The Keeper of the Walls

by Monique Raphel High

  She nodded. “My father was a neuropsychiatrist, in Vienna. But in Paris, he couldn’t practice. And then the Gestapo put him away, in a detention camp in Compiègne, for over a year. On the station, as he was being deported from there, he collapsed.”

  “The best people die,” Mihai said with unexpected vehemence.

  “And when you get out, what will you want to become?”

  “I like cars. I’d like to have an auto repair shop.” His eyes fastened on her, and he smiled. “Hardly a boyfriend for you, Anna Steiner.”

  “For a prostitute?” She stopped, picked up a small pebble, and tossed it neatly between the barbed wire. “Mihai,” she said. “I can’t even look at my mother. I know she’s staying alive out of love for me. Our families were old, respected names in Western Europe. Her family ranked among the first three Jewish families in Paris.” Both seemed to want to speak in a direct line about themselves, finding in the other a listener without preconceptions and prejudice. Now the young boy said: “I’m not a Hungarian. I’m actually a Rumanian, but our province was recaptured by the Horthy regime. The Hungarians have sent all their Jews away to Nazi concentration camps. The Rumanians protected us.”

  “When you return, you’ll see a better life, Mihai,” she reassured him, smiling tremulously. “Wait: reach over, between these two wires, and take my hand.” Her cheeks red, she carefully inserted her small, plump hand through an aperture in the fence, daring the wires to touch her. He stood staring at the delicate, well-tended fingers, for a moment angry at their health and good care. Then, shrugging, he took her hand in his own bony one, feeling the warmth radiating out from her fingers to his. She was still smiling, and he imagined her in her house in Vienna, maybe sitting by a blazing fireplace, roasting chestnuts, her hair plaited like a schoolgirl’s.

  Liking the image, he smiled back.

  “What are you doing here, Anna?”

  The German voice broke into their thoughts like shards of glass thrust through tender skin. She almost jumped, and remembered in time that the slightest wrong move would electrocute both her and the boy. Slowly, judiciously, their fingers came apart. She faced Heinz Kleinert, standing with his hands clenched into fists, pounding into the flesh of his thighs, as if to punish himself for loving her.

  Mihai Berkovits waited, and with the back of one of her hands, she signaled that it would be best for all if he left the scene at once. “I was just speaking to a companion,” she said, softly.

  “You are just a whore. If there weren’t a fence, you’d have been in bed with him! I was a fool to think you were different. You like all men . . . like a real gutter whore.”

  Her blue eyes blazed with a quiet, inner fire. Perhaps because she was challenging danger, or perhaps because this contact with the young Rumanian had so profoundly touched her, awakening her spirit, she answered him. “No, Heinz. I’m not, and have never been, a whore. You know I was a virgin, you know I was only with you. You know I never liked it, and was ashamed! But you forced me to be with you . . . and I had no choice!”

  “You’re telling me that you didn’t want me?”

  At this precise instant, he was not a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in the SS, and she a fourteen-year-old slave prisoner. They were two young people, confronting each other. She was totally unafraid. “It isn’t that I didn’t want you, “ she explained. “It’s that I had no choice.”

  “I would have married you,” he retorted, his eyelids narrowed over sharp, light-blue irises, lighter and colder than hers.

  “But you were not the man I dreamed of, to spend the rest of my life with.”

  “You wanted a Jew. Not me, but a Jew. A low-down, dirty Jew with a hooked nose. Right, Anna . . . Hannah?”

  “Hannah happens to be my Hebrew name. And I am not ashamed of it.”

  “But I am ashamed of myself,” he declared, “that I ever allowed a Jewish whore to corrupt me, to make me betray every ideal I have fought for and respected. Good-bye, Anna Steiner. My love is now dead.”

  With her strange maturity, she stared at him, smoldering. “Thank you, Heinz Kleinert,” she murmured. “For you have just set me free.”

  * * *

  Nanni stood naked in the smallish square room, looking with terror at the other women. There were only a hundred of them, and she had heard all the stories about the gas chambers, and the crematoria. Except in Auschwitz I, the death room accommodated three thousand. And these people here were all different. They were all plump, some of them actually tubs of lard. How was this possible?

