The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  But Schuler’s twin just groans. He hardly groans, come to that. It’s just a sigh with a harsh trailing edge of resignation. The other prisoner turns his ankle again, more roughly this time and in the other direction—mainly for the benefit of Slazak, who’s getting nearer and beginning to toss men out of his way in order to see what’s going on in the dimness of that bunk—and Schuler’s twin stirs. Pulling his ankle free and drawing it up toward his buttocks. Curling in on himself. Drawing breath and rolling over on his back and inching toward the light. Just in time.

  As punishment for his weakness, he goes without rations. When they head out for the excavation he limps along pitifully, leaning on Schuler and reluctant to let go of him at the place where he needs to break off for Canada. It hardly seems fair that Schuler—relatively upright and more or less energetic, his every step cushioned by those gum-soled shoes of his—should head off to a soft job under the shade of a roof while his twin must hurl himself again into the ditch. The twin complains. Watching Schuler go, he lays out his grievances before the other prisoners and before God Himself, and although he’s correct in every particular there will be no redress.

  Jacob commiserates. He says that injustice strikes each man here in his own particular way. Consider his own situation. A skilled barber, a man who with his own hands has trimmed the hair of the monsignor of the Church of the Holy Family on Krupowki Street in Zakopane, he’s condemned to digging ditches while every Friday morning, just like clockwork, Schuler goes off to commit his butchery. Talk about fairness, will you?

  Slazak overhears. He laughs at first—the nerve of these animals!—and then he stops laughing.

  Max

  Artists are combative by nature. Civilians don’t realize that. You have to be pleasant and you have to smile nicely in the direction of other people’s work and you have to say things that are suitable for quoting in family publications when critics ask you what you think, but that doesn’t mean you’re not combative.

  It’s Darwinism at work. Pure Darwinism.

  How many people can rise to the top, after all? This isn’t like business, where you have thousands of companies with thousands of big shots running them. It’s not like medicine or law, where you’re your own boss and nobody other than your CPA can see how well or how poorly you’re doing. Have a bad year? Take out another loan and buy yourself the latest German car. Nobody will be the wiser.

  It’s not like that. It’s more like education—college, I mean, the groves of academe—where the rewards are lousy and the egos are big.

  By the time you’re as old as I am, you’ll have had it with pretty much everybody. Yourself included. After all, you’re the one who fell into the trap. You didn’t have to take it that far. You could have painted for the love of it. For the love of the things you painted. Like my mother.

  Once you’ve reached this point, though, the only people you’re going to be comfortable around are the ones who’ve achieved less than you have. And since they can’t stand to be around you, what’s the use? So you take up golf maybe. Find a foursome at the gym if you’re a fitness nut which I’m not or at the synagogue if you’re a religious nut which I’m not either. Some other guys you can talk to about anything other than art. Go chase a little ball around. Get drunk at the nineteenth hole every now and then. Have a little fun in the autumn of your years.

  The alternative is to spend every minute either working or thinking about work.

  Which means you go out there in the world and you smile and you nod and you wish the whole time that everybody but you would go straight to hell. And then you head home and sit down in front of your easel or your whatever, and you do your best to make that happen.

  To save yourself with your own two hands.

  That’s art.

  Four

  The deliveryman doesn’t want her after all. He wants something else. Something negotiable. There’s a great sack of radishes in one of the storerooms. He knows about it because he was here when it was delivered a few weeks before, and he’s watched Eidel and Zofia and the other women dice up the usual turnips and potatoes and carrots in the meantime, but it’s been a rare day when he’s seen a radish. There are surely some left.

  “We’re sparing of them,” says Eidel.

  “I’m sure. A radish is a rare thing.”

  “It adds flavor,” she says. “There’s little enough.”

  “Exactly,” The deliveryman rubs his hands together. “That’s why I need a couple of kilos.”

  “Two kilos of radishes.” She’s kneading dough for bread. Pushing at it with whatever strength she has.

  “Just two. That’s not much.”

  “It’s a month’s worth.”

  “For you, maybe, but not for a certain guard I happen to know. He eats them like candy.”

  It’s unimaginable. The rumors that her own capo grows fat on bratwurst and chocolate are bad enough. Those things come from the outside, arriving in Red Cross packages for the Russians and turning up inside the suitcases of new prisoners who’ve come by train. They circulate in a black market so remote as not to exist at all from Eidel’s point of view. But radishes. Radishes aren’t imaginary like chocolate or sausage. They’re real, like potatoes or carrots. Two kilos of radishes could mean life or death for someone on the verge. A woman in her commando, her block, even her own bunk.

  “I can’t do it,” she says.

  “It’s risky, I know. That capo of yours—”

  “It’s not the capo.”

  “What, then?”

  He’ll never understand, so she doesn’t bother explaining. “I just can’t do it.”

  “No matter. I’ll find somebody who will.” He laughs, shaking his head. Today is a coal day, and almost every part of him is black.

  “I hope you don’t. These women need the nourishment.”

