The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  Chaim leads the way once the water has come to a boil. With white linen draped over his arms and a basin of water raised up before him, he could be a participant in some holy sacrament. This moment of entry into the dining room is the first time all day that Jacob has seen him subdued, however, the first time he’s seen him subdued in the least, and there’s a sudden and palpable tension in the air. It isn’t just a matter of Vollmer’s rank. The man simply doesn’t look at the boy and the boy simply doesn’t look at the man. Jacob watches as Vollmer pushes his chair away from the table and Chaim puts down the bowl and unfolds the drape and arranges it around the sturmbannführer’s neck. Vollmer recoils at his touch, as if the boy has been dipped in poison.

  “Begin,” he says to Jacob, and Jacob begins.

  The light here is good, pouring in from large windows on two sides and reflected by a broad mirror mounted high on one wall. He doesn’t need to ask Vollmer to change position even once, which is good, since he’s not certain that he ought to be speaking to him at all. Now and again Vollmer checks himself in the mirror with a sly look not intended for Jacob to see, and it’s clear enough that he finds the work satisfactory. It ought to be, after the butchery committed by Schuler. Jacob catches the thought before it’s halfway formed and reminds himself not to think ill of the dead, especially the dead with whom he’s recently been so intimate. If he weren’t wearing Slazak’s uniform instead of his own, the deputy commandant would no doubt detect the stench of Schuler’s corpse on him right now.

  He’s wearing one dead man’s uniform so as not to smell like another one. All things considered, he’s lucky to be alive.

  Nearly finished, he steps back and slowly circles Vollmer in the chair, the comb upraised in his left hand and the scissors upraised in his right, narrowing his eyes and permitting the scissors to dart in exactly once for a final microscopic snip. There. Perfection and relief in one quick movement. He puts down the comb and the scissors and takes up a little whisk broom to tidy Vollmer’s neck, and that’s when he finally looks up and sees the painting.

  It hangs right over the fireplace. He doesn’t know how he could have missed it, and yet he does know. In the presence of a cobra, a rabbit wouldn’t take notice of a da Vinci.

  It’s Lydia. Lydia in Eidel’s attic studio in Zakopane, lit by that alpine sunlight and caught by that loving hand and preserved by both of them forever. Lydia lost and Lydia found.

  Vollmer can’t possibly know. He can’t have any idea as to where the painting has come from or what sort of child it represents. The mountain light falling like gold upon Lydia’s hair has surely persuaded him that the image represents one of his own, an Aryan child. Damn him for his blind stupidity. Only an imbecile would be so persuaded, an idiot lacking any ability whatsoever to perceive the world before him. Why, the deputy’s hair itself has shifted color and tone and texture a million times as Jacob has circled around him during the past ten minutes, changing with the changing light from the north window and the east window and the mirror hung high on the opposite wall. It’s the simplest thing in the world, a matter of physics, a matter of geometry. Shadow and light.

  Damn his pigheaded stupidity, then, but be thankful for it too, because it has saved this painting—and with it this child—from at least one kind of oblivion.

  The painting is matted in alpine greens and browns and mounted in a grand gilded frame carved all over with oak leaves and acorns. Jacob can’t stop looking at it, looking at it the way a parched hiker would look at a mountain stream. Thank God, then, for the reliability of old professional habits. He sweeps the long white drape from around Vollmer’s body, and with the skill of a stage magician he vanishes it into the wooden supply box. Chaim moves in with the broom and Vollmer lifts up his feet with a cringe that suggests aversion more than accommodation. But meanwhile the deputy has noticed the failure of Jacob’s concentration, the drift of his eyes even as he packs away his tools, and he pats absently at a cowlick that has never before stayed down and turns toward him in the chair and says, “Isn’t she lovely?”

  The painting. The child. Lydia.

  “Without question, sir. She is.” Lovely enough to enchant a monster.

  Perhaps this is why they kill the children. To keep themselves from falling in love.

