trolley line, the distribution of bread and soup, the digging of drains and foundations. Some of these photographs of Titsch’s are probably of the illegal supply of bread to the Madritsch workshop. Certainly round brown loaves were bought by Raimund himself, with Julius Madritsch’s consent and money, and delivered to Plaszow by truck beneath bales of rags and bolts of cloth. Titsch photographed round rye being hurried from hand to hand into Madritsch’s storeroom, on the side away from the towers and screened from the main access road by the bulk of the camp stationery plant.
He photographed the SS and the Ukrainians marching, at play, at work. He photographed a work party under the supervision of engineer Karp, who was soon to be set on by the killer dogs, his thigh ripped open, his genitals torn off. In a long shot of Plaszow, he intimated the size of the camp, its desolation. It seems that on Amon’s sun deck he even took close-ups of the Commandant at rest in a deck chair, a hefty Amon approaching now the 120 kg at which newly arrived SS Dr. Blancke would say to him, “Enough, Amon; you have to take some weight off.” Titsch photographed Rolf and Ralf loping and sunning, and Majola holding one of the dogs by the collar and pretending to enjoy it. He also took Amon in full majesty on his big white horse.
As the reels were shot, Titsch did not have them developed. As an archive, they were safer and more portable in roll form. He hid them in a steel box in his Cracow apartment. There also he kept some of the remaining goods of the Madritsch Jews. Throughout Plaszow you found people who had a final treasure; something to offer— at the moment of greatest danger—to the man with the list, the man who opened and closed the doors on the cattle cars. Titsch understood that only the desperate deposited goods with him. That prison minority who had a stock of rings and watches and jewelry hidden somewhere in Plaszow didn’t need him. They traded regularly for favors and comforts. But into the same hiding as Titsch’s photographs went the final resources of a dozen families —Auntie Yanka’s brooch, Uncle Mordche’s watch. In fact, when the Plaszow regimen passed, when Scherner and Czurda had fled, and when the impeccable files of the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office had been baled up in trucks and moved away as evidence, Titsch had no need to develop the photographs, and every reason not to. In the files of ODESSA, the postwar secret society of former SS men, he would be listed as a traitor. For the fact that he’d supplied the Madritsch people with some 30,000 loaves of bread, as well as many chickens and some kilos of butter, and that for his humanity he had been honored by the Israeli Government, had received some publicity in the press. Some people made threats and hissed at him as he passed in the streets of Vienna. “Jew-kisser.” So the Plaszow reels would lie for twenty years in the soil of a small park in the suburbs of Vienna where Titsch had buried them, and might well have stayed there forever, the emulsion drying on the dark and secret images of Amon’s love Majola, his killing dogs, his nameless slave laborers. It might therefore have been seen as a sort of triumph for the population of Plaszow when, in November 1963, a Schindler survivor (leopold Pfefferberg) secretly bought the box and its contents for $500 from Raimund Titsch, who was then suffering from terminal heart disease. Even then, Raimund didn’t want the rolls developed until after his death. The nameless shadow of ODESSA frightened him more than had the names of Amon Goeth, of Scherner, of Auschwitz, in the days of Plaszow.
After his burial, the reels were developed.
Nearly all the pictures came out.
Not one of that small body of Plaszow inmates who would survive Amon and the camp itself would ever have anything accusatory to say of Raimund Titsch. But he was never the sort of man concerning whom mythologies arose. Oskar was. From late 1943, there is a story about Schindler which runs among the survivors with the electric excitement of a myth. For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, nor whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself. Through listening to such stories, one can see that to the Plaszow people, while Titsch may have been the good hermit, Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double-faced—in the Greek manner—as any small god; endowed with all the human vices; many-handed; subtly powerful; capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.
One story concerns the time when the SS police chiefs were under pressure to close Plaszow, as its reputation as an efficient industrial complex was not high with the Armaments Inspectorate.
Helen Hirsch, Goeth’s maid, often encountered officers, dinner guests, who wandered into the hallway or kitchen of the villa to escape Amon for a while and to shake their heads. An SS officer named Tibritsch, turning up in the kitchen, had said to Helen, “Doesn’t he know there are men giving their lives?” He meant on the Eastern Front, of course, not out there in the dark of Plaszow. Officers with less imperial lives than Amon were becoming outraged by what they saw at the villa or, perhaps more dangerously, envious.
