The Thief of Auschwitz (10 page)

Schuler doesn’t rejoice. He says farewell to his freedom. He says farewell to Canada, with its soft work and its riches. He examines his gum-soled shoes, calculating how well they’ll hold up on the water project, and he studies his own soft hands, imagining them callused and bleeding. He despairs.

The first day that he’s back among the ordinary run of prisoners, trudging off to the excavation, men begin asking him questions they haven’t asked before. It’s as if he’s a traveler come back at last from some mysterious place even more exotic than Canada. As if he’s tumbled back to earth from the heavens. Max is the most curious of them all, since his father has gone off this very morning to take the old barber’s place and he wonders about the conditions and the people he’ll meet. He asks him if the sorting facility is really the land of plenty that everyone has been led to believe.

Schuler, like an old voluptuary who’s drained his last bottle, sighs and nods his head. He can’t even speak to make a proper answer.

Max asks if it’s true that the commandant’s cook is a grandmotherly old woman who might part now and then with a little something in the way of food.

Schuler comes back to something approaching life, barking out a derisive laugh. “The commandant’s cook? I should say not. The commandant’s cook is just back from service on a U-boat, and he’s a squint-eyed Nazi devil if there ever was one.”

“But—”

“But nothing. The kindly old woman you’ve heard about is the housekeeper. Except she isn’t kindly either.”

“No?”

“Definitely not. She is, however, deaf as a post.”

Max sags.

“Buck up,” says Schuler. “If your father uses his head, deaf is a thousand times better.
Kindly
depends on someone else, you see. But
deaf
opens the way for a man’s own cunning.”

Slazak has a length of pipe he’s been carrying around as a walking stick, and he jabs Schuler in the ribs to keep him quiet. “Save your wind,” he says, and when Schuler stumbles but walks on he hits him harder, this time across the back of the knees. Schuler goes down and cries out and Max tries to lift him but Slazak won’t permit it. He clouts Max across the shoulders and the boy goes down too. This time he’s able to help Schuler up while acting as if he’s only helping himself. “Good boy,” says Schuler under his breath, and Slazak doesn’t hear, so that’s the end of it for now.

Max starts asking questions again when they break for noon rations, but this time the other men don’t want to hear about food. They think about food enough, without having to dream about the delicacies that Rosen might be able to get his hands on for the exclusive benefit of himself and his son. The truth is that they are of two minds about the subject. Half of them gave up all thoughts of food the moment they entered the camp, in order to keep themselves from going mad; the rest believe in thinking of nothing else, in order to keep themselves from despairing entirely.

Never mind the temptations, they say, tell us about the commandant himself.

“He drinks,” says Schuler, leaning back on a pile of black iron pipe.

No one looks surprised.

“And as far as I can tell, he believes that Jews are gorgons.”

There are a few blank faces among the men, so he elucidates by holding his hands up alongside his head and wiggling his fingers.

“Like Medusa,” he says. “He’ll look at them only in the mirror. Under any other condition, the bastard averts his eyes.” The stack of pipe is warm in the hot sun and he leans on it like a lizard, gathering heat into his old bones.

“Could be he’s ashamed of himself,” comes a voice.

“Hah,” says Schuler. “An individual more puffed up with pride never set foot upon this earth.” He stretches his fingers around a length of pipe, feeling the warmth sink in.

Another voice: “So why didn’t you slit his throat when you had the chance?” No one seems to know exactly where the words come from, but they hang in the air like notes from a church bell. A couple of the men check to see if Slazak or perhaps even one of the Ukrainians has overheard, but no.

Schuler sits up. “Why didn’t I slit the bastard’s throat? I’ll tell you why.” He surveys them one by one. “I did it to save the worthless skins of idiots like you.”

A muttering comes from the men. Of course. They hadn’t thought it through. The dream of standing behind the commandant with a blade of sharp German steel in their hands is powerful enough to block out all logic, all reason. Kill the commandant and you kill not just yourself but your commando, your block, probably half the prisoners in the entire camp. Just like that. To say nothing of what the Nazis would do to every blood relative you had in all of Europe. They’d hunt them down and slaughter them one after another. And when the bloodshed was finished, they’d install another commandant just like the first one. Worse, if they could find such a creature.

So old Schuler, deposed barber and sorter of stolen goods, lounging there on his stack of pipe like a dragon on his treasure and smiling to himself in an ecstasy of satisfaction, was right. Hands off the commandant. Hands off every last one of them.

*

Partly indoors and partly out, Canada is a great open-air bazaar of the lost and the stolen. Treasures lurk everywhere: rare gems and glittering costume jewelry, wedding rings and coins of all nations; dark Belgian chocolates and rich French cheeses and fat fragrant sausages from every corner of Europe. The first lesson that Jacob learns is that you never know where you’ll find such things, and the second lesson is that the first lesson is an illusion. There are, after all, only a limited number of places where desperate people might have hidden their valuables upon reaching the end of the line. The hems of coats and dresses. The toes of boots. False bottoms and secret compartments in trunks and suitcases.

The capo is Jankowski, a Pole with the manner and build of an armored tank. He trundles about slowly and methodically, grinding beneath his feet anything or anyone unlucky enough to get in his way, and his huge square head swivels from side to side as he makes one circuit of the perimeter after another. He misses nothing. Some men say they’ve never seen him so much as blink.

He was anything but happy with Schuler but he’s less happy with Rosen, because someone will need to train him. Training means not just outlining what goes where—men’s clothing in these piles, women’s in these; coins here and jewels here and food over there out of the sun; every single yellow star thrown into this burn barrel—but reinforcing the dangers of trying to pocket so much as an atom of contraband.
Organizing,
the prisoners call it. Since these ignoramuses learn only by example, someone is going to have to suffer.

