Schindler's List Part 6

At last Schindler slipped from his horse, tripped, and found himself on his knees hugging the trunk of a pine tree. The urge to throw up his excellent breakfast was, he sensed, to be suppressed, for he suspected it meant that all his cunning body was doing was making room to digest the horrors of Krakusa Street.

Their lack of shame, as men who had been born of women and had to write letters home (What did they put in them?), wasn't the worst aspect of what he'd seen. He knew they had no shame, since the guard at the base of the column had not felt any need to stop the red child from seeing things. But worst of all, if there was no shame, it meant there was official sanction. No one could find refuge anymore behind the idea of German culture, nor behind those p.r.o.nouncements uttered by leaders to exempt anonymous men from stepping beyond their gardens, from looking out their office windows at the realities on the sidewalk. Oskar had seen in Krakusa Street a statement of his government's policy which could not be written off as a temporary aberration. The SS men were, Oskar believed, fulfilling there the orders of the leader, for otherwise their colleague at the rear of the column would not have let a child watch.

Later in the day, after he had absorbed a ration of brandy, Oskar understood the proposition in its clearest terms. They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed the witnesses all would perish too.

- In the corner of Plac ZG.o.dy (Peace Square) stood an Apotheke run by Tadeus Pankiewicz. It was a pharmacy in the old style. Porcelain amphoras with the Latin names of ancient remedies marked on them, and a few hundred delicate and highly varnished drawers, hid the complexity of the pharmacopoeia from the citizens of Podgrze. Magister Pankiewicz lived above the shop by permission of the authorities and at the request of the doctors in the ghetto clinics. He was the only Pole permitted to remain within the ghetto walls. He was a quiet man in his early forties and had intellectual interests. The Polish impressionist Abraham Neumann, the composer Mordche Gebirtig, philosophical Leon Steinberg, and the scientist and philosopher Dr. Rappaport were all regular visitors at Pankiewicz'. The house was also a link, a mail drop for information and messages running between the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) and the partisans of the Polish People's Army. Young Dolek Liebeskind and s.h.i.+mon and Gusta Dranger, organizers of the Cracow ZOB, would sometimes call there, but discreetly. It was important not to implicate Tadeus Pankiewicz by their projects, which-unlike the cooperative policies of the Judenrat-involved furious and unequivocal resistance.

The square in front of Pankiewicz' pharmacy became in those first days of June a marshaling yard. "It beggared belief," Pankiewicz would always thereafter say of Peace Square. In the parkland in the middle, people were graded again and told to leave their baggage-No, no, it will be sent on to you! Against the blank wall at the western end of the square, those who resisted or were found carrying the secret option of Aryan papers in their pockets were shot without any explanation or excuses to the people in the middle. The astounding thunder of the rifles fractured conversation and hope. Yet in spite of the screams and wailing of those related to the victims, some people-shocked or focusing desperately on life-seemed almost unaware of the heap of corpses. Once the trucks rolled up, and details of Jewish men loaded the dead into the back, those left in the square would begin at once to talk of their futures again. And Pankiewicz would hear what he had been hearing all day from SS NCOs. "I a.s.sure you, madam, you Jews are going to work. Do you think we can afford to squander you?" Frantic desire to believe would show blatantly on the faces of those women. And the SS rank and file, fresh from the executions against the wall, strolled among the crowd and advised people on how to label their luggage.

From Bednarskiego, Oskar Schindler had not been able to see into Plac ZG.o.dy. But Pankiewicz in the square, like Schindler on the hill, had never witnessed such dispa.s.sionate horror. Like Oskar, he was plagued by nausea, and his ears were full of an unreal sibilance, as if he had been struck on the head. He was so confused by the ma.s.s of noise and savagery, he did not know that among the dead in the square were his friends Gebirtig, composer of that famed song "Burn City, Burn," and gentle Neumann the artist. Doctors began to stumble into the pharmacy, panting, having run the two blocks from the hospital. They wanted bandages-they had dragged the wounded in from the streets. A doctor came in and asked for emetics. For in the crowd a dozen people were gagging or comatose from swallowing cyanide. An engineer Pankiewicz knew had slipped it into his mouth when his wife wasn't looking.

Young Dr. Idek Schindel, working at the ghetto hospital on the corner of Wegierska, heard from a woman who came in hysterical that they were taking the children. She'd seen the children lined up in Krakusa Street, Genia among them. Schindel had left Genia that morning with neighbors-he was her guardian in the ghetto; her parents were still hiding in the countryside, intending to slip back into the ghetto, which had been, until today, less perilous. This morning Genia, always her own woman, had wandered away from the woman who was minding her back to the house where she lived with her uncle. There she had been arrested. It was in this way that Oskar Schindler, from the park, had been drawn by her motherless presence in the column in Krakusa Street.

Taking off his surgical coat, Dr. Schindel rushed to the square and saw her almost at once, sitting on the gra.s.s, affecting composure within the wall of guards. Dr. Schindel knew how faked the performance was, having had to get up often enough to soothe her night terrors.

He moved around the periphery of the square and she saw him. Don't call out, he wanted to say; I'll work it out. He didn't want a scene because it could end badly for both of them. But he didn't need to be concerned, for he could see her eyes grow mute and unknowing. He stopped, transfixed by her pitiably admirable cunning. She knew well enough at the age of three years not to take the short-term comfort of calling out to uncles. She knew that there was no salvation in engaging the interest of the SS in Uncle Idek.

