR, STRUS, ROSENTHAL, BIRMAN, ZEITLIN. Names against which no receipts would be issued. "Heaps of goods laden with memories," the young artist Josef Bau had written of such scenes. "Where are my treasures?"

From beyond this battleground of fallen luggage he could hear the aggressive baying of dogs. Then into Jzefiska Street, striding on the far pavement, came three SS men, one of them dragged along by a canine flurry which proved to be two large police dogs. The dogs hauled their handler into No. 41 Jzefiska, but the other two men waited on the pavement. Poldek had paid most of his attention to the dogs. They looked like a cross between Dalmatians and German shepherds. Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they'd been brought in from some other and harsher ghetto. For even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last a.s.sumption was wiped away in the next half-minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack of the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lww or Warsaw, as you thought. It was at the north side of Jzefiska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes, and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman's howling protest.

Just as Pfefferberg would think of the pile of bodies in the hospital yard as 60 or 70, he would always testify that the child was two or three years of age.

Perhaps before she was even dead, certainly before he himself even knew he had moved, as if the decision had came from some mettlesome gland behind his forehead, Pfefferberg gave up the freezing iron gate, since it would not protect him from the dogs, and found himself in the open yard. He adopted at once the military bearing he'd learned in the Polish Army. He emerged from the lumberyard like a man on a ceremonial a.s.signment, and bent and began lifting the bundles of luggage out of the carriageway and heaping them against the walls of the yard. He could hear the three SS men approaching; the dogs' snarling breath was palpable, and the whole evening was stretched to breaking by the tension in their leashes. When he believed they were some ten paces off, he straightened and permitted himself, playing the biddable Jew of some European background, to notice them. He saw that their boots and riding breeches were splashed with blood, but they were not abashed to appear before other humans dressed that way. The officer in the middle was tallest. He did not look like a murderer; there was a sensitivity to the large face and a subtle line to the mouth.

Pfefferberg in his shabby suit clicked his cardboard heels in the Polish style and saluted this tall one in the middle. He had no knowledge of SS ranks and did not know what to call the man. "Herr," he said. "Herr Commandant!"

It was a term his brain, under threat of its extinction, had thrown forth with electric energy. It proved to be the precise word, for the tall man was Amon Goeth in the full vitality of his afternoon, elated at the day's progress and as capable of instant and instinctive exercises of power as Poldek Pfefferberg was of instant and instinctive subterfuge.

"Herr Commandant, I respectfully report to you that I received an order to put all the bundles together to one side of the road so that there will be no obstruction of the thoroughfare."

The dogs were craning toward him through their collars. They expected, on the basis of their black training and the rhythm of today's Aktion, to be let fly at Pfefferberg's wrist and groin. Their snarls were not simply feral, but full of a frightful confidence in the outcome, and the question was whether the SS man on the Herr Commandant's left had enough strength to restrain them. Pfefferberg didn't expect much. He would not be surprised to be buried by dogs and after a time to be delivered from their ravages by a bullet. If the woman hadn't got away with pleading her motherhood, he stood little chance with stories of bundles, of clearing a street in which human traffic had in any case been abolished.

But the Commandant was more amused by Pfefferberg than he had been by the mother. Here was a Ghettomensch playing soldier in front of three SS officers and making his report, servile if true, and almost endearing if not. His manner was, above all, a break in style for a victim. Of all today's doomed, not one other had tried heel-clicking. The Herr Commandant could therefore exercise the kingly right to show irrational and unexpected amus.e.m.e.nt. His head went back; his long upper lip retracted. It was a broad, honest laugh, and his colleagues smiled and shook their heads at its extent.

In his excellent baritone, Untersturmfhrer Goeth said, "We're looking after everything. The last group is leaving the ghetto. Verschwinde!" That is, Disappear, little Polish clicking soldier!

Pfefferberg began to run, not looking back, and it would not have surprised him if he had been felled from behind. Running, he got to the corner of Wegierska and turned it, past the hospital yard where some hours ago he had been a witness. The dark came down as he neared the gate, and the ghetto's last familiar alleys faded. In Podgrze Square, the last official huddle of prisoners stood in a loose cordon of SS men and Ukrainians.

"I must be the last one out alive," he told people in that crowd.

- Or if not he it was Wulkan the jeweler and his wife and son. Wulkan had been working these past months in the Progress factory and, knowing what was to happen, had approached Treuhnder Unkelbach with a large diamond concealed for two years in the lining of a coat. "Herr Unkelbach," he told the supervisor, "I'll go wherever I'm sent, but my wife isn't up to all that noise and violence." Wulkan and his wife and son would wait at the OD police station under the protection of a Jewish policeman they knew, and then perhaps during the day Herr Unkelbach would come and convey them bloodlessly to Paszw.

