The Emperor of Lies (50 page)

From Altszuler’s in Wolborska Street,
the police went on to Młynarska Street, where the concierge let them into the
flat of one Moszje Tafel, whom they caught
in
flagrante delicto
, as it were. Tafel was sitting there with his
headphones on, listening intently, and glanced up only briefly as the police
surrounded him.

After Moszje Tafel, they seized a man
named Lubliński in Niecała Street; then three brothers named Weksler – Jakub,
Szymon and Henoch – in Łagiewnicka Street. And then there was Chaim Widawski,
whose name seemed to crop up in all the interrogations.

On the morning of 8 June, Detective
Superintendent Gerlow and two of his assistants go to Widawski’s home in
Podrzeczna Street, where the young man’s terrified parents tell him that it is
true their son has not been home for some days, but that he is an honest,
upright individual who has most definitely not had the slightest thing to do
with any listeners. At the coupon department, too, Widawski’s fellow workers
have to admit they have not seen young Mr Coupon Inspector for a few days, but
say he has probably just taken a few days off because he is ill. Then the police
tell Widawski’s colleagues to spread word that if the fugitive traitor does not
immediately give himself up, they will arrest not only Widawski’s mother and
father but also the entire staff of his department, and kill them one by one
until all the illegal listeners have been caught.

Then they go on to the next name on the
list.

*

Vĕra is writing. She sits all day down
among the piles of books and files and albums, writing. She writes without a
break, and as fast as her aching fingers will let her; on clean sheets of paper
or the backs of sheets already used; on catalogue cards, in the spaces on the
title pages of books or in the margins of old notebooks. She writes down
everything she has ever heard, or thought she heard, the newsreaders say.

Every time she hears the scraping sound
of footsteps on the steps outside, or thinks she sees the shadow of a moving
body, she huddles down as if to make herself invisible. When she hears the
clatter of the soup cart, she goes up to the archive and takes her place in the
queue, and stands there waiting for her ladleful, looking neither right nor
left, afraid that the least glance in any direction might be enough to give her
away.

She thinks about Aleks. About whether
they have heard about the raids on the Altszulers and Wekslers out in Marysin,
too, and been able to find somewhere safe, as Widawski has. But where would
Aleks go, if so? They live in a ghetto. Where could there possibly be any safe
places to hide?

When five o’clock comes and the working
day is over, and the Kripo still have not turned up, she packs up her things.
But instead of turning into the yard of her own block, she carries on along
Brzezińska Street.

At the crossroads were she last saw
Shem, as he was mobbed by joyful solitaires, a knot of people is standing, backs
turned. She pauses a little way from them, to check none of the backs belong to
anyone living in that building, who might recognise her and give her away. After
a while she cautiously takes a man by the elbow, draws him out of the crowd and
asks him what’s happening. The man looks her up and down suspiciously. Then he
suddenly appears to make his mind up, and in a voice outwardly quivering with
indignation but inwardly bursting with pride at being able to tell her, he
confides to her that one of the listeners the police are looking for – the
ringleader himself! – committed suicide that morning. – Someone called Chaim
Widawski, if that name means anything to her. People who lived round there had
seen him standing outside his parents’ flat all night, not being able to decide
whether to make his presence known or not. Towards morning, somebody saw him get
something out of his pocket, and thought: he’ll give up now, he’ll finally go
into the house and up to the flat; but he only made it halfway to the front door
before the poison took effect and he fell to the ground;
prussic acid
, says the man, with a knowing nod,
he had the poison with him all the time. Died before his parents’ very eyes, he
did; they both saw him from the window.

Vĕra asks if there have been any
arrests in the building outside which they are now standing, and the man tells
her the Kripo were there and found a radio in a coal shed in the house on the
other side of the road, cunningly hidden in an old trunk. They’d caught two men
so far – one a slim, acrobatic type; and the other a German Jew already
identified as the owner of the trunk. His name and former address in Berlin had
been on the inside of the lid.

But from Aleks, not a word.

If they hadn’t caught him, there was
only one place he could be: the old Hashomer building in Próżna Street. Halfway
out to Marysin, hunger makes her go all light-headed again. The world starts to
sway in that familiar way, her knees buckle and her mouth goes all dull and dry.
She sits down on a big stone at the roadside and unwraps the bit of bread she
always carries in her handkerchief for times like this. But she is overcome, not
only by weakness but also by the feeling of having lost all control and
direction. Before, there had been an
inside
and
an
outside
, and a firm, unshakeable, albeit
intangible will to get the world out there to penetrate
here
, into the ghetto, and in that way (almost
like turning a piece of clothing inside out) somehow get
out
herself. Now there is nothing here – no
outside, no inside. All that is left is sun, behind a film of bright cloud, a
pale sun, slowly melting into the whiteness, and suddenly everything dissolves
around her into a hot, white, shapeless haze.

