The Birthday Buyer (13 page)

Two of those they killed were Sofia and Yakov Pawlicka.

I have always been afraid of going crazy. And so was Yakov Pawlicka, the father of Hurbinek who could never know he was his son. From childhood losing one’s mind on the stage of history always seemed like an appalling fate. Like the man who went to Waterloo after becoming obsessed with reading
La Chartreuse de Parme
and wandered across the former battlefield thinking he was Fabrice del Dongo. Some people go to Waterloo as
Stendhalian
tourists, hunt for ghosts and mirages, and find them.

One cannot travel to Auschwitz in that frame of mind. It is neither right nor possible. But madness is never far away. I am thinking of the madness suffered by Yakov Pawlicka during those last weeks before he died, the mental fog where he lost himself before being taken to the gas chamber. He never discovered he had a son in Auschwitz. Better that way. His madness would have been compounded by the anguish caused by even greater suffering. Sofia never saw him again after they were separated on arrest. She was going to tell him that afternoon when they were arrested, she was going to tell him that she was pregnant, but she never had the slightest opportunity. When they got into the different trucks that were to take them to the concentration camps, their lives separated out for ever, and they would never meet again.

I sometimes think I will be better after this trip, but other times I think that when I reach Auschwitz I will be overwhelmed by the real madness of history, the madness of the horror, the madness of Yakov Pawlicka that hovers eternally over the camps of Auschwitz like air that is unbreathable. I even think that, when one doesn’t travel as a tourist, one travels in search of self-improvement. And yet many people return with a lesser or greater degree of madness. But I am also sure there is a moral quest in every journey. I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore. Perhaps the onset of my madness came prior to the journey and I should admit I was travelling in order to give Hurbinek’s short life a second birth, as if I were a demiurge, through my gaze, by seeing what he saw. I will go to Auschwitz for that alone. It is an act of justice, although it may very likely be an act of madness as well.

However, there is another kind of madness. For example, Eduard Wirths helping his friend Rudolf Höss to write a letter-cum-report for Arthur Liebehens, the new camp commandant, who came from Majdanek in November 1943 to take over from Höss. That letter-cum-report glossed over everything to do with the day-to-day running of the camp, including the economic angles, and only mentions in any detail the project Höss and Wirths intended to launch in January 1944 with the support of the officer class. The project they’d been nurturing was the creation of a horse-racing track in the Auschwitz Stammlager and stables for many more purebreds. Until then the camp had had few such horses, that is: four race horses, four for dressage, five for hunting and six pack horses. He wanted to emulate the great and renowned races that he used to see in Riem. Höss recommended his successor should continue flattening the ground in the area they had selected so no holes remained that might be lethal for horses’ hoofs, and should delineate the boundaries of the race track with grave stones taken from Jewish cemeteries. Höss believed that the inhabitants of the two local cities, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as the soldiers garrisoned there, would come to the races, and that they would “sportingly” enliven camp life that was “overly mechanical and absorbed by the annihilation tasks we are carrying out.” Obviously, there
is
another form of madness.

When the members of the
Sonderkommando
opened the gas chambers, the bodies were simply layers of limp flesh, with contorted rictus on every face, mouths gaping open and black tongues hanging out. It was a huge physical effort to extract the corpses from the pile one by one by pulling on an arm or a leg. Many children were locked tight in their mothers’ arms and were impossible to separate out. They went into the ovens like that, mother and child together. If they were separated from their parents, they would be heaped together so they could be placed in a different oven ten at a time. That saved on space.

In order to move the bodies from the gas chamber to the adjacent ovens, they used ropes they put round necks in order to drag the bodies opposite the oven doors and then other men picked them up and threw them into the flames. The people responsible for pulling out gold teeth and cutting hair would often clamber into the gas chambers, trampling on corpses and climbing over the mountain of bodies that tended to form by the door, which those gassed had been desperately knocking on and screaming at. When they were on top of the human pile, they’d begin to push them down, make them roll over each other. The surface gave easily, there were lots of gaps and they often slipped and fell among the bodies and got mixed up with them. One of those men fell on the naked body of Sofia Pawlicka; he didn’t know who she was—how could he?—but he did notice the astonishingly sweet composure on her face with its eyes closed, a trace of fleeting happiness, as if, at the moment of death, she had been courageous enough to remember something beautiful.

