The Emperor of Lies (5 page)

On this occasion, Princess Helena was
highly agitated and declared to everyone around her that it was just like the
revolution in Paris, when the people ‘lost their senses’ and turned against
their own kind. She tottered back and forth between the window and the desk,
giving little screams and flailing her arms. The sight of the scenes of tumult
outside was eventually too much for her:
They’re going
to kill us all
, she shrieked hoarsely, and then staged one of her
more extravagant fainting fits.

As always when Princess Helena was
afflicted by some
malaise
, Józef Rumkowski
stalked over to his brother. And just stood there: right up close to him, with
his gaze fixed accusingly on him. He had done it ever since they were
little.

Well, what
are you going to do about this?
he said.

And Rumkowski? As always on such
occasions, he sensed his feelings of inadequacy and shame being diluted by an
unreasoning hatred: of his brother’s rigid reproaches; of his subjection to a
wife who was trying with all the means at her disposal to divert attention from
the situation that had arisen onto her own interminable self-pity. In normal
circumstances, his anger would have erupted at that moment. But no angry
outburst ever made any impact on Jósef. His brother just went on staring. There
was no way of retreating from or evading that unyielding stare.

Luckily, neither of them needed to do
anything.

The Germans were already on the
way.

From further down Zgierska, the sound
of emergency vehicles could already be heard – and a discernible sense of alarm
spread not only through the ranks of the demonstrators but also among the
policemen Rozenblat had called in, most of whom had already been knocked to the
ground or taken shelter against the walls of the buildings along Spacerowa
Street. Should they exploit the situation and try to look as though they were
‘responding forcefully’ when the Germans came, or copy the demonstrators and try
to run away as fast as possible?

Most of them opted for the latter but,
like the demonstrators, did not get very far before a whole commando of German
security forces blocked all the surrounding roads with riot-squad vans and
strategically parked jeeps. Rounds of submachine-gun fire issued from the
vehicles to confuse the fleeing demonstrators, who didn’t know which way to run,
and seconds later soldiers came surging from every corner and alleyway. In the
space of a few minutes, Łagiewnicka Street had been completely cleared, leaving
only a handful of bodies lying there among a pathetic collection of broken
paving stones, abandoned caps, and trampled leaflets and banners.

That night, Rumkowski called a meeting,
attended by Commandant Rozenblat, Wiktor Miller and Henryk Neftalin the head of
the Population Registration Bureau. Plus some of the district police commanders
in whom Rozenblat claimed to have particular confidence.

The Chairman urged them all to take a
sensible view of the situation.

Ordinary people, particularly men with
a family to support, did not take to the streets en masse unless exhorted to do
so. There were troublemakers in every district. And it was these agitators they
needed to get at: Communists and Bundists and activists from the left wing of
the Poale Zion; countless secret party cells had been formed inside the ghetto.
Treacherous
people. People who did
everything in their power to prove there was no difference between those in
positions of trust in
his
administration and
the odious Nazis. Rumour had it that there were even men in his own Council of
Elders trying to exploit the situation for their own gain, individuals who had
ways of discreetly stirring up the troublemakers with the aim of making the
Germans dismiss the whole
Beirat
.

What the Chairman wanted from Rozenblat
and Neftalin was
names
. The lists of names
would be divided among all police units, which would be detailed to swoop on the
suspects’ homes the following night. It made no difference whether they were
socialists, Bundists, or just run-of-the-mill criminals and troublemakers. He
had already ordered prison chief Shlomo Hercberg to prepare special examination
cells for interrogations.

The strategy proved surprisingly
effective. Between September and December there were no further incidents; the
ghetto remained calm. But then winter came, and winter was his enemy’s best
friend.

Hunger
.

The discontented were driven out onto
the street once more, now so desperate that they stopped at nothing, least of
all a simple baton blow.

*

That was the first ghetto winter.

