The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  Thank God for their youth, because they’re not entirely too winded to offer a blessing once the man is in his grave. And when they finally finish and reenter the camp and return to the block, they slip into their usual sleeping places with the belief that they’ve accomplished something worthwhile.

  *

  Somehow, the summer passes.

  No longer reduced to counting bowls of soup, Eidel marks days instead and soon enough she realizes that her husband walks along the fenceline exactly once a week. On Fridays, at seven-thirty in the morning. So she manufactures reasons to be on the step outside the kitchen at the right time, tossing soapy water into the yard from a dishpan or wringing out a mop, and they become like mechanical figures on a cuckoo clock, Jacob passing by on his rounds and Eidel poking her head out through the door, synchronized but doomed never to meet. It keeps them going.

  Fridays for Jacob begin on a high note, with that brief glimpse of Eidel, but for every moment he spends anticipating that vision and thrilling to it and reflecting on it he spends another dreading the instant when he must step into Vollmer’s dining room, the instant when he must face the painting once more.

  Chaim asks him about it as they make their way toward the apartment building. “So Vollmer rubs you the wrong way, too?” he says, for he’s noticed the pattern. He’s seen how Jacob’s mood worsens as the day goes on. He’s caught the final profound downward shift of it when they leave the commandant’s villa and head for Vollmer’s apartment.

  “It’s not Vollmer,” says Jacob.

  “Don’t kid me,” says Chaim. “I know people. I can tell. You don’t like him any better than I do.”

  “I don’t like any of them.”

  “Aww, they’re not so bad.” He walks along munching a crisp red apple that the commandant’s housekeeper pressed into his pocket on his way out the door. A little gray boy walking along in a little gray uniform with a big bright red apple raised up in his hand like a target.

  “Maybe they’re not so bad to you, but that’s a different story. In any event, it’s not Vollmer. It’s something else.” He can’t take his eyes away from the apple.

  “So I was right,” says Chaim

  “You were wrong about Vollmer.”

  “I was right about it being something.”

  “Fine,” says Jacob, salivating over the apple but unwilling to ask for a bite. “You were right. It was something.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “The painting,” he says.

  “The painting of the girl?”

  “The painting of the girl.”

  “It’s a nice painting.”

  “I know. It’s a very nice painting.”

  “So?”

  “So?” Jacob stops on the sidewalk and the boy stops alongside him, taking another bite of the apple and wiping his chin with the back of his hand. “So?” He draws breath and looks up at the sky and looks down at the boy again. “So it’s a picture of my daughter.”

  “I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

  “I don’t. Not anymore.”

  Chaim’s face collapses. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “That’s all right.” He starts up again but the boy doesn’t move.

  “I thought you just had Max.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “That picture must break your heart.”

  “It does. Every time.” He stands looking down at the boy and assessing the sympathetic look on his face and wondering what it might mean. Wondering if it means anything at all, or if it’s just a look on the face of a boy who’s taught himself how to respond to almost anything. Deciding in the end that it doesn’t matter. “The thing that makes it all worse,” he says, “is that my wife painted it.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your wife painted that picture?” he says. An old woman with a child in tow and another one bundled up in a carriage passes them by and clears her throat and gives a hard look back over her shoulder. Time to move along. But Chaim isn’t going. “Your wife in the camp?”

  Jacob watches the old woman go. “My wife in the camp,” he says. “I suppose she would be happy that it wasn’t destroyed with everything else. But she’d be heartbroken to think of it hanging where it does.”

  The old woman has come to the corner and is speaking to a policeman there, a policeman who nods his head and presses his lips together and looks their way. Jacob takes the apple from the boy’s hand and jams it into his pocket, and then he takes the boy by the shoulder and together they hurry along the street again, their steps furtive, their eyes downcast. A couple of mice. The policeman loses interest only when they turn down the walk leading to Vollmer’s apartment building, because they certainly can’t get into any trouble there.

  Max

  “Max Rosen’s human figures, rare as they are, have turned their backs upon you by the time you take notice of them.”

  That was Edgar Mudd, writing in the Times of London in the spring of 1958, and it was probably the only defensible line of criticism that he ever delivered.

  Mudd, you’ll remember, was a great booster of Calder and those big toys of his that the museums were all fighting over at the time. The most respected museums in the world, bidding against shopping malls and office parks and what have you. Airports. Frankly, I think every airport in the world should have a Calder. They’re too big to miss, even if you’re running past with a suitcase in tow, which means everybody gets the impression that he’s been exposed to something important—and yet they don’t require or even reward any actual thought. That makes them just about perfect for a culture on the move.

  Besides, putting the damned things in airports would keep them out of the museums.

  Back to Mudd, though, God rest his soul. In a rare moment of illumination, poor blind Edgar noticed that if there are any people at all in my paintings, they seem to have rejected the viewer and whatever interest he might have in them. They might even be hiding, concealing themselves among the planes and angles of the closed-in spaces that have always fascinated me so. For once he was right.

