When their voices receded in the distance, Mala grabbed hold of the man’s ice-cold forearm. “They’re gone. Come, I’ll help you out.”
For the next half an hour, as the darkness was gathering force, they found themselves in a nightmare of slippery mud and pliable, still-soft limbs on which they kept falling. Mala wanted to scream each time her hand felt cold, clammy flesh that shifted and parted under her feet as she attempted to rise, but she only pressed her jaws tighter together, resolved to get herself and the man who looked just like her father in the falling night out of that open grave. They clawed their way through the washed-out, slippery surface, and whenever one fell, the second one followed back to the bottom to prop the other one up again, because it was both of them or nothing—an unspoken agreement of the survivors that was stronger than blood.
At last, after they made it onto the firm surface and simultaneously turned onto their backs, gasping for air from the effort, the man turned to Mala. It was a relief to see that the terror was gone out of his eyes, replaced by warmth and gratitude.
“Thank you,” he rasped, his bony chest rising and falling rhythmically, ghostly-pale against the darkening sky.
“Thank you for not giving up,” Mala replied, managing a smile.
“May I ask why you risked your life for me?” he asked after a pause. “Please, take no offense, I’m immensely grateful… It’s just… You don’t even know me.”
Mala looked into his eyes, saw the loved and unseeing ones in their place and hardly restrained herself from putting her palm against his cheek. “You look just like my father. Only, he went blind a few years ago. But he’s just as resilient as you are.” She shifted her gaze toward the sky which kept weeping above them, mourning the humanity under its eye. “I don’t know whether he’s dead or alive. But you were still alive, and I just had to make sure that you stay so. Sounds idiotic, I know,” she tossed her head, annoyed. “Sentimental rubbish—”
“No, no,” the man rushed to interrupt her. “Not at all.” He paused and then suddenly added, “It’s the best rubbish I’ve heard.”
Exhausted mentally and physically to the point of collapse, Mala found enough strength to smile at his words.
When they regained breath, Mala escorted him to the men’s camp sickbay and gave her own woolen coat to the doctor in charge as a payment. “He’s an essential inmate. Treat him as you would treat your own father.”
The doctor grabbed the coat at once but scowled at the man’s undressed state. “It looks like he was chosen to die at the recent selection. There may be a problem with him, if his number is on the camp office’s list—”
“I work at the camp office. There will be no problem.”
Whether it was the tone of her voice or the look she gave him, the inmate doctor nodded his understanding and promised to have Mala’s new charge in the best shape possible by the end of the week.
It was pitch-dark when Mala reached the camp administration office, scarcely dragging her feet but infinitely relieved.
“Good God, Mally!” Zippy’s eyes widened at the sight of her begrimed friend. “You look like something the cat dragged in. In which muddy ditch did you roll about?”
At those words, Mala released a harsh, one-syllable snort and then burst into mirthless, hysterical laughter. “A ditch with corpses in it.” Tears were streaming down her face, but with the best will in the world, she couldn’t stop herself from laughing. Her nerves had finally snapped and everything had suddenly come loose. “Moll threw me in it. But I saved him, Zippy… In spite of it all, I saved him. He’s alive.”
She fell asleep by the radiator in Zippy’s private room, wrapped in several layers of blanket. That night, she dreamt of her father’s hands holding the seat of her bicycle as he taught her to ride; of the silly faces he made to cheer her up after she came home, sulking from not acing a German test; of the tears of pride he’d wiped discreetly with the back of his hand at her graduation ceremony; at the new patent leather shoes he bought for her when she announced that she was going to dances with her new beau. Of the last tight, bone-crushing embrace he’d given her before she set off to Brussels, never to see him again.
“I saved him, Zippy,” she whispered through her sleep now and again, a rare smile warming her face. “I saved him after all…”
The following morning, she marched straight to Hössler’s office with a handwritten report detailing everything that had transpired. The further the camp leader read, the paler he grew until his hand began to shake with righteous anger.
“That swine!” he snapped, pushing his chair away with a screech and marching out of the office.
