The Emperor of Lies, page 8
The two German guards who found her had initially thought she was dead, yet another of those Jewish suicides. But when they bent down to deal with the body, they discovered she was still breathing. They searched through the woman’s clothing for identity papers, but found nothing. The German guards were now faced with a real dilemma. Having found no identity papers, they could not say for sure whether the woman was from the Jewish or the Aryan side of the wire; whether she had been escaping from the ghetto or, on the contrary (and these things still happened – just look at Zawadzki!), had been trying to force entry through the wire.
In consultation with their superiors, they decided to take the woman to the office of the Eldest of the Jews, so its employees could take over the matter. The Kripo also demanded to see the daily reports of all the guard commanders, so they could see whether any Jew had been reported missing in the ghetto. The admittance books of all the hospitals were checked, as were the patient records of the psychiatric clinic in Wesoła Street, to which many of the more well-to-do ghetto inhabitants had their mentally or physically enfeebled relatives admitted. But nowhere had any report been filed of patients going missing. They therefore felt it safe to conclude that the woman had not come from inside the ghetto.
One of the first to examine her was Leon Szykier, the
‘workers’ doctor’. He was known as the workers’ doctor because he was the only physician in the ghetto who did not demand shamelessly high fees of his patients, so even ordinary people could afford to consult him. During the examination, Dr Szykier palpated the woman’s body, and found it ‘a little wasted and emaciated’ but without any other signs of dehydration. There were also scratches and abrasions to the lower legs and arms, indicating that the woman had tried to climb over an obstacle of some kind. The body showed no other injuries. No swellings in the throat. No fever. Pulse and breathing normal.
It was later hinted that the good half-hour Szykier had spent alone with the woman had been enough to ‘damage her’. Others naturally disputed this. But it was quite clear that the woman had been lying calmly and peacefully on the stretcher when the German police guards carried her into the Secretariat, whereas half an hour later – when Dr Szykier left her – she was writhing on the barrack-bed in feverish convulsions and mumbling incoherent words of prayer in Hebrew and Yiddish.
Some even thought they could hear traces of the prophet’s words on her lips:
ashrei kol-chochei lo –
For the LORD is a God of justice;
blessed are all those who wait for Him.
News of the paralysed woman and her strange utterances spread rapidly. The Chairman had her taken to the Hasidic School in Lutomierska Street, where she was put into the care of a rebbe named Gutesfeld and his assistant Fide Sajn. The Hasidic Jews would later claim that Reb Gutesfeld had already seen the incapacitated woman in his dreams. In these dreams she was apparently not paralysed but went stumbling from house to house in a burning city. She did not enter the houses, merely touched the mezuzah on the doorpost of each one – as if to give a sign to those living there that they should leave and follow her.
In the eyes of the Hasidic Jews, there could be no doubt about the matter. She was a tzadika, perhaps a messenger, come to offer the incarcerated Jews of the ghetto a little comfort after two years’ war and a dreadful winter of hunger. The ordinary people of the ghetto would later refer to her as Mara, the sorrowful one. For a period of time, she was the only one of the ghetto’s inhabitants – almost a quarter of a million at that time – who had no fixed address or bread-ration card. She did not even feature in the register of the Kripo, which otherwise included every soul in the ghetto and was updated monthly by the Meldebüro of the Statistics Department.
On the face of it she was clearly a matter for the rabbinate, though they were only too happy to entrust her to Reb Gutesfeld’s care. But even the Hasidic community dared not let her stay, so the rebbe and his helper were often seen making their way through the narrow streets of the ghetto with the woman on a litter between them. Fide Sjazn would be at the front while Gutesfeld, who had problems with his legs and could not see very well either, stumbled along behind in his black cassock. They could cover quite a few kilometres that way, in rain, in icy winds or blinding snowstorms. Every so often the rebbe stopped to try to work out their location by running his fingers along a wall or the side of a house, or to let Fide Szajn (whose lungs were diseased) finish coughing.
Why were they on the move? Why did they keep on moving?
Some said it was because the woman would never keep still. As soon as they put down the litter, a piercing cry would force its way from her throat and she would thrash her arms about, as if to fend off invisible demons. Others said that every house, every block, concealed an informer who would not hesitate to go to the Kripo if they knew the woman was there; and what would happen to the sorrowful one then?
There were days, however, when the rebbe brought the litter back to the prayer room, and on those days a wan but hopeful band always gathered outside the front door in the hope that a touch or a look from the paralysed woman would cure the pain in their arms or heal wounds that refused to heal, or even lift from them the curse of hunger that made formerly strong and healthy men move like ghosts through the streets of the ghetto. Dr Szykier, who was a convinced socialist and loathed all superstition, tried to make the local police drive away the crowd, but the rebbe insisted, saying that his dream had also predicted the arrival of these people, and that it would be blasphemous to turn away Jews who had come in the belief that the God of the Scriptures could perform a miracle through even one of his most distant representatives.
