by Jana Petken
“When you say launched, do you mean with guns?”
Gert laughed. “Ach, Doctor, you’ve got a lot to learn about the Jews and how uncooperative some of them can be. They hide from us and cheat with false identity cards. They try to run – many of them did – and there are those, the worst of all, who refuse to move out of their houses. Have you never been to a Jewish detention camp before?”
“No. I was in Paris…”
“Lucky sod.” Gert was still chuckling and wiggling his tongue around his teeth as though trying to dislodge a wedged piece of ham. “Look, Paul, the only way to get the Jews into line is to use deadly force from time to time as an example to others. On that day, two years ago, the Kikes didn’t want to see reason, and the Orpo shot about three hundred and fifty of them in their houses. Some might say it was a bit heavy-handed, but it taught the other Kikes a lesson they wouldn’t forget in a hurry. After that, they were like little yellow-starred sheep with their battered leather suitcases and little Jew children hanging onto their arms as they filed into the ghetto without a chirp – they still call that day, Bloody Thursday. Umm … where was I? Ah, yes, during the next two months we erected wire and wooden fences around the area to cut it off from the rest of the city. Electricity and water were cut off, and we kept non-Jews out by issuing a warning that the area planned for the ghetto was rampant with infectious diseases.”
Paul’s mind went back to the fences and warnings around the area where Judith’s family had lived. He recalled his disapproval at the time, thinking that their confinement was the worst thing that could happen to them.
“The Ghetto is run by the Erweitertes Polizeigefängnis, Radegast – you know, the German Order Police and Gestapo – our authorities also established a Jewish Council inside the ghetto’s walls. The Kikes call it the Judenrat. A Jew called Chaim Rumkowski runs it. He thinks he’s a king, but we just let him get on with it. Our officials thought it better to give him the power he needs to properly maintain order and organisation in the Ghetto. The other Jews seem to respect him. They listen to him. I suppose without him, there would be a lot more work for us to do, and chaos for our administrators.”
Gert stopped speaking and took a long, bold look at Paul. “So where are you going to be based?”
“I’ve got to report to Radogoszcz Prison with my orders first. After that, I’ll be working at Hospital No.4.”
“Ah, on Mickiewicza Street.”
“That’s right. My father-in-law is a high-ranking Gestapo officer. He’ll be arriving later this week with our wives.”
“Is that right? Your wife is being allowed to join you?”
Paul chuckled as Gert Wolff’s expression changed from I know it all to I’d better be respectful. He hoped to capitalise on the man’s new-found deference by requesting that he show him the way to the prison when they got off the train.
“I take it we’re going to the only train station in Łódź? I’m not sure where the ghetto is, but I was told that the station is right on its boundary,” Paul said.
“That’s right. We in the SS have a saying about Radegast train station because it links the ghetto to the outside world. All roads lead to Litzmannstadt, but if you leave as a Jew your only destination is a long sleep – get it? They don’t want to go into it, but they never want to leave the place when we deport them because there might be something worse outside the ghetto’s walls.”
Paul didn’t have a clue what Gert was on about but kept up his friendly façade and smiled regardless. “It seems I do have a lot to learn. I must sound like an idiot, so forgive me for asking why the Jews don’t want to leave the Ghetto?”
Gert hesitated. “Would you like a sandwich? My aunt made far too many. I’ve only got cheese left though. Is that all right?” He avoided answering Paul’s question by removing the lid of his stainless-steel goody box and offering the sandwich inside to Paul, who gratefully accepted.
In return, Paul took out a sponge cake, baked by his mother-in-law for his journey, and cut a slice for Gert. “My mother-in-law’s. She’ll be upset if it doesn’t get eaten.” Paul handed the young, enthusiastic Nazi a piece, then bit into the sandwich. Gert could be a great source of information. Shame he was a Jew-hating bigit.
