The power of their music passes through the walls and filters through the barbed wire fences. The prisoners working in the camp’s drainage ditches stop briefly and lean on their shovels to hear better.
“Listen! It’s the children—they’re singing.…”
In the clothing hut and in the mica hut, where they make condensers for electric machines, they also slow down their work for a moment and turn their faces toward the happy melody filtering through from some place that seems foreign to the Lager.
“No, no,” someone replies, “it’s angels from heaven.”
In the ditches into which ash never stops falling, and which the Kapos pressure the inmates to dig until their hands bleed, that music and those voices carried by the wind are a miracle. The words speak of a time when millions will embrace each other, the whole world will exchange kisses, and all mankind will be brothers and sisters. A cry for peace shouted as loudly as possible in the biggest factory of death of all time.
The Ode rings out so loudly it even reaches the desk of a notable music lover. He lifts his head as if he smells the aroma of a delicious tart so strongly that it must be tracked to the oven in which it is baking. He quickly abandons his papers, crosses the Lagerstrasse of the family camp, and plants himself on the threshold of Block 31.
The children have already repeated several times the strains of the first verse, which is the one they all know by heart, and they have just reached the end of the chorus when the figure wearing the peaked cap with its silver death’s head insignia appears in the doorway, projecting an excessively large and menacing shadow. Lichtenstern feels icy cold, as if winter had suddenly returned.
Dr. Mengele …
He continues to sing, but his voice weakens. They aren’t authorized to celebrate any Jewish feasts. Dita becomes momentarily mute, but then she immediately picks up the words again because, even though the adults have fallen silent, the children have continued to sing with all their might as if nothing has happened.
Mengele stands there listening for a few moments, his expression neutral, impassive, impenetrable. He turns his head toward Lichtenstern, who has stopped singing and is looking at him, terrified. Mengele nods his head in approval, as if he likes what he’s hearing, and waves his white-gloved hand to encourage them to go on singing. The officer turns around, and the block finishes the Ode with everyone singing as loudly as they can to send a message of strength to Mengele. Then they burst into applause, some of it directed at themselves, their energy, and their daring.
Shortly after the celebration of Passover has come to an end, when everyone is getting ready for the evening roll call and the sounds of Ode to Joy are still vibrating in their ears, a different kind of music is heard outside. Sharper, more compelling, monotonous, with no trace of joy, even though some people smile when they hear it. It’s the alarm sirens blaring throughout the Lager.
Members of the SS run in all directions. Two soldiers who were in the Lagerstrasse rush to their guard posts. The sirens are signaling an escape. Escapes are an all-or-nothing situation—freedom or death.
It’s the second time the escape siren has gone off in the past few days. First, it was that man Lederer, who is rumored to be a member of the Resistance and who they say escaped with an SS deserter. There has been no further news of them, and that’s the best possible news. Word is that the Nazi got Lederer out dressed as a member of the SS, that they calmly walked through the main gate, that the guards on watch were so stupid they even invited them to share a few shots of vodka.
Now the siren rings out again. Escapes upset the Nazis. They are a contempt of their authority, but in particular, they are a breach of the order the Germans have so obsessively established. For Schwarzhuber, two escapes so close together in time constitute an offense. And so it proves: When they inform him of the news, he begins to kick his subordinates and demand that heads roll. Any heads.
The prisoners know it’s going to be a long night, and they’re not wrong. The Germans make everyone, including the children, line up outdoors on the main street of the camp. Roll call is repeated several times—three hours pass, and they are all still standing there. It’s one way of checking that no one else is missing, but it’s also a form of revenge, because the Nazis can’t direct their rage at the fugitives. Or at least not right now.
While the guards race around and tension rises, Rudi Rosenberg the registrar and his comrade, Fred Wetzler, maintain total silence a few hundred meters away, in pitch-darkness. They are in a tiny hideout somewhat like a vault, and only their frantic breathing adds life to the thick darkness. In his mind’s eye Rudi projects an image from a few days ago, when the Russian fugitives were hanged in the middle of the camp—their blue, swollen tongues, their eyes crying tears of blood as they burst from their sockets.
A drop of sweat rolls down his forehead, and he doesn’t dare wipe it away for fear of moving even one millimeter. Now he’s the one in the bunker built by the Russians, together with his friend Fred. They’ve decided to go for broke—all or nothing.
The camp sirens wail. He extends his hand toward Fred and touches his leg. Fred puts his hand on top of Rudi’s. There’s no going back now. They waited a few days to see if the Nazis would dismantle the Russians’ hideout, and when they didn’t, the two of them reached the conclusion that it was secure. They’ll soon know whether that’s the case.
Back in the family camp, after an exhausting day and with only a few minutes before lights-out, Dita is helping her mother get rid of her nits before they turn into lice. This requires running the little piece of comb through her hair again and again. Her mother can’t bear lack of hygiene, or at least she couldn’t before, when she used to scold Dita, always telling her to wash her hands with soap before touching anything. Now she has no choice but to put up with the dirt. Dita thinks back to her mother before the war; she was a beautiful woman—much more so than her daughter—and very elegant.
