The Thief of Auschwitz (2 page)

On days that dawned particularly fine she would beg Jacob to close the shop and come with her to the mountains, and if it weren’t Monday (when the rabbi came at ten-fifteen sharp), or Thursday (when the cantor arrived at nine), he might consider it. The Sabbath was theirs either way. Eidel wasn’t religious by nature, a condition as unremarkable in Warsaw as it was scandalous in the country. Even the Catholics raised their eyebrows to see her leading her husband down the main street toward the mountains, bundled for skiing or dressed for the trail, in the light of a perfect and God-given Saturday morning.

Through her eyes he learned to see all over again, both the things she painted and the things she didn’t. Just the simple fact of her
looking
—whether at a larch tree or an angle of light, at a sunrise or a mossy cobblestone—made the thing that had fallen within her vision worth looking at. The gift of Eidel’s attention to the world became his gift as well.

By and by the children arrived, Max entirely by accident and Lydia because Max had brought the two of them more happiness than they could possibly keep to themselves. By that reckoning, they realized only afterward, there might have been no end of it.

Max was like his father. Intense, constantly in motion, tearing through the world but in certain ways oblivious to it. Jacob himself, older now and wiser, prayed that some day, when Max was sufficiently mature to handle the shock, he would find someone like Eidel to change everything for him—someone to open his eyes and slow him down—although in his heart he doubted that it was possible. Lightning might strike twice, but not love. Not that kind.

As for Lydia, she was like neither of them. She was unworldly, ethereal. She talked late and she walked late and she was in no hurry for anything whatsoever, content to let the world come to her if it should come at all. About the time she was ready to start school, the synagogue got her attention. It was the other children, really, the line of them filing toward
shul
each morning, filtering one by one and two by two from the doorways of houses and cottages. They joined with one another and flowed down the streets like water, as if they had no will of their own and didn’t require any. Her mother had never cared for the synagogue and her father had quit attending altogether, except on the holiest of holy days when he crept in later than the last of the shuffling old men and felt even more guilt than was necessary. But Lydia drew them back. She reminded her father of where he had come from, and she opened her mother’s eyes to the invisible.

Men and women sat apart in the synagogue, the women in a balcony and the men below. The separation was meant to focus attention on the everlasting, but for Eidel it had the opposite effect. The absence of her husband and son was a powerful distraction. It set her on edge and kept her mind from settling. She was certain that if only she were able to sit alongside them she would be able to pray, although she couldn’t decide if this was a failing on her part or a failing on the part of the synagogue or something else. In any event it was vexing in the extreme. She found herself trying to single out their voices during the prayers, Max’s high and Jacob’s low, entwining around the rote mutterings of the old men and enclosing them. This, the faithful and patient act of listening for her son and her husband, became of necessity her one and only prayer. It was enough.

At least she had Lydia by her side. Lydia whose idea this had been in the first place.

Early in the morning they would climb the thirty-six steps to the balcony with their coats still on and take their seats with the last of the snow still melting from the soles of their shoes, and from that chill and elevated place—an aerie itself—they would look out over the town through a high window and be the first to see the sun rising over the mountains. The men murmured below in the dark, and the Catholics were still asleep in their beds, and for just that one moment, the day was their secret.

*

The children grew, and Eidel painted them at every age. As a rule her paintings of Max captured him either in motion or in recovery. Playing some game or setting off along a mountain path or resting afterward. In the summertime she would catch him at the kitchen table with a glass of cold milk and the alpine breeze lifting the lace curtain, in the wintertime before the fire with a mug of tea, his cheeks ruddy, bending forward to massage the life back into his toes. She had to work fast when she painted her son, and she had to see him clearly and completely in the space of an instant, for soon he would be just a blur.

To paint her daughter, on the other hand, she had to learn patience. She needed to be watchful, for she might find Lydia anywhere, pensive or wide-eyed, with a book or a toy or just an open window, dreaming. But the trick was to capture her stillness, the moment of the painting and the moment before it and the moment after it all come together into one. Alone with Lydia for the hours it took, she sometimes felt as if she were entering into the child’s dream herself. That was when the work went well. When the effort fell away and all that remained was love.

One such painting was her favorite. It showed the attic studio, shot through with light. In the window was Lydia, seated at a wooden table in profile, hands folded, the sun gleaming upon her auburn hair and burnishing it into surprising gold. Upon her small rapt face was a pink glow of anticipation for what might lie beyond the window. For what might lie ahead in the world. And behind her in a shadowy corner, barely visible but rendered with the same intensity of observation and care as all the rest, lay a castoff toy, a stuffed gray rabbit worn down to almost nothing, left there only the week prior but left perhaps for good.

The more she painted the children the less she painted her husband, not only because there were only so many hours in the day but because Jacob was usually busy in the shop downstairs. Thinking of the future, building up his trade, setting aside such treasure as he could for the days when the children would need it most. A university education. A wedding.

“But papa already has a fortune,” Eidel would say, which only made him work harder. Max and Lydia were
his
children, not his father-in-law’s, and their future required a fortune of his own making.

He hung a clock over the big plate-glass mirror and he put a sign in the window promising to cut any man’s hair in five minutes and shave his face in five minutes more—a banker on a schedule or a busy shopkeeper with customers waiting could be spruced up and on his way in no time at all—and as the children grew his trade grew as well. No longer just the rabbi at ten-fifteen on Monday and the cantor on Thursday at nine, but the mayor and the chief of police and for a while even the monsignor from the Church of the Holy Family on Krupowki Street. On some days there was a line.

