by Evans, Mike
Then a man appeared at the door. He glanced out to the hall through the opening and gave me an angry look, then slammed the door shut. The clerk who was with me took me by the arm and hustled me to the front of the building. As he opened the door for me to leave he whispered, “Never let them see your emotions again. They will shoot you for being a sympathizer.”
“But the teeth,” I protested.
“Mind your own business,” he slammed the door behind me. Outside, the cool air helped me catch my breath and I filled my lungs with it over and over, as I had when we were riding in the truck. As it had then, the fresh, crisp air cleared my mind and I felt a sense of hope. But guilt quickly overwhelmed me. If what we’d heard was true, Mama, Papa, David, and everyone else faced a horrible life in the camps. And here I was, with fresh clothes to wear, a place to stay, and the promise of three meals each day.
Someone nudged me on the elbow and I turned to see a soldier standing beside me. “Are you lost?”
“No,” I replied. Then I remembered the paper Adolf had given me for the boardinghouse. I took it from my pocket and showed it to him. “Can you tell me where this is located?”
He glanced at the document, reading it with disdain, hoping to find some reason to give me trouble. Then his eyes came upon Adolf’s signature at the bottom. His body tensed, as if snapping to attention. He handed the document to me and pointed to the left. “Down the street. Two blocks on the right.”
“Thank you.” Gripping the suitcase in one hand, with the document in the other, I set off in the direction he’d pointed, wondering what would happen next.
The walk to the boardinghouse took only a few minutes. I arrived at the corner just before dark and checked the address on the paper. A soldier stood nearby with a rifle slung over his shoulder. I would later learn they manned all the corners in the city, at least during those early days after the Nazis occupied our country, but seeing him that evening with the rifle and all his gear left me unsettled. He looked in my direction and when I lingered longer than he expected, he started toward me. I was frightened at first, then I thought of the other soldier’s reaction moments earlier when he’d seen Adolf ’s signature on the paper. No one would bother me. Not that night, anyway. Instead of cowering and waiting for the guard to accost me, I turned away from him, pushed open the door to the boardinghouse, and went inside.
The door opened to a short hallway with a coatrack. A staircase lay just ahead, and to the right a door led into the front room. I glanced inside and saw a sofa along the wall beneath a window that looked out on the street. End tables stood to either side with lamps on both. Chairs were arranged at right angles to the sofa. Paintings covered the walls. As I admired the furnishings, a woman appeared beside me. She wore a teal green suit with flat black shoes. Her gray hair was pulled up in a bun.
She stared at me with cold gray eyes that seemed to bore right through me. Her name was Hilda Gedek and right from the start I did not like her.
“May I help you?” she asked in a tone that made the question sound like a threat.
“I was told you have a room for me.” I handed her the document. “Adolf Eichmann sent me.”
She seemed unfazed by the mention of his name and kept her eyes focused on the document, which she quickly scanned. “You have identification papers?” she asked without looking up.
“Yes.” I handed her the identity card. She studied it a moment, then stepped aside.
A phone sat on a table at the end of the hallway by the stairs. She picked it up and clicked the button on the cradle several times. I heard her talking to someone but her back was to me, which prevented me from hearing what she said. The conversation lasted longer than I expected but after two or three minutes she hung up the phone and returned to me. “Very well,” she handed me the identity card. “I will show you to your room.”
She led the way upstairs to the second floor, then turned and brought me to a room in the corner on the backside of the house. The room was dusty but not as dirty as the apartment in the ghetto. Plaster on the walls was cracked, as was the ceiling. In the corner, a section near the window was broken away, exposing wooden lathing beneath. To the left was a single bed with a blanket folded neatly at one end. A chair sat beside it in the corner. A lone window overlooked a courtyard in back of the house. Next to the window, near the corner with the cracked plaster, was a chest with four drawers. A bare light bulb hung from the ceiling.
Hilda handed me a key. “You share a bathroom at the end of the hall. No smoking. No food in the room. And absolutely no visitors.” She backed toward the door. “Breakfast is served each morning at six.
Dinner at seven each evening. If you want to eat, you must be on time.”
She glanced at the watch on her wrist. “Dinner will be served in two hours.” Then without waiting for me to reply, she stepped into the hall and closed the door.
Alone in the room I found the silence overwhelming. Gone were the cries of hungry children and the wail of mourning mothers. No sound of footsteps in the hall or angry voices outside. I moved slowly from the door and stood near the foot of the bed, turning in a circle, my eyes scanning every detail. Between the bed and chair in the corner there was a closet I hadn’t noticed before. I set the suitcase on the bed, walked around to the opposite side, and opened the closet door. A row of shelves stood to one side with a bar that extended from the shelves to the wall on the right. Several clothes hangers dangled there. I opened the suitcase, took out the coat, and hung it in the closet. Then I noticed a shelf above the bar and on it was a single large hatbox. I took it down and opened the top, hoping to find a long-lost treasure or at least a surprise. It was empty and I replaced it on the shelf.
