The Emperor of Lies (19 page)

All you can see at first is the sharp glare of headlights, hanging out there in the dark. The light rises and falls, as if an invisible arm were raising and lowering a lantern. The lantern swells into a ball of light that suddenly shatters, and at that instant one can make out the heavy chuffs and groans of the labouring locomotive behind. Then the locomotive erupts into the siding in a deafening screech of metal against metal. There are always four or five armed guards on board, and as many again come running along the long platform of the loading bay, or swing themselves aboard, grabbing hold of side ladders or doors. And the commanding officers gather at the front of the train, shouting in gruff, rasping voices until the group of workers who have been waiting behind storehouses and carriage sheds slowly and almost reluctantly approach the wagons that are now to be unloaded from both sides.

On paper, they are
outside
the ghetto boundary now. Adam Rzepin would have felt a degree of elation at this fact if it had not looked exactly the same
out here
as it did
in
there
. The same contingent of utterly bored German soldiers from the ghetto guard, in helmets of dull steel and full-length, field-grey military greatcoats, moving to and fro – chain-smoking, passing neutral phrases between them, and looking on with indifference as the workers pulled open the sliding doors of the goods wagons.

On the other side of the illuminated station yard there is nothing but darkness. And flat, open country. And mud. And the certainty of a shot in the back once the marksmen up in the watchtower have caught up with the sweeping beam of the searchlight. Radogoszcz may lie outside the ghetto. But no one has ever escaped from here, or even tried. The ghetto’s boundaries are not as simply drawn as that.

Considerably more cheering was the fact that a few Polish railwaymen generally accompanied the goods trains. They would sometimes shout down to the Jewish workers. A mixture of threats, insults and words of encouragement. One of the Poles even addressed him by name:

Psst Adam, A-daam, come here . . . !

A hand reached down from the wagon and brushed against his; a smile vanished into the darkness and chaos as soon as the unloading began. The Poles never did more than slide open the doors or release the locking mechanisms of the loading hatches. The heavy work, the unloading itself, was to be done by the Jews. The only tools they had at their disposal were shovels and simple handcarts. Two men would swing themselves up into the goods wagon; two others would climb onto the handcart and stand ready, and then the sacks of flour would be slung from man to man. Items like white and red cabbage, carrots and potatoes were usually emptied from the wagons loose, directly into the barrows. If they were in a hurry, the Poles simply pulled up the side flaps of the wagons so the load poured out, at worst straight onto the ground. And if you were really unlucky, the
commanding officer
– Oberwachtmeister Sonnenfarb – would decide at that very moment to squeeze himself out of the little security hut by the loading bay where he sat eating his packed lunch and listening to the radio. Dietrich Sonnenfarb was a German of vast proportions, whose main amusement was imitating the Jews in his charge. If anybody passed him with a wheelbarrow, Sonnenfarb would immediately follow after with both hands outstretched as if he, too, was wheeling a barrow, his great body with its rolls of fat wobbling from side to side as he shouted, and encouraged the other guards to shout:

Ich bin ein Karrenführer, ich bin ein Karrenführer!

The other guards would double up with laughter; and as if that was not enough, Sonnenfarb’s underling Henze would follow in his wake and take swipes with his rifle butt at any Jews in the vicinity, to force them to laugh as well. Henze was lower in rank; it was important to him that everybody – Jew or Aryan – did exactly what Sonnenfarb wanted.

But to everybody’s relief, there was usually no time for further orgies of laughter. Another wagon would arrive and need ‘scooping out’.

Sometimes, other cargoes came welling out of the wagons when the side hatches were opened:

Empty suitcases, rucksacks and briefcases. And shoes, hundreds of thousands of shoes – ladies’ shoes, men’s shoes, children’s sandals – most of them with the soles or uppers torn off. There were rumours that gold objects had been found stuffed inside some of the shoes or sewn into the linings of the suitcases. The German guards were therefore extra-vigilant whenever they saw a load like this arrive. Adam stood alongside, watching a number of his fellow workers root frantically through the bloody items of kit. But this was never allowed to go on for long.
Schluss! Schluss!
Henze would cry.
Aufhören damit!
As soon as a cart was fully loaded, the two men who had been up in the train would jump down and be ‘hitched’ to the front of it, while the two who had stayed on the ground would go round to push from behind.

