The Emperor of Lies

Steve Sem-Sandberg

Translated from the Swedish by Sarah
Death

Translation copyright © 2011 Sarah Death

Originally published in 2009 by Albert
Bonniers Förlag, Sweden, as
De fattiga i
Łódź.
English translation originally published in 2011 by Faber
and Faber Ltd., in Great Britain.

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN
PUBLICATION
Sem-Sandberg, Steve, 1958–
The emperor of lies / Steven
Sem-Sandberg.
Translation of: De fattiga i Łódź.
eISBN
978-1-7708-904-1
I. Title.
PT9876.29.E47F3813 2011        839.73’74        C2010-906482-8

Jacket design: Nayon Cho
Text design:
Jonathan D. Lippincott

We acknowledge for
their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the
Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the
Canada Book Fund.

This translation has been published with the
financial
sponsorship of the Swedish Arts Council.

Some streets in the ghetto,
with their Polish and German names

Bałucki Rynek – Baluter Ring (Bałuty Square)

Plac Kościelny – Kirchplatz (Church Square)

Radogoszcz – Radegast

Bazarna/Bazarowa Street – Basargasse

Bracka Street – Ewaldstrasse

Brzezińska Street – Sulzfelderstrasse

Ceglana Street – Steinmetzgasse

Ciesielska Street – Bleicherweg

Czarnieckiego Street – Schneidergasse

Drewnowska Street – Holzstrasse

Drukarska Street – Zimmerstrasse

Dworska Street – Matrosengasse

Franciszkańska Street – Franzstrasse

Gnieźnieńska Street – Gnesenerstrasse

Jagiellońska Street – Bertholdstrasse

Jakuba Street – Rembrandtstrasse

Karola Miarki Street – Arminstrasse

Łagiewnicka Street – Hanseatenstrasse

Limanowskiego Street – Alexanderhofstrasse

Lutomierska Street – Hamburgerstrasse

Marysińska Street -Siegfriedstrasse

Mickiewicza Street – Richterstrasse

Młynarska Street – Mühlgasse

Pieprzowa Street – Pfeffergasse

Podrzeczna – Am Bach

Próżna Street – Leeregasse

Rybna Street – Fischgasse

Szklana Street – Trödlergasse

Urzędnicza Street – Reiterstrasse

Wesoła Street – Lustigergasse

Zagajnikowa Street – Bernhardstrasse

Zgierska Street – Hohensteinerstrasse

Łódź, 10 December 1939
Confidential
Classified

Establishment of a Ghetto in the City of Łódź

There are, at a reasonable estimate, some 320,000 Jews living in the city of Łódź today. This number cannot all be evacuated simultaneously. A thorough study undertaken by the relevant authorities has shown it would be impossible for them all to be concentrated in a single, closed ghetto. In due course, the Jewish question will be solved as follows:

1) All Jews living north of the line marked by 11 Listopada Street, Plac Wolności and Pomorska Street must be placed in a sealed ghetto, ensuring firstly that a strong German centre around Independence Square (Plac Wolności) is free of Jews, and secondly that this ghetto can also be extended to the northern parts of the town already inhabited exclusively by Jews.

2) Able-bodied Jews who live in other parts of Łódź will be organised into special labour units and housed in barracks under close supervision.

Preparations for and implementation of this plan are to be the responsibility of a staff consisting of representatives of the following:

1. NSDAP (the German National Socialist Workers’ Party)

2. The Łódź representative in the Government Presiding Committee in Kalisz

3. The Łódź City housing, employment and public health departments

4. The Schutzpolizei, responsible for local law and order

5. The security police

6. The Death’s-Head Units (SS forces)

7. The Offices of Trade and Industry

8. The Offices of Finance

The authorities will also take the following preliminary measures:

1) Assess the action required to close off streets and barricade entrances and exits from buildings, et cetera.

2) Assess the resources required to position guards around the perimeter of the ghetto.

3) Hold ready material from the Administrative Development Agency for the closure of the ghetto.

4) Make preparations to ensure health-care provision in the ghetto – particularly the prevention of epidemics – by transfer of drugs and medical equipment.

5) Draw up regulations for future removal of refuse and waste from the ghetto and transportation of dead bodies to the Jewish cemetery, or for setting up a similar burial site within the ghetto.

6) Be equipped to supply the amount of fuel required by the ghetto.

