Just as Pfefferberg would think of the pile of bodies in the hospital yard as 60 or 70, he would always testify that the child was two or three years of age.
Perhaps before she was even dead, certainly before he himself even knew he had moved, as if the decision had came from some mettlesome gland behind his forehead, Pfefferberg gave up the freezing iron gate, since it would not protect him from the dogs, and found himself in the open yard. He adopted at once the military bearing he’d learned in the Polish Army. He emerged from the lumberyard like a man on a ceremonial assignment, and bent and began lifting the bundles of luggage out of the carriageway and heaping them against the walls of the yard. He could hear the three SS men approaching; the dogs’ snarling breath was palpable, and the whole evening was stretched to breaking by the tension in their leashes. When he believed they were some ten paces off, he straightened and permitted himself, playing the biddable Jew of some European background, to notice them. He saw that their boots and riding breeches were splashed with blood, but they were not abashed to appear before other humans dressed that way. The officer in the middle was tallest. He did not look like a murderer; there was a sensitivity to the large face and a subtle line to the mouth.
Pfefferberg in his shabby suit clicked his cardboard heels in the Polish style and saluted this tall one in the middle. He had no knowledge of SS ranks and did not know what to call the man. “Herr,” he said. “Herr Commandant!”
It was a term his brain, under threat of its extinction, had thrown forth with electric energy. It proved to be the precise word, for the tall man was Amon Goeth in the full vitality of his afternoon, elated at the day’s progress and as capable of instant and instinctive exercises of power as Poldek Pfefferberg was of instant and instinctive subterfuge.
“Herr Commandant, I respectfully report to you that I received an order to put all the bundles together to one side of the road so that there will be no obstruction of the thoroughfare.”
The dogs were craning toward him through their collars. They expected, on the basis of their black training and the rhythm of today’s Aktion, to be let fly at Pfefferberg’s wrist and groin. Their snarls were not simply feral, but full of a frightful confidence in the outcome, and the question was whether the SS man on the Herr Commandant’s left had enough strength to restrain them. Pfefferberg didn’t expect much. He would not be surprised to be buried by dogs and after a time to be delivered from their ravages by a bullet. If the woman hadn’t got away with pleading her motherhood, he stood little chance with stories of bundles, of clearing a street in which human traffic had in any case been abolished.
But the Commandant was more amused by Pfefferberg than he had been by the mother. Here was a Ghettomensch playing soldier in front of three SS officers and making his report, servile if true, and almost endearing if not. His manner was, above all, a break in style for a victim. Of all today’s doomed, not one other had tried heel-clicking. The Herr Commandant could therefore exercise the kingly right to show irrational and unexpected amusement. His head went back; his long upper lip retracted. It was a broad, honest laugh, and his colleagues smiled and shook their heads at its extent.
In his excellent baritone, Untersturmführer Goeth said, “We’re looking after everything. The last group is leaving the ghetto. Verschwinde!” That is, Disappear, little Polish clicking soldier!
Pfefferberg began to run, not looking back, and it would not have surprised him if he had been felled from behind. Running, he got to the corner of Wegierska and turned it, past the hospital yard where some hours ago he had been a witness. The dark came down as he neared the gate, and the ghetto’s last familiar alleys faded. In Podgórze Square, the last official huddle of prisoners stood in a loose cordon of SS men and Ukrainians.
“I must be the last one out alive,” he told people in that crowd.
Or if not he it was Wulkan the jeweler and his wife and son. Wulkan had been working these past months in the Progress factory and, knowing what was to happen, had approached Treuhänder Unkelbach with a large diamond concealed for two years in the lining of a coat. “Herr Unkelbach,” he told the supervisor, “I’ll go wherever I’m sent, but my wife isn’t up to all that noise and violence.”
Wulkan and his wife and son would wait at the OD police station under the protection of a Jewish policeman they knew, and then perhaps during the day Herr Unkelbach would come and convey them bloodlessly to Płaszów.
Since this morning they had sat in a cubicle in the police station, but it had been as frightful a wait as if they’d stayed in their kitchen, the boy alternately terrified and bored, and his wife continuing to hiss her reproaches. Where is he? Is he going to come at all? These people, these people! Early in the afternoon, Unkelbach did in fact appear, came into the Ordnungsdienst to use the lavatory and have coffee. Wulkan, emerging from the office in which he’d been waiting, saw a Treuhänder Unkelbach he had never known before: a man in the uniform of an SS NCO, smoking and exchanging animated conversation with another SS man; using one hand to take hungry mouthfuls of coffee, to bite off mouthfuls of smoke, to savage a lump of brown bread while his pistol, still held in the left hand, lay like a resting animal on the police-station counter and dark spatters of blood ran across the breast of his uniform. The eyes he turned to meet Wulkan’s did not see the jeweler. Wulkan knew at once that Unkelbach was not backing out of the deal, he simply did not remember it. The man was drunk, and not on liquor. If Wulkan had called to him, the answer would have been a stare of ecstatic incomprehension. Followed, very likely, by something worse.
Wulkan gave it up and returned to his wife. She kept saying, “Why don’t you talk to him? I’ll talk to him if he’s still there.” But then she saw the shadow in Wulkan’s eyes and sneaked a look around the edge of the door. Unkelbach was getting ready to leave. She saw the unaccustomed uniform, the blood of small traders and their wives splashed across its front. She uttered a whimper and returned to her seat. Like her husband, she now fell into a well-founded despair, and the waiting became somehow easier. The OD man they knew restored them to the usual pulse of hope and anxiety. He told them that all the OD, apart from Spira’s praetorians, had to be out of the ghetto by 6 P.M. and on the Wieliczka Road to Płaszów. He would see if there was a way of getting the Wulkans into one of the vehicles. After dark had fallen in the wake of Pfefferberg’s passage up Wegierska, after the last party of prisoners had assembled at the gate into Podgórze Square, while Dr. H and his wife were moving eastward in the company and under the cover of a group of rowdy Polish drunks, and while the squads of the Sonderkommando were resting and taking a smoke before the last search of the tenements, two horse-drawn wagons came to the door of the police station. The Wulkan family were hidden by the OD men under cartons of paperwork and bundles of clothing. Symche Spira and his associates were not in sight, were on the job somewhere in the streets, drinking coffee with NCO’S, celebrating their permanence within the system.