The Emperor of Lies (17 page)

But how could anyone know what was really happening at all? In times like these, all anybody cared about was that their own soup bowl was filled, preferably with
two
ladlefuls; and that the thin slice of bread they ate would last them for at least an hour or two before the terrible hunger cramps came back.

There were evenings when Vĕra could hardly move, when cups and plates slipped out of her hands as if the latter were nothing more than two useless
objects
.

Martin and Josel helped her scrub the kitchen floor, which to her eyes looked permanently ingrained with grime. Together, they did the washing and hung it up to dry.

The aching persisted, even so. It was as if a deadening chill was biting into her joints, making every bone in her body sag and bend. At nights it felt as if her whole skeleton turned to a block of ice; a body of
pain
within what was left of her own, making her thoughts turn to places and things they would not voluntarily have dwelt on: to Marysin where Emelie and her family and thousands of other ghetto residents were shuffling through the snow with a hastily packed bare minimum in bundles and sacks on their backs, or tied round their waists.

On their way where? Nobody knew.

The resettlement operation continued.

In February, the Chairman was called to another meeting with the authorities and informed that the respite period was over and a further ten thousand Jews would have to leave the ghetto.

His Resettlement Commission was working on its lists round the clock. It just about managed to find the numbers for ten transports during February, but this still was not enough to reach the specified quota. Figures reported to the German administration of the ghetto in February indicated that ‘only’ 7,025 Jews had left the ghetto, as opposed to the agreed ten thousand.

The authorities expressed their distress at this dilatory behaviour and decided as a result to add what remained of the February quota to that for March, so the Chairman was ordered to arrange by 1 April, in addition to the ten thousand Jews
normally
demanded, three special transports of some three thousand.

The authorities’ displeasure also made itself felt in other ways:

There were alarming reports from Radogoszcz of deportees having their luggage taken from them before they boarded the trains. Those who did not immediately comply were beaten bloody by German guards and then thrust into the train by force.

So was all this business of carefully regulated numbers just camouflage, a trick to make people go to the assembly points voluntarily?

What was more, the deportations of February and March 1942 coincided with some of the coldest days the ghetto had ever seen. At the assembly points, stove-pipes and chimney-stacks cracked in the cold and people had to sleep on the floor with nothing to cover them but their clothes. In the second week in March, a violent storm swept in over north-eastern Europe, a cloud of driving snow and bitter cold. That week, nine people froze to death in a former schoolroom in Młynarska Street, waiting for a train that never came. The open trucks that had been shuttling to and fro between Radogoszcz Station and Bałuty Square with the baggage the deportees had been forced to leave behind now came back loaded with corpses, frozen stiff.

It was possible to appeal against deportation decisions.

The applicant had to present his petition to the Commission in person within five days of receiving his notification to leave. To be approved, an appeal had to be accompanied by documents from the employer to certify that the applicant had a job and his work was satisfactory. Such certificates could be bought in the ghetto for a couple of marks. There was also the option of paying a copyist, who would formulate the appeal using approved standard phrases.

This explains the awkwardly formal tone of some of them:

To the Resettlement Commission –
Re: Departure Notice NR VII/211-23

Most esteemed Resettlement Commission,

I hereby apply most sincerely to be granted respite from the instruction to leave on the part of myself, my wife Zora and my four children, and also my mother: Mrs Libkowicz, widow of Mr Paweł Libcowicz, machine operator. I am a professionally trained electrician with a number of years’ experience, and my wife Zora works as a hat-maker at Resort No. 14 in Brzezińska Street. Mr Viekl, her
resort-laiter
, has been very satisfied with her as a dutiful and competent worker, and in our family we have never been in trouble with the law but have each of us always honestly earned our daily bread, for which reason the departure notice has come as a bolt from the blue. I have heard our Praeses say several times that a workbook and a settled home life are the best guarantee of peace and quiet in the ghetto and so I wonder why we have reached a point where ordinary, honest workers are being punished.

I am most respectfully grateful for your attention and ask you, gentlemen of the Resettlement Commission, to please spare me and my wife and also my mother who after a long working life now suffers with her legs and is generally not in a fit state to take part in the resettlement.

