asked. Pemper believed, reasonably enough, that he could detect in Amon’s eyes resentment that his onetime prisoner was still a breathing source of evidence for the SS Court. Surely Amon was powerless here, thinned down, looking doleful in an old suit, washed up in Oskar’s office? But you couldn’t be sure. It was still Amon, and he had the habit of authority. Pemper said, “The judge told me I was not to talk to anyone about my interrogation.” Goeth was outraged and threatened to complain to Herr Schindler. That, if you like, was a measure of Amon’s new impotence. He had never had to go to Oskar before to appeal for the chastisement of a prisoner.
By the second night of Amon’s visit, the women were feeling more triumphant. He couldn’t touch them. They persuaded even Helen Hirsch of this. Yet her sleep was uneasy.
The last time Amon passed within sight of prisoners, it was on his way to be taken by car to the station at Zwittau. He had never in the past made three visits to any space without bringing some poor bastard’s world crashing down. It was clear now that he had no power at all. Yet still not everyone could look him in the face as he left. Thirty years later, in the sleep of Plaszow veterans from Buenos Aires to Sydney, from New York to Cracow, from Los Angeles to Jerusalem, Amon would still be rampaging. “When you saw Goeth,” said Poldek Pfefferberg, “you saw death.”
So, in his own terms, he was never an utter failure.
CHAPTER 37
Oskar’s thirty-seventh birthday was celebrated by Oskar himself and all the prisoners.
One of the metalworkers had crafted a small box suitable for holding studs or cuff links, and when the Herr Direktor appeared on the workshop floor, the twelve-year-old Niusia Horowitz was pushed toward him to make a rehearsed speech in German. “Herr Direktor,” she said in a voice he had to stoop to hear. “All the prisoners wish you the very best for this your birthday.”
It was a Shabbat, which was apt, because the Brinnlitz people would always remember it as a festival. Early in the morning, about the time Oskar had begun celebrating with Martell cognac in his office and flourishing that insulting telegram from the engineers at Brno, two truckloads of white bread rolled into the courtyard. Some went to the garrison, even to the hung-over Liepold sleeping late in his house in the village. That much was necessary to stop the SS from grumbling about the way the Herr Direktor favored prisoners. The prisoners themselves were issued three-quarters of a kilo of the bread. They inspected it as they ate and savored it. There was some speculation about where Oskar had got it. Perhaps it could be partially explained by the goodwill of the local mill manager, Daubek, the one who turned away while Brinnlitz prisoners filled their pants with oatmeal. But that Saturday bread was truly celebrated more in terms of the magic of the event, of the wonder-working. Though the day is remembered as jubilant, there was in fact not so much cause for festive feeling. Sometime in the past week, a long telegram had been directed from Herr Commandant Hassebroeck of Gross-Rosen to Liepold of Brinnlitz giving him instructions about the disposal of the population in the event the Russians drew near. There was to be a final selection, said Hassebroeck’s telegram. The aged and the halt were to be shot immediately, and the healthy were to be marched out in the direction of Mauthausen. Though the prisoners on the factory floor knew nothing of this telegram, they still had an unspecified fear of something like it. All that week there had been rumors that Poles had been brought in to dig mass graves in the woods beyond Brinnlitz. The white bread seemed to have come as an antidote to that rumor, a warranty of all their futures. Yet everyone seemed to know that an era of dangers more subtle than those of the past had begun.
If Oskar’s factory hands knew nothing of the telegram, neither did Herr Commandant Liepold himself. The cable was delivered first to Mietek Pemper in Liepold’s outer office. Pemper had steamed it open and resealed it and taken the news of its contents straight to Oskar. Schindler stood at his desk reading it, then turned to Mietek. “All right, then,” growled Oskar. “We have to say goodbye to Untersturmfuhrer Liepold.”
For it seemed both to Oskar and to Pemper that Liepold was the only SS man in the garrison capable of obeying such a telegram. The Commandant’s deputy was a man in his forties, an SS Oberscharfuhrer named Motzek.
