Schindler's List Page 7

  CHAPTER 5

  Victoria Klonowska, a Polish secretary, was the beauty of Oskar’s front office, and he immediately began a long affair with her. Ingrid, his German mistress, must have known, as surely as Emilie Schindler knew about Ingrid. For Oskar would never be a surreptitious lover. He had a childlike sexual frankness. It wasn’t that he boasted. It was that he never saw any need to lie, to creep into hotels by the back stairs, to knock quietly on any girl’s door in the small hours.

  Since Oskar would not seriously try to tell his women lies, their options were reduced; traditional lovers’ arguments were difficult.

  Blond hair piled up above her pretty,

  foxy, vividly made-up face, Victoria

  Klonowska looked like one of those lighthearted girls to whom the inconveniences of history are a temporary intrusion into the real business of life. This autumn of simple clothes, Klonowska was frivolous in her jacket and frilled blouse and slim skirt. Yet she was hardheaded, efficient, and adroit. She was a nationalist too, in the robust Polish style. She would in the end negotiate with the German dignitaries for her Sudeten lover’s release from SS institutions. But for the moment Oskar had a less risky job for her.

  He mentioned that he would like to find a good bar or cabaret in Cracow where he could take friends. Not contacts, not senior people from the Armaments Inspectorate. Genuine friends. Somewhere lively where middle-aged officials would not turn up. Did Klonowska know of such a place?

  She discovered an excellent jazz cellar in the narrow streets north of the Rynek, the city square. It was a place that had always been popular with the students and younger staff of the university, but Victoria herself had never been there before. The middle-aged men who had pursued her in peacetime would never want to go to a student dive.

  If you wished to, it was possible to rent an

  alcove behind a curtain for private parties under

  cover of the tribal rhythms of the band. For finding this

  music club, Oskar nicknamed Klonowska

  “Columbus.” The Party line on jazz was that it

  not only was artistically decadent but expressed

  an African, a subhuman animality. The

  ump-pa-pa of Viennese waltzes was the

  preferred beat of the SS and of Party officials, and they earnestly avoided jazz clubs.

  Round about Christmas in 1939, Oskar got together a party at the club for a number of his friends. Like any instinctive cultivator of contacts, he would never have any trouble drinking with men he didn’t like. But that night the guests were men he did. Additionally, of course, they were all useful, junior but not uninfluential members of sundry agencies of Occupation; and all of them more or less double exiles—not only were they away from home, but home or abroad, they were all variously uneasy under the regime.

  There was, for example, a young German

  surveyor from the Government General’s Division

  of the Interior. He had marked out the boundaries of

  Oskar’s enamel factory in Zablocie. At

  the back of Oskar’s plant, Deutsche

  Email Fabrik (Def), stood a vacant

  area where two other manufactories abutted, a box factory and a radiator plant. Schindler had been delighted to find that most of the waste area belonged, according to the surveyor, to DEF. Visions of economic expansion danced in his head. The surveyor had, of course, been invited because he was a decent fellow, because you could talk to him, because he might be handy to know for future building permits.

  The policeman Herman Toffel was there also, and the SD man Reeder, as well as a young officer—also a surveyor, named Steinhauser—from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar had met and taken to these men while seeking the permits he needed to start his plant. He had already enjoyed drinking bouts with them. He would always believe that the best way to untie bureaucracy’s Gordian knot, short of bribery, was booze. Finally there were two Abwehr men. The first was Eberhard Gebauer, the lieutenant who had recruited Oskar into the Abwehr the year before. The second was Leutnant Martin Plathe of Canaris’ headquarters in Breslau. It had been through his friend Gebauer’s recruitment that Herr Oskar Schindler had first discovered what a city of opportunity Cracow was.

