Searching for Schindler (11 page)

Seven

Kraków, not heavily bombed, taken without damage by the Germans in 1939 and similarly overrun by the Russians in 1945, had been left largely intact by the war, and as we stepped out for a walk that night, Poldek uttered his hymns to this city as if ghosts did not inhabit it. He pointed out the ancient cloth hall, the marvelously ornate Sukiennice, and St. Mary’s Church in the town square, the Rynek Glówny, with a citizen’s enthusiasm. Indeed, everything looked gracious here, and built for a happier and more elegant life than history had provided.

Kraków was a city of churches, Romanesque and Gothic, and they were all full of people even in the middle of the day. But it also possessed ancient synagogues, some dating back to the fifteenth century, which in 1981 were abandoned and largely going to ruin. The old residential streets around the square mimicked in some cases the Rococo of Vienna and then the solid Austro-Hungarian style of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even so, because of air pollution damage to its stones, the city lacked the film-set atmospherics of old Prague, and Poldek told me it had deteriorated since the period of Nazi occupation when the paradoxical Schindler lived in a good apartment in Straszewskiego Street. After the war the great Stalinist steelworks and planned city of Nowa Huta to the east meant that the gargoyles of St. Mary’s, the groins of the stone cloth hall, and the buttresses of the cathedral on Wawel Hill were (and still are today) gritty, their surfaces smudged and eroded by acid rain. Poldek believed it was a deliberate Kremlin policy, to attack the ancient pride of fashionable Kraków with poisonous Stalinist grime. The Rynek Glówny, despite the grime, looked to me vast and beautiful and ancient, all of which it was—“Kraków’s drawing room,” people called it. But of course, Stalin delighted in turning such bourgeois pretensions on their head.

Poldek, as if trying to reconcile me with the Church, graciously insisted on my visiting all the churches with him, and was solemn and prayerful in both splendidly lofty chancel and in minuscule chapel. I was aware that many of his fellow survivors would see the Mariacki, St. Mary’s Church, not as a glory of medieval and Renaissance art, but as perhaps yet another pulpit from which for centuries the Jews had been denounced as Christ killers.

After the churches, and after looking at the artworks and linens for sale in the Sukiennice, we walked south to the Vistula and stared up at the castle atop a hill on the riverbank. We began to climb. This was the Wawel, home to Polish dynasties, and here Hitler’s darling, former Reich minister without portfolio, SS Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Hans Frank, governed the occupied Government General of Poland territories, the more southerly sector of Poland with Kraków as its capital, for nearly the entirety of the war. It was under him that the major experiments in colonization and resettlement of German populations took place, and under him that “the Jewish problem” was addressed most directly. Under Frank, too, the Polish intelligentsia and resistance were slaughtered to the tune of three million, as well as nearly the totality of Poland’s Jews. Yet again, the survivor Leopold Pfefferberg took me on the first day, and many times after, to the Wawel, and expatiated on its obvious glories, especially its cathedral.

An immense keep faced the ornate cathedral, the church of Poldek’s “Polish Pope” (
Polish Pop
) when he was Cardinal-Archbishop of Kraków. The keep and its apartments were more melodramatic and expressive of power than any film location spotter or artistic director could possibly need. The Wawel was said in prehistory to be the lair of a dragon—his cave can be seen in the hill below. With Frank, of course, the demon emerged at last. It was very easy to imagine the glistening black of Frank’s limo-of-state rolling over these cobblestones toward the stateroom end of the castle square. He made a name for himself even after the war, while in prison, for converting to Catholicism and declaring, a penitent all too late, “A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased.”

But again, Poldek seemed to see the place as a site of retrieved Polish glory. “The Wawel was Polish a thousand years ago,” he said, “and it’s Polish again now.” We went into the cathedral to visit the tomb of St. Stanislav, patron saint of the nation, and then the Gothic sarcophagus of King Vladislav Jagiello, founder of the Jagiellonian University. I sometimes wondered whether, if Poldek stopped viewing these wonders so positively, he would be destroyed by their significance for his vanished family and himself.

We strolled from the Wawel to Straszewskiego Street, where Schindler lived at Number 7, a building a little exorbitantly decorated in a nineteenth-century sort of way, but in a good part of town. His apartment had been confiscated from a middle-class Jewish family named the Nussbaums, who would end up on Schindler’s list. Straszewskiego ran, park to one side, stylish nineteenth-century buildings on the other, directly from the Wawel.

