The Emperor of Lies (23 page)

Between the block of flats at 22
Gnieźnieńska Street and number 24, there is a gap or opening a few metres wide.
It is as though both buildings, which have been standing on this spot for years,
have leaned closer and closer to each other but never quite got all the way. In
the middle of this shrinking space between the two blocks stands a partially
collapsed brick wall, and on it sits Adam Rzepin, keeping guard.

It is the Sabbath. It is the day of
rest. The factory gates are closed.

The wooden bridges linking the various
sections of the ghetto, which are usually black with the crush of people
crossing over them, are as empty as scaffolds. No traffic anywhere. All Adam can
hear is the metallic drone of the flies taking off from the rubbish dump behind
him. The sound of the swarms of flies rising into the air, which then dies away;
beyond that, nothing but his own pounding heartbeat.

From the top of the wall, he has an
uninterrupted view of the entire south-western section of the ghetto. He can see
over to Lutomierska Street and to the plank and barbed-wire wall at Wrześnieńska
Street where the old people’s home is, and Judge Jakobson’s
gericht
.

Posted at strategically important
points all over the ghetto are other lookouts like him, and they send runners
between them to report on what they have seen.

It is from them Adam learns that the
operation has begun.

*

Although they must have known from the
outset that they would never be able to do it, the Jewish police had initially
tried to carry out the whole operation themselves.

Just after dawn, as the sun still hung
low and swollen over the worn cobblestone streets of the ghetto, men from
Gertler’s Sonderabteilung sealed off parts of Rybna Street. Then the concierge
in each block was ordered to go ahead with the master keys and unlock not only
the doors to attics and storerooms but also any doors the residents had not
opened voluntarily.

Most people seemed to have tried to
barricade themselves into their rooms.

Jewish
politsayen
carried out screaming women and children, who struggled
wildly to fend them off, while the old people clutched the doorposts of their
homes with a convulsive, unspeaking determination, as if they were trying to
take root in the very walls. Old men could be seen pulling in their skinny,
spidery legs as they attempted to hide under bedsteads, or sitting with covers
or prayer shawls over their heads, rocking back and forth.

Ten or so women, their children
balanced precariously in their arms or on their hips, tried to escape through
the windows of Rybna Street flats facing into the courtyard. Crazed and
screaming hysterically, they threatened to let themselves and their children
drop if the policemen in the flats took so much as a step towards them. Two men
– one in a flat up on the third floor, the other on the latrine roof, down in
the yard, had tied together some sheets and blankets to make a long rope, and
shouted encouragement to the escaping women to climb down the rope. The women
lowered their children down first. A number of them had time for an ungainly
scramble to safety, over the far side of the latrine roof. But only a few
minutes later, Gertler’s men came charging out into the yard and hauled down the
children who were still on the roof, before the very eyes of their desperate
parents, leaning helplessly out of the windows above.

Not only had the police been ordered
out that morning, but also Kaufmann’s firemen and the men who carried the sacks
of flour from the depots to the ghetto bakeries: the so-called
White Guard
.

According to one of the rumours that
had reached Adam as he stood at his post on the wall, all the firemen, transport
workers and unloaders who had agreed to back up the police in carrying out the
authorities’ bloody handiwork had been given guarantees that their own children
would be safe. Sometimes the victims and the perpetrators even knew each
other:

What have you
done with your own son, Schlomo?
a man was heard to ask as his child
was dragged down from the latrine roof by men never seen there in uniform
before.
How much blood money did you get, you
traitor . . . ?
Such exchanges were generally
followed by a scuffle. A few blocks further down Rybna Street, a group of men
started improvising barricades. As soon as the Jewish police and firemen showed
themselves, they were pelted with stones –

Gayt
avek ayere nakhesn, mir veln undzere kinder nisht opgebn . . .
⁷

This was the point at which the German
authorities decided to take matters into their own hands.

