Schindler's List Part 9

Amon Goeth's camp now held more than 30,000 people. On the near side of the Appellplatz, near the Jewish mortuary chapel which had now become a stable, stood a Polish compound which could hold some 1,200 prisoners. Obergruppenfhrer Krger was so pleased by his inspection of the new, booming camp that he now promoted the Commandant two SS grades to the rank of Hauptsturmfhrer.

As well as the crowd of Poles, Jews from the East and from Czechoslovakia would be held in Paszw while s.p.a.ce was made for them farther west in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Grss-Rosen. Sometimes the population rose above 35,000 and the Appellplatz teemed at roll call. Amon therefore often had to cull his early comers to make way for new prisoners. And Oskar knew that the Commandant's quick method was to enter one of the camp offices or workshops, form up two lines, and march one of them away. The line marched away would be taken either to the Austrian hill fort, for execution by firing squads, or else to the cattle cars at the Cracow-Paszw Station or, when it was laid down in the autumn of 1943, to the railway siding by the fortified SS barracks.

On just such a culling exercise, Stern told Oskar, Amon had entered the metalworks in the factory enclosure some days past. The supervisors had stood at attention like soldiers and made their eager reports, knowing that they could die for an unwise choice of words. "I need twenty-five metalworkers," Amon told the supervisors when the reports were finished. "Twenty-five and no more. Point out to me the ones who are skilled."

One of the supervisors pointed to Levartov and the rabbi joined the line, though he could see that Amon took a special note of his selection. Of course, one never knew which line would be moved out or where it would be moved to, but it was in most cases a safer bet to be on the line of the skilled.

So the selection continued. Levartov had noticed that the metal shops were strangely empty that morning, since a number of those who worked or filled in time by the door had got forewarning of Goeth's approach and had slipped over to the Madritsch garment factory to hide among the bolts of linen or appear to be mending sewing machines. The forty or so slow or inadvertent who had stayed on in the metalworks were now in two lines between the benches and the lathes. Everyone was fearful, but those in the smaller line were the more uneasy.

Then a boy of indeterminate age, perhaps as young as sixteen or as old as nineteen, had called from the midst of the shorter line, "But, Herr Commandant, I'm a metal specialist too."

"Yes, Liebchen?" murmured Amon, drawing his service revolver, stepping to the child and shooting him in the head. The enormous blast in this place of metal threw the boy against the wall. He was dead, the appalled Levartov believed, before he fell to the workshop floor.

The even shorter line was now marched out to the railroad depot, the boy's corpse was taken over the hill in a barrow, the floor was washed, the lathes returned to operation. But Levartov, making gate hinges slowly at his bench, was aware of the recognition that had flashed for an instant in Amon's eye-the look that had said, There's one. It seemed to the rabbi that the boy had, by crying out, only temporarily distracted Amon from Levartov himself, the more obvious target.

A few days had pa.s.sed, Stern told Schindler, before Amon returned to the metalworks and found it crowded, and went around making his own selections for the hill or the transports. Then he'd halted by Levartov's bench, as Levartov had known he would. Levartov could smell Amon's after-shave lotion. He could see the starched cuff of Amon's shirt. Amon was a splendid dresser.

"What are you making?" asked the Commandant.

"Herr Commandant," said Levartov, "I am making hinges." The rabbi pointed, in fact, to the small heap of hinges on the floor.

"Make me one now," Amon ordered. He took a watch from his pocket and began timing. Levartov earnestly cut a hinge, his fingers urging the metal, pressuring the lathe; convinced laboring fingers, delighted to be skilled. Keeping tremulous count in his head, he turned out a hinge in what he believed was fifty-eight seconds, and let it fall at his feet.

"Another," murmured Amon. After his speed trial, the rabbi was now more a.s.sured and worked confidently. In perhaps another minute the second hinge slid to his feet.

Amon considered the heap. "You've been working here since six this morning," said Amon, not raising his eyes from the floor. "And you can work at a rate you've just shown me-and yet, such a tiny little pile of hinges?"

Levartov knew, of course, that he had crafted his own death. Amon walked him down the aisle, no one bothering or brave enough to look up from his bench. To see what? A death walk. Death walks were commonplace in Paszw.

Outside, in the midday air of spring, Amon stood Menasha Levartov against the workshop wall, adjusting him by the shoulder, and took out the pistol with which he'd slaughtered the child two days before.

Levartov blinked and watched the other prisoners hurry by, wheeling and toting the raw materials of the Paszw camp, eager to be out of range, the Cracovians among them thinking, My G.o.d, it's Levartov's turn. Privately, he murmured the Shema Yisroel and heard the mechanisms of the pistol. But the small internal stirrings of metal ended not in a roar but in a click like that of a cigarette lighter which won't give a flame. And like a dissatisfied smoker, with just such a trivial level of annoyance, Amon Goeth extracted and replaced the magazine of bullets from the b.u.t.t of the pistol, again took his aim, and fired. As the rabbi's head swayed to the normal human suspicion that the impact of the bullet could be absorbed as could a punch, all that emerged from Goeth's pistol was another click.

Goeth began cursing prosaically. "Donnerwetter! Zum Teufel!" It seemed to Levartov that at any second Amon would begin to run down faulty modern workmanship, as if they were two tradesmen trying to bring off some simple effect-the threading of a pipe, a drill hole in the wall. Amon put the faulty pistol away in its black holster and withdrew from a jacket pocket a pearl-handled revolver, of a type Rabbi Levartov had only read of in the Westerns of his boyhood. Clearly, he thought, there are going to be no remissions due to technical failure. He'll keep on. I'll die by cowboy revolver, and even if all the firing pins are filed down, Hauptsturmfhrer Goeth will fall back on more primitive weapons.

