The Emperor of Lies (51 page)

The last deportations from the ghetto were done in two stages. A first, more orderly operation lasted from 16 July until the middle of the following month. Then there was a break of two weeks, when most things seemed to go back to normal. Then the deportations resumed, and this time there was no question of transports to places outside the ghetto any more; this was a total
Verlagerung
.

The whole ghetto, people, machinery and everything, was to be moved elsewhere.

The front was very close now. The air-raid sirens regularly howled for several hours each night, and as she lay awake behind the curtain in Mrs Grabowska’s flat, Rosa Smoleńska could feel the detonations of distantly falling bombs, dull tremors through the walls of the house and up through her own body.

In these last weeks, Debora Żurawska had been working at Tusk’s factory on the corner of Lwowska Street and Zielna Street. The factory made porcelain casings for fuses and insulators, and was one of the few activities classed as
kriegswichtig
by Biebow and thus allowed to remain in the ghetto even after the evacuation had begun. Debora worked right at the end of the cold, crowded shed, where she and some other girls stood packing the finished fuses in little square boxes made of card. Twelve plugs to a box, and then the flaps at the top and bottom of the boxes had to be tucked into the little diagonal slots on their sides. Then the boxes were packed in bigger cardboard boxes, twenty in each.

Day after day Debora would perform these simple operations.

Then one day, she did not come home. Rosa had to admit afterwards that she could not say exactly
when
Debora had gone off: whether it was that morning on her way to Tusk’s, or during the night, or even the evening before. It had happened quite often recently, Debora going off, or ‘forgetting herself’ as they said at the factory. She would leave the packing room at the
resort
, wander off and get lost in one of the streets behind the factory that were simultaneously familiar yet utterly strange. This could happen in the middle of the day, or in the evening after the factory whistle blew. If it was the middle of the day, she usually only got a few blocks before the Sonder stopped her and demanded to see her workbook. But if it happened at the end of the shift, she had sometimes gone quite some distance before a neighbour or acquaintance alerted Rosa to the fact that they had seen ‘her girl’ in the district. Once she even went over the wooden bridge at Bałuty and wandered round among the workers at the cabinet-maker’s in Drukarska Street, and it was sheer luck that Rosa got to her before the Sonder did.

But there were times when Rosa was simply too tired. Ten hours a day at the uniform-making workshop, where she had a job sewing linings into gloves and winter caps; then three hours queuing every evening for some meagre allocation of rations, or carrying water up from the gas collective, or washing clothes, or scrubbing the stairs and floors. Sometimes she was so exhausted she just fell into bed. When she woke up the next morning, she sometimes found Debora sitting fully clothed on the floor outside the sleeping alcove, starring transfixed at the flies moving around on the reverse of the fabric Rosa had put over the window, where the sun was shining through it: the way the flies’ shadows enlarged, the moment before they attached themselves to the fabric, then shrank as they let go again and flew off. That generally meant she had been out all night, and Rosa shuddered to think what might happen if she ventured too close to the wire in her confusion, and one of the bored German sentries suddenly took it into his head to fire.

But Debora not only ‘forgot herself’ in the ghetto, she also tried to disappear behind the goodwill of others, or behind her own or other people’s words.

‘Let me help you,’ she would say with enthusiastic kindness as Mrs Grabowska came along with the coal bucket, and go down on hands and knees to light the fire in the stove.
This
Debora was as swift to aid and come to the rescue of others as the girl that Rosa had come to know in the Green House; but
this
Debora forgot the bucket of coal or pail of water the instant she had gone to get it, or merely stared at Rosa in disbelief as she tried to explain the best way home from the factory. The words fell off her as the flies and other insects fell off the back of the fabric at the window. They were only shadows, and just as irrelevant.

