Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 31

At some point in any discussion of Schindler, the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will blink and shake their heads and begin the almost mathematical business of finding the sum of his motives. For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still “I don’t know why he did it.” It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which, in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia.

And not only for them. In early September he drove to Podgórze and visited Madritsch, who at that point employed more than 3,000 prisoners in his uniform factory. This plant would now be disbanded. Madritsch would get his sewing machines back, and his workers would vanish. If we made a combined approach, said Oskar, we could get more than four thousand out. Mine and yours as well. We could relocate them in something like safety. Down in Moravia.

Madritsch would always and justly be revered by his surviving prisoners. The bread and chickens smuggled into his factory were paid for from his pocket and at continuous risk. He would have been considered a more stable man than Oskar. Not as flamboyant, and not as subject to obsession. He had not suffered arrest. But he had been much more humane than was safe and, without wit and energy, would have ended in Auschwitz.

Now Oskar presented to him a vision of a Madritsch-Schindler camp somewhere in the High Jeseniks; some smoky, safe little industrial hamlet.

Madritsch was attracted by the idea but did not rush to say yes. He could tell that though the war was lost, the SS system had become more instead of less implacable. He was correct in believing that, unhappily, the prisoners of Płaszów would—in coming months—be consumed in death camps to the west. For if Oskar was stubborn and possessed, so were the SS Main Office and their prize field operatives, the commandants of the Concentration Camps.

He did not say no, however. He needed time to think about it. Though he couldn’t say it to Oskar, it is likely he was afraid of sharing factory premises with a rash, demonic fellow like Herr Schindler.

Without any clear word from Madritsch, Oskar took to the road. He went to Berlin and bought dinner for Colonel Erich Lange. I can go completely over to the manufacture of shells, Oskar told Lange. I can transfer my heavy machinery.

Lange was crucial. He could guarantee contracts; he could write the hearty recommendations Oskar needed for the Evacuation Board and the German officials in Moravia. Later, Oskar would say of this shadowy staff officer that he had given consistent help. Lange was still in that state of exalted desperation and moral disgust characteristic of many who had worked inside the system but not always for it. We can do it, said Lange but it will take some money. Not for me. For others.

Through Lange, Oskar talked with an officer of the Evacuation Board at OKH on Bendler Street. It was likely, said this officer, that the evacuation would be approved in principle. But there was a major obstacle. The Governor cum Gauleiter of Moravia, ruling from a castle at Liberec, had followed a policy of keeping Jewish labor camps out of his province.

Neither the SS nor the Armaments Inspectorate had so far persuaded him to change his attitude. A good man to discuss this impasse with, said the officer, would be a middle-aged Wehrmacht engineer down in the Troppau office of the Armaments Inspectorate, a man named Sussmuth. Oskar could talk to Sussmuth too about what relocation sites were available in Moravia. Meanwhile, Herr Schindler could count on the support of the Main Evacuation Board. “But you can understand that in view of the pressure they are under, and the inroads the war has made on their personal comforts, they are more likely to give a quick answer if you could be considerate to them in some way. We poor city fellows are short of ham, cigars, liquor, cloth, coffee… that sort of thing.”

The officer seemed to think that Oskar carried around with him half the peacetime produce of Poland. Instead, to get together a gift parcel for the gentlemen of the board, Oskar had to buy luxuries at the Berlin black-market rate.

An old gentleman on the desk at the Hotel Adlon was able to acquire excellent schnapps for Herr Schindler for a discount price of about 80 RM. a bottle. And you couldn’t send the gentlemen of the board less than a dozen. Coffee, however, was like gold, and Havanas were at an insane price. Oskar bought them in quantity and included them in the hamper. The gentlemen might need a head of steam if they were to bring the Governor of Moravia around. In the midst of Oskar’s negotiations, Amon Goeth was arrested.

Someone must have informed on him. Some jealous junior officer, or a concerned citizen who’d visited the villa and been shocked by Amon’s sybaritic style. A senior SS investigator named Eckert began to look at Amon’s financial dealings. The shots Amon had taken from the balcony were not germane to Eckert’s investigation. But the embezzlements and the black-market dealings were, as were complaints from some of his SS inferiors that he had treated them severely.

