The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  Margit becomes very serious and gives them an intense look.

  “My home will be your home.”

  She not just being polite. Dita knows that it’s a sister’s declaration of love. Margit’s father jots down the address of some Czech friends who are not Jewish on a scrap of paper. He hopes they’re still all right, and that he and Margit can stay with them.

  “We’ll see each other in Prague!” Dita tells him as they hold hands and say good-bye.

  This time it’s a more hopeful farewell. A farewell where it finally makes sense to say, “See you soon!”

  Confusion reigns for the first few days. The British were trained to fight, not to look after hundreds of thousands of disoriented people with no personal documentation, many of them sick or malnourished. The English battalion has an office to deal with the repatriation of the prisoners, but it’s overwhelmed and the assignment of provisional papers is unbearably slow. At least the inmates have received food rations and clean blankets again, and field hospitals have been set up for the thousands of sick people.

  Dita didn’t want to spoil Margit’s day by telling her that she was worried about Liesl: She isn’t well. Although she’s eating, she’s not gaining weight and has the beginning of a fever. There’s no other option but to admit her to the field hospital, which means Dita and her mother will have to delay their transfer to Prague. In the field hospital, set up by the Allies in the former camp hospital to look after the survivors of Bergen-Belsen, there is little evidence that the war has ended. The German army has surrendered. Hitler has committed suicide in his own bunker, and the SS officers have either become prisoners awaiting summary trial or they’ve gone into hiding. But in the hospital, war is stubbornly refusing to give in. The armistice doesn’t make the amputated limbs of the mutilated grow back; it doesn’t cure the pain of the wounded; it doesn’t eradicate typhus; it doesn’t rescue the dying from their decline; it doesn’t return those who have marched on. Peace doesn’t cure everything, at least not that quickly.

  Liesl Adler, who has resisted all the deprivations, tragedies, and miseries of these years, becomes gravely ill with the arrival of peace. Dita can’t believe that after all she has overcome, she isn’t going to live in peace. It’s not fair.

  Liesl is lying on a field bed, but at least the sheets are clean compared to the last few years. Dita takes her mother’s hand and whispers words of encouragement in her ear. The medication keeps Liesl sedated.

  As the days pass, the nurses become accustomed to the presence of the Czech girl with the face of a mischievous angel, who doesn’t leave her mother’s bedside. To the extent that it’s possible, they try to look after Dita as well: They make sure she eats her food ration and periodically gets out of the hospital, that she doesn’t stay with her mother for too many hours at a time, and that she wears a mask when she’s sitting beside her.

  One afternoon, Dita spots one of the nurses—a round-faced young man with freckles called Francis—reading a novel. She walks over and stares avidly at the title. It’s a Western, and the front cover has a picture of an Indian chief with a striking feather headdress, war paint on his cheeks, and a gun in his hand. Feeling himself under intense scrutiny, the nurse looks up from the book and asks Dita if she likes Westerns. Dita has read a novel by Karl May, and she really likes Old Shatterhand and his Apache friend Winnetou, whom she imagined experiencing amazing adventures on the never-ending plains of North America. Dita touches the book as if she were stroking it, and then runs a finger very slowly up and down the spine. Puzzled, the soldier watches her. He thinks the girl might be a little disturbed. After living in that hell, it wouldn’t surprise anyone.

  “Francis…”

  Dita points to the book and then at herself. He understands that she wants to borrow it. He gives her a smile and gets up. From the back pocket of his pants, he removes two more novels with similar features: small, flexible, with yellowish paper and brilliantly colored front covers. One is a Western and the other a crime novel. He gives them to Dita, and she walks off with them. And then something suddenly clicks in his mind, and he calls out to her,

  “Hey, sweetie! They’re in English!” And then he translates what he’s said into clumsy German: “Mädchen! Sind auf Englisch!”

  Dita turns around and without stopping, gives him a smile. She doesn’t care. While her mother sleeps, she sits down on an empty bed and inhales the smell of paper, fans the pages quickly with her thumb, and smiles at the way it sounds like a deck of cards being shuffled. She opens a page, and the paper rustles. She runs her hand up and down the spine again and notices the blobs of glue on the covers. She likes the names of the authors—English names that sound exotic to her. As she holds the books in her hands, her life begins to fall into place again. Doing this helps her slowly put the pieces of the puzzle back where they belong.

  But there is one piece that doesn’t fit: Her mother isn’t improving. The days pass by, and Liesl keeps getting worse. The fever is taking its toll, and her body is becoming more and more transparent. The doctor in attendance doesn’t speak German, but he gesticulates in such a way that Dita knows perfectly how things are going—not very well.

  One night, Liesl deteriorates: Her breathing is intermittent, and she flails around in the bed. Dita decides to give it one last go, to play her final hand. She goes outside and walks until she’s well away from the blinking lights powered by the hospital generators. She is looking for darkness and discovers it in an area of level ground a few hundred meters from the hospital. When she finds herself totally alone, she lifts her face to the cloudy night sky in which there is no moon and there are no stars. She falls on her knees and asks God to save her mother. After everything that’s happened, he can’t let her die without even being able to return to Prague. He can’t do this to her. He owes it to her. This woman has never hurt anyone, never offended or annoyed anyone, never stolen even a crumb of bread. Why punish her like this? Dita reproaches God, she begs him, she humbly implores him not to let her mother die. She makes all sorts of promises in exchange: becoming the most devoted of the devout, making a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, dedicating her entire life to praising God’s infinite glory and generosity.

