finding an appropriate site, somewhere down in
Moravia, and of the Ostbahn in making the shift
southwest from Cracow. He let Amon know that
he’d be very grateful for any support. The
mention of gratitude always excited
Amon. Yes, he said, if Oskar could get
all the cooperation he needed from the boards involved, Amon would then allow a list of people to be drawn up.
When that was settled, Amon wanted a game of cards. He liked blackjack, a version of the French vingt-et-un. It was a hard game for junior officers to fake losing without being obvious. It did not permit of too much sycophancy. It was therefore true sport, and Amon preferred it. Besides, Oskar wasn’t interested in losing this evening. He would be paying enough to Amon for that list.
The Commandant began by betting modestly, in 100-z@loty bills, as if his doctors had advised moderation in this as well. He kept busting however, and when the beginning stake had been raised to 500 z@l., Oskar got a “natural,” an ace and a jack, which meant that Amon had to pay him double the stake.
Amon was disconsolate about that, but not too testy. He called for Helen Hirsch to bring coffee. She came in, a parody of a gentleman’s servant, crisply dressed still in black but her right eye blinded by swelling. She was so small that Amon would need to stoop to beat her up. The girl knew Oskar now, but did not look at him. Nearly a year past, he had promised to get her out. Whenever he came to the villa he managed to slip down the corridor to the kitchen and ask her how she was. It meant something, but it had not touched the substance of her life. A few weeks back, for example, when the soup hadn’t been the correct temperature—
Amon was pernickety about soup, flyspecks in the corridor, fleas on dogs—the Commandant had called for Ivan and Petr and told them to take her to the birch tree in the garden and shoot her.
He’d watched from the French windows as she walked
in front of Petr’s Mauser, pleading under her
breath with the young Ukrainian. “Petr, who’s this
you’re going to shoot? It’s Helen. Helen who
gives you cakes. You couldn’t shoot Helen, could
you?” And Petr answering in the same manner, through
clenched teeth, “I know, Helen. I don’t
want to. But if I don’t, he’ll kill
me.” She’d bent her head toward the spotted birch bark. Having often asked Amon why he wouldn’t kill her, she wanted to die simply, to hurt him by her willing acceptance. But it wasn’t possible. She was trembling so hard that he could have seen it. Her legs were shaking. And then she’d heard Amon call from the windows, “Bring the bitch back. There’s plenty of time to shoot her. In the meantime, it might still be possible to educate her.”
Insanely, in between his spates of savagery, there were brief phases in which he tried to play the benign master. He had said to her one morning, “You’re really a very well-trained servant. If after the war you need a reference, I shall be happy to give you one.” She knew it was just talk, a daydream. She turned her deaf ear, the one whose eardrum he had perforated with a blow. Sooner or later, she knew, she would die of his customary fury.
In a life like hers, a smile from visitors was only a momentary comfort. Tonight she placed the enormous silver pot of coffee beside the Herr Commandant—he still drank it by the bucket in cups laden with sugar—made her obeisance, and left. Within an hour, when Amon was 3,700 z@l. in debt to Oskar and complaining sourly about his luck, Oskar suggested a variation on the betting. He would need a maid in Moravia, he said, when he moved to Czechoslovakia. There you couldn’t get them as intelligent and well trained as Helen Hirsch. They were all country girls. Oskar suggested therefore that he and Amon play one hand, double or nothing. If Amon won, Oskar would pay him 7,400 z@l. If he hit a “natural,” it would be 14,800 z@l. But if I win, said Oskar, then you give me Helen Hirsch for my list.
Amon wanted to think about that. Come on, said Oskar, she’s going to Auschwitz anyhow. But there was an attachment there. Amon was so used to Helen that he couldn’t easily wager her away.
When he’d thought of an end for her, it had
probably always been that he would finish her by his
own hand, with personal passion. If he played
cards for her and lost, he would be under pressure,
as a Viennese sportsman, to give up the
pleasure of intimate murder.
