Polish workmen, and where there had been open spaces, cement walls were raised. As well, the trolleys would have their doors closed as they entered the ghetto and could not stop until they emerged again in the Umwelt, the Aryan world, at the corner of Lwowska and Sw Kingi Street. Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast- moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation zloty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.
From March 20, Oskar’s Jewish workers would not receive any wages and were meant to live entirely by their rations. Instead he would pay a fee to SS headquarters in Cracow. Both Oskar and Madritsch were uneasy about that, for they knew the war would end and the slaveholders, just as in America, would be shamed and stripped naked. The dues he would pay to the police chiefs were the standard SS Main Administrative and Economic Office fees—7.50 Reichsmarks per day for a skilled worker, 5 RM. for unskilled and women. They were, by a margin, cheaper rates than those which operated on the open labor market. But for Oskar and Julius Madritsch both, the moral discomfort outweighed the economic advantage. The meeting of his wage bill was the least of Oskar’s worries that year. Besides, he was never an ideal capitalist. His father had accused him often in his youth of being reckless with money. While he was a mere sales manager, he’d maintained two cars, hoping that Hans would get to hear of it and be shocked. Now, in Cracow, he could afford to keep a stableful—a Belgian Minerva, a Maybach, an Adler cabriolet, a BMW.
To be a prodigal and still be wealthier than your more careful father—that was one of the triumphs Schindler wanted out of life. In boom times the cost of labor was beside the point.
It was that way for Madritsch too. Julius Madritsch’s uniform mill stood on the western side of the ghetto, a mile or so from Oskar’s enamelworks. He was doing so well that he was negotiating to open a similar plant in Tarnow. He too was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, and his credit was so good that he had received a loan of a million zloty from the Bank Emisyjny (issue Bank).
Whatever ethical queasiness they felt, it is not likely that either entrepreneur, Oskar or Julius, felt a moral obligation to avoid employing additional Jews. That was a stance, and since they were pragmatists, stances weren’t their style. In any case, Itzhak Stern as well as Roman Ginter, a businessman and representative of the Relief Office of the Judenrat, called on Oskar and Julius both and begged them to employ more Jews, as many as could be fitted in. The objective was to give the ghetto an economic permanence. It was almost axiomatic, Stern and Ginter considered at that stage, that a Jew who had an economic value in a precocious empire hungry for skilled workers was safe from worse things. And Oskar and Madritsch agreed.
So for two weeks the Jews trundled their barrows through Kazimierz and over the bridge into Podgorze. Middle-class families whose Polish servants had come with them to help push the cart. At the bottom of the barrows lay the remaining brooches, the fur coats, under mattresses and kettles and skillets.
Crowds of Poles on Stradom and Starovislna Streets jeered and hurled mud. “The Jews are going, the Jews are going. Goodbye, Jews.”
Beyond the bridge a fancy wooden gate greeted the new citizens of the ghetto. White with scalloped ramparts which gave it an Arabesque look, it had two wide arches for the trolleys coming from and going to Cracow, and at the side was a white sentry box. Above the arches, a title in Hebrew sought to reassure. JEWISH TOWN, it proclaimed. High barbed-wire fences had been strung along the front of the ghetto, facing the river, and open spaces were sealed with round-topped cement slabs nine feet tall, resembling strings of gravestones for the anonymous. At the ghetto gate the trundling Jew was met by a representative of the Judenrat Housing Office. If he had a wife and large family, a man might be assigned two rooms and have the use of a kitchen. Even so, after the good living of the Twenties and Thirties, it was painful to have to share your private life with families of different rituals, of another, distasteful musk and habits. Mothers screamed, and fathers said things could be worse and sucked on hollow teeth and shook their heads. In the one room, the Orthodox found the liberals an abomination. On March 20, the movement was complete. Everyone outside the ghetto was forfeit and in jeopardy. Inside, for the moment, there was living space.
Twenty-three-year-old Edith Liebgold was assigned a first-floor room to share with her mother and her baby. The fall of Cracow eighteen months back had put her husband into a mood verging on despair. He’d wandered away from home as if he wanted to look into the courses open to him. He had ideas about the forests, about finding a safe clearing. He had never returned.
