by Ellen Keith
After arranging its delivery, he crossed the prisoners’ camp again. The band was playing to march the inmates off to their work details, but the music sounded flat and tired, and the tuba player seemed to choke on his notes, like he didn’t have the breath left in his lungs. The rising sun hit the frozen ground as the muster grounds began to clear out. When Karl cut in between two sets of blocks in the quiet northwest corner, he stopped. Two men stood at the far end of the buildings, wrapped in an embrace.
“What in God’s name are you doing?”
The prisoners broke apart and spun around. Their faces were ashen. Sure enough, they wore pink triangles on their uniforms. They cowered like street dogs while Karl marched over to them. “Where are you supposed to be right now?”
The older of the pair stepped forward. “I was saying goodbye, sir.” He hesitated. “I’m being transferred.”
“Now he’s late for work.”
“I’m very sorry, sir.”
The other man hunched over, afraid to look at Karl.
“And you.” Karl pointed to him. “What Kommando are you in?”
The inmate spit out the name of the munitions factory with an accent that marked him a Berliner.
“From now on, you’re digging ditches.”
The inmate nodded, still focused on the ground. Karl noted their numbers and was about to let them go when he spotted a group of guards who had gathered to watch. An officer walked past the end of the blocks before doubling back. Hoffmann.
“Is everything all right, Schutzhaftlagerführer?” Hoffmann asked. “Do you need any assistance?”
“Everything is under control.”
“These fags acting up again?”
“I’ve dealt with it.”
“You know, sir, I caught the shrimp touching the bigger one just last week.” The gleam in his eye suggested he was lying. “The Kommandant says there’s no room for second chances.”
Karl cleared his throat. “I know very well what the Kommandant said. You can leave, Hoffmann.”
Hoffmann stalked off, but the other guards stayed within earshot. The prisoners’ shoulders fell in relief, which made Karl bristle. They took him for spineless, probably thought he’d let them off, even with everyone watching.
“Can one of you tell me what Himmler has to say about fags?” he asked.
Neither responded. The fear returned to their eyes, driving him on. They were nothing but weaklings, pansies. Degenerates going against society, against science.
“Homosexuality is polluting the Reich, impeding the rise of the Aryan race.” The guards moved in, so he kept talking. “The two of you are like weeds, contaminating our garden. Tell me, what does a good gardener do with weeds?”
One of the men buckled like he’d taken a shot to the gut. Karl nodded to the guards. They circled the prisoners, raised their batons, the butts of their guns in the air and brought them down hard. Part of Karl wanted to turn away, but he watched every hit. Dirty fags. Those damn, filthy fags. He repeated the phrase over and over in his head. The smack of metal against flesh muffled the men’s cries.
When they could no longer stand, he held up his hand. “Enough. Take them away. Put them both on the next train to Auschwitz and make sure they get sent straight to the showers.”
FOR all Marijke had heard about Karl’s life, he knew little about hers. He preferred to think of her as having always been waiting for him, of her story starting when her path crossed his.
His little violinist, his Roman candle.
One Sunday, he thought about her as he sat in his drawing room with his morning coffee, what it would be like to have her sitting beside him in her dressing gown. Else used to fuss over him, rising to refill his drink before he’d reached the bottom. But Marijke? She would be absorbed in the newspaper, reading out the latest symphony reviews, speculating about why the cellist had gone flat. He chuckled thinking about it.
The double doors opened, and a hunched prisoner shuffled in with a stepladder. He jolted as he spotted Karl. “I’m very sorry, sir, I was told to change these light bulbs.” He pointed to a pair of overhead lights, which had weakened to a dull glow. “I’ll come back later.”
With a wave of his hand, Karl instructed the prisoner to carry on and tried to return to his fantasies of Marijke. The inmate set up the ladder near the bookshelves and clambered up to unscrew an old bulb. He looked the same age as Karl. When he bent to set the faulty bulb on a shelf, Karl pictured Marijke’s husband, leaning over to pass her a book. A man without a name, without a face, but the thought of him wouldn’t go away. There they were, sitting hand in hand on the settee, Marijke gazing at him with a saccharine smile.
