Schindler's Ark Read online

  The oldest of the company was Herr Franz Bosch, a veteran of the first war, manager of various workshops, legal and illegal, inside Plaszów. He was also an ‘economic adviser’ to Julian Scherner and had business interests in the city.

  Oskar despised Bosch and the two police chiefs, Scherner and Czurda. However, their cooperation was essential to the existence of his own peculiar plant in Zablocie, and so he regularly sent them gifts. The only guests with whom Oskar shared any fellow feeling were Julius Madritsch, owner of the Madritsch uniform factory inside this camp of Plaszów, and Madritsch’s manager, Raimund Titsch. Madritsch was a year or so younger than Oskar and Goeth. He was an enterprising but humane man, and if asked to justify the existence of his profitable factory inside the camp, would have argued that it kept nearly four thousand prisoners employed and therefore safe from the death mills. Raimund Titsch, a man in his early forties, slight and private and likely to leave the party early, ran the Madritsch works on a daily basis, smuggled in truckloads of food for his prisoners (an enterprise which could have earned him a fatal stay in Montelupich prison, the SS jail, or else Auschwitz) and agreed with Madritsch.

  Such was the regular bag of dinner companions at Herr Commandant Goeth’s villa.

  The four women guests, their hair formally done up and their gowns expensive, were younger than any of the men. They were better-class whores, German and Polish, from Cracow. Some of them were regular dinner guests here. Their number permitted a range of gentlemanly choice for the two senior officers. Goeth’s German mistress, Majola, generally stayed at her apartment in the city during these feasts. She looked on Goeth’s dinners as exclusively male and therefore offensive to her sensibilities.

  There is no doubt that in their way the police chiefs and the commandant liked Oskar. There was, however, something odd about him. They might have been willing to write it off in part to his origins. He was Sudeten German, Arkansas to their Manhattan, Liverpool to their Cambridge. There were signs that he wasn’t right thinking, though he paid well, was a good source of scarce commodities, could hold his drink and had a slow and sometimes rowdy sense of humour. He was the sort of man you smiled and nodded at across the room, but it was not necessary or even wise to jump up and make a fuss of him.

  It is most likely that the SS men noticed Oskar Schindler’s entrance because of a frisson among the four girls. Those who knew Oskar in those years speak of his easy magnetic charm, exercised particularly over women, with whom he was unremittingly and improperly successful. The two police chiefs, Czurda and Scherner, now probably paid attention to Herr Schindler as a means of keeping the attention of the women. Goeth also came forward to take his hand. The commandant was as tall as Schindler, and the impression that he was abnormally fat for a man in his early thirties was aided by this height, an athletic height on to which the obesity seemed unnaturally grafted. The face seemed scarcely flawed at all, except that there was a vinous light in the eyes. The commandant drank indecent quantities of the local brandy.

  He was not, however, as far gone as Herr Bosch, Plaszów’s and the SS’s economic wizard. Herr Bosch was purple nosed; the oxygen which by rights belonged to the veins of his face had for years gone to feed the sharp blue flame of all that liquor. Schindler, nodding to the man, knew that tonight Bosch would, as always, put in an order for goods.

  “A welcome to our industrialist,” intoned Goeth, and then he made a formal introduction to the girls around the room. The Rosner brothers would have played through this, Henry’s eyes wandering only between his strings and the emptiest corner of the room, Leo smiling down at his accordion keys. And from it all arising the notes which Strauss put on paper for the titillation of gentlefolk.

  Herr Schindler was now introduced to the women. He felt some small pity for these Cracow working girls, since he knew that later, when the slap and tickle began, the slap might leave welts and the tickle gouge the flesh. But for the present Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth, a mad satrap when drunk, was an exemplary Viennese gentleman.

