He regarded the past as a trap. Where instruments of torture were concerned he did not wish to go into details.
When the talk turned to whether we had learnt anything useful in the camps, Skinny said, quicker than Adler or I expected:
“I don’t think I learnt anything.” She probably hadn’t wanted to. “Should I have learnt from Dr Krueger how to castrate Jewish boys? Or choose girls to send to field brothels as prostitutes?” Adler asked her no further questions.
“Well, just look at all the things Jindra Kraus learnt.” He pointed at me.
She stiffened at the sight of people in green huntsmen’s hats with badger brushes. She thought the items of German Afrika-Korps uniforms, which youngsters were wearing like a trophy, rather ridiculous. There must have been an army surplus store in Prague because so many people wore these uniforms.
Skinny regularly reported to the welfare department of the Jewish Community. People were searching for their missing relations. Each day new lists of returnees were posted up. She hung on to the boots that the railwayman had given to her in Pecs as if to a talisman. She counted her haircuts, gratified that her ginger hair had not been made into mattresses, blankets or rope ladders for U-boats. At night she no longer had to relieve herself into a saucepan or mug to avoid going out in the rain. And during the day, when her turn came, she no longer had to get soup put into a mug, once every 24 hours. Sometimes the soup had been so hot that those who had no mug and had to have it poured into their palms let it spill on the floor. Then they had to content themselves with one helping of soup for 48 hours. She no longer had to hold her nose at the excrement tubs, as in the Frauenkonzentrationslager. Nor did she have to use the latrine at No. 232 Ost. She was living at Belgickâ 24, in a Jewish orphanage which the National Committee had returned to the Jewish Community. She no longer slept on a three-tier bunk, but in a clean bed with a pillow filled with goose feathers. She no longer had to be either healthy or dead. She did not have to look out on the chimneys of Crematoria No. 2 and No. 3.
Apart from a few clothes, she didn’t wish to own anything after the war. It would have been too painful to lose it all again. She thought of little Ramon who, at the age of 13, a fortnight after being accepted among the grown-ups, they had fed on Zyklon B.
“You’re pretty,” Ervin Adler acknowledged.
“Yes, they called me Die Schöne.”
“Your hair’s coming back very nicely. Can you imagine how many eiderdowns and pillows they could stuff it with? Or line winter coats or insulate houses? Don’t say we haven’t had the devil’s own luck.”
“Why the devil’s?”
“I don’t rely on Heaven any more,” Adler grinned. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”
The sky was blue, the weather was perfect. It had been fine for a week. Adler said he had three tickets for a football match. She was thinking how they might have taken Ramon along.
“I’ve grabbed hold of the future,” Adler assured her, as though she had asked him.
“Who hasn’t?” she answered. “Besides, we have no other choice.”
Adler, like Skinny, had come to realize that his experiences were incommunicable to others. Sometimes he regretted this, at other times he didn’t care. He would turn to the written word; it was less recalcitrant. He tried to persuade us to do the same. He wouldn’t try-too hard to describe physical suffering. He was searching for an eleventh commandment to complete the notorious Ten. Perhaps: Thou shalt not humiliate anyone. The Germans did not set up concentration camps in order to concentrate people there. They had killed on a conveyor belt as never before in history. But Adler did not want this to become a s trait jacket. He didn’t feel like a victim, but he was simply unable to put what had happened behind him.
No doubt there were some things about Adler that Skinny liked. He was interested in the inner reserves of a human being, with the struggle that individuals wage with themselves. The Germans didn’t interest him all that much; he tended to ignore them as though Germany was no longer on the map of Europe. He was interested in something else: In what respect could a person be better? Adler looked at pictures of the delighted crowds in Berlin, or at Nuremberg, as they prepared for war — when they believed themselves to be superhuman, a master race. First they humiliated their opponents, hoping that every member of the “lower race” would personally acknowledge his inferiority and be grateful to his murderers. Adler was both fascinated and irritated by certain German words, such as Endlösung, Final Solution; Übersiedlung, Resettlement; Sonderbehandlung, Special Treatment. And also by the articles on the punctuality of the railways, the development of the autobahn network, or how Hitler had been fond of dogs and children. He was furious when one magazine article declared that Hitler and Churchill were tarred with the same brush. It suggested that Hitler might not have known about all the atrocities. Was time blurring the differences between truth and falsehood, between guilt and innocence? Between justice and injustice? Was it all water under the bridge, flowing into the ocean of oblivion?
Over a dish of ice cream we discussed how we would have behaved if we’d been born Germans. Adler was interested less in what the Germans had stolen from their victims than in what they had offered them to lure them to their deaths.
He would tease Skinny. He could, as he put it, live with her.
“Aren’t you lacking ambition?”
“What’s that?” She reacted as if an ulcer had burst in her stomach.
In the field brothel she had had to conceal that she was Jewish and now she would have to conceal that she had been an army whore. She could imagine what a lot of people would throw at her. Did she really have no other way? Did she have to be a whore for the Germans? How was that different from Mr Slâma in their block of flats or the barber who, during the war, had been proud to shave German chins? A lot of people to whom nothing had happened in the war would think that she should have let herself be killed.
Fortunately, she looked innocent. It was more than likely that she was the only girl from No. 232 Ost who had survived.
She toyed with the idea of emigrating to some distant country — to America or to Australia. She’d registered for English classes. Then she added Spanish. After three weeks she gave up. It reminded her too much of her father who, at an advanced age, had joined a rapid-study English class.
We strolled on the wooden bridge over the Vltava River. Trams and cars no longer ran over it, it was now only for pedestrians. It was a pretty bridge and we thought it a pity that it would soon disappear as if it had never existed.
I asked her why she was so gloomy.
“Do I seem gloomy to you?”
“You act as if Adolf Hitler were kissing you.”
“Adolf Hitler is kissing me.”
“Who do you think wrote Hitler’s speeches? Did he write them himself?”
“Your worries!” Skinny exclaimed.
“Don’t you underestimate it,” Adler said. “It’s one — nil for us.”
“Ten — nil,” I corrected him.
“One — nil is enough,” said Skinny.
Did Hanka Kaudersovâ derive no satisfaction from the newsreels shown before each film, showing Hitler in a shabby army tunic, pale and wild-eyed, his head twitching and his left arm dangling helplessly? Wasn’t this a long way from 1941, when he believed that he had won the war and so demobilized 40 divisions and ordered industry to start producing peacetime consumer goods? But was it enough to offset Block 18 of the Frauenkonzentrationslager at Auschwitz-Birkenau or No. 232 Ost?