The sound receded. Mrs. Dresner waited. There was no second sweep. The second sweep would be tomorrow or the day after. They would return again and again now, culling the ghetto. What in June had been seen as a culminating horror had become by October a daily process. And as grateful as she was to the OD boy, it was clear as she went upstairs to get Danka that when murder is as scheduled, habitual, industrial as it was here in Cracow you could scarcely, with tentative heroism, redirect the overriding energy of the system. The more Orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan—”An hour of life is still life.” The OD boy had given her that hour. She knew there was no one who could give her more.
Upstairs, the woman was a little shamefaced.
“The girl can come whenever she wishes,” she said. That is, I didn’t exclude you out of cowardice, but as a matter of policy. And the policy stands. You can’t be accepted, but the girl can.
Mrs. Dresner did not argue—she had a sense that the woman’s stance was part of the same equation that had saved her in the downstairs hall. She thanked the woman. Danka might need to accept her hospitality again.
From now on, since she looked young for her forty-two years and still had her health, Mrs. Dresner would attempt to survive on that basis—the economic one, the putative value of her strength to the Armaments Inspectorate or to some other wing of the war effort. She wasn’t confident of the idea. These days anyone with half a grasp on truth could tell that the SS believed the death of the socially unappeasable Jew outbalanced any value he might have as an item of labor. And the question is, in such an era, Who saves Juda Dresner, factory purchasing officer? Who saves Janek Dresner, auto mechanic at the Wehrmacht garage? Who saves Danka Dresner, Luftwaffe cleaning woman, on the morning the SS finally choose to ignore their economic value?
While the OD man was arranging Mrs. Dresner’s survival in the hallway of the house in Dabrowski, the young Zionists of the Halutz Youth and the ZOB were preparing a more visible act of resistance. They had acquired uniforms of the Waffen SS and, with them, the entitlement to visit the SS’-RESERVED Cyganeria Restaurant in Sw Ducha Plac, across the square from the Slowacki Theater. In the Cyganeria they left a bomb which blew the tables through the roof, tore seven SS men to fragments, and injured some forty more.
When Oskar heard about it, he knew he could have been there, buttering up some official.
It was the deliberate intent of Shimon and Gusta Dranger and their colleagues to run against the ancient pacifism of the ghetto, to convert it to universal rebellion. They bombed the SS’-ONLY Bagatella Cinema in Karmelicka Street. In the dark, Leni Riefenstahl flickered the promise of German womanhood to the wandering soldier frayed from performing the nation’s works in the barbarous ghetto or on the increasingly risky streets of Polish Cracow, and the next second a vast yellow spear of flame extinguished the sight.
The ZOB would in a few months sink patrol boats on the Vistula, fire-bomb sundry military garages throughout the city, arrange Passierscheins for people who were not supposed to have them, smuggle passport photographs out to centers where they could be used in the forging of Aryan papers, derail the elegant Army-only train that ran between Cracow and Bochnia, and get their underground newspaper into circulation. They would also arrange for two of OD Chief Spira’s lieutenants, Spitz and Forster, who had drawn up lists for the imprisonment of thousands, to walk into a Gestapo ambush. It was a variation of an old undergraduate trick. One of the underground, posing as an informer, made an appointment to meet the two policemen in a village near Cracow. At the same time, a separate supposed informer told the Gestapo that two leaders of the Jewish partisan movement could be found at a particular rendezvous point. Spitz and Forster were both mown down while running from the Gestapo.
Still, the style of resistance for the ghetto dwellers remained that of Artur Rosenzweig, who, when asked in June to make a list of thousands for deportation, had placed his own name, his wife’s, his daughter’s at the top.
Over in Zablocie, in the backyard of Emalia, Mr. Jereth and Oskar Schindler were pursuing their own species of resistance by planning a second barracks.
CHAPTER 17
An Austrian dentist named Sedlacek had now arrived in Cracow and was making wary enquiries about Schindler. He had come by train from Budapest and carried a list of possible Cracow contacts and, in a false- bottomed suitcase, a quantity of Occupation zloty, which, since Governor General Frank had abolished the major denominations of Polish money, took up an unconscionable space.
