2
A hat with ear flaps
The hat with earflaps that Gloria gave to Hurbinek, traded with a prisoner for her boots, had belonged to an eight-year-old boy—his name was Moniek Swajcer—the only survivor from his whole family in the selection made on the ramp where prisoners left the convoys, though he was beaten to death a month later.
It was a small, quite worn, leather, fur-lined hat. Its dark blue had faded and cracked. There were remnants of gold filigree on the foldable earflaps. Little Moniek had been given the hat for his fifth birthday by his father. The day when the boy was caught peeing outside the latrines by an eighteen-year-old SS who beat him to death with a mace encrusted at both ends with huge nails, the hat ended up in the hands of one of the women who distributed the food round the barracks and happened to be passing by. She didn’t look up or at the dead boy. She was shaking as she retrieved the hat and put it away. She swapped it for Gloria’s boots. Gloria was left barefoot, and had to manufacture boots from strips of felt and material collected at dawn from bodies that died every night; they weren’t enough to resist the cold and the frosts. In the roll calls at twilight, that went on for hours out in the open, one of her feet froze. She lost all feeling in it, although the pain had been intolerable to that point. But she didn’t complain; that way she would betray nothing. Even so, her frozen foot was the reason why she was selected for the gas chamber, when the female guard saw she was limping and that one of her feet was completely dead. They went out of their way to amputate before gassing her.
Hurbinek survived, cared for by the other prisoners, although it was risky. He was once mistaken for a bird, perhaps an owl or a smaller bird, when an SS looked up at the ceiling beams when she heard a noise. She thought she had heard wings flapping and aimed her gun at whatever was moving, but she could see nothing clearly from where she was standing. The prisoners didn’t even look startled; they knew the child was condemned to die and would be found out at any moment: his time had come, period. Not one muscle tensed. But when the female guard was taking aim, convinced it was a bird, a pigeon or a jay maybe, she had second thoughts and lowered her gun,“I don’t kill animals. When did that bird ever do me any harm? I go into the countryside when I want to hunt,” she rasped as she left.
3
Soup bowl
A month later they disinfected the barrack because there were too many rats. They gnawed on the sick and the dead. They hauled out all the prisoners and kept them standing on the esplanade for forty-eight hours. They could only sit down for one hour in every twelve. They were forced to stand for the rest of that time. Several elderly women died of exhaustion. Others were shot in the neck because they squatted or kneeled down. The women looking after Hurbinek, Gloria’s companions in the third level of bunk beds, aware of the secret, hidden child, assumed that boy would be poisoned when he breathed in the disinfectant dust. Besides, there were three other children hidden like him. But when they returned to the barrack two days later, they found that Hurbinek—what name did they call him by? None perhaps, names create bonds, create affection—was still alive, very undernourished and dirty, and almost at death’s door. The other three children had died. They didn’t have a mother; the women who were crying and had hidden them weren’t their mothers. Perhaps, like Hurbinek, they were children who’d had to stay there after they failed to smuggle them out of the camp. One woman started to give him little sips of watery potato soup, using a chipped enameled metal bowl, the edge of which was painted red, that was rusty in parts, including the handle. They had no spoons, or only one to share among several prisoners.
That bowl that brushed little Hurbinek’s lips for many weeks had been manufactured in the center of Cologne, by Julius Hölderbruner Industries, Karlstrasse, 17, that specialized in equipment for the Wehrmacht and came from a consignment of items “for domestic use,” as it said in the order requesting 150,000 bowls signed first by R. Höss, the camp commandant, and underneath, in second place, by A. Eichmann. Before it belonged to the woman who fed Hurbinek, it had been owned in the concentration camp by Anita Sachs (who engraved her name on the bottom of the bowl) and Gloria Monod. After the death of its last anonymous owner, the bowl rusted completely and was buried, with other useless bits of crockery, in a ditch near the barbed wire fence. A Russian soldier, Ivan Rutilov, stumbled over it in March, 1945 when he was walking around the Auschwitz camp looking for a target for a spot of shooting practice. He dug it up and threw it into the air. A salvo of bullets from his pistol filled it with five holes.