They said in the ghetto that it was so
cold the saliva froze in people’s mouths. Sometimes people did not turn up for
work because they had frozen to death in their beds during the night.

The Fuel Department sent out teams of
workers to pull down ramshackle buildings and salvage the wood. On the
Chairman’s express orders, all fuel was to go to the workshops and factories,
and also to soup kitchens and bakeries which would
not otherwise have had
anything to heat their ovens with. Allocating fuel for private consumption was
out of the question. Which naturally had the effect of increasing the
black-market price of fuel tenfold within just a couple of days. It was here, on
the black market, that the majority of sawn wood ended up. As the fuel crisis
deepened, deliveries of flour to the bakeries of the ghetto failed to
materialise. When the Chairman took it up with the authorities, they said they
were not even getting their own emergency supplies through, because of the snow
and ice. He tried to play for time by temporarily reducing rations, but he was
aware of trouble starting to brew out in the factories again.

Every day brought the same sights.
Snowbound streets, carts and sledges that could not be shifted because their
wheels or runners had frozen fast in the snow. It took the shoulders of at least
four men to get the handcarts back into the tracks worn by other wheels. And at
the soup kitchens in Zgierska Street, in Brzezińska, in Młynarska, Drewnowska,
sat rows of backs, male and female, huddled tightly together under coats and
shawls and bedcovers, drinking down the increasingly watery soup as dense clouds
of fine snow blew through the streets and alleys.

The disturbances that now broke out
were of a different kind.

The mob was fully mobile this time. It
had no set destination when it gathered in the streets, but moved swiftly from
district to district.

Rumour was what drove it.

A ratsye iz
du, a ratsye iz du!

Wherever these words were heard, people
turned and followed the crowd to where the incoming food convoys were thought to
be heading.

A food delivery would scarcely be
through the Radogoszcz Gate before it was attacked. The driver of the
horse-drawn vehicle would be pulled to the ground, and as five or six men put
their shoulders to it, the whole cart went over, to great cheers. By the time
the
Schupo
lumbered up, the overturned
load had been plundered of every last potato or swede.

There was a rumour going round that
timber was available for collection from an address in Brzezińska Street. The
timber consisted of a dilapidated hovel somehow overlooked by the Fuel
Department when it drew up its inventory of the ghetto’s wood reserves.

And the mob was immediately on the
spot.

Somebody took the lead by getting
lifted up onto the roof of the ramshackle building, while others used axes and
ripping saws to attack everything that could be hacked or pulled loose, and the
building promptly collapsed. Of the men and women inside, half a dozen were
trampled to death. When the police arrived, they were faced with men determined
to fight them off while their comrades grabbed as much of the highly prized wood
as possible before running off.

At that point, the staff of the six
ghetto hospitals decided to go on strike. They worked in three shifts – round
the clock, and what was more, in premises so cold that the surgeons could
scarcely feel the knives in their hands – trying to save frightened, starving
adults and children who were brought in with frostbite damage or with crushed or
broken arms and legs from being struck or trampled down outside the ghetto’s
distribution centres. Only a fraction of the food convoys coming from Radogoszcz
got through. Those that were not intercepted on their way from the goods station
were attacked once they were in the ghetto. A handful of men jumped over the low
wall running round the central vegetable depot, and even though Rozenblat had by
then ordered his officers to work double shifts to protect every food delivery
(there were now two policemen to every convoy of provisions and at least three
at every depot), they could not prevent the mob from getting in, and out again
through the gates, so that in the course of just a few hours it had been
stripped entirely bare.

Hunger
was the problem.

Whatever measures the Chairman took to
tackle the lawlessness in the ghetto, he would never bring it under control
until he got to grips with the hunger.

To give an impression of strength and
decisiveness, the Chairman abolished all extra rations and increased the
collective bread ration. Everyone employed in the ghetto, regardless of
profession or position in the ghetto hierarchy, would be entitled to a ration of
four hundred grams of bread a week.

