"Where's your father?" Manci shouted.

"At work," said Olek. "He'll be back from work soon. I'm saving these potatoes for him."

"Oh, G.o.d," Manci murmured to her sister-in-law. So much for the food in his hand. Young Richard told it straighter. "Mamushka, Mamushka, Mamushka," he yelled, "I'm so hungry!"

But he too held up a few potatoes. He was keeping them for Dolek, he said. Dolek and Rosner the violinist were working at the rock quarry.

Henry Rosner arrived first. He too stood at the wire, his left arm bared and raised. "The tattoo," he called in triumph. She could see, though, that he was shivering, sweating and cold at the same time. It had not been a soft life in Paszw, but he'd been allowed to sleep off in the paint shop the hours of work he'd put in playing Lehar at the villa. Here, in the band which sometimes accompanied the lines marching to the "bathhouses," they didn't play Rosner's brand of music.

When Dolek turned up, he was led to the wire by Richard. He could see the pretty, hollow-faced women peering out from the undercarriage. What he and Henry dreaded most was that the women would offer to stay. They could not be with their sons in the male camp. They were in the most hopeful situation in Auschwitz there, hunkered under a train that was certain to move before the day was over. The idea of a clan reunion here was illusory, but the fear of the men at the Birkenau wire was that the women would opt to die for it. Therefore Dolek and Henry talked with false cheer-like peacetime fathers who'd decided to take the kids up to the Baltic that summer so that the girls could go to Carlsbad on their own. "Look after Niusia," Dolek kept calling, reminding his wife that they had another child, that she was in the car above Regina's head.

At last some merciful siren sounded in the men's camp. The men and boys now had to leave the wire. Manci and Regina climbed limply back into the train and the door was locked. They were still. Nothing could surprise them anymore.

The train rolled out in the afternoon. There were the usual speculations. Mila Pfefferberg believed that if the destination was not Schindler's place, half the women crammed in the cars would not live another week. She herself expected that she had only days left. The girl Lusia had scarlet fever. Mrs. Dresner, tended by Danka but leached by dysentery, seemed to be dying.

But in Niusia Horowitz' car, the women saw mountains and pine trees through the broken slat. Some of them had come to these mountains in their childhood, and to see the distinctive hills even from the floor of these putrid wagons gave them an unwarranted sense of holiday. They shook the girls who sat in the muck staring. "Nearly there," they promised. But where? Another false arrival would finish them all.

At cold dawn on the second day, they were ordered out. The locomotive could be heard hissing somewhere in the mist. Beards of dirty ice hung from the understructures of the train, and the air pierced them. But it was not the heavy, acrid air of Auschwitz. It was a rustic siding, somewhere. They marched, their feet numb in clogs, and everybody coughing. Soon they saw ahead of them a large gate and, behind it, a great bulk of masonry from which chimneys rose; they looked like brothers to the ones left behind in Auschwitz. A party of SS men waited by the gate, clapping their hands in the cold. The group at the gate, the chimneys-it all looked like part of that sickening continuum. A girl beside Mila Pfefferberg began to weep. "They've brought us all this way to send us up the chimney anyhow."

"No," said Mila, "they wouldn't waste their time. They could have done all that at Auschwitz."

Her optimism was, however, like that of the girl Lusia-she couldn't tell where it came from.

As they got closer to the gate, they became aware that Herr Schindler was standing in the midst of the SS men. They could tell at first by his memorable height and bulk. Then they could see his features under the Tyrolean hat which he'd been wearing lately to celebrate his return to his home mountains. A short, dark SS officer stood beside him. It was the Commandant of Brinnlitz, Untersturmfhrer Liepold. Oskar had already discovered-the women would discover it soon-that Liepold, unlike his middle-aged garrison, had not yet lost faith in that proposition called "the Final Solution." Yet though he was the respected deputy of Sturmbannfhrer Ha.s.sebroeck and the supposed incarnation of authority in this place, it was Oskar who stepped forward as the lines of women stopped. They stared at him. A phenomenon in the mist. Only some of them smiled. Mila Pfefferberg, like others of the girls in the column that morning, remembers that it was an instant of the most basic and devout grat.i.tude, and quite unutterable. Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. "He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down."

Then Oskar began to talk. It was another of his outrageous speeches, full of dazzling promises. "We knew you were coming," he said. "They called us from Zwittau. When you go inside the building, you'll find soup and bread waiting for you." And then, lightly and with pontifical a.s.surance, he said it: "You have nothing more to worry about. You're with me now."

It was the sort of address against which the Untersturmfhrer was powerless. Though Liepold was angry at it, Oskar was oblivious. As the Herr Direktor moved with the prisoners into the courtyard, there was nothing Liepold could do to break into that certainty.

The men knew. They were on the balcony of their dormitory looking down. Sternberg and his son searching for Mrs. Clara Sternberg, Feigenbaum senior and Lutek Feigenbaum looking out for Nocha Feigenbaum and her delicate daughter. Juda Dresner and his son Janek, old Mr. Jereth, Rabbi Levartov, Ginter, Garde, even Marcel Goldberg all strained for a sight of their women. Mundek Korn looked not only for his mother and sister but for Lusia the optimist, in whom he'd developed an interest. Bau now fell into a melancholy from which he might never fully emerge. He knew definitively, for the first time, that his mother and wife would not arrive in Brinnlitz. But Wulkan the jeweler, seeing Chaja Wulkan below him in the factory courtyard, knew with astonishment now that there were individuals who intervened and offered astounding rescue.

