Standing in the center of the courtyard, rain pelting his wool uniform, was the SS officer I called Herr Tremor. There was no shudder in his grasp as he lifted a whip and brought it down on the back of the girl from my block who had hidden the radio. She lay facedown in a puddle. After each blow he yelled at her to get up, and each time she did, he struck her again.
I would be next.
An uncontrollable shiver ran down the length of me. My teeth were chattering, my nose running. I wondered if he would kill the girl who stole the radio.
Or me, for that matter.
It is a strange thing, to contemplate dying. I found myself thinking of the criteria I had once kept for my father, as an inside joke. I had criteria of my own now:
When I die, please make it fast.
If there is a bullet, aim for my heart, not my head.
It would be good if it did not hurt.
I’d rather die of a sudden blow than an infection. I’d even welcome the gas. Maybe that just felt like going to sleep and never waking up.
I do not know when I started thinking of the mass extermination at this camp as being humane—thinking like the Germans, I supposed—but if the alternative was to waste away to a corpse, as my mind shut down by degrees due to starvation, well, then, maybe it was best to just get this over with.
As we approached Herr Tremor, he looked up, the rain sleeting across his features. His eyes, I noticed, were like glass. Pale and practically silver, like a mirror. “I am not done here,” he said in German.
“Should we wait, Schutzhaftlagerführer?” asked the guard.
“I have no intention of standing around all day in this pissing rain because some animals cannot follow rules,” he said.
I lifted my chin. Very precisely, in German, I said, “ Ich bin kein Tier.”
I am not an animal.
His gaze narrowed on mine. I immediately looked down at my feet.
He lifted his right hand, the one holding the whip, and cracked it across my cheekbone so that my head snapped to the side. “ Da irrst du dich.”
You are mistaken.
I fell to my knees in the mud, holding one hand up to my cheek. The tail of the whip had cut a gash under my eye. Blood mixed with rain, running down my chin. The girl on the ground beside me caught my gaze. Her uniform had been flayed open; the flesh of her back was peeled back like the petals of a rose.
Behind me I could hear conversation; the guards who had brought me here were telling someone else, someone new, what my infraction was. This new officer stepped over me. “ Schutzhaftlagerführer, ” a voice said. “You are busy here. With your permission perhaps I can help you?”
I could see only the back of his uniform, and his gloved hands, which were clasped behind him. His boots were so shiny that I stared at them, wondering how he could walk through so much mud without getting them filthy.
I could not believe that was what I was thinking about, the minute before I was to be killed.
Herr Tremor shrugged and turned back to the girl on the ground beside me. The other officer walked off. I was hauled upright and taken across the compound, past Kanada, to the administrative building where this officer entered. He shouted an order at the guards, and I was brought downstairs to some kind of cell. I heard a heavy lock being snapped into place after the door was sealed.
There was no light. The walls and the floor were made of stone; it was like an old wine cellar, slightly damp, with moss that made everything slippery. I sat with my back against the wall, sometimes pressing my swollen cheek to the cool stones. The one time I dozed off, I awakened to the feel of a mouse running up my leg beneath my work dress. After that, I stood.
Several hours passed. The cut on my face stopped bleeding. I wondered if the officer had forgotten about me, or if he was just saving me for punishment after the rain stopped, so that Herr Tremor could take his time hurting me. By then my cheek had inflamed so badly that my eye was swollen shut. When I heard the door being opened again, I winced at the beam of light that fell into the cramped space.
I was brought to an office. HAUPTSCHARFÜHRER F. HARTMANN, it said on the door. There was a large wooden desk, and many filing cabinets, and an ornate chair—the kind you always found lawyers sitting in. In that chair was the officer in charge of Kanada.
And spread out in front of him, across the green blotter of his desk and various papers and files, were all of my photographs, flipped onto their bellies to reveal my story.
I knew what Herr Tremor was capable of; I saw it every day at Appell. In a way, Herr Dybbuk was more frightening, because I had no idea what to expect from him.
He was in charge of Kanada and I had stolen from him and the evidence was displayed between us.
“Leave us,” he said to the guard who had brought me.
There was a window behind the officer. I watched the rain strike the glass, reveling in the simple fact that I was inside and warm. I was standing in a room where there was faint classical music playing on the radio. If not for the fact that I was probably about to be beaten to death, I would have counted this as the first moment since arriving at the camp that I felt normal.
“So you speak German,” he said, in his native tongue.
I nodded. “ Ja, Herr Hauptscharführer.”
“And you can apparently write it, too.”
My eyes flickered toward the photographs. “I studied in school,” I replied.
He passed me a pad of paper and a pen. “Prove it.” He began to walk around the room, reciting a poem. “ Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten, / Daß ich so traurig bin, / Ein Märchen aus uralten Zeiten, / Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn.”
I knew the poem. I had studied it with Herr Bauer and had once taken an examination on this very dictation, for which I received the highest marks. I translated in my head: I wish I knew the meaning, a sadness has fallen on me. The ghost of an ancient legend, that will not let me be.
“Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt, ” the Hauptscharführer continued. “ Und ruhig flie ß t der Rhein . . .”
