The Keeper of the Walls

by Monique Raphel High

  “If we announce the death, the authorities will come to seal off the apartment,” Kira declared.

  “Worse than that: this Henriette person will arrive, and we’ll have to go into hiding God knows where.”

  Close to tears, Kira said: “But we can’t keep a dead body here! I’ll just have to go to the janitor, and beg him to help us.”

  “What have we to offer? He’s the one who reported the upstairs neighbor.”

  Kira shook her head, overcome by the impossibility of the situation. “I used to hate the old biddy,” she cried. “But why did she have to die on us?”

  And then, her face brightened. “Raïssa Markovna,” she said. “We have an apartment full of riches here. If they held their tongue because of a small gold pendant, think how they’d help us if we offered them a chance at Aunt Marthe’s things!”

  Two days later, in the middle of the night, the janitor and one of his friends removed the dead body, presumably to bury it. The next morning, the same man returned to disinfect the dead woman’s room. And, in the afternoon, the janitor and his wife rifled through all the piles of Bertholet antiques, and departed with four sacks full of jewelry and objets d’art.

  Kira, continuing to buy food on Aunt Marthe’s ration cards, felt the uneasiness of guilt gnawing at her. They had just performed an inhuman, dishonest act. But then the Germans, occupying France, had performed worse in the name of the Reich.

  She felt she’d had no choice, if she and Sudarskaya wished to continue to hide out in peace, and to eat without fear of being seized by the Gestapo. For she was sure that the Germans were on the lookout for them in their old neighborhoods, where they’d registered for ration cards.

  And Sudarskaya continued, punctually every Friday morning, to telephone Henriette Bruisson to give her this week’s bulletin on her aunt’s state of health.

  Chapter 26

  By August, the marshes of the Auschwitz swamp had begun to fester with disease, and many of the women, stooping to lap up the fetid liquid to slake their thirst, caught dysentery. Lily, at ninety pounds, was still relatively healthy; but Maryse weighed a bare sixty-eight, and looked hardly better than a Musulman.

  Occasionally, in the evening on the Lagerstrasse, they encountered Nanni. Yet they were not able to speak to her in private, as a young lieutenant of the SS was always with her, his arm possessively around her. She looked lustrous, healthy, and even beautiful in the finery with which she paraded down the main avenue of Birkenau. But her face was infinitely sad, and she tried to look at the ground whenever she was near them.

  By August 15, it seemed as if Maryse was very sick indeed. Her scalp was covered with eczema, and her hands had swollen, so that it was difficult to accomplish even half of her task at the factory. Lily was finding it impossible to make ends meet for two people. And so one afternoon, Lily begged Malka to arrange another work detail for her friend.

  “You’ll have to pay me,” the Slovakian announced, small eyes narrowed.

  Lily felt new despair gnaw into her heart. She was sure that Maryse, if not helped, would soon wither away. She had no personal belongings to swap with the Kapo for an easier detail. And so she decided that only Nanni would be able to help.

  Winding her way through the complexes of huts and fences, Lily, understanding that she was risking twenty-five lashes for being in a forbidden area, kept her head bent. In front of the whores’ barrack, a terrible sense of shame spread through her. These were young women, many of them, like Nanni, girls of good family; but she’d seen them on the street, their carriage proud as they kicked at the others who, like herself, were slave laborers. Lily felt ashamed because the Nazis had transformed these tender young women into hard, predatory animals, who boasted of their good fortune with all the delicacy of sadistic monsters. And yet this “good fortune” had to be one of the most degrading forms of slavery. Nanni, barely fourteen, had been raped and used, and Lily could feel this degradation inside the pit of her own stomach.

  Shyly, she knocked on the door. An SS officer, his shirt undone, swung it open, his face turning purple at the sight of her. But behind him, she saw Nanni. The young girl thrust herself between the man and Lily, and kneeled before him with the subservience of a practiced geisha. “Please,” she begged, her voice low and pleading. “This woman is my aunt. I must speak with her.”

  “One minute only,” the man snapped, drawing back.

  Nanni stepped outside. She was wearing a silk dress and a long gold chain with a cluster of rubies hanging from it. “Is it Mama?” she whispered.

