Schindler's List Part 11

The irony was that Pemper's photographic memory would in the end, more than the memory of any other prisoner, bring about the hanging of Amon in Cracow. But Pemper did not believe such an era would come. In 1944, if he'd had to guess who'd be the most likely victim of his near-perfect recall, he would have had to say Mietek Pemper himself.

Pemper was meant to be the backup typist. For confidential doc.u.ments, Amon was to use Frau Kochmann, a woman not nearly as competent as Mietek and slow at dictation. Sometimes Amon would break the rule and let young Pemper take confidential dictation. And Mietek, even while he sat across Amon's desk with the pad on his knee, could not stop contradictory suspicions from distracting him. The first was that all these inside reports and memoranda, whose details he was retaining, would make him a prime witness on the remote day when he and Amon stood before a tribunal. The other suspicion was that Amon would, in the end, have to erase him as one later would a cla.s.sified tape.

Nonetheless, Mietek prepared each morning not only his own sets of typing paper, carbons, and duplicates, but a dozen for the German girl. After the girl had done her typing, Pemper would pretend to destroy the carbons, but in fact would keep and read them. He kept no written records, but he had had this reputation for memory since school days. He knew that if that tribunal ever met, if he and Amon sat in the body of the court, he would astound the Commandant with the precise dating of his evidence.

Pemper saw some astonis.h.i.+ng cla.s.sified doc.u.ments. He read, for example, memoranda on the flogging of women. Camp commanders were to be reminded that it should be done to maximum effect. It was demeaning to involve SS personnel, and therefore Czech women were to be flogged by Slovak women, Slovaks by Czechs. Russians and Poles were to be bracketed for the same purposes. Commandants were to use their imagination in exploiting other national and cultural differences.

Another bulletin reminded them that they did not hold in their own persons the right to impose the death sentence. Commandants could seek authorization by telegram or letter to the Reich Security Main Office. Amon had done this in the spring with two Jews who'd escaped from the subcamp at Wieliczka and whom he proposed to hang. A telegram of permission had returned from Berlin, signed, Pemper noticed, by Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office.

Now, in April, Pemper read a memorandum from Gerhard Maurer, the Labor Allocation Chief of General Glcks's Section D. Maurer wanted Amon to tell him how many Hungarians could be held temporarily at Paszw. They were meant ultimately to go to the German Armament Works, DAW, which was a subsidiary of Krupp making artillery-sh.e.l.l fuses in the enormous complex at Auschwitz. Given that Hungary had only recently been taken over as a German Protectorate, these Hungarian Jews and dissidents were in a better state of health than those who had had years of ghettoization and prison life. They were therefore a windfall for the factories of Auschwitz. Unfortunately, accommodation at DAW was not yet ready for them, and if the commandant of Paszw would take up to 7,000, pending the proper arrangements, Section D would be extremely grateful.

Goeth's answer, either seen or typed by Pemper, was that Paszw was up to capacity and that there was no building s.p.a.ce left inside the electric fences. However, Amon could accept up to 10,000 transit prisoners if (a) he were permitted to liquidate the unproductive element inside the camp; and (b) he were at the same time to impose double bunking. Maurer wrote in reply that double bunking could not be permitted in summer for fear of typhus, and that ideally, according to the regulations, there should be a minimum 3 cubic meters of air per person. But he was willing to authorize Goeth to undertake the first option. Section D would advise Auschwitz-Birkenau-or at least, the extermination wing of that great enterprise-to expect a s.h.i.+pment of reject prisoners from Paszw. At the same time, Ostbahn transport would be arranged with cattle cars, of course, run up the spur from the main line to the very gate of Paszw.

Amon therefore had to conduct a sorting-out process inside his camp.

With the blessing of Maurer and Section D, he would in a day abolish as many lives as Oskar Schindler was, by wit and reckless spending, harboring in Emalia. Amon named his selection session Die Gesundheitaktion, the Health Action.

He managed it as one would manage a country fair. When it began, on the morning of Sunday, May 7, the Appellplatz was hung with banners: "FOR EVERY PRISONER, APPROPRIATE WORK!" Loudspeakers played ballads and Strauss and love songs. Beneath them was set a table where Dr. Blancke, the SS physician, sat with Dr. Leon Gross and a number of clerks. Blancke's concept of "health" was as eccentric as that of any doctor in the SS. He had rid the prison clinic of the chronically ill by injecting benzine into their bloodstreams. These injections could not by anyone's definition be called mercy killings. The patient was seized by convulsions which ended in a choking death after a quarter of an hour. Marek Biberstein, once president of the Judenrat and now, after his two-year imprisonment in Montelupich Street, a citizen of Paszw, had suffered heart failure and been brought to the Krankenstube. Before Blancke could get to him with a benzine syringe, Dr. Idek Schindel, uncle of that Genia whose distant figure had galvanized Schindler two years before, had come to Biberstein's bedside with a number of colleagues. One had injected a more merciful dose of cyanide.

Today, flanked by the filing cabinets of the entire prison population, Blancke would deal with the prisoners a barracks at a time, and when he finished with one battery of cards it would be taken away and replaced by the next.

