Oskar Schindler, page 33
With the exception of Willi Haase, though, no other SS officer is mentioned in these accounts. Yet one of the five charges brought against Amon Göth in his war crimes trial was that, in the process of closing the Szebnie forced labor camp from September 1943 until early February 1944, he was responsible for “causing the death of several thousand persons.”89 The Polish court’s evidence was based on the testimony of various witnesses, including Mietek Pemper, Regina Weiss, and Henryk Faber. Weiss, who was taken to Szebnie from Tarnów, never mentioned Göth in her testimony, though she does support Pogonowski’s claim that 2,800 Szebnie Jews were shipped to Auschwitz and murdered in early November 1943. She also partially confirms official Auschwitz statistics about another 1,200 Szebnie Jews sent to Auschwitz at the same time. But, she says, they were Poles, not Jews. Faber said nothing about Göth in his brief testimony.90
One of the reasons for this was that Göth had little to do with the closing of the Szebnie camp. Mietek Pemper said that even though Göth was briefly “nominal commandant” there, he soon lost control of Szebnie to Kellermann, who oversaw the its closing, though Göth continued to play an oversight role there. This fits with the testimony of Dr. Aleksander Biberstein, a Schindler Jew and one of the principal witnesses in Göth’s trial. In mid-February 1943, Biberstein and another physician, Dr. Zygfryd Schwarz, were ordered by Dr. Weichert’s Jewish Aid Society to meet with Göth to talk about “building the [Płaszów] hospital and about the sanitary facilities in the camp.”91 Göth was unusually friendly to both Jewish physicians and offered them cigarettes; he did almost all the talking and told them that at the time he was building two camps, the one in Płaszów and another in Szebnie.92
Other evidence presented in Göth’s trial gives a more expansive view of the role he played in the clearing and liquidation of the Szebnie forced labor camp. Like many small German forced labor camps, Szebnie had Jewish and Polish workers. There were 4,000 Jewish slave laborers at Szebnie and 1,500 Polish forced laborers. The Göth trial records make no mention of Haase, and given his rank, it is hard to imagine that he was involved directly in the Szebnie roundup, though it is possible he was there briefly as an observer. It was not uncommon for higher-ranking SS officials to show up on the first day of a roundup or the closing of a ghetto or forced labor camp to watch the Aktion. In reality, Göth sent one of his lower-ranking subordinates from Płaszów, SS-Hauptscharführer Josef Grzimek, to work with Szebnie’s commandant, Kellermann, to close the camp, which took place between September 21, 1943 and February 3, 1944. As the camp was being shut down, Göth ordered a detailed inventory of the camp’s goods, which were then shipped to Płaszów. Most of the Poles in Szebnie were sent to Płaszów and Bochnia, though it is not certain how many survived the war.93
Płaszów
But it is not in Szebnie, Tarnów, or even Kraków where Amon Göth committed his greatest war crimes. It was in Płaszów, the forced labor and later concentration camp he commanded from February 11, 1943 until the SS arrested him for corruption on September 13, 1944. According to the Polish indictment against him, Amon Göth was responsible for the deaths of 8,000 inmates during the time that he ran the camp, though it is difficult to determine the exact number. A recent study undertaken by the Polish Foundation for the Protection of Monuments of National Memory-Iwona Ruebenbauer-Skwara (Fundacja Opieka nad Pomnkiem Pamieci Narodowej-Iwona Ruebenbauer-Skwara) estimated that the number of Jews and others murdered at Płaszów was between 8,000 and 12,000. Mietek Pemper testified in Göth’s trial that “natural mortality” in the camp was very low. About five hundred prisoners were executed for trying to escape, and most of these were killed “by Goeth himself or his subordinates.” Pemper estimated that another 5,000 to 6,000 were either executed or were on the May 14, 1944, transport to Auschwitz. Pemper added that the SS murdered about 2,000 Jews during the closing of the Kraków ghetto in the spring of 1943. But these figures must also be put into the context of the actual number of Jews, and, to a much lesser degree, Christian Poles who were sent briefly to Płaszów and then on to concentration or death camps. When Płaszów first opened, it only had about 2,000 prisoners, about half the number it could initially handle. During the next year, its population grew tremendously; at its peak in 1944, it had a permanent population of approximately 30,000. But because it also served as a temporary transit camp, about 150,000 inmates passed through Płaszów. In mid-1943, Płaszów was a sub-camp of Majdanek, but became its own separate concentration camp in early 1944. Until this point, Płaszów housed only Jewish prisoners. A small camp for Polish prisoners guilty of misdemeanors was added in the summer of 1943. When they had served their prison terms, they were released or sent to forced labor camps in Poland. About 3,000 Poles were imprisoned at Płaszów during the war.94
