Oskar wasn’t distressed. There were larger employers of Jewish prison labor than he. There were the megaliths, Krupp, of course, and I. G. Farben. There was the Cable Works at P@lasz@ow. Walter C. Toebbens, the Warsaw industrialist whom Himmler had tried to force into the Wehrmacht, was a heavier employer of labor than Herr Schindler. Then there were the steelworks at Stalowa Wola, the aircraft factories at Budzyn and Zakopane, the Steyour-Daimler-Puch works at Radom.
The personnel officer had the plans of
Emalia on his desk. I hope, he said
curtly, you don’t want to increase the size of your camp. It would be impossible to do it without courting a typhus epidemic.
Oskar waved that suggestion aside. He was interested in the permanence of his labor force, he said. He had had a talk on that matter, he told the officer, with a friend of his, Colonel Erich Lange. The name, Oskar could tell, meant something to the SS man. Oskar produced a letter from the Colonel, and the personnel officer sat back reading it. The office was silent—all you could hear from other rooms was pen-scratch and the whisper of papers and quiet, earnest talk, as if none here knew that they lay at the core of a network of screams.
Colonel Lange was a man of
influence, Chief of Staff of the Armaments
Inspectorate at Army Headquarters,
Berlin. Oskar had met him at a party at
General Schindler’s office in Cracow. They had liked each other almost at once. It happened a lot at parties that two people could sense in each other a certain resistance to the regime and might retire to a corner to test each other out and perhaps establish friendship. Erich Lange had been appalled by the factory camps of Poland—by the I. G. Farben works at Buna, for example, where foremen adopted the SS “work tempo” and made prisoners unload cement on the run; where the corpses of the starved, the broken were hurled into ditches built for cables and covered, together with the cables, with cement. “You are not here to live but to perish in concrete,” a plant manager had told newcomers, and Lange had heard the speech and felt damned.
His letter to Oranienburg had been preceded by some phone calls, and calls and letter both promoted the same proposition: Herr Schindler, with his mess kits and his 45mm antitank shells, is considered by this Inspectorate to be a major contributor to the struggle for our national survival. He has built up a staff of skilled specialists, and nothing should be done to disrupt the work they perform under the Herr Direktor Schindler’s supervision.
The personnel officer was impressed and said he would speak frankly to Herr Schindler. There were no plans to alter the status or interfere with the population of the camp in Zablocie. However, the Herr Direktor had to understand that the situation of Jews, even skilled armaments workers, was always risky. Take the case of our own SS enterprises. Ostindustrie, the SS company, employs prisoners in a peat works, a brush factory and iron foundry in Lublin, equipment factories in Radom, a fur works in Trawniki. But other branches of the SS shoot the work force continually, and now Osti is for all practical purposes out of business.
Likewise, at the killing centers, the staff
never retains a sufficient percentage of
prisoners for factory work. This has been a matter of frequent correspondence, but they’re intransigent, those people in the field. “Of course,” said the personnel officer, tapping the letter, “I’ll do what I can for you.”
“I understand the problem,” said Oskar, looking up at the SS man with that radiant smile.
“If there is any way I can express my
gratitude ....”
In the end, Oskar left Oranienburg with at least some guarantees about the continuity of his backyard camp in Cracow.
The manner in which the new status of
P@lasz@ow impinged on lovers was that a proper penal separation of the sexes—such as was provided for in a series of SS Main Office of Economics and Administration memos—was created. The fences between the men’s prison and the women’s, the perimeter fence, the fence around the industrial sector were all electrified. The voltage, the spacing of wires, the number of electrified strands and insulators were all provided for by Main Office directives.
Amon and his officers were not slow to notice the disciplinary possibilities involved. Now you could stand people for twenty-four hours at a time between the electrified outer fence and the inner, neutral, original fence. If they staggered with weariness, they knew that inches behind their backs ran the hundreds of volts. Mundek Korn, for example, found himself, on returning to camp with a work party from which one prisoner was missing, standing in that narrow gulf for a day and a night.
But perhaps worse than the risk of falling against the wire was the way the current ran, from the end of evening roll call to reveille in the morning, like a moat between man and woman. Time for contact was now reduced to the short phase of milling on the Appellplatz, before the orders for falling into line were shouted. Each couple devised a tune, whistling it among the crowds, straining to pick up the answering refrain amid a forest of sibilance. Rebecca Tannenbaum also settled on a code tune. The requirements of General Pohl’s Main SS Office had forced the prisoners of P@lasz@ow to adopt the mating stratagems of birds. And by these means, the formal romance of Rebecca and Josef went forward.
Then Josef somehow got a dead woman’s
dress from the clothing warehouse. Often, after roll
call in the men’s lines, he would go to the
latrines, put on the long gown, and place an
Orthodox bonnet on his hair. Then he would
come out and join the women’s lines. His
short hair would not have amazed any SS guard,
since most of the women had been shorn because of
lice. So, with 13,000 women prisoners, he
would pass into the women’s compound and spend the night
sitting up in Hut 57 keeping Rebecca
company.
