Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  TWENTY-SIX

  Raimund Titsch was making payments of a different order. Titsch was a quiet, clerkly Austrian Catholic with a limp that 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 Plaszów camp, he managed Julius Madritsch’s uniform factory, a business of three thousand seamstresses and mechanics.

  One way he paid was through his bouts of chess with Amon Goeth. The Administration Block 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 commandant’s favour. 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 accomplishment 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 Block 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 preventative chess. Independently of Sedlacek and of the man with the pocket camera whom Oskar had brought to Plaszów, 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 Plaszów by truck beneath bales of rags and bolts of cloth. Titsch photographed round rye being carried from hand to hand into the Madritsch factory storeroom, on its relatively blind side, 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 Plaszów, he intimated the size of the camp, its desolation. It seems that on Amon’s sundeck he even took close-ups of the commandant at rest in a deckchair, a hefty Amon approaching now the hundred and twenty kilos at which newly arrived SS Dr Blancke will say to him, “Enough, Amon; you have to take some weight off.” Titsch also 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 Plaszów 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 wagons. Titsch understood that only the desperate deposited goods with him. That prison minority who had a stock of rings and watches and jewellery hidden somewhere in Plaszów didn’t need him. They traded regularly for favours 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 Plaszów 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. On the files of ODESSA, the postwar secret society of former SS men, he would be listed as a traitor. The fact that he’d supplied the Madritsch people with some thirty thousand loaves of bread, as well as many chickens and some kilos of butter, and that for his humanity he had been honoured 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. “Jewkisser.” So the Plaszów 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 for ever, the emulsion drying on the dark and secret images of Amon’s love, Majola, his killing dogs, his nameless slave labourers. It might therefore have been seen as a sort of triumph for the population of Plaszów when, in November 1963, a Schindler survivor (Leopold Pfefferberg) secretly bought the box and its contents 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 anonymous shadow of ODESSA frightened him more than had the names of Amon Goeth, of Scherner, of Auschwitz in the days of Plaszów.

  After his burial, the reels were developed. Nearly all the pictures came out.

  Not one of that small body of Plasów inmates who would survive Amon and the camp itself would ever have anything accusatory to say of Raimund Titsch. But he was never the sort of man concerning whom mythologies arose. Oskar was. From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the Plaszów survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself. Through listening to such stories, one can see that to the Plaszów people, while Titsch may have been the good hermit, Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double-faced – in the Greek manner – as any small god, endowed with all the human vices, many-handed, subtly powerful, capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.

  One story concerns the time when the SS police chiefs were under pressure to close Plaszów, as its reputation as an efficient industrial complex was not high with the Armaments Inspectorate. Helen Hirsch, Goeth’s maid, often encountered officers, dinner guests, who wandered into the hallway or kitchen of the villa to escape Amon for a while and to shake their heads. An SS officer called Tibritsch, turning up in the kitchen, had said to Helen, “Doesn’t he know there are men giving their lives?” He meant on the Eastern Front, of course, not out there in the dark of Plaszów. Officers with less imperial lives than Amon were becoming outraged by what they saw at the villa or, perhaps more dangerously, envious.

  As the legend has it, it was on a Sunday evening that General Julius Schindler himself visited Plaszów to decide whether its existence was of any real value to the war effort. It was an odd hour for a grand bureaucrat to be visiting plant, but perhaps the Armaments Inspectorate, in view of the perilous winter now falling on the Eastern Front, were working desperate hours. The inspection had been preceded by dinner at Emalia, at which wine and cognac flowed, for Oskar is associated like Bacchus with the Dionysian line of gods.

  Because of the dinner, the inspection party rolling out to Plaszów in their Mercedes were in a mood of less than professional detachment. In making this claim, the story ignores the fact that Schindler and his officers were all production experts and engineers with nearly four years of detached professionalism behind them. But Oskar would be the last to be awed by that fact.

  The inspection started at the Madritsch works. This was Plaszów’s showplace. During 1943, it had produced Wehrmacht uniforms at a monthly rate of something over twenty thousand. But the question was whether Herr Madritsch would do better to forget Plaszów, to spend his capital on expanding his more efficient and better supplied Polish factories in Podgórze and Tarnow. The ramshackle conditions of Plaszów were no encouragement to Madritsch or any other investor to install the sort of machinery a sophisticated works would need.

