bankrupt manufactory to a company government agencies could take seriously. As the first snows fell, Schindler noticed and was irritated when, on any given day, 60 or more of his Jewish employees would be absentees. They would have been detained by SS squads on the way to work and employed in clearing snow. Herr Schindler visited his friend Toffel at SS headquarters in Pomorska Street to complain.
On one day, he told Toffel, he had 125 absentees.
Toffel confided in him. “You’ve got to understand that some of these fellows here don’t give a damn about production. To them it’s a matter of national priority that Jews be made to shovel snow. I don’t understand it myself… it’s got a ritual significance for them, Jews shoveling snow. And it’s not just you, it’s happening to everyone.” Oskar asked if all the others were complaining too. Yes, said Toffel. However, he said, an economic big shot from the SS Budget and Construction Office had come for lunch in Pomorska and said that to believe the Jewish skilled worker had a place in Reich economics was treasonable. “I think you’re going to have to put up with a lot of snow shoveling yet, Oskar.”
Oskar, for the moment, assumed the stance of the outraged patriot, or perhaps of the outraged profiteer. “If they want to win the war,” said Oskar, “they’d have to get rid of SS men like that.”
“Get rid of them?” asked Toffel. “For Christ’s sake, they’re the bastards who’re on top.”
As a result of such conversations, Oskar became an advocate of the principle that a factory owner should have unimpeded access to his own workers, that these workers should have access to the plant, that they should not be detained or tyrannized on their way to and from the factory. It was, in Oskar’s eyes, a moral axiom as much as an industrial one. In the end, he would apply it to its limit at Deutsche Email Fabrik.
CHAPTER 7
Some people from the big cities—from Warsaw and Lodz with their ghettos and Cracow with Frank’s commitment to making it judenfrei— went to the countryside to lose themselves among the peasants. The Rosner brothers, Cracovian musicians who would come to know Oskar well, settled in the old village of Tyniec. It was on a pretty bend of the Vistula, and an old Benedictine abbey on a limestone cliff hung above it. It was anonymous enough for the Rosners, though. It had a few Jewish storekeepers and Orthodox artisans, with whom nightclub musicians had little to converse about. But the peasants, busy with the tedium of the harvest, were as pleased as the Rosners could have hoped to find musicians in their midst.
They’d come to Tyniec not from Cracow, not from that great marshaling point outside the botanical gardens in Mogilska Street where young SS men pushed people onto trucks and called out bland and lying promises about the later delivery of all adequately labeled baggage. They had come in fact from Warsaw, where they had been enjoying an engagement at the Basilisk. They had left the day before the Germans sealed up the Warsaw ghetto— Henry and Leopold and Henry’s wife, Manci, and five-year-old son, Olek. The idea of a south Polish village like Tyniec, not far from their native Cracow, appealed to the brothers. It offered the option, should conditions improve, of catching a bus into Cracow and finding work. Manci Rosner, an Austrian girl, had brought with her her sewing machine, and the Rosners set up a little clothing business in Tyniec. In the evenings they played in the taverns and became a sensation in a town like that. Villages welcome and support occasional wonders, even Jewish ones. And the fiddle was, of all instruments, most venerated in Poland.
One evening a traveling Volksdeutscher (german-speaking Pole) from Poznan heard the brothers playing outside the inn. The Volksdeutscher was a municipal official from Cracow, one of those Polish Germans in whose name Hitler had taken the country in the first place. The Volksdeutscher told Henry that the mayor of Cracow, Obersturmbannfuhrer Pavlu, and his deputy, the renowned skier Sepp Rohre, would be visiting the countryside at harvest time, and he would like to arrange for them to hear such an accomplished pair as the Rosners.