From her end window Edith Liebgold could see the Vistula through the barbed-wire barricade, but her path to other parts of the ghetto, especially to the hospital in Wegierska Street, took her through Plac Zgody, Peace Square, the ghetto’s only square. Here, on the second day of her life inside the walls, she missed by twenty seconds being ordered into an SS truck and taken to shovel coal or snow in the city. It was not just that work details often, according to rumor, returned to the ghetto with one or more fewer members than when they had left. More than this sort of odds, Edith feared being forced into a truck when, half a minute earlier, you’d thought you were going to Pankiewicz’ pharmacy, and your baby was due to be fed in twenty minutes. Therefore she went with friends to the Jewish Employment Office. If she could get shift work, her mother would mind the baby at night.
The office in those first days was crowded. The Judenrat had its own police force now, the Ordnungsdienst (or OD), expanded and regularized to keep order in the ghetto, and a boy with a cap and an armband organized waiting lines in front of the office.
Edith Liebgold’s group were just inside the door, making lots of noise to pass the time, when a small middle- aged man wearing a brown suit and a tie approached her. They could tell that they’d attracted him with their racket, their brightness. At first they thought he intended to pick Edith up.
“Look,” he said, “rather than wait… there is an enamel factory over in Zablocie.”
He let the address have its effect.
Zablocie was outside the ghetto, he was telling them. You could barter with the Polish workers there. He needed ten healthy women for the night shift. The girls made faces, as if they could afford to choose work and might even turn him down. Not heavy, he assured them. And they’ll teach you on the job. His name, he said, was Abraham Bankier. He was the manager. There was a German owner, of course. What sort of German? they asked. Bankier grinned as if he suddenly wanted to fulfill all their hopes. Not a bad sort, he told them.
That night Edith Liebgold met the other members of the enamel-factory night shift and marched across the ghetto toward Zablocie under the guard of a Jewish OD. In the column she asked questions about this Deutsche Email Fabrik. They serve a soup with plenty of body, she was told. Beatings? she asked. It’s not that sort of place, they said. It’s not like Beckmann’s razor-blade factory; more like Madritsch. Madritsch is all right, and Schindler too. At the entrance to the factory, the new night-shift workers were called out of the column by Bankier and taken upstairs and past vacant desks to a door marked HERR DIREKTOR. Edith Liebgold heard a deep voice tell them all to come in. They found the Herr Direktor seated on the corner of his desk, smoking a cigarette. His hair, somewhere between blond and light brown, looked freshly brushed; he wore a double-breasted suit and a silk tie. He looked exactly like a man who had a dinner to go to but had waited specially to have a word with them. He was immense; he was still young. From such a Hitlerite dream, Edith expected a lecture on the war effort and increasing production quotas. “I wanted to welcome you,” he told them in Polish. “You’re part of the expansion of this factory.” He looked away; it was even possible he was thinking, Don’t tell them that—they’ve got no stake in the place.
Then, without blinking, without any introduction, any qualifying lift of the shoulders, he told them, “You’ll be safe working here. If you work here, then you’ll live through the war.” Then he said good night and left the office with them, allowing Bankier to hold them back at the head of the stairs so that the Herr Direktor could go down first and get behind the wheel of his automobile. The promise had dazed them all. It was a godlike promise. How could a mere man make a promise like that? But Edith Liebgold found herself believing it instantly. Not so much because she wanted to; not because it was a sop, a reckless incentive. It was because in the second Herr Schindler uttered the promise it left no option but belief.
The new women of DEF took their job instruction in a pleasant daze. It was as if some mad old Gypsy with nothing to gain had told them they would marry a count. The promise had forever altered Edith Liebgold’s expectation of life. If ever they did shoot her, she would probably stand there protesting, “But the Herr Direktor said this couldn’t happen.”
The work made no mental demands. Edith carried the enamel-dipped pots, hanging by hooks from a long stick, to the furnaces. And all the time she pondered Herr Schindler’s promise.
