Schindler's List Page 19

  Now Amon half-smiled at Hujar.

  We’re not going to have arguments with these people, he said, as if it were a promise. Bring me the girl.

  Amon could tell, from the way she walked toward

  him, the bogus elegance with which her middle-class

  parents had raised her, the European manners

  they had imbued her with, sending her—when the honest

  Poles wouldn’t take her in their universities

  --off to Vienna or Milan to give her a

  profession and a heightened protective coloration. She walked toward him as if his rank and hers would bind them in the battle against oafish NCO’S and the inferior craft of whichever SS engineer had supervised the digging of the foundations. She did not know that he hated her the worst—the type who thought, even against the evidence of his SS uniform, of these rising structures, that their Jewishness was not visible.

  “You’ve had occasion to quarrel with

  Oberscharf@uhrer Hujar,” Goeth told

  her as a fact. She nodded firmly. The Herr

  Commandant would understand, the nod suggested, even though that idiot Hujar couldn’t. The entire foundations at that end must be redug, she told him energetically. Of course, Amon knew “they” were like that, they liked to string out tasks and so ensure that the labor force was safe for the duration of the project. If everything is not redug, she told him, there will be at least subsidence at the southern end of the barracks. There could be collapse. She went on arguing the case, and Amon nodded and presumed she must be lying. It was a first principle that you never listened to a Jewish specialist. Jewish specialists were in the mold of Marx, whose theories were aimed at the integrity of government, and of Freud, who had assaulted the integrity of the Aryan mind. Amon felt that this girl’s argument threatened his personal integrity.

  He called Hujar. The NCO returned

  uneasily. He thought he was going to be told

  to take the girl’s advice. The girl did

  too. Shoot her, Amon told Hujar. There

  was, of course, a pause while Hujar

  digested the order. Shoot her, Amon repeated. Hujar took the girl’s elbow to lead her away to some place of private execution. Here! said Amon. Shoot her here! On my authority, said Amon.

  Hujar knew how it was done. He gripped her by the elbow, pushed her a little to his front, took the Mauser from his holster, and shot her in the back of the neck.

  The sound appalled everyone on the work site, except—it seemed—the executioners and the dying Miss Diana Reiter herself. She knelt and looked up once. It will take more than that, she was saying. The knowingness in her eyes frightened Amon, justified him, elevated him. He had no idea and would not have believed that these reactions had clinical labels. He believed, in fact, that he was being awarded the inevitable exaltation that follows an act of political, racial, and moral justice. Even so, a man paid for that, for by evening the fullness of this hour would be followed by such emptiness that he would need, to avoid being blown away like a husk, to augment his size and permanence by food, liquor, contact with a woman.

  Apart from these considerations, the shooting of this

  Diana Reiter, the cancelling of her Western

  European diploma, had this practical

  value: that no erector of huts or roads in

  P@lasz@ow would consider himself essential to the task—that if Miss Diana Reiter could not save herself with all her professional skill, the only chance of the others was prompt and anonymous labor. Therefore the women lugging frames up from the Cracow-P@lasz@ow railway station, the quarry teams, the men assembling the huts all worked with an energy appropriate to what they’d learned from Miss Reiter’s assassination.

  As for Hujar and his colleagues, they knew now that instantaneous execution was to be the permitted style of P@lasz@ow.

  CHAPTER 20

  Two days after the visit of the factory heads to P@lasz@ow, Schindler turned up at Commandant Goeth’s temporary office in the city, bringing with him the compliments of a bottle of brandy. The news of Diana Reiter’s assassination had by this time reached the front office of Emalia and was the sort of item that confirmed Oskar in his intention to keep his factory outside P@lasz@ow.

  The two big men sat opposite each other and there was a mutual knowingness in them too, just as there had been in the brief relationship between Amon and Miss Reiter. What they knew was that each of them was in Cracow to make a fortune; that therefore Oskar would pay for favors. At that level Oskar and the Commandant understood each other well. Oskar had the characteristic salesman’s gift of treating men he abhorred as if they were spiritual brothers, and it would deceive the Herr Commandant so completely that Amon would always believe Oskar a friend.

  But from the evidence of Stern and others it is

  obvious that, from the time of their earlier contacts,

  Oskar abominated Goeth as a man who went to the

  work of murder as calmly as a clerk goes to his

  office. Oskar could speak to Amon the

  administrator, Amon the speculator, but

  knew at the same time that nine-tenths of the Commandant’s being lay beyond the normal rational processes of humans. The business and social connections between Oskar and Amon worked well enough to tempt the supposition that Oskar was somehow and despite himself fascinated by the evil of the man. In fact, no one who knew Oskar at this time or later saw a sign of any such enthrallment. Oskar despised Goeth in the simplest and most passionate terms. His contempt would grow without limit, and his career would dramatically demonstrate it. Just the same, the reflection can hardly be avoided that Amon was Oskar’s dark brother, was the berserk and fanatic executioner Oskar might, by some unhappy reversal of his appetites, have become.

