The Emperor of Lies (8 page)

But Princess Helena’s trembling hand
and handkerchief never reached their goal.

At that moment, spasms shook the
woman’s body again. Dr Szykier, who had been working from the outset on the
assumption that his patient was suffering from epilepsy, rushed forward to prize
her jaw open. But instead of resisting his action, she opened her mouth even
wider and at the very moment the
dybek
(so
Tausengeld claimed) left the body, the whole frightened crowd crushed into the
backyard of the prayer house could stare right into the swollen orifice and see
the thick, white coating on the woman’s palate and throat. Then Mara was said to
have uttered two short sentences, or in some versions just two words, forced out
with great difficulty – though this time in fully ‘comprehensible’ Yiddish:

Du host mikh
geshendt . . . !

A bayze riekh zol dikh und
dayn hoyz khapn . . .
³

That was all. In her initial, terrified
confusion, Princess Helena had put the handkerchief to her face, realised what
she was doing and then hysterically tried to shake it out of her hand:

She’s sick!
She’s sick!

They have sent
sickness to us!

In the course of a few seconds, the
room emptied of people, leaving only the police behind. Leon Szykier pleaded
with them to send for an ambulance, but they returned instead with the news that
the
Praeses
’ brother – Józef Rumkowski –
did not in any circumstances intend to let any of the ghetto’s hospitals admit
the woman. The official line was that the woman could not be treated because
nobody knew who she was. There was no written record card for her at the
Meldebüro
. And if there was no name under which
she could be entered in the books, how could anyone be sure she was a Jewess and
not some person in disguise sent by Amalek to spread sickness and disintegration
to them all?

For four days and nights, the first
lady of the ghetto hovered between life and death as a result of her meeting
with the sick woman. Józef Rumkowski took Helena’s favourite birds to her room:
the linnets that liked to sit in the fruit trees; the comical starling that
sounded just like Marshal Piłudski.

But the birds, too, sat silent and
dejected in their cages.

In the prayer room in Lutomierska
Street, Dr Szykier had established a quarantine station. It was the first in the
ghetto, and was presumably viewed as extremely provisional, for a big crowd had
again begun to gather outside the room. This time, however, it was considerably
more aggressive and consisted mainly of men demanding that the woman be sent
away.

Shame, shame
on any who bring sickness to the ghetto!

The Hasidic
rebbe
finally had no alternative but to lift up the woman on her
litter and carry her round again. She spent the first two days and nights in the
kitchen of Dr Szykier’s home. But the furious mob soon found its way there, as
well. And so they set off on an unsteady journey between various houses and
addresses, that would not end until 5 September 1942, the first night of the
szpera
, when the Chairman took his
protective hand from the ghetto and the German police under the command of
SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Fuchs went from house to house, taking with them all
the weak and sick, all the children and old people.

And for Samuel Wajsberg there had been
no remedy.

Nor for his wife Hala, who three days
after the curfew was announced was to lose her most beloved son, Chaim.

It was indeed like losing life
itself.

*

Two days after the uproar in the
Hasidic prayer house, the Chairman called all members of the medical profession
to a meeting to decide once and for all how to deal with the epidemics
threatening to destroy the ghetto from within.

The meeting generated some heated
discussion.

Doctor Szykier dismissed all the
rumours that the woman had brought the infection with her, and he was supported
in this by Wiktor Miller, the ghetto’s Minister of Health, who maintained that
in the case of diphtheria, there were in fact phases or preliminary stages that
sometimes resembled neural paralysis. What was more, Dr Miller claimed,
diphtheria constituted a threat above all to the children of the ghetto, but the
illness could only be transmitted from mouth to mouth, which did limit the
threat. It is a different matter, he said, when the infections are carried by
the water we drink and the food we eat and the bugs crawling in our walls, and
we can do nothing to root them out short of sanitising the whole ghetto.

To combat
dysentery and typhus we need doctors; nothing but that – doctors, doctors,
doctors!

Dr Miller was to make the battle with
the epidemics of the ghetto into his own, private crusade. ‘People complain they
can’t keep kosher any more, but it never occurs to them to boil their water or
keep the floor under their own stoves clean!’ With his iron-tipped white stick,
the blind man tirelessly measured the depth of the ghetto’s open drains, used
the few remaining fingers on his hand to trawl through piles of rubbish and
latrine trenches; he stuck his thumbs behind swollen or bulging wallpaper in
search of typhus lice. At the least suspicion of typhus or dysentery, the whole
building would be quarantined.

