Oskar Schindler, page 37
One of the favored methods of punishment at Płaszów was lashing, particularly of women. Mietek Pemper testified at Göth’s trial that he remembered one SS circular in the camp that dealt with the lashing of women. It ordered that Czech women were to be lashed by Slovak women and Polish females were to be lashed by Russian women. Pemper said he interpreted this to mean that this was “to cause hatred between people of the same race [Slavs].”165 And though Amon Göth claimed in his trial that lashing prisoners happened only “once in a while,” Pemper testified that it was a common form of punishment. And Göth always insisted that the prisoner receive the maximum number of “hits”—fifty—though Pemper remembered that prisoners were often struck more than a hundred times by the lash. This was particularly true when Płaszów was a forced labor camp and not a more strictly regulated concentration camp.166
According to Leon Leyson (Leib Lejzon), the guards used whips with small ball bearings at the end. The first lash was “equal to having somebody cut you with a knife.”167 Betty Sternlicht Schragin believes that her sister Sydel was the first woman at Płaszów to receive twenty-five lashes “on the bare buttocks.”168 The SS punished Sydel for letting five girls in her road crew go into the bathroom to warm up because it was so cold outside. And this was not the last time that Sydel was lashed. A year after the first punishment, the SS entered her barracks and said that everyone would be punished for not attending roll call. The women in Sydel’s barracks had been told that because it was a holiday they would not have to work. It was also a Sunday and everyone was asleep when the SS entered the barracks. Sydel volunteered to be the first to be lashed. Before she went outside, Betty told her not to yell out in pain. Sydel was taken out and forced to bend over a chair, where a Jewish policeman named Zimmerman, who was later executed by the Poles, did the lashings. Ultimately, all the women in the barracks, including Betty, were beaten. Afterwards, they “couldn’t sit for weeks.”169
If anything came to symbolize the absolute horror of Płaszów, it was the camp’s principal execution, burial, and desecration site, Hujowa Gorka. The inmates’ nicknamed it “Prick Hill” because it could be seen from almost any part of the camp. There were also two other camp execution and burial sites at Lipowy Dolek and the northern section of the old Jewish cemetery. We also know that Göth had plans to build a crematorium and gas chambers at Płaszów. Mietek Pemper testified at Göth’s trial that the crematorium was to serve the camp as well as “Gestapo around the Kraków [area] and others.”170 The site of the crematorium was shown on the camp plans used during Göth’s trial though it is difficult to determine from trial testimony whether it was ever built. The gas chambers were never built because the representative of the Erfurt company (probably Topf and Sons, which built the crematoria at Auschwitz) sent to build them, Koller, “was a decent man” who tried to stall construction, saying “it was too cold” to build them.171
Most of those who were murdered by Göth or his SS subordinates were buried in Hujowa Gorka. In addition, the 2,000 Jews murdered in the closing of the ghetto in 1943 were also buried in one of the camp’s three common grave sites. The Gestapo and the SS in Kraków also sent some of its prisoners to Płaszów for execution. In one instance, an entire Polish wedding party, including the priest and guests, were sent to the camp for execution. Beginning in the fall of 1943, prisoners were brought three or four times a week from Montelupich prison in Kraków to Płaszów for execution, usually in the morning. The prisoners were ordered from the trucks and told to undress. They were then marched to a ditch surrounding Hu-jowa Gorka and told to lie down. An SS man, a Genickschußspezialist (specialist in shooting in the neck), would then administer a Nackenschuß, a shot in the nape of the neck. A dental technician, usually a Jew, would then pull the gold teeth out of each victim’s mouth. The dead bodies were then covered with a layer of dirt, though once Płaszow became a concentration camp the bodies were burned. The victims’ clothes were sent to the camp’s storehouses and most of the valuables were taken by the executioners.172
