At eleven thirty, the truck that took Sofia to the camp in Auschwitz finally drove off.
XI
OUR BODIES ARE ALL THAT WE HAVE
1
Born on the snow.
On March 5, 1942, at 8:55 a.m., Sofia Pawlicka, Cèrmik by her maiden name, from Rzeszów, went into labor and gave birth to a boy in a hidden corner of barrack 115 in the women’s camp in Birkenau, in Auschwitz II. It was snowing and the temperature had gone down to several degrees below zero. The baby was small and scrawny because his mother was so weak and everything suggested he wouldn’t survive.
Sofia had to endure many afflictions, especially to avoid her pregnancy being noticed during roll call and conceal the changes her body, that grew from month to month, was undergoing. Other women prisoners told her what happened to pregnant women when they reached Auschwitz, and she was determined that wouldn’t happen to her as long as she was alive and she would draw on all her strength to hide that son she carried within her from the Germans. And she succeeded in keeping it secret for several months. To that end, she stayed still, almost paralyzed for long periods of time in places the female SS didn’t usually search, like underneath the barrack, where the prisoners had made a hole for her, where she crouched for hours until she couldn’t feel her legs, that were stiff and numb, or fainted from nervous stress. She also hid inside the latrines or underneath the bunks, right up against the wall, on her back in a space where she could hardly breathe, where rats and insects passed constantly.
In fact most of the pregnant women Sofia heard about were taken to a barrack set apart for them, V3 in Birkenau, three hundred feet or so from barrack 115. They generally kept some seventy or eighty desperate women in there, who arrived with the faint maternal hope they could save their children, but immediately went mad when they discovered what the real purpose of that barrack was. However, nobody lasted long in that place. They provoked premature, aborted births through injections of chemicals or via blows or kicks delivered by the female camp guards. In both cases, mother and child sometimes died simultaneously. I have often wondered why they didn’t gas them straight away when they got off the trains or trucks. But they didn’t because the arbitrary mentality of the Nazis acted in formal, mechanical ways when it came to setting up procedures, and a pregnancy was just another procedure, naturally to produce a life that would have to be immediately terminated, but nevertheless it had to follow its own procedure, except in those cases when a mother resisted too fiercely when being led to the labor barrack, and then she would be sent straight to the gas chambers without a moment’s hesitation. If they didn’t abort and did finally give birth, the SS women snatched the babies from their mother’s arms and killed them immediately, sometimes in the mothers’ presence, by submerging their heads in buckets of water. There were cases when they were handed over to be sent to Germany to be subjected to a programme of Aryanization—if the child was fair-haired and blue-eyed. The mothers never knew what the fate of their children was and, generally, soon died from septicemia, since they were taken to the filthiest of barracks where they bled to death or contracted lethal diseases.
Sofia gave birth in the spot under the barrack where she had hidden so often. Crouching, she gave birth on the snow, silently, clenching her lips so she didn’t scream, helped by Sara Ruda Malach—a fellow prisoner and mother of three children that died in the ghetto—who severed her umbilical cord with her teeth. Then they carefully wrapped the child in rags and hid him between straw mattresses. They ran the risk that his crying might betray everyone in the barrack, that they might all be gassed for concealing that child. They were even afraid he would choke to death because Sofia was so rigorous in her efforts to hide him from the female guards. Moreover, Sofia and some of the other prisoners who were aware of the baby’s existence knew there were real dangers they could only fend off with prayers: they knew she could barely feed her child, for whom there was no medicine, that it was freezing cold and that there were the loathsome rats that were Sofia’s obsession ever since the day she saw, near where she was hiding under the barrack, rats fighting and biting over an abandoned baby next to its dead mother. But then a time came when she was forced to think, even if only to herself, against her feelings of tenderness, that that protection was simply a slow death sentence, that sooner or later they would find him, they would find her baby. To proclaim his existence would amount to executing him herself; hoping for a miracle was futile. And she couldn’t cry, her tears had dried up forever. But she would let life decide rather than surrender. And she began by giving him a name: Ari. Yakov would have liked that name. That name and body that were now breathing together in spite of everything.
