The Auschwitz Detective
(Adam Lapid Mysteries #6)
by Jonathan Dunsky
BOOKS BY JONATHAN DUNSKY
Ten Years Gone
The Dead Sister
The Auschwitz Violinist
A Debt of Death
A Deadly Act
The Auschwitz Detective
A Death in Jerusalem
The Unlucky Woman (a short story)
The Payback Girl
For Tal, Liora, Netta, and Nitzan
1
I had never seen a man cry like that.
He lay prone on his bunk, second level of three, and bawled as though he had been driven mad. As he howled his pain out, his entire body quaked in jerky spasms, like an exposed heart beating erratically. His limbs jolted and flailed about, banging hard against the rough wooden slats that bore his weight.
Each sob was so deep it must have originated in the center of the Earth. It then chewed its way upward through rock and dirt, pierced the crust of the hard Polish ground on which the camp sprawled, burrowed through the floor of our block, and wormed its way into the crying man’s soul. From there it finally erupted from his mouth in a scream of such primal agony that it would have shattered our hearts at any other time, in any other place. Right then, it only hurt our ears.
The man had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau eleven hours ago. Soon after that, his wife and six children were led to the gas chambers and exterminated. Someone had informed him of this fact five hours ago. His denial had lasted for three. He had been crying for the past two.
Other prisoners were giving him as much space as our overcrowded block allowed. Not out of kindness, but because his wailing was so unpleasant. No one comforted him, not even me. And I sat very close to his bunk, looking at him and wishing he’d shut up already and feeling ashamed for thinking that.
Not that I could have lessened his pain. No words held such power. His wife and children were dead. You couldn’t console a man in such circumstances. You had to let him cry.
He wasn’t the first man to cry in our block, as Auschwitz prisoner barracks were called, nor would he be the last. I had cried my first night there myself, knowing with an uncanny certainty that my wife and two daughters were dead. But no one had cried like this man. Even those who were loud, and many were, did not scream with such abandon, nor did their muscles clench and release as though they had come into contact with a live wire. Nor did their mouth gape wide in tortured silence before a delayed shriek burst through like fire from a flamethrower.
He cried like a man possessed by demons, like a man dispossessed by devils. I wasn't sure about the former, but the latter was definitely true. For all had been taken from him, as it had been taken from each and every man who now had to hear him scream. And those who had taken everything from us were the closest things to the devil any of us would encounter on this side of death.
The man was in his late thirties, of average height, and had the fullness of flesh of a new prisoner. This would not last, of course. In the coming days and weeks, his muscles would dwindle, his fat would melt, his skin would shrink around his skeleton. He would look like the rest of us—gaunt and hollow-cheeked, with huge eyes and sharp bones and a sickly complexion. He would not look like a man any longer; at least not like any man he’d seen before the war, before he’d arrived here in Auschwitz.
In a way, he did not look like a man even now. Not with the endless tears leaking from his eyes. Not with the thick snot running from his nostrils. Not with the bubbles of spittle dotting his lips and the film of sweat on his forehead and shaven scalp. I wasn’t sure what he looked like. I wasn’t sure what I looked like. I wasn’t sure what I was anymore.
Apart from a number.
The number tattooed on my left forearm in bluish ink. That number was me, and I was that number. Sometimes it felt that this was all I ever was. That everything I had once been—father, son, husband, policeman—had been expunged, erased, eradicated so thoroughly that even the memory of those things was suspect, as though my life prior to arriving in the camp had been an illusion or a fevered dream.
I knew nothing of the crying man’s past. I did not know how he had made his living. I did not know his exact age. I did not know his hobbies or passions. I did not know his political or religious beliefs. I did not even know his last name. What I did know was that he was a Hungarian Jew, like myself. I knew that his first name was Gyuri. And I knew that he had married a woman, had fathered children, and, judging by the ferocity of his wailing, loved them dearly.
He and I had never exchanged a word. What I knew of him I’d learned from other prisoners—those who had greeted him upon his arrival in our block; those who had shared with him the grim new reality of his life.
And once it had sunk in, he had begun crying and hadn’t stopped since.
Another howl, this one achingly high-pitched, exploded from his mouth. It echoed around the dim interior of the block, making my ears ring. A number of the other prisoners groaned. Someone swore. A few cast baleful looks at the crying man. As usual, everyone was hungry and tired. We all craved sleep. But if Gyuri kept crying like that, sleep would be impossible. Even exhausted men cannot sleep in such noise.
There was tension in the air: a sense of impending trouble, like a honed blade poised for deadly use. That was why I was sitting so close to Cyuri, in spite of my throbbing eardrums.
There was a heavy thud from my left. A man had jumped down from his bunk partway up the block and was stomping his way over, his wooden clogs tapping an angry rhythm on the packed-earth floor. He was tall and angular, with a face as hard as a brick. There was murder in his eyes. I noticed his hands were balled into fists.
I knew who he was: a gruff, truculent Dutch Jew by the name of Hendrik. He’d been in Auschwitz for over a year. That alone said he was tough. But I had also seen him use his fists on more than one occasion. Once he had fought another prisoner over a crust of bread found under the shirt of a man who had died during the night. Another time a bunkmate had snored too loudly in his ear. Hendrik had won both altercations. His first opponent emerged from their skirmish with nothing but bruises. The second had not been as fortunate. He had suffered a fractured wrist, rendering him unfit for work. Three days later, during selection at the camp hospital, an SS doctor sent him to the gas chambers.
When Hendrik reached Gyuri’s bunk, he snarled in German, “Shut up already, you bastard! Stop wailing!” and he grabbed Gyuri by the armpits and yanked him off his bunk, throwing him to the floor.
Incredibly, Gyuri kept on crying, apparently oblivious to his surroundings. He lay on his back, his knees half-bent, his arms still twitching. A thin trickle of blood dripped from a cut on his temple, where his head had hit the floor.
Hendrik loomed over him, an expression of utter incredulity on his face. He couldn’t fathom how Gyuri could display no reaction to his command to be quiet, let alone being hurled to the floor. Three heartbeats later, the incredulity gave way to blazing fury. The blood rose in Hendrik’s face, and a feral growl rumbled deep in his throat.
"You won't shut up," he roared, "I’ll make you shut up.” And he drew back his right leg, intending to kick the crying man.
Jumping to my feet, I got to Hendrik as his foot was already flying toward Gyuri’s unprotected head. He did not see me coming. I planted both hands on his chest and shoved. It wasn’t a particularly hard push. I wasn’t trying to topple him, just keep him from burying his clog in Gyuri’s face. Still, with one foot in the air, Hendrik nearly lost his balance. He staggered back, his feet doing a stuttering shuffle, and he would have fallen had he not managed to brace himself on a nearby bunk.