***
The investigation into Augustus Brühl’s investigation was officially closed. Julian Scherer telephoned one evening while I was writing the account of Shoshana’s Magic Bell and how she lost her eye in our parents’ grocery store. A Polish waiter at Krakauer Burg castle had been charged with Brühl’s death after the murder weapon was found in a ‘trophy drawer’ in the kitchens, covered in dried blood. The waiter was hanged at dawn that morning. To save the regiment from further embarrassment, the details would not be reported, but Scherer wanted to put my mind at ease.
‘It’s over,’ he said.
I tried to sound grateful for the fact that an indiscrete New Year’s Eve dalliance in the castle bathrooms had led to an innocent Pole’s death.
‘Your father’s told me about the letter you sent last year,’ Scherer said. ‘I don’t use the word lightly, but the man is heart-broken.’
‘As am I. It’s a wretched situation.’
‘You had your reasons, I know, and it’s not for me to judge. But for the love of God, Harry, don’t leave things like this.’
‘I won’t.’
‘If you want me to broker peace - ’
‘I’ll do it.’
‘You’ll call him ?’
‘I will.’
‘I believe you owe me, Harry. Do this, and we’re even.’
***
On Febraury 23rd, a third postcard arrived.
Eluding capture had boosted the Phantom’s confidence. This time he left his handiwork outside the apartment block, pinned to the tram-stop timetable on the corner of Tragutta and Wielicka:
Free Press!
Continue with the Nazi system and the common soldier Hitler and his gang will plunge us into the abyss!
This Hitler Göring Himmler Goebbels gang is for Poland only a death chamber!
Inspector Schmidt returned that night with a team of twenty Gestapo men. They swept the building, interviewing each tenant, myself included, and took handwriting samples.
***
At the end of February, Rottenführer Ritschak announced that all staff were to be inspected again for sexually-transmitted diseases. The tests, I learned, were monthly affairs. The Jewish Hospital had been used since the Ghetto opened, and the SS loathed it.
Today, however, Ritschak crowed, the authorities were pleased to announce a significant change in policy. Following questions about the Jewish Hospital’s suitability for SS officers, a more accommodating centre had been selected. The Eagle Pharmacy was closing for the rest of the day, and the Jozefinska staff were cordially invited to make our way to Rynek square, at our own convenience, where tea and biscuits would be served. The city’s Chief Medical Officer himself would be supervising proceedings. Ritschak was keen to point out that although Hauptsturmführer Kunde had listened to his men, in terms of environmental concerns, inspections were still mandatory. Failure to report before the end of the day would be considered a gross breach of responsibility, and swift disciplinary action would follow.
I wasn’t surprised that Mende left for his appointment while Ritscak was still climbing back upstairs, nor that my work-shy colleague still hadn’t returned by mid-afternoon. When the clock struck five o’clock, I could put it off no more. I took one final look around the office.
After my last scare at the Jewish Hospital, I made sure to always leave the apartment with sufficient bribery funds, and had still barely put a dent in Erich Mohnke’s cash reserves. I prayed that the Chief Medical Officer was as grasping a man as his grotesque predecessor. If I did happen to meet the world’s first incorruptible Nazi, there was no Plan B.
The usual crowd of desperate humanity milled around in front of the Pharmacy’s closed doors. The surly youths made no attempt to move aside, and for once I ignored their mulishness. Germans still acted civilly within the shop, as if they too yearned an escape from the barbarity outside.
Magister Pankiewicz and Helena Krywaniuk were laughing behind the counter, but promptly stopped when I entered. Stony-faced, Pankiewicz consulted his list. As hoped, I was the last of the Jozefinska officers to present myself. The consultation room was empty. Miss Krywaniuk would show me through.
I was about to enquire as to the Chief Medical Officer’s temperament, when Dr Ludwik Zurowksi opened the door behind the counter, he of the snug tweed suit and preternaturally black eyebrows.
‘I thought I heard voices,’ Zurowski said, making little snapping jaws of his hands. He smiled blankly at me, no recognition.
‘Oberführer Mohnke is the final appointment,’ Miss Krywaniuk said. ‘Would you like me to assist?’
