The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  “Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want anything in return. I just want to do something good in the midst of all the awful things we do here every day.”

  Renée still doesn’t say a word. The SS guard realizes it’s not going to be easy to gain her confidence. The girl tugs at one of her curls and pulls it down to her mouth in that movement he adores.

  “Would you like me to come back and see you another day?”

  She doesn’t answer. Her eyes sweep the camp’s muddy ground. He’s SS—he can do what he likes; he doesn’t have to ask her permission to speak to her. Or to do whatever he wants to do. She doesn’t say anything, but Pestek is so excited that he interprets her silence as a discreet yes.

  After all, she hasn’t said no.

  He smiles happily and says good-bye with an awkward wave of his hand.

  “I’ll see you soon, Renée.”

  She watches the SS officer walk away and stands motionless for a long time, perplexed. Silver cogs, springs, and golden splinters are left in the mud.

  * * *

  It’s not easy for Dita. Her father’s absence weighs unbearably on her. How can something that no longer exists be so heavy? How can emptiness have weight?

  She could barely get down from her bunk this morning. She did it so slowly that she infuriated her bad-tempered bunkmate, who started to swear in the filthiest language Dita had ever heard. At any other time, Dita would have been terrified by the old woman’s fury, but she didn’t even have the energy to be frightened. She turned her head and fixed the woman with a stare of such indifference that, to her surprise, the woman stopped swearing and didn’t say another word until Dita had finished her slow descent.

  Following the afternoon roll call and the order to fall out, the children from Block 31 noisily march off either to play or go and meet their parents. In a vegetative state, Dita slowly begins to gather together her books, and drags herself over to the Blockältester’s cubicle to hide them. Fredy is going through some packages.

  “I was keeping something for you, for when you have to carry out repairs on your books,” says Hirsch.

  He holds out a pair of cute blue scissors with rounded ends—the sort young schoolkids use. It can’t have been easy for him to get his hands on such an exceptional item in the Lager. And he leaves immediately to avoid hearing her thanks.

  Dita decides to take advantage of the scissors to cut some stray threads off the old Czech book. She’d rather stay and do any task in Block 31. She knows that Mrs. Turnovská and a few acquaintances from Terezín are keeping her mother company, and she doesn’t feel like seeing anyone. She stows all the books in the hidey-hole except for the dilapidated novel, and then retrieves a little velvet bag tied with string in which she keeps her librarian’s small first-aid kit. The bag used to hold a whole potato, the prize in a heavily contested crossword puzzle competition. Dita occasionally lifts the bag to her nose and inhales the marvelous smell of that potato.

  She goes over to the corner where the hidey-hole is and painstakingly applies herself to her task. First, she cuts off all the dangling threads with her scissors. Then, as if she were suturing an open wound, she uses a rudimentary needle and thread to resew some pages that are on the verge of coming loose. The result isn’t beautiful, but the pages are now firmly held together. She also applies strips of tape to the torn pages, and the book stops looking like something that’s going to fall apart imminently.

  She wants to escape from the loathsome reality of the camp that has killed her father. A book is like a trapdoor that leads to a secret attic: You can open it and go inside. And your world is different.

  She hesitates briefly, wondering whether she should or shouldn’t read this book with its missing pages, which according to Hirsch, is unsuitable for young ladies and bears the title The Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk. But her hesitation lasts less time than her midday bowl of soup. After all, who says she wants to be a young lady? And anyway, she’d rather be a research scientist investigating microbes or an airline pilot than a prissy young thing who wears frilly dresses and white ribbed stockings.

