The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg Page B

speak German.
    Or he or she couldn’t hear what the sentry was shouting because a tram came past at the same time.
    Or perhaps there was no tram. The sentry just shouted, and the man or woman who should have been home long ago panicked and started running.
    Which the sentry interpreted as an escape attempt. And the shot rang out.
    At least four of the seven individuals who went to the wire in February 1941 were killed that way. Did they deliberately seek death, or were their senses dulled by fatigue? Or was there perhaps no distinction between conscious intent and unconscious choice? Perhaps they made for the boundary because they knew there was quite simply nowhere else to go.
    A few weeks later, in March 1941, the Chronicle reported that forty-one-year-old Cwajga Blum had succeeded in taking her life that way after no less than thirteen attempts to go to the wire.
    Cwajga Blum lived in Limanowskiego Street. The only window in the flat she shared with two other women looked out directly over the cordon. Limanowskiego Street was the main thoroughfare for the German transports of foodstuffs and materials for the factories, for unloading at Bałuty Square, and was for that reason very closely guarded. A little way up stood the third wooden bridge, the one that linked the northern and southern lobes of the ghetto with each other, with red-and-white-striped sentry boxes clearly visible at each end of the bridge. It was to the box at the southern end of the bridge that Cwajga Blum went with her request.
    Shoot me , she said to the sentry in the box.
    The sentry pretended not to hear. He lit a cigarette, let the strap of his rifle slip from his shoulder, laid the rifle across his lap and pretended to take an interest in the detail of its stock and muzzle.
    Please , she pleaded. Shoot me.
    It was the same guard on duty night after night. And the same Cwaiga.
    After this nuisance had gone on for several weeks, the guard’s commanding officer asked the local Jewish police to take the matter in hand.
    The harassment simply had to stop.
    From then on, the front entrance of Cwajga Blum’s block of flats in Limanowskiego Street was guarded round the clock by two of Rozenblat’s men. As soon as Cwajga ventured over the threshold, the Jewish policemen were there, dragging her back to safety.
    Cwajga Blum tried to get out the back way instead. But the policemen had already seen through her. The minute she emerged from the courtyard they were there, hauling her back into the building. This game of cat and mouse was repeated twelve times. At the thirteenth attempt, Cwajga Blum succeeded in outwitting her supervisors, and it also so happened that the Schupo had just changed its rota of sentry duties. The embarrassed police guard from Limanowskiego Street had been moved to Marysin and a rather more outspoken colleague had taken his place in the Limanowskiego Street box.
    Please shoot me , said Cwajga Blum.
    Do a little dance for me and then we’ll see , said the new guard.
    Before Rozenblat’s men realised what was going on, Cwajga Blum performed a desperate, crazy dance on the other side of the barbed wire. When she had finished, the guard took aim with his rifle and shot her twice in the chest. When her body insisted on continuing to twitch even though it was lying on the ground, he fired another shot to be on the safe side.
    The story of Cwajga Blum was told in different versions around the ghetto. One version had it that she had previously been an in-patient in the psychiatric ward of the Wesoła Street hospital, but had been forced to give up her bed to some high-ranking person in the Beirat .
    In another variant, Cwajga Blum was said to have been so confused that she was not even aware she was in a ghetto, and what she said to the guard in Limanowskiego Street was actually not shoot me, shoot me , but shut me in, shut me in – because she thought she recognised the soldier as one of the ward attendants from the hospital.
    (In that