The Keeper of the Walls (74 page)

One learned to feel the hunger pangs at each and every moment, and to still them by thinking of something else.

Now Maryse asked: “Why does everyone always speak of burning? Malka tried to frighten us with that, and I thought she was crazy.”

Glancing around furtively, Magda leaned toward them and whispered: “She's mean, but hardly crazy. Look, to the west end of camp, at the smokestacks. I learned, from my work companions, what goes on there. There are five ovens, in Auschwitz—four large, modern ones here in the new camp, and one less evolved in the old. Underground, below each oven, is a huge gas chamber. And every day, the SS gas six thousand Jews—the ones that got sent to the left at the first selection, and all the ones who get too weak to pass all the next ones. The ovens burn the bodies of all the Jews who were gassed . . . day and night.”

Maryse's lips had fallen open, and she said, awed: “That man, at the ramp ... He asked me if I felt strong, or if I wanted to be sent to the family camp. You mean that . . . ?”

Lily, as usual, had a firm arm around her shoulders, steadying her. She spoke firmly, staunchly. “What did you mean . . . ‘all the
next
ones'? You mean that there will be other selections?”

With a short laugh, the Hungarian dancer made a face. “Auschwitz, and especially Birkenau, the new camp, is a death factory, Lily. They don't have to look for excuses to slaughter us. Josef Mengele, the man at the station, goes up and down the Lagerstrasse looking for blocks where weak people seem to predominate. And then, swiftly, he makes it a point to descend on that block with some kind of trumped-up inspection.”

A few minutes later, she broke the silence again, her chin aimed in the direction of a skeletal woman leaning against a cart, her dark eyes vacant, her face smeared with dust and dirt, her nails like claws. “See that one?” she murmured. “We call them ‘Musulmen.' They're the ones who've stopped being human, who defecate in the middle of the barrack, or who haven't washed in months. The ones who've turned senile at twenty-five. The ones who weigh sixty pounds and are dying of the typhus or of dysentery. And, sooner or later, we'll all end up that way. Our only hope is that before we reach that point, the Allies will come swooping down in their magnificent shiny airplanes, and save us. Because the Musulmen are prime target for immediate gassing. The Germans want working slaves, not slobbering idiots.”

“Surely, surely my husband died on the transport,” Maryse said, her voice ragged. “I don't know where they were taking him, but if they have ovens here, wouldn't they have them elsewhere, too?”

“Preferably outside the Reich. But many died in the boxcars, when we came from Hungary, and thus were spared, Mari.”

Bending her head, Maryse let the tears fall on Lily's hand, and, impulsively, the young dancer hugged her. “But we're alive,” she said, vibrating courage. “And
we'll
never see the inside of those gas chambers.”

T
his barrack looked
nothing like the others. It had proper beds, curtains, heating, and even potted plants. A movable bar had been installed, set up with liquor bottles and fine crystal glasses.

And the girls. Girls, all of them, not women. Young, one lovelier than the next, ranging in years from late teens to early twenties. Nanni, who was the youngest, looked at her reflection in the gilded mirror, and was amazed. She'd never considered herself beautiful. Her mother, and her Aunt Lily, were beautiful women. She had just been a girl, with good skin, glossy brown hair, normal, symmetrical features, and intelligent blue eyes. Not bad, but certainly nothing to dream about.

Now she saw a small
woman,
the silk dress cinching her tiny waist and revealing the fine, muscled legs encased in kid boots. For, even in the summer, Auschwitz-Birkenau was damp and cold and gray, and its paths filled with ugly marshes through which one could catch cold.

Wanda, one of the Polish girls, had combed Nanni's long hair so that it fell in great, dark swoops around her shoulders. And the contrast between her hair and eye colors drew attention. Nanni realized, with shock and a certain youthful pride, that in her person had been captured the best elements of both Robinsons and Steiners.

“You're such a pretty girl,” Heinz Kleinert said, motioning for her to sit down next to him. “When I saw the dress this morning, I had to bring it to you at once. Perhaps I'm falling in love with you.”

