The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  By contrast, the time she spends with Viktor is a moment of calm. Viktor—who does most of the talking while she listens—has told her that he worked on a farm before the war. She pictures him carrying bales of hay. If this damned war hadn’t broken out, he’d probably be an ordinary, honest, hardworking boy like any other. Who knows, she might even have fallen in love with him.

  But this particular afternoon, Viktor is much more nervous than usual. He brings her a present each time they meet. He’s learned his lesson—this time he brings her a sausage wrapped up in paper. But the present he wants to offer her is something else.

  “A plan, Renée.”

  She looks at him.

  “I have a plan for us to get away from here, get married, and start a new life together.”

  She doesn’t say a word.

  “I have it all worked out. We’ll walk out through the gate without raising any suspicions.”

  “You’re mad…”

  “No, no. You’ll be wearing an SS uniform. It will be after night has fallen. I’ll give the password, and we’ll calmly walk out. You mustn’t say a word, of course. We’ll catch a train and go to Prague. I’ve got a contact in that city. I’ve made some friends among the prisoners; they know I’m not like the other SS guards. We’ll get some forged documents and head to Romania. And we’ll wait there for the war to end.”

  Renée looks carefully at this thin, rather short, somewhat awkward guard with his black hair and blue eyes.

  “You’d do that for me?”

  “I’d do anything for you, Renée. Will you come with me?”

  There’s no doubt that love and madness have some common features.

  Renée sighs. To get out of Auschwitz is the dream of each and every one of the thousands of prisoners caught between the fences and the crematoriums. She looks up, tugs on one of her curls and nibbles at it.

  “No.”

  “But you mustn’t be scared. It will work. It will be one of the days when some of my friends are on duty. There’ll be no hitch—it will be easy.… Staying here is just waiting for your turn to die.”

  “I can’t leave my mother here by herself.”

  “But Renée, we’re young—she’ll understand. We have a life in front of us.”

  “I’m not going to leave my mother. There’s nothing more to discuss. Don’t insist.”

  “Renée—”

  “I’ve told you there’s nothing more to discuss. It doesn’t matter what you say, I won’t change my mind.”

  Pestek thinks for a moment. He’s never been a pessimist.

  “Then we’ll get your mother out as well.”

  Renée starts to get annoyed. It all sounds like a lot of hot air, something entertaining that she doesn’t find the least bit amusing. There’s no risk for Pestek, but there certainly is for herself and her mother. They’re in no position to go around playing games about getting out of Auschwitz, as if it were a cinema where, if you got tired of the movie, you could just get up from your seat and leave.

  “For us, being in here isn’t a game, Viktor. My father died of typhus, and my cousin and his wife were killed with the rest of the September transport. Forget it. This escape game isn’t funny.”

  “Do you think I’m joking? You still don’t know me. If I say I’m going to get you and your mother out of here, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

  “That’s impossible, and you know it. She’s a tiny fifty-two-year-old woman with rheumatism. Are you going to dress her up as an SS guard?”

  “We’ll modify the plan. Let me work on it.”

  Renée looks at him and doesn’t know what to think. Is there even the remotest possibility that Viktor is capable of getting the two women out of there alive? And if they got out, what would happen after that? Would two Jewish women escapees from Auschwitz and a traitor be able to hide themselves from the Nazis? And even if they could … would she link her life to that of a Nazi, even if he was a deserter? Does she want to spend the rest of her life with someone who, up till now, has not been troubled when it’s time to take hundreds of innocent people to their death?

  Too many questions.

  Once again, she falls silent. She limits herself to not saying anything, and Pestek understands her silence as acceptance, because that’s what he wants to believe.

  * * *

  It finally stopped raining, so Dita took advantage of the soup break to try and find the man from the Resistance. But the earth, which had become a sticky, muddy quagmire, seemed to have swallowed him up. She was circling the workshop when the prisoners had their break, but she didn’t come across him.

  Now, sitting on her bench, she carefully smooths out the wrinkles in the French novel, which is missing its front and back covers, and applies some glue to its spine. The glue comes from Margit, who secretly removed it from the workshop to which she’s assigned, where they make military boots. Dita wants to do a thorough repair job on the book before she lends it to the only person who ever asks for it, a teacher with a somewhat sour disposition called Markéta. She has straight hair that is too gray for her age, and her arms are like sticks. They say she was governess to the children of a government minister before the war. She teaches one of the groups of nine-year-old girls, and Dita occasionally overhears her teaching a few words of French to her pupils, who are very attentive because she’s always telling them that it’s the language spoken by elegant young ladies. To Dita, the musical words sound like a language invented by troubadours.

  Although Dita found Markéta somewhat distant and not interested in conversation, the teacher had asked Dita for the novel so many times that one day, Dita asked her if she knew the book. Markéta looked her up and down in utter amazement.

  Thanks to Markéta, Dita was able to catalogue the book formally by its title and author, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. The teacher also told her that it was a famous book in France.