  As I believe I’ve already said, spacious skies give me the willies. The critics have never known exactly what to make of that. It would be politically incorrect to blame it on my being an East Coast Jew, a New Yorker, a city boy. It would be philosophically taboo to blame it on my history in the camp. Heaven forbid. People act as if you make everything up out of whole cloth, as if you could possibly help the way you’re built and the things you’ve gone through and the way your work comes out. As if you could choose to overrule your own nature and experience.

  They’re wrong. I’ve tried.

  You can’t paint someone else’s paintings. You can only paint your own, with greater or lesser degrees of success.

  Does this mean I’ve been too hard on Andy, after all? Andy and his fields and his farmhouses? Andy and his beloved teutonic Helga? I don’t suppose he could help himself any more than I can.

  Calder, though. There’s no excusing Calder. Never mind what I said about airports. His kind of nonsense belongs underneath a circus tent.

  Ten

  They never really see Vollmer’s children. Not in the apartment, at least. There is one occasion when they spot them going back to school in the company of their mother, hurrying toward them down the sidewalk and crossing over at the last minute even though the school is on this side. According to Chaim it is, anyway, and he knows everything.

  Aside from that one moment, the boy and the girl are just voices through a closed door, footsteps on hardwood. The day when they finally do get a chance to see the two of them is cold, bitter and blowing with the windy change of the seasons, and the children are too bundled up to be entirely visible. Jacob and Chaim shiver in their thin burlap, thinking of how they’ll want to race between buildings when the winter comes, too distracted to look closely.

  “There they go,” says Chaim, and they’re gone. Jacob shoots a look across the str
eet, over his shoulder, but even looking is dangerous. That policeman on the corner has been keeping an eye on them ever since the day they paused with the apple. They can see he’s waiting for them to make a single misstep. Just dying for his chance.

  “They could have been anybody,” says Jacob. “I didn’t see.”

  Chaim sighs. “You didn’t miss much,” he says. “They’re a couple of little piglets. Exactly as you’d imagine.”

  Jacob nods and hugs himself and they walk on.

  The sturmbannführer wants to talk about the little piglets, though. With Chaim sequestered in his usual corner, he begins by rhapsodizing over the painting of Lydia as he has done so many times before. A person might think that Jacob would be accustomed to this by now, accustomed not just to seeing the painting each week but to hearing it analyzed in painstaking detail, but such a person could never have been a father. He tries not to listen as Vollmer keeps on about the angle of the light, the curve of the child’s neck, the golden gleam of her hair. Enchanted as he may be he’s no appreciator of art, since for the most part his response is not to the painting before him but to the girl it depicts, not to the rendering but to the flesh. He speaks as if she’s right there before him. He goes on to say that even though the painting brings unspeakable joy to his narrow life in this dreary little town, there is one thing about it that troubles him.

  Oh, no. Jacob guesses that someone’s told him the child in the painting is a Jew.

  But that isn’t it it. “Each time I study her,” Vollmer says, referring to the painting by referring to the girl, “I wish that I could find a way to pair her with a similar painting of my own children. Perhaps the whole family. A formal portrait.”

  Jacob nods.

  “The question is, where would I find an artist even half as accomplished as this one?”

  In the corner, Chaim clears his throat.

  “There’s a fellow in town who does landscapes. Mountains and trees and that sort of thing. The occasional still life, I believe. A bowl of apples. A round of cheese.”

  Jacob chews his lip.

  “But my children are not apples,” says Vollmer. “They are not cheese.”

  Jacob sighs in a kind of abashed agreement.

  “I can see you’ve learned nothing whatsoever about painting,” says Vollmer, “despite all I’ve tried to teach you.” He shifts in his chair, causing Jacob to recalibrate. “But whether you can understand or not, I simply cannot put my children in the hands of a landscape artist.”

  Jacob shrugs. Chaim clears his throat again. And nothing more gets said on the subject, not today. But on their way back to the camp, Chaim asks Jacob if he’s lost his mind.

  “No” he says. “No, I haven’t.”

  “That was your big opportunity.”

  “So you say.”

  “So I know.”

  “You’re the expert in such things.”

  “I am. Vollmer likes you.”

  Jacob laughs. It makes quite a sight: a shaven Jew in striped burlap, laughing on an Auschwitz streetcorner. “Vollmer likes me,” he says, shaking his head.

  “He does. And this is your chance to make him like you even more. To earn some favors for both yourself and your wife.”

  “Never. I could never send Eidel to that apartment. If she saw the painting, she would die on the spot.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I nearly did, the first time.” He looks down at Chaim, indignant. “And what do you know? I very nearly die each time I set foot in that room.”

  “But that’s in a manner of speaking.”

  “She would die, period. It would kill her.”

  “Maybe she’s tougher than you think.”

  “She’s an artist.”

  “A person can be tough and be an artist.”

  “She doesn’t paint Nazis. She paints subjects of beauty.”