As Stern relayed it to Schindler, when Goeth aimed again and fired, Menasha Levartov had already begun to look about in case there was some object in the neighborhood that could be used, together with these two astounding failures of Goeth's service pistol, as a lever. By the corner of the wall stood a pile of coal, an unpromising item in itself. "Herr Commandant," Levartov began to say, but he could already hear the small murderous hammers and springs of the barroom pistol acting on each other. And again the click of a defective cigarette lighter. Amon, raging, seemed to be attempting to tear the barrel of the thing from its socket.

Now Rabbi Levartov adopted the stance he had seen the supervisors in the metalworks a.s.sume. "Herr Commandant, I would beg to report that my heap of hinges was so unsatisfactory for the reason that the machines were being recalibrated this morning. And therefore instead of hinge-work I was put on to shoveling that coal."

It seemed to Levartov that he had violated the rules of the game they had been playing together, the game that was to be closed by Levartov's reasonable death just as surely as Snakes and Ladders ends with the throwing of a six. It was as if the rabbi had hidden the dice and now there could be no conclusion. Amon hit him on the face with a free left hand, and Levartov tasted blood in his mouth, lying on the tongue like a guarantee.

Hauptsturmfhrer Goeth then simply abandoned Levartov against the wall. The contest, however, as both Levartov and Stern could tell, had merely been suspended.

Stern whispered this narrative to Oskar in the Building Office of Paszw. Stern, stooping, eyes raised, hands joined, was as generous with detail as ever. "It's no problem," Oskar murmured. He liked to tease Stern. "Why the long story? There's always room at Emalia for someone who can turn out a hinge in less than a minute."

When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory subcamp in the summer of '43, he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler's little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov operated a lathe, Schindler would say, "You shouldn't be here, Rabbi. You should be preparing for Shabbat." But when Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in the ceremonies, Levartov knew that the Herr Direktor was not joking. Before dusk on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of sourly drying laundry, he would recite Kiddush over a cup of wine among the roof-high tiers of bunks. Under, of course, the shadow of an SS watchtower.

THE OSKAR SCHINDLER who dismounted from his horse these days in the factory yard of Emalia was still the prototypical tyc.o.o.n. He looked sleekly handsome in the style of the film stars George Sanders and Curt Jrgens, to both of whom people would always compare him. His hacking jacket and jodhpurs were tailored; his riding boots had a high shine. He looked like a man to whom it was profit all the way.

Yet he would return from his rural rides and go upstairs to face the sort of bills novel even to the history of an eccentric enterprise like DEF.

Bread shipments from the bakery at Paszw to the factory camp in Lipowa Street, Zablocie, were a few hundred loaves delivered twice a week and an occasional token half-truckload of turnips. These few high-backed and lightly laden trucks were no doubt written large and multiplied in Commandant Goeth's books, and such trusties as Chilowicz sold off on behalf of the Herr Hauptsturmfhrer the difference between the mean supplies that arrived at Lipowa Street and the plenteous and phantom convoys that Goeth put down on paper. If Oskar had depended on Amon for prison food, his 900 internees would each have been fed perhaps three-quarters of a kilo of bread a week and soup every third day. On missions of his own and through his manager, Oskar was spending 50,000 z. a month on black-market food for his camp kitchen. Some weeks he had to find more than three thousand round loaves. He went to town and spoke to the German supervisors in the big bakeries, and had in his briefcase Reichsmarks and two or three bottles.

Oskar did not seem to realize that throughout Poland that summer of 1943, he was one of the champion illicit feeders of prisoners; that the malign pall of hunger which should by SS policy hang over the great death factories and over every one of the little, barbed-wired forced-labor slums was lacking in Lipowa Street in a way that was dangerously visible.

That summer a host of incidents occurred which augmented the Schindler mythology, the almost religious supposition among many prisoners of Paszw and the entire population of Emalia that Oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation.

Early in the career of every subcamp, senior officers from the parent camp, or Lager, paid a visit to ensure that the energy of the slave laborers was stimulated in the most radical and exemplary manner. It is not certain exactly which members of Paszw's senior staff visited Emalia, but some prisoners and Oskar himself would always say that Goeth was one of them. And if not Goeth it was Leo John, or Scheidt. Or else Josef Neuschel, Goeth's protege. It is no injustice to mention any of their names in connection with "stimulating energy in a radical and exemplary manner." Whoever they were, they had already in the history of Paszw taken or condoned fierce action. And now, visiting Emalia, they spotted in the yard a prisoner named Lamus pushing a barrow too slowly across the factory yard. Oskar himself later declared that it was Goeth who was there that day and saw Lamus' slow trundling and turned to a young NCO named Grn-Grn being another Goeth protege, his bodyguard, a former wrestler. It was certainly Grn who was ordered to execute Lamus.

So Grn made the arrest, and the inspectors continued on into other parts of the factory camp. It was someone from the metal hall who rushed up to the Herr Direktor's office and alerted Schindler. Oskar came roaring down the stairs even faster than on the day Miss Regina Perlman had visited, and reached the yard just as Grn was positioning Lamus against the wall.

Oskar called out, You can't do that here. I won't get work out of my people if you start shooting. I've got high-priority war contracts, et cetera. It was the standard Schindler argument and carried the suggestion that there were senior officers known to Oskar to whom Grn's name would be given if he impeded production in Emalia.

Grn was cunning. He knew the other inspectors had pa.s.sed on to the workshops, where the whumping of metal presses and the roaring of lathes would cover any noise he chose, or failed, to make. Lamus was such a small concern to men like Goeth and John that no investigation would be made afterward. "What's in it for me?" the SS man asked Oskar. "Would vodka do?" said Oskar.

