Szmul’s death and Doll’s plan to have Hannah killed

Szmul’s death and Doll’s plan to have Hannah killed reveal how Paul Doll turns command over prisoners into a weapon against his own household. He makes Szmul rehearse an assassination with a concealed spike, then stages a birthday-garden meeting where the prisoner’s refusal to attack Hannah ends in Doll shooting him. Hannah later understands that the apparent gift and spectacle concealed a murder plot directed at her as well as Szmul.

The coercive bargain

Doll gives Szmul an assignment in the basement beneath Crematory IV. He instructs him to conceal a marlinspike-like weapon in his sleeve and practise drawing it quickly to stab a sack. The rehearsal is not an abstract exercise: Doll wants Szmul to be able to carry out a killing on command. He tells him that Shulamith is scheduled to be taken at noon on May 1, unless Doll cancels the order by telephone that morning. Her fate is thus made conditional on Szmul’s obedience.

Doll presents the bargain as simple and elegant, but its terms force Szmul to choose between the life of his wife and an attack on Hannah. He insists that the only way Szmul can keep Shulamith alive is by killing Doll’s wife. The threat reaches beyond the immediate victim: Doll uses his power over prisoners and the camp’s machinery of execution to place Shulamith in danger, then makes Szmul personally responsible for the violence he demands. The arrangement offers no genuine choice, only a deadline and an ultimatum backed by Doll’s authority.

After the rehearsal, Doll and Szmul leave the basement and walk through a tunnel roofed with creaking, whistling sheets of tin. That passage connects the concealed preparation to the later garden encounter. The weapon is no longer merely an object tested on a sack; it is part of a planned attack that Doll intends to bring into his domestic space.

A birthday invitation turned trap

On Walpurgisnacht, Doll asks Hannah to come into the garden to watch Roman candles. He presents Szmul’s proposed birthday gift as the reason to go outside, adding that the prisoner worships her. Hannah has previously shown Szmul the ordinary courtesy of saying good morning, and Doll offers that small gesture as an explanation for the supposed present. The invitation gives the meeting a benign, even festive appearance while concealing the threat established in the basement.

Hannah later reconstructs the scene for Angelus Thomsen. The three of them are in the garden at twilight, with the Walpurgisnacht fire and perhaps a rocket rising beyond the slope. Szmul waits on the other side of the fence in his prison stripes. His expression appears glazed; when he draws the long spike from his sleeve, Hannah experiences the moment as uncertain and staged. Doll kicks open the gate and urges him forward. The birthday pretext has brought Hannah within reach of the weapon, while the fence and the prisoner’s uniform make visible the distance between the domestic garden and the camp from which Doll exercises control.

Szmul’s refusal and Doll’s violence

Instead of attacking Hannah, Szmul stands his ground, opens his shirt, and places the point of the spike against his own chest. He looks Hannah in the eye and tells her, in German, that Doll had wanted him to do this to her. The gesture reverses the attack Doll arranged: Szmul exposes the plan rather than carrying it out, and directs the weapon toward himself rather than Hannah.

Doll responds by asking what use Szmul is, then shoots him in the face. When Szmul falls, Doll crouches and shoots him again in the back of the neck. Hannah remembers that Szmul stops quivering before Doll turns toward her. The killing is neither an accidental discharge nor an attempt to disarm him: Doll fires twice after Szmul has made clear that he will not carry out the assault. His choice to shoot Szmul destroys the prisoner’s face and prevents him from dying by his own hand, a detail Hannah later identifies as especially terrible.

Hannah’s recognition and escape

The shooting changes what Hannah understands about both men. She had seen Szmul almost every day, but says that he had never looked her in the eye until this moment. His gaze, his warning, and Doll’s bloody attempt to keep smiling bring the hidden arrangement into view. Hannah describes Doll as resembling a child caught doing something disgusting, yet still trying to smile: the image joins his childish presentation to the deliberate killing she has just witnessed.

Hannah immediately gathers the girls and takes them to Romhilde Seedig’s home; they leave as soon as they can. Her account does not establish what ultimately happens to Shulamith or whether Doll ever makes the threatened telephone call. It does establish that Hannah believed Doll had persuaded Szmul to hurt or kill her, and that the birthday invitation had been part of the scheme. She recounts the episode to Thomsen five years later, asking him to consider what it means. The later telling turns a staged garden spectacle into testimony: the apparent gift is exposed as a pretext, and Szmul’s final act as a refusal of the violence Doll assigned him.

Narrative and moral significance

The episode brings together Doll’s bureaucratic authority and his capacity for intimate coercion. He can set a date for Shulamith’s death, make that order conditional, and direct Szmul to attack Hannah; the rehearsal, weapon, deadline, and garden invitation give the plan distinct practical stages. When Szmul refuses, Doll’s personal violence completes what his command had set in motion. He kills the prisoner who will not kill for him, while Hannah and the girls must flee the home in which the plot was arranged.

The scene also complicates the apparent roles within the coercive bargain. Szmul is a prisoner and a participant in the camp’s murderous system, but here he declines the assigned murder and warns the intended victim. Doll, by contrast, disguises an attack as a birthday present, threatens one prisoner’s wife to compel another prisoner, and then shoots that prisoner when he resists. Hannah’s delayed account preserves the sequence as she comes to understand it: the rehearsed thrust, the spike at Szmul’s chest, Doll’s two shots, and the smile that fails to make the killing look harmless.