The Thief of Auschwitz (4 page)

The heat in the kitchen is ungodly as well. She keeps the silk handkerchief in her pocket, and as she mops her brow she thinks of Lydia and Max.

In addition to the soup they bake bread, using flour that arrives three or four times a week in a wagon drawn by horses. The same wagon brings coal on alternate days, and the same men deliver it. A two-man
commando,
a work crew. Handling flour or coal they use the same short-handled shovels and the same wheelbarrow with the same broken axle, the alternation of their labor turning them white one day and black the next. The bread is gray and it weighs nothing. It tastes of combustion.

Wonder of wonders, though: as time goes by, the men of the delivery commando prove to be incorrigible flirts. Imagine that. This pair of ragged scarecrows, thin as sticks, worn down by work and woe to a condition beyond any determinable level of vitality or even age, behaving like youngsters at a country dance. Who could have foreseen such a thing? They are shy at the outset, though. Shy as Eidel’s own son was and forever will be, God rest his soul. They communicate with sidelong looks and diffident postures. They linger by the door and whisper to each other, secretive as field mice, glancing up timidly from beneath the brims of their low-slung caps. But they are full-grown men after all, and their reserve can’t last. Certainly not here in the camp, where time is both compressed and nonexistent. Where all things must occur at once or never occur at all. Where whatever happens will happen again and again without ceasing, as everything must always happen in the mind of God.

*

Most of the men in Jacob’s block work on a water project, digging trenches for the new women’s camp. It’s dry work in the hot sun. The
capo
—the individual in charge of the work and in charge of the block too—is Slazak, pot-bellied Slazak from Lodz, denizen and product of one ghetto after another. He is both a Jew and a disgrace to Jews, and if Jacob had encountered him back when he was a free man freely at work in his father’s barber shop in Zakopane, he wouldn’t have stooped to cut his hair. Even six months ago, working for a couple of apples at a time, he would have turned his back. But six months ago Slazak was already ensconced here at Auschwitz, already proving himself the sort that the SS could depend on, clawing his way up toward that subtle meniscus where the prisoner begins to confuse himself with those who have imprisoned him. The role of the capo is an essential position but a tenuous one, because in order to earn the job and the green patch that goes with it a man must demonstrate a capacity for cunning and brutality that will surely doom him one day. For certain men, though, the dream is irresistible. No one believes in the future anyhow.

No one believes in the future, and yet the work proceeds. Progress occurs. The men dig trenches and lay water pipes and bury them again, inch by inch. Jacob and Max work like Percherons and eat like monks. A daily slice of bread and a partial bowl of thin soup, and in the evening a scrap of fatty meat or moldy cheese. It pares them down and it builds them up, at least for a little while. It builds them up out of nothing but the will to go on. Each of them has spent sufficient time in the mountains, traversing from peak to peak with never quite enough in the way of food and water, to have labored long on an empty belly before. But it was nothing compared to this.

They work through hunger and they work through pain and they work through broken hearts. They work through visions of Eidel and memories of Lydia, Max with his back bent and his gaze down and his father keeping a watchful eye on him for all the good it might do, here in this place that has already cost him one child.

Among the things that keep them both going is the idea of a new women’s camp. It floats before them like a mirage. For if there is to be such a thing as a new women’s camp, then the SS must be planning to move women into it—one of whom might be Eidel. So when Jacob’s legs can support him no more and Max’s hands are too bloody to hold the shovel, they think of her—they think of how this very trench will come to hold pipes that will come to hold water that one day she might come to drink—and they carry on.

For her, if not for Lydia. They can do nothing for Lydia.

Each morning, well before dawn, the men rise to the clanging of three alarm bells and drag themselves out to the yard to be counted. Slazak is always first. Slazak is everywhere first. A couple of old fellows from the country, as alike as a pair of skeletons, are always the last. One of them is named Schuler, Ernst Schuler, and the other one has no name at all that Jacob or Max has ever heard. The men call him
Schuler’s Twin
because he models himself so closely on the other man and sticks to him as if they’ve been fused together, but they’re probably no relation. Schuler has an airy manner about him in spite of everything. He stands upright in his rags like royalty and he never lowers himself to complain. Not about the sleeping accommodations and not about the rising heat and not about the awful rations. The reason is that he doesn’t work on the water project, although his twin does. Schuler works in the sorting facility, out by the train platform, going through the belongings of new arrivals in search of whatever treasures they might have abandoned in pockets and handbags and the linings of coats.

It doesn’t take long for Jacob and Max to understand how this sets him apart. Schuler’s feet give him away. He owns an extraordinary pair of shoes, gum-soled and comfortable-looking as the pillows on which some sultan might recline, and one of them is tied with regular laces instead of salvaged wire or baling twine or nothing at all. Jacob considers his own shoes, poor burst things never meant for the abuse they take each day on the water project, and he works his way over to where Schuler stands to ask him where he happened to come by such a pair of marvels.

“Canada,” whispers Schuler.

“Canada?”

“Oh, yes. Canada.” Nodding imperceptibly. Keeping an eye on Slazak. “It’s the land of plenty.”

Schuler’s twin explains. Canada is what they call the sorting facility. In Canada, a man with sufficient cunning can get his hands on practically anything at all. Sometimes even food. Particularly food. Cheese from every country in Europe. Chocolate wrapped in golden foil. Foods that keep well, foods that uprooted people will bring with them on a long journey, foods that even the starving will permit themselves to eat only sparingly because they’re so precious and because they remind them of home.

No wonder Schuler doesn’t complain about the rations.

