The Emperor of Lies, page 22
Aware of the expectation that he will do something, he grasps his stick more firmly and strides up to the squat Mühlhaus.
Chairman: What is happening here?
Mühlhaus: I have orders to let no one pass.
Chairman: I am Rumkowski.
Mühlhaus: You could be Hermann Göring for all I care. I still can’t let you through.
Then Mühlhaus is gone; he hasn’t the patience to stand discussing anything with a Jew, no matter who he is or what he calls himself.
And the Chairman is left standing there alone. For a moment he looks as lost and powerless as the poor, broken men and women being carried or led from the hospital entrance to the trailers and the backs of the lorries. And yet he is not one of them. It is clearly discernible: a sort of vacuum, forming around him. Not only the German soldiers but also Rozenblat’s men fall back as if he had the plague.
On the back of the lorry nearest the main building, about a hundred elderly patients are crammed in together, standing up; many of them are half-naked or wearing faded, tattered hospital clothes.
He thinks he recognises one of Regina’s aunts, whom they used to visit on Sundays. He isn’t sure which of the old ladies it is; but he vaguely remembers having boasted to her that they would be able to take the tram all the way to Paris together, and that she laughed delightedly behind her bony hand: Oh Chaim, you can’t expect me to believe that … ! Now the woman is stripped naked of everything but the grey hair on her head and her terrified white eyes. Through the hubbub and crush that divides them, the woman shouts something to him and waves her matchstick arms, or perhaps her cries are directed at someone else. He is not sure, and he has no time to make sure, either. The soldier who has just shoved the last batch of patients up onto the truck hears her making a noise just beside him and takes aim at her face with his rifle butt in a wide, swinging action.
The blow lands right in the middle of the woman’s jaw, and something large and messy flies out of her mouth in a spurt of blood.
He turns away, nauseated.
That is when he notices that the hospital entrance is unguarded. The guards stationed there earlier have all rushed to cut off the escape route of a patient trying to get out through a first-floor window. The escapee is wearing a blue-and-white-striped nightshirt far too big for him, which hangs like a curtain over his face and the top part of his body as he falls forward, flailing his arms frantically. (The only reason the man does not plummet straight to the ground is that someone in the room behind him has swiftly leant out and grabbed his ankles.)
He himself seizes his opportunity and slips in through the half-open main door of the hospital, and suddenly the screams and deafening shouted orders are shut off.
Broken glass crunches under the soles of his boots.
He goes slowly up the broad sweep of the spiral staircase, his steps echoing beneath the high, vaulted stonework above him; goes on down the dark corridors, taking a look here and there into the now deserted wards on either side.
When he last came visiting with Regina, there were at least two hundred patients to a ward, two per bed, head to tail like the kings and knaves on a playing card. He remembered how their toothless, two-stalked heads had all smiled, and greeted him as if with a single mouth:
GOOD MORNING, MR CHAIRMAN –
Only Benji had opted to stay silent. He had been standing over by the window, his chin resting in his hand in a studiedly thoughtful pose. Now he was trying desperately to remember the number of Benji’s ward. But in all this upheaval, it is as if the hospital has been turned into an alien place. Unknown, impossible to navigate.
More or less by chance, he spots a doctor’s office at the far end of one of the corridors and steps inside with a sense of relief. On a shelf just inside the door are files of purchase lists and medical notes, and on the desk a telephone, still on the hook.
As he looks at it, the telephone, absurdly, begins to ring.
For a moment he is nonplussed. Should he lift the receiver and answer? Or will the ringing just attract German officers who will throw him out of the building as soon as they see him?
He ends up backing out into the corridor again. And Benji is standing there.
He spots him out of the corner of his eye long before he realises who it is. The ward doors are all open and the light is penetrating the corridors in long, mote-filled columns or tunnels. The light that draws Benji to his attention, however, is coming not from the side, but from above – from the ceiling – which is impossible of course: there are no windows there. Benji is wearing a blue-and-white-striped nightshirt like all the other patients, and leaning forward slightly, wielding a chair, its four legs pointing down the corridor, as if to defend himself from something.
