The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  When she reaches her hut, the Kapo is already standing at the door with her stick, ready to hit the women who arrive after the curfew has started, and Dita covers her head with her arms to soften the blow. The Kapo hits her hard, but she barely feels the pain. As she clambers into her bunk, she sees a head being raised in the bunk beside her. It’s her mother.

  “You’re very late, Edita. Is everything all right?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re not deceiving me?”

  “No,” Dita answers grudgingly.

  It irritates her that her mother treats her like a little girl. She feels like telling her that of course she’s fooling her, that in Auschwitz everybody deceives everyone else. But it wouldn’t be fair to take her anger out on her mother.

  “So everything’s fine?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Shut up, you bitches, or I’ll slit your throats!” someone bellows.

  “Stop that racket!” orders the Kapo.

  Silence descends on the hut, but the voice inside Dita’s head doesn’t stop. Hirsch isn’t who they think he is. Who is he, then?

  She tries to fit together everything she knows about him, and that’s when she realizes it’s not a lot. After catching a fleeting glimpse of him at the sports ground on the outskirts of Prague, the next time she bumped into him was in Terezín.

  The Terezín ghetto …

  8.

  Dita clearly remembers the typewritten letter with the Reichsprotektor stamp lying on top of the table with the dark-red-check oiled tablecloth, in that tiny apartment in Josefov. It was an insignificant piece of paper that changed everything. It changed even the name of the small town of Terezín, sixty kilometers from Prague, its German name written in dark capital letters as if they wanted to proclaim it: THERESIENSTADT. And next to that, the word relocation.

  Terezín, or Theresienstadt, was a city Hitler generously donated to the Jews—or so Nazi propaganda maintained. They would even film a documentary directed by Kurt Gerron, the Jewish film director, which showed people happily employed in workshops, playing sports, and calmly attending lectures and social events, all presented with a voiceover that explained how content the Jews were in Terezín. The documentary would “prove” that the rumors about the internment and murder of Jews were false. As soon as he finished the documentary, the Nazis would send Kurt Gerron to Auschwitz, where he would die in 1944.

  Dita sighs.

  The Terezín ghetto …

  The Jewish Council of Prague had offered Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich various options for the location of a such a Jewish city. But Heydrich had wanted Terezín—nothing else would do—and for a rock-solid reason: Terezín was a walled city.

  Dita recalls the sadness of that morning when they had to put their entire lives into two suitcases and drag them to the assembly point near Stromovka park. The Czech police escorted the whole column of deportees to a special train that took them to Terezín.

  She sorts through her mental album for a photograph from November 1942. Her father is helping her grandfather, the old senator, get off the train at Bohušovice station. Her grandmother is in the background, carefully watching. The expression on Dita’s face now is one of anger and irritation at the biological deterioration that attacks even the most upright and energetic people. Her grandfather had been a stone fortress, and now he was a mere sandcastle. In the background of that frozen image, she can also see her mother with that stubbornly neutral expression of hers, pretending that nothing bad is happening and trying not to attract anyone’s attention. She can see herself, too, aged thirteen, more of a girl and outlandishly fat. Her mother had made her wear several sweaters one on top of the other, not because of the cold, but because they were allowed only fifty kilos per person in the suitcases, and layering clothes meant they could bring more. Her father is standing behind her. It’s not the first time I’ve told you not to eat so much pheasant, Edita, he said in that serious way he had when he was joking.

  The first image her eyes had stored in the Terezín album—after they walked past the guard post at the entrance to the precinct and under the archway bearing the phrase ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work makes you free—was of a dynamic city. It was a place with avenues full of people. It had a hospital, a fire station, kitchens, workshops, a day care center. Terezín even had its own Jewish police, the Ghettowache, who wandered about in their jackets and dark caps like any other police in the world. But if you looked more carefully at the hustle and bustle in the streets, you realized that people were carrying baskets with missing handles, threadbare blankets, watches without hands.… The inhabitants rushed to and fro as if they were in a hurry, but Dita understood that no matter how fast you walked, you’d always end up bumping into a wall. That was the deception.

