The Librarian of Auschwitz(28)
It would be a while before she saw him again. And it would be a stack of books that would lead to their next encounter.
It all started when Dita discovered that, among the sheets, clothing, underwear, and other belongings her mother had stuffed into the suitcases, her father had hidden a book. Fortunately, her mother didn’t know, or she would have hit the ceiling over such a waste of allowable weight. When her mother unpacked the suitcase that first night, she was surprised by the thick volume and glared at Dita’s father.
“We could have brought three more pairs of shoes, given what this weighs.”
“Why would we want so many shoes, Liesl? We can’t go anywhere.”
Her mother didn’t answer, but Dita thought she lowered her head so they wouldn’t see she was smiling. Dita’s mother sometimes scolded her father for being such a dreamer, but deep down, she adored him because of it.
Papa was right. That book took me much further than any pair of shoes.
Lying on the edge of her bunk in Auschwitz, she smiles as she recalls that moment when she opened the cover of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).
Starting a book is like boarding a train to go on holiday.
The Magic Mountain tells how Hans Castorp travels from Hamburg to Davos, in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin Joachim, who is undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at an elegant health spa. At first Dita didn’t know if she identified with the cheerful Hans, who has just arrived at the spa for a few days’ holiday, or with the chivalrous and ill Joachim.
A year is very important at our age. It brings so many changes with it and so much progress down there in the real world! But I have to stay inside this place like a bat; yes, as if I were inside a putrid hole, and I assure you that the comparison is not an exaggeration.
Dita recalls how she unconsciously nodded in agreement as she read this, and she’s still nodding now as she lies awake on her bunk in Auschwitz. She felt that the characters in that book understood her better than her own parents, because whenever she complained about all the misfortunes they were experiencing in Terezín—her parents having to sleep in separate quarters, her work in the vegetable gardens, the sense of suffocation from living in a walled city, the monotonous diet—they’d tell her to be patient; it would all be over soon. Maybe by next year the war will be finished, they’d say to her as if they were passing on a magnificent piece of news. For the grown-ups, a year was nothing more than a small segment of a large apple. Her parents would give her a smile, and she’d bite her tongue in frustration because they didn’t understand anything. When you’re young, a year is almost your entire life, the whole apple.
There were afternoons when her parents would be chatting with other married couples in the inner courtyard of her building, and she’d lie on her bed, cover herself with her blanket, and feel a little like Joachim taking his obligatory rest on the chaise longue in the spa. Or perhaps more like Hans Castorp, who decides to have a few more days of holiday, taking advantage of the rest sessions, but in the more relaxed manner of a tourist rather than a patient.
In Terezín, Dita lay on her bed waiting for night to fall, just like the two cousins in the book, though her dinner—barely more than bread and cheese—was much more sparse than the five courses served in the Berghof International Spa.
Cheese! she thinks now, as she lies on top of her bunk in Auschwitz. What did cheese taste like? I don’t even remember anymore. Wonderful!
It is true that in Terezín, despite being wrapped in four layers of sweaters, she felt the same cold as Joachim, the same cold as the patients lying on lounge chairs on the balconies of their rooms at night, wrapped in blankets and breathing in the cold mountain air that was supposed to be so good for restoring their damaged lungs. And lying there in Terezín with her eyes closed, she shared Joachim’s view that youth is over in a flash.
It was a long novel, so during the next few months, she shared her own enforced confinement with Joachim and his cheerful cousin Hans. She delved into the secrets, gossip, and obligations of the luxurious Berghof, where illness made time seem to stand still. She shared the conversations between the cousins and the other patients and, in a way, took part in them. The reality in the book became truer and more understandable than the one that surrounded her in that walled city. And it was much more credible than the Auschwitz nightmare of electrified wires and gas chambers that formed the world she currently inhabited.
One afternoon, a half-German girl who used to hang around in the small room they shared in the ghetto, but whom Dita ignored, decided to ask the girl who was always reading if she knew the Russian novel The Republic of ShKID, and if she’d heard of the boys in Block L417. Well, of course she’d heard about the boys!
That was when Dita closed her book and pricked up her ears. Curious, she asked Hanka to take her to meet them … “Right now!”
Hanka tried to tell her that it was a bit late in the day, so maybe tomorrow, but Dita, smiling now as she remembers that moment, cut her off:
“We don’t have a tomorrow. Everything has to be now!”
The two girls set off quickly for Block L417, a boys’ block, which they were allowed to visit until seven p.m. At the entrance, Hanka stopped and turned to her roommate with a serious look on her face.
“Watch out for Ludek.… He’s very handsome! But don’t even think about flirting with him, because I saw him first.”