The Emperor of Lies (38 page)

*

The ghetto’s Sonderabteilung had its headquarters on the other side of Bałuty Square, looking out on the back yard of the building at the corner of Limanowskiego and Zgierska Streets that housed the Gestapo offices and the First District of the police. All visitors to the Sonder had first to present themselves to the German guard manning the barrier, and if he found their papers in order, they then walked round the barrier and in through a little gate to the left of the actual Gestapo building.

There were no lights on behind the barred windows, but a cluster of men were standing outside, warming themselves round an improvised brazier in the yard: a big, wide-bellied metal drum, long since blackened, from which sulphurous black smoke billowed and fumed. All the air in the yard was permeated with a faint smoke haze that made bodies and faces pale and indistinct.

Samstag did not say anything as she approached, but turned away with a slight smile – as if she had caught him doing something shameful. On his arm he wore the Sonderabteilung’s armband with the Star of David. The peaked cap that went with it had been laid aside with the others on the window sill, but she could see that the sweatband inside had left a clear mark on his forehead, a narrow stripe, shining like an inflamed wound in the reflected gleam of the fire. The only thing that was still the same was that row of sharp, even teeth, shiny and wet with saliva when they were bared by his smile.

Are you his bit of skirt now?
was all he said, and then in Polish, so the others would hear as well:
Czy jesteś jego kochanką?

At the expression
bit of skirt
, the other men drew closer to the brazier and eyed Rosa impudently, with big smiles on their faces. The smoke from the burning drum forced tears from her eyes, and suddenly her whole body was shaking helplessly.

Samstag stepped forward and held her.

There there
, he said.
Don’t cry
.

The hands that held her were firm and calloused. She could smell the sweat and the ingrained, stale smoke in his clothes, and something else besides, sweet and cloying, and suddenly it was all too much, and she felt something give way. Like the feeble, rambling old woman she has been reduced to, she tells him about her visit to Franciszkańska Street; about Debora who only came out to turn her away; and about her hands: ‘she’ll never be able to apply to the Conservatoire with those’ (these were her exact words); and about the repulsive Belly, who couldn’t walk unaided and whose once bulging stomach now hung like a limp bag of flesh between his legs. She does not know if Samstag is listening or not. Maybe he is. At the mention of The Belly’s name, however, the smiles of the other policemen fade. The Belly is a powerful man from whom many of the Sonder have taken bribes. She sees them turning their backs, suddenly indifferent.

But Samstag carries on comforting her – ever more mechanically and persistently:

Nie płacz, kochana, nie płacz . . .

The roles are reversed. Inconceivable that this is the body she once lifted out of Chaja Meyer’s bathtub in the kitchen of the Green House: the rangy teenager who had tried to cover himself when the coarse, frayed towel got down to his private parts. She thinks about the children in the well. How long can they stay down there in the cold, dead water without something changing irrevocably inside them, so they come back up as another person?

Two days after her visit, a unit of Gertler’s Sonderabteilung went to The Belly’s overpopulated residence in Franciszkańska Street. Reports disagreed on what actually happened next. Some said Samstag had led the operation in person. Others were sure he had held back, to let his men deal with the matter on their own.

The witnesses were all, however, in perfect agreement that the police had entered the house without warning. They had swung their batons to drive out all the women and children, and set about body-searching all the men they had seized. A large number of knives were confiscated, along with fat wads of Reichsmarks and American dollars. In cases like this, the unwritten rule was that the police officers on duty pocketed the bundles of notes they confiscated. Seeing them do this, The Belly was shocked out of the temporary paralysis induced by the unexpected raid, and with his head drawn into his shoulders, he charged the police.

Certain people said that the Belly’s vast paunch was just a common oedema. That The Belly was as starving as everyone else. But be that as it may, he was still possessed of a brute strength never before seen in the ghetto. It took several men to wrestle the immense body to the floor, and The Belly almost broke free several times. According to some sources, while all this was going on, Samstag pushed his way through the knot of battling policemen, bent back The Belly’s mighty bovine neck and beat him with his baton until the blood spurted from his smashed nose and the resisting body finally slumped back.

It was said that The Belly then tried to run away.

But he didn’t get far with his eyes full of blood and a body he could not hold upright on his own.

Outside the house, he was brought down in yet another tussle.

In the middle of the yard, just as in all the other yards in the ghetto, there was a pump. On the pump was a curved iron hook, for hanging a bucket on while you pumped up the water. The Belly was lying on his back on the ground by the pump, his face a furious mask of blood and mud. There were six men sitting on his arms and legs to stop him getting up again. Some witnesses said Samstag then stepped forward to the felled figure. From the depths of his smile, shiny with saliva, he asked The Belly if he knew what the punishment was for men who assaulted the children entrusted to their care.

