The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  She also makes a point of giving the soup one complete stir with the ladle after a certain number of portions served, keeping a strict count in her head. The number varies. It might be five one day and it might be three the next and it might be nine the day after that. A certain Mathilde Kessler, one of the older denizens of the block and one of the more cunning, has observed this, and as the women line up for each meal she hangs back and watches for the number. Once she’s discovered it she counts the women in the line and positions herself to be holding up her bowl just after Eidel has stirred the pot, her theory being that whatever scraps of vegetables are in the soup will be highest in the suspension at that instant and most likely to be ladled up. There is risk to her system, as there is risk to everything. Wait a little too long and the vegetables will have been filtered out into other women’s bowls. Wait too long entirely and there’ll be nothing left. Not even water. For there’s never enough soup.

  This is how Eidel has endured, though. By establishing and maintaining utter equanimity. By concentrating on nothing but the present moment. By walking a middle path where there is no real path at all.

  Five bowls of soup. Stir. Five bowls of soup. Stir. Five bowls of soup.

  And this is how others endure, others like Mathilde Kessler, by keeping watch on the tiniest of details and turning them to their advantage if they can.

  Five bowls it is, then. Count off by fives and your chances will improve.

  But now the junkman has spoken, and a door has opened up in Eidel’s mind, and the possibility of learning her husband’s fate has changed everything. It fires her heart and it sets her on edge and it gives her hope and fear where she has taught herself to have neither.

  The question—I need to know if my husband is alive—came out of nowhere. She certainly hadn’t known she’d ask it; she hadn’t known she’d ever have the chance to ask anything again. But now she does have the chance, and now the world has shifted or shown the potential to shift, and now she stands in the kitchen ladling soup with Jacob on her mind and she loses count of the women she’s served. She curses herself for it.

  Kessler is standing toward the end of the line and she sees what’s gone wrong and tries to rectify it. Stepping out of line and letting two women pass her by and thinking halfway better of that after a moment and trying to edge up again by one place. But the capo catches her at it.

  “If you can’t stay in line,” she says, “you’ll have no rations at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” says Kessler. She bows her head.

  “You’ll be sorrier,” says the capo, reaching to confiscate the woman’s bowl. Kessler hands it over and shuffles all of a half step back before the capo strikes her over the head. The gray crockery bowl is heavy as stone and Rolak puts her considerable weight behind it and Kessler goes down. The bowl breaks in half.

  The line moves forward. The woman behind will find three tiny peas awash in her soup today. The discovery—if not the peas themselves—will give her the strength to go on. Lucky her.

  *

  Edmund Vollmer, the deputy commandant, is responsible only to the commandant himself and perhaps to God. Few of the men have ever seen him in the flesh. Fewer still have seen the commandant, of course, and none have seen the Almighty. Many, but by no means all, have given up hope in that department.

  Setting eyes on Vollmer at the edge of the yard during the morning roll call is therefore like sighting one element of the Holy Trinity. A murmur passes through the moving crowd of men like something alive and dangerous. Any interruption to the routine is dangerous. Everyone looks but tries not to be caught looking. Everyone stops but tries not to stop. It’s Vollmer himself. See if you can, but don’t be seen.

  Jacob and Max have learned to take places near the middle of the middle row at the twice-daily roll call. It’s the eye of whatever hurricane might ensue. This principal applies when they’re in motion as well, en route to the dig or to a selection lineup or anywhere else. Stay in the middle of the pack, where it’s safest. The roll call is a capricious thing, sometimes an actual counting of the men and sometimes not. It can last ten minutes or it can last an hour. In the mornings, when there’s work to be done, it’s generally a brisk affair. At day’s end, when the only thing at risk is the men’s sleep, it can go on forever. There are those who claim to remember counts that lasted twelve hours. Eighteen. Longer, entire days spent standing at attention in the yard in summer heat and winter snow. Men were reported to have crumpled over in the ranks during such periods, to have passed out on the ground and spasmed and died, with the only consequence being the need to begin the roll call over again. But who can say?