  As she’s returning, she sees a tall, thin figure standing in the illuminated doorway of the hospital, looking out into the night. It’s Francis. He’s waiting for her. Looking very serious, he takes a step toward her and puts an affectionate hand on her shoulder. A heavy hand. He looks at Dita and shakes his head slowly to tell her that no, it wasn’t possible.

  Dita runs to her mother’s bed, and the doctor is there closing his bag. Her mother has gone. All that remains is her tiny human form, the body of a little bird. Nothing else.

  Broken, Dita sits down on a bed. The freckle-faced nurse comes over.

  “Are you okay?” And he raises his thumb so she understands that he’s asking if she’s all right.

  How can she be all right? Destiny, or God, or the devil, or whatever it might be, hasn’t relieved her mother of a single minute of suffering during six years of war, and at the same time, hasn’t allowed her to enjoy even one day of peace. The nurse continues to look at her as if he is waiting for an answer.

  “Scheisse,” she replies.

  The nurse makes that funny face the English make when there’s something they don’t understand—he stretches his neck and raises his eyebrows as high as they’ll go.

  “Shit … Scheisse,” says Dita, who has learned the English word over the past few days.

  And then the nurse agrees.

  “Shit,” he repeats, and sits down beside her in silence.

  Dita is left with the consolation that her mother took her last breath as a free woman—though it seems very small for such a lot of pain. But she turns to the nurse, who is watching her with some concern, and gives him the thumbs-up to tell him she’s fine. The young health worker feels somewhat relieved and gets up to give some water to a patient in another bed who’s asking for it.

>   Why did I tell him I’m fine if I’m feeling dreadful, if I couldn’t be worse? Dita asks herself. And she knows the answer before she finishes the question: Because he’s my friend, and I don’t want him to be worried.

  I’m starting to behave like my mother.…

  It’s as if she’s taken over that role.

  Next day, the doctor tells her that they’re going to speed up her paperwork so she can go home right away. He hopes this will cheer her up, but Dita listens to him as if she were sleepwalking.

  Go home? she asks herself. To where?

  She has no parents, no home, no ID. Is there any place to go back to?

  32.

  The window of the Hedva department store in Na Příkopé reflects a stranger: a young woman wearing a long blue dress and a modest gray felt hat with a ribbon. Dita examines her carefully but still doesn’t recognize her. She can’t accept that she is the stranger, her reflection in the glass.

  The day the Germans entered Prague, she was a nine-year-old girl walking along the street holding her mother’s hand; now she’s a woman of sixteen on her own. She still shakes when she remembers the shudder of the tanks crossing the city. It’s all over, but in her head, nothing has finished. It will never end.

  After the jubilation of victory and the celebrations marking the end of the war, after the dances organized by the Allied forces and the pompous speeches, postwar reality shows itself for what it is: mute, harsh, and without fanfare. The bands have gone, the parades are over, and the grand speeches have been reduced to silence. The reality behind peace is that in front of her is a country in ruins. She has no parents or siblings, no home, no studies, no belongings apart from the clothes they gave her in the Civilian Assistance Society, and no way to survive beyond the little ration card she was able to get after a great deal of cumbersome paperwork. On this, her first night in Prague, she’ll sleep in a hostel set up for the repatriated.

  The only thing she has is a scrap of paper with an address scribbled on it. She’s has looked at it so many times she knows it by heart. War changes everything. So does peace. What will be left of the sisterly relationship she shared with Margit in the concentration camps now that the war is over? Margit and her father thought Dita and her mother would take a transport train a couple of days after them, but her mother’s illness delayed her return by several weeks. During that time, Margit could have made new friends. She might want to forget everything that happened in the past, like Renée, who greeted her from afar without stopping.

  The address jotted down by Margit’s father belongs to some non-Jewish friends with whom he’d been out of touch for years. In fact, when they left Bergen-Belsen, Margit and her father didn’t know where they’d go to live or what they would do with their new lives. They didn’t even know if those friends of theirs would still be at that address after all those years of war, or if they’d want to have anything to do with them. The piece of paper is getting wrinkled in the palm of her hand, and the writing is becoming illegible.

  She wanders through the northern part of the city, looking for the address, asking people and trying to follow their instructions along streets she’s never been in. She no longer knows her way around Prague. The city seems enormous and like a labyrinth. The world appears colossal when you feel small.

  Finally, she reaches the square with the three broken benches they told her to look for; number 16 of the street on the piece of paper is close by. She goes inside the main entrance and rings the bell of apartment 1B. A somewhat overweight blond woman opens the door. She’s not Jewish; fat Jews are an extinct species.

  “Excuse me, but do Mr. Barnai and his daughter Margit live here?”

  “No, they don’t live here. They’ve gone to live some distance from Prague.”

