Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 26

Raimund Titsch was making payments of a different order. Titsch was a quiet, clerkly Austrian Catholic with a limp some said came from the first war and others from a childhood accident.

He was ten years or more older than either Amon or Oskar. Inside the Płaszów camp, he managed Julius Madritsch’s uniform factory, a business of 3,000 seamstresses and mechanics.

One way he paid was through his chess matches with Amon Goeth. The Administration Building was connected with the Madritsch works by telephone, and Amon would often call Titsch up to his office for a game. The first time Raimund had played Amon, the game had ended in half an hour and not in the Hauptsturmführer’s favor.

Titsch, with the restrained and not so very triumphal “Mate!” dying on his lips, had been amazed at the tantrum Amon had thrown. The Commandant had grabbed for his coat and gun belt, buttoning and buckling them on, ramming his cap on his head.

Raimund Titsch, appalled, believed that Amon was about to go down to the trolley line looking for a prisoner to chastise for his—for Raimund Titsch’s—minor victory at chess. Since that first afternoon, Titsch had taken a new direction. Now he could take as long as three hours to lose to the Commandant. When workers in the Administration Building saw Titsch limping up Jerozolimska to do this chess duty, they knew the afternoon would be saner for it. A modest sense of security spread from them down to the workshops and even to the miserable trolley pushers.

But Raimund Titsch did not only play preventive chess. Independently of Dr. Sedlacek and of the man with the pocket camera whom Oskar had brought to Płaszów, Titsch had begun photographing. Sometimes from his office window, sometimes from the corners of workshops, he photographed the stripe-uniformed prisoners in the trolley line, the distribution of bread and soup, the digging of drains and foundations. Some of these photographs of Titsch’s are probably of the illegal supply of bread to the Madritsch workshop. Certainly round brown loaves were bought by Raimund himself, with Julius Madritsch’s consent and money, and delivered to Płaszów by truck beneath bales of rags and bolts of cloth. Titsch photographed round rye being hurried from hand to hand into Madritsch’s storeroom, on the side away from the towers and screened from the main access road by the bulk of the camp stationery plant.

He photographed the SS and the Ukrainians marching, at play, at work. He photographed a work party under the supervision of engineer Karp, who was soon to be set on by the killer dogs, his thigh ripped open, his genitals torn off. In a long shot of Płaszów, he intimated the size of the camp, its desolation. It seems that on Amon’s sun deck he even took close-ups of the Commandant at rest in a deck chair, a hefty Amon approaching now the 120 kg at which newly arrived SS Dr. Blancke would say to him, “Enough, Amon; you have to take some weight off.” Titsch photographed Rolf and Ralf loping and sunning, and Majola holding one of the dogs by the collar and pretending to enjoy it. He also took Amon in full majesty on his big white horse.

As the reels were shot, Titsch did not have them developed. As an archive, they were safer and more portable in roll form. He hid them in a steel box in his Cracow apartment. There also he kept some of the remaining goods of the Madritsch Jews. Throughout Płaszów you found people who had a final treasure; something to offer—at the moment of greatest danger—to the man with the list, the man who opened and closed the doors on the cattle cars. Titsch understood that only the desperate deposited goods with him. That prison minority who had a stock of rings and watches and jewelry hidden somewhere in Płaszów didn’t need him. They traded regularly for favors and comforts. But into the same hiding as Titsch’s photographs went the final resources of a dozen families—Auntie Yanka’s brooch, Uncle Mordche’s watch. In fact, when the Płaszów regimen passed, when Scherner and Czurda had fled, and when the impeccable files of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office had been baled up in trucks and moved away as evidence, Titsch had no need to develop the photographs, and every reason not to. In the files of ODESSA, the postwar secret society of former SS men, he would be listed as a traitor. For the fact that he’d supplied the Madritsch people with some 30,000 loaves of bread, as well as many chickens and some kilos of butter, and that for his humanity he had been honored by the Israeli Government, had received some publicity in the press. Some people made threats and hissed at him as he passed in the streets of Vienna. “Jew-kisser.” So the Płaszów reels would lie for twenty years in the soil of a small park in the suburbs of Vienna where Titsch had buried them, and might well have stayed there forever, the emulsion drying on the dark and secret images of Amon’s love Majola, his killing dogs, his nameless slave laborers. It might therefore have been seen as a sort of triumph for the population of Płaszów when, in November 1963, a Schindler survivor (leopold Pfefferberg) secretly bought the box and its contents for $500 from Raimund Titsch, who was then suffering from terminal heart disease. Even then, Raimund didn’t want the rolls developed until after his death. The nameless shadow of ODESSA frightened him more than had the names of Amon Goeth, of Scherner, of Auschwitz, in the days of Płaszów.

After his burial, the reels were developed.

Nearly all the pictures came out.

