The Thief of Auschwitz

by Clinch, Jon

  “Then you need to come faster.”

  “Yes, capo. Yes. I will.”

  “You will.”

  “I give you my word,” says Eidel.

  “I don’t want your word.” The tip of the poker rises again and this time it most definitely swings forward, the capo taking a step behind it.

  Eidel has no answer for her. She can only wait.

  The poker swings like a pendulum and the capo takes one more step, the poker now close enough that Eidel could lean on it herself. If she were to collapse from anxiety or panic or a heart attack she would fall straight down upon it to no good end. For whether the poker strikes the woman or the woman strikes the poker, the result will always be the same. “Do you hear me?” says the capo.

  “Yes. I hear you.”

  “Good,” says the capo. “I don’t want your word. What I want is your coat.”

  “Of course,” says Eidel, unwrapping it and slipping it off. The kitchen already feels colder.

  The jacket, with its soft gray wool and its narrow cut, drapes over Rolak’s broad shoulders like a prayer shawl. Owning it pleases her, that much is plain—Eidel can imagine her in the storeroom, posing before her reflection in some shiny surface that might distort her figure into something that passes for a human being—and the capo stumps off down the hall with her poker, satisfied. Calling over her shoulder that Eidel should bring her something else next Saturday. Surely the sturmbannführer’s apartment is crammed with riches.

  *

  Gretel has finally gotten her hands on another bottle. It’s a jar, actually, with a wide round mouth and a slab of old wood worn into a rough circle that fits the opening more or less. The jar was empty when she found it except for a little dirt and some bits of straw and the partial shell of a plover egg. It could have been a collection that some child was keeping or it could have been the remains of a nest, but either way—whether it signifies a life cut short or a life begun or both—it’s hers now and she begins putting it to use.

  Eidel has given her a fresh pencil and some little scraps of paper stolen from the supply in the sturmbannführer’s apartment, a tiny cache of untellable worth. The paper she tears into smaller pieces rather than risk growing careless in the face of such wealth. The pencil is so precious that she gnaws a notch into the middle of it with her front teeth and breaks it in half; that way if she loses it she won’t have lost everything. She keeps one half in her pocket and the other half in a crevice in the wall, packed in behind a makeshift masonry of sawdust and spit that she checks and renews every night if she has the strength. Such rituals preserve life and hope, if life and hope can be preserved at all.

  The jar fills up quickly. She remembers that she hasn’t written down Eidel’s story yet, the story of how the Nazis took from her both her family and her art, and she regrets that the narrative has grown more complex while she’s delayed getting it down. If she plans to make a full account now, she’ll have to include the subversion of the poor woman’s skills to the heartless vanity of that wicked Vollmer. This is the way it always goes. Complication folds in upon complication, tragedy unfurls from tragedy. A great collapse and a great blooming forth, all in one perpetual instant. She can never hope to keep up.

  Haunted, she awakens in the middle of the night. Sleep is always elusive, and prisoners who manage to capture it for any length of time do so knowing that they may never wake up at all. It’s a risk, for the boundaries are thin between one state of consciousness and another, between life and death, between dream and doom. But on this particular occasion she’s been sleeping soundly—without any particular dreams that she can recall—when she’s roused up with infinite slowness by the sound of scratching. It’s furtive and faint, and it’s not a noise made by any rat or mouse. Rats and mice are rare here in the camp, especially in the cold months, for their status as scavenging omnivores has been co-opted by far more desperate creatures higher up the food chain.

  No. It’s the sound of a pencil point on wood. She’s certain of it. She doesn’t worry that it might her own pencil, fallen somehow into other hands—she doesn’t worry because she can feel one half of hers grinding into her hip against the hard bunk, and she can see from the corner of one eye that the sawdust concealing the other half is still intact—but it’s a pencil for sure. She lies still listening for a while, not willfully but because movement is nearly impossible in the tightly packed bunk, and as long as she listens the sound keeps up, one scratch after another. Long strokes with long intervals between them and shorter strokes coming in rapid little flurries. It isn’t the sound of writing. After a while she’s sure of that. Cursive writing would be steadier, more even. Lettering would be more staccato. So it’s neither. She decides instead that she’s listening to someone who’s drawing a picture.