Amon was on leave in Vienna, staying with his father, the publisher, when the SS arrested him. They also raided an apartment Hauptsturmführer Goeth kept in the city and discovered a cache of money, some 80,000 RM., which Amon could not explain to their satisfaction. They found as well, stacked to the ceiling, close to a million cigarettes. Amon’s Viennese apartment, it seemed, was more warehouse than pied à terre.

It might be at first sight surprising that the SS—OR rather, the officers of Bureau V of the Reich Security Main Office—should want to arrest such an effective servant as Hauptsturmführer Goeth. But they had already investigated irregularities in Buchenwald and tried to pin the Commandant, Koch. They had even attempted to find evidence for the arrest of the renowned Rudolf Hóss, and had questioned a Viennese Jewess who, they suspected, was pregnant by this star of the camp system. So Amon, raging in his apartment while they ransacked it, had no cause to hope for much immunity.

They took him to Breslau and put him in an SS prison to await investigation and trial. They showed their innocence of the way affairs were run in Płaszów by going to the villa and questioning Helen Hirsch on suspicion of her being involved in Amon’s swindles. Twice in coming months she would be taken to the cells beneath the SS barracks of Płaszów for interrogation. They fired questions at her about Amon’s contacts on the black market—who his agents were, how he worked the jewelry shop at Płaszów, the custom-tailoring shop, the upholstery plant. No one hit her or threatened her. But it was their conviction that she was a member of a gang that tormented her. If Helen had ever thought of an unlikely and glorious salvation, she would not have dared dream that Amon would be arrested by his own people. But she felt her sanity going now in the interrogation room, when under their law they tried to shackle her to Amon. Chilowicz might have been able to help you, she told them. But Chilowicz is dead.

They were policemen by trade, and after a time would decide she could give them nothing except a little information about the sumptuous cuisine at the villa Goeth. They could have asked her about her scars, but they knew they couldn’t get Amon on grounds of sadism. Investigating sadism in the camp at Sachsenhausen, they’d been forced off the prem-ises by armed guards. In Buchenwald they had found a material witness, an NCO, to testify against the Commandant, but the informer had been found dead in his cell. The head of that SS investi-gating team ordered that samples of a poison found in the NCO’S stomach be administered to four Russian prisoners. He watched them die, and so had his proof against the Commandant and the camp doctor. Even though he got prosecutions for murder and sadistic practice, it was a strange justice. Above all, it made the camp personnel close ranks and dispose of living evidence. So the men of Bureau V did not question Helen about her injuries. They stuck to embezzlement, and in the end stopped troubling her. They investigated Mietek Pemper too.

He was wise enough not to tell them much about Amon, certainly not about his crimes against humans. He knew little but rumors of Amon’s frauds.

He played the neutral and well-mannered typist of nonclassified material. “The Herr Commandant would never discuss such matters with me,” he pleaded continually. But beneath his performance, he must have suffered the same howling disbelief as Helen Hirsch. If there was one event most likely to guarantee him a chance of life, it was Amon’s arrest. For there had been no more certain limit to his life than this: that when the Russians reached Tarnow, Amon would dictate his last letters and then assassinate the typist. What worried Mietek, therefore, was that they would release Amon too soon.

But they were not interested solely in the question of Amon’s speculations. The SS judge who questioned Pemper had been told by Oberscharführer Lorenz Landsdorfer that Hauptsturmführer Goeth had let his Jewish stenographer type up the directives and plans to be followed by the Płaszów garrison in the case of an assault on the camp by partisans. Amon, in explaining to Pemper how the typing of these plans should be set out, had even shown him copies of similar plans for other concentration camps. The judge was so alarmed by this disclosure of secret documents to a Jewish prisoner that he ordered Pemper’s arrest.

