The Librarian of Auschwitz(107)
Exchanging Poland for Germany hadn’t made things any better. There, the members of the SS had more news of the war, and nervousness spread. Germany was retreating on all fronts, and the feverish dream of the Third Reich was starting to crack. The guards vented their rage and frustration on the Jews, whom they blamed for the inevitable defeat.
They’d sent their prisoners to a camp where the working day was so long that it seemed as if the days had far more than twenty-four hours. When they got back to their huts, they didn’t even have the strength to complain. They only managed to eat their soup in silence and stretch out on their bunks to try and recover for the next day.
Dita has one image drilled into her head from the months they spent in Hamburg: her mother in front of a brick-packing machine, sweat dripping from under the kerchief on her head. Liesl was sweating, but her expression was as impassive, focused, and serene as if she were preparing a potato salad.
Dita was suffering because of her mother, who was so fragile that not even the slight improvement in rations compared with Auschwitz had led to her putting on any weight at all. It was forbidden to talk while they worked, but whenever Dita passed with a load of some material near the conveyor belt at which her mother was working, she would wordlessly ask how she was doing, and Liesl would nod and smile. She was always fine.
Dita admits that sometimes her mother drives her mad—no matter how she’s feeling, Liesl always says she’s fine. How can Dita know the truth?
But Mrs. Adler is always feeling fine for Dita.
Right now, in this train, Liesl, her head resting against the wall of the carriage, is pretending to be asleep. She knows that Edita wants her to sleep, although in actual fact, for months now, she’s only been able to sleep off and on during the night. But she’s not going to tell that to her daughter, who’s too young to understand how tragic it is for a mother not to be able to give her daughter a happy childhood.
The only thing that Liesl can do for her daughter—who is already stronger, braver, and more perceptive than she ever was—is to worry her as little as possible, and always to say she’s perfectly well, although since the death of her husband, she feels a wound inside her that is continually bleeding.
Work in the brick factory in Hamburg hadn’t lasted long. The nervousness in the Nazis’ top leadership group had produced contradictory orders. A few weeks later, Dita and her mother were transferred to another factory, where they recycled military material. Defective bombs that hadn’t exploded were being repaired in one of the workshops. Nobody particularly seemed to mind working there, and that included Dita and Liesl: You worked under cover, so when it rained, you didn’t get wet.
One afternoon as she was heading back to her hut after she’d finished her working day, Dita spotted Renée Neumann coming out of a workshop, chatting animatedly with some girls. Dita was really pleased to see her. Renée gave her a friendly smile and a brief wave from a distance, but kept on walking without stopping, utterly absorbed in the conversation with her companions. She’s made new friends, thought Dita, people who don’t know she once had a friend in the SS and to whom she doesn’t owe any explanations. She doesn’t want to stop and talk with her past.
And now the Germans have mobilized the prisoners yet again, without telling them where they’re going, turning them once more into livestock that has to be transported.
“They treat us like lambs being taken to the slaughterhouse,” complains a woman with a Sudeten accent.
“If only! They feed sheep being taken to the slaughterhouse.”
The stock car sways with the sound of a sewing machine. It’s like a metallic oven for baking sweat. Dita and her mother are sitting on the floor together with a contingent of women of various nationalities, but many of them German Jews. Of the thousand women who left the family camp at Auschwitz behind eight months ago, only half now remain. They’re exhausted. Dita examines her hands; they are the hands of an old woman.
Although perhaps it’s a different type of exhaustion. They’ve spent years being shoved from one place to another and threatened with death, sleeping poorly and eating badly, without knowing if there’s a purpose to it all, if they really are going to see the end of this war.
The worst thing is that Dita is beginning not to care. Apathy is the worst possible symptom.
No, no, no … I won’t give in.
She pinches her arm until it hurts. Then she pinches herself even harder until she almost draws blood. She needs life to hurt. When something pains you, it’s because that something is important to you.
She remembers Fredy Hirsch. She’s been thinking less about him these past months, because memories end up being filed away. But she still continues to wonder what happened to him that afternoon. The messenger boy with the long legs said he didn’t commit suicide, but he asked the doctor for tranquilizers, so … did he overdo the tranquilizers? She wants to believe he didn’t intend to wipe himself out. But she knows that Hirsch was very methodical, very German. How could he have taken too many pills by mistake?
Dita sighs. Maybe none of this matters anymore: He’s not here any longer, and he’s not coming back. What difference does it make?
There’s a rumor going around the train that they are being sent to a place called Bergen-Belsen. They listen to conversations where they’re speculating about the new camp. Some people have heard that it’s a labor camp, that it’s nothing like Auschwitz or Mauthausen, where the only industry is killing people. So they’re not taking them to a slaughterhouse. The news sounds reassuring, but most of them keep quiet because hope has acquired a razor-thin edge, and each time you put your hand on it, it cuts you.