I Am Juden Read online

  In a city fuelled by a black market economy for luxury goods, the leather workshop flourished. After only a week, they outgrew the Gestapo basement and needed to be rehoused an old Jewish school nearby. Impressing greatly as Officer of the Watch and flaunting his own credentials as a successful pre-war shoe manufacturer, Gertenberg was promoted from Jew escort and put in charge of the expanded workshop.

  Under his control, the Gestapo work detail acquired a lucrative sideline outfitting senior Nazis with hand-crafted clothes and accessories for wives and girlfriends. Money and business were slushing in, justifying the faith his superior’s had placed in the industrious officer. With his crooked teeth and bulbous nose, Gertenberg was hardly a poster boy for the genetic purity of the SS. But he was proof that the German army respected the ability to turn a Reichmark as much as the rest of the Weimar.

  Of course, Gertenberg never missed an opportunity to profit personally, in backhands and bribes. But he also gained a reputation as a fair and decent employer, and made sure his workers were cosseted from the horrors of the streets. After a month in new premises, the workshop ran out of space again. Gertenberg managed to requisition an old abandoned cable-works factory in the middle of the Ponary forest, installed the whole Kommando only last week and Camp Moda was born. The rank of Hauptsturmführer was added to his accomplishments.

  Gertenberg was a chancer with an eye for the comfortable life. But he was a profiteer with a conscience, a rare enough commodity in times of war. The men and women in his employ enjoyed a privileged life of protection compared to the rest of the citizenry. In his private life, he was said to be considerably less disciplined, as if the two spheres could not exist without some give and – mostly, it must be said - take. He was a glutton who added three inches to his waist-size every month, an inveterate gambler, an egotist and a serial womaniser, with a mistress for each mistress. His favourite saying was reputed to be, ‘If God didn’t want to me to sin every day, why did he make seven of them, and seven days of the week?’

  On the last weekend of every month he returned to his family in Silesia and played the doting husband and father to twin boys. But even his own children had no exclusive claims on his affections if there was another underdog to champion. One of the legends I heard most often that night was the time the Chaze turned up late for his sons’ football match, found them winning comfortably, and switched his support to the other team. Whether true or not, it is the story that best encapsulates the man. In that famous irregular grin I saw the botched dentistry of an irascible charmer who’d been born poor, and pulled himself up by his boot-straps, even if he now wore thigh-length Marschstiefels. Most of that birthday evening, it was the chubby, carefree boy I saw, a mischievous glint in his eye and the last remnants of the snuggle-toothed grin he’d almost outgrown.

  And now the Chaze was a man, when the darkness did descend upon his brow, there was a remedy. Well before the end of the evening, I saw him put his arms around the two pretty violinists – seventeen if they were a day - and steer them out of the canteen towards his office.

  Turning to the old one-armed man now standing next to me, I said, ‘Haven’t they done enough tonight in terms of services rendered?’

  ‘Did you see them complaining?’

  ‘No. But what would you think, if you were their father?’

  ‘He’s one of us, that’s what counts.’

  One of us? Blessed was the shoe-maker indeed, to walk away with a couple of beauties like that for the night.

  5

  After the peculiarities of that first day, life at Camp Moda returned to its prosaic routines. There were no more early finishes, no more nights of champagne and iced cake. The Chaze’s appearance in our midst became a rarity, and I wondered if what I’d seen could really be true. Oiling the wheels of business kept him occupied in Wilno, where he maintained a grand apartment on Parliament Square that by all accounts put our Art Deco reception rooms to shame. The day-to-day running of the Camp was left to Herr Ritter (ordering, invoicing and a multitude of such invisible upstairs work) while Oswald Zgismond oversaw the factory floor.

  Conditions were never less than reasonable but our shifts were long (twelve hours with a thirty minute lunch) and the exacting nature of the handiwork took its toll on fingers and wrists. Double-shifts at short or indeed no notice were commonplace, and unrecompensed with extra food or sleep. But no matter how great the demands placed upon his workers, the Chaze’s stature continued to swell, much like the great man’s waistline. A weak boss would have commanded no respect at all. We were here to work. Not only did we accept that, but most were grateful for the opportunity when they remembered what was happening outside. Camp Moda was hard but fair, and the Chaze a decent employer. The more I learned about the man, the more convinced I became that his dealings with us Jews were the only honest transactions in his life.

