I picked up the parcel and was headed back to the Hauptscharführe r’s office, when suddenly the door of the canteen burst open and the Schutzhaftlagerführer flew through it, pounding the face of a junior officer.
Believe it or not, there were rules at Auschwitz. An officer could beat any prisoner for no more reason than that the prisoner looked at him funny, but he could not kill without reason, because that meant eliminating a worker from the great cog that was this camp. He could treat a prisoner like pond scum, and could abuse a Ukrainian guard or a Jewish kapo, but he was not allowed to show disrespect to another SS man.
The Schutzhaftlagerführer was clearly important, but there had to be someone more important than him, who would get word of this.
I started to run. I raced across the camp, slipping on patches of ice, my cheeks and nose numbed by the cold, until I reached the administration building where the Hauptscharführe r’s office was.
It was empty.
I hurried outside again, this time to the barracks of Kanada. I found the Hauptscharführer talking to several of the guards, pointing out an inaccuracy in their reporting.
“Excuse me, Herr Hauptscharführer,” I murmured, as my pulse raced uncontrollably. “May we speak privately?”
“I am busy,” he said.
I nodded, moving away.
If I said nothing, no one would ever know what I had witnessed.
If I said nothing, the Schutzhaftlagerführer would be reprimanded. Maybe even demoted or transferred. Which would certainly be a good thing for all of us.
Well, maybe not for his brother.
I don’t know what was more viscerally shocking to me: the fact that I turned around and marched back into the sorting barracks, or the realization that I cared about the Hauptscharführe r’s welfare. “I am sorry, Herr Hauptscharführer,” I murmured. “But this is a matter of grave importance.”
He dismissed the officers, and dragged me outside by the arm. The wind and snow howled around us. “You do not interrupt me in my work, is that clear?”
I nodded.
“Perhaps I have given you the wrong impression. I am the one who orders you around, not vice versa. I will not have officers beneath me thinking that I—”
“The Schutzhaftlagerführer,” I interrupted. “He is in a brawl outside the canteen.”
The blood drained from the Hauptscharführe r’s face. He started to walk briskly in the direction of the camp village, breaking into a run as he turned the corner.
My fingers flexed on the bottle of aspirin, still tucked inside my pink mitten. I walked back to the administration building and let myself into the office. I took off my coat and my hat and mittens, and set them to dry on the radiator. Then I sat down and began to type.
I worked through lunch. This time, there was no reading; there was no extra ration for me. It was not until twilight that the Hauptscharführer returned. He dusted the snow off his coat and hung it up with his officer’s cap, then dropped down heavily behind his desk, steepling his hands together.
“Do you have a sibling?” he asked.
I faced him. “I did.”
The Hauptscharführer met my gaze and nodded.
He scribbled a message on a piece of stationery and folded it into an envelope. “Take this to the Kommandant’s office,” he said, and I blanched. I had never been there before, although I knew where it was. “Explain that the Schutzhaftlagerführer is indisposed with illness and will not be present at Appell.”
I nodded. I pulled on my coat, still wet, and my mittens and my hat. “Wait.” The Hauptscharführe r’s voice called me back as I started to turn the doorknob. “I do not know your name.”
I had been working for him, now, for twelve weeks. “Minka,” I murmured.
“Minka.” He looked down at the papers on his desk, dismissing me. It was, I realized, the closest he could come to giving me his thanks.
He never called me by name again.
• • •
The items that were seized from Kanada were shipped to various places in Europe, along with meticulous lists of what was included in the shipments, which had been typed by me. From time to time, there was a discrepancy. This was usually blamed on a prisoner stealing an item, but more likely, it was an SS officer. Darija said she often saw junior officers slip something into their pockets when they thought no one else was looking.
When the lists did not match the contents, a phone call would be placed to the Hauptscharführer. It would be up to him to mete out the necessary punishment, even though it had been weeks since the actual looting.
One afternoon, when Herr Hauptscharführer was retrieving his lunch from the village, I answered such a phone call. As always in my precise German, I said, “Herr Hauptscharführer Hartmann, guten Morgen.”
The man on the other end of the line introduced himself as Herr Schmidt. “I’m sorry. Herr Hauptscharführer has stepped away from his desk. May I take a message?”
“Yes, you may tell him that the shipment arrived intact. But before I go, I must say, Fräulein . . . I am having the hardest time placing your accent.”
I did not correct him when he called me Fräulein. “ Ich bin Berlinerin, ” I said.
“Really. Because your diction puts mine to shame,” Herr Schmidt replied.
“I attended boarding school in Switzerland,” I lied.
“Ah yes. Perhaps the only place left in Europe that has not been completely ravaged. Vielen Dank, Fräulein. Auf Wiederhören.”
I placed the receiver in its cradle, feeling as if I’d been through an interrogation. When I turned around, the Hauptscharführer was back. “Who was that?”
“Herr Schmidt. Confirming the shipment.”
“Why did you say you were from Berlin?”
“He asked about my accent.”
“He was suspicious?” the Hauptscharführer asked.
