Today, flanked by the filing cabinets of the entire prison population, Blancke would deal with the prisoners a barracks at a time, and when he finished with one battery of cards it would be taken away and replaced by the next.
As they reached the Appellplatz, prisoners were told to strip. They were lined up naked and run back and forth in front of the doctors. Blancke and Leon Gross, the collaborating Jewish physician, would make notations on the card, point at this prisoner, call on that one to verify his name. Back the prisoners would run, the physicians looking for signs of disease or muscular weakness. It was an odd and humiliating exercise. Men with dislocated backs (pfefferberg, for example, whose back Hujar had thrown out with the blow of a whip handle); women with chronic diarrhea, red cabbage rubbed into their cheeks to give them color—all of them running for their lives and understanding that it was so. Young Mrs. Kinstlinger, who’d sprinted for Poland at the Berlin Olympics, knew that all that had been just a game. This was the true contest. With your stomach turning and your breath thin, you ran—beneath the throb of the lying music—for your golden life. No prisoner found out the results until the following Sunday when, under the same banners and band music, the mass of inmates was again assembled. As names were read out and the rejects of the Gesundheitaktion were marched to the eastern end of the square, there were cries of outrage and bewilderment. Amon had expected a riot and had sought the help of the Wehrmacht garrison of Cracow, who were on standby in case of a prisoner uprising. Nearly 300 children had been discovered during the inspection the previous Sunday, and as they were now dragged away, the protests and wailings of parents were so loud that most of the garrison, together with Security Police detachments called in from Cracow, had to be thrown into the cordon separating the two groups. This confrontation lasted for hours, the guards forcing back surges of demented parents and telling the usual lies to those who had relatives among the rejects. Nothing had been announced, but everyone knew that those down there had failed the test and had no future. Blurred by waltzes and comic songs from the loudspeakers, a pitiable babel of messages was shouted from one group to the other. Henry Rosner, himself in torment, his son, Olek, in fact hidden somewhere in the camp, had the bizarre experience of facing a young SS man who, with tears in his eyes, denounced what was happening and made a pledge to volunteer for the Eastern Front. But officers shouted that unless people showed a little discipline, they would order their men to open fire. Perhaps Amon hoped that a justifiable outbreak of shooting would further reduce the overcrowding.
At the end of the process, 1,400 adults and 268 children stood, hedged in by weapons, at the eastern rim of the Appellplatz, ready for fast shipment to Auschwitz. Pemper would see and memorize the figures, which Amon would consider disappointing. Though it was not the number for which Amon had hoped, it would create immediate room for a large temporary intake of Hungarians.
In Dr. Blancke’s card-file system, the children of P@lasz@ow had not been as precisely registered as the adults. Many of them chose to spend both these Sundays in hiding, both they and their parents knowing instinctively that their age and the absence of their names and other details from the camp’s documentation would make them obvious targets of the selection process.
Olek Rosner hid in the ceiling of a hut on
the second Sunday. There were two other children with him
all day above the rafters, and all day they kept
the discipline of silence, all day held their
bladders among the lice and the little packages of
prisoners’ belongings and the rooftop rats. For the
children knew as well as any adult that the SS and the
Ukrainians were wary of the spaces above the
ceiling. They believed them typhus-ridden, and had
been informed by Dr. Blancke that it took but a
fragment of louse feces in a crack in your skin
to bring on epidemic typhus. Some of
P@lasz@ow’s children had been housed for months
near the men’s prison in the hut marked
ACHTUNG TYPHUS.
This Sunday, for Olek Rosner, Amon’s
health Aktion was far more perilous than typhus-bearing lice. Other children, some of the 268 separated out of the mass that day, had in fact begun the Aktion in hiding. Each P@lasz@ow child, with that same toughness of mind, had chosen a favorite hiding place. Some favored depressions beneath huts, some the laundry, some a shed behind the garage. Many of these hideouts had been discovered either this Sunday or last, and no longer offered refuge.