Not one of that small body of Płaszów inmates who would survive Amon and the camp itself would ever have anything accusatory to say of Raimund Titsch. But he was never the sort of man concerning whom mythologies arose. Oskar was. From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself. Through listening to such stories, one can see that to the Płaszów people, while Titsch may have been the good hermit, Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double-faced—in the Greek manner—as any small god; endowed with all the human vices; many-handed; subtly powerful; capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.

One story concerns the time when the SS police chiefs were under pressure to close Płaszów, as its reputation as an efficient industrial complex was not high with the Armaments Inspectorate.

Helen Hirsch, Goeth’s maid, often encountered officers, dinner guests, who wandered into the hallway or kitchen of the villa to escape Amon for a while and to shake their heads. An SS officer named Tibritsch, turning up in the kitchen, had said to Helen, “Doesn’t he know there are men giving their lives?” He meant on the Eastern Front, of course, not out there in the dark of Płaszów. Officers with less imperial lives than Amon were becoming outraged by what they saw at the villa or, perhaps more dangerously, envious.

As the legend has it, it was on a Sunday evening that General Julius Schindler himself visited Płaszów to decide whether its existence was of any real value to the war effort. It was an odd hour for a grand bureaucrat to be visiting a plant, but perhaps the Armaments Inspectorate, in view of the perilous winter now falling on the Eastern Front, were working desperate hours. The inspection had been preceded by dinner at Emalia, at which wine and cognac flowed, for Oskar is associated like Bacchus with the Dionysian line of gods. Because of the dinner, the inspection party rolling out to Płaszów in their Mercedeses were in a mood of less than professional detachment. In making this claim, the story ignores the fact that Schindler and his officers were all production experts and engineers with nearly four years of detachment behind them. But Oscar would be the last to be awed by that fact.

The inspection started at the Madritsch clothing factory. This was Płaszów’s showplace. During 1943, it had produced Wehrmacht uniforms at a monthly rate of better than twenty thousand. But the question was whether Herr Madritsch would do better to forget Płaszów, to spend his capital on expanding his more efficient and better-supplied Polish factories in Podgórze and Tarnow. The ramshackle conditions of Płaszów were no encouragement to Madritsch or any other investor to install the sort of machinery a sophisticated factory would need.

The official party had just begun its inspection when all the lights in all the workshops went out, the power circuit broken by friends of Itzhak Stern’s in the Płaszów generator shed. To the handicaps of drink and indigestion which Oskar had imposed on the gentlemen of the Armaments Inspectorate were now added the limitations of bad light. The inspection went ahead by flashlight, in fact, and the machinery on the benches remained inoperative and therefore less of a provocation to the inspectors’ professional feelings.

As General Schindler squinted along the beam of a flashlight at the presses and lathes in the metalworks, 30,000 Płaszówians, restless in tiered bunks, waited on his word.

Even on the overladen lines of the Ostbahn, they knew, the higher technology of Auschwitz was but a few hours’ journey west. They understood that they could not expect from General Schindler compassion as such. Production was his specialty. For him, Production was meant to be an overriding value.

Because of Schindler’s dinner and the power failure, says the myth, the people of Płaszów were saved. It is a generous fable, because in fact only a tenth of Płaszów people would be alive at the end. But Stern and others would later celebrate the story, and most of its details are probably true. For Oskar always had recourse to liquor when puzzled as to how to treat officials, and he would have liked the trickery of plunging them into darkness. “You have to remember,” said a boy whom Oskar would later save, “that Oskar had a German side but a Czech side too. He was the good soldier Schweik. He loved to foul up the system.”

It is ungracious to the myth to ask what the exacting Amon Goeth thought when the lights went out. Maybe, even on the level of literal event, he was drunk or dining elsewhere. The question is whether Płaszów survived because General Schindler was deceived by dim light and alcohol-dimmed vision, or whether it continued because it was such an excellent holding center for those weeks when the great terminus at Auschwitz-Birkenau was overcrowded. But the story says more of people’s expectations of Oskar than it does of the frightful compound of Płaszów or the final end of most of its inmates.

And while the SS and the Armaments Inspectorate considered the future of Płaszów, Josef Bau—a young artist from Cracow, whom Oskar would in the end come to know well—was falling into conspicuous and unconditional love with a girl named Rebecca Tannenbaum. Bau worked in the Construction Office as a draftsman. He was a solemn boy with an artist’s sense of destiny. He had, so to speak, escaped into Płaszów, because he had never held the correct ghetto papers. Since he had had no trade of use to the ghetto factories, he had been hidden by his mother and by friends. During the liquidation in March 1943, he’d escaped out of the walls and attached himself to the tail of a labor detail going to Płaszów. For in Płaszów there was a new industry which had had no place in the ghetto. Construction. In the same somber two-winged building in which Amon had his office, Josef Bau worked on blueprints. He was a protégé of Itzhak Stern’s, and Stern had mentioned him to Oskar as an accomplished draftsman and as a boy who had, potentially at least, skills as a forger.