Since this morning they had sat in a cubicle in the police station, but it had been as frightful a wait as if they'd stayed in their kitchen, the boy alternately terrified and bored, and his wife continuing to hiss her reproaches. Where is he? Is he going to come at all? These people, these people! Early in the afternoon, Unkelbach did in fact appear, came into the Ordnungsdienst to use the lavatory and have coffee. Wulkan, emerging from the office in which he'd been waiting, saw a Treuhnder Unkelbach he had never known before: a man in the uniform of an SS NCO, smoking and exchanging animated conversation with another SS man; using one hand to take hungry mouthfuls of coffee, to bite off mouthfuls of smoke, to savage a lump of brown bread while his pistol, still held in the left hand, lay like a resting animal on the police-station counter and dark spatters of blood ran across the breast of his uniform. The eyes he turned to meet Wulkan's did not see the jeweler. Wulkan knew at once that Unkelbach was not backing out of the deal, he simply did not remember it. The man was drunk, and not on liquor. If Wulkan had called to him, the answer would have been a stare of ecstatic incomprehension. Followed, very likely, by something worse.

Wulkan gave it up and returned to his wife. She kept saying, "Why don't you talk to him? I'll talk to him if he's still there." But then she saw the shadow in Wulkan's eyes and sneaked a look around the edge of the door. Unkelbach was getting ready to leave. She saw the unaccustomed uniform, the blood of small traders and their wives splashed across its front. She uttered a whimper and returned to her seat.

Like her husband, she now fell into a well-founded despair, and the waiting became somehow easier. The OD man they knew restored them to the usual pulse of hope and anxiety. He told them that all the OD, apart from Spira's praetorians, had to be out of the ghetto by 6 P.M. and on the Wieliczka Road to Paszw. He would see if there was a way of getting the Wulkans into one of the vehicles.

After dark had fallen in the wake of Pfefferberg's pa.s.sage up Wegierska, after the last party of prisoners had a.s.sembled at the gate into Podgrze Square, while Dr. H and his wife were moving eastward in the company and under the cover of a group of rowdy Polish drunks, and while the squads of the Sonderkommando were resting and taking a smoke before the last search of the tenements, two horse-drawn wagons came to the door of the police station. The Wulkan family were hidden by the OD men under cartons of paperwork and bundles of clothing. Symche Spira and his a.s.sociates were not in sight, were on the job somewhere in the streets, drinking coffee with NCOs, celebrating their permanence within the system.

But before the wagons had turned out of the ghetto gate, the Wulkans, flattened to the boards, heard the nearly continuous sound of rifle and small-arms fire from the streets behind them. It meant that Amon Goeth and Willi Haase, Albert Hujar, Horst Pilarzik, and some hundreds of others were bursting into the attic niches, the false ceilings, the crates in cellars, and finding those who all day had maintained a hopeful silence.

More than 4,000 such people were discovered overnight and executed in the streets. In the next two days their bodies were taken to Paszw on open-platform trucks and buried in two ma.s.s graves in the woods beyond the new camp.

WE DO NOT KNOW IN What Condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13, the ghetto's last and worst day. But by the time his workers returned to him under guard from Paszw, he was back in the mood for collecting data to pa.s.s on to Dr. Sedlacek on the dentist's next visit. He found out from the prisoners that Zw.a.n.gsarbeitslager Paszw-as it was known in SS bureaucratese-was to be no rational kingdom. Goeth had already pursued his pa.s.sion against engineers by letting the guards beat Zygmunt Grnberg into a coma and bring him so late to the clinic up near the women's camp that his death was a.s.sured. From the prisoners who ate their hearty noonday soup at DEF, Oskar heard also that Paszw was being used not only as a work camp but as a place of execution as well. Though all the camp could hear the executions, some of the prisoners had been witnesses.

The prisoner M,1 for example, who had had a prewar decorating business in Cracow. In the first days of the camp he was in demand to decorate the houses of the SS, the few small country villas that flanked the lane on the north side of the camp. Like any especially valued artisan he had more freedom of movement, and one afternoon that spring he had been walking from the villa of Untersturmfhrer Leo John up the track toward the hill called Chujowa Grka, on whose crest stood the Austrian fort. Before he was ready to turn back down the slope to the factory yard, he had to pause to let an Army truck grind past him uphill. M had noticed that beneath its canopy were women under the care of white-coveralled Ukrainian guards. He had hidden between stacks of lumber and got an incomplete view of the women, disembarked and marched inside the fort, refusing to undress. The man yelling the orders in there was the SS man Edmund Sdrojewski. Ukrainian NCOs marched among the women hitting them with whip handles. M presumed they were Jewish, probably women caught with Aryan papers, brought here from Montelupich prison. Some cried out at the blows, but others were silent, as if to refuse the Ukrainians that much satisfaction. One of them began to intone the Shema Yisroel, and the others took it up. The verses rose vigorously above the mound, as if it had just occurred to the girls-who till yesterday had played straight Aryans-that now the pressure was off, they were freer than anyone to celebrate their tribal difference in the faces of Sdrojewski and the Ukrainians. Then, huddling for modesty and the bite of the spring air, they were all shot. At night the Ukrainians took them away in wheelbarrows and buried them in the woods on the far side of Chujowa Grka.

