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.