He was lucky not to come into too much contact with Amon, because he displayed the air of genuine sensibility which had, before today, caused Amon to reach for his revolver. Bau’s office was on the far side of the building from Amon’s. Some prisoners worked on the ground floor, with offices near the Commandant’s. There were the purchasing officers; the clerks; Mietek Pemper, the stenographer. They faced not only a daily risk of an unexpected bullet but, more certainly than that, assaults on their sense of outrage. Mundek Korn, for example, who had been a buyer for a string of Rothschild subsidiaries before the war and who now bought the fabrics, sea grass, lumber, and iron for the prison workshops, had to work not only in the Administration Building but in the same wing where Amon had his office. One morning Korn looked up from his desk and saw through the window, across Jerozolimska Street and by the SS barracks, a boy of twenty or so years, a Cracovian of his acquaintance, urinating against the base of one of the stacks of lumber there. At the same time he saw white-shirted arms and two ham fists appear through the bathroom window at the end of the wing. The right hand held a revolver. There were two quick shots, at least one of which entered the boy’s head and drove him forward against the pile of cut wood. When Korn looked once more at the bathroom window, one white-shirted arm and free hand were engaged in closing the window.

On Korn’s desk that morning were requisition forms signed with Amon’s open-voweled but not deranged scrawl. His gaze ranged from the signature to the unbuttoned corpse at the box of lumber. Not only did he wonder if he had seen what he had seen. He sensed the seductive concept inherent in Amon’s methods. That is, the temptation to agree that if murder was no more than a visit to the bathroom, a mere pulse in the monotony of form signing, then perhaps all death should now be accepted— with whatever despair—as routine.

It does not seem that Josef Bau was exposed to such radical persuasion. He missed too the purge of the administrative staff on the ground floor right and center. It had begun when Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s protégé, complained to the Commandant that a girl in the office had acquired a rind of bacon. Amon had come raging down the corridor from his office. “You’re all getting fat!” he had screamed. He had divided the office staff into two lines then. It had been, to Korn, like a scene from the Podgórze High School: the girls in the other line so familiar to him, daughters of families he’d grown up with, Podgórze families. It could have been that a teacher was sorting them out into those who would visit the Kosciuszko Monument and those for the museum at the Wawel. In fact, the girls in the other line were taken straight from their desks to Chujowa Górka and, for the decadence of that bacon rind, gunned down by one of Pilarzik’s squads.

Though Josef Bau was not involved in such office turmoil, no one could have said that he was leading a sheltered life in Płaszów. But it had been less perilous than the experience of the girl of his choice. Rebecca Tannenbaum was an orphan, though in the clannish life of Jewish Cracow, she had not been bereft of kindly aunts and uncles. She was nineteen, sweet-faced, and neatly built. She could speak German well and made pleasant and generous conversation. Recently she’d begun to work in Stern’s office behind the Administration Building, away from the most immediate environs of the Commandant’s berserk interference. But her job in the Construction Office was only half her labor. She was a manicurist. She treated Amon weekly; she tended the hands of Untersturmführer Leo John, those of Dr. Blancke and of his lover, the harsh Alice Orlowski. Taking Amon’s hands, she had found them long and well made, with tapering fingers—not a fat man’s hands at all; certainly not those of a savage.

When a prisoner had first come to her and told her that the Herr Commandant wanted to see her, she had begun to run away, fleeing among the desks and down the back stairs. The prisoner had followed and cried after her, “For God’s sake, don’t! He’ll punish me if I don’t bring you back.”

So she had followed the man down to Goeth’s villa. But before going into the salon, she first visited the stinking cellar—this was in Goeth’s first residence, and the cellar had been dug down into the boundaries of an ancient Jewish graveyard. Down amid the grave soil, Rebecca’s friend Helen Hirsch had been nursing bruises. You have a problem, Helen admitted. But just do the job and see. That’s all you can do. Some people he likes a professional manner from, some people he doesn’t. And I’ll give you cake and sausage when you come. But don’t just take food; ask me first. Some people take food without asking, and I don’t know what I have to cover up for.

Amon did accept Rebecca’s professional manner, presenting his fingers and chatting in German. It could have been the Hotel Cracovia again, and Amon a crisp-shirted, overweight young German tycoon come to Cracow to sell textiles or steel or chemicals. There were, however, two aspects to these meetings that detracted from their air of timeless geniality. The Commandant always kept his service revolver at his right elbow, and frequently one or the other of the dogs drowsed in the salon. She had seen them, on the Appellplatz, tear the flesh of engineer Karp. Yet sometimes, as the dogs snuffled in sleep and she and Amon compared notes on prewar visits to the spa at Carlsbad, the roll-call horrors seemed remote and beyond belief. One day she felt confident enough to ask him why the revolver was always at his elbow. His answer chilled the back of her neck as she bent over his hand. “That’s in case you ever nick me,” he told her.