People in the camp below had also heard that first execution on the hill now profanely nicknamed "p.r.i.c.k Hill." Some told themselves that it was partisans being shot up there, intractable Marxists or crazy nationalists. It was another country up there. If you obeyed the ordinances within the wire, you need never visit it. But the more clearheaded of Schindler's workers, marched up Wieliczka Street past the cable factory and over to Zablocie to work at DEF-they knew why prisoners from Montelupich were being shot at the Austrian hill fort, why the SS did not seem alarmed if the truckloads were seen arriving or the noise was heard throughout Paszw. The reason was that the SS did not look on the prison population as ultimate witnesses. If there had been concern about a time in court, a ma.s.s of future testimony, they would have taken the women deeper into the woods. The conclusion to be drawn, Oskar decided, was not that Chujowa Grka was a separate world from Paszw, but that all of them, those brought to the mound fort by truck and those behind the wire down the hill, were under sentence.

- The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out his front door and murdered a prisoner at random, there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on Chujowa Grka, as a unique event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon's morning routine.

Wearing a shirt and riding breeches and boots on which his orderly had put a high shine, he would emerge on the steps of his temporary villa. (They were renovating a better place for him down at the other end of the camp perimeter.) As the season wore on he would appear without his shirt, for he loved the sun. But for the moment he stood in the clothes in which he had eaten breakfast, a pair of binoculars in one hand and a sniper's rifle in the other. He would scan the camp area, the work at the quarry, the prisoners pushing or hauling the quarry trucks on the rails which pa.s.sed by his door. Those glancing up could see the smoke from the cigarette which he held clamped between his lips, the way a man smokes without hands when he is too busy to put down the tools of his trade. Within the first few days of the camp's life he appeared thus at his front door and shot a prisoner who did not seem to be pushing hard enough at a cart loaded with limestone. No one knew Amon's precise reason for settling on that prisoner-Amon certainly did not have to doc.u.ment his motives. With one blast from the doorstep, the man was plucked from the group of pushing and pulling captives and hurled sideways in the road. The others stopped pushing, of course, their muscles frozen in expectation of a general slaughter. But Amon waved them on, frowning, as if to say that he was pleased for the moment with the standard of work he was getting from them.

Apart from such excesses with prisoners, Amon was also breaking one of the promises he'd made to the entrepreneurs. Oskar got a telephone call from Madritsch-Madritsch wanted them both to complain. Amon had said he would not interfere in the business of the factories. At least, he was not interfering from within. But he held up shifts by detaining the prison population for hours on the Appellplatz (parade ground) at roll call. Madritsch mentioned a case in which a potato had been found in a given hut, and therefore every prisoner from that barracks had to be publicly flogged in front of the thousands of inmates. It is no fast matter to have a few hundred people drag their pants and underwear down, their shirts or dresses up, and treat each of them to twenty-five lashes. It was Goeth's rule that the flogged prisoner call out the numbers for the guidance of the Ukrainian orderlies who did the flogging. If the victim lost track of the count, it was to begin again. Commandant Goeth's roll calls on the Appellplatz were full of just such time-consuming trickery.

Therefore shifts would arrive hours late at the Madritsch clothing factory inside the Paszw camp, and an hour later still at Oskar's place in Lipowa Street. They would arrive shocked, too, unable to concentrate, muttering stories of what Amon or John or Scheidt or some other officer had done that morning. Oskar complained to an engineer he knew at the Armaments Inspectorate. It's no use complaining to the police chiefs, said the engineer. They're not involved in the same war we are. What I ought to do, said Oskar, is keep the people on the premises. Make my own camp.

The idea amused the engineer. Where would you put them, old man? he asked. You don't have much room.

If I can acquire the s.p.a.ce, said Oskar, would you write a supporting letter?

When the engineer agreed, Oskar called an elderly couple named Bielski who lived in Stradom Street. He wondered if they would consider an offer for the land ab.u.t.ting his factory. He drove across the river to see them. They were delighted by his manner. Because he had always been bored by the rituals of haggling, he began by offering them a boom-time price. They gave him tea and, in a state of high excitement, called their lawyer to draw up the papers while Oskar was still on the premises. From their apartment, Oskar drove out, as a courtesy, and told Amon that he intended to make a subcamp of Paszw in his own factory yard. Amon was quite taken with the idea. "If the SS generals approve," he said, "you can expect my cooperation. As long as you don't want my musicians or my maid."

The next day a full-scale appointment was arranged with Oberfhrer Schemer at Pomorska Street. Somehow both Amon and General Schemer knew that Oskar could be made to foot the whole bill for a new camp. They could detect that when Oskar pushed the industrial argument-"I want my workers on the premises so that their labor can be more fully exploited"-he was at the same time pushing some other intimate craze of his in which expense was no question. They thought of him as a good enough fellow who'd been stricken with a form of Jew-love as with a virus. It was a corollary to SS theory that the Jewish genius so pervaded the world, could achieve such magical effects, that Herr Oskar Schindler was to be pitied as much as was a prince turned into a frog. But he would have to pay for his disease.

