The Librarian of Auschwitz(27)
“You’re very late, Edita. Is everything all right?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? You’re not deceiving me?”
“No,” Dita answers grudgingly.
It irritates her that her mother treats her like a little girl. She feels like telling her that of course she’s fooling her, that in Auschwitz everybody deceives everyone else. But it wouldn’t be fair to take her anger out on her mother.
“So everything’s fine?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Shut up, you bitches, or I’ll slit your throats!” someone bellows.
“Stop that racket!” orders the Kapo.
Silence descends on the hut, but the voice inside Dita’s head doesn’t stop. Hirsch isn’t who they think he is. Who is he, then?
She tries to fit together everything she knows about him, and that’s when she realizes it’s not a lot. After catching a fleeting glimpse of him at the sports ground on the outskirts of Prague, the next time she bumped into him was in Terezín.
The Terezín ghetto …
8.
Dita clearly remembers the typewritten letter with the Reichsprotektor stamp lying on top of the table with the dark-red-check oiled tablecloth, in that tiny apartment in Josefov. It was an insignificant piece of paper that changed everything. It changed even the name of the small town of Terezín, sixty kilometers from Prague, its German name written in dark capital letters as if they wanted to proclaim it: THERESIENSTADT. And next to that, the word relocation.
Terezín, or Theresienstadt, was a city Hitler generously donated to the Jews—or so Nazi propaganda maintained. They would even film a documentary directed by Kurt Gerron, the Jewish film director, which showed people happily employed in workshops, playing sports, and calmly attending lectures and social events, all presented with a voiceover that explained how content the Jews were in Terezín. The documentary would “prove” that the rumors about the internment and murder of Jews were false. As soon as he finished the documentary, the Nazis would send Kurt Gerron to Auschwitz, where he would die in 1944.
Dita sighs.
The Terezín ghetto …
The Jewish Council of Prague had offered Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich various options for the location of a such a Jewish city. But Heydrich had wanted Terezín—nothing else would do—and for a rock-solid reason: Terezín was a walled city.
Dita recalls the sadness of that morning when they had to put their entire lives into two suitcases and drag them to the assembly point near Stromovka park. The Czech police escorted the whole column of deportees to a special train that took them to Terezín.
She sorts through her mental album for a photograph from November 1942. Her father is helping her grandfather, the old senator, get off the train at Bohu?ovice station. Her grandmother is in the background, carefully watching. The expression on Dita’s face now is one of anger and irritation at the biological deterioration that attacks even the most upright and energetic people. Her grandfather had been a stone fortress, and now he was a mere sandcastle. In the background of that frozen image, she can also see her mother with that stubbornly neutral expression of hers, pretending that nothing bad is happening and trying not to attract anyone’s attention. She can see herself, too, aged thirteen, more of a girl and outlandishly fat. Her mother had made her wear several sweaters one on top of the other, not because of the cold, but because they were allowed only fifty kilos per person in the suitcases, and layering clothes meant they could bring more. Her father is standing behind her. It’s not the first time I’ve told you not to eat so much pheasant, Edita, he said in that serious way he had when he was joking.
The first image her eyes had stored in the Terezín album—after they walked past the guard post at the entrance to the precinct and under the archway bearing the phrase ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work makes you free—was of a dynamic city. It was a place with avenues full of people. It had a hospital, a fire station, kitchens, workshops, a day care center. Terezín even had its own Jewish police, the Ghettowache, who wandered about in their jackets and dark caps like any other police in the world. But if you looked more carefully at the hustle and bustle in the streets, you realized that people were carrying baskets with missing handles, threadbare blankets, watches without hands.… The inhabitants rushed to and fro as if they were in a hurry, but Dita understood that no matter how fast you walked, you’d always end up bumping into a wall. That was the deception.
Terezín was a city where the streets led nowhere.
That was where she saw Fredy Hirsch again, although her initial memory is of a sound, not an image. It’s of the thunderous clatter of a buffalo stampede like the ones in Karl May’s adventure novels set in the American prairies. It was during one of her first days in the ghetto, and she was still feeling stunned. She was returning from her assigned work—the vegetable gardens that had been planted at the foot of the walls to provide supplies for the SS garrison.
She was heading back to her small cubicle when she heard a galloping sound coming toward her along a nearby street. She pressed herself against the wall of an apartment block to avoid being mowed down by what she assumed were horses, but what finally came running around the corner was a large group of boys and girls. Their leader was an athletic man with impeccably slicked-back hair and a smooth, elastic stride. He greeted her with a slight nod of his head as he went past. It was Fredy Hirsch, unmistakable, even elegant, in his shorts and T-shirt.