The Emperor of Lies, page 11
But most of all, children. They come swarming round our legs as soon as we are inside the barricades – and they will not leave us alone until the police marching alongside step in.
We have now got to our ‘final destination’ – an old school building. The wide archway into the courtyard is flooded with sewage. Some of the younger people put down planks so the older ones can keep their feet dry as they go in, and form a human chain to pass the cases through.
People jostle, push forward; all the classrooms and the corridors from one end of the building to the other have been converted into dormitories. Wooden bunks are lined up under the windows, each bunk 75 cm long, so people’s feet have to hang over the end. In that small space, we are also to store our luggage: rucksacks at the head end, suitcases at the foot end. Our room has about sixty people ‘living’ in it. There are just as many in the corridor outside! When everyone has a place, they give out bread that is meant to last us a whole week.
In the morning: weak black coffee, like brown water.
Young women from the ghetto bring big vats of soup from the soup kitchens.
It’s not much of a soup – hot water with something greenish in it. But everyone falls on the food, even those who said earlier that they wouldn’t touch it! It turns out to be the only meal of the day.
Washing is difficult. We have to go out into the yard because there’s no water in the taps. And then: stand in the snow, queuing for the latrines. Toilet paper – forget it. What little toilet paper we have is reserved for the sick! They say tuberculosis and typhus fever are rife in the ghetto. Every other inhabitant is ill with it. My hands ache right up to the elbows with a constant, dull pain that is made worse by having to wash clothes in ice-cold water. It’s the rheumatism again!
Some people have strung lines around their bunks so they can hang up their wet washing. Everyone huddles up as tightly they can; children scream, howl and cry; and many of those who are sick make the sounds sick people make.
So the nights pass, and are followed by the days.
And then it is night again. And in the morning the same thin, beige soup that looks and smells just as rank as before – like ammonia. The smell of the soup stays in the walls far into the night, and it’s like the ache in your stomach and the band of hunger round your forehead. Will I ever get used to it?
But the worst thing of all is the regret. The thought that we should have got away to safety while there was still time – that Papa thought it was more important to do his bit at the hospital than to look after his family. That he refused to think of us and of Maman!
But I can’t say any of that, because of course now Papa is making himself indispensable upstairs, where they’ve set up a first-aid post for the sickest people in the transport! They’re crying out for doctors here! But I can’t sleep, it feels too horrible not knowing what the future holds for us …
Somewhere, somehow, there must be some way to get help, otherwise we shall all fade away and die … Somewhere, there must be …
Adam Rzepin lived with his father Szaja and sister Lida in a flat, just one room and a kitchen, at the top of Gnieźnieńska Street, near the south-western boundary of the ghetto. In the kitchen, they also kept a bed for Szaja’s brother Lajb. But ever since the fatal strike at Drukarska Street, it was as if Lajb had some kind of curse on him. He moved from resort to resort, changing jobs like other people change their clothes, and nobody really knew where he slept from one night to the next. It was said in the ghetto that he was a Spitzel for the Kripo and it was best for people to keep out of his way.
Adam’s sister now lay in the bed that used to be Lajb’s. When Adam got up to fetch water and light the stove in the mornings, Lida would lie there, listening to the angels. The angels often came down from Heaven and spoke to Lida. In summer they sang in the stove-pipe, and in winter they traced their own, delicate wing-quill patterns in the frost flowers on the window panes. Adam and Lida’s father Szaja had insulated the frame with old rags but the damp got in anyway, and in winter the glass was sometimes entirely frozen over on the inside, the catch covered in fine hairs of frost. Every so often, one particular angel they called the big beast would talk to Lida. Lida’s world was populated by the little beasts and the big beast. The little beasts were the bedbugs, who gathered in drifts behind the wallpaper and crawled over your hand as soon as you pulled away a skirting board. The big beast was a bleeding angel of hunger.
