Oskar made an early opportunity to travel to Berlin and meet the people who would be dealing with his files. Oranienburg had begun as a concentration camp. Now it had become a sprawl of administrative barracks. From the offices of Section D, every aspect of prison life and death was regulated. Its chief, Richard Glücks, had responsibility as well, in consultation with Pohl, for establishing the balance between laborers and candidates for the chambers, for the equation in which X represented slave labor and y represented the more immediately condemned. Glücks had laid down procedures for every event, and from his department came memos drafted in the anesthetic jargon of the planner, the paper shuffler, the detached specialist.
SS Main Office of Economics and Administration Section Chief D (concentration Camps)
D1-AZCC14fl-Ot-S
GEH TGB No 453-44
To the Commandants of Concentration Camps Da, Sah, Bu, Mau, Slo, Neu, Au 1-III, Gr-Ro, Natz, Stu, Rav, Herz, A-Like-Bels, Gruppenl.
D.Riga, Gruppenl. D.Cracow (Płaszów).
Applications from Camp Commandants for punishment by flogging in cases of sabotage by prisoners in the war production industries are increasing.
I request that in future in all proved cases of sabotage (a report from the management must be enclosed), an application for execution by hanging should be made. The execution should take place before the assembled members of the work detachment concerned. The reason for the execution is to be made known so as to act as a deterrent.
In this eerie chancellory, some files discussed the length a prisoner’s hair should be before it was considered of economic use for “the manufacture of hair-yarn socks for U-boat crews and hair-felt footwear for the Reichs railway,” while others debated whether the form registering “death cases” should be filed by eight departments or merely covered by letter and appended to the personnel records as soon as the index card had been brought up to date. And here Herr Oskar Schindler of Cracow came to talk about his little industrial compound in Zablocie. They appointed someone of middle status to handle him, a personnel officer of field rank.
Oskar wasn’t distressed. There were larger employers of Jewish prison labor than he. There were the megaliths, Krupp, of course, and I. G. Farben. There was the Cable Works at Płaszów. Walter C. Toebbens, the Warsaw industrialist whom Himmler had tried to force into the Wehrmacht, was a heavier employer of labor than Herr Schindler. Then there were the steelworks at Stalowa Wola, the aircraft factories at Budzyn and Zakopane, the Steyour-Daimler-Puch works at Radom.
The personnel officer had the plans of Emalia on his desk. I hope, he said curtly, you don’t want to increase the size of your camp. It would be impossible to do it without courting a typhus epidemic.
Oskar waved that suggestion aside. He was interested in the permanence of his labor force, he said. He had had a talk on that matter, he told the officer, with a friend of his, Colonel Erich Lange. The name, Oskar could tell, meant something to the SS man. Oskar produced a letter from the Colonel, and the personnel officer sat back reading it. The office was silent—all you could hear from other rooms was pen-scratch and the whisper of papers and quiet, earnest talk, as if none here knew that they lay at the core of a network of screams.
Colonel Lange was a man of influence, Chief of Staff of the Armaments Inspectorate at Army Headquarters, Berlin. Oskar had met him at a party at General Schindler’s office in Cracow. They had liked each other almost at once. It happened a lot at parties that two people could sense in each other a certain resistance to the regime and might retire to a corner to test each other out and perhaps establish friendship. Erich Lange had been appalled by the factory camps of Poland—by the I. G. Farben works at Buna, for example, where foremen adopted the SS “work tempo” and made prisoners unload cement on the run; where the corpses of the starved, the broken were hurled into ditches built for cables and covered, together with the cables, with cement. “You are not here to live but to perish in concrete,” a plant manager had told newcomers, and Lange had heard the speech and felt damned.
His letter to Oranienburg had been preceded by some phone calls, and calls and letter both promoted the same proposition: Herr Schindler, with his mess kits and his 45mm antitank shells, is considered by this Inspectorate to be a major contributor to the struggle for our national survival. He has built up a staff of skilled specialists, and nothing should be done to disrupt the work they perform under the Herr Direktor Schindler’s supervision.
The personnel officer was impressed and said he would speak frankly to Herr Schindler. There were no plans to alter the status or interfere with the population of the camp in Zablocie. However, the Herr Direktor had to understand that the situation of Jews, even skilled armaments workers, was always risky. Take the case of our own SS enterprises. Ostindustrie, the SS company, employs prisoners in a peat works, a brush factory and iron foundry in Lublin, equipment factories in Radom, a fur works in Trawniki. But other branches of the SS shoot the work force continually, and now Osti is for all practical purposes out of business.
Likewise, at the killing centers, the staff never retains a sufficient percentage of prisoners for factory work. This has been a matter of frequent correspondence, but they’re intransigent, those people in the field. “Of course,” said the personnel officer, tapping the letter, “I’ll do what I can for you.”
“I understand the problem,” said Oskar, looking up at the SS man with that radiant smile.
“If there is any way I can express my gratitude….”
In the end, Oskar left Oranienburg with at least some guarantees about the continuity of his backyard camp in Cracow.
The manner in which the new status of Płaszów impinged on lovers was that a proper penal separation of the sexes—such as was provided for in a series of SS Main Office of Economics and Administration memos—was created. The fences between the men’s prison and the women’s, the perimeter fence, the fence around the industrial sector were all electrified. The voltage, the spacing of wires, the number of electrified strands and insulators were all provided for by Main Office directives.
Amon and his officers were not slow to notice the disciplinary possibilities involved. Now you could stand people for twenty-four hours at a time between the electrified outer fence and the inner, neutral, original fence. If they staggered with weariness, they knew that inches behind their backs ran the hundreds of volts. Mundek Korn, for example, found himself, on returning to camp with a work party from which one prisoner was missing, standing in that narrow gulf for a day and a night.
But perhaps worse than the risk of falling against the wire was the way the current ran, from the end of evening roll call to reveille in the morning, like a moat between man and woman. Time for contact was now reduced to the short phase of milling on the Appellplatz, before the orders for falling into line were shouted. Each couple devised a tune, whistling it among the crowds, straining to pick up the answering refrain amid a forest of sibilance. Rebecca Tannenbaum also settled on a code tune. The requirements of General Pohl’s Main SS Office had forced the prisoners of Płaszów to adopt the mating stratagems of birds. And by these means, the formal romance of Rebecca and Josef went forward.