Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 28

In Amon’s office in the Administration Building there were two typists. One was a young German woman, a Frau Kochmann; the other, a studious young prisoner, Mietek Pemper. Pemper would one day become secretary to Oskar, but in the summer of ‘44 he worked with Amon, and like anyone else in that situation was not too sanguine about his chances.

He first came into close contact with Amon as accidentally as had Helen Hirsch, the maid. Pemper was summoned to Amon’s office after someone had recommended him to the Commandant. The young prisoner was a student of accounting, a touch typist, and could take dictation in both Polish and German shorthand. His powers of memory were said to be a byword. So, a prisoner of his skills, Pemper found himself in Płaszów’s main office with Amon, and would also sometimes take dictation from Amon at the villa.

The irony was that Pemper’s photographic memory would in the end, more than the memory of any other prisoner, bring about the hanging of Amon in Cracow. But Pemper did not believe such an era would come. In 1944, if he’d had to guess who’d be the most likely victim of his near-perfect recall, he would have had to say Mietek Pemper himself.

Pemper was meant to be the backup typist. For confidential documents, Amon was to use Frau Kochmann, a woman not nearly as competent as Mietek and slow at dictation. Sometimes Amon would break the rule and let young Pemper take confidential dictation. And Mietek, even while he sat across Amon’s desk with the pad on his knee, could not stop contradictory suspicions from distracting him. The first was that all these inside reports and memoranda, whose details he was retaining, would make him a prime witness on the remote day when he and Amon stood before a tribunal. The other suspicion was that Amon would, in the end, have to erase him as one later would a classified tape.

Nonetheless, Mietek prepared each morning not only his own sets of typing paper, carbons, and duplicates, but a dozen for the German girl. After the girl had done her typing, Pemper would pretend to destroy the carbons, but in fact would keep and read them. He kept no written records, but he had had this reputation for memory since school days. He knew that if that tribunal ever met, if he and Amon sat in the body of the court, he would astound the Commandant with the precise dating of his evidence.

Pemper saw some astonishing classified documents. He read, for example, memoranda on the flogging of women. Camp commanders were to be reminded that it should be done to maximum effect. It was demeaning to involve SS personnel, and therefore Czech women were to be flogged by Slovak women, Slovaks by Czechs. Russians and Poles were to be bracketed for the same purposes.

Commandants were to use their imagination in exploiting other national and cultural differences.

Another bulletin reminded them that they did not hold in their own persons the right to impose the death sentence. Commandants could seek authorization by telegram or letter to the Reich Security Main Office. Amon had done this in the spring with two Jews who’d escaped from the subcamp at Wieliczka and whom he proposed to hang. A telegram of permission had returned from Berlin, signed, Pemper noticed, by Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the Reich Security Main Office.

Now, in April, Pemper read a memorandum from Gerhard Maurer, the Labor Allocation Chief of General Glücks’s Section D.

Maurer wanted Amon to tell him how many Hungarians could be held temporarily at Płaszów. They were meant ultimately to go to the German Armament Works, DAW, which was a subsidiary of Krupp making artillery-shell fuses in the enormous complex at Auschwitz. Given that Hungary had only recently been taken over as a German Protectorate, these Hungarian Jews and dissidents were in a better state of health than those who had had years of ghettoization and prison life. They were therefore a windfall for the factories of Auschwitz.

Unfortunately, accommodation at DAW was not yet ready for them, and if the commandant of Płaszów would take up to 7,000, pending the proper arrangements, Section D would be extremely grateful.

Goeth’s answer, either seen or typed by Pemper, was that Płaszów was up to capacity and that there was no building space left inside the electric fences. However, Amon could accept up to 10,000 transit prisoners if (a) he were permitted to liquidate the unproductive element inside the camp; and (b) he were at the same time to impose double bunking. Maurer wrote in reply that double bunking could not be permitted in summer for fear of typhus, and that ideally, according to the regulations, there should be a minimum 3 cubic meters of air per person.