Rudolf Höss, the inventor of mass gassing techniques, ceased to be Auschwitz’s chief commandant in December 1943 and became Chief Inspector of Department I in the Central Office for Concentration Camps, and was thus responsible for the supervision of all the extermination camps. His mission up to 1945 was to implement the liquidation programme established by Heydrich, Eichmann and Himmler. In the spring of 1944 he returned to Auschwitz in order to implement personally the elimination of 450,000 Hungarian Jews. The Third Reich, that according to Hitler’s prophecy, was due to last a thousand years, capitulated in May, 1945. Summoned to the witness box, Höss proudly confessed, in a most matter-of-fact tone of voice, to the whole policy of extermination in the declaration he made at the Nuremberg trials. On March 11, 1947, two years after Hurbinek’s death, Höss was judged in Warsaw and sentenced to death. He was hung on April 16 opposite Crematorium I in the Stammlager, on the exact spot where he had planned to put his racetrack.

In mid-April 1941, Sofia Cèrmik and Yakov Pawlicka went to Krakow on their honeymoon. They ignored the advice of parents and relatives, alarmed by the news coming from the city’s ghetto, and fearful that, now that the whole of Poland belonged to the Reich, the invaders would prevent them from reaching their capricious destination, or even worse, would arrest and intern them in a camp, as it was rumored the SS was doing systematically. But Pavel Ramadian, Yakov’s ingenious friend, provided them with forged papers, and a Mr. and Mrs. Jankowski booked into the Hotel Merkur on Krakowska Street. They lived on love, lived the unreality of newlyweds, distanced from fear, unaware that their dream was to shortly end in the most horrible of nightmares. When they left Rzeszów, waving their hands, more excited than they were happy, bidding farewell to friends and relatives, neither they nor anyone else present imagined that they would never return.

The Hotel Merkur was on the corner of the bustling, very commercial Józefa Street, which leads into the Kazimierz Jewish neighborhood, full of synagogues and small, shady gardens. But it is all abandoned now because the Jews have been forcefully enclosed within the southern ghetto, in Podgórze, a first step—although few know this as yet—to the extermination camp in Plaszów. Under their assumed names of Mr. and Mrs. Jankowski that aroused no suspicions on the part of the hotelier, a wary woman from the Carpathians, Sofia and Yakov rashly ignore the curfew in the ghetto, though it doesn’t in fact affect them, since they are pretending not to be Jews, and they come and go throughout the city, convinced of their role as two young Poles in love, untouched by the occupation, and determinedly mundane, even frivolous, like dolls wrapped and boxed as a present for children who are starving to death.

I can picture Sofia. She is alone, leaning on the frame of their bedroom window. From her vantage point she can see the entrance to the ghetto, at the end of a long street. There, on both sides of the roadway furrowed by tramrails, are wooden barriers with a large number at the top indicating each door, and a sign in Gothic lettering, reminding the Jews that they face the death penalty if they leave that precinct. A car filled with German soldiers is parked on each side of the checkpoint. They look at papers and push and shove people.

I can see, or rather I should say that I imagine Sofia and her loneliness at four in the afternoon, waiting for Yakov to come back from an errand he is running for Samuel Pawlicka, his father. She is imagining everything she wants to do in these days of bliss, all that she associates with happiness and wants to happen. It is beyond her scope and she has to make choices. Thus, for example, she acknowledges that she is happy with the clothes she bought shortly after they arrived with the money her mother gave her—a red dress and shawl—in a shop recommended by Frankie, one of her cousins, who has now moved from Jakuba Street to the ghetto with Artur Sugar, her husband, and their daughters. Sofia and Yakov visited them on their first day in Krakow only to slope off, first repelled by the sad tedium of their visit with its meager offering of rancid Pomeranian jam, but driven above all by the desire to make love in their bedroom at the Merkur, making love conscious that they were different, new, untouched and pure compared with the filth in the lives of those living in the ghetto. They can neither believe it or reproach themselves. And then they will make love until they are blissfully consumed, at dawn, when, without their knowing, the ghetto doors open and many workers leave in trucks for the factories and some are shot down by bullets from drunken soldiers amusing themselves from the sidewalk, as the trucks drive by, with a little shooting range practice. But what can they know of any of that, if they are in the throes of love? Nausea and panic coexist parallel to their love. Anesthesia, consolation and self-defence are words Sofia once heard on the lips of her mother Raca’s doctor, and stored away. Who could ever have anticipated she would use them now, in the midst of happiness.

