Searching for Schindler (10 page)

Before going to our rooms we said good night to Marek, and Poldek conducted a two-way conversation with me and the driver about our plans for the following days. We did not need him that evening, since we were going to the old city, and vehicles were not permitted there.

In the unexpectedly bright lobby of our hotel, the government exchange office stood near the reception desk. The official exchange rate was pegged at some thirty-seven zloty to the U.S. dollar. As Poldek checked us in at full volume, I headed for its grille to change my money. Before I reached it, however, Poldek rushed to me. “Thirty-seven zloty to the dollar? Ridiculous! Son-of-bitch thieves. I can get at least three times that on the street!”

“Black market?” I suggested timorously and in a whisper.

“Don’t shout it everywhere, Thomas, my dear friend,” he advised me, and then vociferously concluded his sign-in at the reception desk, where the clerk seemed as awed by his Orbis badge as Poldek had predicted. Throughout our journeys in Poland, backing up his general air of self-confidence, the badge gave him immediate, unguessed-at authority with hotel staff, causing a flurry among them. He would then raucously put them at ease, praising their bone structure in Polish before uttering many
bardzo dzie kuje
s (thank you very much). Again this was no mere act, however. This was his singing of the survival of the Poles. He overwhelmed people through his genuine joy, and in praising the harried Polish girls of 1981, he sang the remembered glory of the girls of 1939, Jewish and Catholic, all of them with the coming sword hanging above their dazzling heads.

We would be spending some days in Warsaw, not because we had many survivors to visit there but because it was the center of the lost lives of the
Schindlerjuden
, the big smoke of their youth. It was in its large ghetto that the great uprising occurred. Though in the occupation it had been under different administration than Kraków, it was essential background.

On Hitler’s orders, Warsaw had been totally dynamited as a final gesture of cultural punishment before Hitler’s troops withdrew. But the old town had been rebuilt from photographs and from Canaletto’s famous painting of the city. Indeed, the streets of the old town, an easy walk from the hotel, were still under cash-starved but elegant restoration, and again Poldek took a patriotic joy in this, that a nation plundered by the Germans, and economically and politically oppressed by Stalinism, should find the spirit to rebuild its old graciousness, including the fascinating Royal Castle and the Cathedral of St. John, the Jesuit church. In the town square, the Rynek Starego Miasta, Poldek stood expatiating. People gave him a wide berth. With Solidarno
consigned to the shadows, and arrests and beatings of its members by the security police, only a lunatic or a man of power could speak at such high volume. In the end, even Poldek fell silent. He stood still and saluted the dead of history, to whom this city had contributed untold battalions.

There were a number of restaurants nearby, and Poldek had me eating soups full of barley and dumplings, and delicious courses of stuffed tripe, considered offal in richer countries but presented with artistry and succulence here. We finished with pancakes and drank Hungarian Bull’s Blood wine.

Even though Marshal Pilsudski’s Sanacja Party had made an alliance, after the old man’s death in 1935, with the Camp of National Unity, an anti-Semitic group, Poldek considered these cobblestones on which he himself had been elevated to the Polish officer corps to be holy ground. A few years after he received his commission, Poldek’s division began a bitter retreat before the invading Germans, from the direction of Wroclaw through Katowice to hold a position at Kraków. The Germans bypassed Kraków, however, and Poldek’s division scuttered out along the road toward Lwów and along more obscure arteries, beneath predatory dive bombers, to take up a final position at the San, where he was wounded and lost his beloved platoon sergeant and was helped to hospital in Przemy
l, by an NCO. The place was soon overrun by the German army and Poldek, recuperating, became a prisoner. It was while being transhipped in Kraków from one POW train to another, going west to Germany, that he made his escape home, catching a Number One tram ten blocks to his parents’ place in Grodzka Street, Kraków.

Poldek felt little martial shame over the defeat of 1939. He seemed genuinely to believe, as the free world itself came to believe in 1939, that Poland was being punished for its very gallantry and dash by a cruel totalitarian machine not playing by the rules of gallantry.

When we strolled back from the old town to the less exuberant atmosphere of our hotel, the doorman and everyone in the reception area saluted Poldek’s Orbis badge.

Six

During our Warsaw time, as leaden autumn dawns led to days full of ambiguous light under which a frightened populace kept their heads down, Poldek took me, for the sake of my education, to the Pawiak prison. The Pawiak, a series of cellars converted into dim interrogation cells, had housed thousands of captured Polish partisans, Jews masquerading as Aryans, and similar perceived threats to the balance of civilization. There was once a tall structure on top of the cellars, a more conventional prison, but it had been dynamited by the Nazis, and Polish nationalist zeal had not yet been applied to its restoration.

