The Librarian of Auschwitz

by Antonio Iturbe

  It’s an excuse to stay with her, but it isn’t a lie. Dita’s way is already part of his path.

  A few days later, in Teplice, some kilometers from Prague, Margit Barnai is sweeping the entrance to her building. As she sweeps, she daydreams about a young man who does deliveries on his bicycle and rings his bell merrily each time he cycles past her. She thinks that perhaps it’s time to start paying more attention to her hair in the mornings and putting a new ribbon in it. Suddenly, out of the corner of her eye she glimpses the shadow of someone coming through the entrance.

  “You’re very fat, girl!” the person shouts.

  Her first impulse is to give a rude response to her rude neighbor. But then the broom almost falls out of her hand.

  It’s Dita’s voice.

  Margit is the older of the two girls, but she’s always felt like the younger sister. She throws herself into Dita’s arms in the way little children do—not worrying about the speed, not holding back.

  “We’re going to fall!” says Dita, laughing.

  “And what does that matter, as long as we’re together!”

  It was true. Finally, something good was true. They were waiting for her.

  EPILOGUE

  Ota became a special friend who used to come on the train to see her on afternoons she had off from the occasional work she found. She combined the work with classes she attended in the school in Teplice, where she and Margit were making up for some of the time they had lost in schooling. If that were possible.

  Teplice is an old spa city renowned for its waters. Dita had finally found her Berghof. There were no Alps as in The Magic Mountain, but the high country of Bohemia was close by. She liked to stroll along the streets with their geometric stone pavements, despite the fact that the war had severely punished this beautiful city with its stately buildings. She occasionally wondered what had become of the enigmatic Mme. Chauchat, who left the spa resort in search of new horizons. She would like to have asked her advice about what to do with her life.

  The beautiful synagogue had burned down, and its scorched ruins were a reminder of those burned-out years. On Saturdays, Ota accompanied her on her walks. He talked to her about a thousand things. He was a young man with a voracious curiosity; everything interested him. He sometimes complained a little of having to take various combinations of trains and buses to travel the eighty kilometers between Prague and Teplice. But his complaints were more like the satisfied purr of a cat.

  There were months of pleasant strolls through those squares, which little by little, regained their flowerpots and began to give Teplice back its charming air of a town of hot springs. During those walks, Ota and Dita gradually became entwined. A year after their meeting in the line at the documents office, Ota said something to Dita that changed everything:

  “Why don’t you come to Prague? I can’t love you from a distance!”

  They had already told each other their entire lives. It was the moment to start from scratch, to begin again.

  Ota and Dita were married in Prague.

  After a great amount of paperwork, Ota managed to take back his father’s business and get it going again. It was an exciting project, because in a way, Ota was able to recover the past. He couldn’t bring back those who were absent or erase the scars, but at least it was a way of returning to the Prague of 1939, even though Ota wasn’t sure if he wanted to be a businessman. He, like his father, preferred opera scores to balance sheets, and the language of poets to the language of lawyers.

  But he didn’t have the time to be disillusioned. The footprints of the Nazi boots on the streets of Prague had not yet disappeared when the boots of the Soviets made their mark. With that delightful obstinacy history has of repeating itself, the factory was again confiscated. This time, it wasn’t in the name of the Third Reich but of the Communist Party.

  Ota didn’t give in; neither did Dita. They were born to swim against the tide. Thanks to his mastery of English and knowledge of literature, Ota found work in the Ministry of Culture, choosing which new English-language publications were interesting enough to be translated into Czech. He was the only employee at his level who was not a Communist Party member. Many in that period spouted Leninist slogans, but no one was going to teach him anything. He knew more about Marxism than any of them; he had read more than any of them. He knew better than anyone that Communism was a beautiful path that ended at a precipice.

  They accused him of being an enemy of the Party, and things started to get difficult. In 1949, the year their first child was born, Ota and Dita decided to emigrate to Israel, where they ran into another old inmate from Block 31, Avi Fischer, now called Avi Ofir, the man who had converted a modest barrack full of child prisoners into a cheerful glee club. He helped them find work at the Hadassim School near Netanya. There, Ota and Dita worked as English teachers at one of the most renowned schools in Israel. The school accepted many children who came in the wave of immigrants after the end of World War II. Later, the school took care of children from families with problems and students at risk of social exclusion. They always employed teachers who were particularly involved in those sorts of issues, but it was hard to find people more sensitive to the suffering of others than Ota and Dita.

  The couple had three children and four grandchildren. Ota, the great storyteller from Block 31, wrote various books. One of them, The Painted Wall, fictionalized the lives of a series of people in the family camp, BIIb. Dita and Ota experienced life’s ups and downs together for fifty-five years. They never stopped loving and supporting each other. They shared books, an indestructible sense of humor, life in general.

  They grew old together. Only death could break the iron bond forged in the most terrible times anyone could experience.

  POSTSCRIPT

  There are still some important things to tell about the librarian of Block 31, and about Fredy Hirsch.

