The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  This was his first shift, his first day on the job, but it was the middle of the night. Suddenly it was neither day nor night for him but some new time he had never experienced. If day followed night there would be an end to it as there was for other jobs but there had never been a job like this, not ever. Seeing the mountain of corpses that waited for him, Mandelbrot knew that day, as he had known it, had ended forever. It had ended not just for him but also for the world.

  He had heard the rumours but this was far worse than the rumours.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘This is you if you don’t get to work. The others are coming but you’re already dressed so you can start now.’

  ‘But … what?’

  ‘Look, Jew, I can shoot you and throw you on the heap and get another one or you can start work and stop asking questions.’

  ‘But what do we do?’

  ‘What do you think? The three of you are to start dragging the pieces to the pits over there. Welcome to the Sonderkommando. Start now or I’m taking aim. Tell me you understand?’ he said, lifting his rifle.

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Okay, start now. We’re getting very behind. I’m watching you. Move! Move!’

  Henryk Mandelbrot bent down to pick up his first body. The floodlights shone down from the towers. In the middle distance dogs were barking at the next transport of Jews, which had already arrived; a fresh trainload of people to be converted into corpses as soon as the system could process them. Terrified, bewildered, thirsty, exhausted, dirty, unsteady on their feet, and with the dogs leaping and barking at them, they stumbled and fell out of the cattle cars they had been packed in for days. It sounded to Henryk Mandelbrot, still with a rifle trained at him, not like the barking of a pack of dogs but like the barking of all the dogs of Europe.

  Transports were being unloaded inside the camp for the first time that very month instead of at the Judenrampe outside, the rail line extension inside the camp having just been completed in time to facilitate the extermination of the Jews of Hungary. But now the crematoria were unable to cope with so many bodies quickly enough and, to take the pressure off them, pits had to be dug and the corpses burned in these. It was to the extra labour that had to be found to boost each shift of the Sonderkommando that Mandelbrot and his two companions had been assigned.

  ‘Move!’ the SS man shouted above the sound of dogs and the terror of the transport being unloaded in the middle distance. Mandelbrot heard the exhausted Jews getting off the train and he saw the mountain of corpses. He knew the two were separated by an hour or two at the most.

  For all his revulsion, he had to move quickly because the guard still had his rifle trained on him. The first corpse he touched from the top of the mound belonged to a child, a girl of no more than ten. His two companions saw him and went for bodies next to the dead girl. The corpse Mandelbrot reached for should have been easy to drag. The child had been starved and there was nothing of her. But when he picked up her hand he couldn’t get a grip of her. The girl’s skin was coming off in his hand. He reached further up her arm as the guard watched but her skin was coming off from her upper arm too. It was like nothing he had ever experienced. These bodies had been lying there for hours. They’d been gassed and the previous shift had been unable to get them through the crematorium because the ovens couldn’t cope. There were just too many bodies to get through in the time allowed and they kept coming. The previous shift had had to leave them there for the next shift and the first members of the next shift were the three new prisoners who had never worked a single shift, one of whom was Henryk Mandelbrot.

  Seeing the flesh come off in their hands, the SS guard said almost by way of explanation, ‘That’s not how they’re usually stored. But you better figure something out. I want them moved. Now!’

  Henryk Mandelbrot saw where the victims’ clothes were waiting to be sent to Kanada where the murdered Jews’ property was stored and he walked over to the heap with the guard still watching him. He picked up a shirt from within the pile and tore it into a long strip out of which he fashioned a crude rope. He walked back with it, intending to slip it around the girl’s body to better drag her. When he bent down to lift the girl’s head with one hand he inadvertently pressed down on her chest with the other, leaning on her slightly and causing a profusion of human gases to come out of her, startling him, arousing fresh revulsion in him and causing the guard to let out a little laugh. With the cloth rope partially around her he stood back upright and began to drag the girl. The other two Jews hurriedly went to get strips of cloth to do the same. But in their fear they went too quickly to observe the full effect of Mandelbrot’s experiment. It had barely made any difference. After a few paces friction was causing the parts of the body in contact with the ground to detach from the rest of it. The girl’s body was coming away in pieces as he tried to pull it. They were never going to get this hill of corpses to the pit this way. Then Henryk Mandelbrot remembered something he’d seen in his father’s butcher shop. He got a bucket and filled it with water, splashed some of the water on the young girl’s body and the rest of it along the ground that was to be his path to the pit. This worked. Now she would slide.

  ‘This Jew’s strong and clever,’ said the first SS man to the second. ‘He’ll make a good recruit.’ Then as Henryk Mandelbrot made his way towards the vast open pits with the bucket in one hand and the girl’s corpse dragging under the crudely fashioned rope, the SS man called out to him, ‘You’ll do well here.’

  part nine

  ‘LAST NIGHT THERE WAS A MASSACRE outside the brush-maker’s shop. Who has heard about it? Anyone?’