When the hunger angel got its teeth into someone, it was as if they were being turned inside out. Every bit of their body was crying out for food; anything would do, as long as it could be chewed and swallowed and taken down into their stomach. When the big beast spoke, its voice seemed to come from a great, ravenously dark pit of hunger. The only thing Lida could do was to open and close her mouth in terror, to let out its tormenting screams.
Whenever the big beast took his sister in its clutches, Adam got a blanket and lay down beside her; he lay so close to her that it was as if he was trying to absorb her body into his own.
Though she weighed no more than about thirty kilos, Lida’s face was remarkably unscathed, the skin pale, bluish, and as thin as porcelain. And beneath the rags in which Lida lay swaddled there was, in spite of everything, a body with a distended belly and two small, thin breasts. Where it had not already grown swollen and waterlogged from lack of nutrition, her flesh was covered in sores and bruises. Every morning, Adam carried water up from the yard and washed his sister in a large wooden tub, then wrapped the rags around her again. But even while he was washing Lida, her china face remained smooth and immobile, as if frozen in an expression of perpetual wonder – at the existence of the world, and of her brother, and of the hunger angel beating and beating its hard wings out there in the icy brown darkness.
The Rzepin family had lived in Gnieźnieńska Street since long before the ghetto existed. Back then, they had all helped to provide for the family, even Uncle Lajb. But since Lajb fell into disgrace, Szaja could rely on little more than the daily workplace soup, and you did not get fat by running errands with parcels or keeping watch for children, as Adam did.
Everyone was talking about the new arrivals in the ghetto now. Moshe Stern said the richest Jews were the ones from Prague. According to Moshe, some of them had even had so much food with them when they arrived that they gave away what they couldn’t carry to children, and other people who begged for it.
Lying there beside his sick sister in the evenings, Adam Rzepin kept turning this over in his mind. How was it possible that someone could reach the ghetto with such a surplus?
The Prague Jews had been divided into two collectives inside the ghetto. One was quartered in the former children’s hospital at 37 Łagiewnicka Street, the other in the elementary school in Franciszkańska Street. Adam opted for the latter, because he thought there were more, and safer, escape routes from there; and a few weeks later he cautiously began to prowl about the area.
The snow that had begun to fall the day the foreign Jews arrived was still coming down, though not as thickly. It had got colder. Down in the Prague Jews’ courtyard a few women were busy hauling up buckets of water from the well and carrying them into the school. The women carried their water awkwardly, clumsy in their movements; they were city Jews – and it showed. The children, too, were different. Instead of playing with whatever came to hand, they just wandered aimlessly round the yard, barging into each other.
Adam realised at once how much of a stranger he was here. He spoke Yiddish in his daily life, Polish when he had to. But the peculiar, spiky, sing-song Czech spoken by the women in the yard was completely alien to him. He couldn’t understand a single word.
Moshe Stern, who had been to the collective several times, said there was only one way to treat the newcomers. You had to smile and be polite. So Adam put on his sunniest smile as soon as he got into the yard. With that smile he pushed past a small group of Czech men on their way out of the building with snow shovels in their hands and thick, hunting-style caps, the earflaps fastened on top. Adam did not need to turn round to be aware of their looks boring into his back. It started to hurt inside his head. The higher he climbed inside the building, the tighter the band of pain around his forehead grew, and when he was at the very top, Lida started to sing.
Lida had only once before started singing for him while he was out. He and some of the kids from his street had gone to look for reject building timber on the empty plot next to the plank store in Drukarska Street. The plot had been fenced off, and the whole storage area was patrolled by local police, on duty in shifts from dawn to late evening. With Feliks Frydman from the tenement next door he had managed to dig a way under the fence along the back of the plank compound, and Feliks was already inside when he heard Lida’s voice, as indelibly pure and clear as the sound of a spoon tapping a glass that is half-full. As the tone faded away, a pain ran through his head, as if someone had suddenly pushed a sharp metal wire through it, from one temple to the other. He only just had time to get away before the guards came rushing up, batons raised. They had already caught Feliks inside the compound.