With the coat put away, I walked to the chest on the opposite side of the room. When I opened the top drawer I found a copy of Life magazine dated in March of 1938. It was written in English and at the time I could only read a few words, but the cover was a picture of a German soldier with a bugle in his hand. My heart leaped at the sight of it. Months had passed since I had read anything. I took it out and laid it on the bed, then put my dresses in the drawer. As I placed them inside, I caught a glimpse of myself in the window and saw how dirty and disheveled I appeared. I felt ashamed and knew then why people on the street glared at me and why Hilda had been so suspicious. Then I thought of work the next day, and tears came to my eyes at the prospect of going there looking the way I did. I ran my fingers over my face, and tiny clumps of dirt appeared on my fingertips. “You are a mess,” I told myself. “Sarah Batsheva. A dirty, stinking—” Suddenly I remembered the identity card. I glanced around for it and found it on the bed. Holding it in my hand I stared at the picture and whispered the name written beneath it. “Ellen Krupp. My name is Ellen Krupp. And I have papers to prove it.”
Determined to take advantage of the opportunity I’d been given, I took a dress from the drawer and walked down the hall to the bathroom. I pushed open the door and found a large tub along the back wall. Next to it was a toilet and in the corner a sink with running water. I closed and locked the door, stripped off the dress I’d been wearing for months, and turned on the water in the tub. Steam rose in the air as hot water filled it. Then I stepped into it and let my body sink down, stretching all the way out. By the time I finished washing, the water was dingy with dirt but I was relaxed and refreshed. Afterward, I put on new dress, washed out the old one, and returned to the bedroom.
The room was cold but I did not mind. For the first time in months I was clean. I hung the old dress on a hanger in the closet to let it dry. As I hung it in place on the bar, I brushed lint from the shoulders of the overcoat and held out each side, checking the fabric once more just to make sure there were no holes or tears. It had pockets on either side. I slid my hand into the one on the right and found it was empty. But in the one on the left, my fingers touched something that felt like paper. I pulled it out to see it was an empty envelope addressed to Ayelet Yavin in Pottenstein. I knew the v
illage. It was located southwest of Vienna. As I stared at it a moment, wondering what happened to Ayelet, I heard voices from the first floor and the sound of footsteps in the hall. Then I remembered mealtime and turned away to go downstairs.
* * *
The next morning, I awoke at sunup and was downstairs in time for breakfast. I ate so much at dinner the night before that Hilda took notice. That morning I tried not to overdo it but I had been hungry for a long time. Now with food before me I found it difficult to resist.
After breakfast I put on the overcoat and started up the street toward the office. Several other women from the boardinghouse took the same route but I avoided them and kept to myself. The morning air was cold against my cheeks but the wool overcoat kept me warm inside, which made the walk rather pleasant.
When I arrived at the building, the guard at the door checked my identity card against a list on a clipboard. Then he handed me a pen and instructed me to sign beside my name. My eyes scanned down the list for Sarah Batsheva, but it wasn’t there. My heart skipped a beat and for an instant I wondered if I was asleep and the day before had been a cruel dream, then I remembered my name was now Ellen Krupp. I found the name, scribbled a signature beside it, and went inside.
On the second floor I was met by a woman who introduced herself as Eva Fröbe. She was petite, a few years older than I, and very much German. She wore a plain wool suit with a swastika pin on each lapel and, like the woman I’d seen the day before and Hilda at the boardinghouse, her hair was pulled in a bun that lay tightly against her scalp. I followed her down the hall past Adolf ’s office to a door on the right. Beyond it was a room with six desks arranged in rows, three on either side, each with a typewriter in the center, a tray for documents on the left, and a chair tucked neatly in place.
Eva led me to the center one on the left. “This is your desk,” she pointed. “Colonel Eichmann expects you to keep it neat and orderly.” She opened the top drawer. “Pens and pencils are in here, along with an extra bottle of ink.” She shoved it closed and opened another drawer. “Paper is in here. The inkwell is kept in the drawer below when it’s not in use.” She turned to the right and gestured with her hand. “File cabinets are along the wall. Someone will show you the order as you work. Any questions?”
“What will I be doing?”
“Reports,” she said tersely. “The new girls start with reports.” She gave me a quick smile and turned away. “Speak up if you have any questions. No one expects you to know everything on the first day.”
When she was gone I scooted the chair back from the desk and took a seat. I sat there with the coat wrapped around me, my head scrunched down against the collar, and let my eyes wander over the room. It was on the opposite side of Vienna from the ghetto, yet it was a lifetime away from the filth and squalor. Mama and Papa had not wanted me to associate with Adolf, yet I was here and they were…wherever they were because of my friendship with him. Friendship with Stephan put my life in jeopardy. My relationship to Mama and Papa put my future at risk. But my relationship with Adolf, which had been forbidden, rescued me from the peril they created. At the thought of it, the sense of guilt I’d felt before returned. I shouldn’t be so ungrateful. They were only doing what they thought best for me. But it was true, Adolf was the reason I was sitting in that room and not in the camps Stephan talked so much about.
A few minutes later a woman entered the room and took a seat in front of me. She glanced in my direction and pointed past me. “Hang your coat back there.” I glanced over my shoulder and saw a row of hooks along the wall by the door.
