The speech pursued two main promises.
First, the great tyranny was coming to a close. He spoke of the SS men around the walls as if they too were imprisoned and yearned for liberation. Many of them, Oskar explained to the prisoners, had been conscripted from other units and without their consent into the Waffen SS. His second promise was that he would stay at Brinnlitz until the end of the hostilities was announced. “And five minutes longer,” he said. For the prisoners, the speech, like past pronouncements of Oskar’s, promised a future. It stated his vigorous intent that they should not go into graves in the woods. It reminded them of his investment in them, and it enlivened them.
One can only guess, however, how it bedeviled the SS men who heard it. He had genially insulted their corps. How they protested, or whether they swallowed it, he would learn from their reaction. He had also warned them that he would stay in Brinnlitz at least as long as they would, and that therefore he was a witness.
But Oskar did not feel as blithe as he sounded. Later he confessed that at the time he was concerned about actions retreating military units in the Zwittau area might take in regard to Brinnlitz. He even says, “We were in a panic, because we were afraid of the despairing actions of the SS guards.” It must have been a quiet panic, for no prisoner, eating his white bread on Oskar’s birthday, seems to have caught a whiff of it. Oskar was also concerned about some Vlasov units which had been stationed on the edges of Brinnlitz. These troops were members of the ROA, the Russian Army of Liberation, formed the year before on the authority of Himmler from the vast ranks of Russian prisoners in the Reich and commanded by General Andrei Vlasov, a former Soviet general captured in front of Moscow three years past. They were a dangerous corps for the Brinnlitz people, for they knew Stalin would want them for a special punishment and feared that the Allies would give them back to him. Vlasov units everywhere were therefore in a state of violent Slavic despair, which they stoked with vodka. When they withdrew, seeking the American lines farther west, they might do anything.
Within two days of Oskar’s birthday speech, a set of orders arrived on Liepold’s desk. They announced that Untersturmfuhrer Liepold had been transferred to a Waffen SS infantry battalion near Prague. Though Liepold could not have been delighted with them, he seems to have packed quietly and left. He had often said at dinners at Oskar’s, particularly after the second bottle of red wine, that he would prefer to be in a combat unit. Lately there had been a number of field-rank officers, Wehrmacht and SS, from the retreating forces invited to dinner in the Herr Direktor’s apartment, and their table talk had always been to stir Liepold’s itch to seek combat. He had never been faced with as much evidence as the other guests that the cause was finished.
It is unlikely that he called Hassebroeck’s office before packing his bags.
Telephone communications were not sound, for the Russians had encircled Breslau and were within a walk of Gross-Rosen itself. But the transfer would not have surprised anyone in Hassebroeck’s office, since Liepold had often made patriotic sounds to them too. So, leaving Oberscharfuhrer Motzek in command of Brinnlitz, Josef Liepold drove off to battle, a hard-liner who had got his wish.
With Oskar, there was no mute waiting for the close. During the first days of May, he discovered somehow —perhaps even by telephone calls to Brno, where lines were still operating—that one of the warehouses with which he regularly dealt had been abandoned. With half a dozen prisoners, he drove off by truck to loot it. There were a number of roadblocks on the way south, but at each of them they flashed their dazzling papers, forged, as Oskar would write, with the stamps and signatures “of the highest SS police authorities in Moravia and Bohemia.” When they arrived at the warehouse, they found it encircled by fire. Military storehouses in the neighborhood had been set alight, and there had been incendiary bombing raids as well. From the direction of the inner city, where the Czechoslovak underground was fighting door to door with the garrison, they could hear firing. Herr Schindler ordered the truck to back into the loading dock of the warehouse, broke the door open, and discovered that the interior was full of a brand of cigarettes called Egipski.
In spite of such lighthearted piracy, Oskar was frightened by rumors from Slovakia that the Russians were uncritically and informally executing German civilians. From listening to the BBC news each night, he was comforted to find that the war might end before any Russian reached the Zwittau area.