Ordinarily, that wouldn’t bother Jankowski in the least. He’d see it as an opportunity. But the trains have been delivering prisoners night and day, and Canada is filling up with goods faster than his commando can sort them, and the officer in charge has the sympathy of a baboon and the forbearance of an emperor. What Jankowski needs is additional men, a dozen strong and vigorous backs to bend to the work, not just a replacement for that shiftless old layabout Schuler. Not another one to be dividing his time between here and the barber’s chair, off every Friday currying favor among the officers and complaining about any work that might roughen his delicate hands.

For this, for the education of this new part-timer Rosen, he’s going to have to sacrifice a perfectly good worker. It infuriates him, but there’s no alternative. Making his slow transit around the edge of the yard, he assesses the men under his command with an eye to choosing the one most in need of a little salutary discipline. Ideally it will be one whose loss, whether temporary or permanent, will set back the commando’s output as little as possible. He spies Wasserman. Wasserman is as innocent and harmless as they come, a timid and pigeon-chested weakling afraid of his own shadow. His work is cautious and slow but impeccable; he never makes a mistake and he’s never been caught pocketing anything. Jankowski hates him for it.

Wasserman will do.

The capo grinds on past, his square mouth opening into a narrow black smile. It looks like something a gunner would fire through. He lowers himself step by step into the sorting area and veers toward a table piled high with coins. Jacob is there emptying a sack onto the tabletop, the coins tumbling out like water and singing like music. “Faster,” says Jankowski, “and more carefully,” although coins will only fall out of a canvas sack so fast, and no amount of caution will have any effect on the end result. It’s just what he says.

“Wait,” he says then, and Jacob waits. He picks up one of the fallen coins and assesses it, squinting at it from both sides, examining the marks around the edges, hefting it in his meaty hand. He pauses and thinks and dampens his thumb with his tongue and rubs it over the coin’s face, poking out his wet lower lip and drawing down the corners of his mouth. An eyebrow lifted, he looks from the coin to Jacob and back again. He grunts and shakes his head, as if to suggest that he of all people—this capo Jankowski who before his brief heyday at Auschwitz was a farm laborer in the deepest reaches of the countryside, hauling silage and shoveling manure—as if to suggest that he has found this particular coin not entirely up to his standards.

Jacob stands at attention the entire time—waiting for a chance to explain that this coin has come from the same source as all of the others and that he doesn’t know what on earth might have happened to it if anything happened to it at all but that whatever it was that happened most surely took place long before the coin fell into his hands; waiting for the more likely outcome, which is that Jankowski will abuse him in some way without hearing an explanation or wanting one; asking himself what old Schuler’s secret was for thriving in this treacherous environment—but in the end not one of these things happens. Instead the capo calls out to the nearest of the guards and flips the coin and they both watch it as it soars upward into the sunlight. Everyone watches. The coin spins slowly and slowly, bright sun glinting from it. Time stops. At the top of its arc the coin rotates one last impossible time and the sunlight sparks and the descent begins. Jankowski holds out his hand, and as the guard watches, and as every man in the commando watches too, he catches the coin and slips it into the pocket of his shirt. Just like that.

Then, and only then, does he turn his attention to Jacob, holding out one meaty index finger like a sausage or the barrel of a gun and waggling it back and forth.
Don’t you try that,
the gesture says, as if such a thing needs saying.

What follows is a perverse morality play. Jankowski goes to Wasserman’s table. One end of it is piled high with men’s shoes and the other end with women’s. Children’s shoes, of which there are many, go in a separate crate. No one knows what will happen to the children’s shoes, there are so many of them left behind and so few feet to fill them up. None at all, really.

Narrow-chested Wasserman, stunned from watching Jankowski pocket the coin and on his guard for whatever terrible thing might happen next, his arms laden with shoes, stumbles toward the table himself. He has half an impulse to speed up and half an impulse to slow down, but he does neither. He just keeps moving. Jankowski beats him to the table and begins examining his work. A thousand times a thousand shoes, lying one atop another like dogs and stinking in the heat. He rummages through the pile and comes up with a particular pair, wingtip brogues the color of oxblood, and he examines them like treasure.

“What’s this?” he says as Wasserman reaches the table. “No laces?”

Wasserman dumps his load of shoes on the ground. “They came that way,” he says.

The capo squints. “Empty your pockets,” he says.

Wasserman complies. The pocket of his shirt holds a morsel of bread that he’s been saving for two days now, and Jankowski grinds it to powder between his fingers and blows it away into the summer air. The pockets of his trousers are empty.

“Let’s see
your
shoes, then,” says the capo.

Wasserman lifts the cuffs of his trousers to display a pair of ancient workboots closed at the tops with tiny twists of wire.

“Reason enough,” says the capo, lifting the wingtips, “for you to steal a proper pair of shoelaces.”

“But I didn’t,” says Wasserman.

“You’ve hidden them somewhere, haven’t you?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“We’ll see.” He orders Wasserman to take off his shirt and trousers and turn them inside out. Wasserman complies, standing there in Canada with the sun shining and the breeze blowing, clad in tattered woolen undershorts the color of mud. “Off with those too,” says Jankowski, as if Wasserman might be hiding something within them other than his dignity.

Once they’re off, one of the guards laughs and raises his machine gun, elbowing the fellow next to him, pretending that he can’t sight accurately on a target so small.

“Hand those over,” says Jankowski. He makes a show of trying to make as little contact as possible with Wasserman’s filthy undershorts, and when he gives them back the gold coin falls out.

“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.