The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  * * *

  It is this same Dr. Mengele who now stands at one end of Block 31, taking in the scene. The Priest leads his guards toward the back of the hut, kicking aside stools and hauling inmates out of the line, though they find no excuse to take inmates away. Not this time.

  When the Nazis finish inspecting the hut, the sergeant turns to the medical captain, but he has vanished. The guards should be pleased; they have found no escape tunnels or weapons—nothing against the rules. But they are furious; there is nothing to punish. They shout and make threats, violently shaking one boy. And then they leave.

  They’ve gone, but they’ll be back.

  When the door shuts behind them, there’s a murmur of relief. Fredy Hirsch puts the whistle he always wears around his neck to his lips, and blows it loudly, signaling them to fall out. Dita’s arm is so numb she can barely move it, and the pain brings tears to her eyes. She is so relieved by the departure of the Nazis that she cries and laughs at the same time.

  Nervous chatter breaks out. The teachers want to discuss what has happened, to understand what they have seen. The children run around and let off steam. Dita sees Mrs. Křižková approach her, bearing down on her. As she walks, the flap of skin under her chin wobbles like a turkey’s gobbler. She stops just in front of Dita.

  “Are you crazy, girl? Don’t you know that when the order is given, you have to go to your assigned spot in the assistants’ area, not run around like a madwoman? Don’t you realize that they can haul you off and kill you? Don’t you realize that they can kill all of us?”

  “I did what I thought best—”

  “What you thought…” begins Mrs. Křižková, her face wrinkling. “And who are you to change the rules? Do you think you know everything?”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Křižková…”

  Dita clenches her fists to stop her tears from falling. She’s not going to give her the satisfaction.

  “I’m going to report what you’ve done—”

  “That won’t be necessary,” says a man’s voice, speaking Czech with a strong German accent, slow and deliberate, and yet emphatic. It is Hirsch.

  “Mrs. Křižková, there’s still a little time before classes end. You should take charge of your group.”

  Mrs. Křižková always brags that she has the most disciplined and hardworking group of girls in all of Block 31. Without a word, she glances furiously at the head of the hut, turns around, and marches stiffly away toward her pupils. Dita sighs with relief.

  “Thank you, Mr. Hirsch.”

  “Fredy.…”

  “I’m sorry I broke the rules.”

  Hirsch smiles at her.

  “A good soldier doesn’t need to wait for orders; he knows what his duty is.”

  And before he walks off, he turns toward her and looks at the books she’s holding against her chest.

  “I’m proud of you, Dita. May God bless you.”

  She watches him leave and remembers the night of the Snow White performance. As the assistants were dismantling the stage, Dita emerged from her prompter’s den and headed for the exit, thinking she might never again set foot in this wonderful hut that could turn itself into a theater. But a vaguely familiar voice stopped her.

  “Young girl…” Fredy Hirsch’s face was still covered with white chalk makeup. “Your arrival in this camp is timely,” he said.

  “Timely?”

  “Absolutely!” He gestured for her to follow him to the back of the stage, which was now empty of people. Close up, Hirsch’s eyes were an odd mix of gentleness and insolence. “I desperately need a librarian for our children’s hut.”

  It astonished Dita that he would remember her. Hirsch had been in charge of the Youth Office in the Terezín ghetto, but she’d caught a glimpse of him only a few times as she helped one of the librarians wheel her trolley of books.

  Dita was perplexed, though. She was no librarian. She was just a fourteen-year-old girl.

  “Forgive me, but I think there’s been a misunderstanding. The librarian was Miss Sittigová; I only helped her.”

  The director of Block 31 smiled. “I noticed you several times. You were pushing the library cart.”

  “Yes, because it was very heavy for her, and the little wheels didn’t roll easily on the cobblestones.”

  “You could have spent the afternoon lying on your pallet, going for walks with your girlfriends, or just doing your own thing. But instead, you pushed the cart so that people could have their books.”

  She was looking at him, perplexed, but Hirsch’s words left no room for argument. He was in charge of an army. And like a general, he pronounced, “You are a librarian.”

  He added, “But it’s dangerous. Very dangerous. Handling books here is no game. If the SS catches anyone with a book, they execute them.”

  As he said it, he raised his thumb and extended his index finger. He aimed that imaginary pistol at Dita’s forehead. She tried to appear unbothered, but she was becoming nervous at the thought of this responsibility.

  “Count on me.”

  “It’s a huge risk.”

  “I don’t mind at all.”

  “They might kill you.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Dita tried to sound decisive, but she was unsuccessful. She could not control her trembling legs, and Hirsch stared at her shaking limbs.

  “Running the library requires a brave person.…”

  Dita blushed. The more she tried to stay still, the wilder her trembling became. Her hands began to shake, too, and she feared the director might think her too weak for the job.

  “S-s-so you’re not counting on me, then?”

  “You seem like a brave girl to me.”

  “But I’m trembling!” she replied, devastated.