“Hmm. Delicious, Paul, thank you,” Gert mumbled with a piece of cake in his mouth. “Getting back to your question about the Jews leaving the ghetto. You see, Paul, I don’t think our lot expected as many Jews as they got. The ghetto was originally intended as a preliminary step on a more extensive plan of creating the Judenfrei province of Warthegaut. Instead, about forty thousand Polish Jews were forced out of Warthegaut and its surrounding areas and shoved into Litzmannstadt. Then, to make matters worse, they started transporting foreign Jews from Vienna, Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, Luxembourg, the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and the citywide Theresienstadt concentration camp.
“When word got back to Germany about the ghetto bulging at the seams, Heinrich Himmler came to see for himself. No doubt about it, he helped calm the situation. Shortly after that visit, most of the patients in the ghetto’s psychiatric hospital were taken away, and thank God, they’ve not returned – that must have been a bloody awful place to work – Jews are bad enough, but mad Jews?”
Paul replaced the top of his tea flask as he listened to the knowledgeable Gert. The patients from the psychiatric hospital were probably dead by now, and while he was reminded again of Brandenburg and Herr Rudolph, Kurt also came to mind.
“Did the over-occupancy problem inside the ghetto get solved?” Paul asked.
“Ach, if you ask me, it won’t be solved until every Jew is expelled from Europe.” Gert sniggered. “But, having said that, the authorities seemed to be getting to grips with the overcrowding. Just last month, ten thousand Jews were deported to Kulmhof – the Poles call it Chełmno – and things are looking up. I know for a fact that more deportations are on the cards for later this year. I can’t say any more on that subject. You understand, Paul?”
“Of course. Thank you, Gert. Your information has been invaluable. I now know what to expect. I imagine I’ll be kept very busy at the hospital.”
“Oh, you’ll be kept busy, alright.” He cocked his head as though he were looking for a hint of dissension. “You seem scared, but it’s not all bad, Paul. We’ve got trams on the ghetto’s streets now. They transport food, fuel, and raw materials from Radegast station to various departments, and the goods produced in the ghetto go on the return journeys back to the station.”
Gert got a map of the ghetto out of his rucksack and ran his finger across it. “Look, here. Tram lines have been built along Brzezinska, Marysinska, and Jagiellonska streets. And see these side tracks? They were built to serve the most important departments.”
“Departments?” Paul hadn’t a clue what he was supposed to be looking at. He couldn’t even pronounce the street names, never mind know what the important departments were.
“This one,” Gert was still pointing to the map, “is the tailoring department at Jakuba Street, where clothes are made, repaired or dished out. And this line here stops at the vegetable market on Lagiewnicka Street. There’s talk of the trams being made available to the public, to transport people to work, but no news on when that’s supposed to happen.”
Paul smiled. “I’m very glad I met you, Gert. You’ve been a big help.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Before getting off the train, Gert handed Paul a note with the directions to his barracks and the name of a bar-restaurant situated outside the ghetto walls. The German military used it, although only officers were entitled to membership. Paul and Gert promised to keep in touch then parted ways, leaving Paul to lug his suitcase in one hand and his papers and a map of the ghetto in the other.
His priority was to look for Kurt, but he decided to postpone his search until after he’d registered with the Gestapo and deposited his heavy suitcase in his billet. He was staying in the city’s military barracks until the Biermanns
arrived. His father-in-law’s detached house with a garden would be much grander than the one-bedroom apartment he’d been promised, but Valentina would make it look like a palace.
Paul would probably never know how the Kriminaldirektor had managed to obtain married quarters for a junior officer in the Medical Corps, but he supposed it was entirely possible that his father-in-law’s Gestapo rank was more powerful than he’d led his wife and daughter to believe. One never knew what to think when it came to the Gestapo, apart from it being prudent to guard one’s political opinions when in their company.