As they reached the Appellplatz, prisoners were told to strip. They were lined up naked and run back and forth in front of the doctors. Blancke and Leon Gross, the collaborating Jewish physician, would make notations on the card, point at this prisoner, call on that one to verify his name. Back the prisoners would run, the physicians looking for signs of disease or muscular weakness. It was an odd and humiliating exercise. Men with dislocated backs (Pfefferberg, for example, whose back Hujar had thrown out with the blow of a whip handle); women with chronic diarrhea, red cabbage rubbed into their cheeks to give them color-all of them running for their lives and understanding that it was so. Young Mrs. Kinstlinger, who'd sprinted for Poland at the Berlin Olympics, knew that all that had been just a game. This was the true contest. With your stomach turning and your breath thin, you ran-beneath the throb of the lying music-for your golden life.

No prisoner found out the results until the following Sunday when, under the same banners and band music, the ma.s.s of inmates was again a.s.sembled. As names were read out and the rejects of the Gesundheitaktion were marched to the eastern end of the square, there were cries of outrage and bewilderment. Amon had expected a riot and had sought the help of the Wehrmacht garrison of Cracow, who were on standby in case of a prisoner uprising. Nearly 300 children had been discovered during the inspection the previous Sunday, and as they were now dragged away, the protests and wailings of parents were so loud that most of the garrison, together with Security Police detachments called in from Cracow, had to be thrown into the cordon separating the two groups. This confrontation lasted for hours, the guards forcing back surges of demented parents and telling the usual lies to those who had relatives among the rejects. Nothing had been announced, but everyone knew that those down there had failed the test and had no future. Blurred by waltzes and comic songs from the loudspeakers, a pitiable babel of messages was shouted from one group to the other. Henry Rosner, himself in torment, his son, Olek, in fact hidden somewhere in the camp, had the bizarre experience of facing a young SS man who, with tears in his eyes, denounced what was happening and made a pledge to volunteer for the Eastern Front. But officers shouted that unless people showed a little discipline, they would order their men to open fire. Perhaps Amon hoped that a justifiable outbreak of shooting would further reduce the overcrowding.

At the end of the process, 1,400 adults and 268 children stood, hedged in by weapons, at the eastern rim of the Appellplatz, ready for fast s.h.i.+pment to Auschwitz. Pemper would see and memorize the figures, which Amon would consider disappointing. Though it was not the number for which Amon had hoped, it would create immediate room for a large temporary intake of Hungarians.

In Dr. Blancke's card-file system, the children of Paszw had not been as precisely registered as the adults. Many of them chose to spend both these Sundays in hiding, both they and their parents knowing instinctively that their age and the absence of their names and other details from the camp's doc.u.mentation would make them obvious targets of the selection process.

Olek Rosner hid in the ceiling of a hut on the second Sunday. There were two other children with him all day above the rafters, and all day they kept the discipline of silence, all day held their bladders among the lice and the little packages of prisoners' belongings and the rooftop rats. For the children knew as well as any adult that the SS and the Ukrainians were wary of the s.p.a.ces above the ceiling. They believed them typhus-ridden, and had been informed by Dr. Blancke that it took but a fragment of louse feces in a crack in your skin to bring on epidemic typhus. Some of Paszw's children had been housed for months near the men's prison in the hut marked ACHTUNG TYPHUS.

This Sunday, for Olek Rosner, Amon's health Aktion was far more perilous than typhus-bearing lice. Other children, some of the 268 separated out of the ma.s.s that day, had in fact begun the Aktion in hiding. Each Paszw child, with that same toughness of mind, had chosen a favorite hiding place. Some favored depressions beneath huts, some the laundry, some a shed behind the garage. Many of these hideouts had been discovered either this Sunday or last, and no longer offered refuge.

A further group had been brought without suspicion to the Appellplatz. There were parents who knew this or that NCO. It was as Himmler had once complained, for even SS Oberscharfhrers who did not flinch in the act of execution had their favorites, as if the place were a school playground. If there was a question about the children, some parents thought, you could appeal to an SS man who knew you.

The previous Sunday a thirteen-year-old orphan thought he'd be safe because he had, at other roll calls, pa.s.sed for a young man. But naked, he wasn't able to argue away the childlikeness of his body. He had been told to dress and been marked down for the children's group. Now, as parents at the other end of the Appellplatz cried out for their rounded-up children and while the loudspeakers brayed forth a sentimental song called "Mammi, kauf mir ein Pferdchen" (Mummy, buy me a pony), the boy simply pa.s.sed from one group to another, moved with that infallible instinct which had once characterized the movement of the red-capped child in Plac ZG.o.dy. And as with Redcap, no one had seen him. He stood, a plausible adult among the others, as the hateful music roared and his heart sought to beat its way through his rib cage. Then, faking the cramps of diarrhea, he asked a guard to let him go to the latrine.

