For a few moments, Edek was silent too. “I think you’ll make a great writer and a great cinematographer one day,” he said, giving Wiesław a friendly clap on his shoulder. “You observe everything very closely. You memorize things. And it’s good. Keep doing it, so when we’re out of here, you can tell our story to the world, so none of these horrors repeat themselves again.”
Wiesław glanced up in surprise.
“What?” Edek grinned knowingly. “You expected me to tease you about it, like we tease each other about everything else?”
“To be frank with you, yes. I did.”
“I considered it but couldn’t come up with a good joke.”
They picked up the old sink and were already heading out when Edek suddenly stopped in the door and spoke again, his expression as grave as ever.
“Promise me, Wiesław.”
“What?”
“To write about it.”
“How about we co-write it?”
“I’m not good with words.”
“Yes, you are. With all the right words.”
Fourteen
“So, you made your acquaintance with Frau Alma?” Mala asked with a playful grin.
They met at their usual place, the Sauna. Inside, it was business as usual, with all sorts of transactions taking place. As he had promised, Edek brought a full pocket of nails and screws, pinched from his new fitters’ Kommando. This time, instead of taking the contraband from him, Mala stepped very close to Edek and opened her pocket, so he could lower the goods into it himself. In spite of himself, Edek held his breath as he dipped a fistful of contraband into Mala’s pocket, feeling heat rising in his cheeks as he sensed the warmth of her body through the thin lining of her coat.
She didn’t move away at once, but stood there, still much too close, studying his face with an enigmatic smile on her face. It took Edek great effort to recall what it was precisely she had asked him.
“Frau Alma? Yes.” He swallowed, recovering himself with difficulty. “I did. She seems… A bit intimidating.”
Rather to his surprise, Mala chuckled. “You’re not the only one with that impression. Some of the SS are quite fearful of her. Well, I suppose, that’s to be expected.” She paused before adding unexpectedly, “Hössler is in love with her. All of his inferiors know she’s under his direct protection.”
“Hössler?” Edek stared at her, astounded. “Camp leader Hössler?”
“The very same. To be sure, he would never admit to it openly, but…” For a few moments, Mala searched for the right words with her head tilted slightly to one side. “He talks about her constantly and goes to listen to her play her violin nearly every day. The wardens hate her.”
“Why?”
“She’s from a prominent Austrian family. Her father used to be the concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic. Her uncle was a composer. Her brother and she are both celebrated musicians. Their only trouble was they happened to be Jews, assimilated like me, but that doesn’t matter to the Nazis.” Mala gave an indifferent shrug. “That’s why the wardens hate her. Their SS bosses could have thrown Frau Alma into Auschwitz, but they couldn’t change her nature. She’s a refined, high-society lady and an accomplished violinist and even the local SS elite like Hössler understand it and admire it. The wardens may wear the uniform and imagine themselves the masters of this little camp universe, but deep down, even they understand the difference between them and Frau Alma. She’s everything they aspire to be but will never become. And so, they hate her for it.”
“I still can’t believe what you said about Hössler.”
“He’s only a man. And love doesn’t care for such trifles as race, skin color, or religion.”
“My former Kommandoführer Lubusch married a Polish girl.”
“See?” Mala gave him a triumphant grin.
Edek didn’t tell her how much he, a Pole, liked a certain Jewish girl as well.
“Naturally, Hössler’s situation is a little different,” Mala continued, as he reddened further. “He’ll never act upon his feelings. Instead, he’ll keep admiring Frau Alma from afar, continue doing favors for her and never betray himself with a single word. Us women, we see the little things men in love do for us. But, outwardly, he keeps his appearances, supervises gassings at the crematoria, shoots a few prisoners now and then. An exemplary SS man, in his superiors’ eyes. Only to me he will talk about her, and only when he knows that no one else will hear.” Her face turned pensive. “Sometimes I pity him. He could have been a decent man had he not fallen under his Führer’s indoctrination. Free to live his life the way he wanted. Free to love whoever he wanted. He was studying photography, you know. And now…” Mala shook her head.
