The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  “And you can’t warn them?” Rudi jumps in.

  He immediately feels Schmulewski’s hard stare drilling into him. Rudi has no right to a vote or an opinion here. But the Jewish-Italian answers him in that distressed way he has of speaking, as if he were asking for forgiveness with every word that comes out of his mouth.

  “May God forgive me. No, I don’t warn them. What would a mother with two children do? Turn on the armed guards? They’d hit her in front of her children; they’d kick her when she fell down. They do that already, in fact. If anyone asks a question, they break his teeth with their rifle butts so he won’t talk anymore, and after that no one says another word; everyone looks elsewhere. The SS won’t allow anyone to interfere with the process. Once, a well-dressed, erect old woman arrived, holding the hand of her six- or seven-year-old grandson. That woman knew. I don’t know how she knew, but she knew they were going to kill them. She threw herself at the feet of an SS guard, she knelt in front of him and begged him to kill her but to let her grandson live. Do you know what that guard did? He dropped his trousers, took out his penis, and started to urinate over her, just like that. The woman, totally humiliated, went back to her place. Today, there was a very elegant woman. I’m sure she came from a good family. She was embarrassed about having to undress. I stood in front of her, with my back to her, to screen her. Then she was so ashamed of being naked in front of us that she put her daughter in front of her to cover herself. But she thanked me with such a sweet smile.…”

  He stops for a moment, and the others respect his silence. They even look down as if to prevent themselves from looking immodestly at the naked mother hugging her daughter.

  “They went into the chamber with the rest of them, may God forgive me. The guards squash them in, you know? They put in more than can really fit. If there are any healthy men in the group, they leave them till last and then they drive them in with blows so that they’ll force their way inside and make room for themselves by pushing against those already in there. Then they seal the chamber, which has showerheads so the prisoners won’t be suspicious and will keep on thinking they’re going to have a shower.”

  “And then?” asks Schmulewski.

  “We remove the lid of the tank and one of the SS guards throws in a canister of Zyklon gas. Then we wait fifteen minutes, maybe a bit less.… And then, silence.”

  “Do they suffer?”

  A sigh, followed by another glance heavenward.

  “May God forgive me, you have no idea what it’s like. When you enter the chamber, you find a mountain of intertwined corpses. I’m sure many of them die of asphyxiation from being crushed. When the poison hits, the body must react horribly: suffocation, convulsions. The corpses are covered in excrement. Their eyes are bulging and their bodies bleeding, as if everything inside had exploded. Their hands are contorted into claws and twisted around other bodies in an act of desperation, and their necks are stretched upward so tautly in the hunt for air that they look as if they’re going to snap.”

  “And what’s your job?”

  “I have to cut the hair, especially if it’s long or in braids. Then it’s picked up by a truck. Since my job doesn’t require much effort, I take turns with some of the others pulling out any gold teeth. Or dragging the bodies to the freight elevator which takes them up from the basement to the ovens. Dragging them is awful. First you have to untangle them from the other bodies, which are a real confusion of arms covered in blood and who knows what else. You pull them by the hand, and it’s wet. It doesn’t take long for your hands to become so slimy that you can’t grab hold of anything. In the end, we make use of the old people’s walking sticks to grab the bodies by their necks. It’s the best way to do it. And then they burn them up top.”

  “How many murders a day are we talking about?”

  “Who knows. There’s a day shift and a night shift. They never stop. There are at least two to three hundred people per session, and that’s just in our crematorium. Sometimes there’s one daytime session; other times, there’s two. Sometimes the ovens can’t cope with the number of bodies, and they tell us to take the corpses to a clearing in the forest. We load them up into a small truck and then we have to unload them again.”

  “And do you bury them?”

  “That would require too many work squads! They don’t want that. May God forgive me. The corpses are sprayed with gasoline and burned. Then the ashes are shoveled onto a truck. I think they use them as fertilizer. The hip bones are too large to burn properly, so they have to be crushed.”

  “My God,” whispers Rudi.

  “In case anyone hadn’t realized it,” says Schmulewski sternly, “that’s Auschwitz–Birkenau.”

  * * *

  While this somber meeting is taking place, two camps away Dita arrives at Barrack 22, next to the second block of latrines. She looks around: No sign of any guards or suspicious persons. Despite that, she can’t shake off the unpleasant sensation of being watched. But she goes inside the hut.

  That morning, after roll call, her attention had been caught by an older woman wandering close to the barbed wire fence, despite the fact that it was forbidden. Mrs. Turnovská, whom Dita refers to as Radio Birkenau, had told her mother that the guards gave this woman some leeway because she’s the seamstress. The woman—everyone knows her as Dudince because that’s the name of the city she comes from in southern Slovakia—finds small broken pieces of wire near the fence, which she sharpens with a stone and then forms into sewing needles.

  Dita has committed to continuing as librarian, but she has to find a safer way of carrying out her duties. The time between the last roll call and curfew, after which no one is allowed to leave their barracks, is the time for deals and transactions, and that’s when Dudince meets with her customers. She says her repairs are the cheapest in Poland: half a bread ration to shorten a jacket; two cigarettes to take in the waistband on a pair of pants; an entire bread ration to patch a big tear.