Nanni blushed. Suddenly, because of the young boy at the train ramp, she had been propelled into a world for which she felt totally unprepared. She found it both a horror and a strange, kaleidoscopic mirage . . . nothing at all like the boxcars, nor like what she'd seen happen to her mother and Lily. She tried not to think of them, because inevitably, the gnawing anxiety sprang up, and the pain of missing them.

She and her mother had never been separated, even for one night, until now. Poor Mama . . . ! She'd aged so much, and all that fine, vibrant, naughty spirit had been washed out of her, leaving only an exhausted, frightened woman approaching middle age, whose tears flowed incessantly.

She went to sit on the bed, next to Heinz. Like this, in the late afternoon light, he seemed just like any young man she might have known in Vienna. He was even handsome. But when he started to push himself on her, when he forced that part of his body, so engorged and disgusting, purple and veined, into her most private enclave—she wanted to scream with anger and shame, and with the searing pain of her violation.

“Accept it gladly,” Wanda had advised her. She was a tall, voluptuous blonde, older than Nanni by eight years. “Remember that when they tire of us, they'll make sure we never live to discuss what happened here.”

Perhaps her father would have preferred for her to die. As she let Heinz's hand travel from her shoulder to her breast, the profound shame overwhelmed her, and she froze. “What's wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing. I was thinking of my father. I'm sure he's dead now.”

“I'm sorry.” Heinz Kleinert gently pushed her onto the satin coverlet, and started to massage the tips of her nipples. “Your father was not a Jew. Of course not. What did he do? Did he plot against the Reich?”

Wanda had warned her never to say anything that might displease their SS lovers. And so, swallowing her anguish, she said, tears in her eyes: “He worked with the Social Democrats against the
Anschluss.
” Which, of course, was part of the truth.

“And so they sent you here because of this?”

Tears swam up and engulfed her. He took this to mean an affirmation, and, in sympathy, buried his face between her breasts. She'd heard of some inmates who carried poison capsules on them, and wished, now, that all this might be over.

He had removed his pants, and now she saw, through the haze of her tears, that tremendous, obscene organ, throbbing with a life of its own. He was bringing it close to her, and she could smell the odor of his flesh, of that slight perspiration combined with sex and urine. “Kiss me now,” he told her, his voice oddly thick, the way it was each time he mounted her. Only this time, he hadn't touched her once in her tender parts.

She started to sit up, but with a motion of his hand, he stayed her. “No, Anna,” he said. “Kiss me
there.
I want to feel your warm, sweet lips around
him. He
wants you just as much as I do.”

Her eyes widened with incredulity. Heinz had this horrid habit of personalizing his organ. Sometimes he called it “Hermann.” And she was supposed to call it “Hermann,” and to caress it gently. But to
kiss
it?

Holding her breath, she planted one short, dry kiss on the tip of Heinz's penis. He began to laugh. “Open your mouth,” he ordered, though the words still came in that polite, kind tone of voice he always used with her. She parted her lips. And then, with full force, he thrust his penis inside her mouth, to the far back of her throat, and she felt herself gag uncontrollably.

Nanni held her breath, counted to ten in German and in French, in order not to vomit. And then he spewed out his liquid, and her mouth was filled with warm, thick matter, and she wanted to spit it out but didn't know where. He had thrown himself exhausted on top of her, and now asked: “Did you swallow me? Swallow me, Anna. I want you to have all of me, because I love you, I love your purity, and because I knew from the beginning that you couldn't possibly be a Jew.”

Nanni swallowed.

S
lowly
, Maryse and Lily learned most of what there was to know about the strange city where they were interned. It was fifty miles west of Cracow, occupying a city the Poles had called Oświeçim. The first concentration camp, Auschwitz I, contained the prisoners of war and other, mostly non-Jewish inmates. On Monowice stood the industrial plants. And Lily and Maryse, along with some two hundred thousand other men and women, the vast majority being deported Jews from varied countries of Europe, lived in Birkenau, named for the alley of slim pines and birches through which the condemned had to pass on their way to the gas chambers.

