The Thief of Auschwitz (31 page)
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The good news, unveiled when they return to Canada, is that there’s been a catastrophe on the rail project and scores of men have died. Some were buried alive in an instant, and some were hauled away for burial or burning elsewhere, and the rest were merely covered up where they fell. The luck of the draw. There were hundreds of injuries as well, more than the hospital can possibly hold, and broken men lie scattered about the yard as if felled by some military encounter. The French doctor paces among them, his hands folded behind his back.
The deaths keep up all afternoon and into the evening, wrecked bodies giving up the ghost one after another. Everything falls apart. A van comes to the block and takes away some of the bodies. Two guards from the fenceline stroll over like a pair of bored gunslingers and put an end to the suffering of a few more, but because it seems a waste of ammunition when they’re so close to death already they cease fire and advise Wenzel to have them loaded up as they are, dead or otherwise. What’s the difference. But the capo doesn’t report to them, so he keeps on.
When roll call comes, it’s impossible. Every man, alive or dead, seems to be propping up another man in the gathering darkness. Sometimes a pair of them breathe their last at the same time, as if nothing but mutuality has been holding them up, and together they collapse, inward and downward, sliding onto the clay. Wenzel’s trusted clipboard and his businesslike intentions are of no use now, not in the face of so much onrushing random death. He sends word that he needs another van, but no van comes.
“Now,”
whispers Jacob to his son. “Find some other strong young fellow. Tell Wenzel he can rely on you to bury a couple of corpses, out beyond the fence.”
Max has a different idea. He steps forward and volunteers all right, but not with some other young man from the block. Not at all. Instead he volunteers himself and his father. Together. As a team. The proposal comes from his lips as if he’s been planning it this way for a while, and he has. At least since this new torrent of death has begun. Why not? Deprived of his usual sense of order, Wenzel might never miss them. He might assume that they’ve been killed too, hauled off in one of the vans perhaps, their serial numbers unnoted in the rush. It’s possible.
Except Wenzel still has some of his wits about him. “You go,” he says to Max. “And you as well,” pointing to another prisoner altogether. “This isn’t some family outing.”
Max
Did I understand that I was leaving them to die? I suppose I did. It was a long time ago, and what I remember most is the weight of the moment, the pressure and the opportunity, with death all around and my father telling me it was time to go and Wenzel giving me the order. What else could I do? Regardless of the year I’d spent in Auschwitz, I was still a child.
My mother would have wanted it as much as my father did. They’d had enough of dread. We’d all had enough. And if they couldn’t save Lydia, at least they could save me.
So I did as I was told. Until I got beyond the fence, anyhow.
The key to the antique shop was exactly where Chaim had said it would be. The painting was in a bin, rolled up with some others. I wrapped it up in brown paper and tied it with string, and I helped myself to a heavy coat that was hanging on a peg behind the counter, and I pocketed every coin that was in the cashbox. And then I set out toward what I hoped was France.
I traveled by night, keeping to the margins of anything like civilization—if you could call what was happening in Poland and Germany at that time
civilization.
I lived like an animal, furtive and shy of human contact and very nearly starving, which was nothing new. The whole world terrified me.
I had no sense of myself, really. The whole way to England and beyond, I didn’t have any more sense of who I was than a rat has. It had been wrung right out of me. I can’t say when I recovered it, or if I ever really did. Maybe not entirely.
Back in the sixties, people spent a lot of time talking about alienation—in those days you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting somebody who was talking about alienation, not in the art world anyhow—and it always seemed to me that I could give them all lessons on the subject. You don’t know what alienation is, until you’ve been alienated from yourself. Those people in my paintings, with their backs turned and their eyes averted? They’re not just uninterested in
you;
they’re uninterested in
themselves.
They don’t even recognize themselves. They’ve lost track of who they are, they count for so little in the world.
But nobody asked me about all that. Everyone was too busy explaining their theories to everyone else. Not that I would have told them, even if I’d been asked straight out. It’s only in a moment of weakness that I’d ever consider explaining anything, and moments of weakness always pass.
The only thing that occupied my mind on my long trek across Europe was my mother’s painting. You could picture the two of us as an Olympian and his flaming torch, as long as you didn’t imagine anything too heroic. I was just a broken boy with a badly-healed leg and an empty belly and a stolen past, making his way toward a future that he couldn’t imagine. But I did have the painting. It led me on, drawing me away from one thing and pulling me toward something else. In that way, I believe it saved my life all over again.
