Schindler's List Part 5

The wall of the place stretched a long block, and the ominous sameness of the windows of the third and fourth floors could be seen from the back seat of the Gestapo Mercedes. Inside the front gate and through the archway they came to an office where the SS clerk spoke in whispers, as if raised voices would set up head-splitting echoes along the narrow corridors. They took his cash, but told him it would be given to him during his imprisonment at a rate of 50 z. a day. No, the arresting officers told him, it was not yet time for him to call a lawyer.

Then they left, and in the corridor, under guard, he listened for the traces of screams which might, in this convent hush, spill out through the cracks of the Judas windows in the walls. He was led down a flight of stairs into a claustrophobic tunnel and past a string of locked cells, one with an open grille. Some half-dozen prisoners in s.h.i.+rt sleeves sat there, each in a separate stall, facing the rear wall so that their features could not be seen. Oskar noticed a torn ear. And someone was sniffling but knew better than to wipe his nose. Klonowska, Klonowska, are you making your telephone calls, my love?

They opened a cell for him and he went in. He had felt a minor anxiety that the place might be crowded. But there was only one other prisoner in the cell, a soldier wearing his greatcoat up around his ears for warmth and seated on one of the two low wooden bed frames, each with its pallet. There were no washbasins, of course. A water bucket and a waste bucket. And what proved to be a Waffen SS Standartenfhrer (an SS rank equivalent to colonel) wearing a slight stubble, a stale, unb.u.t.toned s.h.i.+rt under the overcoat, and muddy boots.

"Welcome, sir," said the officer with a crooked grin, raising one hand to Oskar. He was a handsome fellow, a few years older than Oskar. The odds were in favor of his being a plant. But one wondered why they had put him in uniform and provided him with such exalted rank. Oskar looked at his watch, sat, stood, looked up at the high windows. A little light from the exercise yards filtered in, but it was not the sort of window you could lean against and relieve the intimacy of the two close bunks, of sitting hands on knees facing each other.

In the end they began to talk. Oskar was very wary, but the Standartenfhrer chattered wildly. What was his name? Philip was his name. He didn't think gentlemen should give their second names in prison. Besides, it was time people got down to first names. If we'd all got down to first names earlier, we'd be a happier race now.

Oskar concluded that if the man was not a plant, then he had had some sort of breakdown, was perhaps suffering sh.e.l.l shock. He'd been campaigning in southern Russia, and his battalion had helped hang on to Novgorod all winter. Then he had got leave to visit a Polish girlfriend in Cracow and they had, in his words, "lost themselves in each other," and he had been arrested in her apartment three days after his leave expired.

"I suppose I decided," said Philip, "not to be too d.a.m.n exact about dates when I saw the way the other b.a.s.t.a.r.ds"-he waved a hand at the roof, indicating the structure around him, the SS planners, the accountants, the bureaucrats-"when I saw the way they lived. It wasn't as if I deliberately decided to go absent without leave. But I just felt I was owed a certain d.a.m.n lat.i.tude."

Oskar asked him would he rather be in Pomorska Street. No, said Philip, I'd rather be here. Pomorska looked more like a hotel. But the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds had a death cell there, full of s.h.i.+ning chromium bars. But that aside, what had Herr Oskar done?

"I kissed a Jewish girl," said Oskar. "An employee of mine. So it's alleged."

Philip began to hoot at this. "Oh, oh! Did your p.r.i.c.k drop off?"

All afternoon Standartenfhrer Philip continued to condemn the SS. Thieves and orgiasts, he said. He couldn't believe it. The money some of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds made. They started so incorruptible too. They would kill some poor b.l.o.o.d.y Pole for smuggling a kilo of bacon while they lived like G.o.dd.a.m.n Hanseatic barons.

Oskar behaved as if it were all news to him, as if the idea of venality among the Reichfhrers was a painful a.s.sault on his provincial Sudetendeutsch innocence which had caused him to forget himself and caress a Jewish girl. At last Philip, worn out by his outrage, took a nap.

Oskar wanted a drink. A certain measure of liquor would help speed time, make the Standartenfhrer better company if he was not a plant and more fallible if he was. Oskar took out a 10-z. note and wrote down names on it and telephone numbers; more names than last time: a dozen. He took out another four notes, crumpled them in his hands and went to the door and knocked at the Judas window. An SS NCO turned up-a grave middle-aged face staring in at him. He didn't look like a man who exercised Poles to death or ruptured kidneys with his boots, but of course, that was one of the strengths of torture: you didn't expect it from a man whose features were those of someone's country uncle.

