them later said that she was just a quiet and submissive wife. For the healthy in Brinnlitz stayed hostage to Oskar’s flamboyance, to this great Brinnlitz confidence trick. Even the women who were still standing had their attention taken by the grand, magical, omniprovident Oskar.
Manci Rosner, for example. A little later in Brinnlitz’ history, Oskar would come to the lathes where she worked the night shift and hand her Henry’s violin. Somehow, during a journey to see Hassebroeck at Gross-Rosen, he’d got the time to go into the warehouse there and find the fiddle. It had cost him 100 RM. to redeem it. As he handed it to her, he smiled in a way that seemed to promise her the ultimate return of the violinist to go with the violin. “Same instrument,” he murmured. “But—for the moment— different tune.”
It was hard for Manci, faced by Oskar and the miraculous violin, to see behind the Herr Direktor to the quiet wife. But to the dying, Emilie was more visible. She fed them semolina, which she got God knows where, prepared in her own kitchen and carried up to the Krankenstube. Dr. Alexander Biberstein believed that Mrs. Dresner was finished. Emilie spooned the semolina into her for seven days in a row, and the dysentery abated. Mrs. Dresner’s case seemed to verify Mila Pfefferberg’s claim that if Oskar had failed to rescue them from Birkenau, most of them would not have lived another week.
Emilie tended Janka Feigenbaum also, the nineteen-year-old with bone cancer. Lutek Feigenbaum, Janka’s brother, at work on the factory floor, sometimes noticed Emilie moving out of her ground-floor apartment with a canister of soup boiled up in her own kitchen for the dying Janka. “She was dominated by Oskar,” Lutek would say. “As we all were. Yet she was her own woman.”
When Feigenbaum’s glasses were broken, she arranged for them to be repaired. The prescription lay in some doctor’s office in Cracow, had lain there since before the ghetto days. Emilie arranged for someone who was visiting Cracow to get the prescription and bring back the glasses made up. Young Feigenbaum considered this more than an average kindness, especially in a system which positively desired his myopia, which aimed to take the spectacles off all the Jews of Europe. There are many stories about Oskar providing new glasses for various prisoners. One wonders if some of Emilie’s kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood.
CHAPTER 34
The doctors in the Krankenstube were Doctors Hilfstein, Handler, Lewkowicz, and Biberstein. They were all concerned about the likelihood of a typhus outbreak. For typhus was not only a hazard to health. It was, by edict, a cause to close down Brinnlitz, to put the infested back into cattle cars and ship them to die in the ACHTUNG TYPHUS! barracks of Birkenau. On one of Oskar’s morning visits to the clinic, about a week after the women arrived, Biberstein told him that there were two more possible cases among the women. Headache, fever, malaise, general pains throughout the whole body—all that had begun. Biberstein expected the characteristic typhoid rash to appear within a few days. These two would need to be isolated somewhere in the factory.
Biberstein did not have to give Oskar too much home instruction in the facts of typhus.
Typhus was carried by louse bite. The prisoners were infested by uncontrollable populations of lice. The disease took perhaps two weeks to incubate. It might be incubating now in a dozen, a hundred prisoners. Even with the new bunks installed, people still lay too close. Lovers passed the virulent lice to each other when they met, fast and secretly, in some hidden corner of the factory. The typhus lice were wildly migratory. It seemed now that their energy could checkmate Oskar’s.
So that when Oskar ordered a delousing unit—showers, a laundry to boil clothes, a disinfection plant—built upstairs, it was no idle administrative order. The unit was to run on hot steam piped up from the cellars. The welders were to work double shifts on the project. They did it with a will, for willingness characterized the secret industries of Brinnlitz. Official industry might be symbolized by the Hilo machines rising from the new-poured workshop floor. It was in the prisoners’ interest and in Oskar’s, as Moshe Bejski later observed, that these machines be properly erected, since it gave the camp a convincing front. But the uncertified industries of Brinnlitz were the ones that counted. The women knitted clothing with wool looted from Hoffman’s left-behind bags. They paused and began to look industrial only when an SS officer or NCO passed through the factory on his way to the Herr Direktor’s office, or when Fuchs and Schoenbrun, the inept civil engineers (“Not up to the weight of our engineers,” a prisoner would later say) came out of their offices.
