Schindler's List Page 10

  It was that way for Madritsch too. Julius Madritsch’s uniform mill stood on the western side of the ghetto, a mile or so from Oskar’s enamelworks. He was doing so well that he was negotiating to open a similar plant in Tarnow. He too was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, and his credit was so good that he had received a loan of a million z@loty from the Bank Emisyjny (issue Bank).

  Whatever ethical queasiness they felt, it is

  not likely that either entrepreneur, Oskar or

  Julius, felt a moral obligation to avoid

  employing additional Jews. That was a stance, and

  since they were pragmatists, stances weren’t their

  style. In any case, Itzhak Stern as well

  as Roman Ginter, a businessman and

  representative of the Relief Office of the Judenrat, called on Oskar and Julius both and begged them to employ more Jews, as many as could be fitted in. The objective was to give the ghetto an economic permanence. It was almost axiomatic, Stern and Ginter considered at that stage, that a Jew who had an economic value in a precocious empire hungry for skilled workers was safe from worse things. And Oskar and Madritsch agreed.

  So for two weeks the Jews trundled their barrows through Kazimierz and over the bridge into Podg@orze. Middle-class families whose Polish servants had come with them to help push the cart. At the bottom of the barrows lay the remaining brooches, the fur coats, under mattresses and kettles and skillets.

  Crowds of Poles on Stradom and Starovislna Streets jeered and hurled mud. “The Jews are going, the Jews are going.

  Goodbye, Jews.”

  Beyond the bridge a fancy wooden gate greeted the new citizens of the ghetto. White with scalloped ramparts which gave it an Arabesque look, it had two wide arches for the trolleys coming from and going to Cracow, and at the side was a white sentry box. Above the arches, a title in Hebrew sought to reassure. JEWISH TOWN, it proclaimed. High barbed-wire fences had been strung along the front of the ghetto, facing the river, and open spaces were sealed with round-topped cement slabs nine feet tall, resembling strings of gravestones for the anonymous. At the ghetto gate the trundling Jew was met by a representative of the Judenrat Housing Office. If he had a wife and large family, a man might be assigned two rooms and have the use of a kitchen. Even so, after the good living of the Twenties and Thirties, it was painful to have to share your private life with families of different rituals, of another, distasteful musk and habits. Mothers screamed, and fathers said things could be worse and sucked on hollow teeth and shook their heads. In the one room, the Orthodox found the liberals an abomination. On March 20, the movement was complete. Everyone outside the ghetto was forfeit and in jeopardy. Inside, for the moment, there was living space.

  Twenty-three-year-old Edith Liebgold was assigned a first-floor room to share with her mother and her baby. The fall of Cracow eighteen months back had put her husband into a mood verging on despair. He’d wandered away from home as if he wanted to look into the courses open to him. He had ideas about the forests, about finding a safe clearing. He had never returned.

  From her end window Edith Liebgold could see

  the Vistula through the barbed-wire barricade, but

  her path to other parts of the ghetto, especially to the

  hospital in Wegierska Street, took her

  through Plac Zgody, Peace Square, the

  ghetto’s only square. Here, on the second day of her life inside the walls, she missed by twenty seconds being ordered into an SS truck and taken to shovel coal or snow in the city. It was not just that work details often, according to rumor, returned to the ghetto with one or more fewer members than when they had left. More than this sort of odds, Edith feared being forced into a truck when, half a minute earlier, you’d thought you were going to Pankiewicz’ pharmacy, and your baby was due to be fed in twenty minutes. Therefore she went with friends to the Jewish Employment Office. If she could get shift work, her mother would mind the baby at night.

  The office in those first days was crowded. The Judenrat had its own police force now, the Ordnungsdienst (or OD), expanded and regularized to keep order in the ghetto, and a boy with a cap and an armband organized waiting lines in front of the office.

  Edith Liebgold’s group were just inside the door, making lots of noise to pass the time, when a small middle-aged man wearing a brown suit and a tie approached her. They could tell that they’d attracted him with their racket, their brightness. At first they thought he intended to pick Edith up.

  “Look,” he said, “rather than wait ... there is an enamel factory over in Zablocie.”

  He let the address have its effect.

  Zablocie was outside the ghetto, he was telling them. You could barter with the Polish workers there. He needed ten healthy women for the night shift. The girls made faces, as if they could afford to choose work and might even turn him down. Not heavy, he assured them. And they’ll teach you on the job. His name, he said, was Abraham Bankier. He was the manager. There was a German owner, of course. What sort of German? they asked. Bankier grinned as if he suddenly wanted to fulfill all their hopes. Not a bad sort, he told them.

