For some days after Oskar’s bout with Amon, news came to Emalia that the dual temptation was having its result with the Commandant. Dr. Sedlacek, going back to Budapest, would report to Samu Springmann that Amon had given up, for the time being at least, arbitrarily murdering people. And gentle Samu, among the diverse cares he had in the list of places from Dachau and Drancy in the west to Sobibor and Bełżec in the east, hoped for a time that the hole at Płaszów had been plugged.
But the allure of clemency vanished quickly.
If there was a brief respite, those who were to survive and give testimony of their days in Płaszów would not be aware of it. The summary assassinations would seem continual to them. If Amon did not appear on his balcony this morning or the next, it did not mean he would not appear the morning after that. It took much more than Goeth’s temporary absence to give even the most deluded prisoner some hope of a fundamental change in the Commandant’s nature. And then, in any case, there he would be, on the steps in the Austrian-style cap he wore to murders, looking through his binoculars for a culprit.
Dr. Sedlacek would return to Budapest not only with overly hopeful news of a reform in Amon but with more reliable data on the camp at Płaszów. One afternoon a guard from Emalia turned up at Płaszów to summon Stern to Zablocie. Once Stern arrived at the front gate, he was led upstairs into Oskar’s new apartment. There Oskar introduced him to two men in good suits. One was Sedlacek; the other a Jew—equipped with a Swiss passport—who introduced himself as Babar. “My dear friend,” Oskar told Stern, “I want you to write as full a report on the situation in Płaszów as you can manage in an afternoon.” Stern had never seen Sedlacek or Babar before this and thought that Oskar was being indiscreet. He bent over his hands, murmuring that before he undertook a task like that he would like a word in private with the Herr Direktor.
Oskar used to say that Itzhak Stern could never make a straight statement or request unless it arrived smuggled under a baggage of talk of the Babylonian Talmud and purification rites. But now he was more direct. “Tell me, please, Herr Schindler,” he asked, “don’t you believe this is a dreadful risk?”
Oskar exploded. Before he got control of himself, the strangers would have heard him in the other room. “Do you think I’d ask you, if there was a risk?” Then he calmed and said, “There’s always risk, as you know better than I. But not with these two men. These two are safe.”
In the end, Stern spent all afternoon on his report. He was a scholar and accustomed to writing in exact prose. The rescue organization in Budapest, the Zionists in Istanbul would receive from Stern a report they could rely on.
Multiply Stern’s summary by the 1,700 large and small forced-labor camps of Poland, and then you had a tapestry to stun the world!
Sedlacek and Oskar wanted more than that of Stern. On the morning after the Amon-Oskar binge, Oskar dragged his heroic liver back out to Płaszów before office-opening time. In between the suggestions of tolerance Oskar had tried to drop into Amon’s ear the night before, he’d also got a written permit to take two “brother industrialists” on a tour of this model industrial community. Oskar brought the two into the gray Administration Building that morning and demanded the services of Häftling (prisoner) Itzhak Stern for a tour of the camp. Sedlacek’s friend Babar had some sort of miniature camera, but he carried it openly in his hand. It was almost possible to believe that if an SS man had challenged him, he would have welcomed the chance to stand and boast for five minutes about this little gadget he’d got on a recent business trip to Brussels or Stockholm.
As Oskar and the visitors from Budapest emerged from the Administration Building, Oskar took the thin, clerkly Stern by the shoulder. His friends would be happy to see the workshops and the living quarters, said Oskar. But if there was anything Stern thought they were missing out on, he was just to bend down and tie his shoestring.
On Goeth’s great road paved with fractured gravestones, they moved past the SS barracks. Here, almost at once, prisoner Stern’s shoestring needed tying. Sedlacek’s associate snapped the teams hauling truckloads of rock up from the quarry, while Stern murmured, “Forgive me, gentlemen.” Yet he took his time with the tying so that they could look down and read the monumental fragments. Here were the gravestones of Bluma Gemeinerowa (1859-1927); of Matylde Liebeskind, deceased at the age of 90 in 1912; of Helena Wachsberg, who died in childbirth in 1911; of Rozia Groder, a thirteen-year-old who had passed on in 1931; of Sofia Rosner and Adolf Gottlieb, who had died in the reign of Franz Josef. Stern wanted them to see that the names of the honorable dead had been made into paving stones.
Moving on, they passed the Puffhaus, the SS and Ukrainian brothel staffed by Polish girls, before reaching the quarry, the excavations running back into the limestone cliff. Stern’s shoelaces required reef knots here; he wanted this recorded. They destroyed men at this rock face, working them on the hammers and wedges. None of the scarred men of the quarry parties showed any curiosity about their visitors this morning. Ivan, Amon Goeth’s Ukrainian driver, was on duty here, and the supervisor was a bullet-headed German criminal named Erik.
Erik had already demonstrated a capacity for murdering families, having killed his own mother, father, sister. He might by now have been hanged or at least been put in a dungeon if the SS had not realized that there were worse criminals still than patricides and that Erik should be employed as a stick to beat them with. As Stern had mentioned in his report, a Cracow physician named Edward Goldblatt had been sent here from the clinic by SS Dr. Blancke and his Jewish protégé, Dr. Leon Gross. Erik loved to see a man of culture and speciality enter the quarry and report soft-handed for work, and the beatings began in Goldblatt’s case with the first display of uncertainty in handling the hammer and spikes. Over a period of days, Erik and sundry SS and Ukrainian enlisted men beat Goldblatt. The doctor was forced to work with a ballooning face, now half again its normal size, with one eye sealed up. No one knew what error of quarry technique set Erik to give Dr. Goldblatt his final beating.
Long after the doctor lost consciousness, Erik permitted him to be carried to the Krankenstube, where Dr. Leon Gross refused to admit him. With this medical sanction Erik and an SS enlisted man continued to kick the dying Goldblatt as he lay, rejected for treatment, on the threshold of the hospital. Stern bent and tied his shoelace at the quarry because, like Oskar and some others in the Płaszów complex, he believed in a future of judges who might ask, Where—in a word—did this act occur?
Oskar was able to give his colleagues an overview of the camp, taking them up to Chujowa Górka and the Austrian mound, where the bloodied wheelbarrows used to transport the dead to the woods stood unabashedly at the mouth of the fort. Already thousands were buried down there in mass graves in or on the verges of those eastern pinewoods. When the Russians came from the east, that wood with its population of victims would fall to them before living and half-dying Płaszów.