‘I’ll be fine, thank-you.’ Zurowski held the door open for me. ‘Oberführer Mohnke, after you.’
I smelled coffee and peppermints on his breath as I brushed past. The room was empty. Zurokski showed me to the bed in the corner, stepped back and pulled the curtain round on its rail, leaving me to undress.
‘We’ve met before,’ I said, through the fabric.
‘We have?’
I removed my jacket and shirt, draping them over the back of the chair
‘I’m better with names than faces,’ Zurowksi said.
I folded my vest carefully and placed it on the bed.
‘Very briefly, last year,’ I said. ‘Here, out front. Wilhelm Kunde’s lady-friend.’
‘Ah, yes.’
But I could tell he didn’t remember me.
I removed my boots, socks, trousers, down to my shorts
‘Are we ready?’
‘All set.’
Zurowksi pulled back the curtain and chuckled when he saw me sitting on the side of the bed, stripped to my underwear. ‘Very thorough. Unfortunately it’s just the shorts that need to come off.’
He perched on the edge of the chair and leaned forward expectantly. I rose and dropped the elasticated waist to my knees.
After a minute of gentle lifting and prodding, he said, ‘Unless I’m very much mistaken, your foreskin has been removed.’
‘Masel tov.’
He gave another uncertain chuckle.
I pulled my shorts up and sat back on the bed.
‘The circumcision was quite a while ago, I’d hazard. Accident? Infection? It all looks very clean.’
‘Would you mind locking the door, Dr?’
‘Absolute discretion is assured, you needn’t worry.’
‘The door,’ I said. ‘Please.’
‘Alright. As you wish.’
When he returned, I handed him my folded vest.
‘You require a laundry service?’ he asked.
‘Read it.’
‘Read it?’
I pointed to the tiny stitching under the neck.
‘My name is Jozef Siegler,’ Zurowksi intoned reluctantly, as if he was being set up for a cruel joke. ‘25/03/1901. I am a Jew.’
Dropping the vest on the mattress, he said, ‘I don’t understand.’
‘I was circumcised in the Brasov synagogue in Romania on April 2nd when I was eight days old, according to the ceremony of brit milah. After a simple meal of fish and eggs, my foreskin was buried in our garden, under a young juniper tree.’
‘A juniper tree?’
‘If you want I can recite the rabbi’s prayers, but unless you speak Yiddish, it won’t mean much.’
‘You can get dressed now.’
‘I realise how this looks. I was a prisoner, in Wilno, in a labour camp. I broke out when I learned the truth. The mass executions, the burial pits - ’
‘The Pharmacy is about to close, Oberführer. In terms of STDs, you have a clean bill of health. That’s all I need to know.’
39
By mid-May, the census was nearing completion. Twenty-thousand men, women and children, crammed into sixteen square blocks. The pressure was intolerable, residents clawing chunks out of each other for territory, like rats and foxes. Everybody knew the situation could not endure. The question was, what came next? Five months after Augustus Brühl’s promise of racial a
pocalypse, the Ghetto population was more numerous than ever. It was hard to see this as any kind of victory for the Jews. I couldn’t help thinking of the German expression, ‘shooting fish in a barrel’.
One upshot of such a regimented and fastidiously documented concentration was that I knew my family had not been dragged back behind the walls. Was I glad? Were they safer inside or out? That depended what kind of night I had. Every morning I rose and scoured the freshly-delivered Judenrat lists, before setting to work archiving for the department.
Towards the end of one such day, I asked Karl Mende for his list, as was my custom, in order to make sure no Sieglers were amongst his paltry contribution. Being a Friday, Mende was at his least productive, barely processing fifty names to my hundred. With undisguised glee, he dumped his in-tray on my desk and went back to the newspaper he’d been scowling at all afternoon, that shriveled right eyeball of his red and angry. Not content with frittering his day away, Mende now tried to distract me from my work. It was like sitting opposite the class clown.
As soon as I began ticking names off his list, Mende started challenging me with tricky crossword clues. I maintained my default position, which was to ignore him. Only once did I rise to the bait.