The security forces again deployed the
commando units they had used for emptying the ghetto hospitals. The soldiers
came running down the street in tight formation, as if to generate terror by
their very appearance; lorries and tractors came after them with grating
gearboxes and loudly revving engines. Soon the improvised barricades were tossed
aside, vehicle entrance gates broken in or blasted open, and soldiers came
pouring in through archways, rifles at the ready.

Behind the gates, the terrified
concierge would at best have persuaded the families living in the building to
venture out of their flats and down into the yard.

While the officers went round shouting
orders, men and women attempted to gather up their children and other relatives
and hand over health certificates and workbooks to the SS commanders inspecting
them. In some cases, Jewish police officers accompanied them, as a silent
escort. There were rumours that Dawid Gertler himself had been seen on his way
in and out of addresses where various prominent people lived.

By no means did all the SS commanders
who had been called out bother to check the workbooks or consult the lists of
names handed over to them. They went by how young or old, well or poorly
nourished the lined-up Jews looked. Children and feeble, emaciated old people
were shoved ruthlessly to one side, ready for loading onto the waiting vehicles.
While this was going on, Gertler’s
politsayen
had extreme difficulty in stopping desperate mothers and fathers from hurling
themselves onto the long trailers and trying to rescue the children who had been
wrested from them. There were at least two SS soldiers posted by every vehicle,
and they showed no mercy, opening fire on anybody who got too close.

*

By about five in the afternoon, the
German commando units and their lorries and trailers reach Gnieźnieńska Street.
Just as Adam anticipated, they pull up first outside the old people’s home. From
his vantage point, Adam sees men from the White Guard helping old men and women
up onto the trailers and backs of the lorries. The majority of them can scarcely
walk unaided, and reach out imploringly to their executioners, who carry them
across their shoulders or sling them from one to another like sacks of
flour.

But by then, he has already decided to
hide Lida. In the yard, there are two coal cellars. One has a wide metal hatch
at ground level through which the coal is tipped in. Adam assumes that if the
Germans look for runaways anywhere, it will be here. The other cellar served as
a tool store in the past. Coal shovels were kept there, along with brooms and
snow shovels and the old wheelbarrow in which Adam often used to wheel Lida
round.

At the very back of the now empty tool
shed he has dug a hole in the ground, deep enough for the person standing in it
not to be visible in the strip of light from the open door.

Into that hole he puts Lida.

She resists at first. She doesn’t
understand why she has to stand still in an ice-cold mass of earth, shared with
spiders and old coal dust. But he stands in the hole with her for a while. He
sings to her, and that makes it better.

They are there much sooner than Adam
had expected.

He can hear the concierge, Mrs
Herszkowicz, warbling her agitated summons across the yard:

The
Germans are coming, the Germans are coming . . .

Assemble in the yard everybody, all down to the yard . . .

Today is Mrs Herszkowicz’s big day. She
is wearing a dark brown velvet dress with a creamy lace trim around her generous
decolletage; and with it a cartwheel-sized hat with a complicated feather
arrangement tucked into a ribbon round the crown. As she runs to and fro across
the yard, clucking, she reminds Adam of a garishly painted pheasant.

He holds Lida’s face between his two
hands. He wants to force the song within her to fall silent. After a while, they
shift a little so they are standing together in the hole the way they always
stand: he with his arm around her body, she resting her head on his shoulder.
Brother and sister. Since she is taller than him, she has to bend her knees to
be at his level; and the moment she does that, and stretches her neck to nuzzle
her head against his collarbone, he knows that he loves and always will love
her, with a love that is beyond what anyone will understand.

The Germans are under the command of
the same undersized Mühlhaus who led the purge of the hospital in Wesoła Street.
Because of the heat, he has removed his peaked cap and gloves and is holding
them in one hand as he moves briskly along the row of tenants Mrs Herszkowicz
has lined up.

Adam’s father, Szaja Rzepin, is among
the last to join their ranks.

Standing next to him are Moshe and Rosa
Pinczewski and their daughter Maria.

