The Emperor of Lies (42 page)

Then the barriers of wood and barbed wire gradually began to close in on them, and the tram started to climb up the ‘dead’ Aryan corridor that ran along Zgierska Street. One of the passengers must have spoken to the driver by then, because against all the rules, the tram stopped at Bałuty Square, and the Chairman got off. And the tram gave a ding of its bell and set off again with terror-struck faces staring out of its illuminated windows, and the Chairman walked towards his ghetto, thinking of Biebow and the promise the man had given him:

Aber guter Arbeiter – Musterarbeiter müssen es sein.

Opinion would subsequently differ as to when the last wave of deportations from the ghetto actually began. Whether it was in June 1944, when Mayor Otto Bradfisch gave orders for the final evacuation of the ghetto, or at the start of February, as soon as the authorities suddenly demanded that 1,500 strong, fit men register for ‘work outside the ghetto’. (An order which, when not immediately followed, was raised to 1,600 men and then to 1,700.) Or did the deportations in actual fact start as early as that chill grey, misty December morning in 1943, when the Praeses
presented himself to the German guards at Bałuty Square after having vanished from the ghetto without trace for a whole day and night?

He came empty-handed, but he still had something with him that he had not had when he left.

That was what some people thought, anyway.

Now Rumkowski was not known for slacking when there were things that needed to be done. Scarcely two hours after the tram deposited him at Bałuty Square, he paid a visit to
Betrieb Sonnabend
at 12 Jakuba Street. The cobblers there had just downed tools to protest against their dreadful working conditions, and refused to eat their soup despite Director Sonnabend’s entreaties. Rumkowski was scarcely through the factory gates before he went up to one of the strikers and knocked him to the ground. He punished the other cobblers by extending their working day by two hours every evening, and he took the ringleader to the Central Jail where he had him flogged in front of all the other prisoners.

It was a pattern that would be repeated all through that spring. If you stole the tiniest stump of hemp rope, or even just a couple of nuts or screws, you were mercilessly hauled off to the Central Jail. In previous years it would have been a disaster to have so many able-bodied people in the ghetto behind bars. But not any more. On an inspection of the jail just a few weeks into the new calendar year, the Chairman referred to ‘his’ prisoners as a
store of usable human material
that could serve as a
reserve
in bad times. There was much deliberation in the ghetto over what the Chairman could possibly mean by this, and in particular, which bad times he had in mind. It was not long before the announcement was made that everyone had somehow known to be coming:

Proclamation No. 408:
1,500 men for work outside the ghetto

On the instructions of Amtsleiter Biebow, 1,500 men are to be sent away for manual labour outside the ghetto. The workers in question shall have physical and mental capacities that will expedite their training for various purposes. No large items of luggage are permitted. The workers in question are, however, to bring shoes and winter clothing.

Exemption from this summons is granted to workers at those factories and workshops deemed by the Trades Commission to be indispensable for the production of goods in the ghetto, and to the following sectors:

1./ Dry-cleaning and cleansing

2./ Gas department

3./ Empty bottle depot

Workers in all other sections are to report from tomorrow at 8 a.m. to the former out-patient’s clinic at 40 Hamburgerstrasse for examination and inspection by a medical commission appointed for the purpose.

Litzmannstadt-Ghetto, Tuesday 8 February 1944
M Ch. Rumkowski. Eldest of the Jews

No one reading this proclamation could avoid thinking back to the
szpera
operation, eighteen months previously. Admittedly the Chairman came round and assured them it was all different this time, and
only
to do with work (what had it been before, then?), that all those who went would be
out of danger
. But if he had not told the truth last time around, why should anyone believe him now? What was more, persistent rumours insisted that the ghetto would no longer be under civilian rule, and that all the industries in the ghetto were going to be bought up by a newly established, SS-run company called Ostindustrie-Gesellschaft, which intended to send away all the Jews unfit for work, regardless of age, meaning in practice they would turn the ghetto into a concentration camp. The Praeses of the ghetto had, moreover, apparently agreed to this plan, in fact he was even said to support it, since it gave him the chance to get rid of his enemies once and for all and to take charge of the ghetto again.

That was why nobody responded to the summons when it actually came.

Two days later, the morning of 10 February 1944, only thirteen of the required 1,500 workers had come forward for medical examinations at Hamburgerstrasse.

Two days later, the number had risen to fifty-one.

The rest failed to appear.

