Mendelssohn is on the Roof by Jirí Weil

Author:Jirí Weil [Jirí Weil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907970177
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2013-11-23T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

THE LARGE ROOM looked like a junk shop. It was full of every possible kind of thing – furniture, chandeliers, refrigerators, radios, gramophones, clothing, vacuum cleaners, paintings, framed photographs, pots and pans, serving dishes, toys, binoculars, typewriters, irons, tennis rackets, oars, kayaks, footballs, a garden ornament in the shape of a dwarf. There was none of the orderliness here he had grown used to at the Collection Agency, where everything was sorted according to type and every type of object had its own special stockroom: an eiderdown stockroom and a refrigerator stockroom. There, every object had a tag with a number. Here, everything was just thrown together. Of course, there was a simple explanation for the sloppy state of affairs in this warehouse.

The theft of Jewish property was a part of the larger mission aimed at the extermination of all Jews. The Reich declared this property to be its own, and organisers from the Jewish Community had created a safe and reliable net to catch such property in the warehouses of the Collection Agency.

This warehouse also depended on theft. But the objects came by a different route – they came as a result of the red decrees. It was not possible to predict the number of those who would be executed and to plan for the disposal of their property. There were periods when the number of red decrees went down, others when it rose. Right now, in the wake of the assassination of the Acting Reich Protector, the number of names on the red decrees was rising so precipitously that everybody in the warehouse was going crazy with the flood of things. The small objects – gold, jewellery, fountain pens, watches – went their own way and never reached the warehouse. But the room was constantly filling up with heavy objects – furniture, chandeliers, kitchen sinks.

Now the dealers were coming virtually every day. These were the vultures who used to buy goods from pawnshops. The lady manager of the warehouse sold them everything for a song, just to get rid of them. Requests for clothes and furniture for bombed-out families kept arriving at the warehouse from various Reich relief societies. The lady manager threw these into the wastebasket, saying, ‘The Gestapo gives nothing for free. The Gestapo only sells.’

The lady manager, a Baltic German, spoke German with a Russian accent. She called herself a baroness, though people said she once ran a brothel in Riga. Gestapo members used her office as if it were their bar, but they brought their own drink. They also brought along various provisions from the confiscated goods – rare delicacies, Hungarian salami and real coffee. They’d arrive there half-drunk, stamping around as if they were trying to shake off something. Sometimes, when they were very tight, they’d try to shoot off their guns and break dishes. But the baroness knew how to keep things in hand.

‘You’re not going to make a pigsty here. Go somewhere else for that. I’ve seen plenty of your type in my life, and I’ve always known how to handle them.

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