The Librarian of Auschwitz(91)
Some of the women mutter in bewilderment, but Liesl keeps talking.
“You say there’s no point in escaping. The Germans are going to have dozens of patrols searching for the fugitives, and that forces them to keep more and more troops on the home front rather than sending them to fight against the Allies who are going to rescue us. Is it pointless for us to fight here in order to distract the German troops? Does it serve any purpose for us to stay here obeying whatever the SS tell us to do until they decide to kill us?”
Astonishment has stifled all the muttering and given rise to differences of opinion. Dita is frozen on the spot in amazement, still holding the comb. Liesl Adler’s is the only voice to be heard in the hut.
“I once heard a young girl refer to us as ‘old hens.’ She was right. We spend the whole day clucking and not doing much else.”
“And you, who are talking so much, why don’t you escape if it’s such a good thing?” screeched the woman who had been speaking earlier. “It’s fine to talk, but—”
“I’m too old, and I’m not strong enough. Or brave enough. I’m an old hen. That’s why I respect those who are brave enough to do what I wouldn’t do.”
The women around her have not only stopped murmuring; they’ve stopped saying anything. Even that friendly chatterbox, Mrs. Turnovská, who always takes a leading role in any conversation, looks at her friend quizzically.
Dita puts the comb down on the mattress and looks at her mother as if she were studying her under a microscope, surprised to have discovered someone quite different from the person she’s always lived with. She has thought her mother was living in isolation in her own world since the death of her husband, quite removed from everything that was going on around her.
“Mama, I haven’t heard you say so much in years.”
“Do you think I said more than I ought to have, Edita?”
“Absolutely not.”
A few hundred meters away, silence reigns. And darkness. If either fugitive raises his hand to his face, he can’t even see his fingers. In this wooden cubicle, where they either have to sit or lie down, the passage of time is agonizingly slow, and they feel a bit sick from breathing in the overused air inside the cubicle. A veteran advised them to soak tobacco with kerosene to throw the dogs off their scent.
Rudi notices Fred Wetzler’s agitated breathing. They have the time to go over the same list of things a million times in their heads. It’s impossible for Rudi to avoid thinking how crazy he is to have left his advantageous position in the camp, where he could have waited out the war getting by as he has so far. But escape fever took hold of him, and there was no way to get rid of it. He couldn’t rid his mind of Alice Munk’s final look at him or of Hirsch’s blue face. After seeing an indestructible being like Fredy Hirsch fall apart in front of his eyes, there’s no way he believes in any sort of resistance to the fever.
And what is there to say about the death of Alice? How can he accept that her beauty and her youth were not enough to halt the steamroller of hate? There are no barriers for the Nazis; their determination to kill even the last Jew hiding at the ends of the earth is methodical and unrelenting. He and Wetzler have to escape. But that isn’t enough. They must also tell the world—particularly the slow-moving West, which believes the front is in Russia or France—that the real slaughter is taking place in the heart of Poland, in the places they refer to as concentration camps, which only truly concentrate on perpetrating the most heinous criminal operation in history.
And so, despite the anguish that is adding to the cold on this dark, freezing night, Rudi ultimately decides he is where he ought to be.
Time ticks on, although the minuscule crack doesn’t allow them to see if it’s day or night. They must spend three days submerged in the total darkness of night. Even so, they know that the day has already dawned outside because of the sound of activity.
Waiting is difficult. They manage to doze off from time to time, but on awakening, they react with a nervous start because when they open their eyes, the world has disappeared, swallowed by blackness. And then almost immediately they remember that they are in this bunker and they calm down, but only a little, because they are hidden just a few meters from the guard towers. Their heads spin.
They’ve imposed complete silence, because for all they know, someone could be wandering around outside and might hear them. They also have no idea if the tiny crack in the lacework of wooden planks will be enough to prevent them from suffocating. But despite all this, there comes a moment when one of them can’t take it any longer and, in a whisper, asks what would happen if one morning more planks were placed on top of their pile, and they weighed so much that they couldn’t move them. They both know the answer—the hideout would turn into a sealed coffin in which they would slowly die an agonizing death from asphyxiation or hunger and thirst. It’s inevitable that during this long and stressful wait, they will become delirious, inevitable that they will ask themselves which of the two of them will die first, should they become trapped.
They hear the barking of dogs, their worst enemies, but luckily they’re quite far off. But then they start to hear another sound coming ever closer: footsteps and voices approaching until they sound worryingly defined.
The guards’ boots thud on the ground. The two fugitives hold their breath. They couldn’t breathe even if they wanted to, because fear seals their lungs. They hear the muffled sound of planks being moved aside. Some of the SS soldiers are removing boards in the area where they are hiding. Bad news. The soldiers are so close now that they can even catch snippets of conversation, angry words from troops who have had their leave canceled because they have to tramp around the perimeter of the Lager. Their words are full of hatred directed at the fugitives. They’re saying that when they find the men, if Schwarzhuber doesn’t execute them, they’ll happily smash in their skulls themselves. And their words are so clear that Rudi feels his body grow cold, as if he were dead already. His life depends solely upon the thickness of the board that covers them. A mere four or five centimeters is all that separates them from death.