Doomed prisoners’ near-last thoughts remained scrawled on the walls of Pawiak, and were interpreted in English in a visitors’ guide. Many who were either killed here or were sent on from here to concentration camps were, like Poldek, Poland’s most passionate children. Scrawled sentiments such as “Poland is deathless!” were common, as were defiant remarks that it would take more than bullets to defeat the Polish people. The one I remember best, however, was the one that said, “Oh God, how they beat me!”

By now, Marek was back with us and drove us around the old Jewish ghetto, with its present-day dreary apartment blocks, and then across to the Praga side of the Vistula and out into the countryside to buy black-market butter—both from lack of butter in Marek’s family and also to illustrate how much better-placed farmers and their families were to withstand food shortages under the present tyranny.

Between Poldek and me, the argument about money exchange had not been settled. One morning we had the question out. Poldek had ambushed me in the hotel lobby, on my surreptitious way to the state cashier’s window to change money.

“Thomas, what are you doing?” he asked me with basso incredulity.

“I want to get a bottle of vodka, from the store there.”

In the major hotels were stores where, to the chagrin of the Polish populace, tourists and Poles of status in the regime could buy luxury items, including the best of Polish vodka, Wyborowa and Pieprzówka, brands which were normally exported to the USSR.

“Look, I’m just doing it for the experience of it,” I told him, though he knew by now that I was a much heartier drinker than most Jews were, and would find a robust vodka comforting in the evenings.

“Give me your money!” growled Leopold. “I’ll change it for you, three times the rate! Why do you go to these crazy little money shops? What is it you have there? A hundred dollars?”

“Poldek,” I told him, “I don’t like this. You’re a grandfather, for God’s sake. How about you let me do it legally?”

“
Legal?
Tell me what is legal. What the Russian sons-of-bitch want? Give it to me. I know how it works here.”

“How will it work at the airport, when I get arrested?”

“Thomas, dear friend, why do you always worry ahead? Do you think I will let you get in trouble? You? My brother?”

“Even you can’t stop it. I’m going to change this legally.”

He turned lugubrious. “And so you give in to Jaruzelski? So you don’t trust me.”

“Don’t try that. Of course I trust you.”

“Then give me the money.”

And so the dispute went. It was a sense that our debate was becoming public, and attracting the attention both of the reception desk staff and the state’s cashier behind his grille, that caused me to slip the notes to him.

“Let me come with you,” I urged.

“Don’t be stupid,” Poldek told me.

“You’re not a young man, Poldek. I insist.”

“I like you like a brother, Thomas, but you haven’t lived through things. You volunteer too much information and you talk too loud. You wouldn’t have lasted two weeks with the Nazis. They loved killing guys like you. Poetic guys.”

“What if your black-market man is a policeman in plain clothes?” I whispered. “An agent provocateur?”

“And you think I couldn’t tell the difference?”

Poldek, law-abiding Eagle Scout master of Beverly Hills, saw no reason to respect the laws of Poland as they stood in the late winter of 1981. Soon he was back with the promised zloty, and I bought my bottle of Wyborowa from a lean shopwoman whose weary eyes indicated she might benefit from some luxury items herself.

When Poldek proposed a side trip to Lodz, an industrial city to the west of Warsaw, he had a frank purpose: to visit the graves of Misia’s grandparents and her father, the good physician. Misia’s mother, Dr. Maria Lewinson, had an unknown, unmarked grave somewhere in the East. Misia’s grandparents and father had been worldly successes and assimilating Jews, and they had reached their honored graves in the late 1930s at the end of a normal life span, before the cataclysm. It was because Misia’s parents had heard the stories of members of the Camp of National Unity, who resisted the entry of Jews into universities by slashing the faces of pretty Jewish undergraduates, that they had sent her to more subtly anti-Semitic Vienna to study. In addition, Polish universities had a
numerus clausus
(a closed number) for Jewish students, which would have made it difficult for Misia to study in her home country.