It is doubtful whether The Belly understood what Samstag was talking about. His jawbone had probably been smashed by the baton blows Samstag had already dealt him, for his mouth was hanging slackly and a growing froth of saliva and blood was forming over his cracked lower lip.

Two of Samstag’s men forced The Belly’s arms behind his back to make him get up. The Belly presumably thought they were trying to arrest him, so he made his body as heavy as he could. Samstag took advantage of this, and with the men still holding on to The Belly, he took a firm grasp on his head and brought it down on the pump so that the protruding iron hook plunged straight into The Belly’s left eye.

The Belly let out an almost animal bellow.

Samstag’s men kept their grip on both his arms. As the blood flowed, the gouged-out eye dangled on its string like an egg, coated in an oily, brownish membrane. Samstag siezed hold of The Belly’s head again, countered the heaving and thrusting of his body with calm, careful, almost affectionate manoeuvres – and forced the head down onto the pump handle again. It was done more slowly this time. The Belly struggled against it with everything he had: arms, legs, shoulders, back. But Samstag was patient. Unimaginably slowly, punctuated by short, intense jolts as The Belly seemed on the verge of tearing himself free, the bloodied pump hook eased into his right eye, too.

And there he lay, the once almighty, like a bull in a slaughterhouse with blood coursing from his blinded face.

While all this was in progress, a curious crowd had gathered. First those who lived under The Belly’s own roof, about a score of them, women and children; then passers-by, who had heard the commotion from the street and dashed in to investigate. Debora realised that if she wanted to escape, she would have to do it now, before the police withdrew and The Belly began to wreak his terrible vengeance. She went back into the house, packed what few possessions she had in her old rucksack and then waded through the wide, sludge-bottomed ditch out into the street. Then she wandered for hours in the streets around Bałuty Square, asking everyone she met if they could possibly tell her where Rosa Smoleńska lived.

The ghetto clock at the corner of Zawiszy Czarnego and Łagiewnicka Streets showed almost five. In the encroaching winter darkness, the slushy pavements were crowded with people leaving factories and workshops. One of the passers-by thought he knew of an old schoolmistress by the name of Smoleńska who lived in the same block of flats as his sister in Brzezińska Street. She would have no trouble finding the place. It had a bay window at the front.

It was on the front steps of the building with the peeling bay window that Rosa Smoleńska found Debora Żurawska many hours later, when she got home. The girl was sitting huddled at the top of the steps, right outside the front door, shivering with terror and cold. Rosa put her to sleep in her bed, while she slept rolled up in some thick blankets on the dirty floor in front of the stove. In the grey dawn light, Debora got up, packed her rucksack and disappeared off to work without a word. But she was back in Rosa’s flat that evening, bringing with her all her ration cards, and as a signal of her intention to stay, she let Rosa lock them in the kitchen drawer where she kept her own card and coupons.

This is a
city of workers, Herr Reichsführer, not a ghetto.

In 1943 and the early part of 1944,
Hans Biebow could look out over an empire that was the closest a ghetto could
get to a fully functioning city of workers. Ninety per cent of the population
worked in the factories and workshops Rumkowski had established on Biebow’s
orders. Production was efficient, proceeds were high. The previous year (1942),
the Gettoverwaltung as a whole had made a net profit of almost ten million
Reichsmarks, a prodigious sum.

But if you ran a
Musterlager
, it made others envious. So far, the
ghetto had been under civilian administration, but the SS, which under Himmler
was looking more and more like a state within the state, was making ever more
audacious moves to get its hands on the lucrative ghetto. If the Litzmannstadt
ghetto became a labour camp, it could be run much more efficiently under a
military regime, the SS argued. A concrete proposal had already been submitted
by the organisation’s so-called Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt to move the whole
ghetto, heavy machinery and all, to Lublin, where the ghetto (in terms of
numbers of Jews) was almost as large but only a tenth as productive. If the
ghetto industries of Lublin and Litzmannstadt were merged, the profit generated
by the rationalisation would run into millions. The SS had worked it all
out.

Biebow did what he could to keep the SS
and Reichsführer Himmler at bay. He went to Posen to make sure he had the
continuing support of the civilian administration there. He went to Berlin and
met Speer and representatives of the army’s Rüstungskommando, which despite the
massive retreats in the East continued to fill the order books of the ghetto
with orders for uniforms and war equipment. As long as the war effort continued
at the current highly intensive level, the Wehrmacht would never accept any
moves or changes that might threaten a stoppage or interruption in the supply
chain. But Biebow knew everything was hanging by the slenderest of threads; if
there were any more setbacks on the Eastern front, the Führer might suddenly
start listening to Himmler again and order relocation or restructuring of the
ghetto.

