Feet sticking in the mud, they were marched to the delousing plant and stripped by order of tough young SS women with truncheons in their hands. Mila Pfefferberg was troubled by rumors of the type most prisoners of the Reich had by now heard-that some shower nozzles gave out a killing gas. These, she was delighted to find, gave mere icy water.

After their wash, some of them expected to be tattooed. They knew as much as that about Auschwitz. The SS tattooed your arm if they wanted to use you. If they intended to feed you into the machine, however, they did not bother. The same train that had brought the women of the list had brought also some 2,000 others who, not being Schindlerfrauen, were put through the normal selections. Rebecca Bau, excluded from the Schindler list, had pa.s.sed and been given a number, and Josef Bau's robust mother had also won a tattoo in that preposterous Birkenau lottery. Another Paszw girl, fifteen years old, had looked at the tattoo she'd been given and been delighted that it had two fives, a three, and two sevens-numbers enshrined in the Tashlag, or Jewish calendar. With a tattoo, you could leave Birkenau and go to one of the Auschwitz labor camps, where there was at least a chance.

But the Schindler women, left untattooed, were told to dress again and taken to a windowless hut in the women's camp. There, in the center of the floor, stood a sheet-iron stove housed in bricks. It was the only comfort. There were no bunks. The Schindlerfrauen were to sleep two or three to a thin straw pallet. The clay floor was damp, and water would rise from it like a tide and drench the pallets, the ragged blankets. It was a death house at the heart of Birkenau. They lay there and dozed, frozen and uneasy in that enormous acreage of mud.

It confounded their imaginings of an intimate location, a village in Moravia. This was a great, if ephemeral, city. On a given day more than a quarter of a million Poles, Gypsies, and Jews kept brief residence here. There were thousands more over in Auschwitz I, the first but smaller camp where Commandant Rudolf Hss lived. And in the great industrial area named Auschwitz III, some tens of thousands worked while they could. The Schindler women had not been precisely informed of the statistics of Birkenau or of the Auschwitz duchy in itself. They could see, though, beyond birch trees at the western end of the enormous settlement, constant smoke rising from the four crematoria and the numerous pyres. They believed they were adrift now, and that the tide would take them down there. But not with all the capacity for making and believing rumors that characterizes a life in prison would they have guessed how many people could be ga.s.sed there on a day when the system worked well. The number was-according to Hss-nine thousand.

- The women were equally unaware that they had arrived in Auschwitz at a time when the progress of the war and certain secret negotiations between Himmler and the Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte were imposing a new direction on it. The secret of the extermination centers had not been kept, for the Russians had excavated the Lublin camp and found the furnaces containing human bones and more than five hundred drums of Zyklon B. News of this was published throughout the world, and Himmler, who wanted to be treated seriously as obvious postwar successor to the Fhrer, was willing to make promises to the Allies that the ga.s.sing of Jews would stop. He did not, however, issue an order on the matter until some time in October-the date is not certain. One copy went to General Pohl in Oranienburg; the other, to Kaltenbrunner, Chief of Reich Security. Both of them ignored the directive, and so did Adolf Eichmann. Jews from Paszw, Theresienstadt, and Italy continued to be ga.s.sed up to the middle of November. The last selection for the gas chambers is believed, however, to have been made on October 30.

For the first eight days of their stay in Auschwitz, the Schindler women were in enormous danger of death by ga.s.sing. And even after that, as the last victims of the chambers continued to file throughout November toward the western end of Birkenau, and as the ovens and pyres worked on their backlog of corpses, they would not be aware of any change in the essential nature of the camp. All their anxieties would in any case be well founded, for most of those left after the ga.s.sing ceased would be shot-as happened to all the crematorium workers-or allowed to die of disease.

In any case, the Schindler women went through frequent ma.s.s medical inspections in both October and November. Some of them had been separated out in the first days and sent off to the huts reserved for the terminally ill. The doctors of Auschwitz-Josef Mengele, Fritz Klein, Doctors Konig and Thilo-not only worked on the Birkenau platform but roamed the camp, turning up at roll calls, invading the showers, asking with a smile, "How old are you, Mother?" Mrs. Clara Sternberg found herself put aside in a hut for older women. Sixty-year-old Mrs. Lola Krumholz was also cut out of the Schindlergruppe and put into a barracks for the aged where she was meant to die at no expense to the administration. Mrs. Horowitz, believing that her fragile daughter of eleven years, Niusia, could not survive a "bathhouse" inspection, hustled her into an empty sauna boiler. One of the SS girls who'd been appointed to the Schindler women-the pretty one, the blonde-saw her do it but did not give her away. She was a puncher, that one, short-tempered, and later she would ask Mrs. Horowitz for a bribe and get a brooch which Regina had somehow concealed till then. Regina handed it over philosophically. There was another, heavier, gentler one who made lesbian advances and may have required a more personal payoff.

