It is hard to describe what they saw when the doors were at last opened. In each car, a pyramid of frozen corpses, their limbs madly contorted, occupied the center. The hundred or more still living stank awesomely, were seared black by the cold, were skeletal. Not one of them would be found to weigh more than 75 pounds.
Oskar was not at the siding. He was inside the factory, where a warm corner of the workshop floor was being made ready for the shipment from Goleszów. Prisoners dismantled the last of Hoffman’s dumped machinery and carried it to the garages. Straw was brought in and the floor strewn with it.
Already Schindler had been out to the Commandant’s office to speak to Liepold. The Untersturmführer didn’t want to take the Goleszów men; in that, he resembled all the other commandants they had met in the past few weeks. Liepold remarked pointedly that no one could pretend that these people were munitions workers. Oskar admitted that, but guaranteed to put them on the books, and so to pay 6 RM. a day for each of them. “I can use them after their recuperation,” said Oskar. Liepold recognized two aspects of the case. First, that Oskar was unstoppable. Second, that an increase in the size of Brinnlitz and the labor fees paid might well please Hassebroeck. Liepold would have them quickly enrolled on the books and the entries back-dated, so that even as the Goleszów men were carried in through the factory gate, Oskar was paying for them.
Inside the workshop, they were wrapped in blankets and laid down on the straw. Emilie came from her apartment, followed by two prisoners toting an enormous bucket of porridge. The doctors noted the frostbite and the need for frost ointments. Dr. Biberstein mentioned to Oskar that the Goleszów people would need vitamins, though he was sure there were none to be had in Moravia. In the meantime the 16 frozen corpses were placed in a shed. Rabbi Levartov, looking at them, knew that with their limbs twisted by the cold they would be hard to bury in the Orthodox manner, which permitted no breaking of bones. The matter, Levartov knew, would, however, have to be argued with the Commandant. Liepold had on file from Section D a number of directives urging SS personnel to dispose of the dead by burning. In the boiler rooms were perfect facilities, industrial furnaces capable almost of vaporizing a body. Yet Schindler had so far twice refused to permit the burning of the dead.
The first time was when Janka Feigenbaum died in the Brinnlitz clinic. Liepold had at once ordered her body incinerated. Oskar heard through Stern that this was abhorrent to the Feigenbaums and to Levartov, and his resistance to the idea may have been fueled also by the Catholic residue in his own soul. In those years the Catholic Church was firmly opposed to cremation. As well as refusing Liepold the use of the furnace, Oskar also ordered the carpenters to prepare a coffin, and himself supplied a horse and wagon, allowing Levartov and the family to ride out under guard to bury the girl in the woods.
Feigenbaum father and son had walked behind the wagon, counting the steps from the gate so that when the war ended they could reclaim Janka’s body. Witnesses say that Liepold was furious at this sort of pandering to the prisoners. Some Brinnlitz people even comment that Oskar could show toward Levartov and the Feigenbaums a more exacting delicacy and courtesy than he usually managed with Emilie.
The second time Liepold wanted the furnaces used was when old Mrs. Hofstatter died. Oskar, at Stern’s request, had another coffin prepared, allowing a metal plaque on which Mrs. Hofstatter’s vital statistics were marked to be included in the coffin. Levartov and a minyan, the quorum of ten males who recite Kaddish over the dead, were permitted to leave camp and attend the funeral.
Stern says that it was for Mrs. Hofstatter’s sake that Oskar established a Jewish cemetery in the Catholic parish of Deutsch-Bielau, a nearby village. According to him, Oskar went to the parish church on the Sunday Mrs. Hofstatter died and made the priest a proposition. A quickly convened parish council agreed to sell him a small parcel of land just beyond the Catholic cemetery. There is nothing surer than that some of the council resisted, for it was an era when Canon Law was interpreted narrowly in its provisions as to who could and who could not be buried in consecrated ground.
Other prisoners of some authority say, however, that the Jewish cemetery plot was bought by Oskar at the time of the arrival of the Goleszów cars with their tithe of twisted dead. In a later report, Oskar himself implies that it was the Goleszów dead who caused him to buy the land. By one account, when the parish priest pointed out the area beyond the church wall reserved for the burial of suicides and suggested that the Goleszów people be buried there, Oskar answered that these weren’t suicides. These were victims of a great murder. The Goleszów deaths and the death of Mrs. Hofstatter must have come close together in any case, and were both marked with full ritual in the unique Jewish cemetery of Deutsch-Bielau.
It is clear from the way all Brinnlitz prisoners spoke of it that this interment had enormous moral force within the camp. The distorted corpses who were unloaded from the freight cars had seemed less than human. Looking at them, you became frightened for your own precarious humanity. The inhuman thing was beyond feeding, washing, warming. The one way left to restore it—as well as yourself—to humanity was through ritual. Levartov’s rites, therefore, the exalted plainchant of Kaddish, had a far larger gravity for the Brinnlitz prisoners than such ceremonies could ever have had in the relative tranquillity of prewar Cracow.
To keep the Jewish burial ground tidy in case of future deaths, Oskar employed a middle-aged SS Unterscharführer and paid him a retainer.
Emilie Schindler had transactions of her own to make. Carrying a clutch of false papers supplied by Bejski, she had two prisoners load up one of the plant trucks with vodka and cigarettes, and ordered them to drive her to the large mining town of Ostrava up near the border of the Government General. At the military hospital she was able to make an arrangement with various of Oskar’s contacts and to bring back frostbite ointments, sulfa, and the vitamins Biberstein had thought beyond procuring. Such journeys now became regular events for Emilie. She was growing to be a traveler, like her husband.
After the first deaths, there were no others. The Goleszów people were Mussulmen, and it was a first principle that the condition of Mussulmen could not be reversed. But there was some intractability in Emilie which would not accept it. She harried them with her bucketfuls of farina. “Out of those rescued from Goleszów,” said Dr. Biberstein, “not one would have stayed alive without her treatment.” The men began to be seen, trying to look useful, on the factory floor. One day a Jewish storeman asked one of them to carry a box out to a machine on the workshop floor. “The box weighs thirty-five kilos,” said the boy, “and I weigh thirty-two. How in the hell can I carry it?”
To this factory of ineffective machines, its floor strewn with scarecrows, Herr Amon Goeth came that winter, following his release from prison, to pay his respects to the Schindlers. The SS court had let him out of prison in Breslau because of his diabetes. He was dressed in an old suit that may have been a uniform with the markings stripped off. There are rumors about the meaning of this visit, and they persist to this day. Some thought that Goeth was looking for a handout, others that Oskar was holding something for him—cash or kind from one of Amon’s last Cracow deals in which Oskar had perhaps served as Amon’s agent. Some who worked close to Oskar’s office believe that Amon even asked for a managerial post at Brinnlitz. No one could say that he did not have the experience. In fact, all three versions of Amon’s motives in coming down to Brinnlitz are possibly correct, though it is unlikely that Oskar ever acted as Amon’s agent.