The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  Margit remembers that moment, which has been burned into her memory, and shakes her head as if she can’t believe it.

  “Did they know that being in that group of old people, sick people, and children was almost certainly a death sentence? Maybe they did, and were just happy for me, because I was part of the group of those who might be able to save themselves.”

  Dita shrugs, and Liesl strokes Margit’s head. They picture Margit’s mother and sister at that moment when they are already on the other side, when the fight for survival is over and there’s no longer any fear.

  “They were smiling,” whispers Margit.

  They ask about her father; she hasn’t seen him since that same morning in BIIb.

  “I’m almost glad I don’t know what has become of him.”

  Maybe he died; maybe he didn’t; either way, the uncertainty keeps her company.

  Margit may already be sixteen, but Mrs. Adler orders her to transfer her blanket to their hut. There is so little control that nobody will notice, and the three of them will sleep together on the bunk.

  “You’ll be uncomfortable,” Margit replies.

  “But we’ll be together.” And Liesl’s answer brooks no response.

  Liesl Adler takes charge of Margit as if she were her second daughter. For Dita, Margit is that big sister she has always wanted. As they are both dark-haired and have a sweet smile and gap teeth, many people in the family camp were convinced that they were sisters anyway, and the misunderstanding pleased both of them.

  The two girls examine each other. They are thinner and somewhat the worse for wear, but neither one says so to the other. They cheer each other on. They talk, although there’s not much to tell. Chaos and hunger, total indifference, infections and sickness. Nothing new.

  A few rows from their bunk, two actual sisters ill with typhus are already losing the game of life. The younger sister, Anne, is shaking with fever in her bunk. The elder, Margot, is even worse. She’s lying immobile in the lower bunk, connected to the world by a wisp of breath that is fading.

  If Dita had gone over to look at the girl who was still alive, she would have discovered that they were very similar: teenagers with a sweet smile, dark hair, and the eyes of dreamers. Like Dita, Anne was an energetic and talkative girl, a bit of a rebel and with an imagination. She was also a girl who, apart from her unruly and self-assured appearance, had a reflexive and melancholy inner voice, but that was her secret. The two sisters had arrived in Bergen-Belsen in October 1944, after they’d been deported from Amsterdam to Auschwitz. Their crime: being Jewish. Five months have been too many to avoid death in this wet hole. Typhus has no respect for youth.

  Anne dies alone in her bunk the day after her sister. Her remains will stay buried forever in Bergen-Belsen’s mass graves. But Anne has done something that will end up being a small miracle: Her memory and her sister’s memory will bring them back to life many years later. In the secret place in Amsterdam where the two girls and their family hid, she spent two years writing notes about her life in the “house at the back”—some rooms attached to her father’s office, which were closed off and converted into a hiding place. For two years, with the help of family friends who supplied provisions, the family lived there, together with the van Pels family and Fritz Pfeffer. Shortly after they moved into their hideout, they celebrated Anne’s birthday, and among the presents was a small notebook. Since she couldn’t have a close friend in the hideout with whom she could share her feelings, she shared them with that notebook, which she christened Kitty. It didn’t occur to her to give a title to this outline of her life in the “house at the back,” but posterity took care of that. It has become part of history as The Diary of Anne Frank.

  30.

  Food has become a rarity. The Germans give them only a few pieces of bread for the entire day. Every now and again, a pot of soup appears. Dita and her mother have lost even more weight than they did in Auschwitz. The inmates who have been there the longest and know this situation well are no longer skinny or emaciated—they’re just wooden puppets with stick arms and legs. Water is scarce and you have to wait in line for hours to fill a bowl from any tap that’s still dripping.

  And yet another transport with women arrives at this jam-packed camp where there’s nothing but infections and sickness. They are Hungarian Jews. One of them asks for the latrines. What an innocent.

  “We have bathrooms with gold taps. And be sure to ask Volkenrath to bring you some bath salts.”

  Some of the women laugh uproariously.

  There aren’t any latrines. They made holes in the ground, but these are already full.