Was it possible to order five bottles of vodka? Oskar asked. Five bottles, sir? said the NCO. He might have been advising a young, callow drinker uncertain of quant.i.ties. He was also pensive, however, as if he were considering reporting Oskar to his superiors. The general and I, said Oskar, would appreciate a bottle apiece to stimulate conversation. You and your colleagues please accept the rest with my compliments. I presume also, said Oskar, that a man of your authority has power to make routine telephone calls on behalf of a prisoner. You'll see the telephone numbers there . . . yes, on the note. You don't have to call them all yourself. But give them to my secretary, eh? Yes, she's the first on the list.

These are very influential people, murmured the SS NCO.

You're a d.a.m.n fool, Philip told Oskar. They'll shoot you for trying to corrupt their guards.

Oskar slumped, apparently casual.

It's as stupid as kissing a Jewess, said Philip.

We'll see, said Oskar. But he was frightened.

At last the NCO came back and brought, together with the two bottles, a parcel of clean s.h.i.+rts and underwear, some books, and a bottle of wine, packed at the apartment in Straszewskiego Street by Ingrid and delivered to the Montelupich gate. Philip and Oskar had a pleasant enough evening together, though at one time a guard pounded on the steel door and demanded that they stop singing. And even then, as the liquor added s.p.a.ciousness to the cell and an unexpected cogency to the Standartenfhrer's ravings, Schindler was listening for remote screams from upstairs or for the b.u.t.ton-clicking Morse of some hopeless prisoner in the next cell. Only once did the true nature of the place dilute the effectiveness of the vodka. Next to his cot, partially obscured by the pallet, Philip discovered a minute statement in red pencil. He spent some idle moments deciphering it-not doing so well, his Polish much slower than Oskar's.

"'My G.o.d,'" he translated, "'how they beat me!' Well, it's a wonderful world, my friend Oskar. Isn't it?"

In the morning Schindler woke clearheaded. Hangovers had never plagued him, and he wondered why other people made such a fuss about them. But Philip was white-faced and depressed. During the morning he was taken away and came back to collect his belongings. He was to face a court-martial that afternoon, but had been given a new a.s.signment at a training school in Stutthof, so he presumed they didn't intend to shoot him for desertion. He picked up his greatcoat from his cot and went off to explain his Polish dalliance. Alone, Oskar spent the day reading a Karl May book Ingrid had sent and, in the afternoon, speaking to his lawyer, a Sudetendeutscher who'd opened a practice in civil law in Cracow two years before. Oskar was comforted by the interview. The cause of the arrest was certainly as stated; they weren't using his transracial caresses as a pretext to hold him while they investigated his affairs. "But it will probably come to the SS Court and you'll be asked why you aren't in the Army."

"The reason is obvious," said Oskar. "I'm an essential war producer. You can get General Schindler to say so."

Oskar was a slow reader and savored the Karl May book-the hunter and the Indian sage in the American wilderness-a relations.h.i.+p of decency. He did not rush the reading, in any case. It could be a week before he came to court. The lawyer expected that there would be a speech by the president of the court about conduct unbecoming a member of the German race and then there would be a substantial fine. So be it. He'd leave court a more cautious man.

On the fifth morning, he had already drunk the half-liter of black ersatz coffee they'd given him for breakfast when an NCO and two guards came for him. Past the mute doors he was taken upstairs to one of the front offices. He found there a man he'd met at c.o.c.ktail parties, Obersturmbannfhrer Rolf Czurda, head of the Cracow SD. Czurda looked like a businessman in his good suit.

"Oskar, Oskar," said Czurda like an old friend reproving. "We give you those Jewish girls at five marks a day. You should kiss us, not them."

Oskar explained that it had been his birthday. He'd been impetuous. He'd been drinking.

Czurda shook his head. "I never knew you were such a big-timer, Oskar," he said. "Calls from as far away as Breslau, from our friends in the Abwehr. Of course it would be ridiculous to keep you from your work just because you felt up some Jewess."

"You're very understanding, Herr Obersturmbannfhrer," said Oskar, feeling the request for some sort of gratuity building up in Czurda. "If ever I'm in a position to return your liberal gesture . . ."

"As a matter of fact," said Czurda, "I have an old aunt whose flat has been bombed out."

