Schindler's List Part 4

Beyond the bridge a fancy wooden gate greeted the new citizens of the ghetto. White with scalloped ramparts which gave it an Arabesque look, it had two wide arches for the trolleys coming from and going to Cracow, and at the side was a white sentry box. Above the arches, a t.i.tle in Hebrew sought to rea.s.sure. JEWISH TOWN, it proclaimed. High barbed-wire fences had been strung along the front of the ghetto, facing the river, and open s.p.a.ces were sealed with round-topped cement slabs nine feet tall, resembling strings of gravestones for the anonymous.

At the ghetto gate the trundling Jew was met by a representative of the Judenrat Housing Office. If he had a wife and large family, a man might be a.s.signed two rooms and have the use of a kitchen. Even so, after the good living of the Twenties and Thirties, it was painful to have to share your private life with families of different rituals, of another, distasteful musk and habits. Mothers screamed, and fathers said things could be worse and sucked on hollow teeth and shook their heads. In the one room, the Orthodox found the liberals an abomination.

On March 20, the movement was complete. Everyone outside the ghetto was forfeit and in jeopardy. Inside, for the moment, there was living s.p.a.ce.

Twenty-three-year-old Edith Liebgold was a.s.signed a first-floor room to share with her mother and her baby. The fall of Cracow eighteen months back had put her husband into a mood verging on despair. He'd wandered away from home as if he wanted to look into the courses open to him. He had ideas about the forests, about finding a safe clearing. He had never returned.

From her end window Edith Liebgold could see the Vistula through the barbed-wire barricade, but her path to other parts of the ghetto, especially to the hospital in Wegierska Street, took her through Plac ZG.o.dy, Peace Square, the ghetto's only square. Here, on the second day of her life inside the walls, she missed by twenty seconds being ordered into an SS truck and taken to shovel coal or snow in the city. It was not just that work details often, according to rumor, returned to the ghetto with one or more fewer members than when they had left. More than this sort of odds, Edith feared being forced into a truck when, half a minute earlier, you'd thought you were going to Pankiewicz' pharmacy, and your baby was due to be fed in twenty minutes. Therefore she went with friends to the Jewish Employment Office. If she could get s.h.i.+ft work, her mother would mind the baby at night.

The office in those first days was crowded. The Judenrat had its own police force now, the Ordnungsdienst (or OD), expanded and regularized to keep order in the ghetto, and a boy with a cap and an armband organized waiting lines in front of the office.

Edith Liebgold's group were just inside the door, making lots of noise to pa.s.s the time, when a small middle-aged man wearing a brown suit and a tie approached her. They could tell that they'd attracted him with their racket, their brightness. At first they thought he intended to pick Edith up.

"Look," he said, "rather than wait . . . there is an enamel factory over in Zablocie."

He let the address have its effect. Zablocie was outside the ghetto, he was telling them. You could barter with the Polish workers there. He needed ten healthy women for the night s.h.i.+ft.

The girls made faces, as if they could afford to choose work and might even turn him down. Not heavy, he a.s.sured them. And they'll teach you on the job. His name, he said, was Abraham Bankier. He was the manager. There was a German owner, of course. What sort of German? they asked. Bankier grinned as if he suddenly wanted to fulfill all their hopes. Not a bad sort, he told them.

That night Edith Liebgold met the other members of the enamel-factory night s.h.i.+ft and marched across the ghetto toward Zablocie under the guard of a Jewish OD. In the column she asked questions about this Deutsche Email Fabrik. They serve a soup with plenty of body, she was told. Beatings? she asked. It's not that sort of place, they said. It's not like Beckmann's razor-blade factory; more like Madritsch. Madritsch is all right, and Schindler too.

At the entrance to the factory, the new night-s.h.i.+ft workers were called out of the column by Bankier and taken upstairs and past vacant desks to a door marked HERR DIREKTOR. Edith Liebgold heard a deep voice tell them all to come in. They found the Herr Direktor seated on the corner of his desk, smoking a cigarette. His hair, somewhere between blond and light brown, looked freshly brushed; he wore a double-breasted suit and a silk tie. He looked exactly like a man who had a dinner to go to but had waited specially to have a word with them. He was immense; he was still young. From such a Hitlerite dream, Edith expected a lecture on the war effort and increasing production quotas.

"I wanted to welcome you," he told them in Polish. "You're part of the expansion of this factory." He looked away; it was even possible he was thinking, Don't tell them that-they've got no stake in the place.