He was composing a speech he intended to make to the large Oberscharfhrer who stood by the execution wall. It was better not to approach the authorities too humbly or through anyone of lesser rank. Looking back again to the child, he saw the suspicion of a flutter of her eyes, and then, with a dazzling speculator's coolness, she stepped between the two guards nearest to her and out of the cordon. She moved with an aching slowness which, of course, galvanized her uncle's vision, so that afterward he would often see behind his closed eyes the image of her among the forest of gleaming SS knee boots. In Plac ZG.o.dy, no one saw her. She maintained her part-stumbling, part-ceremonial bluffer's pace all the way to Pankiewicz' corner and around it, keeping to the blind side of the street. Dr. Schindel repressed the urge he had to applaud. Though the performance deserved an audience, it would by its nature be destroyed by one.

He felt he could not move directly behind her without disclosing her feat. Against all his usual impulses, he believed that the instinct which had taken her infallibly out of Plac ZG.o.dy would provide her with a hiding place. He returned to the hospital by the alternative route to give her time.

Genia returned to the front bedroom in Krakusa Street that she shared with her uncle. The street was deserted now, or, if a few were by cunning or false walls still there, they did not declare themselves. She entered the house and hid under the bed. From the corner of the street, Idek, returning to the house, saw the SS, in a last sweep, come knocking. But Genia did not answer. She would not answer him when he arrived himself. It was just that he knew where to look, in the gap between curtain and window sash, and saw, s.h.i.+ning in the drabness of the room, her red shoe beneath the hem of the bedspread.

By this time, of course, Schindler had returned his horse to the stable. He was not on the hill to see the small but significant triumph of red Genia's return to the place where the SS had first found her. He was already in his office at DEF, shut away for a time, finding the news too heavy to share with the day s.h.i.+ft. Much later, in terms uncharacteristic of jovial Herr Schindler, Cracow's favorite party guest, Zablocie's big spender, in terms, that is, which showed-behind the playboy facade-an implacable judge, Oskar would lay special weight on this day. "Beyond this day," he would claim, "no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system."

THE SS KEPT AT WORK in the Ghetto until Sat.u.r.day evening. They operated with that efficiency which Oskar had observed in the executions in Krakusa Street. Their thrusts were hard to predict, and people who had escaped on Friday were caught on Sat.u.r.day. Genia survived the week, however, through her precocious gift for maintaining silence and for being imperceptible in scarlet.

Over in Zablocie, Schindler did not dare believe that this red child had survived the Aktion process. He knew from talking to Toffel and other acquaintances from police headquarters in Pomorska Street that 7,000 people had been cleared from the ghetto. A Gestapo official from the Jewish Affairs Office was delighted to confirm the clearance. Up in Pomorska Street, among the paper pushers, the June Aktion was voted a triumph.

Oskar had now become more exact about this sort of information. He knew, for example, that the Aktion had been under the overall management of one Wilhelm Kunde but had been led by SS Obersturmfhrer Otto von Mallotke. Oskar kept no dossier, but he was preparing for another era when he would make a full report to either Canaris or the world. It would be made earlier than he expected. For the moment, he inquired after matters which he had in the past treated as temporary lunacies. He got his hard news from police contacts, but also from clearheaded Jews like Stern. Intelligence from other parts of Poland was piped into the ghetto, in part through Pankiewicz' pharmacy, by the partisans of the People's Army. Dolek Liebeskind, leader of the Akiva Halutz Resistance Group, also brought in information from other ghettos as a result of his official traveling job with the Jewish Communal Self-Help, an organization which the Germans-with half an eye on the Red Cross-permitted to exist.

It was no use bringing such tidings to the Judenrat. The Judenrat Council did not consider it civilly advisable to tell the ghetto dwellers anything about the camps. People would merely be distressed; there would be disorder in the streets, and it would not go unpunished. It was always better to let people hear wild rumors, decide they were exaggerated, fall back on hope. This had been the att.i.tude of most Jewish Councillors even under decent Artur Rosenzweig. But Rosenzweig was gone. The salesman David Gutter, helped by his Germanic name, would soon become president of the Judenrat. Food rations were now diverted not only by certain SS officials but by Gutter and the new Councillors, whose vicar in the streets was high-booted Symche Spira. The Judenrat therefore had no interest anymore in informing the ghetto people about their probable destinations, since they were confident that they themselves would not be made to travel.

The beginning of knowledge for the ghetto, and the clinching news for Oskar, was the return to Cracow-eight days after he'd been s.h.i.+pped off from Prokocim-of the young pharmacist Bachner. No one knew how he had got back inside the ghetto, or the mystery of why he returned to a place from which the SS would simply send him off on another journey. But it was, of course, the pull of the known that brought Bachner home.

All the way down Lwwska and into the streets behind Plac ZG.o.dy he carried his story. He had seen the final horror, he said. He was mad-eyed, and in his brief absence his hair had silvered. All the Cracow people who had been rounded up in early June had been taken nearly to Russia, he said, to the camp of Belec. When the trains arrived at the railway station, the people were driven out by Ukrainians with clubs. There was a frightful stench about the place, but an SS man had kindly told people that that was due to the use of disinfectant. The people were lined up in front of two large warehouses, one marked "CLOAK ROOM" and the other "VALUABLES." The new arrivals were made to undress, and a small Jewish boy pa.s.sed among the crowd handing out lengths of string with which to tie their shoes together. Spectacles and rings were removed. So, naked, the prisoners had their heads shaved in the hairdresser's, an SS NCO telling them that their hair was needed to make something special for U-boat crews. It would grow again, he said, maintaining the myth of their continued usefulness. At last the victims were driven down a barbed-wire pa.s.sage to bunkers which had copper Stars of David on their roofs and were labeled "BATHS AND INHALATION ROOMS." SS men rea.s.sured them all the way, telling them to breathe deeply, that it was an excellent means of disinfection. Bachner saw a little girl drop a bracelet on the ground, and a boy of three picked it up and went into the bunker playing with it.

