For several days now, the atmosphere had noticeably lightened, as a five-year hope seemed about to come true. All around, Parisians were making flags to hang outside when the time came. Kira found a small piece of blue cloth, then a torn red rag, and she sewed them together, adding parts of a white handkerchief to form the three stripes. But she was afraid to hang her flag outside, for fear that some of the Germans who had not yet departed might make a last minute raid through the Rue de la Tour, and shoot the ones who had adorned their balconies.
The next morning, on the twenty-fifth, Kira was on her way to the laundress when a group of running people almost knocked her down. “They’re here!” she heard. “They arrived this morning, and are going up the Avenue Mozart!”
A tremendous lump rose in Kira’s throat. Her first impulse was to follow these excited people; but she thought of Sudarskaya, waiting at home, and wanted her to witness this with her own eyes. To hell with the laundress, she thought, and ran back to the house, taking the stairs two at a time.
Inside the apartment, she seized Sudarskaya, and told her the news. Together they hung the small flag from their balcony, and then raced down the stairs outside. The entire street was adorned with red, white, and blue material, dancing in the wind.
Already, a grumbling noise could be heard growing in intensity as it approached. Hand in hand, the young woman and the small Russian piano teacher made their way to the corner of the Avenue Mozart. Bumper to bumper, enormous tanks were rolling up, in a slow, uninterrupted march. The crowd, pressed together, began to shout and clap, and Kira and Sudarskaya joined in, as loudly as they could, tears flowing freely down their open faces.
The tanks were the color of sand, and on their flanks were scrawled, in large black letters, their war names. Most were geographic appellations: Normandy, Poitou, Rheims, Loire; or of fighter animals: lion, panther, falcon; or, finally, the names of women: Pauline, Jeannette, Valérie, Suzanne. There were no more than four or five men in each tank: tired men, harassed men, tanned, dirty, and unshaven men, so exhausted that only their eyes seemed alive in their heads. But how intensely their eyes shone! The Parisians at the side of the street shouted tender, grateful epithets, and, since the procession was infinitely slow, with many stops and starts, young girls were climbing on the tanks and winding their arms around the heroes, and middle-aged matrons were applying resounding kisses on those unshaven cheeks.
They had been traveling since the previous morning. They had fought and crossed the cities and towns of Normandy, and, knowing that the Americans had stopped at the Porte de Saint-Cloud and at the Porte d’Orléans in order to let the French be the first to enter their city, they had allowed themselves no rest.
After several hours, Kira, feeling hungry, put her arm around Sudarskaya’s shoulders and turned back toward home. “You were stupid not to climb aboard, like the other girls,” Raïssa Markovna chided her. “Just think . . . Pierre might be among them!”
But at that moment, a sudden rain of bullets crashed onto the pavement of the small street where they had been walking. Kira and Sudarskaya flattened themselves against the façade of a granite building, terrified. An old man, huddled near them, said sotto voce: “It’s the collaborationist militia, trying to get its revenge. Look—on the roof!”
Kira hooded her eyes, and peered upward at the house directly opposite them. Men were crouched behind machine guns, emptying their pellets where they could, haphazardly. But after a few minutes she felt her courage return, and led the way, keeping close to the walls, to the Avenue Paul-Doumer. There, the torrent of bullets seemed far too dense, and the two women waited for half an hour.
Confused, Kira wondered what to do. And then Sudarskaya cried: “Let God protect us!” and, grabbing Kira’s hand, ran as fast as she could across the dangerous street. They kept their heads bent, as if this would have helped had they been hit. But, standing on the opposite sidewalk, they realized that they were still intact, and they looked at each other, shaken.
“God has been protecting us for many months now, Raïssa Markovna,” Kira murmured, a stream of perspiration matting her curious red-blond hair. “I think it’s time for us to do what’s long overdue. On the Sabbath, we’ll go to services at the temple on the Rue de la Victoire, and pay our homage to Rabbi Weill.”
