The Emperor of Lies (33 page)

Vaterland hör
deiner Söhne Schwur:

Nimmer zurück!
Vorwärts den Blick!

What happened after that remains
unclear. Led by the men of the new age, and in particular by Gertler and
Jakubowicz, who had both tired of the protracted ceremony on stage, the
dignitaries made their way out to the foyer, where the Sumptuous Buffet was laid
out.

The Sumptuous Buffet was famous even
before it saw the light of day. The question is, whether the Sumptuous Buffet
was not more widely discussed, more minutely evoked, already in one sense
sampled and tasted, than the Exhibition itself had been.

The reason for the authorities’
allowing Princess Helena to lay on a Buffet was so that the food products of the
ghetto could also to be put on show. So there were sausages and salted meats
from the ghetto’s own butcheries, sadly not kosher, but they had long since been
forced to give up that sort of dream; there was bread from its bakeries; there
were even items of confectionery and sweet cakes with jam made in Shlomo
Hercberg’s former fruit-canning plant in Marysin. Red wine was also served, in
tapering glasses. The wine came from Litzmannstadt and was a
Geschenk
from Biebow, but the glasses were real
crystal and arranged so artistically on mirrored trays that the business leaders
reaching greedily for the platters of food could not help thinking back to the
golden days when
di sheyne yidn
could sit in a
café in Piotrkowska Street eating
szarlotka
,
drinking tea or sipping a good Rhine wine from tall glasses, like anybody
else.

As for the Chairman, he seemed to have
rallied after all the inspiring speeches and was now walking among the buffet
guests, leaning on what little he had left of his dignity.

Most of those in the circles gathered
round Jakubowicz and Gertler discreetly turned their backs at his approach.
Others were not so choosy. Soon the Chairman, too, had a little group clustered
around him, insignificant officials and recording clerks, waiting for some
favourable word to fall from his lips that could later be cashed in, in the form
of a better position; and perhaps it was the competition – men like Jakubowicz,
Warszawski, Gertler or Reingold were attracting crowds double the size of his –
that made the Chairman unusually liberal with his promises and undertakings that
evening:

Ah, Mr
Schulz, it’s you!
he exclaimed as he spied Dr Arnošt Schulz and his
daughter at the far end of the Sumptous Buffet:

This,
gentlemen . . .
 he explained to the Retinue
following restless and anxious on his heels. (After the incident at the medal
ceremony, no one dared let him out of sight for a second.)

This
is Professor Schulz –
aus Prag, nicht
wahr?!
– the only one of my doctors who has
dared to tell me from the heart what he thinks.

You
are a man of enlightenment, are you not, Herr Professor Schulz?

Vĕra Schulz could later clearly recall
the first and only time she stood face to face with the tributary king of the
ghetto, the self-proclaimed steward of the fates of a hundred thousand
long-settled and newly arrived Jews.
An automaton
– she wrote in her diary afterwards –
a man
lacking all outward life, whose energetic walk, loud speech and apparently
entirely gratuitous hand movements seem to be triggered by a mechanism
hidden somewhere inside his body. His face dead, pale, puffy; his voice as
shrill as a factory whistle.

For several long minutes, the Chairman
stands with Vĕra Schulz’s hand in his, as if he has come into possession of a
precious object and does not know what to do with it. Vĕra notes the beads of
sweat along his hairline, beneath his swept-back mane of white hair.

But
how . . .
 he starts, then breaks off and tries
again (with apparently genuine surprise):

How can you
work with a hand like this?

Perhaps that was the very moment at
which the
Stomach Upset
, of which so much
would later be written, began to make itself felt.

Opinion was divided on the causes of
‘the incident’.

Either the ghetto butchers had had to
draw too deeply on their basically limited supplies of raw meat, and in order to
produce the required number of sausages been obliged to turn to the inferior
meat that was usually buried as soon as it arrived at Radogoszcz. Or the special
delivery of
gut gehacktes Fleisch
that the
ghetto administration had promised proved to consist of the same putrid horse
flesh the Germans always sent, which stank for miles around from the moment it
was delivered: pale green and so foul and decomposed that it virtually ran out
of the wagons into the tubs when it was unloaded. But this time the meat
distribution department had not dared to report the sub-standard raw materials
for fear of (as they put it afterwards) ‘spoiling the whole occasion’. So the
sausages were delivered to the Buffet, fatty, unwholesome, the slimy intestines
used for their skins distended by the soda and fermenting substances
within . . . !

Another possible explanation was that –
as most people thought – the sudden, unexpected abundance of lard at the party
was more than even normally well-exercised directorial digestions could
withstand; particularly as all the invitees to this lavish Buffet knew that an
event of this distinction would in all probability only happen once in the
history of the ghetto, and the important thing was to eat now, while they had
the chance and the sausages were lying there, all red and tasty and contented in
their sheen of glossy fat . . . !

