Pemper won the post of Göth’s personal secretary and interpreter [at Plaszow]. He was so terrified of working in close quarters with the volatile commandant that despite his workload he refused to ask for an assistant, unwilling to risk another prisoner’s death. Anyway, no one volunteered — the inmates were too afraid of Göth. The following anecdote, coolly related by Pemper, shows why:
“I would sit in the commandant’s office and take dictation from him. While he talked, Göth would watch the mirror outside his window, which he used to oversee the area in front of the barracks. Suddenly he would stand up, take one of the rifles from the rack on the wall and open the window. I would hear a few shots and then nothing but screams. As if he had interrupted the dictation only to take a telephone call, Göth would come back to his desk and say, ‘Where were we?’ ”
From reading the SS correspondence, Pemper realized that the Plaszow camp could be kept open (and its workers not sent to Auschwitz) only if it could be proved that its weapons production was siegentscheidend, or “crucial for victory.” A megalomaniac who desired authority (and access to luxuries) at all costs, Göth agreed to the inflated production tables that Pemper drew up for him. Pemper would also persuade Schindler that producing arms in his factory would keep his workers safe. “If Schindler hadn’t begun production of grenade parts in 1943,” Pemper writes, “there would have been no Schindler’s list and no rescue effort.”
Pemper’s prodigious memory and powers of observation allowed him to give vital testimony in the commandant’s trial in Poland after the war, which resulted in Göth’s execution. The memoir draws a devastating portrait of a brute who stood out even among the SS for his recklessness and arrogance, so gung-ho about his macabre work that he visited other camps for inspiration...Göth was careless, of course, because he believed assurances that no witnesses would remain. When he saw the list of witnesses at his trial, he reportedly exclaimed: “So many Jews? And they always told us not a single one . . . would be left.”
The deniers continue to deny. The haters continue to hate. The violent continue to hurt and injure and damage.
But we will remember all those who have proven to be unjust and unfair and evil.
And we will give testimony and witness and we will repay.
Never again will Jews be defenseless, unable to respond to our enemies.
Amd those who seek to weaken and undermine Israel - economically, militarily, psychologically and spiritually - those, too, will be remembered.
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