At the ghetto gates, Paul set his suitcase on the ground and handed over his papers to the German Schupo officer for inspection. Afterwards, a Jewish ghetto policeman offered to escort Paul to the prison. He even insisted on carrying the suitcase, much to Paul’s embarrassment.
Radogoszcz prison, a German Police and Gestapo establishment, had originally been a four-storey factory with an adjoining floor. Biermann had talked at length about the prison in which he was going to work, although he’d been reticent about the ghetto itself.
Paul lingered outside the building, somewhat loath to enter. His father-in-law had made a point of telling Valentina and Olga that the first thing the Nazi authorities did when they took over Łódź was to arrest members of the city’s intelligentsia. It had been an excellent plan, he’d agreed. “We always knew that to truly occupy a city, we would first have to get rid of its leaders.” That strategy had been highly successful in Łódź because they’d not only incarcerated local and state bureaucrats, social and political activists, but also teachers and artists.
“What on earth did the Gestapo want with artists, dear?” Olga had asked innocently.
“As I said, Olga, strip a city of its leaders, journalists, and cultural examples and you will control an ignorant and vulnerable population. Do you understand now?”
“I suppose so,” she’d answered with an unconvinced frown.
Paul had not been as easy on his father-in-law as his wife and daughter had been. Both women tended to listen and nod a lot when Biermann spoke about the war. He wished that Valentina would question her father, ask about how the war was going, give her opinions on political matters. Hannah always had, and he was all for women having their say and airing their thoughts. He hoped that by being married to him, Valentina would come to disagree with some of the Reich’s policies, such as the one that dealt with Jews. It would be nice if she responded to her father one day, saying, “Jews are people, Papa, not animals, as you and Herr Hitler call them.” She, like many Germans, had been brainwashed by Herr Geobbels’ anti-Jewish propaganda machine, and evidently by her father whose nightly lectures concentrated on the merits of exiling Jews and dealing with them in the toughest way possible. Paul suspected that Biermann was preparing the ladies for what they would witness in Poland; if only he were as prepared and excited as the women seemed to be. He was not looking forward to working in the ghetto hospital at all.
That evening in Berlin, after the ladies had gone to bed, Paul had pressed Biermann for more information. The women had not asked what had happened to the city’s leaders after their arrests and incarcerations, but that question had been on the tip of Paul’s tongue. Reluctantly, his father-in-law had responded with a wishy-washy answer in which he’d explained that arrests had been made based on proscribed lists, and after a trial by a summary court, the people had been sentenced to death. “Why? For being respected leaders of the community?” Paul had questioned, keeping his temper in check.
Biermann had cut him off without an answer. “I’m going to bed, Paul. I shouldn’t even be talking to you about this.” That memory was still fresh in Paul’s mind as he went through the registration procedures.
After he’d signed the necessary papers, Paul was escorted to his temporary barracks, situated four streets away from the ghetto’s outer walls and barbed wire fences. Alone at last, he emptied his suitcase, and hung his clothes in a wardrobe big enough for only three hangers and with no shelving for underwear or socks. Then he put the food items he had brought from Berlin into his rucksack.
As he slung his rucksack over his shoulder, he imagined the poor buggers who had to live in the barracks’ dingy, musty rooms with peeling wallpaper, black, damp patches on bare brick and putrid odours that caught in his throat. Duguay’s basement in France had been more comfortable than the officers’ quarters in Łódź.
Paul took more notice of the entrance upon his return to the ghetto from his barracks. Signs with large black letters saying JUDEN, were hung on sturdy branches. Long, white planks of wood were also nailed into trunks and stretched from one tree to another like pretty, white picket fencing. A young Gestapo Kriminalassistent and a policeman wearing a yellow star stood outside the security booth at the gate while two other Jewish policemen searched the bags of those going into the ghetto.
Gert had mentioned that the ghetto measured about one and a half square miles and housed around one hundred sixty thousand people, but on first impression, Paul thought the area was even smaller than he’d pictured. Gert had also mentioned that the German authorities had insisted that the ghetto be scaled down so that the factories could be situated outside its perimeter.
