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 center. It had begun when Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s prot@eg‘e, 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 Podg@orze High School: the girls in the other line so familiar to him, daughters of families he’d grown up with, Podg@orze families. It could have been that a teacher was sorting them out into those who would visit the Kosciuszko Monument and those for the museum at the Wawel. In fact, the girls in the other line were taken straight from their desks to Chujowa G@orka 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 P@lasz@ow. But it had been less perilous than the experience of the girl of his choice. 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 Stern’s office behind the Administration Building, away from the most immediate environs of the Commandant’s berserk interference. But her job in the Construction Office was only half her labor. She was a manicurist. She treated Amon weekly; she tended the hands of Untersturmf@uhrer Leo John, those of Dr. Blancke and of his lover, the harsh 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 down into the boundaries of an ancient Jewish graveyard. Down amid 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 the other of the dogs drowsed in the salon. She had seen them, on the Appellplatz, tear the flesh of engineer Karp. Yet sometimes, as the dogs snuffled in sleep and she and Amon compared notes on prewar visits to the spa at Carlsbad, the roll-call 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— materialized, leaped at her, and, holding her by the shoulders, opened its jaw on her breast. 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 shoeshine boy for faulty work; hang his fifteen-year-old orderly, Poldek Deresiewicz, 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 dr@o@zka 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 gray morning when he stood outside the Bauleitung holding up a blueprint frame toward the low autumn cloud. His thin body seemed overburdened by the weight. 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 sensitized blueprint paper. If the sun, he said, were only to shine harder, 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?”
Pretty girls weren’t used to delicacy from boys in P@lasz@ow. Sexuality there took its harsh impetus from the volleys heard on Chujowa G@orka, 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 out of the line. 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 ... 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 plaguing your groin and armpits made a mockery of formality. Young males mounted 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 was not as desperate at Emalia. In the enamel workshop, niches had been designed among the machinery on the factory floor to permit lovers to meet at greater length. There was only a theoretical segregation in the cramped barracks. The absence of daily fear, the fuller ration of daily bread made for a little less frenzy. Besides, Oskar still maintained that he 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 warned men and women, first, 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, it was something close to a shock, a remembrance of a vanished culture, to meet in P@lasz@ow 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 got 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 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 moldings. Do it carefully, she told him, anxious because she was 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 her back 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 P@lasz@ow, even among the SS, but they proceeded less sunnily than this very proper romance between Josef Bau and the manicurist. Oberscharf@uhrer 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 P@lasz@ow; 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 Fraulein 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 Oberscharf@uhrer
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 Rosner, the
violinist, and his brother Leopold, the
accordionist, spreading Viennese melodies
around Goeth’s dinner table, were aware of it. One
night a tall, slim, gray 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.” The song is an emotional outpouring in which a young man 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 guest, old enough to have teen-age sons and daughters, themselves caught up in the excesses of puppy 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 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 cohen, 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 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 out
behind the villa for execution. As for Henry’s
performance, it is not relevant to ask was it good or
bad. It was possessed. And only one man, the
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 enduring a grief like this.”
The Rosners went on repeating the song beyond the limit at which Amon would normally have shouted, “Enough!” At last the guest stood up and went out onto 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 Supp‘e 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 P@lasz@ow. Lice,
crabs, and urgency inside the wire; murder and
lunacy on its fringes. And in its midst
Josef Bau and Rebecca Tannenbaum
pursued their ritual dance of courtship.
In the midst of the snows that year, P@lasz@ow
underwent a change of status adverse to all
lovers inside the wire. In the early days of
January 1944, it was designated a
Konzentrationslager (concentration Camp)
under the central authority of General Oswald
Pohl’s SS Main Economic and
Administrative Office in Oranienburg, on
the outskirts of Berlin. Subcamps of
P@lasz@ow—such as Oskar Schindler’s
Emalia—now also came under
Oranienburg’s control. Police chiefs
Scherner and Czurda lost their direct
authority. The labor fees of all those
prisoners employed by Oskar and Madritsch no longer went to Pomorska Street, but to the office of General Richard Gl@ucks, head of Pohl’s Section D (concentration Camps). Oskar, if he wanted favors now, had not only to drive out to P@lasz@ow 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 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 p
rison life and
death was regulated. Its chief, Richard
Gl@ucks, 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. Gl@ucks 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
(p@lasz@ow).
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.
(signed)
SS Obersturmf@uhrer
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.
Schindler's List Page 27