The Thief of Auschwitz (21 page)

This fellow, I don’t remember his name, he told me the story maybe twenty years ago. Straight out of the blue at a fancy dinner party. He said if he ever had the chance, he’d do it again.

I said I wouldn’t stop him.

Twelve

The guards and the SS men are laughing when they arrive at the hospital. They come on a truck with an open bed, two officers in the front and six guards in the back, seated on benches around the perimeter like people on their way to a picnic in the country. They’re wearing heavy winter coats and their bellies are full and their laughter rises in a cloud of warm breath and cigarette smoke. The driver draws up to the door and stops, ratcheting the parking brake, and they all climb out. Another truck, this one closed, follows and parks nearer to the door. The driver sits inside fogging his own windows, the engine idling, a sour look on his face. A line of prisoners runs past, dressed in rags and driven by a capo who flails at their heels with a horsewhip, and each one of them looks up at the driver in his warm cabin with a look of hopeless envy. The driver doesn’t even lower himself to snarl back.

The French doctor is on duty. Perhaps he’s always on duty. Perhaps he’s an incarnation of that famous cursed ferryman of legend, doomed to pole back and forth across the same haunted river until he can deceive another man into taking his place. He’s alone on duty, and since there was no selection yesterday the hospital is full. Under ordinary circumstances in an ordinary hospital this would be untenable. There would be too much to do. Too many patients. Too little staff. But not here. Here additional staff would just mean more eyes to witness the unmitigated and irreducible suffering of the patients. It would represent a kind of cruelty that even the Nazis haven’t thought of yet, or if they have thought of it they have rejected it as too subtle for their purposes.

The doctor has blood on his hands, and he’s at the iron sink scrubbing them under a trickle of cold water when the men storm through the door. He’s just finished changing a bandage. It’s not part of his usual routine, and it hasn’t been for as long as he’s been here. He hasn’t so much as seen an ordinary gauze bandage until yesterday, much less a bottle of iodine and a spool of adhesive tape, and yet here they are. He’d given up asking for such things months ago. But yesterday morning he’d requisitioned these and other supplies in the name of the
sturmbannführer,
and within an hour they were in his hands. Not everything he’d asked for but enough to get started, with a suggestion that there might be more to come at a future date. Everyone has orders, he supposes. His orders yesterday morning had been to bind up the boy’s wounds and make him fit again for work, and he’d said he needed certain materials, and certain materials had appeared. Like magic.

There’s been a general scrambling among the hospital beds ever since the trucks began rolling up outside. Men who can’t walk running for the latrine. Men who can’t crawl tearing open their thin mattresses and climbing inside. Men who can’t sit up scrambling under the nearest bunk to conceal themselves behind junk and old rags and dirty laundry. Anything to avoid being seen by the SS and put through the selection. It’s all hopeless.

The first officer through the door—an old man composed of nothing but bones, a ghastly gray spectre of death bearing upon his hollow chest a death’s-head insignia—laughs and blows smoke as if something inside of him has caught fire. “Tell me,
Herr Doktor,”
he says, “who is the better physician now? Do you see how the men rise up to greet me?”

The selection process doesn’t take long. Two prisoners are in the latrine, one of them jammed up between the ceiling joists like a spider and the other huddled down behind some broken masonry, and although these two are clearly in fair enough condition to resume work they’re loaded into the closed truck as punishment for their daring. The men who’ve torn open their mattresses are taken out alongside the building and shot for a lesson in destroying the property of the Reich, and the two under the beds are given another day of rest before they’ll be returned to their commandos. All of the others, with the sole exception of Max, are marched or chased or hauled into the waiting truck and from there to the gas. The hospital is nearly empty again.

“There will be more patients to keep us company later on today,” says the doctor. “Rest assured of that.”

Max doesn’t answer. His pain is too great. Nor does either of the other men make any reply, the first because he’s busy coughing blood onto the floor and the other because the panic of this near miss has left him curled shivering in a fetal position, cradling a stomach wound. The doctor can do nothing for the man with the cough, but the other might have a chance if only he dared use some of the iodine and gauze reserved for Max. He thinks about it, standing in the open door and watching the trucks pull away. Watching a little snow begin to drift down from the gray sky, watching a little white smoke begin to rise up from the mouths of the tall stacks.

It wouldn’t take much. The infection might yield easily. He might actually practice a little medicine again. He’d like that.

On the other hand, it would most certainly be suicide.

*

Saturday is the housekeeper’s day off, so it’s Vollmer’s wife who answers. She’s smiling when she opens the door, and she keeps on smiling when she sees Eidel. “You’re the artist,” she says in Eidel’s own Polish, and the word comes as a surprise. Not even a surprise. It comes to her as a word from some foreign language, a word describing something unknown and perhaps unknowable here. Something like magic or fairies or kindness. She doesn’t yet understand that she’s here to paint, and even if she had expected it, even if she had come here with the understanding that she was to pick up a brush upon arrival, she could never have made the connection between this moment and the weekly transit that Jacob has been making for months now. Yet the beginning of the idea sinks in,
You’re the artist,
and she realizes that someone must have told someone. It makes her suspicious, for suspicion is always in the air. She wonders who has been watching her, who has been learning things about her life that she herself has all but forgotten.