  There would be a by-product from the presence of Gebauer and Plathe. Oskar was still on the Abwehr’s books as an agent and, in his years in Cracow, would keep the staff of Canaris’ Breslau office satisfied by passing on to them reports on the behavior of their rivals in the SS. Gebauer and Plathe would consider his bringing along of a more-or-less disaffected gendarme like Toffel, and of Reeder of the SD, as an intelligence favor, a gift quite apart from the good company and the liquor.

  Though it is not possible to say exactly what the members of the party talked about that night, it is possible from what Oskar said later of each of these men to make a plausible reconstruction.

  It was Gebauer, of course, who would have made the toast, saying he would not give them governments, armies or potentates: instead he would give them the enamel factory of their good friend Oskar Schindler. He did so because if the factory prospered, there would be more parties, parties in the Schindler style, the best parties you could imagine.

  But after the toast had been drunk, the talk

  turned naturally to the subject that bemused or

  obsessed all levels of the civil

  bureaucracy. The Jews.

  Toffel and Reeder had spent the day at

  Mogilska Station supervising the unloading of Poles and Jews from eastbound trains. These people had been shipped in from the Incorporated Territories, newly conquered regions which had been German in the past. Toffel wasn’t making a point about the comfort of the passengers in the Ostbahn cattle cars, although he confessed that the weather had been cold. But the transport of populations in livestock carriages was new to everyone, and the cars were not as yet inhumanly crowded. What confused Toffel was the policy behind it all.

  There is a persistent rumor, said Toffel, that

  we are at war. And in the midst of it the

  Incorporated Territories are too damn

  simon-pure to put up with a few Poles and a half-million Jews. “The whole Ostbahn system,” said Toffel, “has to be turned over to delivering them to us.”

  The Abwehr men listened, slight smiles on their faces. To the SS the enemy within might be the Jew, but to the Canaris the enemy within was the SS.

  The SS, Toffel said, had reserved the entire rail system from November 15 on.

  Across his desk in Pomorska Street, he said,

  had crossed copies of angry SS memoranda

  addressed to Army officials and complaining that the

  Army was welching on its deal, had gone two

  weeks over schedule in its use of the

  Ostbahn. For Christ’s sake, Toffel

  asked, shouldn’t the Army have first use, for as long as it liked, of the railway system? How else is it to deploy east and west? Toffel asked, drinking excitedly. On bicycles?

  Oskar was half-amused to see that the Abwehr men did not comment. They suspected Toffel might be a plant instead of simply being drunk. The surveyor and the man from the Armaments Inspectorate asked Toffel some questions about these remarkable trains arriving at Mogilska.

  Soon such shipments wouldn’t be worth talking about:

  transports of humans would become a clich‘e of resettlement policy. But on the evening of Oskar’s Christmas party, they were still a novelty.

  “They call it,” said Toffel, “concentration.

  That’s the word you find in the documents.

  Concentration. I call it bloody obsession.”

  The owner of the jazz club brought in plates of

  herring and sauce. The fish went down well with the

  fiery liquor, and as they wolfed it, Gebauer

  spoke about the Judenrats, the Jewish

  councils set up in each community on the order

  of Governor Frank. In cities
like Warsaw

  and Cracow the Judenrat had twenty-four

  elected members personally responsible for the

  fulfillment of the orders of the regime. The

  Judenrat of Cracow had been in existence for

  less than a month; Marek

  Biberstein, a respected municipal

  authority, had been appointed its president. But, Gebauer remarked, he had heard that it had already approached Wawel Castle with a plan for a roster of Jewish labor. The Judenrat would supply the labor details for digging ditches and latrines and clearing snow. Didn’t everyone find that excessively cooperative of them?

  Not at all, said engineer Steinhauser of the Armaments Inspectorate. They thought that if they supplied the labor squads it would stop random press-ganging. Press-ganging led to beatings and the occasional bullet in the head.

  Martin Plathe agreed. They’ll be cooperative for the sake of avoiding something worse, he said. It’s their method—you have to understand that. They’d always bought the civil authorities off by cooperating with them and then negotiating.

