Schindler's List Page 17

Springmann in Budapest, Dr. Sedlacek

  arranged another meeting with Schindler. In Oskar’s office at DEF, he handed over nearly all the currency Springmann had given him to bring to Poland. There was always some risk, in view of Schindler’s hedonistic taste, that he would spend it on black-market jewelry. But neither Springmann nor Istanbul required any assurances. They could never hope to play the auditor.

  It must be stated that Oskar behaved impeccably and gave the cash to his contacts in the Jewish community to spend according to their judgment. Mordecai Wulkan, who like Mrs.

  Dresner would in time come to know Herr Oskar Schindler, was a jeweler by trade. Now, late in the year, he was visited at home by one of Spira’s political OD. This wasn’t trouble, the OD man said. Certainly Wulkan had a record. A year before, he had been picked up by the OD for selling currency on the black market. When he had refused to work as an agent for the Currency Control Bureau, he had been beaten up by the SS, and Mrs. Wulkan had had to visit Wachtmeister Beck in the ghetto police office and pay a bribe for his release.

  This June he’d been seized for transport to Bel@zec, but an OD man he’d known had arrived to pick him up and led him straight out of the Optima yard. For there were Zionists in the OD, however small their chances of ever beholding Jerusalem might be.

  The OD man who visited him this time was no

  Zionist. The SS, he told Wulkan,

  urgently needed four jewelers. Symche

  Spira had been given three hours to find them. In this way Herzog, Friedner, Gr@uner, and Wulkan, four jewelers, were assembled at the OD station and marched out of the ghetto to the old Technical Academy, now a warehouse for the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office.

  It was obvious to Wulkan as he entered the Academy that a great security operated here. At every door stood a guard. In the front hall, an SS officer told the four jewelers that should they speak to anyone about their work here, they could expect to be sent to a labor camp. They were to bring with them, he said, every day, their diamond-grading kits, their equipment for assessing the karat value of gold.

  They were led down into the basement. Around the walls stood racks laden with suitcases and towering layers of briefcases, each with a name studiously and futilely printed on it by its past owner. Beneath the high windows stood a line of wooden crates. As the four jewelers squatted in the center of the floor, two SS men took down a suitcase, labored across the cellar with it, and emptied it in front of Herzog. They returned to the rack for another, which they emptied in front of Gr@uner. Then they brought a cascade of gold for Friedner, then for Wulkan. It was old gold—rings, brooches, bracelets, watches, lorgnettes, cigarette holders.

  The jewelers were to grade the gold, separate the gold plate from the solid. Diamonds and pearls were to be valued. They were to classify everything, according to value and karat weight, in separate heaps.

  At first they picked up individual pieces

  tentatively, but then worked faster as old

  professional habits asserted themselves. As the

  gold and jewelry went into their piles, the SS

  men loaded the stuff into its appropriate

  crate. Every time a crate was filled, it was

  labeled in black paint—SS

  REICHSF@UHRER BERLIN. The SS

  Reichsf@uhrer was Himmler himself, in whose name the confiscated jewelry of Europe was deposited in the Reichsbank. There were quantities of children’s rings, and one had to keep a cool rational control of one’s knowledge of their provenance. Only once did the jewelers falter: when the SS men opened a suitcase and out of it tumbled gold teeth still smeared with blood. There in a pile at Wulkan’s knees, the mouths of a thousand dead were represented, each one calling for him to join them by standing and flinging his grading stone across the room and declaring the tainted origin of all this precious stuff. Then, after the hiatus, Herzog and Gr@uner, Wulkan and Friedner commenced to grade again, aware now, of course, of the radiant value of whatever gold they themselves carried in their mouths, fearful that the SS would come prospecting for it.