Then, without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, "You'll be safe working here. If you work here, then you'll live through the war." Then he said good night and left the office with them, allowing Bankier to hold them back at the head of the stairs so that the Herr Direktor could go down first and get behind the wheel of his automobile.

The promise had dazed them all. It was a G.o.dlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.

The new women of DEF took their job instruction in a pleasant daze. It was as if some mad old Gypsy with nothing to gain had told them they would marry a count. The promise had forever altered Edith Liebgold's expectation of life. If ever they did shoot her, she would probably stand there protesting, "But the Herr Direktor said this couldn't happen."

The work made no mental demands. Edith carried the enamel-dipped pots, hanging by hooks from a long stick, to the furnaces. And all the time she pondered Herr Schindler's promise. Only madmen made promises as absolute as that. Without blinking. Yet he wasn't mad. For he was a businessman with a dinner to go to. Therefore, he must know. But that meant some second sight, some profound contact with G.o.d or devil or the pattern of things. But again, his appearance, his hand with the gold signet ring, wasn't the hand of a visionary. It was a hand that reached for the wine; it was a hand in which you could somehow sense the latent caresses. And so she came back to the idea of his madness again, to drunkenness, to mystical explanations, to the technique by which the Herr Direktor had infected her with certainty.

Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of pa.s.sing on conviction, then there was no G.o.d and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and the odds weren't good.

THAT SPRING Schindler left his factory in Cracow and drove west in a BMW over the border and through the awakening spring forests to Zwittau. He had Emilie to see, and his aunts and sister. They had all been allies against his father; they were all tenders of the flame of his mother's martyrdom. If there was a parallel between his late mother's misery and his wife's, Oskar Schindler-in his coat with the fur lapels, guiding the custom-made wheel with kid-gloved hands, reaching for another Turkish cigarette on the straight stretches of thawing road in the Jeseniks-did not see it. It was not a child's business to see these things. His father was a G.o.d and subject to tougher laws.

He liked visiting the aunts-the way they raised their hands palm upward in admiration of the cut of his suit. His younger sister had married a railway official and lived in a pleasant apartment provided by the rail authorities. Her husband was an important man in Zwittau, for it was a rail-junction town and had large freight yards. Oskar drank tea with his sister and her husband, and then some schnapps. There was a faint sense of mutual congratulation: the Schindler children hadn't turned out so badly.

It was, of course, Oskar's sister who had nursed Frau Schindler in her last illness and who had now been visiting and speaking to their father in secret. She could do no more than make certain hints in the direction of a reconciliation. She did that over the tea and was answered by growls.

Later, Oskar dined at home with Emilie. She was excited to have him there for the holiday. They could attend the Easter ceremonies together like an old-fas.h.i.+oned couple. Ceremonies was right, for they danced around each other ceremoniously all evening, attending to each other at table like polite strangers. And in their hearts and minds, both Emilie and Oskar were amazed by this strange marriage disability-that he could offer and deliver more to strangers, to workers on his factory floor than he could to her.

The question that lay between them was whether Emilie should join him in Cracow. If she gave up the apartment in Zwittau and put in other tenants, she would have no escape at all from Cracow. She believed it her duty to be with Oskar; in the language of Catholic moral theology, his absence from her house was a "proximate occasion of sin." Yet life with him in a foreign city would be tolerable only if he was careful and guarded and sensitive to her feelings. The trouble with Oskar was that you could not depend on him to keep his lapses to himself. Careless, half-tipsy, half-smiling, he seemed sometimes to think that if he really liked some girl, you had to like her too.

The unresolved question about her going to Cracow lay so oppressively between them that when dinner was finished he excused himself and went to a cafe in the main square. It was a place frequented by mining engineers, small businessmen, the occasional salesman turned Army officer. Gratefully he saw some of his biker friends there, most of them wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. He began drinking cognac with them. Some expressed surprise that a big husky chap like Oskar was not in uniform.

"Essential industry," he growled. "Essential industry."

They reminisced about their motorcycle days. There were jokes about the one he'd put together out of spare parts when he was in high school. Its explosive effects. The explosive effects of his big 500cc Galloni. The noise level in the cafe mounted; more cognac was being shouted for. From the dining annex old school friends appeared, that look on their faces as if they had recognized a forgotten laugh, as in fact they had.

Then one of them got serious. "Oskar, listen. Your father's having dinner in there, all by himself." Oskar Schindler looked into his cognac. His face burned, but he shrugged.

