In any case, Mrs. Pfefferberg had no idea what the tall, well-tailored German was doing at her door. He could have been there to ask for her son, who happened to be in the kitchen just then. He could have been there to commandeer her apartment, and her decorating business, and her antiques, and her French tapestry.
In fact, by the December feast of Hanukkah the German police would, on the orders of the housing office, get around to the Pfefferbergs, arriving at their door and then ordering them, shivering in the cold, downstairs onto the pavement of Grodzka. When Mrs. Pfefferberg asked to go back for a coat, she would be refused; when Mr. Pfefferberg made for a bureau to get an ancestral gold watch, he would be punched in the jaw. “I have witnessed terrible things in the past,” Hermann Góring had said; “little chauffeurs and Gauleiters have profited so much from these transactions that they now have about half a million.” The effect of such easy pickings as Mr. Pfefferberg’s gold watch on the moral fiber of the Party might distress Góring. But in Poland that year, it was the style of the Gestapo to be unaccountable for the contents of apartments.
When Schindler first came to the Pfefferbergs’ second-floor apartment, however, the family were still in tenuous occupation. Mrs. Pfefferberg and her son were talking among the samples and bolts of fabric and wallpaper when Herr Schindler knocked. Leopold was not worried. There were two front entrances to the apartment—the business door and the kitchen door faced each other across a landing. Leopold retreated to the kitchen and looked through the crack in the door at the visitor. He saw the formidable size of the man, the fashionable cut of his suit. He returned to his mother in the living room. He had the feeling, he said, that the man was Gestapo. When you let him in at the office door, I can always slip out through the kitchen. Mrs. Mina Pfefferberg was trembling. She opened the office door. She was, of course, listening for sounds along the corridor.
Pfefferberg had in fact picked up the pistol and put it into his belt and intended to wed the sound of his exit to the sound of Herr Schindler’s entry. But it seemed folly to go without knowing what the German official wanted. There was a chance the man would have to be killed, and then there would need to be a concerted family flight into Rumania.
If the magnetic drift to the event had drawn Pfefferberg to take out his pistol and fire, the death, the flight, the reprisals would have been considered unexceptional and appropriate to the history of the month. Herr Schindler would have been briefly mourned and summarily avenged. And this would have been, of course, the brisk ending to all Oskar’s potentialities. And back in Zwittau they would have said, “Was it someone’s husband?”
The voice surprised the Pfefferbergs. It was calm, quiet, suited to the doing of business, even to the asking of favors. They had got used in past weeks to the tone of decree and summary expropriation. This man sounded fraternal. That was somehow worse. But it intrigued you too. Pfefferberg had slipped from the kitchen and concealed himself behind the double doors of the dining room. He could see a sliver of the German. You’re Mrs. Pfefferberg? the German asked. You were recommended to me by Herr Nussbaum. I have just taken over an apartment in Straszewskiego Street, and I would like to have it redecorated.
Mina Pfefferberg kept the man at the door. She spoke so incoherently that the son took pity on her and appeared in the doorway, his jacket buttoned up over the weapon. He asked the visitor in and at the same time whispered assurances in Polish to his mother.
Now Oskar Schindler gave his name. There was some measuring up, for Schindler could tell that Pfefferberg had appeared to perform an act of primal protection. Schindler showed his respect by talking now through the son as through an interpreter.
“My wife is coming up from Czechoslovakia,” he said, “and I’d like the place redone in her style.” He said the Nussbaums had maintained the place excellently, but they went in for heavy furniture and somber colors. Mrs.
Schindler’s tastes were livelier—a little French, a little Swedish.
Mrs. Pfefferberg had recovered enough to say that she didn’t know—it was a busy time with Christmas coming up. Leopold could tell there might be an instinctive resistance in her to developing a German clientele; but the Germans might be the only race this season with enough confidence in the future to go in for interior design. And Mrs. Pfefferberg needed a good contract—her husband had been removed from his job and worked now for a pittance in the housing office of the Gemeinde, the Jewish welfare bureau.
Within two minutes the men were chatting like friends. The pistol in Pfefferberg’s belt had now been relegated to the status of armament for some future, remote emergency. There was no doubt that Mrs. Pfefferberg was going to do the Schindler apartment, no expense spared, and when that was settled, Schindler mentioned that Leopold Pfefferberg might like to come around to the apartment to discuss other business. “There is the possibility that you can advise me on acquiring local merchandise,” Herr Schindler said. “For example, your very elegant blue shirt… I don’t know where to begin to look for that kind of thing myself.” His ingenuousness was a ploy, but Pfefferberg appreciated it. “The stores, as you know, are empty,” murmured Oskar like a hint.
Leopold Pfefferberg was the sort of young man who survived by raising the stakes. “Herr Schindler, these shirts are extremely expensive, I hope you understand. They cost twenty-five złoty each.”
He had multiplied the price by five. There was all at once an amused knowingness in Herr Schindler—not enough, though, to imperil the tenuous friendship or remind Pfefferberg that he was armed. “I could probably get you some,” said Pfefferberg, “if you give me your size. But I’m afraid my contacts will require money in advance.”
Herr Schindler, still with that knowingness in his eyes, took out his wallet and handed Pfefferberg 200 Reichsmarks. The sum was flamboyantly too much and even at Pfefferberg’s inflated price would have bought shirts for a dozen tycoons. But Pfefferberg knew the game and did not blink. “You must give me your measurements,” he said. A week later, Pfefferberg brought a dozen silk shirts to Schindler’s apartment on Straszewskiego Street. There was a pretty German woman in the apartment who was introduced to Pfefferberg as Treuhänder of a Cracow hardware business. Then, one evening, Pfefferberg saw Oskar in the company of a blond and large-eyed Polish beauty. If there was a Frau Schindler, she did not appear even after Mrs. Pfefferberg had redecorated the place. Pfefferberg himself became one of Schindler’s most regular connections to that market in luxuries— silk, furnishings, jewelry—which flourished in the ancient town of Cracow.
CHAPTER 4
The next time Itzhak Stern met Oskar Schindler was on a morning in early December. Schindler’s application to the Polish Commercial Court of Cracow had already been filed, yet Oskar had the leisure to visit the offices of Buchheister and, after conferring with Aue, to stand near Stern’s desk in the outer office, clap his hands, and announce in a voice that sounded already tipsy, “Tomorrow, it’s going to start. Józefa and Izaaka Streets are going to know all about it!”
There were in Kazimierz a Józefa Street and an Izaaka Street. There were in every ghetto, and Kazimierz was the site of the old ghetto of Cracow, once an island ceded to the Jewish community by Kazimier the Great, now a near suburb nestled in an elbow of the Vistula River.