The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  However, though the drawings and stools are still there, Block 31 no longer exists. It is no longer a school. It is no longer a refuge. Now, just inside the door, they come up against an office table with Dr. Mengele seated behind it, together with a registrar and two guards with submachine guns. Two groups of those already selected are forming at the back of the hut. The one on the left will stay in Auschwitz, and the one on the right will be sent to work at another camp. The young women and the middle-aged women who look healthy—in other words, those who can still work—are in the group on the right. The other, much bigger group consists of small children, old women, and women who look sick.

  When they say that the group on the left is going to stay in Auschwitz, they are telling the truth: Their ashes will settle on top of the forest slime and mix forever with the mud of Birkenau.

  The impassive Nazi doctor waves his white-gloved hand to the left and to the right, and channels people to one side of life or the other. He does it with remarkable ease. And without hesitation.

  The line in front of Dita is dwindling. The woman who was crying has been sent to the left with those whom the Reich deems weak and expendable.

  Dita takes a deep breath: It’s her turn.

  She takes a few steps and stops in front of the medical captain’s table. Dr. Mengele looks at her. Dita wonders if he really will recognize her as a member of Block 31, but it’s impossible to know what he’s thinking. What she sees in the doctor’s eyes, however, sends shivers up her spine: nothing. No emotion whatsoever. The look is frighteningly empty and terrifyingly neutral.

  He recites the questions he’s spent hours routinely asking each inmate:

  “Name, number, age, and profession.”

  Dita knows that the instructions given to everyone are to name any profession that might be useful to the Germans—carpenter, farmer, mechanic, cook—and the instructions given to minors is to bump up their age and say they are older so that they’re more likely to make the cut. Dita knows all that, and she has to be careful, but her character demands something different.

  Standing in front of the all-powerful Dr. Josef Mengele, owner of life and death like an Olympian god, she recites her name, Edita Adler; her number, 73305; her age, sixteen (she’s added a year). When it comes time to provide her profession, she hesitates briefly and then, instead of saying something useful and convenient that will please the SS man with the iron cross on his chest, she finally says, “Painter.”

  Mengele, bored, tired by what for him must be mere routine, looks her in the eye more attentively, in the same way that snakes lift their heads when prey comes within reach.

  “Painter? Do you paint walls or portraits?”

  Dita feels her heart beating repeatedly in her throat, but she answers in her impeccable German and with a composure that smacks of rebellion:

  “I paint portraits, sir.”

  Screwing up his eyes a little, Mengele looks at her with the faint hint of an ironic smile.

  “Could you paint me?”

  Dita has never been so scared. She couldn’t be in a more vulnerable position: fifteen years old, alone and naked in front of men with submachine guns who are going to decide right now if they will kill her or let her live a little longer. Sweat runs down her naked skin, and the drops fall to the ground. But she answers with surprising vigor.

  “Yes, sir!”

  Mengele studies her slowly. It’s not a good sign if the medical captain pauses to think. Any veteran would say that nothing good can come out of that mind. Everyone is waiting for the outcome. There’s not a sound in the hut; you can’t even hear people breathing. Even the SS guards with the submachine guns don’t dare disturb the doctor’s moment of reflection. Finally, Mengele gives an amused smile and, gesturing with his gloved hand, sends her to the right—to the fit group.

  But there’s no sigh of relief from Dita yet: Her mother is next in line. Dita walks more slowly and turns her head to look back.

  Liesl is a woman with a sad face and a sad body, and her shoulders are hunched, all of which emphasize her sickly appearance. She’s convinced she won’t make the cut and is defeated before she even starts to fight. She hasn’t a chance, and the doctor doesn’t waste a second.

  “Links!”

  Left. The bigger group, the one for the useless women.

  Nevertheless, with no attempt at rebellion of any kind, simply because of her mother’s total bewilderment—or so it seems to Dita—Liesl heads toward the right behind her daughter and stands in a line where she shouldn’t be. It takes her daughter’s breath away: What’s her mother doing here? They’ll drag her away, and there’ll be a terrible scene. She’ll chain herself to her mother, come what may. Let the guards drag both of them out.