"You ought to talk to him," said someone. "He's a shadow, the poor old b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

Oskar said that he had better go home. He began to stand, but their hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down again. "He knows you're here," they said. Two of them had already gone through to the annex and were persuading old Hans Schindler over the remnants of his dinner. Oskar, in a panic, was already standing, searching in his pocket for the checkroom disk, when Herr Hans Schindler, his expression pained, appeared from the dining room propelled gently along by two young men. Oskar was halted by the sight. In spite of his anger at his father, he'd always imagined that if any ground was covered between himself and Hans, he'd be the one who'd have to cover it. The old man was so proud. Yet here he was letting himself be dragged to his son.

As the two of them were pushed toward each other, the old man's first gesture was an apologetic half-grin and a sort of shrug of the eyebrows. The gesture, by its familiarity, took Oskar by storm. I couldn't help it, Hans was saying. The marriage and everything, your mother and me, it all went according to laws of its own. The idea behind the gesture might have been an ordinary one, but Oskar had seen an identical expression on someone's face already that evening-on his own, as he shrugged to himself, facing the mirror in the hallway of Emilie's apartment. The marriage and everything, it's all going according to laws of its own. He had shared that look with himself, and here-three cognacs later-his father was sharing it with him.

"How are you, Oskar?" asked Hans Schindler. There was a dangerous wheeze along the edge of the words. His father's health was worse than he remembered it.

So Oskar decided that even Herr Hans Schindler was human-a proposition he had not been able to swallow at teatime at his sister's; and he embraced the old man, kissing him on the cheek three times, feeling the impact of his father's bristles, and beginning to weep as the corps of engineers and soldiers and past motorcyclists applauded the gratifying scene.

THE COUNCILMEN of Artur Rosenzweig's Judenrat, who still saw themselves as guardians of the breath and health and bread ration of the internees of the ghetto, impressed upon the Jewish ghetto police that they were also public servants. They tended to sign up young men of compa.s.sion and some education. Though at SS headquarters the OD was regarded as just another auxiliary police force which would take orders like any police force, that was not the picture most OD men lived by in the summer of '41.

It cannot be denied that as the ghettos grew older, the OD man became increasingly a figure of suspicion, a supposed collaborator. Some OD men fed information to the underground and challenged the system, but perhaps a majority of them found that their existence and that of their families depended increasingly on the cooperation they gave the SS. To honest men, the OD would become a corrupter. To crooks it was an opportunity.

But in its early months in Cracow, it seemed a benign force. Leopold Pfefferberg could stand as a token of the ambiguity of being a member. When all education for Jews, even that organized by the Judenrat, was abolished in December 1940, Poldek had been offered a job managing the waiting lines and keeping the appointment book in the Judenrat housing office. It was a part-time job, but gave him a cover under which he could travel around Cracow with some freedom. In March 1941, the OD itself was founded with the stated purpose of protecting the Jews entering the Podgrze ghetto from other parts of the city. Poldek accepted the invitation to put on the cap of the OD. He believed he understood its purpose-that it was not only to ensure rational behavior inside the walls but also to achieve that correct degree of grudging tribal obedience which, in the history of European Jewry, has tended to ensure that the oppressors will go away more quickly, will become forgetful so that, in the interstices of their forgetfulness, life may again become feasible.

At the same time Pfefferberg wore his OD cap, he ran illegal goods-leatherwork, jewelry, furs, currency-in and out of the ghetto gate. He knew the Wachtmeister at the gate, Oswald Bosko, a policeman who had become so rebellious against the regime that he let raw materials into the ghetto to be made up into goods-garments, wine, hardware-and then let the goods out again to be sold in Cracow, all without even asking for a bribe.

On leaving the ghetto, the officials at the gate, the lounging schmalzownicks, or informers, Pfefferberg would take off the Judaic armband in some quiet alley before moving on to business in Kazimierz or the Centrum.

On the city walls, above fellow pa.s.sengers' heads in the trolleys, he would read the posters of the day: the razor-blade advertis.e.m.e.nts, the latest Wawel edicts on the harboring of Polish bandits, the slogan "JEWS-LICE-TYPHUS," the billboard depicting a virginal Polish girl handing food to a hook-nosed Jew whose shadow was the shadow of the Devil. "WHOEVER HELPS A JEW HELPS SATAN." Outside groceries hung pictures of Jews mincing rats into pies, watering milk, pouring lice into pastry, kneading dough with filthy feet. The fact of the ghetto was being validated in the streets of Cracow by poster art, by copywriters from the Propaganda Ministry. And Pfefferberg, with his Aryan looks, would move calmly beneath the artwork, carrying a suitcase full of garments or jewelry or currency.