Now he could hear Lida’s voice again; like the thin whine of a drill:
eeeeee-eeeeee
He wonders if it is the men with the snow shovels she wants to warn him about. But what has he actually got to hide? He’s only here out of curiosity, to look round a bit. And anyway, he has gone too far to turn back now.
There are sleeping places in the classrooms, and the corridors outside them, but to his surprise, Adam sees few people between the screens that separate the various families’ spaces. Most members of the collective must have moved out; or the Praeses has already found jobs for them all. He runs his eyes frantically over bunks and improvised tables, sees clothes, blankets and mattresses, spread out or rolled up; sees lots of kitchen equipment, saucepans, frying pans, washing bowls and tubs piled in and on one another, or stowed with suitcases under the narrow bunks. But nowhere can he see anything worth stealing. Then he suddenly remembers something Moshe told them: at least one doctor came with each transport, and those doctors were expected to set up a surgery in every collective. Adam has seen no sign of any surgery on the ground floor of the building. So there must be one upstairs somewhere. He is on the second floor now. The rooms are smaller here, the corridor running between them narrower. He notices people tense and turn round to stare after him as he pushes past them increasingly curtly.
He is suddenly aware of how few people there are up here.
Two youngish men approach from one side.
Where’s the doctor’s surgery? he asks.
In Polish: Gdzie jest przychodnia lekarska?
And then, mainly to gain time, in Yiddish as well: I’m looking for the DOCTOR. Can anybody tell me where he is?
One of the two men thinks he understands what Adam means, and points uncertainly along a further stretch of corridor. As he walks in the direction indicated by the man, he thinks he is probably not going to get out of here alive.
But the far end of the corridor opens out into something that looks like a waiting room, with people sitting or lying on the floor outside a closed door. He goes up to the door and pulls it open, expecting to see a doctor look up in alarm from examining a patient. To his astonishment, the room inside is empty. A perfectly ordinary office with a desk, and an armchair behind it, and next to the desk a cabinet with some dishes, dressings and anonymous glass bottles on its shelves. He opens the cabinet doors and pulls out its drawers; he pays scant attention to what he is taking, just fills his pockets with as many bottles and jars and packs of dressings as he can cram in; then backs out into the corridor and makes his way out by the same route he came in by.
But now his sunny smile no longer meets with other smiles. An elderly man he tries to squeeze past opens his mouth and screams.
He starts to run, heedless of anyone or anything in his way. Until he reaches the end of the corridor and his eyes fall on a woman dozing on a wooden stool with her head – all he can really see is a huge mass of hair tied in some kind of headscarf – hanging low between her knees. On the floor beside the woman is her handbag: a real handbag. It is large, quite plain, in faded leather with a clasp at the top like the one Józefina Rzepin had on hers when the two of them strolled up and down Piotrkowska on Sundays. It is this sudden image of a mother he otherwise scarcely remembers that decides the matter for Adam. Before he knows what he is doing, he has snatched the bag and run headlong down the stairs. Out of the corner of his eye he sees the men with the hunting caps swarming up the same stairs, in an avalanche of indignant voices, but they have come too late – taken the wrong doors – he knows he will have time to get down and out ahead of them: two more strides and he’ll be safe.
Franciszkańska. The sharp, blinding light of the snow in his eyes.
Muddy slush in the streets. Empty facades.
Ten metres down the road, a gap between two buildings leads into a narrow courtyard. At one time, all the inner courtyards of the ghetto were surrounded by tall wooden fences, but those have all been taken down now, chopped up and carried off for fuel. Instead, a whole network of firebreaks, some as wide as avenues, opens up behind the house fronts, affording the fugitive free passage from one part of the ghetto to another. But these internal routes are known only to those who lived here long before the barricades came. Long before there was even a ghetto here.
The name of the woman with the headscarf and the handbag in the collective in Franciszkańska Street was Irena, though no one had ever called her anything but Maman, pronounced not in the French way but with equal stress on both syllables.
