Schindler's List Read online

  Itzhak Stern took the notes and studied them. He had indeed developed a procedure, he told the Herr Treuh@ander. Without a smile or a wink, he moved to the open fire at the end of the room and dropped both notes into it.

  “I write these transactions off to profit and loss, under “free samples,”” he said. There had been a lot of free samples since September. Aue liked Stern’s dry, effective style with the legal evidence. He began to laugh, seeing in the accountant’s lean features the complexities of Cracow itself, the parochial canniness of a small city. Only a local knew the ropes.

  In the inner office Herr Schindler sat in need of local information. Aue led Stern through into the manager’s office to meet Herr Schindler, who stood staring at the

  fire, an unstoppered hip flask held absently in one hand. The first thing Itzhak Stern thought was, This isn’t a manageable German. Aue wore the badge of his

  F@uhrer, a miniature Hakenkreuz, as negligently as a man might wear the badge of a cycling club. But big Schindler’s coin-sized emblem took the light from the fire in its black enamel. It, and the young man’s general affluence, were all the more the symbols of Stern’s autumn griefs as a Polish Jew with a cold. Aue made the introductions. According to the edict already issued by Governor Frank, Stern made his statement: “I have to tell you, sir, that I am a Jew.”

  “Well,” Herr Schindler growled at him

  .

  “I’m a German. So there we are!”

  All very well, Stern almost intoned privately behind his sodden handkerchief. In that case, lift the edict.

  For Itzhak Stern was a man—even now, in only the seventh week of the New Order in Poland—not under one edict but already under many.

  Hans Frank, Governor General of Poland, had already initiated and signed six restrictive edicts, leaving others to his district governor, Dr. Otto W@achter, an SS

  Gruppenf@uhrer (equivalent to major general), to implement. Stern, besides declaring his origins, had also to carry a distinctive registration card marked by a yellow stripe. The Orders-in-Council forbidding kosher preparation of meats and commanding forced labor for Jews were three weeks old when Stern stood coughing in Schindler’s presence. And Stern’s official ration as an Untermensch (subhuman) was little more than half that of a non-Jewish Pole, the latter being tainted by Untermensch’-hood himself.

  Finally, by an edict of November 8, a general registration of all Cracovian Jews had begun and was required to be completed by the 24th.

  Stern, with his calm and abstract cast of mind, knew that the edicts would continue, would circumscribe his living and breathing further still. Most Cracow Jews expected such a rash of edicts. There would be some disruption of life—

  Jews from the shtetls being brought to town to shovel coal, intellectuals being sent into the countryside to hoe beets. There would also be sporadic slaughters for a time, like the one over at Tursk where an SS artillery unit had kept people working on a bridge all day and then driven them into the village synagogue in the evening and shot them. There would always be such intermittent instances. But the situation would settle; the race would survive by petitioning, by buying off the authorities—it was the old method, it had been working since the Roman Empire, it would work again. In the end the civil authorities needed Jews, especially in a nation where they were one in every eleven.

  Stern, however, wasn’t one of the sanguine ones. He didn’t presume that the legislation would soon achieve a plateau of negotiable severity. For these were the worst of times. So though he did not know that the coming fire would be different in substance as well as degree, he was already resentful enough of the future to think, All very well for you, Herr Schindler, to make generous little gestures of equality.

  This man, said Aue, introducing Itzhak

  Stern, was Buchheister’s right-hand man. He had good connections in the business community here in Cracow.

  It was not Stern’s place to argue with Aue about that. Even so, he wondered if the Treuh@ander wasn’t gilding the lily for the distinguished visitor.

  Aue excused himself.

  Left alone with Stern, Schindler murmured that he’d be grateful if the accountant could tell him what he knew about some of the local businesses. Testing Oskar, Stern suggested that perhaps Herr Schindler should speak to the officials of the Trust Agency.