  Terezín was a city where the streets led nowhere.

  That was where she saw Fredy Hirsch again, although her initial memory is of a sound, not an image. It’s of the thunderous clatter of a buffalo stampede like the ones in Karl May’s adventure novels set in the American prairies. It was during one of her first days in the ghetto, and she was still feeling stunned. She was returning from her assigned work—the vegetable gardens that had been planted at the foot of the walls to provide supplies for the SS garrison.

  She was heading back to her small cubicle when she heard a galloping sound coming toward her along a nearby street. She pressed herself against the wall of an apartment block to avoid being mowed down by what she assumed were horses, but what finally came running around the corner was a large group of boys and girls. Their leader was an athletic man with impeccably slicked-back hair and a smooth, elastic stride. He greeted her with a slight nod of his head as he went past. It was Fredy Hirsch, unmistakable, even elegant, in his shorts and T-shirt.

  It would be a while before she saw him again. And it would be a stack of books that would lead to their next encounter.

  It all started when Dita discovered that, among the sheets, clothing, underwear, and other belongings her mother had stuffed into the suitcases, her father had hidden a book. Fortunately, her mother didn’t know, or she would have hit the ceiling over such a waste of allowable weight. When her mother unpacked the suitcase that first night, she was surprised by the thick volume and glared at Dita’s father.

  “We could have brought three more pairs of shoes, given what this weighs.”

  “Why would we want so many shoes, Liesl? We can’t go anywhere.”

  Her mother didn’t answer, but Dita thought she lowered her head so they wouldn’t see she was smiling. Dita’s mother sometimes scolded her father for being such a dreamer, but deep down, she adored him because of it.

  Papa was right. That book took me much further than any pair of shoes.

  Lying on the edge of her bunk in Auschwitz, she smiles as she recalls that moment when she opened the cover of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).

  Starting a book is like boarding a train to go on holiday.

  The Magic Mountain tells how Hans Castorp travels from Hamburg to Davos, in the Swiss Alps, to visit his cousin Joachim, who is undergoing treatment for tuberculosis at an elegant health spa. At first Dita didn’t know if she identified with the cheerful Hans, who has just arrived at the spa for a few days’ holiday, or with the chivalrous and ill Joachim.

  A year is very important at our age. It brings so many changes with it and so much progress down there in the real world! But I have to stay inside this place like a bat; yes, as if I were inside a putrid hole, and I assure you that the comparison is not an exaggeration.

  Dita recalls how she unconsciously nodded in agreement as she read this, and she’s still nodding now as she lies awake on her bunk in Auschwitz. She felt that the characters in that book understood her better than her own parents, because whenever she complained about all the misfortunes they were experiencing in Terezín—her parents having to sleep in separate quarters, her work in the vegetable gardens, the
sense of suffocation from living in a walled city, the monotonous diet—they’d tell her to be patient; it would all be over soon. Maybe by next year the war will be finished, they’d say to her as if they were passing on a magnificent piece of news. For the grown-ups, a year was nothing more than a small segment of a large apple. Her parents would give her a smile, and she’d bite her tongue in frustration because they didn’t understand anything. When you’re young, a year is almost your entire life, the whole apple.

  There were afternoons when her parents would be chatting with other married couples in the inner courtyard of her building, and she’d lie on her bed, cover herself with her blanket, and feel a little like Joachim taking his obligatory rest on the chaise longue in the spa. Or perhaps more like Hans Castorp, who decides to have a few more days of holiday, taking advantage of the rest sessions, but in the more relaxed manner of a tourist rather than a patient.

  In Terezín, Dita lay on her bed waiting for night to fall, just like the two cousins in the book, though her dinner—barely more than bread and cheese—was much more sparse than the five courses served in the Berghof International Spa.

