by Thaisa Frank
When Goebbels finished, he crawled back to his chair, sat on his pile of books, and rang a buzzer.
This is Obërst Lodenstein, he said when an officer appeared. Give him the best food, the best wine and—he winked—the best women.
Lodenstein gave the Nazi salute and followed the officer down the crimson hall to the cabaret, amazed that his legs were holding him up. A woman in a tight black bodice was playing the accordion, and an officer was singing “Lorelei” into her ample bosom. Lodenstein sat near the door and ate venison and potatoes. He left the cabaret, went to his room, and threw up.
Soon he was in bed—vast, unfamiliar, much larger than the bed he shared with Elie. He fell into half-sleep and woke when he heard rustling outside his door. He was afraid Goebbels had sent a woman. But when he opened the door, he found an envelope filled with everything he’d surrendered, including the white rose, which still smelled of Elie’s perfume. He slept with it for almost two weeks. Then Heidegger arrived on a moonless night, and they set off by train for Auschwitz.
Dear Gretchen,
I need to see you.
Don’t worry. No one can find out. Friends will keep us safe. I look for you by the gates. I look for you by rocks. I need to talk to you, see your face, feel your arms, kiss you. Come quickly.
Love,
Paul
Asher Englehardt, a terse man with shrewd blue eyes, had been surprised to be pulled from a job lugging rocks in the snow.
Over here! said a guard, grabbing him by the shoulder.
Nobody stopped working because they would get shot, as Asher was certainly about to be. He put down the stone, thinking at least he wouldn’t be lifting something that weighed almost as much as he did, and stepped from the line. An Unteroffizier was standing next to the guard, and an Unteroffizier often meant a hanging—worse than a swift bullet near the red brick wall of the jail. Hangings happened in the evening when the whole camp assembled for roll call. Daniel would watch him die.
The Unteroffizier motioned Asher to his Kübelwagen and drove along the unpaved road. He was so pleasant Asher assumed he wanted to put him at ease since panic made it hard to cooperate with a noose. They drove to the camp through the side entrance, rather than the main gate where Asher saw Arbeit Macht Frei every morning when he left for work. Instead of going to the jail, they went to a small room in the officers’ quarters where another officer brought soup, huge slices of rye bread, and beer. It was the first table set with food Asher had seen in over four months.
Eat slowly, said the Unteroffizier. It takes time to adjust if you haven’t eaten for a while.
Asher hesitated. It occurred to him that he might be part of one of the ghoulish experiments the camp gossiped about— performed by Mengele, the doctor who greeted transports and decided who would live or die. He performed experiments, the prisoners said, on people with or without disease. And perhaps this one, Asher thought, would be about the rate of digestion of starving people after a full meal. There would be one needle to knock him out and another in the heart: Not bad. But did he want Reich food in him when he died?
The Unteroffizier pulled up his chair and offered Asher a cigarette, which he took without thinking. The Unteroffizier lit one for each of them and said:
Cigarettes. The common bond around here.
Asher laughed, then wondered if he shouldn’t have. People got killed for thinking the wrong things were funny.
Listen, said the Unteroffizier. Things at the clinic are a mess. We need you to make glasses.
Asher didn’t ask what kind of mess he meant, and the officer didn’t explain because there was a blast of motorcycles from a battalion that was revved up to drown out screams when people were gassed. The officer left the room for over ten minutes. When the motorcycles stopped he came back.
No one’s getting the right glasses, he said. And it’s chaotic to sort through the heaps.
Asher understood that heaps referred to the piles of glasses that belonged to people who’d died in the gas chambers.
So we really need you, the officer concluded.
Asher didn’t believe him. But knowing there had just been a gassing filled him with a conviction he sometimes had when he knew there had been an atrocity—namely that he was lucky to be alive, even special. This made him decide to eat while he still could. The soup was thick. The rye bread was fresh. The beer tasted like manna. The Unteroffizier looked relieved and said he’d be back in a few minutes.
And now it’s going to happen, Asher thought. A couple of needles. Maybe from Mengele himself.
But Mengele didn’t appear. The Unteroffizier came back with real shoes, thick socks, a warm sweater, and a woolen cap and gloves. Then they walked to the officers’ clinic, past the winter quarters for the angora rabbits. Many camps had rabbits tended by the prisoners to prove to the Red Cross that there were pleasant pastimes. The Unteroffizier tried to hurry him past Mengele’s quarters, but not before Asher saw two twins strapped to gurneys.
Dear Petra,
Do you remember how the four of us used to laugh on the playground and say that twins were special? Well, we were right! Everybody is good to Sylvia and me. And they’ll be good to you and Miep.
Love,
Ania
The room in the officers’ clinic was like Asher’s shop in Freiburg shrunk to a fourth of its size. In this miniature version of his old room, he saw an optometrist’s chair, an illuminated eye chart with gothic letters, and tools for grinding lenses. A man with a green armband was cleaning instruments and said he would be his assistant, since he knew how to weld frames.
