The Emperor of Lies (2 page)

Feldman was also responsible for maintenance of the Green House, on the corner of Zagajnikowa and Okopowa Street. The Green House was the smallest and most outlying of the six orphanages that the Chairman had set up in Marysin, and here it was that Feldman would often find him, sitting hunched in Kuper’s carriage opposite the fenced-off children’s playground in the garden.

The old man clearly found it soothing to watch the children at play.

The children and the dead.
Their horizons were limited. They took sides only on the basis of what was right before their eyes. They did not let themselves be duped by the machinations of the living.

They talked of the war, he and Feldman. Of that immense German army which seemed to continue expanding on all fronts, and of Europe’s persecuted Jews who had to submit to life at the feet of the mighty Amalek. And the Chairman confessed that he had a dream. Or rather, he had two. He spoke of one of them to many people; that was the dream of the Protectorate. He spoke of the other to only a few.

He dreamt, he said, that he would demonstrate to the authorities what capable workers the Jews are, so they would let themselves be persuaded once and for all to extend the ghetto. Then even other parts of Łódź would be incorporated into the ghetto, and when the war was over, the authorities would finally be forced to admit that the ghetto was a
special
place. Here the lamp of industry was kept burning, here there was production such as had never been seen before. And everyone had something to gain by letting the incarcerated population of Litzmannstadt work. Once the Germans had realised this, they would declare the ghetto a Protectorate within the borders of those parts of Poland that had been incorporated into the German Reich: a Jewish free state under German supremacy, where freedom had been honestly won at the price of hard work.

That was the dream of the Protectorate.

In the other, the secret dream, he was standing on the prow of a big passenger ship on the way to Palestine. The ship had left the port of Hamburg after he had personally led the exodus from the ghetto. Exactly who, apart from himself, had been allowed to emigrate was never clarified in the dream. But Feldman understood that most of them were children. Children from the vocational schools and from the ghetto orphanages, children whose lives the
Praeses
had personally saved. In the background, on the far horizon, was a coast: faint in the strong sun, with a strip of white buildings along the shoreline, and above them rolling hills that merged imperceptibly with the white sky. He knew it was Eretz Israel he could see, Haifa to be more precise, but he could not make anything out very clearly because it all melted into one: the white deck of the ship, the white sky, the refracting white sea.

Feldman admitted he found it hard to see how the two dreams could be compatible. The dream of the ghetto as an extended Protectorate, or the dream of the exodus to Palestine? The Chairman answered, as he always did, that the ends depended on the means, that you had to be a realist, and see what opportunities presented themselves. After all these years, he was familiar with the Germans’ way of thinking and behaving. And even he had acquired many confidants among their number. But one thing he knew for sure. Every time he woke up and realised he had dreamt the dream again, his breast filled with pride. Whatever happened, to him and to the ghetto: he would never abandon his people.

Yet later, that was precisely what he would do.

The Chairman rarely spoke of himself or where he came from. That’s all over and done with, he would say when certain events from his past were brought up. But still sometimes, when he gathered all the children around him, he found himself coming back to certain events that had presumably taken place when he was a child himself, and that he had obviously never got out of his mind. One of these stories was about one-eyed Stromka, who had been a teacher of Talmud classes back home in Ilino. Just like blind Dr Miller, Stromka had a stick, and that stick had been long enough for him to reach any pupil in the cramped schoolroom at any moment. The Chairman showed the children how Stromka used to deploy his stick, and then rocked his own heavy body just the way Stromka would rock up and down between the desks where the pupils sat hunched over their books, and every so often the stick would shoot out furiously and rap some inattentive child on the hand or the back of the neck.
Like that!
said the Chairman. The children had nicknamed the stick the extending eye. It was as if Stromka could
see
with the end of his stick. With his actual, blind eye he could see into another world, a world beyond our own where everything was perfect and without distortion or imperfection, a world where the pupils formed the Hebrew characters with complete accuracy and rattled off their Talmud verses without stumbling or hesitating in the slightest. Stromka appeared thoroughly to enjoy looking into that perfected world, but he hated what he could see on the outside.

