shipped to Nuremberg. What an improbable world it had become!
Business was wonderful that winter just the same. In the next year his friends in the Armaments Inspectorate began to talk to Oskar about the possibility of opening a munitions division to manufacture antitank shells. Oskar was not as interested in shells as in pots and pans. Pots and pans were easy engineering. You cut out and pressed the metal, dipped it in the tubs, fired it at the right temperature. You didn’t have to calibrate instruments; the work was nowhere near as exacting as it would be for arms. There was no under-the-counter trade in shell casings, and Oskar liked under-the-counter—liked the sport of it, the disrepute, the fast returns, the lack of paperwork.
But because it was good politics, he established a munitions section, installing a few immense Hilo machines, for the precision pressing and tooling of shell casings, in one gallery of his No. 2 workshop. The munitions section was so far developmental; it would take some months of planning, measuring, and test production before any shells appeared. The big Hilos, however, gave the Schindler works, as a hedge against the questionable future, at least the appearance of essential industry.
Before the Hilos had even been properly calibrated, Oskar began to get hints from his SS contacts at Pomorska Street that there was to be a ghetto for Jews. He mentioned the rumor to Stern, not wanting to arouse alarm. Oh, yes, said Stern, the word was out. Some people were even looking forward to it. We’ll be inside, the enemy will be outside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us, no one stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.
The edict, “Gen. Gub. 44/91,” posted on March 3, was published in the Cracow dailies and blared forth from loudspeakers on trucks in Kazimierz. Walking through his munitions department, Oskar heard one of his German technicians comment on the news. “Won’t they be better off in there?” asked the technician. “The Poles hate them, you know.”
The edict used the same excuse. As a means of reducing racial conflict in the Government General, a closed Jewish quarter would be set up. Enclosure in the ghetto would be compulsory for all Jews, but those with the proper labor card could travel from the ghetto to work, returning in the evening. The ghetto would be located in the suburb of Podgorze just across the river. The deadline for entering it would be March 20. Once in, you would be allocated housing by the Judenrat, but Poles presently living in the area of the ghetto and who therefore had to move were to apply to their own housing office for apartments in other parts of town.
A map of the new ghetto was appended to the edict. The north side would be bounded by the river, the east end by the railway line to Lwow, the south side by the hills beyond Rekawka, the west by Podgorze Place. It would be crowded in there.
But there was hope that repression would take definite form now and provide people with a basis on which to plan their restricted futures. For a man like Juda Dresner, a textile wholesaler of Stradom Street who would come to know Oskar, the past year and a half had brought a bewildering succession of decrees, intrusions, and confiscations. He had lost his business to the Trust Agency, his car, his apartment. His bank account had been frozen. His children’s schools had been closed, or else they had been expelled from them.
The family’s jewelry had been seized, and their radio. He and his family were forbidden entry to the center of Cracow, denied any travel by train. They could use only segregated trolley cars. His wife and daughter and sons were subject to intermittent roundups for snow shoveling or other compulsory labor. You never knew, when you were forced into the back of a truck, if the absence would be a short or long one, or what sort of hair-trigger madmen might be supervising the work you would be forced to. Under this sort of regimen you felt that life offered no footholds, that you were slithering into a pit which had no bottom. But perhaps the ghetto was the bottom, the point at which it was possible to take organized thought.
Besides, the Jews of Cracow were accustomed—in a way that could best be described as congenital— to the idea of a ghetto. And now that it had been decided, the very word had a soothing, ancestral ring. Their grandfathers had not been permitted to emerge from the ghetto of Kazimierz until 1867, when Franz Josef signed a decree permitting them to live wherever they wished in the city. Cynics said that the Austrians had needed to open up Kazimierz, socketed as it was in the elbow of the river so close to Cracow, so that Polish laborers could find accommodation close to their places of work. But Franz Josef was nonetheless revered by the older people from Kazimierz as energetically as he had been in the childhood household of Oskar Schindler.