He never brought up the subject of Moll with Mala again, even when he stopped by to have his usual coffee and chat with her. Instead, he placed a transfer letter bearing Hauptscharführer’s name on Mala’s desk and asked her, as nonchalantly as possible, to type three copies for him. In a few days, Moll had disappeared. The Sonderkommando celebrated his departure with such a feast, Mala heard their singing well into the night in her room.
Fifteen
Wiesław’s bribery skills had finally paid off. He had purchased his and Edek’s temporary freedom for a few sardine tins, a couple of liquor bottles and a lemon he had received from the generous women’s sickbay supervisors. Almost all of them were German Black Triangles, asocial prisoners and former prostitutes sent to Auschwitz for re-education. Enduring their affections for a chance to step outside the impenetrable Auschwitz gates was worthwhile as far as he was concerned. And so he smiled politely whenever they cornered him in their personal quarters or pinched his behind or outright smothered him with kisses, pressing their impressive bosoms against his ribs until he’d worm and apologize his way out of their suffocating embraces and promise to stop by later, when the dreaded Kapo Jupp wasn’t around.
The Kapo threat never failed to work its magic. Wiesław narrowly escaped quite a few unwanted encounters by mentioning the name of the man who was notorious not only among the inmates but the SS as well.
Aside from mentioning it once to Edek, Wiesław kept silent until the very last day, unsure whether the bribed Kapo who dealt mostly with civilians would go through with the enterprise. Only after the two of them had been singled out of the entire fitters’ detail and escorted by the Kapo first to Auschwitz and then outside its gates and straight into the pristine wintery expanse and forest looming ahead, did he explain to Edek what it was all about.
“One of the SS big shots’ wives arrived from Germany recently and announced that the bathroom was not up to her standards,” he announced, his eyes shining about with excitement. “Well, guess who’ll be fixing it for her for the next week?”
Edek only looked at him, incredulous and fighting the desire to scoop his ingenious friend into a bear hug. Intoxicated by the sudden promise of freedom, he kept gazing about him, almost drunk with the fresh winter air that smelled of pine forest and sharply of fresh snow and not the nauseatingly sweet scent of churned flesh and unwashed bodies stuffed into airless barracks, five soon-to-be-corpses per bunk. It got to him, this sudden pristine expanse; it went straight to his head like cool wine on a sweltering summer afternoon; he swayed slightly as he walked, and this time not from hunger, but from the overwhelming sensation of being a free man once again.
“That’s right,” Wiesław confirmed, very pleased with himself indeed. “Us, and a certain civilian tiler from Kozy.”
“Not Szymlak?”
Wiesław didn’t have the chance to respond—the Kapo swiped his club over his head half-heartedly.
“Quit your jawing!” His face was twisted into a grimace of utter distaste, but in his eyes was a silent warning.
Only then did Edek notice an SS man strolling through the woods with his submachine gun at the ready. It had suddenly dawned on him that he had failed to notice it all before—the SS patrol, the guard towers neatly tucked away in between the trees, camouflaged so that an inexperienced eye wouldn’t spot them or their
hawk-eyed inhabitants with their machine guns mounted on the tables and trained on any moving target. Presently, its black muzzle followed their small procession. Stealing another glance around, Edek counted several more such installations and his heart dropped to the pit of his stomach. Black despair overcame him, far stronger than the exhilaration he’d felt not even five minutes ago.
Auschwitz didn’t end with the Auschwitz gates. Just then a nightmarish thought occurred to him: the entire world was now Auschwitz; it had swallowed the planet and there was no escape from it. Edek stumbled, as though stunned by a Kapo’s club—full force, straight in the chest, shattering his heart and all the hopes it had been nursing in its wake.
“That’s right,” the Kapo said very quietly through his teeth, almost without moving his lips. “Don’t get any ideas, lads. They’re all sharpshooters, those sods in the towers, and even if they weren’t, with their machinery, any idiot would make a colander out of an inmate within seconds.”
