The Emperor of Lies, page 24
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By about five in the afternoon, the German commando units and their lorries and trailers reach Gnieźnieńska Street. Just as Adam anticipated, they pull up first outside the old people’s home. From his vantage point, Adam sees men from the White Guard helping old men and women up onto the trailers and backs of the lorries. The majority of them can scarcely walk unaided, and reach out imploringly to their executioners, who carry them across their shoulders or sling them from one to another like sacks of flour.
But by then, he has already decided to hide Lida. In the yard, there are two coal cellars. One has a wide metal hatch at ground level through which the coal is tipped in. Adam assumes that if the Germans look for runaways anywhere, it will be here. The other cellar served as a tool store in the past. Coal shovels were kept there, along with brooms and snow shovels and the old wheelbarrow in which Adam often used to wheel Lida round.
At the very back of the now empty tool shed he has dug a hole in the ground, deep enough for the person standing in it not to be visible in the strip of light from the open door.
Into that hole he puts Lida.
She resists at first. She doesn’t understand why she has to stand still in an ice-cold mass of earth, shared with spiders and old coal dust. But he stands in the hole with her for a while. He sings to her, and that makes it better.
They are there much sooner than Adam had expected.
He can hear the concierge, Mrs Herszkowicz, warbling her agitated summons across the yard:
The Germans are coming, the Germans are coming …
Assemble in the yard everybody, all down to the yard …
Today is Mrs Herszkowicz’s big day. She is wearing a dark brown velvet dress with a creamy lace trim around her generous decolletage; and with it a cartwheel-sized hat with a complicated feather arrangement tucked into a ribbon round the crown. As she runs to and fro across the yard, clucking, she reminds Adam of a garishly painted pheasant.
He holds Lida’s face between his two hands. He wants to force the song within her to fall silent. After a while, they shift a little so they are standing together in the hole the way they always stand: he with his arm around her body, she resting her head on his shoulder. Brother and sister. Since she is taller than him, she has to bend her knees to be at his level; and the moment she does that, and stretches her neck to nuzzle her head against his collarbone, he knows that he loves and always will love her, with a love that is beyond what anyone will understand.
The Germans are under the command of the same undersized Mühlhaus who led the purge of the hospital in Wesoła Street. Because of the heat, he has removed his peaked cap and gloves and is holding them in one hand as he moves briskly along the row of tenants Mrs Herszkowicz has lined up.
Adam’s father, Szaja Rzepin, is among the last to join their ranks.
Standing next to him are Moshe and Rosa Pinczewski and their daughter Maria.
Maria Pinczewska looks petrified. On paper, she has nothing to fear. For the past three months, she has been employed at a tailor’s workshop that makes decals and uniform insignia for the Wehrmacht. If she had possessed merely a fraction of the ingratiating approach displayed by Mrs Herszkowicz as she shows the German soldiers round the building, she might have asserted her own usefulness and got away with it. What is more, Miss Pinczewska is still young and beautiful; blonde and blue-eyed, almost like a real Aryan.
Samuel Wajsberg and Mr and Mrs Frydman from the flats across the yard are far less favourably placed. Mrs Frydman has put a headscarf on her daughter, which makes her look significantly older than she is. Beside her stand Mr and Mrs Mendel and their daughter. Not even the normally punctilious Mühlhaus bothers to look at Mr Mendel’s workbook, merely gestures impatiently to a space to the right of the stump which is all that remains of Fabian Zajtman’s great chestnut tree. That is where those selected for deportation have to stand. The Frydmans’ children are also escorted there. As they go, Mrs Frydman sinks into her husband’s arms.
Samuel Wajsberg calls out to his wife Hala, who has not yet appeared.
It sounds more like a cry for help.
Hala! he screams.
The echo reverberates in waves up the tall, crumbling facades.
Adam comes to his father’s side.
Szaja Rzepin just stares straight in front of him, head down.
Where’s Lida? he asks finally, without raising his eyes from the ground.
