The Emperor of Lies (16 page)

Benji was there, too. He went round, pale and composed, asking everyone to give a piece of bread and tip a few drops from their wineglasses into a bowl he was holding pressed to his chest. When the bowl was full, he went out to the forecourt where curious onlookers had gathered, despite the icy wind, to witness the event from a distance. All the wedding guests could see the bride’s brother from the window as he, his half-mast suit trousers flapping around his anklebones, handed out bread and poured wine for the poor of the ghetto.

And those with the sense to be ashamed were ashamed.

The rest danced to prohibited gramophone music.

But Regina was not ashamed. She was physically incapable of being ashamed of her brother.

Afterwards, the Chairman told his wife he had earmarked a special place for Benji at the ‘sanatorium’ in Wesoła Street. Perhaps a stay in a rest home would make him calm down and finally feel more content. Regina asked her husband if she could rely on him keeping this promise. He replied that if that was all it took to make his beloved wife happy, then it was the least he could do.

After six months in the Franciszkańska Street collective, the Schulz family had finally been allocated a place to live. It was a couple of blocks away in Sulzfelderstrasse, or Brzezińska as the street was called in Polish. Two families were already housed in the little flat. In the room overlooking the inner yard lived a young working couple and they had a little girl with long plaits, named Emelie, who never said a word or even looked up when they met in the hall; in the larger room, facing the street, lived a paint dealer named Riemer and his wife, who had both also come from Prague.

On Dr Schulz’s advice, Martin and Josel slept in the Riemers’ room, while Vĕra and her mother moved into the kitchen.

Just off the kitchen there was a tiny room, formerly used as a larder or possibly a cloakroom. There were two doors to this cubbyhole: a door from the kitchen that was so small you had to crouch to get through it; and a taller, narrower one from the hall that looked like an ordinary cloakroom door.

Up on the ceiling of this room there was an air vent, which could be opened using a rod fixed to the wall. As long as the vent was open, you could have both doors shut and there was still some light in the cubbyhole.

Maman installed herself in this restricted space. Vĕra took food in to her on a tray every day, and they also brought her water in a bucket, and an enamel bowl to use as a chamber pot. It was so cramped inside that if Maman wanted to sleep with the door shut, she had to sit with her back against the wall and her knees pulled up. So there she sat. She ate very little; soon she was eating nothing at all, unless Vĕra or Martin put the food in her mouth and forced her to swallow.

Arnošt tried to use his connections to get Maman admitted, first to the hospital in Łagiewnicka Street, then to the ‘special clinic’ in Wesoła Street; but he was forced to give up. In a ghetto where everyone is more or less ill, stays in hospital were for
di privilizherte
, and Arnošt Schulz, foreign Jew that he was, still had a long way to go before he could count himself among that select, privileged group.

But he worked doggedly, day after day, to try to get there.

In 1942, he and a Dr Wieneger from Berlin, with whom he had had some correspondence on scientific matters before the war, developed a technique for making a special salt and sugar solution that could be given subcutaneously; it was derived from a decoction of potato peelings left over from the factory soup kitchens.

Potato peelings –
shobechts
– were desirable commodities in the ghetto; they came in ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ varieties and were sold in sacks of two or five kilos to anybody with contacts within the administration, and those individuals naturally knew at once what it took to get five times as much for the sacks on the black market. The trade in potato peelings eventually became so widespread that the Chairman had to insist they be put on prescription, just like milk and other dairy products. That was how the two doctors, Schulz and Wieneger, were able to get their hands on them. They simply wrote prescriptions for each other.

Then, finally, something happened to make the Eldest of the ghetto take some notice of the stocky but undeniably quick-witted doctor from Prague. In a speech to the ghetto administration in February 1942, Rumkowski made particular mention of
Prague physician Schulz’s brilliant innovation using the waste products of the soup kitchens
as a model of how current problems in the ghetto could be solved if only one were inventive enough and worked out ways of reusing the ghetto’s own resources.

*

But it was for Maman’s sake, this obsession with potato peelings.

Every morning before he went to the hospital, he fastened the solution he had devised himself onto a stand Martin had made out of old coathangers, and then inserted the tubing that was attached to the drip bag into a vein in Maman’s left wrist.

Thus Maman could get her nutrition intravenously.