  She sits on her bunk, a cigarette dangling from her lips, as she measures material with a tape measure she’s marked off by eye. When she looks up to see what’s blocking her light, she finds a skinny adolescent girl with messy hair and a determined look on her face.

  “I want you to make me two pockets to wear inside my smock, attached to the side seams under my armpits. They have to be strong.”

  The woman takes hold of what’s left of the cigarette with the tips her fingers and inhales deeply.

  “I get it—a couple of holsters under your clothes. And what are you going to use those secret pockets for?”

  “I didn’t say they were to be secret…”

  Dita gives an exaggerated smile, trying to look a bit stupid. The woman raises her eyebrows as she looks at her.

  Dita begins to regret having made this trip. There are stories all over the camp of informers who sell their fellow prisoners for a bowl of soup or half a pack of cigarettes. And she notices that the seamstress smokes with the air of a ruined vampire—Dita secretly baptizes her with the name Countess Cigarette Butt.

  It does also occur to Dita, however, that if the seamstress were receiving an informer’s privileges, there’d be no need for her to spend her afternoons sewing by the feeble light of the lamps in the hut. And she feels a certain tenderness toward the seamstress.

  No, Countess Patches is a better nickname for her.

  “Well, yes, it’s a bit secret. I want to carry some mementos of my dead grandmothers.”

  Dita adopts the air of a naïve young girl again.

  “Look, I’m going to give you some advice,” says the seamstress. “And I’ll even give it to you for free. If you can’t do a better job of lying, you’d be better off telling the truth from now on.”

  The woman takes another deep drag on her cigarette, so deep that the burning embers are right at her yellow-stained fingers. Dita blushes and looks down. Old Dudince is the one who smiles now, like a granny confronted by a naughty granddaughter.

  “Chil
d, I don’t give a damn about what you’re going to put in them. It could be a gun, for all I care; in fact, I hope it is a gun and you shoot some of those bastards,” she says, spitting out some dark saliva. “I’m only asking because it sounds like what you want to hide is heavy, and if it weighs a lot, it’ll pull your smock out of shape and be very noticeable. So I’d have to add some pleats to the side seams to reinforce them so they can bear the weight.”

  “It’s heavy. But I’m afraid it’s not a gun.”

  “Fine, fine; it’s of no interest to me. I don’t want to know any more. It will require some work. Have you brought any material? No, of course not. Well, Aunt Dudince has some leftover scraps that’ll do. Sewing it will cost you half a ration of bread and a piece of margarine, and the material will be another quarter ration of bread.”

  “Done,” Dita replies.

  The seamstress looks at her in amazement—even more than when she thought Dita wanted to hide a gun.

  “You’re not going to bargain?”

  “No. You’re doing a job, and it deserves fair recompense.”

  The woman’s laugh turns into a cough, and then she spits off to one side.

  “Young people! You know nothing about life. Is that what that handsome director of yours teaches you? Still, a bit of integrity isn’t a bad thing, either. Look, forget about the margarine; I’m sick of that yellow fat. Just make it half a ration of bread; the material isn’t a big deal, so I’ll give it to you for free.”

  Night has fallen by the time Dita leaves Countess Patches, and she heads quickly for her hut. She doesn’t want any more unexpected encounters at this hour of the night. But a hand grabs her arm and a hysterical shriek emerges from her throat.

  “It’s me—Margit!”

  Dita recovers her breath as her friend looks at her with alarm.

  “What a yell! You seem upset. Has something happened?”

  Margit is the only person she can talk to about Mengele.

  “It’s that damn doctor’s fault.…” She can’t even think of a nickname for him; her mind goes blank when she thinks about him. “He’s threatened me.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “Mengele.”

  Margit’s hand covers her mouth in horror, as if Dita has referred to the devil himself. And in fact, she has.

  “He told me he’ll never take his eye off me, and if he catches me doing anything odd, he’ll slit me open like a calf in the slaughterhouse.”

  “That’s terrible. Oh my God! You’ll have to be careful!”

  “What am I supposed to do?”

  “You must be very careful.”

  “I am already.”

  “They were telling a terrible story in our row of bunks yesterday!”

  “What?”

  “I overheard one of my mother’s friends telling her that Mengele worships the devil and goes into the forest at night with black candles.”

  “What nonsense!”

  “I swear that’s what they were saying. The Kapo had told them. She said the Nazi chiefs approve of that sort of thing. They don’t have any religion.”

  “They say lots of things—”

  “Pagans do that sort of thing. Worship Satan.”

  “Well, God protects us—more or less.”

  “Don’t talk like that! It’s not right! Of course God protects us.”

  “Well, I don’t feel very protected in here.”

  “He also teaches us that we have to look after ourselves.”

  “I’m already doing that.”