To Grn it was a substantial prize. For working all day behind the machine guns during Aktions, the ma.s.sed and daily executions in the East-for shooting hundreds-you were given half a liter of vodka. The boys lined up to be on the squad so that they could take that prize of liquor back to their messes in the evening. And here the Herr Direktor offered him three times that for one act of omission.

"I don't see the bottle," he said. Herr Schindler was already nudging Lamus away from the wall and pushing him out of range. "Disappear!" Grn yelled at the wheelbarrow man. "You may collect the bottle," said Oskar, "from my office at the end of the inspection."

Oskar took part in a similar transaction when the Gestapo raided the apartment of a forger and discovered, among other false doc.u.ments completed or near-completed, a set of Aryan papers for a family called the Wohlfeilers-mother, father, three adolescent children, all of them workers at Schindler's camp. Two Gestapo men therefore came to Lipowa Street to collect the family for an interrogation which would lead, through Montelupich prison, to Chujowa Grka. Three hours after entering Oskar's office both men left, reeling on the stairs, beaming with the temporary bonhomie of cognac and, for all anyone knew, of a payoff. The confiscated papers now lay on Oskar's desk, and he picked them up and put them in the fire.

Next, the brothers Danziger, who cracked a metal press one Friday. Honest, bemused men, semiskilled, looking up with staring shtetl eyes from the machine they had just loudly shattered. The Herr Direktor was away on business, and someone-a factory spy, Oskar would always say-denounced the Danzigers to the administration in Paszw. The brothers were taken from Emalia and their hanging advertised at the next morning's roll call in Paszw. Tonight (it was announced), the people of Paszw will witness the execution of two saboteurs. What of course qualified the Danzigers above all for execution was their Orthodox aura.

Oskar returned from his business trip to Sosnowiec at three o'clock on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, three hours before the promised execution. News of the sentence was waiting on his desk. He drove out through the suburbs to Paszw at once, taking cognac with him and some fine kielbasa sausage. He parked by the Administration Building and found Goeth in his office. He was pleased not to have to rouse the Commandant from an afternoon nap. No one knows the extent of the deal that was struck in Goeth's office that afternoon, in that office akin to Torquemada's, where Goeth had had ringbolts attached to the wall from which to hang people for discipline or instruction. It is hard to believe, however, that Amon was satisfied simply with cognac and sausage. In any case, his concern for the integrity of the Reich's metal presses was soothed by the interview, and at six o'clock, the hour of their execution, the Danziger brothers returned in the back seat of Oskar's plush limousine to the sweet squalor of Emalia.

All these triumphs were, of course, partial. It is an aspect of Caesars, Oskar knew, to remit as irrationally as they condemn. Emil Krautwirt, by day an engineer in the radiator factory beyond the Emalia barracks, was an inmate of Oskar's SS subcamp. He was young, having got his diploma in the late Thirties. Krautwirt, like the others in Emalia, called the place Schindler's camp, but by taking Krautwirt away to Paszw for an exemplary hanging, the SS demonstrated whose camp it really was, at least for some aspects of its existence.

For the fraction of Paszw people who would live on into the peace, the hanging of engineer Krautwirt was the first story, other than their own intimate stories of pain and humiliation, which they would relate. The SS were ever economical with their scaffolds, and at Paszw the gallows resembled a long, low set of goalposts, lacking the majesty of the gibbets of history, of the Revolutionary guillotine, the Elizabethan scaffold, the tall solemnity of jailhouse gallows in the sheriff's backyard. Seen in peacetime, the gallows of Paszw and Auschwitz would intimidate not by their solemnity but by their ordinariness. But as mothers of children would discover in Paszw, it was still possible, even with such a ba.n.a.l structure, for five-year-olds to see too much of an execution from within the ma.s.s of prisoners on the Appellplatz. With Krautwirt, a sixteen-year-old boy named Haubenstock was also to be hanged. Krautwirt had been condemned for some letters he had written to seditious persons in the city of Cracow. But with Haubenstock, it was that he had been heard singing "Volga, Volga," "Kalinka Maya," and other banned Russian songs with the intention, according to his death sentence, of winning the Ukrainian guards over to Bolshevism.

The rules for the rite of execution inside Paszw involved silence. Unlike the festive hangings of earlier times, the drop was performed in utter stillness. The prisoners stood in phalanxes, and were patrolled by men and women who knew the extent of their power: by Hujar and John; by Scheidt and Grn; by the NCOs Landsdorfer, Amthor, and Grimm, Ritschek and Schreiber; and by the SS women supervisors recently a.s.signed to Paszw, both of them accomplished with the truncheon-Alice Orlowski and Luise Danz. Under such supervision, the pleadings of the condemned were heard in silence.

Engineer Krautwirt himself seemed at first stunned and had nothing to say, but the boy was vocal. In an uneven voice he reasoned with the Hauptsturmfhrer, who stood beside the scaffold. "I am not a Communist, Herr Commandant. I hate Communism. They were just songs. Ordinary songs." The hangman, a Jewish butcher of Cracow, pardoned for some earlier crime on condition that he undertake this work, stood Haubenstock on a stool and placed the noose around his neck. He could tell Amon wanted the boy hanged first, didn't want the debate to drag on. When the butcher kicked the support out from beneath Haubenstock, the rope broke, and the boy, purple and gagging, noose around his neck, crawled on his hands and knees to Goeth, continuing his pleadings, ramming his head against the Commandant's ankles and hugging his legs. It was the most extreme submission; it conferred on Goeth again the kingship he'd been exercising these fevered months past. Amon, in an Appellplatz of gaping mouths uttering no sound but a low hiss, a susurrus like a wind in sand dunes, took his pistol from his holster, kicked the boy away, and shot him through the head.

