Mystery Man (14 page)

'Raspberry,' I said.

'Butter or margarine?'

'Butter.'

'Crusts on or off?'

'On.'

'I think we're a perfect match,' she said. She smiled again. Then she slipped out of the van and hurried up to her front door.

I sat where I was for another minute. I watched the lights come on in the downstairs apartment, then in what I took to be her bedroom. I caught a glimpse of her throwing down her coat, and then moving back out of the room. She had held my hand and kissed my cheek. It was more than I had ever imagined. Father always taught me that God crushes those who dare to hope, and life had shown him to be right.

I moved into the driver's seat and started the engine.

Then I drove home.

Anne Mayerova had spoken with unexpected clarity and so far as I could judge her recall seemed absolute. There was no vagueness, nothing half remembered. She might no longer be capable of living alone or of combing her own hair, but she was certain about the events that had defined her life.

She had arrived at the Birkenau labour camp at Auschwitz in April of 1944 with her young husband Mark. She was branded with a serial number, though she said it didn't seem particularly painful – possibly because she was already in shock. Conditions were of course appalling, although that didn't stop those who were already there taking great satisfaction in describing how awful life would be and what would happen to her. Everyone expected to die. Those who had arrived the previous September, for example, had been worked into the ground until March, and then exterminated. Six months was as long as anyone survived.

Anne was surprised to meet an old acquaintance, a man called Alfred, who was working as a kapo in the laundry. He quickly got her a job there, washing the clothes taken from the new arrivals – but as most of these were already clean and packed in suitcases it wasn't particularly hard. She readily admitted that she had grown up cosseted, and even in the camp it took a while to knock that out of her. One morning she was late for work and Alfred threw her to the ground and beat her very badly – because if she was late, then he got into trouble – although he later went down on his knees and begged her forgiveness. His own parents had only recently been sent to the gas chambers. Although she was in a women's barracks, she was still able to meet with her husband during the day – she didn't tell him about the beating and he didn't tell her about his own appalling experiences. Several times they were even able to make love.

On 6 June the Allied invasion of Europe changed things in the camp. Hitler declared that as workers were needed, no longer would
everyone
be sent to be exterminated – only the sick and the weak, the very old and the very young. But that meant
selection.
By this stage Anne had fallen seriously ill with typhoid and could barely walk. Her husband helped her to strip with the other prisoners and then join the inspection lines, dogs barking all around them, SS guards barking orders, and Dr Mengele watching everyone like a hawk. One quick glance at her emaciated, fevered frame, and Anne was selected for death. Mark could say nothing. It would mean his own death. There were two parallel lines – those who would live, and could reclaim their clothes; and those who would remain naked and be taken to the gas chambers. But the two lines were quite close together. Realising what was coming, and knowing that she had nothing left to lose, Anne just closed her eyes and stepped out of her death line into that of the living. And nobody noticed. She had a brief moment with Mark before he was marched away to the men's camp.

Anne and her fellow prisoners were also taken out of what had been a family camp into an all-women camp. Even the SS officers in charge were women – in this case the cruel and barbarous Oberaufseherin Elsa who regularly oversaw beatings and took great joy in dispatching anyone she took a dislike to directly to the gas chambers. They survived on watery soup, served in bowls without spoons so that they had to lap out of them like dogs. They were formed into small groups called kommandos and set to work carrying bricks, running with them along a path, depositing them, and then running back for more. Their hands bled and the wounds did not heal. They were given a lump of bread at night, and they were always torn whether to eat it all at once or to save some for the next day, which meant running the risk of having it stolen during the night. They were freezing and hungry and in such total despair that many of the prisoners literally gave up: they volunteered for the trucks leaving for the gas chambers.

Even in the midst of such degradation, there was still defiance. When it came time to celebrate Yom Kippur, the women prisoners decided to observe it by fasting for twenty-four hours. Their SS tormentors were furious, but the inmates stuck to their plan, even though at the end of it the guards refused to hand over their evening meal, which meant that these already starving women went without food for thirty-six hours. There were other tiny pinpricks of light in this universe of darkness. There was one SS guard known as the Mechanic who rode about the camp on a bicycle repairing broken-down vehicles and machinery. He would occasionally stop and talk to the women, and offer a kind word. It was remarkable how important even little things like this became. Anne had been suffering from dysentery and was barely able to work, but she had no choice. On one particularly bad day, the Mechanic saw her distress and actually gave her his lunch. He suggested she go to see the camp doctor, without apparently realising that once you went to see him, you didn't come back. She was so unused to the relatively rich food that she immediately threw it back up. The Mechanic knelt beside her and whispered encouragement: that he believed that life was like a great wheel, that some days you were moving up on that wheel and some days you were moving down. She was down right now, but one day she would be on the top of the wheel while he would be at the bottom. After this he took to coming every day and surreptitiously giving one of them part of his lunch.

As Christmas approached, Elsa, the Oberaufseherin, decided that a programme of entertainment should be mounted, featuring dramatic sketches, music and dancing. Auditions and rehearsals were held in the early hours of the morning. Anne was dragged there by friends, just to watch, and with no desire to take part – she was far too ill and weak – but when she saw the selected dancers perform she forgot herself and shouted that they didn't know what they were doing. She had, after all, been a professional dancer – and those on the makeshift stage reacted by telling her that if she knew so much, she should show them how to do it. Thus, barely able to walk, she made it to the stage, and as the musical accompaniment began – an accordionist – something miraculous happened. She felt power in her legs again. She felt adrenaline course through her pathetic body. She danced the
valse
from
Coppelia
in her torn and stinking pyjamas, with block clogs on her rancid feet. It must have looked bizarre indeed – but it worked. Anne was not only recruited as the lead dancer, but to choreograph the entire production.