  A different woman might be able to push her bunkmates aside and roll over, but Gretel is too small and too weak. She’s wedged in tight, lying on one side where she takes up the minimum amount of space, and the sound of the scratching is coming from behind her and above. She stretches her neck until the bones threaten to snap, but the farthest she can see is the patch of wall where she’s hidden her pencil. The scratching goes on. Light comes in through cracks—the familiar darting of searchlights, known but not entirely predictable, a photonic equivalent of the cruelty that’s everywhere. She begins to edge herself around, the friction of her body against the bodies to the left and the right enormous, her fear that any noise she makes will cause the user of the pencil to abandon her work, but her need to witness overcoming everything nonetheless.

  She already knows who the artist will be. She knows who would have access to a pencil and who would be working away on a drawing here in the middle of the night. It can only be Eidel. Eidel, whose art until now has been to her nothing but a rumor, a fairy tale, a secondhand memory. Eidel, whose talent she’ll finally have the opportunity to see for herself, provided she’s quiet enough.

  She wonders what she’s drawing on the low ceiling of the bunk. Her daughter, perhaps. Yes, of course. Lydia. That’s it. She’s bringing the child back to life. How deep her love must be, to possess such power! How great her gift must be, to carry such a burden! Gretel marvels, straining every muscle and edging herself another fraction of an inch closer to seeing the miracle for herself. The beam of a searchlight rakes the darkness, nearly blinding her for a heartbeat, coursing past and blinking out for a fraction of a fraction of a second as the artist’s upthrust arm severs it for an instant and then blinking back on and then disappearing. She’s close now.

  It’s an effort like giving birth, and no doubt with a similar outcome. She’ll see the child, Eidel’s beloved, restored to the world.

  One more push and she’s there. She tilts her head back and to the side and focuses her eyes as the fragmentary beams of the searchlights slash the darkness, but when the image above grows clear it’s not the child after all. There are four creatures up there, heavy creatures arranged in a tableau, their ragged outlines hatched by way of shading. Black graphite on black wood. In some places the outlines have been drawn so ferociously that the pencil lead has cut into the wood and left behind more white than black.

  Gretel can’t make out many specifics. The drawing is still just a sketch, hastily and furiously done, but the fierce vitality of the lines has already brought it to a kind of ghastly life. Studying it she thinks of the golem of Prague, raised up from mud in defense of the Jews. She thinks of how Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel set the terrifying thing on their attackers, and how its murderous rage grew beyond all proportion, and how the Emperor himself finally begged to be granted mercy. And she remembers how the rabbi accomplished that one final miracle by rubbing out a single letter on the creature’s forehead, turning the word “Reality” into the word “Death.”

  They say that the lifeless husk of the golem is stored to this day in the attic of the synagogue, ready to be brought to life again by a single penstroke.

  And this, Gretel decides, is what Ei
del is doing. She’s creating a family of golems to replace her own family, raising up monsters to avenge her loss. At least she still believes in something. It’s difficult, though, to draw a clear line between belief and insanity. At least here in the camp.

  *

  Weeks go by and Max grows comfortable with a crutch, but the French doctor won’t let him leave the hospital. He’s filed his reports and that’s the answer he’s received. Another week goes by and the cast comes off and the doctor still won’t release him. “I’ve been told to take no chances,” he says. “You must build up your strength. You must exercise.”

  Max is without doubt the only Jew in the world whose health the Reich actually cares about at this moment. At least it means his mother is still at work for the sturmbannführer, which means she’s still enjoying a few hours each week in a warm and comfortable apartment building, which means—at the very bottom of it all—that she’s still among the living. That alone is reason enough for him to rejoice.

