The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg Page A

gold objects to Stromberg. By then, the whole ghetto was talking about Dawid Gertler, the young Jewish police commander who seemed to be on such a good footing with all the officers of the occupying force.
    Adam was in the queue for the baker’s in Piwna Street. Every bakery was by now baking its own bread, and it always went fast; you had to get up early to be sure of getting your ration.
    In Piwna Street. Bread queue. Some dygnitarzy push their way to the front.
    The young man in the gabardine raincoat is suddenly there again. As before, he is accompanied by two bodyguards. There are sounds of protest from the queue. The bodyguards step resolutely forward, ready to wield their batons to silence the noisemakers. But this time the normal course of events fails to unfold. It is the men in suits from Rumkowski’s Beirat who have to give way.
    ‘Even in the ghetto, those who have had to wait longest will get their bread,’ says the man in the raincoat.
    Gertler, Gertler, Gertler . . . ! shout the people in the queue with their hands in the air, their heads straining forward as if they were cheering on a sports star.
    And Dawid Gertler presses his hat to his chest and bows like a vaudeville artiste in a circus ring. Adam is not giving up his place in the queue at any price; nor does he raise his eyes, for fear of being recognised by the powerful man. Would the people in the bread queue have carried on applauding if they had known that the young Dawid Gertler was ready to sell their very souls as long as he could stay on intimate terms with the odious Germans?
    But perhaps it didn’t matter.
    As long as the bread could be shared out fairly and everyone got the same.

One of the regular daily columns in the Ghetto Chronicle was a record of the number of births and deaths. This was sometimes followed by an entry giving the names of those who had died by their own hand.
    That was how the Chronicle put it: died by their own hand . But in the ghetto they just said that he or she had gone to the wire . The phrase expanded the ghetto’s already rich vocabulary with an expression that meant not only taking your own life but also transgressing all the limitations the authorities imposed on how life should be lived inside.
    In the first week of February 1941, according to the Chronicle , seven people went to the wire. Some of the suicides were striking, to say the least. A middle-aged clerk in Rumkowski’s housing department took it into his head to crawl right under the fence of planks that reinforced the barbed-wire barrier on the north side of Zgierska Street. Of all the places he could have chosen for his escape attempt, he opted for the most closely guarded stretch in the entire ghetto. It still took some time for him to be detected. There was time for several of the trams that carried Germans and Poles straight through the ghetto to pass by the man’s head and shoulders, wedged under the fence, before the police in the lookout two hundred metres away realised something was up. The clerk just lay flat on the ground, waiting for the terrified guard to start shooting.
    Other cases were less clear.
    They generally involved workers returning home from their evening shift.
    Everyone moving through the ghetto had orders to stay as far away from the boundary as possible. Two hundred and fifty metres was the recommended safety margin. But if you couldn’t avoid approaching the wire, you were recommended to do so in broad daylight, right under the eyes of the German guards and for some explicit purpose (if, contrary to all expectation, anyone should ask you).
    But for worn-out shift workers there was always the temptation of saving a block or a few hundred metres by taking a short cut along the ghetto boundary to the nearest wooden bridge.
    And maybe it was dark. The person taking the short cut couldn’t see.
    The sentry on the other side couldn’t see very clearly, either.
    And maybe the man or woman on their way home didn’t