Levartov knew that the Herr Direktor was not joking. Before dusk on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of sourly drying laundry, he would recite Kiddush over a cup of wine among the roof-high tiers of bunks. Under, of course, the shadow of an SS watchtower.
CHAPTER 24
The Oskar Schindler who dismounted from his horse these days in the factory yard of Emalia was still the prototypical tycoon. He looked sleekly handsome in the style of the film stars George Sanders and Curt Jurgens, to both of whom people would always compare him. His hacking jacket and jodhpurs were tailored; his riding boots had a high shine. He looked like a man to whom it was profit all the way.
Yet he would return from his rural rides and go upstairs to face the sort of bills novel even to the history of an eccentric enterprise like DEF.
Bread shipments from the bakery at Plaszow to the factory camp in Lipowa Street, Zablocie, were a few hundred loaves delivered twice a week and an occasional token half-truckload of turnips. These few high-backed and lightly laden trucks were no doubt written large and multiplied in Commandant Goeth’s books, and such trusties as Chilowicz sold off on behalf of the Herr Hauptsturmfuhrer the difference between the mean supplies that arrived at Lipowa Street and the plenteous and phantom convoys that Goeth put down on paper. If Oskar had depended on Amon for prison food, his 900 internees would each have been fed perhaps three-quarters of a kilo of bread a week and soup every third day. On missions of his own and through his manager, Oskar was spending 50,000 zl. a month on black-market food for his camp kitchen. Some weeks he had to find more than three thousand round loaves. He went to town and spoke to the German supervisors in the big bakeries, and had in his briefcase Reichsmarks and two or three bottles.
Oskar did not seem to realize that throughout Poland that summer of 1943, he was one of the champion illicit feeders of prisoners; that the malign pall of hunger which should by SS policy hang over the great death factories and over every one of the little, barbed-wired forced-labor slums was lacking in Lipowa Street in a way that was dangerously visible. That summer a host of incidents occurred which augmented the Schindler mythology, the almost religious supposition among many prisoners of Plaszow and the entire population of Emalia that Oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation.
Early in the career of every subcamp, senior officers from the parent camp, or Lager, paid a visit to ensure that the energy of the slave laborers was stimulated in the most radical and exemplary manner. It is not certain exactly which members of Plaszow’s senior staff visited Emalia, but some prisoners and Oskar himself would always say that Goeth was one of them. And if not Goeth it was Leo John, or Scheidt. Or else Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s protege. It is no injustice to mention any of their names in connection with “stimulating energy in a radical and exemplary manner.” Whoever they were, they had already in the history of Plaszow taken or condoned fierce action. And now, visiting Emalia, they spotted in the yard a prisoner named Lamus pushing a barrow too slowly across the factory yard. Oskar himself later declared that it was Goeth who was there that day and saw Lamus’ slow trundling and turned to a young NCO named Grun—Grun being another Goeth protege, his bodyguard, a former wrestler. It was certainly Grun who was ordered to execute Lamus.
So Grun made the arrest, and the inspectors continued on into other parts of the factory camp. It was someone from the metal hall who rushed up to the Herr Direktor’s office and alerted Schindler. Oskar came roaring down the stairs even faster than on the day Miss Regina Perlman had visited, and reached the yard just as Grun was positioning Lamus against the wall. Oskar called out, You can’t do that here. I won’t get work out of my people if you start shooting. I’ve got high-priority war contracts, et cetera. It was the standard Schindler argument and carried the suggestion that there were senior officers known to Oskar to whom Grun’s name would be given if he impeded production in Emalia.
Grun was cunning. He knew the other inspectors had passed on to the workshops, where the whumping of metal presses and the roaring of lathes would cover any noise he chose, or failed, to make. Lamus was such a small concern to men like Goeth and John that no investigation would be made afterward. “What’s in it for me?” the SS man asked Oskar. “Would vodka do?” said Oskar.
To Grun it was a substantial prize. For working all day behind the machine guns during Aktions, the massed and daily executions in the East—for shooting hundreds—you were given half a liter of vodka. The boys lined up to be on the squad so that they could take that prize of liquor back to their messes in the evening. And here the Herr Direktor offered him three times that for one act of omission.