The light bulb squeaked as it twisted into the socket. Karl became aware of a stagnant taste in his mouth and took a big sip of coffee, debating whether it was too early to break into his liquor cabinet.
The prisoner noticed Karl watching and doubled his speed.
“Enough,” Karl said. “You can finish the job later.”
The inmate hurried down from the ladder, almost dropping it against the wall in his rush to pack it up. Karl waited until he had left, put down his coffee and headed over to the records office.
“I need information on a Dutchman,” Karl said to the inmate clerk. “The name is De Graaf.”
“Yes, sir. Do you know his number?”
“He arrived from KZ Vught late in the spring. That’s all I know.”
“Shall I send the information to your office, sir?”
“I’ll wait.”
The clerk left the room. Five minutes passed before he returned with some files. “Two men with that name arrived in the spring.”
The first record card showed someone with a heavy overbite and wrinkles, but his wife’s name was Johanna. Karl flipped to the second card. Theodoor de Graaf. Age twenty-five. Love of Marijke’s life. The man stared up at Karl through his photo. Spectacles and a square face. The records listed his hair colour as brown and his height at 185 centimetres.
Karl held up the file. “This one.”
The clerk brought him another card that covered De Graaf’s labour details. De Graaf had worked as a university lecturer in Amsterdam. Had his brain seduced Marijke? Certainly not those sailboat ears. As a Dutch political prisoner, he hadn’t been assigned hard labour. Instead, he belonged to the Camp Protection detachment: inmates responsible for guarding the depots at night and supervising camp cleanliness, the type of labour that could grant someone access to the camp bonus system. To the brothel. The file noted him a hard worker. Karl tugged to loosen the collar of his uniform and gestured to the clerk to come closer.
“How else can I help you, sir?” the inmate asked.
“Make me a copy of these records. Every word you have on him.”
Chapter Twelve
LUCIANO
MAY 13, 1977
BUENOS AIRES
THE WOMAN TO LUCIANO’S LEFT WAS GROWING louder. He often woke to the sound of her retching, and she murmured strings of nonsense whenever he returned to his cell. One night, her stomach rumbled so loudly that Luciano could hear it through the partition. She wept, a sound like the wind shaking rain from leafy branches.
He inched up against the partition. “Are you all right?” He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Her cries stopped. “He needs more food,” she whispered at last.
“Who?”
“My son.”
“Your son is here?”
Someone approached. He moved away from the wall, and the footsteps ceased. A soft noise came from the other side of the particleboard, like the woman had placed her hands against it.
“I’m pregnant.”
Luciano touched his own side of the partition. He thought of all the times she’d rested her hands on his shoulders during the chain-gang slog back from breakfast. Her fragile touch. She blended in with everyone else in the dining room, like a hand-me-down doll worn to the stitching. Maybe she used to be very pretty, but
in any case, he hadn’t noticed any bulge at her belly. “How far along are you?”
“When I arrived, I was six months, but I think it’s almost time.” She paused. “His father is dead. They showed me his bloody shirt.”
Luciano withdrew his hand from the wall and dug his nails into the thin fabric of the mattress. “Jesus.”
She grew quiet and he considered telling her he was sorry to hear it, but that meant nothing.
“Did they take your wife?” she asked. “Are you married?”
He thought of Fabián, his plump, bowed lips, the scar on his knee from the time he’d tried to slide down the banister at the campus library, the crinkle of his rolling papers. “No.”
The footsteps returned, marking an unfamiliar pace.
“Do they know about the baby?” Luciano asked, once he dared to speak.
“I don’t know.”
TWO nights later, her cell was silent. Luciano pressed his ear to the partition, tapped softly, but got no response. And when the guard came to lead everyone back from breakfast, a new pair of hands fell on Luciano’s shoulders.
That afternoon, as their documentation supervisor stepped outside to get another coffee, Luciano nudged Gabriel’s foot. “The pregnant girl in the cell near us, she’s gone.”
Two other labourers looked up, but they continued working with mechanical movements.
