As the others filed into the small room, I saw the Schutzhaftlagerführer standing among them, his hands clasped behind his back.
The high-ranking officer lifted his hand and beckoned him.
“Herr Oberführer? You have a question?”
He pointed to the Jew who had been carrying the bandages for the nurse. “That one.”
The Schutzhaftlagerführer in turn jerked his head at one of the guards accompanying the little battalion. The prisoner was taken from the room.
“It is . . .” the Oberführer intoned, “. . . adequate.”
The other officers all relaxed infinitesimally.
“Adequate is not impressive,” the Oberführer added.
He swept out of the room, and the others followed.
At lunch, I took the broth that I was given. It had a button floating in it, instead of any visible vegetable or meat. I closed my eyes and imagined what the Hauptscharführer was eating. Pork roast, I knew, because I had been the one to fetch him the menu earlier this week from the officers’ mess. I had eaten pork only once, at the home of the Szymanskis.
I wondered if the Szymanskis were still living in Łód. If they ever thought of their Jewish friends and what had become of them.
Pork roast, with green beans, and cherry demi-glace; that’s what the menu had promised. I did not know what demi-glace meant, but I could taste the cherries bursting on my tongue. I remembered taking a wagon out to the country where Darija’s father’s factory had been, with Josek and the other boys. We had spread a picnic on a checked tablecloth and Josek had played a game, tossing a cherry into the air and then catching it in his mouth. I showed him how I could tie the stem into a knot with my tongue.
I was thinking of this, and of pork roast, and of the picnics we used to have in the summers that were packed by Darija’s housekeeper with so much food that we fed the extra to the ducks in the pond—can you imagine having extra? I was thinking of this, and trying so hard to remember the flavor of a walnut, and how it differed from a peanut, and considering whether you could lose your sense of taste the way you lost the function of a limb from disuse. I was thinking of this, which was why I did not hear, at first, what was happening at the entrance to the ward.
The Hauptscharführer was yelling at one of the nurses. “Do you think I have time for this incompetence?” he asked. “Do I need to approach the Schutzhaftlagerführer to solve a problem that should be so far beneath him?”
“No, Herr Hauptscharführer. I am sure we can locate—”
“Never mind.” Spying me, he strode to the pad where I was lying and grabbed me roughly by the wrist. “You will report to work immediately. You are no longer sick,” he pronounced, and he pulled me out of the ward, down the front steps of the hospital, and across the courtyard to the administration buildings. I had to run to keep up with him.
When I arrived, my chair and table and typewriter had been set up again in the same spot. The Hauptscharführer sat down at his desk. His face was red, and he was sweating, although the outside temperature was below freezing. We did not speak of what had happened until the end of the day. “Herr Hauptscharführer,” I asked hesitantly, “should I report back here tomorrow morning?”
“Where else would you go?” he asked, and he did not look up from the list of numbers he was adding.
Darija had her own news for me that night. The Beast was dead. The man I’d seen at Block 30 had been the SS-Oberführer—Gluecks’s deputy at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps—and he had also come through the barracks to do an inspection. According to one of the women in our block, who was part of the underground resistance movement at the camp, this deputy had a reputation for plucking Jews out of cushy jobs and sending them to the gas chamber. We had a new Blockälteste, who attempted to prove herself to the Aufseherin by making us do jumping jacks for over an hour, and beating anyone who tripped or fell in exhaustion. But it was not until a week later, when I was running an errand for the Hauptscharführer, that I realized it was not just the Blockälteste who had been shot. Nearly every other Jew in a job of privilege—from those who worked like me as secretaries to those who served officers’ meals at the mess hall to the cellist who played at the theater to the nurse assistant at the hospital—was gone.
The Hauptscharführer had not been punishing me by firing me and sending me to the hospital. He had been saving my life.