When she gets to the collective in
Próżna Street, it is milky-white twilight already, and exhausted workers have
curled up in their sleeping places under the roof and its holes. When she crawls
at last to the spot she shared with Aleks, the mattress and blankets are cold
and undisturbed. She lies awake all night, listening to the bats darting about
on rapid, invisible wings in the vast darkness under the roof; but he does not
come.

From the Ghetto Chronicle
Litzmannstadt Ghetto,
Thursday/Friday 15–16 June 1944:

Commission in the ghetto
. The ghetto is
once again in a state of great agitation. In the late morning, a commission came
to the ghetto, made up of head mayor Dr Bradfisch, former mayor Wentske,
regional parliamentary president Dr Albers and a senior officer (bearing the
insignia of the Order of Knights), probably from the air defence forces.

The commission members made their
way to the Chairman’s office, where Dr Bradfisch had some minutes’ conversation
with the Praeses. Then Gestapo Commissars Fuchs and Stromberg came to Miss
Fuchs’s office. No sooner were these visits over than the ghetto was full of
wild rumours. They all tended in one direction: resettlement [
Aussiedlung
]. Nobody in the ghetto yet knew what
had actually been said in the Chairman’s office, but it is believed that it had
to do with large-scale resettlements. Earlier this morning, a figure of 500–600
men was being bandied about, but later in the day thousands of people were
understood to be involved, possibly the majority of the ghetto population – in
fact some even claimed to know that a total liquidation of the ghetto lies
ahead.

[. . .] The aim is for a number
of large transports of workers to leave the ghetto. It is said that an initial
group of 500 will be taken to Munich for clearing-up operations after the recent
bombing raids. Another group of 900 or so will leave the same week, probably as
soon as Friday 23 June. Then 3,000 people a week are to leave in the following
three weeks. A supervisor, two doctors, medical staff and police will be ordered
to accompany these transports. The police will not be recruited from the
ghetto’s existing forces but from the people in the transport. [. . .] It is
unclear where these major transports will be going.

*

Proclamation No. 416
Re: Voluntary Labour
Outside the Ghetto
ATTENTION!

It is hereby announced that men
and women (including married couples) may register for labour outside the
ghetto.

Parents who have children who
have reached working age may also register these children for labour outside the
ghetto.

Those who register will be
supplied with all necessary items: clothes, shoes, underwear and socks. Fifteen
kilograms of luggage per person are permitted.

I would like to draw particular
attention to the fact that that these workers have been granted permission to
use the postal service, and will be able to write letters. It has also been
confirmed that all those who register for labour outside the ghetto will have
the opportunity to collect their rations immediately, and not need to wait their
turn. Registration for the above will take place in the ghetto at the Central
Labour Office, 13 Lutomierska Street, from Friday 16 July 1944, daily between 8
a.m. and 9 p.m.

Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 19 June 1944
Ch. Rumkowski, Eldest of the Jews
in Litzmannstadt

*

Memorandum
(written copy of order issued verbally)
¹⁷

Each Monday, Wednesday and Friday
a transport will leave for labour outside the ghetto. Each transport will
consist of 1,000 people. The first transport will leave this Wednesday, 21 June
1944 (
c.
600). The transports will be numbered
with Roman numerals (Transport I, etc). Every worker who is leaving will be
issued with a transport number. Each individual will wear this number on his/her
person, and attach the same number to his/her baggage. Fifteen to twenty
kilograms of effects per person are permitted; this should include a small
pillow and a blanket. Food for three days is to be taken. A transport supervisor
will be appointed for each transport, and ten assistants; a total of eleven
people per transport.

The transports will leave at 7
a.m., and loading must therefore begin punctually at 6 a.m. A doctor or field
surgeon and two or three nurses will accompany each group of 1,000. Relatives of
medical staff may accompany them.

Effects not to be wrapped in
sheets or blankets but to be packed as compactly as possible for ease of stowing
on board the trains.

Regarding the eleven accompanying
persons: these are all to wear the caps and armbands of the local police
force.

*

From the
Ghetto Chronicle
,
Litzmanstadt Ghetto, Thursday/Friday 22–23
June 1944

This is how it was reported in the
Chronicle
:

At five in the afternoon on Friday 16 June 1944, the day head mayor Otto Bradfisch came to Rumkowski to inform him that the ghetto was now to be cleared definitively, Hans Biebow had also arrived at Bałuty Square. In a highly intoxicated state, he barged into the Chairman’s office, ordered all the staff to leave the room; then hurled himself at the Chairman and set about him with his stick.