The long latrines lay beyond the men's camp, and arriving there the boy stepped over the plank on which men sat while defecating. An arm either side of the pit, he lowered himself, trying to find knee- and toeholds in either wall. The stench blinded him, and flies invaded his mouth and ears and nostrils. As he entered the larger foulness and touched the bottom of the pit, he seemed to hear what he believed to be a hallucinatory murmur of voices behind the rage of flies. Were they behind you? said one voice. And another said, Dammit, this is our place!

There were ten children in there with him.

- Amon's report made use of the compound word Sonderbehandlung-Special Treatment. It was a term that would become famous in later years, but this was the first time that Pemper had come across it. Of course, it had a sedative, even medical ring, but Mietek could tell by now that medicine was not involved.

A telegram Amon dictated that morning to be transmitted to Auschwitz gave more than a hint of its meaning. Amon explained that to make escape more difficult he had insisted that those selected for Special Treatment should drop any remnants of civilian clothing they still possessed at the rail siding and should put on striped prison clothes there. Since a great shortage of such garments prevailed, the stripes in which the Paszw candidates for Special Treatment turned up at Auschwitz should be sent back at once to Concentration Camp Paszw for reuse.

And all the children left in Paszw, of whom the greatest number were those who shared the latrine with the tall orphan, hid out or impersonated adults until later searches discovered them and took them to the Ostbahn for the slow day's journey 60 kilometers to Auschwitz. The cattle cars were used that way all through high summer, taking troops and supplies east to the stalemated lines near Lww and, on the return trip, wasting time at sidings while SS doctors watched ceaseless lines of the naked run before them.

OSKAR, SITTING IN AMON'S OFFICE, the windows flung open to a breathless summer's day, had the impression from the start that this meeting was a fake. Perhaps Madritsch and Bosch felt the same, for their gaze kept drifting away from Amon toward the limestone trolleys outside the window, toward any pa.s.sing truck or wagon. Only Untersturmfhrer Leo John, who took notes, felt the need to sit up straight and keep his top b.u.t.ton done up.

Amon had described it as a security conference. Though the Front had now been stabilized, he said, the advance of the Russian center to the suburbs of Warsaw had encouraged partisan activity all over the Government General. Jews who heard of it were encouraged to attempt escapes. They did not know, of course, Amon pointed out, that they were better off behind the wire than exposed to those Jew-killers among the Polish partisans. In any case, everyone had to beware of partisan attack from outside and, worst of all, of collusion between the partisans and the prisoners.

Oskar tried to imagine the partisans invading Paszw, letting all the Poles and Jews pour out, making of them an instant army. It was a daydream, and who could believe it? But there was Amon, straining to convince them all that he believed it. It had a purpose, this little act. Oskar was sure of that.

Bosch said, "If the partisans are coming out to your place, Amon, I hope it's not a night when I've been invited."

"Amen, amen," murmured Schindler.

After the meeting, whatever it meant, Oskar took Amon to his car, parked outside the Administration Building. He opened the trunk. Inside lay a richly tooled saddle worked with designs characteristic of the Zakopane region in the mountains south of Cracow. It was necessary for Oskar to keep priming Amon with such gifts even now that payment for the forced labor of DEF no longer went anywhere near Hauptsturmfhrer Goeth but, instead, was sent directly to the Cracow area representative of General Pohl's Oranienburg headquarters.

Oskar offered to drive both Amon and his saddle down to the Commandant's villa.

On such a blistering day, some of the trolley-pushers were showing a little less than the required zeal. But the saddle had mollified Amon, and in any case, it was no longer permitted for him to jump from a car and shoot people down in their tracks. The car rolled past the garrison barracks and came to the siding where a string of cattle cars stood. Oskar could tell, by the haze hanging above the cars and blending with and wavering in the heat rebounding from the roofs, that they were full. Even above the sound of the engine, you could hear the mourning from inside, the pleas for water.

Oskar braked his car and listened. This was permitted him, in view of the splendid multizoty saddle in the trunk. Amon smiled indulgently at his sentimental friend. They're partly Paszw people, said Amon, and people from the work camp at Szebnie. And Poles and Jews from Montelupich. They're going to Mauthausen, Amon said whimsically. They're complaining now? They don't know what complaint is . . . .

The roofs of the cars were bronzed with heat. You have no objection, said Oskar, if I call out your fire brigade?

Amon gave a What-will-you-think-of-next? sort of laugh. He implied that he wouldn't let anyone else summon the firemen, but he'd tolerate Oskar because Oskar was such a character and the whole business would make a good dinner-party anecdote.

But as Oskar sent Ukrainian guards to ring the bell for the Jewish firemen, Amon was bemused. He knew that Oskar knew what Mauthausen meant. If you hosed the cars for people, you were making them promises about a future. And would not such promises const.i.tute, in anyone's code, a true cruelty? So disbelief mingled with tolerant amus.e.m.e.nt in Amon as the hoses were run out and jets of water fell hissing on the scalding cartops. Neuschel also came down from the office to shake his head and smile as the people inside the cars moaned and roared with grat.i.tude. Grn, Amon's bodyguard, stood chatting with Untersturmfhrer John and clapped his side and hooted as the water rained down. Even at full extension the hoses reached only halfway down the line of cars. Next, Oskar was asking Amon for the loan of a truck or wagon and of a few Ukrainians to drive into Zablocie and fetch the fire hoses from DEF. They were 200-meter hoses, Oskar said. Amon, for some reason, found that sidesplitting. "Of course I'll authorize a truck," said Amon. Amon was willing to do anything for the sake of the comedy of life.

