The Birthday Buyer (17 page)

Later on, he’d suddenly start attacking the prisoner next to him, no matter who, and would punch and abuse him hysterically. No one understood why he acted in that hateful way, but it was futile to try to get him to understand how ridiculous he was being because they assumed he was striking out against the impotence they all felt.

A few days after he began to confuse objects and people and speak to himself or empty space. The guards mocked him, tripped him so he fell to the ground and insulted him. “Talk to my helmet,” they’d say as they laughed. The mad Jew entertained them. He thanked them and bowed to them, he’d lost his grip on reality and thought he was an actor on stage.

“I am happy, I am happy. Thank you, thank you,” he kept repeating to the other bemused prisoners who had finally decided to ignore him.

In a short time he had become a buffoon whose death the guards had already assigned a date. What good was that idiot to them? By June he was completely mad: he imitated German with words that he made up, and that provoked the same hilarity in the guards as if they’d been in a comic cabaret in pre-war Berlin, and he’d bang his head against the walls of the barrack. Nobody saw to his injuries and they became infected. The day he was
selected
he gave out blessings left and right in a Latin he had heard in church.
Dominus vobiscum . . . Ora pro nobis . . . Amen, amen, amen . .
. He never understood what was happening and thought the gas chamber was the ocean liner that was finally going to take him to Jamaica. His last words were, “It’s about to set sail.” He thought Sofia was by his side.

Come on, come and help me
.

Three months earlier, at twelve-thirty one morning in February,
Frau
Mandel walked into the barrack 115 and, without ordering them to line up, bawled “You, you and you!” not haphazardly, but knowing who the weakest were, the ones to dispense with that day. Her words needed no explanation. They heard and started to shout and implore. They were beaten, pushed and shoved outside to join a row of women from other barracks. A total of 110 women, children and old people were led to the gas chamber.

The woman lying beside and embracing Sofia—Josefina Luftwig, the owner of the clothes shop in Krakow—has her eyes closed and mouth open, a dark, bottomless, repulsively human hole between lips as white as chalk. Sofia shares a similar rictus, that same private boundary that marks the end. They have just died and their bodies are in a pile with others in the gas chamber. The immeasurable closeness of bodies, Benjamin’s words come to mind once again. Sofia and the woman embracing her are naked, their bones visible through their white skin. Remnants to be burnt quickly. Skeletal, angular extremities they sometimes must be broken to put them in the oven. Nothing remains, no wage for memory.

Then, finally, I wonder, rather obscenely, what might Sofia’s last thought have been. I imagine her thinking of Ari, her son, that forlorn being who, when separated from his mother, came to be Hurbinek the Nameless, but perhaps she thought of Yakov, Yakov’s love, smells and kisses. “Come on, come and help me,” words connected to something he once said to her very tenderly, when he needed her, but where? Her time had run out. The rest was her heart beating fast, almost breaking out of her body. The horror.

The child they called Ari while Sofia, his mother, was alive, is Hurbinek again, the boy without a name. That child never left the camp, didn’t escape, wasn’t one of the children they smuggled out of Auschwitz with great difficulty, as Sofia preferred to believe before she died. He was picked up from under barrack 115, as planned by Gloria Monod, a skinny French Jewess who used to be a shop assistant in a big department store on the Champs Elysées, but she couldn’t expedite the child’s departure from the camp. If he’d died right then, frozen to death or skewered by one of the SS guards, nothing would have been altered in the chain of life: it was his natural fate in the day-to-day running of the camp. On the other hand, Gloria Monod also forged her own fate when she decided to keep him close. She used a high, hiding place in her barrack, a space hollowed out where the wood ceiling beams crossed, that only she had access to from the third tier of bunks, where she slept with five other women. However, that was a thin line between life and death. Gloria knew Hurbinek could fall or cry in her absence, and that’s why she tied him to the beam with strips of cloth and put a gag in his mouth. When she returned to the barrack she never knew whether she would find the child dead or alive.

One of the first things Gloria Monod did with Hurbinek was to change his clothes. She got rid of the pieces of blanket that were wrapped round him when she found him, and dressed him in a kind of striped, woollen shirt, made from the prison uniform belonging to a young woman who’d died of diphtheria in her barrack. She also dressed him in a double jacket that was also striped, that was mended and re-sewn with bits of string and pieces of underwear torn into very thin strips. As they didn’t have needles, the prisoners used wooden splinters they sharpened, or bit through the material and then sewed big darns with their fingers.

When I think of Hurbinek’s short life, I cannot not avoid thinking about the objects he had or that accompanied him for that brief period. They were never entirely his: they came from someone else and would be passed on to someone else. In a way, he was an unconscious borrower of other people’s objects. There could never be many. They would inevitably be few, very few, ordinary, common, basic materials at hand: rubber, leather, iron, wool and wood. I can imagine them now in a museum, on display in a glass cabinet, symbols and samples from many other people who used or possessed similar things. I imagine them in the museum in Auschwitz, or any other Holocaust museum, cold, distant but eloquent, offered to visitors as a slice of historical memory, visitors who struggle to locate them in the inconceivable reality to which they once belonged.