Ma-mann! Ma-mann!
It was a cry that had echoed right through Vĕra Schulz’s childhood, through stairwells where the high, stone vaulting intensified the noise of the passing trams, and through the empty rooms in the spacious apartment in Vinohrady in Prague, which at this time of day, in the afternoon, was suffused with warm sunlight and the stately sound of ticking clocks. After she had sat all morning practising at the grand piano, Maman would languish and pine the afternoons away. She complained the heat gave her migraine, and rubbed expensive creams into her skin to stop it drying out. Lying on her back, on top of the bedclothes on the wide bed, she would amuse the children by tying coloured ribbons in her hair. Maman had a shock of curly, almost frizzy hair, which with a little effort she could transform into any look she chose. Maman would step into her wardrobe and came out again in a tennis skirt and Mary Pickford hat, or dress up as Mrs Benešová the President’s wife in a tailored suit of ‘English cut’, with a hat that looked like a military cap.
The fact that her mother was always vanishing and coming back as someone else, even if it was only in her piano soirée costume, had implanted in Vĕra from an early age a dread of Maman one day vanishing for good. As long as you look after me properly, I won’t be vanishing anywhere, Maman would joke, but none of the children – as well as Vĕra there were two brothers, Martin and Josel – believed her. For as long as they had known their mother, she had always been leaving them in some way or another.
Arnošt Schulz loved his wife in a more pragmatic way: as you love and care for a desirable ornament. According to him, Maman did not have good or bad days, she had different personalities (you did that, as an artist), and the family was instructed to stay on good terms with them all: Now children, please leave Maman in peace for a little while, he would say as soon as Vĕra or her brothers raised their voices at the dining table or played too boisterously in their rooms.
After two weeks in the ghetto, Maman had only one of her personalities left: a gaunt, hollow-eyed woman sitting crouched under a cloud of frizzy hair, who flinched in terror if anyone spoke to her. She would only eat the disgusting soup if someone fed it to her with a spoon, or the way Vĕra did it: soaked a few bits of dry bread in it and popped them in her mouth as soon as her attention was elsewhere.
But how different it was for her energetic husband.
From the very first moment, Dr Arnošt Schulz had made himself the spokesman of the Prague collective. He had set up a system of guards to tackle the local inhabitants’ brazen theft from the new arrivals, and had also composed letters and coordinated petitions to the Chairman’s office to complain about unheated rooms, lack of running water and a latrine-emptying procedure that resembled nothing so much as a farce. This last comment was made in his capacity as newly appointed general practitioner at Hospital No. 1 in Łagiewnicka Street where he is, as he puts it, occupied day and night with saving the lives of people who as a result of the inadequate supply of nutrition in the ghetto lack all the prerequisites for survival.
For a number of weeks after he sent off this missive, nothing happened.
One day, a slim envelope arrived, stamped with the Chairman’s postmark. Inside was an invitation to attend a ‘musical soirée’ to be held in honour of the new arrivals at the House of Culture in Krawiecka Street, and Arnošt Schulz decided to go with his daughter. He went with mixed feelings and no great expectations, and returned ‘distressed’, as he put it. Vĕra, too, describes the event, in the diary she was keeping fairly regularly at the time:
Evening Revue in the House of Culture
The first people we meet are a group of politsayen with armbands and batons [!] who tell us to step aside and let the honoratiores through.
I had not expected to find hierarchies like this in the ghetto. It’s as if they have invited us just to show us how little we are worth!
We stood like prisoners behind bars, watching the honoratiores arrive. I saw Rumkowski himself, a dour, white-haired man, like a pompous emperor at the head of his praetorian guard. It would have been laughable, but for the fact that everyone in the place leapt to their feet and started clapping.
Then the show got under way. A painted backdrop of a synagogue. Some actors dash up on stage and blurt out some lines in loud voices. Since the audience laughs, it must be some kind of joke, but I can’t understand a word. The whole thing is in Yiddish.