Oskar gave the Ukrainians a note for Bankier and Garde. While they were gone, Amon was so willing to enter the spirit of the event that he permitted the doors of the cars to be opened and buckets of water to be pa.s.sed in and the dead, with their pink, swollen faces, to be lifted out. And still, all around the railway siding stood amused SS officers and NCOs. "What does he think he's saving them from?"

When the large hoses from DEF arrived and all the cars had been drenched, the joke took on new dimensions. Oskar, in his note to Bankier, had instructed that the manager also go into Oskar's own apartment and fill a hamper with liquor and cigarettes, some good cheeses and sausages, and so on. Oskar now handed the hamper to the NCO at the rear of the train. It was an open transaction, and the man seemed a little embarra.s.sed at the largesse, shoving it quickly into the rear van in case one of the officers of KL Paszw reported him. Yet Oskar seemed to be in such curious favor with the Commandant that the NCO listened to him respectfully. "When you stop near stations," said Oskar, "will you open the car doors?"

Years later, two survivors of the transport, Doctors Rubinstein and Feldstein, would let Oskar know that the NCO had frequently ordered the doors opened and the water buckets regularly filled on the tedious journey to Mauthausen. For most of the transport, of course, that was no more than a comfort before dying.

As Oskar moves along the string of cars, accompanied by the laughter of the SS, bringing a mercy which is in large part futile, it can be seen that he's not so much reckless anymore but possessed. Even Amon can tell that his friend has s.h.i.+fted into a new gear. All this frenzy about getting the hoses as far as the farthest car, then bribing an SS man in full view of the SS personnel-it would take just a s.h.i.+ft in degree or so in the laughter of Scheidt or John or Hujar to bring about a ma.s.s denunciation of Oskar, a piece of information the Gestapo could not ignore. And then Oskar would go into Montelupich and, in view of previous racial charges against him, probably on to Auschwitz. So Amon was horrified by the way Oskar insisted on treating those dead as if they were poor relations traveling third cla.s.s but bound for a genuine destination.

Some time after two, a locomotive hauled the whole miserable string of cattle cars away toward the main line, and all the hoses could again be wound up. Schindler delivered Amon and his saddle to the Goeth villa. Amon could see that Oskar was still preoccupied and, for the first time in their a.s.sociation, gave his friend some advice about living. You have to relax, said Amon. You can't go running after every trainload that leaves this place.

- Adam Garde, engineer and prisoner of Emalia, also saw symptoms of this s.h.i.+ft in Oskar. On the night of July 20, an SS man had come into Garde's barracks and roused him. The Herr Direktor had called the guardhouse and said it was necessary to see engineer Garde, professionally, in his office.

Garde found Oskar listening to the radio, his face flushed, a bottle and two gla.s.ses in front of him on the table. Behind the desk these days was a relief map of Europe. It had never been there in the days of German expansion, but Oskar seemed to take a sharp interest in the shrinkage of the German Fronts. Tonight he had the radio tuned to the Deutschlandsender, not-as was usually the case-to the BBC. Inspirational music was being played, as it often was as prelude to important announcements.

Oskar seemed to be listening avidly. When Garde came in, he stood up and hustled the young engineer to a seat. He poured cognac and pa.s.sed it hurriedly across the desk. "There's been an attempt on Hitler's life," said Oskar. It had been announced earlier in the evening, and the story then was that Hitler had survived. They'd promised that he would soon be speaking to the German people. But it hadn't happened. Hours had pa.s.sed and they hadn't been able to produce him. And they kept playing a lot of Beethoven, the way they had when Stalingrad fell.

Oskar and Garde sat together for hours. A seditious event, a Jew and a German listening together-all night if necessary-to discover if the Fhrer had died. Adam Garde, of course, suffered that same breathless surge of hope. He noticed that Oskar kept gesturing limply, as if the possibility that the Leader was dead had unstrung his muscles. He drank devoutly and urged Garde to drink up. If it was true, said Oskar, then Germans, ordinary Germans like himself, could begin to redeem themselves. Purely because someone close to Hitler had had the guts to remove him from the earth. It's the end of the SS, said Oskar. Himmler will be in jail by morning.

Oskar blew clouds of smoke. Oh, my G.o.d, he said, the relief to see the end of this system!

The 10 P.M. news brought only the earlier statement. There had been an attempt on the Fhrer's life but it had failed and the Fhrer would be broadcasting in a few minutes. When, as the hour pa.s.sed, Hitler did not speak, Oskar turned to a fantasy which would be popular with many Germans as the war drew to a close. "Our troubles are over," he said. "The world's sane again. Germany can ally itself with the West against the Russians."