  In the Lager, nobody except the privileged, like herself, could eat proper meals. She’d been told about people suffering from glandular diseases, and supposed these poor, shaking women were fat because of this. And though she, at one hundred five pounds, was not nearly fat, by Auschwitz-Birkenau standards she was well overweight.

  She wanted to cry, but terror so paralyzed her that her throat had become constricted. She wanted her mother. She wanted to be near Lily, near somebody who loved her and had known her all her life. Above all, she didn’t want to die.

  Above them were the same shower spigots that she had been warned about. Now she closed her eyes, wishing it to be over. The glass door was being shut, and she turned, in spite of herself, and saw the SS guards peering out at them, one hundred unfortunate Jewish women, condemned to death. It was going to happen. Now.

  She could hear the soft hiss of the gas being released . . . cyanide capsules, she’d been told. And then she smelled the strange, odious smell, and waited, for it to kill her. But it wasn’t doing that. Instead, she felt oddly euphoric, and good. Suddenly life was pleasant again, and she felt like laughing aloud . . . and she actually laughed aloud, and heard respondent laughter. They’d all been spared, as if by a supreme joke, the SS had fooled them again, as they liked to do!

  An outside door was opening, and she saw the bright summer light, welcoming her back to the realm of humanity. Heinz had relented, and would be waiting for her, with a nice gift from “Canada.” He hadn’t meant it, about his love being dead. In front of her, rows and rows of fat women were running toward the beckoning light, and, filled with excitement, she followed, a little dazed by the odd gas that she had just breathed. Everyone was laughing.

  Anna Steiner skipped out into the late August sunlight, her small feet light as those of a doe in springtime. She skipped, and was surprised, because it seemed as if the ground had receded, and was not present to receive her. Her last moment of consciousness, before landing in the gigantic cauldron of boiling water, was that, somehow, Heinz had deceived her after all.

  “I have some news about your daughter,” the tall, handsome young lieutenant of the SS said to Maryse.

  The woman turned, and stared at him, disbelieving. She was nothing more than a skeleton, with white skin drawn tight over the bones, and a shaved skull. But the eyes were the same as Anna’s, and their huge, saucer-like proportions, with their periwinkle irises, hit him suddenly below the belt.

  “You’re Anna’s mother, aren’t you?” he demanded brutally. The Musulman nodded, speechless.

  “This morning, your daughter was boiled alive, and fat from her body was melted into a bar of soap.”

  The wraithlike creature shook her head. She was like a caricature of a death’s-head. Heinz Kleinert hated her with all his might, this Jewish bitch who had poisoned his girl into turning from him, and from their love. Their pure, unique love that had flourished here, among the smokestacks and the gassings, among the Musulmen and the fat, nauseating Kapos.

  He held out his hand, and the whitish-gray material, inscribed R.I.R, gleamed in the sunlight. The woman again shook her head, and so, anguished beyond words, he threw the cake of human soap right into her face, hitting her brow and causing her to raise both hands to protect herself.

  Retching, he turned away, striding off as quickly as his legs would carry him. His pistol jangled in its holster, and perspiration drenched his shirt. By the side of the barrack, he had to b
end over to vomit.

  The Musulman still stood shaking her head, and touching her forehead. And then, she tiptoed across the Lagerstrasse, and stood for a minute or two in front of the barbed-wire divider. He was mopping his mouth with a clean white handkerchief when he heard the bloodcurdling yell, and wheeled about immediately.

  The sight was no different from that which he’d witnessed many times before. A woman, turned black by the electroshock, had killed herself by flinging her body, arms out, upon the wires.

  At roll call on January 18, 1945, Camp Commander Höss suddenly bellowed everybody to attention. Those who could walk one hundred forty miles should move to one side, those who believed they would not succeed, should move to the other. Magda, who had somehow survived her bout with typhoid fever, and who had not, after all, been selected for the gas chamber, whispered to Lily: “The Russians are approaching so fast, I’m afraid that if we admit our weakness and stay here, we shall be shot or blown up with the whole camp, by the SS.” For it was now a well-known fact, propagated through the underground, that the Allies had all but won the war, and that the panicking Nazis were disbanding all the Lagers outside the Reich, and marching as many prisoners as they could back into Germany, one step ahead of the Russian army.

