Free The Emperor of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg Page A

Gnieźnieńska Street. Jakub was ten years old, and Chaim six. They had picks and shovels with them, but sooner or later they always had to resort to their hands. The wide jute sacks they wore tied over their shoulders then fell forward so they were hanging at stomach level, and all they had to do was stuff the prized black gold straight into the sacks.
    Nowadays it was rare for anyone to come across coal from the brickworks’ own firing kilns. But if they were lucky, the mud might yield an old chunk of wood or rag, or something else, all covered in coal dust. If you put a rag like that in the stove, you could make the fire burn for at least a couple of hours longer, a good, evenly burning, settled fire; a rag like that fetched twenty or thirty pfennigs if you sold it down at Jojne Pilcer Square.
    Jakub and Chaim usually worked as a team with two brothers from the tenement next door, Feliks and Dawid Frydman, but that was no guarantee they would be left to work in peace. All it took was for some of the adults who were also on the lookout for coal to come by their patch, and their coal sacks were gone in a flash. That was why the children had collectively employed Adam Rzepin to keep guard.
    Adam Rzepin lived on the floor above the Wajsbergs and was known in the streets around Gnieźnieńska Street as Ugly Adam or Adam Three-Quarters , because his nose looked as if it had got squashed when he was born. He always used to say that his nose was crooked because his mother had got into the habit of twisting it every time he lied. But everyone knew that was a fib. Adam Rzepin lived alone with his father and his mentally retarded sister; nobody had ever seen a Mrs Rzepin.
    All Adam could remember of the first years in the ghetto was the hunger, like a permanently aching wound in his belly. Just being watchman for young gold-diggers was not enough to assuage the pain of the wound in the long run. So on the fairly rare occasions when Moshe Stern came round to the brickworks and asked Adam to run an errand for him, Adam leapt at the chance and left his guard duties to take care of themselves.
    Moshe Stern was one of the many thousand Jews who made a fortune after the ghetto was sealed off from the outside world by dealing in combustible material of all kinds. Most responsible fathers of families tried to build up a stock of coal or briquettes, which they kept locked up in various convenient places. Some of the locks could be picked – and then the desirable black gold was out on the market again. There was also money to be made from trading in minor timber items, such as old wooden furniture, kitchen cupboards and drawers, skirting boards and window frames, banisters and anything else that could be sawn up and bundled as firewood. In the summer months, the price of such bundles sank to about twenty pfennigs a kilo, but it went back up to two or three rumkies as winter approached. In other words, it was a matter of waiting for the demand. In the very worst winters, when even the coalmines were inaccessible, people quite literally made fires of whatever they sat and slept on.
    Time after time, the police pounced on Moshe Stern. His mother tried to hide him in the drying attic above the old people’s home, where he was rumoured to have his secret stores. But the local police came and drove him out.
    Rumour had it that Stern was aiming to become the new Zawadzki.
    Zawadzki was the smuggler king of the ghetto. He was also known as ‘the tightrope walker’ because he was in the habit of escaping over the rooftops. It was the only way of gaining access to the ghetto from the Aryan parts of the town, because the buildings closest to the ghetto boundary had no underground water or waste pipes.
    Perfumes, ladies’ soap; flour, sugar, rye flakes; canned goods, everything from German sauerkraut to pickled ox tongues: these were some of the items that found their way into the ghetto with Zawadzki as their intermediary. Late one evening in 1940,