It’s freezing cold, and the ground is covered with frost. Rudi is wearing a cloth jacket, but Alice has only a worn sweater and an old woolen shawl. When Rudi notices that her lips are turning blue and she’s shivering, he tells her she’d better go back to her hut, but she refuses.
She’s happier sharing this afternoon outdoors in freezing intimacy than inside a hut full of women who reek of sweat and illness—and occasionally, of resentment.
When the cold becomes unbearable, they stand up and walk in step on either side of the fence. The guards have become used to their presence. Rudi gets tobacco for some of them, and sometimes acts as interpreter with the Russian and Czech soldiers, so their afternoon meetings near the fence are tolerated for now.
Rudi talks to Alice about amusing moments in his life as registrar. He doesn’t want to tell her about what he sees in the eyes of recent camp arrivals on the other side of his registration table. So now and then, he invents funny anecdotes to make his stories more entertaining. When Alice speaks of the hundreds of people arriving daily, he tells her it’s only the terminally ill who are gassed, that she shouldn’t be distressed, and immediately changes the topic of conversation.
“I’ve brought you a present…”
He pulls his hand out of his pocket and opens his fist. What’s on display is tiny, but Alice’s eyes open wide when she recognizes its enormous value. It’s a clove of garlic.
Rudi has become something of an expert at keeping an eye on the soldier in the nearest guard tower. When the barrel of his gun suggests he has his back to them, he takes two quick steps to the fence. He mustn’t touch the wire, but he can’t dither. He’s got ten seconds before the guard turns back to face them. He pinches his fingers together and carefully introduces them into the appropriate gap. Five seconds. He releases the garlic clove. Alice reaches out and snaps it up. Four seconds. They both return to their original spots, a few paces from the fence.
There’s admiration and fear on Alice’s face. Rudi is pleased. There aren’t many people willing to insert their fingers in the deadly fences. Some black marketeers toss goods over the tops of the fences that separate the camps, but Rudi believes that sort of action is too visible from a long way off, and there are too many tongues, and too many eyes, in the Lager.
“Eat it, Alice. It’s got lots of vitamins.”
“But then I won’t be able to give you a kiss…”
“Come on, Alice, it’s important. You must eat. You’re very thin.”
“Don’t you like me?” asks Alice, flirting.
Rudi sighs.
“You know I’m mad about you. And your hair is particularly lovely today.”
“You noticed!”
“But you have to eat that garlic. It cost me a lot to get it.”
“And I’m really, really grateful.”
But she hides it in her hand rather than eating it. Rudi swears silently.
“You did the same thing the other day when I brought you a stick of celery.”
Then Alice gives him a teasing look and lifts her chin as if she were signaling to him. And Rudi finally notices and claps his hand to his forehead.
“Alice, you’re crazy!”
He hasn’t realized until this very moment that Alice is wearing a purple hairband. Perhaps a little childish, but a luxury item in this place. It has cost him a celery stick. Alice laughs.
“No, don’t do it! Winter isn’t over, you’ve got hardly any warm clothing, and you have to eat. Don’t you understand? The person in charge of the corpse cart picks up a dozen people a day in your camp—people who die of exhaustion, malnutrition, or just a simple cold. A cold kills you here, Alice. We’re very weak. You’ve got to eat!” And for the first time, his voice hardens as he speaks to Alice: “I want you to eat that garlic clove right now!”
He had to hand over the names and ranks of the most recently arrived Russian officers to a certain helper in the kitchen in order to get the garlic. Rudi neither knows nor wants to know why he wants the list, but it’s valuable information. Favors like that could even cost him his life.
Alice looks at him sadly, and he can see a tear in her eye.
“You don’t understand, Rudi.”
That’s all she says. She’s not very talkative. And no, Rudi doesn’t understand. Exchanging a celery stalk, so nutritious and hard to get hold of, for a useless piece of wire covered in velvet, made quickly and on the run in one of the camp workshops, seems stupid to him. He doesn’t understand that Alice will soon turn sixteen. After spending all her adolescence trapped in the ugliness of war, feeling beautiful for one afternoon makes Alice happy. And that is more nourishing than an entire field of celery.
