Lords of the Polish Ghettos

...Accordingly, Trumpleman is ruthless in handling internal dissidence: When the Stalinist resistance group led by the lawyer Lipsky attempts to break Trumpleman's rule by staging a work-strike, the wily Elder colludes with the enemy outside (referred to, somewhat coyly, as The Others) to vanquish his enemy inside...

...We have to be the way they are...

...Trumple-man arrived in our town...

...In their matter-of-factness of tone, betrayed only by occasional grimly personal remarks?At night I read a lot, constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times"—and stark references that follow dispassionate accountings?Bread now costs 12 zlotys [per kilogram loaf] and watery milk 4-4.5 zlotys per liter...

...Then we can all meet together...

...The housemaid put down her broom...

...He will see how everybody works, nobody complains...

...If Trumpleman fails, or simply chooses not to see that the stakes are ultimate ones, isn't there a perverse courage in such blindness...

...How tiring all this is...

...His dream of Nazi dependence upon Jewish labor to provide clothing and other materiel for the troops?A sewing machine can save a life," he writes a few scant lines before the diary stops—was finally shattered...

...Amid much debate and airing of suspicions ("A wonderful doctor...

...For minute after minute it lazily dropped...

...Also running through the novel, like a black thread, is the self-hatred—so historically ingrained as to appear endemic—that made the Jews tragically amenable...

...This opening chapter ends with a chillingly naturalistic evocation of the outbreak of war: "On a bright afternoon, in September, 1939, a small dot, a speck appeared high in the sky...

...The children looked up...

...It is a strangely moving document in spite of, or perhaps because of, Czerniakow's terseness in regard to the plight of his community—a terseness that stemmed from the strength of his ongoing, practical commitment, rather than from any deficiency of heart...

...Between 1940-42, German forces created walled Jewish ghettos in Poland as an interim strategy of destruction before the mass deportations to the concentration camps...

...First he awes the townspeople with his unusual medical skills, then he disappears for many years after fleecing them in an insurance-deal, returning to reinstate himself as a bearded and blue-eyed ("the eyes themselves were also round, like a boy's and were for a Litvak's remarkably blue") angel of mercy...

...The intrinsic nobility of such a decision—and of ghetto life generally—is that it represents a civilized mode of grappling with an uncivilized reality...

...Until then, too bad...

...Maybe someday the war will end...

...To obtain an audience with the authorities for the smallest request Czerniakow had to wade through masses of red tape, wait endlessly outside the SS offices, and was then usually disdained for his pains: "I requested an increase in the number of telephones for our commercial and industrial undertakings (250) and no more...

...The Warsaw Diary of A dam Czerniakow (Stein and Day, 420 pp., $16.95) contains the secret notebooks—nine in all (one is missing)—of the man who served as leader of the Warsaw Judenrat until his suicide on July 23,1942...

...A dangerous man too, since he keeps telling the authorities that all is well in his preserve...

...As one head of the state to another...

...Nevertheless, a full comprehension of the slow and methodical annihilation of the Jews depends upon our willingness to confront the prosaic mon-strousness of the Nazi regime—its efficient and grisly machinery, as well as the final, unbanal solution of the death camps...

...Then he veered into the Marysinka Corner, and the lights began to blink out there, too...

...7 am a dog, a dog,' Leibelshifter had said...

...As the story progresses, his megalomania becomes increasingly overt and even his least questionable allegiance?to the orphans in the Hatter's Asylum—is tainted with amour-propre, since it is his habit to lull the children to sleep with self-glorifying bedtime stories...

...For the Judenrat—among the Nazis' most devious inspirations —aped the power-system of the very oppressors it was answerable to, thereby generating fearful obedience in the community at large...

...I had made up my mind to emulate the captain...

...Leslie Epstein's novel, King of the Jews (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 350 pp., $10.95) takes good advantage of this...

...No one, anywhere, spoke...

...Of course there were thousands and thousands of light bulbs still burning...

...The full ludicrous-ness of Czerniakow's position, its essential impotence, is conveyed by a line that winds in and out of his entries: " I am forwarding a report to the proper authorities...

...The gallows humor that had sustained him?In the morning at the Community...

...Perhaps he put out every one...

...No, no cure for Judaism...

...A sunflower nodded...

...Where are his credentials...

...Mostly, however, there was no forgetting: On the one hand Czerniakow was liable to the Nazi officials, who insisted upon correct bureaucratic procedure?Auerswald [the Kommissar Czerniakow was directly responsible to] kept wondering about 'my title,' reaching the conclusion that I should imprint on the forms and letters ' Verwaltung des Juedischen Wohnbezirks' [Administration of the Jewish District]"—and on the other to the dying ghetto population...

...For the next 30-odd pages Epstein deftly sketches the picturesque hustle-and-bustle of Balut—an amusing mixture of provincial attitudes and cosmopolitan flourishes—and Trumpleman's wildly fluctuating reputation...

...He switched off all the lights...

...Showoffs...

...Yet the King of the Jews is not merely a villain...

...In the beginning [Auerswald] told me that I talk too much and asked me to come to the point...

...He will see our spotless streets...

...Children starving to death"—these diaries comprise an astonishing record of desperate adaptation and resilient will: " Many people hold a grudge against me for organizing play activity for the children, for arranging festive openings of playgrounds, for the music, etc...

...The novel, at least, would seem to imply this in using throughout an imagery of light and darkness that alternately illumines and shadows its major character...

...Trumpleman was turning off every switch in the ghetto...

...I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece...

...The diary is primarily composed of factual notations concerning Czerniakow's dealings with the Germans and the economic situation within the ghetto...