If she ever needed proof that a chat about spas was all the same to Amon as an act of madness, she had it the day she entered the hallway and saw him dragging her friend Helen Hirsch out of the salon by the hair—Helen striving to keep her balance and her auburn hair coming out by the roots, and Amon, if he lost his grip one second, regaining it the next in his giant, well-tended hands. And further proof came on the evening she entered the salon and one of those dogs—Rolf or Ralf— materialized, leaped at her, and, holding her by the shoulders, opened its jaw on her breast. She looked across the room and saw Amon lolling on the sofa and smiling. “Stop shaking, you stupid girl,” he told her, “or I won’t be able to save you from the hound.”

During the time she tended the Commandant’s hands, he would shoot his shoeshine boy for faulty work; hang his fifteen-year-old orderly, Poldek Deresiewicz, from the ringbolts in his office because a flea had been found on one of the dogs; and execute his servant Lisiek for lending a dróźka and horse to Bosch without first checking. Yet twice a week, the pretty orphan entered the salon and philosophically took the beast by the hand.

She met Josef Bau one gray morning when he stood outside the Bauleitung holding up a blueprint frame toward the low autumn cloud. His thin body seemed overburdened by the weight. She asked if she could help him. “No,” he said. “I’m just waiting for the sunshine.” “Why?” she asked. He explained how his transparency drawings for a new building were clamped in the frame beside sensitized blueprint paper. If the sun, he said, were only to shine harder, a mysterious chemical union would transfer the drawing from the transparency to the blueprint. Then he said, “Why don’t you be my magical sunshine?”

Pretty girls weren’t used to delicacy from boys in Płaszów. Sexuality there took its harsh impetus from the volleys heard on Chujowa Górka, the executions on the Appellplatz. Imagine a day, for instance, when a chicken is found among the work party returning from the cable factory on Wieliczka. Amon is ranting on the Appellplatz, for the chicken was discovered lying in a bag in front of the camp gate during a spot check. Whose bag was it? Amon wants to know. Whose chicken? Since no one on the Appellplatz will admit anything, Amon takes a rifle from an SS man and shoots the prisoner at the head of the line. The bullet, passing through the body, also fells the man behind. No one speaks, though. “How you love one another!” roars Amon, and prepares to execute the next man in line. A boy of fourteen steps out of the line. He is shuddering and weeping. He can say who brought the chicken in, he tells the Herr Commandant. “Who, then?” The boy points to one of the two dead men. “That one!” the boy screams. Amon astonishes the entire Appellplatz by believing the boy, and puts his head back and laughs with the sort of classroom incredulity teachers like to exhibit. These people… can’t they understand now why they’re all forfeit?

After an evening like that, in the hours of free movement between 7 and 9 P.M. most prisoners felt that there was no time for leisurely courtship. The lice plaguing your groin and armpits made a mockery of formality. Young males mounted girls without ceremony. In the women’s camp they sang a song which asked the virgin why she’d bound herself up with string and for whom she thought she was saving herself. The atmosphere was not as desperate at Emalia. In the enamel workshop, niches had been designed among the machinery on the factory floor to permit lovers to meet at greater length. There was only a theoretical segregation in the cramped barracks. The absence of daily fear, the fuller ration of daily bread made for a little less frenzy. Besides, Oskar still maintained that he would not let the SS garrison go inside the prison without his permission.

One prisoner recalls wiring installed in Oskar’s office in case any SS official did demand entry to the barracks. While the SS man was on his way downstairs, Oskar could punch a button connected to a bell inside the camp. It warned men and women, first, to stub out the illicit cigarettes supplied daily by Oskar. (“Go to my apartment,” he would tell someone on the factory floor almost daily, “and fill this cigarette case.” He would wink significantly.) The bell also warned men and women to get back to their appointed bunks. To Rebecca, it was something close to a shock, a remembrance of a vanished culture, to meet in Płaszów a boy who courted as if he’d met her in a patisserie in the Rynek.

Another morning when she came downstairs from Stern’s office, Josef showed her his work desk. He was drawing plans for yet more barracks. What’s your barrack number, and who’s your barrack Alteste? She let him know with the correct reluctance. She had seen Helen Hirsch dragged down the hallway by the hair and would die if she accidentally jabbed the cuticle of Amon’s thumb. Yet this boy had restored her to coyness, to girlhood. I’ll come and speak to your mother, he promised. I don’t have a mother, said Rebecca. Then I’ll speak to the Alteste.

That was how the courting began—with the permission of elders and as if there were world enough and time. Because he was such a fantastical and ceremonious boy, they did not kiss. It was, in fact, under Amon’s roof that they first managed a proper embrace. It was after a manicure session. Rebecca had got hot water and soap from Helen and crept up to the top floor, vacant because of renovations pending, to wash her blouse and her change of underwear. Her washtub was her mess can. It would be needed tomorrow to hold her soup.