Before the war, the Pfefferberg family had lived in a similarly comfortable but older Austro-Hungarian-style apartment building at 48 Grodzka Street, on the other, eastern side of the Rynek. Standing outside the building—painted cream, which suited its architecture—Poldek was now overcome by memories of his father, of his mother the interior designer, and of his young sister, all of them annulled from Europe’s history.

From the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Congress of Vienna created a small and sovereign republic of Kraków, a free city somewhat like Danzig before World War II, Jews who were considered to have assimilated were permitted to live in Gentile streets such as this end of Grodzka. Under the Austrians, Poldek Pfefferberg’s forebears continued to live in the fashionable parts of Kraków, a little way from the old Jewish ghetto of Kazimierz. Poldek’s cream apartment building, of a design one would see in Prague or Vienna itself, stood as a symbol of the tension Jews faced during European history—between secular assimilation and Orthodox memory. This might have been no more the central question of German and Polish Jewry than in the late nineteenth century. The Jews who assimilated into the professions and into Gentile areas hoped that by professional competence and civic loyalty, combined with restrained observance of their religion, they could show themselves to be good citizens of Europe, and so defeat abiding anti-Semitism. Jewish people of the Pfefferbergs’ background believed they were enhancing, not diminishing, their Jewishness by the way they lived within the broader culture. Hence Poldek, with a now chastened joy and many understandable references to “son-of-bitch Hans Frank” and other remembered Nazis, stood before the family house where his mother had run her interior decorating office. It was clear now that Poldek saw it unequivocally as home, and also realized that he had been separated from it by treachery. Here, on the run from his guards at Kraków’s Glowny station, Poldek first met Oskar, when Herr Schindler came to consult Mrs. Pfefferberg on the interior design of his apartment.

On the street in 1981, as men in their Polish caps passed and looked at us obliquely from under their eyebrows with their perpetual, soul-draining caution, Poldek told me a story which showed how the expropriation of Jewish possessions, the icons of home, still resonated in his dreams. When his mother, father, sister and he had been expelled from this apartment in December 1939 to move to the ghetto, they were forced to leave behind all the furniture. Among the most prized family pieces was a silver lazy Susan, a centerpiece of the Pfefferberg table, ornately wrought by silversmiths and inherited from nineteenth-century grandparents. It would be a small item in the vast SS confiscations, yet infused with the spirit of a family. It was the object, said Poldek, he always looked for in the flea markets of Paris, in the antique shops of London and Prague and New York. He still believed his eyes would alight upon it one day and retrieve it as a memento of his sister, restoring possession to a girl who, caught with her husband living on Aryan papers in Warsaw and shot in Pawiak Prison, had been denied all possessions in death.

Pfefferberg’s parents had not been markedly Orthodox Jews but, though they lived in fashionable Grodzka Street, were only a short walk from where Jewish Kraków began, an older and more benign ghetto than the Podgórze ghetto the Nazis set up. This old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, named to honor King Kazimierz the Great in 1335, was in the old days separated from Kraków by a stream of the Vistula, but since then the growing city had expanded to include it. When we visited, it was a wistful quarter, with only its ancient synagogues to proclaim its vanished Jewishness. Poldek and I walked up Szeroka Street, mounted the steps of the deserted and locked-up Old Synagogue, Stara Boznica, of the late fourteenth century. Silence ached in its vestibule and in the square it sat on. It was a fascinating building, with a Romanesque look to it, and though it was a tourist site by the time I wrote this sentence, it was certainly not in dour, cramped, hungry 1981. For Poldek it evoked childhood, given his parents had brought him here for Yom Kippur, jollying along their vocal, muscular, fasting son.

It had its strong connection with Schindler, too. Itzhak Stern, the accountant, would later say that Schindler had given him prior warning of the first SS outrage in Kazimierz. An SS party from an
Einsatzgruppe
—an elite “Special Duty Squad”—and policemen of the SD, the
Sicherheitsdienst
or security police, who were also the Party’s intelligence wing, moved in to lead the first large raid on the old Jewish ghetto in December 1939. Jewish apartments were plundered, but since this was the first raid of all, people thought that they had the right of protest against such confiscations. It was the hour of prayer at the Old Synagogue, and a number of Jewish householders and families who were not engaged in the prayers in the synagogue were driven there. All were shot, and then the synagogue was set fire to, but was not burned down.