Garde's hopes were more modest. At worst, he hoped for a ghetto which was a ghetto in the old Franz Josef sense.

And as they drank and the music played, it seemed more and more reasonable that Europe would yield them that night the death vital to its sanity. They were citizens of the continent again; they were not the prisoner and the Herr Direktor. The radio's promises to produce a message from the Fhrer recurred, and every time, Oskar laughed with increasing point.

Midnight came and they paid no attention anymore to the promises. Their very breath was lighter in this new post-Fhrer Cracow. By morning, they surmised, there would be dancing in every square, and it would go unpunished. The Wehrmacht would arrest Frank in the Wawel and encircle the SS complex in Pomorska Street.

A little before 1 A.M., Hitler was heard broadcasting from Rastenberg. Oskar had been so convinced that that voice was a voice he would never need to hear again that for a few seconds he did not recognize the sound, in spite of its familiarity, thinking it just another temporizing Party spokesman. But Garde heard the speech from its first word, and knew whose voice it was.

"My German comrades!" it began. "If I speak to you today, it is first in order that you should hear my voice and should know that I am unhurt and well, and, second, that you should know of a crime unparalleled in German history."

The speech ended four minutes later with a reference to the conspirators. "This time we shall settle accounts with them in the manner to which we National Socialists are accustomed."

Adam Garde had never quite bought the fantasy Oskar had been pus.h.i.+ng all evening. For Hitler was more than a man: he was a system with ramifications. Even if he died, it was no guarantee the system would alter its character. Besides, it was not in the nature of a phenomenon such as. .h.i.tler to perish in the s.p.a.ce of a single evening.

But Oskar had been believing in the death with a feverish conviction for hours now, and when it turned out to be an illusion, it was young Garde who found himself cast as the comforter, while Oskar spoke with an almost operatic grief. "All our vision of deliverance is futile," he said. He poured another gla.s.s of cognac each, then pushed the bottle across the desk, opening his cigarette box. "Take the cognac and some cigarettes and get some sleep," he said. "We'll have to wait a little longer for our freedom."

In the confusion of the cognac, of the news and of its sudden reversal in the small hours, Garde did not think it strange that Oskar was talking about "our freedom," as if they had an equivalent need, were both prisoners who had to wait pa.s.sively to be liberated. But back in his bunk Garde thought, It's amazing that Herr Direktor should have talked like that, like someone easily given to fantasies and fits of depression. Usually, he was so pragmatic.

- Pomorska Street and the camps around Cracow crawled with rumors, that late summer, of some imminent rearrangement of prisoners. The rumors troubled Oskar in Zablocie, and at Paszw, Amon got unofficial word that the camps would be disbanded.

In fact that meeting about security had to do not with saving Paszw from partisans, but with the coming closure of the camp. Amon had called Madritsch and Oskar and Bosch out to Paszw and held the meeting just to give himself protective coloration. It then became plausible for him to drive into Cracow and call on Wilhelm Koppe, the new SS police chief of the Government General. Amon sat on the far side of Koppe's desk wearing a fake frown, cracking his knuckles as if from the stress of a besieged Paszw. He told Koppe the same story he'd given Oskar and the others-that partisan organizations had sprung up inside the camp, that Zionists within the wire had had communication with radicals of the Polish People's Army and the Jewish Combat Organization. As the Obergruppenfhrer could appreciate, that sort of communication was difficult to stamp out-messages could come in in a smuggled loaf of bread. But at the first sign of active rebellion, he-Amon Goeth-as Commandant, would need to be able to take summary action. The question Amon wanted to ask was, if he fired first and did the paperwork for Oranienburg afterward, would the distinguished Obergruppenfhrer Koppe stand by him?

No problem, said Koppe. He didn't really approve of bureaucrats either. In years past, as police chief of the Wartheland, he'd commanded the fleet of extermination trucks which carried Untermenschen out into the countryside and which then, running the engines at full throttle, pumped the exhaust back into the locked interior. That too was an off-the-cuff operation, not permitting precise paperwork. Of course, you have to use your judgment, he told Amon. And if you do, I'll back you.

Oskar had sensed at the meeting that Amon was not really worried about partisans. Had he known then that Paszw was to be liquidated, he would have understood the deeper meaning of Amon's performance. For Amon was worried about Wilek Chilowicz, his Jewish chief of camp police. Amon had often used Chilowicz as an agent on the black market. Chilowicz knew Cracow. He knew where he could sell the flour, rice, b.u.t.ter the Commandant held back from the camp supplies. He knew the dealers who would be interested in product from the custom jewelry shop staffed by interns like Wulkan. Amon was worried about the whole Chilowicz clique: Mrs. Marysia Chilowicz, who enjoyed conjugal privileges; Mietek Finkelstein, an a.s.sociate; Chilowicz' sister Mrs. Ferber; and Mr. Ferber. If there had been an aristocracy inside Paszw, it had been the Chilowiczes. They had had power over prisoners, but their knowledge was double-edged: they knew as much about Amon as they did about some miserable machinist in the Madritsch factory. If, when Paszw closed, they were s.h.i.+pped to another camp, Amon knew they would try to barter their inside knowledge of his rackets as soon as they found themselves in the wrong line. Or more likely, as soon as they were hungry.

