Schindler's Ark Read online

  CONTENTS

  Schindler’s Ark

  Also by Thomas Keneally

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Glossary

  Author’s Note

  Prologue Autumn 1943

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  SCHINDLER’S ARK

  Thomas Keneally

  Also by Thomas Keneally

  Fiction

  The Place at Whitton

  The Fear

  Bring Larks and Heroes

  Three Cheers for the Paraclete

  The Survivor

  A Dutiful Daughter

  The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

  Gossip from the Forest

  Season in Purgatory

  A Victim of the Aurora

  Passenger

  Confederates

  The Cut-rate Kingdom

  A Family Madness

  The Playmaker

  Towards Asmara

  By the Line

  Flying Hero Class

  Woman of the Inner Sea

  Jacko

  A River Town

  Bettany’s Book

  The Tyrant’s Novel

  Non-fiction

  Outback

  The Place Where Souls Are Born

  Now and in Time to Be: Ireland and the Irish

  Memoirs from a Young Republic

  Homebush Boy: A Memoir

  The Great Shame

  Commonwealth of Thieves

  For Children

  Ned Kelly and the City of Bees

  Copyright © 1982, Serpentine Publishing Co. Pty. Ltd.

  First published in Great Britain in 1982 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  First published by Sceptre in 1996

  An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton

  The right of Thomas Keneally to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 020 8

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 93629 0

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  An Hachette Livre UK company

  338 Euston Road

  London NWl 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To the memory of Oskar Schindler, and to Leopold Pfefferberg who by zeal and persistence caused this book to be written.

  GLOSSARY

  SS Ranks and Their Army Equivalents

  COMMISSIONED RANKS

  Oberstgruppenführer general

  Obergruppenführer lieutenant general

  Gruppenführer major general

  Brigadeführer brigadier general

  Oberführer (no army equivalent)

  Standartenführer colonel

  Obersturmbannführer lieutenant colonel

  Sturmbannführer major

  Hauptsturmführer captain

  Obersturmführer first lieutenant

  Untersturmführer second lieutenant

  NON-COMMISSIONED RANKS

  Oberscharführer senior non-commissioned rank

  Unterscharführer equivalent to sergeant

  Rottenführer equivalent to corporal

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In 1980 I visited a luggage store in Beverly Hills and asked about the prices of briefcases. The store belonged to Leopold Pfefferberg, a Schindler survivor. Beneath Pfefferberg’s shelves of imported Italian leather goods, I first heard of Oskar Schindler, the German bon vivant, speculator, charmer, and sign of contradiction, and of his salvage of a cross-section of a condemned race during those years now known by the generic name, Holocaust.

  This account of Oskar’s astonishing history is based in the first place on interviews with fifty Schindler survivors from seven nations – Australia, Israel, West Germany, Austria, the United States, Argentina and Brazil. It is enriched by a visit, in the company of Leopold Pfefferberg, to locations which figure prominently in the book – Cracow, Oskar’s adopted city; Plaszów, the scene of Amon Goeth’s labour camp; Lipowa Street, Zablocie, where Oskar’s factory still stands; Auschwitz – Birkenau, from which Oskar extracted his women prisoners. But the narrative depends also on documentary and other information supplied by those few wartime associates of Oskar’s who can still be reached, as well as by the large body of his postwar friends. Many of the hundreds of testimonies regarding Oskar and deposited by Schindler Jews at Yad Vashem, The Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, further enriched the record, as did written testimonies from private sources and a body of Schindler papers and letters, some supplied by Yad Vashem, some by Oskar’s friends.

  To use the texture and devices of a novel to tell a true story is a course which has frequently been followed in modern writing. It is the one I have chosen to follow here; both because the craft of the novelist is the only craft to which I can lay claim, and because the novel’s techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar. I have attempted to avoid all fiction, though, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar’s stature. Sometimes it has been necessary to attempt to reconstruct conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. But most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews), of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar’s acts of outrageous rescue.

  I would like to thank first three Schindler survivors – Leopold Pfefferberg, Justice Moshe Bejski of the Israeli Supreme Court, and Mieczyslaw Pemper, who not only passed on their memories of Oskar to the author and gave him certain documents which have contributed to the accuracy of the narrative, but also read the early draft of the book and suggested corrections. Many others, whether Schindler survivors or Oskar’s postwar associates, gave interviews and generously contributed information through letters and documents. These include Frau Emilie Schindler, Mrs Ludmila Pfefferberg, Dr Sophia Stern, Mrs Helen Horowitz, Dr Jonas Dresner, Mr & Mrs Henry and Mariana Rosner, Leopold Rosner, Dr Alex Rosner, Dr I
dek Schindel, Dr Danuta Schindel, Mrs Regina Horowitz, Mrs Bronislawa Karakulska, Mr Richard Horowitz, Mr Shmuel Springmann, the late Mr Jakob Sternberg, Mr Jerzy Sternberg, Mr & Mrs Lewis Fagen, Mr Henry Kinstlinger, Mrs Rebecca Bau, Mr Edward Heuberger, Mr & Mrs M. Hirschfeld, Mr & Mrs Irving Glovin and many others. In my home city, Mr & Mrs E. Korn not only gave of their memories of Oskar but were a constant support. At Yad Vashem, Dr Josef Kermisz, Dr Shmuel Krakowski, Vera Prausnitz, Chana Abells and Hadassah Mödlinger provided generous access to the testimonies of Schindler survivors and to video and photographic material.

