The Emperor of Lies (18 page)

A Saturday in May: long, pale curtains of steady rain hang from the sky. In the curiously cold, watery blue light in the courtyard of the Resettlement Commission in Rybna Street, a crowd about a hundred strong stand waiting, compressed into a single mass of stiff shoulders and hands thrust into threadbare coat pockets.

They had already been standing there for weeks, ever since the announcement that the Western Jews who had still not found jobs were to be evacuated. In his speeches, the Chairman constantly returned to the new arrivals’ unwillingness to work. His voice trembling, he referred to them as work-shy parasites who had lost all drive, and said that he had wanted to settle his account with them long since, but the deportations of the permanent residents had got in the way. Now, however, the time had come.

Any time now
, he declaimed from up on his platform.

Any time now, it will be your judgement day, too!

The Czech and German Jews in the ghetto were caught napping by the Chairman’s aggressive attacks on them. The Central Labour Office at Bałuty Square and the Resettlement Commission’s office in Rybna Street were suddenly inundated with people from the collectives looking for work; or claiming they could prove they already
had
work; or brandishing documents to prove they were so ill that they could not possibly undergo another transport like the one they had so recently suffered, which they could verify by producing doctor’s certificates and all manner of letters of introduction from their friends and former employers.

Arnošt Schulz had found himself sought out over the past few weeks by numerous former acquaintances from the Jewish congregation in Prague, men who would scarcely have given him the time of day, but who now insisted on his signature on a variety of certificates they said were their only hope of salvation.

There was one woman in particular who came to see them several times: Hana Skořápková, just a few years younger than Vĕra, who was from one of the Prague families with whom they had shared a room in the collective. Now, Hana’s father, mother and elder brother had all been notified that they were on the list and that she alone, as the only one of them to have a job, would be allowed to stay. Vĕra helped the frantic Hana type out an application for postponement, and Dr Schulz appended a note certifying that Mrs Skořápková, Hana’s mother, was suffering from muscle inflammation and was thus unsuitable for selection for transport –
für Transport ungeeignet
. All this was sent to the Resettlement Commission; then there was nothing to do but wait.

That was why they were standing there in the rain in the courtyard of the office in Fischgasse. On the stroke of eight every morning, decisions were announced on the most recently processed applications for postponement.

Vĕra could later remember the tense intake of breath that ran like a wave through the many-headed crowd as the door at the back of the courtyard opened and the Commission secretary, a short man with his shirtsleeves rolled up and his braces dangling, came out and began shuffling his papers. Standing there beside Hana, Vĕra could hear the sound of raindrops pattering on a tarpaulin canopy that was sticking out from the wall of the building; and beyond that sporadic dripping the great, deep roar of rain, like an invisible wall in the air around them.

In an unexpectedly loud, almost resounding voice, the secretary began reading out the names, first those of people who had been granted respite, then those whose appeals had been turned down.

At first the crowd stood in complete silence. Although the names were read out in alphabetical order, some people still thought it worth hoping: perhaps the name they were waiting for had been missed by the reader, or was lower down the list; but a vague unease soon began to spread among the crowd. Somebody burst into shrill tears; another started shouting out the name of someone who had just been turned down. And what had until then been just a slight forward movement turned into a huge avalanche, the entire crowd hurling itself at the doorway (through which the lone clerk had already slipped), and the police who had been standing on guard throughout stepped in and formed a human chain across the entrance.

The policemen had seen it all many times before. But not Hana. The girl was inconsolable. All her appeals for postponement, including the one for her mother, had been rejected.

*

The ghetto was getting ready for departure. On pavements and street corners from Jojne Pilcer Square and all the way up Łagiewnicka Street, German and Czech Jews were trying to sell whatever household goods and personal property they had. Only a short time before, the new arrivals from Prague, Luxembourg and Vienna had paid porters with crisp Reichsmarks to carry all the baggage they had brought with them to the ghetto. Now all those indispensable articles were nothing but a weighty encumbrance, worth not much more than the linings of the expensive winter coats they were inviting passers-by to bid for.

