Then they left, and in the corridor, under guard, he listened for the traces of screams which might, in this convent hush, spill out through the cracks of the Judas windows in the walls. He was led down a flight of stairs into a claustrophobic tunnel and past a string of locked cells, one with an open grille. Some half-dozen prisoners in shirt sleeves sat there, each in a separate stall, facing the rear wall so that their features could not be seen. Oskar noticed a torn ear. And someone was sniffling but knew better than to wipe his nose.
Klonowska, Klonowska, are you making your telephone calls, my love?
They opened a cell for him and he went in.
He had felt a minor anxiety that the place might be crowded. But there was only one other prisoner in the cell, a soldier wearing his greatcoat up around his ears for warmth and seated on one of the two low wooden bed frames, each with its pallet. There were no washbasins, of course. A water bucket and a waste bucket. And what proved to be a Waffen SS Standartenfuhrer (an SS rank equivalent to colonel) wearing a slight stubble, a stale, unbuttoned shirt under the overcoat, and muddy boots.
“Welcome, sir,” said the officer with a crooked grin, raising one hand to Oskar. He was a handsome fellow, a few years older than Oskar. The odds were in favor of his being a plant. But one wondered why they had put him in uniform and provided him with such exalted rank. Oskar looked at his watch, sat, stood, looked up at the high windows. A little light from the exercise yards filtered in, but it was not the sort of window you could lean against and relieve the intimacy of the two close bunks, of sitting hands on knees facing each other.
In the end they began to talk. Oskar was very wary, but the Standartenfuhrer chattered wildly. What was his name? Philip was his name. He didn’t think gentlemen should give their second names in prison. Besides, it was time people got down to first names. If we’d all got down to first names earlier, we’d be a happier race now.
Oskar concluded that if the man was not a plant, then he had had some sort of breakdown, was perhaps suffering shell shock. He’d been campaigning in southern Russia, and his battalion had helped hang on to Novgorod all winter. Then he had got leave to visit a Polish girlfriend in Cracow and they had, in his words, “lost themselves in each other,” and he had been arrested in her apartment three days after his leave expired.
“I suppose I decided,” said Philip, “not to be too damn exact about dates when I saw the way the other bastards”—he waved a hand at the roof, indicating the structure around him, the SS planners, the accountants, the bureaucrats—”when I saw the way they lived. It wasn’t as if I deliberately decided to go absent without leave. But I just felt I was owed a certain damn latitude.”
Oskar asked him would he rather be in Pomorska Street. No, said Philip, I’d rather be here. Pomorska looked more like a hotel. But the bastards had a death cell there, full of shining chromium bars. But that aside, what had Herr Oskar done?
“I kissed a Jewish girl,” said Oskar.
“An employee of mine. So it’s alleged.”
Philip began to hoot at this. “Oh, oh! Did your prick drop off?”
All afternoon Standartenfuhrer Philip continued to condemn the SS. Thieves and orgiasts, he said. He couldn’t believe it. The money some of the bastards made. They started so incorruptible too. They would kill some poor bloody Pole for smuggling a kilo of bacon while they lived like goddamn Hanseatic barons.
Oskar behaved as if it were all news to him, as if the idea of venality among the Reichfuhrers was a painful assault on his provincial Sudetendeutsch innocence which had caused him to forget himself and caress a Jewish girl. At last Philip, worn out by his outrage, took a nap.
Oskar wanted a drink. A certain measure of liquor would help speed time, make the Standartenfuhrer better company if he was not a plant and more fallible if he was. Oskar took out a 10-zl. note and wrote down names on it and telephone numbers; more names than last time: a dozen. He took out another four notes, crumpled them in his hands and went to the door and knocked at the Judas window. An SS NCO turned up—a grave middle-aged face staring in at him. He didn’t look like a man who exercised Poles to death or ruptured kidneys with his boots, but of course, that was one of the strengths of torture: you didn’t expect it from a man whose features were those of someone’s country uncle.
