The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  Nothing. Slazak clomps down the steps and stalks toward the kitchen.

  The junkman climbs back into the wagon. “Tell him she wants to know what they’re going to do without you and your sister. And tell him I owe her a message back. He can give it to me next time.”

  Nothing from Max.

  “Don’t forget.”

  He won’t.

  *

  “How shall we go on without Lydia and Max?”

  It was a hopeful message, now that she thinks about it. She hadn’t meant it that way. It had been a cry from the heart and nothing more, the first thing that had come into her mind. But she sees now that within its context of despair is the notion of moving forward, which is hopeful. She wonders if Jacob will understand it that way.

  When the delivery commando arrives with the flour, she practically accosts the junkman. “Were you able to get to him?” she asks.

  “I was.”

  “And he said?”

  The junkman shrugs. “He didn’t say anything. There wasn’t time.”

  She glares up from her cutting.

  “The capo, the guards, you know how it goes. This place isn’t always conducive to a long talk.”

  “But he gave you a message.”

  “No ma’am, he didn’t.” Taking a step away, lifting the white shovel. “I’m sure he’ll have one for you soon enough.”

  Eidel crumples forward in spite of herself. No word. No word from Jacob at all. It’s not possible.

  The junkman begins shoveling. He looks back at her over his shoulder and asks himself if he should tell her about Max. How he’s seen him and talked to him. How he’s all right. Alive, at least.

  Eidel picks up her knife again and turns away. “No message?” she says, turning resolute. “In that case, you won’t get your second kilo.”

  It’s the junkman’s turn to be aghast. God knows what he’s promised that ravenous Slovak guard of his. He could be right on the verge of that old familiar pop pop pop that he was so quick to bring up a couple of days before.

  “No message,” she says, “no radishes,” believing that he’s up to something. That he has a message—surely Jacob wouldn’t have permitted him to leave without one—but thinks he can extract a little bit more for delivering it.

  The junkman hardly believes his ears, although he knows he has it coming. No message, no radishes. The idea of leaving empty-handed turns his face as pale as the flour that covers the rest of him. “Wait a minute,” he says, lifting his hat and giving his shaven head a theatrical scratch, “I seem to remember that there might have been a message after all.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And you’re just remembering now?”

  “I have a lot on my mind.” He screws the hat down. “But I think it’s coming back.”

  She’s still cutting. Rutabagas today, although there aren’t many of them and they’re softer than they should be. Nearly rotten. She keeps cutting, and she doesn’t look up.

  The junkman slaps himself on the side of the head. A white cloud blooms. “The boy,” he says. “The boy is alive.”

  She drops the knife. “Max?”

  “Yes! Max! I’ve seen him with my own eyes.”

  “My son?”

  “None other.” He stands there beaming. “Your husband pointed him out.”

  She can’t believe the reality of anything so wonderful. It must be verified. “Tell me about him,” she says. “Tell me what he looks like.”

  “Very much like his father,” says the junkman.

  “Good guess. Go on.”

  The junkman looks hurt. “I’m not guessing,” he says. “Beyond the resemblance to his father, I must say he looks pretty much like the rest of us. No hair. Shabby clothing. Nothing but skin and bones.”

  “Anything else?” She doesn’t want to lead him, but there must be something. There is something. And she knows what it is.

  The junkman pulls at his lip. “He’s tall for his age,” he says. “At first I thought he was a fully grown man.”

  “Max,” she says, clutching her throat and putting down the knife. She has run the tip of that blade down a vein before and she’s told herself she’ll never do it again, but now she knows for certain. Not with Max alive. She’d been convinced that her husband was enough—dayenu, she’d said—but now, wonder of wonders, she’s found herself in a world that still has her son in it too.