Litzmannstadt Ghetto, 7/3 1942
Józef Libkowicz

By March, pressure on the Resettlement Commission had become so great that it was obliged to move to larger, more spacious premises in Rybna Street. The number of secretaries and administrative assistants was increased from four to some twenty, to deal with all the appeals. A telephonist was also engaged to answer enquiries, particularly from the German ghetto administration. Every morning, before the Commission’s offices opened at 8 a.m., a queue of over a hundred appellants, or
petenter
as they were called, would form, awaiting their turn at the counter.

In particularly tricky cases, Shlomo Hercberg was even known to make a personal visit to the applicants’ homes. There was a special expression for this in the ghetto. It was said that nobody escaped their
tnoyim
until they learnt to
kiss Hercberg
.

Tnoyim
– the marriage contract – was what they called the printed forms the Commission sent to those it selected for resettlement, giving the date and time when they were to present themselves at the assembly points. Hercberg could, as a last resort, agree to put off the departure date a little. But the price of such a postponement was high. The price for permission to stay in the ghetto for an unlimited period was, if that is imaginable, even higher, and payment in cash was always required.

Former cinema projectionist Shlomo Hercberg was well on his way to amassing a considerable fortune in a very short space of time. But something must have gone wrong with his calculations.

Or maybe someone with even better
pleytses
set about slandering him.

On the morning of 13 March 1942, Shlomo Hercberg’s success story came to an end. The Kripo raided two of Hercberg’s addresses: his city apartment in Drukarska Street and his summer house in Marysin. They also entered his offices in Młynarska Street and broke into the prisoner detention areas of the Central Jail, which Hercberg had locked and sealed. The list below details what the German criminal police found in the Cinema, in addition to the equivalent of 2,995 Reichsmarks in US dollars, stuffed in old shoeboxes, and artist Hirsch Szylis’s murals of ‘famous actors and naked women’, deemed by the German treasurer to be ‘of no value’:

70 kg bacon (salted)

60 kg ham (salted, dried, cured)

12 barrels sauerkraut

120 kg rye and wheat flour (in sacks)

150 kg sugar

24 boxes of sweets and ‘jellied fruits’

32 bottles of brandy + vodka

40 preserved ox tongues

1 crate of oranges

242 pkts ‘perfumed’ soap

262 tins shoe polish (sealed and unopened)

By this time, Adam Rzepin had already started his job in the unloading bay out at Radogoszcz Station that his uncle Lajb had fixed for him; and he had just finished his shift that icy, grey morning when the Gestapo drove up with the man who had been Rumkowski’s right hand, the prison commandant and chief of police who had locked up and raped his sister.

It was 17 March 1942; a completely ordinary day in the ‘new life’ of the ghetto.

That day’s transport stood ready for loading. The final columns marched out from the assembly point in Marysińska Street had arrived, and stood stamping their feet in the muddy slush. Disturbances broke out here and there as groups of German guards approached the new arrivals to separate them from their luggage. Rucksacks, bedding and mattresses, rolled and tied, had already been gathered in a huge heap to one side of the low station building.

Just before the train was due to depart, a black car with its hood up swept into the railway sidings, and a deathly pale Shlomo Hercberg emerged from it, handcuffed to a Kripo man in plain clothes. He was not allowed to straighten up or even look around, but bundled directly into the nearest available wagon.

The next morning, the procedure was repeated with Hercberg’s wife, mother-in-law and three children. According to those who saw them there, the children looked ‘as scared as everyone else’. Which should perhaps have been a comfort to all who had been victims of Hercberg’s greed. But for most in the ghetto, it had the opposite effect. It was only when Shlomo Hercberg and his family were deported that ordinary people in the ghetto realised the authorities’ sentence on the Jews of Litzmannstadt was in earnest.

If there was no mercy or deliverance even for those at the very top, what hope did they have when it was their turn?

On Sunday 12 April, the Chairman was summoned by the authorities once more. Those present besides Biebow himself were his two deputies, Czarnulla and Ribbe, while the security forces were represented by SS-Sturmscharführer Albert Richter, second-in-command of the so-called Section II B 4, responsible for Jewish affairs in the ghetto.

On this occasion, too, discussions were conducted in a ‘disciplined and, in the circumstances, relatively relaxed atmosphere’.

