“Thus the disaster came about,” the rabbi murmured. “That’s where the devil came from. That’s what opened the door and the windows and swept away all barriers.”
Then he added: “Shoah”
She heard the word for the first time. It was Hebrew. From the rabbi’s expression, from his shining brown eyes, the beads of sweat that appeared on his forehead, she could guess what it meant. He pronounced the three Hebrew characters as if he were pulling a rock down upon himself.
On her first day at the brothel she had regarded her pain as a punishment – just as Estelle did. She had committed a sin and her only excuse was that she wanted to stay alive. The rabbi wondered when wishing to stay alive could be a sin. She had not expected the depth of her humiliation, nor the pain, nor her unpreparedness, her sense of vertigo and free fall – until she eventually got used to it. Not that “used to” was really the right term. Had it helped that she had to conceal all the pain, just as she did her origin? She shared with Estelle a tendency to blame herself for something that was not their fault. They were surrounded by a world within which was their private world, invisible to others, a world of personal guilt which became their home.
“There is no more justice,” the rabbi said.
Then he added: “It is an unending chain.” He was thinking of the injustice that enveloped them. He knew of no book that could teach one how to live in such a time.
“We have learned to die,” he whispered. Was he saying that they were waiting for a second heaven? She didn’t wish to ask him.
It did not bother her that he was talking in riddles. Perhaps she, too, sometimes talked in this way, even though it did her good to speak openly. She wondered how far she should allow her openness free rein. She was afraid that she might herself become terrified by what she was telling him.
They were waiting for the first star to appear.
“What are we, each of us?” the rabbi asked. And Skinny answered him, just as quietly: “I am just a lump of flesh.”
She ate well. The rabbi was a good cook. She left practically nothing of what he put before her or let her prepare for herself. She devoured the soft Hungarian bread with its crisp crust that the baker delivered, and the Hungarian salami the butcher brought. At first, the rabbi paid them in Hungarian pengö, later with gold rings and other valuables, until eventually he had nothing left and the butcher and baker supplied him on credit.
On the third day the rabbi opened a large cupboard. One half of it contained the clothes of his wife, the other the clothes and accessories of his daughter.
“Her name was Erzsika,” Rabbi Schapiro said.
She realized they were both dead.
“Take whatever you need. It’s as if they were giving it to you,” the rabbi told her.
She looked at a cotton nightshirt and a flannel one. The rabbi took them out from the stack of underwear and handed them to her. She did not know yet which of the two she would sleep in, perhaps neither. She had become accustomed to wearing things that had belonged to dead people.
During the night she dreamt of Erzsika, the rabbi’s daughter.
The rabbi did not mention them to her again. Not until much later did she ask about them at all. Hints were sufficient; she worked out the rest for herself.
On the fifth day they kept silent. Skinny rested and ate. She spent hours in the bath, immersed to her chin, in hot, then tepid and finally cold water – as she was accustomed to. It was unbelievable to feel clean. She divided her day into two halves: during the first half she remembered the faces, hands, feet and bodies of the girls from No. 232 Ost, Madam Kulikowa, the guards and the officers, while in the second half she planned how she would live her new life. At first these ideas were vague but gradually they acquired a sharper outline. No. 232 Ost was always in the background for these. She lay in the water and talked to the girls about what the day held in store, she saw herself passing the guards, recalling individual faces, uniforms, and cars. She was still afraid of The Frog, as though he were just round the corner, instead of the pharmacy, the tailor’s shop, the tavern, the baker and the butcher, with its brightly coloured notices in Hungarian. Lying in the bath, staring at the ceiling, she watched the wolves and swept the snow from the entrance to let the vehicles enter and leave the yard of No. 232 Ost.
On the sixth day the rabbi said to her: “You were in a house without God; in a country without God. Under stars where God was absent.”
It sounded like an echo. Surely he had said this before?
“Among people who had walked away from the Ten Commandments. You were in a heathen, German land.”
“I was in Poland,” Skinny said.
“You were in Europe.”
On the seventh day Rabbi Schapiro asked her – as if she was the rabbi and not he: “Isn’t God everywhere, invisible and omnipresent?”
They were at the end of the circle and back at its beginning.
“He is powerless,” she said, as if this were a question one could answer. That was how it seemed to her. Who was she going to confess this to, if not to a rabbi? She did not want to say it again.
The rabbi was ashamed to look into her half-childish, half-adult green eyes. He did not want to see in them a sea of death covered with ashes. She didn’t only have sad eyes: she had eyes that saw what she had been through and what was ahead of her. There was in her a primitive awareness that she was alive, in spite of everything. That was quite a lot. She was like a small island of life in an ocean of death. She could not admit to herself that with her 15-year-old eyes she had, during those 21 days, seen more than Rabbi Gideon Schapiro in all the years that he was a rabbi; more than all the rabbis of all generations the world over, throughout the past 40 centuries.
He was looking at her long legs, her thin thighs and childish breasts and resisted the thought of the men she had been with. He hesitated to ask the question, which endlessly troubled him: Was God merciful? Or what was the opposite of mercy. He realized that he was not the first person to accuse God.
