The Emperor of Lies (39 page)

But it was only the Kripo who came.
There must have been about ten of them, and halfway up the stairs to the first
floor, where Princess Helena lay on her sickbed, they caught up with him and
dragged him back out to the courtyard, where one of their cars was waiting. Half
an hour later he was hanging with his arms tied behind his back from the
infamous meat hook in the basement of the Red House, while half a dozen men from
the prison section admired the comical oddities of nature that had created Mr
Tausendgeld’s elongated right arm. His body hung very obviously askew, so much
askew that his lumpy face pointed
down
to the
floor, whereas the prisoners usually had their heads
up
. Custody officer Müller therefore had to swing his
rubber-sheathed wooden club up from underneath to land a blow to the head,
almost as if perfecting his golf swing. But the blow hit home nonetheless; and
Tausendgeld screamed – and his body cowered as it hung there, even though there
was nothing to cower behind. But the only name the Kripo interrogator got out of
him was Gertler’s, which was not the name they wanted to hear at that time.

Meanwhile, Biebow had got back to his
office in Bałuty Square. He still had chicken feathers on his lapels when
Rumkowski was brought in. Rumkowski stood as he always did, head sunk on chest,
arms at his sides. It was almost as if you could hear the whole mighty palace
come thundering about his ears.

Biebow
: I thought we had an agreement.

Chairman
: We did, and we still do, Herr Amtsleiter.

Biebow
: And yet provisions for a sum equivalent to 126,263 Jews have
been brought into the ghetto and entered into your books, despite the fact that
by your own calculations, there are currently only 86,985 Jews. How do you
explain that?

Chairman
: There must be some mistake.

Biebow
: Mistake? We make no mistakes here. 38,278 Jews must
therefore have found the situation in the ghetto so overwhelmingly attractive
that they have made their own way here to help themselves from our loaded
tables. Can you tell me where these Jews are now, Mr Rumkowski?

Chairman
: If incorrect information has been filed or supplied, I
shall immediately –

Biebow
: And how did they get in? Perhaps they made sure to sneak in
when I was asleep or at some other time when my back was turned?

Chairman
: I shall go and get to the bottom of this unfortunate
situation at once.

Biebow
: You will have to do more than that, Rumkowski! I order you
here and now to carry out a new census.
Every head
must be counted!
And for every Jew, address and
Ressort
must be clearly stated. From now on, no
address is valid unless it is also a residential address and the one at which
the Jew in question is registered. Do you understand? And that includes your own
stupid head, Rumkowski! To achieve this, new workbooks must also be issued. Each
book will, in addition to the holder’s name, date of birth, residential address
and
Ressort
, also have a photograph, certified
as authentic by Jakubowitsch at the Central Labour Office. This identity
document will be shown every time provisions that require coupons are handed
over, and every time premises are searched. –
Ist das
verstanden worden
?

The first raid began immediately.
Through the half-open bedroom window, Princess Helena saw the policemen who had
so recently dragged off poor Tausendgeld standing down in the garden by her bird
cages. She could just about put up with them taking away Mr Tausendgeld, but
what possible justification could they have for touching her birds? She threw
the window open wide, leant out into the lethal white light and shouted:

Don’t touch my linnets!

Take whatever you want, just don’t touch my linnets!

Every year it was the same story where
Princess Helena’s liver was concerned:

Summer came, bringing with it fatigue
and malaise, and a headache that made it almost impossible for her to open her
eyes in the mornings. On palpating her abdominal organs, Dr Garfinkel discerned,
just as he had the year before, a certain swelling of the liver, and he
therefore prescribed a strict diet consisting of white meat in a delicate broth,
and above all rest in complete darkness, since jaundice patients risked serious
eye damage if exposed to direct sunlight.