From whom? From him? The Chairman takes a few steps into the impossible light:
Benji, it’s me, he says, and tries to smile.
Benji backs away. From his twisted lips comes a strange, inarticulate singing or whining sound.
Benji … ? is all he says. He wants his voice to sound full of anxiety and concern, but by the time it gets out of his mouth, it just sounds dishonest and false:
Be-en-j-ii, I’ve come to get you out of here, Be-en-jii …
Then Benji hurls himself forward. The four chair legs hit the Chairman full in the chest and Benji immediately drops the chair, as if it he has burnt himself on it, and runs off. But comes to a halt just as suddenly.
It is as if he had run straight into a wall.
Then the Chairman hears them, too. The sound of loud voices – German voices! – comes up from the stairwell below, followed by the scraping echo of energetic, booted footsteps. Now Benji does not know which way to go: forward, towards the inexorably advancing German officers, or back, towards the Praeses he fears if anything even more.
But the Chairman, too, is withdrawing, hastily taking cover behind the door of the doctor’s office.
SS-Hauptscharführer Mühlhaus and two of his subordinates walk briskly along the corridor outside, and the next moment, the mechanical creaking of boot soles and rattle of weapons against leather shoulder-belts is swallowed up by the echoes from the stairwell. As soon as the sound of footsteps has died away, the Chairman goes over to the medicine cabinet in the doctor’s room, takes an enamel jug from the bottom shelf and fills it with water from a tap over the sink. Then he reaches into his jacket pocket for one of the white tablets he always carries, puts it in a glass and pours in some water.
When he looks out into the corridor again, Benji is gone. He finds him again in the big ward nearest to the stairs, crouching against the whitewashed wall behind a mountain of ripped mattresses and screens that have been tossed aside. Benji is trembling from shoulder to foot, but he does not look up. The Chairman has to say his name several times with different intonation before he finally looks up through the thick fringe hiding his face.
Here Benji, drink this … !
Benji gives him the same drained look of terror that he had when the German officers were close by. The Chairman has to get down on his knees to put the glass to his mouth. Benji presses his lips to it and takes big, urgent gulps, like a child. The Chairman gently puts a hand to the back of his neck to support and help him.
And it is simple. He thinks of his wife. If only everything with her could have been that simple.
Benji looks up at him once, almost with gratitude. Then the poison does its work and his eyes glaze over. A long spasm runs through his body, starting at his head and ending with his heels, which jerk convulsively for a moment, then somehow stiffen in mid-movement. Without really knowing when or how it happened, he finds himself sitting with his brother-in-law’s dead body in his arms.
Of the six hospitals in the ghetto, Hospital No. 1 in Łagniewnicka Street was the largest. Its ground plan was square, with two wings extending from the main building round an open courtyard. So the building could be approached from a number of different directions.
In a desperate attempt to make contact with her father, Vĕra went in the back way, through dense shrubbery between some huts and a shed, to the separate entrance for the maternity wing. Many of the vehicles were already in place, parked there with their trailers. SS soldiers in field-grey uniforms with leather belts and tall, shiny boots were idling away their time round the drivers’ cabs or on the backs of the lorries. The soldiers’ passivity was deceptive, however. She got almost as far as the loading bay at the back entrance to the hospital when a shrill whistle cut through the air. When she looked up, she saw a man in uniform appear at a wide-open window on the second floor. Then a naked baby was pushed out, and fell headlong, straight down onto the back of the waiting lorry.
