The Emperor of Lies (24 page)

Guten Tag,
meine Herren
, she says casually, swinging her arms to and fro.

Mühlhaus stares at her.

Wo hattest du
dich versteckt . . . ?
he roars, suddenly
inflated by his own rage.

Lida carries on swinging her arms. It
is as if she is getting ready to take off and fly away.

Mülhaus moves closer. In one rapid
movement he grabs her by the hair, pulls her head down to his own and yells
straight into her dissolving face:

WO
HATTEST DU DICH VERSTECKT?

But Lida just carries on smiling and
swinging her arms.

Mühlhaus fumbles for his service
pistol; then with an expression of unbounded disgust on his face, fires two
shots straight through the girl’s head.

Takes a swift step back.

And Lida falls. It is her final
crash.

Blood and brains spurt from the back of
her head.

After the shots, utter panic breaks
out. The women scream out loud, the men scream even louder. The two carefully
separated groups – those waiting on one side to be taken away on the trailers,
and the rest – converge again, so the two Jewish policemen step in on their own
initiative and start clumsily hitting and shoving people to make sure they
remain apart.

As if suddenly losing patience with the
whole thing, Mühlhaus takes a couple of steps back; then with his bloodstained
hand he points out a further handful of people who are to be pushed to one side.
His hand falls on old Mrs Krumholz, and, as he gives a quick little smile, the
blonde, blue-eyed Maria Pinczewska.

After her, Chaim Wajsberg.

It is all completely random. He has not
even bothered to look at the lists Mrs Herszkowicz has given him.

Gertler’s two
politsayen
take hold of Chaim Wajsberg and propel him towards the
rest of the group for deportation. Hala is already on her way after her son. But
Samuel intervenes. With a cry that no one would have thought his ruined lungs
capable of, he throws himself at his wife and knocks her to the ground.

Jakub Wajsberg is left standing there
alone. He watches in bewilderment as his father crawls up over his mother’s
body, as if trying to cover every inch of it with his own. A few metres from
them, Adam Rzepin sits cradling his sister Lida’s bloody head in his lap.

The last morning in the Green House, Rosa Smoleńska got up at four as usual, to fetch in the water that Chaja Meyer then poured into the big washtubs in the kitchen; and Józef Feldman came on his bicycle as usual, to fill the coal boxes and light the stoves. As usual; for the sake of the children, they did all they could to make even this last day begin the same way as all the others. The sun had not yet risen above the horizon, but the sky was already bright and transparently blue, and a few stray swallows were flitting about in the air, as if to announce that this September day, too, would be hot and sunny.

The evening before, Superintendent Rubin and Dr Zysman the paediatrician gathered everyone together in the
świetlica
of the children’s home. Superintendent Rubin told them the authorities had decided that their stay in the ghetto was now over and that some children would be going home, while others would be looked after in ‘ordinary’ children’s homes outside the ghetto. He said those who were moving out should not be sad about it. There was a world beyond the walls, too, he said, and it was bigger, much, much bigger than any ghetto.

He laughed again. There can surely never have been so much laughter heard in the Green House as there was that evening. But the children were grave and quiet behind their smiles. Then Nataniel asked who was to take them out of the ghetto, and how they would be travelling, by train, or perhaps by tram (all the children had seen the tram that had been taking the deportees to Radogoscz since the start of the year), and Superintendent Rubin’s smile grew even wider, and he replied that they would find out tomorrow; now it was time to go and pack their things, and they should only take what they needed for the journey, and be sure to put on their very best clothes and not forget to bow or curtsey to the German soldiers who came to show them the way.

A woman from the administrative office in Dworska Street, a Mrs Goldberg, had been entrusted with taking the children to the designated assembly point. Mrs Goldberg had vivid red lipstick and was dressed in a very close-fitting, tailored suit that meant she could only take short steps when she walked. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, as if afraid her gaze might get snagged on something, and when she spoke it was always nervously, out of the corner of her mouth.

While Mrs Goldberg and the two guards who were to escort them waited outside, Rosa Smoleńska went round the corridors of the Green House and clapped her hands, and the children lined up in exactly the same order as they had been taught to do whenever the Chairman came to visit: the youngest at the front, the older ones rising in steps behind. On the stroke of seven, as instructed, all the children and their nurses set off to march to the assembly point on the big Ghetto Field; Rosa walked at the front with the youngest children Liba, Sofie, Dawid, and the twins Abram and Leon holding her hands; while Chaja Meyer and Malwina Kempel brought up the rear with the older ones.

