The Thief of Auschwitz (6 page)

Butchery for the butchers.
The irony of it rises up in him and makes him laugh for the first time since he’s been here. Not loudly, though. Not loudly enough to be heard down the line.

Hours later, shoveling alongside his son, he still can’t get over it. He says, “Did you get a look at Vollmer’s neck?”

“No,” says Max.

“It’s a disgrace.”

Shoveling away as they are, and under the observation of that pot-bellied pig Slazak, their conversation is telegraphic.

“Really?”

“Really. It’s a disgrace to the Nazi party.” Another shovelful. “Which takes some doing.”

“How so?”

“Bad haircut.
Lousy
haircut.”

Max just shakes his head. After all they’ve been through. That father of his.

Jacob shovels and goes on. “It’s our friend Schuler,” he says.

They work. The trench is deep but not deep enough. They’ve been edging toward a road that they must dig beneath in order to reach the plot of ground that will be the new women’s camp. All month long the men have complained quietly to one another about the depth of the excavation, as if it’s been just a whim on Slazak’s part, but now they see. A German technician with a graduated pole stands on this side of the road and another one with a transit stands on the other side, and they shake their heads gravely at Slazak whenever he looks their way.
Not deep enough.

Slazak walks along the berm of raw earth piled up on one side of the ditch and kicks some of it down onto the prisoners. Max stops to dig it out of his shirt collar and Slazak hollers at him to keep working. “I can move more dirt with the toe of my boot than you can move with that goddamned shovel,” he says, demonstrating the truth of his claim with another kick. Clods pelt the prisoners and they labor on in silence, like men digging their way out of a hailstorm. Max grumbles and Slazak cocks his head to listen but his father hushes him. Slazak walks forward a couple of steps and kicks down some more dirt on more prisoners and spits after it for good measure—Slazak who began here as one of their own but has gone crooked now, Slazak spoiling for a fight, Slazak in league with the enemy and enjoying it, jamming his thumbs into his belt and leaning forward with his jaw jutting to make the men under his command a promise: if they fail to reach the road by the end of the day, they can lie right down where they are. The guards will draw their machine guns and a commando of fresh men will shovel the dirt back into the ditch and no one will be the wiser. There is always another path to the women’s camp. There are always more prisoners.

Jacob looks up over the rim of the ditch to see the guards themselves, a couple of Ukrainians with dead eyes and thin lips, pass a look back and forth. It’s hard to say what the look might mean, but he gets the feeling that they would just as soon Slazak joined the others in the ditch before they started in with the guns.

The surveyor laughs and steadies his pole.

*

In the end, Mathilde Kessler stands up and walks under her own power—but only after a certain amount of encouragement from the capo. Her head swims and she’s unsteady on her feet and her kidneys hurt from Rolak’s blows of encouragement, but she staggers to the hospital block without any help, pausing only now and then to lean against a wall or a railing. No one so much as watches her go, not even the guards, for what trouble could a woman in her condition get into? They could open the main gates wide, and she wouldn’t have the strength to leave.

She isn’t in the block when the lights go out, and she isn’t at work the next day, and the rumors start. They’re all variations on the same theme.
She’s dead from a broken skull
or
She’s dead from the fall to the concrete floor
or
She’s dead from the blows to her stomach.

Eidel tries not to listen. It doesn’t occur to her that she might have had anything to do with Kessler’s fate, whatever it is. That her tiny failure to keep to the middle path has cost this other woman so much. She has other things on her mind.

Night falls and Kessler is still missing. The rumors metastasize.
She’s dead from internal bleeding
or
She’s dead from an injection given to her by one of the doctors
or
She’s dead because she’s been selected for the gas.

Eidel would cover her ears if she could move, but the bunk is too crowded. She can’t so much as free her arms.

If by some miracle Kessler were to appear here in the darkness among them they would leap as if they’d seen a ghost, so sure are they that she must have become one by now. Her black fate spreads like oil. One woman claims that Kessler had a twin sister in another block, and that that same sister was spirited away during the roll call this morning. Spirited away never to be heard from again. The doctors have a special fascination with twins, after all.

Eidel can’t bear it. She has her own torments. She lies on her side in the crowded bunk, feeling the pressure of women breathing on both sides of her, and she thinks of Jacob and the children. She sheds tears for both of them, unable even to reach the silk handkerchief she keeps jammed into her pocket as a memento. She wonders if Jacob might be thinking these same thoughts in some place more or less identical to this, and she resolves that she must find out. She must know for certain, now that she can.

Which means, of course, that she must resign herself to sleeping with the junkman. What else could he possibly want from her? She’s not blind. People are forever pairing off around the camp, whether desiring one another or desiring something from one another no one can say. Even here, where the conditions are constant, the reasons vary. It’s impossible to explain how lust endures, but there’s no denying the fact of it.

She has seen how he looks at her. She has seen how he looks at every woman in the kitchen, even little Zofia Kohen, the most wasted and wan of them all, a pale mouse before she came here and a pale mouse now, Zofia who first suggested that in exchange for putting Eidel’s mind at rest the junkman will surely demand the gift of her body. The truth of it is that Zofia has taken a shine to him herself. She adores the rakish tilt of his hat and she admires his freedom to wander the farthest corners of the camp, imagining for him a life as varied and exotic as the journeys of Marco Polo. That cocky little junkman from Witnica, out navigating the spice routes. She doesn’t like to admit it, but it’s true. Anyone can see. So when she suggested to Eidel that the only way she’d learn anything about her husband was to submit to the deliveryman’s carnal requirements, Eidel said that she was imagining things. “You may dream of that for yourself,” she said, “but don’t go bringing me into it.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Zofia, “and I’m not.”

