“Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.”
It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had—by her reply —somehow cut her off from suicide as an option. Something awful had happened at Brinnlitz. Oskar, the Moravian traveler, was away. He was trading in kitchenware and diamonds, liquor and cigars, all over the province. Some of it was crucial business. Biberstein speaks of the drugs and medical instruments that came into the Krankenstube at Brinnlitz. None of it was standard issue.
Oskar must have traded for medicines at the depots of the Wehrmacht, or perhaps in the pharmacy of one of the big hospitals in Brno.
Whatever the cause of his absence, he was away when an inspector from Gróss-Rosen arrived and walked through the workshop with Untersturmführer Josef Liepold, the new Commandant, who was always happy for a chance to intrude inside the factory. The inspector’s orders, originating from Oranienburg, were that the Gróss-Rosen subcamps should be scoured for children to be used in Dr. Josef Mengele’s medical experiments in Auschwitz. Olek Rosner and his small cousin Richard Horowitz, who’d believed they had no need of a hiding place here, were spotted racing around the annex, chasing each other upstairs, playing among the abandoned spinning machines. So was the son of Dr. Leon Gross, who had nursed Amon’s recently developed diabetes, who had helped Dr. Blancke with the Health Aktion, and who had other crimes still to answer for. The inspector remarked to Untersturmführer Liepold that these were clearly not essential munitions workers.
Liepold—short, dark, not as crazy as Amon—was still a convinced SS officer and did not bother to defend the brats.
Further on in the inspection Roman Ginter’s nine-year-old was discovered. Ginter had known Oskar from the time the ghetto was founded, had supplied the metalworks at Płaszów with scrap from DEF. But Untersturmführer Liepold and the inspector did not recognize any special relationships. The Ginter boy was sent under escort to the gate with the other children. Frances Spira’s boy, ten and a half years old, but tall and on the books as fourteen, was working on top of a long ladder that day, polishing the high windows. He survived the raid.
The orders required the rounding up of the children’s parents as well, perhaps because this would obviate the risk of parents beginning demented revolutions on the subcamp premises. Therefore Rosner the violinist, Horowitz, and Roman Ginter were arrested. Dr. Leon Gross rushed down from the clinic to negotiate with the SS. He was flushed. The effort was to show this inspector from Gróss-Rosen that he was dealing with a really responsible sort of prisoner, a friend of the system. The effort counted for nothing. An SS Unterscharführer, armed with an automatic weapon, was given the mission of escorting them to Auschwitz.
The party of fathers and sons traveled from Zwittau as far as Katowice, in Upper Silesia, by ordinary passenger train. Henry Rosner expected other passengers to be hostile. Instead, one woman walked down the aisle looking defiant and gave Olek and the others a heel of bread and an apple, all the while staring the sergeant in the face, daring him to react. The Unterscharführer was polite to her, however, and nodded formally. Later, when the train stopped at Usti, he left the prisoners under the guard of his assistant and went to the station cafeteria, bringing back biscuits and coffee paid for from his own pocket. He and Rosner and Horowitz got talking. The more the Unterscharführer chatted, the less he seemed to belong to that same police force as Amon, Hujar, John, and all those others. “I’m taking you to Auschwitz,” he said, “and then I have to collect some women and bring them back to Brinnlitz.”
So, ironically, the first Brinnlitz men to discover that the women might be let out of Auschwitz were Rosner and Horowitz, themselves on their way there.
Rosner and Horowitz were ecstatic. They told their sons: This good gentleman is bringing your mother back to Brinnlitz. Rosner asked the Unterscharführer if he would give a letter to Manci, and Horowitz pleaded to be able to write to Regina. The two letters were written on pieces of paper the Unterscharführer gave them, the same stuff the man used to write to his own wife. In his letter, Rosner made arrangements with Manci to meet at an address in Podgórze if they both survived.
When Rosner and Horowitz had finished writing, the SS man put the letters in his jacket. Where have you been these past years?
Rosner wondered. Did you start out as a fanatic? Did you cheer when the gods on the rostrum screamed, “The Jews are our misfortune”?
Later in the journey, Olek turned his head in against Henry’s arm and began to weep. He would not at first tell Rosner what was wrong. When he did speak at last, it was to say that he was sorry to drag Henry off to Auschwitz. “To die just because of me,” he said. Henry could have tried to soothe him by telling lies, but it wouldn’t have worked. All the children knew about the gas. They grew petulant when you tried to deceive them.
The Unterscharführer leaned over.
Surely he had not heard, but there were tears in his eyes. Olek seemed astonished by them—the way another child might be astounded by a cycling circus animal. He stared at the man. What was startling was that they looked like fraternal tears, the tears of a fellow prisoner. “I know what will happen,” said the Unterscharführer. “We’ve lost the war. You’ll get the tattoo. You’ll survive.”
Henry got the impression that the man was making promises not to the child but to himself, arming himself with an assurance which—in five years’ time perhaps, when he remembered this train journey—he could use to soothe himself.
On the afternoon of her attempt to find the wires, Clara Sternberg heard the calling of names and the sound of women’s laughter from the direction of the Schindlerfrauen barracks. She crawled from her own damp hut and saw the Schindler women lined up beyond an inner fence of the women’s camp. Some of them were dressed only in blouses and long drawers. Skeleton women, without a chance. But they were chattering like girls. Even the blond SS girl seemed delighted, for she too would be liberated from Auschwitz if they were.
“Schindlergruppe,” she called, “you’re going to the sauna and then to the trains.” She seemed to have a sense of the uniqueness of the event. Doomed women from the barracks all around looked blankly out through the wire at the celebratory girls. They compelled you to watch, those list women, because they were so suddenly out of balance with the rest of the city. It meant nothing, of course. It was an eccentric event; it had no bearing on the majority’s life; it did not reverse the process or lighten the smoky air. But for Clara Sternberg, the sight was intolerable. As it was also for sixty-year-old Mrs. Krumholz, also half-dead in a hut assigned to the older women. Mrs. Krumholz began to argue with the Dutch Kapo at the door of her barracks. I’m going out to join them, she said. The Dutch Kapo put up a mist of arguments. In the end, she said, you’re better off here. If you go, you’ll die in the cattle cars. Besides that, I’ll have to explain why you aren’t here. You can tell them, said Mrs. Krumholz, that it’s because I’m on the Schindler list. It’s all fixed.