The Librarian of Auschwitz(99)
On the platform, Lederer slowly retreats. They haven’t noticed him, and he takes advantage of the commotion caused by the arrest to slip away. As he walks off, trying to stay calm, he curses the heavens: The Resistance is riddled with informers. Someone has betrayed them. He finds an unchained motorbike in town, gets on it, and doesn’t look back.
Viktor Pestek is taken to the central quarters of the SS. They will torture him for days. They want to know why he came back to Auschwitz; they want information about the Resistance, but he knows nothing about them, and he says nothing about his relationship with Renée Neumann. He will remain in jail until he is executed on October 8, 1944.
26.
Margit and Dita are sitting at the back of the hut. The afternoons have grown longer, and it’s even starting to get a bit hot. It’s a sticky heat in Auschwitz, stained with swirls of ash. The girls’ conversation has tapered off. Their friendship has reached a point where moments of silence don’t bother them. An old friend suddenly appears.
“Renée! It’s been a long time!”
The blond girl gives a faint smile at the reception. She tugs down a curl and chews it. Hardly anyone has treated her kindly in recent times.
“Did you hear about Lederer’s escape with a first officer of the SS who didn’t want to be a Nazi anymore?”
“Yes. It was that Nazi you used to tell us about, the one who used to look at you.…”
Renée nods her head very slowly.
“It turns out he wasn’t a bad person,” she tells them. “He really didn’t like what was going on in here. That’s why he deserted.”
Dita and Margit don’t say a word. To a Jew, a Nazi SS officer who acts as an executioner in an extermination camp … can it really be that he’s not a bad person? It’s hard to accept. And yet, every one of them has stood watching one of those immature young men dressed in his black uniform and high boots. And when they look into his eyes, they don’t see an executioner or a guard; they see a young man.
“Two patrol guards approached me this afternoon. They pointed at me and laughed. They told me that two days ago they arrested—well, those two pigs said he was my lover, but that’s a dirty lie. Anyway, they arrested him at O?wi?cim station.”
“Three kilometers from here! But he escaped almost two months ago! Why didn’t he hide farther away?”
Renée looks thoughtful for a moment. “I know why he was so close.”
“Was he hiding in the town all this time?”
“No, I’m sure he was coming from Prague. He came back to get me out of here—and my mother, of course, I’d never have gone without her. But they caught him.…”
The other two girls remain silent. Renée looks down. She regrets having been so honest with them. She turns and starts to walk back to her hut.
“Renée,” Dita calls after her. “That Viktor, maybe he wasn’t a bad person, after all.”
Renée takes her time in agreeing. In any event, she’ll no longer be able to find out.
Margit heads off to spend some time with her family, and Dita is left on her own. Today, there aren’t any inmates in the quarantine camp, and the neighboring camp on the other side, camp BIIc, is also temporarily empty, its occupants evacuated to where no one knows. It’s unusual for these two neighboring camps to be empty. And because of the unusually hot afternoon, people in the family camp are inside their huts. Dita pauses to take in the rare moment of silence.
Then she notices that someone is looking at her. A solitary figure in camp BIIc waves and gestures at her. It’s a prisoner, a teenager who must be carrying out some repairs. As she walks toward the fence on her side, taking a proper look, she sees that he’s wearing a newer striped suit than usually worn by the prisoners in the camps, and his beret is a sign that he belongs to the maintenance crew, a privileged group. She recalls Arkadiusz, the Pole who takes advantage of his assigned task of covering the barrack roofs with asphalt sheets to do deals in the latrines. His talent for carrying out all sorts of repairs gives him access to all the camps and, what’s even better, to improved food rations. That’s why the maintenance people are instantly recognizable, just like this one, by their healthy look.
Dita makes as if she’s leaving, but he gesticulates wildly, waving her closer. He seems pleasant enough and, between laughs, says a few words in Polish that Dita doesn’t understand. She only manages to decipher the word jabko, which means “apple” in Czech—a magic word. Anything that suggests food is magic.
“Jabko?”
He smiles and signals no with his finger.
“Not jabko … jajko!”
Dita feels a little disillusioned. It’s been so long since she tasted an apple that she’s almost forgotten what it’s like. She thinks they are sweet but a little tart, but what she remembers best is the crunch of their flesh. Her mouth waters. She has no idea what the boy is trying to saying to her. Maybe it’s nothing in particular and he just wants to flirt with her, but she’s determined to find out. It makes her a bit uncomfortable, but she’s not really bothered that older boys now notice her.
She’s frightened of the electric fence. She’s already seen several inmates walking with feverish resolve until they hit the fence and receive a lethal electric shock. After the first time, whenever Dita has seen someone heading toward the fence with that mad look in their eyes, she’s walked away as quickly as she can, away from the horrific cries. She’s never been able to forget that first spark, the frizzy hair of that sickly woman, her body suddenly turning black, the disagreeable smell of singed flesh, the wisps of smoke rising from the charred body.