Abstractedly, she gazed down at the back of her right hand. It was dripping blood, and the skin was gashed and pulpy. With the hem of her skirt, she dabbed at it. It hardly hurt. “I guess I’ve been wounded, like a good soldier,” she said, and smiled, the corners of her mouth trembling only a little.
* * *
It had begun as a very strange proceeding. SS men and women had handed out postcards to the four hundred women assembled at the gatehouse, and someone had barked out the order to write down their full names and addresses on the back, in neat block letters. And so the women, who had come from all parts of Europe, had done as they were told, wondering what the cards would be used for.
And now Josef Mengele, an ironic smile giving his face the look of a bored, detached aristocrat deigning to supervise an inept staff, walked among the four hundred exhausted, skeletal women. Disseminated among the group were the black-clad, well-fed, muscular SS. Raising his left hand, he made a signal with his thumb, pointing to the door.
At once, the SS moved to marshal the prisoners out. Five abreast as usual, these sad-looking Musulmen shuffled their feet into the rain, and sloshed through the mud to a building they had never seen before. An SS lieutenant held a wooden door open, and the others prodded the women through by jamming the barrels of their rifles into the small of their backs. As soon as all had come inside, the lieutenant locked the door with several bolts and a padlock, and, from the darkened interior, the women heard the SS departing, chatting and laughing easily together as they shared a casual joke.
The boots of the SS slipping on the mud, and receding into the distance, resounded like the last fragment of hope for these four hundred. They were sure they had been abandoned to die. They found themselves in a long but low enclosure, its wooden walls soggy with moisture, its roof leaking rain. There were no beds, only the hard floor, as wet as the street. Lily was too tall to stand up straight, and the situation reminded her of the boxcars, when one hundred had been crammed inside without food or air. She thought of Magda, in the makeshift infirmary; perhaps she was already on her way to the gas chamber. She felt waves of sadness for this new friend who had done all she could to help Maryse, and who was paying with her own life.
Yet Lily, of the four hundred jammed together in the dark barrack, was probably the only one who felt an enormous sense of reprieve. In the morning, following roll call, she’d been certain that a truck, disguised as a Red Cross ambulance, would drive up to take her and her companions to be gassed. Instead, they were here . . . still alive. A fervent hope crested in her chest. If she’d survived this far, she owed it to God to survive till the end.
But after several hours, the hope began to ebb away as thirst, and a beseeching hunger, crept through her body. Aware that she was among the healthier of the inmates, she made an effort to resist without succumbing to the moaning and groaning of her neighbors. Some were women she knew, from her barrack. She moved quietly to them, finding them in the light from the ripped ceiling, and from tiny clerestory apertures. And then, sitting near them, she tried to speak, to soothe, to calm. By busying herself with women who were really sick, some of whom she knew were dying, from their weakness, the drought, and the closed quarters without air, food, or water, Lily kept herself from going crazy, and proceeded in her idea that the secret of survival lay in doing, not thinking.
She stopped trying to figure out how many hours had passed when, next to her, a young Greek girl passed away. From the clerestory windows, no more light appeared. There were seldom any stars in the Auschwitz-Birkenau skies, so Lily could see nothing. A tremendous sense of futility fell upon her, and she lay on the ground, spreading the dead woman’s ripped skirt as a blanket between
herself and the muddy floor.
After the second day with no food and water, Lily fell into a kind of dreamless haze, and, like an animal, crawled among her companions, the living and the dead, to lick the moisture from the wooden walls.
And then, on the third day, the door was suddenly thrown open, and Mengele, a riding crop impatiently tapping his freshly pressed pants, was outlined against the clear, even gray that blinded those who, still alive, could still distinguish forms in their line of vision. He wrinkled his nose. Lily sat up, her lips parted with thirst. It had been so long since she’d smelled the odors around her, that the view of human feces spread around, and of decomposing, bloated bodies, maggots already feeding from them, failed to make an impression. But to Mengele, walking in from the outside, the odors and the sight must have been overpowering. “Scheisse!” he exclaimed, reeling slightly.
