Invisible Love (10 page)

Coming to this realization had an unexpected effect on me: I lifted my head and vowed that, whatever happened, I would resist. Yes, even if they were dead, whatever tortures they had suffered, I would stay alive. It was an obligation. I owed them that. Rita had given me that destiny forever: to survive.

My sister had appointed me, I was the chosen one, I would never be a victim. Rita had taken risks for me. She may even have sacrificed herself for me . . . If I died, I would kill her a second time . . .

I tried therefore to apply that resolve.

Alas, I was living in a world where resolve had no place. The purpose of the camp was to turn us into animals, to break our individual wills. Whatever we had that was human, Auschwitz took it from us: when we arrived we had already lost our homes, our social standing, our money if we had any; if we stayed, we would lose our names, our clothes, our hair, our dignity, walk naked—naked even in our prison uniforms, another kind of nakedness—tattooed, reduced to numbers, ruthlessly exploited, tools to be used, bodies to be experimented on by the doctors. Like cattle, I was becoming an object in the hands of a superior race, the Nazis, who granted themselves the right to do whatever they liked with me.

At first, I had the foolish idea that I was having an adventure. I even remember taking refuge in a kind of ironic reserve, noting the stages of my degradation. A consciousness remained, that of a shy adolescent who believed in existence, who had decided to live, even through terrible ordeals.

But, with all the exhaustion and injustice and torture, all the pain, I was dwindling.

How to stop being humiliated and suffering from it? By telling yourself you don't deserve any other fate than the one you've been given; by agreeing to be what other people make of you; by considering yourself less than a pig, a piece of shit—in short, by abdicating your inner life. After five months, I no longer took refuge in my mind, I was nothing more than my cold skin, my cracked feet, my belly tight with hunger, my ass spewing endless diarrhea, my exhausted muscles that no longer responded to me. Sometimes, I even left my body, and became the cold, the hunger, the pain.

My survival plan had faded; only a primeval animal instinct, which depended on neither will nor morale, kept me alive. I crawled. I fought over a crust of bread. I obeyed the kapos to avoid being beaten. When one of us lay dying, it no longer affected me, I simply searched the body to make sure he wasn't hiding any food, or any object that could be swapped for something I wanted. During the marches to the factory and back, I stepped over corpses without compassion; my eyes remained dry and empty, like those of the dead; there was no time to weep. If I happened to recognize the face of a corpse, I envied it: here was a cold body that had stopped feeling the cold.

Because the dark, windy Polish autumn already had the icy edge of winter. One morning, I was shivering so much that, seeing the chimneys in the distance belching smoke, the origin of which I suspected, I imagined myself there, in the middle of the fire, fulfilled, dilated, radiant. Oh yes, I dreamed of burning in the oven to stop the shivering. Those fires on my body, caressing it. Flames of joy. My teeth have stopped chattering. What beneficial heat . . .

 

Once again, I laid Samuel Heymann's pages aside. I felt enormous guilt, guilt at reading this confession before Miranda had, guilt at having always talked with Samuel Heymann in total ignorance of the fact that he had been through an ordeal like that. How stupid and superficial I must have seemed to him!

I looked at the silver print that had been slipped in behind the letter, and recognized what it was: the photograph François Bastien had mentioned during our visit to the kennel. There, beside a barbed wire fence, stood a skeletal adolescent in a strange uniform, in the company of a dog whose ribs stuck out so much you could count them. The young man looked like Samuel Heymann, or at least the way you might have imagined Samuel Heymann as a starving adolescent; as for the Beauceron, it was the exact double of the Argos I had known. Already, you could see the master and the beast living in perfect harmony, both distracted by the camera but smiling at it. Who was imitating whom? The dog, the master? The master, the dog? When and where had this photograph been taken?

Decidedly, I had to read this text right through to the end.

 

I'm coming now, Miranda, to the essential moment that will allow you to understand the kind of father you lived with.

