Gratitude (31 page)

Twenty-Three

Auschwitz-Birkenau – November 7, 1944

LIBUSE HAD RECOVERED
her eyesight well enough, miraculously, that she could make out figures of people in front of her, even if she didn’t recognize who they were, necessarily. She was very good at faking what she needed to fake: working, eating, getting ready for bed, answering questions.

The
kapo
announced a dreaded
selekcja
. Marta awoke with the word waiting in her ear. The word spread around the
lager
and the yard. Latin married to Polish to produce a devil child:
selekcja
, the selection. It was to be more formal this time than last.

The inmates had a day to prepare. How could they prepare? They needed to puff themselves out in a day, make themselves look more robust, clean themselves up in the scarce seconds they had in the latrine. Women asked one another whether they’d be picked or spared, and their kindness, whatever was left of it, flushed to the surface. “You look good,” many said. “You look strong.” No one said pretty. The lustre was gone. Those who were still standing were starved and grimy. Their skin seemed to cling to them as if to a coat hanger.

The exception was Marta. She hadn’t starved for long enough yet, had been spared much of the heavy labour forced upon the others, felt her work had a
purpose
, had got more to eat in the infirmary, and she was lovely to begin with. So everyone sought her opinion and approval. And she tried to give it and make it sound fair, though she had to lie to many.

“What number am I again—the last three digits?” Libuse asked Marta as they stripped bare in the
lager
. The taller woman held out her arm.

“You know your number,” Marta said. “705.”

“Just checking to be sure,” Libuse said as she removed her wooden shoes and was bare before Marta was. “I was in the pink of life when I got here, and now I can barely even see pink. How do I look?”

“Strong as ever. Just look ahead as though you’re at attention.”

Manci, the
kapo
, circulated through the bony throngs, handing each woman a card with her name, number, nationality and age written on it. When she said, “705,” Libuse smiled and held out her hand. Manci didn’t notice anything unusual and asked Libuse if she was feeling better.

“Much.”

Manci gave Marta her card, 818, and moved on, hustling the naked women out to the yard when they were ready. Just as soon as the
kapo
was out of earshot, Libuse whispered, “Must the Germans persist in proving to us who they are? Must we persist in proving to them who we are? Why the same exercises every time?”

A small woman hiccupped, folded herself back on a bunk and vomited all over herself, another woman’s foot and the floor.

“You bitch,” the other woman said and tried to fling the vomit off.

Manci was upon them in a second. “Wipe yourself clean, both of you, and get outside!” Manci booted the one who’d thrown up and the woman fell over, but she leapt back to her feet and ran out past the others.

The other inmates stepped aside to let her through. They didn’t want to be infected with an illness, not now. The stench was worse than usual. In the next narrow aisle between bunks, someone said that the Russians were within a hundred kilometres of Auschwitz.

“How’s that possible?” someone else whispered.

“There’s been bombing in the countryside. They’re coming for us.”

“Not today,” Libuse said as they stepped outside.

“Didn’t you hear the planes? Those weren’t German planes. They’re coming.”

Manci came up from behind. She punched the woman, who fell in a heap to the floor. “Outside,” Manci said.

The woman rose and staggered toward the door. “Don’t you want for us to be liberated?” the woman said. And Manci hit her again, harder, so that this time she stayed for a spell on the floor, and women had to step over her scrawny legs.

“There are new recruits,” Manci announced as she stood by the door and herded the women out. “We need to make room for them. There are many of them, and they’re from my Hungary.
Selekcja
,” she said again as if she were calling people in for tea. “Come along.
Selekcja
.”

They were greeted outside this time by a senior SS commander, Romeo Stern, and four guards. Manci would trail along to answer questions as they arose. The officer would inspect each woman, sometimes merely by glancing at her, sometimes by circling her, sometimes by asking a question. Then Stern would call out “Right” or “Left,” the right possibly meaning death by gassing today and the left a reprieve—until the next selection. The last time, it was the reverse; left meant death, while right meant life for another day. No one said openly that one side was death by gassing, of course, merely that some people were once again being relocated and were to be given a special shower, so clothing would not be necessary. The clothing was then piled on a cart or truck for laundering for the incoming prisoners, or for disposal, depending on how ragged the garment had become.

