Schindler's List Page 18

  A Viennese, he had joined the National

  Socialist Party early, in 1930. When the

  nervous Austrian Republic banned the party in 1933, he was already a member of its security force, the SS. Driven underground, he had emerged onto the streets of Vienna after the Anschluss of 1938 in the uniform of an SS noncommissioned officer. In 1940 he had been raised to the rank of SS Oberscharf@uhrer and in 1941 achieved the honor of commissioned rank, immensely harder to come by in the SS than in Wehrmacht units. After training in infantry tactics, he was put in charge of Sonderkommandos during Aktionen in the populous ghetto of Lublin and, by his performance there, earned the right to liquidate Cracow.

  Untersturmf@uhrer Amon Goeth then, speeding on the Wehrmacht special between Lublin and Cracow, there to take command of well-tried Sonderkommandos, shared with Oskar not only his year of birth, his religion, his weakness for liquor, but a massive physique as well. Goeth’s face was open and pleasant, rather longer than Schindler’s. His hands, though large and muscular, were long-fingered. He was sentimental about his children, the children of his second marriage whom, because of his foreign service, he had not seen often in the past three years. As a substitute, he was sometimes attentive to the children of brother officers. He could be a sentimental lover too, but though he resembled Oskar in terms of general sexual voraciousness, his tastes were less conventional, running sometimes to his brother SS men, frequently to the beating of women. Both his former wives could have testified that once the first blaze of infatuation had died, he could become physically abusive. He considered himself a sensitive man, and thought that his family’s trade proved it. His father and grandfather were Viennese printers and binders of books on military and economic history, and he liked to list himself on official papers as a Literat: a man of letters. And though, at this moment, he would have told you that he looked forward to his taking of control of the liquidation operation—that this was the major chance of his career and carried with it the promise of promotion— his service in Special Actions seemed to him to have altered the flow of his nervous energies. He had been plagued with insomnia for two years now and, if he had his way, stayed up till three or four and slept late in the mornings. He had become a reckless drinker and believed he held his liquor with an ease he had not known in his youth. Again like Oskar, he never suffered the hangovers he deserved. He thanked his hardworking kidneys for this benefit.

  His orders, entrusting him with the extinction of the ghetto and the kingship of the P@lasz@ow camp, were dated February 12, 1943. He hoped that after consulting with his senior NCO’S, with Wilhelm Kunde, commander of the SS guard detail for the ghetto, and with Willi Haase, Scherner’s deputy, it would be possible to begin the clearing of the ghetto within a month of the date on his commission.

  Commandant Goeth was met at the Cracow Central Station by Kunde himself and by the tall young SS man Horst Pilarzik, who was temporarily in charge of the work camps at Prokocim and Wieliczka. They piled into the back of a Mercedes and were driven off for a reconnaissance of the ghetto and the site of the new camp. It was a bitter day, and snow began to fall as they crossed the Vistula.

  Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth was pleased for a pull on a flask of schnapps Pilarzik carried with him. They passed through the fake-Oriental portals and down the trolley lines of Lw@owska Street, which cut the ghetto into two icy portions. The dapper Kunde, who had been a customs agent in civilian life and was adept at reporting to superiors, gave a deft sketch of the ghetto. The portion on their left was Ghetto B, said Kunde.

  Its inhabitants, about 2,000 of them, had

  escaped earlier Aktionen or had been

  previously employed in industry. But new

  identification cards had been issued since then,

  with appropriate initials—either W for Army

  employees, Z for employees of the civil

  authorities, or R for workers in essential

  industries. The inhabitants of Ghetto B

  lacked these new cards and were to be shipped away for Sonderbehandlung (special Treatment).

  In clearing the ghetto, it might be preferable to start on that side first, though that sort of tactical decision was entirely up to the Herr Commandant.