It was January 1945. We'd had no news of the fighting, we didn't know if the Americans had made any progress since the Normandy landings, if the Russians were advancing on us or retreating, in short, we continued to trudge through the snow, suffering through a winter that seemed endless.

I was aware of how weak I had become. I could see it in myself and also in Peter, a Fleming who had arrived in Auschwitz at the same time as me. This tall, well-built boy with magnificent teeth had become an emaciated rat with spindly feet, gray in complexion, his features hardened, dark shadows under his eyes. He was like a mirror image of me. What surprised me was that in the middle of his furrowed face, he had kept his big, shiny, healthy teeth; I often looked at them surreptitiously, clinging to those pieces of enamel like a dying man to a buoy because I told myself that, when they fell, we would all die.

The cold, the wind, the snow had taken root deep down inside us. Although we still worked in the factory, we had the impression that it required less of us, that the work was becoming lighter; we refused, though, to think openly that German industry was running at less than full capacity, for fear that the hope would poison us; to me it was a godsend, after the efforts I had been making to allay suspicion, to demonstrate that I was still healthy, useful, and efficient.

One morning, we were told we'd be staying in the camp that day.

Warning bells rang in what remained of our intelligence. Were we going to be executed?

After a day spent trembling with fear, the following dawn brought the same news: no factory today. We realized then that, with orders lessening, the factory was idle.

In spite of the cold, some of us got some fresh air.

I was walking along the sides of the huts when I saw three soldiers talking to a dog that was leaping about on the outside of the barbed wire fence. The men kept throwing snowballs at it, and each time the dog would chase after the ball, believing—or pretending to believe—that it was solid enough for him to catch it in his mouth. Obviously, each time, it would crumble in his jaws and he would bark in surprise, as if someone had played a bad trick on him. The three Germans would burst out laughing. From my hidden vantage point, I too was amused by the dog's stubbornness, his leaps and bounds, the carefree gaiety with which he ignored his failures and kept starting all over again.

Then the three soldiers heard a bell summoning them to resume their duties and walked away. When they disappeared from the animal's sight, the dog, unable to get through the fence, tilted his head to one side, whined with disappointment and sat down, looking bewildered.

I stepped forward. Why? I don't know . . . Especially since it was very unwise for a prisoner to wander too close to the edge of the camp. Never mind, I stepped forward.

As soon as he saw me, the dog wagged his tail and gave me a big smile. The closer I got, the greater his euphoria. He was stamping with impatience.

Without thinking, I grabbed some snow and threw a ball of it over the wire. Enthusiastically, he leaped up in the path of the projectile, seized it, reduced it to powder in his teeth, protested, then turned to me with a yelp, beaming with pleasure. I did it again, several times. He would rush at the ball, his hindquarters driven forward by some invisible, irrepressible force, abandoning himself to the intoxication of the race, swerving, tumbling, completely given over to his passion for movement.

I fell to the ground, my knees in the snow, my torso on my thighs, hot tears running down my cheeks. How good it was to cry at last . . . How long was it since I had last cried? How long was it since I had last felt anything? How long was it since I had last reacted like a human being?

When I looked up, the dog was sitting snugly in his rough fur coat, staring at me, questioning, anxious.

I smiled at him. He pricked up his ears, looking for a confirmation. His posture said, “Should I be worried or not?”

I was crying even more but insisted on smiling. For the dog, that wasn't a clear answer.

I walked toward him. He moaned with satisfaction.

When we were within a few feet of each other, he yapped shrilly and tried to push his muzzle between the barbed wire. Bending forward, I felt his warm breath on my palm, his damp, soft nose. He was kissing me. I started talking to him, I talked to him as I had never talked to anybody in the camp.