  Emanuel Ringelblum asked this question to the assembly of carefully chosen people seated around the crowded front room, some on chairs, and some on the floor. The door behind them in the second-storey flat on Leszno Street was closed. On the staircase side of the door a teenage boy, Nahum Grzywacz, was keeping watch. This was a meeting of a clandestine organisation. A few people had already heard about the massacre outside the brush-maker’s shop. Someone from inside the room would be assigned the task of finding witnesses. They were to learn and record as much as they could.

  It was 1942 and the walls of the Warsaw ghetto had been sealed since November 1940. A third of Warsaw’s pre-war population, its Jews, had been forced into two and a half per cent of the city’s area and then, as the months went on, more and more Jews from all over Poland were added to their number. Hunger was everywhere. While the weather could perhaps be temporarily kept out of a room, even a damp mouldy room within a crumbling building, poor, dilapidated to begin with and made worse by the aerial bombing that accompanied the German invasion of Poland, the sharp, piercing, cunning, relentless hunger followed you into the room. If you had a blanket, it found you under your blanket. If you went to sleep, it went there with you. And when you woke up it was there first thing, even before you knew where you were. Before you knew who you were, you knew only that you were hungry. If you could not sleep it was there anyway, eating you, eating away at whatever was left inside you, eating the core of you, your hope and your cells. You might try to not think of the pain but you can’t. It laughs. It wins every time. This was how you knew you weren’t dead. You were hungry.

  Everyone was always hungry. The poorer you were, the hungrier you were, and with the hunger came weakness and irritability. It became difficult to think clearly and you needed to think clearly to work out how to survive the next day, how to get food. You were sure you could still work if you could find work, and you could look for it if only you could eat. But how were you going to get food, for yourself, for your children, for your wife or husband, for your parents? There were simply too many people within those walls for the calories that were let in. How were you to get food when there just wasn’t enough of it? What were you going to have to do? With hunger of this severity came fatigue, a weakness that transcended tiredness and permeated your sinews and bones. As your limbs got ever lighter, they felt progress
ively heavier with each new day.

  With so many hundreds of thousands of people so hungry, so weak, desperately pressed up next to each other, disease swam about the population with reckless abandon, lethal and unchecked. Disease licked your face like a dog unrestrained. Here is a lick from dysentery. From around the corner comes a kiss on the lips and then into your mouth from typhus. Tuberculosis lusts after you insatiably. Too weak to resist, you are burning up as the marriage is consummated right there on the street. You lie there on the ground, unrecognisable, a nuisance to those still able to make their way to the soup kitchen. Will someone notice your absence there today? They might. You will never know. But you do know what’s going on over there. They all have a fever of their own. It holds their gaze and whispers to them in voices unheard and unheard of outside the ghetto. They are not them and you are not you. Is that you, friendless? Is that you, dying? Is that you, naked in the filth of a grey city street? Among the slowly dying, new thieves are born every day. When did you last speak to anybody, who did you still know who might bury you once your clothes have been stolen?

  In the middle of all of this, Emanuel Ringelblum had set up an underground organisation, a group that numbered variously between fifty and sixty people chosen from the ranks of historians, teachers, journalists, economists and other intellectuals, business people, political activists of various hues, administrators, and leaders of youth groups. He chose them carefully and vetted them over time on their quality and aptitude for the work. Their task was to collect, document and preserve a record of what was happening to the Jews of Warsaw and of Poland generally. He had begun recording his observations when the war started but by 1940 he had realised that the scope of the task he envisaged was way beyond that which any one person, no matter how dedicated, could hope to achieve on his own and that was why he had established his Oneg Shabbas, a group dedicated to recording the torment of a once-bustling civilisation that had existed precariously there within another civilisation for a thousand years. When, on his own, he had first begun recording the life of Jewish Warsaw under Nazi occupation his aim had been to spread word of what was happening in the hope of persuading the outside world to intervene. But now it was 1942 and it had long been apparent to Emanuel Ringleblum that no historian had ever undertaken a more futile task. The community he knew, the people he saw, the once dynamic, vibrant, seemingly inexhaustible world he was trying to record and save, was vanishing. Any day now it would be completely gone and there would be nobody left to save. He knew that. All he could still try to do, against all odds, was to save their memory.

  Some members of his clandestine Oneg Shabbas group were charged with interviewing people; people from the streets, the shops and the work details. They interviewed nurses, housewives, smugglers who risked their lives to bring food from outside the ghetto walls, undertakers, artisans reduced to begging, former factory workers, the people who ran the soup kitchens and the people from within the hungry tens and tens of thousands who patronised them, everybody. Other members, better known from before the war for their writing skills, were to write their own accounts of what they saw, what they heard, what they had been told and what they felt. Some Oneg Shabbas members were dedicated solely to the transcription and copying of documents. At a meeting of the group’s Executive Committee Emanuel Ringelblum asked who knew about the previous night’s massacre outside the brush-maker’s shop.

  ‘Cecilya, tomorrow you should go and talk to Czerniakow.’

  ‘Emanuel, he’ll tell me –’

  ‘I know he’ll tell you that he’s the Chairman of the Jewish Council and that among many other things he’s trying to organise soup for over 100,000 people, many of whom will die that day if they don’t get it. He’ll tell you this and your problem will be that it’s completely true. You can’t argue with that. But when they die, there will be no way of telling the world they had even existed if we don’t bother him.’