The requirements of Obergruppenfhrer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krger, police chief of the Government General and superior of Schemer and Czurda, were based on the regulations set down by the Concentration Camp Section of General Oswald Pohl's SS Main Administrative and Economic Office, even though as yet Paszw was run independently of Pohl's bureau. The basic stipulations for an SS Forced Labor Subcamp involved the erection of fences nine feet tall, of watchtowers at given intervals according to the length of the camp perimeter, of latrines, barracks, a clinic, a dental office, a bathhouse and delousing complex, a barbershop, a food store, a laundry, a barracks office, a guard block of somewhat better construction than the barracks themselves, and all the accessories. What had occurred to Amon, Schemer, and Czurda was that Oskar, as was only proper, would meet the expenses either out of economic motives or because of the cabalistic enchantment he lay under.

And even though they would make Oskar pay, his proposal suited them. There was still a ghetto in Tarnow, forty-five miles east, and when it was abolished the population would need to be absorbed into Paszw. Likewise the thousands of Jews now arriving at Paszw from the shtetls of southern Poland. A subcamp in Lipowa Street would ease that pressure.

Amon also understood, though he would never say it aloud to the police chiefs, that there would be no need to supply a Lipowa Street camp too precisely with the minimum food requirements as laid down in General Pohl's directive. Amon-who could hurl thunderbolts from his doorstep without meeting protest, who believed in any case in the official idea that a certain attrition should take place in Paszw-was already selling a percentage of the prison rations on the open market in Cracow through an agent of his, a Jew named Wilek Chilowicz, who had contacts with factory managements, merchants, and even restaurants in Cracow.

Dr. Alexander Biberstein, now a Paszw prisoner himself, found that the daily ration varied between 700 and 1,100 calories. At breakfast a prisoner received a half-liter of black ersatz coffee, tasting of acorns, and a lump of rye bread weighing 175g, an eighth of one of the round loaves collected by barracks mess orderlies each morning at the bakery. Hunger being such a disruptive force, each mess orderly cut up the loaf with his back to the others and called, "Who wants this piece? Who wants this one?" At midday a soup was distributed-carrots, beets, sago subst.i.tute. Some days it had a fuller body than on others. Better food came in with the work parties who returned each evening. A small chicken could be carried under a coat, a French roll down a trouser leg. Yet Amon tried to prevent this by having the guards search returning details at dusk in front of the Administration Building. He did not want the work of natural wastage to be frustrated, nor the ideological wind to be taken out of his food dealings through Chilowicz. Since, therefore, he did not indulge his own prisoners, he felt that if Oskar chose to take a thousand Jews, he could indulge them at his own expense, without too regular a supply of bread and beets from the storerooms of Paszw.

That spring, it was not only the police chiefs of the Cracow region whom Oskar had to talk to. He went into his backyard, persuading the neighbors. Beyond the two shabby huts constructed of Jereth's pineboard, he came to the radiator factory run by Kurt Hoderman. It employed a horde of Poles and about 100 Paszw inmates. In the other direction was Jereth's box factory, supervised by the German engineer Kuhnpast. Since the Paszw people were such a small part of their staff, they didn't take to the idea with any pa.s.sion, but they weren't against it. For Oskar was offering to house their Jews 50 meters from work instead of 5 kilometers.

Next Oskar moved out into the neighborhood to talk to engineer Schmilewski at the Wehrmacht garrison office a few streets away. He employed a squad of Paszw prisoners. Schmilewski had no objections. His name, with Kuhnpast's and Hoderman's, was appended to the application Schindler sent off to Pomorska Street.

SS surveyors visited Emalia and conferred with surveyor Steinhauser, an old friend of Oskar's from the Armaments Inspectorate. They stood and frowned at the site, as surveyors will, and asked questions about drainage. Oskar had them all into his office upstairs for a morning coffee and a cognac, and then everyone parted amiably. Within a few days the application to establish a Forced Labor Subcamp in the factory backyard was accepted.

That year DEF would enjoy a profit of 15.8 million Reichsmarks. It might be thought that the 300,000 RM. Oskar now spent on building materials for the Emalia camp was a large but not fatal overhead. The truth was though that he was only beginning to pay.