“You are Ari. Your name is Ari. I hope you’ll be able to say it some day,” Sofia told the child she pressed against her breast, in a faint murmur fraught with silence. The camp’s snow-covered esplanade was beginning to awaken to the realization of hard facts invading like nightmares.
So then, Hurbinek was really Ari. Ari Pawlicka, at least once and only from the whispering lips of his mother. Primo Levi never knew. Henek didn’t either. No one ever did.
2
The closeness of bodies.
When I was in Moscow in 1989 I saw a woman who looked as I imagined the mother of Hurbinek—really Ari—to be, that Hurbinek I am creating as Sofia created hers. She was small and vivacious, beautiful and firm, but looked ill. She walked slowly and her glance was very expressive. We were very close for a moment. Then she went on her way without noticing me. Her face stayed with me. I don’t really know why. When I was thinking about Sofia, here, in my room in a Frankfurt hospital, I suddenly thought of that woman I had walked past in the GUM Department Stores and realized that the moment had come to give that memory substance. It was a face from the future I encountered in the past to illustrate a much greater past I entered as an intruder. She had Sofia’s sweet, slightly pale, emaciated face, with prominent bags under eyes that depressed her eye sockets even deeper, perhaps as a result of poor food, or a complete lack of food, or an illness, tuberculosis perhaps. That spectral, skinny face that had suddenly aged, is how I imagine Sofia’s to be, in the weeks after she gave birth.
In barrack 115, packed with bodies that now have nothing, that are themselves their only possession and only identity, Sofia is nursing Ari, always in a state of terrified alert. But she doesn’t eat. Only now and then her Hungarian friend, Sara Ruda Malach, keeps back for her a ration of potato soup. “Our body is what we are, all we have,” Sofia thinks, when she sees herself surrounded by other bodies, bodies everywhere, whose ages no one could ever guess: elderly girls, elderly women bereft of flesh and future, women surviving daily the selection that takes hundreds to the gas chamber. Bodies close to each other. “The immeasurability of immediate closeness,”Walter Benjamin wrote somewhere, as I now recall. How can one measure one’s own history, that brims over in contact with another body, when there is no privacy for bodies that are complete strangers, that don’t love each other, that wouldn’t even know of their existence if it weren’t for that togetherness forced upon them by the camp, that absurd cruelty, reduction to zero, unavoidable reduction to a common fate?
Bodies, in Auschwitz, are near one another, and protect, abhor, detest, touch, accompany one another. Some bodies steal subtly from others (like, for example, the body that snatches from another dying body its bowl of soup, thus enacting life’s implacable law); or snitch on other sick bodies so they take them away, they don’t want to know where—although, of course, they know!—and leave space for those remaining, and leave blankets and shoes. But then the body that has snitched realizes the empty space is being filled by two or three additional bodies, that fight over that space, those shoes and that blanket. Bodies that will finally want to embrace any body whatsoever before dying, as Sofia will do in the last second of her life, several months later.
At night, among the bodies sleeping in barrack 115, Sofia left Ari in t
he straw and put a small, not very tight muzzle over his mouth to deaden the sound of his frequent, unexpected crying. She knew Ari might choke, but Sofia preferred that terrible possibility to the certainty he would be murdered if his existence were discovered. On many such nights when she couldn’t get to sleep, as in the many preceding months, she tortured herself repeatedly thinking about how she didn’t know what had happened to Yakov. She didn’t want to think he was dead, though she took it for granted on days she felt particularly pessimistic. At other moments she would let herself be lulled by a timid hope, and thought how he must be well and out of that camp; then she’d be tortured by the sorrow Yakov would feel when he thought of her and searched for her everywhere, futilely, never finding her, as he never found Azvel the old bookseller, and never found any views of Jamaica. But Sofia could never know when she was thinking of her family, for example, that they were really so close. Her father-in-law Samuel Pawlicka and her brother-inlaw David died in Auschwitz, a few barracks away, days after Ari was born, that March 5, and worst of all, her elder brothers, Aaron and Stefan Cèrmik, taken in a round-up in Rzeszów and hurled into a cattle truck that dropped them on a platform in Auschwitz at midnight, were gassed at the very moment she arrived in the camp. The bodies, beloved bodies of beloved beings, had for a time been close, very close, gathered together forever.