  Jaroslav Hašek, the author of the book, sets the action in Prague during the Great War and describes the protagonist as a chubby chatterbox who, having already escaped once from joining the army—“exempted because of stupidity”—is drafted again. He arrives at the recruitment office in a wheelchair, supposedly suffering from arthritis in the knees. He’s a rogue who’s keen to eat all the food and drink all the liquor he can lay his hands on, and work as little as possible. His name is Švejk, and he earns a living by catching stray dogs and selling them as if they were purebreds. He speaks very politely to everyone, and his gestures and friendly gaze are always kindly. Whenever he’s asked for something, he usually has some anecdote or story to illustrate the matter, although frequently it has no bearing on the case and no one has asked to hear it. And everyone is puzzled by the fact that whenever somebody attacks him or yells at him or insults him, he doesn’t answer back, but agrees with them. In this way, he convinces them he’s a complete idiot and they let him be.

  “You’re a complete nitwit!”

  “Yes, sir, what you’re saying is absolutely true,” Švejk replies in his meekest tone.

  Dita misses Dr. Manson, whom she had accompanied in her reading through the mining towns of the Welsh mountains, and even Hans Castorp, calmly stretched out on his chaise longue facing the Alps. This book insists on tying her to Bohemia and to war. Her eyes skim over the pages, and she can’t quite understand what this Czech author wants to say to her. A furious officer reprimands the soldier-protagonist, a poor potbellied, shabbily dressed soul who’s a bit of a fool. She doesn’t like it; the situation is almost decadent. She likes books that enlarge life, not the ones that belittle it.

  But there’s something familiar about this character. And in any case, the world out there is much worse, so she’d rather stay curled up on her stool, concentrating on her reading and hoping the teachers sitting around talking don’t pay too much attention to her.

  A bit further along in the book, she comes across Švejk dressed awkwardly in his uniform as a soldier of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, despite the fact that the Czechs, at least those of the working classes, were not at all pleased to be under the command of the snooty Germans in the First World War.

  And how right they were, thinks Dita to herself.

  He’s the adjutant to Lieutenant Lukáš, who yells at him, calls him an animal, and gives him a whack on the back of his head whenever Švejk drives him mad. Because there’s no question that Švejk has a talent for complicating everything, for misplacing documents entrusted to him, for executing the exact opposite of every order, and for making the officer look ridiculous, even though he always appears to do everything good-naturedly and with the best of intentions, but with minimal brainpower. At this stage in the book, Dita still can’t work out if Švejk is acting the fool or actually is a complete idiot.

  She’s having a hard time understanding what the author is trying to say. The outrageous soldier answers his superior’s questions and orders in such a painstaking and detailed manner that his lengthy replies go on forever. They branch out into digressions and little stories about relatives and neighbors whom the soldier, absolutely seriously, introduces into his response in the most absurd way.

  I met a certain Paroubek who had a bar in Libeň. On one occasion, a telegraph operator got drunk on gin and, instead of taking the messages of condolence to the relatives of a poor man who had died, he took them the price list of the alcohol being sold at the bar. It caused a huge scandal. And especially because up until then no one had read the price list, and it turned out that good old Paroubek was charging a few cents extra for each drink; although he did later explain that the extra money was for charitable works.…

  The stories he uses to illustrate his explanations become so long and so surrealistic that the lieutenant ends up yelling at him to disappear: “Get out of my sight, you blockhead
!”

  And Dita is surprised to find that she’s laughing at the thought of the lieutenant’s expression. She immediately scolds herself. How can such a stupid character make her laugh? She even briefly questions whether it’s legitimate to laugh after everything that’s happened, and with everything that’s still going on.

  How can you laugh while people you love are dying?

  And her thoughts turn momentarily to Hirsch, and that permanent, enigmatic smile of his. And suddenly, she understands: Hirsch’s smile is his victory. His smile tells whoever is standing in front of him that he’s no match for Hirsch. In a place like Auschwitz, where everything is designed to make you cry, a smile is an act of defiance.

  And she sets off after that dope of a Švejk and his tricks. And in this dark moment of her life when she doesn’t know where to go, she grabs the hand of a rascal, and he tugs on it to encourage her to keep moving forward.

  When Dita goes to her hut, darkness is falling and a freezing wind mixed with sleet stings her face. But her spirits have lifted. However, happiness in a place like Auschwitz is fleeting. Someone is coming toward her whistling a few bars of Puccini.