The air is cool in the twilight and gently flows the Rhine . . .
“Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt, ” I added under my breath, “im Abendsonnenschein.”
He had heard me. He took the pad and checked my transcription. Then he looked up, staring at me as if I were a creature he had never seen before. “You know this work.”
I nodded. “ ‘The Lorelei,’ by Heinrich Heine.”
“Ein unbekannter Verfasser, ” he corrected. Anonymous.
That was when I remembered that Heinrich Heine had been Jewish.
“You realize that you stole material from the Reich,” he murmured.
“Yes, I know,” I burst out. “I’m sorry. It was a mistake.”
He raised his brows. “It was a mistake to willfully steal something?”
“No. It was a mistake to think the photographs didn’t matter to the Reich.”
He opened his mouth and then snapped it shut. He could not admit that the photographs were valuable, because that was tantamount to admitting that those who were killed had worth; but he couldn’t admit that the photos were meaningless, because doing so would dilute his argument for punishing me. “That is not the point,” he said finally. “The point is that they do not belong to you.”
The officer sank back into his chair, rapping his fingers on his desk. He picked up one of the pictures and flipped it over to the side with writing on it. “This story. Where is the rest of it?”
I imagined the guards ransacking the block, trying to find more photographs with writing. When they didn’t, would they just start hurting people until someone gave them the answer they wanted? “I haven’t written it yet,” I confessed.
This surprised him; I realized he had assumed I was simply recounting a tale I’d read elsewhere. I wasn’t supposed to be intelligent enough to create something like this. “You,” he said. “You made up this monster . . . this upiór?”
“Yes,” I answered
. “Well, I mean, no. In Poland everyone knows about the upiór. But this particular one, he is a figment of my imagination.”
“Most girls write of love. You chose to write about a beast,” he said thoughtfully.
We were speaking in German. We were having a conversation, about writing. As if at any moment he might not take out his pistol and shoot me in the head.
“Your choice of topic reminds me of another mythical beast,” he said. “The Donestre. You have heard of it?”
Was this a test? A trick? Was it a euphemism for some kind of corporal punishment? Was my treatment dependent on my answer? I knew of Wodnik—the water demon—and Dziwo ona—dryads—but they were Polish legends. What if I lied and said yes? Would I be worse off than if I told the truth and said no?
“The ancient Greeks—which is what I studied in school—wrote of the Donestre. It had the head of a lion and the body of a man. It could speak all the languages of the human race, which as you might imagine,” the Hauptscharführer said drily, “came in handy.”
I looked into my lap. I wondered what he would think if he knew my nickname for him, Herr Dybbuk, referred to yet another mythical beast.
“Like your upiór, this brute killed freely and devoured its prey. But the Donestre had one peculiar trait. It would save the severed head of its victim, sit beside it, and weep.” He fixed his gaze on me until I glanced up. “Why do you think that was?”
I swallowed. I had never heard of this Donestre, but I knew the upiór Aleksander better than I knew myself. I had lived, breathed, birthed that character. “Perhaps some monsters,” I said quietly, “still have a conscience.”
The officer’s nostrils flared. He stood up and came around the desk, and I immediately cowered, throwing up my arm to block the blow.
“You realize,” he said, his voice practically a whisper, “for stealing, I could make an example of you. Publicly flog you, like the prisoner the Schutzhaftlagerführer was punishing earlier. Or kill you.”
Tears sprang to my eyes. As it turned out I was not too proud to plead for my meager life. “Please don’t. I’ll do anything.”
The Hauptscharführer hesitated. “Then tell me,” he said, “what happens next?”
• • •
To say I was stunned would be an understatement. Not only did the Hauptscharführer not lay a hand on me but he kept me in his office for the rest of the day, typing out lists of all the items that had been salvaged in Kanada. These, I would learn, were sent to various places around Europe that were still controlled by the Germans, along with the goods themselves. This, he told me, was my new assignment. I would take dictation, type letters, answer the phone (in German, of course), and take messages for him. When he left to walk through the barracks of Kanada, his usual routine, he did not leave me alone. Instead, he had another officer stand guard inside the office, to make sure I did not do anything suspicious. The whole time I was typing, my fingers shook on the keys. When the Hauptscharführer returned, he sat down at his desk without saying a word. He began to punch numbers into an adding machine. Its long white tongue curled over the edge of his desk as he worked his way through a stack of papers.
By late afternoon, my head was swimming. Unlike in Kanada, I had not been given soup at lunch. However limited that sustenance was, it was still food. When the Hauptscharführer came back after one of his patrols of Kanada with a muffin and a coffee, my stomach growled so loudly that I knew that in our close quarters, he could hear it.
Shortly afterward there was a knock on the office door, and I jumped in my chair. The Hauptscharführer called out for the visitor to enter. I kept my eyes trained on the page in front of me, but immediately recognized the voice of the Schutzhaftlagerführer, which sounded like smoke falling over the edge of a blade. “What a pisshole of a day,” he said, throwing open the door. “Come, I need to dull my senses at the canteen before I have to suffer through Appell.”
