The Thief of Auschwitz (16 page)

Eidel puts down her rag and walks to the doorway and looks down the hall. The capo is down there but she’s busy, seated at her worktable with her back turned. So she picks up the rag again in one hand and the poker in the other, and she dips the rag in cool water and wrings it out and goes to kneel down before the stove. “My arms are longer than yours,” she says to Gretel, and then she stretches to reach underneath.

*

Wenzel is the new capo. He doesn’t look like much—he’s baldheaded and bookish and if he speaks at all he speaks with the methodical cadence of a man struggling to mask a painful stutter—and on the first day, Max finds working under him no trouble. “Wenzel’s all business,” he says to his father, and it’s true. Where Slazak was a
provocateur
and a slave driver, the new capo picks no fights and makes no particularly unreasonable demands. Under his guidance the men work quickly and well and without incident. Their rations arrive on time. No one is hurt on the first day, and nobody dies.

Things go differently on the second day, but it’s not Wenzel’s fault. A man pushing a wheelbarrow overflowing with lime stumbles against a pile of black iron pipe, sending one eighteen-foot length of it into the ditch and crushing another man’s skull. Wenzel looks irritated but not angry. He looks like a weary traveler who has just learned that a train he’s been waiting for will be delayed. He makes some notes on paper—one day it will come out that he was a bookkeeper before he came to the camp, and that his crimes all involved being a little too handy with figures—and then he orders the fallen man brought up and covered over with a tarp.

The guards, those slit-eyed Ukrainians who’ve seen it all, haven’t seen this. A dead Jew decently covered over. They light cigarettes and shake their heads, cradling their guns as the smoke rises. One of them comes over to Wenzel after a minute and makes a recommendation, pointing with the barrel of his gun, kicking at a shovel with his boot. Why not just bury the bastard where he fell?

Wenzel shakes his head. Oh, no. That might have happened under the other fellow—what was his name, Slazak?—but it’s his commando now and he’ll run it his way. It’s all about motivation. Keep the men working and get the job done.

The Ukrainian laughs and grinds out his cigarette under his boot. He’s still laughing when he gets back to where the other guard is waiting for him, and he’s coughing from the cigarette, and it’s all he can do to explain that the new man doesn’t have the first idea as to what he’s supposed to be doing. Wenzel thinks the job is to build a water line, when the job is actually to kill Jews.

“He’s different,” says Max to his father at the end of the day. They’re resting in the yard under the eyes of the Ukrainians. The late afternoon is hot and still and the place is dead silent except for the dry and distant sound of a train creaking into the station. Black smoke from the high chimneys goes straight up. “He’s not half as bad as Slazak,” says Max, pointing toward the tarp beneath which the dead man lies. “There’ll be a special burial detail tonight. Outside the fence. I’m on it.”

“And what an honor
that
will be,” says Jacob.

“You don’t understand,” says the boy.

“I understand that one of our brothers has died. That’s all I need to understand.”

“But it was an accident.”

“An accident, fine. But an accident in the service of what?”

Max squirms. “At least he’ll have a proper burial.”

“That’s cold comfort,” says his father. But cold or otherwise it’s all the comfort his son can find, and even as he says the words he feels guilty for depriving him of it. Still, he sees that as much as he’s needed to protect the boy from Slazak’s brutality, now he’ll need to protect him from Wenzel’s cunning. Enough, though. Enough for now. “Did I tell you,” he says, “how beautiful your mother looked when I saw her through the fence?”

“You did.”

“She looked beautiful to me, anyway.”

“I’m sure she did.”

“I wish you could have seen her.”

“I do, too, Papa. I do, too.”

*

Long after dark, when the men are all jammed tight into their bunks and struggling to sleep, Wenzel emerges from his compartment and slips through the darkness and awakens Max. Max and another young man, another boy really, a boy who has probably lied about his age as well. Such is the advantage of those who are born with strength to spare. Both of them are reduced now, though, Max and the other boy. They’ve begun to look old in the way that anyone sufficiently ill or overworked looks old. Their eyes are hollow, weary of witness.

All the same, having Wenzel confirm their selection for the burial detail cheers them up. No one in the block has seen this kind of operation before, two men and a corpse outside the fence unsupervised. There’s a commonplace, assembly-line quality to the regular burial details. The men assigned to them—the ill-fated
Sonderkommando,
doomed by the repetition of their ugly work to haunt these premises like bodies whose souls have been scraped out
—
are anything but lucky. Sooner or later such an assignment always proves to be a one-way ticket. But this is different. Max and the other boy will be out there alone, past the line, within sight of the guards but beyond earshot. It will be a thing so close to freedom that if they work quickly they may have time to say a few words over the body before shoveling the dirt back down. They’re just two boys, nothing like a
minyan,
but times are difficult. You make do.

Wenzel stays behind, watching from the doorway as they move toward the fence in the company of a guard. The moon is a vague sliver behind a high overcast and the stars are invisible and down on the ground the beams of the searchlights rake at everything. The three men stop at the place where the fallen man lies alone under a tarp, the guard shooing away a curious dog with the barrel of his gun and the two prisoners stooping to lift the body. Max takes the corpse and the other boy takes the shovels and they move along, four of them now.

Soon they’re out of Wenzel’s sight, across the yard and down behind another block, so the capo goes back in and makes his rounds. Satisfied, he lets himself into his little chamber. Everything is quiet.