His efforts were eventually crowned
with success. Over the course of a year, there was a tenfold reduction in
dysentery cases, from 3,414 in the second year of the ghetto’s existence to
scarcely 300 the year after. Typhus traces a similar downward curve, with a peak
of 981 cases in the period January–December 1942, and a gradual falling away in
the two years that followed.

As for the outbreak of diphtheria in
the ghetto, however, something remarkable happens. In the first twenty-four
hours after the rumpus in the Hasidic prayer house, the out-patient clinics of
the ghetto register seventy-four new cases of diphtheria, but only two the day
after, and then no more at all. Just like the hazy image Mr Tausendgeld thought
he saw sliding across the sick woman’s face, sickness comes and goes in the
ghetto like the briefest of whispers. Not even Princess Helena feels its
effects, despite lying upstairs in Miarki Street day after day, shaking with
fever, waiting for the ghastly voice that called out to her from Mara’s swollen
throat to take her in its grip, too.

But nothing happens. At least, not
yet.

Early
on the morning of 9 May 1941, Rumkowski’s newly appointed Minister of Propaganda, Szmul Rosensztajn, climbed onto an upturned beer crate outside the barrack-hut office at Bałuty Square and informed all those who cared to listen that the Chairman had gone to Warsaw to find doctors for the ghetto. Wherever people gathered, from Wiewiórka’s barber’s shop in Limanowskiego Street to the tailors’ workshops in Łagiewnicka, the word spread:
The Chairman has gone to Warsaw to find a way to cure and save the sick of the ghetto.

The Chairman had scarcely left before they began the preparations for his return. It was all to be on a grand scale –
po królewsku
– with a carriage and a guard of honour, and crowds of cheering onlookers kept at a safe distance by ghetto police. Though in fact it was only one of the routine transports organised by the Gestapo, who travelled the 130 kilometres to Warsaw in convoy every day, and who had no objection at all to letting a Jew come along, if he was stupid enough to pay twenty thousand marks for his ticket.

Rumkowski’s trip to Warsaw lasted eight days.

He was courted day and night by members of Czerniaków’s Jewish Council, and also by resistance workers and couriers, who tried to pump him for all he could possibly tell them about German troop transports and conditions for the Jews left in Wartheland. The Chairman, however, had no interest in hearing how the Jews of Warsaw were faring, how they organised their
aleynhilf
, how they dealt with the distribution of food, educated their children or engaged in political agitation. Wherever he went, he lugged a large trunk with him. In the trunk he had brochures and information leaflets prepared at his request by the lawyer Neftalin, head of the Department of Statistics, and printed by Rosensztajn. They detailed how many corsets and brassieres his ladies’ tailoring workshops produced each month, and how many military greatcoats, gloves, uniform caps or fur-lined camouflage caps the German
Heeresbekleidungsamt
had ordered from him. The old man with the trunk made an indelible impression on the Warsaw Jews who encountered him:

A person calling himself King Chaim has been holding court here for some days, an old man of seventy with great ambitions, a little crazy [
a bisl a tsedreyter
]. He tells miraculous tales of the ghetto. In Łódź [he says] there is a Jewish state with four hundred police officers and three jails. He has his own ‘ministry of foreign affairs’ and various other departments. When asked why, if it is that good, it is still so bad, why so many people are dying, he does not answer.

He sees himself as the Lord’s chosen one.

For those who can be bothered to listen, he talks of how he combats corruption in the police service. He says he goes into the local police headquarters and rips off the caps and armbands of everybody there.

That is how the Lord’s chosen one administers justice in the Litzmannstadt ghetto.

The ruling Council of Elders in Litzmannstadt has seventeen members. They obey his every order and slightest wish. He seems to view everything in the ghetto as his personal possession. They are
his
banks and
his
markets,
his
shops,
his
factories. And also, one presumes,
his
epidemics,
his
poverty,
his
fault that his ghetto dwellers are subjected to such degradation.

Adam Czerniaków and the other members of the Warsaw ghetto Jewish council also met him. Czerniaków writes in his diary:

We had a meeting with Rumkowski today.

The man is unimaginably stupid, self-important; officious. He goes on and on about his own splendid qualities. Never listens to what anybody else says.