On an afternoon when the bound sheaves lay drowsing in fields as quiet and as abandoned as on Sunday, a convoy of limousines wound through Tyniec and up a rise to the villa of an absentee Polish aristocrat. On the terrace, the dapper Rosner brothers waited, and when all the ladies and gentlemen had been seated in a room that might once have been used for balls, they were invited to perform. Henry and Leopold felt both exultation and fear at the seriousness with which Obersturmbannfuhrer Pavlu’s party had geared themselves for their playing. The women wore white dresses and gloves, the military officials full dress, the bureaucrats their winged collars. When people went to such trouble, it was easier to disappoint them. For a Jew, even to impose a cultural disappointment on the regime was a serious crime.
But the audience loved them. They were a characteristically gemutlich crowd; they loved Strauss, the confections of Offenbach and Lehar, Andr’e Messager and Leo Fall. At request time they grew mawkish.
And as Henry and Leopold performed, the ladies and gentlemen drank champagne from long-stemmed flutes brought in by hamper. Once the official recital had finished, the brothers were taken down the hill to where the peasants and the soldiers of the escort had been gathered. If there was to be some crude racial demonstration, it would take place here. But again, once the brothers had climbed onto a wagon and looked the crowd in the eye, Henry knew they would be safe. The pride of the peasants, partly a national thing—the Rosners being for the night a credit to Polish culture—all that protected them. It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Manci, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.
When it was finished, a middle-aged SS NCO—A Rottenfuhrer (a junior noncommissioned SS rank) perhaps —Henry not being as familiar as he might become with the gradations of SS rank—approached them as they stood by the wagon receiving congratulations. He nodded to them and barely smiled. “I hope you have a nice harvest holiday,” he said, bowed, and left.
The brothers stared at each other. As soon as the SS man was out of hearing, they gave in to the temptation to discuss his meaning. Leopold was convinced. “It’s a threat,” he said. It went to show what they had feared in their marrow when the Volksdeutsche official first spoke to them— that these days it didn’t do to stand out, to acquire a distinctive face.
That was life in the country in 1940. The curtailment of a career, the rustic tedium, the scratching out of a trade, the occasional terror, the pull of that bright core called Cracow.
To that, the Rosners knew, they would eventually return.
Emilie had returned home in the autumn, and when Stern next came to Schindler’s apartment it was Ingrid who brought the coffee. Oskar made no secret of his weaknesses, and never seemed to think that ascetic Itzhak Stern needed any apologia for Ingrid’s presence. Similarly, when the coffee was finished, Oskar went to the liquor cabinet and brought back a fresh bottle of brandy, setting it down on the table between his seat and Stern’s, as if Stern were really likely to help him drink it.
Stern had come that evening to tell Oskar that a family whom we shall call the C’s were spreading stories about him, old David and young Leon C, saying even on the streets in Kazimierz—let alone in parlors—that Oskar was a German gangster, a thug. When Stern passed on these accusations to Oskar, he didn’t use terms quite as vivid as that.
The reason an initial is employed here instead of a fictionalized name is that in Cracow the whole range of Polish Jewish names were found, and that to employ any name other than the C’s‘ real one might cause offense to the memory of some vanished family or to some living friend of Oskar’s. Oskar knew Stern wasn’t looking for a response, that he was just passing on intelligence.
But of course he felt he had to respond anyway.
“I could spread stories about them,” said Oskar. “They’re robbing me blind. Ask Ingrid if you like.”
Ingrid was the C’s‘ supervisor. She was a benign Treuhander and, being only in her twenties, commercially inexperienced. The rumor was that Schindler himself had got the girl appointed so that he would have an assured outlet for his kitchenware. The C’s, however, still did pretty well what they wanted with their company. If they resented the idea that it was held in trust by the occupying power, no one could blame them for that. Stern waved Oskar’s suggestion away. Who was he to want to grill Ingrid? It wasn’t much use to compare notes with the girl anyhow. “They run rings around Ingrid,” said Oskar. They turned up at Lipowa Street for delivery of their orders and altered the invoices on the spot and took away more than they had paid for. “She says it’s all right,” they’d tell the Schindler employees. “He’s arranged it with Ingrid.”
The son had in fact been gathering crowds and telling them that Schindler had had the SS beat him up. But