The carts were lugged to one of the many wooden store sheds that had been put up round the main building in the railway yard. From here, the produce was taken directly to the big vegetable depot at Bałuty Square. In Radogoszcz there was also a meat store where slaughterhouse waste was kept to await ‘processing’. Summer or winter, a nauseous, suffocating stench permeated the space beneath the tall rafters. Into long, shiny tubs at one end they sorted the meat products that were classed as ‘seconds’: bits of raw horsemeat with bluish veins, beneath which the flesh had already gone grey and sweaty. These ‘seconds’ were carted off into the ghetto and ground down to make sausages; every time the storehouse door was opened and the carts passed by, they could smell the thick, nauseating stench of the rotting, meaty dross, like a putrid wave hitting them in the face.

There were the severest penalties for attempting to smuggle anything out of the wagons or store sheds. The local police did full body searches of all those working there: first to make sure they were not bringing in any illicit goods; then a second time when they were going home after their shift. But no police force in the world could prevent the unloading gang as they went about their work picking up a potato or turnip that had happened to fall off the cart and swiftly chewing and swallowing it. This was known as ‘skimming’. Everybody skimmed. First the workers in the unloading bay. Then those who handled the provisions at the depot. Then the workers who took the food into the ghetto and unloaded it at the central stores. Then the cart drivers who took the food from the stores to the distribution points. Then those in charge of the distribution, who always liked to put a little aside for themselves, or those whose protection they enjoyed. By the time a customer who had queued for three or four hours finally reached the counter and handed over their coupon, they often found that the desirable consignment of
rote Rüben
was all gone –

Aus
, they would be told in that characteristically brusque and dismissive tone,
kein Zucker mehr, kein Brot heute –

Aus –

Adam Rzepin was not stupid, and realised it was a job with privileges his uncle Lajb had wangled for him, despite the night shifts and the arduous physical labour. For as long as the deportations lasted, there were three or four full trains per shift to unload. As well as old clothes and shoes, which were reused in the ghetto factories, materials for the wood-product and metal-goods factories were also delivered this way. And the foreman made no distinction between human beings, old rags, scrap iron and coal briquettes. They were all just freight to be unloaded.

And then there were
the two soups
. Everyone who did a night shift got an extra portion of soup. It was after the second helping of soup one night, when the work gang Adam belonged to had just set about emptying a wagon of scrap metal, that he heard the voice again:

Ugly Adam! – don’t you recognise me?

And there, perched on the coupling between two wagons, was Paweł Biełka. They had lived in adjoining blocks of flats in Gnieźnieńska Street, the Rzepin family at number twenty-six, the Biełkas at twenty-four. Paweł Biełka had been one of those louts who went round kicking other kids and calling them
Jewish arseholes
. But now here he was, behaving as if he was absolutely delighted to see him again, a grin plastered all over his face:

Adam, you ugly mug – how are things . . . ?

And Adam, too taken aback by their reunion to reply, just had time to glance quickly over his shoulder to check there were no German guards within earshot.

Only a week earlier, Adam had seen German policemen come charging along the train. The reason: a Pole and a Jew had stopped about ten metres from each other. Adam could not tell if they were talking or not. But one of the police guards had landed a rifle-butt blow on the Jew’s head – it was Mirek Tryter – and Mirek had not turned up for the next shift, and nobody had dared to ask about him.

But to Adam’s surprise, Biełka responded by grabbing his shoulders and pulling him into the gap between the wagons. They would subsequently often stand like this, pressed as close together as two coins. And Paweł repeated
how are things in there really, we hear the most bloody awful rumours, like you having to lick the shit off the walls because you haven’t got enough to eat, is it true Adam, that you eat your own shit, is it true
, as he stood there, feet planted wide apart, rocking to and fro on the coupling that connected the two goods wagons.

