The Librarian of Auschwitz(120)

I flew to Kraków, and from there I took a train to O?wi?cim (Auschwitz). Nothing in that small, peaceful city hints at the horror experienced on its outskirts. Everything is so normal, and you can even get to the camp entrance by bus.

Auschwitz I has a parking lot for buses and a museum-like entrance. It used to be a Polish army barracks, and the pleasant, rectangular brick buildings separated by wide, paved avenues—complete with pecking birds—give no indication, at first sight, of the horror. But there are various pavilions you can go into. One of them has been designed like an aquarium: You walk along a dark corridor lined with huge illuminated fish tanks. They contain worn-out shoes, mountains—thousands—of them. Two tons of human hair form a dark sea. Dirty prostheses resemble broken toys. And there are thousands of pairs of broken glasses, almost all of them with round frames like the ones Morgenstern wore.

The family camp, BIIb, is three kilometers away, at Auschwitz–Birkenau. The phantasmagorical watchtower at the entrance to the Lager still stands, with a tunnel at its base that was used from 1944 onward to allow the railway line to run right into the camp. The original huts were burned after the war. There are a few reconstructed ones you can go inside: They are horse stables, which seem gloomy even when they are clean and well-ventilated. Behind this first line of huts, which are in what would have been the quarantine camp, BIIa, there is an immense expanse of waste ground that originally contained the rest of the camps. To see the spot that BIIb occupied in its day, you have to abandon the route of the guided tour, which doesn’t go beyond the first row of replica huts, and skirt the entire perimeter. You have to be on your own. Walking through Auschwitz–Birkenau in solitude means enduring a very cold wind that carries echoes of the voices of those who remained there forever and became part of the mud present-day visitors walk on. All that’s left of BIIb is the metal door at the entrance to the camp and an intensely solitary space where even bushes barely grow. Only cobblestones, wind, and silence remain. A tranquil or ghostly place—it depends how much the eyes looking at it know.

I returned from that trip with many questions and almost no answers; some sense of what the Holocaust was that no history book could teach me; and, completely by chance, a copy of an important book: Je me suis évadé d’Auschwitz, the French translation of Rudolf Rosenberg’s memoir, I Cannot Forgive, which I found in the bookstore at the Shoah (Holocaust) Museum in Kraków.

There was another book that particularly interested me and which I started to track down as soon as I got home. It was a novel set in the family camp, with the title The Painted Wall, written by someone called Ota Kraus. There was a website where the book could be purchased and sent to you, cash-on-delivery. It wasn’t a very professional website: You couldn’t pay with a credit card, but there was a contact address. I wrote to the address, expressing my interest in the book and asking how payment should be made. And then I received one of those emails that prove to be a crossroads in your life. The reply, very polite, was that I could send the money via Western Union; there was an address in Netanya, Israel, and the message was signed D. Kraus.

With all the tact I could muster, I asked if she was Dita Kraus, the girl who had been in the family camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau. She was. The librarian of Block 31 was alive and was writing an email to me! Life is full of surprises, but sometimes, it can be truly extraordinary.

Dita was not so young anymore—at that stage she was eighty—but she was still the same passionate and tenacious person she had always been, who was now battling to ensure that her husband’s books were not forgotten.

From that moment, we began to correspond. Her incredible kindness helped us to understand each other despite my poor English. Eventually, we agreed to meet in Prague, where she spent a few weeks every year, and she took me to visit the Terezín ghetto. Dita is not one of those old-style, placid grandmothers. She’s a friendly whirlwind, who immediately found accommodation for me close to her apartment and organized everything. When I arrived at the Hotel T?íska’s reception desk, she was already waiting for me on one of the sofas in the lobby. She was exactly as I had imagined her: thin, restless, active, at once serious and cheerful, totally charming.

Dita’s life wasn’t easy during the war years, nor has it been easy since. She and Ota were very close until his death in 2000. They had two sons and a daughter; their daughter died before she turned twenty, after a long illness. But Dita hasn’t allowed herself to be broken by fate’s blows—she didn’t allow it back then; she won’t allow it ever.

It is remarkable how someone who carries so much accumulated pain manages to keep on smiling. “It’s all I have left,” Dita tells me. But she has many other things left—her energy, her dignity as a battler against everything and everyone—and this makes her an upright eighty-year-old woman with fire in her eyes. As we travel around Terezín, she refuses to take a taxi, and I don’t dare contradict her thriftiness, typical of anyone who has lived through bad times. We take the subway, and she stands. There are free seats but she doesn’t sit down. No one can vanquish a woman like that. The entire Third Reich failed to do it.

Indefatigable or tired but never resigned to giving up, Dita asks me to give her a hand because she’s going to take fifty copies of The Painted Wall to the Terezín Memorial store, which has run out. We don’t rent a car; she insists that we go by coach. We make the same trip she made almost sixty years earlier, although now she’s dragging along a suitcase full of books. I’m scared she might find herself affected by this trip back in time, but she’s a strong woman. Right now, her greatest concern is to restock the ghetto library with these books.