Schindler's List Read online

  That first membership of the Judenrat consisted of twenty-four men, most of them intellectuals. Each day, on his way to Zablocie, Oskar passed their corner office in Podg@orze into which were crowded a number of secretariats.

  In the manner of a cabinet, each member of the council took care of a different aspect of government. Mr. Schenker had charge of taxes, Mr. Steinberg of buildings—an essential job in a society where people drifted in and out, this week trying the option of refuge in some small village, next week walking back to town surfeited with the narrowness of the peasants. Leon Salpeter, a pharmacist by profession, had charge of one of the social-welfare agencies.

  There were secretariats for food, cemeteries,

  health, travel documentation, economic

  affairs, administrative services, culture,

  even—in the face of the ban on schooling—of education.

  Biberstein and his council believed on principle that the Jews who were expelled from Cracow would end up in worse places, and so they decided to fall back on an ancient stratagem: bribery. The hard-up Judenrat treasury allocated 200,000 z@loty for the purpose. Biberstein and the Housing Secretary, Chaim Goldfluss, had sought out an intermediary, in this case a Volksdeutscher named Reichert, a man who had contacts in the SS and the city administration. Reichert’s task was to pass on the money to a series of officials beginning with Obersturmf@uhrer (an SS rank equivalent to first lieutenant) Seibert, the liaison officer between the Judenrat and the city government. In return for the money, the officials were to permit another 10,000 Jews of the Cracow community to remain at home, despite Frank’s order. Whether Reichert had insulted officials by retaining too large a percentage for himself and making too low an offer, or whether the gentlemen involved felt that Governor Frank’s most cherished ambition to render his city judenfrei made the taking of bribes too perilous, no one could tell from the court proceedings. But Biberstein had got two years in Montelupich, Goldfluss six months in Auschwitz. Reichert himself had got eight years. Yet everyone knew he would have a softer time of it than the other two.

  Schindler shook his head at the idea of putting 200,000 z@loty on such a fragile hope.

  “Reichert is a crook,” he murmured. Just ten minutes before, they had been discussing whether he and the C’s were crooks and had let the question stand. But there was no doubt about Reichert. “I could have told them Reichert was a crook,” he kept insisting.

  Stern commented—as a philosophic principle

  --that there were times when the only people left to do business with were crooks.

  Schindler laughed at that—a wide, toothy, almost rustic laugh. “Thank you very much, my friend,” he told Stern.

  CHAPTER 8

  It wasn’t such a bad Christmas that year. But there was a wistfulness, and snow lay like a question in the parkland across from Schindler’s apartment, like something posed, watchful and eternal, on the roof of the Wawel up the road and under the ancient facades of Kanonicza Street. No one believed anymore in a quick resolution—neither the soldiery nor the Poles nor the Jews on either side of the river.

  For his Polish secretary Klonowska, that

  Christmas, Schindler bought a poodle, a

  ridiculous Parisian thing, acquired

  by Pfefferberg. For Ingrid he bought jewelry and

  sent some also to gentle Emilie down in

  Zwittau. Poodles were hard to find,

  Leopold Pfefferberg reported. But jewelry was a snap. Because of the times, gems were in a high state of movement.

  Oskar seems to have pursued his simultaneous attachments to three women and sundry casual friendships with others, all without suffering the normal penalties that beset the womanizer. Visitors to his apartment cannot remember ever finding Ingrid sulking. She seems to have been a generous and complaisant girl. Emilie, with even greater grounds for complaint, had too much dignity to make the scenes Oskar richly deserved. If Klonowska had any resentment, it does not seem to have affected her manner in the front office of DEF nor her loyalty to the Herr Direktor. One could expect that in a life like Oskar’s, public confrontations between angry women would be commonplace. But no one among Oskar’s friends and workers—witnesses willing enough to admit and even in some cases chuckle over his sins of the flesh—remembers such painful confrontations, so often the fate of far more restrained philanderers than Oskar.

  To suggest as some have that any woman would be pleased with partial possession of Oskar is to demean the women involved. The problem was, perhaps, that if you wanted to talk to Oskar about fidelity, a look of childlike and authentic bewilderment entered his eyes, as if you were proposing some concept like Relativity which could be understood only if the listener had five hours to sit still and concentrate. Oskar never had five hours and never understood.

  Except in his mother’s case. That Christmas morning, for his dead mother’s sake, Oskar went to Mass at the Church of St. Mary. There was a space above the high altar where Wit Stwosz’s wooden tryptych had until weeks ago diverted worshipers with its crowd of jostling divinities. The vacancy, the pallor of the stone where the tryptych’s fixings had been, distracted and abashed Herr Schindler. Someone had stolen the tryptych. It had been shipped to Nuremberg. What an improbable world it had become!

