The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  “You could ask for an umbrella for your birthday.”

  Margit shakes her head. “How did you two manage to get those places on the top bunks?” she shoots back.

  “You know what an uproar there was in the camp when our transport train arrived in December.”

  The two girls stop talking for a moment. The September veterans had not only been fellow Czechs, they’d been friends, acquaintances, even family members who, like them, had been deported from Terezín. But nobody was pleased to see the new arrivals in December. The addition of five thousand new prisoners to the camp meant they’d have to share the water that dribbled from the taps; the roll calls would become interminable; and the huts would be absolutely jam-packed.

  “When my mother and I went inside our assigned hut to find a bunk, it was total chaos.”

  Margit nods. She remembers the arguments, shouts, and fights among women doing battle over a blanket or a filthy pillow.

  “In my hut,” Margit explains, “there was a very sick woman who couldn’t stop coughing. Each time she tried to sit down on a straw mattress, its occupant would shove her onto the floor. ‘Idiots!’ the German-appointed woman prisoner who was the barrack supervisor, or Kapo, would yell at them. ‘Do you think you’re healthy? Do you really think it makes any difference whether there’s a sick woman sharing your bed?’”

  “The Kapo was right.”

  “You’re kidding! After she said that, the Kapo grabbed a stick and started to beat everyone, even the sick woman.”

  Dita thinks back to the confusion of shouts, scurrying about, and weeping, and then continues.

  “My mother wanted us to leave the hut until things calmed down inside. It was cold outside. A woman said that there wouldn’t be enough bunks even if we were to share, that some women would have to sleep on the dirt floor.”

  “So what did you do?” asked Margit.

  “Well, we went on freezing to death outside. You know my mother—she doesn’t like to call attention to herself. If a streetcar ran over her one day, she wouldn’t cry out, because she wouldn’t want to be a topic of conversation. But I was about to explode. So I didn’t ask her permission. I took off and ran inside before she could say anything. And I realized something.…”

  “What?”

  “The top bunks were almost all occupied. They had to be the best ones. In a place like this, you have to pay attention to what the old hands are doing.”

  “I’ve noticed that some will let you share their bunk if you pay them something. I saw one woman agree in exchange for a potato.”

  “And a potato’s worth a fortune,” Dita replies. “She must have had no idea about exchange rates. You can buy lots of things and many favors for half a potato.”

  “Did you have something to exchange?”

  “Not a thing. I checked out which veterans still had a bunk to themselves. Where the bunks already had two occupants, those women were sitting on them with their legs dangling over the edge to mark out their territory. Women who had arrived on our train were wandering around begging for a space, top, bottom, or wherever. There were searching for the least-hardened inmates who might allow them to share their mattresses. But such friendly veterans had already agreed to share their beds.”

  “That happened to us, too,” says Margit. “Luckily, we eventually came across a neighbor from Terezín who helped me, my mother, and my sister.”

  “I didn’t know anyone.”

  “Did you finally find an understanding veteran?”

  “It was too late for that. There were only the angry ones and the selfish ones left. So do you know what I did?”

  “No.”

  “I searched for the worst one of the lot.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I was desperate. I saw a middle-aged veteran with short hair that looked as if it had been bitten off, sitting on her bunk. She had a defiant look on her face, which was split in two by a black scar. You could tell she’d been in jail by the blue tattoo on the back of her hand. A woman approached her, begging for space, and the veteran drove her off with yells, even tried to kick the woman with her dirty feet. Huge, twisted feet they were, too!”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I cheekily stood right in front of her and said, ‘Hey, you!’”

  “You didn’t! I don’t believe it! You’re kidding! You see an old hand who looks like a criminal and, without knowing anything about her, you go up to her and calmly say, ‘Hey, you’?”

  “Who said I was calm? I was scared stiff. But with a woman like that, you can’t walk up and say, ‘Good evening, madam, do you think the apricots will ripen on time this year?’ She’d kick you out of there. I had to speak her language if I wanted her to listen to me.”