The war, which had made Biebow’s
fortune in so many ways, was ultimately a double-edged sword. At times, a
dreadful suspicion came over Biebow that the ghetto he otherwise considered so
stable and secure had no solid foundation at all, that everything he had built
up was mere show, and a single word – a single stroke of the pen on a despatch
from Berlin – would be enough to bring it all crashing
down . . . Like when the new mayor of Litzmannstadt, Otto
Bradfisch, claimed at their recent meeting that the ghetto was not a
Musterlager
at all, but on the contrary,
a disgrace, Herr Biebow, a
disgrace . . . !
The normally self-controlled and
chilly Bradfisch thumped his fist on the police reports that had piled up on his
desk. Biebow knew very well what these contained; they were reports of Kripo
employees bribed to turn a blind eye to ‘losses’ from the factories, and of
officials in his own administration who had, in exchange for a generous private
commission, agreed to set the workers to producing women’s underwear for
Neckermann’s in Berlin instead of fulfilling existing orders for the army on
time; and
how can it be possible that to this very
day, officials in your own administration are letting themselves be bribed
by Jews, how can it be possible, Herr Biebow?

And what help then are Biebow’s
attempts to explain that corruption is in the Jewish
nature
, which he repeats over and over again (he blames the Jews
even though it was his own administrative staff who did the stealing).
Then see to it that this nature is suppressed once and
for all!
Bradfisch retorts. Biebow is trapped in a vice. No matter
what he does or does not do, he is simply giving the SS more arguments for
taking charge of the ghetto.

*

Here’s Biebow
again.
It is high summer. In the grass, the crickets send arcs of
scraping sound up to the high sky of hunger. Below it, thousands of parched,
crook-backed men and women are in constant motion. With carts and barrows, they
are making their way out of the stinking back alleys of the ghetto or bent over
picks and shovels in the mud and grit by the side of the road.

But Biebow does not see them. His
vehicle has stopped by the dilapidated wooden hovel known in the ghetto as
Praszkier’s workshop. His driver has parked the vehicle a little further on and
opened both doors; the bodyguards have sought the shade of the tree. As for him,
he is sauntering around with his hands behind his back, watching the dust he has
kicked up slowly settle on the toes of his shoes.

On the other side of the road, by the
corner of Próżna Street and Okopowa Street, two elderly men are mowing a field.
Despite the baking July heat, they are wearing thick jackets, the linings fully
visible in the seams on the back and chest where the star-shaped yellow patches
have been sewn on. Their scythes glint in the sunlight. They have a can of
water, which they keep passing back and forth between them. Then one of them
shouts something to Biebow.

What’s going on? Something is
proffered. Biebow reluctantly makes his way towards them.

One of them has a toothless smile
between sunken cheeks. Raises the can. Offers Biebow some water. I thought you
might be thirsty in this heat, Sir.

This is naturally something quite
unheard of in the ghetto. A Jew offering a drink to an Aryan, and the first in
command at that; not to mention something as insanitary as a communal can of
water. Biebow looks from one to the other – they are standing beneath the blades
of their scythes; there is a sort of expectant look to their smiles – so he has
no choice but at least to uncork the container and wipe his mouth with a grimace
(though God knows he’s thirsty).

And then it comes, of course. One Jew,
feigning tact and discretion, asks if the high-up gentleman can spare a little
bread.

What’s that? – Bread? –Bread is a
rationed commodity. – Any decent man will have been issued with coupons so he
can get bread from his local shop.

I’ve a bookful of coupons, the man
persists, but what good are they, if I drag myself round to the distribution
point and they say there’s no bread to be had –
Es ist
kein Brot da
. He makes his voice honeyed and fawning, the way he
thinks Germans in authority expect Jews to speak, and says:

I haven’t
eaten a meal for three whole days.

But Biebow concedes nothing:
Here in the ghetto, there is bread for all who are
willing to work.

At this, the hay-maker plucks up his
courage and points out that he jolly well does work, the high-up gentlemen can
see that with his own eyes, he and his friend Icek have mowed a whole meadow to
provide feed and seed corn for dairyman Mr Michał Gertler and his cows. But
there are some people who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives.
They come and go, those
shiskes
! – Oh yes. – He
knows all right. – Some of them even travel in
limouzz-iines
.

He says the word as if it is a warm egg
he is holding in his mouth.

All of a sudden, Biebow is listening.
Who
, he says.

The man gives a vague wave of his
hand.

Biebow:
And
where to
?

The hay-maker:
Where to
?

Biebow:
Where
do they go, these people in limousines?

The hay-maker:
To that place over there.

Biebow:
What
sort of place is it?

The hay-maker:
They used to call it the Green House. Now I don’t know
what––

Biebow:
What?
Speak up, man!

The hay-maker:
A pensie.

Biebow:
A
what?

The hay-maker:
A boarding house
.

Biebow:
Well,
well, a boarding house, is it? For whom, if I might ask?