  Last, I would like to honour the efforts which the late Mr Martin Gosch expended on bringing the name of Oskar Schindler to the world’s notice, and to signify my thanks to his widow, Mrs Lucille Gaynes, for her cooperation with this project.

  PROLOGUE Autumn 1943

  In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and – in the lapel of the dinner jacket – a large ornamental gold-on-black enamel swastika, emerged from a fashionable apartment block in Straszewskiego Street on the edge of the ancient centre of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.

  “Watch the pavement, Herr Schindler,” said the chauffeur. “It’s icy like a widow’s heart.”

  In observing this small winter scene, we are on safe ground. The tall young man would to the end of his days wear double-breasted suits, would, being something of an engineer, always be gratified by large dazzling vehicles, would, though a German and at this point in history a German of some influence, always be the sort of man with whom a Polish chauffeur could safely crack a lame, comradely joke.

  But it will not be possible to see the whole story under such easy character headings. For this is the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms. When you work from the other end of the beast, when you chronicle the predictable and measurable success evil generally achieves, it is easy to be wise, wry, piercing, to avoid bathos. It is easy to show the inevitability by which evil acquires all of what you could call the real estate of the story, even though good might finish up with a few imponderables like dignity and self-knowledge. Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.

  In fact virtue is such a dangerous word that we have to rush to explain; Herr Oskar Schindler, chancing his glimmering shoes on the icy pavement in this old and elegant quarter of Cracow, was not a virtuous young man in the customary sense. In this city he kept house with his German mistress and maintained a long affair with his Polish secretary. His wife Emilie chose to live most of the time at home in Moravia, though she sometimes came to Poland to visit him. There’s this to be said for him, that to all his women he was a well-mannered and generous lover. But under the normal interpretation of virtue that’s no excuse.

  Likewise he was a drinker. Some of the time he drank for the pure glow of it, at other times with associates, bureaucrats, SS men for more palpable results. Like few others, he was capable of staying canny while drinking, of keeping his head. That again, though, under the narrow interpretation of morality, has never been an excuse for carousing. And although Herr Schindler’s merit is well documented, it is a feature of his ambiguity that he worked within or, at least, on the strength of, a corrupt and savage scheme; one which filled Europe with camps of varying but consistent inhumanity and created a submerged, unspoken-of nation of prisoners. The best thing, therefore, may be to begin with a tentative instance of Herr Schindler’s strange virtue and of the places and associates to which it brought him.

  At the end of Straszewskiego Street, the car moved beneath the black bulk of Wawel Castle, from which the National Socialist Party’s darling lawyer Hans Frank ruled the Government General of Poland. As from the palace of any evil giant, no light showed. Neither Herr Schindler nor the driver glanced up at the ramparts as the car turned south-east towards the river. At the Podgórze Bridge, the guards, placed above the freezing Vistula to prevent the transit of partisans and other curfew-breakers between Podgórze and Cracow, were used to the vehicle, to Herr Schindler’s face, to the Passierschein presented by the chauffeur. Herr Schindler passed this check-point frequently, travelling either from his factory (where he also had an apartment) to the city on business, or else from his Straszewskiego Street apartment to his works in the suburb of Zablocie. They were used to seeing him after dark, too, attired formally or semi-formally, passing one way or another to a dinner, a party, a bedroom; perhaps, as was the case tonight, on his way ten kilometres out of town to the forced labour camp at Plaszów, to dine there with SS Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth, that highly placed sensualist. Herr Schindler had a reputation for being generous with gifts of drink at Christmas, and so the car was permitted to pass over into the suburb of Podgórze without much delay.

  It is certain that by this stage of his history, in spite of his liking for good food and wine, Herr Schindler approached tonight’s dinner at Commandant Goeth’s more with loathing than with anticipation. There had in fact never been a time when to sit and drink with Amon had not been a repellent business. Yet the revulsion Herr Schindler felt was of a piquant kind, an ancient exultant sense of abomination such as, in a medieval painting, the just show for the damned. An emotion, that is, which stung Oskar rather than unmanned him.

