Oskar Schindler, page 56
Schindler must have known all this, which makes one wonder why he would have sent his chief engineer, Schöneborn, to Auschwitz at the very time he needed him at Brünnlitz to oversee the setting up of factory operations there. The idea that he sent a secretary or old girlfriend to get the women back with bribes and sex also seems a little farfetched, particularly in light of the dangers involved in such a venture. Allied air raids had intensified in the Auschwitz area and any such trip was going to be dangerous, particularly with Czech and Polish guerillas in the area and the Red Army only a hundred miles away.
On the other hand, given all the trouble that Oskar had gone through to set up the move to Brünnlitz, it seems unlikely that he would have simply sat around waiting for the women to arrive. If nothing else, Oskar Schindler was quite aggressive when it came to his factories and Jewish workers, which brings us back to Spielberg’s version of the story. Oskar continued to operate Emalia until the Soviets occupied Kraków in early 1945, so it would have been easy for him to pay a visit to Auschwitz. According to Emilie, he spent a lot of time in Kraków before the Soviets occupied in January 1945. She said he “could not let go of the old enamelware factory.”140
But Oskar probably wanted nothing to do with Kraków or the SS in the aftermath of his recent detention as part of the SS investigation of Amon Göth. After the Soviets took over Kraków, Oskar seemed seldom to stray too far from Brünnlitz. And even though he had acquired a comfortable villa just outside the factory grounds, he had an apartment built in the principal factory building where he lived with Emilie. Why? Oskar had already lost one factory to the Soviets and he wanted to protect his second one as much as possible. He was also afraid that if he was not around to protect his workers, they would fall victim to the whims of the SS. So it is highly unlikely that Oskar Schindler would have risked a trip to Auschwitz to save his women unless this was the only option left open to him. He well understood the dangers of such a trip for himself and his male workers, who were essential to the operation of his new factory in Brünnlitz.
10.
BRÜNNLITZ
SCHINDLERJUDE ROMAN FERBER ONCE REMARKED AFTER THE war that the arrival of the Schindler men at Brünnlitz was anticlimactic.1 This was certainly not so with the Schindler women. Their weeks in Auschwitz had been terrifying and their mysterious trip to Brünnlitz was equally frightening. Stella Müller-Madej has written the most complete account of that journey in her memoirs, A Girl from Schindler’s List. Stella had been put in Birkenau’s Krankenstube (sick room) several days before the Brünnlitz transport left Auschwitz. Two friends, Bronia and Mira, managed to delude the SS into thinking that Stella was well and got her out of the sick room. All her clothes had been taken from her, so they carefully re-dressed her before they took her before the reporting officer (Rapportführer) to try to convince him to put Stella on the Brünnlitz transport. Their efforts were successful and Stella was ordered to join the other Schindler women.2
As the Aufseherinnen marched the Schindler women past the crematorium to the train, they decided to give them a “farewell flogging” with their whips. As soon as the cars were loaded, the train began to move. But uncertainty and fear continued to haunt the women as the train stopped and started time and again during what seemed an eternity. At one of the stops, the women called out to ask where they where. The response from outside was “Meskoslovensko.” The Schindler women then asked why the train was not moving. The voice outside responded that there was no locomotive to pull the cars. It had been taken by the Wehrmacht. Panic swept through the cars and many of the Schindler women were convinced they would be “taken out and finished off.” Stella said that some women began to pray; others wailed “in a language I could not understand.” She thought the wailing was going to drive her mad and pleaded with her mother and friends to make it stop.3
But soon another locomotive was found and the train again began its journey to Brünnlitz. Hunger and thirst now swept through the cars and some women feared they would starve to death. When the train stopped again, another voice from outside asked whether there was anyone in the cars. In unison, the women on Stella’s car shouted, “We’re here. Why have we stopped?” A person outside replied, “They want to take you back to Auschwitz.” Stella said that everyone “went crazy. Anything except that. Let them kill us here.”4 After a while, the women heard more voices outside and asked for food and water. “I can’t,” was the reply. As the women debated about whether to use one corner of the car as a toilet, the train began moving. Were they returning to Auschwitz? No one knew. Even the stronger women now began to lose hope. Natka Feigenbaum tried to reassure everyone in Stella’s car that “if Schindler doesn’t save us, that means he’s dead himself.” Several women told her to “stop blabbering about your wonderful Schindler.” Natka replied simply, “God will help. God will help.”5