Soon after the barrack had been disinfected, at the end of 1943, the prisoners decided to put an end to Hurbinek’s suffering, and they agreed that one of them would deposit him in the latrines, next to a pile of bricks the top of which had a spout that stuck out and served as a kind of shower. If one of the female guards found him, he was sure to die, but perhaps another woman prisoner would take him in. What would she do with that child? Perhaps hand him over? What was the point of living like that? In any case, they trusted in her pity, although the price of mercy in Auschwitz was high. On the other hand, chance came cheap. It would be down to luck. So they left Hurbinek to his.
4
Shoes
It was a long time before Hurbinek had any shoes. In the middle of January 1944 young Ruchel Szlezinger made him some by adapting those that had once belonged to Miriam, her eight-year-old sister, who was taken aside upon arriving in the camp and eliminated. She managed to keep hold of them because she had a little bundle of the two sisters’ belongings she hid under her clothes. Miriam’s shoes were black, made from good leather, with round toecaps and laces that tied by the bottom of the ankle. Little Miriam Szlezinger had cleaned them the night before she was arrested and they still retained some of that shine. Ruchel adopted the shoes to Hurbinek’s tiny feet by packing the toes with material she folded over several times, and then plaited the laces around the baby’s legs so the shoes didn’t rub and make them sore.
Ruchel and Miriam Szlezinger were the daughters of a Prague doctor who was sent with his wife to the camp in Theresienstadt. The two sisters ended up in Auschwitz because of a transportation error; it didn’t matter much, they were all going to die anyway. Dr. Szlezinger was well off and paid the Gestapo in order to preserve his freedom after the assassination of Heydrich in 1941, but when his capital—the the proceeds from jewels that had been inherited across many generations—dried up, he and his family were brutally deported.
They bought Miriam’s shoes in 1940. They’d been on display in a shopwindow in Mala Strana for several days; nobody took any interest in them until little Miriam, out for a walk with her parents, fell in love with them. They had to pay for them in marks from the Reich, though the Szlezingers couldn’t do so directly, because Jews couldn’t buy anything, and so a Czech woman, the nurse who helped Szlezinger, did it for them. They’d been manufactured in Munich in a factory expropiated from a Jewish family murdered in Bergen-Belsen. Thus, the only real shoes Hurbinek wore in his short life were German shoes, probably made by a happy woman, convinced she was an honest soul, whose husband perhaps belonged to a Police Batallion heading to the Ukraine or Lithuania and responsible for carrying out racial cleansing.
Young Ruchel picked up Hurbinek out of compassion, moved by the loving memory of her sister, the day after an anonymous hand had deposited him in the latrines by the water spout. It was a misty, very cold, winter’s day. She had to warm him with her breath, rubbing his arms and legs, and immediately began to scheme so they wouldn’t catch her with him. She knew that children’s lives were of no value in that place, because they couldn’t work; she knew that was why they had sacrificed Miriam, since Rachel felt all that death surrounding her was a sacrifice Yaveh demanded of his people, an absurd sacrifice like all the other words that issued from the mouths of rabbis. The lives of children were soon snuffed out in a mere clout, a squeeze of the neck, or by hurling them against a post.
Taking al
l kinds of precautions, though guided by a gloomy, unfathomable presentiment, she finally hid him cleverly inside her straw mattress. He stayed there until June, 1944, when they searched Ruchel’s barrack for a rudimentary radio apparatus via which the women prisoners had heard that the Americans had disembarked in France. The SS didn’t find the radio in the barrack; however, they did find Hurbinek, two years, three months and three days after he was born.
