“Good. Is there anything else?”
“Fredy … thank you!”
“I’m asking you to remain in the front line of fire, risking your life, and you’re thanking me?”
What Dita wants to say is I’m sorry—I regret that I doubted you. But she doesn’t know how.
“Well … I wanted to thank you for being here.”
Hirsch smiles.
“There’s no need. I’m where I ought to be.”
Dita heads outside. The snow has settled over the camp, and decorated with it, Birkenau somehow seems less terrible, almost sleepy. The cold is intense, but at times that seems preferable to the feverish conversations inside the huts.
She comes across Gabriel, number one recipient of teacher scoldings and punishments. The outrageous ten-year-old redhead is wearing very wide pants that are way too big for him and held up with string, and a grease-spotted shirt that’s just as large. He’s leading a commando group of half a dozen boys his age.
He’s up to no good, Dita thinks to herself.
There’s another group of four-and five-year-olds, all holding hands, trailing along a few meters behind the commando group: old clothes, grubby faces, and innocent eyes sparkling like the newly fallen snow.
Gabriel is one of the idols of the little children in Block 31, thanks to his ability to dream up all sorts of mischief. Just this morning he threw a grasshopper at the head of a very pretentious girl called Marta Ková?, and the whole block was brought to a standstill by her hysterical screams. Even Gabriel stopped dead at her over-the-top reaction, which culminated in the girl planting herself in front of him and, in a fit of rage, slapping him so hard she almost wiped the freckles off his face.
The teacher in charge reached the conclusion that Talmudic justice had been served, and classes continued without further punishment for Gabriel beyond the one that had already been delivered by hand.
Usually when the little kids follow to watch his pranks, Gabriel tries to shake them off or scare them away. So Dita is surprised that he seems happy to have such a crowd tagging along behind him. She decides to follow them at a distance.
She sees them heading toward the camp’s exit, at which point she realizes where they’re going—the kitchen. Gabriel’s friends come to a halt a safe distance from the off-limits kitchen building, but Gabriel continues inside. The others gather around the door. What happens next reminds Dita of a scene from a comedy. Gabriel emerges at a run, followed by a very bad-tempered cook called Beata, who’s waving her arms like a windmill to scare off the flock of children as if they were birds.
Dita realizes they must have come to ask for potato peelings, one of the children’s favorite treats. But it seems the cook is fed up with freeloaders, and she’s decided to send them packing. Gabriel and the older children don’t retreat; rather, the boys split into two groups, leaving a corridor down which Gabriel and the angry cook make their way. Gabriel dodges to one side, and the cook almost slips and falls on a patch of ice. When she regains her balance, she finds herself confronted by the group of little children who’ve just arrived. They’re all still holding hands and breathing heavily because of the effort they’ve had to make to keep up with the older boys. Beata can’t avoid the sight of their permanently hungry expressions. Caught unawares by a herd of mud-and-snow-covered cherubs with imploring eyes in front of her, she stops waving her arms and puts her hands on her hips.
Dita can’t hear her, but she doesn’t have to. The cook has a strong personality, rough hands, and a tender heart. Dita smiles when she thinks of Gabriel’s cunning. He’s led the youngest children to that spot to soften up the cook. Beata is undoubtedly telling them in her strictest voice that she’s prohibited from handing over any leftovers without authorization, that if the Kapo catches her or any other kitchen hand doing so, they’ll lose their jobs and be severely punished, that this and that and blah, blah, blah.… The children keep looking at her with their doe eyes, so … she’ll make an exception this time, but they’d better not think of coming back, or she’ll beat them. Some of the children nod their heads in agreement, fully aware that they have her eating out of their hands.
The cook disappears inside the hut and comes back out a few minutes later with a metal bucket full of potato peelings. She puts a halt to the threat of a riot by holding up her large hand, making them come up one by one, starting with the youngest and ending with the oldest. Then they return to Block 31 chewing on their potato skins.
Dita heads back along the Lagerstrasse in a good mood, but halfway back, she bumps into her mother, who is looking unusually disheveled for someone who, even inside Auschwitz, has managed to get hold of an old bit of comb. Her mother always has her hair carefully arranged.
So Dita knows something is wrong. She runs to her mother, who gives her an uncharacteristically strong hug and tells Dita that when she went to meet her husband outside his workshop, he wasn’t there. A fellow worker, Mr. Brady, told her that he hadn’t come to work in the morning because he couldn’t get out of his bunk.
“Mr. Brady told me your father has a fever, but the Kapo said it was better not to take him to the hospital.”
Her mother is confused and doesn’t really know what to do.
“Maybe I should insist the Kapo send him to hospital.”
“Papa said that the Kapo in his hut is a German social democrat, not a Jew. He’s aloof, but quite fair. Maybe the hospital isn’t a good idea. The hospital is in front of Block Thirty-One.…”
Dita stops. She’s on the point of saying that the sick people she sees hobbling in usually come out on the corpse cart pushed by Mr. Lada and others. But she mustn’t speak of death; death must be kept far away from her father.
“We can’t even see him,” moans Dita’s mother. “We can’t go into the men’s huts. I asked Mr. Brady, who’s a very kind gentleman from Bratislava, to do me the favor of going inside to see him while I waited at the entrance, and then coming back out to tell me how he was.” She has to pause, overcome with emotion. Dita holds her hand. “Mr. Brady told me he’s no different from how he was this morning: semiconscious because of the fever. And that he looked bad. Edita, maybe your father should go to the hospital.”
“We’ll go and see him.”
“What are you saying? We can’t go inside the hut! It’s forbidden.”
“It’s also forbidden to lock people up and kill them, but I don’t see that stopping anyone around here. Wait for me at the entrance to the hut.”