Searching for Schindler (12 page)

In the picture, we can sense behind the faces in this entryway, behind Oskar’s huge frame, the presence and industry of the Emalia slave laborers working within, occupying the barracks which Oskar had by now set up behind the factory to save his workers from the risks of being marched back and forth from Commandant Goeth’s notorious Plaszów, out in the countryside four miles south.

In gritty Lipowa Street, Poldek and I took in the facade of the building—it was, as Oskar himself said, influenced by the style of Walter Gropius, with large windows fronting the street. Now it was a telephone components factory. The only really vociferous man in Poland, Poldek, entered the building with me and argued at length with a doorman on the lower ground floor, at the base of the stairs which led to what had once been Oskar’s office. These stairs Schindler had ascended and descended on business. So had Itzhak Stern, Oskar’s accountant, and Abraham Bankier, who was related to the family connected with the bankrupt factory Schindler had acquired. These characters were becoming mythic to me, and yet familiar, and their former occupancy gave the banal building a legendary status.

Poldek at last concluded his argument with the doorman, who picked up the phone and called upstairs. It was in this exact place that, in reality and in the film, Miss Regina Perlman, a good-looking Jewish girl trying to survive on faked Aryan papers, had come to beg Schindler for her parents to be rescued from Plaszów and brought to DEF.

Poldek demanded to speak to the management. An official descended from the upper floor, and Poldek introduced himself and me. The man spoke English with an American accent. We could not possibly be admitted into the manufacturing plant, he said, for among other things the factory was turning out components for the Polish and Soviet army. Poldek now argued with a flattering note of subservience and respect in his voice. He told the man that we were engaged in research into the factory’s use in World War II, and could we please just see the main office? At last he consented. We followed him upstairs to a large waiting room where shoddy-looking conductors and pieces of cable were on display, the nonsecret portion of the company’s manufacturing. High windows looked down onto the factory floor, where workers did not seem to be imbued with any sense of urgency to turn out the materials needed by the Warsaw Pact armies. The lack of spirit, the dearth of energy which arose from poor diet and crimping of the soul, pervaded the place, and Poldek told me that the Emalia people willingly worked much harder.

In this office, Oskar had, like the true male chauvinist he was, selected only the most lustrous of Polish secretaries. Ever expansive, he had provided them with Christmas and Easter hams and other black-market luxuries, so that even in the picture taken in 1944, at the height of Polish want, they looked healthy. And to this office, too, Itzhak Stern brought the names of old men, maidens and children who needed particular rescue from Plaszów.

Having grown fraternal with our escort, Poldek now began making extravagant promises to all the officials in this upstairs office. There would be an extraordinary book on Polish wartime heroism! There would also be a film. Please, could he have a card from each of the senior staff? I had already noticed this propensity for card collecting, as if each name Poldek gathered gave him some increment of Polish authority.

At my request we revisited Lipowa Street a number of times during our period in Kraków. Among the avenues of grim industrial Polish architecture, it retained the individuality of its cream color and its covered entryway, but otherwise had no distinction unless the passerby happened to know of its peculiar history.

A relatively short walk eastward, we came to the suburb of Podgórze, site of the wartime Jewish ghetto, which had been set up by a decree of March 3, 1941. People were to enter it by March 20, and any Jew who did not could expect the worst. The Jews of Kraków and a number of other towns, including Tarnów and Lodz, had been crammed in progressively, a family or two or three or five per room, in an area approximately six blocks by four. Walls were erected along Lwowska Street so that trams could pass through without anyone seeing inside the ghetto. The walls of the ghetto were decorated with Middle Eastern–style scallops, rather Egyptian in appearance, to go with the Middle Eastern–style gate of the region the SS would call
Judenstadt
, Jewish Town. Even now, so long after the ghetto had been “liquidated,” some of these screening walls were still in place along Lwowska Street.

As in Lodz, the allocation of lodging was under the administration of the
Judenrat
, the Jewish Council, which attempted to allay the situation by cooperating with the authorities, especially now that they believed the very worst, the confiscation of homes and businesses, had occurred. And again, as in Lodz, the Nazis’ demands that the
Judenrat
select people for transportation out of the ghetto were met, the
Judenrat
at first sacrificing a few for the many, and then acquiring greater and greater desperate knowledge that the system was a Moloch which wanted the lot. During successive deportations, the people to be transported
Ost
, to the East, were guarded on their way into the trucks by the Jewish ghetto police, the
Ordnungsdienst
(OD), who themselves made a journey from innocence to collaboration, and who liked to believe that their own turn for a journey to oblivion could be averted.

