The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg Page A

how did one set about feeding a
ghetto of 160,000 people on 1,500 kilos of potatoes?
    It could only be a matter of time
before hunger riots broke out.
    In August 1940, the unrest began.
    The demonstrators were not initially
violent, but they were vociferous. Wave after wave of impoverished Jews in rags
came welling out of the buildings in Lutomierska and Zgierska Streets, and it
soon became impossible to move in the ghetto except by going with the flow of
the marchers.
    Rumkowski knew at once that he was
facing a serious dilemma.
    Leister had made it plain from the
outset that if he, Rumkowski, was not able to maintain peace and order in the
ghetto, then the Gestapo would dissolve the whole Council of Jewish Elders with
immediate effect, and the autonomy he had dreamt of for the Jews of the ghetto
would be nothing more than a memory.
    He had, however, no proper police force
of his own to deploy. Armed only with their own fists and a rubber truncheon
each, the fifty ghetto policemen Commendant Rozenblat had managed to assemble
did not even venture among the ranks of demonstrators. They opted instead to
erect barricades along the streets and then make themselves scarce. But the
demonstrators paid little attention to barricades. They were soon massed outside
Hospital No. 1 in Łagiewnicka Street, where the Chairman had his ‘private
quarters’, shouting, swearing and chanting slogans. They also despatched a
messenger to demand that the Chairman come out and ‘speak’ to them.
    Down in the hospital, Wiktor Miller,
the blind doctor, was on the telephone urging more doctors to come on duty. Dr
Miller had served in the Germans’ last war as a field surgeon, and just as he
was helping to carry away a soldier who had fallen in a French artillery
onslaught, an ammunition store close by had blown up. The explosion took off his
right leg and bits of his right arm, and shrapnel penetrated his skull through
both eyes, permanently blinding him. For this contribution, the Germans had
awarded him the Iron Cross for ‘courage in the field’. But it was for his
contribution during the hunger riots in the ghetto that he definitively earned
himself the epithet Justice. With the scar tissue in his mangled face shiny and
sweating behind his dark glasses, and with only his stick and a couple of
bewildered nurses to aid him, he ran to and fro calming the most hot-blooded
demonstrators while helping the wounded onto stretchers so they could be carried
into improvised surgeries in the waiting rooms. For now, most of the wounded had
only themselves to blame: they had been trampled by the crowd, or collapsed with
exhaustion or dehydration. They had nothing to eat, after all, so how could they
find the strength to demonstrate? Outside the waiting room, a man lay bleeding
copiously from a gash to his head caused by a piece of paving stone intended for
the Chairman’s windows on the first floor.
    It was now clear that the revolt had
spread throughout the ghetto.
    In the meantime, Rumkowski’s brother
Józef and the latter’s wife had arrived at the rooms where the Chairman lived.
From the first-floor windows they could see Rozenblat’s men wielding their
harmless batons, hitting out in a pathetic attempt to make inroads into the
crowd. Fights broke out here and there, where isolated knots of men refused to
flinch from the baton blows and continued their offensive with stones and
sticks.
    On this occasion, Princess Helena was
highly agitated and declared to everyone around her that it was just like the
revolution in Paris, when the people ‘lost their senses’ and turned against
their own kind. She tottered back and forth between the window and the desk,
giving little screams and flailing her arms. The sight of the scenes of tumult
outside was eventually too much for her: They’re going
to kill us all , she shrieked hoarsely, and then staged one of her
more extravagant fainting fits.
    As always when Princess Helena was
afflicted by some malaise