Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally

  Pretty girls weren’t used to delicacy from boys in Plaszów. Sexuality took its harsh impetus from the volleys heard on Chujowa Górka, the executions on the Appellplatz. Imagine a day, for instance, when a chicken is found among the work party returning from the cable factory on Wieliczka. Amon is ranting on the Appellplatz, for the chicken was discovered lying in a bag in front of the camp gate during a spot check. Whose bag was it? Amon wants to know. Whose chicken? Since no one on the Appellplatz will admit anything, Amon takes a rifle from an SS man and shoots the prisoner at the head of the line. The bullet, passing through the body, also fells the man behind. No one speaks though. How you love one another! roars Amon, and prepares to execute the next man in line. A boy of fourteen steps forward. He is shuddering and weeping. He can say who brought the chicken in, he tells the Herr Commandant. Who then?

  The boy points to one of the two dead men. That one, the boy screams. Amon astonishes the entire Appellplatz by believing the boy and puts his head back and laughs with the sort of classroom incredulity teachers like to exhibit. These people, he’s saying. Can’t they understand now why they’re all forfeit?

  After an evening like that, in the hours of free movement between 7 and 9 p.m., most prisoners felt that there was no time for leisurely courtship. The lice which plagued your groin and armpits made a mockery of formality. Young males jumped on girls without ceremony. In the women’s camp they sang a song which asked the virgin why she’d bound herself up with string and for whom she thought she was saving herself.

  The atmosphere at Emalia was not as desperate. In the enamel workshop niches had been designed among machinery on the factory floor to permit lovers to meet at greater length. There was only a theoretic segregation in the cramped barracks. The absence of daily fear, the fuller ration of daily bread made for a little less frenzy. Besides, Oskar would not let the SS garrison go inside the prison without his permission.

  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 gave men and women warning 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 though, in Plaszów, it was something close to a shock, a remembrance of a vanished culture, to meet 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 collected 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 noon 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 skirting boards. Do it carefully, she told him, anxious, 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 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 Plaszów, 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 Plaszów, 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 Fraülein 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 and Leopold Rosner, spreading Viennese melodies around Goeth’s dinner table, were aware of it. One night a tall, slim, grey 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, a syrupy love ballad in which a boy 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 officer, old enough to have teenage sons and daughters, themselves caught up in the excesses of calf-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 always looked to a result. 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 Kohen 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 which 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 behind the villa for execution. As for the standard of Henry’s performance, it is not relevant to ask whether it was good or bad. It was possessed. And only one man, the SS 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
carrying a grief like this.”

  The Rosners went on repeating the song beyond the limit at which Amon would normally have shouted, “Enough!” Then the officer stood up and went out on to 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 Plaszów. Lice, crabs and urgency inside the wire, murder and lunacy on its fringes. And in its midst Josef Bau and Rebecca Tannenbaum were pursuing a ritual dance of courtship.

  In the midst of the snows that year, Plaszów underwent a change of status adverse to all lovers inside the wire. In the early days of January 1944, it was designated a Konzentrationslager under the central authority of General Oswald Pohl’s SS Main Economic and Administrative Office in Oranienburg on the outskirts of Berlin. Subcamps of Plaszów – such as Oskar Schindler’s Emalia – now also came under Oranienburg’s control. Police chiefs Scherner and Czurda lost their direct authority. The labour 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 favours now, had not only to drive out to Plaszów and sweeten Amon, not only to have Julian Scherner to dinner, but also to reach certain officials in the grand bureaucratic complex of Oranienburg.

  Oskar took 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 labourers and candidates for the chambers, for the equation in which X represented slave labour and Y represented the more immediately condemned.

  Glücks had laid down procedures for every event and from his department came memos drafted in the anaesthetic verbiage of the planner, the paper shuffler, the detached specialist.

  SS Main Office of Economics

  and Administration

  Section Chief D (Concentration

  Camps)

  DI-AZ: 14fl-ot-S-GEH TGB NO 453–44

  To the Commandants of Concentration Camps

  Da, Sah, Bu, Mau, Slo, Neu, Au l-III,

  Gr-Ro, Natz, Stu, Rav, Herz, A-L-Bels,

  Gruppenl. D. Riga, Gruppenl. D.Cracow (Plaszów).

  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 proven 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.

  Signed SS Obersturmführer.

  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 Reich’s 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 personal records as soon as the index card had been brought up to date.

  And here came Herr Schindler of Cracow 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 labour than he. There were the megaliths, Krupp, of course, and I. G. Farben. There was the cable works at Plaszów. Walter C. Toebbens, the Warsaw industrialist whom Himmler had tried to force into the Wehrmacht, was a heavier employer of labour than Herr Schindler. Then there were the steelworks at Stalowa Wola, the aircraft factories at Budzyn and Zakopane, the Steyr-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 labour 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 so 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 régime and might retire to a corner to test each other out and perhaps establish a 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 works manager had told newcomers, and Lange had heard the speech and felt damned.

  The letter Schindler carried had been preceded by some phone calls, and both calls and letter pushed the same proposition. Herr Schindler, with his messkits and his 45mm anti-tank 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 at a peat works, a brush factory and iron foundry in Lublin, an equipment works 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 centres, the staff never retain 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 Plaszów 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, o
n 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 rollcall 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 among 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 Plaszów to adopt the mating stratagems of birds. And by these means, the formal romance of Rebecca and Josef went forward.

  Then Josef somehow got a dead woman’s dress from the clothing warehouse. Often, after rollcall in the men’s lines, he would go to the latrines, put on the long gown, and place an orthodox bonnet on his hair. Then he would come out and join the women’s lines. His short hair would not have amazed any SS guard, since most of the women had been shorn because of lice. So, with thirteen thousand women prisoners, he would pass into the women’s compound and spend the night sitting up in hut 57 keeping Rebecca company.

  In Rebecca’s barracks, the older women took Josef at his word. If Josef required a traditional courtship, they would fall into their traditional rôle as chaperones. Josef was a gift to them too, a licence to play their pre-war ceremonious selves. From their four-tiered bunks they looked down on the two children until everyone fell asleep. If any one of them thought, Let’s not be too fussy in times like these about what the children get up to at dead of night, it was never said. In fact, two of the older women would crowd into the one narrow ledge so that Josef could have a bunk of his own. The discomfort, the smell of the other body, the risk of the migration of lice from your friend to yourself – none of that was as important, as crucial to self-respect, as that the courtship should be fulfilled according to the norms.