The Emperor of Lies (52 page)

My Jews
, he says.

This is what we could have done.

We could have loaded you into lorries and deported the lot of you.

Aber so machen wir es nicht!
Nein, nein, nein . . . !

We do not want to use violence. There is no need.

All the Jews in the ghetto are safe and secure in our hands.

There is plenty of work in Germany, and there are still spare places on the trains.

Go home and think it over in peace and quiet, and then bring your children and other husbands or wives and report to Radegast Station first thing tomorrow morning.

We promise to do our best to make existence as tolerable for you as possible.

Rosa Smoleńska stands among the others who have gathered around the back of the lorry to listen to the two men. She has in her hand the list of the Praeses children she has compiled by referring to the prohibited adoption files in Miss Wołk’s office. The list includes not only the names of the children themselves, but also the names of their ‘new’ parents, or their next of kin; and the names of the factories in which either Wołk or Rumkowski has been able to get them jobs, plus the names of the
kierownicy
who, like Mr Tusk, had been instructed to act as the children’s guardians.

She goes with her list from
resort
to
resort
. But the factory managers have long since lost track of which employees they have or do not have. The workers they once had have been exchanged for others long ago; either they, too, have been sold as souls; or they have been sold but then come back under a different name, or in another guise, because someone with greater power and influence has bought their freedom; or they have simply stopped turning up. There is a transport leaving the ghetto every day now. People think that if they can just stay hidden a bit longer, liberation may come. But in these last days, even the distinction between the dead and the living is dissolving. There are people who claim to have seen
neshomes
walking about the streets of the ghetto as large as life, neighbours or work colleagues who sold themselves and were deported from the ghetto, and whom everyone thought dead and gone for good, but who have now come back to demand what is rightfully theirs.

It is the eighth of August. Rosa Smoleńska is on her way back from the glove and sock factory in Młynarska Street when shots are fired close by. It is not the first time, but it is the first time it has sounded so close.

At first it does not seem too bad. A bang here and there, not continuous firing.

Then she sees that the whole street below is full of people. They seem to be issuing from everywhere: a viscous mass of human beings. For a time, the human mass appears to be at a complete standstill in front of her. Not because people are not moving fast enough, but because everyone is trying to move at once and therefore nobody is succeeding. People are pushing, barging, trying to elbow their way through. Some have their possessions with them. A basket of clothes and shoes; an enamel bowl full of household utensils; a dangling milk can, swinging to and fro like a cowbell. In the midst of all these silent or shouting, open-mouthed or grimly dogged faces, she catches sight of Mrs Grabowska, making her way forward a few metres at a time, lugging an enormous suitcase.

It is from Mrs Grabowska that she hears that the Germans have finally moved into the ghetto.

Not from the fringes as everyone had feared and been talking about for months, but straight into the heart of the ghetto: Łagiewnicka, Zawiszy Czarnego, Brzezińska and Młynarska: all four streets in the middle of the ghetto are blocked by German military vehicles. The police have set up provisional
Schutzpunkte
and rolled out barbed wire, running east from Bałuty Square, and special SS units have already started to enter the blocks of flats in Zawiszy Czarnego and Berka Joselewicza Streets.

‘We can’t get back,’ says Mrs Grabowska.

And who is the first man to enter the cordoned-off zone but Biebow’s henchman, the Praeses? The soldiers standing guard let him pass, as a mine-clearance company would let through a seeker dog. He walks alone, without bodyguards this time, as if to underline the gravity of his purpose. Mrs Grabowska saw him herself, standing in the doorway of someone’s home, pleading. As if in some farcical reversal of the story of the paralysed woman Mara – upright, perverted and proud – he tells the waiting families that this is their last chance to leave. He says he can give them his
personal
guarantee that not a hair on their heads will be harmed.

*

Rosa spends the night with someone Mrs Grabowska knows, who lives at the top of one of the old tenements in Młynarska. From the window of the flat, she sees German army vehicles arriving from Litzmannstadt to reinforce the ghetto roadblocks. File after file of heavy lorries drive in with wire mesh fencing and rolls of barbed wire on the back.

She is with some twenty people who have not yet reported for departure, sitting in a single room, all with their faces hidden behind hunched shoulders and drawn-up knees. None of them have anything to eat or drink. Many of them have not even had time to grab their cooking pots.

