Schindler's List Part 3

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.

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 quant.i.ty of product. The deal might be an investment of 50,000 zoty 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, kitchen ware was safer and more disposable than zoty.

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 Podgrze. 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 quant.i.ty of product the man was ent.i.tled 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 d.a.m.ned 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 d.a.m.n 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.

When Oskar took over the Rekord works, renaming it Deutsche Emailwaren Fabrik, there were forty-five employees involved in a modest output of kitchen ware. Early in the new year he received his first Army contracts. They were no surprise. He had cultivated various influential Wehrmacht engineers who sat on the Main Armaments Board of General Schindler's Armaments Inspectorate. He had gone to the same parties and taken them to dinner at the Cracovia Hotel. There are photographs of Oskar sitting with them at expensive tables, everyone smiling urbanely at the camera, everyone well fed, generously liquored, and the officers elegantly uniformed. Some of them put the right stamps on his bids, and wrote the crucial letters of recommendation to General Schindler, merely out of friends.h.i.+p and because they believed Oskar had the plant and would deliver. Others were influenced by gifts, the sort of gifts Oskar would always proffer to officials-cognac and carpets, jewelry and furniture and hampers of luxury food. As well as that, it became known that General Schindler was acquainted with and liked very much his enamelware-producing namesake.

Now, with the authority of his lucrative Armaments Inspectorate contracts, Oskar was permitted to expand his plant. There was room. Beyond the lobby and offices of DEF stood two large industrial lofts. Some of the floor s.p.a.ce in the building on the left as you emerged from the lobby into the interior of the factory was occupied by present production. The other building was totally empty.

He bought new machinery, some locally, some from the homeland. Apart from the military demand, there was the all-devouring black market to serve. Oskar knew now that he could be a magnate. By midsummer of 1940 he would be employing 250 Poles and would be faced with inst.i.tuting a night s.h.i.+ft. Herr Hans Schindler's farm-machinery plant in Zwittau had at the best of times employed 50. It is a sweet thing to outstrip a father whom you haven't forgiven.

At times throughout the year, Itzhak Stern would call on Schindler to arrange employment for some young Jew-a special case; an orphan from d; the daughter of a clerk in one of the departments of the Judenrat (Jewish Council). Within a few months, Oskar was employing 150 Jewish workers and his factory had a minor reputation as a haven.

It was a year, like each succeeding year for the rest of the war, when Jews would be looking for some employment considered essential to the war effort. In April, Governor General Frank had decreed an evacuation of Jews from his capital, Cracow. It was a curious decision, since the Reich authorities were still moving Jews and Poles back into the Government General at the rate of nearly 10,000 a day. Yet conditions in Cracow, Frank told his cabinet, were scandalous. He knew of German divisional commanders who had to live in apartment buildings that contained Jewish tenants. Higher officials were also subjected to the same scandalous indignity. Over the next six months, he promised, he would make Cracow judenfrei (free of Jews). There would be a permitted remnant of 5,000 to 6,000 skilled Jewish workers. All the rest were to be moved into other cities in the Government General, into Warsaw or Radom, Lublin, or Czestochowa. Jews could immigrate voluntarily to the city of their choice as long as they did it before August 15. Those still left in the city after that date would be trucked out with a small amount of luggage to whatever place suited the administration. From November 1, said Hans Frank, it would be possible for the Germans of Cracow to breathe "good German air," to walk abroad without seeing the streets and lanes "crawling with Jews."

Frank would not manage that year to reduce the Jewish population to quite so low a level; but when his plans were first announced, there was a rush among the Jews of Cracow, especially among the young, to acquire skilled qualifications. Men like Itzhak Stern, official and unofficial agents of the Judenrat, had already developed a list of sympathizers, Germans to whom they could appeal. Schindler was on that list; so was Julius Madritsch, a Viennese who had recently managed to get himself released from the Wehrmacht and taken up the post of Treuhnder of a plant manufacturing military uniforms. Madritsch could see the benefits of Armaments Inspectorate's contracts and now intended to open a uniform factory of his own in the suburb of Podgrze. In the end he would make an even larger fortune than Schindler, but in the annus mirabilis of 1940 he was still on a salary. He was known to be humane-that was all.

By November 1, 1940, Frank had managed to move 23,000 Jewish volunteers out of Cracow. Some of them went to the new ghettos in Warsaw and d. The gaps at table, the grieving at railway stations can be imagined, but people took it meekly, thinking, We'll do this, and that will be the brunt of what they ask. Oskar knew it was happening, but, like the Jews themselves, hoped it was a temporary excess.