“I don’t see the bottle,” he said. Herr Schindler was already nudging Lamus away from the wall and pushing him out of range. “Disappear!” Grun yelled at the wheelbarrow man. “You may collect the bottle,” said Oskar, “from my office at the end of the inspection.”
Oskar took part in a similar transaction when the Gestapo raided the apartment of a forger and discovered, among other false documents completed or near-completed, a set of Aryan papers for a family called the Wohlfeilers—mother, father, three adolescent children, all of them workers at Schindler’s camp. Two Gestapo men therefore came to Lipowa Street to collect the family for an interrogation which would lead, through Montelupich prison, to Chujowa Gorka. Three hours after entering Oskar’s office both men left, reeling on the stairs, beaming with the temporary bonhomie of cognac and, for all anyone knew, of a payoff. The confiscated papers now lay on Oskar’s desk, and he picked them up and put them in the fire.
Next, the brothers Danziger, who cracked a metal press one Friday. Honest, bemused men, semiskilled, looking up with staring shtetl eyes from the machine they had just loudly shattered. The Herr Direktor was away on business, and someone—a factory spy, Oskar would always say—denounced the Danzigers to the administration in Plaszow. The brothers were taken from Emalia and their hanging advertised at the next morning’s roll call in Plaszow. Tonight (it was announced), the people of Plaszow will witness the execution of two saboteurs. What of course qualified the Danzigers above all for execution was their Orthodox aura.
Oskar returned from his business trip to Sosnowiec at three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, three hours before the promised execution. News of the sentence was waiting on his desk. He drove out through the suburbs to Plaszow at once, taking cognac with him and some fine kielbasa sausage. He parked by the Administration Building and found Goeth in his office. He was pleased not to have to rouse the Commandant from an afternoon nap. No one knows the extent of the deal that was struck in Goeth’s office that afternoon, in that office akin to Torquemada’s, where Goeth had had ringbolts attached to the wall from which to hang people for discipline or instruction. It is hard to believe, however, that Amon was satisfied simply with cognac and sausage. In any case, his concern for the integrity of the Reich’s metal presses was soothed by the interview, and at six o’clock, the hour of their execution, the Danziger brothers returned in the back seat of Oskar’s plush limousine to the sweet squalor of Emalia.
All these triumphs were, of course, partial. It is an aspect of Caesars, Oskar knew, to remit as irrationally as they condemn. Emil Krautwirt, by day an engineer in the radiator factory beyond the Emalia barracks, was an inmate of Oskar’s SS subcamp. He was young, having got his diploma in the late Thirties. Krautwirt, like the others in Emalia, called the place Schindler’s camp, but by taking Krautwirt away to Plaszow for an exemplary hanging, the SS demonstrated whose camp it really was, at least for some aspects of its existence. For the fraction of Plaszow people who would live on into the Peace, the hanging of engineer Krautwirt was the first story, other than their own intimate stories of pain and humiliation, which they would relate. The SS were ever economical with their scaffolds, and at Plaszow the gallows resembled a long, low set of goalposts, lacking the majesty of the gibbets of history, of the Revolutionary guillotine, the Elizabethan scaffold, the tall solemnity of jailhouse gallows in the sheriff’s backyard.
Seen in peacetime, the gallows of Plaszow and Auschwitz would intimidate not by their solemnity but by their ordinariness. But as mothers of children would discover in Plaszow, it was still possible, even with such a banal structure, for five-year-olds to see too much of an execution from within the mass of prisoners on the Appellplatz. With Krautwirt, a sixteen-year-old boy named Haubenstock was also to be hanged. Krautwirt had been condemned for some letters he had written to seditious persons in the city of Cracow. But with Haubenstock, it was that he had been heard singing “Volga, Volga,” “Kalinka Maya,” and other banned Russian songs with the intention, according to his death sentence, of winning the Ukrainian guards over to Bolshevism.
The rules for the rite of execution inside Plaszow involved silence. Unlike the festive hangings of earlier times,