Pemper spent two miserable weeks in a cell beneath the SS barracks. He was not beaten, but was questioned regularly by a series of Bureau V investigators and by two SS judges. He thought he could read in their eyes the conclusion that the safest thing was to shoot him. One day during questioning about Płaszów’s emergency plans, Pemper asked his interrogators, “Why keep me here? A prison is a prison. I have a life sentence anyhow.” It was an argument calculated to bring a resolution, either release from the cells or else a bullet. After the session ended, Pemper spent some hours of anxiety until his cell door opened again. He was marched out and returned to his hut in the camp. It was not the last time, however, that he would be questioned on subjects relating to Commandant Goeth. It seemed that following his arrest, Amon’s juniors did not rush to give him references. They were careful. They waited. Bosch, who’d drunk so much of the Commandant’s liquor, told Untersturmführer John that it was dangerous to try to bribe these determined investigators from Bureau V. As for Amon’s seniors, Scherner was gone, assigned to hunting partisans, and would in the end be killed in an ambush in the forests of Niepolomice. Amon was in the hands of men from Oranienburg who’d never dined at the Goethhaus—or, if they had, had been either shocked or touched by envy. After her release by the SS, Helen Hirsch, now working for the new Commandant, Hauptsturmführer Büscher, received a friendly note from Amon asking her to get together a parcel of clothes, some romances and detective novels, and some liquor to comfort him in his cell. It was, she thought, like a letter from a relative. “Would you kindly gather for me the following,” it said, and ended with “Hoping to see you again soon.” Meanwhile Oskar had been down to the market city of Troppau to see engineer Sussmuth. He’d brought along liquor and diamonds, but they weren’t needed in this case. Sussmuth told Oskar that he had already proposed that some small Jewish work camps be set up in the border towns of Moravia to turn out goods for the Armaments Inspectorate. Such camps would, of course, be under the central control of either Auschwitz or Gróss-Rosen, for the areas of influence of the big concentration camps crossed the Polish-Czechoslovak border. But there was more safety for prisoners in little work camps than could be found in the grand necropolis of Auschwitz itself. Sussmuth had got nowhere, of course. The Castle at Liberec had trampled on the proposal. He had never had a lever. Oskar— the support Oskar had from Colonel Lange and the gentlemen of the Evacuation Board—that could be the lever.

Sussmuth had in his office a list of sites suitable to receive plants evacuated from the war zone. Near Oskar’s hometown of Zwittau, on the edge of a village called Brinnlitz, was a great textile plant owned by the Viennese brothers Hoffman. They’d been in butter and cheese in their home city, but had come to the Sudetenland behind the legions (just as Oskar had gone to Cracow) and become textile magnates. An entire annex of their plant lay idle, used as a storehouse for obsolete spinning machines. A site like that was served from the rail depot at Zwittau, where Schindler’s brother-in-law was in charge of the freight yard. And a railway loop ran close to the gates. The brothers are profiteers, said Sussmuth, smiling. They have some local party backing—the County Council and the District Leader are in their pockets. But you have Colonel Lange behind you.

I will write to Berlin at once, Sussmuth promised, and recommend the use of the Hoffman annex.

Oskar knew the Germanic village of Brinnlitz from his childhood. Its racial character was in its name, since the Czechs would have called it Brnenec, just as a Czech Zwittau would have become Zvitava. The Brinnlitz citizens would not fancy a thousand or more Jews in their neighborhood. The Zwittau people, from whom some of Hoffman’s workers were recruited, would not like it either, this contamination, so late in the war, of their rustic-industrial backwater.

In any case, Oskar drove down to take a quick look at the site. He did not approach Hoffman Brothers’ front office, since that would give the tougher Hoffman brother, the one who chaired the company, too much warning. But he was able to wander into the annex without being challenged. It was an old-fashioned two-story industrial barracks built around a courtyard. The ground floor was high-ceilinged and full of old machines and crates of wool. The upper floor must have been intended as offices and for lighter equipment. Its floor would not stand the weight of the big pressing machines. Downstairs would do for the new workshops of DEF, as offices and, in one corner, the Herr Direktor’s apartment. Upstairs would be barracks for the prisoners.

He was delighted with the place. He drove back to Cracow yearning to get started, to spend the necessary money, to talk to Madritsch again. For Sussmuth could find a site for Madritsch too—perhaps even floor space in Brinnlitz.

When he got back, he found that an Allied bomber, shot down by a Luftwaffe fighter, had crashed on the two end barracks in the backyard prison. Its blackened fuselage sat crookedly across the wreckage of the flattened huts. Only a small squad of prisoners had been left behind in Emalia to wind up production and maintain the plant. They had seen it come down, flaming. There had been two men inside, and their bodies had burned. The Luftwaffe people who came to take them away had told Adam Garde that the bomber was a Stirling and that the men were Australian. One, who was holding the charred remnants of an English Bible, must have crashed with it in his hand. Two others had parachuted in the suburbs. One had been found, dead of wounds, still in his harness. The partisans had got to the other one first and were hiding him somewhere.