Auschwitz occupied 1,150 acres, on which hundreds of barracks and blockhouses were strewn in complexes set apart from one another by electrified fences. Farther away, munitions factories had been set up, as well as farming fields and mining camps, all worked by squadrons, or
Kommandos,
of slave laborers. It was considered a privilege to be sent out of Birkenau to work in the synthetic plants, or in the factories. Because this way, one avoided the constant selections that took place “on the home grounds.”

In retreat from all of this, the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, and the SS officers under him, including the beautiful Irma Griese and the trim, dandified Dr. Mengele, dwelled in smart houses set inside blooming gardens. There were about forty-five hundred SS guards for the hundreds of thousands of inmates, yet the latter knew better than to try to escape. The electrified fences, the Alsatian dogs, and the watchful eye of silver-pistoled guards prevented almost any successful escape. Those who tried were inevitably caught, tortured, and killed, in front of the whole camp.

There were no children around, and no old people. Their absence stayed conspicuously on everyone's mind. And, under Lily's eyes, women who had come with them from France turned from refined, respected ladies into animals slavering at the mouth. There were never enough plates for the soup, and sometimes a single bowl had to be passed among several dozen women. Few were those who waited patiently for their turns.

It was almost impossible, at first, to go to sleep. The barrack was alive with cries of pain, as women, five abreast, tossed and turned upon each other. The sick groaned, and voided their intestines before reaching the pail. But after a few days, Lily's exhaustion was such that she fell asleep without feeling the hardness of the slats of wood.

At around five, whistles awakened them. The women had only half an hour in which to wash, clothe themselves in their single rag, and clean the barrack. The washroom was a hut in which a pipe with holes oozed drops of water, and the toilet, a slat of wood set on a trough, with holes drilled through the wood. Thirty seconds was the most time allowed per person, to visit these two huts. And so the most fastidious women dipped into the dew on the grass, or into the ubiquitous puddles, or soaked the hems of their dresses in the rain, in order to maintain cleanliness. One learned to brush one's teeth with a finger held under the dripping pipe.

After cleanup, breakfast came, and then, the morning roll call, held under yellow lights because the sun had not yet come up. Often, the camp band played delicate Bach variations, or joyful martial music, while the Jews were counted.

At the end of roll call, certain prisoner numbers would be called out, and one waited with held breath, hoping that one would be spared.

The weak hid their weakness, the sick their illness. And one tried to avoid using the bar of soap that had been issued on the first day. Because by now it was known that this soap had been made with the fat from Jewish bodies, right on the premises of Birkenau.

After roll call, the labor
Kommandos
were formed, and those headed for the munitions plants filed out singing loud songs under the direction and jeering of the SS. Maryse and Lily had been selected to help put together endless parts of rubber tubing.

They worked in long, silent rows, punished by lashes of the whip if they spoke to offer encouragement to each other. Maryse's fingers shook, and she often did not fulfill her quota of hose parts. But Lily, next to her, worked with dexterous hands, and finished off her friend's work so that no one noticed.

They drank their soup in the courtyard, and had half an hour. Then they returned to work until five.

Evening roll call took a long time, and by then, dusk had fallen and a cold wind had risen. The SS shouted, whipped, and threatened. Even those who had died of natural causes had to be dragged out into piles, and accounted for. Only when all the numbers tallied by the prisoner clerks had been verified, could the exhausted women return to their barracks, and eat their night's ration of indigestible food.

After dinner, a certain amount of free time was allotted, and the inmates could wander about on the Lagerstrasse, or retire early. Lily, from the start, had become a center of attention. By her quiet, unwaveringly positive voice, she had made friends among the sad and sorry inmates of her barrack. She spoke to them about the need to hold on to their faith, and to pray to God to help them through each day.

“There is no God,” a middle-aged woman named Hannah countered. “No God would allow the ovens.”

“God allowed Christ, the best of men, to die. We have to learn not to give in to death, without becoming like the Musulmen. We can only do this by believing.”

But she herself felt her faith wavering as the days continued, the starvation gnawing deep within her reserves of strength. Before her eyes, Maryse's face had hollowed out, her stomach had caved in. Lily refused to think about what she herself might look like. She kept up her gentle encouragement, but now she did it to keep from thinking, to keep her own thoughts away. She spoke the words without believing them.