disbanded.
In fact that meeting about security had to do not with saving Plaszow from partisans, but with the coming closure of the camp. Amon had called Madritsch and Oskar and Bosch out to Plaszow and held the meeting just to give himself protective coloration. It then became plausible for him to drive into Cracow and call on Wilhelm Koppe, the new SS police chief of the Government General. Amon sat on the far side of Koppe’s desk wearing a fake frown, cracking his knuckles as if from the stress of a besieged Plaszow. He told Koppe the same story he’d given Oskar and the others—that partisan organizations had sprung up inside the camp, that Zionists within the wire had had communication with radicals of the Polish People’s Army and the Jewish Combat Organization. As the Obergruppenfuhrer could appreciate, that sort of communication was difficult to stamp out—messages could come in in a smuggled loaf of bread. But at the first sign of active rebellion, he—Amon Goeth—as Commandant, would need to be able to take summary action. The question Amon wanted to ask was, if he fired first and did the paperwork for Oranienburg afterward, would the distinguished Obergruppenfuhrer Koppe stand by him?
No problem, said Koppe. He didn’t really approve of bureaucrats either. In years past, as police chief of the Wartheland, he’d commanded the fleet of extermination trucks which carried Untermenschen out into the countryside and which then, running the engines at full throttle, pumped the exhaust back into the locked interior. That too was an off-the-cuff operation, not permitting precise paperwork. Of course, you have to use your judgment, he told Amon. And if you do, I’ll back you.
Oskar had sensed at the meeting that Amon was not really worried about partisans. Had he known then that Plaszow was to be liquidated, he would have understood the deeper meaning of Amon’s performance. For Amon was worried about Wilek Chilowicz, his Jewish chief of camp police. Amon had often used Chilowicz as an agent on the black market. Chilowicz knew Cracow. He knew where he could sell the flour, rice, butter the Commandant held back from the camp supplies. He knew the dealers who would be interested in product from the custom jewelry shop staffed by interns like Wulkan. Amon was worried about the whole Chilowicz clique: Mrs. Marysia Chilowicz, who enjoyed conjugal privileges; Mietek Finkelstein, an associate; Chilowicz’ sister Mrs. Ferber; and Mr. Ferber. If there had been an aristocracy inside Plaszow, it had been the Chilowiczes. They had had power over prisoners, but their knowledge was double-edged: they knew as much about Amon as they did about some miserable machinist in the Madritsch factory. If, when Plaszow closed, they were shipped to another camp, Amon knew they would try to barter their inside knowledge of his rackets as soon as they found themselves in the wrong line. Or more likely, as soon as they were hungry.
Of course, Chilowicz was uneasy too, and Amon could sense in him the doubt that he would be allowed to leave Plaszow. Amon decided to use Chilowicz’ very concern as a lever. He called Sowinski, an SS auxiliary recruited from the High Tatras of Czechoslovakia, into his office for a conference. Sowinski was to approach Chilowicz and pretend to offer him an escape deal. Amon was sure that Chilowicz would be eager to negotiate.
Sowinski went and did it well. He told Chilowicz he could get the whole clan out of the camp in one of the large fuel-burning trucks. You could sit half a dozen people in the wood furnace if you were running on gas.
Chilowicz was interested in the proposition. Sowinski would of course need to deliver a note to friends on the outside, who would provide a vehicle. Sowinski would deliver the clan to the rendezvous point in the truck. Chilowicz was willing to pay in diamonds. But, said Chilowicz, as an earnest of their mutual trust, Sowinski must provide a weapon.
Sowinski reported the meeting to the Commandant, and Amon gave him a .38-caliber pistol with the pin filed down. This was passed to Chilowicz, who of course had neither need nor opportunity to test-fire it. Yet Amon would be able to swear to both Koppe and Oranienburg that he had found a weapon on the prisoner.
It was a Sunday in mid-August when Sowinski met the Chilowiczes in the building-material shed and hid them in the truck.
Then he drove down Jerozolimska to the gate. There should be routine formalities there; then the truck could roll out into the countryside. In the empty furnace, in the pulses of the five escapees was the febrile, almost insupportable hope of leaving Amon behind.