The hair on the back of my neck prickled. He had to suffer through Appell?
His eyes fell on me, head bent, diligently typing. “Well,” he said. “What is this?”
“I needed a secretary, Reiner. I told you that a month ago. The amount of paper that gets processed through this office grows bigger every day.”
“And I told you I’d take care of it.”
“It was taking you too long. Write me up, if it makes you feel better.” He shrugged. “I took matters into my own hands.”
The Schutzhaftlagerführer walked around me in a half circle. “By taking one of my workers?”
“One of my workers,” the Hauptscharführer said.
“Without my permission.”
“For God’s sake, Reiner. You can find another. This one happens to be fluent in German.”
“Wirklich? ” he said. Really?
He was talking to me, but since I had my back to him, I didn’t know he was waiting for a response. Suddenly, something crashed down on the back of my skull. I fell out of my chair onto my knees, reeling. “You will answer when you are spoken to!” The Schutzhaftlagerführer stood over me with his hand raised.
Before he could strike me again, his brother took a firm grasp of his arm. “I would request that you trust me to discipline my own staff.”
The Schutzhaftlagerführe r’s eyes glittered. “You would ask this of your superior, Franz?”
“No,” the Hauptscharführer replied. “I would ask this of my brother.”
The tension dissipated then, like steam through a window. “So you’ve decided to adopt a pet.” The Schutzhaftlagerführer laughed. “You would not be the first officer to do so, although I question your judgment when there are fine volksdeutsche girls who are ready and willing.”
I dragged myself onto the chair again, running my tongue across my teeth to make sure none had been knocked loose. I wondered if this was what the Hauptscharführer planned for me. If I’d been brought here to be his whore.
That was a whole new level of punishment I hadn’t considered.
I had not yet heard of a female prisoner being sexually abused by an officer. It was not that they were such gentlemen. But relationships were against the rules, and these officers were big on rules. Plus, we were Jews, and therefore completely undesirable. To lie with one of us was to lie with vermin.
“Let’s talk about this in the canteen,” the Hauptscharführer suggested. He left the remains of his muffin on his desk. As he passed me, he said, “You will clean up my desk while I’m gone.”
I nodded, looking away. I could feel the Schutzhaftlagerführe r’s eyes raking over my face, my knobby body hidden beneath the work dress. “Just remember, Franz,” he said. “Stray dogs bite.”
This time the Hauptscharführer did not have a junior officer babysit me. Instead, he locked me into the office. This trust unnerved me. The interest in my writing, the news that he was making me his secretary—a job that would allow me to be warm all day long, now that winter was coming, and that could not be considered hard labor by any means. Why show me kindness, if he planned to rape me?
So it’s not rape.
The thought fell like a stone into the well of my mind.
It would never happen. I’d slit my throat with a letter opener before I developed any kind of relationship with an SS officer.
I silently sent a thank-you to Aron, who had been my first, so that this German did not have to be.
I crossed to his desk. How long had it been since I had a muffin? My father had baked them, sometimes, with stone-ground cornmeal and the finest white sugar. This one was dark, with currants caught in the cake.
I pressed my fingers to the wax paper, gathering up the crumbs. Half of it I tucked into a little torn corner of the paper, and slipped into my dress, saving it for later. I would share it with Darija. Then I licked my fingers clean. The flavor nearly brought me to my knees. I drank the last sips of coffee, too, before carefully putting the paper into the trash, and drying the cup.
Immediately, I began to panic. What if this w
as not a show of trust, but another test? What if he came back and checked the garbage can to see if I had stolen his food? I played out the scenarios in my mind. The two brothers would enter, and the Schutzhaftlagerführer would say, “I told you so, Franz.” And then the Hauptscharführer would shrug and turn me over to his brother for the whipping I had been expecting this morning. If stealing photographs from the dead was bad, surely taking food that belonged to an officer was much worse.
By the time the Hauptscharführer unlocked the office door and entered again—alone—I was so nervous that my teeth were chattering. He frowned at me. “You are cold?” I could smell beer on his breath.
I nodded, although I had not been this warm for weeks.
He did not look in the trash. He glanced around the room cursorily, then sat down on the corner of his desk and picked up the stack of photographs. “I must confiscate these. You understand?”
“Yes,” I whispered.
It took me a moment to realize that he was holding something out to me. A small leather journal, and a fountain pen. “You will take these instead.”
Hesitantly, I took the gifts. The pen was heavy in my hand. It was all I could do to not hold the journal up to my nose, breathe in the scent of the paper and the hide.
“This arrangement,” he said formally. “It suits you?”
As if I had a choice.
Was I willing to trade my body in order to feed my mind? Because that was the deal he was striking, or so his brother had said. For a price, I could write all I wanted. And I would be assigned to a job anyone else would have killed for.
When I did not answer, he sighed and stood. “Come,” he said.
I started shaking again, so violently that he stepped away from me. It was time for me to pay up. I crossed my arms, hugging the journal to my chest, wondering where he would take me. To officers’ quarters, I supposed.
The Storyteller Page 32