  Overwhelmed by pity, Lily drew the girl close to her, and held her. “Your mother has dysentery. She can’t work anymore, and Malka wants something to barter for a change of assignment.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Nanni said. Her face was darkened with anguish, as if she couldn’t wait to be away from Lily, away from a confrontation with what she had been turned into.

  Lily nodded. Impulsively, Nanni removed a small gold charm bracelet, and closed Lily’s fingers over it. “Heinz gave this to me,” she whispered. “But I don’t want it. I don’t want any of the gifts he gives me.”

  Her hand closed over the cool gold links, Lily’s mind suddenly turned over, and a swift anger filled her. “They’ve given you gifts?” she echoed, pushing the astonished girl away from her with surprising vehemence. “Anna Steiner, your mother is dying from lack of nutrition, and we are all working our hearts out, merely to escape being selected out! And you are here, sharing absolutely nothing! In your place, another would have smuggled anything she found, to help her sisters!”

  Aghast, Nanni’s eyes filled with tears. “But . . . Heinz . . . I’m never alone,” she finally murmured, her face crumpling.

  “I’d have gone to the washroom. I’d have thought of something! Where do you suppose your fine Heinz has purchased these gifts of his ... these expensive, exquisite gifts?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Lily stared at the girl, her own breath coming ragged with excitement. Nanni’s face was masked with sorrow, the nameless sorrow of the ageless, of mourners. “You know very well,” she stammered in a low, hard voice. “They were unpacked by the ‘Canada’ brigade, from the suitcases of gassed women!”

  Before Nanni could reply, Lily strode away, the gold bracelet safely tucked in a fold of a makeshift belt she had confectioned from the hem of a smaller woman’s ragged uniform.

  All night long, Lily could not sleep. Her heart hammered inside her, and vivid images of Nanni in her whore’s outfit kept passing through her mind. All pity had been snuffed out. Next to her, moaning in a trance, Maryse lay huddled like a trusting, ailing child, her body racked by shivers. Already five times, Lily had had to help her void her intestines into the small food bowl they had found in one of the garbage pails, and which Lily had dumped into the communal night bucket, and wiped clean.

  Left and right, women were dropping off like insects, brought down by the unsanitary conditions, by the contagion, and by malnutrition. Lily did all she could to keep clean, for herself and Maryse. And it was becoming increasingly difficult, at night, with fifteen women tossing together on the thin wooden slats, to get the proper rest to keep strong. There were repeated incidents of broken tiers collapsing, of inmates crashing on top of their companions on the bunk below. Now, to help Maryse with her diarrhea, Lily had to carry her friend like a baby, climbing with utmost care over the sleeping bodies of the others, to do their business on the dank, wooden floor.

  In the morning, Lily slipped the gold chain, without the jeweled charms, into a quarter of her slice of bread, and handed it to Malka. And in the evening, the Slovakian Kapo informed them that Maryse had been transferred to the kitchen detail. Then Lily went to Hannah, the girl she knew from this Kommando, and gave her the beautifully crafted charms. “That’s to make sure Maryse eats proper food, not this slop,” she whispered.

  Hannah’s eyes widened with disbelief, but she nodded, mutely. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, one had no
personal use for beautiful gems; but one could trade them for food, or for special favors.

  And at night, Lily reflected on how much they all had changed: she, Maryse, and Nanni. She was most surprised at herself. For now, she felt such a powerful hatred in her heart for all that threatened their survival, that she found it difficult to recognize the person she had been in Paris, when she had found excuses for all kinds of infamy, and forgiven with an open spirit.

  * * *

  “Why did you want to come here?” Heinz asked.

  Nanni slowly let her shoulders rise and drop. “I wanted to see this operation,” she answered sweetly. “Are you angry?”

  The young man shook his head, and sighed. “Not angry. But I don’t like it when you become curious . . . like all the others. They just want things. With you, it’s different. I think you care about who I am.”

  Nanni’s large blue eyes, so like her mother’s, rested on him in their calm, gentle fashion. In a sense, she had to like him. This was such an inhuman place, where every value had been sacrificed or distorted for reasons of cupidity, that a simple person like Heinz Kleinert, who only wished to stay near her, seemed like the least offensive participant in a world where cruelty was the norm, and torture the pleasure.

