At last Herr Schindler put the accounts of Rekord back into his breast pocket, stood up, and led Itzhak Stern out into the main office. They stood there for a time, among the typists and clerks, growing philosophical, as Oskar liked to do. It was here that Oskar brought up the matter of Christianity’s having its base in Judaism, a subject which for some reason, perhaps even because of his boyhood friendship with the Kantors in Zwittau, interested him. Stern spoke softly, at length, learnedly. He had published articles in journals of comparative religion. Oskar, who wrongly fancied himself a philosopher, had found an expert. The scholar himself, Stern, whom some thought a pedant, found Oskar’s understanding shallow, a mind genial by nature but without much conceptual deftness. Not that Stern was about to complain. An ill-assorted friendship was firmly established. So that Stern found himself drawing an analogy, as Oskar’s own father had, from previous empires and giving his own reasons why Adolf Hitler could not succeed. The opinion slipped out before Stern could withdraw it. The other Jews in the office bowed their heads and stared fixedly at their worksheets. Schindler did not seem disturbed.
Near the end of their talk, Oskar did say something that had novelty. In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He’d hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.
“Of course, of course,” said Oskar Schindler.
Itzhak, rightly or wrongly, always believed that it was at that moment that he had dropped the right seed in the furrow.
CHAPTER 3
There is another Cracow Jew who gives an account of meeting Schindler that autumn—and of coming close to killing him. This man’s name was Leopold (poldek) Pfefferberg. He had been a company commander in the Polish Army during the recent tragic campaign. After suffering a leg wound during the battle for the river San, he’d limped around the Polish hospital in Przemyśl, helping with the other wounded. He was no doctor, but a high school physical-education teacher who had graduated from the Jagiellonian University of Cracow and so had some knowledge of anatomy. He was resilient; he was self-confident, twenty-seven years old, and built like a wedge.
With some hundreds of other captured Polish officers from Przemyśl, Pfefferberg was on his way to Germany when his train drew into his home city of Cracow and the prisoners were herded into the first-class waiting room, to remain there until new transport could be provided. His home was ten blocks away. To a practical young man, it seemed outrageous that he could not go out into Pawia Street and catch a No. 1 trolley home. The bucolic-looking Wehrmacht guard at the door seemed a provocation. Pfefferberg had in his breast pocket a document signed by the German hospital authority of Przemyśl indicating that he was free to move about the city with ambulance details tending to the wounded of both armies. It was spectacularly formal, stamped and signed. He took it out now and, going up to the guard, thrust it at him.
“Can you read German?” Pfefferberg demanded. This sort of ploy had to be done right, of course. You had to be young; you had to be persuasive; you had to have retained, undiminished by summary defeat, a confident bearing of a particularly Polish nature—something disseminated to the Polish officer corps, even to those rare members of it who were Jewish, by its plentiful aristocrats.
The man had blinked. “Of course I can read German,” he said. But after he’d taken the document he held it like a man who couldn’t read at all—held it like a slice of bread.
Pfefferberg explained in German how the document declared his right to go out and attend to the ill. All the guard could see was a proliferation of official stamps. Quite a document. With a wave of the head, he indicated the door.
Pfefferberg was the only passenger on the No. 1 trolley that morning. It was not even 6 A.M. The conductor took his fare without a fuss, for in the city there were still many Polish troops not yet processed by the Wehrmacht. The officers had to register, that was all. The trolley swung around the Barbakan, through the gate in the ancient wall, down Floriańska to the Church of St. Mary, across the central square, and so within five minutes into Grodzka Street. Nearing his parents’ apartment at No. 48, as he had as a boy he jumped from the car before the air brakes went on and let the momentum of the jump, enhanced by that of the trolley, bring him up with a soft thud against the doorjamb.
After his escape, he had lived not too uncomfortably in the apartments of friends, visiting Grodzka 48 now and then. The Jewish schools opened briefly—they would be closed again within six weeks—and he even returned to his teaching job. He was sure the Gestapo would take some time to come looking for him, and so he applied for ration books. He began to dispose of jewelry—as an agent and in his own right—on the black market that operated in Cracow’s central square, in the arcades of the Sukiennice and beneath the two unequal spires of St. Mary’s Church. Trade was brisk, among the Poles themselves but more so for the Polish Jews. Their ration books, full of precancelled coupons, entitled them to only two-thirds of the meat and half of the butter allowance that went to Aryan citizens, while all the cocoa and rice coupons were cancelled. And so the black market which had operated through centuries of occupation and the few decades of Polish autonomy became the food and income source and the readiest means of resistance for respectable bourgeois citizens, especially those who, like Leopold Pfefferberg, were street-wise.
He presumed that he would soon be traveling over the ski routes around Zakopane in the Tatras, across Slovakia’s slender neck into Hungary or Rumania. He was equipped for the journey: he had been a member of the Polish national ski team. On one of the high shelves of the porcelain stove in his mother’s apartment he kept an elegant little .22 pistol—armory both for the proposed escape and in case he was ever trapped inside the apartment by the Gestapo.
With this pearl-handled semitoy, Pfefferberg came close to killing Oskar Schindler one chilly day in November. Schindler, in double-breasted suit, Party badge on the lapel, decided to call on Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg, Poldek’s mother, to offer her a commission.
He had been given by the Reich housing authorities a fine modern apartment in Straszewskiego Street. It had previously been the property of a Jewish family by the name of Nussbaum. Such allocations were carried out without any compensation to the previous occupant. On the day Oskar came calling, Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg herself was worried that it would happen to her apartment in Grodzka.
A number of Schindler’s friends would claim later—though it is not possible to prove it—that Oskar had gone looking for the dispossessed Nussbaums at their lodgings in Podgórze and had given them a sum close to 50,000 złoty in compensation. With this sum, it is said, the Nussbaums bought themselves an escape to Yugoslavia. Fifty thousand złoty signified substantial dissent; but there would be other similar acts of dissent by Oskar before Christmas. Some friends would in fact come to say that generosity was a disease in Oskar, a frantic thing, one of his passions. He would tip taxi drivers twice the fare on the meter. But this has to be said too—that he thought the Reich housing authorities were unjust and told Stern so, not when the regime got into trouble but even in that, its sweetest autumn.