Vĕra records in her diary that her mother’s body shook with a strange fever and thick, foul-smelling sweat oozed from her pores and made her face red and swollen. Yet despite the side effects, Maman seemed to get back some of her former strength and impulsiveness. In her alert moments, she was still quite convinced she had never left their apartment in Mánesova Street. She told Vĕra one evening she suspected there were Czech Nazis hidden in the apartment, who at nights, when the family was asleep, sat up writing secret despatches to Berlin on Vĕra’s portable typewriter.

Before they left Prague, that typewriter had been the subject of an argument between mother and daughter. Vĕra had insisted on bringing it with her, knowing that sooner or later she would have to look for a job; Maman had said no.

Has the girl taken leave of her senses; that blessed machine must weigh at least fifteen kilos!

Was this now Maman’s subtle attempt to pay her back after she had been forced to relent?

But as Vĕra sat with Maman in the tiny room, she too could clearly hear the click of little type bars hitting the narrow cylinder. She looked up at the ceiling and saw a clump of cockroaches – as big as a wasps’ nest – clinging to the vent, their hard bodies falling to the floor one by one,
click, click, click
: it sounded just like the typewriter bars hitting the cylinder . . .

By that stage, the authorities had imposed blackout regulations.

Every evening, Martin or Josel would climb up and cover the kitchen windows with a sheet of tin to stop the light spilling out.

But the children dared not cover the vent in Maman’s ceiling, despite the fact that the vermin got in through it. When the door was shut, it was her room’s only source of light.

So they all sat there together in their dirty, unheated kitchen in a Polish town they did not know, listening to the distant sound of what Josel said were Allied bombers on their way into Germany, and from the darkness of her chamber Maman whispered that she was sure the Allies’ disembarkation plan would succeed this time, and when she next went out to buy fresh
rohliky
at the baker’s on the corner, she would find that all the hateful Nazis had been driven out of Prague.

Linguistic confusion

I know. It was nothing but trouble, just like Papa and Mama said, for me to bring the typewriter with me. But I could see no point in spending Kč150 on a portable typewriter in working order only to leave it ‘in store’, which in this case would have been the same as making a gift of it to the Germans.

There was bound to be a demand for secretarial services even where we were going. Łódź is, as Martin explained to us all, a
German
town.

And how right I was! and how wrong!

In the offices here they use
Polish
typewriters, of course, I’d be an imbecile to get a job here – as I understand it, they don’t use the German letters on the keyboard here; for a German e they type a Polish ę – or an ą – or an Ł instead of a proper L.

The spoken language is even worse. It’s like living in a swarm of bees. Everywhere you hear Polish, Yiddish, Hebrew. The only language
not
being spoken is German. That’s the language of the occupiers, the enemy – the Germans.

As a speaker of German or Czech you are entirely isolated here; you
have no idea
what’s being discussed all around you. It makes me feel like a complete illiterate . . .

It was the spring of 1942. The resettlement operation, as the deportations were known, was already fully under way.

For many of the German Jews, the dismay of finding themselves in such a miserable situation had turned into a nagging terror of what might come next. It was reported that even some
Western Jews
were now on the lists of those to be deported, which many felt to be an utter absurdity. Would this misery never end?

It was so cold in these winter months that Martin had to hack chunks of ice out of the well before he could carry water up to the flat. Vĕra went down on hands and knees and tried to scrub away the worst of the dirt, but the water was so cold that her hands were soon numb and swollen, and all the joints ached dreadfully. They had to hang the washing on a line strung from the stove-pipe to the handle of the door to Maman’s little room, but it scarcely dried, and however much they tried to keep a fire going, they were still frozen to the bone.

But it was not so much the cold and damp as the hunger that made life a daily torture. The skin of their bellies and round their wrists and ankles became swollen and heavy, retaining water; weakness was like a weight in every limb. After a few days with nothing to eat but the thin soup that stank of ammonia, lassitude turned to dizziness and dizziness in turn developed into a kind of mania. Hour by hour, minute by minute, Vĕra had no thought in her head but
food
. She thought about the newly baked bread Maman would bring home in the mornings, with a hard, crusty, aromatic outside, and so fresh that it lay warmly in the palm of your hand when you broke it; or of the deliciously garlicky boiled beef that their housekeeper would set before them on Sundays, with potato dumplings that she mixed and kneaded herself and boiled in a big saucepan and then served with a big, juicy blob of butter on top; or of the proper
palašinky
the children used to have for dessert when they got home from school, with jam and cream; or of the laden plates of
cukrovinky
, little nut and vanilla cakes shaped into balls and twists, that were always put on the table around Hanukkah. None of these visions were of the slightest use for alleviating her torment, in fact they merely drove the hunger animal in her guts even wilder. What was more, Arnošt would brook no compromise: any food that they could spare, however little, must go to Maman.

