“And what did your veteran do?”
“She started arguing. She dug around in her straw mattress and pulled out a piece of twisted wire about ten centimeters long, with a really sharp point. She propped herself up with one hand on her neighbor’s bunk and held the wire to her neighbor’s throat with the other. There was no question which argument was more convincing. The neighbor quickly nodded her head in agreement. The panic made her so bug-eyed it looked as if her eyes would fall out of their sockets!” And Dita laughed.
“There’s nothing funny about that. What a horrible woman! God will punish her.”
“Well, I once heard the Christian upholsterer who owned the store on the ground floor of our apartment block say that while God’s plan is straight, the path to achieving it is twisted. So maybe twisted wires work, too. I thanked her and said, ‘My name is Edita Adler. Perhaps we’ll become good friends.’”
“And what was her answer?”
“There wasn’t one. She must have thought she’d already wasted too much time on me. She turned toward the wall, leaving barely a hand’s width of room for me to lie down with my head at her feet.”
“And she didn’t say another word?”
“She hasn’t spoken to me since, Margit. Can you believe it?”
“Oh, Ditiňka. I would believe anything these days. May God watch over us.”
It’s dinnertime, so the two girls say good-bye to each other and head back to their barracks. Night has fallen, and only the orange lights illuminate the camp. Dita sees two Kapos chatting at the entrance to one of the huts. You can recognize them by their better clothes, their brown “special prisoner” armbands, and the triangular badge that identifies them as non-Jews. A red triangle identifies the political prisoners, many of them Communists or social democrats; a brown one is for Gypsies; a green one for criminals and ordinary delinquents. A black triangle is for social misfits, retarded people, and lesbians, while homosexual men wear a pink triangle. Kapos with black or pink triangles are rare in Auschwitz, as these are worn by prisoners of the lowest possible category, almost as low as Jews. In camp BIIb, the exception is the rule. The two Kapos chatting to each other—a man and a woman—wear a pink and a black triangle respectively; chances are no one else wants to talk to them.
Dita walks toward her hut, thinking about the chunk of bread she’s about to receive. She sees it as a feast, the only decent meal of the day, since the soup is a bowl of slops that serves only to soothe her thirst for a moment.
A black shadow, darker than all the rest, is walking along the Lagerstrasse in the opposite direction. People give way to it, stepping aside so that it will walk past without stopping. You’d think it was Death itself, and it is. The tune from Wagner’s “The Ride of the Valkyries” filters through the darkness.
Dr. Mengele.
As he gets close to her, Dita gets ready to lower her head and move to one side, like everyone else. But the officer stops, and his eyes bore through her.
“You’re the one I’m looking for.”
“Me?”
Mengele studies her at length.
“I never forget a face.”
His words carry a deadly stillness. If Death were to speak, it would do so with precisely this icy cadence. Dita goes back over what happened in Block 31 earlier in the afternoon. The Priest didn’t focus on her in the end, thanks to the altercation with the crazy teacher, and she thought she’d escaped. But she hadn’t reckoned on Dr. Mengele. He had been farther away, but it was obvious he’d seen her. His forensic eye would definitely have picked up that she wasn’t in the correct spot, that she had one arm across her chest, that she was hiding something. She can read all that in the coldness of his eyes, which are, unusually for a Nazi, brown.
“Number?”
“73305.”
“I’m going to keep my eye on you. I’ll be watching you even when you can’t see me. I’ll be listening to you, even when you think I can’t hear you. I know everything. If you break the camp rules even fractionally, I’ll know, and you’ll end up stretched out in my autopsy lab. Live autopsies are very enlightening.”
And he nods as he says this, as if he were talking only to himself.
“You see the last waves of blood pumped out by the heart reaching the stomach. It’s an extraordinary sight.”
Mengele becomes lost in thought, thinking about the perfect surgical laboratory he has set up in Crematorium 2, where he has the most up-to-date equipment at his disposal. He is delighted with the red cement floor, the polished marble dissection table with the sinks set in the middle, and its nickel fittings. It’s his altar dedicated to science. He feels proud. Suddenly, he remembers there are some Gypsy children waiting for him to complete an experiment on their craniums, and he strides off in a hurry.
Dita, stunned, stands stock-still in the middle of the campground. Her sticklike legs are shaking. A moment ago there were hordes of people on the Lagerstrasse, but now she’s all on her own. They’ve all disappeared into the camp’s alleyways.
Nobody approaches her to see if she’s all right or if she needs anything. Dr. Mengele has marked her. A few of the inmates who stopped a safe distance away to watch what was happening feel sorry for her; she looks so frightened and confused. Some of the women even know her by sight from the Terezín ghetto. But they choose to hurry away. Survival comes above all else. That’s one of God’s commandments.
Dita reacts and heads off toward her alleyway. She wonders if he really is going to keep tabs on her. That icy look is the answer. As she walks, the questions keep multiplying in her head. What should she do now? It would be wise to quit her job as librarian. How is she going to manage the books with Mengele hot on her heels? Something about him terrifies her, which is unusual for her. She’s come across many Nazis in the past few years, but there’s something about this one that sets him apart. She senses that he has a special talent for evil.
She whispers a quick good-night to her mother so that Liesl won’t notice her anxiety, and carefully lies down alongside her bunkmate’s foul-smelling feet. Her quiet good-night disappears among the cracks in the ceiling.