At the gate, however, were Amon and Amthor and Hujar, and the Ukrainian Ivan Scharujew. A leisurely inspection was made. Lumbering with half-smiles across the bed of the truck, the gentlemen of the SS saved the wood furnace till last. They mimed surprise when they discovered the pitiable Chilowicz clan sardine-tight in the wood hole. As soon as Chilowicz had been dragged out, Amon “found” the illegal gun tucked into his boot.
Chilowicz’ pockets were laden with diamonds, bribes paid him by the desperate inmates of the camp.
Prisoners at their day of rest heard that Chilowicz was under sentence down there at the gate. The news made for the same awe, the confusion of emotions that had operated the night the year before when Symche Spira and his OD had been executed. Nor could any prisoner decipher what it meant to his own chances.
The Chilowicz crowd were executed one at a time with pistols. Amon, very yellow now from liver disease, at the height of his obesity, wheezing like an elderly uncle, put the muzzle to Chilowicz’ neck. Later the corpses were displayed in the Appellplatz with placards tied to their chests: “THOSE WHO VIOLATE JUST LAWS CAN EXPECT A SIMILAR DEATH.”
That, of course, was not the moral the prisoners of Plaszow took from the sight.
Amon spent the afternoon drafting two long reports, one to Koppe, one to General Glucks’s Section D, explaining how he had saved Plaszow from an insurgency in its first phase—the one in which a group of key conspirators escaped from the camp—by executing the plot’s leaders. He did not finish revising either draft till 11 P.M. Frau Kochmann was too slow for such late work, and so the Commandant had Mietek Pemper roused from his barracks and brought to the villa. In the front parlor, Amon stated levelly that he believed the boy had been party to Chilowicz’ escape attempt. Pemper was astounded and did not know how to answer. Looking around him for some sort of inspiration, he saw the seam of his pants leg, which had come unsewn. How could I pass on the outside in this sort of clothing? he asked.
The balance of frank desperation in his answer satisfied Amon. He told the boy to sit down and instructed him how the typing was to be set out and the pages numbered. Amon hit the papers with his spatulate fingertips. “I want a first-class job done.” And Pemper thought, That’s the way of it—I can die now for being an escapee, or later in the year for having seen these justifications of Amon’s.
When Pemper was leaving the villa with the drafts in his hand, Goeth followed him out onto the patio and called a last order. “When you type the list of insurgents,” Amon called companionably, “I want you to leave room above my signature for another name to be inserted.”
Pemper nodded, discreet as any professional secretary. He stood just a half-second, trying for inspiration, some fast answer that would reverse Amon’s order about the extra space. The space for his name. Mietek Pemper. In that hateful torrid silence of Sunday evening in Jerozolimska, nothing plausible came to him. “Yes, Herr Commandant,” said Pemper.
As Pemper stumbled up the road to the Administration Building, he remembered a letter Amon had had him type earlier that summer. It had been addressed to Amon’s father, the Viennese publisher, and was full of filial concern for an allergy which had troubled the old man that spring. Amon hoped that it had lifted by now. The reason Pemper remembered that letter out of all the others was that half an hour before he’d been called into Amon’s office to take it down, the Commandant had dragged a girl filing clerk outside and executed her. The juxtaposition of the letter and the execution proved to Pemper that, for Amon, murder and allergies were events of equal weight. And if you told a tractable stenographer to leave a space for his name, it was a matter of course that he left it.
Pemper sat at the typewriter for more than an hour, but in the end left the space for himself. Not to do that would be even more suddenly fatal. There had been a rumor among Stern’s friends that Schindler had some movement of people in mind, some rescue or other, but tonight rumors from Zablocie meant nothing anymore. Mietek typed;
Mietek left in each report the space for his own death. And all his remembrance of the Commandant’s criminal carbons which he’d so industriously memorized—all that was made futile by the space he left.
When both typescripts were word-perfect, he returned to the villa. Amon kept him waiting by the French windows while he himself sat in the parlor reading the documents. Pemper wondered if his own body would be displayed with some declamatory lettering: “SO DIE ALL JEWISH BOLSHEVISTS!”
At last Amon appeared at the windows. “You may go to bed,” he said.
“Herr Commandant?”
“I said, you may go to bed.”
Pemper went. He walked less steadily now. After what he had seen, Amon could not let him live. But perhaps
