Pfefferberg not only had served briefly with the boy in the OD, but in the first year of his teaching career at Kosciuszko High School in Podgórze had taught his sister.
The boy looked up. Panie Pfefferberg, he murmured with a respect from those vanished days. As if the yard were full of practiced criminals, he asked what Panie Pfefferberg was doing here.
It’s nonsense, said Pfefferberg, but I haven’t got a Blauschein yet.
The boy shook his head. Follow me, he said. He walked Pfefferberg to a senior uniformed Schupo at the gate and saluted. He did not look heroic in his funny OD cap and with his skinny, vulnerable neck. Later, Pfefferberg supposed that that had given him greater credibility.
“This is Herr Pfefferberg from the Judenrat,” he lied with a deft combination of respect and authority. “He has been visiting some relatives.” The Schupo seemed bored by the mass of police work proceeding in the yard. Negligently he waved Pfefferberg out the gate. Pfefferberg had no time to thank the boy or to reflect on the mystery of why a child with a skinny neck will lie for you even unto death just because you taught his sister how to use the Roman rings.
Pfefferberg rushed straight to the Labor Office and broke into the waiting line. Behind the desk were Frauleins Skoda and Knosalla, two hearty Sudeten German girls.
“Liebchen, Liebchen,” he told Skoda, “they want to take me away because I don’t have the sticker. Look at me, I ask you.” (he was built like a bull, and had played hockey for his country and belonged to the Polish ski team.) “Am I not exactly the sort of fellow you’d like to keep around here?”
In spite of the crowds who’d given her no rest all day, Skoda raised her eyebrows and failed to suppress a smile. She took his Kennkarte. “I can’t help you, Herr Pfefferberg,” she told him. “They didn’t give it to you, so I can’t. A pity….”
“But you can give it to me, Liebchen,” he insisted in a loud, seductive, soap-opera voice. “I have trades, Liebchen, I have trades.”
Skoda said that only Herr Szepessi could help him, and it was impossible to get Pfefferberg in to see Szepessi. It would take days. “But you will get me in, Liebchen,” Pfefferberg insisted. And she did. That is where her reputation as a decent girl came from, because she abstracted from the massive drift of policy and could, even on a crowded day, respond to the individual face. A warty old man might not have done so well with her, however.
Herr Szepessi, who also had a humane reputation even though he serviced the monstrous machine, looked quickly at Pfefferberg’s permit, murmuring, “But we don’t need gym teachers.”
Pfefferberg had always refused Oskar’s offers of employment because he saw himself as an operator, an individualist. He didn’t want to work long shifts for small pay over in dreary Zablocie. But he could see now that the era of individuality was vanishing. People needed, as a staple of life, a trade. “I’m a metal polisher,” he told Szepessi. He had worked for short periods with a Podgórze uncle of his who ran a small metal factory in Rekawka.
Herr Szepessi eyed Pfefferberg from behind spectacles. “Now,” he said, “that’s a profession.” He took a pen, thoroughly crossing out HIGH SCHOOL PROFESSOR, cancelling the Jagiellonian education of which Pfefferberg was so proud, and over the top he wrote METAL POLISHER. He reached for a rubber stamp and a pot of paste and took from his desk a blue sticker. “Now,” he said, handing the document back to Pfefferberg—”now should you meet a Schupo, you can assure him that you’re a useful member of society.”
Later in the year they would send poor Szepessi to Auschwitz for being so persuadable.
CHAPTER 14
From diverse sources—from the policeman Toffel as well as drunken Bosch of Ostfaser, the SS textile operation, Oskar Schindler heard rumors that “procedures in the ghetto” (whatever that meant) were growing more intense. The SS were moving into Cracow some tough Sonderkommando units from Lublin, where they had already done sterling work in matters of racial purification. Toffel had suggested that unless Oskar wanted a break in production, he ought to set up some camp beds for his night shift until after the first Sabbath in June.
So Oskar set up dormitories in the offices and upstairs in the munitions section. Some of the night shift were happy to bed down there. Others had wives, children, parents waiting back in the ghetto. Besides, they had the Blauschein, the holy blue sticker, on their Kennkartes.
On June 3, Abraham Bankier, Oskar’s office manager, didn’t turn up at Lipowa Street. Schindler was still at home, drinking coffee in Straszewskiego Street, when he got a call from one of his secretaries. She’d seen Bankier marched out of the ghetto, not even stopping at Optima, straight to the Prokocim depot. There’d been other Emalia workers in the group too. There’d been Reich, Leser… as many as a dozen.
Oskar called for his car to be brought to him from the garage. He drove over the river and down Lwówska toward Prokocim. There he showed his pass to the guards at the gate. The depot yard itself was full of strings of cattle cars, the station crowded with the ghetto’s dispensable citizens standing in orderly lines, convinced still—and perhaps they were right— of the value of passive and orderly response. It was the first time Oskar had seen this juxtaposition of humans and cattle cars, and it was a greater shock than hearing of it; it made him pause on the edge of the platform. Then he saw a jeweler he knew. Seen Bankier? he asked. “He’s already in one of the cars, Herr Schindler,” said the jeweler. “Where are they taking you?” Oskar asked the man. “We’re going to a labor camp, they say. Near Lublin. Probably no worse than…” The man waved a hand toward distant Cracow.
Schindler took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, found some 10-złoty bills and handed the pack and the notes to the jeweler, who thanked him. They had made them leave home without anything this time. They said they’d be forwarding the baggage. Late the previous year, Schindler had seen in the SS Bulletin of Budget and Construction an invitation for bids for the construction of some crematoria in a camp southeast of Lublin. Bełźec. Schindler considered the jeweler. Sixty-three or comfour. A little thin; had probably had pneumonia last winter. Worn pin-striped suit, too warm for the day. And in the clear, knowing eyes a capacity to bear finite suffering. Even in the summer of 1942 it was impossible to guess at the connections between such a man as this and those ovens of extraordinary cubic capacity. Did they intend to start epidemics among the prisoners? Was that to be the method? Beginning from the engine, Schindler moved along the line of more than twenty cattle cars, calling Bankier’s name to the faces peering down at him from the open grillwork high above the slats of the cars. It was fortunate for Abraham that Oskar did not ask himself why it was Bankier’s name he called, that he did not pause and consider that Bankier’s had only equal value to all the other names loaded aboard the Ostbahn rolling stock. An existentialist might have been defeated by the numbers at Prokocim, stunned by the equal appeal of all the names and voices.
But Schindler was a philosophic innocent. He knew the people he knew. He knew the name of Bankier. “Bankier! Bankier!” he continued to call.
He was intercepted by a young SS Oberscharführer, an expert railroad shipper from Lublin. He asked for Schindler’s pass. Oskar could see in the man’s left hand an enormous list—pages of names.
My workers, said Schindler. Essential industrial workers. My office manager. It’s idiocy. I have Armaments Inspectorate contracts, and here you are taking the workers I need to fulfill them.