Itzhak and Emilie were the keepers of vigils.
The scholarly accountant would always put the most loyal interpretation on Oskar’s wanderings around Moravia. In a speech years after, Stern would say, “He rode day and night, not only to purchase food for the Jews in Brinnlitz camp—by means of forged papers made by one of the prisoners—but to buy us arms and ammunition in case the SS conceived of killing us during their retreats.” The picture of a restlessly provident Herr Direktor does credit to Itzhak’s love and loyalty. But Emilie would have understood that not all the absences had to do with Oskar’s brand of humane racketeering.
During one of Oskar’s furloughs, nineteen-year-old Janek Dresner was accused of sabotage. In fact Dresner was ignorant of metalwork. He had spent his time in Plaszow in the delousing works, handing towels to the SS who came for a shower and sauna, and boiling lice-ridden clothes taken from prisoners. (from the bite of a louse he’d suffered typhus, and survived only because his cousin, Dr. Schindel, passed him off in the clinic as an angina case.)
The supposed sabotage occurred because engineer Schoenbrun, the German supervisor, transferred him from his lathe to one of the larger metal presses. It had taken a week for the engineers to set the metrics for this machine, and the first time Dresner pressed the start button and began to use it, he shorted the wiring and cracked one of the plates. Schoenbrun harangued the boy and went into the office to write a damning report. Copies of Schoenbrun’s complaint were typed up and addressed to Sections D and W in Oranienburg, to Hassebroeck at Gross-Rosen, and to Untersturmfuhrer Liepold in his office at the factory gate.
In the morning, Oskar had still not come home. So rather than mail the reports, Stern took them out of the office mailbag and hid them. The complaint addressed to Liepold had already been hand-delivered, but Liepold was at least correct in the terms of the organization he served and could not hang the boy until he had heard from Oranienburg and Hassebroeck. Two days later, Oskar had still not appeared. “It must be some party!” the whimsical ones on the shop floor told each other. Somehow Schoenbrun discovered that Itzhak was sitting on the letters. He raged through the office, telling Stern that .his name would be added to the reports. Stern seemed to be a man of limitless calm, and when Schoenbrun finished he told the engineer that he had removed the reports from the mailbag because he thought the Herr Direktor should, as a matter of courtesy, be apprised of their contents before they were mailed. The Herr Direktor, said Stern, would of course be appalled to find out that a prisoner had done 10,000 RM. worth of damage to one of his machines. It seemed only just, said Stern, that Herr Schindler be given the chance to add his own remarks to the report.
At last Oskar drove in through the gate.
Stern intercepted him and told him about Schoenbrun’s charges.
Untersturmfuhrer Liepold had been waiting to see Schindler too and was eager to push his authority inside the factory, to use the Janek Dresner case as a pretext. I will preside over the hearing, Liepold told Oskar. You, Herr Direktor, will supply a signed statement attesting to the extent of the damage. Wait a minute, Oskar told him. It’s my machine that’s broken. I’m the one who’ll preside.
Liepold argued that the prisoner was under the jurisdiction of Section D. But the machine, replied Oskar, came under the authority of the Armaments Inspectorate. Besides, he really couldn’t permit a trial on the shop floor.
If Brinnlitz had been a garment or chemical factory, then perhaps it wouldn’t have much impact on production. But this was a munitions factory engaged in the manufacture of secret components. “I won’t have my work force disturbed,” said Oskar.
It was an argument Oskar won, perhaps because Liepold gave in. The Untersturmfuhrer was afraid of Oskar’s contacts. So the court was convened at night in the machine-tool section of DEF, and its members were Herr Oskar Schindler as president, Herr Schoenbrun, and Herr Fuchs. A young German girl sat at the side of the judicial table to keep a record, and when young Dresner was brought in, he saw in front of him a solemn and fully constituted court. According to a Section D edict of April 11, 1944, what Janek faced was the first and crucial stage of a process which should, after a report to Hassebroeck and a reply from Oranienburg, end in his hanging on the workshop floor in front of all the Brinnlitz people, his parents and sister among them. Janek noticed that tonight there was none of that shop-floor familiarity to Oskar. The Herr Direktor read aloud Schoenbrun’s report of the sabotage. Janek knew about Oskar mainly from the reports of others, particularly from his father, and couldn’t tell now what Oskar’s straight-faced reading of Schoenbrun’s accusations meant. Was Oskar really grieving for the cracked machine? Or was it all just theatrics?
When the reading was finished, the Herr Direktor began to ask questions. There was not much Dresner could say in answer. He pleaded that he was unfamiliar with the machine. There had been trouble setting it, he explained. He had been too anxious and had made a mistake. He assured the Herr Direktor that he had no reason to wish to sabotage the machinery. If you are not skilled at armaments work, said Schoenbrun, you shouldn’t be here. The Herr Direktor has assured me that all you prisoners have had experience in the armaments industry. Yet here you are, Haftling Dresner, claiming ignorance.
With an angry gesture, Schindler ordered the prisoner to detail exactly what he had done on the night of the offense. Dresner began to talk about the preparations for starting up the machine, the setting of it, the dry run at the controls, the switching on of the power, the sudden racing of the engine, the splitting of the mechanism. Herr Schindler became more and more restless as Dresner talked, and began to pace the floor glowering at the boy. Dresner was describing some alteration he had made to one of the controls when Schindler stopped, ham fists clenched, his eyes glaring. What did you say? he asked the boy.
Dresner repeated what he had said: I adjusted the pressure control, Herr Direktor.
Oskar walked up to him and hit him across the side of the jaw. Dresner’s head sang, but in triumph, for Oskar—his back to his fellow judges—had winked at Dresner in a way that could not be mistaken. Then he began waving his great arms, dismissing the boy. “The stupidity of you damned people!” he was bellowing all the while. “I can’t believe it!”
He turned and appealed to Schoenbrun and Fuchs, as if they were his only allies. “I wish they were intelligent enough to sabotage a machine. Then at least I’d have their goddamned hides! But what can you do with these people? They’re an utter waste of time.”
Oskar’s fist clenched again, and Dresner recoiled at the idea of another roundhouse punch. “Clear out!” yelled Oskar.
As Dresner went out through the door, he heard Oskar tell the others that it was better to forget all this. “I have some good Martell upstairs,” he said.
This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity. Dresner’s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners’ lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.
CHAPTER 35
For the factory produced nothing. “Not a shell,” Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing. Oskar himself contrasts the output of DEF in the Cracow years with the Brinnlitz record. In Zablocie, enamelware was manufactured to the value of 16,000,000 RM.
During the same time, the munitions section of Emalia produced shells worth 500,000 RM. Oskar explains that at Brinnlitz, however, “as a consequence of the falling off of the enamel production,” there was no output to speak of. The armaments production, he says, encountered “start-up difficulties.” But in fact he did manage to ship one truckful of “ammunition parts,” valued at 35,000 RM., during the Brinnlitz months. “These parts,” said Oskar later, “had been transferred to Brinnlitz already half-fabricated. To supply still less [to the war effort] was impossible, and the excuse of “start-up difficulties” became more and more dangerous for me and my Jews, because Armaments Minister Albert Speer raised his demands from month to month.”
The danger of Oskar’s policy of nonproduction was not only that it gave him a bad name at the Armaments
