Walter Gallardo
Tucumano journalist based in Madrid
The word “villain” has almost always had a literary or cinematographic nuance, sometimes satirical, so it would not serve to paint Chaim Rumkowski, who must be said, in principle, that it was a megalomaniac cretin. Its history is that of a traitor with dangerous veleities of a tyrant, pompous and pedantic, useful as a servant of the mandamase, an abuser in the broadest and most disgusting sense of the term, dedicated night and day to build and maintain a small empire as quirky as sinister.
Before the burst of World War II, Rumkowski was a mediocre Jewish businessman, equipped with a contagious energy and a remarkable ability to persuasion. He had an active social presence and dedicated part of his time to pious works, among them, to administer an orphanage in which suspicions arose that he had violated a considerable number of children after knowing unusual cases of gonorrhea. In October 1939, the Nazi occupant, Sagaz and perverse in psychological reading, appointed him president of the Judenrat, the highest authority of the Lodz Gueto, the second largest in Poland. No one ever knew how he got there, a position that put more than 150,000 people at the mercy of his delusions and arbitrariness. Rumkowski, intoxicated of importance, trusted the improbable reward of working in favor of the cause of the German enemy.
He accumulated so much power that he called Chaim I, as if he were the founder of a dynasty, he ordered the impression of its own currency, metal and tickets, known as “Rumkie”, and stamps with its effigy. He used to walk in a float surrounded by the Gueto Police, hit the who contradicted him, sexually assault young and girls and deport, and therefore condemn a safe death, the rebels.
In fact, the first test of fidelity that the occupation forces asked him was the delivery of those under 10 years old and those over 65. In his speech to explain the apparent inevitability of this offering, he said: “I never imagined being forced to deliver this sacrifice to the altar with my own hands (…) brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers, give me their children!” As a consequence, around 20,000 people went to gas cameras. This infamy, one of the most aberrant episodes in the conflict, did not take a minute of sleep to Rumkowski. On the contrary, it would be feared feeding their despotive ninfules and the number of henchmen and betrayers.
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His reign lasted a little less than war. And it lasted just because Lodz was then a highly productive industrial center that contributed to German war machinery. In the summer of 1944, with the release of Europe underway and the Nazi regime in decline, the ghetto began to be dismantled and its inhabitants sent to extermination fields. From an approximate total of 200,000 people who had passed by, just 10,000 would survive. Rumkowski, still believing an ally of the SS, tried to get a safe -conduct, but was forced to climb with his family in one of the trains that would take him to Auschwitz along with thousands of other thousands of Jews overcrowded in merchandise cars. Even so, until the last moment, with unusual candidness he tried to obtain at least some privilege: he asked for a letter of recommendation to the German businessman Hans Biebow, a partner in his businesses, to grant him a comfortable and safe stay in the Lager. Letter in hand, when they arrived at destination, he was given the same treatment as the rest. Therefore, his relatives went to the gas cameras and he, the king of Lodz, would be beaten until death by other countrymen who took the opportunity to charge old debts.
The memory of this vile character immediately brings the image, with all its similar and great nuances, of which the high spheres are depleted by falling as a compliance and offering generous treason services. How many Rumkowskis have been seen throughout the years in almost all areas that distil some authority, in offices of large companies, mixed between executives, in meetings of presidents and ministers, acting as “the right hand” of many of them, in governments and parliaments such as correveidiles or intermediaries, and in entities and clubs in apparent attitude of “selfless” collaborators?
You only need a quick look around to identify them. In power spaces, Rumkowskis are located in an intermediate, flexible, elastic, functional and servile zone to the cusp, anthropophagic in their despair for highlighting or condescending, easily corruptible, and with a cruel disposition to execute orders or sacrifices such as loyalty test to their masters. It is a diffuse area, vague and changing borders, populated, without contradictions, by people with different intelligence coefficients, although with a common weakness: pathological hunger due to a quota of command or perhaps only for its own desk at the end of a dark and cold corridor.
Their names are little or nothing known, but they pass decisions, if we talk about politics, transcendental for the daily life of a society. How many unfair laws are today in force for their maneuvers in the back room, how many talents are frustrated by their parallete zancadillas, how many tenders were dear for the benefit of a group of allies and against “non -friends” companies, how many permits for unhealthy products that we consumed were approved thanks to their fraudulent efforts or how many elections of political positions passed through their hands?
Ethical limit
Their bosses usually assign missions in which they are not required to respect an ethical limit, if perhaps a minimum, that is, a low range of compassion to achieve the objective. In his task there are no moral repairs, nor could there be: Dignity is the first thing that is discarded to be part of that rare paradise. Not doing so would mean something as ridiculous as declaring himself honest while a corpse is thrown into the river.
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Someone may think that it is a personal choice with limited effects to a private sphere. But it is not so, and perhaps here the confusion lies. Who renounces decency with the purpose of maintaining or increasing their power of power will recruit others that are resembled, people stripped of scruples. This will multiply, as in a game of mirrors, sick behaviors in a society.
The Primo Levi writer, in “The Sunk and the Saved”, speaks of “The Gray Zone”, that region in which the human being is morally unpredictable, especially when he is cornered and endangered; The same one that can, without denying its nature, to be a hero or someone despicable, even a little of each according to the circumstances, and not for that reason of a definitive judgment. Levi places Rumkowski in that “gray zone” and the height of the prisoners that in the extermination fields accepted the task of receiving the new prisoners, taking them to the gas chambers and then, concluded the first part of the work, dealing with the bodies, removing the gold teeth and introducing them into the furnaces.
And finally, get rid of ashes. All this for one more day of life (if that could be called that) and change of extra liter of soup, and perhaps some alcohol to cushion consciousness, with the certainty that they would be eliminated to avoid their testimony and replaced by another squad that would be in turn responsible for eliminating them, as they had eliminated the previous one.
Rumkowskis today are no different from the original in their appetite, delivery and talent for servitude. They belong to the same gender, so that they are unpredictable and reckless beasts wandering in the imprecise “gray zone”, in a morally moving or amoral terrain, living with honest citizens, respectful of their duties, which ignore which part of their lives depends on those, on their intrigues and machinations, on their fever offerings to those who send.