In the bunkers, said Bachner, they were all ga.s.sed. And afterward, squads were sent in to disentangle the pyramid of corpses and take the bodies away for burial. It had taken barely two days, he said, before they were all dead, except for him. While waiting in an enclosure for his turn, he'd somehow got to a latrine and lowered himself into the pit. He'd stayed there three days, the human waste up to his neck. His face, he said, had been a hive of flies. He'd slept standing, wedged in the hole for fear of drowning there. At last he'd crawled out at night.

Somehow he'd walked out of Belec, following the railway tracks. Everyone understood that he had got out precisely because he was beyond reason. Likewise, he'd been cleaned by someone's hand-a peasant woman's, perhaps-and put into fresh clothes for his journey back to the starting point.

Even then there were people in Cracow who thought Bachner's story a dangerous rumor. Postcards had come to relatives from prisoners in Auschwitz. So if it was true of Belec, it couldn't be true of Auschwitz. And was it credible? On the short emotional rations of the ghetto, one got by through sticking to the credible.

The chambers of Belec, Schindler found out from his sources, had been completed by March of that year under the supervision of a Hamburg engineering firm and of SS engineers from Oranienburg. From Bachner's testimony, it seemed that 3,000 killings a day were not beyond their capacity. Crematoria were under construction, lest old-fas.h.i.+oned means of disposal of corpses put a brake on the new killing method. The same company involved in Belec had installed identical facilities at Sobibor, also in the Lublin district. Bids had been accepted, and construction was well advanced, for a similar installation at Treblinka, near Warsaw. And chambers and ovens were both in operation at the Auschwitz main camp and at the vast Auschwitz II camp a few kilometers away at Birkenau. The resistance claimed that 10,000 murders on a given day were within the capacity of Auschwitz II. Then, for the d area, there was the camp at Chelmno, also equipped according to the new technology.

To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept. Throughout Europe that summer some millions of people, Oskar among them, and the ghetto dwellers of Cracow too, tortuously adjusted the economies of their souls to the idea of Belec or of like enclosures in the Polish forests.

That summer also Schindler wound up the bankrupt estate of Rekord and, under the provisions of the Polish Commercial Court, acquired by a species of pro forma auction owners.h.i.+p of the property. Though the German armies were over the Don and on their way to the Caucasus oil fields, Oskar discerned by the evidence of what had happened in Krakusa Street that they could not finally succeed. Therefore it was a good season to legitimize to the limit his possession of the factory in Lipowa Street. He still hoped, in a way that was almost childlike and to which history would pay no regard, that the fall of the evil king would not bear away that legitimacy-that in the new era he would go on being Hans Schindler's successful boy from Zwittau.

Jereth of the box factory went on pressing him about building a hut-a refuge-on his patch of wasteland. Oskar got the necessary approvals from the bureaucrats. A rest area for the night s.h.i.+ft was his story. He had the lumber for it-it had been donated by Jereth himself.

When finished in the autumn, it seemed a slight and comfortless structure. The planking had that crate-wood greenness and looked as if it would shrink as it got darker, and let in the slanting snow. But during an Aktion in October it was a haven for Mr. and Mrs. Jereth, for the workers from the box factory and the radiator works, and for Oskar's night s.h.i.+ft.

The Oskar Schindler who comes down from his office on the frosty mornings of an Aktion to speak to the SS man, to the Ukrainian auxiliary, to the Blue Police, and to OD details who would have marched across from Podgrze to escort his night s.h.i.+ft home; the Oskar Schindler who, drinking coffee, calls Wachtmeister Bosko's office near the ghetto and tells some lie about why his night s.h.i.+ft must stay in Lipowa Street this morning-that Oskar Schindler has endangered himself now beyond the limit of cautious business practice. The men of influence who have twice sprung him from prison cannot do it indefinitely even if he is generous to them on their birthdays. This year they are putting men of influence in Auschwitz. If they die there, their widows get a terse and unregretful telegram from the Commandant. "YOUR HUSBAND HAS DIED IN KONZENTRATIONSLAGER AUSCHWITZ."

Bosko himself was lanky, thinner than Oskar. Gruff-voiced, and like him a German Czech. His family, like Oskar's, was conservative and looked to the old Germanic values. He had, for a brief season, felt a pan-Germanic antic.i.p.ation at the rise of Hitler, exactly the way Beethoven had felt a grand European fervor for Napoleon. In Vienna, where he had been studying theology, he'd joined the SS-partly as an alternative to conscription into the Wehrmacht, partly from an evanescent ardor. He regretted that ardor now and was, more fully than Oskar knew, expiating it. All that Oskar understood about him at the time was that he was always pleased to undermine an Aktion. His responsibility was the perimeter of the ghetto, and from his office beyond the walls he looked inward at the Aktion with a precise horror, for he, like Oskar, considered himself a potential witness.

Oskar did not know that in the October Aktion, Bosko had smuggled some dozens of children out of the ghetto in cardboard boxes. Oskar did not know either that the Wachtmeister provided, ten at a time, general pa.s.ses for the underground. The Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB) was strong in Cracow. It was made up mainly of youth-club members, especially of members of Akiva-a club named after the legendary Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, scholar of the Mishna. The ZOB was led by a married couple, s.h.i.+mon and Gusta Dranger-her diary would become a cla.s.sic of the Resistance-and by Dolek Liebeskind. Its members needed to pa.s.s freely into and out of the ghetto, for purposes of recruitment and to carry currency, forged doc.u.ments, and copies of the underground newspaper. They had contacts with the left-wing Polish People's Army, which was based in the forests around Cracow, and which also needed the doc.u.ments Bosko provided. Bosko's contacts with ZOB and the People's Army were therefore sufficient to hang him; but still he secretly mocked and despised himself and had contempt for partial rescues. For Bosko wanted to save everyone, and would soon try to, and would perish because of it.

- Danka Dresner, cousin of red Genia, was fourteen years old and had by then outgrown the sure infantile instincts which had led her small relative safely out of the cordon in Plac ZG.o.dy. Though she had work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe base, the truth was that by autumn any woman under fifteen or more than forty could be taken away to the camps anyhow.