  “My God,” whispers Dita.

  She still has a few huts to go, but in this zone the middle of the road is dimly lit, so she ducks into the first hut she comes to in the hope that he hasn’t seen her. She enters so quickly that she bowls over a couple of women and then slams the door shut.

  “What are you doing coming in here in such a hurry?”

  Dita’s eyes are wide open in fear as she points outside.

  “Mengele…”

  And the women’s irritation switches to alarm.

  “Dr. Mengele,” they whisper.

  As the message jumps from bunk to bunk, the murmurs and conversations die down.

  “Doctor Death…”

  Some of the women start to pray while others demand silence so they can hear any sound from outside. A faint, high-pitched tune filters through the sound of the rain.

  One of the women explains that Mengele has an obsessive fixation with eyes.

  “They say that one of the prisoners, a Jewish doctor by the name of Vexler Jancu, has seen a wooden table with samples of eyes in Mengele’s office in the Gypsy camp.”

  “I’ve heard he pins eyeballs to a piece of cork on the wall as if they were a collection of butterflies.”

  “They told me he stitched two children together side by side, and they returned to their barrack still sewn together. They were crying with the pain and smelled of gangrene. They died that same night.”

  “Well, I heard he was investigating ways of sterilizing Jewish women so they wouldn’t have any more children. He irradiated their ovaries and then removed them to investigate the effect. That son of Satan didn’t even use an anesthetic. The women’s screams were deafening.”

  Someone asks for silence. The music seems to be moving away.

  And then the words of an order begin to be heard ricocheting from one throat to another as it is relayed throughout camp BIIb: “Twins to Block 32!” Inmates who are outside are under orders to relay such an order or face the possibility of severe punishment if they don’t—execution is an ever-present possibility in Auschwitz. No matter where they might be, the boy twins, Zdeněk and Jirka, and the girl twins, Irene and Renée, must present themselves immediately at the hospital block.

  Josef Mengele graduated with a medical degree from the University of Munich and, from 1931, served in units close to the Nazi party. He was a disciple of Dr. Ernst Rüdin, one of the main supporters of the idea that worthless lives should be eradicated. Rüdin was also one of the architects of the law of obligatory sterilization promulgated by Hitler in 1933 for people with deformities, mental disabilities, depression, or alcoholism. Mengele had managed to arrange to have himself assigned to Auschwitz, where he had a human warehouse at his disposal for his genetic experiments.

  The mother of the boy twins accompanies them to their destination. She can’t rid her mind of the gory stories about Dr. Mengele. She has to bite her lip to stop herself from crying as the children happily walk beside her, jumping from one puddle to the next. She hasn’t the courage to tell them to stop splattering themselves with mud. Her lip is bleeding.

  At the camp’s entry control point, she hands her children over to an SS guard and watches them go through the metal door and head off toward the Nazi doctor’s laboratory. She thinks she may never see them again, or that when they return they’ll be missing an arm or have their mouths stitched shut or some other deformity provoked by the outrageous ideas of that madman. But there’s nothing she can do about it; refusing an officer’s order is punishable by death. Sometimes it’s Mengele himself who occupies a room in the medical area of Block 32 and other people, whom she fears even more, bring the children to his laboratory.

  So far, the children have returned safely from their encounters with the doctor, happy even, after spending a few hours with him and returning with a sausage or a piece of bread that Uncle Josef has given them. They even say he’s pleasant and makes them laugh. They explain that he measures their heads and asks them to make the same movements together and individually, and put out their tongues. Sometimes, however, they don’t feel like explaining anything and evade their parents’ questions about what goes on during those opaque hours in the laboratory. On this occasion, the mother returns to her hut with what feels like a knot of barbed wire in her throat.

  Dita heaves a sigh of relief because she wasn’t the one he was looking for tonight. The woman who tells the most graphic stories about Mengele has straggly white hair, which escapes from under her kerchief. Dita approaches her.

  “Excuse me, I wanted to ask you something.”

