Chapter 4 Dorotha #2
At once, the men’s sluggishness shook off, and they all sat bolt upright, keen as wolves scenting blood.
Ruth started to shake, and Dorotha gripped her arm and leaned in to whisper in her ear. ‘You’ll need to run. They’ve been drinking heavily. They won’t be able to shoot straight. It’s your only hope.’
But Ruth wasn’t listening. She was praying fervently, her eyes closed, her mouth moving.
Dorotha took Ruth’s wrist and made a pretence of trying to tug the bracelet.
‘Ruth, you have to listen to me,’ she urged, her heart thundering. ‘On the count of three, I’ll turn and push him, and you must run. Run as fast as you can back home.’
Ruth’s brown eyes snapped open. ‘B-but they’ll kill you!’
Dorotha heard laughter behind her. The heavy tread of boots.
‘Better one of us get out of this situation alive,’ she muttered. ‘Count with me, then run. Three . . . two . . .’ Dorotha gripped the bracelet and gave it a last desperate yank.
The blood hissed in her ears as she turned and saw a flash of silver slice through the sky, and then the glistening piece of pink meat stuck in the Kripo’s teeth as his mouth fell open in surprise.
The silver bracelet had slid off Ruth’s arm and rolled along the cobblestones, coming to a stop at his boots. The Kripo put down the axe.
‘Pick it up and give it to me,’ he ordered Dorotha, who did as she was told.
‘Now get to work.’ As she turned, he kicked her in her lower back, sending her crashing to the cobbles. She lay for a long moment, head pulsing with pain, until she heard the crunching of their tyres.
‘Dorotha . . .’ said Ruth, crouching down beside her. ‘They’ve gone. Are you all right?’
‘Yes,’ she muttered, swallowing down a shooting pain in her kidneys as she forced herself to her feet, wiping horse shit off her hands. ‘Bastards.’
Ruth used the skirts of her dress to wipe down her hands. ‘Thank you,’ she murmured, incredulous. ‘You’d actually have given your life for mine. I knew you were tough, Dorotha Berkowicz, but I didn’t know you were so courageous.’
That wasn’t a title Dorotha felt comfortable with. ‘A reckless fool, more like. Now come, we must hurry.’
At work, her superior was hovering in the doorway.
‘I’m sorry we are a little late, Mr Weiss,’ she gabbled.
‘It’s all right. I’m relieved to see you is all.’ Dorotha’s usually calm superior looked rattled. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
Dorotha and Ruth both shook their heads.
He took out a handkerchief and wiped his brow. ‘Last night, they emptied the hospitals on Weso?a Street, Drewnowska, ?agiewnicka and Mickiewicz Streets. Without warning, the Kripo surrounded them at five a.m. and blocked the streets. All the sick have been removed from the ghetto.’
‘So that’s why there are so many of those drunk animals about.’
Mr Weiss gestured to a closed door further up the corridor and raised a finger to his lips. ‘Keep your voice down. Something’s brewing. The chairman’s been in there with Biebow for the past hour.’
They saw the handle turn.
‘Get behind your desk quickly! Don’t look at him.’
Hastily sitting down, Dorotha picked up the stack of papers on her desk before turning to her typewriter.
All at once, the room was charged with static electricity as if a storm was brewing.
Dorotha could smell him first. Her father had a theory that you could always hear or smell a German before you saw one.
If it wasn’t the heavy thud of a jackboot on the cobbles, it was the powerful odour of them, a mix of the linseed oil they used on their boots, and cologne.
In this shabby, grey, cabbage-stinking wasteland, it wasn’t hard to stand out.
She focused on her typewriter as the two men passed by.
It was the so-called King of the Ghetto, the chairman, and his puppet master, Hans Biebow, Nazi head of administration for the ?ód? ghetto.
Even out the corner of her eye, she could see that both cut imposing figures.
Rumkowski, with his halo of bushy white hair and round glasses, and Biebow, his tall, lithe figure always immaculately dressed.
With his golden hair and blue eyes, Biebow could have been a poster boy for the Reich, Dorotha thought bitterly.
She’d heard rumours that, before the war, he’d been a coffee merchant from Bremen.
Curiosity overcame her, and she glanced up briefly. The two men stood at the door, speaking in whispers, before Biebow’s eyes sparked and he clapped Rumkowski on the arm proprietorially.
