The Thief of Auschwitz (8 page)

“Oh, he’s alive all right,” says the deliveryman.

“Thank you for the report,” she says.

He’s unruffled. “Messages cost extra,” he says.

“One kilo for taking a message to my husband,” she says again, “and the other kilo when you bring a message from him back to me.”

“That’s two messages.” He’s holding up his fingers. “The going rate for two messages—”

Eidel takes a step toward him and bends to open the oven. The hinges scream and a cloud of heat crowds all the air from the room and the deliveryman winces. Eidel works on. “The going rate for me to betray the women in my commando by giving away their food,” she says without even looking at him, “is two messages. Take it or leave it. Take it or go find your radishes somewhere else.”

She slams the oven shut and the heat still chokes the room and the little junkman from Witnica says, “Fine. Two kilos, two messages.” He pulls a ragged little sack from his pocket and tilts his head toward the storage room. “Now…while your capo’s still nowhere to be seen?”

*

The administration building is out by the gates, near the train station. It’s enormous and complex, containing on one hand the echoing halls and damp, foul-smelling chambers where prisoners are stripped and deloused, and on the other the offices and conference rooms where the men who manage such things spend their days—and although Jacob has seen it before he’s never seen it from this angle. He reports to a low door just around the corner from the main entrance. It’s the kind of door a mouse would use. SS vehicles are parked in a lot close by—trucks and vans, black cars and powerful motorcycles. The high fence of electrified barbed wire is only a few yards distant. He could walk over and touch it if he wanted to. Touch it and die. Or die from mere proximity, since on either side are guard towers bristling with machine guns.

He knocks at the door but no one answers. He steps close and looks through the window into a dim and unwelcoming space with hallways leading off in three directions. A radiator stands in one corner and he realizes that he hasn’t seen such a thing in a long while. The weather is warm now, summer having begun, but how luxurious it will be for these Nazi murderers come winter, settled here in their comfortable offices, enjoying the benefits of steam heat! He imagines the clanking noises when the steam begins to flow, the dry smell of dust burning off hot iron, the rising warmth. He imagines himself coming in through this door every Friday morning all winter long, stamping snow from his shoes and closing the door behind him and going on to penetrate the warm depths of this place for an hour, two hours, an entire working day.

The idea overcomes him and draws him in, and once his eyes have adjusted he can see that there’s a woman at a desk at the end of the hallway straight ahead. She sits in a pool of light provided by a gooseneck lamp, and she talks on a telephone, and she doesn’t raise her eyes as other women and men in SS uniforms hurry past her. She must be the one expecting him. He scrapes his feet on a rough mat and moves down the hall. Daniel in the lion’s den, treading toward apocalypse.

She keeps her eyes down and looks only from a calendar on the desk to a pad of paper on which she makes a mark now and then, but she looks up as Jacob approaches—as if among all of these individuals this Jew is the only one with the ability to attract her attention. She looks up smoothly and without emotion, the way one of the men in the guard towers would raise his gun.

If she knows his name, she doesn’t use it. If she knows that he even has a name. She looks down to read his serial number aloud from her pad and she looks up again and Jacob nods. He shows the tattoo on his left arm in confirmation. This is the way it always goes. Your capo might use your name, but no one higher.

She stands. “The
scharführer
is waiting.”

But the sergeant isn’t waiting. Not really. He’s on a telephone call, apparently with someone higher up, and Jacob has to wait outside the office where the receptionist leaves him. Standing at attention, not touching the wall, not touching anything. Just listening. Standing there as if he has no more sentience than a potted plant.

The sergeant’s name is Drexler, and he’s the commandant’s senior clerk. Jacob watches him as he listens and consults a piece of paper and idly runs his finger down the pages of an enormous ledger. The ledger sits on top of another one just like it, and there are many more on a tall set of bookshelves just behind him, rank on rank of them like volumes of an encyclopedia. Jacob has seen ledgers like these before, elsewhere in this very building. His own name and serial number were recorded in one on the day he arrived.

“Already this week,” says Drexler, into the telephone, “we have had twelve die of heart attacks, nine more of inflammation of the kidneys, and fifteen of bronchitis.”

Murmurs from the other end.

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir. Pneumonia is always good, but in my opinion it’s more credible in the cold weather.”

Murmurs.

“Yes, sir. I have indeed requested a greater variety of diagnoses, but as you know, the doctor has many other things on his mind. Yes, sir. I have done so under your authority. But you know the doctor, sir.” Drexler glances up. He flashes a reflexive smile at the figure in the doorway, a smile either submissive or predatory depending, and when the figure in the doorway proves to be only the Jewish barber he withdraws it.

“Very well, sir,” he says, smiling at the telephone instead. “My thoughts exactly, sir. There is no need to carry on this charade any longer. We shall close the book on it, so to speak. Yes, sir. Very good, sir.
Heil Hitler.”
He hangs up and touches the tip of the pencil to his tongue and draws a line across the open page before him, and then he shuts the book and waves the barber in. There is a wooden chair in the corner, alongside a round table arrayed with towels and soap and the rest. An empty basin and a jug of steaming water. A hand mirror and a white linen sheet and a barbering kit which although not half so fine as the one that Jacob lost along the way is nonetheless immaculately maintained and sharp as weaponry.

“Hurry up,” says Drexler in Polish, carrying the ledger with him to the chair. “I don’t have all day.” He takes his seat with the book in his lap, and reaches up to loosen his collar. Jacob approaches from the front and bows his head a little bit and Drexler looks right through him, so he goes about his business. He locates and unfolds the white linen drape, and as he sweeps it around Drexler’s shoulders he takes note of the word inked onto the front of the ledger.
Totenbuch.