Pfefferberg waved at Mila a package he had kept for her arrival-a hank of wool stolen from one of the cases Hoffman had left behind, and a steel needle he had made in the welding department. Frances Spira's ten-year-old son also looked down from the balcony. To stop himself from calling out, he had jammed his fist into his mouth, since there were so many SS men in the yard.

The women staggered across the cobbles in their Auschwitz tatters. Their heads were cropped. Some of them were too ill, too hollowed out to be easily recognized. Yet it was an astounding a.s.sembly. It would not surprise anyone to find out later that no such reunion occurred anywhere else in stricken Europe. That there had never been, and would not be, any other Auschwitz rescue like this one.

The women were then led up into their separate dormitory. There was straw on the floor-no bunks yet. From a large DEF tureen, an SS girl served them the soup Oskar had spoken about at the gate. It was rich. There were lumps of nutrient in it. In its fragrance, it was the outward sign of the value of the other imponderable promises. "You have nothing more to worry about."

But they could not touch their men. The women's dormitory was for the moment quarantined. Even Oskar, on the advice of his medical staff, was concerned about what they might have brought with them from Auschwitz.

There were, however, three points at which their isolation could be breached. One was the loose brick above young Moshe Bejski's bunk. Men would spend the coming nights kneeling on Bejski's mattress, pa.s.sing messages through the wall. Likewise, on the factory floor there was a small fanlight which gave into the women's latrines. Pfefferberg stacked crates there, making a cubicle where a man could sit and call messages. Finally, for early morning and late evening, there was a crowded wire barrier between the men's balcony and the women's. The Jereths met there: old Mr. Jereth, from whose wood the first Emalia barracks had been built; his wife, who had needed a refuge from the Aktions in the ghetto. Prisoners used to joke about the exchanges between Mr. and Mrs. Jereth. "Have your bowels moved today, dear?" Mr. Jereth would somberly ask his wife, who had just come from the dysentery-ridden huts of Birkenau.

On principle, no one wanted to be put in the clinic. In Paszw it had been a dangerous place where you were made to take Dr. Blancke's terminal benzine treatment. Even here in Brinnlitz, there was always a risk of sudden inspections, of the type that had already taken the boy children. According to the memos of Oranienburg, a labor-camp clinic should not have any patients with serious illnesses. It was not meant to be a mercy home. It was there to offer industrial first aid. But whether they wanted it or not, the clinic at Brinnlitz was full of women. The teen-age Janka Feigenbaum was put in there. She had cancer and might die in any case, even in the best of places. She had at least come to the best of places left to her. Mrs. Dresner was brought in, as were dozens of others who could not eat or keep food in their stomachs. Lusia the optimist and two other girls were suffering from scarlet fever and could not be kept in the clinic. They were put in beds in the cellar, down amid the warmth of the boilers. Even in the haze of her cold fever, Lusia was aware of the prodigious warmth of that cellar ward.

Emilie worked as quiet as a nun in the clinic. Those who were well in Brinnlitz, the men who were disa.s.sembling the Hoffman machines and putting them in storehouses down the road, scarcely noticed her. One of them later said that she was just a quiet and submissive wife. For the healthy in Brinnlitz stayed hostage to Oskar's flamboyance, to this great Brinnlitz confidence trick. Even the women who were still standing had their attention taken by the grand, magical, omniprovident Oskar.

Manci Rosner, for example. A little later in Brinnlitz' history, Oskar would come to the lathes where she worked the night shift and hand her Henry's violin. Somehow, during a journey to see Ha.s.sebroeck at Grss-Rosen, he'd got the time to go into the warehouse there and find the fiddle. It had cost him 100 RM. to redeem it. As he handed it to her, he smiled in a way that seemed to promise her the ultimate return of the violinist to go with the violin. "Same instrument," he murmured. "But-for the moment-different tune."

It was hard for Manci, faced by Oskar and the miraculous violin, to see behind the Herr Direktor to the quiet wife. But to the dying, Emilie was more visible. She fed them semolina, which she got G.o.d knows where, prepared in her own kitchen and carried up to the Krankenstube. Dr. Alexander Biberstein believed that Mrs. Dresner was finished. Emilie spooned the semolina into her for seven days in a row, and the dysentery abated. Mrs. Dresner's case seemed to verify Mila Pfefferberg's claim that if Oskar had failed to rescue them from Birkenau, most of them would not have lived another week.

Emilie tended Janka Feigenbaum also, the nineteen-year-old with bone cancer. Lutek Feigenbaum, Janka's brother, at work on the factory floor, sometimes noticed Emilie moving out of her ground-floor apartment with a canister of soup boiled up in her own kitchen for the dying Janka. "She was dominated by Oskar," Lutek would say. "As we all were. Yet she was her own woman."

When Feigenbaum's gla.s.ses were broken, she arranged for them to be repaired. The prescription lay in some doctor's office in Cracow, had lain there since before the ghetto days. Emilie arranged for someone who was visiting Cracow to get the prescription and bring back the gla.s.ses made up. Young Feigenbaum considered this more than an average kindness, especially in a system which positively desired his myopia, which aimed to take the spectacles off all the Jews of Europe. There are many stories about Oskar providing new gla.s.ses for various prisoners. One wonders if some of Emilie's kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood.