By midnight, the first festively
dressed dignitaries had started tottering out to the inner courtyard, where they
braced themselves on the sooty brick walls and threw up behind hunched
shoulders. In the foyer, people milled about in confusion. Some sought cover
behind the great buffet table or the chairs and small tables that were still
dotted about, while the kitchen and adjacent service corridor were occupied by
Gertler’s bodyguards, vomiting without any inhibition into the first crate or
pail that came to hand, and even the saucepans and serving dishes containing the
sausages that had not yet been brought out.

Having watched glassy-eyed as his whole
Retinue went down, the Chairman picked his way with proud, heron-like gait out
to the courtyard, where he, too, fell to the ground. Miss Dora Fuchs, who had
spent the whole evening going round moistening lips with a handkerchief, now
waved it vainly in the air as she shouted for a doctor – so Dr Schulz had to
spend even this jubilee the way he had spent every day since arriving at the
ghetto. He grabbed the doctor’s bag he always had with him, asked Vĕra to fold a
chair cover under the back of the Chairman’s neck, and went down on his knees to
check the ageing man’s pulse:

Chairman
(faintly, with his eyes on the distant ghetto sky): Who are
you?

Schulz
: Schulz.

Chairman
: Schulz?

Schulz
: We have met.

Chairman
(to Vĕra): And this exquisite beauty at your side?

Schulz
: This is my daughter Vĕra. You were talking to her just a few
minutes ago.

Chairman
: But what have you done to your lovely young hands, young
Miss Vĕra?

Schulz
: You said yourself that they were no good for work any more,
Mr Chairman.

Chairman
: Whoever heard of such a thing! Everyone who still has
hands will naturally be given a job, and I see you have nice, clean hands, Miss
Schulz.

Schulz
: Clean or not, those hands are nothing to do with
you . . . !

Just then, Herr Amtsleiter ordered his
escort to clear the premises. Those who could still stand were forced to their
feet by baton blows and rifle butts, and herded out into the back yard. There
they lay, officials, policemen and ordinary ghetto dwellers, all jumbled
together until they recovered sufficiently to make their own way out. On the way
back to the Red House afterwards, a German officer was heard to mutter something
about filthy Jewish pigs who hadn’t the sense to hang on to even what little
food they were given.

But of course there was nothing to eat. They could pretend or delude themselves that there was enough food or that they had enough money or valuables to buy or barter for something, and that it was just a matter of scrimping and saving and making things go further.

But the fact remained: there was no food.

The black-market price of a loaf of bread was three hundred marks, but since not even the vendors would venture out into the terrible cold of that winter, there was no bread to buy. On the bottom shelf of the larder were a few frost-damaged potatoes with scabbed skins. That was all they had. Every morning, Vĕra dissolved some potato flour in lukewarm water and sprinkled in some flakes of rye. That was the ‘soup’ they had fed Maman every morning. If her father had not been able to get Maman a bed in the clinic in Mickiewicza Street, none of them would have survived. Since she had been in the clinic, Maman had at least been getting free soup and bread, and if there was any left over, Vĕra sometimes got a bowlful. In thanks for this food, she had to sit with her Olympia typewriter on her lap all day, helping her father by typing out case notes and filling in registration cards. On Rumkowski’s express orders, Dr Schulz had not only assumed responsibility for what was once the tuberculosis clinic but also for the former out-patient clinics in Dworska Street, and hundreds of patients were now crammed into a space that previously accommodated ten beds at most. Even the cellar and the damp laundries below the clinic building now had patients lying in them, and the corridors were full of what were called day patients (though they lay there round the clock), people who were not considered ill enough to need a bed: men with blood poisoning or chronic diarrhoea; with legs swollen with hunger or acutely paralysed; or simply with frostbite. Vĕra registered a hundred such cases a week, most of which went for amputation, whether it was necessary or not, since Dr Schulz considered sepsis
a far worse evil
, and one for which he had no resources in current circumstances.

In the bed next to Maman’s in Dr Schulz’s department lay an elderly man, as bald as an egg but with bushy eyebrows, still black, which knitted in the middle like an animal’s whenever he was watching someone.

The nurses called him Rabbi Einhorn or just
Mr Rabbi Sir
, and moved around his bed with the greatest reverence. Several times a day, Rabbi Einhorn took out his prayer shawl and
tefillin
, which he kept with his books in a dented little suitcase. Since he was so weak that he could hardly sit upright, Vĕra had to help him wind the leather straps round his arm and fasten the little leather box round his forehead, but he always wanted to find his books himself, and afterwards he did not want them touched by her or anyone else, but lay in bed with them pressed to his thin chest.

She often saw him lying there watching her as she wound paper into her typewriter or pulled it out, or tapped out an entry in some notes, or an address.

