The Emperor of Lies (41 page)

The Chairman’s fall from power after the
szpera
operation seemed to go on almost indefinitely. Like a madman being stripped of garment after garment, he had one absolute power after another taken from him. He no longer had any influence over production or the conditions of production in the ghetto. He no longer had any say in food distribution – except the tiny two per cent that was his to allocate ‘personally’, which he persisted in using for ex gratia gestures, like giving all the workers in the ghetto coupons equivalent to a plate of
tsholent
at Yom Kippur. After the purges of the summer of 1943, he was not even in charge of his own appointments. The names of all those he wished to see promoted, or for that matter, dismissed, had to be approved by the German ghetto administration. Ultimately, it was Biebow who pulled all the strings. The Praeses of the ghetto was a lord of misrule, a ragged spindle-shanks whose power amounted to nothing more than a style he had adopted, and whose world could be reduced to a few ceremonies, marrying and divorcing people, and going on pointless ‘inspections’ of factories or soup kitchens. Not even the bodyguards who had always been at his side seemed to form up in such numbers any more.

But at the very moment the fall seemed almost complete, the humiliation total, something happened to give the Chairman, at a stroke, if not his power and authority back, then at least some kind of rehabilitation.

They said he was a traitor to the ghetto. But perhaps treachery, like heroism, is something that requires a long period of preparation before it can be crowned with success. In that case, the treachery was already there on the first day of the
szpera
operation, when Rumkowski acted his part most heroically and refused to carry out the actions the authorities had ordered him to carry out. But hero or traitor? Saviour or executioner? Perhaps it made no difference in the long run. Rumkowski
was
the ghetto. Whatever actions he took, whichever or however many Jews he saved or did not save, the only stage prepared for him was that of the traitor. His only task was to step up onto that stage when the time was ripe and the powers that be commanded it.

From the Ghetto Chronicle
Litzmannstadt Ghetto, Tuesday 14 December 1943:

At 11.30 this morning, a rumour ran like wildfire round the ghetto:
The Chairman has been taken away by the Gestapo
. The course of events is said to have been as follows. At 9.30, a vehicle from the Geheimen Staatspolizei in Posen arrived at Baluter Ring. Two men, one in uniform and one in plain clothes, announced themselves in the Secretariat outside the Chairman’s office.

‘Are you the Eldest of the Jews . . . ? What is your name?’ The Chairman gave his name, and then the two policemen said: ‘Let us have this conversation in private,’ and went into his office. The two men the Chairman happened to have with him, Moshe Karo and Eliasz Tabaksblat, immediately left the room.

The Chairman’s meeting with the two officers lasted for about two hours. Then, at about 11.30, the Chairman went off towards the city centre in the company of the two men from the security services.

At first, no one in the ghetto was really aware this had occurred. It was only at about seven in the evening, when the Chairman had still not returned, that the ghetto’s heart began to pound. Everywhere, people congregated in groups to talk about what had happened.

The Chairman’s horse and carriage stood outside his office as usual, and they were still there late that evening, no reports having been received. Many were convinced the Chairman had been taken to Posen.

As he left Baluter Ring, the Chairman just had time to say to Dr [Wiktor] Miller, who happened to be there: ‘If anything should happen, remember the food distribution is the only thing that matters. Nothing else.’ The Chairman appeared very composed.

In these difficult hours, many recalled the Gertler affair. But there is a great difference between the two. Gertler was a popular personality in the ghetto, but this incident – everybody agreed – involved the father of the ghetto himself. The horror of it ran in the bloodstream of every single one of them. Never had people been so acutely aware of the inescapable fact that
Rumkowski is the ghetto!
– hardly anyone could sleep that night. And there was further cause for alarm: Amtsleiter Biebow had been called to the city and nothing had been heard from him, either. In a situation like this, what was there to do but wait and see?