She was working away on that small bucket of suds when Josef appeared. Why are you here? she asked him. I’m measuring for my drawings, for the renovations, he told her. And why are you here yourself? You can see, she told him. And please don’t talk too loudly.

He danced around the room, flashing the tape measure up walls and along moldings. Do it carefully, she told him, anxious because she was aware of Amon’s exacting standards.

While I’m here, he told her, I might as well measure you. He ran the tape along her arms and down her back from the nape of her neck to the small of her spine. She did not resist the way his thumb touched her, marking her dimensions. But when they had embraced each other thoroughly for a while, she ordered him out. This was no place for a languorous afternoon.

There were other desperate romances in Płaszów, even among the SS, but they proceeded less sunnily than this very proper romance between Josef Bau and the manicurist. Oberscharführer Albert Hujar, for example, who had shot Dr. Rosalia Blau in the ghetto and Diana Reiter after the foundations of the barracks collapsed, had fallen in love with a Jewish prisoner. Madritsch’s daughter had been captivated by a Jewish boy from the Tarnow ghetto—he had, of course, worked in Madritsch’s Tarnow plant until the expert ghetto-liquidator Amon had been brought in at the end of the summer to close down Tarnow as he had Cracow. Now he was in the Madritsch workshop inside Płaszów; the girl could visit him there. But nothing could come of it. The prisoners themselves had niches and shelters where lovers and spouses could meet. But everything—the law of the Reich and the strange code of the prisoners—resisted the affair between Fraulein Madritsch and her young man.

Similarly, honest Raimund Titsch had fallen in love with one of his machinists. That too was a gentle, secretive, and largely abortive love. As for Oberscharführer Hujar, he was ordered by Amon himself to stop being a fool. So Albert took the girl for a walk in the woods and with fondest regrets shot her through the nape of the neck.

It seemed, in fact, that death hung over the passions of the SS. Henry Rosner, the violinist, and his brother Leopold, the accordionist, spreading Viennese melodies around Goeth’s dinner table, were aware of it. One night a tall, slim, gray officer in the Waffen SS had visited Amon for dinner and, drinking a lot, had kept asking the Rosners for the Hungarian song “Gloomy Sunday.” The song is an emotional outpouring in which a young man is about to commit suicide for love. It had exactly the sort of excessive feeling which, Henry had noticed, appealed to SS men at their leisure. It had, in fact, enjoyed notoriety in the Thirties—governments in Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia had considered banning it because its popularity had brought on a rash of thwarted-love suicides. Young men about to blow their heads off would sometimes quote its lyrics in their suicide notes. It had long been a song proscribed by the Reich Propaganda Office. Now this tall, elegant guest, old enough to have teen-age sons and daughters, themselves caught up in the excesses of puppy love, kept walking up to the Rosner boys and saying, “Play “Gloomy Sunday.”” And though Dr. Goebbels would not have permitted it, no one in the wilds of southern Poland was going to argue with an SS field officer with unhappy memories of an affair.

After the guest had demanded the song four or five times, an unearthly conviction took hold of Henry Rosner. In its tribal origins, music was always magic. And no one in Europe had a better sense of the potency of the violin than a Cracovian Jew like Henry, who came from the sort of family in which music is not so much learned as inherited, in the same way as the status of cohen, or hereditary priest. It came to Henry now that, as he would say later—“God, if I have the power, maybe this son-of-a-bitch will kill himself.”

The proscribed music of “Gloomy Sunday” had gained legitimacy in Amon’s dining room through being repeated, and now Henry declared war with it, Leopold playing with him and reassured by the stares of almost grateful melancholy the handsome officer directed at them.

Henry sweated, believing that he was so visibly fiddling up the SS man’s death that at any moment Amon would notice and come and take him out behind the villa for execution. As for Henry’s performance, it is not relevant to ask was it good or bad. It was possessed. And only one man, the officer, noticed and assented and, across the hubbub of drunken Bosch and Scherner, Czurda and Amon, continued to look up from his chair directly into Henry’s eyes, as if he were going to jump up at any second and say, “Of course, gentlemen. The violinist is absolutely right. There’s no sense in enduring a grief like this.”

The Rosners went on repeating the song beyond the limit at which Amon would normally have shouted, “Enough!” At last the guest stood up and went out onto the balcony. Henry knew at once that everything he could do to the man had been done. He and his brother slid into some Von Suppé and Lehar, covering their tracks with full-bodied operetta. The guest remained alone on the balcony and after half an hour interrupted a good party by shooting himself through the head.

Such was sex in Płaszów. Lice, crabs, and urgency inside the wire; murder and lunacy on its fringes. And in its midst Josef Bau and Rebecca Tannenbaum pursued their ritual dance of courtship.