Pfefferberg's greatest coup had been last year, when Governor Frank had withdrawn 100- and 500-zoty notes from circulation and demanded that existing notes of those denominations be deposited with the Reich Credit Fund. Since a Jew could exchange only 2,000 z., it meant that all notes held secretly-in excess of 2,000 and against the regulations-would no longer have any value. Unless you could find someone with Aryan looks and no armband who was willing on your behalf to join the long lines of Poles in front of the Reich Credit Bank. Pfefferberg and a young Zionist friend gathered from ghetto residents some hundreds of thousands of zoty in the proscribed denominations, went off with a suitcase full of notes, and came back with the approved Occupation currency, minus only the bribes they'd had to pay to the Polish Blue Police at the gate.

That was the sort of policeman Pfefferberg was. Excellent by the standards of Chairman Artur Rosenzweig; deplorable by the standards of Pomorska.

- Oskar visited the ghetto in April-both from curiosity and to speak to a jeweler he had commissioned to make two rings. He found it crammed beyond what he had imagined-two families to a room unless you were lucky enough to know someone in the Judenrat. There was a smell of clogged plumbing, but the women held off typhus by arduous scrubbing and by boiling clothes in courtyards. "Things are changing," the jeweler confided in Oskar. "The OD have been issued truncheons." As the administration of the ghetto, like that of all ghettos in Poland, had pa.s.sed from the control of Governor Frank to that of Gestapo Section 4B, the final authority for all Jewish matters in Cracow was now SS Oberfhrer Julian Schemer, a hearty man of somewhere between forty-five and fifty, who in civilian clothes and with his baldness and thick lenses looked like a nondescript bureaucrat. Oskar had met him at German c.o.c.ktail parties. Schemer talked a great deal-not about the war but about business and investment. He was the sort of functionary who abounded in the middle ranks of the SS, a sport, interested in liquor, women, and confiscated goods. He could sometimes be discovered wearing the smirk of his unexpected power like a childish jam stain in the corner of the mouth. He was always convivial and dependably heartless. Oskar could tell that Scherner favored working the Jews rather than killing them, that he would bend rules for the sake of profit, but that he would fulfill the general drift of SS policy, however that might develop.

Oskar had remembered the police chief last Christmas, sending him half a dozen bottles of cognac. Now that the man's power had expanded, he would rate more this year.

It was because of this s.h.i.+ft of power-the SS becoming not simply the arm of policy but the makers of it as well-that beneath the high June sun the OD was taking on a new nature. Oskar, merely by driving past the ghetto, became familiar with a new figure, a former glazier named Symche Spira, the new force in the OD. Spira was of Orthodox background and by personal history as well as temperament despised the Europeanized Jewish liberals who were still found on the Judenrat Council. He took his orders not from Artur Rosenzweig but from Untersturmfhrer Brandt and SS headquarters across the river. From his conferences with Brandt, he returned to the ghetto with increased knowingness and power. Brandt had asked him to set up and lead a Political Section OD, and he recruited various of his friends for it. Their uniform ceased to be the cap and armband and became instead gray s.h.i.+rt, cavalry breeches, Sam Browne belt, and s.h.i.+ny SS boots.

Spira's Political Section would go beyond the demands of grudging cooperation and would be full of venal men, men with complexes, with close-held grudges about the social and intellectual slights they'd received in earlier days from respectable middle-cla.s.s Jewry. Apart from Spira, there were Szymon Spitz and Marcel Zellinger, Ignacy Diamond, David Gutter the salesman, Forster and Grner and Landau. They settled in to a career of extortion and of making out for the SS lists of unsatisfactory or seditious ghetto dwellers.

Poldek Pfefferberg now wanted to escape the force. There was a rumor that the Gestapo would make all OD men swear an oath to the Fhrer, after which they would have no grounds for disobedience. Poldek did not want to share a profession with gray-s.h.i.+rted Spira or with Spitz and Zellinger, the makers of lists. He went down the street to the hospital at the corner of Wegierska to speak to a gentle physician named Alexander Biberstein, the official physician to the Judenrat. The doctor's brother Marek had been that first president of the Council and was presently doing time in mournful Montelupich prison for currency violations and attempting to bribe officials.