Yet another old aunt. Schindler made a compa.s.sionate click with his tongue and said that a representative of chief Czurda would be welcome any time in Lipowa Street to make a selection from the range of products turned out there. But it did not do to let men like Czurda think of his release as an absolute favor-and of the kitchenware as the least that the luckily released prisoner could offer. When Czurda said he could go, Oskar objected.

"I can't very well just call my car, Herr Obersturmbannfhrer. After all, my fuel resources are limited."

Czurda asked if Herr Schindler expected the SD to take him home.

Oskar shrugged. He did live on the far side of the city, he said. It was a long way to walk.

Czurda laughed. "Oskar, I'll have one of my own drivers take you back."

But when the limousine was ready, engine running, at the bottom of the main steps, and Schindler, glancing at the blank windows above him, wanted a sign from that other republic, the realm of torture, of unconditional imprisonment-the h.e.l.l beyond bars of those who had no pots and pans to barter-Rolf Czurda detained him by the elbow.

"Jokes aside, Oskar, my dear fellow. You'd be a fool if you got a real taste for some little Jewish skirt. They don't have a future, Oskar. That's not just old-fas.h.i.+oned Jew-hate talking, I a.s.sure you. It's policy."

EVEN THAT SUMMER, people inside the walls were clinging to the idea of the ghetto as a small but permanent realm. The idea had been easy enough to credit during 1941. There had been a post office; there had even been ghetto postage stamps. There had been a ghetto newspaper, even though it contained little else than edicts from the Wawel and Pomorska Street. A restaurant had been permitted in Lwwska Street: Foerster's Restaurant, where the Rosner brothers, back from the perils of the countryside and the changeable pa.s.sions of the peasants, played the violin and the accordion. It had seemed for a brief time that schooling would proceed here in formal cla.s.srooms, that orchestras would gather and regularly perform, that Jewish life would be communicated like a benign organism along the streets, from artisan to artisan, from scholar to scholar. It had not yet been demonstrated finally by the SS bureaucrats of Pomorska Street that the idea of that sort of ghetto was to be considered not simply a whimsy but an insult to the rational direction of history.

So when Untersturmfhrer Brandt had Judenrat president Artur Rosenzweig around to Pomorska for a beating with the handle of a riding crop, he was trying to correct the man's incurable vision of the ghetto as a region of permanent residence. The ghetto was a depot, a siding, a walled bus station. Anything that would have encouraged the opposite view had, by 1942, been abolished.

So it was different here from the ghettos old people remembered even affectionately. Music was no profession here. There were no professions. Henry Rosner went to work in the Luftwaffe mess at the air base. There he met a young German chef/manager named Richard, a laughing boy hiding, as a chef can, from the history of the twentieth century among the elements of cuisine and bar management. He and Henry Rosner got on so well that Richard would send the violinist across town to pick up the Luftwaffe Catering Corps pay-you couldn't trust a German, said Richard; the last one had run off to Hungary with the payroll.

Richard, like any barman worthy of his station, heard things and attracted the affection of officials. On the first day of June, he came to the ghetto with his girlfriend, a Volksdeutsche girl wearing a sweeping cape-which, on account of the June showers, didn't seem too excessive a garment. Through his profession, Richard knew a number of policemen, including Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko, and had no trouble being admitted to the ghetto, even though it was officially out-of-bounds to him. Once inside the gate, Richard crossed Plac ZG.o.dy and found Henry Rosner's address. Henry was surprised to see them. He had left Richard at the mess only a few hours before, yet here he was with his girl, both dressed as if for a formal visit. It reinforced for Henry the strangeness of the season. For the past two days, ghetto people had been lining up at the old Polish Savings Bank building in Jzefiska Street for the new ident.i.ty cards. To your yellow Kennkarte with its sepia pa.s.sport photograph and its large blue J, the German clerks now attached-if you were lucky-a blue sticker. People could be seen to leave the bank waving their cards with the Blauschein attached as if it proved their right to breathe, their permanent validity. Workers at the Luftwaffe mess, the Wehrmacht garage, at the Madritsch works, at Oskar Schindler's Emalia, at the Progress factory all had no trouble getting the Blauschein. But those who were refused it felt that their citizens.h.i.+p even of the ghetto was under question.

Richard said that young Olek Rosner should come and stay with his girlfriend at her apartment. You could tell that he'd heard something in the mess. He can't just walk out the gate, said Henry. It's fixed with Bosko, said Richard.