Though he pretended to be traveling on business, he was a courier for a Zionist rescue organization in Budapest.
Even in the autumn of 1942, the Zionists of Palestine, let alone the population of the world, knew nothing but rumors of what was happening in Europe. They had set up a bureau in Istanbul to gather hard information. From an apartment in the Beyoglu section of the city, three agents sent out postcards addressed to every Zionist body in German Europe. The postcards read: “Please let me know how you are. Eretz is longing for you.” Eretz meant the “land” and, to any Zionist, Israel. Each of the postcards was signed by one of the three, a girl named Sarka Mandelblatt, who had a convenient Turkish citizenship.
The postcards had gone into the void. No one answered. It meant that the addressees were in prison, or in the forest, or at labor in some camp, or in a ghetto, or dead. All the Zionists of Istanbul had was the ominous negative evidence of silence.
In the late autumn of 1942, they at last received one reply, a postcard with a view of the Belvaros of Budapest. The message on it read: “Encouraged by your interest in my situation. Rahamim maher [urgent help] is much needed. Please keep in touch.”
This reply had been composed by a Budapest jeweler named Samu Springmann, who’d first received and then puzzled out the message on Sarka Mandelblatt’s postcard. Samu was a slight man, jockey size, in the prime of his thirties. Since the age of thirteen, despite an inalienable probity, he had been oiling officials, doing favors for the diplomatic corps, bribing the heavy-handed Hungarian Secret Police. Now the Istanbul people let him know that they wanted to use him to pipe rescue money into the German empire and to transmit through them to the world some definite intelligence on what was happening to European Jewry.
In the German-allied Hungary of General Horthy, Samu Springmann and his Zionist colleagues were as bereft of solid news from beyond the Polish border as the people in Istanbul. But he began to recruit couriers who, for a percentage of the bag or else out of conviction, would be willing to penetrate the German territories. One of his couriers was a diamond dealer, Erich Popescu, an agent of the Hungarian Secret Police. Another was an underworld carpet smuggler, Bandi Grosz, who had also assisted the secret police, but who began to work for Springmann to expiate all the grief he had caused his late mother. A third was Rudi Schulz, an Austrian safecracker, an agent for the Gestapo Management Bureau in Stuttgart. Springmann had a gift for playing with double agents such as Popescu, Grosz, and Schulz, by touching their sentimentality, their greed, and, if any, their principles.
Some of his couriers were idealists, working from firm premises. Sedlacek, who asked after Herr Schindler in Cracow near the end of 1942, belonged to that species. He had a successful dental practice in Vienna and, in his mid-forties, did not need to lug false-bottomed suitcases into Poland. But here he was, with a list in his pocket, the list having come from Istanbul. And the second name on the list, Oskar’s!
It meant that someone—Itzhak Stern, the businessman Ginter, Dr. Alexander Biberstein—had forwarded Schindler’s name to the Zionists in Palestine. Without knowing it, Herr Schindler had been nominated for the post of righteous person.
Dr. Sedlacek had a friend in the Cracow garrison, a fellow Viennese, a patient he’d got to know in his practice. It was Major Franz Von Korab of the Wehrmacht. On his first evening in Cracow, the dentist met Major Von Korab at the Hotel Cracovia for a drink. Sedlacek had had a miserable day; had gone to the gray Vistula and looked across at Podgorze, the cold fortress of barbed wire and lofty gravestoned walls, a cloud of a special dimness above it this mean winter’s day, a sharper rain falling there beyond the fake eastern gate where even the policemen looked accursed. When it was time to go and meet Von Korab, he went gratefully.
In the suburbs of Vienna it had always been rumored that Von Korab had a Jewish grandmother. Patients would idly say so—in the Reich, genealogical gossip was as acceptable small talk as was the weather. People would seriously speculate over drinks whether it was true that Reinhard Heydrich’s grandmother had married a Jew named
