The Emperor of Lies (13 page)

They said this was a time when the Chairman never slept.

Day and night he sat agonising over the Resettlement Commission’s lists.

His room: a single, illuminated cube in the barrack-hut offices on Bałuty Square. The rest of the offices were in darkness because of the blackout. But as long as he was still there at his desk, some of his staff stayed at their posts, too. They crept about in the dark, lurking behind doorposts and office furniture, ready to obey his least command. As the hands of the ghetto clock on the corner of Łagniewnicka Street moved towards midnight, he closed the file and asked Miss Fuchs to order his carriage. He was intending to visit the children in the Green House and then spend the night at the Residence in Miarki Street.

(But it’s late, Mr Chairman. It’s almost twelve.

He brushed aside her objections:

Ring Feldman, too, and ask him to go on ahead and light the stoves.
)

Despite the anguish of the job in hand, there was something deeply satisfying in leaving the office so late. The tall facades with their rows of darkened windows gave him a sense of tranquility. Here and there, at a street corner or outside some factory, he saw a policeman on guard. Outside the Kripo’s red-brick castle, the black limousines of the Gestapo stood parked in long, shiny rows.

And so on through the empty night-time streets of Marysin.

He had the brim of his hat pulled well down and his collar turned up over his ears. The only sounds at this dark, midnight hour apart from the creak of the carriage wheels and the muffled clatter of hoofs were the repeated cracks of the whip as the driver urged the horse on.

And Marysin was something else, of course. Whenever he was being driven out there, he always had the sensation of the ghetto dissolving around him. The houses shrank in height, and spread themselves out behind walls and railings. Houses, outhouses; little workshops and sheds. Squeezed in here and there were cultivated plots that had belonged to the cottages, but that he had now given away as individual parcels of land to his most loyal colleagues. Then came the kibbutzim that the Zionists used to operate: large, open fields in which young men with spades and hoes moved among precise rows of potatoes, green cabbages and beetroot.

The Green House was the most outlying of the summer villas he had converted into young people’s hostels and children’s homes. Altogether there were six children’s homes like this in the ghetto, plus a newly established children’s hospital and large dispensary to go with them. But his heart belonged to the children in the Green House. They were the only ones who reminded him of the free and happy years in Helenówek, before the war and the occupation.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the building: a dilapidated, two-storey house with damp in the walls and its roof in a state of disrepair. As soon as his
Kinderkolonie
had moved there from Helenówek, he had had the house repainted. The only colour of paint available in the ghetto had been green. So the walls had been painted green, the roof, the front porch, the window frames; even the handrails of the steps. The house became so green that in the summertime it was scarcely distinguishable from the creeping vegetation behind.

But this was his kingdom: a
shtetl
world of little, tightly clustered houses in which the lamp of diligence burnt late into the evenings. He would really have preferred to visit unannounced. That was how he saw himself. The simple man, the unknown benefactor who, in spite of the lateness of the hour, just happened to be passing.

The transports to the ghetto in recent
months had included many children who had lost all their close relatives, or
perhaps never had any. One of them was a girl called Mirjam, another a boy with
no name.

The girl was eight or nine years old,
and turned up at the Green House with a little cardboard suitcase that she
refused to be parted from, in which Miss Smoleńska later found two carefully
ironed dresses, a warm coat and four pairs of shoes. One pair was patent leather
with silver buckles. The girl’s identity papers were in a pocket inside the
suitcase, neatly folded. According to them, her full name was Mirjam Szygorska.
She was born and registered in Zgierz. (But that was not where she had come
from.) Her case also contained some toys, a doll, and a couple of books in
Polish.

The boy was delivered to the Green
House by brothers Jósef and Jakub Kohlman, acting on direct orders from the
coordinator of transports in the Cologne collective. The boy had arrived with
one of the last transports from Cologne, on 20 November 1941. He appeared on the
transport list as number 677. But that figure said no more about him than the
fact that he had been the 677th person registered for the transport. On one side
of the next column was a forename, WERNER, followed by a question mark, then the
designation SCHUELER, and finally, under JAHRGANG, the year 1927. Assuming the
columns had been filled in correctly, SCHUELER was just the neutral term for
‘student’, and the young man had no surname.

They called him SAMSTAG, since it was
on the Sabbath the Kohlman brothers brought him to the front door of the Green
House; and that was the name under which Dr Rubin, the superintendent of the
children’s home, entered him on the roll:

SAMSTAG, WERNER, geb: 1927
(KÖLN);
VATER/MUTTER: Unbekannt

From the very start, there was
something unruly and pent-up about him. He could not pass a wall or a doorpost
without knocking into it. If his eyes had anything in them at all, it was as if
they were constantly searching for something behind or to the side of what he
was looking at. And then there was his smile. Werner smiled a lot and, thought
Rosa Smoleńska, the person who generally had to deal with him, in an almost
brazen way; it was a smile full of gleaming little white teeth.

