gasps and gaggings. He heard the nurse murmuring, “Here’s something for you.” He heard an intake of breath. He didn’t know if it was patient or nurse. The woman is the hero of this, he thought.
When he looked again, the nurse was waking the kidney patient, the sleepy musician, and offering him the glass. From the far end of the ward, Dr. B looked on in a clean white coat.
Dr. H moved to old Roman and took his pulse. There was none. In a bed at the far end of the ward, the musician forced the almond-smelling mixture down.
It was all as gentle as H had hoped. He looked at them—their mouths agape, but not obscenely so, their eyes glazed and immune, their heads back, their chins pointed at the ceiling—with the envy any ghetto dweller would feel for escapees.
CHAPTER 21
Poldek Pfefferberg shared a room on the second floor of a nineteenth-century house at the end of Jozefinska Street. Its windows looked down over the ghetto wall at the Vistula, where Polish barges passed upstream and down in ignorance of the ghetto’s last day and SS patrol boats puttered as casually as pleasure craft. Here Pfefferberg waited with his wife, Mila, for the Sonderkommando to arrive and order them out into the street. Mila was a small, nervous girl of twenty-two, a refugee from Lodz whom Poldek had married in the first days of the ghetto. She came from generations of physicians, her father having been a surgeon who had died young in 1937, her mother a dermatologist who, during an Aktion in the ghetto of Tarnow last year, had suffered the same death as Rosalia Blau of the epidemic hospital, being cut down by automatic fire while standing among her patients.
Mila had lived a sweet childhood, even in Jew-baiting Lodz, and had begun her own medical education in Vienna the year before the war. She had met Poldek when Lodz people were shipped down to Cracow in 1939. Mila had found herself billeted in the same apartment as the lively Poldek Pfefferberg.
Now he was already, like Mila, the last of his family. His mother, who had once redecorated Schindler’s Straszewskiego Street apartment, had been shipped with his father to the ghetto of Tarnow. From there, it would be discovered in the end, they were taken to Belzec and murdered. His sister and brother-in-law, on Aryan papers, had vanished in the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. He and Mila had only each other. There was a temperamental gulf between them: Poldek was a neighborhood boy, a leader, an organizer; the type who, when authority appeared and asked what in God’s name was happening, would step forward and speak up. Mila was quieter, rendered more so by the unspeakable destiny that had swallowed her family. In a peaceable era, the mix between them would have been excellent. She was not only clever but wise; she was a quiet center. She had a gift for irony, and Poldek Pfefferberg often needed her to restrain his torrents of oratory. Today, however, on this impossible day, they were in conflict. Though Mila was willing, should the chance come, to leave the ghetto, even to entertain a mental image of herself and Poldek as partisans in the forest, she feared the sewers. Poldek had used them more than once as a means of leaving the ghetto, even though the police were sometimes to be found at one end or the other. His friend and former lecturer, Dr. H, had also mentioned the sewers recently as an escape route which might not be guarded on the day the Sonderkommando moved in. The thing would be to wait for the early winter dusk. The door of the doctor’s house was mere meters from a manhole cover. Once down in there, you took the left-hand tunnel, which brought you beneath the streets of nonghetto Podgorze to an outlet on the embankment of the Vistula near the Zatorska Street canal. Yesterday Dr. H had given him the definite news. The doctor and his wife would attempt the sewer exit, and the Pfefferbergs were welcome to join them. Poldek could not at that stage commit Mila and himself. Mila had a fear, a reasonable one, that the SS might flood the sewers with gas or might resolve the matter anyhow by arriving early at the Pfefferbergs’ room at the far end of Jozefinska Street.
