The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  …

  A revolt against the Germans was madness, the doctor thought; it was death for everyone: the condemned transport, the prisoners in the family camp, and even the team from the hospital requisitioned by Mengele. The man had gone mad, he was clearly out of his mind, and if he wasn’t stopped, the Jewish doctors would die with the rest of the prisoners.

  “I’ll give you something, a sedative,” the doctor told him, and turned to the pharmacist.

  They were always short of medicine, but they had a small stock of tranquilizers. The pharmacist handed him a bottle of sleeping pills. The doctor emptied the contents into his hand and immediately clenched his fist around them. He had some cold tea in his mug into which he tipped the pills, and then he swirled the tea around until they’d dissolved in the murky liquid.

  There are words in penal codes to describe what really happened to Fredy Hirsch that afternoon in 1944. Sometimes, narrative fiction reveals truths that can’t be told any other way.

  Increasingly, other testimonies contradict the suicide theory that can be found in the official profiles of Hirsch. Michael Honey, a family camp survivor who worked as an errand boy for the medical team, casts doubt on Rosenberg’s testimony in his memoir when he speaks of what happened on March 8, 1944: “He was given an overdose of Luminal when he asked for a pill because of a headache.”

  I hope this book also serves as a vindication of the figure of Fredy Hirsch, somewhat tarnished by the false idea that he voluntarily took his own life. As a result of this notion, his integrity in decisive moments has been questioned. Fredy Hirsch did not commit suicide. He would never have abandoned his children. He was a captain; he would have gone down with his ship. This is how he should be remembered: as a fighter of extraordinary valor.

  And, naturally, this book is a homage to Dita, from whom I have learned so much.

  The librarian of Block 31 continues to live in Netanya and travels to spend a few weeks each year in her tiny apartment in Prague. And she’ll keep doing it as long as her health allows. She is still a woman of unimaginable curiosity, astuteness, kindness, and integrity. Until now, I hadn’t believed in heroes, but I now know they exist: Dita is one of them.

  WHAT HAPPENED TO …

  RUDI ROSENBERG

  After the war, Rudi Rosenberg changed his name to Rudi Vrba. Following his escape from Auschwitz, he hastened to dictate a preliminary report for Jewish leaders in the city of Zilina about what was really happening to the people deported to Auschwitz. Its contents bore no resemblance to the lies of the Nazis. The report was sent to Budapest, but some of the senior Jewish leaders ignored it, and in May 1944, the Nazis began to transport up to twelve thousand Hungarian Jews a day to Auschwitz. When Rudi reached Britain, he and his fellow escapee Fred Wetzler wrote another, more detailed report that served to inform the world of the terrible truth of what was happening in the concentration camps. This document was one of the pieces of evidence used at the Nuremberg trials. After the war, Rosenberg was decorated. He studied chemistry at Charles University (in Prague) and became a respected professor in the field of neurochemistry. He moved to Canada, where he died in 2006. His bitter criticism of prominent members of the Hungarian-Jewish community, who would subsequently play a key role in the founding of the State of Israel, caused certain sectors of that state to question for decades both his testimony and Rudi himself as a person. To this day he remains a controversial figure there.

  ELISABETH VOLKENRATH

  Elisabeth Volkenrath was a qualified hairdresser by profession, but her affiliation with the Nazi party led to her enlisting with the SS. She undertook a period of training in the Ravensbrück camp, and in 1943 was posted to Auschwitz as an SS Aufseherin, or female guard. In November 1944, she was promoted to SS Oberaufseherin, or head female guard, and in this position, she ordered an increased number of executions. Early in 1945 she was transferred to Bergen-Belsen as supervisor. When the Allies liberated the camp, she was arrested by British troops and put on trial as part of the process to determine the responsibilities of the Bergen-Belsen guards. As a result, she was condemned to death by hanging and was executed on December 13, 1945, in the town of Hamelin.