Pfefferberg begged Biberstein to give him a medical certificate so that he could leave the OD. It was difficult, Biberstein said. Pfefferberg did not even look sick. It would be impossible for him to feign high blood pressure. Dr. Biberstein instructed him in the symptoms of a bad back. Pfefferberg took to reporting for duty severely stooped and using a cane.

Spira was outraged. When Pfefferberg had first asked him about leaving the OD, the police chief had p.r.o.nounced-like a commander of some palace guard-that the only way out was on your s.h.i.+eld. Inside the ghetto, Spira and his infantile friends were playing a game of Elite Corps. They were the Foreign Legion; they were the praetorians. "We'll send you to the Gestapo doctor," screamed Spira.

Biberstein, who had been aware of the shame in young Pfefferberg, had tutored him well. Poldek survived the Gestapo doctor's inspection and was discharged from the OD as suffering from an ailment likely to inhibit his good performance in crowd control. Spira, saying goodbye to officer Pfefferberg, expressed a contemptuous enmity.

The next day, Germany invaded Russia. Oskar heard the news illicitly on the BBC and knew that the Madagascar Plan was finished now. It would be years before there were s.h.i.+ps for a solution like that. Oskar sensed that the event changed the essence of SS planning, for everywhere now the economists, the engineers, the planners of movements of people, the policemen of every stripe put on the mental habits appropriate not only to a long war, but to a more systematic pursuit of a racially impeccable empire.

IN AN ALLEY OFF LIPOWA, its rear pointing toward the workshop of Schindler's enamel plant, stood the German Box Factory. Oskar Schindler, always restless and hungry for company, used to stroll over there sometimes and chat with the Treuhnder, Ernst Kuhnpast, or to the former owner and unofficial manager, Szymon Jereth. Jereth's Box Factory had become the German Box Factory two years back according to the usual arrangement-no fees being paid, no doc.u.ments to which he was signatory having been drawn up.

The injustice of that did not particularly worry Jereth anymore. It had happened to most of the people he knew. What worried him was the ghetto. The fights in the kitchens, the pitiless communality of life there, the stench of bodies, the lice that jumped onto your suit from the greasy jacket of the man whose shoulder you brushed on the stairs. Mrs. Jereth, he told Oskar, was deeply depressed. She'd always been used to nice things; she'd come from a good family in Kleparz, north of Cracow. And when you think, he told Oskar, that with all the pineboard I could build myself a place there. He pointed to the wasteland behind his factory. Workers played football there, vast, hard-running games in plentiful s.p.a.ce. Most of it belonged to Oskar's factory, the rest to a Polish couple named Bielski. But Oskar did not point that out to poor Jereth, or say either that he too had been preoccupied by that vacant s.p.a.ce. Oskar was more interested in the implied offer of lumber. You can "alienate" as much pineboard as that? You know, said Jereth, it's only a matter of paperwork.

They stood together at Jereth's office window, considering the wasteland. From the workshop came the sound of hammering and whining power saws. I would hate to lose contact with this place, Jereth told Oskar. I would hate just to vanish into some labor camp and have to wonder from a distance what the d.a.m.n fools were doing here. You can understand that, surely, Herr Schindler?

A man like Jereth could not foresee any deliverance. The German armies seemed to be enjoying limitless success in Russia, and even the BBC was having trouble believing that they were advancing into a fatal salient. The Armament Inspectorate orders for field kitchenware kept turning up on Oskar's desk, sent on with the compliments of General Julius Schindler scribbled at the bottom of the covering letters, accompanied by the telephoned best wishes of sundry junior officers. Oskar accepted the orders and the congratulations in their own right, but took a contradictory joy from the rash letters his father was writing to him to celebrate their reconciliation. It won't last, said Schindler senior. The man [Hitler] isn't meant to last. America will come down on him in the end. And the Russians? My G.o.d, did anyone ever take the trouble to point out to the dictator just how many G.o.dless barbarians there are over there? Oskar, smiling over the letters, was not troubled by the conflicting pleasures-the commercial exhilaration of the Armaments Inspectorate contracts and the more intimate delight of his father's subversive letters. Oskar sent Hans a monthly bank draft of 1,000 RM. in honor of filial love and sedition, and for the joy of largesse.

It was a fast and, still, almost a painless year. Longer hours than Schindler had ever worked, parties at the Cracovia, drinking bouts at the jazz club, visits to the gorgeous Klonowska's apartment. When the leaves began to fall, he wondered where the year had gone. The impression of vanished time was augmented by the late summer and now by autumn rains earlier than usual. The asymmetric seasons would, by favoring the Soviets, affect the lives of all Europeans. But to Herr Oskar Schindler in Lipowa Street, weather was still simply weather.

