Krishna
Starts honestly, listing Oskar Schindler’s many faults first. He had affairs with a mistress and his secretary at the same time, he had a penchant for alcohol. Now, Schindler was a Nazi insider, a businessman favoured by the regime, rich and generous in his tips to Nazi footsoldiers whom he passed every day from his workplace to home, and also friends with Amon Goeth, a high running Nazi official.
All of them use Schindler. Herr Bosch, a high ranking official, taps Schindler for six dozen sets of kitchen utensils made in his factory for an ‘aunt whose property was ruined’. Schindler has only contempt for them but is complaisant, being wise about where his interests lie.
When he meets the maid (Jewish, brought from prison by Bosch to work in his kitchen) he shows a bit of kindness and she confesses the monstrous nature of Bosch. Not only does he use her for sex anytime he wants but also likes to humiliate and slap her and beat her publicly in front of his other girls he brings home for sex. He also likes to shoot any (Jewish) passerby without apparent reason. The maid (Fraulein Helen Hirch) is resigned to her fate and expects that one day Bosch will turn his pistol on her and kill her.
All that comes later. Oskar Schindler was an Austrian and his father, an industrialist settled in Czechoslovakia, but in a German speaking cluster in that country. (Hitler was also an Austrian by birth). Goeth, later an SS commander, studied in the same place and like the Schindler’s was also a Catholic. Oskar had a sister, Elfriede. Their mother, Louisa was a devout Catholic but both Oskar and father Hans were “negligent Catholics” which distressed the mother.
The picture of Polish Jews slowly being victimized is told with a chilling effect. First their businesses were confiscated and then they were ordered into specific ghettos. Given their abuse in the hands of thugs as well as what they thought of ‘a final resolution’ of their problems, they even seemed eager to move into the ghetto assigned to them, so that they can order their own lives from there onwards – totally unaware of what is waiting for them in the future.
When some Jewish women are coaxed to join Schindler’s factory despite their apprehensions in leaving their safe ghetto, Schindler makes what seems to be a very rash promise to them ‘As long as you work for me, you will be safe’.
It is shocking that as the Nazi control of Poland tightens, Schindler is hauled into questioning by Gestapo twice. The first time is due to ‘impropriety of accounts’ which he gets out of by using his influence (He spent a night in a house arrest – a comfortable jail with all the amenities). The second time is because he was a Jew Kisser – a complaint by one of his subordinates. This was true as he celebrated his birthday by having wine and cake distributed to all his employees – including Jews and hugging them when they congratulated him on his birthday. The second time, it initially seems like even his contacts may not be enough to get him out of trouble.
And then the situation escalates. Suddenly, without any notice, he hears that some of his Jewish employees have been asked to be loaded on a train going ‘somewhere’. He rushes and then threatens to report this to the Nazi commandant of Krakow. He says that production needed for Nazi war machine will be unduly compromised of his people are not excluded from the list. He gets his way, but only just.
Then he goes around the ghetto to see scenes of chaos where families have been driven out of the house by the Nazi soldiers and he is offended that Jewish police are part of the evacuation – Jews forcing Jews out and even beating them into obedience. He learns later that they do it for two reasons – to avoid much harsher repercussions from the Nazi officers and because they know that failure to corral them would mean their own families will be included in the next list. Heartrending.
There are even more emotional scenes. A couple of people, in the chaos and the arguments, manage to slip back into their houses (without the Nazi soldiers noticing). A small girl in a red cap is a protege of a German physician – the only non Jew who has a clinic in the ghetto with official sanction. When he tries to go and ‘rescue’ the girl, at considerable danger to himself, she quietly walks to him right between the soldiers who were picking up people.
The saddest part is that the soldiers keep giving false hopes to the people they are shepherding. A man who went with them, a young pharmacist called Bachner, comes back with horrific tales. The people were told to leave their luggage against the wall. Clear instructions were given to the Jewish people to mark them a specific way so that they can be sent over to them later. Later they are taken to Balzac, almost on the Russian border. There they are shorn of their hair – reassured that ‘these are for making wigs for sale. Your hair will grow back anyway’. Then they notice the stench and are told that this is from disinfectants ‘for their own protection’. They are stripped naked and taken to a room (where they are told they will be sanitized with disinfectant’. Right up to the moment they are gassed, they are given false hopes. Truly heartrending. Balzac manages to escape by dipping neck deep in the open toilet – yes in excrement – for three days (sleeping standing up) until all the inhabitants had been disposed off and managed to escape – he comes right back to the ghetto. (God knows why) and manages to tell people but they disbelieve him, clinging to a false hope and taking him – whose hair also has gone gray fully – as a raving madman.
Schindler, on the other hand, learns of multiple gas chambers and crematoriums built in multiple places – Auschwitz and Auschwitz II being two of them – which can efficiently dispose of several thousand people per day.