• • •
Two days later, when the camp was thick with snow, we were gathered in the courtyard between the blocks to watch a hanging. Months ago, there had been a revolt by prisoners who worked as Sonderkommandos—disposing of the bodies that came out of the gas chambers. We did not see them, as they were kept separate from the rest of us. From what I heard, the men attacked the guards and blew up one of the crematoria. Prisoners escaped, too—though most of them were recaptured and shot. But at the time, it had created quite a buzz. Three officers were killed, including one who had been pushed alive into one of the ovens—which meant that the prisoners had not died in vain.
That had been a bad week for everyone else, as the SS officers took their anger out on every prisoner in the camp. But then it had passed, and we had assumed it was over, until we huddled in the cold with our breath frosting before us and saw the women being led to the gallows.
The gunpowder for the explosions had been traced to four girls who worked at a munitions factory. They would smuggle tiny amounts of powder, wrapped in cloth or paper, and hide it somewhere on their persons. Then it got passed to a girl who worked in the clothing division of our camp, who in turn smuggled it to prisoners who were part of the resistance movement, who got it to the Sonderkommando leaders in time for the uprising. The girl who worked in the clothing division lived in my block. She was a small, mousy thing who did not give any appearance of being a rebel. That’s why she is a good one, Darija had pointed out. One day the girl had been dragged away from morning Appell. We knew she had been put in the prison cells for a while, and badly tortured, and eventually sent back to live with us—but by then, she was completely broken. She couldn’t speak, couldn’t look at us. She pulled long strips of skin from her fingers and chewed her nails till they bled. Every night without fail she would scream in her sleep.
Today, she had been left behind in the block, and even now, I could hear her shrieks. Her sister was one of the two girls being hanged.
They were led to the gallows wearing their normal work dresses but no coats. They looked at us, clear-eyed, their heads held high. I could see the family resemblance between one of them and the girl from my block.
The Schutzhaftlagerführer stood at the base of the gallows. At his command, another officer tied the girls’ hands behind their backs. The first one was pulled up onto the table that stood beneath the gallows, and a noose was slipped around her neck. One moment she was standing, and the next she was pulled upward. The second girl followed. They twisted, fish caught on the line.
All that day, working in the office, I imagined I could hear the screams of the younger sister, whose execution had been delayed. It was impossible, at this distance, but they were etched in my mind, an endless radio loop. It made me think of my own sister. For the first time, I thought that maybe Basia was right, since she had been spared the horrors of a place like this. If you knew you were going to die, wasn’t it better to choose the time and place, instead of waiting for fate to drop on you like an anvil? What if Basia’s act wasn’t one of desperation but a final moment of self-control? The Hauptscharführer had chosen to save me last week, but that did not mean the next time he would be as generous. The only person I could truly depend on was myself.
I imagined this was how the younger sister in my block felt when she began routing the gunpowder to the resistance. She wasn’t any different from Basia. They both were just looking for a way out.
I was so distracted that the Hauptscharführer asked if I had a headache. I did, but I knew it would get worse when I returned to the block at the end of the da
y.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The sister and a fourth girl had been hanged just after the sun set, before Appell. I tried not to look as I passed by, but I could hear the creak of the wood as their bodies twirled, macabre ballerinas, with skirts that sang in the bitter wind.
• • •
One night it grew so cold that we awakened with frost matting our hair. In the morning, when we were being given our rations, the Blockälteste took a tin cup of coffee from one of the women and threw it into the air so that it froze instantly, a great white cloud. The dogs that patrolled with the officers now whined and pawed at the icy ground with their tails between their legs as we stood at Appell losing feeling in our extremities. When we walked to work afterward, we had to wrap our scarves around our heads or risk frostbite on any skin that was exposed.
That week the temperatures dipped so low twenty-two women in our block died. Another fourteen who were assigned to outside labor fell to the ground and froze to death. Darija brought me tights and a sweater from Kanada, so that I would have an extra layer. The price of a blanket on the black market at the camp quadrupled.
