The Librarian of Auschwitz(59)

Josef Mengele graduated with a medical degree from the University of Munich and, from 1931, served in units close to the Nazi party. He was a disciple of Dr. Ernst Rüdin, one of the main supporters of the idea that worthless lives should be eradicated. Rüdin was also one of the architects of the law of obligatory sterilization promulgated by Hitler in 1933 for people with deformities, mental disabilities, depression, or alcoholism. Mengele had managed to arrange to have himself assigned to Auschwitz, where he had a human warehouse at his disposal for his genetic experiments.

The mother of the boy twins accompanies them to their destination. She can’t rid her mind of the gory stories about Dr. Mengele. She has to bite her lip to stop herself from crying as the children happily walk beside her, jumping from one puddle to the next. She hasn’t the courage to tell them to stop splattering themselves with mud. Her lip is bleeding.

At the camp’s entry control point, she hands her children over to an SS guard and watches them go through the metal door and head off toward the Nazi doctor’s laboratory. She thinks she may never see them again, or that when they return they’ll be missing an arm or have their mouths stitched shut or some other deformity provoked by the outrageous ideas of that madman. But there’s nothing she can do about it; refusing an officer’s order is punishable by death. Sometimes it’s Mengele himself who occupies a room in the medical area of Block 32 and other people, whom she fears even more, bring the children to his laboratory.

So far, the children have returned safely from their encounters with the doctor, happy even, after spending a few hours with him and returning with a sausage or a piece of bread that Uncle Josef has given them. They even say he’s pleasant and makes them laugh. They explain that he measures their heads and asks them to make the same movements together and individually, and put out their tongues. Sometimes, however, they don’t feel like explaining anything and evade their parents’ questions about what goes on during those opaque hours in the laboratory. On this occasion, the mother returns to her hut with what feels like a knot of barbed wire in her throat.

Dita heaves a sigh of relief because she wasn’t the one he was looking for tonight. The woman who tells the most graphic stories about Mengele has straggly white hair, which escapes from under her kerchief. Dita approaches her.

“Excuse me, I wanted to ask you something.”

“Ask away, young lady.”

“You see, I have a friend who was cautioned by Mengele—”

“Cautioned?”

“Yes, warned that he’d be watching her.”

“Bad…”

“What do you mean?”

“When he’s hovering around someone, it’s like birds of prey flying above their victims.”

“But with so many people in here, and so many things on his mind—”

“Mengele never forgets a face. I know that personally.”

And as she says it, she becomes very serious and falls silent. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to say any more; a memory has silenced her momentarily.

“Run away from him as if he were the plague. Don’t put yourself in his path. The Nazi bosses practice dark magic rituals—I know. They go into the woods and celebrate black masses. Himmler, the head of the SS, never makes a decision without consulting his psychic. They’re people from the dark side—I know. Heaven help the poor soul who gets in their way. Their evil isn’t of this world; it comes from hell. I believe that Mengele is the fallen angel. He’s Lucifer himself who’s taken over a human body. If he’s after someone, may God have mercy on their soul.”

Dita nods and walks off without a word. If God exists, then so does the devil. They’re travelers on the same rail line, moving in opposite directions. Good and evil somehow counterbalance each other. You could almost say they need each other: How would we know that we are doing good if evil didn’t exist so that we could compare them and see the difference? she wonders. There’s no other place in the world where the devil moves as freely as he does in Auschwitz.

Would Lucifer whistle opera arias?

Night has closed in, and the only thing whistling is the wind. She feels a shiver run through her. She sees someone near the fence, underneath a beam of light. It’s a woman, talking to someone on the other side of the fence. She thinks it’s one of the assistants from Block 31, the oldest and the prettiest one, Alice. She was one of Dita’s assistants on library duty once. She told Dita she knew Rosenberg the registrar, and she insisted several times that they were just friends, as if it really mattered to her.

Dita wonders what they talk about. Is there anything left to say? Maybe they just look at each other and say those pretty words that people in love say to each other. If Rosenberg were Hans Castorp and Alice were Mme. Chauchat, he’d kneel down on his side of the fence and say, I know who you are, as Castorp said to Chauchat on carnival night when he was finally honest with her. He told her that falling in love was to see someone and suddenly recognize them for who they were, knowing that this was the person you’d always been waiting for. Dita wonders if she’ll ever experience that sort of revelation.

Her thoughts turn back to Alice and Rosenberg. What sort of relationship can you have with someone who’s on the other side of a fence? She’s not sure. In Auschwitz, the weirdest things are normal. Would she be capable of falling in love with someone on the other side of a fence? More to the point, is it possible to love in this terrible place? The answer seems to be yes, because Alice Munk and Rudi Rosenberg stand there defying the cold.