What a fool Rumkowski was to believe he could do deals with the Nazis. Did he think that issuing postage stamps and creating a currency named after himself meant that the Germans wouldn’t kill him when they were finished with him?
As a typist, Dorotha was invisible to these arrogant beasts, but she photographed them with her memory as they stood, heads bent together in conversation.
Survive. I must survive to tell others. It was a mantra she told herself again and again. Someone had to reveal this cruelty to the world when all this was over, and she had to believe there was a life after this; otherwise, what was the point in going on?
When Biebow and Rumkowski left, Ruth turned to her from the next desk, her eyes wary. ‘I’ve seen that man before,’ she whispered.
‘Rumkowski? Yes, you told me.’
‘No, not him. The German. He oversaw the selection in Zdun?ska Wola.’
‘Are you sure?’
Ruth’s fingers trembled as she fed paper into her typewriter.
‘Quite sure. He’s not someone you forget in a hurry.
He was at the entrance to the cemetery where they forced us for selection, directing us with a whip.
All the old people, invalids, pregnant women and people whom he declared unfit to work went to the left, the schlechte Seite.
My bubbe and zayde included. We never saw them again, but we heard the machine guns and the screams from our side of the cemetery.
’ A tear rolled down her cheek. ‘They dug a pit, and all the bodies were tossed in. That much we did see. And that man oversaw it all.’
‘Remember his face and his name,’ Dorotha replied, boiling with molten fury. ‘Never forget it. You are a witness.’
The rest of the day passed by in a blur, mostly of hunger, as Dorotha’s fingers numbly typed up list after list. The Germans were punctilious record-keepers.
Everything that went in or out of the ghetto, from a loaf of bread to a human being, was documented by the Department of Vital Statistics.
But that wasn’t all that was being documented.
The department, established in November 1940, also kept a secret daily journal of events in the ghetto called The Chronicle of the ?ód? Ghetto.
A team of writers, diarists and academics contributed to it.
Her superior, Oscar Weiss, edited it, and from time to time, Dorotha also wrote her own observations.
The Germans knew nothing about it, and Oscar was meticulous in his editing in case they discovered it.
It was deliberately never critical of Rumkowski or the Germans, and that way it could remain an important source for understanding daily life, as well as a means of bearing witness for future generations.
Dorotha liked that idea, that words on a page could stand as a written testimony, and who knew? Maybe eighty years from now, because of the Chronicle, people would learn about the cruelty and madness of the ?ód? ghetto.
That is why she, too, kept her own, more clandestine, record.
She waited until Mr Weiss was in his office and Ruth in the toilet before she pulled out a dog-eared notebook from under a loose floorboard beneath her desk. The faded words ‘Libertatem per Lectio’ were etched on the front in ink. Mildew and damp were already creeping across its pages.
Dorotha picked up her pen.
Friday 4 September 1942.
Dear Secret Society of Librarians,
The Kripo emptied the hospitals last night.
Rumours sweep the ghetto every day. A cloud of uncertainty grips us.
Old people, children and the sick are being slaughtered.
My old library assistant, Ruth Mordkowicz, and her mother are now living with us.
It does us all good to have new people in our midst. After work, I have promised I will read The Secret Garden to the children in the orphanage.
There are nearly a hundred of them there.
Their parents have been removed from the ghetto by the Nazis . . .
Then she stopped and crossed out the last line.
Her record was not public, so it was important she did not censor herself. ‘There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.’ She murmured Virginia Woolf’s words under her breath and started again.
Their parents have been sent to their deaths. How can I be sure of this? I can’t, but we all know that when a person who can’t work is sent away, they are surely being sent to their deaths.
Ruth Mordkowicz just told me she saw Biebow oversee a selection in which hundreds of men, women and children from Zdun?ska Wola were massacred and thrown into a pit. That is not ‘administration’. That is mass-murder.
Reading to the children reminds me of what it is to be human and that, before the ghetto, I was a librarian. And God willing, I will be again one day.
Your Dorotha
She wanted to write more but, hearing footsteps, she stuffed the notebook back under the floorboard and moved the waste bin over it.
The notebook wasn’t just a means of documenting.
It also gave her a tangible link to the Secret Society.
Ink on a page was a fair substitute for the spoken word.
It also kept her friends alive in her mind in a way that felt meaningful while also reminding her of the society’s vow at the outbreak of war.
The words of that first bulletin they sent her were engrained in her heart.
If people can’t get to the books, we take books to the people.