over a glass of herbata, letting it grow cold while they talked about the influence of Zoroaster on Judaism, or the other way round, or the concept of the natural world in Taoism. Stern, when it came to comparative religion, got greater pleasure out of talking to Levartov than he could ever have received from bluff Oskar Schindler, who nonetheless had a fatal weakness for discoursing on the same subject.
During one of Oskar’s visits to Plaszow, Stern told him that somehow Menasha Levartov had to be got into Emalia, or else Goeth would surely kill him. For Levartov had a sort of visibility—it was a matter of presence. Goeth was drawn to people of presence; they were, like idlers, another class with high target priority. Stern told Oskar how Goeth had attempted to murder Levartov.
Amon Goeth’s camp now held more than 30,000 people. On the near side of the Appellplatz, near the Jewish mortuary chapel which had now become a stable, stood a Polish compound which could hold some 1,200 prisoners. Obergruppenfuhrer Kruger was so pleased by his inspection of the new, booming camp that he now promoted the Commandant two SS grades to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer.
As well as the crowd of Poles, Jews from the East and from Czechoslovakia would be held in Plaszow while space was made for them farther west in Auschwitz-Birkenau or Gross-Rosen. Sometimes the population rose above 35,000 and the Appellplatz teemed at roll call. Amon therefore often had to cull his early comers to make way for new prisoners. And Oskar knew that the Commandant’s quick method was to enter one of the camp offices or workshops, form up two lines, and march one of them away. The line marched away would be taken either to the Austrian hill fort, for execution by firing squads, or else to the cattle cars at the Cracow-Plaszow Station or, when it was laid down in the autumn of 1943, to the railway siding by the fortified SS barracks.
On just such a culling exercise, Stern told Oskar, Amon had entered the metalworks in the factory enclosure some days past. The supervisors had stood at attention like soldiers and made their eager reports, knowing that they could die for an unwise choice of words. “I need twenty-five metalworkers,” Amon told the supervisors when the reports were finished. “Twenty-five and no more. Point out to me the ones who are skilled.”
One of the supervisors pointed to Levartov and the rabbi joined the line, though he could see that Amon took a special note of his selection. Of course, one never knew which line would be moved out or where it would be moved to, but it was in most cases a safer bet to be on the line of the skilled.
So the selection continued. Levartov had noticed that the metal shops were strangely empty that morning, since a number of those who worked or filled in time by the door had got forewarning of Goeth’s approach and had slipped over to the Madritsch garment factory to hide among the bolts of linen or appear to be mending sewing machines. The forty or so slow or inadvertent who had stayed on in the metalworks were now in two lines between the benches and the lathes. Everyone was fearful, but those in the smaller line were the more uneasy.
Then a boy of indeterminate age, perhaps as young as sixteen or as old as nineteen, had called from the midst of the shorter line, “But, Herr Commandant, I’m a metal specialist too.” “Yes, Liebchen?” murmured Amon, drawing his service revolver, stepping to the child and shooting him in the head. The enormous blast in this place of metal threw the boy against the wall. He was dead, the appalled Levartov believed, before he fell to the workshop floor.
The even shorter line was now marched out to the railroad depot, the boy’s corpse was taken over the hill in a barrow, the floor was washed, the lathes returned to operation. But Levartov, making gate hinges slowly at his bench, was aware of the recognition that had flashed for an instant in Amon’s eye—the look that had said, There’s one. It seemed to the rabbi that the boy had, by crying out, only temporarily distracted Amon from Levartov himself, the more obvious target.
A few days had passed, Stern told Schindler, before Amon returned to the metalworks and found it crowded, and went around making his own selections for the hill or the transports. Then he’d halted by Levartov’s bench, as Levartov had known he would. Levartov could smell Amon’s after-shave lotion. He could see the starched cuff of Amon’s shirt. Amon was a splendid dresser.
“What are you making?” asked the Commandant. “Herr Commandant,” said Levartov, “I am making hinges.” The rabbi pointed, in fact, to the small heap of hinges on the floor.
“Make me one now,” Amon ordered. He took a watch from his pocket and began timing. Levartov earnestly cut a hinge, his fingers urging the metal, pressuring the lathe; convinced laboring fingers, delighted to be skilled.