That was why Princess Helena was
standing in the middle of the room with her hand over her eyes when the Kripo
came in, overturning everything in their path. Wicker cages of frightened,
fluttering birds. Boxes and trunks of shoes and clothes; her writing desk with
all the letters and invitations and thank-you cards. Even the abundantly plumed
hat she had worn to the Sumptuous Buffet, where men such as Biebow and Fuchs had
been among the guests, was pulled off the hat shelf in the wardrobe to be
trampled and soiled beneath the heels of boots. Princess Helena screamed and
tried to hide behind the curtains. When that did not work, she sought cover back
in bed, just as Detective Superintendent Schnellmann passed her a telephone
receiver and demanded that Mrs Helena Rumkowska ring her brother-in-law. When
she refused, and carried on screaming and thrashing her arms about,
Superintendent Schnellmann made the call himself, and took the opportunity of
reporting to his superior at the same time:

Wir haben
noch ein paar Hühner gefunden
– while irritably batting away a pair
of disorientated starlings who, freed from their cages, were flapping about
between the bed and the fluttering curtains.

In normal circumstances, it would now
have been high time for Mr Tausendgeld to come in and start to parley. He might
have popped some small gift into the assiduous detective inspector’s hand. He
might have said they could help each other sort out this little difficulty to
the satisfaction of both parties. But now Tausendgeld was hanging from the hook
in the basement of the Red House and being forced to answer questions about his
‘clandestine’ links with the Sonderabteilung of the ghetto, and there was
unfortunately very little room for compromise. When the Chairman finally
realised that this time there was no way out, he ordered a carriage to be sent
to Karola Miarki Street to rescue her from the siege.

Now it just so happened that a large
number of carriages had been ordered in Marysin that day; a lot of people
suddenly wanted to move from ‘the country’ to ‘the town’. The Chairman had only
his own barouche at his disposal, but after arguing the toss for quite some time
he was finally able to supplement it with a very ordinary, basic rack wagon, the
sort the two men mowing the field used for their grass.

When the whole equipage arrived,
however, Princess Helena was less interested in being evacuated herself than in
finding safe refuge for her birds. She stood at the bedroom window directing
Kuper and the other coachmen until they had filled the whole carriage from the
driver’s seat to the hood with cages of starlings and finches. Then she returned
to her bed and refused to budge, despite all threats. In the end, the coachmen
had to carry the bed with Helena in it down the narrow, creaking staircase and
lift it into the wagon, where they tied the whole lot down securely so the vast
lady would not tip out. Then trunks, boxes and bags were also put aboard, and
the procession moved off.

It was on the afternoon of Saturday 10
July 1943: a close and clammy day with the sky hanging as taut and
blue-glistening as a cow’s udder over the dustbowl streets of the ghetto. All
the way in from Marysin to Bałuty Square, The Belly’s prostitutes could be seen
walking, their arms as thin as sticks and their stomachs distended by hunger.
They called out to the deposed princess lying in her bed on top of the swaying,
lumbering wagon. But behind the length of material someone had compassionately
tied round Princess Helena’s sensitive eyes, she was almost as blind as The
Belly had once been. She could hear nothing, either. The racket the caged birds
were making drowned out everything else.

Once at Dworska Street, the procession
turned and proceeded without pause towards the Chairman’s town residence. If
they had made an unexpected stop there, they would have seen Mr Tausengeld’s
broken body floating in the pool of raw sewage on the corner. He was lying face
down, the longer of his two arms stretched sideways at a crooked angle, as if
trying to reach even in death for something he would never quite be able to
grasp.

*

For her part, Regina Rumkowska would
always remember the last time she saw the Gertler family, dressed as if straight
out of some popular weekly magazine: his wife in a light cotton dress and coat,
and a hat with a veil; the boys in shorts with knee socks and short tweed sports
jackets; the little girl in proper shoes with laces, like her mother’s, and a
hat that was also identical to her mother’s except for the two pretty red
ribbons dangling from its brim, parallel with the long plait hanging down her
back.

The Praeses
is not at home,
was all Regina could say to this miraculous family
that had suddenly appeared on her doorstep. But Gertler merely lifted his hat
urbanely and said the family had just popped round to ask if young
Mr Stanisław
or the
Son
of the House
might perhaps like to accompany his wife and children on
a little carriage ride. He himself, he said, would be glad to stay a little
longer. He had a matter of some urgency to talk to her about.