The train stopped again and Stella was convinced the SS was going to kill them all. For her, “to stand still and wait like this was horrible.” The train stopped once more and everyone seemed certain this was the last stop. No one heard dogs barking and no guards were shouting from below. Someone did give instructions in German but spoke “calmly and without shouting.” The women were filled with “a mixture of amazement and horror.” No one beat them or hit them with rifle butts as they jumped out of the cars. Stella wondered how it was possible the Germans could have had “become so mild just before the end.” As the women were being lined up, a car drove up and two tall Germans got out. One was dressed in an SS uniform; the other wore a “different uniform.” The biggest of the two men, whom Stella described as “massive,” was Oskar Schindler. Natka muttered, “on your knees, on your knees before him.”6
Stella says the SS guards were offended by the women’s smell, and one of them said, “O, wie die Frauen stinken” (Oh, how the women stink). Stella asked her mother whether she had noticed that the guards called them women and not swine as they did in Auschwitz and Płaszów. As Schindler walked along the rows and rows of dirty, lice-ridden, emaciated women, Stella wrote, he had a strange expression on his face, one of “horror, pity and benevolence.”7 Emilie Schindler, who saw the women a few minutes later, said that they were “in disastrous condition—fragile, emaciated, weak.”8
As they marched the short distance to Schindler’s factory, Stella began to wonder about the Schindler males. Were they in the factory? Once inside the two story main factory building, Stella and the other women saw the men in the distance on the other side of a screen on the ground floor. Men and women began to shout to each other or call out each other’s name. An emotional tidal wave swept over the thousand women and men. In the midst of this tearful celebration, soup was brought in for the women. Afterwards, they were taken upstairs to the segregated living quarters. The bunks had not yet arrived and straw had been spread on the floor for sleeping.9
And then Oskar Schindler appeared in the doorway. He said in a powerful “but very gentle” voice:
I know that you have been through hell on your way here. Your appearance says it all. Here also, for the time being, you will be forced to suffer many discomforts, but you are brave women. We did not have a great deal of hope that it would be possible to bring you here. That is in the past now. I am counting on your discipline and sense of order. I think that the worst has been overcome. The bunks should be here in a few days. Now you must put things in order yourselves. The [female] doctors should report to the head physician, and you should elect block supervisors. Doctor Hilf-stein and [Mietek] Pemper will show you where you can wash. The sick and those who need bandaging should go with the doctors.10
But their fear and suffering was not over. Hunger and disease remained a serious problem, and Dr. Chaim Hilfstein, one of the Jewish physicians, told Stella and her parents that Brünnlitz’s commandant, Josef Leipold, “was dangerous and had to be watched.” Schindler was “doing everything he could to keep Leipold in line, but we should be careful.”11
The small collection of factory buildings at one end of the sprawling Hoffmann factory complex in Brünnlitz (Czech, Brněnec) that Oskar Schindler took over for his Emalia operations in the Sudetenland could best be described as shabby and unused. The buildings were completely empty. Oskar would have to start from scratch and rebuild his factory from the ground up. He would use the machinery, tools, and raw materials sent from Kraków to Brünnlitz in 250 train cars to do this. But in addition to transferring and rebuilding his small Kraków armaments operations, he also had to construct a small concentration camp overseen by SS engineers from Hans Kammler’s WVHA construction Office Group C in Oranienburg. He got no help from Reich authorities for this and had to pay the full construction costs from his own pocket. As Oskar explained after the war, the “owner was free to decide on the equipment and design; he solely had to comply with the safety and security standards of the SS” in the construction of his factory camps. This involved the construction of “watch towers, barb wire, high voltage lines, toilets, watch blocks, housing, separate quarters for the sick, a camp kitchen.”12 After the war, Oskar estimated that he spent RM 100,000 ($40,000) relocating his armaments factory to Brünnlitz and another RM 200,000 ($80,000) building the new camp.13
