The Thief of Auschwitz (3 page)

Everyone is impatient. Lydia asks her father where they’re going, and he can’t say. Max has learned not to ask. It’s enough to be moving. Anyplace might be an improvement. There’s always hope.

Eventually they reach a wire fence with a sign separating men from women. Eidel gives her husband a pained look, and he angles his head down and smiles the best smile he can assemble out of nothing and says, “Pretend we’re in the synagogue.”

“I’ve always hated that about the synagogue.”

“I know.”

”Hated it.”

“I know.” But there’s no choice. He says, “We’ll meet again on the other side.”

Eidel wonders if today in fact might be the Sabbath. How long have they been on the train? What day was it when they boarded? Time has lost its grip and she can’t say for certain, so she keeps the thought to herself. She leans toward her husband seeking one more touch, perhaps even a kiss, but a smiling individual with a death’s-head on his collar intervenes. “There’ll be plenty of time for that,” he says. He seems kindly enough. He seems to understand their impulse. They separate, Jacob and Max going left and Eidel and Lydia going right. They walk on, along opposite sides of the fence, losing themselves in the crush. Into the sun.

*

A gravel roadway runs alongside the path, separated from it by a second wire fence and a low wall of stone, and urgent white vans bearing the Red Cross insignia come and go along it at breakneck speed, raising great windblown clouds of grainy gray dust. Lydia watches the vans rumble back and forth and reflects for a moment and asks her mother if the path they’re walking leads to a hospital or a clinic of some kind, and her mother says she doesn’t believe so but she can’t be certain. Lydia squints into the sun and says she hopes that it might, with this cough of hers, with this runny nose. She picked them up in one of those apartments, and the dust of the vans’ passage only makes them worse.

Her mother stops and lowers herself to one knee and takes the handkerchief and shakes it out and holds it to her nose and says
blow,
the women behind making angry noises at the holdup, grumbling and complaining in three or four different languages. It’s an international convention of disapproval. They will tolerate no delay, for they seem to be bound somewhere at last.

*

The men’s line snakes toward another officer wearing the death’s-head. Unlike the first, who stood with his hands behind his back and showed his nicotine-brown teeth and spoke freely, this one stands at attention to a degree that is nearly supernatural. He’s barely disturbed by his own breathing. His gray-green uniform is spotless and he wears tall boots that gleam despite the dust rising all around. A pair of black miracles.

Jacob smiles at him from a distance in case he should happen to glance his way, but the officer only looks straight ahead. He stands at attention with the thumb of his left hand parallel to the seam in his trousers and his right elbow cocked and his right hand lifted up to a point beneath his chin, suspended there as steadily as if it were hung from a wire. As each individual passes beneath his gaze, the index finger of that one hand makes a single tiny movement. It’s the only part of him that stirs, the one component of a broken machine still functional. The finger points by five or ten degrees either to the left or to the right, apparently independent of anything but its own volition, not even seeming to consult with the officer himself, who stands at attention and makes no other movement while the line of men approaching him becomes two lines. Two streams of weary travelers parting around him like water.

To the right go the strong ones. Healthy full-grown men. To the left go the rest. The weak and the sick, the aged and the young. Those with canes or crutches or even the slightest trace of peculiarity to their gaits.

Jacob grits his teeth and takes his son by the arm, and they stop dead. The man behind them in line stumbles and curses.

Jacob whispers in the boy’s ear, “The gas is to the left.”

Max says, “No. The Red Cross trucks are going that way.”

Jacob says, “No. It’s the gas. The rumors are true.” They move forward again.

“There’s no gas,” Max says. “It’s a clinic.”

“You must go to the right. You must come with me.”

“He’ll send me to the right anyhow. I’m not sick and I’m not a child.”

“You’re fourteen.”

“So?”

“Fourteen is a child. Children go to the left. Today, you’re eighteen.” He studies the SS officer as a cornered man would study a wolf.

“He isn’t asking anyone’s age, Papa. He isn’t asking anything.”

“He asks. Now and then he asks.” For he does. From time to time the officer violates the rule of his own posture and tips his head forward just the slightest, no more than the five or ten degrees that his finger moves, and lifts an eyebrow by way of inquiry. He does so now, and Jacob grunts. “See? You see? Tell him eighteen.”

“I will if he asks.”

“Even if he doesn’t. Just tell him.”

“What if telling him makes him angry?”

“Do as I say.”

“He looks like the type who might get angry.”

“If he’s going to get angry, we’re already lost.”

Max looks up at his father. “But what if it’s just a clinic after all?”

“It’s no clinic.”

“It might be.”

“It’s not.”

“Then what about Lydia?”

Jacob stops, and the man behind him stumbles into him once more, and the cursing starts up again. “Perhaps it’s a clinic after all,” he says. “Still, you come with me.”

The boy doesn’t argue.

*

Eidel is adrift.

Alone and adrift with nothing but an old silk handkerchief for comfort. A silk handkerchief and a rolled-up painting, although soon enough the painting will be gone too since a person can’t hold onto anything for long. Everything falls away.

She’s glad to have the handkerchief to cling to, but at the same time she wishes she had managed to return it to Lydia, for her daughter needs it more than she does.

Max

Wyeth had his Helga. Surprise, surprise, surprise. As if one single thinking person in the whole wide world was shocked to learn that straitlaced old Andy had been hiding nudie pictures in the barn.

Somebody else’s barn, at that.