THE DOCTORS IN THE Krankenstube were Doctors Hilfstein, Handler, Lewkowicz, and Biberstein. They were all concerned about the likelihood of a typhus outbreak. For typhus was not only a hazard to health. It was, by edict, a cause to close down Brinnlitz, to put the infested back into cattle cars and ship them to die in the ACHTUNG TYPHUS! barracks of Birkenau. On one of Oskar's morning visits to the clinic, about a week after the women arrived, Biberstein told him that there were two more possible cases among the women. Headache, fever, malaise, general pains throughout the whole body-all that had begun. Biberstein expected the characteristic typhoid rash to appear within a few days. These two would need to be isolated somewhere in the factory.

Biberstein did not have to give Oskar too much home instruction in the facts of typhus. Typhus was carried by louse bite. The prisoners were infested by uncontrollable populations of lice. The disease took perhaps two weeks to incubate. It might be incubating now in a dozen, a hundred prisoners. Even with the new bunks installed, people still lay too close. Lovers pa.s.sed the virulent lice to each other when they met, fast and secretly, in some hidden corner of the factory. The typhus lice were wildly migratory. It seemed now that their energy could checkmate Oskar's.

So that when Oskar ordered a delousing unit-showers, a laundry to boil clothes, a disinfection plant-built upstairs, it was no idle administrative order. The unit was to run on hot steam piped up from the cellars. The welders were to work double shifts on the project. They did it with a will, for willingness characterized the secret industries of Brinnlitz. Official industry might be symbolized by the Hilo machines rising from the new-poured workshop floor. It was in the prisoners' interest and in Oskar's, as Moshe Bejski later observed, that these machines be properly erected, since it gave the camp a convincing front. But the uncertified industries of Brinnlitz were the ones that counted. The women knitted clothing with wool looted from Hoffman's left-behind bags. They paused and began to look industrial only when an SS officer or NCO pa.s.sed through the factory on his way to the Herr Direktor's office, or when Fuchs and Schoenbrun, the inept civil engineers ("Not up to the weight of our engineers," a prisoner would later say) came out of their offices.

The Brinnlitz Oskar was still the Oskar old Emalia hands remembered. A bon vivant, a man of wild habits. Mandel and Pfefferberg, at the end of their shift and overheated from working on the pipe fittings for the steam, visited a water tank high up near the workshop ceiling. Ladders and a catwalk took them to it. The water was warm up there, and once you climbed in, you could not be seen from the floor. Dragging themselves up, the two welders were amazed to find the tub already taken. Oskar floated, naked and enormous. A blond SS girl, the one Regina Horowitz had bribed with a brooch, her naked b.r.e.a.s.t.s buoyant at the surface, shared the water with him. Oskar became aware of them, looked up at them frankly. s.e.xual shame was, to him, a concept something like existentialism, very worthy but hard to grasp. Stripped, the welders noticed, the girl was delicious.

They apologized and left, shaking their heads, whistling softly, laughing like schoolboys. Above their heads, Oskar dallied like Zeus.

When the epidemic did not develop, Biberstein thanked the Brinnlitz delousing unit. When the dysentery faded, he thanked the food. In a testimony in the archives of the Yad Vashem, Biberstein declares that at the beginning of the camp, the daily ration was in excess of 2,000 calories. In all the miserable winter-bound continent, only the Jews of Brinnlitz were fed this living meal. Among the millions, only the soup of the Schindler thousand had body.

There was porridge too. Down the road from the camp, by the stream into which Oskar's mechanics had recently thrown black-market liquor, stood a mill. Armed with a work pa.s.s, a prisoner could stroll down there on an errand from one or another department of DEF. Mundek Korn remembers coming back to the camp loaded with food. At the mill you simply tied your trousers at the ankles and loosened your belt. Your friend then shoveled your pants full of oatmeal. You belted up again and returned to the camp-a grand repository, priceless as you walked, a little bandy-legged, past the sentries into the annex. Inside, people loosened your cuffs and let the oatmeal run out into pots.

In the drafting department, young Moshe Bejski and Josef Bau had already begun forging prison pa.s.ses of the type that allowed people to make the mill run. Oskar wandered in one day and showed Bejski doc.u.ments stamped with the seal of the rationing authority of the Government General. Oskar's best contacts for black-market food were still in the Cracow area. He could arrange shipments by telephone. But at the Moravian border, you had to show clearance doc.u.ments from the Food and Agriculture Department of the Government General. Oskar pointed to the stamp on the papers in his hand. Could you make a stamp like that? he asked Bejski.

Bejski was a craftsman. He could work on little sleep. Now he turned out for Oskar the first of the many official stamps he would craft. His tools were razor blades and various small cutting instruments. His stamps became the emblems of Brinnlitz' own outrageous bureaucracy. He cut seals of the Government General, of the Governor of Moravia, seals to adorn false travel permits so that prisoners could drive by truck to Brno or Olomouc to collect loads of bread, of black-market gasoline, of flour or fabric or cigarettes. Leon Salpeter, a Cracow pharmacist, once a member of Marek Biberstein's Judenrat, kept the storehouse in Brinnlitz. Here the miserable supplies sent down from Grss-Rosen by Ha.s.sebroeck were kept, together with the supplementary vegetables, flour, cereals bought by Oskar under Bejski's minutely careful rubber stamps, the eagle and the hooked cross of the regime precisely crafted on them.

- "You have to remember," said an inmate of Oskar's camp, "that Brinnlitz was hard. But beside any other-paradise!" Prisoners seem to have been aware that food was scarce everywhere; even on the outside, few were sated.

And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of the prisoners?

The answer is indulgent laughter. "Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?" And then a frown, in case you think this att.i.tude too serflike. "You don't understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be."

