No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home

Arthur Volunteers for a Concentration Camp

I have a chance to go to the camp where my wife is. I volunteer to go but the day before I arrive, they evacuated my wife. I am the only person in the war who volunteered for concentration camp.

Plaszow is where my worst is. Whatever bad happened to me physically happened there. And it was bad for many reasons. It was the same city I was born in. People who used to be my friends treat me not so good. There was a gallows, a whipping place, and a shooting place. Each a different type of punishment. I didn’t know for what you got beaten, for what you got hung, for what you got shot. I wasn’t interested. They shaved us. A very short crew cut. But to give us a little oomph, they shaved a stripe down the middle of the crew cut. You could recognize a prisoner right away.

Shooting people was a daily occurrence. I was working on an electric pole one day and it was a desolated part of the camp, on the outskirts. A beautiful day. The countryside is lush. I was working and I saw this car, a Mercedes, stop and a very elegant lady came out of it with a German officer. They walked with a little girl. It was often the case, some of the very pretty women, Jewish women, wound up with the German officers. She had a nice fur coat. I didn’t see her face. She took a walk with him and he shot the girl and then he shot her. He drove the car away. I continue working on the electric pole.

They put me in with a group of electricians from Kraków and they don’t like me. They sent me into the worst places, for instance, to fix things for the commander of the camp. He is Goeth, a complete lunatic. He rides a white horse with his lover to the camp at sunrise. A beautiful woman with long hair. He had these stallions, riding around the camp. He is from Vienna. Very tall, a beautiful man. Looks like something out of an Aryan opera. Something not quite earthly. He has two dogs running with him all the time, killers these dogs.

Goeth loved to shoot people for any kind of reason. He would go to the women’s camp where they peeled potatoes and he would say, ladies, please do your work, and he’d go around this mound of potatoes, and say, this is a beautiful child, this is a beautiful child. She doesn’t deserve this. She deserves better. So he shot her. After the war, Goeth’s defense is he had to be cruel to stay in command because if Berlin knew he was soft on the Jews, they would replace him. To save Jews, he had to be harsh.

He has a magnificent little villa on top of the camp, and a lot of Hungarian girls working for him. There’s a whole operation going on. He has a beautiful garden with elegant lights and a piano. Best wines, best liquor, classical music all the time. I love it when the electricians send me to the villa because the girls give me food. The electricians are sending me there because Goeth is crazy and might shoot me, but I’m getting food. I want to go there. They think I’m the crazy one, not Goeth!

The electric iron doesn’t work and I can’t fix it. Time is done with it. The light is coming from the ceiling and a shadow is in my eyes. I turn around, and Goeth was standing over me. He said, does it work?

The only thing I can do is make believe. I push this wire in, put the screws in the thing. Nothing explodes. Suddenly it works for a minute. I am saved.

I had the pleasure to look into his eyes and if I ever saw the Devil looking at me, it was him because his eyes were as cold as steel. I had this heavy iron. I could have certainly hurt him badly. I could have hit him at least twice. He was hanged after the war, but I could have killed him. Death was liberating for him. You cannot hurt or demean somebody who’s dead. Him and Hitler should have been sentenced to life in prison under the same conditions as me.