After that, chaos took over. Some of the slave laborers came in, dragging corpses out with strange, twisted hooks, which they’d passed through the heads of the dead. Lily recognized her own Kapo, Malka Sandikova, and some of the others from neighboring barracks. One of the Kapos was saying to Mengele: “Some of these women are still good for work, Herr Oberarzt. We could use them.”
Carelessly, Mengele shrugged. “Very well, then. Bring them for one final selection, in Facility Number Two.”
A tremor passed through Lily. She had accepted Magda’s stories of the gas chambers and crematoria, though there were still some who believed that the red flames were bursting from a bakery, or a gigantic factory. The smell of burning flesh was perceptible every day, whether the wind had risen or not. Facility Number Two contained a gas chamber in its west wing, below the ground; and on the first floor, the bodies of the gassed were cremated, their ashes to be dispersed later as fertilizer for the fields. One final selection. Josef Mengele had made his ultimate joke, laughing at the Jewish Kapo and at what remained of the four hundred women interned for three days and nights without food, water, or sanitary facilities. They’d been left to rot, and the majority had done just that.
Only about one hundred women remained alive, and all in sorry condition. A young female SS, her strong hips swaying, escorted them into the birch grove, where tall, delicate, and poetic pines and birches rose to form a cluster evocative in its distilled sadness. Lily was walking next to a woman her own age, who, surprisingly, was clutching a Bible. Its leather binding was ripped, but its gold-leaved pages attested to its presence in a loving family over several generations. “Which way do you think will condemn us to death?” she asked Lily, her cultured voice hard and toneless, the way all women learned to speak after a few months.
Lily was afraid to answer. The woman, her bony face still luminous, said softly, “My name is Edna Rosenthal, and I’m a Belgian. If I don’t make it, and you do, will you tell my daughter? She’s in Barrack Twenty-six.”
Lily smiled. In French, she murmured: “Don’t speak this way. You’ve somehow managed to hold on to your Bible; you’ll hold on to your life.”
“They told me this is the way the people walk when they’re sent to the left at the arriving ramp,” Edna said, her voice calm. “But I don’t think we’ll live to talk about our own walk. They call it the grove of the condemned.” After a while, she spoke again. “I saw one of the cards we filled out, in Dr. Mengele’s hand. And in his handwriting, had been scrawled: ‘Dead from scarlet fever.’ They made us sign our own death certificates.”
The straggly group of women had reached the entrance to Killing Facility Number Two, which, on the outside, resembled the neat mansion of an English country squire. Its brick façade was disconcerting. But the flames belching from its chimney petrified the hundred. Almost in a trance, they walked inside.
They were told to go down some stairs. Now, Lily thought, no escape was possible anymore, for downstairs were the gas chambers, where the innocents who were taken directly there on arrival were told that they would shower. They stood in a room where signs explained that one had to remember where one left one’s clothes, and that, upon returning from the showers, the diabetics would have to report their condition. But this was all right for the naïve first arrivals; for seasoned inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, like them, there was no need to disguise the truth. They knew where they stood.
“Take off your clothes,” the female SS ordered.
A young French girl had once hidden under a pile of clothes, and been saved by a member of the Sonderkommando who had come to collect the discarded outfits. But Lily was a tall woman, and besides, in a commotion involving three thousand, one person might do some quick thinking. Here, with only one hundred prisoners, ten SS stood on guard, and Dr. Mengele sat at a table in the front of the room, his eyes alert and not at all bored now.
Lily stepped out of her prison-gray dress, and she saw Edna slip the Bible between the folds of hers. The doors to the gas chamber lay open, to the right. This meant that, under no condition, would anyone sent right be able to survive.