  While Wehrmacht uniforms and the ingenious new flying boot were the Camp’s bread and butter, it was the sideline in luxury accessories that provided the cream for the Chaze to skim. For this most closed of workshops, he recruited the highest skilled leather workers, personally travelling the width and breadth of the Baltics to collect his next artisan. It was their fine gloves and belts and handbags and ladies shoes – boxes of tissue-lined delights that blocked corridor after corridor – which were loaded into the Chaze’s

  Daimler to be gifted upon his superiors at Gestapo headquarters. If there was anything left over at the end of the week, Herr Ritter negotiated an arrangement with the local farmer who supplied our dairy produce. After a delivery to the canteen, his truck would depart with treasures to be sold on the Wilno black market, with a healthy percentage of profit funneling its way back to Herr Ritter’s desk drawers.

  There were days when I believed I was the only man in Ponary not in on the graft. The Chaze grew ever richer, indulging his appetites for French cuisine and horse-racing. But a generous proportion of his gains went directly into the Camp’s coffers. Our nutritious and filling meals, I learned from Herr Ritter, were paid for out the Chaze’s own pocket. Had my co-workers known, they would have undoubtedly petitioned to make him a Ger Toshav, the Righteous Amongst Nations, the highest honour for a gentile who had helped Jews.

  Days passed and I saw no sign of the Chaze’s ‘exacting clients’ whose fittings we’d been warned about during our initial tour. I was beginning to think it was a scare-story dreamed up by Oswald Zgismond to keep new arrivals on their toes.

  I also saw precious little of my former cell-mate. Come evening Ronen was too tired to chat, preferring to doze in his rooms before lights out, while I had taken to strolling around the factory grounds before sleep. What interaction I had with Ronen was confined to the row of bathroom sinks first thing in the morning, where we would take turn with the shaving brush and paste.

  We were joined at the mirrors by Ernst Bau, the one-legged man I’d seen huddled with Herr Ritter during the birthday party, and had spoken to briefly at the end. Ronen and he grew quite close, as older members of a workforce will tend to. They were an odd couple to be sure. I took Bau to be a man of some influence and stature, perhaps a rabbi who had survived by shaving his beard. He was certainly no longer able to work leather, if he ever had. He was employed as the barrack cleaner, although as far as I could tell, spent most of the time dozing in his mop cupboard, or reading a newspaper with the assistance of a wooden library-style turning rack.

  Although Ronen didn’t mention the various money-making schemes I’d already observed, it didn’t take him long to uncover the Camp’s less guarded secrets. On our third morning, his razor hand positively shook with excitement as he told me that not only did many workers have family at the Camp, but it was possible to request names from Oswald, or Ozzie as he had taken to calling him. I professed astonishment. Ronen might have lost the photograph of his parents, but he was convinced the real thing would be joining him before the summer was out.

  I urged a sense of caution, although it was true that
in the seventy-two hours since our arrival, another pair of siblings had been reunited and now hefted rolls of raw crust calf hide together in the leather store all day long. But I could not forget the endless columns of old men and women being marched through the city on the night of our arrest, or the piles of stolen loot I’d glimpsed in the Luskikes ballroom.

  Camps like Moda where you were allowed to keep your valuables were few and far in between. The grueling Konzentrationzlangers of neighbouring Stutthof were the rule to our exception. And from all reports, conditions in Wilno were growing more perilous by the hour for those Jews who remained.

  Deep down, Ronen knew all this. It was he who’d spooked me with whispers of shootings in the woods as we’d rattled our way here that morning. But three days later, such speculation had been tucked away in a dim corner of his mind. Camp Moda could be dangerous that way.

  On the morning of August 16th, we were woken an hour earlier than usual, with no reason given. Breakfast was a bowl of thin, watered-down porridge, no egg or toast in sight. When I left the canteen to start work, I noticed the doors to the accommodation block had been padlocked shut and a red sign proclaimed ‘NO ENTRY: CLOSED FOR ESSENTIAL MAINTENANCE’.

