The Tattooist of Auschwitz(48)

She forces a brave smile. ‘I don’t have a choice, Lale. I go where my people go. Goodbye, my friend, it’s been …’ An officer pushes her along before she can finish.

Lale stands paralysed, watching until the last person has been loaded onto the trucks. The trucks drive off and slowly he walks back into the eerily silent block. He goes back to bed. Sleep will not come.

?

In the morning Lale, distraught, joins Leon and they work furiously as new transports arrive.

Mengele is scanning the silent rows, making his way slowly towards the tattooists’ station. Leon’s hands tremble at his approach. Lale tries to give him a reassuring look. But the bastard who has mutilated him is only a few feet away. Mengele stops and watches them work. Occasionally he peers closely at a tattoo, increasing Lale and Leon’s agitation. His deathly smirk never leaves his face. He attempts eye contact with Lale, who never raises his eyes above the level of the arm he is working on.

‘T?towierer, T?towierer,’ Mengele says, leaning over the table, ‘maybe today I will take you.’ He tilts his head, curiously, seeming to enjoy Lale’s discomfort. Then, having had his fun, he ambles away.

Something light lands on Lale’s head and he looks up. Ash is belching from the nearby crematorium. He starts to tremble and drops his tattoo stick. Leon tries to steady him.

‘Lale, what is it? What’s wrong?’

Lale’s scream is choked by a sob. ‘You bastards, you fucking bastards!’

Leon grips Lale’s arm, trying to get him to control himself as Mengele looks their way and starts to walk back over. Lale is seeing red. He is out of control. Nadya. He tries desperately to rein himself in as Mengele arrives. He feels as though he might vomit.

Mengele’s breath is in his face. ‘Is everything all right here?’

‘Yes, Herr Doktor, everything is fine,’ Leon answers shakily.

Leon bends down and picks up Lale’s stick.

‘Just a broken stick. We’ll fix it and be right back to work,’ Leon continues.

‘You don’t look well, T?towierer. Would you like me to take a look at you?’ Mengele asks.

‘I’m fine, just a broken stick,’ Lale coughs. He keeps his head down, turns away and tries to get back to work.

‘T?towierer!’ Mengele barks.

Lale turns back towards Mengele, jaw clenched, head still low. Mengele has unholstered his pistol. He holds it limply at his side.

‘I could have you shot for turning away from me.’ He raises the weapon, pointing it at Lale’s forehead. ‘Look at me. I could shoot you right now. What do you say to that?’

Lale raises his head but moves his gaze to the doctor’s forehead, refusing to look into his eyes. ‘Yes, Herr Doktor. I’m sorry, it won’t happen again, Herr Doktor,’ he mutters.

‘Get back to work. You’re holding things up,’ Mengele barks, and again walks off. Lale looks at Leon and points to the ash now falling all around them.

‘They emptied the Gypsy camp last night.’

Leon hands Lale his tattoo stick, before going back to work himself, in silence. Lale looks up, searching for the sun to shine down on him. But it is concealed by ash and smoke.

That evening he returns to his block, which is now occupied by people that he and Leon marked earlier. He shuts himself away in his room. He doesn’t want to make friends. Not tonight. Not ever. He wants only silence in his block.





Chapter 23


For weeks, Lale and Gita’s time together is spent mostly in silence as she tries in vain to console him. He has told her what happened, and while she understands his distress, she doesn’t share it to the same degree. It isn’t her fault she never got to know Lale’s ‘other family’. She had delighted in hearing his stories of the children and their attempts to play, with no toys, kicking balls made out of snow or debris, seeing who could jump the highest to touch the timber slats on their building, mostly just playing chase. She tries to get him to talk about his biological family, but Lale has become stubborn and is refusing to say anything more until she shares information about her own life. Gita doesn’t know how to break the spell of Lale’s grief. They have both withstood, for more than two and a half years, the worst of humanity. But this is the first time she’s seen Lale sink to this depth of depression. ‘What about the thousands of our people?’ she yells at him one day. ‘What about what you have seen at Auschwitz, with Mengele? Do you know how many people have been through these two camps? Do you?’ Lale does not reply. ‘I see the cards with the names and ages – babies, grandparents – I see their names and their numbers. I can’t even count that high.’

Lale doesn’t need Gita to remind him of the number of people who have passed through the camps. He has marked their skin himself. He looks at her; she is studying the ground. He realises that while to him they were just numbers, to Gita they were names. Her job means that she knows more about these people than he does. She knows their names and ages, and he realises that this knowledge will forever haunt her.

‘I’m sorry, you’re right,’ he says. ‘Any death is one too many. I’ll try not to be so gloomy.’

‘I want you to be yourself with me, but it’s been going on for too long, Lale, and one day is a long time for us.’