And the Chairman leans forward and slaps his knees, and begins his story:
There was a boy named Kindl who had the keys to all the houses in the whole city. Magic keys. There was no front door lock that Kindl’s keys couldn’t pick. His keys fitted the mayor’s house up by the castle just as they fitted the rabbi’s simple abode behind the synagogue. And he had access to the miller’s store of sacks of flour, and all the rich merchants’ dwellings down in the city, too. He could go in and take whatever he wanted, but he was not the sort of boy to take from other people.
He could enter human hearts, as well. He was often frightened by what he saw when he opened the door to a person’s heart. There was so much evil, deceit and envy. (But when he turned the key in the lock of his mother’s heart, all he saw was that she loved him . . . !)
Kindl went about the city as he usually did, opening doors with his keys. People were used to him coming, and would often leave food out for him. Many people in the city took it as a good omen if Kindl visited their homes. Doors are not for keeping shut and bolted. They are there for people to come and go through. Why else would there be doors?
Many people in the city were very fond of Kindl.
Then one day, he came to a house he had not seen before. A great mansion, many storeys high, with towers and pinnacles. The front door must have been at least three metres tall, and small and insignificant as he was, Kindl found it hard to reach up to the keyhole with his key.
But the key did fit, and with some effort he got the door open.
Behind the door, however, there was nothing but a great, desolate darkness and a mighty voice saying:
Do not be afraid, Kindl, come in!
But Kindl was afraid. The darkness behind the great door was like no darkness he had ever seen before. It was like a night sky without stars. It was vast and cold. There was not even any wind blowing through all that darkness; everything that fell into it was swallowed up as if it had never existed.
For the first time in his life, Kindl dared not enter. He closed the door he had just opened and went home and lay on his bed, and lay there sick for many days and nights, while his mother sat at his side and prayed to the Lord to spare his young life.
When Kindl had recovered, many weeks later, he noticed something strange. None of his keys fitted any of the houses any more. Not the mayor’s residence, not the rabbi’s room; not the miller’s house or the merchant’s: nowhere were his keys able to pick the locks. He realised there was only one thing to do. To go back to the great mansion and not be scared, but accept the voice’s invitation to enter.
Once again, Kindl faced the grand door, and found that his key still fitted. It was as if no time had passed.
Again he faced the great darkness, and from the darkness came the same mighty voice as before, saying:
Do not be afraid, Kindl, come in!
And Kindl plucked up his courage and stepped into the vast, black darkness.
And he was not blinded, as he had feared he would be. Nor was he swallowed up by the vastness and blackness and darkness, as he had thought he would be. He did not even fall, but floated there in the dark as if supported by a great, safe hand. And he understood that the mighty voice that had spoken to him from the darkness was the voice of the Lord God, and that God had only wanted to test him. From that day on, Kindl was at home wherever he went in the world. And he did not need to be afraid of anything, for he knew that whichever way he moved in the darkness, God would be there to lead him on the right path.
Five days after the eighth and final day of Hanukkah, the Chairman of the ghetto held bar mitzvah for his adopted son, Stanisław Rumkowski. The ceremony took place in the former preventorium at 55 Łagiewnicka Street, where Moshe Karo used to hold his
minyens
, and where rumour had it that the Chairman had met the Hasidic Jews. Moshe Karo walked at the head of a little procession, carrying the Sefer Torah scroll from the locked gallery at the Talmud Torah School in Jakuba Street right through the ghetto; and he carried the Torah scroll openly, fearing neither informers nor unbribable Kripo men.
It was a cold and frosty winter’s day. The smoke rose as straight as an arrow from chimney stacks to a sky that neither received nor turned away anything.
In addition to close members of the family, thirty of the ghetto’s
honoratiores
were invited; apart from people close to the Chairman such as Miss Dora Fuchs, who ran the General Secretariat, and her brother Bernhard, the guests included Mr Aron Jakubowicz, head of the Central Labour Office, Judge Stanisław-Szaja Jakobson, Mr Izrael Tabaksblat and, of course, Moshe Karo, whose resourceful action had once saved the young boy’s life, and who was perhaps more of a father to him than the Chairman had ever been – though naturally such a thing could not be said on a day like this. As a sign of the special affinity between them, however, it was Moshe Karo who had given the boy the gift of the prayer shawl he was now wearing for the first time as he sat waiting on the podium.
Then the Torah scroll was brought in, and since there was no rabbi to officiate at the ceremony, it also fell to Moshe Karo to go round with it to the whole assembly, so each and every one of them could kiss the tassels of their prayer shawl and touch the scroll. A warm and intimate atmosphere spread among those assembled in the chill hall, an atmosphere further emphasised by Mr Tobaksblat reading the day’s text from the Torah. According to the calendar, the reading from the Prophets for that day was taken from Ezekiel, and young Rumkowski read in a clear, distinct voice the text he had been taught to read.
