The Emperor of Lies (25 page)

The Child

(September 1942–January 1944)

From a prayer written on one of
the walls in the prayer room
in Podrzeczna Street (at the approach of Rosh
Hashanah
and the Day of Atonement, 1941)

From the Ghetto Chronicle
Litzmannstadt Ghetto, Saturday 1 January
1944:

Today at 10 a.m. in the former
preventorium at 55 Łagiewnicka Street, the Chairman celebrated bar mitzvah for
his adopted son Stanisław Stein. Some thirty guests, people close to the
Chairman, were in attendance. When the boy read from the Prophets, he used the
Sephardic pronunciation. In the year that has passed since the adoption, the
Chairman has made sure the boy has received a thorough Jewish education.

At the modest reception that
followed, Moshe Karo made a speech to the assembled guests.

Among the ladies present were as
always Mrs Regina Rumkowska, Mrs Helena Rumkowska, Mrs [Aron] Jakubowicz and
Miss [Dora] Fuchs. Despite the modest refreshment, the Chairman was able to
create a warm and intimate atmosphere among his guests.

This is the picture –

In the middle of the photograph stands
a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy with a yarmulke on his head and a candle in
one hand. He is wearing a suit, clearly new and tailor-made, which looks several
sizes too big for him, baggy across the shoulders, its sleeves drooping over his
wrists. To his right stands an elderly man with thick, white hair, combed back,
a lined face and spectacles with round, ‘American’ frames. The spectacles must
have taken a knock, or perhaps they merely slid down his nose in the course of
that awkward gesture of attempted blessing, raising his hand above his son’s
head. On the boy’s left is a youngish woman, quite small but holding herself
erect, shoulders pulled back as if she might be able to grow a centimetre or two
in the picture. Despite the smile with which she is trying to dazzle the
photographer, her face is gaunt and tired, and between the bridge of her nose
and her cheekbone there is some kind of deposit or swelling on her skin, unless
it is just a shadow cast by the bright light suffusing the whole scene at the
instant the picture was taken.

Only the boy seems unruffled. Heedless
of his father’s clumsy movements or his mother’s rigid posture, of all that has
happened or is going to happen to him, he just stares inquisitively straight
into the camera. As if the only thing of interest to him at that moment is
how it actually works
– how events and things
that would otherwise scarcely exist suddenly become real and are arrested for
all time.

There is another picture, too. It is a
copy of the X-ray the Chairman had done to satisfy himself that the child he had
decided to adopt was ‘entirely healthy’.

This is the
only real picture of yourself you will ever see
, Professor Weisskopf
told the boy as the overhead light was turned off.

The examination room was plunged into
complete darkness, and as if it had been waiting for just such an opportunity,
the peculiar, box-like thing they had fastened to his chest slowly began to move
up towards his chin and head, then back down again. It made a faint rustling
noise.

Then everything went quiet, and a few
minutes later, Professor Weissman came out from behind the curtain. He was
holding the plate, eager to display it.

The picture was like nothing the boy
had ever seen before. Against a dark, shiny background, pale half-arcs rose in a
regular pattern. They looked like a temple with tall pillars, floating on
bright, airy clouds high up under a dark sky. Did everyone have a temple of
light like that inside them? Or was it only inside him it looked that way, since
he (as the Chairman often told him) was different.

It was a question that preoccupied him
a great deal at that time.

What distinguishes one human being from
another? How do you become
a chosen one
?

This was what he and all other
schoolchildren were taught in those days:

When Wilhelm Röntgen conducted his
first experiments with what were then called cathode rays in the autumn of 1895,
he covered the tube and the device that generated the rays in black cardboard;
then he blocked all the openings. Despite the total seal on the tube, an
intense, flickering light immediately appeared on a bench he had positioned a
few metres away.

Though he moved the bench further back,
the light did not diminish. Nor did it gradually start to fade, as light from
other sources did.

From this experiment he concluded that
the new light he had discovered could also penetrate solid objects. The lower
the density of the object, the easier it was for the rays to get through. They
could, for example, easily penetrate a book of a thousand pages, a pack of
cards, wood or hard rubber; but they could not pass through harder substances
like lead or bone.

It is not
possible to see the soul itself
, wrote Röntgen,
but if one holds up a hand in front of the screen, the
shadow picture clearly shows every bone in a finger joint, with the tissue
visible as a faint outline around it
. As proof, he prepared a number
of photographic plates. One of them showed the bones of his wife’s left hand,
complete with ring.

In June 1945, six months after the Red
Army liberated Litzmannstadt, chest X-ray pictures were found in the basement of
the former preventorium at 55 Łagiewnicka Street
⁸
of thousands of the children who were
taken away in the
szpera
operation of September
1942 and murdered by the Nazis.

The X-ray negatives were found in
bundles up to about twenty centimetres thick, tied up with string. Some of the
chest X-rays clearly showed dark areas of fluid, which in a young person causes
a hunched, jerky gait with a noticeably protruding or raised shoulder. In
others, darker shading within the shimmering white covering of bone is a clear
indication of advanced stages of tuberculosis. But all the pictures are
anonymous. If there was ever a name, a date and place of birth, or a
registration number that could have identified the individual negatives, it has
long since been lost.

The only feature by which the pictures
can now be identified – retrospectively given a body, a name, a face – are the
abnormalities themselves.

The other person entrusted with young Mr Rumkowski’s education, apart from Moshe Karo, was Fide Szajn. The Chairman was said to have a soft spot for the ghetto’s Hasidic Jews, and Fide Szajn was one to whom learning came easily. At any event, it was not anticipated that he could do any harm.