  Cheese! she thinks now, as she lies on top of her bunk in Auschwitz. What did cheese taste like? I don’t even remember anymore. Wonderful!

  It is true that in Terezín, despite being wrapped in four layers of sweaters, she felt the same cold as Joachim, the same cold as the patients lying on lounge chairs on the balconies of their rooms at night, wrapped in blankets and breathing in the cold mountain air that was supposed to be so good for restoring their damaged lungs. And lying there in Terezín with her eyes closed, she shared Joachim’s view that youth is over in a flash.

  It was a long novel, so during the next few months, she shared her own enforced confinement with Joachim and his cheerful cousin Hans. She delved into the secrets, gossip, and obligations of the luxurious Berghof, where illness made time seem to stand still. She shared the conversations between the cousins and the other patients and, in a way, took part in them. The reality in the book became truer and more understandable than the one that surrounded her in that walled city. And it was much more credible than the Auschwitz nightmare of electrified wires and gas chambers that formed the world she currently inhabited.

  One afternoon, a half-German girl who used to hang around in the small room they shared in the ghetto, but whom Dita ignored, decided to ask the girl who was always reading if she knew the Russian novel The Republic of ShKID, and if she’d heard of the boys in Block L417. Well, of course she’d heard about the boys!

  That was when Dita closed her book and pricked up her ears. Curious, she asked Hanka to take her to meet them … “Right now!”

  Hanka tried to tell her that it was a bit late in the day, so maybe tomorrow, but Dita, smiling now as she remembers that moment, cut her off:

  “We don’t have a tomorrow. Everything has to be now!”

  The two girls set off quickly for Block L417, a boys’ block, which they were allowed to visit until seven p.m. At the entrance, Hanka stopped and turned to her roommate with a serious look on her face.

  “Watch out for Ludek.… He’s very handsome! But don’t even think about flirting with him, because I saw him first.”

  Dita raised her right hand with mock solemnity, and the two girls laughed as they headed up the stairs. As soon as they arrived, Hanka started to chat to a tall, slim boy. Not knowing what else to do, Dita approached a boy who was drawing a picture of planet Earth as seen from space.

  “What are those really weird mountains in the foreground?” she asked him without any introduction.

  “It’s the moon.”

  Petr Ginz was the editor-in-chief of Vedem, a clandestine, loose-leaf magazine, which was read out loud every Friday, and which contained information about events in the ghetto. But it also accepted opinion pieces, poems, and fantasies. Petr was a great admirer of Jules Verne, and From the Earth to the Moon was one of his favorite books. At night, lying on top of his bunk, he’d think about how incredible it would be to have a cannon like Mr. Barbicane’s from which he could launch himself into space inside a giant ball. He stopped drawing for a moment, looked up, and stared at the girl who had questioned him with such self-confidence. He liked the sparkle in her eyes, but he nevertheless addressed her severely.

  “You’re very curious.”

  Dita blushed and was overcome with shyness. She regretted being such a chatterbox. And then Petr’s attitude changed.

  “Curiosity is the primary virtue of a good journalist. I’m Petr Ginz. Welcome to Vedem.”

  Now Dita asks herself what sort of a chronicle Petr Ginz would have written about the activities of Block 31. She wonders what became of that skinny, sensitive boy.

  That day, after their first encounter, Dita was walking with Petr in front of the so-called “Dresden barracks.” When he had asked her if she’d like to accompany him to do an interview for the magazine, Dita had hesitated for a second—probably not even that—before saying yes. They were going to interview the director of the library.

  She was thrilled at the idea of being a journalist, and she felt a shiver of pride when she arrived with the determined Petr Ginz at the entrance to Building L304, where the library was located. They asked the receptionist if the director, Dr. Utitz, could receive two journalists from the magazine, Vedem, and the woman smiled amiably and asked them to have a seat.

  Emil Utitz appeared a few minutes later. Before the war, he had been a professor of philosophy and psychology at the German University in Prague, and a columnist for various newspapers.

