The Emperor of Lies, page 16
Thus Justice and the Law prevailed in the ghetto –
Der gerekhter un dos gezets.
Justice came in the person of blind Dr Miller. Day after day he dragged his body, supported on its false limbs, through the alleyways of the ghetto, putting houses and factories in quarantine, and making sure housewives took themselves off to the gas-fuelled kitchens he had set up especially for them, so they could get their drinking water boiled for the negligible sum of ten pfennigs a litre. The Law was presided over by apple-cheeked Szaja Jakobson, the judge. By now a special police court (shnelgericht) had been set up to mete out instant punishments whenever a crime was discovered. Workers caught pilfering shoelaces or misappropriating a few grams of wood chips were brought forward, beret in hand.
(They had two sentences to choose from: excrement removal duties or deportation. Most chose excrement removal duties, so even this proved beneficial to the ghetto.)
By cleanliness and discipline, the ghetto would survive from day to day.
That was what the Chairman, in his infinite wisdom, had decided. As for Love or other extravagances, the ghetto was hardly the place for them in current historical circumstances. Yet Love was to prove capable of getting through the wires anyway, in its own strange and wonderful way, and changing everyone’s lives. Not least the Chairman’s own.
The Praeses appointed a young lawyer with good prospects, Samuel Bronowski, as the President of his shnelgericht, and put at his disposal a secretary named Rywka Tenenbaum. Miss Tenenbaum was one of the many beautiful young women in his Secretariat to whom the Chairman had certain romantic aspirations. The two of them had even been seen together occasionally. But then the Chairman went off on his much-discussed Warsaw trip, and it so happened that while he was away, Rywka Tenenbaum went and fell head over heels in love with young law graduate Bronowski.
And as if that were not enough: when the Praeses was back from his trip, she not only owned up to her amorous adventure, but also rebuffed the Chairman’s continuing advances, saying she was not the woman he thought she was, and most definitely not for sale.
The Chairman was so furious about this deliberate betrayal that he immediately ordered Dawid Gertler to search young Bronowski’s home. In the course of his search, Gertler found no fewer than 10,000 US dollars hidden away in various places in Bronowski’s many secret cupboards and drawers. The young lawyer whom the Chairman had entrusted with fighting corruption in the ghetto turned out to be the most corrupt of them all. In view of the severity of the crime, the Chairman decided to lead the proceedings himself, and the perpetrator was sentenced to a six-month prison term followed by deportation, for theft, document forgery and accepting bribes.
Two days later, Rywka Tenenbaum hanged herself from the pipework behind the courtroom in Gnieźnieńska Street, one of the few buildings in the ghetto that had running water and a flushable toilet.
*
As far as the Chairman was concerned, it was not so much a matter of being popular with women as of power and ownership. Just as the court and the bank were his court and bank, each collective and distribution point his collective and distribution point, so every woman in the ghetto was to be primarily his and no one else’s.
Seasoned female employees in his various offices thought they could tell just by looking at the old man whether he had ‘got any’ the night before or not. They could tell by his mood. He could be as gentle as a dove if he had had his way. Standoffish, sarcastic, nasty, if he had been refused. Some even reckoned they could predict his state of mind from the degree of compliance his chosen ones had demonstrated in the course of the day. Goodwill on the Chairman’s part was always dependent on some woman having made up to him earlier. If he was rebuffed, on the other hand, nobody could do anything to mitigate the power and intensity of his fits of rage.
His rage was like the dark edge of a towering thundercloud. His eyes narrowed, the flesh under his chin quivered; the saliva sprayed from his lips.
There was only one person who eventually proved able to curb that anger once it was raging.
She gets to her feet on the defence side of the long table:
We must remember, Regina Wajnberger says to the court that is in session to pass sentence in the Bronowski case, that this is naturally not about theft or embezzlement; this is a classic crime de passion; that is how we must see it, and judge it.
The Chairman stares in disbelief at the young female counsel who is speaking for Bronowski. She can’t be much older than the accused is himself, and moreover so tiny that she looks as though she is having to stand on tiptoe to reach her own face. But his disbelief stems above all from this: that there is a single person in the ghetto who dare assert the rights of Love in a place where treachery and greed reign. It is like a miracle. With just one word, it is as if this wonderful woman has given his life and his life’s work new meaning.
Regina Wajnberger was one of those people of whom it is said: she had a strong soul but a passive heart. She knew that to get anywhere in the ghetto you had to aim for the very top, and from the very outset she had hoped to ensnare the old man. But Regina also had a brother, and that brother did not allow himself to be manipulated so easily. Benjamin, known as Benji, had to be viewed as more or less a Law unto himself. He complied with nobody, least of all his industrious sister; and she answered him with an unconditional love unlike any other love in the world.
Benji was tall and thin with a mane of thick, prematurely grey hair which he was always sweeping out of his face with long, bony fingers. He was generally to be found on some street corner, expounding to audiences of varying sizes on how vital it was that certain ghetto dignitaries take responsibility for their own actions and start to practise what they preached for once; and he would add, with a delighted, almost spiteful glint in his eye:
And from now on I count my so-called brother-in-law among those dignitaries … !