  “Leave the beauty to her,” says Chaim. They turn and keep going, down the lane toward the gate in the barbed wire fence. “Next week, tell Vollmer that it was your wife who painted the girl. Don’t forget: she’ll get a soft job out of it. That’s the main thing to keep in mind. A soft job.”

  “If she can endure the shock.”

  “She’s endured worse.”

  Which Jacob can’t deny.

  Trucks come and go. A motorcycle or two and a couple of children chasing a ball, crying out, oblivious to the camp just a few yards distant. They walk on. Up ahead, the lane intersects a gravel road used by the familiar Red Cross vans on their way to and from the processing station. The man and boy watch them sail past raising gray dust.

  “What if I were to go ahead with it?” says Jacob. “Should I take a step further, and tell him it’s my daughter?”

  “I wouldn’t. He doesn’t need to know that.” Chaim lifts his shoulders a little straighter and walks a little more erect, having taken on the role of trusted counselor.

  “I suppose you’re right,” says Jacob.

  “Don’t let pride get the better of common sense.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Vollmer likes you, but there are limits.”

  “I know. And I’m not saying I’ve made up my mind to tell him at all.”

  “You should. You will. She’ll get a soft job out of it. She’ll get back to painting.”

  They stop at the edge of the gravel road to let Chaim adjust the weight he’s carrying. A drawer in the wooden box slips open and a comb falls out followed by a small glass bottle of witch hazel, the comb skittering across the gravel and the bottle crashing on the stones but not breaking. The guards opposite, standing ranked on either side of the gate, hardly look. Another van careens by, its tires narrowly clearing the bottle. Jacob begins to reach down but stops himself just in time. The guards laugh. Chaim sets his box down by the side of the road and the towels tumble from it into the dirt and he picks them up and studies them with a look of disgust and the guards laugh again. They’re putting on quite a show, these two.

  The coast is clear for a moment—no vans—so Chaim ducks into the road and gets the bottle and the comb and restores them to their drawer. He and Jacob recover themselves and take a breath and prepare to cross, but the bunched towels are piled higher than usual and Chaim can’t see where he’s going and he steps out into the gravel road nearly into the path of one of the vans. Jacob catches him by the collar just in time.

  The rear windows of the van are hung with black curtains, but the window on the driver’s side is open and the window on the passenger’s side is open as well, and both the driver and his passenger smoke furiously as the car tears past. Three streams of exhaust altogether. There was a time when Jacob would have raised a fist at so careless a driver, but that time is long gone. It doesn’t even occur to him, certainly not in the presence of those guards on the other side of the road. “Some Red Cross they are,” he says as he bends to straighten Chaim’s load, and Chaim says, “Don’t you know?”

  “Don’t I know what?” They cross and stop just outside the fence, waiting for the guards to swing open the gate and admit them. Jacob always enjoys this moment. It’s the only time all week when somebody waits on him instead of the other way around. He figures that if he were to reach out and try to lend a hand, though, he’d be shot in an instant. He lowers his chin and speaks to the boy again, “Come come, you little villain. Don’t I know what?”

  Chaim bites his tongue until they’re safely inside, well away from the guards. “Those wagons say Red Cross,” he says, “but that’s not what they are. They’re full of bug powder. Only they don’t use it on bugs.”

  *

  For days, Gretel goes about the camp like a reverse Johnny Appleseed, picking up the seeds she’s sown into every crack and crevice and jamming them into the pockets of her uniform and transferring them from there into the vinegar bottle. It fills up quickly. She’s had no idea, she says to Eidel just before roll call one morning, no idea of how much evidence she’s assembled already. The bottle is in the rafters ove
r her bunk, lying on its side and spilling its contents like milk, and there are still a hundred more little scraps of paper and bark and cloth hidden in a hundred additional places that she knows of right off the top of her head, never mind how many she may have forgotten.

  She dreams through the day half-dizzy, wondering where she’ll get her hands on a second container, imagining the moment when the wickedness preserved beneath the clay of Auschwitz will rise to the surface as it must. Overcome with a vision of the bottle rising up from the mud like a corpse, unbalanced as any saint by the certainty of resurrection and rapture, she can think of nothing else.

  Eidel struggles to keep her focused on the work before her. “The last girl,” she says, “got careless with that same knife. Her name was Zofia, poor thing.”

  Gretel remembers spending her first morning scouring the chopping block, the blood soaked deep into the wood, and she does her best to concentrate. Rolak careens by. Gretel dares not look up. The capo opens the door and steps out into the wind and the wind slams the door shut behind her. The room goes quiet again. Gretel tries to remember all of the stories that she hasn’t written down yet, linking them one after another into a single unforgettable narrative of which she’ll remember every part long enough to get it all down. She finds a place for Eidel’s story somewhere near the end, the story of the loss of her paintings and the loss of her daughter, a touching story to be sure but nothing special compared to the thousand other stories clamoring for their due.

  She asks herself how much one person can remember, how much weight one person can carry—even if the weight is as small as a scrap of paper, as slight as someone else’s memory. And she drifts off again, and the pace of her work slows, and Eidel worries. A person can think too much for her own good.