Henry and Manci were hesitant and consulted with each other as the girl in the cape promised to fatten Olek up on chocolate. An Aktion? Henry Rosner asked in a murmur. Is there going to be an Aktion?

Richard answered with a question. You've got your Blauschein? he asked. Of course, said Henry. And Manci? Manci too. But Olek hasn't, said Richard. In the drizzling dusk, Olek Rosner, only child, newly six years old, walked out of the ghetto under the cape of Richard the chef's girlfriend. Had some policeman bothered to lift the cape, both Richard and the girl could have been shot for their friendly subterfuge. Olek too would vanish. In the childless corner of their room, the Rosners hoped they'd been wise.

- Poldek Pfefferberg, runner for Oskar Schindler, had earlier in the year been ordered to begin tutoring the children of Symche Spira, exalted glazier, chief of the OD.

It was a contemptuous summons, as if Spira were saying, "Yes, we know you're not fit for man's work, but at least you can pa.s.s on to my kids some of the benefits of your education."

Pfefferberg amused Schindler with stories of the tutorial sessions at Symche's house. The police chief was one of the few Jews to have an entire floor to himself. There, amid two-dimensional paintings of nineteenth-century rabbis, Symche paced, listening to the instruction Pfefferberg gave, seeming to want to see knowledge, like petunias, sprout from his children's ears. A man of destiny with his hand hooked inside his jacket, he believed that this Napoleonic mannerism was a gesture universal to men of influence.

Symche's wife was a shadowy woman, a little bemused by her husband's unexpected power, perhaps a little excluded by old friends. The children, a boy of about twelve and a girl of fourteen, were biddable but no great scholars.

In any case, when Pfefferberg went to the Polish Savings Bank he expected to be given the Blauschein without any trouble. He was sure his labor with the Spira children would be counted as essential work. His yellow card identified him as a HIGH SCHOOL PROFESSOR, and in a rational world as yet only partly turned upside down, it was an honorable label.

The clerks refused to give him the sticker. He argued with them and wondered if he should appeal to Oskar or to Herr Szepessi, the Austrian bureaucrat who ran the German Labor Office down the street. Oskar had been asking him for a year to come to Emalia, but Pfefferberg had always thought it would be too constricting of his illegal activities to have full-time work.

As he emerged from the bank building, details of the German Security Police, the Polish Blue Police, and the political detail of the OD were at work on the pavements, inspecting everyone's card and arresting those who did not have the sticker. A line of rejects, hangdog men and women, already stood in the middle of Jzefiska Street. Pfefferberg affected his Polish military bearing and explained that of course, he had a number of trades. But the Schupo he spoke to shook his head, saying, "Don't argue with me; no Blauschein; you join that line. Understand, Jew?"

Pfefferberg went and joined the line. Mila, the delicate, pretty wife he'd married eighteen months before, worked for Madritsch and already had her Blauschein. So there was that.

When the line had grown to more than a hundred, it was marched around the corner, past the hospital, and into the yard of the old Optima confectionery plant. There hundreds were already waiting. The early comers had taken the shady areas of what used to be the stable, where the Optima horses used to be harnessed between the shafts of drays laden with cremes and liqueur chocolates. It was not a rowdy group. There were professional men, bankers like the Holzers, pharmacists and dentists. They stood in cl.u.s.ters, talking quietly. The young pharmacist Bachner stood speaking to an old couple named Wohl. There were many old people in here. The old and poor who depended on the Judenrat ration. This summer the Judenrat itself, the distributor of food and even of s.p.a.ce, had been less equitable than it had been last.

Nurses from the ghetto hospital moved among these detainees with buckets of water, which was said to be good for stress and disorientation. It was, in any case, just about the only medicine, other than some black-market cyanide, that the hospital had to give. The old, the poor families from the shtetls, took the water in restive silence.

Throughout the day, police of three varieties would enter the yard with lists, and lines of people would be formed to be met at the gate of the yard by SS details and moved out to the Prokocim Railway Station. In some people the urge rose to evade this next movement by keeping to the far corners of the yard. But it was Pfefferberg's style to hang around the gate, looking for some official to whom he could make a claim. Perhaps Spira would be there, dressed up like a movie actor and willing-with a little heavy-handed irony-to release him. In fact there stood by the gatekeeper's hut a sad-faced boy in an OD hat studying a list, holding the corner of the page in delicate fingers. Pfefferberg not only had served briefly with the boy in the OD, but in the first year of his teaching career at Kosciuszko High School in Podgrze had taught his sister.