Today, it is hard to imagine that this was the site of Amon Göth’s brutal camp. Years ago, the Poles turned it into a nature preserve and it has retained its quiet, bucolic nature. Poles who live in the private homes (some in Göth’s private villa and the “Gray House,” the camp’s former prison) and apartments that run along the northern border of the camp on Jero-zoliminka, W. Heltmana and Wielicka Streets, can be seen walking their dogs along the paths that traverse the former camp site. Unfortunately, despite a few monuments at the southeastern end of the camp site, little has been done to preserve the largely hidden but important remnants of the camp. On one occasion when I was looking for the remains of the old Jewish mortuary there, I fell into an open grave that had been desecrated by the Germans. It took me three trips to Płaszów over several years before I truly grasped the significance of these ruins. My most important visits took place in the summer of 2000, when I was accompanied first by Jaroslav Zotciak, a landscape architect who had studied and mapped the Płaszów site, and Stella Müller-Madej, a Schindler Jew who lives in Kraków. Both were able to bring Płaszów back to life for me, but in different ways.
The trip with Stella was the most moving. The day before, I had spent a great deal of time with her talking about Schindler and her experiences during the Holocaust, which she has documented in the first volume of her two-part memoir, Dziewczynka z listy Schindlera (A Girl from Schindler’s List). Stella had lived in Kraków all her life and spent hours telling me and my research assistant, Konstancja Szymura, about her life there before the war. She also shared with us stories about her life in the Kraków ghetto, in Płaszów, and with Oskar Schindler in Brünnlitz. In her fluid, literary way of speaking, she shared with us the range of emotions that she experienced in those long, horrible years during the Holocaust. At the end of the evening, she asked whether we would like her to take us to Płaszów. She also mentioned that she had never been to the site of Schindler’s factory on ul. Lipowa and wondered whether I would mind taking her there on the way to Płaszów. I hesitated at first because over the years I had learned to respect the tender emotions of Holocaust survivors, who are often forced to bring back painful memories when they speak about or visit former Holocaust sites. But Stella insisted and Konstancja and I agreed to spend the following afternoon with her at Płaszów and Emalia.
The trip to Emalia had little meaning to Stella because she had never worked there. But her return to Płaszów was as emotional as I expected it to be. The site is large and Stella, who had been there many times before, decided it would be too much for her to walk the complete site. Instead, she drove off the main road onto one of the dirt roads that runs through the camp. Small mounds of trash left there by inconsiderate visitors were mixed in with the open graves and ruins of the barracks. During other trips to Poland, I have visited Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Majdanek with Holocaust survivors. But this visit was different because I had gotten to know Stella very well and was deeply touched by the pain that she experienced as we slowly moved through Płaszów. She would periodically stop the car to point out the location of a barracks or the Appellplatz. But when we stopped before Hujowa Górka, the principal mass murder and burial site of the camp, she got out of the car and walked quietly away from us. Konstancja asked whether we should do something to help. I said that what she was feeling and experiencing was very, very personal and that we should leave her alone. Neither of us could imagine the horrible thoughts and memories that came flooding back to her as she stood in the quiet of Płaszów on that pleasant summer day. When she returned to the car, she had regained her composure and suggested that we go into the hills above Kraków for ice cream.