In fact, it was only when Mrs Grabowska came in with the coal to light the stove the second morning and stood there with the rake and shovel and suddenly remembered –
oh yes, there was someone here asking for young Miss Debora the other day
– that Rosa started to worry. She asked who it was, but Mrs Grabowska had no idea, of course. How could she know? There were so many people coming and going these days. Youngish type – Sonder or something like that – was all she could remember.

*

The story is still told in the ghetto of the mute and paralysed woman Mara who was found in Zgierska Street outside the barbed wire one day, and who was rejected by the Orthodox rabbis and was therefore taken care of by the rabbi of the ghetto’s Hasidic Jews, one Reb Gutesfeld. Day after day, Reb Gutesfeld and his
helfer
were to be seen parading round with the paralysed woman on a sort of pallet, a rudimentary stretcher, and people had come to her in secret in the prayer house in Lutomierska Street or in the synagogue in the old Bajka cinema, as a rumour spread that she was the daughter of a
tsaddik
and therefore had healing powers.

But she never spoke, nor moved so much as a limb.

Then the Nazis brought in the
Gehsperre
and people sat in their homes, terrified, waiting for the Sonder and the SS men to come and take their old people and children from them. The last of the ghetto’s ageing rabbis were sent away from the ghetto, and the
righteous woman
would have been, too, if she had not already been summarily shot.

But then a rumour went round that somebody in the ghetto had seen her. It must have been the third, or possibly the fourth, day after the curfew was imposed, and the policemen from Gertler’s Sonderabteilung who reported the sighting were terror-struck. For the paralysed woman had been seen walking upright, on her own two feet, not always straight, but tottering from one house wall to the next; every so often she collapsed, but soon got up again. And once this rumour started to spread, it turned out that other people had seen the woman, from inside their flats. And this time she was even alleged to have got into houses through closed front doors, and on every floor she came to, she was said to have touched the mezuzah on the doorpost, and some people were even rumoured to have let her in, and it was said she told them that the God of Israel is with his people at the hour of departure, whether it is to Babylon or Mitsraim. And if a single one of the tribe of Israel should perish on the way, then as the prophet says, all will have perished. Yet one who perishes cannot destroy them all. For if it is so that a single stone cannot be hewn from a rock without harming the whole rock, then it is equally so that even if a stone is hewn from it, the rock will still endure. The tribe of Israel is indestructible. That was what she was reported to have said.

As departure faced them again now, there were again people finding their way from house to house by night. But they could certainly not be considered holy men, and they spoke inspiringly, not of the indestructible rock of Zion or Eretz Israel, as the woman Mara allegedly did, but of the chance for everyone to be well fed and satisfied for at least one day before the transports left. Rosa had heard them herself, standing whispering with their silky-smooth voices behind the piece of red cloth she had put across the window –

Drai . . . !
They might say.

Or:

Drai en a halb . . . !

The longer Debora was away, the more convinced Rosa was that the girl had fallen prey to one of those whispering buyers of souls.

This was how it was:

Since Biebow had insisted that as many factories as possible continue production, all
Ressort-Leiter
had the task of drawing up lists of which workers they considered indispensable and which they could do without, if strictly necessary. On the basis of these lists, a special
Inter-Ressort Komitee
then decided which workers would go in the next transport and which would carry on working. A
resort
could also ‘buy’ workers from the committee if there was a specific need for them, or if Biebow had decreed that production in that
resort
was of particular importance.

This meant there was a continuous trade in people.

Some factory bosses could pay as much as ten ‘dispensables’ in exchange for one skilled mechanic.

Thus the need for all these ‘souls’. These were often very young men or women, who in return for bread or food coupons agreed to be deported in place of the person in demand, so the quota of deportees would remain filled and steady.

It was like a machine; a gigantic sorting mechanism at work:

Those who had enough money to pay for it bought themselves a bit longer in the ghetto. Those who did not have money at least still had their ‘souls’, and could sell those.

By early dawn, Brzezińska Street is already filled with a noise so intense it seems to form a body in its own right, a body of sound floating high above the mass of people moving sluggishly up and down the whole length of the street.