The five hundred women stood in rows, wretched and naked, but also stalwart, like soldiers in the breezy autumn air. It had not rained in a week, so the ground was dry. Stern looked the women over as he made his rounds. “Left,” he said to one woman, and “Left” to the woman beside her, who was larger and still robust. The card each woman was holding was placed in the left hand of Stern’s junior officer.

Immediately, everyone was trying to discern a pattern. Why did the robust woman’s card join the slight woman’s card in the guard’s left hand? Was he looking for a particular posture today, the more erect the better, or a particular light about the face, some responsiveness? Did Romeo Stern have a quota? “404, right,” he said to a puny thing; “203, right,” to a woman who stole bowls and always wanted to trade something for bits of people’s crust of bread. But here was the woman who’d vomited: “387, left,” Romeo said. Had she cleaned herself up? Did she not look so green? “675, right,” to an inmate whose hair stubble had turned white in the short months she’d spent in the camp, a woman of twenty, no more; “662, right” to the oldest one in the
lager
, forty-five, but strong and tough, a bull of a worker.

The infernal band sounded again nearby, where camp insurgents were to face the firing squad. They played another marching song, “Flieger Empor!,” a song exhorting the German air forces to triumph, followed by “75 Millionen, ein Schlag!” This one brought a smile to Romeo Stern’s face. He even conducted for a moment as he turned to his junior officer to say, “Seventy-five million Germans—one heartbeat.” The song cheered Stern up, and while it played he said “right” more often than “left,” much more often, giving the inmates a hint as to which was which.

“The bogey man has come,” Libuse whispered as the band played on, “not for you, beautiful Marta, beautiful Snow White, but for me, the water spirit, washed up here on the land.”

“Wherever you go,” Marta said, “I’m going, too.”

“I doubt it,” said Libuse.

But Stern was approaching, so Marta begged Libuse to keep quiet.

Marta glimpsed his face from over the women’s heads. Romeo Stern. Who’d given him the name of Romeo? Who’d given her northern boy that sunny southern name? Who’d looked into his blue eyes and decided he would seek love? Who looked into his eyes and sought love herself? And who was his fair Juliet? From what sad balcony in what German town did she beam her love to this distant yard where the inmates burned daylight, where Juliet’s Romeo was beating the dancing days out of the knobby knees of his charges, where he was turning swans into crows into ash? Or was there no balcony after all, Marta wondered, and no Juliet waiting? We are your Juliets, we star-crossed lovers, we brides of Frankenstein, we five hundred nymphs, shorn, starved, bare and barren, unable to express our modesty with sultry striped and numbered uniforms. Wherefore
our
Romeo, tough Star of the yards? Gone to cellars and wet trenches? When we are gone to unseen balconies, our sweet southern love, will you cut us out in little stars, or will you turn us instead into black cloud to smudge out the day and fill in the night, so that we will show your conscience the way to its own grave?

And then to the women’s surprise, but in particular to Libuse’s surprise and Marta’s, the band played a beautiful Czech song.

“It’s a sign,” Libuse whispered. “I’m half-Czech, don’t forget, like the whole Czech Princess Libuse.”

“Quiet,” Marta said.

“My time has come.”

“Don’t talk, please,” Marta whispered. Stern and his entourage approached. Libuse had begun to sway, to mouth the lyrics. “Please, Libuse,” Marta whispered.

And then the two were in front of them. Stern took the card from Libuse’s hand. “Are you enjoying the entertainment we’ve arranged for you?” he asked.

He was looking directly into Libuse’s eyes, Marta could tell, and Libuse turned her head directly toward the voice.

“Yes, sir,” Libuse said. “It’s a song from
Rusalka
by Dvorak, my favourite opera.”

“What appeals to you, exactly?”

“It’s never easy to explain why music appeals.”

“Still,” he said.

“It’s Rusalka’s call to the moon, we’re hearing.” She’d begun to sway a bit again. “‘
Rekni mu, stribrny mesicku, me ze jej objima rame
’—‘Oh tell him, silver moon, that my arms enfold him, in the hope that for at least a moment he will dream of me.’ She is the little mermaid, the fairy-tale mermaid in love with a prince,” Libuse said. “She wants to become a creature of the land. The prince doesn’t know, when he goes to swim in the sea, that she envelops him, stirs up the waves to caress him.” Libuse paused, but Stern didn’t respond.

At the conclusion of the aria, the band bounced on immediately to another soldier’s song, “Es war ein Edelweiss,” Herms Niel’s paean to the elite mountain troops, played repeatedly on Heinz Goedecke’s
Request Concert
radio show, broadcast over Greater German Radio to the armed forces.