To help run the camp, Oskar had a staff of twenty Germans and fifty Polish volunteers who came with him from Kraków. The SS provided a hundred SS guards under the command of SS-Obersturmführer Josef Leipold. This figure was in line with SS statistics released in January 1945 that showed an average of seventy-four guards concentration camp-wide for every 1,000 male prisoners. Over time, this contingent would probably have grown in size because Hassebroek prepared a memorandum in November 1944 that discussed increasing the size of Brünnlitz’s inmate population to 1,400 women and eight hundred men. Needless to say, the vicissitudes of war prevented the expansion from taking place. Schindler never mentioned these plans after the war but it is hard to imagine, given his relationship with Hassebroek, that he would not have been privy to them. But this might explain why he was allowed to take in extra Jews without question in 1945. 14
Oskar was responsible for housing and feeding the SS contingent as his sub-camp. He also had to pay the SS a daily fee for each of his Jewish workers. In the General Government, Schindler had paid the SS via the Armaments Inspectorate Zł 5 ($1.56) a day for his male Jewish workers and Zł 4 ($1.25) a day for his female Jewish workers. Businesses there were allowed to deduct up to Zł 1.60 a day for “maintenance.” By the time Schindler moved his armaments factory and its Jewish workers to the Sudetenland Region (Gauleitung Sudetenland), which was an integral part of the Greater German Reich, the fees he had to pay the SS to “rent” his Jewish laborers had gone up. And because his Brünnlitz factory was in Greater Germany, he would have to pay the SS in Reichsmarks. It now cost Oskar RM 4 to RM 8 ($1.60 to $3.20) for skilled workers and RM 3 to RM 4 ($1.29 to $1.60) a day for unskilled workers. As each of his 1,000 Jewish workers had a specific trade listed by their names on the two “Schindler’s Lists,” we can presume that Oskar was paying the SS RM 4,000 ($1,600) to RM 6,000 ($2,400) a day to “rent” his workers. His costs would later increase after he added another ninety-eight names to his list of 1,000 Jewish laborers during the last four months that he operated his factory in Brünnlitz. After the war, Oskar noted that he always employed far more Jews than he needed in Kraków and Brünnlitz. In the latter camp, he had no work for the three hundred women, who spent most of their time knitting or sewing for their families. Yet he still had to pay the SS a daily fee for their skilled “services.” After the war, he estimated that he paid the SS RM 250,000 ($59,524) during the “seven months” his three hundred female Jewish workers were in Brünnlitz. He added that he had had “no practical use” for these women but had to list them “as productive laborers” to insure their survival.15
When Oskar first prepared an estimated cost of what he had spent directly and indirectly to save his Jews in Kraków and Brünnlitz just after the end of the war, he said he had “invested” RM 1,935,000 ($774,000) in Poland and RM 705,000 ($282,000) for similar expenses in the Sude-tenland. He added that he did not include in his estimates the “several hundred thousand Zl [złótys]” he paid to the SS “for small favors.” In other words, Oskar claimed after the war that it cost him more than RM 2,640,000 ($1,056,000) to save his Jews. This included the fees he paid to the SS to “rent” his Jewish workers, the costs of constructing two small concentration camps at both factories, his expenses for black market food and feeding his SS contingents, and bribes to Reich officials and the SS. He admitted in his 1945 statement that these estimates were not meant to be “a balance sheet but instead it is intended to give an illustration of abstract and tangible values that were sacrificed.”16
