up the papers while Oskar was still on the premises. From their apartment, Oskar drove out, as a courtesy, and told Amon that he intended to make a subcamp of Plaszow in his own factory yard. Amon was quite taken with the idea. “If the SS generals approve,” he said, “you can expect my cooperation. As long as you don’t want my musicians or my maid.”
The next day a full-scale appointment was arranged with Oberfuhrer Scherner at Pomorska Street. Somehow both Amon and General Scherner knew that Oskar could be made to foot the whole bill for a new camp. They could detect that when Oskar pushed the industrial argument—”I want my workers on the premises so that their labor can be more fully exploited”—he was at the same time pushing some other intimate craze of his in which expense was no question. They thought of him as a good enough fellow who’d been stricken with a form of Jew-love as with a virus. It was a corollary to SS theory that the Jewish genius so pervaded the world, could achieve such magical effects, that Herr Oskar Schindler was to be pitied as much as was a prince turned into a frog. But he would have to pay for his disease.
The requirements of Obergruppenfuhrer Friedrich-Wilhelm Kruger, police chief of the Government General and superior of Scherner and Czurda, were based on the regulations set down by the Concentration Camp Section of General Oswald Pohl’s SS Main Administrative and Economic Office, even though as yet Plaszow was run independently of Pohl’s bureau. The basic stipulations for an SS Forced Labor Subcamp involved the erection of fences nine feet tall, of watchtowers at given intervals according to the length of the camp perimeter, of latrines, barracks, a clinic, a dental office, a bathhouse and delousing complex, a barbershop, a food store, a laundry, a barracks office, a guard block of somewhat better construction than the barracks themselves, and all the accessories. What had occurred to Amon, Scherner, and Czurda was that Oskar, as was only proper, would meet the expenses either out of economic motives or because of the cabalistic enchantment he lay under. And even though they would make Oskar pay, his proposal suited them. There was still a ghetto in Tarnow, forty-five miles east, and when it was abolished the population would need to be absorbed into Plaszow. Likewise the thousands of Jews now arriving at Plaszow from the shtetls of southern Poland. A subcamp in Lipowa Street would ease that pressure.
Amon also understood, though he would never say it aloud to the police chiefs, that there would be no need to supply a Lipowa Street camp too precisely with the minimum food requirements as laid down in General Pohl’s directive. Amon—who could hurl thunderbolts from his doorstep without meeting protest, who believed in any case in the official idea that a certain attrition should take place in Plaszow—was already selling a percentage of the prison rations on the open market in Cracow through an agent of his, a Jew named Wilek Chilowicz, who had contacts with factory managements, merchants, and even restaurants in Cracow.
Dr. Alexander Biberstein, now a Plaszow prisoner himself, found that the daily ration varied between 700 and 1,100 calories. At breakfast a prisoner received a half-liter of black ersatz coffee, tasting of acorns, and a lump of rye bread weighing 175g, an eighth of one of the round loaves collected by barracks mess orderlies each morning at the bakery. Hunger being such a disruptive force, each mess orderly cut up the loaf with his back to the others and called, “Who wants this piece? Who wants this one?” At midday a soup was distributed—carrots, beets, sago substitute. Some days it had a fuller body than on others. Better food came in with the work parties who returned each evening. A small chicken could be carried under a coat, a French roll down a trouser leg. Yet Amon tried to prevent this by having the guards search returning details at dusk in front of the Administration Building. He did not want the work of natural wastage to be frustrated, nor the ideological wind to be taken out of his food dealings through Chilowicz. Since, therefore, he did not indulge his own prisoners, he felt that if Oskar chose to take a thousand Jews, he could indulge them at his own expense, without too regular a supply of bread and beets from the storerooms of Plaszow.
That spring, it was not only the police chiefs of the Cracow region whom Oskar had to talk to. He went into his backyard, persuading the neighbors. Beyond the two shabby huts constructed of Jereth’s pineboard, he came to the radiator factory run by Kurt Hoderman. It employed a horde of Poles and about 100 Plaszow inmates. In the other direction was Jereth’s box factory, supervised by the German engineer Kuhnpast. Since the Plaszow people were such a small part of their staff, they didn’t take to the idea with any passion, but they weren’t against it. For Oskar was offering to house their Jews 50 meters from work instead of 5 kilometers.
