As for Płaszów as an industrial wonder, it was bound to disappoint any serious observer.
Amon, Bosch, Leo John, Josef Neuschel all thought it a model city on the ground that it was making them rich. It would have shocked them to find that one of the reasons their sweet billet in Płaszów continued was not any delight on the part of the Armaments Inspectorate with the economic miracles they were performing.
In fact the only economic miracles within Płaszów were the personal fortunes made by Amon and his clique. It was a surprise to any calm outsider that war contracts came to the workshops of Płaszów at all, considering that their plant was so poor and old-fashioned. But shrewd Zionist prisoners inside Płaszów put pressure on convinced outsiders, people like Oskar and Madritsch, who could in turn put pressure on the Armaments Inspectorate. On the ground that the hunger and sporadic murders of Płaszów were still to be preferred to the assured annihilations of Auschwitz and Bełżec, Oskar was willing to sit down with the purchasing officers and engineers of General Schindler’s Arms Inspectorate.
These gentlemen would make faces and say, “Come on, Oskar! Are you serious?” But in the end they would find contracts for Amon Goeth’s camp, orders for shovels manufactured from the collected scrap iron of Oskar’s Lipowa Street factory, orders for funnels turned out of offcuts of tin from a jam factory in Podgórze. The chances of full delivery of the shovels and their handles ever being made to the Wehrmacht were small. Many of Oskar’s friends among the officers of the Armaments Inspectorate understood what they were doing, that prolonging the life of the slave-labor camp of Płaszów was the same thing as prolonging the life of a number of the slaves. With some of them it stuck in the craw, because they knew what a crook Goeth was, and their serious and old-fashioned patriotism was affronted by Amon’s sybaritic life out there in the countryside.
The divine irony of Forced Labor Camp Płaszów—that some of the slaves were conspiring for their own purposes to maintain Amon’s kingdom— can be seen in the case of Roman Ginter. Ginter, former entrepreneur and now one of the supervisors in the metalworks from which Rabbi Levartov had already been rescued, was summoned to Goeth’s office one morning and, as he closed the door, took the first of a number of blows. While he beat Ginter, Amon raged incoherently. Then he dragged him out-of-doors and down the steps to a stretch of wall by the front entrance. May I ask something? said Ginter against the wall, spitting out two teeth, offhandedly, lest Amon think him an actor, a self-pitier. You bastard, roared Goeth, you haven’t delivered the handcuffs I ordered! My desk calendar tells me that, you pig’s-ass. But Herr Commandant, said Ginter, I beg to report that the order for handcuffs was filled yesterday. I asked Herr Oberscharführer Neuschel what I should do with them and he told me to deliver them to your office, which I did.
Amon dragged bleeding Ginter back to the office and called the SS man Neuschel. Why, yes, said young Neuschel. Look in your second-top drawer on the left, Herr Commandant. Goeth looked and found the manacles. I almost killed him, he complained to his young and not-so-gifted Viennese protégé.
This same Roman Ginter, complaisantly spitting up his teeth against the foundation of Amon’s gray Administration Building—this Jewish cipher whose accidental murder would have caused Amon to blame Neuschel—this Ginter is the man who under special pass goes to Herr Schindler’s DEF to talk to Oskar about workshop supplies for Płaszów, about large scrap metal without which the whole metal-shop crew would be railroaded off to Auschwitz. Therefore, while the pistol-waving Amon Goeth believes he maintains Płaszów by his special administrative genius, it is as much the bloody-mouthed prisoners who keep it running.
CHAPTER 25
To some people it now seemed that Oskar was spending like a compulsive gambler. Even from the little they knew of him, his prisoners could sense that he would ruin himself for them if that was the price. Later—not now, for now they accepted his mercies in the same spirit in which a child accepts Christmas presents from its parents—they would say, Thank God he was more faithful to us than to his wife. And like the prisoners, sundry officials could also ferret Oskar’s passion out.
One such official, a Dr. Sopp, physician to the SS prisons in Cracow and to the SS Court [The SS had its own judiciary section.] in Pomorska, let Herr Schindler know through a Polish messenger that he was willing to do a brand of business. In Montelupich prison was a woman named Frau Helene Schindler. Dr. Sopp knew she was no relative of Oskar’s, but her husband had invested some money in Emalia. She had questionable Aryan papers. Dr. Sopp did not need to say that for Mrs. Schindler this portended a truck ride to Chujowa Górka. But if Oskar would put up certain amounts, said Sopp, the doctor was willing to issue a medical certificate saying that, in view of her condition, Mrs. Schindler should be permitted to take the cure indefinitely at Marienbad, down in Bohemia.
Oskar went to Sopp’s office, where he found out that the doctor wanted 50,000 zł. for the certificate. It was no use arguing. After three years of practice, a man like Sopp could tell to within a few złoty the price to put on favors. During the afternoon, Oskar raised the money. Sopp knew he could, knew that Oskar was the sort of man who had black-market money stashed, money with no recorded history. Before making the payment, Oskar set some conditions. He would need to go to Montelupich with Dr. Sopp to collect the woman from her cell. He would himself deliver her to mutual friends in the city. Sopp did not object. Under a bare light bulb in freezing Montelupich, Mrs. Schindler was handed her costly documents. A more careful man, a man with an accountant’s mind, might reasonably have repaid himself for his trouble from the money Sedlacek brought from Budapest. All together, Oskar would be handed nearly 150,000 Reichsmarks carried to Cracow in false-bottomed suitcases and in the lining of clothes. But Oskar, partly because his sense of money (whether owed or owing) was so inexact, partly because of his sense of honor, passed on to his Jewish contacts all the money he ever received from Sedlacek, except for the sum spent on Amon’s cognac.
It was not always a straightforward business. When in the summer of ‘43 Sedlacek arrived in Cracow with 50,000 RM., the Zionists inside Płaszów to whom Oskar offered the cash feared it might be a setup.
Oskar first approached Henry Mandel, a welder in the Płaszów metal shop and a member of Hitach Dut, a Zionist youth and labor movement. Mandel did not want to touch the money. Look, said Schindler, I’ve got a letter in Hebrew to go with it, a letter from Palestine. But of course, if it was a setup, if Oskar had been compromised and was being used, he would have a letter from Palestine. And when you hadn’t enough bread for breakfast, it was quite a sum to be offered: 50,000 RM.—100,000 złoty. To be offered that for your discretionary use. It just wasn’t credible.
Schindler then tried to pass the money, which was sitting there, inside the boundary of Płaszów in the trunk of his car, to another member of Hitach Dut, a woman named Alta Rubner. She had some contacts, through prisoners who went to work in the cable factory, through some of the Poles in the Polish prison, with the underground in Sosnowiec. Perhaps, she said to Mandel, it would be best to refer the whole business to the underground, and let them decide on the provenance of the money Herr Oskar Schindler was offering.
Oskar kept trying to persuade her, raising his voice at her under cover of Madritsch’s chattering sewing machines. “I guarantee with all my heart that this isn’t a trap!” With all my heart. Exactly the sentiment one would expect from an agent provocateur!