But beyond these figures were the greater costs of transferring a portion of his factory from Kraków to Brünnlitz and then building a new factory and camp in the Sudetenland. This was far more expensive than opening Emalia in Kraków. It should also be remembered that Schindler lost two factories at the end of the war. These losses traumatized him and he would devote half his postwar life to seeking compensation for them from the West German government. German authorities carefully but slowly investigated his claims and ultimately compensated Oskar for his losses. The detailed statistics compiled by Schindler after the war as part of his Las-tenausgleich (equalization of burdens) compensation quest give us insight into the totality of his losses. He estimated, for example, that his Emalia losses in Kraków totaled DM 1,910,000 ($454,762) and those in Brünnlitz DM 4,246,400 ($1,011,047). Part of these losses were tied to helping his Jewish workers. He spent, for example, DM 270,000 ($64,285) for workers’ quarters and facilities in Kraków. His losses for such facilities in Brünnlitz were even greater. He estimated that he had spent DM 293,700 ($69,928) to build an “installation” for his Jewish workers there and another 48,000 DM ($11,428) for similar facilities for his fifty Polish workers. He also had to spend another DM 39,950 ($9,512) in Brünnlitz on SS faciliites. Oskar also included in his Brünnlitz losses DM 320,000 ($76,190) for his “private quarters and fortune” and DM 300,000 ($71,428) in the Deutsche Bank in Zwittau.17
The difference between his Kraków losses and those in Brünnlitz was that Schindler was always able to counterbalance what he spent in Kraków on his Jewish workers with excess enamelware production that was then used to trade on the black market. During his years in Kraków, Oskar estimated that he produced about RM 15,000,000 ($6,000,000) in enamelware and RM 500,000 ($200,000) in armaments. His factory in Brünnlitz produced one wagon load of ammunition parts worth RM 35,000 ($14,000). In other words, Schindler had to dip into the profits he made from his Kraków operations to pay the expenses for his factory in Brünnlitz. Needless to say, whatever “fortune” he had made in Kraków was reduced significantly during his months in the Sudetenland at the end of the war.18
Bribery and black marketeering remained an integral part of Schindler’s operations in Brünnlitz. The single greatest problem that Oskar faced was the shortage of food and medicines. But, as Oskar explained, there was a difference. In Poland, “one had to pay a lot of money but was able to get large amounts [of food].” There was simply little food available in the Sudetenland and “one sack of flour could potentially result in the death penalty.” Yet Oskar needed “tens of thousands of kg [kilograms] of various food products every month in order to save many hundreds of people from dying of hunger and becoming skeletons.” Oskar was determined that his “Schindler Jews would not become ‘Muselmenen’ [Muslims],” the term commonly used in the concentration camps to describe inmates on the verge of death from malnutrition, disease, or both. But Oskar also had to feed the one hundred SS men who served as guards at Brünnlitz. Oskar saw their well-being, at least when it came to keeping his SS contingent well supplied with alcohol, tobacco, and food, as essential to the health and well-being of his Schindlerjuden. In fact, soon after the opening of the Brünnlitz factory camp, Oskar said, he “had the guards and supervisors under control, which primarily guaranteed humane treatment of my inmates, often against the will of the camp commandant.”19
Oskar had to do more than keep his SS contingent well supplied with food, drink, and tobacco to insure the well-being of his Jewish workers. He also had to pay considerable bribes to SS and Reich officials in the Sudetenland to help him counter local opposition to his move there. After the war, he estimated that he had spent RM 75,000 ($17,857) to bribe SS and Reich officials during his eight months in the Sudetenland. Oskar wrote Fritz Lang in 1951 that local officials continued to protest his move to Brünnlitz even after he had already won final approval from Berlin. They were quite angry when his 250 train cars of factory goods tied up the town’s small train station upon arrival. But local authorities were particularly afraid of disease when Schindler’s 1,000 Jews arrived in Brünnlitz.20 Johannes Hassebroek, Groß Rosen’s commandant, was an occasional visitor to Brünnlitz and the recipient of regular bribes from Schindler. Another person who regularly took bribes from Schindler in return for his support of Oskar’s operations in Kraków and Brünnlitz was Karl Heinz Bigell, a textile specialist who had once served as economic adviser to SS-Oberführer Julian Scherner, the HSSPF in Kraków from 1941 to 1944. Oskar said that Bigell as “an obscure figure, a drunkard,” who was “always out of money.” On the other hand, he had “very good connections to the highest SS circles in Krakow and Berlin.” Oskar found Bigell useful when it came to questions about permits or items vital to Emalia’s operations. In “exchange for small ‘loans,’ Bigell repeatedly took care of things like construction permits, wood-contingents, prison releases, wagons of SS cement, or 2–3 tons of Diesel oil or gasoline.”21
