CHAPTER 25
To some people it now seemed that Oskar was spending like a compulsive gambler. Even from the little they knew of him, his prisoners could sense that he would ruin himself for them if that was the price. Later—not now, for now they accepted his mercies in the same spirit in which a child accepts Christmas presents from its parents—they would say, Thank God he was more faithful to us than to his wife. And like the prisoners, sundry officials could also ferret Oskar’s passion out.
One such official, a Dr. Sopp, physician to the SS prisons in Cracow and to the SS Court [The SS had its own judiciary section.] in Pomorska, let Herr Schindler know through a Polish messenger that he was willing to do a brand of business. In Montelupich prison was a woman named Frau Helene Schindler. Dr. Sopp knew she was no relative of Oskar’s, but her husband had invested some money in Emalia. She had questionable Aryan papers. Dr. Sopp did not need to say that for Mrs. Schindler this portended a truck ride to Chujowa Gorka. But if Oskar would put up certain amounts, said Sopp, the doctor was willing to issue a medical certificate saying that, in view of her condition, Mrs. Schindler should be permitted to take the cure indefinitely at Marienbad, down in Bohemia.
Oskar went to Sopp’s office, where he found out that the doctor wanted 50,000 zl. for the certificate. It was no use arguing. After three years of practice, a man like Sopp could tell to within a few zloty the price to put on favors. During the afternoon, Oskar raised the money. Sopp knew he could, knew that Oskar was the sort of man who had black-market money stashed, money with no recorded history. Before making the payment, Oskar set some conditions. He would need to go to Montelupich with Dr. Sopp to collect the woman from her cell. He would himself deliver her to mutual friends in the city. Sopp did not object. Under a bare light bulb in freezing Montelupich, Mrs. Schindler was handed her costly documents. A more careful man, a man with an accountant’s mind, might reasonably have repaid himself for his trouble from the money Sedlacek brought from Budapest. All together, Oskar would be handed nearly 150,000 Reichsmarks carried to Cracow in false-bottomed suitcases and in the lining of clothes. But Oskar, partly because his sense of money (whether owed or owing) was so inexact, partly because of his sense of honor, passed on to his Jewish contacts all the money he ever received from Sedlacek, except for the sum spent on Amon’s cognac.
It was not always a straightforward business. When in the summer of ‘43 Sedlacek arrived in Cracow with 50,000 RM., the Zionists inside Plaszow to whom Oskar offered the cash feared it might be a setup.
Oskar first approached Henry Mandel, a welder in the Plaszow metal shop and a member of Hitach Dut, a Zionist youth and labor movement. Mandel did not want to touch the money. Look, said Schindler, I’ve got a letter in Hebrew to go with it, a letter from Palestine. But of course, if it was a setup, if Oskar had been compromised and was being used, he would have a letter from Palestine. And when you hadn’t enough bread for breakfast, it was quite a sum to be offered: 50,000 RM.—100,000 zloty. To be offered that for your discretionary use. It just wasn’t credible.
Schindler then tried to pass the money, which was sitting there, inside the boundary of Plaszow in the trunk of his car, to another member of Hitach Dut, a woman named Alta Rubner. She had some contacts, through prisoners who went to work in the cable factory, through some of the Poles in the Polish prison, with the underground in Sosnowiec. Perhaps, she said to Mandel, it would be best to refer the whole business to the underground, and let them decide on the provenance of the money Herr Oskar Schindler was offering.
Oskar kept trying to persuade her, raising his voice at her under cover of Madritsch’s chattering sewing machines. “I guarantee with all my heart that this isn’t a trap!” With all my heart. Exactly the sentiment one would expect from an agent provocateur!
Yet after Oskar had gone away and Mandel had spoken to Stern, who declared the letter authentic, and then conferred again with the girl, a decision was made to take the money. They knew now, however, that Oskar wouldn’t be back with it. Mandel went to Marcel Goldberg at the Administration Office. Goldberg had also been a member of Hitach Dut, but after becoming the clerk in charge of lists—of labor lists and transport lists, of the lists of living and dead—he had begun taking bribes. Mandel could put pressure on him, though. One of the lists Goldberg could draw up—or at least, add to and subtract from—was the list of those who went to Emalia to collect scrap metal for use in the workshops of Plaszow. For old times’ sake, and without having to disclose his reason for wanting to visit Emalia, Mandel was put on this list.
