“They arrested our sublieutenant as well, and I was really sorry because he was a good person apart from his fixation with coconuts…”
Lieutenant Dub glares furiously at the childlike face of the good soldier ?vejk and angrily asks him:
“Do you know me?”
“Yes, sir, I know you.”
Lieutenant Dub’s eyes are popping out of his head. He starts to stamp his feet and roar:
“No, you don’t know me yet.”
And ?vejk answers in his sweet, deliberate way:
“Yes, I know you, sir. You belong to our battalion.”
“I’m telling you that you still don’t know me!” the lieutenant yells again, beside himself. “You may know my good side, but when you get to know my bad side you’ll shake with fright: I’m tough and I make people cry. So, do you, or do you not, know me?”
“Of course I know you, sir.”
“I’m telling you for the last time that you don’t know me, you ass. Do you have any brothers?”
“At your service, sir; I have one.”
At the sight of ?vejk’s guileless face and good-natured expression, the lieutenant becomes furious and shouts even louder:
“So your brother will be an animal just like you; he must be a complete idiot.”
“Yes, sir, a complete idiot.”
“And what does your complete idiot of a brother do?”
“He was a teacher, and when he was called up because of
the war, they made him a lieutenant.”
Lieutenant Dub looks daggers at ?vejk, who’s watching him with a kindhearted look on his face. Red with rage, Dub yells at him to get lost.
Some children laugh. From the back of the hut, Miriam Edelstein peeks out through her fingers. Dita continues to read more unexpected events and adventures of that soldier who, by pretending to be a fool, ridicules war, any war. Miriam looks up at her librarian. That small book with its stories has managed to bring the whole hut together.
When Dita shuts her book, the children stand up and move about again, even running around the hut. Life has been reconnected. Dita caresses the old spine of the book which has been sewn back together with thread, and she feels happy because she knows that Fredy would be proud of her. She has fulfilled the promise she made to him: to keep going and never give up. A veil of sadness nevertheless falls over her. Why did he give up?
21.
Mengele walks through the entrance to the family camp accompanied by the sound of Wagner’s Valkyries and a blast of cold. He studies everything that moves around him. He appears to have X-ray eyes. He looks as if he’s searching for something, or someone, but Dita is inside Block 31. She’s safe there … at least for now.
They say that one of the deeds most celebrated by Rudolf H?ss, the former Kommandant of Auschwitz, was the way in which, toward the end of 1943, Mengele put a stop to a serious outbreak of typhus that was already affecting seven thousand women. The fever was out of control because the huts were infested with lice. But Mengele came up with a solution. He ordered an entire hut of six hundred women to be sent to the gas chamber and then had their hut disinfected from top to bottom. Bathtubs with disinfection kits were placed outdoors and all the women from the next hut were ordered to go through disinfection before being sent into the clean hut. Then the hut they had been occupying was disinfected, and this procedure was followed with all the women in the camp. And that was how Mengele succeeded in putting an end to the epidemic.
High command congratulated the doctor. They even wanted to give him a medal. This was the criterion that governed his behavior: Global results and scientific advancement were fundamental; the human lives abandoned in his wake were unimportant.
A senior sergeant brings him his twins. The children approach somewhat timidly and greet him in chorus with, “Good day, Uncle Pepi.” He smiles at them, ruffles little Irene’s hair, and they all head off to his quarters in Camp F, which the SS guards refer to as the Zoo when Mengele isn’t around.
Several pathologists work there under Mengele’s orders. The children have good food, clean sheets, and even toys and treats. But whenever they go inside that place with the doctor, their parents’ hearts seem to stop beating until they return. So far, these children have always returned happy, with a bun in their pocket as a reward, and tales of being measured all over, having their blood tested, and being given the occasional injection, after which the doctor always gives them a candy bar.
Other children haven’t been so lucky. Mengele has been researching the effects of illness on twins; in the Gypsy camp, he injected various sets of twins with typhus to see how they reacted, and then he killed them so he could carry out autopsies to study the evolution of the organism in each twin.
But this time, Mengele strokes the heads of his twins and even smiles affectionately at them as he says good-bye.
“Don’t forget Uncle Pepi!” he tells them, because he has no intention of forgetting them.
Forgetting is not a choice. Days of funereal routine have gone by in Auschwitz, but Dita can’t forget. Actually, she doesn’t want to forget. Fredy Hirsch suddenly turned off the tap of his life, but a question persistently drips onto her head and bores into her brain: Why?
She continues to perform her duties as librarian—managing her books at the end of each lesson—but she has withdrawn into herself. She’s pleased to see how Block 31 keeps going despite everything. Nevertheless, perhaps because there are fewer of them, everything seems smaller, more commonplace even, since Hirsch has gone.
Dita’s assistant today is a very likeable boy who’s even handsome, with a sprinkling of cinnamon-colored freckles over his face. She might have tried to be friendlier toward him on another occasion, as there aren’t too many good-looking boys around, but she barely responds when he tries to start a conversation. Her mind is somewhere else.
She continues to work over in her head the question of why Hirsch took his own life.
It’s not like him.
Given everything he’d put up with and how disciplined he was—his personality was a combination of German and Jewish traits—running away from his responsibilities seems abnormal. Dita shakes her head, and the sway of her hair back and forth duplicates that no—there’s a piece missing from the puzzle. Fredy told her they were soldiers and they had to fight to the end. How is it possible that he would abandon his post? No, it doesn’t fit with Fredy Hirsch’s logic. He was a soldier. He had a mission. It’s true he was more melancholy than usual when she saw him that last afternoon, more fragile, maybe. He probably knew that the transfer bore all the signs of ending badly. But she doesn’t understand why he committed suicide. And Dita can’t bear not being able to understand something. She’s stubborn, as her mother always tells her. And her mother is right: Dita is one of those people who never leave a jigsaw puzzle unfinished.