There was another story, too – but the Chairman was not as fond of telling it:

The little town of Ilino where he had grown up was situated on the River Lovať near the town of Velikiye Luki, for which many fierce battles were to be fought during the war. The town consisted at that time almost exclusively of narrow, rickety wooden houses, built close together. On the short slopes between the buildings, which swelled into shapeless areas of mud when the rains came in spring and the river burst its banks, there was room for little garden plots. The mainly Jewish families who lived there traded in cloth and imported comestibles and other goods from the colonies, conveyed all the way from Vilna and Vitebsk. The district was poor, but the synagogue looked like an oriental palace with two substantial pillars in front; all made of wood.

The bathhouse stood on the riverbank. On the far side of the bathhouse was a stony beach, to which the children often went after Talmud classes. The river was shallow just there. In the summertime it looked like the stagnant water from the well that his mother used when she was washing clothes on the front porch; he loved dipping his hand into the water, warm as his own urine.

At low tide, a little island would appear, a flat streak of land in midstream, on which birds would stand spying for fish. But the bank’s shallow appearance was deceptive. On the other side of the ‘island’, the muddy riverbed fell away sharply again and the water grew suddenly deep. A child had drowned there. It had happened long before he came into the world, but they still spoke of it in the village. Perhaps that was why his schoolmates were drawn to the place. Every afternoon, crowds of children competed in daring to go out to the island lying bare and exposed in the middle of the fast-flowing river. He remembers one of the boys waded in almost to the waist and stood with elbows raised far out in the choppy, glittering water, shouting to the others to hurry up and join him.

As he remembers it, he was not among the boys who then, laughing, ploughed their way through the water.

Perhaps he had volunteered to join the game but been rejected. Perhaps they had said (as they often did) that he was too fat; too clumsy, too ugly.

That was when he had a sudden inspiration.

He decided to go to Stromka and tell him what the others were up to. Afterwards he could only dimly recollect the effect he had hoped to achieve. By turning informer, he would somehow win Stromka’s respect, and if he only had respect, the other children would not dare to exclude him from their games any more.

A brief moment of triumph followed, as blind Stromka came stalking down to the river, his long stick swinging in front of him. But the moment of triumph was short-lived. He did not find himself in favour with Stromka after all. On the contrary, the evil eye stared at him from then on with even greater contempt and ill will, if that was possible. The other children avoided him. They would stand aside and whisper each day when he came to school. Then one afternoon, when he was on his way home, they came too, crowding round him. He was surrounded by a whole crowd of shouting, laughing children. That was what he remembered afterwards. The sudden surge of happiness that ran through him when he thought himself accepted and included in their circle. Though he realised at once that there was something forced and unnatural about those smiles and comradely thumps on the back. They joke and play around, they tell him to wade out into the water, they say they bet he doesn’t dare.

Then it all happens very quickly. He’s standing up to his waist in water, and behind him the children closest to him are bending down to pick up stones from the beach. And before he realises what is happening, the first stone strikes his shoulder. He feels dizzy, tastes blood in his mouth. He does not even have time to turn round ready to run out of the water before the next stone comes flying. He flails his arms, tries to get to his feet, but falls again; and the stones are landing in the water all around him. He sees they are aimed in such a way as to drive him out towards the deeper channel. The moment it dawns on him – that they want him dead – the wave of panic breaks over him. To this day, he has little idea how he did it, but by frantically pushing aside the water with one arm and holding the other over his head for protection, he somehow manages to get back onto the beach, find his feet and shuffle or limp away, as the stones rain down on him.

Afterwards he was made to stand with his back to the class while Stromka beat him with his stick. Fifteen brisk strokes on his bottom and thighs, already swollen and blue where the stones had hit him. It was not for missing lessons but for telling tales on his classmates.