The boy looked up. Panie Pfefferberg, he murmured with a respect from those vanished days. As if the yard were full of practiced criminals, he asked what Panie Pfefferberg was doing here.

It's nonsense, said Pfefferberg, but I haven't got a Blauschein yet.

The boy shook his head. Follow me, he said. He walked Pfefferberg to a senior uniformed Schupo at the gate and saluted. He did not look heroic in his funny OD cap and with his skinny, vulnerable neck. Later, Pfefferberg supposed that that had given him greater credibility.

"This is Herr Pfefferberg from the Judenrat," he lied with a deft combination of respect and authority. "He has been visiting some relatives." The Schupo seemed bored by the ma.s.s of police work proceeding in the yard. Negligently he waved Pfefferberg out the gate. Pfefferberg had no time to thank the boy or to reflect on the mystery of why a child with a skinny neck will lie for you even unto death just because you taught his sister how to use the Roman rings.

Pfefferberg rushed straight to the Labor Office and broke into the waiting line. Behind the desk were Frauleins Skoda and Knosalla, two hearty Sudeten German girls. "Liebchen, Liebchen," he told Skoda, "they want to take me away because I don't have the sticker. Look at me, I ask you." (He was built like a bull, and had played hockey for his country and belonged to the Polish ski team.) "Am I not exactly the sort of fellow you'd like to keep around here?"

In spite of the crowds who'd given her no rest all day, Skoda raised her eyebrows and failed to suppress a smile. She took his Kennkarte. "I can't help you, Herr Pfefferberg," she told him. "They didn't give it to you, so I can't. A pity . . . ."

"But you can give it to me, Liebchen," he insisted in a loud, seductive, soap-opera voice. "I have trades, Liebchen, I have trades."

Skoda said that only Herr Szepessi could help him, and it was impossible to get Pfefferberg in to see Szepessi. It would take days. "But you will get me in, Liebchen," Pfefferberg insisted. And she did. That is where her reputation as a decent girl came from, because she abstracted from the ma.s.sive drift of policy and could, even on a crowded day, respond to the individual face. A warty old man might not have done so well with her, however.

Herr Szepessi, who also had a humane reputation even though he serviced the monstrous machine, looked quickly at Pfefferberg's permit, murmuring, "But we don't need gym teachers."

Pfefferberg had always refused Oskar's offers of employment because he saw himself as an operator, an individualist. He didn't want to work long s.h.i.+fts for small pay over in dreary Zablocie. But he could see now that the era of individuality was vanis.h.i.+ng. People needed, as a staple of life, a trade. "I'm a metal polisher," he told Szepessi. He had worked for short periods with a Podgrze uncle of his who ran a small metal factory in Rek.a.w.ka.

Herr Szepessi eyed Pfefferberg from behind spectacles. "Now," he said, "that's a profession." He took a pen, thoroughly crossing out HIGH SCHOOL PROFESSOR, cancelling the Jagiellonian education of which Pfefferberg was so proud, and over the top he wrote METAL POLISHER. He reached for a rubber stamp and a pot of paste and took from his desk a blue sticker. "Now," he said, handing the doc.u.ment back to Pfefferberg-"now should you meet a Schupo, you can a.s.sure him that you're a useful member of society."

Later in the year they would send poor Szepessi to Auschwitz for being so persuadable.

FROM DIVERSE SOURCES-from the policeman Toffel as well as drunken Bosch of Ostfaser, the SS textile operation, Oskar Schindler heard rumors that "procedures in the ghetto" (whatever that meant) were growing more intense. The SS were moving into Cracow some tough Sonderkommando units from Lublin, where they had already done sterling work in matters of racial purification. Toffel had suggested that unless Oskar wanted a break in production, he ought to set up some camp beds for his night s.h.i.+ft until after the first Sabbath in June.

So Oskar set up dormitories in the offices and upstairs in the munitions section. Some of the night s.h.i.+ft were happy to bed down there. Others had wives, children, parents waiting back in the ghetto. Besides, they had the Blauschein, the holy blue sticker, on their Kennkartes.

On June 3, Abraham Bankier, Oskar's office manager, didn't turn up at Lipowa Street. Schindler was still at home, drinking coffee in Straszewskiego Street, when he got a call from one of his secretaries. She'd seen Bankier marched out of the ghetto, not even stopping at Optima, straight to the Prokocim depot. There'd been other Emalia workers in the group too. There'd been Reich, Leser . . . as many as a dozen.

