The Birthday Buyer (16 page)

Meanwhile Yakov had seen other men go into decline, robust men, people with faith, true fighters. They were transformed into the living dead, and then hunted down and
selected
. He knows the ability to resist has its limits and keeps repeating that to himself. But those limits are extensive; he is still one resisting inside that kind of filthy rabbit farm, he thought, destined to be fodder for the slaughterhouse or mere skins. They resisted beyond all manner of belief. That was supreme courage, success at survival. He was thinking about resistance the day Ari was born, about strength taken from where there no longer was anymore. If he went to sleep thinking along those same lines, it was because he had entered a strange twilight zone, a mental place where he located himself to see what he would become the day after. He saw himself as if he were someone else, stronger and not in retreat.

One day he laughed. He was looking after another seriously ill prisoner who was so skinny he seemed to float in the air. The man would die the day after. In the midst of that wretchedness, the sickly man burst out laughing as if he were coughing, and took from his pocket a soft, wrinkled potato on which someone had etched a caricature of Hitler. He handed it to Yakov who burst out laughing; he wasn’t sure why, perhaps it was the potato’s ridiculous shape or the grotesqueness of the situation. However, he went on laughing and Yakov had to put one hand over the sick man’s mouth as he placed the other over his own. The man convulsed and was soon back in his moribund state. Yakov shamelessly devoured the potato there and then. That night, appalled once again by that affliction but astonished to be still alive, Yakov realized he missed laughter, or rather, when he thought of that afternoon’s occurrence, he remembered that sensation actually did exist though he’d quite forgotten what it was like. Laughter didn’t emerge, not even in the case of those who went crazy. There were no laughs. No one laughed in the camp, except for the guards when they were doing their work in a good mood.

Fear in the blood
.

Maria Mandel was a tall, lean woman, who always looked rage-stricken, with her hair tied back and an unpleasant expression on her lips, as if in a continual mix of repulsion and ironic smile. A photo exists of her saluting Himmler when he visited the camp. She is next to Wirths. Whenever she spoke, she screamed piercingly and displayed her uneven teeth. She was Head of the Women’s Camp and was known as
The Beast
because of her extreme brutality. Others called her
The Spider
, because of the way she wove her webs to catch the prisoners’ hidden children. That was her mission in life and she applied herself with exaggerated zeal. She had received her training in the Ravensbrück camp, where she left in her wake a reputation as a merciless murderer. She was always preceded by two female SS. She would tour the barracks daily and walk in without prior warning, acting like a hunter mounting an ambush. The prisoners shook when they saw her come in because they never knew what to expect. What
The Beast
thought was right one day was wrong the next, what was recommended one day was forbidden the next: a piece of cloth like a scarf on someone’s head annoyed her one day (and she was capable of killing the individual involved just for that) and the day after, on the contrary, she’d linger tying a knot in a morbid maternal spirit on the head of a pale, motionless prisoner.

Any sideways glance that met with hers was a challenge that called for humiliation. She would react, beside herself, furiously punching and kicking her victim in the belly. They found it hard to separate her out from the victim she would beat with gloved hands or a chain she wore round her waist. When she finished the job, she was so red in the face and sweating so much, that the SS had to prise her off and prop her up, she was so exhausted. In 1947, when she was sentenced to death and they were about to hang her, someone at the foot of the scaffold reminded her how she had killed eight hundred women with her own hands. She bawled for one last time, flashing the whites of her eyes, in an indication it wasn’t very many.

Sofia had seen her several times and suffered one of her attacks in June 1942.
The Beast
had walked into barrack 115 in the middle of the morning; at the time Sofia was looking after Ari, but couldn’t react quickly enough to hide him. When the two SS women ordered them imperiously to stand in a row, she only had time to put the gag in her baby’s mouth and hand him over to Sara Ruda who hid under the wooden bunks during the entire visit of
Frau
Mandel. To help Sara, Sofia distracted the brutal woman by mentioning that there was no wood or coal left for the stove. Without saying a word, Maria Mandel let go a slap that made her collapse on the ground. She undid her chain, started bawling and hitting her remorselessly.

