Paul Doll's coercion of Szmul Zachariasz and his eventual murder

Paul Doll’s relationship with Szmul Zachariasz is a study in coercive dependence: the camp commandant relies on Szmul to keep its machinery moving, then exploits his wife’s threatened execution to force him toward a killing. The relationship ends in a garden, where Szmul refuses the role Doll has prepared for him and Paul Doll shoots him. Their final encounter makes visible the violence that the daily routines of the camp had obscured: authority, forced service, and a threat to a loved one converge in one weapon.

Command and Forced Dependence

When Special Train 105 is due to arrive, Paul Doll assembles an imposing force on the ramp: physicians, labor managers, disinfectors, troops, and Captain Boris Eltz’s men. Among them is Szmul, identified as Doll’s trusted Sonderkommandofuhrer, with a twelve-man team, three of whom speak French. Szmul’s place in this apparatus is not incidental. Doll relies on him and his team to carry out the procedures surrounding arrivals, while the armed force and the camp’s professional staff stand behind the commandant’s authority.

That dependence is inseparable from what the team is compelled to do. Doll describes the workers dragging corpses from the shower room to the Leichenkeller, removing gold teeth, cutting off women’s hair, taking earrings and wedding bands, and loading bodies toward the crematory retorts. Ashes are ground and dispersed in the Vistula. These are described as the Sonders’ collective tasks, not as a private choice by Szmul; the account nevertheless establishes the brutal role through which Doll knows and commands him. Doll also attributes to the prisoners a deadened indifference and an appetite for food taken from the disrobing room. His contemptuous description turns their coerced survival into another accusation against them, while leaving the command structure that has made their labor necessary in plain view.

A Threat to Shulamith

The relationship becomes most explicit when Paul Doll makes Szmul’s wife, Shulamith Zachariasz, the lever of control. He tells Szmul that she is scheduled to be taken at noon on May 1, unless Doll countermandes the order by telephone that morning. The condition is stark: the only way Szmul can keep his wife alive, Doll says, is by killing Doll’s wife. The commandant thus presents murder as a bargain, but he controls both the threat and the possibility of reprieve. Szmul is given no free choice between equivalent outcomes; Doll has made his wife’s life depend on obedience to an act of violence.

Doll frames the assignment as Szmul’s last service to him and to the Reich, telling him to take comfort in the idea that he will not have to live with his conscience for long. He shows Szmul a concealed weapon, a handled spike that can be hidden up a sleeve, and makes him practice the thrust on a sack. The rehearsal turns the threat into a procedure: weapon, gesture, target, deadline. Doll’s instructions are at once practical and taunting, and his references to Szmul’s conscience reveal that he understands the moral injury he is imposing even as he treats it as an inconvenience to be managed.

The Garden and the Refusal

Hannah Doll later recounts the final encounter. On Walpurgisnacht, Paul Doll has asked her into the garden to watch the Roman candles, telling her that Szmul wants to give her a birthday present. The scene is staged to appear almost festive; beyond the garden fence, Szmul stands in his striped clothing. He draws the spike from his sleeve, but instead of attacking Hannah, he holds his ground, opens his shirt, and places its point against his own chest. He tells her that Paul Doll had wanted him to do this to her.

The gesture breaks the arrangement Doll has rehearsed. Szmul’s words disclose the command behind the apparent gift, and the weapon’s direction makes his refusal bodily and immediate. Paul Doll kicks open the gate and shoots Szmul in the face; when Szmul is down, he crouches and shoots him in the back of the neck. The second shot follows the first as a final act of control. Hannah remembers Szmul looking her in the eye as he spoke, something he had never done in their near-daily encounters. His direct gaze, in the account, marks the difference between his earlier obscured presence in the camp’s routines and this brief, unmistakable act of communication.

Murder, Exposure, and Meaning

After killing Szmul, Paul Doll turns toward Hannah, covered in blood and still trying to smile. She recognizes him as a nightmarish child caught doing something plainly disgusting, a grotesque image that strips his commandant’s authority down to exposed shame. The smile does not soften the murder; it sharpens the contrast between Doll’s self-presentation and what he has just done. Hannah gathers the girls and takes them away as soon as she can, so the killing also precipitates their immediate departure.

Elsewhere, Paul Doll insists that he is a normal man with normal feelings and justifies cruelty as service to Germany. His treatment of Szmul gives that self-exculpation a concrete form: Doll invokes duty while threatening a wife, supplies the weapon, supervises the practice, and retains the power to decide whether the threatened execution proceeds. Szmul is first made essential to the camp’s operations and then forced into a supposed choice designed by his commander. His final refusal cannot undo the coercion or save him from Doll’s gun, but it exposes the truth of the relationship: the apparent bargain was never consent, and the commandant’s claim to orderly authority rests on personal domination and murder.