  “That man is the devil. They say he cuts open the stomachs of pregnant women with a scalpel and no anesthetic, and then he cuts open the fetuses as well. He injects healthy people with typhoid bacteria so he can see how the illness develops. He exposed a group of Polish nuns to X-rays until the radiation burned them. They say he makes boys have sex with their twin sisters so he can find out if they’ll produce twins. How revolting! He’s performed skin grafts, and the patients have died of gangrene.…”

  They fall silent as they imagine Mengele’s laboratory of horrors.

  “You’ve got to be careful, Dita.”

  “I’ve already told you that I am!”

  “Even more careful.”

  “We’re in Auschwitz. What do you want me to do? Take out life insurance?”

  “You’ve got to treat Mengele’s threat more seriously! You’ve got to pray, Dita.”

  “Margit…”

  “What?”

  “You sound like my mother.”

  “And what’s wrong with that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The two of them stop talking until Dita decides to speak again.

  “My mother mustn’t find out, Margit. Please! She’d be worried, she wouldn’t sleep, and her concern would end up making me fret.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s not well, though he says he feels fine. I don’t want to worry him, either.”

  “I won’t say a word.”

  “I know.”

  “But I think you ought to tell your mother—”

  “Margit!”

  “Okay, okay. It’s your decision.”

  Dita smiles. Margit is the big sister she never had.

  She walks back to her hut accompanied by the crunching sound of her shoes on the frozen mud. She’s also accompanied by the rare sensation of a pair of eyes staring at her back. When she looks behind her, though, all she can see are the reddish bursts from the ovens, which, seen from afar, have an unreal or nightmarish quality to them. She reaches the hut safe and sound, kisses her mother, and then curls up around the oversized feet of her veteran bunkmate. She thinks that maybe the woman moves her legs away a little to give her a bit more room, but when Dita says good night to her, she doesn’t even answer. Dita knows she’ll have a hard time going to sleep, but she closes her eyes and squeezes her eyelids tight just to be contrary. She’s so stubborn that, in the end, she does fall asleep.

  * * *

  The first thing Dita does after roll call is go to Fredy Hirsch’s cubicle. She knocks three times, slowly and distinctly, so that Hirsch will know it’s the librarian. He opens the door and then closes it again as soon as she has slipped inside. Then he opens the secret trapdoor just long enough to remove the two books that have been requested for that day’s work: the geometry book and A Short History of the World.

  Hirsch had happily agreed to her suggestion for hiding the books, but four is the limit: It’s all that Dita’s secret pockets can hold at a time. The thin canvas pockets are tied to each other at the waist so they won’t move around.

  Dita has to undo the top few buttons of her smock to put the books inside the pockets. Fredy watches, and she hesitates briefly. A respectable young girl shouldn’t be by herself in a man’s room, and she certainly shouldn’t be unbuttoning her dress in front of him. If her mother found out, it would be a disaster. But there’s no time to lose. When she unbuttons the smock, one of her small breasts is exposed. Fredy realizes this and immediately looks away in the direction of the door. Dita blushes, but she also feels proud; she’s no longer a little girl.

  She leaves the Blockältester’s cubicle with her hands empty; the two little volumes are perfectly concealed under her clothes. Anyone who saw her going in and coming out would have no idea she was taking something away. She takes advantage of the flurry of activity after the roll call to make her way to the back of the hut. She hides behind a pile of wood and takes the books out of the hidden pockets. The others have no idea where they’ve come from. The children look at her with the same smiling admiration they have for a magician and his tricks.

  It’s Avi Fischer who’s asked for the math book for his group of children, the oldest in the school. Dita sees herself as just an ordinary girl whom nobody notices. That’s why, when she started as the librarian, she assumed she’d hand the book over to the teacher, and no one would pay any attention to her. She’d melt into the crowd like a shadow. But sh
e was wrong.

  When she reaches a group, instinct and curiosity make even the most unruly children suddenly stop what they’re doing and watch her. The teacher takes the book by the cover and opens it, reverent.

  Many of the children hated books when they were going to regular school. Books were synonymous with boring classes and homework, which prevented them from going outside to play. But here a book is like a magnet; the children are drawn to it.

  Dita’s attention is caught by Gabriel, a mischievous redhead covered in freckles. He’s always making animal noises during class, or pulling a girl’s hair, or plotting some prank. But even he looks at the book, totally absorbed.

  When Dita hands over her second book, other teachers signal that they, too, would like a book. She crosses paths with Seppl Lichtenstern, a deputy director, and comments on the new interest.

  “I don’t know what’s happened. Suddenly, I’m being flooded with requests for books.”

  “They’ve realized the library service works.”

  Dita smiles, a little overwhelmed by the compliment and the responsibility. Everyone expects so much of her now.

  “Seppl, I have a suggestion. Has Fredy told you about my invention for hiding books under my clothing?”

  “Yes, he thinks it’s very clever.”

  “Well, it makes things easier if there’s a sudden inspection, even if they don’t happen too often. What I’m proposing is that you use my secret pockets as a model and have two more made up for another assistant volunteer. That way we could have all the books out here during the day at the disposal of the teachers. Then it really would be like a genuine library.”