Schindler's List Read online

  CHAPTER 12

  The child arrived at the Dresners’, on the eastern side of the ghetto, late in the afternoon. She had been returned to Cracow by the Polish couple who had been taking care of her in the country. They had been able to talk the Polish Blue Police at the ghetto gate into allowing them entry on business, and the child passed as theirs.

  They were decent people, and shamefaced at having brought her up to Cracow and the ghetto from the countryside. She was a dear girl; they were attached to her. But you couldn’t keep a Jewish child in the countryside anymore. The municipal authorities—never mind the SS—WERE offering sums of 500 z@l. and upward for every Jew betrayed. It was one’s neighbors. You couldn’t trust your neighbors. And then not only would the child be in trouble, we’d all be. My God, there were areas where the peasants went out hunting Jews with scythes and sickles.

  The child didn’t seem to suffer too much from whatever squalors the ghetto now imposed on her. She sat at a little table among screens of damp clothing and fastidiously ate the heel of bread Mrs. Dresner gave her. She accepted whatever endearments the women sharing the kitchen happened to utter. Mrs. Dresner noticed how strangely guarded the child was in all her answers.

  She had her vanities, though, and like most

  three-year-olds a passionately preferred

  color. Red. She sat there in red cap, red

  coat, small red boots. The peasants had

  indulged her passion.

  Mrs. Dresner made conversation by talking about the child’s real parents. They too had been living— in fact, hiding—in the countryside. But, said Mrs. Dresner, they were going to come and join everyone here in Cracow soon. The child nodded, but it didn’t seem to be shyness that kept her quiet.

  In January her parents had been rounded up

  according to a list supplied to the SS by Spira, and

  while being marched to Prokocim Station had passed

  a crowd of jeering Poles—“Bye-bye,

  Jews.” They had dodged out of the column just like

  two decent Polish citizens crossing the

  street to watch the deportation of social

  enemies, and had joined the crowd, jeered a little themselves, and then strolled off into the countryside around that outer suburb.

  Now they too were finding life no safer out there and intended to sneak back into Cracow during the summer. The mother of “Redcap,” as the Dresner boys nicknamed her as soon as they got home with the work details from the city, was a first cousin of Mrs. Dresner’s.

  Soon Mrs. Dresner’s daughter, young

  Danka, also got home from her work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe air base.

  Danka was going on fourteen, tall enough to have the Kennkarte (labor card) enabling her to work outside the ghetto. She enthused over the noncommittal child. “Genia, I know your mother, Eva. She and I used to go shopping for dresses together, and she’d buy me cakes at the patisserie in Bracka Street.”

  The child kept to her seat, did not smile, looked ahead. “Madam, you’re mistaken. My mother’s name is not Eva. It’s Jasha.” She went on naming the names in the fictional Polish genealogy in which her parents and the peasants had schooled her in case the Blue Police or the SS ever questioned her. The family frowned at each other, brought to a standstill by the unusual cunning of the child, finding it obscene but not wanting to undermine it, since it might, before the week was out, be essential survival equipment.

  At suppertime Idek Schindel, the child’s uncle, a young doctor at the ghetto hospital in Wegierska Street, arrived. He was the sort of whimsical, half-teasing, and infatuated uncle a child needs. At the sight of him, Genia became a child, getting down off her chair to rush at him. If he were here, calling these people cousins, then they were cousins. You could admit now that you had a mother named Eva and that your grandparents weren’t really named Ludwik and Sophia.

  Then Mr. Juda Dresner, purchasing officer of the Bosch plant, arrived home and the company was complete.

