The Librarian of Auschwitz(15)
“You can join us. We organize summer camps in Bezpráví, by the Orlice River, where we play sport and strengthen our Jewish spirit. There’s more information about our activities on the flyer.”
Her father didn’t like those sorts of things. She had overheard him telling her uncle that he didn’t approve of mixing politics and sport. They said this Hirsch fellow organized guerrilla warfare games with the children, had them digging trenches from which they pretended to shoot weapons, and talked to them about combat techniques as if they were a small army under his command.
If Hirsch is the commander, Dita is now more than ready to get into any trench. Anyway, she’s already in it up to her neck. They are Jews, a stubborn people. The Nazis won’t be able to crack her, or Hirsch. She won’t quit the library … but she’ll have to be alert, all eyes and ears, keep an eye on the shadows in which Mengele operates so she doesn’t get trapped. She’s a fourteen-year-old girl, and they are the most powerful military weapon of destruction in history, but she’s not going to take part silently in the procession again. Not this time. She’s going to stand up to them.
No matter the cost.
Dita isn’t the only one suffering insomnia.
Fredy Hirsch, as the head of Block 31, has been granted the privilege of sleeping in his own cubicle, and in a barrack where he is the only resident. After working on one of his reports, he leaves his cubicle and stands by himself in the silence. The whispering has faded, the books have been closed, the songs are over.… When the kids race off, the school goes back to being a crude wooden shed.
They’re the best thing we’ve got, he tells himself.
One more day and one more inspection have passed. Each day is a battle won. His chest shrinks and his straight collarbones disappear into his shoulders. He collapses onto a stool and closes his eyes. He’s exhausted, but no one must know. He’s a leader. He can’t let them down.
If they only knew.…
He’s lying to them all. If they found out who he really is, they would hate him.
He feels drained. So he drops to the floor, beginning a round of push-ups. He’s constantly telling the members of his teams that effort overcomes tiredness.
Up, down; up, down.
The whistle he always wears around his neck bangs rhythmically against the foot-flattened earth. His secret feels like an iron ball shackled to his ankle, but he knows he has no choice. He has to keep going. Up and down …
“Weakness is a sin,” he whispers, almost out of breath.
Growing up in Aachen, all the children walked to school. Fredy was the only one who ran, his schoolbooks tied to his shoulders with a rope. The store owners would jokingly ask him where he was going in such a hurry, and he greeted them politely, but never slowed down. He had no reason to hurry; he just enjoyed running. Whenever an adult asked him why he ran, he would answer that walking made him feel tired, but running never did.
He would race into the little square in front of the main entrance to the school and then, because there were no old people sitting on the bench at that hour, he would leap over it as if he were taking part in a steeplechase. Whenever the opportunity arose, he would tell his classmates that it was his ambition to be a professional athlete.
At the age of ten, his childhood was smashed into a million pieces when his father died. Sitting on the stool in the barrack, Fredy tries to picture his father, but he can’t. His strongest memory of him back then is of the hole left by his absence. That emptiness, which he felt so acutely, has never been filled. He continues to feel that uneasy sense of being alone, even when he’s surrounded by people.
After his father’s death, Fredy started to lose the strength to run. He stopped enjoying races and lost his bearings. His mother had to spend all day working, and so, to stop him from spending long stretches at home on his own or fighting with his older brother, she signed him up for a German-Jewish version of the Boy Scouts called the Jüdischer Pfadfinderbund Deutschland or JPD. They ran activities for young children and had a separate sports branch called Maccabi Hatzair.
The first time Fredy entered the large and somewhat shabby premises, with its list of rules tacked to the wall, it smelled of bleach. He remembers choking back his tears. Little by little, young Fredy Hirsch found the warmth that was lacking in his empty house. He found companionship, tabletop games on rainy days, excursions that always included a guitar and someone telling an inspiring story about Israel’s martyrs. Games of football and basketball, sack races, athletics—they all became a life raft he could cling to. When Saturday rolled around and all the others stayed at home with their families, he would go to the sports grounds by himself to throw balls at the rusty hoops on the basketball court or do endless rounds of sit-ups until his T-shirt was soaked with sweat.
He wiped out all his concerns and banished his insecurities by training to the point of exhaustion. He would set himself small challenges: race to the corner and back five times in under three minutes, do ten push-ups and clap his hands together on the last one, sink four baskets in four attempts from a particular spot on the basketball court.… His mind was a blank while he was concentrating on his challenges; he was almost happy.
His mother remarried, and throughout his adolescence, Fredy felt more at home in the JPD headquarters than at home. When school was over, he’d go straight there, staying late into the evening. He always had some reason to give his mother for not coming home: meetings of the youth board—of which he was a member; the need to organize excursions or sports tournaments; maintenance work around the premises.… As he got older, he became less and less capable of connecting with kids his own age. Few of them shared either his heightened Zionist mysticism, which encouraged him to see the return to Palestine as a mission, or his passion for endless sports training. His peers invited him to the odd party, where the first couples began to form, but Fredy kept making excuses. Eventually they stopped asking him.