“If she’s pregnant,” Gabriel replied, “she’s done for.”
The long-haired girl stopped typing. “No, you’re wrong. They’ve taken her to the maternity ward.”
“So they’ll let her keep the baby?” Luciano asked.
One of the other men interjected. “And miss out on an opportunity to flaunt their omnipotence? They must kill the unborn babies along with the mothers.”
Gabriel glanced at the doorway before turning back to Luciano. “No, they’ll keep her there with the other pregnant women, but when the baby is born, they’ll take it away.”
“Then they’ll kill the mother,” the other man said, “electrify her to toast.”
The girl went pale and started chewing on a strand of her hair. “You’re sick. Talk like that just makes them win.”
The man stared back with his lined face. Then the supervisor reappeared, pausing in the middle of the floor to scrutinize them. As Luciano turned back to his translation, he realized he had never bothered to ask the pregnant girl her name.
Dear Papá,
That music. The music is tormenting me. The operas. The piano and the—what are they? Flutes. Dear Papá, the piano and the flutes play on and on, but all I can think of is what they’re trying to cover up. The pleas, the screams. Wretched screams. I can’t take it anymore. It’s so, it’s so . . . Papá, somehow the music also reminds me of you.
What time was it? If his father was already home from work, he would be sitting in the teak armchair with a glass of Fernet and cola, listening to Brahms or Schubert. And whenever the violin picked up again, Papá would tilt his head and smile, his eyes glazed over with some secret memory. Luciano had grown up to those sounds. According to Arturo Wagner, nothing trumped the splendour of music. Not just classical, either. As a kid, Luciano had lain on the linoleum floor, gazing up at his parents as they circled the room in a tango. While Carlos Gardel crooned about his love for Buenos Aires on the record player, his mother would rest her head on Papá’s shoulder. Their feet gave the illusion of moving on their own: pivoting, crossing, and now and then swishing into a little kick, Mamá pausing to wink at Papá.
No matter how much of an asshole mood you’re in when you walk in that door, once the LP starts crackling, everything changes. You lean back in your chair and close your eyes; your face relaxes. It’s like you become someone else. What do you hear in that music? Where does it transport you? I need to know. I need to see something beautiful again.
Chapter Thirteen
MARIJKE
DECEMBER 14, 1943
BUCHENWALD
EVERY DAY THE SAME CYCLE: CLEANING, DARNING, primping, all leading up to that horrible finale. The other girls began to measure our days in the number of men they bedded. I refused to count. On Sundays, we suffered through extended hours, but that was at least shower day for the men. On tolerable days, business was slow. On exceptional days, a camp speech or electricity outage might shut down the brothel. But those instances of relief were few and far between, and for the most part, I was forced to spread my legs each night from seven to nine, when I would count down the minutes until I could try to scrub the shame from my thighs and slip back into my own bed.
Aside from Karl’s visits, the only interruptions to this miserable routine were our camp walks, which grew more sporadic as time progressed. The young guard who often led us had a stout build and a face that was squished in like a bat’s. He was one of the same guards who peeped on us at night, and I would have despised him if he weren’t the only one who permitted us to talk amongst ourselves while we walked.
One afternoon, he showed up later than usual, near the end of the workday. We filed out of the brothel and followed him two by two, passing the enclosed area of the Little Camp, where several Jews stared back at us. The way they looked at us reminded me of something I’d seen shortly after Theo and I had joined the resistance. We’d walked over to Nieuwmarkt with forged ration coupons stuffed under our clothes. A barbed-wire barricade sliced through the square, cordoning off the Jewish quarter. While I kept a lookout for our contact, Theo gestured to the old weigh house with a sigh. “Just think how small Amsterdam must have been when they built this city gate some five hundred years ago.” He lowered his voice. “And now the damn moffen have gone and cut it all up again.”
Across the barricade, a little girl was studying us. She began tugging at the yellow star on her coat, fascinated by its brightness. Her mother chided her and checked around for nearby soldiers before kneeling to straighten the star.
Theo was still admiring the building’s turrets. “Look at this beautiful city of ours. This is what we’re fighting for, Marijke.”