What these Australians had been doing was dropping supplies to the partisans in the primeval forest east of Cracow.

If Oskar had wanted some sort of confirmation, this was it. That men should come all this way from unimaginable little towns in the Australian Outback to hasten the end in Cracow. He put a call through at once to the official in charge of rolling stock in the office of Ostbahn President Gerteis and invited him to dinner to talk about DEF’S potential need of flatcars.

A week after Oskar spoke to Sussmuth, the gentlemen of the Berlin Armaments Board instructed the Governor of Moravia that Oskar’s armaments company was to be allocated the annex of Hoffman’s spinning mill in Brinnlitz. The Governor’s bureaucrats could do nothing more, Sussmuth told Oskar by telephone, than slow the paperwork down. But Hoffman and other Party men in the Zwittau area were already conferring and passing resolutions against Oskar’s intrusion into Moravia. The Party Kreisleiter in Zwittau wrote to Berlin complaining that Jewish prisoners from Poland would be a peril to the health of Moravian Germans. Spotted fever would very likely appear in the region for the first time in modern history, and Oskar’s small armaments factory, of dubious value to the war effort, would also attract Allied bombers, with resultant damage to the important Hoffman mills. The population of Jewish criminals in the proposed Schindler camp would outweigh the small and decent population of Brinnlitz and be a cancer on the honest flank of Zwittau.

A protest of that kind didn’t have a chance, since it went straight to the office of Erich Lange in Berlin. Appeals to Troppau were quashed by honest Sussmuth. Nonetheless, the posters went up on walls in Oskar’s hometown: “KEEP THE JEWISH CRIMINALS OUT.”

And Oskar was paying. He was paying the Evacuation Committee in Cracow to help speed up the permits for the transfer of his machinery. The Department of the Economy in Cracow had to be encouraged to provide the clearances of bank holdings. Currency wasn’t favored these days, so he paid in goods—in kilos of tea, in pairs of leather shoes, in carpets, in coffee, in canned fish. He spent his afternoons in the little streets off the market square of Cracow haggling at staggering prices for whatever the bureaucrats desired. Otherwise, he was sure, they would keep him waiting till his last Jew had gone to Auschwitz.

It was Sussmuth who told him that people from Zwittau were writing to the Armaments Inspectorate accusing Oskar of black-marketeering. If they’re writing to me, said Sussmuth, you can bet the same letters are going to the police chief of Moravia, Obersturmführer Otto Rasch. You should introduce yourself to Rasch and show him what a charming fellow you are.

Oskar had known Rasch when he was SS police chief of Katowice. Rasch was, by happy chance, a friend of the chairman of Ferrum AG at Sosnowiec, from which Oskar had bought his steel. But in rushing down to Brno to head off informers, Oskar didn’t rely on anything as flimsy as mutual friendships. He took a diamond cut in the brilliant style which, somehow, he introduced into the meeting. When it crossed the table and ended on Rasch’s side of the desk, it secured Oskar’s Brno front.

Oskar later estimated that he spent 100,000 RM.—NEARLY $40,000—to grease the transfer to Brinnlitz. Few of his survivors would ever find the figure unlikely, though there were those who shook their heads and said, “No, more! It would have to have been more than that.”

He had drawn up what he called a preparatory list and delivered it to the Administration Building. There were more than a thousand names on it—the names of all the prisoners of the backyard prison camp of Emalia, as well as new names. Helen Hirsch’s name was freshly on the list, and Amon was not there to argue about it. And the list would expand if Madritsch agreed to go to Moravia with Oskar. So Oskar kept working on Titsch, his ally at Julius Madritsch’s ear. Those Madritsch prisoners who were closest to Titsch knew the list was under compilation, that they could have access to it. Titsch told them without any ambiguity: You must get on it. In all the reams of Płaszów paperwork, Oskar’s dozen pages of names were the only pages with access to the future.

But Madritsch still could not decide whether he wanted an alliance with Oskar, whether he would add his 3,000 to the total.

There is again a haziness suitable to a legend about the precise chronology of Oskar’s list. The haziness doesn’t attach to the existence of the list—a copy can be seen today in the archives of the Yad Vashem. There is no uncertainty as we shall see about the names remembered by Oskar and Titsch at the last minute and attached to the end of the official paper. The names on the list are definite. But the circumstances encourage legends. The problem is that the list is remembered with an intensity which, by its very heat, blurs. The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf.

