The Emperor of Lies (37 page)

Rosa Smoleńska had done everything she possibly could to find out what had happened to the Green House children. In the Secretariat in Dworska Street there were several grey files to which technically only Miss Wołk had access, but Rosa had crept in now and again to take a look inside them. Once she had been caught at it by Miss Wołk herself.
If I see you nosing into the Adoption Committee minutes again, I shall personally see to it that you are deported
, Miss Wołk had said, as Rosa gathered her skirts around her legs and stood bolt upright, arms at her sides with her eyes on the ground, as she had learnt to do whenever anyone in authority accused her of anything.
No, Mr Rumkowski, I wasn’t standing there listening
, she said, that time the Chairman locked himself into the office with the ‘naughty’ girls in Helenówek; she said the same thing now:

No, Miss Wołk, there must be some misunderstanding. Miss Wołk, I’ve never seen any files like that.

Only to return to Miss Wołk’s office day after day and painstakingly, file by file, memorise all the names.

First and foremost, the Praeses children. This was the name given to those for whom the Chairman had found apprenticeship places as part of his great campaign to ‘save the children of the ghetto’: either in the newly established apprentices’ school in Franciszkańska Street, or straight in at the Central Tailoring Workshop. The youngsters had become model workers, and the Praeses children were therefore in great demand among those who wrote to the Secretariat after
di shpere
and applied to adopt.

It was also apparent that the people applying had often lost children of their own in the events of September.

Kazimir’s new parents, former tram driver Jurczak Topoliński and his wife, had lost both their boys, one aged six, the other four. Nataniel’s foster parents had lost a daughter, born the very day the Germans entered Poland, 1 September 1939. I always thought, her mother said, that the fact she shared her birthday with the war would protect her, but the Germans came on the very first day of the curfew and took her away from me. Can you explain that to me, Miss Smoleńska? How can anyone expect a little girl of three to cope all by herself without her mummy?

There were tales of survival, too. There was much talk in the ghetto of the
well children
. There were several versions of the story. One was about a girl of two who was put in a sling made of sheets and lowered into a well on the chain usually used for sending down the buckets. When the Germans came, the girl’s parents said she had died of typhus and they had had to burn all her clothes and bury them in the yard, because of the risk of infection. The girl was kept down in the cold well in her sling of sheets for seven days. Every day they lowered food and water for her, until the curfew was lifted and they could haul her up again. She was cold and exhausted, but alive.

And she was still alive. Because the remarkable thing about these well children was that once the
szpera
operation had raged its last, nobody cared about the fact that they had been on the deportation lists. The bureaucratic apparatus of the ghetto enfolded them anew, and the girl in the well got a new set of bread coupons and ration cards.

Debora Żurawska, the child who was perhaps closest of all to Rosa, would also have got an apprenticeship place in Franciszkańska Street, except that after the Chairman’s visit to the Green House and what happened to Mirjam, she refused to have anything more to do with the Praeses of the ghetto. Rosa knew no more of her present life than what was in the files in Miss Wołk’s office.

Herrn PLOT, Maciej
, FRANZSTR. 133

In Beantwortung Ihres Gesuches vom
24.9.1942
wird Ihnen hiermit das Kind
ŻURAWSKA, Debora
im Alter von 15 Jahren zur Aufnahme in Ihre Familie zugeteilt.

Litzmannstadt Getto, den
25.9.42
–

No. 133 Franzstrasse/Franciszkańska turned out to be a row of wooden shanties by a shallow ditch with sewage and rubbish floating in it. There was no door on the street side, and the only window in the row had long since been boarded up and sealed with mortar. When Rosa attempted to make her way across the stinking ditch and round the back of the building, she was confronted by a bunch of men who audibly and with much wild gesturing assured her that no Debora Żurawska lived there, nor any Maciej Plot for that matter, whatever the documents claimed.

