The Emperor of Lies (4 page)

The march into the ghetto –

It is February 1940. Snow on the ground. The sky bright white, poised motionless above.

Across the snow trundle creaking wagon wheels, barouches with sagging suspension, carts loaded high with suitcases and precariously lashed items of furniture.

Some are in front, pulling the carts, others push from behind, or walk alongside to make sure the huge mountain of bags and cases does not tip over.

Tens of thousands of people in motion, grand folk and workers. The grey winter’s day does not differentiate between them. Despite the cold, some are wearing skirts or in shirtsleeves, perhaps with a blanket or coat round their shoulders, driven out of their hiding places by the Gestapo, which is continuing its search of every Jewish home. Sporadic shots are heard from inside the buildings. There is broken glass lying in the snow.

He sings as he escorts the children from Helenówek.

They have brought everything with them: even housekeepers, cooks and nurses.

They are like a travelling company. Dangling pots and pans clatter.

They have five horse-drawn vehicles at their disposal, among them the carriage that will later become his own
dróshke
, with the fold-down step and the silver plaque on each side.

He sits in the front carriage beside the coachman Lev Kuper, along with some of the children; they are wearing thick winter hats and coats trimmed with fur. They drive past the ruins of the Temple Synagogue in Kościusz Street.

He tells the children about the town he came from.

It is like the town they are heading for.

A
teeny tiny
town, he explains. So tiny it fits into a matchbox.

He holds up his tobacco-stained hands to show them.

He has a high, almost squeaky voice. It is the combination of his thin monotone and his bodily bulk (he is not tall or burly in any way, but
heavy
) that makes such an overwhelming impression on the children who have had the misfortune to encounter him; this and the anger that could suddenly suffuse him, overpowering in its intensity. With eyes open wide and spittle spraying from his lips, he sends a hail of sarcastic comments over whichever apprentice or clerk or day labourer has not completed his task, and, a second later, his stick follows. Even when his voice is mild and temperate, it is clear he will brook no contradiction.

He is also very conscious of the effect he has on others; in the same intuitive way that an actor is conscious of the range of expression available to him on stage. Playing the childish idiot. Or the tough, dogged, loyal worker. A wise old man with semi-blind eyes and a cracked voice, who has seen his whole life pass by. He is almost uncannily clever at assuming these different guises and at falling into others’ way of speaking, so he sounds just like them –

There was a cobbler in this little town, and a blacksmith
.

(He mimics:)

There was a baker and a lacemaker.

There was a cooper and an apothecary.

There was a cabinet-maker and a rope-maker.

And of course there was also a rabbi.

(who lived right at the back of the synagogue in an unheated room full of books and papers)

And there was a teacher there, too, a teacher who wasn’t like your teachers but had one good eye and one bad.

(with the good eye he looked to all those who were of any use –

and with the bad eye at those who drifted round idly with nothing to do)

When he talks to, or in front of, the children, his thin voice is as smooth and flat as a stone, but with a slightly pedantic ring. His tongue and palate linger a moment on every syllable, to make sure the children are listening.

And the children truly are.

The older ones with a look of blind fascination on their faces, as if they can’t get enough of the perfectly judged, rhythmic, metronome beat of that thin voice.

For the younger ones, the voice is if anything more hypnotic. As soon as the Chairman starts to speak, it is as if the person behind the voice disappears, leaving just the voice, hanging disembodied in the air like the glow of the cigarette he would at some stage in his story produce from his silver case and light.

And then there was someone who could do a bit of all the things I’m going to tell you about: he was called Kamiński.

He skinned and flayed oxen and sheep.

He even had the skill of tanning the hides the old way, by rubbing fat into them and burning them over an open fire.

He also had the art of repairing clocks and watches.

He used mixtures of herbs to make decoctions that cleaned wounds and eased swellings.

He knew exactly what kind of clay to insert between the oven stones of stoves that had burnt through.

It was said that he could even tame wild wolves.

The Chairman went quiet for a little while.

The end of his cigarette glowed red and enlarged before fading again when he took a puff, and then another.
He
was called Kamiński
, he added quietly to himself.

In the light of the glowing cigarette, the furrowed old face softened, and assumed a sort of introspective look. As if he could see quite clearly in front of him the man he was attempting to conjure up for them:

He
was called Kamiński . . .