As the legend has it, it was on a Sunday evening that General Julius Schindler himself visited Plaszow to decide whether its existence was of any real value to the war effort. It was an odd hour for a grand bureaucrat to be visiting a plant, but perhaps the Armaments Inspectorate, in view of the perilous winter now falling on the Eastern Front, were working desperate hours. The inspection had been preceded by dinner at Emalia, at which wine and cognac flowed, for Oskar is associated like Bacchus with the Dionysian line of gods. Because of the dinner, the inspection party rolling out to Plaszow in their Mercedeses were in a mood of less than professional detachment. In making this claim, the story ignores the fact that Schindler and his officers were all production experts and engineers with nearly four years of detachment behind them. But Oscar would be the last to be awed by that fact.
The inspection started at the Madritsch clothing factory. This was Plaszow’s showplace. During 1943, it had produced Wehrmacht uniforms at a monthly rate of better than twenty thousand. But the question was whether Herr Madritsch would do better to forget Plaszow, to spend his capital on expanding his more efficient and better- supplied Polish factories in Podgorze and Tarnow. The ramshackle conditions of Plaszow were no encouragement to Madritsch or any other investor to install the sort of machinery a sophisticated factory would need.
The official party had just begun its inspection when all the lights in all the workshops went out, the power circuit broken by friends of Itzhak Stern’s in the Plaszow generator shed. To the handicaps of drink and indigestion which Oskar had imposed on the gentlemen of the Armaments Inspectorate were now added the limitations of bad light. The inspection went ahead by flashlight, in fact, and the machinery on the benches remained inoperative and therefore less of a provocation to the inspectors’ professional feelings.
As General Schindler squinted along the beam of a flashlight at the presses and lathes in the metalworks, 30,000 Plaszowians, restless in tiered bunks, waited on his word.
Even on the overladen lines of the Ostbahn, they knew, the higher technology of Auschwitz was but a few hours’ journey west. They understood that they could not expect from General Schindler compassion as such. Production was his specialty. For him, Production was meant to be an overriding value.
Because of Schindler’s dinner and the power failure, says the myth, the people of Plaszow were saved. It is a generous fable, because in fact only a tenth of Plaszow people would be alive at the end. But Stern and others would later celebrate the story, and most of its details are probably true. For Oskar always had recourse to liquor when puzzled as to how to treat officials, and he would have liked the trickery of plunging them into darkness. “You have to remember,” said a boy whom Oskar would later save, “that Oskar had a German side but a Czech side too. He was the good soldier Schweik. He loved to foul up the system.”
It is ungracious to the myth to ask what the exacting Amon Goeth thought when the lights went out. Maybe, even on the level of literal event, he was drunk or dining elsewhere. The question is whether Plaszow survived because General Schindler was deceived by dim light and alcohol-dimmed vision, or whether it continued because it was such an excellent holding center for those weeks when the great terminus at Auschwitz-Birkenau was overcrowded. But the story says more of people’s expectations of Oskar than it does of the frightful compound of Plaszow or the final end of most of its inmates.
And while the SS and the Armaments Inspectorate considered the future of Plaszow, Josef Bau—a young artist from Cracow, whom Oskar would in the end come to know well—was falling into conspicuous and unconditional love with a girl named Rebecca Tannenbaum. Bau worked in the Construction Office as a draftsman. He was a solemn boy with an artist’s sense of destiny. He had, so to speak, escaped into Plaszow, because he had never held the correct ghetto papers. Since he had had no trade of use to the ghetto factories, he had been hidden by his mother and by friends. During the liquidation in March 1943, he’d escaped out of the walls and attached himself to the tail of a labor detail going to Plaszow. For in Plaszow there was a new industry which had had no place in the ghetto. Construction. In the same somber two-winged building in which Amon had his office, Josef Bau worked on blueprints. He was a protege of Itzhak Stern’s, and Stern had mentioned him to Oskar as an accomplished draftsman and as a boy who had, potentially at least, skills as a forger.
He was lucky not to come into too much contact with Amon, because he displayed the air of genuine sensibility which had, before today, caused Amon to reach for his revolver. Bau’s office was on the far side of the