Oskar called for his car to be brought to him from the garage. He drove over the river and down Lwwska toward Prokocim. There he showed his pa.s.s to the guards at the gate. The depot yard itself was full of strings of cattle cars, the station crowded with the ghetto's dispensable citizens standing in orderly lines, convinced still-and perhaps they were right-of the value of pa.s.sive and orderly response. It was the first time Oskar had seen this juxtaposition of humans and cattle cars, and it was a greater shock than hearing of it; it made him pause on the edge of the platform. Then he saw a jeweler he knew. Seen Bankier? he asked. "He's already in one of the cars, Herr Schindler," said the jeweler. "Where are they taking you?" Oskar asked the man. "We're going to a labor camp, they say. Near Lublin. Probably no worse than . . ." The man waved a hand toward distant Cracow.

Schindler took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, found some 10-zoty bills and handed the pack and the notes to the jeweler, who thanked him. They had made them leave home without anything this time. They said they'd be forwarding the baggage.

Late the previous year, Schindler had seen in the SS Bulletin of Budget and Construction an invitation for bids for the construction of some crematoria in a camp southeast of Lublin. Belec. Schindler considered the jeweler. Sixty-three or -four. A little thin; had probably had pneumonia last winter. Worn pin-striped suit, too warm for the day. And in the clear, knowing eyes a capacity to bear finite suffering. Even in the summer of 1942 it was impossible to guess at the connections between such a man as this and those ovens of extraordinary cubic capacity. Did they intend to start epidemics among the prisoners? Was that to be the method?

Beginning from the engine, Schindler moved along the line of more than twenty cattle cars, calling Bankier's name to the faces peering down at him from the open grillwork high above the slats of the cars. It was fortunate for Abraham that Oskar did not ask himself why it was Bankier's name he called, that he did not pause and consider that Bankier's had only equal value to all the other names loaded aboard the Ostbahn rolling stock. An existentialist might have been defeated by the numbers at Prokocim, stunned by the equal appeal of all the names and voices. But Schindler was a philosophic innocent. He knew the people he knew. He knew the name of Bankier. "Bankier! Bankier!" he continued to call.

He was intercepted by a young SS Oberscharfhrer, an expert railroad s.h.i.+pper from Lublin. He asked for Schindler's pa.s.s. Oskar could see in the man's left hand an enormous list-pages of names.

My workers, said Schindler. Essential industrial workers. My office manager. It's idiocy. I have Armaments Inspectorate contracts, and here you are taking the workers I need to fulfill them.

You can't have them back, said the young man. They're on the list . . . . The SS NCO knew from experience that the list conferred an equal destination on all its members.

Oskar dropped his voice to that hard murmur, the growl of a reasonable man, well connected, who wasn't going to bring up all his heavy guns yet. Did the Herr Oberscharfhrer know how long it would take to train experts to replace those on the list? At my works, Deutsche Email Fabrik, I have a munitions section under the special protection of General Schindler, my namesake. Not only would the Oberscharfhrer's comrades on the Russian Front be affected by the disruption of production, but the office of the Armaments Inspectorate would demand explanations as well.

The young man shook his head-just a hara.s.sed transit official. "I've heard that kind of story before, sir," he said. But he was worried. Oskar could tell it and kept leaning over him and speaking softly with an edge of menace. "It's not my place to argue with the list," said Oskar. "Where is your superior officer?"

The young man nodded toward an SS officer, a man in his thirties wearing a frown above his spectacles. "May I have your name, Herr Untersturmfhrer?" Oskar asked him, already pulling a notebook from his suit pocket.

The officer also made a statement about the holiness of the list. For this man it was the secure, rational, and sole basis for all this milling of Jews and movement of rail cars. But Schindler got crisper now. He'd heard about the list, he said. What he had asked was what the Untersturmfhrer's name was. He intended to appeal directly to Oberfhrer Schemer and to General Schindler of the Armaments Inspectorate.

"Schindler?" asked the officer. For the first time he took a careful look at Oskar. The man was dressed like a tyc.o.o.n, wore the right badge, had generals in the family. "I believe I can guarantee you, Herr Untersturmfhrer," said Schindler in his benign grumble, "that you'll be in southern Russia within the week."

