Searching for Schindler

  By now, Marek was back with us and drove us around the old Jewish ghetto, with its present-day dreary apartment blocks, and then across to the Praga side of the Vistula and out into the countryside to buy black-market butter—both from lack of butter in Marek’s family and also to illustrate how much better-placed farmers and their families were to withstand food shortages under the present tyranny.

  Between Poldek and me, the argument about money exchange had not been settled. One morning we had the question out. Poldek had ambushed me in the hotel lobby, on my surreptitious way to the state cashier’s window to change money.

  “Thomas, what are you doing?” he asked me with basso incredulity.

  “I want to get a bottle of vodka, from the store there.”

  In the major hotels were stores where, to the chagrin of the Polish populace, tourists and Poles of status in the regime could buy luxury items, including the best of Polish vodka, Wyborowa and Pieprzówka, brands which were normally exported to the USSR.

  “Look, I’m just doing it for the experience of it,” I told him, though he knew by now that I was a much heartier drinker than most Jews were, and would find a robust vodka comforting in the evenings.

  “Give me your money!” growled Leopold. “I’ll change it for you, three times the rate! Why do you go to these crazy little money shops? What is it you have there? A hundred dollars?”

  “Poldek,” I told him, “I don’t like this. You’re a grandfather, for God’s sake. How about you let me do it legally?”

  “Legal? Tell me what is legal. What the Russian sons-of-bitch want? Give it to me. I know how it works here.”

  “How will it work at the airport, when I get arrested?”

  “Thomas, dear friend, why do you always worry ahead? Do you think I will let you get in trouble? You? My brother?”

  “Even you can’t stop it. I’m going to change this legally.”

  He turned lugubrious. “And so you give in to Jaruzelski? So you don’t trust me.”

  “Don’t try that. Of course I trust you.”

  “Then give me the money.”

  And so the dispute went. It was a sense that our debate was becoming public, and attracting the attention both of the reception desk staff and the state’s cashier behind his grille, that caused me to slip the notes to him.

  “Let me come with you,” I urged.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Poldek told me.

  “You’re not a young man, Poldek. I insist.”

  “I like you like a brother, Thomas, but you haven’t lived through things. You volunteer too much information and you talk too loud. You wouldn’t have lasted two weeks with the Nazis. They loved killing guys like you. Poetic guys.”

  “What if your black-market man is a policeman in plain clothes?” I whispered. “An agent provocateur?”

  “And you think I couldn’t tell the difference?”

  Poldek, law-abiding Eagle Scout master of Beverly Hills, saw no reason to respect the laws of Poland as they stood in the late winter of 1981. Soon he was back with the promised zloty, and I bought my bottle of Wyborowa from a lean shopwoman whose weary eyes indicated she might benefit from some luxury items herself.

  When Poldek proposed a side trip to Lodz, an industrial city to the west of Warsaw, he had a frank purpose: to visit the graves of Misia’s grandparents and her father, the good physician. Misia’s mother, Dr. Maria Lewinson, had an unknown, unmarked grave somewhere in the East. Misia’s grandparents and father had been worldly successes and assimilating Jews, and they had reached their honored graves in the late 1930s at the end of a normal life span, before the cataclysm. It was because Misia’s parents had heard the stories of members of the Camp of National Unity, who resisted the entry of Jews into universities by slashing the faces of pretty Jewish undergraduates, that they had sent her to more subtly anti-Semitic Vienna to study. In addition, Polish universities had a numerus clausus (a closed number) for Jewish students, which would have made it difficult for Misia to study in her home country.

  I knew that a brief journey to Lodz would be good background, since many of the people who turned up in the Kraków ghetto came from Lodz’s quarter of a million Jews. Lodz was fascinating to me also because of all I had read of a remarkable figure named Mordechai Haim Rumkowski, the Ältester (Elder) of the Judenrat, the Jewish Council in the Lodz ghetto which liaised with the Nazi rulers. Rumkowski had believed that the ghetto could become a semi-sovereign place where the Jews could live fruitfully for the duration by making themselves useful to the Nazi regime in Governor-General Frank’s occupied zone. It was a false hope that many of the Judenräte held at the start of the ghetto phase of the Nazi process. On the basis of that dream, Rumkowski utterly misunderstood his status and grotesquely entitled himself His Royal Highness, Prince Rumkowski of Litzmannstadt Ghetto—Litzmannstadt being the German name for Lodz. He produced his own ghetto currency, with his image on the notes, and ghetto postage stamps for his postal service, which he named the Judenpost. No doubt he was a vain man, this king of the Jews within the Lodz ghetto. But then the Jews of Europe had never met such obliterating intentions as they did in the case of the SS, and thought that, as in the past, they could bargain their way out—sacrificing some casualties, perhaps, but allowing a strong Jewish remnant to survive.

