The Emperor of Lies, page 23
But Vĕra could not stop hearing her heart beating behind the closed-up wall. That night, and on all those that followed, it was as if not just the wall but the whole room where they lay was bulging and pulsating with Maman’s invisible heartbeats.
On the afternoon of 3 September 1942, the authorities summoned the Praeses again. He stood before them as usual, head bowed, hands at his sides.
He faced Biebow, Czarnulla, Fuchs and Ribbe.
Biebow said he had given careful consideration to the Chairman’s suggestion that the old and the sick would be let go if the children were spared.
There is, of course, a certain logic to your proposal, Rumkowski, but the orders we have received from Berlin leave us no room for such an accommodation. All ghetto inhabitants who cannot support themselves must, of necessity, leave. That is the order, and it also applies to children.
Then Biebow set out a number of calculations he had asked to be made, and said these showed there should be a total of at least twenty thousand non-workers, the majority of them old people and children. If they could free themselves of these Unbrauchbare, Berlin would no longer find reason to involve itself in ‘internal’ ghetto affairs.
Rumkowski replied that this was an order no human being could carry out. No human being voluntarily gives up his own children.
Then Biebow replied that Rumkowski had had his chance but he had missed it.
You’ve had weeks, months, Rumkowski, but what have you achieved? You’ve taken every opportunity to get round the rules. You’ve set children to work who scarcely know what hemstitch is. You’ve turned the hospitals into rest homes … ! And all this has been going on while our administration does everything in its power to secure the ghetto’s food supply.
Then Fuchs said:
You must consider the nature of our heroic war effort, Herr Rumkowski. Everyone is called upon to make sacrifices.
Then Ribbe said:
What could possibly make you imagine we would expend time and energy on support for miserable Jews at a time when Germans are being forced out of house and home by the Allies’ cowardly air raids? Are you really so naive that you thought we would continue dispensing this sort of charity indefinitely, Rumkowski?
Rumkowski asked them to give him time to think it over and consult his colleagues. They said there was no time. They said that if he had not handed over comprehensive lists of ghetto residents over sixty-five and under ten within twelve hours, they would initiate the operation themselves.
Czarnulla said:
The ghetto is a plague zone, a boil that must be lanced.
If you do it now, once and for all, you may hope to survive.
If you don’t, there’s not a chance.
The public meeting in the fire-station yard in Lutomierska Street is due to start at half past three in the afternoon, but people have been gathering in the big, open space since two. At that time of the afternoon, the sun is at its highest, and the whole expanse of stone between the buildings on either side of the yard is turned into a well of scalding hot, white light. Only later in the afternoon does a narrow shadow start to edge from the long row of sheds and outbuildings running along the exterior of the crumbling stone wall. Those just arriving all cluster in the thin strip of shade. In the end there are so many of them jostling together along the wall that the chief of the ghetto fire brigade, Mr Kaufmann, feels impelled to emerge from his cool office and push or pleadingly pull on reluctant arms to make the crowd space itself out a little.
But nobody willingly stands in the broiling hot sun.
When the Chairman finally arrives, it is half past four and the area of shade has spread halfway across the inner courtyard. But it is by now such a huge gathering that only a fraction can stand in that shade. The rest have either moved to the gable end, deeper into the courtyard, or climbed onto the roofs of the sheds and outhouses. The people up on the roofs are the first to catch sight of the Chairman and his bodyguards.
At the sight of the old man, a ripple runs through the crowd. He does not walk with head and stick held defiantly high as usual, but with hunched shoulders and eyes on the ground. In an instant, the yard falls completely silent. It is so quiet that you can even hear the birds chirruping in the trees on the other side of the wall.
The podium this time consists of a rickety table. On top of that, somebody has placed a chair, so the speaker can at least be a head taller than the crowd. Dawid Warszawski is the first to climb up onto the improvised platform. The microphones have been mounted a little too far forward, so he has to stretch to reach them, which makes him look as if he is permanently about to lose his balance and fall off. Even so, somehow he gets too close to the microphone, and every word he speaks sends an echo billowing back and forth between the loudspeakers, as if it were constantly trying to interrupt him.
Warszawski says how ironic it is that the Chairman, of all people, has been forced to take this difficult decision. After all the years the Eldest of the ghetto has devoted to bringing up the Jewish children. (CHILDREN! The echo reverberates back off the walls.) In conclusion, he tries to appeal for the understanding of all those gathered to listen.
There is a war on. Every day, the air-raid sirens whine above our heads. Everyone has to run for cover. At times like these, the young and the old just get in the way. That it is why it would be better if they were removed.