  ‘Is everything OK?’ I said to Hirschel, the absent-minded clicker with whom I shared a bench.

  He gave a mystifying wink. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  I tried to heed his advice and concentrate on my work. If the accommodation block was closed, I told myself, bad luck came in threes, and this morning’s fill was my lot. It was certainly well overdue. But then, just before lunch, Herr Ritter paid a rare visit to the clicking room and requested my presence outside in the corridor.

  Whenever an employer makes an unscheduled appearance in my day, I fear the worst. Perhaps that is the lot of the working man. Even after a lecture at the sedate University of Kiel, I lived in fear that the Head of Philosophy would knock on my door, to upbraid me for a controversial interpretation of Nietzsche or a joke I may have cracked about the city burghers. As a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe, you might conclude that a smattering of paranoia was well placed.

  ‘Don’t fret,’ Herr Ritter said. He was the only man in the Camp to speak to me in German, but usually only a curt, Gutten morgen. ‘You haven’t done anything wrong. Quite the opposite, in fact. You’re earning some glowing reviews.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘A man of your intellect shouldn’t look so surprised, Herr Siegler.’ He straightened his polkadot bow-tie. ‘It’s time for you to really start earning your keep.’

  ‘I can work faster. I was unforgivably slow this morning.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with your work, and everything right with it. On your first day, I believe you enquired of Oswald Zgismond what was the drawback of life in Moda?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t - ’

  ‘Do you know the name Hinrich Lohse?’

  ‘Of course.’ I drew back, perplexed by Herr Ritter’s change of tact. ‘Reich Commissar for the newly designated Ostland region.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘He was Oberprasident of the Province of Schleswig-Holstein when I lived in Kiel.’

  ‘Exactly so. Yesterday he was in Kaunas. And at 1.30 this afternoon he will find time in his busy schedule to be our guest. The Reich Commissar has requested a fitting for a pair of Adelaide semi-brogues. We are extremely honoured to receive a man of his stature, naturally.’

  Hinrich Lohse’s stature was five foot one, in heels. If he looked like a sour, baby-faced accountant, that’s precisely what he was. A baby-faced accountant with a toothbrush moustache, and a pair of thick round spectacles behind which his eyes blinked like gormless goldfish. We used to call him FF, the Fat Führer. Tell a newspaper cartoonist to caricature a Nazi, and he’d end up drawing Hinrich Lohse. Tales of the man’s temper were legendary in the cafes of Kiel. An avid horticulturalist, he had once been summoned from the garden by his valet to take an urgent telephone call. When the Oberprasident found himself addressing a dead line, he repaid the courtesy by fracturing the valet’s cheekbone with the receiver.

  ‘Word of our craftsmanship is spreading far and wide,’ Herr Ritter continued. ‘Great news for the camp, but it presents challenges, in terms of recruitment. The labour pool, shall we say, is an ever diminishing one. Today, the Reich Commissar’s appointment will be conducted by Joziek Seidel, one of our most eminent lasters.’

  I was relieved to hear that I would be spared. Joziek was a stoic sort and a gifted craftsmen, whom even Ronen rated highly.

  Ritter said, ‘You will be his apprentice, his shadow.’

  A shadow: I could just about live with that.

  ‘If you feel I am ready, Herr Ritter.’

  ‘You are there to watch and learn, to listen but on no account to talk. If the Reich Commissar feels so much as the need to comment on your presence in the room, then clearly you were not ready, and your position may need to be reviewed.’

  ‘I understand, sir.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ Herr Ritter smiled like a business traveller whose wife had just walked into his new favourite bar. ‘Seidel will collect you from the canteen after lunch.’

  I returned to the clicking room, but could only hang my head and count the grooves on the bench.

  Hirschel gave my arm a light squeeze. ‘You’ll be fine. We’ve all been there.’

  ‘Who did you get?’

  ‘A nobody, compared to the Reich Commissar.’

  ‘How did it go?’

  He snorted, the tip of his nose and the right corner of his mouth pulling into a mirthless smirk. ‘Why do you think I’m stuck in here?’

  The department took lunch together in the canteen as usual, but for once I was in no mood for small talk. My silence was contagious, enveloping the table like a thick mist. Not even the ubiquitous Schumann or Mozart played today. Lost in my thoughts, I picked at the scabs that Herr Ritter had left.