5
Blanket
They were human whimpers and this time the guard didn’t mistake them for a cat or bird. They were inarticulate whimpers, not even crying, more like a striving effort, a soft click, a kind of shout or barely audible affirmation of life. It was coming from the meagre mattress of one of the prisoners, a young woman with a scarf around her head and a look of terror in her eyes that she intuited would be her last. It was Ruchel. When they extracted him from the mattress, from the straw, he was tightly wrapped in a blanket. Ruchel had thought of re-shaping that thick material to cover him better, perhaps giving it sleeves, a collar, or shaping it, she hadn’t gone to dress-making classes in Prague for nothing, but she never had the time or energy in those months.
It was a gray blanket bordered by a labyrinth of yellow geometric shapes. It wasn’t a blanket given out by the Waffen SS, but a blanket brought at the last moment by a prisoner. It belonged to a Greek family, the Karaindrous, from Salonika. The head of the family had grabbed it instinctively when they were forced to leave their houses at gunpoint, and had thrown it over the shoulder of his middle son, who, in turn, in the cattle truck, gave it to an old woman who was shivering in one corner. That meant the woman didn’t freeze to death that day. In the camp, when the old woman’s heart stopped beating while she was asleep, Ruchel took it before the others snatched the rest of her clothes.
It was a good quality blanket that ended up in tatters in a Soviet camp, where the female SS guard died five years later, the one who took Hurbinek by the arm after stripping him of his blanket and lifted him up like a young pup to bang him against the little brick wall that ran acrosss the barrack.
And she would have done so—it wouldn’t have been the first time—if it hadn’t been for a lean, wily Jewish helper in the Lagerarzt, who was forced to be present at all the roll calls and participate in the cruel search for booty, deformed men and women, twins, hidden children, or people with some physical peculiarity. She thought that child with its tiny, still body that looked atrophied, with his sunken eyes, was the most wretched, defeated being in the world, and would be a suitable item. A sinister smile spread over her face, though it wasn’t at all proud. That trophy would improve her position; it would give her a partial reprieve, they wouldn’t kill her, yet.
As for Ruchel Szlezinger, the girl with the shining, intelligent eyes, she was sent to the gas chamber within an hour. They applied the usual, horrific practice, the routine immolation of her innocence, that now no longer stirred the remaining survivors in the emotional wasteland that was Auschwitz. Hurbinek, for his part, would lose his shoes in Dr. Mengele’s infirmary; it wouldn’t matter because by then his legs would have lost all feeling.
6
A wooden doll
There was a toy in section B2a of the barrack given over to Mengele’s experiments, a rough-and-ready toy, handmade by a puppet maker like Geppetto de Collodi. It was a wooden doll that had lost most of its original colors: the slender body of a fairy-tale prince. A gypsy girl had taken it there. Mengele had given the girl’s skin radiation treatment to the point of producing burns that gradually spread over the rest of her skin, from the calves to the base of her neck. The girl died after two weeks. The wooden doll began to be used by Mengele and his collaborators as a means to calm the disconsolate sobbing of the children they were experimenting on. It was perhaps the only toy in Auschwitz and acted as a bait.
Children of different ages were housed in an outbuilding with bars like a big laboratory cage for mice. Several small white beds made that prison seem aseptic and scientific, but they were insufficient to take all the prisoners they lodged there, sometimes for months, depending on the nature of the experiment. Hurbinek stayed with Mengele for four months. He was tortured in various ways: they first focused on his food and weight, that was incredibly low, with progressive increases and reductions in the amount they gave him; then Mengele spent ages studying his anatomy before injecting him with controlled dosages of petrol, but then decided not to, although he did consider—made a note in his notebook to that end—boiling him and then extracting his bones and reconstructing him. However, he was finally chosen for a bone graft onto his spine. The operation was carried out without any medical precautions or concerns for his health, something that never worried Mengele. He kept him under observation for four or five weeks after the operation. It was a miracle he survived such torture.
Hurbinek had the wooden doll in his possession for a few days after he was brought to Mengele’s barrack, but it was then taken away from him. He got it back after the operation. During those weeks the boy gripped the doll tight and tried to wail when it fell on the ground, though he never succeeded. A nurse would give it back to him and Hurbinek would stare endlessly at the doll, scrutinising the cracks in its red cape and the blue circles on the trousers or gold brushstrokes on the crown. What could any of that mean to him? I can’t begin to imagine how curiosity develops in the midst of such torment.