  It took six weeks for them to work through the

  treasures of the Technical Academy. After they

  had finished there, they were taken to a disused garage which

  had been converted to a silver warehouse. The

  lubrication pits were filled to spilling over with

  solid silver—rings, pendants, Passover

  platters, yad pointers, breastplates,

  crowns, candelabra. They separated the solid silver from the silver plate; they weighed it all. The SS officer in charge complained that some of these objects were awkward to pack, and Mordecai Wulkan suggested that perhaps they might consider melting them down. It seemed to Wulkan, though he was not pious, that it would be somehow better, a minor triumph, if the Reich inherited silver from which the Judaic form had been removed. But for some reason the SS officer refused. Perhaps the objects were intended for some didactic museum inside the Reich. Or perhaps the SS liked the artistry of synagogue silverware.

  When this appraisal work ran out, Wulkan was again at a loss for employment. He needed to leave the ghetto regularly to find enough food for his family, especially for his bronchitic daughter. For a time he worked at a metal factory in Kazimierz, getting to know an SS moderate, Oberscharf@uhrer Gola. Gola found him work as a maintenance man at the SA barracks near Wawel. As Wulkan entered the mess with his wrenches, he saw above the door the inscription, F@UR JUDEN UND HUNDE EINTRITT VERBOTEN: Entrance forbidden to Jews and dogs. This sign, together with the hundred thousand teeth he had appraised at the Technical Academy, convinced him that deliverance could not in the end be expected from the offhand favor of Oberscharf@uhrer Gola. Gola drank here without noticing the sign; and neither would he notice the absence of the Wulkan family on the day they were taken to Bel@zec or some place of equal efficiency. Therefore Wulkan, like Mrs. Dresner and some fifteen thousand other dwellers in the ghetto, knew that what was needed was a special and startling deliverance. They did not believe for a moment that it would be provided.

  CHAPTER 18

  Dr. Sedlacek had promised an uncomfortable journey, and so it was. Oskar traveled in a good overcoat with a suitcase and a bag full of various comforts which he badly needed by the end of the trip. Though he had the appropriate travel documents, he did not want to have to use them. It was considered better if he did not have to present them at the border. He could always then deny that he had been to Hungary that December.

  He rode in a freight van filled with bundles of the Party newspaper, V@olkischer Beobachter, for sale in Hungary. Closeted with the redolence of printer’s ink and among the heavy Gothic print of Germany’s official newspaper, he was rocked south over the winter-sharp mountains of Slovakia, across the Hungarian border, and down to the valley of the Danube.

  A reservation had been made for him at the Pannonia, near the University, and on the afternoon of his arrival, little Samu Springmann and an associate of his, Dr. Rezso Kastner, came to see him. The two men who rose to Schindler’s floor in the elevator had heard fragments of news from refugees. But refugees could give you little but threads. The fact that they had avoided the threat meant that they knew little of its geography, its intimate functioning, the numbers it ran to. Kastner and Springmann were full of anticipation, since—if Sedlacek could be believed—the Sudeten German upstairs could give them the whole cloth, the first full-bodied report on the Polish havoc.

  In the room the introductions were brief, for

  Springmann and Kastner had come to listen and they could tell that Schindler was anxious to talk. There was no effort, in this city obsessed with coffee, to formalize the event by calling Room Service for coffee and cakes. Kastner and Springmann, after shaking the enormous German by the hand, sat down. But Schindler paced. It seemed that far from Cracow and the realities of Aktion and ghetto, his knowledge disturbed him more than it had when he’d briefly informed Sedlacek. He rampaged across th
e carpet. They would have heard his steps in the room below—their chandelier would have shaken when he stamped his foot, miming the action of the SS man in the execution squad in Krakusa, the one who’d pinned his victim’s head down with a boot in full sight of the red child at the tail of the departing column.

  He began with personal images of the cruel parishes of Cracow, what he had beheld in the streets or heard from either side of the wall, from Jews and from the SS. In that connection, he said, he was carrying letters from members of the ghetto, from the physician Chaim Hilfstein, from Dr. Leon Salpeter, from Itzhak Stern. Dr.

  Hilfstein’s letter, said Schindler, was a report on hunger. “Once the body fat’s gone,” said Oskar, “it starts to work on the brain.”