- Oskar sent a plea to the Bauleitung, or Construction Office, of Paszw for the help of a young engineer named Adam Garde. Garde was still working on the barracks of Amon's camp and, after leaving instructions for the barracks builders, would be marched under individual guard from Paszw to Lipowa Street to supervise the setting up of Oskar's compound. When Garde first turned up in Zablocie, he found two rudimentary huts already occupied by close to 400 prisoners. There was a fence patrolled by an SS squad, but the inmates told Garde that Oskar did not let the SS into the encampment or onto the factory floor, except, of course, when senior inspectors came to look over the place. Oskar, they said, kept the small SS garrison of the Emalia factory well liquored and happy with their lot. Garde could see that the Emalia prisoners themselves were content between the shrinking fragile boards of their two huts, the men's and the women's. Already they called themselves Schindlerjuden, using the term in a mood of cautious self-congratulation, the way a man recovering from a heart attack might describe himself as a lucky beggar.

They'd already dug some primitive latrines, which engineer Garde, much as he approved the impulse behind the work, could smell from the factory entrance. They washed at a pump in the DEF yard.

Oskar asked him to come up to the office and look at the plans. Six barracks for up to 1,200 people. The cookhouse at this end, the SS barracks-Oskar was temporarily accommodating the SS in a part of the factory-beyond the wire at the far end. I want a really first-rate shower block and laundry, Oskar told him. I have the welders who can put it together under your direction. Typhus, he growled, half-smiling at Garde. None of us wants typhus. The lice are already biting in Paszw. We need to be able to boil clothes.

Adam Garde was delighted to go to Lipowa Street each day. Two engineers had already been punished at Paszw for their diplomas, but at DEF experts were still experts. One morning, as his guard was marching him up Wieliczka Street toward Zablocie, a black limousine materialized, braking hard at their heels. From it emerged Untersturmfhrer Goeth. He had that restless look about him.

One prisoner, one guard, he observed. What does it mean? The Ukrainian begged to inform the Herr Commandant that he had orders to escort this prisoner each morning to Herr Oskar Schindler's Emalia. They both hoped, Garde and the Ukrainian, that the mention of Oskar's name would give them immunity. One guard, one prisoner? asked the Commandant again, but he was appeased and got back into his limousine without resolving the matter in any radical way. Later in the day he approached Wilek Chilowicz, who besides being his agent was also chief of the Jewish camp police-or "firemen," as they were called. Symche Spira, recently the Napoleon of the ghetto, still lived there and spent each day supervising the searching out and the digging up of the diamonds, gold, and cash hidden away and unrecorded by people who were now ashes on the pine needles of Belec. In Paszw, however, Spira had no power, the center of prison power being Chilowicz. No one knew where Chilowicz' authority came from. Perhaps Willi Kunde had mentioned his name to Amon; perhaps Amon had recognized and liked his style. But all at once, here he was chief of firemen in Paszw, hander-out of the caps and armbands of authority in that debased kingdom and, like Symche, limited enough in imagination to equate his power with that of tsars.

Goeth approached Chilowicz and said that he had better send Adam Garde to Schindler full-time and get it over with. We have engineers to burn, said Goeth with distaste. He meant that engineering had been a soft option for Jews who weren't allowed into the medical faculties of the Polish universities. First, though, said Amon, before he goes to Emalia, he has to finish the work on my conservatory.

This news came to Adam Garde in his barracks, at his place in the four-tiered bunks of Hut 21. He would be delivered to Zablocie at the end of a trial. He would be building at Goeth's back door, where, as Reiter and Grnberg might have told him, the rules were unpredictable.

In the midst of his work for the Commandant, a large beam was lifted to its place in the rooftree of Amon's conservatory. As he worked, Adam Garde could hear the Commandant's two dogs, named Rolf and Ralf, names from a newspaper cartoon-except that Amon had permitted them in the past week to rip the breast from a female prisoner suspected of idling. Amon himself, with his half-completed technical education, would return again and again to take a professional stance and watch the roof beams lifted by pulley. He came to ask questions when the center beam was being slotted into place. It was an immense length of heavy pine, and across it Goeth called his question. Adam Garde could not catch the meaning and put his hand to his ear. Again Goeth asked it, and worse than not hearing it, Garde could not understand it. "I don't understand, Herr Commandant," he admitted. Amon grabbed the rising beam with both long-fingered hands, dragged back the end of it, and swung it toward the engineer. Garde saw the ma.s.sive timber spinning toward his head and understood that it was a mortal instrument. He lifted his right hand and the beam took it, shattering the knuckles and the metacarpals and hurling him to the ground. When Garde could see again through the fog of pain and nausea, Amon had turned and walked away. Perhaps he would come again tomorrow for a satisfactory answer . . . .

Lest he be seen as deformed and unfit, engineer Garde avoided favoring his shattered hand on the way to the Krankenstube (infirmary). Carried normally, it weighed at his side, a bladder of torment. He let Dr. Hilfstein talk him into accepting a plaster cast. So he continued to supervise the construction of the conservatory and each day marched to the Emalia works, hoping that the long sleeve of his coat helped conceal the cast. When he was unsure about this, he cut his hand free of the thing. Let the hand mend crookedly. He wanted to ensure his transfer to Schindler's subcamp by presenting an unmaimed appearance.

