The Emperor of Lies (7 page)

But perhaps it didn’t matter.

As long as the bread could be shared out fairly and everyone got the same.

One of the regular daily columns in the
Ghetto Chronicle
was a record of the number of births and deaths. This was sometimes followed by an entry giving the names of those who had died by their own hand.

That was how the
Chronicle
put it:
died by their own hand
. But in the ghetto they just said that he or she had
gone to the wire
. The phrase expanded the ghetto’s already rich vocabulary with an expression that meant not only taking your own life but also transgressing all the limitations the authorities imposed on how life should be lived inside.

In the first week of February 1941, according to the
Chronicle
, seven people went to the wire. Some of the suicides were striking, to say the least. A middle-aged clerk in Rumkowski’s housing department took it into his head to crawl right under the fence of planks that reinforced the barbed-wire barrier on the north side of Zgierska Street. Of all the places he could have chosen for his escape attempt, he opted for the most closely guarded stretch in the entire ghetto. It still took some time for him to be detected. There was time for several of the trams that carried Germans and Poles straight through the ghetto to pass by the man’s head and shoulders, wedged under the fence, before the police in the lookout two hundred metres away realised something was up. The clerk just lay flat on the ground, waiting for the terrified guard to start shooting.

Other cases were less clear.

They generally involved workers returning home from their evening shift.

Everyone moving through the ghetto had orders to stay as far away from the boundary as possible. Two hundred and fifty metres was the recommended safety margin. But if you couldn’t avoid approaching the wire, you were recommended to do so in broad daylight, right under the eyes of the German guards and for some explicit purpose (if, contrary to all expectation, anyone should ask you).

But for worn-out shift workers there was always the temptation of saving a block or a few hundred metres by taking a short cut along the ghetto boundary to the nearest wooden bridge.

And maybe it was dark. The person taking the short cut couldn’t see.

The sentry on the other side couldn’t see very clearly, either.

And maybe the man or woman on their way home didn’t speak German.

Or he or she couldn’t hear what the sentry was shouting because a tram came past at the same time.

Or perhaps there was no tram. The sentry just shouted, and the man or woman who should have been home long ago panicked and started running.

Which the sentry interpreted as an escape attempt. And the shot rang out.

At least four of the seven individuals who went to the wire in February 1941 were killed that way. Did they deliberately seek death, or were their senses dulled by fatigue? Or was there perhaps no distinction between conscious intent and unconscious choice? Perhaps they made for the boundary because they knew there was quite simply nowhere else to go.

A few weeks later, in March 1941, the
Chronicle
reported that forty-one-year-old Cwajga Blum had succeeded in taking her life that way after no less than thirteen attempts to go to the wire.

Cwajga Blum lived in Limanowskiego Street. The only window in the flat she shared with two other women looked out directly over the cordon. Limanowskiego Street was the main thoroughfare for the German transports of foodstuffs and materials for the factories, for unloading at Bałuty Square, and was for that reason very closely guarded. A little way up stood the third wooden bridge, the one that linked the northern and southern lobes of the ghetto with each other, with red-and-white-striped sentry boxes clearly visible at each end of the bridge. It was to the box at the southern end of the bridge that Cwajga Blum went with her request.

Shoot me
, she said to the sentry in the box.

The sentry pretended not to hear. He lit a cigarette, let the strap of his rifle slip from his shoulder, laid the rifle across his lap and pretended to take an interest in the detail of its stock and muzzle.

Please
, she pleaded.
Shoot me.

It was the same guard on duty night after night. And the same Cwaiga.

After this nuisance had gone on for several weeks, the guard’s commanding officer asked the local Jewish police to take the matter in hand.

The harassment simply had to stop.

From then on, the front entrance of Cwajga Blum’s block of flats in Limanowskiego Street was guarded round the clock by two of Rozenblat’s men. As soon as Cwajga ventured over the threshold, the Jewish policemen were there, dragging her back to safety.

Cwajga Blum tried to get out the back way instead. But the policemen had already seen through her. The minute she emerged from the courtyard they were there, hauling her back into the building. This game of cat and mouse was repeated twelve times. At the thirteenth attempt, Cwajga Blum succeeded in outwitting her supervisors, and it also so happened that the
Schupo
had just changed its rota of sentry duties. The embarrassed police guard from Limanowskiego Street had been moved to Marysin and a rather more outspoken colleague had taken his place in the Limanowskiego Street box.

Please shoot me
, said Cwajga Blum.

Do a little dance for me and then we’ll see
, said the new guard.

Before Rozenblat’s men realised what was going on, Cwajga Blum performed a desperate, crazy dance on the other side of the barbed wire. When she had finished, the guard took aim with his rifle and shot her twice in the chest. When her body insisted on continuing to twitch even though it was lying on the ground, he fired another shot to be on the safe side.