But later when Ari was two months old, he began to be her greatest torture. And the torture grew because only she knew when she had those unexpected flashes of that horrific though righteous thought about killing him with her own hands, to save him from all that future pain. A thought that came to her the first time under barrack 115, immediately after her son was born. She’d never ruled it out completely. It was her most private, lacerating secret. Then, she thought, if she did do it, she’d throw herself at the electrified fence. She wouldn’t be able to live a second more.
She was tortured by the filth in which they lived, a source of infection for Ari and herself. What would be of her son if she died first? The clothing wrapped around Ari was full of bits from his defecations, earth and grease stains, bits of other people’s dirt, filth that carried the filth of others. And yet Sofia had got over her revulsion. One day she discovered her own body had sores. She’d been infected with horrible boils, her friend Sara Ruda was to blame, devored as she was by lice and fleas, and the boy as well. The sores had reached her mouth, that was covered in ulcers, just like her baby’s, whose lips were strips of raw flesh. Moreover, Ari wasn’t growing; he fitted in the small hollow shaped by her hands.
Time went by, Ari was three months old. Feeding him was agony as death drew nearer and nearer. A prisoner, who said she was a doctor, although she’d admitted to Sofia she had in fact only been a doctor’s lover, confirmed that malnutrition was advancing. Sofia could do nothing; she was one more defeated woman.
The evasive glances from the other bodies refused to meet hers. They were forlorn glances. And I imagine and see them in Frankfurt, exchanged by the patients in this hospital, as I’ve seen them at other times in my life. It is easy enough, if you know how. They meld with uneasy looks: what’s happening, what’s dream, what’s reality. And the glances finally become disconsolable grief. They watched Sofia in her colossal struggle to keep her child alive, but they knew that today or tomorrow neither would be there. Dream: no dreams were possible, only a dream of eating. Dreams cannot be interpreted, cannot be deciphered in terms of any another reality. Dreams are what they are, an additional, different, distanced reality. Sofia would like to dream of food, of food for her and her son. But she avoided dreams, avoided that luxury, even avoided sleep, because when she slept, exhausted by tiredness, Sofia knew that when she woke up, Ari’s body, in her lap, an extension of herself, might perhaps be frozen or crushed.
3
No one laughs.
My thoughts now turned back to Yakov. He arrived in the camp the same week as Sofia, after spending several days exposed to the elements in Plaszów, where an SS officer put an unloaded revolver to his temple every morning, laughed and said, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, right!” He came in a truck that formed part of a convoy of twenty-two trucks packed with Jews from the whole of Galicia. He recognized faces from the Podgórze ghetto and was scared. He was still with Artur, who kept by his side all the time, weeping despondently, interminably, when he thought of his daughters and Frankie, whose murder was unknown to him. But Artur was separated from him as soon as they reached Auschwitz, and taken with the majority of those men to the barrack next to the gas chambers and crematoria. Yakov said goodbye because he knew where his friend was headed.
They sent the remainder to a large esplanade before allotting them to a barrack. They forced them to witness one of the frequent executions. It was an old man and a young man, barely an adolescent. They were on the point of hanging them, had just put a rope round their necks. The scaffold was very basic, made from white timber; it rocked at every movement; prisoners were underneath with barrows ready to collect the bodies. Only the fifteen-year-old whimpered things Yakov, who happened to be in the front row, couldn’t understand. He was Russian and had pushed a German soldier who was whipping the old man. Now both young man and old were paying for that with a lesson for everyone.