The workers involved did not arrive at their places of work either, not even turning up to fetch their daily soup ration. The Chairman threatened to withdraw their workbooks and block their ration cards. But even that did not help.

On the morning of 18 February 1944
it was
reported that a total of 653 men were now interned in the Central Jail. Even if one included all those who were already incarcerated there for other reasons, it was still not enough to fill the first transport of 750 men that the authorities were demanding.

The same day, the Chairman declared a ghetto-wide curfew.

Overnight, all the factories were sealed, all the distribution points were closed, and the men of the Sonder went from house to house. Apartments, cellars and attic storerooms were broken into and searched, and those who were not on any of the exemption lists, or who could not produce any valid work permits, were summarily taken away to the Central Jail. People said it was just like it had been during
di groise shpere
. Only this time, the Jews themselves had done all the dirty work. There was not a single German soldier, not a single German weapon to be seen anywhere.

*

There had been a time when Jakub Wajsberg had had no other way of earning his keep than to dig for coal on the site of the old brickworks on the corner of Łagiewnicka and Dworska Streets, where he had to compete not only with hundreds of other children but also with starving adults who prowled the site, hoping to steal the coal sacks from the doggedly labouring children. (Sometimes Adam Rzepin helped by keeping watch for him from the roof of the works, sometimes not.)

But all that had changed now.

Because for the past couple of months, Jakub had been the fortunate owner of a small barrow: a simple cart with two stiff wheels that could only be moved by means of a shaft or a trace. In the barrow he kept the tools his uncle Fabian Zajtman used before the war in his puppet-making workshop on Gnieźnieńska Street. Awls, hammers and chisels; everything you could possibly need to sharpen a knife or bend a piece of metal into a crowbar.

Jakub Wajsberg went from yard to yard offering such services for sale. He also carried with him the glove puppets and marionettes his uncle had made. His original intention had been to sell the puppets, or at least the material they were made of – the fabric, the wood, the wood shavings and the metal wire would certainly have their uses. But then he did not need to, because with the help of the barrow, his father had managed to get his
Ressort-Leiter
to agree to let Jakub help transport things for the carpentry workshop.

It was all thanks to the barrow.

This was the time, the late winter and early spring of 1944, when the ghetto began production of the
Behelfshäuser
ordered by the armaments ministry in Berlin. These were to be houses for German families whose homes had been reduced to ashes and rubble during the Allied bombing raids. All the parts for the emergency housing were to be prefabricated in the ghetto. Not only the famous Heraklite panels (whose miraculous mixture of cement and wood pulp had been eulogised by Biebow) but also the doors, gables and roof trusses of the houses. Never before in the four-year history of the ghetto had the pace of work been so intensive or the production rate so high. The factories involved introduced a three-shift system; saw-blades and planing machines were not still for a single hour of the day; and once the stamp of the Central Labour Office had landed in your work log, nobody asked who you were or where you came from; you were thrown straight into the job. Since Jakub had a barrow, he was put to work at the timber yard at Bazarowa Street, from where, every day, hundreds of cubic metres of timber had to be taken first to the sawmill at Drukarska, then to the various cabinet-makers in Pucka and Urzędnicza Streets.

These were the strangest of days in the ghetto.

The ghetto Jakub had grown up in was a crowded, noisy place. Now it was as if sheets of ominous silence were spreading across whole areas. Jakub might stop with his barrow in the middle of a normally overpopulated street, and all he could hear was the hollow sound of raindrops pattering against a tarpaulin awning, and then the rain itself, rising like a whisper from the wet ground beneath. When had it ever been so silent around him that he had been able to make out the almost inaudible murmur of falling rain?

The only people outside on days like these would be the men of the Sonder. They were posted on every street corner, standing guard with their hands behind their backs and their tall boots planted far apart. Sometimes singly, sometimes in groups of four or six – as if they were preparing to storm a whole neighbourhood. Quite often they would be dragging someone, a man, or something that had once been a man but that now looked more like one of Zajtman’s puppets, with legs dangling limply from its body: yet another of the many thousand who preferred to stay hidden in woodsheds and coal cellars rather than report for labour duties as ordered by the Chairman.

And if Jakub happened to stop with his barrow in a place where a police raid had just taken place, the Sonder would overpower him, too. Their faces were wrecked by the violence to which they daily subjected others, filled with dictatorial scorn and an obscure brand of shame:

Rozejść się, rozejść się –

Get yourself off home! Go home!