The line began dwindling with the Occupation. It didn’t take long to peter out altogether, although during the first weeks Zakopane seemed almost immune, remote as it was from the great centers of population, the cities like Warsaw and Krakow where Jews lived in higher concentrations and made easier targets. But the glories of the Carpathian peaks appealed to the Nazis as irresistibly as to anyone else, and soon enough there were security police in the streets.
Sicherheitspolizei,
along with uniformed SS officers and grim-looking Hungarians and Slovaks and Ukrainians very different from those who typically visited this mountain town on holiday. These serious visitors were all men, for one thing, pale men with dark looks. Even their smiles looked hungry.

Rather than draw attention to himself, Jacob removed the sign from his window. The fortune he’d been laying up began to diminish.

The SS commandeered the Palace Hotel, the grandest building in town, a place known for luxury and opulence, although no one dared imagine now what kind of pleasures the new management might be indulging there. Now and then a Jewish family would receive word that they were to appear at headquarters for questioning, and sometimes they returned to the village untouched or apparently so and sometimes they did not, but under no circumstances did any of them ever speak a word of what had transpired. In the end they all vanished one way or another, either immediately into the bowels of the hotel or afterward into the mists of the mountains like mist themselves. Before long Jacob decided that taking down his sign wasn’t enough in the way of self-defense.

And so, toward the end of 1939, they abandoned Zakopane for good. With their clothing packed in steamer trunks and Eidel’s paintings boxed up in square wooden crates and Jacob’s barbering tools tucked into a modest little folding leather case, they boarded a train and returned to Eidel’s childhood home in Warsaw. Leaving, like any family at the close of their time in the mountains, with mingled sadness and anticipation.

*

Warsaw granted them fourteen months. Eidel’s father had connections in the courts, and they served him just that long but no longer. So much for the illusion of immunity. So much for having faith that conditions would improve, that the occupation would end or that they would be somehow passed over. So much for going from the fire into the frying pan. Her father and mother packed a pair of small bags and set out for Sweden, begging Eidel and her family to come along as well, but what can you do with children, even grown ones? They have minds of their own. Jacob and Eidel took Max and Lydia and went to Krakow, on their second involuntary rail journey of the war years and the first of many that would serve to whittle them and their possessions down into kindling.

1941 was telescopic, their world collapsing upon itself at a rate that only increased. They stayed in Krakow for six or eight weeks, time enough to hang some of Eidel’s paintings on the walls and time enough to barter some of them away for things that were more necessary. As if the paintings themselves were not necessities. After Krakow they lived in no one place for more than a month, then no more than two weeks, then no more than a week, and finally no more than a few days. Each apartment was smaller and meaner than the last, each village more crowded and less hospitable.

Along the way Eidel gave up painting entirely. One morning she looked out the window of a wretched apartment in a woebegone village and said to Jacob,
There’s nothing here that I can stand looking at for long enough,
and that was the end of it. She abandoned her paints and brushes in a cupboard behind some earlier tenant’s castoffs, and she used her last clean scraps of canvas to wrap food that would have lasted long enough only if her family had been living in some fairy tale, and they moved on.

She bartered away more paintings. Sometimes she stripped out the canvases and sold the bare frames. As time went by the wood became more valuable as fuel than as decoration, and the paintings themselves became worthless altogether. Jacob put a sign in whatever window was visible from whatever street they looked out on and cut hair for whatever he could get. For money, of course, until every coin in every village had been sewn into the hem of a dress or concealed in the false bottom of a traveling bag. Then for the things that coins represented, since translation of real goods into negotiable currency was no longer required or even possible.

Food. Coal. A tattered scrap of a blanket.

In one particularly dark and narrow village they shared an apartment with two other families, separated by not so much as a curtain, and when the time came to move on they left just about everything behind. Everything being almost nothing. They had the clothes on their backs and one battered valise holding a change of underclothing and not much else. Jacob’s barbering tools. A book. A washrag hastily wrung out and hung to dry over the coal stove and stinking now of their provisional past.

They opened the door onto the warm spring day and flung their wool coats over their shoulders like capes, young Max deciding at the last moment to leave his hat behind since the weather was so fine, and Lydia carrying that stuffed rabbit under her arm and a silk handkerchief in her fist. The rabbit had left Zakopane on the train to Warsaw and had never been out of her sight since. As for the handkerchief, she’d been battling a cold for weeks and this was the only weapon remaining to her. Like everything else, it stank of coalsmoke.

Just inside the door was the very last of Eidel’s paintings, standing on the mantle above the dead fireplace. It was the picture of Lydia in the attic, the room full of light, the child full of promise. Eidel took it down and measured it against the valise and saw that fitting it in was hopeless. She worked the canvas from the frame, rolled it up gently, folded it over and put it in her coat. Then she smashed the frame on the stones of the hearth, and put the pieces in her husband’s valise.

Jacob snapped the valise shut and gave her such comfort as he could. He said the time had come to content themselves with the girl herself, and never mind the painting.

Something—a sliver of wood, a rusted coil of picture wire, a stubborn staple—had pricked her finger, and she put the tip of it in her mouth, tasting iron.

The four of them set out for the train.

*

The day is bright at the Auschwitz station as well, and they squint into it as they move forward. As a rule people on a boarding platform move with energy and purpose, but here they shuffle. Stopping and going and stopping again. There are too many of them. They pass low entrances lettered
Men
and
Women,
but the restrooms are occupied or at least the doors are locked. Lines of travelers form in front of them and slowly disperse in frustration and then reform from new constituents.