It was the secretiveness that made the whole thing dirty, and it was the dirt that got people’s attention. How he never told his wife what he was up to, I mean. How Helga never told her husband. Crafty old Uncle Andy made two hundred and fifty-some paintings of that woman, give or take, over ten or fifteen years. Two hundred and fifty-some paintings of her in every possible state of dress and undress.

In my book, that’s called an unhealthy obsession.

He didn’t just dash them off, either. He didn’t work fast. You can’t work fast. Not and get things right, or however close to right Andy was capable of getting things, which is another question.

Helga herself, though. She’s the main thing.

When people asked what it was that drew his eye to her—as if he needed a reason; as if he weren’t entitled to paint whatever he pleased; as if the paintings themselves, plainspoken and flatfooted as they were, weren’t explanation enough—when people asked, do you know what he said?

Her Germanic qualities.
That’s right. As if, once again, anyone could possibly have been surprised. The sturdy Prussian marching across the winter fields in her braids and her long loden coat. The homely Prussian undressed in a homely country farmhouse of the sort that Andy had reduced to some kind of trademark years and years before.

Helga. Uncle Andy’s Helga.

You never know who’s going to reveal himself to be a monster at heart, and you never know how.

No wonder he kept her a secret.

Two

They are travelers no more. They’re prisoners now, stripped of everything, their clothing abandoned inside the door along with whatever private treasures were hidden within it. Rings and gems and coinage from a dozen countries. Lockets and pearl buttons and pocket combs of ivory. Mementos meaningless to anyone but the bearer.

They’ve been shorn and shaven raw with razors whose edges have seen a hundred times a hundred men since last they were stropped and will see a hundred times a hundred more before they’re stropped again. Their skin has been rubbed white with calcium chloride and they stagger forward into the light as pale as fish in their uniforms of striped burlap, ill-fitting trousers and jackets that stink powerfully and unmistakably of gas.

Don’t breathe,
they think. And yet they breathe.

One by one and two by two they emerge into the same bright day that they left not an hour before. The sky is still blue and the clouds are still white and the wind still blows. The river, for the camp is built alongside a river
—how could they have failed to notice this? what were they thinking? what other precious elements of the ordinary world have they neglected to see until now?—
the river still flows. Everything in the world is exactly as it has been, with the exception of these stunned men moving like the dead into a kind of parade ground to await whatever will happen to them next. Standing on tiptoe and craning their necks to look toward the other side of the building, where the women must surely be, and failing to see them. Walls and chains and crosses of heavy timber wrapped in barbed wire block the view.

Everything is the same and nothing is the same.

Max is wearing a pair of trousers at least five sizes too large. His father found them in the pile of uniforms and insisted that he take them because who knows when he’ll get another chance. He’ll grow into them by and by. Max is almost as tall as any grown man already, and he rolls up the cuffs thinking there must be a naked giant hiding in the camp somewhere. Or a naked giant lying dead, which is more likely.

He pulls back his left sleeve and watches the seepage of blood and ink on the outside of his arm. His father does the same—every man here does, as if they’ve decided one after another to consult their missing wristwatches—studying his serialized tattoo and taking the permanence of it as a good sign. With as much reassurance as he can muster up he says to Max, “I suppose they wouldn’t have bothered if we were bound straight for the gas.”

Max nods. looking around at the rest of the men. They’re a sturdy and fit enough crowd, considering. Not a weakling or an old-timer among them. Not a bent back and not a crutch. Certainly not a child anywhere.

Max’s father must make the same observation at the same time, for he is on his knees when the guards step forward to round them up.

Lydia. Lydia.

*

The women’s camp is bursting, but all of the camps at Auschwitz are bursting. They were designed to be overcrowded, housing for rats or not even rats, and temporary housing at that.

Eidel doesn’t mind the conditions. She doesn’t even register the crowding and the filth and the hunger. She lies on her side each night in a wooden bunk with another woman pressed against her back and another one against her chest, the bunk itself barely tall enough to slide into, barely a grave, barely large enough to contain the women and the air they need to live through the summer night. Light leaks in from the outside in quivering arcs, searchlights in motion.

Some of the women curse and some of them pray. Eidel does neither. She only clutches the silk handkerchief in her fist and waits. She waits for sleep to come or not to come. It makes no difference to her, for tomorrow will be tomorrow either way.

Tomorrow she will still have lost her daughter and her son, and she will still possess the handkerchief. It’s all she has of Lydia. All she has of anything.

She remembers the days of looking forward. When it was possible and when she could permit herself. She remembers summers past, walking on a mountain path or along the bank of an alpine lake with the children, alive to them and to their vitality, alert to the landscape, aware that at any moment she could choose to set up her easel and get it all down. All of it forever.

She remembers her husband’s barber shop. The bright oily smell of hair tonic, and the warm round scent of shaving cream, and above it all the high astringent tang of witch hazel, hovering in the air like a sung note.

But she doesn’t speak of these things. Not even to Zofia Kohen, who lives in the same block and sleeps in the same bunk and works in the same place she does, day after day. Eidel is lucky to have been assigned to the kitchen, although it’s caused her to forget almost everything that she once knew about cooking. Not that she ever cared much for cooking or was much skilled at it—in her father’s house a woman from Krakow had presided over the kitchen, a woman who’d studied in France, so it wasn’t until she’d married Jacob and come to Zakopane that she’d even tried her hand—but then again this isn’t exactly cooking, not by any definition. Potato soup that’s little more than hot water, or turnip soup or pea soup or carrot soup that isn’t any better. Looking down into one of the great boiling vats is like looking down into a deep and cloudy stream. Just a hint of something lurking near the bottom.