While Motzek might be capable of some sort of panic slaughter, to administer the cool murder of 1,300 humans was beyond him.
In the days before his birthday, Oskar made a number of confidential complaints to Hassebroeck about the excessive behavior of Herr Commandant Liepold. He visited the influential Brno police chief, Rasch, and lodged the same sort of charges against Liepold. He showed both Hassebroeck and Rasch copies of letters he had written to the office of General Glucks in Oranienburg. Oskar was gambling that Hassebroeck would remember Oskar’s past generosities and the promise of future ones, that he would take note of the pressure for Liepold’s removal now being built up by Oskar in Oranienburg and Brno, that he would transfer Liepold without bothering to investigate the Untersturmfuhrer’s behavior toward the inmates of Brinnlitz.
It was a characteristic Schindler maneuver—the Amon-Oskar game of blackjack writ large. All the Brinnlitz men were in the stake, from Hirsch Krischer, Prisoner No. 68821, a forty-eight-year-old auto mechanic, to Jarum Kiaf, Prisoner No. 77196, a twenty-seven-year-old unskilled worker and survivor of the Goleszow carriages. And all the Brinnlitz women were counted in as well, from No. 76201, twenty-nine-year-old metalworker Berta Aftergut, to No. 76500, thirty-six-year-old Jenta Zwetschenstiel.
Oskar got fuel for further complaints about Liepold by inviting the Commandant to dinner at the apartment inside the factory. It was April 27, the eve of Schindler’s birthday. About eleven o’clock that night, the prisoners at work on the floor of the plant were startled to see a drunken Commandant reeling across the factory floor, assisted on his way by a steadier Herr Direktor. In the course of his passage, Liepold attempted to focus on individual workers. He raged, pointing at the great roof beams above the machinery. The Herr Direktor had so far kept him off the factory floor, but here he was, the final and punishing authority. “You fucking Jews,” he was roaring. “See that beam, see it! That’s what I’ll hang you from. Every one of you!”
Oskar eased him along, directing him by the shoulder, murmuring at him, “That’s right, that’s right. But not tonight, eh? Some other time.” The next day Oskar called Hassebroeck and others with predictable accusations. The man rages around the factory drunk, making threats about immediate executions. They’re not laborers! They’re sophisticated technicians engaged in secret-weapons manufacture, and so on. And although Hassebroeck was responsible for the deaths of thousands of quarry workers, although he believed that all Jewish labor should be liquidated when the Russians were close, he did agree that until then Herr Schindler’s factory should be treated as a special case.
Liepold, said Oskar, kept stating that he’d like at last to go into combat. He’s young, he’s healthy, he’s willing. Well, Hassebroeck told Oskar, we’ll see what can be done.
Commandant Liepold himself, meanwhile, spent Oskar’s birthday sleeping off the dinner of the night before.
In his absence, Oskar made an astounding birthday speech. He had been celebrating all day, yet no one remembers his delivery being unsteady. We do not have the text of what he said, but there is another speech, made ten days later on the evening of May 8, of which we do have a copy. According to those who listened, both speeches pursued similar lines. Both were, that is, promises of continuing life.
To call either of them a speech, however, is to demean their effect. What Oskar was instinctively attempting was to adjust reality, to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the SS. Long before, with pertinacious certainty, he’d told a group of shift workers, Edith Liebgold among them, that they would last the war.
He’d flourished the same gift for prophecy when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on their morning of arrival the previous November, and told them, “You’re safe now; you’re with me.”
It can’t be ignored that in another age and condition, the Herr Direktor could have become a demagogue of the style of Huey Long of Louisiana or John Lang of Australia, whose gift was to convince the listeners that they and he were bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil devised by other men.
Oskar’s birthday speech was delivered in German at night on the workshop floor to the assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the German civilian personnel were present as well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek Pfefferberg felt the hairs on his lice stand to attention. He looked around at the mute faces of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and of the SS men with their automatics. They will kill this man, he thought. And then everything will fall apart.