The Registry of Death.
His head spins. They must keep such records, after all. It’s the German way: everything in its place, everything properly noted. Even murder. But to happen upon it is like happening upon Satan himself in some dark mountain pass, Satan with his endless scroll of the damned. And this Drexler is the devil who maintains it.

“Schnell,”
he says, settling beneath that death-white sheet with the book in his lap. And then he speaks in Polish again, assuming that Jacob could not possibly understand even the simplest of commands in more than one language, “Just a little off the sides, and trim the nape while you’re at it.” He points with his finger.

Concentration is impossible. Jacob tries the scissors and brings the comb toward Drexler’s hair. His hands shake. He withdraws, breathing irregularly, and Drexler turns his head in question. Without thinking, and strictly against orders, Jacob speaks: “Straight ahead, please,” he says, in German. The words are a combination of reflex and self-defense, and Drexler’s response is reflexive as well. He straightens his neck and looks forward, the conventions of the barber’s chair and his military background combining to produce automatic obedience, even to one so low.

The establishment of a familiar rhythm soothes Jacob. His hands steady a bit. He tries the scissors again and puts the comb to Drexler’s head and finds himself all at once back in his element. Click click. Snip snip. He works briskly and automatically and he tries not to look at the outline of the ledger in Drexler’s lap. He wonders how long before his own name will be inscribed there, or Max’s name. He wonders if Eidel’s is there already, and he is certain that Lydia’s must be.

“Watch the ear,” says Drexler.

He watches. Barbering a man in an ordinary straight-backed chair is different from using the old mechanical chair he had in Zakopane, his father’s overstuffed leather chair with its pedals and its levers and its million fine adjustments. As many haircuts as he’s given in one ghetto after another, on benches and straightbacked chairs and milking stools, he has never quite accustomed himself to the difference. These last few months of digging ditches haven’t refined his skills either. But he perseveres. He empties his mind and he straightens his back and he keeps on.

“That’s better,” says Drexler.

Jacob dares to breathe. He thinks perhaps he’ll get this assignment after all. Every Friday he’ll come here for a few hours, and on the other days of the week he’ll be sent to a soft job like Schuler’s in Canada, and as a further benefit he’ll acquire the right to move around the camp with more freedom than any ordinary prisoner. He’ll go from assignment to assignment by himself, at least on Fridays. On that day he’ll even be able to go outside the fence, since the commandant’s villa is known to be on a street just beyond the entrance. He wonders where such freedom will lead him. What he might discover and what he might learn. It’s possible that he could even get word of Eidel, regardless of whether or not she’s being transferred to the new women’s camp.

How happy that would make him. How happy it would make Max.

He sinks into this reverie and lets his hands operate according to their own will, and they work a kind of small magic on Drexler’s appearance. When Jacob holds up the mirror, the Nazi smiles. It’s a smile directed only at himself, but it’s a smile nonetheless. “Go ahead and give me a shave,” he says, indicating the jug of hot water and drawing a hand across his chin.

Jacob shaves him carefully and well, for Eidel and for Max.

Moments later he’s outside again, shading his eyes from the bright sun, beginning the long walk back to the excavation. All alone out here he feels vulnerable and exposed—there’s no pack of men to work his way into the middle of, and no protection from whatever brutality some stranger may choose to inflict upon him—but the truth is that no one notices him at all. Not the prisoners standing in one of the yards enduring a roll call that began sometime the night before. Not the capo in charge of those men and not the guards. Not the SS officer who careens past on a motorcycle and not the two wasted prisoners standing like supplicants outside the door of the hospital. He may as well be invisible. He wonders if it will always be this way, should he get the job and be permitted to come and go alone. If he will always be beneath notice.

He’s thought all along that exposure would be the worst thing,
safety in numbers
and so forth, but now he’s not so certain. As long as he keeps moving, and as long as he stays clear of the fence, he seems entirely safe. To test this idea he turns down a passageway between two blocks, not knowing where he’s headed, and wanders freely for a while. Turning one way and then another at intersections between the buildings, moving steadily, looking purposeful. Nothing happens. He emerges into the clear and turns again, this time back in the direction of the main gate instead of toward the excavation, and once more no one notices. Not a pair of guards smoking alongside the fence, not a woman looking down from a high window overhead, not a group of prisoners queued up in front of the block waiting for something.

All of this walking takes energy. He’s getting tired, and he realizes that he ought to save his strength for the dig. A commando of prisoners passes by at double time, raising dust with their torn boots and their bare feet, and under the cover of their passing he turns back.

He looks down at the tattoo on his arm as he goes and he thinks of the ledgers where such things are recorded. He thinks of Drexler and his
Totenbuch.
The sergeant was talking on the phone to someone higher up—Vollmer, perhaps, or even the commandant himself—about the entries filling that infernal volume. Bronchitis. Inflammations of the kidneys. Heart attack after heart attack.

More diagnoses were required, he said, a greater variety.

Jacob stumbles and nearly falls but catches himself at the last second. A misstep will draw attention. A misstep will destroy his anonymity. So he takes a deep breath and keeps on, understanding at last that he of all people has just seen the end of the
Totenbuch.
It has been a compilation of lies all along—how many prisoners can die of heart attacks in a single day? in a single hour?—and the Nazis won’t be bothered to keep it up anymore.

Anonymity indeed. When men and women die from now on, their names and numbers won’t even go on the record.

He steadies himself and picks up the pace ever so slightly. Not enough to be noticed, but enough. He must get back to the excavation. He must return to his son.

Max