Mala’s eyes met his gaze, full of golden specks. “You haven’t given up on your idea to smuggle me out of here, have you?”
“Never in my life. I go where you go and if you stay, I stay. That was our deal, was it not?”
“There’s logistical trouble is all I’m saying.”
“No more logistical trouble.” With utmost gentleness, Edek took a pinch of crumbs and carefully dropped them into Mala’s palm in which the mouse was still feasting. “One of my new Soviet friends gave me an idea and Jerzy agreed to help. We’ll dress you as a male inmate in fitters’ blue overalls, cut your hair and cover your head with a sink or some such to conceal your face. All you’ll have to do is to put another name inside that Ausweis, so that there are two of you I’ll be supposedly escorting. And as for the picture, I’ll just say there was a shortage in printing paper or some such—the war is going on. Some lowly guard at the gate won’t doubt an officer’s word.”
“I see your Lubusch has taught you well.”
“He did,” Edek confirmed with a warm grin and nuzzled Mala’s hair. “Just think of it, Mally. A couple more months and we shall be free. Perhaps, one more year and the war shall be over.”
“What do you want to do after the war? Go back to your maritime academy?” Mala looked up at him, genuinely curious.
“No.” Edek shook his head categorically. “Never in my life shall I ever wear a uniform again. I’ve had enough of this war rot to last me a lifetime.”
“What then?”
“I considered becoming a carpenter—I’m certain anyone will employ me with my extensive experience.” He burst into grim chuckles. “But then I realized that you will probably be an interpreter again and it’ll be unseemly for you to have a husband who’s a simple carpenter. So, I’ve decided to become an architect instead. The studies shall take a few years, but it’ll be worth it in the end.”
“An architect?” Mala arched a brow, impressed. They had joked about getting married before and despite never discussing it in all seriousness—making plans was much too laughable an affair in an extermination camp where an inmate’s life could have been cut short by any SS person’s whim—it had been somehow assumed that this was precisely what would happen, if they ever made it outside Auschwitz’s walls.
Edek tried to laugh, but his smile slipped off his face in spite of himself, and a wistful look veiled his eyes. “I thought the world could use more architects instead of more soldiers. So that we can rebuild whatever we have destroyed.”
“I think it’s a wonderful plan.” Mala took his hand with her free one and clasped it tightly.
“And what is yours?” he asked.
“To be with you.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know precisely what you meant.” She nodded a few times. “My plan is to be with you. That’s all I want. It doesn’t matter what I do or where I work. If I have you to come home to every evening, I shall be happy.”
In the meadow behind Crematorium V, Hauptscharführer Moll was raging.
“You bloody lot of idiots, are you blind?!” the newly appointed head of the Sonderkommando bellowed, pointing with his swagger stick at the taut marking string. “Do you have enough mental abilities to understand that you are to dig inside the mark and not around it? One more mistake like that and I’ll dispatch you personally where you stand. Stinking, brainless carcasses!”
He had arrived a few days ago with the former Kommandant Höss, who once again had replaced the “humane Kommandant” Liebehenschel. At once, Moll threw himself into his favorite pastime—the organization of the extermination site on the scale of mass annihilation. From Mala, Edek had learned that Moll had once been in charge of extermination, long before the four Birkenau crematoriums were built and Hössler took up that position. It was Moll who had invented the idea to bury the corpses, with which the only crematorium in Auschwitz couldn’t cope, in mass graves in that very meadow where Edek was presently standing. It was also Moll who supervised the exhumation and cremation of the decomposed corpses after they began to rise to the earth’s surface, contaminating the water in the vicinity with the black poison seeping from their mass graves. It was Moll who had later liquidated the entire Sonderkommando as soon as they finished their morbid task of exhuming and burning the bodies. And it was Moll who nearly killed Mala as well, shoving her into a death ditch filled with bodies.
Aware of Moll’s gruesome résumé by now and observing him at work, Edek had no difficulty in concluding what precisely the one-eyed beast was organizing in a formerly emerald meadow that had been broken into sections, sliced and dug up by the somber Sonderkommando men. Their faces were sweat-streaked and smudged with dirt, they shoved their spades into sticky clay; already doomed; painfully aware that they were digging their own graves into which they would perish right after Moll was done with his intended victims, the Hungarian Jews.
