The Librarian of Auschwitz(105)
A cordon of SS soldiers controls access to Block 31. The groups who won’t go through selection that day stroll tensely around the camp. The teachers try to keep the children occupied until the last minute. Some groups sit behind the huts and try to organize guessing games or whatever else they can come up with. Even snooty Markéta is playing Drop the Handkerchief with some of her girls. Each time she picks up the handkerchief, she furtively lifts it to her face to wipe away her tears. Her eleven-year-old girls, who are running around full of life, arguing and fighting over who managed to touch the hanky first … will the Germans consider any of them old enough to be part of the workforce, or will they kill them all?
Finally, Dita is lined up with the women from her hut in front of Block 31. They make them undress and put their clothes on top of huge piles, which are starting to form a mountain range of rags on the surface of the mud.
She feels more concern for the nude body of her mother on public display than for her own. She turns away so she won’t see Liesl’s wrinkled breasts, her exposed sex, the bones sticking out from under her skin. Some women have their arms crossed in an attempt to hide their intimate parts as best they can, but most don’t care anymore. There are small groups of SS soldiers on either side of the lines. They are at ease and off duty, and they spend the morning eyeing the naked women maliciously and making loud comments about the ones they fancy. The bodies are squalid, their ribs are more curved than their hips, and there are girls who have barely a wisp of pubic hair between their legs, but the soldiers are desperate for some distraction, and they are so used to seeing the skeletal thinness of the inmates that they cheer on the women as if they were luscious beauties.
Dita tries to peer over the wall of soldiers to see what’s happening inside the hut by getting up on her tiptoes. Despite the fact that both her own life and her mother’s are at risk, she can’t stop thinking sadly about her library. The books are still in the hidey-hole, stored underground and sleeping deeply until someone finds them by chance and opens them, thereby restoring them to life, just like the Prague legend of the Golem, who lies inert in a secret place waiting for someone to resuscitate him. She now regrets not having left a message with the books in case some other prisoner trapped inside Auschwitz finds them. She would like to have said, Take care of them, and they’ll take care of you.
They have to wait naked for several more hours. Their legs hurt, and they become weak. One woman sits down because she can’t take any more, and she refuses to stand up despite the shouts and threats of a young Kapo. Two guards haul her off to the hut as if they were carrying a sack of potatoes. The rest of the women suspect that they’ll have thrown her directly onto the reject pile.
Dita’s turn finally comes, and enveloped by murmurs and prayers, she and her mother walk through the entrance of Block 31. The woman just in front of them is sobbing.
“Don’t cry, Edita,” whispers her mother. “Now’s the time to show that you’re strong.”
Dita nods. Inside the hut, despite the tension in the air, the armed SS soldiers, and the table in front of the chimney where Mengele pronounces his sentence, she somehow feels protected. The Germans haven’t removed the children’s pictures from the walls. There are various versions of Snow White and her dwarves, princesses, jungle animals, and ships drawn in many colors from the early days when there were still some drawing classes. She realizes how much she misses being able to draw in Auschwitz as she used to in Terezín, to turn the chaos of her emotions into a picture.
However, though the drawings and stools are still there, Block 31 no longer exists. It is no longer a school. It is no longer a refuge. Now, just inside the door, they come up against an office table with Dr. Mengele seated behind it, together with a registrar and two guards with submachine guns. Two groups of those already selected are forming at the back of the hut. The one on the left will stay in Auschwitz, and the one on the right will be sent to work at another camp. The young women and the middle-aged women who look healthy—in other words, those who can still work—are in the group on the right. The other, much bigger group consists of small children, old women, and women who look sick.
When they say that the group on the left is going to stay in Auschwitz, they are telling the truth: Their ashes will settle on top of the forest slime and mix forever with the mud of Birkenau.
The impassive Nazi doctor waves his white-gloved hand to the left and to the right, and channels people to one side of life or the other. He does it with remarkable ease. And without hesitation.
The line in front of Dita is dwindling. The woman who was crying has been sent to the left with those whom the Reich deems weak and expendable.
Dita takes a deep breath: It’s her turn.
She takes a few steps and stops in front of the medical captain’s table. Dr. Mengele looks at her. Dita wonders if he really will recognize her as a member of Block 31, but it’s impossible to know what he’s thinking. What she sees in the doctor’s eyes, however, sends shivers up her spine: nothing. No emotion whatsoever. The look is frighteningly empty and terrifyingly neutral.
He recites the questions he’s spent hours routinely asking each inmate:
“Name, number, age, and profession.”
Dita knows that the instructions given to everyone are to name any profession that might be useful to the Germans—carpenter, farmer, mechanic, cook—and the instructions given to minors is to bump up their age and say they are older so that they’re more likely to make the cut. Dita knows all that, and she has to be careful, but her character demands something different.