Today, it is hard to realize that at its peak the Płaszów camp covered between 173 and 197 acres. The only significant remains are Amon Göth’s villa, the “Grey House,” which housed the camp’s small prison, and some broken tombstones and open graves of the two Jewish cemeteries desecrated by the Germans as they constructed the forced labor camp on this site. There are also building foundations and raised mounds as well as portions of one of the camp roads built with broken Jewish cemetery headstones, though they are hard to find, particularly in the summer’s tall grass. There were three mass murder sites in Płaszów: one in the northern part of the old Jewish cemetery; another, Lipowy Dolek, in the southeastern part of the camp, which also contained a mass grave; and Hujowa Górka, which contains two monuments, one Polish and one Jewish, to honor those who were murdered here. The Polish Martyrs’ Monument to all Płaszów victims at Hujowa Górka sits atop the site of a former Austrian fort complete with its old moat. It is one of those striking, stark Soviet-style monuments found throughout Moscow’s former empire. The smaller, more tasteful Jewish memorial is down the hill and just across the moat from the Polish memorial. And hidden away in the hills at the eastern edge of the former camp overlooking Płaszów is a stark cross circled in barbed wire to commemorate the Christian Poles who died in Płaszów.95
According to Jaroslav Zotciak, the name for the camp, Płaszów, was a bit of a misnomer because it was located in Kraków’s Podgórze and Wola Duchacka districts, not in the Płaszów district. It probably got the name Płaszów because its first Jewish prisoners came from Julag I, which was in the Płaszów region. In some ways, the site of the future Płaszów forced labor and concentration camp was always a natural island in a sea of Polish development. Today, high rise apartments block the view of the camp from Wielicka street, the large boulevard that runs closest to the former camp site. The buildings now sit where Göth housed his SS troops, and a McDonald’s and other commercial buildings stand on or near the site where he stored the goods taken from the camp’s inmates. The area has not suffered from further development only because Płaszów was built partly in Krzemionki, where Kraków’s prewar Jewish community had two of its most important cemeteries. And just beyond this is the large Christian Podgórski cemetery. So well before World War II, this part of Podgórze had become a sacred place for Jews and Christians.
In 1887, the Jews in Kraków’s Old City built their first cemetery in Krzemionki because space was running out in the small cemeteries in Kaz-imierz. In 1932, the Jews of Podgórze built a much larger cemetery next to the smaller one. The new cemetery contained a beautiful three-domed mortuary that sat at the entrance of the cemeteries and then ran beside Jero-zolinska and Abrahama Streets. At one point, Göth used the mortuary as a stable but later had part of it destroyed to build a rail line into the camp. The SS used what remained of the mortuary for a power station. Göth also built Płaszów’s main entrance near the site of the entrance to the Jewish cemeteries. SS camp tradition dictated a certain style and architecture for entrances to forced labor and concentration camps that reminds one somewhat of the storied entrance to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. But unlike Birke-nau, where train tracks ran through the two-storied entranceway, the train tracks into Płaszów ran beside the entranceway. Two black-and-white-striped guard posts stood beside the two-storied entranceway, which had elongated buildings attached to it on both sides. This style of SS architecture with its “central tower and side wings” had been perfected at Dachau, Buchenwald, and other SS-run camps. According to Wolfgang Sofsky, the camp gate was a “sign of final and irreversible inclusion.”96
Płaszów’s origins centered around the creation of three Julags, or small Jewish labor camps in the Płaszów, Prokocim, and Biełżanów districts of Kraków. Each of the camps was located within a kilometer or two of the future Płaszów forced labor/concentration camp. Henry Weiner, Jack Mintz, and Richard Krumholz, all three future Schindlerjuden, worked at one of the Julags. Henry Weiner worked for Siemens-Bauwerke at Julag I in Płaszów, where he built roads; Jack Mintz (Jehuda Minc-Anschell Freimann) and his two brothers, David and Benjamin, worked at Julag II in Prokocim, where they built railroad bridges. Julag I, which would become the nucleus of the main Płaszów camp, was commanded first by SS-Unterscharführer Horst Pilarzik and later Franz Müller.97