Of course, Chilowicz was uneasy too, and Amon could sense in him the doubt that he would be allowed to leave Paszw. Amon decided to use Chilowicz' very concern as a lever. He called Sowinski, an SS auxiliary recruited from the High Tatras of Czechoslovakia, into his office for a conference. Sowinski was to approach Chilowicz and pretend to offer him an escape deal. Amon was sure that Chilowicz would be eager to negotiate.

Sowinski went and did it well. He told Chilowicz he could get the whole clan out of the camp in one of the large fuel-burning trucks. You could sit half a dozen people in the wood furnace if you were running on gas.

Chilowicz was interested in the proposition. Sowinski would of course need to deliver a note to friends on the outside, who would provide a vehicle. Sowinski would deliver the clan to the rendezvous point in the truck. Chilowicz was willing to pay in diamonds. But, said Chilowicz, as an earnest of their mutual trust, Sowinski must provide a weapon.

Sowinski reported the meeting to the Commandant, and Amon gave him a .38-caliber pistol with the pin filed down. This was pa.s.sed to Chilowicz, who of course had neither need nor opportunity to test-fire it. Yet Amon would be able to swear to both Koppe and Oranienburg that he had found a weapon on the prisoner.

It was a Sunday in mid-August when Sowinski met the Chilowiczes in the building-material shed and hid them in the truck. Then he drove down Jerozolimska to the gate. There should be routine formalities there; then the truck could roll out into the countryside. In the empty furnace, in the pulses of the five escapees was the febrile, almost insupportable hope of leaving Amon behind.

At the gate, however, were Amon and Amthor and Hujar, and the Ukrainian Ivan Scharujew. A leisurely inspection was made. Lumbering with half-smiles across the bed of the truck, the gentlemen of the SS saved the wood furnace till last. They mimed surprise when they discovered the pitiable Chilowicz clan sardine-tight in the wood hole. As soon as Chilowicz had been dragged out, Amon "found" the illegal gun tucked into his boot. Chilowicz' pockets were laden with diamonds, bribes paid him by the desperate inmates of the camp.

Prisoners at their day of rest heard that Chilowicz was under sentence down there at the gate. The news made for the same awe, the confusion of emotions that had operated the night the year before when Symche Spira and his OD had been executed. Nor could any prisoner decipher what it meant to his own chances.

The Chilowicz crowd were executed one at a time with pistols. Amon, very yellow now from liver disease, at the height of his obesity, wheezing like an elderly uncle, put the muzzle to Chilowicz' neck. Later the corpses were displayed in the Appellplatz with placards tied to their chests: "THOSE WHO VIOLATE JUST LAWS CAN EXPECT A SIMILAR DEATH."

That, of course, was not the moral the prisoners of Paszw took from the sight.

- Amon spent the afternoon drafting two long reports, one to Koppe, one to General Glcks's Section D, explaining how he had saved Paszw from an insurgency in its first phase-the one in which a group of key conspirators escaped from the camp-by executing the plot's leaders. He did not finish revising either draft till 11 P.M. Frau Kochmann was too slow for such late work, and so the Commandant had Mietek Pemper roused from his barracks and brought to the villa. In the front parlor, Amon stated levelly that he believed the boy had been party to Chilowicz' escape attempt. Pemper was astounded and did not know how to answer. Looking around him for some sort of inspiration, he saw the seam of his pants leg, which had come unsewn. How could I pa.s.s on the outside in this sort of clothing? he asked.

The balance of frank desperation in his answer satisfied Amon. He told the boy to sit down and instructed him how the typing was to be set out and the pages numbered. Amon hit the papers with his spatulate fingertips. "I want a first-cla.s.s job done." And Pemper thought, That's the way of it-I can die now for being an escapee, or later in the year for having seen these justifications of Amon's.

When Pemper was leaving the villa with the drafts in his hand, Goeth followed him out onto the patio and called a last order. "When you type the list of insurgents," Amon called companionably, "I want you to leave room above my signature for another name to be inserted."

Pemper nodded, discreet as any professional secretary. He stood just a half-second, trying for inspiration, some fast answer that would reverse Amon's order about the extra s.p.a.ce. The s.p.a.ce for his name. Mietek Pemper. In that hateful torrid silence of Sunday evening in Jerozolimska, nothing plausible came to him.

"Yes, Herr Commandant," said Pemper.

As Pemper stumbled up the road to the Administration Building, he remembered a letter Amon had had him type earlier that summer. It had been addressed to Amon's father, the Viennese publisher, and was full of filial concern for an allergy which had troubled the old man that spring. Amon hoped that it had lifted by now. The reason Pemper remembered that letter out of all the others was that half an hour before he'd been called into Amon's office to take it down, the Commandant had dragged a girl filing clerk outside and executed her. The juxtaposition of the letter and the execution proved to Pemper that, for Amon, murder and allergies were events of equal weight. And if you told a tractable stenographer to leave a s.p.a.ce for his name, it was a matter of course that he left it.