Within a week, carrying a shirt and some books in a bundle, he was marched to Lipowa Street for good.

1. Now living in Vienna, the man does not want his real name used.

AMONG PRISONERS WHO KNEW, there was already compet.i.tion to get into Emalia. Prisoner Dolek Horowitz, a purchasing officer inside the Paszw camp, knew that he would not be allowed to go to Schindler's place himself. But he had a wife and two children.

Richard, the younger of the children, woke up early these spring mornings as the earth gave off its last winter humor in mist, got down from his mother's bunk in the women's quarters, and ran down the hillside to the men's camp, his mind on the coa.r.s.e morning bread. He had to be with his father for morning roll call on the Appellplatz. His path took him past Chilowicz' Jewish Police post and, even on foggy mornings, within sight of two watchtowers. But he was safe because he was known. He was a Horowitz child. His father was considered invaluable by Herr Bosch, who in turn was a drinking companion of the Commandant's. Richard's unselfconscious freedom of movement derived from his father's expertise; he moved charmed under the eyes in the towers, finding his father's barracks and climbing to his cot and waking him with questions. Why is there mist in the mornings and not in the afternoons? Will there be trucks? Will it take long on the Appellplatz today? Will there be floggings?

Through Richard's morning questions, Dolek Horowitz had it borne in on him that Paszw was unfit even for privileged children. Perhaps he could contact Schindler-Schindler came out here now and then and walked around the Administration Building and the workshops, under the guise of doing business, to leave small gifts and exchange news with old friends like Stern and Roman Ginter and Poldek Pfefferberg. When Dolek did not seem to be able to make contact this way, it struck him that perhaps Schindler could be approached through Bosch. Dolek believed they met a lot. Not out here so much, but perhaps in offices in town and at parties. You could tell they were not friends, but were bound together by dealings, by mutual favors.

It was not only, and perhaps not mainly, Richard whom Dolek wanted to get into Schindler's compound. Richard could diffuse his terror in clouds of questions. It was his ten-year-old daughter, Niusia, who no longer asked questions; who was just another thin child past the age of frankness; who-from a window in the brushworks shop where she sewed the bristles into the wooden backs-saw the daily truckloads arriving at the Austrian hill fort and carried her terror insupportably, the way adults will, unable to climb onto a parental chest and transfer the fear. To soothe her hunger in Paszw, Niusia had taken to smoking onion leaves in newspaper wrappings. The solid rumors about Emalia were that such precocious methods weren't necessary there.

So Dolek appealed to Bosch during one of his tours of the clothing warehouse. He presumed on Bosch's earlier kindnesses, he said, to beg him to talk to Herr Schindler. He repeated his pleadings and repeated the children's names again, so that Bosch, whose memory was eroded by schnapps, might still remember. Herr Schindler is probably my best friend, said Bosch. He'd do anything for me.

Dolek expected little from the talk. His wife, Regina, had no experience of making sh.e.l.ls or enamelware. Bosch himself never mentioned the request again. Yet within the week they marched out on the next Emalia list, cleared by Commandant Goeth in return for a little envelope of jewelry. Niusia looked like a thin, reserved adult in the women's barracks at Emalia, and Richard moved as he had in Paszw, everyone knowing him in the munitions section and the enamel shops, the guards accepting his familiarity. Regina kept expecting Oskar to come up to her in the enamel factory and say, "So you're Dolek Horowitz' wife?" Then the only question would be how to frame her thanks. But he never did. She was delighted to find that she was not very visible at Lipowa Street, and neither was her daughter. They understood that Oskar knew who they were, since he often chatted with Richard by name. They knew, too, by the altered nature of Richard's questions, the extent of what they had been given.

- The Emalia camp had no resident commandant to tyrannize the inmates. There were no permanent guards. The garrison was changed every two days, two truckloads of SS and Ukrainians coming up to Zablocie from Paszw to take over the security of the subcamp. The Paszw soldiers liked their occasional duty at Emalia. The Herr Direktor's kitchens, more primitive even than Paszw's, turned out better meals. Since the Herr Direktor started raging and making phone calls to Oberfhrer Schemer if any guard, instead of just patrolling the perimeter, entered the camp, the garrison kept to their side of the fence. Duty in Zablocie was pleasurably dull.

Except for inspection by senior SS men, the prisoners who worked at DEF rarely got a close view of their guards. One barbed-wire pa.s.sageway took the inmates to their work in the enamel plant; another ran to the door of the munitions section. Those Emalia Jews who worked at the box factory, the radiator plant, the garrison office were marched to work and back by Ukrainians-different Ukrainians every second day. No guard had the time to develop a fatal grudge against a prisoner.

