The Emperor of Lies (12 page)

Rz-zepin! It’s your lucky day today, Rz-zepin.

Your name’s been c-c-crossed off the list.

*

They walked in silence, he and Lajb.

Coming in the opposite direction they met several more knots of men and women who had just been notified of their deportation and were on their way to the assembly camp at the Central Jail, and once again a sort of circle or vacuum formed around them. Adam dared not look the deportees in the face. He dared not lift his eyes any higher than their knees. Most of them had no shoes, just bits of cloth wound round and tied at the ankles, or feet stuck into primitive, loose-fitting clogs that they were dragging through the snow as if they were fetters.

Adam thought about the new shoes he had seen Uncle Lajb putting on, the day after the Praeses announced that all the workers behind the strike in Drukarska Street were to be deported from the ghetto.

That was the way it went: some had been deported; others had got new shoes.

Just as with Uncel Lajb’s bicycle, no one in the ghetto had ever seen such shoes: proper lace-ups of smooth, glossy leather, with a substantial heel and sole, and punched, stitched decoration to the uppers. When Lajb walked up and down the flat in Gnieźnieńska Street wearing them, they creaked against the floor just as their steps were creaking on the dry snow now.

In normal circumstances, the flat would have been empty at this time of day, with his father at work. But Szaja got up self-consciously from the kitchen table when they came in. Adam’s eyes went involuntarily to the bed where Lida usually lay. Where the bed had stood, there were now a table and two spindly wooden chairs, and on the chairs sat a man and a woman, with a girl of about ten or twelve on the floor between them.

This is the Mendel family
, says Szaja in a formal, Littvishe Yiddish of a kind he would never normally use; and, as if to clarify (in Polish):

They are from the Prague collective. They have been billeted with us.

Mr Mendel is a short man with a bent, almost hunchbacked posture; bald-headed, with round spectacles. Adam gazes into his eyes, but the look behind the spectacles is entirely blank. He sees, and yet does not see. His wife sits beside him, fiddling with something in a handbag.

Where’s Lida?
Adam asks.

Szaja says nothing.

Adam turns round, ready to ask Lajb the same question.

Where’s Lida?

But Lajb is no longer there. A mere minute before he was standing close beside Adam, his face as mute and expressionless as ever. Now it’s as if he had never been there.

When Józefina Rzepin died, father and son learnt to carry out their respective duties silently and with the minimum of fuss. In the mornings, Szaja would generally light the stove while Adam went down to the yard to fetch water. Since Szaja was the only one of the two with a proper workbook, he was usually the one to queue at the food distribution points when new rations were announced; while Adam was the one to make the soup for dinner, wash the clothes, feed Lida, and talk and sing to her.

This is the first time for many years they both realise the silence that has arisen can only be broken with words. Adam has a huge hole in his chest. The hole is called Lida. But it’s too big to fill with words like missing or anxious or afraid. Or rather the words, if he were to dare to utter them, would simply disappear down into it.

I’ve never asked for help
, Szaja finally says, nodding in the direction of the door through which Lajb has just gone.

Adam says nothing. At the other end of the room sits the Mendel family, following their interaction with worried looks. Though they understand none of what is being said, it is as if they, too, have been caught up in the tension between father and son.

They said they’d deport the lot of us.
(At the word deport, Adam’s father lowers his voice still further.)
Even Lida was on their list.

So I asked Lajb to help me

I’ve never asked anyone for help in my whole life

Adam looks his father in the eyes.

Where’s Lida, is all he says.

They were going to deport Lida, too

Adam glances over at the Mendel family. He wonders if Mr Mendel recognises him as the
criminal
who broke into their collective. Presumably he does. It’s just taking a while for the realisation to sink in. That he is now to be the lodger of the very same man who tried to rob him of all his worldly possessions.

Lajb’s found a job for you

Adam stares at his father.

At Radogoszcz Station. They need people for the unloading. Well paid.

Insight has deepened into horror in Mr Mendel’s face. He is looking straight at Adam now, and Adam looks back. (Defiantly, scornfully: what can he do?) Then to his father:

Where’s Lida?

You don’t know what it’s been like while you were away

Where’s Lida?

Adam hurls himself forward, leaning across the table to grab his father by the shoulders, shaking him as if he were some rag doll. At the other end of the room, Mrs Mendel gets to her feet and presses her daughter’s face to her bosom as if to protect her from attack. Plates and cutlery crash from the table to the floor.