By the time that Amon Göth became commandant of the new Zwangsar-beitslager Plaszow des SS- und Polizeiführers im Distrikt Krakau (Płaszów Forced Labor Camp of the SS and Police Leader in the Kraków District) in February 1943, the SS had gained full control over Jewish labor in the General Government. It had involved a considerable struggle with the Wehrmacht, which now had to go to the SS to get Jewish laborers for its armaments factories in that part of occupied Poland. The considerable administrative changes the SS forced labor and concentration camp system was undergoing made things even more complicated. These had begun in early 1942, when SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Waffen SS und Polizei Oswald Pohl, the head of the SS-Wirtschaftsunternehmen, brought together the various SS offices that dealt with economic and construction matters into one office, the Economic and Administrative Main Office (WVHA; Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungshauptamt) in Oranienburg, a suburb of Berlin. WVHA was divided into four Amtsgruppen (Office Groups), with Amtsgruppe D (formerly the IKL, or Inspektion der Konzentrationslager; Inspector of Concentration Camps) under SS-Gruppenführer und General der Waffen-SS Richard Glücks, who oversaw all aspects of the SS camp network. But in reality, the real head of Amtsgruppe D was not the incompetent Glücks but the head of Amtsgruppe D2, the office of Labor Action of the Prisoners, SS-Obersturmbannführer (later, SS-Standartenführer) Gerhard Maurer. When Oskar Schindler sought permission to move his factory from Kraków to Brünnlitz in the fall of 1944, he first approached a close friend in the Army High Command’s Ordnance Department, Erich Lange, who in turn negotiated with Maurer over the move.98
Göth took command of Płaszów ten days after Germany’s stunning military defeat at Stalingrad. As the tide of war began gradually to shift in the Allies’ favor, Germany’s military and industrial manpower needs became more severe and created a conflict between those in the Nazi leadership who wanted to continue their mass murder program of the Jews and those who wanted to balance this with the greater economic interests of the Third Reich. The SS did not give up its goal of ridding Europe of its “racial enemies” and, under Maurer, Amtsgruppe D2 sought to balance these goals with the needs of the burgeoning armaments industry. He tried to give SS physicians more control over life and death in the camps to insure a steady supply of slave laborers. Those deemed unfit for the SS labor needs would be murdered. But Maurer was unable to control ongoing, sadistic reigns of terror unleashed by Göth and other commandants. In fact, the SS would not address the issue of indiscriminate murder in the camps until much later.99
Today it is impossible to visit the former site of Płaszów and get any sense of the vast complex that was begun there in late 1942. But photographs in the archives of Beit Lohamei Haghetaot in Israel and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., help bring it to life. In addition, Jaroslav Zotciak shared with me a large map of the concentration camp that he had reconstructed based on materials he discovered in the archives of the Glowa Komisja Badana Zbrodni Przeciwko Narodowi Polskiemu Instytut Pamieci Narodowej Okregowa Komisja w Krakowie (the Main Commission for the Investigation of Crimes Against the Polish Nation). The only difference between this map and the one in Joseph Bau’s Dear God, Have You Ever Gone Hungry? is that Bau’s map shows the camp’s crematorium. I have been able to form a much clearer picture of the vast complex that Amon Göth and the SS built between 1942 and 1944 from information that Jaroslav shared with me, as well as from our careful trek across the camp’s remains, the accounts I have read or gathered from survivors (particularly Dr. Aleksander Biber-stein’s Zagłada Żydów w Krakowie [Extermination of the Jews in Kraków]), and the photographs I have collected.100
It is important to remember that Płaszów evolved slowly over twenty-six months first as a Julag, then as a forced labor camp, and was finally a permanent concentration camp complete witha crematory and plans for gas chambers. Most of the evidence we have about Płaszów centers around its existence as one of Nazi Germany’s permanent German concentration camps from January 1944 to January 1945. And even here, documents and testimony must be blended with photographs to understand the size and complexity of the concentration camp’s operation. There is little information about the Płaszów Zwangsarbeitslager. Mietek Pemper testified at Göth’s 1946 trial that it was run without rules or orders and that everything was decided by the camp commandant. This was when Göth committed his most brutal and indiscriminate murders. When Płaszów became a concentration camp in 1944, the paperwork required by the SS for such actions tended to hamper, but not end, Göth’s ability to kill at will.101
