Some people from the big cities—from Warsaw and Łódź with their ghettos and Cracow with Frank’s commitment to making it judenfrei— went to the countryside to lose themselves among the peasants. The Rosner brothers, Cracovian musicians who would come to know Oskar well, settled in the old village of Tyniec. It was on a pretty bend of the Vistula, and an old Benedictine abbey on a limestone cliff hung above it. It was anonymous enough for the Rosners, though. It had a few Jewish storekeepers and Orthodox artisans, with whom nightclub musicians had little to converse about. But the peasants, busy with the tedium of the harvest, were as pleased as the Rosners could have hoped to find musicians in their midst.
They’d come to Tyniec not from Cracow, not from that great marshaling point outside the botanical gardens in Mogilska Street where young SS men pushed people onto trucks and called out bland and lying promises about the later delivery of all adequately labeled baggage. They had come in fact from Warsaw, where they had been enjoying an engagement at the Basilisk. They had left the day before the Germans sealed up the Warsaw ghetto—Henry and Leopold and Henry’s wife, Manci, and five-year-old son, Olek. The idea of a south Polish village like Tyniec, not far from their native Cracow, appealed to the brothers. It offered the option, should conditions improve, of catching a bus into Cracow and finding work. Manci Rosner, an Austrian girl, had brought with her her sewing machine, and the Rosners set up a little clothing business in Tyniec. In the evenings they played in the taverns and became a sensation in a town like that. Villages welcome and support occasional wonders, even Jewish ones. And the fiddle was, of all instruments, most venerated in Poland.
One evening a traveling Volksdeutscher (german-speaking Pole) from Poznan heard the brothers playing outside the inn. The Volksdeutscher was a municipal official from Cracow, one of those Polish Germans in whose name Hitler had taken the country in the first place. The Volksdeutscher told Henry that the mayor of Cracow, Obersturmbannführer Pavlu, and his deputy, the renowned skier Sepp Róhre, would be visiting the countryside at harvest time, and he would like to arrange for them to hear such an accomplished pair as the Rosners.
On an afternoon when the bound sheaves lay drowsing in fields as quiet and as abandoned as on Sunday, a convoy of limousines wound through Tyniec and up a rise to the villa of an absentee Polish aristocrat. On the terrace, the dapper Rosner brothers waited, and when all the ladies and gentlemen had been seated in a room that might once have been used for balls, they were invited to perform. Henry and Leopold felt both exultation and fear at the seriousness with which Obersturmbannführer Pavlu’s party had geared themselves for their playing. The women wore white dresses and gloves, the military officials full dress, the bureaucrats their winged collars. When people went to such trouble, it was easier to disappoint them. For a Jew, even to impose a cultural disappointment on the regime was a serious crime.
But the audience loved them. They were a characteristically gemütlich crowd; they loved Strauss, the confections of Offenbach and Lehar, Andr’e Messager and Leo Fall. At request time they grew mawkish.
And as Henry and Leopold performed, the ladies and gentlemen drank champagne from long-stemmed flutes brought in by hamper. Once the official recital had finished, the brothers were taken down the hill to where the peasants and the soldiers of the escort had been gathered. If there was to be some crude racial demonstration, it would take place here. But again, once the brothers had climbed onto a wagon and looked the crowd in the eye, Henry knew they would be safe. The pride of the peasants, partly a national thing—the Rosners being for the night a credit to Polish culture—all that protected them. It was so like old times that Henry found himself smiling down at Olek and Manci, playing to her, capable of ignoring the rest. It did seem for those seconds that the earth had at last been pacified by music.
When it was finished, a middle-aged SS NCO—A Rottenführer (a junior noncommissioned SS rank) perhaps—Henry not being as familiar as he might become with the gradations of SS rank—approached them as they stood by the wagon receiving congratulations. He nodded to them and barely smiled. “I hope you have a nice harvest holiday,” he said, bowed, and left.