And none of the hagglers were interested in money. Those selling wanted to exchange their goods for food; and the ‘natives’ who had come to barter for the wares all brought their own scales in which they carefully weighed out the amounts of flour, sugar or rye flakes they could spare in exchange for that warm winter coat or a pair of shoes with some wear left in them.

From somewhere in the throng, Vĕra heard a voice calling her name.

A little way down the road, a man stood waving to her, his arm flapping wildly. That was how she recognised him, by the way he carried himself.

Schmied
was his name. Hans Schmied.
Aus Hamburg
.

In the weeks following the arrival of the transports, he and some of the other German Jews from Cologne and Frankfurt had fallen into the habit of coming down to the old elementary school in Franzstrasse for a chat with the Czech Jews who were housed there.

They said they only came to swap news, the ghetto’s perpetual
was Neues
, or to make useful contacts in the never-ending hunt for food. But they were particularly complimentary to the women, and Schmied had for some reason immediately latched on to Vĕra.

Not that Herr Schmied’s appearance was entirely against him. The same God who at his birth had twisted his shoulders half a turn out of alignment had also given his long, narrow face an aristocratic look, with a slender nose and an austere downward turn to the mouth. Even on those rare occasions when he did venture a smile, the corners of his mouth were pulled down, which made him appear to be viewing everything with the same vaguely disgusted disapproval. His aristocratic air was contradicted by his voice, however. Schmied talked constantly, and insistently. He had told her that he had almost completed his diploma in electronics when the new race laws came into force. Two years after that, the whole family had been deported to Litzmannstadt. But the family had not lost touch with all its old contacts, he said. His father, who had a shipping firm in Hamburg, had many of the rich textile manufacturers of Litzmannstadt as clients. He was now lodging with one of those clients, a certain Herr Kleszczewski, who had kindly let him have a room of his own in the family’s apartment in Sulzfelderstrasse.

Things had, said Schmied (almost boastfully), gone unspeakably well for him in the ghetto.

Yet here he was now, caught up in the crush in the street; with the suit he had worn for courting her now dangling on a coathanger from the wrought-iron railings behind him. He had not even bothered to unpick the hateful yellow Star of David from the back and front.

So you are leaving
,
Mr Schmied
, she said.

It was more of an observation than a question. She didn’t know what to say.

But he wasn’t listening. With one hand on her arm, he leant forward and whispered that he had something to show her, something important. She would only have to give him a quarter of an hour of her time, twenty minutes at most.

She looked round. She tried to explain that she was needed at home. That her mother was ill, and could not be left alone for any length of time.

But Schmied insisted. His eyes had a moist, strangely evasive look:
I don’t know who else I’d dare tell
, he said, with that stiff, disapproving expression on his face, making it look more and more like a rigid mask of bone.

A little while later, Schmied was leading her through an archway that looked wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. Inside the courtyard, she noticed an abandoned handcart of a rudimentary design, propped against a wall. The cart had a wooden wheel with metal fittings, and long wooden handles, splintered and unpainted. When she tried to find her way back to this address much later, it was the broad gateway she looked for – and the handcart in the yard.

But by
then
, of course, it was all gone, and the archway looked a lot narrower.

That was what the hunger did to you. Anything that was not right before your eyes immediately drained from your memory and all you were left with was the hollow yearning for food. (Was it food he was going to give her? Bread, maybe he had some left over and couldn’t take it with him on the journey.) Looking back, she remembered that once inside the building, they ascended several flights of stairs and kept meeting other people on their way down. On the first floor they passed four men who were blocking the whole landing with the big bed they were carrying between them. Everything must be sold now! Tables and chairs from the flats on the floors above were also on their way down.

It was not until they reached the top floor, where the walls closed in and the ceiling was so low that they could scarcely stand upright, that they found themselves alone. Hans Schmied took out a key and unlocked a door with shiny metal fittings.

In the dusky light into which they stepped, tall rafters supported a distant roof from which some kind of rope and tackle hung. Here and there, mattresses and blankets abandoned in corners partially obscured random collections of household items. Schmied went straight over to the far wall, knelt down by a sort of basic fireplace, took out a knife blade and began working loose some of the sooty bricks. Behind the grit and other debris that this generated, a rectangular cavity emerged, and within it – scarcely distinguishable through the cloud of brick dust – a simple, home-made radio receiver.

