Read Online The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg - Free Book Online

ghetto winter.
    They said in the ghetto that it was so
cold the saliva froze in people’s mouths. Sometimes people did not turn up for
work because they had frozen to death in their beds during the night.
    The Fuel Department sent out teams of
workers to pull down ramshackle buildings and salvage the wood. On the
Chairman’s express orders, all fuel was to go to the workshops and factories,
and also to soup kitchens and bakeries which would
not otherwise have had
anything to heat their ovens with. Allocating fuel for private consumption was
out of the question. Which naturally had the effect of increasing the
black-market price of fuel tenfold within just a couple of days. It was here, on
the black market, that the majority of sawn wood ended up. As the fuel crisis
deepened, deliveries of flour to the bakeries of the ghetto failed to
materialise. When the Chairman took it up with the authorities, they said they
were not even getting their own emergency supplies through, because of the snow
and ice. He tried to play for time by temporarily reducing rations, but he was
aware of trouble starting to brew out in the factories again.
    Every day brought the same sights.
Snowbound streets, carts and sledges that could not be shifted because their
wheels or runners had frozen fast in the snow. It took the shoulders of at least
four men to get the handcarts back into the tracks worn by other wheels. And at
the soup kitchens in Zgierska Street, in Brzezińska, in Młynarska, Drewnowska,
sat rows of backs, male and female, huddled tightly together under coats and
shawls and bedcovers, drinking down the increasingly watery soup as dense clouds
of fine snow blew through the streets and alleys.
    The disturbances that now broke out
were of a different kind.
    The mob was fully mobile this time. It
had no set destination when it gathered in the streets, but moved swiftly from
district to district.
    Rumour was what drove it.
    A ratsye iz
du, a ratsye iz du!
    Wherever these words were heard, people
turned and followed the crowd to where the incoming food convoys were thought to
be heading.
    A food delivery would scarcely be
through the Radogoszcz Gate before it was attacked. The driver of the
horse-drawn vehicle would be pulled to the ground, and as five or six men put
their shoulders to it, the whole cart went over, to great cheers. By the time
the Schupo lumbered up, the overturned
load had been plundered of every last potato or swede.
    There was a rumour going round that
timber was available for collection from an address in Brzezińska Street. The
timber consisted of a dilapidated hovel somehow overlooked by the Fuel
Department when it drew up its inventory of the ghetto’s wood reserves.
    And the mob was immediately on the
spot.
    Somebody took the lead by getting
lifted up onto the roof of the ramshackle building, while others used axes and
ripping saws to attack everything that could be hacked or pulled loose, and the
building promptly collapsed. Of the men and women inside, half a dozen were
trampled to death. When the police arrived, they were faced with men determined
to fight them off while their comrades grabbed as much of the highly prized wood
as possible before running off.
    At that point, the staff of the six
ghetto hospitals decided to go on strike. They worked in three shifts – round
the clock, and what was more, in premises so cold that the surgeons could
scarcely feel the knives in their hands – trying to save frightened, starving
adults and children who were brought in with frostbite damage or with crushed or
broken arms and legs from being struck or trampled down outside the ghetto’s
distribution centres. Only a fraction of the food convoys coming from Radogoszcz
got through. Those that were not intercepted on their way from the goods station
were attacked once they were in the ghetto. A handful of men jumped over the low
wall running round the central vegetable depot, and even though Rozenblat had by
then ordered