Maria Pinczewska looks petrified. On
paper, she has nothing to fear. For the past three months, she has been employed
at a tailor’s workshop that makes decals and uniform insignia for the Wehrmacht.
If she had possessed merely a fraction of the ingratiating approach displayed by
Mrs Herszkowicz as she shows the German soldiers round the building, she might
have asserted her own usefulness and got away with it. What is more, Miss
Pinczewska is still young and beautiful; blonde and blue-eyed, almost like a
real Aryan.

Samuel Wajsberg and Mr and Mrs Frydman
from the flats across the yard are far less favourably placed. Mrs Frydman has
put a headscarf on her daughter, which makes her look significantly older than
she is. Beside her stand Mr and Mrs Mendel and their daughter. Not even the
normally punctilious Mühlhaus bothers to look at Mr Mendel’s workbook, merely
gestures impatiently to a space to the right of the stump which is all that
remains of Fabian Zajtman’s great chestnut tree. That is where those selected
for deportation have to stand. The Frydmans’ children are also escorted there.
As they go, Mrs Frydman sinks into her husband’s arms.

Samuel Wajsberg calls out to his wife
Hala, who has not yet appeared.

It sounds more like a cry for help.

Hala!
he screams.

The echo reverberates in waves up the
tall, crumbling facades.

Adam comes to his father’s side.

Szaja Rzepin just stares straight in
front of him, head down.

Where’s Lida? he asks finally, without
raising his eyes from the ground.

Adam does not reply. Szaja does not
repeat the question.

HA-A-A-LAA!
cries Samuel again.

No answer; just the echo rolling back
down.

Mrs Herszkowicz smiles a smile far too
wide, and plucks nervously at the frills and flounces on her bosom.

Now, finally, Hala Wajsberg comes out
into the courtyard. She is shepherding her younger son Chaim. One step behind
them comes Jakub. She has dressed both her sons in freshly ironed white shirts,
dark trousers with turn-ups, and carefully polished black shoes. Hala, too, is
soberly attired in a straight, long-sleeved dress. She has her hair scraped back
into a bun. The high bun makes her normally powerful neck look strangely
vulnerable. Her cheekbones are high and shiny, almost as though she had polished
her face with a glossy cream.

No more than a few minutes have elapsed
since Adam came to his father’s side. Mrs Herszkowicz is already back. Task
completed, she can proudly inform the handsome SS officer with the tall black
boots and glinting collar insignia.

Mühlhaus is now standing in front of
Samuel Wajsberg, who at his full height is almost a head taller than the German
officer. Mühlhaus does not even attempt to meet his eye, just holds out his hand
and waits for Samuel to give him the family’s workbooks.

But the fact that the officer is taking
no notice of her despite all the trouble she has gone to on his behalf is
suddenly too much for Mrs Herszkowicz. Unlike most of the others in these blocks
of flats, she comes from a good family and has had a good Polish education,
despite coming from Jewish stock. She has, moreover, carried out the task
assigned to her with aplomb. She has got all the tenants to evacuate their flats
in time. Here they all are, lined up with their workbooks in their hands. Yet
the German officer has not so much as glanced at her.

There’s one
family member missing over here
, she therefore announces loudly and
clearly in German, pointing over to Szaja and Adam Rzepin.

SS-Hauptscharführer Mühlhaus looks up
from the documents in his hand. Only now does he seem fully to appreciate what
this dolled-up woman is trying to say to him, which makes Mrs Herszkowicz
nervous:
Fräulein Rzepin hat sich vielleicht
versteckt
, she clarifies, with something that could have passed for a
full curtsey if her frilly dress had not got in the way.

Mühlhaus nods. With a distracted wave,
he sends the two Jewish
politsayen
he has
brought with him to hunt for the missing person; then returns to checking Samuel
Wajsberg’s documents. Within a couple of minutes, Lida is brought out. She is
twice as tall as the two policemen carrying her; her legs are dangling floppily
from her body and her face is all black with soot and soil.