Libuse heard nothing but the marching music. She saw a presence still before her, so she took a chance and proceeded. “Rusalka is neither woman nor fairy, neither living nor dead. She wants to be set free from a watery grave. She sees a devastating beauty she can’t attain—more than a prince, more than the land—
beauty
, a life.”

The officer still didn’t answer and didn’t move. She couldn’t see him. Was she supposed to keep talking until he asked her to stop? Maybe she should talk about other arias, other operas, her feelings about music. She said, weakly now, calmly, “It seems to be a story about the earth and the sea, but really it’s a story about desire. In the song, Dvorak is really bringing us news from heaven, if you listen.”

“I see.”

“But that’s not why I love the music.”

“It’s not?”

“No, I love the music because I want the same thing Rusalka wants. I long for beauty. The song is beautiful, and you’ve asked me to explain beauty, to rationalize my love. It’s not easy. It’s much easier to rationalize hatred.”

Stern waited another moment as if to see if Libuse was finished. Libuse kept her head aimed at the place his voice had been. “705, to the right,” he said, finally, and placed Libuse’s card in the hand of his assistant.

Libuse was just then overcome. She sobbed, tried to hold it back, but sobbed again. She didn’t know how to stop herself. Stern was still half in front of her. He waited. Libuse clutched herself around the ribs and breasts, shuddering with the fall wind and with the final triumphant notes of “Es war ein Edelweiss.”

Stern stood before Marta now, but waited for Libuse to finish before he continued. He was grinding his teeth, his jaw rippling as he gazed at Marta, held her card, glanced down at it and up again. Finally, though Libuse had not finished gasping and hiccuping, Stern said, “818, right.”

He moved on immediately. There was a woman standing next to Marta whom Marta had never seen. She didn’t know what nationality the woman was and couldn’t even tell her age, and yet it was plain she’d been in Auschwitz a long time. The ravages showed in her body and face. When they’d first assembled in the line, Marta had wanted to acknowledge the woman with her eyes, touch the woman with her health, but she’d seemed out of reach, untouchable. She was a woman utterly deprived of the means to express herself, not with a jaunty dress, not with the copper ringlets of hair quickly sprouting from her scalp, not with an extra handle around the midriff to say she enjoyed her cakes, not with so much as an expression on her face—not a smile, not a scowl, not fear. She was a woman in whom even the pilot light had gone out.

Romeo Stern took this woman’s card, noted her number, “344,” and added, “right.”

He hustled down the line now. A spate of lefts was followed by a long succession of rights. It seemed almost indiscriminate, rushed. Then the small group in charge marched to the front where they’d begun.

Stern was matter-of-fact when he turned and spoke. “Those of you on the left, return to the
lager
and retrieve your clothing. Those of you on the right, you won’t be needing anything for the time being. Please stay in the yard until the others have left.”

The words clung to Marta, constricted her throat. As the chosen women filed back into the
lager
, Libuse leaned toward Marta and said, “I’m sorry. I lost my grip on things. I—”

“Do you ever shut up?” Marta asked. “I mean
ever
?”

Oh, dear Lord, my dear God, thought Marta, as the reality of her situation circulated through her body. What had happened here? To stand before an accuser in a court of law after taking the life of a child or an innocent bank clerk or a political leader—to butcher a sworn enemy at an inappropriate time and in an inappropriate place—was one thing. At least you could fathom why you’d been sentenced to death. Even if it didn’t thrill you to be so sentenced, something in you, a sense of balance, would have been satisfied. Even here, even in Auschwitz, to stand before a firing squad with an idiot orchestra playing after organizing an insurgency and strangling a guard, or even
not
strangling a guard, in some demented and satanic understanding of the universe satisfied a sense of justice. But to have been a dental assistant in Szeged who wanted nothing more than to make visitors comfortable, relieve every patient’s toothache, to have attended mass and confession more often than Jesus or Mary had any right to expect, to have sought extra cabbage for her man and her cat, to have grieved her parents’ passing and written loving letters to her one brother in Chicago, to have confidently played Juliet in her
Gymnazium
opposite another Romeo, a sweet but fumbling one with blond curls coiling from his musketeer hat—where in this
vitae
did a visit to the gallows satisfy the laws of humanity or nature?