When poor engineer Krautwirt saw the horror of the boy's execution, he took a razor blade that he'd concealed in his pocket and slashed his wrists. Those prisoners at the front could tell that Krautwirt had injured himself fatally in both arms. But Goeth ordered the hangman to proceed in any case, and splashed with the gore from Krautwirt's injuries, two Ukrainians lifted him to the scaffold, where, gushing from both wrists, he strangled in front of the Jews of southern Poland.

- It was natural to believe with one part of the mind that each such barbarous exhibition might be the last, that there might be a reversal of methods and att.i.tudes even in Amon, or if not in him, then in those unseen officials who in some high office with French windows and waxed floors, overlooking a square where old women sold flowers, must formulate half of what happened in Paszw and condone the rest.

On the second visit of Dr. Sedlacek from Budapest to Cracow, Oskar and the dentist devised a scheme which might to a more introverted man than Schindler have seemed naive. Oskar suggested to Sedlacek that perhaps one of the reasons Amon Goeth behaved so savagely was the bad liquor he drank, the gallons of local so-called cognac which weakened even further Amon's faulty sense of ultimate consequences. With a portion of the Reichsmarks Dr. Sedlacek had just brought to Emalia and handed to Oskar, a crate of first-rate cognac should be bought-not such an easy or inexpensive item in post-Stalingrad Poland. Oskar should deliver it to Amon, and in the progress of conversation suggest to Goeth that one way or another the war would end at some time, and that there would be investigations into the actions of individuals. That perhaps even Amon's friends would remember the times he'd been too zealous.

It was Oskar's nature to believe that you could drink with the devil and adjust the balance of evil over a snifter of cognac. It was not that he found more radical methods frightening. It was that they did not occur to him. He'd always been a man of transactions.

Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko, who had earlier had control of the ghetto perimeter, was, in contrast, a man of ideas. It had become impossible for him to work within the SS scheme, pa.s.sing a bribe here, a forged paper there, placing a dozen children under the patronage of his rank while a hundred more were marched out the ghetto gate. Bosko had absconded from his police station in Podgrze and vanished into the partisan forests of Niepolomice. In the People's Army he would try to expiate the callow enthusiasm he'd felt for n.a.z.ism in the summer of 1938. Dressed as a Polish farmer, he'd be recognized in the end in a village west of Cracow and shot for treason. Bosko would therefore become a martyr.

Bosko had gone to the forest because he had no other option. He lacked the financial resources with which Oskar greased the system. But it accorded with the natures of both men that one be found with nothing but a cast-off rank and uniform, that the other would make certain he had cash and trade goods. It is not to praise Bosko or denigrate Schindler that one says that if ever Oskar suffered martyrdom, it would be by accident, because some business he was transacting had turned sour on him. But there were people who still drew breath-the Wohlfeilers, the Danziger brothers, Lamus-because Oskar worked that way. Because Oskar worked that way, the unlikely camp of Emalia stood in Lipowa Street, and there, on most days, a thousand were safe from seizure, and the SS stayed outside the wire. No one was beaten there, and the soup was thick enough to sustain life. In proportion to their natures, the moral disgust of both Party members, Bosko and Schindler, was equal, even if Bosko manifested his by leaving his empty uniform on a coat hanger in Podgrze, while Oskar put on his big Party pin and went to deliver high-cla.s.s liquor to mad Amon Goeth in Paszw.

- It was late afternoon, and Oskar and Goeth sat in the salon of Goeth's white villa. Goeth's girlfriend Majola looked in, a small-boned woman, a secretary at the Wagner factory in town. She did not spend her days amid the excesses of Paszw. She had sensitive manners, and this delicacy helped a rumor to emerge that Majola had threatened not to sleep with Goeth if he continued arbitrarily gunning people down. But no one knew whether that was the truth or just one of those therapeutic interpretations which arise in the minds of prisoners desperate to make the earth habitable.

Majola did not stay long with Amon and Oskar that afternoon. She could tell there would be a drinking session. Helen Hirsch, the pale girl in black who was Amon's maid, brought them the necessary accompaniments-cakes, canapes, sausage. She reeled with exhaustion. Last night Amon had beaten her for preparing food for Majola without his permission; this morning he had made her run up and down the villa's three flights of stairs fifty times on the double because of a flyspeck on one of the paintings in the corridor. She had heard certain rumors about Herr Schindler but had not met him until now. This afternoon she took no comfort from the sight of these two big men, seated either side of the low table, fraternal and in apparent concord. There was nothing here to interest her, for the certainty of her own death was a first premise. She thought only about the survival of her young sister, who worked in the camp's general kitchen. She kept a sum of money hidden in the hope that it would effect her sister's survival. There was no sum, she believed, no deal, that could influence her own prospects.

So they drank through the camp's twilight and into the dark. Long after the prisoner Tosia Lieberman's nightly rendition of Brahms's "Lullaby" had calmed the women's camp and insinuated itself between the timbers of the men's, the two big men sat on. Their prodigious livers glowed hot as furnaces. And at the right hour, Oskar leaned across the table and, acting out of an amity which, even with this much cognac aboard, did not go beyond the surface of the skin . . . Oskar, leaning toward Amon and cunning as a demon, began to tempt him toward restraint.

Amon took it well. It seemed to Oskar that he was attracted by the thought of moderation-a temptation worthy of an emperor. Amon could imagine a sick slave on the trolleys, a returning prisoner from the cable factory, staggering-in that put-upon way one found so hard to tolerate-under a load of clothing or lumber picked up at the prison gate. And the fantasy ran with a strange warmth in Amon's belly that he would forgive that laggard, that pathetic actor. As Caligula might have been tempted to see himself as Caligula the Good, so the image of Amon the Good exercised the Commandant's imagination for a time. He would, in fact, always have a weakness for it. Tonight, his blood running golden with cognac and nearly all the camp asleep beyond his steps, Amon was more definitely seduced by mercy than by the fear of reprisal. But in the morning he would remember Oskar's warning and combine it with the day's news that Russian threats were developing on the Front at Kiev. Stalingrad had been an inconceivable distance from Paszw. But the distance to Kiev was imaginable.