One of the soldiers on the lorry – a young man with bright blond hair and a uniform that looked several sizes too big for him – stood up and waved his rifle to his colleague on the second floor. The sleeves of his jacket were so long that he had to turn them up before he could attach his bayonet. Then he stood there, legs planted wide apart, while more squealing infant bodies came raining down from the window. Whenever he skewered one of the babies on his bayonet, he lifted it high above the end of his rifle, the blood running down his rolled-up sleeves.
Somewhere in the building above, people must have noticed what was happening, for other windows opened, and from inside came the sound of screaming in Yiddish and Polish:
Murderers, murderers … !
Vĕra didn’t know what to do. As if spurred on by the commotion, even more German soldiers appeared on the second floor. They were all cradling infants at their uniformed chests.
Then Vĕra started screaming herself.
The face of the laughing soldier on the back of the lorry changed to an ‘O’ of astonishment. In an instant, he had torn the bloody bundle from the tip of his bayonet and turned the sights of his rifle on her.
The sudden volley of rifle fire sent leaves and chips of wood flying from the roof of the hut, just above her head. She ducked and ran, and out of the bushes around her other running figures also appeared. Some in hospital gowns, others almost completely naked, mostly women and elderly men. Her sudden scream, and the shots that followed it, had driven them out of their temporary hiding places and now they were all running – frightened out of their senses, lifting their feet in high, stalking steps – as the salvoes of rifle fire carried on whipping up gravel and grass from the dust in front of the figures that had not yet fallen.
*
At the midday break, she stood in the queue for the soup kitchen in Jakuba Street with her tin mug, the heat of the sun burning and stinging her unprotected head as if there were a huge, open wound under the skin.
Almost everybody in the soup queue had family members in the various ghetto hospitals, and they almost all had similar stories to tell: of children thrown from maternity wards straight down into the waiting lorries; of infirm old people who had come tottering out of their wards to be run through by bayonets or shot dead. Only a few of those returning from the hospitals had managed to bring their relatives home with them.
It was rumoured that the Chairman, after protracted negotiations, had persuaded the authorities to exempt some particularly high-ranking individuals among the sick, but only on condition that others would be deported in their stead. A new Resettlement Commission had been set up to go through the patient registers to identify former in-patients who had been discharged, or people who had previously applied for places but been turned down for lack of the right contacts; anything or anyone would do: as long as they could take the places of the few irreplaceable individuals that those in charge said they could not do without.
It’s a disgrace, an utter disgrace … ! Mr Moszkowski could be heard muttering as he walked in the clouds of fluff among the looms. It was as though someone kept poking him in the side with a big stick. As soon as he sat down, he was up on his feet again.
In the evening, news came through that the Chairman’s father-in-law and various relatives and close friends of Jakubowicz and police commissioner Rozenblat had been ‘bought out’ by substitutes stepping into their places. The only person the Chairman had not managed to bring down from the trailers was his brother-in-law, young Benjamin Wajnberger, for the simple reason that nobody seemed to know what had become of him. There was no sign of him at the hospital; nor had he been seen in any of the temporary assembly camps. Had he tried to escape and fallen foul of some German patrol? Regina Rumkowska was broken-hearted, and said she feared the worst.
The very first evening, the Schulz family received a visit from a certain Mr Tausendgeld. He was the one charged with arranging to get them out.
Much later, when the story came out of his violent death at the hands of the German torturers, Vĕra tried to remember his face. But the image of Mr Tausendgeld remained as indistinct as it had been then, as he sat with them in the kitchen alcove next to Maman’s little room. She remembered a face covered in lumps and bumps, and in it a mouth with small, sharp, pointed teeth that he bared every time he smiled. With his long, slim, strangely stalk-like hands, he spread what looked like long lists of names on the table and made a show of marking off names as he talked.
From inside her chamber, Maman called out to Vĕra and asked her in a hoarse voice to run down to Roháneks on the corner to buy some thread. She had decided to take up sewing again. She had made things for Martin and Josel when they were little. Those had been ‘troubled times’, too.
At the table, Mr Tausendgeld was all eyes and ears.