  First there was his mild rebuke concealed amongst the compliments: a man of my intellect shouldn’t look so surprised. What had he meant by that? Herr Ritter was known to measure his words like pieces of gold: every last one accounted for. A man of my intelligence? I had come close to disclosing my previous life as a professor to Ronen in Luskiskes, but had thought twice. There was nobody else with whom I would have confided. Since the subject of my intelligence (distinctly average, whatever was claimed) had not been raised in even the most innocent context since my arrival, I was forced to conclude that Herr Ritter had somehow found out the truth about my previous occupation from elsewhere, but found out he had. Yes, I had switched careers. One would be hard-pressed to find a European Jew in the 1940s who hadn’t. In the three years since leaving Kiel, I’d become a solid shoe-maker, if not an exceptional one. But I’d never claimed to be anything else. Was this a hanging offence? Was my ‘fraud’ about to be uncovered? With the Reich Commissar drafted in as an unwitting stooge? Highly unlikely.

  Perhaps I’d been selected because I’d worked in Kiel. I spoke fluent German and knew the Schleswig-Holstein area well.

  If so, it still made no sense. Herr Ritter had expressly forbidden me from talking to the man.

  And then there was the matter of the camp’s reputation, ‘spreading far and wide’. Herr Ritter gave the impression that we were struggling to cope with a flood of VIP fittings. Yet this was the first since my arrival.

  I was being manoeuvred by shadowy forces beyond my control. There was nothing to do but submit, and pray that Camp Moda would continue to keep me from harm.

  Although I’d been going through the motions of eating at the long table, no discernible tastes had yet troubled my palate. Upon glancing at my dish, I saw why. The usual tomato soup had been replaced by a thin watery stew. None of my fellow clickers had seen fit to comment on the substitution.

  In fact, nobody was talking at all, in the entire canteen. The silence reminded me of the artful vigil we’d maintained under the flagpole that first evening, awaiting the Chaze’s
arrival.

  I thought back to this morning’s early alarm, the meagre porridge, the closing of bedrooms for so-called essential maintenance… Finally, the day was starting to make a modicum of sense.

  From the moment the Camp had woken, it was putting on another display. All sense of contentment and joy had been banished for the day. This time the intended audience wasn’t a garrison of faceless soldiers on the other side of a fence, but the most powerful Nazi in the country. It seemed utterly inconceivable that an entire SS work camp would conspire to dupe the visiting Reich Commissar, but that’s exactly what was happening. My own tribulations paled into insignificance for a handful of sweet, fleeting seconds, until Joziek Seidel’s hand came to rest on my shoulder.

  ‘It’s time,’ he said, solemn as an executioner.

  As I rose to follow, not one of my co-workers raised their heads to watch us go. Ronen sat determinedly swirling his spoon in his stew, as if motion alone could thicken the broth. But today even daydreams were curtailed: the back to work bell rang before the two of us reached the exit. Lunch was a paltry fifteen minutes. Joziek and I were to await the Commissar’s arrival while our co-workers returned stony-faced to their labours.

  We passed through the cool oak reception lobby out into a barbarous August sun, from which the solitary flagpole offered scant resistance. It was 1.20pm. With any luck our guest would be punctual and we would only be lightly grilled as opposed to charcoaled. To pass the time, I asked Joziek for a breakdown of the fitting procedure.

  The first meeting normally took an hour to measure and assess the feet, and discuss the models, toe shapes, leathers and decoration that the client desired. Since the Commissar already knew what he wanted - a pair of Adelaide brogues - today’s appointment might only take thirty minutes. After this, Joziek would begin making the bespoke ‘last’ that would give Hinrich Lohse’s shoes their unique shape and personality. Hand carved from a block of kiln dried Beechwood, the last incorporates every contour and measurement of the foot so as to make it as comfortable a fit as possible. The finished last then shapes the paper patterns from which my team of clickers will cut the various components. The inner sole is soaked in water, attached to the sole of the last, and left to dry for a long period so that it assumes the correct shape to walk upon. This process takes time to perfect. Providing he was happy, the Commissar would be expected to return in a week, for the first of several trial fittings.