The silver bracelet had slid off Ruth’s arm and rolled along the cobblestones, coming to a stop at his boots. The Kripo put down the axe.
‘Pick it up and give it to me,’ he ordered Dorotha, who did as she was told.
‘Now get to work.’ As she turned, he kicked her in her lower back, sending her crashing to the cobbles. She lay for a long moment, head pulsing with pain, until she heard the crunching of their tyres.
‘Dorotha...’ said Ruth, crouching down beside her. ‘They’ve gone. Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she muttered, swallowing down a shooting pain in her kidneys as she forced herself to her feet, wiping horse shit off her hands. ‘Bastards.’
Ruth used the skirts of her dress to wipe down her hands. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, incredulous. ‘You’d actually have given your life for mine. I knew you were tough, Dorotha Berkowicz, but I didn’t know you were so courageous.’
That wasn’t a title Dorotha felt comfortable with. ‘A reckless fool, more like. Now come, we must hurry.’
At work, her superior was hovering in the doorway.
‘I’m sorry we are a little late, Mr Weiss,’ she gabbled.
‘It’s all right. I’m relieved to see you is all.’ Dorotha’s usually calm superior looked rattled. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
Dorotha and Ruth both shook their heads.
He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. ‘Last night, they emptied the hospitals on Wesola Street, Drewnowska, Lagiewnicka and Mickiewicz Streets. Without warning, the Kripo surrounded them at five a.m. and blocked the streets. All the sick have been removed from the ghetto.’
‘So that’s why there are so many of those drunk animals about.’
Mr Weiss gestured to a closed door further up the corridor and raised a finger to his lips. ‘Keep your voice down. Something’s brewing. The chairman’s been in there with Biebow for the past hour.’
They saw the handle turn.
‘Get behind your desk quickly! Don’t look at him.’
Hastily sitting down, Dorotha picked up the stack of papers on her desk before turning to her typewriter.
All at once, the room was charged with static electricity as if a storm was brewing. Dorotha could smell him first. Her father had a theory that you could always hear or smell a German before you saw one. If it wasn’t the heavy thud of a jackboot on the cobbles, it was the powerful odour of them, a mix of the linseed oil they used on their boots, and cologne. In this shabby, grey, cabbage-stinking wasteland, it wasn’t hard to stand out.
She focused on her typewriter as the two men passed by. It was the so-called King of the Ghetto, the chairman, and his puppet master, Hans Biebow, Nazi head of administration for the Lódz ghetto. Even out the corner of her eye, she could see that both cut imposing figures. Rumkowski, with his halo of bushy white hair and round glasses, and Biebow, his tall, lithe figure alwaysimmaculately dressed. With his golden hair and blue eyes, Biebow could have been a poster boy for the Reich, Dorotha thought bitterly. She’d heard rumours that, before the war, he’d been a coffee merchant from Bremen.
Curiosity overcame her, and she glanced up briefly. The two men stood at the door, speaking in whispers, before Biebow’s eyes sparked and he clapped Rumkowski on the arm proprietorially.
What a fool Rumkowski was to believe he could do deals with the Nazis. Did he think that issuing postage stamps and creating a currency named after himself meant that the Germans wouldn’t kill him when they were finished with him?
As a typist, Dorotha was invisible to these arrogant beasts, but she photographed them with her memory as they stood, heads bent together in conversation.
Survive. I must survive to tell others.It was a mantra she told herself again and again. Someone had to reveal this cruelty to the world when all this was over, and she had to believe there was a life after this; otherwise, what was the point in going on?
When Biebow and Rumkowski left, Ruth turned to her from the next desk, her eyes wary. ‘I’ve seen that man before,’ she whispered.
‘Rumkowski? Yes, you told me.’
‘No, not him. The German. He oversaw the selection in Zdun´ska Wola.’
‘Are you sure?’
Ruth’s fingers trembled as she fed paper into her typewriter. ‘Quite sure. He’s not someone you forget in a hurry. He was at the entrance to the cemetery where they forced us for selection, directing us with a whip. All the old people, invalids, pregnant women and people whom he declared unfit to work went to the left, theschlechte Seite. Mybubbeandzaydeincluded. We never saw them again, but we heard the machine guns and the screamsfrom our side of the cemetery.’ A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘They dug a pit, and all the bodies were tossed in. That much we did see. And that man oversaw it all.’
‘Remember his face and his name,’ Dorotha replied, boiling with molten fury. ‘Never forget it. You are a witness.’
The rest of the day passed by in a blur, mostly of hunger, as Dorotha’s fingers numbly typed up list after list. The Germans were punctilious record-keepers. Everything that went in or out of the ghetto, from a loaf of bread to a human being, was documented by the Department of Vital Statistics. But that wasn’t all that was being documented.