Sometimes at roll call, one or more of the doctors would appear in front of the barracks. Seeing the medical gentlemen, women rubbed clay into their cheeks to induce a little bogus color. At one such inspection, Regina found stones for her daughter, Niusia, to stand on, and silver-haired young Mengele came to her and asked her a soft-voiced question concerning her daughter's age and punched her for lying. Women felled like this at inspection were meant to be picked up by the guards while still semiconscious, dragged to the electrified fence at the edge of the women's camp, and thrown onto it. They had Regina halfway there when she revived and begged them not to fry her alive, to let her return to her line. They released her, and when she crept back into the ranks, there was her bird-boned, speechless daughter still, frozen to the pile of stone.

These inspections could occur at any hour. The Schindler women were called out one night to stand in the mud while their barracks was searched. Mrs. Dresner, who had once been saved by a vanished OD boy, came out with her tall teen-age daughter, Danka. They stood there in that eccentric mire of Auschwitz which, like the fabled mud of Flanders, would not freeze when everything else had frozen-the roads, the rooftops, the human traveler.

Both Danka and Mrs. Dresner had left Paszw in the summer clothing that was all they had left. Danka wore a blouse, a light jacket, a maroon skirt. Since it had begun snowing earlier in the evening, Mrs. Dresner had suggested that Danka tear a strip off her blanket and wear it beneath the skirt. Now, in the course of the barracks inspection, the SS discovered the ripped blanket.

The officer who stood before the Schindler women called out the barracks Alteste-a Dutch woman whom, until yesterday, none of them had known-and said that she was to be shot, together with any other prisoner found with a blanket strip under her dress.

Mrs. Dresner began whispering to Danka. "Take it off and I'll slip it back into the barracks." It was a credible idea. The barracks stood at ground level and no step led up to them. A woman in the rear line might slip backward through the door. As Danka had obeyed her mother once before in the matter of the wall cavity in Dabrowski Street, Cracow, she obeyed her now, slipping from beneath her dress that strip of Europe's poorest blanket. In fact, while Mrs. Dresner was in the hut, the SS officer pa.s.sed by and idly extracted a woman of Mrs. Dresner's age-it was probably Mrs. Sternberg-and had her taken away to some worse part of the camp, some place where there was no Moravian illusion.

Perhaps the other women in line did not let themselves understand what this simple act of weeding out meant. It was in fact a statement that no reserved group of so-called "industrial prisoners" was safe in Auschwitz. No cry of "Schindlerfrauen!" would keep them immune for long. There had been other groups of "industrial prisoners" who had vanished in Auschwitz. General Pohl's Section W had sent some trainloads of skilled Jewish workers from Berlin the year before. I. G. Farben had needed labor and was told by Section W to select its workers from these transports. In fact, Section W had suggested to Commandant Hss that the trains should be unloaded in the I. G. Farben works, not near the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Of 1,750 prisoners, all male, in the first train, 1,000 were immediately ga.s.sed. Of 4,000 in the next four trainloads, 2,500 went at once to the "bathhouses." If the Auschwitz administration would not stay its hand for I. G. Farben and Department W, it was not going to be finicky about the women of some obscure German potmaker.

In barracks like those of the Schindler women, it was like living outdoors. The windows had no gla.s.s and served only to put an edge on the blasts of cold air out of Russia. Most of the girls had dysentery. Crippled with cramp, they limped in their clogs to the steel waste drum out in the mud. The woman who tended it did so for an extra bowl of soup. Mila Pfefferberg staggered out one evening, seized with dysentery, and the woman on duty-not a bad woman, a woman Mila had known as a girl-insisted that she could not use the drum but had to wait for the next girl out and then empty it with her help. Mila argued but could not shake the woman. Beneath the hungry stars this tending of the drum had become something like a profession, and there were rules. With the drum as pretext, the woman had come to believe that order, hygiene, sanity were possible.

The next girl out arrived at Mila's side, gasping and bent and desperate. But she too was young and, in peaceful days in Lodz, had known the woman on the can as a respectable married woman. So the two girls were obedient and lugged the thing 300 meters through the mud. The girl who shared the burden asked Mila, "Where's Schindler now?"

Not everyone in the barracks asked that question, or asked it in that fierce, ironic way. There was an Emalia girl named Lusia, a widow of twenty-two, who kept saying, "You'll see, it will all come out. We'll end up somewhere warm with Schindler's soup in us." She did not know herself why she kept repeating such statements. In Emalia she had never been the type to make projections. She'd worked her shift, drunk her soup, and slept. She had never predicted grandiose events. Sufficient to her day had always been the survival thereof. Now she was ill and there was no reason for her to be prophetic. The cold and hunger were wasting her, and she too bore the vast obsessions of her hunger. Yet she amazed herself by repeating Oskar's promises.