The story of Cwajga Blum was told in different versions around the ghetto. One version had it that she had previously been an in-patient in the psychiatric ward of the Wesoła Street hospital, but had been forced to give up her bed to some high-ranking person in the
Beirat
.

In another variant, Cwajga Blum was said to have been so confused that she was not even aware she was in a ghetto, and what she said to the guard in Limanowskiego Street was actually not
shoot me, shoot me
, but
shut me in, shut me in
– because she thought she recognised the soldier as one of the ward attendants from the hospital.

(In that case, the guard must have thought the lady was making fun of him. Why would she ask him to shut her in? She was already well and truly shut in.)

At any event, these tales of men and women who went to the wire became so legion that the Chairman felt obliged to issue a special decree (Public Notice no. 241), in which he expressly forbade any unwarranted approaches to the ghetto boundary. And particularly outside normal shift-working time.

But people went to the wire even so. One way or another.

In April 1941, the
Chronicle
reported a reduction in the number of fatal shootings along the boundary. The statistics showed that would-be suicides now preferred to throw themselves out of high windows, from flats or stairwells. Most of them chose, moreover, to do this from buildings other than those in which they lived. Possibly because they wanted to be sure the drop would be long enough, or perhaps to avoid causing their neighbours any unnecessary bother.

In May 1941, according to the
Ghetto Chronicle
, no fewer than forty-three such suicides were recorded. But even those who died by throwing themselves out of windows were said to have gone to the wire. They had simply been too depressed, or too weakened by hunger and illness, to drag themselves there under their own steam.

One morning, the German police reported
that the body of a female had been discovered on ‘Aryan territory’ alongside the
barbed-wire fence, right by the now infamous sentry post in Limanowskiego
Street. The woman was lying on her back, with her head resting on the ground and
her arms sticking out at an unnatural angle.

The two German guards who found her had
initially thought she was dead, yet another of those Jewish suicides. But when
they bent down to deal with the body, they discovered she was still breathing.
They searched through the woman’s clothing for identity papers, but found
nothing. The German guards were now faced with a real dilemma. Having found no
identity papers, they could not say for sure whether the woman was from the
Jewish or the Aryan side of the wire; whether she had been escaping from the
ghetto or, on the contrary (and these things still happened – just look at
Zawadzki!), had been trying to force entry through the wire.

In consultation with their superiors,
they decided to take the woman to the office of the Eldest of the Jews, so its
employees could take over the matter. The
Kripo
also demanded to see the daily reports of all the guard
commanders, so they could see whether any Jew had been reported missing in the
ghetto. The admittance books of all the hospitals were checked, as were the
patient records of the psychiatric clinic in Wesoła Street, to which many of the
more well-to-do ghetto inhabitants had their mentally or physically enfeebled
relatives admitted. But nowhere had any report been filed of patients going
missing. They therefore felt it safe to conclude that the woman had
not
come from inside the ghetto.

One of the first to examine her was
Leon Szykier, the
‘workers’ doctor’. He was known as the workers’ doctor
because he was the only physician in the ghetto who did not demand shamelessly
high fees of his patients, so even ordinary people could afford to consult him.
During the examination, Dr Szykier palpated the woman’s body, and found it ‘a
little wasted and emaciated’ but without any other signs of dehydration. There
were also scratches and abrasions to the lower legs and arms, indicating that
the woman had tried to climb over an obstacle of some kind. The body showed no
other injuries. No swellings in the throat. No fever. Pulse and breathing
normal.

It was later hinted that the good
half-hour Szykier had spent alone with the woman had been enough to ‘damage
her’. Others naturally disputed this. But it was quite clear that the woman had
been lying calmly and peacefully on the stretcher when the German police guards
carried her into the Secretariat, whereas half an hour later – when Dr Szykier
left her – she was writhing on the barrack-bed in feverish convulsions and
mumbling incoherent words of prayer in Hebrew and Yiddish.

Some even thought they could hear
traces of the prophet’s words on her lips:

ashrei
kol-chochei lo –

For the LORD is
a God of justice;

blessed are all
those who wait for Him.

News of the paralysed woman and her
strange utterances spread rapidly. The Chairman had her taken to the Hasidic
School in Lutomierska Street, where she was put into the care of a
rebbe
named Gutesfeld and his assistant Fide
Sajn. The Hasidic Jews would later claim that Reb Gutesfeld had already seen the
incapacitated woman in his dreams. In these dreams she was apparently not
paralysed but went stumbling from house to house in a burning city. She did not
enter the houses, merely touched the mezuzah on the doorpost of each one – as if
to give a sign to those living there that they should leave and follow her.