Adam does not reply. Szaja does not repeat the question.
HA-A-A-LAA! cries Samuel again.
No answer; just the echo rolling back down.
Mrs Herszkowicz smiles a smile far too wide, and plucks nervously at the frills and flounces on her bosom.
Now, finally, Hala Wajsberg comes out into the courtyard. She is shepherding her younger son Chaim. One step behind them comes Jakub. She has dressed both her sons in freshly ironed white shirts, dark trousers with turn-ups, and carefully polished black shoes. Hala, too, is soberly attired in a straight, long-sleeved dress. She has her hair scraped back into a bun. The high bun makes her normally powerful neck look strangely vulnerable. Her cheekbones are high and shiny, almost as though she had polished her face with a glossy cream.
No more than a few minutes have elapsed since Adam came to his father’s side. Mrs Herszkowicz is already back. Task completed, she can proudly inform the handsome SS officer with the tall black boots and glinting collar insignia.
Mühlhaus is now standing in front of Samuel Wajsberg, who at his full height is almost a head taller than the German officer. Mühlhaus does not even attempt to meet his eye, just holds out his hand and waits for Samuel to give him the family’s workbooks.
But the fact that the officer is taking no notice of her despite all the trouble she has gone to on his behalf is suddenly too much for Mrs Herszkowicz. Unlike most of the others in these blocks of flats, she comes from a good family and has had a good Polish education, despite coming from Jewish stock. She has, moreover, carried out the task assigned to her with aplomb. She has got all the tenants to evacuate their flats in time. Here they all are, lined up with their workbooks in their hands. Yet the German officer has not so much as glanced at her.
There’s one family member missing over here, she therefore announces loudly and clearly in German, pointing over to Szaja and Adam Rzepin.
SS-Hauptscharführer Mühlhaus looks up from the documents in his hand. Only now does he seem fully to appreciate what this dolled-up woman is trying to say to him, which makes Mrs Herszkowicz nervous: Fräulein Rzepin hat sich vielleicht versteckt, she clarifies, with something that could have passed for a full curtsey if her frilly dress had not got in the way.
Mühlhaus nods. With a distracted wave, he sends the two Jewish politsayen he has brought with him to hunt for the missing person; then returns to checking Samuel Wajsberg’s documents. Within a couple of minutes, Lida is brought out. She is twice as tall as the two policemen carrying her; her legs are dangling floppily from her body and her face is all black with soot and soil.
Guten Tag, meine Herren, she says casually, swinging her arms to and fro.
Mühlhaus stares at her.
Wo hattest du dich versteckt … ? he roars, suddenly inflated by his own rage.
Lida carries on swinging her arms. It is as if she is getting ready to take off and fly away.
Mülhaus moves closer. In one rapid movement he grabs her by the hair, pulls her head down to his own and yells straight into her dissolving face:
WO HATTEST DU DICH VERSTECKT?
But Lida just carries on smiling and swinging her arms.
Mühlhaus fumbles for his service pistol; then with an expression of unbounded disgust on his face, fires two shots straight through the girl’s head.
Takes a swift step back.
And Lida falls. It is her final crash.
Blood and brains spurt from the back of her head.
After the shots, utter panic breaks out. The women scream out loud, the men scream even louder. The two carefully separated groups – those waiting on one side to be taken away on the trailers, and the rest – converge again, so the two Jewish policemen step in on their own initiative and start clumsily hitting and shoving people to make sure they remain apart.
As if suddenly losing patience with the whole thing, Mühlhaus takes a couple of steps back; then with his bloodstained hand he points out a further handful of people who are to be pushed to one side. His hand falls on old Mrs Krumholz, and, as he gives a quick little smile, the blonde, blue-eyed Maria Pinczewska.
After her, Chaim Wajsberg.
It is all completely random. He has not even bothered to look at the lists Mrs Herszkowicz has given him.