If he was, did that mean my time as a secretary had run its course? Would I be sent back to Kanada, or worse, fall prey to another selection?
“I don’t think so,” I said, my heart racing. “He believed me when I said I’d studied abroad.”
The Hauptscharführer nodded his agreement. “Not all would look kindly on your position here.” He sat down, arranging his napkin and slicing into a platter of roast chicken. “Now. Where did we leave off?”
I turned my wooden chair away from the typewriter to face him and opened the leather journal. I had written my requisite ten pages the night before, but for the first time, I did not think I could share it out loud.
“Go on, go on,” the Hauptscharführer urged, waving his fork at me.
I cleared my throat. “I had never been so aware of my own breathing, or my own pulse.” That was as far as I got before heat flooded my face and I looked into my lap.
“What is it?” he asked. “Is it no good?”
I shook my head.
He reached across the desk and grabbed the book from me.
• • •
“Of course, there was no heartbeat to hear. Just an emptiness, an understanding that we would never be the same. Did that mean that he had not felt the way I did as he moved between—”
Suddenly, he broke off, blushing just as deeply as I was. “Oh,” the Hauptscharführer said. “Perhaps this bit is better read silently.”
He kissed me as if he were poisoned, and I was the antidote. Maybe, I thought, that was true. His teeth nipped at my lip, making it bleed again. When he sucked at the wound, I arched in his embrace, imagining him drinking from me.
Afterward, I lay against him, my hand spread across his chest, as if I were measuring the void inside. “I would do anything to have my heart back,” Aleksander said. “If only so that I could give it to you.”
“You are perfect like this.”
He buried his face in the curve of my neck. “Ania,” he said, “I am far from perfect.”
There is a magic to intimacy, a world built of sighs and skin that is thicker than brick, stronger th
an iron. There is only you, and him, so impossibly close that nothing can come between. Not the enemy, not your allies. In this safe haven, in this hallowed place and time, I could even ask the questions whose answers I feared. “Tell me what it was like,” I whispered. “Your first time.”
He did not pretend to misunderstand. He curled onto his side, his body spooned around mine, so that he would not have to look me in the eye as he spoke. “It felt as if I had been in a desert for months, and would die if I couldn’t drink. But water, it did nothing. I could consume a lake and it would not have been enough. What I craved was what I could smell through the skin, rich as cognac.” He hesitated. “I had tried to fight the urge. By then, I was so hungry, so faint, that I could barely stand. I crawled into a barn, wishing for death again. She was carrying a bucket of chicken feed, scattering it in the coop, and I could see her from where I crouched in the rafters. I fell like an archangel, covered her scream with the fabric of my cape, and dragged her into the hayloft where I had been hiding.
“She begged me for her life. But mine was more important. So I ripped out her throat. I drank her dry and chewed on her bones and peeled away her flesh until there was nothing left, consumed by my hunger. I was disgusted; I could not believe what I had become. I tried to clean myself, but her blood left a stain on my hands. I stuck my finger down my throat but could not purge. Still, for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t hungry; and because of this I could finally sleep. The next morning, when her parents came searching for her, calling her name, I awakened. Beside me was all that was left of her: that head, with the thick blond braid, that round mouth frozen in terror. Those marble eyes, staring back at the monster that was now me. I sat beside her, keeping vigil, and I sobbed.”
• • •
The Hauptscharführer looked up at me, surprised. “The Donestre,” he said, and I nodded, pleased that he had caught the reference to the mythical beast he had told me about.
• • •
“The second time, it was a prostitute who had stopped to pull up her stockings in an alley. It was easier, or so I told myself, because otherwise, I would have had to admit that what I’d done before was wrong. The third time, my first man: a banker who was locking up at the end of the day. There was a teenage girl once, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And a socialite I heard crying on a hotel balcony. And after that I stopped caring who they had been. It only mattered that they were there, at that moment, when I needed them.” Aleksander closed his eyes. “It turns out that the more you repeat the same action, no matter how reprehensible, the more you can make an excuse for it in your own mind.”
I turned in his arms. “How do I know that one day you won’t kill me?”
He stared at me, hesitating. “You don’t.”
• • •
That was the end, so far. I had stopped writing at that point so that I could get a few hours of sleep before Appell. The Hauptscharführer set the journal down on the desk between us. His cheeks were still bright pink. “Well,” he said.
I could not meet his eye. I had undressed in front of strangers here; I had been stripped in a courtyard by a guard for punishment, and yet I had never felt so exposed.
“It’s quite interesting, as all that’s really described is a kiss. What makes it graphic is the way you talk of Aleksander’s . . . other exploits.” He tilted his head. “Fascinating, to think of violence being just as intimate as love.”
When he said that, it surprised me. I could not say that I had written this intentionally, but wasn’t it the truth? In both relationships, there were only two people: one who gave and one who sacrificed. It made me think of all those hours we had spent at Gymnasium analyzing the text of a great author: But what did Thomas Mann really mean here? Maybe he had meant nothing. Maybe he just wanted to write a story that nobody could put down.
“I take it you have had a beau.”
The Hauptscharführer’s voice startled me. I could not manage to stammer a response. Finally, I just shook my head.