  Gebauer seemed to be out to mislead Toffel and

  Reeder by pushing the point, by seeming more

  passionately analytic about Jews than he

  really was. “I’ll tell you what I mean

  by cooperation,” he said. “Frank passes an

  edict demanding that every Jew in the Government

  General wear a star. That edict’s only a

  few weeks old. In Warsaw you’ve got a

  Jewish manufacturer churning them out in washable plastic at three z@loty each. It’s as if they’ve got no idea what sort of law it is. It’s as if the thing were an emblem of a bicycle club.”

  It was suggested then that since Schindler was in the enamel business, it might be possible to press a deluxe enamel badge at the Schindler plant and retail it through the hardware outlet his girlfriend Ingrid supervised. Someone remarked that the star was their national insigne, the insigne of a state that had been destroyed by the Romans and that now existed only in the minds of Zionists. So perhaps people were proud to wear the star.

  “The thing is,” said Gebauer, “they don’t have any organization for saving themselves. They’ve got weathering-the-storm sorts of organizations. But this one’s going to be different. This storm will be managed by the SS.” Gebauer, again, sounded as if without being too florid about it, he approved of the professional thoroughness of the SS. “Come on,” said Plathe; “the worst that can happen to them is that they’ll get sent to Madagascar, where the weather is better than it is in Cracow.”

  “I don’t believe they’ll ever see

  Madagascar,” said Gebauer.

  Oskar demanded a change of subject.

  Wasn’t it .his party?

  In fact, Oskar had already seen Gebauer hand over forged papers for a flight to Hungary to a Jewish businessman in the bar of the Hotel Cracovia. Maybe Gebauer was taking a fee, though he seemed too morally sensitive to deal in papers, to sell a signature, a rubber stamp. But it was certain, in spite of his act in front of Toffel, that he was no abominator of Jews. Nor was any of them. At Christmas 1939 Oskar found them simply a relief from the orotund official line.

  Later they would have more positive uses.

  CHAPTER 6

  The Aktion of the night of December 4 had convinced Stern that Oskar Schindler was that rarity, the just Goy. There is the Talmudic legend of the Hasidei Ummot Ha-olam, the Righteous of the Nations, of whom there are said to be—at any point in the world’s history—thirty-six. Stern did not believe literally in the mystical number, but the legend was psychologically true for him, and he believed it a decent and wise course to try to make of Schindler a living and breathing sanctuary.

  The German needed capital—the Rekord plant had been partially stripped of machinery, except for one small gallery of metal presses, enamel bins, lathes, and furnaces. While Stern might be a substantial spiritual influence on Oskar, the man who put him in touch with capital on good terms was Abraham Bankier, the office manager of Rekord, whom Oskar had won over.

  The two of them—big, sensual Oskar and squat, elfin Bankier—went visiting possible investors. By a decree of November 23, the bank and safe deposits of all Jews were held by the German administration, in fixed trust, without allowing the owner any right of access or interest. Some of the wealthier Jewish businessmen, those who knew anything about history, kept secret funds in hard currencies. But they could tell that for a few years under Governor Hans Frank, currencies would be risky;

  portable wealth—diamonds, gold, trade goods

  --would be desirable.

  Around Cracow there were a number of men Bankier knew who were willing to put up investment capital in return for a guaranteed quantity of product. The deal might be an investment of 50,000 z@loty in return for so many kilos of pots and pans a month, delivery to begin July 1940 and to continue for a year. For a Cracow Jew, given Hans Frank in the Wawel, kitchenware was safer and more disposable than z@loty. The parties to these contracts—Oskar, the investor, Bankier as middleman—brought away from these arrangements nothing, not even deal memoranda. Full-fledged contracts were of no use and could not be enforced anyhow. Nothing could be enforced. It all depended on Bankier’s accurate judgment of this Sudeten manufacturer of enamelware.