On the day Poldek led me along Jósefinska Street in 1981, the former ghetto was populated chiefly by Catholic Poles. But it didn’t seem a place of any great civic joy. The Polish residents knew everything there was to know about the fatuity and dangers of history. Through the street-level entryways one could see courtyards in which muffled children breathed condensation into the air and played on wintry ground with antique tricycles as their mothers hung droopy washing. Poldek showed me the place at 2 Jósefinska Street where he and Misia had lived as a ghetto-bound young married couple. Here, too, was the timber yard where during the final ghetto liquidation in early 1943 he had hidden briefly from the SS, until he heard the bloodhounds on their way and emerged from hiding just in time to see the SS and their dogs round the corner toward him.

He took me to a backyard in Limanowskiego Street where in a cellar during the ghetto days an old man had manufactured wine for seders and for general consumption, and who had been raided by the SS and the Polish Green Police and shot dead. Poldek was expatiating on the tragedy in his normal basso volume when, looking up, we saw people staring timidly down at us from gaps between their curtains. “They think we’re KGB or something,” Poldek told me. “We’re too well dressed.” But one of those who were drawing drapes across their windows he now recognized. He began shouting to her in Polish. “Regina darling!
Dzien dobry. Przepraszam!
” He turned to me. “It is a beautiful girl I knew when I was a boy,” he told me. “I went to the gymnasium with her.”

And so we entered a stairwell with its redolence of piss, and ascended the steps at an earnest pace set by Poldek. We arrived at the head of the stairs, Poldek calling, “Regina, it’s me. Poldiu Pfefferberg.” And at last a door opened a slit. “Remember Poldek Pfefferberg, my dear friend? I became Professor Magister Leopold Pfefferberg at the gymnasium. But first we were kids together.” The door opened fully. We entered the room and Poldek looked fondly at the white-haired Polish woman who stood in the hallway, her demeanor marked by nervousness and dignity in equal measure. She stepped back to let us enter, and when we were inside, an older man wearing a yarmulke edged forward from the shadows of the apartment and closed the door behind us. We moved from the corridor into the drawing room. In happier times the apartment had been well designed to admit the sun in winter, but everything was curtained now. No one seemed to want to make eye contact with the treacherous sunlight. The lowered voices of Regina and the old man, and her restrained but friendly reception of Poldek, caused my traveling companion to lower his own voice to the level of what is sometimes called an Irish whisper.

The old man turned out to be not Regina’s husband but a fellow Jewish survivor. Regina and the old man were, indeed, two of Kraków’s two hundred remaining Jews. Governor General Frank, who had wanted Kraków
judenrein
—clean of Jews—had just about managed it.

Regina switched the lights on in the dim room and it became apparent that this was a little museum. On tables around the edge of the room were ancient-looking kiddush cups, Shabbat candlesticks and trays. There were various silver implements with whose uses I was vaguely familiar—a dented Torah crown, a Havdalah tower. There were occasional parchment fragments of Torah scrolls and, in one case, a scroll in its entirety revealing an illuminated, anciently wrought text. There were fragments from the Torah ark as well, and those silver wands,
yad
s, with a tiny hand at the end of them with which the rabbi traced the holy text.

These artifacts have, by the time I’m writing this, probably been returned to the museum in the Old Synagogue of Kazimierz, a museum which did not exist in 1981. They were remnants from the Old Synagogue of 1570, the little seventeenth-century Remuh Synagogue, beside the extraordinary Remuh cemetery, and the Popov Synagogue, a later building—the three synagogues, that is, of the old Jewish sector named Kazimierz.

Regina insisted now on making all of us
herbata
(tea), and laying out sugar and honey. A few days before, in Kraków, I had visited a state grocery store in which the only items for sale were pickles, soap and mineral water. When a stock of jam or sugar or tea came in, Regina told Poldek, she depended on the grapevine to tell her. Once you got there, you queued for hours. Nor were there any uncomplicated exchanges. Every item required a docket, the docket system being in theory a precaution against the black market. The old man in the yarmulke nodded in confirmation. Survival itself was a test.