Much earlier in P@lasz@ow’s history,
Schindler had asked that Helen be assigned to Emalia. But Amon had refused. It seemed only a year ago that P@lasz@ow would exist for decades, and that the Commandant and his maid would grow old together, at least until some perceived fault in Helen brought about the abrupt end of the connection. This time a year ago, no one would have believed that the relationship would be resolved because the Russians were outside Lw@ow. As for Oskar’s part in this proposal, he had made it lightly. He did not seem to see, in his offer to Amon, any parallel with God and Satan playing cards for human souls. He did not ask himself by what right he made a bid for the girl. If he lost, his chance of extracting her some other way was slim. But all chances were slim that year. Even his own.
Oskar got up and bustled around the room, looking for stationery with an official letterhead on it. He wrote out the marker for Amon to sign should he lose: “I authorize that the name of prisoner Helen Hirsch be added to any list of skilled workers relocated with Herr Oskar Schindler’s DEF Works.”
Amon was dealer and gave Oskar an 8 and a 5. Oskar asked to be dealt more. He received a 5 and an ace. It would have to do. Then Amon dealt to himself. A 4 came up, and then a king.
God in heaven! said Amon. He was a
gentleman cusser; he seemed to be too
fastidious to use obscenities. I’m out. He laughed a little but was not really amused. My first cards, he explained, were a three and a five. With a four I should have been safe. Then I got this damned king.
In the end, he signed the marker. Oskar picked up all the chits he’d won that evening from Amon and returned them. Just look after the girl for me, he said, till it’s time for us all to leave.
Out in her kitchen, Helen Hirsch did not know she’d been saved over cards.
Probably because Oskar reported his evening with Amon to Stern, rumors of Oskar’s plan were heard in the Administration Building and even in the workshops. There was a Schindler list. It was worth everything to be on it.
CHAPTER 31
At some point in any discussion of Schindler, the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will blink and shake their heads and begin the almost mathematical business of finding the sum of his motives. For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still “I don’t know why he did it.” It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which, in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia.
And not only for them. In early September he drove to Podg@orze and visited Madritsch, who at that point employed more than 3,000 prisoners in his uniform factory. This plant would now be disbanded. Madritsch would get his sewing machines back, and his workers would vanish. If we made a combined approach, said Oskar, we could get more than four thousand out. Mine and yours as well. We could relocate them in something like safety. Down in Moravia.
Madritsch would always and justly be revered by his surviving prisoners. The bread and chickens smuggled into his factory were paid for from his pocket and at continuous risk. He would have been considered a more stable man than Oskar. Not as flamboyant, and not as subject to obsession. He had not suffered arrest. But he had been much more humane than was safe an
d, without wit and energy, would have ended in Auschwitz.
Now Oskar presented to him a vision of a Madritsch-Schindler camp somewhere in the High Jeseniks; some smoky, safe little industrial hamlet.
Madritsch was attracted by the idea but did not rush to say yes. He could tell that though the war was lost, the SS system had become more instead of less implacable. He was correct in believing that, unhappily, the prisoners of P@lasz@ow would—in coming months—be consumed in death camps to the west. For if Oskar was stubborn and possessed, so were the SS Main Office and their prize field operatives, the commandants of the Concentration Camps.
He did not say no, however. He needed time to think about it. Though he couldn’t say it to Oskar, it is likely he was afraid of sharing factory premises with a rash, demonic fellow like Herr Schindler.
Without any clear word from Madritsch, Oskar
took to the road. He went to Berlin and bought
dinner for Colonel Erich Lange. I can go
completely over to the manufacture of shells,
Oskar told Lange. I can transfer my
heavy machinery.
Lange was crucial. He could guarantee
contracts; he could write the hearty
recommendations Oskar needed for the Evacuation Board and the German officials in Moravia. Later, Oskar would say of this shadowy staff officer that he had given consistent help. Lange was still in that state of exalted desperation and moral disgust characteristic of many who had worked inside the system but not always for it. We can do it, said Lange but it will take some money. Not for me. For others.