The brothers stared at each other. As soon as the SS man was out of hearing, they gave in to the temptation to discuss his meaning. Leopold was convinced. “It’s a threat,” he said. It went to show what they had feared in their marrow when the Volksdeutsche official first spoke to them— that these days it didn’t do to stand out, to acquire a distinctive face.
That was life in the country in 1940. The curtailment of a career, the rustic tedium, the scratching out of a trade, the occasional terror, the pull of that bright core called Cracow.
To that, the Rosners knew, they would eventually return.
Emilie had returned home in the autumn, and when Stern next came to Schindler’s apartment it was Ingrid who brought the coffee. Oskar made no secret of his weaknesses, and never seemed to think that ascetic Itzhak Stern needed any apologia for Ingrid’s presence. Similarly, when the coffee was finished, Oskar went to the liquor cabinet and brought back a fresh bottle of brandy, setting it down on the table between his seat and Stern’s, as if Stern were really likely to help him drink it.
Stern had come that evening to tell Oskar that a family whom we shall call the C’s were spreading stories about him, old David and young Leon C, saying even on the streets in Kazimierz—let alone in parlors—that Oskar was a German gangster, a thug. When Stern passed on these accusations to Oskar, he didn’t use terms quite as vivid as that.
The reason an initial is employed here instead of a fictionalized name is that in Cracow the whole range of Polish Jewish names were found, and that to employ any name other than the C’s‘ real one might cause offense to the memory of some vanished family or to some living friend of Oskar’s. Oskar knew Stern wasn’t looking for a response, that he was just passing on intelligence.
But of course he felt he had to respond anyway.
“I could spread stories about them,” said Oskar. “They’re robbing me blind. Ask Ingrid if you like.”
Ingrid was the C’s‘ supervisor. She was a benign Treuhänder and, being only in her twenties, commercially inexperienced. The rumor was that Schindler himself had got the girl appointed so that he would have an assured outlet for his kitchenware. The C’s, however, still did pretty well what they wanted with their company. If they resented the idea that it was held in trust by the occupying power, no one could blame them for that. Stern waved Oskar’s suggestion away. Who was he to want to grill Ingrid? It wasn’t much use to compare notes with the girl anyhow. “They run rings around Ingrid,” said Oskar. They turned up at Lipowa Street for delivery of their orders and altered the invoices on the spot and took away more than they had paid for. “She says it’s all right,” they’d tell the Schindler employees. “He’s arranged it with Ingrid.”
The son had in fact been gathering crowds and telling them that Schindler had had the SS beat him up. But his story varied—the beating was supposed to have occurred at Schindler’s factory, in a storeroom from which young C emerged with a black eye and broken teeth. Then it was supposed to have occurred on Limanowskiego, in front of witnesses. A man called F, an employee of Oskar’s and a friend of the C’s, had said he’d heard Oskar stamping up and down in his office in Lipowa Street and threatening to kill old David C. Then Oskar was said to have driven around to Stradom and raided the C cash register, to have stuffed his pockets with currency and told them that there was a New Order in Europe, and then to have beaten up old David in his office.
Was it possible that Oskar could let fly at old David C and land him in bed with bruises?
Was it likely he would call on friends in the police to assault Leon? On one level Oskar and the C’s were gangsters, selling tons of kitchenware illegally, without sending records of sales to the Transferstelle, without use of the required merchandizing coupons called Bezugschein. On the black market, the dialogue was primitive and tempers were short. Oskar admitted he’d raged into the C’s‘ showroom and called father and son thieves and indemnified himself out of the till for the kitchenware the C’s had taken without authorization. Oskar admitted he’d punched young Leon. But that was the limit of his admissions.
And the C’s, whom Stern had known since childhood—they had one of those reputations. Not exactly criminal, but sharp in dealing and, significant in this case, with a reputation for squealing when caught.
Stern knew Leon C’s bruises did exist. Leon wore them down the street and was willing to elaborate on them. The SS beating did take place somewhere or other, but it could have had a dozen causes. Stern not only did not believe that Oskar had begun asking the SS for that sort of favor, but also had the sense that to believe or disbelieve what was said to have happened in this case was irrelevant to his own wider purposes. It would become relevant only when and if Herr Schindler established a brutal pattern. For Stern’s purposes, occasional lapses did not count. Had Oskar been without sin, this apartment would not exist in its present form, and neither would Ingrid be waiting in the bedroom.
