The next day he was interrogated by a panel of twelve SS investigators, one a judge of the SS Court. Oskar denied that he had given any money to ensure that the Commandant would, in the words of the transcript of Amon’s evidence, “go easy on the Jews.” I may have given him the money as a loan, Oskar admitted at one stage. Why would you give him a loan? they wanted to know. I run an essential war industry, said Oskar, playing the old tune. I have a body of skilled labor. If it is disturbed, there is loss to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate, to the war effort. If I found that in the mass of prisoners in Płaszów there was a skilled metalworker of a category I needed, then of course I asked the Herr Commandant for him. I wanted him fast, I wanted him without red tape. My interest was production, its value to me, to the Armaments Inspectorate. In consideration of the Herr Commandant’s help in these matters, I may have given him a loan.
This defense involved some disloyalty to his old host, Amon. But Oskar would not have hesitated. His eyes gleaming with transparent frankness, his tone low, his emphasis discreet, Oskar—without saying it in so many words—let the investigators know that the money had been extorted. It didn’t impress them. They locked him away again.
The interrogation went into a second, third, and fourth day. No one did him harm, but they were steely. At last he had to deny any friendship with Amon at all. It was no great task: he loathed the man profoundly anyhow. “I’m not a fairy,” he growled at the gentlemen of Bureau V, falling back on rumors he’d heard about Goeth and his young orderlies.
Amon himself would never understand that Oskar despised him and was willing to help the case Bureau V had against him. Amon was always deluded about friendship. In sentimental moods, he believed that Mietek Pemper and Helen Hirsch were loving servants. The investigators probably would not have let him know that Oskar was in Pomorska and would have listened mutely to Amon urging them, “Call in my old friend Schindler. He’ll vouch for me.”
What helped Oskar most when he faced the investigators was that he had had few actual business connections with the man. Though he had sometimes given Amon advice or contacts, he had never had a share in any deal, never made a złoty out of Amon’s sales of prison rations, of rings from the jewelry shop, of garments from the custom-tailoring plant or furniture from the upholstery section. It must also have helped him that his lies were disarming even to policemen, and that when he told the truth he was positively seductive. He never gave the impression that he was grateful for being believed. For example, when the gentlemen of Bureau V looked as if they might at least give standing room to the idea that the 80,000 RM. was a “loan,” a sum extorted, Oskar asked them whether in the end the money might be returned to him, to Herr Direktor Schindler, the impeccable industrialist.
A third factor in Oskar’s favor was that his credentials checked out. Colonel Erich Lange, when telephoned by Bureau V, stressed Schindler’s importance to the conduct of the war. Sussmuth, called in Troppau, said that Oskar’s plant was involved in the production of “secret weapons.” It was not, as we will see, an untrue statement. But when said bluntly, it was misleading and carried a distorted weight. For the Führer had promised “secret weapons.” The phrase itself was charismatic and extended its protection now to Oskar. Against a phrase like “secret weapons,” any confetti of protest from the burghers of Zwittau did not count.
But even to Oskar it did not seem that the imprisonment was going well. About the fourth day, one of his interrogators visited him not to question him but to spit at him. The spittle streaked the left lapel of his suit. The man ranted at him, calling him a Jew-lover, a fucker of Jewesses. It was a departure from the strange legalism of the interrogations. But Oskar wasn’t sure that it was not planned, that it did not represent the true impetus behind his imprisonment.
After a week, Oskar sent a message, by way of Huth and Klonowska, to Oberführer Scherner. Bureau V was putting such pressure on him, the message went, that he did not believe he could protect the former police chief much longer. Scherner left his counterinsurgency work (it was soon to kill him) and arrived in Oskar’s cell within a day. It was a scandal what they were doing, said Scherner. What about Amon? Oskar asked, expecting Scherner to say that that was a scandal too. He deserves all he gets, said Scherner. It seemed that everyone was deserting Amon. Don’t worry, said Scherner before leaving, we intend to get you out.
On the morning of the eighth day, they let Oskar out onto the street. Oskar did not delay his going—nor did he, this time, demand transport. Enough to be deposited on the cold sidewalk.
He traveled across Cracow by streetcar and walked to his old factory in Zablocie. A few Polish caretakers were still there, and from the upstairs office he called Brinnlitz and told Emilie that he was free.
Moshe Bejski, a Brinnlitz draftsman, remembers the confusion while Oskar was away—the rumors, all the questions about what it meant. But Stern and Maurice Finder, Adam Garde and others had consulted Emilie about food, about work arrangements, about the provision of bunks. They were the first to discover that Emilie was no mere passenger. She was not a happy woman, and her unhappiness was compounded by Bureau V’s arrest of Oskar. It must have seemed cruel that the SS should intrude on this reunion before it had got properly started. But it was clear to Stern and the others that she was not there, keeping house in that little apartment on the ground floor, purely out of wifely duty. There was what you could call an ideological commitment too. A picture of Jesus with His heart exposed and in flames hung on a wall of the apartment. Stern had seen the same design in the houses of Polish Catholics. But there had been no ornament of that kind in either of Oskar’s Cracow apartments. The Jesus of the exposed heart did not always reassure when you saw it in Polish kitchens. In Emilie’s apartment, however, it hung like a promise, a personal one. Emilie’s.
Early in November, her husband came back by train. He was unshaven and smelly from his imprisonment. He was amazed to find that the women were still in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
In planet Auschwitz, where the Schindler women moved as warily, as full of dread as any space travelers, Rudolf Hóss ruled as founder, builder, presiding genius. Readers of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice encountered him as the master of Sophie— a very different sort of master than Amon was to Helen Hirsch; a more detached, mannerly, and sane man; yet still the unflagging priest of that cannibal province. Though in the 1920’s he had murdered a Ruhr schoolteacher for informing on a German activist and had done time for the crime, he never murdered any Auschwitz prisoner by his own hand. He saw himself instead as a technician. As champion of Zyklon B, the hydrogen cyanide pellets which gave off fumes when exposed to air, he had engaged in a long personal and scientific conflict with his rival, Kriminalkommissar Christian Wirth, who had jurisdiction over the Bełżec camp and who was the head of the carbon monoxide school. There had been an awful day at Bełżec, which the SS chemical officer Kurt Gerstein had witnessed, when Kommissar Wirth’s method took three hours to finish a party of Jewish males packed into the chambers. That Hóss had backed the more efficient technology is partially attested to by the continuous growth of Auschwitz and the decline of Bełżec. By 1943, when Rudolf Hóss left Auschwitz to do a stint as Deputy Chief of Section D in Oranienburg, the place was already something more than a camp. It was even more than a wonder of organization. It was a phenomenon. The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth’s malice—a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out. The underground chambers were named “disinfection cellars,” the aboveground chambers “bathhouses,” and Oberscharführer Moll, whose task it was to order the insertion of the blue crystals into the roofs of the “cellars,” the walls of the “bathhouses,” customarily cried to his assistants, “All right, let’s give them something to chew on.” Hóss had returned to Auschwitz in May 1944 and presided over the entire camp at the time the Schindler women occupied a barracks in Birkenau, so close to the whimsical Oberscharführer Moll. According to the Schindler mythology, it was Hóss himself with whom Oskar wrestled for his 300 women. Certainly Oskar had telephone conversations and other commerce with Hóss. But he also had to deal with Sturmbannführer Fritz Hartjenstein, Commandant of Auschwitz II—THAT is, of Auschwitz-Birkenau—and with Untersturmführer Franz Hóssler, the young man in charge, in that great city, of the suburb of women.