I looked at Marco, who held both hands up.
"I didn't want to do it," he said, “but Hendrik would have killed me if I refused."
Maybe it was the truth. Or maybe Marco had decided to switch sides only when I had killed Hendrik. I didn’t care either way right now. I was satisfied that Marco posed no threat. I rushed to Vilmos, falling to my knees by his motionless form.
With eyes that had gone blurry with tears, I searched for blood on his torso, but there was none. Frowning, I was about to raise Vilmos's shirt, when I heard a loud groan. "Ahhh. Ooh, my head."
It was Vilmos. He was shaking his head, hand pressed to his face. He let out another groan, blinking rapidly as though emerging from a deep sleep.
"Vilmos?" I asked stupidly. "Vilmos, you’re okay?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I think so. But my head hurts like mad."
I helped him to a sitting position and his eyes focused on me. “Are you hurt? There’s blood on your face."
"It’s not mine. It’s theirs.” I pointed at Jan and Hendrik.
"How?" Vilmos asked.
I touched his collar. “The blood from your neck dripped right over where I sewed your collar a few days ago. It reminded me of my needle. Hendrik hadn’t expected it. But I don’t understand—I saw you get stabbed. How come you’re not wounded?"
Then I caught sight of Vilmos's bowl. Like mine, it was tied to the loops of his waistband. Only now it sported a large dent near its center, as though it had been punched by something hard. Like a shiv.
I looked from the bowl to Vilmos. "A knight in shining armor," I said, and we both started laughing. A laughter of pure relief and amazement.
It didn’t last long; less than a minute. When we were through, Vilmos glanced at Marco and looked questioningly at me.
"He saved your life," I said. “He pushed Jan away from you.”
"I didn’t want to do any of this," Marco said, trembling. “But I had no choice. I swear."
Vilmos and I exchanged a look, followed by a nod.
"You can go, Marco," I said. “There’s been enough death here today."
EPILOGUE
Hope is a deceitful, fickle creature. Like a disloyal lover, she makes you believe she will forever be at your side, only to desert you when you least expect it.
Two days after I’d killed Hendrik, Vilmos’s fever returned. Like a firestorm, it erupted in the morning and burned through him in a matter of hours. That afternoon, after sinking the blade of his shovel into the earth, he paused, leaned on the handle, turned his weary head my way, and gave me a small smile that I would remember till my dying day.
Then he collapsed, his depleted body giving a small thud as it hit the ground.
I rushed over, falling to my knees beside him and clasping his hands. I watched the life go out of his eyes and take a piece of my heart with it.
At the end of the workday, I carried his body back to camp, refusing to relinquish him when others sought to relieve me of my load.
In camp, I laid his body with care alongside the other dead of the day. I smoothed his clothes, caressed his cheek, and wet his forehead with my tears. And then, even though it wasn’t the time or place for such a prayer, I murmured the Kaddish. And I swore to him that I would survive this place.
The day after Vilmos had gone, what little hope remained in me suffered another blow. A few dozen men and teenage boys arrived at the men’s camp. They had come from the Czech family camp. The Nazis had liquidated it, sending a few hundred prisoners to other work camps to the west. Most of the thousands who had resided there, including all the small children, were gassed and burned.
Trains from Hungary ceased coming, but Jews continued to arrive in Auschwitz, and kept on dying in their multitudes.
The weeks dragged on. In August, the gypsy camp was also liquidated. Thousands of gypsies—young and old, male and female—were devoured by the gas chambers.
Summer drifted into autumn. News of Russian advances abounded, yet the death machine rattled on. Whether by hunger, disease, punishment, or selection, our numbers continued to dwindle. Every day, I awoke to find a familiar face missing, another life extinguished.
In October, we heard a terrifying blast and saw a different sort of fire paint the western sky red. It took a couple of days for the story to filter back to us.
Members of the Sonderkommando, those miserable men working in the crematoriums, who witnessed up close the gassing of the victims and were later tasked with burning their bodies, had revolted. They blew up one of the crematoriums, had managed to kill a number of soldiers and Kapos, and attempted a mass escape.
It was said that all the prisoners involved, over four hundred of them, were captured and killed. They were the only ones to strike a real blow against the Germans in the entire history of Auschwitz.
Winter arrived, and it was every bit as bad as the old timers had said. At night, we shivered in our bunks, the cold enveloping us like a blanket of ice. In the evening, we stood at roll call as snowflakes the size of fists pummeled our shaking bodies. The guards had us clear snow with our hands, which quickly turned blue and numb. Men died as though the Angel of Death himself were swinging his scythe through our ranks.
I came very close to dying myself one day when a vicious guard whipped me into unconsciousness. If I had not made that oath to Vilmos, I would not have found the strength to carry on living.
Eight months after I arrived at the camp, in January 1945, in the face of approaching Russian divisions, the Nazis vacated Auschwitz. In thick snow and bone-shuddering cold, they ordered us—the weak, hungry, bereft, and exhausted— to begin marching. We left Auschwitz for the last time, leaving behind the sick in the hospital.
We walked for days through the frigid countryside with almost no food or rest. Those who faltered were shot without mercy. The sides of the roads were littered with frozen bodies. One of those bodies belonged to Vilmos's lover, Zoltan; and another to Andris Farkas, the man who had ratted me out as a policeman to the Lageralteste.
After many tribulations, I and the rest of the survivors staggered into Buchenwald, a concentration camp near Weimar, Germany. Among our number was the Lageralteste.
There, stripped of his position and authority, reduced to a common prisoner, he was finally vulnerable to our vengeance. On the second night, we set upon him, giving him the sort of treatment every tyrant deserves. It took four men to hold him down, and four more—armed with makeshift daggers—to stab him to death. I was one of the four assassins. Another was Mendel, the fifteen-year-old boy who had replaced Franz as the Lageralteste's servant.
Rolf suffered a similar fate to that of his erstwhile master, though I took no part in his death. As for Mathias and Otto, they did not arrive in Buchenwald, and no one in the camp seemed to know what became of them.
There was very little food, and the guards were sadistic beasts, driven to even greater cruelty by the disintegration of their beloved Third Reich.
Each day, waves of airplanes flew overhead from the west—allied bombers and fighters, en route to destroy another piece of Hitler’s Germany.
One needed to control one’s reaction at the sight of these airplanes. The guards would beat or shoot any man who allowed his excitement and happiness to show.
Optimistic rumors pervaded Buchenwald. Germany was on the brink of defeat. The Allies were closing in. Some said British troops would liberate us, while others believed it would be the Americans. These rumors seemed more plausible than the ones that had circulated in Auschwitz the previous summer. But would we still be alive when Allied soldiers finally got here? Or would the SS guards kill us all beforehand?