  Rumkowski ended up exhorting his populace in the summer of 1944: “Jews of the ghetto, come to your senses! Volunteer for the transports!” When the ghetto was liberated in January 1945, fewer than nine hundred Jews were found alive. Rumkowski himself had by then been forced onto a transport and vanished.

  Marek drove us. It was meant to be spring, but if most of the snow had gone the vividness of spring had not yet arrived. The forest looked cold, the farms hunched and secretive. Somewhere in the seeping trees near Lodz, Poldek told Marek to stop and rest, and took me to a sedate but decaying prewar cemetery graced by its own necropolis railway station where grass grew between the lines and on the platform.

  The redheaded cemetery caretaker emerged from his ram-shackle residence in that abandoned station house at the cemetery gate. He had the shaggy look of a hunter. Poldek told me that he always left this man some money for the upkeep of Misia’s father’s and grandparents’ graves. The sole visitors, we walked the leaf-muted avenues of the old cemetery, reading the Polish and Hebrew names, admiring splendid monuments and crypts. Poldek found the burial places of Misia’s father and her grandparents, muttered that the caretaker had done a passable job of maintenance, and kept a mourning silence with me. Then he coughed.

  “Do your Catholic thing,” he told me.

  “What Catholic thing?”

  “Make your cross sign, Thomas. They won’t mind.”

  Though he had overestimated my devoutness, I didn’t see why not, so I did it. My tribalism met his. Then, returning to the caretaker’s house, Poldek paid him in American dollars for another year’s care.

  We visited the gray streets of the old ghetto, and then Marek turned our car southeast to Kraków. A thin sun dared fall on the farmlands, which suddenly looked pleasant, timeless and enduring. On the road toward Czestochowa, Marek began to pull up behind, and then pass, truckloads of Russian conscripts. They looked bored and blank, unmarked and extremely young as they stared at us over the tailgates of their vehicles. We were still passing them when we skirted the dark pinnacle of the church-fortress shrine of Czestochowa’s miraculous Black Virgin. It struck me that this holy place was sinisterly close to Auschwitz, where other Jewish women had not been venerated at all. But again Poldek seemed awed by the Black Virgin’s potent cult, and kept a reverent silence as Marek blessed himself and touched the rosary beads and scapular which hung from his mirror. Poldek told me, “The Polish pope has a great devotion to the Black Virgin.”

  From here on, I began to feel Poldek’s palpable excitement as we approached Kraków from the west. Even the thought that his mother and father had been murdered at relatively nearby Tarnów in an early experiment with carbon mo
noxide, and his sister in some other death camp, did not seem to restrain the homecoming. The dead had been, in his mind, vindicated by history, and he knew that was all that could happen on earth.

  We were staying at Eastern Europe’s only Holiday Inn, whose manager was an excellent friend of Poldek’s and another of his parcel receivers. I was a little disappointed we weren’t staying at the Europa, a hotel right on the market square in the town center, or at the Cracovia. Both were decayed grand hotels much patronized in their heyday by Oskar. The Holiday Inn was, however, only a short distance from all we wanted to visit, and more architecturally pleasant than the name might imply. The young manager was summoned to the door immediately for our arrival, and the manager’s respect, combined with the Orbis badge, greased our entry into the hotel. Given our room keys, we said good-bye to wiry little Marek, the friend of Walesa, with fraternal best wishes and embraces. For our further adventures, we intended to hire a Fiat—in its various models the most common car seen on the streets of Polish towns.

