Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark

“I have to be home,” said Oskar. At home was Ingrid, his German mistress.

“You’re a bloody stallion,” said Goeth.

“Not in your class,” said Schindler.

“No, you’re right. I’m a frigging Olympian. We’re going… where’re we going?” He turned his head to the girl but answered the question himself. “We’re going to the kitchen to see that Lena’s clearing up properly.”

“No,” said the girl, laughing. “We aren’t doing that.” She steered him to the stairs. It was decent of her—the sorority in operation— to protect the thin, bruised girl in the kitchen. Schindler watched them—the hulking officer, the slight, supporting girl—staggering crookedly up the staircase. Goeth looked like a man who would have to sleep at least till lunchtime, but Oskar knew the Commandant’s amazing constitution and the clock that ran in him. By 3 A.M. Goeth might even decide to rise and write a letter to his father in Vienna. By seven, after only an hour’s sleep, he’d be on the balcony, infantry rifle in hand, ready to shoot any dilatory prisoners.

When the girl and Goeth reached the first landing, Schindler sidled down the hallway toward the back of the house.

Pfefferberg and Lisiek heard the Commandant, considerably earlier than they had expected him, entering the bedroom and mumbling to the girl he’d brought upstairs. In silence they picked up their cleaning equipment, crept into the bedroom and tried to slip out a side door. Still standing and able to see them on their line of escape, Goeth recoiled at the sight of the cleaning stick, suspecting the two men might be assassins. When Lisiek stepped forward, however, and began a tremulous report, the Commandant understood that they were merely prisoners.

“Herr Commandant,” said Lisiek, panting with justified fear, “I wish to report that there has been a ring in your bathtub….”

“Oh,” said Amon. “So you called in an expert.” He beckoned to the boy. “Come here, darling.”

Lisiek edged forward and was struck so savagely that he went sprawling halfway under the bed. Amon again uttered his invitation, as if it might amuse the girl to see him speaking endearments to prisoners. Young Lisiek rose and tottered toward the Commandant again for another round. As the boy picked himself up the second time, Pfefferberg, an experienced prisoner, expected anything—that they’d be marched down to the garden and summarily shot by Ivan. Instead the Commandant simply raged at them to leave, which they did at once.

When Pfefferberg heard a few days later that Lisiek was dead, shot by Amon, he presumed it was over the bathroom incident. In fact it was for a different matter alt—Lisiek’s offense had been to harness a horse and buggy for Herr Bosch without first asking the Commandant’s permission. In the kitchen of the villa, the maid, whose real name was Helen Hirsch (goeth called her Lena out of laziness, she would always say), looked up to see one of the dinner guests in the doorway. She put down the dish of meat scraps she’d been holding and stood at attention with a jerky suddenness. “Herr…” She looked at his dinner jacket and sought the word for him. “Herr Direktor, I was just putting aside the bones for the Herr Commandant’s dogs.”

“Please, please,” said Herr Schindler.

“You don’t have to report to me, Fraulein Hirsch.”

He moved around the table. He did not seem to be stalking her, but she feared his intentions. Even though Amon enjoyed beating her, her Jewishness always saved her from overt sexual attack. But there were Germans who were not as fastidious on racial matters as Amon. This one’s tone of voice, however, was one to which she was not accustomed, even from the SS officers and NCO’S who came to the kitchen to complain about Amon.

“Don’t you know me?” he asked, just like a man —a football star or a violinist—whose sense of his own celebrity has been hurt by a stranger’s failure to recognize him. “I’m Schindler.”

She bowed her head. “Herr Direktor,” she said. “Of course, I’ve heard… and you’ve been here before. I remember…”

He put his arm around her. He could surely feel the tensing of her body as he touched her cheek with his lips.

He murmured, “It’s not that sort of kiss.

I’m kissing you out of pity, if you must know.”

She couldn’t avoid weeping. Herr Direktor Schindler kissed her hard now in the middle of the forehead, in the manner of Polish farewells in railway stations, a resounding Eastern European smack of the lips. She saw that he had begun to weep too. “That kiss is something I bring you from…” He waved his hand, indicating some honest tribe of men out in the dark, sleeping in tiered bunks or hiding in forests, people for whom—by absorbing punishment from Hauptsturmführer Goeth—she was in part a buffer.

Herr Schindler released her and reached into his side pocket, bringing out a large candy bar. In its substance it too seemed prewar.

“Keep that somewhere,” he advised her.

“I get extra food here,” she told him, as if it were a matter of pride that he not assume she was starving. Food, in fact, was the least of her worries. She knew she would not survive Amon’s house, but it wouldn’t be for lack of food.

“If you don’t want to eat it, trade it,” Herr Schindler told her. “Or why not build yourself up?” He stood back and surveyed her. “Itzhak Stern told me about you.”

“Herr Schindler,” murmured the girl. She put her head down and wept neatly, economically for a few seconds. “Herr Schindler, he likes to beat me in front of those women. On my first day here, he beat me because I threw out the bones from dinner. He came down to the basement at midnight and asked me where they were. For his dogs, you understand. That was the first beating. I said to him… I don’t know why I said it; I’d never say it now… Why are you beating me? He said, The reason I’m beating you now is you asked me why I’m beating you.”

She shook her head and shrugged, as if reproving herself for talking so much. She didn’t want to say any more; she couldn’t convey the history of her punishments, her repeated experience of the Hauptsturmführer’s fists. Herr Schindler bent his head to her confidingly. “Your circumstances are appalling, Helen,” he told her.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’ve accepted it.”

“Accepted it?”

“One day he’ll shoot me.”

Schindler shook his head, and she thought it was too glib an encouragement to her to hope. Suddenly, the good cloth and the pampered flesh of Herr Schindler were a provocation. “For God’s sake, Herr Direktor, I see things. We were up on the roof on Monday, chipping off the ice, young Lisiek and I. And we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio, right below us. And there on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn’t seem fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else. I couldn’t guess what she’d done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see that there’s no set of rules you can keep to. You can’t say to yourself, If I follow these rules, I’ll be safe…”

Schindler took her hand and wrung it for emphasis. “Listen, my dear Fraulein Helen Hirsch, in spite of all that, it’s still better than Majdanek or Auschwitz. If you can keep your health…”

She said, “I thought it would be easy to do that in the Commandant’s kitchen. When I was assigned here, from the camp kitchen, the other girls were jealous.” A pitiful smile spread on her lips.

Schindler raised his voice now. He was like a man enunciating a principle of physics.