There had been people coming and going
all day, an endless stream of people discussing the evacuation of the summer
residences in Marysin, and who had been taken by the Kripo and who had as yet
been ‘spared’. They had been able to erect screens around Princess Helena’s bed,
so she would not have to hear the worst of it; but as soon as she recognised her
husband’s voice above those of the other men, she started crying out and
shouting orders again.

Józef, can you bring me my tea that Dr Garfinkel prescribed?

Did
you remember to bring the morello cherries from Miarki Street;

and
the bowl of cream Michał’s wife brought?

(Nor did the screens around Helena’s
bed do anything to lessen the cacophony of starlings, goldfinches and other
birds singing and calling and twittering in their cages: a whole zoo that
suddenly seemed to have been substituted for the living, human guests.)

We’re going to Sosnowiec, not Hamburg after all. But maybe it will be just
as easy to find out what has become of your brother from there, Mrs
Rumkowska, I think I may have picked up the trail.

Dawid Gertler leant forward and offered
her a cigarette from a slim silver case, which he opened with his little
fingernail. She stared at him. It had suddenly hit her why Gertler and his wife
and children were dressed up. They were about to leave the ghetto, all of
them.

You
must be patient and wait, Mrs Rumkowska.

That was the last time she saw him. It
was 13 July 1943.

Soon after they had left, she packed
her suitcase with the few possessions she still had, including her passport and
examination certificates, and prepared to wait.

The next afternoon, 14 July, two cars
with Poznań number plates drove up to the security hut outside Gestapo
headquarters in Limanowskiego Street, where the Sonderabteilung also had its
base. Once past the barrier, the cars stopped but kept their engines running.
Gertler was brought out immediately, between two plainclothes policemen. Several
officials from the security service followed with armloads of cardboard boxes,
files, drawers and other clearly confiscated material. Some of the staff of the
Praeses’s Secretariat, who witnessed the event, heard Gertler, just as he was
climbing into the car, ask one of the non-uniformed policemen if they had enough
material or would like to search his home as well, and heard the German police
commander say loud and clear that he and his men had all they needed for the
time being. Minutes later, the two cars swept out past the Bałuty gates, past
the obligatory salute of the duty guards; then on down Limanowskiego Street and
out of the ghetto.

In the days that followed, people
converged on Bałuty Square in the evenings, because every day rumours circulated
that Gertler was about to return. Every evening for two weeks, people flocked
there to receive him. And the numbers continued to swell; there were days when
up to five hundred hopeful faces stood waiting under the ghetto clock at the
corner of Zawiszy Czarnego and Łagiewnicka Streets. Rumour had it that Gertler
would be coming back in the same Poznań-registered car that had taken him away,
and that the moment he ‘entered the gates of the ghetto’ he would give a special
‘sign’ through the back window of the car.

The rumours of Gertler’s return seemed
at times to have more staying power and detail to them than anything being said
about why he had been forced to go.

Regina Rumkowska, too, dreamt several
times of Dawid Gertler’s return. In most of these dreams, Gertler was already
dead. She could not explain how she had established he was dead, but she knew
straight away it was a dead man sitting behind the gleaming window of the SS
limousine that came purring under the wooden bridges one night with its
headlights switched off; a dead man who then climbed out and saluted the guard
of honour from his own Sonder commando that had come to welcome him back. The
men in the guard of honour were dead, too. In actual fact, everybody in the
ghetto was dead. The bodies of the fourteen thieves and troublemakers the
Germans had put to death were still hanging in Bazarowa Street (each with a
placard round its neck saying
I am a Jew and a traitor
to my own people
), and the dead Gertler pushed the corpses aside as
you might sheets on a washing line, and went in to sit down and confer with his
closest advisers in the offices in the Limanowskiego Street building: the lights
from the office windows on the first floor facing the courtyard in the Gestapo
complex were the only lights on in the ghetto, and they shone all night. (And
even as she was still dreaming this dream of herself and a quarter of a million
other dead people, she would think that this perhaps explained why Gertler could
move with such ease across the ghetto border, day or night. Why his family had
always seemed so well dressed and sophisticated. Perhaps this was also the
reason for his finally claiming to be on the trail of her vanished brother.