He wanted to know where she had acquired this commendable skill.

She replied that at the school of commerce in Prague there had also been courses in shorthand and typing. He wanted to know which languages she spoke, and she replied that she could express herself tolerably well in English and French but unfortunately not in Yiddish or Hebrew; then he offered to help her, took out his book and read her some prayers, first in Hebrew and then in Polish, explaining in German as he went along what he was reading. Over the following days, they read several prayers together. He read first, and then she had to read the same thing. When they got to the end, he would complain long and loud about her ignorance.
It seems to me that you young people go into a room and bemoan the fact that it’s so dark everywhere that you can’t see anything, even though the light is shining into every nook and cranny.

But by then he had already taught her several words in the new language. He had taught her how the syllables looked and were pronounced, and how they were put together and taken apart again to form new meanings. Three simple-sounding syllables were enough to create a whole world of words. One of the many Hebrew words he taught her was
panim
. The original word for
face
, which depending how you took it apart and put it back together could mean anything from to
be confronted with
, to
lay oneself open to
, or to be
shone through
by the Almighty.

So perhaps you understand, Fräulein Schulz, that the act of praying consists not of gabbling words from a book but of turning one’s face to the Lord so that he can illuminate each and every one of his holy words from within . . .

Once when they had been reading together, he grasped her hand and asked if she could help him when the time came. In her naivety, she thought he wanted her to help him die. But when she intimated as much, he shook his bald head emphatically. What he wanted was something much more concrete than that. He said a letter would arrive, addressed to her. And when the letter came, could Fräulein Schulz do him the favour of at least giving the offer contained in it her careful consideration?

*

In May 1940, when the ghetto was set up, the Jewish ghetto administration had a hundred employees at most. Three years later, in June 1943, more than 13,000 ghetto residents made a living from one of the many offices and departments, divisions, labour offices, control bodies and inspection units presided over by Rumkowski.

Since Rumkowski’s administrative machine had become so confusingly large in the course of those three years, people just said
the offices
.

Or
the Chairman’s offices
.

Or
the Palace
.

It was of course a palace with no visible towers or parapets, but with many subterranean passages where employees sat keeping account without knowing what they were keeping account of, or merely dozing behind nightly inspection hatches. The Palace was an edifice built on very vague foundations, and its extent was always in doubt. Departments and offices would suddenly sprout in ordinary blocks of flats, only to vanish again as if they had never existed. But this palace did have a clear entrance. The entrance was the Chairman’s secretariat on Bałuty Square. It was there everyone had to go if they wanted to get into or progress up, or further through, the hierarchies of the ghetto.

Those seeking sanctuary under the Chairman’s patronage were known as
petitioners
, and the Chairman had taken in thousands of these petitioners since the ghetto was formed.

Back then, the petitioners outside the Bałuty office were given special dispensation to be in the zone cordoned off by the Germans for short periods. After the
szpera
operation, however, Biebow decided to put an end to
all this running back and forth
, and therefore barred anyone not employed by the administration from Aryan territory. Which in no way prevented the Chairman from receiving petitioners. A watchman’s hut in Łagiewnicka Street was pressed into service instead. They managed to squeeze in a desk, behind which the Chairman would sit with all the personal files in front of him, and Miss Fuchs devised a primitive appointment system, handing out numbered slips to the applicants, who had to queue up outside and be called in one by one.

People petitioned for all manner of things.

Many, like Vĕra, asked for a hospital bed for their relatives. Others appealed for milk rations for their children. Or allotments to cultivate, now the growing season was approaching.

Many applied for permission to marry. Getting married was one of the few legal means nowadays of getting extra food rations. It was the Chairman who made these food rations available, out of his own extra quota. It was the Chairman, too, who conducted the marriage services themselves, as all religious ceremonies in the ghetto were banned, and almost all the rabbis had been deported. Some people were heard to say that the old man was absolutely
shameless
in taking such liberties, playing at being a holy man and a man of law, when he was suspected of having blood on his hands! Others said they could to some extent understand the old man adopting this role. How else could he demonstrate his power, now that Amtsleiter Biebow had not only publicly mocked and ridiculed him, but also put an end to any say he had in production and food distribution in the ghetto, not to mention ‘police matters’?

According to the
Ghetto Chronicle
, in one of the wedding ceremonies regularly held at the old preventorium in Łagiewnicka Street the Chairman married no fewer than thirteen couples simultaneously; and there was a tray to hand with thirteen individual wine glasses, which were filled from a bottle fitted with a special ‘sanitary’ spout. It was Dr Miller who insisted on this practice, to minimise the risk of transmitting epidemic diseases. Dr Miller himself stood hidden behind the bridal canopy and used his stick to satisfy himself that everyone drank from
their own
glass and every glass was then wiped and put back on the tray without being smashed.