  But fate, which has behaved so badly toward them, determines that just at this very moment, not one of the guards, tired of the docile manner of the prisoners and more concerned with eyeing the younger girls than with being vigilant, actually notices. Nor does Mengele, distracted just then by the registrar, who apparently has not heard one of the numbers dictated to him and asks the doctor for his assistance. Some of the women sent to the left have shrieked and begged and thrown themselves on the ground, and the guards have had to drag them away. But Liesl didn’t complain or protest. She has calmly walked nude in front of Death’s eyes with a naturalness and a lack of haste that would have unnerved even the bravest of the brave.

  Dita has to grab her chest to stop her heart from leaping out. She glances at her mother, who is standing behind her and looking at her absentmindedly, seemingly unaware of what she has done. She’s not brave enough to do something like that in a premeditated way … although Dita doesn’t know what to think. Without saying a word, they hold hands tightly and squeeze as hard as they can. And they look at each other and say everything with that glance. Another woman joins the line and places herself behind Liesl to hide from the guards’ line of sight.

  The Germans send them to the quarantine camp. Once there, there are joyous hugs among those who find themselves in this group, which has been saved for now, and dejected faces near the entrance waiting for relatives and friends who never arrive. Mrs. Turnovská isn’t in the quarantine camp group, nor are any of the woman who were part of her mother’s conversation group. The children don’t arrive, either. And Dita has heard nothing more of Miriam Edelstein, although it is true that there’s a great deal of confusion. They begin to evacuate the first groups of people toward the station platform before the final selections of BIIb have been completed. Margit isn’t in Dita’s group, either.

  It is a fact that they have momentarily dodged death. But survival is a minuscule consolation when so many innocent people are left behind to die.

  28.

  Another train. Eight months have passed since the liquidation of the family camp, and once again they are inside a stock car traveling to who knows where. Her very first trip was from Prague to Terezín. Then it was from Terezín to Auschwitz. Next, it was from Auschwitz to Hamburg. And now Dita no longer knows where this diaspora by train, which has derailed her youth, is taking her.

  On the Auschwitz platform, the Germans had shoved them into a freight train and sent them with a group of women to Germany. It was a voyage of hunger, of thirst, of mothers separated from their children, of daughters without mothers. When they opened the stock car in Hamburg, the SS found a container full of broken dolls.

  Exchanging Poland for Germany hadn’t made things any better. There, the members of the SS had more news of the war, and nervousness spread. Germany was retreating on all fronts, and the feverish dream of the Third Reich was starting to crack. The guards vented their rage and frustration on the Jews, whom they blamed for the inevitable defeat.

  They’d sent their prisoners to a camp where the working day was so long that it seemed as if the days had far more than twenty-four hours. When they got back to their huts, they didn’t even have the strength to complain. They only managed to eat their soup in silenc
e and stretch out on their bunks to try and recover for the next day.

  Dita has one image drilled into her head from the months they spent in Hamburg: her mother in front of a brick-packing machine, sweat dripping from under the kerchief on her head. Liesl was sweating, but her expression was as impassive, focused, and serene as if she were preparing a potato salad.

  Dita was suffering because of her mother, who was so fragile that not even the slight improvement in rations compared with Auschwitz had led to her putting on any weight at all. It was forbidden to talk while they worked, but whenever Dita passed with a load of some material near the conveyor belt at which her mother was working, she would wordlessly ask how she was doing, and Liesl would nod and smile. She was always fine.

  Dita admits that sometimes her mother drives her mad—no matter how she’s feeling, Liesl always says she’s fine. How can Dita know the truth?

  But Mrs. Adler is always feeling fine for Dita.