One day toward the end of autumn, Mengele leaned over Hurbinek and took the doll from him and threw it far away. The small doll broke into two. Then two women grabbed Hurbinek and put him on a battered stretcher in the passageway, near the back door. Mengele had decided to let him die once septicemia from his spinal injuries set in. Mengele forbade any kind of cure. When the baby disappeared from his stretcher, nobody missed him; they assumed someone had taken him to the crematorium.
7
Buttons
Ángela Pérez León was a Spanish Sephardic Jew who’d been living in Bohemia since the end of the civil war. She suffered as she wondered what could be the purpose behind that senseless phase of history that had come her way. She couldn’t forgive, wasn’t able to garner more hatred, but was in such a state of defeat that many mornings, when the cold of dawn met the blue light of the new day, she anxiously strived to believe she must already be dead. The next moment of reality for her was the worst, most cruel torture that could be inflicted on the remnants of humanity everyone in the camp had become.
In Auschwitz Ángela had the misfortune to belong to the group of women prisoners forced to do support work in a Sonderkommando. She stripped the corpses in section B2a, Mengele’s infirmary, before other Jews piled them up on a barrow and burned them in the open air, in a wood behind Crematorium V in Birkenau, when the ovens couldn’t keep pace that winter. She was the person who took Hurbinek, still alive, to her barrack, 346, where she looked after and protected him until Christmas Eve, 1944, when SS Obergruppenführer Heinz Rügen walked in, found the child and shot her in the back of the neck. She was also the woman who introduced buttons into Hurbinek’s life.
Ángela removed the jacket from the corpse of a five-year-old boy, Mosze Gold, one of Mengele’s victims alongside Gavrilo, his twin brother. The woolen jacket had mother-of-pearl buttons, five large iridescent buttons the size of a small coin. Hurbinek touched them, in all likelihood, and felt their warm, polished surface, since that jacket stayed with him until he died. Marx was right when he said that social relations exist between objects, because those buttons had been manufactured in Denmark from seashells brought from Jamaica—that place Yakov Pawlicka so longed for—and had been imported by a Polish firm in 1938. The mother of the Gold twins bought the buttons in a haberdashery in Krakow next door to the Merkur Hotel on Krakowska Street where Yakov and Sofia checked in for their honeymoon, and sewed them on the jacket she herself had made for Mosze. She chose silvery buttons for Gavrilo. How could that mother ever have imagined that those Jamaican mother-of-pearl button
s would end up between the small, clumsy fingers of a dying child whose only homeland was that sewer of horror and rottenness?
After Hurbinek died, Henek, who picked him up from the snow where Heinz Rügen had thrown him, kept this knitted jacket for many years, until he finally forgot it on his nth move, as one leaves behind things that no longer belong to anyone. However, he did pull off a button which he always kept on a silver chain round his neck.
8
Scarf
The last object in Hurbinek’s imaginary museum is a scarf a Russian soldier tied round his sweaty, feverish forehead, when the camp was liberated. The scarf, as I picture it now in my imagination, or as it really must appear among Lucia Levi’s possessions, is clean and ironed: it isn’t very big, there are frayed threads at the corners and small tears; its ivory color has almost, but not quite, faded, and you can still make out the drawing of a Chinese dragon in the center. Hurbinek first wore it round his head like a ribbon—Henek would put it on and remove it—and later, days before he died, he put it around his neck to warm him up because he was shivering so much.
It was the young soldier Yuri Chanicheverov who put it on Hurbinek one day in early March 1945, after he entered the infirmary-barrack and found the dying child between Henek and Levi, who were caressing him. Disturbed and moved by the scene, he first soaked it in water from his water-flask. He thought something cool would do him good.
The Birthday Buyer Page 18