The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  “What have we here?” he asks no one in particular. “It’s not enough to steal shoelaces! Shoelaces I might be able to forgive! But this!”

  Wasserman falls to his knees.

  “You should know better.”

  “I do know better. I didn’t—”

  Jankowski tells Wasserman to bring him the coin. Wasserman does, naked on his knees in the naked dirt, lifting up the gold piece like an offering. The capo takes it and heaves it with all of his strength toward Jacob, who actually makes the catch. Poor Jacob, making himself Jankowski’s accomplice in the process.

  The capo steps away from the kneeling man. It’s in the hands of the guards now. He can’t take responsibility for how they might judge so terrible and daring a crime against the Reich. The one with the raised machine gun, the one who laughed, fires a single short burst. There’s something offhand about it, and when it’s over, perhaps half a second after it began, he lights a cigarette.

  Jankowski hopes aloud that whoever is sent to replace Wasserman will be an improvement. Regardless, the new man has certainly learned how things go.

  Wasserman’s clothing goes straight to the sorting tables. His boots as well. And within moments, one stealthy prisoner or another has pocketed those two precious twists of wire.

  Max

  Andy had Frolic Weymouth’s roomy old place down on the Brandywine River, attic and barn and all, but what do I have? Where would I hide anything that I wanted to keep a secret? Space is precious in the city, and I’ve been a creature of the city ever since I came to America.

  People go around singing O beautiful, for spacious skies and that’s fine for them, but I say to hell with spacious skies. Spacious skies give me the willies.

  It’s true enough that in the city you never know what’s lurking around the next corner, but in the wide open spaces you just never know, period. Anything could happen. In the city you’ve got a fair chance, but out in the open you could get struck by lightning or the earth could open right up or you could just get lost without one single thing to help you tell one cornfield from another.

  Don’t call it paranoia, either. It’s not paranoia. It’s an acquired response. It’s one more souvenir I picked up at Auschwitz. Try working in the sun and the wind for a year or two, with Ukrainians pointing machine guns at you the whole time—or try lining up in a big open square every day for something that’s ostensibly roll call but that’s really a kind of random selection process for who’s going to get a bullet in his brain this morning—and you’ll decide that a blind alley with a broken streetlamp is a pretty good alternative to the great outdoors. Try watching the clouds race overhead when you can’t go anywhere yourself. Try watching the seasons change.

  You’ll end up like me.

  Anyhow, there’s a young girl working on the retrospective, an intern or an assistant or whatever who comes up from Washington and camps out in a hotel somewhere for a week at a time just to keep tabs on me, and she keeps asking if I’ve got any pieces I haven’t shown. I keep saying where in hell would I keep them. I’m nice enough about it. At least I hope I am. She’s just a girl, after all, just a child, and she keeps asking the same way a child would keep asking. As if there’s a chance that I might have a cookie jar hidden on a high shelf somewhere.

  You know what would make me blow my top? If she asked in the context of Helga. If she said, “Andrew Wyeth came up with those Helga paintings when he was 70 years old, you know, so I was wondering—”

  She’d never see what I’ve got in the locker. Not after a question like that. Nobody would ever see it.

  Six

  To know that her husband and son are alive changes things, but not entirely for the better. Such is the way of the camp. Like the river of the world it bears a certain fixed amount of everything there is—good and evil, love and hate, life and death—in proportions that are cruel but constant. Any gain here requires a loss there. The slightest disturbance ripples through everything.

  Where once she worked at murdering time, at creating a perpetual present, at eradicating her memories and destroying her dreams, she is unmoored now. She can think of nothing but Jacob and Max. She certainly can’t empty her mind entirely. There’s no more counting bowls of soup and mechanically stirring the pot and sinking the ladle halfway regardless of the pleas of the women in the line. Each prisoner’s woe speaks to her, and she would help every one of them if she could, for every one of them is an incarnation of her husband or her son.

