Schindler's List Page 15

  He moved around the periphery of the square and she

  saw him. Don’t call out, he wanted

  to say; I’ll work it out. He didn’t want

  a scene because it could end badly for both of them. But he didn’t need to be concerned, for he could see her eyes grow mute and unknowing. He stopped, transfixed by her pitiably admirable cunning. She knew well enough at the age of three years not to take the short-term comfort of calling out to uncles. She knew that there was no salvation in engaging the interest of the SS in Uncle Idek. He was composing a speech he intended to make to the large Oberscharf@uhrer who stood by the execution wall. It was better not to approach the authorities too humbly or through anyone of lesser rank. Looking back again to the child, he saw the suspicion of a flutter of her eyes, and then, with a dazzling speculator’s coolness, she stepped between the two guards nearest to her and out of the cordon. She moved with an aching slowness which, of course, galvanized her uncle’s vision, so that afterward he would often see behind his closed eyes the image of her among the forest of gleaming SS knee boots. In Plac Zgody, no one saw her. She maintained her part-stumbling, part-ceremonial bluffer’s pace all the way to Pankiewicz’ corner and around it, keeping to the blind side of the street. Dr. Schindel repressed the urge he had to applaud. Though the performance deserved an audience, it would by its nature be destroyed by one.

  He felt he could not move directly behind her without disclosing her feat. Against all his usual impulses, he believed that the instinct which had taken her infallibly out of Plac Zgody would provide her with a hiding place. He returned to the hospital by the alternative route to give her time.

  Genia returned to the front bedroom in Krakusa Street that she shared with her uncle. The street was deserted now, or, if a few were by cunning or false walls still there, they did not declare themselves. She entered the house and hid under the bed. From the corner of the street, Idek, returning to the house, saw the SS, in a last sweep, come knocking. But Genia did not answer. She would not answer him when he arrived himself. It was just that he knew where to look, in the gap between curtain and window sash, and saw, shining in the drabness of the room, her red shoe beneath the hem of the bedspread.

  By this time, of course, Schindler had returned his horse to the stable. He was not on the hill to see the small but significant triumph of red Genia’s return to the place where the SS had first found her. He was already in his office at DEF, shut away for a time, finding the news too heavy to share with the day shift. Much later, in terms uncharacteristic of jovial Herr Schindler, Cracow’s favorite party guest, Zablocie’s big spender, in terms, that is, which showed—behind the playboy facade—an implacable judge, Oskar would lay special weight on this day. “Beyond this day,” he would claim, “no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The SS kept at work in the ghetto until

  Saturday evening. They operated with that efficiency which Oskar had observed in the executions in Krakusa Street. Their thrusts were hard to predict, and people who had escaped on Friday were caught on Saturday. Genia survived the week, however, through her precocious gift for maintaining silence and for being imperceptible in scarlet.

  Over in Zablocie, Schindler did not dare believe that this red child had survived the Aktion process. He knew from talking to Toffel and other acquaintances from police headquarters in Pomorska Street that 7,000 people had been cleared from the ghetto. A Gestapo official from the Jewish Affairs Office was delighted to confirm the clearance. Up in Pomorska Street, among the paper pushers, the June Aktion was voted a triumph.

  Oskar had now become more exact about this sort

  of information. He knew, for example, that the

  Aktion had been under the overall management of

  one Wilhelm Kunde but had been led by SS

  Obersturmf@uhrer Otto von

  Mallotke. Oskar kept no dossier, but he

  was preparing for another era when he would make a

  full report to either Canaris or the world. It would

  be made earlier than he expected. For the moment,

  he inquired after matters which he had in the past

  treated as temporary lunacies. He got his

  hard news from police contacts, but also from

  clearheaded Jews like Stern. Intelligence from

  other parts of Poland was piped into the ghetto, in part

  through Pankiewicz’ pharmacy, by the partisans of the

  People’s Army. Dolek Liebeskind, leader of the

  Akiva Halutz Resistance Group, also

  brought in information from other ghettos as a result of

  his official traveling job with the Jewish

  Communal Self-Help, an organization which the

  Germans—with half an eye on the Red Cross

  --permitted to exist.