I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore. I won’t see those objects, and yet, at night, here in my Frankfurt hospital bedroom, I see them clearly, I can see that cabinet, the light illuminating it, the line on the floor warning “don’t cross” a few inches from the cabinet, the striped clothes on the body of a hollow dummy or doll made of transparent polyurethane. And I can’t help thinking that, though the clothes are real, what’s really important is the hollow inside of the invisible dummy wearing them, because that hollowness and dummy are the Jew or Gypsy, or even my Hurbinek.

But I know that only what has a name exists, and I want to name each detail, each insignificant detail of those objects, because they are what existed
with
Hurbinek, what gave his life substance. And when I see or imagine those clothes that once clad Hurbinek’s tiny body or the objects that passed through his life, I imagine the possible histories of both clothes and objects. Where did they come from, who touched them, who owned them, who loved and used them before and after him? Who do those things belong to, in the end, in life? Can we speak of a
beloved
object when referring to clothes made from remnants of uniforms belonging to prisoners whose names are now impossible to trace, striped material that has never been washed, that carries vomit from Sarah, excrements from a fellow called Rufus or blood from some girl called Chana? Yes but, even so, those clothes Gloria Monod made for him were the only ones Hurbinek wore during the rest of his life.

The hat with earflaps that Gloria gave to Hurbinek, traded with a prisoner for her boots, had belonged to an eight-year-old boy—his name was Moniek Swajcer—the only survivor from his whole family in the selection made on the ramp where prisoners left the convoys, though he was beaten to death a month later.

It was a small, quite worn, leather, fur-lined hat. Its dark blue had faded and cracked. There were remnants of gold filigree on the foldable earflaps. Little Moniek had been given the hat for his fifth birthday by his father. The day when the boy was caught peeing outside the latrines by an eighteen-year-old SS who beat him to death with a mace encrusted at both ends with huge nails, the hat ended up in the hands of one of the women who distributed the food round the barracks and happened to be passing by. She didn’t look up or at the dead boy. She was shaking as she retrieved the hat and put it away. She swapped it for Gloria’s boots. Gloria was left barefoot, and had to manufacture boots from strips of felt and material collected at dawn from bodies that died every night; they weren’t enough to resist the cold and the frosts. In the roll calls at twilight, that went on for hours out in the open, one of her feet froze. She lost all feeling in it, although the pain had been intolerable to that point. But she didn’t complain; that way she would betray nothing. Even so, her frozen foot was the reason why she was selected for the gas chamber, when the female guard saw she was limping and that one of her feet was completely dead. They went out of their way to amputate before gassing her.

Hurbinek survived, cared for by the other prisoners, although it was risky. He was once mistaken for a bird, perhaps an owl or a smaller bird, when an SS looked up at the ceiling beams when she heard a noise. She thought she had heard wings flapping and aimed her gun at whatever was moving, but she could see nothing clearly from where she was standing. The prisoners didn’t even look startled; they knew the child was condemned to die and would be found out at any moment: his time had come, period. Not one muscle tensed. But when the female guard was taking aim, convinced it was a bird, a pigeon or a jay maybe, she had second thoughts and lowered her gun,“I don’t kill animals. When did that bird ever do me any harm? I go into the countryside when I want to hunt,” she rasped as she left.

A month later they disinfected the barrack because there were too many rats. They gnawed on the sick and the dead. They hauled out all the prisoners and kept them standing on the esplanade for forty-eight hours. They could only sit down for one hour in every twelve. They were forced to stand for the rest of that time. Several elderly women died of exhaustion. Others were shot in the neck because they squatted or kneeled down. The women looking after Hurbinek, Gloria’s companions in the third level of bunk beds, aware of the secret, hidden child, assumed that boy would be poisoned when he breathed in the disinfectant dust. Besides, there were three other children hidden like him. But when they returned to the barrack two days later, they found that Hurbinek—what name did they call him by? None perhaps, names create bonds, create affection—was still alive, very undernourished and dirty, and almost at death’s door. The other three children had died. They didn’t have a mother; the women who were crying and had hidden them weren’t their mothers. Perhaps, like Hurbinek, they were children who’d had to stay there after they failed to smuggle them out of the camp. One woman started to give him little sips of watery potato soup, using a chipped enameled metal bowl, the edge of which was painted red, that was rusty in parts, including the handle. They had no spoons, or only one to share among several prisoners.

That bowl that brushed little Hurbinek’s lips for many weeks had been manufactured in the center of Cologne, by Julius Hölderbruner Industries, Karlstrasse, 17, that specialized in equipment for the Wehrmacht and came from a consignment of items “for domestic use,” as it said in the order requesting 150,000 bowls signed first by R. Höss, the camp commandant, and underneath, in second place, by A. Eichmann. Before it belonged to the woman who fed Hurbinek, it had been owned in the concentration camp by Anita Sachs (who engraved her name on the bottom of the bowl) and Gloria Monod. After the death of its last anonymous owner, the bowl rusted completely and was buried, with other useless bits of crockery, in a ditch near the barbed wire fence. A Russian soldier, Ivan Rutilov, stumbled over it in March, 1945 when he was walking around the Auschwitz camp looking for a target for a spot of shooting practice. He dug it up and threw it into the air. A salvo of bullets from his pistol filled it with five holes.

