“Quit your spying, you louts!” he shouted at them, half-serious. “I’ll report you to the Kommandant for interfering with official SS business!”
“You’ve got yourself set up nicely, with that official SS business!” one of the SS men was quick to see the joke.
“Do you need more actors in your gang?” another one chimed in, his teeth shining white in the artificial light.
“Yes, I need more vagabonds and you look just the part!” Franz bared his teeth in a snarl in reply to all the taunts. “Now, change into those rags and step on the stage and my girls will carry the duty for you, in the meantime. They look more capable at any rate.”
“Capable, you say?”
“And much more pleasant to look at, than your silly mug!” Franz finished someone off, with a charming smile full of incomparable sarcasm.
Amid such an exchange of pleasantries and the guffaws invariably following them, we stood, smiling, in our costumes.
We did have two men with us; Krampus, a huge, towering Pole with fierce black eyes and a build to match, whom Franz had borrowed from the Sonderkommando and also St. Nicholas himself. It was St. Nicholas who caused quite an argument between Wolff and Franz when Franz had just brought him in from the back of the Kanada.
“You’re taking Dayen with you?” Wolff looked over the former rabbi incredulously.
“I am. I need someone to play St. Nicholas.”
“Should you really take him then?”
“Surely someone else can burn all of those books and documents in his absence,” Franz only shrugged.
Wolff waited for the punch line to the joke. When it didn’t come, he cleared his throat once again. “He’s a Jew.”
Franz regarded his comrade as though the latter had just said something incredibly moronic. “In case you didn’t notice, they all are. Do you want to ask the SS for the volunteers to act in the Christmas play? So that it would be Aryan enough to suit your taste? Or would you like to be St. Nicholas yourself? I don’t care one way or another. Just say the word and I’ll dress you up in a red coat and glue a cotton beard on your face.”
Wolff bristled. It was not something SS comrades would say to one another. He wished to reply something and he had already opened his mouth but suddenly realized that he didn’t know what exactly to say. There was an unmistakable treasonous quality to his comrade Franz’s words, something vague and imperceptible and rogue, yet on which it was impossible to put one’s finger, for Franz didn’t say anything openly hostile to the regime or to the SS or even to the racial theory. He merely thought it to be all right, for a Jew and a rabbi to be St. Nicholas. What could have been said against that? After all, he was in charge of the play. The new Kommandant entrusted him with the full rights to do whatever he pleased with it. At last, Wolff’s Party loyalty triumphed. If the Kommandant said it to be all right, he wasn’t the one to question superior orders.
“Do what you must.” He looked somewhere above Franz’s head as though the mere idea of looking at his comrade’s face was repulsive to him. Franz stood much too close to those Jews. They clung to him much like sheep to their sheepdog. Wolff felt momentarily disgusted with such a trusting attitude. He didn’t like one bit how those Jews looked at Franz. He didn’t like one bit how Franz allowed them to look at him that way.
Something changed in their relationship from that day on. Some wedge drew itself between the two guards and now, not only Andrej but also Wolff, was following Franz with the same eyes – steady, watchful, waiting for something.
Elza was from Slovakia, a recent addition to our Kommando. Her entire family had been gassed upon arrival – mother and father for being too elderly and frail and sisters for being too young – and she resented everyone, who had any relatives left, for this very reason. Not that she was to blame for it. Everyone copes with such enormous grief in their own way; some go mad, like Zosia, who started screaming one day in August of 1942 and didn’t stop until Wolff dragged her outside the barrack and shot her. Some turn into Muselmänner despite lucking out and making it to the Kanada detail where the chances of survival were much higher than in the regular camp. They simply stopped eating, much like Róžínka did when she had just learned about her children and slowly wasted away, withered without having anyone to care for them. Or because they had no one to live for… One can never tell with those silent types.
And then, there were people like Elza, who lived, obsessed with grim hatred for people like Róžínka and me just because we had each other and she didn’t have anyone, anymore.
She was the first one to scoff at my idea to stage a play for the new administration even before I had voiced it to Franz. However, her contempt soon transformed into something much darker, just like her eyes, at the sight of us, the Acting Kommando, appearing just before the evening Appell and still chatting in excitement among ourselves. She watched us silently as we lined up next to the girls from the women’s camp and discreetly slipped our daily rations into the pockets of their striped dresses. She watched us as we resumed our rehearsing after receiving our dinner in our barrack. She watched us as we laughed and shouted our lines and wrapped the blankets around ourselves as capes. She watched us and finally, she’d had enough of such merriment.
“Aren’t you ashamed of yourselves?”
Her shout cut through our chatter like a sharp knife through butter. Silence descended upon the barrack, much like at the SS doctors’ arrival for the inspection.
“Prancing around like a bunch of tramps,” she continued, satisfied with the effect her words had produced. “Are you really so excited about pleasing your SS masters then? Have you no pride left in you at all? Dressing up and jumping around like monkeys, in a circus, for their pleasure! A truly honorable calling. Nothing to say!”
I felt for her. I always had but for some reason, her accusations, which she chose to direct at all of us, prompted a response from me which I couldn’t quite explain to myself. I stepped in front of the group to face her.