  Dita nods her head. She doesn’t reproach them. Maybe they waited, but it’s taken her so long to return to Prague that it’s too late. After everything that’s happened, it’s not enough just to turn to a new page. You have to close that book and open another.

  “Don’t stand on the doorstep,” the woman says to her. “Come in and have a piece of freshly made cake.”

  “No, thank you, please don’t bother. Someone’s waiting for me, in fact. A family commitment, you know. I’m off. Some other time…”

  Dita turns around to leave as quickly as she can and makes to walk away. But the woman calls out to her.

  “You’re Edita, Edita Adler.”

  And Dita stops. She already has one foot on the stairs.

  “You know my name?”

  The woman nods.

  “I was expecting you. I have something for you.”

  The woman introduces Dita to her husband, a man with white hair and blue eyes who is still handsome at his advanced age. The woman brings her an enormous piece of hazelnut cake and an envelope with her name on it.

  They are such kind people that Dita doesn’t hesitate to open the envelope in front of them. Inside are two train tickets and a note from Margit written in her schoolgirl hand:

  Dear Ditiňka, we’re waiting for you in Teplice. Come right away. A huge kiss from your sister, Margit.

  A person waiting for you somewhere is like a match you strike at night in the countryside. It may not be able to light up everything, but it does show you the way back home.

  While they are all eating, the couple explains to Dita that Mr. Barnai found work in Teplice, and he’s living there with Margit. They tell her that Margit spent entire afternoons talking about her.

  Before she leaves for Teplice, Dita has to fix up her papers, just as they told her in the Jewish Council office. So, first thing the next morning, she stands in the very long line of the office that issues identity papers.

  Hours of waiting in line, again. But it’s not like the lines in Auschwitz, because here people are making plans as they wait. There are also angry people, even more irate than those who waited in half a meter of snow for a watery bowl of soup or a piece of bread. Now those who wait are irritated by the delay or because they’ve been misinformed or because of the number of papers they need. Dita smiles to herself. Life is back to normal when it’s small things that annoy people.

  Someone joins the line right behind her. When she sneaks a look, she realizes it’s a familiar face—one of the young teachers from the family camp. He also seems surprised to meet her here.

  “The librarian with the skinny legs!” he exclaims.

  It’s Ota Keller, the young man who people said was a Communist, and who used to make up stories about Galilee for his pupils. Dita immediately recognizes that ironic look of intelligence that used to intimidate her a little.

  Now, though, she sees something special in the young teacher’s eyes, a special warmth. He doesn’t just remember that she was a companion in the camp at a critical moment in their lives, but he discovers a thread that unites them. They hardly spoke in Block 31. In fact, nobody ever introduced them; they are two people who seemingly have never met. But when they bump into each other in Prague, it’s as if they are two old friends meeting again.

  Ota looks at her and smiles. His lively, somewhat roguish eyes are telling the girl, I’m happy you are alive; I’m happy to have found you again. Dita smiles at him, too, without really knowing why.

  She is immediately infected by his good humor.

  “I’ve found work doing the accounts in a factory, and I’ve found modest accommodation.… Though if you think about where we’ve come from, you’d have to say it’s a palace!”

  Dita smiles.

  “But I hope to find something even better. They’ve offered me a job as an English translator.”

  The line is long, but it seems short to Dita. They talk without pause, without any embarrassing silences, and with the confidence shared by old comrades. Ota talks about his father, the serious businessman who always wanted to be a singer.

  “He had an extraordinary voice,” Ota explains with a proud smile. “They took away his factory in 1941; they even put him in jail.
Then they sent us all to Terezín. And from there to the family camp. In the selection of July 1944, when they broke up camp BIIb, he didn’t make the cut.”

  Ota, so resolute and talkative, notices that he’s choking on his words, but it doesn’t embarrass him if Dita sees that his eyes are moist.

  “Sometimes, at night, I think I can hear him singing.”

  And when one of them looks away to remember a difficult or painful moment from those years, the other one also turns their eyes toward that same point to which we only allow people we trust completely to accompany us, those who have seen us both laugh and cry. Together, they visit those moments that have marked them forever. They’re so young that telling each other about those years amounts to telling each other about their whole lives.

  “What will have happened to Mengele? Have they hanged him?” Dita wonders.

  “Not yet, but they’re looking for him.”

  “Will they find him?”

  “Of course they will. Half a dozen armies are looking for him. They’ll catch him and put him on trial.”

  “I hope they hang him straightaway. He’s a criminal.”

  “No, Dita. They have to give him a trial.”

  “Why waste time on procedures?”

  “We are better than them.”

  “Fredy Hirsch used to say that, too!”

  “Hirsch…”

  “How I miss him.”

  It’s her turn at the window—time to resolve all her issues. That’s it. They are still two strangers. It’s the moment to wish each other luck and say good-bye. But Ota asks her where she’s going next. She tells him she’s off to the Jewish Community Office and asks if what they’ve told her is true: that she can request a small orphan pension.

  Ota asks her if she’d mind if he accompanied her there.

  “It’s on my way,” he says, so seriously that she doesn’t know whether to believe him or not.