In the drafting department, young Moshe Bejski and Josef Bau had already begun forging prison passes of the type that allowed people to make the mill run. Oskar wandered in one day and showed Bejski documents stamped with the seal of the rationing authority of the Government General. Oskar’s best contacts for black-market food were still in the Cracow area. He could arrange shipments by telephone. But at the Moravian border, you had to show clearance documents from the Food and Agriculture Department of the Government General. Oskar pointed to the stamp on the papers in his hand. Could you make a stamp like that? he asked Bejski. Bejski was a craftsman. He could work on little sleep. Now he turned out for Oskar the first of the many official stamps he would craft. His tools were razor blades and various small cutting instruments. His stamps became the emblems of Brinnlitz’ own outrageous bureaucracy.
He cut seals of the Government General, of the Governor of Moravia, seals to adorn false travel permits so that prisoners could drive by truck to Brno or Olomouc to collect loads of bread, of black-market gasoline, of flour or fabric or cigarettes. Leon Salpeter, a Cracow pharmacist, once a member of Marek Biberstein’s Judenrat, kept the storehouse in Brinnlitz. Here the miserable supplies sent down from Gróss-Rosen by Hassebroeck were kept, together with the supplementary vegetables, flour, cereals bought by Oskar under Bejski’s minutely careful rubber stamps, the eagle and the hooked cross of the regime precisely crafted on them.
“You have to remember,” said an inmate of Oskar’s camp, “that Brinnlitz was hard. But beside any other—paradise!” Prisoners seem to have been aware that food was scarce everywhere; even on the outside, few were sated.
And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of the prisoners?
The answer is indulgent laughter. “Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?” And then a frown, in case you think this attitude too serflike. “You don’t understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be.”
As in his early marriage, Oskar was still temperamentally an absentee, was away from Brinnlitz for stretches of time. Sometimes Stern, purveyor of the day’s requests, would wait up all night for him. In Oskar’s apartment Itzhak and Emilie were the keepers of vigils.
The scholarly accountant would always put the most loyal interpretation on Oskar’s wanderings around Moravia. In a speech years after, Stern would say, “He rode day and night, not only to purchase food for the Jews in Brinnlitz camp—by means of forged papers made by one of the prisoners—but to buy us arms and ammunition in case the SS conceived of killing us during their retreats.” The picture of a restlessly provident Herr Direktor does credit to Itzhak’s love and loyalty. But Emilie would have understood that not all the absences had to do with Oskar’s brand of humane racketeering.
During one of Oskar’s furloughs, nineteen-year-old Janek Dresner was accused of sabotage. In fact Dresner was ignorant of metalwork. He had spent his time in Płaszów in the delousing works, handing towels to the SS who came for a shower and sauna, and boiling lice-ridden clothes taken from prisoners. (from the bite of a louse he’d suffered typhus, and survived only because his cousin, Dr. Schindel, passed him off in the clinic as an angina case.)
The supposed sabotage occurred because engineer Schoenbrun, the German supervisor, transferred him from his lathe to one of the larger metal presses. It had taken a week for the engineers to set the metrics for this machine, and the first time Dresner pressed the start button and began to use it, he shorted the wiring and cracked one of the plates. Schoenbrun harangued the boy and went into the office to write a damning report. Copies of Schoenbrun’s complaint were typed up and addressed to Sections D and W in Oranienburg, to Hassebroeck at Gróss-Rosen, and to Untersturmführer Liepold in his office at the factory gate.
In the morning, Oskar had still not come home. So rather than mail the reports, Stern took them out of the office mailbag and hid them. The complaint addressed to Liepold had already been hand-delivered, but Liepold was at least correct in the terms of the organization he served and could not hang the boy until he had heard from Oranienburg and Hassebroeck. Two days later, Oskar had still not appeared. “It must be some party!” the whimsical ones on the shop floor told each other. Somehow Schoenbrun discovered that Itzhak was sitting on the letters. He raged through the office, telling Stern that .his name would be added to the reports. Stern seemed to be a man of limitless calm, and when Schoenbrun finished he told the engineer that he had removed the reports from the mailbag because he thought the Herr Direktor should, as a matter of courtesy, be apprised of their contents before they were mailed. The Herr Direktor, said Stern, would of course be appalled to find out that a prisoner had done 10,000 RM. worth of damage to one of his machines. It seemed only just, said Stern, that Herr Schindler be given the chance to add his own remarks to the report.
At last Oskar drove in through the gate.
Stern intercepted him and told him about Schoenbrun’s charges.
Untersturmführer Liepold had been waiting to see Schindler too and was eager to push his authority inside the factory, to use the Janek Dresner case as a pretext. I will preside over the hearing, Liepold told Oskar. You, Herr Direktor, will supply a signed statement attesting to the extent of the damage. Wait a minute, Oskar told him. It’s my machine that’s broken. I’m the one who’ll preside.
Liepold argued that the prisoner was under the jurisdiction of Section D. But the machine, replied Oskar, came under the authority of the Armaments Inspectorate. Besides, he really couldn’t permit a trial on the shop floor.
If Brinnlitz had been a garment or chemical factory, then perhaps it wouldn’t have much impact on production. But this was a munitions factory engaged in the manufacture of secret components. “I won’t have my work force disturbed,” said Oskar.
It was an argument Oskar won, perhaps because Liepold gave in. The Untersturmführer was afraid of Oskar’s contacts. So the court was convened at night in the machine-tool section of DEF, and its members were Herr Oskar Schindler as president, Herr Schoenbrun, and Herr Fuchs. A young German girl sat at the side of the judicial table to keep a record, and when young Dresner was brought in, he saw in front of him a solemn and fully constituted court. According to a Section D edict of April 11, 1944, what Janek faced was the first and crucial stage of a process which should, after a report to Hassebroeck and a reply from Oranienburg, end in his hanging on the workshop floor in front of all the Brinnlitz people, his parents and sister among them. Janek noticed that tonight there was none of that shop-floor familiarity to Oskar. The Herr Direktor read aloud Schoenbrun’s report of the sabotage. Janek knew about Oskar mainly from the reports of others, particularly from his father, and couldn’t tell now what Oskar’s straight-faced reading of Schoenbrun’s accusations meant. Was Oskar really grieving for the cracked machine? Or was it all just theatrics?
When the reading was finished, the Herr Direktor began to ask questions. There was not much Dresner could say in answer. He pleaded that he was unfamiliar with the machine. There had been trouble setting it, he explained. He had been too anxious and had made a mistake. He assured the Herr Direktor that he had no reason to wish to sabotage the machinery. If you are not skilled at armaments work, said Schoenbrun, you shouldn’t be here. The Herr Direktor has assured me that all you prisoners have had experience in the armaments industry. Yet here you are, Häftling Dresner, claiming ignorance.