  *

  Ever since the disappearance of his twin, Schuler has been weakening steadily. When he kneels to sort clothing in Canada, his bones crack like firewood. The pain in his joints dims his eyes and twists his mouth into a grimace. His walking pace has slowed to a shuffle, and officers waiting for their Friday trim grow peevish at his absence even though when he finally arrives his hands shake so badly that his work is worse than ever before. When the word circulates then that a new barber has passed Drexler’s scrutiny, there’s a general rejoicing among the highly placed.

  Schuler doesn’t rejoice. He says farewell to his freedom. He says farewell to Canada, with its soft work and its riches. He examines his gum-soled shoes, calculating how well they’ll hold up on the water project, and he studies his own soft hands, imagining them callused and bleeding. He despairs.

  The first day that he’s back among the ordinary run of prisoners, trudging off to the excavation, men begin asking him questions they haven’t asked before. It’s as if he’s a traveler come back at last from some mysterious place even more exotic than Canada. As if he’s tumbled back to earth from the heavens. Max is the most curious of them all, since his father has gone off this very morning to take the old barber’s place and he wonders about the conditions and the people he’ll meet. He asks him if the sorting facility is really the land of plenty that everyone has been led to believe.

  Schuler, like an old voluptuary who’s drained his last bottle, sighs and nods his head. He can’t even speak to make a proper answer.

  Max asks if it’s true that the commandant’s cook is a grandmotherly old woman who might part now and then with a little something in the way of food.

  Schuler comes back to something approaching life, barking out a derisive laugh. “The commandant’s cook? I should say not. The commandant’s cook is just back from service on a U-boat, and he’s a squint-eyed Nazi devil if there ever was one.”

  “But—”

  “But nothing. The kindly old woman you’ve heard about is the housekeeper. Except she isn’t kindly either.”

  “No?”

  “Definitely not. She is, however, deaf as a post.”

  Max sags.

  “Buck up,” says Schuler. “If your father uses his head, deaf is a thousand times better. Kindly depends on someone else, you see. But deaf opens the way for a man’s own cunning.”

  Slazak has a length of pipe he’s been carrying around as a walking stick, and he jabs Schuler in the ribs to keep him quiet. “Save your wind,” he says, and when Schuler stumbles but walks on he hits him harder, this time across the back of the knees. Schuler goes down and cries out and Max tries to lift him but Slazak won’t permit it. He clouts Max across the shoulders and the boy goes down too. This time he’s able to help Schuler up while acting as if he’s only helping himself. “Good boy,” says Schuler under his breath, and Slazak doesn’t hear, so that’s the end of it for now.

  Max starts asking questions again when they break for noon rations, but this time the other men don’t want to hear about food. They think about food enough, without having to dream about the delicacies that Rosen might be able to get his hands on for the exclusive benefit of himself and his son. The truth is that they are of two minds about the subject. Half of them gave up all thoughts of food the moment they entered the camp, in order to keep themselves from going mad; the rest believe in thinking of nothing else, in order to keep themselves from despairing entirely.

  Never mind the temptations, they say, tell us about the commandant himself.

  “He
drinks,” says Schuler, leaning back on a pile of black iron pipe.

  No one looks surprised.

  “And as far as I can tell, he believes that Jews are gorgons.”

  There are a few blank faces among the men, so he elucidates by holding his hands up alongside his head and wiggling his fingers.

  “Like Medusa,” he says. “He’ll look at them only in the mirror. Under any other condition, the bastard averts his eyes.” The stack of pipe is warm in the hot sun and he leans on it like a lizard, gathering heat into his old bones.

  “Could be he’s ashamed of himself,” comes a voice.

  “Hah,” says Schuler. “An individual more puffed up with pride never set foot upon this earth.” He stretches his fingers around a length of pipe, feeling the warmth sink in.

  Another voice: “So why didn’t you slit his throat when you had the chance?” No one seems to know exactly where the words come from, but they hang in the air like notes from a church bell. A couple of the men check to see if Slazak or perhaps even one of the Ukrainians has overheard, but no.