  Another woman from the transport, furious, turns to one of the guards who have just arrived and tells her that they are workers. They must be sent to a factory and taken out of this dunghill. She’s had the misfortune to say it to the least appropriate person. One of the veterans tells her it’s Volkenrath, the supervisor of the guards but the warning comes too late.

  Volkenrath calmly adjusts her partially collapsed blond topknot, takes her Luger out of her belt, and rams the barrel against the woman’s forehead. She also gives the woman a look as rabid as a dog foaming at the mouth—the foam Pasteur dedicated himself to studying. The prisoner raises her arms, and her legs shake so much she looks as if she’s dancing. Volkenrath laughs.

  She’s the only one laughing now.

  The gun is like a rod of ice against the prisoner’s head, and warm urine begins to trickle down her legs. It’s not very respectful to wet yourself in front of a supervisor. They all grit their teeth and prepare themselves for the sound of the gunshot. Some women look down so they won’t see the head exploding into little pieces. Volkenrath has a heavy vertical wrinkle between her eyebrows running right up to her hairline. It is so noticeable and deep that it looks like a black scar. The knuckles clutching the gun are white from the fury with which she’s holding it. She’s angrily pushing the weapon against the woman’s forehead, and the woman is crying and peeing at the same time. Finally, the supervisor removes the gun; the prisoner has a reddish circle on her forehead. With a movement of her chin, Volkenrath sends her back to her place.

  “I’m not going to do you the favor, Jewish bitch. No, it’s not your lucky day.”

  And she lets loose a demented guffaw that sounds just like a saw.

  A white-haired woman spends much of the night crying over the death of her daughter. She doesn’t even know what caused the death. In the morning, she kneels behind the hut and starts to dig a grave for the girl with her bare hands. She manages only to make a small hole a sparrow might fit into. The woman flops onto the muddy ground, and her bunkmate comes over to console her.

  “Is no one going to help me bury my daughter?” the woman shouts from the ground.

  There’s not much energy left, and no one sees the sense in wasting what little there is on something that can’t be fixed. Even so, various women offer to help her and start to dig. But the ground is hard, and their weak hands start to bleed. Exhausted and in pain, the women stop, although they’ve removed only a few fistfuls of earth.

  Her friend tries to persuade her to take her daughter to the pit.

  “The pit … I’ve seen it. No, please, not there. It offends God.”

  “She’ll be with all the other innocents. That way, she won’t be by herself.”

  The woman agrees very reluctantly. Nothing can console her.

  The camp stinks. It’s filled with the excretions of those who have dysentery. They lean against the wooden walls of the huts and collapse onto the ground on top of their own excrement, and nobody lends them a hand. If a dead person has family or friends, they take the body to the pit. If they don’t, the body lies on the ground in the camp until some SS guard takes out her gun and forces prisoners to drag the body away.

  Dita, Margit, and Liesl walk slowly around the camp, and the sight is equally devastating no matter where they look. Dita holds Margit’s hand on one side, and her mother’s on the
other. Her mother is shaking, either with fever or horror, but it’s impossible to distinguish disease from degradation.

  They go back to their hut, and it’s even worse: the sour smell of disease, the moans, the monotonous murmur of prayers. Many of the ill are unable to get down from their bunks; many of them perform their bodily functions right where they are, and the smell is unbearable.

  Dita looks at the devastatingly gloomy bunks. Family and friends are gathered around, trying to give relief to the sick, but in many cases, the sick are suffering alone, fading alone, dying alone.

  Dita and her mother decide to leave the hut. April has arrived, but it continues to be intensely cold in Germany—a cold that hurts your teeth, numbs your fingers, and freezes your nose. Anyone who stays outdoors starts to shake.

  “It’s better to die of cold than of disgust,” Dita says to her mother.

  “Edita, don’t be vulgar.”