  “I do care,” she told him softly. “And I only came here because ... I heard that all the presents that we receive come from here.”

  “And what of it?” he retorted, suddenly Prussian and aloof, his eyes old and defensive. “Do we have any sort of garrison town in this camp, for us to purchase presents for our girls?”

  Putting her hand on his arm, she said: “Just let me look around, all right? I’m not going to get in anybody’s way.”

  Suspicious, Heinz nevertheless allowed her to step out into the busy workroom of “Canada.” Emaciated inmates in stripes and rags, stood sorting through rucksacks and suitcases. Nanni spotted Mihai Berkovits at once, and, casually, stopping here and there to pick up a lady’s slip or a furry wrap, wended her way to where the young boy sat working, alone, with a pile of men’s shoes. She bent down, picked up a moccasin, examined the leather sole, and whispered, continuing her scrutiny: “I threw a paper wrapped around a stone into the men’s camp, two weeks ago. And when you didn’t answer, I asked my mother’s friend, Magda, to contact you. She worked on this detail, too.”

  Mihai said nothing, but kept on working. “Today I learned that Magda came down with typhoid fever, and was sent to the infirmary. So I suppose she never told you. I need help,” Nanni said urgently, tossing the shoe aside and lifting another from the pile.

  Mihai’s brown eyes fell fully on her face, and she was touched by the intelligence in them, and the undisguised torment. “Why should I help you?” he asked. “You seem to have done plenty well enough alone.”

  Stemming the tears before they could spill out, Nanni said: “You saved my life. I wanted to see you, to speak with you, to walk a little beside you on the other side of the barbed fence . . . but you never answered my messages. And now my mother is dying. She has dysentery. They put her on the kitchen detail, and she’s being well fed. But the Kapo’s an Austrian peasant, and she’s decided to let my mother suffer for all the years when we were rich, on the Schwindgasse, and her family was poor. So she’s made Mama carry the coffee and soup urns back and forth from the huts, with only one other woman to help her. The urns weigh more than she does, and my aunt Lily’s afraid she’ll collapse.”

  “My father was gassed the first day,” Mihai declared. “And my mother was sent to the soap factory, with my sister. We wash with the fat from their bodies.”

  With the back of her hand, Nanni flicked off the moisture from her cheeks. She was angry with herself for giving in to tears. Her young voice suddenly hard, she said: “I’ll do anything you want, Mihai Berkovits. I’ll meet you in the washroom and make love to you. I’ll let you sell me to your friends. But you have to help me. You have to send me something I can give this Kapo, to prevent her from killing my mother. Magda can’t help us now.”

  The boy stopped making piles of shoes, and reached over her to pick up a child’s slipper. Deliberately, his hand brushed against her leg, and she could feel the warmth. “Anna,” he murmured. “Of course I’ll help. It won’t be easy, but I’ll help because we all need our mothers, and I’ve lost mine. You don’t have to treat me like an SS pig, and yourself like a whore. You’re not a whore; they’ve just chosen you for that particular work detail.”

  “I wish I could die,” she whispered, fervently.

  Again his brown eyes fastened on her. “No, you don’t,” he said.

  * * *

  In the middle of the night, the lights were suddenly turned on, and the elegant form of Oberscharfûhrerin Irma Griese, a vision of feminine loveliness with her thick, white-blond hair and her eyes of periwinkle blue, came striding in, her silver pistol aimed at the ceiling. “She looks like an angel,” Magda had told Lily, repeating the camp cliché. “But she’s more cruel than Mengele.”

  “Out of bed, you Jewish sows!” she called, her assistants swinging their clubs randomly through the tiered pallets. “Selection! Take off your nightshirts, raise your arms, and run one by one in front of me!”

  Dazed, their hearts thumping, the thousand women trampled over each other in their effort to prove their strength. But Maryse had not moved from the bed. Lily jostled her, whispering urgently that they had to get down, that time was of the essence. “I don’t care,” Maryse whispered, her face so white that every small capillary seemed clearly delineated like a thick river on the map of a plain. “Let them take me.”

