The Thief of Auschwitz (29 page)

I had the paintings set out on the couch and on the pass-through to the kitchen and on every functioning easel I could locate, on the windowsills and the counters and the toilet tank, and they were still out when the buzzer sounded. I’ve hated the sound of an alarm ever since my year in the camp, where three of them in a row would go off to wake you up, and I must admit I jumped.

It was the tattooed girl. Now you tell me what I was supposed to do.

Seventeen

The junkman’s work is never done. During the interval between evening rations and the second roll call Gretel spies him talking with Rolak, and his presence is the distraction she needs. While he and the capo are haggling over something, the pair of them huddled secretive and confidential as thieves, she slips out the door with a scrap of paper and the stub of her pencil and conceals herself in plain sight at the mouth of an alley between the block and the latrine. The shadows are deep there, but there’s just enough light to work on Eidel’s story. The Nazis’ theft of her family and her art. Vollmer’s insistence upon her painting the portrait. The horrifying vision she’s created to balance out that painting, for this is what Gretel has decided the drawing in the bunk it is, a leveling-out of things. One more case of the camp’s insistence upon keeping good and evil in an immutable ratio.

For every beautiful work of art, an equal and opposite atrocity.

She puts down the story in as much detail as she can. The pencil is hardly as long as a single joint of her finger, and it’s almost intractably blunt. To sharpen it would be to waste it, perhaps even to surrender it up as lost, and yet to go on using a blunt pencil is to write too large and waste space. There will never be enough paper to go around, there will never be enough pencil lead to wear away, there will never be enough bottles to store it all up, and yet she soldiers on. By the time she’s done, the story has taken up both sides of the paper, marking the first time since beginning her project that she’s devoted this much space to a single prisoner’s tale. But Eidel has been particularly kind to her after all, so she uses the space she needs without too much in the way of regret, and then she folds the scrap over twice which is all the folding it will stand, and at last with both the paper and the pencil concealed in her tiny fist she comes to her feet and begins drifting back toward the block, keeping close to the wall.

Some object passes between Rolak and the junkman as they part. Something small, but everything that changes hands is small. A cigarette, maybe. A bit of chocolate or cheese. She wonders what power the capo has over the junkman that lets her bid him to do this or that, for as often as she has seen these two exchanging something the transaction has only gone in that same direction. The junkman surely has a capo of his own to report to. Perhaps he fears a bad report from Rolak, manufactured or otherwise. Perhaps he fears a bad report from every single capo at every single stop he makes. Perhaps this avatar of the free and easy life at Auschwitz, making his way from place to place without active oversight, is as penned in as the rest of them after all. Perhaps more so. Perhaps he has learned that the entire camp is a spiderweb rigged to catch him in the slightest transgression, and he only pretends to make the most of it.

Everyone has his own woes. Everyone has a lens through which he must understand the world of the camp. Gretel herself, for example, having seen the transaction between the two of them, reflects only for a moment on the poor junkman before she begins to wonder what fate might lie in store for the scrap of unburned cigarette paper or bit of foil that will remain when Rolak is done with whatever he’s given her. She vows to keep an eye out, already adding this potential treasure to the storehouse of material that she keeps for her project. So it is that riches trickle down, even here.

*

They lie in the bunk back to front, Max with Jacob behind him, listening to the noises of the sleeping and the sick. It’s hard to fall asleep with the racket and the stench raised by so many collapsing lives—the gasping and the coughing, the scrambling of some individual to the edge of the bunk where he can spill the little contents of his digestive tract onto the floor from one uncontrollable orifice or another—but the alternative is worse, for silence is death.

Jacob steadies his breath and whispers into his son’s ear, thinking he’s read somewhere that those thoughts reinforced as sleep approaches are best remembered and most deeply understood. “The next time there’s a special burial detail,” he says, “you must volunteer.”

“I can’t,” says Max. “Wenzel knows my leg won’t take much weight.”

“Wenzel is in the habit of going easy on you. He’ll accommodate your desire to volunteer.”

“What if he doesn’t?”

“We’ll think of something else.”

“What if he does?”

“If he does, the leg works to our advantage. A man with a bad leg can’t dig a grave very rapidly. So you slip away while the other fellow digs, you get the painting from the town—it’s five or six minutes, even for you, the shopkeeper hides the key in the gas lamp beside the door—and then you slip back.”

“And the painting?”

“You bury it with the dead man.”

“What about the attic over the Officers’ Club?”

“There isn’t time. We’ll move it another day.”

“And what if I’m caught?”

“If you’re caught they’ll kill us all, but they’ll kill us all sooner or later. At least we’ll have accomplished something. Now go to sleep.”

*

It will be the last snowfall of a long season and it comes up out of nowhere, blowing in across the distant hilltops and settling on the camp like something vengeful. Yet Auschwitz endures. The officers gather the collars of their coats around their necks and the Red Cross vans of Zyklon-B careen down the treacherous gravel road and the smoke goes up the chimneys.

Gretel has filled up her jar, and although she probably ought to hold off burying it until the weather improves, she can’t. Done is done. So after the evening roll call, when she’s soaked to the bone anyhow and couldn’t possibly get any colder, she retrieves it from its hiding place among the rafters and goes out. The red-brown clay of the yard is still almost impenetrable, and where it’s covered over with snow she’s reluctant to disturb it. Yet there’s one place she knows, a place hidden by little drifts that have collected against the wall of the latrine, and she gravitates in that direction. Other women huddle and mill in the falling snow. The place she’s looking for is a weak spot where one of the foundation stones was loose and when she reaches the latrine she sets out to find it, edging along, keeping her back to the wall and kicking with her heel. Snow fills what remains of her shoes, but she doesn’t care. Why should she care? The storm keeps up and the wind gusts and she clutches the jar with all her strength. The glass is difficult to grip.