There was an official called Bosko, a German transplant like Schindler who also managed to transport children out of camps and thus save them, transporting them in boxes! He also helped the underground resistance when he could. He overreached and wanted to save them all and was eventually caught and executed.
An underground agent from Hungary called Dr Sedlacek, through one of Oskar’s contacts, is introduced to Oskar. He is carrying money for the Jews. In a private conversation, Left in private to talk, they size each other up. Then Dr Sedlacek asks Oskar if he knows of any action against the Jews in Cracow. This is the moment, where Oskar could have pretended not to know anything and led his cozy life. But Oskar makes a decision to come clean and after checking for any eavesdroppers, he describes what he has seen to Sedlacek. The latter is stunned at the systematic and organized program. He knew of individual acts of violence but had no clue on the big picture. He is amazed at the fact that ‘in the midst of the desperate battle – Germany had sent troops to invade Russia – the Nazis would spend enormous amount of armed manpower, not to mention freight trains, camps, gas chambers and scientists – for a goal that serves no military end to the Nazis – only political idealogy is served’. I knew – like you – a lot about the Holocaust but never thought of it in these terms. Interesting!
The experience of an experienced Jewish jeweler Mordecai Vulkan is equally horrifying. He has been carefully cultivating relationships with the SS men – a survival tactic. He is called to help with some jewelry related work, along with three other jewelers who were urgently requisitioned. When he goes to the place of work, they are made to sit on the floor and suitcases (with names carefully written on them) is emptied. Inside are ‘used gold items and gemstones’ and they have been asked to carefully evaluate whether they are genuine and to grade them if they are. The graded ones are packed into parcels, addressed to Himmler, and taken away. The only time they briefly flinch is when another suitcase is opened and a lot of sets of teeth with gold teeth among them is poured in front of them to evaluate, with blood still on many of them!
The casual business dealings of the property of dead folks whom they themselves exterminated makes for a much more chilling reading than if it was described graphically.
When contacted by underground Jewish resistance from Hungary, he agrees to go to Hungary by train and describes the horrors to the people who came to see him.
Meanwhile a new, ambitious, and merciless SS man (promoted to Untersturmfuhrer) is sent to Cracow to ‘clear the Jewish ghetto’ after a similar success with a ghetto in Lubin.
The doctors keep some cyanide ready in case they have to use it on the worst Jewish patients, before the forces come to take them. They evacuate the others out – however, they will still be in the ghetto itself, so it is not much of a protection, probably.
It is really heartrending to see how the officers shoot anyone at will even if they thought they were slacking a bit; in full view of others. The thinking people in the camp and Oskar know that they don’t care if there are witnesses because they know that at the end, not one of the camp residents will escape the ‘solution’ and therefore no need to worry about future lawsuits and eyewitnesses testifying against them.
Schinder tries to move his employees into a building near the factory and out of the ghetto – of course with watchtowers and guards with dogs to ensure they don’t escape. This suits the Nazis as they are struggling with ‘temporary’ overcrowding in the camps. They still consider Schindler as a friend albeit one inflicted by the inexplicable ‘Jew love’ virus that seems to exist in loyal Germans.
It is incredible both to see how Goeth could go to his balcony with a binocular, observing Jews in the camp working and pick one at random (for slacking) and kill him dead on the spot as ‘punishment’. Once he breaks the teeth of an assistant – a Jew – for not delivering the manacles on time, only to be told by his assistant that they were indeed delivered and were in his desk drawers. Such absolute power and casual cruelty by officers of the camp is stunning – even to those of us who knew a lot about the ‘final solution’.
It is also amazing how much Oskar protected : once he released a man who was about to be publicly hanged. He treated his workers with far more respect than those in the camps across the street. He took old people who would have been definitely killed into his company ‘as skilled labourers needed to produce armaments for the army’. He bribed his way through. At considerable risk to himself, he even took spies from Hungary to photograph the conditions at the camp for future justice. It is really breathtaking!
Schindler’s fame spreads across the Jews and he is magnified to almost mythical proportions.
The casual cruelty galls, even after reading pages and pages of it. Amon orders a woman from the ghetto to do his nails. Though terrified she obeys and asks him after several sessions, summoning her courage, why he always has his pistol at his side. His answer? “Just in case you nick me’. He laughs when Amon’s ferocious dogs once come at her – the same dogs she has seen ripping the hands off of other victims at Amon’s command. Amon is laughing, ordering her not to shake, or else he would not be able to control the dogs.
The courtship and marriage amidst life threatening danger of two young people in the ghetto – Joseph Bau and Rebecca Tannenbaum – and their subsequent marriage is told in a way that would melt your heart.