The Brinnlitz Oskar was still the Oskar old Emalia hands remembered. A bon vivant, a man of wild habits. Mandel and Pfefferberg, at the end of their shift and overheated from working on the pipe fittings for the steam, visited a water tank high up near the workshop ceiling. Ladders and a catwalk took them to it. The water was warm up there, and once you climbed in, you could not be seen from the floor. Dragging themselves up, the two welders were amazed to find the tub already taken. Oskar floated, naked and enormous. A blond SS girl, the one Regina Horowitz had bribed with a brooch, her naked breasts buoyant at the surface, shared the water with him. Oskar became aware of them, looked up at them frankly. Sexual shame was, to him, a concept something like existentialism, very worthy but hard to grasp. Stripped, the welders noticed, the girl was delicious.
They apologized and left, shaking their heads, whistling softly, laughing like schoolboys. Above their heads, Oskar dallied like Zeus.
When the epidemic did not develop, Biberstein thanked the Brinnlitz delousing unit. When the dysentery faded, he thanked the food. In a testimony in the archives of the Yad Vashem, Biberstein declares that at the beginning of the camp, the daily ration was in excess of 2,000 calories. In all the miserable winter-bound continent, only the Jews of Brinnlitz were fed this living meal. Among the millions, only the soup of the Schindler thousand had body.
There was porridge too. Down the road from the camp, by the stream into which Oskar’s mechanics had recently thrown black-market liquor, stood a mill. Armed with a work pass, a prisoner could stroll down there on an errand from one or another department of DEF. Mundek Korn remembers coming back to the camp loaded with food. At the mill you simply tied your trousers at the ankles and loosened your belt. Your friend then shoveled your pants full of oatmeal. You belted up again and returned to the camp— a grand repository, priceless as you walked, a little bandy-legged, past the sentries into the annex. Inside, people loosened your cuffs and let the oatmeal run out into pots.
In the drafting department, young Moshe Bejski and Josef Bau had already begun forging prison passes of the type that allowed people to make the mill run. Oskar wandered in one day and showed Bejski documents stamped with the seal of the rationing authority of the Government General. Oskar’s best contacts for black-market food were still in the Cracow area. He could arrange shipments by telephone. But at the Moravian border, you had to show clearance documents from the Food and Agriculture Department of the Government General. Oskar pointed to the stamp on the papers in his hand. Could you make a stamp like that? he asked Bejski. Bejski was a craftsman. He could work on little sleep. Now he turned out for Oskar the first of the many official stamps he would craft. His tools were razor blades and various small cutting instruments. His stamps became the emblems of Brinnlitz’ own outrageous bureaucracy.
He cut seals of the Government General, of the Governor of Moravia, seals to adorn false travel permits so that prisoners could drive by truck to Brno or Olomouc to collect loads of bread, of black-market gasoline, of flour or fabric or cigarettes. Leon Salpeter, a Cracow pharmacist, once a member of Marek Biberstein’s Judenrat, kept the storehouse in Brinnlitz. Here the miserable supplies sent down from Gross-Rosen by Hassebroeck were kept, together with the supplementary vegetables, flour, cereals bought by Oskar under Bejski’s minutely careful rubber stamps, the eagle and the hooked cross of the regime precisely crafted on them.
“You have to remember,” said an inmate of Oskar’s camp, “that Brinnlitz was hard. But beside any other— paradise!” Prisoners seem to have been aware that food was scarce everywhere; even on the outside, few were sated.
And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of the prisoners?
The answer is indulgent laughter. “Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?” And then a frown, in case you think this attitude too serflike. “You don’t understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be.”
As in his early marriage, Oskar was still temperamentally an absentee, was away from Brinnlitz for stretches of time. Sometimes Stern, purveyor of the day’s requests, would wait up all night for him. In Oskar’s apartment
