The jewelers were to grade the gold, separate the gold plate from the solid. Diamonds and pearls were to be valued. They were to classify 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 asserted 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 REICHSFüHRER BERLIN. The SS Reichsführer was Himmler himself, in whose name the confiscated jewelry of Europe was deposited in the Reichsbank. There were quantities 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 Grüner, 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, Passover 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, Oberscharführer 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, FÜR 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 Oberscharführer 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 Bełżec 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.
CHAPTER 18
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 documents, 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, Vólkischer 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 associate 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 anticipation, 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 Łódź and of Cracow. The population of the Warsaw ghetto had been reduced by four-fifths, Łódź 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 Bełżec, 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 Płaszów, 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 Płaszów 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.