- As in his early marriage, Oskar was still temperamentally an absentee, was away from Brinnlitz for stretches of time. Sometimes Stern, purveyor of the day's requests, would wait up all night for him. In Oskar's apartment Itzhak and Emilie were the keepers of vigils. The scholarly accountant would always put the most loyal interpretation on Oskar's wanderings around Moravia. In a speech years after, Stern would say, "He rode day and night, not only to purchase food for the Jews in Brinnlitz camp-by means of forged papers made by one of the prisoners-but to buy us arms and ammunition in case the SS conceived of killing us during their retreats." The picture of a restlessly provident Herr Direktor does credit to Itzhak's love and loyalty. But Emilie would have understood that not all the absences had to do with Oskar's brand of humane racketeering.

During one of Oskar's furloughs, nineteen-year-old Janek Dresner was accused of sabotage. In fact Dresner was ignorant of metalwork. He had spent his time in Paszw in the delousing works, handing towels to the SS who came for a shower and sauna, and boiling lice-ridden clothes taken from prisoners. (From the bite of a louse he'd suffered typhus, and survived only because his cousin, Dr. Schindel, pa.s.sed him off in the clinic as an angina case.) The supposed sabotage occurred because engineer Schoenbrun, the German supervisor, transferred him from his lathe to one of the larger metal presses. It had taken a week for the engineers to set the metrics for this machine, and the first time Dresner pressed the start b.u.t.ton and began to use it, he shorted the wiring and cracked one of the plates. Schoenbrun harangued the boy and went into the office to write a d.a.m.ning report. Copies of Schoenbrun's complaint were typed up and addressed to Sections D and W in Oranienburg, to Ha.s.sebroeck at Grss-Rosen, and to Untersturmfhrer Liepold in his office at the factory gate.

In the morning, Oskar had still not come home. So rather than mail the reports, Stern took them out of the office mailbag and hid them. The complaint addressed to Liepold had already been hand-delivered, but Liepold was at least correct in the terms of the organization he served and could not hang the boy until he had heard from Oranienburg and Ha.s.sebroeck. Two days later, Oskar had still not appeared. "It must be some party!" the whimsical ones on the shop floor told each other. Somehow Schoenbrun discovered that Itzhak was sitting on the letters. He raged through the office, telling Stern that his name would be added to the reports. Stern seemed to be a man of limitless calm, and when Schoenbrun finished he told the engineer that he had removed the reports from the mailbag because he thought the Herr Direktor should, as a matter of courtesy, be apprised of their contents before they were mailed. The Herr Direktor, said Stern, would of course be appalled to find out that a prisoner had done 10,000 RM. worth of damage to one of his machines. It seemed only just, said Stern, that Herr Schindler be given the chance to add his own remarks to the report.

At last Oskar drove in through the gate. Stern intercepted him and told him about Schoenbrun's charges. Untersturmfhrer Liepold had been waiting to see Schindler too and was eager to push his authority inside the factory, to use the Janek Dresner case as a pretext. I will preside over the hearing, Liepold told Oskar. You, Herr Direktor, will supply a signed statement attesting to the extent of the damage.

Wait a minute, Oskar told him. It's my machine that's broken. I'm the one who'll preside.

Liepold argued that the prisoner was under the jurisdiction of Section D. But the machine, replied Oskar, came under the authority of the Armaments Inspectorate. Besides, he really couldn't permit a trial on the shop floor. If Brinnlitz had been a garment or chemical factory, then perhaps it wouldn't have much impact on production. But this was a munitions factory engaged in the manufacture of secret components. "I won't have my work force disturbed," said Oskar.

It was an argument Oskar won, perhaps because Liepold gave in. The Untersturmfhrer was afraid of Oskar's contacts. So the court was convened at night in the machine-tool section of DEF, and its members were Herr Oskar Schindler as president, Herr Schoenbrun, and Herr Fuchs. A young German girl sat at the side of the judicial table to keep a record, and when young Dresner was brought in, he saw in front of him a solemn and fully const.i.tuted court. According to a Section D edict of April 11, 1944, what Janek faced was the first and crucial stage of a process which should, after a report to Ha.s.sebroeck and a reply from Oranienburg, end in his hanging on the workshop floor in front of all the Brinnlitz people, his parents and sister among them.

Janek noticed that tonight there was none of that shop-floor familiarity to Oskar. The Herr Direktor read aloud Schoenbrun's report of the sabotage. Janek knew about Oskar mainly from the reports of others, particularly from his father, and couldn't tell now what Oskar's straight-faced reading of Schoenbrun's accusations meant. Was Oskar really grieving for the cracked machine? Or was it all just theatrics?

When the reading was finished, the Herr Direktor began to ask questions. There was not much Dresner could say in answer. He pleaded that he was unfamiliar with the machine. There had been trouble setting it, he explained. He had been too anxious and had made a mistake. He a.s.sured the Herr Direktor that he had no reason to wish to sabotage the machinery. If you are not skilled at armaments work, said Schoenbrun, you shouldn't be here. The Herr Direktor has a.s.sured me that all you prisoners have had experience in the armaments industry. Yet here you are, Hftling Dresner, claiming ignorance.

With an angry gesture, Schindler ordered the prisoner to detail exactly what he had done on the night of the offense. Dresner began to talk about the preparations for starting up the machine, the setting of it, the dry run at the controls, the switching on of the power, the sudden racing of the engine, the splitting of the mechanism. Herr Schindler became more and more restless as Dresner talked, and began to pace the floor glowering at the boy. Dresner was describing some alteration he had made to one of the controls when Schindler stopped, ham fists clenched, his eyes glaring.

