with a carload of sick women to Auschwitz. They would be placed in a hut in some corner of Birkenau and left to die. Yet most of them, overlooked by camp officials and exempt from the usual regimen of the place, would live. Schindel himself would be sent to Flossenburg and then—with his brothers—on a death march. He would survive by a layer of skin, but the youngest Schindel boy would be shot on the march on the next-to-last day of the war. That is an image of the way the Schindler list, without any malice on Oskar’s side, with adequate malice on Goldberg’s, still tantalizes survivors, and tantalized them in those desperate October days.
Everyone has a story about the list. Henry Rosner lined up with the Schindler people, but an NCO spotted his violin and, knowing that Amon would require music should he be released from prison, sent Rosner back. Rosner then hid his violin under his coat, against his side, tucking the node of the sound post under his armpit. He lined up again and was let through to the Schindler cars. Rosner had been one of those to whom Oskar had made promises, and so had always been on the list. It was the same with the Jereths: old Mr. Jereth of the box factory and Mrs. Chaja Jereth, described in the list inexactly and hopefully as a Metallarbeiterin—a metalworker. The Perlmans were also on as old Emalia hands, and the Levartovs as well. In fact, in spite of Goldberg, Oskar got for the most part the people he had asked for, though there may have been some surprises among them. A man as worldly as Oskar could not have been amazed to find Goldberg himself among the inhabitants of Brinnlitz.
But there were more welcome additions than that. Poldek Pfefferberg, for example, accidentally overlooked and rejected by Goldberg for lack of diamonds, let it be known that he wanted to buy vodka—he could pay in clothing or bread. When he’d acquired the bottle, he got permission to take it down to the orderly building in Jerozolimska where Schreiber was on duty. He gave Schreiber the bottle and pleaded with him to force Goldberg to include Mila and himself. “Schindler,” he said, “would have written us down if he’d remembered.” Poldek had no doubt that he was negotiating for his life. “Yes,” Schreiber agreed. “The two of you must get on it.” It is a human puzzle why men like Schreiber didn’t in such moments ask themselves, If this man and his wife were worth saving, why weren’t the rest?
The Pfefferbergs would find themselves on the Schindler line when the time came. And so, to their surprise, would Helen Hirsch and the younger sister whose survival had always been Helen’s own obsession.
The men of the Schindler list entrained at the Plaszow siding on a Sunday, October 15. It would be another full week before the women left. Though the 800 were kept separate during the loading of the train and were pushed into freight cars kept exclusively for Schindler personnel, they were coupled to cars containing 1,300 other prisoners all bound for Gross-Rosen. It seems that some half-expected to have to pass through Gross-Rosen on their way to Schindler’s camp; but many others believed that the journey would be direct. They were prepared to endure a slow trip to Moravia—they accepted that they would be made to spend time sitting in the cars at junctions and on sidings. They might wait half a day at a time for traffic with higher priority to pass. The first snow had fallen in the last week, and it would be cold. Each prisoner had been issued only 300 gm. of bread to last the journey, and each car had been provided with a single water bucket. For their natural functions, the travelers would have to use a corner of the floor, or if packed too tightly, urinate and defecate where they stood. But in the end, despite all their griefs they would tumble out at a Schindler establishment.
The 300 women of the list would enter the cars the following Sunday in the same sanguine state of mind.
Other prisoners noticed that Goldberg traveled as lightly as any of them. He must have had contacts outside Plaszow to hold his diamonds for him. Those who still hoped to influence him on behalf of an uncle, a brother, a sister allowed him enough space to sit in comfort. The others squatted, their knees pushed into their chins. Dolek Horowitz held six-year-old Richard in his arms. Henry Rosner made a nest of clothing on the floor for nine-year-old Olek.
It took three days. Sometimes, at sidings, their breath froze on the walls. Air was always scarce, but when you got a mouthful it was icy and fetid. The train halted at last on the dusk of a comfortless autumn day. The doors were unlocked, and passengers were expected to alight as quickly as businessmen with appointments to keep. SS guards ran among them shouting directions and blaming them for smelling. “Take everything off!” the NCO’S were roaring. “Everything for disinfection!” They piled their clothing and marched naked into the camp. By six in the evening they stood in naked lines on the Appellplatz of this bitter destination. Snow stood in the surrounding woods; the surface of the parade ground was iced. It was not a Schindler camp. It was Gross-Rosen. Those who had paid Goldberg glared at him, threatening murder, while SS men in overcoats walked along the lines, lashing the buttocks of those who openly shivered.