  He told them the library had about sixty thousand books. These came from the hundreds of public libraries and private collections belonging to the Jewish community, which the Nazis had closed down and plundered. He also explained that the library still had no reading room, and so for the time being, it was a mobile library, by which he meant that the books were wheeled from building to building and could be borrowed. Petr asked Utitz if it was true that he had been a friend of Franz Kafka. The director nodded.

  The editor in chief of Vedem then requested permission to accompany one of the librarians on a book round so that they could explain in the magazine how it all worked. Utitz happily agreed to the request.

  On the appointed afternoon, Petr had to attend a poetry recital, so it was Dita who cheerfully accompanied the librarian, Miss Sittigová, as she pushed her trolley of books around the streets of Terezín. After a day’s labor in the workshops, factories, and foundries or at agricultural tasks, the opportunity to escape offered by the library-on-wheels was warmly welcomed. But Miss Sittigová told her that books were often stolen, and not always so they could be read. They were also used as toilet paper or as fuel for the stoves.

  The librarian didn’t even have to announce her arrival in a loud voice: “Library service!” Young and old passed on the news in a chorus of mixed voices, which rang out merrily until people began to emerge from the doors of their buildings and eagerly leaf through the available books. Dita so enjoyed pushing the books that from then on, she began to travel around with them regularly. Once her day’s work was over, if she didn’t have an art class, she would spend the rest of the afternoon helping the librarian with her work.

  And that was when she bumped into Fredy Hirsch again.

  He was living in one of the buildings near the main clothing warehouse. But he was rarely to be found there. He was always on the go, organizing sports competitions or taking part in activities with the ghetto youth. Whenever Dita saw him heading toward the trolley, he was always neatly dressed and walking energetically, and he always greeted them with that faint smile of his, which was just enough to make you feel important. He was always on the lookout for songbooks and books of poetry to use during the gatherings he organized with the young people on Friday evenings to celebrate Shabbat. There’d be singing and storytelling, and Fredy would talk to them about the return to Palestine, where they would go after the war. On one occasion, he
even tried to encourage Dita to join the group. She blushed as she told him that it might happen one day, but she felt really embarrassed and didn’t think her parents would let her go. Deep down, however, she would have loved to join the older boys and girls who sang, discussed things like adults, and even secretly exchanged kisses.

  Dita now realizes how little she knows about Alfred Hirsch. And her life is in his hands. If he tells the German commanders that “inmate Dita Adler hides clandestine books under her clothing,” they’ll catch her in flagrante at the next inspection. But if he wanted to denounce her … why wouldn’t he have done it already? And why would Hirsch denounce himself if Block 31 is his initiative? It makes no sense. Dita thinks she’ll have to do some digging, but discreetly. Maybe Hirsch is somehow getting preferential treatment for the prisoners and she could ruin it all.

  That must be it.

  She wants to trust Hirsch.… But then why is the block chief afraid that they’ll find out about him and hate him?

  9.

  The quarantine camp is packed with newly arrived Russian prisoners. There’s little of their soldier’s honor left: Their heads have been shaved, and they’re wearing striped prison garb. They are an army of beggars now. They wait their turn, pacing up and down or sitting on the ground. There aren’t many groups in huddles, and it is deathly quiet. Some of them look through the wire fence at the Czech women in the family camp who still have their hair, and at the children chasing each other along the Lagerstrasse.

  Rudi Rosenberg, in his role as the quarantine camp registrar, is working busily, drawing up lists of the new admissions. Rudi speaks Russian, as well as Polish and a little German, which as he well knows, makes life easier for the SS guards who are supervising the registration process. So far, this morning, he’s ensured that the three or four pencils at his disposal have made their way into his pockets. He’s now talking to a German corporal he’s gotten to know who’s even younger than he is. He often exchanges a few jokes with the soldier, frequently at the expense of the young women who arrive on the women’s transportation trains.