The Librarian of Auschwitz(9)
Fredy Hirsch watched her in silence, taking pleasure in her absorbed expression. If he had any doubts about the responsibility he’d given to the young Czech girl, they dissipated in that moment. He knew that Edita would look after the library carefully.
The Basic Treatise on Geometry was somewhat better preserved. It unfurled a different geography in its pages: a countryside of isosceles triangles, octagons, and cylinders, rows of ordered numbers in squads of arithmetical armies, formations that were like clouds, and parallelograms like mysterious cells.
Her eyes opened wide at the third book. It was A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. A book populated by primitive men, Egyptians, Romans, Maya … civilizations that formed empires and then collapsed so that new ones could emerge.
The fourth title was A Russian Grammar. She didn’t understand a thing, but she liked those enigmatic letters. Now that Germany was also at war with Russia, the Russians were her friends. Dita had heard that there were many Russian prisoners of war in Auschwitz and that the Nazis treated them with extreme cruelty.
There was also a French novel in bad condition and a treatise with the title New Paths to Psychoanalytic Therapy by a professor named Freud. There was another novel in Russian with no cover. And the eighth book was Czech, only a handful of sheets held together by a few threads along the spine. Before she could take it in her hands, Fredy grabbed it. She looked at him with the expression of a displeased librarian. She wished she had a pair of tortoiseshell glasses so that she could look at him over their rim, as serious librarians do.
“This one’s in a very bad state. It’s no good.”
“I’ll fix it.”
“And anyway … it’s not appropriate for children, especially girls.”
Dita narrowed her eyes in irritation.
“With all due respect, Fredy, I’m fourteen years old. Do you honestly believe that after observing on a daily basis thousands of people going to the gas chambers at the edge of the Lager, what I read in a novel might shock me?”
Hirsch looked at her with surprise. And it wasn’t easy to surprise him. He explained to her that the book in question was called The Adventures of the Good Soldier ?vejk and was written by a blasphemous alcoholic called Jaroslav Ha?ek, that it contained scandalous opinions about politics and religion, and more than dubious moral situations. In the end, though, he handed her that book.
Dita caressed the books. They were broken and scratched, worn, with reddish-brown patches of mildew; some were mutilated. But without them, the wisdom of centuries of civilization might be lost—geography, literature, mathematics, history, language. They were precious.
She would protect them with her life.
3.
Dita eats her turnip soup very slowly—they say it fills you more that way—but sipping it barely takes her mind off her hunger. Between one spoonful and the next, the groups of teachers discuss the extraordinary behavior of Morgenstern, their scatterbrained colleague.
“He’s a very strange man. Sometimes he talks a lot, but at other times he hardly says a word to anyone.”
“It would be better if he didn’t speak at all. He just talks nonsense. He’s off his rocker.”
“It was painful to watch him bowing down in front of the Priest in such a servile manner.”
“You couldn’t exactly call him a Resistance hero.”
“I don’t know why Hirsch lets a man with a screw loose give classes to the children.”
Dita overhears them and feels sorry for the old man, who reminds her a bit of her grandfather. She sees him sitting on a stool at the back of the hut, eating by himself, even talking to himself while, with his little finger raised with a refinement that is so out of place in this hut, he ceremoniously lifts the spoon to his mouth as if he were sharing his meal with aristocrats.
They dedicate the afternoon to the usual children’s games and sporting activities, but Dita is desperate for the school day to finish and the final roll call to be over so she can race off to see her parents. In the family camp, news travels quickly from hut to hut, but like in a game of telephone, there are distortions in the retellings.
As soon as she can, Dita rushes off to reassure her mother, who will already have found out about the Block 31 inspection. As she runs down the Lagerstrasse, she comes across her friend Margit.
“Ditiňka, I hear you had an inspection in Thirty-One!”
“That disgusting Priest!”
“Did they find anything? Did they detain anyone?”
“Absolutely nothing; there’s nothing for them to find there.” Dita winked. “Mengele was there, too.”
“Dr. Mengele? He’s a madman. He experimented with injections of blue ink into the pupils of thirty-six children in an attempt to produce blue-eyed people. It was horrible, Ditiňka. Some died of infection, and others were left blind. You were lucky to escape his notice.”
The two girls stop talking. Margit is her best friend, and well aware of her work with the secret library, but Margit knows not to say anything to Dita’s mother, Liesl. She would try to stop her, say it was too dangerous. She’d threaten to tell Dita’s father, or start begging God to save her. It’s better not to tell her, or her father, anything. To change the topic, Dita tells Margit about Morgenstern.
“What a fuss he stirred up. You should have seen the Priest’s face as the professor kept dumping out the contents of his pocket each time he bent over.”