Therefore, on the morning an SS Sonderkommando and squads of Security Police rolled into Lwwska Street, Mrs. Dresner took Danka with her down to Dabrowski, to the house of a neighbor who had a false wall. The neighbor was a woman in her late thirties, a servant at the Gestapo mess near the Wawel, who could therefore expect some preferential treatment. But she had elderly parents who were automatic risks. So she had bricked up a 60-centimeter cavity for her parents, a costly project, since bricks had to be smuggled into the ghetto in barrows under heaps of legal goods-rags, firewood, disinfectant. G.o.d knew what her bricked-up secret s.p.a.ce had cost her-maybe 5,000 z., maybe 10,000.

She'd mentioned it a number of times to Mrs. Dresner. If there was an Aktion, Mrs. Dresner could bring Danka and come herself. Therefore, on the morning Danka and Mrs. Dresner heard from around the corner of Dabrowski the startling noise, the bark of Dalmatians and Dobermans, the megaphoned roaring of Oberscharfhrers, they hurried to their friend's place.

When the Dresners had gone up the stairs and found the right room, they could see that the clamor had had an effect on their friend. "It sounds bad," said the woman. "I have my parents in there already. I can fit the girl in. But not you."

Danka stared, captivated, at the end wall, at its stained wallpaper. In there, sandwiched in brick, rats perhaps worrying at their feet, their senses stretched by darkness, were this woman's elderly mother and father.

Mrs. Dresner could tell that the woman wasn't rational. The girl, but not you, she kept saying. It was as if she thought that should the SS penetrate the wall they would be more forgiving on account of Danka's lesser poundage. Mrs. Dresner explained that she was scarcely obese, that the Aktion seemed to be concentrating on this side of Lwwska Street, and that she had nowhere else to go. And that she could fit. Danka was a reliable girl, said Mrs. Dresner, but she would feel safer with her mother in there. You could see by measuring the wall with your eyes that four people could fit abreast in the cavity. But shots from two blocks distant swept away the last of the woman's reason. "I can fit the girl!" she screamed. "I want you to go!"

Mrs. Dresner turned to Danka and told her to go into the wall. Later Danka would not know why she had obeyed her mother and gone so mutely into hiding. The woman took her to the attic, removed a rug from the floor, then lifted a raft of floorboards. Then Danka descended into the cavity. It wasn't black in there; the parents were burning a stub of candle. Danka found herself beside the woman-someone else's mother but, beyond the unwashed smell, with the same warm, protective musk of motherhood. The woman smiled at her briefly. The husband stood on the far side of his wife, keeping his eyes closed, not to be distracted from signals from outside.

After a time the friend's mother motioned to her that she could sit if she wanted. So Danka crouched sideways and found a comfortable posture on the floor of the cavity. No rats troubled her. She heard no sound-not a word from her mother and the friend beyond the wall. Above everything else she felt unexpectedly safe. And with the sensation of safety came displeasure at herself for obeying her mother's order so woodenly, and then fear for her mother, who was out there in the world of Aktions.

Mrs. Dresner did not leave the house at once. The SS were in Dabrowski Street now. She thought she might as well stay on. If she was taken, it was no loss to her friend. It might, in fact, be a positive help. If they took a woman from this room, it would probably increase their satisfaction with their task, exempt them from a sharper inspection of the state of the wallpaper.

But the woman had convinced herself no one would survive the search if Mrs. Dresner stayed in the room; and, Mrs. Dresner could see, no one would if the woman remained in that state. Therefore she stood up, calmly despairing of herself, and left. They would find her on the steps or in the hall. Why not on the street? she wondered. It was so much an unwritten rule that ghetto natives must stay on quivering in their rooms until discovered that anyone found moving on the stairways was somehow guilty of defiance of the system.

A figure in a cap prevented her from going out. He appeared on the front step, squinting down the dark corridor to the cold blue light of the courtyard beyond. Staring at her, he recognized her, as she did him. It was an acquaintance of her elder son's; but you could not be sure that that counted for anything; you could not know what pressures they'd put on the OD boys. He stepped into the hall and approached her. "Pani Dresner," he said. He pointed at the stairwell. "They'll be gone in ten minutes. You stay under the stairs. Go on. Get under the stairs."

As numbly as her daughter had obeyed her, she now obeyed the OD youth. She crouched down under the stairs, but knew it was no good. The autumn light from the courtyard revealed her. If they wanted to look at the courtyard, or at the apartment door at the rear of the hallway, she would be seen. Since upright or cowering made no difference, she stood upright. From near the front door, the OD man urged her to stay there. Then he went. She heard yells, orders, and appeals, and it all seemed to be as close as next door.

At last, he was back with others. She heard the boots at the front door. She heard him say in German that he'd searched the ground floor and no one was at home. There were occupied rooms upstairs, though. It was such a prosaic conversation he had with the SS men that it didn't seem to her to do justice to the risk he was taking. He was staking his existence against the likelihood that having worked down Lwwska and so far down Dabrowski they might by now be incompetent enough not to search the ground floor themselves and therefore not to find Mrs. Dresner, whom he dimly knew, beneath the stairs.

In the end they took his word. She heard them on the stairs, opening and slamming doors on the first landing, their boots clattering on the floor in the room of the cavity. She heard her friend's raised, shrewish voice . . . of course I have a work permit, I work over at the Gestapo mess, I know all the gentlemen. She heard them come down from the second floor with someone; with more than one; a couple, a family. Subst.i.tutes for me, she would later think. A middle-aged male voice with an edge of bronchitis to it said, "But surely, gentlemen, we can take some clothing." And in a tone as indifferent as that of a railway porter asked for timetable information, the SS man telling him in Polish, "There's no need for it. At these places they provide everything."

