The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg Page A

the tears on
her eyelids, the sweat on her brow.
    But Princess Helena’s trembling hand
and handkerchief never reached their goal.
    At that moment, spasms shook the
woman’s body again. Dr Szykier, who had been working from the outset on the
assumption that his patient was suffering from epilepsy, rushed forward to prize
her jaw open. But instead of resisting his action, she opened her mouth even
wider and at the very moment the dybek (so
Tausengeld claimed) left the body, the whole frightened crowd crushed into the
backyard of the prayer house could stare right into the swollen orifice and see
the thick, white coating on the woman’s palate and throat. Then Mara was said to
have uttered two short sentences, or in some versions just two words, forced out
with great difficulty – though this time in fully ‘comprehensible’ Yiddish:
    Du host mikh
geshendt . . . !
    A bayze riekh zol dikh und
dayn hoyz khapn . . . 3
    That was all. In her initial, terrified
confusion, Princess Helena had put the handkerchief to her face, realised what
she was doing and then hysterically tried to shake it out of her hand:
    She’s sick!
She’s sick!
    They have sent
sickness to us!
    In the course of a few seconds, the
room emptied of people, leaving only the police behind. Leon Szykier pleaded
with them to send for an ambulance, but they returned instead with the news that
the Praeses ’ brother – Józef Rumkowski –
did not in any circumstances intend to let any of the ghetto’s hospitals admit
the woman. The official line was that the woman could not be treated because
nobody knew who she was. There was no written record card for her at the Meldebüro . And if there was no name under which
she could be entered in the books, how could anyone be sure she was a Jewess and
not some person in disguise sent by Amalek to spread sickness and disintegration
to them all?
    For four days and nights, the first
lady of the ghetto hovered between life and death as a result of her meeting
with the sick woman. Józef Rumkowski took Helena’s favourite birds to her room:
the linnets that liked to sit in the fruit trees; the comical starling that
sounded just like Marshal Piłudski.
    But the birds, too, sat silent and
dejected in their cages.
    In the prayer room in Lutomierska
Street, Dr Szykier had established a quarantine station. It was the first in the
ghetto, and was presumably viewed as extremely provisional, for a big crowd had
again begun to gather outside the room. This time, however, it was considerably
more aggressive and consisted mainly of men demanding that the woman be sent
away.
    Shame, shame
on any who bring sickness to the ghetto!
    The Hasidic rebbe finally had no alternative but to lift up the woman on her
litter and carry her round again. She spent the first two days and nights in the
kitchen of Dr Szykier’s home. But the furious mob soon found its way there, as
well. And so they set off on an unsteady journey between various houses and
addresses, that would not end until 5 September 1942, the first night of the szpera , when the Chairman took his
protective hand from the ghetto and the German police under the command of
SS-Hauptsturmführer Günther Fuchs went from house to house, taking with them all
the weak and sick, all the children and old people.
    And for Samuel Wajsberg there had been
no remedy.
    Nor for his wife Hala, who three days
after the curfew was announced was to lose her most beloved son, Chaim.
    It was indeed like losing life
itself.
    *
    Two days after the uproar in the
Hasidic prayer house, the Chairman called all members of the medical profession
to a meeting to decide once and for all how to deal with the epidemics
threatening to destroy the ghetto from within.
    The meeting generated some heated
discussion.
    Doctor Szykier dismissed all the
rumours that the woman had brought the infection with her, and he was supported
in this by Wiktor Miller, the ghetto’s Minister of Health, who maintained that
in the