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The Birthday Buyer

Page 17

by Adolfo García Ortega


  Sofia had seen her several times and suffered one of her attacks in June 1942. The Beast had walked into barrack 115 in the middle of the morning; at the time Sofia was looking after Ari, but couldn’t react quickly enough to hide him. When the two SS women ordered them imperiously to stand in a row, she only had time to put the gag in her baby’s mouth and hand him over to Sara Ruda who hid under the wooden bunks during the entire visit of Frau Mandel. To help Sara, Sofia distracted the brutal woman by mentioning that there was no wood or coal left for the stove. Without saying a word, Maria Mandel let go a slap that made her collapse on the ground. She undid her chain, started bawling and hitting her remorselessly.

  “You fool! There are no stoves for you in summer, you shitty Jew, there are no stoves for you!” she shouted in the foulest of tempers.

  Sofia protected herself as best she could, but too many blows were raining down. Why so much punishment for such a trifle, she wondered. She passed out, she was so weak. The worst about that visit wasn’t the savage beating she received, but the fear she was left with, terrible fear in her body because she had brought herself to the attention of Frau Mandel and sensed she would be back, that she wouldn’t leave her in peace and in the end would discover Ari.

  She imagined this and her blood froze when another woman appeared in her mind, who, like her, was hiding her small child in the barrack’s hellish nooks and crannies. Her name was Barbara Breonka and she was Czech.

  They had caught her making a kind of pap from the daily broth and dry black bread, to which she’d added a small piece of potato. She was crumbling it with her fingers to make it softer. The Mandel woman spotted her and was suspicious. There were lots in her position; she had already rooted out more than forty and in every case both mother and child had died, but only after being tortured.

  When Frau Mandel took hold of the baby Barbara Breonka had tied to her lap and that was beginning to wriggle free, she ordered all the women in the neighboring barracks to line up opposite the barbed wire fences. She placed the woman in front of them and the child on the ground. She took the baby’s clothes off. It wasn’t yet six month’s old, was tiny and was crying. The Beast then crossed her arms and waited silently for one of the women who couldn’t stand it any longer to clutch at the baby in order to pick it up off the ground. Frau Mandel suddenly burst into song. Sofia recognized the music she’d heard on her parents’ gramophone.

  It was a cruel torture for Sofia to see that child turn purple and move on the ground that cold morning. She scratched her wrists in anguish. An old woman ran to help the baby, knowing it was a suicidal act, and was cut down by a bullet from one of the watch towers.

  “Bravo, you good Jew!” Frau Mandel exclaimed. And started singing again.

  The dead woman thus lost all she had, all she was, she lost her body, thought Sofia while her eyes tried to avoid that bundle stretched on the ground, and her mind went off to distant beech woods and meadows they couldn’t see, as eternal as the vineyards and cherry and chestnut trees on the hills of Rzeszów. That old woman no longer existed. All the other women were horrified. After standing in front of that cruel spectacle for a few hours, Frau Mandel gave out orders for the mother to be taken to the gas chambers and for the rest to go back to their barracks. The baby was left there, and there it died in the afternoon.

  5

  Saying goodbye forever.

  She heard the trains arriving when she couldn’t get to sleep in the barrack; she identified the whistle of that train; it was like the one that took her and Yakov to Krakow when they were so much in love; she identified the whistles, the sound of the engine; she was also familiar with the howls of the dogs and wondered about Yakov. Might he be in one of those? How could she look for her husband? She was in despair because she was sure he was there, in the camp, somewhere. But then she began to think more coldly and was consoled by the macabre hope that he might be dead, she told herself, all his suffering must be at an end. But there are no more beautiful funerals. Death in Auschwitz was wretched and extremely mechanical, a routine that neither angered nor shocked anyone.

  Thinking those thoughts, in November 1942, four months before she died, Sofia decided to separate out from her son. Frau Mandel was sniffing avidly around and she couldn’t continue to play with his fate. The danger was immense and a possible scenario of Ari in The Beast’s hands horrified her. The checks, when they only found wretchedness and the odd corpse that nobody had noticed—perhaps because the person seemed to be asleep—became more frequent, and Frau Mandel’s interrogations more aggressive and cruel. Now that her dear friend and accomplice, Sara Ruda, had died at the end of summer, she was afraid the rest of the women wouldn’t tolerate Ari and would betray him. Yes, she must separate out from Ari, she must not think about herself but the fact that he could be saved. Whatever the cost.

  Sofia began to harbor vague hopes when she heard rumors that there had been cases of babies born in the camp who’d been successfully smuggled out and taken to places unknown. Ada Neufeld had told her about that, Ada, one of the women who, like her, had been in the camp the longest. She also warned her she would possibly never see her son again. That was the price. Sofia accepted the price and paid with her sorrow. She needed to believe it was possible.

  One cold night she left him, in the open, on the ground under the barrack’s false floor, the same place where she had given birth. Before she went through the hole back into the barrack, she felt Ari’s heart between his ribs. She touched his face lingeringly, as if she were trying to hold on to every inch of his skin, every fold and feature. She knew she would only be left with memories. He was very cold, it was winter and he was shivering. She breathed on his cheeks and hands; then pulled tight the tattered strips of blanket wrapped around him. She said goodbye with one last glance, sadly, disconsolately. She murmured “my little love” and went back inside.