Vollmer’s wife moves back into the entryway and on through another door, leading the way, the voices of the children still coming from elsewhere. The kitchen or the parlor. They enter the bright dining room and pass the big mirror hung squarely on the wall and she looks away from it, aghast at the vision of herself reflected there. A pale and shaven revenant in striped burlap, ears and nose reddened from the cold, not even a ghost but the lifeless husk that a ghost has left behind. She keeps her eyes on the floor and imagines the woman of the house gazing into that same mirror by the hour, experimenting with the tilt of her head, adjusting the set of her smile. There is a chair for Eidel against the wall near the fireplace, a narrow wooden chair much abused and rocking on uneven legs and altogether very little better than firewood, a negative image of the eight padded chairs set evenly around the table. She sits in it without looking up, and thus she doesn’t see her own painting where it hangs only a little distance away.

Vollmer’s wife goes to one of the east windows and opens it a crack to thin the smell that has come in with Eidel. She puts her back to it and folds her arms around herself and moves away, shivering. She is still smiling but something about the curve of her lips has turned suspicious. “I had hoped you would recognize your work,” she says.

Eidel has no answer. Her mind blanks completely for an instant and then fills up all over again, charged this time with visions of every possible kind of deceit and treachery, every unhappy ending known to man and some unknown as of yet, unimagined even in this camp at the end of the world. She decides that she’s been brought here merely as an amusement for this woman, that she must have taken a misstep somewhere along the line and not been called to account for it until now, until this very moment when Frau Vollmer requires a victim upon whom to exercise an appetite for cruelty that is as yet untapped and unfathomable.

But then again, maybe not. For at this instant the woman of the house gives something away after all, and it’s not entirely inhumane. Her eyes flash for a moment toward the place over Eidel’s head, the wall over the fireplace, and Eidel dares follow their direction and look there herself. To see the portrait. No. Not even the portrait. To see Lydia. Her own daughter, brought back. The flesh of her flesh, lifted up into a rightful place of honor even in this den of savages. She very nearly faints. She certainly doesn’t think. She clutches the rough burlap of her uniform around her neck and rises to her feet and cries out, “My daughter, my daughter, my daughter.” The tears beginning, the tears that she’s caused herself to hold back all these months. “Lydia,” she says, torn between reaching out to touch the image of the girl and stepping away so as to see her more clearly. “Lydia.”

“Your daughter?”
says Frau Vollmer. Her smile has collapsed in on itself.

Eidel can’t answer. She can hardly breathe.

“Your daughter, you say?” Coming a little closer, around the table.

Eidel lifts a shoulder to dry her face on the rough fabric of her uniform.
Yes,
she nods, biting her lips and struggling to compose herself.
Yes.

“Then it’s true,” says the woman of the house. “You are who they say you are. An excellent development.” Turning on her heel as she speaks, and vanishing through a swinging door into the deeper realms of the apartment.

When she returns, she has the children with her. A boy and a girl, Karl and Luzi. She has given no thought as to what this lowly Jewish prisoner ought to call the two of them, but it seems ridiculous that they should go by anything other than their Christian names, so that will have to do. Karl says he is seven and Luzi says she is five, each of them speaking as if having reached such ages and expecting to continue into the future stacking year upon year without foreseeable end is the most ordinary thing. Eidel dries her eyes and keeps looking from them to the portrait of her daughter and back again. She fears that she’ll seem distracted, but she can’t help herself.

The woman of the house, by her own declaration not
Frau
but
Madam,
pulls a chair free and gathers Luzi onto her lap and calls Karl to her side. She explains that Eidel is here to paint their family portrait. The three of them and her husband,
sturmbannführer
Vollmer himself. Eidel knows of Vollmer, doesn’t she?

Yes, yes, she does. Of course. Dabbing at her nose with her tattooed forearm. The low fire in the fireplace is warm against her back. It feels like summer. To be entirely truthful it feels like summer in Zakopane, with the yellow sunlight streaming in through the blue windows of her attic studio. She half wonders if what she feels is emanating in some mystical way from the painting, as if the image of her daughter has the power to open a doorway otherwise inaccessible. It’s a ridiculous idea but a disorienting one, particularly in her extreme state of hunger and anxiety and exhaustion—a dream state in this nightmare place where anything at all could prove to be true—and before she knows what’s happening she has collapsed to the floor, very nearly into the fireplace but not quite.

She awakens stretched out on the carpet, her head throbbing, the boy Karl looking down at her with the dull curiosity of a hungry animal. His round face swims in and out of focus. “She’s awake,” he says, satisfied, and then he disappears and things go black.

Vollmer is there when she opens her eyes again. He has a mug of tea in one hand and a sliced apple on a small plate in the other and he’s speaking her name in a voice neither commanding nor tender. Just saying her name. The mug of tea and the sliced apple are not for her but the name is, her name and not her number, and she takes the use of it for the kindness it’s meant to represent. Embarrassed at her fall, she props herself up on her elbows and comes slowly to her feet and apologizes.

“Very well,” he says through a mouthful of apple. “We had hoped to let you make some sketches today, to see if you were the artist you’ve been reputed to be, but I understand that such a step won’t be necessary.”

“No, sir,” she says. “I suppose not.”

He indicates a pad of paper and a pencil on the table. “Then write down whatever supplies you’ll need—brushes, paints, solvents, and so forth—and we’ll begin next week.”

She looks lost. It’s been so long.

“You
can
write, can’t you?”

“Oh, yes sir,” she says. “I can write.” She’s tempted to ask him whether he would prefer she make the list in German or in Polish, but she bites her tongue.

“Very well, then. Proceed.”

She steps toward the table and writes out the list while he watches from the corner. It takes a few minutes, since she’s afraid of forgetting something. It’s been so long. In the end she makes two columns side by side—one in German and the other in Polish—and she would add a third if she dared, a third column in perfect schoolbook French, this ignorant slave brought in to raise up devils by means of the highest art.