The Thief of Auschwitz (5 page)

“One of what.”

“One of the sons of bitches I’m required to keep looking sharp.” The SS man’s hat falls off in the breeze and he stops the bicycle to retrieve it. “Every Friday,” Schuler says, “I cut the officers’ hair.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

Jacob hasn’t given this kind of thing any thought. The only barbering he’s seen around here has been so brutal—his own occasional passage, for example, under the rusty razors of the commando of sadists and mental defectives in the shed out by the train platform—that it’s never occurred to him that his skills might have any real use around the camp. Use of the sort that might get him away from digging trenches now and then. As a rule, keeping out of sight is a good idea; dealing with the capo is a terrible enough fate, without exposing himself directly to the SS. But on the other hand, the work doesn’t seem to be doing Schuler any harm. He seems to be thriving on it.

“What came first?” he asks the old man. “The barbering business, or Canada?”

“Oh, the barbering. I was transferred to lighter work once they’d seen how valuable I was.” He walks along, puffed up by more than his gum-soled shoes.

The SS officer with the bicycle is beating the dust out of his hat and watching the commando march past, smiling as if he finds the very sight of them amusing. The way they stumble over the rocky path in their ruined shoes and their bare feet. Jacob hazards a quick look in his direction, and notes a cowlick pointing straight up from the crown of his head. That’s not all. His sideburns are uneven as well. Jacob decides that old man Schuler might not be quite as valuable as he thinks he is.

*

“Everything has a price,” says the junkman.

“But all I need is to
know
something,” says Eidel. “I’m not after food or anything else like that. Not like—you know.” Puffing out her cheeks, doing her best impression of the capo.

“Information has a price, too,” says the man in white. But before he has a chance to suggest what that price might be, the capo has come back and is shooing him out the door. Seriously this time. Vehemently. Her fat face is red and she has a rag wrapped around her fist and a piece of ice from the icebox is melting inside the rag. She’s injured her hand in some way. Eidel can guess how. That stray prisoner she’d been running down. And sure enough, as the capo stands rubbing her fist and watching water trail along her arm and drip from her elbow onto the dusting of flour that the deliveryman has tracked in, she vows that next time she’ll use a stick of kindling or maybe a poker. One of those big rusty soup ladles if nothing else. Letting it be known. Next time.

The deliveryman may have outworn his welcome for this morning, but there will be a next time for him as well. In a world where nothing changes, there’s always a next time.

Max

My mother was a wonderful painter, I can tell you that.

Even then, you see, I had an eye. Even as a boy. You wouldn’t have imagined it to look at me, but how could it have been otherwise? With a mother like mine?

The most remarkable thing about her work is that she was completely unschooled—by which I mean she schooled herself. She trained her eye by studying good work. How you can tell good work from bad when you don’t have anybody around to educate you is the mystery, but it’s the first indicator of a gift. It’s where the gift begins.

She loved Vermeer, and you could see it everywhere in her work. She used to poke fun, calling herself
the third-rate Vermeer of the shtetl,
but there was nothing third-rate about what she did. And she’d never lived in the shtetl, for that matter. She grew up in Warsaw, under conditions of comfort if not opulence. Her father was an attorney. And then she met my father and they got married and set up housekeeping in Zakopane. Zakopane was a resort town then, just as it is now. They were privileged to live there. We were all privileged.

The only time she spent in the shtetl was toward the end, and it was then that she finally gave up painting. Nineteen-forty, nineteen-forty-one.

She’d never dressed things up. As beautiful as her work always was—and her paintings
were
beautiful, whether or not you happen to believe that beauty has anything to do with art—it wasn’t because she was actively making it that way. Pushing things around, consciously or unconsciously. I suppose that’s why she stopped when the going got bad; she’d never gilded the lily and she wasn’t about to start. She was entering into a difficult period where everything around her was changing for the worse, and she didn’t have any desire to document it. You have to respect that.

My mother was one hell of a painter, though. That’s the main thing.

Take my word for it.

Three

Eidel makes no distinctions among her fellow prisoners. She plays no favorites and she bears no grudges, and this sets her apart. It makes her inscrutable. When the women line up for their ration of bread and soup, she sinks the ladle to a point exactly halfway down into the pot for every one of them. Halfway and no more. Halfway and no less. There is always someone who will beg her to go a little deeper just this once, please—either for her own bowl, or for the bowl of a friend whose vitality is dangerously waning—hoping that down on the bottom of the pot the ladle will dredge up a couple of beans or a thin slice of carrot in addition to the filmy water that constitutes their usual undoctored portion.

But no. She never even looks up to dignify such a request.

She also makes a point of giving the soup one complete stir with the ladle after a certain number of portions served, keeping a strict count in her head. The number varies. It might be five one day and it might be three the next and it might be nine the day after that. A certain Mathilde Kessler, one of the older denizens of the block and one of the more cunning, has observed this, and as the women line up for each meal she hangs back and watches for the number. Once she’s discovered it she counts the women in the line and positions herself to be holding up her bowl just after Eidel has stirred the pot, her theory being that whatever scraps of vegetables are in the soup will be highest in the suspension at that instant and most likely to be ladled up. There is risk to her system, as there is risk to everything. Wait a little too long and the vegetables will have been filtered out into other women’s bowls. Wait too long entirely and there’ll be nothing left. Not even water. For there’s never enough soup.

This is how Eidel has endured, though. By establishing and maintaining utter equanimity. By concentrating on nothing but the present moment. By walking a middle path where there is no real path at all.

Five bowls of soup. Stir. Five bowls of soup. Stir. Five bowls of soup.