And everybody got angry with this Kamiński.

(the rabbi got cross, because he saw him as an envoy of Satan, but so did the baker, the tanner, the paver, the locksmith and the apothecary, because they all thought he was stealing their customers from before their very eyes . . .)

So the members of our
kehila
unanimously decided to have him deported from the village.

But it was decided that he would first be shut in a cage and put on show in the market place.

He sat in the cage for forty days, a trapped animal baring his teeth like a wolf, while he showed the children who flocked around the cage how to make
matze
–

Pat pat, with both hands

(
like this!
)

The Chairman clamped his cigarette between his lips. Held up his own hands and demonstrated by clapping and patting his hands together.

Bread, he said, and smiled.

The Lord took seven days to create and
order the world.

It took Rumkowski three months.

On the first of April 1940, a whole
month before the ghetto was sealed, he opened a tailor’s workshop at 45
Łagiewnicka Street and put the energetic manufacturer Dawid Warszawski in charge
of operations there. This was the
resort
later
to be known as the Central Tailors. Shortly afterwards, in May, another
tailoring workshop opened at 8 Jakuba Street, close to the ghetto boundary. On
the eighth of July, a shoemaker’s opened in the same premises as the Central
Tailors.

And so it went on:

14
July
: a cabinet-maker’s and a factory for wood products at 12–14
Drukarska, with a timber store for the latter in the yard.

18
July
: another tailor’s workshop, at 18 Jakuba.

4
August
: a workshop for upholstering furniture at 9 Urzędnicza.
Mattresses were also made here, as well as sofas and armchairs (stuffed with
dried seaweed).

5
August
: a linen factory at 5 Młynarska Street.

10
August
: a tannery at 9 Urzędnicza. (This dressed soles and uppers to
be used for shoes and boots for the Wehrmacht.)

15–20
August
: a dye works; a shoemaker’s (actually a slipper factory) in
Marysin; and another tailoring workshop, this time at 53 Łagiewnicka Street.

23
August
: a metalwork factory on Zgierska, manufacturing among other
things metal tubs and various kinds of bucket and pail; as well as containers
for wood-gas fuel, primarily for military use.

17
September
: a (new) tailor’s, at 2 Młynarska Street.

18
September
: another tailor’s, 13 Żabia Street.

8
October
: a furrier’s, 9 Ceglana.

28
October
: yet another tailor’s, 10 Dworska Street.

Apart from uniforms for the German
army, the tailors produced (for the same army): protective and camouflage suits;
footwear of all kinds: shoes, heavy-duty boots, marching boots; leather belts
with metal buckles; blankets, mattresses. But also various kinds of women’s
underwear: corsets and brassieres. And for men: earmuffs and woollen jackets,
the model known at the time as golfing jackets.

Under the authorities’ direction,
Rumkowski set up his administrative office in a number of interconnecting wooden
barrack huts on Bałuty Square. The German ghetto administration had its local
office in a couple of similar blocks. The section of the ghetto administration
under the city’s jurisdiction was in Moltkestrasse, in central
Litzmannstadt.

The head of the ghetto administration
was Hans Biebow.

Biebow supported Rumkowski’s plans from
the very start. If Rumkowski told Biebow they were a hundred cutting-out
machines short, then Biebow arranged delivery of a hundred cutting-out
machines.

Or sewing machines.

Sewing machines were hard to get hold
of in wartime, in an economic crisis. Many of those fleeing Poland before the
German invasion had taken their more basic machines with them.

But Biebow managed to organise even
sewing machines. They might not arrive in full working order, for Biebow always
tried to pay the lowest possible price. But Rumkowski would reply that it didn’t
matter if the Singer machines were in a usable state or not. He had foreseen the
problem and set up two sewing-machine repair workshops in the ghetto: one at 6
Rembrandtstrasse (Jakuba), the other at 18 Putzigerstrasse (Pucka).

This was how their collaboration
initially worked:

Whatever the one saw a need for, the
other procured.

And that was how the ghetto grew:
suddenly, out of nothing, materialised the German army’s most important stock
supplier.

*

Here’s
Biebow.
He’s holding a garden party for his staff in a leafy inner
courtyard near the offices of the German occupying authorities in
Moltkestrasse.