*

For a while, Eidel believes that she might kill herself. She thinks of it night and day, lying breathless in her bunk or sitting at the big table in the kitchen slicing potatoes for soup. A knife in her hand. Once she slips the blade along the flesh inside her left wrist, just opposite the tattoo, and presses to see if she can draw blood. Just to find out if it’s possible. It is.

Suicide would be a way of cementing that endless present in which she tries to exist, and the idea of it is comforting in a way. It doesn’t clear her mind, but it does give her something to think about other than the obvious. It crowds out Lydia, at least for a moment or two, but soon she returns—Lydia and Max too, for Max was a child as well and he must have been doomed to the same fate as his sister—and all thoughts of saving herself by bringing about her own end vanish.

I have no right,
she tells herself. No right to choose her own fate when Lydia and Max were given no say in theirs. No right even to distract herself with the idea of it. Such faithlessness is unbecoming of a mother. It’s a betrayal of her family.

And so she goes on. Thinking that as long as she keeps her two children in her heart they are alive at least somewhere. Unwilling to extinguish that light from the world.

One morning, one of the deliverymen asks her name. It happens on a day when the wagon is loaded with flour, and he and his partner are white from head to toe. Later she’ll realize that there’s a reason for the haphazard haste with which they go about their work—at the end of the day there’ll be a few ounces of coal or flour in their pockets and cuffs—but for now she sighs and gives not her name but her number. The number tattooed onto her wrist and sewn onto her uniform.

The deliveryman is persistent, though. He says his name is Oskar Wirtz, and he’s from Witnica by way of Barlinek by way of Krakow, and he’s pretty certain that he’s seen her somewhere before, no doubt under better circumstances. He leans there in the doorway like a scrawny ghost in his pale rags, smiling at Eidel with a kind of punch-drunk optimism, proving that some things never change. Even under conditions as hopeless as these.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ve told you mine. Now you have to tell me yours.”

“Eidel. Eidel Rosen.”

“Eidel,” he says.

“You can call me Mrs. Rosen.”

“What happened to your Mister?”

“He’s around here someplace.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Lucky you,” says the ghost in the doorway, crestfallen. “My own Missus ran into some difficulty. I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

The female capo who runs the kitchen, a gigantic Pole whose last name is Rolak and whose first name no one has dared speak in so long that it has entered into the realm of myth, hurries past in pursuit of some prisoner who isn’t where she’s supposed to be. Eidel puts her head down.
Don’t draw attention.
The deliveryman smiles brightly at Rolak, though, and doffs his whitened cap to her, and she smiles back. They have some kind of understanding. “Don’t be flirting with these women,” she says, tossing the words back over her shoulder. “They don’t have time for your nonsense.”

Eidel has never seen the capo talk to an ordinary prisoner this way. Like a human being. Rolak is a great fat woman, astonishingly so for as long as she’s been confined here in Auschwitz, but Eidel has never seen her eat so much as a bite. It must happen elsewhere. There are rumors. Rumors of imported delicacies consumed in secret. Eidel pictures her alone in one of the storerooms, shoving aside bushel baskets of turnips and beans to reach such rare foods as she might keep hidden in the darkness behind them; she pictures her in her little boarded-off room within the block, the private quarters behind whose padlocked door she might keep hidden anything at all. She pictures her luxuriating on the bed—
a bed with a mattress! think of it!
—her mouth crammed full of chocolate or sausage or cheese. Drowning herself in food.

“The capo,” she says to the junkman. “Do you get food for her?”

“I can get anything.” He smiles and takes one step toward the table where she sits. “A fellow in my position moves pretty freely around the camp. I know lots of people.” It’s true. For a junkman from Witnica, he’s come up in the world.

Eidel hardly even knows what she is asking when she asks it. “Can you get information?” she says.

He cocks an eyebrow, putting his knuckles on the table. “Information? Of course!”

“I need to know just one thing.”

“One thing,” he nods—slowly, again and again, like the handle of a pump—leaning forward. “Everyone wants to know one thing. Remember, though: I’m not a fortune teller. I can’t predict your future.”

“I know you can’t.”

“For that, you’d need a gypsy.” He smiles, all teeth.

“I don’t want to know my future.”

He shrugs. “Why not? It’s the one thing we all want to know.”

“I’ve already seen my future,” she says. And she’s right. There’s no denying it. Not even for him.

“All right, then,” says the deliveryman. “What’ll it be?”

“My husband. Jacob Rosen. I need to know if he’s alive.”

“But you told me he was around here someplace.”

“I was lying. I don’t know for sure.”

Again he looks crestfallen. Now that he’s quit feigning shyness, this seems to be one of his two modes of communication. He looks either disappointed or predatory, depending. “You were lying,” he says, shaking his head from side to side, heartbroken. “You were lying, to
me.”
Straightening up. His knuckles leaving white rings on the rough wood of the table.

“His name is Jacob Rosen. Jacob Rosen from Zakopane.”

“Zakopane!”
he says, all smiles once more.
“That’s
where I’ve seen you!” The junkman from Witnica never gives up hope.

*

Schuler says that he can’t work properly without adequate shoes.

They’re walking now, Jacob’s commando on its way to the excavation and Schuler about to split off toward Canada. He tells Jacob he needs the gum-soled shoes because he isn’t on his hands and knees sorting through castoffs seven days a week. Oh, no. Not at all. On Fridays he’s on his feet for the whole day, a man of his age, and he’s working under a kind of crippling pressure that someone like Jacob can’t possibly imagine. One false move and it’s all over. He drags a finger across his own neck.

A young SS officer comes pedaling past on a bicycle. Schuler inclines his head toward him. Very softly he says, “He’s one of them.”