  “And did she?”

  “First, she threw me a murderous look. I must have been as white as a sheet, but I tried to hide my fear from her. I told her the Kapo would end up randomly assigning women who didn’t have a bunk. ‘There are still twenty or thirty women outside, and you could end up with any one of them,’ I said. ‘There’s a really fat one who would squash you. And another one whose breath smells more than her feet. And there are others who are old and have bad digestion, and they stink.’”

  “Dita, you’re terrible! And what did she say?”

  “She gave me a dirty look—though I don’t think she could give you a kind look even if she wanted to. Anyway, she let me continue. ‘I weigh less than forty-five kilos. There’s no one thinner on the whole train. I don’t snore, I wash every day, and I know when to shut up. You won’t find a better bunkmate in all of Birkenau, no matter how hard you look.’”

  “And what did she do?”

  “She stretched out her head toward me and looked at me like you look at a fly when you don’t know whether to squash it or leave it alone. If my legs hadn’t been shaking so hard, I would have run away.”

  “Fine, but what did she do?”

  “She said, ‘Of course you’re sharing with me.’”

  “You got your way!”

  “No, not yet. I said to her, ‘As you can see, I will make a great bunkmate, but I’ll only share your bunk if you help me to get another top bunk for my mother.’ You can’t imagine how angry she became! It was obvious that she wasn’t the least bit impressed that a puny young girl would tell her what to do. But I could see her checking out the other women wandering around the hut with a look of disgust on her face. Do you know what she asked me—totally serious?”

  “What?”

  “‘Do you wet the bed?’ ‘Absolutely not. Never,’ I replied. ‘Lucky for you,’ she answered in her booming, vodka-damaged voice. Then she turned to the woman on the bunk next to her, who didn’t have a bunkmate.

  “‘Hey, Bošcovič,’ she said, ‘did you know they’ve ordered us to share our pallets?’ The other woman pretended she didn’t: ‘We’ll see about that. I’m not convinced by your arguments.’”

  “And what did your veteran do?”

  “She started arguing. She dug around in her straw mattress and pulled out a piece of twisted wire about ten centimeters long, with a really sharp point. She propped herself up with one hand on her neighbor’s bunk and held the wire to her neighbor’s throat with the other. There was no question which argument was more convincing. The neighbor quickly nodded her head in agreement. The panic made her so bug-eyed it looked as if her eyes would fall out of their sockets!” And Dita laughed.

  “There’s nothing funny about that. What a horrible woman! God will punish her.”

  “Well, I once heard the Christian upholsterer who owned the store on the ground floor of our apartment block say that while God’s plan is straight, the path to achieving it is twisted. So maybe twisted wires work, too. I thanked her and said, ‘My name is Edita Adler. Perhaps we’ll become good friends.’”

  “And what was her answer?”

  “There wasn’t one. She must have thought she’d already wasted too much time on me. She turned toward the wa
ll, leaving barely a hand’s width of room for me to lie down with my head at her feet.”

  “And she didn’t say another word?”

  “She hasn’t spoken to me since, Margit. Can you believe it?”

  “Oh, Ditiňka. I would believe anything these days. May God watch over us.”

  It’s dinnertime, so the two girls say good-bye to each other and head back to their barracks. Night has fallen, and only the orange lights illuminate the camp. Dita sees two Kapos chatting at the entrance to one of the huts. You can recognize them by their better clothes, their brown “special prisoner” armbands, and the triangular badge that identifies them as non-Jews. A red triangle identifies the political prisoners, many of them Communists or social democrats; a brown one is for Gypsies; a green one for criminals and ordinary delinquents. A black triangle is for social misfits, retarded people, and lesbians, while homosexual men wear a pink triangle. Kapos with black or pink triangles are rare in Auschwitz, as these are worn by prisoners of the lowest possible category, almost as low as Jews. In camp BIIb, the exception is the rule. The two Kapos chatting to each other—a man and a woman—wear a pink and a black triangle respectively; chances are no one else wants to talk to them.