It was a slow, tense day up in the attic room, waiting to find out which way to jump. Neighbors must also have been waiting. Perhaps some of them, not wanting to deal with the delay, had marched up the road already with their packages and hopeful suitcases, for in a way it was a mix of sounds fit to draw you down the stairs— violent noise dimly heard from blocks away, and here a silence in which you could hear the ancient, indifferent timbers of the house ticking away the last and worst hours of your tenancy. At murky noon Poldek and Mila chewed on their brown bread, the 300g each they had in stock. The recurrent noises of the Aktion swept up to the corner of Wegierska, a long block away, and then, toward midafternoon, receded again. There was near-silence then. Someone tried uselessly to flush the recalcitrant toilet on the first-floor landing. It was nearly possible at that hour to believe that they had been overlooked.
The last dun afternoon of their life in No. 2 Jozefinska refused, in spite of its darkness, to end. The light, in fact, was poor enough, thought Poldek, for them to try for the sewer earlier than dusk. He wanted, now that it was quiet, to go and consult with Dr. H.
Please, said Mila. But he soothed her.
He would keep off the streets, moving through the network of holes that connected one building with another. He piled up the reassurances. The streets at this end seemed to be clear of patrols. He would evade the occasional OD or wandering SS man at the intersections, and be back within five minutes. Darling, darling, he told her, I have to check with Dr. H.
He went down the back stairs and into the yard through the hole in the stable wall, not emerging into the open street until he’d reached the Labor Office. There he risked crossing the broad carriageway, entering the warrens of the triangular block of houses opposite, meeting occasional groups of confused men conveying rumors and discussing options in kitchens, sheds, yards, and corridors. He came out into Krakusa Street just across from the doctor’s place. He crossed unnoticed by a patrol working down near the southern limit of the ghetto, three blocks away, in the area where Schindler had witnessed his first demonstration of the extremities of Reich racial policy.
Dr. H’s building was empty, but in the yard Poldek met a dazed middle-aged man who told him that the Sonderkommando had already visited the place and that the doctor and his wife had first hidden, then gone for the sewers. Perhaps it’s the right thing to do, said the man. They’ll be back, the SS. Poldek nodded; he knew now the tactics of the Aktion, having already survived so many.
He went back the way he’d come and again was able to cross the road. But he found No. 2 empty, Mila vanished with their baggage, all doors opened, all rooms vacant. He wondered if in fact they were not all hidden down at the hospital—Dr. H and his wife, Mila. Perhaps the H’s had called for her out of respect for her anxiety and her long medical lineage.
Poldek hurried out through the stable again, and by alternative passageways reached the hospital courtyard. Like disregarded flags of surrender, bloodied bedding hung from the balconies of both the upper floors. On the cobblestones was a pile of victims. They lay, some of them, with their heads split open, their limbs twisted. They were not, of course, the terminal patients of Doctors B and H. They were people who had been detained here during the day and then executed. Some of them must have been imprisoned upstairs, shot, then tumbled into the yard. Always thereafter, when questioned about the corpses in the ghetto hospital yard, Poldek would say 60 to 70, though he had no time to count that tangled pyramid. Cracow being a provincial town and Poldek having been raised as a very sociable child in Podgorze and then in the Centrum, visiting with his mother the affluent and distinguished people of the city, he recognized in that heap familiar faces: old clients of his mother’s; people who had asked him about school at the Kosciuszko High School, got precocious answers in reply, and fed him cake and candy for his looks and charm. Now they were shamefully exposed and jumbled in that blood-red courtyard.
Somehow it did not occur to Pfefferberg to look for the bodies of his wife and the H’s. He sensed why he had been placed there. He believed unshakably in better years to come, years of just tribunals. He had that sense of being a witness which Schindler had experienced on the hill beyond Rekawka.
He was distracted by the sight of a crowd of people in Wegierska Street beyond the courtyard. They moved toward the Rekawka gate with the dull but not desperate languor of factory workers on a Monday morning, or even of supporters of a defeated football team. Among this wave of people he noticed neighbors from Jozefinska Street. He walked out of the yard, carrying like a weapon up his sleeve his memory of it all. What had happened to Mila? Did any of them know? She’d already left, they said. The Sonderkommando’s been through. She’d already be out the gate, on her way to the place.
To Plaszow.
He and Mila, of course, had had a contingency plan for an impasse like this. If one of them ended up in