“You fool! There are no stoves for you in summer, you shitty Jew, there are no stoves for you!” she shouted in the foulest of tempers.

Sofia protected herself as best she could, but too many blows were raining down. Why so much punishment for such a trifle, she wondered. She passed out, she was so weak. The worst about that visit wasn’t the savage beating she received, but the fear she was left with, terrible fear in her body because she had brought herself to the attention of
Frau
Mandel and sensed she would be back, that she wouldn’t leave her in peace and in the end would discover Ari.

She imagined this and her blood froze when another woman appeared in her mind, who, like her, was hiding her small child in the barrack’s hellish nooks and crannies. Her name was Barbara Breonka and she was Czech.

They had caught her making a kind of pap from the daily broth and dry black bread, to which she’d added a small piece of potato. She was crumbling it with her fingers to make it softer. The Mandel woman spotted her and was suspicious. There were lots in her position; she had already rooted out more than forty and in every case both mother and child had died, but only after being tortured.

When
Frau
Mandel took hold of the baby Barbara Breonka had tied to her lap and that was beginning to wriggle free, she ordered all the women in the neighboring barracks to line up opposite the barbed wire fences. She placed the woman in front of them and the child on the ground. She took the baby’s clothes off. It wasn’t yet six month’s old, was tiny and was crying.
The Beast
then crossed her arms and waited silently for one of the women who couldn’t stand it any longer to clutch at the baby in order to pick it up off the ground.
Frau
Mandel suddenly burst into song. Sofia recognized the music she’d heard on her parents’ gramophone.

It was a cruel torture for Sofia to see that child turn purple and move on the ground that cold morning. She scratched her wrists in anguish. An old woman ran to help the baby, knowing it was a suicidal act, and was cut down by a bullet from one of the watch towers.

“Bravo, you good Jew!”
Frau
Mandel exclaimed. And started singing again.

The dead woman thus lost all she had, all she was, she lost her body, thought Sofia while her eyes tried to avoid that bundle stretched on the ground, and her mind went off to distant beech woods and meadows they couldn’t see, as eternal as the vineyards and cherry and chestnut trees on the hills of Rzeszów. That old woman no longer existed. All the other women were horrified. After standing in front of that cruel spectacle for a few hours, Frau Mandel gave out orders for the mother to be taken to the gas chambers and for the rest to go back to their barracks. The baby was left there, and there it died in the afternoon.

Saying goodbye forever
.

She heard the trains arriving when she couldn’t get to sleep in the barrack; she identified the whistle of that train; it was like the one that took her and Yakov to Krakow when they were so much in love; she identified the whistles, the sound of the engine; she was also familiar with the howls of the dogs and wondered about Yakov. Might he be in one of those? How could she look for her husband? She was in despair because she was sure he was there, in the camp, somewhere. But then she began to think more coldly and was consoled by the macabre hope that he might be dead, she told herself, all his suffering must be at an end. But there are no more beautiful funerals. Death in Auschwitz was wretched and extremely mechanical, a routine that neither angered nor shocked anyone.

Thinking those thoughts, in November 1942, four months before she died, Sofia decided to separate out from her son.
Frau
Mandel was sniffing avidly around and she couldn’t continue to play with his fate. The danger was immense and a possible scenario of Ari in
The Beast
’s hands horrified her. The checks, when they only found wretchedness and the odd corpse that nobody had noticed—perhaps because the person seemed to be asleep—became more frequent, and
Frau
Mandel’s interrogations more aggressive and cruel. Now that her dear friend and accomplice, Sara Ruda, had died at the end of summer, she was afraid the rest of the women wouldn’t tolerate Ari and would betray him. Yes, she must separate out from Ari, she must not think about herself but the fact that he could be saved. Whatever the cost.

Sofia began to harbor vague hopes when she heard rumors that there had been cases of babies born in the camp who’d been successfully smuggled out and taken to places unknown. Ada Neufeld had told her about that, Ada, one of the women who, like her, had been in the camp the longest. She also warned her she would possibly never see her son again. That was the price. Sofia accepted the price and paid with her sorrow. She needed to believe it was possible.