Keeping tremulous count in his head, he turned out a hinge in what he believed was fifty-eight seconds, and let it fall at his feet.
“Another,” murmured Amon. After his speed trial, the rabbi was now more assured and worked confidently. In perhaps another minute the second hinge slid to his feet.
Amon considered the heap. “You’ve been working here since six this morning,” said Amon, not raising his eyes from the floor. “And you can work at a rate you’ve just shown me—and yet, such a tiny little pile of hinges?”
Levartov knew, of course, that he had crafted his own death. Amon walked him down the aisle, no one bothering or brave enough to look up from his bench. To see what? A death walk. Death walks were commonplace in Plaszow. Outside, in the midday air of spring, Amon stood Menasha Levartov against the workshop wall, adjusting him by the shoulder, and took out the pistol with which he’d slaughtered the child two days before. Levartov blinked and watched the other prisoners hurry by, wheeling and toting the raw materials of the Plaszow camp, eager to be out of range, the Cracovians among them thinking, My God, it’s Levartov’s turn.
Privately, he murmured the Shema Yisroel and heard the mechanisms of the pistol. But the small internal stirrings of metal ended not in a roar but in a click like that of a cigarette lighter which won’t give a flame. And like a dissatisfied smoker, with just such a trivial level of annoyance, Amon Goeth extracted and replaced the magazine of bullets from the butt of the pistol, again took his aim, and fired. As the rabbi’s head swayed to the normal human suspicion that the impact of the bullet could be absorbed as could a punch, all that emerged from Goeth’s pistol was another click.
Goeth began cursing prosaically.
“Donnerwetter! Zum Teufel!” It seemed to Levartov that at any second Amon would begin to run down faulty modern workmanship, as if they were two tradesmen trying to bring off some simple effect—the threading of a pipe, a drill hole in the wall. Amon put the faulty pistol away in its black holster and withdrew from a jacket pocket a pearl-handled revolver, of a type Rabbi Levartov had only read of in the Westerns of his boyhood. Clearly, he thought, there are going to be no remissions due to technical failure. He’ll keep on.
I’ll die by cowboy revolver, and even if all the firing pins are filed down, Hauptsturmfuhrer Goeth will fall back on more primitive weapons.
As Stern relayed it to Schindler, when Goeth aimed again and fired, Menasha Levartov had already begun to look about in case there was some object in the neighborhood that could be used, together with these two astounding failures of Goeth’s service pistol, as a lever. By the corner of the wall stood a pile of coal, an unpromising item in itself. “Herr Commandant,” Levartov began to say, but he could already hear the small murderous hammers and springs of the barroom pistol acting on each other. And again the click of a defective cigarette lighter. Amon, raging, seemed to be attempting to tear the barrel of the thing from its socket.
Now Rabbi Levartov adopted the stance he had seen the supervisors in the metalworks assume. “Herr Commandant, I would beg to report that my heap of hinges was so unsatisfactory for the reason that the machines were being recalibrated this morning. And therefore instead of hinge-work I was put on to shoveling that coal.” It seemed to Levartov that he had violated the rules of the game they had been playing together, the game that was to be closed by Levartov’s reasonable death just as surely as Snakes and Ladders ends with the throwing of a six. It was as if the rabbi had hidden the dice and now there could be no conclusion. Amon hit him on the face with a free left hand, and Levartov tasted blood in his mouth, lying on the tongue like a guarantee.
Hauptsturmfuhrer Goeth then simply abandoned Levartov against the wall. The contest, however, as both Levartov and Stern could tell, had merely been suspended.
Stern whispered this narrative to Oskar in the Building Office of Plaszow. Stern, stooping, eyes raised, hands joined, was as generous with detail as ever. “It’s no problem,” Oskar murmured. He liked to tease Stern. “Why the long story? There’s always room at Emalia for someone who can turn out a hinge in less than a minute.”
When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory subcamp in the summer of ‘43, he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler’s little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov operated a lathe, Schindler would say, “You shouldn’t be here, Rabbi.
You should be preparing for Shabbat.” But when Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in the ceremonies,