  The ghettos were being wound down, Oskar told them. It was true equally of Warsaw as of @l@od@z and of Cracow. The population of the Warsaw ghetto had been reduced by four-fifths, @l@od@z by two-thirds, Cracow by half. Where were the people who had been transferred? Some were in work camps; but the gentlemen here this afternoon had to accept that at least three-fifths of them had disappeared into camps that used the new scientific methods. Such camps were not exceptional. They had an official SS name—Vernichtungslager:

  Extermination Camp.

  In the past few weeks, said Oskar, some

  2,000 Cracow ghetto dwellers had been

  rounded up and sent not to the chambers of Bel@zec, but to labor camps near the city. One was at Wieliczka, one at Prokocim, both of these being railway stations on the Ostbahn line which ran toward the Russian front. From Wieliczka and Prokocim, these prisoners were being marched every day to a site at the village of P@lasz@ow, on the edge of the city, where the foundations for a vast labor camp were being laid.

  Their life in such a labor camp, said

  Schindler, would be no holiday—the barracks of Wieliczka and Prokocim were under the command of an SS NCO named Horst Pilarzik who had earned a reputation last June when he had helped clear from the ghetto some 7,000 people, of whom only one, a chemist, had returned. The proposed camp at P@lasz@ow would be under a man of the same caliber. What was in favor of the labor camps was that they lacked the technical apparatus for methodical slaughter. There was a different rationale behind them. They had economic reasons for existing—prisoners from Wieliczka and Prokocim were marched out every day to work on various projects, just as they were from the ghetto.

  Wieliczka, Prokocim, and the proposed camp

  at P@lasz@ow were under the control of the chiefs of

  police for Cracow, Julian Scherner and

  Rolf Czurda, whereas the

  Vernichtungslagers were run by the central management of the SS Administrative and Economic Main Office at Oranienburg near Berlin. The Vernichtungslagers also used people as labor for a time, but their ultimate industry was death and its by-products—the recycling of the clothes, of remaining jewelry or spectacles, of toys, and even of the skin and hair of the dead.

  In the midst of explaining the distinction between extermination camps and those for forced labor, Schindler suddenly stepped toward the door, wrenched it open, and looked up and down the empty hallway. “I know the reputation of this city for eavesdropping,” he explained. Little Mr. Springmann rose and came to his elbow. “The Pannonia isn’t so bad,” he told Oskar in a low voice. “It’s the Victoria that’s the Gestapo hotbed.”

  Schindler surveyed the hallway once more, closed the door, and returned across the room. He stood by the windows and continued his grim report. The forced-labor camps would be run by men appointed for their severity and efficiency in clearing the ghettos. There would be sporadic murders and beatings, and there would certainly be corruption involving food and therefore short rations for the prisoners. But that was preferable to the assured death of the Vernichtungslagers. People in the labor camps could get access to extra comforts, and individuals could be taken out and smuggled to Hungary.

  These SS men are as corruptible as any other police force, then? the gentleman of the Budapest rescue committee asked Oskar. “In my experience,” growled Oskar, “there isn’t one of them who isn’t.”

  When Oskar finished, there was, of course,

  silence. Kastner and Springmann were not readily

  astounded. All their lives they’d lived under the

  intimidation of the Secret Police. Their

  present activities were both vaguely

  suspected by the Hungarian police—rendered

  safe only by Samu’s contacts and bribes—and

  at the same time disdained by respectable

  Jewry. Samuel Stern, for example,

  president of the Jewish Council, member of the

  Hungarian Senate, would dismiss this afternoon’s

  report by Oskar Schindler as pernicious

  fantasy, an insult to German culture, a

  reflection on the decency of the intentions of the Hungarian Government. These two were used to hearing the worst.

