The family’s jewelry had been seized, and their radio. He and his family were forbidden entry to the center of Cracow, denied any travel by train. They could use only segregated trolley cars. His wife and daughter and sons were subject to intermittent roundups for snow shoveling or other compulsory labor. You never knew, when you were forced into the back of a truck, if the absence would be a short or long one, or what sort of hair-trigger madmen might be supervising the work you would be forced to. Under this sort of regimen you felt that life offered no footholds, that you were slithering into a pit which had no bottom. But perhaps the ghetto was the bottom, the point at which it was possible to take organized thought.
Besides, the Jews of Cracow were accustomed—in a way that could best be described as congenital— to the idea of a ghetto. And now that it had been decided, the very word had a soothing, ancestral ring. Their grandfathers had not been permitted to emerge from the ghetto of Kazimierz until 1867, when Franz Josef signed a decree permitting them to live wherever they wished in the city. Cynics said that the Austrians had needed to open up Kazimierz, socketed as it was in the elbow of the river so close to Cracow, so that Polish laborers could find accommodation close to their places of work. But Franz Josef was nonetheless revered by the older people from Kazimierz as energetically as he had been in the childhood household of Oskar Schindler.
Although their liberty had come so late, there was at the same time among the older Cracow Jews a nostalgia for the old ghetto of Kazimierz. A ghetto implied certain squalors, a crowding in tenements, a sharing of bathroom facilities, disputes over drying space on clotheslines. Yet it also consecrated the Jews to their own specialness, to a richness of shared scholarship, to songs and Zionist talk, elbow to elbow, in coffeehouses rich in ideas if not in cream. Evil rumors emanated from the ghettos of Łódź and Warsaw, but the Podgórze ghetto as planned was more generous with space, for if you superimposed it on a map of the Centrum, you found that the ghetto was in area about half the size of the Old City—by no means enough space, but not quite strangulation.
There was also in the edict a sedative clause that promised to protect the Jews from their Polish countrymen. Since the early 1930’s, a willfully orchestrated racial contest had prevailed in Poland. When the Depression began and farm prices fell, the Polish government had sanctioned a range of anti-Semitic political groups of the kind that saw the Jews as the base of all their economic troubles.
Sanacja, Marshal Pilsudski’s Moral Cleansing Party, made an alliance after the old man’s death with the Camp of National Unity, a right-wing Jew-baiting group. Prime Minister Skladkowski, on the floor of the Parliament in Warsaw, declared, “Economic war on the Jews? All right!” Rather than give the peasants land reform, Sanacja encouraged them to look at the Jewish stalls on market day as the symbol and total explanation of Polish rural poverty. There were pogroms against the Jewish population in a series of towns, beginning in Grodno in 1935. The Polish legislators also entered the struggle, and Jewish industries were starved under new laws on bank credit. Craft guilds closed their lists to Jewish artisans, and the universities introduced a quota, or what they themselves—strong in the classics—called numerus clausus aut nullus (a closed number or nil), on the entry of Jewish students. Faculties gave way to National Unity insistence that Jews be appointed special benches in the quadrangle and be exiled to the left side of the lecture halls. Commonly enough in Polish universities, the pretty and brilliant daughters of city Jewry emerged from lecture halls to have their faces savaged by a quick razor stroke delivered by a lean, serious youth from the Camp of National Unity.
In the first days of the German Occupation, the conquerors had been astounded by the willingness of Poles to point out Jewish households, to hold a prayer-locked Jew still while a German docked the Orthodox beard with scissors or, pinking the facial flesh as well, with an infantry bayonet. In March 1941, therefore, the promise to protect the ghetto dwellers from Polish national excess fell on the ear almost credibly.
Although there was no great spontaneous joy among the Jews of Cracow as they packed for the move to Podgórze, there were strange elements of homecoming to it, as well as that sense of arriving at a limit beyond which, with any luck, you wouldn’t be further uprooted or tyrannized. Enough so that even some people from the villages around Cracow, from Wieliczka, from Niepolomice, from Lipnica, Murowana, and Tyniec hurried to town lest they be locked out on March 20 and find themselves in a comfortless landscape. For the ghetto was by its nature, almost by definition, habitable, even if subject to intermittent attack. The ghetto represented stasis instead of flux.
The ghetto would introduce a minor inconvenience in Oskar Schindler’s life. It was usual for him to leave his luxury apartment in Straszewskiego, pass the limestone lump of the Wawel stuck in the mouth of the city like a cork in a bottle, and so roll down through Kazimierz, over the Kosciuszko bridge and left toward his factory in Zablocie. Now that route would be blocked by the ghetto walls. It was a minor problem, but it made the idea of maintaining an apartment on the top floor of his office building in Lipowa Street more reasonable. It wasn’t such a bad place, built in the style of Walter Gropius. Lots of glass and light, fashionable cubic bricks in the entranceway. Whenever he did travel between the city and Zablocie in those March days before the deadline, he would see the Jews of Kazimierz packing, and on Stradom Street would pass, early in the grace period, families pushing barrows piled with chairs, mattresses, and clocks toward the ghetto. Their families had lived in Kazimierz since the time it was an island separated from the Centrum by a stream called Stara Wisła. Since, in fact, the time Kazimier the Great had invited them to Cracow when, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death. Oskar surmised that their ancestors would have turned up in Cracow like that, pushing a barrowful of bedding, more than five hundred years before. Now they were leaving, it seemed, with the same barrowful. Kazimier’s invitation had been cancelled. During those morning journeys across town, Oskar noticed that the plan was for the city trolleys to go on rolling down Lwówska Street, through the middle of the ghetto. All walls facing the trolley line were being bricked up by Polish workmen, and where there had been open spaces, cement walls were raised. As well, the trolleys would have their doors closed as they entered the ghetto and could not stop until they emerged again in the Umwelt, the Aryan world, at the corner of Lwówska and Św Kingi Street. Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage. And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation złoty or a message in code for the partisans. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.
From March 20, Oskar’s Jewish workers would not receive any wages and were meant to live entirely by their rations. Instead he would pay a fee to SS headquarters in Cracow. Both Oskar and Madritsch were uneasy about that, for they knew the war would end and the slaveholders, just as in America, would be shamed and stripped naked. The dues he would pay to the police chiefs were the standard SS Main Administrative and Economic Office fees—7.50 Reichsmarks per day for a skilled worker, 5 RM. for unskilled and women. They were, by a margin, cheaper rates than those which operated on the open labor market. But for Oskar and Julius Madritsch both, the moral discomfort outweighed the economic advantage. The meeting of his wage bill was the least of Oskar’s worries that year. Besides, he was never an ideal capitalist. His father had accused him often in his youth of being reckless with money. While he was a mere sales manager, he’d maintained two cars, hoping that Hans would get to hear of it and be shocked. Now, in Cracow, he could afford to keep a stableful—a Belgian Minerva, a Maybach, an Adler cabriolet, a BMW.