  The official party had just begun its inspection when al
l the lights in all the workshops went out, the power circuit broken by friends of Itzhak Stern in Plaszów’s generator shed. To the handicaps of drink and indigestion which Oskar had imposed on the gentlemen of the Armaments Inspectorate were now added the limitations of bad light. The inspection went ahead by flashlight, in fact, and the machinery on the benches remained inoperative and therefore less of a provocation to the inspectors’ professional feelings.

  As General Schindler squinted along the beam of a flashlight at the presses and lathes in the metalworks, thirty thousand Plaszóvians, restless in tiered bunks, waited on his word. Even on the overladen lines of the Ostbahn, the higher technology of Auschwitz was but a few hours’ journey west, they knew. They understood that they could not expect from General Schindler compassion as such. Production was his speciality. For him, Production was meant to be an overriding value.

  Because of Schindler’s dinner and the power failure, says the myth, the people of Plaszów were saved. It is a generous fable, because in fact only a tithe of Plaszów people would be alive at the end. But Stern and others would later celebrate the story, and most of its details are probably true. For Oskar always had recourse to alcohol when puzzled as to how to treat officials, and he would have liked the trickery of plunging them into darkness. “You have to remember,” said a boy whom Oskar would later save, “that Oskar had a German side but a Czech side too. He was the good soldier Schweik. He loved to foul up the system.”

  It is ungracious to the myth to ask what the exacting Goeth thought when the lights went out. Maybe, even on the level of literal event, he was drunk or dining elsewhere. It could justly be asked whether Plaszów survived because General Schindler was deceived by dim light and alcohol-dimmed vision, or whether it continued because it was such an excellent holding centre for those weeks when the great terminus at Auschwitz-Birkenau was overcrowded. But the story says more of people’s expectations of Oskar than it does of the frightful compound of Plaszów or the final end of most of its inmates.

  And while the SS and the Armaments Inspectorate considered the future of Plaszów, Josef Bau – a young artist from Cracow, whom Oskar would in the end come to know well – was falling into conspicuous and unconditional love with a girl called Rebecca Tannenbaum. Bau worked in the Construction Office as a draughtsman. He was a solemn boy with an artist’s sense of destiny. He had – so to speak – escaped into Plaszów, because he had never held the correct ghetto papers. Since he had had no trade of use to the ghetto factories, he had been hidden by his mother and by friends. During the liquidation in March 1943, he’d escaped out of the walls and attached himself to the tail of a labour detail going to Plaszów. For in Plaszów there was a new industry which had had no place in the ghetto. Building. In the same sombre, two-winged building blockhouse in which Amon had his office, Josef Bau worked on blueprints. He was a protégé of Itzhak Stern, and Stern had mentioned him to Oskar as an accomplished draughtsman and as a boy who had, potentially at least, skills as a forger.

  He was lucky not to come into too much contact with Amon, because he displayed that air of genuine sensibility which had until now always caused Amon to reach for his revolver.

  Bau’s office was on the far side of the building from Amon’s. Some prisoners worked on the ground floor, with offices near the commandant’s. There were the purchasing officers, the clerks, Mietek Pemper the stenographer. They faced not only a daily risk of an unexpected bullet but, more certainly than that, assaults on their sense of outrage. Mundek Korn, for example, who had been a buyer for a string of Rothschild subsidiaries before the war, and who now bought the fabrics, seagrass, lumber and iron for the prison workshop, had to work not only in the Administration Building but in the same wing as Amon had his office. One morning Korn looked up from his desk and saw through the window, across Jerozolimska Street and by the SS barracks, a boy of twenty years or so, a Cracovian of his acquaintance, urinating against the base of one of the stacks of timber there. At the same time he saw white-shirted arms and two ham fists appear through the bathroom window. The right hand held a revolver. There were two quick shots, at least one of which entered the boy’s head and drove him forward against the pile of cut wood. When Korn looked once more at the bathroom window, one white-shirted arm and free hand were engaged in closing the window.

  On Korn’s desk that morning were requisition forms signed with Amon’s open vowelled but not deranged scrawl. His gaze ranged from the signature to the unbuttoned corpse at the box of timber. Not only did he wonder if he had seen what he had seen. He sensed the seductive concept inherent in Amon’s methods. That is, the temptation to agree that if murder was no more than a visit to the bathroom, a mere pulse in the monotony of form signing, then perhaps all death should now be accepted – with whatever despair – as routine.