  With a bottle of brandy between them, Oskar explained to Amon why it was impossible for him to move into P@lasz@ow. His plant was too substantial to be shifted. He believed his friend Madritsch intended to move his Jewish workers in, but Madritsch’s machinery was more easily transferred—it was basically a series of sewing machines. There were different problems involved in moving heavy metal presses, each of which, as a sophisticated machine will, had developed special quirks. His skilled workers had become accustomed to these quirks. But on a new factory floor the machines would display an entirely new set of eccentricities. There’d be delays; the settling-in period would take longer than it would for his esteemed friend Julius Madritsch. The Untersturmf@uhrer would understand that with important war contracts to fulfill, DEF could not spare such a lapse of time. Herr Beckmann, who had the same sort of problem, was firing all his Jews over at the Corona works. He didn’t want the fuss of the Jews marching out from P@lasz@ow to the factory in the morning and back in the evenings.

  Unfortunately, he, Schindler, had hundreds more skilled Jewish workers than Beckmann did. If he got rid of them, Poles would have to be trained in their place and there would again be a production delay, an even greater one than if he accepted Goeth’s attractive offer and moved into P@lasz@ow.

  Amon secretly thought that Oskar might be worried that a move into P@lasz@ow would impinge on any sweetly running little deals he had going in Cracow. The Commandant therefore hurried to reassure Herr Schindler that there’d be no interference in the management of the enamel factory. “It’s purely the industrial problems that worry me,” said Schindler piously. He didn’t want to inconvenience the Commandant, but he would be grateful, and he was sure the Armaments Inspectorate would also be grateful, if DEF were permitted to stay in its present location.

  Among men like Goeth and Oskar, the word “gratitude” did not have an abstract meaning. Gratitude was a payoff. Gratitude was liquor and diamonds. I understand your problems, Herr Schindler, said Amon. I shall be happy, once the ghetto is liquidated, to provide a guard to escort your workers from P@lasz@ow to Zablocie.

  Itzhak Stern, coming to Zablocie one afternoon on business for the Progress factory, found Oska
r depressed and sensed in him a dangerous feeling of impotence. After Klonowska had brought in the coffee, which the Herr Direktor drank as always with a shot of cognac, Oskar told Stern that he’d been to P@lasz@ow again: ostensibly to look at the facilities; in fact to gauge when it would be ready for the Ghettomenschen. “I took a count,” said Oskar. He’d counted the terraced barracks on the far hill and found that if Amon intended to cram 200 women into each, as was likely, there was now room for some 6,000 women up there in the top compound. The men’s sector down the hill did not have so many finished buildings, but at the rate things were done in P@lasz@ow it could be finished in days. Everyone on the factory floor knows what’s going to happen, said Oskar. And it’s no use keeping the night shift on the premises here, because after this one, there’ll be no ghetto to go back to. All I can tell them, said Oskar, taking a second slug of cognac, is that they shouldn’t try to hide unless they’re sure of the hiding place. He’d heard that the pattern was to tear the ghetto apart after it had been cleared. Every wall cavity would be probed, every attic carpet taken up, every niche revealed, every cellar plumbed.

  All I can tell them, said Oskar, is not

  to resist.

  So it happened oddly that Stern, one of the targets of the coming Aktion, sat comforting Herr Direktor Schindler, a mere witness.

  Oskar’s attention to his Jewish laborers was being diffused, tempted away by the wider tragedy of the ghetto’s coming end. P@lasz@ow was a labor institution, said Stern. Like all institutions, it could be outlived. It wasn’t like Bel@zec, where they made death in the same manner in which Henry Ford made cars. It was degrading to have to line up for P@lasz@ow on orders, but it wasn’t the end of things. When Stern had finished arguing, Oskar put both thumbs under the beveled top of his desk and seemed for a few seconds to want to tear it off. You know, Stern, he said, that that’s damn well not good enough! It is, said Stern. It’s the only course.

  And he went on arguing, quoting and hairsplitting, and was himself frightened. For Oskar seemed to be in crisis. If Oskar lost hope, Stern knew, all the Jewish workers of Emalia would be fired, for Oskar would wish to be purified of the entire dirty business.

  There’ll be time to do something more positive, said Stern. But not yet.

  Abandoning the attempt to tear the lid from his desk, Oskar sat back in his chair and resumed his depression. “You know that Amon Goeth,” he said. “He’s got charm. He could come in here now and charm you. But he’s a lunatic.”

  On the ghetto’s last morning—a

  Shabbat, as it happened, March 13--Amon Goeth arrived in Plac Zgody, Peace Square, at an hour which officially preceded dawn. Low clouds obscured any sharp distinctions between night and day. He saw that the men of the Sonderkommando had already arrived and stood about on the frozen earth of the small park in the middle, smoking and laughing quietly, keeping their presence a secret from the ghetto dwellers in the streets beyond Herr Pankiewicz’ pharmacy. The roads down which they’d move were clear, as in a model of a town. The remaining snow lay heaped and tarnished in gutters and against walls. It is safe to guess that sentimental Goeth felt paternal as he looked out at the orderly scene and saw the young men, comradely before action, in the middle of the square.