Children from the other Marysin orphanages are already standing in scattered groups around the sloping, muddy field; and more are on their way. Deep tyre tracks in the loose clay show which way the lorries came in. They have backed in to form a star pattern, radiating out from the centre where the children and their supervisors are to congregate. Two cars driven by orderlies have pulled up about ten metres away, one of them with the inscription GETTOVERWALTUNG on one side. Rosa sees Hans Biebow himself walking over from that direction. He is dressed as if he were on a hunting trip, in big, baggy
Stiefelhosen
, with a rifle slung on a strap over his shoulder.

He seems agitated about something. He keeps turning round, shouting and gesticulating. Too many children are arriving at the same time. It’s all going too fast.

Some of the Jewish policemen, who have been standing about in bewilderment in their peaked caps and tall, shiny boots, suddenly leap into action and start to shove the growing numbers of bodies backwards and pack them closer together.

The children are to be counted.

Then they all have to form up again. Each children’s home separately. Six groups.

But by now, the alarm has begun to transmit itself to the children. They squeeze anxiously between each other’s legs; some try to slink away, but they are caught by Jewish policemen, who even allow themselves to break into a run to retrieve them. A girl in a worn-out grey cardigan suddenly bursts into tears. Rosa casts an anxious glance at her own group. Staszek looks terrified. And Biebow is approaching with two SS men in long, black officer’s coats.

One of them, a man with round, steel-rimmed glasses like Himmler’s, has a sheaf of papers in his hand. From over by the rows of children come angry German orders for the count to be done again.

The sun is high in the sky now; she feels it burning the back of her neck, making it sweat.

Mrs Goldberg from the Wołkówna Secretariat, in her tight skirt with the slit at the back, is standing just in front of her, trying to sort out someone further back. Biebow and his men are getting closer.

All at once, a little boy in shorts and a beret sets off at a run across the stubbly grass. From where Rosa is standing, it is obvious where he is heading. In the heat haze on the far side of the Ghetto Field, there are tantalising glimpses of the shiny, corrugated tin roofs of the potting sheds along Bracka Street. If only he can make it that far.

A soldier next to her lets out a loud yell. She hears the rattle of his shoulder strap as he unhooks and raises his submachine gun. She sees the rucksack bouncing about on the boy’s back, his legs beating like drumsticks beneath it. A second later, a dull shot rings out. But it is not the soldier with the submachine gun who has fired. Looking past the soldier’s suddenly wavering rifle sight, she sees that Biebow has his rifle raised, too; he fires again – and far ahead of them, the boy falls from sight behind the grass bank.

Suddenly she is engulfed in a sea of running legs and struggling bodies. She keeps a tight hold on Staszek with one hand, and on the screaming Sofia with the other. Afraid of being trampled, she dare not turn round, but just carries on moving forward, her neck and shoulders held stiffly erect, like all the others now being herded along in the great crush. Of the children whose hands she is not holding, she can only catch sight of Liba and Nataniel. The twins are nowhere to be seen. Then she spots them: a couple of policemen with Jewish armbands lift first Adam, then Leon, onto the back of an already crowded truck. The children’s faces have dissolved into tears. She frees one arm to signal her presence, if nothing else. At the same moment, she feels a hard blow to her back. One of the German soldiers is brutally shoving her forward with the butt of his rifle, and yelling to her from under his shiny helmet –
Vorwärts, vorwärts, nicht stehenbleiben
– and without knowing how, she too finds herself gripped round the waist and hoisted onto the lorry. As the vehicle moves off, she is thrown headlong into a jumble of children and sharp-cornered rucksacks.

Nothing in her thirty years as a nursery nurse ever prepared her for a situation like this. For what is happening now, there are no words, no instructions. Lorry engines throb and rumble all around the shuddering truck in which she sits. They pass streets which she remembers filled with people, which are now so empty that they seem unreal. Every so often, the convoy passes a German guard post; the guards stand motionless in their sentry boxes, or clustered for a smoke by the barriers at the crossing points.

Then there is a jolt and the lorry comes to a stop again. Hands release the catches at the back of the lorry, lower the tailgate, and soldiers’ faces come into view at floor level, shouting at them all to get down. On the far side of the gravel forecourt where the lorries have pulled up she can see the stone steps leading up to the main entrance of the Drewnowska Street hospital.