  Lily weighed no more than sixty pounds. Her hair had stopped attempting to grow back, and her stomach had swollen from malnutrition. But still, every morning, she went to the washroom and waited while the drops of polluted water dripped out of the pipe, so that she might clean herself as best she could.

  Her general exhaustion was such that she had not been able to see clearly for some time now. It had been all the more difficult to fight, when she’d returned from the gas chamber selection and been informed of the double deaths of Maryse and Nanni. Now her connection to the living was completely severed. She clung only to the hope that Nicky was alive, in America; for of Kira, she knew absolutely nothing. Sometimes, when an Allied victory came to her ears (for there was at least one homemade radio in the Lager underground, from which news traveled by word of mouth), she wondered what might have happened to Mark. But her interest was only casual. She really had stopped caring. The normal feelings and opinions of a human being were now foreign to her world.

  “I couldn’t make it,” she whispered back.

  “You have to,” Magda pressed.

  Magda’s fingers curved over Lily’s arm, and they moved together to the side of the strong. A side composed of some sixty thousand men and women, eaten away by dirt, disease, and starvation. In the sub-zero chill of the Polish winter, they shivered in their scant clothing. Lily had acquired, through Magda’s theft from the “Canada” brigade, a short alpaca jacket. Magda herself hugged a woolen coat, three sizes too large, to her bones.

  And so, linking arms, the two friends joined into a row of five with three other women, and the procession began. The SS escorted them, comfortably ensconced in horse-drawn carts. The men and women trudged through the deep snow in their wooden clogs, slipping on the icy roads, holding on to one another.

  The nervousness of the SS was apparent. They reacted like predators who knew that, just around the corner, a hunter lay in wait to kill them. In the last throes of their power, they vented their helpless rage on the poor thousands marching like exhausted automatons over the frozen roads of Poland, westward, ever more westward toward the safety of the Fatherland.

  Lily and Magda had forgotten which day it was, and why they were marching. They were given a bare five minutes every few hours to lie down, in the snow, to take a load off their feet. Lily thought that, perhaps,

  her days walking all over Paris had helped her to build up a resistance that some of her more spoiled companions had never experienced, but on which she still knew how to draw. The rows of fives were diminishing every hour. Whenever someone faltered, an SS guard would shoot him or her at once, leaving the body in the snow.

  On the fourth day, when the reserves of sawdust bread and margarine had been consumed, Lily’s strength gave out at last. Magda, in the “Canada” brigade, had never been so physically taxed as she, in the factory. “Just leave me here,” Lily murmured. “I don’t care. But I can’t continue for another mile.”

  She knew that they had crossed the border into Germany, for that morning, they had crossed a village and been given milk by some of the women, who had addressed them in the language of their captors. But Magda was adamant. “We’re going to carry you,” she asserted. “But we’re not leaving you here to die.”

  The young Rumanian girl on Lily’s other side took hold of Magda’s hand, and together they lifted Lily’s torso from under her arms. After that, she lost consciousness, and they dragged her body until, two days later, she awakened once more.

  “We’ve arrived somewhere,” Magda said. “It’s some kind of camp, I think.”

  Of the sixty thousand, perhaps fifteen thousand were still alive. Lily could hardly make out their surroundings, but she could see a courtyard and barracks. Another prison opening up its gates to the dregs of the world, the wandering Jews whom nobody would claim and who were hated and derided by all. Overwhelmed by bitterness, she followed the long line of exhausted women to their next home.

  They worked underground, manufacturing bombs to be used against the British. Their heads shaved, in their tattered dresses, they stood side by side, their fingers putting the tiny pieces together like automatons. Lily’s hands were swollen, and she knew that her sight was probably permanently impaired. She was forty years old, but felt sixty-five. Her skin was blotched with eczema, and a tic kept bringing down the right corner of her up.

