The Librarian of Auschwitz(118)

Now, though, she sees something special in the young teacher’s eyes, a special warmth. He doesn’t just remember that she was a companion in the camp at a critical moment in their lives, but he discovers a thread that unites them. They hardly spoke in Block 31. In fact, nobody ever introduced them; they are two people who seemingly have never met. But when they bump into each other in Prague, it’s as if they are two old friends meeting again.

Ota looks at her and smiles. His lively, somewhat roguish eyes are telling the girl, I’m happy you are alive; I’m happy to have found you again. Dita smiles at him, too, without really knowing why.

She is immediately infected by his good humor.

“I’ve found work doing the accounts in a factory, and I’ve found modest accommodation.… Though if you think about where we’ve come from, you’d have to say it’s a palace!”

Dita smiles.

“But I hope to find something even better. They’ve offered me a job as an English translator.”

The line is long, but it seems short to Dita. They talk without pause, without any embarrassing silences, and with the confidence shared by old comrades. Ota talks about his father, the serious businessman who always wanted to be a singer.

“He had an extraordinary voice,” Ota explains with a proud smile. “They took away his factory in 1941; they even put him in jail. Then they sent us all to Terezín. And from there to the family camp. In the selection of July 1944, when they broke up camp BIIb, he didn’t make the cut.”

Ota, so resolute and talkative, notices that he’s choking on his words, but it doesn’t embarrass him if Dita sees that his eyes are moist.

“Sometimes, at night, I think I can hear him singing.”

And when one of them looks away to remember a difficult or painful moment from those years, the other one also turns their eyes toward that same point to which we only allow people we trust completely to accompany us, those who have seen us both laugh and cry. Together, they visit those moments that have marked them forever. They’re so young that telling each other about those years amounts to telling each other about their whole lives.

“What will have happened to Mengele? Have they hanged him?” Dita wonders.

“Not yet, but they’re looking for him.”

“Will they find him?”

“Of course they will. Half a dozen armies are looking for him. They’ll catch him and put him on trial.”

“I hope they hang him straightaway. He’s a criminal.”

“No, Dita. They have to give him a trial.”

“Why waste time on procedures?”

“We are better than them.”

“Fredy Hirsch used to say that, too!”

“Hirsch…”

“How I miss him.”

It’s her turn at the window—time to resolve all her issues. That’s it. They are still two strangers. It’s the moment to wish each other luck and say good-bye. But Ota asks her where she’s going next. She tells him she’s off to the Jewish Community Office and asks if what they’ve told her is true: that she can request a small orphan pension.

Ota asks her if she’d mind if he accompanied her there.

“It’s on my way,” he says, so seriously that she doesn’t know whether to believe him or not.

It’s an excuse to stay with her, but it isn’t a lie. Dita’s way is already part of his path.

A few days later, in Teplice, some kilometers from Prague, Margit Barnai is sweeping the entrance to her building. As she sweeps, she daydreams about a young man who does deliveries on his bicycle and rings his bell merrily each time he cycles past her. She thinks that perhaps it’s time to start paying more attention to her hair in the mornings and putting a new ribbon in it. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye she glimpses the shadow of someone coming through the entrance.

“You’re very fat, girl!” the person shouts.

Her first impulse is to give a rude response to her rude neighbor. But then the broom almost falls out of her hand.

It’s Dita’s voice.

Margit is the older of the two girls, but she’s always felt like the younger sister. She throws herself into Dita’s arms in the way little children do—not worrying about the speed, not holding back.

“We’re going to fall!” says Dita, laughing.

“And what does that matter, as long as we’re together!”

It was true. Finally, something good was true. They were waiting for her.





EPILOGUE

Ota became a special friend who used to come on the train to see her on afternoons she had off from the occasional work she found. She combined the work with classes she attended in the school in Teplice, where she and Margit were making up for some of the time they had lost in schooling. If that were possible.

Teplice is an old spa city renowned for its waters. Dita had finally found her Berghof. There were no Alps as in The Magic Mountain, but the high country of Bohemia was close by. She liked to stroll along the streets with their geometric stone pavements, despite the fact that the war had severely punished this beautiful city with its stately buildings. She occasionally wondered what had become of the enigmatic Mme. Chauchat, who left the spa resort in search of new horizons. She would like to have asked her advice about what to do with her life.