  It was no use bringing such tidings to the

  Judenrat. The Judenrat Council did

  not consider it civilly advisable to tell the

  ghetto dwellers anything about the camps. People would

  merely be distressed; there would be disorder in the

  streets, and it would not go unpunished. It was always

  better to let people hear wild rumors, decide

  they were exaggerated, fall back on

  hope. This had been the attitude of most

  Jewish Councillors even under decent Artur Rosenzweig. But Rosenzweig was gone. The salesman David Gutter, helped by his Germanic name, would soon become president of the Judenrat. Food rations were now diverted not only by certain SS officials but by Gutter and the new Councillors, whose vicar in the streets was high-booted Symche Spira. The Judenrat therefore had no interest anymore in informing the ghetto people about their probable destinations, since they were confident that they themselves would not be made to travel.

  The beginning of knowledge for the ghetto, and the clinching news for Oskar, was the return to Cracow—eight days after he’d been shipped off from Prokocim—of the young pharmacist Bachner. No one knew how he had got back inside the ghetto, or the mystery of why he returned to a place from which the SS would simply send him off on another journey. But it was, of course, the pull of the known that brought Bachner home.

  All the way down Lw@owska and into the streets behind Plac Zgody he carried his story. He had seen the final horror, he said.

  He was mad-eyed, and in his brief absence his

  hair had silvered. All the Cracow people who had

  been rounded up in early June had been taken

  nearly to Russia, he said, to the camp of

  Bel@zec. When the trains arrived at the

  railway station, the people were driven out by Ukrainians with clubs. There was a frightful stench about the place, but an SS man had kindly told people that that was due to the use of disinfectant. The people were lined up in front of two large warehouses, one marked “CLOAK ROOM” and the other “VALUABLES.” The new arrivals were made to undress, and a small Jewish boy passed among the crowd handing out lengths of string with which to tie their shoes together. Spectacles and rings were removed. So, naked, the prisoners had their heads shaved in the hairdresser’s, an SS NCO telling them that their hair was needed to make something special for U-boat crews. It would grow again, he said, maintaining the myth of their continued usefulness. At last the victims were driven down a barbed-wire passage to bunkers which had copper Stars of David on their roofs and were labeled BATHS AND INHALATION ROOMS. SS men reassured them all the way, telling them to breathe deeply, that it was an excellent means of disinfection. Bachner saw a little girl drop a bracelet on the ground, and a boy of three picked it up and went into the bunker playing with it. In the bunkers, said Bachner, they were all gassed. And afterward, squads were sent in to disentangle the pyramid of corpses and take the bodies away for burial. It had taken barely two days, he said, before they were
all dead, except for him. While waiting in an enclosure for his turn, he’d somehow got to a latrine and lowered himself into the pit. He’d stayed there three days, the human waste up to his neck. His face, he said, had been a hive of flies.

  He’d slept standing, wedged in the hole for fear of drowning there. At last he’d crawled out at night.

  Somehow he’d walked out of Bel@zec, following the railway tracks. Everyone understood that he had got out precisely because he was beyond reason. Likewise, he’d been cleaned by someone’s hand—a peasant woman’s, perhaps—and put into fresh clothes for his journey back to the starting point.

  Even then there were people in Cracow who thought Bachner’s story a dangerous rumor.

  Postcards had come to relatives from prisoners in Auschwitz. So if it was true of Bel@zec, it couldn’t be true of Auschwitz. And was it credible? On the short emotional rations of the ghetto, one got by through sticking to the credible. The chambers of Bel@zec, Schindler found out from his sources, had been completed by March of that year under the supervision of a Hamburg engineering firm and of SS engineers from Oranienburg. From Bachner’s testimony, it seemed that 3,000 killings a day were not beyond their capacity.