Therefore, though the SS may have set the limits to the life people led in Emalia, Oskar set its tone. The tone was one of fragile permanence. There were no dogs. There were no beatings. The soup and the bread were better and more plentiful than in Paszw -about 2,000 calories a day, according to a doctor who worked in Emalia as a factory hand. The shifts were long, often twelve hours, for Oskar was still a businessman with war contracts to fill and a conventional desire for profit. It must be said, though, that no shift was arduous and that many of his prisoners seem to have believed at the time that their labor was making a contribution in measurable terms to their survival. According to accounts Oskar presented after the war to the Joint Distribution Committee, he spent 1,800,000 zoty ($360,000) on food for the Emalia camp. Cosmetic entries could be found, written off to similar expenditure, in the books of Farben and Krupp-though nowhere near as high a percentage of the profit as in Oskar's accounts. The truth is, though, that no one collapsed and died of overwork, beatings, or hunger in Emalia. Whereas at I. G. Farben's Buna plant alone, 25,000 prisoners out of a work force of 35,000 would perish at their labor.

Long afterward, Emalia people would call the Schindler camp a paradise. Since they were by then widely scattered, it cannot have been a description they decided on after the fact. The term must have had some currency while they were in Emalia. It was, of course, only a relative paradise, a heaven by contrast with Paszw. What it inspired in its people was a sense of almost surreal deliverance, something preposterous which they didn't want to look at too closely for fear it would evaporate. New DEF hands knew of Oskar only by report. They did not want to put themselves in the Herr Direktor's path or risk speaking to him. They needed time for recovery and for adjustment to Schindler's unorthodox prison system.

A girl named Lusia, for example. Her husband had recently been separated out from the ma.s.s of prisoners on the Appellplatz at Paszw and shipped off with others to Mauthausen. With what would turn out to be mere realism, she grieved like a widow. Grieving, she'd been marched to Emalia. She worked at carrying dipped enamelware to the furnaces. You were permitted to heat up water on the warm surfaces of machinery, and the floor was warm. For her, hot water was Emalia's first beneficence.

She saw Oskar at first only as a large shape moving down an aisle of metal presses or traversing a catwalk. It was somehow not a threatening shape. She sensed that if she were noticed, the nature of the place-the lack of beatings, the food, the absence of guards in the camp-might somehow reverse itself. She wanted only un.o.btrusively to work her shift and return down the barbed-wire tunnel to her hut in the compound.

After a while she found herself giving an answering nod to Oskar and even telling him that, yes, thank you, Herr Direktor, she was quite well. Once he gave her some cigarettes, better than gold both as a comfort and as a means of trading with the Polish workers. Since she knew friends vanished, she feared his friendship; she wanted him to continue to be a presence, a magical parent. A paradise run by a friend was too fragile. To manage an enduring heaven, you needed someone both more authoritative and more mysterious than that.

Many of the Emalia prisoners felt the same.

- There was a girl named Regina Perlman living, at the time Oskar's factory subcamp came into existence, in the city of Cracow on forged South American papers. Her dark complexion made the papers credible, and under them she worked as an Aryan in the office of a factory in Podgrze. She would have been safer from blackmailers if she'd gone to Warsaw, d, or Gdansk. But her parents were in Paszw, and she carried forged papers for their sakes too, so that she could supply them with food, comforts, medicine. She knew from the days in the ghetto that it was an adage in the Jewish mythology of Cracow that Herr Schindler could be expected to take extreme pains. She also knew the reports from Paszw, from the quarry, the Commandant's balcony. She would have to break cover to do it, but she believed it essential that she get her parents into Schindler's backyard camp.

The first time she visited DEF she wore a safely anonymous faded floral dress and no stockings. The Polish gateman went through the business of calling Herr Schindler's office upstairs, and through the gla.s.s she could see him disapproving of her. It's n.o.body-some grubby girl from one of the other factories. She had the normal fear of people on Aryan papers that a hostile Pole would somehow spot her Jewishness. This one looked hostile.

It's of no great importance, she told him when he returned shaking his head. She wanted to put him off her track. But the Pole did not even bother to lie to her. "He won't see you," he said. The hood of a BMW glowered in the factory yard, she could see, and it could belong only to Herr Schindler. He was in, but not to visitors who couldn't afford stockings. She went away trembling at her escape. She'd been saved from making to Herr Schindler a confession which, even in her sleep, she feared making to anyone.

She waited a week before she could get more time off from the factory in Podgrze. She devoted an entire half-day to her approach. She bathed and got black-market stockings. From one of her few friends-a girl on Aryan papers could not risk having many-she borrowed a blouse. She had an excellent jacket of her own and bought a lacquered straw hat with a veil. She made up her face, achieving a dark radiance appropriate to a woman living beyond threat. In the mirror she looked like her prewar self, an elegant Cracovienne of exotic racial derivation-Hungarian businessman father, perhaps, and a mother from Rio.

