“Well, call him what you will, but Hirsch’s file says he was born in Aachen in North Rhine–Westphalia. As far as I know, that’s in Germany.”
Schwarzhuber gives Mengele a fiery look. Mengele can read his thoughts—his superior finds his impertinence intolerable—but Mengele’s not worried, because he can also detect his superior’s mistrust. Schwarzhuber knows that he has to tread carefully, because Mengele has powerful friends in Berlin. There’s a flash of malice in his eyes, as if he’s licking his lips in anticipation of the moment when Mengele’s lucky star will fade and Schwarzhuber can allow himself the pleasure of crushing him. But Mengele smiles affably; he knows that moment will never arrive. He’s always a step ahead of these military men who, in reality, have understood nothing and have no idea why they are at war. Mengele does know. He’s fighting to turn himself into a celebrity. First, he’ll head up the DFG, the German Research Foundation, and then he’ll change the course of medical history. The course of humanity, ultimately. Josef Mengele knows he’s not a humble man; he leaves that to the weak.
History will teach Mengele a lesson. That the greatest weakness of all is precisely that of the strong: They end up believing they are invincible. So the strength of the Third Reich is also its fragility. Believing it is indestructible, it will open so many battlefronts that it will end up collapsing. The planes of the Allies are already starting to circle over Auschwitz, and the first bombardments can be heard in the distance.
Nobody avoids weakness. Not even the invincible Fredy Hirsch.
It happens a few days later. When the last activities of the afternoon are over and the hut starts to empty, Dita hurries to gather her books. She wraps them up in a piece of material to protect them from the soil in the hidey-hole and walks over to Hirsch’s cubicle to stow them away. She wants to get back to her mother quickly, to keep her company.
She knocks on Hirsch’s door and hears him giving her permission to come in. She finds him, as usual, sitting in the cubicle’s only chair, but this time he isn’t working on a report. His arms are crossed, and he’s staring blankly into space. Something inside him has changed.
She accesses the wooden trapdoor hidden under a pile of folded blankets and fits the books into the space. She works speedily so she can leave quickly without disturbing Hirsch too much. But as she turns around to leave, she hears his voice behind her.
“Edita…”
Hirsch sounds unhurried, perhaps a little tired, and lacking that energy which inspires his young listeners when he gives his pep talks. When she faces the athlete, what she sees is a man who is unexpectedly exhausted.
“You know something? Maybe, when all this is over, I won’t go to the Promised Land.”
Dita looks at him, mystified, and Fredy smiles benevolently at her reaction. It’s logical, he thinks, that she wouldn’t understand. He’s spent years putting all his effort into explaining to young people that they should feel proud to be Jews and should prepare themselves to return to the land of Zion, where they can use the Golan Heights as a springboard to be closer to God.
“Look, the people here … what are they? Zionists? Anti-Zionists? Atheists? Communists?” A sigh blurs his words momentarily. “And who cares? If you look more carefully, all you can see is people, nothing more. Fragile, corruptible people. Capable of the best and the worst.”
And Dita struggles to hear some of his words, which, like the earlier ones, Hirsch is addressing to himself rather than to her:
“Everything that was important now strikes me as insignificant.”
He falls silent again and gazes into space—which is what we do when we want to look inside ourselves. Dita doesn’t understand a thing. She doesn’t understand why a man who has fought so hard to return to the Promised Land has suddenly lost all interest in going there. She’d like to ask him, but he’s no longer looking at her; he’s not there anymore. She decides to leave him alone in his labyrinth and depart without making a sound.
She’ll understand later, but right at that moment, she’s incapable of seeing in his change of heart that rare moment of clarity that comes to people when they find themselves on a cliff-edge of life. From the top of the precipice, everything looks incredibly small.
Dita glances at the table. The papers lying on it are in Hirsch’s hand, but when she looks at them more carefully, she realizes they aren’t reports or administrative notes, but poems. Lying on top of them, like a rock that has come loose and crushed everything, is a sheet of paper bearing the letterhead of the camp’s command headquarters. She only has time to read one word on it written in bold: Transfer.
News of the transfer has already reached the office of the registrar in the quarantine camp, Rudi Rosenberg. The six-month deadline for the September transport has been reached and, as forecast on the file, the Germans are setting in motion the “special treatment.”
That’s why, as he waits anxiously for Alice to meet him at the fence, he buttons the jacket he acquired on the black market all the way to the top. He can’t stop moving.
The day before, he’d asked Alice for her help in carrying out the assignment Schmulewski has given him, to find out exactly how many people there are in the family camp’s Resistance cell. The Resistance operates so secretly that the collaborators themselves often don’t know one another. This afternoon, Rudi has learned that even Alice herself is linked to the Resistance through a friend.
Schmulewski says little, rarely more than half a dozen words. It’s part of his technique for survival. Whenever he’s asked for further explanation or someone reproaches him for his lack of speech, he replies that a criminal lawyer friend once told him that mute people reach old age. But Rudi had found him especially bleak and, moved by his anguish, couldn’t avoid asking him if the signs were bad. His words—always few, always veiled—were “Things are going badly.”
By “things,” he means the family camp.