Although their liberty had come so late, there was at the same time among the older Cracow Jews a nostalgia for the old ghetto of Kazimierz. A ghetto implied certain squalors, a crowding in tenements, a sharing of bathroom facilities, disputes over drying space on clotheslines. Yet it also consecrated the Jews to their own specialness, to a richness of shared scholarship, to songs and Zionist talk, elbow to elbow, in coffeehouses rich in ideas if not in cream. Evil rumors emanated from the ghettos of Lodz and Warsaw, but the Podgorze ghetto as planned was more generous with space, for if you superimposed it on a map of the Centrum, you found that the ghetto was in area about half the size of the Old City—by no means enough space, but not quite strangulation.
There was also in the edict a sedative clause that promised to protect the Jews from their Polish countrymen. Since the early 1930’s, a willfully orchestrated racial contest had prevailed in Poland. When the Depression began and farm prices fell, the Polish government had sanctioned a range of anti-Semitic political groups of the kind that saw the Jews as the base of all their economic troubles.
Sanacja, Marshal Pilsudski’s Moral Cleansing Party, made an alliance after the old man’s death with the Camp of National Unity, a right-wing Jew-baiting group. Prime Minister Skladkowski, on the floor of the Parliament in Warsaw, declared, “Economic war on the Jews? All right!” Rather than give the peasants land reform, Sanacja encouraged them to look at the Jewish stalls on market day as the symbol and total explanation of Polish rural poverty. There were pogroms against the Jewish population in a series of towns, beginning in Grodno in 1935. The Polish legislators also entered the struggle, and Jewish industries were starved under new laws on bank credit. Craft guilds closed their lists to Jewish artisans, and the universities introduced a quota, or what they themselves —strong in the classics—called
In the first days of the German Occupation, the conquerors had been astounded by the willingness of Poles to point out Jewish households, to hold a prayer-locked Jew still while a German docked the Orthodox beard with scissors or, pinking the facial flesh as well, with an infantry bayonet. In March 1941, therefore, the promise to protect the ghetto dwellers from Polish national excess fell on the ear almost credibly.
Although there was no great spontaneous joy among the Jews of Cracow as they packed for the move to Podgorze, there were strange elements of homecoming to it, as well as that sense of arriving at a limit beyond which, with any luck, you wouldn’t be further uprooted or tyrannized. Enough so that even some people from the villages around Cracow, from Wieliczka, from Niepolomice, from Lipnica, Murowana, and Tyniec hurried to town lest they be locked out on March 20 and find themselves in a comfortless landscape. For the ghetto was by its nature, almost by definition, habitable, even if subject to intermittent attack. The ghetto represented stasis instead of flux.
The ghetto would introduce a minor inconvenience in Oskar Schindler’s life. It was usual for him to leave his luxury apartment in Straszewskiego, pass the limestone lump of the Wawel stuck in the mouth of the city like a cork in a bottle, and so roll down through Kazimierz, over the Kosciuszko bridge and left toward his factory in Zablocie. Now that route would be blocked by the ghetto walls. It was a minor problem, but it made the idea of maintaining an apartment on the top floor of his office building in Lipowa Street more reasonable. It wasn’t such a bad place, built in the style of Walter Gropius. Lots of glass and light, fashionable cubic bricks in the entranceway. Whenever he did travel between the city and Zablocie in those March days before the deadline, he would see the Jews of Kazimierz packing, and on Stradom Street would pass, early in the grace period, families pushing barrows piled with chairs, mattresses, and clocks toward the ghetto. Their families had lived in Kazimierz since the time it was an island separated from the Centrum by a stream called Stara Wisla. Since, in fact, the time Kazimier the Great had invited them to Cracow when, elsewhere, they were footing the blame for the Black Death. Oskar surmised that their ancestors would have turned up in Cracow like that, pushing a barrowful of bedding, more than five hundred years before. Now they were leaving, it seemed, with the same barrowful. Kazimier’s invitation had been cancelled. During those morning journeys across town, Oskar noticed that the plan was for the city trolleys to go on rolling down Lwowska Street, through the middle of the ghetto. All walls facing the trolley line were being bricked up by