But he was willing to authorize Goeth to undertake the first option. Section D would advise Auschwitz-Birkenau—or at least, the extermination wing of that great enterprise—to expect a shipment of reject prisoners from Płaszów. At the same time, Ostbahn transport would be arranged with cattle cars, of course, run up the spur from the main line to the very gate of Płaszów.

Amon therefore had to conduct a sorting-out process inside his camp.

With the blessing of Maurer and Section D, he would in a day abolish as many lives as Oskar Schindler was, by wit and reckless spending, harboring in Emalia. Amon named his selection session Die Gesundheitaktion, the Health Action.

He managed it as one would manage a country fair. When it began, on the morning of Sunday, May 7, the Appellplatz was hung with banners: “FOR EVERY PRISONER, APPROPRIATE WORK!” Loudspeakers played ballads and Strauss and love songs. Beneath them was set a table where Dr. Blancke, the SS physician, sat with Dr. Leon Gross and a number of clerks. Blancke’s concept of “health” was as eccentric as that of any doctor in the SS. He had rid the prison clinic of the chronically ill by injecting benzine into their bloodstreams. These injections could not by anyone’s definition be called mercy killings. The patient was seized by convulsions which ended in a choking death after a quarter of an hour. Marek Biberstein, once president of the Judenrat and now, after his two-year imprisonment in Montelupich Street, a citizen of Płaszów, had suffered heart failure and been brought to the Krankenstube. Before Blancke could get to him with a benzine syringe, Dr. Idek Schindel, uncle of that Genia whose distant figure had galvanized Schindler two years before, had come to Biberstein’s bedside with a number of colleagues. One had injected a more merciful dose of cyanide.

Today, flanked by the filing cabinets of the entire prison population, Blancke would deal with the prisoners a barracks at a time, and when he finished with one battery of cards it would be taken away and replaced by the next.

As they reached the Appellplatz, prisoners were told to strip. They were lined up naked and run back and forth in front of the doctors. Blancke and Leon Gross, the collaborating Jewish physician, would make notations on the card, point at this prisoner, call on that one to verify his name. Back the prisoners would run, the physicians looking for signs of disease or muscular weakness. It was an odd and humiliating exercise. Men with dislocated backs (pfefferberg, for example, whose back Hujar had thrown out with the blow of a whip handle); women with chronic diarrhea, red cabbage rubbed into their cheeks to give them color—all of them running for their lives and understanding that it was so. Young Mrs. Kinstlinger, who’d sprinted for Poland at the Berlin Olympics, knew that all that had been just a game. This was the true contest. With your stomach turning and your breath thin, you ran—beneath the throb of the lying music—for your golden life. No prisoner found out the results until the following Sunday when, under the same banners and band music, the mass of inmates was again assembled. As names were read out and the rejects of the Gesundheitaktion were marched to the eastern end of the square, there were cries of outrage and bewilderment. Amon had expected a riot and had sought the help of the Wehrmacht garrison of Cracow, who were on standby in case of a prisoner uprising. Nearly 300 children had been discovered during the inspection the previous Sunday, and as they were now dragged away, the protests and wailings of parents were so loud that most of the garrison, together with Security Police detachments called in from Cracow, had to be thrown into the cordon separating the two groups. This confrontation lasted for hours, the guards forcing back surges of demented parents and telling the usual lies to those who had relatives among the rejects. Nothing had been announced, but everyone knew that those down there had failed the test and had no future. Blurred by waltzes and comic songs from the loudspeakers, a pitiable babel of messages was shouted from one group to the other. Henry Rosner, himself in torment, his son, Olek, in fact hidden somewhere in the camp, had the bizarre experience of facing a young SS man who, with tears in his eyes, denounced what was happening and made a pledge to volunteer for the Eastern Front. But officers shouted that unless people showed a little discipline, they would order their men to open fire. Perhaps Amon hoped that a justifiable outbreak of shooting would further reduce the overcrowding.

At the end of the process, 1,400 adults and 268 children stood, hedged in by weapons, at the eastern rim of the Appellplatz, ready for fast shipment to Auschwitz. Pemper would see and memorize the figures, which Amon would consider disappointing. Though it was not the number for which Amon had hoped, it would create immediate room for a large temporary intake of Hungarians.