The NCO going ahead, Herr Schindler and the officer marched side by side between the ranks of prisoners and the loaded cattle cars. The locomotive was already steaming and the engineer leaning from his cabin, looking down the length of the train, waiting to be dispatched. The officer called to Ostbahn officials they pa.s.sed on the platform to hold up. At last they reached one of the rear cars. There were a dozen workers in there with Bankier; they had all boarded together as if expecting a joint deliverance. The door was unlocked and they jumped down-Bankier and Frankel from the office; Reich, Leser, and the others from the factory. They were restrained, not wanting to permit anyone to detect their pleasure at being saved the journey. Those left inside began chattering merrily, as if they were fortunate to be traveling with so much extra room, while with emphasis in his pen strokes, the officer removed the Emalia workers one at a time from the list and required Oskar to initial the pages.

As Schindler thanked the officer and turned to follow his workers away, the man detained him by the elbow of his suit coat. "Sir," he said, "it makes no difference to us, you understand. We don't care whether it's this dozen or that."

The officer, who had been frowning when Oskar first saw him, now seemed calm, as if he had discovered the theorem behind the situation. You think your thirteen little tinsmiths are important? We'll replace them with another thirteen little tinsmiths and all your sentimentality for these will be defeated. "It's the inconvenience to the list, that's all," the officer explained.

Plump little Bankier admitted that the group of them had neglected to pick up Blauscheins from the old Polish Savings Bank. Schindler, suddenly testy, said to attend to it. But what his curtness covered was dismay at those crowds at Prokocim who, for want of a blue sticker, stood waiting for the new and decisive symbol of their status, the cattle car, to be hauled by heavy engine across their range of vision. Now, the cattle cars told them, we are all beasts together.

FROM THE FACES OF HIS own workers, Oskar could read something of the ghetto's torment. For a person had no time to catch his breath there, no room to dig in, a.s.sert one's habits or set up family rituals. Many took refuge and a sort of comfort in suspicion of everyone-of the people in the same room as much as of the OD man in the street. But then, even the sanest were not sure whom to trust. "Each tenant," a young artist named Josef Bau wrote of a ghetto house, "has his own world of secrets and mysteries." Children suddenly stopped talking at a creaking in the stairwell. Adults woke from dreams of exile and dispossession to find themselves exiled and dispossessed in a crowded room in Podgrze-the events of their dreams, the very taste of fear in dreams, finding continuity in the fears of the day. Fierce rumors beset them in their room, on the street, on the factory floor. Spira had another list and it was either twice or three times as long as the last. All children would go to Tarnow to be shot, to Stutthof to be drowned, to Breslau to be indoctrinated, deracinated, operated upon. Do you have an elderly parent? They are taking everyone over fifty to the Wieliczka salt mines. To work? No. To seal them up in disused chambers.

All this hearsay, much of which reached Oskar, was based on a human instinct to prevent the evil by voicing it-to forestall the Fates by showing them that you could be as imaginative as they. But that June, all the worst of the dreams and whispers took concrete form, and the most unimaginable rumor became a fact.

South of the ghetto, beyond Rek.a.w.ka Street, rose a hilly parkland. There was an intimacy, like that of medieval siege paintings, about the way you could look down over the ghetto's southern wall. As you rode along the brow of the hills, the ghetto's map was revealed, and you could see, as you pa.s.sed them, what was happening in the streets below.

Schindler had noticed this advantage while riding here with Ingrid in the spring. Now, shocked by the sights of the Prokocim depot, he decided to go riding again. The morning after the rescue of Bankier, he rented horses from the stables in Park Bednarskiego. They were impeccably turned out, he and Ingrid, in long hacking jackets, riding breeches, and dazzling boots. Two Sudeten blonds high above the disturbed ant heap of the ghetto.

They rode up through the woods and had a short gallop over open meadows. From their saddles they could now see Wegierska Street, crowds of people around the hospital corner and, closer, a squad of SS working with dogs, entering houses, families pouring forth into the street, pulling on coats in spite of the heat, antic.i.p.ating a long absence. Ingrid and Oskar reined in their horses in the shade of trees and considered this sight, beginning to notice refinements of the scene. OD men armed with truncheons worked with the SS. Some of these Jewish police seemed enthusiastic, for in a few minutes' view from the hill Oskar saw three reluctant women beaten across the shoulders. At first there was a naive anger in him. The SS were using Jews to flog Jews. It would become clear during the day, however, that some of the OD bludgeoned people to save them from worse things. And there was a new rule for the OD anyhow: if you failed to deliver a family into the street, your own family was forfeit.