  Right now, in this train, Liesl, her head resting against the wall of the carriage, is pretending to be asleep. She knows that Edita wants her to sleep, although in actual fact, for months now, she’s only been able to sleep off and on during the night. But she’s not going to tell that to her daughter, who’s too young to understand how tragic it is for a mother not to be able to give her daughter a happy childhood.

  The only thing that Liesl can do for her daughter—who is already stronger, braver, and more perceptive than she ever was—is to worry her as little as possible, and always to say she’s perfectly well, although since the death of her husband, she feels a wound inside her that is continually bleeding.

  Work in the brick factory in Hamburg hadn’t lasted long. The nervousness in the Nazis’ top leadership group had produced contradictory orders. A few weeks later, Dita and her mother were transferred to another factory, where they recycled military material. Defective bombs that hadn’t exploded were being repaired in one of the workshops. Nobody particularly seemed to mind working there, and that included Dita and Liesl: You worked under cover, so when it rained, you didn’t get wet.

  One afternoon as she was heading back to her hut after she’d finished her working day, Dita spotted Renée Neumann coming out of a workshop, chatting animatedly with some girls. Dita was really pleased to see her. Renée gave her a friendly smile and a brief wave from a distance, but kept on walking without stopping, utterly absorbed in the conversation with her companions. She’s made new friends, thought Dita, people who don’t know she once had a friend in the SS and to whom she doesn’t owe any explanations. She doesn’t want to stop and talk with her past.

  And now the Germans have mobilized the prisoners yet again, without telling them where they’re going, turning them once more into livestock that has to be transported.

  “They treat us like lambs being taken to the slaughterhouse,” complains a woman with a Sudeten accent.

  “If only! They feed sheep being taken to the slaughterhouse.”

  The stock car sways with the sound of a sewing machine. It’s like a metallic oven for baking sweat. Dita and her mother are sitting on the floor together with a contingent of women of various nationalities, but many of them German Jews. Of the thousand women who left the family camp at Auschwitz behind eight months ago, only half now remain. They’re exhausted. Dita examines her hands; they are the hands of an old woman.

  Although perhaps it’s a different type of exhaustion. They’ve spent years being shoved from one place to another and threatened with death, sleeping poorly and eating badly, without knowing if there’s a purpose to it all, if they really are going to see the end of this war.

  The worst thing is that Dita is beginning not to care. Apathy is the worst possible symptom.

  No, no, no … I won’t give in.

  She pinches her arm until it hurts. Then she pinches herself even harder until she almost draws blood. She needs life to hurt. When something pains you, it’s because that something is important to you.

  She remembers Fredy Hirsch. She’s been thinking less about him these past months, because memories end up being filed away. But she still continues to wonder what happened to him that afternoon. The messenger boy with the long legs said he didn’t commit suicide, but he asked the doctor for tranquilizers, so … did he overdo the tranquilizers? She wants to believe he didn’t intend to wipe himself out. But she knows that Hirsch was very methodical, very German. How could he have taken too many pills by mistake?

  Dita sighs. Maybe none of this matters anymore: He’s not here any longer, and he’s not coming back. What difference does it make?

  There’s a rumor going around the train that they are being sent to a place called Bergen-Belsen. They listen to conversations where they’re speculating about the new camp. Some people have heard that it’s a labor camp, that it’s nothing like Auschwitz or Mauthausen, where the only industry is killing people. So they’re not taking them to a slaughterhouse. The news sounds reassuring, but most of them keep quiet because hope has acquired a razor-thin edge, and each time you put your hand on it, it cuts you.

  “I’m from Auschwitz,” says one woman. “Nothing can be worse than that.”

  The other women don’t say a word. She doesn’t convince them. They’ve discovered over the years that horror is bottomless. They don’t trust anyone—once bitten, twice shy. But the worst of it is that they’re going to be proven correct.

  It’s a short trip from Hamburg to Bergen-Belsen, but the train takes several hours before it finally stops with a grinding of gears. They have to walk from the platform to the entrance of the women’s camp. They are escorted by several guards from the women’s section of the SS, who shove them violently and shout swear words at them. There’s a steely meanness in their eyes. One of the prisoners stares at a guard, and the guard spits in her face so she’ll turn away.