  The sturmbannführer doesn’t look like a man with time to waste. This is a good sign. He’s on a small platform speaking with another SS officer—the young one who rides the bicycle—in a manner that permits no interruption. He is brusque but not hurried, intense but not urgent. The sun has risen over the low tarpaper blocks, and up on the platform its rays gleam from his hat and his belt and his boots.

  Physically he’s compact and sturdy and immaculate. If the Germans have set out to demonstrate their status as the master race, Vollmer would seem to be as good an argument as any, although every man standing here with his eyes on him knows that in a fair fight things would be different. Their strength has been sapped now, and their will has been destroyed. They have been weakened and wounded and worn down. But once upon a time a man like Vollmer would have been beneath their particular notice. Just another customer, just another head to trim, forgotten as soon as he’d left the chair. But not now.

  Among them all, Max is an exception. It’s his youth that makes the difference. Even here in the camp his strength has increased over the last couple of months, in spite of thin rations and backbreaking work or perhaps because of them. He is still fourteen but the lie has come true and he looks eighteen or older, for some chemical switch inside of him has not yet been thrown, and he can still turn almost any kind of nourishment into power. It’s a condition that won’t last.

  But now he looks at Vollmer and turns his head a few degrees toward his father and whispers low, “I could take him.”

  “And you could get every last one of us shot.”

  Both of which are true.

  Vollmer leaves off conferring with the other officer and steps down from the platform and takes a stroll along the lines of assembled men, almost as if he has overheard Max’s challenge and seeks to draw him out. Down here on ground level he seems even smaller. Just a little man in a gray-green uniform among this ragged assembly of dust-brown stick figures, assessing them like crops. He looks satisfied, even happy, with what he sees. Down the line he goes, toward Jacob and Max, strutting in the way of his superiors, and the father hears the son draw breath. Jacob draws breath too, shifting his weight and turning his chin toward Max so very slightly that no one other than his own flesh and blood could possibly begin to perceive it. But it’s enough. Max exhales. They both exhale. Vollmer nears and moves on without noticing either one of them. They’re just two more scarecrows, neither one of whom dares to look at Vollmer’s face. No one does.

  It’s the back of Vollmer’s head that Jacob notices. The back of his neck, specifically. It’s an area in which he still takes a professional interest, and the hair at Vollmer’s nape is simply a disgrace. Ragged and asymmetrical and roughly chopped off, it could be the sign of an acceptable haircut gone too long between trimmings except that the skin below it looks red and angry and scraped raw. Jacob consults the calendar in his head and can’t decide what day it is until he remembers that yesterday morning Schuler didn’t walk with the rest of them toward his usual rendezvous with Canada. Today must be Saturday, then. Yesterday was Friday, the day the officers get their hair cut.

  Butchery for the butchers. The irony of it rises up in him and makes him laugh for the first time since he’s been here. Not loudly, though. Not loudly enough to be heard down the line.

  Hours later, shoveling alongside hi
s son, he still can’t get over it. He says, “Did you get a look at Vollmer’s neck?”

  “No,” says Max.

  “It’s a disgrace.”

  Shoveling away as they are, and under the observation of that pot-bellied pig Slazak, their conversation is telegraphic.

  “Really?”

  “Really. It’s a disgrace to the Nazi party.” Another shovelful. “Which takes some doing.”

  “How so?”

  “Bad haircut. Lousy haircut.”

  Max just shakes his head. After all they’ve been through. That father of his.

  Jacob shovels and goes on. “It’s our friend Schuler,” he says.

  They work. The trench is deep but not deep enough. They’ve been edging toward a road that they must dig beneath in order to reach the plot of ground that will be the new women’s camp. All month long the men have complained quietly to one another about the depth of the excavation, as if it’s been just a whim on Slazak’s part, but now they see. A German technician with a graduated pole stands on this side of the road and another one with a transit stands on the other side, and they shake their heads gravely at Slazak whenever he looks their way. Not deep enough.

