The Librarian of Auschwitz(82)
Markéta averts her eyes and looks down at the floor of rammed earth. She’s gone back to being the timid and unsociable woman she usually is.
“I’m sorry; that’s not possible. I’m fine teaching my girls, but for me to stand up in the middle of the hut … definitely not.”
Dita sees that just the thought of doing it has made the woman blush. But they can’t afford to lose a book, and so Dita quickly thinks about what Fredy Hirsch would have said in a situation like this.
“I know it’s a huge effort for you, but … for the time the story lasts, the children stop being in a stable full of fleas, they stop smelling burned flesh, they stop being afraid. During those minutes, they’re happy. We can’t deny this to these children.”
The woman agrees a bit reluctantly. “We can’t.…”
“If we look at our reality, we feel anger and disgust. All we have is our imagination, Markéta.”
The teacher finally stops looking at the floor and raises her angular face.
“Add me to the list.”
“Thank you, Markéta. Thank you. Welcome to the library.”
The teacher tells Dita that it’s too late for her to read the book now, and so she’ll ask her for it again tomorrow morning.
“I have to go over a few passages.”
It strikes Dita that there’s a touch of joy in her voice and that there’s a new spring in her step as she walks away. Maybe she’s coming round to the idea of being a “living” book. Dita sits there quietly a while longer, leafing through the book, whispering the name of Edmond Dantès, and trying to make it sound French. She wonders if she’ll manage to get away from where she is, as the protagonist of the novel did. She doesn’t think she’s as brave as him, although if she had an opportunity to run toward the woods, she wouldn’t hesitate.
She also wonders if, were she successful, she’d dedicate her life to taking revenge on all the SS guards and officers, and if she’d do it in the same methodical, implacable, and yes, even merciless, manner as the Count of Monte Cristo. Of course she’d be delighted if they suffered the same pain they inflicted on so many innocent people. But nevertheless, she can’t avoid feeling some sadness at the thought that she liked the happy and confident Edmond Dantès of the beginning of the story much more than the calculating, hate-filled man he became. She asks herself, Can you really choose, or do the blows dealt to you by fate change you no matter what, in the same way that the blow of an ax converts a living tree into firewood?
The memory pops into her head of her father’s last days, when he was dying in the dirty bunk without any medicine to give him relief, slowly being killed by the illness with which the Nazis have allied themselves in their obsession with death. And as she thinks about this, she feels her temples throb with rage and an insatiable hunger for violence. But then she remembers what Professor Morgenstern taught her: Our hatred is a victory for them. And she nods in agreement.
If Professor Morgenstern was mad, then lock me up with him.
22.
Two compounds away from the family camp, a scene takes place that no prisoner wants to witness. But they are given no choice. Rudi Rosenberg, who has come to BIId with some lists, is walking along the Lagerstrasse when an SS patrol enters the camp. They are escorting four thin Russians who are still feisty, despite their bruised faces, scraggly beards, and torn clothes. It was Rudi’s friend Wetzler, an inmate assigned to the camp morgue, who told him that the Russian prisoners of war were working on the extension to Birkenau on the other side of the camp perimeter. They spent exhausting days stacking up metal sheets and piles of wood.
One of those mornings, when the Kapo supervising the Russians disappeared for a few hours to make out with the woman in charge of the group of female prisoners clearing the adjacent land, the four Russian prisoners managed to build a small hideout. They placed four thick planks edgewise to form the walls, with another board on top to form a roof. Then they piled more wooden planks all around, leaving the little hideout buried underneath. Their plan was to wait until the Kapo was distracted and then pull aside the board that served as the roof and climb inside the hideout. When it was time for roll call, their absence would be noticed. Assuming they had escaped, the Germans would start to look for them in the forest and surrounding area, because they wouldn’t suspect that they were, in fact, hiding outside the electrified perimeter of the camp complex, just a few meters from their own camp fence.
The Germans were methodical. Any escape activated a state of alert that instantly mobilized SS soldiers into search parties and heightened security at the checkpoints in nearby towns for precisely three days. At the end of this time, these special measures came to an end and the SS returned to their normal guard duties. So the Russians would have had to wait inside their hideout for exactly three days and then take advantage of the fourth night to reach the edge of the forest and begin their flight without the added pressure of the special search and capture forces.
The idea of escaping has taken hold of the registrar himself, to the point where it has become an obsession. Some of the camp veterans talk about escape fever as an illness that attacks people in the same way as a contagious disease. There comes a moment when the victim suddenly starts to feel the urgent and unstoppable need to escape. At first, you think about it now and again, then more and more often, and in the end, you’re incapable of concentrating on anything else. You spend all day and night planning how to do it.