The Librarian of Auschwitz(119)
The beautiful synagogue had burned down, and its scorched ruins were a reminder of those burned-out years. On Saturdays, Ota accompanied her on her walks. He talked to her about a thousand things. He was a young man with a voracious curiosity; everything interested him. He sometimes complained a little of having to take various combinations of trains and buses to travel the eighty kilometers between Prague and Teplice. But his complaints were more like the satisfied purr of a cat.
There were months of pleasant strolls through those squares, which little by little, regained their flowerpots and began to give Teplice back its charming air of a town of hot springs. During those walks, Ota and Dita gradually became entwined. A year after their meeting in the line at the documents office, Ota said something to Dita that changed everything:
“Why don’t you come to Prague? I can’t love you from a distance!”
They had already told each other their entire lives. It was the moment to start from scratch, to begin again.
Ota and Dita were married in Prague.
After a great amount of paperwork, Ota managed to take back his father’s business and get it going again. It was an exciting project, because in a way, Ota was able to recover the past. He couldn’t bring back those who were absent or erase the scars, but at least it was a way of returning to the Prague of 1939, even though Ota wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a businessman. He, like his father, preferred opera scores to balance sheets, and the language of poets to the language of lawyers.
But he didn’t have the time to be disillusioned. The footprints of the Nazi boots on the streets of Prague had not yet disappeared when the boots of the Soviets made their mark. With that delightful obstinacy history has of repeating itself, the factory was again confiscated. This time, it wasn’t in the name of the Third Reich but of the Communist Party.
Ota didn’t give in; neither did Dita. They were born to swim against the tide. Thanks to his mastery of English and knowledge of literature, Ota found work in the Ministry of Culture, choosing which new English-language publications were interesting enough to be translated into Czech. He was the only employee at his level who was not a Communist Party member. Many in that period spouted Leninist slogans, but no one was going to teach him anything. He knew more about Marxism than any of them; he had read more than any of them. He knew better than anyone that Communism was a beautiful path that ended at a precipice.
They accused him of being an enemy of the Party, and things started to get difficult. In 1949, the year their first child was born, Ota and Dita decided to emigrate to Israel, where they ran into another old inmate from Block 31, Avi Fischer, now called Avi Ofir, the man who had converted a modest barrack full of child prisoners into a cheerful glee club. He helped them find work at the Hadassim School near Netanya. There, Ota and Dita worked as English teachers at one of the most renowned schools in Israel. The school accepted many children who came in the wave of immigrants after the end of World War II. Later, the school took care of children from families with problems and students at risk of social exclusion. They always employed teachers who were particularly involved in those sorts of issues, but it was hard to find people more sensitive to the suffering of others than Ota and Dita.
The couple had three children and four grandchildren. Ota, the great storyteller from Block 31, wrote various books. One of them, The Painted Wall, fictionalized the lives of a series of people in the family camp, BIIb. Dita and Ota experienced life’s ups and downs together for fifty-five years. They never stopped loving and supporting each other. They shared books, an indestructible sense of humor, life in general.
They grew old together. Only death could break the iron bond forged in the most terrible times anyone could experience.
POSTSCRIPT
There are still some important things to tell about the librarian of Block 31, and about Fredy Hirsch.
The bricks used to construct this story are facts, and they are held together in these pages with a mortar of fiction. The real name of the librarian of Block 31, whose life has inspired these pages, was Dita Poláchová. Ota Keller, the young teacher in the novel, is based on the person who would become Dita’s husband, the teacher Ota Kraus.
A brief mention of the existence of a minuscule library in a concentration camp made by Alberto Manguel in his book The Library at Night was the point of departure for my journalistic investigation, which gave rise to this book.
There are those who don’t share my fascination for discovering why certain people risked their lives to run a secret school and clandestine library in Auschwitz–Birkenau. There are those who might think that this was an act of useless bravery in an extermination camp when there were other, more pressing concerns—books don’t cure illnesses; they can’t be used as weapons to defeat an army of executioners; they don’t fill your stomach or quench your thirst. It’s true: Culture isn’t necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water. It’s also true that with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: Nothing significant distinguishes them from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.
There’s a great deal of information about Auschwitz on the internet, but it only talks about the place. If you want a place to speak to you, you have to go there and stay long enough to hear what it has tell you. In order to find some trace of the family camp or some track to follow, I traveled to Auschwitz. I needed not only quantitative data and dates, but to feel the vibration of that accursed place.