Schindler noticed too that in Wegierska Street two lines were continually forming. One was stable, but the other, as it lengthened, was regularly marched away in segments around the corner into Jzefiska and out of sight. It was not hard to interpret this a.s.sembling and movement, since Schindler and Ingrid, fringed by pine trees and elevated above the ghetto, were a distance of only two or three short blocks from the Aktion.

As families were routed out of the apartments, they were separated forcibly into two lines without regard to family considerations. Adolescent daughters with the proper papers went to the static line, from which they called out to their middle-aged mothers in the other. A night-s.h.i.+ft worker, still sullen from disturbed sleep, was pointed to one line, his wife and child to the other. In the middle of the street, the young man argued with an OD policeman. The man was saying, Screw the Blauschein! I want to go with Eva and the kid.

An armed SS man intervened. Beside the nondescript ma.s.s of Ghettomenschen, such a being, in his freshly pressed summer uniform, looked superbly fed and fresh. And from the hill you could see the oil on the automatic pistol in his hand. The SS man hit the Jew on the ear and was talking to him, loudly and harshly. Schindler, though he could not hear, was sure it was a speech he'd encountered before, at Prokocim Station. It doesn't make any difference to me. If you want to go with your frigging Jewish wh.o.r.e, go! The man was led from one line to another. Schindler saw him edge along it to embrace his wife, and under cover of this act of conjugal loyalty, another woman crept back indoors and was not seen by the SS Sonderkommando.

Oskar and Ingrid turned their horses, crossed a deserted avenue, and after a few meters, rode out onto a limestone platform facing directly down Krakusa. In its closer reaches, this street was not as hectic as Wegierska. A line of women and children, not so long, was being led away toward Piwna Street. A guard walked in front, another strolled behind. There was an imbalance in the line: far more children than the few women in it could themselves have borne. At the rear, dawdling, was a toddler, boy or girl, dressed in a small scarlet coat and cap. The reason it compelled Schindler's interest was that it made a statement, the way the argumentative s.h.i.+ft worker in Wegierska had. The statement had to do, of course, with a pa.s.sion for red.

Schindler consulted Ingrid. It was definitely a little girl, said Ingrid. Girls got obsessed by a color, especially a color like that.

As they watched, the Waffen SS man at the rear of the column would occasionally put out his hand and correct the drift of this scarlet node. He did not do it harshly-he could have been an elder brother. Had he been asked by his officers to do something to allay the sentimental concern of watching civilians, he could not have done better. So the moral anxiety of the two riders in Bednarskiego Park was, for a second, irrationally allayed. But it was brief comfort. For behind the departing column of women and children, to which the scarlet toddler placed a meandering period, SS teams with dogs worked north along either side of the street.

They rampaged through the fetid apartments; as a symptom of their rush, a suitcase flew from a second-story window and split open on the sidewalk. And, running before the dogs, the men and women and children who had hidden in attics or closets, inside drawerless dressers, the evaders of the first wave of search, jolted out onto the pavement, yelling and gasping in terror of the Doberman pinschers. Everything seemed speeded-up, difficult for the viewers on the hill to track. Those who had emerged were shot where they stood on the sidewalk, flying out over the gutters at the impact of the bullets, gus.h.i.+ng blood into the drains. A mother and a boy, perhaps eight, perhaps a scrawny ten, had retreated under a windowsill on the western side of Krakusa Street. Schindler felt an intolerable fear for them, a terror in his own blood which loosened his thighs from the saddle and threatened to unhorse him. He looked at Ingrid and saw her hands knotted on the reins. He could hear her exclaiming and begging beside him.

His eyes slewed up Krakusa to the scarlet child. They were doing it within half a block of her; they hadn't waited for her column to turn out of sight into Jzefiska. Schindler could not have explained at first how that compounded the murders on the sidewalk. Yet somehow it proved, in a way no one could ignore, their serious intent. While the scarlet child stopped in her column and turned to watch, they shot the woman in the neck, and one of them, when the boy slid down the wall whimpering, jammed a boot down on his head as if to hold it still and put the barrel against the back of the neck-the recommended SS stance-and fired.

Oskar looked again for the small red girl. She had stopped and turned and seen the boot descend. A gap had already widened between her and the next to last in the column. Again the SS guard corrected her drift fraternally, nudged her back into line. Herr Schindler could not see why he did not bludgeon her with his rifle b.u.t.t, since at the other end of Krakusa Street, mercy had been cancelled.