  Business was wonderful that winter just the same. In the next year his friends in the Armaments Inspectorate began to talk to Oskar about the possibility of opening a munitions division to manufacture antitank shells. Oskar was not as interested in shells as in pots and pans. Pots and pans were easy engineering. You cut out and pressed the metal, dipped it in the tubs, fired it at the right temperature. You didn’t have to calibrate instruments; the work was nowhere near as exacting as it would be for arms. There was no under-the-counter trade in shell casings, and Oskar liked under-the-counter—liked the sport of it, the disrepute, the fast returns, the lack of paperwork.

  But because it was good politics, he established a munitions section, installing a few immense Hilo machines, for the precision pressing and tooling of shell casings, in one gallery of his No. 2 workshop. The munitions section was so far developmental; it would take some months of planning, measuring, and test production before any shells appeared. The big Hilos, however, gave the Schindler works, as a hedge against the questionable future, at least the appearance of essential industry.

  Before the Hilos had even been properly calibrated, Oskar began to get hints from his SS contacts at Pomorska Street that there was to be a ghetto for Jews. He mentioned the rumor to Stern, not wanting to arouse alarm. Oh, yes, said Stern, the word was out. Some people were even looking forward to it. We’ll be inside, the enemy will be outside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us, no one stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.

  The edict, “Gen. Gub. 44/91,” posted on March 3, was published in the Cracow dailies and blared forth from loudspeakers on trucks in Kazimierz. Walking through his munitions department, Oskar heard one of his German technicians comment on the news. “Won’t they be better off in there?” asked the technician. “The Poles hate them, you know.”

  The edict used the same excuse. As a

  means of reducing racial conflict in the

  Government General, a closed Jewish quarter would be set up. Enclosure in the ghetto would be compulsory for all Jews, but those with the proper labor card could travel from the ghetto to work, returning in the evening. The ghetto would be located in the suburb of Podg@orze just across the river. The deadline for entering it would be March 20. Once in, you would be allocated housing by the Judenrat, but Poles presently living in the area of the ghetto and who therefore had to move were to apply to their own housing office for apartments in other parts of town.

  A map of the new ghetto was appended to the edict. The north side would be bounded by the river, the east end by the railway line to Lw@ow, the south side by the hills beyond Rekawka, the west by Podg@orze
Place. It would be crowded in there.

  But there was hope that repression would take definite form now and provide people with a basis on which to plan their restricted futures. For a man like Juda Dresner, a textile wholesaler of Stradom Street who would come to know Oskar, the past year and a half had brought a bewildering succession of decrees, intrusions, and confiscations. He had lost his business to the Trust Agency, his car, his apartment. His bank account had been frozen. His children’s schools had been closed, or else they had been expelled from them.

  The family’s jewelry had been

  seized, and their radio. He and his family were

  forbidden entry to the center of Cracow, denied any

  travel by train. They could use only

  segregated trolley cars. His wife and

  daughter and sons were subject to intermittent roundups for snow shoveling or other compulsory labor. You never knew, when you were forced into the back of a truck, if the absence would be a short or long one, or what sort of hair-trigger madmen might be supervising the work you would be forced to. Under this sort of regimen you felt that life offered no footholds, that you were slithering into a pit which had no bottom. But perhaps the ghetto was the bottom, the point at which it was possible to take organized thought.

  Besides, the Jews of Cracow were accustomed—in a way that could best be described as congenital— to the idea of a ghetto. And now that it had been decided, the very word had a soothing, ancestral ring. Their grandfathers had not been permitted to emerge from the ghetto of Kazimierz until 1867, when Franz Josef signed a decree permitting them to live wherever they wished in the city. Cynics said that the Austrians had needed to open up Kazimierz, socketed as it was in the elbow of the river so close to Cracow, so that Polish laborers could find accommodation close to their places of work. But Franz Josef was nonetheless revered by the older people from Kazimierz as energetically as he had been in the childhood household of Oskar Schindler.

  Although their liberty had come so late, there was at the same time among the older Cracow Jews a nostalgia for the old ghetto of Kazimierz. A ghetto implied certain squalors, a crowding in tenements, a sharing of bathroom facilities, disputes over drying space on clotheslines. Yet it also consecrated the Jews to their own specialness, to a richness of shared scholarship, to songs and Zionist talk, elbow to elbow, in coffeehouses rich in ideas if not in cream. Evil rumors emanated from the ghettos of @l@od@z and Warsaw, but the Podg@orze ghetto as planned was more generous with space, for if you superimposed it on a map of the Centrum, you found that the ghetto was in area about half the size of the Old City—by no means enough space, but not quite strangulation.

  There was also in the edict a sedative clause that promised to protect the Jews from their Polish countrymen. Since the early 1930’s, a willfully orchestrated racial contest had prevailed in Poland. When the Depression began and farm prices fell, the Polish government had sanctioned a range of anti-Semitic political groups of the kind that saw the Jews as the base of all their economic troubles.