But what is happiness? A pleasant, straightforward principle like a holy law: today happiness for Sofia is going out with Yakov to eat in a modest restaurant down the sidestreets of the old city, after walking down Grodzka Street, in Rynek Glowny, and then kissing passionately with wet lips under the century-old tower of the Town Hall. A German soldier on leave asked them to take a photo of him in the square with the tower in the background. Yakov took the camera and the German held Sofia by the arm, and she didn’t resist. They both smiled as Yakov pressed the shutter release. Blissful ignorance of victims and their executioners. Now, I stiffen all of a sudden: what if that photo were the one I think my bedroom companion, here in Frankfurt, is using as a marker in the book he is reading? What if that photo were an old family photo, and that soldier—who never again saw that Polish couple, was unable to imagine they were two young Jews who barely two years hence were to enter a gas chamber, starving, humiliated, dying—were the father, uncle or grandfather of the man in the bed next to mine, who voted for the Social Democratic Party, is a Bayern Munich supporter and even has an extremely tolerant attitude toward Turkish immigrants, now that the Wall has fallen, and they are once again a single united Germany, a Germany
über alles
?

And what is happiness? I ask a second time. No doubt, for Sofia, it is about giving Yakov a hug in the fairground where they go every afternoon, before having dinner in a tavern that has Hungarian music, violins, tambourines and all that. They will get on the Ferris wheel they saw in the distance the day they arrived in the city and then go for a spin on the colorful carousel; she sits on his legs, while they whisper words of love and desire and she imagines herself back in bed at the Merkur under Yakov’s embrace, intent, loving, gasping. Happiness for Sofia are those eternal moments when time comes to a halt, when she runs her fingers through Yakov’s hair and nothing else matters; when night falls and together they don’t feel the chill of Spring, despite the open window that looks over a gray street where paving stones have been lifted and brick walls plastered with orders from the Nazis, along which carts pass carrying corpses to the ghetto cemetery, where they beat youngsters who straggle behind, or perhaps say nothing and simply shoot them in the temples,
for the purposes of ethnic cleansing
. Neither Yakov nor Sofia are capable of understanding what is happening around them, in that street or in every street throughout the country, because love is deaf to gunshots; love is deaf to everything.

And is Sofia happy? Yes, she is, leaning on the window frame, watching the Nazis in their cars in the distance by the entrance to the ghetto, with a mind only for the imminent events of their evening that is about to begin: 1)Yakov will come—he’s late, but he will soon be there—2) they will leave the hotel, 3) he will cling to her waist and they will walk down the street, and 4) they will get on the Ferris wheel, their way to climb into the sky, and when they reach the very top, someone at the bottom will stop the motor for a few moments so they can survey the rooftops of Krakow and kiss. Fortunately for the pair of them, one cannot see the ghetto from the top of the Ferris wheel.

They were also together in Krakow just over a year ago, in February 1940. They told their families white lies, they said they’d be staying with cousin Frankie, though they stayed in a boarding house on Miodowa Street, in Kazimierz, with help from Frankie, who found them the best non-Jewish place in the neighborhood. On that occasion, the train journey was rather longer. Via an irony of fate, the train went through the city of
Oświęcim
without stopping. From their window they saw nothing odd on the outskirts of the town, except for large numbers of soldiers and howling dogs straining on their leashes everywhere. Himmler had yet to order the erection of the barbed wire fences, though the SS had arrived. Sofia was irrationally afraid for a few seconds, since she couldn’t imagine the most crucial, intense moments in her short life would take place there, on that terrain the train was now leaving behind. A year later, on their honeymoon trip, everything in the area was slightly different: the train changed track before entering the town, with a points change in Babice. They saw men everywhere working under the eye of guards who were aiming their guns at them. Yakov assumed they had perhaps made a new branch line. There were still rails and crossties next to the soil dug up by the tracks. He told Sofia something amusing he had just remembered: Alfred Loewy, Kafka’s uncle, had worked on that rail line in his youth as a second-grade administrator. Yakov knew that because he’d perhaps read about it in one of the Yiddish magazines in his parents’ library. Yakov was a great admirer of Kafka.

“You see? We engineers also read,” he then commented ironically to his wife.