And those gathered round the lanky loner would burst out laughing. They laughed until they fell over in the street; strong fists wiped away tears and then enthusiastically hoisted Benji aloft.
Why were they in such high spirits? Because someone in the ghetto was finally daring to speak out and say what everyone thought but nobody dared say aloud? And because these home truths came not from some passing stranger, but from the inner circle itself – from someone who might reasonably be expected to know – from the brother of the young woman whom the old man had finally chosen to marry – from the Chairman’s own brother-in-law to be?
Sister and brother. They were each other’s opposite and precondition:
Where she was the Rule, he was the errant Exception.
Where she was the Light, shining like a lamp, he was the great Darkness.
Where she was the smiling, perpetual Innocent, he was the Conscience.
Where she (despite her physical frailty) was the Strength it took to overcome all obstacles, he was like a constant Weakness that would punish her until her dying day, and even longer.
If Benji had not existed, Regina would hardly have accepted when the Chairman presented her with an offer of marriage. She might possibly have carried on seeing him ‘at the office’, as his other lovers did. What was the alternative? Any woman who had once been favoured with the presence of the Praeses scarcely had any option but to bend to his will.
But getting married was another matter. Her father, lawyer Aron Wajnberger, warned her repeatedly of the consequences of allowing herself to be wedded to that ‘fanatic’ for all time, for all eternity. But for Regina, the ghetto was like slow suffocation. Every day, a little bit more of the life she lived was taken from her. Her aged father was now in a wheelchair; he could no longer get up or walk unaided; and what would happen the day her father – who was, after all, an esteemed and respected lawyer in the Chairman’s camp – no longer held his protective hand over them? And what would happen to Benji then?
Her brother meanwhile naturally went round the ghetto in his typical way, doing all he could to undermine the position she had carved out for herself and her family.
Benji was particularly fond of talking to the ‘new arrivals’, the Jews from Berlin, Prague and Vienna who were seeking out the market places of the ghetto with increasing desperation. To them he could tell it like it was: that the deportations which were about to take place were just the beginning of an exodus on a massive scale, and that the Germans would not give up until not a single Jew was left alive in the ghetto.
And the new arrivals should not think they were safe just because they had been deported once already, or because they as ‘German Jews’ constituted some specially spared elite:
On these trains, we all travel in the same class, my friends!
Only the Chairman believes the Germans will treat good, well-behaved Jews any differently. In actual fact, they see the whole lot of us as rubbish to be thrown away – and the only reason they’ve gathered us all in one place is to make it easier to get rid of us. Believe me, my friends. That’s what they want. To get rid of us.
Some of the new arrivals thought what Benji said was dreadful and wanted to hear no more. Others stayed and paid attention.
Benji was one of the few ‘real’ ghetto dwellers they had met who spoke in a way they could understand – in pure, clear German, in which one could discuss not only Schopenhauer but also practical matters like how to apply for a proper place to live, or where to go in the ghetto for coal briquettes or paraffin. And besides, Benji seemed to have connections in the higher echelons of the ghetto hierarchy. If they could interpret his outpourings correctly, they might get at least some hint of an answer to the question that was plaguing them all. That is: how long would they be kept here? And what did the authorities have in store for them?
And Benji told them willingly – everything he knew.
He told them of the Debt the Chairman had incurred from the authorities when the ghetto factories were built, and of Biebow’s constant demands that this Debt be repaid in some form; if not in cash then at least in valuable objects or brigades of hearty, healthy workers who could be sent to labour outside the ghetto. The Debt, he said, was infinite. That was why the new arrivals had to pledge to hand over all their ready money and exchange all their possessions for money at the Chairman’s bank for a ludicrous cashing fee, and still it would not be enough:
He speaks to you as if you were a resource, but you are not a resource; in actual fact you have all come here to be slaughtered … And do you know how? The same way as animals, put into a pen. First they have to tire themselves out round its zigzag runs and then, when they come out, the club and the butcher’s hook are waiting … !
Many of those Benji talked to subsequently hung on to their savings and assets. It was said that many also asked whether there was anyone else in the ghetto to hold their possessions in trust for them. Was there a private bank? But Benji was aware of none, and if, contrary to expectation, he had known of anybody, he would never have said so. He simply stared back at whoever asked, looking at them as if they had just crawled out of their own skin, and then strode off.
*
Before the deportations began in the late winter of 1942, the wedding of Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski and Regina Wajnberger was the most widely discussed event in the ghetto.
People talked about the lavish celebration the Chairman was expected to lay on for his bride, and the gifts he intended showering on her family and all the Jews in the ghetto out of gratitude for having been given her. But mainly they talked about his chosen one. They said how scandalous it was that she was thirty years younger than him, but most of all that she was ‘one of them’, and so it followed that it could have been absolutely anybody who was thus overnight elevated to the mighty man’s side. Many saw in the image of the young, apparently defenceless Regina a way out of this captivity and degradation that nobody had thought possible until then.