He had heard, though not at first hand, how the master race had populated the lands between the Elbe and the Urals by clearing them of their original inhabitants. How the armies of the Herrenvolk had opened the spaces in the east in order to turn them into a home for 200 million Germans by exterminating tens of millions, from infants to the elderly.
He heard from Skinny for the first time how Polish children thought suitable for Germanization were rounded up in the east, the way weasels were hunted, or badgers – and sometimes even on horseback with hounds and whips, the way foxes were hunted.
The rabbi gazed into her half-closed green eyes. He was filled with a humility he had not experienced before, he wept and felt ashamed. The smoke of the cremated had risen quickly to the sky because it was pushed up by more smoke, but eventually there was so much of it that it sank down under its own weight. Not even the strongest wind could disperse it. It seemed to him that, like people throughout Europe and the world, he would breathe the smoke of Auschwitz-Birkenau for a long time to come.
Skinny smiled at the rabbi. The corners of his mouth turned up while tears were rolling down his cheeks, wetting the collar ofhis shirt. They understood and did not understand one another.
“When you left home you were a child.”
“I don’t feel like a child any more.”
“A child is not responsible for what it’s made to do.”
“I knew what I was doing. I chose to do it.”
The rabbi was silent. She was tempted to tell something but she didn’t have the courage.
“I would have done more if they’d wanted me to,” she said instead.
“Was it worse at Auschwitz-Birkenau?”
“I told you what was happening at Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
Before her she saw again the German soldiers and men from the technical services, as well as the inmates, all shouting at each other at the railway ramp, the warehouses and around the five crematoria. There were French voices, Yidd
ish and Hungarian, Slovak, German, Polish and Lithuanian. They were like Martians, like creatures from another planet, but she understood them. They had faces, arms and legs, uniforms or prison clothes. It seemed to her like a gigantic, continuous performance. But soon it would end, not as in the finale in a theatre, after which the audience and the actors go home. This was different. This was real – not a theatrical performance. There was no curtain to go up or fall. Here no secret was made of what was happening. This was what the Germans called Endlösung, the Final Solution. And it was on planet Earth.
Rabbi Schapiro listened, endeavouring to visualize and comprehend, but unable to form a picture of it for himself.
She tried to simplify it for him, to reduce it to concepts by which people communicated. It unnerved her a little that she was facing a rabbi and was unable to convey this to him. How could she make him see? The Germans were no Spartans or ascetics. They had enjoyed the best food while thousands around them starved to death. They lived in villas, even at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in close proximity to the prisoners who were crowded together, worse than sardines, in the wooden huts that had housed Austro-Hungarian cavalrymen. There was no parallel to call on. And it was not something temporary, an emergency situation which the authorities intended to remedy or which (as after the war they tried to do) could be blamed on wartime conditions. This was what they had planned.
She did not say that perhaps the victims were glad they had crossed the bridge which lead nowhere but the gas chamber, that they had reached the end, the Final Solution, after which there was nothing. They had attained their final right or privilege – the right to die.
“There was no heaven there.”
“Auschwitz,” the rabbi whispered.
“On windless days soot would fall from morning to evening.”
“Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
“The inscription over the gate was: Arbeit macht frei.”
She explained to the rabbi that there had been three camps in one, on the area of eight demolished Polish villages. One of them, Brzezinki, was Birkenau. Aryan inmates gave as their address: Arbeitslager Auschwitz near Neu-Berun.
“Auschwitz-Birkenau,” the rabbi repeated.
“Auschwitz-Birkenau,” his echo confirmed.
“Feldbordell No. 232 Ost.”
“Feldbordell No. 232 Ost.”
“How were we born?”
The rabbi let his head drop. He was now smaller than her.
“A child’s birth is not governed by his wishes. No-one knows what awaits him.”
It went deep, far and wide. He had in his eyes a sea that did not divide. A flood which lasted 40 times 40 days and 40 nights. There was no point in counting the days of disaster.
For a wild moment she imagined inviting Rabbi Gideon Schapiro into her cubicle.
The rabbi had become pale during her stay. He suffered terrible headaches. He didn’t eat, and drank only water, occasionally nibbling a crust ofbread. He tried to stifle his anger, to dampen it with humility. Flames of wrath were flickering inside him. He was seeking echoes of his lost confidence. He gazed at her as he would into a mirror. He had come up against something that was not in the sacred books -there was nothing in his sacred books about Auschwitz-Birkenau or No. 232 Ost.
On his forehead, at the corners of his eyes and his mouth, wrinkles had appeared which had not been there when she arrived, even though his own life in hiding could not have been without anxiety. His voice had gone deeper, hoarser and more excited. He looked at her with his head lowered as if each day he were seeing her for the first time.
She confided in the rabbi, but she did not complain. She was guided by Madam Kulikowa’s advice, perhaps more so than she would have liked. The Madam had taught her that anyone running herself down makes a mistake, anyone apologizing accuses herself at the same time. She was guided by a self-preserving principle, which told her when to draw the line. She did not want the rabbi to feel sorry for her. She spoke more of the other girls than of herself.