The face she makes at Rudi seeks his forgiveness, and he shrugs. He doesn’t understand her, but it’s impossible to be angry with her.
The fate of his garlic clove has already been decided. When the afternoon roll call is over, Alice rushes to Hut 9 in search of Mr. Lada. He’s a short little man who works with the group responsible for transporting the dead. It’s not a pleasant job, but it does allow him to move throughout the Lager, and freedom of movement means making deals. Alice holds a tiny piece of soap and inhales deeply; it smells divine. Lada does the same thing with his garlic clove; it smells divine, too.
Alice is so thrilled with her acquisition that she spends the remaining time before curfew washing her clothes. She puts on a woolen jumper full of holes and a very old plaid skirt she stores under the pillow of her bunk. They are the only items of clothing she can wear when, every two weeks, she washes her underwear, her socks, and her blue dress—now faded to gray.
She has to line up for an hour and a half to get a turn at one of the only three taps that provide a trickle of water. You can’t drink the water. It’s already killed a few people who either didn’t believe it was harmful or couldn’t put up with the thirst tormenting them, especially at night when so many hours had passed since their last drop of liquid—their midday soup.
The icy cold tap water burns Alice’s hands and leaves them feeling numb and rough. Barely a minute has passed, but the women in the line are already swearing at her to hurry up and finish. Several of them talk unpleasantly about her, loud enough for Alice to hear them. There’s no such thing as secrets in the camp; rumors are rife, like the mold that covers the walls from floor to ceiling, and they corrupt everything in their path.
People know about her relationship with that Slovak registrar, and it doesn’t please those prisoners who hate the thought of something good happening to anyone else. Eagerness to survive leads many of them into a moral slide that causes them to overcome their fears and pain by being bitterly resentful of their fellow inmates. They believe doing harm to others is a justice of sorts that alleviates their own suffering.
“How unfair, that shameless sluts who open their legs for prisoners with influence have a piece of soap while decent women have to wash with dirty water!” comments one woman.
A mutter of agreement rises from a chorus of women with scarves on their heads.
“Decency has disappeared, and respect has gone, too,” says another.
“Disgraceful,” adds another voice, speaking loudly to make sure Alice can hear her.
The young girl scrubs furiously, as if hoping the sliver of glycerin soap might remove the resentment. She hurriedly ends her task, even though she hasn’t finished. Ashamed and incapable of defending herself, she doesn’t dare raise her head; as she leaves, she deposits what’s left of the soap on the shelf. Several women launch themselves at it in a huddle of shoves and yells.
Alice is feeling so ashamed and nervous that the last person she wants to see is her mother. So she ends up walking to Block 31. Hut doors must always be ajar, but as Alice pushes the hut door farther open, a metal bowl containing screws falls to the ground. It’s one of Fredy Hirsch’s tricks so he knows if someone is entering outside the usual hours. The block chief emerges from his cubicle and notices that Alice is trembling.
&
nbsp; “What’s the matter, child?”
“They hate me, Fredy!”
“Who does?”
“All those women. They insult me because I’m friendly with Rudi!”
Hirsch puts his hands on her shoulders; Alice can’t stop crying.
“Those women don’t hate you, Alice. They don’t even know you.”
“They do hate me! They said horrible things to me, and I couldn’t even answer them in the way they deserved.”
“You did the right thing. When a dog barks fiercely at someone, or even bites them, it does it out of fear, not hate. If you ever have to confront an aggressive dog, don’t run or shout, because you’ll frighten it and it will bite you. Stand still and talk to it slowly so it becomes less scared. These women are afraid, Alice. They’re angry at everything that’s happening to us.”
Alice begins to calm down.
“You should go and dry your clothes.”
She nods and tries to thank him, but Fredy stops her with a wave of his hand. There’s nothing to thank him for. He’s responsible for all his people. The assistants are his soldiers, and a soldier never says thank you; he stands at attention and gives a salute.