What did I tell him? That I was grateful to him. That he had made me laugh, which was something I hadn't done for a year. Above all, that he had made me cry, and that those tears were tears not of sadness but of joy. He had overwhelmed me by accepting me after the soldiers. Not only had I not thought he would give me such a warm welcome, I hadn't even thought he would see me. Most of the time I was transparent, nobody took any notice of me. According to the Nazis, I belonged to an inferior race, good only for dying, or for working hard before dying. A race even below his, because the soldiers liked animals. When he had shown me how pleased he was to see me, I had become a man again. Yes, as soon as he had looked at me with the same interest and the same impatience as he had looked at the guards, he had given me back my humanity. In his eyes, I was as much a man as the Nazis were. That was why I was sobbing . . . I had forgotten I was a person, and I was no longer expecting to be shown any respect. He had restored my dignity.
 

Happy to discover my voice, he fixed his mahogany eyes on mine, his face grimacing, now with approval, now with disapproval. I was certain he could understand what I said.

Once I had calmed down, I noticed how thin he was. His ribs were visible through his skin, his bones protruded everywhere. He too was lacking in the necessities. And in spite of that, he was taking the time to amuse himself . . .

“You're hungry, aren't you, old boy? I'd really like to help, but I can't do a thing for you.”

He drew in his tail even more between his hind legs. Although clearly disappointed, he wasn't angry with me. He continued to gaze at me with trusting eyes. He expected something wonderful, convinced I could perform miracles. He had faith in me.

Can you imagine it, Miranda? I had fought over stale bread, I had searched dead bodies looking for crumbs, but now, at lunchtime, I put a portion of beans in a cloth and took it to him that afternoon.

When he saw me, his tail lashed the air, and his back quivered. In all the hours he'd waited, he hadn't doubted me. His joy moved me all the more in that I wasn't going to disappoint him. I dropped the beans through the wire and he charged at them. In four seconds, my treasure had been devoured. He looked up: “More?” I told him that was all I had. He passed his tongue several times over his chops and seemed to accept my explanation.

I quickly ran away. Hearing him whine, I walked faster. When I reached our hut, my heart thumping, I told myself off: I had exposed myself to too many risks for a mutt, depriving myself of my own ration, walking too close to the fence. And yet, almost unwittingly, I began singing to myself. The other prisoners were startled.

“What's gotten into you?”

I started laughing. Certain that I had gone crazy, they turned away and went back to whatever they had been doing before.

The song was louder in my brain than what emerged through my cracked lips: I realized that the dog had brought me happiness.

Every day after that, taking advantage of the unusual idleness, I crept away to feed him.

A week later, the camp was liberated by the Russian army.

I confess that none of us had really believed it would happen. Of course, there had been some advance signs—soldiers leaving, squabbles among the kapos, noises in the night, cars coming and going—but, even when we saw our liberators with their red stars, we hesitated. Was it a trap? Some perverse trick dreamed up by the Nazis? Surprised or disgusted by our appearance, the Soviet infantrymen in their long coats stared at us in horror; we probably looked more like ghosts than human beings . . .

Nobody smiled at the soldiers, nobody thanked them. We didn't move, didn't speak—gratitude was a virtue we had long forgotten. It was only when the Russians opened the food stores and summoned us to the feast that we consented to make a move.

It was a ghastly scene. We fell on the pieces of ham, bread and meat paste like termites attacking a piece of wood, mechanically, heedless of whatever was around us. There was no pleasure in our eyes, only the fear of being interrupted.

Some died a few hours later from this abundance, because their bodies could no longer bear to ingest food. Who among them cared? At least they'd died with their bellies full.

At midnight, once I had eaten my fill, I said good night to Peter, the boy with the beautiful teeth, then walked along the fence looking for the dog . . . After the miracle that had just happened, I saw him as the herald angel, the bringer of glad tidings. His appearance on the scene had made it possible for me to bear the days preceding my liberation. In my pocket, I had kept for him a piece of meat paste I was looking forward to seeing him eat.

I didn't see him. I talked and sang in the hope that he would pick up my voice, but he never appeared.