  In the black leather interior of the Adler as it raced along the tramtracks in what was until recently the Jewish ghetto, Herr Schindler chain smoked, as ever. But it was composed chain smoking. There was never tension in the hands; he was stylish. His manner implied that he knew where the next cigarette was coming from and the next bottle of cognac. Only he could have told us whether he had to succour himself from a flask as he passed by the mute, black village of Prokocim and saw, on the railway line to Lwów, a string of stalled cattle wagons, which might hold infantry or prisoners or even – though the odds on this were long – cattle.

  Out in the countryside, perhaps ten kilometres from the centre of town, the Adler turned right at a street named – by an irony – Jerozolimska. This night of sharp frosty outlines, Herr Schindler saw beneath the hill first a ruined synagogue, and then the bare shapes of what passed these days as the city of Jerusalem, Forced Labour Camp Plaszów, barrack town of twenty thousand unquiet Jews, Polacks and Gypsies. The Ukrainian and Waffen SS men on the gate greeted Herr Schindler courteously, for he was known at least as well here as on the Podgórze Bridge.

  When level with the Administration Block, the Adler moved on to a prison road paved with Jewish gravestones. The camp site had been till two years before a Jewish cemetery. Commandant Amon Goeth, who claimed to be a poet, had used in the construction of his camp whatever metaphors were to hand. This metaphor of shattered gravestones ran the length of the camp, splitting it in two, but did not extend eastwards to the villa occupied by Commandant Goeth himself.

  On the right, past the guard barracks, stood a former Jewish mortuary building. It seemed to declare that here all death was natural and by attrition, that all the dead were laid out. In fact the place was now used as the commandant’s stables. Though Herr Schindler was used to the sight, it is possible that he still reacted with an ironic little cough. Admittedly if you reacted to every little irony of the new Europe you took it into you, it became part of your luggage. But Herr Schindler possessed an immense capacity for carrying that sort of secret drollery.

  A prisoner called Poldek Pfefferberg was also on his way to the commandant’s villa that evening. Lisiek, the commandant’s nineteen-year-old orderly, had come to Pfefferberg’s barracks with passes signed by an SS NCO. The youngster’s problem was that the commandant’s bath had a stubborn ring around it, and Lisiek feared that he would be beaten up for it when Commandant Goeth came to take his morning bath. Pfefferberg, who had been Lisiek’s teacher i
n high school in Podgórze, worked in the camp garage and had access to solvents. So, in company with Lisiek, he went to the garage and fetched a long stick with a swab on the end and a can of solvent. To approach the commandant’s villa was always a dubious business, but involved the chance that you would be given food by Helen Hirsch, Goeth’s misused Jewish maid, a generous girl who had also been a student of Pfefferberg’s.

  When Herr Schindler’s Adler was still a hundred metres from Goeth’s villa, it set the dogs barking, the Great Dane, the Wolfhound, and all the others the commandant kept in the kennels beyond the house. The villa itself, a square building with an attic, had a balcony along the upper floor. All around the walls was a terraced patio with a balustrade. Amon Goeth liked sitting out of doors in the summer. Since he’d come here, he’d put on weight. Next summer he’d make a fat sun-worshipper. But in this particular version of Jerusalem he’d be safe from mockery.

  An SS Unterscharführer with white gloves had been put on the door tonight. Saluting, the sergeant admitted Herr Schindler to the house. In the hallway the Ukrainian orderly, Ivan, took Herr Schindler’s coat and homberg. Schindler patted the breast pocket of his suit to be sure he had the gift for his host, a gold plated cigarette case, black market. Amon was doing so well on the side, especially out of confiscated jewellery, that he would be offended by anything less than the best gold plate. Yet even the best gold plate was to Amon nothing but a pleasant token.

  At the double doors giving on to the dining room, the Rosner brothers were playing, Henry on violin, Leo on accordion. On Hauptsturmführer Goeth’s command they had taken off the tattered clothing of the camp paint shop where they worked in the daytime and adopted the evening suits they kept in their barracks for such events. Oskar Schindler knew that although the commandant admired their music the Rosners never played at ease in the villa. They had seen too much of Amon. They knew he was erratic and given to ex tempore executions. They played studiously and hoped that their music would not suddenly give offence.

  At Goeth’s table that night there would be seven men. Apart from Schindler himself, the guests included Oberführer∗ Julian Scherner, head of the SS for the Cracow region, and Obersturmbannführer Rolf Czurda, the lieutenant colonel who was chief of the Cracow branch of the SD, the late Reinhard Heydrich’s security service. They were the guests of highest honour, for this camp was run by their authority. They were some ten years older than Goeth, and SS police chief Scherner looked definitely middle-aged with his glasses and bald head and slight obesity. Even so, in view of his protégé’s profligate living habits, the age difference between himself and Amon didn’t seem so great.