Abolishing special rations initially
seemed a wise move. It would later turn out to have been the Chairman’s biggest
mistake, one that very nearly led to open revolt against his rule.

Ever since the ghetto was sealed off
from the outside world, distribution of what food there was had been in
accordance with a clear hierarchy of privilege.

First, the so-called
B rations
.

B stood for
Beirat
, the central ghetto administration. B rations were allocated
to people in positions of particular trust – divided into categories from I to
III, depending on their position in the ghetto hierarchy: from members of the
Chairman’s own Secretariat down to business leaders and technical instructors,
lawyers, doctors and others.

There were also so-called C
rations.

C stood for
Ciężko Pracujacy
and was given to manual labourers with particularly
heavy jobs. They did not amount to a great deal more than the normal worker’s
ration: the heavy workers were given fifty grams more bread a day than the
ordinary factory workers, and possibly an extra ladleful of soup. But it was a
symbolically important extra allowance because it was proof that hard work
paid.

When word got out that the C ration was
to be stopped to finance an increase in everyone’s bread allowance, the joiners
in Drukarska and Urzędnicza Streets decided to go on strike. They demanded not
only no cut in the C rations but also an insignificant wage rise.

It was naturally impossible for the
Chairman to agree to this. If the joiners of Drukarska were allowed to keep
their extra rations, then a host of other workers would soon be insisting that
their jobs, too, required a supplementary food ration. He ordered Rozenblat to
have his forces ready. Rozenblat sent seventy men, led by a police inspector
named Frenkel, to the Drukarska Street joinery shop. A few of the workers left
the building when they saw it was surrounded by the police, but most barricaded
themselves in on the first floor and refused to evacuate the premises despite
repeated appeals, first from Frenkel and then from Freund, the factory manager.
When the seventy-strong band of police finally stormed the upper storey, it was
met with a hail of wooden furniture at various stages of manufacture. Stick-back
chairs struck the policemen on the head; these were followed by shelves, sofa
legs, table tops. Shielding their faces with their arms, the police made their
way up the stairs and attempted to overpower the workers one by one and drag
them out. Not a single worker gave in without a fight. In fact, reported the
agitated factory manager Freund on the telephone to Rumkowski afterwards,
several of the arrested workers subsequently needed hospital treatment. They
were in such a starved state that they collapsed with exhaustion even before
Inspector Frenkel’s men got the handcuffs on them.

Freund had no sooner hung up than
Wiśniewski, manager of the tailoring workshop that made uniforms at 12 Jakuba,
rang to report that they had also stopped work there, in sympathy with the
joiners in Drukarska and Urzędnicza. Wiśniewski was desperate. His workshop was
just about to complete delivery of an order of some ten thousand Wehrmacht
uniforms, each with shoulder boards and collar insignia. How would the
authorities react if they did not get their uniforms on time? And Wiśniewski was
scarcely off the line before Estera Daum at the Secretariat put through a call
from Marysin. This time it was the chairman of the Funeral Association speaking
on behalf of a company of gravediggers who had announced that they did not
intend to dig any more graves unless they could keep their extra rations of
bread and soup. Why, they argued, should the gravediggers be singled out and
punished with sub-standard soup? Did their work somehow count as less strenuous
and important than that of other workers who had previously been receiving C
rations?

‘What do you expect me to do about it?’
was all Rumkowski said.

Unlike Wiśniewski, who had been almost
in tears as he poured out his anguish over the phone, the representative of the
Funeral Association, one Mr Morski, took a more humorous view.

‘Well, even the dead will have to wait
their turn now,’ he said.

That same morning, the temperature in
Marysin had been recorded as minus twenty-one degrees, Mr Morski told him; he
had been informed of this by Mr Józef Feldman, who of course was also a
respected and trusted member of his digging team. Twelve bodies had arrived from
the centre of town that morning. His
grobers
had attacked the ground in their usual way with picks and iron bars, but had not
even penetrated the surface of the soil.