  Today, Markéta asked her if she could have the book for a while, so once Dita has finished fixing it, she goes over to the stool where the teacher is sitting by herself, sunk in her thoughts. Markéta rarely talks to anyone, but Dita has given some consideration as to how she can approach her, and now is the time. The hut is quiet because Avi Fischer’s choir is having a rehearsal down the back, and they’ve driven everyone else away with their warbling. Without waiting to be invited, Dita plonks herself down on the neighboring stool.

  “I’d like to know what this book is about. Would you tell me?”

  If the teacher tells her to get lost, she’ll get up and walk away. But Markéta gives her a look and, against all the odds, doesn’t send her away. Rather, she seems glad of Dita’s company. And what’s even more surprising is that this woman of few words begins to tell her the story with unexpected warmth.

  “The Count of Monte Cristo…”

  She talks to Dita about a young man called Edmond Dantès, whose name she pronounces the French way, with very open and striking vowels, thereby instantly granting him a literary pedigree. She says that Edmond is an honest, strapping, young man, who’s sailing back to Marseilles in command of the Pharaon, and looking forward to seeing his father and his Catalan fiancée.

  “He had to take command of the ship after the death of the captain at sea. The captain’s dying wish was that Edmond take a letter on his behalf to an address in Paris. Life is treating Edmond well at that stage: The ship owner wants to make him captain, and his fiancée, the lovely Mercédès, loves him madly. They’re going to get married right away. But a cousin of Mercédès, who is also wooing her and is an officer on the ship, is angry because he hasn’t been named the new captain. He denounces Dantès for treason, and the dead captain’s letter incriminates him. It’s terrible. So on his wedding day, Dantès plummets from the heights of happiness to the depths of despair when he’s arrested during the wedding ceremony and taken as a prisoner to the horrific penal island of If.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “It’s a small island
facing the port of Marseilles. There he’ll spend many years locked up in a cell. But Dantès finds a companion in misfortune in a nearby cell, the Abbé Faria. He’s an abbot whom all consider mad because he constantly shouts at the warders that if they release him, he’ll share a fabulous treasure with them. The abbot has spent years patiently digging a tunnel with tools he himself has made, but he has miscalculated the direction the tunnel should take and, instead of exiting outside the prison wall, he turns up in Dantès’s cell. Thanks to the tunnel, about which the warders know nothing, the two cells are now connected, and the two men keep each other company and ease the burden of their imprisonment.”

  Dita listens carefully. She identifies with Edmond Dantès, an innocent man whom malice has caused to be most unjustly imprisoned, just as has happened to herself and her family.

  “What’s Dantès like?”

  “Strong and handsome, very handsome. And above all else, he is kindhearted, good, and generous.”

  “And what happens to him? Does he get the liberty he deserves so much?”

  “He and Faria plan their escape. They spend years digging a tunnel, and in the meantime, Abbé Faria becomes Dantès’s mentor, almost like his father, teaching him history, philosophy, and many other subjects during their hours of imprisonment. But when the tunnel is almost complete, Abbé Faria dies. Their plan falls apart. Just as Dantès thinks freedom is centimeters away, his friend’s death wrecks everything.”

  As if her own misfortune weren’t enough for her to worry about, Dita now purses her lips and laments poor Dantès’s bad luck. Markéta smiles.

  “Dantès is a very resourceful and brave man. After the warders have ascertained that the abbot is dead and have left his cell, Dantès goes through the secret tunnel to Faria’s cell, transfers the body of his good friend into his own cell, and lays him down on the bunk. Then he returns to Faria’s cell and sews himself inside the dead abbot’s body bag. When the people charged with burying the body arrive, they take away Dantès, whose plan is to get out of the bag and escape the moment he’s left unattended in the morgue.”

  “Good plan!”

  “Not so good. What he doesn’t know is that there is no morgue in the sinister If prison, or burials, because the bodies of the prisoners are thrown into the sea. They throw Dantès, still inside the sack, into the sea from a great height, and so when they discover they’ve been tricked, they assume that Dantès will have drowned anyway.”

  “And does he die?” asks Dita anxiously.

  “No, there’s still a long way to go in the novel. He manages to escape from the bag and, although he’s exhausted, he successfully swims to shore. But do you know the best part? Abbé Faria wasn’t mad; he really had found treasure. Edmond Dantès goes in search of it, and the riches he finds enable him to adopt a new identity: He becomes the Count of Monte Cristo.”

  “And does he spend his life living happily ever after?” asks Dita naïvely.

  Markéta gives her that look of utter amazement and slight reproach.

  “No! How can he go on as if nothing had happened? He does what he has to do. He takes revenge on all those people who betrayed him.”

  “And is he successful?”

  Markéta nods so enthusiastically that there’s no question that Dantès ruthlessly exacts revenge. She summarizes the astute and intricate schemes whereby Dantès, now the Count of Monte Cristo, imposes devastating punishment on the people who ruined his life. It’s a complex and Machiavellian plan from which there is no escape, even for Mercédès, who when she thought Dantès was dead, finally married her cousin, unaware of his trickery. He shows her no mercy, either. He gets close to all of them, gains their confidence in his role as the rich and worldly count, and then crushes them.”