  The pre-dinner conversation was unexceptional. There was talk of the war, and while SD chief Czurda took it upon himself to assure a tall German girl that the Crimea was securely held, SS chief Schemer informed one of the other women that a boy he knew from Hamburg days, a decent chap, an Oberscharführer in the SS, had had his legs blown off when the partisans bombed a restaurant in Czestochowa. Schindler talked factory talk with Madritsch and his manager Titsch. There was a genuine friendship between these three entrepreneurs. Herr Schindler knew that little Titsch procured illegal quantities of black-market bread for the prisoners of the Madritsch uniform factory, and that much of the money for the purpose was put up by Madritsch. This was the merest humanity; since the profits in Poland were large enough, in Herr Schindler’s opinion, to satisfy the most inveterate capitalist and justify some illegal outlay on extra bread. In Herr Schindler’s case itself the contracts of the Rustungsinspektion, the Armaments Inspectorate – a body that solicited bids and awarded contracts for the manufacture of every commodity the German forces needed – had been so rich that he had exceeded his desire to be successful in the eyes of his father. Unhappily, Madritsch and Titsch and he, Oskar Schindler, were the only ones he knew who regularly spent money on black-market bread.

  Towards the time when Goeth would call them to the dinner table, Herr Bosch approached Schindler, took him by the elbow and led him over by the door where the musicians played, as if he expected the Rosners’ impeccable melodies to cover the conversation.

  “Business good, I see,” said Bosch.

  Schindler smiled at the man. “You see that, do you, Herr Bosch?”

  “I do,” said Bosch. And of course Bosch would have read the official bulletins of the Main Armaments Board, announcing contracts awarded – on the basis of successful bids – to the Schindler factory.

  “I was wondering,” said Bosch inclining his head, “if in view of the present boom, founded, after all, on our general successes on a series of fronts . . . I was wondering if you might feel like a generous gesture. Nothing big. Just a gesture.”

  “Of course,” said Schindler. He felt the nausea that goes with being used, and at the same time a sensation close to joy. The office of police chief Scherner had twice used its influence to get Oskar Schindler out of jail. They were willing now to build up the obligation of having to do it again.

  “My aunt in Bremen’s been bombed out, poor old dear,” said Bosch. “Everything! The marriage bed. The sideboards, all her Meissen and crockery. I wondered could you spare some kitchenware for her. And perhaps a pot or two – those big tureen things turned out at DEF.”

  Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik, the German Enamel Works, was the name of Herr Schindler’s booming business. Germans called it DEF for short, but the Poles and the Jews had a different sort of shorthand, calling it Emalia.

  Herr Schindler said, “I think that can be managed. Do you want the goods consigned direct to her or through you?”

  Bosch did not even smile. “Through me, Oskar. I’d like to enclose a little card.”

  “Of course.”

  “So it’s settled. We’ll say half a gross of everything – soup bowls, plates, coffee mugs. And half a dozen of those stew pots.”

  Herr Schindler, raising his jaw, laughed frankly. There was also some weariness in the laugh. But when he spoke he sounded complaisant. As indeed he was. He was always reckless with gifts. It was simply that Bosch regularly seemed to suffer from bombed-out kinsfolk.

  Oskar murmured, “Does your aunt run an orphanage?”

  Bosch looked him in the eye again, nothing furtive about this drunk. “She’s an old woman with no resources. She can barter what she doesn’t need.”

  “I’ll tell my secretary to see to it.”

  “That Polish girl?” said Bosch. “The looker?”

  “The looker,” Schindler agreed.

  Bosch tried to whistle, but the tension of his lips had been destroyed by the overproof brandy which was h
is tipple, and the sound emerged as a low raspberry. “Your wife,” he said, man to man, “must be a saint.”

  “She is,” Herr Schindler admitted with disquiet. Bosch was welcome to his kitchenware, but he didn’t want him talking about his wife.

  “Tell me,” said Bosch. “How do you keep her off your back? She must know . . . Yet you seem to be able to control her very well.”

  All the humour left Schindler’s face now. Anyone could have seen frank distaste there. But the small, potent growl which arose from him was not unlike his normal voice.

  “I never talk about intimacies like that,” he said.