The book is full of such horrific scenes and is even more effective since the author does not go for dramatics and describes them calmly. For instance there is this fact that Amon had buried everyone he had mass killed in unmarked mass graves and when some reverses for the Nazi army in Russia came to light, employed the Jews to dig up the rotting corpses so that they could be cremated to erase evidence in case they are either asked to answer for it or even discovery of the graves as evidence of the Nazi atrocities. (He did not fully succeed because Nazis themselves did not keep track of all of them).
When Hungarian Jews from newly conquered Hungary were to be housed, Amon was asked if they can be located in Crakow, and he ‘made space for them’ by sending the weak in the ghetto in sufficient numbers to the other concentration camps which was in effect a clear death sentence for those so chosen. The authorities chose the weak and infirm by having batch after batch of the Jews strip naked – men and women – and made to run back and forth in front of a watching panel of doctors who were looking for signs of weakness! The people in desperation tried to appear healthier than they were by various ruses. Children, hidden in the ghetto by parents, if discovered, were automatically thrown into the ‘discarded group’ ignoring the wails of the pathetic parents, all the while telling them open lies about ‘moving these into another quarters much like the ones they were in’. All to the “uplifting music of upbeat songs and Wagner opera” coming through the loudspeakers and with posters and buntings in the camp as if for a festival.
There are also scenes where some prisoners (sick and unwell) being injected with benzene – which causes a horribly painful death after fifteen minutes of torture – and the Jews injecting their own very ill patients with a more kindly cyanide before they can be discovered by the authorities when they were in the hospital.
Aweful, blunt descriptions that bring home the casual brutality of the Nazi regime. There is more. Even when Schindler, spending money like water in gifts to get permission to move a list of people – the famous Schindler’s list – by railroad to a safer haven in xxx, drama continues. The efforts of people to get themselves added to the list, the list keeper yyy demanding payment in diamonds for the favour, the list being ‘lost’ and having had to be recreated from memory when they were halfway to the new factory – else they would have been retained in another concentration camp to what would have been their certain death – all add tension and make this real life story read like a racy thriller.
In the meanwhile Amon has been arrested for graft by SS (through complaints by some of his own people who were motivated by revulsion or envy) and so his secretary was also added to the list (Helen Hirsch who was battered by Amon all her life) and went with the group.
Schindler tries to move the people to a safer place deep inside Germany and with great difficulty the men are moved there. He then tries to get the women too, and they are sent by mistake to Auschwitz camp and then – minus some who were chosen for the gas chambers and some young ones by Josef Mengele, the rest of them join the men in the safer camp – still under Nazi control but not target of indiscriminate killings.
There are many amazing stories on the heartlessness of the Nazis – including people being taken in freezing carriages in sardine like conditions and reduced to licking the condensation inside to get some water; of course a large number of them did not survive.
Equally astonishing is Schindler’s help to get more and more of them into his protected camp, including abandoned jews in carriages left to die in subzero temperatures. He was smuggling food into other camps which later was revealed to have saved several lives that would have been lost due to starvation.
If you want the full impact of these, read the book. A summary like this does not do justice. At the same time, the author is careful to recognize that, for all his good nature and intentions – he did not even care about production in his factory towards the end – he saved only a very small proportion of the Jews in the large scheme of things.
His wife, considered a doormat for her silent acceptance of all his ill treatment (by neglect) and his affairs also was deeply devoted to helping the Jews and is as such recognized.
A brilliant story, brilliantly told.
The biggest surprise is how, after his exit from Poland, the rest of Schindler’s life was spent in poverty. He started two companies, once in Argentina and one in Germany and had to declare bankruptcy in both. He mainly had to live, first, by the generosity of the grateful Jews and also, later, by Israel, which lionized him. Later, the Jews in Germany lobbied successfully to get him a pension.
It is also interesting that he was reviled and sometimes pelted with stones, in postwar Germany as a traitor.
All said, there is some irony in how he was fabulously wealthy in wheeling and dealing with the corrupt Nazi regime but post war industry was not something he could thrive in – this is mainly attributed to his lack of concentration. It is also telling that Emily stayed back in Argentina and he lived alone back in Germany.
Now, Emily comes across as an even greater person than Schindler. True, Schindler saved the lives of an estimated 1200 Jews from certain death and his motives were pure. Towards the end, he did not even care about the production in the factory and spent a fortune in getting more people into his ‘factory’ so that they can be saved, when there was no revenue. But Emily, the long suffering wife who was always ignored and put up with the constant affairs of Oskar took it all in her stride; genuinely helped the Jews with food and looked after them when needed; she gave a very generous interview about Oskar much later with no bitterness towards his treatment of her visible. An amazing lady.
And like all biographies written recently, the book is a very honest description of Oskar and Emily Schindler, warts and all. They do not hesitate to give the bad with the good, which enhances the appeal of the book as you read it.
All in all, as I said, a brilliant book.
9/10
== Krishna