  Another week goes by and the doctor files another report, and this time he receives authorization to let him go. At first Max fears that some terrible fate has befallen his mother, but on hobbling back to the block and joining his father in the line for rations he learns otherwise. Her work goes on. Jacob has actually seen the painting with his own eyes, and it’s a thing of great power, and she seems to be in no hurry whatsoever to finish it.

  Wenzel comes down the line with a rare and menacing sort of offhandedness in his manner, sauntering along with his hands jammed into the pockets of his trousers, heading in Max’s direction. He walks as if he’s here by chance, but he’s never in all his life been anywhere by chance. Jacob sees him coming and whispers to his son enough about your mother, and Max understands. He breaks off and heads for the back of the line, jolting along on the crutch as if his leg hurts more than it does, as if a person could excuse his having forgotten the rituals of the block after an absence of such length. He’ll learn, his departure says. He’ll fit in once again.

  But the capo keeps coming. When Wenzel’s hand claps down on his shoulder Max tenses and spins on the crutch, the leg hurting every bit as much as he’s been pretending it does, and under the assault of the pain he very nearly collapses. It’s as if Wenzel’s hand weighs a thousand pounds and he seeks to crush him with it. “Forgive me,” Max says, wincing and putting one hand to the place above his knee where the bone went through. “I didn’t mean to break into the line.”

  “Think nothing of it!” says Wenzel. “I was going to bring you forward myself!”

  Max looks at him the way he’d look at a talking chimpanzee. He can’t help himself.

  But the capo doesn’t notice. “Come along,” he says, his hand sliding down from shoulder to elbow. “No need to put off your recuperation!”

  So Wenzel has gotten the message too. Max wonders how. A direct order, the grapevine, no one can say. He might not even know the specifics—how it all has to do with Max’s mother—for if he did, wouldn’t he be just as solicitous of Jacob? Wouldn’t he? God only knows.

  The capo walks him along as if the two of them are going up the aisle. Endlessly patient, uttering a word of encouragement now and then, keeping his voice low. As they draw nearer to Jacob he indicates him with his free hand and whispers to Max, “Perhaps you’ve heard that your assignment has been changed. You’ve been given a position in Canada. That’s right. Canada, with your father. Side by side. It will be like a family business.”

  Good news. More good news. So much good news that as Wenzel sweeps aside the last few men and hands him a bowl and personally selects with his own fingers the largest and leanest scrap of fatty pork in the pot, Max doesn’t notice how the other men are assessing him. How ravenous they are.

  *

  They’re walking to Canada on the first day, and Chaim appears out of nowhere. His short legs ordinarily work double-time to keep up with Jacob, but today Max’s crutch and the rutted ground have brought their pace to a crawl.

  “The painting,” says Chaim.

  “What about it?”

  “It’s definitely in the antique shop.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “I spoke to someone who knows for sure. Frau Vollmer returned it herself.”

  “So it hasn’t been destroyed.”

  “No.”

  Max gives his father a hopeful look, but his father doesn’t return it.

  “As far as we’re concerned,” Jacob says to both of them, “it may as well be.”

  “But I had another idea,” says Chaim.

  “And that would be?”

  “Buy it. Buy it fair and square.”

  Jacob coughs and spits on the icy ground. “In case you haven’t noticed,” he says, “we’re not exactly rich men.”

  “People owe me this and that,” says Chaim. “You know.”

  “I’d rather not owe you as well,” says Jacob.

  “Never mind that,” says Chaim. “Nobody owes me quite enough, as it turns out. You see, now that your painting has hung in Vollmer’s apartment, the price has gone sky high.”

  “But Vollmer didn’t want it.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “Vollmer hated it.”

  “Who cares? Provenance is everything.”

  ”Provenance. You pick up the most curious information.”

  “I pick up what I can pick up,” says Chaim. “You never know when something’s going to be useful.”