Us women, we see these little things men in love do for us. Edek stole a glance at Mala’s pocket and wondered whether she knew as well, the reason for all of these visits, all of the risks he was taking just to get precious contraband for her. And then her eyes met his and he saw that she knew. Of course, she did. They, women, always did.
He cleared his throat. “And what about her?”
“What about her? She uses him for her own purposes, for privileges for her girls and that sort of thing, and good for her. She’s a highly intelligent woman. Zippy positively adores her.”
“Zippy is your colleague from the camp office?”
“Yes. She also plays the mandolin in the orchestra. Sometimes, they play here, in the Sauna, on Sundays. You should come along.”
Edek searched her face. “Will you be here?”
“Does it make a difference?” Mala asked, her smile turning coy.
“All the difference in the world. I’m not very educated musically. I need someone to explain it all to me,” he said, a tad embarrassed.
Mala laughed. “You don’t explain music, silly. You enjoy it and dance to it.”
“Will you dance with me then?”
Mala didn’t answer. Instead, she suddenly cupped his cheek, pecked him on the other one and said, “Thank you for the goods. I shall have your Ausweis before Christmas, as promised.”
For a long time after Mala had disappeared into the crowd, Edek stood and gazed after her, his palm over the very place where she had kissed him.
It poured something unmerciful that afternoon—a rare midwinter rain, icy and sharp like needles against one’s face. Soaked to the bone, for the wardens didn’t much care whether their runners wore anything suitable for such weather, Mala trooped along the barbed wire fence separating the men’s and women’s camps, holding a folder wrapped in several layers of cellophane against her chest. Keeping paperwork dry was the priority of the SS. The inmates carrying them were expendable.
On the very edge of the men’s camp, one selection or the other was taking place. Accompanied by hoarse shouts and the occasional flicking of the whip, hundreds of gray, cadaverous creatures ran in front of the SS men, inspecting them from a distance, so that the filthy Jewish scum wouldn’t splatter their tailored military raincoats with mud. From time to time, on an SS guard’s signal, a Kapo grabbed hold of his newest victim and shoved him toward a growing group of prisoners. With a doomed, tormented look in their sunken eyes, the men clung to each other, razor-sharp shoulders touching under the glistening skin that was gradually turning blue; bony hands covering their private parts in a last attempt to protect their modesty.
Passing them by behind the SS men’s backs, Mala swiftly averted her gaze so as not to embarrass them any further. They were already sentenced to death solely because the SS found them to be too frail to keep working for the glory of the Reich. The last thing they needed was some runner ogling them in their misery.
Before long, a deep construction ditch crept into view, from which, Mala knew, the local inmates got their water. It was muddy, crawled with vermin and stunk to high heaven, but since only the privileged prisoners got access to drinking water, the rest of the camp population had to choose between drinking from the ditch or dying from thirst. For the majority,
the choice was obvious, judging by the countless outbreaks of dysentery that landed them in the sickbay and sometimes straight in the gas chambers.
Her rain-soaked woolen coat weighing a ton on her shoulders, Mala soldiered on, head held high and mouth pursed into a hard, resolute line. From behind, shrill, scornful laughter reached her, turning her gut with pure, savage hatred. She would recognize that madman’s laughter out of a thousand. Only Hauptscharführer Moll, the one-eyed beast, could laugh with such maniacal glee at the suffering of the others. She hastened her step, but the sound of it followed her, growing louder and louder in her mind until it drowned out her own thoughts.
There were plenty of SS men to detest in the camp, but not a single one’s behavior caused such revulsion and loathing in Mala as this glass-eyed crematorium supervisor. Unlike most of his colleagues who went through their gruesome jobs with an indifferent attitude of “orders are orders” and “someone has to do this work,” Moll took cruel, sadistic pleasure in torturing and murdering his victims in the most callous of ways. Sometimes, when the camp overwhelmed her to the point of delirium, Mala dreamt of revenge—on all of them, really—but it was Moll’s freckled face with his glass eye that invariably stood out from the uniformed, faceless crowd.