  It does not seem that Josef Bau was exposed to such radical persuasion. He missed too the purge of the administrative staff on the ground floor right and centre. It had begun when Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s protégé, complained to the commandant that a girl in the office had acquired a rind of bacon. Amon had come raging down the corridor from his office. You’re all getting fat, he had screamed. He had divided the office staff into two lines then. It had been to Korn like a scene from the Podgórze gymnasium, the girls in the other line so familiar to him, daughters of families he’d grown up with, Podgórze families. It could have been that a teacher was sorting them out into those who would visit the Kosciuszko Monument and those the museum at the Wawel. In fact, the girls in the other line were taken straight from their desks to Chujowa Górka and, for the decadence of that bacon rind, gunned down by one of Pilarzik’s squads.

  Though Josef Bau was not involved in such office turmoil, no one could have said that he was leading a sheltered life in Plaszów. But it had been less perilous than the experience of the girl he had fallen for. Rebecca Tannenbaum was an orphan, though in the clannish life of Jewish Cracow she had not been bereft of kindly aunts and uncles. She was nineteen, sweet-faced and neatly built. She could speak German well and made pleasant and generous conversation. Recently she’d begun to work in Itzhak Stern’s office at the rear of the Administration Building – upstairs, away from the immediate environs of the commandant’s berserk interference. But her job in the Construction Office was only half her labour. She was a manicurist. She treated Amon weekly, she tended the hands of Untersturmführer Leo John, those of Dr Blancke and of his SS lover, the harshly pretty Alice Orlowski. Taking Amon’s hands, she had found them long and well made with tapering fingers, not a fat man’s hands at all; certainly not those of a savage.

  When a prisoner had first come to her and told her that the Herr Commandant wanted to see her, she had begun to run away, fleeing among the desks and down the back stairs. The prisoner had followed and cried after her, “For God’s sake, don’t. He’ll punish me if I don’t bring you back.”

  So she had followed the man down to Goeth’s villa. But before going into the salon, she first visited the stinking cellar – this was in Goeth’s first residence, and the cellar had been dug into the boundaries of an ancient Jewish graveyard. Down among the grave soil, Rebecca’s friend Helen Hirsch had been nursing bruises. You have a problem, Helen admitted. But just do the job and see. That’s all you can do. Some people he likes a professional manner from, some people he doesn’t. And I’ll give you cake and sausage when you come. But don’t just take food. Ask me first. Some people take food without asking, and I don’t know what I have to cover up for.

  Amon did accept Rebecca’s professional manner, presenting his fingers and chatting in German. It could have been the Hotel Cracovia again, and Amon a crisp-shirted, overweight young German tycoon come to Cracow to sell textiles or steel or chemicals. There were, however, two aspects to these meetings that detracted from their air of timeless geniality. The commandant always kept his service revolver at his right elbow, and frequently one or other of the dogs drowsed in the salon. She had seen them, on the Appellplatz, te
ar the flesh of engineer Karp. Yet sometimes, as a dog snuffled in sleep and she and Amon compared notes on pre-war visits to the spa at Carlsbad, the rollcall horrors seemed remote and beyond belief. One day she felt confident enough to ask him why the revolver was always at his elbow. His answer chilled the back of her neck as she bent over his hand. “That’s in case you ever nick me,” he told her.

  If she ever needed proof that a chat about spas was all the same to Amon as an act of madness, she had it the day she entered the hallway and saw him dragging her friend Helen Hirsch out of the salon by the hair – Helen striving to keep her balance and her auburn hair coming out by the roots, and Amon, if he lost his grip one second, regaining it the next in his giant, well-tended hands. And further proof came on the evening she entered the salon and one of those dogs – Rolf or Ralf – materialised, jumped at her and, holding her by the shoulders, took her breast in its jaw. She looked across the room and saw Amon lolling on the sofa and smiling. “Stop shaking, you stupid girl,” he told her, “or I won’t be able to save you from the hound.”

  During the time she tended the commandant’s hands he would shoot his shoe-shine boy for faulty work, suspend his fifteen-year-old orderly, Poldek Dereshowitz, from the ringbolts in his office because a flea had been found on one of the dogs, and execute his servant Lisiek, for lending a drozka and horse to Bosch without first checking. Yet twice a week, the pretty orphan entered the salon and philosophically took the beast by the hand.

  She met Josef Bau one grey morning when he stood outside the Construction Office holding up a blueprint frame towards the low autumn cloud. His thin body seemed overburdened by the weight of it. She asked if she could help him. No, he said. I’m just waiting for the sunshine. Why? she asked. He explained how his transparency drawings for a new building were clamped in the frame beside sensitised blueprint paper. If the sun were only to shine harder, he said, a mysterious chemical union would transfer the drawing from the transparency to the blueprint. Then he said, Why don’t you be my magical sunshine?