A further group had been brought without suspicion to the Appellplatz. There were parents who knew this or that NCO. It was as Himmler had once complained, for even SS Oberscharf@uhrers who did not flinch in the act of execution had their favorites, as if the place were a school playground. If there was a question about the children, some parents thought, you could appeal to an SS man who knew you.
The previous Sunday a thirteen-year-old orphan thought he’d be safe because he had, at other roll calls, passed for a young man. But naked, he wasn’t able to argue away the childlikeness of his body. He had been told to dress and been marked down for the children’s group.
Now, as parents at the other end of the
Appellplatz cried out for their rounded-up children and
while the loudspeakers brayed forth a sentimental
song called “Mammi, kauf mir
ein Pferdchen” (mummy, buy me a
pony), the boy simply passed from one group to another, moved with that infallible instinct which had once characterized the movement of the red-capped child in Plac Zgody. And as with Redcap, no one had seen him. He stood, a plausible adult among the others, as the hateful music roared and his heart sought to beat its way through his rib cage. Then, faking the cramps of diarrhea, he asked a guard to let him go to the latrine.
The long latrines lay beyond the men’s camp, and arriving there the boy stepped over the plank on which men sat while defecating. An arm either side of the pit, he lowered himself, trying to find knee- and toeholds in either wall. The stench blinded him, and flies invaded his mouth and ears and nostrils. As he entered the larger foulness and touched the bottom of the pit, he seemed to hear what he believed to be a hallucinatory murmur of voices behind the rage of flies. were they behind you? said one voice. And another said, Dammit, this is our place!
There were ten children in there with him. Amon’s report made use of the compound word Sonderbehandlung—Special Treatment.
It was a term that would become famous in later years, but this was the first time that Pemper had come across it. Of course, it had a sedative, even medical ring, but Mietek could tell by now that medicine was not involved.
A telegram Amon dictated that morning to be transmitted to Auschwitz gave more than a hint of its meaning. Amon explained that to make escape more difficult he had insisted that those selected for Special Treatment should drop any remnants of civilian clothing they still possessed at the rail siding and should put on striped prison clothes there. Since a great shortage of such garments prevailed, the stripes in which the P@lasz@ow candidates for Special Treatment turned up at Auschwitz should be sent back at once to Concentration Camp P@lasz@ow for reuse.
And all the children left in P@lasz@ow, of whom the greatest number were those who shared the latrine with the tall orphan, hid out or impersonated adults until later searches discovered them and took them to the Ostbahn for the slow day’s journey 60 kilometers to Auschwitz. The cattle cars were used that way all through high summer, taking troops and supplies east to the stalemated lines near Lw@ow and, on the return trip, wasting time at sidings while SS doctors watched ceaseless lines of the naked run before them.
CHAPTER 29
Oskar, sitting in Amon’s office, the windows flung open to a breathless summer’s day, had the impression from the start that this meeting was a fake. Perhaps Madritsch and Bosch felt the same, for their gaze kept drifting away from Am
on toward the limestone trolleys outside the window, toward any passing truck or wagon.
Only Untersturmf@uhrer Leo John,
who took notes, felt the need to sit up
straight and keep his top button done up. Amon had described it as a security conference. Though the Front had now been stabilized, he said, the advance of the Russian center to the suburbs of Warsaw had encouraged partisan activity all over the Government General. Jews who heard of it were encouraged to attempt escapes. They did not know, of course, Amon pointed out, that they were better off behind the wire than exposed to those Jew-killers among the Polish partisans. In any case, everyone had to beware of partisan attack from outside and, worst of all, of collusion between the partisans and the prisoners.
Oskar tried to imagine the partisans invading P@lasz@ow, letting all the Poles and Jews pour out, making of them an instant army. It was a daydream, and who could believe it? But there was Amon, straining to convince them all that he believed it. It had a purpose, this little act. Oskar was sure of that.
