The Emperor of Lies Read Online Free PDF Page B

leads into the ghetto from the west, thus cutting the western lobe into two smaller sections, a northern and a southern. Here there is a lesser-used wooden bridge: the bridge at Masarska Street.
    In the middle of the ghetto, at the point where the two main streets, Zgierska and Limanowskiego, meet, lies Bałuty Square. You could call this square the stomach of the ghetto. All the materials the ghetto needs are digested here, and then taken on to its resorty , the factories and larger workshops. And it is from here that most of the products of the ghetto’s factories and workshops go out. Bałuty Square is the only neutral zone in the ghetto where Germans and Jews meet, totally isolated, surrounded by barbed wire, with only two permanently guarded ‘gates’: one to Łagniewnicka Street and one out into ‘Aryan’ Litzmannstadt at Zgierska Street.
    The German ghetto administration also has a local office at Bałuty Square, a handful of barrack buildings back to back with Rumkowski’s Secretariat: Headquarters, as it is popularly known. Here, too, is the Central Labour Office ( Centralne Biuro Resortów Pracy ), headed by Aron Jakubowicz, who coordinates labour in the resorty of the ghetto and is ultimately responsible for all production and trade with the German authorities.
    A transitional zone .
    A no man’s or, perhaps one should say, an everyman’s land in the midst of this strictly monitored Jewish land , to which both Germans and Jews have access, the latter however only on condition that they can produce a valid pass.
    Or perhaps simply the specific pain node at the heart of the ghetto that is the explanation of the ghetto’s whole existence. This gigantic collection of dilapidated, unhygienic buildings around what is basically nothing but a huge export depot.

He had discovered early on that there was a sort of vacuum of muteness around him. He talked and talked but no one heard, or the words did not get through. It was like being trapped in a dome of transparent glass.
    Those days when his first wife Ida lay dying.
    It was February 1937, two and a half years before the outbreak of war, and after a long marriage which, to his great sorrow, had borne no fruit. The illness, which perhaps explained why Ida had remained childless, made her body and soul slowly waste away. Towards the end, when he took the tray up to the room where she was in the care of two young maids, she no longer recognised him. There were times when she was polite and correct, as if to a stranger; and others when she was curtly dismissive. On one occasion she knocked the tray out of his hand and shouted at him, calling him a dybek who must be driven out.
    He watched over her while she slept; that was the only way he could convince himself he still completely owned her. She lay tangled in her sweat-soaked sheets, lashing out in all directions. Don’t touch me , she screamed, keep your dirty hands off me . He went out onto the landing and called to the maids to run for a doctor. But they just stood down there, staring at him, as if they did not understand who he was or what he was saying. In the end, he had to go himself. He staggered from door to door like a drunken man. Finally he got hold of a doctor who demanded twenty złoty before he would even put his coat on.
    But by then it was too late. He bent over and whispered her name, but she did not hear. Two days later, she was dead.
    He had once tried his luck as a manufacturer of plush in Russia, but the Bolshevik Revolution had got in the way. His hatred of all manner of socialists and Bundists stemmed from that period. I know a thing or two about Communists that isn’t fit for polite company, he would say.
    He saw himself as a simple, practical person, without any sophisticated airs and graces . When he spoke, he said what he thought, loud and clear, in an insistent, slightly shrill voice that caused many people to look away uncomfortably.
    He was a long-standing member of Theodor Herzl’s