Some of those whose names appeared on the list say that there was a party at Goeth’s villa, a reunion of SS men and entrepreneurs to celebrate the times they’d had there. Some even believe that Goeth was there, but since the SS did not release on bail, that is impossible. Others believe that the party was held at Oskar’s own apartment above his factory. Oskar had for more than two years given excellent parties there. One Emalia prisoner remembers the early hours of 1944 when he was on night watch duty and Oskar had wandered down from his apartment at one o’clock, escaping the noise upstairs and bringing with him two cakes, two hundred cigarettes, and a bottle for his friend the watchman.

At the Płaszów graduation party, wherever it took place, the guests included Dr. Blancke, Franz Bosch, and, by some reports, Oberführer Julian Scherner, on vacation from his partisan-hunting. Madritsch was there too, and Titsch. Titsch would later say that at it Madritsch informed Oskar for the first time that he would not be going to Moravia with him. “I’ve done everything I can for the Jews,” Madritsch told him. It was a reasonable claim; he would not be persuaded although he said Titsch had been at him for days.

Madritsch was a just man. Later he would be honored as such. He simply did not believe that Moravia would work. If he had, the indications are that he would have attempted it.

What else is known about the party is that an urgency operated there, because the Schindler list had to be handed in that evening. This is an element in all the versions of the story survivors tell. The survivors could tell and expand upon it only if they had heard it in the first place from Oskar, a man with a taste for embellishing a story. But in the early 1960’s, Titsch himself attested to the substantial truth of this one. Perhaps the new and temporary Commandant of Płaszów, a Hauptsturmführer Büscher, had said to Oskar, “Enough fooling around, Oskar! We have to finalize the paperwork and the transportation.” Perhaps there was some other form of deadline imposed by the Ostbahn, by the availability of transport. At the end of Oskar’s list, therefore, Titsch now typed in, above the official signatures, the names of Madritsch prisoners. Almost seventy names were added, written in by Titsch from his own and Oskar’s memories. Among them were those of the Feigenbaum family—the adolescent daughter who suffered from incurable bone cancer; the teen-age son Lutek with his shaky expertise in repairing sewing machines. Now they were all transformed, as Titsch scribbled, into skilled munitions workers. There was singing in the apartment, loud talk and laughter, a fog of cigarette smoke, and, in a corner, Oskar and Titsch quizzing each other over people’s names, straining for a clue to the spelling of Polish patronyms.

In the end, Oskar had to put his hand on Titsch’s wrist. We’re over the limit, he said. They’ll balk at the number we already have. Titsch continued to strain for names, and tomorrow morning would wake damning himself because one had come to him too late. But now he was at the limit, wrung out by this work. It was blasphemously close to creating people anew just by thinking of them. He did not begrudge doing it. It was what it said of the world—that was what made the heavy air of Schindler’s apartment so hard for Titsch to breathe.

The list was vulnerable, however, through the personnel clerk, Marcel Goldberg.

Büscher, the new Commandant, who was there merely to wind the camp down, himself could not have cared, within certain numerical limits, who went on the list. Therefore Goldberg had the power to tinker with its edges. It was known to prisoners already that Goldberg would take bribes. The Dresners knew it. Juda Dresner—uncle of red Genia, husband of the Mrs. Dresner who’d once been refused a hiding place in a wall, and father of Janek and of young Danka—Juda Dresner knew it. “He paid Goldberg,” the family would simply say to explain how they got on the Schindler list. They never knew what was given. Wulkan the jeweler presumably got himself, his wife, his son on the list in the same way.

Poldek Pfefferberg was told about the list by an SS NCO named Hans Schreiber.

Schreiber, a young man in his mid-twenties, had as evil a name as any other SS man in Płaszów, but Pfefferberg had become something of a mild favorite of his in that way that was common to relationships—throughout the system—between individual prisoners and SS personnel. It had begun one day when Pfefferberg, as a group leader in his barracks, had had responsibility for window cleaning. Schreiber inspected the glass and found a smudge, and began browbeating Poldek in the style that was often a prelude to execution. Pfefferberg lost his temper and told Schreiber that both of them knew the windows were perfectly polished and if Schreiber wanted a reason to shoot him, he ought to do it without any more delay.