“Kindly spare us your sentiments on our account. When was the last time we were allowed to do something to make us smile in this place? An opportunity comes at last for us to do something – anything – that is not digging through the murdered people’s belongings daily and you ought to object to that? You have no right! You simply have no right!” A previously unknown feeling, some dark, overpowering rage welled up inside of me, uncontrollable and roaring, which made me shout without any regard to the regulations. “Some of us have been here for years. We have seen it all – the death, the beatings, the disease, the selections – and you wish to preach to us that we are not allowed to pretend, for a couple of short weeks only – that there’s something else beyond that, in this world? You blame us for our desire to remember what human emotions are like? You blame us for our desire to dress up and pretend to be someone else just to escape the horror of this place for a few moments? You’re not the only one who lost everyone, Elza. You’re not the only one whose feelings are to be considered. We want to live the best we can and you have not the right to tell us that we can’t!”
Momentarily, she grabbed my elbow and pulled me, still wrapped in the colorful blanket, towards the door of the barrack. She shoved it open and pushed me into the snow-shrouded outside. A gust of wind hit me in the face, along with her words.
“I have not the right?! Look!” She pressed my jaw into her vice-like grip, directing my face toward the crematorium. “Look at the chimney, you idiot! People are being burned there as we speak. People are being burned there daily, our own people, our own families and you tell me that I have no right?! You wish to celebrate it by dancing and singing! You wish to thank the good Herr Kommandant for his kind treatment of us! You wish to thank the SS for being so considerate!”
“It has gotten better under Kommandant Liebehenschel’s command,” I muttered stubbornly in my defense. “You were not here before, when Höss was in charge. You have not the faintest idea of how bad it was then. If there’s anything
we can do to keep in Kommandant Liebehenschel’s good graces—”
“Just like you keep in Dahler’s good graces?” She stepped in front of me. Shadows played on her face, provided by the light of the stove, lit inside the barrack, distorting it and twisting it into a grotesque mask.
I did not say anything to that. I had not anything to say to that.
“You say I have no right! No, I say, it’s you who has no right. You have no right to call yourself a Jew after what you did. You’re a disgrace to our ancestors who suffered but endured in the name of God. You’re a disgrace to our history. You’re nothing but a dirty tramp who sold herself to the SS.” Her face almost touched mine. She repeated, articulating every syllable, “Dirty. Tramp.” The words stung more than the back of her hand with which she’d hit me across my mouth. I sensed it coming and didn’t turn away, didn’t try to dodge it.
She was right. I was a dirty tramp and I deserved it.
Elza was long gone and I still stood in-between the darkness and light, between the madness and sanity, between the life of the barrack and death of the chimney, belching reddish clouds of smoke towards the indigo, indifferent sky. It was December, yet no one shouted for me to shut the door like they ordinarily would have. It was Róžínka who took me by my shoulders and brought me inside to the suddenly quiet barrack and whispered in my ear the only consolation she could offer me, “She has no right to tell you how to survive. She’s mad at you for having me around, is all. Don’t take it to heart.”
Elza kept glaring at me the entire morning before the roll call, peering almost greedily into Franz’s face which had clouded over and grew dark and wrathful as soon as he laid eyes on my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Elza straighten in her place trembling with some emotion I couldn’t explain. She wished to prove something to herself that morning, hoping for everyone to see the degree to which I had fallen and wishing for me to point at her, as soon as Franz asked me the expected question, “What happened to your face?”
Looking somewhere past him, I replied softly, “I slipped and fell, Herr Unterscharführer.”
He stepped closer to me, forcing me to look him in the eye.
“Who hit you?” he repeated, purposely rephrasing the question.
“No one, Herr Unterscharführer. I slipped and fell,” I repeated, louder this time.
He had just started saying something when Wolff spoke abruptly behind his back.
“The clumsy broad has already said it fifteen fucking times that she fell on her face! Can we get on with the roll call or do you wish to call a doctor for her?!”
Franz turned on his heel and glared at him with all the venom in the world but said nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Germany, 1947
Helena reflected for some time after giving her testimony. The Chairman didn’t rush her, respectful of her past.
“I don’t know who reported us in the end,” she summarized at last. “As you can clearly see, far too many people were aware of our relationship already by Christmas. And then at Christmas, after the play, Franz made the mistake of thanking me a bit too warmly in front of the Kommandant and the officers… It was nothing really, just a natural human reaction; he wanted to thank me for the idea with the play that earned him the commendation from his superior and… Kommandant Liebehenschel only laughed it off and turned it into a joke but several others from his staff began looking at Franz with suspicion from that moment on. By the time Kommandant Höss arrived in May of 1944 and took over the command once again, the whole of Auschwitz, if not knew, then suspected that something was going on between us.” She sighed. “Someone reported it.”
She grew pensive, her eyes, clouded with memories, fixed on the floor on which the story of her life unraveled, invisible for the others. Her hands lay limply on her lap now. She seemed oddly serene to Dr. Hoffman, blissfully lost in her own world into which he had no access.
The Chairman cleared his throat and probed her gently, with a soft, “What happened next, Frau Dahler?”