What did you say? he asked the boy. Dresner repeated what he had said: I adjusted the pressure control, Herr Direktor.

Oskar walked up to him and hit him across the side of the jaw. Dresner's head sang, but in triumph, for Oskar-his back to his fellow judges-had winked at Dresner in a way that could not be mistaken. Then he began waving his great arms, dismissing the boy. "The stupidity of you d.a.m.ned people!" he was bellowing all the while. "I can't believe it!"

He turned and appealed to Schoenbrun and Fuchs, as if they were his only allies. "I wish they were intelligent enough to sabotage a machine. Then at least I'd have their G.o.dd.a.m.ned hides! But what can you do with these people? They're an utter waste of time."

Oskar's fist clenched again, and Dresner recoiled at the idea of another roundhouse punch. "Clear out!" yelled Oskar.

As Dresner went out through the door, he heard Oskar tell the others that it was better to forget all this. "I have some good Martell upstairs," he said.

This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity.

Dresner's account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners' lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.

FOR THE FACTORY PRODUCED NOTHING. "Not a sh.e.l.l," Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm sh.e.l.l manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing. Oskar himself contrasts the output of DEF in the Cracow years with the Brinnlitz record. In Zablocie, enamelware was manufactured to the value of 16,000,000 RM. During the same time, the munitions section of Emalia produced sh.e.l.ls worth 500,000 RM. Oskar explains that at Brinnlitz, however, "as a consequence of the falling off of the enamel production," there was no output to speak of. The armaments production, he says, encountered "start-up difficulties." But in fact he did manage to ship one truckful of "ammunition parts," valued at 35,000 RM., during the Brinnlitz months. "These parts," said Oskar later, "had been transferred to Brinnlitz already half-fabricated. To supply still less [to the war effort] was impossible, and the excuse of 'start-up difficulties' became more and more dangerous for me and my Jews, because Armaments Minister Albert Speer raised his demands from month to month."

The danger of Oskar's policy of nonproduction was not only that it gave him a bad name at the Armaments Ministry. It made other managements angry. For the factory system was fragmented, one workshop producing the sh.e.l.ls, another the fuses, a third packing in the high explosives and a.s.sembling the components. In this way, it was reasoned, an air raid on any one factory could not substantially destroy the flow of arms. Oskar's sh.e.l.ls, dispatched by freight to factories farther down the line, were inspected there by engineers Oskar did not know and could not reach. The Brinnlitz items always failed quality control. Oskar would show the complaining letters to Stern, to Finder, to Pemper or Garde. He would laugh uproariously, as if the men writing the reprimands were comic-opera bureaucrats.

Later in the camp's history one such case occurred. Stern and Mietek Pemper were in Oskar's office on the morning of April 28, 1945, a morning when the prisoners stood at an extremity of danger, having been, as will be seen, all condemned to death by Sturmbannfhrer Ha.s.sebroeck. The day was Oskar's thirty-seventh birthday, and a bottle of cognac had already been opened to mark it. And on the desk lay a telegram from the armaments a.s.sembly plant near Brno. It said that Oskar's ant.i.tank sh.e.l.ls were so badly produced that they failed all quality-control tests. They were imprecisely calibrated, and because they had not been tempered at the right heat they split under testing.

Oskar was ecstatic at this telegram, pushing it toward Stern and Pemper, making them read it. Pemper remembers that he made another of his outrageous statements. "It's the best birthday present I could have got. Because I know now that no poor b.a.s.t.a.r.d has been killed by my product."

This incident says something about two contrasting frenzies. There is some madness in a manufacturer like Oskar who rejoices when he does not manufacture. But there is also a cool lunacy in the German technocrat who, Vienna having fallen, Marshal Koniev's men having embraced the Americans on the Elbe, still takes it for granted that an arms factory up in the hills has time to tidy up its performance and make a condign offering to the grand principles of discipline and output.

But the main question that arises from the birthday telegram is how Oskar lasted those months, the seven months up to the date of his birthday.

The Brinnlitz people remember a whole series of inspections and checks. Men from Section D stalked the factory, checklists in their hands. So did engineers from the Armaments Inspectorate. Oskar always lunched or dined these officials, softened them up with ham and cognac. In the Reich there were no longer so many good lunches and dinners to be had. The prisoners at the lathes, the furnaces, the metal presses would state that the uniformed inspectors reeked of liquor and reeled on the factory floor. There is a story all the inmates tell of an official who boasted, on one of the final inspections of the war, that Schindler would not seduce him with camaraderie, with a lunch and liquor. On the stairs leading from the dormitories down to the workshop floor, the legend has it, Oskar tripped the man, sending him to the bottom of the stairs, a journey that split the man's head and broke his leg. The Brinnlitz people are, however, generally unable to say who the SS hard case was. One claims that it was Rasch, SS and police chief of Moravia. Oskar himself never made any recorded claim about it. The anecdote is one of those stories that reflect on people's picture of Oskar as a provider who covers all possibilities. And one has to admit, in natural justice, that the inmates had the right to spread this sort of fable. They were the ones in deepest jeopardy. If the fable let them down, they would pay for it most bitterly.

One reason Brinnlitz pa.s.sed the inspections was the relentless trickery of Oskar's skilled workers. The furnace gauges were rigged by the electricians. The needle registered the correct temperature when the interior of the furnace was in fact hundreds of degrees cooler. "I've written to the manufacturers," Oskar would tell the armaments inspectors. He would play the somber, baffled manufacturer whose profits were being eroded. He would blame the floor, the inferior German supervisors. He spoke yet again of "start-up difficulties," implying future tonnages of munitions once the problems faded.

