The Lost Choice (4 page)

The small group laughed.“Just have it sent to my office. Five complete sets of your finest, mind you. I will take care of Mama.”The group laughed again.

The direktor had lost count of how many mothers of officers had “lost their enamelware in bombings.” It wasn't remotely true, of course. The entire charade was merely an unspoken business transaction. All parties knew that the enamelware would quickly find its way onto the black market, lining the pockets of the officers. It was a bribe, pure and simple.

Not a stupid man, the direktor was about to arrange several sets to be delivered to Bosche as well when Steinhauser spoke again.“You there!” he barked. The group turned, looking for the object of his attention.

A small man, a factory worker, was crossing the court- yard. He wore threadbare clothes, a blue and white armband with the Star of David around his sleeve. Practically dragging himself along, it was obvious even from a distance that he was sobbing; tears fell from his unshaven face.

“You!” The man stopped and looked up. “Come!” Steinhauser commanded.

The man fearfully shuffled over and stopped about ten feet away.

“What is your name?” Steinhauser asked.

The man stared blankly, unresponsive.

“Animals,” Bosche muttered under his breath as he shook his head.“They are just—”

Steinhauser held up his hand.“Herman, please,” he said. “We must show a degree of sensitivity in these situations.” Taking a step closer to the man cowering in front of him, he enunciated, “I asked your name.”

“Lamus,” he answered.

“Lamus,my friend, why are you so upset? See here, you are crying like a child.”

As Steinhauser paused, Lamus interrupted, his words bursting forth in agony.“My wife, Rena, and our two-year-old boy, Samuel,were killed in the evacuation of the ghetto last week.” Now, weeping uncontrollably and practically screaming, he said,“My only child was swung by his heels into a wall in front of his mother before she died!”

Steinhauser's eyebrows lifted. “Lamus, I am deeply touched. And fortunately for you, I am a man with the power to act upon my compassion.”Turning to the adjutant, he said, “Shoot the Jew so that he may be reunited with his family in heaven.”

The officers howled with laughter as Bosche clapped Steinhauser on the back. They moved quickly out of the yard leaving Lamus, the adjutant, and an openmouthed direktor standing there. The adjutant smiled and unsnapped his gleaming leather holster. Removing a Luger, he quickly worked the action, feeding a bullet into the chamber of the automatic pistol.

“This cannot be done!” the direktor said forcefully.“You are interfering with all my discipline here!”

The SS officer sneered, then said to Lamus, “Slip your pants down to your ankles and start walking.”

In a daze, Lamus did as he was told.

“The morale of my workers will suffer,” the direktor said desperately.“Production for
der Vaterland
will be affected!” The officer aimed the Luger.

“A bottle of schnapps if you don't shoot him!” the direktor hissed.

A pause . . . and then,
“Stimmt!”
the adjutant replied. “Done!” He lowered the pistol and placed it back in his holster.

Lamus continued to drag his trousers along behind him, moving slowly away, waiting for the bullet in his head that never came. The adjutant of the SS walked toward the factory offices to collect his schnapps, still talking cheerfully, his arm around the shoulders of Herr Direktor Oskar Schindler.

POLAND—MARCH 1944

Itzhak Stern bent over the high bookkeeper's table in his office. Pen in hand, his papers organized neatly around him, the thin, gray-haired gentleman with the glasses perched on top of his head gave every evidence of an employee hard at work. Even his hand was moving the pen just above the surface of the balance sheets. His eyes, however, were cut to the left, where he could see through the glass door of the larger adjoining office. There behind a large desk sat the direktor, Herr Schindler.

Stern was an accountant by trade, and had directed the auditing division of a large import-export firm since 1924. After the occupation of Poland in September of 1939, the head of each Jewish business was removed and supplanted by a
Treuhander,
or German trustee. Stern's new boss had been a man named Sepp Aue, who eventually introduced him to Oskar Schindler.

