The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg Page B

case of diphtheria, there were in fact phases or preliminary stages that
sometimes resembled neural paralysis. What was more, Dr Miller claimed,
diphtheria constituted a threat above all to the children of the ghetto, but the
illness could only be transmitted from mouth to mouth, which did limit the
threat. It is a different matter, he said, when the infections are carried by
the water we drink and the food we eat and the bugs crawling in our walls, and
we can do nothing to root them out short of sanitising the whole ghetto.
    To combat
dysentery and typhus we need doctors; nothing but that – doctors, doctors,
doctors!
    Dr Miller was to make the battle with
the epidemics of the ghetto into his own, private crusade. ‘People complain they
can’t keep kosher any more, but it never occurs to them to boil their water or
keep the floor under their own stoves clean!’ With his iron-tipped white stick,
the blind man tirelessly measured the depth of the ghetto’s open drains, used
the few remaining fingers on his hand to trawl through piles of rubbish and
latrine trenches; he stuck his thumbs behind swollen or bulging wallpaper in
search of typhus lice. At the least suspicion of typhus or dysentery, the whole
building would be quarantined.
    His efforts were eventually crowned
with success. Over the course of a year, there was a tenfold reduction in
dysentery cases, from 3,414 in the second year of the ghetto’s existence to
scarcely 300 the year after. Typhus traces a similar downward curve, with a peak
of 981 cases in the period January–December 1942, and a gradual falling away in
the two years that followed.
    As for the outbreak of diphtheria in
the ghetto, however, something remarkable happens. In the first twenty-four
hours after the rumpus in the Hasidic prayer house, the out-patient clinics of
the ghetto register seventy-four new cases of diphtheria, but only two the day
after, and then no more at all. Just like the hazy image Mr Tausendgeld thought
he saw sliding across the sick woman’s face, sickness comes and goes in the
ghetto like the briefest of whispers. Not even Princess Helena feels its
effects, despite lying upstairs in Miarki Street day after day, shaking with
fever, waiting for the ghastly voice that called out to her from Mara’s swollen
throat to take her in its grip, too.
    But nothing happens. At least, not
yet.

Earlyon the morning of 9 May 1941, Rumkowski’s newly appointed Minister of Propaganda, Szmul Rosensztajn, climbed onto an upturned beer crate outside the barrack-hut office at Bałuty Square and informed all those who cared to listen that the Chairman had gone to Warsaw to find doctors for the ghetto. Wherever people gathered, from Wiewiórka’s barber’s shop in Limanowskiego Street to the tailors’ workshops in Łagiewnicka, the word spread: The Chairman has gone to Warsaw to find a way to cure and save the sick of the ghetto.
    The Chairman had scarcely left before they began the preparations for his return. It was all to be on a grand scale – po królewsku – with a carriage and a guard of honour, and crowds of cheering onlookers kept at a safe distance by ghetto police. Though in fact it was only one of the routine transports organised by the Gestapo, who travelled the 130 kilometres to Warsaw in convoy every day, and who had no objection at all to letting a Jew come along, if he was stupid enough to pay twenty thousand marks for his ticket.
    Rumkowski’s trip to Warsaw lasted eight days.
    He was courted day and night by members of Czerniaków’s Jewish Council, and also by resistance workers and couriers, who tried to pump him for all he could possibly tell them about German troop transports and conditions for the Jews left in Wartheland. The Chairman, however, had no interest in hearing how the Jews of Warsaw were faring, how they organised their aleynhilf , how they dealt with the distribution of food, educated their children or engaged in political agitation. Wherever he went,