“Sorry,” I said sheepishly. “I forgot I had it on.” I walked to the back of the room, hung the coat on one of the hooks, and returned to my chair.
Ten minutes later, Eva entered the room with a handful of papers tucked under her arm. She dropped them on my desk, placed her hand on the back of my chair, and leaned over me. “Use the notes on these pages to prepare arrival reports for the locations indicated at the top.” She tapped on the pages with her finger as she spoke and I could see information on the sheets had been written by hand. “Do you know how to use a typewriter?”
“Somewhat,” I tried to sound confident. In reality, I had never typed a word on a machine like that or any other.
She opened a side drawer of the desk and took out several preprinted forms. “Use these.” She laid the forms beside the stack of pages. “Prepare your reports in triplicate—three copies of each page. You should find some carbon paper in one of the drawers. Keep the pages square and even. Colonel Eichmann doesn’t like sloppy work.” She pointed to the empty desks in the room. “These were all occupied by women who did sloppy work. They aren’t here now. You are. Make the most of it.”
When she was gone, the woman who was seated at the desk in front of me turned around to face me. “I am Gerda Becker,” she smiled. “You don’t have a clue what she was talking about, do you?”
I gave her a wry smile. “Was it that obvious?”
“Don’t worry. No one ever does at first.” She rose from her chair and came behind me. “This is what you do.” She opened a drawer on the right and took out carbon paper, then placed it between the blank forms. “Three forms, with a carbon between them.” She held the forms between her fingers and gently bumped the bottom edge against the desktop. “Tap it like that to get the pages lined up, then feed it into the typewriter like this.” She rolled it into place and tucked the top beneath a bar that held the paper against the roller. “You can press the knob on the end of the roller to get the lines in the correct position and then you’re ready to type.”
At the top of each handwritten page was the name Mauthausen Camp. I knew the town of Mauthausen. It was on the Danube River, not far east of Linz. Stephan told me about a camp there but I didn’t believe it actually existed. Now I could see for myself that he’d been right. On the pages were lists of names with dates indicating the time when each person arrived at the camp. As I worked through them I saw many people whom I knew, some of them I had known all my life.
With Gerda’s help I pecked away on the typewriter using both index fingers. Before long, my fingers learned the location of the keys and my typing speed increased. By midmorning I had completed the pages for Mauthausen and moved on to sheets for a camp located at Gusen, a town situated midway between Linz and Mauthausen. No one had mentioned a camp at that location and I wondered how many more camps there might be.
At midmorning, Eva brought a stack of completed reports from the previous day. She set them in the tray on my desk and told me to file them in the cabinet. Her tone was more abrupt than before and she didn’t stay long to check on us. When she was gone, Gerda picked up the reports from my tray and gestured with a smile. “Come on. I’ll show you what to do.” I followed her to the file cabinets and watched as she pulled open a drawer.
“Completed reports are filed according to the location noted on the top of the form.” She flipped through the files with her fingers. “The files we’re looking at right here are for Mauthausen.”
I gestured to the row of file cabinets that lined the wall. “We have this many camps?”
“Not everything in here relates to the camps. That’s just where they start you out.” She placed her hands on the cabinets in front of us. “These two cabinets are for the camps. The others you’ll learn about as we go.” She turned back to the open drawer. “Arrival censuses go in one folder. Transfers go in another. Deaths go in back. And there are separate files for correspondence, contracts, that sort of thing. You’ll see that as you go.”
A puzzled frown wrinkled my forehead. “We have death reports?” “We get those about every other day.” She said it in a matter-of-fact tone, as if deaths were a routine matter. “How many?”
“How many what?”
“How many people die?” “Ten or twelve pages.”
The handwritten sheets I worked from that morning contained twenty-five or thirty names each. I quickly calculated the numb
er in my head. “That many people die in two days?”
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. “I just fill out the forms.”
Gerda checked the reports Eva put on my desk. “These forms she gave you just now are all from Gusen. That file is over here.”
She moved to the left, but I remained with the open drawer, my eyes fixed on the death census file. I took it out and glanced through the pages. Names appeared on the left side of the form with the date and time of death in center and the cause of death on the far right. I scanned down the list, looking first at the names, then the dates, and finally the cause of death. It was all arranged so neat and orderly. The names in alphabetical order. The dates and times in chronological sequence. “This isn’t right.”
“What isn’t right?”
I pointed to the form. “They’re listed in alphabetical order.”
“These were prepared according to the information on handwritten lists. Just like the census reports you’ve been working on. Someone checked them before they were filed. I’m sure they are correct.”
“But they’re in chronological sequence, too.”
She looked at me and lowered her voice. “Just type what they give us. Don’t ask questions about what you see.”
“But this is impossible,” I argued. “According to this report, these people all died in alphabetical order and in chronological sequence.”
Gerda snatched the file from my hand, stuffed it back in place, and shoved the drawer closed. “Listen to me,” her voice was barely a whisper. “If you want to keep your job, you’ll do as you’re told and only what you’re told.” She pointed to the empty desks behind us. “The others who were here weren’t doing sloppy work. They were very efficient.