That year would very likely be the most industrious of Oskar's life-a year spent building the place up from a bankrupt manufactory to a company government agencies could take seriously. As the first snows fell, Schindler noticed and was irritated when, on any given day, 60 or more of his Jewish employees would be absentees. They would have been detained by SS squads on the way to work and employed in clearing snow. Herr Schindler visited his friend Toffel at SS headquarters in Pomorska Street to complain. On one day, he told Toffel, he had 125 absentees.

Toffel confided in him. "You've got to understand that some of these fellows here don't give a d.a.m.n about production. To them it's a matter of national priority that Jews be made to shovel snow. I don't understand it myself . . . it's got a ritual significance for them, Jews shoveling snow. And it's not just you, it's happening to everyone."

Oskar asked if all the others were complaining too. Yes, said Toffel. However, he said, an economic big shot from the SS Budget and Construction Office had come for lunch in Pomorska and said that to believe the Jewish skilled worker had a place in Reich economics was treasonable. "I think you're going to have to put up with a lot of snow shoveling yet, Oskar."

Oskar, for the moment, a.s.sumed the stance of the outraged patriot, or perhaps of the outraged profiteer. "If they want to win the war," said Oskar, "they'd have to get rid of SS men like that."

"Get rid of them?" asked Toffel. "For Christ's sake, they're the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds who're on top."

As a result of such conversations, Oskar became an advocate of the principle that a factory owner should have unimpeded access to his own workers, that these workers should have access to the plant, that they should not be detained or tyrannized on their way to and from the factory. It was, in Oskar's eyes, a moral axiom as much as an industrial one. In the end, he would apply it to its limit at Deutsche Email Fabrik.

SOME PEOPLE FROM THE BIG cities-from Warsaw and d with their ghettos and Cracow with Frank's commitment to making it judenfrei-went to the countryside to lose themselves among the peasants. The Rosner brothers, Cracovian musicians who would come to know Oskar well, settled in the old village of Tyniec. It was on a pretty bend of the Vistula, and an old Benedictine abbey on a limestone cliff hung above it. It was anonymous enough for the Rosners, though. It had a few Jewish storekeepers and Orthodox artisans, with whom nightclub musicians had little to converse about. But the peasants, busy with the tedium of the harvest, were as pleased as the Rosners could have hoped to find musicians in their midst.

They'd come to Tyniec not from Cracow, not from that great marshaling point outside the botanical gardens in Mogilska Street where young SS men pushed people onto trucks and called out bland and lying promises about the later delivery of all adequately labeled baggage. They had come in fact from Warsaw, where they had been enjoying an engagement at the Basilisk. They had left the day before the Germans sealed up the Warsaw ghetto-Henry and Leopold and Henry's wife, Manci, and five-year-old son, Olek.

The idea of a south Polish village like Tyniec, not far from their native Cracow, appealed to the brothers. It offered the option, should conditions improve, of catching a bus into Cracow and finding work. Manci Rosner, an Austrian girl, had brought with her her sewing machine, and the Rosners set up a little clothing business in Tyniec. In the evenings they played in the taverns and became a sensation in a town like that. Villages welcome and support occasional wonders, even Jewish ones. And the fiddle was, of all instruments, most venerated in Poland.

One evening a traveling Volksdeutscher (German-speaking Pole) from Poznan heard the brothers playing outside the inn. The Volksdeutscher was a munic.i.p.al official from Cracow, one of those Polish Germans in whose name Hitler had taken the country in the first place. The Volksdeutscher told Henry that the mayor of Cracow, Obersturmbannfhrer Pavlu, and his deputy, the renowned skier Sepp Rhre, would be visiting the countryside at harvest time, and he would like to arrange for them to hear such an accomplished pair as the Rosners.

On an afternoon when the bound sheaves lay drowsing in fields as quiet and as abandoned as on Sunday, a convoy of limousines wound through Tyniec and up a rise to the villa of an absentee Polish aristocrat. On the terrace, the dapper Rosner brothers waited, and when all the ladies and gentlemen had been seated in a room that might once have been used for b.a.l.l.s, they were invited to perform. Henry and Leopold felt both exultation and fear at the seriousness with which Obersturmbannfhrer Pavlu's party had geared themselves for their playing. The women wore white dresses and gloves, the military officials full dress, the bureaucrats their winged collars. When people went to such trouble, it was easier to disappoint them. For a Jew, even to impose a cultural disappointment on the regime was a serious crime.

But the audience loved them. They were a characteristically gemtlich crowd; they loved Strauss, the confections of Offenbach and Lehar, Andre Messager and Leo Fall. At request time they grew mawkish.

And as Henry and Leopold performed, the ladies and gentlemen drank champagne from long-stemmed flutes brought in by hamper.

