them, Poles would have to be trained in their place and there would again be a production delay, an even greater one than if he accepted Goeth’s attractive offer and moved into Plaszow.
Amon secretly thought that Oskar might be worried that a move into Plaszow would impinge on any sweetly running little deals he had going in Cracow. The Commandant therefore hurried to reassure Herr Schindler that there’d be no interference in the management of the enamel factory. “It’s purely the industrial problems that worry me,” said Schindler piously. He didn’t want to inconvenience the Commandant, but he would be grateful, and he was sure the Armaments Inspectorate would also be grateful, if DEF were permitted to stay in its present location.
Among men like Goeth and Oskar, the word “gratitude” did not have an abstract meaning. Gratitude was a payoff. Gratitude was liquor and diamonds. I understand your problems, Herr Schindler, said Amon. I shall be happy, once the ghetto is liquidated, to provide a guard to escort your workers from Plaszow to Zablocie.
Itzhak Stern, coming to Zablocie one afternoon on business for the Progress factory, found Oskar depressed and sensed in him a dangerous feeling of impotence. After Klonowska had brought in the coffee, which the Herr Direktor drank as always with a shot of cognac, Oskar told Stern that he’d been to Plaszow again: ostensibly to look at the facilities; in fact to gauge when it would be ready for the Ghettomenschen. “I took a count,” said Oskar. He’d counted the terraced barracks on the far hill and found that if Amon intended to cram 200 women into each, as was likely, there was now room for some 6,000 women up there in the top compound. The men’s sector down the hill did not have so many finished buildings, but at the rate things were done in Plaszow it could be finished in days. Everyone on the factory floor knows what’s going to happen, said Oskar. And it’s no use keeping the night shift on the premises here, because after this one, there’ll be no ghetto to go back to. All I can tell them, said Oskar, taking a second slug of cognac, is that they shouldn’t try to hide unless they’re sure of the hiding place. He’d heard that the pattern was to tear the ghetto apart after it had been cleared. Every wall cavity would be probed, every attic carpet taken up, every niche revealed, every cellar plumbed.
All I can tell them, said Oskar, is not to resist.
So it happened oddly that Stern, one of the targets of the coming Aktion, sat comforting Herr Direktor Schindler, a mere witness.
Oskar’s attention to his Jewish laborers was being diffused, tempted away by the wider tragedy of the ghetto’s coming end. Plaszow was a labor institution, said Stern. Like all institutions, it could be outlived. It wasn’t like Belzec, where they made death in the same manner in which Henry Ford made cars. It was degrading to have to line up for Plaszow on orders, but it wasn’t the end of things. When Stern had finished arguing, Oskar put both thumbs under the beveled top of his desk and seemed for a few seconds to want to tear it off. You know, Stern, he said, that that’s damn well not good enough! It is, said Stern. It’s the only course.
And he went on arguing, quoting and hairsplitting, and was himself frightened. For Oskar seemed to be in crisis. If Oskar lost hope, Stern knew, all the Jewish workers of Emalia would be fired, for Oskar would wish to be purified of the entire dirty business.
There’ll be time to do something more positive, said Stern. But not yet.
Abandoning the attempt to tear the lid from his desk, Oskar sat back in his chair and resumed his depression. “You know that Amon Goeth,” he said. “He’s got charm. He could come in here now and charm you. But he’s a lunatic.”
On the ghetto’s last morning—a Shabbat, as it happened, March 13—Amon Goeth arrived in Plac Zgody, Peace Square, at an hour which officially preceded dawn. Low clouds obscured any sharp distinctions between night and day. He saw that the men of the Sonderkommando had already arrived and stood about on the frozen earth of the small park in the middle, smoking and laughing quietly, keeping their presence a secret from the ghetto dwellers in the streets beyond Herr Pankiewicz’ pharmacy. The roads down which they’d move were clear, as in a model of a town. The remaining snow lay heaped and tarnished in gutters and against walls. It is safe to guess that sentimental Goeth felt paternal as he looked out at the orderly scene and saw the young men, comradely before action, in the middle of the square.
