punishment from Hauptsturmfuhrer Goeth—she was in part a buffer.
Herr Schindler released her and reached into his side pocket, bringing out a large candy bar. In its substance it too seemed prewar.
“Keep that somewhere,” he advised her.
“I get extra food here,” she told him, as if it were a matter of pride that he not assume she was starving. Food, in fact, was the least of her worries. She knew she would not survive Amon’s house, but it wouldn’t be for lack of food.
“If you don’t want to eat it, trade it,” Herr Schindler told her. “Or why not build yourself up?” He stood back and surveyed her. “Itzhak Stern told me about you.”
“Herr Schindler,” murmured the girl. She put her head down and wept neatly, economically for a few seconds. “Herr Schindler, he likes to beat me in front of those women. On my first day here, he beat me because I threw out the bones from dinner. He came down to the basement at midnight and asked me where they were. For his dogs, you understand. That was the first beating. I said to him… I don’t know why I said it; I’d never say it now… Why are you beating me? He said, The reason I’m beating you now is you asked me why I’m beating you.”
She shook her head and shrugged, as if reproving herself for talking so much. She didn’t want to say any more; she couldn’t convey the history of her punishments, her repeated experience of the Hauptsturmfuhrer’s fists. Herr Schindler bent his head to her confidingly. “Your circumstances are appalling, Helen,” he told her.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve accepted it.”
“Accepted it?”
“One day he’ll shoot me.”
Schindler shook his head, and she thought it was too glib an encouragement to her to hope. Suddenly, the good cloth and the pampered flesh of Herr Schindler were a provocation. “For God’s sake, Herr Direktor, I see things. We were up on the roof on Monday, chipping off the ice, young Lisiek and I. And we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio, right below us. And there on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn’t seem fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else. I couldn’t guess what she’d done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see that there’s no set of rules you can keep to. You can’t say to yourself, If I follow these rules, I’ll be safe…”
Schindler took her hand and wrung it for emphasis. “Listen, my dear Fraulein Helen Hirsch, in spite of all that, it’s still better than Majdanek or Auschwitz. If you can keep your health…”
She said, “I thought it would be easy to do that in the Commandant’s kitchen. When I was assigned here, from the camp kitchen, the other girls were jealous.” A pitiful smile spread on her lips.
Schindler raised his voice now. He was like a man enunciating a principle of physics.
“He won’t kill you, because he enjoys you too much, my dear Helen. He enjoys you so much he won’t even let you wear the Star. He doesn’t want anyone to know it’s a Jew he’s enjoying. He shot the woman from the steps because she meant nothing to him, she was one of a series, she neither offended nor pleased him. You understand that. But you… it’s not decent, Helen. But it’s life.”
Someone else had said that to her. Leo John, the Commandant’s deputy. John was an SS Untersturmfuhrer —equivalent to second lieutenant. “He won’t kill you,” John had said, “till the end, Lena, because he gets too much of a kick out of you.” Coming from John, it hadn’t had the same effect. Herr Schindler had just condemned her to a painful survival. He seemed to understand that she was stunned. He murmured encouragement. He’d see her again. He’d try to get her out. Out? she asked. Out of the villa, he explained; into my factory, he said. Surely you have heard of my factory. I have an enamelware factory.
“Oh, yes,” she said like a slum child speaking of the Riviera. ““Schindler’s Emalia.”
I’ve heard of it.”
“Keep your health,” he said again. He seemed to know it would be the key. He seemed to draw on a knowledge of future intentions—Himmler’s, Frank’s—when he said it. “All right,” she conceded.
She turned her back on him and went to a china closet, dragging it forward from the wall, an exercise of strength which in such a diminished girl amazed Herr Schindler. She removed a brick from the section of wall the closet had previously covered. She brought out a wad of money—
“I have a sister in the camp kitchen,” she said. “She’s younger than I am. I want you to spend this buying her back if ever she’s put on the cattle cars. I believe you often find out about these things beforehand.”
“I’ll make it my business,” Schindler told her, but with ease, not like a solemn promise. “How much is it?”
“Four thousand zloty.”
He took it negligently, her nest egg, and shoved it into a side pocket. It was still safer with him than in a niche behind Amon Goeth’s china closet.
So the story of Oskar Schindler is begun perilously, with Gothic Nazis, with SS hedonism, with a thin and brutalized girl, andwitha figure of the imagination somehow as popular as the golden-hearted whore: the good German.
On one hand, Oskar has made it his business to know the full face of the system, the rabid face behind the veil of bureaucratic decency. He knows, that is, earlier than most would dare know it, what Sonderbehandlung means; that though it says “Special Treatment,” it means pyramids of cyanotic corpses in Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and in that complex west of Cracow known to the Poles as Oswiecim-Brzezinka but which will be known to the West by its German name, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
On the other hand, he is a businessman, a dealer by temperament, and he does not openly spit in the system’s eye. He has already reduced the pyramids, and though he does not know how this year and next they will grow in size and number and overtop the Matterhorn, he knows the mountain is coming. Though he cannot predict what bureaucratic shifts will occur in its construction, he still presumes there will always be room and need for Jewish labor. Therefore, during his visit to Helen Hirsch, he insists, “Keep your health.” He is sure, and out in the darkened Arbeitslager (work camp) of Plaszow, wakeful Jews stir and promise themselves, that no regime—the tide set against it—can afford to do away with a plentiful source of free labor. It’s the ones who break down, spit blood, fall to dysentery who are put on the Auschwitz transports. Herr Schindler himself has heard prisoners, out on the Appellplatz of the Plaszow labor camp, summoned for morning roll call, murmur, “At least I still have my health,” in a tone which in normal life only the aged use.
So, this winter night, it is both early days and late days for Herr Schindler’s practical engagement in the salvage of certain human lives. He is in deep; he has broken Reich laws to an extent that would earn him a multiplicity of hangings, beheadings, consignments to the drafty huts of Auschwitz or Gross-Rosen. But he does not know yet how much it will really cost. Though he has spent a fortune already, he does not know the extent of payments still to be made.
Not to stretch belief so early, the story begins with a quotidian act of kindness—a kiss, a soft voice, a bar of chocolate. Helen Hirsch would never see her 4,000 zaloty again —not in a form in which they could be counted and held in the hand. But to this day she considers it a matter of small importance that Oskar was so inexact with sums of money.
CHAPTER 1
General Sigmund List’s armored divisions, driving north from the Sudetenland, had taken the sweet south Polish jewel of Cracow from both flanks on September 6, 1939.
And it was in their wake that Oskar Schindler entered the city which, for the next five years, would be his oyster. Though within the month he would show that he was disaffected from National Socialism, he could still see that Cracow, with its railroad junction and its as yet modest industries, would be a boomtown of the new regime. He wasn’t going to be a salesman anymore. Now he was going to be a tycoon.
It is not immediately easy to find in Oskar’s family’s history the origins of his impulse toward rescue. He was born on April 28, 1908, into the Austrian Empire of Franz Josef, into the hilly Moravian province of that ancient Austrian realm. His hometown was the industrial city of Zwittau, to which some commercial opening had brought