  Amon took a pull of cognac while he

  waited there for the middle-aged

  Sturmbannf@uhrer Willi Haase, who

  would have strategic, though not tactical, control of today’s Aktion. Today Ghetto A, from Plac Zgody westward, the major section of the ghetto, the one where all the working (healthy, hoping, opinionated) Jews dwelt, would be emptied. Ghetto B, a small compound a few blocks square at the eastern end of the ghetto, contained the old, the last of the unemployable. They would be uprooted overnight, or tomorrow. They were slated for Commandant Rudolf H@oss’s greatly expanded extermination camp at Auschwitz. Ghetto B was straightforward, honest work. Ghetto A was the challenge.

  Everyone wanted to be here today, for today was

  history. There had been for more than seven

  centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening—

  or at least by tomorrow—those seven centuries would have

  become a rumor, and Cracow would be

  judenrein (clean of Jews). And every petty

  SS official wanted to be able to say that he had

  seen it happen. Even Unkelbach, the

  Treuh@ander of the Progress cutlery

  factory, having some sort of reserve SS

  rank, would put on his NCO’S uniform today and move through the ghetto with one of the squads. Therefore the distinguished Willi Haase, being of field rank and involved in the planning, had every right to be counted in.

  Amon would be suffering his customary minor headache and be feeling a little drained from the feverish insomnia in which he’d spent the small hours. Now he was here, though, he felt a certain professional exhilaration. It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honor without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at. Psychological impunity had been harder to achieve. Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide. SS training documents, written to combat these futile casualties, pointed out the simplemindedness of believing that because the Jew bore no visible weapons he was bereft of social, economic, or political arms. He was, in fact, armed to the teeth. Steel yourself, said the documents, for the Jewish child is a cultural time bomb, the Jewish woman a biology of treasons, the Jewish male a more incontrovertible enemy than any Russian could hope to be.

  Amon Goeth was steeled. He knew he could not be touched, and the very thought of that gave him the same delicious excitement a long-distance runner might have before an event he feels sure about. Amon despised in a genial sort of way those officers who fastidiously left the act itself to their men and NCO’S. He sensed that in some way that might be more dangerous than lending a hand yourself. He would show the way, as he had with Diana Reiter. He knew the euphoria that would build during the day, the gratification that would grow, along with a taste for liquor, as noon came and the pace picked up. Even under the low squalor of those clouds, he knew that this was one of the best days, that when he was old and the race extinct, the young would ask with wonder about days like this.

  Less than a kilometer away, a doctor of the ghetto’s convalescent hospital, Dr. H, sat among his last patients, in darkness, grateful that they were isolated like this on the hospital’s top floor, high above the street, alone with their pain and fever.

  For at street level everyone knew what had

  happened at the epidemic hospital near

  Plac Zgody. An SS detachment under

  Oberscharf@uhrer Albert Hujar had

  entered the hospital to close it down and had found

  Dr. Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of

  her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients,

  who, she said, should not be moved. The whooping cough

  children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet

  fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for

  their own sakes and for the community’s, and the

  tuberculosis cases were simply too sick

  to walk out.

  Since scarlet fever is an adolescent

  disease, many of Dr. Blau’s patients were girls between the age of twelve and sixteen. Faced with Albert Hujar, Dr. Blau pointed, as warranty for her professional judgment, to these wide-eyed, feverish girls. Hujar himself, acting on the mandate he’d received the week before from Amon Goeth, shot Dr.

  Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some

  trying to rise in their beds, some detached in their own

  delirium, were executed in a rage of

  automatic fire. When Hujar’s squad had

  finished, a detail of ghetto men was sent up the stairs to deal with the dead, to pile the bloodied linen, and to was
h down the walls.

  The convalescent hospital was situated in what had been before the war a Polish police station. Throughout the life of the ghetto, its three floors had been cluttered with the sick. Its director was a respected physician named Dr. B. By the bleak morning of March 13, Doctors B and H had reduced its population to four, all of them immovable. One was a young workman with galloping consumption; the second, a talented musician with terminal kidney disease. It seemed important to Dr. H that they somehow be spared the final panic of a mad volley of fire. Even more so the blind man afflicted by a stroke, and the old gentleman whose earlier surgery for an intestinal tumor had left him weakened and burdened with a colostomy. The medical staff here, Dr. H included, were of the highest caliber. From this ill-equipped ghetto hospital would derive the first Polish accounts of Weil’s erythroblastic disease, a condition of the bone marrow, and of the Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome. This morning, though, Dr. H was concerned with the question of cyanide. With an eye to the option of suicide, H had acquired a supply of cyanic acid solution. He knew that other doctors had too. This past year depression had been endemic to the ghetto. It had infected Dr. H. He was young; he was formidably healthy. Yet history itself seemed to have gone malignant. To know he had access to cyanide had been a comfort for Dr. H on his worst days. By this late stage of the ghetto’s history, it was the one pharmaceutical left to him and to the other doctors in quantity. There had rarely been any sulfa. Emetics, ether, and even aspirin were used up. Cyanide was the single sophisticated drug remaining.