For some days after Oskar's bout with Amon, news came to Emalia that the dual temptation was having its result with the Commandant. Dr. Sedlacek, going back to Budapest, would report to Samu Springmann that Amon had given up, for the time being at least, arbitrarily murdering people. And gentle Samu, among the diverse cares he had in the list of places from Dachau and Drancy in the west to Sobibor and Belec in the east, hoped for a time that the hole at Paszw had been plugged.

But the allure of clemency vanished quickly. If there was a brief respite, those who were to survive and give testimony of their days in Paszw would not be aware of it. The summary a.s.sa.s.sinations would seem continual to them. If Amon did not appear on his balcony this morning or the next, it did not mean he would not appear the morning after that. It took much more than Goeth's temporary absence to give even the most deluded prisoner some hope of a fundamental change in the Commandant's nature. And then, in any case, there he would be, on the steps in the Austrian-style cap he wore to murders, looking through his binoculars for a culprit.

- Dr. Sedlacek would return to Budapest not only with overly hopeful news of a reform in Amon but with more reliable data on the camp at Paszw. One afternoon a guard from Emalia turned up at Paszw to summon Stern to Zablocie. Once Stern arrived at the front gate, he was led upstairs into Oskar's new apartment. There Oskar introduced him to two men in good suits. One was Sedlacek; the other a Jew-equipped with a Swiss pa.s.sport-who introduced himself as Babar. "My dear friend," Oskar told Stern, "I want you to write as full a report on the situation in Paszw as you can manage in an afternoon." Stern had never seen Sedlacek or Babar before this and thought that Oskar was being indiscreet. He bent over his hands, murmuring that before he undertook a task like that he would like a word in private with the Herr Direktor.

Oskar used to say that Itzhak Stern could never make a straight statement or request unless it arrived smuggled under a baggage of talk of the Babylonian Talmud and purification rites. But now he was more direct. "Tell me, please, Herr Schindler," he asked, "don't you believe this is a dreadful risk?"

Oskar exploded. Before he got control of himself, the strangers would have heard him in the other room. "Do you think I'd ask you, if there was a risk?" Then he calmed and said, "There's always risk, as you know better than I. But not with these two men. These two are safe."

In the end, Stern spent all afternoon on his report. He was a scholar and accustomed to writing in exact prose. The rescue organization in Budapest, the Zionists in Istanbul would receive from Stern a report they could rely on. Multiply Stern's summary by the 1,700 large and small forced-labor camps of Poland, and then you had a tapestry to stun the world!

Sedlacek and Oskar wanted more than that of Stern. On the morning after the Amon-Oskar binge, Oskar dragged his heroic liver back out to Paszw before office-opening time. In between the suggestions of tolerance Oskar had tried to drop into Amon's ear the night before, he'd also got a written permit to take two "brother industrialists" on a tour of this model industrial community. Oskar brought the two into the gray Administration Building that morning and demanded the services of Hftling (prisoner) Itzhak Stern for a tour of the camp. Sedlacek's friend Babar had some sort of miniature camera, but he carried it openly in his hand. It was almost possible to believe that if an SS man had challenged him, he would have welcomed the chance to stand and boast for five minutes about this little gadget he'd got on a recent business trip to Brussels or Stockholm.

As Oskar and the visitors from Budapest emerged from the Administration Building, Oskar took the thin, clerkly Stern by the shoulder. His friends would be happy to see the workshops and the living quarters, said Oskar. But if there was anything Stern thought they were missing out on, he was just to bend down and tie his shoestring.

On Goeth's great road paved with fractured gravestones, they moved past the SS barracks. Here, almost at once, prisoner Stern's shoestring needed tying. Sedlacek's a.s.sociate snapped the teams hauling truckloads of rock up from the quarry, while Stern murmured, "Forgive me, gentlemen." Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859-1927); of Matylde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of 90 in 1912; of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911; of Rozia Groder, a thirteen-year-old who had pa.s.sed on in 1931; of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honorable dead had been made into paving stones.

Moving on, they pa.s.sed the Puffhaus, the SS and Ukrainian brothel staffed by Polish girls, before reaching the quarry, the excavations running back into the limestone cliff. Stern's shoelaces required reef knots here; he wanted this recorded. They destroyed men at this rock face, working them on the hammers and wedges. None of the scarred men of the quarry parties showed any curiosity about their visitors this morning. Ivan, Amon Goeth's Ukrainian driver, was on duty here, and the supervisor was a bullet-headed German criminal named Erik. Erik had already demonstrated a capacity for murdering families, having killed his own mother, father, sister. He might by now have been hanged or at least been put in a dungeon if the SS had not realized that there were worse criminals still than patricides and that Erik should be employed as a stick to beat them with. As Stern had mentioned in his report, a Cracow physician named Edward Goldblatt had been sent here from the clinic by SS Dr. Blancke and his Jewish protege, Dr. Leon Gross. Erik loved to see a man of culture and speciality enter the quarry and report soft-handed for work, and the beatings began in Goldblatt's case with the first display of uncertainty in handling the hammer and spikes. Over a period of days, Erik and sundry SS and Ukrainian enlisted men beat Goldblatt. The doctor was forced to work with a ballooning face, now half again its normal size, with one eye sealed up. No one knew what error of quarry technique set Erik to give Dr. Goldblatt his final beating. Long after the doctor lost consciousness, Erik permitted him to be carried to the Krankenstube, where Dr. Leon Gross refused to admit him. With this medical sanction Erik and an SS enlisted man continued to kick the dying Goldblatt as he lay, rejected for treatment, on the threshold of the hospital.