After these words, which merely generate restlessness and anxiety in the crowd, the Chairman climbs onto the table and leans forward to the microphone. By his voice, too, people can tell that he has changed. Gone is the shrill, slightly hysterical tone of command. The sentences follow each other slowly, with a dull and sustained metallic tone; as if it were a torture to produce each word:
The ghetto has been dealt a terrible blow. They demand that we give them the very things most valuable to us – our children and our old people. I have never had the good fortune to father children of my own, but I have spent the best years of my life among children. So I would never have imagined that it would be I who was obliged to take the sacrificial lambs to the altar. But in the autumn of my years, I must now reach out my hands and ask:
Brothers and sisters, give them to me. Give me your children … !
[…]
I had a premonition of this. I was expecting ‘something’, and was constantly on my guard to try to prevent it. But I was unable to intervene, because I did not know the nature of the threat we were about to face.
When they seized the patients from the hospitals, it took me completely by surprise. Believe me. I had friends and relations of my own in those hospitals and I could not help them. I believed what happened there meant it was all over, and now we would have the calm I had worked so hard to achieve. But fate proved to have something else in store. That is the lot of the Jews: when we suffer, we are forced to suffer still more – especially in times of crisis like these.
Yesterday I was ordered to deport more than twenty thousand people from the ghetto; otherwise, they said, they would do it themselves. The question was whether we should take on this odious task ourselves or leave it to others. But since our guiding principle is not ‘How many will disappear?’ but ‘How many can we save?’, we decided – we: that is to say, my closest colleagues and I – that however hard it might be, we had to implement the ruling ourselves. I had to carry out the cruel and bloody operation myself. I had to amputate the arms to save the body. I had to let the children go. If I did not do it, then maybe yet more would have to go –
I have no words of consolation to offer you today. Nor have I come to try to calm your fears. I have come like a thief, to take from you what you hold dearest. I did everything in my power to make the authorities retract this order. When that did not work, I tried to make them reduce their demand. I tried to save at least one more age group – children between nine and ten. But they refused to yield. There was only one thing I managed to do. Children above ten are saved. Let that at least be some consolation in your great pain.
We have many tuberculosis patients in the ghetto; their days, or at best weeks, are numbered. I do not know – perhaps this is just a wicked and malicious thought, perhaps not – but I still cannot help putting it before you. Give me these patients, and I will be able to save healthy people in their place. I know how much it means to you to nurse your sick relatives at home. But when faced with a decree that makes us choose who can be saved and who cannot, common sense dictates that the saved must be those who can be saved and those who have a chance of being rescued, not those who cannot be saved in any case …
We live in a ghetto. We live in such destitution that we haven’t enough to provide for the well, let alone the sick. We all care for our sick at the cost of our own health. You give them what little bread and sugar you can spare, but in doing that, you make yourselves ill. If I had been forced to choose between sacrificing the sick, those who can never recover from their illnesses, and saving the well, I would choose without hesitation to save the well. That is why I have ordered my doctors to surrender the incurably ill, with the aim of saving in their place healthy people who are still capable of living …
I understand you, mothers. I see your tears. And I hear your hearts pounding, you fathers, who will have to go to your work the morning after I have taken your children from you, those children you were playing with just the other day. I understand and feel all this. Since 4 p.m. yesterday, when this ruling was announced, I have been a broken and tormented man. I share your powerlessness and feel your pain; I do not know how I can go on living after all this. I must tell you a secret. Initially they demanded I sacrifice twenty-four thousand, three thousand people a day for eight days, but I managed to negotiate the number down to twenty thousand or less, on condition this would include children up to the age of ten. Children who have turned ten are out of danger. Since the number of children and old people combined amounts to thirteen thousand, the rest of the quota must be filled with the sick.
I find it hard to speak. My strength fails me. But I must ask you one last thing. Help me to carry out this operation. The prospect of them – God forbid! – taking the matter into their own hands makes me quake with terror …
It is a broken man you see before you. Do not envy me. This is the most difficult decision I have ever had to make. I raise my trembling hands and implore you: give me these sacrificial victims in order that I may save others from being sacrificed, in order that I may save a hundred thousand Jews.
That was what they promised me, you see: if you hand over these people yourselves, you will be left in peace –
(Shouts from down in the crowd:
‘We can all go’; and:
‘Mr Chairman, don’t take all the children; take one child from families with several!’)
But my dear people – these are all just hollow phrases. I cannot discuss it with you. When the authorities come, none of you will say so much as a word.
I know what it means to tear limbs from your body. I begged them on my knees, but it was pointless. From towns that formerly had seven or eight thousand Jews, barely a thousand reached our ghetto alive. So what is best? What do you want? For us to let eight or nine thousand people live, or look on mutely as all perish … Decide for yourselves. It is my duty to try to help as many survive as possible. I am not appealing to the hotheads among you. I am appealing to people who can still listen to reason. I have done, and will continue to do, everything in my power to keep weapons off our streets and avoid bloodshed … The ruling could not be overturned, only tempered.