  After we had exchanged heavy hugs with the worthy Marek, and were preparing to go to our rooms, Poldek gave me a solemn warning. If beautiful Polish women came to my door offering themselves in the middle of the night, I was not to accept, since they were certainly agents provocateurs.

  Seven

  * * *

  Kraków, not heavily bombed, taken without damage by the Germans in 1939 and similarly overrun by the Russians in 1945, had been left largely intact by the war, and as we stepped out for a walk that night, Poldek uttered his hymns to this city as if ghosts did not inhabit it. He pointed out the ancient cloth hall, the marvelously ornate Sukiennice, and St. Mary’s Church in the town square, the Rynek Glówny, with a citizen’s enthusiasm. Indeed, everything looked gracious here, and built for a happier and more elegant life than history had provided.

  Kraków was a city of churches, Romanesque and Gothic, and they were all full of people even in the middle of the day. But it also possessed ancient synagogues, some dating back to the fifteenth century, which in 1981 were abandoned and largely going to ruin. The old residential streets around the square mimicked in some cases the Rococo of Vienna and then the solid Austro-Hungarian style of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even so, because of air pollution damage to its stones, the city lacked the film-set atmospherics of old Prague, and Poldek told me it had deteriorated since the period of Nazi occupation when the paradoxical Schindler lived in a good apartment in Straszewskiego Street. After the war the great Stalinist steelworks and planned city of Nowa Huta to the east meant that the gargoyles of St. Mary’s, the groins of the stone cloth hall, and the buttresses of the cathedral on Wawel Hill were (and still are today) gritty, their surfaces smudged and eroded by acid rain. Poldek believed it was a deliberate Kremlin policy, to attack the ancient pride of fashionable Kraków with poisonous Stalinist grime. The Rynek Glówny, despite the grime, looked to me vast and beautiful and ancient, all of which it was—“Kraków’s drawing room,” people called it. But of course, Stalin delighted in turning such bourgeois pretensions on their head.

  Poldek, as if trying to reconcile me with the Church, graciously insisted on my visiting all the churches with him, and was solemn and prayerful in both splendidly lofty chancel and in minuscule chapel. I was aware that many of his fellow survivors would see the Mariacki, St. Mary’s Church, not as a glory of medieval and Renaissance art, but as perhaps yet another pulpit from which for centuries the Jews had been denounced as Christ killers.

  After the churches, and after looking at the artworks and linens for sale in the Sukiennice, we walked south to the Vistula and stared up at the castle atop a hill on the riverbank. We began to climb. This was the Wawel, home to Polish dynasties, and here Hitler’s darling, former Reich minister without portfolio, SS Obergruppenführer (Lieutenant General) Hans Frank, governed the occupied Government General of Poland territories, the more southerly sector of Poland with Kraków as its capital, for nearly the entirety of the war. It was under him that the major experiments in colonization and resettlement of German populations took place, and under him that “the Jewish problem” was addressed most directly. Under Frank, too, the Polish intelligentsia and resistance were slaughtered to the tune of three million, as well as nearly the totality of Poland’s Jews. Yet again, the survivor Leopold Pfefferberg took me on the first day, and many times after, to the Wawel, and expatiated on its obvious glories, especially its cathedral.

  An immense keep faced the ornate cathedral, the church of Poldek’s “Polish Pope” (Polish Pop) when he was Cardinal-Archbishop of Kraków. The keep and its apartments were more melodramatic and expressive of power than any film location spotter or artistic director could possibly need. The Wawel was said in prehistory to be the lair of a dragon—his cave can be seen in the hill below. With Frank, of course, the demon emerged at last. It was very easy to imagine the glistening black of Frank’s limo-of-state rolling over these cobblestones toward the stateroom end of the castle square. He made a name for himself even after the war, while in prison, for converting to Catholicism and declaring, a penitent all too late, “A thousand years will pass and the guilt of Germany will not be erased.”

  But again, Poldek seemed to see the place as a site of retrieved Polish glory. “The Wawel was Polish a thousand years ago,” he said, “and it’s Polish again now.” We went into the cathedral to visit the tomb of St. Stanislav, patron saint of the nation, and then the Gothic sarcophagus of King Vladislav Jagiello, founder of the Jagiellonian University. I sometimes wondered whether, if Poldek stopped viewing these wonders so positively, he would be destroyed by their significance for his vanished family and himself.

