“The block chief has ordered me to report to him immediately.”
The Kapo is a German with the badge of the common prisoners. He gives Rudi a quick look in the midst of the surrounding maelstrom, recognizes him, and stops his club in midflight. He gestures at a soldier with a submachine gun, and they let him leave. A man who grabs hold of Rudi’s jacket and tries to leave with him is hit in the ribs with the submachine gun. Rudi hears him pleading, but he doesn’t turn around. He walks away, trying to feign indifference, but his legs almost collapse under him.
As he walks to his hut, he hears the noise of the shouts, the orders, the sobs, the truck doors slamming shut, the engines moving off. He thinks about Alice. He remembers her doe eyes looking at him for the last time, and shakes his head as if he wants to shake off the memory so that it won’t weigh him down. He continues on his way, walking quickly, and finally reaches his room and shuts himself inside.
There’s no documentary evidence to indicate if Rudi Rosenberg cried.
*
Dita is still awake in her bunk, as are all the women. It’s so quiet you can even hear the sound of brakes squealing again and again on the damp ground and trucks coming to a halt with their engines still running. More and more trucks.
And then the night explodes. Shouts, whistles, sobs, pleas, cries to an absent God erupt in the camp next door. And then the sound of truck doors being slammed is heard again, immediately followed by the screech of metal bolts. Cries of panic have given way to the sound of sobs and pitiful moans, the sound of hundreds of voices intermingling in a confused storm of screams.
Nobody sleeps in the family camp. Nobody speaks; nobody moves. In Dita’s hut, when someone anxiously asks, “What’s happening? What will happen to them?” in a loud voice, the other women, irritated, quickly tell her to be quiet and demand total silence. They have to keep listening so they know exactly what’s happening, or maybe they want complete silence so the SS officers won’t hear them, won’t notice them, and will let them stay alive on their filthy bunks—at least for a little longer.
The metallic bang of truck doors rings out and the sound of the voices dies down. The rumble of the engines suggests that the first lot of loaded trucks is moving off. And then Dita, her mother, and all the other occupants of the hut think they can hear music—perhaps a hallucination produced by their own distress. But then the sound grows in volume.
“Is that voices singing?”
The chorus is drowning out the growl of the trucks. A perplexed voice says it out loud, and other voices repeat it, as if they find it so hard to believe that they have to tell everyone else, or themselves, about it—“They are singing! The male and female prisoners being taken away in the trucks to die are singing!”
They can make out the Czech national anthem, “Kde Domov M?j?”—Where Is My Home?—and as another truck goes by, it carries the notes of the Jewish anthem, “Hatikvah,” while from yet another truck, “The Internationale” can be heard. The music inevitably sounds broken, like a fugue, and diminishes as the trucks move away. The voices shrink until they disappear. On this night, thousands of voices are switched off forever.
During the night of March 8, 1944, 3,792 prisoners from the family camp BIIb were gassed and then incinerated in Crematorium III of Auschwitz–Birkenau.
20.
The next morning, Dita doesn’t need to wait for the yells of the Kapo to wake her, because she hasn’t managed to get to sleep. Her mother gives her a kiss, and then Dita jumps off her bunk and sets off to Block 31 for roll call, as she does every day. Except this isn’t a day like all the others; half the people who used to be with her have gone and won’t return.
Despite the risk of attracting the attention of some Kapo or guard, Dita turns off the Lagerstrasse and heads for the rear of the huts closest to the fence. She looks over into the quarantine camp with the remote hope of finding someone alive. But there’s nothing moving among the huts of camp BIIa, except for the odd scrap of material torn from some piece of clothing fluttering on the ground.
Nothing remains of the shouts from the previous night; just a thick silence. The camp is deserted. It’s as quiet as a cemetery. The ground is strewn with trampled hats, an abandoned coat, and empty bowls. The head from one of the clay dolls the children made in Block 31 peeps out from among the other objects. Dita spies something white lying on top of the mud: a wrinkled scrap of paper. She closes her eyes to stop herself from looking at it any longer. It’s one of Professor Morgenstern’s origami birds, trampled and crushed in the mud.
And that’s exactly how Dita feels.
Seppl Lichtenstern has been charged with carrying out the roll call this morning under the impassive gaze of an SS guard, but once the guard leaves the hut, everyone relaxes a little. The children have spent the whole time looking from side to side for those who are missing. No matter how much the daily roll call normally irritates the children, its brevity this morning has shattered them.
Dita heads outside to escape the feeling of oppression in the barrack. But although dawn broke a short time ago, something is darkening the atmosphere. The breeze is carrying a dry rain that is making everything dirty. Ash. A black snowfall the likes of which has never been seen before.
The people working in the ditches look skyward. Those hauling stones leave them on the ground and come to a standstill. The people in the workshops stop laboring, despite the yells of the Kapos, and go outside to look, in what could be their first act of rebellion—looking up at the black sky, indifferent to orders and threats.
Night seems suddenly to have returned.
“My God! What is it?” someone asks.
“It’s God’s curse!” cries another.
Dita looks up, and her face, hands, and dress are spotted with tiny gray flakes that disintegrate between her fingers. The inhabitants of Block 31 come outside to see what’s going on.
“What’s happening?” asks a frightened little girl.
“Don’t be afraid,” says Miriam Edelstein to the children. “It’s our friends from the September transport. They’re returning.”
Children and teachers crowd together in silence. Many of them quietly pray. Dita cups her hands so she can catch some of that rain of souls, unable to hold back her tears, which form white furrows down her blackened face. Miriam Edelstein is hugging her son, Arieh, and Dita joins them.
“They’ve come back, Dita. They’ve come back.”
They’ll never leave Auschwitz again.