  Magda, younger and healthier, in spite of her bout with typhoid fever, was less adept with her fingers. By the end of the long day, when they returned aboveground to the barracks, she was always in tears, certain that her mistakes would sooner or later catch up with her. One hundred twenty thousand Jews were working as slave laborers in the factory of Ludwigschutz, and, although they had one free day per week, and there were no crematoria to haunt them, they worked in terror; for at lunchtime, those who had broken a piece of machinery were lined up by the Germans, and hanged in front of the whole group.

  In the morning, they marched to work to the sound of the Lager orchestra. They felt as if their hearts had shrunk, as if all the hope that had animated them during those last few weeks at Auschwitz had been for naught. The Russians might have saved those who had remained in the death camp; but the Allies were not aware of the hundred twenty thousand lost souls in Ludwigschutz.

  Magda told Lily that, even if the Allies came to save them, she would have no home to which to return. “You have your children,” she despaired. “But my parents are dead, and there’s no reason for me to return to Budapest. The ballet would never be able to use me.”

  Lily could offer few words of comfort; Magda had spoken the truth. They would never, any one of the survivors, be able to resume a normal life.

  And then, one morning at the beginning of April, Magda, her hands shaking uncontrollably, dropped a small hammer, and saw it land on an infinitesimal plastic wedge. Her eyes widened with horror, and she could not move to retrieve it. Lily, in the flash of a second, had dropped to her knees, her vision blurry as she tried to find the shattered piece of plastic. But immediately, an SS guard stepped between her and her quarry. The plump, sturdy SS sergeant, his eyes cold and bright amid creases of fat, had his hand on Magda’s arm, and then was bludgeoning her about the shoulders and neck with his cudgel. She was taken away, screaming her pain and fright, and Lily remained frozen in position, blinking back her own tears.

  With sympathy, her companions allowed her to stay in place, immobile, until the lunchtime break, each taking more than her share of work so that the SS would not notice her lack of productivity. The young Rumanian who had helped drag her through the snow, Cornelia Ionescu, put an arm about Lily’s shoulder and walked outside into the courtyard with her. In the concrete square, gallows had been set up, as they were every day. Only t
his time, Magda was standing with the condemned.

  Lily watched, through her dimmed eyes, as the SS put nooses around the necks of each of the victims. She remembered sitting in Claire’s room, as a small girl, and being read to from Les Misérables. A crust of stolen bread, a piece of broken plastic. And then, an explosion occurred inside her own head, and dots of jagged red filled her line of vision. With a sudden scream, she darted forward, her hands outstretched to the brave, kind young ballerina she had grown to love in the Dantesque horrors of Birkenau.

  She heard Cornelia screaming: “Lily! Get back!” and then fell forward, her wooden clog catching on a bramble. She felt the ground rise up to meet her just as the SS bullet went through her shoulder. At the same instant that Magda Gaspar was choked to death by the hangman’s noose, Lily Brasilova lost consciousness, her blood seeping like India ink into the eternal gray of the German Lager yard. She missed hearing the sudden, shrill sound of an air raid siren, and seeing the German guards scamper for cover.

  When she opened her eyes, she had a sensation of infinite softness, of a cleanliness only dreams could be made of. She blinked, saw the unknown female face bending over her, and heard strange words in a strange voice. American English. It had been years since she had heard that kind of accent. The truth was that she spoke very little English, only enough to get along . . . an American accent?

  “Hospital,” the unknown woman was saying, intonating for her. “Hôpital? You’re French, aren’t you?”

  Lily nodded, and tried to move her right hand to touch her face. But a terrible pain went through her, and she realized that something was resisting her freedom of movement. The woman said, in hesitant French: “You’re in an American hospital, in the American sector of Berlin. You were found among a handful of survivors, in the courtyard of a Nazi munitions factory. You were delirious, you had pneumonia, and your shoulder had been damaged by a bullet. But you were alive. The Red Cross brought you first to the Russian sector, and then, three weeks ago, they sent you here, thinking we might have more success finding out who you are.”