When they come to the fence they turn and go along the barbed wire searching for a hidden gate—the guard is certain it’s here somewhere—and when they find it he opens the padlock and stands back while Max hauls on the chain. The gate swings open. Without lowering his machine gun, a little penlight propped in his mouth, the guard checks the serial number on the dead man’s coat against a number he’s written on the palm of his own hand. Then he shoos the boys and the dead man on through, standing at a kind of lazy attention in the open gate. They go as far out as they dare, even farther, the dead man’s shoes dragging trails in the clay, until the guard calls out to them that they’ve gone far enough. That will do. The searchlights claw the ground and they dig.

Thank God for their youth, because they’re not entirely too winded to offer a blessing once the man is in his grave. And when they finally finish and reenter the camp and return to the block, they slip into their usual sleeping places with the belief that they’ve accomplished something worthwhile.

*

Somehow, the summer passes.

No longer reduced to counting bowls of soup, Eidel marks days instead and soon enough she realizes that her husband walks along the fenceline exactly once a week. On Fridays, at seven-thirty in the morning. So she manufactures reasons to be on the step outside the kitchen at the right time, tossing soapy water into the yard from a dishpan or wringing out a mop, and they become like mechanical figures on a cuckoo clock, Jacob passing by on his rounds and Eidel poking her head out through the door, synchronized but doomed never to meet. It keeps them going.

Fridays for Jacob begin on a high note, with that brief glimpse of Eidel, but for every moment he spends anticipating that vision and thrilling to it and reflecting on it he spends another dreading the instant when he must step into Vollmer’s dining room, the instant when he must face the painting once more.

Chaim asks him about it as they make their way toward the apartment building. “So Vollmer rubs you the wrong way, too?” he says, for he’s noticed the pattern. He’s seen how Jacob’s mood worsens as the day goes on. He’s caught the final profound downward shift of it when they leave the commandant’s villa and head for Vollmer’s apartment.

“It’s not Vollmer,” says Jacob.

“Don’t kid me,” says Chaim. “I know people. I can tell. You don’t like him any better than I do.”

“I don’t like any of them.”

“Aww, they’re not so bad.” He walks along munching a crisp red apple that the commandant’s housekeeper pressed into his pocket on his way out the door. A little gray boy walking along in a little gray uniform with a big bright red apple raised up in his hand like a target.

“Maybe they’re not so bad to
you,
but that’s a different story. In any event, it’s not Vollmer. It’s something else.” He can’t take his eyes away from the apple.

“So I was right,” says Chaim

“You were wrong about Vollmer.”

“I was right about it being something.”

“Fine,” says Jacob, salivating over the apple but unwilling to ask for a bite. “You were right. It was something.”

“What kind of something?”

“The painting,” he says.

“The painting of the girl?”

“The painting of the girl.”

“It’s a nice painting.”

“I know. It’s a very nice painting.”

“So?”

“So?” Jacob stops on the sidewalk and the boy stops alongside him, taking another bite of the apple and wiping his chin with the back of his hand. “So?” He draws breath and looks up at the sky and looks down at the boy again. “So it’s a picture of my daughter.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”

“I don’t. Not anymore.”

Chaim’s face collapses. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

“That’s all right.” He starts up again but the boy doesn’t move.

“I thought you just had Max.”

“It’s all right.”

“That picture must break your heart.”

“It does. Every time.” He stands looking down at the boy and assessing the sympathetic look on his face and wondering what it might mean. Wondering if it means anything at all, or if it’s just a look on the face of a boy who’s taught himself how to respond to almost anything. Deciding in the end that it doesn’t matter. “The thing that makes it all worse,” he says, “is that my wife painted it.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“Your wife painted that picture?”
he says. An old woman with a child in tow and another one bundled up in a carriage passes them by and clears her throat and gives a hard look back over her shoulder. Time to move along. But Chaim isn’t going. “Your wife in the camp?”

Jacob watches the old woman go. “My wife in the camp,” he says. “I suppose she would be happy that it wasn’t destroyed with everything else. But she’d be heartbroken to think of it hanging where it does.”

The old woman has come to the corner and is speaking to a policeman there, a policeman who nods his head and presses his lips together and looks their way. Jacob takes the apple from the boy’s hand and jams it into his pocket, and then he takes the boy by the shoulder and together they hurry along the street again, their steps furtive, their eyes downcast. A couple of mice. The policeman loses interest only when they turn down the walk leading to Vollmer’s apartment building, because they certainly can’t get into any trouble there.

Max

“Max Rosen’s human figures, rare as they are, have turned their backs upon you by the time you take notice of them.”

That was Edgar Mudd, writing in the
Times of London
in the spring of 1958, and it was probably the only defensible line of criticism that he ever delivered.

Mudd, you’ll remember, was a great booster of Calder and those big toys of his that the museums were all fighting over at the time. The most respected museums in the world, bidding against shopping malls and office parks and what have you. Airports. Frankly, I think every airport in the world should have a Calder. They’re too big to miss, even if you’re running past with a suitcase in tow, which means everybody gets the impression that he’s been exposed to something important—and yet they don’t require or even reward any actual thought. That makes them just about perfect for a culture on the move.

Besides, putting the damned things in airports would keep them out of the museums.

Back to Mudd, though, God rest his soul. In a rare moment of illumination, poor blind Edgar noticed that if there are any people at all in my paintings, they seem to have rejected the viewer and whatever interest he might have in them. They might even be hiding, concealing themselves among the planes and angles of the closed-in spaces that have always fascinated me so. For once he was right.