The sound receded. Mrs. Dresner waited. There was no second sweep. The second sweep would be tomorrow or the day after. They would return again and again now, culling the ghetto. What in June had been seen as a culminating horror had become by October a daily process. And as grateful as she was to the OD boy, it was clear as she went upstairs to get Danka that when murder is as scheduled, habitual, industrial as it was here in Cracow you could scarcely, with tentative heroism, redirect the overriding energy of the system. The more Orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan-"An hour of life is still life." The OD boy had given her that hour. She knew there was no one who could give her more.

Upstairs, the woman was a little shamefaced. "The girl can come whenever she wishes," she said. That is, I didn't exclude you out of cowardice, but as a matter of policy. And the policy stands. You can't be accepted, but the girl can.

Mrs. Dresner did not argue-she had a sense that the woman's stance was part of the same equation that had saved her in the downstairs hall. She thanked the woman. Danka might need to accept her hospitality again.

From now on, since she looked young for her forty-two years and still had her health, Mrs. Dresner would attempt to survive on that basis-the economic one, the putative value of her strength to the Armaments Inspectorate or to some other wing of the war effort. She wasn't confident of the idea. These days anyone with half a grasp on truth could tell that the SS believed the death of the socially unappeasable Jew outbalanced any value he might have as an item of labor. And the question is, in such an era, Who saves Juda Dresner, factory purchasing officer? Who saves Janek Dresner, auto mechanic at the Wehrmacht garage? Who saves Danka Dresner, Luftwaffe cleaning woman, on the morning the SS finally choose to ignore their economic value?

- While the OD man was arranging Mrs. Dresner's survival in the hallway of the house in Dabrowski, the young Zionists of the Halutz Youth and the ZOB were preparing a more visible act of resistance. They had acquired uniforms of the Waffen SS and, with them, the ent.i.tlement to visit the SS-reserved Cyganeria Restaurant in w Ducha Plac, across the square from the Sowacki Theater. In the Cyganeria they left a bomb which blew the tables through the roof, tore seven SS men to fragments, and injured some forty more.

When Oskar heard about it, he knew he could have been there, b.u.t.tering up some official.

It was the deliberate intent of s.h.i.+mon and Gusta Dranger and their colleagues to run against the ancient pacifism of the ghetto, to convert it to universal rebellion. They bombed the SS-only Bagatella Cinema in Karmelicka Street. In the dark, Leni Riefenstahl flickered the promise of German womanhood to the wandering soldier frayed from performing the nation's works in the barbarous ghetto or on the increasingly risky streets of Polish Cracow, and the next second a vast yellow spear of flame extinguished the sight.

The ZOB would in a few months sink patrol boats on the Vistula, fire-bomb sundry military garages throughout the city, arrange Pa.s.sierscheins for people who were not supposed to have them, smuggle pa.s.sport photographs out to centers where they could be used in the forging of Aryan papers, derail the elegant Army-only train that ran between Cracow and Bochnia, and get their underground newspaper into circulation. They would also arrange for two of OD Chief Spira's lieutenants, Spitz and Forster, who had drawn up lists for the imprisonment of thousands, to walk into a Gestapo ambush. It was a variation of an old undergraduate trick. One of the underground, posing as an informer, made an appointment to meet the two policemen in a village near Cracow. At the same time, a separate supposed informer told the Gestapo that two leaders of the Jewish partisan movement could be found at a particular rendezvous point. Spitz and Forster were both mown down while running from the Gestapo.

Still, the style of resistance for the ghetto dwellers remained that of Artur Rosenzweig, who, when asked in June to make a list of thousands for deportation, had placed his own name, his wife's, his daughter's at the top.

Over in Zablocie, in the backyard of Emalia, Mr. Jereth and Oskar Schindler were pursuing their own species of resistance by planning a second barracks.

AN AUSTRIAN DENTIST named Sedlacek had now arrived in Cracow and was making wary enquiries about Schindler. He had come by train from Budapest and carried a list of possible Cracow contacts and, in a false-bottomed suitcase, a quant.i.ty of Occupation zoty, which, since Governor General Frank had abolished the major denominations of Polish money, took up an unconscionable s.p.a.ce.

Though he pretended to be traveling on business, he was a courier for a Zionist rescue organization in Budapest.

Even in the autumn of 1942, the Zionists of Palestine, let alone the population of the world, knew nothing but rumors of what was happening in Europe. They had set up a bureau in Istanbul to gather hard information. From an apartment in the Beyoglu section of the city, three agents sent out postcards addressed to every Zionist body in German Europe. The postcards read: "Please let me know how you are. Eretz is longing for you." Eretz meant the "land" and, to any Zionist, Israel. Each of the postcards was signed by one of the three, a girl named Sarka Mandelblatt, who had a convenient Turkish citizens.h.i.+p.

The postcards had gone into the void. No one answered. It meant that the addressees were in prison, or in the forest, or at labor in some camp, or in a ghetto, or dead. All the Zionists of Istanbul had was the ominous negative evidence of silence.

In the late autumn of 1942, they at last received one reply, a postcard with a view of the Belvaros of Budapest. The message on it read: "Encouraged by your interest in my situation. Rahamim maher [urgent help] is much needed. Please keep in touch."

This reply had been composed by a Budapest jeweler named Samu Springmann, who'd first received and then puzzled out the message on Sarka Mandelblatt's postcard. Samu was a slight man, jockey size, in the prime of his thirties. Since the age of thirteen, despite an inalienable probity, he had been oiling officials, doing favors for the diplomatic corps, bribing the heavy-handed Hungarian Secret Police. Now the Istanbul people let him know that they wanted to use him to pipe rescue money into the German empire and to transmit through them to the world some definite intelligence on what was happening to European Jewry.

