in the dining room thickened, all the officers removing their uniform jackets. There was more gossip about war contracts. Madritsch, the uniform manufacturer, was asked about his Tarnow factory. Was it doing as well with Armaments Inspectorate contracts as was his factory inside Plaszow? Madritsch referred to Titsch, his lean, ascetic manager. Goeth seemed suddenly preoccupied, like a man who has remembered in the middle of dinner some urgent business detail he should have cleared up that afternoon and which now calls out to him from the darkness of his office.
The girls from Cracow were bored, the small-boned Pole, glossy-lipped, perhaps twenty, probably eighteen, placing a hand on Herr Schindler’s right sleeve. “You’re not a soldier?” she murmured. “You’d look dashing in uniform.” Everyone began to chuckle—Madritsch too. He’d spent a while in uniform in 1940 until released because his managerial talents were so essential to the war effort. But Herr Schindler was so influential that he had never been threatened with the Wehrmacht. Madritsch laughed knowingly. “Did you hear that?” Oberfuhrer Scherner asked the table at large. “The little lady’s got a picture of our industrialist as a soldier. Private Schindler, eh? Eating out of one of his own mess kits with a blanket around his shoulders. Over in Kharkov.”
In view of Herr Schindler’s well-tailored elegance it did make a strange picture, and Schindler himself laughed at it.
“Happened to…” said Bosch, trying to snap his fingers; “happened to… what’s his name up in Warsaw?”
“Toebbens,” said Goeth, reviving without warning. “Happened to Toebbens. Almost.”
The SD chief, Czurda, said, “Oh, yes. Near thing for Toebbens.” Toebbens was a Warsaw industrialist. Bigger than Schindler, bigger than Madritsch. Quite a success. “Heini,” said Czurda (heini being Heinrich Himmler), “went to Warsaw and told the armaments man up there, Get the fucking Jews out of Toebbens’ factory and put Toebbens in the Army and… and send him to the Front. I mean, the Front! And then Heini told my associate up there, he said, Go over his books with a microscope!”
Toebbens was a darling of the Armaments Inspectorate, which had favored him with war contracts and which he had favored in return with gifts. The Armaments Inspectorate’s protests had managed to save Toebbens, Scherner told the table solemnly, and then leaned over his plate to wink broadly at Schindler. “Never happen in Cracow, Oskar. We all love you too much.”
All at once, perhaps to indicate the warmth the whole table felt for Herr Schindler the industrialist, Goeth climbed to his feet and sang a wordless tune in unison with the theme from Madame Butterfly which the dapper brothers Rosner were working on as industriously as any artisan in any threatened factory in any threatened ghetto.
By now Pfefferberg and Lisiek, the orderly, were upstairs in Goeth’s bathroom, scrubbing away at the heavy bathtub ring. They could hear the Rosners’ music and the bursts of laughter and conversation. It was coffee time down there, and the battered girl Lena had brought the tray in to the dinner guests and retreated unmolested back to the kitchen.
Madritsch and Titsch drank their coffee quickly and excused themselves. Schindler prepared to do the same. The little Polish girl seemed to protest, but this was the wrong house for him. Anything was permitted at the Goethhaus, but Oskar found that his inside knowledge of the limits of SS behavior in Poland threw sickening light on every word you spoke here, every glass you drank, not to mention any proposed sexual exchange. Even if you took a girl upstairs, you could not forget that Bosch and Scherner and Goeth were your brothers in pleasure, were—on the stairs or in a bathroom or bedroom—going through the same motions. Herr Schindler, no monk, would rather .be a monk than have a woman at chez Goeth. He spoke across the girl to Scherner, talking about war news, Polish bandits, the likelihood of a bad winter. Letting the girl know that Scherner was a brother and that he would never take a girl from a brother. Saying good night, though, he kissed her on the hand. He saw that Goeth, in his shirt sleeves, was disappearing out the dining-room door, heading for the stairwell, supported by one of the girls who had flanked him at dinner. Oskar excused himself and caught up with the Commandant. He reached out and laid a hand on Goeth’s shoulder. The eyes Goeth turned on him struggled for focus. “Oh,” he muttered. “Going, Oskar?”