In Rebecca’s barracks, the older women
took Josef at his word. If Josef
required a traditional courtship, they would fall into their traditional roles as chaperones. Josef was therefore a gift to them too, a license to play their prewar ceremonious selves. From their four-tiered bunks they looked down on the two children until everyone fell asleep. If any one of them thought, Let’s not be too fussy in times like these about what the children get up to in the dead of night, it was never said. In fact, two of the older women would crowd onto one narrow ledge so that Josef could have a bunk of his own. The discomfort, the smell of the other body, the risk of the migration of lice from your friend to yourself—none of that was as important, as crucial to self-respect as that the courtship should be fulfilled according to the norms. At the end of winter, Josef, wearing the armband of the Construction Office, went out into the strangely immaculate snow in the strip between the inner fence and the electrified barrier and, steel measure in hand, under the eyes of the domed watchtowers, pretended to be sizing up no-man’s-land for some architectural reason.
At the base of the concrete stanchions studded with porcelain insulators grew the first tiny flowers of that year. Flashing his steel ruler, he picked them and shoved them into his jacket. He brought the flowers across the camp, up Jerozolimska Street. He was passing Amon’s villa, his chest stuffed with blossoms, when Amon himself appeared from the front door and advanced, towering, down the steps. Josef Bau stopped. It was most dangerous to stop, to appear to be in arrested motion in front of Amon. But having stopped, he seemed frozen there. He feared that the heart he’d so energetically and honestly signed over to the orphan Rebecca would likely now become just another of Amon’s targets.
But when Amon walked past him, not noticing him, not objecting to his standing there with an idle ruler in his hands, Josef Bau concluded that it meant some kind of guarantee. No one escaped Amon unless it was a sort of destiny.
All dolled up in his shooting uniform, Amon had entered the camp unexpectedly one day through the back
gate and had found the Warrenhaupt girl lolling in a limousine at the garage, staring at herself in the rearview mirror. The car windows she’d been assigned to clean were still smudged. He had killed her for that. And there was that mother and daughter Amon had noticed through a kitchen window. They had been peeling potatoes too slowly. So he’d leaned in on the sill and shot both of them. Yet here at his steps was something he hated, a stock-still Jewish lover and draftsman, steel ruler dangling in his hands. And Amon had walked by. Bau felt the urge to confirm this outrageous good luck by some emphatic act. Marriage was, of course, the most emphatic act of all.
He got back to the Administration Building, climbed the stairs to Stern’s office and, finding Rebecca, asked her to marry him. Urgency, Rebecca was pleased and concerned to notice, had entered the business now.
That evening, in the dead woman’s dress, he visited his mother again and the council of chaperones in Hut 57. They awaited only the arrival of a rabbi. But if rabbis came, they remained only a few days on their way to Auschwitz—not long enough for people requiring the rites of kiddushin and nissuin to locate them and ask them, before they stepped into the furnace, for a final exercise of their priesthood.
Josef married Rebecca on a Sunday night of fierce cold in February. There was no rabbi. Mrs. Bau, Josef’s mother, officiated. They were Reformed Jews, so that they could do without a ketubbah written in Aramaic. In the workshop of Wulkan the jeweler someone had made up two rings out of a silver spoon Mrs. Bau had had hidden in the rafters. On the barracks floor, Rebecca circled Josef seven times and Josef crushed glass—a spent light bulb from the Construction Office—beneath his heel.
The couple had been given the top bunk of the tier. For the sake of privacy, it had been hung with blankets. In darkness Josef and Rebecca climbed to it, and all around them the earthy jokes were running. At weddings in Poland there was always a period of truce when profane love was given its chance to speak. If the wedding guests didn’t wish to voice the traditional double entendres themselves, they could bring in a professional wedding jester. Women who might in the Twenties and Thirties have sat up at weddings making disapproving faces at the risqu‘e hired jester and the belly-laughing men, only now and then permitting themselves, as mature women, to be overcome with amusement, stepped tonight into the place of all the absent and dead wedding jesters of southern Poland.
Josef and Rebecca had not been together more than ten minutes on the upper bunk when the barracks lights came on. Looking through the blankets, Josef saw Untersturmf@uhrer Scheidt patrolling the canyons of bunks. The same old fearful sense of destiny overcame Josef. They’d found he was missing from his barracks, of course, and sent one of the worst of the officers to look for him in his mother’s hut. Amon had been blinded to him that day outside the villa only so that Scheidt, who was quick on the trigger, could come and kill him on his wedding night!
He knew too that all the women were compromised
--his mother, his bride, the witnesses, the ones who’d uttered the most exquisitely embarrassing jokes. He began murmuring apologies, pleas to be forgiven. Rebecca told him to be quiet. She took down the screen of blankets. At this time of night, she reasoned, Scheidt wasn’t going to climb to a top bunk unless provoked. The women on the lower bunks were passing their small straw-filled pillows to her. Josef might well have orchestrated the courtship, but he was now the child to be concealed. Rebecca pushed him hard up into the corner of the bunk and covered him with pillows. She watched Scheidt pass below her, leave the barracks by its back door. The lights went out. Among a last spatter of dark, earthy jokes, the Baus were restored to their privacy.