  RUDOLF HÖSS

  Rudolf Höss, the Kommandant of Auschwitz, received a strict Catholic upbringing. His father even wanted him to become an ordained priest. In the end, Höss opted for the army: order and hierarchy fascinated him. During his term as Kommandant, between one and two million people were killed. When the war ended, Höss escaped from the encirclement of the Allies hunting for major war criminals by using a false identity that suggested he was an ordinary soldier. He worked as a farmer for almost a year, until the Allies forced his wife to reveal his whereabouts and he was arrested. He was tried in Poland and condemned to death. While in jail, before he was executed, he wrote his memoirs, in which he did not deny the hundreds of thousands of crimes he had committed, and justified them by declaring that, given his military rank, he was obliged to obey the orders he received. He was even proud of his organizational skills in managing a death machine as complex as the one at Auschwitz. He was hanged in Auschwitz I, and the gallows still stand where the sentence was carried out.

  ADOLF EICHMANN

  Adolf Eichmann was one of the primary ideologues of the so-called Final Solution to exterminate the Jewish race. He took charge of the logistics involved in the deportations to the concentration camps. He was also the architect of the Judenräte, or Jewish councils, which collaborated in the deportations. Eichmann was captured by American troops at the end of the war, but he passed himself off as Otto Eckmann and they didn’t realize he was one of the most wanted Nazis. After hiding in Germany and traveling through Italy, Eichmann boarded a ship to Argentina in 1950. There, he gathered his family together and lived under a false name, working as a machine operator in a car factory. In 1960, thanks to information gathered by the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, an elite group of the Mossad (the Israeli intelligence service) found him in Buenos Aires. In a daring operation, they arrested Eichmann in the street, bundled him into a car, and headed for the airport. From there, he was secretly taken out of the country in a plane belonging to the Israeli airline El Al, by pretending he was a drunk aircraft mechanic. The incident gave rise to a bitter diplomatic dispute between Argentina and Israel. SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was tried in Jerusalem and condemned to death. The sentence was carried out on June 1, 1962.

  PETR GINZ

  The editor-in-chief of the magazine Vedem, put together voluntarily by the youth of Terezín, was born in Prague on February 1, 1928. His parents were passionate advocates of the universal language Esperanto, and people with a deep interest in culture. In October 1942, the Gestapo ordered Petr and several hundred others to be deported to Terezín, while his parents and sister remained temporarily in Prague. Petr was one of the few unaccompanied children in Terezín, although his parents regularly sent him packages containing food and writing paper. In one letter that has been preserved, Petr asked his family for chewing gum, notebooks, a spoon, bread, illustrations for copying … and a sociology book. He shared his packages with his roommates. His generosity, intelligence, and pleasant manner made him one of the boys most loved by both his companions and his teachers. In 1944 he was deported to Auschwitz; he didn’t return home when the war ended. But his name didn’t appear on any list of the dead, either, and for ten years his family held out the faint hope that they would see him again. At the end of that time, they were contacted by Jehuda Bacon, who had been deported on the same transport. He explained to them that when they were sent to Auschwitz, a selection was carried out on the station platform itself: Those on the right went to the camp, and those on the left went directly to the gas chambers. Jehuda saw Petr being assigned to the left group.

  DAVID SCHMULEWSKI

  The Polish leader of the Resistance in Auschwitz was already a veteran left-winger before he was detained—he had fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, a
nd later against the Nazis. After the war ended, he held several important positions in the Polish Communist Party. A murky business in which he was caught up—something to do with the trafficking of works of art—forced him to step down from the Party, and he ended up in exile in Paris, where he lived until his death. It is not known to what extent his involvement in the trafficking of artwork was a ploy by leaders of the Communist Party to discredit him, since his status as a war hero made him untouchable. His grand-nephew, the polemical and brilliant English intellectual Christopher Hitchens, who died in 2011, talks about some of these matters in his book Hitch-22.

  SIEGFRIED LEDERER

  He was the fellow escapee with SS First Officer Viktor Pestek, whose desertion cost him his life. Lederer escaped from the Gestapo by the skin of his teeth and became an active member of the Resistance. In Zrabaslav he passed himself off as an SS general to help local Resistance groups. He ended up in Slovakia, where he spent the rest of the war helping local partisans.