In the background: a long table,
decorated with wreaths and freshly cut flowers. Rows of tall, fluted glasses.
Piles of plates. Platters of cakes, pastries and fruit. People are standing in a
crowd round the table, most of them in uniform.

Biebow himself in the foreground,
wearing a light-coloured suit with narrow lapels to the jacket, and a dark tie.
His hair is in the military style, shaved right up the back of his neck, and
parted to one side, accentuating the angular shape of his face, with its
pronounced chin and cheekbones. Beside him, one can glimpse Joseph Hämmerle, the
head of finance, and Wilhelm Ribbe, who was in charge of goods deliveries and
stock purchase in the ghetto. The latter’s narrow, foxy-looking face looks out
from between two rather plump women, while his arms are round their waists. The
two women have permed hair and very obvious dimples. The reason for their
laughter is the Torah scroll in Biebow’s hand, which he has been given as a
birthday present.

In actual fact, it is one of the
scrolls the community rabbis were able to save at the last moment from the
burning synagogue in Wolborska Street in November 1939, scrolls which the German
authorities have now, as it were, confiscated all over again, this time with the
express purpose of giving them to Biebow as a
gift
. It is widely known among senior German officers and officials
in Łódź that Biebow has a comical weakness for Judaica of all kinds. He even
considers himself something of an expert on Jewish questions. He has already, in
a letter to the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in Berlin, offered to take over the
running of the concentration camp in Theresienstadt personally. There are
cultivated Jews there, as opposed to the poor and uneducated workers who jostle
for space here.

By this stage, Rumkowski thinks he has
got to know Biebow quite well.
Er ist uns kein
Fremder
, is how he often describes him. Nothing could be further from
the truth.

Biebow is an erratic administrator.
Sometimes he is absent from the ghetto for weeks on end, only to turn up with a
huge delegation and demand immediate stocktaking in every factory. With his
bodyguards in tow, he then goes from workshop to workshop, searching their
stores of materials for anything hidden away on the sly. If, on his way back to
Bałuty Square, he happens to pass a wagon or handcart of potatoes or vegetables
en route to the soup kitchens of the ghetto, and a single potato falls off the
back, he gestures majestically to halt the vehicle, and goes down on hands and
knees to retrieve the dropped potato. Then wipes it on the sleeve of his jacket
before replacing it carefully, almost reverently, on the pile.

You must look
after what little you have.

This concern for every overlooked
detail in the ghetto is not easy to reconcile with Biebow’s personality as a
whole, which is expansive, to say the least. He is seldom sober when he comes
into the office, and when he is in what he calls ‘a delicate condition’, he
often summons his Eldest of the Jews. One day when Rumkowski comes in, he is
sitting at his desk howling like a dog. On another occasion he is crawling
around on all fours in front of the desk, doing imitations of a chuffing steam
engine. It is the day after the first removal order has been issued: the order
for the first train convoys to the death camps in Chełmno.

Biebow generally adopts a considerably
more friendly tone. He wants to
talk things
over
. He wants to talk production quotas and food deliveries. That
kind of discussion could sometimes lead to a strange, false intimacy between
them.
Well I must say, Rumkowski, you’ve developed
quite a belly
, he might say, for example, throwing his arms round the
other man’s girth.

That certainly was a sight: the coffee
merchant from Bremen clinging to the ghetto’s Eldest of the Jews as if to a
reluctant pillar. Rumkowski stood there, hat in hand, his head bent
subserviently as always. Openings like that gave Biebow the excuse to expand on
his thesis that the hungry are the best workers.

Workers with full stomachs get bloated,
he said.

They can’t keep a firm grip on their
tools, he said.

They fall on their arses.

And if they don’t fall on their arses,
they can’t tear their eyes away from the clock on the wall telling them when
they can leave their seats and let their overfed bodies get some rest.

No, he went on theorising, the thing is
to keep the swine at a level where they’ve got a little but never quite enough.
When they’re working, they think about food all the time, and the thought of
soon being able to eat makes them work a bit more, give up a bit more, always on
the verge of getting by and yet never quite there;
on
the verge
, Rumkowski, on the verge.

(
You
see?
he said, looking at the Chairman as if appealing to him, as if
still not entirely sure Rumkowski had understood the full implication of what he
had said.)