There are two streams running though the ghetto. One on its way
up
from Plac Kościelny. In it are the paid-for, the freed, the exceptions, those who still have jobs to go to, with rucksacks on their backs and
menażki
clattering inoffensively at their waists. Another stream is on its way
down
to Plac Kościelny. In it are all the others: those who have been given written notice to leave or been forced to sell themselves as souls.

By dinnertime, the crowd has assumed almost incredible proportions:

People are standing in the middle of the street with their loads of furniture and kitchen equipment; just standing: trapped in an apparently never-ending caravan of carts and barrows that have tipped over or got stuck, and people are trying to get them up and running again by pushing from behind or trying to drag them with rope harnesses and straps.

On her way down towards Bałuty Square, Rosa passes the so-called
purchase point
: a large enclosure that starts right down by Kron’s chemist’s shop at the foot of the wooden bridge and runs all the way up to Jojne Pilcer Square. Anything that could possibly be sold has been brought here: tables, dining suites, cabinets, doors; used, even damaged suitcases and bags that might still be serviceable in some way; clothes, too, above all warm coats and overcoats, and winter shoes and boots. The ghetto will buy back certain household goods; but few of those who have made their way here to dispose of their last possessions want
payment
for them. And certainly not in money. The ghetto rumkies are worthless now. People preparing to leave want food: bread, flour, sugar or tinned food, anything they can take with them to eat.

And disputes have broken out all over the place, because people think they have not got what they were promised, or not for the right price. The scuffles are observed by forty or so policemen, who form a loosely linked chain up from the wooden bridge. But the police do not intervene, or they just make an occasional, token intervention to break up a few of the particularly violent fights. Perhaps they have had orders to keep out of it, or perhaps they don’t dare get involved. Or they could just be guarding their own property; they might have relatives of their own in nearby buildings or districts.

Every so often Rosa thinks she catches a glimpse of the Chairman’s carriage amid all the chaos, the Chairman’s disfigured face beneath the brim of his hat or inside the hood of the carriage as it passes. The Praeses of the ghetto is tirelessly active in these final days. He issues proclamations. He makes speeches. He appeals to the ghetto residents who are still in hiding to give up and come out.

Yidn fun geto bazint zikh!

Sometimes he and Biebow appear together. It looks most peculiar – the aggressor and the aggressed standing side by side. To crown it all, Biebow still has the hand that hit the Chairman bandaged and in a sling, and the Chairman wears his blood-encrusted cuts and his closed and puffy eye like a mask over his real face. They even prompt each other, like the comedy duo in Moshe Paławer’s Ghetto Revue. First the Chairman says a few introductory words. Then Biebow speaks.

My Jews
, says Biebow.

He’s never said that before.

One day there is a rumour that there is food available down at the old fruit and vegetable market. White cabbage. Three kilos per ration. An almost unimaginable amount for a ghetto that has been living on rotten turnips and fizzing, fermented sauerkraut for several years.

Scales and weights stand ready in the middle of the market square, and people push forward, ready to fill their empty bags. Then comes the sudden sound of revving tractor engines; then the loud clink of trailers being attached, metal on metal. A terrifying sound for those who remember the
szpera
days of eighteen months before. People instantly drop what they are doing and make a run for it, but get no further than a block or two before helmeted soldiers come charging into the square from all directions. Reinforcements in the form of truckloads of German police come in from Łagiewnicka Street; they move so fast that they almost seem to
flow
off the backs of the lorries; they seize those in flight and bundle them unceremoniously up onto the trailers.

Then suddenly the Chairman and Biebow are there again – the aggressor and the aggressed; the German and the Jew – standing on the back of one of the trucks. Biebow even raises his bandaged hand as if appealing to the crowd, while shouting:
No, no, no . . . !
And beside him stands the Praeses with his disfigured face, and he too raises an arm in the air and shouts
no, no, no
, like some sort of echo; and Biebow speaks: