Oskar first approached Henry Mandel, a welder in the P@lasz@ow metal shop and a member of Hitach Dut, a Zionist youth and labor movement. Mandel did not want to touch the money. Look, said Schindler, I’ve got a letter in Hebrew to go with it, a letter from Palestine. But of course, if it was a setup, if Oskar had been compromised and was being used, he would have a letter from Palestine. And when you hadn’t enough bread for breakfast, it was quite a sum to be offered: 50,000 RM.--100,000 z@loty. To be offered that for your discretionary use. It just wasn’t credible.
Schindler then tried to pass the money, which was sitting there, inside the boundary of P@lasz@ow in the trunk of his car, to another member of Hitach Dut, a woman named Alta Rubner. She had some contacts, through prisoners who went to work in the cable factory, through some of the Poles in the Polish prison, with the underground in Sosnowiec. Perhaps, she said to Mandel, it would be best to refer the whole business to the underground, and let them decide on the provenance of the money Herr Oskar Schindler was offering.
Oskar kept trying to persuade her, raising his voice at her under cover of Madritsch’s chattering sewing machines. “I guarantee with all my heart that this isn’t a trap!” With all my heart. Exactly the sentiment one would expect from an agent provocateur!
Yet after Oskar had gone away and Mandel had spoken to Stern, who declared the letter authentic, and then conferred again with the girl, a decision was made to take the money. They knew now, however, that Oskar wouldn’t be back with it. Mandel went to Marcel Goldberg at the Administration Office. Goldberg had also been a member of Hitach Dut, but after becoming the clerk in charge of lists—of labor lists and transport lists, of the lists of living and dead—he had begun taking bribes. Mandel could put pressure on him, though. One of the lists Goldberg could draw up—or at least, add to and subtract from—was the list of those who went to Emalia to collect scrap metal for use in the workshops of P@lasz@ow. For old times’ sake, and without having to disclose his reason for wanting to visit Emalia, Mandel was put on this list.
But arriving in Zablocie and sneaking away from the scrap-metal detail to get to Oskar, he’d been blocked in the front office by Bankier. Herr Schindler was too busy, said Bankier. A week later Mandel was back. Again Bankier wouldn’t let him in to speak to Oskar. The third time, Bankier was more specific. You want that Zionist money? You didn’t want it before. And now you want it. Well, you can’t have it. That’s the way life goes, Mr. Mandel!
Mandel nodded and left. He presumed wrongly that Bankier had already lifted at least a segment of the cash. In fact, however, Bankier was being careful. The money did finish in the hands of Zionist prisoners in P@lasz@ow, for Alta Rubner’s receipt for the funds was delivered to Springmann by Sedlacek. It seems that the amount was used in part to help Jews who came from other cities than Cracow and therefore had no local sources of support.
Whether the funds that came to Oskar and were
passed on by him were spent mainly on food, as
Stern would have preferred, or largely on underground
resistance—the purchase of passes or weapons
--is a question Oskar never investigated. None of this money, however, went to buy Mrs. Schindler out of Montelupich prison or to save the lives of such people as the Danziger brothers. Nor was the Sedlacek money used to replace the 30,000-kilogram bribes of enamelware
Oskar would pay out to major and minor SS officials during 1943 to prevent them from recommending the closure of the Emalia camp. None of it was spent on the 16,000-z@l. set of gynecological instruments Oskar had to buy on the black market when one of the Emalia girls got pregnant—pregnancy being, of course, an immediate ticket to Auschwitz. Nor did any of it go to purchase the broken-down Mercedes from Untersturmf@uhrer John. John offered Oskar the Mercedes for sale at the same time as Oskar presented a request for 30 P@lasz@ow people to be transferred to Emalia.
The car, bought by Oskar one day for 12,000
z@l., was requisitioned the next by Leo
John’s friend and brother officer,
Untersturmf@uhrer Scheidt, to be used in the construction of fieldworks on the camp perimeter. Perhaps they’ll carry soil in the trunk, Oskar raged to Ingrid at the supper table. In a later informal account of the incident, he commented that he was glad to be of assistance to both gentlemen.
CHAPTER 26
Raimund Titsch was making payments of a different order. Titsch was a quiet, clerkly Austrian Catholic with a limp 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 the P@lasz@ow camp, he
managed Julius Madritsch’s uniform
factory, a business of 3,000
seamstresses and mechanics.
One way he paid was through his chess matches with Amon Goeth. The Administration Building 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 Hauptsturmf@uhrer’s favor.
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 victory 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 Building 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
preventive chess. Independently of Dr.
Sedlacek and of the man with the pocket camera whom Oskar had brought to P@lasz@ow, 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 P@lasz@ow by truck beneath bales of rags and bolts of cloth. Titsch photographed round rye being hurried from hand to hand into Madritsch’s storeroom, on 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 P@lasz@ow, he
intimated the size of the camp, its desolation. It seems that on Amon’s sun deck he even took close-ups of the Commandant at rest in a deck chair, a hefty Amon approaching now the 120 kg at which newly arrived SS Dr.
Blancke would say to him, “Enough, Amon; you have to take some weight off.” Titsch 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 P@lasz@ow 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 cars. Titsch understood that only the desperate deposited go
ods with him. That prison minority who had a stock of rings and watches and jewelry hidden somewhere in P@lasz@ow didn’t need him. They traded regularly for favors 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 P@lasz@ow 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. In the files of ODESSA, the postwar secret society of former SS men, he would be listed as a traitor. For the fact that he’d supplied the Madritsch people with some 30,000 loaves of bread, as well as many chickens and some kilos of butter, and that for his humanity he had been honored 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. “Jew-kisser.” So the P@lasz@ow 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 forever, the emulsion drying on the dark and secret images of Amon’s love Majola, his killing dogs, his nameless slave laborers. It might therefore have been seen as a sort of triumph for the population of P@lasz@ow when, in November 1963, a Schindler survivor (leopold Pfefferberg) secretly bought the box and its contents for $500 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 nameless shadow of ODESSA frightened him more than had the names of Amon Goeth, of Scherner, of Auschwitz, in the days of P@lasz@ow.
After his burial, the reels were developed.
Nearly all the pictures came out.
Not one of that small body of P@lasz@ow 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 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 P@lasz@ow 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 P@lasz@ow, 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 named 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 P@lasz@ow. 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 P@lasz@ow 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 a 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 P@lasz@ow in their Mercedeses 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 detachment behind them. But Oscar would be the last to be awed by that fact.
The inspection started at the Madritsch clothing factory. This was P@lasz@ow’s showplace. During 1943, it had produced Wehrmacht uniforms at a monthly rate of better than twenty thousand. But the question was whether Herr Madritsch would do better to forget P@lasz@ow, to spend his capital on expanding his more efficient and better-supplied Polish factories in Podg@orze and Tarnow. The ramshackle conditions of P@lasz@ow were no encouragement to Madritsch or any other investor to install the sort of machinery a sophisticated factory would need.
The official party had just begun its inspection when all the lights in all the workshops went out, the power circuit broken by friends of Itzhak Stern’s in the P@lasz@ow 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, 30,000 P@lasz@owians, restless in tiered bunks, waited on his word.
Even on the overladen lines of the
Ostbahn, they knew, the higher technology of Auschwitz was but a few hours’ journey west. They understood that they could not expect from General Schindler compassion as such. Production was his specialty. 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 P@lasz@ow were saved. It is a generous fable, because in fact only a tenth of P@lasz@ow 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 liquor 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 Amon Goeth thought when the lights went out. Maybe, even on the level of literal event, he was drunk or dining elsewhere. The question is whether P@lasz@ow survived because General Schindler was deceived by dim light and alcohol-dimmed vision, or whether it continued because it was such an excellent holding center 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 P@lasz@ow or the final end of most of its inmates.
And while the SS and the Armaments
Inspectorate considered the future of
P@lasz@ow, 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 named Rebecca Tannenbaum. Bau worked in the Construction Office as a draftsman. He was a solemn boy with an artist’s sense of destiny. He had, so to speak, escaped into P@lasz@ow, 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 labor detail going to P@lasz@ow. For in P@lasz@ow there was a new industry which had had no place in the ghetto. Construction. In the same somber two-winged building in which Amon had his office, Josef Bau worked on blueprints. He was a prot@eg‘e of Itzhak Stern’s, and Stern had mentioned him to Oskar as an accomplished draftsman 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 the air of genuine sensibility which had, before today, 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, sea grass, lumber, and iron for the prison workshops, had to work not only in the Administration Building but in the same wing where 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 or so years, a Cracovian of his acquaintance, urinating against the base of one of the stacks of lumber there. At the same time he saw white-shirted arms and two ham fists appear through the bathroom window at the end of the wing. 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-voweled but not
deranged scrawl. His gaze ranged from the
signature to the unbuttoned corpse at the box
of lumber. 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.
Schindler's List Page 26