The auditor wished him good morning. He hoped he had had a comfortable night. There had not been time to conduct more than a cursory examination of Herr Schindler’s records, but it had been decided that a gentleman who stood so high in the opinion of so many people influential in the war effort need not be too closely looked at for the moment. We have, said the SS man, received certain telephone calls…. Oskar was convinced, as he thanked the man, that the acquittal was temporary. He received the ledgers and got his money handed back in full at the reception desk.
Downstairs, Klonowska was waiting for him, radiant. Her liaison work had yielded this result, Schindler coming forth from the death house in his double-breasted suit and without a scratch. She led him to the Adler, which they had let her park inside the gate. Her ridiculous poodle sat on the back seat.
CHAPTER 12
The child arrived at the Dresners’, on the eastern side of the ghetto, late in the afternoon. She had been returned to Cracow by the Polish couple who had been taking care of her in the country. They had been able to talk the Polish Blue Police at the ghetto gate into allowing them entry on business, and the child passed as theirs.
They were decent people, and shamefaced at having brought her up to Cracow and the ghetto from the countryside. She was a dear girl; they were attached to her. But you couldn’t keep a Jewish child in the countryside anymore. The municipal authorities—never mind the SS—WERE offering sums of 500 zl. and upward for every Jew betrayed. It was one’s neighbors. You couldn’t trust your neighbors. And then not only would the child be in trouble, we’d all be. My God, there were areas where the peasants went out hunting Jews with scythes and sickles.
The child didn’t seem to suffer too much from whatever squalors the ghetto now imposed on her. She sat at a little table among screens of damp clothing and fastidiously ate the heel of bread Mrs. Dresner gave her. She accepted whatever endearments the women sharing the kitchen happened to utter. Mrs. Dresner noticed how strangely guarded the child was in all her answers.
She had her vanities, though, and like most three-year-olds a passionately preferred color. Red. She sat there in red cap, red coat, small red boots. The peasants had indulged her passion.
Mrs. Dresner made conversation by talking about the child’s real parents. They too had been living— in fact, hiding—in the countryside. But, said Mrs. Dresner, they were going to come and join everyone here in Cracow soon. The child nodded, but it didn’t seem to be shyness that kept her quiet.
In January her parents had been rounded up according to a list supplied to the SS by Spira, and while being marched to Prokocim Station had passed a crowd of jeering Poles—”Bye-bye, Jews.” They had dodged out of the column just like two decent Polish citizens crossing the street to watch the deportation of social enemies, and had joined the crowd, jeered a little themselves, and then strolled off into the countryside around that outer suburb.
Now they too were finding life no safer out there and intended to sneak back into Cracow during the summer. The mother of “Redcap,” as the Dresner boys nicknamed her as soon as they got home with the work details from the city, was a first cousin of Mrs. Dresner’s.
Soon Mrs. Dresner’s daughter, young Danka, also got home from her work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe air base.
Danka was going on fourteen, tall enough to have the Kennkarte (labor card) enabling her to work outside the ghetto. She enthused over the noncommittal child. “Genia, I know your mother, Eva. She and I used to go shopping for dresses together, and she’d buy me cakes at the patisserie in Bracka Street.”
The child kept to her seat, did not smile, looked ahead. “Madam, you’re mistaken. My mother’s name is not Eva. It’s Jasha.” She went on naming the names in the fictional Polish genealogy in which her parents and the peasants had schooled her in case the Blue Police or the SS ever questioned her. The family frowned at each other, brought to a standstill by the unusual cunning of the child, finding it obscene but not wanting to undermine it, since it might, before the week was out, be essential survival equipment.
At suppertime Idek Schindel, the child’s uncle, a young doctor at the ghetto hospital in Wegierska Street, arrived. He was the sort of whimsical, half-teasing, and infatuated uncle a child needs. At the sight of him, Genia became a child, getting down off her chair to rush at him. If he were here, calling these people cousins, then they were cousins. You could admit now that you had a mother named Eva and that your grandparents weren’t really named Ludwik and Sophia.
Then Mr. Juda Dresner, purchasing officer of the Bosch plant, arrived home and the company was complete.
April 28 was Schindler’s birthday, and in 1942 he celebrated it like a child of the spring, loudly, profligately. It was a big day at DEF. The Herr Direktor brought in rare white bread, regardless of expense, to be served with the noonday soup. The festivity spread into the outer office and to the workshops out back. Oskar Schindler, industrialist, was celebrating the general succulence of life. This, his thirty-fourth birthday, began early at Emalia. Schindler signaled it by walking through the outer office carrying three bottles of cognac under his arm to share with the engineers, the accountants, the draftsmen. Office workers in Accounts and Personnel had handfuls of cigarettes thrust at them, and by midmorning the handouts had spread to the factory floor. A cake was brought in from a patisserie, and Oskar cut it on Klonowska’s desk. Delegations of Jewish and Polish workers began to enter the office to congratulate him, and he heartily kissed a girl named Kucharska, whose father had figured in the Polish parliament before the war. And then the Jewish girls came up, and the men shaking hands, even Stern getting there somehow from the Progress Works where he was now employed, to take Oskar’s hand formally and find himself wrapped up in a rib-cracking embrace.
That afternoon someone, perhaps the same malcontent as last time, contacted Pomorska and denounced Schindler for his racial improprieties. His ledgers might stand up to scrutiny, but no one could deny he was a “Jew- kisser.”
The manner of his arrest seemed more professional than the last. On the morning of the 29th, a Mercedes blocked the factory entrance and two Gestapo men, seeming somehow surer of their ground than the last two, met him crossing the factory yard. He was charged, they told him, with breaking the provisions of the Race and Resettlement Act. They wanted him to come with them. And no, there was no need for him to visit his office first.
“Do you have a warrant?” he asked them.
“We don’t need one,” they told him.
He smiled at them. The gentlemen should understand that if they took him away without a warrant, they would come to regret it.
He said it lightly, but he could tell by their demeanor that the level of threat in them had firmed and focused since last year’s half-comic detention. Last time the conversation at Pomorska had been about economic matters and whether they had been breached. This time you were dealing with grotesque law, the law of the lower guts, edicts from the black side of the brain. Serious stuff.
“We will have to risk regret,” one of the two told him.
He assessed their assurance, their perilous indifference to him, a man of assets, newly turned thirty-four. “On a spring morning,” he told them, “I can spare a few hours for driving.”
He comforted himself that he would again be put into one of those urbane cells at Pomorska. But when they turned right up Kolejowa, he knew that this time it would be Montelupich prison.
“I shall wish to speak to a lawyer,” he told them.
“In time,” said the driver.
Oskar had it on the reasonable word of one of his drinking companions that the Jagiellonian Institute of Anatomy received corpses from Montelupich.
The wall of the place stretched a long block, and the ominous sameness of the windows of the third and fourth floors could be seen from the back seat of the Gestapo Mercedes. Inside the front gate and through the archway they came to an office where the SS clerk spoke in whispers, as if raised voices would set up head-splitting echoes along the narrow corridors. They took his cash, but told him it would be given to him during his imprisonment at a rate of 50 zl. a day. No, the arresting officers told him, it was not yet time for him to call a lawyer.
