Schindler’s List: Chapter 26 Summary & Analysis

Raimund Titsch is an Austrian Catholic and a WWI veteran who manages Madritsch’s uniform factory. He also played chess regularly with Goeth. One time when Titsch wins, Goeth gets so furious that he looks like he’s going to go out and shoot someone. From then on, Titsch decides to lose intentionally, doing so in long, drawn-out games. Like Babar, Titsch has also been collecting photographs of the camp. Through his involvement in the black market, Titsch will end up supplying the Madritsch people with 30,000 loaves of bread. Because after the war he is viewed as a traitor by former SS men (who secretly organize in a group called ODESSA), he hides his film by burying it, where it remains hidden until 1963. After Titsch’s death, the pictures are finally developed.

The few camp survivors never have anything negative to say about Titsch, but he also never spurred the same sort of reverence that Schindler eventually would. One such story involves when General Schindler himself (unrelated to Oskar Schindler) came to visit Płaszów to see whether it was really necessary for the war effort.

Before the inspection, Oskar Schindler invites General Schindler over for a big, boozy dinner. Later, while the general is investigating Madritsch’s clothing factory, the most important part of the camp to Germans, the power goes out, the circuit having been broken by allies of Stern. The general is forced to continue his inspection by flashlight. A myth grows that because Oskar’s dinner gave the general indigestion, and because the power went out during the inspection, the people of Płaszów were saved from being shipped somewhere worse, like Auschwitz.

Josef Bau, an artist from Cracow begins to fall in love with a girl named Rebecca Tannenbaum. He actually sneaks into Płaszów because he never had the correct ghetto papers. There he becomes a protégé of Stern’s and attracts attention for his possible skills as a forger.

Rebecca Tannenbaum, meanwhile, is an orphan who has recently begun to work in Stern’s office. She is also a manicurist who treats Goeth weekly, as well as other prominent Nazis. She is nervous because Goeth is quick to punish people for minor offenses, at one time shooting his shoeshine boy for bad work.

Tannenbaum and Bau meet one day when Bau his holding up a heavy blueprint frame. She offers to help. Romance and sex remain desperate and infrequent between prisoners, although the conditions are a little better at Emalia. Bau and Rebecca begin to see each other.

Other romantic attachments sometimes form in the camp. In one case, the SS officer Hujar falls in love with a Jewish prisoner. When Goeth finds out, he orders Hujar to take her in the woods and shoot her, which he does. Death is a constant factor in many relationships in the camp, particularly ones that involve the SS.

In January 1944, a change at Płaszów makes all relationships more difficult. The camp is reclassified as a concentration camp, and even subcamps like Schindler’s Emalia are placed under the authority of General Oswald Pohl in Oranienburg. Schindler’s contacts in local police, like Scherner and Czurda, lose much of their power, so Schindler now must report to the officials in Oranienburg.

Schindler travels to Berlin to meet the people who will be dealing with his files. Richard Glücks is the chief of the department that controls prison life. Glücks puts out memos full of bureaucratic jargon to cover every sort of situation in camp.

During his meeting with a personnel officer who has the Emalia plans, Schindler puts forward his request that his work force be allowed to remain permanently. He tells the officer that he has just discussed the matter with Colonel Erich Lange, a name that seems to have some influence and whom Schindler met once at a party in Cracow. At that party, Schindler could tell that Lange too had misgivings about the camps’ brutal conditions.

The personnel officer is impressed by Schindler’s connections and says he’s told the truth: there are no plans to dismantle Emalia, but the situation of Jews, even skilled workers, is never safe. Schindler says he understands and ends the meeting by saying, “If there is any way I can express my gratitude…”

The new regulations in Płaszów lead to a much more rigid separation of the sexes, with new electric fences erected. Couples make up coded tunes to whistle so that they can meet up during the brief time they have in the morning before they are lined up. Rebecca Tannenbaum makes up her own whistle. Josef Bau gets a dress from a dead woman and uses it to sneak into the women’s barracks.

One cold Sunday night in February, Bau marries Rebecca at a ceremony with no rabbi. Mrs. Bau officiates, and someone from Wulkan’s workshop makes two rings out of silver spoons. They are given a curtained-off top bunk for their wedding night, but after only 10 minutes, the barracks lights come on, and one of the most fearsome SS officers comes through. Bau fears that the officer knows he’s missing and is looking for him.

The officer leaves and the lights go back out. But a few minutes later, a siren goes off. Everyone in the barracks fears the worst. Bau grabs his clothes and rushes back toward the men camp. As hurries over the electric fence, he’s surprised to find the voltage turned off. He gets back, preparing an excuse about how he had diarrhea, but in fact they were searching for three young Zionists who had just escaped.