put themselves in the Herr Direktor’s path or risk speaking to him.
They needed time for recovery and for adjustment to Schindler’s unorthodox prison system. A girl named Lusia, for example. Her husband had recently been separated out from the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz at Plaszow and shipped off with others to Mauthausen. With what would turn out to be mere realism, she grieved like a widow. Grieving, she’d been marched to Emalia. She worked at carrying dipped enamelware to the furnaces. You were permitted to heat up water on the warm surfaces of machinery, and the floor was warm. For her, hot water was Emalia’s first beneficence.
She saw Oskar at first only as a large shape moving down an aisle of metal presses or traversing a catwalk. It was somehow not a threatening shape. She sensed that if she were noticed, the nature of the place—the lack of beatings, the food, the absence of guards in the camp—might somehow reverse itself. She wanted only unobtrusively to work her shift and return down the barbed-wire tunnel to her hut in the compound.
After a while she found herself giving an answering nod to Oskar and even telling him that, yes, thank you, Herr Direktor, she was quite well.
Once he gave her some cigarettes, better than gold both as a comfort and as a means of trading with the Polish workers. Since she knew friends vanished, she feared his friendship; she wanted him to continue to be a presence, a magical parent. A paradise run by a friend was too fragile. To manage an enduring heaven, you needed someone both more authoritative and more mysterious than that.
Many of the Emalia prisoners felt the same. There was a girl named Regina Perlman living, at the time Oskar’s factory subcamp came into existence, in the city of Cracow on forged South American papers. Her dark complexion made the papers credible, and under them she worked as an Aryan in the office of a factory in Podgorze. She would have been safer from blackmailers if she’d gone to Warsaw, Lodz, or Gdansk. But her parents were in Plaszow, and she carried forged papers for their sakes too, so that she could supply them with food, comforts, medicine. She knew from the days in the ghetto that it was an adage in the Jewish mythology of Cracow that Herr Schindler could be expected to take extreme pains. She also knew the reports from Plaszow, from the quarry, the Commandant’s balcony. She would have to break cover to do it, but she believed it essential that she get her parents into Schindler’s backyard camp.
The first time she visited DEF she wore a safely anonymous faded floral dress and no stockings. The Polish gateman went through the business of calling Herr Schindler’s office upstairs, and through the glass she could see him disapproving of her. It’s nobody—some grubby girl from one of the other factories. She had the normal fear of people on Aryan papers that a hostile Pole would somehow spot her Jewishness. This one looked hostile.
It’s of no great importance, she told him when he returned shaking his head. She wanted to put him off her track. But the Pole did not even bother to lie to her. “He won’t see you,” he said. The hood of a BMW glowered in the factory yard, she could see, and it could belong only to Herr Schindler. He was in, but not to visitors who couldn’t afford stockings. She went away trembling at her escape. She’d been saved from making to Herr Schindler a confession which, even in her sleep, she feared making to anyone.
She waited a week before she could get more time off from the factory in Podgorze. She devoted an entire half-day to her approach. She bathed and got black-market stockings. From one of her few friends—a girl on Aryan papers could not risk having many—she borrowed a blouse.
She had an excellent jacket of her own and bought a lacquered straw hat with a veil. She made up her face, achieving a dark radiance appropriate to a woman living beyond threat. In the mirror she looked like her prewar self, an elegant Cracovienne of exotic racial derivation—Hungarian businessman father, perhaps, and a mother from Rio.
This time, as she had intended, the Pole in the gatehouse did not even recognize her. He let her inside while he rang Miss Klonowska, the Herr Direktor’s secretary, and then was put on to speak to Schindler himself. Herr Direktor, said the Pole, there is a lady here to see you on important business. Herr Schindler seemed to want details. A very well-dressed young lady, said the Pole, and then, bowing while holding the telephone, a very beautiful young lady, he said. As if he had a hunger to see her, or perhaps as if she might be some forgotten girl who’d embarrass him in the outer office, Schindler met her on the steps. He smiled when he saw he did not know her. He was very pleased to meet her, this Fraulein Rodriguez. She could see that he had a respect for pretty women, that it was at the same time childlike and yet sophisticated. With flourishes like those of a matinee idol, he indicated she should follow him upstairs. She wanted to talk to him in confidence? Of course she should. He led her past Klonowska. Klonowska took it calmly. The girl could mean anything— black-market or currency business. She could even be a chic partisan. Love might be the least of motivations. In any case, a worldly girl like Klonowska didn’t expect to own Oskar, or to be owned in return.
