The Secret of the Blue Trunk (11 page)

Mathilde calmed down. She knew Simone was justified in speaking to her like this. Quietly she began to tell us that thanks to her accountant’s job, she was in contact with two officers who could grant her some privileges. They considered she was doing good work; the inventories had never been as accurate nor the accounts clearer. They often checked the books and hadn’t found a single mistake. This sausage was the first present they had given her. We asked no more questions.

I would have liked to tell them what had happened to me today with Franz. With their experience, they could have explained and analyzed what I felt for him. But I thought it better to keep my secret. I didn’t want them to lecture me. We were worried enough about Iréna’s fate and began to dream up plans to gain access to the infirmary.

As soon as the lights were switched off, we divided up the sausage and ate it in silence. We thanked Mathilde from the bottom of our hearts for this present. She must have gone to a great deal of trouble for it. Naturally we hid Iréna’s piece in our mattress.

The following day, we had barely opened our eyes when an officer brought us another girl to share our mattress with. Did this mean that Iréna had died of her fever? We didn’t know. In the meantime we had to split our bowl of brown liquid with this stranger. No one wanted to discriminate. We were all in the same hell, and our strength lay in supporting each other. We all realized that. But it was difficult nonetheless to accept another prisoner taking the place of the one who had become our friend and whose life we wanted to save. Iréna had become a symbol. She was the one motivating us in our struggle to survive, the one we defended, at our own risk. For all these reasons we just couldn’t be friendly with the newcomer.

But there was hardly any time to talk to her. We had to start our daily routine. Simone and Mathilde would both try to find out more about Iréna’s condition. I naturally worried about Iréna and didn’t like that she had been replaced like this. But even so, all I could think of was Franz.

I settled myself at my machine and saw Franz coming up to me. I began to shake. He seemed really happy to see me and smiled broadly. He wanted to know how I was.

“I can tell you, Franz, that apart from our conversations, which do me a lot of good, everything depresses me. Most of all, I wonder how I’ll find the strength to hold on until the end. I don’t know anything about this war. I don’t even know exactly why I was arrested. Could you tell me a little more about it? Will it be much longer? How much more time will we be spending here, in these degrading conditions?”

Then I had the audacity to mention his leader. “Everyone says Hitler is mad.” I realized I had just made a very risky remark. How could I be sure Franz wouldn’t turn against me? Also, someone might have heard me …

I glanced around. Everything seemed normal. Franz looked around, too. Then he answered, speaking faster than usual:

“Many Germans, myself included, think he is very dangerous. In 1928 he already stated in one of his speeches that in a struggle for life the strongest, the fittest won, while the least able, the weaker one lost. Hitler leads his party in accordance with an incorrect interpretation of the work of Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection. This helps us to understand the ideology of Nazism, which considers man to be an animal with animal values. The brute who wins has to win if he is the stronger one. The child that dies has to die if it is the weakest.”

I was fascinated by what he told me. I began to make more sense of Hitler’s thinking, although I grasped by no means all the aspects of Nazi theory.

Franz checked his watch. His spell of duty was nearly finished. He turned to me, looking sad. That touched me. I had no experience of life but was intelligent enough to understand that from now on what I called for the time being a friendly connection wouldn’t be exactly restful.

W
hen
I woke up the following morning, I asked Simone how she thought I looked. My question puzzled her. “Why do you want to know? I hope you haven’t talked to that soldier?” I replied half a second too late. Simone had guessed. She cradled her head in her hands. “Oh, no! It isn’t true! I don’t believe it!”

I promised I would deal with this relationship on my own and to tell her everything so long as she didn’t criticize me. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. At last she told me that my face hadn’t got too thin, my cheeks weren’t too hollow, and I still had a little doll’s face. I kissed her on the cheek and went off to work.

He was already there! I was afraid he might notice how excited I was, so I tried to look relaxed. He asked me if I wanted to continue yesterday’s conversation.

I nodded in agreement while carrying on with my work. Before he began to speak, I asked him very quickly and without raising my voice what the reason was for this hatred and hounding of the Jews. Franz replied that unfortunately the persecution of the Jewish people went back a long way. The Jews had been the victims of prejudices for centuries and were even prohibited from holding certain jobs and entering some professions.

“Not too long ago, Jews couldn’t own land nor farm it,” Franz told me. “After the First World War, anti-Semitism was commonplace in Germany. The existence of extermination camps was confirmed only recently. When people told us about such horrors, we didn’t want to believe them. At first there was denial, but later we had to admit they existed. Then shame took hold. People kept quiet and pretended it wasn’t true. The first of these camps, Dachau, opened its gates in the early 1930s. When they were released, prisoners had to sign a document in which they committed themselves never to talk about what they had experienced there, under penalty of being automatically sent back to the camp. There were many Germans who believed or chose to believe that the concentration camps were “merely” places where enemies of the Nazi party were punished. They also thought the reign of terror only applied to political opponents and Jews. They regarded this as normal.

Suddenly Franz fell silent. We had almost been caught. We needed to be even more vigilant.

Whenever he stopped talking to me and looking at me, I felt lonely right away. And when we had to end a conversation, I realized how hard it would it be for me to go on enduring this horror if I never saw him again. When he left, I concentrated on my work. I looked down so no one would see me cry.

Four days went by without him showing himself. I obviously couldn’t ask his replacement what had happened to him, although I wanted to very badly.

When I saw him again, on the fifth day, my excitement reached fever pitch and I found it difficult to quiet down. I was wondering if he had any idea how I felt when he was away. But I could see from the look he flashed at me that he’d understood.

He explained, as though to apologize, that he was assigned to different tasks every day and never knew where he would be sent next. That’s why he couldn’t let me know beforehand. This calmed me down. I decided to make the most of each minute; never mind how much time we still had together or the void our parting would inevitably leave.

Franz asked me once again if I would like him to pick up the conversation from where we left off. I nodded. I even reminded him that when he’d had to leave, he was just trying to explain why the Germans hounded and despised the Jewish people.

Franz then described to me in detail how the roundups of Jews were conducted. Soldiers had been specially trained to hunt them down, in the utmost secrecy. He told me that 80 percent of the denunciations were done by private citizens. I couldn’t believe it! But most surprising of all was that the police or the Gestapo didn’t even reward those who handed over Jews. They were ordinary citizens, not even members of the Nazi Party. The Jews distinguished themselves by their way of living, which was different from that of the majority of Germans. People who cracked a joke about Hitler were likely to be betrayed, too. Denunciations could also result from self-interest. Someone would want to take over the apartment of a Jewish family, so then that person denounced the family. Someone might find his neighbours too much of a nuisance, same thing.

“I heard another story, which is just as appalling,” he went on. “The Jewish neighbour of a family member of mine was driven with other Jews from Nuremberg to a stadium where the grass was particularly long. To humiliate them and show them they were truly at the bottom of the ladder, soldiers forced them to cut the grass with their teeth, or graze on it, no more no less. Do you really think, Armande, that I can agree with that?”

I began to cry, looking down at my machine.

Franz continued, “If a bullet could put an end to my life, I wouldn’t have to be ashamed of being German anymore, later on, when the war is over. How will I be able to live after this conflict? It will be impossible to pretend none of this ever existed. That’s why I would like to live somewhere else, not out of denial, but so I wouldn’t have to look every day at the images and places of this slaughter, which has dishonoured every German.”

Franz’s spell of duty was now finished. He told me he would be working in the administrative services for the next two weeks. He assured me he would ask to be sent back here as soon as his assignment had been completed.

The following night I tossed about restlessly in my sleep. Franz was now part of my dreams. In one of these dreams I walked along with him in Paris, clinging to his arm. I was elegantly dressed, like those women he described, whom he used to meet during his strolls on the Champs-Elysées. My hair had grown long and was drawn back into a chignon. I wore a small hat on top of my head, with a veil that fell over my nose. We really looked like a pair of lovers. We chatted and laughed a lot. It was a sunny day. I often dreamed of sun-filled days while I was in captivity, and would always be disappointed when I woke up. How is it possible to spend so many years without seeing daylight?

Dreams were essential to us. They were our only means of escape. Iréna told us for example that her dreams about her mother’s food satisfied her hunger.

I had another dream, a much less enjoyable one. Franz and I were caught in the middle of a conversation. Officers took Franz away, and I never saw him again. All this was likely to happen, but I hoped it would be as late as possible. I prayed to God that He answer my prayers. I continued to keep my feelings for Franz to myself, wanting to preserve my relationship with my other friends.

I began to count backwards the days before Franz’s return. My first working day without contact with him was surely the longest I had lived through since I arrived at the camp and since we met.

Did
he
think about our conversations now and then? Was I in love with my torturer or was it just friendship? In the end I wondered if everything hadn’t been easier for me before I met Franz.

The days came and went and my mind was still just as full of Franz. I was tired of thinking about him all the time. I went through the whole gamut of emotions. It was naive of me to believe in him, I thought, foolish to be so romantic. Weren’t this man and my values poles apart? I felt guilty for falling into the trap of the girl who is excited by a sudden interest from a man.

One evening Simone reported to us that she had spoken to a prisoner who worked with her in the kitchens. This woman had the job of taking meals to the sick in the infirmary. She had seen Iréna and gave Simone a description of her condition. Iréna’s temperature hadn’t really dropped. She had dysentery and was completely dehydrated. We were very worried about her.

We had to find a way to come to her aid at any cost, but it wasn’t easy. Mathilde obtained permission to make a lightning visit to the infirmary. She particularly wanted to make sure the tattooed number on Iréna’s arm was still covered up. If not, she was ready to take care of it.

She told us that as a result of the typhus epidemic that was spreading throughout the camp the infirmary was crammed full. Iréna remained almost incognito in all that commotion. It was vitally important to ensure she wouldn’t be sent somewhere else or be killed. Mathilde had overheard a conversation among the officers. They had said that the SS no longer hesitated to eliminate the sick and the weak. These prisoners were killed by phenol injections because the SS needed to make room in the infirmary. It was like euthanizing a sick animal. They also tried out various vaccines on patients. To do this, they would leave some typhus sufferers untreated. These patients were called “transmitters.” They served to keep the virus alive and at the disposal of the SS doctors, who used the transmitters’ blood to infect other prisoners.

Mathilde got in touch with an inmate of French birth who worked in the infirmary, and promised to regularly bring her a few extra food rations in exchange for which her caring for Iréna had to take precedence over that of other patients. She should definitely not report the tattooed number on her skin. This Frenchwoman could apparently be trusted.

Meanwhile, we got to know the woman who had taken Iréna’s place on our mattress a little better. She was called Karina and was a Romany.

I had never heard that word before. After a few days, or, to be more truthful, as soon as we were sure we could trust her, we asked her a number of questions about her people. We learnt that the Romanies have a common Indian origin. They were also called Gypsies, Manush, Roma, Tziganes, or Romanichals. Since people considered them to be of tainted stock, they began to travel all over the world, no doubt to escape from society’s rejection.

Several years after the war, I found out that the Romanies, this nomadic people of no fixed abode who travelled in caravans from town to town, village to village, had been the subject of a genocide that went almost unnoticed. Historians have estimated there were 250,000 to 500,000 victims out of a population of 700,000 Romanies in Europe. They suffered virtually the same fate as the Jews. For a long time this tragedy was hushed up, as if it hadn’t happened.

Karine was twenty-four and had jet-black eyes lined with very thick lashes. Before her hair, which I imagined had been as black as her eyes, was shaved off, she must have been a great beauty. Quite small but sturdy; there was nothing frail about her.

During a selection process following her arrest, she had been examined like a cart horse, and the officials concluded she would be perfect for heavy work. That’s how she ended up at the Buchenwald camp. Her job was demanding; she packed up the arms we produced and carried boxes from one place to another all day.

As I watched her, I noticed she wasn’t afraid of anything. She greedily ate her food portions, and it seemed to me she was immune to every illness. The difficult living conditions of her people must have given her the strength to survive the horror.

She stayed with us as long as Iréna’s illness lasted. For a long time, that is. While Iréna was treated for dysentery, she developed a lump in her neck, which was so large that the doctor in charge decided to remove it. But sanitary conditions weren’t the best. And what was bound to happen happened. The wound became infected; pus oozed out of it. The prisoners who worked in the infirmary unfortunately wiped it away with dirty cloths. At last, after three weeks, Mathilde managed — God knows how — to find sulfa drugs.