Schindler's Ark

CHAPTER 13

Even that summer, people inside the walls were clinging to the idea of the ghetto as a small but permanent realm. The idea had been easy enough to credit during 1941. There had been a post office; there had even been ghetto postage stamps. There had been a ghetto newspaper, even though it contained little else than edicts from the Wawel and Pomorska Street. A restaurant had been permitted in Lwówska Street: Foerster’s Restaurant, where the Rosner brothers, back from the perils of the countryside and the changeable passions of the peasants, played the violin and the accordion. It had seemed for a brief time that schooling would proceed here in formal classrooms, that orchestras would gather and regularly perform, that Jewish life would be communicated like a benign organism along the streets, from artisan to artisan, from scholar to scholar. It had not yet been demonstrated finally by the SS bureaucrats of Pomorska Street that the idea of that sort of ghetto was to be considered not simply a whimsy but an insult to the rational direction of history.

So when Untersturmführer Brandt had Judenrat president Artur Rosenzweig around to Pomorska for a beating with the handle of a riding crop, he was trying to correct the man’s incurable vision of the ghetto as a region of permanent residence. The ghetto was a depot, a siding, a walled bus station. Anything that would have encouraged the opposite view had, by 1942, been abolished.

So it was different here from the ghettos old people remembered even affectionately. Music was no profession here. There were no professions. Henry Rosner went to work in the Luftwaffe mess at the air base. There he met a young German chefstmanager named Richard, a laughing boy hiding, as a chef can, from the history of the twentieth century among the elements of cuisine and bar management. He and Henry Rosner got on so well that Richard would send the violinist across town to pick up the Luftwaffe Catering Corps pay—you couldn’t trust a German, said Richard; the last one had run off to Hungary with the payroll.

Richard, like any barman worthy of his station, heard things and attracted the affection of officials. On the first day of June, he came to the ghetto with his girlfriend, a Volksdeutsche girl wearing a sweeping cape—which, on account of the June showers, didn’t seem too excessive a garment. Through his profession, Richard knew a number of policemen, including Wachtmeister Oswald Bosko, and had no trouble being admitted to the ghetto, even though it was officially out-of-bounds to him. Once inside the gate, Richard crossed Plac Zgody and found Henry Rosner’s address. Henry was surprised to see them. He had left Richard at the mess only a few hours before, yet here he was with his girl, both dressed as if for a formal visit. It reinforced for Henry the strangeness of the season. For the past two days, ghetto people had been lining up at the old Polish Savings Bank building in Józefińska Street for the new identity cards. To your yellow Kennkarte with its sepia passport photograph and its large blue J, the German clerks now attached—if you were lucky— a blue sticker. People could be seen to leave the bank waving their cards with the Blauschein attached as if it proved their right to breathe, their permanent validity. Workers at the Luftwaffe mess, the Wehrmacht garage, at the Madritsch works, at Oskar Schindler’s Emalia, at the Progress factory all had no trouble getting the Blauschein. But those who were refused it felt that their citizenship even of the ghetto was under question.

Richard said that young Olek Rosner should come and stay with his girlfriend at her apartment. You could tell that he’d heard something in the mess. He can’t just walk out the gate, said Henry. It’s fixed with Bosko, said Richard.

Henry and Manci were hesitant and consulted with each other as the girl in the cape promised to fatten Olek up on chocolate. An Aktion? Henry Rosner asked in a murmur. Is there going to be an Aktion? Richard answered with a question. You’ve got your Blauschein? he asked. Of course, said Henry. And Manci? Manci too. But Olek hasn’t, said Richard. In the drizzling dusk, Olek Rosner, only child, newly six years old, walked out of the ghetto under the cape of Richard the chef’s girlfriend. Had some policeman bothered to lift the cape, both Richard and the girl could have been shot for their friendly subterfuge. Olek too would vanish. In the childless corner of their room, the Rosners hoped they’d been wise.

Poldek Pfefferberg, runner for Oskar Schindler, had earlier in the year been ordered to begin tutoring the children of Symche Spira, exalted glazier, chief of the OD.

It was a contemptuous summons, as if Spira were saying, “Yes, we know you’re not fit for man’s work, but at least you can pass on to my kids some of the benefits of your education.” Pfefferberg amused Schindler with stories of the tutorial sessions at Symche’s house. The police chief was one of the few Jews to have an entire floor to himself. There, amid two-dimensional paintings of nineteenth-century rabbis, Symche paced, listening to the instruction Pfefferberg gave, seeming to want to see knowledge, like petunias, sprout from his children’s ears. A man of destiny with his hand hooked inside his jacket, he believed that this Napoleonic mannerism was a gesture universal to men of influence.

Symche’s wife was a shadowy woman, a little bemused by her husband’s unexpected power, perhaps a little excluded by old friends. The children, a boy of about twelve and a girl of fourteen, were biddable but no great scholars.

In any case, when Pfefferberg went to the Polish Savings Bank he expected to be given the Blauschein without any trouble. He was sure his labor with the Spira children would be counted as essential work. His yellow card identified him as a HIGH SCHOOL PROFESSOR, and in a rational world as yet only partly turned upside down, it was an honorable label.

The clerks refused to give him the sticker. He argued with them and wondered if he should appeal to Oskar or to Herr Szepessi, the Austrian bureaucrat who ran the German Labor Office down the street. Oskar had been asking him for a year to come to Emalia, but Pfefferberg had always thought it would be too constricting of his illegal activities to have full-time work.