It was Fide Sjazn who carried the front end of the stretcher when Reb Gutesfeld took Mara the paralysed woman round the ghetto. Staszek, who had still not seen very much of the ghetto, was told by Szajn in interminable detail about the way the three of them had moved from place to place. In all winds and weathers and at any time of day or night they were forced to move on. At night they sought refuge in the old Bajka cinema, now used as a prayer house, or in the synagogue in Jakuba Street where the Talmud Torah School had been, and where the few Torah scrolls and prayer books saved from the Nazis’ acts of arson were kept in utmost secrecy. They had also found sanctuary in the basement storeroom of the shoe factory on the corner of Towianskiego and Brzezińska Streets, because the
kierownik
who ran the place was a deeply pious Jew. They had spent a few days in the ruins of a dilapidated tenement house in Smugowa Street. The authorities had decreed that the streets in that block were to be incorporated into the Aryan part of Litzmannstadt; the residents had already been forced to move out and the demolition team had begun its work. But the house was still standing, though only the girders and parts of the frontage remained, and it rained on them incessantly as they sat huddled under a bed headboard and a few old armchairs that the wood plunderers still had not found, while the woman lay under a dirty blanket on the floor in front of them, mumbling incomprehensible strings of Hebrew prayers.

Back then there had still, believe it or not, been places in the ghetto where you could stay unnoticed. Then came the dreadful September operation, and the Jewish police forcibly ejected Reb Gutesfeld from the simple, rented room where he lived with his wife. Fide Szajn, too, was obliged to go into hiding. He could have been deported if Moshe Karo had not arranged just in time for a
tzetl
to be written out in his name, and he was transferred to a place called
optgesamt
, home to a thousand Jews that the authorities had seen fit to spare. But once he got there, and even with the passage of time, hardly a day went by without his thoughts turning to the woman they had had to leave behind them. Her name and the memory of her remained his great torment. Perhaps, he speculated to young Mr Rumkowski, she had flown over the wire again, back the way she first came, and perhaps she would return one day when the Jews once more blew the
shoifer
. Then, if not before, it would be seen that the Lord, despite all the signs to the contrary, had still not abandoned the people of Israel.

Fide Szajn was an obstinate soul. Admittedly he had had his hair cut off because the Kripo had issued orders for the arrest of anyone daring to show themselves in religious apparel. But he stubbornly persisted in wearing his long coat and big black hat. The hat looked comical perched on top of his long, emaciated, shaven head. His body looked comical, too, as if it was several sizes too large for the clothes he wore. His trousers ended at his calves and the sleeves of his over-tight jacket left his thin wrists exposed.

His face was bony and white, and his gaze darted this way and that, as if it could never decide in time where it wanted to go. Unlike everyone else’s gaze, it seemed not to want to rest for a minute more than necessary on young Mr Rumkowski. Fide Szajn’s own copy of the Torah had Polish text on one side and Hebrew on the facing page. He made Staszek cover the left side with his hand, and then read and interpret what was written on the other. If Staszek got even the tiniest Hebrew word wrong, or could not remember the words he had just read, Fide Szajn rapped him over the back of the neck with his open hand.

He did not care that it was Rumkowski’s very own son he had as a
talmid
. It was the words that mattered, and always would.

Fide Szajn came every day except the Sabbath, and he always began his lessons by eating. If there was one thing Fide Szajn revered more than the books he would insist on lugging with him, it was the food the Chairman’s housekeeper put in front of him, and he always ate in absolute silence, as if every crumb demanded his total concentration.

After the meal, the teaching began.

Fide Szajn went in detail through the order of service, how the reading of the Torah was done, and the best ways of learning the selected sections of the text so the Holy Scripture could simply flow out of you by its own divine force. Fide Szajn invested particular care in teaching Staszek Hebrew. He dealt thoroughly with every letter of the alphabet, explaining why they looked as they did, and the divine origin of every word. A single word could serve for a whole afternoon’s lecture.
Help me explain
, Fide Szajn might say (he often put it that way, as if he were the one who needed help in solving a problem and not Staszek):
help me explain why the words for fear and faith have the same root
. When Staszek could not answer, Fide Szajn would counter with a story. When Jacob, waking from his long sleep, finds the ladder leading up to Heaven in Beer Sheva, reaching out over the place where the temple lies, he is seized by fear that the place where he lay down has suddenly become another.

‘The Lord is surely in this place –

how dreadful is this place . . .’

And he called the name of that place Bêt El, the house of God.

So says Rabbi Ezrael in Rabbi Ben Zimra’s name:

To learn to feel fear is to learn to know the true essence of God. God has struck fear into us that we may seek him, his name made manifest, his origins.

This was one of Fide Szajn’s favourite subjects. There were false prophets who drew a distinction between
faith
and
fear
, and called themselves the emissaries of God because they considered that they were the only ones who could put the words back together. They were thus guilty of blasphemy, for only God can heal the rift that runs between words and people.

Then Fide Szajn told the story of Sabbatai Tzvi from seventeenth-century Smyrna, who had himself proclaimed Messiah. Having been thrown out of Smyrna, Salonica and Jerusalem, he went to Constantinople to depose the Sultan. The Sultan gave him two alternatives: either to convert to Islam or to be put to death. Sabbatai Tzvi chose the former, and by this apostasy proved himself a false
shoyfet
. The word was still cleft in his sermons, so when he spoke of faith he was really only speaking of his own fear. Men like that are all too eager to run the Sultan’s errands.

Fide Szajn did not need to say it out loud; it was still apparent that he viewed Chaim Rumkowski as a self-appointed redeemer of the same kind.

A man who had learnt to put his fear above his faith.