All Rosa has is the list of Praeses children, along with a few photographs she has saved. One of them was taken in the kitchen of the Green House. At one end of the long row of shiny saucepans and vats of soup stands Chaja Meyer in her cook’s hat and white apron, and behind her sit all the children in a row, also wearing white, the youngest with bibs; all bent over their bowls of soup, as if the aim of the picture were to display their deloused heads. In another photograph, the children are lined up in front of the fence out at the Big Field. They are all seen in profile, standing with their hands on each other’s shoulders like a ballet company or as if about to march off.

But they are just pictures. Shaven-headed boys; girls with plaits.

They could be any old children.

That morning, Rumkowski has had a new proclamation printed. Copies of it have been pasted up on every house wall from Młynarska Street all the way down to the sewage pools in Dworska:

Proclamation Regarding Relocation of the Ghetto
All factories to remain closed:

From Thursday 10 August 1944, all factories in the ghetto are to remain closed. A maximum of ten people may stay behind in each factory to pack and ship goods.

Clearance of the western section of the ghetto:

From Thursday 10 August 1944, the western part of the ghetto (on the far side of the bridge) is to be cleared of all residents and workers. All its residents and workers are to move to the eastern part of the ghetto.

From Thursday 10 August 1944, no provisions will be supplied to the western parts of the ghetto.

Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 9 August 1944
Mordechai Ch. Rumkowski
Eldest of the Jews

Watching from the window the following day, she sees long columns of people on their way out to Radogoszcz. They look peaceful, despite the enormous burdens they are carrying. Somewhere from under the forest of rucksacks with blankets and mattresses bound to them, and collections of pots and pans all tied together, a woman steps forward and grabs a bunch of parsley from an allotment as they go by, and passes it to another woman, a friend further back. She wonders where they have all come from, these people; whether the authorities have begun emptying whole factories. She also wonders if she dare run down and show the names and pictures of the Praeses children to the people marching by, in the hope that someone may recognise a name or a face.

But she does not dare. The marching column is accompanied on either side by local police, keeping strict watch. The police did not stop the woman picking parsley, but they would definitely react to someone who came and disturbed the pace and order of the march.

It is another whole day before she feels bold enough to venture out. This being summer, darkness falls late. And when the daylight has faded enough for the street below to be visible only as a thin ribbon through the bluish gloom, the moon rises into the sky and once again it is almost as bright as day. She tries to stay close to the walls and shadows of buildings, to keep out of the light; but down in Zgierska Street there is no more darkness left to hide in. The full moon straddles the narrow gap between the two halves of the ghetto, and beneath its huge disc, the wooden bridge is black with the jostling crowd of people crossing it. As she gets closer, she can also hear the sound: the drumming of thousands of
trepki
tramping across the bare boards of the bridge.

She knows at that moment that there is no point looking for the children any more. At the western end of the bridge at Lutomierska Street there are guards, and they grab and haul aside anybody trying to push their way over the bridge against the tide of people. And there is no point asking those who are emerging on the eastern side with their bags and packs.

She sits down on the worn stone steps of a building entrance in Zgierska Street and tries to think. What is she to do if she no longer has freedom of movement in the ghetto?

And what is she to say to the old man if she can’t bring him the children?

They were there, they were all there, but they disappeared.

Or:
they were all there; but I couldn’t reach them.

She simply can’t say it.

*

New day, new dawn. Once more she makes her way out to Marysin. All along Marysińska Street she passes a line of trailers, stationed at neat, twenty-metre intervals. Halfway up to the Chairman’s residence, the Germans have erected a road block, where a handful of SS men stand joking with the guard. A few individuals and bunches of stragglers, mostly elderly men and women, are walking up the road with their luggage. They look so much more vulnerable to her now they are no longer part of the marching convoy, and the SS men notice it, too. One of the police officers suddenly breaks into a run (his long coat opening like an umbrella over his tall boots), shoulder belt jangling, to catch up with one of the Jews on the road. – What has he done? Has he brought too much baggage? Is he too close to the edge of the road? – Then all at once, all five policemen are bunching round the now prone Jew. Through their laughing, jeering voices come the dull thump of boot toes on a soft body and the man’s desperate cries for help.