Through Lange, Oskar talked with an officer of the Evacuation Board at OKH on Bendler Street. It was likely, said this officer, that the evacuation would be approved in principle. But there was a major obstacle. The Governor cum Gauleiter of Moravia, ruling from a castle at Liberec, had followed a policy of keeping Jewish labor camps out of his province.
Neither the SS nor the Armaments Inspectorate had so far persuaded him to change his attitude. A good man to discuss this impasse with, said the officer, would be a middle-aged Wehrmacht engineer down in the Troppau office of the Armaments Inspectorate, a man named Sussmuth. Oskar could talk to Sussmuth too about what relocation sites were available in Moravia. Meanwhile, Herr Schindler could count on the support of the Main Evacuation Board. “But you can understand that in view of the pressure they are under, and the inroads the war has made on their personal comforts, they are more likely to give a quick answer if you could be considerate to them in some way. We poor city fellows are short of ham, cigars, liquor, cloth, coffee ... that sort of thing.”
The officer seemed to think that Oskar carried around with him half the peacetime produce of Poland. Instead, to get together a gift parcel for the gentlemen of the board, Oskar had to buy luxuries at the Berlin black-market rate.
An old gentleman on the desk at the Hotel Adlon was able to acquire excellent schnapps for Herr Schindler for a discount price of about 80 RM. a bottle. And you couldn’t send the gentlemen of the board less than a dozen. Coffee, however, was like gold, and Havanas were at an insane price. Oskar bought them in quantity and included them in the hamper. The gentlemen might need a head of steam if they were to bring the Governor of Moravia around. In the midst of Oskar’s negotiations, Amon Goeth was arrested.
Someone must have informed on him. Some jealous junior officer, or a concerned citizen who’d visited the villa and been shocked by Amon’s sybaritic style. A senior SS investigator named Eckert began to look at Amon’s financial dealings. The shots Amon had taken from the balcony were not germane to Eckert’s investigation. But the embezzlements and the black-market dealings were, as were complaints from some of his SS inferiors that he had treated them severely.
Amon was on leave in Vienna, staying with his father, the publisher, when the SS arrested him. They also raided an apartment Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth kept in the city and discovered a cache of money, some 80,000 RM., which Amon could not explain to their satisfaction. They found as well, stacked to the ceiling, close to a million cigarettes. Amon’s Viennese apartment, it seemed, was more warehouse than pied @a terre.
It might be at first sight surprising that the SS—OR rather, the officers of Bureau V of the Reich Security Main Office—should want to arrest such an effective servant as Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth. But they had already investigated irregularities in Buchenwald and tried to pin the Commandant, Koch. They had even attempted to find evidence for the arrest of the renowned Rudolf H@oss, and had questioned a Viennese Jewess who, they suspected, was pregnant by this star of the camp system. So Amon, raging in his apartment while they ransacked it, had no cause to hope for much immunity.
They took him to Breslau and put him in an SS prison to await investigation and trial. They showed their innocence of the way affairs were run in P@lasz@ow by going to the villa and questioning Helen Hirsch on suspicion of her being involved in Amon’s swindles. Twice in coming months she would be taken to the cells beneath the SS barracks of P@lasz@ow for interrogation. They fired questions at her about Amon’s contacts on the black market—who his agents were, how he worked the jewelry shop at P@lasz@ow, the custom-tailoring shop, the upholstery plant. No one hit her or threatened her. But it was their conviction that she was a member of a gang that tormented her. If Helen had ever thought of an unlikely and glorious salvation, she would not have dared dream that Amon would be arrested by his own people. But she felt her sanity going now in the interrogation room, when under their law they tried to shackle her to Amon. Chilowicz might have been able to help you, she told them. But Chilowicz is dead.