Later in their stay in Auschwitz, when they had been moved to a hut closer to the crematoria and did not know if they were to go to the showers or the chambers, Lusia continued pushing the glad message. Even so, the tide of the camp having washed them to this geographic limit of the earth, this pole, this pit, despair wasn't quite the fashion for the Schindlerfrauen. You would still find women huddled in recipe talk and dreams of prewar kitchens.

- In Brinnlitz when the men arrived, there was only the sh.e.l.l. There were no bunks yet; straw was strewn in the dormitories upstairs. But it was warm, with steam heat from the boilers. There were no cooks that first day. Bags of turnips lay around what would be the cookhouse, and men devoured them raw. Later, soup was brewed and bread baked, and the engineer Finder began the allocating of jobs. But from the start, unless there were SS men looking on, it was all slow. It is mysterious how a body of prisoners could sense that the Herr Direktor was no longer a party to any war effort. The pace of work grew very canny in Brinnlitz. Since Oskar was detached from the question of production, slow work became the prisoners' vengeance, their declaration.

It was a heady thing to withhold your labor. Everywhere else in Europe, the slaves worked to the limit of their 600 calories per day, hoping to impress some foreman and delay the transfer to the death camp. But here in Brinnlitz was the intoxicating freedom to use the shovel at half-pace and still survive.

None of this unconscious policy-making was evident in the first days. There were still too many prisoners anxious for their women. Dolek Horowitz had a wife and daughter in Auschwitz. The Rosner brothers had their wives. Pfefferberg knew the shock which something as vast, as appalling as Auschwitz would have on Mila. Jacob Sternberg and his teen-age son were concerned about Mrs. Clara Sternberg. Pfefferberg remembers the men cl.u.s.tering around Schindler on the factory floor and asking him again where the women were.

"I'm getting them out," Schindler rumbled. He did not go into explanations. He did not publicly surmise that the SS in Auschwitz might need to be bribed. He did not say that he had sent the list of women to Colonel Erich Lange, or that he and Lange both intended to get them to Brinnlitz according to the list. Nothing of that. Simply "I'm getting them out."

- The SS garrison who moved into Brinnlitz in those days gave Oskar some cause to hope. They were middle-aged reservists called up to allow younger SS men a place in the front line. There were not so many lunatics as at Paszw, and Oskar would always keep them gentle with the specialties of his kitchen-plain food, but plenty. In a visit to their barracks, he made his usual speech about the unique skills of his prisoners, the importance of his manufacturing activities. Ant.i.tank sh.e.l.ls, he said, and casings for a projectile still on the secret list. He asked that there be no intrusion by the garrison into the factory itself, for that would disturb the workers.

He could see it in their eyes. It suited them, this quiet town. They could imagine themselves lasting out the cataclysm here. They did not want to rampage round the workshops like a Goeth or a Hujar. They didn't want the Herr Direktor to complain about them.

Their commanding officer, however, had not yet arrived. He was on his way from his previous post, the labor camp at Budzyn, which had, until the recent Russian advances, manufactured Heinkel bomber parts. He would be younger, sharper, more intrusive, Oskar knew. He might not readily take to being denied access to the camp.

- Among all this pouring of cement floors, the knocking of holes in the roof so that the vast Hilos would fit, the softening of NCOs, amid the private uneasiness of settling into married life with Emilie again, Oskar was arrested a third time.

The Gestapo turned up at lunchtime. Oskar was not in his office, in fact had driven to Brno on some business earlier in the morning. A truck had just arrived at the camp from Cracow laden with some of the Herr Direktor's portable wealth-cigarettes, cases of vodka, cognac, champagne. Some would later claim that this was Goeth's property, that Oskar had agreed to bring it into Moravia in return for Goeth's backing of his Brinnlitz plans. Since Goeth had now been a prisoner for a month and had no more authority, the luxuries on the truck could just as well be considered Oskar's.

The men doing the unloading thought so and became nervous at the sight of the Gestapo men in the courtyard. They had mechanics' privileges and so were permitted to drive the truck to a stream down the hill, where they threw the liquor into the water by the easeful. The two hundred thousand cigarettes on the truck were hidden more retrievably under the cover of the large transformer in the power plant.

It is significant that there were so many cigarettes and so much liquor in the truck: a sign that Oskar, always keen on trade goods, intended now to make his living on the black market.

They got the truck back to the garage as the siren for midday soup was blown. In past days the Herr Direktor had eaten with the prisoners, and the mechanics hoped that today he would do so again; they could then explain what had happened to such an expensive truckload.