Itzhak did not trust Herr Schindler, not at first; after all the man wore a swastika! Before the outbreak of the war, Poland had been relatively safe for Jews. When Germany invaded, however, an entire population of people was herded into one barbed-wire ghetto. Jewish real-estate holdings were stolen and businesses razed or “sold” to German businessmen. These businessmen would then profit greatly from goods produced by Jewish slave labor. One of these “investors” in the economic future of Poland was the fast-talking, hard-drinking, shameless womanizer, Oskar Schindler.

It was an advantage, Stern knew, to be able to leave the confines of the ghetto and to work all day in the factory. When the deportations from Krakow began, Herr Schindler had instructed Stern to falsify records. Stern was astounded at the sheer audacity of the maneuver . . . and the danger to Schindler himself. Old people were notarized as twenty years younger, babies were listed as adults, and doctors and teachers were indexed as metalworkers and mechanics. Everyone filled a role—on paper—as a craftsman essential to the war effort.

When the final liquidation of the ghetto took place on March 13, 1943, the factory was shut down. Itzhak, along with the other 370 necessary workers at the enamel plant had been moved to Plaszow, a labor camp outside the city. In Plaszow, hundreds had died or had been sent by rail to Auschwitz—only sixty kilometers away. Two months after the move, Stern fell gravely ill. Receiving word of his former accountant's condition, Schindler had visited. He bribed the guards, showered bottles of illegal booze on the officers, and managed to smuggle in the medicine Stern needed to survive. But what he saw in Plaszow unnerved him.

It was at that point, Itzhak felt, that Herr Schindler had crossed some invisible line. He began to put all his thoughts and efforts into a new enterprise.

Schindler knew that other camps, such as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, were already closed due to the advance of the Russian front. Their inhabitants had been liquidated to the last Jew—without exception. The same would happen soon to Plaszow.

One evening, Schindler convinced one of his drinking associates—a gruppenführer also named Schindler, but no relation—that Plaszow would be an utterly perfect location to produce weapons for the war effort. “After all,” the direktor had argued, “I have Jews here who are already trained in assembly and fabrication.” He then placed several hundred thousand German marks in the proper hands, and Plaszow was officially designated and converted into a “war-essential” concentration camp. The factory was housed in a building in the town of Zablocie, several kilometers from Plaszow.

A sadist of the first order, Hauptsturmführer Amon Goethe was the commandant in charge of Plaszow. Every morning for several weeks, Itzhak had watched as the com- mandant eased onto the bedroom balcony of his villa. Usually shirtless and wearing pajama pants with a cigarette in his mouth, Goethe used a high-powered rifle and scope to shoot children as they played. If another child stopped to look or a parent cried out, he shot that person too. When a worker was deemed to be walking too slowly—or walking too quickly—he targeted him or her as an example to the other workers.

Stern had watched with trepidation and amazement as Herr Schindler created a “friend” in Hauptsturmführer Goethe. The direktor plied him regularly with liquor, women, and cash, finally manipulating Goethe himself into introducing a brilliant idea. Why not house the Schindler Jews at the factory in Zablocie to save time in transportation? That, he reasoned, would increase production. It was a brilliant plan, Schindler agreed.

So now,
Itzhak thought,
we number over nine hundred. We sleep in the factory or the barracks next to the building. The guards are bribed, and for the moment, no one is beaten or killed . . .
He placed his pen on the table and feigned a stretch, all the while staring and wondering about Oskar Schindler.
Why is he taking this risk? He has created an oasis in hell.

At that moment, Schindler looked through the glass door and caught his accountant's gaze. With a hand, he motioned Stern into his office. Entering, Itzhak pushed through the ever-present cloud of cigarette smoke to stand in front of the direktor's messy desk. Scattered papers, an empty vase, and two ashtrays covered the desk's large surface, but Itzhak's eyes were on the odd paperweight Schindler plucked from the clutter.

“And how is your morning progressing, Itzhak?” Schindler leaned back in his chair, momentarily placed the paperweight on his knee, and lit a cigarette. His suit jacket was hanging on a coat tree in the corner.

“Everything is in order, if that is your concern, Herr Direktor.”

Schindler took a deep draw on the cigarette and exhaled loudly. “I suppose that is my concern.” Absently, he picked up a paperweight in front of him, tested its heaviness in his hand, and said,“Call me Oskar. And sit, please.”