  The deliveryman chuckles at the futility of everything. “You don’t understand,” he says. “That guard of mine will get his radishes one way or another. He’s a Slovak. Cruel as they come. And if he doesn’t get what he wants, bad things will happen.”

  “To you,” says Eidel. “They’ll happen to you.”

  “No, no,” he reassures her. “Not to me. He relies on me.”

  Eidel lifts the dough and throws it down.

  “The bad things will happen to the men he oversees.” He raises up his shovel and squints along the length of it as down the barrel of a gun. “Pop pop pop,” he says. “No skin off my nose.”

  Eidel leans into the dough.

  The deliveryman watches her, gauging everything. “So you see how it is. A radish less here, a bullet more there.”

  “I can’t help you,” she says. “I have to look out for my own.”

  The little misplaced junkman from Witnica leans on his shovel. “Too bad,” he says. “You see, I’ve been making some inquiries as to your husband, after all.”

  *

  The men are waiting in the yard for their rations, sitting on rocks and squatting in the dirt and speculating about what has happened to Schuler’s twin—exactly when he disappeared, who in particular was the last to see him, where he might be and whether or not they’ll ever see him again—when word comes down that Slazak wants to see Jacob in his quarters. He enters that little rough-hewn square the way he’d enter a mineshaft, tentatively, poking his head through the door to find the capo in a hard chair by the bed, a cigarette burning in his fist and a glass of vodka on a lace doily in the center of the table. The doily is the whitest thing in the room, the whitest thing in the block, and the incongruous sight of it is disorienting. It’s something from another world.

  “Come in, come in,” says Slazak. He speaks through smoke.

  “Yes, sir,” says Jacob. He’s left Max out in the yard. Better there than here in the lion’s den, but the separation makes him uncomfortable.

  “You say you’re something of a barber.”

  So it’s true. Slazak does hear everything. “Yes, sir. I was a barber.”
<
br />   “You were? Were?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Have you forgotten how to cut a man’s hair, then?”

  “No, sir.”

  Slazak keeps on. “Was this all just talk?” He draws on the cigarette and his face glows red.

  “No, sir. It wasn’t just talk. I—”

  “Fine, then. Fine.” Slazak lets out smoke and laughs as the gray cloud of it emerges into the little room. He chuckles as if they’re just friends here. Comrades. “That’s all fine,” he says. “I just don’t want to be found wanting when I make my recommendations.”

  “Recommendations?”

  “Even a fellow in my position has to look out when he makes recommendations.”

  “Recommendations?”

  “For a new barber. Upstairs.” He looks heavenward, as if the men he reports to live in that direction.

  “A new barber.”

  “Schuler isn’t long for this world. Look at what happened to that brother of his.”

  “Is that his brother?”

  “Who knows? We’ll never know now. They’re old men, in any event. We can’t have Schuler passing out in the commandant’s villa, can we?”

  “I suppose not.”

  The cigarette has gone dead, and Slazak lights it again, grunting into the flame. “I’m doing him a favor by finding his replacement.”

  Jacob is dumbfounded.

  “You’ll have to prove yourself tomorrow morning. The administration building. Eight o’clock sharp. Some SS clerk.”

  “How will I know?”

  “You’ll know. They’re expecting you.”

  At such a thought, Jacob nearly stops breathing.

  “Speak to no one,” Slazak says. “Got that?”

  “Absolutely. I’ll speak to no one.”

  Slazak turns his attention to his vodka.

  “Forgive my asking,” says Jacob before he turns to go, “and believe me, I’m flattered, but do they always come to you for advice in this area? The SS, I mean. Do you have some specialty?”

  Slazak puts down the vodka and coughs into his fist and wipes the flat of his palm on his pantleg. “My specialty is what you see. But when I see a chance to improve a man’s lot, I can’t help but take it.” The lot he’s referring to is his own, of course. And if along the way he can heap extra woe upon one or two of the men in his charge, that’s fine too.

  Jacob will be up half the night figuring the angles.

  To begin with, it will mean light work at least one day a week. Make that seven days a week, provided that, like Schuler before him, he gets moved to Canada.

  Then again, he’ll be exposed directly to the SS.

  And not just to any SS, but to the commandant and the deputy commandant and who knows who else. The highest of the high, and by any reasonable logic surely the worst of the worst. If a person has to watch his step around Slazak, imagine the risks of working directly for such men.

  Schuler has done it, though. He’s done it for longer than anyone remembers, and he’s thrived. Just consider those gum-soled shoes of his. Shoes like that boost a man’s health and prolong his life. Every man in the camp lusts after them. Jacob himself has not been immune to their allure.

  But on the other hand, Jacob is a father. Shoes even half that fine, were they to come into his possession, would have to go straight to Max. No question about it. To pass them on would be his duty and his joy. Other benefits would accrue to Max as well. Slazak mentioned the commandant’s villa. God knows what delicacies such a place holds. In Jacob’s imagination it’s a kind of gingerbread house, crammed with riches. A prisoner would enter through the back door, and where would the back door lead? Straight into the kitchen, of course. A kitchen, if the rumors are true, presided over by a grandmotherly German with, they say, a kindly heart and a soft spot for the starving.

