The Librarian of Auschwitz(69)
“My name’s Lida!” she says in her gravelly voice.
The Kapo gallops up, starts to yell at her to return to her group immediately, and waves her club menacingly. As the woman hurriedly rejoins her group, she looks back momentarily, and Dita waves good-bye to her.
“Good luck, Lida! I love your name,” she shouts.
She thinks her bunkmate smiles proudly.
One of the last people to walk past those waving good-bye is Fredy Hirsch. He’s wearing his jacket, and his silver whistle swings slightly on top of it. He walks with martial precision, head high and eyes fixed firmly in front of him, focused on his own thoughts and paying no attention to any of the waves or farewells, even from those who call his name.
His state of mind and the doubts that torment him are not important. It’s a new exodus of the Jews, now expelled from their own prison, and they must face it with the utmost dignity. There can be no sign of frailty or weakness. That’s why he doesn’t respond to any greeting or wave, though his attitude is interpreted by some as arrogance.
It’s true that he feels proud of what he has achieved: In the whole time Block 31 has existed, not one of the pupils has died. To keep 521 children alive for months is a record that no one has probably achieved in Auschwitz. He looks forward, not at the back of the neck of the person in front of him but much, much farther, toward the row of poplars in the distance, and even farther than that, toward the horizon.
As the September inmates file past, a rumor that they’re going to be transferred to the Heydebreck camp runs through the ranks. Most of them think there’ll be a drastic selection process and that many of them won’t get there. Some think that not one of the transferees will make it.
18.
March 7, 1944
Rudi Rosenberg watches as the 3,800 September transport prisoners from the family camp arrive at the quarantine camp, BIIa. The news Schmulewski has given him is horrifying. Anyone would be deeply depressed by it. But Rudi is searching for one thing among the columns of prisoners: the slender figure of his girlfriend, Alice. Finally, their eyes meet and their smiles of satisfaction rise above the anguish. Once all the prisoners have been assigned to huts, the Nazis allow the inmates to move freely about the camp. In his room, Rudi gets together with Alice and her two Resistance friends, Vera and Helena.
Helena tells him that most of the prisoners seem to have accepted the official story—that they’ll be transferred to a more northerly camp located close to Warsaw.
Vera has a shrill voice that makes her emaciated face seem even more birdlike.
“Some of the important representatives of the camp’s Jewish community think that the Germans won’t dare exterminate the children because they’re scared that word would spread.”
Rosenberg has no alternative but to pass on Schmulewski’s impressions from this morning, which are grimmer and more to the point than ever:
“He told me there wasn’t much time left, and he believed they could all die tomorrow.”
Rudi’s words are met with complete silence. The women understand that the head of the Resistance knows the facts better than anyone because he has an extensive network of spies throughout Auschwitz. Nervousness gives rise to all sorts of rumors, half rumors, wishes, ideas, fantasies.…
“And if the war were to end tonight?”
Helena momentarily recovers her cheerfulness.
“If the war ended tonight and I returned to Prague, the first thing I’d do is go to my mother’s house and eat a bowl of goulash the size of a barrel.”
“I’d climb into the saucepan with a loaf of bread and leave it so clean that I could then use it as a mirror to pluck my eyebrows.”
They start to sniff the aroma of the spicy stew and sigh with happiness. And then they return to reality and the smell of fear. They try to reorder their thoughts again in an attempt come up with something positive in such a densely black outlook, some tiny detail they’ve overlooked that would provide a satisfactory explanation for everything. A nail on which they can hang their hopes—and their lives.
The only additional information Rudi can provide, because as registrar he’s seen the transport lists, is that nine people in total from the September transport will be left behind in the family camp: the two sets of twins whom Dr. Mengele has reserved for his experiments; three doctors and a pharmacist who have accompanied the transferees to the quarantine camp, whom Mengele has also claimed; and the mistress of Mr. Willy, the camp Kapo. All the others will receive the special treatment specified in the Nazi plan laid out when they arrived in September.
Rudi’s information is, in fact, incorrect. There are more people on the “not to be transferred” list, but things are too confusing at this stage, although all will be revealed in due course. After an hour of exhaustive reflection that leads nowhere, they’re so weary they fall silent.
Vera and Helena leave, and Rudi and Alice find themselves alone. For the first time, no barbed wire comes between them, no guards in towers with guns at their shoulders watch them, and no chimneys remind them of the degradation that surrounds them. They look at each other for a moment, shyly and with some awkwardness at first, and then more and more intensely. They’re young and they’re beautiful, full of life and plans and desires and an urgency to drink their fill of the present moment. And as they gaze again at each other, with the spark of desire well alight in their eyes, they feel that their happiness insulates them, that it takes them to another place and that nothing can snatch this moment from them.