Bosch said, “If the partisans are coming out to your place, Amon, I hope it’s not a night when I’ve been invited.”
“Amen, amen,” murmured Schindler.
After the meeting, whatever it meant, Oskar took Amon to his car, parked outside the Administration Building. He opened the trunk. Inside lay a richly tooled saddle worked with designs characteristic of the Zakopane region in the mountains south of Cracow. It was necessary for Oskar to keep priming Amon with such gifts even now that payment for the forced labor of DEF no longer went anywhere near Hauptsturmf@uhrer Goeth but, instead, was sent directly to the Cracow area representative of General Pohl’s Oranienburg headquarters.
Oskar offered to drive both Amon and his saddle down to the Commandant’s villa.
On such a blistering day, some of the trolley-pushers were showing a little less than the required zeal. But the saddle had mollified Amon, and in any case, it was no longer permitted for him to jump from a car and shoot people down in their tracks. The car rolled past the garrison barracks and came to the siding where a string of cattle cars stood. Oskar could tell, by the haze hanging above the cars and blending withand wavering in the heat rebounding from the roofs, that they were full. Even above the sound of the engine, you could hear the mourning from inside, the pleas for water.
Oskar braked his car and listened. This was
permitted him, in view of the splendid
multiz@loty saddle in the trunk. Amon
smiled indulgently at his sentimental friend. They’re partly P@lasz@ow people, said Amon, and people from the work camp at Szebnie. And Poles and Jews from Montelupich. They’re going to Mauthausen, Amon said whimsically. They’re complaining now? They don’t know what complaint is.
...
The roofs of the cars were bronzed with heat. You have no objection, said Oskar, if I call out your fire brigade?
Amon gave a What-will-you-think-of-next? sort of laugh. He implied that he wouldn’t let anyone else summon the firemen, but he’d tolerate Oskar because Oskar was such a character and the whole business would make a good dinner-party anecdote.
But as Oskar sent Ukrainian guards to ring the bell for the Jewish firemen, Amon was bemused.
He knew that Oskar knew what Mauthausen
meant. If you hosed the cars for people, you were making
them promises about a future. And would not such
promises constitute, in anyone’s code, a
true cruelty? So disbelief mingled with
tolerant amusement in Amon as the hoses were
run out and jets of water fell hissing on the
scalding cartops. Neuschel also came down from
the office to shake his head and smile as the people
inside the cars moaned and roared with
gratitude. Gr@un, Amon’s bodyguard,
stood chatting with Untersturmf@uhrer John
and clapped his side and hooted as the water rained
down. Even at full extension the hoses reached
only halfway down the line of cars. Next,
Oskar was asking Amon for the loan of a truck or
wagon andofa few Ukrainians to drive
into Zablocie and fetch the fire hoses from
DEF. They were 200-meter hoses, Oskar
said. Amon, for some reason, found that
sidesplitting. “Of course I’ll authorize
a truck,” said Amon. Amon was willing to do anything for the sake of the comedy of life.
Oskar gave the Ukrainians a note for
Bankier and Garde. While they were gone, Amon
was so willing to enter the spirit of the event that he
permitted the doors of the cars to be opened and
buckets of water to be passed in and the dead, with
their pink, swollen faces, to be lifted out. And
still, all around the railway siding stood amused
SS officers and NCO’S. “What does he
think he’s saving them from?”
When the large hoses from DEF arrived and all the cars had been drenched, the joke took on new dimensions. Oskar, in his note to Bankier, had instructed that the manager also go into Oskar’s own apartment and fill a hamper with liquor and cigarettes, some good cheeses and sausages, and so on. Oskar now handed the hamper to the NCO at the rear of the train. It was an open transaction, and the man seemed a little embarrassed at the largesse, shoving it quickly into the rear van in case one of the officers of KL P@lasz@ow reported him. Yet Oskar seemed to be in such curious favor with the Commandant that the NCO listened to him respectfully. “When you stop near stations,” said Oskar, “will you open the car doors?”
