building from Amon’s. Some prisoners worked on the ground floor, with offices near the Commandant’s. There were the purchasing officers; the clerks; Mietek Pemper, the stenographer. They faced not only a daily risk of an unexpected bullet but, more certainly than that, assaults on their sense of outrage. Mundek Korn, for example, who had been a buyer for a string of Rothschild subsidiaries before the war and who now bought the fabrics, sea grass, lumber, and iron for the prison workshops, had to work not only in the Administration Building but in the same wing where Amon had his office. One morning Korn looked up from his desk and saw through the window, across Jerozolimska Street and by the SS barracks, a boy of twenty or so years, a Cracovian of his acquaintance, urinating against the base of one of the stacks of lumber there. At the same time he saw white-shirted arms and two ham fists appear through the bathroom window at the end of the wing. The right hand held a revolver. There were two quick shots, at least one of which entered the boy’s head and drove him forward against the pile of cut wood. When Korn looked once more at the bathroom window, one white-shirted arm and free hand were engaged in closing the window.
On Korn’s desk that morning were requisition forms signed with Amon’s open-voweled but not deranged scrawl. His gaze ranged from the signature to the unbuttoned corpse at the box of lumber. Not only did he wonder if he had seen what he had seen. He sensed the seductive concept inherent in Amon’s methods. That is, the temptation to agree that if murder was no more than a visit to the bathroom, a mere pulse in the monotony of form signing, then perhaps all death should now be accepted— with whatever despair—as routine.
It does not seem that Josef Bau was exposed to such radical persuasion. He missed too the purge of the administrative staff on the ground floor right and center. It had begun when Josef Neuschel, Goeth’s protege, complained to the Commandant that a girl in the office had acquired a rind of bacon. Amon had come raging down the corridor from his office. “You’re all getting fat!” he had screamed. He had divided the office staff into two lines then. It had been, to Korn, like a scene from the Podgorze High School: the girls in the other line so familiar to him, daughters of families he’d grown up with, Podgorze families. It could have been that a teacher was sorting them out into those who would visit the Kosciuszko Monument and those for the museum at the Wawel. In fact, the girls in the other line were taken straight from their desks to Chujowa Gorka and, for the decadence of that bacon rind, gunned down by one of Pilarzik’s squads.
Though Josef Bau was not involved in such office turmoil, no one could have said that he was leading a sheltered life in Plaszow. But it had been less perilous than the experience of the girl of his choice. Rebecca Tannenbaum was an orphan, though in the clannish life of Jewish Cracow, she had not been bereft of kindly aunts and uncles. She was nineteen, sweet-faced, and neatly built. She could speak German well and made pleasant and generous conversation. Recently she’d begun to work in Stern’s office behind the Administration Building, away from the most immediate environs of the Commandant’s berserk interference. But her job in the Construction Office was only half her labor. She was a manicurist. She treated Amon weekly; she tended the hands of Untersturmfuhrer Leo John, those of Dr. Blancke and of his lover, the harsh Alice Orlowski. Taking Amon’s hands, she had found them long and well made, with tapering fingers—not a fat man’s hands at all; certainly not those of a savage.
When a prisoner had first come to her and told her that the Herr Commandant wanted to see her, she had begun to run away, fleeing among the desks and down the back stairs. The prisoner had followed and cried after her, “For God’s sake, don’t! He’ll punish me if I don’t bring you back.”
So she had followed the man down to Goeth’s villa. But before going into the salon, she first visited the stinking cellar—this was in Goeth’s first residence, and the cellar had been dug down into the boundaries of an ancient Jewish graveyard. Down amid the grave soil, Rebecca’s friend Helen Hirsch had been nursing bruises. You have a problem, Helen admitted. But just do the job and see. That’s all you can do. Some people he likes a professional manner from, some people he doesn’t. And I’ll give you cake and sausage when you come. But don’t just take food; ask me first. Some people take food without asking, and I don’t know what I have to cover up for.
Amon did accept Rebecca’s professional manner, presenting his fingers and chatting in German. It could have been the Hotel Cracovia again, and Amon a crisp-shirted, overweight young German tycoon come to Cracow to sell textiles or steel or chemicals. There were, however, two aspects to these meetings that detracted from their air of timeless geniality. The Commandant always kept his service revolver at his right elbow, and frequently one or the other of the dogs drowsed in the salon. She had seen them, on the Appellplatz, tear the flesh of engineer Karp. Yet sometimes, as the dogs snuffled in sleep and she and Amon compared notes on prewar visits to the spa at Carlsbad, the roll-call horrors seemed remote and beyond belief. One day she felt confident enough to ask him why the revolver was always at his elbow. His answer chilled the back of her neck as she bent over his hand. “That’s in case you ever nick me,” he told her.