It takes the heart of a thief to demand what I demand of you now. But put yourselves in my shoes. Think logically, and draw your own conclusions. I cannot act in any way other than I do, since the number of people I can save this way far exceeds the number I have to let go …
Between the block of flats at 22 Gnieźnieńska Street and number 24, there is a gap or opening a few metres wide. It is as though both buildings, which have been standing on this spot for years, have leaned closer and closer to each other but never quite got all the way. In the middle of this shrinking space between the two blocks stands a partially collapsed brick wall, and on it sits Adam Rzepin, keeping guard.
It is the Sabbath. It is the day of rest. The factory gates are closed.
The wooden bridges linking the various sections of the ghetto, which are usually black with the crush of people crossing over them, are as empty as scaffolds. No traffic anywhere. All Adam can hear is the metallic drone of the flies taking off from the rubbish dump behind him. The sound of the swarms of flies rising into the air, which then dies away; beyond that, nothing but his own pounding heartbeat.
From the top of the wall, he has an uninterrupted view of the entire south-western section of the ghetto. He can see over to Lutomierska Street and to the plank and barbed-wire wall at Wrześnieńska Street where the old people’s home is, and Judge Jakobson’s gericht.
Posted at strategically important points all over the ghetto are other lookouts like him, and they send runners between them to report on what they have seen.
It is from them Adam learns that the operation has begun.
*
Although they must have known from the outset that they would never be able to do it, the Jewish police had initially tried to carry out the whole operation themselves.
Just after dawn, as the sun still hung low and swollen over the worn cobblestone streets of the ghetto, men from Gertler’s Sonderabteilung sealed off parts of Rybna Street. Then the concierge in each block was ordered to go ahead with the master keys and unlock not only the doors to attics and storerooms but also any doors the residents had not opened voluntarily.
Most people seemed to have tried to barricade themselves into their rooms.
Jewish politsayen carried out screaming women and children, who struggled wildly to fend them off, while the old people clutched the doorposts of their homes with a convulsive, unspeaking determination, as if they were trying to take root in the very walls. Old men could be seen pulling in their skinny, spidery legs as they attempted to hide under bedsteads, or sitting with covers or prayer shawls over their heads, rocking back and forth.
Ten or so women, their children balanced precariously in their arms or on their hips, tried to escape through the windows of Rybna Street flats facing into the courtyard. Crazed and screaming hysterically, they threatened to let themselves and their children drop if the policemen in the flats took so much as a step towards them. Two men – one in a flat up on the third floor, the other on the latrine roof, down in the yard, had tied together some sheets and blankets to make a long rope, and shouted encouragement to the escaping women to climb down the rope. The women lowered their children down first. A number of them had time for an ungainly scramble to safety, over the far side of the latrine roof. But only a few minutes later, Gertler’s men came charging out into the yard and hauled down the children who were still on the roof, before the very eyes of their desperate parents, leaning helplessly out of the windows above.
Not only had the police been ordered out that morning, but also Kaufmann’s firemen and the men who carried the sacks of flour from the depots to the ghetto bakeries: the so-called White Guard.
According to one of the rumours that had reached Adam as he stood at his post on the wall, all the firemen, transport workers and unloaders who had agreed to back up the police in carrying out the authorities’ bloody handiwork had been given guarantees that their own children would be safe. Sometimes the victims and the perpetrators even knew each other:
What have you done with your own son, Schlomo? a man was heard to ask as his child was dragged down from the latrine roof by men never seen there in uniform before. How much blood money did you get, you traitor … ? Such exchanges were generally followed by a scuffle. A few blocks further down Rybna Street, a group of men started improvising barricades. As soon as the Jewish police and firemen showed themselves, they were pelted with stones –
Gayt avek ayere nakhesn, mir veln undzere kinder nisht opgebn …7
This was the point at which the German authorities decided to take matters into their own hands.
The security forces again deployed the commando units they had used for emptying the ghetto hospitals. The soldiers came running down the street in tight formation, as if to generate terror by their very appearance; lorries and tractors came after them with grating gearboxes and loudly revving engines. Soon the improvised barricades were tossed aside, vehicle entrance gates broken in or blasted open, and soldiers came pouring in through archways, rifles at the ready.
Behind the gates, the terrified concierge would at best have persuaded the families living in the building to venture out of their flats and down into the yard.
While the officers went round shouting orders, men and women attempted to gather up their children and other relatives and hand over health certificates and workbooks to the SS commanders inspecting them. In some cases, Jewish police officers accompanied them, as a silent escort. There were rumours that Dawid Gertler himself had been seen on his way in and out of addresses where various prominent people lived.
By no means did all the SS commanders who had been called out bother to check the workbooks or consult the lists of names handed over to them. They went by how young or old, well or poorly nourished the lined-up Jews looked. Children and feeble, emaciated old people were shoved ruthlessly to one side, ready for loading onto the waiting vehicles. While this was going on, Gertler’s politsayen had extreme difficulty in stopping desperate mothers and fathers from hurling themselves onto the long trailers and trying to rescue the children who had been wrested from them. There were at least two SS soldiers posted by every vehicle, and they showed no mercy, opening fire on anybody who got too close.