Further up the market square, still in Szeroka Street, Poldek led me to the sixteenth-century Remuh Synagogue. This synagogue was also deserted except for the supervision of one aged Orthodox Jew. In the shaded cemetery, the headstones of Jews from 1551 to about 1800 are crowded in, inscribed with Hebrew. Lining the pathways and shrubbery were cracked gravestones shot up by the Nazis that evening in December 1939, or recovered from the old Jerozolimska Synagogue in Plaszów. The gravestone fragments from Jerozolimska had been used with both symbolic and engineering intent by the SS to pave the road which led into Plaszów concentration camp. Brought back here after the war, the fragments which could not be fitted together made a wall for a circular wooded shrubbery. Similar pieces leaned round the inside of the high walls of the little cemetery, which had the air of a place unvisited, of deaths forgotten, of gravestones unread.

Kraków.
This wonderful city had been Schindler’s World War II oyster. He did not go to the market square, however, for its beautiful 700-year-old cloth hall, but to visit the hotels and bars, as well as jazz cellars operating despite official Nazi condemnation of the genre as decadent and Negroid.

Many of Schindler’s German peers in Kraków, including Ingrid, whom I had interviewed on Long Island, were
Treuhänder
, German managers put in place to run confiscated Jewish businesses. Schindler, however, always boasted to survivors, and stated in a document written in the late 1950s, that he had taken over a bankrupt enamel business named Rekord, choosing not to be restricted by managing a business as a
Treuhänder
under the regulatory and corrupt German Trust Agency.

I have wondered since, more than I did when writing the book, if
all
the money Schindler gathered to acquire and crank up the business came secretly from Jewish parties whose cash was officially frozen. We know from a number of testimonies that at least a good deal of it did come from these sources. But some might also have come from the Abwehr, German military intelligence.

According to an excellent documentary directed by the Englishman John Blair, sparked by the book and appearing after it, as an Abwehr agent Oskar had played a large part in providing a pretext for the Germans to invade Poland. Blair had managed to find Majola, Goeth’s mistress, something Poldek and I did not accomplish. She was dying of emphysema at the time Blair made his documentary, 1983, and comes across on screen as a piteous figure, gasping before the camera. “We were all good Nazis,” she wheezed, so close to death that she was not afraid to state these things. “Oskar was a good Nazi.” She claimed that in the weeks before the outbreak of war, a memo was sent around to all Abwehr offices asking whether it was possible for anyone to acquire Polish army uniforms. There were no specifics, of course, about the reason for which they were needed, but Schindler—who as a tractor sales rep traveled over the border into Poland all the time, and was based anyhow right on the border at the Abwehr office in Ostrava in Sudetenland—undertook to acquire some. These, claimed Majola, rightly or wrongly, were the Polish uniforms German soldiers wore when they attacked an ethnic German radio station just over the German-Polish border and killed its
volksdeutsch
—ethnic German—staff. These murders were used by Dr. Goebbels and Hitler to justify the German army’s advance into Poland to protect their fellow Germans.

If Majola was right, then Schindler had a lot of credit with the Abwehr, and his industrial career would have been partly underwritten by them. Indeed, his Abwehr handlers, Lieutenant Eberhard Gebauer and Lieutenant Martin Plathe, were often in Schindler’s company, and he considered them very decent fellows, as indeed they seem to have been. Now Oskar, as an agent-cum-businessman in Kraków, passed on to the Abwehr’s Breslau office reports on the plans and behavior of their rivals in the SS, including what he knew about the development of extermination programs. Oskar’s Kraków was a complicated place, but he relished it.

Oskar’s camp, the Jewish ghetto site and Plaszów were beyond the Vistula and to the south. Poldek and I made our way by tram down Lwowska Street, which had once bisected the Jewish ghetto. Getting off, we walked by way of a few dismal, semi-industrial streets very unlike the glory of the Stare Miasto area near the town square. So we came to undistinguished 4 Lipowa Street, where Schindler had had his office, works and, ultimately, the barracks of DEF, Deutsche Email Fabrik, German Enamel Company, commonly called Emalia by the Jews of Kraków. I recognized the building at once from a photograph Poldek had acquired and shown me—one of Oskar and his office staff standing in front of the entryway of DEF. Oskar stands in the middle of the group, nearly side-on. One can see the front office windows upstairs, from which DEF was run. The staff ranged around him includes Victoria Klonowska, his Polish secretary and red-haired beauty of his front office, with whom he conducted a close relationship simultaneously with his association with Ingrid. Some of his Jewish accountants are there too. A Nazi flag swings from either side of the factory’s roofed gateway behind him. Above the entryway, adequate to admit and send forth truckloads of enamelware, someone has painted
4
JAHRE D.E.F
.
(Four Years of DEF). This impressive and well-grouped picture was taken in the spring of 1944, the last spring of Emalia, and ultimately Spielberg decided to restage it, as he would restage others of Oskar’s and Titsch’s photographs, in the ultimate, undreamt-of except by Poldek, film.