The Librarian of Auschwitz(58)
But there’s something familiar about this character. And in any case, the world out there is much worse, so she’d rather stay curled up on her stool, concentrating on her reading and hoping the teachers sitting around talking don’t pay too much attention to her.
A bit further along in the book, she comes across ?vejk dressed awkwardly in his uniform as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, despite the fact that the Czechs, at least those of the working classes, were not at all pleased to be under the command of the snooty Germans in the First World War.
And how right they were, thinks Dita to herself.
He’s the adjutant to Lieutenant Luká?, who yells at him, calls him an animal, and gives him a whack on the back of his head whenever ?vejk drives him mad. Because there’s no question that ?vejk has a talent for complicating everything, for misplacing documents entrusted to him, for executing the exact opposite of every order, and for making the officer look ridiculous, even though he always appears to do everything good-naturedly and with the best of intentions, but with minimal brainpower. At this stage in the book, Dita still can’t work out if ?vejk is acting the fool or actually is a complete idiot.
She’s having a hard time understanding what the author is trying to say. The outrageous soldier answers his superior’s questions and orders in such a painstaking and detailed manner that his lengthy replies go on forever. They branch out into digressions and little stories about relatives and neighbors whom the soldier, absolutely seriously, introduces into his response in the most absurd way.
I met a certain Paroubek who had a bar in Libeň. On one occasion, a telegraph operator got drunk on gin and, instead of taking the messages of condolence to the relatives of a poor man who had died, he took them the price list of the alcohol being sold at the bar. It caused a huge scandal. And especially because up until then no one had read the price list, and it turned out that good old Paroubek was charging a few cents extra for each drink; although he did later explain that the extra money was for charitable works.…
The stories he uses to illustrate his explanations become so long and so surrealistic that the lieutenant ends up yelling at him to disappear: “Get out of my sight, you blockhead!”
And Dita is surprised to find that she’s laughing at the thought of the lieutenant’s expression. She immediately scolds herself. How can such a stupid character make her laugh? She even briefly questions whether it’s legitimate to laugh after everything that’s happened, and with everything that’s still going on.
How can you laugh while people you love are dying?
And her thoughts turn momentarily to Hirsch, and that permanent, enigmatic smile of his. And suddenly, she understands: Hirsch’s smile is his victory. His smile tells whoever is standing in front of him that he’s no match for Hirsch. In a place like Auschwitz, where everything is designed to make you cry, a smile is an act of defiance.
And she sets off after that dope of a ?vejk and his tricks. And in this dark moment of her life when she doesn’t know where to go, she grabs the hand of a rascal, and he tugs on it to encourage her to keep moving forward.
When Dita goes to her hut, darkness is falling and a freezing wind mixed with sleet stings her face. But her spirits have lifted. However, happiness in a place like Auschwitz is fleeting. Someone is coming toward her whistling a few bars of Puccini.
“My God,” whispers Dita.
She still has a few huts to go, but in this zone the middle of the road is dimly lit, so she ducks into the first hut she comes to in the hope that he hasn’t seen her. She enters so quickly that she bowls over a couple of women and then slams the door shut.
“What are you doing coming in here in such a hurry?”
Dita’s eyes are wide open in fear as she points outside.
“Mengele…”
And the women’s irritation switches to alarm.
“Dr. Mengele,” they whisper.
As the message jumps from bunk to bunk, the murmurs and conversations die down.
“Doctor Death…”
Some of the women start to pray while others demand silence so they can hear any sound from outside. A faint, high-pitched tune filters through the sound of the rain.
One of the women explains that Mengele has an obsessive fixation with eyes.
“They say that one of the prisoners, a Jewish doctor by the name of Vexler Jancu, has seen a wooden table with samples of eyes in Mengele’s office in the Gypsy camp.”
“I’ve heard he pins eyeballs to a piece of cork on the wall as if they were a collection of butterflies.”
“They told me he stitched two children together side by side, and they returned to their barrack still sewn together. They were crying with the pain and smelled of gangrene. They died that same night.”
“Well, I heard he was investigating ways of sterilizing Jewish women so they wouldn’t have any more children. He irradiated their ovaries and then removed them to investigate the effect. That son of Satan didn’t even use an anesthetic. The women’s screams were deafening.”
Someone asks for silence. The music seems to be moving away.
And then the words of an order begin to be heard ricocheting from one throat to another as it is relayed throughout camp BIIb: “Twins to Block 32!” Inmates who are outside are under orders to relay such an order or face the possibility of severe punishment if they don’t—execution is an ever-present possibility in Auschwitz. No matter where they might be, the boy twins, Zdeněk and Jirka, and the girl twins, Irene and Renée, must present themselves immediately at the hospital block.