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 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 Kraków's wartime black market.