When Alice leaves, Hirsch looks around and then shuts himself inside his cubicle again. But the hut isn’t actually empty. There’s someone huddled behind the woodpile who’s been silently listening.
Dita’s father has been unsuccessfully battling a cold for days, and her mother has forced him to abandon their outdoor lessons, so Dita has spent her afternoons keeping guard in her hideout at the back of the hut. She’s been waiting for the secret SS contact to reappear, but her surveillance hasn’t produced any results so far. If there’s no one she can trust, then she’ll just have to solve the Hirsch mystery on her own. Fredy has emerged from his cubicle periodically to do push-ups and sit-ups, or lift stools as if they were weights. Miriam Edelstein has dropped in on the odd afternoon, but that’s it. Dita misses her conversations with Margit, who she knows sits down for a chat with Renée now and again.
Hirsch, convinced that the hut is empty, has turned out the lights, so it’s dark inside. Dita hugs herself tightly to try and keep warm. The shiver reminds her of the patients in the Berghof spa, who would lie down at night facing the Alps so that the cold, dry mountain air would clear their lungs of tuberculosis. These weeks in the Lager have made it difficult for her to remember the intensive reading of The Magic Mountain she enjoyed in Terezín. The book had such an impact on her that the characters have become part of her store of memories.
The Berghof reminded Dita of the ghetto. Life had been better there than in Auschwitz. It was much less violent and horrific than the factory of pain in which they now struggle to survive, despite the fact that Terezín was a spa where no one was cured.
Hans Castorp arrived for a stay of a few days, which became months and then years. Whenever it looked like he might leave, Dr. Behrens detected a slight problem in his lung and he had to extend his stay. Dita had been in Terezín for a year when she started to read the book, and at that stage she had no idea when she would be able to leave that city-prison. Given the rumors about the world beyond those walls—the Nazis relentlessly advancing through a war-torn Europe with millions already dead and camps where Jews were being sent for extermination—it occurred to her that the walls might be imprisoning her, but they were also protecting her. Much the same could be said of Hans and the Berghof sanatorium he no longer wanted to leave to face his world.
She exchanged her labor in Terezín’s perimeter gardens for more comfortable duties in a military garment workshop and, as time passed, while her mother lost energy and her father made ever fewer witty observations, Dita kept reading. The story of Hans fascinated her, and she kept him company until he reached the critical moment of his life. It was carnival night and, taking advantage of the freedom provided by the masks they were all wearing, he dared to speak for the first time to Mme. Chauchat, a very beautiful Russian woman with whom he was hopelessly in love, despite the fact that they had never exchanged more than a few exquisitely polite words of greeting. In the stiflingly ceremonious atmosphere of the Berghof, protected by carnival dispensation, he had dared to address her informally and call her Clawdia. Dita closes her eyes and relives that moment when he prostrates himself so romantically before Clawdia and, in a gallant and impassioned manner, declares his rash love.
Dita likes the incredibly elegant Mme. Chauchat, with her almond eyes, who is usually the last to enter the regal dining room and shuts the door loudly enough to make Hans jump in his seat. The first few times, it irritates him, but then he is swept up by her Tartar beauty. In that moment of freedom offered by carnival, when those speaking are not people trapped within the strict rules of social etiquette but masks, Mme. Chauchat says to Hans, “All Europe knows that you Germans love order more than freedom.”
And Dita, tucked up in her hidey-hole of wooden boards, nods in agreement.
Mme. Chauchat is so right.
Dita thinks she’d like to be Mme. Chauchat, such a cultured, refined, and independent woman: When she entered a room, all the boys would steal a look at her. After the undoubtedly daring but charming compliments of the young German, which the Russian lady finds not the least bit offensive, something completely unexpected happens. Mme. Chauchat opts for a change of environment and leaves for Daghestan, or maybe Spain.