  “They’re thieves,” said Herr Schindler genially. “They’re bureaucrats too. I would like some latitude.” He shrugged. “I am a capitalist by temperament and I don’t like being regulated.”

  So Stern and the self-declared capitalist began to talk. And Stern was quite a source; he seemed to have friends or relatives in every factory in Cracow—textiles, garments, confectionery, cabinetmaking, metalwork. Herr Schindler was impressed and took an envelope from the breast pocket of his suit. “Do you know a company called Rekord?” he asked.

  Itzhak Stern did. It was in bankruptcy, he said. It had made enamelware. Since it had gone bankrupt some of the metal-press machinery had been confiscated, and now it was largely a shell, producing—under the management of one of the former owners’ relatives—a mere fraction of its capacity. His own brother, said Stern, represented a Swiss company that was one of Rekord’s major creditors. Stern knew that it was permitted to reveal a small degree of fraternal pride and then to deprecate it. “The place was very badly managed,” said Stern.

  Schindler dropped the envelope into Stern’s lap. “This is their balance sheet. Tell me what you think.”

  Itzhak said that Herr Schindler should of course ask others as well as himself. Of course, Oskar told him. But I would value your opinion. Stern read the balance sheets quickly; then, after some three minutes of study, all at once felt the strange silence of the office and looked up, finding Herr Oskar Schindler’s eyes full on him.

  There was, of course, in men like Stern an ancestral gift for sniffing out the just Goy, who could be used as buffer or partial refuge against the savageries of the others. It was a sense for where a safe house might be, a potential zone of shelter. And from now on the possibility of Herr Schindler as sanctuary would color the conversation as might a half-glimpsed, intangible sexual promise color the talk between a man and a woman at a party. It was a suggestion Stern was more aware of than Schindler, and nothing explicit would be said for fear of damaging the tender connection.

  “It’s a perfectly good business,” said

  Stern. “You could speak to my brother. And, of course, now there’s the possibility of military contracts. ...”

  “Exactly,” murmured Herr Schindler.

  For almost instantly after the fall of Cracow, even before Warsaw’s siege ended, an Armaments Inspectorate had been set up in the Government General of Poland, its mandate being to enter into contracts with suitable manufacturers for the supply of army equipment. In a plant like Rekord, mess kits and field kitchenware could be turned out. The Armaments Inspectorate, Stern knew, was headed by a Major General Julius Schindler of the Wehrmacht. Was the

  general a relative of Herr Oskar Schindler’s? Stern asked. No, I’m afraid not, said Schindler, but as if he wanted Stern to keep his nonrelationship a secret.

  In any case, said Stern, even the skeleton production at Rekord was grossing more than a half-million z@loty a year, and new metal-pressing plant and furnaces could be acquired relatively easily. It depended on Herr Schindler’s access to credit.

  Enamelware, said Schindler, was closer to his line than textiles. His background was in farm machinery, and he understood steam presses and so forth.

  It did not any longer occur to Stern to ask why an elegant German entrepreneur wished to talk to him about business options. Meetings like this one had occurred throughout the history of his tribe, and the normal exchanges of business did not quite explain them. He talked on at some length, explaining how the Commercial Court would set the fee for the leasing of the bankrupt estate. Leasing with an option to buy—it was better than being a Treuh@ander. As a Treuh@ander, only a supervis
or, you were completely under the control of the Economics Ministry.

  Stern lowered his voice then and risked saying it:

  “You will find you are restricted in the people you’ll be allowed to employ. ...”

  Schindler was amused. “How do you know all this?

  About ultimate intentions?”

  “I read it in a copy of the Berliner Tageblatt. A Jew is still permitted to read German newspapers.”

  Schindler continued to laugh, reached out a hand, and let it fall on Stern’s shoulder. “Is that so?” he asked.