In a rest home
, is all Szaja says.

Lajb found her a place in a rest home

*

For Adam, as for many other Bałuty residents, Marysin was more or less unknown territory. A place for
the others
: the wealthy, men with power and influence.

Ordinary folk only went to Marysin if they had business there: at the shoe factory, for example, which was one of the few
resorty
in Marysin; or at the warehouse behind Praszkier’s workshop, where people with special coupons queued for allocations of heavy-duty timber, or coal briquettes. Or if you were dead, and were going to be buried. Day in, day out, Meir Klamm and the other members of the Funeral Association could be seen driving funeral director Muzyk’s horse-drawn hearses back and forth along Dworska and Marysińska Streets. On the other side of the wall in Zagajnikowa Street, the kingdom of the dead stretched away, such a vast expanse that it was said you could not see all the way from one side to the other. The air in Marysin was also full of death, the putrid smell of raw, open earth, crumbling concrete and refuse; and when the snow melted to grit and mud, and the wind was in the wrong direction, it was filled with the bittersweet stench of saltpetre from the cesspits where the excrement workers were applying quicklime. You could see them in the distance. A long row of men with shovels was outlined against the sky, like tattered crows on a telegraph wire.

Adam had never set foot in the area round Okopowa and Prożna Street, where the Praeses and the other powerful men in the
Beirat
had their homes. But he knew from Moshe Stern’s reports that there were ghetto residents who rented out ‘casual rooms’ here, and they could sometimes be seen prowling up and down Marysińska Street, touting for custom.

It was bitterly cold the evening Adam Rzepin set out to look for his sister. The snow was piled in big drifts between the buildings where vehicles could no longer get through. Adam did not encounter many of the room touts. Those he asked instinctively turned their backs on him. For them he was presumably just a ragged tramp: a man ‘with no shoulders’, as they said in the ghetto. Without some elevated
dignitary
to support you, you were quite literally nobody out here.

If it had not been for Lida’s voice, it is hardly likely he would have persevered, alone in the cold. Lida’s voice was as faint as the flimsiest shadow through glass; but it was alive, and talking to him constantly.

I shall take you home, Lida
, he told it.

Don’t be afraid. I shall take you home with me.

Wispy smoke was rising from a few of the houses. Police from the Fifth District were on guard, wearing their armbands and tall, shiny boots. He saw them talking to some of those with rooms for hire. He didn’t know whose protection these particular streets were under. Above the empty gables and tops of walls along Marysińska Street, the sky shone a pale red with the reflected light from the parts of Litzmannstadt that were not blacked out.

All at once he saw a cab, coming from the centre of the ghetto. He heard the high snorting of the horse and the jingle of its bridle and halter: a sound so familiar and yet so unusual out here that it was enough to startle anybody. The snow was so deep that the horse’s hoofs made scarcely a sound. The driver pulled up the horse. Climbing down from the springy step of the cab was Shlomo Hercberg, wearing a big, thick coat of fur that looked like beaver or some wild animal of the kind. Two bodyguards had followed in another cab, and they both instinctively moved towards him, as if to clear away this troublesome obstacle that had suddenly materialised in the Prison Commandant’s path. But Hercberg was in a hurry this evening, and the guards contented themselves with shoving Adam out of the way; Hercberg disappeared into a little house slightly further up the left-hand side of Marysińska Street, scarcely more than a shack behind two tall wrought-iron gates, which were unlocked by someone from the house as Hercberg approached.

The cab waited. The horse snorted and stamped in its harness. After a while, the driver climbed down and started walking up and down, slapping and hugging himself to keep warm. Adam didn’t know what to do. He dared not leave, for fear that Hercberg would get away. Nor did he dare to go any closer, for fear of being caught by the cab driver and guards.

After barely half an hour, Hercberg emerged again. He spoke in commanding tones to someone beside him; then climbed into the cab and was borne swiftly away. The man who had come out with him, and who presumably rented out the room, stood there for a few moments; then he shut and locked the big wrought-iron gates. Adam waited until both were out of sight, then threw all his weight against the gate. The lock did not yield. Around the house was a stone wall with metal railings with big, sharp spikes. He managed to get one foot up on the wall, then gripped the railings as high as he could reach, and launched his body forward and up, over the sharp metal points. But he had no time to ready himself for landing. His foot twisted sideways on impact, and an intense shooting pain seared his leg. He limped swiftly to cover at the foot of the house wall. Waited. Nothing.