And it is yet again one of those things which must be said, that Oskar would save all of them—Mr. and Mrs. C, Leon C, Mr. H, Miss M, old C’s secretary—and that they would always admit that, but that they would also and always stick to their story of the bruises.
That evening Itzhak Stern also brought news of Marek Biberstein’s jail sentence. He had got two years in the prison in Montelupich Street, this Marek Biberstein who was the president of the Judenrat, or who had been until his arrest. In other cities the Judenrat was already cursed by the general Jewish population, for its main work had become the drawing up of lists for forced labor, for transfers to camps. The Judenrats were regarded by the German administration as organs of its will, but in Cracow, Marek Biberstein and his cabinet still saw themselves as buffers between the office of the military mayor of Cracow, Schmid and later Pavlu, on one hand, and the Jewish inhabitants of the city on the other. In the Cracow German newspaper of March 13, 1940, a Dr. Dietrich Redecker said that on a visit to the Judenrat office he was struck by the contrast between its carpet and plush chairs and the poverty and squalor of the Jewish quarter in Kazimierz. But Jewish survivors do not remember the first Cracow Judenrat as men who cut themselves off from the people. Hungry for revenue, however, they had made the mistake the Judenrats of Łódź and Warsaw had made before them, permitting the affluent to buy their way off forced-labor lists, forcing the poor onto the roster in return for soup and bread. But even later, in 1941, Biberstein and his council still had the respect of the Jews of Cracow.
That first membership of the Judenrat consisted of twenty-four men, most of them intellectuals. Each day, on his way to Zablocie, Oskar passed their corner office in Podgórze into which were crowded a number of secretariats.
In the manner of a cabinet, each member of the council took care of a different aspect of government. Mr. Schenker had charge of taxes, Mr. Steinberg of buildings—an essential job in a society where people drifted in and out, this week trying the option of refuge in some small village, next week walking back to town surfeited with the narrowness of the peasants. Leon Salpeter, a pharmacist by profession, had charge of one of the social-welfare agencies.
There were secretariats for food, cemeteries, health, travel documentation, economic affairs, administrative services, culture, even—in the face of the ban on schooling—of education.
Biberstein and his council believed on principle that the Jews who were expelled from Cracow would end up in worse places, and so they decided to fall back on an ancient stratagem: bribery. The hard-up Judenrat treasury allocated 200,000 złoty for the purpose. Biberstein and the Housing Secretary, Chaim Goldfluss, had sought out an intermediary, in this case a Volksdeutscher named Reichert, a man who had contacts in the SS and the city administration. Reichert’s task was to pass on the money to a series of officials beginning with Obersturmführer (an SS rank equivalent to first lieutenant) Seibert, the liaison officer between the Judenrat and the city government. In return for the money, the officials were to permit another 10,000 Jews of the Cracow community to remain at home, despite Frank’s order. Whether Reichert had insulted officials by retaining too large a percentage for himself and making too low an offer, or whether the gentlemen involved felt that Governor Frank’s most cherished ambition to render his city judenfrei made the taking of bribes too perilous, no one could tell from the court proceedings. But Biberstein had got two years in Montelupich, Goldfluss six months in Auschwitz. Reichert himself had got eight years. Yet everyone knew he would have a softer time of it than the other two.
Schindler shook his head at the idea of putting 200,000 złoty on such a fragile hope.
“Reichert is a crook,” he murmured. Just ten minutes before, they had been discussing whether he and the C’s were crooks and had let the question stand. But there was no doubt about Reichert. “I could have told them Reichert was a crook,” he kept insisting.
Stern commented—as a philosophic principle—that there were times when the only people left to do business with were crooks.
Schindler laughed at that—a wide, toothy, almost rustic laugh. “Thank you very much, my friend,” he told Stern.