  Then Hirsch smiled in his particular way. “That’s why you’re brave. Brave people are not the ones who aren’t afraid. Those are reckless people who ignore the risk; they put themselves and others in danger. That’s not the sort of person I want on my team. I need the ones who know the risk—whose legs shake, but who carry on.”

  As she listened, Dita’s legs began to tremble less.

  “Brave people are the ones who can overcome their own fear. You are one of those. What’s your name?”

  “My name is Edita Adler, Mr. Hirsch.”

  “Welcome to Block Thirty-One, Edita. May God bless you. Please call me Fredy.”

  They had waited quietly until everyone had gone. Then Dita entered Fredy Hirsch’s cubicle—a narrow rectangle with a pallet and a pair of old chairs. It was almost bare, with only a few food packages, scraps of material left over from the set of Snow White, and Fredy’s food bowl in sight.

  Hirsch told her something that left her dumbstruck: They had a library on legs, a “living library.” Teachers who knew particular books well had become book-people. They rotated among the different groups, telling the children stories they knew almost by heart.

  “Mrs. Magda is really good with The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, and the children have fun when she makes them imagine that they’re flying over the skies of Sweden holding on to geese. Šašek does a really good job with stories of the American Indians and the adventures of the Wild West. Dezo Kovác is almost like a walking Bible.”

  But this living library wasn’t enough for Fredy Hirsch. He told her about the books that had reached the camp clandestinely. A Polish carpenter called Mietek had brought three, and a Slovak electrician, another two. They were the sorts of prisoners who moved among the camps with greater freedom, as they were employed to do maintenance work. They had managed to sneak some books from the ramp where the luggage from the arriving transports was sorted by privileged prisoners.

  As the librarian, Dita would be in charge of keeping track of which books were lent to which teacher, as well as collecting the books when classes were finished and returning them to their secret compartment.

  Hirsch made for a corner where scraps of material were piled up, and mo
ved them aside. He removed a wooden board, and books began to emerge. Dita couldn’t restrain her joy and clapped.

  “This is your library. It’s not much.” And he looked at her out of the corner of his eye to see what effect it was having on her.

  It wasn’t an extensive library. In fact, it consisted of eight books, and some of them were in poor condition. But they were books. In this incredibly dark place, they were a reminder of less somber times, when words rang out more loudly than machine guns.

  Dita picked up the books one by one, holding them in her hands as carefully as she would a newborn baby. The first one was an unbound atlas, with a few pages missing. It showed a Europe of the past, with empires that had ceased to exist some time ago. The political maps were a mosaic of vermilion, brilliant greens, orange, navy blue, in sharp contrast to the dullness that surrounded Dita: the dark brown of the mud, the faded ocher of the huts, and an ashy clouded sky. She started to leaf through the pages, and it was as if she were flying over the world. She crossed oceans and mountains, navigating with her finger along the rivers Danube and Volga, and then the Nile. To put all those millions of square kilometers of seas, forests, all of Earth’s mountain ranges, all the rivers, all the cities and countries into such a tiny space was a miracle that only a book could achieve.

  Fredy Hirsch watched her in silence, taking pleasure in her absorbed expression. If he had any doubts about the responsibility he’d given to the young Czech girl, they dissipated in that moment. He knew that Edita would look after the library carefully.

  The Basic Treatise on Geometry was somewhat better preserved. It unfurled a different geography in its pages: a countryside of isosceles triangles, octagons, and cylinders, rows of ordered numbers in squads of arithmetical armies, formations that were like clouds, and parallelograms like mysterious cells.

  Her eyes opened wide at the third book. It was A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells. A book populated by primitive men, Egyptians, Romans, Maya … civilizations that formed empires and then collapsed so that new ones could emerge.

  The fourth title was A Russian Grammar. She didn’t understand a thing, but she liked those enigmatic letters. Now that Germany was also at war with Russia, the Russians were her friends. Dita had heard that there were many Russian prisoners of war in Auschwitz and that the Nazis treated them with extreme cruelty.

  There was also a French novel in bad condition and a treatise with the title New Paths to Psychoanalytic Therapy by a professor named Freud. There was another novel in Russian with no cover. And the eighth book was Czech, only a handful of sheets held together by a few threads along the spine. Before she could take it in her hands, Fredy grabbed it. She looked at him with the expression of a displeased librarian. She wished she had a pair of tortoiseshell glasses so that she could look at him over their rim, as serious librarians do.

  “This one’s in a very bad state. It’s no good.”

  “I’ll fix it.”

  “And anyway … it’s not appropriate for children, especially girls.”

  Dita narrowed her eyes in irritation.

  “With all due respect, Fredy, I’m fourteen years old. Do you honestly believe that after observing on a daily basis thousands of people going to the gas chambers at the edge of the Lager, what I read in a novel might shock me?”

  Hirsch looked at her with surprise. And it wasn’t easy to surprise him. He explained to her that the book in question was called The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk and was written by a blasphemous alcoholic called Jaroslav Hašek, that it contained scandalous opinions about politics and religion, and more than dubious moral situations. In the end, though, he handed her that book.