The Chairman only ever told a select circle of people close to him what happened in the course of the twenty-four hours he was away from the ghetto. He initially thought the two security men were taking him to the offices of the German administration in Moltkestrasse, but when he recounted what had happened afterwards, he was not so sure. The only thing he could remember clearly was that the doors through which he was led were so tall that he could not see how close they came to the ceiling, and that the stucco ornaments at the top were gilded. He was taken into a large room, where five ‘top men’ were seated at a long table, with green lampshades above it, hanging so low that the smoke suspended in the lamplight obscured the faces behind it. He was not able to make out a single one of them, despite the fact that they all (he said) had their eyes fixed on him at that moment.

An adjutant clicked his heels and barked his
Heil Hitler!
For his part, he stood as always with his hands at his sides and his head bowed:

Rumkowski!

Ich melde mich gehorsamt!

Out of the corner of his eye, he nonetheless saw one of the security officers bring in the account books he had been ordered to bring with him, and the books passing between the Germans sitting at the table. There was a sound like one of them clearing his throat, or perhaps giving a low laugh:

We know who you are.

You are the Elder of the Jews, the richest Jew in Łódź.

The whole Reich is talking about you.

The account books had finally reached the man seated on the far left. He leafed through a few pages distractedly, and then went back to observing him through his thick glasses, while continuously moistening his lower lip with the tip of his tongue. I found out later, said Rumkowski, that it was SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann; and the man to his right, with the horn-rimmed glasses, was SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr Max Horn of the SS’s Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungsamt, whose initiative this whole committee was; and next to him was SS-Oberführer Dr Herbert Mehlhorn, with responsibility for the Jews at the Reichsstatthalterei in Posen. But none of these top men introduced themselves, naturally; none of them did or said anything at all except create a tinkle of glasses and carafes, or clear their throats or smack their tongues. (It was as if, Rumkowski said later, they were all perfectly happy just to have cast an eye over me.) A few moments later, the tall doors were opened again, an orderly came in, gave the Hitler salute and announced Amtsleiter Biebow. But by then, Rumkowski had already been asked to leave the room, and all he was able to catch before the door was closed behind him were a few quick questions from the far side of the table, to which he heard Biebow reply that the production of the Heraklite boards was in full swing.
Genau, Herr Hauptsturmführer
, and the ‘ghetto laboratories’ had even developed a special mixture of cement and wood chips that was displaying quite
unique
qualities in all the durability tests. Nowhere else in the Generalgouvernement or the Warthegau had they succeeded in manufacturing such an
exemplary
product
.

Und so weiter
. Filtering out through the crack between the door and its frame – or perhaps somewhere higher up: through the gap just below the soaring entablature – came the sound of Biebow’s ingratiating voice as he continued to boast of the ghetto’s working capacity and outstanding productivity.

Rumkowski was shown out to an anteroom. Along the wall, under a portrait-sized picture of the Führer, ran a row of wooden benches. Rumkowski perched on the edge of one of them. His audience had been so brief that he was convinced for some time he had only been brought out temporarily and would shortly be called back into the room. But time passed, and nothing happened except that the voices on the other side of the door grew more strident. Then he also heard a chink of glass and the sound, light but firm, of boots crossing the creaking wooden floor. The eyes of the SS guard, too, kept swivelling from him to the door, as if he did not know what to do with this Jew his superiors had dumped on him. And he had no cigarettes on him, Rumkowski said later; all he had were a couple of dry biscuits he had managed to grab from the tin Miss Dora Fuchs kept on her desk, but he dared not get them out for fear of giving an unfavourable impression: ‘a poor Jew, eating.’

Then a sudden burst of laughter came from within, the door opened, and Biebow’s face looked out – first uncomprehending, then horrified:

Are you still here, Rumkowski?

Biebow closed the door behind him with both hands and put a shushing forefinger to his lips. Then he led Rumkowski across a landing and down a long, dark corridor to a small room where the light was on, and shot Rumkowski a conspiratorial look as he closed the door behind him.

What happened next was hard for Rumkowski to explain even to his closest associates. Perhaps he lacked the words to describe the sudden sense of intimacy that seemed to have arisen between him and Biebow. It was almost like the old days, before there was any ‘production process’, before there were any
resorty
to speak of, when they would sit in Rumkowski’s office together while Biebow went through long lists of tenders without finding the product he needed anywhere, and Rumkowski would suddenly come up with the name of a person or a company and Biebow would exclaim:

Why, that’s brilliant, Rumkowski!