- Then, in the b.u.t.t end of 1941, Oskar found himself under arrest. Someone-one of the Polish s.h.i.+pping clerks, one of the German technicians in the munitions section, you couldn't tell-had denounced him, had gone to Pomorska Street and given information. Two plainclothes Gestapo men drove up Lipowa Street one morning and blocked the entrance with their Mercedes as if they intended to bring all commerce at Emalia to an end. Upstairs, facing Oskar, they produced warrants ent.i.tling them to take all his business records with them. But they did not seem to have any commercial training. "Exactly what books do you want?" Schindler asked them.

"Cashbooks," said one.

"Your main ledgers," said the other.

It was a relaxed arrest; they chatted to Klonowska while Oskar himself went to get his cash journal and accounts ledger. Oskar was permitted time to scribble down a few names on a pad, supposedly the names of a.s.sociates with whom Oskar had appointments which must now be cancelled. Klonowska understood, though, that they were a list of people to be approached for help in bailing him out.

The first name on the list was that of Oberfhrer Julian Schemer; the second, that of Martin Plathe of the Abwehr in Breslau. That would be a long-distance call. The third name belonged to the supervisor of the Ostfaser works, the drunken Army veteran Franz Bosch on whom Schindler had settled quant.i.ties of illegal kitchen-ware. Leaning over Klonowska's shoulder, over her piled-up flaxen hair, he underlined Bosch's name. A man of influence, Bosch knew and advised every high official who played the black market in Cracow. And Oskar knew that this arrest had to do with the black market, whose danger was that you could always find officials ready to be bribed, but you could never predict the jealousy of one of your employees.

The fourth name on the list was that of the German chairman of Ferrum AG of Sosnowiec, the company from which Herr Schindler bought his steel. These names were a comfort to him as the Gestapo Mercedes carried him to Pomorska Street, a kilometer or so west of the Centrum. They were a guarantee that he would not vanish into the system without a trace. He was not, therefore, as defenseless as the 1,000 ghetto dwellers who had been rounded up according to Symche Spira's lists and marched beneath the frosty stars of Advent to the cattle cars at Prokocim Station. Oskar knew some heavy guns.

The SS complex in Cracow was an immense modern building, humorless, but not as portentous as the Montelupich prison. Yet even if you disbelieved the rumors of torture attached to the place, the building confused the arrestee as soon as he entered by its size, its Kafkaesque corridors, by the numb threat of the departmental names painted on the doors. Here you could find the SS Main Office, the headquarters of the Order Police, of Kripo, Sipo and Gestapo, of SS Economy and Administration, of Personnel, of Jewish Affairs, of Race and Resettlement, of the SS Court, of Operations, of SS Service, of the Reichskommissariat for the Strengthening of Germandom, of the Welfare Office for Ethnic Germans.

Somewhere in that hive a middle-aged Gestapo man, who seemed to have a more exact knowledge of accountancy than the arresting officers, began interviewing Oskar. The man's manner was half-amused, like a customs official who finds that a pa.s.senger suspected of currency smuggling is really smuggling house plants for an aunt. He told Oskar that all the enterprises involved in war production were under scrutiny. Oskar did not believe it but said nothing. Herr Schindler could understand, the Gestapo man told him, that businesses supplying the war effort had a moral duty to devote all their product to that great enterprise-and to desist from undermining the economy of the Government General by irregular dealings.

Oskar murmured away in that peculiar rumble of his which could at the same time contain threat and bonhomie. "Do you imply, Herr Wachtmeister, that there are reports that my factory does not fulfill its quotas?"

"You live very well," said the man, but with a concessive smile, and as if that were all right, it was acceptable for important industrialists to live well. And anyone who lives well, he pointed out . . . well, we have to be sure that his standard of living derives entirely from legitimate contracts.

Oskar beamed at the Gestapo man. "Whoever gave you my name," he said, "is a fool and is wasting your time."

"Who's the plant manager of DEF?" asked the Gestapo man, ignoring this.

"Abraham Bankier."

"A Jew?"

"Of course. The business used to belong to relatives of his."

These records might be adequate, said the Gestapo man. But if they wanted more, he presumed Herr Bankier could supply it.

