The Oskar Schindler who comes down from his office on the frosty mornings of an Aktion to speak to the SS man, to the Ukrainian auxiliary, to the Blue Police, and to OD details who would have marched across from Podgorze to escort his night shift home; the Oskar Schindler who, drinking coffee, calls Wachtmeister Bosko’s office near the ghetto and tells some lie about why his night shift must stay in Lipowa Street this morning—that Oskar Schindler has endangered himself now beyond the limit of cautious business practice. The men of influence who have twice sprung him from prison cannot do it indefinitely even if he is generous to them on their birthdays. This year they are putting men of influence in Auschwitz. If they die there, their widows get a terse and unregretful telegram from the Commandant. “YOUR HUSBAND HAS DIED IN KONZENTRATIONSLAGER AUSCHWITZ.”
Bosko himself was lanky, thinner than Oskar. Gruff-voiced, and like him a German Czech. His family, like Oskar’s, was conservative and looked to the old Germanic values. He had, for a brief season, felt a pan-Germanic anticipation at the rise of Hitler, exactly the way Beethoven had felt a grand European fervor for Napoleon. In Vienna, where he had been studying theology, he’d joined the SS-partly as an alternative to conscription into the Wehrmacht, partly from an evanescent ardor. He regretted that ardor now and was, more fully than Oskar knew, expiating it. All that Oskar understood about him at the time was that he was always pleased to undermine an Aktion. His responsibility was the perimeter of the ghetto, and from his office beyond the walls he looked inward at the Aktion with a precise horror, for he, like Oskar, considered himself a potential witness. Oskar did not know that in the October Aktion, Bosko had smuggled some dozens of children out of the ghetto in cardboard boxes. Oskar did not know either that the Wachtmeister provided, ten at a time, general passes for the underground. The Jewish Combat Organization (Zob) was strong in Cracow. It was made up mainly of youth-club members, especially of members of Akiva—a club named after the legendary Rabbi Akiva ben Joseph, scholar of the Mishna. The ZOB was led by a married couple, Shimon and Gusta Dranger—her diary would become a classic of the Resistance—and by Dolek Liebeskind. Its members needed to pass freely into and out of the ghetto, for purposes of recruitment and to carry currency, forged documents, and copies of the underground newspaper. They had contacts with the left-wing Polish People’s Army, which was based in the forests around Cracow, and which also needed the documents Bosko provided. Bosko’s contacts with ZOB and the People’s Army were therefore sufficient to hang him; but still he secretly mocked and despised himself and had contempt for partial rescues. For Bosko wanted to save everyone, and would soon try to, and would perish because of it. Danka Dresner, cousin of red Genia, was fourteen years old and had by then outgrown the sure infantile instincts which had led her small relative safely out of the cordon in Plac Zgody. Though she had work as a cleaning woman at the Luftwaffe base, the truth was that by autumn any woman under fifteen or more than forty could be taken away to the camps anyhow. Therefore, on the morning an SS Sonderkommando and squads of Security Police rolled into Lwowska Street, Mrs. Dresner took Danka with her down to Dabrowski, to the house of a neighbor who had a false wall. The neighbor was a woman in her late thirties, a servant at the Gestapo mess near the Wawel, who could therefore expect some preferential treatment. But she had elderly parents who were automatic risks. So she had bricked up a 60-centimeter cavity for her parents, a costly project, since bricks had to be smuggled into the ghetto in barrows under heaps of legal goods—rags, firewood, disinfectant.
God knew what her bricked-up secret space had cost her—maybe 5,000 zl., maybe 10,000.
She’d mentioned it a number of times to Mrs. Dresner. If there was an Aktion, Mrs. Dresner could bring Danka and come herself. Therefore, on the morning Danka and Mrs. Dresner heard from around the corner of Dabrowski the startling noise, the bark of Dalmatians and Dobermans, the megaphoned roaring of Oberscharfuhrers, they hurried to their friend’s place.
When the Dresners had gone up the stairs and found the right room, they could see that the clamor had had an effect on their friend. “It sounds bad,” said the woman. “I have my parents in there already. I can fit the girl in. But not you.”
Danka stared, captivated, at the end wall, at its stained wallpaper. In there, sandwiched in brick, rats perhaps worrying at their feet, their senses stretched by darkness, were this woman’s elderly mother and father.