I knew that a brief journey to Lodz would be good background, since many of the people who turned up in the Kraków ghetto came from Lodz’s quarter of a million Jews. Lodz was fascinating to me also because of all I had read of a remarkable figure named Mordechai Haim Rumkowski, the
Ältester
(Elder) of the
Judenrat
, the Jewish Council in the Lodz ghetto which liaised with the Nazi rulers. Rumkowski had believed that the ghetto could become a semi-sovereign place where the Jews could live fruitfully for the duration by making themselves useful to the Nazi regime in Governor-General Frank’s occupied zone. It was a false hope that many of the
Judenräte
held at the start of the ghetto phase of the Nazi process. On the basis of that dream, Rumkowski utterly misunderstood his status and grotesquely entitled himself His Royal Highness, Prince Rumkowski of Litzmannstadt Ghetto—
Litzmannstadt
being the German name for Lodz. He produced his own ghetto currency, with his image on the notes, and ghetto postage stamps for his postal service, which he named the
Judenpost
. No doubt he was a vain man, this king of the Jews within the Lodz ghetto. But then the Jews of Europe had never met such obliterating intentions as they did in the case of the SS, and thought that, as in the past, they could bargain their way out—sacrificing some casualties, perhaps, but allowing a strong Jewish remnant to survive.

Rumkowski ended up exhorting his populace in the summer of 1944: “Jews of the ghetto, come to your senses! Volunteer for the transports!” When the ghetto was liberated in January 1945, fewer than nine hundred Jews were found alive. Rumkowski himself had by then been forced onto a transport and vanished.

Marek drove us. It was meant to be spring, but if most of the snow had gone the vividness of spring had not yet arrived. The forest looked cold, the farms hunched and secretive. Somewhere in the seeping trees near Lodz, Poldek told Marek to stop and rest, and took me to a sedate but decaying prewar cemetery graced by its own necropolis railway station where grass grew between the lines and on the platform.

The redheaded cemetery caretaker emerged from his ram-shackle residence in that abandoned station house at the cemetery gate. He had the shaggy look of a hunter. Poldek told me that he always left this man some money for the upkeep of Misia’s father’s and grandparents’ graves. The sole visitors, we walked the leaf-muted avenues of the old cemetery, reading the Polish and Hebrew names, admiring splendid monuments and crypts. Poldek found the burial places of Misia’s father and her grandparents, muttered that the caretaker had done a passable job of maintenance, and kept a mourning silence with me. Then he coughed.

“Do your Catholic thing,” he told me.

“What Catholic thing?”

“Make your cross sign, Thomas. They won’t mind.”

Though he had overestimated my devoutness, I didn’t see why not, so I did it. My tribalism met his. Then, returning to the caretaker’s house, Poldek paid him in American dollars for another year’s care.

We visited the gray streets of the old ghetto, and then Marek turned our car southeast to Kraków. A thin sun dared fall on the farmlands, which suddenly looked pleasant, timeless and enduring. On the road toward Czestochowa, Marek began to pull up behind, and then pass, truckloads of Russian conscripts. They looked bored and blank, unmarked and extremely young as they stared at us over the tailgates of their vehicles. We were still passing them when we skirted the dark pinnacle of the church-fortress shrine of Czestochowa’s miraculous Black Virgin. It struck me that this holy place was sinisterly close to Auschwitz, where other Jewish women had not been venerated at all. But again Poldek seemed awed by the Black Virgin’s potent cult, and kept a reverent silence as Marek blessed himself and touched the rosary beads and scapular which hung from his mirror. Poldek told me, “The Polish pope has a great devotion to the Black Virgin.”

From here on, I began to feel Poldek’s palpable excitement as we approached Kraków from the west. Even the thought that his mother and father had been murdered at relatively nearby Tarnów in an early experiment with carbon monoxide, and his sister in some other death camp, did not seem to restrain the homecoming. The dead had been, in his mind, vindicated by history, and he knew that was all that could happen on earth.

We were staying at Eastern Europe’s only Holiday Inn, whose manager was an excellent friend of Poldek’s and another of his parcel receivers. I was a little disappointed we weren’t staying at the Europa, a hotel right on the market square in the town center, or at the Cracovia. Both were decayed grand hotels much patronized in their heyday by Oskar. The Holiday Inn was, however, only a short distance from all we wanted to visit, and more architecturally pleasant than the name might imply. The young manager was summoned to the door immediately for our arrival, and the manager’s respect, combined with the Orbis badge, greased our entry into the hotel. Given our room keys, we said good-bye to wiry little Marek, the friend of Walesa, with fraternal best wishes and embraces. For our further adventures, we intended to hire a Fiat—in its various models the most common car seen on the streets of Polish towns.

After we had exchanged heavy hugs with the worthy Marek, and were preparing to go to our rooms, Poldek gave me a solemn warning. If beautiful Polish women came to my door offering themselves in the middle of the night, I was not to accept, since they were certainly agents provocateurs.