  Book Two

  Testament

  Nine

  On their way back to the camp, Jacob asks the boy what he knows about the painting. How long it’s been hanging there. Where it came from.

  Chaim knows everything. “Believe it or not,” he says, “it came through Canada. Which means I’ve got news for you: That kid? She’s no shiksa.”

  “Never mind that. Never mind the girl. Tell me about the painting.”

  “It’s a pretty good joke on Vollmer, don’t you think?”

  “Never mind the joke.”

  “A Jewish kid on his wall?”

  “Never mind his wall. Never mind Vollmer. Tell me about the painting.”

  “What’s the difference? You some kind of artist yourself?”

  “Let’s say I have an interest.”

  Chaim stops and puts down the box and picks it up again and they go on. “Word is that Jankowski got his mitts on it and traded it to one of the Ukrainians for a whole pile of cigarettes and then the Ukrainian sold it to an antique dealer in town. The dealer was the one who put it in the frame. Dressed it up so when Vollmer’s wife saw it looking so nice, she just had to have it.” Chaim shakes his head. “Women.”

  “Women. Right.”

  “Plus even the wife could tell it wasn’t a genuine antique, so she got it for next to nothing.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. She practically stole it. Frame included.”

  For the first time all day, Jacob laughs. “And they talk about Jews,” he says.

  “Exactly,” says the boy. “And they talk about Jews.”

  *

  It’s just a bottle. A long tall narrow glass bottle that once held vinegar. Gretel has discovered it beneath one of the big coal stoves, glinting there in a dusty black corner, and one of these days when no one is looking she’ll take the poker or a stick of wood and risk whatever burns might be necessary in order to get her hands on it. In the meantime she’ll wait and keep her own counsel and perfect her plans.

  How will she get it out of the kitchen?

  In her sleeve, her own arm being so thin as to take up no room at all.

  Where will she take it?

  Home to the block, where she’ll hide it in the rafters above her bunk.

  What will she do with it once she’s claimed it for her own?

  She’ll fill it up with stories, and then she’ll bury it. She already has a spot in mind, a place she knows behind the block where water runs down from the roofline and disturbs the earth, churning up mud around the foundation and exposing loose gravel. It will be safe there, safe until the day when some historian excavates this place and finds it.

  The bottle is everything she knows of hope. That and the scraps of paper and the tattered bits of gauze bandage and whatever else she can find upon which to scratch out the history of Auschwitz. She has the stub of a pencil that must have fallen from an officer’s pocket—she keeps it in the hem of her jacket by day and jammed into a crack in the wall of her bunk by night—an irreplaceable stub that was the catalyst of her campaign. When she came upon the single bitter inch of it scuffed down hard between the floorboards, it was like discovering a passageway to a new continent. A whole world bloomed before her, a world in which someone would someday know what she and the rest have endured here. She marks time not from the date of her birth or from the date of her arrival at the camp, but from that transformational morning.

  The bottle under the stove seems to have a paper label on it, the idea of which thrills her. She’ll peel it off and write carefully around the printing and then turn it over and write on the back, for she must let nothing go to waste. Any inch left unfilled is a story untold, a cry unheard. Sea
rch as she might she can never find scraps to write on as quickly as the testimony piles up, but she does her best. The tip of the pencil is blunt, and she makes her letters as tiny and precise as she can.

  Eidel finds her squinting down at such a project one day, a charred curl of cigarette paper pressed down flat on the chopping block and a look of utter concentration on her face. Eidel clears her throat and Gretel jumps. She’s prepared to swallow the evidence, pencil and all.

  “Drawing,” asks Eidel, “or writing?”

  “Writing.” Gretel smiles and rolls the paper up around the pencil. “Just getting some things down,” she says, tucking everything into a hole in the hem of her jacket.

  “I understand,” says Eidel. “I was a painter, once upon a time. I was forever getting things down.”

  Gretel nods, picking up a rag with one hand and worrying the pencil deeper with the other.

