The Emperor of Lies (6 page)

‘And what do you expect me to do about
it?’ repeated the Chairman impatiently.

But Mr Morski was far too preoccupied
by his own difficulties even to listen. ‘I suppose we’ll have to stand them on
end,’ he said. ‘If we stand the bodies on end instead of stacking them on top of
each other, they’ll take up less space.’

But now the
Praeses
of the ghetto had had enough. He
pushed his way through the Secretariat’s sea of industrious telephonists and
typists, threw open the door and yelled to Kuper to get the carriage ready at
once. Then he was taken the short distance to Jakuba Street. Mr Wiśniewski met
him at the door, rubbing his hands together, though it was not clear whether
this was from cold or from a desire to show the Chairman into his factory as
soon as possible.

The striking seamstresses sat
obediently in their places at their workbenches, looking up at Mr Chairman
expectantly.

Wiśniewski
: I gave them a beating.

The
Chairman
: I beg your pardon?

Wiśniewski
: I gave them a beating with my stick. Those who wouldn’t
work, that is.

The
Chairman:
But my dear Mr Wiśniewski, I don’t understand how you
imagine you can take such liberties; if anyone is to do any beating, it is
I!

And whether it was David Wiśniewski’s
burning red ears at that moment, or the strange atmosphere in the freezing
factory building, where Wehrmacht uniforms marched in rows along the far wall (a
whole army of brown tailor’s dummies, admittedly nothing but chests and trunks,
but all on the march!), suddenly it was as if inspiration struck the old man,
and before anybody knew it, before anybody could rush forward to offer a
supporting arm or elbow, the Chairman was up on one of the rickety benches,
speaking with clenched fist held high, for all the world like one of those
socialist agitators he had just been condemning; and the speech he made was
subsequently acknowledged by all those present to have been one of his most
stirring ever:

You
are the first to condemn me, you women – you may take the part of all those
agitating against me. But tell me honestly: what would you have thought of
me if you had known that I only favoured the few in the ghetto and forced
the rest to work for slave wages . . . !

Every hour, I am focused exclusively on what is best for the ghetto. Order
and calm in our workplaces is the only salvation for us
all . . . !

(Shame on those who think otherwise!)

Don’t you know that it is the GERMAN MILITARY POWERS you and I and all of
us are working for; have you considered that for a moment? And what do you
think would happen if at this very second – right now, as I am speaking –
German soldiers rushed in and took you at gunpoint to an assembly point for
deportation?

What
would you say to your poor parents, your husbands, your children . . .
?

[The
women crouched behind their workbenches.]

From
today, I am imposing a WORK BAN at this and all other workplaces in the
ghetto where agitation and rebellion have occurred.

MR
WIŚNIEWSKI! SEE THAT ALL WORKERS ARE IMMEDIATELY REMOVED FROM THESE
PREMISES. SEAL THE FACTORY GATES!

No
rations will be distributed from this point on. All strikers will surrender
their identity cards and work logs. Only when you accept the fact that
whatever serves the ghetto’s best interests is also in your best interests
are you welcome back to your former places of work!

The strikers held out for six days.

On 30 January, Rumkowski let it be
officially known that the factory gates stood open again for those who pledged
to accept existing conditions. All the strikers went back to work, and the whole
story could have ended there.

But it did not end there.

Two days after the strike was called
off, on 1 February 1941, Rumkowski took his revenge. In another speech, this
time to the ghetto’s
resort-laiter
, he
announced his intention to have deported from the ghetto all ‘vermin and
disturbers of the peace’
²
who could be proved to have taken part
in the strikes. Among the 107 people whose names went on the list that day were
some thirty workers from the joinery workshop in Drukarska, and the same number
from Urzędnicza Street.

One of those who was ‘sacked’ and left
the joinery on Drukarska Street that day was thirty-year-old cabinetmaker Lajb
Rzepin.

Lajb Rzepin had taken part in the
strike action, even been one of the workers who barricaded themselves in the
upstairs rooms and thrown things at the police.

But Lajb Rzepin’s name never featured
on any of the deportation lists.

On 8 March 1941 – the same day the
first transport of forcibly ejected workers left the ghetto – Lajb Rzepin
started a new job at Winograd’s
Kleinmöbelfabrik
in Bazarowa. Around him at the long workbench, where he stood with his
gluing tools, you could have heard a pin drop. No one raised their eyes from the
work of their hands, no one dared look the traitor in the eye.