As soon as these initial measures have been taken and a sufficiently large security force is available, I will fix a date for the implementation of the ghetto scheme, i.e. at a given point in time the boundaries as specified in advance will be manned by guards and the streets will be sealed with barbed wire and other obstructions. At the same time, house fronts will be walled up or otherwise blocked off by workers within the ghetto. Inside the ghetto, Jewish self-government will be established. This will consist of an Eldest of the Jews and an expanded community council (
kehila
).

The Department of Food Distribution in the City of Łódź will supply the ghetto with food and fuel, which will be transported to designated places within it where they will be given into the charge of the Jewish administration. The scheme will operate on the principle that the ghetto can only pay for provisions and fuel with goods, fabrics, textiles and other such items. Thus we will extract from the Jews all the valuables they have misappropriated and amassed.

Other parts of the city will be searched so that all Jews unfit for work can be transferred to the ghetto immediately it is in operation, or very soon afterwards. Those Jews fit for work will be placed in special labour units in supervised barracks constructed by the City authorities and security police.

With reference to the above, the following conclusion is to be drawn. All Jews placed in special labour units who prove unfit for work or fall ill must be transferred to the ghetto. Those Jews inside the ghetto who are still able-bodied must carry out whatever work is required within the ghetto itself. I shall reach a decision later about the extent to which able-bodied Jews are to be moved from the ghetto to the labour barracks.

Naturally, the establishment of the ghetto is only a temporary measure. I reserve the right to decide when and how the City of Łódź is to be purged of Jews. The ultimate aim must be to burn away this infectious abscess entirely, once and for all.

[signed]

Übelhör

The Chairman Alone

(1–4 September 1942)

Ecclesiastes 9:10

That was the day, engraved for ever in the memory of the ghetto, when the Chairman announced in front of everyone that he had no choice but to let the children and old people of the ghetto go. Once he had made his proclamation that afternoon, he went to his office on Bałuty Square and sat waiting for higher powers to intervene to save him. He had already been forced to part with the sick people of the ghetto. That only left the old and the young. Mr Neftalin, who a few hours earlier had called the Commission together again, had impressed on him that all the lists must be completed and handed over to the Gestapo by midnight at the latest. How then could he make it clear to them what an appalling loss this represented for him?
For sixty-six years I have lived and not yet been granted the happiness of being called Father, and now the authorities demand of me that I sacrifice all my children
.

Had any one of them an inkling of how he felt at this moment?

(‘What shall I say to them?’ he had asked Dr Miller when the Commission met that afternoon, and Dr Miller had extended his ravaged face across the table, and on his other side Judge Jakobson, too, had looked him deep in the eyes, and they had both said:

Tell them the truth. If nothing else will do, you’ll have to tell them that.

But how can there be Truth if there is no Law, and how can there be any Law if there is no longer any World?)

With the voices of the dying children roaring in his head, the Chairman reached for the jacket Miss Fuchs had hung up for him on the hook on the wall of the barrack hut, fumbled with the key in the lock and had scarcely opened the door when the voices overpowered him again. But there was no Law standing outside his office door, and no World either, merely what remained of his personal staff in the form of half a dozen clerks exhausted by lack of sleep, with the tireless Miss Fuchs at their head, neatly dressed on this day as on all others in a freshly ironed, blue-and-white-striped blouse, with her hair in a chignon.

He said:

If the Lord had intended to let this, His last city, go under, He would have told me. At the very least He would have given me a sign.

But his staff just stared back uncomprehendingly:

Mr Chairman
, they said,
we are already an hour late.

*

The sun was as it usually is in the month of Elul, a sun like the approaching Judgement Day, a sun that was a thousand needles piercing your skin. The sky was as heavy as lead, without a breath of wind. A crowd of some fifteen hundred people had gathered at the fire station. The Chairman often made his speeches there. On other occasions it was curiosity that brought people to listen. They came to hear the Chairman speak of his plans for the future, of imminent deliveries of food, of the work awaiting them. Those present today had not gathered because they were curious. Curiosity would hardly have induced people to leave the queues for the potato depots and distribution points and walk all the way to the square in front of the fire station. Nobody had come to hear news; people had come to listen to the sentence that was to be passed on them – a life sentence or, God forbid, a death sentence. Fathers and mothers came to hear the sentence that was to be handed down to their children. The elderly summoned the last of their strength to listen to what fate had in store for them. Most of those gathered there were old people – leaning
on thin sticks or on their children’s arms. Or young people, holding their children tightly by the hand. Or children themselves.

With heads bowed, faces distorted with grief, with swollen eyes and throats constricted by tears, all these human beings – all fifteen hundred assembled in the square – were like a town, a community in its final moment; waiting under the sun for the Chairman and his downfall.

