The Librarian of Auschwitz(60)

God has allowed Auschwitz to exist, so maybe he isn’t an infallible watchmaker, as they told her. The most beautiful flowers emerge from the foulest dung heap. So maybe, thinks Dita, God isn’t a watchmaker but a gardener.

God sows and the devil reaps with a scythe that cuts down everything.

Who’ll win this mad game? she asks herself.





16.

As Ota Keller walks toward his father’s hut, he mulls over which of the various stories in his head he’s going to tell the children this afternoon. One day, he’d like to collect and publish in a book all the stories about the land of Palestine he’s invented to distract the children in Block 31.

There are so many things to do! But they are trapped by the war.

There was a time when he believed in revolutions and the idea that there could be a just war.

That was so long ago.…

He has taken advantage of the meal break to visit his father who is eating his soup in front of the workshop where he rivets the straps from which the German soldiers hang their water bottles. He’s elderly, and has been stripped of everything he was before the war, but Mr. Keller hasn’t lost his love of life. Just the week before, he’d offered to give a brief concert at the back of the hut before lights-out. And Ota admits that even though his father’s voice has declined, he continues to sound like a professional singer. The men happily listened to him. Few of them knew that Richard Keller had been, until very recently, a very important businessman in Prague, owner of a thriving company that made lingerie and employed fifty people.

Although Richard Keller kept a meticulous eye on the company’s finances, his real passion has always been opera. Some businessmen furrowed their brows when they learned of Mr. Keller’s excessive fondness for warbling. He even took lessons—at his age!

Ota thinks his father is the most serious man in the world, and that’s why he never stops singing, either out loud or sotto voce. When the emissary from the Jewish Council informed half the occupants of his section in Terezín that they were being deported to Auschwitz, some shouted, others cried, and the odd one banged his fists against the wall. His father, however, quietly began to sing the aria from Rigoletto when they kidnap Gilda, and the Duke of Mantua is overcome with grief: “Ella mi fu rapita!… Parmi veder le lagrime.…” His voice was the deepest, the sweetest, of them all. Maybe that was why, little by little, silence descended until only his voice remained.

Mr. Keller gives Ota a wink when he sees him. The old man has lost his business and his house—both requisitioned by the Nazis—along with his dignity as an upper-class citizen. But he hasn’t lost his inner strength or his willingness to crack jokes.

When Ota sees that his father is well and chatting with his fellow workers about that day’s deaths, he heads off toward Block 31. He looks around, and what he sees is sad: emaciated people dressed in rags like beggars. He never thought he’d see his people looking like this, but the more broken they seem to him, the more aware he is of his Jewishness.

He’s left behind the period of his adolescence when he allowed himself to be bewitched by the teachings of Karl Marx, when he believed that internationalization and Communism were the answers to all of history’s problems. There was a moment when he didn’t know exactly where he belonged: He was the son of an upper-class family, he flirted with lounge-room Communism, he was Czech, and he was a Jew. When the Nazis entered Prague and began to round up the Jews, Ota finally realized his place in the world: Blood and a thousand-year tradition tied him so much more to the Jews than to any other group. And if he had any doubt about who he was, the Nazis ensured that he wouldn’t forget it for a single moment of his life by sewing a yellow star on his chest.

That was why he joined the Zionists and became an active member of the hachshara movement, which prepared young people for the aliyah, the return to Palestine. He remembers with pleasure and a touch of melancholy those excursions where there was always someone with a guitar and time to sing songs. In that fraternity, there was something of the primitive spirit he had been looking for—a community of musketeers where it was all for one and one for all.

He began to make up his first tales during those nights around the campfire telling horror stories. In those days, he occasionally bumped into Fredy Hirsch. Fredy struck him as one of those people whose convictions had no chinks. That was why he was so proud to be under his command in Block 31.

These are not good times …

But Ota is an optimist. He has inherited his father’s ironic sense of humor, and he refuses to believe that the Jews aren’t going to get out of this rough patch, given their history of constant setbacks. And in order to get rid of such bad thoughts, he returns to the story he’s going to tell the children, because there must be no end to stories, so that imagination never stops and children continue to dream.

You are what you dream, Ota says to himself.

Ota Keller is twenty-two years old, but his self-assurance makes him seem older. He is telling the children a story he’s told many times before. It’s a story of his own invention, so if he forgets any detail, he just replaces it with another. It’s about a traveling rogue who sells silent flutes, which have no holes because, he says, in this way the magnificent sound they produce will be heard only in heaven.…

“And you wouldn’t believe how many people bought his flutes—until one of his customers was a child.”