  “It seemed so important when I was doing it,” Eidel says, “but now I don’t know. The paintings are all gone, everything’s gone, so maybe it was just wasted time. Maybe I should have been doing something else instead. Living instead of looking.”

  “I’ll get that down too,” says Gretel. “If you want me to. If there’s room. There’s already so much.”

  “What do you mean?” She moves toward the oven with a rag in her hand and opens the door and checks on the bread.

  “I’ll write down how you lost your paintings.” Gretel moves closer to the oven’s radiant heat and puts a finger to her lips. “I’m writing down everything that happens here, so people will know.” She goes on to tell Eidel about the vinegar bottle she’s discovered beneath the stove, and about her plan for filling it up with words and burying it as evidence. A message set out upon the sea of time.

  She says that she has scraps hidden away in every corner of the camp. She’s jammed them under clapboards and pushed them into gaps in masonry. She’s stuck them beneath washtubs with a paste made of water and mud and rolled them tight enough to slide into the little tunnels eaten into her bunk by worms. She’s spread them around everywhere, her own furtive infestation of truths too precious to be concentrated in one place until now. It’s entirely possible that she has enough scraps to fill the vinegar bottle already, she won’t know until she tries, but if that’s so then she’ll cap it with a plug of wood or stone and bury it where it will come to light one day, and then she’ll keep her eye out for another bottle. Perhaps Eidel will help.

  “On the other hand,” Eidel says, “you could trade that bottle for something better. Food. Cigarettes if you must. A favor of some kind.” For bottles are notoriously hard to come by. They can contain anything, for purposes ranging from safekeeping to transport. Even when broken they can be put to use. Perhaps especially when broken. So it seems a shame to bury one. Eidel comes to her feet and closes the oven door and takes her by the arm. “You’re so thin.”

  Gretel pulls free, her mind on other things. “I could never be that selfish.”

  “It’s not selfishness. It’s self-preservation.”

  “For what? You and I won’t live to see the end of this place. The bottle will be all that’s left of us.”

  Eidel puts down her rag and walks to the doorway and looks down the hall. The capo is down there but she’s busy, seated at her worktable with her back turned. So she picks up the rag again in one hand and the poker in the other, and she dips the rag in cool water and wrings it out and goes to kneel down before the stove. “My arms are longer than yours,” she says to Gretel, and then she stretches to reach underneath.

  *

  Wenzel is the new capo. He doesn’t look like much—he’s baldheaded and bookish and if he speaks at all he speaks with the methodical cadence of a man struggling to mask a painful stutter—and on the first day, Max finds working under him no trouble. “Wenzel’s all business,” he says to his father, and it’s true. Where Slazak was a provocateur and a slave driver, the new capo picks no fights and makes no particularly unreasonable demands. Under his guidance the men work quickly and well and without incident. Their rations arrive on time. No one is hurt on the first day, and nobody dies.

  Things go differently on the second day, but it’s not Wenzel’s fault. A man pushing a wheelbarrow overflowing with lime stumbles against a pile of black iron pipe, sending one eighteen-foot length of it into the ditch and crushing another man’s skull. Wenzel looks irritated but not angry. He looks like a weary traveler who has just learned that a train he’s been waiting for will be delayed. He makes some notes on paper—one day it will come out that he was a bookkeeper before he came to the camp, and that his crimes all involved being a little too handy with figures—and then he orders the fallen man brought up and covered over with a tarp.

  The guards, those slit-eyed Ukrainians who’ve seen it all, haven’t seen this. A dead Jew decently covered over. They light cigarettes and shake their heads, cradling their guns as the smoke rises. One of them comes over to Wenzel after a minute and makes a recommendation, pointing with the barrel of his gun, kicking at a shovel with his boot. Why not just bury the bastard where he fell?

  Wenzel shakes his head. Oh, no. That might have happened under the other fellow—what was his name, Slazak?—but it’s his commando now and he’ll run it his way. It’s all about motivation. Keep the men working and get the job done.