  Dita walks toward her hut, thinking about the chunk of bread she’s about to receive. She sees it as a feast, the only decent meal of the day, since the soup is a bowl of slops that serves only to soothe her thirst for a moment.

  A black shadow, darker than all the rest, is walking along the Lagerstrasse in the opposite direction. People give way to it, stepping aside so that it will walk past without stopping. You’d think it was Death itself, and it is. The tune from Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” filters through the darkness.

  Dr. Mengele.

  As he gets close to her, Dita gets ready to lower her head and move to one side, like everyone else. But the officer stops, and his eyes bore through her.

  “You’re the one I’m looking for.”

  “Me?”

  Mengele studies her at length.

  “I never forget a face.”

  His words carry a deadly stillness. If Death were to speak, it would do so with precisely this icy cadence. Dita goes back over what happened in Block 31 earlier in the afternoon. The Priest didn’t focus on her in the end, thanks to the altercation with the crazy teacher, and she thought she’d escaped. But she hadn’t reckoned on Dr. Mengele. He had been farther away, but it was obvious he’d seen her. His forensic eye would definitely have picked up that she wasn’t in the correct spot, that she had one arm across her chest, that she was hiding something. She can read all that in the coldness of his eyes, which are, unusually for a Nazi, brown.

  “Number?”

  “73305.”

  “I’m going to keep my eye on you. I’ll be watching you even when you can’t see me. I’ll be listening to you, even when you think I can’t hear you. I know everything. If you break the camp rules even fractionally, I’ll know, and you’ll end up stretched out in my autopsy lab. Live autopsies are very enlightening.”

  And he nods as he says this, as if he were talking only to himself.

  “You see the last waves of blood pumped out by the heart reaching the stomach. It’s an extraordinary sight.”

  Mengele becomes lost in thought, thinking about the perfect surgical laboratory he has set up in Crematorium 2, where he has the most up-to-date equipment at his disposal. He is delighted with the red cement floor, the polished marble dissection table with the sinks set in the middle, and its nickel fittings. It’s his altar dedicated to science. He feels proud. Suddenly, he remembers there are some Gypsy children waiting for him to complete an experiment on their craniums, and he strides off in a hurry.

  Dita, stunned, stands stock-still in the middle of the campground. Her sticklike legs are shaking. A moment ago there were hordes of people on the Lagerstrasse, but now she’s all on her own. They’ve all disappeared into the camp’s alleyways.

  Nobody approaches her to see if she’s all right or if she needs anything. Dr. Mengele has marked her. A few of the inmates who stopped a safe distance away to watch what was happening feel sorry for her; she looks so frightened and confused. Some of the women even know her by sight from the Terezín ghetto. But they choose to hurry away. Survival comes above all else. That’s one of God’s commandments.

  Dita reacts and heads off toward her alleyway. She wonders if he really is going to keep tabs on her. That icy look is the answer. As she walks, the questions keep multiplying in her head. What should she do now? It would be wise to quit her job as librarian. How is she going to manage the books with Mengele hot on her heels? Something about him terrifies her, which is unusual for her. She’s come across many Nazis in the past few years, but there’s something about this one that sets him apart. She senses that he has a special talent for evil.

  She whispers a quick good-night to her mother so that Liesl won’t notice her anxiety, and carefully lies down alongside her bunkmate’s foul-smelling feet. Her quiet good-night disappears among the cracks in the ceiling.

  She can’t sleep, but she can’t move, either. She has to keep her body still while her head spins. Mengele has given her a warning. And maybe she’s privileged, because there’ll be no more warnings, for sure. Next time he’ll simply stick a hypodermic needle into her heart. She can’t go on looking after the books in Block 31. But how can she abandon the library?