If Dita had been Mme. Chauchat, she would have been unable to resist the charm and graciousness of a gentleman like Hans. It’s not that she lacks the bravery to roam the world, because when this nightmare war is over, she’d like to go anywhere with her family. Maybe even to that land of Palestine Fredy Hirsch talks about so much.
Just then, she hears the sound of the hut door opening. When she carefully peers out, she sees the same tall figure in boots and a dark cape that she saw the first time. Her heart jumps in her chest.
The much anticipated moment of truth has arrived. But does she really want to confront it? Each time the truth is revealed, something falls apart. She sighs and thinks it would be best if she left the hut; she is racked with uncertainty. But she needs to know the truth.
Dita had once read a piece about spies in one of the magazines her parents kept on the coffee table in the living room. The article suggested you could hear conversations through walls by putting your ear up to the bottom of a glass placed against the wall. She tiptoes up to the wall of the Blockältester’s cubicle, breakfast bowl in hand. It’s risky. If they catch her spying, who knows what will happen to her.
As she places the metal container against the wall, she realizes she can hear perfectly well just by putting her ear to the wooden divider. There’s even a small hole in the panel through which she can see inside.
She spies Hirsch, with a dark expression on his face. She can see only the back of the blond man facing him. He’s not wearing an SS uniform, but he’s not wearing regular prison garb, either. Then she spots the brown armband worn by barrack Kapos.
“This will be the last time, Ludwig.”
“Why?”
“I can’t go on deceiving my people.” Fredy slicks back his hair with one hand. “They believe I’m one thing, when in reality, I’m something quite different.”
“And what is that terrible other thing you are?”
Fredy smiles bitterly.
“You already know that. Better than anyone.”
“Come on, Fredy, dare to name it.…”
“There’s nothing more to say.”
“Why not?” The words of his interlocutor are loaded with irony and resentment. “The fearless man doesn’t dare admit what he is? Do you lack the courage to say the terrible thing that you are?”
The Blockältester sighs and his voice drops:
“A … homosexual.”
“Dammit, call it what it is! The great Fredy Hirsch is a queer!”
Hirsch, beside himself, launches himself at the man and grabs him violently by his lapels. He smashes him up against the wa
ll, and the veins stand out in his neck.
“Shut up! Never ever say that again.”
“Come on! Is it so horrible? I’m one, too, and I don’t consider myself a monster. Do you think I am? Do you think I deserve to be branded a pariah?” And, as he speaks, he points to the pink triangle sewn onto his shirt.
Hirsch releases him. He closes his eyes and slicks back his hair as he tries to compose himself.
“Forgive me, Ludwig. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“Well, you have.” Ludwig fixes his crumpled lapel with the fastidiousness of a dandy. “You say you don’t want to deceive the people who follow you. So what will you do when you get out of here? Find a nice Jewish girl who’ll cook you kosher meals and marry her? Will you deceive her?”
“I don’t want to deceive anyone, Ludwig. That’s why we have to stop seeing each other.”
“Do whatever you like. Repress your feelings if that makes you feel better. Try making love to some girl. I’ve tried it: It’s like eating a tasteless bowl of soup. But it’s not totally bad. And do you think that the deceptions will be over? Absolutely not! There’ll still be someone you’ll be lying to: yourself.”
“I’ve already told you it’s over, Ludwig.”
His words leave no room for a response. They look at each sadly without saying a word. The Kapo with the pink triangle slowly nods his assent, accepting defeat. He walks up to Hirsch and kisses him on the lips. A silent tear runs down Ludwig’s cheek.
On the other side of the wooden wall, Dita almost cries out. It’s more than she can bear. She’s never seen two men kiss, and she finds it disgusting. Even more so because it’s Fredy Hirsch. Her Fredy Hirsch. She runs silently out of the hut, not even noticing the shock of the cold night air. She’s so upset she doesn’t think to look out for Dr. Mengele. She’s stunned on the outside and feels dirty on the inside. She feels an incredible anger toward Fredy Hirsch; she feels defrauded. Tears of rage cloud her sight.
That’s why she bumps into someone walking in the opposite direction.
The Librarian of Auschwitz Page 13