Then Josef somehow got a dead woman’s dress from the clothing warehouse. Often, after roll call in the men’s lines, he would go to the latrines, put on the long gown, and place an Orthodox bonnet on his hair. Then he would come out and join the women’s lines. His short hair would not have amazed any SS guard, since most of the women had been shorn because of lice. So, with 13,000 women prisoners, he would pass into the women’s compound and spend the night sitting up in Hut 57 keeping Rebecca company.
In Rebecca’s barracks, the older women took Josef at his word. If Josef required a traditional courtship, they would fall into their traditional roles as chaperones. Josef was therefore a gift to them too, a license to play their prewar ceremonious selves. From their four-tiered bunks they looked down on the two children until everyone fell asleep. If any one of them thought, Let’s not be too fussy in times like these about what the children get up to in the dead of night, it was never said. In fact, two of the older women would crowd onto one narrow ledge so that Josef could have a bunk of his own. The discomfort, the smell of the other body, the risk of the migration of lice from your friend to yourself—none of that was as important, as crucial to self-respect as that the courtship should be fulfilled according to the norms. At the end of winter, Josef, wearing the armband of the Construction Office, went out into the strangely immaculate snow in the strip between the inner fence and the electrified barrier and, steel measure in hand, under the eyes of the domed watchtowers, pretended to be sizing up no-man’s-land for some architectural reason.
At the base of the concrete stanchions studded with porcelain insulators grew the first tiny flowers of that year. Flashing his steel ruler, he picked them and shoved them into his jacket. He brought the flowers across the camp, up Jerozolimska Street. He was passing Amon’s villa, his chest stuffed with blossoms, when Amon himself appeared from the front door and advanced, towering, down the steps. Josef Bau stopped. It was most dangerous to stop, to appear to be in arrested motion in front of Amon. But having stopped, he seemed frozen there. He feared that the heart he’d so energetically and honestly signed over to the orphan Rebecca would likely now become just another of Amon’s targets.
But when Amon walked past him, not noticing him, not objecting to his standing there with an idle ruler in his hands, Josef Bau concluded that it meant some kind of guarantee. No one escaped Amon unless it was a sort of destiny.
All dolled up in his shooting uniform, Amon had entered the camp unexpectedly one day through the back gate and had found the Warrenhaupt girl lolling in a limousine at the garage, staring at herself in the rearview mirror. The car windows she’d been assigned to clean were still smudged. He had killed her for that. And there was that mother and daughter Amon had noticed through a kitchen window. They had been peeling potatoes too slowly. So he’d leaned in on the sill and shot both of them. Yet here at his steps was something he hated, a stock-still Jewish lover and draftsman, steel ruler dangling in his hands. And Amon had walked by. Bau felt the urge to confirm this outrageous good luck by some emphatic act. Marriage was, of course, the most emphatic act of all.
He got back to the Administration Building, climbed the stairs to Stern’s office and, finding Rebecca, asked her to marry him. Urgency, Rebecca was pleased and concerned to notice, had entered the business now.
That evening, in the dead woman’s dress, he visited his mother again and the council of chaperones in Hut 57. They awaited only the arrival of a rabbi. But if rabbis came, they remained only a few days on their way to Auschwitz—not long enough for people requiring the rites of kiddushin and nissuin to locate them and ask them, before they stepped into the furnace, for a final exercise of their priesthood.
Josef married Rebecca on a Sunday night of fierce cold in February. There was no rabbi. Mrs. Bau, Josef’s mother, officiated. They were Reformed Jews, so that they could do without a ketubbah written in Aramaic. In the workshop of Wulkan the jeweler someone had made up two rings out of a silver spoon Mrs. Bau had had hidden in the rafters. On the barracks floor, Rebecca circled Josef seven times and Josef crushed glass—a spent light bulb from the Construction Office—beneath his heel.
The couple had been given the top bunk of the tier. For the sake of privacy, it had been hung with blankets. In darkness Josef and Rebecca climbed to it, and all around them the earthy jokes were running. At weddings in Poland there was always a period of truce when profane love was given its chance to speak. If the wedding guests didn’t wish to voice the traditional double entendres themselves, they could bring in a professional wedding jester. Women who might in the Twenties and Thirties have sat up at weddings making disapproving faces at the risqu’e hired jester and the belly-laughing men, only now and then permitting themselves, as mature women, to be overcome with amusement, stepped tonight into the place of all the absent and dead wedding jesters of southern Poland.
Josef and Rebecca had not been together more than ten minutes on the upper bunk when the barracks lights came on. Looking through the blankets, Josef saw Untersturmführer Scheidt patrolling the canyons of bunks. The same old fearful sense of destiny overcame Josef. They’d found he was missing from his barracks, of course, and sent one of the worst of the officers to look for him in his mother’s hut. Amon had been blinded to him that day outside the villa only so that Scheidt, who was quick on the trigger, could come and kill him on his wedding night!
He knew too that all the women were compromised—his mother, his bride, the witnesses, the ones who’d uttered the most exquisitely embarrassing jokes. He began murmuring apologies, pleas to be forgiven. Rebecca told him to be quiet. She took down the screen of blankets. At this time of night, she reasoned, Scheidt wasn’t going to climb to a top bunk unless provoked. The women on the lower bunks were passing their small straw-filled pillows to her. Josef might well have orchestrated the courtship, but he was now the child to be concealed. Rebecca pushed him hard up into the corner of the bunk and covered him with pillows. She watched Scheidt pass below her, leave the barracks by its back door. The lights went out. Among a last spatter of dark, earthy jokes, the Baus were restored to their privacy.
Within minutes, the sirens began to sound. Everyone sat up in the darkness. The noise meant to Bau that yes, they were determined to stamp out this ritual marriage. They had found his empty bunk over in the men’s quarters and were now seriously hunting him.
In the dark aisle, the women were milling. They knew it too. From the top bunk he could hear them saying it. His old-fashioned love would kill them all. The barracks Alteste, who’d been so decent about the whole thing, would be shot first once the lights came on and they found a bridegroom there in token female rags.
Josef Bau grabbed his clothes. He kissed his wife perfunctorily, slid to the floor, and ran from the hut. In the darkness outside, the wail of the sirens pierced him. He ran in dirty snow, with his jacket and old dress bundled up under his armpits. When the lights came on, he would be seen by the towers. But he had the berserk idea that he could beat the lights over the fence, that he could even climb it between the alternations of its current. Once back in the men’s camp, he could make up some story about diarrhea, about having gone to the latrines and collapsed on the floor, being brought back to consciousness by the noise of sirens.
But even if electrocuted, he understood as he sprinted, he could not then confess what woman he was visiting. Racing for the fatal wire, he did not understand that there would have to be a classroomlike scene on the Appellplatz and that Rebecca would be made, one way or another, to step forward.