In the German-allied Hungary of General Horthy, Samu Springmann and his Zionist colleagues were as bereft of solid news from beyond the Polish border as the people in Istanbul. But he began to recruit couriers who, for a percentage of the bag or else out of conviction, would be willing to penetrate the German territories. One of his couriers was a diamond dealer, Erich Popescu, an agent of the Hungarian Secret Police. Another was an underworld carpet smuggler, Bandi Grosz, who had also a.s.sisted the secret police, but who began to work for Springmann to expiate all the grief he had caused his late mother. A third was Rudi Schulz, an Austrian safecracker, an agent for the Gestapo Management Bureau in Stuttgart. Springmann had a gift for playing with double agents such as Popescu, Grosz, and Schulz, by touching their sentimentality, their greed, and, if any, their principles.

Some of his couriers were idealists, working from firm premises. Sedlacek, who asked after Herr Schindler in Cracow near the end of 1942, belonged to that species. He had a successful dental practice in Vienna and, in his mid-forties, did not need to lug false-bottomed suitcases into Poland. But here he was, with a list in his pocket, the list having come from Istanbul. And the second name on the list, Oskar's!

It meant that someone-Itzhak Stern, the businessman Ginter, Dr. Alexander Biberstein-had forwarded Schindler's name to the Zionists in Palestine. Without knowing it, Herr Schindler had been nominated for the post of righteous person.

- Dr. Sedlacek had a friend in the Cracow garrison, a fellow Viennese, a patient he'd got to know in his practice. It was Major Franz Von Korab of the Wehrmacht. On his first evening in Cracow, the dentist met Major Von Korab at the Hotel Cracovia for a drink. Sedlacek had had a miserable day; had gone to the gray Vistula and looked across at Podgrze, the cold fortress of barbed wire and lofty gravestoned walls, a cloud of a special dimness above it this mean winter's day, a sharper rain falling there beyond the fake eastern gate where even the policemen looked accursed. When it was time to go and meet Von Korab, he went gratefully.

In the suburbs of Vienna it had always been rumored that Von Korab had a Jewish grandmother. Patients would idly say so-in the Reich, genealogical gossip was as acceptable small talk as was the weather. People would seriously speculate over drinks whether it was true that Reinhard Heydrich's grandmother had married a Jew named Suss. Once, against all good sense but for the sake of friends.h.i.+p, Von Korab had confessed to Sedlacek that the rumor was true in his case. This confession had been a gesture of trust, which it would now be safe to return. Sedlacek therefore asked the major about some of the people on the Istanbul list. To Schindler's name, Von Korab responded with an indulgent laugh. He knew Herr Schindler, had dined with him. He was physically impressive, said the major, and made money hand over fist. He was much brighter than he pretended to be. I can call him right now and make an appointment, said Von Korab.

At ten the next morning they entered the Emalia office. Schindler accepted Sedlacek politely but watched Major Von Korab, measuring his trust of the dentist. After a time Oskar warmed to the stranger, and the major excused himself and would not stay for morning coffee. "Very well," said Sedlacek, when Von Korab was gone, "I'll tell you exactly where I come from."

He did not mention the money he had brought, nor the likelihood that in the future trusted contacts in Poland would be handed small fortunes in Jewish Joint Distribution Committee cash. What the dentist wanted to know, without any financial coloring, was what Herr Schindler knew and thought about the war against Jewry in Poland.

Once Sedlacek had the question out, Schindler hesitated. In that second, Sedlacek expected a refusal. Schindler's expanding workshop employed 550 Jews at the SS rental rate. The Armaments Inspectorate guaranteed a man like Schindler a continuity of rich contracts; the SS promised him, for no more than 7.50 Reichsmarks a day per person, a continuity of slaves. It should not be a surprise if he sat back in his padded leather chair and claimed ignorance.

"There is one problem, Herr Sedlacek," he growled. "It's this. What they are doing to people in this country is beyond belief."

"You mean," said Dr. Sedlacek, "that you're concerned my princ.i.p.als won't believe you?"

Schindler said, "Since I scarcely believe it myself." He rose, went to the liquor cabinet, poured two snifters of cognac and brought one for Dr. Sedlacek. Returning to his own side of the desk with the other, he took a swallow, frowned at an invoice, picked it up, went to the door on the b.a.l.l.s of his feet and swung it open as if to trap an eavesdropper. For a while he stood there framed. Then Sedlacek heard him talking calmly to his Polish secretary about the invoice. In a few minutes, closing the door, he returned to Sedlacek, took a seat behind the desk, and after another deep swallow, began to talk.

Even among Sedlacek's own small cell, his Viennese anti-n.a.z.i club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railroads, an enormous cubic footage of cargo s.p.a.ce, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research-and-development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole a.r.s.enals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one. Dr. Sedlacek had expected mere horror stories-hunger, economic strictures, violent pogroms in this city or that, violations of owners.h.i.+p-all the historically accustomed things.

Oskar's summary of events in Poland convinced Sedlacek precisely because of the sort of man Oskar was. He had done well from the Occupation; he sat at the heart of his own hive, a brandy snifter in his hand. There were both an impressive surface calm and a fundamental anger in him. He was like a man who had, to his regret, found it impossible to disbelieve the worst. He showed no tendency to be extravagant in the facts he relayed.

If I can arrange your visa, said Sedlacek, would you come to Budapest and pa.s.s on what you just told me to my princ.i.p.als and the others?

Schindler seemed momentarily surprised. You can write a report, he said. And surely you've heard this sort of thing from other sources. But Sedlacek told him no; there had been individual stories, details of this incident and that. No comprehensive picture. Come to Budapest, said Sedlacek. Mind you, it might be uncomfortable traveling.

Do you mean, asked Schindler, that I have to cross the border on foot?

Not as bad as that, said the dentist. You might have to travel in a freight train.