Yet what he would remember later were not the informing and the punishment but the instant at which the smiling children’s faces down by the river were suddenly transformed into a vengeful wall, and he realised he was, in effect, in a cage. Yes, over and over again (even in front of ‘his own’ children) he would come back to that barred cage with spaces through which stones and sticks were perpetually thrown or poked at him and he was a prisoner with nowhere to retreat to and no means of protecting himself.

When does a lie begin?

A lie, Rabbi Fajner would say, has no
beginning. A lie runs downwards like a rootlet, branching an infinite number of
times. But if you trace the rootlets down, you never find a moment of
inspiration and vision, only overwhelming desperation and despair.

A lie always begins with denial.

Something has happened – yet you do not
want to admit that it has.

That is how a lie begins.

*

The evening the authorities decided
without his knowledge to deport all the old and sick people from the ghetto, he
had been attending the House of Culture with his brother Józef and his
sister-in-law, Helena, for a celebration of the foundation of the ghetto fire
brigade, precisely one year before. The following day it was exactly three years
since Germany invaded Poland and the war and the occupation began. But naturally
they did not celebrate that.

The soirée opened with some musical
impromptus; these were followed by some turns from Moshe Puławer’s ‘Ghetto
Review’, which had on that same day received its hundredth performance.

The Chairman generally found musical
performances extremely trying. The deathly pale Miss Bronisława Rotsztat wound
herself around her violin is if an electric shock were passing through her over
and over again. Miss Rotsztat’s musical expression was, however, much
appreciated by the women. Then it was time for the Schum sisters, who were
twins. Their act was always the same. First they rolled their eyes and
curtseyed. Then they rushed out into the wings and came back as each other.
Since they were exactly alike, this naturally presented no problem. They simply
swapped clothes. Then one of them vanished – and the other sister began to look
for her. She looked in bags, she looked in boxes. Then the missing sister popped
up and started looking for the one who had been looking before (and who had now
vanished), or maybe it was actually the same sister looking all the time.

It was all extremely disconcerting.

Then Mr Puławer himself came on stage
and told
plotki
.

One of his stories was about two Jews
meeting each other. One of them was from Insterberg. The second man asked:
What’s new in Insterberg? The first one replied: Nothing. The second: Nothing?
The first:
A hintel hot gebilt.
A dog
barked.

The audience laughed.

Second Man
: A dog barked in Insterberg? Is that all that’s
happened?

First
Man
: Don’t ask me. A big crowd of people seems to have assembled.

Second
Man
: A big crowd of people assembled? A dog barked? Is that all
that’s happened in Insterberg?

First
Man
: They’ve arrested your brother.

Second
Man
: They’ve arrested my brother. What for?

First
Man:
They’ve arrested your brother for forging bills of exchange.

Second
Man
: My brother’s been forging bills of exchange? That’s not news, is
it?

First
Man
: Like I said, nothing new in Insterberg.

Everyone in the hall convulsed with
laughter, except Józef Rumkowski. The Chairman’s brother was the only person in
the hall who failed to realise the joke was about him.

There were also stories about
Rumkowski’s young wife Regina and her incorrigible brother Benji, whom the
Chairman was said to have locked up in the mental hospital in Wesoła Street for
‘causing too much trouble’; that is, for saying things to the Chairman’s face
that the Chairman did not want to hear.

The most popular stories of all,
however, were about the Chairman’s sister-in-law, Helena. Moshe Puławer told
those himself, coming forward to the edge of the stage with his hands stuck
impishly into his trouser pockets. For example, the fact that he referred to her
as the Princess of Kent, making play on the Yiddish verb for knowing a person:
Ver hot zi gekent un ver vil zi kenen?
He
asked, and suddenly the stage was full of actors shading their eyes and spying
out for the missing princess:
Princess of Kent?
Princess of Kent?
The audience went wild, pointing to the front row
where Princess Helena sat blushing bright red beneath the curved brim of her
hat.

The other actors went on scanning the
audience:

Where is she?
Where is she?