From that day, it was as if treachery
began to cast its long shadows into the ghetto, Jew against Jew; no worker could
be sure that he would not have his work permit withdrawn the next day and be
expelled from the ghetto, without having done anything more than claim his right
to his own daily bread. But Chaim Rumkowski knew how words and rumour could run
through the ghetto. In his speech to his
resort-laiter
he had said that he never had more to give than there
was to give. But the very fact that he
gave
meant he was also entitled to
take
. Namely from
those wicked, irresponsible people who misappropriated the bread that everyone
had a right to demand.

In that respect, he said, quoting the
Talmud,
he stood on solid ground.

And so it was decreed from the highest quarters: everyone in the ghetto was to work.

By earning your keep, you also served the public good.

Yet there were many in the ghetto who couldn’t care less about the public good and preferred to provide for themselves. Some of them dug for coal behind the brickworks on the corner of Dworska and Łagiewnicka Streets. The yard behind the works had been used as a dump for years. It often took several hours just to get down to the coal level. First you had to dig down through a slimy mess of vegetable tops and other food waste that lay rotting under a covering of angrily buzzing flies. Then down through layer after layer of waterlogged sand and mud full of smashed crockery with shards that cut into your hands.

Among the dozen or so children who dug here were two brothers, Jakub and Chaim Wajsberg from Gnieźnieńska Street. Jakub was ten years old, and Chaim six. They had picks and shovels with them, but sooner or later they always had to resort to their hands. The wide jute sacks they wore tied over their shoulders then fell forward so they were hanging at stomach level, and all they had to do was stuff the prized black gold straight into the sacks.

Nowadays it was rare for anyone to come across coal from the brickworks’ own firing kilns. But if they were lucky, the mud might yield an old chunk of wood or rag, or something else, all covered in coal dust. If you put a rag like that in the stove, you could make the fire burn for at least a couple of hours longer, a good, evenly burning, settled fire; a rag like that fetched twenty or thirty pfennigs if you sold it down at Jojne Pilcer Square.

Jakub and Chaim usually worked as a team with two brothers from the tenement next door, Feliks and Dawid Frydman, but that was no guarantee they would be left to work in peace. All it took was for some of the adults who were also on the lookout for coal to come by their patch, and their coal sacks were gone in a flash. That was why the children had collectively employed Adam Rzepin to keep guard.

Adam Rzepin lived on the floor above the Wajsbergs and was known in the streets around Gnieźnieńska Street as
Ugly Adam
or
Adam Three-Quarters
, because his nose looked as if it had got squashed when he was born. He always used to say that his nose was crooked because his mother had got into the habit of twisting it every time he lied. But everyone knew that was a fib. Adam Rzepin lived alone with his father and his mentally retarded sister; nobody had ever seen a Mrs Rzepin.

All Adam could remember of the first years in the ghetto was the hunger, like a permanently aching wound in his belly. Just being watchman for young gold-diggers was not enough to assuage the pain of the wound in the long run. So on the fairly rare occasions when Moshe Stern came round to the brickworks and asked Adam to run an errand for him, Adam leapt at the chance and left his guard duties to take care of themselves.

Moshe Stern was one of the many thousand Jews who made a fortune after the ghetto was sealed off from the outside world by dealing in combustible material of all kinds. Most responsible fathers of families tried to build up a stock of coal or briquettes, which they kept locked up in various convenient places. Some of the locks could be picked – and then the desirable black gold was out on the market again. There was also money to be made from trading in minor timber items, such as old wooden furniture, kitchen cupboards and drawers, skirting boards and window frames, banisters and anything else that could be sawn up and bundled as firewood. In the summer months, the price of such bundles sank to about twenty pfennigs a kilo, but it went back up to two or three rumkies as winter approached. In other words, it was a matter of waiting for the demand. In the very worst winters, when even the coalmines were inaccessible, people quite literally made fires of whatever they sat and slept on.

Time after time, the police pounced on Moshe Stern. His mother tried to hide him in the drying attic above the old people’s home, where he was rumoured to have his secret stores. But the local police came and drove him out.

Rumour had it that Stern was aiming to become the new Zawadzki.