  When Markéta finishes her story of the relentless revenge of the Count of Monte Cristo, the two of them fall silent. Dita gets up to go, but before she does so, she turns to the teacher and says, “Markéta … you’ve told the story so well it’s almost as if I’d read it. Would you like to be one of our ‘living’ books? That way we’d have The Wonderful Adventures of Nils Holgersson, the stories of the American Indians, the history of the Jews, and now The Count of Monte Cristo.”

  Markéta averts her eyes and looks down at the floor of rammed earth. She’s gone back to being the timid and unsociable woman she usually is.

  “I’m sorry; that’s not possible. I’m fine teaching my girls, but for me to stand up in the middle of the hut … definitely not.”

  Dita sees that just the thought of doing it has made the woman blush. But they can’t afford to lose a book, and so Dita quickly thinks about what Fredy Hirsch would have said in a situation like this.

  “I know it’s a huge effort for you, but … for the time the story lasts, the children stop being in a stable full of fleas, they stop smelling burned flesh, they stop being afraid. During those minutes, they’re happy. We can’t deny this to these children.”

  The woman agrees a bit reluctantly. “We can’t.…”

  “If we look at our reality, we feel anger and disgust. All we have is our imagination, Markéta.”

  The teacher finally stops looking at the floor and raises her angular face.

  “Add me to the list.”

  “Thank you, Markéta. Thank you. Welcome to the library.”

  The teacher tells Dita that it’s too late for her to read the book now, and so she’ll ask her for it again tomorrow morning.

  “I have to go over a few passages.”

  It strikes Dita that there’s a touch of joy in her voice and that there’s a new spring in her step as she walks away. Maybe she’s coming round to the idea of being a “living” book. Dita sits there quietly a while longer, leafing through the book, whispering the name of Edmond Dantès, and trying to make it sound French. She wonders if she’ll manage to get away from where she is, as the protagonist of the novel did. She doesn’t think she’s as brave as him, although if she had an opportunity to run toward the woods, she wouldn’t hesitate.

  She also wonders if, were she successful, she’d dedicate her life to taking revenge on all the SS guards and officers, and if she’d do it in the same methodical, implacable, and yes, even merciless, manner as the Count of Monte Cristo. Of course she’d be delighted if they suffered the same pain they inflicted on so many innocent people. But nevertheless, she can’t avoid feeling some sadness at the thought that she liked the happy and confident Edmond Dantès of the beginning of the story much more than the calculating, hate-filled man he became. She asks herself, Can you really choose, or do the blows dealt to you by fate change you no matter what, in the same way that the blow of an ax converts a living tree into firewood?

  The memory pops into her head of her father’s last days, when he was dying in the dirty bunk without any medicine to give him relief, slowly being killed by the illness with which the Nazis have allied themselves in their obsession with death. And as she thinks about this, she feels her temples throb with rage and an insatiable hunger for violence. But then she remembers what Professor Morgenstern taught her: Our hatred is a victory for them. And she nods in agreement.

  If Professor Morgenstern was mad, then lock me up with him.

  22.

  Two compounds away from the family camp, a scene takes place that no prisoner wants to witness. But they are given no choice. Rudi Rosenberg, who has come to BIId with some lists, is walking along the Lagerstrasse when an SS patrol enters the camp. They are escorting four thin Russians who are still feisty, despite their bruised faces, scraggly beards, and torn clothes. It was Rudi’s friend Wetzler, an inmate assigned to the camp morgue, who told him that the Russian prisoners of war were working on the extension to Birkenau on the other side of the camp perimeter. They spent exhausting days stacking up metal sheets and piles of wood.

  One of those mornings, when the Kapo supervising the Russians disappeared for a few hours to make out with the woman in charge of the group of female prisoners clearing the adjacent
land, the four Russian prisoners managed to build a small hideout. They placed four thick planks edgewise to form the walls, with another board on top to form a roof. Then they piled more wooden planks all around, leaving the little hideout buried underneath. Their plan was to wait until the Kapo was distracted and then pull aside the board that served as the roof and climb inside the hideout. When it was time for roll call, their absence would be noticed. Assuming they had escaped, the Germans would start to look for them in the forest and surrounding area, because they wouldn’t suspect that they were, in fact, hiding outside the electrified perimeter of the camp complex, just a few meters from their own camp fence.

  The Germans were methodical. Any escape activated a state of alert that instantly mobilized SS soldiers into search parties and heightened security at the checkpoints in nearby towns for precisely three days. At the end of this time, these special measures came to an end and the SS returned to their normal guard duties. So the Russians would have had to wait inside their hideout for exactly three days and then take advantage of the fourth night to reach the edge of the forest and begin their flight without the added pressure of the special search and capture forces.

  The idea of escaping has taken hold of the registrar himself, to the point where it has become an obsession. Some of the camp veterans talk about escape fever as an illness that attacks people in the same way as a contagious disease. There comes a moment when the victim suddenly starts to feel the urgent and unstoppable need to escape. At first, you think about it now and again, then more and more often, and in the end, you’re incapable of concentrating on anything else. You spend all day and night planning how to do it.