  April 28 was Schindler’s birthday, and in

  1942 he celebrated it like a child of the spring,

  loudly, profligately. It was a big day at

  DEF. The Herr Direktor brought in rare

  white bread, regardless of expense, to be served with the noonday soup. The festivity spread into the outer office and to the workshops out back. Oskar Schindler, industrialist, was celebrating the general succulence of life. This, his thirty-fourth birthday, began early at Emalia. Schindler signaled it by walking through the outer office carrying three bottles of cognac under his arm to share with the engineers, the accountants, the draftsmen. Office workers in Accounts and Personnel had handfuls of cigarettes thrust at them, and by midmorning the handouts had spread to the factory floor. A cake was brought in from a patisserie, and Oskar cut it on Klonowska’s desk. Delegations of Jewish and Polish workers began to enter the office to congratulate him, and he heartily kissed a girl named Kucharska, whose father had figured in the Polish parliament before the war. And then the Jewish girls came up, and the men shaking hands, even Stern getting there somehow from the Progress Works where he was now employed, to take Oskar’s hand formally and find himself wrapped up in a rib-cracking embrace.

  That afternoon someone, perhaps the same malcontent as last time, contacted Pomorska and denounced Schindler for his racial improprieties. His ledgers might stand up to scrutiny, but no one could deny he was a “Jew-kisser.”

  The manner of his arrest seemed more professional than the last. On the morning of the 29th, a Mercedes blocked the factory entrance and two Gestapo men, seeming somehow surer of their ground than the last two, met him crossing the factory yard. He was charged, they told him, with breaking the provisions of the Race and Resettlement Act. They wanted him to come with them. And no, there was no need for him to visit his office first.

  “Do you have a warrant?” he asked them.

  “We don’t need one,” they told him.

  He smiled at them. The gentlemen should understand that if they took him away without a warrant, they would come to regret it.

  He said it lightly, but he could tell by their demeanor that the level of threat in them had firmed and focused since last year’s half-comic detention. Last time the conversation at Pomorska had been about economic matters and whether they had been breached. This time you were dealing with grotesque law, the law of the lower guts, edicts from the black side of the brain. Serious stuff.

  “We will have to risk regret,” one of the two told him.

  He assessed their assurance, their perilous indifference to him, a man of assets, newly turned thirty-four. “On a spring morning,” he told them, “I can spare a few hours for driving.”

  He comforted himself that he would again be put into one of those urbane cells at Pomorska. But when they turned right up Kolejowa, he knew that this time it would be Montelupich prison.

  “I shall wish to speak to a lawyer,” he told them.

  “In time,” said the driver.

  Oskar had it on the reasonable word of one of his drinking companions that the Jagiellonian Institute of Anatomy received corpses from Montelupich.

  The wall of the place stretched a long block, and the ominous sameness of the windows of the third and fourth floors could be seen from the back seat of the Gestapo Mercedes. Inside the front gate and through the archway they came to an office where the SS clerk spoke in whispers, as if raised voices would set up head-splitting echoes along the narrow corridors. They took his cash, but told him it would be given to him during his imprisonment at a rate of 50 z@l. a day. No, the arresting officers told him, it was not yet time for him to call a lawyer.

  Then they left, and in the corridor, under guard, he listened for the traces of screams which might, in this convent hush, spill out through the cracks of the Judas windows in the walls. He was led down a flight of stairs into a claustrophobic tunnel and past a string of locked cells, one with an open grille. Some half-dozen prisoners
in shirt sleeves sat there, each in a separate stall, facing the rear wall so that their features could not be seen. Oskar noticed a torn ear. And someone was sniffling but knew better than to wipe his nose.

  Klonowska, Klonowska, are you making your telephone calls, my love?

  They opened a cell for him and he went in.

  He had felt a minor anxiety that the place

  might be crowded. But there was only one other

  prisoner in the cell, a soldier wearing his

  greatcoat up around his ears for warmth and seated on

  one of the two low wooden bed frames, each with its

  pallet. There were no washbasins, of course. A

  water bucket and a waste bucket. And what

  proved to be a Waffen SS

  Standartenf@uhrer (an SS rank

  equivalent to colonel) wearing a slight stubble, a stale, unbuttoned shirt under the overcoat, and muddy boots.