  Summoning every particle of strength within her, Lily pulled her friend toward her, and stepped off the bunk. She deposited Maryse on the floor, and held her up beneath her arms. “Just for a few minutes,” she entreated. “Do it for me, and for Nanni. Without you, now that Magda’s in the infirmary, I’d be too alone to continue.”

  Maryse swayed on her feet, then appeared to regain a modicum of stamina. She’s a Musulman already, Lily thought, terrified. How many times this week, Lily had washed her face for her, and helped to clean the urine from the sides of her legs. She could remember her young mother, explaining to her in her childhood that the body was the soul’s mirror: that how we treated our bodies was a reflection of the way we saw ourselves as individuals. And Maryse was, bit by bit, forgetting who she was.

  “I know you.” Irma Griese was standing in front of her, a charming smile on her perfectly chiseled features. “What’s your name?”

  She reached out, and her fingers turned Lily’s forearm over, to read her number. “B-14448. And what was your name?”

  “Liliane Brasilova.”

  Still that exquisite face smiled, and the blue eyes sparkled. Then, all at once, Irma Griese punched Lily with her fist, right under her diaphragm. The breath knocked out of her, Lily was bent in half. “That’s for your activities in ‘Canada,’” she said softly. “We apprehended the other . . . Magda? the Hungarian. Who were you selling those goodies to, B-14448?”

  Maryse, her eyes enormous in her haggard face, tiptoed up, like a wraith. She fell to her knees, and seized the hem of the Oberscharfûhrerin’s skirt, raising it abjectly to her parched lips. “It was for me, gnädige Frau,” she murmured. Her voice was toneless, a hollow tube, devoid of will or of strength. “She did it to save my life.”

  Irma Griese looked down at the human skeleton on the floor, and started to laugh, a low, merry chuckle. Immediately, Malka the Kapo began to laugh, and soon the entire barrack was resounding with the jeering, harsh laughter of animals turning on a weaker species. Then, with the tip of her dark, polished boot, she kicked out once. Maryse fell away, like a dead fly, and did not get up.

  Irma Griese touched Lily’s cheek with a well-manicured nail. “Well, my lovely,” she declared softly. “You shall have your wish. What a sad challenge to put to sleep one such as your friend. Musulmen finish themselves off, sooner or later, in any case. I shall not select her. But
you, my dear, shall report to the gatehouse tomorrow, after Zeile Appell.”

  Within minutes, the Oberscharfûhrerin had selected twenty other names, and had turned her erect back and walked out. “Back to bed!” Malka called out, and in the mad scrambling that ensued, Lily found herself jostled next to the Slovakian Kapo.

  “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  “Because you and Magda thought you were smarter than I. You only gave me what you wanted. But that hospital ward, where they put her, is worse than any other barrack. Mengele starts there when he makes his selections!”

  Lily, like a stone, lay down on the hard wooden pallet, next to Maryse. She knew, beyond a doubt, that there was to be no exit from this situation. In the morning, she would be sent out to be gassed.

  For the rest of the night, Lily lay awake, listening to the groans of her companions, and images of her parents, her children, Mark, Misha slid into her mind like turning pages of a family album. She was too terrified to weep, and her mind felt congealed. At length, toward dawn, she began to whisper the words of the shma just to keep from hearing her heart beat.

  * * *

  After the twentieth of August, everyone knew that the liberation of Paris was imminent. The French and the Allies had recaptured almost all of Normandy, although the fighting was still fierce there, and the Germans savage in the defense of this territory.

  In Paris itself, the Germans were already packing up. Truckloads of soldiers rolled away as fast as they could, followed by tanks, all bound for the East or the western fronts. Toward the East, they were hoping to cross the border into their own country, and to the west they were headed for Brittany, where a heavy German contingent awaited them. The Parisians watched them with stupefaction, but didn’t dare mock them aloud.

  Rumor ran that Paris had been mined in several places, and that Abetz had been ordered to destroy the city when he left it. The Parisians were therefore living in fear of being blown up at any moment. But this rumor proved to have been for naught. Either the ambassador had no time to fulfill his instructions, or, married as he was to a Frenchwoman, he allowed his scruples to overrule his devotion to the Reich.