“What happened to you is what happened to all who were there,” the rabbi said.
“It did not happen to everyone.”
“You did what you had to.”
“Maybe.”
“We’ve got to live.”
“My father threw himself against the electric fence.”
“And your mother?”
“I think that they killed my mother.”
“As they killed your brother?”
“Yes.”
“They didn’t kill you.”
“I don’t know. Humiliating is like killing,” she replied.
“You were close to it.”
In the end the rabbi said: “I don’t want to blaspheme.” He was gripped by revulsion. He closed his eyes for three seconds. Perhaps he was praying. He had to pray for 15-year-olds who claimed to be 18. For a God who kept silent. He conceived a prayer which as yet had no text.
“If I asked you whether you’ve brought back something good from there, would you think I’d gone mad?”
“I would have told you myself: I’m no longer letting anything surprise me.”
He was startled by the marter-of-factness with which she had armed herself. Why had God chosen her for the right side on the railway ramp? To be one of 30 army whores? Did He breathe that defiance into her which she had clung to tooth and nail, not allowing herself to die?
“Perhaps,” he said.
“Perhaps what?” she asked.
“God is in you.”
The rabbi’s forehead was like the rucked carpet under his chair. His cheekbones protruded, covered only by thin skin. From Skinny’s green eyes sins were looking out at him, legends as old as man, smaller than history and deeper than memory.
On the tenth day she was afraid he might really go mad.
She regretted that she had told him how, on that first Friday, a soldier had planted his body on hers.
*
Rabbi Schapiro knew of children who had knocked at the door of Hungarian people they had never set eyes on, and these people had given them a hiding place. Those were the unknown, the self-effacing, who softened the face of the Christian world.
“No-one is without a face,” he said.
“No,” she agreed.
She remembered Obersturmführer Stefan Sarazin of the Waffen-SS, the longest serving member of Einsatzgruppe D, who loved to shoot rabbis. For him, one murdered rabbi was like ten murdered Jews. He had shown her a photograph of the unit in which he’d first served. It was like a school photograph, the boys still wet behind their ears, barely unleashed from their mothers’ apron strings. They belonged to one of four detachments of Einsatzgruppe D, which, together with Einsatzgruppen A, B and C, had in the course of one year, during their advance from the Oder to the Dnieper and Volga, murdered more than a million people.
Skinny and the rabbi could supplement this picture with photographs taken by the Allies that they’d seen, of the pits, filled with the bodies of people who, before their execution, had had to take off their clothes. Unforgettable scenes, of tumbled, waxwork-like bodies.
To Obersturmführer Sarazin death meant an intertwined mass of bodies whose approximate number he would record, with the help ofhis book-keeping corporal, and after affixing the unit’s seal, forward to Berlin, along with a crate packed with his victims’ belongings.
The Obersturmführer had told her: “We are a new culture.” They wished to have nothing to do with what had gone before.
The 17-year-olds from her transport had been made to run under a rope strung across part of the ramp, as soon as they had arrived. They had no idea what the test was for. The shorter ones, those who didn’t have to duck to get under the rope, like her girl cousin, went straight to the gas chamber.
The hungriest among the others picked up the rats the Hitlerjugend boys had left lying in the mud. Skinny decided not to tell the rabbi – not before supper – what they had eaten.
“What remains good and what is bad?” The rabbi said aft
er a moment.
And then: “What we didn’t see didn’t exist.”
Not for the first time on that tenth day it seemed to her that the rabbi was talking in a confused way.
“Sometimes it’s better not to see,” she said.
“What makes you stronger – seeing or not seeing?”
He didn’t expect an answer from her; or for that matter, from himself. Even so, he felt guilt. Would anyone ever know more? Know the whole mosaic?
She didn’t have to tell him that the most credible testimony could be borne only by the dead, not by those like herself who had survived.
“It began a long time ago,” the rabbi said.
They had been having this kind of conversation every evening before supper, except that he had not been so feverish before. She urged herself to be patient, so that they could finally sit down at the table.
“Do I want from you something that no-one can ever explain to me?”
“It happened every day,” she said.
“You think so?”
“Some things can’t be explained,” she admitted.
Did the rabbi accept her as an adult? “Child,” he had said. That had been his first word to her. She wasn’t sure whether she wanted him to treat her as a child or as an adult.
“There are no words for it,” the rabbi answered.
Yes, so far there were no words for it, he repeated to himself.
Not once had the rabbi used the word prostitution. It had become for him, over the ten days she was with him, a metaphor for something greater than the fate of just one 15-year-old.
“Even the most sacred was desecrated,” he said. “Even the purest was soiled.”
Words, he said to himself. For the second time on that tenth day he felt the misery of the world into which they had been born. The darker side of man. That which was in the words and beyond them. The darkness of silence. That which would remain a secret.
“Words such as life, words such as ruin,” he said.
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