"You mean you're going to detain me?" asked Oskar. He began to laugh. "I want to tell you now," he said, "when Oberfhrer Schemer and I are laughing about all this over a drink, I'll tell him that you treated me with the utmost courtesy."

The two who had made the arrest took him to the second floor, where he was searched and permitted to keep cigarettes and 100 z. to buy small luxuries. Then he was locked in a bedroom-one of the best they had, Oskar surmised, equipped with a washbasin and toilet and dusty draperies at the barred window-the sort of room they kept dignitaries in while interrogating them. If the dignitary was released, he could not complain about a room like this, any more than he could enthuse over it. And if he was found to be treacherous, seditious, or an economic criminal, then, as if the floor of this room opened like a trapdoor, he'd find himself waiting in an interrogation cell in the bas.e.m.e.nt, sitting motionless and bleeding in one of the series of stalls they called tramways, looking ahead to Montelupich, where prisoners were hanged in their cells. Oskar considered the door. Whoever lays a hand on me, he promised himself, I'll have him sent to Russia.

He was bad at waiting. After an hour he knocked at the door from the inside and gave the Waffen SS man who answered 50 z. to buy him a bottle of vodka. It was, of course, three times the price of liquor, but that was Oskar's method. Later in the day, by arrangement between Klonowska and Ingrid, a bag of toiletries, books, and pajamas arrived. An excellent meal was brought to him with a half-bottle of Hungarian wine, and no one came to disturb him or ask him a question. He presumed that the accountant was still slaving over the Emalia books. He would have enjoyed a radio on which to listen to the BBC news from Russia, the Far East, and the newly combatant United States, and he had the feeling that if he asked his jailers they might bring him one. He hoped the Gestapo had not moved into his apartment on Straszewskiego, to a.s.sess the furnis.h.i.+ngs and Ingrid's jewelry. But by the time he fell asleep, he'd got to the stage where he was looking forward to facing interrogators.

In the morning he was brought a good breakfast-herring, cheese, eggs, rolls, coffee-and still no one bothered him. And then the middle-aged SS auditor, holding both the cash journal and the accounts ledger, came to visit him.

The auditor wished him good morning. He hoped he had had a comfortable night. There had not been time to conduct more than a cursory examination of Herr Schindler's records, but it had been decided that a gentleman who stood so high in the opinion of so many people influential in the war effort need not be too closely looked at for the moment. We have, said the SS man, received certain telephone calls . . . . Oskar was convinced, as he thanked the man, that the acquittal was temporary. He received the ledgers and got his money handed back in full at the reception desk.

Downstairs, Klonowska was waiting for him, radiant. Her liaison work had yielded this result, Schindler coming forth from the death house in his double-breasted suit and without a scratch. She led him to the Adler, which they had let her park inside the gate. Her ridiculous poodle sat on the back seat.

THE CHILD ARRIVED AT THE Dresners', on the eastern side of the ghetto, late in the afternoon. She had been returned to Cracow by the Polish couple who had been taking care of her in the country. They had been able to talk the Polish Blue Police at the ghetto gate into allowing them entry on business, and the child pa.s.sed as theirs.

They were decent people, and shamefaced at having brought her up to Cracow and the ghetto from the countryside. She was a dear girl; they were attached to her. But you couldn't keep a Jewish child in the countryside anymore. The munic.i.p.al authorities-never mind the SS-were offering sums of 500 z. and upward for every Jew betrayed. It was one's neighbors. You couldn't trust your neighbors. And then not only would the child be in trouble, we'd all be. My G.o.d, there were areas where the peasants went out hunting Jews with scythes and sickles.

The child didn't seem to suffer too much from whatever squalors the ghetto now imposed on her. She sat at a little table among screens of damp clothing and fastidiously ate the heel of bread Mrs. Dresner gave her. She accepted whatever endearments the women sharing the kitchen happened to utter. Mrs. Dresner noticed how strangely guarded the child was in all her answers. She had her vanities, though, and like most three-year-olds a pa.s.sionately preferred color. Red. She sat there in red cap, red coat, small red boots. The peasants had indulged her pa.s.sion.

Mrs. Dresner made conversation by talking about the child's real parents. They too had been living-in fact, hiding-in the countryside. But, said Mrs. Dresner, they were going to come and join everyone here in Cracow soon. The child nodded, but it didn't seem to be shyness that kept her quiet.