They were policemen by trade, and after a time would decide she could give them nothing except a little information about the sumptuous cuisine at the villa Goeth. They could have asked her about her scars, but they knew they couldn’t get Amon on grounds of sadism. Investigating sadism in the camp at Sachsenhausen, they’d been forced off the prem-ises by armed guards. In Buchenwald they had found a material witness, an NCO, to testify against the Commandant, but the informer had been found dead in his cell. The head of that SS investi-gating team ordered that samples of a poison found in the NCO’S stomach be administered to four Russian prisoners. He watched them die, and so had his proof against the Commandant and the camp doctor. Even though he got prosecutions for murder and sadistic practice, it was a strange justice. Above all, it made the camp personnel close ranks and dispose of living evidence. So the men of Bureau V did not question Helen about her injuries. They stuck to embezzlement, and in the end stopped troubling her. They investigated Mietek Pemper too.
He was wise enough not to tell them much about Amon, certainly not about his crimes against humans. He knew little but rumors of Amon’s frauds.
He played the neutral and well-mannered
typist of nonclassified material. “The
Herr Commandant would never discuss such matters
with me,” he pleaded continually. But beneath his
performance, he must have suffered the same howling
disbelief as Helen Hirsch. If there was one
event most likely to guarantee him a chance
of life, it was Amon’s arrest. For there
had been no more certain limit to his
life than this: that when the Russians reached Tarnow, Amon would dictate his last letters and then assassinate the typist. What worried Mietek, therefore, was that they would release Amon too soon.
But they were not interested solely in the question of
Amon’s speculations. The SS judge who
questioned Pemper had been told
by Oberscharf@uhrer Lorenz Landsdorfer that
Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth had let his
Jewish stenographer type up the directives
and plans to be followed by the P@lasz@ow
garrison in the case of an assault on the
camp by partisans. Amon, in explaining
to Pemper how the typing of these plans shoul
d be set out, had even shown him copies of similar plans for other concentration camps. The judge was so alarmed by this disclosure of secret documents to a Jewish prisoner that he ordered Pemper’s arrest.
Pemper spent two miserable weeks in a cell beneath the SS barracks. He was not beaten, but was questioned regularly by a series of Bureau V investigators and by two SS judges. He thought he could read in their eyes the conclusion that the safest thing was to shoot him. One day during questioning about P@lasz@ow’s emergency plans, Pemper asked his interrogators, “Why keep me here? A prison is a prison. I have a life sentence anyhow.” It was an argument calculated to bring a resolution, either release from the cells or else a bullet. After the session ended, Pemper spent some hours of anxiety until his cell door opened again. He was marched out and returned to his hut in the camp. It was not the last time, however, that he would be questioned on subjects relating to Commandant Goeth. It seemed that following his arrest, Amon’s juniors did not rush to give him references. They were careful. They waited. Bosch, who’d drunk so much of the Commandant’s liquor, told Untersturmf@uhrer John that it was dangerous to try to bribe these determined investigators from Bureau V. As for Amon’s seniors, Scherner was gone, assigned to hunting partisans, and would in the end be killed in an ambush in the forests of Niepolomice. Amon was in the hands of men from Oranienburg who’d never dined at the Goethhaus—or, if they had, had been either shocked or touched by envy. After her release by the SS, Helen Hirsch, now working for the new Commandant, Hauptsturmf@uhrer B@uscher, received a friendly note from Amon asking her to get together a parcel of clothes, some romances and detective novels, and some liquor to comfort him in his cell. It was, she thought, like a letter from a relative. “Would you kindly gather for me the following,” it said, and ended with “Hoping to see you again soon.” Meanwhile Oskar had been down to the market city of Troppau to see engineer Sussmuth. He’d brought along liquor and diamonds, but they weren’t needed in this case. Sussmuth told Oskar that he had already proposed that some small Jewish work camps be set up in the border towns of Moravia to turn out goods for the Armaments Inspectorate. Such camps would, of course, be under the central control of either Auschwitz or Gr@oss-Rosen, for the areas of influence of the big concentration camps crossed the Polish-Czechoslovak border. But there was more safety for prisoners in little work camps than could be found in the grand necropolis of Auschwitz itself. Sussmuth had got nowhere, of course. The Castle at Liberec had trampled on the proposal. He had never had a lever. Oskar— the support Oskar had from Colonel Lange and the gentlemen of the Evacuation Board—that could be the lever.
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