*

There was a Debt. Biebow constantly
reminded him about it. The outward manifestation of this Debt was a loan of two
million Reichsmarks made to Rumkowski by Leister, the City Commissioner,
allowing the former to expand the industries of the ghetto. This loan was now to
be paid off in instalments, with interest; the payments were to be in the form
of Jewish possessions that had been confiscated and goods that had been
produced, and these were now streaming through the export depot at Bałuty Square
at an ever-increasing rate.

But the Debt also had an internal
dimension. It was used to establish the value of work within the ghetto. The
amount for subsistence for each inhabitant of the ghetto was reckoned at
thirty pfennigs
; no one living there was to cost
more than that. It was Biebow’s head of finance, Joseph Hämmerle, who had worked
out this
Jew allowance
on the basis of what it
cost to supply food and fuel to the ghetto.

Families with children or old people at
home faced the added burden of the cost of milk, if available, plus electricity
and fuel. The Chairman set one of his colleagues to working it all out. To
guarantee the survival of a single adult in the ghetto it took a food ration
costing at least one mark and fifty pfennigs per day, that is to say, five times
as much as the daily quota fixed by the authorities.

Most of the food supplies reaching the
ghetto were also of poor quality or downright inedible. Out of a
ten-thousand-kilo consignment of potatoes that reached the ghetto in August
1940, only 1,500 kilos could be salvaged. The rest of the shipment was entirely
rotten and had to be buried in the cesspits at Marysin.

So how did one set about feeding a
ghetto of 160,000 people on 1,500 kilos of potatoes?

It could only be a matter of time
before hunger riots broke out.

In August 1940, the unrest began.

The demonstrators were not initially
violent, but they were vociferous. Wave after wave of impoverished Jews in rags
came welling out of the buildings in Lutomierska and Zgierska Streets, and it
soon became impossible to move in the ghetto except by going with the flow of
the marchers.

Rumkowski knew at once that he was
facing a serious dilemma.

Leister had made it plain from the
outset that if he, Rumkowski, was not able to maintain peace and order in the
ghetto, then the Gestapo would dissolve the whole Council of Jewish Elders with
immediate effect, and the autonomy he had dreamt of for the Jews of the ghetto
would be nothing more than a memory.

He had, however, no proper police force
of his own to deploy. Armed only with their own fists and a rubber truncheon
each, the fifty ghetto policemen Commendant Rozenblat had managed to assemble
did not even venture among the ranks of demonstrators. They opted instead to
erect barricades along the streets and then make themselves scarce. But the
demonstrators paid little attention to barricades. They were soon massed outside
Hospital No. 1 in Łagiewnicka Street, where the Chairman had his ‘private
quarters’, shouting, swearing and chanting slogans. They also despatched a
messenger to demand that the Chairman come out and ‘speak’ to them.

Down in the hospital, Wiktor Miller,
the blind doctor, was on the telephone urging more doctors to come on duty. Dr
Miller had served in the Germans’ last war as a field surgeon, and just as he
was helping to carry away a soldier who had fallen in a French artillery
onslaught, an ammunition store close by had blown up. The explosion took off his
right leg and bits of his right arm, and shrapnel penetrated his skull through
both eyes, permanently blinding him. For this contribution, the Germans had
awarded him the Iron Cross for ‘courage in the field’. But it was for his
contribution during the hunger riots in the ghetto that he definitively earned
himself the epithet Justice. With the scar tissue in his mangled face shiny and
sweating behind his dark glasses, and with only his stick and a couple of
bewildered nurses to aid him, he ran to and fro calming the most hot-blooded
demonstrators while helping the wounded onto stretchers so they could be carried
into improvised surgeries in the waiting rooms. For now, most of the wounded had
only themselves to blame: they had been trampled by the crowd, or collapsed with
exhaustion or dehydration. They had nothing to eat, after all, so how could they
find the strength to demonstrate? Outside the waiting room, a man lay bleeding
copiously from a gash to his head caused by a piece of paving stone intended for
the Chairman’s windows on the first floor.

It was now clear that the revolt had
spread throughout the ghetto.

In the meantime, Rumkowski’s brother
Józef and the latter’s wife had arrived at the rooms where the Chairman lived.
From the first-floor windows they could see Rozenblat’s men wielding their
harmless batons, hitting out in a pathetic attempt to make inroads into the
crowd. Fights broke out here and there, where isolated knots of men refused to
flinch from the baton blows and continued their offensive with stones and
sticks.