Albert Richter began by explaining that the war effort had made it necessary to concentrate the Jewish population in a few locations of ‘strategic’ importance in the Warthegau region. It would therefore soon be time for transports of Jews from the rest of the Warthegau
to
the Litzmannstadt ghetto. In spite of these operations – or perhaps rather
because
of them – it was vital that the resettlements from the ghetto continued swiftly and without interruption. Berlin had stated that it was now ‘imperative’ that only Jews who were part of the labour force could remain in the ghetto. Therefore all non-productive elements among the newly arrived Western Jews would now also have to leave.

Rumkowski was then given the opportunity to speak and asked the assembled authorities how it was to be decided who was capable of working and who not.

Richter replied that a medical commission made up of German doctors would examine all the remaining residents of the ghetto over ten years of age –
Western
Jews as well as
all the rest
. Those who got a stamp to say they were incapable of working would have to go. All the others could stay.

Chairman
: May a Jew say a few words?

Richter
: Naturally. You are always welcome to give us your views, Rumkowski.

Chairman
: At all costs, exceptions must be made to this labour requirement for the sick and weak of the ghetto. I will provide for them from my own resources.

Richter
: But of course, Rumkowski. We are not inhuman.

On the orders of the security services, the ghetto administration now allowed a rumour to spread with regard to where the deportees had been taken. They were said to have gone to the town of Chełmno in the Warthbrücken district,
Kulmhof
in German. Once the German population had been evacuated, a camp of huts had been constructed of a similar size to the first labour camps that had been built, outside Lublin. According to the Gestapo, a hundred thousand Jews from Warthegau were accommodated (
verlagert
) here, among them the forty thousand who had already been evacuated from Litzmannstadt. The living conditions were, it was said,
extremely
good. Three full meals were served every day; all those who considered themselves fit could also do a light day’s work for a reasonable wage. The men were said to be largely occupied in mending roads, while the women did agricultural work.

The rumour about the ‘labour camp in Warthbrücken’ spread rapidly by word of mouth and soon everybody knew the official line, but nobody believed it. It was possible the deportees were still alive and in some labour camp elsewhere in Wartheland or the Generalgouvernement. But they were most definitely not in a newly opened labour camp in Warthbrücken.

*

Outside the communal soup kitchen in Młynarska Street, a long queue formed in the early dawn as people waited to be ‘stamped’. Most of them were German Jews from the collectives: men, women and children in random order, because the supervisors of the transports said that only those who voluntarily submitted to a medical examination would be allowed to present their coupons afterwards and get their daily ration of soup.

The queue divided at the entrance into a male and a female line.

The men had to carry on shuffling through the ground-floor rooms to a counter at the back, where normally the serving women stood with their vats of soup, but where now a row of grave doctors in white coats was waiting. While the men’s workbooks were checked, they had to twist the upper part of their bodies this way and that beneath carefully palpating doctors’ fingers, after which the senior doctor stamped them firmly on the chest, back or waist in blue ink.

There was a system of letter codes for the stamps, running from ‘
A
’ – which meant fully fit for work – right down to ‘
E
’ or ‘
L
’, which meant unfit for work of any kind.

After five days, the medical commission had stamped and drawn up lists of a total of 9,956 of the twenty thousand people it was expected to examine, and had begun to transfer in-patients from hospitals and other care homes to the medical stations. The next day, the authorities took the decision to initiate the ‘evacuation’ of the western European Jews as well.

As soon as this order had been given, Rumkowski said in a speech:

You know as well as I do the old Jewish proverb that the truth is the best lie. Well, I shall tell you the truth: all the Jews from Prague, Berlin and Vienna who leave the ghetto will be given work in other places. I have the word of the authorities that no one’s life is in danger and that all Jews leaving the ghetto will be brought to safety.

But those packing the paltry ten kilos they were allowed to take with them asked themselves the perfectly natural question: since they had been examined and stamped fit for work, why now go to the bother of deporting them to put them to work elsewhere?

Then the transports from Brzeziny and Pabianice began arriving, and then came the convoys of lorries loaded with used clothes and shoes, and the root-fibres of the lie were exposed to broad daylight.