The most chilling accounts about the horrible scenes at Hujowa Gorka came from Schindlerjuden forced to work on the burial details or for the special Sonderkommando 1005 unit sent to the camp in the fall of 1944 to exhume and burn the bodies buried in mass graves there. Henry Wiener was assigned to one of the camp’s burial details in the fall of 1943. He remembered they would bring the bodies of young Jewish girls who had been executed for having false papers for burial and the bodies of those executed for the escape of someone else. Before burial, gold teeth were removed from the bodies. Occasionally, those on the burial detail would pocket some of the gold teeth. “You felt like vomiting,” Weiner said. “It was just awful. But the SS guy was right behind you with a gun. I never saw anybody having a nervous breakdown in all those years. In my case, I said ‘I don’t give a damn what they gonna do. We have to keep going and see their defeat, in spite of what they do to us.’”173
The Sonderkommando 1005 units were created in the summer of 1942 “to prevent the possible reconstruction of the number of victims.”174 They were commanded by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel, an architect and engineer who had gained a reputation as commander of Sonderkommando 4a in Ukraine for “crudity and bloodthirstiness.”175 These units were made up of about twenty men drawn from the SD, Sipo, and the Order Police. They, in turn, used prisoners, particularly Jews, to dig up the bodies and carry them to the pyres specially constructed for this purpose. Blobel and his men began their work in the late summer of 1942 where they experimented with various burning methods at Auschwitz and Chełmno. The one that Blobel and his men devised centered around large pyres that intermixed layers of timber with several thousand bodies. Gasoline or another flammable liquid was poured on the four corners of the pyre and then lit. Body fat from the victims helped stoke the flames.176 When they had completed their experimental work at Chełmno and Auschwitz, where they emptied mass graves containing over 100,000 bodies, Blobel’s units then did the same thing at Beł`zec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. Himmler then sent them to occupied Russia and Poland. By the time a Sonderkommando 1005 unit arrived in Płaszów in the fall of 1944, their work was coming to an end. Several months earlier, Blobel took command of Einsatzgruppe Iltis to fight partisans on the Yugoslav-Austrian border. Many of the men who had served under him in the Sonderkommando 1005 units joined his new antipartisan unit.177
In the summer of 1944, Blobel and SS-Obergruppenführer Wilhelm Koppe, the HSSPF in Kraków, met with SD, Sipo, and police officials to discuss the creation of regional Sonderkommando 1005 units to operate throughout the General Government. It was one of these new units that arrived later in Płaszów to begin its grisly work. Spielberg poignantly captured the horror of these efforts in Schindler’s List, though the scene with the body of “Red Coat” Genia was fictional. Francisco Wichter, the only Schindler Jew remaining in Buenos Aires and a close friend of Emilie Schindler’s before her death in 2001, was forced to work for the Son-derkommando 1005 unit in Płaszów. A calm, kind, gentle man, it is hard to imagine what he went through during the time that he worked exhuming and burning bodies. Normally, the Germans shot the workers after they had completed their work. Somehow, Francisco survived. The work crews were ordered to dig up the bodies and carry them to the large pyre for burning. Francisco’s job was to carry the bodies exhumed the night before to the wooden pyre. One morning as he walked to the stack of bodies, he saw the body of an eighteen-year-old girl sitting up and staring at him. He said he could not eat for two days afterwards and could still see her face.178
Maurice Markheim’s experiences were even more gruesome. He was forced to work on one of the exhumation details during the winter when the ground was frozen solid. The inmates used axes to open the ground and, according to Markheim, if they struck someone’s head, the brains would splash out. “When you discovered the face, you had to holler. A man came down with a pair of pliers, opened the mouth and pulled the gold teeth. You could recognize one thing: a child. [You could tell] a woman from a man by the hair only. The inmates on the exhumation details were forced to eat among the dead bodies and sit close to the pyres that were aflame twenty-four hours a day. After a while, the inmates working among the dead began to smell of death. Markheim said that even after two or three months in Brünnlitz, his body was “still smelling like the dead bodies, because the smell got under your skin.”179