  “Pig,” mutters Dita under her breath. Her mother gives her a pinch to stop her talking.

  Dita wonders why the guards are so angry with the prisoners, given that they are the ones who have been humiliated and deprived of everything, given that they’ve barely set foot in the camp and haven’t done anyone any harm, given that all they’re going to do is obey and work feverishly for the Reich without asking for anything in return. But these robust, well-fed, and well-dressed guards prove to be furious. They taunt the prisoners, hit them in the ribs with their clubs, insult them with obscene phrases, and generally show themselves to be irascible toward these docile new arrivals. Dita is surprised by the irritation of their aggressors, their display of indignation toward people who have done them no harm.

  When the prisoners have lined up in formation, the supervisor appears. She’s tall, blond, and has broad shoulders and a square jaw. She moves with the assurance of a person used to being in charge and instantly obeyed. She informs them in her booming voice that they are forbidden to leave their huts after the seven o’clock curfew under pain of death. She pauses and eagerly searches out a glance from any of the inmates. Their eyes are all fixed straight in front of them. Then one young woman makes the mistake of returning her glance. The supervisor takes two strides and plants herself in front of the girl. She grabs her violently by her hair, drags her out of the line, and throws her to the ground in front of the group. Although it appears as if no one is looking directly, they all see. She hits the girl once with her club. Then again, and again. The girl doesn’t cry out; she only sobs. After the fifth stroke, she’s not even sobbing, and barely moaning. They don’t hear what the supervisor says when she puts her mouth to the girl’s ear, but the prisoner gets up, dripping blood, and stumbles back to her place in the line.

  The name of the supervisor in charge of the guards at Bergen-Belsen is Elisabeth Volkenrath. After training as a warden at Ravensbrück, she moved on to Auschwitz, where she forged a solid reputation for the ease with which she ordered executions by hanging for the slightest misdemeanor. She was posted to Bergen-Belsen at the start of 1945.

  The path they take go
es past several fenced-off areas that enclose a range of compounds about which they’ll learn more later on. They include a camp for the male prisoners; the “star” camp, for inmates destined to be exchanged for German prisoners of war; the “neutral” camp, for several hundred Jews who hold passports from neutral countries; the quarantine camp to isolate prisoners with typhus; a camp for Hungarians; and the feared prison camp, which in reality is an extermination compound where sick prisoners from other labor camps are interned, forced to work under extreme conditions, and exploited until they die a few days later.

  Eventually Dita’s group reaches the small women’s camp, which the Germans have had to set up in a hurry on some barren land next to the main camp because of the huge number of female detainees who have arrived at Bergen-Belsen over the past few months. It’s a temporary camp with prefabricated barracks, no plumbing, and no waste pipes, just four thin, wooden walls.

  In the barrack to which Dita, her mother, and about fifty other women have been assigned, there’s no dinner, no beds, and the blankets smell of urine. They have to sleep on the wooden floor, and there’s barely any room for them, not even on the floor.

  Bergen-Belsen was originally a camp for prisoners of war under the supervision of the regular army, the Wehrmacht, but the pressure from the Russian troops in Poland has caused prisoners to be rerouted there from Polish camps, so the SS has taken control. New transports arrive constantly, and the installations are overflowing. Overcrowding, lack of food, and poor sanitary conditions have caused prisoner deaths to skyrocket.

  Mother and daughter exchange looks. Liesl grimaces bleakly at the sight of their new hut companions, all so emaciated and sickly. But even worse is the fixed expression of many of them, the absent look—most of them are so listless that you’d think they’d already given up on life. Dita doesn’t know if her mother’s expression is a reaction to the starving prisoners or to themselves, because this is exactly how they will look very soon. The veterans hardly respond to the disturbance caused by the latest arrivals. Many don’t get up from their improvised beds made out of piles of old blankets. Some couldn’t, even if they wanted to.