One cold night she left him, in the open, on the ground under the barrack’s false floor, the same place where she had given birth. Before she went through the hole back into the barrack, she felt Ari’s heart between his ribs. She touched his face lingeringly, as if she were trying to hold on to every inch of his skin, every fold and feature. She knew she would only be left with memories. He was very cold, it was winter and he was shivering. She breathed on his cheeks and hands; then pulled tight the tattered strips of blanket wrapped around him. She said goodbye with one last glance, sadly, disconsolately. She murmured “my little love” and went back inside.

She kept waiting, fighting the temptation to look and see if he was still there. Ada had told her. And she had risked it. Maybe the women were well organized, the plan would work out, there was someone trustworthy pulling the strings. They would pick him up, as had been agreed, when there was a change of guard. Sofia couldn’t know who did it, whether a heroic prisoner or a guard who had felt remorse. Nor did she know how or when he would leave the camp, or where they would hide him from Mandel’s violence. A feeling of guilt ran through her, her sorrow was unbearable for a few moments and she choked on her silent anguish. All that potential life she would no longer live with her son, a life as happy as the life she’d lived with her parents in Rzeszów, passed before her eyes and vanished. “Goodbye, goodbye,” that life not lived with her son seemed to say. Dreams also say goodbye, she thought. She quickly opened the trapdoor at the back of the barrack and put her head out. Ari had gone.

Over the next four months Sofia regretted doing what she had done, and succumbed to the wracking uncertainty about what might have been her son’s fate. She tried to find him, but Ada Neufeld, the only one who could give her a clue, was
selected
a few weeks after organising Ari’s exit. Her regret morphed into a passive attitude in relation to her own fate. She had discovered the dialect of death, that was to do nothing to avoid it, to sink into quiet stagnation. Sick and starving, she dragged her feet and sat in the puddles on the camp, splashing rhythmically, totally in a void. It was the prelude to death and she let herself be swept away by an irresistible tide. She no longer even closed the eyes of those who died beside her. She felt scornful and hollow. She sighed for Yakov and hated herself for letting them snatch Ari from her. She only found consolation in the idea, entertained because it was so impossible, that she would be able to repeat her life, to start all over again. Though when she had such thoughts, she always reached the same conclusion: life is utterly treacherous and so inevitable.

Saved by madness
.

Yakov, Yakov! It is the rainy month of May 1943. Sofia is dead and Yakov’s teeth have started to fall out. His strength is now inhabited by the fragile remnant of a human being. He caught diphtheria and his gums are turning black. I feel great compassion for him as I imagine him in my bed in this Frankfurt hospital from which I will soon be discharged. He wanders senselessly, unaware of his son’s existence, of his wife’s death, a kind of unbalanced, frightened, skeletal character from Dante. He wanders senselessly, only responds to the fear that beats in every corner of the camp: when he hears the SS corporal utter the words “Jewish pig!” aimed at someone else, he automatically puts his arms over his face to shield himself against the coming bl ow.

The Yakov I imagine hears music in the air and stops and listens opposite the barrack entrance, in the middle of the main road. He tries to look up high to find out where it is coming from, to glimpse the secret to the delightful sound only he has heard. He looks toward the sky as if experiencing an epiphany. The guard is hitting his feet with his gun and Yakov howls and doesn’t understand why the German is tittering and then says, “a bird will shit on you or lightning will strike you down, you imbecile!”

Yakov gradually lost his mind, in a few weeks. First came symptoms of disarray, he was bewildered doing the work he was forced to do in the Krupp factory where he’d been sent. What am I doing here? Is this Jamaica? he wondered uneasily and it took him a few minutes to understand the reality surrounding him. He looked in every direction and sometimes it seemed like a fairground, at others a castle, and others a slaughterhouse. He’d lost his sense of identity. He’d even lost any notion of death. He stacked weighty objects, they made him carry beams from one side to the other, following criteria that were completely arbitrary, as he would have to carry the same beams back to the spot where they’d been before. Or else bricks (and if he dropped one, they would rifle-butt him in the back and he’d collapse). Or else he’d be interminably unloading steel bars or barrels of oil off the backs of trucks. His hands often went numb and he frequently had to rub them together.