Was it possible to order five bottles of vodka? Oskar asked. Five bottles, sir? said the NCO. He might have been advising a young, callow drinker uncertain of quantities. He was also pensive, however, as if he were considering reporting Oskar to his superiors. The general and I, said Oskar, would appreciate a bottle apiece to stimulate conversation. You and your colleagues please accept the rest with my compliments. I presume also, said Oskar, that a man of your authority has power to make routine telephone calls on behalf of a prisoner.
You’ll see the telephone numbers there… yes, on the note. You don’t have to call them all yourself. But give them to my secretary, eh? Yes, she’s the first on the list.
These are very influential people, murmured the SS NCO.
You’re a damn fool, Philip told Oskar. They’ll shoot you for trying to corrupt their guards.
Oskar slumped, apparently casual.
It’s as stupid as kissing a Jewess, said Philip.
We’ll see, said Oskar. But he was frightened. At last the NCO came back and brought, together with the two bottles, a parcel of clean shirts and underwear, some books, and a bottle of wine, packed at the apartment in Straszewskiego Street by Ingrid and delivered to the Montelupich gate. Philip and Oskar had a pleasant enough evening together, though at one time a guard pounded on the steel door and demanded that they stop singing. And even then, as the liquor added spaciousness to the cell and an unexpected cogency to the Standartenfuhrer’s ravings, Schindler was listening for remote screams from upstairs or for the button-clicking Morse of some hopeless prisoner in the next cell. Only once did the true nature of the place dilute the effectiveness of the vodka. Next to his cot, partially obscured by the pallet, Philip discovered a minute statement in red pencil. He spent some idle moments deciphering it—not doing so well, his Polish much slower than Oskar’s.
“‘My God,’” he translated, “‘how they beat me!’ Well, it’s a wonderful world, my friend Oskar. Isn’t it?”
In the morning Schindler woke clearheaded. Hangovers had never plagued him, and he wondered why other people made such a fuss about them. But Philip was white-faced and depressed. During the morning he was taken away and came back to collect his belongings. He was to face a court-martial that afternoon, but had been given a new assignment at a training school in Stutthof, so he presumed they didn’t intend to shoot him for desertion. He picked up his greatcoat from his cot and went off to explain his Polish dalliance.
Alone, Oskar spent the day reading a Karl May book Ingrid had sent and, in the afternoon, speaking to his lawyer, a Sudetendeutscher who’d opened a practice in civil law in Cracow two years before. Oskar was comforted by the interview. The cause of the arrest was certainly as stated; they weren’t using his transracial caresses as a pretext to hold him while they investigated his affairs. “But it will probably come to the SS Court and you’ll be asked why you aren’t in the Army.”
“The reason is obvious,” said Oskar. “I’m an essential war producer. You can get General Schindler to say so.”
Oskar was a slow reader and savored the Karl May book—the hunter and the Indian sage in the American wilderness—a relationship of decency. He did not rush the reading, in any case. It could be a week before he came to court. The lawyer expected that there would be a speech by the president of the court about conduct unbecoming a member of the German race and then there would be a substantial fine. So be it. He’d leave court a more cautious man.
On the fifth morning, he had already drunk the half-liter of black ersatz coffee they’d given him for breakfast when an NCO and two guards came for him. Past the mute doors he was taken upstairs to one of the front offices. He found there a man he’d met at cocktail parties, Obersturmbannfuhrer Rolf Czurda, head of the Cracow SD. Czurda looked like a businessman in his good suit. “Oskar, Oskar,” said Czurda like an old friend reproving. “We give you those Jewish girls at five marks a day. You should kiss us, not them.”
Oskar explained that it had been his birthday.
He’d been impetuous. He’d been drinking. Czurda shook his head. “I never knew you were such a big-timer, Oskar,” he said. “Calls from as far away as Breslau, from our friends in the Abwehr. Of course it would be ridiculous to keep you from your work just because you felt up some Jewess.”
“You’re very understanding, Herr Obersturmbannfuhrer,” said Oskar, feeling the request for some sort of gratuity building up in Czurda. “If ever I’m in a position to return your liberal gesture…” “As a matter of fact,” said Czurda, “I have an old aunt whose flat has been bombed out.”
Yet another old aunt. Schindler made a compassionate click with his tongue and said that a representative of chief Czurda would be welcome any time in Lipowa Street to make a selection from the range of products turned
