The Thief of Auschwitz (20 page)

Jacob can’t answer outright.

“Someone looking to curry favor.”

Jacob’s heart sinks for an instant. “I’ve found the artist who painted the girl,” he says.

“The girl? Impossible.”

“So you would think.”

“Whoever painted the girl is in Paris. Holland, perhaps.”

“No, sir. The painter is right here.”

“Here in Poland?”

“Here in Auschwitz.”

“Impossible.”

“Not impossible. Right here in the camp.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

“The same painter?”

“Yes.”

“You’re certain.”

“I am.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I watched her paint it to begin with.”

Vollmer puts down the cards. He sits for a moment dumbstruck.

“She’s my wife,
sturmbannführer.”
Jacob can hardly speak. His mouth is dry and the breath is caught within his chest, trapped nearly beyond summoning. He fears that he will strangle himself right here, right on these very words. “She’s my wife,” he says again. “The painter.”

If Vollmer weren’t suspicious before, he certainly is now. “And thus,” he sighs, “is revealed the favor that you wish to ask. No doubt your dear one has been assigned some painful duty that you’d like to see lightened. So you hope to arrange for a few days’ luxury in the
sturmbannführer’s
apartment, doodling and sketching and fooling everyone until her charade is found out and she’s sent on her way.”

“No, sir. That’s not it.”

But Vollmer isn’t listening. “You’re a cunning figure, Rosen. I’ll grant you that. I don’t know why it surprises me.”

“I’m not all that cunning, sir.”

“Cunning enough.”

“Maybe a little,” says Jacob. “You see, it’s not my wife who needs a favor. It’s my son.”

“First your wife, and now your son?
It’s as I always say. There is no host in the world more hospitable than the SS. We insist on bringing families together.”

Chaim laughs, a little hysterical shriek which relieves Jacob of the need to answer. “It’s my son,” he says again to Vollmer. “His leg is badly broken. He’s in the hospital block with that French doctor, and one way or another I believe he’s doomed.”

“It must be very bad.”

“It is. I’ve been afraid to tell you about my wife, but now I’m more afraid for the boy.”

“And you think that if I get my family portrait made, then—”

“Exactly. If you’d be so kind.”

Alongside them the commandant stops a waiter and takes a glass from his tray and downs its contents in a single pull, his adam’s apple valving. He puts the glass down hard on the tray and pushes the waiter off with the sole of his boot and reaches out the other hand to pinch Chaim’s cheek, reddening it to something approximating the alcohol-infused color of his own.

Vollmer’s curiosity is up. “What if your wife isn’t the painter you say she is?”

“She is. Rest assured.”

“Let’s say you’re correct. What happens if I don’t like her work anyhow?”

“I imagine you’ll have us killed.”

“I imagine I will.”

“All three of us.”

Vollmer nods. “And you’d risk that?”

“I believe I already have.”

Vollmer looks from the barber to the boy, from the boy to the smiling commandant, and then back to the barber. “You’d do this for your son,” he says.

“Without a moment’s hesitation.”

“Then so be it,” says Vollmer. “I’ll send word to the hospital.”

*

In the morning Jacob will smile more broadly than ever at the fleeting vision of his wife on the step outside the kitchen. She will see his teeth and they will remind her of the skull beneath his skin.

*

Pity poor Eidel: Rolak says she has a surprise in store. Such a thing is rarely good news and the capo knows it, so in order to draw out the suffering she lets her spend the rest of the day imagining just what the surprise might be. Not even after supper, when the women of the commando have finished restoring the kitchen to what passes for cleanliness and they’ve lined up to proceed back to the block for roll call, does she let on. She only gives Eidel a slow look, a gravid look of sorrow and shared anticipation, and leaves it at that. Poor Eidel can only speculate. Marching back she decides that the capo has discovered why she ducks outside at seven-thirty every Friday morning, and that she’s reassigning her to some other work crew so as to take away this small joy. Standing in the yard she imagines that the capo has learned not that but something worse—that some terrible thing has happened to Jacob or to Max or to both of them—and that she’s waiting to tell her at a moment when the effect will be the most crushing. Counting off she imagines the only thing worse yet: that whatever has befallen her loved ones is somehow her fault, that she’s committed some unknown sin and that Auschwitz itself, in its infinite and evenhanded cruelty, has caused the punishment to fall upon her husband and her son.

Yes,
she decides.
That must be it.
So when the count is over and Rolak stops her to explain that tomorrow morning at nine o’clock she will be excused from the kitchen and must report directly to the apartment of the deputy commandant, in a certain building on the main street of the town, she very nearly faints.

“That’s it?” she asks.

“That’s it. Tomorrow morning and every Saturday morning after that. Nine o’clock sharp.”

“The deputy commandant’s apartment.”

“You heard me.”

“What will I do there?”

“You’ll mind your manners,” says the capo, “if you have any sense. Beyond that, I can’t say.” She could say, of course—she could very easily say, since it’s her business to know everything about the women under her command—but why spoil the fun? Nine o’clock in the morning will come regardless. Let her wonder.

Eidel sleeps less than usual, and not only because of the anxiety that’s overcome her. The night turns bitter cold and even the choking proximity of the other women’s bodies doesn’t help. A breeze bearing a few flakes of snow comes in through a crack in the wall and the chill of it drifts down along her neck . She shivers. They all shiver, the same chill passing from one to the next like some contagion. If she still had her silk handkerchief she would tuck it into her collar to help keep out the cold, but it’s long gone and Zofia who took it is long gone as well. The memory of it reminds her of Lydia but doesn’t keep her warm.

