The Thief of Auschwitz

A Novel by Jon Clinch

Copyright 2012 by Jon Clinch

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

All rights reserved.

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For Wendy, as always.

And for the actual Sam.

“Things happened there—love and death, mostly death.”

— Helena Citrónová

Auschwitz: A New History

Laurence Rees

“And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

— Job 16:1

Book One
Shadow and Light

Max

The camp at Auschwitz took one year of my life, and of my own free will I gave it another four.

This was 1942. I was fourteen years old but tall for my age, and I’d spent a lot of time outdoors, so I lied and I got away with it. My father and I passed through that barbed wire gate and presto, I was eighteen. It was his idea, and if I hadn’t followed through on it they’d have been done with me in an hour, not a year. Maybe less than that. I was just a boy, after all. I was too young to be of any use.

That little white lie makes me eighty-eight years old now. I don’t mind. My Social Security card lies and so does my driver’s license, not that I drive anymore. You don’t drive in New York unless you’re some kind of a nut.

The last time one of the art magazines came around and asked me what I thought about some young Turk—it doesn’t matter who; I don’t even remember myself—what showed up in print sounded a whole lot like
you ought to forgive old Rosen, since he’ll be turning ninety in a couple of years after all. Maybe he’s going blind
.

Old Max Rosen.

Sympathetic, cantankerous, worn-out old Max.

King of the old-school representationalists.

The last believer in looking at things the way they are, and reporting back.

One

The clock built high into the station wall is painted on, a clumsy and heartless
trompe-l’oeil
that under ordinary circumstances wouldn’t fool a soul, but those who pass beneath it have too much on their minds to look closely. If any one of them so much as glances up, some mother raising her eyes above the scuffle and the crowd for just an instant, she sees an ordinary railroad station clock and is reassured by it—reassured the same way that she is reassured by the crisply lettered signs hanging overhead and by the gaily painted flower boxes bursting with pansies beneath each station window. Reassured that all is well. That the train has stopped at an ordinary station and that she and her family have arrived at an ordinary village. That the rumors she has heard can’t possibly be true.

Those who actually check the time are men, mainly. Two or three of them per car and no more, individuals who pride themselves on leading lives of regularity and precision. Shipping agents and clerks and shopkeepers, men of commerce, each fingering his vest pocket or raising his wrist to compare this public information with his own private store.
Half past three
says the station clock. Half past three will have to do, for these orderly men are surprised once again to remember that they’ve bartered away their watches in recent weeks or sewn them into the linings of their overcoats or otherwise set them aside. They shake their heads
—what slow learners they’ve become!—
and they move on. Keeping up. The clock says half past three. There is no time to waste.

Among those who don’t look up at all are the four members of the Rosen family. The parents, Jacob and Eidel. The children, Max and Lydia. Like everyone else in their car, they’ve been under way for three days or perhaps four. Not really traveling so much as waiting to travel, locked in the cars and anticipating movement and dreading it at the same time, for with each lurch forward the train has taken them another step toward a destination known only to itself.

*

Their journey began eighteen months prior and barely a hundred miles away, high among the highest ranges of the Carpathian mountains, in the resort town of Zakopane. It was the place of Jacob’s birth, which meant that he’d be a long time seeing how very beautiful it was. He’d need help, in fact. The help of a girl, which is often the way these things go. Beauty of any sort had never been much in his line to begin with. He’d been a hiker during his youth and early manhood, but strictly for the exercise. Although his friends knew the name of every peak and the song of every bird and the chatter of every squirrel, Jacob Rosen cataloged only the most difficult routes from one destination to the next. It was never a walk in the woods for him. It was always a test.

At home he’d stand in the corner of his father’s shop, drinking the last of the water from his canteen and watching the old man’s hands as he trimmed the hair of a vacationer from Warsaw or Krakow. Listening to the stranger rhapsodize about the fields of undulating crocuses that he and his wife had discovered blooming in some alpine valley just this very morning. Thinking that this great lump of a tourist, sitting beneath a crisp white sheet as if masquerading as a mountain himself, sounded like a man who’d never seen a crocus before. Worse than that. Like the man who’d invented them.

As years went by, Jacob’s father taught him what he needed to know about running the shop, including how best to endure men like these. He said
you don’t want word getting out that young Rosen has no respect for the people who constitute his trade.
A reputation like that would be trouble enough right there in the town, but imagine if people began telling tales back in Warsaw. Saying,
visit Zakopane if you must, but get your hair trimmed before you go! Young Rosen would just as soon take your ears off!
It would be the end of everything that his father had built in this life.

More years had gone by and the old man had passed away and the shop was in Jacob’s hands when Eidel arrived, Eidel Mankowicz from Warsaw, here for a month’s skiing with her parents and her three younger sisters. She’d never seen a place even half so beautiful. She couldn’t get enough of it. The truth was that she could barely bring herself to come indoors, and late one afternoon as Jacob trimmed her father’s hair she waited outside the shop, utterly rapt and completely indifferent to what was going on inside, caught up in the gathering of clouds over the high peaks, her face illuminated by the last rays of the fading light.

Inside, Jacob slipped and nicked her father’s cheek and Mankowicz said, “Perhaps you ought to turn on a light, the evening comes so early here in the mountains.” He was a hard man by the look of him, worldly but tough-minded, a lawyer perhaps. Someone with the means to bring a large family here to the limits of the Carpathians on an extended holiday. He was a hard man but he could see that this barber wasn’t going to turn on a lamp until the last possible minute, not while pretty young Eidel was standing outside his window with her face tilted up into the dying light. Not as long as he could still see her. Mankowicz was a man who understood the world, and he resigned himself to enduring another nick or two.

What was the harm? They were children. They wouldn’t be young forever.

*

She didn’t go home to Warsaw. When the month was over she stayed on in Zakopane, and she acquired her own apartment with money from her father, and she sent home for her paints and brushes. She skied or hiked each morning and she painted each afternoon and she let Jacob court her for two years altogether, although they both knew from the beginning exactly how it was going to end. They’d both known it from the moment her father had emerged into the starlit street outside the barber shop and she had looked past him, through the open door, and let her eyes fall upon the young man within. But here in the mountains the turn of every season was a fresh delight and twenty-four months seemed a reasonable interval and after the earth had gone twice around the sun she confessed what she’d known at the outset. That this was how she must spend the rest of her days. Here and with him. They took a train to Warsaw for the wedding, and then they hurried back to the mountains to set up housekeeping in the rooms over the shop.

Eidel claimed the attic as her studio and Jacob emptied it out and she washed the windows to let in the warm southern light. She could have spent every single one of the endless days ahead painting the changing face of Mount Rysy, registering its subtle changes without ceasing, if there had not been so many other subjects at hand. The beautiful and sturdy children of the town. The throngs of happy tourists in their holiday clothing. The steaming windows of the neighborhood
cukiernia,
jammed with pastries and marzipan. Her own husband.