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party, but more for practical convenience than out of any burning belief in the Zionist cause. When the Polish government postponed the elections for the local Jewish councils in 1936 for fear that the socialists would take over those, too, all the Zionists in the Łódź kehila resigned and let Agudat Israel run the council on his own. All except Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, who refused to put his place on the community council at anyone else’s disposal. His critics, who responded by expelling him from the party, said he would collaborate with the Devil himself if it came to it. They did not know how right they were.
    There was a time when he had also dreamt of becoming a rich and successful cloth manufacturer, like all the other legendary names in Łódź: Kohn, Rozenblat or the incomparable Izrael Poznański. For a while, he and a partner ran a textile factory. But he lacked the sort of patience needed for business. He lost his temper over every late delivery, suspected deception and swindling behind every invoice. It ended in altercations between him and his partner. This was followed by the Russian venture, and bankruptcy.
    When he returned to Łódź after the war, he took a job as an agent and salesman for various insurance companies including Silesia and Prudential. Curious and terrified faces crowded the windows at his knock, but no one dared open the door. They called him Pan Śmierć , Mr Death, and he also wore the face of Death as he dragged himself through the streets, for his stay in Russia had made him sick at heart. He often sat alone in one of the fashionable cafés on Pietrkowska Street which were frequented by the doctors and lawyers in whose distinguished circles he would have liked to be seen.
    But no one would share a table with him. They knew he was an uneducated man who resorted to the coarsest of threats and insults to sell his insurance. He told a paint dealer on Kościelna Street he would drop dead if he did not sign up his family at once, and the next morning he was found dead under the flap of his own shop counter, leaving his wife and seven children suddenly with no means of supporting themselves. At Mr Death’s café table, people with confidential information came and went; they sat with their backs to everyone and dared not show their faces. It was said he was consorting even then with certain people who would later be part of the ghetto’s Beirat – ‘third-rate “personages” with little appreciation of the public good, still less of ordinary honour and decency’ . It was as if wherever he went, he found himself trailed not by the ‘great men’ he envied, but by a pack of wasters.
    But then something happened: a conversion.
    He was later to tell the children and the nurses at the Green House it had felt as if the words of the Lord had suddenly and unexpectedly revealed themselves to him with the force of an exhortation . From that day forward, he said, the sickness had left him, like some mere, fleeting illusion.
    It happened in winter. He had been dragging himself dejectedly through one of the dark, narrow streets of Zgierz, when he came across a girl sitting huddled under a sheet-metal shelter at a tram stop. The girl had stopped him, and asked him in a voice shaking with cold if he could give her anything to eat. He took off his long overcoat and wrapped it round the girl, then asked her what she was doing out so late, and why she had no food. She replied that both her parents were dead and she had nowhere to live. None of her relations had been willing to take her in or give her anything to eat.
    Then the future Chairman took the girl with him up the hill, to where the client he was on his way to visit lived on the top floor of a grand house. This man was a business associate of the well-known cloth merchant and philanthropist Heiman-Jarecki. Rumkowski told the man that if he knew the meaning of Jewish tsdóke , he would at once take care of this orphan girl, give her a