His head hanging low, Edek followed the round-bellied German with the green triangle of a professional criminal on his chest, who, oddly enough, turned out to be a decent fellow.
Wiesław tried to encourage him with a friendly dig in the ribs, but Edek felt nothing but those cold, piercing eyes on his back; could think of nothing else but the muzzles of the guns trained on them from every side.
The house turned out to be a small but splendid affair. A woman in her forties with a purple triangle sewn onto her civilian cardigan opened the door to them, a wide, gentle smile on her face. Edek was aware that the role of domestics for the SS was reserved for the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but he’d never come across one himself. He couldn’t understand what they were doing in the camp in the first place. Unlike him, the enemy alien, they were Germans, for the most part, of good racial stock, according to their idiotic Nuremberg Laws on race and blood, non-violent and certainly far from being criminal. Their only crime was their devotion to their Lord instead of Adolf Hitler and their fierce opposition to all forms of violence. They refused to perform the obligatory Hitler salute and shied away not only from the military service itself, but from any type of work that directly or indirectly contributed to the war effort. In the eyes of the Nazi regime, such “crimes” were punishable by imprisonment in concentration camps. Former camp Kommandant Höss had made it clear that any Purple Triangle would be released at once—all they had to do was to sign a renunciation paper. One idiotic signature, Edek thought to himself in despair, just one idiotic signature and they’d be free to go. But, instead, they suffered nobly for their faith and died for it, wearing smiles on their faces.
The same kind, gentle smile this woman before them was displaying.
“Come on in,” she urged in German. “Poor children! Such a long walk, through all that snow. You must be freezing. Come to the kitchen; I’ll fix you tea and sandwiches at once.”
“Are you mad? Tea and sandwiches are for the guests.” A tall, slender woman appeared in the hallway, her platinum locks twisted into an intricate hairdo. She was dressed with great taste, in a silk pale-blue dress with a leather belt and high-heeled shoes matching the belt in color. Her cool, gray eyes observed the trio with barely veiled disgust. “These are foreigners and criminals.” Her white, beautiful arm shot in the direction to her left. “The bathroom is over there. That other Pole is already working on it. I want you to stand there the entire time to make sure they don’t steal anything.” She gave her maid a pointed look. “Oh, and if one of them tries to use our facilities…” She let the phrase hang ominously in the air.
“I guess we’ll just have to hold it till the evening,” Wiesław muttered in Polish and, this time, Edek actually smiled.
Antoni Szymlak, who must have arrived earlier due to living in a village that was a twenty-minute walk from the SS settlement, was hard at work at the bathroom wall, but he lowered his spatula at once to greet the men with a warm handshake. He was an elderly man with a kind mouth hidden under a formidable white mustache and bright, lively eyes shining with quiet intelligence.
“They’re all mine for the day, aren’t they?” he asked the Kapo.
“All yours.”
“It’ll be a little too tight for all of us here.” Szymlak gazed about the bathroom skeptically. In fact, it was a grand affair where all of them could work comfortably, but it appeared that the Polish tiler had his own agenda. “There’s a laundry room right next door,” he said meaningfully, addressing the Kapo. “It’s very warm and the Frau never sets foot in there. A perfect place to rest your head for a few hours, while we work here. You ought to be exhausted after supervising the inmates every single day.”
“I have been working rather hard lately, now that you brought it up.” The Kapo obviously wasn’t stupid. The old Auschwitz rule was, “one must take the good as it comes”; only a complete blockhead wouldn’t make use of the local civilian’s generous offer to look after the inmates while he slept soundly nearby. “As long as you promise to keep an eye on them—”
“Herr Kapo, I shall guard them with my life.”
The Kapo knew the tiler would. If one of them decided to make a run for it, it would be Szymlak who’d be thrown into Auschwitz as a replacement, innocent civilian or not.
“And make sure they don’t slack off.”
“Herr Kapo, you have my word. I won’t shout at them though, you know, not to disturb your rest.”
“As long as the day’s work is done, I don’t care one way or the other.”