Next Oskar moved out into the neighborhood to talk to engineer Schmilewski at the Wehrmacht garrison office a few streets away. He employed a squad of Plaszow prisoners. Schmilewski had no objections. His name, with Kuhnpast’s and Hoderman’s, was appended to the application Schindler sent off to Pomorska Street.
SS surveyors visited Emalia and conferred with surveyor Steinhauser, an old friend of Oskar’s from the Armaments Inspectorate. They stood and frowned at the site, as surveyors will, and asked questions about drainage. Oskar had them all into his office upstairs for a morning coffee and a cognac, and then everyone parted amiably. Within a few days the application to establish a Forced Labor Subcamp in the factory backyard was accepted.
That year DEF would enjoy a profit of 15.8 million Reichsmarks. It might be thought that the 300,000 RM. Oskar now spent on building materials for the Emalia camp was a large but not fatal overhead. The truth was though that he was only beginning to pay.
Oskar sent a plea to the Bauleitung, or Construction Office, of Plaszow for the help of a young engineer named Adam Garde. Garde was still working on the barracks of Amon’s camp and, after leaving instructions for the barracks builders, would be marched under individual guard from Plaszow to Lipowa Street to supervise the setting up of Oskar’s compound. When Garde first turned up in Zablocie, he found two rudimentary huts already occupied by close to 400 prisoners. There was a fence patrolled by an SS squad, but the inmates told Garde that Oskar did not let the SS into the encampment or onto the factory floor, except, of course, when senior inspectors came to look over the place.
Oskar, they said, kept the small SS garrison of the Emalia factory well liquored and happy with their lot. Garde could see that the Emalia prisoners themselves were content between the shrinking fragile boards of their two huts, the men’s and the women’s. Already they called themselves Schindlerjuden, using the term in a mood of cautious self-congratulation, the way a man recovering from a heart attack might describe himself as a lucky beggar.
They’d already dug some primitive latrines, which engineer Garde, much as he approved the impulse behind the work, could smell from the factory entrance. They washed at a pump in the DEF yard.
Oskar asked him to come up to the office and look at the plans. Six barracks for up to 1,200 people. The cookhouse at this end, the SS barracks—Oskar was temporarily accommodating the SS in a part of the factory— beyond the wire at the far end. I want a really first-rate shower block and laundry, Oskar told him. I have the welders who can put it together under your direction. Typhus, he growled, half-smiling at Garde. None of us wants typhus. The lice are already biting in Plaszow. We need to be able to boil clothes.
Adam Garde was delighted to go to Lipowa Street each day. Two engineers had already been punished at Plaszow for their diplomas, but at DEF experts were still experts. One morning, as his guard was marching him up Wieliczka Street toward Zablocie, a black limousine materialized, braking hard at their heels. From it emerged Untersturmfuhrer Goeth. He had that restless look about him.
One prisoner, one guard, he observed.
What does it mean? The Ukrainian begged to inform the Herr Commandant that he had orders to escort this prisoner each morning to Herr Oskar Schindler’s Emalia. They both hoped, Garde and the Ukrainian, that the mention of Oskar’s name would give them immunity. One guard, one prisoner? asked the Commandant again, but he was appeased and got back into his limousine without resolving the matter in any radical way.
Later in the day he approached Wilek Chilowicz, who besides being his agent was also chief of the Jewish camp police—or “firemen,” as they were called. Symche Spira, recently the Napoleon of the ghetto, still lived there and spent each day supervising the searching out and the digging up of the diamonds, gold, and cash hidden away and unrecorded by people who were now ashes on the pine needles of Belzec. In Plaszow, however, Spira had no power, the center of prison power being Chilowicz. No one knew where Chilowicz’ authority came from. Perhaps Willi Kunde had mentioned his name to Amon; perhaps Amon had recognized and liked his style. But all at once, here he was chief of firemen in Plaszow, hander-out of the caps and armbands of authority in that debased kingdom and, like Symche, limited enough in imagination to equate his power with that of tsars.
Goeth approached Chilowicz and said that he had better send Adam Garde to Schindler full-time and get it over with. We have engineers to burn, said Goeth with distaste. He meant that engineering had been a soft option for Jews who weren’t allowed into the medical faculties of the Polish universities. First, though, said Amon, before