To him as an eleven-year-old, this was incomprehensible. How could it be that spots of such unreal silence could exist in the very places where the shrill scraping and cutting of saw-blades and planes continued without a break, hour after hour, and people ran themselves breathless getting from one work station to the next? How could two workers bend down in unison to lift the two ends of a wide pack of boards, just as a third man was carried out between them, a battered, bloody head between two strong, uniformed arms? And nobody saw, nobody took any notice at all.

From out of this unfathomable landscape of noise and silence, Bajgelman’s carriage came grinding into view on its reluctant wheel axles.

The piano tuner, who had as usual been perched precariously on top of the mountain of props at the back, jumped down into the sawmill yard and whisked the tarpaulin aside with the same exaggerated flourish he might have used to open a stage curtain. Under a red cloth cover stood a piano, and piled on top of it and lying all round it were tubas and trombones, their mouthpieces stifled by mattresses and old sofa stuffing, and their shiny valves and keys tucked up in dirty rags like children with colds. A double bass in an oilcloth shroud. Violins in their cases, stacked one on top of the other like coffins.

There was something predatory about the piano tuner’s face as he told them about the German youth orchestra, its members drawn exclusively from the Hitler-Jugend, which had been set up a few weeks back in Litzmannstadt, and that its leaders had demanded that their instruments come from the city’s rich
Judengebiet
. As soon as he received this ‘offer’, Biebow had ordered the Chairman to issue a decree that all musical instruments were to be handed in immediately to the compulsory purchase centre at Bleicherweg. An official German valuer had then been sent in from Litzmannstadt. He had divided the instruments into three categories – worthless, unusable and acceptable – and only agreed to pay a few symbolic marks for the third group; and never before had conductor Bajgelman cried as much as he did when a violin made by an apprentice of the eighteenth-century master Guarneri, worth at least several thousand marks, was taken out of his hands for about twenty worthless
rumkies
.

The fact that people are starving and dying or being rounded up and deported you can endure. But what do you do with the silence, what do you do with all this dreadful silence?

*

The ninth of March is Purim. It is also Chaim Rumkowski’s birthday. But the Praeses of the ghetto stays in bed that day and lets it be known he will not be receiving visitors, though he will accept birthday greetings by post. These should bear the special stamps that
Pinkas the Forger
has produced to mark the double celebration.

It seems the Chairman is reverting to some of his earlier airs and graces.

Bajgelman’s theatre troupe will have to refrain from instrumental birthday tributes this year, as there are no longer any instruments in the ghetto. Mrs Grosz will have to perform her song of congratulation to the accompaniment of whatever is to hand: wooden mallets, vibrating saw blades,
menażki
and clattering broom handles. Afterwards, Jakub Wajsberg stages an improvised Purim play with some of Fabian Zajtman’s puppets. He uses the edge of the cart as a stage and the vivid red camouflage cover from Bajgelman’s piano as a curtain that can be raised and lowered.

The Hungry Rabbi of Włodawa is given the role of
loyfer
, the one who introduces the whole show. The Hungry Rabbi of Włodawa was one of Fabian Zajtman’s favourite puppets. Wherever he went with his puppet theatre, he would always take the Hungry Rabbi with him; sometimes the Hungry Rabbi would introduce the whole performance, while at other times he just took one of the roles in the play.

The Hungry Rabbi of Włodawa lives at the very top of the town’s synagogue, in an attic room with a sloping roof, a bed, a small table and a wood-burning stove. From this elevated position (on stage he is now seen climbing in through the attic window) he explains he served as rabbi in Włodawa for twenty years and has not been given a crust of bread to eat since. When he asks the Eldest of the Parish why he has never received any bread, the Eldest replies that it is because the rulers of the
kehillah
do not like what he preaches. But the Hungry Rabbi of Włodawa is carrying a sack. It is the same sack that Jakub always carries, the one in which he keeps all Fabian Zajtman’s puppets. And now the Hungry Rabbi asks the audience if they would like him to open the sack to see what’s inside. And the audience laughs and shouts and calls out
yes, yes . . . !
(they know Jakub and his sack); and from the sack the Hungry Rabbi of Włodawa produces a rare oriental plant which, when burnt, gives off a special kind of smoke that works as a
vundermitl
(meanwhile Jakub has started a fire to illustrate this, and smoke is billowing up from under the cart). When people stick their heads into the smoke it is as if their minds are being distorted, Jakub explains, making them believe that everything they are told is true, that the Persian king Ahasveros wishes the people of Israel well, and that they have nothing to fear from the evil Haman.