She ought to do something to make him suffer, Mala uttered a silent oath to herself that dark, winter day. She ought to give him a taste of his own medicine. Hopefully, with Edek’s help, someday…
Through the wall of the rain, the immense Mexico compound unfolded before her. It was still in the first stages of construction, with unfinished barracks and the semblance of a road leading to where the Kommando was disassembling the downed allied and German planes transported to Birkenau from all parts of Poland where they’d met their untimely end. A few inmates roamed around restlessly, pulling the scraps of their colorful blankets around their bony, shivering frames. It was them and their ridiculous, pitiful attires that had given the compound its name. Unlike the Kanada work detail named after the land of riches, the Mexico one was the poorest and the dirtiest in the eyes of the camp administration—a third-world part of the camp, even by Auschwitz measures.
With her trained eye, Mala instantly spotted Polish civilians trading goods with the local inmates on the sly, away from the guards’ eyes. The guards, it appeared, couldn’t be bothered with guarding anyone in such weather; their commander, to whom Mala was to deliver the written orders and blueprints, preferred to lounge in one of the barracks, where she discovered him engaged in a game of Skat with one of his subordinates. Without taking his eyes off his cards, he interrupted Mala’s report mid-word and waved her toward the overturned crate, on which she was to leave the cellophane-swaddled folder amid the bottles of schnapps and half-eaten ham and cheese sandwiches. It was Mala’s profound conviction that he wouldn’t open it for the next few hours at the least.
On her way back, the rain only intensified. It slashed at Mala’s face with each gust of wind and washed away what had remained of the well-trodden path, turning it into a swampy river of mud. With each new step, her feet were sinking into it deeper and deeper as though invisible hands of the dead grabbed at her ankles, firmly set on pulling her under the ground where they had found their last resting place.
Once again, the construction ditch materialized through the curtain of the rain, only this time with Moll staring with curiosity into it, his head tilted slightly to one side. Next to him, his colleague Voss was standing. With his hands clasped behind his back, he scowled deeply at something inside the ditch. The selection, Mala realized, was thankfully over.
Yanking her feet out of the slushy ground, Mala tried to steer as far away from the two SS men as possible, but came to an abrupt halt in spite of herself when a pair of pale hands appeared over the edge of the ditch. Squinting through the rain, Mala stared at the trench with purpose this time and felt her throat constrict with primal horror: it was filled with corpses of the recently murdered men, the men she had seen clinging to each other on the way to the Mexico not even an hour ago.
“Look at this stinking carcass!” Moll brayed with laughter as he pointed with his gloved hand at the man desperately groping his way out. “He’s a resilient one. It’s the fifth time he’s climbed out of there.” With deliberate cruelty, Moll moved toward his victim and kicked at the man’s hands with his steel-lined boots, sending him sliding in the mud and tumbling back into the ditch. Delighted, Moll turned to Voss. “How much do you want to bet he’ll crawl out of there ten times?” Without waiting for a response, he extracted a wad of bills out of his pocket. “I’ll bet you fifty Reichsmarks he’ll make it to ten.”
Voss, who had always been half-drunk and cracking jokes with the Sonderkommando men, appeared oddly sober to Mala just then. He didn’t budge, even when Moll kept waving the money before his face, which was somber and stern and betraying just a slight hint of distaste in the curve of his mouth.
“What for did you order them to be thrown into the ditch in the first place?” he uttered at last, without looking at his colleague.
Moll only shrugged, unperturbed. “Wanted to see if that desperate scum from the local barracks will keep drinking from the ditch with corpses swimming in it. They didn’t mind the mud and the rats; I bet you another twenty they’ll hesitate before slurping from the open mass grave, ha-ha!” Once again, he threw his head back, apparently finding the situation positively hilarious. “Don’t fret, we’ll send someone to fish them out after a few days. I don’t fancy dealing with the stench the Mexico construction Kommando commander will raise once he finds out we’re using his ditch as an underwater cemetery.”