“I have to be home,” said Oskar. At home was Ingrid, his German mistress.
“You’re a bloody stallion,” said Goeth.
“Not in your class,” said Schindler.
“No, you’re right. I’m a frigging Olympian. We’re going… where’re we going?” He turned his head to the girl but answered the question himself. “We’re going to the kitchen to see that Lena’s clearing up properly.”
“No,” said the girl, laughing. “We aren’t doing that.” She steered him to the stairs. It was decent of her—the sorority in operation— to protect the thin, bruised girl in the kitchen. Schindler watched them—the hulking officer, the slight, supporting girl—staggering crookedly up the staircase. Goeth looked like a man who would have to sleep at least till lunchtime, but Oskar knew the Commandant’s amazing constitution and the clock that ran in him. By 3 A.M. Goeth might even decide to rise and write a letter to his father in Vienna. By seven, after only an hour’s sleep, he’d be on the balcony, infantry rifle in hand, ready to shoot any dilatory prisoners.
When the girl and Goeth reached the first landing, Schindler sidled down the hallway toward the back of the house.
Pfefferberg and Lisiek heard the Commandant, considerably earlier than they had expected him, entering the bedroom and mumbling to the girl he’d brought upstairs. In silence they picked up their cleaning equipment, crept into the bedroom and tried to slip out a side door. Still standing and able to see them on their line of escape, Goeth recoiled at the sight of the cleaning stick, suspecting the two men might be assassins. When Lisiek stepped forward, however, and began a tremulous report, the Commandant understood that they were merely prisoners.
“Herr Commandant,” said Lisiek, panting with justified fear, “I wish to report that there has been a ring in your bathtub….”
“Oh,” said Amon. “So you called in an expert.” He beckoned to the boy. “Come here, darling.”
Lisiek edged forward and was struck so savagely that he went sprawling halfway under the bed. Amon again uttered his invitation, as if it might amuse the girl to see him speaking endearments to prisoners. Young Lisiek rose and tottered toward the Commandant again for another round. As the boy picked himself up the second time, Pfefferberg, an experienced prisoner, expected anything—that they’d be marched down to the garden and summarily shot by Ivan. Instead the Commandant simply raged at them to leave, which they did at once.
When Pfefferberg heard a few days later that Lisiek was dead, shot by Amon, he presumed it was over the bathroom incident. In fact it was for a different matter alt—Lisiek’s offense had been to harness a horse and buggy for Herr Bosch without first asking the Commandant’s permission. In the kitchen of the villa, the maid, whose real name was Helen Hirsch (goeth called her Lena out of laziness, she would always say), looked up to see one of the dinner guests in the doorway. She put down the dish of meat scraps she’d been holding and stood at attention with a jerky suddenness. “Herr…” She looked at his dinner jacket and sought the word for him. “Herr Direktor, I was just putting aside the bones for the Herr Commandant’s dogs.”
“Please, please,” said Herr Schindler.
“You don’t have to report to me, Fraulein Hirsch.”
He moved around the table. He did not seem to be stalking her, but she feared his intentions. Even though Amon enjoyed beating her, her Jewishness always saved her from overt sexual attack. But there were Germans who were not as fastidious on racial matters as Amon. This one’s tone of voice, however, was one to which she was not accustomed, even from the SS officers and NCO’S who came to the kitchen to complain about Amon.
“Don’t you know me?” he asked, just like a man —a football star or a violinist—whose sense of his own celebrity has been hurt by a stranger’s failure to recognize him. “I’m Schindler.”
She bowed her head. “Herr Direktor,” she said. “Of course, I’ve heard… and you’ve been here before. I remember…”
He put his arm around her. He could surely feel the tensing of her body as he touched her cheek with his lips.
He murmured, “It’s not that sort of kiss.
I’m kissing you out of pity, if you must know.”
She couldn’t avoid weeping. Herr Direktor Schindler kissed her hard now in the middle of the forehead, in the manner of Polish farewells in railway stations, a resounding Eastern European smack of the lips. She saw that he had begun to weep too. “That kiss is something I bring you from…” He waved his hand, indicating some honest tribe of men out in the dark, sleeping in tiered bunks or hiding in forests, people for whom—by absorbing