Asher still wondered if this were a prelude to death, but after two days, he didn’t care because life was a little more bearable. After morning roll call, a guard walked him through the snow to the warm quiet halls of the officers’ clinic. Every time Asher opened the door he thought he might find Mengele and instruments of torture. But he always found an optometrist’s room—calm, quiet, efficient. The officers who came for glasses answered questions politely—so politely Asher almost forgot he was a prisoner.
He was pulled from heavy labor in mid-February: a few mornings later he looked from the window of his workroom to a snowfall that covered everything in a bridal-veil of white—even the rune-like, barbed-wire fences and the corpses that hung from them like sheets. By noon there was a shooting, and a red stain bloomed in the snow. The stain faded to pink, and by dusk it was a rust-colored blotch.
A few days later there was another snowfall, veiling the camp in white all over again. It occurred to Asher—not without irony—that as long as there was snow, whatever happened in Auschwitz was reversible. He liked looking from the paned window of his workroom. The snow reminded him of winter childhoods when he played with his sister, who’d been smart enough to move to America. It had been a time when the woods were safe for children, and they believed in snow maidens who came to life and wolves that could grant wishes. He and his sister had lain in the snow, waved their hands, and left imprints that looked like angels.
Now and then he worked late and saw the night sky. The searchlights made it preternaturally bright and obscured the stars. Once he saw the moon and was surprised it was still in the sky. Sometimes he saw shipments of boxes outside Mengele’s quarters—one labeled Furniture, another labeled Bones. At least once a day he heard motorcycles.
One evening he saw a transport. People were in clotted groups. Children were crying. A floodlight illuminated the figure of Mengele. He was an elegant man with his right elbow on his left arm, gesturing with a gloved index finger that moved hardly at all. The night Asher and his son arrived Mengele had sent a tailor from Freiburg to the left and Asher’s son to the right. After pausing, he’d also sent Asher to the right. He hadn’t known what this meant until he’d whispered to a prisoner in the five-by-five bunk above him. Then he understood the tailor had been gassed.
As soon as Asher Englehardt began to make glasses, more and more officers wanted them. They didn’t like r
ummaging through the collection from the gas chambers—a haphazard junk shop, annoying some and upsetting others because they’d looked too long in the eyes of women and men and children who’d waited in the quaint little woods that concealed one of the gas chambers.
Some officers said that they liked the new frames made from melted Jew-gold. Others said they liked the way Asher asked questions—as though everything they said had significance. But there was also something else that brought them to that room, and this was the aura of calm Asher emanated while he tested the eyes of people who had killed his friends. It was a deep and almost audible sense of peace that Asher himself didn’t understand—especially since his son Daniel was digging trenches in air so cold your tongue would stick to anything it touched. He saw Daniel at night when he brought him bread and extra food. The guards looked the other way. They knew about Goebbels’s orders.
After a week, a bed appeared in his workroom so Asher could nap during the day. He slept, not caring if he’d be murdered. Since coming to Auschwitz, he hadn’t been aware of dreams. The barracks were filled with stench. People were up all night, moaning and begging for water. At least one person was in the process of dying.
But now, in this quiet white room, Asher dreamt of his wife playing Schubert on the piano. And of Daniel playing with blocks on their living room floor. When he woke up, he still smelled burning flesh. He was still surrounded by barracks and bloodstained snow.
From time to time he thought of Martin Heidegger, who came for glasses every year and had visited him a few days before the shop was raided. The October day had been warm, and Heidegger wore lederhosen and an alpine hat. The SS man who was Asher’s friend had just told him there wouldn’t be enough coal to get through the winter and that they were cracking down on people with Aryan mothers and Jewish fathers, making Heidegger’s visit strained and splitting Asher into two people—one an optometrist who joked and talked about philosophy, the other a terrified man who thought he and his son were about to die.
Heidegger sat in a high-backed chair looking at the alphabet while Asher changed lenses and made notes. He went along with Heidegger when he said—as he often did—how ironic that the first person he’d told about a revelation caused by his glasses became an optometrist.
Usually Asher could ignore his terror. He could joke that Heidegger’s glasses were the only reason he’d become an optometrist—as though it had nothing to do with losing his teaching job or his father being Jewish. But on that particular day he struggled to remember what to say.
Heidegger’s eyes were somewhat worse, and Asher said maybe he should switch to an Aryan optometrist—because these days you never knew. Heidegger waved him off and tried to cheer him up by telling him how disappointed he was in the Nazi Party.
I’ve warned them that they don’t understand that machines have their own Being, he said. No vision. No guiding principles.
Vision always trumps machines, said Asher.