Later on, in the barrack, Yakov’s thoughts returned to those he had left behind. To his family in Rzeszów, to his beloved Sofia, who he thought was free along with Frankie somewhere in the ghetto or perhaps, in his most utopian moments, had escaped from there and been hidden by Raca in a corner of her big house on Ta rgova Street. His imagination couldn’t harbor anything tainted by reality. He didn’t know the fates of his father and brother. He didn’t know Sofia was pregnant. After a few months, Yakov would wander through the camp, would go to and from the Krupp workshops where he worked as a slave, and not even suspect that his own son, whose existence he was totally unaware of, would be born and survive in that appalling factory of death.
Meanwhile Yakov had seen other men go into decline, robust men, people with faith, true fighters. They were transformed into the living dead, and then hunted down and selected. He knows the ability to resist has its limits and keeps repeating that to himself. But those limits are extensive; he is still one resisting inside that kind of filthy rabbit farm, he thought, destined to be fodder for the slaughterhouse or mere skins. They resisted beyond all manner of belief. That was supreme courage, success at survival. He was thinking about resistance the day Ari was born, about strength taken from where there no longer was anymore. If he went to sleep thinking along those same lines, it was because he had entered a strange twilight zone, a mental place where he located himself to see what he would become the day after. He saw himself as if he were someone else, stronger and not in retreat.
One day he laughed. He was looking after another seriously ill prisoner who was so skinny he seemed to float in the air. The man would die the day after. In the midst of that wretchedness, the sickly man burst out laughing as if he were coughing, and took from his pocket a soft, wrinkled potato on which someone had etched a caricature of Hitler. He handed it to Yakov who burst out laughing; he wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was the potato’s ridiculous shape or the grotesqueness of the situation. However, he went on laughing and Yakov had to put one hand over the sick man’s mouth as he placed the other over his own. The man convulsed and was soon back in his moribund state. Yakov shamelessly devoured the potato there and then. That night, appalled once again by that affliction but astonished to be still alive, Yakov realized he missed laughter, or rather, when he thought of that afternoon’s occurrence, he remembered that sensation actually did exist though he’d quite forgotten what it was like. Laughter didn’t emerge, not even in the case of those who went crazy. There were no laughs. No one laughed in the camp, except for the guards when they were doing their work in a good mood.
4
Fear in the blood.
Maria Mandel was a tall, lean woman, who always looked rage-stricken, w
ith her hair tied back and an unpleasant expression on her lips, as if in a continual mix of repulsion and ironic smile. A photo exists of her saluting Himmler when he visited the camp. She is next to Wirths. Whenever she spoke, she screamed piercingly and displayed her uneven teeth. She was Head of the Women’s Camp and was known as The Beast because of her extreme brutality. Others called her The Spider, because of the way she wove her webs to catch the prisoners’ hidden children. That was her mission in life and she applied herself with exaggerated zeal. She had received her training in the Ravensbrück camp, where she left in her wake a reputation as a merciless murderer. She was always preceded by two female SS. She would tour the barracks daily and walk in without prior warning, acting like a hunter mounting an ambush. The prisoners shook when they saw her come in because they never knew what to expect. What The Beast thought was right one day was wrong the next, what was recommended one day was forbidden the next: a piece of cloth like a scarf on someone’s head annoyed her one day (and she was capable of killing the individual involved just for that) and the day after, on the contrary, she’d linger tying a knot in a morbid maternal spirit on the head of a pale, motionless prisoner.
Any sideways glance that met with hers was a challenge that called for humiliation. She would react, beside herself, furiously punching and kicking her victim in the belly. They found it hard to separate her out from the victim she would beat with gloved hands or a chain she wore round her waist. When she finished the job, she was so red in the face and sweating so much, that the SS had to prise her off and prop her up, she was so exhausted. In 1947, when she was sentenced to death and they were about to hang her, someone at the foot of the scaffold reminded her how she had killed eight hundred women with her own hands. She bawled for one last time, flashing the whites of her eyes, in an indication it wasn’t very many.
The Birthday Buyer Page 16