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Call it a moment of weakness, then, when the tattooed girl from the National Gallery rang my bell and I let her up without putting everything away first. But how could I have done otherwise? She was in the lobby, and I’d have had to get to the basement, and it was impossible.
The painting was right there in the middle of the couch. My mother’s painting. There’s certainly no mistaking it for one of mine, and particular evidence to that effect was everywhere, on windowsills and on easels and on every stick of furniture I own. Failed attempt after failed attempt. I kid myself, you see. I’m pathetically hopeful. I bring them up now and then and I look at them in all kinds of light—two or three at a time, a dozen at a time—but the truth is that they never get any better.
You can’t paint someone else’s painting, even though I’ve tried.
The tattooed girl dropped her briefcase as if she’d never seen paint on canvas before. She didn’t ask where I’d been keeping these pictures or why, even though she’d asked a million times if I had anything else tucked away somewhere. Something I hadn’t shown anyone. She didn’t criticize me for misleading her. And she didn’t say a word about Wyeth and his goddamned Helga, thank God.
The truth is that she was dumbstruck, and she stood there in front of the couch with her mouth open for a while before she thought to ask me anything at all. I told her a little. Just enough. How the girl in the painting was my sister, how she’d been murdered on our first day in the camp, and how my mother had painted this picture back when we’d lived in Zakopane. Back before the war, when all of us were children. I didn’t say how this one painting was all I had left, but anyone could have seen that.
And now it’s on its way to the National Gallery. My mother’s painting along with a few of my lousy copies by way of contrast, all of them crated up like the treasures of King Tut and loaded into an armored van. Such caution, so much security, for a painting that I carried rolled up in butcher paper over better than a thousand miles’ worth of occupied Europe. A painting I used for a walking stick when I could barely stand on my own.
According to the tattooed girl, it’s exactly what she’s been yearning for all along. That was her word.
Yearning.
She said something about devoting one modest gallery to
contexts
and
influences
and so on, the way they do, and using my mother’s painting as the centerpiece. I believe that’s what she said. I wasn’t paying attention. I was busy watching them box it up for the trip. I was hoping that they’d light it properly down in Washington, although I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much about that. The light coming in through that attic window, with my mother behind the canvas and my father working downstairs and my sister dreaming away at her table, will be enough.
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Notes and Acknowledgments
My last novel,
Kings of the Earth,
was in many ways a memorial to central New Yorkers of my parents’ generation—country people whose voices are dying out and whose stories are on the verge of vanishing forever. In
The Thief of Auschwitz,
I hope to have created a second memorial to that same generation, this time honoring those on my wife’s side of the family of man—the Jewish side—whose stories are likewise in danger of being lost.
Reading and rereading the first-person accounts of Wiesel and Frankl and Nyiszli over a period of a year or two, I had no plan to write a book. But along the way I discovered something within myself that disturbed me to no end: the more closely I studied the raw materials, the more repellent they became and the more difficulty I had in maintaining my focus on them. It was as if the facts themselves, horrible and numberless as they were, were conspiring to drive me away again and again, preventing me from connecting with the people behind them as fully as I needed to.
Supposing that other readers might face the same difficulty, and intent on the preservation of these voices and these stories, I wondered if fiction might provide an answer. I hope that it has, at least a little, by way of this book.
As always, I owe a great debt to my first readers, Wendy and Emily and David and Robbie, whose guidance and patience and support are so terribly important to me. Thanks are due as well to my far-flung internet correspondents—Amy, Danielle, Elizabeth, Jessica, Karen, Keith, Lauren, Renee, Sachin, and Tasha—who have provided me with so much wise counsel and so much encouragement for so very long. And last, I mustn’t sign off without a tip of the hat to Sam Winston, who went on ahead.
Jon Clinch — The Green Mountains, 2012
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Jon Clinch is on the web:
Web site:
jonclinch.com
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@jonclinch
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Visit
jonclinch.com
to download a Reading Group Guide.
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Also by Jon Clinch:
Finn
Kings of the Earth
What Came After
(writing as Sam Winston)
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