He did in fact return from Brno soon after, but was stopped at the inner gate by one of the Gestapo men who stood there with his hand raised. The Gestapo man ordered him to leave his car at once.

"This is my factory," a prisoner heard Oskar growl back. "If you want to talk to me, you're welcome to jump in the car. Otherwise follow me to my office."

He drove into the courtyard, the two Gestapo men walking quickly on either side of the vehicle.

In his office, they asked him about his connections with Goeth, with Goeth's loot. I do have a few suitcases here, he told them. They belong to Herr Goeth. He asked me to keep them for him until his release.

The Gestapo men asked to see them, and Oskar took them through to the apartment. He made formal and cold introductions between Frau Schindler and the men from Bureau V. Then he brought out the suitcases and opened them. They were full of Amon's civilian clothing, and old uniforms from the days when Amon had been a slim SS NCO. When they'd been through them and found nothing, they made the arrest.

Emilie grew aggressive now. They had no right, she said, to take her husband unless they could say what they were taking him for. The people in Berlin will not be happy about this, she said.

Oskar advised her to be silent. But you will have to call my friend Klonowska, he told her, and cancel my appointments.

Emilie knew what that meant. Klonowska would do her trick with the telephone again, calling Martin Plathe in Breslau, the General Schindler people, all the big guns. One of the Bureau V men took out handcuffs and put them on Oskar's wrists. They took him to their car, drove him to the station in Zwittau, and escorted him by train to Cracow.

The impression is that this arrest scared him more than the previous two. There are no stories of lovelorn SS colonels who shared a cell with him and drank his vodka. Oskar did later record some details, however. As the Bureau V men escorted him across the grand neocla.s.sic loggia of the Cracow central station, a man named Huth approached them. He had been a civilian engineer in Paszw. He had always been obsequious to Amon, but had a reputation for many secret kindnesses. It may have been an accidental meeting, but suggests that Huth may have been working with Klonowska. Huth insisted on shaking Oskar by his shackled hand. One of the Bureau V men objected. "Do you really want to go around shaking hands with prisoners?" he asked Huth. The engineer at once made a speech, a testimonial to Oskar. This was the Herr Direktor Schindler, a man greatly respected throughout Cracow, an important industrialist. "I can never think of him as a prisoner," said Huth.

Whatever the significance of this meeting, Oskar was put into a car and taken across the familiar city to Pomorska Street again. They put him in a room like the one he had occupied during his first arrest, a room with a bed and a chair and a washbasin but with bars on the window. He was not easy there, even though his manner was one of bearlike tranquillity. In 1942, when they had arrested him the day after his thirty-fourth birthday, the rumor that there were torture chambers in the Pomorska cellars had been terrifying and indefinite. It wasn't indefinite anymore. He knew that Bureau V would torture him if they wanted Amon badly enough.

That evening Herr Huth came as a visitor, bringing with him a dinner tray and a bottle of wine. Huth had spoken to Klonowska. Oskar himself would never clarify whether or not Klonowska had prearranged that "chance encounter." Whichever it was, Huth told him now that Klonowska was rallying his old friends.

The next day he was interrogated by a panel of twelve SS investigators, one a judge of the SS Court. Oskar denied that he had given any money to ensure that the Commandant would, in the words of the transcript of Amon's evidence, "go easy on the Jews." I may have given him the money as a loan, Oskar admitted at one stage. Why would you give him a loan? they wanted to know. I run an essential war industry, said Oskar, playing the old tune. I have a body of skilled labor. If it is disturbed, there is loss to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate, to the war effort. If I found that in the ma.s.s of prisoners in Paszw there was a skilled metalworker of a category I needed, then of course I asked the Herr Commandant for him. I wanted him fast, I wanted him without red tape. My interest was production, its value to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate. In consideration of the Herr Commandant's help in these matters, I may have given him a loan.

This defense involved some disloyalty to his old host, Amon. But Oskar would not have hesitated. His eyes gleaming with transparent frankness, his tone low, his emphasis discreet, Oskar-without saying it in so many words-let the investigators know that the money had been extorted. It didn't impress them. They locked him away again.

The interrogation went into a second, third, and fourth day. No one did him harm, but they were steely. At last he had to deny any friendship with Amon at all. It was no great task: he loathed the man profoundly anyhow. "I'm not a fairy," he growled at the gentlemen of Bureau V, falling back on rumors he'd heard about Goeth and his young orderlies.

Amon himself would never understand that Oskar despised him and was willing to help the case Bureau V had against him. Amon was always deluded about friendship. In sentimental moods, he believed that Mietek Pemper and Helen Hirsch were loving servants. The investigators probably would not have let him know that Oskar was in Pomorska and would have listened mutely to Amon urging them, "Call in my old friend Schindler. He'll vouch for me."