Gertler’s two politsayen take hold of Chaim Wajsberg and propel him towards the rest of the group for deportation. Hala is already on her way after her son. But Samuel intervenes. With a cry that no one would have thought his ruined lungs capable of, he throws himself at his wife and knocks her to the ground.
Jakub Wajsberg is left standing there alone. He watches in bewilderment as his father crawls up over his mother’s body, as if trying to cover every inch of it with his own. A few metres from them, Adam Rzepin sits cradling his sister Lida’s bloody head in his lap.
The last morning in the Green House, Rosa Smoleńska got up at four as usual, to fetch in the water that Chaja Meyer then poured into the big washtubs in the kitchen; and Józef Feldman came on his bicycle as usual, to fill the coal boxes and light the stoves. As usual; for the sake of the children, they did all they could to make even this last day begin the same way as all the others. The sun had not yet risen above the horizon, but the sky was already bright and transparently blue, and a few stray swallows were flitting about in the air, as if to announce that this September day, too, would be hot and sunny.
The evening before, Superintendent Rubin and Dr Zysman the paediatrician gathered everyone together in the świetlica of the children’s home. Superintendent Rubin told them the authorities had decided that their stay in the ghetto was now over and that some children would be going home, while others would be looked after in ‘ordinary’ children’s homes outside the ghetto. He said those who were moving out should not be sad about it. There was a world beyond the walls, too, he said, and it was bigger, much, much bigger than any ghetto.
He laughed again. There can surely never have been so much laughter heard in the Green House as there was that evening. But the children were grave and quiet behind their smiles. Then Nataniel asked who was to take them out of the ghetto, and how they would be travelling, by train, or perhaps by tram (all the children had seen the tram that had been taking the deportees to Radogoscz since the start of the year), and Superintendent Rubin’s smile grew even wider, and he replied that they would find out tomorrow; now it was time to go and pack their things, and they should only take what they needed for the journey, and be sure to put on their very best clothes and not forget to bow or curtsey to the German soldiers who came to show them the way.
A woman from the administrative office in Dworska Street, a Mrs Goldberg, had been entrusted with taking the children to the designated assembly point. Mrs Goldberg had vivid red lipstick and was dressed in a very close-fitting, tailored suit that meant she could only take short steps when she walked. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, as if afraid her gaze might get snagged on something, and when she spoke it was always nervously, out of the corner of her mouth.
While Mrs Goldberg and the two guards who were to escort them waited outside, Rosa Smoleńska went round the corridors of the Green House and clapped her hands, and the children lined up in exactly the same order as they had been taught to do whenever the Chairman came to visit: the youngest at the front, the older ones rising in steps behind. On the stroke of seven, as instructed, all the children and their nurses set off to march to the assembly point on the big Ghetto Field; Rosa walked at the front with the youngest children Liba, Sofie, Dawid, and the twins Abram and Leon holding her hands; while Chaja Meyer and Malwina Kempel brought up the rear with the older ones.
Children from the other Marysin orphanages are already standing in scattered groups around the sloping, muddy field; and more are on their way. Deep tyre tracks in the loose clay show which way the lorries came in. They have backed in to form a star pattern, radiating out from the centre where the children and their supervisors are to congregate. Two cars driven by orderlies have pulled up about ten metres away, one of them with the inscription GETTOVERWALTUNG on one side. Rosa sees Hans Biebow himself walking over from that direction. He is dressed as if he were on a hunting trip, in big, baggy Stiefelhosen, with a rifle slung on a strap over his shoulder.
He seems agitated about something. He keeps turning round, shouting and gesticulating. Too many children are arriving at the same time. It’s all going too fast.
Some of the Jewish policemen, who have been standing about in bewilderment in their peaked caps and tall, shiny boots, suddenly leap into action and start to shove the growing numbers of bodies backwards and pack them closer together.
The children are to be counted.
Then they all have to form up again. Each children’s home separately. Six groups.