Amon took a pull of cognac while he waited there for the middle-aged Sturmbannfuhrer Willi Haase, who would have strategic, though not tactical, control of today’s Aktion. Today Ghetto A, from Plac Zgody westward, the major section of the ghetto, the one where all the working (healthy, hoping, opinionated) Jews dwelt, would be emptied. Ghetto B, a small compound a few blocks square at the eastern end of the ghetto, contained the old, the last of the unemployable. They would be uprooted overnight, or tomorrow. They were slated for Commandant Rudolf Hoss’s greatly expanded extermination camp at Auschwitz. Ghetto B was straightforward, honest work. Ghetto A was the challenge.
Everyone wanted to be here today, for today was history. There had been for more than seven centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening—or at least by tomorrow—those seven centuries would have become a rumor, and Cracow would be judenrein (clean of Jews). And every petty SS official wanted to be able to say that he had seen it happen. Even Unkelbach, the Treuhander of the Progress cutlery factory, having some sort of reserve SS rank, would put on his NCO’S uniform today and move through the ghetto with one of the squads. Therefore the distinguished Willi Haase, being of field rank and involved in the planning, had every right to be counted in.
Amon would be suffering his customary minor headache and be feeling a little drained from the feverish insomnia in which he’d spent the small hours. Now he was here, though, he felt a certain professional exhilaration. It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honor without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at. Psychological impunity had been harder to achieve. Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide. SS training documents, written to combat these futile casualties, pointed out the simplemindedness of believing that because the Jew bore no visible weapons he was bereft of social, economic, or political arms. He was, in fact, armed to the teeth. Steel yourself, said the documents, for the Jewish child is a cultural time bomb, the Jewish woman a biology of treasons, the Jewish male a more incontrovertible enemy than any Russian could hope to be.
Amon Goeth was steeled. He knew he could not be touched, and the very thought of that gave him the same delicious excitement a long-distance runner might have before an event he feels sure about. Amon despised in a genial sort of way those officers who fastidiously left the act itself to their men and NCO’S. He sensed that in some way that might be more dangerous than lending a hand yourself. He would show the way, as he had with Diana Reiter. He knew the euphoria that would build during the day, the gratification that would grow, along with a taste for liquor, as noon came and the pace picked up. Even under the low squalor of those clouds, he knew that this was one of the best days, that when he was old and the race extinct, the young would ask with wonder about days like this.
Less than a kilometer away, a doctor of the ghetto’s convalescent hospital, Dr. H, sat among his last patients, in darkness, grateful that they were isolated like this on the hospital’s top floor, high above the street, alone with their pain and fever.
For at street level everyone knew what had happened at the epidemic hospital near Plac Zgody. An SS detachment under Oberscharfuhrer Albert Hujar had entered the hospital to close it down and had found Dr. Rosalia Blau standing among the beds of her scarlet fever and tuberculosis patients, who, she said, should not be moved. The whooping cough children she had sent home earlier. But the scarlet fever sufferers were too dangerous to move, both for their own sakes and for the community’s, and the tuberculosis cases were simply too sick to walk out.
Since scarlet fever is an adolescent disease, many of Dr. Blau’s patients were girls between the age of twelve and sixteen. Faced with Albert Hujar, Dr. Blau pointed, as warranty for her professional judgment, to these wide- eyed, feverish girls. Hujar himself, acting on the mandate he’d received the week before from Amon Goeth, shot Dr. Blau in the head. The infectious patients, some trying to rise in their beds, some detached in their own delirium, were executed in a rage of automatic fire. When Hujar’s squad had finished, a detail of ghetto men was sent up the stairs to deal with the dead, to pile the bloodied linen, and to wash down the walls.
The convalescent hospital was situated in what had been before the war a Polish police station. Throughout the life of the ghetto, its three floors had been cluttered with the sick. Its director was a respected physician named Dr. B. By the bleak morning of March 13, Doctors B and H had reduced its population to four, all of them immovable. One was a young workman with galloping consumption; the second, a talented musician with terminal kidney disease. It seemed important to Dr. H that they somehow be spared the final panic of a mad volley of fire. Even more so the blind man afflicted by a stroke, and the old gentleman whose earlier surgery for an intestinal tumor had