  We strolled from the Wawel to Straszewskiego Street, where Schindler lived at Number 7, a building a little exorbitantly decorated in a nineteenth-century sort of way, but in a good part of town. His apartment had been confiscated from a middle-class Jewish family named the Nussbaums, who would end up on Schindler’s list. Straszewskiego ran, park to one side, stylish nineteenth-century buildings on the other, directly from the Wawel.

  Before the war, the Pfefferberg family had lived in a similarly comfortable but older Austro-Hungarian-style apartment building at 48 Grodzka Street, on the other, eastern side of the Rynek. Standing outside the building—painted cream, which suited its architecture—Poldek was now overcome by memories of his father, of his mother the interior designer, and of his young sister, all of them annulled from Europe’s history.

  From the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when the Congress of Vienna created a small and sovereign republic of Kraków, a free city somewhat like Danzig before World War II, Jews who were considered to have assimilated were permitted to live in Gentile streets such as this end of Grodzka. Under the Austrians, Poldek Pfefferberg’s forebears continued to live in the fashionable parts of Kraków, a little way from the old Jewish ghetto of Kazimierz. Poldek’s cream apartment building, of a design one would see in Prague or Vienna itself, stood as a symbol of the tension Jews faced during European history—between secular assimilation and Orthodox memory. This might have been no more the central question of German and Polish Jewry than in the late nineteenth century. The Jews who assimilated into the professions and into Gentile areas hoped that by professional competence and civic loyalty, combined with restrained observance of their religion, they could show themselves to be good citizens of Europe, and so defeat abiding anti-Semitism. Jewish people of the Pfefferbergs’ background believed they were enhancing, not diminishing, their Jewishness by the way they lived within the broader culture. Hence Poldek, with a now chastened joy and many understandable references to “son-of-bitch Hans Frank” and other remembered Nazis, stood before the family house where his mother had run her interior decorating office. It was clear now that Poldek saw it unequivocally as home, and also realized that he had been separated from it by treachery. Here, on the run from his guards at Kraków’s Glowny station, Poldek first met Oskar, when Herr Schindler came to consu
lt Mrs. Pfefferberg on the interior design of his apartment.

  On the street in 1981, as men in their Polish caps passed and looked at us obliquely from under their eyebrows with their perpetual, soul-draining caution, Poldek told me a story which showed how the expropriation of Jewish possessions, the icons of home, still resonated in his dreams. When his mother, father, sister and he had been expelled from this apartment in December 1939 to move to the ghetto, they were forced to leave behind all the furniture. Among the most prized family pieces was a silver lazy Susan, a centerpiece of the Pfefferberg table, ornately wrought by silversmiths and inherited from nineteenth-century grandparents. It would be a small item in the vast SS confiscations, yet infused with the spirit of a family. It was the object, said Poldek, he always looked for in the flea markets of Paris, in the antique shops of London and Prague and New York. He still believed his eyes would alight upon it one day and retrieve it as a memento of his sister, restoring possession to a girl who, caught with her husband living on Aryan papers in Warsaw and shot in Pawiak Prison, had been denied all possessions in death.

  Pfefferberg’s parents had not been markedly Orthodox Jews but, though they lived in fashionable Grodzka Street, were only a short walk from where Jewish Kraków began, an older and more benign ghetto than the Podgórze ghetto the Nazis set up. This old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, named to honor King Kazimierz the Great in 1335, was in the old days separated from Kraków by a stream of the Vistula, but since then the growing city had expanded to include it. When we visited, it was a wistful quarter, with only its ancient synagogues to proclaim its vanished Jewishness. Poldek and I walked up Szeroka Street, mounted the steps of the deserted and locked-up Old Synagogue, Stara Boznica, of the late fourteenth century. Silence ached in its vestibule and in the square it sat on. It was a fascinating building, with a Romanesque look to it, and though it was a tourist site by the time I wrote this sentence, it was certainly not in dour, cramped, hungry 1981. For Poldek it evoked childhood, given his parents had brought him here for Yom Kippur, jollying along their vocal, muscular, fasting son.