‘I built the whole thing myself,’ he said, his voice thick with dust and pride. ‘I used old parts Kleszczewski got hold of for me.’

This
– he leant forward and pointed –

‘This is the valve, and this is the oscillator.’

And this
, he said. He brought out a dirty exercise book, brushed the dust off the cover and showed her page after page of closely written notes:

‘This is the log of all the news broadcasts I’ve managed to pick up in the last six months.’

All written in
code
, so even if the radio was found, nobody could link it to him.

And I’ll give you the key to the code so you can read it for yourself, everything that’s happened since we came here.

Vĕra instinctively took a couple of steps back. She listened for footsteps following them up the stairs, but all she could hear was the whispering, rustling sound of rain on the roof above; and Schmied’s energetic voice as it went on telling her how he would creep up here to the drying attic secretly in the evenings, sometimes alone, sometimes with Kleszczewski. They listened mainly to the German stations transmitting from Litzmannstadt and Posen, but also to the illegal Polish station Świt. In the latter case, Kleszczewski would listen and Schmied would sit beside him, writing things down.

He leafed through the book, letting her see all the pages of notes, made in his own, secret script:

‘The German winter offensive is a fiasco, the siege of Stalingrad a war of attrition that only the Russian People’s Army can win. The Russian patriots have pushed forward their front line in the Caucasus. Sooner or later, the victorious Russian army will cross the Weichsel and the ghetto will no longer exist. It is only a matter of time.’

He looked gave her a long, intense look, which made her feel distinctly uneasy. ‘There are Listeners all over the ghetto,’ he said.

Without her noticing, he had taken hold of her right hand, into which he now slipped the key he had used to open the attic door.

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he said. ‘Just look after it for me. It’s enough for me to know it’s in safe keeping.’

He spoke in a steady voice and with surprising composure.
Now go
, he said, and when she made no move to leave:
I’ll stay here until I’m sure you’ve gone
. She closed her fingers round the key and walked towards the attic door, and when she turned round one last time, he had already slotted the bricks back into the hole behind the fireplace and brushed away all the traces.

Later, she saw him leaving the ghetto.

She stood in the group of curious people that had gathered behind the police barriers, and watched the deportees leave the assembly point in Trödlergasse outside the Central Jail and make their way down the dusty road to Radegast. It was a boiling hot day in May; Hana Skořápková was there, too, walking with her mother and father towards the rear of the column. So in the end she had decided to leave the ghetto rather than be parted from her family.

Schmied walked alone, with that customary aristocratic look on his face and a suitcase in one hand; over his shoulder he had a lumpy bundle of what she assumed to be household items rolled up in towels and sheets. He met her eye as she stood there at the roadside, but gave no sign of recognition and did not turn back, either.

Night after night, convoys of heavy army vehicles drove into the ghetto. Those who lived along the main roads in and out of the ghetto told of headlights so bright that they tore great wounds right through the blackout curtains, and the throb of engines that made the walls shake. There were at least ten lorries in every convoy. Each one was loaded with a hundred twenty-kilo sacks of torn and bloody clothes.

The next morning, the area around the Church of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary was cordoned off. In the open space between the church door and the statue of the Virgin by the steps down to Zgierska Street lay heaps of mattresses and sacks full of sheets and blankets.

Workers were recruited on the spot at Bałuty Square.

Fifty casual labourers loaded the sacks onto wheelbarrows and took them into the empty church. They began by stacking the sacks of clothes in front of the altar; then the space between the pews was packed with blankets and mattresses. Soon they had built a pyramid of sacks so tall that the light falling through the beautiful, lead glass windows above the altar was obscured, the echo vanished and the empty, abandoned church was plunged into darkness.

It was at about this time that the Jews from the neighbouring towns of Brzeziny and Pabianice began arriving in the ghetto. They, too, were brought at night, in small train carriages with sealed doors and windows.

There were a thousand Jews in the first transport – all women. Somewhere along the way, the women had been separated from their menfolk, and their children had been taken from them. Their accounts were incoherent and confused. Some said the Germans had herded them all together, hundreds of them, and made them run to the station, mercilessly shooting down any who tripped over or couldn’t keep up.