They kept the men on the Appellplatz all night, for there were no huts available. It was not until midmorning the next day that they would be put under cover. In speaking of that seventeen hours of exposure, of ineffable cold dragging down on the heart, survivors do not mention any deaths.
Perhaps life under the SS, or even at Emalia, had tempered them for a night like this one. Though it was a milder evening than those earlier in the week, it was still murderous enough. Some of them, of course, were too distracted by the possibility of Brinnlitz to drift away with cold.
Later, Oskar would meet prisoners who had survived an even longer exposure to cold and frostbite. Certainly elderly Mr. Garde, the father of Adam Garde, lived through this night, as did little Olek Rosner and Richard Horowitz.
Toward eleven o’clock the next morning, they were taken to the showers. Poldek Pfefferberg, crowded in with the others, considered the nozzle above his head with suspicion, wondering if water or gas would rain down. It was water; but before it was turned on, Ukrainian barbers passed among them, shaving their heads, their pubic hair, their armpits. You stood straight, eyes front, while the Ukrainian worked at you with his unhoned razor. “It’s too dull,” one of the prisoners complained. “No,” said the Ukrainian, and slashed the prisoner’s leg to show that the blade still held a cutting edge.
After the showers, they were issued striped prison uniforms and crowded into barracks. The SS sat them in lines, like galley oarsmen, one man backed up between the legs of the man behind him, his own opened legs affording support to the man in front. By this method, 2,000 men were crammed into three huts. German Kapos armed with truncheons sat on chairs against the wall and watched. Men were wedged so tightly—every inch of the floor space covered—that to leave their rows for the latrines, even if the Kapos permitted it, meant walking on heads and shoulders and being cursed for it.
In the middle of one hut was a kitchen where turnip soup was being made and bread baked. Poldek Pfefferberg, coming back from a visit to the latrines, found the kitchen under the supervision of a Polish Army NCO he had known at the beginning of the war. The NCO gave Poldek some bread and permitted him to sleep by the kitchen fire. The others, however, spent their nights wedged in the human chain.
Each day they were stood at attention in the Appellplatz and remained there in silence for ten hours. In the evenings, however, after the issue of thin soup, they were allowed to walk around the hut, to talk to each other. The blast of a whistle at 9 P.M. was the signal for them to take up their curious positions for the night.
On the second day, an SS officer came to the Appellplatz looking for the clerk who had drawn up the Schindler list. It had not been sent off from Plaszow, it seemed. Shivering in his coarse prison uniform, Goldberg was led off to an office and asked to type out the list from memory. By the end of the day he had not finished the work and, back in the barracks, was surrounded by a spate of final pleas for inclusion. Here, in the bitter dusk, the list still enticed and tormented, even if all it had done so far for those on it was bring them to Gross-Rosen. Pemper and others, moving in on Goldberg, began to pressure him to type Dr. Alexander Biberstein’s name on the sheet in the morning. Biberstein was brother of the Marek Biberstein who had been that first, optimistic president of the Cracow Judenrat. Earlier in the week Goldberg had confused Biberstein, telling him that he was on the list. It was not till the trucks were loaded that the doctor found out he was not in the Schindler group. Even in such a place as Gross-Rosen, Mietek Pemper was sure enough of a future to threaten Goldberg with postwar reprisals if Biberstein were not added.
Then, on the third day, the 800 men of Schindler’s now revised list were separated out; taken to the delousing station for yet another wash; permitted to sit a few hours, speculating and chatting like villagers in front of their huts; and marched out once more to the siding. With a small ration of bread, they climbed up into cattle cars. None of the guards who loaded them admitted to knowing where they were going. They squatted on the floorboards in the prescribed manner. They kept fixed in their minds the map of Central Europe, and made continual judgments about the passage of the sun, gauging their direction by glimpses of light through small wire ventilators near the roofs of the cars. Olek Rosner was lifted to the ventilator in his car and said that he could see forests and mountains. The navigation experts claimed the train was traveling generally southeast. It all indicated a Czech