‘She must think she’s back in Prague,’ he said, smiling almost approvingly through the growths on his face.
It soon became clear that he knew ‘everything worth knowing’ about Maman and her illness. Mrs Schulz, he said, was a person of the highest rank who must be saved at any price. And as if this were something that could only be divulged in the greatest confidence, he leant forward and whispered to Professor Schulz that the Secretariat was in the process of setting up a special enclosed camp for all those enjoying the authorities’ protection. The camp would be opposite the now evacuated hospital in Łagiewnicka Street. The move there would be carried out under the protection of the ghetto’s own forces, under the command of Dawid Gertler himself, whom they had to thank for the successful negotiation of this unique agreement with the German authorities.
What does it cost? was all Professor Schulz said; and Mr Tausendgeld – without hesitation, without even looking up from his paper, where he had already noted down the sum in the margin – replied:
Thirty thousand! They are demanding even more for what might be called notables, but in your family’s case I think thirty thousand marks will do.
Vĕra had often seen her father’s face turn pale with anger, seen the knotted veins on the back of his hand bulge as if they were about to burst. But this time, Professor Schulz managed to keep his anger in check. Maybe it was because of Maman’s confused voice, which persisted in calling out to Vĕra from the cubbyhole. Her illness hung like an incomprehensible punctuation mark in the thick, stuffy air above their heads. Or was the situation, as Vĕra would subsequently write in her diary, so absurd that it could be understood only by acknowledging that the whole world had gone mad?
In actual fact, Vĕra realised later, Professor Schulz had already made up his mind. They would wall up the opening to Maman’s room. Martin had an idea for what he called false wallpaper: an ordinary roll of wallpaper, glued to a wooden board and slotted into the tongue-and-groove wall, over the opening beside the kitchen sink. The side of the false wall could be prised up with a knife and moved aside, then slotted back in place. This wouldn’t put Maman’s health at risk, because the air vent was still there in the ceiling, and since Papa was a doctor, he would be able to get a Passierschein and come and go as he wanted, no matter what happened.
‘It’ll be all right, Vĕra, you’ll see,’ he said.
She wondered where he got it from, this unwavering conviction of his.
But it all had to be done quickly. The new Resettlement Commission had almost finished going through its lists of those required to come forward as replacements for the people who had been ‘redeemed’, and the Sonder were already going round looking for them in factories and living quarters.
On the afternoon of the third day of the operation, the Chairman had a new proclamation put up outside the Department of Statisitics in Kirchplatz. From now on, it said, the recruitment section at the Central Labour Office would also accept applications from children aged nine and up.
That could only mean one thing: all children under nine were also to be deported!
The mad chasing around began all over again. Not to the hospitals and clinics this time, but to the Central Labour Office in Bałuty Square, where people queued for hours to get their children registered for work before it was too late.
Everyone was asking for the Chairman.
Where is the Praeses in this hour of need when we can least do without him? Tomorrow, they were told, tomorrow, in the fire-station yard in Lutomierska Street, he will make a speech to the residents of the ghetto that will answer all your questions.
*
In the early evening, Vĕra went into Maman’s little room one last time. Maman was talking about the Hoffmann family, who had been their neighbours all those years in Mánesova Street. We’re in Łódź, Mama, not in Prague, Vĕra said. But her mother went on insisting. Night after night she could hear their youngest girl walking up and down the hall outside the sealed apartment, crying for her deported parents.
Vĕra brought in the bedpan and fed Maman pieces of bread soaked in water. After a little while, Martin and Josel also squeezed in beside her. By then, even Maman realised things were not as usual. Her eyes went from one child to the next, with a glassy, unsteady look. Arnošt gave her the injection, in one arm, and her head fell into his hands like a rag. Then Martin and Josel walled her in. Arnošt had already prepared a death certificate. He said the best thing would be not to think of Maman as a living person, at least not for the next few, critical days.