As he emerged from the bank building, details of the German Security Police, the Polish Blue Police, and the political detail of the OD were at work on the pavements, inspecting everyone’s card and arresting those who did not have the sticker. A line of rejects, hangdog men and women, already stood in the middle of Józefińska Street. Pfefferberg affected his Polish military bearing and explained that of course, he had a number of trades. But the Schupo he spoke to shook his head, saying, “Don’t argue with me; no Blauschein; you join that line. Understand, Jew?”

Pfefferberg went and joined the line. Mila, the delicate, pretty wife he’d married eighteen months before, worked for Madritsch and already had her Blauschein. So there was that.

When the line had grown to more than a hundred, it was marched around the corner, past the hospital, and into the yard of the old Optima confectionery plant. There hundreds were already waiting. The early comers had taken the shady areas of what used to be the stable, where the Optima horses used to be harnessed between the shafts of drays laden with crèmes and liqueur chocolates. It was not a rowdy group. There were professional men, bankers like the Holzers, pharmacists and dentists. They stood in clusters, talking quietly. The young pharmacist Bachner stood speaking to an old couple named Wohl. There were many old people in here. The old and poor who depended on the Judenrat ration. This summer the Judenrat itself, the distributor of food and even of space, had been less equitable than it had been last. Nurses from the ghetto hospital moved among these detainees with buckets of water, which was said to be good for stress and disorientation. It was, in any case, just about the only medicine, other than some black-market cyanide, that the hospital had to give. The old, the poor families from the shtetls, took the water in restive silence.

Throughout the day, police of three varieties would enter the yard with lists, and lines of people would be formed to be met at the gate of the yard by SS details and moved out to the Prokocim Railway Station. In some people the urge rose to evade this next movement by keeping to the far corners of the yard. But it was Pfefferberg’s style to hang around the gate, looking for some official to whom he could make a claim. Perhaps Spira would be there, dressed up like a movie actor and willing—with a little heavy-handed irony—to release him. In fact there stood by the gatekeeper’s hut a sad-faced boy in an OD hat studying a list, holding the corner of the page in delicate fingers.

Pfefferberg not only had served briefly with the boy in the OD, but in the first year of his teaching career at Kosciuszko High School in Podgórze had taught his sister.

The boy looked up. Panie Pfefferberg, he murmured with a respect from those vanished days. As if the yard were full of practiced criminals, he asked what Panie Pfefferberg was doing here.

It’s nonsense, said Pfefferberg, but I haven’t got a Blauschein yet.

The boy shook his head. Follow me, he said. He walked Pfefferberg to a senior uniformed Schupo at the gate and saluted. He did not look heroic in his funny OD cap and with his skinny, vulnerable neck. Later, Pfefferberg supposed that that had given him greater credibility.

“This is Herr Pfefferberg from the Judenrat,” he lied with a deft combination of respect and authority. “He has been visiting some relatives.” The Schupo seemed bored by the mass of police work proceeding in the yard. Negligently he waved Pfefferberg out the gate. Pfefferberg had no time to thank the boy or to reflect on the mystery of why a child with a skinny neck will lie for you even unto death just because you taught his sister how to use the Roman rings.

Pfefferberg rushed straight to the Labor Office and broke into the waiting line. Behind the desk were Frauleins Skoda and Knosalla, two hearty Sudeten German girls.

“Liebchen, Liebchen,” he told Skoda, “they want to take me away because I don’t have the sticker. Look at me, I ask you.” (he was built like a bull, and had played hockey for his country and belonged to the Polish ski team.) “Am I not exactly the sort of fellow you’d like to keep around here?”

In spite of the crowds who’d given her no rest all day, Skoda raised her eyebrows and failed to suppress a smile. She took his Kennkarte. “I can’t help you, Herr Pfefferberg,” she told him. “They didn’t give it to you, so I can’t. A pity….”

“But you can give it to me, Liebchen,” he insisted in a loud, seductive, soap-opera voice. “I have trades, Liebchen, I have trades.”

Skoda said that only Herr Szepessi could help him, and it was impossible to get Pfefferberg in to see Szepessi. It would take days. “But you will get me in, Liebchen,” Pfefferberg insisted. And she did. That is where her reputation as a decent girl came from, because she abstracted from the massive drift of policy and could, even on a crowded day, respond to the individual face. A warty old man might not have done so well with her, however.

Herr Szepessi, who also had a humane reputation even though he serviced the monstrous machine, looked quickly at Pfefferberg’s permit, murmuring, “But we don’t need gym teachers.”

Pfefferberg had always refused Oskar’s offers of employment because he saw himself as an operator, an individualist. He didn’t want to work long shifts for small pay over in dreary Zablocie. But he could see now that the era of individuality was vanishing. People needed, as a staple of life, a trade. “I’m a metal polisher,” he told Szepessi. He had worked for short periods with a Podgórze uncle of his who ran a small metal factory in Rekawka.

Herr Szepessi eyed Pfefferberg from behind spectacles. “Now,” he said, “that’s a profession.” He took a pen, thoroughly crossing out HIGH SCHOOL PROFESSOR, cancelling the Jagiellonian education of which Pfefferberg was so proud, and over the top he wrote METAL POLISHER. He reached for a rubber stamp and a pot of paste and took from his desk a blue sticker. “Now,” he said, handing the document back to Pfefferberg—”now should you meet a Schupo, you can assure him that you’re a useful member of society.”

Later in the year they would send poor Szepessi to Auschwitz for being so persuadable.