I was never so grateful for my office job with the Hauptscharführer, but I knew that Darija, in the unheated barracks of Kanada, was still in danger of freezing. So as I had done a few times before, when the Hauptscharführer left to get his lunch, I hurriedly typed a note on a stolen piece of his letterhead requesting that prisoner A18557 report to his office. Bundling myself into my coat and hat and mittens and scarf, I hurried across the camp to Kanada to deliver the message and bring my best friend out of the cold, if only for a few minutes.
We huddled together, arm in arm, and Darija slipped into my mitten a small piece of chocolate she had squirreled away during her work. We didn’t talk; it took too much energy. Even after we had entered the building, we had to keep up the pretense that Darija had been summoned by the Hauptscharführer.
We passed SS officers and guards and kept our eyes averted. By this point I was known to them, nothing suspicious. As was my habit, when I reached the office door, I turned the knob first and peeked inside, just in case I had miscalculated and the Hauptscharführer had returned.
There was someone in the room.
Behind the Hauptscharführer’s desk was a safe. In it was the money that was found at Kanada, which was shipped out daily under lock and key. Each time the Hauptscharführer made his rounds of Kanada, he would empty the box that sat in the center of the barracks where valuables were kept. The smaller items, like bills and coins and diamonds, were brought to his office. As far as I knew the only person who had the combination to the safe was the Hauptscharführer himself.
But now, as I saw the Schutzhaftlagerführer standing in front of its open door, I realized I was wrong.
He was slipping a stack of currency into the inside breast pocket of his coat.
I saw his eyes widen, as he stared at me as if I were a ghost.
An upiór.
Something that was supposed to be dead.
I realized that he had assumed I was killed last week when the Oberführer from Oranienburg had come and systematically liquidated all the Jews working in office jobs.
I started to back out of the room, panicked. I had to get out of there, and I had to get Darija out of there. But even if we were able to break through the fence and escape to Russia it would not have been far enough. As long as I knew that the Schutzhaftlagerführer was stealing, and as long as I worked for his brother, I could turn him in. Which meant he’d have to get rid of me.
“Run,” I yelled to Darija as the Schutzhaftlagerführer’s hand closed over my wrist. Darija paused, and that was just enough time for the officer to grab her by the hair with his other hand and drag her into the office.
He closed the door behind us. “What do you think you saw?” he demanded.
I shook my head, looking at the ground.
“Speak!”
“I . . . I saw nothing, Herr Schutzhaftlagerführer.”
Beside me, Darija slipped her hand into mine.
The Schutzhaftlagerführer saw the slight movement, the rustle between our dresses. I don’t know what he thought at that moment. That we were passing a note? That we had some kind of code? Or simply that if he let us go, I would tell my friend what he had done, and then there would be two people who knew his secret.
He pulled his pistol out of its holster and shot Darija in the face.
She fell, still holding on to my hand. The plaster wall behind us exploded in a rain of dust. I started to scream. My best friend’s blood spattered my face and my dress; I couldn’t hear anything after the blast of the gunshot. I fell to my hands and knees, rocking, hugging what was left of Darija, waiting for the bullet that was destined for me.
“Reiner? What are you doing in here, for the love of God?”
The Hauptscharführer’s voice sounded like it was coming through a tunnel, like I had been wrapped in layers of cotton batting. I looked up at him, still screaming. The Schutzhaftlagerführer pulled me upright by the throat. “I caught these two stealing from you, Franz. It is a good thing I happened to come in when I did.”
He held out the wad of currency that he had been tucking into his coat.
The Hauptscharführer set down a tray of food on the desk and looked at me. “You did this?”
It didn’t matter what I said, I realized. Even if the Hauptscharführer believed me, his brother would be watching me at every moment, waiting for a chance to do to me what he had done to Darija so that I would not tell the Hauptscharführer what I had seen.
Oh, God, Darija.
I shook my head, sobbing. “No, Herr Hauptscharführer.”