Steering as far away from Moll and his pristine white summer uniform as possible, Edek inched his way toward Kostek, Mala’s resistance friend from the Sonderkommando. Shirtless and bronze from the sun exposure, the Greek freedom fighter stood waist-deep inside the fresh pit, busy wrapping his bleeding palms with bandages crudely made out of his own torn undershirt. He must have just paused; his chest was still rising and falling with visible difficulty, yet his face immediately split into a huge grin as soon as he noticed Edek squatting on the edge of his trench.
“Greetings to the fitters’ Kommando.” Kostek raised his torn palm in a mock salute. Only his green eyes didn’t smile, full of unspoken suffering. Edek regarded him with sympathy and felt it all in his own soul—the immense burden of being forced into an accomplice in the Nazi mass murder. At least Edek only fixed the pipes for them. Kostek was digging the pits which soon would swallow countless families, entire communities, without a trace. “Whatever you need, make it snappy. We have a new administration here, as you can see,” Kostek said. “If Moll sees you loitering about, he’ll test his new method of extermination on you.”
In spite of himself, Edek’s eyes widened with growing concern. “After everything they’ve already done to us, he’s managed to invent something new?”
Kostek only waved him off, as if he was saying, you don’t want to imagine something of the sort.
“So, what is it?” Kostek asked.
“Mala said you were holding a wristwatch for me?” Edek asked, lowering his voice to a whisper. “A German one? Something an SS man would wear?”
Before Edek could finish his explanation, Kostek had dug out something small wrapped in a grubby handkerchief from his pocket and threw it into Edek’s awaiting hands. “I hope this watch brings you luck. Hide it well before the actual day when you have to wear it. Use the admissions block as a hiding place if you need one; it stands empty most of the time and the SS never search it. We store some of our own contraband there. The fellow in charge of it is called Jurek.”
Edek nodded readily. “I know him. Superficially, but still. I once helped fix a radiator in his personal room.”
“Even better, the fact that you know each other. He’ll hide a suitcase of goods for you as long as you pay. And now scram before the Cyclops sees you.”
As Edek trotted back in the direction of the crematorium, he surveyed the meadow cut into the ugly wounds of the future mass graves, its flowers upturned and discarded, slashed by the sharp spades. In the distance, SS men were crawling on top of two former gas chambers that hadn’t seen action due to the new Birkenau constructions for over two years, probing at the hatches in the roof and dusting off two inconspicuous former farmhouses turned extermination facilities. In the rays of the fiery sunset, the Little Red House and the Little White House were stirring back to life. Shuddering with dread, Edek hastened his steps as though Satan himself was chasing him.
The next evening, Edek returned to Wiesław’s barracks just in time to see blocks 4 and 6 being turned virtually upside down by the Political Department. It appeared that their t
horough search produced no results apart from a few bits of food and a few bottles of spirits which the SS didn’t even bother to requisition. Annoyed, the SS officer in charge stalked off, accompanied by his entourage.
At once, Edek nudged Wiesław with his elbow. “We’ve got to move the goods,” he whispered to his comrade almost without moving his lips. “Today it’s blocks 4 and 6, tomorrow it shall be 5 and 8.”
“Seven,” Wiesław tried to argue unconvincingly. “They’re Germans. They love order.”
“Yes, but more than order they like surprising us with searches we don’t expect.” Edek stared at him hard. “Tonight, we’re moving it. A fellow from the Sonderkommando has just told me about a perfect place—the admissions block. It’s only busy during the day, when the new arrivals go through it. No one lives there. It’s perfectly empty at night. The SS never search it. Jurek, the admissions clerk, is all by himself and Kostek says he’ll help us in exchange for a couple of gold nuggets and the promise of his own freedom.”
“I can’t go out at night. I’m the block clerk.”
Edek cursed under his breath, patting himself for a cigarette. His nerves were strained to the utmost. Smoking was the only thing that calmed him. Smoking and feeling the weight of Mala’s head on his arm as she slept soundly, her breathing deep and undisturbed. “I’ll go by myself then.”
