The Emperor of Lies (10 page)

From his vantage point on the roof of the brickworks Adam Rzepin could see the ‘foreign’ Jews arriving at the ghetto. Thousands of people in a single line, like a rope stretched across the low horizon. Above this long rope of humanity, the October sky arched wide and desolate over the treeless plain. One minute the sky was almost stingingly open and blue, the next it was all but covered in a rapid swell of black cloud. And a few moments after that, the file of people disappeared into the dark mass of cloud as if it were swallowing them up. When the new arrivals emerged once more, their baggage, the clothes they were wearing, everything was covered in a fine layer of snow.

Adam cupped his hands into a funnel and shouted down to Jakub Weisberg –
The foreigners are coming! The foreigners are coming!
– He saw Jakub’s face turn upward in dismay; then he swung himself, like Zawadzki the smuggler, in one fluid movement from the roof down to the ground, with its still pristine covering of snow.

But hundreds of ghetto dwellers seemed to have had the same idea. The streets and alleyways leading to Marysin were packed with people. Out at Marynarska Street, Gertler’s
Sonderkommando
had erected a roadblock. Nobody was allowed to pass unless they could pay first: twenty marks just to be let through, another twenty if you had a handcart. Adam had only his two lacerated hands, but the fierce guard insisted on payment even for those.

No access for porters unless they can pay their way!

From behind the barriers through which he would never get, Adam saw one of the newcomers – a short man in a hat and an elegant gabardine raincoat – fishing in the inner pocket of his jacket for money. Beside the peculiar foreigner stood the foreigner’s wife, wearing a tight skirt, real stockings and high-heeled shoes, and next to her their three almost grown-up children, two boys and a young woman. The children were looking around them, wide-eyed. They obviously hadn’t the faintest idea where they had ended up. With a gesture that was meant to look extravagant, but merely emphasised his bewilderment still further, the newcomer took out his wallet and gave the porter a couple of notes.

Beside them, all the suitcases they had brought with them had already been stacked and lashed onto the porter’s barrow: a mountain of luggage.

*

Schnell, schnell . . . !

Mach, dass du hier wegkommst, dumme Judensau . . .

This was the first thing Vĕra Schulz heard: the German police guard’s voice, sharp yet tinny, cutting through many closed wagon doors. Then the doors were pulled open from outside and a sort of dark, metallic
clang
ran through the whole train, and suddenly all was chaos and noise as people who had been sitting stiff and immobile for many hours set their heavy limbs reluctantly in motion.

She wrote the date in her exercise book:

4 October 1941; Transport No. ‘Prague II’

It must have snowed during the night; the bright light reflecting off the snow was piercing to eyes that began to water in the unexpected cold. No platform: just bare, frozen ground. Boards like those used for unloading cattle were propped against the open wagon doors. The sick and the old held out groping, disorientated hands and were helped down by passengers who had already made it to the ground. And once they were down, the desperate crush that arises when thousands of people don’t know which way to go.

German soldiers driving them from all directions; those hysterically shouting voices can be heard everywhere above the din:
Schnell, schnell! Nicht stehenbleiben! Los!

Not a moment to rest or get your breath back.

There are some men standing beside the train, all wearing the same uniform caps, and armbands with stars of David, whom she at first took for railway employees but now sees to be policemen of some kind. A number of them are blocking people’s way and demanding to see identity papers or insisting that all accompanying
Gepäck
be opened, and that (as she only later realises) is how such huge amounts of clothing and valuables go missing before the newcomers have even properly arrived.

Among the Polish Jews there are also some adolescents, mostly boys, who have bribed their way through the police barriers and are coming up with barrows to offer to carry luggage. Someone in the transport (not her wagon) must have become separated from her husband or son, because she is desperately crying out his name into the crowd. Another woman – directly behind Vĕra – falls to her bare knees and starts to sob.

Heart-rending, uninhibited sobbing.

Where have they taken us? Where are we?