“That makes this section even more impressive then,” the Hauptscharführer replied. “If inaccurate.”
My eyes flew to meet his. He abruptly looked away, standing as was his custom after lunch, to leave me the remains while he did a patrol of Kanada.
“Not the . . . mechanics,” he said formally, as he buttoned his overcoat. “The last bit. When Aleksander says it gets easier, the second time.” The Hauptscharführer turned away and settled his cap on his head. “It never does.”
• • •
My typewriter was missing.
I stood in front of the spot that the Hauptscharführer had designated as my own little office cubicle, wondering what I had done wrong.
Darija had told me that I should not get used to this treatment, and I had shrugged away her concern. When other women sneered or made sarcastic comments about me and the odd friendship I had developed with the Hauptscharführer, I brushed them aside. What did I care what people thought of me, as long as I knew the truth? I was delusional enough to convince myself that as long as my story continued, so would my life. Yet even Scheherazade had run out of stories, after 1001 nights. By then, the King who had spared her from execution each dawn so that she could tell him the rest of the tale later that night had been made wiser and kinder by the lessons in her stories.
He made her his queen.
I only wanted the Allies to show up before I ran out of plot twists.
“You no longer work here,” the Hauptscharführer said flatly. “You will report immediately to the hospital.”
I blanched. The hospital was an anteroom for the gas chamber. We all knew it; it was why, no matter how sick a girl was, she resisted being taken there.
“I am not ill,” I said.
He flicked his glance toward me. “This is not a negotiation.”
Mentally I recounted my work from yesterday: the requisition forms I had filled out, the messages I had taken. I could find nothing that had been done in error. We had talked for a half hour about my book, too, as usual, and it had spurred the Hauptscharführer to tell me of his brief time at university, when he had won an award for his poetry. “Herr Hauptscharführer,” I begged. “Please, give me another chance. Whatever I did wrong I will fix . . .”
He looked past me toward the open doorway and waved in a young officer, who was to escort me out.
I do not remember much about my arrival at Block 30. My number was entered into the records by a Jewish prisoner who was manning the front desk. I was brought to a room that was small, crowded, and filthy. Patients lay on top of each other on paper pads, their uniforms stained with bloody diarrhea or vomit. Some had long scars that had been rudimentarily stitched. Rats ran over the bodies of those too exhausted to move. Another prisoner, who must have been assigned here as a worker, carried a stack of linen dressing, and followed a nurse as she changed bandages. I tried to get her attention, but she refused to meet my gaze.
Probably out of the fear that she was replaceable, like me.
The girl beside me was missing an eye. She kept clawing at my arm. “So thirsty,” she said, over and over in Yiddish.
My temperature was taken and recorded. “I want to see a doctor,” I cried, my voice rising above the moans of the others. “I am healthy!”
I would tell the doctor that I was fine. That I could go back to work, any kind of work. My worst fear was having to stay here, with these women who looked like broken toys.
A woman shoved aside the skeletal body of the girl with the missing eye and sat down on the pad beside me. “Shut up,” she hissed. “Are you an idiot?”
“No, but I need to tell them—”
“If you make enough of a fuss about not being ill, one of the doctors will hear.”
Clearly, this woman was mad. Because wasn’t that exactly what I wanted?
“They want the healthy ones,” she continued.
I shook my head, completely confused.
“I came here because
I had a rash on my leg. The doctor who saw me decided the rest of me was sound enough.” She pulled up her dress so that I could see the blistered red burns on her abdomen. “He did this to me with X-rays.”
Shuddering, I started to understand. I had to act ill, at least ill enough to escape the notice of the doctors. But not ill enough to be selected by the guards.
It seemed like an impossible tightrope to walk.
“Some bigwig is coming in from Oranienburg today,” she continued. “That’s what the rumor is. If you know what’s good for you, you will not draw attention to yourself. They want to look good for their superiors, if you know what I mean.”
I did. It meant that they needed scapegoats.
I wondered if word would get to Darija that I had been taken here. If she would try to bribe someone with a treasure from Kanada to get me released. If that were even possible.
After a while I lay down on the pad. The girl with the missing eye had a fever; her body was throwing off waves of heat. “Thirsty?” she kept whispering.
I turned away from her, curling into myself. I slipped the leather journal from my dress and started to read my story, from the beginning. I used this as an anesthetic, trying to see nothing but the words on the page and the world they created.
I was aware of a stir in the ward as the nurses raced in, tidying up the room and moving prisoners so that we were not lying on top of each other. I slipped my journal inside my dress again, wondering if the doctor was coming.
Instead, a small phalanx of soldiers arrived. They flanked an older man I had never seen before—a highly decorated officer. Judging from the number of underlings surrounding the man and the way the camp officers were practically kissing his boots, he had to be someone very important.
A man in a white coat—the infamous doctor?—was leading what seemed to be a tour. “We continue to make progress on methods of mass sterilization through radiation,” I translated from the German, as he spoke. I thought of the girl who had warned me to keep my mouth shut, of the burns on her belly.
The Storyteller Page 34