Only madmen made promises as absolute as that. Without blinking. Yet he wasn’t mad. For he was a businessman with a dinner to go to. Therefore, he must know. But that meant some second sight, some profound contact with god or devil or the pattern of things. But again, his appearance, his hand with the gold signet ring, wasn’t the hand of a visionary. It was a hand that reached for the wine; it was a hand in which you could somehow sense the latent caresses. And so she came back to the idea of his madness again, to drunkenness, to mystical explanations, to the technique by which the Herr Direktor had infected her with certainty.
Similar loops of reasoning would be traced this year and in years to come by all those to whom Oskar Schindler made his heady promises. Some would become aware of the unstated corollary. If the man was wrong, if he lightly used his powers of passing on conviction, then there was no God and no humanity, no bread, no succor. There were, of course, only odds, and the odds weren’t good.
CHAPTER 9
That spring Schindler left his factory in Cracow and drove west in a BMW over the border and through the awakening spring forests to Zwittau. He had Emilie to see, and his aunts and sister. They had all been allies against his father; they were all tenders of the flame of his mother’s martyrdom. If there was a parallel between his late mother’s misery and his wife’s, Oskar Schindler—in his coat with the fur lapels, guiding the custom-made wheel with kid-gloved hands, reaching for another Turkish cigarette on the straight stretches of thawing road in the Jeseniks—did not see it. It was not a child’s business to see these things. His father was a god and subject to tougher laws.
He liked visiting the aunts—the way they raised their hands palm upward in admiration of the cut of his suit. His younger sister had married a railway official and lived in a pleasant apartment provided by the rail authorities. Her husband was an important man in Zwittau, for it was a rail-junction town and had large freight yards. Oskar drank tea with his sister and her husband, and then some schnapps. There was a faint sense of mutual congratulation: the Schindler children hadn’t turned out so badly.
It was, of course, Oskar’s sister who had nursed Frau Schindler in her last illness and who had now been visiting and speaking to their father in secret. She could do no more than make certain hints in the direction of a reconciliation. She did that over the tea and was answered by growls. Later, Oskar dined at home with Emilie. She was excited to have him there for the holiday. They could attend the Easter ceremonies together like an old- fashioned couple. Ceremonies was right, for they danced around each other ceremoniously all evening, attending to each other at table like polite strangers. And in their hearts and minds, both Emilie and Oskar were amazed by this strange marriage disability—that he could offer and deliver more to strangers, to workers on his factory floor than he could to her.
The question that lay between them was whether Emilie should join him in Cracow. If she gave up the apartment in Zwittau and put in other tenants, she would have no escape at all from Cracow. She believed it her duty to be with Oskar; in the language of Catholic moral theology, his absence from her house was a “proximate occasion of sin.” Yet life with him in a foreign city would be tolerable only if he was careful and guarded and sensitive to her feelings. The trouble with Oskar was that you could not depend on him to keep his lapses to himself. Careless, half-tipsy, half-smiling, he seemed sometimes to think that if he really liked some girl, you had to like her too.
The unresolved question about her going to Cracow lay so oppressively between them that when dinner was finished he excused himself and went to a cafe in the main square. It was a place frequented by mining engineers, small businessmen, the occasional salesman turned Army officer. Gratefully he saw some of his biker friends there, most of them wearing Wehrmacht uniforms. He began drinking cognac with them. Some expressed surprise that a big husky chap like Oskar was not in uniform.
“Essential industry,” he growled. “Essential industry.”
They reminisced about their motorcycle days.
There were jokes about the one he’d put together out of spare parts when he was in high school. Its explosive effects. The explosive effects of his big 500cc Galloni. The noise level in the cafe mounted; more cognac was being shouted for. From the dining annex old school friends appeared, that look on their faces as if they had recognized a forgotten laugh, as in fact they had.
Then one of them got serious. “Oskar, listen. Your father’s having dinner in there, all by himself.” Oskar Schindler looked into his cognac. His face burned, but he shrugged.
“You ought to talk to him,” said someone. “He’s a shadow, the poor old bastard.”
Oskar said that he had better go home. He began to stand, but their hands were on his shoulders, forcing him down again. “He knows you’re here,” they said. Two of them had already gone through to the annex and were persuading old Hans Schindler over the remnants of his dinner. Oskar, in a panic, was already standing, searching in his pocket for the checkroom disk, when Herr Hans Schindler, his expression pained, appeared from the dining room propelled gently along by two young men. Oskar was halted by the sight. In spite of his anger at his father, he’d always imagined that if any ground was covered between himself and Hans, he’d be the one who’d have to cover it. The old man was so proud. Yet here he was letting himself be dragged to his son.
As the two of them were pushed toward each other, the old man’s first gesture was an apologetic half-grin and a sort of shrug of the eyebrows. The gesture, by its familiarity, took Oskar by storm. I couldn’t help it, Hans was saying. The marriage and everything, your mother and me, it all went according to laws of its own. The idea behind the gesture might have been an ordinary one, but Oskar had seen an identical expression on someone’s face already that evening—on his own, as he shrugged to himself, facing the mirror in the hallway of Emilie’s apartment. The marriage and everything, it’s all going according to laws of its own. He had shared that look with himself, and here—three cognacs later—his father was sharing it with him.
“How are you, Oskar?” asked Hans Schindler. There was a dangerous wheeze along the edge of the words. His father’s health was worse than he remembered it.
So Oskar decided that even Herr Hans Schindler was human—a proposition he had not been able to swallow at teatime at his sister’s; and he embraced the old man, kissing him on the cheek three times, feeling the impact of his father’s bristles, and beginning to weep as the corps of engineers and soldiers and past motorcyclists applauded the gratifying scene.
CHAPTER 10
The councilmen of Artur Rosenzweig’s Judenrat, who still saw themselves as guardians of the breath and health and bread ration of the internees of the ghetto, impressed upon the Jewish ghetto police that they were also public servants. They tended to sign up young men of compassion and some education. Though at SS headquarters the OD was regarded as just another auxiliary police force which would take orders like any police force, that was not the picture most OD men lived by in the summer of ‘41.
It cannot be denied that as the ghettos grew older, the OD man became increasingly a figure of suspicion, a supposed collaborator. Some OD men fed information to the underground and challenged the system, but perhaps a majority of them found that their existence and that of their families depended increasingly on the cooperation they gave the SS. To honest men, the OD would become a corrupter. To crooks it was an opportunity.
But in its early months in Cracow, it seemed a benign force. Leopold Pfefferberg could stand as a token of the ambiguity of being a member. When all education for Jews, even that organized by the Judenrat, was abolished in December 1940, Poldek had been offered a job managing the waiting lines and keeping the appointment book in the Judenrat housing office. It was a part-time job, but gave him a cover under which he could travel around Cracow with some freedom. In March 1941, the OD itself was founded with the stated purpose of protecting the Jews entering the Podgorze ghetto from other parts of the city. Poldek accepted the invitation to put on the cap of the OD. He believed he understood its purpose—that it was not only to ensure rational behavior inside the walls but also to achieve that correct degree of grudging tribal obedience which, in the history of European Jewry, has tended to ensure that the oppressors will go away more quickly, will become forgetful so that, in the interstices of their