A week before Christmas it was announced that the Ober would be attending the rehearsal to see how her great idea was progressing. She duly clapped and laughed through the entire show, until it came to Anne's turn to dance. She watched without reaction – and at the end simply got up and walked out. Anne naturally feared the worst, especially when, the next morning at roll-call, her name was called out and she had to step forward. But then it was announced that from now on she would be excused from outside work and would receive an extra portion of soup every day.

The show took place on Christmas night, and Anne remembered it better than anything else in her life. Hundreds of women prisoners crowded into the hall, dozens of SS were there as well – not to guard them, but to enjoy the show. The sketches were greeted uproariously, everyone sang along to the music, and then the climax of the show – Anne dancing
Coppelia –
and for a few minutes she and the entire audience were transported to another dimension. They gave themselves up to the grace and passion of the music and the movement; the horrors they were all living through were forgotten, and she danced as she had never danced before. The bare wooden stage was better than any stage in the world, the heavy-fingered accordion more powerful than a great orchestra; as she danced she glimpsed snow falling through the hall windows, almost as if it was washing away everyone's sins. She felt love and hope and knew that it didn't matter if she survived, that her life's purpose had been fulfilled, that she had given hope to the poor people around her and perhaps given pause for thought to their tormentors. When she finished the audience stood as one and cheered so much that she was forced to perform an encore, this time a South American tango. It was a triumph. Afterwards the cast were treated to soup with real meat in it.

In the telling of this, Anne Mayerova had raised herself on her spindly legs and did her best to ape the movements she had performed on that Christmas night in Auschwitz; we made space for her to shuffle back and forth. She looked like a
nut.

But she absolutely lived it again.

Alison was sobbing. It was powerful stuff. You couldn't imagine what it had been like in those camps. Although I would do my best. After Anne's recounting of what had happened at the show, a lot of the life went out of her; in her eyes the rest was an anticlimax. Her story-telling became more vague, and quite listless. She said that the 'good times' could not last, and very soon she was back with her kommando, working outdoors. The difference was that she had several weeks of comparatively healthy eating behind her, which made her better able to cope, at least for a short while, with the appalling conditions.

Within a few weeks, however, their situation changed again. The war was all but lost, and the Russians were closing in on the camp. The SS, frightened of what the enemy would do when they discovered what had been going on, forced the prisoners to go on what became a death march, walking for days at a time without food or shelter in freezing weather and without any apparent destination. If a prisoner stumbled and fell, they were shot where they lay. Anne became so ill that she began to hallucinate and soon could no longer walk. She lay down to die. But instead of her being murdered, an Allied air raid distracted her guards and in the confusion she found some last surge of strength, just enough to allow her to find a hiding place. Her fellow prisoners were marched off to their deaths, and she was taken in by a Polish farmer. She hovered between life and death for several weeks, but eventually recovered enough strength to be handed over to the by-now Russian victors; and from there she made it home to Prague, only to discover that she was the only one of her family who had survived the war. But then only two days later another miracle – her husband, her Mark, whom she had presumed dead in Auschwitz, walked through the door, like a ghost. They had both survived.

I sat at the kitchen table and worried. This was not unusual. I had a hot chocolate and a Twix. Neither was this. I worried about what Alison was thinking of me, and about whether she was thinking of me at all. After all, how important was supper with a vague acquaintance compared to the astonishing story she had just listened to? She was quite probably entirely consumed by that. It was an epic of survival that spoke volumes about the power of the human spirit. It illustrated exactly how art could raise you up out of the most dispiriting situations imaginable. No, Alison wasn't wasting any thought
at all
on this mystery-bookshop owner. She might not even have noticed my sudden departure. If she remembered tomorrow and asked what had happened I would say,
There was a family emergency, I had to get home.
And if she didn't buy that, then I would have to reconcile myself to the end of our nascent relationship. It didn't mean I wouldn't see her again. I had the webcam, and
stealth.

Yes, I worried about Alison, but mostly I worried about moral ambiguity.

If you took the old woman's story at face value it was evocative, emotive and uplifting. It was, ultimately, a triumph of good over evil, which, rather than dwell on man's inhumanity to man, is how we like to deal with our Holocausts. I have to admit I
was
quite carried away with her story – at least until the climactic dance when she described how she'd glimpsed the snow falling outside, and that was when I realised that she was giving us a version of the events warped by both time and ego.
Of course
it wasn't snow falling picturesquely at Christmas; it was ash from the crematorium chimneys. And when I thought this I also thought of the preposterousness of their mounting a Christmas show at the behest of and for the entertainment of their SS captors, the monsters who were doing their very best to destroy the entire tribe of David. These poor cretins, who could hardly stand, whose loved ones were being exterminated even as they hoofed across the stage, somehow deluded themselves that
auditioning
for,
rehearsing
for and
performing
in comedy sketches and dances was somehow a
good thing
, to be remembered fondly. It was
The Bridge on the River Kwai
in ballet shoes, without the saving grace of 'What have I done?' at the end.

Did it make Anne Mayerova a collaborator? Probably not. Did it make her a hate figure amongst her fellow prisoners? Chosen for special treatment, excused hard labour, given extra rations? To do what –
dance? Of course
they hated her. She remembered it as her finest moment, but was it anything like that? Was there wild applause and encores?

No!

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no!

I sat at my table and ate my Twix and attempted to cry for the Jews of Auschwitz.

Couldn't.

Malfunctioning tear ducts.

I moaned for a bit.

After a while Mother came through. We still weren't speaking, but she had obviously heard me from upstairs and had taken the trouble to jot down a note of support. She set it on the table before me and then went to fill the kettle.