At that moment there is a strange, whistling sound, and all the air is torn from her lungs. She sees the sentry at the barrier ahead take two steps forward and hold up both hands as if to ward something off; the whistle grows to a roar, and beneath her running feet, the ground she was standing on becomes a shaking board.

She sees herself lying in the ditch on top of the battered man; sees the smoke from the explosion rising above the soft straps of his rucksack. Then someone reaches down to her from above, grasps her under the arms and pulls her out onto the road again. It is Samstag. (She would have known him even if he had emerged from her deepest dreams.) What is he doing here? That is all she has time to think.

Run
, is all he says, pointing to the houses further down Marysińska Street.

Somehow she finds her feet. She still feels as though she is on the deck of a ship that is constantly tilting and pitching beneath her. The buildings on either side of the road seem to be sliding to and fro, too; one moment they are enveloped in a cloud of thick, billowing smoke, the next they are fully visible again. Once she gets in through the front entrance, she realises it is the place she stayed the night before.

Then, the stairwells and flats had been full to overflowing with people. Now there is not a soul to be seen, only some of the things they have left behind: blankets, mattresses, pots and pans. She goes upstairs to the room on the second floor. The windows of the flat are wide open. When she looks out, she sees the long row of trailers she passed earlier, and it dawns on her that the trailers are not waiting there ready for the operation, but that the operation
is already complete
. The SS commandos must have come through and cleared the whole district that night, while she was gone. That is why there are no people left. That is why the road block is right at the top of the street.

Werner Samstag materialises again, in the doorway behind her.

With an expression of sympathy so lofty and distant that it seems more like sarcasm, he looks down at the blood all over the front of her dress.

Then he bends down to her. For a moment she is convinced he is about to kill her, but he just takes her under the arms again and slings her over his shoulder with surprising ease. Only now, hanging head-down over his shoulder, does she become aware that she is still holding the list of Praeses children in one hand. In the other, clutched equally tightly, she has the handkerchief containing the scraps of bread she was saving in case she came across any of the children again. She finds herself being carried down the cluttered stairs and out into the ghetto once more.

But it is a ghost town now.

All around, doors hang open, banging to and fro. Empty, gaping windows.

It is as if a great wind has surged through everything, but a wind of no defined dimensions or direction, a wind that simply shapes the emptiness all around without touching anything.

Although it is now lighter, the dawn sky is entirely black –

Clinging to Samstag’s back, at the edge of her field of vision she glimpses houses, fences and walls, flickering past with an even rhythm. They take the back way through everything. Samstag moves with animal litheness, loping between rows of outhouses and latrines, where the horrible smell hits her, only to be wafted aside a moment later by the sickly scent of once-flowering lilacs. For a minute or two, she thinks she can see the barbed-wire-topped walls of the Central Jail, and the cell block inside them. Then all at once, she knows where she is. They are in the forecourt of what was once the children’s hospital of the ghetto, and up on the crumbling wall of the building, the sign confirms it:

KINDERHOSPITAL DES ÄLTESTEN DER JUDEN

There is still evidence of the Central Labour Office’s big industrial exhibition. In the entrance hall, the display cases are still standing on their plinths, and on the floor, surrounded by broken glass and bits of torn curtain fabric, drifts of posters showing statistics form piles and fans: pathetic now, with dirty footprints clearly superimposed on the beautifully ordered columns of figures.

From the back building, a basic, single-storey affair with rough planks over the windows, a set of stone steps with un-bricked walls plunges virtually straight into the base of the building; then a narrow basement passage seems to run like a tunnel under the building itself. Rosa can feel the dank draught of cold from the stone-and-earth walls and instinctively ducks her head to avoid hitting it on the ceiling. But Samstag is careful. As if she were no more than an oversized doll, he shifts her down onto one arm. In his other hand he has an arc light. He must have reached for a switch without her noticing, for suddenly the walls and ceiling and floor of the cellar passage around her are illuminated by a blindingly sharp light. Pots of paint, jars of solvent on shelves; tools laid out, sorted by shape and size. The remains of Pinkas Szwarc’s big printing press stands brooding in the middle of the floor. However did they get that great thing down here? And beyond the printing press, in a shelf beneath the low roof, there are musical instruments of very imaginable kind: a tuba, a trombone and (suspended from hooks screwed into wood panels) violins hanging by their necks from loops of finest piano wire.

