Book description
In February 1940, the Nazis established what would become the
second largest Jewish ghetto in the Polish city of Lódz. Its chosen
leader: Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, a sixty-three-year-old Jewish
businessman and orphanage director, and the elusive, authoritarian
power sustaining the ghetto's very existence. From one of
Scandinavia's most critically acclaimed and bestselling authors, The
Emperor of Lies chronicles the tale of Rumkowski's monarchical rule
over a quarter of a million Jews. Driven by a titanic ambition, he
sought to transform the ghetto into a productive industrial complex
and strove to make it - and himself - indispensable to the Nazi
regime. Drawing on the chronicles of life in the Lódz ghetto, Steve
Sem-Sandberg captures the full panorama of human resilience, and
questions the nature of evil. He asks the most difficult questions:
Was Rumkowski a ruthless opportunist, an accessory to the Nazi regime
driven by a lust for power? Or was he a pragmatic strategist who
managed to save Jewish lives through his collaboration policies?
Steve Sem-Sandberg was born in 1958. He divides his time between
Vienna and Stockholm.