  Jacob and Max are here but not here, and the frustration of their proximity brings her back to Saturdays in the synagogue in Zakopane, sitting with Lydia in the balcony, trying to concentrate on her prayers but unable to—listening instead for the sound of their voices rising above the rest.

  She sees the two of them everywhere. She sees Jacob back when they first met, stealing glances at her through the window of his father’s barber shop in the fading alpine twilight; she sees Max charging through her house and her heart like some unstoppable force, the duplicate of his father in so many ways; she sees the two of them standing side by side in the line alongside the camp train station.

  And in the midst of it all she sees Lydia. For such is the way of the camp too, with its precarious balance of life and death, and love and hate, and good and evil. If it should permit a heart to rise, it will just as surely strike it down.

  *

  “Canada is just like everywhere else.”

  Jacob has given Max half of his bread and a little bit of the gristly boiled beef that the cooks slid onto his plate. They sit side by side against the foundation of the block, on the shady side where the masonry is cooler against their backs. The day has been hot and their shirts and trousers are soaked through and this is the only pleasure to be had. This and companionship.

  “Did you get any food there?” says Max, chewing and chewing on that tough scrap of beef.

  “No,” says his father. “There’s food around, but they keep a tight rein on things. I don’t think Schuler ever really got much from Canada.”

  Max reaches into his mouth and takes out the gray knot he’s been working on. “I thought—”

  “I know what you thought,” says his father, holding up a hand. “I didn’t get anything extra, but on the other hand I haven’t worked as hard as you. I’m sure of that.”

  Max sits holding the meat between two fingers and a thumb, the knob of it like another filthy appendage and just as appetizing. “Papa—”

  “Go on. You’re a growing boy.” He takes what remains of his own bread and scrapes the plate with it, soaking up the little bit of watery runoff that arrived with the beef. “Eat up,” he says.

  Max does.

  “People die in Canada just like everywhere else. It’s no paradise in that department.” He tells Max about Wasserman and the gold piece. Wasserman and Jankowski and the gold piece and the machine gun.

  “So there’s really gold? There’s really gold?”

  Youth. It hasn’t been wrung out of him yet.

  “This fellow Wasserman,” says Jacob, shaking his head, ignoring the question. “He was a weakling. A weakling even here among us weaklings. I’d thought that such a man could get by in Canada. Look at Schuler. He may not be as pathetic a creature as Wasserman was, but he’s older by fifteen years. Maybe twenty.”

  “Schuler’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Jacob is licking the damp spots on his plate, but he leaves off. It’s only been one day that he’s had the old man’s duties. “Dead?”

  “He committed suicide.”

  “How? Where?”

  “At the excavation.” Max lowers his voice to a whisper, and his father leans in. “Slazak didn’t like the way he was digging. Schuler talked back, told him that his work was always good enough for the capo in Canada. Said that maybe Slazak should take a lesson from him instead of complaining.” Max shakes his head and swallows. “We buried him where he fell. Those nice shoes and everything.”

  Perhaps the youth has bee
n wrung out of him after all.

  *

  Zofia is standing outside the kitchen door, fending off the two boulevardiers of the delivery commando. One of them, not the junkman of Witnica but his partner, formerly a knife-sharpener and mender of pots from a village in the Carpathians, has brought her a couple of cigarettes. “Free of charge,” he says, “no obligation on your part whatsoever.” He smiles and shows teeth that he could have sharpened in an earlier life. Tilted incisors and long canines and molars like tombstones. Certain gaps where teeth have rotted and fallen out, and certain other gaps where gold teeth have been removed with a pair of pliers. He has a cigarette of his own jutting through one of those holes, just as if he’d intended it for that purpose.

  Three cigarettes in total, then, one between his lips and two more peeking from his pocket, the Holy Trinity incarnate in pilfered tobacco. Three cigarettes, a treasure as great as Blackbeard’s, possessed by a man—this being a coal delivery day—whose skin and clothing and facial stubble are as black as that very name. Call him Blackbeard, then. Blackbeard the sharpener of knives and mender of pots.