  The bricks used to construct this story are facts, and they are held together in these pages with a mortar of fiction. The real name of the librarian of Block 31, whose life has inspired these pages, was Dita Poláchová. Ota Keller, the young teacher in the novel, is based on the person who would become Dita’s husband, the teacher Ota Kraus.

  A brief mention of the existence of a minuscule library in a concentration camp made by Alberto Manguel in his book The Library at Night was the point of departure for my journalistic investigation, which gave rise to this book.

  There are those who don’t share my fascination for discovering why certain people risked their lives to run a secret school and clandestine library in Auschwitz–Birkenau. There are those who might think that this was an act of useless bravery in an extermination camp when there were other, more pressing concerns—books don’t cure illnesses; they can’t be used as weapons to defeat an army of executioners; they don’t fill your stomach or quench your thirst. It’s true: Culture isn’t necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water. It’s also true that with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: Nothing significant distinguishes them from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.

  There’s a great deal of information about Auschwitz on the internet, but it only talks about the place. If you want a place to speak to you, you have to go there and stay long enough to hear what it has tell you. In order to find some trace of the family camp or some track to follow, I traveled to Auschwitz. I needed not only quantitative data and dates, but to feel the vibration of that accursed place.

  I flew to Kraków, and from there I took a train to Oświęcim (Auschwitz). Nothing in that small, peaceful city hints at the horror experienced on its outskirts. Everything is so normal, and you can even get to the camp entrance by bus.

>   Auschwitz I has a parking lot for buses and a museum-like entrance. It used to be a Polish army barracks, and the pleasant, rectangular brick buildings separated by wide, paved avenues—complete with pecking birds—give no indication, at first sight, of the horror. But there are various pavilions you can go into. One of them has been designed like an aquarium: You walk along a dark corridor lined with huge illuminated fish tanks. They contain worn-out shoes, mountains—thousands—of them. Two tons of human hair form a dark sea. Dirty prostheses resemble broken toys. And there are thousands of pairs of broken glasses, almost all of them with round frames like the ones Morgenstern wore.

  The family camp, BIIb, is three kilometers away, at Auschwitz–Birkenau. The phantasmagorical watchtower at the entrance to the Lager still stands, with a tunnel at its base that was used from 1944 onward to allow the railway line to run right into the camp. The original huts were burned after the war. There are a few reconstructed ones you can go inside: They are horse stables, which seem gloomy even when they are clean and well-ventilated. Behind this first line of huts, which are in what would have been the quarantine camp, BIIa, there is an immense expanse of waste ground that originally contained the rest of the camps. To see the spot that BIIb occupied in its day, you have to abandon the route of the guided tour, which doesn’t go beyond the first row of replica huts, and skirt the entire perimeter. You have to be on your own. Walking through Auschwitz–Birkenau in solitude means enduring a very cold wind that carries echoes of the voices of those who remained there forever and became part of the mud present-day visitors walk on. All that’s left of BIIb is the metal door at the entrance to the camp and an intensely solitary space where even bushes barely grow. Only cobblestones, wind, and silence remain. A tranquil or ghostly place—it depends how much the eyes looking at it know.

  I returned from that trip with many questions and almost no answers; some sense of what the Holocaust was that no history book could teach me; and, completely by chance, a copy of an important book: Je me suis évadé d’Auschwitz, the French translation of Rudolf Rosenberg’s memoir, I Cannot Forgive, which I found in the bookstore at the Shoah (Holocaust) Museum in Kraków.

  There was another book that particularly interested me and which I started to track down as soon as I got home. It was a novel set in the family camp, with the title The Painted Wall, written by someone called Ota Kraus. There was a website where the book could be purchased and sent to you, cash-on-delivery. It wasn’t a very professional website: You couldn’t pay with a credit card, but there was a contact address. I wrote to the address, expressing my interest in the book and asking how payment should be made. And then I received one of those emails that prove to be a crossroads in your life. The reply, very polite, was that I could send the money via Western Union; there was an address in Netanya, Israel, and the message was signed D. Kraus.

  With all the tact I could muster, I asked if she was Dita Kraus, the girl who had been in the family camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau. She was. The librarian of Block 31 was alive and was writing an email to me! Life is full of surprises, but sometimes, it can be truly extraordinary.

  Dita was not so young anymore—at that stage she was eighty—but she was still the same passionate and tenacious person she had always been, who was now battling to ensure that her husband’s books were not forgotten.

  From that moment, we began to correspond. Her incredible kindness helped us to understand each other despite my poor English. Eventually, we agreed to meet in Prague, where she spent a few weeks every year, and she took me to visit the Terezín ghetto. Dita is not one of those old-style, placid grandmothers. She’s a friendly whirlwind, who immediately found accommodation for me close to her apartment and organized everything. When I arrived at the Hotel Tříska’s reception desk, she was already waiting for me on one of the sofas in the lobby. She was exactly as I had imagined her: thin, restless, active, at once serious and cheerful, totally charming.

  Dita’s life wasn’t easy during the war years, nor has it been easy since. She and Ota were very close until his death in 2000. They had two sons and a daughter; their daughter died before she turned twenty, after a long illness. But Dita hasn’t allowed herself to be broken by fate’s blows—she didn’t allow it back then; she won’t allow it ever.