One of the people queuing was Hala Wajsberg, Adam Rzepin’s neighbour in the building in Gnieźnieńska Street, and mother to Jakub and Chaim who spent their days hunting for wood and coal dust at the old brickworks in Łagiewnicka Street. Hala Wajsberg had heard of Mara’s gifts from her friend Borka at the Central Laundry and persuaded her husband Samuel to try a visit to the woman for his painfully aching lung.
In the first months after the ghetto was sealed off, there had been no wooden bridges, and the German police guards opened the fence every morning to let through workers like Samuel who had to move from one half of the ghetto to the other to get to work. The fence was opened at specific times and workers had to make sure they were there punctually. It seemed to Samuel that he was always the last man hurrying across the street before the two guards who presided over the opening lifted the barbed-wire barricade back into place, and one morning he really was the last man out – before he realised what was happening, he was alone in the middle of the ‘Aryan’ corridor, and the ghetto was closed to him in both directions.
There was a finely developed sadism among those bored German guards with nothing to do all day but shift barbed wire, and every time they managed to catch a Jew between them in ‘the corridor’ it was a moment of pure and unalloyed pleasure.
Samuel stumbled and fell, and one of the policemen hit him several times with the butt of his rifle across the back and in the belly, and kicked him straight in the chest with the steel-capped toe of his boot to make him get up again. As the traffic was allowed to start flowing again, they grabbed hold of the now semi-conscious body and heaved it between them over the barbed-wire barrier. Even long after his broken ribs had healed, the imprint of the policeman’s boot remained as a physical mark of oppression in Samuel’s left lung. And things scarcely got any better when the wooden footbridges were built.
Every step he took up the bridge was suffocating, every step back down a torture. Forty-seven steps up, forty-seven steps down. With every step, less air was left in the wheezing, aching lung. By the time he got down to the foot of the bridge he was wet with sweat and quivering like an eel, and everything went black; but through the haze of hunger the heavy, metal-shod voice of the guard rang out again:
Schnell, schnell … !
Beeilung, nicht stehenbleiben … !
If Mr Serwański at the joinery in Drukarska Street had not been aware of Samuel’s problems with his lung, he would undoubtedly have let Samuel go, and what would become of the family then? Hala was thinking primarily of herself. The ghetto was already full of men hollowed out by hunger until they were beyond recognition, who spent their time lying at home, pale and staring, while their wives had to provide for the family alone.
The morning Hala Wajsberg took her husband Samuel to the Hasidic prayer house it was a raw, pallid winter day with mist hanging so low over the ghetto that the three wooden bridges appeared to vanish straight up into the sky. There was chaos in the back room that morning. Guards, the same guards that normally oversaw the ghetto factories, were doing their best to push back the swarm of people pressing its way in from outside and growing larger by the minute. Half a dozen women had managed to elbow their way to the litter and were now hanging over the face of the paralysed woman with their sick children in their arms.
There was such dreadful shouting and clamouring that nobody noticed that the woman on the litter had herself stopped shouting some time before. Dr Szykier had opened his big, black doctor’s bag and given Mara an injection in one of her thin arms, their many red, infected grazes illuminated by the glow of the candles Fide Sjajn had placed round the litter.
At that moment, Helena Rumkowska and her retinue entered the room.
Princess Helena, too, had latterly begun to feel the effects of one particular ghetto illness, that malaise au foie which according to her private physician, Dr Garfinkel, afflicted many of the ‘chosen few’ in the ghetto. As its French name indicated, it was an illness primarily affecting the liver. Since an attack of jaundice many years before, Mrs Rumkowska’s liver was officially sensitive. The obscure symptoms generated by this liver provided an inexhaustible topic of conversation at the dinners she regularly gave at the Soup Kitchen for intellectuals in Łagiewnicka Street. Only ghetto dwellers with coupons for B rations, respectable people, as she put it, had access to this kitchen, and it was certainly a gift from above to be able to see Princess Helena pause in one of her tours of inspection, lean kindly over some diner’s shoulder, pull out a chair or perhaps even sit down and engage in a little well-bred conversation.
An even more highly prized favour, out of most people’s reach, was to be invited as a personal guest to Helena and Józef Rumkowski’s ‘residence’ in Karola Miarki Street in Marysin. The couple’s home was not much to boast about in itself: a run-down dacha with lots of poky rooms, heated by wood-burning stoves, with carved wooden banisters, Russian carpets and single-glazed veranda windows that steamed up when the winter cold breathed on them, turning them as shiny white with frost as the outside of Dr Miller’s removable china eye.
But from the ceiling hung the crystal chandelier which Princess Helena had brought with her from her old home in the centre of Łodz – and that was a relic. Those who had been guests of the Rumkowskis spoke not only of the ‘generous spreads’ Princess Helena was known to provide, but also of the way the flecks of light cast by the chandelier spread shimmering colours across the cramped room, from the simple tulle curtains to the cane furniture and matt sheen of the linen cloth.
