Oskar Schindler
After the defeat of Poland and its partition between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Pfefferberg needed to decide to travel East or West. In his own words:
- "We officers had to decide to go east or west. I decided not to go east, even though I was Jewish. If I had, I would have been shot with all the other poor sons of bitches in Katyn Forest."
As a prisoner at Płaszów, near Kraków, Pfefferberg used a German-issued document to visit his soldiers in a military hospital, and also to visit his mother. In this way he met Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German businessman who was taking over an enamelware factory that had been confiscated from Jews. Schindler employed Pfefferberg's mother, an interior designer, to decorate his new apartment.
Through this connection Pfefferberg was employed in Schindler's factory near the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp outside Kraków. This enabled him to survive the extermination of 3 million Polish Jews, during which his parents, sister, brother-in-law and many other relatives were murdered. Pfefferberg described Schindler as "a modern Noah," who was able to save a number of Kraków Jews from deportation to the nearby extermination camp at Auschwitz. Those he saved became known as Schindlerjuden or "Schindler's Jews".
In 1941 he married Ludmila Page (then Ludmila Lewison) with whom he would have two children.
He moved with Schindler and many others to a camp at Brünnlitz.
During these experiences he acquired skill as a welder.
Read more about this topic: Poldek Pfefferberg