  Bosch rushed in. “Forgive me. I didn’t . . .” He went on incoherently begging pardon. Herr Oskar Schindler did not like sodden Herr Bosch enough to explain to him at this advanced night of his life that it wasn’t a matter of controlling anyone, that the Schindler marital disaster was instead a case of an ascetic temperament, Frau Emilie Schindler’s, and a hedonistic temperament, Herr Oskar Schindler’s, willingly and against good advice binding themselves together. But Oskar’s anger at Herr Bosch was more profound than even he would have admitted. Emilie was very like his late mother, Frau Louisa Schindler, whom Herr Schindler senior had left in 1935. So Oskar had a visceral feeling that in explaining away the Emilie-Oskar marriage, Bosch was also demeaning the marriage of the senior Schindlers.

  The man was still rushing out apologies. This grape-faced speculator, a hand in every till in Cracow, was now in a sweating fright at the chance of losing six dozen sets of kitchenware.

  The guests were summoned to the table. Onion soup was carried in and served by the maid. While the guests supped and chatted, the Rosner brothers continued to play, moving in closer to the diners, but not so close as to impede the movements of the maid or of Ivan and Petr, Goeth’s two Ukrainian orderlies. Herr Schindler, sitting between the tall girl whom Scherner had appropriated and a sweet-faced, small-boned Pole who spoke German, saw that both girls watched this maid. She wore the traditional domestic uniform, black dress and white apron. She bore no Jewish star on her arm, no stripe of yellow paint on her back, yet she was Jewish just the same. What drew the attention of the other women was the condition of her face. There was bruising along the line of the jaw, and you would have thought that Goeth had too much shame to display a servant in that condition in front of the guests from Cracow. Both the women and Herr Schindler could see, as well as the injury to her face, a more alarming purple, not always covered by her collar, at the junction where her thin neck joined her shoulder.

  Not only did Amon Goeth neglect to leave the girl unexplained in the background, but he turned his chair towards her, gesturing at her with a hand, displaying her to the assembled company. Herr Schindler had not been at this house for six weeks now, but his informants told him the relationship between Goeth and the girl had developed this way. When with friends he used her as a conversational device. He only hid her away when senior officers from beyond the Cracow region were visiting.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he called, mimicking the tones of a fake-drunken master of cabaret, “may I introduce Lena? After five months she is now doing well in cuisine and deportment.”

  “I can see from her face,” said the tall girl, Scherner’s, “that she’s had a collision with the kitchen furniture.”

  “And the bitch can have another,” said Goeth with a genial liquid gurgle. “Yes. Another. Couldn’t you, Lena?”

  “He’s hard on women,” the SS chief boasted, winking at his tall consort. Scherner’s intention might not have been unkind, since he did not refer to Jewish women but to women in general. It was when Goeth was reminded of Lena’s Jewishness that she took more punishment, either publicly, in front of dinner guests, or later, when the commandant’s friends had gone home. Scherner, being Goeth’s superior, could have ordered the commandant to stop beating the girl. But that would have been bad form, would have soured the friendly parties at Amon’s villa. Scherner came here not as a superior, but as a friend, an associate, a carouser, a savourer of women. Amon was a strange fellow, but no one could turn on parties the way he could.

  Next there was herring in sauce, then pork knuckles, superbly cooked and garnished by Lena. They were drinking a heavy Hungarian red wine with the meat; the Rosner brothers moved in with torrid Hungarian music, and the air in the dining room thickened, all the officers removing their uniform jackets. There was more gossip about war contracts. Madritsch, the uniform manufacturer, was asked about his Tarnow factory. Was it doing as well with Armaments Inspectorate contracts as was his factory inside Plaszów? Madritsch referred to Titsch, his lean, ascetic manager. Goeth seemed suddenly preoccupied, like a man who has remembered in the middle of dinner some urgent business detail he should have cleared up that afternoon and which now calls out to him from the darkness of his office.

  The girls from Cracow were bored, the small-boned Pole, glossy-lipped, perhaps twenty, likely eighteen, placing a hand on Herr Schindler’s right sleeve. “You’re not a soldier?” she murmured. “You’d look very chic in uniform.” Everyone began to chuckle, Madritsch too. He’d spent a while in uniform in 1940 until released because his managerial talents were so essential to the war effort. But Herr Schindler was so influential that he had never been threatened with the Wehrmacht. Madritsch laughed knowingly.

  “Did you hear that?” Oberführer Scherner asked the table at large. “The little lady’s got a picture of our industrialist as a soldier. Private Schindler, eh? Eating out of one of his own mess kits with a blanket round his shoulders. Over in Karkov.”

