Andrzej Bart

The Flypaper Factory

About the author

Excerpt

In September 1939 the Germans appointed Chaim Rumkowski President of the Łódź Judenrat. Rumkowski was a Jewish entrepreneur and an excellent administrator, who rapidly changed the poor, overpopulated Łódź ghetto into a perfectly, if inhumanly organised production zone. The President fought for the survival of the majority, so he always chose the “lesser evil”: when the Germans demanded an increase in production, he increased it; when they demanded that the sick be given up for transportation, he gave them up; when they demanded that he hand over children under the age of ten, he handed them over. He reckoned the Jews’ economic usefulness was their only bargaining chip, stronger than the Germans’ anti-Semitism and their plans for the Holocaust plans.
So the Łódź ghetto continued to exist when all the other Jewish districts in Poland had long since been annihilated. About ten thousand Jews were saved from it, more than from any other part of Poland. So Rumkowski achieved a lot, though we should never forget at what cost. He forced everyone to do inhuman labour; he was incapable of bridling his own arrogance or resisting the temptation of wealth, and so by exploiting his position he was disloyal to his own people, who were starving to death.
Andrzej Bart’s novel is a subtly constructed account of Chaim Rumkowski’s trial. All the participants – the judge, the prosecutor, the defence lawyer and the jury – are Jews. By sentence of the court Rumkowski is condemned to “be eternally remembered just as he was” – a puffed-up fool whose vanity made him believe in his own unique qualities and in his mission to save the Jews.
Of course, this trial never actually took place. But Bart has come to the conclusion that everyone who came into contact with Rumkowski, all those who lived in the Łódź ghetto and were sent to Treblinka, have a right to express their view of the President of the Judenrat. As a result, this grotesque trial provides an opportunity to confront memory and to expose the moral ambivalence of the Holocaust era. What counted as betrayal for some of Rumkowski’s co-workers proved to be some people’s salvation.

Przemysław Czapliński

Andrzej Bart (born 1951) writes fiction, screenplays, and documentary films and is regarded as one of Poland’s most interesting post-modernist authors.