He talked constantly about Maman to Vĕra and her two brothers.

And thus,
talking about Maman
became a way of escaping the hunger. It was the only way of dulling your own body’s pain: incessantly talking about someone whose suffering and hunger were greater.

Weak, distracted almost to breaking point by pain and hunger, Vĕra made her way each day with thousands of other workers along the deep, dirty furrows that had been worn in the banked-up snow along the middle of the street.

The carpet-weaving workshop where she had been given a job as a ‘Polish’ secretary was in a side street off Jakuba. There must have been a dairy or some shop of that kind in the building before the ghetto was sealed, for the imprint of the lettering was still visible in the grey plaster where the sign used to be:
M l e k o
it said, in italic shadow letters above a row of three deep shop windows, their glass broken but the inside still carefully covered with blackout paper.

One small consolation amid all her sorrow was that her skills as a typist had come in useful after all. Instead of sitting at the looms, she had been allocated a little booth, or partially partitioned-off area, next to the office of the manager Mr Moszkowski, and there she spent her days typing out long lists of materials and invoices directed to
Centraler Arbeits-Ressort
, which Mr Moszkowski would sign at the end of the working day.

There was very little elbow-room between her open office and three looms with the warp threads stretching right up to the ceiling; the carpet weavers sat in rows on long benches, men and women in pairs or groups of four. The foreman’s name was Gross; he walked round like a slave-driver on a Roman galley, beating time with a wooden stick which he thumped against the wooden frames of the looms, and beside the harrying stick the weavers’ hands flew round and round, sending the shuttle and bobbin through the warp, and pressed the wooden treadle right down with the arch of their foot to operate the harnesses, and the weft thread was sent back again; the beater slammed home:

Send, receive; treadle.

The air above them was thick with fluff.

Clouds of damp dust that clogged your throat like a thick, choking sock of cloth, making it hard to swallow and blocking your nose and ears.

Though Vĕra was behind her protective partition, she scarcely dared breathe for fear of taking more of the foul, dirty carpet dust into her lungs. How must it have felt for the workers at the looms? But the ghetto workers were nothing more than the operations they performed: those urgent hands and treadle-stamping feet working ten hours a day to keep pace with a frenzied tempo that no human being could match under normal circumstances.

At twelve o’clock,
mittags
was served at the tailor’s workshop in Jakuba. The serving hatch was not a hatch in the normal sense of the word but simply a window on the ground floor of an ordinary tenement block. Inside the window, a scarcely visible hand dispensed soup from a ladle into the outstretched tin mugs and other vessels.

Those in positions of trust, that is to say the people the woman serving knew or had taken into her confidence, got two ladlefuls. Everyone else, including Vĕra, got one. On producing her dinner coupon she was also handed a slice of dark, dry bread without any margarine. They always had to wait their turn for the food. The workers from the uniform workshop at 12 Jakuba were always allowed to go first. They took priority with the soup, because they were sewing for the German army.

It was as she was standing in the queue waiting for the ladle of the
pani Wydzielaczka
to reach her tin that she realised the deportations were under way. First one of the women weavers said she was ‘leaving them’ and surprised them by solemnly going round all her fellow workers to shake their hands and say goodbye, and Mr Moszkowski and the foreman Mr Gross and the two policemen from the ghetto Wirtschaftspolizei who had been posted there to make sure
nothing was stolen
all looked away or down at the ground, red in the face with shame. Knowing that you had your work and your living quarters in the ghetto
on charity
was one thing; proving it to anybody and everybody was quite another.

The following day, the Polish working couple living in the other room of the flat were gone. When Vĕra got back from Mr Moszkowski’s
resort
one evening in February, another family was standing in the hall, with an almost identical daughter: she, too, had plaits, and kept her eyes on the floor. Vĕra felt like asking her if she knew what had happened to the other girl, Emelie, as if the fact that they were so alike might mean this girl knew something about the other one.