  Slazak walks along the berm of raw earth piled up on one side of the ditch and kicks some of it down onto the prisoners. Max stops to dig it out of his shirt collar and Slazak hollers at him to keep working. “I can move more dirt with the toe of my boot than you can move with that goddamned shovel,” he says, demonstrating the truth of his claim with another kick. Clods pelt the prisoners and they labor on in silence, like men digging their way out of a hailstorm. Max grumbles and Slazak cocks his head to listen but his father hushes him. Slazak walks forward a couple of steps and kicks down some more dirt on more prisoners and spits after it for good measure—Slazak who began here as one of their own but has gone crooked now, Slazak spoiling for a fight, Slazak in league with the enemy and enjoying it, jamming his thumbs into his belt and leaning forward with his jaw jutting to make the men under his command a promise: if they fail to reach the road by the end of the day, they can lie right down where they are. The guards will draw their machine guns and a commando of fresh men will shovel the dirt back into the ditch and no one will be the wiser. There is always another path to the women’s camp. There are always more prisoners.

  Jacob looks up over the rim of the ditch to see the guards themselves, a couple of Ukrainians with dead eyes and thin lips, pass a look back and forth. It’s hard to say what the look might mean, but he gets the feeling that they would just as soon Slazak joined the others in the ditch before they started in with the guns.

  The surveyor laughs and steadies his pole.

  *

  In the end, Mathilde Kessler stands up and walks under her own power—but only after a certain amount of encouragement from the capo. Her head swims and she’s unsteady on her feet and her kidneys hurt from Rolak’s blows of encouragement, but she staggers to the hospital block without any help, pausing only now and then to lean against a wall or a railing. No one so much as watches her go, not even the guards, for what trouble could a woman in her condition get into? They could open the main gates wide, and she wouldn’t have the strength to leave.

  She isn’t in the block when the lights go out, and she isn’t at work the next day, and the rumors start. They’re all variations on the same theme. She’s dead from a broken skull or She’s dead from the fall to the concrete floor or She’s dead from the blows to her stomach.

  Eidel tries not to listen. It doesn’t occur to her that she might have had anything to do with Kessler’s fate, whatever it is. That her tiny failure to keep to the middle path has cost this other woman so much. She has other things on her mind.

  Night falls and Kessler is still missing. The rumors metastasize. She’s dead from internal bleeding or She’s dead from an injection given to her by one of the doctors or She’s dead because she’s been selected for the gas.

  Eidel would cover her ears if she could move, but the bunk is too crowded. She can’t so much as free her arms.

  If by some miracle Kessler were to appear here in the darkness among them they would leap as if they’d seen a ghost, so sure are they that she must have become one by now. Her black fate spreads like oil. One woman claims that Kessler had a twin sister in another block, and that that same sister was spirited away during the roll call this morning. Spirited away never to be heard from again. The doctors have a special fascination with twins, after all.

  Eidel can’t bear it. She has her own torments. She lies on her side in the crowded bunk, feeling the pressure of women breathing on both sides of her, and she thinks of Jacob and the children. She sheds tears for both of them, unable even to reach the silk handkerchief she keeps jammed into her pocket as a memento. She wonders if Jacob might be thinking these same thoughts in some place more or less identical to this, and she resolves that she must find out. She must know for certain, now that she can.

  Which means, of course, that she must resign herself to sleeping with the junkman. What else could he possibly want from her? She’s not blind. People are forever pairing off around the camp, whether desiring one another or desiring something from one another no one can say. Even here, where the conditions are constant, the reasons vary. It’s impossible to explain how lust endures, but there’s no denying the fact of it.