Standing a little further off is a handful of German soldiers in knee-length, greyish-green military greatcoats, with rifles slung across their backs. They stamp their booted feet to keep warm in the cold, and they are all smiling though they are feigning indifference, pretending not to see. Perhaps they are thinking about the profits to be made now that all the Jews – all of them from the Reich, with everything they own, stashed or sewn into suitcases and rucksacks and coat linings – will finally be forced to pay back all they owe the German people.

*

Diary entry:

We walk as if in a trance. The march seems to go on for ever. Run-down tenements with smashed or empty, gaping windows. No motorised traffic; but everywhere the same crush. Men and women hauling loaded carts and stinking latrine tanks – two in front, two pushing at the back. Like working animals!

But most of all, children. They come swarming round our legs as soon as we are inside the barricades – and they will not leave us alone until the police marching alongside step in.

We have now got to our ‘final destination’ – an old school building. The wide archway into the courtyard is flooded with sewage. Some of the younger people put down planks so the older ones can keep their feet dry as they go in, and form a human chain to pass the cases through.

People jostle, push forward; all the classrooms and the corridors from one end of the building to the other have been converted into dormitories. Wooden bunks are lined up under the windows, each bunk 75 cm long, so people’s feet have to hang over the end. In that small space, we are also to store our luggage: rucksacks at the head end, suitcases at the foot end. Our room has about sixty people ‘living’ in it. There are just as many in the corridor outside! When everyone has a place, they give out bread that is meant to last us a whole week.

In the morning: weak black coffee, like brown water.

Young women from the ghetto bring big vats of soup from the soup kitchens.

It’s not much of a soup – hot water with something greenish in it. But everyone falls on the food, even those who said earlier that they wouldn’t touch it! It turns out to be the only meal of the day.

Washing is difficult. We have to go out into the yard because there’s no water in the taps. And then: stand in the snow, queuing for the latrines. Toilet paper – forget it. What little toilet paper we have is reserved for the sick! They say tuberculosis and typhus fever are rife in the ghetto. Every other inhabitant is ill with it. My hands ache right up to the elbows with a constant, dull pain that is made worse by having to wash clothes in ice-cold water. It’s the rheumatism again!

Some people have strung lines around their bunks so they can hang up their wet washing. Everyone huddles up as tightly they can; children scream, howl and cry; and many of those who are sick make the sounds sick people make.

So the nights pass, and are followed by the days.

And then it is night again. And in the morning the same thin, beige soup that looks and smells just as rank as before – like ammonia. The smell of the soup stays in the walls far into the night, and it’s like the ache in your stomach and the band of hunger round your forehead. Will I ever get used to it?

But the worst thing of all is the regret. The thought that we should have got away to safety while there was still time – that Papa thought it was more important to do his bit at the hospital than to look after his family. That he refused to think of us and of Maman!

But I can’t say any of that, because of course now Papa is making himself indispensable upstairs, where they’ve set up a first-aid post for the sickest people in the transport! They’re crying out for doctors here! But I can’t sleep, it feels too horrible not knowing what the future holds for us . . .

Somewhere, somehow, there must be some way to get help, otherwise we shall all fade away and die . . . Somewhere, there must be . . .

Adam Rzepin lived with his father Szaja and sister Lida in a flat, just one room and a kitchen, at the top of Gnieźnieńska Street, near the south-western boundary of the ghetto. In the kitchen, they also kept a bed for Szaja’s brother Lajb. But ever since the fatal strike at Drukarska Street, it was as if Lajb had some kind of curse on him. He moved from
resort
to
resort
, changing jobs like other people change their clothes, and nobody really knew where he slept from one night to the next. It was said in the ghetto that he was a
Spitzel
for the Kripo and it was best for people to keep out of his way.

Adam’s sister now lay in the bed that used to be Lajb’s. When Adam got up to fetch water and light the stove in the mornings, Lida would lie there, listening to the angels. The angels often came down from Heaven and spoke to Lida. In summer they sang in the stove-pipe, and in winter they traced their own, delicate wing-quill patterns in the frost flowers on the window panes. Adam and Lida’s father Szaja had insulated the frame with old rags but the damp got in anyway, and in winter the glass was sometimes entirely frozen over on the inside, the catch covered in fine hairs of frost. Every so often, one particular angel they called
the big beast
would talk to Lida. Lida’s world was populated by the little beasts and the big beast. The little beasts were the bedbugs, who gathered in drifts behind the wallpaper and crawled over your hand as soon as you pulled away a skirting board. The big beast was a bleeding angel of hunger.