When Rosa Smoleńska went to the Department of Statistics, she was informed by a weary clerk that there certainly had been a person named Maciej Plot in the ghetto, but that his name had been deleted from the register. Maciej Plot had been employed at the sawmill in Drukarska Street. In January 1942 he had been put on the Resettlement Committee’s list of ‘undesirable elements’ in the ghetto, and in February he had been deported. Someone had accused him of stealing offcuts from the sawmill’s plank store. The accusation could have been genuine, or it could have been trumped up to save someone else’s skin. That was the winter, after all, said the clerk, when it was so cold in the ghetto that everybody stole; and those who for whatever reason had no chance to steal just froze to death before they even got as far as the waiting trains in Marysin.

But if Maciej Plot had been deported or was dead, who had filled in the adoption papers in his name? And in that case where, and with
whom
, was young Miss Żurawska now?

What Rosa still did not know was that there were two ways for a Jew to leave the ghetto. You took either the ‘interior’ or the ‘exterior’ route. In both cases, the relatives you left behind had to hand in your workbook and ration cards, which were then cancelled by the authorities in question, who stamped them with the word
TOT
or
AUSGESIEDELT
– depending which route had been chosen.

But the fact that a workbook had been stamped was not the same as its former owner being entirely out of circulation. There were artful men who bought up ration cards that had been left behind, or bribed employees of the Central Labour Office not to put their stamp on the identity papers of the deportees. As soon as the availability of a new consignment of rations was announced, they went round with the dead people’s cards and used up the vouchers left in them. Bread, rye flakes, sugar. Since there were so many moving out, tens of thousands of men and women in the course of just a few months, this meant a considerable amount of food ended up on the black market, where it could be bought by those who had
gelt genug
– that is to say, who had already done well out of other sorts of business.

One of the individuals raising the dead like this was a known ghetto thief and swindler named
Mogn
– The Belly. The Belly was even craftier than the rest. He took the workbooks and ration cards of the dead to the
resort
bosses in the ghetto and persuaded them to take on their previous employees again. This admittedly meant they would be obliged to pay out wages to people who had been deported, but The Belly swiftly offered to bear that expense himself. The point was that the dead could then carry on drawing their benefits and getting their ration cards renewed, basically for ever.

An empire built on nothing, a shadow empire; but The Belly was a rich man:

When he received guests, he sat in an armchair two metres tall, his rump and back supported on soft, silken cushions and his enormous paunch, slack but majestic, hanging down between his two flabby forearms. A good and dutiful Jew who kept the Sabbath holy, followed all the prescribed rituals and even thought he could afford to keep kosher. What was more, he did charitable works. To show his piety and his charitable zeal, he decided to apply for the guardianship of some of the poor orphaned children forced out of their
ochronki
after the
szpera
operation, who were now being auctioned off by the Wołkówna Secretariat. A flock of his most deserving dead people – among them former sawmill worker Maciej Plot – filled in the adoption forms, and they were all completed so correctly that not even Miss Wołk and her colleagues in the Adoption Committee could find any fault.

So it was that Debora Żurawska, too, found herself in the kingdom of the dead, although she was still among the living.

She naturally had to surrender her workbook and ration cards as soon as she set foot in The Belly’s home. In exchange for a very modest share of her own rations, she scrubbed the floors in the row of shanties in Franciszkańska Street, or ran around after one of the many ‘wives’ The Belly had acquired over the years. Still being pretty, she had to put in some hours in one of the ‘rest homes’ which Gertler had taken over from the Chairman, and which The Belly had now populated with the dead so he had something to offer the jaded policemen who came in for a rest. In one of these homes there was a piano, and since Debora Żurawska was rumoured once to have played the piano, she also had to provide musical entertainment for The Belly’s guests.