As he trudged through the slushy snow, Paul cast his eyes around him, storing the images of people and streets. The ghetto, isolated from the outside world, seemed to be divided in two, but wooden bridges had been built so Jews could cross between the two sections. Wire fencing also separated different sectors, and children stood up against one such partition with their noses peeking through the diamond-shaped holes.
Paul looked at a street sign: Zigurska Street, and then checked it on the map given to him by a policeman in the prison. It was an Aryan street apparently, and like many of the locations on the map, had a notice attached, this one specifying that Jews couldn’t go there.
He observed a wooden bridge that was accessed by about sixty steps at either end. It was overloaded with people bumping into each other as they crossed in opposite directions. Why it hadn’t already collapsed under their weight was beyond him.
Further along, two men, harnessed like mules, were pulling a cart carrying hundreds of loaves of bread lined up on end. The wheels were having difficulty turning because of the slush and ice on the ground and a few men loitering on the street corner joined the effort by pushing the sides of the cart.
At the corner of this street, the first signs of human suffering hit Paul. A row of men sat against a wall eating watery soup from battered tin bowls, every one of them with gaunt, grey faces, sunken cheeks and eyes, bony fingers, and emaciated hands. They lowered their heads as he neared, wary of looking him in the eye.
In the next street, Jews were going about their business. Some of them seemed to be bartering with each other for goods that were piled up on ground sheets, despite probably standing in the frigid air for hours.
Children were throwing slushy snowballs at each other. Paul smiled at them and they ran away. Further along, a man trudged through a minefield of concrete blocks and steel from the remains of a destroyed synagogue. He took off his cap and bowed his head as Paul passed, then replaced it and walked on. A pillar with the Star of David carved into the stone leaned at an angle jutting out of the snow like a memorial. It painted a stark contrast to the perfectly intact church with two tall spires that Paul spotted in the distance.
At a main road, he bumped into two Polish policemen who were running after a young man gripping a long loaf of bread in his hand. Biermann had told him that to ensure there was no contact between the Jewish and non-Jewish populations of the city, two German Order Police formations had been assigned to patrol the perimeter of the ghetto. Within its walls, however, a Jewish police force ensured that no prisoners tried to escape or committed crimes. So far on his walk, he had seen sixteen Jews carrying batons, dressed in police uniforms sporting the Star of David. A strange sensation swept over him. He saw them as Jews, yet also as traitors to their own race; ke
eping other Jews in order by force if necessary. It was a personal observation and not one he would share.
As a work-related question, Paul had asked Gert about the area specific to German Jews. He’d suspected that Jews with the same ethnicity would live together as would other minority groups such as Roma and clergy who had spoken out against Hitler’s policies. If he were lucky enough to find Kurt, it would be in the designated German section.
Paul had wondered whether Biermann’s motives had been benevolent or sinister when he’d deported Kurt to Łódź – Litzmannstadt – to hell with it, he’d call it Łódź. He was going to work with Polish doctors, and they were going to hate him for being German. The least he could do was get the name of their city right.
As he walked on, Paul thought again about Kurt and the reasons behind Biermann’s sudden change of heart. This ghetto wasn’t an unusual resettlement. Thousands of German Jews had already been deported to the city, but Biermann’s unexpected decision was troubling, as were his strict orders.
“You mustn’t go near Kurt Sommer, Paul. It’s very important that you respect me in this,” Biermann had insisted when Paul was leaving Germany. It was an unreasonable order and not one Paul would obey. He suspected that Biermann was using it as a loyalty test, but he also believed that his father-in-law wanted to interrogate Kurt further, and knew the only way he could do that would be to have Kurt close at hand. Paul didn’t know how Biermann operated or what was in his mind, but he was convinced it wasn’t kindness that had brought Kurt to this miserable place.