Except the news they were discussing this time was not so cheering, said Rumkowski, and he tried to repeat Biebow’s confidences as best he could. Namely that a decision had been taken in Berlin to the effect that the demands of the continuing war effort made it no longer feasible to retain a ghetto administration of the present size, that the administration would be reorganised and even previously ‘irreplaceable’ people like Ribbe and Czarnulla would be obliged to leave Litzmannstadt to serve in the army.

But that’s not the worst thing, Rumkowski; the worst thing is that the whole ghetto, the entire section of ghetto production working for the armament industry, is going to transfer from civilian administration to the SS’s Ostindustrie-Gesellschaft – in short, the ghetto’s going from the Gau to the SS!

The room they were now in was what Rumkowski called Biebow’s ‘city office’. It was dominated by a big, wide desk, with a blotter and inkstand of imitation marble. Along the edge of the table stood telephones, arranged in order of size. Biebow took a glass from a wall cupboard and poured himself a drink, and then took a cigarette from a case on the desk; he did not offer one to Rumkowski:

They’re taking a break now, but this much is clear: if Dr Horn gets his way in the negotiations, I shall have to leave my post in the administration as well, and I’m sure you can imagine very vividly what that will mean for the autonomy I have given you Jews all these years, Rumkowski.

That was the moment at which a stage that had lain shrouded in darkness until then suddenly revealed itself to him, Rumkowski said. By reaching down his hand and smiling accommodatingly, Biebow was now bringing Rumkowski up onto that stage in a considerate, almost comradely fashion:

But I won’t leave the administration, of course, without paying tribute to the excellent spirit of cooperation in which we have always worked, you and I, Rumkowski.

And I may have the option of taking some of your most capable workers with me. But then they must be really capable workers, the sort I know only you can generate.

I have great plans, Rumkowski. They’re trying to tempt me with the offer of taking over a big textile exporting company with depots and warehouses in Hamburg and Kiel, and of course I’ve still got all my contacts in the coffee and tea business.

And as for you and your family, Rumkowski, I shall at any event make sure you are offered a secure and dignified exit from here.

Gute Geschäftsbeziehungen vergisst man doch nicht so schnell.

But now you must go, Rumkowski; Dr Horn is punctuality itself, he holds people to account if they are so much as a minute late.

This last was said as he took hold of Rumkowski’s arm: Rumkowski, who was expecting some kind of embrace to follow – a drunken test of loyalty like those he had had to endure in the old days – adjusted his stance accordingly. But Biebow was only trying to get to the coins in his jacket pocket. He pressed a few pfennigs into Rumkowski’s hand and slapped him chummily on the back:

This should be enough for your tram fare, Rumkowski!

And remarkably enough, that was how Rumkowski the ‘rich’ Jew, who except for that time he went in the Gestapo’s lorry convoy to Warsaw had never once stepped outside his allotted
Gebiet
, found himself standing entirely alone and unguarded in the Aryan part of Litzmannstadt, waiting for a tram to come and take him back to the ghetto.

Grey dawn. At the tram stop in Podolska Street, a group of ordinary Poles and Volksdeutsche had formed. They all stared at the yellow star he wore on the breast and shoulder of his jacket. Was a Jew coming on the tram with
them
? And what was a Jew doing outside the walls and fences of the ghetto, anyway? But Herr Amtsleiter had not only told him to take the tram but also given him money for his ticket, so when the tram came, Rumkowski did that most forbidden of things. He –
a common Jew!
– got into one of the Polish carriages and nobody stopped him. He sat right at the back, staring at the doors as they opened and closed with an almost miraculous smoothness to let other Poles on or off. The car was soon completely full. But at the back, where he was, it was empty. He was hungry. He still had in his pocket the two biscuits he had taken from Dora Fuchs’s old tea caddy. But he didn’t dare touch them. He didn’t dare move a muscle.