“What I’m telling you is the truth.”
“You should give me time,” she said.
“Surely there are things you don’t have to explain,” I said.
She didn’t seem to understand what I meant; she was clearly alarmed at what she could not explain to me.
“I’m not a rabbi,” I said. “But I could do with a rabbi for what I need.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” she said.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I said weakly.
She remained silent for several minutes. All I could do was repeat to myself a hundred times that I loved her, that some things could not be invented because they were more true than truth itself. I saw her as half of my own being, but there was nothing I could do unless she felt the same.
“I’m losing you in the dark. And do you know why?”
“Because it is dark.”
I see the estate from an icy height. The two bridges over the River San, the circle of the quarry, khaki figures in bulky greatcoats, and trucks in the yard. The long low building of the brothel, the army kitchen, the vehicle parks. I am with Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, that first Friday in December, when she feels like the flesh of an exotic fruit from which strange hands pluck the kernel twelve times a day, sometimes 14 or even 15 times. I can hear Oberführer S chimmelpfennig shouting that in other brothels the girls were serving as many as 50 men. I have Skinny’s dark circles under my eyes. I am standing there, with no clothes on, for hours, in front of the bored S S men.
I am in Terezin with her parents; they are still alive. Her mother is splitting mica for the cockpits of Messerschmitts, Heinkels and Fokkers on Bastion III or on South Hill. Later she works with Skinny in the tailor’s shop, adapting German uniforms destined for the eastern front by spraying their backs with white camouflage paint. Skinny’s father is working in K-Produktion (Kistenproduktion), assembling diesel engines for U-boats in a large circus tent in the square outside the Catholic Church. Ramon is attending the so-called substitute school and helping out in the carpenter’s shop in the former riding school.
In September 1943 the Dienststelle allowed the children to do gymnastics in preparation for the Makabi Games on Bastion III. A Protectorate Newsreel team came out to film them at it. After their exercises the children were packed off to Auschwitz-Birkenau by Transport DL.
I see her again on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where soon her brother will be cremated. What amazes her father is that somebody has had to think all this up, to plan it, put it on paper, convert it into a thousand memos and instructions and orders, all worked out to the last detail. Do any of these people, as they shuffle forward in single file, suspect that one and a half million people have already passed in front of the doctors on this ramp?
The new arrivals were greeted by the prisoners’ band playing a French musical hit in German. Come back to me, I’ll wait for you, you are my happiness. “J’attendrai”. The band also played it for those who had tried to escape as they were being hanged. No-one could say that there wasn’t a sense ofhumour at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Come back to me before I’ve searched the world for you. For the first time in her life Skinny encountered a force for which she had no name, a force stronger than any individual. Until then, evil had been a sweet offered by a stranger, which might be poisoned. She was on a boundary line, among the dead even if they were still alive. Suddenly happiness lay in becoming a slave, a whore. The crematoria looked like brick kilns or baking houses. Where was that virgin soil, still untilled, which, allegedly, they had come to settle? They had been promised that families would not be separated.
Now I see before me the night when S S men are using their whips to drive onto a train some Aryan girls chosen to work in field brothels. Skinny knows by then that there are worse things than a whipping, but she clambers onto the train as fast as she can to avoid further lashes. An S S man slams the wagon door. They have an escort — 60-year-old Scharführer Franz Ordentlich, who never utters a word.
I am standing in front of Madam Kulikowa at a roll-call taken by Oberführer Schimmelpfennig. Madam Kulikowa is preparing the girls for tomorrow’s batch of soldiers, men exhausted from their withdrawal under fire. The troops come here shaken by the battering they’ve received, confused by defeats for which nothing has prepared them. They no longer look like the flower of Germany, as they had after defeating Poland and France. They no longer believe that nothing would stop them until they had reached the foot of the Urals. Now they were a master race with sore bottoms, inflamed foreskins and swollen feet, with water on their knees, with prominent varicose veins. Their eyes are bloodshot with fatigue. They come to the brothel as if to a field hospital. The members of the Waffen-S S do not seem so crushed by the retreat. They have the same uniforms as the Wehrmacht, field grey, except that on the right sides of their helmet they have a white shield marked with the S S insignia and on the left side a swastika in a white circle on a red background.
I can see Skinny, feeling like a piece of raw meat on a butcher’s slab after the first time she has intercourse. I see them cross the threshold twelve times a day. Faces, bodies, boots, trousers, puttees. Every day except Sunday, and sometimes even on Sunday.
I am gazing into the wasteland through her eyes. I see a roan horse struggling through the snow, jerking its head around, terrified of the wolves. Scharführer Wolfgang Strupp drives the leader of the pack away by firing at him. The silver wolf, his tail up, is clever. He will not let himself be shot. Scharführer Strupp calms his mount by lightly patting its flank. He slips his rifle back under the saddle.
Even when compared to the British and French servicemen the Americans were well dressed and well fed. They got as far as Plzen — the Russians would not let them advance further. At that time we did not yet understand why, we were in favour of anyone who drove the Germans out. The Allies had behind them an unquestionable victory. No-one spat on them. They didn’t have to beg favours from anyone. But they also had some costly operations behind them. For every mistake, for every underestimation of the Germans, as at the bridge of Remagen, they had paid heavily. They had truth on their side, and honour, and the kind of humour and lightness that we associated with America. Now they were on leave in Prague. People were a little envious of them, perhaps because America was so rich and also because it was so far away. They had been in Normandy, in Alsace and in Berlin, and on their side of the Elbe. They seemed self-assured, whether they were looking out for a taxi or asking the number of a tram, the name of a street, a tavern or a nightclub.
Skinny examined the faces of passers-by as we walked. Suppose Ramon hadn’t died in the gas chamber but had got lost? What if her father had lost his memory and was now trying to find out who he was? Maybe he had lost his sense of time and place? Imagine if it wasn’t true that her father had flung himself against the wire in Birkenau? The people who said they saw him die could have been mistaken, and by some miracle he might have survived. She almost forgot that she’d seen him herself. Was her memory playing tricks? The same might be true of her mother. If she was still alive three days before the end of the war, then perhaps she was now walking about, searching, as so many others were.
We had one advantage: we did not pity one another, we had everything still ahead of us. All of us lost practically everybody to the murderers — nine out of every ten people. Pity for the fate of others only came a lot later. At that time, the band in the café, a decent meal and a clean bed were worth a lot.