  Many other prisoners have opted, like them, to move outside. Liesl and the two girls have found a bit of space by the hut where they can lean against the wall, and that’s where they stay, wrapped up in blankets they prefer not to examine too closely. The camp is closed, nobody goes in or out anymore, and there are only a few guards in the towers with machine guns. They should try to escape—if they are caught, at least they’ll die more quickly—but they don’t even have the strength to try. There’s nothing left.

  As the days go by, everything collapses. The SS guards have stopped patrolling the camp, which has turned into a cesspit. There hasn’t been any food for days, and the water has definitely been cut off. Some prisoners drink from the puddles, but they soon writhe on the ground with stomach cramps and die of cholera. The weather is getting warmer, and the corpses are decomposing more quickly. No one remains to remove them.

  Hardly anyone gets up from where they are. Many will never get up again; some try, but their legs, thin as wire, are too weak, and they collapse on the ground, which is covered with excrement. Others fall spectacularly on top of corpses. It’s hard to distinguish between the living and the dead.

  Explosions from the battles are getting closer. The shots are louder, the impact of the bombs sends vibrations up their legs, and the only hope they have left is that this hell will end in time. But death seems to advance much more quickly and resolutely on its own front.

  Dita hugs her mother. She looks at Margit, whose eyes are closed, and decides that she’s not going to fight any longer. She shuts her eyes, too; the curtain lowers. She promised Fredy Hirsch she’d hold out. She hasn’t given up, but her body has. And anyway, Hirsch himself also let go in the end. Or not? But what does it matter now?

  When she closes her eyes, the horror that is Bergen-Belsen disappears and she shifts to the Berghof sanatorium of The Magic Mountain. She even thinks she feels a burst of that cold, clear air from the Alps.

  Dita’s feebleness extends to her mind. Moments, places, and people she has known in real life get mixed up with others she has met in books, and Dita is unable to distinguish the real from the imagined.

  She doesn’t know if the arrogant Dr. Behrens from the Berghof—who looked after Hans Castorp—is more real than Dr. Mengele; at one point she can see them strolling together through the gardens of the sanatorium. Suddenly, she walks into a dining room and finds the gentlemanly Dr. Manson from The Citadel sitting at a table set with a magnificent banquet, together with the handsome Edmond Dantès in his unbuttoned sailor shirt and the elegant and seductive Mme. Chauchat. She looks more carefully and sees that the person at the head of the table is Dr. Pasteur, who instead of carving the juicy turkey fresh from the oven so they can eat it, is dissecting it with a scalpel. Mrs. Křižková walks past, the woman she always called Mrs. Nasty, and she’s scolding a waiter who tries to give her the slip; the waiter’s face is that of Mr. Lichtenstern. A fatter waiter approaches carrying a tray with a delicious meat pie, but with unheard of clumsiness, he trips, and the pie sails speedily through the air onto the table, splattering grease over the dinner guests, who look at him with disapproval. The waiter apologizes, full of remorse for his blunder, and lowers his head in a submissive bow several times as he hurries to pick up the remains of the destroyed pie. That’s when Dita recognizes him: It’s that rascal Švejk doing his thing! She’s sure he’ll mount a feast for the kitchen hands with those destroyed pieces of pie.

  Her sanity is already as slippery as butter. It’s better that way. She knows she’s disconnecting from reality. And she doesn’t mind. She feels happy, just as she did when she was little. When she closed her bedroom door, the world remained outside and nothing could harm her. She feels dizzy, and the world clouds over and begins to fall apart. She sees the mouth of the tunnel.

  She hears outlandish voices inside her head from another world. She feels she has already crossed the border and is on the other side, in a place where there are strong male voices speaking an incomprehensible language, an enigmatic gibberish that only the chosen ones know how to decipher. She’d never asked herself what language was spoken in heaven. Or in purgatory. Or in hell. It’s a language she doesn’t understand.

  She also hears hysterical shouts. But those high-pitched shrieks … they are too laden with emotion. It can’t be the afterlife. They are from this world. She’s not dead yet. She opens her eyes and sees prisoners shouting like madwomen. There’s lots of noise, whistles are blowing, and she can hear the sound of footsteps. She’s so stunned that she doesn’t understand a thing.