And the hay-maker, with a shrug – as if
to say:
What do I know? For the people in power? For
people with broad shoulders? For people who think they deserve a rest
between breaths?
But he says none of this. Nor does he need to. For
Herr Biebow is already off, striding up towards the Green House. And the two
scythes follow. This could get interesting.

A year after its evacuation in the
szpera
operation, not much is left of the
old children’s home. The last vestiges of the colour that once gave the
orphanage its name flaked off long ago; some kind of rot has started spreading
upwards from the heavy stone base of the building, turning the wood into a foul,
spongy mass of timber. The roof has caved in, and several of the window frames
have been taken out, leaving gaping black holes in the walls. Yet curtains have
been put up at some of these holes, and from behind the curtains, a collection
of frightened or angry faces is peering.

Biebow bangs on the door lintel with
the side of his hand, and, as if the house were a living being, a loud wail
suddenly issues from its depths.

Crazy
,
mutters the old hay-maker, standing close by,
completely crazy
, and what happens next is crazier still. For hardly
has Biebow withdrawn his hand than the door is wrenched open and ten or so
chickens flap wildly up in front of him.
Yes, real
chickens – real, live chickens
, the hay-maker later declares, of the
sort not seen in the ghetto since before the Germans came. Biebow must have been
equally startled himself. He puts his hands up to his face to protect himself
from this fluttering onslaught, and it takes him a while to notice the enormous
man sitting in a trolley on the far side of the flapping wings, his mouth open
in a scream as crazed and deformed as himself. Yes, some people would certainly
have found it hard to recognise The Belly. Not least because of this scream,
which he now directs at anything and anyone coming near him in his sightless
degradation. How was he to know it was the Amtsleiter himself standing there on
the other side of the frenzied chickens? For he could not see a thing. And what
Biebow saw was a grotesque, misshapen monster, thrust into a rickety wooden
contraption, his body overflowing from its sides, with a belly in the middle, a
smooth, blue-veined belly scantily covered by cloth rags, and above it a
disfigured face with bloody, crusted scabs where the eyes should have been, and
a mouth – gaping, wobbling flesh – screaming at him like a madman.

Mechanically he took two steps back,
fumbling for the gun in the holster inside his jacket as if desperate for
something to hang on to; and when he finally drew it, he instantly emptied the
whole magazine into the repulsive Creature, which was hurled backwards by the
force of the bullets and hit the wall with a sort of squelch; and as if they,
too, had been hit by a ricochet, the chickens scattered in all directions: the
air is filled for a moment with a cloud of blood and fluttering feathers.

Then something very strange happened. A
silence fell that unified them all. Biebow was right at the front, with his
emptied magazine, his head and shoulders covered in chicken feathers; and beside
him, also in chicken suits, stood The Belly’s two guards, who had pushed The
Belly’s trolley to the door when the knock came because he, despite the risks
involved, always wanted to open the door himself; and after the guards came two
of the young prostitutes The Belly had insisted on bringing with him to the
Green House, who were now displaying themselves at the door, and then, outside
said door, the two hay-makers who had joined the walk up from Prazkier’s
workshop.

At that moment, they were many – and
Biebow was alone. One of The Belly’s sidekicks could have gone for one of Chaja
Meyer’s big cook’s knives that were still in the top kitchen drawer. And the
hay-makers still had their scythes, as well.

Right there and then, somebody could
easily have got rid of the highest representative of the tyrannical power that
made their lives a daily hell.

But this apparently did not occur to
any of them at that precise moment. The Belly’s bearers and attendants seemed
virtually paralysed by the sight of their master dead; while the hay-maker whose
name was Icek had only one idea in his head. The white vestment of feathers had
scarcely settled on Herr Amtsleiter’s shoulders before Icek took one of the
cackling chickens under his arm and dashed off with it down the hill. It meant
food for himself and his family for at least a month. Halfway down Zagajnikowa
Street he met Biebow’s chauffeur and bodyguards, who had heard the shot and come
rushing to see what the matter was.

*

Nobody in the ghetto could seriously
claim that everything which subsequently happened – the fall of the Palace,
Gertler’s arrest and the attempt on the Chairman’s life – was the result of a
common pimp and petty thief called The Belly having his eyes poked out and then
being shot by a German. But in Wiewiórka’s barber’s shop, where these events
were the subject of lively discussion, the general conclusion was that in the
ghetto, pride went before a fall. That applied as much to petty thieves as it
did to
shiskes
. And once a stone had been set
rolling . . . !

Mr Tausendgeld, who was the one who had
rented out the Green House as a safe haven for the fleeing Belly, was feeding
the birds in Princess Helena’s aviaries when the first shot rang out from down
in Zagajnikowa Street. He was so startled that he almost fell off the ladder;
then he ran into the house with his long right arm flailing in front of him:

The English
are coming, the English are coming . . .