  The greater portion of the ghetto stood to the right and contained some 10,000 people still. They would of course be the initial labor force for the factories of the P@lasz@ow camp. It was expected that the German entrepreneurs and supervisors—

  Bosch, Madritsch, Beckmann, the

  Sudetenlander Oskar Schindler—would want to move all or part of their operations out of town into the camp. As well as that there was a cable-making plant no more than half a mile from the proposed camp, and laborers would be marched there and back each day.

  Would the Herr Commandant, asked Kunde, care to continue down the road a few kilometers and have a look at the campsite itself?

  Oh, yes, said Amon, I think that would be advisable.

  They turned off the highway where the cable-factory yard, snow lying on the giant spools, marked the beginning of Jerozolimska Street. Amon Goeth had a glimpse of a few groups of hunched and bescarved women dragging segments of huts—a wall panel, an eaves section—across the highway and up Jerozolimska from the direction of the railway station at Cracow-P@lasz@ow. They were women from the Prokocim camp, Pilarzik explained. When P@lasz@ow was ready, Prokocim would of course be disbanded and these laboring women would come under the management of the Herr Commandant. Goeth estimated the distance the women had to carry the frames to be some three-quarters of a kilometer. “All uphill,” said Kunde, putting his head on one shoulder, then on the other, as if to say, So it’s a satisfactory form of discipline, but it slows up construction.

  The camp would need a railway spur, said Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth. He would make an approach to Ostbahn.

  They passed on the right a synagogue and its mortuary buildings, and a half-tumbled wall showed gravestones like teeth in the cruelly exposed mouth of winter. Part of the campsite had been until this month a Jewish cemetery. “Quite extensive,” said Wilhelm Kunde. The Herr Commandant uttered a witticism which would come to his lips often during his residency at P@lasz@ow. “They won’t have to go far to get buried.”

  There was a house to the right which would be suitable as a temporary residence for the Commandant, and then a large new building to serve as an administration center. The synagogue mortuary, already partly dynamited, would become the camp stable. Kunde pointed out that the two limestone quarries within the camp area could be seen from here. One stood in the bottom of the little valley, the other up on the hill behind the synagogue. The Herr Commandant might be able to notice the tracks being laid for trolleys which would be used in hauling stones. Once the heavy weather let up, the construction of the track would continue.

  They drove to the southeast end of the proposed camp, and a trail, just passable in the snow, took them along the skyline. The trail ended at what had once been an Austrian military earthwork, a circular mound surrounding a deep and broad indentation. To an artilleryman it would have appeared an important redoubt from which cannon could be sighted to enfilade the road from Russia. To Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth it was a place suited for disciplinary punishment. From up here, the camp area could be seen whole.

  It was a rural stretch, graced with the Jewish

  cemetery, and folded between two hills. It was in

  this weather two pages of a largely blank book

  opened and held at an angle, sideways, to the

  observer on the fort hill. A gray, stone

  country dwelling was stuck at the entrance to the

  valley, and past it, along the far slope and

  among the few finished barracks, moved teams of

  women, black as bunches of musical

  notations, in the strange darkling luminescence of a

  snowy evening. Emerging from the icy alleys beyond

  Jerozolimska, they toiled up the white slope

&
nbsp; under the urgings of Ukrainian guards and dropped

  the sections of frames where the SS engineers,

  wearing homburgs and civilian clothes,

  instructed them.

  Their rate of work was a limitation,

  Untersturmf@uhrer Goeth remarked. The ghetto people could not, of course, be moved here until the barracks were up and the watchtowers and fences completed. He had no complaints about the pace at which the prisoners on the far hill were working, he told them, confidingly. He was in fact secretly impressed that so late on a biting day, the SS men and Ukrainians on the far slope were not letting the thought of supper and warm barracks slow the pace of operations.