Józef Zelkowicz:
In jejne koshmarne teg
(
In These Nightmarish Days
, 1944)

*

The whole ghetto was out on the streets that afternoon.

Although the bodyguards succeeded in keeping the majority of the mob at a distance, a few grinning whipping boys found their way up into his carriage all the same. He leant back against the hood, too feeble to brandish his stick at them as he usually did. It was as malevolent tongues were always saying behind his back: he was done for, his time as
Praeses
of the ghetto was over. Afterwards they would say of him that he was a false
shoyfet
who had taken the wrong decision, an
eved hagermanim
who had acted not for the good of his people but just for the power and profit he could engineer for himself.

But he had never acted for anything but the good of the ghetto.

Lord God, how can You do this to me? he thought.

People were already filling the fire-station yard in the scalding sunlight. They must have been standing there for hours. As soon as they caught sight of the bodyguards, they hurled themselves towards him like a pack of ferocious animals. A line of policemen formed a human chain at the front and wielded their batons to drive back the crowd. But it was not enough. Sneering faces still hung over the policemen’s shoulders.

It had been decided that Warszawski and Jakobson would speak first, while he waited in the shade of the platform, to temper as far as possible the pain in the hard words he would be forced to speak to them. The only trouble was that, by the time he came to climb up onto the speaker’s rostrum they had improvised for him, there was no longer any shade, and no platform either: just an ordinary chair on a rickety table. He would be forced to stand on this tottering pedestal while the loathsome black mass jeered and gaped at him from down in the shade on the other side of the yard. Faced with this body of darkness, he felt a terror unlike any he had ever felt before. This, he now realised, must have been how the prophets felt the moment they stepped before their people; Ezekiel, who from besieged Jerusalem, the
city of blood
, spoke of the need to cleanse the city of evil and all filth and set a mark on the forehead of all those who rallied behind the true faith.

Warszawski spoke, and he said:

Yesterday, the Chairman received an order to send away more than twenty thousand of us . . . among them our children and our very oldest people.

Do not the winds of fate shift strangely? We all know our Chairman!

We all know how many years of his life, how much of his strength, his work and his health he has devoted to the upbringing of the Jewish children.

And now they demand that he, HE, of all people . . .

*

He had often imagined it possible to converse with the dead. Only those who had already escaped the incarceration could have said whether he acted rightly or wrongly in letting people go who would not have had any other life anyway.

In the first, difficult period – when the authorities had just begun the deportations – he had ordered his carriage so he could visit the cemetery in Marysin.

Endless days at the start of January, or in February when the flat country round Łódź, the vast potato and beet fields, lay shrouded in a raw and pallid haze. At long last, the snow melted and spring came, and the sun was so low on the horizon that it seemed to cast the whole landscape in bronze. Every detail stood out against the light: the stark mesh of the trees against the ochre shade of the fields, and here and there a splash of bright violet from a pond or the line of a brook hidden in the undulations of the plain.

On days like these he sat huddled and unmoving in the rearmost seat of the carriage; behind Kuper, whose back assumed the same curve as the horsewhip balanced in his lap.

On the other side of the fence, one of the German guards would stand stiffly, or pace restlessly up and down around his sentry box. Some days a fierce wind would blow across the open fields and pasture land. The wind swept sand and loose soil along with it, and also blew a litter of paper over the fence and walls; and with the smoking soil came the the cackle and mooing of poultry and cattle from the Polish farms just the other side of the fence. At times like these it was so evident how arbitrary the drawing of the boundary line had been. The guard stood impotent, head down into the persistent wind, with his uniform coat flapping pointlessly around his arms and legs.

But the Chairman sat there as still as ever while the sand and soil whirled around him. If all that he saw and heard had any effect on him, he did not show it.

There was a man called Józef Feldman who dug graves as a member of Baruk Praszkier’s gang of diggers. Seven days a week, even on the Sabbath since the authorities had ordered it, he was there digging graves for the dead. The graves he dug were not large: seventy centimetres deep and half a metre wide. Just deep enough for a body. But considering there was a requirement for two, perhaps even three, thousand graves a year, it was obviously heavy work. Usually with the wind and loose soil whipping him in the face.

In winter, digging was out of the question. The graves for the winter had to be dug in the warmer half of the year, which was therefore the time when Feldman and the other diggers had to work hardest. In the colder months, he retreated to his ‘office’ for a rest.