The outburst had, in a contradictory way, amused Schreiber, who afterward occasionally used to stop Pfefferberg and ask him how he and his wife were, and sometimes even gave Poldek an apple for Mila. In the summer of 1944, Poldek had appealed to him desperately to extricate Mila from a trainload of women being sent from Płaszów to the evil camp at Stutthof on the Baltic. Mila was already in the lines boarding the cattle cars when Schreiber came waving a piece of paper and calling her name. Another time, a Sunday, he turned up drunk at Pfefferberg’s barracks and, in front of Poldek and a few other prisoners, began to weep for what he called “the dreadful things” he had done in Płaszów. He intended, he said, to expiate them on the Eastern Front. In the end, he would.

Now he told Poldek that Schindler had a list and that Poldek should do everything he could to get on it. Poldek went down to the Administration Building to beg Goldberg to add his name and Mila’s to the list. Schindler had in the past year and a half often visited Poldek in the camp garage and had always promised rescue.

Poldek had, however, become such an accomplished welder that the garage supervisors, who needed for their lives’ sake to produce high-standard work, would never let him go. Now Goldberg sat with his hand on the list—he had already added his own name to it—and this old friend of Oskar’s, once a frequent guest in the apartment in Straszewskiego, expected to have himself written down for sentiment’s sake. “Do you have any diamonds?” Goldberg asked Pfefferberg.

“Are you serious?” asked Poldek.

“For this list,” said Goldberg, a man of prodigious and accidental power, “it takes diamonds.”

Now that the Viennese music lover Hauptsturmführer Goeth was in prison, the Rosner brothers, musicians to the court, were free to work their way onto the list. Dolek Horowitz also, who had earlier got his wife and children out to Emalia, now persuaded Goldberg to include him, his wife, his son, his young daughter. Horowitz had always worked in the central warehouse of Płaszów and had managed to put some small treasure away. Now it was paid to Marcel Goldberg.

Among those included in the list were the Bejski brothers, Uri and Moshe, officially described as machine fitter and draftsman. Uri had a knowledge of weapons, and Moshe a gift for forging documents. The circumstances of the list are so clouded that it is not possible to say whether they were included for these talents or not.

Josef Bau, the ceremonious bridegroom, would at some stage be included, but without his knowing it. It suited Goldberg to keep everyone in the dark about the list. Given his nature, it is possible to assume that if Bau made any personal approach to Goldberg it could only have been on the basis that his mother, his wife, himself should all be included. He would not find out until too late that he alone would be listed for Brinnlitz. As for Stern, the Herr Direktor had included him from the beginning. Stern was the only father confessor Oskar ever had, and Stern’s suggestions had a great authority with him. Since October 1, no Jewish prisoner had been allowed out of Płaszów either to march to the cable factory or for any other purpose. At the same time, the trusties in the Polish prison had begun to put guards on the barracks to stop Jewish prisoners from trading with the Poles for bread. The price of illegal bread reached a level it would be hard to express in złoty. In the past you could have bought a loaf for your second coat, 250 gm. for a clean undershirt. Now—as with Goldberg—it took diamonds.

During the first week of October, Oskar and Bankier visited Płaszów for some reason and went as usual to see Stern in the Construction Office. Stern’s desk was down the hallway from the vanished Amon’s office. It was possible to speak more freely here than ever before. Stern told Schindler about the inflated price of rye bread.

Oskar turned to Bankier. “Make sure Weichert gets fifty thousand złoty,” murmured Oskar.

Dr. Michael Weichert was chairman of the former Jewish Communal Self-Help, now renamed Jewish Relief Office. He and his office were permitted to operate for cosmetic reasons and, in part, because of Weichert’s powerful connections in the German Red Cross. Though many Polish Jews within the camps would treat him with understandable suspicion, and though this suspicion would bring him to trial after the war—he would be exonerated—Weichert was exactly the man to find 50,000 zł. worth of bread quickly and introduce it into Płaszów.

The conversation of Stern and Oskar moved on. The 50,000 złoty were a mere obiter dicta of their talk about the unsettled times and about how Amon might be enjoying his cell in Breslau. Later in the week black-market bread from town was smuggled into camp hidden beneath cargoes of cloth, coal, or scrap iron. Within a day, the price had fallen to its accustomed level.

It was a nice case of connivance between Oskar and Stern, and would be followed by other instances.