“If you just wait till tomorrow, I’ll move the goods myself, during the day. No one will be here in the afternoon—”
“Tomorrow may be too late,” Edek interrupted him abruptly. “I’m moving them tonight. You worry about getting yourself into a working Kommando and quit delaying it till the last moment and blaming it on our ‘fine arrangement’ here.” Seeing an expression of profound hurt on his friend’s face, Edek softened his tone at once. “Forgive me, please. I didn’t mean anything by it. It’s just… the nerves; surely, you understand?”
Wiesław nodded, and walked toward the block without waiting for Edek. Cursing under his breath, Edek threw his unfinished cigarette on the ground and wiped his hands down his face.
“Lovers’ quarrel?” Kolya mocked him good-naturedly as he passed him by.
“Piss off, Bolshevik,” Edek grumbled back. “All the trouble is because of you. If you Reds didn’t bolt a dozen a day, the Political Department would have never showed their noses here.”
“At least we have the balls to run,” Kolya replied lightheartedly, aware that Edek wasn’t blaming him in earnest. After a fight with one’s best friend, one ought to have taken out his frustration on someone. “Don’t fret; we’ll come to liberate you, gentle Polaks, soon enough!”
Laughing, Kolya and his comrades went inside, leaving Edek alone with his uneasy thoughts.
At night, when the rest of the camp was dozing peacefully, Edek crept across the compound and into the bread store of Wiesław’s block. In the uncertain light of the moon, throwing one nervous glance over his shoulder after the other, he pried the floorboards open as silently as he could. He didn’t know what possessed him, whether it was Kolya’s teasing or his former Kommandoführer’s acting lessons, but before he knew what he was doing, he was pulling on Lubusch’s uniform over his own.
It was a reckless and utterly idiotic idea, but before long he was strolling along the camp, whistling a tune, hands in pockets—a typical master of the world who had the right to be where he wanted to be and do as he pleased. His stomach somersaulted each time a guard passed him by, but even then he discovered that he had nothing to fear. Recognizing officers’ markings, they jumped out of his way, slammed their heels together, saluted him, and waited at attention for Edek to stroll by, his arm bent lazily at the elbow.
“Heil Hitler,” he barely bothered to reply in response, the words tasting vile in his mouth.
Jurek, the admissions block clerk, had quite a fright after Edek strode into his quarters.
“Stand to attention! Eyes right! Heels together!” Edek bellowed in his best German.
Instantly scrambling off his bunk where he was reading a book, Jurek tripped on his own boots and nearly fell face down at the sight of authority. It took him a few more moments to recognize Edek in the laughing SS man.
“Edek, is that you, you miserable sod? I nearly pissed my pants! What in the blue hell are you doing, wandering around in such get-up?”
“Practicing,” Edek answered evasively.
“For what? Your own execution at the Appellplatz?”
“No. For walking around like a free man again.”
Jurek looked at him. “Oh no. You too, then?”
“Me too, then. And it shall be you who will help me.”
Jurek was already shaking his head, holding up his hands in the air. “I don’t want any part of it. I have enough troubles with the Sonderkommando and whatever it is they’re stuffing all over the place.”
“Oh, you don’t? Have you seen those pits Moll is constructing behind the crematoriums? Have you seen the SS readying the two former gas chambers? Little Red House and the Little White House are being prepped as we speak. What do you think they’re doing?” He pretended to ponder. “Spring cleaning, perhaps? Simply dusting off the old gas chambers? Or perhaps it’s because the second ramp is now completed and soon trains full of Hungarian Jews shall start arriving here in such quantities they’re sending you helpers from other details?”
“I didn’t hear about any helpers.”
“The official order hasn’t come out yet. It’s still in the administration office.”
“Please don’t tell me you saw it after you strode in there looking like that.”
“No. I have my own people working there.” There was no need to mention Mala’s name. He stepped closer to Jurek, who now looked thoroughly frightened. “If you help me hide this uniform and gun, you can use it for your own escape after I’m gone. I’ll send it back through a civilian who works here.”