In the midst of the snows that year, Płaszów underwent a change of status adverse to all lovers inside the wire. In the early days of January 1944, it was designated a Konzentrationslager (concentration Camp) under the central authority of General Oswald Pohl’s SS Main Economic and Administrative Office in Oranienburg, on the outskirts of Berlin. Subcamps of Płaszów—such as Oskar Schindler’s Emalia—now also came under Oranienburg’s control. Police chiefs Scherner and Czurda lost their direct authority. The labor fees of all those prisoners employed by Oskar and Madritsch no longer went to Pomorska Street, but to the office of General Richard Glücks, head of Pohl’s Section D (concentration Camps). Oskar, if he wanted favors now, had not only to drive out to Płaszów and sweeten Amon, not only to have Julian Scherner to dinner, but also to reach certain officials in the grand bureaucratic complex of Oranienburg.

Oskar made an early opportunity to travel to Berlin and meet the people who would be dealing with his files. Oranienburg had begun as a concentration camp. Now it had become a sprawl of administrative barracks. From the offices of Section D, every aspect of prison life and death was regulated. Its chief, Richard Glücks, had responsibility as well, in consultation with Pohl, for establishing the balance between laborers and candidates for the chambers, for the equation in which X represented slave labor and y represented the more immediately condemned. Glücks had laid down procedures for every event, and from his department came memos drafted in the anesthetic jargon of the planner, the paper shuffler, the detached specialist.

In this eerie chancellory, some files discussed the length a prisoner’s hair should be before it was considered of economic use for “the manufacture of hair-yarn socks for U-boat crews and hair-felt footwear for the Reichs railway,” while others debated whether the form registering “death cases” should be filed by eight departments or merely covered by letter and appended to the personnel records as soon as the index card had been brought up to date. And here Herr Oskar Schindler of Cracow came to talk about his little industrial compound in Zablocie. They appointed someone of middle status to handle him, a personnel officer of field rank.

Oskar wasn’t distressed. There were larger employers of Jewish prison labor than he. There were the megaliths, Krupp, of course, and I. G. Farben. There was the Cable Works at Płaszów. Walter C. Toebbens, the Warsaw industrialist whom Himmler had tried to force into the Wehrmacht, was a heavier employer of labor than Herr Schindler. Then there were the steelworks at Stalowa Wola, the aircraft factories at Budzyn and Zakopane, the Steyour-Daimler-Puch works at Radom.

The personnel officer had the plans of Emalia on his desk. I hope, he said curtly, you don’t want to increase the size of your camp. It would be impossible to do it without courting a typhus epidemic.

Oskar waved that suggestion aside. He was interested in the permanence of his labor force, he said. He had had a talk on that matter, he told the officer, with a friend of his, Colonel Erich Lange. The name, Oskar could tell, meant something to the SS man. Oskar produced a letter from the Colonel, and the personnel officer sat back reading it. The office was silent—all you could hear from other rooms was pen-scratch and the whisper of papers and quiet, earnest talk, as if none here knew that they lay at the core of a network of screams.

Colonel Lange was a man of influence, Chief of Staff of the Armaments Inspectorate at Army Headquarters, Berlin. Oskar had met him at a party at General Schindler’s office in Cracow. They had liked each other almost at once. It happened a lot at parties that two people could sense in each other a certain resistance to the regime and might retire to a corner to test each other out and perhaps establish friendship. Erich Lange had been appalled by the factory camps of Poland—by the I. G. Farben works at Buna, for example, where foremen adopted the SS “work tempo” and made prisoners unload cement on the run; where the corpses of the starved, the broken were hurled into ditches built for cables and covered, together with the cables, with cement. “You are not here to live but to perish in concrete,” a plant manager had told newcomers, and Lange had heard the speech and felt damned.

His letter to Oranienburg had been preceded by some phone calls, and calls and letter both promoted the same proposition: Herr Schindler, with his mess kits and his 45mm antitank shells, is considered by this Inspectorate to be a major contributor to the struggle for our national survival. He has built up a staff of skilled specialists, and nothing should be done to disrupt the work they perform under the Herr Direktor Schindler’s supervision.

The personnel officer was impressed and said he would speak frankly to Herr Schindler. There were no plans to alter the status or interfere with the population of the camp in Zablocie. However, the Herr Direktor had to understand that the situation of Jews, even skilled armaments workers, was always risky. Take the case of our own SS enterprises. Ostindustrie, the SS company, employs prisoners in a peat works, a brush factory and iron foundry in Lublin, equipment factories in Radom, a fur works in Trawniki. But other branches of the SS shoot the work force continually, and now Osti is for all practical purposes out of business.

Likewise, at the killing centers, the staff never retains a sufficient percentage of prisoners for factory work. This has been a matter of frequent correspondence, but they’re intransigent, those people in the field. “Of course,” said the personnel officer, tapping the letter, “I’ll do what I can for you.”