At last we left the apartment, Regina at the door trying to hush Poldek’s protestations of his abiding admiration of her beauty, and proudly trying to refuse the wad of dollars he passed to her for the museum’s upkeep and her own welfare.

Eight

In Poldek’s picture collection was a photograph of Oskar, in appropriate equestrian garb, ready to mount a horse for an excursion through the parklands of Kraków. Oskar had told people after the war that in June 1942 he and Ingrid, out riding in a small hilly park named Bednarskiego, south of the ghetto, witnessed one of the first and fiercest
Aktionen
, raids to round up ghetto Jews, children, the aged, and those without the labor documents, the
Blauschein
and
Kennkarte
, and take them away. (That was the day little Genia, a member of the Dresner family, was fruitlessly abroad in her brave red coat.)

Oskar implied that he had had prior knowledge of this
Aktion
, and that he had deliberately placed himself on Bednarskiego. Though the claim that he could have witnessed the
Aktion
from there has been disputed by a subsequent historian, when Poldek took me up among the bare trees in 1981, I found that by walking along it on foot one did have a view of the north/ south-running streets of the ghetto (though not of its cross-streets), and I could well imagine the chaos and savagery visible to Oskar at every crossroads in 1942, when the young men of the SS, mothers’ sons perverted by the license which was permitted them, now found mothers trying to hide babies, and took the infants by the ankle and smashed them against walls.

I have never believed that the SS were insane—indeed, Himmler said he was very careful to screen out men with murderous pathologies. To make his sane young men believe in the necessity and merit of murder, he changed the language, calling, for example, the corps consigned to the slaughter of Jews behind the front line
Einsatzgruppen
, Special Duty Squads, a sanctifying title.

“That’s what I wanted to pointed out,” Poldek said after each stop on the ghetto’s stations of tears, and the story of each place rendered his little grammatical solecism irrelevant. Such intimacy of horror prevailed in the ghetto! It had been a cramped neighborhood. Poldek showed me the location of the fever hospital, where patients who could not rise were killed in their beds before the eyes of the medical staff, who were themselves about to die. In the general hospital, in the ghetto’s western border near the uniform factory of a kindly Austrian, Julius Madritsch, the doctors and nurses fed a merciful dose of strychnine to the patients, so that the SS found only corpses.

Plac Zgody, Peace Place, was a short walk eastward, past Regina’s little museum. It was a backwater in 1981. But here in the ghetto days, as well as at the nearby Optima factory, people selected in the
Aktionen
were forcibly loaded onto trucks. In Plac Zgody forty or so years before our visit, each act of minor defiance by them caused an addition to the heap of corpses on the pavement.

Some thousands whom Oskar observed being collected for the transport that summer day in 1942 were, he discovered, gassed in carbon monoxide chambers at Belzec camp to the east of Kraków, or in specially designed Renault vehicles. Oskar found out about this extermination, it seems, as part of his work for the Abwehr, who wished to keep an eye on these improbable events. The gassing of people had begun, but its “camouflage name” was, even by early 1943 when the ghetto was finally liquidated, “Special Treatment” (
Sonderbehandlung
). The screening to separate people for extermination from those who could still labor was entitled
Gesundheitsaktion
—“Health Action.”

In Plac Zgody, I had heard from all the survivors I had so far interviewed, lay the pharmacy of Tadeusz Pankiewitz. He was a Gentile apothecary permitted to remain in the ghetto, and though increasingly deprived of drugs, he had served the Jews heroically. The pharmacy still stood in the square in 1981, a plaque on its wall to honor the man who would rush forth in the face of armed SS to try to treat those summarily shot in the ghetto’s roundups and last hours. Poldek said he had got to know the pharmacist Pankiewitz well, through his own journeys in and out of the ghetto. With his high Slavic cheekbones, Poldek could easily pass as a Gentile Pole and had been a frequent errand runner for the
Judenrat
, the Jewish Council, and for others.

One of Poldek’s reasons for moving in and out of the ghetto by crossing Plac Zgody and passing through the fanciful Arabian gate into Lwowska Street, where trams could be caught to central Kraków, was the creation by the Nazis of a new monetary unit banned to Jews. At considerable personal risk, he would carry the funds of ghetto individuals and organizations to town, where he would exchange them for the new, safer currency at as small a discount as he could negotiate with Gentile money-dealers, who were permitted to use both currencies. No wonder he was not scared of government exchanges and back-lane currency deals! I’d heard this from others—that Poldek was good at these tasks, which he pursued without wearing his Star of David and thus under pain of summary execution.