But by now, the alarm has begun to transmit itself to the children. They squeeze anxiously between each other’s legs; some try to slink away, but they are caught by Jewish policemen, who even allow themselves to break into a run to retrieve them. A girl in a worn-out grey cardigan suddenly bursts into tears. Rosa casts an anxious glance at her own group. Staszek looks terrified. And Biebow is approaching with two SS men in long, black officer’s coats.
One of them, a man with round, steel-rimmed glasses like Himmler’s, has a sheaf of papers in his hand. From over by the rows of children come angry German orders for the count to be done again.
The sun is high in the sky now; she feels it burning the back of her neck, making it sweat.
Mrs Goldberg from the Wołkówna Secretariat, in her tight skirt with the slit at the back, is standing just in front of her, trying to sort out someone further back. Biebow and his men are getting closer.
All at once, a little boy in shorts and a beret sets off at a run across the stubbly grass. From where Rosa is standing, it is obvious where he is heading. In the heat haze on the far side of the Ghetto Field, there are tantalising glimpses of the shiny, corrugated tin roofs of the potting sheds along Bracka Street. If only he can make it that far.
A soldier next to her lets out a loud yell. She hears the rattle of his shoulder strap as he unhooks and raises his submachine gun. She sees the rucksack bouncing about on the boy’s back, his legs beating like drumsticks beneath it. A second later, a dull shot rings out. But it is not the soldier with the submachine gun who has fired. Looking past the soldier’s suddenly wavering rifle sight, she sees that Biebow has his rifle raised, too; he fires again – and far ahead of them, the boy falls from sight behind the grass bank.
Suddenly she is engulfed in a sea of running legs and struggling bodies. She keeps a tight hold on Staszek with one hand, and on the screaming Sofia with the other. Afraid of being trampled, she dare not turn round, but just carries on moving forward, her neck and shoulders held stiffly erect, like all the others now being herded along in the great crush. Of the children whose hands she is not holding, she can only catch sight of Liba and Nataniel. The twins are nowhere to be seen. Then she spots them: a couple of policemen with Jewish armbands lift first Adam, then Leon, onto the back of an already crowded truck. The children’s faces have dissolved into tears. She frees one arm to signal her presence, if nothing else. At the same moment, she feels a hard blow to her back. One of the German soldiers is brutally shoving her forward with the butt of his rifle, and yelling to her from under his shiny helmet – Vorwärts, vorwärts, nicht stehenbleiben – and without knowing how, she too finds herself gripped round the waist and hoisted onto the lorry. As the vehicle moves off, she is thrown headlong into a jumble of children and sharp-cornered rucksacks.
Nothing in her thirty years as a nursery nurse ever prepared her for a situation like this. For what is happening now, there are no words, no instructions. Lorry engines throb and rumble all around the shuddering truck in which she sits. They pass streets which she remembers filled with people, which are now so empty that they seem unreal. Every so often, the convoy passes a German guard post; the guards stand motionless in their sentry boxes, or clustered for a smoke by the barriers at the crossing points.
Then there is a jolt and the lorry comes to a stop again. Hands release the catches at the back of the lorry, lower the tailgate, and soldiers’ faces come into view at floor level, shouting at them all to get down. On the far side of the gravel forecourt where the lorries have pulled up she can see the stone steps leading up to the main entrance of the Drewnowska Street hospital.
The hospital is right on the ghetto boundary – but where once a barbed-wire fence ran, only a watchtower now remains. All forms of barrier seem to have been cleared away, and the German army vehicles have free access across the formerly impassable border. And the hospital is not a hospital any longer, either. It is more like a warehouse or transit camp. The soldiers herd them into a narrow, empty hallway, its floor covered in broken glass. The stairs to the upper floor are littered with soiled clothes and torn sheeting. The corridors run off the hall like dark, gaping tunnels. There is no electricity. They blunder around in the dark for a while and are then pushed into a large room that must formerly have been a ward. But there are no beds in it now, just a dirty floor and a window through which what remains of the sun is seeping in, thick and sludgy.