Her entire body trembling, Mala stood riveted to her place and stared at him with all the hatred she felt coursing through her veins like acid. But then the two hands miraculously materialized on the very edge of the trench and Mala felt a breath hitch in her throat as she caught sight of the man for the first time. His hair was shorn, and the sharp cheekbones streaked with filth, but how painfully familiar he looked. If only it wasn’t for his eyes that stared pleadingly at the SS guards above him, she would have taken him for her father.
“That’s six,” Moll announced almost admiringly and shoved the helpless man back into the rotten, freezing water.
After releasing a devastated cry, the inmate pleaded in French, promising that he could work, that he was very strong, that he would crawl out twenty times if needed, just to be allowed back into his work detail. But Moll only mocked him with heartless mirth, screaming nonsensical French words over the man’s tearful pleas.
“We don’t understand your gibberish. Speak German, if you wish to be understood!”
“Stop resisting! Pretend that you’re dead or they’ll kill you!” Mala screamed in French at the man, possessed by the sudden need to save at least him from Moll’s clutches.
Both SS men swung round at once, Moll fixing a withering glare of his only good eye on Mala’s slight frame. She held his gaze without flinching, without lowering her own, suddenly brave to a suicidal extent and ready for a fight.
“Ah, Mally,” Moll drawled in a singsong voice, a dark sneer spreading over his face. “Come here, pet. Stand right before me; there’s a good girl. And now, report to me, as you should, what you just said to that filthy washrag trashing about in the mud?”
With all the defiance she felt burning in her chest, Mala smiled viciously at him and spat, “If you spoke French, you wouldn’t need an interpreter for that.”
She was aware of the nothingness behind her back, of the edge of the ditch he’d strategically positioned her at just moments before, of Moll stepping closer, nose to nose now, his nostrils flaring with ire, and yet, she took not a single step to avoid the unavoidable.
“You think you’re smarter than me, you Jew-bitch? You haven’t the faintest idea how long I’ve been waiting for this moment.” He hissed and shoved her hard in her chest, knocking the breath out of her for one short instant.
With a resounding splash, Mala lande
d on top of the soft mound of flesh and shuddered with primal terror as she groped about to regain her footing. The trembling Frenchman crouched by the trench’s wall, searching her face with wild eyes appealing silently for mercy. On top of the trench, Moll was already towering, his hand unbuckling the holster languidly, as though savoring the moment.
With a tremendous effort, on shaking knees, Mala rose from the water and straightened to full height. Without taking her eyes off her executioner, she squared her shoulders and sneered at him with icy scorn, ruining his pleasure.
He was thoroughly incensed now at her prideful stance, at her unflinching glare full of challenge; he lost his temper and began to curse at her crudely, like only the SS could, tearing his gun out and aiming it at her head.
But suddenly, Voss installed himself before him and even though Mala couldn’t see his face, she could hear precisely what he said: “If you shoot her, I’ll have to report to Hössler precisely what happened.”
Voss’s voice was cool and collected, but the veiled threat in it was audible. The gun wavering in his hand, Moll regarded him in stunned surprise. In another instant, his face reddened at such a betrayal of the SS brotherhood.
“She’s just a dirty Jew…”
“She’s Hössler’s Jew,” Voss corrected him evenly, his hand on his comrade’s wrist, pulling it forcefully down. “You don’t need any more problems with him.”
“All my troubles with him began precisely because of her, after that day at the Krema, when that bastard escaped—”
“And as I said, you don’t need to make matters even worse for yourself.”
“But she’s just a Jew… a worthless Jew…” Moll seemed genuinely puzzled to comprehend how the loss of one such Jew could be upsetting to anyone, let alone camp leader Hössler.
“Come.” Voss was already steering him away from the ditch. “You’ve had your fun. Perhaps, they won’t be able to climb out of there after all,” he offered as a consolation. “Then, we’ll report that she fell there herself. Look at this weather. Dreadful, eh?”
The Girl Who Escaped from Auschwitz: A totally gripping and absolutely heartbreaking World War 2 page-turner, based on a true story Page 12