  She has seen how he looks at her. She has seen how he looks at every woman in the kitchen, even little Zofia Kohen, the most wasted and wan of them all, a pale mouse before she came here and a pale mouse now, Zofia who first suggested that in exchange for putting Eidel’s mind at rest the junkman will surely demand the gift of her body. The truth of it is that Zofia has taken a shine to him herself. She adores the rakish tilt of his hat and she admires his freedom to wander the farthest corners of the camp, imagining for him a life as varied and exotic as the journeys of Marco Polo. That cocky little junkman from Witnica, out navigating the spice routes. She doesn’t like to admit it, but it’s true. Anyone can see. So when she suggested to Eidel that the only way she’d learn anything about her husband was to submit to the deliveryman’s carnal requirements, Eidel said that she was imagining things. “You may dream of that for yourself,” she said, “but don’t go bringing me into it.”

  “I wouldn’t,” said Zofia, “and I’m not.”

  “You would, and you did.” She leaned hard against her knife, driving it through a turnip.

  But that was yesterday. Now she lies awake wondering what she’ll have to endure if she wants the truth. Wondering what kind of an agreement she can reach. A scheme leaps up into her mind at one point—she will agree to do the deliveryman’s bidding only if the news is good—but instantly she realizes such a system’s shortcoming. He’ll tell her anything to get what he wants.

  On the other hand, he might tell her anything anyhow. Of what value is the truth to him?

  No. She adjusts her position on the hard bunk. No. If she’s to proceed, she must have faith. Faith in Jacob and faith in herself. And faith in a cunning little junkman from a backwoods village, trotting around this death camp in his motley black and white, making deals and carrying secrets and bearing God knows what contagion from door to door and bed to bed. Carrying worse than contagion. Perhaps even the makings of a child. Which would be the death of her.

  *

  “You need to be more careful,” Jacob tells his son, the two of them jammed into a bunk no more than a quarter of a mile distant from Eidel but nonetheless at the other end of the world. “You need to be on your guard. You mustn’t let them rile you.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do. It’s instinctive. You’re young.”

  “I’m not that young.”

  “You’re young. And you won’t get much older if you don’t learn a little self-control.” Other men are murmuring in the dark as well, and as of yet Slazak hasn’t charged out from his little chamber to quiet them down. “You got riled at Slazak today. Over a little dirt.”
/>   “So?”

  “So where does that lead? What would you have done if I hadn’t shushed you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s right,” says Jacob. “You would have done nothing. So why start?”

  “I didn’t start.”

  “You wanted to start. You very nearly did.”

  Max doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say anything at all. Jacob might be persuaded that his son has actually fallen asleep, if his chest weren’t pressed so tightly against the boy’s back. But Max is awake and his father can feel it in the beating of his heart. Nothing can be concealed under these conditions. Not from him. He breathes as deeply as he can under the circumstances and feels the pressure of his son’s body against his, flesh of his flesh, not just the boy himself but the woman of whom the boy is the last trace. Eidel. Eidel who is all alone in the world if she is in the world at all, Eidel who has done nothing to deserve that fate, Eidel who ought to have a child of her own by her side if anyone should. At least Jacob has someone to look after.

  Other men are still talking, a handful of them complaining about the heat and the food and the work, until Slazak finally bursts through his little door. “Quiet,” he snarls, “unless you’re rested enough to start digging again.” Which is a threat on which he’d follow through if he weren’t so exhausted himself. But the prisoners don’t know that—they don’t know what he’s capable of, for not one man among them is foolish enough to believe that he’s seen Slazak’s limits—so they close their eyes and clear their throats and lie subdued, as still as firewood or fish.

  Some of them sleep and some of them even dream, the lucky ones of freedom and family and sumptuous meals, the rest of torment and hunger and pain, and come morning the three bells awaken them all.

  They all rise but one. Schuler, it would seem at first, judging from the position of his body in the usual spot on the usual bunk, but it’s not Schuler. Schuler is in the latrine, and the body lying motionless on the boards is his nameless twin. A younger prisoner just then making his way down the line between the bunks, seeing the prone figure and spying Slazak on his way to rouse him and eager to gain a little favor, perhaps even aspiring to become a capo himself one day, reaches down and twists the twin’s ankle and curses him in the vilest terms available in two languages or maybe three. Saying it’s time to start pulling his own weight.