Jack Mintz (Jehuda Minc; Anschell Freimann) said that they carried the bodies on stretchers from the mass graves and then manually put them on the pyres. He added that the scene in Schindler’s List where the inmates were loading bodies on a conveyor belt was wrong. Everything was done by hand. They then stacked wood on the bodies and lit the fire with tar paper. Jack worked with his older brother Iser on the exhumation detail. He particularly remembered one of the Kapos (Italian for boss or chief), Ivan, who supervised his work crew. Ivan took gold teeth from the bodies to buy vodka, which he drank constantly. He would hit his workers over the head with a shovel to keep them in line though he seemed to favor Iser, who could take “a whole body on the shovel and put it on the stretcher.” As a reward for his toughness, Ivan let Iser go to the kitchen for his crew’s food ration. This allowed Iser to have the first bowl of soup, which meant he could scoop “from the bottom, where anything of nutritional value might have sunk.”180
All these experiences helped those Jews who worked for or were saved by Oskar Schindler during the war appreciate the time they spent in Emalia or Brünnlitz. Oskar Schindler was no angel and certainly had his flaws. Moreover, his motives were not solely humanitarian. He was a businessman who made a great deal of money during the war and hoped to do so afterwards, hopefully with the Jews who were part of his workforce in Kraków and Brünnlitz. But life as an SS slave laborer in one of Oskar Schindler’s factories was heaven compared to the constant threat of death in Płaszów under Amon Göth. And even though Oskar Schindler seemed close to Göth, this relationship had more to do with the role he had to play to have a free hand with his Jewish and Polish workers than it did with sympathy for Göth’s murderous behavior in Płaszów. Yet many of Schindler’s Jews remained suspicious of him because of this relationship and his relationship with the SS until after the war. In conversations among themselves and with other survivors, they came to realize the remarkable efforts of Oskar Schindler to save their lives, regardless of the motivation. Simply stated, they were alive because of him.
7.
SCHINDLER’S EMALIA SUB-CAMP
THE CLOSING OF THE KRAKÓW GHETTO IN THE SPRING OF 1943 created problems as well as potential opportunities for Oskar Schindler. If he wanted to maintain his enamelware operations in Kraków, he would have to consider doing what Julius Madritsch would do—move it to the new Płaszów forced labor camp run by Amon Göth. But there was another option, and that was maintaining his operations in Podgórze as a sub-camp of Płaszów. But to do this, he would have to win the support of Amon Göth, whose goodwill, support, and important ties to SS leaders in the General Government were essential for such an operation.
According to Mietek Pemper, Schindler established contact with Göth soon after the Viennese SS officer took command of Płaszów. Both men evidently hit it off quickly, in part because they were the same age and “were big, athletic, strong, with the feeling that the world belonged to them.”1 Pemper said that this created “a certain sense of connection” between Schindler and Göth despite the considerable differences between them. Schindler, Pemper admitted, was a “contact-artist” who quickly “took advantage” of his new relationship with Amon Göth.2 Pemper said that Schindler “came from the region that produced the upright soldier Schweijk. And these Schweijk-like features, he played these out wherever it was necessary.”3
His allusion to Jaroslav Hašek’s brilliant Czech satire, The Good Soldier Švejk (Osydy Dobrého Vojáka Švejka za Svetové; 1921–1922), is interesting and is quite revealing. The central figure in Hašek’s novel is Josef Švejk (Schwejk or Schweik), at first glance a bumbling fool, who served in the Austrian army in World War I. What Švejk does best is confound and trick those around him. Švejk became, for better or worse, a symbol of the Czech national character after World War I. Švejk, Ivan Olbrecht said, was a “smart idiot, perhaps an idiot savant, who through his stupid but cunning good nature [had to] win everywhere because it [was] impossible for him not to win.” He added: “This is Švejk.”4 But Czechs saw him differently. In pubs throughout Prague during the 1920s and 1930s there were pictures of Švejk which bore the simple statement: “Take it easy!” often followed by “And keep your feet warm!”5 For many Czechs, Josef Švejk was an extremely adaptable person who made the best of bad circumstances. And this is certainly what Oskar Schindler did. So perhaps Mietek Pemper’s characterization of him as a Švejk-like figure is more on the mark than one realizes.6 Peter Steiner concludes in his analysis of The Good Soldier Švejk that