In Dr. Blancke’s card-file system, the children of Płaszów had not been as precisely registered as the adults. Many of them chose to spend both these Sundays in hiding, both they and their parents knowing instinctively that their age and the absence of their names and other details from the camp’s documentation would make them obvious targets of the selection process.

Olek Rosner hid in the ceiling of a hut on the second Sunday. There were two other children with him all day above the rafters, and all day they kept the discipline of silence, all day held their bladders among the lice and the little packages of prisoners’ belongings and the rooftop rats. For the children knew as well as any adult that the SS and the Ukrainians were wary of the spaces above the ceiling. They believed them typhus-ridden, and had been informed by Dr. Blancke that it took but a fragment of louse feces in a crack in your skin to bring on epidemic typhus. Some of Płaszów’s children had been housed for months near the men’s prison in the hut marked ACHTUNG TYPHUS.

This Sunday, for Olek Rosner, Amon’s health Aktion was far more perilous than typhus-bearing lice. Other children, some of the 268 separated out of the mass that day, had in fact begun the Aktion in hiding. Each Płaszów child, with that same toughness of mind, had chosen a favorite hiding place. Some favored depressions beneath huts, some the laundry, some a shed behind the garage. Many of these hideouts had been discovered either this Sunday or last, and no longer offered refuge.

A further group had been brought without suspicion to the Appellplatz. There were parents who knew this or that NCO. It was as Himmler had once complained, for even SS Oberscharführers who did not flinch in the act of execution had their favorites, as if the place were a school playground. If there was a question about the children, some parents thought, you could appeal to an SS man who knew you.

The previous Sunday a thirteen-year-old orphan thought he’d be safe because he had, at other roll calls, passed for a young man. But naked, he wasn’t able to argue away the childlikeness of his body. He had been told to dress and been marked down for the children’s group.

Now, as parents at the other end of the Appellplatz cried out for their rounded-up children and while the loudspeakers brayed forth a sentimental song called “Mammi, kauf mir ein Pferdchen” (mummy, buy me a pony), the boy simply passed from one group to another, moved with that infallible instinct which had once characterized the movement of the red-capped child in Plac Zgody. And as with Redcap, no one had seen him. He stood, a plausible adult among the others, as the hateful music roared and his heart sought to beat its way through his rib cage. Then, faking the cramps of diarrhea, he asked a guard to let him go to the latrine.

The long latrines lay beyond the men’s camp, and arriving there the boy stepped over the plank on which men sat while defecating. An arm either side of the pit, he lowered himself, trying to find knee- and toeholds in either wall. The stench blinded him, and flies invaded his mouth and ears and nostrils. As he entered the larger foulness and touched the bottom of the pit, he seemed to hear what he believed to be a hallucinatory murmur of voices behind the rage of flies. were they behind you? said one voice. And another said, Dammit, this is our place!

There were ten children in there with him. Amon’s report made use of the compound word Sonderbehandlung—Special Treatment.

It was a term that would become famous in later years, but this was the first time that Pemper had come across it. Of course, it had a sedative, even medical ring, but Mietek could tell by now that medicine was not involved.

A telegram Amon dictated that morning to be transmitted to Auschwitz gave more than a hint of its meaning. Amon explained that to make escape more difficult he had insisted that those selected for Special Treatment should drop any remnants of civilian clothing they still possessed at the rail siding and should put on striped prison clothes there. Since a great shortage of such garments prevailed, the stripes in which the Płaszów candidates for Special Treatment turned up at Auschwitz should be sent back at once to Concentration Camp Płaszów for reuse.

And all the children left in Płaszów, of whom the greatest number were those who shared the latrine with the tall orphan, hid out or impersonated adults until later searches discovered them and took them to the Ostbahn for the slow day’s journey 60 kilometers to Auschwitz. The cattle cars were used that way all through high summer, taking troops and supplies east to the stalemated lines near Lwów and, on the return trip, wasting time at sidings while SS doctors watched ceaseless lines of the naked run before them.