Plaszow, it would be better for the other to attempt to stay out. He knew that Mila had her gift for unobtrusiveness, a good gift for prisoners; but also she could be racked by extraordinary hunger. He’d be her supplier from the outside. He was sure these things could be managed. It was no easy decision, though—the bemused crowds, barely guarded by the SS, now making for the south gate and the barbed-wire factories of Plaszow were an indication of where most people, probably quite correctly, considered that long-term safety lay.
The light, though late now, was sharp, as if snow were coming on. Poldek was able to cross the road and enter the empty apartments beyond the pavement. He wondered whether they were in fact empty or full of ghetto dwellers concealed cunningly or naively—those who believed that wherever the SS took you, it led in the end to the extermination chambers.
Poldek was looking for a first-class hiding place. He came by back passages to the lumberyard on Jozefinska. Lumber was a scarce commodity. There were no great structures of cut timber to hide behind. The place that looked best was behind the iron gates at the yard entrance. Their size and blackness seemed a promise of the coming night. Later he would not be able to believe that he’d chosen them with such enthusiasm.
He hunched in behind the one that was pushed back against the wall of the abandoned office. Through the crack left between the gate and the gatepost, he could see up Jozefinska in the direction he’d come from. Behind that freezing iron leaf he watched the slice of cold evening, a luminous gray, and pulled his coat across his chest. A man and his wife hurried past, rushing for the gate, dodging among the dropped bundles, the suitcases labeled with futile large letters. KLEINFELD, they proclaimed in the evening light. LEHRER, BAUME, WEINBERG, SMOLAR, STRUS, ROSENTHAL, BIRMAN, ZEITLIN.
Names against which no receipts would be issued. “Heaps of goods laden with memories,” the young artist Josef Bau had written of such scenes. “Where are my treasures?”
From beyond this battleground of fallen luggage he could hear the aggressive baying of dogs. Then into Jozefinska Street, striding on the far pavement, came three SS men, one of them dragged along by a canine flurry which proved to be two large police dogs. The dogs hauled their handler into No. 41 Jozefinska, but the other two men waited on the pavement. Poldek had paid most of his attention to the dogs. They looked like a cross between Dalmatians and German shepherds. Pfefferberg still saw Cracow as a genial city, and dogs like that looked foreign, as if they’d been brought in from some other and harsher ghetto. For even in this last hour, among the litter of packages, behind an iron gate, he was grateful for the city and presumed that the ultimate frightfulness was always performed in some other, less gracious place. This last assumption was wiped away in the next half-minute. The worst thing, that is, occurred in Cracow. Through the crack of the gate, he saw the event which revealed that if there was a pole of evil it was not situated in Tarnow, Czestochowa, Lwow or Warsaw, as you thought. It was at the north side of Jozefinska Street a hundred and twenty paces away. From 41 came a screaming woman and a child. One dog had the woman by the cloth of her dress, the flesh of her hip. The SS man who was the servant of the dogs took the child and flung it against the wall. The sound of it made Pfefferberg close his eyes, and he heard the shot which put an end to the woman’s howling protest.
Just as Pfefferberg would think of the pile of bodies in the hospital yard as 60 or 70, he would always testify that the child was two or three years of age.
Perhaps before she was even dead, certainly before he himself even knew he had moved, as if the decision had came from some mettlesome gland behind his forehead, Pfefferberg gave up the freezing iron gate, since it would not protect him from the dogs, and found himself in the open yard. He adopted at once the military bearing he’d learned in the Polish Army. He emerged from the lumberyard like a man on a ceremonial assignment, and bent and began lifting the bundles of luggage out of the carriageway and heaping them against the walls of the yard. He could hear the three SS men approaching; the dogs’ snarling breath was palpable, and the whole evening was stretched to breaking by the tension in their leashes. When he believed they were some ten paces off, he straightened and permitted himself, playing the biddable Jew of some European background, to notice them. He saw that their boots and riding breeches were splashed with blood, but they were not abashed to appear before other humans dressed that way. The officer in the middle was tallest. He did not look like a murderer; there was a sensitivity to the large face and a subtle line to the mouth.