RublachJosefM14/11/1884
‘Five across, eight letters: to cut goods from leather.’
I put my pen down. ‘What kind of goods?’
‘Leather ones.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Big help. The word is clicking.’
GoldsteinChaimM20/3/1882
‘Nope.’
‘Have it your way.’
BurgenblattDynaF10/10/1917
Mende said, ‘Actually, it’s fleshing.’
‘Why ask if you’ve already got it?’
‘I grew up in a horse stable, I should know.’
‘That explains a thing or two. Which side of the door?’
‘What did you say?’
FarbsteinLubaF / /1922
I put my pen down again. ‘Fleshing is separating the fat from the skin.’
‘That’s cutting,’ Mende said.
I fought the urge to launch my pen as a projectile. ‘Clicking is cutting out the pattern, goods from leather. It happens after the flesh has been removed.’
ZygotMordkaM13/02/1872
I read that last line again.
ZygotMordkaM13/02/1872
Good God.
Mr. Zygot, the old bachelor who’d lived next to my mother’s grocery store on Izaaka Street. It had to be the same man. Neither first nor second name was that common, and the date of birth fit with his age. This was the closest I’d got to my family since Paskow. As of the January resettlement, Mr. Zygot lived right here, in the Ghetto. Apartment 4, 13 Cranach Street. Shoshana might have told him something, a destination, a message to pass on.
I resolved to wait around until the stationhouse was empty, and visit Cranach Street that night. Karl Mende had already gone home for the weekend; I’d been too wrapped up in my discovery to notice.
I carried on working until seven o’clock. On my way out, I passed the waste-paper basket into which Mende had tossed his well-worn copy of Der Stürmer. I wasn’t able to resist pulling the newspaper out to check the crossword for five across, still convinced I was right.
I couldn’t believe what I saw.
Although Mende had spent the lion’s share of the afternoon working on the puzzle, he hadn’t written a single word. Instead, each white box was filled with a tiny inked swastika. Five across contained three spaces, not eight, and the clue had nothing to do with clicking or indeed fleshing. Leather cutting wasn’t mentioned anywhere on the page.
Number 13 was occupied by two families, the Zlatins and the Freilichs. Neither were related to Mr. Zygot. He had been brought up on a stretcher by two members of the Judenrat in January, who informed Mr. Freilich that the apartment was below minium occupancy.
I explained that Zygot’s name had been passed to the Department of Civil Affairs by an informant, and that I needed to interview him as a matter of some urgency. Mr. Freilich wished me a wry good luck.
‘Is he dead?’
‘He should be so lucky.’
‘We should be so lucky,’ his wife corrected.
There were nominally six people in that modest single room, but the number grew to twenty-six by evening, when the streets emptied. When I entered, it was already well into double figures, the younger children huddled together on the dirty floor. All the furniture had been pushed together at one end of the room, a sideboard and large table around which the adults squeezed, playing cards. Later in the evening, the grown-ups would take turns to sleep sitting up, since there wasn’t enough space for everybody to stretch out at once.
I found Mr. Zygot against the far wall. He had shrunk dramatically but I recognized him by the stripe of scarred flesh on the right side of his beard where no bristles grew – as a child, Mordka had fallen face-first into his parents’ fireplace. A pillow had been placed under the old man’s head, but his neck was twisted, and his head lolled awkwardly against the wood. I crouched next to him, beside a sleeping teenage girl crippled by polio.
Mr. Zygot’s eyes were open, but failed to focus when I loomed across his field of vision.
‘I am trying to find your old neighbours,’ I whispered. ‘From the shop on Izaaka Street. You remember Elena Siegler and her daughters. Shoshana Siegler, the girl with one eye. Mr. Zygot?’
Gazing at the ceiling, he mumbled something about a park. There were no green spaces in Kazimierz.
‘Do you mean the cemetery?’
He shrugged a little. ‘Why do you live in a park?’
‘Me? I don’t. I’m looking for Elena Siegler.’
‘Ah.’ The hint of a smile. ‘Evidence.’
‘Yes. Do you have information?’
‘I want to see a better world.’
‘You won’t get any argument from me there.’