Now he could see the window through which the stove-pipe protruded. A thin, pale light from inside cast a faint square on the snow.

He went up to the front door and knocked. Nothing.

He had hardly expected anything else. He knocked harder.

Open up, it’s the police!
he said.

The door opened. Inside stood Lida. It was so cold that the light streaming out was entirely blue. Lida’s body was blue, too – from her porcelain neck, all the way down to the blood between her legs. He could not comprehend why she had no clothes on.

Lida, he said.

She smiled at him, briefly and cheerlessly as one might at a total stranger, took a step forward and spat in his face.

The first meeting about the resettlements of the ghetto ordered by the occupying powers was held on 16 December 1941, according to Rosensztajn’s records. Just as on previous occasions, the meeting had not been preceded by any correspondence; Rumkowski had merely been summoned to the offices of the Ghetto Administration, to receive his orders directly from the authorities. Others present at the meeting, apart from Biebow himself, were his deputy Wilhelm Ribbe, Günther Fuchs and a handful of representatives of the police and security services, whose task it would be to supply transport and supervise the actual loading.

Rumkowski stood as he always did, and always would, in front of his superiors. With his ageing white head bowed, his eyes on the floor.

Ich bin Rumkowski. Ich melde mich gehorsamst.

They were friendly and correct, but came straight to the point and made it clear to the Eldest of the Jews that they were now facing yet another long, hard, wartime winter, and that in the long term it was impossible for them to ensure supplies of food and fuel for all the Jews who had been given sanctuary in the ghetto. For that reason, the
Gauleitung
in Kalisz had decided to move a proportion of the ghetto population to smaller towns in the Warthegau, where the supply situation was less acute.

He asked how many people this would involve.

They said twenty thousand.

He stood there at a loss, saying the ghetto could not possibly spare as many as twenty thousand.

They replied that unfortunately the supply situation demanded it.

He reminded them that the authorities had very recently allowed twenty thousand foreign Jews to move
to
the ghetto.

They replied that the decision about the foreign Jews had been taken in Berlin.

What was at issue here was how they were to deal with the regional supply problem in the Warthegau.

He then said he could offer them
ten thousand
.

Their response was that they could consider limiting the ‘initial evacuation’ to ten thousand people, provided that he could guarantee that the transports could begin without delay. It was naturally understood that he himself, together with his council, would be responsible for the selection of those to be deported and for moving them to the assembly points at Radogoszcz, where the German police would take over.

Those who saw the Chairman after this meeting said he certainly seemed upset, yet also, in some strange way, self-controlled and decisive. It was as if the meeting with supreme authorities, along with the fact that he alone had been called upon to put that power’s intentions into practice, had breathed new life into his body, soul and mind.

He repeated this over and over again:

Ten thousand Jews will be obliged to leave the ghetto. This is perfectly true. It is what the authorities have decided. But we must not let ourselves be paralysed by the fact. It makes more sense to turn the question round instead, and see the opportunities it has to offer us. If it is entirely unconditional that ten thousand must leave, then which people can the ghetto best afford to lose?

On the Chairman’s advice, they decided to set up a
Resettlement Commissio
n to deal with all the questions arising from the impending mass move. The Commission’s work would be led by the head of the Population Registry, lawyer Henryk Neftalin, and its members, in addition to Rumkowski, would be Leon Rozenblat, head of the ghetto police, Szaja Jakobson, chairman of the presiding committee of judges, and prison commandant Shlomo Hercberg. The Commission would have the task of going through the population registers
from cover to cover
, cross-checking them against criminal records and the lists of patients in the ghetto hospitals, and it would then determine who had to leave the ghetto.

They decided to try wherever possible not to leave individuals to be deported on their own, but to
let whole families go
. A decision was also taken to prioritise the removal of so-called
undesirable elements
. When somebody asked what the criteria were to qualify as ‘undesirable’, the Chairman referred them to the criminal record department. Notorious black marketeers; known criminal recidivists, prostitutes, thieves – those who saw dealing in other people’s vulnerability and despair as their ‘meal ticket’ – these would be the first to go.

And if the person or persons considered undesirable were, contrary to all expectation, found to have no criminal record? Then their cases were to be referred to him. The decision to initiate the deportations might have been the authorities’, but, just like last time, he reserved the right to make the final decision on who should go.