When they brought him, the Kohlman
brothers explained that he spoke neither Polish nor Yiddish. But when Rosa
Smoleńska tried talking to him in German, she got only cross grimaces in return.
It was as if the words were there, and he understood what they meant, but could
not comprehend why she was saying what she said or addressing him the way she
did. If they tried to force him to do something he didn’t want to, he had
terrible fits of rage. One day he overturned a full washtub Chaja had brought
into the kitchen; on another occasion he started throwing furniture out of the
window of the Pink Room. When Superintendent Rubin went over and tried to calm
him down, he bit him in the arm. And sat there with his jaws clamped, refusing
to let go, although four of them, including Chaja who weighed at least twice as
much as he did, threw themselves into the fray and tried to separate the two
bodies. His closely spaced little teeth embedded in Superintendent Rubin’s arm
looked like like those of a shark, all sharp and shiny.

He did not seem to have any problem
communicating with the other children. He liked being with the younger ones, and
best of all he liked being with Mirjam. When they were out in the grounds, he
would just hang around in a corner, almost comical in his oversized shoes, twice
as tall as his playmates. But if Mirjam was going anywhere, Werner would always
follow, a couple of paces behind. He played cops and robbers with two of the
younger boys, Abraham and Leon. He would chase them with a stick and shout
ikh hob dikh gekhapt
– Gotcha! – like all the
others, but in a strange accent that revealed he had never spoken the language
in his life before.

(Later, Rosa would remember how
peculiar she found it from the outset that someone who had never spent any time
in the ghetto could mimic pitch and intonation so closely; she had even said
this to him on one occasion – in German of course, as that was the language the
two of them still used with each other at that stage:
Du bist doch ein kleiner Schauspieler du,
Werner . . . !
Only to see his face stiffen the
next instant into that horrible smile she had learnt to fear. Nothing but teeth,
no mouth, and no expression of any kind behind those pale-blue eyes.)

*

Rosa Smoleńska had worked with homeless
or orphaned children all her life. She held her post in Helenówek for eight
years, and was always in charge of the very youngest children. Apart from the
head of the home, Superintendent Rubin, she and Chaja Meyer the housekeeper were
the only ones who had come to the ghetto with the Chairman after the occupation.
The other nursery nurses had fled to Warsaw when war broke out. But they had all
been married and had
other
options
. Rosa had never had either a husband or
any other option: just all these children! There were forty-seven of them now,
including the latest arrivals, Werner and Mirjam.

Rosa Smoleńska was among the first to
get up in the mornings. In winter she was up by four or five, to light the
fires. Once she had the big stove in the kitchen alight, she went to the well a
little way down the slope where the enclosed part of the Big Field started. As
dawn broke, there were usually pale streaks of light above the banks of cloud in
the eastern sky. The reflected light of the rising sun made the brick wall round
the cemetery cast long shadows across the snow. A couple of hours later, the sun
rose above the top of the wall and the light glittered on the frosted wires
running between the telegraph poles along Zagajnikowa Street. At six or seven in
the morning she often saw knots of workers on their way to or from their shifts
at Radogoszcz Station. They walked in a huddle, as if to preserve as much heat
as they could in the cold, and without saying a word. The only sound was the
hollow clatter of the empty tin mugs tied to their belts. At regular intervals,
German tanks and lorries would also rumble their way through the frosty silence,
and distrustful-looking soldiers with submachine guns would patrol the pavement
on the ghetto side. The Germans seldom came any closer than that. The black,
horse-drawn hearses that came from Bałuty every morning were a more familiar
sight. Sometimes there were no horses available, and the carts were pulled, just
like the excrement tanks, by men hitched or harnessed to the shafts in front,
while other unfortunates had to push the carts from behind.

Once she had carried in the water, she
would go back out to wait until she saw Józef Feldman trudging up Zagajnikowa
with his buckets of coal. Summer and winter he was bundled up in the same
yellowing sheepskin coat and leather cap, his face almost completely covered.
Rosa knew the Chairman had given Feldman instructions always to see to the fires
in the Green House first, and to be ready to drop what he was doing at any time,
if help were needed
up there
. Feldman’s actual
job was in Baruk Praszkier’s gravedigging team. Rosa never dared go too close to
him – she thought she could smell death on his hands – but she helped him carry
the coal buckets down into the cellar so he could pour in the coal and get the
fire going. Meanwhile, Malwina would wake all the children. They stood shivering
in the narrow hallway, waiting for their turn to come forward and wash. Rosa
would decant some of the cold water she had fetched from the well into a big tub
that Chaja always set in the doorway from the kitchen to the dining room. They
had to wash before they were allowed to take their seats on the benches, where
Chaja cut the bread for them. The slices grew thinner all the time, but there
was always a slice for everybody, spread with a thin layer of margarine.

One morning Feldman brought with him a
small figure, pale and shy, whose name and origins nobody knew. But unlike
Werner and Mirjam, he did not seem to have come with the transports. When Rosa
Smoleńska asked him who he was and what he was doing there, the boy just took a
few cocky steps into the room and announced, as if singing or declaiming a
poem:

I
have heard there is a piano here that needs tuning!