Once the official recital had finished, the brothers were taken down the hill to where the peasants and the soldiers of the escort had been gathered. If there was to be some crude racial demonstration, it would take place here. But again, once the brothers had climbed onto a wagon and looked the crowd in the eye, Henry knew they would be safe. The pride of the peasants, partly a national thing-the Rosners being for the night a credit to Polish culture-all that protected them. It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Manci, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.

When it was finished, a middle-aged SS NCO-a Rottenfhrer (a junior noncommissioned SS rank) perhaps-Henry not being as familiar as he might become with the gradations of SS rank-approached them as they stood by the wagon receiving congratulations. He nodded to them and barely smiled. "I hope you have a nice harvest holiday," he said, bowed, and left.

The brothers stared at each other. As soon as the SS man was out of hearing, they gave in to the temptation to discuss his meaning. Leopold was convinced. "It's a threat," he said. It went to show what they had feared in their marrow when the Volksdeutsche official first spoke to them-that these days it didn't do to stand out, to acquire a distinctive face.

That was life in the country in 1940. The curtailment of a career, the rustic tedium, the scratching out of a trade, the occasional terror, the pull of that bright core called Cracow. To that, the Rosners knew, they would eventually return.

- Emilie had returned home in the autumn, and when Stern next came to Schindler's apartment it was Ingrid who brought the coffee. Oskar made no secret of his weaknesses, and never seemed to think that ascetic Itzhak Stern needed any apologia for Ingrid's presence. Similarly, when the coffee was finished, Oskar went to the liquor cabinet and brought back a fresh bottle of brandy, setting it down on the table between his seat and Stern's, as if Stern were really likely to help him drink it.

Stern had come that evening to tell Oskar that a family whom we shall call the Cs1 were spreading stories about him, old David and young Leon C, saying even on the streets in Kazimierz-let alone in parlors-that Oskar was a German gangster, a thug. When Stern pa.s.sed on these accusations to Oskar, he didn't use terms quite as vivid as that.

Oskar knew Stern wasn't looking for a response, that he was just pa.s.sing on intelligence. But of course he felt he had to respond anyway.

"I could spread stories about them," said Oskar. "They're robbing me blind. Ask Ingrid if you like."

Ingrid was the Cs' supervisor. She was a benign Treuhnder and, being only in her twenties, commercially inexperienced. The rumor was that Schindler himself had got the girl appointed so that he would have an a.s.sured outlet for his kitchenware. The Cs, however, still did pretty well what they wanted with their company. If they resented the idea that it was held in trust by the occupying power, no one could blame them for that.

Stern waved Oskar's suggestion away. Who was he to want to grill Ingrid? It wasn't much use to compare notes with the girl anyhow.

"They run rings around Ingrid," said Oskar. They turned up at Lipowa Street for delivery of their orders and altered the invoices on the spot and took away more than they had paid for. "She says it's all right," they'd tell the Schindler employees. "He's arranged it with Ingrid."

The son had in fact been gathering crowds and telling them that Schindler had had the SS beat him up. But his story varied-the beating was supposed to have occurred at Schindler's factory, in a storeroom from which young C emerged with a black eye and broken teeth. Then it was supposed to have occurred on Lima-nowskiego, in front of witnesses. A man called F, an employee of Oskar's and a friend of the Cs, had said he'd heard Oskar stamping up and down in his office in Lipowa Street and threatening to kill old David C. Then Oskar was said to have driven around to Stradom and raided the C cash register, to have stuffed his pockets with currency and told them that there was a New Order in Europe, and then to have beaten up old David in his office.

Was it possible that Oskar could let fly at old David C and land him in bed with bruises? Was it likely he would call on friends in the police to a.s.sault Leon? On one level Oskar and the Cs were gangsters, selling tons of kitchen ware illegally, without sending records of sales to the Transferstelle, without use of the required merchandizing coupons called Bezugschein. On the black market, the dialogue was primitive and tempers were short. Oskar admitted he'd raged into the Cs' showroom and called father and son thieves and indemnified himself out of the till for the kitchenware the Cs had taken without authorization. Oskar admitted he'd punched young Leon. But that was the limit of his admissions.

And the Cs, whom Stern had known since childhood-they had one of those reputations. Not exactly criminal, but sharp in dealing and, significant in this case, with a reputation for squealing when caught.

Stern knew Leon C's bruises did exist. Leon wore them down the street and was willing to elaborate on them. The SS beating did take place somewhere or other, but it could have had a dozen causes. Stern not only did not believe that Oskar had begun asking the SS for that sort of favor, but also had the sense that to believe or disbelieve what was said to have happened in this case was irrelevant to his own wider purposes. It would become relevant only when and if Herr Schindler established a brutal pattern. For Stern's purposes, occasional lapses did not count. Had Oskar been without sin, this apartment would not exist in its present form, and neither would Ingrid be waiting in the bedroom.