  The Ukrainian laughs and grinds out his cigarette under his boot. He’s still laughing when he gets back to where the other guard is waiting for him, and he’s coughing from the cigarette, and it’s all he can do to explain that the new man doesn’t have the first idea as to what he’s supposed to be doing. Wenzel thinks the job is to build a water line, when the job is actually to kill Jews.

  “He’s different,” says Max to his father at the end of the day. They’re resting in the yard under the eyes of the Ukrainians. The late afternoon is hot and still and the place is dead silent except for the dry and distant sound of a train creaking into the station. Black smoke from the high chimneys goes straight up. “He’s not half as bad as Slazak,” says Max, pointing toward the tarp beneath which the dead man lies. “There’ll be a special burial detail tonight. Outside the fence. I’m on it.”

  “And what an honor that will be,” says Jacob.

  “You don’t understand,” says the boy.

  “I understand that one of our brothers has died. That’s all I need to understand.”

  “But it was an accident.”

  “An accident, fine. But an accident in the service of what?”

  Max squirms. “At least he’ll have a proper burial.”

  “That’s cold comfort,” says his father. But cold or otherwise it’s all the comfort his son can find, and even as he says the words he feels guilty for depriving him of it. Still, he sees that as much as he’s needed to protect the boy from Slazak’s brutality, now he’ll need to protect him from Wenzel’s cunning. Enough, though. Enough for now. “Did I tell you,” he says, “how beautiful your mother looked when I saw her through the fence?”

  “You did.”

  “She looked beautiful to me, anyway.”

  “I’m sure she did.”

  “I wish you could have seen her.”

  “I do, too, Papa. I do, too.”

  *

  Long after dark, when the men are all jammed tight into their bunks and struggling to sleep, Wenzel emerges from his compartment and slips through the darkness and awakens Max. Max and another young man, another boy really, a boy who has probably lied about his age as well. Such is the advantage of those who are born with strength to spare. Both of them are reduced now, though, Max and the other boy. They’ve begun to look old in the way that anyone sufficiently ill or overworked looks old. Their eyes are hollow, weary of witness.

  All the same, having Wenzel confirm their selection for the burial detail cheers them up. No one in the block has seen this kind of operation before, two men and a corpse outside the fence unsupervised. There’s a commonplace, assembly-line quality to the regu
lar burial details. The men assigned to them—the ill-fated Sonderkommando, doomed by the repetition of their ugly work to haunt these premises like bodies whose souls have been scraped out—are anything but lucky. Sooner or later such an assignment always proves to be a one-way ticket. But this is different. Max and the other boy will be out there alone, past the line, within sight of the guards but beyond earshot. It will be a thing so close to freedom that if they work quickly they may have time to say a few words over the body before shoveling the dirt back down. They’re just two boys, nothing like a minyan, but times are difficult. You make do.

  Wenzel stays behind, watching from the doorway as they move toward the fence in the company of a guard. The moon is a vague sliver behind a high overcast and the stars are invisible and down on the ground the beams of the searchlights rake at everything. The three men stop at the place where the fallen man lies alone under a tarp, the guard shooing away a curious dog with the barrel of his gun and the two prisoners stooping to lift the body. Max takes the corpse and the other boy takes the shovels and they move along, four of them now.

  Soon they’re out of Wenzel’s sight, across the yard and down behind another block, so the capo goes back in and makes his rounds. Satisfied, he lets himself into his little chamber. Everything is quiet.

  When they come to the fence they turn and go along the barbed wire searching for a hidden gate—the guard is certain it’s here somewhere—and when they find it he opens the padlock and stands back while Max hauls on the chain. The gate swings open. Without lowering his machine gun, a little penlight propped in his mouth, the guard checks the serial number on the dead man’s coat against a number he’s written on the palm of his own hand. Then he shoos the boys and the dead man on through, standing at a kind of lazy attention in the open gate. They go as far out as they dare, even farther, the dead man’s shoes dragging trails in the clay, until the guard calls out to them that they’ve gone far enough. That will do. The searchlights claw the ground and they dig.