Within minutes, the sirens began to sound. Everyone sat up in the darkness. The noise meant to Bau that yes, they were determined to stamp out this ritual marriage. They had found his empty bunk over in the men’s quarters and were now seriously hunting him.
In the dark aisle, the women were milling. They knew it too. From the top bunk he could hear them saying it. His old-fashioned love would kill them all. The barracks Alteste, who’d been so decent about the whole thing, would be shot first once the lights came on and they found a bridegroom there in token female rags.
Josef Bau grabbed his clothes. He kissed his wife perfunctorily, slid to the floor, and ran from the hut. In the darkness outside, the wail of the sirens pierced him. He ran in dirty snow, with his jacket and old dress bundled up under his armpits. When the lights came on, he would be seen by the towers. But he had the berserk idea that he could beat the lights over the fence, that he could even climb it between the alternations of its current. Once back in the men’s camp, he could make up some story about diarrhea, about having gone to the latrines and collapsed on the floor, being brought back to consciousness by the noise of sirens.
But even if electrocuted, he understood as he sprinted, he could not then confess what woman he was visiting. Racing for the fatal wire, he did not understand that there would have to be a classroomlike scene on the Appellplatz and that Rebecca would be made, one way or another, to step forward.
In the fence between the men’s and women’s camps in P@lasz@ow ran nine electrified strands. Josef Bau launched himself high, so that his feet would find purchase on the third of the strands and his hands, at the stretch, might reach the second from the top. He imagined himself then as racing over the strands with a ratlike quickness. In fact he landed in the mesh of wire and simply hung there. He thought the coldness of the metal in his hands was the first message of the current. But there was no current.
There were no lights. Josef Bau, stretched on
the fence, did not speculate on the reason there
wasn’t any voltage. He got to the top and
vaulted into the men’s camp. You’re a married
man, he told himself. He slid into the
latrines by the washhouses. “A frightful
diarrhea. Herr Oberscharf@uhrer.”
He stood gasping in the stench. Amon’s blindness on the day of the flowers ... the consummation, waited forwith an untoward patience, twice interrupted ... Scheidt and the sirens ... a problem with the lights and the wire—staggering and gagging, he wondered if he could support the ambiguity of his life. Like others, he wanted a more definite rescue. He wandered out to be one of the last to join the lines in front of his hut. He was trembling, but sure the Alteste would cover up for him. “Yes, Herr Untersturmf@uhrer, I gave H@aftling Bau permission to visit the latrines.”
They weren’t looking for him at all. They were looking for three young Zionists who’d escaped in a truckload of product from the upholstery works, where they made Wehrmacht mattresses out of sea grass.
CHAPTER 27
On April 28, 1944, Oskar—by looking sideways at himself in a mirror—was able to tell that his waist had thickened for his thirty-sixth birthday. But at least today, when he embraced the girls, no one bothered to denounce him. Any informer among the German technicians must have been demoralized, since the SS had let Oskar out of Pomorska and Montelupich, both of them centers supposed impregnable to influence.
To mark the day, Emilie sent the usual greetings from Czechoslovakia, and Ingrid and Klonowska gave him gifts. His domestic arrangements had scarcely changed in the four and a half years he had spent in Cracow. Ingrid was still a consort, Klonowska a girlfriend, Emilie an understandably absent wife. Whatever grievances and bewilderment each suffered goes unrecorded, but it would become obvious in this, his thirty-seventh, year that some coolness had entered his relations with Ingrid; that Klonowska, always a loyal friend, was content with a merely sporadic liaison; and that Emilie still considered their marriage indissoluble. For the moment, they gave their presents and kept their counsel.
Others took a hand in the celebration. Amon permitted Henry Rosner to bring his violin to Lipowa Street in the evening under the guard of the best baritone in the Ukrainian garrison.
Amon was, at this stage, very pleased with his association with Schindler. In return for his contin
uing support for the Emalia camp, Amon had one day recently requested and got the permanent use of Oskar’s Mercedes—not the jalopy Oskar had bought from John for a day, but the most elegant car in the Emalia garage.
The recital took place in Oskar’s
office. No one attended except
Oskar. It was as if he were tired of company.
When the Ukrainian went to the lavatory, Oskar
revealed his depression to Henry. He was upset
about the war news. His birthday had come in a
hiatus. The Russian armies had halted behind
the Pripet Marshes in Belorussia and in
front of Lw@ow. Oskar’s fears puzzled
Henry. Doesn’t he understand, he wondered, that if the Russians aren’t held off, it’s the end of his operation here?
“I’ve often asked Amon to let you come here permanently,” Oskar told Rosner. “You and your wife and child. He won’t hear of it. He appreciates you too much. But eventually ...” Henry was grateful. But he felt he had to point out that his family might be as safe as any in P@lasz@ow. His sister-in-law, for example, had been discovered by Goeth smoking at work, and he had ordered her execution. But one of the NCO’S had begged to put before the Herr Commandant’s notice the fact that this woman was Mrs. Rosner, wife of Rosner the accordionist. “Oh,” Amon had said, pardoning her. “Well, remember, girl, I won’t have smoking on the job.”
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