would.
Now he told Poldek that Schindler had a list and that Poldek should do everything he could to get on it. Poldek went down to the Administration Building to beg Goldberg to add his name and Mila’s to the list. Schindler had in the past year and a half often visited Poldek in the camp garage and had always promised rescue.
Poldek had, however, become such an accomplished welder that the garage supervisors, who needed for their lives’ sake to produce high-standard work, would never let him go. Now Goldberg sat with his hand on the list—he had already added his own name to it—and this old friend of Oskar’s, once a frequent guest in the apartment in Straszewskiego, expected to have himself written down for sentiment’s sake. “Do you have any diamonds?” Goldberg asked Pfefferberg.
“Are you serious?” asked Poldek.
“For this list,” said Goldberg, a man of prodigious and accidental power, “it takes diamonds.”
Now that the Viennese music lover Hauptsturmfuhrer Goeth was in prison, the Rosner brothers, musicians to the court, were free to work their way onto the list. Dolek Horowitz also, who had earlier got his wife and children out to Emalia, now persuaded Goldberg to include him, his wife, his son, his young daughter. Horowitz had always worked in the central warehouse of Plaszow and had managed to put some small treasure away. Now it was paid to Marcel Goldberg.
Among those included in the list were the Bejski brothers, Uri and Moshe, officially described as machine fitter and draftsman. Uri had a knowledge of weapons, and Moshe a gift for forging documents. The circumstances of the list are so clouded that it is not possible to say whether they were included for these talents or not.
Josef Bau, the ceremonious bridegroom, would at some stage be included, but without his knowing it. It suited Goldberg to keep everyone in the dark about the list. Given his nature, it is possible to assume that if Bau made any personal approach to Goldberg it could only have been on the basis that his mother, his wife, himself should all be included. He would not find out until too late that he alone would be listed for Brinnlitz. As for Stern, the Herr Direktor had included him from the beginning. Stern was the only father confessor Oskar ever had, and Stern’s suggestions had a great authority with him. Since October 1, no Jewish prisoner had been allowed out of Plaszow either to march to the cable factory or for any other purpose. At the same time, the trusties in the Polish prison had begun to put guards on the barracks to stop Jewish prisoners from trading with the Poles for bread. The price of illegal bread reached a level it would be hard to express in zloty. In the past you could have bought a loaf for your second coat, 250 gm. for a clean undershirt. Now—as with Goldberg—it took diamonds.
During the first week of October, Oskar and Bankier visited Plaszow for some reason and went as usual to see Stern in the Construction Office. Stern’s desk was down the hallway from the vanished Amon’s office. It was possible to speak more freely here than ever before. Stern told Schindler about the inflated price of rye bread.
Oskar turned to Bankier. “Make sure Weichert gets fifty thousand zloty,” murmured Oskar.
Dr. Michael Weichert was chairman of the former Jewish Communal Self-Help, now renamed Jewish Relief Office. He and his office were permitted to operate for cosmetic reasons and, in part, because of Weichert’s powerful connections in the German Red Cross. Though many Polish Jews within the camps would treat him with understandable suspicion, and though this suspicion would bring him to trial after the war—he would be exonerated—Weichert was exactly the man to find 50,000 zl. worth of bread quickly and introduce it into Plaszow.
The conversation of Stern and Oskar moved on. The 50,000 zloty were a mere obiter dicta of their talk about the unsettled times and about how Amon might be enjoying his cell in Breslau. Later in the week black-market bread from town was smuggled into camp hidden beneath cargoes of cloth, coal, or scrap iron. Within a day, the price had fallen to its accustomed level.
It was a nice case of connivance between Oskar and Stern, and would be followed by other instances.
CHAPTER 32
At least one of the Emalia people crossed off by Goldberg to make room for others—for relatives, Zionists, specialists, or payers—would blame Oskar for it.
