In spite of such lighthearted piracy, Oskar was frightened by rumors from Slovakia that the Russians were uncritically and informally executing German civilians. From listening to the BBC news each night, he was comforted to find that the war might end before any Russian reached the Zwittau area.
The prisoners also had indirect access to the BBC and knew what the realities were. Throughout the history of Brinnlitz the radio technicians, Zenon Szenwich and Artur Rabner, had continually repaired one or another radio of Oskar’s. In the welding shop, Zenon listened with an earphone to the 2 P.M. news from the Voice of London. During the night shift, the welders plugged into the 2 A.M. broadcast. An SS man, in the factory one night to take a message to the office, discovered three of them around the radio. “We’ve been working on it for the Herr Direktor,” they told the man, “and just got it going a minute ago.”
Earlier in the year, prisoners had expected that Moravia would be taken by the Americans. Since Eisenhower had stood fast at the Elbe, they now knew that it would be the Russians. The circle of prisoners closest to Oskar were composing a letter in Hebrew, explaining what Oskar’s record was. It might do some good if presented to American forces, which had not only a considerable Jewish component, but field rabbis. Stern and Oskar himself therefore considered it vital that the Herr Direktor somehow be got to the Americans. In part Oskar’s decision was influenced by the characteristic Central European idea of the Russians as barbarians, men of strange religion and uncertain humanity. But apart from that, if some of the reports from the east could be believed, he had grounds for rational fear.
But he was not debilitated by it. He was awake and in a state of hectic expectation when the news of the German surrender came to him through the BBC in the small hours of May 7. The war in Europe was to cease at midnight on the following night, the night of Tuesday, May 8. Oskar woke Emilie, and the sleepless Stern was summoned into the office to help the Herr Direktor celebrate. Stern could tell that Oskar now felt confident about the SS garrison, but would have been alarmed if he could have guessed how Oskar’s certitude would be demonstrated that day.
On the shop floor, the prisoners maintained the usual routines. If anything, they worked better than on other days. Yet about noon, the Herr Direktor destroyed the pretense of business as usual by piping Churchill’s victory speech by loudspeaker throughout the camp.
Lutek Feigenbaum, who understood English, stood by his machine flabbergasted. For others, the honking and grunting voice of Churchill was the first they’d heard in years of a language they would speak in the New World. The idiosyncratic voice, as familiar in its way as that of the dead Führer, carried to the gates and assailed the watchtowers, but the SS took it soberly. They were no longer turning inward toward the camp. Their eyes, like Oskar’s, were focused—but far more sharply—on the Russians. According to Hassebroeck’s earlier telegram, they should have been busy in the rich green woods. Instead, clock-watching for midnight, they looked at the black face of the forest, speculating whether partisans were there. A fretful Oberscharführer Motzek kept them at their posts, and duty kept them there also. For duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius.
In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweler named Licht, had been making a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box he’d been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. It had been supplied by old Mr. Jereth of the box factory. It was established— even the Budzyn men, devout Marxists, knew it—that Oskar would have to flee after midnight. The urge to mark that flight with a small ceremony was the preoccupation of the group—Stern, Finder, Garde, the Bejskis, Pemper—close to Oskar. It is remarkable, at a time when they were not sure themselves that they would see the peace, that they should worry about going-away presents.
All that was handy to make a gift with, however, was base metals. It was Mr. Jereth who suggested a source of something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework. Without Oskar, he said, the SS would have the damned stuff anyway. My teeth would be in a heap in some SS warehouse, along with the golden fangs of strangers from Lublin, Łódź, and Lwów.
It was, of course, an appropriate offering, and Jereth was insistent. He had the bridgework dragged out by a prisoner who had once had a dental practice in Cracow. Licht melted the gold down and by noon on May 8 was engraving an inscription on the inner circle in Hebrew. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheister’s in October 1939. “He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”
In one of the factory garages that afternoon, two prisoners were engaged in removing the upholstery from the ceiling and inner doors of Oskar’s Mercedes, inserting small sacks of the Herr Direktor’s diamonds and replacing the leatherwork without, they hoped, leaving any bulges. For them too it was a strange day. When they came out of the garage, the sun was setting behind the towers where the Spandaus sat loaded yet weirdly ineffectual. It was as if all the world were waiting for a decisive word.
Words of that nature seem to have come in the evening. Again, as on his birthday, Oskar instructed the Commandant to gather the prisoners on the factory floor. Again the German engineers and the secretaries, their escape plans already made, were present. Among them stood Ingrid, his old flame. She would not be leaving Brinnlitz in Schindler’s company. She would make her escape with her brother, a young war veteran, lame from a wound. Given that Oskar went to so much trouble to provide his prisoners with trade goods, it is unlikely that he would let an old love like Ingrid leave Brinnlitz without anything to barter for survival. Surely they would meet on friendly terms later, somewhere in the West.
As at Oskar’s birthday speech, armed guards stood around the great hall. The war had nearly six hours to run, and the SS were sworn never to abandon it in any case. Looking at them, the prisoners tried to gauge their states of soul. When it was announced that the Herr Direktor would make another address, two women prisoners who knew shorthand, Miss Waidmann and Mrs. Berger, had each fetched a pencil and prepared to take down what was said. Because it was an ex tempore speech, given by a man who knew he would soon become a fugitive, it was more compelling as spoken than it is on the page in the Waidmann-Berger version. It continued the themes of his birthday address, but it seemed to make them conclusive for both the prisoners and the Germans. It declared the prisoners the inheritors of the new era; it confirmed that everyone else there—the SS, himself, Emilie, Fuchs, Schoenbrun—was now in need of rescue.
“The unconditional surrender of Germany,” he said, “has just been announced. After six years of the cruel murder of human beings, victims are being mourned, and Europe is now trying to return to peace and order. I would like to turn to you for unconditional order and discipline—to all of you who together with me have worried through many hard years— in order that you can live through the present and within a few days go back to your destroyed and plundered homes, looking for survivors from your families. You will thus prevent panic, whose results cannot be foreseen.”
He did not, of course, mean panic in the prisoners. He meant panic among the garrison, among the men lining the walls. He was inviting the SS to leave, and the prisoners to let them do so. General Montgomery, he said, the commander of the Allied land forces, had proclaimed that one should act in a humane way toward the conquered, and everyone—in judging the Germans—had to distinguish between guilt and duty. “The soldiers at the front, as well as the little man who has done his duty everywhere, shall not be responsible for what a group calling itself German has done.” He was uttering a defense of his countrymen which every prisoner who survived the night would hear reiterated a thousand times in the era to come. Yet if anyone had earned the right to make that defense and have it listened to with—at least—tolerance, it was surely Herr Oskar Schindler.