“I understand the problem,” said Oskar, looking up at the SS man with that radiant smile.

“If there is any way I can express my gratitude….”

In the end, Oskar left Oranienburg with at least some guarantees about the continuity of his backyard camp in Cracow.

The manner in which the new status of Płaszów impinged on lovers was that a proper penal separation of the sexes—such as was provided for in a series of SS Main Office of Economics and Administration memos—was created. The fences between the men’s prison and the women’s, the perimeter fence, the fence around the industrial sector were all electrified. The voltage, the spacing of wires, the number of electrified strands and insulators were all provided for by Main Office directives.

Amon and his officers were not slow to notice the disciplinary possibilities involved. Now you could stand people for twenty-four hours at a time between the electrified outer fence and the inner, neutral, original fence. If they staggered with weariness, they knew that inches behind their backs ran the hundreds of volts. Mundek Korn, for example, found himself, on returning to camp with a work party from which one prisoner was missing, standing in that narrow gulf for a day and a night.

But perhaps worse than the risk of falling against the wire was the way the current ran, from the end of evening roll call to reveille in the morning, like a moat between man and woman. Time for contact was now reduced to the short phase of milling on the Appellplatz, before the orders for falling into line were shouted. Each couple devised a tune, whistling it among the crowds, straining to pick up the answering refrain amid a forest of sibilance. Rebecca Tannenbaum also settled on a code tune. The requirements of General Pohl’s Main SS Office had forced the prisoners of Płaszów to adopt the mating stratagems of birds. And by these means, the formal romance of Rebecca and Josef went forward.

Then Josef somehow got a dead woman’s dress from the clothing warehouse. Often, after roll call in the men’s lines, he would go to the latrines, put on the long gown, and place an Orthodox bonnet on his hair. Then he would come out and join the women’s lines. His short hair would not have amazed any SS guard, since most of the women had been shorn because of lice. So, with 13,000 women prisoners, he would pass into the women’s compound and spend the night sitting up in Hut 57 keeping Rebecca company.

In Rebecca’s barracks, the older women took Josef at his word. If Josef required a traditional courtship, they would fall into their traditional roles as chaperones. Josef was therefore a gift to them too, a license to play their prewar ceremonious selves. From their four-tiered bunks they looked down on the two children until everyone fell asleep. If any one of them thought, Let’s not be too fussy in times like these about what the children get up to in the dead of night, it was never said. In fact, two of the older women would crowd onto one narrow ledge so that Josef could have a bunk of his own. The discomfort, the smell of the other body, the risk of the migration of lice from your friend to yourself—none of that was as important, as crucial to self-respect as that the courtship should be fulfilled according to the norms. At the end of winter, Josef, wearing the armband of the Construction Office, went out into the strangely immaculate snow in the strip between the inner fence and the electrified barrier and, steel measure in hand, under the eyes of the domed watchtowers, pretended to be sizing up no-man’s-land for some architectural reason.

At the base of the concrete stanchions studded with porcelain insulators grew the first tiny flowers of that year. Flashing his steel ruler, he picked them and shoved them into his jacket. He brought the flowers across the camp, up Jerozolimska Street. He was passing Amon’s villa, his chest stuffed with blossoms, when Amon himself appeared from the front door and advanced, towering, down the steps. Josef Bau stopped. It was most dangerous to stop, to appear to be in arrested motion in front of Amon. But having stopped, he seemed frozen there. He feared that the heart he’d so energetically and honestly signed over to the orphan Rebecca would likely now become just another of Amon’s targets.

But when Amon walked past him, not noticing him, not objecting to his standing there with an idle ruler in his hands, Josef Bau concluded that it meant some kind of guarantee. No one escaped Amon unless it was a sort of destiny.

All dolled up in his shooting uniform, Amon had entered the camp unexpectedly one day through the back gate and had found the Warrenhaupt girl lolling in a limousine at the garage, staring at herself in the rearview mirror. The car windows she’d been assigned to clean were still smudged. He had killed her for that. And there was that mother and daughter Amon had noticed through a kitchen window. They had been peeling potatoes too slowly. So he’d leaned in on the sill and shot both of them. Yet here at his steps was something he hated, a stock-still Jewish lover and draftsman, steel ruler dangling in his hands. And Amon had walked by. Bau felt the urge to confirm this outrageous good luck by some emphatic act. Marriage was, of course, the most emphatic act of all.

He got back to the Administration Building, climbed the stairs to Stern’s office and, finding Rebecca, asked her to marry him. Urgency, Rebecca was pleased and concerned to notice, had entered the business now.

That evening, in the dead woman’s dress, he visited his mother again and the council of chaperones in Hut 57. They awaited only the arrival of a rabbi. But if rabbis came, they remained only a few days on their way to Auschwitz—not long enough for people requiring the rites of kiddushin and nissuin to locate them and ask them, before they stepped into the furnace, for a final exercise of their priesthood.

