Pfefferberg’s greatest coup had been last year, when Governor Frank had withdrawn 100- and
[email protected] notes from circulation and demanded that existing notes of those denominations be deposited with the Reich Credit Fund. Since a Jew could exchange only 2,000
[email protected], it meant that all notes held secretly—in excess of 2,000 and against the regulations—would no longer have any value. Unless you could find someone with Aryan looks and no armband who was willing on your behalf to join the long lines of Poles in front of the Reich Credit Bank.
Pfefferberg and a young Zionist friend gathered from ghetto residents some hundreds of thousands of
[email protected] in the proscribed denominations, went off with a suitcase full of notes, and came back with the approved Occupation currency, minus only the bribes they’d had to pay to the Polish Blue Police at the gate.
That was the sort of policeman Pfefferberg was. Excellent by the standards of Chairman Artur Rosenzweig; deplorable by the standards of Pomorska.
Oskar visited the ghetto in April—both from curiosity and to speak to a jeweler he had commissioned to make two rings. He found it crammed beyond what he had imagined—two families to a room unless you were lucky enough to know someone in the Judenrat. There was a smell of clogged plumbing, but the women held off typhus by arduous scrubbing and by boiling clothes in courtyards. “Things are changing,” the jeweler confided in Oskar. “The OD have been issued truncheons.” As the administration of the ghetto, like that of all ghettos in Poland, had passed from the control of Governor Frank to that of Gestapo Section 4B, the final authority for all Jewish matters in Cracow