The Librarian of Auschwitz(13)

If she does, they’ll think she’s scared. She’ll present her reasons, all of them understandable. Anyone in her position with any sense at all would do the same. But she’s already well aware that news in Auschwitz jumps from one bunk to the next faster than any flea. If someone in the first bunk says that a man has drunk a glass of wine, by the time the news reaches the last bunk, he’s drunk an entire barrel. And they don’t do it out of spite. All the women are respectable. It even happens with Mrs. Turnovská, who treats her mother so well and is a good woman. Even she can’t control her tongue.

Dita can hear her already: Of course, the little girl got scared.… And they’ll say it with that condescending tone that makes her blood boil, pretending to be understanding. And what makes it even worse is that there’s always some kind soul who’ll say, Poor little thing! It’s easy to understand. She got frightened. She’s just a child.

A child? Dita thinks. Far from it. You have to have a childhood to be a child!





4.

Childhood …

It was during one of her many sleepless nights that Dita came up with the idea of turning her memories into photos and her head into the only album that nobody would ever be able to take away from her.

After the Nazis arrived in Prague, the family had to leave their apartment. Dita had really liked that place. It was in the city’s most modern building, with a laundry in the basement and an intercom system that was the envy of all her classmates. She remembers coming home from school and seeing her father standing in the living room, dressed as elegantly as he always was, in his gray double-breasted suit, but looking much more serious than he normally did. He told her they were going to swap their marvelous apartment for one across the river in Smíchov. Without looking at her, he told her it was sunnier. He didn’t even joke about it, as he usually did when he wanted to make something seem insignificant. Her mother was leafing through a magazine and didn’t say a word.

“I have no intention of leaving!” Dita bellowed.

Her father, dismayed, lowered his head. Her mother got up from the armchair and slapped her so hard that her fingers left marks on Dita’s cheek.

“But, Mama,” Dita said, more puzzled than hurt—her mother wasn’t in the habit of even raising her voice, never mind her hand—“you were the one who said that this apartment was a dream come true.…”

And Liesl hugged her.

“It’s the war, Edita. It’s the war.”

*

A year later, her father was again standing in the middle of the living room, in the same double-breasted suit. By that stage he already had less work in the social security office where he was employed as a lawyer. He used to spend many afternoons at home staring at maps and spinning his world globe. He told her they were moving to the Josefov district. The Nazi Reichsprotektor, who governed the whole country, had ordered that all Jews must live there. The three of them and her grandparents had to move into a tiny dilapidated apartment on Eli?ky Krásnohorské Street. She didn’t ask questions anymore, nor did she object.

It was the war, Edita. It was the war.

And eventually, the day came when the summons from the Jewish Council of Prague arrived, ordering them to move yet again, this time, out of Prague. They were to move to Terezín, a small town that had once been a military fortification and had been converted into a Jewish ghetto—a ghetto that seemed awful when she first arrived, and for which she now yearns. The ghetto from which they slid into the mud and ashes of Auschwitz.

After that winter of 1939, when everything began, the world around Dita began to collapse, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. Ration cards, bans—no entry into cafés, no shopping at the times when other citizens were doing theirs, no radios, no access to movies or theaters, no buying of new shoes.… The expulsion of Jewish children from schools followed. They weren’t even permitted to play in the parks. It was as if the Nazis wanted to ban childhood.

Dita smiles briefly as an image pops into her head: two children walking hand in hand in Prague’s old Jewish cemetery, wandering among the graves where small stones weighed down slips of paper so they wouldn’t blow away in the wind. Prague’s Jewish children, banned from the city’s parks and schools, had turned the old cemetery into an adventure playground. The Nazis planned to convert the synagogue and cemetery into a museum about the soon-to-be extinguished Jewish race.

In her mind’s eye, the children chased each other around the ancient gravestones covered with grass and lost in centuries-old silence.

Under a chestnut tree, and hidden by two thick gravestones leaning so much they had almost fallen over, Dita showed her little classmate Erik the name on an even bigger stone—Judah Loew ben Bezalel. Erik had no idea who he was, so she told him the story her father used to tell her whenever he put his yarmulke on his head and the two of them went for a walk in the cemetery.

Judah was a rabbi in the Josefov district in the sixteenth century, when all the Jews had to live in the ghetto, as they do now. He studied the Kabbalah and found out how to bring a clay figurine to life.

“That’s impossible!” Erik burst in, laughing.

She still smiles now as she remembers how she then resorted to her father’s trick: She lowered her voice, put her head next to Erik’s, and in a deep voice, whispered,