The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  She steps toward the table and writes out the list while he watches from the corner. It takes a few minutes, since she’s afraid of forgetting something. It’s been so long. In the end she makes two columns side by side—one in German and the other in Polish—and she would add a third if she dared, a third column in perfect schoolbook French, this ignorant slave brought in to raise up devils by means of the highest art.

  *

  After an anxious day has passed, Wenzel tells Jacob that he may visit his son in the hospital. The capo smiles broadly as he says it—as magnanimous as if he has arranged this kindness himself—but the lie implicit in his large-heartedness stands because who is Jacob to protest and what difference would it make if he did. At the close of the day, in the minutes between returning from Canada and standing in the freezing wind for roll call, he sets out, wishing only that it were Friday morning already and he could pass by Eidel’s kitchen door and suggest to her by the width of his smile and the joy on his face that some impossible transformation has taken place. That they—husband and wife, father and mother—have together engineered the resurrection of their son from a fate that she hasn’t even suspected.

  There’s a little coal stove in the hospital to help keep the suffering men from freezing, but it’s more punishment by suggestion than anything else. The prisoners are huddled in corners, huddled in cots, huddled together in great heaps like cats or corpses. Among them only Max is alert. This would be remarkable enough—it’s the first time his father has seen him awake since before the accident—but the plaster cast on his leg is an astonishment of an entirely different order. An undiluted act of God. The doctor points it out the way he’d point out any other miracle: blood seeping from a carved crucifix, the likeness of a saint materialized upon a rock face. As time goes by the boy’s special treatment will draw various responses from various other prisoners; some will be envious and others will take it as a sign of hope and still others will look upon Max himself with a kind of superstitious reverence, making of him a living embodiment of some transcendent mystery, of some reality deeper and more forgiving than this one, and angling for a cot closer to his upon which to spend their last nights on earth.

  Just yet, Max himself doesn’t understand. “Why me?” he asks his father, and the doctor answers first. “Why anyone?” Jacob looks the doctor’s way and nods and waits, why anyone, indeed, but the doctor is at his desk sorting papers, his glasses slipping down his nose, not the least bit interested in continuing this conversation or pursuing this line of reasoning anywhere but within his own mind, if there. It’s settled.

  Jacob kneels by the cot and explains everything. How he persuaded Vollmer to intervene. How it was his idea although only part of it was his doing—braving the sturmbannführer in the Officers’ Club to ask a favor and make a deal—because his mother had actually been the one to save the day by going straight into the lion’s den unwitting and unprepared. Imagine the terror she must have felt, being called into the deputy commandant’s apartment for who knew what reason. And yet she had borne up. She must have borne up, she must have faced the entire Vollmer family and agreed to paint their portrait, perhaps without even knowing why she had been called to do so—she must have endured the sight of Lydia’s portrait hanging on the wall of that monsters’ den—or else neither one of them would be here in the hospital now. Max would have been taken out with the first selection. The medical supplies would never have come.

  The Nazis have sent plaster of Paris, for God’s sake. Manna from heaven.

  “That’s why you,” he says, tapping lightly on the boy’s great white cast and preparing to shove off for roll call. “Because there are still people in this world who love you.”

  Max

  You’d think it would have been every man for himself in the camps, but it was worse than that. A situation becomes every man for himself only among those who’ve lost every last shred of human decency, and that was never the object. The Nazis never wanted you to part with the last scrap of your decency. Hanging onto it served their purposes, because something like that could always be used against you.

  I had my father and my mother to consider, but even in the absence of family a person will make connections. The smallest kindness will get it started. A hand up out of a ditch, or a look with some compassion in it when the capos are doing their worst. Little insignificant things that become significant. The next thing you know there’s a line running between you and another person, a line that you hope the guards and the capos won’t notice, because if they do their minds will start grinding away, thinking of ways to leverage that little bit of human connection against you.

  It’s economics, really. When two people care about each other, a pistol shot to the temple will destroy two men for the price of one bullet.

  That was the risk that was developing around my little family. Somehow, everybody in the camp knew there were three of us now instead of just two, and that wasn’t necessarily good. There would be that many more angles to work, that much more complexity. But everybody also knew what had happened. That my father had made a deal with Vollmer and that Vollmer was protecting us for his own purposes. It made us untouchable for as long as it lasted. But it couldn’t last forever. Nothing does. Not even Auschwitz.

  Thirteen

  The day dawns wet and raw, and the kitchen door is shut against the weather when Jacob passes on his way to the administration building. He hunches forward against the cold and jams his hands beneath his armpits and lets a million thoughts race through his mind, most of them having to do with what might have gone wrong over in the women’s camp. It’s the first Friday morning that she hasn’t been watching for him since the day she broke the bowl, and pelting sleet or no he persuades himself that there’s some deeper and uglier reason behind her absence.

  He would die of a broken heart if something happened to her, and Max would be doomed all over again. That’s how tenuous this arrangement is. Nonetheless, he must go forward. He must report for duty in his warm corner of the officers’ kitchen and cut the hair of a score of terrible men and try to distract himself with the concrete fact that he’s manipulating various cutting implements in the vicinity of individuals who would kill him for the slightest transgression. One nick and who knows. Especially if Eidel is gone and the structure he’s built to support his family has collapsed without his knowing.