For a very long time, Jurek paced the room, considering the offer. He smoked two cigarettes in a row while Edek waited patiently in the corner. At last, he motioned Edek to follow him into the block itself.
“There, under the roof of the landing.” He pointed to the place he had in mind. “There’s a double layer of boards that form the ceiling. Wedge it between them. No one will ever think of looking there.”
Thirty
May 1944
Mala stood on the newly constructed ramp and watched the train pulling up, her gaze full of sorrow. It was the very first one of many that were scheduled to arrive in the next couple of months—she had personally typed and copied the schedule that was later distributed among the SS chiefs. Next to her, camp leader Hössler stood, his hands clasping his swagger stick behind his back. Only, his usual benevolent grin was absent from his face that day. Wistfully, he searched the spot where Alma Rosé used to conduct her orchestra. Instead of the violinist, the head of the male orchestra now waited the order to begin, and Hössler turned away in disgust.
“Laks is a very good conductor,” Mala tried to smile, but Hössler only glared at her.
“He’s not Frau Alma.”
It had been over a month since the violinist’s death—suicide, according to Zippy—but he still suffered. Silently, perhaps, refusing to acknowledge it even to himself, but he did. Hössler had summoned Mala here supposedly as an interpreter, but it was her suspicion that he just wanted to have someone near. Someone who wasn’t wearing the same uniform. Someone with whom he sometimes shared his memories and could speak of things which his colleagues at best wouldn’t understand and, at worst, would report him for. Someone, who reminded him of his Alma—the only woman whom he’d loved innocently and selflessly and whom he’d lost to the very camp he was in charge of.
Mala pitied him. Loathed him just like she loathed all SS—but pitied him all the same. It couldn’t have been an easy burden to carry, this realization that he, himself, was complicit in the death of someone who meant so much to him. Served him right, and still…
With a groan, the trai
n had pulled to a stop. At once, the Kapos charged at the doors, undid the heavy locks swiftly and expertly, and began herding the frightened crowds onto the platform. Both the inmates and the SS operated in a much different style than usual. Instead of the dogs straining themselves on the leashes, barking at the new inmates, officers calmly directed the arrivals into two columns. Polite requests replaced the usual curses and blows.
Her heart as heavy as a rock in her chest, Mala watched the SS with cold hatred in her eyes, knowing all too well what they had in store for the new arrivals. The gas and furnaces right after. With a shudder of anguish, she swiftly averted her gaze, feeling utterly helpless and loathing the Nazis even more for making her feel so.
“Please, leave your luggage right here on the platform. We have a special Kommando who shall carry them into the camp.”
When someone tried to protest that his luggage wasn’t marked, an SS guard went to pains to write the gentleman’s name on it with a piece of chalk. Pacified, the elderly man raised his hat and took his place in the column where men stood. Mala saw him give someone in the women’s column an encouraging smile—Don’t fret, these Germans seem to be very correct—and felt her heart sinking to some unimaginable depth of despair. Poor man. If only he knew the reason for all this “correctness.”
Just two days ago, Hössler was giving instructions to his underlings on the parade ground before the camp office. “The Hungarians never lived in the ghettos. They have never seen any violence. It is of paramount importance to instill peace in them and reassure them that they have nothing to fear from us. In the next couple of months, we shall be getting transports daily. It means thousands and thousands of people will need to go through all six gas chambers, the Little Red House and the Little White House included, every single day. To ensure the smoothness of the operation, we need to do our utmost to assure the new arrivals that they shall be completely safe in our hands. There must be absolutely no cursing, no shouting, and definitely no physical action against the Hungarians. If they ask for water, tell them they shall have it after their shower. If they want to drink from the hose, allow them to go to the hose. If they want to sit on the grass before the crematorium while we’re gassing the first batch, let them sit, as long as they believe they’re about to have an innocent shower. I don’t think I need to explain to you what’s going to happen if one of you idiots says anything about them going to the gas like some of you love to taunt them. If that crowd of several thousand people starts a riot, we’re in big trouble. So it’s in your best interests to act as politely as possible. Joke around with their men. Comfort the women. Play with their children, like you did with the Family Camp. Be as accommodating as possible…”
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 25