Pemper sat at the typewriter for more than an hour, but in the end left the s.p.a.ce for himself. Not to do that would be even more suddenly fatal. There had been a rumor among Stern's friends that Schindler had some movement of people in mind, some rescue or other, but tonight rumors from Zablocie meant nothing anymore. Mietek typed; Mietek left in each report the s.p.a.ce for his own death. And all his remembrance of the Commandant's criminal carbons which he'd so industriously memorized-all that was made futile by the s.p.a.ce he left.

When both typescripts were word-perfect, he returned to the villa. Amon kept him waiting by the French windows while he himself sat in the parlor reading the doc.u.ments. Pemper wondered if his own body would be displayed with some declamatory lettering: "So DIE ALL JEWISH BOLSHEVISTS!"

At last Amon appeared at the windows. "You may go to bed," he said.

"Herr Commandant?"

"I said, you may go to bed."

Pemper went. He walked less steadily now. After what he had seen, Amon could not let him live. But perhaps the Commandant believed there would be leisure to kill him later. In the meantime, life for a day was still life.

The s.p.a.ce, as it proved, was for an elderly prisoner who, by unwise dealings with men like John and Hujar, had let it be known he had a cache of diamonds somewhere outside the camp. While Pemper sank into the sleep of the reprieved, Amon had the old man summoned to the villa, offered him his life for the diamonds' location, was shown the place, and, of course, executed the old man and added his name to the reports to Koppe and Oranienburg-to his humble claim of having snuffed out the spark of rebellion.

THE ORDERS, LABELED OKH (ARMY HIGH COMMAND), already sat on Oskar's desk. Because of the war situation, the Director of Armaments told Oskar, KL Paszw and therefore the Emalia camp were to be disbanded. Prisoners from Emalia would be sent to Paszw, awaiting relocation. Oskar himself was to fold his Zablocie operation as quickly as possible, retaining on the premises only those technicians necessary for dismantling the plant. For further instructions, he should apply to the Evacuation Board, OKH, Berlin.

Oskar's initial reaction was a cool rage. He resented the tone, the sense of a distant official trying to absolve him from further concern. There was a man in Berlin who, not knowing of the black-market bread that bound Oskar and his prisoners together, thought it was reasonable for a factory owner to open the gate and let the people be taken. But the worst arrogance was that the letter did not define "relocation." Governor General Frank was more honest than that and had made a notorious speech a little earlier in the year. "When we ultimately win the war, then as far as I'm concerned, Poles, Ukrainians, and all that rabble idling around here can be made into mincemeat, into anything you like." Frank had the courage to put an accurate name to the process. In Berlin, they wrote "relocation" and believed themselves excused.

Amon knew what "relocation" meant and, during Oskar's next visit to Paszw, freely told him so. All Paszw men would be sent to Grss-Rosen. The women would go to Auschwitz. Grss-Rosen was a vast quarry camp in Lower Silesia. The German Earth & Stone Works, an SS enterprise with branches throughout Poland, Germany, and the conquered territories, consumed the prisoners of Grss-Rosen. The processes at Auschwitz were, of course, more direct and modern.

When the news of the abolition of Emalia reached the factory floor and ran through the barracks, some Schindler people thought it was the end of all sanctuary. The Perlmans, whose daughter had come out of Aryan cover to plead for them, packed their blankets and talked philosophically to their bunk neighbors. Emalia has given us a year's rest, a year's soup, a year's sanity. Perhaps it might be enough. But they expected to die now. It was apparent from their voices.

Rabbi Levartov was resigned too. He was going back to unfinished business with Amon. Edith Liebgold, who'd been recruited by Bankier for the night s.h.i.+ft in the first days of the ghetto, noticed that although Oskar spent hours talking solemnly with his Jewish supervisors, he did not come up to people and make dizzying promises. Perhaps he was as baffled and diminished by these orders from Berlin as the rest. So he wasn't quite the prophet he'd been the night she'd first come here more than three years ago.

Just the same, at the end of summer, as his prisoners packed their bundles and were marched back to Paszw, there was a rumor among them that Oskar had spoken of buying them back. He had said it to Garde; he had said it to Bankier. You could almost hear him saying it-that level certainty, the paternal rumble of the throat. But as you went up Jerozolimska Street, past the Administration Building, staring in newcomer's disbelief at the hauling gangs from the quarry, the memory of Oskar's promises was very nearly just another burden.

The Horowitz family were back in Paszw. Their father, Dolek, had last year maneuvered them to Emalia, but here they were back. The six-year-old boy, Richard; the mother, Regina. Niusia, eleven now, was again sewing bristles onto brush paddles and watching, from the high windows, the trucks roll up to the Austrian hill fort, and the black cremation smoke rise over the hill. As Paszw was when she had left it last year, so it continued. It was impossible for her to believe that it would ever end.

But her father believed that Oskar would make a list of people and extricate them. Oskar's list, in the mind of some, was already more than a mere tabulation. It was a List. It was a sweet chariot which might swing low.