  “You’re a bit off today,” Chaim says as they sit at the bench over their regal luncheon. Blood sausage and rolls with butter and spaetzel in gravy, and for dessert a pie made with molasses and raisins.

  “You,” says Jacob, “are a sharp observer of human nature.”

  “It pays,” says the boy. “And let me give you a little advice in that department: You’re not doing yourself any favors by wearing that long face around these fellows.” Chewing away at a roll dipped in gravy, indicating with a tilt of his head a couple of officers walking past the kitchen door.

  “What long face? How could anyone seated at a banquet like this have a long face?”

  “Nice try,” says the boy. “But you still look miserable.” He mops at the gravy and stuffs the roll into his mouth.

  “Fine. I’m worried about my wife.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “Really,” the boy says, dabbing a napkin at his lips. “Don’t be.”

  “I’m worried something’s happened to her.”

  “Quit it.”

  “I can’t. I’m worried.”

  “How come?”

  “Signs.”

  “Signs,” he says. “That’s great. That’s just great.”

  Jacob leans across the table, speaking rapidly and low. “This morning, you see, she wasn’t where she usually is. She wasn’t waiting to see me pass by.”

  “So? Something came up.”

  “Something came up.”

  “Things come up.”

  “The kitchen door was shut. The whole place was sealed
like a tomb.”

  “So? The weather’s lousy.”

  “You’re right,” says Jacob, sitting back on the bench. “You’re right about everything. I know.”

  “Of course I am.”

  “But what if—”

  “To hell with what if,” says the child. “What if will drive you mad. What if will make you careless. What if will draw attention to you and that long face you’re walking around with.”

  Jacob’s face only gets longer.

  “Here’s what you do. When we get to the apartment, you ask Vollmer if he’s looking forward to sitting for her tomorrow. If there’s any problem, you’ll know it right away. Just by looking at him. No matter what he might say.”

  “All right,” says Jacob. “I’ll do that.”

  But in the end, he doesn’t have to.

  It’s the housekeeper who lets him know that he has nothing to worry about, taking him aside in the entryway to say how much the family is anticipating his wife’s visit. Despite the differences in their station—he a poor doomed Polish Jew, she a German relocated to this country only until the work of extermination is done—she speaks to him for this private moment with a warmth and a confidentiality from which he can conclude only one thing: having a contented Frau Vollmer around the apartment is a change for which the woman has been praying without letup, and therefore he’s become her savior, witting or otherwise.

  The woman of the house, she says, has taken her children to the nicest shops in town and outfitted them with new clothes for the portrait. Traditional German outfits easier to find here in Poland than they once were: a dirndl for Luzi, bundhosen for Karl, all finished with the finest embroidery money can buy. The shopping alone got her out of the apartment for two entire mornings. She advises him to have his wife remark on how marvelous they look. Such a compliment will make Frau Vollmer happy, even coming from one whose opinion doesn’t matter in the least.

  But no, he says, he can’t communicate with his wife. It’s not possible. They’re in a prison camp, after all. A death camp. Men are kept apart from women, even husbands from wives. Especially husbands from wives. As he says it he wonders if it’s possible that she’s forgotten the horrors living in her own back yard.

  “Be that as it may,” she says, opening the door and letting Chaim run in ahead, “it would make my life easier if she could put in a word.”

  The dining room curtains are drawn against the cold, and even if they were wide open the gray skies and the pelting rain would admit only the weakest and dreariest of light, so the electric chandelier hanging is lit and a couple of gas lamps are burning and together with a slight chill in the air they give the room a gloomy quality. It feels like a cave at the end of the world, Chaim briskly setting out the tools and then scurrying off to the safety of his dim corner like some creature accustomed to dark places. A secretive rodent. Jacob shakes off the strangeness as best he can and unfolds the white cotton drape beneath which he’ll conceal every sign of Vollmer’s allegiance and rank, that snowy drape the only thing that lets him pretend that the sturmbannführer is an ordinary man or even a man at all and not something far worse. But the light makes him ill at ease regardless of how he busies himself, and the sounds of Vollmer moving through the depths of the apartment are the sounds of a spirit prowling, and as happy as he is to have learned that all is most likely well with Eidel he begins to doubt all over again that he’s done the right thing by letting her be sent here. Perhaps tomorrow the weather will improve. Yes. Things will be brighter.

  He looks up from his work as Vollmer’s hand falls upon the knob, and rather than be seen casting his eyes upon the sturmbannführer as he enters he looks respectfully away, across the room toward the fireplace, where the absence of the painting arrests him. His daughter is gone. His heart sinks as if he has lost her all over again. Vollmer comes through the door and sees what Jacob sees and doesn’t so much as acknowledge it. It was just a painting, after all.

  Watching from his dim corner, Chaim perceives that Jacob not only can’t endure the painting’s absence but can’t even risk asking about it. He, on the other hand, has nothing to lose. His standing with Vollmer slipped down to zero or thereabouts a long time ago, and in the meantime he’s cultivated plenty of partisans other than the sturmbannführer, so he uses up a little of his remaining capital and asks outright. “What happened to the girl?”

