The Librarian of Auschwitz(32)
“And what did he see?”
“According to him, too many things. In his books, he explains that the mind is a storeroom where memories languish and send people mad. He came up with a way of curing mental illnesses: The patient would lie down on a couch, and Freud would make him talk until he’d exhausted the last of his memories. In this way, Freud probed the patient’s most hidden thoughts. He called it psychoanalysis.”
“What happened to him?”
“He became famous. That saved his skin in Vienna in 1938. Some Nazis went into his consulting rooms, destroyed everything, and left with two thousand Reichsmarks. When Freud found out, he remarked that he had never charged that much for a consultation. Freud knew a lot of influential people outside Austria, but even so, the Nazis didn’t allow him to leave the country and go to London with his wife and daughter until he’d signed a piece of paper where he stated that the Nazi authorities had treated him really well and life in Vienna under the Third Reich was wonderful. He asked if he could add something to the end of the document because he felt the Germans had sold themselves short. Then he wrote, I strongly recommend the Gestapo to everybody. The Nazis were delighted.”
“They just don’t get the Jewish sense of humor.”
“As far as the Germans are concerned, humor means tickling your toes.”
“And when he reached England?”
“Freud died the following year, in 1939. He was already very old and sick.” The young teacher picks up the book by Freud and leafs through it. “Freud’s books were among the first to be burned on Hitler’s orders in 1933. This book is pure danger. It’s not only a clandestine book—it’s banned as well.”
Dita feels a slight shiver and decides to change the topic.
“And who was H. G. Wells?”
“He was a freethinker and a socialist. But above all, he was a great novelist. Have you heard of The Invisible Man?”
“Yes.”
“Well, he wrote that novel. And The War of the Worlds, in which he talks about Martians landing on Earth. And The Island of Doctor Moreau, with that mad scientist who combines human and animal genes. Dr. Mengele would like him. But I think his best book is The Time Machine. To go back and forth in time…” He sounds pensive as he continues. “Can you picture it? Do you have any idea what it would mean to get inside that machine, fly back in time to 1924, and prevent Adolf Hitler from being released from jail?”
“But all that business of the machine is made up, isn’t it?”
“Sadly, yes. Novels add what’s missing to life.”
“Well, if you think it would be better, I can put Mr. Freud and Mr. Wells at opposite ends of the bench.”
“No, leave them where they are. Maybe they can learn something from each other.”
And he says it so seriously that Dita can’t tell if this young teacher, who has the poise of an experienced man despite his youth, is joking or absolutely serious.
He turns round and returns to his group, and it occurs to Dita that he’s a walking encyclopedia. The assistant beside her hasn’t spoken a word. It’s only when the teacher has gone that he tells Dita in a high-pitched, childish voice—which makes his normal silence understandable—that the teacher’s name is Ota Keller, and he’s a Communist. Dita nods.
The teachers asked Dita for one of her “living” books for the afternoon—The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson. Mrs. Magda is a fragile-looking woman with snow-white hair and as slight as a sparrow. But when she starts to tell the story, she turns into a giant. Her voice becomes remarkably energetic, and she spreads her arms dramatically to describe the flight of the geese carrying Nils Holgersson through the air. A large group of children of mixed ages climb on board the flock of strong geese, too. They follow every word wide-eyed as they fly, seated on those geese, all over the skies of Sweden.
Almost all the children have heard the story before, in some cases several times, but the ones who enjoy it most are the ones who know it best. They recognize the various stages of the tale and they even laugh in anticipation of events, because they are already part of the adventure. Even Gabriel, the terror of the teachers in Block 31, who is normally incapable of staying still, has turned into a statue.
Nils is a willful boy who plays tricks on the animals on his farm. One day, while his parents are in church and he’s alone at home, he has a run-in with a tomte, or gnome, who has had enough of the boy’s arrogant attitude and shrinks him to the size of a small woodland animal. In an attempt to redeem himself, Nils holds on to the neck of a domestic goose and they join a band of wild geese flying over the Swedish countryside. In the same way that the impertinent Nils, clutching the neck of his goose, begins to mature and to realize that there is more to the world than him, so, too, the group of listeners rise above their harsh reality, full of the egotism of people pushing into the line to get to the soup first or stealing their neighbor’s spoon.
Sometimes, when Dita goes in search of Mrs. Magda to tell her that she has a session with Nils Holgersson at a particular time, the woman hesitates.
“But they’ve all heard the story a dozen times already! When they see that I’m telling it again, they’ll get up from their stools and leave.”
No one ever leaves. It doesn’t matter how many times they listen to the story, they always enjoy it. And not only that, but they always want to hear it from the start. Sometimes Mrs. Magda, worried that she’ll bore them, tries to take shortcuts and make the story shorter by skipping sections, but there are immediate protests from her audience.