  JOSEF MENGELE

  In January 1945, a few days before the Allied forces liberated Auschwitz, Josef Mengele blended into a retreating infantry battalion. In this way, he ended up being one of hundreds of soldiers taken prisoner and managed to pass unnoticed by the Allies. He was assisted not only by the chaos in the first few weeks after the war ended, but by the fact that the Allies were identifying members of the SS by a tattoo they all had on their arms that identified their blood type—something regular soldiers did not have. Mengele, always prudent, had never been tattooed. He managed to escape from Germany with the financial assistance of his influential industrialist family and took refuge in Argentina. He lived an agreeable, upper-class life there as a partner in a pharmaceuticals company. Toward the end of the 1950s, Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal picked up Mengele’s tracks thanks to divorce papers he signed—an action he agreed to by letter with his wife. But someone managed to warn Mengele that he’d been discovered, and he left for Uruguay. He lived there under a new false identity but in considerably less comfortable circumstances, in a modest shack and with the worry of knowing he was being pursued. He was, however, never caught. He died in 1979 at the age of sixty-eight while bathing in the sea—probably of a heart attack. In the biography of Mengele written by Gerald Posner and John Ware, the authors tell how, after years of intermittent contact by mail, Mengele’s son Rolf went to visit him before his death. Rolf was finally able to ask the question that had been eating away at him since he was a child, that is, whether Mengele was really responsible for the atrocious crimes attributed to him. It was difficult for a son to accept that his father—so solicitous and considerate in his letters—could be the vicious monster talked about in the media. When Rolf finally asked him face-to-face if he really had ordered thousands of people to be executed, Josef Mengele assured him that it was just the opposite. Showing absolutely no emotion or doubt, Mengele told his son that thanks to his selections—in which he separated those Jews who were still in a fit state to work from those who were going to be killed—he had saved thousands from death by assigning them to the “suitable” line.

  SEPPL LICHTENSTERN

  Seppl Lichtenstern was selected for transportation from the family camp to the Schwarzheide camp in Germany in July 1944. There, the Nazis put him to work in a factory that converted brown coal into diesel fuel. At the end of the war, the Nazis organized a macabre march, with no food supplies, of thousands of prisoners from camps that were about to fall into the hands of the Allies. It was a march-flight to nowhere in particular. It was called “the death march” because weapons were fired without warning and those who were dying were summarily executed by the side of the road. Thousands of these prisoners, including Lichtenstern, died during this final act of Nazi madness. His remains lie in the Saupsdorf cemetery in Germany.

  MARGIT BARNAI

  Margit got married and lived the rest of her life in Prague. Although Dita emigrated to Israel, they never lost touch. They exchanged letters and photographs of their children. Margit had three daughters. The youngest was born when Margit was already forty years old. She was baptized with the name Dita. Dita Kraus continues to keep in touch with Margit’s daughters. She’s like an aunt to them, and they catch up whenever Dita visits Prague.

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Adler, Shimon. “Block 31: The Children’s Block in the Family Camp at Birkenau.” Yad Vashem Studies XXIV (1994): 281–315.

  Demetz, Peter. Prague in Danger. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

  Gutman, Yisrael, and Michael Berenbaum, eds. Anatomy of the Auschwitz Death Camp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

  Kraus, Ota B. The Painted Wall. Tel Aviv: Yaron Golan Publishing, 1994.

  Křížková, Marie Rút, Kurt Jiří Kotouč, and Zdeněk Ornest. We Are Children Just the Same: Vedem, the Secret Magazine by the Boys of Terezin. Prague: Aventinum Nakladatelství, 1995.

  Levine, Alan J. Captivity, Flight, and Survival in World War II. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2000.

  Millu, Liana. El humo de Birkenau. Barcelona: Acantilado, 2005.

  Posner, Gerald L., and John Ware. Mengele: La esfera de los Libros. 2002.

  Venezia, Shlomo. Sonderkommando. Barcelona: RBA, 2010.

  Vrba, Rudolf, and Alan Bestic. Je me suis évadé d’Auschwitz. Paris: Éditions J’ai Lu, 1998.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Antonio Iturbe is a novelist and journalist. He interviewed Dita Kraus, the real-life librarian of Auschwitz, for The Librarian of Auschwitz. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Epigraphs

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  What happened to …

  Primary Sources

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Henry Holt and Company, Publishers since 1866

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  Text copyright © 2012 by Antonio Iturbe

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Lilit Žekulin Thwaites

  Endpaper images courtesy of the National Archives

  All rights reserved.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-62779-618-7

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  First published in Spain by Editorial Planeta in 2012

  First American edition, 2017

  eISBN 9781627796194

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  Antonio Iturbe, The Librarian of Auschwitz