  It is remarkable how someone who carries so much accumulated pain manages to keep on smiling. “It’s all I have left,” Dita tells me. But she has many other things left—her energy, her dignity as a battler against everything and everyone—and this makes her an upright eighty-year-old woman with fire in her eyes. As we travel around Terezín, she refuses to take a taxi, and I don’t dare contradict her thriftiness, typical of anyone who has lived through bad times. We take the subway, and she stands. There are free seats but she doesn’t sit down. No one can vanquish a woman like that. The entire Third Reich failed to do it.

  Indefatigable or tired but never resigned to giving up, Dita asks me to give her a hand because she’s going to take fifty copies of The Painted Wall to the Terezín Memorial store, which has run out. We don’t rent a car; she insists that we go by coach. We make the same trip she made almost sixty years earlier, although now she’s dragging along a suitcase full of books. I’m scared she might find herself affected by this trip back in time, but she’s a strong woman. Right now, her greatest concern is to restock the ghetto library with these books.

  Terezín turns out to be a peaceful place full of square buildings, dotted with lawns and trees and bathed in brilliant May light. Dita not only drops off the books but, being her normal feisty self, gets me free entry into the permanent exhibition.

  The day is full of emotionally charged moments. Among the pictures by the ghetto internees on the wall is one by Dita herself, a dark and gloomy picture that shows a much less dazzling town than the one we’re walking around now. There’s also a room with the names of the children who were sent to Terezín. Dita runs through the list and smiles as she remembers some of them. They are almost all now dead.

  Four video screens show the testimony of survivors talking about their experiences in Terezín. An older man with a deep voice appears on one of them. It’s Ota Kraus, Dita’s husband. He speaks in Czech, and although there are English subtitles, I don’t pay attention to them because I’m too hypnotized by his voice. It conveys such composure that you can’t help but listen to it. Dita silently pays attention. She’s looks grave but doesn’t shed a single tear. We leave and she tells me we’re going to see where she lived. She’s made of steel, or gives that appearance. I ask her if it isn’t difficult for her. “It is,” she replies, but she doesn’t stop, continuing on her way at a good pace. I had never before met a woman with such extraordinary courage in every aspect of her life.

  Where she was housed during her time in the Terezín ghetto is now an inoffensive neighborhood block of apartments. Dita looks up at the third floor. She tells me that one of her cousins, who was a carpenter, made her a bookshelf. She tells me much more as we head toward another building where one floor has been preserved as a museum, its rooms full of bunks, just as it was during the ghetto years. It’s an oppressive place, too small for so many beds. They’ve even kept the earthenware basin the occupants used as a communal toilet.

  “Can you imagine the smell?” Dita asks me.

  No, I can’t. We go into another room where there’s a security guard. Pictures and posters from the ghetto era hang on the walls. An opera by the famous pianist and composer Viktor Ullmann is playing. He became one of the most active contributors to culture in Terezín. Dita stops in the middle of the room, empty but for the bored attendant. She quietly starts to sing Ullmann’s opera. Her voice is the voice of the children of Terezín, which rings out again that morning for a much-reduced but no less surprised audience. This is another moment when time goes backward and Dita becomes Ditiňka with her woolen socks and eyes of a dreamer, singing the children’s opera Brundibár.

  During our return trip to Prague, Dita energetically as
ks the coach driver to open the sliding roof so we won’t die of asphyxiation from heat in a vehicle with windows that don’t open. The driver ignores her, so she starts to pull on the hatch lever herself, and I join her. Between the two of us, we succeed.

  It is while we are sitting in the coach that a topic that has been buzzing around in my head for months comes up in the conversation: What happened that afternoon of the 8th of March 1944 when Fredy Hirsch went off to think about the proposal from the Resistance that he lead a camp uprising, given the imminent extermination of the September transport in the gas ovens? Why did a man as composed as Fredy Hirsch commit suicide with an overdose of Luminal?

  Dita looks at me, and there’s a whole world in her eyes. And I begin to understand. I read in her eyes what I had read in the lines written by Ota in his book, but which I had taken as artistic license or a personal hypothesis. After all, wasn’t The Painted Wall a novel? Or was it only a novel in order to camouflage certain things which, if Ota had said them in a different context, might have caused him serious problems?

  Dita asks me to be discreet, because she thinks that what she’s told me might cause her problems.

  That’s why, rather than explaining what she told me, I’ll simply reproduce what Ota Kraus wrote and published in his novel, The Painted Wall, set in the family camp. One of the few characters in the book to appear with his real name is Fredy Hirsch, the instructor in charge of Block 31. This is what the novel recounts about that crucial moment when, after the SS have transferred the September transport to the quarantine camp, the Resistance asks Fredy to lead an uprising, and he asks for some time to think about it:

  After an hour, Hirsch got up from his bed to go and look for one of the medics.

  “I’ve decided,” he said. “As soon as it gets dark I’ll give the order. I need a pill to calm my nerves.”