  They’ve neared the corner where they’ll need to separate, Jacob and Max keeping on for Canada and Chaim turning off. Guards stand to the left and the right but they’re occupied with the tricky business of lighting cigarettes in a cold wind, so the three pause for just a moment. Jacob frowns and chews his lip and studies the sky. Max slumps, only the crutch holding him up. Jacob says he’s learned to live without the painting before. He supposes he can learn to live without it again.

  Chaim shakes his head. “You shouldn’t have to do anything of the sort,” he says. “Maybe we can figure out a way to steal it, instead.”

  *

  Eidel works slowly, not for any selfish reason but because she must. Her pace is a product of her uncertainty, but as the weeks go by the figures of the Vollmer family do begin to emerge from the depths of that blue curtain, resolving into a kind of life that she’d never thought she’d manage. By and by the weather beyond the window turns brighter and a little springlike, but the thick curtain excludes any such change from the twin sealed universes of the painting and the dining room. When she enters each Saturday morning, stepping into that little hallway redolent of cinnamon and sausage, she goes straight to the dining room to draw the curtain tight against the day. She pauses sometimes to look out the window, out over certain low buildings and fences and underbrush, into the middle distance where the camp lies like some treacherous thing sleeping. Only the smoke from the crematoria moves in the bright air, heavenward if there were a heaven. She watches the change of the seasons and she fears that by taking so much time she’s captured something false in the painting. It’s taken her too long. Things are different. The girl Luzi is taller than when they started. The boy Karl is heavier, more filled out, although he was plenty filled out before. The result of too much sausage, she thinks. Karl is practically made of sausage. Overstuffed and slow, lazy in his movements.

  If there were any consistency in the judgment of the Reich, someone would send him off to the gas as unsuited for work.

  The painting itself, though. Sometimes she hates herself for granting this family of monsters a thing so fine, whatever the reason. Even with a gun to her head. They should have been satisfied with the picture of Lydia. As she nears the end of each morning’s session and as the sun creeps around the building and begins to illuminate the family from over her shoulder, she thinks she understands what Vollmer saw in that painting. Not its evocation of a time and a place. Not its attempt to capture the sweet and hopeful soul of a young girl. But the resemblance that Lydia, with those
caramel highlights on her sunshot hair, bore to his own daughter.

  Each time her mind begins to travel down that path she knows that the time has come to leave off for the day. Stopping is the only way she can go on. So she purses her lips and squints at the paint on the easel and pushes some last little dab of it around, sighing and saying that although she would like to get more done this morning, the pigment must have its way.

  It’s the only power she has.

  *

  “This is not a game,” says Jacob to Chaim. They’re alone in the corner of the kitchen, late on a Friday morning, in between customers. “You talk about taking the painting as if it were something we could actually accomplish. As if we’d know what to do it with it if we had it.”

  “The war won’t last forever.”

  “That’s a comfort,” Jacob says, passing the blade of a straight razor over a rough leather strop. “I won’t last forever, either.”

  Chaim is pushing a broom, and he stops to look up at the barber. He’s grown some in the last few months as well. He’s noticeably taller but he’s no more filled out—or at least not much. Jacob wonders how long a child like Chaim will be able to work his magic in this place, once he’s a child no more.

  “Don’t worry,” says the boy. “We’ll find someplace to keep it. That’s the least of our troubles.”

  “We’ll find someplace like where?”

  “Like the attic over the Officers’ Club. The waiters keep things up there you could never imagine. Bottles of schnapps. Big wheels of cheese from Switzerland. Champagne, even. Real live French Champagne.”

  “Champagne.”

  “I’m telling you the truth. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

  “How do they get such things?”

  “The same way we’ll get your painting. They steal them.”

  “And the officers don’t notice?”

  “The officers have been known to look the other way. It’s either that or train new waiters. Waiters who might turn out to be even bigger thieves than the ones they already have.”