Someone else had said that to her. Leo John, the Commandant’s deputy. John was an SS Untersturmführer—equivalent to second lieutenant. “He won’t kill you,” John had said, “till the end, Lena, because he gets too much of a kick out of you.” Coming from John, it hadn’t had the same effect. Herr Schindler had just condemned her to a painful survival. He seemed to understand that she was stunned. He murmured encouragement. He’d see her again. He’d try to get her out. Out? she asked. Out of the villa, he explained; into my factory, he said. Surely you have heard of my factory. I have an enamelware factory.
“Oh, yes,” she said like a slum child speaking of the Riviera. ““Schindler’s Emalia.”
I’ve heard of it.”
“Keep your health,” he said again. He seemed to know it would be the key. He seemed to draw on a knowledge of future intentions—Himmler’s, Frank’s—when he said it. “All right,” she conceded.
She turned her back on him and went to a china closet, dragging it forward from the wall, an exercise of strength which in such a diminished girl amazed Herr Schindler. She removed a brick from the section of wall the closet had previously covered. She brought out a wad of money—
“I have a sister in the camp kitchen,” she said. “She’s younger than I am. I want you to spend this buying her back if ever she’s put on the cattle cars. I believe you often find out about these things beforehand.”
“I’ll make it my business,” Schindler told her, but with ease, not like a solemn promise. “How much is it?”
“Four thousand złoty.”
He took it negligently, her nest egg, and shoved it into a side pocket. It was still safer with him than in a niche behind Amon Goeth’s china closet.
So the story of Oskar Schindler is begun perilously, with Gothic Nazis, with SS hedonism, with a thin and brutalized girl, andwitha figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.
On one hand, Oskar has made it his business to know the full face of the system, the rabid face behind the veil of bureaucratic decency. He knows, that is, earlier than most would dare know it, what Sonderbehandlung means; that though it says “Special Treatment,” it means pyramids of cyanotic corpses in Bełżec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and in that complex west of Cracow known to the Poles as Oświęcim-Brzezinka but which will be known to the West by its German name, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
On the other hand, he is a businessman, a dealer by temperament, and he does not openly spit in the system’s eye. He has already reduced the pyramids, and though he does not know how this year and next they will grow in size and number and overtop the Matterhorn, he knows the mountain is coming. Though he cannot predict what bureaucratic shifts will occur in its construction, he still presumes there will always be room and need for Jewish labor. Therefore, during his visit to Helen Hirsch, he insists, “Keep your health.” He is sure, and out in the darkened Arbeitslager (work camp) of Płaszów, wakeful Jews stir and promise themselves, that no regime—the tide set against it—can afford to do away with a plentiful source of free labor. It’s the ones who break down, spit blood, fall to dysentery who are put on the Auschwitz transports. Herr Schindler himself has heard prisoners, out on the Appellplatz of the Płaszów labor camp, summoned for morning roll call, murmur, “At least I still have my health,” in a tone which in normal life only the aged use.
So, this winter night, it is both early days and late days for Herr Schindler’s practical engagement in the salvage of certain human lives. He is in deep; he has broken Reich laws to an extent that would earn him a multiplicity of hangings, beheadings, consignments to the drafty huts of Auschwitz or Gróss-Rosen. But he does not know yet how much it will really cost. Though he has spent a fortune already, he does not know the extent of payments still to be made.
Not to stretch belief so early, the story begins with a quotidian act of kindness—a kiss, a soft voice, a bar of chocolate. Helen Hirsch would never see her 4,000 zaloty again —not in a form in which they could be counted and held in the hand. But to this day she considers it a matter of small importance that Oskar was so inexact with sums of money.
CHAPTER 1
General Sigmund List’s armored divisions, driving north from the Sudetenland, had taken the sweet south Polish jewel of Cracow from both flanks on September 6, 1939.
And it was in their wake that Oskar Schindler entered the city which, for the next five years, would be his oyster. Though within the month he would show that he was disaffected from National Socialism, he could still see that Cracow, with its railroad junction and its as yet modest industries, would be a boomtown of the new regime. He wasn’t going to be a salesman anymore. Now he was going to be a tycoon.
It is not immediately easy to find in Oskar’s family’s history the origins of his impulse toward rescue. He was born on April 28, 1908, into the Austrian Empire of Franz Josef, into the hilly Moravian province of that ancient Austrian realm. His hometown was the industrial city of Zwittau, to which some commercial opening had brought the Schindler ancestors from Vienna at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Herr Hans Schindler, Oskar’s father, approved of the imperial arrangement, considered himself culturally an Austrian, and spoke German at the table, on the telephone, in business, in moments of tenderness. Yet when in 1918 Herr Schindler and the members of his family found themselves citizens of the Czechoslovak republic of Masaryk and Beneš, it did not seem to cause any fundamental distress to the father, and even less still to his ten-year-old son. The child Hitler, according to the man Hitler, was tormented even as a boy by the gulf between the mystical unity of Austria and Germany and their political separation. No such neurosis of disinheritance soured Oskar Schindler’s childhood. Czechoslovakia was such a bosky, unravished little dumpling of a republic that the German-speakers took their minority stature with some grace, even if the Depression and some minor governmental follies would later put a certain strain on the relationship.
Zwittau, Oskar’s hometown, was a small, coal-dusted city in the southern reaches of the mountain range known as the Jeseniks. Its surrounding hills stood partly ravaged by industry and partly forested with larch and spruce and fir. Because of its community of German-speaking Sudetendeutschen, it maintained a German grammar school, which Oskar attended. There he took the Realgymnasium Course which was meant to produce engineers—mining, mechanical, civil—to suit the area’s industrial landscape. Herr Schindler himself owned a farm-machinery plant, and Oskar’s education was a preparation for this inheritance. The family Schindler was Catholic. So too was the family of young Amon Goeth, by this time also completing the Science Course and sitting for the Matura examinations in Vienna.
Oskar’s mother, Louisa, practiced her faith with energy, her clothes redolent all Sunday of the incense burned in clouds at High Mass in the Church of St. Maurice. Hans Schindler was the sort of husband who drives a woman to religion. He liked cognac; he liked coffeehouses. A redolence of brandy-warm breath, good tobacco, and confirmed earthiness came from the direction of that good monarchist, Mr. Hans Schindler.
The family lived in a modern villa, set in its own gardens, across the city from the industrial section. There were two children, Oskar and his sister, Elfriede. But there are not witnesses left to the dynamics of that household, except in the most general terms. We know, for example, that it distressed Frau Schindler that her son, like his father, was a negligent Catholic.