“Magda shall wake you when lunch is ready.” Szymlak was already escorting him by the elbow in the direction of the laundry room.
Edek and Wiesław exchanged incredulous glances. A job outside the camp and now this? It was all too good to be true.
When Szymlak returned, a big grin nearly split his face in two. “I’ll show you what needs to be done,” he said in a whisper. “As soon as your watchman is fast asleep, we shall talk business. Now, this sink needs to be taken out. There’s a new porcelain one in the cellar…”
They worked in agreeable silence for the first thirty minutes. After sonorous snores reached them from behind the wall, Szymlak turned to them, suddenly all business.
“So? What is it that you need? A letter delivered to the family? Some contraband smuggled back to you?”
Wiesław looked at him gravely. “We need a place to stay.”
Szymlak’s eyes widened slightly but, otherwise, he didn’t betray himself.
“A place to stay and civilian clothes,” Edek added.
For a time, Szymlak considered their request. “It’s a big risk,” he said eventually.
“My sister lives in Zakopane,” Wiesław said. “It’s very close to where you live.”
“If you’re a civilian.” Szymlak looked at him pointedly. “Not a camp inmate hunted by the entire local SS.”
“We’ll go through the forest and mountains and avoid all roads,” Edek explained at once. His expression didn’t waver, but his eyes trained on Szymlak were desperate, searching.
Szymlak looked at the partially tiled wall, behind which the Kapo was presently napping, and then back at the two men. “What will they do to you if they catch you?”
“They’ll hang us,” Wiesław admitted the bitter truth. “But they won’t catch us.”
“Most certainly they’ll beat the names of your accomplices out of you first,” Szymlak mused aloud in the same detached tone.
“We won’t betray anyone, you included,” Edek promised. Auschwitz had toughened his skin with beatings and abuse. The camp Gestapo tortures wouldn’t mean much to him; that much he knew.
Moving his lips under his mustache, as though chewing on something invisible, Szymlak worked things out in his mind.
“One night,” he announced his verdict at last. “Only one night I shall give you under my roof, but you shall stay in the cellar. It can be accessed from the outside, so if they catch you, I’ll deny everything and tell them you stole your way inside and I had not the
faintest suspicion anyone was hiding in there.”
For Edek and Wiesław, it was more than enough. They grasped the man’s hand one after the other and gave it a thorough shake.
“We’ll pay you for your troubles after the war is over—” Edek began, but his compatriot only waved him into silence.
“I don’t want your money. That’s not why I’m helping you.”
Edek nodded. He understood, just like Wiesław did. No, it had nothing to do with the profit. Szymlak simply wanted to be able to look at himself in the mirror every morning and know that he saw a decent man looking back at him—a man who did the right thing even though he risked his own life while doing so. Money could buy a lot of things but not human decency. That wasn’t something that could be purchased. It was something earned and carried later as a badge of honor; something that would never be lost or stolen.
The only thing that Edek regretted was that there were so few Antoni Szymlaks around. Perhaps, if there were more men who did the right thing instead of doing the profitable thing, who chose compassion and selflessness over power and greed, there wouldn’t be any camps in existence.
Sixteen
Sunday, the inmates’ only day off, dawned tender pink and shimmering with snow. Her collar turned up against the wind, Mala was braving her way across the frost-bitten compound. In the distance, the Sauna loomed white against the greasy-gray smoke from the chimneys.
“You’re actually planning to grace us with your presence tomorrow?” Zippy had asked in an exaggeratingly astounded tone just the day before. Mala had completely recovered from her recent ordeal with Moll; but her spirits soared even higher once her bribes purchased the man she’d saved a kosher place in the inmates’ kitchen. She visited him from time to time, the dreamt-up substitution for her father, and he gladly played the role, slipping her potatoes or onions when he could and asking her, with a fatherly concern, how her day was. Even if Zippy thought it to be odd or unhealthy, she never said a single word of discouragement. Whatever got an inmate through their day. “I’m afraid to believe it. You’ve been promising me for months now.”
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 13