“I will sit,” Stern said, “but I will not do such a foolish thing as to call you by your given name.”

Nodding, Schindler continued to gaze out the window. “I need a missive constructed.” He glanced at Stern and gestured with his cigarette.“Have it ready to sign today or at least by this evening. I will be with Goethe, Scherner, the gruppenführer will be there . . . as well as the Gestapo royalty,” he said sarcastically.“Address it to the Gestapo in the form of a request. It should read . . . ahhh . . .‘In the interest of continued war production, please send all intercepted Jewish fugitives to me . . . severely understaffed' . . . something about the desperate need for labor and so on.”

Stern adjusted his glasses and wrote as Schindler spoke.
Amazing,
he thought.
He is doing it again.
The accountant had many times heard his direktor sniping at the SS or Gestapo. “Stop killing my good workers,” he'd say.“We've got a war to win. These things can always be settled later!” Stern had met dozens of Jews whom Schindler saved in this way.

Schindler put his feet up on his desk and was alternating between holding the paperweight and placing it on his stomach, just above his belt line. He put it on his desk again, leaned back—and almost immediately leaned forward to pick it up again.

Distracted, Stern peered over his glasses and said,“What is that?”

“What?” Schindler responded.

“Forgive my curiosity,” Stern said hesitantly,“but I have wondered about it for some time now. What is the thing in your hand? You pick it up. You put it down and pick it up again. You carry it into my office and leave it on my table. Then you come back to get it as soon as you are out my door.”

Schindler shrugged and tossed the object to his employee.“A piece of metal,” he said.“I don't know. You're the metalworker, Itzhak. You tell me.”

Stern caught it deftly. “I am an accountant.”

“No, I have seen your papers. They are in my top drawer right there.” Schindler pointed to a filing cabinet and grinned. “You are without a doubt one of the Reich's finest metalworkers.”

Both men chuckled.

Stern turned the object over in his hand. It was not very heavy, but definitely a dark metal of some sort. It was rectangular in shape and appeared to have been broken or crushed, though plainly visible on its surface were peculiar indentions on both sides—a design? writing?—that seemed almost familiar.“Where did you get this?”

“It was left on the desk when I bought the enamelware factory in Krakow. Just sitting there on a single piece of notepaper on which someone had written,‘Do something!'An anchor for papers in a breezy office. And, I suppose, it feels good in my hand. So I took it when we left.”

Stern cocked his head, a bemused expression on his face.“You didn't bring the big picture on the wall of your wife when you left.” He held the item toward Schindler. “But you brought this?”

Schindler stood suddenly, a scowl on his face. He took the object from Stern's hand and walked to the window. “Why are we talking about this? Are there not more serious issues with which we need to deal?” He drew ferociously on the last of the cigarette, then tossed it out the open window.

Stern folded his hands in his lap and was quiet. Finally, he said, “I apologize. It was not my intent to upset you.”

“I'm not upset.” He put the object on his desk and lit another cigarette. Falling heavily back into his chair, he eyed the paperweight, then glancing sheepishly at the accountant, picked it up again. He frowned.“To be honest, it does make me feel”—Schindler motioned with his hand—“ahh . . . conflicted . . . strange? . . .muddled somehow.”

Itzhak furrowed his brow, concerned. “An item? Herr Schindler, you are now simply, and quite honestly, under the same duress as your children.” Narrowing his eyes and leaning forward, he said slyly, “You do know that is what they call themselves.
Schindlerjuden
. All your workers refer to each other as ‘Schindler's children.'”

“Yes, I have heard.”

“They depend on you, you know? And they notice the extra food. And they notice the medicine. We see the villa you have been given, yet you spend every night here. Every single night!”

Schindler heaved a sigh. “Itzhak, if the Gestapo were to come while I was gone—”

Stern interrupted,“I know why you stay here, and so do they. You know what is happening all around us. You know that Mengele is experimenting on children in Block Ten at Auschwitz. You see the ashes that fall into the courtyard from the ovens, and yet you continue to create directives such as this!” He held up the notes he had taken earlier.