In 1963, the Martin Buber Society would receive a pitiable letter from a New Yorker, a former Emalia prisoner. In Emalia, he said, Oskar had promised deliverance. In return, the people had made him wealthy with their labor. Yet some found themselves off the edge of the list. This man saw his own omission as a very personal betrayal and—with all the fury of someone who has been made to travel through the flames to pay for another man’s lie—blamed Oskar for all that had happened afterward: for Gross-Rosen, and for the frightful cliff at Mauthausen from which prisoners were thrown, and last of all for the death march with which the war would end. Strangely, the letter, radiant with just anger, shows most graphically that life on the list was a feasible matter, while life off it was unutterable. But it seems unjust to condemn Oskar for Goldberg’s fiddling with names. The camp authorities would, in the chaos of those last days, sign any list Goldberg gave them as long as it did not exceed too drastically the 1,100 prisoners Oskar had been granted. Oskar himself could not police Goldberg by the hour. His own day was spent speaking to bureaucrats, his evenings in buttering them up.
He had, for example, to receive shipment authorizations for his Hilo machines and metal presses from old friends in the office of General Schindler, some of whom delayed the paperwork, finding small problems which could confound the idea of Oskar’s salvage of his 1,100.
One of these Inspectorate men had raised the problem that Oskar’s armament machines had come to him by way of the procurement section of the Berlin Inspectorate, and under approval from its licensing section, specifically for use in Poland. Neither of these sections had been notified of the proposed move to Moravia. They would need to be. It could be a month before they gave their authorization. Oskar did not have a month. Plaszow would be empty by the end of October; everyone would be in Gross-Rosen or Auschwitz. In the end, the problem was cleared away by the accustomed gifts.
As well as such preoccupations, Oskar was concerned about the SS investigators who had arrested Amon. He half-expected to be arrested or—which was the same thing—heavily interrogated about his relationship with the former Commandant. He was wise to anticipate it, for one of the explanations Amon had offered for the 80,000 RM. the SS had found among his belongings was “Oskar Schindler gave it to me so I’d go easy on the Jews.” Oskar therefore had to keep in contact with friends of his at Pomorska Street who might be able to tell him the direction Bureau V’s investigation of Amon was taking. Finally, since his camp at Brinnlitz would be under the ultimate supervision of KL Gross-Rosen, he was already dealing with the Commandant of Gross-Rosen, Sturmbannfuhrer Hassebroeck. Under Hassebroeck’s management, 100,000 would die in the Gross-Rosen system, but when Oskar conferred with him on the telephone and drove across into Lower Silesia to meet him, he seemed the least of all Oskar’s worries. Schindler was used by now to meeting charming killers and noticed that Hassebroeck even seemed grateful to him for extending the Gross-Rosen empire into Moravia. For Hassebroeck did think in terms of empire. He controlled one hundred and three subcamps. (brinnlitz would be one hundred and four and—with its more than 1,000 inmates and its sophisticated industry—a major addition.) Seventy-eight of Hassebroeck’s camps were located in Poland, sixteen in Czechoslovakia, ten in the Reich. It was much bigger cheese than anything Amon had managed.
With so much sweetening, cajoling, and form-filling to occupy him in the week Plaszow was wound down, Oskar could not have found the time to monitor Goldberg, even if he had had the power. In any case, the account the prisoners give of the camp in its last day and night is one of milling and chaos, Goldberg—Lord of the Lists—at its center, still holding out for offers.
Dr. Idek Schindel, for example, approached Goldberg to get himself and his two young brothers into Brinnlitz. Goldberg would not give an answer, and Schindel would not find out until the evening of October 15, when the male prisoners were marshaled for the cattle cars, that he and his brothers were not listed for the Schindler camp. They joined the line of Schindler people anyway. It is a scene from a cautionary engraving of Judgment Day—the ones without the right mark attempting to creep onto the line of the justified and being spotted by an angel of retribution, in this case Oberscharfuhrer M’uller, who came up to the doctor with his whip and slapped him, left cheek, right cheek, left and right again with the leather butt, while asking amusedly, “Why would you want to get on that line?”
Schindel would be made to stay on with the small party involved in liquidating Plaszow and would then travel
