Yet after Oskar had gone away and Mandel had spoken to Stern, who declared the letter authentic, and then conferred again with the girl, a decision was made to take the money. They knew now, however, that Oskar wouldn’t be back with it. Mandel went to Marcel Goldberg at the Administration Office. Goldberg had also been a member of Hitach Dut, but after becoming the clerk in charge of lists—of labor lists and transport lists, of the lists of living and dead—he had begun taking bribes. Mandel could put pressure on him, though. One of the lists Goldberg could draw up—or at least, add to and subtract from—was the list of those who went to Emalia to collect scrap metal for use in the workshops of Płaszów. For old times’ sake, and without having to disclose his reason for wanting to visit Emalia, Mandel was put on this list.
But arriving in Zablocie and sneaking away from the scrap-metal detail to get to Oskar, he’d been blocked in the front office by Bankier. Herr Schindler was too busy, said Bankier. A week later Mandel was back. Again Bankier wouldn’t let him in to speak to Oskar. The third time, Bankier was more specific. You want that Zionist money? You didn’t want it before. And now you want it. Well, you can’t have it. That’s the way life goes, Mr. Mandel!
Mandel nodded and left. He presumed wrongly that Bankier had already lifted at least a segment of the cash. In fact, however, Bankier was being careful. The money did finish in the hands of Zionist prisoners in Płaszów, for Alta Rubner’s receipt for the funds was delivered to Springmann by Sedlacek. It seems that the amount was used in part to help Jews who came from other cities than Cracow and therefore had no local sources of support.
Whether the funds that came to Oskar and were passed on by him were spent mainly on food, as Stern would have preferred, or largely on underground resistance—the purchase of passes or weapons—is a question Oskar never investigated. None of this money, however, went to buy Mrs. Schindler out of Montelupich prison or to save the lives of such people as the Danziger brothers. Nor was the Sedlacek money used to replace the 30,000-kilogram bribes of enamelware Oskar would pay out to major and minor SS officials during 1943 to prevent them from recommending the closure of the Emalia camp. None of it was spent on the 16,000-zł. set of gynecological instruments Oskar had to buy on the black market when one of the Emalia girls got pregnant—pregnancy being, of course, an immediate ticket to Auschwitz. Nor did any of it go to purchase the broken-down Mercedes from Untersturmführer John. John offered Oskar the Mercedes for sale at the same time as Oskar presented a request for 30 Płaszów people to be transferred to Emalia.
The car, bought by Oskar one day for 12,000 zł., was requisitioned the next by Leo John’s friend and brother officer, Untersturmführer Scheidt, to be used in the construction of fieldworks on the camp perimeter. Perhaps they’ll carry soil in the trunk, Oskar raged to Ingrid at the supper table. In a later informal account of the incident, he commented that he was glad to be of assistance to both gentlemen.
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.