  She kept waiting, fighting the temptation to look and see if he was still there. Ada had told her. And she had risked it. Maybe the women were well organized, the plan would work out, there was someone trustworthy pulling the strings. They would pick him up, as had been agreed, when there was a change of guard. Sofia couldn’t know who did it, whether a heroic prisoner or a guard who had felt remorse. Nor did she know how or when he would leave the camp, or where they would hide him from Mandel’s violence. A feeling of guilt ran through her, her sorrow was unbearable for a few moments and she choked on her silent anguish. All that potential life she would no longer live with her son, a life as happy as the life she’d lived with her parents in Rzeszów, passed before her eyes and vanished. “Goodbye, goodbye,” that life not lived with her son seemed to say. Dreams also say goodbye, she thought. She quickly opened the trapdoor at the back of the barrack and put her head out. Ari had gone.

  Over the next four months Sofia regretted doing what she had done, and succumbed to the wracking uncertainty about what might have been her son’s fate. She tried to find him, but Ada Neufeld, the only one who could give her a clue, was selected a few weeks after organising Ari’s exit. Her regret morphed into a passive attitude in relation to her own fate. She had discovered the dialect of death, that was to do nothing to avoid it, to sink into quiet stagnation. Sick and starving, she dragged her feet and sat in the puddles on the camp, splashing rhythmically, totally in a void. It was the prelude to death and she let herself be swept away by an irresistible tide. She no longer even closed the eyes of those who died beside her. She felt scornful and hollow. She sighed for Yakov and hated herself for letting them snatch Ari from her. She only found consolation in the idea, entertained because it was so impossible, that she would be able to repeat her life, to start all over again. Though when she had such thoughts, she always reached the same conclusion: life is utterly treacherous and so inevitable.

  6

  Saved by madness.

  Yakov, Yakov! It is the rainy month of May 1943. Sofia is dead and Yakov’s teeth hav
e started to fall out. His strength is now inhabited by the fragile remnant of a human being. He caught diphtheria and his gums are turning black. I feel great compassion for him as I imagine him in my bed in this Frankfurt hospital from which I will soon be discharged. He wanders senselessly, unaware of his son’s existence, of his wife’s death, a kind of unbalanced, frightened, skeletal character from Dante. He wanders senselessly, only responds to the fear that beats in every corner of the camp: when he hears the SS corporal utter the words “Jewish pig!” aimed at someone else, he automatically puts his arms over his face to shield himself against the coming bl ow.

  The Yakov I imagine hears music in the air and stops and listens opposite the barrack entrance, in the middle of the main road. He tries to look up high to find out where it is coming from, to glimpse the secret to the delightful sound only he has heard. He looks toward the sky as if experiencing an epiphany. The guard is hitting his feet with his gun and Yakov howls and doesn’t understand why the German is tittering and then says, “a bird will shit on you or lightning will strike you down, you imbecile!”

  Yakov gradually lost his mind, in a few weeks. First came symptoms of disarray, he was bewildered doing the work he was forced to do in the Krupp factory where he’d been sent. What am I doing here? Is this Jamaica? he wondered uneasily and it took him a few minutes to understand the reality surrounding him. He looked in every direction and sometimes it seemed like a fairground, at others a castle, and others a slaughterhouse. He’d lost his sense of identity. He’d even lost any notion of death. He stacked weighty objects, they made him carry beams from one side to the other, following criteria that were completely arbitrary, as he would have to carry the same beams back to the spot where they’d been before. Or else bricks (and if he dropped one, they would rifle-butt him in the back and he’d collapse). Or else he’d be interminably unloading steel bars or barrels of oil off the backs of trucks. His hands often went numb and he frequently had to rub them together.

  Later on, he’d suddenly start attacking the prisoner next to him, no matter who, and would punch and abuse him hysterically. No one understood why he acted in that hateful way, but it was futile to try to get him to understand how ridiculous he was being because they assumed he was striking out against the impotence they all felt.

  A few days after he began to confuse objects and people and speak to himself or empty space. The guards mocked him, tripped him so he fell to the ground and insulted him. “Talk to my helmet,” they’d say as they laughed. The mad Jew entertained them. He thanked them and bowed to them, he’d lost his grip on reality and thought he was an actor on stage.

  “I am happy, I am happy. Thank you, thank you,” he kept repeating to the other bemused prisoners who had finally decided to ignore him.

  In a short time he had become a buffoon whose death the guards had already assigned a date. What good was that idiot to them? By June he was completely mad: he imitated German with words that he made up, and that provoked the same hilarity in the guards as if they’d been in a comic cabaret in pre-war Berlin, and he’d bang his head against the walls of the barrack. Nobody saw to his injuries and they became infected. The day he was selected he gave out blessings left and right in a Latin he had heard in church. Dominus vobiscum . . . Ora pro nobis . . . Amen, amen, amen . . . He never understood what was happening and thought the gas chamber was the ocean liner that was finally going to take him to Jamaica. His last words were, “It’s about to set sail.” He thought Sofia was by his side.

