Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark

The Commandant began by betting modestly, in 100-złoty bills, as if his doctors had advised moderation in this as well. He kept busting however, and when the beginning stake had been raised to 500 zł., Oskar got a “natural,” an ace and a jack, which meant that Amon had to pay him double the stake.

Amon was disconsolate about that, but not too testy. He called for Helen Hirsch to bring coffee. She came in, a parody of a gentleman’s servant, crisply dressed still in black but her right eye blinded by swelling. She was so small that Amon would need to stoop to beat her up. The girl knew Oskar now, but did not look at him. Nearly a year past, he had promised to get her out. Whenever he came to the villa he managed to slip down the corridor to the kitchen and ask her how she was. It meant something, but it had not touched the substance of her life. A few weeks back, for example, when the soup hadn’t been the correct temperature—

Amon was pernickety about soup, flyspecks in the corridor, fleas on dogs—the Commandant had called for Ivan and Petr and told them to take her to the birch tree in the garden and shoot her.

He’d watched from the French windows as she walked in front of Petr’s Mauser, pleading under her breath with the young Ukrainian. “Petr, who’s this you’re going to shoot? It’s Helen. Helen who gives you cakes. You couldn’t shoot Helen, could you?” And Petr answering in the same manner, through clenched teeth, “I know, Helen. I don’t want to. But if I don’t, he’ll kill me.” She’d bent her head toward the spotted birch bark. Having often asked Amon why he wouldn’t kill her, she wanted to die simply, to hurt him by her willing acceptance. But it wasn’t possible. She was trembling so hard that he could have seen it. Her legs were shaking. And then she’d heard Amon call from the windows, “Bring the bitch back. There’s plenty of time to shoot her. In the meantime, it might still be possible to educate her.”

Insanely, in between his spates of savagery, there were brief phases in which he tried to play the benign master. He had said to her one morning, “You’re really a very well-trained servant. If after the war you need a reference, I shall be happy to give you one.” She knew it was just talk, a daydream. She turned her deaf ear, the one whose eardrum he had perforated with a blow. Sooner or later, she knew, she would die of his customary fury.

In a life like hers, a smile from visitors was only a momentary comfort. Tonight she placed the enormous silver pot of coffee beside the Herr Commandant—he still drank it by the bucket in cups laden with sugar—made her obeisance, and left. Within an hour, when Amon was 3,700 zł. in debt to Oskar and complaining sourly about his luck, Oskar suggested a variation on the betting. He would need a maid in Moravia, he said, when he moved to Czechoslovakia. There you couldn’t get them as intelligent and well trained as Helen Hirsch. They were all country girls. Oskar suggested therefore that he and Amon play one hand, double or nothing. If Amon won, Oskar would pay him 7,400 zł. If he hit a “natural,” it would be 14,800 zł. But if I win, said Oskar, then you give me Helen Hirsch for my list.

Amon wanted to think about that. Come on, said Oskar, she’s going to Auschwitz anyhow. But there was an attachment there. Amon was so used to Helen that he couldn’t easily wager her away.

When he’d thought of an end for her, it had probably always been that he would finish her by his own hand, with personal passion. If he played cards for her and lost, he would be under pressure, as a Viennese sportsman, to give up the pleasure of intimate murder.

Much earlier in Płaszów’s history, Schindler had asked that Helen be assigned to Emalia. But Amon had refused. It seemed only a year ago that Płaszów would exist for decades, and that the Commandant and his maid would grow old together, at least until some perceived fault in Helen brought about the abrupt end of the connection. This time a year ago, no one would have believed that the relationship would be resolved because the Russians were outside Lwów. As for Oskar’s part in this proposal, he had made it lightly. He did not seem to see, in his offer to Amon, any parallel with God and Satan playing cards for human souls. He did not ask himself by what right he made a bid for the girl. If he lost, his chance of extracting her some other way was slim. But all chances were slim that year. Even his own.

Oskar got up and bustled around the room, looking for stationery with an official letterhead on it. He wrote out the marker for Amon to sign should he lose: “I authorize that the name of prisoner Helen Hirsch be added to any list of skilled workers relocated with Herr Oskar Schindler’s DEF Works.”

Amon was dealer and gave Oskar an 8 and a 5. Oskar asked to be dealt more. He received a 5 and an ace. It would have to do. Then Amon dealt to himself. A 4 came up, and then a king.

God in heaven! said Amon. He was a gentleman cusser; he seemed to be too fastidious to use obscenities. I’m out. He laughed a little but was not really amused. My first cards, he explained, were a three and a five. With a four I should have been safe. Then I got this damned king.

In the end, he signed the marker. Oskar picked up all the chits he’d won that evening from Amon and returned them. Just look after the girl for me, he said, till it’s time for us all to leave.

Out in her kitchen, Helen Hirsch did not know she’d been saved over cards.

Probably because Oskar reported his evening with Amon to Stern, rumors of Oskar’s plan were heard in the Administration Building and even in the workshops. There was a Schindler list. It was worth everything to be on it.

At some point in any discussion of Schindler, the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will blink and shake their heads and begin the almost mathematical business of finding the sum of his motives. For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still “I don’t know why he did it.” It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which, in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia.

And not only for them. In early September he drove to Podgórze and visited Madritsch, who at that point employed more than 3,000 prisoners in his uniform factory. This plant would now be disbanded. Madritsch would get his sewing machines back, and his workers would vanish. If we made a combined approach, said Oskar, we could get more than four thousand out. Mine and yours as well. We could relocate them in something like safety. Down in Moravia.

Madritsch would always and justly be revered by his surviving prisoners. The bread and chickens smuggled into his factory were paid for from his pocket and at continuous risk. He would have been considered a more stable man than Oskar. Not as flamboyant, and not as subject to obsession. He had not suffered arrest. But he had been much more humane than was safe and, without wit and energy, would have ended in Auschwitz.

Now Oskar presented to him a vision of a Madritsch-Schindler camp somewhere in the High Jeseniks; some smoky, safe little industrial hamlet.

Madritsch was attracted by the idea but did not rush to say yes. He could tell that though the war was lost, the SS system had become more instead of less implacable. He was correct in believing that, unhappily, the prisoners of Płaszów would—in coming months—be consumed in death camps to the west. For if Oskar was stubborn and possessed, so were the SS Main Office and their prize field operatives, the commandants of the Concentration Camps.