  Schuler sits up. “Why didn’t I slit the bastard’s throat? I’ll tell you why.” He surveys them one by one. “I did it to save the worthless skins of idiots like you.”

  A muttering comes from the men. Of course. They hadn’t thought it through. The dream of standing behind the commandant with a blade of sharp German steel in their hands is powerful enough to block out all logic, all reason. Kill the commandant and you kill not just yourself but your commando, your block, probably half the prisoners in the entire camp. Just like that. To say nothing of what the Nazis would do to every blood relative you had in all of Europe. They’d hunt them down and slaughter them one after another. And when the bloodshed was finished, they’d install another commandant just like the first one. Worse, if they could find such a creature.

  So old Schuler, deposed barber and sorter of stolen goods, lounging there on his stack of pipe like a dragon on his treasure and smiling to himself in an ecstasy of satisfaction, was right. Hands off the commandant. Hands off every last one of them.

  *

  Partly indoors and partly out, Canada is a great open-air bazaar of the lost and the stolen. Treasures lurk everywhere: rare gems and glittering costume jewelry, wedding rings and coins of all nations; dark Belgian chocolates and rich French cheeses and fat fragrant sausages from every corner of Europe. The first lesson that Jacob learns is that you never know where you’ll find such things, and the second lesson is that the first lesson is an illusion. There are, after all, only a limited number of places where desperate people might have hidden their valuables upon reaching the end of the line. The hems of coats and dresses. The toes of boots. False bottoms and secret compartments in trunks and suitcases.

  The capo is Jankowski, a Pole with the manner and build of an armored tank. He trundles about slowly and methodically, grinding beneath his feet anything or anyone unlucky enough to get in his way, and his huge square head swivels from side to side as he makes one circuit of the perimeter after another. He misses nothing. Some men say they’ve never seen him so much as blink.

  He was anything but happy with Schuler but he’s less happy with Rosen, because someone will need to train him. Training means not just outlining what goes where—men’s clothing in these piles, women’s in these; coins here and jewels here and food over there out of the sun; every single yellow star thrown into this burn barrel—but reinforcing the dangers of trying to pocket so much as an atom of contraband. Organizing, the prisoners call it. Since these ignoramuses learn only by example, someone is going to have to suffer.

  Ordinarily, that wouldn’t bother Jankowski in the least. He’d see it as an opportunity. But the trains have been delivering prisoners night and day, and Canada is filling up with goods faster than his commando can sort them, and the officer in charge has the sympathy of a baboon and the forbearance of an emperor. What Jankowski needs is additional men, a dozen strong and vigorous backs to bend to the work, not just a replacement for that shiftless old layabout Schuler. Not another one to be dividing his time between here and the barber’s chair, off every Friday currying favor among the officers and complaining about any work that might roughen his delicate hands.

  For this, for the education of this new part-timer Rosen, he’s going to have to sacrifice a perfectly good worker. It infuriates him, but there’s no alternative. Making his slow transit around the edge of the yard, he assesses the men under his command with an eye to choosing the one most in need of a little salutary discipline. Ideally it will be one whose loss, whether temporary or permanent, will set back the commando’s output as little as possible. He spies Wasserman. Wasserman is as innocent and harmless as they come, a timid and pigeon-chested weakling afraid of his own shadow. His work is cautious and slow but impeccable; he never makes a mistake and he’s never been caught pocketing anything. Jankowski hates him for it.

  Wasserman will do.

  The capo grinds on past, his square mouth opening into a narrow black smile. It looks like something a gunner would fire through. He lowers himself step by step into the sorting area and veers toward a table piled high with coins. Jacob is there emptying a sack onto the tabletop, the coins tumbling out like water and singing like music. “Faster,” says Jankowski, “and more carefully,” although coins will only fall out of a canvas sack so fast, and no amount of caution will have any effect on the end result. It’s just what he says.