Years later, two survivors of the
transport, Doctors Rubinstein and
Feldstein, would let Oskar know that the NCO had
frequently ordered the doors opened and the water
buckets regularly filled on the tedious
journey to Mauthausen. For most of the
transport, of course, that was no more than a comfort before dying.
As Oskar moves along the string of cars, accompanied by the laughter of the SS, bringing a mercy which is in large part futile, it can be seen that he’s not so much reckless anymore but possessed. Even Amon can tell that his friend has shifted into a new gear. All this frenzy about getting the hoses as far as the farthest car, then bribing an SS man in full view of the SS personnel—it would take just a shift in degree or so in the laughter of Scheidt or John or Hujar to bring about a mass denunciation of Oskar, a piece of information the Gestapo could not ignore. And then Oskar would go into Montelupich and, in view of previous racial charges against him, probably on to Auschwitz. So Amon was horrified by the way Oskar insisted on treating those dead as if they were poor relations traveling third class but bound for a genuine destination.
Some time after two, a locomotive hauled the whole miserable string of cattle cars away toward the main line, and all the hoses could again be wound up. Schindler delivered Amon and his saddle to the Goeth villa. Amon could see that Oskar was still preoccupied and, for the first time in their association, gave his friend some advice about living. You have to relax, said Amon. You can’t go running after every trainload that leaves this place.
Adam Garde, engineer and prisoner of Emalia, also saw symptoms of this shift in Oskar. On the night of July 20, an SS man had come into Garde’s barracks and roused him. The Herr Direktor had called the guardhouse and said it was necessary to see engineer Garde, professionally, in his office.
Garde found Oskar listening to the radio, his face flushed, a bottle and two glasses in front of him on the table. Behind the desk these days was a relief map of Europe. It had never been there in the days of German expansion, but Oskar seemed to take a sharp interest in the shrinkage of the German Fronts. Tonight he had the radio tuned to the Deutschlandsender, not—as was usually the case—to the BBC. Inspirational music was being played, as it o
ften was as prelude to important announcements.
Oskar seemed to be listening avidly. When Garde came in, he stood up and hustled the young engineer to a seat. He poured cognac and passed it hurriedly across the desk. “There’s been an attempt on Hitler’s life,” said Oskar.
It had been announced earlier in the evening, and the story then was that Hitler had survived. They’d promised that he would soon be speaking to the German people. But it hadn’t happened. Hours had passed and they hadn’t been able to produce him. And they kept playing a lot of Beethoven, the way they had when Stalingrad fell.
Oskar and Garde sat together for hours. A seditious event, a Jew and a German listening together—all night if necessary—to discover if the F@uhrer had died. Adam Garde, of course, suffered that same breathless surge of hope. He noticed that Oskar kept gesturing limply, as if the possibility that the Leader was dead had unstrung his muscles. He drank devoutly and urged Garde to drink up. If it was true, said Oskar, then Germans, ordinary Germans like himself, could begin to redeem themselves.
Purely because someone close to Hitler had had the
guts to remove him from the earth. It’s the end of the
SS, said Oskar. Himmler will be in jail
by morning.
Oskar blew clouds of smoke. Oh, my
God, he said, the relief to see the end of this system!
The 10 P.m. news brought only the earlier statement. There had been an attempt on the F@uhrer’s life but it had failed and the F@uhrer would be broadcasting in a few minutes. When, as the hour passed, Hitler did not speak, Oskar turned to a fantasy which would be popular with many Germans as the war drew to a close. “Our troubles are over,” he said. “The world’s sane again. Germany can ally itself with the West against the Russians.”
Garde’s hopes were more modest. At worst, he hoped for a ghetto which was a ghetto in the old Franz Josef sense.
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