For thus saieth the Lord:
Behold, I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen, whither they be gone, and will gather them on every side, and bring them into their own land.
And I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all; and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all.
Neither shall they defile themselves any more with their idols, nor with their detestable things, nor with any of their transgressions; but I will save them out of all their dwelling places, wherein they have sinned, and will cleanse them, so shall they be my people, and I will be their God.
Staszek faltered only once. That was when the ceremony called on him to turn to his parents and thank them for making it possible for him to receive the knowledge with which he could now be taken into the congregation. The Chairman was sitting with his wife, brother and sister-in-law right at the front by the improvised reading desk, with his head bent forward and his legs crossed, as if the impatience he felt had merely made him sink more deeply into himself.
Staszek looked at him and the words stuck in his throat. Then Moshe Karo stepped forward and said them for him to repeat. The prompt came in a swift, fervent whisper, and nobody seemed to notice anything. Regina just sat there with the big smile she now wore day and night, and beside her sat Princess Helena, who had now arisen from her ‘bed of pain’ to – as the
Chronicle
reported at about that time – resume charge of all the soup kitchens in the ghetto. Her replacement, a woman who remained unnamed, had had to step down for what were termed ‘political reasons’.
Up at the desk, the holy words died away and the congregation started to leave, stepping from the holy space to find themselves beneath the vaulted white sky which resembled a vast hole into which all the light was gushing. It was just a few hundred metres from the preventorium to the Chairman’s new apartment, where a ‘spartan’ reception was held, with bread and wine and a vast array of presents.
*
The photograph was taken by Mendel Grossman. Mendel was one of a group of five or six photographers employed by the ghetto’s Office of Archival and Population Statistics. He was the one, for example, who took the photographs for the workbooks that from the summer of 1943 onwards the ghetto residents were obliged to carry with them wherever they went. This picture is no different from those in the way it is posed, lit or taken, with a sort of delayed exposure that makes the people in the picture appear to be stepping out of their own movements, as others might step out of their clothes.
Regina Rumkowska
, all dressed up inside her wide but anxious smile, as if she is standing behind a cracked or broken pane of glass, trying desperately to convey her goodwill to someone on the other side;
Chaim Rumkowski
, on his way forward or into the centre of the picture, one hand clumsily outstretched in something that might be a blessing or a gesture of reconciliation;
And
Stanisław Rumkowski
, the son: wearing a yarmulke and the prayer shawl that was a present from Moshe Karo, and holding a candle in one hand.
The only thing is, it isn’t a candle (as we can see now) but a bird, struggling free of his fingers and taking to the wing, vanishing up out of the picture so swiftly that the camera cannot keep up. And behind the three of them, in what in a photographer’s studio would have been a painted backdrop or possibly a piece of artistically draped fabric, we can make out something like a ribcage or the colonnade of a collapsing palace, row after row – the bars of the cage that is holding them all captive.
The Last City
(September 1942–August 1944)
There was a stage. On the stage, a
ghetto. There was even barbed wire round the stage, to show where the ghetto
started and where it finished. An actor picked his way around the pieces of
scenery, lifting up the wire to demonstrate, pointing. ‘
Here’s the wire. Don’t try to get past it or you’ll be
in trouble. Don’t try to take it with you, either, or you’ll be in even
worse trouble . . . !
And the audience in the
House of Culture hooted with laughter. Regina Rumkowska had never seen an
audience laugh so much as when it was shown its own little world by a collection
of third-rate revue artistes. Then figures were lowered from wires up at ceiling
level; simple figures of card, with backs of thicker cardboard. She recognised
every one of them, though their faces were so crudely drawn that you could
scarcely tell one from another. Here came the Chairman in his carriage; here was
Rozenblat, Chief of Police, on patrol and wielding his baton; and here came
Wiktor Miller,
der gerekhter
, with his white
doctor’s coat flapping around his wooden leg, and here was Judge Jakobson, a
nodding puppet, sitting in his courtroom swinging his club up and down as ranks
of thieves and criminals paraded past the bar.
But above them all hung a single Face.
The face was smooth shaven; it had sleek, dark, pomaded hair and a smile as
frank and open as a child’s. And on the stage below, a choir assembled, and one
actor after another ran on stage; they linked arms and began to sing:
Gertler der
nayer keyser
Er iz a yid a
heyser
Er zugt indz tsi tsi
geybn
Men zol es nor
derleybn
Poylen bay dem
yeke
Men zol efenen di geto
10
Gertler . . . ?!
Of course the song was not
about Gertler! Regina could scarcely imagine what had made her entertain such an
irreverent thought. It was her husband who was the Praeses of the ghetto, and of
course it was to him the actors on the stage were paying their satirical
tribute. And yet Regina knew she was far from alone in the audience when she
mentally exchanged the mask of the old man’s sagging face for the younger police
chief’s considerably more handsome portrait, visible on a cardboard placard in
the background.
