The guards move on. Dita’s arm is getting tired, but she pulls the books into her chest even more tightly. They stop at the group beside hers, and the Priest lifts his chin, ordering a man out of the line.
It’s the first time Dita has paid any attention to Professor Morgenstern, an inoffensive-looking man who, based on the folds of skin under his chin, must once have been chubby. He has close-cropped white hair and wears a faded, patched jacket that is too big for him. A pair of round glasses sit in front of his myopic beaver-like eyes. Dita has difficulty hearing what the Priest is saying to him, but she sees Professor Morgenstern hold the spectacles out to him. The Priest takes them and examines them; inmates aren’t allowed to keep any personal effects, though glasses for a shortsighted person are no luxury. Even so, the Priest examines them carefully before holding them back out for the old man. When the teacher reaches for them, they fall, smashing against a stool before landing on the floor.
“Clumsy idiot!” the sergeant yells at him.
Professor Morgenstern calmly bends to pick up the broken glasses. He begins to straighten, but a pair of wrinkled origami birds fall from his pocket and he bends again to retrieve them. As he reaches down, his glasses fall to the ground again. The Priest observes this clumsiness with barely contained irritation. Angrily, he turns on his heel and continues the inspection. Mengele misses nothing as he watches from the front of the hut.
Dita senses the SS approach, though she does not look. They stop in front of her group, the Priest directly opposite Dita, not more than four or five paces away. She sees the girls trembling. The sweat on her shoulders is icy cold. There’s nothing she can do: Her height makes her stick out, and she’s the only one not standing to attention, clearly gripping something with one arm. The Priest’s eye is ruthless, inescapable. He’s one of those Nazis who, like Hitler, is intoxicated by hatred.
Though she looks straight ahead, Dita feels the Priest’s gaze piercing her, and fear forms a lump in her throat. She needs air; she’s suffocating. She hears a male voice, and she’s already preparing herself to step out from the middle of the group.
It’s all over—
But not yet. It’s not the voice of the Priest, but a much more timid one. It’s the voice of Professor Morgenstern.
“Excuse me, Sergeant, sir, do you give me permission to go back to my place in the line? If it’s all right with you, of course—otherwise I’ll stay here until you give me the order. The last thing I’d want to do is to cause you any kind of trouble.…”
The Priest looks angrily at the insignificant little man who has dared to address him without permission. The old professor has put his glasses back on, cracked lens and all, and still standing out of line, he looks dopily toward the SS officer.
The Priest strides toward him, and the guards follow behind. For the first time, he raises his voice.
“Stupid old Jewish imbecile! If you’re not back in line in three seconds, I’ll shoot you!”
“At your service, whatever you order,” the professor replies meekly. “I beg you to forgive me, I had no intention of being a nuisance. It’s just that I preferred to ask rather than committing an act of insubordination that might be contrary to the rules, because I don’t like behaving in an inconvenient manner, and it’s my wish to serve you in the most fitting way—”
“Back in line, idiot!”
“Yes, sir. At your orders, sir. Forgive me once again. It wasn’t my intention to interrupt, rather—”
“Shut your mouth, before I put a bullet in your head!” yells the Nazi, beside himself.
The professor, bowing his head in an exaggerated manner, steps backward, returning to his group. The enraged Priest does not notice that his guards are now behind him, and as he turns abruptly, he barrels into them. It’s a spectacular scene: Nazis bounce off each other like billiard balls. Some of the children laugh quietly, and the teachers, alarmed, elbow them to be quiet.
The sergeant looks to Mengele, who despises nothing more than incompetence, before he angrily thrusts his men aside and resumes the inspection. As he walks in front of Dita’s row, she clenches her numb arm. And her teeth. In his agitation, the Priest thinks he’s already inspected this group and moves on to the next. There are more shouts, more shoves, the odd search … and the soldiers move slowly away from Dita.
The librarian can breathe again, though the danger has not passed: The guards remain in the hut. Her arm aches from holding it in the same position for so long. To distract herself from the pain, she thinks of how fate brought her to Block 31.
*
It was December when Dita and her family arrived in Auschwitz. On their very first morning in the camp, before the morning roll call, her mother bumped into an acquaintance from Terezín, Mrs. Turnovská, who had owned a fruit shop in Zlín. The encounter was a small joy amidst the misery. Mrs. Turnovská told Dita’s mother of the barrack-school for children. There, they held roll call under cover, out of the wet and cold, each morning. There, they didn’t have to work all day. Even the food rations were a little better.
When her mother said that Edita was fourteen—just a year too old to join the school—Mrs. Turnovská told her that the director of the school had convinced the Germans he needed a few assistants to help maintain order in the hut. In this way, he’d taken on a few children aged fourteen to sixteen. Mrs. Turnovská, who seemed to know everything, knew the deputy director, Miriam Edelstein, from her hut.
The women found Miriam walking quickly along the Lagerstrasse, the camp’s main avenue, which stretched from one end to the other. Miriam was in a rush and in a bad mood; things hadn’t gone at all well for her since her family’s transfer from the Terezín ghetto, where her husband, Yakub, had been chairman of the Jewish Council. When they arrived at the camp, he was put with the political prisoners in Auschwitz I.
Mrs. Turnovská sang Dita’s virtues, but before she could finish, Miriam Edelstein cut her off: “The quota for assistants has been filled, and many people before you have asked me for the same favor.” With that, Miriam set off in a great hurry.
But just as she was about to disappear down the Lagerstrasse, she stopped, then returned to the spot where she had left the women. They had not moved.
“Did you say that this girl speaks perfect Czech and German, and that she reads very well?”