If she ever needed proof that a chat about spas was all the same to Amon as an act of madness, she had it the day she entered the hallway and saw him dragging her friend Helen Hirsch out of the salon by the hair—Helen striving to keep her balance and her auburn hair coming out by the roots, and Amon, if he lost his grip one second, regaining it the next in his giant, well-tended hands. And further proof came on the evening she entered the salon and one of those dogs—Rolf or Ralf— materialized, leaped at her, and, holding her by the shoulders, opened its jaw on her breast. She looked across the room and saw Amon lolling on the sofa and smiling. “Stop shaking, you stupid girl,” he told her, “or I won’t be able to save you from the hound.”
During the time she tended the Commandant’s hands, he would shoot his shoeshine boy for faulty work; hang his fifteen-year-old orderly, Poldek Deresiewicz, from the ringbolts in his office because a flea had been found on one of the dogs; and execute his servant Lisiek for lending a drozka and horse to Bosch without first checking. Yet twice a week, the pretty orphan entered the salon and philosophically took the beast by the hand.
She met Josef Bau one gray morning when he stood outside the Bauleitung holding up a blueprint frame toward the low autumn cloud. His thin body seemed overburdened by the weight. She asked if she could help him. “No,” he said. “I’m just waiting for the sunshine.” “Why?” she asked. He explained how his transparency drawings for a new building were clamped in the frame beside sensitized blueprint paper. If the sun, he said, were only to shine harder, a mysterious chemical union would transfer the drawing from the transparency to the blueprint. Then he said, “Why don’t you be my magical sunshine?”
Pretty girls weren’t used to delicacy from boys in Plaszow. Sexuality there took its harsh impetus from the volleys heard on Chujowa Gorka, the executions on the Appellplatz. Imagine a day, for instance, when a chicken is found among the work party returning from the cable factory on Wieliczka. Amon is ranting on the Appellplatz, for the chicken was discovered lying in a bag in front of the camp gate during a spot check. Whose bag was it? Amon wants to know. Whose chicken? Since no one on the Appellplatz will admit anything, Amon takes a rifle from an SS man and shoots the prisoner at the head of the line. The bullet, passing through the body, also fells the man behind. No one speaks, though. “How you love one another!” roars Amon, and prepares to execute the next man in line. A boy of fourteen steps out of the line. He is shuddering and weeping. He can say who brought the chicken in, he tells the Herr Commandant. “Who, then?” The boy points to one of the two dead men. “That one!” the boy screams. Amon astonishes the entire Appellplatz by believing the boy, and puts his head back and laughs with the sort of classroom incredulity teachers like to exhibit. These people… can’t they understand now why they’re all forfeit?
After an evening like that, in the hours of free movement between 7 and 9 P.M. most prisoners felt that there was no time for leisurely courtship. The lice plaguing your groin and armpits made a mockery of formality. Young males mounted girls without ceremony. In the women’s camp they sang a song which asked the virgin why she’d bound herself up with string and for whom she thought she was saving herself. The atmosphere was not as desperate at Emalia. In the enamel workshop, niches had been designed among the machinery on the factory floor to permit lovers to meet at greater length. There was only a theoretical segregation in the cramped barracks. The absence of daily fear, the fuller ration of daily bread made for a little less frenzy. Besides, Oskar still maintained that he would not let the SS garrison go inside the prison without his permission.
One prisoner recalls wiring installed in Oskar’s office in case any SS official did demand entry to the barracks. While the SS man was on his way downstairs, Oskar could punch a button connected to a bell inside the camp. It warned men and women, first, to stub out the illicit cigarettes supplied daily by Oskar. (“Go to my apartment,” he would tell someone on the factory floor almost daily, “and fill this cigarette case.” He would wink significantly.) The bell also warned men and women to get back to their appointed bunks. To Rebecca, it was something close to a shock, a remembrance of a vanished culture, to meet in Plaszow a boy who courted as if he’d met her in a patisserie in the Rynek.
Another morning when she came downstairs from Stern’s office, Josef showed her his work desk. He was