Before the war, Józef Feldman had been the owner of a small plant nursery in Marysin. In two greenhouses he had grown tomatoes, cucumbers and green vegetables, salad leaves and spinach; he had also sold bulbs and packets of seeds for spring planting. Now the greenhouses were empty and deserted, their glass broken. Józef Feldman himself slept in a simple wooden cabin off one of the greenhouses, which he had formerly used as an office. There was a low wooden bunk along its back wall. He also had a wood-burning stove, with a flue sticking straight out through the window, and a little hotplate that ran on propane gas.

All the plots of land and former allotments in Marysin were formally owned by the Eldest of the Jews, to be let out as he chose. The same applied to all land previously in collective ownership: the Zionists’
hachsharot
, for example, twenty-one fenced-off allotments with long rows of meticulously pruned fruit trees where the ghetto’s Pioneers had toiled day and night; Borachov’s kibbutz, the Hashomer collective’s decaying farm on Próźna Street where they grew vegetables; and the youth cooperative Chazit Dor Bnej Midbar. Also the large, open areas behind the tumbledown old toolshed that went by the name of Prazkier’s workshop, where the few dairy cows left in the ghetto grazed. All this belonged to the Chairman.

But for some reason, the Chairman had let Feldman keep his. The two of them were often to be seen in Feldman’s office together. The big man and the little man. (Józef Feldman was diminutive. People used to say he scarcely reached to the top of the graves he dug.) The Chairman would be talking about his plans to transform the area round Feldman’s nursery business into one huge beet field and plant fruit trees on the slope down to the road.

It was something often said of the Chairman. He basically preferred the company of ordinary, simple people to that of rabbis and Council members in the ghetto. He felt more at home among the Hasidic Jews in their school in Lutomierska Street or among the uneducated but deeply devout Orthodox Jews who continued making their way out to the big cemetery on Bracka Street for as long as they were allowed to. They would sit there for hours then, crouching between the graves with their prayer shawls over their heads and their well-thumbed prayer books held to their faces. Like him, they had all lost something – a wife, a child, a rich and prosperous relation who could have been providing food and lodging now they were old. It was the same eternal
shoklen
, the same lament down the years:

Why is the gift of life given to one tormented so bitterly;

to one who waits for death but waits in vain;

to one who would delight if he could find his grave;

to one whose path is wreathed in darkness:

pervaded, immured by God?

From the younger visitors, less lofty sentiments were heard:

— If Moshe had left us in Mitsraim we could all have been sitting in a café in Cairo instead of being trapped in here.

— Moshe knew what he was doing. If we hadn’t left Mitsraim we would never have been blessed with the Torah.

— And what has our Torah given us?

—
Im eyn Torah, eyn kemakh
, it is written; without the Torah, no bread.

— I’m quite sure that even if we’d had the Torah, we still wouldn’t have had any bread.

The Chairman paid Feldman for the winter upkeep of his summer residence in Karola Miarka Street. Virtually all the members of the Council of Elders had ‘summer residences’ in Marysin at their disposal, in addition to their town apartments in the ghetto, and some were rumoured never to leave the area, like the Chairman’s sister-in-law, Princess Helena, who was said only to leave her summer residence if there was a concert at the House of Culture or some rich business owner was giving a dinner for the
shpitsn
of the ghetto; then she would always put in an appearance, wearing one of her many elegant, flat, wide-brimmed hats, with some of her favourite finches in a hemp-rope basket. Princess Helena collected birds. In the garden round the house in Marysin she had her personal secretary, the versatile Mr Tausendgeld, construct a large aviary to accommodate no fewer than five hundred different species, many so rare that they were never sighted at these latitudes and certainly not in the ghetto, where the only birds generally to be seen were crows.

As for the Chairman, he shunned all excess. Even his enemies could testify to his modest lifestyle. Cigarettes, however, he consumed in great quantities, and when he was sitting up late, working in his office in a barrack hut at Bałuty Square, he not infrequently fortified himself with a glass or two of vodka.

And sometimes, even in midwinter, Miss Dora Fuchs would ring from the Secretariat to say the Chairman was on his way, so Feldman had to take his coal scuttles and march all the way up to Marki Street to light the stove, and when the Chairman got there he would be unsteady on his feet and cursing because it was still cold and damp in the house, and it would fall to Feldman’s lot to get the old man to bed. Feldman was more intimate than most with all the swings of the Chairman’s mood, and well aware of the oceans of hatred and envy that lay behind that silent gaze and sarcastic, tobacco-stained smile.