The Emperor of Lies (58 page)

Many of the characters appearing in this book vanish out of history with the final evacuation of the ghetto in August 1944. But there are exceptions. One is Dawid Gertler, who features particularly in the third part of the novel. Though Gertler’s contemporaries ascribed to him an almost mystical capacity for survival, it was generally assumed that he was murdered by the Nazis after the Gestapo took him from the ghetto in July 1943. Contrary to expectations, however, Gertler turned out to have survived both his interrogation and his subsequent detention in a concentration camp. He surfaces in Hannover in 1961 as a witness at the trial of Günther Fuchs, which was then in progress. Fuchs was chief in command of the department within the security forces that dealt with what were known as ‘Jewish affairs’, in the ghetto set up by the Germans in Litzmannstadt. It was therefore Fuchs who was in practice responsible for the mass murders committed from January 1942 onwards, and for the so-called
szpera
action in September of the same year, which had such catastrophic consequences for the population of the ghetto.

In his evidence against Fuchs, however, Gertler paints a somewhat different picture of the events of those dramatic days than the one that had been painted previously.

He asserts, for example, that after Rumkowski made his speech of 4 September 1942 – in which he informed the ghetto inhabitants of the Nazis’ decision to deport all old people and children under ten – he was seized with indecision. According to Gertler, after making his speech, Rumkowski went in person to Fuchs to inform him he could not carry out the order and then withdrew from the public eye, basically not being seen again until seven days later, when the curfew was lifted. For the ten days and nights of the curfew, the so-called
szpera
days, it fell instead to David Gertler to mitigate the effects of the Nazis’ decision and to attempt in this, the ghetto’s ‘most critical hour’, to save as many lives as possible:

I approached Fuchs and Bibow
[sic!]
to try to negotiate with them about buying the children’s freedom. I had already taken Bibow into my confidence, as he could otherwise have put obstructions in my way. The Gestapo, so in practice Fuchs, were responsible for the transaction itself. I was thus able, on behalf of those in the ghetto who had money, to buy back large numbers of children. Since the Gestapo, and Bibow too, were practically eating out of my hand, various people in positions of authority even agreed in the course of these transactions to release children without demanding any payment at all. This meant that the total number of people transported [from the ghetto] amounted to 12,300 or 12,700 rather than the 20,000 that was the original target . . .

Whatever weight one may attach to this testimony – Gertler’s principal concern was naturally to enhance his own reputation – it still offers a rather different image of Rumkowski as a person than that which had previously emerged (through historians such as Isaiah Trunk, for example).

Most of the testimonies of people who outlived Rumkowski, and there are in fact quite a number, portray him as an unscrupulous careerist and collaborator who would go to some lengths to implement the decisions of the Nazi powers. And yet there was clearly a point at which even Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski felt obliged to look away and say no. This novel revolves around that moment. What did it take to make even the strong man of the ghetto refuse to obey? What made him do it? And what price did he have to pay for his (as Gertler still – paradoxically enough – calls it during his cross-examination) irresponsible submission?

In broad outline, but with some additions, the course of events in this novel follows developments in the ghetto as described in the
Ghetto Chronicle
.

The
Ghetto Chronicle
is a document of some three thousand pages which was the collective work of a handful of employees in the ghetto’s archive section. The archive was a section of the
Statistische Abteilung
set up by Rumkowski in the spring of 1940, and later also oversaw the ghetto’s population register (
Meldebüro
or
Meldeamt
). Over time, these sections merged and expanded, and by 1944 consisted in total of ‘44 employees, 1 director, 23 secretaries and office staff, 12 draughtsmen and printmakers, 4 photographers and 4 odd-jobbers [
sonstige
]’, as stated in a report reproduced by the
Chronicle
at the time.