This time, as she had intended, the Pole in the gatehouse did not even recognize her. He let her inside while he rang Miss Klonowska, the Herr Direktor's secretary, and then was put on to speak to Schindler himself. Herr Direktor, said the Pole, there is a lady here to see you on important business. Herr Schindler seemed to want details. A very well-dressed young lady, said the Pole, and then, bowing while holding the telephone, a very beautiful young lady, he said. As if he had a hunger to see her, or perhaps as if she might be some forgotten girl who'd embarra.s.s him in the outer office, Schindler met her on the steps. He smiled when he saw he did not know her. He was very pleased to meet her, this Fraulein Rodriguez. She could see that he had a respect for pretty women, that it was at the same time childlike and yet sophisticated. With flourishes like those of a matinee idol, he indicated she should follow him upstairs. She wanted to talk to him in confidence? Of course she should. He led her past Klonowska. Klonowska took it calmly. The girl could mean anything-black-market or currency business. She could even be a chic partisan. Love might be the least of motivations. In any case, a worldly girl like Klonowska didn't expect to own Oskar, or to be owned in return.

Inside the office, Schindler placed a chair for her and walked behind his desk beneath the ritual portrait of the Fhrer. Would she like a cigarette? Perhaps a Pernod or a cognac? No, she said, but he must, of course, feel free to take a drink. He poured himself one from his c.o.c.ktail cabinet. What's this very important business? he asked, not quite with that crisp grace he'd shown on the stairs. For her manner had changed now the door to the outer office was closed. He could tell she'd come to do hard business. She leaned forward. For a second it seemed ridiculous for her, a girl whose father had paid 50,000 z. for Aryan papers, to say it without a pause, to give it all away to a half-ironic, half-worried Sudetendeutscher with a snifter of cognac in his hand. Yet in some ways it was the easiest thing she'd ever done.

I have to tell you, Herr Schindler, I'm not a Polish Aryan. My real name is Perlman. My parents are in Paszw. They say, and I believe it, that coming to Emalia is the same as being given a Lebenskarte-a card of life. I have nothing I can give you; I borrowed clothes to get inside your factory. Will you bring them here for me?

Schindler put down his drink and stood up. You want to make a secret arrangement? I don't make secret arrangements. What you suggest, Fraulein, is illegal. I have a factory here in Zablocie and the only question I ask is whether or not a person has certain skills. If you care to leave your Aryan name and address, it might be possible to write to you at some stage and inform you that I need your parents for their work skills. But not now, and not on any other ground.

But they can't come as skilled workers, said Fraulein Perlman. My father's an importer, not a metalworker.

We have an office staff, said Schindler. But mainly we need skills on the factory floor.

She was defeated. Half-blind with tears, she wrote her false name and real address-he could do with it whatever he wanted. But on the street she understood and began to revive. Maybe Schindler thought she might be an agent, that she might have been there for entrapment. Just the same, he'd been cold. There hadn't even been an ambiguous, nonindictable gesture of kindness in the manner in which he'd thrown her out of his office.

Within a month Mr. and Mrs. Perlman came to Emalia from Paszw. Not on their own, as Regina Perlman had imagined it would happen should Herr Oskar Schindler decide to be merciful, but as part of a new detail of 30 workers. Sometimes she would go around to Lipowa Street and bribe her way onto the factory floor to see them. Her father worked dipping the enamel, shoveling coal, clearing the floor of sc.r.a.p. "But he talks again," said Mrs. Perlman to her daughter. For in Paszw he'd gone silent.

In fact, despite the drafty huts, the plumbing, here at Emalia there was a certain mood, a fragile confidence, a presumption of permanence such as she, living on risky papers in sullen Cracow, could not hope to feel until the day the madness stopped.

Miss Perlman-Rodriguez did not complicate Herr Schindler's life by storming his office in grat.i.tude or writing effusive letters. Yet she always left the yellow gate of DEF with an unquenchable envy for those who stayed inside.

- Then there was a campaign to get Rabbi Menasha Levartov, masquerading as a metalworker in Paszw, into Emalia. Levartov was a scholarly city rabbi, young and black-bearded. He was more liberal than the rabbis from the shtetls of Poland, the ones who believed the Sabbath was more important even than life and who, throughout 1942 and 1943, were shot by the hundreds every Friday evening for refusing work in the forced-labor cantonments of Poland. He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while G.o.d may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.

Levartov had always been admired by Itzhak Stern, who worked in the Construction Office of Amon Goeth's Administration Building. In the old days, Stern and Levartov would, if given the leisure, have sat together for hours over a gla.s.s of herbata, letting it grow cold while they talked about the influence of Zoroaster on Judaism, or the other way round, or the concept of the natural world in Taoism. Stern, when it came to comparative religion, got greater pleasure out of talking to Levartov than he could ever have received from bluff Oskar Schindler, who nonetheless had a fatal weakness for discoursing on the same subject.

During one of Oskar's visits to Paszw, Stern told him that somehow Menasha Levartov had to be got into Emalia, or else Goeth would surely kill him. For Levartov had a sort of visibility-it was a matter of presence. Goeth was drawn to people of presence; they were, like idlers, another cla.s.s with high target priority. Stern told Oskar how Goeth had attempted to murder Levartov.