“You would, and you did.” She leaned hard against her knife, driving it through a turnip.

But that was yesterday. Now
she lies awake wondering what she’ll have to endure if she wants the truth. Wondering what kind of an agreement she can reach. A scheme leaps up into her mind at one point—she will agree to do the deliveryman’s bidding only if the news is good—but instantly she realizes such a system’s shortcoming. He’ll tell her anything to get what he wants.

On the other hand, he might tell her anything anyhow. Of what value is the truth to him?

No.
She adjusts her position on the hard bunk.
No.
If she’s to proceed, she must have faith. Faith in Jacob and faith in herself. And faith in a cunning little junkman from a backwoods village, trotting around this death camp in his motley black and white, making deals and carrying secrets and bearing God knows what contagion from door to door and bed to bed. Carrying worse than contagion. Perhaps even the makings of a child. Which would be the death of her.

*

“You need to be more careful,” Jacob tells his son, the two of them jammed into a bunk no more than a quarter of a mile distant from Eidel but nonetheless at the other end of the world. “You need to be on your guard. You mustn’t let them rile you.”

“I don’t.”

“You do. It’s instinctive. You’re young.”

“I’m not that young.”

“You’re young. And you won’t get much older if you don’t learn a little self-control.” Other men are murmuring in the dark as well, and as of yet Slazak hasn’t charged out from his little chamber to quiet them down. “You got riled at Slazak today. Over a little dirt.”

“So?”

“So where does that lead? What would you have done if I hadn’t shushed you?”

“Nothing.”

“That’s right,” says Jacob. “You would have done nothing. So why start?”

“I didn’t start.”

“You wanted to start. You very nearly did.”

Max doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say anything at all. Jacob might be persuaded that his son has actually fallen asleep, if his chest weren’t pressed so tightly against the boy’s back. But Max is awake and his father can feel it in the beating of his heart. Nothing can be concealed under these conditions. Not from him. He breathes as deeply as he can under the circumstances and feels the pressure of his son’s body against his, flesh of his flesh, not just the boy himself but the woman of whom the boy is the last trace. Eidel. Eidel who is all alone in the world if she is in the world at all, Eidel who has done nothing to deserve that fate, Eidel who ought to have a child of her own by her side if anyone should. At least Jacob has someone to look after.

Other men are still talking, a handful of them complaining about the heat and the food and the work, until Slazak finally bursts through his little door. “Quiet,” he snarls, “unless you’re rested enough to start digging again.” Which is a threat on which he’d follow through if he weren’t so exhausted himself. But the prisoners don’t know that—they don’t know
what
he’s capable of, for not one man among them is foolish enough to believe that he’s seen Slazak’s limits—so they close their eyes and clear their throats and lie subdued, as still as firewood or fish.

Some of them sleep and some of them even dream, the lucky ones of freedom and family and sumptuous meals, the rest of torment and hunger and pain, and come morning the three bells awaken them all.

They all rise but one. Schuler, it would seem at first, judging from the position of his body in the usual spot on the usual bunk, but it’s not Schuler. Schuler is in the latrine, and the body lying motionless on the boards is his nameless twin. A younger prisoner just then making his way down the line between the bunks, seeing the prone figure and spying Slazak on his way to rouse him and eager to gain a little favor, perhaps even aspiring to become a capo himself one day, reaches down and twists the twin’s ankle and curses him in the vilest terms available in two languages or maybe three. Saying it’s time to start pulling his own weight.

But Schuler’s twin just groans. He hardly groans, come to that. It’s just a sigh with a harsh trailing edge of resignation. The other prisoner turns his ankle again, more roughly this time and in the other direction—mainly for the benefit of Slazak, who’s getting nearer and beginning to toss men out of his way in order to see what’s going on in the dimness of that bunk—and Schuler’s twin stirs. Pulling his ankle free and drawing it up toward his buttocks. Curling in on himself. Drawing breath and rolling over on his back and inching toward the light. Just in time.

As punishment for his weakness, he goes without rations. When they head out for the excavation he limps along pitifully, leaning on Schuler and reluctant to let go of him at the place where he needs to break off for Canada. It hardly seems fair that Schuler—relatively upright and more or less energetic, his every step cushioned by those gum-soled shoes of his—should head off to a soft job under the shade of a roof while his twin must hurl himself again into the ditch. The twin complains. Watching Schuler go, he lays out his grievances before the other prisoners and before God Himself, and although he’s correct in every particular there will be no redress.

Jacob commiserates. He says that injustice strikes each man here in his own particular way. Consider his own situation. A skilled barber, a man who with his own hands has trimmed the hair of the monsignor of the Church of the Holy Family on Krupowki Street in Zakopane, he’s condemned to digging ditches while every Friday morning, just like clockwork, Schuler goes off to commit his butchery. Talk about fairness, will you?

Slazak overhears. He laughs at first
—the nerve of these animals!—
and then he stops laughing.

Max

Artists are combative by nature. Civilians don’t realize that. You have to be pleasant and you have to smile nicely in the direction of other people’s work and you have to say things that are suitable for quoting in family publications when critics ask you what you think, but that doesn’t mean you’re not combative.

It’s Darwinism at work. Pure Darwinism.