  “Welcome, sir,” said the officer with a crooked grin, raising one hand to Oskar. He was a handsome fellow, a few years older than Oskar. The odds were in favor of his being a plant. But one wondered why they had put him in uniform and provided him with such exalted rank. Oskar looked at his watch, sat, stood, looked up at the high windows. A little light from the exercise yards filtered in, but it was not the sort of window you could lean against and relieve the intimacy of the two close bunks, of sitting hands on knees facing each other.

  In the end they began to talk. Oskar was very wary, but the Standartenf@uhrer chattered wildly. What was his name? Philip was his name. He didn’t think gentlemen should give their second names in prison. Besides, it was time people got down to first names. If we’d all got down to first names earlier, we’d be a happier race now.

  Oskar concluded that if the man was not a plant, then he had had some sort of breakdown, was perhaps suffering shell shock. He’d been campaigning in southern Russia, and his battalion had helped hang on to Novgorod all winter. Then he had got leave to visit a Polish girlfriend in Cracow and they had, in his words, “lost themselves in each other,” and he had been arrested in her apartment three days after his leave expired.

  “I suppose I decided,” said Philip,

  “not to be too damn exact about dates when I

  saw the way the other bastards”—he waved a hand

  at the roof, indicating the structure around him, the

  SS planners, the accountants, the bureaucrats

  --“when I saw the way they lived. It wasn’t as if I deliberately decided to go absent without leave. But I just felt I was owed a certain damn latitude.”

  Oskar asked him would he rather be in Pomorska Street. No, said Philip, I’d rather be here. Pomorska looked more like a hotel. But the bastards had a death cell there, full of shining chromium bars. But that aside, what had Herr Oskar done?

  “I kissed a Jewish girl,” said Oskar.

  “An employee of mine. So it’s

  alleged.”

  Philip began to hoot at this. “Oh, oh!

  Did your prick drop off?”

  All afternoon Standartenf@uhrer Philip

  continued to condemn the SS. Thieves and orgiasts, he said. He couldn’t believe it. The money some of the bastards made. They started so incorruptible too. They would kill some poor bloody Pole for smuggling a kilo of bacon while they lived like goddamn Hanseatic barons.

  Oskar behaved as if it were all news to him, as if the idea of venality among the Reichf@uhrers was a painful assault on his provincial Sudetendeutsch innocence which had caused him to forget himself and caress a Jewish girl. At last Philip, worn out by his outrage, took a nap.

  Oskar wanted a drink. A certain measure of liquor would help speed time, make the Standartenf@uhrer better company if he was not a plant and more fallible if he was. Oskar took out a 10-z@l. note and wrote down names on it and telephone numbers; more names than last time: a dozen. He took out another four notes, crumpled them in his hands and went to the door and knocked at the Judas window. An SS NCO turned up—a grave middle-aged face staring in at him. He didn’t look like a man who exercised Poles to death or ruptured kidneys with his boots, but of course, that was one of the strengths of torture: you didn’t expect it from a man whose features were those of someone’s country uncle.

  Was it possible to order five bottles of

  vodka? Oskar asked. Five bottles, sir?

  said the NCO. He might have been advising a young, callow drinker uncertain of quantities. He was also pensive, however, as if he were considering reporting Oskar to his superiors. The general and I, said Oskar, would appreciate a bottle apiece to stimulate conversation. You and your colleagues please accept the rest with my compliments. I presume also, said Oskar, that a man of your authority has power to make routine telephone calls on behalf of a prisoner.

  You’ll see the telephone numbers there ... yes, on the note. You don’t have to call them all yourself. But give them to my secretary, eh? Yes, she’s the first on the list.

  These are very influential people, murmured the SS NCO.

  You’re a damn fool, Philip told

  Oskar. They’ll shoot you for trying to corrupt their guards.

  Oskar slumped, apparently casual.

  It’s as stupid as kissing a Jewess, said

  Philip.