Poldek spoke with affection of a German policeman he used to meet on the gate, Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko, a devout Catholic in a way Oskar wasn’t, who would let food and medicines be smuggled into the ghetto without the necessity of a bribe. At a stage when people didn’t know whether their children were safer within the walls or out of them, Bosko let children be smuggled in and out, since they would face being shipped off or shot if they entered or left openly. Ryszard Horowitz, future renowned photographer, was smuggled in from a hiding place outside to join his parents, whom he was missing; his playmate Roman Polanski was smuggled out. Oswald Bosko would ultimately be arrested for his pro-Jewish activities, tried and executed. He has been honored by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, yet poignantly there is no extant photograph of this decent soul.

We had nearly finished trawling the ghetto, drawing at every turn suspicious looks as Poldek dragged me into courtyards and along piss-streaked pavements. He pointed out such features as the old Polish Savings Bank, where people came to get the certificates they needed for their survival. He had not been issued a
Blauschein
once, and had nearly been sent off in a truck, purely because his then occupation, tutoring the children of Symche Spira, the self-important head of the ghetto police, was not considered essential.

If a prisoner survived the ghetto and its liquidation by the SS officer Amon Goeth, the next stage of the process was detention in the new camp of Plaszów. Plaszów was at the time in Kraków’s rural fringe, four miles southeast of the city on the road to Lwów. By 1981 it was still a huge, open acreage, though partially impinged upon by new houses. What the prisoners always called the commandant’s “villa” still stood, surrounded by the villas of his senior officers. On the drizzly spring day Poldek and I walked past them, they were occupied, of course, by Polish tenants again. In their ordinary stucco—in Hannah Arendt’s much publicized phrase—“the banality of evil” was still evident.

The core of what had been the camp was a vast field with, at one end, the encroaching city, and at the other the notorious old Austro-Hungarian hill fort which had once guarded the road to Lwów, a mounded enclosure nicknamed by locals Chujowa Górka, Prick Hill. In this screened-off place the executions of thousands of Poles and Jews were carried out. Slaughtered or buried in it were Jews found living under Aryan papers; members of the Jewish resistance, the ZOB, who had blown up a Wehrmacht and SS café, the Cyganeria in Kraków; Polish partisans, both Gentile and Jew; and those summarily executed by gunshot or hanging within the camp, such as Lisiek, Goeth’s house and stable boy, who was shot dead for supposedly mishandling Goeth’s saddle. When the Russians got close, sooner than the SS had calculated they would, many able-bodied guards and prisoners were employed to dig up the graves and burn the remains on pyres, a scene which, as the dead sat up and even seemed to dance in the flames, sent some people, including an SS NCO, temporarily insane. Poldek had been there, working like crazy to avoid a bullet, seeing the bodies gesticulate in the flames as he breathed through his rag mask and wept.

Nearby, on a low rise, stands a postwar monument of four giant sculpted figures, riven pieces of stone in stylized human form, to commemorate the victims. In these green fields enough agony occurred to make Plaszów a byword for cruelty, if it had not been for the fact that the SS had also devised and implemented the ultimate, the destruction camp, of which Auschwitz was the archetype.

Poldek was exceptionally sober and undemonstrative as he showed me where the Ukrainian barracks were; the
Puffhaus
—brothel—for the SS; the women’s camp; the men’s; the
Appellplatz
or parade ground where random executions also took place during roll call. I took photographs of everything, but they were not necessary. I can still bring to mind the camp plan, the green bed of the fort where the brave and the adventurous died, and the starkness of those part-fractured, soulful pillars of stone, the acid rain of Nowa Huta working a new chemistry upon them. The geography is still engraved on my brain by the force of the events I heard of there. I was astonished by Poldek’s capacity to revisit the place, to exercise distance, to be a solemn tourist to his own past misery.

When the SS closed down the Kraków ghetto and sent everyone either to labor camps (
Zwangsarbeitslager
), or to destruction camps (
Vernichtungslager
) for
Sonderbehandlung
, Schindler was given, as those who have read the book might remember, the option of placing DEF inside this new camp at Plaszów. Oskar’s fellow entrepreneur, Julius Madritsch,
would
locate his uniform factory inside Plaszów camp. Oskar had rejected the idea, not wanting to be under anyone’s close inspection, and that was why each day his workers were marched to Emalia in Lipowa Street, and—until Oskar put in his own barracks—came back under guard in the evening to the barracks of Plaszów.

