Schindler's List by Keneally Thomas

Author:Keneally, Thomas [Keneally, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical, Contemporary, Classic, Non-Fiction, Military, Biography
ISBN: 9780671516888
Publisher: Sceptre
Published: 1982-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

The Oskar Schindler who dismounted from his horse these days in the factory yard of Emalia was still the prototypical tycoon. He looked sleekly handsome in the style of the film stars George Sanders and Curt Jürgens, to both of whom people would always compare him. His hacking jacket and jodhpurs were tailored; his riding boots had a high shine. He looked like a man to whom it was profit all the way.

Yet he would return from his rural rides and go upstairs to face the sort of bills novel even to the history of an eccentric enterprise like DEF.

Bread shipments from the bakery at Płaszów to the factory camp in Lipowa Street,

Zablocie, were a few hundred loaves delivered twice a week and an occasional token half-truckload of turnips. These few high-backed and lightly laden trucks were no doubt written large and multiplied in Commandant Goeth’s books, and such trusties as Chilowicz sold off on behalf of the Herr Hauptsturmführer the difference between the mean supplies that arrived at Lipowa Street and the plenteous and phantom convoys that Goeth put down on paper. If Oskar had depended on Amon for prison food, his 900 internees would each have been fed perhaps three-quarters of a kilo of bread a week and soup every third day. On missions of his own and through his manager, Oskar was spending 50,000 zł. a month on black-market food for his camp kitchen. Some weeks he had to find more than three thousand round loaves. He went to town and spoke to the German supervisors in the big bakeries, and had in his briefcase Reichsmarks and two or three bottles.

Oskar did not seem to realize that throughout Poland that summer of 1943, he was one of the champion illicit feeders of prisoners; that the malign pall of hunger which should by SS policy hang over the great death factories and over every one of the little, barbed-wired forced-labor slums was lacking in Lipowa Street in a way that was dangerously visible. That summer a host of incidents occurred which augmented the Schindler mythology, the almost religious supposition among many prisoners of Płaszów and the entire population of Emalia that Oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation.

Early in the career of every subcamp, senior officers from the parent camp, or Lager, paid a visit to ensure that the energy of the slave laborers was stimulated in the most radical and exemplary manner. It is not certain exactly which members of Płaszów’s senior staff visited Emalia, but some prisoners and Oskar himself would always say that Goeth was one of them. And if not Goeth it was Leo John, or Scheidt. Or else Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s prot@eg’e. It is no injustice to mention any of their names in connection with “stimulating energy in a radical and exemplary manner.” Whoever they were, they had already in the history of Płaszów taken or condoned fierce action. And now, visiting Emalia, they spotted in the yard a prisoner named Lamus pushing a barrow too slowly across the factory yard.

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