Inside the office, Schindler placed a chair for her and walked behind his desk beneath the ritual portrait of the Fuhrer. Would she like a cigarette? Perhaps a Pernod or a cognac? No, she said, but he must, of course, feel free to take a drink. He poured himself one from his cocktail cabinet. What’s this very important business? he asked, not quite with that crisp grace he’d shown on the stairs. For her manner had changed now the door to the outer office was closed.
He could tell she’d come to do hard business. She leaned forward. For a second it seemed ridiculous for her, a girl whose father had paid 50,000 zl. for Aryan papers, to say it without a pause, to give it all away to a half- ironic, half-worried Sudetendeutscher with a snifter of cognac in his hand. Yet in some ways it was the easiest thing she’d ever done.
I have to tell you, Herr Schindler, I’m not a Polish Aryan. My real name is Perlman.
My parents are in Plaszow. They say, and I believe it, that coming to Emalia is the same as being given a Lebenskarte—a card of life. I have nothing I can give you; I borrowed clothes to get inside your factory. Will you bring them here for me?
Schindler put down his drink and stood up. You want to make a secret arrangement? I don’t make secret arrangements. What you suggest, Fraulein, is illegal. I have a factory here in Zablocie and the only question I ask is whether or not a person has certain skills. If you care to leave your Aryan name and address, it might be possible to write to you at some stage and inform you that I need your parents for their work skills. But not now, and not on any other ground. But they can’t come as skilled workers, said Fraulein Perlman. My father’s an importer, not a metalworker.
We have an office staff, said Schindler. But mainly we need skills on the factory floor.
She was defeated. Half-blind with tears, she wrote her false name and real address—he could do with it whatever he wanted. But on the street she understood and began to revive. Maybe Schindler thought she might be an agent, that she might have been there for entrapment. Just the same, he’d been cold. There hadn’t even been an ambiguous, nonindictable gesture of kindness in the manner in which he’d thrown her out of his office.
Within a month Mr. and Mrs. Perlman came to Emalia from Plaszow. Not on their own, as Regina Perlman had imagined it would happen should Herr Oskar Schindler decide to be merciful, but as part of a new detail of 30 workers.
Sometimes she would go around to Lipowa Street and bribe her way onto the factory floor to see them. Her father worked dipping the enamel, shoveling coal, clearing the floor of scrap. “But he talks again,” said Mrs. Perlman to her daughter. For in Plaszow he’d gone silent.
In fact, despite the drafty huts, the plumbing, here at Emalia there was a certain mood, a fragile confidence, a presumption of permanence such as she, living on risky papers in sullen Cracow, could not hope to feel until the day the madness stopped.
Miss Perlman-Rodriguez did not complicate Herr Schindler’s life by storming his office in gratitude or writing effusive letters. Yet she always left the yellow gate of DEF with an unquenchable envy for those who stayed inside.
Then there was a campaign to get Rabbi Menasha Levartov, masquerading as a metalworker in Plaszow, into Emalia. Levartov was a scholarly city rabbi, young and black-bearded. He was more liberal than the rabbis from the shtetls of Poland, the ones who believed the Sabbath was more important even than life and who, throughout 1942 and 1943, were shot by the hundreds every Friday evening for refusing work in the forced-labor cantonments of Poland. He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.
Levartov had always been admired by Itzhak Stern, who worked in the Construction Office of Amon Goeth’s Administration Building. In the old days, Stern and Levartov would, if given the leisure, have sat together for hours