Zawadzki was the smuggler king of the ghetto. He was also known as ‘the tightrope walker’ because he was in the habit of escaping over the rooftops. It was the only way of gaining access to the ghetto from the Aryan parts of the town, because the buildings closest to the ghetto boundary had no underground water or waste pipes.

Perfumes, ladies’ soap; flour, sugar, rye flakes; canned goods, everything from German sauerkraut to pickled ox tongues: these were some of the items that found their way into the ghetto with Zawadzki as their intermediary. Late one evening in 1940, he was apprehended by the Jewish police on the Lutomierska side of the ghetto with a rucksack crammed with chocolate powder, cigarettes and ladies’ stockings. The police took him for interrogation to the headquarters of the first police district at Bałuty Square. When the Germans heard that the Jews had caught Zawadzki themselves, they rang for a car from the centre of Litzmannstadt. The Jewish officers realised this was the end for Zawadzki and asked him if he had a final request. He replied that he wished to go to the toilet. Two policemen escorted Zawadzki to the latrines out in the yard. They handcuffed Zawadzki to the latrine door and then stood guard outside, keeping a careful watch on the shoes clearly visible beneath the locked door. The policemen stood staring at Zawadzki’s shoes for a good hour. Then one of them plucked up the courage to break down the door. The shoes were still there, and the handcuffs, but no Zawadzki. An open roof hatch showed which way he had escaped.

Zawadzki the smuggler was a legend. Everybody talked about Zawadzki. But Zawadzki was a Pole – he came from the
Aryan
part of the town. And when he had been in the ghetto for as long as he wanted, he
got out again!
Whenever Adam Rzepin dreamt he was free, he dreamt he had a rope and a rucksack, like Zawadzki. He dreamt that one day he would hit the big time like Zawadzki, be something more in life than a mere
luftmentsh
.

Adam’s dream very nearly came true one morning when Moshe Stern sent one of his many messengers round to the brickworks, where he was at his usual post, keeping guard on the kids. The message was that there was
pekl
to be fetched.
Pekl
could be almost anything – a bundle, a packet, a consignment – from coal briquettes to dried milk. Adam Rzepin had learnt not to ask questions. But when he got to the address where he had been sent, some empty basement premises in Łagiewnicka Street, all he found there was Moshe Stern, no
pekl
.

Moshe Stern was a small man, but walked as if he were several sizes larger. When he handed out orders and instructions, he crossed his arms on his chest like a resolute bureaucrat. But not this time – Moshe Stern took two firm steps towards Adam Rzepin and gripped his shoulders. As always when he was worried or nervous, he licked his lips.

The parcel in question, he said, was to be delivered to ‘a very important person’. This person was so important that if the police stopped him or started asking questions, Adam was
in no circumstances
to reveal that he had been given the parcel by Moshe Stern. Could he promise that?

Adam promised.

Moshe said Adam was the only person in the ghetto he could rely on; then he handed him the parcel.

In the middle of the yard of the house in Gnieźnieńska Street there had once stood a chestnut tree with mighty roots and trunk and a huge crown that made the tree look as if it had found its way there from one of the grand avenues in Paris or Warsaw. Beneath the chestnut, puppet-maker Fabian Zajtman had his workshop: an adjoining pair of wooden sheds, so cramped that there was only room for the puppets inside. From long metal hooks along the roof and walls of the sheds hung rabbis with long
kapotes
and peasant women with headscarves, all equally smiling and helpless. In summer, when it was hot under the wooden roof, Zajtman preferred to sit out under the chestnut tree with his tools. There he sat among the children, carving puppet heads and watching the clouds drift across the pale-blue sky of the yard.
Do you know where the thunder goes to rest?
he had once asked Adam, there on a visit to the Wajsbergs, and had nodded meaningfully up into the crown of the tree, behind which the tall mass of dark clouds was gathering. From that day on, Adam had lived in permanent terror of what really lay hidden in the crown of the chestnut tree; particularly on hot days when the leaves hung motionless and the air was as hot as a baker’s oven in the narrow streets.

Fabian Zajtman had died just before the war. They found him lying sprawled across his workbench, almost as if the thunder had turned back in anger to smite the chisel and plane from his hand. There were many orthodox Jews around Gnieźnieńska Street who spat on the ground and said it was an abomination for a Jew to devote his time to idols as that Zajtman had done.

