Paul Doll—Szmul

Paul Doll—Szmul is a relationship built on radically unequal power. Doll interrogates Szmul, taunts him with what he knows or suspects, and finally uses the threatened killing of Szmul’s wife, Shulamith, as leverage. Szmul’s position as a Sonderkommando leader gives him duties inside the camp’s machinery of death, but it does not protect him from Doll: his own survival and the safety of the person he loves remain subject to the commandant’s orders.

An encounter on the ramp

The relationship first takes shape through an interrogation after a transport has been processed. Doll no longer goes out to Spring Meadow often, and Szmul is there less frequently too. Sometimes, around midnight, Szmul checks that the processing is proceeding as it should, then returns to his duties as a greeter. Doll observes that an exchange with Szmul now requires catching him on the ramp. Their contact occurs in the intervals of the camp’s routine, but that routine is itself lethal: the first train has been dealt with when Doll approaches Szmul, who is seated on a suitcase beneath an untended arc light and eating a wedge of cheese.

Doll asks why Szmul was on the first transport out of Litzmannstadt. Szmul answers that it was for undesirables and that he was one of them. Doll turns this answer into an occasion for mockery, contrasting the label with the image of a schoolmaster and asking whether Szmul taught physical training. The exchange exposes the distance between Szmul’s former life and his present position without giving him room to explain either. Doll controls the questions; Szmul’s terse replies are constrained by the setting and by the man addressing him.

Doll then presses on Szmul’s time at Chełmno, remarking that few Jews get out of the place and suggesting that Szmul may have been kept because he knew German. He asks whether Szmul was there during the killing of the silent boys. Szmul says no, and the narration identifies that answer as a lie. The lie marks a boundary Doll is trying to breach: Szmul withholds knowledge of an atrocity, but his denial does not end the interrogation or release him from Doll’s attention.

Suspicion becomes a threat

Doll’s scrutiny shifts from Szmul’s history to his face. He describes Szmul’s lips as always tense and notched, even while eating, and interprets their expression as evidence that Szmul intends to kill someone. He asks whether Szmul wants to kill him, draws his Luger, and presses the barrel against Szmul’s brow. Doll then performs a plea for his own life before the searchlight crackles out. The episode turns a question about Szmul’s intentions into a demonstration of Doll’s power: he can bring a gun to Szmul’s forehead and dictate what happens next.

As he turns away, Doll predicts that he will tell Szmul exactly what to do when Szmul’s time comes. The threat is not only that Doll can punish him; it is that he can assign him an act of violence. When the yellow eye of the second train appears in the night, Doll muses that they should make a special effort for November 9. The juxtaposition places his private menace beside the continuing arrival of transports. Szmul is addressed as an individual, but only within a system whose operations continue around them.

Doll’s offered alternatives

Later, Doll tries to redirect the possibility of being killed away from himself. He says Szmul should kill someone else and insists that he is not a monster who tortures people for pleasure. He names other men as possible targets, urges Szmul to choose someone powerful, and presents himself as merely a cog in a vast machine. He then calls himself worthless and repeats that Szmul should not kill Paul Doll, though he is welcome to try.

This performance does not undo the earlier threat. Doll’s self-description as powerless is spoken by the man who has already held a Luger to Szmul’s head and who can issue orders about Shulamith’s fate. His plea makes the imbalance more visible: Doll can theatrically invite resistance while retaining the authority to determine what Szmul must do. The language of being a cog also recasts responsibility as something belonging elsewhere, even as Doll directly exercises command over Szmul.

Shulamith as leverage

The threat becomes explicit when Doll next summons Szmul in the morgue. Szmul is supervising the barber Kommando and the oral Kommando. One group works with shears; the other uses a chisel or small, heavy hammer and a blunt hook to control the jaws. An SS dentist sleeps on a bench in the corner. Against this workroom of bodily handling, Doll arrives with his Luger drawn but not raised and makes Szmul precede him into a stockroom of hoses, brooms, brushes, and bleach. There he tells Szmul to enter a date in his diary, turning the summons into the prelude to an order.

Doll demonstrates that he knows where Shulamith is and what she does. He describes her black hair with a white stripe and calls her Szmul’s wife. He says she earns her living sewing swastikas onto Wehrmacht uniforms in Factory 104, and that at night she goes to an attic above a bakery on Tlomackie Street. These precise details make the threat more than a general warning: Doll presents himself as able to locate her and control what happens to her.

Doll says Shulamith will be taken on May 1, which he identifies as the third anniversary of the sealing of the Jewish slum. He then says he will have her killed that day in Łódź, unless he countermanded the order that morning. His claim that he will spare Szmul by arranging her death elsewhere makes the cruelty unmistakable: the supposed concession preserves Doll’s control while placing Shulamith’s life under an explicit, dated threat. Szmul answers Doll formally, and Doll asks whether he had been happy with her. The questions about their marriage intrude upon the threat rather than soften it; Szmul’s private attachment has become part of the means by which Doll governs him.

A coerced assignment

After recalling the silent boys, the narrative returns to Doll’s promise that he will tell Szmul whom to kill. The sequence links the memory of boys murdered without making a sound to the present prospect of another commanded killing. Doll’s power over Szmul thus operates through both knowledge and anticipation: he probes what Szmul remembers, threatens the person Szmul loves, and reserves the authority to name a target.

The evidence establishes the order and its threatened date, but does not establish here whether Doll carries it out or whether Shulamith is killed as he says. The relationship remains suspended in that uncertainty. Szmul is compelled to hear Doll’s terms without being shown a safe answer, while Doll’s command over the coming action is presented as the decisive fact. Their encounters make the camp’s organized violence personal without making it private: even Szmul’s marriage is exposed to the same authority that governs transports, work, and death.