his story varied—the beating was supposed to have occurred at Schindler’s factory, in a storeroom from which young C emerged with a black eye and broken teeth. Then it was supposed to have occurred on Limanowskiego, in front of witnesses. A man called F, an employee of Oskar’s and a friend of the C’s, had said he’d heard Oskar stamping up and down in his office in Lipowa Street and threatening to kill old David C. Then Oskar was said to have driven around to Stradom and raided the C cash register, to have stuffed his pockets with currency and told them that there was a New Order in Europe, and then to have beaten up old David in his office.
Was it possible that Oskar could let fly at old David C and land him in bed with bruises?
Was it likely he would call on friends in the police to assault Leon? On one level Oskar and the C’s were gangsters, selling tons of kitchenware illegally, without sending records of sales to the Transferstelle, without use of the required merchandizing coupons called Bezugschein. On the black market, the dialogue was primitive and tempers were short. Oskar admitted he’d raged into the C’s‘ showroom and called father and son thieves and indemnified himself out of the till for the kitchenware the C’s had taken without authorization. Oskar admitted he’d punched young Leon. But that was the limit of his admissions.
And the C’s, whom Stern had known since childhood—they had one of those reputations. Not exactly criminal, but sharp in dealing and, significant in this case, with a reputation for squealing when caught.
Stern knew Leon C’s bruises did exist. Leon wore them down the street and was willing to elaborate on them. The SS beating did take place somewhere or other, but it could have had a dozen causes. Stern not only did not believe that Oskar had begun asking the SS for that sort of favor, but also had the sense that to believe or disbelieve what was said to have happened in this case was irrelevant to his own wider purposes. It would become relevant only when and if Herr Schindler established a brutal pattern. For Stern’s purposes, occasional lapses did not count. Had Oskar been without sin, this apartment would not exist in its present form, and neither would Ingrid be waiting in the bedroom.
And it is yet again one of those things which must be said, that Oskar would save all of them—Mr. and Mrs. C, Leon C, Mr. H, Miss M, old C’s secretary—and that they would always admit that, but that they would also and always stick to their story of the bruises.
That evening Itzhak Stern also brought news of Marek Biberstein’s jail sentence. He had got two years in the prison in Montelupich Street, this Marek Biberstein who was the president of the Judenrat, or who had been until his arrest. In other cities the Judenrat was already cursed by the general Jewish population, for its main work had become the drawing up of lists for forced labor, for transfers to camps. The Judenrats were regarded by the German administration as organs of its will, but in Cracow, Marek Biberstein and his cabinet still saw themselves as buffers between the office of the military mayor of Cracow, Schmid and later Pavlu, on one hand, and the Jewish inhabitants of the city on the other. In the Cracow German newspaper of March 13, 1940, a Dr. Dietrich Redecker said that on a visit to the Judenrat office he was struck by the contrast between its carpet and plush chairs and the poverty and squalor of the Jewish quarter in Kazimierz. But Jewish survivors do not remember the first Cracow Judenrat as men who cut themselves off from the people. Hungry for revenue, however, they had made the mistake the Judenrats of Lodz and Warsaw had made before them, permitting the affluent to buy their way off forced-labor lists, forcing the poor onto the roster in return for soup and bread. But even later, in 1941, Biberstein and his council still had the respect of the Jews of Cracow.
That first membership of the Judenrat consisted of twenty-four men, most of them intellectuals. Each day, on his way to Zablocie, Oskar passed their corner office in Podgorze into which were crowded a number of secretariats.
In the manner of a cabinet, each member of the council took care of a different aspect of government. Mr. Schenker had charge of taxes, Mr. Steinberg of buildings—an essential job in a society where people drifted in and out, this week trying the option of refuge in some small village, next week walking back to town surfeited with the narrowness of the peasants. Leon Salpeter, a pharmacist by profession, had charge of one of the social-welfare agencies.
There were secretariats for food, cemeteries, health, travel documentation, economic affairs, administrative services, culture, even—in the face of the ban on schooling—of education.