And this is how others endure, others like Mathilde Kessler, by keeping watch on the tiniest of details and turning them to their advantage if they can.

Five bowls it is, then. Count off by fives and your chances will improve.

But now the junkman has spoken, and a door has opened up in Eidel’s mind, and the possibility of learning her husband’s fate has changed everything. It fires her heart and it sets her on edge and it gives her hope and fear where she has taught herself to have neither.

The question
—I need to know if my husband is alive—
came out of nowhere. She certainly hadn’t known she’d ask it; she hadn’t known she’d ever have the chance to ask anything again. But now she does have the chance, and now the world has shifted or shown the potential to shift, and now she stands in the kitchen ladling soup with Jacob on her mind and she loses count of the women she’s served. She curses herself for it.

Kessler is standing toward the end of the line and she sees what’s gone wrong and tries to rectify it. Stepping out of line and letting two women pass her by and thinking halfway better of that after a moment and trying to edge up again by one place. But the capo catches her at it.

“If you can’t stay in line,” she says, “you’ll have no rations at all.”

“I’m sorry,” says Kessler. She bows her head.

“You’ll be sorrier,” says the capo, reaching to confiscate the woman’s bowl. Kessler hands it over and shuffles all of a half step back before the capo strikes her over the head. The gray crockery bowl is heavy as stone and Rolak puts her considerable weight behind it and Kessler goes down. The bowl breaks in half.

The line moves forward. The woman behind will find three tiny peas awash in her soup today. The discovery—if not the peas themselves—will give her the strength to go on. Lucky her.

*

Edmund Vollmer, the deputy commandant, is responsible only to the commandant himself and perhaps to God. Few of the men have ever seen him in the flesh. Fewer still have seen the commandant, of course, and none have seen the Almighty. Many, but by no means all, have given up hope in that department.

Setting eyes on Vollmer at the edge of the yard during the morning roll call is therefore like sighting one element of the Holy Trinity. A murmur passes through the moving crowd of men like something alive and dangerous. Any interruption to the routine is dangerous. Everyone looks but tries not to be caught looking. Everyone stops but tries not to stop.
It’s Vollmer himself. See if you can, but don’t be seen.

Jacob and Max have learned to take places near the middle of the middle row at the twice-daily roll call. It’s the eye of whatever hurricane might ensue. This principal applies when they’re in motion as well, en route to the dig or to a selection lineup or anywhere else.
Stay in the middle of the pack, where it’s safest.
The roll call is a capricious thing, sometimes an actual counting of the men and sometimes not. It can last ten minutes or it can last an hour. In the mornings, when there’s work to be done, it’s generally a brisk affair. At day’s end, when the only thing at risk is the men’s sleep, it can go on forever. There are those who claim to remember counts that lasted twelve hours. Eighteen. Longer, entire days spent standing at attention in the yard in summer heat and winter snow. Men were reported to have crumpled over in the ranks during such periods, to have passed out on the ground and spasmed and died, with the only consequence being the need to begin the roll call over again. But who can say?

The
sturmbannführer
doesn’t look like a man with time to waste. This is a good sign. He’s on a small platform speaking with another SS officer—the young one who rides the bicycle—in a manner that permits no interruption. He is brusque but not hurried, intense but not urgent. The sun has risen over the low tarpaper blocks, and up on the platform its rays gleam from his hat and his belt and his boots.

Physically he’s compact and sturdy and immaculate. If the Germans have set out to demonstrate their status as the master race, Vollmer would seem to be as good an argument as any, although every man standing here with his eyes on him knows that in a fair fight things would be different. Their strength has been sapped now, and their will has been destroyed. They have been weakened and wounded and worn down. But once upon a time a man like Vollmer would have been beneath their particular notice. Just another customer, just another head to trim, forgotten as soon as he’d left the chair. But not now.

Among them all, Max is an exception. It’s his youth that makes the difference. Even here in the camp his strength has increased over the last couple of months, in spite of thin rations and backbreaking work or perhaps because of them. He is still fourteen but the lie has come true and he looks eighteen or older, for some chemical switch inside of him has not yet been thrown, and he can still turn almost any kind of nourishment into power. It’s a condition that won’t last.

But now he looks at Vollmer and turns his head a few degrees toward his father and whispers low, “I could take him.”

“And you could get every last one of us shot.”

Both of which are true.

Vollmer leaves off conferring with the other officer and steps down from the platform and takes a stroll along the lines of assembled men, almost as if he has overheard Max’s challenge and seeks to draw him out. Down here on ground level he seems even smaller. Just a little man in a gray-green uniform among this ragged assembly of dust-brown stick figures, assessing them like crops. He looks satisfied, even happy, with what he sees. Down the line he goes, toward Jacob and Max, strutting in the way of his superiors, and the father hears the son draw breath. Jacob draws breath too, shifting his weight and turning his chin toward Max so very slightly that no one other than his own flesh and blood could possibly begin to perceive it. But it’s enough. Max exhales. They both exhale. Vollmer nears and moves on without noticing either one of them. They’re just two more scarecrows, neither one of whom dares to look at Vollmer’s face. No one does.

It’s the back of Vollmer’s head that Jacob notices. The back of his neck, specifically. It’s an area in which he still takes a professional interest, and the hair at Vollmer’s nape is simply a disgrace. Ragged and asymmetrical and roughly chopped off, it could be the sign of an acceptable haircut gone too long between trimmings except that the skin below it looks red and angry and scraped raw. Jacob consults the calendar in his head and can’t decide what day it is until he remembers that yesterday morning Schuler didn’t walk with the rest of them toward his usual rendezvous with Canada. Today must be Saturday, then. Yesterday was Friday, the day the officers get their hair cut.