Sometime before dawn Estelle said to her: “Did you know that you wake up, say something about your father and then fall asleep again? You sit up, half comb your hair, but you lack the strength to finish.”
“Do I talk in my sleep?”
“Only about your father. You turn about a bit.”
“I’m tired.”
“That’s all right.”
Two
Oberführer S chimmelpfennig corresponded with a doctor in Mauthausen in Austria. His friend was learning to amputate limbs, measuring the time before an amputee could walk again. Did he think of Helga, with whom he had been at University? She was training at Buchenwald. They were due to start at an army hospital together. They were thinking of getting married before they were transferred to the front, where they would have to operate in earnest.
For her part, after three tots of liquor Big Leopolda Kulikowa would return in her mind to the Odeon and the Gloria in Cracow. The fairytale of the frog that changed into a prince after a single, generous kiss should be rewritten, she felt, so that no-one was misled — those single girls in civvies who saw every possibility as love, for example. That’s how unmarried mothers pay for a single love-making … those girls don’t take account of their own worth, they give themselves away cheap, mostly for free. To the soldiers, a girl is like a spring of water in the desert.
Twelve: Gustav Habenicht, Sepp Bartells, Hanan Baltrusch, Fritz Puhse, Heinrich Rinn, Otto Scholtz, Heini Baumgarten, Fritz Heindl, Wilhelm Kube, Johannes Kurfürst, Rudolf Weissmüller, Hans Ewing.
There was an icy wind blowing, and freezing fog. The truck driver wiped his nose on his sleeve and muttered a few obscenities. He stacked the huge boxes he had stolen from a wooden Orthodox Church before setting fire to it in the office of the Oberführer, Dr Helmuth Gustav S chimmelpfennig.
I was still in Terezin at the end of September when I lost sight of Skinny. She was put on one of five transports going east. In the Frauenkonzentrationslager at Auschwitz-Birkenau she and her mother were put to work, at first, repairing the sides of rail wagons, sweeping roads and carrying stones to and from the Auto-Union plant. Eventually she found herself as a cleaner in the hospital block of Sturmbannführer Dr Julius Krueger, who sterilized her.
The day after Dr Krueger was promoted to Obersturmbannführer he performed an urgent operation on a frostbitten Waffen-S S Obergruppenführer, transplanting onto him a large patch of skin cut from a Jewish subhuman. For this, Dr Krueger was instantly transferred to the eastern front. He only had time to retrieve his medical diploma from the wall and one proclaiming him to be a doctor of philosophy and biology.
Skinny finished cleaning up the surgery. With a damp cloth she wiped blood from the tiles and polished the used instruments. Dr Krueger’s departure had left her at her wit’s end. She didn’t even dare contemplate what would happen in the morning. They would get rid of her as a compromising witness. She was alone in the surgery, perhaps the whole block, probably by mistake. She switched off the light, and the surgery windows were engulfed by the night. It was one of those nights at Auschwitz-Birkenau when the darkness seemed to mean the end of the world, the end of the last human being, the last tree, the last star.
Life at the Frauenkonzentrationslager was simply the opposite of how people had lived before they got there. She was faced with the deadening knowledge of what was an everyday occurrence: the medical experiments, the killing of people on a conveyor belt, the processions towards the basement undressing rooms of the five crematoria. And then the flames licking up from the low chimneys, exhaling in the form of soot and ashes the remains of what an hour previously had been living beings. From Monday, when the selections were held, to Sunday, and again from Monday to Sunday — again and again. In her mind she tried to tell somebody about it, just to convince herself that she was still sane. She clung to memories of people who had long forgotten her, but whom she once knew. The teacher at her primary school, who had commended her for drawing so well, or the music master who had tactfully told her that whatever she was going to succeed at when she grew up, it would not be a career in opera.
The surgery smelled of carbolic acid, iodine, blood and water. It was a smell Skinny had grown used to. Through the window she saw the fires of the No. 2 and No. 3 crematoria. While working for Dr Krueger, she wore an apron and didn’t have to endure what the other girls from the block had to undergo. She had a pass through the Postenkette, past the sentries. It expired that night. Even though she didn’t think of it for more than a second, everyone at Auschwitz-Birkenau could picture themselves in the basement undressing room, pulling off their clothes, stepping under the showers before the airtight door without an inside handle closed on them and the crystals of greenish Zyklon B began to drop from the shower-heads, turning to gas on contact with the air.
As well as the smell of the surgery, the greasy smoke which penetrated through every crack hung in the air. This was how she might live her final moments, though she had never harmed a soul. This was how she might rack her brains without ever finding an answer. Auschwitz-Birkenau was the final station for her. In her mind’s eye, she saw the inoffensive German word, the compound noun Endlösung, final solution.
She felt tense, like a mouse caught in a trap. Only yesterday she had been reassured by the presence of Dr Krueger, in his smart uniform with its silver epaulettes and silver-trimmed buttonholes. He could pick up the telephone and call his wife, or his grown-up children, just as he had called his daughter in Alsace. There was a question of what he would do on Sunday. But not now.
Skinny was hungry and thirsty, and knew it would be worse by morning. She was cold too, so she kept her headscarf on. The previous week she had had toothache. The girl she had replaced in Dr Krueger’s surgery had not received any special treatment either. Anyone here was alive at the expense of someone else.
She heard a noise in an office at the far end of the corridor that was rarely used. A door creaked and then slammed. Someone was going to the lavatory. She heard the door again and then water flushing. A girl appeared.
“Hello,” Skinny said, moving into the passageway.
“What is it?” the girl asked in Polish.
“Do you belong to this block?”
“No.”
The girl was about 18. She was dressed as if she were somewhere in Warsaw: a knee-length skirt, a blouse with short, puffed sleeves of a bright washable material, warm woollen socks and high lace-up boots — not at all what the female inmates looked like. Her hair was brushed into a quiff, the way boys used to wear it in Prague at the beginning of the war. The girl told her that the doctor who was to replace Krueger (she didn’t know his name) was choosing girls for a field brothel further east. With lightning speed Skinny considered what this could mean for her.
“If we’re lucky they’ll turn us into whores,” the girl said. “What do you think? Am I suitable?”
“Is it a selection?” Skinny asked.
“What’s that, a selection?”
“Sortierung. Sorting out.” The girl didn’t know the camp jargon.
“There are 60 of us and they’ll choose 30. He’s already told us. The rest can volunteer for nursing.”