“Indeed.” I looked back at the girl, who had waved to me over her mother’s shoulder. “If we don’t stand up for her, who will?”
Unlike that child, there were few signs of humanity left in the men standing behind the fence of the Little Camp. Thin skin draped over their bones like a shroud. A week of relentless rain had turned the clay ground in the enclosure to mud. One of the men knelt, and the feet that jutted from his wooden clogs looked black with rot. I resisted the urge to turn away, giving the man what I hoped was a look of solace.
As the guard led us on toward the depot buildings, we began to talk in low voices. The sun shone above us, but thunderheads gathered on the horizon. Edith tauntingly pointed this out to Sophia.
“Don’t be cruel,” I said. “You also wouldn’t like thunder if you’d suffered through half the air strikes she has.”
“Don’t talk to me about suffering,” she retorted. Like many of the girls, she’d become catty, prone to bickering about small things, about who got the best portions at supper, who got the seat in the sunlight after our chores.
My attention shifted from her as some of the gardening Kommando came out of the greenhouses to our left, carrying hoes and trowels. I scanned the group, but they were almost all green triangles and I knew Theo would be red like me. The Kapo cursed at them, waving a bludgeon over his head. When a prisoner slipped in the mud, the Kapo went over and smacked him on the back.
I looked down at my feet, and Sophia sighed. After a moment, she took my hand. “Think of how nice it will be to have a garden again, once all this is over. Tell me, what will you plant in yours?”
“I thought it was my job to distract you,” I said, “not the other way around.”
She carried on. “The first thing I’d want is strawberries.”
“Oh?”
“When I was little, I would help Mother tend her garden. She always let me water the flowers, and I pretended to hold court in a fairy-tale
kingdom, with strawberry blossoms as my ladies in waiting.”
I smiled, trying to picture her as a laughing little girl. We continued on in silence, but I could feel the warm reassurance of her presence beside me, and I wondered how I would ever have managed at Buchenwald without her.
The clouds darkened, bringing cold air. The first raindrops fell on my head, and the guard lifted the collar of his jacket to protect his neck. As we started our circle back, two prisoners stepped out of the crematorium with baskets full of clothing. Mostly uniforms, but also men’s shirts. One of these fell from the basket, but the prisoner didn’t notice and kept walking. As we passed, I reached down to pick it up, spotting the large X painted on the back. I had seen this mark on some of the women at Ravensbrück. When there were shortages of uniforms, the moffen used an X to distinguish the prisoners from civilians. It could be seen at a distance, the perfect target on an escaping back.
The smell of sweat still clung to the fabric of the dress shirt, and I tried to imagine the man who had worked and died in it. Had he come from another camp, another country? Was he Hungarian, Polish, or maybe Dutch? A husband, a father? I fingered the button on the right cuff, reminiscing of languid Sundays at home, the mornings when we had raisin buns and coffee in bed, when I wore nothing but Theo’s dress shirt to wash the dishes. Those echoes of what was lost felt heavy in my chest.
I didn’t notice our line had stopped and I bumped into the girl in front of me. Sophia yanked the shirt from my hands and passed it to the guard who had come over to see what I’d found.
He beckoned to another prisoner, ordering him to bring the shirt to the laundry. He narrowed his eyebrows at me in warning. “Keep up.”
Water began to stream down my neck, under the collar of my blouse, and into my shoes. I started to shiver. The guard took us back through the heart of the blocks while the rain soaked through our shirts to our undergarments. It was almost dusk, and labour Kommandos were returning from work. They marched in five by five, heads low and feet dragging. Some could hardly walk. Mud splattered their uniforms and raindrops dripped from their eyebrows. These were the men who had once played soccer with their friends, competed in breaststroke at local swimming pools. The men who had run down city streets, children bouncing on their shoulders in laughter. Men who had carried their wives across the wedding threshold, who had promised nothing but happiness and love. As we passed by, many of them watched us with smiles or the sadness of their own memories, but others looked ahead, their eyes vacant, unseeing. Those were the Muselmänner, the walking dead.