  In view of Herr Schindler’s well-tailored elegance it did make a strange picture, and Schindler himself laughed at it.

  “Happened to . . .” said Bosch, trying to snap his fingers, “happened to, what’s his name up in Warsaw?”

  “Toebbens,” said Goeth, reviving without warning. “Happened to Toebbens. Almost.”

  The SD chief Czurda said, “Oh yes. Close thing for Toebbens.” Toebbens was a Warsaw industrialist. Bigger than Schindler, bigger than Madritsch. Quite a success. “Heini,” said Czurda (Heini being Himmler), “went to Warsaw and told the armaments man up there, Get the fucking Jews out of Toebbens’s factory and put Toebbens in the army and . . . and send him to the front. I mean, the front! And then Heini told my associate up there, he said, Go over his books with a microscope!”

  Toebbens, however, was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, which had favoured him with war contracts and which in return he had favoured with gifts. The Armaments Inspectorate’s protests had succeeded in saving Toebbens, Scherner told the table solemnly, and then leaned out across his plate to wink broadly at Schindler. “Never happen in Cracow, Oskar. We all love you too much.”

  All at once, perhaps to indicate the warmth the whole table felt for Herr Schindler the industrialist, Amon Goeth climbed to his feet and sang a wordless tune in unison with the main theme from Madam Butterfly on which the dapper brothers Rosner were working as industriously as any artisan in any threatened factory in any threatened ghetto.

  By now Pfefferberg and Lisiek the orderly were upstairs in Goeth’s bathroom, scrubbing away at the heavy bath ring with a swab of solvent. They could hear the Rosners’ music and the bursts of laughter and conversation. It was coffee time down there, and the bruised girl Lena had brought the tray in to the dinner guests and retreated unmolested back to the kitchen.

  Madritsch and Titsch drank their coffee quickly and excused themselves. Schindler prepared to do the same. The little Polish girl had put a hand on his shirt sleeve, but this was the wrong house for him. Anything was permitted at the Goethhaus, but Oskar found that his inside knowledge of the limits of SS behaviour in Poland threw sickening light on every word you spoke here, every glass you drank, let alone over any proposed sexual exchange. Even if you took a girl upstairs, you could not forget that Bosch and Scherner and Goeth were your brothers in joy, were – on the stairs or in a bathroom or bedroom – going through the same movem
ents. Herr Schindler, no monk, would rather be a monk than have a woman at chez Goeth.

  He spoke across the girl to Scherner, talking about war news, Polish bandits, the likelihood of a bad winter. Letting the girl know that Scherner was a brother and that he would never take a girl from a brother. Saying good night, though, he kissed her on the hand. He saw that Goeth, in his shirt sleeves, was disappearing out of the dining-room door, making for the stairwell supported by one of the girls who had flanked him at dinner. Oskar excused himself and caught up with the commandant. He reached out and laid a hand on Goeth’s shoulder. The eyes the commandant turned on him struggled to focus. “Oh,” said Goeth in a liquid way. “Going, Oskar?”

  “I have to be home,” said Oskar. At home was Ingrid, his German mistress.

  “You’re a bloody stallion,” said Goeth.

  “Not in your class,” said Schindler.

  “No, you’re right. I’m a frigging Olympian. We’re going, where’re we going . . . ?” He turned his head to the girl but answered the question himself. “We’re going to the kitchen to see that Lena’s clearing away properly.”

  “No,” said the girl, laughing. “We aren’t doing that.”

  She steered him to the stairs. It was decent of her, the sisterhood in operation, to protect the thin, wounded girl in the kitchen.

  Herr Oskar Schindler watched the uneven animal, the hulking officer, the slight, supporting girl, struggling crookedly up the staircase. Goeth looked like a man who would have to sleep at least till lunchtime, but Oskar knew the commandant’s amazing constitution and the clock that ran in him. By 3 a.m. Goeth might even decide to rise and write a letter to his father in Vienna. By seven, after only an hour’s sleep, he’d be on the balcony, infantry rifle in hand, ready to shoot any dilatory prisoners.