Much was said later of the profane version of the Jewish marriage service taking place in the Palace, of how the bridal canopy was nothing but an ordinary curtain rod draped with tulle, which on Dr Miller’s orders was afterwards taken from the ceremony to the sanitary station at Bałuty Square for immediate disinfection. One could almost hear Benji’s voice again, going round the streets swearing and cursing:

A jester king is what he’s let himself be reduced to, that Mr Rumkowski; with that gaggle of clowns at his heels and all his ludicrous ceremonies!

But the food coupons that Miss Ejbuszyc of the approvisation department wrote out for the thirteen bridal couples were genuine, at any rate, and could be exchanged for real bread and enough extra starch in the soup to last, and keep them full, for at least a couple of days.

*

It should have been a ‘happy’ day, the day Josel pulled away the wallpapered panel and finally freed Maman from her incarceration. Vĕra would never forget the sight of the stranger that awaited them on the other side: her body as thin as one of the pins she had directed Vĕra to run ‘round the corner’ and buy, but smiling and straight-backed, holding out her
Ausweis
as if she had been sitting there for weeks anticipating this very opportunity. But Vĕra saw at once that there was something sticky round Maman’s lips, and the walls around her bed were black with blood and dried excrement.

Arnošt, who had taken a look behind the false wall several times in past days, said that Maman’s state of health was no worse than was to be expected, for all that. He took the cannula out of the back of her hand, and for a few days she even sat with them at the table when they were eating. Vĕra soaked cubes of bread in the soup and put them in her mouth, and her mother sucked in her thin cheeks and turned her gaze inwards to investigate this strange find that had landed under her tongue. But she swallowed it all down, and for a while even seemed satisfied with what she was being fed, and the noise and bustle around her.

But appearances were deceptive. Perhaps they were all misled by the fact that she had survived ‘behind the wallpaper’ at all. It soon became evident that Maman’s kidneys could not cope with the food they were giving her. The primitive dialysis Arnošt had set up was not working, the wound in her abdomen where the dialysis liquid went in grew swollen and her peritoneum became inflamed; Maman grew feverish.

Vĕra sat up all night, waiting for the ‘crisis’, after which her temperature would with any luck come down. But no ‘crisis’ ever came. Maman’s fever did recede a little, but she never woke up. Her pulse was weak, her breathing jerky and her heartbeat irregular.

They were all at her side when she died. Vĕra spoke to her mother of the last time they had walked in Rieger Park together, of the birds taking off from the treetops at dusk and forming a second sky above all the forest of tall roofs and copper steeples; and Maman almost seemed to smile weakly for a moment, and the fingers Vĕra was squeezing seemed to squeeze back. Then her breathing slowed to a stop. Maman cast off her body as you might cast off a grubby old outer garment you didn’t really want to touch again, and when that act of undressing was complete, her face lay there completely calm and still, as if no one had ever touched it.

They buried Maman eighteen days into the new calendar year of 1943, one clear and frosty morning with the burnished sun suspended low and smoky above the tops of the walls in Marysin. The main gate to the big cemetery had formerly been on Bracka Street, at the north-east end of the ghetto, but as that was now on Aryan territory, the undertakers’ association had opened up a smaller entrance in the brick wall on the western side, at Zagajnikowa Street, and it was through this that they entered with the cart Professor Schulz had hired.

Within the enclosing walls, the city of the dead spread before them. To the left of the path that led from the little mortuary building, banks of earth, now glittering frostily in the swollen, bluish-white sunlight, stretched out in long rows.

Each bank of earth concealed rows of graves, some of them filled in, others still awaiting their dead. To keep up, they had had to start digging back in November, Józef Feldman told them as they lifted the washed and shrouded body from the cart onto one of the low barrows on which the dead were transported in this place. Everybody remembered what it had been like the year before, in January and February when the deportations had just started and people were crammed into unheated warehouses and froze to death waiting for transport that never came. That time, the frost in the ground went to such a depth that even a crowbar made no impact, and they had no choice but to pile up the corpses and wait for the thaw to set in.

Józef Feldman told them this in the unconcerned yet still tender tone peculiar to those who have daily dealings with the dead, but Vĕra was scarcely listening to what the old man said. Walking behind the rhythmically creaking barrow with its metal-rimmed wheel, behind the rabbi who had conducted the ceremony and her father and two brothers, she saw in the far distance a handful of other gravediggers with a wheelbarrow, pickaxe and spade. The outlines of the figures had almost dissolved in the cold, frost-white haze, so they seemed to be hovering a few metres above the ground, and suddenly everything blurred together: the rhythmic squeak of the barrow wheel, the endless rows of unmarked graves, and the icy wind that bit her cheeks and drove painful tears from her eyes.