In the eyes of the Hasidic Jews, there
could be no doubt about the matter. She was a
tzadika
, perhaps a messenger, come to offer the incarcerated Jews of
the ghetto a little comfort after two years’ war and a dreadful winter of
hunger. The ordinary people of the ghetto would later refer to her as Mara,
the sorrowful one
. For a period of time,
she was the only one of the ghetto’s inhabitants – almost a quarter of a million
at that time – who had no fixed address or bread-ration card. She did not even
feature in the register of the Kripo, which otherwise included every soul in the
ghetto and was updated monthly by the
Meldebüro
of the Statistics Department.

On the face of it she was clearly a
matter for the rabbinate, though they were only too happy to entrust her to Reb
Gutesfeld’s care. But even the Hasidic community dared not let her stay, so the
rebbe
and his helper were often seen making
their way through the narrow streets of the ghetto with the woman on a litter
between them. Fide Sjazn would be at the front while Gutesfeld, who had problems
with his legs and could not see very well either, stumbled along behind in his
black cassock. They could cover quite a few kilometres that way, in rain, in icy
winds or blinding snowstorms. Every so often the
rebbe
stopped to try to work out their location by running his
fingers along a wall or the side of a house, or to let Fide Szajn (whose lungs
were diseased) finish coughing.

Why were they on the move? Why did they
keep on moving?

Some said it was because the woman
would never keep still. As soon as they put down the litter, a piercing cry
would force its way from her throat and she would thrash her arms about, as if
to fend off invisible demons. Others said that every house, every block,
concealed an informer who would not hesitate to go to the
Kripo
if
they knew the woman was there; and what would happen to the sorrowful one
then?

There were days, however, when the
rebbe
brought the litter back to the prayer
room, and on those days a wan but hopeful band always gathered outside the front
door in the hope that a touch or a look from the paralysed woman would cure the
pain in their arms or heal wounds that refused to heal, or even lift from them
the curse of hunger that made formerly strong and healthy men move like ghosts
through the streets of the ghetto. Dr Szykier, who was a convinced socialist and
loathed all superstition, tried to make the local police drive away the crowd,
but the
rebbe
insisted, saying that his dream
had also predicted the arrival of these people, and that it would be blasphemous
to turn away Jews who had come in the belief that the God of the Scriptures
could perform a miracle through even one of his most distant
representatives.

One of the people queuing was Hala
Wajsberg, Adam Rzepin’s neighbour in the building in Gnieźnieńska Street, and
mother to Jakub and Chaim who spent their days hunting for wood and coal dust at
the old brickworks in Łagiewnicka Street. Hala Wajsberg had heard of Mara’s
gifts from her friend Borka at the Central Laundry and persuaded her husband
Samuel to try a visit to the woman for his painfully aching lung.

In the first months after the ghetto
was sealed off, there had been no wooden bridges, and the German police guards
opened the fence every morning to let through workers like Samuel who had to
move from one half of the ghetto to the other to get to work. The fence was
opened at specific times and workers had to make sure they were there
punctually. It seemed to Samuel that he was always the last man hurrying across
the street before the two guards who presided over the opening lifted the
barbed-wire barricade back into place, and one morning he really was the last
man out – before he realised what was happening, he was alone in the middle of
the ‘Aryan’ corridor, and the ghetto was closed to him in both directions.

There was a finely developed sadism
among those bored German guards with nothing to do all day but shift barbed
wire, and every time they managed to catch a Jew between them in ‘the corridor’
it was a moment of pure and unalloyed pleasure.

Samuel stumbled and fell, and one of
the policemen hit him several times with the butt of his rifle across the back
and in the belly, and kicked him straight in the chest with the steel-capped toe
of his boot to make him get up again. As the traffic was allowed to start
flowing again, they grabbed hold of the now semi-conscious body and heaved it
between them over the barbed-wire barrier. Even long after his broken ribs had
healed, the imprint of the policeman’s boot remained as a physical mark of
oppression in Samuel’s left lung. And things scarcely got any better when the
wooden footbridges were built.

Every step he took up the bridge was
suffocating, every step back down a torture. Forty-seven steps up, forty-seven
steps down. With every step, less air was left in the wheezing, aching lung. By
the time he got down to the foot of the bridge he was wet with sweat and
quivering like an eel, and everything went black; but through the haze of hunger
the heavy, metal-shod voice of the guard rang out again:

Schnell,
schnell . . . !

Beeilung, nicht
stehenbleiben . . . !

If Mr Serwański at the joinery in
Drukarska Street had not been aware of Samuel’s problems with his lung, he would
undoubtedly have let Samuel go, and what would become of the family then? Hala
was thinking primarily of herself. The ghetto was already full of men hollowed
out by hunger until they were beyond recognition, who spent their time lying at
home, pale and staring, while their wives had to provide for the family
alone.