Stern bent and tied his shoelace at the quarry because, like Oskar and some others in the Paszw complex, he believed in a future of judges who might ask, Where-in a word-did this act occur?

Oskar was able to give his colleagues an overview of the camp, taking them up to Chujowa Grka and the Austrian mound, where the bloodied wheelbarrows used to transport the dead to the woods stood unabashedly at the mouth of the fort. Already thousands were buried down there in ma.s.s graves in or on the verges of those eastern pinewoods. When the Russians came from the east, that wood with its population of victims would fall to them before living and half-dying Paszw.

As for Paszw as an industrial wonder, it was bound to disappoint any serious observer. Amon, Bosch, Leo John, Josef Neuschel all thought it a model city on the ground that it was making them rich. It would have shocked them to find that one of the reasons their sweet billet in Paszw continued was not any delight on the part of the Armaments Inspectorate with the economic miracles they were performing.

In fact the only economic miracles within Paszw were the personal fortunes made by Amon and his clique. It was a surprise to any calm outsider that war contracts came to the workshops of Paszw at all, considering that their plant was so poor and old-fashioned. But shrewd Zionist prisoners inside Paszw put pressure on convinced outsiders, people like Oskar and Madritsch, who could in turn put pressure on the Armaments Inspectorate. On the ground that the hunger and sporadic murders of Paszw were still to be preferred to the a.s.sured annihilations of Auschwitz and Belec, Oskar was willing to sit down with the purchasing officers and engineers of General Schindler's Arms Inspectorate. These gentlemen would make faces and say, "Come on, Oskar! Are you serious?" But in the end they would find contracts for Amon Goeth's camp, orders for shovels manufactured from the collected sc.r.a.p iron of Oskar's Lipowa Street factory, orders for funnels turned out of offcuts of tin from a jam factory in Podgrze. The chances of full delivery of the shovels and their handles ever being made to the Wehrmacht were small. Many of Oskar's friends among the officers of the Armaments Inspectorate understood what they were doing, that prolonging the life of the slave-labor camp of Paszw was the same thing as prolonging the life of a number of the slaves. With some of them it stuck in the craw, because they knew what a crook Goeth was, and their serious and old-fashioned patriotism was affronted by Amon's sybaritic life out there in the countryside.

The divine irony of Forced Labor Camp Paszw-that some of the slaves were conspiring for their own purposes to maintain Amon's kingdom-can be seen in the case of Roman Ginter. Ginter, former entrepreneur and now one of the supervisors in the metalworks from which Rabbi Levartov had already been rescued, was summoned to Goeth's office one morning and, as he closed the door, took the first of a number of blows. While he beat Ginter, Amon raged incoherently. Then he dragged him out-of-doors and down the steps to a stretch of wall by the front entrance. May I ask something? said Ginter against the wall, spitting out two teeth, offhandedly, lest Amon think him an actor, a self-pitier. You b.a.s.t.a.r.d, roared Goeth, you haven't delivered the handcuffs I ordered! My desk calendar tells me that, you pig's-a.s.s. But Herr Commandant, said Ginter, I beg to report that the order for handcuffs was filled yesterday. I asked Herr Oberscharfhrer Neuschel what I should do with them and he told me to deliver them to your office, which I did.

Amon dragged bleeding Ginter back to the office and called the SS man Neuschel. Why, yes, said young Neuschel. Look in your second-top drawer on the left, Herr Commandant. Goeth looked and found the manacles. I almost killed him, he complained to his young and not-so-gifted Viennese protege.

This same Roman Ginter, complaisantly spitting up his teeth against the foundation of Amon's gray Administration Building-this Jewish cipher whose accidental murder would have caused Amon to blame Neuschel-this Ginter is the man who under special pa.s.s goes to Herr Schindler's DEF to talk to Oskar about workshop supplies for Paszw, about large sc.r.a.p metal without which the whole metal-shop crew would be railroaded off to Auschwitz. Therefore, while the pistol-waving Amon Goeth believes he maintains Paszw by his special administrative genius, it is as much the b.l.o.o.d.y-mouthed prisoners who keep it running.

TO SOME PEOPLE IT NOW Seemed that Oskar was spending like a compulsive gambler. Even from the little they knew of him, his prisoners could sense that he would ruin himself for them if that was the price. Later-not now, for now they accepted his mercies in the same spirit in which a child accepts Christmas presents from its parents-they would say, Thank G.o.d he was more faithful to us than to his wife. And like the prisoners, sundry officials could also ferret Oskar's pa.s.sion out.

One such official, a Dr. Sopp, physician to the SS prisons in Cracow and to the SS Court1 in Pomorska, let Herr Schindler know through a Polish messenger that he was willing to do a brand of business. In Montelupich prison was a woman named Frau Helene Schindler. Dr. Sopp knew she was no relative of Oskar's, but her husband had invested some money in Emalia. She had questionable Aryan papers. Dr. Sopp did not need to say that for Mrs. Schindler this portended a truck ride to Chujowa Grka. But if Oskar would put up certain amounts, said Sopp, the doctor was willing to issue a medical certificate saying that, in view of her condition, Mrs. Schindler should be permitted to take the cure indefinitely at Marienbad, down in Bohemia.

Oskar went to Sopp's office, where he found out that the doctor wanted 50,000 z. for the certificate. It was no use arguing. After three years of practice, a man like Sopp could tell to within a few zoty the price to put on favors. During the afternoon, Oskar raised the money. Sopp knew he could, knew that Oskar was the sort of man who had black-market money stashed, money with no recorded history.

