They kept the men on the Appellplatz all night, for there were no huts available. It was not until midmorning the next day that they would be put under cover. In speaking of that seventeen hours of exposure, of ineffable cold dragging down on the heart, survivors do not mention any deaths.
Perhaps life under the SS, or even at Emalia, had tempered them for a night like this one. Though it was a milder evening than those earlier in the week, it was still murderous enough. Some of them, of course, were too distracted by the possibility of Brinnlitz to drift away with cold.
Later, Oskar would meet prisoners who had survived an even longer exposure to cold and frostbite. Certainly elderly Mr. Garde, the father of Adam Garde, lived through this night, as did little Olek Rosner and Richard Horowitz.
Toward eleven o’clock the next morning, they were taken to the showers. Poldek Pfefferberg, crowded in with the others, considered the nozzle above his head with suspicion, wondering if water or gas would rain down. It was water; but before it was turned on, Ukrainian barbers passed among them, shaving their heads, their pubic hair, their armpits. You stood straight, eyes front, while the Ukrainian worked at you with his unhoned razor. “It’s too dull,” one of the prisoners complained. “No,” said the Ukrainian, and slashed the prisoner’s leg to show that the blade still held a cutting edge.
After the showers, they were issued striped prison uniforms and crowded into barracks. The SS sat them in lines, like galley oarsmen, one man backed up between the legs of the man behind him, his own opened legs affording support to the man in front. By this method, 2,000 men were crammed into three huts. German Kapos armed with truncheons sat on chairs against the wall and watched. Men were wedged so tightly—every inch of the floor space covered—that to leave their rows for the latrines, even if the Kapos permitted it, meant walking on heads and shoulders and being cursed for it.
In the middle of one hut was a kitchen where turnip soup was being made and bread baked. Poldek Pfefferberg, coming back from a visit to the latrines, found the kitchen under the supervision of a Polish Army NCO he had known at the beginning of the war. The NCO gave Poldek some bread and permitted him to sleep by the kitchen fire. The others, however, spent their nights wedged in the human chain.
Each day they were stood at attention in the Appellplatz and remained there in silence for ten hours. In the evenings, however, after the issue of thin soup, they were allowed to walk around the hut, to talk to each other. The blast of a whistle at 9 P.M. was the signal for them to take up their curious positions for the night.
On the second day, an SS officer came to the Appellplatz looking for the clerk who had drawn up the Schindler list. It had not been sent off from Płaszów, it seemed. Shivering in his coarse prison uniform, Goldberg was led off to an office and asked to type out the list from memory. By the end of the day he had not finished the work and, back in the barracks, was surrounded by a spate of final pleas for inclusion. Here, in the bitter dusk, the list still enticed and tormented, even if all it had done so far for those on it was bring them to Gróss-Rosen. Pemper and others, moving in on Goldberg, began to pressure him to type Dr. Alexander Biberstein’s name on the sheet in the morning. Biberstein was brother of the Marek Biberstein who had been that first, optimistic president of the Cracow Judenrat. Earlier in the week Goldberg had confused Biberstein, telling him that he was on the list. It was not till the trucks were loaded that the doctor found out he was not in the Schindler group. Even in such a place as Gróss-Rosen, Mietek Pemper was sure enough of a future to threaten Goldberg with postwar reprisals if Biberstein were not added.
Then, on the third day, the 800 men of Schindler’s now revised list were separated out; taken to the delousing station for yet another wash; permitted to sit a few hours, speculating and chatting like villagers in front of their huts; and marched out once more to the siding. With a small ration of bread, they climbed up into cattle cars. None of the guards who loaded them admitted to knowing where they were going. They squatted on the floorboards in the prescribed manner. They kept fixed in their minds the map of Central Europe, and made continual judgments about the passage of the sun, gauging their direction by glimpses of light through small wire ventilators near the roofs of the cars. Olek Rosner was lifted to the ventilator in his car and said that he could see forests and mountains. The navigation experts claimed the train was traveling generally southeast. It all indicated a Czech destination, but no one wanted to say so.
This journey of a hundred miles took nearly two days; when the doors opened, it was early morning on the second day. They were at the Zwittau depot. They dismounted and were marched through a town not yet awake, a town frozen in the late Thirties. Even the graffiti on the walls—”KEEP THE JEWS OUT OF BRINNLITZ”—LOOKED strangely prewar to them. They had been living in a world where their very breath was begrudged. It seemed almost endearingly naive for the people of Zwittau to begrudge them a mere location. Three or four miles out into the hills, following a rail siding, they came to the industrial hamlet of Brinnlitz, and saw ahead in thin morning light the solid bulk of the Hoffman annex transformed into Arbeitslager (labor Camp) Brinnlitz, with watchtowers, a wire fence encircling it, a guard barracks inside the wire, and beyond that the gate to the factory and the prisoners’ dormitories.
As they marched in through the outer gate, Oskar appeared from the factory courtyard, wearing a Tyrolean hat.
CHAPTER 33
This camp, like Emalia, had been equipped at Oskar’s expense. According to the bureaucratic theory, all factory camps were built at the owner’s cost. It was thought that any industrialist got sufficient incentive from the cheap prison labor to justify a small expenditure on wire and lumber. In fact, Germany’s darling industrialists, such as Krupp and Farben, built their camps with materials donated from SS enterprises andwitha wealth of labor lent to them. Oskar was no darling and got nothing. He had been able to pry some wagonloads of SS cement out of Bosch at what Bosch would have considered a discount black-market price. From the same source he got two to three tons of gasoline and fuel oil for use in the production and delivery of his goods. He had brought some of the camp fencing wire from Emalia.
But around the bare premises of the Hoffman annex, he was required to provide high-tension fences, latrines, a guard barracks for 100 SS personnel, attached SS offices, a sickroom, and kitchens. Adding to the expense, Sturmbannführer Hassebroeck had already been down from Gróss-Rosen for an inspection and gone away with a supply of cognac and porcelainware, and what Oskar described as “tea by the kilogram.” Hassebroeck had also taken away inspection fees and compulsory Winter Aid contributions levied by Section D, and no receipt had been given. “His car had a considerable capacity for these things,” Oskar would later declare. He had no doubt in October 1944 that Hassebroeck was already doctoring the Brinnlitz books.