  “They’ve all gone mad,” she whispers. “The camp is a lunatic asylum.”

  Margit opens her eyes and gives her a frightened look, as if they could still be afraid of anything. She touches her mother’s arm, and Liesl opens her eyes as well.

  And then they see it—soldiers are entering the camp. They’re armed, but they’re not Germans. They are wearing light brown uniforms, totally different from the black uniforms they’ve seen till now. The soldiers first point their weapons in all directions but then they immediately lower them, some put them over their shoulders, and then they put their hands to their heads: “Oh my God!”

  “Who are they, Mama?”

  “They’re English, Edita.”

  Dita’s and Margit’s mouths are as wide open as their eyes.

  “English?”

  A young NCO climbs onto an empty wooden box and shapes his hands into a megaphone. He speaks in rudimentary German:

  “This camp has been liberated in the name of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and her allies. You are free!”

  Dita elbows Margit. Her friend is paralyzed; she can’t speak. Although she has no strength left in her, Dita manages to get up on her feet and rests one hand on Margit’s shoulder and the other on her mother’s. And finally, Dita utters the sentence she’s spent her entire childhood waiting to be able to say.

  “The war is over.”

  The librarian of Block 31 begins to cry. She cries for all those people who couldn’t survive to see this: her grandfather, her father, Fredy Hirsch, Miriam Edelstein, Professor Morgenstern.…

  A soldier walks toward the survivors in her area, and he’s shouting at them in strangely accented German, saying that the camp has been liberated and they are free.

  “Free! Free!”

  A woman drags herself along the ground until she can embrace the soldier’s foot. He bends down smiling, ready to receive the thanks of the liberated. But the gaunt woman says to him with bitter reproach,

  “Why have you taken so long?”

  The British troops were expecting to be received by a euphoric populace. They were expecting smiles and cheers. They weren’t expecting to be met with complaints, sighs, and death rattles, people crying with a mixture of joy for having been saved and deep sorrow for husbands, brothers, uncles, friends, neighbors—so many people who haven’t been liberated.

  There are some soldiers whose faces show compassion; others, incredulity; and many, disgust. They never thought an internment camp for Jews could be this quagm
ire of bodies. The living are even more skeletal than the dead. The English thought they were going to liberate a camp full of prisoners, but what they’ve found is a cemetery.

  There are voices still capable of giving a modest cheer at the news, although most of the women who are alive have only the strength to stare incredulously. And they stare even harder when they see a party of prisoners walk past them. Dita has to look twice before she believes it. For the first time in her life, those under arrest are not Jews. At the front, guarded by armed British soldiers and walking with her head held high, is Elisabeth Volkenrath, her topknot spilling over her face.

  31.

  The first days of freedom have been strange. There have been scenes that Dita, even in her wildest dreams, could never have imagined: Nazi guards dragging the dead with their own hands; Volkenrath, always so impeccable, carrying corpses in her arms to the pit in a muddy uniform and with greasy hair. The British have put Dr. Klein to work lowering the bodies that the SS guards, now prisoners sentenced to hard labor, are passing to him.

  Freedom has arrived, but nobody in Bergen-Belsen is happy. The number of deaths is devastating. The British soon realize that they can’t be as respectful toward the dead as they would like; the spread of diseases is too rapid. In the end, they order the SS guards to pile up the bodies, and a bulldozer pushes them as far as the pit. Peace is very demanding: It has to wipe out the effects of war as quickly as possible.

  Margit is in line waiting for the midday ration when she feels a hand on her shoulder. It’s an insignificant gesture. But there’s something in it that suddenly makes her life expand. Before she turns around, she knows the hand belongs to her father.

  Dita and Liesl are really happy for Margit. Seeing her happy makes them happy. When she tells them that the English have already assigned her father a place on the train for Prague and he has made arrangements for her to accompany him, they wish her luck in her new life. Everything is changing at dizzying speed.