Before making the payment, Oskar set some conditions. He would need to go to Montelupich with Dr. Sopp to collect the woman from her cell. He would himself deliver her to mutual friends in the city. Sopp did not object. Under a bare light bulb in freezing Montelupich, Mrs. Schindler was handed her costly doc.u.ments.

A more careful man, a man with an accountant's mind, might reasonably have repaid himself for his trouble from the money Sedlacek brought from Budapest. All together, Oskar would be handed nearly 150,000 Reichsmarks carried to Cracow in false-bottomed suitcases and in the lining of clothes. But Oskar, partly because his sense of money (whether owed or owing) was so inexact, partly because of his sense of honor, pa.s.sed on to his Jewish contacts all the money he ever received from Sedlacek, except for the sum spent on Amon's cognac.

It was not always a straightforward business. When in the summer of '43 Sedlacek arrived in Cracow with 50,000 RM., the Zionists inside Paszw to whom Oskar offered the cash feared it might be a setup.

Oskar first approached Henry Mandel, a welder in the Paszw metal shop and a member of Hitach Dut, a Zionist youth and labor movement. Mandel did not want to touch the money. Look, said Schindler, I've got a letter in Hebrew to go with it, a letter from Palestine. But of course, if it was a setup, if Oskar had been compromised and was being used, he would have a letter from Palestine. And when you hadn't enough bread for breakfast, it was quite a sum to be offered: 50,000 RM.-100,000 zoty. To be offered that for your discretionary use. It just wasn't credible.

Schindler then tried to pa.s.s the money, which was sitting there, inside the boundary of Paszw in the trunk of his car, to another member of Hitach Dut, a woman named Alta Rubner. She had some contacts, through prisoners who went to work in the cable factory, through some of the Poles in the Polish prison, with the underground in Sosnowiec. Perhaps, she said to Mandel, it would be best to refer the whole business to the underground, and let them decide on the provenance of the money Herr Oskar Schindler was offering.

Oskar kept trying to persuade her, raising his voice at her under cover of Madritsch's chattering sewing machines. "I guarantee with all my heart that this isn't a trap!" With all my heart. Exactly the sentiment one would expect from an agent provocateur!

Yet after Oskar had gone away and Mandel had spoken to Stern, who declared the letter authentic, and then conferred again with the girl, a decision was made to take the money. They knew now, however, that Oskar wouldn't be back with it. Mandel went to Marcel Goldberg at the Administration Office. Goldberg had also been a member of Hitach Dut, but after becoming the clerk in charge of lists-of labor lists and transport lists, of the lists of living and dead-he had begun taking bribes. Mandel could put pressure on him, though. One of the lists Goldberg could draw up-or at least, add to and subtract from-was the list of those who went to Emalia to collect sc.r.a.p metal for use in the workshops of Paszw. For old times' sake, and without having to disclose his reason for wanting to visit Emalia, Mandel was put on this list.

But arriving in Zablocie and sneaking away from the sc.r.a.p-metal detail to get to Oskar, he'd been blocked in the front office by Bankier. Herr Schindler was too busy, said Bankier.

A week later Mandel was back. Again Bankier wouldn't let him in to speak to Oskar. The third time, Bankier was more specific. You want that Zionist money? You didn't want it before. And now you want it. Well, you can't have it. That's the way life goes, Mr. Mandel!

Mandel nodded and left. He presumed wrongly that Bankier had already lifted at least a segment of the cash. In fact, however, Bankier was being careful. The money did finish in the hands of Zionist prisoners in Paszw, for Alta Rubner's receipt for the funds was delivered to Springmann by Sedlacek. It seems that the amount was used in part to help Jews who came from other cities than Cracow and therefore had no local sources of support.

Whether the funds that came to Oskar and were pa.s.sed on by him were spent mainly on food, as Stern would have preferred, or largely on underground resistance-the purchase of pa.s.ses or weapons-is a question Oskar never investigated. None of this money, however, went to buy Mrs. Schindler out of Montelupich prison or to save the lives of such people as the Danziger brothers. Nor was the Sedlacek money used to replace the 30,000-kilogram bribes of enamelware Oskar would pay out to major and minor SS officials during 1943 to prevent them from recommending the closure of the Emalia camp.

None of it was spent on the 16,000-z. set of gynecological instruments Oskar had to buy on the black market when one of the Emalia girls got pregnant-pregnancy being, of course, an immediate ticket to Auschwitz. Nor did any of it go to purchase the broken-down Mercedes from Untersturmfhrer John. John offered Oskar the Mercedes for sale at the same time as Oskar presented a request for 30 Paszw people to be transferred to Emalia. The car, bought by Oskar one day for 12,000 z., was requisitioned the next by Leo John's friend and brother officer, Untersturmfhrer Scheidt, to be used in the construction of fieldworks on the camp perimeter. Perhaps they'll carry soil in the trunk, Oskar raged to Ingrid at the supper table. In a later informal account of the incident, he commented that he was glad to be of a.s.sistance to both gentlemen.

1. The SS had its own judiciary section.

RAIMUND t.i.tSCH WAS MAKING PAYMENTS of a different order. t.i.tsch was a quiet, clerkly Austrian Catholic with a limp some said came from the first war and others from a childhood accident. He was ten years or more older than either Amon or Oskar. Inside the Paszw camp, he managed Julius Madritsch's uniform factory, a business of 3,000 seamstresses and mechanics.

