Inside the office, Schindler placed a chair for her and walked behind his desk beneath the ritual portrait of the Führer. Would she like a cigarette? Perhaps a Pernod or a cognac? No, she said, but he must, of course, feel free to take a drink. He poured himself one from his cocktail cabinet. What’s this very important business? he asked, not quite with that crisp grace he’d shown on the stairs. For her manner had changed now the door to the outer office was closed.
He could tell she’d come to do hard business. She leaned forward. For a second it seemed ridiculous for her, a girl whose father had paid 50,000 zł. for Aryan papers, to say it without a pause, to give it all away to a half-ironic, half-worried Sudetendeutscher with a snifter of cognac in his hand. Yet in some ways it was the easiest thing she’d ever done.
I have to tell you, Herr Schindler, I’m not a Polish Aryan. My real name is Perlman.
My parents are in Płaszów. They say, and I believe it, that coming to Emalia is the same as being given a Lebenskarte—a card of life. I have nothing I can give you; I borrowed clothes to get inside your factory. Will you bring them here for me?
Schindler put down his drink and stood up. You want to make a secret arrangement? I don’t make secret arrangements. What you suggest, Fraulein, is illegal. I have a factory here in Zablocie and the only question I ask is whether or not a person has certain skills. If you care to leave your Aryan name and address, it might be possible to write to you at some stage and inform you that I need your parents for their work skills. But not now, and not on any other ground. But they can’t come as skilled workers, said Fraulein Perlman. My father’s an importer, not a metalworker.
We have an office staff, said Schindler. But mainly we need skills on the factory floor.
She was defeated. Half-blind with tears, she wrote her false name and real address—he could do with it whatever he wanted. But on the street she understood and began to revive. Maybe Schindler thought she might be an agent, that she might have been there for entrapment. Just the same, he’d been cold. There hadn’t even been an ambiguous, nonindictable gesture of kindness in the manner in which he’d thrown her out of his office.
Within a month Mr. and Mrs. Perlman came to Emalia from Płaszów. Not on their own, as Regina Perlman had imagined it would happen should Herr Oskar Schindler decide to be merciful, but as part of a new detail of 30 workers.
Sometimes she would go around to Lipowa Street and bribe her way onto the factory floor to see them. Her father worked dipping the enamel, shoveling coal, clearing the floor of scrap. “But he talks again,” said Mrs. Perlman to her daughter. For in Płaszów he’d gone silent.
In fact, despite the drafty huts, the plumbing, here at Emalia there was a certain mood, a fragile confidence, a presumption of permanence such as she, living on risky papers in sullen Cracow, could not hope to feel until the day the madness stopped.
Miss Perlman-Rodriguez did not complicate Herr Schindler’s life by storming his office in gratitude or writing effusive letters. Yet she always left the yellow gate of DEF with an unquenchable envy for those who stayed inside.
Then there was a campaign to get Rabbi Menasha Levartov, masquerading as a metalworker in Płaszów, into Emalia. Levartov was a scholarly city rabbi, young and black-bearded. He was more liberal than the rabbis from the shtetls of Poland, the ones who believed the Sabbath was more important even than life and who, throughout 1942 and 1943, were shot by the hundreds every Friday evening for refusing work in the forced-labor cantonments of Poland. He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.
Levartov had always been admired by Itzhak Stern, who worked in the Construction Office of Amon Goeth’s Administration Building. In the old days, Stern and Levartov would, if given the leisure, have sat together for hours over a glass of herbata, letting it grow cold while they talked about the influence of Zoroaster on Judaism, or the other way round, or the concept of the natural world in Taoism. Stern, when it came to comparative religion, got greater pleasure out of talking to Levartov than he could ever have received from bluff Oskar Schindler, who nonetheless had a fatal weakness for discoursing on the same subject.
During one of Oskar’s visits to Płaszów, Stern told him that somehow Menasha Levartov had to be got into Emalia, or else Goeth would surely kill him. For Levartov had a sort of visibility—it was a matter of presence. Goeth was drawn to people of presence; they were, like idlers, another class with high target priority. Stern told Oskar how Goeth had attempted to murder Levartov.
Amon Goeth’s camp now held more than 30,000 people. On the near side of the Appellplatz, near the Jewish mortuary chapel which had now become a stable, stood a Polish compound which could hold some 1,200 prisoners. Obergruppenführer Krüger was so pleased by his inspection of the new, booming camp that he now promoted the Commandant two SS grades to the rank of Hauptsturmführer.
As well as the crowd of Poles, Jews from the East and from Czechoslovakia would be held in Płaszów while space was made for them farther west in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Gróss-Rosen. Sometimes the population rose above 35,000 and the Appellplatz teemed at roll call. Amon therefore often had to cull his early comers to make way for new prisoners. And Oskar knew that the Commandant’s quick method was to enter one of the camp offices or workshops, form up two lines, and march one of them away. The line marched away would be taken either to the Austrian hill fort, for execution by firing squads, or else to the cattle cars at the Cracow-Płaszów Station or, when it was laid down in the autumn of 1943, to the railway siding by the fortified SS barracks.
On just such a culling exercise, Stern told Oskar, Amon had entered the metalworks in the factory enclosure some days past. The supervisors had stood at attention like soldiers and made their eager reports, knowing that they could die for an unwise choice of words. “I need twenty-five metalworkers,” Amon told the supervisors when the reports were finished. “Twenty-five and no more. Point out to me the ones who are skilled.”
One of the supervisors pointed to Levartov and the rabbi joined the line, though he could see that Amon took a special note of his selection. Of course, one never knew which line would be moved out or where it would be moved to, but it was in most cases a safer bet to be on the line of the skilled.
So the selection continued. Levartov had noticed that the metal shops were strangely empty that morning, since a number of those who worked or filled in time by the door had got forewarning of Goeth’s approach and had slipped over to the Madritsch garment factory to hide among the bolts of linen or appear to be mending sewing machines. The forty or so slow or inadvertent who had stayed on in the metalworks were now in two lines between the benches and the lathes. Everyone was fearful, but those in the smaller line were the more uneasy.