Mengele, this time, seemed more thorough than he had been at the station ramp. He made each of the prisoners walk up and down, then lie down on the floor. He felt their bodies for odd lumps or crevices. Lily felt the fear knot her stomach. Like most of the others, she had abruptly ceased menstruating less than a month after arrival, which, she thought, was lucky, since no underwear had been provided, and no extra materials to wipe the blood. She was sure malnutrition was the culprit, though some said their food was being drugged. But lately, she’d felt a tremendous pain in her left side, at her waist, and she’d been certain she had developed a hernia.
In Birkenau, one never brought up one’s illnesses; one made every effort to pretend one was in tiptop condition. But with Mengele’s prodding, she would never be able to hide the hernia.
The women were being waved to the right, or out a back door on the left. She noticed that there were two armed SS to push in the recalcitrant ones who refused to put themselves into the gas chamber . . . such a tiny group for such an enormous room, capable of holding three thousand.
Edna passed in front of her, and walked up and down. Mengele nodded. “Now lie down.” After three days without food or drink, this forty-year-old woman wasn’t doing badly. She lay down. With a resigned sigh, Mengele called her forward.
They had all been counting. Already, forty-eight women had been sent right. Lily guessed that Mengele, with his odd sense of proportion and symmetry, would require fifty. But most of those pronounced healthy seemed to have been much younger than she and Edna: eighteen- , nineteen-year-old girls, with better resistance.
Mengele palped the shriveled raisins that had once been Edna’s breasts. In his cultured, dandified voice, he tossed out: “This one has a tumor. Right!”
Lily felt herself freeze with horror. Edna turned once, her beautiful green eyes eloquent with anguish, fear, and a bravery that Lily could not match. She made a gesture with her chin toward her dress, which still covered her Bible. Lily opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She watched, transfixed, as her Belgian companion, friend of an hour, proudly stepped into the gas chamber.
“Next,” Mengele said.
Lily stepped in front of him, began her walk, lay down, and stood up for him to probe. There was absolutely no exit. She wondered frantically about a confession, or about speaking to a rabbi . . . the old religious confusion returning. Next to Mengele, one of the Polish Kapos was saying: “This one’s healthy; I know her.”
“She has a nascent hernia.”
He’d said it. He’d pronounced her dead. But the female SS was saying: “Herr Oberarzt, I think we should close the doors. We don’t want a commotion, and there’s an old one in there . . .”
Josef Mengele looked up from his probe of Lily, and frowned. The Polish woman said, “All the others are young, and relatively healthy. We need them for work details.”
He moved away, fingering his chin. Lily, nude, still stood right in front of him, her once beautiful body reduced to skin, bones, and the hernia.
The Polish Kapo moved her head roughly to the piles of discarded prison garb, and called out: “Get dressed, all you swine! You’re late for work!”
It was only when she was outside, wedged in the middle of the row of five, that somebody spoke to Lily. “I heard them say it’s the first time anyone’s walked away alive from the gas chambers.”
“There are fifty-one of us.”
A long column of seven hundred men was coming up the path from the birch grove, their heads bent and knowing. Mengele, whistling to himself, was sprinting jauntily away on the other side. And then Lily remembered that she had forgotten Edna’s Bible among the clothes of those who had gone in to die, and at last, she wept.
Nanni kicked at one of the ubiquitous stones of the Lager, with the toe of a beautiful patent leather pump. Across the vast divider of the electrified barbed-wire fence, Mihai Berkovits was keeping pace with her, his eyes like shining olives in the white, sickly paste of his skin. She could feel her heart flying out of her, to this young boy she knew so little, whose hand she’d never held. In many ways, she felt that she was much older, though in fact they were both fourteen. But she felt like a divided being: half of her still almost a child, wanting to trust and hope; the other, a tough girl, who had learned how to protect herself from the SS.
“What did you do, in Transylvania?” she asked him.
He shrugged. “My father owned a small business. We were eight children. Now we’re just four, and both our parents have been gassed.”
The Keeper of the Walls Page 61