Some of the other inmates are also taking advantage of the time before they go to sleep to kill the undesirable tenants who live in their hair. And while they do this without pause, comments on the day’s events are passed from one bunk to the next.
“I don’t understand why someone working as a registrar, who never feels hungry, who doesn’t have a particularly tough job, and who is never put up for selection because he’s highly regarded by the Nazis, risks his life in this way.”
“No one understands it.”
“Escape is suicide. Almost all of them end up back here and hanged.”
“And anyway, we’ll be out of here soon,” notes another of the women. “They say the Russians are forcing the Germans to retreat. The war could end this very week.”
This comment gives rise to a host of lively murmurings, optimistic theories strengthened by the desire to see an end to this interminable war.
“On top of that,” adds one of the women who’s calling the shots, “whenever there’s an escape, there are reprisals for rest of us: more restrictions, punishments.… In some of the camps they’ve sent people to the gas chambers in retaliation. Who knows what might happen to us? It’s incredible that some people are such egotists that they don’t care about putting the rest of us in danger.”
Everyone nods in agreement.
Liesl Adler rarely takes part in these discussions. She doesn’t like to call attention to herself, and she’s always telling off her daughter for not being discreet enough. It seems astonishing that a woman who speaks several languages would opt so frequently for the language of silence. But on this occasion, she speaks.
“A sensible voice, at last.” The sea of heads nods again. “Someone finally speaking the truth.”
Approving murmurs can be heard. Liesl continues.
“Finally, someone has spoken about what is really important: We’re not the least bit concerned about whether or not this man escapes with his life. What concerns us is how it might affect us, that they might give us one less spoonful of soup at mealtime or keep us
standing outdoors for several hours doing roll calls. That’s what’s important.”
Some of the women mutter in bewilderment, but Liesl keeps talking.
“You say there’s no point in escaping. The Germans are going to have dozens of patrols searching for the fugitives, and that forces them to keep more and more troops on the home front rather than sending them to fight against the Allies who are going to rescue us. Is it pointless for us to fight here in order to distract the German troops? Does it serve any purpose for us to stay here obeying whatever the SS tell us to do until they decide to kill us?”
Astonishment has stifled all the muttering and given rise to differences of opinion. Dita is frozen on the spot in amazement, still holding the comb. Liesl Adler’s is the only voice to be heard in the hut.
“I once heard a young girl refer to us as ‘old hens.’ She was right. We spend the whole day clucking and not doing much else.”
“And you, who are talking so much, why don’t you escape if it’s such a good thing?” screeched the woman who had been speaking earlier. “It’s fine to talk, but—”
“I’m too old, and I’m not strong enough. Or brave enough. I’m an old hen. That’s why I respect those who are brave enough to do what I wouldn’t do.”
The women around her have not only stopped murmuring; they’ve stopped saying anything. Even that friendly chatterbox, Mrs. Turnovská, who always takes a leading role in any conversation, looks at her friend quizzically.
Dita puts the comb down on the mattress and looks at her mother as if she were studying her under a microscope, surprised to have discovered someone quite different from the person she’s always lived with. She has thought her mother was living in isolation in her own world since the death of her husband, quite removed from everything that was going on around her.
“Mama, I haven’t heard you say so much in years.”
“Do you think I said more than I ought to have, Edita?”
“Absolutely not.”
A few hundred meters away, silence reigns. And darkness. If either fugitive raises his hand to his face, he can’t even see his fingers. In this wooden cubicle, where they either have to sit or lie down, the passage of time is agonizingly slow, and they feel a bit sick from breathing in the overused air inside the cubicle. A veteran advised them to soak tobacco with kerosene to throw the dogs off their scent.
Rudi notices Fred Wetzler’s agitated breathing. They have the time to go over the same list of things a million times in their heads. It’s impossible for Rudi to avoid thinking how crazy he is to have left his advantageous position in the camp, where he could have waited out the war getting by as he has so far. But escape fever took hold of him, and there was no way to get rid of it. He couldn’t rid his mind of Alice Munk’s final look at him or of Hirsch’s blue face. After seeing an indestructible being like Fredy Hirsch fall apart in front of his eyes, there’s no way he believes in any sort of resistance to the fever.
And what is there to say about the death of Alice? How can he accept that her beauty and her youth were not enough to halt the steamroller of hate? There are no barriers for the Nazis; their determination to kill even the last Jew hiding at the ends of the earth is methodical and unrelenting. He and Wetzler have to escape. But that isn’t enough. They must also tell the world—particularly the slow-moving West, which believes the front is in Russia or France—that the real slaughter is taking place in the heart of Poland, in the places they refer to as concentration camps, which only truly concentrate on perpetrating the most heinous criminal operation in history.
And so, despite the anguish that is adding to the cold on this dark, freezing night, Rudi ultimately decides he is where he ought to be.
Time ticks on, although the minuscule crack doesn’t allow them to see if it’s day or night. They must spend three days submerged in the total darkness of night. Even so, they know that the day has already dawned outside because of the sound of activity.