  If she does, they’ll think she’s scared. She’ll present her reasons, all of them understandable. Anyone in her position with any sense at all would do the same. But she’s already well aware that news in Auschwitz jumps from one bunk to the next faster than any flea. If someone in the first bunk says that a man has drunk a glass of wine, by the time the news reaches the last bunk, he’s drunk an entire barrel. And they don’t do it out of spite. All the women are respectable. It even happens with Mrs. Turnovská, who treats her mother so well and is a good woman. Even she can’t control her tongue.

  Dita can hear her already: Of course, the little girl got scared.… And they’ll say it with that condescending tone that makes her blood boil, pretending to be understanding. And what makes it even worse is that there’s always some kind soul who’ll say, Poor little thing! It’s easy to understand. She got frightened. She’s just a child.

  A child? Dita thinks. Far from it. You have to have a childhood to be a child!

  4.

  Childhood …

  It was during one of her many sleepless nights that Dita came up with the idea of turning her memories into photos and her head into the only album that nobody would ever be able to take away from her.

  After the Nazis arrived in Prague, the family had to leave their apartment. Dita had really liked that place. It was in the city’s most modern building, with a laundry in the basement and an intercom system that was the envy of all her classmates. She remembers coming home from school and seeing her father standing in the living room, dressed as elegantly as he always was, in his gray double-breasted suit, but looking much more serious than he normally did. He told her they were going to swap their marvelous apartment for one across the river in Smíchov. Without looking at her, he told her it was sunnier. He didn’t even joke about it, as he usually did when he wanted to make something seem insignificant. Her mother was leafing through a magazine and didn’t say a word.

  “I have no intention of leaving!” Dita bellowed.

  Her father, dismayed, lowered his head. Her mother got up from the armchair and slapped her so hard that her fingers left marks on Dita’s cheek.

  “But, Mama,” Dita said, more puzzled than hurt—her mother wasn’t in the habit of even raising her voice, never mind her hand—“you were the one who said that this apartment was a dream come true.…”

  And Liesl hugged her.

  “It’s the war, Edita. It’s the war.”

  * * *

  A year later, her father was again standing in the middle of the living room, in the same double-breast
ed suit. By that stage he already had less work in the social security office where he was employed as a lawyer. He used to spend many afternoons at home staring at maps and spinning his world globe. He told her they were moving to the Josefov district. The Nazi Reichsprotektor, who governed the whole country, had ordered that all Jews must live there. The three of them and her grandparents had to move into a tiny dilapidated apartment on Elišky Krásnohorské Street. She didn’t ask questions anymore, nor did she object.

  It was the war, Edita. It was the war.

  And eventually, the day came when the summons from the Jewish Council of Prague arrived, ordering them to move yet again, this time, out of Prague. They were to move to Terezín, a small town that had once been a military fortification and had been converted into a Jewish ghetto—a ghetto that seemed awful when she first arrived, and for which she now yearns. The ghetto from which they slid into the mud and ashes of Auschwitz.

  After that winter of 1939, when everything began, the world around Dita began to collapse, slowly at first, and then faster and faster. Ration cards, bans—no entry into cafés, no shopping at the times when other citizens were doing theirs, no radios, no access to movies or theaters, no buying of new shoes.… The expulsion of Jewish children from schools followed. They weren’t even permitted to play in the parks. It was as if the Nazis wanted to ban childhood.

  Dita smiles briefly as an image pops into her head: two children walking hand in hand in Prague’s old Jewish cemetery, wandering among the graves where small stones weighed down slips of paper so they wouldn’t blow away in the wind. Prague’s Jewish children, banned from the city’s parks and schools, had turned the old cemetery into an adventure playground. The Nazis planned to convert the synagogue and cemetery into a museum about the soon-to-be extinguished Jewish race.

  In her mind’s eye, the children chased each other around the ancient gravestones covered with grass and lost in centuries-old silence.

  Under a chestnut tree, and hidden by two thick gravestones leaning so much they had almost fallen over, Dita showed her little classmate Erik the name on an even bigger stone—Judah Loew ben Bezalel. Erik had no idea who he was, so she told him the story her father used to tell her whenever he put his yarmulke on his head and the two of them went for a walk in the cemetery.