The Chairman’s own relatives, however, seemed less responsive. Princess Helena had asked her husband a number of times to talk his brother Chaim out of it. And when that
had no effect, she had gone to the rabbis and asked to have the marriage put to a legal test. She thought that false creature – as she called Regina – had deliberately set out to seduce a helpless old man, and what was more, one with a weak heart, who could thus scarcely be expected to survive the emotional turmoil that marriage with a woman thirty years his junior would probably
entail. But the Chairman said that he had not considered changing his mind at any stage, and had no intention of doing so now. He said of Regina that she was the first woman to come near him who had not made him feel ashamed. In her dazzling smile, he perceived an innocence that redeemed him from all previous taint, and a sublime purity that spurred him on to new duties. Only one thing worried him. Whether her delicate body would be capable of bearing the child he intended to give her. More and more often of late, he had begun to think it his duty not only to discipline and educate, but also to ensure that his inheritance was passed down. In March that year – 1942 – he would be sixty-five. He therefore thought, not unreasonably,
that he had no time to lose in bringing into the world the son he had always dreamt of.
The marriage service itself was conducted by Rabbi Fajner in the old synagogue on Łagiewnicka Street and was a simple ceremony, with Rumkowski in a three-piece velvet suit and the bride as fragile and beautiful as spring rain beneath her white veil. In the course of just a few hours, the Chairman and his young wife received no fewer than six hundred telegrams of congratulation, sent from every conceivable corner of the ghetto; and outside the front entrance to the hospital where the Chairman had his ‘town residence’ at the time, hundreds of kierownicy, heads of department, representatives of the local police and fire brigade queued to hand over personally the gifts they naturally dared not come without. Even Princess Helena and her entourage had thought it prudent to abandon their opposition and change sides, and they stood smiling in the doorway to welcome all the guests, including Princess Helena’s own administrator, Mr Tausendgeld, who had personally undertaken to set up a present table on which the gifts and greetings telegrams were piled.
Benji was there, too. He went round, pale and composed, asking everyone to give a piece of bread and tip a few drops from their wineglasses into a bowl he was holding pressed to his chest. When the bowl was full, he went out to the forecourt where curious onlookers had gathered, despite the icy wind, to witness the event from a distance. All the wedding guests could see the bride’s brother from the window as he, his half-mast suit trousers flapping around his anklebones, handed out bread and poured wine for the poor of the ghetto.
And those with the sense to be ashamed were ashamed.
The rest danced to prohibited gramophone music.
But Regina was not ashamed. She was physically incapable of being ashamed of her brother.
Afterwards, the Chairman told his wife he had earmarked a special place for Benji at the ‘sanatorium’ in Wesoła Street. Perhaps a stay in a rest home would make him calm down and finally feel more content. Regina asked her husband if she could rely on him keeping this promise. He replied that if that was all it took to make his beloved wife happy, then it was the least he could do.
After six months in the Franciszkańska Street collective, the Schulz family had finally been allocated a place to live. It was a couple of blocks away in Sulzfelderstrasse, or Brzezińska as the street was called in Polish. Two families were already housed in the little flat. In the room overlooking the inner yard lived a young working couple and they had a little girl with long plaits, named Emelie, who never said a word or even looked up when they met in the hall; in the larger room, facing the street, lived a paint dealer named Riemer and his wife, who had both also come from Prague.
On Dr Schulz’s advice, Martin and Josel slept in the Riemers’ room, while Vĕra and her mother moved into the kitchen.
Just off the kitchen there was a tiny room, formerly used as a larder or possibly a cloakroom. There were two doors to this cubbyhole: a door from the kitchen that was so small you had to crouch to get through it; and a taller, narrower one from the hall that looked like an ordinary cloakroom door.
Up on the ceiling of this room there was an air vent, which could be opened using a rod fixed to the wall. As long as the vent was open, you could have both doors shut and there was still some light in the cubbyhole.
Maman installed herself in this restricted space. Vĕra took food in to her on a tray every day, and they also brought her water in a bucket, and an enamel bowl to use as a chamber pot. It was so cramped inside that if Maman wanted to sleep with the door shut, she had to sit with her back against the wall and her knees pulled up. So there she sat. She ate very little; soon she was eating nothing at all, unless Vĕra or Martin put the food in her mouth and forced her to swallow.
Arnošt tried to use his connections to get Maman admitted, first to the hospital in Łagiewnicka Street, then to the ‘special clinic’ in Wesoła Street; but he was forced to give up. In a ghetto where everyone is more or less ill, stays in hospital were for di privilizherte, and Arnošt Schulz, foreign Jew that he was, still had a long way to go before he could count himself among that select, privileged group.
But he worked doggedly, day after day, to try to get there.
In 1942, he and a Dr Wieneger from Berlin, with whom he had had some correspondence on scientific matters before the war, developed a technique for making a special salt and sugar solution that could be given subcutaneously; it was derived from a decoction of potato peelings left over from the factory soup kitchens.