Biberstein and his council believed on principle that the Jews who were expelled from Cracow would end up in worse places, and so they decided to fall back on an ancient stratagem: bribery. The hard-up Judenrat treasury allocated 200,000 zloty for the purpose. Biberstein and the Housing Secretary, Chaim Goldfluss, had sought out an intermediary, in this case a Volksdeutscher named Reichert, a man who had contacts in the SS and the city administration. Reichert’s task was to pass on the money to a series of officials beginning with Obersturmfuhrer (an SS rank equivalent to first lieutenant) Seibert, the liaison officer between the Judenrat and the city government. In return for the money, the officials were to permit another 10,000 Jews of the Cracow community to remain at home, despite Frank’s order. Whether Reichert had insulted officials by retaining too large a percentage for himself and making too low an offer, or whether the gentlemen involved felt that Governor Frank’s most cherished ambition to render his city judenfrei made the taking of bribes too perilous, no one could tell from the court proceedings. But Biberstein had got two years in Montelupich, Goldfluss six months in Auschwitz. Reichert himself had got eight years. Yet everyone knew he would have a softer time of it than the other two.
Schindler shook his head at the idea of putting 200,000 zloty on such a fragile hope.
“Reichert is a crook,” he murmured. Just ten minutes before, they had been discussing whether he and the C’s were crooks and had let the question stand. But there was no doubt about Reichert. “I could have told them Reichert was a crook,” he kept insisting.
Stern commented—as a philosophic principle—that there were times when the only people left to do business with were crooks.
Schindler laughed at that—a wide, toothy, almost rustic laugh. “Thank you very much, my friend,” he told Stern.
CHAPTER 8
It wasn’t such a bad Christmas that year. But there was a wistfulness, and snow lay like a question in the parkland across from Schindler’s apartment, like something posed, watchful and eternal, on the roof of the Wawel up the road and under the ancient facades of Kanonicza Street. No one believed anymore in a quick resolution— neither the soldiery nor the Poles nor the Jews on either side of the river.
For his Polish secretary Klonowska, that Christmas, Schindler bought a poodle, a ridiculous Parisian thing, acquired by Pfefferberg. For Ingrid he bought jewelry and sent some also to gentle Emilie down in Zwittau. Poodles were hard to find, Leopold Pfefferberg reported. But jewelry was a snap. Because of the times, gems were in a high state of movement.
Oskar seems to have pursued his simultaneous attachments to three women and sundry casual friendships with others, all without suffering the normal penalties that beset the womanizer. Visitors to his apartment cannot remember ever finding Ingrid sulking. She seems to have been a generous and complaisant girl. Emilie, with even greater grounds for complaint, had too much dignity to make the scenes Oskar richly deserved. If Klonowska had any resentment, it does not seem to have affected her manner in the front office of DEF nor her loyalty to the Herr Direktor. One could expect that in a life like Oskar’s, public confrontations between angry women would be commonplace. But no one among Oskar’s friends and workers—witnesses willing enough to admit and even in some cases chuckle over his sins of the flesh—remembers such painful confrontations, so often the fate of far more restrained philanderers than Oskar.
To suggest as some have that any woman would be pleased with partial possession of Oskar is to demean the women involved. The problem was, perhaps, that if you wanted to talk to Oskar about fidelity, a look of childlike and authentic bewilderment entered his eyes, as if you were proposing some concept like Relativity which could be understood only if the listener had five hours to sit still and concentrate. Oskar never had five hours and never understood.
Except in his mother’s case. That Christmas morning, for his dead mother’s sake, Oskar went to Mass at the Church of St. Mary. There was a space above the high altar where Wit Stwosz’s wooden tryptych had until weeks ago diverted worshipers with its crowd of jostling divinities. The vacancy, the pallor of the stone where the tryptych’s fixings had been, distracted and abashed Herr Schindler. Someone had stolen the tryptych. It had been