  Consider Schuler! Consider his twin! Those two old men could not have survived this long without help.

  He pictures himself leaving the villa, his leather case of barbering tools miraculously restored to him, a bit of bacon or a slice of good black German bread tucked into his pocket.

  He decides that he owes it to his son.

  Provided that Max can learn to watch his temper. Who knows what might happen, without his father around to keep an eye on him every single minute? Perhaps that’s Slazak’s plan. To get the protective father out of the picture, and have his way with the temperamental son. In such a case, all of the bacon and bread in the world won’t help.

  But why would he go to such lengths? He can already punish Max at the slightest whim for any offense, real or imaginary. Why dream up a plot to get rid of Jacob, when Jacob poses no barrier to the worst of his instincts? It could be that all he wants is to burnish his reputation with those higher up. That’s the simplest explanation, and the simplest explanation is usually correct. Which means that Slazak is honestly putting his faith in Jacob, counting on him to do his best when the time comes. And why not? Failure means doom, not just for the barber but probably for his son, and the pot-bellied capo surely has some scheme for removing himself from the equation if he should fall short. In such an event Schuler will get to keep his job after all. Life will go on.

  Schuler, though. If Jacob proves himself in the morning, and he surely will, what will become of Schuler?

  It’s almost dawn before he decides that he’ll never figure it all out. It’s almost dawn and he realizes that he doesn’t have any choice in the matter anyhow. Any minute now the three bells will clang, and the work day will commence, and at eight o’clock he’ll be due at the administration building.

  *

  It’s not fair, but Eidel is long past expecting fairness. I’ve been making some inquiries as to your husband, the junkman had said, and her heart had leapt, so in the morning she asks. “What exactly have you heard of Jacob?”

  “Not so much, just yet.”

  “Tell me.”

  “There are…reports.” His voice trails off.

  “Reports of what?”

  “Reports.”

  “All right,” she says. “You’ll have the radishes.”

  “And you’ll have the reports.”

  “Not will have. I want them now.”

  “First, the radishes.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” She turns her back on him and reaches up to an overhead shelf to pull down a stack of bread pans. She knocks a few of them free with the heel of her hand and greases them with just the tiniest thimbleful of lard and turns back toward him. “You’ll tell me what you know right now, and I’ll give you one kilo of radishes.”

  “Two kilos.”

  “One kilo to get started. One kilo, and then you’ll take a message to my husband. If he’s still alive.”

  “Oh, he’s alive all right,” says the deliveryman.

  “Thank you for the report,” she says.

  He’s unruffled. “Messages cost extra,” he says.

  “One kilo for taking a message to my husband,” she says again, “and the other kilo when you bring a message from him back to me.”

  “That’s two messages.” He’s holding up his fingers. “The going rate for two messages—”

  Eidel takes a step toward him and bends to open the oven. The hinges scream and a cloud of heat crowds all the air from the room and the deliveryman winces. Eidel works on. “The going rate for me to betray the women in my commando by giving away their food,” she says without even looking at him, “is two messages. Take it or leave it. Take it or go find your radishes somewhere else.”

  She slams the oven shut and the heat still chokes the room and the little junkman from Witnica says, “Fine. Two kilos, two messages.” He pulls a ragged little sack from his pocket and tilts his head toward the storage room. “Now…while your capo’s still nowhere to be seen?”

  *

  The administration building is out by the gates, near the train station. It’s enormous and complex, containing on one hand the echoing halls and damp
, foul-smelling chambers where prisoners are stripped and deloused, and on the other the offices and conference rooms where the men who manage such things spend their days—and although Jacob has seen it before he’s never seen it from this angle. He reports to a low door just around the corner from the main entrance. It’s the kind of door a mouse would use. SS vehicles are parked in a lot close by—trucks and vans, black cars and powerful motorcycles. The high fence of electrified barbed wire is only a few yards distant. He could walk over and touch it if he wanted to. Touch it and die. Or die from mere proximity, since on either side are guard towers bristling with machine guns.

  He knocks at the door but no one answers. He steps close and looks through the window into a dim and unwelcoming space with hallways leading off in three directions. A radiator stands in one corner and he realizes that he hasn’t seen such a thing in a long while. The weather is warm now, summer having begun, but how luxurious it will be for these Nazi murderers come winter, settled here in their comfortable offices, enjoying the benefits of steam heat! He imagines the clanking noises when the steam begins to flow, the dry smell of dust burning off hot iron, the rising warmth. He imagines himself coming in through this door every Friday morning all winter long, stamping snow from his shoes and closing the door behind him and going on to penetrate the warm depths of this place for an hour, two hours, an entire working day.

  The idea overcomes him and draws him in, and once his eyes have adjusted he can see that there’s a woman at a desk at the end of the hallway straight ahead. She sits in a pool of light provided by a gooseneck lamp, and she talks on a telephone, and she doesn’t raise her eyes as other women and men in SS uniforms hurry past her. She must be the one expecting him. He scrapes his feet on a rough mat and moves down the hall. Daniel in the lion’s den, treading toward apocalypse.