He’s dangerous, too, because he insists on telling the authorities that all is well in his little reserve.

But Rumkowski had his own eyes to see with, and from what he saw he could draw only one conclusion. Unlike the ghetto in Litzmannstadt, the Warsaw ghetto was in the grip of chaos and decline. People did not seem to do a day’s work, merely wandered around aimlessly. Along the pavements, long rows of emaciated children sat beside their starving mothers, begging. From a restaurant – they still had such things! – came raucous, drunken bawling. The contrasts were enormous. Rumkowski was escorted to a grocer’s shop that had been converted into a tuberculosis clinic. In the shop window, boards had been laid across wooden trestles; on these primitive beds, old men lay dying in front of the eyes of passers-by. He visited soup kitchens run by Poale Zion, in which people were sitting or lying anywhere they could find room, wolfing down free soup.

Wherever he went, people would moan.

About the dirt, the cramped living conditions; the disgusting state of the sanitation.

In the parish hall, a meeting was called of all the Jews who had fled from Łódź in the opening phase of the war and had ended up here, in Abraham Gancwajch’s patronage network, or as Czerniaków’s lackeys. There turned out to be thousands of Łódź Jews, old and young, who filled the hall to the last standing space.

He had his travelling trunk with him, its lid open wide.

‘There is no argument,’ he said, ‘absolutely no argument today, against the ghetto as the future form of livelihood for the Jews of Europe . . . !’

There is war in Europe today. But war is nothing new for Europe’s Jews. All these years, as dark clouds have loomed over our towns and cities, we have resigned ourselves to the fact that we live cut off from one another, and can no longer move freely.

In years gone by, if there was want or destitution in our cities and towns, if we were short of doctors or medicines, the town councils would agree to send an envoy to find out whether any other town nearby had a doctor willing to return with them to help heal and cure.

SEE ME AS SUCH AN ENVOY – I am an ordinary, simple Jew, coming to you with a plea for help [. . .]

Most of you have no doubt heard about my ghetto.

Malicious tongues claim that my Jews have voluntarily submitted to slavery. That we toil in grime and filth. That we voluntarily break the commandment to keep the Sabbath; that we deliberately eat unclean food. That we demean ourselves by carrying out the occupiers’ slightest decree.

Those who claim all this have not learnt to appreciate the value of work properly. For so it is written in the Pirkei Avot: YOU ARE NOT REQUIRED TO CARRY OUT WORK; BUT NOR SHALL YOU REFRAIN FROM IT.

And what does that mean? It means that work is not exclusively about the earnings of you or me. Work is what holds a society together.

Work not only purifies. Work also protects.

Among us, in my ghetto, nobody dies of hunger. All those who work have the right to share what there is to be shared. But with rights come responsibilities. Anyone who misappropriates, who takes from the common store for his own gain, shall be excluded from his
khevre
, and nowhere shall he find food to eat. Nowhere shall he sleep. And nowhere shall he be able to go to pray.

But conversely, anyone who is prepared to work for the community will also be rewarded for that. I do not come to you as one who preaches and lectures. I am a simple person. God has given me, as he has everyone else, two hands. I raise them now to entreat you – come back to us in Litzmannstadt and help us to build a home for all Jews.

All your contributions are welcome.

Gifts of money are also most acceptable.

People came to him in the night.

They did not want to hear about his high production quotas or all his successes in the battle against corruption and black- market trading in the ghetto. They wanted to hear what he could tell them of their nearest and dearest, whom they had left behind in Litzmannstadt, of the streets where they had lived; they wanted to know if the houses were still standing, and if those who once lived there were still alive. And he opened the lid of his trunk and distributed letters and postcards, and, to ‘refresh’ their memories further, he told them of the chestnut trees the Germans were letting them plant in Lutomierska Street this spring. They would make a proper avenue. He told them about the children who went to school each day, about the summer camps he was planning to set up for them in Marysin: seventeen thousand children would be fed three hot meals a day; they would be taught Yiddish, Hebrew and Jewish history by teachers he had trained specially for the purpose; a hospital with all the most modern equipment had been put at his disposal exclusively for the children. In return, the children would work at planting and sowing green vegetables and root vegetables in the spring. He told them there were agricultural collectives where hundreds of kibbutznikim were at work, planting potatoes. They dug three crops of potatoes a year.