When the hunger angel got its teeth into someone, it was as if they were being turned inside out. Every bit of their body was crying out for food; anything would do, as long as it could be chewed and swallowed and taken down into their stomach. When the big beast spoke, its voice seemed to come from a great, ravenously dark pit of hunger. The only thing Lida could do was to open and close her mouth in terror, to let out its tormenting screams.

Whenever the big beast took his sister in its clutches, Adam got a blanket and lay down beside her; he lay so close to her that it was as if he was trying to absorb her body into his own.

Though she weighed no more than about thirty kilos, Lida’s face was remarkably unscathed, the skin pale, bluish, and as thin as porcelain. And beneath the rags in which Lida lay swaddled there was, in spite of everything, a body with a distended belly and two small, thin breasts. Where it had not already grown swollen and waterlogged from lack of nutrition, her flesh was covered in sores and bruises. Every morning, Adam carried water up from the yard and washed his sister in a large wooden tub, then wrapped the rags around her again. But even while he was washing Lida, her china face remained smooth and immobile, as if frozen in an expression of perpetual wonder – at the existence of the world, and of her brother, and of the hunger angel beating and beating its hard wings out there in the icy brown darkness.

The Rzepin family had lived in Gnieźnieńska Street since long before the ghetto existed. Back then, they had all helped to provide for the family, even Uncle Lajb. But since Lajb fell into disgrace, Szaja could rely on little more than the daily workplace soup, and you did not get fat by running errands with parcels or keeping watch for children, as Adam did.

Everyone was talking about the new arrivals in the ghetto now. Moshe Stern said the richest Jews were the ones from Prague. According to Moshe, some of them had even had so much food with them when they arrived that they gave away what they couldn’t carry to children, and other people who begged for it.

Lying there beside his sick sister in the evenings, Adam Rzepin kept turning this over in his mind. How was it possible that someone could reach the ghetto with such a surplus?

The Prague Jews had been divided into two collectives inside the ghetto. One was quartered in the former children’s hospital at 37 Łagiewnicka Street, the other in the elementary school in Franciszkańska Street. Adam opted for the latter, because he thought there were more, and safer, escape routes from there; and a few weeks later he cautiously began to prowl about the area.

The snow that had begun to fall the day the foreign Jews arrived was still coming down, though not as thickly. It had got colder. Down in the Prague Jews’ courtyard a few women were busy hauling up buckets of water from the well and carrying them into the school. The women carried their water awkwardly, clumsy in their movements; they were
city Jews
– and it showed. The children, too, were different. Instead of playing with whatever came to hand, they just wandered aimlessly round the yard, barging into each other.

Adam realised at once how much of a stranger he was here. He spoke Yiddish in his daily life, Polish when he had to. But the peculiar, spiky, sing-song Czech spoken by the women in the yard was completely alien to him. He couldn’t understand a single word.

Moshe Stern, who had been to the collective several times, said there was only one way to treat the newcomers. You had to smile and be polite. So Adam put on his sunniest smile as soon as he got into the yard. With that smile he pushed past a small group of Czech men on their way out of the building with snow shovels in their hands and thick, hunting-style caps, the earflaps fastened on top. Adam did not need to turn round to be aware of their looks boring into his back. It started to hurt inside his head. The higher he climbed inside the building, the tighter the band of pain around his forehead grew, and when he was at the very top, Lida started to sing.

Lida had only once before started singing for him while he was out. He and some of the kids from his street had gone to look for reject building timber on the empty plot next to the plank store in Drukarska Street. The plot had been fenced off, and the whole storage area was patrolled by local police, on duty in shifts from dawn to late evening. With Feliks Frydman from the tenement next door he had managed to dig a way under the fence along the back of the plank compound, and Feliks was already inside when he heard Lida’s voice, as indelibly pure and clear as the sound of a spoon tapping a glass that is half-full. As the tone faded away, a pain ran through his head, as if someone had suddenly pushed a sharp metal wire through it, from one temple to the other. He only just had time to get away before the guards came rushing up, batons raised. They had already caught Feliks inside the compound.

