The Emperor of Lies (3 page)

There were many who wondered afterwards
why the Chairman had done nothing to help his own relations, in spite of the
fact that everyone had seen him standing outside the hospital talking first to
SS-Hauptscharführer Mühlhaus, then to SS-Hauptsturmführer Fuchs.

Some thought they knew the reason for
his compliance. In the course of the brief telephone conversation Rumkowski
later had from inside the hospital with ghetto administrator Hans Biebow, he was
allegedly given a promise. In exchange for agreeing to let all the old and sick
people of the ghetto go, the Chairman would be allowed to compile a personal
list from among those on the expulsion list, a list of
two hundred fit and able-bodied men
, men indispensable to the future
operation and administration of the ghetto, who would be allowed to stay in the
ghetto despite being formally above the age limit. The Chairman was said to have
agreed to this pact with the Devil because he believed it was the only way to
secure the continued existence of the ghetto in the longer term.

Others said Rumkowski realised that the
time of promises was over, as far as he was concerned, the minute the
deportations began without his knowledge. That everything the authorities had
promised until then had turned out to be lies and hollow words. So what did the
lives of a few family members signify, when all that was left for him was to
look on, bewildered and powerless, as the whole mighty empire he had built
slowly crumbled?

Within the Walls

(April 1940–September 1942)

Tish taka
malutka e taka shubrana
Der vos hot a hant a shtarke
Der vos hot oyf
zikh a marke
Krigt fin
shenstn in fin bestn
Afile a ostn
oykh dem grestn

[Ghetto,
beloved little ghetto

You are so
tiny, and so corrupt!

Whoever has a
hand so strong

Whoever bears a
certain mark

will choose
from the loveliest and the best

and at least
the greatest, too]

Jankiel Herszkowicz: ‘Geto,
getunya’

(composed and performed in the
ghetto, around 1940)

© ŁódŹ City Archive

The ghetto: as flat as a saucepan lid between the thundercloud blue of the sky and the cement grey of the earth.

If geographical barriers were no concern, it could go on for ever: a jumble of buildings on the verge of rising up out of their ruins or tumbling back in again. But the real extent of the ghetto only becomes fully obvious once you are
inside
the rough barrier of planks and barbed wire that the Germans have put up all around it.

If it were, in spite of everything – from the air, for example – possible to create an image of the ghetto for yourself, you would clearly see that it consists of two halves or lobes.

The eastern lobe is the larger of the two. It extends from Bałuty Square and the old church square with the Church of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary in the middle – its tall, twin spires could be seen from everywhere – through the remains of what was once the ‘old town’ of Łódź and out to the garden suburb of Marysin.

Before the war, Marysin was little more than a run-down area of allotments and small dwellings, filled in with a random collection of huts and workshops, pigsties and outbuildings. After the ghetto was cut off from the surrounding area, Marysin’s little plots of land and cottages have been turned into an area of summerhouses and convalescent homes for the ruling elite of the ghetto.

Also situated in Marysin is the big Jewish cemetery and, on the other side of the fence, the railway yard at Radogoszcz where the heaviest goods and materials arrive. Units of the
Schutzpolizei
, the same force that guards the ghetto round the clock, lead brigades of Jewish workers from the ghetto every morning to help load and unload at the platform, and the same police company ensures all workers are led back into the ghetto at the end of the working day.

The eastern lobe of the ghetto comprises all the districts east and north of the main thoroughfare of Zgierska Street. All through traffic, including Łódź’s north–south tram link, is routed through this street, which is guarded by German police at virtually every street corner. Of the ghetto’s three, wooden-vaulted bridges, the two busiest cross Zgierska Street. The first bridge is down by the Old Square. The second bridge, called
Hohe Brücke
by the Germans, goes from the stone base of the church of St Mary over Lutomierska Street to the other side of Kirchplatz. The wastern lobe comprises the districts round the old Jewish cemetery and Bazarowa Square where the old synagogue (now converted into stables) once stood. The four blocks of flats in the ghetto that have running water are located in this area.

Another main road, Limanowskiego Street, leads into the ghetto from the west, thus cutting the western lobe into two smaller sections, a northern and a southern. Here there is a lesser-used wooden bridge: the bridge at Masarska Street.