  Zofia doesn’t fancy Blackbeard the way she fancies the junkman, but he’ll do. He has the cigarettes, after all. That helps. It more than helps. It’s everything. The junkman has never offered her anything but a smile and a flattering remark, and she knows the value of those.

  “You must want something in exchange,” she says, lifting up a coy hand for her smile to hide behind. The capo, great fat Rolak, is busy somewhere else, probably in one of the storerooms either helping herself to whatever delicacies she has hidden there or enjoying a carrot or a stalk of celery that ought by rights to be going to the prisoners.

  Blackbeard takes out his cigarette and purses his lips. “Have you any ideas?” he says.

  “Nothing that you haven’t thought of, I’m sure,” says Zofia.

  He shrugs. “There’s nothing new under the sun.”

  “No,” she says.

  “Something conventional then,” he says. “One of the old standbys.” As much as he hates putting off the inevitable, he’s well accustomed to bargaining for everything, both here in the camp and in his prior life. Always let the customer suggest a price, is his belief, because you never know what value he might place on something.

  Zofia reaches out and takes one of the cigarettes from his breast pocket. It’s probably the most daring thing that this poor timid creature has ever done in all her life, a physical act of flirtation, even if it’s only a carrying-forward of something already begun by Blackbeard himself. The cigarette is gray and bent and precious. “I’ll take this one as a down payment,” she says.

  “A down payment on what?”

  But Zofia has vanished, blushing furiously, tearing up the two or three steps into the kitchen and bending over the stove to transfer fire from a stick of kindling to the end of the cigarette. She can hardly breathe and it isn’t the smoke or the exertion of running. Eidel looks over from the chopping block and sighs. “A down payment?” she says.

  Zofia looks up. Her face is red and wreathed in smoke, and with laughter bursting from her she staggers to the chopping block to take up her own knife again. Eidel laughs too. Laughing is something that neither of them has done in a very long time. It seems as if they’ve never laughed before, and together they keep it up for a while, perhaps the better part of a minute, with Blackbeard down in the yard craning his neck and the junkman climbing back onto the wagon and the capo appearing out of nowhere. She trundles down the hallway from the storerooms like a battleship, wiping her mouth on her apron. She’s still chewing something and when she begins to speak tiny bits of it explode from her lips like shrapnel.

  Only the shame at being caught with her mouth full contains her ferocity. It’s a close call, but Eidel and Zofia are both definitely working and the sack of rutabagas on the table alongside the chopping block is surely diminished so she clamps her mouth shut and shakes a finger at them and lets their laughter pass this time. She lets Zofia’s cigarette pass as well, choosing not to ask how she came to be in possession of it. Those men in the delivery commando, no doubt. She wonders what she has given up for it but she thinks she knows. It’s unforgivable, the way these people live.

  *

  Late Thursday, Jacob is given a new suit of clothes intended to make him more presentable for the senior SS officers he’ll be visiting. His old uniform is taken away and in its place he’s issued a relatively clean jacket and trousers made of a lighter weight fabric, closer to new than the uniform he’s been wearing and showing signs of actually having been pressed at some point during their lifetime. Certain men in his block are envious. Certain men would be envious of anything, of any change, of any attention that doesn’t result in injury or death. “Imagine,” he tells Max, “coveting such a ridiculous thing—when the truth is that my old uniform was heavier and I’ll miss it when the winter comes.”

  “Who believes in winter?” says Max.

  The evening roll call is approaching and Jacob must sew his serial number into the new uniform in time, so he sits working furiously with a needle and thread. Clouds are moving in and the light is dying and he squints. Another prisoner comes by and watches him work, a prisoner named Rubin who claims to have been a tailor and who scoffs at Jacob’s hurried work. “I could do that for you in a moment,” he says as he walks away, “but you’d have to give me the jacket for my trouble.” An ironist.