  ‘But Emanuel –’

  ‘Cecilya, don’t be afraid of him.’

  ‘But Emanuel –’

  ‘Cecilya, he will be annoyed at first. Be ready for that. But you will very quickly have him eating out of your hand. Listen, I saw something yesterday that’s remarkable even for here. It involves Czerniakow and when you raise it with him I guarantee that he will stop what he’s doing and tell you about it.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Last night I saw him walking a way ahead of me on Grzybowska Street back towards his office. He must have forgotten something. When he got to the doorway of the building he stepped over something without giving it much thought. Perhaps, unconsciously, he registered the obstacle in the pavement as a corpse but one gets so accustomed to stepping over nameless corpses on the street … anyway, perhaps his mind was elsewhere. He definitely stepped over the obstruction, not on it, but his mind must’ve been somewhere else because he didn’t really examine what it was. He just stepped over it. I saw this myself. He stood outside the building for a moment fumbling in his coat pocket for something when suddenly the pile of broken wooden crating at his feet burst open and in the half-light of the street a small boy, perhaps eight years old, stood up. The boy, clearly starving, was completely naked. Czerniakow was startled. He lost his composure and he screamed in shock. It must have seemed like some kind of apparition to him.

  ‘The boy kicked at the crating beside him with one foot and another boy, about the same age and also completely naked, got out of it and stood up. Both small boys then started to remonstrate with Czerniakow, albeit addressing him respectfully, as Mr Czerniakow. They knew he was the Chairman of the Judenrat, but they weren’t at all fazed by that. They’d been waiting for him and were complaining about the food rations. They were orphans. They said they were the last of their families and they tugged on Czerniakow’s coat. ‘We’ve been waiting for you! Are you going to let us die also, Mr Czerniakow?’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘They were covered in dirt and excrement and God knows what else but Czerniakow knelt down to look at them, to look them in the eye. He took these two skeletons in his arms. He said something I wasn’t able to hear and then he began to sob quite uncontrollably. Really, Czerniakow … I saw this. Then he took them into the building. Go there tomorrow and ask him about it. You can tell him it was me that saw it. Tell him I sent you there. I don’t care. If he won’t write his own account of this for you then get him to dictate it. I’ll bet you two things: no matter how busy he is, he will quickly become acquiescent when you tell him what you know of this. He knows what we’re doing here.’

  ‘What’s the other thing?’ Cecilya Slepak asked.

  ‘The wood those boys had used to hide themselves, even if you leave for Grzybowska Street right now, it won’t be there when you get there.’

  ‘Who’s covering the soup kitchen?’ Eliyahu Gutkowski asked. But before anyone could answer there was a knock at the door. Nobody said anything as Emanuel Ringelblum stood up and walked to the door. He opened it partially to see the young watchman, Nahum Grzywacz, standing next to Rosa Rabinowicz, the deserted wife of Henry Border.

  ‘She told me to knock,’ the boy, instantly ashamed for blaming her, blurted out by way of explanation. He liked Rosa and would normally have cut many corners for her. He had stolen for her, delivered smuggled food to her and had even fantasised about her but to interrupt the meeting might have been going too far.

  ‘It’s all right, Nahum. Rosa, you don’t need to knock. Just come in.’

  She was out of breath. ‘I’m sorry I’m late but –’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes but –’

  ‘Then just come in.’

  ‘No, before I do I need to tell you something that I wasn’t sure I should say in public, I mean not even in front of the Executive Committee.’

  ‘Rosa, can’t it wait?’

  ‘Please forgive me if it can, but I’m not sure it can.’

  ‘Nahum, go inside and tell them everything is all ri
ght but that I need a couple of minutes to attend to something. Then wait inside for me to come back in,’ Ringelblum told him.

  Once they were alone Rosa proceeded to tell her story. ‘A smuggler brought a man into the ghetto just now.’

  ‘Somebody wanted to get into the ghetto! What kind of man could he be?’

  ‘He’s a Jew,’ said Rosa, still out of breath. ‘He says his name is Jacob Grojanowski from the shtetl of Izbica. He said it’s near Lublin. But he hasn’t come from there now. He says he’s escaped from a camp where he was working as a grave digger.’

  ‘Rosa, I have to get back inside. You can take down his story but … Surely this can wait.’

  ‘No, no, it can’t. He’s in hiding now with some people who know me and they stopped me on my way to the meeting. They told me his story. I don’t know why they chose me to tell. I swear I haven’t mentioned a thing about our work here but … Anyway this man, Grojanowski … He wants to see Czerniakow but when I heard his story … well, I thought you should know everything as soon as possible. Even before Czerniakow.

  ‘He says that at the camp he was in the Germans aren’t working the Jews at all. Instead they take them in groups of sixty or so and they put them in hermetically sealed trucks. Then they drive the trucks into the forest. The exhaust from the trucks is channelled back into the sealed part and the Jews are gassed.’

  ‘They’re gassed?’

  ‘That’s what he said. He was working there as a grave digger. He saw everything.’