Again, apologists for the young Oskar would say that he agreed to work for Canaris because, as an Abwehr agent, he was exempt from army service. That was a large part of the proposal’s charm. But he must also have believed that a German advance into Poland would be appropriate. Like the slim officer sitting drinking on the bed with him, he must still have approved of the national business, though he did not like the management. For Oskar, Gebauer may have possessed a moral allure, for he and his Abwehr colleagues considered themselves a decent Christian elite. Though it did not prevent their planning for a military intrusion into Poland, it gave them a contempt for Himmler and the SS, with whom, they believed high-handedly, they were in competition for the control of Germany’s soul.
Later, a very different intelligence-gathering body would find Oskar’s reports to be full and praiseworthy. On his Polish journeys for the Abwehr, he showed a gift for charming news out of people, especially in a social setting—at the dinner table, over cocktails. We do not know the exact nature or importance of what he found out for Gebauer and Canaris, but he came to like the city of Cracow very well, and to discover that though it was no great industrial metropolis, it was an exquisite medieval city surrounded with a fringe of metal, textile, and chemical plants.
As for the unmotorized Polish Army, its secrets were all too apparent.
CHAPTER 2
In late October 1939, two young German NCO’S entered the showroom of J.C. Buchheister and Company in Stradom Street, Cracow, and insisted on buying some expensive bolts of cloth to send home. The Jewish clerk behind the counter, a yellow star sewn to his breast, explained that Buchheister’s did not sell direct to the public but supplied garment factories and retail outlets. The soldiers would not be dissuaded. When it was time to settle their bill, they did it whimsically with a Bavarian banknote of 1858 and a piece of German Army Occupation scrip dated 1914.
“Perfectly good currency,” one of them told the Jewish bookkeeper. They were healthy-looking young men who had spent all spring and summer on maneuvers, the early autumn yielding them an easy triumph and, later, all the latitude of conquerors in a sweet city. The bookkeeper agreed to the transaction and got them out of the shop before ringing up a sale on the cash register. Later in the day, a young German accounts manager, an official appointed by the deftly named East Trust Agency to take over and run Jewish businesses, visited the showroom. He was one of two German officials assigned to Buchheister. The first was Sepp Aue, the supervisor, a middle-aged, unambitious man, and the second, this young go-getter. The young man inspected the books and the till. He took out the valueless currency. What did it mean, this comic-opera money?
The Jewish bookkeeper told his story; the accounts manager accused him of substituting the antique notes for hard złoty. Later in the day, in Buchheister’s warehouse upstairs, the go-getter reported to Sepp Aue and said they should call in the Schutzpolizei.
Herr Aue and the young accountant both knew that such an act would lead to the imprisonment of the bookkeeper in the SS jail in Montelupich Street. The accountant thought that this would set an excellent example for Buchheister’s remaining Jewish staff. But the idea distressed Aue, who had a secret liability of his own, his grandmother having been Jewish, though no one had yet found that out.
Aue sent an office boy with a message to the company’s original accountant, a Polish Jew named Itzhak Stern, who was at home with influenza. Aue was a political appointee with little accounting experience. He wanted Stern to come into the office and resolve the impasse over the bolts of linen. He had just sent the message off to Stern’s house in Podgórze when his secretary came into the office and announced that a Herr Oskar Schindler was waiting outside, claiming to have an appointment. Aue went into the outer room and saw a tall young man, placid as a large dog, tranquilly smoking. The two had met at a party the night before. Oskar had been there with a Sudeten German girl named Ingrid, Treuhänder, or supervisor, of a Jewish hardware company, just as Aue was Treuhänder of Buchheister’s. They were a glamorous couple, Oskar and this Ingrid, frankly in love, stylish, with lots of friends in the Abwehr.
Herr Schindler was looking for a career in Cracow. Textiles? Aue had suggested. “It isn’t just uniforms. The Polish domestic market itself is large enough and inflated enough to support us all. You’re welcome to look Buchheister’s over,” he’d urged Oskar, not knowing how he might regret his tipsy camaraderie at 2 P.M. the next day.
Schindler could see that Herr Aue had possible second thoughts about his invitation. If it’s not convenient, Herr Treuhänder, Oskar suggested…
Herr Aue said not at all and took Schindler through the warehouse and across a yard to the spinning division, where great rolls of golden fabric were running off the machines. Schindler asked if the Treuhänder had had trouble with the Poles. No, said Sepp, they’re cooperative.
Stunned, if anything. After all, it’s not exactly a munitions factory.
Schindler so obviously had the air of a man with connections that Aue could not resist the temptation to test the point. Did Oskar know the people at the Main Armaments Board? Did he know General Julius Schindler, for example. Perhaps General Schindler was a relative.
That makes no difference, said Herr Schindler disarmingly. (in fact General Schindler was unrelated to him.) The General wasn’t such a bad fellow, compared with some, said Oskar. Aue agreed. But he himself would never dine with General Schindler or meet him for drinks; that was the difference.
They returned to the office, encountering on the way Itzhak Stern, Buchheister’s Jewish accountant, waiting on a chair provided by Aue’s secretary, blowing his nose and coughing harshly. He stood up, joined his hands one on top of the other in front of his chest, and with immense eyes watched both conquerors approach, pass him, and enter the office. There Aue offered Schindler a drink and then, excusing himself, left Oskar by the fire and went out to interview Stern. He was so thin, and there was a scholarly dryness to him. He had the manners of a Talmudic scholar, but also of a European intellectual. Aue told him the story of the bookkeeper and the NCO’S and the assumptions the young German accountant had made. He produced from the safe the currency: the 1858 Bavarian, the 1914 Occupation. “I thought you might have instituted an accounting procedure to deal with just this situation,” said Aue. “It must be happening a great deal in Cracow just now.”
Itzhak Stern took the notes and studied them. He had indeed developed a procedure, he told the Herr Treuhänder. Without a smile or a wink, he moved to the open fire at the end of the room and dropped both notes into it.
“I write these transactions off to profit and loss, under “free samples,”” he said. There had been a lot of free samples since September. Aue liked Stern’s dry, effective style with the legal evidence. He began to laugh, seeing in the accountant’s lean features the complexities of Cracow itself, the parochial canniness of a small city. Only a local knew the ropes.
In the inner office Herr Schindler sat in need of local information. Aue led Stern through into the manager’s office to meet Herr Schindler, who stood staring at the fire, an unstoppered hip flask held absently in one hand. The first thing Itzhak Stern thought was, This isn’t a manageable German. Aue wore the badge of his Führer, a miniature Hakenkreuz, as negligently as a man might wear the badge of a cycling club. But big Schindler’s coin-sized emblem took the light from the fire in its black enamel. It, and the young man’s general affluence, were all the more the symbols of Stern’s autumn griefs as a Polish Jew with a cold. Aue made the introductions. According to the edict already issued by Governor Frank, Stern made his statement: “I have to tell you, sir, that I am a Jew.”