Oskar raised the idea of taking Jews away from Cracow with him one night at Amon's villa. It was a still night at the end of summer. Amon seemed pleased to see him. Because of Amon's health-both Doctors Blancke and Gross warning him that if he didn't cut his eating and drinking he would die-there had not been so many visitors to the villa of late.

They sat together, drinking at Amon's new rate of moderation. Oskar sprang the news on him. He wanted to move his factory to Czechoslovakia. He wanted to take his skilled workers with him. He might need other skills from among the Paszw workers too. He would seek the help of the Evacuation Board in finding an appropriate site, somewhere down in Moravia, and of the Ostbahn in making the s.h.i.+ft southwest from Cracow. He let Amon know that he'd be very grateful for any support. The mention of grat.i.tude always excited Amon. Yes, he said, if Oskar could get all the cooperation he needed from the boards involved, Amon would then allow a list of people to be drawn up.

When that was settled, Amon wanted a game of cards. He liked blackjack, a version of the French vingt-et-un. It was a hard game for junior officers to fake losing without being obvious. It did not permit of too much sycophancy. It was therefore true sport, and Amon preferred it. Besides, Oskar wasn't interested in losing this evening. He would be paying enough to Amon for that list.

The Commandant began by betting modestly, in 100-zoty bills, as if his doctors had advised moderation in this as well. He kept busting however, and when the beginning stake had been raised to 500 z., Oskar got a "natural," an ace and a jack, which meant that Amon had to pay him double the stake.

Amon was disconsolate about that, but not too testy. He called for Helen Hirsch to bring coffee. She came in, a parody of a gentleman's servant, crisply dressed still in black but her right eye blinded by swelling. She was so small that Amon would need to stoop to beat her up. The girl knew Oskar now, but did not look at him. Nearly a year past, he had promised to get her out. Whenever he came to the villa he managed to slip down the corridor to the kitchen and ask her how she was. It meant something, but it had not touched the substance of her life. A few weeks back, for example, when the soup hadn't been the correct temperature-Amon was pernickety about soup, flyspecks in the corridor, fleas on dogs-the Commandant had called for Ivan and Petr and told them to take her to the birch tree in the garden and shoot her. He'd watched from the French windows as she walked in front of Petr's Mauser, pleading under her breath with the young Ukrainian. "Petr, who's this you're going to shoot? It's Helen. Helen who gives you cakes. You couldn't shoot Helen, could you?" And Petr answering in the same manner, through clenched teeth, "I know, Helen. I don't want to. But if I don't, he'll kill me." She'd bent her head toward the spotted birch bark. Having often asked Amon why he wouldn't kill her, she wanted to die simply, to hurt him by her willing acceptance. But it wasn't possible. She was trembling so hard that he could have seen it. Her legs were shaking. And then she'd heard Amon call from the windows, "Bring the b.i.t.c.h back. There's plenty of time to shoot her. In the meantime, it might still be possible to educate her."

Insanely, in between his spates of savagery, there were brief phases in which he tried to play the benign master. He had said to her one morning, "You're really a very well-trained servant. If after the war you need a reference, I shall be happy to give you one." She knew it was just talk, a daydream. She turned her deaf ear, the one whose eardrum he had perforated with a blow. Sooner or later, she knew, she would die of his customary fury.

In a life like hers, a smile from visitors was only a momentary comfort. Tonight she placed the enormous silver pot of coffee beside the Herr Commandant-he still drank it by the bucket in cups laden with sugar-made her obeisance, and left.

Within an hour, when Amon was 3,700 z. in debt to Oskar and complaining sourly about his luck, Oskar suggested a variation on the betting. He would need a maid in Moravia, he said, when he moved to Czechoslovakia. There you couldn't get them as intelligent and well trained as Helen Hirsch. They were all country girls. Oskar suggested therefore that he and Amon play one hand, double or nothing. If Amon won, Oskar would pay him 7,400 z. If he hit a "natural," it would be 14,800 z. But if I win, said Oskar, then you give me Helen Hirsch for my list.

Amon wanted to think about that. Come on, said Oskar, she's going to Auschwitz anyhow. But there was an attachment there. Amon was so used to Helen that he couldn't easily wager her away. When he'd thought of an end for her, it had probably always been that he would finish her by his own hand, with personal pa.s.sion. If he played cards for her and lost, he would be under pressure, as a Viennese sportsman, to give up the pleasure of intimate murder.

Much earlier in Paszw's history, Schindler had asked that Helen be a.s.signed to Emalia. But Amon had refused. It seemed only a year ago that Paszw would exist for decades, and that the Commandant and his maid would grow old together, at least until some perceived fault in Helen brought about the abrupt end of the connection. This time a year ago, no one would have believed that the relations.h.i.+p would be resolved because the Russians were outside Lww. As for Oskar's part in this proposal, he had made it lightly. He did not seem to see, in his offer to Amon, any parallel with G.o.d and Satan playing cards for human souls. He did not ask himself by what right he made a bid for the girl. If he lost, his chance of extracting her some other way was slim. But all chances were slim that year. Even his own.