Next to me, the girl started making strange noises in her sleep and kicked my thigh. I shifted closer to Mr. Zygot.
He peered up at me and said, ‘The walls are pale violet. The floor is of red tiles. I will make you sketeches of the other rooms too one day.’
Mr. Zgoti had nothing for me. His mind had gone.
In a rare act of clemency, the Ghetto had taken his soul, and left a babbling babe in its place.
40
Dr. Zubrowski appeared at the stationhouse four days after my medical, but ventured no further than the front desk. I watched him charm Klaus Rother, our new Spokesman for Jewish Matters, Zubrowksi peering past Rother’s bony head, finding me at the back of the office. The doctor’s dark eyebrows rose to form a fuzzy question mark and with a slight tug of his jaw, he gestured to meet outside. Zubrowksi and Rother shook hands, and the the doctor left. I waited two minutes, then told Mende I was popping out for some fresh air.
I caught up with Zubrowksi at the end of Jozefinska, on the corner of Solna Targowa. After a hearty greeting, the doctor said, ‘Keep nodding and smiling as if we’re talking about a night at the opera.’
‘Anything but Wagner.’
‘I owe you an apology, Mr. Siegler. A mutual friend has been in contact, and it would seem I was wrong to doubt you.’ He stole a sideways glance my way as we walked towards Zgody Square.
‘Do you think it’s easy, what I do?’
‘Should I have brought flowers? A portable string quartet? I said I’m sorry, let’s leave it at that. This isn’t a social call. Are you aware of recent developments near Lublin?’
‘No.’
Zubrowski looked around to make sure nobody was following. ‘A farmer was excecuted last week following a tip-off he was sheltering Jews in his barn.’
‘Oh no,’ I groaned.
‘Unfortunately, yes. Anton Popolowsky. The SS shot them all. The Jews, the children, everybody. Please, keep smiling, I know it’s difficult. But there’s worse to come. The local Gendarme has since been looking into the death of a certain police trans
lator, Popolowsky’s cousin from Hamburg, believed to have been killed six months ago in an unprovoked street fight.’
‘Believed to have been?’
‘After Popolowsky’s arrest, suspicions were raised regarding Damien Plotz’s racial purity. Fearing he’d been fooled into hiring a Jew, the Gendarme ordered the translator’s body to be exhumed. A colleague of mine performed the autopsy.’
I groaned again. ‘What did they find?’
‘Mohnke had a tattoo. Here.’ Zubrowski pointed to the underside of his left arm, near the pit. ‘O RHD minus ’
I repeated the letters, for they meant nothing to me.
Zubrowksi said, ‘It’s his blood type.’
‘Tattooed on his arm?’
‘All Waffen-SS are required to wear a Blutgruppentätowierungin in case a transfusion is needed while unconscious.’
‘Shit. So the Gendarme knows Plotz was SS. What happens now ?’
‘Luckily for you, he isn’t likely to make this official. Burying one of Hitler’s Oberführers by mistake isn’t the smartest move a Belorussian could make right now.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Your green-fingered guardian angel in Kopaliny. They’ve got more couriers than the Polish postal service. This little morsel came out of the Lublin Chief Medical Examiner’s Office.’
We had come to a stop at the western side of Zgody Square.
‘Alright,’ I said. ‘So what am I supposed to do?’
Zubrowski shrugged. ‘On this occasion, I’m just the rmessenger.’
He opened the door, slipped inside and turned round the sign to ‘CLOSED’.
***
Arriving home that night, I cleared the last flight of stairs and paused at the sound of German voices in my corridor, on the other side of the Fire door. Low and muttering, indistinct but unmistakable.
Gestapo.
If I’d taken the elevator that stopped right outside my appartment, the cabin would have served me up like a dumbwaiter to the Maître d’. But I had my own rules. I walked the four flights, as I did every day, no matter how weary. Advantage was mine: the Gestapo knew nothing of my approach. I knew exactly what to do next, to turn and flee. I had rehearsed it so many times that I dreamed only in black and white chase scenes. So why did I side-step up to the Fire door, cup my eyes and peer through the glass grille?
I Am Juden Page 38