But by then she has caught sight of the children from the Green House.

Their faces, lined up alongside each other like beads in an abacus, look pale, dazzled by the glaring light. She sees the piano tuner’s wizened face first. Behind that, like a copy of the photograph taken in the kitchen of the Green House: Nataniel; Kazimir; Estera; Adam.

All the children on the list are there. Including Debora Żurawska.

Rosa sees the girl look up quickly, and lower her eyes again in shame. And Rosa wants to say something, but the words she is groping for are now far out of reach. So she squeezes herself between low shelves, the mouthpieces of the hanging brass instruments, the sharp edge of a grinding machine. She has to do the last bit crawling, with her head drawn in, as loose sand and little stones from the roof above are trickling down the back of her neck. When she finally gets there, she opens out the handkerchief with the chunks of bread she has saved. She gives one of the crusts to Debora, who is sitting at the end; then tears up the rest of the bread with trembling hands and passes over roughly the same amount to each of the other children in the row – Nataniel, Kazimir, Estera – still incapable of uttering a single word.

Behind the children runs a low stone wall, with rocks jutting out of it that must once have been plastered over with cement. The cement must have come loose long ago. The mortar between the bricks underneath is also crumbling. The whole wall behind them will collapse before too long.

Samstag came
, says Nataniel, his voice as husky and rasping as the cement.

Samstag works for the police force now
, Estera fills in, a bit officiously (as always): as if the word
police
still had some value as an explanation.

But then, perhaps it does –
for them
.

She remembers a game the children used to play when they lived in the Green House: the forbidden game, Natasza used to call it. In the game, the children all pretended to be getting on with their usual activities. Natasza would be bent over her sewing basket, Debora playing the piano. One of the children was chosen to go out into the hall and shout:
Someone’s coming
. Whenever Kazimir was chosen, he would come back in and yell:
Churchill’s coming!
If Adam were the one chosen, he would come back in and shout
Roosevelt’s coming!

And they all had to go and hide. She remembers one occasion, before Dr Rubin put a stop to all such goings on: Kazimir had rolled himself up in the floor rug under the piano in the Pink Room, and then Werner Samstag came stumbling in with a saucepan on his head and a fish slice in his hand:

The Chairman’s coming . . . !

All around him, the children were sitting as if transfixed.

So
he
had always been the one who came and saved them at the last minute. When she finished handing out the bread and looked up again, she saw the cone of light from the arc lamp still hanging above the door, but there was no longer a body behind the light. The children must have seen Samstag go, but none of them seemed to have reacted. Samstag continued to come and go as he always had.

Debora took a handkerchief from the bodice of her dress, twisted it into a thin string, dampened one side of it with spit; then roughly clamped Rosa’s head between her own two, drawn-up knees, and began firmly but carefully wiping away the blood and dirt from her face. Rosa tried to wriggle free. She felt an urgent need to explain. The children did not know what the ghetto looked like outside this cramped cellar space; they did not know that all the streets round about were blocked off and that the Gestapo would soon be coming with their dogs. She tried to tell them this, but at the sight of Debora wiping her face with the expressionless look you might have while washing a cooking pot or saucepan, she gave up. Overcome with fatigue, she let her head sink impotently back into the girl’s lap.

‘You’ve got to trust me, Debora,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you?’

But Debora did not answer. Debora will never answer. Debora takes the coal shovel out of Mrs Grabowski’s hands or reaches out for the handle of the bucket of water they are carrying back from the well outside the Green House. But she will never answer:

Let me do that
, is all she says.
Seeing as I’m already up
.

Words that she lays before you just as one might produce an object, any old object behind which she can make herself invisible. Just as Debora left her rucksack with the comb and the mirror wrapped in linen cloth by the window in Brzezińska Street; or left behind the music for the musical revue at the Green House. Just as everything ever owned by anyone in the ghetto has been left behind, now and for evermore. Or just as Werner Samstag left behind – what? A big, white, blinding light still burning inside the cellar door that has been closed on them.

So in the end, only Rosa Smoleńska was left, as Debora bent over and wiped the blood and the pain from her face.

And so in the end, Rosa closed her aching eyes.

And so in the end, Rosa Smoleńska’s face was left behind as well.