  In fact, Stern knew these things because Aue had received a directive from Reich Secretary of State Eberhard von Jagwitz of the Economics Ministry outlining the policies to be adopted in Aryanizing businesses. Aue had left it to Stern to make a digest of the memorandum. Von Jagwitz had indicated, more in sadness than in anger, that there would be pressure from other government and Party agencies, such as Heydrich’s RHSA, the Reich Security Main Office, to Aryanize not just the ownership of companies, but also the management and work force. The sooner Treuh@anders filtered out the skilled Jewish employees the better—always, of course, bearing in mind the maintenance of production at an acceptable level.

  At last Herr Schindler put the accounts of Rekord back into his breast pocket, stood up, and led Itzhak Stern out into the main office. They stood there for a time, among the typists and clerks, growing philosophical, as Oskar liked to do. It was here that Oskar brought up the matter of Christianity’s having its base in Judaism, a subject which for some reason, perhaps even because of his boyhood friendship with the Kantors in Zwittau, interested him. Stern spoke softly, at length, learnedly. He had published articles in journals of comparative religion. Oskar, who wrongly fancied himself a philosopher, had found an expert. The scholar himself, Stern, whom some thought a pedant, found Oskar’s understanding shallow, a mind genial by nature but without much conceptual deftness. Not that Stern was about to complain. An ill-assorted friendship was firmly established. So that Stern found himself drawing an analogy, as Oskar’s own father had, from previous empires and giving his own reasons why Adolf Hitler could not succeed. The opinion slipped out before Stern could withdraw it. The other Jews in the office bowed their heads and stared fixedly at their worksheets. Schindler did not seem disturbed.

  Near the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He’d hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.

  “Of course, of course,” said Oskar

  Schindler.

  Itzhak, rightly or wrongly, always believed that it was at that moment that he had dropped the right seed in the furrow.

  CHAPTER 3

  There is another Cracow Jew who gives an account of meeting Schindler that autumn—and of coming close to killing him. This man’s name was Leopold (poldek) Pfefferberg. He had been a company commander in the Polish Army during the recent tragic campaign. After suffering a leg wound during the battle for the river San, he’d limped around the Polish hospital in Przemy@sl, helping with the other wounded. He was no doctor, but a high school physical-education teacher who had graduated from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow and so had some knowledge of anatomy. He was resilient; he was self-confident, twenty-seven years old, and built like a wedge.

  With some hundreds of other captured Polish officers from Przemy@sl, Pfefferberg was on his way to Germany when his train drew into his home city of Cracow and the prisoners were herded into the first-class waiting room, to remain there until new transport could be provided. His home was ten blocks away. To a practical young man, it seemed outrageous that he could not go out into Pawia Street and catch a No. 1 trolley home. The bucolic-looking Wehrmacht guard at the door seemed a provocation. Pfefferberg had in his breast pocket a document signed by the German hospital authority of Przemy@sl indicating that he was free to move about the city with ambulance details tending to the wounded of both armies. It was spectacularly formal, stamped and signed. He took it out now and, going up to the guard, thrust it at him.

  “Can you read German?” Pfefferberg demanded. This sort of ploy had to be done right, of course. You had to be young; you had to be persuasive; you had to have retained, undiminished by summary defeat, a confident bearing of a particularly Polish nature—something disseminated to the Polish officer corps, even to those rare members of it who were Jewish, by its plentiful aristocrats.

  The man had blinked. “Of course I can read German,” he said. But after he’d taken the document he held it like a man who couldn’t read at all—held it like a slice of bread.

  Pfefferberg explained in German how the document declared his right to go out and attend to the ill. All the guard could see was a proliferation of official stamps. Quite a document. With a wave of the head, he indicated the door.