  “The girl?” says Vollmer, settling himself in the chair, not even glancing in Chaim’s direction. It’s as if he’s talking to a disembodied spirit. “The girl?”

  “Yes, sturmbannführer. The girl.”

  “I had her removed,” says Vollmer. “We have enough Jews infesting the place, without singling one out for a position of honor.”

  Jacob holds his breath and settles the drape around Vollmer’s shoulders, but Vollmer makes no more comment. He’s through talking about the painting, he’s certainly through talking about the girl. Whatever he may think about Jacob having concealed her identity is his secret and will stay that way because it’s no business of the barber’s. Jacob’s hands shake, though, and he turns away and arranges his tools for a moment longer than ought to be necessary, concentrating on settling his heart. Thinking that there’s only one way that Vollmer could have found out: Eidel must have let it slip. Of course. Then again, she couldn’t have stopped herself.

  Yet they want her back tomorrow.

  He keeps that thought in his mind as he raises the scissor and comb. It’s all he has to sustain him.

  *

  The day’s steady fall of rain has softened the ground a little, so while the other women eat their evening meal or divide it up so as to keep out a morsel or two for tomorrow’s breakfast, Gretel decides that the time has come to bury her vinegar bottle. She wolfs down a scrap of bread and a tough waxy rind of cheese and slips away from the others, explaining that she’s on her way to the latrine, stopping as she goes at the spot where she’s hidden the bottle in the rafters over her bunk. It’s as full as she can make it, and when she gets outdoors she plugs up the neck with a stone that fits pretty well and packs the rest of the opening with mud. It will have to do.

  Searchlights in the yard pierce the rain and materialize out of the darkness like blades, some tracking steadily through the air and others slashing and swerving like things gone mad, all depending on the relative commitment or lassitude of the men behind them, men whose work is at best driven by certain private theories and principles that no handbook of operations could formalize. The result is a random and moving maze of hard light in darkness, which is probably as efficient a result as any. No one else is outdoors. Just wet men huddled together in windswept towers and fully saturated men standing at attention along fencelines and this one lone woman. She finishes sealing the neck and rises up from the dirt and tucks the bottle into her sleeve to keep it from reflecting light. Her instinct is to dodge and duck the moving beams, but since furtiveness can only lead to trouble she keeps her wits about her and walks slowly toward the latrine, vanishing at the last instant around the corner and back toward the place she’s chosen as the burial site. The spot where rain drips from the roof and loosens the gravel and makes the clay soft.

  She takes off one shoe to dig, kneeling down in the wet mud with the gravel cutting into her knees and the vinegar bottle by her side. She wonders how deep is deep enough and she decides that the answer is as deep as she can go. Every day in the camp she accomplishes more than she starts out thinking she can. The Nazis have taught her that; they’ve proven to her by her own example that she has more capacity for labor than she would have ever thought possible in a perfect world or at least an ordinary one. So she digs. And when the sole of her shoe cracks she puts it back on and removes the other one and digs some more. In the morning she’ll regret breaking it—she’ll regret it for days and weeks to come if she has days and weeks left to her—but she digs. And when she can dig no more, when the other shoe is cracked and useless too and she dares to be absent from the block fo
r not one more minute and she thinks she might be hearing the sound of the roll call starting up, she lays the bottle into its grave like a baby, and covers it up with mud. Her testament, commended to the earth.

  *

  Saturday dawns bright. Eidel awakens to it with a strange good feeling welling up in her heart. She can’t quite identify it, but soon the haze of sleep clears and it comes to her. Today is the day she’ll see her daughter’s picture again. Not only that, but it’s the day she’ll take up painting for the first time in perhaps a year. She wonders if she can still do it. If she can still do either one of these two things, bearing witness to her child on one hand and painting on the other. Each will take reserves that she hasn’t lately called upon.

  In the kitchen she refuses to join in the drawing of lots, believing that someone else ought to have the benefit of starting the fire because she’ll be spending a few hours in the deputy’s warm apartment. Why not share the wealth? Perhaps, she thinks, there isn’t a fixed amount of good and bad in the camp after all. Perhaps by distributing her own good fortune among her sisters in the kitchen she’s set in motion something positive that will go on forever. She thinks it but she doesn’t dare believe it. There’s a difference.

  Just before she sets out for the village she grazes the heel of her hand on the red-hot stovetop, and to cool it she holds it under a stream of icy water from the tap. She’s on edge, no doubt about that, and her nerves have made her careless. As she watches the water run she remembers her childhood in Warsaw, how her mother—her mother now hiding somewhere in Sweden, God bless her—had believed that butter would soothe a burn. Although Eidel herself had never seen any value in it she’d gone on to practice the same folk medicine on her own children anyhow, because where was the harm. It was just butter after all, bright yellow butter as plentiful as air. Here in the camp it’s as precious as gold bullion and twice as rare, so water will have to suffice. At least there’s plenty of it. And it’s icy as death.