In the middle of the ghetto, at the point where the two main streets, Zgierska and Limanowskiego, meet, lies Bałuty Square. You could call this square the stomach of the ghetto. All the materials the ghetto needs are digested here, and then taken on to its
resorty
, the factories and larger workshops. And it is
from
here that most of the products of the ghetto’s factories and workshops go out. Bałuty Square is the only neutral zone in the ghetto where Germans and Jews meet, totally isolated, surrounded by barbed wire, with only two permanently guarded ‘gates’: one to Łagniewnicka Street and one out into ‘Aryan’ Litzmannstadt at Zgierska Street.

The German ghetto administration also has a local office at Bałuty Square, a handful of barrack buildings back to back with Rumkowski’s Secretariat: Headquarters, as it is popularly known. Here, too, is the Central Labour Office (
Centralne Biuro Resortów Pracy
), headed by Aron Jakubowicz, who coordinates labour in the
resorty
of the ghetto and is ultimately responsible for all production and trade with the German authorities.

A transitional zone
.

A no man’s or, perhaps one should say, an
everyman’s land
in the midst of this strictly monitored
Jewish land
, to which both Germans and Jews have access, the latter however only on condition that they can produce a valid pass.

Or perhaps simply the specific
pain node
at the heart of the ghetto that is the explanation of the ghetto’s whole existence. This gigantic collection of dilapidated, unhygienic buildings around what is basically nothing but a huge export depot.

He had discovered early on that there was a sort of vacuum of muteness around him. He talked and talked but no one heard, or the words did not get through. It was like being trapped in a dome of transparent glass.

Those days when his first wife Ida lay dying.

It was February 1937, two and a half years before the outbreak of war, and after a long marriage which, to his great sorrow, had borne no fruit. The illness, which perhaps explained why Ida had remained childless, made her body and soul slowly waste away. Towards the end, when he took the tray up to the room where she was in the care of two young maids, she no longer recognised him. There were times when she was polite and correct, as if to a stranger; and others when she was curtly dismissive. On one occasion she knocked the tray out of his hand and shouted at him, calling him a
dybek
who must be driven out.

He watched over her while she slept; that was the only way he could convince himself he still completely owned her. She lay tangled in her sweat-soaked sheets, lashing out in all directions.
Don’t touch me
, she screamed,
keep your dirty hands off me
. He went out onto the landing and called to the maids to run for a doctor. But they just stood down there, staring at him, as if they did not understand who he was or what he was saying. In the end, he had to go himself. He staggered from door to door like a drunken man. Finally he got hold of a doctor who demanded twenty złoty before he would even put his coat on.

But by then it was too late. He bent over and whispered her name, but she did not hear. Two days later, she was dead.

He had once tried his luck as a manufacturer of plush in Russia, but the Bolshevik Revolution had got in the way. His hatred of all manner of socialists and Bundists stemmed from that period. I know a thing or two about Communists that isn’t fit for polite company, he would say.

He saw himself as a simple, practical person, without any sophisticated
airs and graces
. When he spoke, he said what he thought, loud and clear, in an insistent, slightly shrill voice that caused many people to look away uncomfortably.

He was a long-standing member of Theodor Herzl’s party, but more for practical convenience than out of any burning belief in the Zionist cause. When the Polish government postponed the elections for the local Jewish councils in 1936 for fear that the socialists would take over those, too, all the Zionists in the Łódź
kehila
resigned and let Agudat Israel run the council on his own. All except Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who refused to put his place on the community council at anyone else’s disposal. His critics, who responded by expelling him from the party, said he would collaborate with the Devil himself if it came to it. They did not know how right they were.

There was a time when he had also dreamt of becoming a rich and successful cloth manufacturer, like all the other legendary names in Łódź: Kohn, Rozenblat or the incomparable Izrael Poznański. For a while, he and a partner ran a textile factory. But he lacked the sort of patience needed for business. He lost his temper over every late delivery, suspected deception and swindling behind every invoice. It ended in altercations between him and his partner. This was followed by the Russian venture, and bankruptcy.