The Statistics Department had clearly defined functions from the outset. It was to produce

daily briefings to the state police and other relevant parties within the ghetto administration on the population’s state of health (including births and deaths), along with detailed studies of a demographic nature of the condition of the employees, production in the factories, and anything else requested by the Elder of the Jews.
[It was also]
 . . . to make compilations of this statistical material available to other interested groups, produce visual presentations of statistical data and photomontages for the purposes of teaching and propaganda, and also . . . produce and collect illustrative material for archiving and various practical uses.

In addition to these specific tasks, there was also a more general role, which called on it ‘on the quiet’ – those are the actual words! – ‘to collect material for a future presentation (= history) of the ghetto and to keep personal notes for this purpose’.

From the day the first observation is recorded in the
Chronicle
– 12 January 1941 – through to the last entry a month before the ultimate liquidation of the ghetto, the
Chronicle
is thus primarily conceived as a testimony for
future
readers.

This may not initially be apparent to today’s readers. Until September 1941, the
Chronicle
, at that time written in Polish, was less a collective diary and more a kind of standard, open form on which certain, regular events were repeatedly recorded. In that respect, it is reminiscent of the
pinkas
or
Gemeindebücher
previously kept over several generations in Jewish communities in Poland, and in Eastern Europe generally. The
Chronicle
contains, for example, columns for the day’s weather and for the number of births and deaths; there are extracts from police reports, details of consignments of food and fuel that have arrived or are due to do so; notes of changes to working hours and working conditions in the factories of the ghetto, and so on. The
Chronicle
also reproduces most of the official proclamations emanating from Rumkowski’s headquarters or the German ghetto administration, and also (in shorthand) virtually all the Chairman’s speeches.

This documentary role had an important function. By reference to the
Chronicle
, Rumkowski was able to monitor the history of his reign as it was being written.

Gradually, however, the form and content of the
Chronicle
change. This is most noticeable from the autumn of 1941 onwards, when some of the newly arrived, so-called ‘western Jews’ are taken on by the Archive Department of the ghetto and start writing in the
Chronicle
. At least two of them, Oskar Singer and Oskar Rosenfeld, are established authors and journalists with many years’ experience of operating under various forms of bureaucratic censorship. From this point on, the
Chronicle
is less formulaic and more polyphonic; other genres are introduced, and even critical voices begin to make themselves heard (often in the form of satire). It is important to note, however, that it nonetheless continues to reflect (and subordinate itself to) a version of ghetto events sanctioned by Rumkowski.

The
Chronicle
’s
character as a repository of tradition and a contemporary testimony, yet also a mouthpiece for Rumkowski, means it is concrete and exact (in its detail) and yet simultaneously unreliable on a more general level as a source of information about what was actually happening in the ghetto.

Anyone reading the
Chronicle
today must also learn to distinguish between what posterity (
now
) knows for a fact and what the chroniclers (
then
) could only suspect. Today we may not in all respects know
more
than the inmates of the ghetto did. But we know
in a different way
: with a historical transparency and clarity of detail that those incarcerated there did not possess.

As early as February or March 1942 there was unambiguous evidence available in the ghetto that most of the ‘transports’ that had left since the turn of the year had gone directly to death camps. Rumkowski undoubtedly knew from an early stage, if not from the very start, that the population of the ghetto was being murdered before his very eyes. But far from everybody knew, and the lack of absolute certainty created the strange grey zone, hovering between hope and despair, to which all the entries in the
Chronicle
subscribe. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, there were still those who persisted in believing there was a life beyond the ghetto, somewhere and in some form; and this refusal to abandon all hope of survival characterises the authors of the
Ghetto Chronicle
to the very last day. It also characterises to the very last the image the
Chronicle
presents of Chaim Rumkowski, the man who elevated uncertainty to the level of a state ideology, enabling him to continue unhindered his delivery of the raw material required by the Nazi extermination machine.

Beginning as late as January 1944, some of the
Chronicle
writers attempted to encapsulate life in the ghetto in a
Ghetto Encyclopedia
. The
Encyclopedia
can be seen as an appendix to the
Chronicle
or as yet another attempt to leave a visible record of
the time of the ghetto
for posterity.