Those who survived had been shoved violently onto the waiting trains, and some of them beaten in the process. Others did not even seem to be aware that they had been in a railway wagon, still less that the train had brought them somewhere else.

Blind Dr Miller despatched doctors to Kino Marysin where the women had been taken for the time being, to the same (now empty) storehouse area pressed into service just a few weeks earlier during the evacuation of the Cologne and Frankfurt collectives.

There was also some question of the Chairman going out to talk to the women. But he declined to. Instead, he ordered Rozenblat to close off the area and make sure the women stayed in their huts.

But it was too late. A number of them had already got past the barriers, and before long they were in the streets round Bałuty Square. There, they accosted everyone they met, demanding to know if anyone had seen their children and husbands.

The Jews of the Łódź ghetto listened to their stories with growing horror.

Brzeziny, too, had had a ghetto. But it had been an open ghetto, from which people could come and go as they pleased, without being shot. There had been work, as well. Almost all the Jews in Brzeziny had worked for one German company, Günther & Schwartz, which had made them think all the town’s Jews were safe. But then, without warning, the evacuation order was issued. The SS commando unit blocked off district after district. They had been promised an allowance of eleven kilos of luggage each. But once they had formed themselves into lines with their scanty baggage, black-coated SS men stepped forward and started sorting people. Young, healthy men and women were put into one group, designated A. Others, children, the old and the sick, were allocated to a group B. Whole families were thus split up. Group B had to stand to one side, and group A was ordered to set off to the station at a run. Before they even got there, they could hear the Germans shooting everyone they had left behind.

Others had even more to tell:

In the village of Dabrowa, three kilometres outside Pabianice, a warehouse had been set up in an old factory, disused since the previous century. Mountains of used mattresses, shoes and clothes had been taken to this warehouse. Some of the young men and women who had been in the group A category had initially been brought here, to carry out the task of sorting, and they had reported that among all the coats and jackets and shoes and underclothes they had also found workbooks with Jewish names, all bearing the round seal of the Central Labour Office and with the official stamp
AUSGESIEDELT
across the photograph and signature. They had also found wallets containing coins and five- and ten-mark notes in the Łódź ghetto’s own currency.

For the shocked crowds listening to them, this evidence was incontrovertible. The workbooks could hardly have originated anywhere else but the ghetto, and the currency was only valid here, and not available anywhere else.

*

On Monday 4 May at 7 a.m., the first transport of western European Jews left Radogoszcz Station. The families from Hamburg, Frankfurt, Prague and Berlin who had arrived in the ghetto and endured such hardship just six months earlier were now forced to leave it again.

The resettlement of the collectives took place in much the same order as their arrival:

The first to leave were
Berlin II
and
Vienna II
,
Düsseldorf
,
Berlin IV
and the collective from
Hamburg
. They were followed by:
Vienna IV
,
Prague I
,
Prague III
,
Cologne II
,
Berlin III
,
Prague V
,
Vienna V
,
Prague II
,
Prague IV
and
Vienna I
.

On receiving their deportation order, people were expected to make their way to the assembly point at Trödlergasse. There they had to give up their bread coupons and ration cards, and were registered for a transport whose number matched the one they had been allotted on the Resettlement Commission’s list. They then spent the night either in one of the newly erected barrack huts in Trödlergasse or in the Central Jail. At four in the morning, a special unit of ghetto police came and ordered everyone to form up in marching order – in rows of five, with a police guard at the front and back of every group, and others spaced at ten-metre intervals all along the route.

They were forced to march the length of Marysińska Street, all the way to Radogoszcz Station.

At six in the morning, an hour before the train was due to leave, they were ordered to form up again, this time two metres from the train. Half an hour before departure, two Gestapo cars pulled into the station yard, and two officers accompanied by police from the German ghetto guard went along the train, ordering everyone to put their luggage down on the ground. Once they had complied, the doors were unlocked and the passengers helped aboard the train, which this time consisted of nothing but third-class compartments.

The abandoned luggage was then taken in lorries to the premises of the Resettlement Commission in Rybna Street, where two back rooms facing onto the yard were already full of suitcases and mattresses. A few hours later, the same train was back with the same carriages, though the carriages were now empty, ready for the next transport.