But arriving in Zablocie and sneaking away from the scrap-metal detail to get to Oskar, he’d been blocked in the front office by Bankier. Herr Schindler was too busy, said Bankier. A week later Mandel was back. Again Bankier wouldn’t let him in to speak to Oskar. The third time, Bankier was more specific. You want that Zionist money? You didn’t want it before. And now you want it. Well, you can’t have it. That’s the way life goes, Mr. Mandel!
Mandel nodded and left. He presumed wrongly that Bankier had already lifted at least a segment of the cash. In fact, however, Bankier was being careful. The money did finish in the hands of Zionist prisoners in Plaszow, for Alta Rubner’s receipt for the funds was delivered to Springmann by Sedlacek. It seems that the amount was used in part to help Jews who came from other cities than Cracow and therefore had no local sources of support.
Whether the funds that came to Oskar and were passed on by him were spent mainly on food, as Stern would have preferred, or largely on underground resistance—the purchase of passes or weapons—is a question Oskar never investigated. None of this money, however, went to buy Mrs. Schindler out of Montelupich prison or to save the lives of such people as the Danziger brothers. Nor was the Sedlacek money used to replace the 30,000-kilogram bribes of enamelware Oskar would pay out to major and minor SS officials during 1943 to prevent them from recommending the closure of the Emalia camp. None of it was spent on the 16,000-zl. set of gynecological instruments Oskar had to buy on the black market when one of the Emalia girls got pregnant—pregnancy being, of course, an immediate ticket to Auschwitz. Nor did any of it go to purchase the broken-down Mercedes from Untersturmfuhrer John. John offered Oskar the Mercedes for sale at the same time as Oskar presented a request for 30 Plaszow people to be transferred to Emalia.
The car, bought by Oskar one day for 12,000 zl., was requisitioned the next by Leo John’s friend and brother officer, Untersturmfuhrer Scheidt, to be used in the construction of fieldworks on the camp perimeter. Perhaps they’ll carry soil in the trunk, Oskar raged to Ingrid at the supper table. In a later informal account of the incident, he commented that he was glad to be of assistance to both gentlemen.
CHAPTER 26
Raimund Titsch was making payments of a different order. Titsch was a quiet, clerkly Austrian Catholic with a limp some said came from the first war and others from a childhood accident.
He was ten years or more older than either Amon or Oskar. Inside the Plaszow camp, he managed Julius Madritsch’s uniform factory, a business of 3,000 seamstresses and mechanics.
One way he paid was through his chess matches with Amon Goeth. The Administration Building was connected with the Madritsch works by telephone, and Amon would often call Titsch up to his office for a game. The first time Raimund had played Amon, the game had ended in half an hour and not in the Hauptsturmfuhrer’s favor.
Titsch, with the restrained and not so very triumphal “Mate!” dying on his lips, had been amazed at the tantrum Amon had thrown. The Commandant had grabbed for his coat and gun belt, buttoning and buckling them on, ramming his cap on his head.
Raimund Titsch, appalled, believed that Amon was about to go down to the trolley line looking for a prisoner to chastise for his—for Raimund Titsch’s—minor victory at chess. Since that first afternoon, Titsch had taken a new direction. Now he could take as long as three hours to lose to the Commandant. When workers in the Administration Building saw Titsch limping up Jerozolimska to do this chess duty, they knew the afternoon would be saner for it. A modest sense of security spread from them down to the workshops and even to the miserable trolley pushers.
But Raimund Titsch did not only play preventive chess. Independently of Dr. Sedlacek and of the man with the pocket camera whom Oskar had brought to Plaszow, Titsch had begun photographing. Sometimes from his office window, sometimes from the corners of workshops, he photographed the stripe-uniformed prisoners in the