Heidegger nodded and told Asher he’d fallen out of the world as recently as a week ago. Elfriede Heidegger had been dishing out stew, the handle had broken, and the ladle fell into the pot. Without the ladle the handle became a ludicrous stick, and eventually the whole kitchen felt tilted. Elfriede got irritated that he wasn’t helping.
Martin, Asher said—as he always did—we’re always in the world. So there’s nothing at all to fall out of.
I know, said Heidegger.
Then why not just live here? said Asher.
Because no one can all the time.
Yet Asher had done it since Kristallnacht. After that night of broken glass, he’d never been able to sink into a soft, pillowy sense of comfort—however illusory. When he saw Daniel sleeping, he thought, He’s safe for now. When he got a loaf of fresh bread, he thought, This might be the last. And when he saw people at the train station holding suitcases, he thought, Daniel and I might be next. In this state, many things were soaked of meaning. Suitcases and bread were oblong shapes. A wrench didn’t look that different from a spoon.
Asher tried to forget this last conversation with Heidegger the way he tried to forget all the conversations with people he couldn’t talk to anymore. He tried to forget angry conversations with his wife, who’d joined the early Resistance and blamed him for not paying attention to the rise of the Party. And animated conversations with a woman—lovely, blond, compassionate—who became his lover when his wife disappeared. The woman had disappeared too.
As Asher ground lenses, he wondered if his eternal conversation with Heidegger about death was prescient because in Auschwitz people were pushed so closely against death they couldn’t fall away from an awareness of mortality. The sweet smell of burning flesh permeated the camp. Shots blasted every few minutes.
Even the SS men walked rigidly, as if trying not to hurtle into death. The whole camp reminded Asher of a ghoulish Black Forest of Being, a bizarre amusement park, with barracks instead of trees.
The only person who didn’t seem to feel on the precipice of death was Asher’s assistant, Sypco Van Hoot—a large, compassionate man who’d been a successful bank robber in Holland. His generosity confirmed the opinion at Auschwitz that bank robbers were the most trustworthy and straightforward of criminals because they’d always been honest about their motives. Sypco told Asher he’d gotten used to living with danger, so what was the difference now?
Sypco, who knew how to weld, took the lenses and Asher’s instructions to another part of the camp to make frames. He always stopped at a place called Kanada, where inmates, most of them women, most of them beautiful, sorted possessions from new arrivals. Now and then Sypco brought Asher gifts from Kanada—a watch, a pair of shoes, a sweater. Asher gave them to Daniel as barter for food.
Two weeks after he’d been transferred to the clinic, Sypco brought him a suit and a fedora.
So they’re going to shoot me in style, said Asher.
They never shoot anyone in style, said Sypco. It’s too much trouble to take off good clothes.
Gas me in style, then.
They’d never give me anything from Kanada for someone who’s about to die, said Sypco. It’s too much trouble to sort again.
That night no one came to take him back to the barracks. Asher sat at his worktable, sure he was about to be shot. He was astonished and resentful that his instruments still gleamed and kept thinking about his son. After what seemed like hours, an officer brought him beef, potatoes, warm milk, a loaf of bread, and beer—another last meal. Only this time Asher was so used to food, it didn’t occur to him not to eat. The same officer came back and helped him into the suit. When he put the fedora on his head, the officer looked at it critically, adjusting it until he was satisfied. Then they left the clinic.
Asher had seen Auschwitz many times at night, but now he imagined how his own blood would stain the snow. The searchlights would turn it black. By morning it would be pink. By afternoon it would fade to rust. No one would give it any thought except Daniel, who would realize what happened when his father didn’t answer roll call.
The officers’ quarters were filled with drunken singing. One officer walked up to them, raised his stein, and spilled beer on Asher’s shoes.
For God’s sake, said the officer escorting him. If you can’t hold your liquor, can’t you at least hold your glass?
The other officer bowed and wiped Asher’s shoes. They kept walking until they came to a large mahogany door.
You’re honored, said the officer. This is where the Commandant entertains visitors.
Asher entered a wood-paneled room with leather armchairs and a fireplace with a fire—the first fire in four months he was sure wasn’t meant for burning people. The Commandant stood in front of the fireplace, a man in an SS uniform to his right, and Martin Heidegger next to him. He wore a ski outfit and an alpine hat.
What on earth are you doing here? said Asher.
My friend, said Heidegger. I had to see you.
He walked over and put his arms around As
her. My God, he said. How do you spend your time here?
Making glasses, said Asher.
You came all the way for that?
Yes. But it was worth it.
They laughed and entered a realm no one else could follow—the realm of old friends and private jokes.
For a moment there was a festive feeling in the room. But when the Commandant told everyone to sit down and poured brandy, the air was imbued with silence. The silence continued until the SS officer pointed to a 17th-century painting of a man with a ruched collar.
That’s a wonderful Rembrandt, he said.
The Commandant nodded. We went to a lot of trouble to get it.