  That night Edith Liebgold met the other members of the enamel-factory night shift and marched across the ghetto toward Zablocie under the guard of a Jewish OD. In the column she asked questions about this Deutsche Email Fabrik. They serve a soup with plenty of body, she was told. Beatings? she asked. It’s not that sort of place, they said. It’s not like Beckmann’s razor-blade factory; more like Madritsch. Madritsch is all right, and Schindler too. At the entrance to the factory, the new night-shift workers were called out of the column by Bankier and taken upstairs and past vacant desks to a door marked HERR DIREKTOR. Edith Liebgold heard a deep voice tell them all to come in. They found the Herr Direktor seated on the corner of his desk, smoking a cigarette. His hair, somewhere between blond and light brown, looked freshly brushed; he wore a double-breasted suit and a silk tie. He looked exactly like a man who had a dinner to go to but had waited specially to have a word with them. He was immense; he was still young. From such a Hitlerite dream, Edith expected a lecture on the war effort and increasing production quotas. “I wanted to welcome you,” he told them in Polish. “You’re part of the expansion of this factory.” He looked away; it was even possible he was thinking, Don’t tell them that—they’ve got no stake in the place.

  Then, without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, “You’ll be safe working here. If you work here, then you’ll live through the war.” Then he said good night and left the office with them, allowing Bankier to hold them back at the head of the stairs so that the Herr Direktor could go down first and get behind the wheel of his automobile. The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.

  The new women of DEF took their job instruction in a pleasant daze. It was as if some mad old Gypsy with nothing to gain had told them they would marry a count. The promise had forever altered Edith Liebgold’s expectation of life. If ever they did shoot her, she would probably stand there protesting, “But the Herr Direktor said this couldn’t happen.”

  The work made no mental demands. Edith carried the enamel-dipped pots, hanging by hooks from a long stick, to the furnaces. And all the time she pondered Herr Schindler’s promise.

  Only madmen made promises as absolute as that. Without blinking. Yet he wasn’t mad. For he was a businessman with a dinner to go to. Therefore, he must know. But that meant some second sight, some profound contact with god or devil or the pattern of things. But again, his appearance, his hand with the gold signet ring, wasn’t the hand of a visionary. It was a hand that reached for the wine; it was a hand in which you could somehow sense the latent caresse
s. And so she came back to the idea of his madness again, to drunkenness, to mystical explanations, to the technique by which the Herr Direktor had infected her with certainty.

  Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and the odds weren’t good.

  CHAPTER 9

  That spring Schindler left his factory in Cracow and drove west in a BMW over the border and through the awakening spring forests to Zwittau. He had Emilie to see, and his aunts and sister. They had all been allies against his father; they were all tenders of the flame of his mother’s martyrdom. If there was a parallel between his late mother’s misery and his wife’s, Oskar Schindler—in his coat with the fur lapels, guiding the custom-made wheel with kid-gloved hands, reaching for another Turkish cigarette on the straight stretches of thawing road in the Jeseniks—did not see it. It was not a child’s business to see these things. His father was a god and subject to tougher laws.

  He liked visiting the aunts—the way they raised their hands palm upward in admiration of the cut of his suit. His younger sister had married a railway official and lived in a pleasant apartment provided by the rail authorities. Her husband was an important man in Zwittau, for it was a rail-junction town and had large freight yards. Oskar drank tea with his sister and her husband, and then some schnapps. There was a faint sense of mutual congratulation: the Schindler children hadn’t turned out so badly.

  It was, of course, Oskar’s sister who had nursed Frau Schindler in her last illness and who had now been visiting and speaking to their father in secret. She could do no more than make certain hints in the direction of a reconciliation. She did that over the tea and was answered by growls. Later, Oskar dined at home with Emilie. She was excited to have him there for the holiday. They could attend the Easter ceremonies together like an old-fashioned couple. Ceremonies was right, for they danced around each other ceremoniously all evening, attending to each other at table like polite strangers. And in their hearts and minds, both Emilie and Oskar were amazed by this strange marriage disability—that he could offer and deliver more to strangers, to workers on his factory floor than he could to her.

  The question that lay between them was whether Emilie should join him in Cracow. If she gave up the apartment in Zwittau and put in other tenants, she would have no escape at all from Cracow. She believed it her duty to be with Oskar; in the language of Catholic moral theology, his absence from her house was a “proximate occasion of sin.” Yet life with him in a foreign city would be tolerable only if he was careful and guarded and sensitive to her feelings. The trouble with Oskar was that you could not depend on him to keep his lapses to himself. Careless, half-tipsy, half-smiling, he seemed sometimes to think that if he really liked some girl, you had to like her too.

  The unresolved question about her going to Cracow lay so oppressively between them that when dinner was finished he excused himself and went to a caf‘e in the main square. It was a place frequented by mining engineers, small businessmen, the occasional salesman turned Army officer. Gratefully he saw some of his biker friends there, most of them wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. He began drinking cognac with them. Some expressed surprise that a big husky chap like Oskar was not in uniform.

  “Essential industry,” he growled.

  “Essential industry.”

  They reminisced about their motorcycle days.

  There were jokes about the one he’d put together out of

  spare parts when he was in high school. Its

  explosive effects. The explosive effects

  of his big 500cc Galloni. The noise

  level in the caf‘e mounted; more cognac was being shouted for. From the dining annex old school friends appeared, that look on their faces as if they had recognized a forgotten laugh, as in fact they had.