  “Ask away, young lady.”

  “You see, I have a friend who was cautioned by Mengele—”

  “Cautioned?”

  “Yes, warned that he’d be watching her.”

  “Bad…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When he’s hovering around someone, it’s like birds of prey flying above their victims.”

  “But with so many people in here, and so many things on his mind—”

  “Mengele never forgets a face. I know that personally.”

  And as she says it, she becomes very serious and falls silent. Suddenly, she doesn’t want to say any more; a memory has silenced her momentarily.

  “Run away from him as if he were the plague. Don’t put yourself in his path. The Nazi bosses practice dark magic rituals—I know. They go into the woods and celebrate black masses. Himmler, the head of the SS, never makes a decision without consulting his psychic. They’re people from the dark side—I know. Heaven help the poor soul who gets in their way. Their evil isn’t of this world; it comes from hell. I believe that Mengele is the fallen angel. He’s Lucifer himself who’s taken over a human body. If he’s after someone, may God have mercy on their soul.”

  Dita nods and walks off without a word. If God exists, then so does the devil. They’re travelers on the same rail line, moving in opposite directions. Good and evil somehow counterbalance each other. You could almost say they need each other: How would we know that we are doing good if evil didn’t exist so that we could compare them and see the difference? she wonders. There’s no other place in the world where the devil moves as freely as he does in Auschwitz.

  Would Lucifer whistle opera arias?

  Night has closed in, and the only thing whistling is the wind. She feels a shiver run through her. She sees someone near the fence, underneath a beam of light. It’s a woman, talking to someone on the other side of the fence. She thinks it’s one of the assistants from Block 31, the oldest and the prettiest one, Alice. She was one of Dita’s assistants on library duty once. She told Dita she knew Rosenberg the registrar, and she insisted several times that they were just friends, as if it really mattered to her.

  Dita wonders what they talk about. Is there anything left to say? Maybe they just look at each
other and say those pretty words that people in love say to each other. If Rosenberg were Hans Castorp and Alice were Mme. Chauchat, he’d kneel down on his side of the fence and say, I know who you are, as Castorp said to Chauchat on carnival night when he was finally honest with her. He told her that falling in love was to see someone and suddenly recognize them for who they were, knowing that this was the person you’d always been waiting for. Dita wonders if she’ll ever experience that sort of revelation.

  Her thoughts turn back to Alice and Rosenberg. What sort of relationship can you have with someone who’s on the other side of a fence? She’s not sure. In Auschwitz, the weirdest things are normal. Would she be capable of falling in love with someone on the other side of a fence? More to the point, is it possible to love in this terrible place? The answer seems to be yes, because Alice Munk and Rudi Rosenberg stand there defying the cold.

  God has allowed Auschwitz to exist, so maybe he isn’t an infallible watchmaker, as they told her. The most beautiful flowers emerge from the foulest dung heap. So maybe, thinks Dita, God isn’t a watchmaker but a gardener.

  God sows and the devil reaps with a scythe that cuts down everything.

  Who’ll win this mad game? she asks herself.

  16.

  As Ota Keller walks toward his father’s hut, he mulls over which of the various stories in his head he’s going to tell the children this afternoon. One day, he’d like to collect and publish in a book all the stories about the land of Palestine he’s invented to distract the children in Block 31.

  There are so many things to do! But they are trapped by the war.

  There was a time when he believed in revolutions and the idea that there could be a just war.

  That was so long ago.…

  He has taken advantage of the meal break to visit his father who is eating his soup in front of the workshop where he rivets the straps from which the German soldiers hang their water bottles. He’s elderly, and has been stripped of everything he was before the war, but Mr. Keller hasn’t lost his love of life. Just the week before, he’d offered to give a brief concert at the back of the hut before lights-out. And Ota admits that even though his father’s voice has declined, he continues to sound like a professional singer. The men happily listened to him. Few of them knew that Richard Keller had been, until very recently, a very important businessman in Prague, owner of a thriving company that made lingerie and employed fifty people.