In the fence between the men’s and women’s camps in Płaszów ran nine electrified strands. Josef Bau launched himself high, so that his feet would find purchase on the third of the strands and his hands, at the stretch, might reach the second from the top. He imagined himself then as racing over the strands with a ratlike quickness. In fact he landed in the mesh of wire and simply hung there. He thought the coldness of the metal in his hands was the first message of the current. But there was no current.
There were no lights. Josef Bau, stretched on the fence, did not speculate on the reason there wasn’t any voltage. He got to the top and vaulted into the men’s camp. You’re a married man, he told himself. He slid into the latrines by the washhouses. “A frightful diarrhea. Herr Oberscharführer.”
He stood gasping in the stench. Amon’s blindness on the day of the flowers… the consummation, waited forwith an untoward patience, twice interrupted… Scheidt and the sirens… a problem with the lights and the wire—staggering and gagging, he wondered if he could support the ambiguity of his life. Like others, he wanted a more definite rescue. He wandered out to be one of the last to join the lines in front of his hut. He was trembling, but sure the Alteste would cover up for him. “Yes, Herr Untersturmführer, I gave Häftling Bau permission to visit the latrines.”
They weren’t looking for him at all. They were looking for three young Zionists who’d escaped in a truckload of product from the upholstery works, where they made Wehrmacht mattresses out of sea grass.
CHAPTER 27
On April 28, 1944, Oskar—by looking sideways at himself in a mirror—was able to tell that his waist had thickened for his thirty-sixth birthday. But at least today, when he embraced the girls, no one bothered to denounce him. Any informer among the German technicians must have been demoralized, since the SS had let Oskar out of Pomorska and Montelupich, both of them centers supposed impregnable to influence.
To mark the day, Emilie sent the usual greetings from Czechoslovakia, and Ingrid and Klonowska gave him gifts. His domestic arrangements had scarcely changed in the four and a half years he had spent in Cracow. Ingrid was still a consort, Klonowska a girlfriend, Emilie an understandably absent wife. Whatever grievances and bewilderment each suffered goes unrecorded, but it would become obvious in this, his thirty-seventh, year that some coolness had entered his relations with Ingrid; that Klonowska, always a loyal friend, was content with a merely sporadic liaison; and that Emilie still considered their marriage indissoluble. For the moment, they gave their presents and kept their counsel.
Others took a hand in the celebration. Amon permitted Henry Rosner to bring his violin to Lipowa Street in the evening under the guard of the best baritone in the Ukrainian garrison.
Amon was, at this stage, very pleased with his association with Schindler. In return for his continuing support for the Emalia camp, Amon had one day recently requested and got the permanent use of Oskar’s Mercedes—not the jalopy Oskar had bought from John for a day, but the most elegant car in the Emalia garage.
The recital took place in Oskar’s office. No one attended except Oskar. It was as if he were tired of company.
When the Ukrainian went to the lavatory, Oskar revealed his depression to Henry. He was upset about the war news. His birthday had come in a hiatus. The Russian armies had halted behind the Pripet Marshes in Belorussia and in front of Lwów. Oskar’s fears puzzled Henry. Doesn’t he understand, he wondered, that if the Russians aren’t held off, it’s the end of his operation here?
“I’ve often asked Amon to let you come here permanently,” Oskar told Rosner. “You and your wife and child. He won’t hear of it. He appreciates you too much. But eventually…” Henry was grateful. But he felt he had to point out that his family might be as safe as any in Płaszów. His sister-in-law, for example, had been discovered by Goeth smoking at work, and he had ordered her execution. But one of the NCO’S had begged to put before the Herr Commandant’s notice the fact that this woman was Mrs. Rosner, wife of Rosner the accordionist. “Oh,” Amon had said, pardoning her. “Well, remember, girl, I won’t have smoking on the job.”
Henry told Oskar that night that it had been this attitude of Amon’s—that the Rosners were immune because of their musical talent—which had persuaded him and Manci to bring their eight-year-old son, Olek, into the camp. He had been hiding with friends in Cracow, but that was becoming a less and less secure business every day. Once inside, Olek could blend into that small crowd of children, many unregistered in the prison records, whose presence in Płaszów was connived at by prisoners and tolerated by some of the junior camp officials. Getting Olek into the place, however, had been the risky part.
Poldek Pfefferberg, who’d had to drive a truck to town to pick up toolboxes, had smuggled the boy in. The Ukrainians had nearly discovered him at the gate, while he was still an outsider and living in contravention of every racial statute of the Reich Government General. His feet had burst out of the end of the box that lay between Pfefferberg’s ankles. “Mr. Pfefferberg, Mr. Pfefferberg,” Poldek had heard while the Ukrainians searched the back of the truck. “My feet are sticking out.”
Henry could laugh at that now, though warily, since there were still rivers to be crossed. But Schindler reacted dramatically, with a gesture that seemed to grow from the slightly alcoholic melancholy which had beset him on this evening of his birthday. He lifted his office chair by its back and raised it to the portrait of the Führer. It seemed for a second that he was about to lash into the icon. But he spun again on his heel, lowered the chair deliberately until its four legs hung equidistant from the floor, and rammed them into the carpet, shaking the wall. Then he said, “They’re burning bodies out there, aren’t they?”
Henry grimaced as if the stench were in the room.
“They’ve started,” he admitted.
Now that Płaszów was—in the language of the bureaucrats—a Concentration Camp, its inmates found that it was safer to encounter Amon. The chiefs in Oranienburg did not permit summary execution. The days when slow potato-peelers could be expunged on the spot were gone. They could now be destroyed only by due process. There had to be a hearing, a record sent in triplicate to Oranienburg. The sentence had to be confirmed not only by General Glücks’s office but also by General Pohl’s Department W (economic Enterprises). For if a commandant killed essential workers, Department W could find itself hit with claims for compensation. Allach-Munich, Ltd., for example, porcelain manufacturers using slave labor from Dachau, had recently filed a claim for 31,800 RM. because “as a result of the typhoid epidemic which broke out in January 1943, we had no prison labor at our disposal from January 26, 1943, until March 3, 1943. In our opinion we are entitled to compensation under Clause 2 of the Businesses Compensation Settlement Fund…”
Department W was all the more liable for compensation if the loss of skilled labor arose from the zeal of a trigger-happy SS officer.
So, to avoid the paperwork and the departmental complications, Amon held his hand on most days.
The people who appeared within his range in the spring and early summer of ’44 somehow understood it was safer, though they knew nothing of Department W and Generals Pohl and Glücks. It was to them a remission as mysterious as Amon’s madness itself.
Yet, as Oskar had mentioned to Henry Rosner, they were now burning bodies at Płaszów. In preparation for the Russian offensive, the SS was abolishing its institutions in the East. Treblinka, Sobibor, and Bełżec had been evacuated the previous autumn. The Waffen SS who had run them had been ordered to dynamite the chambers and the crematoria, to leave no recognizable trace, and had then been posted to Italy to fight partisans. The immense complex at Auschwitz, in its safe ground in Upper Silesia, would complete the great task in the East, and once that was concluded, the crematoria would be plowed under the earth. For without the evidence of the crematoria, the dead could offer no witness, were a whisper behind the wind, an inconsequential dust on the aspen leaves.