  Horst Pilarzik assured him that it was all closer to completion than it looked: the land had been terraced, the foundations dug despite the cold, and a great quantity of prefabricated sections carried up from the railway station. The Herr Untersturmf@uhrer would be able to consult with the entrepreneurs tomorrow—a meeting had been arranged for 10 A.m. But modern methods combined with a copious supply of labor meant that these places could be put up almost overnight, weather permitting. Pilarzik seemed to believe that Goeth was in genuine danger of demoralization. In fact Amon was exhilarated. From what he could see here, he could discern the final shape of the place. Nor was he worried about fences. The fences would be a mental comfort to the prisoners rather than an essential precaution. For after the established methodology of SS liquidation had been applied to the Podg@orze ghetto, people would be grateful for the barracks of P@lasz@ow. Even those with Aryan papers would come crawling in here, seeking an obscure berth high up in the green, hoarfrosted rooftrees. For most of them, the wire was needed only as a prop, so that they might reassure themselves that they were prisoners against their will.

  The meeting with the local factory owners and

  Treuh@anders took place in Julian

  Scherner’s office in central Cracow early the

  following day. Amon Goeth arrived smiling

  fraternally and, in his freshly tailored

  Waffen SS uniform, designed precisely

  for his enormous frame, seemed to dominate the

  room. He was sure he could charm the

  independents, Bosch and Madritsch and

  Schindler, into transferring their Jewish labor

  behind camp wire. Besides that, an investigation of the

  skills available among the ghetto dwellers

  helped him to see that P@lasz@ow could become quite

  a business. There were jewelers, upholsterers,

  tailors who could be used for special

  enterprises under the Commandant’s direction,

  filling orders for the SS, the Wehrmacht, the

  wealthy German officialdom. There would be the

  clothing workshops of Madritsch, the enamel

  factory of Schindler, a proposed metal

  plant, a brush factory, a warehouse for

  recycling used, damaged, or stained

  Wehrmacht uniforms from the Russian

  Front, a further warehouse for recycling

  Jewish clothing from the ghettos and dispatching it for the

  use of bombed-out families at home. He

  knew from his experiences of the SS jewelry and

  fur warehouses of Lublin, having seen his

  superiors at work there and taken his proper cut,

  that from most of these prison enterprises he could

  expect a personal percentage. He had reached

  that happy point in his career at which duty and

  financial opportunity coincided. The

  convivial SS police chief, Julian

  Scherner, over dinner last night, had talked to Amon about what a great opportunity P@lasz@ow would be for a young officer—for them both. Scherner opened the meeting with the factory people. He spoke solemnly about the “concentration of labor,” as if it were a great economic principle new-hatched by the SS bureaucracy. You’ll have your labor on site, said Scherner. All factory maintenance will be undertaken at no cost to you, and there will be no rent. All the gentlemen were invited to inspect the workshop sites inside P@lasz@ow that afternoon.

  The new Commandant was introduced. He said how pleased he was to be associated with these businessmen whose valuable contributions to the war effort were already widely known.

  Amon pointed out on a map of the camp area the section set aside for the factories. It was next to the men’s camp; the women—he told them with an easy and quite charming smile—would have to walk a little farther, one or two hundred meters downhill, to reach the workshops. He assured the gentlemen that his main task was to oversee the smooth functioning of the camp and that he had no wish to interfere with their factory policies or to alter the managerial autonomy they enjoyed here in Cracow. His orders, as Oberf@uhrer Scherner could verify, forbade in so many words that sort of intrusion. But the Oberf@uhrer had been correct in pointing out the mutual advantages of moving an industry inside the camp perimeter. The factory owners did not have to pay for the premises, and he, the Commandant, did not have to provide a guard to march the prisoners to town and back. They could understand how the length of the journey and the hostility of the Poles to a column of Jews would erode the worth of the workers. Throughout this speech, Commandant Goeth glanced frequently at Madritsch and Schindler, the two he particularly wished to win over. He knew he could already depend on Bosch’s local knowledge and advice. But Herr Schindler, for example, had a munitions section, small and merely in the developmental stage as yet. It would, however, if transferred, give P@lasz@ow a great respectability with the Armaments Inspectorate.