What helped Oskar most when he faced the investigators was that he had had few actual business connections with the man. Though he had sometimes given Amon advice or contacts, he had never had a share in any deal, never made a zoty out of Amon's sales of prison rations, of rings from the jewelry shop, of garments from the custom-tailoring plant or furniture from the upholstery section. It must also have helped him that his lies were disarming even to policemen, and that when he told the truth he was positively seductive. He never gave the impression that he was grateful for being believed. For example, when the gentlemen of Bureau V looked as if they might at least give standing room to the idea that the 80,000 RM. was a "loan," a sum extorted, Oskar asked them whether in the end the money might be returned to him, to Herr Direktor Schindler, the impeccable industrialist.

A third factor in Oskar's favor was that his credentials checked out. Colonel Erich Lange, when telephoned by Bureau V, stressed Schindler's importance to the conduct of the war. Suss.m.u.th, called in Troppau, said that Oskar's plant was involved in the production of "secret weapons." It was not, as we will see, an untrue statement. But when said bluntly, it was misleading and carried a distorted weight. For the Fhrer had promised "secret weapons." The phrase itself was charismatic and extended its protection now to Oskar. Against a phrase like "secret weapons," any confetti of protest from the burghers of Zwittau did not count.

But even to Oskar it did not seem that the imprisonment was going well. About the fourth day, one of his interrogators visited him not to question him but to spit at him. The spittle streaked the left lapel of his suit. The man ranted at him, calling him a Jew-lover, a f.u.c.ker of Jewesses. It was a departure from the strange legalism of the interrogations. But Oskar wasn't sure that it was not planned, that it did not represent the true impetus behind his imprisonment.

After a week, Oskar sent a message, by way of Huth and Klonowska, to Oberfhrer Schemer. Bureau V was putting such pressure on him, the message went, that he did not believe he could protect the former police chief much longer. Schemer left his counterinsurgency work (it was soon to kill him) and arrived in Oskar's cell within a day. It was a scandal what they were doing, said Schemer. What about Amon? Oskar asked, expecting Scherner to say that that was a scandal too. He deserves all he gets, said Schemer. It seemed that everyone was deserting Amon. Don't worry, said Schemer before leaving, we intend to get you out.

On the morning of the eighth day, they let Oskar out onto the street. Oskar did not delay his going-nor did he, this time, demand transport. Enough to be deposited on the cold sidewalk. He traveled across Cracow by streetcar and walked to his old factory in Zablocie. A few Polish caretakers were still there, and from the upstairs office he called Brinnlitz and told Emilie that he was free.

Moshe Bejski, a Brinnlitz draftsman, remembers the confusion while Oskar was away-the rumors, all the questions about what it meant. But Stern and Maurice Finder, Adam Garde and others had consulted Emilie about food, about work arrangements, about the provision of bunks. They were the first to discover that Emilie was no mere pa.s.senger. She was not a happy woman, and her unhappiness was compounded by Bureau V's arrest of Oskar. It must have seemed cruel that the SS should intrude on this reunion before it had got properly started. But it was clear to Stern and the others that she was not there, keeping house in that little apartment on the ground floor, purely out of wifely duty. There was what you could call an ideological commitment too. A picture of Jesus with His heart exposed and in flames hung on a wall of the apartment. Stern had seen the same design in the houses of Polish Catholics. But there had been no ornament of that kind in either of Oskar's Cracow apartments. The Jesus of the exposed heart did not always rea.s.sure when you saw it in Polish kitchens. In Emilie's apartment, however, it hung like a promise, a personal one. Emilie's.

Early in November, her husband came back by train. He was unshaven and smelly from his imprisonment. He was amazed to find that the women were still in Auschwitz-Birkenau.

- In planet Auschwitz, where the Schindler women moved as warily, as full of dread as any s.p.a.ce travelers, Rudolf Hss ruled as founder, builder, presiding genius. Readers of William Styron's novel Sophie's Choice encountered him as the master of Sophie-a very different sort of master than Amon was to Helen Hirsch; a more detached, mannerly, and sane man; yet still the unflagging priest of that cannibal province. Though in the 1920s he had murdered a Ruhr schoolteacher for informing on a German activist and had done time for the crime, he never murdered any Auschwitz prisoner by his own hand. He saw himself instead as a technician. As champion of Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide pellets which gave off fumes when exposed to air, he had engaged in a long personal and scientific conflict with his rival, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who had jurisdiction over the Belec camp and who was the head of the carbon monoxide school. There had been an awful day at Belec, which the SS chemical officer Kurt Gerstein had witnessed, when Kommissar Wirth's method took three hours to finish a party of Jewish males packed into the chambers. That Hss had backed the more efficient technology is partially attested to by the continuous growth of Auschwitz and the decline of Belec.