Another actor came on stage,
shamelessly imitating Princess Helena’s duck-like gait. Addressing the audience,
he reported that there had been a distress call from the district fire station
in Marysin. An unusual case: a woman had locked herself into her home and
refused to go out. She had her husband bring food home for her. She ate and ate,
and when it was finally time for her to go to the privy, she had ballooned up so
much that she couldn’t get out of the door. The fire brigade would have to come
and lift her through the window.

SO THAT WAS
THE UNKNOWN PRINCESS OF KENT!

Upon which the whole ensemble dashed on
stage, linked hands and burst into song:

S’iz
keyn danken keytn

S’iz
gite tsaytn

Kayner
tit zikh haynt nisht shemen

Yeder
vil du haynt nor nemen;

Abi tsi
zayn tsu zat
¹

It was the most malicious and shameless
song-and-dance act Mr Puławer had ever put words to. Within a hair’s breadth of
lese-majesty, and typical of the mood of despondency and chaos that had
prevailed in the ghetto over the last months. Though the Chairman tried to put a
brave face on it and clap in the right places, even he felt a distinct sense of
relief when the acting was over and the musicians returned to the stage.

Miss Bronisława Rotsztat concluded with
a turgid Liszt scherzo and drew a line under the whole deplorable business with
her well-rosined bow.

*

The
following morning, Tuesday 1 September 1942, Kuper was waiting with the
carriage as usual outside the summer residence on Miarki Street and the
Chairman got in as usual, a scarcely audible grunt his
only greeting.
WAGEN DES ÄLTESTEN DER JUDEN
, says a
silvery-white plaque on each side of the carriage. Not that anyone could be in
doubt. There is only one carriage of its kind in the ghetto.

The Chairman often toured the ghetto in
his carriage. Since everything in the ghetto belonged to him, he was naturally
obliged to look in from time to time, to assure himself that it was all in good
order. That
his
workers were queuing properly
at the foot of one of the ghetto’s wooden bridges, waiting to cross; that
his
factories stood ready with their vehicle
access doors open to admit the vast flood of workers; that
his
police officers were on hand to prevent
unnecessary altercations; that
his
workers went
straight in and stood at their tools and machines waiting for
his
factory whistles to sound, ideally all
together, at the same moment.

And so the factory whistles did, that
morning. It was a perfectly ordinary dawn in the ghetto, clear but a little
chilly. Soon, the heat of the day would burn away the last remaining moisture
from the air and it would be hot again, as it had been all that summer and as it
would remain for the rest of that dreadful September.

He did not notice anything amiss until
Kuper turned off Dworska Street and into Łagiewnicka. The road in front of the
barrier guarded by the
Schupo
, the German
police, at the entrance to Bałuty Square was thronged with people, and none of
them were on their way to work. He saw heads turn in his direction and hands
reach out for the hood of the carriage. One or two people shouted at him, their
faces strangely projected forward from their bodies. Then Rozenblat’s Jewish
constables came running, the forces of law and order surrounded the carriage,
and once the
Schupo
lifted the barrier, they
could calmly continue into the square.

Mr Abramowicz had an arm out ready to
support him as he stepped out of the carriage. Miss Fuchs came rushing out of
the barrack hut, and after her came all the clerks, telephonists and
secretaries. He looked from one frightened face to another and asked:
What are you staring at?
Young Mr Abramowicz was
the first to pluck up courage, stepping forward from the knot of people and
clearing his throat:

Haven’t you
heard, Sir? The order came last night.

They’re emptying
the hospitals of all the sick and the old!

There are several eyewitness accounts
of the Chairman’s reaction on first receiving this news. Some said he did not
hesitate for a moment. They had seen him head instantly, like ‘a whirlwind’,
down Wesoła Street, rushing to try to save his nearest and dearest. Others
thought he had received the news with a look that could best be described as
derisive. He was said to have denied to the very end that any deportations had
occurred. How could anything have happened in the ghetto without his
knowledge?