One way he paid was through his chess matches with Amon Goeth. The Administration Building was connected with the Madritsch works by telephone, and Amon would often call t.i.tsch up to his office for a game. The first time Raimund had played Amon, the game had ended in half an hour and not in the Hauptsturmfhrer's favor. t.i.tsch, with the restrained and not so very triumphal "Mate!" dying on his lips, had been amazed at the tantrum Amon had thrown. The Commandant had grabbed for his coat and gun belt, b.u.t.toning and buckling them on, ramming his cap on his head. Raimund t.i.tsch, appalled, believed that Amon was about to go down to the trolley line looking for a prisoner to chastise for his-for Raimund t.i.tsch's-minor victory at chess. Since that first afternoon, t.i.tsch had taken a new direction. Now he could take as long as three hours to lose to the Commandant. When workers in the Administration Building saw t.i.tsch limping up Jerozolimska to do this chess duty, they knew the afternoon would be saner for it. A modest sense of security spread from them down to the workshops and even to the miserable trolley pushers.

But Raimund t.i.tsch did not only play preventive chess. Independently of Dr. Sedlacek and of the man with the pocket camera whom Oskar had brought to Paszw, t.i.tsch had begun photographing. Sometimes from his office window, sometimes from the corners of workshops, he photographed the stripe-uniformed prisoners in the trolley line, the distribution of bread and soup, the digging of drains and foundations. Some of these photographs of t.i.tsch's are probably of the illegal supply of bread to the Madritsch workshop. Certainly round brown loaves were bought by Raimund himself, with Julius Madritsch's consent and money, and delivered to Paszw by truck beneath bales of rags and bolts of cloth. t.i.tsch photographed round rye being hurried from hand to hand into Madritsch's storeroom, on the side away from the towers and screened from the main access road by the bulk of the camp stationery plant.

He photographed the SS and the Ukrainians marching, at play, at work. He photographed a work party under the supervision of engineer Karp, who was soon to be set on by the killer dogs, his thigh ripped open, his genitals torn off. In a long shot of Paszw, he intimated the size of the camp, its desolation. It seems that on Amon's sun deck he even took close-ups of the Commandant at rest in a deck chair, a hefty Amon approaching now the 120 kg at which newly arrived SS Dr. Blancke would say to him, "Enough, Amon; you have to take some weight off." t.i.tsch photographed Rolf and Ralf loping and sunning, and Majola holding one of the dogs by the collar and pretending to enjoy it. He also took Amon in full majesty on his big white horse.

As the reels were shot, t.i.tsch did not have them developed. As an archive, they were safer and more portable in roll form. He hid them in a steel box in his Cracow apartment. There also he kept some of the remaining goods of the Madritsch Jews. Throughout Paszw you found people who had a final treasure; something to offer-at the moment of greatest danger-to the man with the list, the man who opened and closed the doors on the cattle cars. t.i.tsch understood that only the desperate deposited goods with him. That prison minority who had a stock of rings and watches and jewelry hidden somewhere in Paszw didn't need him. They traded regularly for favors and comforts. But into the same hiding as t.i.tsch's photographs went the final resources of a dozen families-Auntie Yanka's brooch, Uncle Mordche's watch.

In fact, when the Paszw regimen pa.s.sed, when Schemer and Czurda had fled, and when the impeccable files of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office had been baled up in trucks and moved away as evidence, t.i.tsch had no need to develop the photographs, and every reason not to. In the files of ODESSA, the postwar secret society of former SS men, he would be listed as a traitor. For the fact that he'd supplied the Madritsch people with some 30,000 loaves of bread, as well as many chickens and some kilos of b.u.t.ter, and that for his humanity he had been honored by the Israeli Government, had received some publicity in the press. Some people made threats and hissed at him as he pa.s.sed in the streets of Vienna. "Jew-kisser." So the Paszw reels would lie for twenty years in the soil of a small park in the suburbs of Vienna where t.i.tsch had buried them, and might well have stayed there forever, the emulsion drying on the dark and secret images of Amon's love Majola, his killing dogs, his nameless slave laborers. It might therefore have been seen as a sort of triumph for the population of Paszw when, in November 1963, a Schindler survivor (Leopold Pfefferberg) secretly bought the box and its contents for $500 from Raimund t.i.tsch, who was then suffering from terminal heart disease. Even then, Raimund didn't want the rolls developed until after his death. The nameless shadow of ODESSA frightened him more than had the names of Amon Goeth, of Scherner, of Auschwitz, in the days of Paszw.

After his burial, the reels were developed. Nearly all the pictures came out.

- Not one of that small body of Paszw inmates who would survive Amon and the camp itself would ever have anything accusatory to say of Raimund t.i.tsch. But he was never the sort of man concerning whom mythologies arose. Oskar was. From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself. Through listening to such stories, one can see that to the Paszw people, while t.i.tsch may have been the good hermit, Oskar had become a minor G.o.d of deliverance, double-faced-in the Greek manner-as any small G.o.d; endowed with all the human vices; many-handed; subtly powerful; capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.

One story concerns the time when the SS police chiefs were under pressure to close Paszw, as its reputation as an efficient industrial complex was not high with the Armaments Inspectorate. Helen Hirsch, Goeth's maid, often encountered officers, dinner guests, who wandered into the hallway or kitchen of the villa to escape Amon for a while and to shake their heads. An SS officer named Tibritsch, turning up in the kitchen, had said to Helen, "Doesn't he know there are men giving their lives?" He meant on the Eastern Front, of course, not out there in the dark of Paszw. Officers with less imperial lives than Amon were becoming outraged by what they saw at the villa or, perhaps more dangerously, envious.

As the legend has it, it was on a Sunday evening that General Julius Schindler himself visited Paszw to decide whether its existence was of any real value to the war effort. It was an odd hour for a grand bureaucrat to be visiting a plant, but perhaps the Armaments Inspectorate, in view of the perilous winter now falling on the Eastern Front, were working desperate hours. The inspection had been preceded by dinner at Emalia, at which wine and cognac flowed, for Oskar is a.s.sociated like Bacchus with the Dionysian line of G.o.ds.