The prisoners also had indirect access to the BBC and knew what the realities were. Throughout the history of Brinnlitz the radio technicians, Zenon Szenwich and Artur Rabner, had continually repaired one or another radio of Oskar’s. In the welding shop, Zenon listened with an earphone to the 2 P.M. news from the Voice of London. During the night shift, the welders plugged into the 2 A.M. broadcast. An SS man, in the factory one night to take a message to the office, discovered three of them around the radio. “We’ve been working on it for the Herr Direktor,” they told the man, “and just got it going a minute ago.”
Earlier in the year, prisoners had expected that Moravia would be taken by the Americans. Since Eisenhower had stood fast at the Elbe, they now knew that it would be the Russians. The circle of prisoners closest to Oskar were composing a letter in Hebrew, explaining what Oskar’s record was. It might do some good if presented to American forces, which had not only a considerable Jewish component, but field rabbis. Stern and Oskar himself therefore considered it vital that the Herr Direktor somehow be got to the Americans. In part Oskar’s decision was influenced by the characteristic Central European idea of the Russians as barbarians, men of strange religion and uncertain humanity. But apart from that, if some of the reports from the east could be believed, he had grounds for rational fear.
But he was not debilitated by it. He was awake and in a state of hectic expectation when the news of the German surrender came to him through the BBC in the small hours of May 7. The war in Europe was to cease at midnight on the following night, the night of Tuesday, May 8. Oskar woke Emilie, and the sleepless Stern was summoned into the office to help the Herr Direktor celebrate. Stern could tell that Oskar now felt confident about the SS garrison, but would have been alarmed if he could have guessed how Oskar’s certitude would be demonstrated that day.
On the shop floor, the prisoners maintained the usual routines. If anything, they worked better than on other days. Yet about noon, the Herr Direktor destroyed the pretense of business as usual by piping Churchill’s victory speech by loudspeaker throughout the camp.
Lutek Feigenbaum, who understood English, stood by his machine flabbergasted. For others, the honking and grunting voice of Churchill was the first they’d heard in years of a language they would speak in the New World. The idiosyncratic voice, as familiar in its way as that of the dead Fuhrer, carried to the gates and assailed the watchtowers, but the SS took it soberly. They were no longer turning inward toward the camp. Their eyes, like Oskar’s, were focused—but far more sharply—on the Russians. According to Hassebroeck’s earlier telegram, they should have been busy in the rich green woods. Instead, clock-watching for midnight, they looked at the black face of the forest, speculating whether partisans were there. A fretful Oberscharfuhrer Motzek kept them at their posts, and duty kept them there also. For duty, as so many of their superiors would claim in court, was the SS genius.
In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweler named Licht, had been making a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box he’d been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. It had been supplied by old Mr. Jereth of the box factory. It was established— even the Budzyn men, devout Marxists, knew it—that Oskar would have to flee after midnight. The urge to mark that flight with a small ceremony was the preoccupation of the group—Stern, Finder, Garde, the Bejskis, Pemper—close to Oskar. It is remarkable, at a time when they were not sure themselves that they would see the peace, that they should worry about going-away presents.
All that was handy to make a gift with, however, was base metals. It was Mr. Jereth who suggested a source of something better. He opened his mouth to show his gold bridgework. Without Oskar, he said, the SS would have the damned stuff anyway. My teeth would be in a heap in some SS warehouse, along with the golden fangs of strangers from Lublin, Lodz, and Lwow.
It was, of course, an appropriate offering, and Jereth was insistent. He had the bridgework dragged out by a prisoner who had once had a dental practice in Cracow. Licht melted the gold down and by noon on May 8 was engraving an inscription on the inner circle in Hebrew. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheister’s in October 1939. “He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”
In one of the factory garages that afternoon, two prisoners were engaged in removing the upholstery from the ceiling and inner doors of Oskar’s Mercedes, inserting small sacks of the Herr Direktor’s diamonds and replacing the leatherwork without, they hoped, leaving any bulges. For them too it was a strange day. When they came out of the garage, the sun was setting behind the towers where the Spandaus sat loaded yet weirdly ineffectual. It was as if all the world were waiting for a decisive word.
Words of that nature seem to have come in the evening. Again, as on his birthday, Oskar instructed the