Adam didn’t know what to answer. It was as if they were still back in the yard by the flats and Paweł Biełka was challenging him.
Come on, you fat Jewish arsehole!

Biełka swivelled his hips. The whole set of wagons rocked, and Adam instinctively threw himself back down onto the platform. Just in time to shoulder the straps that were passed down to him from the front of the cart of scrap iron, and before
die Feldgrauen
, busy with something further along, had time to notice his absence.

So he took up the straps and pulled.

Two men pulled, and two pushed from behind.

And then a sudden sharp blast on the whistle: the wagons jolted again; then the whole train set off at a slow, almost leisurely pace. Back in the direction from which it had come.

*

Before they had had time to accustom themselves to Lida’s crashes, Adam’s mother Józefina would put a bucket of water beside Lida’s bed and hang a mirror above the head of the bed. This seemed to have a calming effect. She could lie there for hours, running her hands through the water or tracing pictures with her finger in the frost on the inside of the window pane.

Adam got into the habit of doing the same every evening before he went to work: he put out a basin of water by the bed and hung up a mirror and hoped it would do. But Lida had a way of outwitting them all. As long as Adam or Szaja was at home, sleeping, she would lie there peacefully, but as soon as she was left alone in the flat, her crashes would start again.

One morning, as Adam was coming back from Radogoszcz, he heard her hoarse seabird cry long before he turned the corner into Gnieźnieńska Street, and although he was so exhausted after his night duty that he could scarcely walk, he took the stairs up to the flat at a run. Lida was lying on the first-floor landing with her nightdress pulled up over her malnourished, swollen belly, her arms and legs still thrown out as if she imagined she was flying, and bending over her was the concierge Mrs Herszkowicz. She had a coal shovel in her hand and was wielding it coolly and deliberately, as if trying to tenderise a piece of tough meat; and all around stood the neighbours (including Mrs Wajsberg and her two sons Jakub and Chaim, and Mrs Pinczewska and her daughter Maria), and they all saw what was happening but no one made the slightest move to intervene until he forced himself up the stairs. Then they all moved back, shamefaced, even Mrs Herszkowicz (who dropped the coal shovel as if the handle were on fire); and let him put his arm round his sister to help her crashed, broken body back up to the flat.

The first weeks after Lida came back from the stay in the rest home Lajb had arranged for her, everyone had the impression she was a lot better. The weeping sores on her arms and legs had gone; her porcelain skin had regained a little of its former glow. Above all, she could walk more confidently. Instead of creeping along as if the floorboards were about to give way beneath her, she now ran around with a lively spring in her step. She would nod, and announce in a loud, shrill voice:

Einen schönen guten Tag, meine Herren
, or (in Yiddish):

S’iz gut – dos veys ikh schoyn
.

Until then, Adam had found lying down on top of her was enough to calm her when she had her fits. He had lain like that for hours, his body against hers as he whispered or sang into her ear. None of that helped now. With a strength he had not known she possessed, she tore herself out of his embrace and began to plummet again. He tried wheeling her round in a wheelbarrow in the yard. It helped for a little while. Long enough, if he was lucky, for him to get her washed and fed and into bed. As an extra precaution, he tied her arms to the headboard. Sometimes she made no protest. On other occasions she resisted so violently that Adam had to ask Szaja to help hold her down while he tied the ropes. But even then, and for a long time afterwards, he could feel the desperate muscle contractions in her body: long drawn-out spasms running from her trunk all the way along her pinioned arms.

Like wingbeats. Convulsive, unfulfilled.

Something inside her was broken.

There were times when she did not recognise him. And that was perhaps what hurt him most.

It was like when she opened the door to him out in Marysin. In her eyes just then, he had been just another of those who came to use her ill.

He tried to bring the subject up with his father, but Szaja refused to talk about it. Above all, Szaja refused to talk about his brother Lajb.