March 7, 1944
Rudi Rosenberg watches as the 3,800 September transport prisoners from the family camp arrive at the quarantine camp, BIIa. The news Schmulewski has given him is horrifying. Anyone would be deeply depressed by it. But Rudi is searching for one thing among the columns of prisoners: the slender figure of his girlfriend, Alice. Finally, their eyes meet and their smiles of satisfaction rise above the anguish. Once all the prisoners have been assigned to huts, the Nazis allow the inmates to move freely about the camp. In his room, Rudi gets together with Alice and her two Resistance friends, Vera and Helena.
Helena tells him that most of the prisoners seem to have accepted the official story—that they’ll be transferred to a more northerly camp located close to Warsaw.
Vera has a shrill voice that makes her emaciated face seem even more birdlike.
“Some of the important representatives of the camp’s Jewish community think that the Germans won’t dare exterminate the children because they’re scared that word would spread.”
Rosenberg has no alternative but to pass on Schmulewski’s impressions from this morning, which are grimmer and more to the point than ever:
“He told me there wasn’t much time left, and he believed they could all die tomorrow.”
Rudi’s words are met with complete silence. The women understand that the head of the Resistance knows the facts better than anyone because he has an extensive network of spies throughout Auschwitz. Nervousness gives rise to all sorts of rumors, half rumors, wishes, ideas, fantasies.…
“And if the war were to end tonight?”
Helena momentarily recovers her cheerfulness.
“If the war ended tonight and I returned to Prague, the first thing I’d do is go to my mother’s house and eat a bowl of goulash the size of a barrel.”
“I’d climb into the saucepan with a loaf of bread and leave it so clean that I could then use it as a mirror to pluck my eyebrows.”
They start to sniff the aroma of the spicy stew and sigh with happiness. And then they return to reality and the smell of fear. They try to reorder their thoughts again in an attempt come up with something positive in such a densely black outlook, some tiny detail they’ve overlooked that would provide a satisfactory explanation for everything. A nail on which they can hang their hopes—and their lives.
The only additional information Rudi can provide, because as registrar he’s seen the transport lists, is that nine people in total from the September transport will be left behind in the family camp: the two sets of twins whom Dr. Mengele has reserved for his experiments; three doctors and a pharmacist who have accompanied the transferees to the quarantine camp, whom Mengele has also claimed; and the mistress of Mr. Willy, the camp Kapo. All the others will receive the special treatment specified in the Nazi plan laid out when they arrived in September.
Rudi’s information is, in fact, incorrect. There are more people on the “not to be transferred” list, but things are too confusing at this stage, although all will be revealed in due course. After an hour of exhaustive reflection that leads nowhere, they’re so weary they fall silent.
Vera and Helena leave, and Rudi and Alice find themselves alone. For the first time, no barbed wire comes between them, no guards in towers with guns at their shoulders watch them, and no chimneys remind them of the degradation that surrounds them. They look at each other for a moment, shyly and with some awkwardness at first, and then more and more intensely. They’re young and they’re beautiful, full of life and plans and desires and an urgency to drink their fill of the present moment. And as they gaze again at each other, with the spark of desire well alight in their eyes, they feel that their happiness insulates them, that it takes them to another place and that nothing can snatch this moment from them.
For the time this dream lasts, as he hugs Alice’s body, Rudi believes that his happiness is so complete nothing can destroy it. He falls asleep thinking that when he wakes up, all evil will have been erased and that life will flow again as it did before the war—roosters will crow at dawn, and there’ll be a smell of freshly baked bread and the sound of the milkman’s cheerful bicycle bell. But the next day dawns, and nothing has been erased; Birkenau’s menacing landscape remains intact. He’s still too young to know that happiness cannot conquer anything—it’s too fragile.
Rudi is woken abruptly by an agitated voice, and it feels as if a window inside his head has exploded into a million pieces. It’s Helena, and she’s extremely worried. She tells him Schmulewski is looking for him urgently; the whole camp is overrun with SS soldiers, and something really serious is about to happen. Rudi tries to put on his boots as Helena, almost hysterical, tugs at his arm and practically drags him from his bed, while Alice dozes on between the sheets, desperately clinging a little longer to her dreams.
“For God’s sake, Rudi, hurry up! There’s no time, there’s no time!”
As soon as Rudi steps outside, he too senses that something’s not right. There are lots of SS guards—he’s never seen so many before—which suggests they’ve asked for special reinforcements from other detachments. It doesn’t look like the routine procedure for escorting a contingent of prisoners to a train for a regular transfer. He’s got to see Schmulewski right away. There’s no question that he’d prefer not to see him, not to listen to what he has to say, but he must go and meet him in camp BIId. Given his rank, he has no difficulty in exiting the quarantine camp on the pretext that he has to pick up some bread rations that are missing.
The Resistance leader’s face isn’t a face anymore—it’s a confusion of wrinkles and bags under his eyes. He doesn’t beat around the bush anymore. His words aren’t discreet or cautious anymore: They’re razor-sharp.
“The people transferred from the family camp die today,” he says with no hesitation.
“You mean there’ll be a selection? You mean they want to get rid of the old people, the sick, and the children?”
“No, Rudi. Everybody! The young Jewish male prisoners forced to help with the disposal of gas chamber victims have received orders to prepare the ovens tonight for four thousand people.”
And almost without pausing, he adds, “There’s no time for regret, Rudi. It’s time to rebel.”
Schmulewski is under a great deal of strain, but his words are absolutely precise, perhaps because he’s rehearsed and repeated them dozens of times throughout his long night of insomnia.