For many in the ghetto, Karola Miarki Street came to symbolise the pogodne czasy, the ‘golden days’ from before the war. It was beneath that very chandelier, for example, that Princess Helena one memorable evening had ordered a sack to be slit open, releasing a flock of finches collected on Mr Tausengeld’s instructions from the aviary out in the garden: the aim was a symbolic driving out of evil, not only from Princess Helena’s own body but also from those of all decent ghetto dwellers. But not even this dramatic medication had any effect. Princess Helena continued to be tormented by her liver. She lay shut in total darkness in her bedroom for ten days, until Dr Garfinkel appealed to her to try as a last resort to see the woman everyone was talking about, to whom for some reason they attributed powers of healing.
So in great pain, and with a good deal of fuss, she had herself taken in one of the ghetto dróshkes to the Hasidic prayer house. She was dismayed to find other people already there, and she ordered the opiekuni to drive them all, the crippled and the lame, out into the yard. Only when the room was empty did she bend over the poor, pitiful creature lying there on the litter.
That was when it happened, the thing Princess Helena’s people found so hard to explain afterwards. Someone was to write later that it was as if ‘sudden tribulation’ had descended on the paralysed woman. Others described it as being like when you cover a light with your hand. The woman’s pure and limpid gaze was suddenly clouded with a dark, shifting anxiety. ‘A dybek!’ screamed Mr Tausendgeld. Perhaps it was simply that Mara had briefly managed to fight her way up from the heavy, morphine-drenched sleep into which Dr Szykier had sunk her, and Helena Rumkowska, ever prone to sentimentality, had felt her heart wrung by something she felt she had glimpsed a moment earlier in the sick woman’s clear, liquid eyes. Had been so moved, in fact, that she took a little handkerchief from her handbag, carefully dampened its edge with spit and leant forward to wipe away – what? – yes, what had she thought to wipe away (afterwards, not even Helena Rumkowska could remember with any clarity)? – perhaps the saliva at the corners of the woman’s mouth, the tears on her eyelids, the sweat on her brow.
But Princess Helena’s trembling hand and handkerchief never reached their goal.
At that moment, spasms shook the woman’s body again. Dr Szykier, who had been working from the outset on the assumption that his patient was suffering from epilepsy, rushed forward to prize her jaw open. But instead of resisting his action, she opened her mouth even wider and at the very moment the dybek (so Tausengeld claimed) left the body, the whole frightened crowd crushed into the backyard of the prayer house could stare right into the swollen orifice and see the thick, white coating on the woman’s palate and throat. Then Mara was said to have uttered two short sentences, or in some versions just two words, forced out with great difficulty – though this time in fully ‘comprehensible’ Yiddish:
Du host mikh geshendt … !
A bayze riekh zol dikh und dayn hoyz khapn …3
That was all. In her initial, terrified confusion, Princess Helena had put the handkerchief to her face, realised what she was doing and then hysterically tried to shake it out of her hand:
She’s sick! She’s sick!
They have sent sickness to us!
In the course of a few seconds, the room emptied of people, leaving only the police behind. Leon Szykier pleaded with them to send for an ambulance, but they returned instead with the news that the Praeses’ brother – Józef Rumkowski – did not in any circumstances intend to let any of the ghetto’s hospitals admit the woman. The official line was that the woman could not be treated because nobody knew who she was. There was no written record card for her at the Meldebüro. And if there was no name under which she could be entered in the books, how could anyone be sure she was a Jewess and not some person in disguise sent by Amalek to spread sickness and disintegration to them all?
For four days and nights, the first lady of the ghetto hovered between life and death as a result of her meeting with the sick woman. Józef Rumkowski took Helena’s favourite birds to her room: the linnets that liked to sit in the fruit trees; the comical starling that sounded just like Marshal Piłudski.
But the birds, too, sat silent and dejected in their cages.
In the prayer room in Lutomierska Street, Dr Szykier had established a quarantine station. It was the first in the ghetto, and was presumably viewed as extremely provisional, for a big crowd had again begun to gather outside the room. This time, however, it was considerably more aggressive and consisted mainly of men demanding that the woman be sent away.
Shame, shame on any who bring sickness to the ghetto!
The Hasidic rebbe finally had no alternative but to lift up the woman on her litter and carry her round again. She spent the first two days and nights in the kitchen of Dr Szykier’s home. But the furious mob soon found its way there, as well. And so they set off on an unsteady journey between various houses and addresses, that would not end until 5 September 1942, the first night of the szpera, when the Chairman took his protective hand from the ghetto and the German police under the command of SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Fuchs went from house to house, taking with them all the weak and sick, all the children and old people.
And for Samuel Wajsberg there had been no remedy.
Nor for his wife Hala, who three days after the curfew was announced was to lose her most beloved son, Chaim.
It was indeed like losing life itself.
*
Two days after the uproar in the Hasidic prayer house, the Chairman called all members of the medical profession to a meeting to decide once and for all how to deal with the epidemics threatening to destroy the ghetto from within.
