Thomas Keneally - Schindler's Ark

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 Untersturmführer 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 Oberscharführer 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 Glücks 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 Untersturmführer’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 Goleszów 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.

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 Untersturmführer 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.