But there were also those who thought
they could see the uncertainty and fear suddenly breaking through the Chairman’s
authoritarian mask. After all, was it not he who had said in a speech:
My motto is always to be at least ten minutes ahead of
every German command
. An order had been issued sometime during the
night; Commandant Rozenblat must have been informed, since the ghetto police
force had been called out to the last man. All of those most closely concerned
had been informed, except for the Chairman, who had been at the cabaret!

When the Chairman got to the hospital,
just before eight on Tuesday morning, the whole area round Wesoła Street was
closed off. At the hospital entrance, Jewish policemen were forming a human
chain, impossible to breach. On the other side of this wall of Jewish
politsayen
, the Gestapo had brought up big,
open-topped lorries, with two or three large trailers attached behind each
vehicle. Under the supervision of the German police, Rozenblat’s men were in the
process of dragging the old and the sick out of the hospital building. Some of
the sick were still in their hospital clothes; others were dressed only in their
underpants, or nothing at all, with their emaciated arms crossed over their
chests and ribcages. A few individuals managed to break through the police
cordon. One white-clad figure with a shaven head rushed towards the barrier, its
blue-and-white-striped prayer shawl flowing out behind like a banner. The German
soldiers immediately raised their weapons. The man’s incomprehensible cry of
triumph was cut off abruptly and he fell headlong in a shower of fabric shreds
and blood. Another fleeing patient tried to take cover in the back seat of one
of the two black limousines that had pulled up alongside the lorries and
trailers, beside which a handful of German officers had been standing for some
time, impassively observing the tumultuous scene. The escapee was just
attempting to crawl in through the back door of the car when its chauffeur
alerted SS-Hauptscharführer Günther Fuchs to the presence of the intruder. With
a gloved hand, Fuchs dragged the wildly resisting man out of the car and then
shot him, first through the chest and then again – when the man was already
prone – through the head and neck. Two uniformed guards immediately rushed over,
grabbed the man’s arms and threw the body, still bleeding from the head, up onto
the trailer, where a hundred or patients already stood crushed together.

While all this was happening, the
Chairman, calm and composed, had gone up to the officer in charge of the
operation, a certain SS-Hauptscharführer Konrad Mühlhaus, and asked to be given
access to the hospital building. Mühlhaus had refused, saying this was a
Sonderaktion
led by the Gestapo, and no Jews were
allowed to cross the police line. The Chairman had then asked for access to the
office to make an urgent telephone call. When this request, too, was turned
down, the Chairman is supposed to have said:

You can shoot or
deport me. But as Eldest of the Jews, I still have some influence over the
Jews in the ghetto. If you want this operation to run in a smooth and
dignified way, you would be wise to grant my request.

The Chairman was gone for scarcely
thirty minutes. In that space of time, the Gestapo brought up more tractors and
trailers, and an extra handful of Rozenblat’s men were ordered to the hospital
gardens, to find any patients who had tried to escape out of the back entrance.
Those patients who had been hiding in the hospital grounds all this time were
felled with blows from batons or rifle butts; those who had strayed out into the
road were cold-bloodedly shot by the German guards. At regular intervals,
screams and stifled cries could be heard from the cluster of relatives outside
the hospital grounds, who were powerless to help the infirm as they were led one
by one from the hospital building. Meanwhile, more and more eyes turned to the
upstairs windows of the hospital, where people expected to see the Chairman’s
white-haired head appear, to announce that the operation had been suspended,
that it had all been the result of some misunderstanding, that he had spoken to
the authorities and all the sick and the old were now free to return home.

But when the Chairman reappeared at the
main entrance after those thirty minutes, he did not even glance at the column
of loaded trailers. He just walked briskly back to his horse and carriage and
got in, and they set off back towards Bałuty Square.

That day – the first of the September
operation – a total of 674 in-patients from the ghetto’s six hospitals were
taken to assembly points around the ghetto, and then onward out of the ghetto by
train. Among those expelled were Regina Rumkowska’s two aunts, Lovisa and
Bettina, and possibly also Regina’s beloved brother, Mr Benjamin Wajnberger.