Even as Oskar Schindler returned by freight car from Budapest, where he’d predicted that the ghetto would soon be closed, an SS Untersturmführer named Amon Goeth was on his way from Lublin to bring about that liquidation, and to take command of the resultant Forced Labor Camp (Zwangsarbeitslager) at Płaszów. Goeth was some eight months younger than Schindler, but shared more with him than the mere year of birth. Like Oskar he had been raised a Catholic and had ceased observing the rites of the Church as late as 1938, when his first marriage had broken up. Like Oskar too, he had graduated from high school in the Realgymnasium—Engineering, Physics, Math. He was therefore a practical man, no thinker, but considered himself a philosopher.
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 Oberscharführer 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.
Untersturmführer 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 Płaszów 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.
Untersturmführer 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 Lwówska 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 Płaszów 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-Płaszów. They were women from the Prokocim camp, Pilarzik explained. When Płaszów 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 Untersturmführer 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 Płaszów. “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 Untersturmführer 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 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, Untersturmführer 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 Untersturmführer 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 Podgórze ghetto, people would be grateful for the barracks of Płaszów. 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 Treuhänders 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 Płaszów 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 Płaszów 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 Płaszów 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 Oberführer Scherner could verify, forbade in so many words that sort of intrusion. But the Oberführer 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 Płaszów 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 Płaszów 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. Płaszów 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 Administration 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!”
Now Amon half-smiled at Hujar.
We’re not going to have arguments with these people, he said, as if it were a promise. Bring me the girl.
Amon could tell, from the way she walked toward him, the bogus elegance with which her middle-class parents had raised her, the European manners they had imbued her with, sending her—when the honest Poles wouldn’t take her in their universities—off to Vienna or Milan to give her a profession and a heightened protective coloration. She walked toward him as if his rank and hers would bind them in the battle against oafish NCO’S and the inferior craft of whichever SS engineer had supervised the digging of the foundations. She did not know that he hated her the worst—the type who thought, even against the evidence of his SS uniform, of these rising structures, that their Jewishness was not visible.
“You’ve had occasion to quarrel with Oberscharführer Hujar,” Goeth told her as a fact. She nodded firmly. The Herr Commandant would understand, the nod suggested, even though that idiot Hujar couldn’t. The entire foundations at that end must be redug, she told him energetically. Of course, Amon knew “they” were like that, they liked to string out tasks and so ensure that the labor force was safe for the duration of the project. If everything is not redug, she told him, there will be at least subsidence at the southern end of the barracks. There could be collapse. She went on arguing the case, and Amon nodded and presumed she must be lying. It was a first principle that you never listened to a Jewish specialist. Jewish specialists were in the mold of Marx, whose theories were aimed at the integrity of government, and of Freud, who had assaulted the integrity of the Aryan mind. Amon felt that this girl’s argument threatened his personal integrity.
He called Hujar. The NCO returned uneasily. He thought he was going to be told to take the girl’s advice. The girl did too. Shoot her, Amon told Hujar. There was, of course, a pause while Hujar digested the order. Shoot her, Amon repeated. Hujar took the girl’s elbow to lead her away to some place of private execution. Here! said Amon. Shoot her here! On my authority, said Amon.
Hujar knew how it was done. He gripped her by the elbow, pushed her a little to his front, took the Mauser from his holster, and shot her in the back of the neck.
The sound appalled everyone on the work site, except—it seemed—the executioners and the dying Miss Diana Reiter herself. She knelt and looked up once. It will take more than that, she was saying. The knowingness in her eyes frightened Amon, justified him, elevated him. He had no idea and would not have believed that these reactions had clinical labels. He believed, in fact, that he was being awarded the inevitable exaltation that follows an act of political, racial, and moral justice. Even so, a man paid for that, for by evening the fullness of this hour would be followed by such emptiness that he would need, to avoid being blown away like a husk, to augment his size and permanence by food, liquor, contact with a woman.
Apart from these considerations, the shooting of this Diana Reiter, the cancelling of her Western European diploma, had this practical value: that no erector of huts or roads in Płaszów would consider himself essential to the task—that if Miss Diana Reiter could not save herself with all her professional skill, the only chance of the others was prompt and anonymous labor. Therefore the women lugging frames up from the Cracow-Płaszów railway station, the quarry teams, the men assembling the huts all worked with an energy appropriate to what they’d learned from Miss Reiter’s assassination.
As for Hujar and his colleagues, they knew now that instantaneous execution was to be the permitted style of Płaszów.