  Dita caressed the books. They were broken and scratched, worn, with reddish-brown patches of mildew; some were mutilated. But without them, the wisdom of centuries of civilization might be lost—geography, literature, mathematics, history, language. They were precious.

  She would protect them with her life.

  3.

  Dita eats her turnip soup very slowly—they say it fills you more that way—but sipping it barely takes her mind off her hunger. Between one spoonful and the next, the groups of teachers discuss the extraordinary behavior of Morgenstern, their scatterbrained colleague.

  “He’s a very strange man. Sometimes he talks a lot, but at other times he hardly says a word to anyone.”

  “It would be better if he didn’t speak at all. He just talks nonsense. He’s off his rocker.”

  “It was painful to watch him bowing down in front of the Priest in such a servile manner.”

  “You couldn’t exactly call him a Resistance hero.”

  “I don’t know why Hirsch lets a man with a screw loose give classes to the children.”

  Dita overhears them and feels sorry for the old man, who reminds her a bit of her grandfather. She sees him sitting on a stool at the back of the hut, eating by himself, even talking to himself while, with his little finger raised with a refinement that is so out of place in this hut, he ceremoniously lifts the spoon to his mouth as if he were sharing his meal with aristocrats.

  They dedicate the afternoon to the usual children’s games and sporting activities, but Dita is desperate for the school day to finish and the final roll call to be over so she can race off to see her parents. In the family camp, news travels quickly from hut to hut, but like in a game of telephone, there are distortions in the retellings.

  As soon as she can, Dita rushes off to reassure her mother, who will already have found out about the Block 31 inspection. As she runs down the Lagerstrasse, she comes across her friend Margit.

  “Ditiňka, I hear you had an inspection in Thirty-One!”

  “That disgusting Priest!”

  “Did they find anything? Did they detain anyone?”

  “Absolutely nothing; there’s nothing for them to find there.” Dita winked. “Mengele was there, too.”

  “Dr. Mengele? He’s a madman. He experimented with injections of blue ink into the pupils of thirty-six children in an attempt to produce blue-eyed people. It was horrible, Ditiňka. Some died of infection, and others were left blind. You were lucky to escape his notice.”

  The two girls stop talking. Margit is her best friend, and well aware of her work with the secret library, but Margit knows not to say anything to Dita’s mother, Liesl. She would try to stop her, say it was too dangerous. She’d threaten to tell Dita’s father, or start begging God to save her. It’s better not to tell her, or her father, anything. To change the topic, Dita tells Margit about Morgenstern.

  “What a fuss he stirred up. You should have seen the Priest’s face as the professor kept dumping out the contents of his pocket each time he bent over.”

  “I know who you mean now. A very old man with a shabby, patched jacket—he always bows when he passes a lady. He’s always bobbing his head! I think that man is a bit crazy.”

  “And who isn’t, in this place?”

  When Dita reaches her hut, she sees her parents outside, sitting up against one of the long walls, resting. It’s cold outside, but very crowded inside the hut. They look tired, especially her father.

  It’s a long workday: The guards wake them before dawn. They stand outdoors through a lengthy roll call, exposed to the elements, then labor all day. Dita’s father works producing shoulder straps for guns, and his hands are often blackened and blistered from the toxic resins and glues they use. Her mother is a cleaner in a workshop where they make hats. They work many hours with very little food, but at least they are sheltered from the elements. There are many who aren’t so lucky: Some must collect dead bodies with carts, some clean the latrines or drain the trenches, others spend the day hauling soup barrels.

  Her father gives Dita a wink, while her mother quickly gets to her feet.

  “Are you all right, Edita?”

  “Ye-e-e-ss.”

  “You’re not just pretending?”

  “Of course not! I’m here, aren’t I?”

&n
bsp; Just then, Mr. Tomášek walks past.

  “Hans, Liesl! How are you? I see your daughter still has the prettiest smile in Europe.”

  Dita blushes, and the two girls leave the grown-ups.

  “Isn’t Mr. Tomášek kind!”

  “Do you know him, too, Margit?”

  “Yes, he often visits my parents. Here, many people only look after themselves, but Mr. Tomášek looks after others. He asks them how they’re doing; he takes an interest in their problems.”

  “And he listens to them…”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “Thank goodness there are still people who haven’t been corrupted in this hell.”

  Margit remains silent. Although she is a year older, Dita’s direct way of talking makes her feel uncomfortable, but she knows Dita’s right. Auschwitz not only kills innocents; it kills innocence as well.

  “It’s cold, and your parents are outdoors, Dita. Won’t they catch pneumonia?”

  “My mother prefers not to be inside with her bunkmate, who has lots of horrible boils … though she’s no worse than my bunkmate!”

  “But you’re lucky—you both sleep on top bunks. We’re spread among the lowest bunks,” said Margit.

  “You must really feel the damp seeping up from the ground.”

  “Oh, Ditiňka, Ditiňka. The worst part isn’t what comes up from the ground, but what might come down from above. Vomit, diarrhea … bucketloads, Ditiňka. I’ve seen it in other bunks.”

  Dita pauses for a moment and turns toward her, looking serious.

  “Margit…”

  “What?”