  Jacob’s fingers won’t cooperate, and the roll call draws nearer, and he begins to wonder what this infernal new uniform will cost him in the end. Slazak walks past and gives him the resentful look he once reserved for Schuler. He walks past in the dirt and continues around the corner and then comes back and looks more carefully, clucking and stroking his chin. “It would be a shame to go to roll call without proper identification,” he says.

  “Yes, sir,” says Jacob, not even looking up. He sticks himself with the needle and blood drips onto the patch he’s sewing and Slazak clucks again. Shame, shame, shame. Sweat beads up on Jacob’s forehead and he swipes at it, leaving behind a red streak. “Incredible,” says Slazak. “A few days of soft work, and you’ve lost every bit of strength you once had. This won’t go well.”

  “I’m doing my best,” says Jacob.

  “Perhaps you need a few extra minutes.”

  There is nothing more dangerous than Slazak in a solicitous mood. “Oh, no,” says Jacob. “I’ll be all right. I’ll be finished in plenty of time.”

  “Perhaps we should put off the roll call until after rations.”

  Jacob looks up. “Rations first?” A few other men in the yard stir, like the first members of a pack of wolves picking up some fresh scent. Getting rations before lining up for roll call would be the rarest of delights—not just because the men would eat earlier, but because they would be guaranteed to eat at all. It has been a while since the first evening roll call stretched on into the blackest hours of the night, but you never know. Word spreads in some intangible and unknowable way, as if on chemical traces carried by the air itself. Footsteps stir within the block. Men poke their heads out the door.

  Slazak makes the call, rations it is, and they start to line up. Rain begins, a soft rain that patters down on the dusty clay. Max stands and his father stands alongside him and Slazak says, “Oh, no. Not you two. First you must finish the needlework on that fine new uniform.”

  So that’s how it will be. Jacob hurries, working his fingers even more frantically than before, but by the time he finishes sewing and they’ve made their way to the back of the line the rations are gone. Slazak sees their disappointment and grins. Jacob merely turns and walks off toward the yard, but when they get a few steps away and the bell sounds for roll call he apologizes to Max, saying that this may be all of the punishment that Slazak feels comfortable meting out to him in his new position. They’ll need to be careful, though. He can always punish Max instead.

  They line up with their stomachs complaining. It’s late an
d the sun is down and the yard is lit by searchlights. The soft rain keeps up. Slazak patrols the perimeter with a pair of other capos, one of them a German convicted of murder and rape before he was freed and sent to Auschwitz, although he has only gone downhill here. Behind them in the darkness are the guards with their machine guns, black guns carried by gray men in shadows that swim with rain. Two SS men stand on the platform looking straight ahead, one of them the young one who rides the bicycle and the other one the sergeant whose hair Jacob cut last week, Drexler. In Jacob’s chest a kindly feeling toward him rises up unbidden, a feeling connected to the sergeant’s approval of him as the new barber, but he fights it down. One personal kindness is nothing compared to the Totenbuch. He hears Max’s stomach growl and knows himself responsible for it. So much for not calling attention to himself.

  The sky opens and thunder rolls and the rain begins in earnest. It’s a cold rain after a warm day, and although it refreshes the men and washes them clean it feels good for no more than a moment. If it felt good, the SS wouldn’t let them stand out in it. Jacob watches Drexler adjust his hat and gather his coat around his shoulders and he thinks that he looks like a man prepared to stand in the driving rain for as long as it takes. There’s a sour look on his face, though, a look that says he would be happier filling the Totenbuch with lies than standing out here counting prisoners in a rainstorm. It’s a clear look of regret, and Jacob thinks that perhaps Drexler has learned a lesson of his own. Keep a low profile.

  The roll call proceeds. The men line up and count off, giving their serial numbers. Slazak and the other capos circulate and listen and make marks on paper as the count proceeds, and when it’s over they compare their figures against other figures on other papers. Today’s count versus yesterday’s. They shake their heads and confer, standing in the rain, and after a few minutes they order the prisoners to count off once more. Drexler and the other officer watch without comment, without even showing frustration or disgust. On the second count the numbers come up short again, and once more the capos order another roll call.