Pfefferberg in his shabby suit clicked his cardboard heels in the Polish style and saluted this tall one in the middle. He had no knowledge of SS ranks and did not know what to call the man. “Herr,” he said. “Herr Commandant!”
It was a term his brain, under threat of its extinction, had thrown forth with electric energy. It proved to be the precise word, for the tall man was Amon Goeth in the full vitality of his afternoon, elated at the day’s progress and as capable of instant and instinctive exercises of power as Poldek Pfefferberg was of instant and instinctive subterfuge.
“Herr Commandant, I respectfully report to you that I received an order to put all the bundles together to one side of the road so that there will be no obstruction of the thoroughfare.”
The dogs were craning toward him through their collars. They expected, on the basis of their black training and the rhythm of today’s Aktion, to be let fly at Pfefferberg’s wrist and groin. Their snarls were not simply feral, but full of a frightful confidence in the outcome, and the question was whether the SS man on the Herr Commandant’s left had enough strength to restrain them. Pfefferberg didn’t expect much. He would not be surprised to be buried by dogs and after a time to be delivered from their ravages by a bullet. If the woman hadn’t got away with pleading her motherhood, he stood little chance with stories of bundles, of clearing a street in which human traffic had in any case been abolished.
But the Commandant was more amused by Pfefferberg than he had been by the mother. Here was a Ghettomensch playing soldier in front of three SS officers and making his report, servile if true, and almost endearing if not. His manner was, above all, a break in style for a victim. Of all today’s doomed, not one other had tried heel-clicking. The Herr Commandant could therefore exercise the kingly right to show irrational and unexpected amusement. His head went back; his long upper lip retracted. It was a broad, honest laugh, and his colleagues smiled and shook their heads at its extent.
In his excellent baritone, Untersturmfuhrer Goeth said, “We’re looking after everything. The last group is leaving the ghetto. Verschwinde!” That is, Disappear, little Polish clicking soldier!
Pfefferberg began to run, not looking back, and it would not have surprised him if he had been felled from behind. Running, he got to the corner of Wegierska and turned it, past the hospital yard where some hours ago he had been a witness. The dark came down as he neared the gate, and the ghetto’s last familiar alleys faded. In Podgorze Square, the last official huddle of prisoners stood in a loose cordon of SS men and Ukrainians.
“I must be the last one out alive,” he told people in that crowd.
Or if not he it was Wulkan the jeweler and his wife and son. Wulkan had been working these past months in the Progress factory and, knowing what was to happen, had approached Treuhander Unkelbach with a large diamond concealed for two years in the lining of a coat. “Herr Unkelbach,” he told the supervisor, “I’ll go wherever I’m sent, but my wife isn’t up to all that noise and violence.”
Wulkan and his wife and son would wait at the OD police station under the protection of a Jewish policeman they knew, and then perhaps during the day Herr Unkelbach would come and convey them bloodlessly to Plaszow.
Since this morning they had sat in a cubicle in the police station, but it had been as frightful a wait as if they’d stayed in their kitchen, the boy alternately terrified and bored, and his wife continuing to hiss her reproaches. Where is he? Is he going to come at all? These people, these people! Early in the afternoon, Unkelbach did in fact appear, came into the Ordnungsdienst to use the lavatory and have coffee. Wulkan, emerging from the office in which he’d been waiting, saw a Treuhander Unkelbach he had never known before: a man in the uniform of an SS NCO, smoking and exchanging animated conversation with another SS man; using one hand to take hungry mouthfuls of coffee, to bite off mouthfuls of smoke, to savage a lump of brown bread while his pistol, still held in the left hand, lay like a resting animal on the police-station counter and dark spatters of blood ran across the breast of his uniform. The eyes he turned to meet Wulkan’s did not see the jeweler. Wulkan knew at once that Unkelbach was not backing out of the deal, he simply did not remember it. The man was drunk, and not on liquor. If Wulkan had called to him, the answer would have been a stare of ecstatic incomprehension. Followed, very likely, by something worse.
Wulkan gave it up and returned to his wife. She kept saying, “Why don’t you talk to him? I’ll talk to him if he’s still there.” But then she saw the shadow in Wulkan’s eyes and sneaked a look around the edge of the door. Unkelbach was getting ready to leave. She saw the unaccustomed uniform, the blood of small traders and their