Then the Germans came; the wire surrounding the ghetto ran just outside Zajtman’s wooden huts and Mrs Herszkowicz,
die Hauswärtin
as she was now called, had the chestnut felled and split for firewood. She also had both Zajtman’s sheds sawn up.

Now I’ve got enough wood to see me through the war and even longer
, she boasted.

In Gnieźnieńska Street, people got used to the hole in the sky where the chestnut had once stood, but Adam couldn’t stop thinking about the tree and the thunder. Where would the thunder go now there was no chestnut to rest in? There were no trees in the ghetto. Adam imagined the thunder circling aimlessly, getting wilder and wilder in all its din. There was no relief from the perpetual crashing anywhere, no way out. On this side of the wire there was only one route to freedom, as Zawadzki had proved: it went
upwards
, though hatches and windows that didn’t exist or that one was forced to invent in order to get through.

Adam Rzepin stood with his parcel on a treeless plot of land not far from the tailor’s at 12 Jakuba and waited for the ‘very important person’ to show up.

The first person to put in an appearance was a very young man, wearing a hat and a suit, and an elegant, light-coloured gabardine raincoat that made Adam think of the American gangster films they used to show at the Bajka cinema before the war. The man could have been standing on a street corner anywhere in Europe if it had not been for the two others following him like a shadow. Two rugged men: they looked like
politsayen
, though they had no caps or armbands.

Have you got the goods?
asked the man in the light-coloured raincoat.

Adam nodded.

Only then did a fourth person step forward.

Adam Rzepin asked himself afterwards how it could be that he had immediately known the fourth man to be a German officer. The new arrival was dressed in civilian clothes, but the uniform he wore when on duty was still evident in the watchful way his whole body followed when he turned his head or looked to the side.

The man in the gabardine addressed him as Mr Stromberg. That meant he must be Kriminaloberassistent Stromberg, one of the most notorious police commanders in the whole ghetto. Stromberg was a
Volksdeutscher
, one of the Germans who had been living a settled life in Łódź long before the Nazis came.

Stromberg had a permanent smile on his face; but he moved as if wading through sewage. Stromberg did not as much as glance at Adam, just turned to the young man in the gabardine mac and repeated in his vaguely sing-song Polish:

Has he got the money?

And when his question elicited a confirming nod, Herr Kriminaloberassistent Stromberg finally seemed to relax inside his civilian clothes.

Adam interpreted this to mean that the moment had come to hand over his parcel; he gave it to the raincoat who passed it in turn to Stromberg, who immediately started tugging and ripping the paper like an impatient child at Hanukkah. A few moments later, he was holding a shiny gold link between his fingers. The raincoat hurriedly gestured to Adam, beseeching him to turn his back, the way you turn your back on a woman so as not to embarrass her as she gets dressed; then he swiftly thrust a ten-mark note into the palm of Adam’s hand.

Then they were both gone – the young Jew in the gabardine raincoat and the German police chief. Only the two guards remained, their hands threateningly at their hips, as if to assure themselves that Adam was not following the other men.

It was several months before Adam discovered the identity of the man in the raincoat who had sold gold objects to Stromberg. By then, the whole ghetto was talking about Dawid Gertler, the young Jewish police commander who seemed to be on such a good footing with all the officers of the occupying force.

Adam was in the queue for the baker’s in Piwna Street. Every bakery was by now baking its own bread, and it always went fast; you had to get up early to be sure of getting your ration.

In Piwna Street. Bread queue. Some
dygnitarzy
push their way to the front.

The young man in the gabardine raincoat is suddenly there again. As before, he is accompanied by two bodyguards. There are sounds of protest from the queue. The bodyguards step resolutely forward, ready to wield their batons to silence the noisemakers. But this time the normal course of events fails to unfold. It is the men in suits from Rumkowski’s
Beirat
who have to give way.

‘Even in the ghetto, those who have had to wait longest will get their bread,’ says the man in the raincoat.

Gertler, Gertler, Gertler . . . !
shout the people in the queue with their hands in the air, their heads straining forward as if they were cheering on a sports star.

And Dawid Gertler presses his hat to his chest and bows like a vaudeville artiste in a circus ring. Adam is not giving up his place in the queue at any price; nor does he raise his eyes, for fear of being recognised by the powerful man. Would the people in the bread queue have carried on applauding if they had known that the young Dawid Gertler was ready to sell their very souls as long as he could stay on intimate terms with the odious Germans?