When he returned to Łódź after the war, he took a job as an agent and salesman for various insurance companies including Silesia and Prudential. Curious and terrified faces crowded the windows at his knock, but no one dared open the door. They called him
Pan Śmierć
, Mr Death, and he also wore the face of Death as he dragged himself through the streets, for his stay in Russia had made him sick at heart. He often sat alone in one of the fashionable cafés on Pietrkowska Street which were frequented by the doctors and lawyers in whose distinguished circles he would have liked to be seen.

But no one would share a table with him. They knew he was an uneducated man who resorted to the coarsest of threats and insults to sell his insurance. He told a paint dealer on Kościelna Street he would drop dead if he did not sign up his family at once, and the next morning he was found dead under the flap of his own shop counter, leaving his wife and seven children suddenly with no means of supporting themselves. At Mr Death’s café table, people with confidential information came and went; they sat with their backs to everyone and dared not show their faces. It was said he was consorting even then with certain people who would later be part of the ghetto’s
Beirat
–
‘third-rate “personages” with little appreciation of the public good, still less of ordinary honour and decency’
. It was as if wherever he went, he found himself trailed not by the ‘great men’ he envied, but by a pack of wasters.

But then something happened: a conversion.

He was later to tell the children and the nurses at the Green House it had felt as if the words of the Lord had suddenly and unexpectedly revealed themselves to him with the force of an
exhortation
. From that day forward, he said, the sickness had left him, like some mere, fleeting illusion.

It happened in winter. He had been dragging himself dejectedly through one of the dark, narrow streets of Zgierz, when he came across a girl sitting huddled under a sheet-metal shelter at a tram stop. The girl had stopped him, and asked him in a voice shaking with cold if he could give her anything to eat. He took off his long overcoat and wrapped it round the girl, then asked her what she was doing out so late, and why she had no food. She replied that both her parents were dead and she had nowhere to live. None of her relations had been willing to take her in or give her anything to eat.

Then the future Chairman took the girl with him up the hill, to where the client he was on his way to visit lived on the top floor of a grand house. This man was a business associate of the well-known cloth merchant and philanthropist Heiman-Jarecki. Rumkowski told the man that if he knew the meaning of Jewish
tsdóke
, he would at once take care of this orphan girl, give her a nutritious meal and a warm bed to sleep in; the businessman, who by that stage realised death might be his fate if he refused, dared do nothing but follow Rumkowski’s instructions.

From that day, Rumkowsi’s life changed dramatically.

Reinvigorated, he acquired a dilapidated estate building in Helenówek just outside Łódź, and set up a home for orphaned children. His intention was that no Jewish child would have to grow up without food, a place to live, and at least some rudimentary schooling. He read a lot, and his reading now included for the first time works by the founding fathers of the Zionist movement, Ahad Haam and Theodor Herzl. He dreamt of creating free centres, where children could not only work the soil like proper kibbutznikim but also learn simple crafts in preparation for the vocational colleges that awaited them when they eventually left the homes.

He acquired the funding to run his
Kinderkolonie
from various sources, including the American–Jewish aid organisation JDC, the Joint Distribution Committee, which donated freely and abundantly to all manner of charitable institutions in Poland. He raised the rest of the money the same way he sold life insurance. He had his methods.

So here’s Mr Death again. But this time it’s not life insurance he’s selling, it’s sponsorship, for the upkeep and improvement of orphan children. He has names for all his children. They are called Marta, Chaja, Elvira and Sofia Granowska. He has photographs of them in his wallet. Small, bandy-legged three- and four-year-olds, with one hand thrust in their mouths, while the other gropes the air for some invisible adult.

And there’s no escaping behind kitchen curtains for the prospective policyholders this time. Mr Death has found himself a profession that means he can set himself above life and death. He says it is every Jew’s moral duty to give to the weak and needy. And if the donor does not give what he demands, he threatens to do all he can to blacken that person’s name.

His
Kinderkolonie
grew and flourished.

Six hundred orphan children were living in Helenówek the year before the war, and they all saw Rumkowski as a father; they all greeted him joyfully whenever he took a trip out to see them and came driving up the long avenue. He would have his jacket pockets full of sweets, which he sprinkled over them like confetti, to make sure it was they who ran after him and not him after them.

But Mr Death is Mr Death, whatever coat he chooses to wear.