  Then one of them got serious. “Oskar, listen.

  Your father’s having dinner in there, all by himself.” Oskar Schindler looked into his cognac. His face burned, but he shrugged.

  “You ought to talk to him,” said someone. “He’s a shadow, the poor old bastard.”

  Oskar said that he had better go home. He began to stand, but their hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down again. “He knows you’re here,” they said. Two of them had already gone through to the annex and were persuading old Hans Schindler over the remnants of his dinner. Oskar, in a panic, was already standing, searching in his pocket for the checkroom disk, when Herr Hans Schindler, his expression pained, appeared from the dining room propelled gently along by two young men. Oskar was halted by the sight. In spite of his anger at his father, he’d always imagined that if any ground was covered between himself and Hans, he’d be the one who’d have to cover it. The old man was so proud. Yet here he was letting himself be dragged to his son.

  As the two of them were pushed toward each other, the

  old man’s first gesture was an apologetic

  half-grin and a sort of shrug of the eyebrows. The

  gesture, by its familiarity, took Oskar

  by storm. I couldn’t help it, Hans was

  saying. The marriage and everything, your mother and me, it all went according to laws of its own. The idea behind the gesture might have been an ordinary one, but Oskar had seen an identical expression on someone’s face already that evening—on his own, as he shrugged to himself, facing the mirror in the hallway of Emilie’s apartment. The marriage and everything, it’s all going according to laws of its own. He had shared that look with himself, and here—three cognacs later—his father was sharing it with him.

  “How are you, Oskar?” asked Hans

  Schindler. There was a dangerous wheeze along the edge of the words. His father’s health was worse than he remembered it.

  So Oskar decided that even Herr Hans Schindler was human—a proposition he had not been able to swallow at teatime at his sister’s; and he embraced the old man, kissing him on the cheek three times, feeling the impact of his father’s bristles, and beginning to weep as the corps of engineers and soldiers and past motorcyclists applauded the gratifying scene.

  CHAPTER 10

  The councilmen of Artur Rosenzweig’s

  Judenrat, who still saw themselves as guardians of the breath and health and bread ration of the internees of the ghetto, impressed upon the Jewish ghetto police that they were also public servants. They tended to sign up young men of compassion and some education. Though at SS headquarters the OD was regarded as just another auxiliary police force which would take orders like any police force, that was not the picture most OD men lived by in the summer of ‘41.

  It cannot be denied that as the ghettos grew older, the OD man became increasingly a figure of suspicion, a supposed collaborator. Some OD men fed information to the underground and challenged the system, but perhaps a majority of them found that their existence and that of their families depended increasingly on the cooperation they gave the SS. To honest men, the OD would become a corrupter. To crooks it was an opportunity.

  But in its early months in Cracow, it seemed

  a benign force. Leopold Pfefferberg could stand

  as a token of the ambiguity of being a member. When

  all education for Jews, even that organized by the

  Judenrat, was abolished in December

  1940, Poldek had been offered a job

  managing the waiting lines and keeping the appointment book in the Judenrat housing office. It was a part-time job, but gave him a cover under which he could travel around Cracow with some freedom. In March 1941, the OD itself was founded with the stated purpose of protecting the Jews entering the Podg@orze ghetto from other parts of the city. Poldek accepted the invitation to put on the cap of the OD. He believed he understood its purpose—that it was not
only to ensure rational behavior inside the walls but also to achieve that correct degree of grudging tribal obedience which, in the history of European Jewry, has tended to ensure that the oppressors will go away more quickly, will become forgetful so that, in the interstices of their forgetfulness, life may again become feasible.

  At the same time Pfefferberg wore his OD

  cap, he ran illegal goods—leatherwork,

  jewelry, furs, currency—in and out of the

  ghetto gate. He knew the Wachtmeister

  at the gate, Oswald Bosko, a policeman

  who had become so rebellious against the regime that he let raw materials into the ghetto to be made up into goods—garments, wine, hardware—and then let the goods out again to be sold in Cracow, all without even asking for a bribe.

  On leaving the ghetto, the officials at the gate, the lounging schmalzownicks, or informers, Pfefferberg would take off the Judaic armband in some quiet alley before moving on to business in Kazimierz or the Centrum.

  On the city walls, above fellow passengers’

  heads in the trolleys, he would read the posters

  of the day: the razor-blade advertisements, the

  latest Wawel edicts on the harboring of

  Polish bandits, the slogan “JEWS—LICE

  --TYPHUS,” the billboard depicting a

  virginal Polish girl handing food to a

  hook-nosed Jew whose shadow was the shadow of the

  Devil. “WHOEVER HELPS A JEW

  HELPS SATAN.” Outside groceries

  hung pictures of Jews mincing rats

  into pies, watering milk, pouring lice into pastry, kneading dough with filthy feet. The fact of the ghetto was being validated in the streets of Cracow by poster art, by copywriters from the Propaganda Ministry. And Pfefferberg, with his Aryan looks, would move calmly beneath the artwork, carrying a suitcase full of garments or jewelry or currency.