Josef married Rebecca on a Sunday night of fierce cold in February. There was no rabbi. Mrs. Bau, Josef’s mother, officiated. They were Reformed Jews, so that they could do without a ketubbah written in Aramaic. In the workshop of Wulkan the jeweler someone had made up two rings out of a silver spoon Mrs. Bau had had hidden in the rafters. On the barracks floor, Rebecca circled Josef seven times and Josef crushed glass—a spent light bulb from the Construction Office—beneath his heel.

The couple had been given the top bunk of the tier. For the sake of privacy, it had been hung with blankets. In darkness Josef and Rebecca climbed to it, and all around them the earthy jokes were running. At weddings in Poland there was always a period of truce when profane love was given its chance to speak. If the wedding guests didn’t wish to voice the traditional double entendres themselves, they could bring in a professional wedding jester. Women who might in the Twenties and Thirties have sat up at weddings making disapproving faces at the risqu’e hired jester and the belly-laughing men, only now and then permitting themselves, as mature women, to be overcome with amusement, stepped tonight into the place of all the absent and dead wedding jesters of southern Poland.

Josef and Rebecca had not been together more than ten minutes on the upper bunk when the barracks lights came on. Looking through the blankets, Josef saw Untersturmführer Scheidt patrolling the canyons of bunks. The same old fearful sense of destiny overcame Josef. They’d found he was missing from his barracks, of course, and sent one of the worst of the officers to look for him in his mother’s hut. Amon had been blinded to him that day outside the villa only so that Scheidt, who was quick on the trigger, could come and kill him on his wedding night!

He knew too that all the women were compromised—his mother, his bride, the witnesses, the ones who’d uttered the most exquisitely embarrassing jokes. He began murmuring apologies, pleas to be forgiven. Rebecca told him to be quiet. She took down the screen of blankets. At this time of night, she reasoned, Scheidt wasn’t going to climb to a top bunk unless provoked. The women on the lower bunks were passing their small straw-filled pillows to her. Josef might well have orchestrated the courtship, but he was now the child to be concealed. Rebecca pushed him hard up into the corner of the bunk and covered him with pillows. She watched Scheidt pass below her, leave the barracks by its back door. The lights went out. Among a last spatter of dark, earthy jokes, the Baus were restored to their privacy.

Within minutes, the sirens began to sound. Everyone sat up in the darkness. The noise meant to Bau that yes, they were determined to stamp out this ritual marriage. They had found his empty bunk over in the men’s quarters and were now seriously hunting him.

In the dark aisle, the women were milling. They knew it too. From the top bunk he could hear them saying it. His old-fashioned love would kill them all. The barracks Alteste, who’d been so decent about the whole thing, would be shot first once the lights came on and they found a bridegroom there in token female rags.

Josef Bau grabbed his clothes. He kissed his wife perfunctorily, slid to the floor, and ran from the hut. In the darkness outside, the wail of the sirens pierced him. He ran in dirty snow, with his jacket and old dress bundled up under his armpits. When the lights came on, he would be seen by the towers. But he had the berserk idea that he could beat the lights over the fence, that he could even climb it between the alternations of its current. Once back in the men’s camp, he could make up some story about diarrhea, about having gone to the latrines and collapsed on the floor, being brought back to consciousness by the noise of sirens.

But even if electrocuted, he understood as he sprinted, he could not then confess what woman he was visiting. Racing for the fatal wire, he did not understand that there would have to be a classroomlike scene on the Appellplatz and that Rebecca would be made, one way or another, to step forward.

In the fence between the men’s and women’s camps in Płaszów ran nine electrified strands. Josef Bau launched himself high, so that his feet would find purchase on the third of the strands and his hands, at the stretch, might reach the second from the top. He imagined himself then as racing over the strands with a ratlike quickness. In fact he landed in the mesh of wire and simply hung there. He thought the coldness of the metal in his hands was the first message of the current. But there was no current.

There were no lights. Josef Bau, stretched on the fence, did not speculate on the reason there wasn’t any voltage. He got to the top and vaulted into the men’s camp. You’re a married man, he told himself. He slid into the latrines by the washhouses. “A frightful diarrhea. Herr Oberscharführer.”

He stood gasping in the stench. Amon’s blindness on the day of the flowers… the consummation, waited forwith an untoward patience, twice interrupted… Scheidt and the sirens… a problem with the lights and the wire—staggering and gagging, he wondered if he could support the ambiguity of his life. Like others, he wanted a more definite rescue. He wandered out to be one of the last to join the lines in front of his hut. He was trembling, but sure the Alteste would cover up for him. “Yes, Herr Untersturmführer, I gave Häftling Bau permission to visit the latrines.”

They weren’t looking for him at all. They were looking for three young Zionists who’d escaped in a truckload of product from the upholstery works, where they made Wehrmacht mattresses out of sea grass.