The
Ghetto Encyclopedia
is a collection of little catalogue cards recording large numbers of people and phenomena from everyday life in the ghetto, its management and administration. The
Encyclopedia
provides not only definitions and derivations of various words and phrases in common use in the ghetto, neologisms and loan words (usually from Polish, or from the Austrian bureaucratic jargon brought in by the ‘foreign’ Jews), but also a handful of miniature biographies of leading men and women in ghetto society. The influential individuals whose cameos appear there include Aron Jakubowicz, head of the Central Labour Office, Dawid Gertler, and Gertler’s successor as head of the powerful Sonderabteilung, Mordka Kligier.

But not Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski.

There could be several explanations for the absence of a card for Rumkowski. Either there never was a card for him, which seems unlikely – he was the most powerful man in the ghetto, after all. Or the card was removed at some juncture and destroyed. If that is the case, then the
Encyclopedia
bears out the indirect evidence offered by the
Chronicle
that the fiction, or perhaps rather the
editing
of the fiction, of the ghetto had begun even before the German occupation came to an end.

So although most of what happened in the ghetto is unusually well documented, there are gaps in the recording of events, places where reliable evidence is thin on the ground. This applies, for example, to the days of the
szpera
, when Chaim Rumkowski chose to ‘submit’ for a number of days and allow authority to pass to Dawid Gertler. It applies also to the exact circumstances surrounding Rumkowski’s adoption of a child from one of the ghetto’s children’s homes, and his relationship with that child. The fact that Rumkowski systematically abused the orphans is exceptionally well substantiated, given the circumstances. In her book
Rumkowski and the Orphans of Łódź
(1999), Lucille Eichengreen sees these assaults, which she not only witnessed but was herself subjected to, as manifestations not so much of Rumkowski’s sexual predilections as of his constant need to assert his power and authority at all levels in the ghetto. In a world where the only options were survival and subjection, the role of sexuality is hard to define but should not be underestimated. The fictional character Věra Schulz calls Rumkowski ‘a monster’ in her diary, but her words are actually taken from Eichengreen’s book. I have made similar use of the testimonies of many other ghetto survivors. The long description of the ‘western’ Jews’ initial encounter with the Łódź ghetto is largely based on Oskar Rosenfeld’s account of the journey from Radogoszcz Station into the ghetto in
Wozu noch Welt: Aufziehungen aus dem Getto Lodz
(1994).

Unlike Rosenfeld, who retains his anonymity throughout the book, most of the officials and functionaries of any importance appear here under their own names. This is mainly because their deeds and misdeeds are so well documented, not least in the discussions of their backgrounds and actions in the
Chronicle
and the
Encyclopedia
, that inventing names for them would have seemed like providing superfluous disguise. In any case, I am of the view that the nature of the events that took place in Łódź in 1940–44 makes that sort of camouflage morally dubious.

Finally, a few words about the photograph on the cover of this book. The photograph is one of a total of four hundred taken by the chief accountant of the German ghetto administration, an Austrian named Walter Genewein. In all his photography Genewein used colour film, unusual for that time, which he ordered from the laboratories of IG Farbenindustrie in Switzerland. No one knew of the existence of these pictures until 1988 when, soon after Genewein’s death, one of his relatives offered the negatives for sale in a second-hand bookshop in Vienna. Genewein, a convinced Nazi, worked as part of the German administrative machine in the ghetto for virtually as long as it existed, and was therefore probably commissioned to take the photographs. Someone within the administration, possibly Biebow himself, gave amateur photographer Genewein the task of documenting the reality of the ghetto. What is striking about these pictures is how little of the
actual
reality of the ghetto they nonetheless show: how little of the hunger, the sickness, privation and poverty. Even death, ever present in the ghetto, is invisible in Genewein’s work except perhaps as a stylisation of clouds and tram wires above crumbling houses and workshops.