A week after Oskar spoke to Sussmuth, the gentlemen of the Berlin Armaments Board instructed the Governor of Moravia that Oskar’s armaments company was to be allocated the annex of Hoffman’s spinning mill in Brinnlitz. The Governor’s bureaucrats could do nothing more, Sussmuth told Oskar by telephone, than slow the paperwork down. But Hoffman and other Party men in the Zwittau area were already conferring and passing resolutions against Oskar’s intrusion into Moravia. The Party Kreisleiter in Zwittau wrote to Berlin complaining that Jewish prisoners from Poland would be a peril to the health of Moravian Germans. Spotted fever would very likely appear in the region for the first time in modern history, and Oskar’s small armaments factory, of dubious value to the war effort, would also attract Allied bombers, with resultant damage to the important Hoffman mills. The population of Jewish criminals in the proposed Schindler camp would outweigh the small and decent population of Brinnlitz and be a cancer on the honest flank of Zwittau.
A protest of that kind didn’t have a chance, since it went straight to the office of Erich Lange in Berlin. Appeals to Troppau were quashed by honest Sussmuth. Nonetheless, the posters went up on walls in Oskar’s hometown: “KEEP THE JEWISH CRIMINALS OUT.”
And Oskar was paying. He was paying the Evacuation Committee in Cracow to help speed up the permits for the transfer of his machinery. The Department of the Economy in Cracow had to be encouraged to provide the clearances of bank holdings. Currency wasn’t favored these days, so he paid in goods—in kilos of tea, in pairs of leather shoes, in carpets, in coffee, in canned fish. He spent his afternoons in the little streets off the market square of Cracow haggling at staggering prices for whatever the bureaucrats desired. Otherwise, he was sure, they would keep him waiting till his last Jew had gone to Auschwitz.
It was Sussmuth who told him that people from Zwittau were writing to the Armaments Inspectorate accusing Oskar of black-marketeering. If they’re writing to me, said Sussmuth, you can bet the same letters are going to the police chief of Moravia, Obersturmführer Otto Rasch. You should introduce yourself to Rasch and show him what a charming fellow you are.
Oskar had known Rasch when he was SS police chief of Katowice. Rasch was, by happy chance, a friend of the chairman of Ferrum AG at Sosnowiec, from which Oskar had bought his steel. But in rushing down to Brno to head off informers, Oskar didn’t rely on anything as flimsy as mutual friendships. He took a diamond cut in the brilliant style which, somehow, he introduced into the meeting. When it crossed the table and ended on Rasch’s side of the desk, it secured Oskar’s Brno front.
Oskar later estimated that he spent 100,000 RM.—NEARLY $40,000—to grease the transfer to Brinnlitz. Few of his survivors would ever find the figure unlikely, though there were those who shook their heads and said, “No, more! It would have to have been more than that.”
He had drawn up what he called a preparatory list and delivered it to the Administration Building. There were more than a thousand names on it—the names of all the prisoners of the backyard prison camp of Emalia, as well as new names. Helen Hirsch’s name was freshly on the list, and Amon was not there to argue about it. And the list would expand if Madritsch agreed to go to Moravia with Oskar. So Oskar kept working on Titsch, his ally at Julius Madritsch’s ear. Those Madritsch prisoners who were closest to Titsch knew the list was under compilation, that they could have access to it. Titsch told them without any ambiguity: You must get on it. In all the reams of Płaszów paperwork, Oskar’s dozen pages of names were the only pages with access to the future.
But Madritsch still could not decide whether he wanted an alliance with Oskar, whether he would add his 3,000 to the total.
There is again a haziness suitable to a legend about the precise chronology of Oskar’s list. The haziness doesn’t attach to the existence of the list—a copy can be seen today in the archives of the Yad Vashem. There is no uncertainty as we shall see about the names remembered by Oskar and Titsch at the last minute and attached to the end of the official paper. The names on the list are definite. But the circumstances encourage legends. The problem is that the list is remembered with an intensity which, by its very heat, blurs. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf.
Some of those whose names appeared on the list say that there was a party at Goeth’s villa, a reunion of SS men and entrepreneurs to celebrate the times they’d had there. Some even believe that Goeth was there, but since the SS did not release on bail, that is impossible. Others believe that the party was held at Oskar’s own apartment above his factory. Oskar had for more than two years given excellent parties there. One Emalia prisoner remembers the early hours of 1944 when he was on night watch duty and Oskar had wandered down from his apartment at one o’clock, escaping the noise upstairs and bringing with him two cakes, two hundred cigarettes, and a bottle for his friend the watchman.
At the Płaszów graduation party, wherever it took place, the guests included Dr. Blancke, Franz Bosch, and, by some reports, Oberführer Julian Scherner, on vacation from his partisan-hunting. Madritsch was there too, and Titsch. Titsch would later say that at it Madritsch informed Oskar for the first time that he would not be going to Moravia with him. “I’ve done everything I can for the Jews,” Madritsch told him. It was a reasonable claim; he would not be persuaded although he said Titsch had been at him for days.
Madritsch was a just man. Later he would be honored as such. He simply did not believe that Moravia would work. If he had, the indications are that he would have attempted it.
What else is known about the party is that an urgency operated there, because the Schindler list had to be handed in that evening. This is an element in all the versions of the story survivors tell. The survivors could tell and expand upon it only if they had heard it in the first place from Oskar, a man with a taste for embellishing a story. But in the early 1960’s, Titsch himself attested to the substantial truth of this one. Perhaps the new and temporary Commandant of Płaszów, a Hauptsturmführer Büscher, had said to Oskar, “Enough fooling around, Oskar! We have to finalize the paperwork and the transportation.” Perhaps there was some other form of deadline imposed by the Ostbahn, by the availability of transport. At the end of Oskar’s list, therefore, Titsch now typed in, above the official signatures, the names of Madritsch prisoners. Almost seventy names were added, written in by Titsch from his own and Oskar’s memories. Among them were those of the Feigenbaum family—the adolescent daughter who suffered from incurable bone cancer; the teen-age son Lutek with his shaky expertise in repairing sewing machines. Now they were all transformed, as Titsch scribbled, into skilled munitions workers. There was singing in the apartment, loud talk and laughter, a fog of cigarette smoke, and, in a corner, Oskar and Titsch quizzing each other over people’s names, straining for a clue to the spelling of Polish patronyms.
In the end, Oskar had to put his hand on Titsch’s wrist. We’re over the limit, he said. They’ll balk at the number we already have. Titsch continued to strain for names, and tomorrow morning would wake damning himself because one had come to him too late. But now he was at the limit, wrung out by this work. It was blasphemously close to creating people anew just by thinking of them. He did not begrudge doing it. It was what it said of the world—that was what made the heavy air of Schindler’s apartment so hard for Titsch to breathe.