The hospital is right on the ghetto boundary – but where once a barbed-wire fence ran, only a watchtower now remains. All forms of barrier seem to have been cleared away, and the German army vehicles have free access across the formerly impassable border. And the hospital is not a hospital any longer, either. It is more like a warehouse or transit camp. The soldiers herd them into a narrow, empty hallway, its floor covered in broken glass. The stairs to the upper floor are littered with soiled clothes and torn sheeting. The corridors run off the hall like dark, gaping tunnels. There is no electricity. They blunder around in the dark for a while and are then pushed into a large room that must formerly have been a ward. But there are no beds in it now, just a dirty floor and a window through which what remains of the sun is seeping in, thick and sludgy.

She does what she can to muster the children entrusted to her.

Staszek is still with her, as are Liba and the twins. She goes out into the corridor and calls out to Sofie and Nataniel, who have ended up in another ward.

Soon the sunlight has vanished from the window and the pitch black of the corridors is slowly invading the echoing wards, too. The temperature drops. The youngest children are stiff and cold, their lips white with thirst. But nobody brings them bread or water. She has half a dry loaf in her bag, which she tears up so they can all have a little piece. Then they sit in silence in the gathering gloom. From outside they can hear the noise of the overloaded military trucks arriving again. It swells into a roaring wall of sound, then slowly recedes. German officers’ voices can be heard shouting their horrible commands along the empty corridors, which close around the sound, as if around something obscene. She hears dragging steps encased in their own echo; the sound of shrieking, crying children somewhere close yet out of sight.

But it is not only children who are here; there are adults as well. From the sleeping space she has claimed under the window, she thinks she can make out Rumkowski’s confidant Rabbi Fajner, with his big white beard. Beside him, another rabbi stands praying, the bones of his white, beardless face carved out like a bird’s behind the hanging fringes of his prayer shawl. And all around them she can hear other adults dragging their heavier bodies into the room, then falling silent (or exhorting the children to do the same), almost as if they were entering a holy place.

And all at once, the last of the light is gone. And cold: from the bare stone floor, the chill is drawn like a tautened string right through their bodies.

All through the night and long into the early hours, they hear the roar of trucks pulling up and driving off again without ever switching off their engines, and soon the room is so crowded that Rosa has to sit squashed in under the window with her knees drawn up. With Sofie on her lap and Liba’s head cradled in her arms, she still somehow manages to steal some rest.

*

In the crush and chaos on the lorries the previous day, Mrs Goldberg seemed to have vanished into thin air. But this morning, she is back again. Still wearing her tight suit and bright red lipstick, she stands in the faint, grey light of dawn in the hospital ward and motions to Rosa to get up and bring the children with her.

Rosa has Staszek and Liba holding one of her hands, Sofie and Nataniel the other. They walk through corridors that are now filled with a silent, naked, somehow trembling light. Through doorways she sees children sitting waiting, cross-legged, or with their knees tucked up to their chests and chins. Some are clutching their soup mugs or knapsacks. Others are slowly rocking back and forth, their heads clamped between their drawn-up knees.

In the thin, quicksilver light down in the yard, the lorries are already waiting. There are more vehicles today; there must be ten, maybe fifteen, of them. Leading down from the wide stone steps at the hospital entrance, the soldiers form a long wall of rifles.

As she makes her way with the children past the wall of soldiers, she sees Rumkowski. His carriage is parked right at the foot of the steps, so all the children have to pass him before they are lifted onto one of the lorries. And the closer she gets to him, the more she is aware of the minutely appraising look he is giving each and every one of them. The Chairman’s eyes pass swiftly over the skinny, the lame and the deformed. He is looking for that single,
perfect
child, the one who can act as redress for the thousands he has been forced to sacrifice. And then she sees his face suddenly break into that smile she has so often observed before but never been able to make out.

He is smiling, but it isn’t a smile –

From behind her, someone wrenches Staszek’s hand out of hers, and she is left not knowing which way to turn. To go after Staszek, whose cries of protest electrify her, or after the other children, who have been swept on ahead and are calling out to her. Some of them have already been put on the lorry; and it is too late for her to get back to Rumkowski.

She sees the old man bend down and tell his driver to help Staszek up into the coach.
It’s me
, she hears him say to the child, like a parody of the voice she has listened to all these years,
pan Śmierć
. The driver has already turned the horse and the carriage is gliding away, in a different direction from the loaded German lorries driving out past the barriers of barbed wire that have been pushed aside: back to safety in the ghetto.