Read The Emperor of Lies for Free Online Page B

in full public view. A senior Gestapo officer walked along the street, spitting. He was followed by three women, who were forced to fight each other to be the first to lick up his saliva. Other women were put to cleaning the city’s public toilets with their own toothbrushes and underwear. Jewish men, young and old, were harnessed to wagons and carts fully loaded with stones or refuse and forced to haul them from one place to another. Then to unload them, and then to load the whole lot back on again. Ordinary Poles stood silently alongside – or gave stupid cheers.
    Jewish Community Council members tried to negotiate with those now holding power; collectively and individually, they made vigorous representations to the German city commissioner, Albert Leister. Leister finally agreed to receive a certain Dr Klajnzettel at the Grand Hotel, where he was having a meeting with Friedrich Übelhör, the chief of police. Dr Klajnzettel was a lawyer, and brought with him a long list of expropriations of Jewish land and property that had occurred since the German invasion.
    There was a large walnut tree in front of the hotel. After twenty minutes, Klajnzettel was escorted from the hotel by two SS men, who took a long rope, tied the doctor by the ankles and knees and hoisted him up, leaving him hanging upside down from the tree. Around the tree, a crowd of Polish men and women had gathered, and they were at first horrified, but then began to laugh at Klajnzettel, writhing upside down in the tree. There were also a few Jews among the crowd, but no one dared to intervene. Some unoccupied soldiers on guard outside the hotel began throwing stones at Klajnzettel to make him stop screaming and yelling. After a while, some of the Poles in the crowd joined in. In the end, a hail of stones was flying into the tree and the man dangling there like a bat, his own coattails over his face, was no longer moving.
    One of those who witnessed the stoning of Dr Klajnzettel was Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski. He had his own memory of where stoning could lead, and what was more, he thought he knew something about the nature of the monster that seemed to have absorbed the city’s Polish inhabitants into its rough, lizard skin. He thought he knew that when the Germans spoke of Jews, they were speaking not of human beings, but of a potentially useful though basically repulsive raw material. A Jew was a deviation in himself; the very fact of a Jew asserting some kind of individuality was a monstrosity. Jews could only be referred to in collective form. In fixed numbers. Quotas, quantities. This was how Rumkowski thought: To make the monster understand what you meant, you yourself had to start thinking like the monster. See not one, but a larger number.
    At that point, he applied by letter to Leister. He was careful to underline that the letter expressed his personal understanding, which was therefore not necessarily shared by the other members of the Łódź kehila . But the letter nonetheless contained a proposal:
    If you need seven hundred workers, turn to us: we will give you seven hundred workers.
    If you need a thousand, then we will give you a thousand.
    But do not spread terror among us. Do not tear men from their jobs, women from their homes, children from their families.
    Let us live quietly and in peace – and we promise to assist you as far as possible.
    Then somebody did listen to Rumkowski at last, after all.
    On 13 October 1939, Albert Leister issued a proclamation that he had dissolved the old kehila of Łódź and in its place appointed him, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, to the position of Chairman of a new, governing Council of Elders, answerable only to him.

The march into the ghetto –
    It is February 1940. Snow on the ground. The sky bright white, poised motionless above.
    Across the snow trundle creaking wagon wheels, barouches with sagging suspension, carts loaded high with suitcases and precariously lashed items of furniture.
    Some are in