From his trunk he produced a copy of
Informator far klayngertner
, a handbook for vegetable-growers that Szmul Rozenzstajn had printed. What mattered was not
who
or
what
you were, he said, waving the booklet about, what mattered was that everyone who came knew their craft and was willing to work.

*

A week later, the Chairman was back in Litzmannstadt. His return could hardly be described as ‘royal’. A Gestapo vehicle let him off at the ghetto boundary. That was at about half past five in the afternoon. The ghetto was deserted. At the far end of Zgierska Street, near the wooden bridge, a tram had stopped dead, as if it had been struck by lightning.

Where was everybody? His first thought was absurd: that the population of the ghetto had not been able to bear his absence and had quite simply exploded from hunger and sorrow.

His next thought was more plausible: that some kind of coup had been mounted while he was away. Could it be the Bundists, the Zionist Workers or the lunatic Marxists who had ganged up against him? Or could it possibly be that the favoured Dawid Gertler had persuaded the authorities that he be allowed to take over the functions of the police, as well?

But if that had happened – why was it so quiet and empty everywhere?

Die Feldgrauen
were standing there as usual, stiff and idiotic in their red-and-white-striped sentry boxes. They weren’t even looking in his direction. He decided to think no more about it, took up his trunk and set off towards the barrier marking the border at the entry point to Bałuty Square.

Outside the long row of ghetto administration huts stood a parked lorry, and behind it – as if taking cover behind bomb defences – his entire staff was waiting, with Miss Dora Fuchs, Mr Mieczysław Abramowicz and the ubiquitous Szmul Rosenzstajn at their head. They looked nervous, as if he had caught them doing something they were ashamed of.

Where is everybody?

There’s been shooting in the ghetto, Mr Chairman.

Who? Who’s been shooting?

Nobody knows. The shots came from inside the ghetto, that’s all we know. One of them, unfortunately, happened to cause some injury to a German official. Herr Amtsleiter is in quite a state.

Where’s Rozenblat?

Chief Police Commander Rozenblat has been summoned for interview by the authorities.

So ask Gertler to come.

Herr Amtsleiter Biebow has imposed a curfew on the ghetto until the perpetrator is caught. If that person hasn’t come forward by seven o’clock tomorrow morning, he is threatening to have eighteen Jews executed by firing squad.

And where are those Jews now?

In the Red House, Mr Chairman.

Very well, then we shall go to the Red House. Mr Abramowicz, you will accompany me.

The Red House was a building in the district just behind the Church of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary on the big square; it was three storeys high and made of solid, red brick, hence its name.

Before the occupation, the red-brick building had been used by the ministry of the Catholic Church, but as soon as the ghetto was set up, the German criminal police had seen the potential of the place, thrown out all the church occupants and moved their own people in instead. On the top floor, Polish women typists sat writing reports to the Central Staff back in Litzmannstadt. The basement housed the torture cells.

In the ghetto, the Jews were free, mentally at least, to roam any district. And every Bałuty resident could have found their way blindfold to absolutely any passageway, courtyard or side street. But at the Red House, tongues and thoughts came to a full stop. Even uttering the name
Roytes Heizl
was like touching an abscessed tooth: your whole body flinched from the pain. Every night, those who lived round about, in Brzezińska and Jakuba Streets, were awoken by the screams of the torture victims; and every morning – whether there were corpses to collect or not – Mr Muzyk the undertaker would be waiting outside with his cart.

Szmul Rosensztajn records in his diary that Rumkowski had two meetings with the German authorities the day he returned from Warsaw.

First in the Red House (where he finally got the reception he had hoped for when he came home: eighteen of Biebow’s hostages pressing their terror-stricken faces to the bars of the prison windows and shouting out how glad they were that their deliverer had finally returned); and then with Biebow himself in the latter’s Bałuty office.

By then, the account of events was rather different.

It turned out that there had not been any shots fired in the ghetto. What had happened was that some blunt and heavy object had been thrown from inside the ghetto fence and hit a tram that was passing through the ‘Aryan’ corridor beyond. It was the tram he had seen standing on the slope up from Bałuty Square when he arrived. The stone from inside the ghetto had broken one of the tram windows and the splinters of glass had fallen on one of the passengers in the aisle. This might have been overlooked, had not the person involved happened to be Karl-Heinz Krapp, a civil servant from Mayor Werner Ventzki’s office, a dyed-in-the-wool Aryan.