In January her parents had been rounded up according to a list supplied to the SS by Spira, and while being marched to Prokocim Station had pa.s.sed a crowd of jeering Poles-"Bye-bye, Jews." They had dodged out of the column just like two decent Polish citizens crossing the street to watch the deportation of social enemies, and had joined the crowd, jeered a little themselves, and then strolled off into the countryside around that outer suburb.

Now they too were finding life no safer out there and intended to sneak back into Cracow during the summer. The mother of "Redcap," as the Dresner boys nicknamed her as soon as they got home with the work details from the city, was a first cousin of Mrs. Dresner's.

Soon Mrs. Dresner's daughter, young Danka, also got home from her work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe air base. Danka was going on fourteen, tall enough to have the Kennkarte (labor card) enabling her to work outside the ghetto. She enthused over the noncommittal child. "Genia, I know your mother, Eva. She and I used to go shopping for dresses together, and she'd buy me cakes at the patisserie in Bracka Street."

The child kept to her seat, did not smile, looked ahead. "Madam, you're mistaken. My mother's name is not Eva. It's Jasha." She went on naming the names in the fictional Polish genealogy in which her parents and the peasants had schooled her in case the Blue Police or the SS ever questioned her. The family frowned at each other, brought to a standstill by the unusual cunning of the child, finding it obscene but not wanting to undermine it, since it might, before the week was out, be essential survival equipment.

At suppertime Idek Schindel, the child's uncle, a young doctor at the ghetto hospital in Wegierska Street, arrived. He was the sort of whimsical, half-teasing, and infatuated uncle a child needs. At the sight of him, Genia became a child, getting down off her chair to rush at him. If he were here, calling these people cousins, then they were cousins. You could admit now that you had a mother named Eva and that your grandparents weren't really named Ludwik and Sophia.

Then Mr. Juda Dresner, purchasing officer of the Bosch plant, arrived home and the company was complete.

- April 28 was Schindler's birthday, and in 1942 he celebrated it like a child of the spring, loudly, profligately. It was a big day at DEF. The Herr Direktor brought in rare white bread, regardless of expense, to be served with the noonday soup. The festivity spread into the outer office and to the workshops out back. Oskar Schindler, industrialist, was celebrating the general succulence of life.

This, his thirty-fourth birthday, began early at Emalia. Schindler signaled it by walking through the outer office carrying three bottles of cognac under his arm to share with the engineers, the accountants, the draftsmen. Office workers in Accounts and Personnel had handfuls of cigarettes thrust at them, and by mid-morning the handouts had spread to the factory floor. A cake was brought in from a patisserie, and Oskar cut it on Klonowska's desk. Delegations of Jewish and Polish workers began to enter the office to congratulate him, and he heartily kissed a girl named Kucharska, whose father had figured in the Polish parliament before the war. And then the Jewish girls came up, and the men shaking hands, even Stern getting there somehow from the Progress Works where he was now employed, to take Oskar's hand formally and find himself wrapped up in a rib-cracking embrace.

That afternoon someone, perhaps the same malcontent as last time, contacted Pomorska and denounced Schindler for his racial improprieties. His ledgers might stand up to scrutiny, but no one could deny he was a "Jew-kisser."

The manner of his arrest seemed more professional than the last. On the morning of the 29th, a Mercedes blocked the factory entrance and two Gestapo men, seeming somehow surer of their ground than the last two, met him crossing the factory yard. He was charged, they told him, with breaking the provisions of the Race and Resettlement Act. They wanted him to come with them. And no, there was no need for him to visit his office first.

"Do you have a warrant?" he asked them.

"We don't need one," they told him.

He smiled at them. The gentlemen should understand that if they took him away without a warrant, they would come to regret it.

He said it lightly, but he could tell by their demeanor that the level of threat in them had firmed and focused since last year's half-comic detention. Last time the conversation at Pomorska had been about economic matters and whether they had been breached. This time you were dealing with grotesque law, the law of the lower guts, edicts from the black side of the brain. Serious stuff.

"We will have to risk regret," one of the two told him.

He a.s.sessed their a.s.surance, their perilous indifference to him, a man of a.s.sets, newly turned thirty-four. "On a spring morning," he told them, "I can spare a few hours for driving."

He comforted himself that he would again be put into one of those urbane cells at Pomorska. But when they turned right up Kolejowa, he knew that this time it would be Montelupich prison.

"I shall wish to speak to a lawyer," he told them.

"In time," said the driver.

Oskar had it on the reasonable word of one of his drinking companions that the Jagiellonian Inst.i.tute of Anatomy received corpses from Montelupich.