The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg

the sleeve of his jacket
before replacing it carefully, almost reverently, on the pile.
    You must look
after what little you have.
    This concern for every overlooked
detail in the ghetto is not easy to reconcile with Biebow’s personality as a
whole, which is expansive, to say the least. He is seldom sober when he comes
into the office, and when he is in what he calls ‘a delicate condition’, he
often summons his Eldest of the Jews. One day when Rumkowski comes in, he is
sitting at his desk howling like a dog. On another occasion he is crawling
around on all fours in front of the desk, doing imitations of a chuffing steam
engine. It is the day after the first removal order has been issued: the order
for the first train convoys to the death camps in Chełmno.
    Biebow generally adopts a considerably
more friendly tone. He wants to talk things
over . He wants to talk production quotas and food deliveries. That
kind of discussion could sometimes lead to a strange, false intimacy between
them. Well I must say, Rumkowski, you’ve developed
quite a belly , he might say, for example, throwing his arms round the
other man’s girth.
    That certainly was a sight: the coffee
merchant from Bremen clinging to the ghetto’s Eldest of the Jews as if to a
reluctant pillar. Rumkowski stood there, hat in hand, his head bent
subserviently as always. Openings like that gave Biebow the excuse to expand on
his thesis that the hungry are the best workers.
    Workers with full stomachs get bloated,
he said.
    They can’t keep a firm grip on their
tools, he said.
    They fall on their arses.
    And if they don’t fall on their arses,
they can’t tear their eyes away from the clock on the wall telling them when
they can leave their seats and let their overfed bodies get some rest.
    No, he went on theorising, the thing is
to keep the swine at a level where they’ve got a little but never quite enough.
When they’re working, they think about food all the time, and the thought of
soon being able to eat makes them work a bit more, give up a bit more, always on
the verge of getting by and yet never quite there; on
the verge , Rumkowski, on the verge.
    ( You
see? he said, looking at the Chairman as if appealing to him, as if
still not entirely sure Rumkowski had understood the full implication of what he
had said.)
    *
    There was a Debt. Biebow constantly
reminded him about it. The outward manifestation of this Debt was a loan of two
million Reichsmarks made to Rumkowski by Leister, the City Commissioner,
allowing the former to expand the industries of the ghetto. This loan was now to
be paid off in instalments, with interest; the payments were to be in the form
of Jewish possessions that had been confiscated and goods that had been
produced, and these were now streaming through the export depot at Bałuty Square
at an ever-increasing rate.
    But the Debt also had an internal
dimension. It was used to establish the value of work within the ghetto. The
amount for subsistence for each inhabitant of the ghetto was reckoned at thirty pfennigs ; no one living there was to cost
more than that. It was Biebow’s head of finance, Joseph Hämmerle, who had worked
out this Jew allowance on the basis of what it
cost to supply food and fuel to the ghetto.
    Families with children or old people at
home faced the added burden of the cost of milk, if available, plus electricity
and fuel. The Chairman set one of his colleagues to working it all out. To
guarantee the survival of a single adult in the ghetto it took a food ration
costing at least one mark and fifty pfennigs per day, that is to say, five times
as much as the daily quota fixed by the authorities.
    Most of the food supplies reaching the
ghetto were also of poor quality or downright inedible. Out of a
ten-thousand-kilo consignment of potatoes that reached the ghetto in August
1940, only 1,500 kilos could be salvaged. The rest of the shipment was entirely
rotten and had to be buried in the cesspits at Marysin.
    So