  “Wait,” he says then, and Jacob waits. He picks up one of the fallen coins and assesses it, squinting at it from both sides, examining the marks around the edges, hefting it in his meaty hand. He pauses and thinks and dampens his thumb with his tongue and rubs it over the coin’s face, poking out his wet lower lip and drawing down the corners of his mouth. An eyebrow lifted, he looks from the coin to Jacob and back again. He grunts and shakes his head, as if to suggest that he of all people—this capo Jankowski who before his brief heyday at Auschwitz was a farm laborer in the deepest reaches of the countryside, hauling silage and shoveling manure—as if to suggest that he has found this particular coin not entirely up to his standards.

  Jacob stands at attention the entire time—waiting for a chance to explain that this coin has come from the same source as all of the others and that he doesn’t know what on earth might have happened to it if anything happened to it at all but that whatever it was that happened most surely took place long before the coin fell into his hands; waiting for the more likely outcome, which is that Jankowski will abuse him in some way without hearing an explanation or wanting one; asking himself what old Schuler’s secret was for thriving in this treacherous environment—but in the end not one of these things happens. Instead the capo calls out to the nearest of the guards and flips the coin and they both watch it as it soars upward into the sunlight. Everyone watches. The coin spins slowly and slowly, bright sun glinting from it. Time stops. At the top of its arc the coin rotates one last impossible time and the sunlight sparks and the descent begins. Jankowski holds out his hand, and as the guard watches, and as every man in the commando watches too, he catches the coin and slips it into the pocket of his shirt. Just like that.

  Then, and only then, does he turn his attention to Jacob, holding out one meaty index finger like a sausage or the barrel of a gun and waggling it back and forth. Don’t you try that, the gesture says, as if such a thing needs saying.

  What follows is a perverse morality play. Jankowski goes to Wasserman’s table. One end of it is piled high with men’s shoes and the other end with women’s. Children’s shoes, of which there are many, go in a separate crate. No one knows what will happen to the children’s shoes, there are so many of them left behind and so few feet to fill them up. None at all, really.

  Narrow-chested Wasserman, stunned from watching Jankowski pocket the coin and on his guard for whatever terrible thing might happen next, his arms laden with shoes, stumbles toward the table himself. He has half an impulse to speed up and half an impulse to sl
ow down, but he does neither. He just keeps moving. Jankowski beats him to the table and begins examining his work. A thousand times a thousand shoes, lying one atop another like dogs and stinking in the heat. He rummages through the pile and comes up with a particular pair, wingtip brogues the color of oxblood, and he examines them like treasure.

  “What’s this?” he says as Wasserman reaches the table. “No laces?”

  Wasserman dumps his load of shoes on the ground. “They came that way,” he says.

  The capo squints. “Empty your pockets,” he says.

  Wasserman complies. The pocket of his shirt holds a morsel of bread that he’s been saving for two days now, and Jankowski grinds it to powder between his fingers and blows it away into the summer air. The pockets of his trousers are empty.

  “Let’s see your shoes, then,” says the capo.

  Wasserman lifts the cuffs of his trousers to display a pair of ancient workboots closed at the tops with tiny twists of wire.

  “Reason enough,” says the capo, lifting the wingtips, “for you to steal a proper pair of shoelaces.”

  “But I didn’t,” says Wasserman.

  “You’ve hidden them somewhere, haven’t you?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “We’ll see.” He orders Wasserman to take off his shirt and trousers and turn them inside out. Wasserman complies, standing there in Canada with the sun shining and the breeze blowing, clad in tattered woolen undershorts the color of mud. “Off with those too,” says Jankowski, as if Wasserman might be hiding something within them other than his dignity.

  Once they’re off, one of the guards laughs and raises his machine gun, elbowing the fellow next to him, pretending that he can’t sight accurately on a target so small.

  “Hand those over,” says Jankowski. He makes a show of trying to make as little contact as possible with Wasserman’s filthy undershorts, and when he gives them back the gold coin falls out.