  Pfefferberg was the only passenger on the No. 1 trolley that morning. It was not even 6 A.m. The conductor took his fare without a fuss, for in the city there were still many Polish troops not yet processed by the Wehrmacht. The officers had to register, that was all. The trolley swung around the Barbakan, through the gate in the ancient wall, down Floria@nska to the Church of St. Mary, across the central square, and so within five minutes into Grodzka Street. Nearing his parents’ apartment at No. 48, as he had as a boy he jumped from the car before the air brakes went on and let the momentum of the jump, enhanced by that of the trolley, bring him up with a soft thud against the doorjamb.

  After his escape, he had lived not too uncomfortably in the apartments of friends, visiting Grodzka 48 now and then. The Jewish schools opened briefly—they would be closed again within six weeks—and he even returned to his teaching job. He was sure the Gestapo would take some time to come looking for him, and so he applied for ration books. He began to dispose of jewelry—as an agent and in his own right—on the black market that operated in Cracow’s central square, in the arcades of the Sukiennice and beneath the two unequal spires of St. Mary’s Church. Trade was brisk, among the Poles themselves but more so for the Polish Jews. Their ration books, full of precancelled coupons, entitled them to only two-thirds of the meat and half of the butter allowance that went to Aryan citizens, while all the cocoa and rice coupons were cancelled. And so the black market which had operated through centuries of occupation and the few decades of Polish autonomy became the food and income source and the readiest means of resistance for respectable bourgeois citizens, especially those who, like Leopold Pfefferberg, were street-wise.

  He presumed that he would soon be traveling over the ski routes around Zakopane in the Tatras, across Slovakia’s slender neck into Hungary or Rumania. He was equipped for the journey: he had been a member of the Polish national ski team. On one of the high shelves of the porcelain stove in his mother’s apartment he kept an elegant little .22 pistol—armory both for the proposed escape and in case he was ever trapped inside the apartment by the Gestapo.

  With this pearl-handled semitoy, Pfefferberg came close to killing Oskar Schindler one chilly day in November. Schindler, in double-breasted suit, Party badge on the lapel, decided to call on Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg, Poldek’s mother, to offer her a commission.

  He had been given by the Reich housing

  authorities a fine modern apartment in

  Straszewskiego Street. It had previously

  been the property of a Jewish family by the name of Nussbaum. Such allocations were carried out without any compensation to the previous occupant. On the day Oskar came calling, Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg herself was worried that it would happen to her apartment in Grodzka.

  A number of Schindler’s
friends would claim later—though it is not possible to prove it—that Oskar had gone looking for the dispossessed Nussbaums at their lodgings in Podg@orze and had given them a sum close to 50,000 z@loty in compensation. With this sum, it is said, the Nussbaums bought themselves an escape to Yugoslavia. Fifty thousand z@loty signified substantial dissent; but there would be other similar acts of dissent by Oskar before Christmas. Some friends would in fact come to say that generosity was a disease in Oskar, a frantic thing, one of his passions. He would tip taxi drivers twice the fare on the meter. But this has to be said too—that he thought the Reich housing authorities were unjust and told Stern so, not when the regime got into trouble but even in that, its sweetest autumn.

  In any case, Mrs. Pfefferberg had no idea what the tall, well-tailored German was doing at her door. He could have been there to ask for her son, who happened to be in the kitchen just then. He could have been there to commandeer her apartment, and her decorating business, and her antiques, and her French tapestry.

  In fact, by the December feast of Hanukkah the German police would, on the orders of the housing office, get around to the Pfefferbergs, arriving at their door and then ordering them, shivering in the cold, downstairs onto the pavement of Grodzka. When Mrs. Pfefferberg asked to go back for a coat, she would be refused; when Mr. Pfefferberg made for a bureau to get an ancestral gold watch, he would be punched in the jaw. “I have witnessed terrible things in the past,” Hermann G@oring had said; “little chauffeurs and Gauleiters have profited so much from these transactions that they now have about half a million.” The effect of such easy pickings as Mr. Pfefferberg’s gold watch on the moral fiber of the Party might distress G@oring. But in Poland that year, it was the style of the Gestapo to be unaccountable for the contents of apartments.