  The meetings would take place perhaps in the investor’s apartment in the Centrum of Cracow, the old inner city. The Polish landscapists the investor’s wife adored, the French novels his bright and fragile daughters savored would glow in the light of the transaction. Or else the investing gentleman had already been thrown out of his apartment and lived in poorer quarters in Podg@orze. And he would be a man already in shock—his apartment gone and himself now an employee in his own business --and all this in a few months, the year not over yet.

  At first sight, it seems a heroic embellishment of the story to say that Oskar was never accused of welching on these informal contracts. He would in the new year have a fight with one Jewish retailer over the quantity of product the man was entitled to take from DEF’S loading dock in Lipowa Street. And the gentleman would be critical of Oskar on those grounds to the end of his life. But that Oskar did not fulfill deals— that was never said.

  For Oskar was by nature a payer, who somehow gave the impression that he could make limitless repayments out of limitless resources. In any case, Oskar and other German opportunists would make so much in the next four years that only a man consumed by the profit motive would have failed to repay what Oskar’s father would have called a debt of honor.

  Emilie Schindler came up to Cracow, to visit her husband there for the first time, in the new year. She thought the city was the most delightful she had ever been in, so much more gracious and pleasant and old-fashioned than Brno with its clouds of industrial smoke.

  She was impressed with her husband’s new apartment. The front windows looked across at the Planty, an elegant ring of parkland that ran right around the city following the route of the ancient walls long since knocked down. At the bottom of the street the great fortress of Wawel rose, and amidst all this antiquity was Oskar’s modern apartment. She looked around at Mrs. Pfefferberg’s fabrics and wall hangings. His new success was tangible in them.

  “You’ve done very well in Poland,” she said. Oskar knew that she was really talking about the matter of the dowry, the one her father had refused to pay a dozen years back when travelers from Zwittau had rushed into the village of Alt-Molstein with news that his son-in-law was living and loving like an unmarried man. His daughter’s marriage had become exactly the marriage he had feared it would, and he was damned if he’d pay.

  And though the absence of the 400,000 RM. had altered Oskar’s prospects a little, the gentleman farmer of Alt-Molstein did not know how the nonpayment would pain his daughter, make her even more defensive, nor that twelve years later, when it no longer counted for Oskar, it would be still at the front of Emilie’s mind.


  “My dear,” Oskar was always growling, “I never needed the damn money.”

  Emilie’s intermittent relations with Oskar seem to have been those of a woman who knows her husband is not and will not be faithful, but who nonetheless doesn’t want evidence of his affairs thrust under her nose. She must have moved warily in Cracow, going to parties where Oskar’s friends would surely know the truth, would know the names of the other women, the names she did not really want to hear.

  One day a young Pole—it was Poldek

  Pfefferberg, who had nearly shot her husband, but

  she could not know that—arrived at the door of the apartment

  with a rolled-up rug over his shoulder. It was a

  black-market rug from Istanbul via

  Hungary, and Pfefferberg had been

  given the job of finding it by Ingrid, who had moved out for the duration of Emilie’s visit.

  “Is Frau Schindler in?” asked

  Pfefferberg. He always referred to Ingrid as Frau Schindler because he thought it was less offensive.

  “I am Frau Schindler,” said Emilie,

  knowing what the question meant.

  Pfefferberg showed some sensitivity in covering up. Actually he did not need to see Frau Schindler, though he’d heard so much about her from Herr Schindler. He had to see Herr Schindler about some business matter.

  Herr Schindler wasn’t in, said Emilie.

  She offered Pfefferberg a drink, but he hastily refused. Emilie knew what that meant too. That the young man was just a little shocked by Oskar’s personal life and thought it indecent to sit and drink with the victim.

  The factory Oskar had leased was across the river in Zablocie at No. 4 Lipowa Street. The offices, which faced the street, were modern in design, and Oskar thought it might be possible and convenient for him to move in at some time, to have an apartment on the third floor, even though the surroundings were industrial and not as exhilarating as Straszewskiego Street.