I'll come, said Oskar Schindler.

Dr. Sedlacek asked him about the other names on the Istanbul list. At the top of the list, for instance, stood a Cracow dentist. Dentists were always easy to visit, said Sedlacek, since everyone on earth has at least one bona fide cavity. No, said Herr Schindler. Don't visit this man. He's been compromised by the SS.

Before he left Cracow to return to Mr. Springmann in Budapest, Dr. Sedlacek arranged another meeting with Schindler. In Oskar's office at DEF, he handed over nearly all the currency Springmann had given him to bring to Poland. There was always some risk, in view of Schindler's hedonistic taste, that he would spend it on black-market jewelry. But neither Springmann nor Istanbul required any a.s.surances. They could never hope to play the auditor.

It must be stated that Oskar behaved impeccably and gave the cash to his contacts in the Jewish community to spend according to their judgment.

- Mordecai Wulkan, who like Mrs. Dresner would in time come to know Herr Oskar Schindler, was a jeweler by trade. Now, late in the year, he was visited at home by one of Spira's political OD. This wasn't trouble, the OD man said. Certainly Wulkan had a record. A year before, he had been picked up by the OD for selling currency on the black market. When he had refused to work as an agent for the Currency Control Bureau, he had been beaten up by the SS, and Mrs. Wulkan had had to visit Wachtmeister Beck in the ghetto police office and pay a bribe for his release.

This June he'd been seized for transport to Belec, but an OD man he'd known had arrived to pick him up and led him straight out of the Optima yard. For there were Zionists in the OD, however small their chances of ever beholding Jerusalem might be.

The OD man who visited him this time was no Zionist. The SS, he told Wulkan, urgently needed four jewelers. Symche Spira had been given three hours to find them. In this way Herzog, Friedner, Grner, and Wulkan, four jewelers, were a.s.sembled at the OD station and marched out of the ghetto to the old Technical Academy, now a warehouse for the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office.

It was obvious to Wulkan as he entered the Academy that a great security operated here. At every door stood a guard. In the front hall, an SS officer told the four jewelers that should they speak to anyone about their work here, they could expect to be sent to a labor camp. They were to bring with them, he said, every day, their diamond-grading kits, their equipment for a.s.sessing the karat value of gold.

They were led down into the bas.e.m.e.nt. Around the walls stood racks laden with suitcases and towering layers of briefcases, each with a name studiously and futilely printed on it by its past owner. Beneath the high windows stood a line of wooden crates. As the four jewelers squatted in the center of the floor, two SS men took down a suitcase, labored across the cellar with it, and emptied it in front of Herzog. They returned to the rack for another, which they emptied in front of Grner. Then they brought a cascade of gold for Friedner, then for Wulkan. It was old gold-rings, brooches, bracelets, watches, lorgnettes, cigarette holders. The jewelers were to grade the gold, separate the gold plate from the solid. Diamonds and pearls were to be valued. They were to cla.s.sify everything, according to value and karat weight, in separate heaps.

At first they picked up individual pieces tentatively, but then worked faster as old professional habits a.s.serted themselves. As the gold and jewelry went into their piles, the SS men loaded the stuff into its appropriate crate. Every time a crate was filled, it was labeled in black paint-SS REICHSFHRER BERLIN. The SS Reichsfhrer was Himmler himself, in whose name the confiscated jewelry of Europe was deposited in the Reichsbank. There were quant.i.ties of children's rings, and one had to keep a cool rational control of one's knowledge of their provenance. Only once did the jewelers falter: when the SS men opened a suitcase and out of it tumbled gold teeth still smeared with blood. There in a pile at Wulkan's knees, the mouths of a thousand dead were represented, each one calling for him to join them by standing and flinging his grading stone across the room and declaring the tainted origin of all this precious stuff. Then, after the hiatus, Herzog and Grner, Wulkan and Friedner commenced to grade again, aware now, of course, of the radiant value of whatever gold they themselves carried in their mouths, fearful that the SS would come prospecting for it.

It took six weeks for them to work through the treasures of the Technical Academy. After they had finished there, they were taken to a disused garage which had been converted to a silver warehouse. The lubrication pits were filled to spilling over with solid silver-rings, pendants, Pa.s.sover platters, yad pointers, breastplates, crowns, candelabra. They separated the solid silver from the silver plate; they weighed it all. The SS officer in charge complained that some of these objects were awkward to pack, and Mordecai Wulkan suggested that perhaps they might consider melting them down. It seemed to Wulkan, though he was not pious, that it would be somehow better, a minor triumph, if the Reich inherited silver from which the Judaic form had been removed. But for some reason the SS officer refused. Perhaps the objects were intended for some didactic museum inside the Reich. Or perhaps the SS liked the artistry of synagogue silverware.

When this appraisal work ran out, Wulkan was again at a loss for employment. He needed to leave the ghetto regularly to find enough food for his family, especially for his bronchitic daughter. For a time he worked at a metal factory in Kazimierz, getting to know an SS moderate, Oberscharfhrer Gola. Gola found him work as a maintenance man at the SA barracks near Wawel. As Wulkan entered the mess with his wrenches, he saw above the door the inscription, FR JUDEN UND HUNDE EINTRITT VERBOTEN: Entrance forbidden to Jews and dogs. This sign, together with the hundred thousand teeth he had appraised at the Technical Academy, convinced him that deliverance could not in the end be expected from the offhand favor of Oberscharfhrer Gola. Gola drank here without noticing the sign; and neither would he notice the absence of the Wulkan family on the day they were taken to Belec or some place of equal efficiency. Therefore Wulkan, like Mrs. Dresner and some fifteen thousand other dwellers in the ghetto, knew that what was needed was a special and startling deliverance. They did not believe for a moment that it would be provided.

