As Oskar had forewarned Stern in the front office of Buchheister’s, the SS carried economic warfare from door to door in Jakoba and Izaaka and Józefa. They broke into apartments, dragged out the contents of closets, smashed the locks on desks and dressers. They took valuables off fingers and throats and out of watch fobs. A girl who would not give up her fur coat had her arm broken; a boy from Ciemna Street who wanted to keep his skis was shot.
Some of those whose goods were taken—unaware that the SS were operating outside legal restraint—would tomorrow complain at police stations. Somewhere, history told them, was a senior officer with a little integrity who would be embarrassed and might even discipline some of these unruly fellows. There would have to be an investigation into the business of the boy in Ciemna and the wife whose nose was broken with a truncheon. While the SS were working the apartment buildings, the Einsatzgruppe squad moved against the fourteenth-century synagogue of Stara Boźńica. As they expected, they found at prayer there a congregation of traditional Jews with beards and sidelocks and prayer shawls. They collected a number of the less Orthodox from surrounding apartments and drove them in as well, as if they wanted to measure the reaction of one group to the other.
Among those pushed across the threshold of Stara Boźńica was the gangster Max Redlicht, who would not otherwise have entered an ancient temple or been invited to do so. They stood in front of the Ark, these two poles of the same tribe who would on a normal day have found each other’s company offensive. An Einsatz NCO opened the Ark and took out the parchment Torah scroll. The disparate congregation on the synagogue floor were to file past and spit at it. There was to be no faking—the spittle was to be visible on the calligraphy.
The Orthodox Jews were more rational about it than those others, the agnostics, the liberals, the self-styled Europeans. It was apparent to the Einsatz men that the modern ones balked in front of the scroll and even tried to catch their eye as if to say, Come on, we’re all too sophisticated for this nonsense. The SS men had been told in their training that the European character of liberal Jews was a tissue-thin facade, and in Stara Boźńica the backsliding reluctance of the ones who wore short haircuts and contemporary clothes went to prove it.
Everyone spat in the end except Max Redlicht. The Einsatzgruppe men may have seen this as a test worth their time—to make a man who visibly does not believe renounce with spittle a book he views intellectually as antique tribal drivel but which his blood tells him is still sacred. Could a Jew be retrieved from the persuasions of his ridiculous blood? Could he think as clearly as Kant? That was the test.
Redlicht would not pass it. He made a little speech. “I’ve done a lot. But I won’t do that.” They shot him first, and then shot the rest anyway and set fire to the place, making a shell of the oldest of all Polish synagogues.
CHAPTER 5
Victoria Klonowska, a Polish secretary, was the beauty of Oskar’s front office, and he immediately began a long affair with her. Ingrid, his German mistress, must have known, as surely as Emilie Schindler knew about Ingrid. For Oskar would never be a surreptitious lover. He had a childlike sexual frankness. It wasn’t that he boasted. It was that he never saw any need to lie, to creep into hotels by the back stairs, to knock quietly on any girl’s door in the small hours.
Since Oskar would not seriously try to tell his women lies, their options were reduced; traditional lovers’ arguments were difficult.
Blond hair piled up above her pretty, foxy, vividly made-up face, Victoria Klonowska looked like one of those lighthearted girls to whom the inconveniences of history are a temporary intrusion into the real business of life. This autumn of simple clothes, Klonowska was frivolous in her jacket and frilled blouse and slim skirt. Yet she was hardheaded, efficient, and adroit. She was a nationalist too, in the robust Polish style. She would in the end negotiate with the German dignitaries for her Sudeten lover’s release from SS institutions. But for the moment Oskar had a less risky job for her.
He mentioned that he would like to find a good bar or cabaret in Cracow where he could take friends. Not contacts, not senior people from the Armaments Inspectorate. Genuine friends. Somewhere lively where middle-aged officials would not turn up. Did Klonowska know of such a place?
She discovered an excellent jazz cellar in the narrow streets north of the Rynek, the city square. It was a place that had always been popular with the students and younger staff of the university, but Victoria herself had never been there before. The middle-aged men who had pursued her in peacetime would never want to go to a student dive.
If you wished to, it was possible to rent an alcove behind a curtain for private parties under cover of the tribal rhythms of the band. For finding this music club, Oskar nicknamed Klonowska “Columbus.” The Party line on jazz was that it not only was artistically decadent but expressed an African, a subhuman animality. The ump-pa-pa of Viennese waltzes was the preferred beat of the SS and of Party officials, and they earnestly avoided jazz clubs.
Round about Christmas in 1939, Oskar got together a party at the club for a number of his friends. Like any instinctive cultivator of contacts, he would never have any trouble drinking with men he didn’t like. But that night the guests were men he did. Additionally, of course, they were all useful, junior but not uninfluential members of sundry agencies of Occupation; and all of them more or less double exiles—not only were they away from home, but home or abroad, they were all variously uneasy under the regime.
There was, for example, a young German surveyor from the Government General’s Division of the Interior. He had marked out the boundaries of Oskar’s enamel factory in Zablocie. At the back of Oskar’s plant, Deutsche Email Fabrik (Def), stood a vacant area where two other manufactories abutted, a box factory and a radiator plant. Schindler had been delighted to find that most of the waste area belonged, according to the surveyor, to DEF. Visions of economic expansion danced in his head. The surveyor had, of course, been invited because he was a decent fellow, because you could talk to him, because he might be handy to know for future building permits.
The policeman Herman Toffel was there also, and the SD man Reeder, as well as a young officer—also a surveyor, named Steinhauser—from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar had met and taken to these men while seeking the permits he needed to start his plant. He had already enjoyed drinking bouts with them. He would always believe that the best way to untie bureaucracy’s Gordian knot, short of bribery, was booze. Finally there were two Abwehr men. The first was Eberhard Gebauer, the lieutenant who had recruited Oskar into the Abwehr the year before. The second was Leutnant Martin Plathe of Canaris’ headquarters in Breslau. It had been through his friend Gebauer’s recruitment that Herr Oskar Schindler had first discovered what a city of opportunity Cracow was.
There would be a by-product from the presence of Gebauer and Plathe. Oskar was still on the Abwehr’s books as an agent and, in his years in Cracow, would keep the staff of Canaris’ Breslau office satisfied by passing on to them reports on the behavior of their rivals in the SS. Gebauer and Plathe would consider his bringing along of a more-or-less disaffected gendarme like Toffel, and of Reeder of the SD, as an intelligence favor, a gift quite apart from the good company and the liquor.