The Librarian of Auschwitz(114)
When she closes her eyes, the horror that is Bergen-Belsen disappears and she shifts to the Berghof sanatorium of The Magic Mountain. She even thinks she feels a burst of that cold, clear air from the Alps.
Dita’s feebleness extends to her mind. Moments, places, and people she has known in real life get mixed up with others she has met in books, and Dita is unable to distinguish the real from the imagined.
She doesn’t know if the arrogant Dr. Behrens from the Berghof—who looked after Hans Castorp—is more real than Dr. Mengele; at one point she can see them strolling together through the gardens of the sanatorium. Suddenly, she walks into a dining room and finds the gentlemanly Dr. Manson from The Citadel sitting at a table set with a magnificent banquet, together with the handsome Edmond Dantès in his unbuttoned sailor shirt and the elegant and seductive Mme. Chauchat. She looks more carefully and sees that the person at the head of the table is Dr. Pasteur, who instead of carving the juicy turkey fresh from the oven so they can eat it, is dissecting it with a scalpel. Mrs. K?i?ková walks past, the woman she always called Mrs. Nasty, and she’s scolding a waiter who tries to give her the slip; the waiter’s face is that of Mr. Lichtenstern. A fatter waiter approaches carrying a tray with a delicious meat pie, but with unheard of clumsiness, he trips, and the pie sails speedily through the air onto the table, splattering grease over the dinner guests, who look at him with disapproval. The waiter apologizes, full of remorse for his blunder, and lowers his head in a submissive bow several times as he hurries to pick up the remains of the destroyed pie. That’s when Dita recognizes him: It’s that rascal ?vejk doing his thing! She’s sure he’ll mount a feast for the kitchen hands with those destroyed pieces of pie.
Her sanity is already as slippery as butter. It’s better that way. She knows she’s disconnecting from reality. And she doesn’t mind. She feels happy, just as she did when she was little. When she closed her bedroom door, the world remained outside and nothing could harm her. She feels dizzy, and the world clouds over and begins to fall apart. She sees the mouth of the tunnel.
She hears outlandish voices inside her head from another world. She feels she has already crossed the border and is on the other side, in a place where there are strong male voices speaking an incomprehensible language, an enigmatic gibberish that only the chosen ones know how to decipher. She’d never asked herself what language was spoken in heaven. Or in purgatory. Or in hell. It’s a language she doesn’t understand.
She also hears hysterical shouts. But those high-pitched shrieks … they are too laden with emotion. It can’t be the afterlife. They are from this world. She’s not dead yet. She opens her eyes and sees prisoners shouting like madwomen. There’s lots of noise, whistles are blowing, and she can hear the sound of footsteps. She’s so stunned that she doesn’t understand a thing.
“They’ve all gone mad,” she whispers. “The camp is a lunatic asylum.”
Margit opens her eyes and gives her a frightened look, as if they could still be afraid of anything. She touches her mother’s arm, and Liesl opens her eyes as well.
And then they see it—soldiers are entering the camp. They’re armed, but they’re not Germans. They are wearing light brown uniforms, totally different from the black uniforms they’ve seen till now. The soldiers first point their weapons in all directions but then they immediately lower them, some put them over their shoulders, and then they put their hands to their heads: “Oh my God!”
“Who are they, Mama?”
“They’re English, Edita.”
Dita’s and Margit’s mouths are as wide open as their eyes.
“English?”
A young NCO climbs onto an empty wooden box and shapes his hands into a megaphone. He speaks in rudimentary German:
“This camp has been liberated in the name of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and her allies. You are free!”
Dita elbows Margit. Her friend is paralyzed; she can’t speak. Although she has no strength left in her, Dita manages to get up on her feet and rests one hand on Margit’s shoulder and the other on her mother’s. And finally, Dita utters the sentence she’s spent her entire childhood waiting to be able to say.
“The war is over.”
The librarian of Block 31 begins to cry. She cries for all those people who couldn’t survive to see this: her grandfather, her father, Fredy Hirsch, Miriam Edelstein, Professor Morgenstern.…
A soldier walks toward the survivors in her area, and he’s shouting at them in strangely accented German, saying that the camp has been liberated and they are free.
“Free! Free!”
A woman drags herself along the ground until she can embrace the soldier’s foot. He bends down smiling, ready to receive the thanks of the liberated. But the gaunt woman says to him with bitter reproach,
“Why have you taken so long?”
The British troops were expecting to be received by a euphoric populace. They were expecting smiles and cheers. They weren’t expecting to be met with complaints, sighs, and death rattles, people crying with a mixture of joy for having been saved and deep sorrow for husbands, brothers, uncles, friends, neighbors—so many people who haven’t been liberated.
There are some soldiers whose faces show compassion; others, incredulity; and many, disgust. They never thought an internment camp for Jews could be this quagmire of bodies. The living are even more skeletal than the dead. The English thought they were going to liberate a camp full of prisoners, but what they’ve found is a cemetery.