“If they find out how I’m deceiving them, someone would be keen to do that.”
The other person finally leaves the hut, and Dita catches a brief glimpse of him. He’s a well-built man, and he’s wearing a loose-fitting raincoat. She also sees him pulling up the hood even though it’s not raining, as if he doesn’t want to be recognized. But she can still see his feet, and he’s not wearing the clogs the prisoners usually wear, but a gleaming pair of boots.
What’s an incognito SS person doing here? Dita asks herself.
The light escaping from Hirsch’s cubicle allows her to see him returning to it looking utterly dejected. She’s never seen him looking shattered before. The normally proud man hangs his head.
Dita remains behind the woodpile paralyzed. She doesn’t understand what she’s just seen, but the thought of understanding it terrifies her. Hirsch said he is deceiving them.
But why?
Dita feels as if the ground is shifting under her feet, so she sits down again on the stool. She was feeling ashamed because she hasn’t told Hirsch the whole truth … but it turns out he’s the expert when it comes to hiding the fact that he’s secretly meeting with members of the SS, who take advantage of the dark to hide their movements around the camp.
Oh my God …
Dita sighs and covers her face with her hands.
How am I going to tell the truth to someone who hides the truth? If Hirsch can’t be trusted, who can?
She’s so confused that when she stands up, she feels dizzy. As soon as Hirsch shuts himself in his cubicle, Dita quietly leaves the barrack.
At that moment the siren sounds, announcing that curfew is about to start. The last stragglers, who have braved the cold of the night and the fury of the hut Kapos, run toward their rickety bunks, but Dita doesn’t have the will to run. Her questions are too heavy.
What if the person he was talking with isn’t a member of the SS but belongs to the Resistance? But then why would Fredy be worried about the people in Block 31 finding out, if the Resistance is on our side? And how many members of the Resistance speak with that pretentious Berlin accent?
She shakes her head as she walks. It’s impossible to deny the obvious. It was an SS man. It’s true that Hirsch is obliged to deal with them, but that wasn’t an official visit. The Nazi was there incognito and speaking to Fredy in a familiar way, as a friend even. And then there was that image of a Fredy overcome with remorse.…
Oh my God …
It’s rumored all the time in various groups that there are informers and Nazi spies among the prisoners. She can’t stop her legs from shaking.
No, no, definitely not.
Hirsch, an informer? If someone had suggested that to her two hours earlier, she would have scratched their eyes out! It wouldn’t make any sense for him to be an informer for the SS when he deceives them by running Block 31 as a school. Nothing makes sense. It suddenly occurs to her that maybe he’s pretending to be a Nazi informer, but that the information he’s passing over to them is irrelevant or inaccurate, and that’s how he keeps them mollified.
That would explain everything!
But then she remembers how Hirsch walked back to his cubicle utterly dejected once he was alone. He wasn’t a man proud of himself because he was fulfilling a mission. He was weighed down by the burden of guilt. She could see it in his posture.
When she reaches her hut, the Kapo is already standing at the door with her stick, ready to hit the women who arrive after the curfew has started, and Dita covers her head with her arms to soften the blow. The Kapo hits her hard, but she barely feels the pain. As she clambers into her bunk, she sees a head being raised in the bunk beside her. It’s her mother.
“You’re very late, Edita. Is everything all right?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Are you sure you’re all right? You’re not deceiving me?”
“No,” Dita answers grudgingly.
It irritates her that her mother treats her like a little girl. She feels like telling her that of course she’s fooling her, that in Auschwitz everybody deceives everyone else. But it wouldn’t be fair to take her anger out on her mother.
“So everything’s fine?”
“Yes, Mama.”
“Shut up, you bitches, or I’ll slit your throats!” someone bellows.
“Stop that racket!” orders the Kapo.
Silence descends on the hut, but the voice inside Dita’s head doesn’t stop. Hirsch isn’t who they think he is. Who is he, then?
She tries to fit together everything she knows about him, and that’s when she realizes it’s not a lot. After catching a fleeting glimpse of him at the sports ground on the outskirts of Prague, the next time she bumped into him was in Terezín.
The Terezín ghetto …
8.
Dita clearly remembers the typewritten letter with the Reichsprotektor stamp lying on top of the table with the dark-red-check oiled tablecloth, in that tiny apartment in Josefov. It was an insignificant piece of paper that changed everything. It changed even the name of the small town of Terezín, sixty kilometers from Prague, its German name written in dark capital letters as if they wanted to proclaim it: THERESIENSTADT. And next to that, the word relocation.
Terezín, or Theresienstadt, was a city Hitler generously donated to the Jews—or so Nazi propaganda maintained. They would even film a documentary directed by Kurt Gerron, the Jewish film director, which showed people happily employed in workshops, playing sports, and calmly attending lectures and social events, all presented with a voiceover that explained how content the Jews were in Terezín. The documentary would “prove” that the rumors about the internment and murder of Jews were false. As soon as he finished the documentary, the Nazis would send Kurt Gerron to Auschwitz, where he would die in 1944.
Dita sighs.
The Terezín ghetto …
The Jewish Council of Prague had offered Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich various options for the location of a such a Jewish city. But Heydrich had wanted Terezín—nothing else would do—and for a rock-solid reason: Terezín was a walled city.