in a world dominated by power, Švejk is an underdog, the object of manipulation and coercion by inimical social forces that constantly threaten his very existence. Yet, despite the tremendous odds against him, he passes through all the dangers unharmed. Švejk’s mythical invincibility makes him a modern “epic hero” with whom his compatriots identify and of whose exploits they talk because they see in him “a modern Saint George, the hero of a saga of a single mind’s triumph over the hydra of Authority, Regime, and System—of the mind disguised as feebleminded-ness in the war of absurdity in the guise of Wisdom and Dignity—the sense of Nonsense against the nonsense of Sense.”7
The horrible world of Oskar Schindler was nothing like that of the mythical figure, Josef Švejk. And Schindler could never be considered feebleminded. Yet both men, both real and fictional, dealt with insurmountable odds to defy the established authoritarian order of the day. Švejk managed to preserve his own dignity, but Oskar Schindler managed to save the dignity and lives of hundreds.
It could certainly be argued that Oskar’s adaptability to the worst of circumstances (and individuals) was what made him so successful, particularly when it came to his relationship with Amon Göth; in fact, one wonders whether there was more to Schindler’s relationship with Göth than mere business. There is no evidence, for example, to indicate that Julius Madritsch, one of the principal factory owners in Płaszów and a person who aided and cared as deeply for his Jewish workers as Schindler, ever became close friends with Göth. Madritsch’s relationship with Göth was strictly business. However, through no fault of his own, Madritsch was never able to arrange the large-scale transfer of his factory and Jewish workers to safety in the last year of the war. So perhaps Oskar’s close ties with Göth helped pave the way for his remarkable deed.
Helen Sternlicht Jonas Rosenzweig (“Susanna”), told me that Madritsch was never close to Göth and that she never saw him in the villa with women. On the other hand, Schindler seemed to have developed a relationship with Płaszów’s commandant based on something more than just business. We know he was comfortable around Göth and frequented the parties the commandant hosted regularly at his villa. Certainly Schindler’s behavior around Göth confused “Susanna,” though she thought he was essentially a good man. She often saw Oskar at the villa and came to distrust him because of his friendly attitude toward Göth, whom Oskar called “Mony.” She was also disgusted when she saw Oskar with women other than his wife. One evening, for example, a drunken Schindler showed up at Göth’s villa accompanied by several women. Occasionally, he would bring Emilie. Helen knew she was Oskar’s wife and said she always looked “very distinguished and refined.”8
Oskar described the parties he attended at Göth’s villa as increasingly bacchanalian. Schindler often supplied the liquor and the women for such occasions, which “were apparently very wild.” There were usually from ten to twenty SS and Gestapo officers at Göth’s parties, some of them of high rank. One party took place in the midst of a heavy snow storm. As snow drifts built up outside Göth’s villa, someone suggested that they throw all the naked women at the party outside in the snow.9
“Susanna” remembered an embarrassing incident that involved Oskar and one of his girlfriends. One day “Susanna” was in the kitchen when the upstairs bell rang. There were two rooms on the upper floor of Göth’s villa. One had exercise equipment in it and the other contained two beds. When “Susanna” entered the bedroom, Schindler was lying there naked. As she walked over to the bed, he grabbed her with his right hand and exclaimed, “Susanna, Susanna!” Oskar then tried to pull her towards him. “Susanna” was able to resist him by holding on to a nearby armoire. A naked girl was lying beside Schindler.10