Helena pulled her head up with an effort, looking a bit dazed and confused as if she didn’t expect to find herself in the courtroom but someplace entirely different.
“One day, we, the Kommando that is, were being marched from work back to the barrack. A Kapo approached me – I didn’t know him – and told me to follow him. I didn’t know what it was all about until he brought me to Block 11, the punishment block. One of the political SS officers took me to the cell and locked the door without saying anything. Kommandant Liebehenschel got rid of the standing cells but now, with Kommandant Höss being back in the camp, the regular ‘dark’ cells were back in use. Those were just concrete chambers, with no windows and no lights whatsoever; only with a bucket in the corner for the prisoners to use. Sometimes we would receive water. Very rarely, some soup.”
Helena regarded the hem of her skirt, which she kept twisting in her fingers mechanically. Dr. Hoffman saw her struggle with piecing together the memories which she most certainly had tried to avoid ever since the camp’s liberation. Hardly anyone wished to relive their experience with the Auschwitz Gestapo.
“They kept us prisoners, there, for quite some time before they would begin the interrogation – as a means of psychological torture,” Helena continued – calmly, rationally, carefully picking out the words and arranging them into the needed pattern. “At first one didn’t realize it but within hours it began driving people mad, the darkness and the silence. The worst part was that it was impossible to tell whether it was day or night; one couldn’t even hear the roll-call fanfare from there. It was dark and cold and quiet like in some cave into which one falls just to die in there. With time, it began to feel that way, as though the light would never come.”
A paper slid off Franz Dahler’s lap and glided softly toward the floor without him noticing it. Dr. Hoffman saw that the former guard was gazing at the floor with the same haunted look about him. In spite of himself, the psychiatrist pulled forward, a bit unsure if the Austrian would hear him.
“Were you imprisoned in the same bunker, Herr Dahler?”
The former SS guard looked up sharply at the mention of his name – a purely military instinct. He allowed himself a quick smile as if in apology for his absentminded state before confirming Dr. Hoffman’s suspicions with a quiet, “Yes.”
“I have a record of it here.” Still not quite back in the courtroom, still a bit lost in the twilight of his cell, Dahler began searching for the needed document in the stack of files that he kept on his lap.
A bailiff stepped forward and picked up the fallen paper off the floor before handing it to him. Dahler muttered his thanks with another bashful smile – forgive me please, I’m not myself today – and motioned a bit timidly in the direction of Dr. Hoffman. The bailiff understood the gesture and placed the paper in front of the psychiatrist. Dr. Hoffman gave it a peripheral perusal and moved it towards the Chairman and Lieutenant Carter. A simple document in German with a sheet of a verified translation attached to it and simple facts enumerated with typical German bureaucratic meticulousness: name, rank, date of detention, the reason for detention, released due to the lack of evidence.
The paper looked good enough for Dahler’s defense. The grounds were particularly favorable for this hearing: detained on suspicions of having a consensual sexual relationship with an inmate of the Jewish race. “Consensual,” underlined in red by someone from the political office in Auschwitz, must have been a particularly shameful charge for the said SS officer in question. Rape cases were dismissed mostly with an oral reprimand – that much Dr. Hoffman knew already. But consensual, as though an accusation of betrayal of one’s blood, the betrayal of all the ideals the German Reich and the SS stood for, that they couldn’t let go of for almost a week, keeping both Franz and Helena in their cells next to each other and interrogating them separately, in the hope that at least one should break and speak.
Yes, the paper was good if Dahler had the need to
persuade the court that his feelings for his wife were genuine and not some ploy to get himself a release form from the court. But somehow, Dr. Hoffman sensed that the court had long moved past the need for such persuasion.
“They kept me there for almost a week… I think.” Helena scowled, unsure of her date of detention or release. Unlike her husband, she didn’t have any papers recovered from the Gestapo archives. No one wrote such documents for the inmates. Inmates were disposable, not even technically people, in the camp administration’s eyes. “Every day they would take me out of that cell and demand me to sign the paper, to confess that a certain SS Unterscharführer Dahler was having relations with me. I kept insisting that nothing was going on between us and the more I insisted, the more annoyed they grew with me. Soon, Schurz himself – he was the one appointed in Grabner’s place – came to interrogate me. This time, they actually took me outside, he and his men and brought me to the Black Wall. The one, next to which they used to shoot prisoners in the early days…”
She sniffled quietly. Her eyes, though, were dry. “They told me that if I didn’t confess, they’d shoot me right there and then.”
Another long pause. A breath hitched in Dr. Hoffman’s throat despite his knowing the outcome of the interrogation, despite seeing Helena very much alive and breathing in front of him. The tension was still palpable, dark, tense.
“I told them that they might as well. I said that I had nothing else to tell them.”
Helena looked up at the panel of judges and Dr. Hoffman found himself wondering at the sudden determination shining in her black eyes. She must have regarded Schurz the same way, wrathfully almost, empowered by her own newfound strength. A protector, an all-forgiving martyr perhaps, but surely no longer a victim.
The Girl in the Striped Dress: A completely heartbreaking and gripping World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 24