At suppertime Idek Schindel, the child’s uncle, a young doctor at the ghetto hospital in Wegierska Street, arrived. He was the sort of whimsical, half-teasing, and infatuated uncle a child needs. At the sight of him, Genia became a child, getting down off her chair to rush at him. If he were here, calling these people cousins, then they were cousins. You could admit now that you had a mother named Eva and that your grandparents weren’t really named Ludwik and Sophia.
Then Mr. Juda Dresner, purchasing officer of the Bosch plant, arrived home and the company was complete.
April 28 was Schindler’s birthday, and in 1942 he celebrated it like a child of the spring, loudly, profligately. It was a big day at DEF. The Herr Direktor brought in rare white bread, regardless of expense, to be served with the noonday soup. The festivity spread into the outer office and to the workshops out back. Oskar Schindler, industrialist, was celebrating the general succulence of life. This, his thirty-fourth birthday, began early at Emalia. Schindler signaled it by walking through the outer office carrying three bottles of cognac under his arm to share with the engineers, the accountants, the draftsmen. Office workers in Accounts and Personnel had handfuls of cigarettes thrust at them, and by midmorning the handouts had spread to the factory floor. A cake was brought in from a patisserie, and Oskar cut it on Klonowska’s desk. Delegations of Jewish and Polish workers began to enter the office to congratulate him, and he heartily kissed a girl named Kucharska, whose father had figured in the Polish parliament before the war. And then the Jewish girls came up, and the men shaking hands, even Stern getting there somehow from the Progress Works where he was now employed, to take Oskar’s hand formally and find himself wrapped up in a rib-cracking embrace.
That afternoon someone, perhaps the same malcontent as last time, contacted Pomorska and denounced Schindler for his racial improprieties. His ledgers might stand up to scrutiny, but no one could deny he was a “Jew-kisser.”
The manner of his arrest seemed more professional than the last. On the morning of the 29th, a Mercedes blocked the factory entrance and two Gestapo men, seeming somehow surer of their ground than the last two, met him crossing the factory yard. He was charged, they told him, with breaking the provisions of the Race and Resettlement Act. They wanted him to come with them. And no, there was no need for him to visit his office first.
“Do you have a warrant?” he asked them.
“We don’t need one,” they told him.
He smiled at them. The gentlemen should understand that if they took him away without a warrant, they would come to regret it.
He said it lightly, but he could tell by their demeanor that the level of threat in them had firmed and focused since last year’s half-comic detention. Last time the conversation at Pomorska had been about economic matters and whether they had been breached. This time you were dealing with grotesque law, the law of the lower guts, edicts from the black side of the brain. Serious stuff.
“We will have to risk regret,” one of the two told him.
He assessed their assurance, their perilous indifference to him, a man of assets, newly turned thirty-four. “On a spring morning,” he told them, “I can spare a few hours for driving.”
He comforted himself that he would again be put into one of those urbane cells at Pomorska. But when they turned right up Kolejowa, he knew that this time it would be Montelupich prison.
“I shall wish to speak to a lawyer,” he told them.
“In time,” said the driver.
Oskar had it on the reasonable word of one of his drinking companions that the Jagiellonian Institute of Anatomy received corpses from Montelupich.
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 zł. 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 shirt 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 Standartenführer (an SS rank equivalent to colonel) wearing a slight stubble, a stale, unbuttoned shirt 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 Standartenführer 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 shell 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 damn exact about dates when I saw the way the other bastards”—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 damn latitude.”
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 bastards had a death cell there, full of shining 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 prick drop off?”
All afternoon Standartenführer Philip continued to condemn the SS. Thieves and orgiasts, he said. He couldn’t believe it. The money some of the bastards made. They started so incorruptible too. They would kill some poor bloody Pole for smuggling a kilo of bacon while they lived like goddamn Hanseatic barons.