Chaim Rumkowski was a steward, who made
people feel secure despite their hunger and degradation. But there was something
else about Dawid Gertler. It was something almost magical. He moved so easily,
was so relaxed when he talked to people. And then of course there were his
outstandingly good relations with the German authorities. He was said to have
Biebow literally eating out of his hand! That alone was enough to make people
believe Gertler was part of another world entirely.
At the party after the performance, she
saw him standing in the middle of the group of admiring men he always had around
him, explaining that the Germans were human beings, too:
Yes, the day the Jews learn to treat the Germans like
human beings, we will have come a long way
, he said, prompting gales
of laughter. Men bent double; they slapped their thighs; they laughed so much
they nearly choked.
She remembers thinking:
Only a man
who feels no fear can talk like that.
But these were days when fear was
everything. Fear numbed your limbs and made the breath halt in your throat. Fear
made people don their expressions carefully every morning and anxiously follow
everything that was going on behind their backs. Fear made those men and women
sitting in the audience laugh so wildly at the caricatures the revue artistes
portrayed that their laughter bordered on hysteria. Finally they had a chance to
move out of their wretched bodies and faces. And afterwards they all talked so
loudly and affectedly to each other that only the voices could be heard, not a
single word of what anyone said, assuming anything was said at all.
Everybody was talking. Except for
Gertler.
He stood quietly outside the circle of
light and was the only one who knew where the secret exits from the ghetto were,
and her longing to go through them with him was so great that it felt as though
her heart would burst with pain.
*
There was not much to say about Chaim’s
relationship with Dawid Gertler:
At first, he mistrusted him. Then he
came to rely on him. Ultimately, he learnt to fear and hate him.
Before the mistrust turned to hatred,
however, Gertler had been a frequent guest in their home. He would present
himself at any conceivable time of day or night for long, confidential talks
with his Chairman. He had also been known to turn up just to speak to her.
I’ve heard you have not been in the best of health
recently, Mrs Rumkowska
, he might say, sitting with her hand in his
and staring deeply and earnestly into her eyes.
Naturally she knew he was just putting
on an act:
If Gertler came to visit when the
Chairman was not at home, it was because he needed to find out something that
the Chairman would not or could not tell him.
Regina could not stop herself confiding
in him, even so. Once she even let slip
the worst
thing of all
. She intimated to him in various ways that Chaim was
unhappy with her for not getting pregnant. Then Gertler had looked at her with
his big eyes, and asked what made her so sure a child would be the right and
only solution for her. ‘In times like these, children can actually be a burden,’
he said, and then, apparently casually, started talking about some of his
confidants in the German ghetto administration.
He often spoke of German figures of
authority in that way, preferably with some kind of concrete qualifier to
highlight the nature of his relationship with them, like
old
Josef Hämmerle or
my good friend
SS-Hauptscharführer Fuchs, and he asked what made her
think these high-ranking individuals treated all Jews the same. They had eyes to
see with as well, didn’t they? Only last week he had been sought out by Biebow’s
right-hand man, that stripling Schwind, who wanted to hear about the two
engineers Dawidowicz and Wertheim who had so successfully repaired the X-ray
equipment in the ghetto. ‘In Hamburg they are crying out for competent X-ray
technicians at this very moment,’ Schwind had informed him, ‘and it might be
possible to get a ticket for them’. ‘To Hamburg?’ Regina asked. And Gertler:
‘Not even the
master race
can master
everything
; and to acquire the knowledge they
need, I know there are one or two Nazis willing to bend the odd rule.’ There’s
a
list
, he confided to her on a later
occasion; an
unofficial
list circulating among
the authorities in Litzmannstadt, with the names of the
very few
Jews the German administrative staff
considered
absolutely indispensable
. But for
your name to be added to that list, you first had to make it plain to the
authorities that you were
available
; that you
would be willing to place yourself
at their
disposal
at any time. And: ‘Is Chaim on that list?’ she couldn’t help
asking, only to see him shake his head with a regretful smile: ‘No,
unfortunately not, Chaim isn’t on the list; to be honest with you, they view him
as a touch
simple
, and he’s far too closely
linked to the ghetto.’ But on the other hand, there were people, people like her
for example, who could very well end up there, with the right preconditions; he
could see very clearly that Mrs Rumkowska, unlike certain other people, was a
woman of a certain rank and stature.
It only dawned on her much later that
this was how the Devil had chosen to speak to her. In a place like the ghetto,
where everything else stank of excrement and refuse, the Devil was well dressed
and sweet-smelling. She confided in him that for her, the ghetto was not the
walls that surrounded her, the ghetto was not the wires, the ghetto was not the
curfew, the hunger or the sickness, but something in her, like a bone caught in
her throat: a slow suffocation; and that she had got to get away from what was
starving her of air, or she would not be able to live much longer. And the Devil
leant towards her and took her hand in his and said:
‘Be calm and patient, Regina.
If there’s no other way, I shall buy
your freedom.’