Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark

A moment, said his tempter. I see listed here a nine-year-old, daughter of one Phila Rath. I see an eleven-year-old, daughter of one Regina Horowitz. Are you telling me that a nine-year-old and an eleven-year-old are skilled munitions workers? They polish the forty-five-millimeter shells, said Oskar. They were selected for their long fingers, which can reach the interior of the shell in a way that is beyond most adults.

Such conversation in support of the girl who was a friend of the family took place, conducted by Oskar either in person or by telephone. Oskar would relay news of the negotiations to the inner circle of male prisoners, and from them the details were passed on to the men on the workshop floor. Oskar’s claim that he needed children so that the innards of antitank shells could be buffed was outrageous nonsense. But he had already used it more than once. An orphan named Anita Lampel had been called to the Appellplatz in Płaszów one night in 1943 to find Oskar arguing with a middle-aged woman, the Alteste of the women’s camp. The Alteste was saying more or less what Hóss/hóssler would say later in Auschwitz. “You can’t tell me you need a fourteen-year-old for Emalia. You cannot tell me that Commandant Goeth has allowed you to put a fourteen-year-old on your roster for Emalia.” (the Alteste was worried, of course, that if the list of prisoners for Emalia had been doctored, she would be made to pay for it.) That night in 1943, Anita Lampel had listened flabbergasted as Oskar, a man who had never even seen her hands, claimed that he had chosen her for the industrial value of her long fingers and that the Herr Commandant had given his approval.

Anita Lampel was herself in Auschwitz now, but had grown tall and no longer needed the long-fingered ploy. So it was transferred to the benefit of the daughters of Mrs. Horowitz and Mrs. Rath.

Schindler’s contact had been correct in saying that the women had lost nearly all their industrial value. At inspections, young women like Mila Pfefferberg, Helen Hirsch, and her sister could not prevent the cramps of dysentery from bowing and aging them. Mrs. Dresner had lost all appetite, even for the ersatz soup. Danka could not force the mean warmth of it down her mother’s throat. It meant that she would soon become a Mussulman. The term was camp slang, based on people’s memory of newsreels of famine in Muslim countries, for a prisoner who had crossed the borderline that separated the ravenous living from the good-as-dead.

Clara Sternberg, in her early forties, was isolated from the main Schindler group into what could be described as a Mussulman hut. Here, each morning, the dying women were lined up in front of the door and a selection was made. Sometimes it was Mengele leaning toward you. Of the 500 women in this new group of Clara Sternberg’s, 100 might be detailed off on a given morning. On another, 50. You rouged yourself with Auschwitz clay; you kept a straight back if that could be managed. You choked where you stood rather than cough. It was after such an inspection that Clara found herself with no further reserves left for the waiting, the daily risk. She had a husband and a teen-age son in Brinnlitz, but now they seemed more remote than the canals of the planet Mars. She could not imagine Brinnlitz, or them in it. She staggered through the women’s camp looking for the electric wires. When she had first arrived, they’d seemed to be everywhere. Now that they were needed, she could not find them. Each turn took her into another quagmire street, and frustrated her with a view of identically miserable huts. When she saw an acquaintance from Płaszów, a Cracow woman like herself, Clara propped in front of her. “Where’s the electric fence?” Clara asked the woman. To her distraught mind, it was a reasonable question to ask, and Clara had no doubt that the friend, if she had any sisterly feeling, would point the exact way to the wires. The answer the woman gave Clara was just as crazed, but it was one that had a fixed point of view, a balance, a perversely sane core.

“Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.”

It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had—by her reply —somehow cut her off from suicide as an option. Something awful had happened at Brinnlitz. Oskar, the Moravian traveler, was away. He was trading in kitchenware and diamonds, liquor and cigars, all over the province. Some of it was crucial business. Biberstein speaks of the drugs and medical instruments that came into the Krankenstube at Brinnlitz. None of it was standard issue.

Oskar must have traded for medicines at the depots of the Wehrmacht, or perhaps in the pharmacy of one of the big hospitals in Brno.

Whatever the cause of his absence, he was away when an inspector from Gróss-Rosen arrived and walked through the workshop with Untersturmführer Josef Liepold, the new Commandant, who was always happy for a chance to intrude inside the factory. The inspector’s orders, originating from Oranienburg, were that the Gróss-Rosen subcamps should be scoured for children to be used in Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments in Auschwitz. Olek Rosner and his small cousin Richard Horowitz, who’d believed they had no need of a hiding place here, were spotted racing around the annex, chasing each other upstairs, playing among the abandoned spinning machines. So was the son of Dr. Leon Gross, who had nursed Amon’s recently developed diabetes, who had helped Dr. Blancke with the Health Aktion, and who had other crimes still to answer for. The inspector remarked to Untersturmführer Liepold that these were clearly not essential munitions workers.

Liepold—short, dark, not as crazy as Amon—was still a convinced SS officer and did not bother to defend the brats.

Further on in the inspection Roman Ginter’s nine-year-old was discovered. Ginter had known Oskar from the time the ghetto was founded, had supplied the metalworks at Płaszów with scrap from DEF. But Untersturmführer Liepold and the inspector did not recognize any special relationships. The Ginter boy was sent under escort to the gate with the other children. Frances Spira’s boy, ten and a half years old, but tall and on the books as fourteen, was working on top of a long ladder that day, polishing the high windows. He survived the raid.

The orders required the rounding up of the children’s parents as well, perhaps because this would obviate the risk of parents beginning demented revolutions on the subcamp premises. Therefore Rosner the violinist, Horowitz, and Roman Ginter were arrested. Dr. Leon Gross rushed down from the clinic to negotiate with the SS. He was flushed. The effort was to show this inspector from Gróss-Rosen that he was dealing with a really responsible sort of prisoner, a friend of the system. The effort counted for nothing. An SS Unterscharführer, armed with an automatic weapon, was given the mission of escorting them to Auschwitz.

The party of fathers and sons traveled from Zwittau as far as Katowice, in Upper Silesia, by ordinary passenger train. Henry Rosner expected other passengers to be hostile. Instead, one woman walked down the aisle looking defiant and gave Olek and the others a heel of bread and an apple, all the while staring the sergeant in the face, daring him to react. The Unterscharführer was polite to her, however, and nodded formally. Later, when the train stopped at Usti, he left the prisoners under the guard of his assistant and went to the station cafeteria, bringing back biscuits and coffee paid for from his own pocket. He and Rosner and Horowitz got talking. The more the Unterscharführer chatted, the less he seemed to belong to that same police force as Amon, Hujar, John, and all those others. “I’m taking you to Auschwitz,” he said, “and then I have to collect some women and bring them back to Brinnlitz.”