  Crematoria were under construction, lest

  old-fashioned means of disposal of corpses

  put a brake on the new killing method. The

  same company involved in Bel@zec had installed

  identical facilities at Sobibor, also in

  the Lublin district. Bids had been accepted,

  and construction was well advanced, for a similar

  installation at Treblinka, near Warsaw. And

  chambers and ovens were both in operation at the

  Auschwitz main camp and at the vast

  Auschwitz II camp a few kilometers

  away at Birkenau. The resistance claimed that 10,000 murders on a given day were within the capacity of Auschwitz II. Then, for the @l@od@z area, there was the camp at Chelmno, also equipped according to the new technology. To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept. Throughout Europe that summer some millions of people, Oskar among them, and the ghetto dwellers of Cracow too, tortuously adjusted the economies of their souls to the idea of Bel@zec or of like enclosures in the Polish forests. That summer also Schindler wound up the bankrupt estate of Rekord and, under the provisions of the Polish Commercial Court, acquired by a species of pro forma auction ownership of the property. Though the German armies were over the Don and on their way to the Caucasus oil fields, Oskar discerned by the evidence of what had happened in Krakusa Street that they could not finally succeed. Therefore it was a good season to legitimize to the limit his possession of the factory in Lipowa Street. He still hoped, in a way that was almost childlike and to which history would pay no regard, that the fall of the evil king would not bear away that legitimacy—that in the new era he would go on being Hans Schindler’s successful boy from Zwittau. Jereth of the box factory went on pressing him about building a hut—a refuge—on his patch of wasteland. Oskar got the necessary approvals from the bureaucrats. A rest area for the night shift was his story. He had the lumber for it—it had been donated by Jereth himself. When finished in the autumn, it seemed a slight and comfortless structure. The planking had that crate-wood greenness and looked as if it would shrink as it got darker, and let in the slanting snow. But during an Aktion in October it was a haven for Mr. and Mrs. Jereth, for the workers from the box factory and the radiator works, and for Oskar’s night shift.

  The Oskar Schindler who comes down from his office on the frosty mornings of an Aktion to speak to the SS man, to the Ukrainian auxiliary, to the Blue Police, and to OD details who would have marched across from Podg@orze to escort his night shift home; the Oskar Schindler who, drinking coffee, calls Wachtmeister Bosko’s office near the ghetto and tells some lie about why his night shift must stay in Lipowa Street this morning—that Oskar Schindler has endangered himself now beyond the limit of cautious business practice. The men of influence who have twice sprung him from prison cannot do it indefinitely even if he is generous to them on their birthdays. This year they are putting men of influence in Auschwitz. If they die there, their widows get a terse and unregretful telegram from the Commandant. “YOUR HUSBAND HAS DIED IN KONZENTRATIONSLAGER AUSCHWITZ.”

  Bosko himself was lanky, thinner than Oskar.

  Gruff-voiced, and like him a German Czech.