  We’ll see, said Oskar. But he was frightened. At last the NCO came back and brought, together with the two bottles, a parcel of clean shirts and underwear, some books, and a bottle of wine, packed at the apartment in Straszewskiego Street by Ingrid and delivered to the Montelupich gate. Philip and Oskar had a pleasant enough evening together, though at one time a guard pounded on the steel door and demanded that they stop singing. And even then, as the liquor added spaciousness to the cell and an unexpected cogency to the Standartenf@uhrer’s ravings, Schindler was listening for remote screams from upstairs or for the button-clicking Morse of some hopeless prisoner in the next cell. Only once did the true nature of the place dilute the effectiveness of the vodka. Next to his cot, partially obscured by the pallet, Philip discovered a minute statement in red pencil. He spent some idle moments deciphering it—not doing so well, his Polish much slower than Oskar’s.

  “”My God,”” he translated,

  “”how they beat me!” Well, it’s a

  wonderful world, my friend Oskar. Isn’t it?”

  In the morning Schindler woke clearheaded. Hangovers had never plagued him, and he wondered why other people made such a fuss about them. But Philip was white-faced and depressed. During the morning he was taken away and came back to collect his belongings. He was to face a court-martial that afternoon, but had been given a new assignment at a training school in Stutthof, so he presumed they didn’t intend to shoot him for desertion. He picked up his greatcoat from his cot and went off to explain his Polish dalliance.

  Alone, Oskar spent the day reading a Karl

  May book Ingrid had sent and, in the afternoon,

  speaking to his lawyer, a Sudetendeutscher

  who’d opened a practice in civil law in

  Cracow two years before. Oskar was comforted by the

  interview. The cause of the arrest was certainly as

  stated; they weren’t using his

  transracial caresses as a pretext to hold

  him while they investigated his affairs. “But it will probably come to the SS Court and you’ll be asked why you aren’t in the Army.”

  “The reason is obvious,” said Oskar.

  “I’m an essential war producer. You can get General Schindler to say so.”

  Oskar was a slow reader and savored the Karl May book—the hunter and the Indian sage in the American wilderness—a relationship of decency. He did not rush the reading, in any case. It could be a week before he came to court. The lawyer expected that there would be a speech by the president of the court about conduct unbecoming a member of the German race and then there would be a substantial fine. So be it. He’d leave court a more cautious man.

/>   On the fifth morning, he had already drunk the half-liter of black ersatz coffee they’d given him for breakfast when an NCO and two guards came for him. Past the mute doors he was taken upstairs to one of the front offices. He found there a man he’d met at cocktail parties, Obersturmbannf@uhrer Rolf Czurda, head of the Cracow SD. Czurda looked like a businessman in his good suit. “Oskar, Oskar,” said Czurda like an old friend reproving. “We give you those Jewish girls at five marks a day. You should kiss us, not them.”

  Oskar explained that it had been his birthday.

  He’d been impetuous. He’d been drinking. Czurda shook his head. “I never knew you were such a big-timer, Oskar,” he said. “Calls from as far away as Breslau, from our friends in the Abwehr. Of course it would be ridiculous to keep you from your work just because you felt up some Jewess.”

  “You’re very understanding, Herr

  Obersturmbannf@uhrer,” said Oskar,

  feeling the request for some sort of gratuity building up in Czurda. “If ever I’m in a position to return your liberal gesture ...” “As a matter of fact,” said Czurda, “I have an old aunt whose flat has been bombed out.”

  Yet another old aunt. Schindler made a

  compassionate click with his tongue and said that a

  representative of chief Czurda would be

  welcome any time in Lipowa Street

  to make a selection from the range of products turned out there. But it did not do to let men like Czurda think of his release as an absolute favor—and of the kitchenware as the least that the luckily released prisoner could offer. When Czurda said he could go, Oskar objected.

  “I can’t very well just call my car, Herr