The Schutzhaftlagerführer laughed. “What did you think she would say? And why would you even bother to ask?”
A muscle jumped along the Hauptscharführer’s jaw. “You know there are procedures,” he said. “The prisoner should have been arrested, not shot.”
“What are you going to do? Report me?” When his brother didn’t respond, the Schutzhaftlagerführe r’s face went as red as it did when he was drunk. “I make the procedures. Who would contest what I did? This prisoner was found stealing property from the Reich.”
It was the same infraction that had brought me to this office in the first place.
“I stopped her, in the commission of the crime. The same should be done with her accomplice, even if she is your little whore.” The Schutzhaftlagerführer shrugged. “If you do not punish her, Franz, then I will.” To underscore his point, he cocked the trigger on his pistol again.
I felt something warm run down my leg, and realized to my dismay that I had urinated. A small puddle spread on the floor between my wooden shoes.
The Hauptscharführer stepped toward me. “I did not do what he says,” I whispered.
Tucked inside my dress was the journal with the ten pages I had written last night. Aleksander, locked in a prison cell. Ania, breaking into the jail to see him the morning before his public execution. Please, he begged her. Do one thing for me.
Anything, Ania promised.
Kill me, he said.
If this had been any ordinary day, the Hauptscharführer would be settling down to hear me read that aloud. But this was not any ordinary day.
In the four months I had worked for the Hauptscharführer, he had never laid a hand on me. Now, he did. He cupped his hand around my cheek, so gently that it brought tears to my eyes. His thumb stroked my skin the way one would touch a lover, and he met my gaze.
Then he hit me so hard that he broke my jaw.
• • •
When I couldn’t stand up anymore, when I was spitting bloody saliva into my sleeve to keep from choking, when the Schutzhaftlagerführer was satisfied, the Hauptscharführer stopped. He stumbled away from me, as if he were coming out of a trance, and looked around his ravaged office. “Clean up this mess,” he ordered.
He left me under the supervision of another guard, who was ordered to t
ake me to the prison cells as soon as I was finished. I gingerly righted the furniture, wincing when I twisted or moved too quickly. I swept up the plaster dust with my hands. My eyes kept drifting to where Darija lay on the floor, and every time I looked at her I felt like I was going to be sick. So I took off my coat and wrapped her upper body in it. She was already stiffening, her limbs cold and rigid. I started to shake—with cold, with grief, with shock?—and forced myself to go to the janitorial closet and find cleaning supplies, rags, a bucket. I scrubbed the floor. Twice, I passed out from the pain caused by the exertion, and twice the guard poked me with his boot to nudge me back into consciousness.
When the office was clean again, I lifted Darija into my arms. She weighed nothing, but neither did I, and I staggered at the additional burden. With the guard directing me, I carried my best friend—still wrapped in my coat—from the administration building in the frigid cold to a wagon that stood at the outskirts of Kanada. In it were other bodies: people who had died overnight, people who had died during the workday. With all the strength I had I lifted her into the wagon. The only thing that kept me from climbing in there with her was knowing she would hate to see me give up.
The guard grabbed my arm, pulling at me to leave her. I tugged away from him, risking more punishment. I unwrapped the coat from around Darija’s torso and slipped into it. There was no body heat left in her to transfer to me. I reached for her hand, flecked with red measles spots of her own blood, and kissed it.
Before she was hanged, the girl who had come back to our block after being imprisoned had whispered wildly of the Stehzelle, the starvation cell you had to enter through a tiny door like a dog kennel. The cell was built narrow and tall, so that you could not sit down at all. Instead you had to stand, overnight, with mice running across your feet, until you were released the next morning and expected to carry on through your workday. By the time I was brought to one of these, in a building I had never entered in the months I’d been here, I was numb. The cold had robbed me of feeling in my hands and feet and face, which was good, because it kept my jaw from aching. I could not speak without tearing up from the pain, and that was fine, because I had nothing left to say.
The Storyteller Page 35