Mrs. Dresner could tell that the woman wasn’t rational. The girl, but not you, she kept saying. It was as if she thought that should the SS penetrate the wall they would be more forgiving on account of Danka’s lesser poundage. Mrs. Dresner explained that she was scarcely obese, that the Aktion seemed to be concentrating on this side of Lwowska Street, and that she had nowhere else to go. And that she could fit. Danka was a reliable girl, said Mrs. Dresner, but she would feel safer with her mother in there. You could see by measuring the wall with your eyes that four people could fit abreast in the cavity. But shots from two blocks distant swept away the last of the woman’s reason. “I can fit the girl!” she screamed. “I want you to go!”
Mrs. Dresner turned to Danka and told her to go into the wall. Later Danka would not know why she had obeyed her mother and gone so mutely into hiding. The woman took her to the attic, removed a rug from the floor, then lifted a raft of floorboards. Then Danka descended into the cavity. It wasn’t black in there; the parents were burning a stub of candle. Danka found herself beside the woman—someone else’s mother but, beyond the unwashed smell, with the same warm, protective musk of motherhood. The woman smiled at her briefly. The husband stood on the far side of his wife, keeping his eyes closed, not to be distracted from signals from outside.
After a time the friend’s mother motioned to her that she could sit if she wanted. So Danka crouched sideways and found a comfortable posture on the floor of the cavity. No rats troubled her. She heard no sound—not a word from her mother and the friend beyond the wall. Above everything else she felt unexpectedly safe. Andwiththe sensation of safety came displeasure at herself for obeying her mother’s order so woodenly, and then fear for her mother, who was out there in the world of Aktions.
Mrs. Dresner did not leave the house at once. The SS were in Dabrowski Street now. She thought she might as well stay on. If she was taken, it was no loss to her friend. It might, in fact, be a positive help. If they took a woman from this room, it would probably increase their satisfaction with their task, exempt them from a sharper inspection of the state of the wallpaper.
But the woman had convinced herself no one would survive the search if Mrs. Dresner stayed in the room; and, Mrs. Dresner could see, no one would if the woman remained in that state. Therefore she stood up, calmly despairing of herself, and left. They would find her on the steps or in the hall. Why not on the street? she wondered. It was so much an unwritten rule that ghetto natives must stay on quivering in their rooms until discovered that anyone found moving on the stairways was somehow guilty of defiance of the system.
A figure in a cap prevented her from going out. He appeared on the front step, squinting down the dark corridor to the cold blue light of the courtyard beyond. Staring at her, he recognized her, as she did him. It was an acquaintance of her elder son’s; but you could not be sure that that counted for anything; you could not know what pressures they’d put on the OD boys. He stepped into the hall and approached her. “Pani Dresner,” he said. He pointed at the stairwell. “They’ll be gone in ten minutes. You stay under the stairs. Go on. Get under the stairs.”
As numbly as her daughter had obeyed her, she now obeyed the OD youth. She crouched down under the stairs, but knew it was no good. The autumn light from the courtyard revealed her. If they wanted to look at the courtyard, or at the apartment door at the rear of the hallway, she would be seen. Since upright or cowering made no difference, she stood upright. From near the front door, the OD man urged her to stay there. Then he went. She heard yells, orders, and appeals, and it all seemed to be as close as next door.
At last, he was back with others. She heard the boots at the front door. She heard him say in German that he’d searched the ground floor and no one was at home. There were occupied rooms upstairs, though. It was such a prosaic conversation he had with the SS men that it didn’t seem to her to do justice to the risk he was taking. He was staking his existence against the likelihood that having worked down Lwowska and so far down Dabrowski they might by now be incompetent enough not to search the ground floor themselves and therefore not to find Mrs. Dresner, whom he dimly knew, beneath the stairs.
In the end they took his word. She heard them on the stairs, opening and slamming doors on the first landing, their boots clattering on the floor in the room of the cavity. She heard her friend’s raised, shrewish voice… of course I have a work permit, I work over at the Gestapo mess, I know all the gentlemen. She heard them come down from the second floor with someone; with more than one; a couple, a family. Substitutes for me, she would later think. A middle-aged male voice with an edge of bronchitis to it said, “But surely, gentlemen, we can take some clothing.” And in a tone as indifferent as that of a railway porter asked for timetable information, the SS man telling him in Polish, “There’s no need for it. At these places they provide everything.”
