Book Review: The Emperor Of Lies

Children in a Lodz ghetto. Photo / Mendel Grossman

The Emperor Of Lies by Steve Sem-Sandberg
Faber & Faber $39

Reading this very long book is deep immersion in the horrors of the Holocaust, and after a prolonged session readers may have to lift themselves from a state of depression about the human condition. Yet it is a brilliantly executed novel, written in Swedish and translated into English by Sarah Death, a name eerily appropriate to the theme.

The fact that, three generations on, the horror of the Holocaust continues to arouse this sort of searing account screams loudly about how huge and vile was the genocidal crime of the Germans during World War II. One day the events of that time will move into the more contemplative, detached domain of historians - but not yet.

This is a fictional account of the fate of about 200,000 Jews who lived in the Lodz ghetto in Poland, when the German invaders arrived in 1939. Few had survived more than four years later, even though it was the last ghetto in Poland to be emptied by the deportation of its inhabitants to death camps.

The novel swirls around a real-life figure, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, the self-appointed leader who was apparently driven by the belief that, if he could make the inhabitants of the ghetto so productive they would become essential to the German war effort, he could save them from deportation. Lodz was Poland's second-biggest city and the ghetto factories were soon producing furniture and, especially, clothing for the Germans, who encouraged the enterprise.

Through bitter winters, Rumkowski kept driving his half-starved, half-frozen workforce to produce more and more for their conquerors, while still acceding to German demands for the deportation of the very young and very old and anyone else considered unfit for the long hours of arduous labour.

Under Rumkowski's control, the Jewish population had their own police force with members often as brutal as the Germans, but his control loosened as the Russians began winning the eastern front war and the tempo of deportations to the death camps increased.

Rumkowski has become a figure of Holocaust folklore, the subject of an earlier novel, The King Of The Jews, back in 1979. Over the years, a number of attempts have been made to assess his true intent, measure his successes and failings.

There is little equivocation in the picture Sem-Sandberg paints: a seriously insecure, self-serving man who affects a protective love for children but is a paedophile preying on his adopted son.

The novel itself - for all its sad depiction of human frailty - is a gripping read. You have to pay attention to take in the gallery of characters as time and place shift surrealistically.

Many of the inhabitants fight desperately to save themselves and those they love. The man who lasts longest is the hero, and not in the literary sense, Adam Rzepin. His disturbed but beloved sister dies early, but Adam nearly makes it.

Gordon McLauchlan is an Auckland writer.