He was the son of an instrument-maker
by the name of Rozner, so well known among the upper classes of Łódź that no one
ever called him anything but ‘the piano tuner’. But Mr Rozner also repaired
other instruments: flutes, reed instruments, trombones and percussion
instruments for military orchestras. He had put some of his many instruments on
display in a luxuriously fitted showroom next to his workshop.

The workshop itself, however, was
cramped and basic, as anyone who spent any time in it could see; but those just
passing in the street saw only the showroom with the smooth, shiny instruments
laid out on cushions of silk and plush. Since Rozner was a Jew, he was naturally
rumoured to have money squirrelled away in his shop. A drunken mob of
Volksdeutsche
, led by two officers of the
SS, forced their way into the instrument-maker’s premises one evening and
demanded he hand over the money on the spot, and when Rozner denied having any
hidden away, they attacked the shop with clubs and batons until all the
instruments were in pieces and Rozner himself lay in the middle of his
demolished showroom with a smashed skull and every bone in his body broken.
Rozner’s son escaped at the last minute with the most valuable thing his father
owned. This comprised two bags made of coarse sailcloth, joined together, in
which Mr Rozner kept his tools when he went round the rich families of Łódź,
tuning their pianos. The son was now to be seen with the pair of sailcloth bags
over his shoulder in all sorts of unlikely places in the ghetto, going round
trying to complete his dead father’s work.

The piano in the Pink Room had been
badly affected by damp, so now they had to keep a bowl of water inside it to
stop the wood cracking and the strings coming loose from their pegs. The piano
tuner paid careful attention to these and other defects. He tested the pedals of
the piano, ran his palm carefully across the lid and down the sides, tapped all
along the body of the instrument. Only when he had satisfied himself that this
did not produce any unexpected sounds did he ask Kazimir to hold open the lid
while he himself opened the back of the piano and climbed inside. He was so
small that he could hang like a monkey within the exposed tangle of strings,
loosening and tightening, slackening and pulling taut. When he climbed out of
the piano apparently unscathed, he had worked his way through the whole keyboard
from the inside, from one hammer to the next. With an expression of barely
concealed triumph on his wizened face, he set a tuning fork on top of the piano
lid, and gestured smilingly to Debora Żurawska to come forward to the piano
stool.

So Debora took her seat, and struck a
firm and ringing C-Major chord that was clearly taken up by the tuning fork and
amplified.

The children clapped, and as Debora
proceeded to play a Chopin étude, the piano tuner sat down beside her and added
strange trills and arpeggios of his own, in a higher register. It was plain he
had never learnt to play properly, but just by imitating chord sequences and key
changes: as if he had scraped together into his cloth bags every phrase and
motif Chopin had ever used and then scattered them all back over the keyboard,
according to his own taste and in random order. But at that particular moment,
it did not matter. Debora played, and the piano tuner followed, and soon the
playing of the two was so intertwined that no one could hear where her chord
finished and his began.

Within a few days, music and vocal
items had been written; the ‘orchestra’ had rehearsed; a theatre troupe had even
been formed, consisting of all the children from the home with a Mr SAMSTAG,
Werner (
dyrektor teatru
) at its head, and they
went round distributing hand-written invitations:

Actors’ Collective ‘Grine Hoiz’
presents
Der kleyner Wasserman
Play in One Act
By S. Y.
‘Ritter’

Young Adam Gonik read the poem ‘Spring
is here’ in Hebrew, and a small choir of children, led by Superintendent Rubin
himself, performed songs and poems by Bialik. During this overture, the
spider-like piano tuner ascended a ladder in the hallway and removed the metal
cover from the bell mounted on the wall outside the kitchen. With one of the
little metal hammers he kept in his cloth bags, he was able to short-circuit the
device and set it off, so the Green House echoed from top to bottom with a
shrill and piercing note:

riiiiiiiiiii-iiiiiiiing

That was the signal: the children in
the choir ran to pull back the green drapery that the actors’ troupe had strung
across the room as a curtain. Kazimir stumbled onto the stage, dressed up as a
rich Polish nobleman, and told the group of Jews driven from their home town in
Galicia by the troops of the Russian Tsar that he would of course hide them in
the biggest cellar in his castle. Debora hammered a quick succession of dramatic
chords on the piano while the piano tuner stood atop his stepladder, declaiming
loudly – THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! – and all the
children sang:

Umglik, shrek un moyres

Mir
veysn nit fun vanen

Oikh
haynt vi in ale doyres

Zaynen mir oysgeshtanen!
⁴

Then Werner Samstag came clumping on
stage, dressed in a full-length black coat like a proper
rebbe
, and a big black
shtraiml
he must have made all by himself, since bits of the velvet
lining were hanging down over his eyes. His beard was also home-made: a scrap of
grey material through which his smile shone as white and gleaming as ever, with
a total lack of lips. Debora thumped the keys with both hands, deep down in the
lowest octaves, and as the children’s voices soared in bold descant above her,
Reb Samstag raised an admonitory finger, first to the audience and then to
Heaven, and declaimed: