The Keeper of the Walls (77 page)

Lily was afraid to answer. The woman, her bony face still luminous, said softly, “My name is Edna Rosenthal, and I'm a Belgian. If I don't make it, and you do, will you tell my daughter? She's in Barrack Twenty-six.”

Lily smiled. In French, she murmured: “Don't speak this way. You've somehow managed to hold on to your Bible; you'll hold on to your life.”

“They told me this is the way the people walk when they're sent to the left at the arriving ramp,” Edna said, her voice calm. “But I don't think we'll live to talk about our own walk. They call it the grove of the condemned.” After a while, she spoke again. “I saw one of the cards we filled out, in Dr. Mengele's hand. And in his handwriting, had been scrawled: ‘Dead from scarlet fever.' They made us sign our own death certificates.”

The straggly group of women had reached the entrance to Killing Facility Number Two, which, on the outside, resembled the neat mansion of an English country squire. Its brick façade was disconcerting. But the flames belching from its chimney petrified the hundred. Almost in a trance, they walked inside.

They were told to go down some stairs. Now, Lily thought, no escape was possible anymore, for downstairs were the gas chambers, where the innocents who were taken directly there on arrival were told that they would shower. They stood in a room where signs explained that one had to remember where one left one's clothes, and that, upon returning from the showers, the diabetics would have to report their condition. But this was all right for the naïve first arrivals; for seasoned inmates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, like them, there was no need to disguise the truth. They knew where they stood.

“Take off your clothes,” the female SS ordered.

A young French girl had once hidden under a pile of clothes, and been saved by a member of the
Sonderkommando
who had come to collect the discarded outfits. But Lily was a tall woman, and besides, in a commotion involving three thousand, one person might do some quick thinking. Here, with only one hundred prisoners, ten SS stood on guard, and Dr. Mengele sat at a table in the front of the room, his eyes alert and not at all bored now.

Lily stepped out of her prison-gray dress, and she saw Edna slip the Bible between the folds of hers. The doors to the gas chamber lay open, to the right. This meant that, under no condition, would anyone sent
right
be able to survive.

Mengele, this time, seemed more thorough than he had been at the station ramp. He made each of the prisoners walk up and down, then lie down on the floor. He felt their bodies for odd lumps or crevices. Lily felt the fear knot her stomach. Like most of the others, she had abruptly ceased menstruating less than a month after arrival, which, she thought, was lucky, since no underwear had been provided, and no extra materials to wipe the blood. She was sure malnutrition was the culprit, though some said their food was being drugged. But lately, she'd felt a tremendous pain in her left side, at her waist, and she'd been certain she had developed a hernia.

In Birkenau, one never brought up one's illnesses; one made every effort to pretend one was in tiptop condition. But with Mengele's prodding, she would never be able to hide the hernia.

The women were being waved to the right, or out a back door on the left. She noticed that there were two armed SS to push in the recalcitrant ones who refused to put themselves into the gas chamber . . . such a tiny group for such an enormous room, capable of holding three thousand.

Edna passed in front of her, and walked up and down. Mengele nodded. “Now lie down.” After three days without food or drink, this forty-year-old woman wasn't doing badly. She lay down. With a resigned sigh, Mengele called her forward.

They had all been counting. Already, forty-eight women had been sent right. Lily guessed that Mengele, with his odd sense of proportion and symmetry, would require fifty. But most of those pronounced healthy seemed to have been much younger than she and Edna: eighteen- , nineteen-year-old girls, with better resistance.

Mengele palped the shriveled raisins that had once been Edna's breasts. In his cultured, dandified voice, he tossed out: “This one has a tumor. Right!”

Lily felt herself freeze with horror. Edna turned once, her beautiful green eyes eloquent with anguish, fear, and a bravery that Lily could not match. She made a gesture with her chin toward her dress, which still covered her Bible. Lily opened her mouth, but no sound came out. She watched, transfixed, as her Belgian companion, friend of an hour, proudly stepped into the gas chamber.

“Next,” Mengele said.

Lily stepped in front of him, began her walk, lay down, and stood up for him to probe. There was absolutely no exit. She wondered frantically about a confession, or about speaking to a rabbi . . . the old religious confusion returning. Next to Mengele, one of the Polish
Kapos
was saying: “This one's healthy; I know her.”

“She has a nascent hernia.”

He'd said it. He'd pronounced her dead. But the female SS was saying:
“Herr Oberarzt,
I think we should close the doors. We don't want a commotion, and there's an old one in there . . .”

Josef Mengele looked up from his probe of Lily, and frowned. The Polish woman said, “All the others are young, and relatively healthy. We need them for work details.”

He moved away, fingering his chin. Lily, nude, still stood right in front of him, her once beautiful body reduced to skin, bones, and the hernia.

“All right,” he stated. “Shut the doors, Lieutenant. Tell the boys to get the cyanide capsules ready to drop through the ceiling.”

The Polish
Kapo
moved her head roughly to the piles of discarded prison garb, and called out: “Get dressed, all you swine! You're late for work!”

It was only when she was outside, wedged in the middle of the row of five, that somebody spoke to Lily. “I heard them say it's the first time anyone's walked away alive from the gas chambers.”

“There are fifty-one of us.”

A long column of seven hundred men was coming up the path from the birch grove, their heads bent and knowing. Mengele, whistling to himself, was sprinting jauntily away on the other side. And then Lily remembered that she had forgotten Edna's Bible among the clothes of those who had gone in to die, and at last, she wept.

N
anni kicked
at one of the ubiquitous stones of the
Lager,
with the toe of a beautiful patent leather pump. Across the vast divider of the electrified barbed-wire fence, Mihai Berkovits was keeping pace with her, his eyes like shining olives in the white, sickly paste of his skin. She could feel her heart flying out of her, to this young boy she knew so little, whose hand she'd never held. In many ways, she felt that she was much older, though in fact they were both fourteen. But she felt like a divided being: half of her still almost a child, wanting to trust and hope; the other, a tough girl, who had learned how to protect herself from the SS.

“What did you do, in Transylvania?” she asked him.

He shrugged. “My father owned a small business. We were eight children. Now we're just four, and both our parents have been gassed.”

She nodded. “My father was a neuropsychiatrist, in Vienna. But in Paris, he couldn't practice. And then the Gestapo put him away, in a detention camp in Compiègne, for over a year. On the station, as he was being deported from there, he collapsed.”

“The best people die,” Mihai said with unexpected vehemence.

“And when you get out, what will you want to become?”

“I like cars. I'd like to have an auto repair shop.” His eyes fastened on her, and he smiled. “Hardly a boyfriend for you, Anna Steiner.”

“For a prostitute?” She stopped, picked up a small pebble, and tossed it neatly between the barbed wire. “Mihai,” she said. “I can't even look at my mother. I know she's staying alive out of love for me. Our families were old, respected names in Western Europe. Her family ranked among the first three Jewish families in Paris.” Both seemed to want to speak in a direct line about themselves, finding in the other a listener without preconceptions and prejudice. Now the young boy said: “I'm not a Hungarian. I'm actually a Rumanian, but our province was recaptured by the Horthy regime. The Hungarians have sent all their Jews away to Nazi concentration camps. The Rumanians protected us.”

“When you return, you'll see a better life, Mihai,” she reassured him, smiling tremulously. “Wait: reach over, between these two wires, and take my hand.” Her cheeks red, she carefully inserted her small, plump hand through an aperture in the fence, daring the wires to touch her. He stood staring at the delicate, well-tended fingers, for a moment angry at their health and good care. Then, shrugging, he took her hand in his own bony one, feeling the warmth radiating out from her fingers to his. She was still smiling, and he imagined her in her house in Vienna, maybe sitting by a blazing fireplace, roasting chestnuts, her hair plaited like a schoolgirl's.

Liking the image, he smiled back.

“What are you doing here, Anna?”

The German voice broke into their thoughts like shards of glass thrust through tender skin. She almost jumped, and remembered in time that the slightest wrong move would electrocute both her and the boy. Slowly, judiciously, their fingers came apart. She faced Heinz Kleinert, standing with his hands clenched into fists, pounding into the flesh of his thighs, as if to punish himself for loving her.

Mihai Berkovits waited, and with the back of one of her hands, she signaled that it would be best for all if he left the scene at once. “I was just speaking to a companion,” she said, softly.

“You are just a whore. If there weren't a fence, you'd have been in bed with him! I was a fool to think you were different. You like all men . . . like a real
gutter
whore.”

Her blue eyes blazed with a quiet, inner fire. Perhaps because she was challenging danger, or perhaps because this contact with the young Rumanian had so profoundly touched her, awakening her spirit, she answered him. “No, Heinz. I'm not, and have never been, a whore. You know I was a virgin, you know I was only with you. You know I never liked it, and was ashamed! But you forced me to be with you . . . and I had no choice!”

“You're telling me that you didn't want me?”

At this precise instant, he was not a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in the SS, and she a fourteen-year-old slave prisoner. They were two young people, confronting each other. She was totally unafraid. “It isn't that I didn't want
you,
“ she explained. “It's that I had no choice.”

“I would have married you,” he retorted, his eyelids narrowed over sharp, light-blue irises, lighter and colder than hers.

“But you were not the man I dreamed of, to spend the rest of my life with.”

“You wanted a Jew. Not me, but a Jew. A low-down, dirty Jew with a hooked nose. Right, Anna . . .
Hannah?”

“Hannah happens to be my Hebrew name. And I am not ashamed of it.”

“But
I
am ashamed of
myself,”
he declared, “that I ever allowed a Jewish whore to corrupt me, to make me betray every ideal I have fought for and respected. Good-bye, Anna Steiner. My love is now dead.”

With her strange maturity, she stared at him, smoldering. “Thank you, Heinz Kleinert,” she murmured. “For you have just set me free.”

N
anni stood naked
in the smallish square room, looking with terror at the other women. There were only a hundred of them, and she had heard all the stories about the gas chambers, and the crematoria. Except in Auschwitz I, the death room accommodated three thousand. And these people here were all
different.
They were all plump, some of them actually tubs of lard. How was this possible?

In the
Lager,
nobody except the privileged, like herself, could eat proper meals. She'd been told about people suffering from glandular diseases, and supposed these poor, shaking women were fat because of this. And though she, at one hundred five pounds, was not nearly fat, by Auschwitz-Birkenau standards she was well overweight.

She wanted to cry, but terror so paralyzed her that her throat had become constricted. She wanted her mother. She wanted to be near Lily, near somebody who loved her and had known her all her life. Above all, she didn't want to die.

Above them were the same shower spigots that she had been warned about. Now she closed her eyes, wishing it to be over. The glass door was being shut, and she turned, in spite of herself, and saw the SS guards peering out at them, one hundred unfortunate Jewish women, condemned to death. It was going to happen.
Now.

She could hear the soft hiss of the gas being released . . . cyanide capsules, she'd been told. And then she smelled the strange, odious smell, and waited, for it to kill her. But it wasn't doing that. Instead, she felt oddly euphoric, and good. Suddenly life was pleasant again, and she felt like laughing aloud . . . and she actually laughed aloud, and heard respondent laughter. They'd all been
spared,
as if by a supreme joke, the SS had fooled them again, as they liked to do!