At last one heelstroke finds its target. The loose stone gives way, either sliding a good distance back or perhaps even falling into whatever crawlspace lies beneath the building. Either way it’s gone, and Gretel curses her luck. With the stone missing, how can she block the hole? Clay will never do. Someone would notice it.

She lowers herself onto her knees to make certain, pinning the jar against her ribs with one arm and pushing the fingers of her free hand into the hole. Nothing. Nothing but snow and dirt and spiderwebs. It’s hopeless. Gretel begins to cry, squatting there with the jar clutched tight and the snow assailing her cheeks and the searchlights slashing the early dark, and when Rolak materializes from nowhere she springs to her feet, gasping.

The jar drops to the hard clay and breaks open, releasing a little storm of paper that takes flight within the bigger storm of snow.

“What’s this?” says Rolak.

“Nothing,” says Gretel. And then, “I’m sorry.”

The wind and wet have pasted some of Gretel’s handiwork to the wall, and the capo peels two or three pieces away. She holds one up to what light there is and squints at the smeared letters as the searchlights rake the storm. She can’t read more than a hundred words under the best of conditions, but she can read well enough.

*

“That Rosen,” she says to the junkman when he comes around the next morning.

“Rosen?” he says, leaning on the shovel and tipping his head toward the kitchen door. “Your Rosen? What of her?”

The capo frowns. “She’s been living in the lap of luxury, that one.”

“Orders from the top,” he says with a shrug.

“Orders from the top
is right. And what have I gotten for my cooperation? What have I earned from my kindness? A thin wool coat and a bit of ginger cookie, that’s what.”

*

It’s one small shock, but it reverberates throughout the system. By morning the news of Eidel’s perfidy has reached all the way to Vollmer, who pushes back from his desk and straightens his perfect tie and dismisses the captain whose secret pleasure it has been to pass the word along to him. This captain, one Heissmeyer, got it from a certain first lieutenant who got it from a certain second lieutenant who got it from a certain sergeant major who got it from only God himself knows who. The trail has gone cold, but by now everyone short of the commandant himself knows about the drawing carved into the bunk in the women’s block. Along its upstream course the report has borne with it a cloud of relief and retribution and barely concealed glee, traveling as it has along a dual gradient—from those at the bottom who’ve resented Eidel’s special treatment, to those toward the top who’ve resented Vollmer’s freedom to use her talents as he sees fit. Turning her in will ensure that the parties on both ends of the bargain get what they deserve. That the world of the camp will return to normal. That no one will benefit too much from any advantage, no matter how great.

He walks to the block in question. The sun is out and the ground is soft from last night’s snowfall. The change in the weather indicates that spring is here at last. Vollmer’s boots get muddy, but he doesn’t care. An orderly will polish them. He could have had himself driven here, he could have taken a car, but this is something that he needs to see quietly and alone. He wants no fuss.

Past the kitchen he goes, and when Rolak sticks her head out the door he beckons her with one raised finger, not stopping or even turning his head her way. Doglike she comes along behind. They pass along the fenceline that Jacob walks every Friday morning, a commando of prisoners wrestling creosoted railroad ties beyond the barbed wire and the French doctor standing in the dark door of the hospital with his hands folded behind his back and his face pulled down into a frown as a van pulls away in a spray of mud. The sun warms everything.

The block is empty. Vollmer steps inside and orders Rolak to bring him to the bunk in question.

“You
found this,” he says. “No?”

“Yes,” she says, permitting herself a little smile. “I found it,
sturmbannführer.”

He bends to look at the ceiling of the bunk but it isn’t easy. Every surface is filthier than every other surface and he’s reluctant to touch anything but touch it all he must, getting down on his knees and leaning in and craning his neck to look up at the drawing. He doesn’t need to see much. When he regains his feet his face is red, but it could be from the exertion.

Rolak smiles at him, utterly satisfied with everything. “Just as I said, no?”

Vollmer doesn’t acknowledge the question. “Have you a box of matches?” he says.

“What would I light?” Showing him her yellow teeth.

“Don’t press me,” says Vollmer. She unlocks the door to her little cell and goes in. She keeps a box under the mattress with twelve or fifteen matches in it, and she tips out all but three rather than let Vollmer have them.

He’s waiting in the doorway when she turns back, idly toying with the padlock. “All of them,” he says. “Just in case.”

She returns and gathers the rest and gives him a sheepish look as she hands them over.

“Now kerosene,” he says. “That lamp on your table.”

“Yes sir,” she says, unscrewing the tank. “This is just what we need to burn away that thing. Shall we take the entire bunk outdoors? Burn it in the yard? I’m sure whichever way you choose will be the best.”

“We’ll be doing nothing of the kind,” says Vollmer. “Stop trying to use your head.”

She smiles brightly through those yellow teeth. “Yes, sir,” she says, as he closes the door with her inside and slips the padlock through the clasp.

“Leave it to me,” he says through the door. He holds the tank up into the light and frowns at it, for there’s not nearly enough kerosene there to do the job. So he puts it down and walks without the slightest haste to the next block over, where he locates a tin container holding the better part of a gallon. Then he returns at a steady pace, holding the container away from his leg so as not to soil his trousers, not hurrying, not even actually hearing Rolak’s cries as they rise from the locked compartment. She’s hammering on the door with something large and heavy, either the table or the chair that the SS has wasted on her, but there’s hammering everywhere in the camp. Once back inside he empties the little tank first, using all of it on the offending bunk. Then he opens the larger container and splashes kerosene on the floor and on the rest of the bunks and on anything flammable upon which his eye lands. A blanket. A urine-soaked mattress. A single forlorn shoe.