...Then we can talk and drink tea and read newspapers...

...In his total lack of interest in any personal glory that might accrue from his position as chairman, Czerniakow is the antithesis of Trumpleman...

...When he sees what my Jews can do, we can discuss the role Trumpleman will play after the war...

...Fortunately for us this does not entail any costs to the Community"—proved to be all gallows and no humor...

...He thus engages one of the morally ambiguous aspects of the Holocaust period...

...It has been raining...

...He imagined himself pulling a person through them...

...Like bandits...

...He had commissioned these windows—some with Biblical scenes?himself...

...I shall invite him to our ghetto...

...What is more, the slight leverage the Council's members had encouraged them to believe—up until the last doomed moments—in the possibility of just (and unjust) recourse...

...It depicts Balut, a fictionalized "last ghetto in Poland," and the circumstances of life within it?how the inhabitants adapted as well as succumbed...

...And later: "The sun glistens beautifully through the stained-glass windows in my office...

...Such unsophisticated cliches may enable us to blunt a threatening if not intolerable reality, but their ultimate effect can only be illusory understanding: They obscure the complex actuality of what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil...

...But I don't think it would be fair to the novel to read it as other than a lyrical yet determinedly unsentimental transcription of gruesome fact, a transcription that never loses sight of the ordinary, laconic details that persist alongside the tragic forces of history...

...I received as a gift from a young art student several of my sonnets with her illustrations," comments Czerniakow...

...A polish girl was beating dust out of a rug...

...and by his suicide in the face of German orders to organize extensive deportations, including children...

...From the opening sentence of King of the Jews one senses the touch of a natural raconteur...

...He looked into the dusty, deserted streets...

...toward this end Czerniakow laid great stress on education and the arts, meting out small cash prizes, for example, to the young winners of a music and drawing competition...

...It was a sentence for life...

...The distant craft dropped steadily lower, in circles...

...Although there is something forlornly hopeful about it, this emphasis on cultural activities suggests at the same time the modest ways the Jews ameliorated and dignified the daily atrocities...

...Its wings, in the sunlight, were silver, then turned dark beneath a cloud...

...one imagines they, like the books he devoured late at night (Proust, Don Quixote, Fabre's Souvenirs entomol-ogiques, Adolf Raciazer's The 35 Years of Struggle with Foot Distress)—helped him to forget, for minutes or hours at a time, where he was...

...In the winter of 1918-1919, on a day when the wind was blowing, I.C...

...Trumpleman is elected chairman of the Judenrat...

...I went to Auerswald...

...With the subsequent formation of the ghetto, both Trumpieman and the intentions of the novel emerge full-fledged...

...Like wolves...

...With his portrayal of Wohltat, the plump, bulging-eyed coffee roaster who becomes a strutting Nazi factotum, Epstein conveys the lure of power for those without any innate claim to grandeur: "Wohltat turned on his heel and went to the window...

...Some people will regard King of the Jews as a travesty...

...Certainly it is audacious, and if read on a purely literal level by those with scant knowledge of the events Epstein is drawing upon, it could be guilty of rendering a skewed and unconscionably whimsical version of a bloody reality...

...have forgotten to turn off their lights before leaving: "The Elder was going into the houses on Lutomierska...

...But everyone knew he had been mad...

...wherever he went it got darker...

...I would not care to be born a second time...

...Who knows...

...At the book's close, when the entire ghetto has been herded onto trains for the camps, Trumpleman jumps off because he sees that the Jews?Big spenders...

...The children of the Orphanage Number 2 were in the garden...

...The reputed real-life model for Trumpleman, Chaim Rumkowski, chairman of the Lodz ghetto, appears in these pages and is scathingly dismissed: "He is replete with self-praise, a conceited and witless man...

...The author has chosen to focus his re-creation on the workings of the Judenrat—the Jewish Council responsible for supplying the Germans with a productive labor-force and for maintaining a spirit of "law and order" among the ghetto's bewildered and impoverished population...

...By the hair...

...he is a dastardly hero as well, bargaining like a union boss for more time and better conditions: "I shall call the Big Man on the telephone...

...In its conscious embrace of the tenous and its resistance to the conclusive, King of the Jews stands as a significant addition to that literature of catastrophe which attempts, in the manner of a parable, to comprehend as well as to dramatize...

...It is, to my mind, a remarkably emphatic effort of the imagination, discerning in its characterizations of both victors and victims...

...That Czerniakow gradually recognized the irredeemable character of the Jewish situation is evidenced by his sudden, subdued admissions of defeat?The situation, as they say, is without hope...

...The existence of the ghettos provides a unique opportunity for studying a policy of genocide whose mounting barbarism was cunningly disguised as a series of negotiable and limited war measures...

...then two bombs tumbled from it and, whistling a little, fell all the way to the ground...

...Who has seen his diploma...

...The protracted historical suffering of the Holocaust, for instance, may be more immediately invoked by the image of a ranting, fiendishly-mustached Hitler than by the clerkly demeanor and meticulous cruelty of an Eichmann...

...He dwelled on this, on the little pulls and jerks he would give her, and his throat swelled, like an amphibian's, under his shirt...

...He admonished me, because Jewish officials stand too close to him when they talk to him, a practice that—in his opinion—creates a bad impression with his subordinates...

...He gives a brief speech that subtly discloses the rationale behind his evolution into Adonenu Ha-Nasi ("Our lord, the Prince"), who is chauffered around in an "old Daimler Double Six, with a new yellow star on the door" and whose likeness is printed on paper money and stamps: "Maybe a time will come when we can forgive our enemies...

...A Jewess, perhaps...