In the machine-tool departments, as at the furnaces, everything looked normal. Machines seemed perfectly calibrated, but were in fact a micromillimeter off. Most of the arms inspectors who walked through seem to have left not only with a gift of cigarettes and cognac, but with a faint sympathy for the th.o.r.n.y problems this decent fellow was enduring.

Stern would always say in the end that Oskar bought boxes of sh.e.l.ls from other Czech manufacturers and pa.s.sed them off as his own during inspections. Pfefferberg makes the same claim. In any case, Brinnlitz lasted, whatever sleight-of-hand Oskar used.

There were times when, to impress the hostile locals, he invited important officials in for a tour of the factory and a good dinner. But they were always men whose expertise did not run to engineering and munitions production. After the Herr Direktor's stay in Pomorska Street, Liepold, Hoffman, and the local Party Kreisleiter wrote to every official they could think of-local, provincial, Berlin-based-complaining about him, his morals, his connections, his breaches of race and penal law. Suss.m.u.th let him know about the barrage of letters arriving at Troppau. So Oskar invited Ernst Hahn down to Brinnlitz. Hahn was second in command of the bureau of the Berlin main office devoted to services for SS families. "He was," says Oskar with customary reprobate's primness, "a notorious drunkard." With him Hahn brought his boyhood friend Franz Bosch. Bosch, as Oskar has already remarked in this narrative, was also "an impenetrable drunkard." He was also the murderer of the Gutter family. Oskar, however, swallowing his contempt, welcomed him for his public-relations value.

When Hahn arrived in town, he was wearing exactly the splendid, untarnished uniform Oskar had hoped he would. It was festooned with ribbons and orders, for Hahn was an old-time SS man from the early glory days of the Party. With this dazzling Standartenfhrer came an equally glittering adjutant.

Liepold was invited in, from his rented house outside camp walls, to dine with the visitors. From the start of the evening, he was out of his depth. For Hahn loved Oskar; drunks always did. Later Oskar would describe the men and the uniforms as "pompous." But at least Liepold was convinced now that if he wrote complaining letters to distant authorities, they were likely to land on the desk of some old drinking friend of the Herr Direktor's, and that this could well be perilous to himself.

In the morning, Oskar was seen driving through Zwittau, laughing with these glamorous men from Berlin. The local n.a.z.is stood on the pavements and saluted all this Reich splendor as it pa.s.sed.

Hoffman was not as easily quelled as the rest. The three hundred women of Brinnlitz had, in Oskar's own words, "no employment possibility." It has already been said that many of them spent their days knitting. In the winter of 1944, for people whose only cover was the striped uniform, knitting was no idle hobby. Hoffman, however, made a formal complaint to the SS about the wool the Schindler women had stolen from the cases in the annex. He thought it scandalous, and that it showed up the true activities of the so-called Schindler munitions works.

When Oskar visited Hoffman, he found the old man in a triumphant mood. "We've pet.i.tioned Berlin to remove you," said Hoffman. "This time we've included sworn statements declaring that your factory is running in contravention of economic and race law. We've nominated an invalided Wehrmacht engineer from Brno to take over the factory and turn it into something decent."

Oskar listened to Hoffman, apologized, tried to appear penitent. Then he telephoned Colonel Erich Lange in Berlin and asked him to sit on the pet.i.tion from the Hoffman clique in Zwittau. The out-of-court settlement still cost Oskar 8,000 RM., and all winter the Zwittau town authorities, civil and Party, plagued him, calling him in to the town hall to acquaint him with the complaints of various citizens about his prisoners, or the state of his drains.

- Lusia the optimist had a personal experience of SS inspectors that typifies the Schindler method.

Lusia was still in the cellar-she would be there for the entire winter. The other girls had got better and had moved upstairs to recuperate. But it seemed to Lusia that Birkenau had filled her with a limitless poison. Her fevers recurred again and again. Her joints became inflamed. Carbuncles broke out in her armpits. When one burst and healed, another would form. Dr. Handler, against the advice of Dr. Biberstein, lanced some of them with a kitchen knife. She remained in the cellar, well fed, ghost-white, infectious. In all the great square mileage of Europe, it was the only s.p.a.ce in which she could have lived. She was aware of that even then, and hoped that the enormous conflict would roll by above her head.

In that warm hole under the factory, night and day were irrelevant. The time the door at the top of the cellar stairs burst open could have been either. She was used to quieter visits from Emilie Schindler. She heard boots on the stairs and tensed in her bed. It sounded to her like an old-fashioned Aktion.

It was in fact the Herr Direktor with two officers from Grss-Rosen. Their boots clattered on the steps as if to stampede over her. Oskar stood with them as they looked around in the gloom at the boilers and at her. It came to Lusia that perhaps she was it for today. The sacrificial offering you had to give them so that they would go away satisfied. She was partially hidden by a boiler, but Oskar made no attempt to conceal her, actually came to the foot of her bed. Because the two gentlemen of the SS seemed flushed and unsteady, Oskar had a chance to speak to her. His were words of wonderful ba.n.a.lity, and she would never forget them: "Don't worry. Everything's all right." He stood close, as if to emphasize to the inspectors that this was not an infectious case.

"This is a Jewish girl," he said flatly. "I didn't want to put her in the Krankenstube. Inflammation of the joints. She's finished anyway. They don't give her more than thirty-six hours."