The morning Hala Wajsberg took her
husband Samuel to the Hasidic prayer house it was a raw, pallid winter day with
mist hanging so low over the ghetto that the three wooden bridges appeared to
vanish straight up into the sky. There was chaos in the back room that morning.
Guards, the same guards that normally oversaw the ghetto factories, were doing
their best to push back the swarm of people pressing its way in from outside and
growing larger by the minute. Half a dozen women had managed to elbow their way
to the litter and were now hanging over the face of the paralysed woman with
their sick children in their arms.

There was such dreadful shouting and
clamouring that nobody noticed that the woman on the litter had herself stopped
shouting some time before. Dr Szykier had opened his big, black doctor’s bag and
given Mara an injection in one of her thin arms, their many red, infected grazes
illuminated by the glow of the candles Fide Sjajn had placed round the
litter.

At that moment, Helena Rumkowska and
her retinue entered the room.

Princess Helena, too, had latterly
begun to feel the effects of one particular ghetto illness, that
malaise au foie
which according to her private
physician, Dr Garfinkel, afflicted many of the ‘chosen few’ in the ghetto. As
its French name indicated, it was an illness primarily affecting the liver.
Since an attack of jaundice many years before, Mrs Rumkowska’s liver was
officially sensitive. The obscure symptoms generated by this liver provided an
inexhaustible topic of conversation at the dinners she regularly gave at the
Soup Kitchen for intellectuals in Łagiewnicka Street. Only ghetto dwellers with
coupons for B rations,
respectable people
, as
she put it, had access to this kitchen, and it was certainly a gift from above
to be able to see Princess Helena pause in one of her tours of inspection, lean
kindly over some diner’s shoulder, pull out a chair or perhaps even sit down and
engage in a little well-bred conversation.

An even more highly prized favour, out
of most people’s reach, was to be invited as a
personal
guest to Helena and Józef Rumkowski’s ‘residence’ in Karola
Miarki Street in Marysin. The couple’s home was not much to boast about in
itself: a run-down
dacha
with lots of poky
rooms, heated by wood-burning stoves, with carved wooden banisters, Russian
carpets and single-glazed veranda windows that steamed up when the winter cold
breathed on them, turning them as shiny white with frost as the outside of Dr
Miller’s removable china eye.

But from the ceiling hung the crystal
chandelier which Princess Helena had brought with her from her old home in the
centre of Łodz – and that was a relic. Those who had been guests of the
Rumkowskis spoke not only of the ‘generous spreads’ Princess Helena was known to
provide, but also of the way the flecks of light cast by the chandelier spread
shimmering colours across the cramped room, from the simple tulle curtains to
the cane furniture and matt sheen of the linen cloth.

For many in the ghetto, Karola Miarki
Street came to symbolise the
pogodne czasy
, the
‘golden days’ from before the war. It was beneath that very chandelier, for
example, that Princess Helena one memorable evening had ordered a sack to be
slit open, releasing a flock of finches collected on Mr Tausengeld’s
instructions from the aviary out in the garden: the aim was a symbolic driving
out of evil, not only from Princess Helena’s own body but also from those of all
decent ghetto dwellers. But not even this dramatic medication had any effect.
Princess Helena continued to be tormented by her liver. She lay shut in total
darkness in her bedroom for ten days, until Dr Garfinkel appealed to her to try
as a last resort to see the woman everyone was talking about, to whom for some
reason they attributed powers of healing.

So in great pain, and with a good deal
of fuss, she had herself taken in one of the ghetto
dróshkes
to the Hasidic prayer house. She was dismayed to find other
people already there, and she ordered the
opiekuni
to drive them all, the crippled and the lame, out into the
yard. Only when the room was empty did she bend over the poor, pitiful creature
lying there on the litter.

That was when
it
happened, the thing Princess Helena’s people found so hard to
explain afterwards. Someone was to write later that it was as if ‘sudden
tribulation’ had descended on the paralysed woman. Others described it as being
like when you cover a light with your hand. The woman’s pure and limpid gaze was
suddenly clouded with a dark, shifting anxiety. ‘A
dybek
!’ screamed Mr Tausendgeld. Perhaps it was simply that Mara had
briefly managed to fight her way up from the heavy, morphine-drenched sleep into
which Dr Szykier had sunk her, and Helena Rumkowska, ever prone to
sentimentality, had felt her heart wrung by something she felt she had glimpsed
a moment earlier in the sick woman’s clear, liquid eyes. Had been so moved, in
fact, that she took a little handkerchief from her handbag, carefully dampened
its edge with spit and leant forward to wipe away –
what?
– yes,
what
had she thought
to wipe away (afterwards, not even Helena Rumkowska could remember with any
clarity)? – perhaps the saliva at the corners of the woman’s mouth, the tears on
her eyelids, the sweat on her brow.