Rosa Smoleńska had been back to the Population Registry to make further enquiries, and been told that The Belly had arranged a temporary job for Debora at the hat and cap factory in Brzezińska Street. It was the one that made the earmuffs for the German army. Day after day, Rosa waited outside the gates in the hope of catching a glimpse of her former protégée. In the end, one of the other workers took pity on the patiently waiting figure and told her that if it was Debora she wanted, there was another way out, which the girl always used. So Rosa switched her attention to the back of the factory, where there was a small loading bay, and at the end of the shift the next evening she saw Debora coming out that way with a handful of other young girls. Waiting at the base of the loading platform like some sort of escort were two men she recognised from their encounter outside the shanty row in Franciszkańska Street.

Debora is another person, yet still the same.

Thinner, but with her stomach as distended as so many of the other hungry children, and a face as lean as an animal’s. And she walks with a strange, crab-like gait, one shoulder hunched up towards the back of her neck. Rosa recalls she used to walk like that when they were carrying the water up from the well together, but that was because her body was counterbalancing the weight of the full bucket they carried between them; icy cold autumn or winter mornings with the dark earth like a bowl formed of two cupped hands with the lightening sky between them. Debora had told her about all the things she would do when the war was over: apply to the Warsaw conservatoire, maybe go to London or Paris; and after each confidence, she would change hands on the bucket handle. Debora is walking the same way now – but there is no bucket. On her feet she has a pair of
trepki
, their soles so worn that she has to lift one leg as she turns, or is she in fact
limping
?

Rosa sees it now. They must have beaten her up.

She runs after her:

I’ve found you a job
, she says, or rather shouts, since Debora Żurawska is doing her utmost to drag her awkward, twisted body after the other factory girls, who have hurried on ahead.

In the packing shed at Tusk’s china factory.

You’ll be packing fuses. There are plenty of jobs in the packing hall there!

Any number of them!

But Debora does not turn round.

Instead, Rosa finds one of The Belly’s guards on either side of her. They have the peaks of their caps pulled well down and are smiling through immobile faces. They smile even as they grab Rosa round the waist and fling her to the ground.

The girls have got as far as Franciszkańska Street now, and The Belly is standing outside waiting for them. He is even bigger than in real life than the rumours suggest. So fat in the stomach that he can scarcely walk without others to support him. Two youngish women and a man who looks like a younger version of himself – his son (if that is what he is) even has the same kind of Phrygian cap on his head as his father. The bunch advances as one across the dried mud. The paunch that has given The Belly his nickname hangs between his thighs like a loose, shapeless sack. One might have expected The Belly to be parading all the full bellies he has enjoyed, but The Belly’s stomach hangs empty, and maybe that explains his fury. He starts to speak even before they reach her. He knows who she is, he says. She works at the Wołkówna Secretariat doesn’t she? Parasites, he says. That’s what you are, drawing your wages for interfering with the rights of upstanding citizens, because your precious Praeses only has eyes for the children, of course, for the
little ones
, he gives them oranges and
chocolates
, but we adults,
capable
men who do their jobs and support their families, what do we get, oh yes, he thanks us by sending people like Miss Wołk, not to mention you –
Smoleńska
– that’s not even a proper Jewish name!

And all the time The Belly is spitting forth his contempt, Rosa Smoleńska can hear an insistent ringing in her head, just as she did that time the Chairman locked himself in with Mirjam and the piano tuner climbed the stepladder and put his tuning fork to the bell in the hall. And just as it did then, the noise seems to drive away all the light and space around them. Everything is swallowed up or dissolved in that appalling noise, which stops them thinking or breathing, or doing or saying anything at all.

And Rosa sees that Debora’s once slim piano fingers are ruined, inflamed and red and sore, as if they have been dipped in lye; and stuffed into, or rather wrapped in, a pair of gloves that look more like a bundle of rags. She automatically takes the girl’s hand, and Deborah cries out in pain and tries to pull away, and someone (is it The Belly again?) starts up again:

‘Who actually are you, Miss Smoleńska?’ And Rosa replies: ‘I am the girl’s mother.’ Debora immediately says: ‘I have no mother, I never have had a mother.’ And The Belly: ‘Get this woman out of here right now, you lot.’