  Sanacja, Marshal Pilsudski’s Moral

  Cleansing Party, made an alliance after the old

  man’s death with the Camp of National Unity, a

  right-wing Jew-baiting group. Prime Minister

  Skladkowski, on the floor of the Parliament in

  Warsaw, declared, “Economic war on the

  Jews? All right!” Rather than give the peasants

  land reform, Sanacja encouraged them to look at

  the Jewish stalls on market day as the symbol

  and total explanation of Polish rural

  poverty. There were pogroms against the Jewish

  population in a series of towns, beginning in

  Grodno in 1935. The Polish legislators

  also entered the struggle, and Jewish industries were

  starved under new laws on bank credit. Craft

  guilds closed their lists to Jewish artisans,

  and the universities introduced a quota, or

  what they themselves—strong in the classics—called

  numerus clausus aut nullus (a closed

  number or nil), on the entry of Jewish

  students. Faculties gave way to National Unity insistence that Jews be appointed special benches in the quadrangle and be exiled to the left side of the lecture halls. Commonly enough in Polish universities, the pretty and brilliant daughters of city Jewry emerged from lecture halls to have their faces savaged by a quick razor stroke delivered by a lean, serious youth from the Camp of National Unity.

  In the first days of the German Occupation, the conquerors had been astounded by the willingness of Poles to point out Jewish households, to hold a prayer-locked Jew still while a German docked the Orthodox beard with scissors or, pinking the facial flesh as well, with an infantry bayonet. In March 1941, therefore, the promise to protect the ghetto dwellers from Polish national excess fell on the ear almost credibly.

  Although there was no great spontaneous joy among the Jews of Cracow as they packed for the move to Podg@orze, there were strange elements of homecoming to it, as well as that sense of arriving at a limit beyond which, with any luck, you wouldn’t be further uprooted or tyrannized. Enough so that even some people from the villages around Cracow, from Wieliczka, from Niepolomice, from Lipnica, Murowana, and Tyniec hurried to town lest they be locked out on March 20 and find themselves in a comfortless landscape. For the ghetto was by its nature, almost by definition, habitable, even if subject to intermittent attack. The ghetto represented stasis instead of flux.

  The ghetto would introduce a minor

  inconvenience in Oskar Schindler’s life. It was

  usual for him to leave his luxury apartment in

  Straszewskiego, pass the limestone lump of the

  Wawel stuck in the mouth of the city like a cork in

  a bottle, and so roll down through Kazimierz,

  over the Kosciuszko bridge and left toward his

  factory in Zablocie. Now that route would be

  blocked by the ghetto walls. It was a minor

  problem, but it made the idea of maintaining an

  apartment on the top floor of his office building

  in Lipowa Street more reasonable. It wasn’t

  such a bad place, built in the style of

  Walter Gropius. Lots of glass and light,

  fashionable cubic bricks in the entranceway. Whenever he did travel between the city and Zablocie in those March days before the deadline, he would see the Jews of Kazimierz packing, and on Stradom Street would pass, early in the grace period, families pushing barrows piled with chairs, mattresses, and clocks toward the ghetto. Their families had lived in Kazimierz since the time it was an island separated from the Centrum by a stream called Stara Wis@la. Since, in fact, the time Kazimier the Great had invited them to Cracow when, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death. Oskar surmised that their ancestors would have turned up in Cracow like that, pushing a barrowful of bedding, more than five hundred years before. Now they were leaving, it seemed, with the same barrowful. Kazimier’s invitation had been cancelled. During those morning journeys across town, Oskar noticed that the plan was for the city trolleys to go on rolling down Lw@owska Street, through the middle of the ghetto. All walls facing the trolley line were being bricked up by Polish workmen, and where there had been open spaces, cement walls were raised. As well, the trolleys would have their doors closed as they entered the ghetto and could not stop until they emerged again in the Umwelt, the Aryan world, at the corner of Lw@owska and @sw Kingi Street. Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation z@loty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, ev
en if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.

  From March 20, Oskar’s Jewish workers would

  not receive any wages and were meant to live entirely

  by their rations. Instead he would pay a fee to SS

  headquarters in Cracow. Both Oskar and

  Madritsch were uneasy about that, for they knew the

  war would end and the slaveholders, just as in

  America, would be shamed and stripped naked. The

  dues he would pay to the police chiefs were the

  standard SS Main Administrative and

  Economic Office fees--7.50

  Reichsmarks per day for a skilled worker, 5 RM. for unskilled and women. They were, by a margin, cheaper rates than those which operated on the open labor market. But for Oskar and Julius Madritsch both, the moral discomfort outweighed the economic advantage. The meeting of his wage bill was the least of Oskar’s worries that year. Besides, he was never an ideal capitalist. His father had accused him often in his youth of being reckless with money. While he was a mere sales manager, he’d maintained two cars, hoping that Hans would get to hear of it and be shocked. Now, in Cracow, he could afford to keep a stableful—a Belgian Minerva, a Maybach, an Adler cabriolet, a BMW.

  To be a prodigal and still be wealthier than your more careful father—that was one of the triumphs Schindler wanted out of life. In boom times the cost of labor was beside the point.