The Librarian of Auschwitz(3)
That day at the station, the officer passed close to Dita, and she saw his impeccable uniform, his spotless white gloves, and the Iron Cross on the front of his military jacket—the medal that can be won only on the battlefield. He stopped in front of a group of mothers and children and patted one of the children in a friendly manner with his gloved hand. He even smiled. He pointed to a pair of fourteen-year-old twins—Zdeněk and Jirka—and a corporal hurried to remove them from the line. Their mother grabbed the guard by the bottom of his jacket and fell on her knees, begging him not to take them away. The captain calmly intervened.
“No one will treat them like Uncle Josef.”
And in a sense, that was true. No one in Auschwitz touched a hair of the sets of twins that Dr. Josef Mengele collected for his experiments. No one would treat them as Uncle Josef did in his macabre genetic experiments to find out how to make German women give birth to twins and multiply the number of Aryan births. Dita recalls Mengele walking off holding the children by their hands, still calmly whistling.
That same symphony is now audible in Block 31.
Mengele …
*
Block?ltester Hirsch emerges from his tiny cubicle, pretending to be pleasantly surprised by the visit of the SS guards. He clicks his heels together loudly to greet the officer: It’s a respectful way of recognizing the soldier’s rank, but it’s also a way of demonstrating a military attitude, neither submissive nor daunted. Mengele barely gives him a glance; he’s still whistling, with his hands behind his back as if none of this had anything to do with him. The sergeant—the one everyone calls the Priest—scrutinizes the hut with his almost transparent eyes, his hands still tucked inside the sleeves of his greatcoat and hovering over his middle, never far from the holster of his gun.
Jakoubek wasn’t wrong.
“Inspection,” whispers the Priest.
The SS guards repeat his order, amplifying it until it becomes a shout in the prisoners’ ears. Dita, sitting in the midst of a ring of girls, shivers and squeezes her arms against her body. She hears the rustle of the books against her ribs. If they find the books on her, it’s all over.
“That wouldn’t be fair…” she murmurs.
She’s fourteen years old. Her life is just beginning; everything is ahead of her. She recalls the words her mother has been repeating insistently over the years whenever Dita grumbles about her fate: “It’s the war, Edita … it’s the war.”
She is so young that she barely remembers anymore what the world was like when there was no war. In the same way that she hides the books from the Nazis, she keeps secret the memories in her head. She closes her eyes and tries to recall what the world was like when there was no fear.
*
She pictures herself in early 1939, aged nine, standing in front of the astronomical clock in Prague’s Old Town Hall square. She’s sneaking a peek at the old skeleton. It keeps watch over the rooftops of the city with huge empty eye sockets.
They’d told them at school that the clock was a piece of mechanical ingenuity, invented by Maestro Hanu? more than five hundred years ago. But Dita’s grandmothers told her a darker story. The king ordered Hanu? to construct a clock with figures, automatons that paraded on the stroke of every hour. When it was completed, the king ordered his bailiffs to blind the clockmaker so that he could never make another wonder like it. But the clockmaker took revenge, putting his hand into the mechanism to disable it. The cogs shredded his hand, the mechanism jammed, and the clock was broken, unfixable for years. Sometimes Dita had nightmares about that amputated hand snaking its way around the serrated wheels of the mechanism.
Dita, hanging on to the books that may take her to the gas chamber, looks back with nostalgia at the happy child she used to be. Whenever she accompanied her mother downtown on shopping expeditions, she loved to stop in front of the astronomical clock, not to watch the mechanical show—the skeleton in fact disturbed her more than she was prepared to admit—but to watch the passersby, many of them foreigners visiting the capital. She had difficulty concealing her laughter at the astonished faces and silly giggles of those watching. She made up names for them. One of her favorite pastimes was giving everyone nicknames, especially her neighbors and her parents’ friends. She called snooty Mrs. Gottlieb “Mrs. Giraffe” because she used to stretch her neck to give herself airs. And she named the Christian upholsterer in the shop downstairs “Mr. Bowling-Pin-Head” because he was skinny and completely bald. She remembers chasing the tram as, its little bell ringing, it turned the corner at the Old Town Square and snaked its way into the distance through the Josefov neighborhood. Then she would run in the direction of the store, where she knew her mother would be, buying material to make Dita’s winter coats and skirts. She hasn’t forgotten how much she liked that store, with its neon sign in the door, colored spools of thread lighting up one by one from the bottom to the top and then back down again.
If she hadn’t been one of those girls insulated by that happiness typical of children, then perhaps as she passed by the newspaper kiosk she would have noticed that there was a long queue of people waiting to buy the paper. The stack of copies of Lidové Noviny that day carried a headline on the front page four columns wide and in an unusually large type. It screamed rather than stated GOVERNMENT AGREES TO GERMAN ARMY’S ENTRY INTO PRAGUE.
*
Dita briefly opens her eyes and sees the SS guards sniffing around the back of the hut. They leave no stone unturned, even checking behind the drawings that hang on the wall from makeshift barbed wire nails. No one says a word; there is only the sound of the guards rummaging around in the hut. It smells of dampness and mildew. Of fear, too. It’s the smell of war.