By 1943, when Rudolf Hss left Auschwitz to do a stint as Deputy Chief of Section D in Oranienburg, the place was already something more than a camp. It was even more than a wonder of organization. It was a phenomenon. The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth's malice-a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named "disinfection cellars," the aboveground chambers "bathhouses," and Oberscharfhrer Moll, whose task it was to order the insertion of the blue crystals into the roofs of the "cellars," the walls of the "bathhouses," customarily cried to his a.s.sistants, "All right, let's give them something to chew on."

Hss had returned to Auschwitz in May 1944 and presided over the entire camp at the time the Schindler women occupied a barracks in Birkenau, so close to the whimsical Oberscharfhrer Moll. According to the Schindler mythology, it was Hss himself with whom Oskar wrestled for his 300 women. Certainly Oskar had telephone conversations and other commerce with Hss. But he also had to deal with Sturmbannfhrer Fritz Hartjenstein, Commandant of Auschwitz II-that is, of Auschwitz-Birkenau-and with Untersturmfhrer Franz Hssler, the young man in charge, in that great city, of the suburb of women.

What is certain is that Oskar now sent a young woman with a suitcase full of liquor, ham, and diamonds to make a deal with these functionaries. Some say that Oskar then followed up the girl's visit in person, taking with him an a.s.sociate, an influential officer in the S.A. (the Sturmabteilung, or Storm Troops), Standartenfhrer Peltze, who, according to what Oskar later told his friends, was a British agent. Others claim that Oskar stayed away from Auschwitz himself as a matter of strategy and went to Oranienburg instead, and to the Armaments Inspectorate in Berlin, to try to put pressure on Hss and his a.s.sociates from that end.

The story as Stern would tell it years later in a public speech in Tel Aviv is as follows. After Oskar's release from prison, Stern approached Schindler and-"under the pressure of some of my comrades"-begged Oskar to do something decisive about the women ensnared in Auschwitz. During this conference, one of Oskar's secretaries came in-Stern does not say which one. Schindler considered the girl and pointed to one of his fingers, which sported a large diamond ring. He asked the girl whether she would like this rather hefty piece of jewelry. According to Stern, the girl got very excited. Stern quotes Oskar as saying, "Take the list of the women; pack a suitcase with the best food and liquor you can find in my kitchen. Then go to Auschwitz. You know the Commandant has a penchant for pretty women. If you bring it off, you'll get this diamond. And more still."

It is a scene, a speech worthy of one of those events in the Old Testament when for the good of the tribe a woman is offered to the invader. It is also a Central European scene, with its gross, corruscating diamonds and its proposed transaction of the flesh.

According to Stern, the secretary went. When she did not return within two days, Schindler himself-in the company of the obscure Peltze-went to settle the matter.

According to Schindler mythology, Oskar did send a girlfriend of his to sleep with the Commandant-be that Hss, Hartjenstein, or Hssler-and leave diamonds on the pillow. While some, like Stern, say it was "one of his secretaries," others name an Aufseher, a pretty blond SS girl, ultimately a girlfriend of Oskar's and part of the Brinnlitz garrison. But this girl, it seems, was still in Auschwitz anyhow, together with the Schindlerfrauen.

According to Emilie Schindler herself, the emissary was a girl of twenty-two or twenty-three. She was a native of Zwittau, and her father was an old friend of the Schindler family. She had recently returned from occupied Russia, where she'd worked as a secretary in the German administration. She was a good friend of Emilie's, and volunteered for the task. It is unlikely that Oskar would demand a s.e.xual sacrifice of a friend of the family. Even though he was a brigand in these matters, that side of the story is certainly myth. We do not know the extent of the girl's transactions with the officers of Auschwitz. We know only that she approached the dreadful kingdom and dealt courageously.

Oskar later said that in his own dealings with the rulers of necropolis Auschwitz, he was offered the old temptation. The women have been here some weeks now. They won't be worth much as labor anymore. Why don't you forget these three hundred? We'll cut another three hundred for you, out of the endless herd. In 1942, an SS NCO at Prokocim station had pushed the same idea at Oskar. Don't get stuck on these particular names, Herr Direktor.

Now as at Prokocim, Oskar pursued his usual line. There are irreplaceable skilled munitions workers. I have trained them myself over a period of years. They represent skills I cannot quickly replace. The names I know, that is, are the names I know.