Waiting is difficult. They manage to doze off from time to time, but on awakening, they react with a nervous start because when they open their eyes, the world has disappeared, swallowed by blackness. And then almost immediately they remember that they are in this bunker and they calm down, but only a little, because they are hidden just a few meters from the guard towers. Their heads spin.
They’ve imposed complete silence, because for all they know, someone could be wandering around outside and might hear them. They also have no idea if the tiny crack in the lacework of wooden planks will be enough to prevent them from suffocating. But despite all this, there comes a moment when one of them can’t take it any longer and, in a whisper, asks what would happen if one morning more planks were placed on top of their pile, and they weighed so much that they couldn’t move them. They both know the answer—the hideout would turn into a sealed coffin in which they would slowly die an agonizing death from asphyxiation or hunger and thirst. It’s inevitable that during this long and stressful wait, they will become delirious, inevitable that they will ask themselves which of the two of them will die first, should they become trapped.
They hear the barking of dogs, their worst enemies, but luckily they’re quite far off. But then they start to hear another sound coming ever closer: footsteps and voices approaching until they sound worryingly defined.
The guards’ boots thud on the ground. The two fugitives hold their breath. They couldn’t breathe even if they wanted to, because fear seals their lungs. They hear the muffled sound of planks being moved aside. Some of the SS soldiers are removing boards in the area where they are hiding. Bad news. The soldiers are so close now that they can even catch snippets of conversation, angry words from troops who have had their leave canceled because they have to tramp around the perimeter of the Lager. Their words are full of hatred directed at the fugitives. They’re saying that when they find the men, if Schwarzhuber doesn’t execute them, they’ll happily smash in their skulls themselves. And their words are so clear that Rudi feels his body grow cold, as if he were dead already. His life depends solely upon the thickness of the board that covers them. A mere four or five centimeters is all that separates them from death.
The drumming of boots around him and the movement of boards next to his hideout signal the end. He feels such anguish that he just wants them to remove the top of his little cubicle, peer inside, and bring all this to a conclusion as quickly as possible. He’d rather the guards shot them right here. He hopes their fury will save the two of them the humiliation and pain of being hanged in public. A moment ago, Rudi was aiming for freedom; now, all he wants is to die quickly. His heart is beating so strongly that he starts to shake.
Boots thud, planks are moved with a scraping sound like that of a gravestone. Rudi has already started to give in, and relaxes his frozen position; there’s nothing to do now. During the days preceding their escape, he thought obsessively about the distress he’d feel when they caught him, when he realized with absolute certainty that he was going to die. But he now knows that’s not the case, that the anguish happens before. When the Nazi points his Luger at you and tells you to raise your arms, what hits you is a cold calmness, a letting yourself go, because there’s nothing more you can do and nothing worse to fear. He listens to the sound of the wood being moved and instinctively starts to lift his arms. He even closes his eyes to avoid the explosion of light after days of darkness.
But the burst of light doesn’t come. It seems to him that the thud of the boots is somewhat more muffled and the scrape of the wood is less loud. He’s not dreaming.… When he pricks up his ears, he realizes that the conversations and the noises are moving away. And with each passing second—each as long as an hour—the sniffer dogs are also heading away. Eventually, silence returns, with only the occasional sound of a distant truck or whistle. Other than those noises, the only sound to be heard is an out-of-control thudding, and Rudi doesn’t know if it’s his heart, or Fred’s, or their two hearts together.
They’re safe �
�� for now.
To celebrate, Rudi allows himself the luxury of a huge sigh and a slight shift in position. Then it’s Fred who stretches out his sweaty hand in search of Rudi, and Rudi who takes it. They shiver together.
When several minutes have gone by and the danger is over, Rudi whispers in Fred’s ear, “We’re leaving tonight, Fred—we’re leaving forever.”
And that fact brooks no argument: They’re leaving forever. When they pull aside the board that serves as a ceiling and crawl to the forest protected by the dark, no matter what happens, they’ll never again be prisoners in Auschwitz. They’ll either be free men or they’ll die.
24.
While Birkenau camp spends a restless night sleeping inside its electrified fence, a wooden cover slides open on the other side of the barbed wire. It slides open slowly like the top on a box of chess pieces. From below, four hands move it until the cold night air floods into the tiny cubicle. Two heads peer out cautiously. Rudi and Fred gobble up the fresh air. It’s like a banquet.
Rudi looks around carefully. He sees there are no guards nearby and that they are protected by the darkness. The closest tower is no more than forty or fifty meters away, but the guard is watching the inside of the camp and doesn’t notice that outside the perimeter, among the planks piled up in preparation for the new huts to extend the Lager, two figures are crawling toward the forest.
Reaching the trees and filling their lungs with the forest’s damp smell is such a new sensation for the two men that they feel reborn. But the euphoria produced by their first taste of freedom is short-lived. The forest, which from a distance is so beautiful and welcoming, is an inhospitable place for humans at night. They soon realize that blindly walking cross-country is not an easy task. The ground is full of traps: shrubs that scratch them, branches that whack them, foliage that drenches them. They try as best they can to walk in a straight line and put as much distance as possible between themselves and the Lager.
The Librarian of Auschwitz Page 28