On that occasion they spent four days and three nights in Krakow. The ghetto didn’t exist as yet and the whole city had adapted to the hostile presence of the Wehrmacht and was returning to normal social life and entertainment, apparently unperturbed. Sofia and Yakov arrived in a city that was striving to get a feel for the artificial good cheer they all knew was threatened by brutal beatings, surprise round-ups and increasing murders of Jews in the streets and outskirts of Kazimierz. They all preferred to look the other way, unhappily, imperatively. The young couple loved to dance and, unworried as they were by the events slowly condemning the city, they simply looked for somewhere to let themselves go on the dance floor, something they could rarely or never do in Rzeszów, that was no more than a
shtetl
as far they were concerned. Consequently, when they saw a leaflet in their boarding house on Miodowa Street advertising a polka, mazurka and waltz competition, they didn’t think twice about going along. It was on Bracka Street, in the old city, in a mansion that had been converted into a large café and dance hall, the Klub Camelot. It was packed with people pressed against each other and one could barely fit inside. The green of German uniforms predominated and cigarette smoke hung in a white pall over the heads of the dancers. An orchestra on a dais was playing a lively waltz and the couples eddying in the center of the floor made Sofia dizzy with excitement. She grabbed Yakov by the arm and kissed him on the cheek. She loved him and held her hands out toward him. They started to walk through the crowd. They quickly joined the whirlwind dancing and didn’t stop the whole night. Waltzes gave way to polkas and polkas to the charleston, then back to a waltz, hour after hour. Sofia always danced with Yakov, but sometimes a young German soldier or another young Pole asked her for a dance. They all sweated and smelt of camphor or strong eau de cologne. The competition began at midnight and lasted for an hour, and the jury immediately started eliminating couples until they were down to three, one being Yakov and Sofia, who were awarded second place. When the owner of the dance hall handed them their prize he apologized, saying, “I’m sorry, there’s no money for second prize, but you do get a voucher to come and dine here five nights for free.”

Sofia and Yakov would leave the next day, as planned, so they couldn’t enjoy their prize. That saddened Sofia but she perked up when she thought that Frankie and her husband Artur could certainly use the voucher. That made Sofia happy once again, and a few days later, when she was talking to her mother Raca, she kept repeating that the best part of the whole trip was being able to give that voucher to her cousin.

“I don’t think they are very flush,” she told her mother.

They returned to the boarding house in the early hours, occasionally dancing down the street and humming tunes the orchestra had played. The city was frozen and they saw no German soldiers on patrol. The disbelief prompted by being in that moment of history and that precise place meant Yakov and Sofia brimmed with contentment because life had given them the gift of knowing and loving each other. Nothing mattered apart from themselves. The world was a place where phantoms roamed amid the terror, but they alone were alive, and they alone had feelings. They hugged and kissed each other endlessly. Happiness dwelled up to the confines of their embracing bodies, and everything beyond was absurd, vapid and silly. It was the early morning of February 16, 1940 and that was the scene Sofia remembered on the final day of her life when they put her in a Birkenau gas chamber. She wanted to die remembering that now distant warmth from Yakov’s body, but the other bodies, in that sealed chamber, were screaming too loudly in their despair.

Yakov has been delayed. He knows Sofia is waiting for him at the Merkur to go to the fair and the Ferris wheel. He has talked to her such a lot about that wheel! He couldn’t have imagined it would take so long to find the bookshop owned by Simon Azvel, whom he owed a courtesy visit and news from his father, an old friend. He should have found the bookshop in an alleyway off Estery Street, but when he got there, after asking several questions that he phrased carefully depending on the appearance of the passers-by, he discovered the bookshop had in fact been bricked over and the number of the street scratched out with the point of a knife. Along the bottom someone had painted
JUDE
. He looked for another entrance via a front door and got access thanks to a concierge who peered out just then.

“Please, is Simon Azvel’s bookshop here?”

“Of course, but Mr. Azvel has gone to live in Podgórze. He won’t be back for a long time. Do you want a book? He left me in charge.”

“No, I just wanted to give him my father’s best wishes.”

“I can easily open the shop. It’s been bricked up outside by government order, as it is a Jew’s business. You aren’t Jewish, are you? I’ve got nothing against them but the law is there. They say they will all soon be forced to wear a white armband with the star of David, did you know that?”

“No, but I’m not Jewish,” Yakov was quick to reply.

He said goodbye to the concierge, but before leaving had second thoughts and spoke to him again.