Now he could hear Lida’s voice again; like the thin whine of a drill:

eeeeee-eeeeee

He wonders if it is the men with the snow shovels she wants to warn him about. But what has he actually got to hide? He’s only here out of curiosity, to look round a bit. And anyway, he has gone too far to turn back now.

There are sleeping places in the classrooms, and the corridors outside them, but to his surprise, Adam sees few people between the screens that separate the various families’ spaces. Most members of the collective must have moved out; or the Praeses has already found jobs for them all. He runs his eyes frantically over bunks and improvised tables, sees clothes, blankets and mattresses, spread out or rolled up; sees lots of kitchen equipment, saucepans, frying pans, washing bowls and tubs piled in and on one another, or stowed with suitcases under the narrow bunks. But nowhere can he see anything worth stealing. Then he suddenly remembers something Moshe told them:
at least
one doctor came with each transport, and those doctors were expected to set up a surgery in every collective. Adam has seen no sign of any surgery on the ground floor of the building. So there must be one upstairs somewhere. He is on the second floor now. The rooms are smaller here, the corridor running between them narrower. He notices people tense and turn round to stare after him as he pushes past them increasingly curtly.

He is suddenly aware of how few people there are up here.

Two youngish men approach from one side.

Where’s the doctor’s surgery? he asks.

In Polish:
Gdzie jest przychodnia lekarska?

And then, mainly to gain time, in Yiddish as well:
I’m looking for the DOCTOR. Can anybody tell me where he is?

One of the two men thinks he understands what Adam means, and points uncertainly along a further stretch of corridor. As he walks in the direction indicated by the man, he thinks he is probably not going to get out of here alive.

But the far end of the corridor opens out into something that looks like a waiting room, with people sitting or lying on the floor outside a closed door. He goes up to the door and pulls it open, expecting to see a doctor look up in alarm from examining a patient. To his astonishment, the room inside is empty. A perfectly ordinary office with a desk, and an armchair behind it, and next to the desk a cabinet with some dishes, dressings and anonymous glass bottles on its shelves. He opens the cabinet doors and pulls out its drawers; he pays scant attention to what he is taking, just fills his pockets with as many bottles and jars and packs of dressings as he can cram in; then backs out into the corridor and makes his way out by the same route he came in by.

But now his sunny smile no longer meets with other smiles. An elderly man he tries to squeeze past opens his mouth and screams.

He starts to run, heedless of anyone or anything in his way. Until he reaches the end of the corridor and his eyes fall on a woman dozing on a wooden stool with her head – all he can really see is a huge mass of hair tied in some kind of headscarf – hanging low between her knees. On the floor beside the woman is her handbag: a
real
handbag. It is large, quite plain, in faded leather with a clasp at the top like the one Józefina Rzepin had on hers when the two of them strolled up and down Piotrkowska on Sundays. It is this sudden image of a mother he otherwise scarcely remembers that decides the matter for Adam. Before he knows what he is doing, he has snatched the bag and run headlong down the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the men with the hunting caps swarming
up
the same stairs, in an avalanche of indignant voices, but they have come
too late
– taken the
wrong
doors – he knows he will have time to get down and out ahead of them: two more strides and he’ll be safe.

Franciszkańska. The sharp, blinding light of the snow in his eyes.

Muddy slush in the streets. Empty facades.

Ten metres down the road, a gap between two buildings leads into a narrow courtyard. At one time, all the inner courtyards of the ghetto were surrounded by tall wooden fences, but those have all been taken down now, chopped up and carried off for fuel. Instead, a whole network of firebreaks, some as wide as avenues, opens up behind the house fronts, affording the fugitive free passage from one part of the ghetto to another. But these internal routes are known only to those who lived here long before the barricades came. Long before there was even a ghetto here.