  7

  Come on, come and help me.

  Three months earlier, at twelve-thirty one morning in February, Frau Mandel walked into the barrack 115 and, without ordering them to line up, bawled “You, you and you!” not haphazardly, but knowing who the weakest were, the ones to dispense with that day. Her words needed no explanation. They heard and started to shout and implore. They were beaten, pushed and shoved outside to join a row of women from other barracks. A total of 110 women, children and old people were led to the gas chamber.

  The woman lying beside and embracing Sofia—Josefina Luftwig, the owner of the clothes shop in Krakow—has her eyes closed and mouth open, a dark, bottomless, repulsively human hole between lips as white as chalk. Sofia shares a similar rictus, that same private boundary that marks the end. They have just died and their bodies are in a pile with others in the gas chamber. The immeasurable closeness of bodies, Benjamin’s words come to mind once again. Sofia and the woman embracing her are naked, their bones visible through their white skin. Remnants to be burnt quickly. Skeletal, angular extremities they sometimes must be broken to put them in the oven. Nothing remains, no wage for memory.

  Then, finally, I wonder, rather obscenely, what might Sofia’s last thought have been. I imagine her thinking of Ari, her son, that forlorn being who, when separated from his mother, came to be Hurbinek the Nameless, but perhaps she thought of Yakov, Yakov’s love, smells and kisses. “Come on, come and help me,” words connected to something he once said to her very tenderly, when he needed her, but where? Her time had run out. The rest was her heart beating fast, almost breaking out of her body. The horror.

  XII

  THE PLURAL LIFE OF OBJECTS

  1

  Clothes

  The child they called Ari while Sofia, his mother, was alive, is Hurbinek again, the boy without a name. That child never left the camp, didn’t escape, wasn’t one of the children they smuggled out of Auschwitz with great difficulty, as Sofia preferred to believe before she died. He was picked up from under barrack 115, as planned by Gloria Monod, a skinny French Jewess who used to be a shop assistant in a big department store on the Champs Elysées, but she couldn’t expedite the child’s departure from the camp. If he’d died right then, frozen to death or skewered by one of the SS guards, nothing would have been altered in the chain of life: it was his natural fate in the day-to-day running of the camp. On the other hand, Gloria Monod also forged her own fate when she decided to keep him close. She used a high, hiding place in her barrack, a space hollowed out where the wood ceiling beams crossed, that only she had access to from the third tier of bunks, where she slept with five other women. However, that was a thin line between life and death. Gloria knew Hurbinek could fall or cry in her absence, and that’s why she tied him to the beam with strips of cloth and put a gag in his mouth. When she returned to the barrack she never knew whether she would find the child dead or alive.

  One of the first things Gloria Monod did with Hurbinek was to change his clothes. She got rid of the pieces of blanket that were wrapped round him when she found him, and dressed him in a kind of striped, woollen shirt, made from the prison uniform belonging to a young woman who’d died of diphtheria in her barrack. She also dressed him in a double jacket that was also striped, that was mended and re-sewn with bits of string and pieces of underwear torn into very thin strips. As they didn’t have needles, the prisoners used wooden splinters they sharpened, or bit through the material and then sewed big darns with their fingers.

  When I think of Hurbinek’s short life, I cannot not avoid thinking about the objects he had or that accompanied him for that brief period. They were never entirely his: they came from someone else and would be passed on to someone else. In a way, he was an unconscious borrower of other people’s objects. There could never be many. They would inevitably be few, very few, ordinary, common, basic materials at hand: rubber, leather, iron, wool and wood. I can imagine them now in a museum, on display in a glass cabinet, symbols and samples from many other people who used or possessed similar things. I imagine them in the museum in Auschwitz, or any other Holocaust museum, cold, distant but eloquent, offered to visitors as a slice of historical memory, visitors who struggle to locate them in the inconceivable reality to which they once belonged.

  I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore. I won’t see those objects, and yet, at night, here in my Frankfurt hospital bedroom, I see them clearly, I can see that ca
binet, the light illuminating it, the line on the floor warning “don’t cross” a few inches from the cabinet, the striped clothes on the body of a hollow dummy or doll made of transparent polyurethane. And I can’t help thinking that, though the clothes are real, what’s really important is the hollow inside of the invisible dummy wearing them, because that hollowness and dummy are the Jew or Gypsy, or even my Hurbinek.

  But I know that only what has a name exists, and I want to name each detail, each insignificant detail of those objects, because they are what existed with Hurbinek, what gave his life substance. And when I see or imagine those clothes that once clad Hurbinek’s tiny body or the objects that passed through his life, I imagine the possible histories of both clothes and objects. Where did they come from, who touched them, who owned them, who loved and used them before and after him? Who do those things belong to, in the end, in life? Can we speak of a beloved object when referring to clothes made from remnants of uniforms belonging to prisoners whose names are now impossible to trace, striped material that has never been washed, that carries vomit from Sarah, excrements from a fellow called Rufus or blood from some girl called Chana? Yes but, even so, those clothes Gloria Monod made for him were the only ones Hurbinek wore during the rest of his life.

 

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