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 sh.e.l.ls, said Oskar. They were selected for their long fingers, which can reach the interior of the sh.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed on to the men on the workshop floor. Oskar's claim that he needed children so that the innards of ant.i.tank sh.e.l.ls 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 Paszw 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 Hss/Hssler 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 appet.i.te, 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 Paszw, 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 Grss-Rosen arrived and walked through the workshop with Untersturmfhrer 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 Grss-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 Untersturmfhrer 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 metal works at Paszw with sc.r.a.p from DEF. But Untersturmfhrer 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 Grss-Rosen that he was dealing with a really responsible sort of prisoner, a friend of the system. The effort counted for nothing. An SS Unterscharfhrer, 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 pa.s.senger train. Henry Rosner expected other pa.s.sengers 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 Unterscharfhrer was polite to her, however, and nodded formally. Later, when the train stopped at Usti, he left the prisoners under the guard of his a.s.sistant 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 Unterscharfhrer 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."

So, ironically, the first Brinnlitz men to discover that the women might be let out of Auschwitz were Rosner and Horowitz, themselves on their way there.

Rosner and Horowitz were ecstatic. They told their sons: This good gentleman is bringing your mother back to Brinnlitz. Rosner asked the Unterscharfhrer if he would give a letter to Manci, and Horowitz pleaded to be able to write to Regina. The two letters were written on pieces of paper the Unterscharfhrer gave them, the same stuff the man used to write to his own wife. In his letter, Rosner made arrangements with Manci to meet at an address in Podgrze if they both survived.

When Rosner and Horowitz had finished writing, the SS man put the letters in his jacket. Where have you been these past years? Rosner wondered. Did you start out as a fanatic? Did you cheer when the G.o.ds on the rostrum screamed', "The Jews are our misfortune"?

Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry's arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag Henry off to Auschwitz. "To die just because of me," he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn't have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them.

The Unterscharfhrer leaned over. Surely he had not heard, but there were tears in his eyes. Olek seemed astonished by them-the way another child might be astounded by a cycling circus animal. He stared at the man. What was startling was that they looked like fraternal tears, the tears of a fellow prisoner. "I know what will happen," said the Unterscharfhrer. "We've lost the war. You'll get the tattoo. You'll survive."

Henry got the impression that the man was making promises not to the child but to himself, arming himself with an a.s.surance which-in five years' time perhaps, when he remembered this train journey-he could use to soothe himself.

- On the afternoon of her attempt to find the wires, Clara Sternberg heard the calling of names and the sound of women's laughter from the direction of the Schindlerfrauen barracks. She crawled from her own damp hut and saw the Schindler women lined up beyond an inner fence of the women's camp. Some of them were dressed only in blouses and long drawers. Skeleton women, without a chance. But they were chattering like girls. Even the blond SS girl seemed delighted, for she too would be liberated from Auschwitz if they were. "Schindlergruppe" she called, "you're going to the sauna and then to the trains." She seemed to have a sense of the uniqueness of the event.

Doomed women from the barracks all around looked blankly out through the wire at the celebratory girls. They compelled you to watch, those list women, because they were so suddenly out of balance with the rest of the city. It meant nothing, of course. It was an eccentric event; it had no bearing on the majority's life; it did not reverse the process or lighten the smoky air.

But for Clara Sternberg, the sight was intolerable. As it was also for sixty-year-old Mrs. Krumholz, also half-dead in a hut a.s.signed to the older women. Mrs. Krumholz began to argue with the Dutch Kapo at the door of her barracks. I'm going out to join them, she said. The Dutch Kapo put up a mist of arguments. In the end, she said, you're better off here. If you go, you'll die in the cattle cars. Besides that, I'll have to explain why you aren't here. You can tell them, said Mrs. Krumholz, that it's because I'm on the Schindler list. It's all fixed. The books will balance. There's no question about it.

They argued for five minutes and in the process talked of their families, finding out about each other's origins, perhaps looking for a vulnerable point outside the strict logic of the dispute. It turned out that the Dutch woman's name was also Krumholz. The two of them began discussing the whereabouts of their families. My husband is in Sachsenhausen, I think, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. The Cracow Mrs. Krumholz said, My husband and grown son have gone somewhere. I think Mauthausen. I'm meant to be in the Schindler camp in Moravia. Those women beyond the fence, that's where they're going. They're not going anywhere, said the Dutch Mrs. Krumholz. Believe me. No one goes anywhere, except in one direction. The Cracow Mrs. Krumholz said, They think they're going somewhere. Please! For even if the Schindlerfrauen were deluded, Mrs. Krumholz from Cracow wanted to share the delusion. The Dutch Kapo understood this and at last opened the door of the barracks, for whatever it was worth.