  So it was not that Springmann and Kastner were

  unmanned by Schindler’s testimony as much as that

  their minds were painfully expanding. Their resources

  seemed minute now that they knew what they were set

  against—not just any average and predictable

  Philistine giant, but Behemoth itself. Perhaps

  already they were reaching for the idea that as well as

  individual bargaining—some extra food for this

  camp, rescue for this intellectual, a bribe

  to temper the professional ardor of this SS man

  --some vaster rescue scheme would have to be arranged at breathtaking expense.

  Schindler threw himself into a chair. Samu Springmann looked across at the exhausted industrialist. He had made an enormous impression on them, said Springmann. They would, of course, send a report to Istanbul on all Oskar had told them. It would be used to stir the Palestinian Zionists and the Joint Distribution Committee to greater action. At the same time it would be transmitted to the governments of Churchill and Roosevelt. Springmann said that he thought Oskar was right to worry about people’s belief in what he’d say; he was right to say it was all incredible. “Therefore,” said Samu Springmann, “I urge you to go to Istanbul yourself and speak to the people there.” After a little hesitation—whether to do with the demands of the enamelware business or with the dangers of crossing so many borders—Schindler agreed. Toward the end of the year, said Springmann. “In the meantime you will see Dr. Sedlacek in Cracow regularly.”

  They stood up, and Oskar could see that they were changed men. They thanked him and left, becoming simply, on the way downstairs, two pensive Budapest professional men who’d heard disturbing news of mismanagement in the branch offices.

  That night Dr. Sedlacek called at

  Oskar’s hotel and took him out into the brisk streets to dinner at the Hotel Gellert. From their table they could see the Danube, its illuminated barges, the city glowing on the far side of the water. It was like a prewar city, and Schindler began to feel like a tourist again. After his afternoon’s temperance, he drank the dense Hungarian burgundy called Bull’s Blood with a slow, assiduous thirst, and created a rank of empty bottles at their table.

  Halfway through their meal they were joined by an Austrian journalist, Dr. Schmidt, who’d brought with him his mistress, an exquisite, golden Hungarian girl. Schindler admired the girl’s jewelry and told her that he was a great fancier of gems himself. But over apricot brandy, he became less friendly. He sat with a mild frown, listening to Schmidt talk of real estate prices and automobile dealings and horse races. The girl listened raptly to Schmidt, since she wore the results of his business coups around her neck and at her wrists. But Oskar’s unexpected disapproval was clear. Dr. Sedlacek was secretly amused: perhaps Oskar was seeing a partial reflection of his own new wealth, his own tendencies toward trading on the fringes.

  When the dinner was over, Schmidt and his girl left for some nightclub, an
d Sedlacek made sure he took Schindler to a different one. They sat drinking unwise further quantities of barack and watching the floor show.

  “That Schmidt,” said Schindler, wanting to clear up the question so that he could enjoy the small hours. “Do you use him?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think you ought to use men like that,” said Oskar. “He’s a thief.”

  Dr. Sedlacek turned his face, and its

  half-smile, away.

  “How can you be sure he delivers any of the money you give him?” Oskar asked.

  “We let him keep a percentage,” said

  Dr. Sedlacek.

  Oskar thought about it for a full half-minute. Then he murmured, “I don’t want a damned percentage. I don’t want to be offered one.” “Very well,” said Sedlacek.

  “Let’s watch the girls,” said Oskar.

  CHAPTER 19

  Even as Oskar Schindler returned by freight

  car from Budapest, where he’d predicted that the

  ghetto would soon be closed, an SS

  Untersturmf@uhrer named Amon Goeth was

  on his way from Lublin to bring about that liquidation,

  and to take command of the resultant Forced Labor

  Camp (Zwangsarbeitslager) at

  P@lasz@ow. Goeth was some eight months younger

  than Schindler, but shared more with him than the mere

  year of birth. Like Oskar he had been raised a

  Catholic and had ceased observing the rites of the

  Church as late as 1938, when his first marriage

  had broken up. Like Oskar too, he had

  graduated from high school in the

  Realgymnasium—Engineering, Physics,

  Math. He was therefore a practical man, no thinker, but considered himself a philosopher.