  His family, like Oskar’s, was conservative and

  looked to the old Germanic values. He had,

  for a brief season, felt a pan-Germanic

  anticipation at the rise of Hitler, exactly

  the way Beethoven had felt a grand European fervor for Napoleon. In Vienna, where he had been studying theology, he’d joined the SS— partly as an alternative to conscription into the Wehrmacht, partly from an evanescent ardor. He regretted that ardor now and was, more fully than Oskar knew, expiating it. All that Oskar understood about him at the time was that he was always pleased to undermine an Aktion. His responsibility was the perimeter of the ghetto, and from his office beyond the walls he looked inward at the Aktion with a precise horror, for he, like Oskar, considered himself a potential witness. Oskar did not know that in the October Aktion, Bosko had smuggled some dozens of children out of the ghetto in cardboard boxes. Oskar did not know either that the Wachtmeister provided, ten at a time, general passes for the underground. The Jewish Combat Organization (Zob) was strong in Cracow. It was made up mainly of youth-club members, especially of members of Akiva—a club named after the legendary Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, scholar of the Mishna. The ZOB was led by a married couple, Shimon and Gusta Dranger—her diary would become a classic of the Resistance—and by Dolek Liebeskind. Its members needed to pass freely into and out of the ghetto, for purposes of recruitment and to carry currency, forged documents, and copies of the underground newspaper. They had contacts with the left-wing Polish People’s Army, which was based in the forests around Cracow, and which also needed the documents Bosko provided. Bosko’s contacts with ZOB and the People’s Army were therefore sufficient to hang him; but still he secretly mocked and despised himself and had contempt for partial rescues. For Bosko wanted to save everyone, and would soon try to, and would perish because of it. Danka Dresner, cousin of red Genia, was fourteen years old and had by then outgrown the sure infantile instincts which had led her small relative safely out of the cordon in Plac Zgody. Though she had work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe base, the truth was that by autumn any woman under fifteen or more than forty could be taken away to the camps anyhow. Therefore, on the morning an SS Sonderkommando and squads of Security Police rolled into Lw@owska Street, Mrs. Dresner took Danka with her down to Dabrowski, to the house of a neighbor who had a false wall. The neighbor was a woman in her late thirties, a servant at the Gestapo mess near the Wawel, who could therefore expect some preferential treatment. But she had elderly parents who were automatic risks. So she had bricked up a 60-centimeter cavity for her parents, a costly project, since bricks had to be smuggled into the ghetto in barrows under heaps of legal goods—rags, firewood, disinfectant.

  God knew what her bricked-up secret

  space had cost her—maybe 5,000 z@l.,

  maybe 10,000.

  She’d mentioned it a number of times to Mrs.

  Dresner. If there was an Aktion, Mrs.

  Dresner could bring Danka and come herself. Therefore,

  on the morning Danka and Mrs. Dresner heard

  from around the corner of Dabrowski the startling

  noise, the bark of Dalmatians and

  Dobermans, the megaphoned roaring of

  Oberscharf@uhrers, they hurried to their friend’s place.

  When the Dresners had gone up the stairs and found the right room, t
hey could see that the clamor had had an effect on their friend. “It sounds bad,” said the woman. “I have my parents in there already. I can fit the girl in. But not you.”

  Danka stared, captivated, at the end wall, at its stained wallpaper. In there, sandwiched in brick, rats perhaps worrying at their feet, their senses stretched by darkness, were this woman’s elderly mother and father.

  Mrs. Dresner could tell that the woman wasn’t rational. The girl, but not you, she kept saying. It was as if she thought that should the SS penetrate the wall they would be more forgiving on account of Danka’s lesser poundage. Mrs.

  Dresner explained that she was scarcely obese,

  that the Aktion seemed to be concentrating on this

  side of Lw@owska Street, and that she had

  nowhere else to go. And that she could fit. Danka was

  a reliable girl, said Mrs. Dresner, but she

  would feel safer with her mother in there. You could see

  by measuring the wall with your eyes that four people could

  fit abreast in the cavity. But shots from two

  blocks distant swept away the last of the

  woman’s reason. “I can fit the girl!” she

  screamed. “I want you to go!”

  Mrs. Dresner turned to Danka and told

  her to go into the wall. Later Danka would not know why she had obeyed her mother and gone so mutely into hiding. The woman took her to the attic, removed a rug from the floor, then lifted a raft of floorboards. Then Danka descended into the cavity. It wasn’t black in there; the parents were burning a stub of candle. Danka found herself beside the woman—someone else’s mother but, beyond the unwashed smell, with the same warm, protective musk of motherhood. The woman smiled at her briefly. The husband stood on the far side of his wife, keeping his eyes closed, not to be distracted from signals from outside.