For a fence now stood between Mrs. Krumholz, Mrs. Sternberg, and the rest of the Schindler women. It was not an electrified perimeter fence. It was nonetheless built, according to the rulings of Section D, of at least eighteen strands of wire. The strands ran closest together at the top. Farther down, they were stretched in parallel strands about six inches apart. But between each set of parallels and the next there was a gap of less than a foot. That day, according to the testimony of witnesses and of the women themselves, both Mrs. Krumholz and Mrs. Sternberg somehow tore their way through the fence to rejoin the Schindler women in whatever daydream of rescue they were enjoying. Dragging themselves through the perhaps nine-inch gap, stretching the wire, ripping their clothes off and tearing their flesh on the barbs, they put themselves back on the Schindler list. No one stopped them because no one believed it possible. To the other women of Auschwitz, it was in any case an irrelevant example. For any other escapee, the breaching of that fence brought you only to another, and then another, and so to the outer voltage of the place. Whereas for Sternberg and Krumholz, this fence was the only one. The clothing they'd brought with them from the ghetto and kept in repair in muddy Paszw hung now on the wire. Naked and streaked with blood, they ran in among the Schindler women.

Mrs. Rachela Korn, condemned to a hospital hut at the age of forty-four, had also been dragged out the window of the place by her daughter, who now held her upright in the Schindler column. For her as for the other two, it was a birthday. Everyone in the line seemed to be congratulating them.

In the washhouse, the Schindler women were barbered. Latvian girls sheared a lice promenade down the length of their skulls and shaved their armpits and p.u.b.es. After their shower they were marched naked to the quartermaster's hut, where the clothes of the dead were issued to them. When they saw themselves shaven and in odds and ends of clothing, they broke into laughter-the hilarity of the very young. The sight of little Mila Pfefferberg, down to 70 pounds, occupying garments cut for a fat lady had them reeling with hilarity. Half-dead and dressed in their paint-coded rags, they pranced, modeled, mimed, and giggled like schoolgirls.

"What's Schindler going to do with all the old women?" Clara Sternberg heard an SS girl ask a colleague.

"It's no one's business," the colleague said. "Let him open an old people's home if he wants."

No matter what your expectations, it was always a horrifying thing to go into the trains. Even in cold weather, there was a sense of smothering, compounded by blackness. On entering a car, the children always pushed themselves toward any sliver of light. That morning, Niusia Horowitz did that, positioning herself against the far wall at a place where a slat had come loose. When she looked out through the gap, she could see across the railway lines to the wires of the men's camp. She noticed a straggle of children over there, staring at the train and waving. There seemed to be a very personal insistence to their movements. She thought it strange that one of them resembled her six-year-old brother, who was safe with Schindler. And the boy at his side was a double for their cousin Olek Rosner. Then, of course, she understood. It was Richard. It was Olek.

She turned and found her mother and pulled at her uniform. Then Regina looked, went through the same cruel cycle of identification, and began to wail. The door of the car had been shut by now; they were all packed close in near darkness, and every gesture, every scent of hope or panic, was contagious. All the others took up the wailing too. Manci Rosner, standing near her sister-in-law, eased her away from the opening, looked, saw her son waving, and began keening too.

The door slid open again and a burly NCO asked who was making all the noise. No one else had any motive to come forward, but Manci and Regina struggled through the crush to the man. "It's my child over there," they both said. "My boy," said Manci. "I want to show him that I'm still alive."

He ordered them down onto the concourse. When they stood before him, they began to wonder what his purpose was. "Your name?" he asked Regina.

She told him and saw him reach behind his back and fumble under his leather belt. She expected to see his hand appear holding a pistol. What it held, however, was a letter for her from her husband. He had a similar letter from Henry Rosner, too. He gave a brief summary of the journey he'd made from Brinnlitz with their husbands. Manci suggested he might be willing to let them get down under the car, between the tracks, as if to urinate. It was sometimes permitted if trains were long delayed. He consented.

As soon as Manci was down there under the carriage, she let out the piercing Rosner whistle she had used on the Appellplatz of Paszw to guide Henry and Olek to her. Olek heard it and began waving. He took Richard's head and pointed it toward their mothers, peering out between the wheels of the train.

After wild waving, Olek held his arm aloft and pulled back his sleeve to show a tattoo like a varicose scrawl along the flesh of his upper arm. And of course the women waved, nodded, applauded, young Richard also holding up his tattooed arm for applause. Look, the children were saying by their rolled-up sleeves. We have permanence.

But between the wheels, the women were in a frenzy. "What's happened to them?" they asked each other. "In G.o.d's name, what are they doing here?" They understood that there would be a fuller explanation in the letters. They tore them open and read them, then put them away and went on waving.

Next, Olek opened his hand and showed that he had a few pelletlike potatoes in his palm. "There," he called, and Manci could hear him distinctly. "You don't have to worry about me being hungry."