DR. SEDLACEK HAD PROMISED an uncomfortable journey, and so it was. Oskar traveled in a good overcoat with a suitcase and a bag full of various comforts which he badly needed by the end of the trip. Though he had the appropriate travel doc.u.ments, he did not want to have to use them. It was considered better if he did not have to present them at the border. He could always then deny that he had been to Hungary that December.

He rode in a freight van filled with bundles of the Party newspaper, Vlkischer Beobachter, for sale in Hungary. Closeted with the redolence of printer's ink and among the heavy Gothic print of Germany's official newspaper, he was rocked south over the winter-sharp mountains of Slovakia, across the Hungarian border, and down to the valley of the Danube.

A reservation had been made for him at the Pannonia, near the University, and on the afternoon of his arrival, little Samu Springmann and an a.s.sociate of his, Dr. Rezso Kastner, came to see him. The two men who rose to Schindler's floor in the elevator had heard fragments of news from refugees. But refugees could give you little but threads. The fact that they had avoided the threat meant that they knew little of its geography, its intimate functioning, the numbers it ran to. Kastner and Springmann were full of antic.i.p.ation, since-if Sedlacek could be believed-the Sudeten German upstairs could give them the whole cloth, the first full-bodied report on the Polish havoc.

In the room the introductions were brief, for Springmann and Kastner had come to listen and they could tell that Schindler was anxious to talk. There was no effort, in this city obsessed with coffee, to formalize the event by calling Room Service for coffee and cakes. Kastner and Springmann, after shaking the enormous German by the hand, sat down. But Schindler paced. It seemed that far from Cracow and the realities of Aktion and ghetto, his knowledge disturbed him more than it had when he'd briefly informed Sedlacek. He rampaged across the carpet. They would have heard his steps in the room below-their chandelier would have shaken when he stamped his foot, miming the action of the SS man in the execution squad in Krakusa, the one who'd pinned his victim's head down with a boot in full sight of the red child at the tail of the departing column.

He began with personal images of the cruel parishes of Cracow, what he had beheld in the streets or heard from either side of the wall, from Jews and from the SS. In that connection, he said, he was carrying letters from members of the ghetto, from the physician Chaim Hilfstein, from Dr. Leon Salpeter, from Itzhak Stern. Dr. Hilfstein's letter, said Schindler, was a report on hunger. "Once the body fat's gone," said Oskar, "it starts to work on the brain."

The ghettos were being wound down, Oskar told them. It was true equally of Warsaw as of d and of Cracow. The population of the Warsaw ghetto had been reduced by four-fifths, d by two-thirds, Cracow by half. Where were the people who had been transferred? Some were in work camps; but the gentlemen here this afternoon had to accept that at least three-fifths of them had disappeared into camps that used the new scientific methods. Such camps were not exceptional. They had an official SS name-Vernichtungslager: Extermination Camp.

In the past few weeks, said Oskar, some 2,000 Cracow ghetto dwellers had been rounded up and sent not to the chambers of Belec, but to labor camps near the city. One was at Wieliczka, one at Prokocim, both of these being railway stations on the Ostbahn line which ran toward the Russian front. From Wieliczka and Prokocim, these prisoners were being marched every day to a site at the village of Paszw, on the edge of the city, where the foundations for a vast labor camp were being laid. Their life in such a labor camp, said Schindler, would be no holiday-the barracks of Wieliczka and Prokocim were under the command of an SS NCO named Horst Pilarzik who had earned a reputation last June when he had helped clear from the ghetto some 7,000 people, of whom only one, a chemist, had returned. The proposed camp at Paszw would be under a man of the same caliber. What was in favor of the labor camps was that they lacked the technical apparatus for methodical slaughter. There was a different rationale behind them. They had economic reasons for existing-prisoners from Wieliczka and Prokocim were marched out every day to work on various projects, just as they were from the ghetto. Wieliczka, Prokocim, and the proposed camp at Paszw were under the control of the chiefs of police for Cracow, Julian Scherner and Rolf Czurda, whereas the Vernichtungslagers were run by the central management of the SS Administrative and Economic Main Office at Oranienburg near Berlin. The Vernichtungslagers also used people as labor for a time, but their ultimate industry was death and its by-products-the recycling of the clothes, of remaining jewelry or spectacles, of toys, and even of the skin and hair of the dead.

In the midst of explaining the distinction between extermination camps and those for forced labor, Schindler suddenly stepped toward the door, wrenched it open, and looked up and down the empty hallway. "I know the reputation of this city for eavesdropping," he explained. Little Mr. Springmann rose and came to his elbow. "The Pannonia isn't so bad," he told Oskar in a low voice. "It's the Victoria that's the Gestapo hotbed."

Schindler surveyed the hallway once more, closed the door, and returned across the room. He stood by the windows and continued his grim report. The forced-labor camps would be run by men appointed for their severity and efficiency in clearing the ghettos. There would be sporadic murders and beatings, and there would certainly be corruption involving food and therefore short rations for the prisoners. But that was preferable to the a.s.sured death of the Vernichtungslagers. People in the labor camps could get access to extra comforts, and individuals could be taken out and smuggled to Hungary.

These SS men are as corruptible as any other police force, then? the gentleman of the Budapest rescue committee asked Oskar. "In my experience," growled Oskar, "there isn't one of them who isn't."

When Oskar finished, there was, of course, silence. Kastner and Springmann were not readily astounded. All their lives they'd lived under the intimidation of the Secret Police. Their present activities were both vaguely suspected by the Hungarian police-rendered safe only by Samu's contacts and bribes-and at the same time disdained by respectable Jewry. Samuel Stern, for example, president of the Jewish Council, member of the Hungarian Senate, would dismiss this afternoon's report by Oskar Schindler as pernicious fantasy, an insult to German culture, a reflection on the decency of the intentions of the Hungarian Government. These two were used to hearing the worst.