After the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 , he joined the Polish Army as an officer and took part in the defence of Poland against the invasion . He later explained to the Australian novelist Thomas Keneally how he was wounded on the San River where his life was saved by his sergeant major , who carried him to a field hospital . After Poland was defeated and partitioned between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union , Pfefferberg needed to decide whether it would be safer to travel east towards the Soviets or west towards the Germans . He later recalled this choice : 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 . " After sneaking back to Kraków , he was imprisoned along with the rest of the area 's Jews , in the Kraków Ghetto . Pfefferberg used a German-issued document to visit his soldiers in a military hospital , and to also to visit his mother . This is how he first 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 . He later began helping Schindler trade on the Kraków 's wartime black market
Katyn Forest
Katyn massacre
Poldek Pfefferberg