  Herr Madritsch listened with a considered frown, and Herr Schindler watched the speaker with an acquiescent half-smile. Commandant Goeth could tell instinctively, even before he’d finished speaking, that Madritsch would be reasonable and move in, that Schindler would refuse. It was hard to judge by these separate decisions which one of the two felt more paternal toward his Jews—

  Madritsch, who wanted to be inside

  P@lasz@ow with them, or Schindler, who wanted to have his with him in Emalia.

  Oskar Schindler, wearing that same face of avid tolerance, went with the party to inspect the campsite. P@lasz@ow had the form of a camp now—an improvement in the weather had permitted the assembly of barracks; a thawing of the ground permitted the digging of latrines and postholes. A Polish construction company had installed the miles of perimeter fence. Thick-legged watchtowers were going up along the skyline toward Cracow, and also at the mouth of the valley down toward Wieliczka Street, away at the far end of the camp, and up here on this eastern hill where the official party, in the shadow of the Austrian hill fort, watched the fast work of this new creation. Off to the right, Oskar noticed, women were hustling up muddy tracks in the direction of the railway, heavy sections of barracks tilted between them. Below, from the lowest point of the valley and all the way up the far side, the terraced barracks ran, assembled by male prisoners who raised and slotted and hammered with an energy which at this distance resembled willingness.

  On the choicest, most level ground beneath the official party, a number of long wooden structures were available for industrial occupation. Cement floors could be poured should heavy machinery need to be installed. The transfer of all plant machinery would be handled by the SS. The road that serviced the area was admittedly little more than a country track, but the engineering firm of Klug had been approached to build a central street for the camp, and the Ostbahn had promised to provide a spur to the camp gate itself, to the quarry down there on the right. Limestone from the quarries and some of what Goeth called “Polish-defaced” gravestones from over in the cemetery would be broken up to provide other interior roads. The gentlemen should not worry about roads, said Goeth, for he intended to maintain a permanently strong quarrying and road-building team.

  A small railroad had been laid for the rock trolleys. It ran from the quarry up past the Adminis
tration Building and the large stone barracks that were being built for the SS and Ukrainian garrison. Trolleys of limestone, each weighing six tons, were hauled by teams of women, thirty-five or forty of them to a team, dragging on cables set either side of the rock truck, to compensate for the unevenness in the rail line. Those who tripped or stumbled were trampled or else rolled out of the way, for the teams had their own organic momentum and no individual could abdicate from it. Watching this insidious Egyptian-looking industry, Oskar felt the same surge of nausea, the same prickling of the blood he had experienced on the hill above Krakusa Street. Goeth had assumed the businessmen were a safe audience, that they were all spiritual kinfolk of his. He was not embarrassed by that savage hauling down there. The question arose, as it had in Krakusa Street: What could embarrass the SS? What could embarrass Amon?

  The energy of the barracks builders had, even to an informed observer like Oskar, the specious appearance of men working hard to put up shelter for their women. But though Oskar had not yet heard the rumor of it, Amon had performed a summary execution in front of those men this morning, so that now they knew what the full terms of their labor were. After the early-morning meeting with the engineers, Amon had been strolling down Jerozolimska and had come to the SS barracks where the work was under the supervision of an excellent NCO, soon to be promoted to officer rank, named Albert Hujar. Hujar had marched up and made his report. A section of the foundations of the barracks had collapsed, said Hujar, his face flushed. At the same time, Amon had noticed a girl walking around the half-finished building, speaking to teams of men, pointing, directing. Who was that? he asked Hujar. She was a prisoner named Diana Reiter, said Hujar, an architectural engineer who had been assigned to the construction of the barracks. She was claiming that the foundations hadn’t been correctly excavated, and she wanted all the stone and cement dug up and the work on that section of the building to begin again from scratch. Goeth had been able to tell from the color of Hujar’s face that he had had a tough argument with the woman. Hujar had, in fact, been reduced to screaming at her, “You’re building barracks, not the frigging Hotel Europa!”