There is a particular kind of wild beast, he once told the Green House children. It is woven from little bits of all the animals the Lord ever created. This beast’s tail is forked, and it is to be seen walking on four legs. It has scales like a snake or a lizard and teeth as sharp as a wild boar. It is unclean; its belly drags on the ground. Its breath is as hot as fire and burns everything around it to ashes.

It was a wild beast like that which came to us in the autumn of 1939.

It changed everything. Even people who had previously lived peacefully side by side became part of the body of that wild beast.

The day after German tanks and military vehicles rolled into Plac Wolności in Łódź, a group of SS men, drunk on cheap Polish vodka, went along the main road, Pietrowska Street, dragging Jewish tradesmen from their shops and cabs. Cheap Jewish labour was needed somewhere, it was said. The Jews were not even given time to pack their belongings. They were rounded up into big groups, ordered to form columns and marched off in various directions.

Those who ran businesses quickly closed their shops. All those families who were able to barricaded themselves in their homes. The occupying German authorities then issued a decree allowing the Gestapo access to all homes in which Jews were hidden, or were suspected of concealing their wealth. Anything of value was confiscated. Anyone who protested or offered resistance was forced to perform some humiliating task in full public view. A senior Gestapo officer walked along the street, spitting. He was followed by three women, who were forced to fight each other to be the first to lick up his saliva. Other women were put to cleaning the city’s public toilets with their own toothbrushes and underwear. Jewish men, young and old, were harnessed to wagons and carts fully loaded with stones or refuse and forced to haul them from one place to another. Then to unload them, and then to load the whole lot back on again. Ordinary Poles stood silently alongside – or gave stupid cheers.

Jewish Community Council members tried to negotiate with those now holding power; collectively and individually, they made vigorous representations to the German city commissioner, Albert Leister. Leister finally agreed to receive a certain Dr Klajnzettel at the Grand Hotel, where he was having a meeting with Friedrich Übelhör, the chief of police. Dr Klajnzettel was a lawyer, and brought with him a long list of expropriations of Jewish land and property that had occurred since the German invasion.

There was a large walnut tree in front of the hotel. After twenty minutes, Klajnzettel was escorted from the hotel by two SS men, who took a long rope, tied the doctor by the ankles and knees and hoisted him up, leaving him hanging upside down from the tree. Around the tree, a crowd of Polish men and women had gathered, and they were at first horrified, but then began to laugh at Klajnzettel, writhing upside down in the tree. There were also a few Jews among the crowd, but no one dared to intervene. Some unoccupied soldiers on guard outside the hotel began throwing stones at Klajnzettel to make him stop screaming and yelling. After a while, some of the Poles in the crowd joined in. In the end, a hail of stones was flying into the tree and the man dangling there like a bat, his own coattails over his face, was no longer moving.

One of those who witnessed the stoning of Dr Klajnzettel was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. He had his own memory of where stoning could lead, and what was more, he thought he knew something about the nature of the monster that seemed to have absorbed the city’s Polish inhabitants into its rough, lizard skin. He thought he knew that when the Germans spoke of Jews, they were speaking not of human beings, but of a potentially useful though basically repulsive raw material. A Jew was a deviation in himself; the very fact of a Jew asserting some kind of individuality was a monstrosity. Jews could only be referred to in
collective
form. In fixed numbers. Quotas, quantities. This was how Rumkowski thought:
To make the monster understand what you meant, you yourself had to start thinking like the monster. See not one, but a larger number.

At that point, he applied by letter to Leister. He was careful to underline that the letter expressed his
personal
understanding, which was therefore not necessarily shared by the other members of the Łódź
kehila
. But the letter nonetheless contained a proposal:

If you need seven hundred workers, turn to us: we will give you seven hundred workers.

If you need a thousand, then we will give you a thousand.

But do not spread terror among us. Do not tear men from their jobs, women from their homes, children from their families.

Let us live quietly and in peace – and we promise to assist you as far as possible.

Then somebody did listen to Rumkowski at last, after all.

On 13 October 1939, Albert Leister issued a proclamation that he had dissolved the old
kehila
of Łódź and in its place appointed him, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, to the position of Chairman of a new, governing Council of Elders, answerable only to him.