We met for tea another of the child survivors of the Holocaust, Niusia Horowitz, Ryszard’s sister, who still lived in Kraków and was a beautician at the Hotel Europa. Her married name was Karakulska. It did not seem to be an irony to her to be working on the faces of the privileged and of tourists in a hotel which, during her enslavement, had been much patronized by the Nazis. But she was nervous about having to meet this stranger from the Antipodes, under the eccentric aegis of Uncle Poldek, and to have to talk about the ghetto and Amon Goeth’s Plaszów, and her weeks in Auschwitz, and the role of Herr Direktor Schindler in her family’s deliverance.

We drank tea in one of the many splendid cafés around the Rynek. Insofar as Poles and the remaining hundreds of Polish Jews were able, she had made a life for herself, but again, it was palpable in the delicate fidgeting of her fingers on the
herbata
glass that the children had suffered worst, found recall most painful, and that although she said she wanted to give this interview, she was doing so through gratitude to Oskar, fear of Poldek, and perhaps clan solidarity with her parents and brother. An adult prisoner knew at least that those who were oppressing him were working within their own coherent if misguided picture of the universe. Even if, as in the case of Goeth, that coherent picture sanctioned random shooting of prisoners—a form of rifle practice and of keeping the inmates on their toes—the adult prisoner still knew what Goeth was getting at. The child prisoner was more radically disoriented by such events. They could not be absorbed. They could certainly not be interpreted.

Niusia and Ryszard Horowitz’s father, Dolek Horowitz, had been an important purchasing officer inside Plaszów camp, and was allowed to have his children with him. But as other children began to disappear, Niusia, his tall ten-year-old daughter who cut her fingers sewing bristles onto the backs of broomheads in the brush factory, kept seeing trucks arriving at the Austrian hill fort of Chujowa Górka, followed by a racket of guns firing, and was in a terrible mental state. So Dolek pleaded with Stern to get the family moved to Emalia, Oskar’s place. Niusia became one of those children who Schindler insisted must be retained in his camp because only their delicate fingers could polish the interior of his smaller-caliber artillery shells.

Poldek also took me to see his old anatomy professor, Dr. Lax, who lived in what Poldek called “an intellectual’s apartment from the 1930s.” In its way, since Hitler had as many Polish intellectuals shot as he could manage, the apartment was a museum of the period. It was spacious but dominated by somber Polish impressionists, and heavy-bound volumes of Polish and French literature and anatomy. Dr. Lax was tall and frail, a survivor both as a scholar and a Jew, and Poldek spoke to him with a rumble of reverence.

During the war, the secular Lax had seen no reason why young men should be arrested as Jews purely on the grounds of their having been circumcised. But the Gentile majority in Europe were not circumcised, and unless the circumcised male could produce a document proving circumcision on medical grounds, he was considered Jewish. Lax had himself organized a few such certificates but had also devised a method for lengthening the foreskin of secularized Jews who considered themselves Europeans, and thus felt they had every right to go on breathing as much European air as they needed. This method of Dr. Lax’s involved an often very painful sequence of foreskin stretching, which would have sounded funny had the life of individual young men not depended upon it. Sometimes tyrants do away with the necessity of satire by imposing absurdity themselves.

Lax had remained dangerously at large during the war, worked as a doctor with the partisans, survived, and had now come to the full honor of his old age. He had been involved not only with the forest partisans but with those who operated in town, terrorists in the eyes of the German authorities, who blew up a German forces cinema and bombed cafés used by the Wehrmacht and SS.

Still the spring sunshine
seemed merely conditional, as if the earth’s default setting would remain rain and mist. The countryside to the west of Kraków still showed remnants of snow everywhere, and bare trees seemed under an edict not to bud as we journeyed through them. O
wi
cim, the town from whose German-version name, Auschwitz, the camps took their sinister umbrella repute, seemed a normal place, with stores and coffee shops, a community refusing to be tied to or inhibited by its own unfortunate and unchosen associations. Indeed, to be fair, it’s hard to know, had they been sure of everything that was happening a few miles from town,
and
been shocked by it, what an ordinary citizen could have done about the camps. One could so easily succumb to that all-too-human denial which is an inherited gift of all members of the species.