The Librarian of Auschwitz(75)
Seppl Lichtenstern has been charged with carrying out the roll call this morning under the impassive gaze of an SS guard, but once the guard leaves the hut, everyone relaxes a little. The children have spent the whole time looking from side to side for those who are missing. No matter how much the daily roll call normally irritates the children, its brevity this morning has shattered them.
Dita heads outside to escape the feeling of oppression in the barrack. But although dawn broke a short time ago, something is darkening the atmosphere. The breeze is carrying a dry rain that is making everything dirty. Ash. A black snowfall the likes of which has never been seen before.
The people working in the ditches look skyward. Those hauling stones leave them on the ground and come to a standstill. The people in the workshops stop laboring, despite the yells of the Kapos, and go outside to look, in what could be their first act of rebellion—looking up at the black sky, indifferent to orders and threats.
Night seems suddenly to have returned.
“My God! What is it?” someone asks.
“It’s God’s curse!” cries another.
Dita looks up, and her face, hands, and dress are spotted with tiny gray flakes that disintegrate between her fingers. The inhabitants of Block 31 come outside to see what’s going on.
“What’s happening?” asks a frightened little girl.
“Don’t be afraid,” says Miriam Edelstein to the children. “It’s our friends from the September transport. They’re returning.”
Children and teachers crowd together in silence. Many of them quietly pray. Dita cups her hands so she can catch some of that rain of souls, unable to hold back her tears, which form white furrows down her blackened face. Miriam Edelstein is hugging her son, Arieh, and Dita joins them.
“They’ve come back, Dita. They’ve come back.”
They’ll never leave Auschwitz again.
Some teachers have stood their ground and say they won’t teach any classes. For some, it’s a way of protesting, while others simply find themselves incapable of carrying on. Lichtenstern tries to raise their morale, but he lacks the charisma and the self-confidence of Fredy Hirsch. And he can’t cover up the fact that he, too, is demoralized.
One of the teachers asks what happened to Hirsch. Others gather around crestfallen, as if they were at a funeral. Someone says he was told that Hirsch was loaded into one of the trucks on a stretcher, either dying or already dead.
“I think he killed himself out of pride. He was too proud to allow himself to be killed by the Nazis. He wasn’t going to give them that pleasure.”
“I think that when he saw his own German compatriots had tricked and betrayed him, he couldn’t bear it.”
“Children suffering is what he couldn’t bear.”
Dita listens, and something stirs inside her, as if she senses that there is something about Hirsch’s death that doesn’t lend itself to a conventional explanation. She feels not only devastated but confused. What will happen to the school if Hirsch isn’t here to fix everything? She’s found a spot on a stool as far away as possible from all the others, but she can see Lichtenstern, thin and clumsy, coming her way. He’s nervous, and he’d give ten years of his life for a cigarette.
“The children are frightened, Edita. Look at them, they’re not moving; they’re not talking.”
“We’re all angry, Seppl.”
“We have to do something.”
“Do? What can we do?”
“The only thing we can do is carry on. We have to make these children respond. Read something to them.”
Dita looks around and sees that the children have gradually sat down on the ground in silent groups, biting their nails and gazing up at the ceiling. They’ve never been so depressed or so quiet. Dita feels weak, and she has a bitter taste in her mouth. What she’d really like to do is stay on her stool without moving or speaking or having someone talk to her, and never get up again.
“And what am I going to read to them?”
Seppl Lichtenstern opens his mouth, but no words come out, so he closes it again and, somewhat embarrassed, looks down. He admits that he doesn’t know about books, and they can’t ask Miriam Edelstein because she’s too overcome. She’s sitting at the back with her head in her hands, refusing to speak to anyone.
“You’re the librarian of Block Thirty-One,” Lichtenstern reminds her sharply.
Dita nods in agreement. She must assume her responsibility. No one has to remind her of that.
As she makes her way to the Block?ltester’s cubicle, she wishes she could ask Mr. Utitz, the chief librarian at Terezín, which would be the most appropriate book for her to read to the children under these tragic circumstances. She has a serious novel, some math books, and some books about understanding the world. But before she has even lifted the pile of rags which hide the trapdoor to the hidey-hole, she’s already made up her mind.
She takes out the messiest of the books—little more than a bundle of unbound sheets. It may be the least suitable, the least pedagogic, and the most irreverent of them all. There are even teachers who disapprove of it, finding it indecent and in poor taste. But those who believe that flowers grow in vases don’t understand anything about literature. The library has now become her first-aid kit, and she’s going to give the children a little of the medicine that helped her recover her smile when she thought she’d lost it forever.