This was the second time in swift succession that the Chairman had been attacked in what was clearly an act of madness, and his body and face bore the clear marks of the blows. Where he had previously been firm and steady in his bearing, he was now bent and fumbling, and the once proud and unsullied face beneath the mane of white hair, the face that once adorned walls and desks in all the offices and secretariats of the ghetto, was now a mask of wounds and swollen bruises.

The two colleagues who had accompanied Biebow, Czarnulla and Schwind, realised that if they did not restrain Mr Biebow, something highly regrettable might happen. Even some of the Jewish employees, Mr Jakubowicz and Miss Fuchs, tried to talk to Herr Biebow and calm him down. But nothing helped.

You bloody well keep your hands off my Jews!
shouted Biebow from the barrack-hut. Then the window smashed in a shower of broken glass, and Biebow’s voice echoed loud and clear across the square:

The Devil take you, you pathetic coward – I can’t spare a single man, but when Herr Oberbürgermeister comes and says you’ve got to send three thousand men out of the ghetto every week, you just say – jawohl, Herr Oberbürgermeister – of course, Herr Oberbürgermeister – because that’s all you know how to do, you Jews, say your hypocritical and fawning yes and Amen to everything, while they’re literally stealing the ghetto from under my nose.

You tell me: how am I supposed to send off all my deliveries if I haven’t got any workers left to rely on? How shall I survive here in the ghetto if there aren’t any Jews any more?

Once he had had the splinters of glass removed and the wounds to his face patched up with some stitches and dressings, the Praeses of the ghetto had, at his own request, been taken ‘home’ to his old bedroom on the top floor of the summer residence in Karola Miarki Street. By this juncture, everyone thought the Chairman’s last hours had come. Mr Abramowicz bent down to the old man’s sickbed and asked if he had a final request, and the old man said he wanted them to send for his faithful servant from the old days, former nursery nurse Rosa Smoleńska.

There was a good deal of fuss about this afterwards. Despite all the sacrifices made by the Chairman’s many faithful servants and close colleagues all those years, the only person he wanted to see when he was dying was a common nursery nurse. But Mr Abramowicz duly went with Kuper in the barouche to the bay-windowed flat in Brzezińska Street where Miss Smoleńska lived with one of the Praeses children who had been adopted; and Miss Smoleńska put on her old nursery nurse’s uniform again, and the two of them were taken in the carriage out to Marysin; and Mr Abramowicz let her into the sickroom where the dying Praeses lay, and discreetly shut the door; and the Praeses looked her up and down, and gave a vague wave of the hand to indicate she should sit down at his side, and then said
the main thing now is the children
; and from that moment on, everything was as it was before, and always had been.

Chairman
: The main thing now is the children! You, Miss Smoleńska, are to gather them all at a special assembly point that I shall not give you details of until later. NOT ONE SINGLE CHILD MUST BE MISSED. Do you understand, Miss Smoleńska? A special transport has been arranged for the children. Two doctors will accompany it, and two nurses that I shall select myself. What do you say, Miss Smoleńska?

Would you like to go with the transport as its nursery nurse?

Rosa Smoleńska had long since lost count of all the times over the years she had been summoned to offices and bedrooms where the Chairman lay ‘sick’, or perhaps just ‘feeling the effects’. (If it wasn’t his ‘heart’, which was a constant preoccupation of his at that time, it would be something else.)

This time he did look genuinely ill, his face red and swollen, clotted with blood where the wounds on his temple, on both cheeks and near his eye had been stitched. But the dreadful thing was that underneath that mess, the old face was still there. And that face now smiled and winked at her, just as slyly and shamelessly colluding as it always had been; and the voice from inside the bandages was the one that had always ordered her about, or pretended to accommodate her wishes as long as she (in turn) accommodated his:

Chairman
: Because you’ll want to come with your children, won’t you, Miss Smoleńska? In that case, I want you to make it your responsibility to bring all the children to the assembly point that will be specified.

Can you promise Rumkowski that?

He had taken her hand between his. His hands were bandaged right up over his wrists, and his fingers looked like little lumps of dough as they protruded from the bandage. –
But it was the same hand!
– And just as so many times before when he had tricked her into touching him, the hand was trying to find its way in and reach places where it had no business to be.

And how was she to tell him then that all the children he insisted she gather together were gone?

That there were no children left to save!

He had helped to send them all away, hadn’t he!

She couldn’t do it. Behind that mess of a face, his heartless gaze was entreating her again, and she could not let him down. And she said,
Yes, Mr Chairman, I shall do what I can, Mr Chairman
. And under the freshly ironed nursery nurse’s uniform, the doughy, bandage-impeded fingers groped their way over her thigh and between her legs. And what could she do? She smiled, and cried with gratitude, of course. As she had always done.