Then he rambled on about the hot water, where it came from, and the steam for the delousing. He pointed to gauges, piping, cylinders. He edged around her bed as if it too were neutral, part of the mechanism. Lusia did not know where to look, whether to open or close her eyes. She tried to appear comatose. It might seem a touch too much, but Lusia did not think so at the time, that as he ushered the SS men back to the base of the stairs, Oskar flashed her a cautious smile. She would stay there for six months and hobble upstairs in the spring to resume her womanhood in an altered world.

- During the winter, Oskar built up an independent a.r.s.enal. Again there are the legends: Some say that the weapons were bought at the end of winter from the Czech underground. But Oskar had been an obvious National Socialist in 1938 and 1939 and may have been wary of dealing with the Czechs. Most of the weapons, in any case, came from a flawless source, from Obersturmbannfhrer Rasch, SS and police chief of Moravia. The small cache included carbines and automatic weapons, some pistols, some hand grenades. Oskar would later describe the transaction offhandedly. He acquired the arms, he would say, "under the pretense of protecting my factory, for the price of the gift of a brilliant ring to his [Rasch's] wife."

Oskar does not detail his performance in Rasch's office in Brno's Spilberk Castle. It is not hard to imagine, though. The Herr Direktor, concerned about a possible slave uprising as the war grinds on, is willing to die expensively at his desk, automatic weapon in hand, having mercifully dispatched his wife with a bullet to save her from something worse. The Herr Direktor also touches on the chance that the Russians might turn up at the gate. My civilian engineers, Fuchs and Schoenbrun, my honest technicians, my German-speaking secretary, all of them deserve to have the means of resistance. It's gloomy talk, of course. I'd rather speak of issues closer to our hearts, Herr Obersturmbannfhrer. I know your pa.s.sion for good jewelry. May I show you this example I found last week?

And so the ring appeared on the edge of Rasch's blotter, Oskar murmuring, "As soon as I saw it, I thought of Frau Rasch."

Once Oskar had the weapons, he appointed Uri Bejski, brother of the rubber-stamp maker, keeper of the a.r.s.enal. Uri was small, handsome, lively. People noticed that he wandered into and out of the Schindlers' private quarters like a son. He was a favorite, too, with Emilie, who gave him keys to the apartment. Frau Schindler enjoyed a similar maternal relationship with the surviving Spira boy. She took him regularly into her kitchen and fed him up on slices of bread and margarine.

Having selected the small body of prisoners for training, Uri took one at a time into Salpeter's storehouse to teach them the mechanisms of the Gewehr 41 W's. Three commando squads of five men each had been formed. Some of Bejski's trainees were boys like Lutek Feigenbaum. Others were Polish veterans such as Pfefferberg and those other prisoners whom the Schindler prisoners called the "Budzyn people."

The Budzyn people were Jewish officers and men of the Polish Army. They had lived through the liquidation of the Budzyn labor camp, which had been under the administration of Untersturmfhrer Liepold. Liepold had brought them into his new command in Brinnlitz. There were about 50 of them, and they worked in Oskar's kitchens. People remember them as very political. They had learned Marxism during their imprisonment in Budzyn, and looked forward to a Communist Poland. It was an irony that in Brinnlitz they lived in the warm kitchens of that most apolitical of capitalists, Herr Oskar Schindler.

Their rapport with the bulk of the prisoners, who, apart from the Zionists, merely followed the politics of survival, was good. A number of them took private lessons on Uri Bejski's automatics, for in the Polish Army of the Thirties they had never held such sophisticated weapons.

If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband's power in Brno, had idly-during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle-gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Fhrer's. An armed Marxist Jew.

OLD DRINKING FRIENDS OF OSKAR'S, Amon and Bosch among them, had sometimes thought of him as the victim of a Jewish virus. It was no metaphor. They believed it in virtually literal terms and attached no blame to the sufferer. They'd seen it happen to other good men. Some area of the brain fell under a thrall that was half-bacterium, half-magic. If they'd been asked whether it was infectious, they would have said, yes, highly. They would have seen the case of Oberleutnant Suss.m.u.th as an example of conspicuous contagion.

For Oskar and Suss.m.u.th connived over the winter of 1944-45 to get a further 3,000 women out of Auschwitz in groups of 300 to 500 at a time into small camps in Moravia. Oskar supplied the influence, the sales talk, the palm-greasing for these operations. Suss.m.u.th did the paperwork. In the textile mills of Moravia there was a labor shortage, and not all the owners abhorred the Jewish presence as sharply as Hoffman. At least five German factories in Moravia-at Freudenthal and Jagerndorf, at Liebau, Grulich, and Trautenau-took these drafts of women and supplied a camp on the premises. Any such camp was never paradise, and in its management the SS were permitted to be more dominant than Liepold could ever hope to be. Oskar would later describe these women in the little camps as "living under endurable treatment." But the very smallness of the textile camps was an aid to their survival, for the SS garrisons were older, slacker, less fanatical men. There was typhus to be eluded, and hunger to be carried like a weight beneath the ribs. But such tiny, almost countrified establishments would for the most part escape the extermination orders that would come to the bigger camps in the spring.