And it is yet again one of those things which must be said, that Oskar would save all of them-Mr. and Mrs. C, Leon C, Mr. H, Miss M, old C's secretary-and that they would always admit that, but that they would also and always stick to their story of the bruises.

That evening Itzhak Stern also brought news of Marek Biberstein's jail sentence. He had got two years in the prison in Montelupich Street, this Marek Biberstein who was the president of the Judenrat, or who had been until his arrest. In other cities the Judenrat was already cursed by the general Jewish population, for its main work had become the drawing up of lists for forced labor, for transfers to camps. The Judenrats were regarded by the German administration as organs of its will, but in Cracow, Marek Biberstein and his cabinet still saw themselves as buffers between the office of the military mayor of Cracow, Schmid and later Pavlu, on one hand, and the Jewish inhabitants of the city on the other. In the Cracow German newspaper of March 13, 1940, a Dr. Dietrich Redecker said that on a visit to the Judenrat office he was struck by the contrast between its carpet and plush chairs and the poverty and squalor of the Jewish quarter in Kazimierz. But Jewish survivors do not remember the first Cracow Judenrat as men who cut themselves off from the people. Hungry for revenue, however, they had made the mistake the Judenrats of d and Warsaw had made before them, permitting the affluent to buy their way off forced-labor lists, forcing the poor onto the roster in return for soup and bread. But even later, in 1941, Biberstein and his council still had the respect of the Jews of Cracow.

That first members.h.i.+p of the Judenrat consisted of twenty-four men, most of them intellectuals. Each day, on his way to Zablocie, Oskar pa.s.sed their corner office in Podgrze 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 doc.u.mentation, 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 zoty 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 pa.s.s on the money to a series of officials beginning with Obersturmfhrer (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 zoty on such a fragile hope. "Reichert is a crook," he murmured. Just ten minutes before, they had been discussing whether he and the Cs 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.

1. The reason an initial is employed here instead of a fictionalized name is that in Cracow the whole range of Polish Jewish names were found, and that to employ any name other than the Cs' real one might cause offense to the memory of some vanished family or to some living friend of Oskar's.

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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 Ma.s.s at the Church of St. Mary. There was a s.p.a.ce above the high altar where Wit Stwosz's wooden tryptych had until weeks ago diverted wors.h.i.+pers 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 ant.i.tank sh.e.l.ls. Oskar was not as interested in sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 Podgrze 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 Lww, the south side by the hills beyond Rek.a.w.ka, the west by Podgrze 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 s.p.a.ce on clotheslines. Yet it also consecrated the Jews to their own specialness, to a richness of shared scholars.h.i.+p, to songs and Zionist talk, elbow to elbow, in coffeehouses rich in ideas if not in cream. Evil rumors emanated from the ghettos of d and Warsaw, but the Podgrze ghetto as planned was more generous with s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 1930s, 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 Sklad-kowski, 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 cla.s.sics-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 Podgrze, 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, pa.s.s 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 gla.s.s and light, fas.h.i.+onable 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 pa.s.s, early in the grace period, families pus.h.i.+ng 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 Wisa. 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, pus.h.i.+ng 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 Lwwska 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 s.p.a.ces, 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 Lwwska and w 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 zoty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even 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.

It was that way for Madritsch too. Julius Madritsch's uniform mill stood on the western side of the ghetto, a mile or so from Oskar's enamelworks. He was doing so well that he was negotiating to open a similar plant in Tarnow. He too was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, and his credit was so good that he had received a loan of a million zoty from the Bank Emisyjny (Issue Bank).

Whatever ethical queasiness they felt, it is not likely that either entrepreneur, Oskar or Julius, felt a moral obligation to avoid employing additional Jews. That was a stance, and since they were pragmatists, stances weren't their style. In any case, Itzhak Stern as well as Roman Ginter, a businessman and representative of the Relief Office of the Judenrat, called on Oskar and Julius both and begged them to employ more Jews, as many as could be fitted in. The objective was to give the ghetto an economic permanence. It was almost axiomatic, Stern and Ginter considered at that stage, that a Jew who had an economic value in a precocious empire hungry for skilled workers was safe from worse things. And Oskar and Madritsch agreed.

- So for two weeks the Jews trundled their barrows through Kazimierz and over the bridge into Podgrze. Middle-cla.s.s families whose Polish servants had come with them to help push the cart. At the bottom of the barrows lay the remaining brooches, the fur coats, under mattresses and kettles and skillets. Crowds of Poles on Stradom and Starovislna Streets jeered and hurled mud. "The Jews are going, the Jews are going. Goodbye, Jews."