Disclaimer: My story is a simple fiction. It is based on the characters portrayed by Ralph Fiennes and Embeth Davidtz in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List (1993), and not on the real Amon Goeth or on any real people. I do not support Nazi ideology. I try to do my best to preserve the authenticity of that period of the history, all the factual and other kind of errors are mine.
The story starts in April 1943 in the concentration camp of Kraków-Płaszów, Poland.
Chapter 1.
Helena Dreyfus walked back to the villa as quickly as possible, wrapping her shivering arms around her fragile body.
Her thin coat had long lost its original black colour, it looked grey, tattered and dirty now, and it would have suited better for a sunny spring or autumn day but it was freezing cold despite the late April morning. During the night even a thick layer of snow felt, but now it started to melt into the soil. If it weren't a war now, she thought sorrowfully, Anne and I would be playing in the nearby park and building a snowman, even though we are not little girls anymore. Anne was sixteen, Helena was nineteen, and they both loved being outside in the nature.
She was terribly cold and she hated walking on the muddy ground where two Jewish cemeteries used to stand. Since the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto, since 13th and 14th March 1943 Helena lived in the concentration camp of Kraków-Płaszów.
The camp had been planned to be a forced labour camp, supplying cheap working power to the German armament factories and to a stone quarry, but it became one of the most horrible concentration camps of the Nazis. Even though it possessed no gas chambers or crematoria, thousands of people died there – by shootings or by hangings which was the favourite method of punishment of SS Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth, the Viennese commandant of the camp.
He was a tall, dark-haired man with a handsome face and cruel, icy cold blue eyes. The deadness of those eyes caught the attention of an attentive person, but most people let themselves be seduced by his charming good looks. His body was well-trained, despite his slightly slackened belly, and he looked perfect in his Nazi uniform. However the enchantment didn't always last long when they heard his rude manner of speaking or his apathetic rude voice that he used inside the camp. Everyone was afraid of him – not only the inmates of the camp, but the men and women serving under his direction as well. His face always wore a strict, merciless expression and a smile was rarely seen on his thin lips – mostly when he was talking to his friend, Oskar Schindler, the owner of the Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik ("Emalia"), who was always able to make him laugh.
Only when Amon was alone, he dared to show how physically and mentally exhausted he actually was. Oskar often warned him that he would ruin himself by his excessive drinking and smoking and Amon knew that his friend was right but he also knew exactly what was the real problem that undermined his physical and mental health. The Jews, they were the problem.
Every day he had his breakfast on the balcony of his villa and before eating, he shot at least one Jew who seemed to be too slow or too old for his taste. Helena heard that Herr Kommandant had killed two Jewish policemen on his first day when he had arrived to be the camp commandant and he had made the whole camp watch the bloody act. Very few people dared to try to escape the camp – for the luck of the others because Amon Goeth shot ten prisoners as a punishment for the attempt.
It was very easy to make Herr Kommandant angry – only a simple glance on him that he might find offensive or disgusted, could have persuaded him that it would be a wonderful idea to shoot that someone or to send his Great Dane dogs on them or on their neighbours. Helena could experience his anger quite often, even though she almost never looked at him and she did her very best to do her job and fulfil his requests. Herr Kommandant slapped or hit her when the breakfast wasn't ready for the time he requested, when the roasted chicken was burnt a little, when there was a draught in the living room or when she wasn't fast enough to arrive at his study at his call. She could feel his anger and hatred on her own skin almost every day.
Helena walked even quicker when she reached the wooden staircase leading up to the villa. She almost ran past the female guards who were just as brutal and cruel as the Ukrainian SS personnel and the members of the SS-Totenkopfverbände. She could see Kommandoführerin Alice Orlowski approaching, who enjoyed whipping people, especially young women. The blond plump woman wore a satisfied wide grin on her made-up face and she shouted something in German towards a group of teenage girls who were collecting stones nearby.
From the top of the staircase Helena looked down at the camp. She didn't know anything about the different sections into which that horrible place was divided and she had no idea where her sister, Anne could be at that moment. Was she working somewhere? Was she sick? Was she alive at all? She didn't know the answer to those questions and it made her feel sick in the stomach. They had been together until one day Herr Kommandant arrived and chose her to be his maid. Then a few hours later she was taken to the villa and she didn't see Anne anymore.
When she lifted her eyes from the ground and she looked farther and higher, she could see the upper part of Hujowa Górka, the lovely hill that used to be so popular among the Cracovian people before the war. The Dreyfus family loved spending their Sundays there. Her father recited them long poems (he used to teach Literature in a grammar school), then they consumed all the delicious sandwiches and fresh cherry pies that Helena had prepared with her mother in the morning. Anne didn't really like baking or cooking, she preferred writing stories and discussing them with her father. Nowadays paper-thin naked bodies of executed Jews were lying in frightening and smelling piles therefore no one would have gone there for a picnic or weekend trip anymore.
The only thing Helena could be grateful for Herr Kommandant was her chance of survival. In the camp, filled with Polish Jews, almost half of them women and children, dozens of people died every day. Food was scarce and starvation was one of the reasons of the high death rate. Hygiene was also missing and it gave free way to the devastation of the typhus and other diseases. Who could escape from the brutality of Amon Goeth or the guards, had a huge possibility of dying of typhus or having nothing to eat.
Helena was given enough food and a comfortable bed without lice, and she had the luxurious possibility to wash herself every evening before going to bed. All she had to survive was Amon Goeth's deep hatred and violence.