Soon after the barrack had been disinfected, at the end of 1943, the prisoners decided to put an end to Hurbinek’s suffering, and they agreed that one of them would deposit him in the latrines, next to a pile of bricks the top of which had a spout that stuck out and served as a kind of shower. If one of the female guards found him, he was sure to die, but perhaps another woman prisoner would take him in. What would she do with that child? Perhaps hand him over? What was the point of living like that? In any case, they trusted in her pity, although the price of mercy in Auschwitz was high. On the other hand, chance came cheap. It would be down to luck. So they left Hurbinek to his.

It was a long time before Hurbinek had any shoes. In the middle of January 1944 young Ruchel Szlezinger made him some by adapting those that had once belonged to Miriam, her eight-year-old sister, who was taken aside upon arriving in the camp and eliminated. She managed to keep hold of them because she had a little bundle of the two sisters’ belongings she hid under her clothes. Miriam’s shoes were black, made from good leather, with round toecaps and laces that tied by the bottom of the ankle. Little Miriam Szlezinger had cleaned them the night before she was arrested and they still retained some of that shine. Ruchel adopted the shoes to Hurbinek’s tiny feet by packing the toes with material she folded over several times, and then plaited the laces around the baby’s legs so the shoes didn’t rub and make them sore.

Ruchel and Miriam Szlezinger were the daughters of a Prague doctor who was sent with his wife to the camp in Theresienstadt. The two sisters ended up in Auschwitz because of a transportation error; it didn’t matter much, they were all going to die anyway. Dr. Szlezinger was well off and paid the Gestapo in order to preserve his freedom after the assassination of Heydrich in 1941, but when his capital—the the proceeds from jewels that had been inherited across many generations—dried up, he and his family were brutally deported.

They bought Miriam’s shoes in 1940. They’d been on display in a shopwindow in Mala Strana for several days; nobody took any interest in them until little Miriam, out for a walk with her parents, fell in love with them. They had to pay for them in marks from the Reich, though the Szlezingers couldn’t do so directly, because Jews couldn’t buy anything, and so a Czech woman, the nurse who helped Szlezinger, did it for them. They’d been manufactured in Munich in a factory expropiated from a Jewish family murdered in Bergen-Belsen. Thus, the only real shoes Hurbinek wore in his short life were German shoes, probably made by a happy woman, convinced she was an honest soul, whose husband perhaps belonged to a Police Batallion heading to the Ukraine or Lithuania and responsible for carrying out racial cleansing.

Young Ruchel picked up Hurbinek out of compassion, moved by the loving memory of her sister, the day after an anonymous hand had deposited him in the latrines by the water spout. It was a misty, very cold, winter’s day. She had to warm him with her breath, rubbing his arms and legs, and immediately began to scheme so they wouldn’t catch her with him. She knew that children’s lives were of no value in that place, because they couldn’t work; she knew that was why they had
sacrificed
Miriam, since Rachel felt all that death surrounding her was a sacrifice Yaveh demanded of his people, an absurd sacrifice like all the other words that issued from the mouths of rabbis. The lives of children were soon snuffed out in a mere clout, a squeeze of the neck, or by hurling them against a post.

Taking all kinds of precautions, though guided by a gloomy, unfathomable presentiment, she finally hid him cleverly inside her straw mattress. He stayed there until June, 1944, when they searched Ruchel’s barrack for a rudimentary radio apparatus via which the women prisoners had heard that the Americans had disembarked in France. The SS didn’t find the radio in the barrack; however, they did find Hurbinek, two years, three months and three days after he was born.

They were human whimpers and this time the guard didn’t mistake them for a cat or bird. They were inarticulate whimpers, not even crying, more like a striving effort, a soft click, a kind of shout or barely audible affirmation of life. It was coming from the meagre mattress of one of the prisoners, a young woman with a scarf around her head and a look of terror in her eyes that she intuited would be her last. It was Ruchel. When they extracted him from the mattress, from the straw, he was tightly wrapped in a blanket. Ruchel had thought of re-shaping that thick material to cover him better, perhaps giving it sleeves, a collar, or shaping it, she hadn’t gone to dress-making classes in Prague for nothing, but she never had the time or energy in those months.

It was a gray blanket bordered by a labyrinth of yellow geometric shapes. It wasn’t a blanket given out by the
Waffen SS
, but a blanket brought at the last moment by a prisoner. It belonged to a Greek family, the Karaindrous, from Salonika. The head of the family had grabbed it instinctively when they were forced to leave their houses at gunpoint, and had thrown it over the shoulder of his middle son, who, in turn, in the cattle truck, gave it to an old woman who was shivering in one corner. That meant the woman didn’t freeze to death that day. In the camp, when the old woman’s heart stopped beating while she was asleep, Ruchel took it before the others snatched the rest of her clothes.