It was a slow, tense day up in the attic room, waiting to find out which way to jump. Neighbors must also have been waiting. Perhaps some of them, not wanting to deal with the delay, had marched up the road already with their packages and hopeful suitcases, for in a way it was a mix of sounds fit to draw you down the stairs—violent noise dimly heard from blocks away, and here a silence in which you could hear the ancient, indifferent timbers of the house ticking away the last and worst hours of your tenancy. At murky noon Poldek and Mila chewed on their brown bread, the 300g each they had in stock. The recurrent noises of the Aktion swept up to the corner of Wegierska, a long block away, and then, toward midafternoon, receded again. There was near-silence then. Someone tried uselessly to flush the recalcitrant toilet on the first-floor landing. It was nearly possible at that hour to believe that they had been overlooked.
The last dun afternoon of their life in No. 2 Józefińska refused, in spite of its darkness, to end. The light, in fact, was poor enough, thought Poldek, for them to try for the sewer earlier than dusk. He wanted, now that it was quiet, to go and consult with Dr. H.
Please, said Mila. But he soothed her.
He would keep off the streets, moving through the network of holes that connected one building with another. He piled up the reassurances. The streets at this end seemed to be clear of patrols. He would evade the occasional OD or wandering SS man at the intersections, and be back within five minutes. Darling, darling, he told her, I have to check with Dr. H.
He went down the back stairs and into the yard through the hole in the stable wall, not emerging into the open street until he’d reached the Labor Office. There he risked crossing the broad carriageway, entering the warrens of the triangular block of houses opposite, meeting occasional groups of confused men conveying rumors and discussing options in kitchens, sheds, yards, and corridors. He came out into Krakusa Street just across from the doctor’s place. He crossed unnoticed by a patrol working down near the southern limit of the ghetto, three blocks away, in the area where Schindler had witnessed his first demonstration of the extremities of Reich racial policy.
Dr. H’s building was empty, but in the yard Poldek met a dazed middle-aged man who told him that the Sonderkommando had already visited the place and that the doctor and his wife had first hidden, then gone for the sewers. Perhaps it’s the right thing to do, said the man. They’ll be back, the SS. Poldek nodded; he knew now the tactics of the Aktion, having already survived so many.
He went back the way he’d come and again was able to cross the road. But he found No. 2 empty, Mila vanished with their baggage, all doors opened, all rooms vacant. He wondered if in fact they were not all hidden down at the hospital—Dr. H and his wife, Mila. Perhaps the H’s had called for her out of respect for her anxiety and her long medical lineage.
Poldek hurried out through the stable again, and by alternative passageways reached the hospital courtyard. Like disregarded flags of surrender, bloodied bedding hung from the balconies of both the upper floors. On the cobblestones was a pile of victims. They lay, some of them, with their heads split open, their limbs twisted. They were not, of course, the terminal patients of Doctors B and H. They were people who had been detained here during the day and then executed. Some of them must have been imprisoned upstairs, shot, then tumbled into the yard. Always thereafter, when questioned about the corpses in the ghetto hospital yard, Poldek would say 60 to 70, though he had no time to count that tangled pyramid. Cracow being a provincial town and Poldek having been raised as a very sociable child in Podgórze and then in the Centrum, visiting with his mother the affluent and distinguished people of the city, he recognized in that heap familiar faces: old clients of his mother’s; people who had asked him about school at the Kosciuszko High School, got precocious answers in reply, and fed him cake and candy for his looks and charm. Now they were shamefully exposed and jumbled in that blood-red courtyard.
Somehow it did not occur to Pfefferberg to look for the bodies of his wife and the H’s. He sensed why he had been placed there. He believed unshakably in better years to come, years of just tribunals. He had that sense of being a witness which Schindler had experienced on the hill beyond Rekawka.
He was distracted by the sight of a crowd of people in Wegierska Street beyond the courtyard. They moved toward the Rekawka gate with the dull but not desperate languor of factory workers on a Monday morning, or even of supporters of a defeated football team. Among this wave of people he noticed neighbors from Józefińska Street. He walked out of the yard, carrying like a weapon up his sleeve his memory of it all. What had happened to Mila? Did any of them know? She’d already left, they said. The Sonderkommando’s been through. She’d already be out the gate, on her way to the place.
To Płaszów.
He and Mila, of course, had had a contingency plan for an impasse like this. If one of them ended up in Płaszów, it would be better for the other to attempt to stay out. He knew that Mila had her gift for unobtrusiveness, a good gift for prisoners; but also she could be racked by extraordinary hunger. He’d be her supplier from the outside. He was sure these things could be managed. It was no easy decision, though—the bemused crowds, barely guarded by the SS, now making for the south gate and the barbed-wire factories of Płaszów were an indication of where most people, probably quite correctly, considered that long-term safety lay.
The light, though late now, was sharp, as if snow were coming on. Poldek was able to cross the road and enter the empty apartments beyond the pavement. He wondered whether they were in fact empty or full of ghetto dwellers concealed cunningly or naively—those who believed that wherever the SS took you, it led in the end to the extermination chambers.
Poldek was looking for a first-class hiding place. He came by back passages to the lumberyard on Józefińska. Lumber was a scarce commodity. There were no great structures of cut timber to hide behind. The place that looked best was behind the iron gates at the yard entrance. Their size and blackness seemed a promise of the coming night. Later he would not be able to believe that he’d chosen them with such enthusiasm.
He hunched in behind the one that was pushed back against the wall of the abandoned office. Through the crack left between the gate and the gatepost, he could see up Józefińska in the direction he’d come from. Behind that freezing iron leaf he watched the slice of cold evening, a luminous gray, and pulled his coat across his chest. A man and his wife hurried past, rushing for the gate, dodging among the dropped bundles, the suitcases labeled with futile large letters. KLEINFELD, they proclaimed in the evening light. LEHRER, BAUME, WEINBERG, SMOLAR, STRUS, ROSENTHAL, BIRMAN, ZEITLIN.
Names against which no receipts would be issued. “Heaps of goods laden with memories,” the young artist Josef Bau had written of such scenes. “Where are my treasures?”
From beyond this battleground of fallen luggage he could hear the aggressive baying of dogs. Then into Józefińska Street, striding on the far pavement, came three SS men, one of them dragged along by a canine flurry which proved to be two large police dogs. The dogs hauled their handler into No. 41 Józefińska, but the other two men waited on the pavement. Poldek had paid most of his attention to the dogs. They looked like a cross between Dalmatians and German shepherds. Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they’d been brought in from some other and harsher ghetto. For even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last assumption was wiped away in the next half-minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack of the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lwów or Warsaw, as you thought. It was at the north side of Józefińska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes, and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman’s howling protest.