But if the Jewish sepsis had infected Suss.m.u.th, for Oskar Schindler it galloped. Through Suss.m.u.th, Oskar had applied for another 30 metalworkers. It is simple fact that he had lost interest in production. But he saw, with the detached side of his mind, that if his plant was ever to validate its existence to Section D, he would need more qualified hands. When you look at other events of that mad winter, you can see that Oskar wanted the extra 30 not because they were used to lathes and machine tools, but because they were simply an extra 30. It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute pa.s.sion that characterized the exposed and flaming heart of the Jesus which hung on Emilie's wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonization of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.

One of these 30 metalworkers, a man named Moshe Henigman, left a public account of their unlikely deliverance. A little after Christmas, 10,000 prisoners from the quarries of Auschwitz III-from such establishments as the Krupp Weschel-Union armaments factory and from German Earth and Stone, from the Farben synthetic-petroleum plant and the airplane-dismantling enterprise-were put in a column and marched away toward Grss-Rosen. Perhaps some planner believed that once they arrived in Lower Silesia, they would be distributed among the area's factory camps. If that was the scheme, it escaped the SS officers and men who marched with the prisoners. It ignored also the devouring cold of the merciless turning of the year, and it did not inquire how the column would be fed. The limpers, the coughers were culled out at the beginning of each stage and executed. Of 10,000, says Henigman, there were within ten days only 1,200 left alive. To the north, Koniev's Russians had burst across the Vistula south of Warsaw and seized all the roads on the column's northwesterly route. The diminished group was therefore put in an SS compound somewhere near Opole. The Commandant of the place had the prisoners interviewed, and lists made of the skilled workers. But each day the weary selections continued, and the rejects were shot. A man whose name was called out never knew what to expect, a lump of bread or a bullet. When Henigman's name was called, however, he was put in a railway car with 30 others and, under the care of an SS man and a Kapo, was shunted south. "We were given food for the trip," Henigman recalls. "Something unheard of."

Henigman later spoke of the exquisite unreality of arriving at Brinnlitz. "We could not believe that there was a camp left where men and women worked together, where there were no beatings, no Kapo." His reaction is marked by a little hyperbole, since there was segregation in Brinnlitz. Occasionally, too, Oskar's blond girlfriend let fly with an open palm, and once when a boy stole a potato from the kitchen and was reported to Liepold, the Commandant made him stand on a stool all day in the courtyard, the potato clamped in his open mouth, saliva running down his chin, and the placard "I AM A POTATO THIEF!" hung around his neck.

But to Henigman this sort of thing was not worthy of report. "How can one describe," he asks, "the change from h.e.l.l to paradise?"

When he met Oskar, he was told to build himself up. Tell the supervisors when you're ready to work, said the Herr Direktor. And Henigman, faced with this strange reversal of policy, felt not simply that he'd come to a quiet pasture, but that he had gone through the mirror.

Since 30 tinsmiths were merely a fragment of the 10,000, it must be said again that Oskar was only a minor G.o.d of rescue. But like any tutelary spirit, he saved equally Goldberg and Helen Hirsch, and equally he tried to save Dr. Leon Gross and Olek Rosner. With this same gratuitous equality, he made a costly deal with the Gestapo in the Moravia region. We know that the contract was struck, but we do not know how expensive it was. That it cost a fortune is certain.

A prisoner named Benjamin Wrozlawski became one subject of this deal. Wrozlawski was formerly an inmate of the labor camp at Gliwice. Unlike Henigman's camp, Gliwice was not in the Auschwitz region, but was close enough to be one of the Auschwitz subsidiary camps. By January 12, when Koniev and Zhukov launched their offensive, Hss's awesome realm and all its close satellites were in danger of instant capture. The Gliwice prisoners were put in Ostbahn cars and shipped toward Fernwald. Somehow Wrozlawski and a friend named Roman Wilner jumped from the train. One popular form of escape was through loosened ventilators in the cars' ceilings. But prisoners who tried it were often shot by guards stationed on the roofs. Wilner was wounded during this escape, but he was able to travel, and he and his friend Wrozlawski fled through the high quiet towns of the Moravian border. They were at last arrested in one of these villages and taken to the Gestapo offices in Troppau.

As soon as they had arrived and been searched and put in a cell, one of the gentlemen of the Gestapo walked in and told them that nothing bad would happen. They had no reason to believe him. The officer said further that he would not transfer Wilner to a hospital, in spite of the wound, for he would simply be collected and fed back into the system.

Wrozlawski and Wilner were locked away for nearly two weeks. Oskar had to be contacted and a price had to be settled. During that time, the officer kept talking to them as if they were in protective custody, and the prisoners continued to find the idea absurd. When the door was opened and the two of them were taken out, they presumed they were about to be shot. Instead, they were led to the railway station by an SS man who escorted them on a train southeast toward Brno.

For both of them, the arrival at Brinnlitz had that same surreal, delightful and frightening quality it had had for Henigman. Wilner was put in the clinic, under the care of Doctors Handler, Lewkowicz, Hilfstein, Biberstein. Wrozlawski was put in a sort of convalescent area which had been set up-for extraordinary reasons soon to be explained-in a corner of the factory floor downstairs. The Herr Direktor visited them and asked how they felt. The preposterous question scared Wrozlawski; so did the surroundings. He feared, as he would put it years later, "the way from the hospital would lead to execution, as was the case in other camps." He was fed with the rich Brinnlitz porridge, and saw Schindler frequently. But as he confesses, he was still confused, and found the phenomenon of Brinnlitz hard to grasp.

By the arrangement Oskar had with the provincial Gestapo, 11 escapees were added to the crammed-in camp population. Each one of them had wandered away from a column or jumped from a cattle car. In their stinking stripes, they had tried to stay at large. By rights, they should all have been shot.