The cold is worse and the dawn is breaking somewhere behind heavy clouds when the three alarm bells ring. The capo rousts Eidel and Gretel and the rest of the cooking commando and with a curse she sends them off to begin their work, the little flock of them emerging together from the dark block into the dark yard with steam rising up from their bodies like wasted prayers. Something precious given up that they can ill afford.

They enter the kitchen and switch on the lights and with straws broken from a witch’s broom they draw lots to see who gets the pleasure of lighting the coal stoves. Once upon a time—back before Eidel arrived, back somewhere in their collective memory and in the collective memory of all such prisoners, who sooner or later come to believe that they have been here forever and that those who came before and died and have been replaced are but themselves seen from a different perspective, perhaps that of the eternal and omniscient Almighty
blessed be He
—once upon a time they took turns lighting the stove in cold weather, setting up a rotation and following it faithfully, until there were too many sicknesses and too many exceptional circumstances and altogether too many deaths to make order sustainable. Hence the broom, hence the straws, hence the falling back on the comfort of randomness.

This morning Eidel wins, and she takes her victory as an omen: surely the chance to warm herself before the fire will be the only good thing that happens today. But omen or otherwise she accepts what she is given and takes advantage of it, building a little pyramid of kindling and lighting it with the one match she’s permitted and coaxing the coal fire to life with what seems like the last substantial breaths she may ever take.

The work and the fire bring her back to life, but before long the time comes. She hurries across the yard and down along the fence toward the main entrance, realizing that this is the way she sees her Jacob go each week, wondering what he would think if only he knew where she is headed. Out of the camp, of all things. Through the gate and past the guard towers and beyond the barbed wire, into an actual town with actual people living in it. Some of them will be monsters and some of them will be the wives of monsters and the children of monsters, but not everyone. Not everyone. It’s not possible. Someone, perhaps some old grandmother, will see her and take pity upon her at least in her heart. Someone will see her and see written upon her face the infinite wrongs being done in the camp. Someone.

Failing that, Eidel herself will see some sign of normal life proceeding in her absence, and in that sign she will remind herself to find comfort instead of envy, reassurance instead of disgust. She will do her best on that account.

In the end, once past the guards and down the lane and exposed to life in the town, she keeps her eyes averted and doesn’t see anything at all. She’s like some superstitious child afraid to step on a crack in a walkway, daring to look in no direction but down. What’s become of her? she wonders. What’s become of the certainty with which she once met the world? What’s become of the unstoppable urge she once felt to see everything, to capture everything, to make from the rough raw materials of the universe some new and shining creation of her own? She despairs to realize that this private thing has been taken away from her along with everything else, and she keeps her gaze cast downward.

Vollmer’s building is heated with steam, and even in the entryway, just behind the glass door that keeps out the weather but lets in the light, the welcoming warmth feels like a miracle. To think that people could live like this. To think that she herself once did, and not that long ago, if time still means anything. She climbs the stairs to the second floor—the stairs themselves a marvel, with a blue woolen runner straight up the middle and black walnut wainscoting on either side and a hand railing that gleams like glass—and stands outside the numbered door. There are voices inside. The high happy sounds of children, no telling how many, perhaps two, perhaps three, and the soft murmur of a woman’s speech below their laughter. Vollmer’s wife and children. She tries to picture them but she cannot. She tries to imagine a happy family, but the vision will not materialize. And so she steels herself and knocks.

Max

You hear stories. An awful lot of them concern what happened in 1945, when the Red Army finally showed up. That tells you something about human nature. We like to think that the world turns on a moment of heroism, even though it usually just turns.

I guess nothing beats a happy ending.

Maybe my own perspective is different because I got out earlier, and my story isn’t like the stories that end with the Russian tanks rolling in and the fences collapsing and the SS trying to cover the whole thing up, as if they’d had us there at some kind of spa. They demolished the crematorium, I understand. Dynamited it and burned it down. Everything always had to end in fire for those men. They had a hammer and the whole world was a nail.

One story sticks with me, though. One story as vivid as if I’d seen it myself or maybe even lived through it.

This fellow was on the train out. The car was crowded, jammed tight, people stacked everywhere just the same way they’d come. The crowding might well have been worse for all I know, but there was an end in sight so people tolerated it. They were all stacked up like freight. And this fellow I’m talking about, he’s got a little packet of cigarettes. The Russians gave it to him, I guess. I don’t know. He’s got a little packet of cigarettes anyhow. He’s got cigarettes but he’s got nowhere to lie down. Nowhere even to sit, and he’s as tired and weak as you’d imagine he’d be. Another fellow sees him standing there pressed up against the wall and this other fellow is on the floor in the corner, a nice little space he’s got all to himself, and he hollers over that he’ll let him borrow his spot for an hour in trade for a cigarette. He’s got a German accent, this second fellow. He’s been a prisoner like the first one, but he’s German. Maybe he was a German Jew, I can’t say. Maybe he was some kind of political prisoner. Maybe he just looked at somebody cockeyed one day and that was that. It doesn’t matter. He makes this offer in that German accent of his and the fellow with the cigarettes presses through the crowd to take him up on it. Gives him a smoke. Lights it for him. Then he lies down and goes to sleep like a baby. An hour later the German comes back and wants his place again, so the fellow gives it to him. Lets him lie back down. At which point he sits down on his chest and puts his hands around his throat and chokes him to death in front of everybody. Just because he had a German accent.