‘The chairman seems nice,’ Ruth remarked as they set out for work early on a crisp September morning, along with streams of other prisoners. Dorotha stiffened imperceptibly. Chaim Mordechai Rumkowski, a 63-year-old Polish businessman and an orphanage director, had been appointed Judena¨lteste, or ‘elder of the Jews’, known to most as the chairman. Some hoped that the chairman might be a voice in dealing with the Germans, and this is certainly how he portrayed himself, as a kind and paternalistic figure, using his status to make life better for his people.
Maybe Dorotha was being cynical, but she knew better. The Nazis saw him only as a means of implementing their orders. He was a divisive figure in the ghetto. His reputation teetered on the finest of lines between love and hate. Dorotha’s father had nothing but hatred at what he saw as his betrayal of his people, branding the chairman a narcissistic megalomaniac. ‘He and his cronies feast like kings while his own people starve,’ he said frequently.
Privately, Dorotha shared her father’s sentiments, but made sure never to voice them out loud. The chairman was a powerful man.
‘Just be careful around him, Ruth,’ she warned.
‘He asked me if I wanted a voucher to get some better boots at the distribution centre at Widok Street,’ she said. ‘I accepted it because, well, look...’ Ruth’s footwear, like most in the ghetto, was rotting and held together with whatever string she could find.
‘Do you remember those beautiful T-bar tan leather high heels I used to wear in the library?’ she asked wistfully. Dorotha looked at her pretty, heart-shaped face, and the thick dark hair that, despite the lack of nutrition, fell like a curtain down her back. Pretty, young and a newcomer. Just the chairman’s type.
‘He’s not to be trusted,’ she warned.
Ruth looked as if she was about to protest when her attention was caught by a flash of colour at the perimeter fence. ‘Oh, Dorotha, look!’ she exclaimed.
Just beyond the barbed wire on Urzednicza Street, an amusement park had been set up on the ‘Aryan’ side. Polish and Volksdeutsche children were already queueing for the merry-go-round, eating toffee apples and shrieking with excitement.
A group of children Dorotha recognised from an orphanage nearby were sitting on the ghetto side of the barbed-wire fence in silence, their faces haunted. The colour and noise they were staring at were so incongruous with the world on their side of the fence. Did they even recall the ‘other side’? Did they remember the scent of a flower, the taste of an orange, the feel of clean sheets and soft bedding?
The arbitrary injustice of the scene was so stark. Why were the Polish and children of German origin on one side of the fence allowed to have their childhoods, while these Jewish children on the other side were deprived of theirs?
It reminded Dorotha too of her old life. The cosmopolitan Lódz she had grown up in was filled with grand buildings, Parisian-style boulevards and leafy parks, perfect to curl up in with a good book. That was before the bombs, the renaming of the main street to Adolf Hitler Strasse and the rupture of their whole world.
‘Children,’ she said softly, ‘come away from the fence.’
Their age didn’t protect them from the German Order Police, known asSchupos, who regularly patrolled the perimeter fence,ready to stop anyone trying to break free, and who would think nothing of turning their guns on a child.
‘Them Schupos don’t scare me,’ said a little boy Dorotha knew to be called Benny Perlman, who was sticking his chin out and drawing himself up to his full height of four feet. ‘My papa’s a boxer, and when he comes back, he’ll biff them up.’ He danced about on his feet, aiming imaginary punches at the barbed wire.
Dorotha exchanged a worried glance with Ruth.
‘We’ll leave if you promise to come to the orphanage and read to us again,’ said a little girl Dorotha recognised from pre-war story time at the library.
‘Of course I will, Anne.’
She regarded her solemnly. ‘Tonight?’
‘After work, I promise.’
‘Shake on it,’ she said.
Dorotha laughed. ‘You drive a hard bargain.’
‘And please, Miss Berkowicz, will you bring that book about the nosy girl who went places she wasn’t supposed to go?’
‘The Secret Garden?’
‘Yes. That one. I like that girl.’
‘Me too,’ said Dorotha. ‘Now off you go. You don’t want to be late for school.’
She and Ruth watched them shuffle off, a heartbreaking little group. Benny had rickets, which forced his bones into awful angles. Anne could only have been twelve, but her limbs were so swollen and her stomach so distended, she could pass as pregnant. Famine oedema, the ghetto doctors called it. Everyone else in the ghetto called it klepsydra, ‘walking obituaries’.
In the distance, the loudspeakers crackled over the sound of the merry-go-round, and her nerves shrieked. ‘Hurry, children,’ she called after them.
‘Come on. We’re late too,’ Dorotha said to Ruth, and the pair hurried towards Baluty. No one with any sense was seen on theghetto streets during working hours. If you weren’t working, you were a useless mouth, and everyone knew those people vanished from the ghetto. To where, no one truly knew, but all understood they would never return.
There was a strange feeling in the air today, a kind of feverishness that reverberated through the usual lament of the ghetto and a larger-than-usual German presence.
