“Don’t overdo it, Bohumila.”
And then the tone of voice gets louder.
“I’m not asking for me, stupid! I’m telling you that it’s the Kapo. If she doesn’t turn a blind eye and doesn’t let us use her cubicle, you’ll be left without your tasty morsel.”
Arkadiusz lowers his voice but he still sounds angry and menacing:
“We agreed on a ration of bread and ten cigarettes. You won’t get a crumb more from me. Split it up among you however you want.”
Even Dita hears the woman’s grumble.
“Everything would be settled with fifteen cigarettes.”
“I said that’s not possible.”
“Damned Polish moneylender! Fine, I’ll give the Kapo two more cigarettes from my commission. But if I lose my income and I can’t buy food on the black market, I’ll get sick. And who’s going to get you pretty young Jewish women? Then you’ll come crying to Aunt Bohumila, yes, indeed, and you’ll be sorry you were so pigheaded with me.”
And then there’s silence. When the exchanges are being finalized, there’s always a moment’s silence, as if the two parties need to concentrate in their own particular way. Arkadiusz takes out five cigarettes; Bohumila always asks for half in advance. The other part of the payment, the ration of bread, will be paid to the woman at the time of the rendezvous.
“I want to see the goods.”
“Wait.”
There’s silence again for a few minutes and then Dita hears the woman’s nasal voice again.
“Here it is.”
Dita can’t resist craning her neck and leaning forward a little, taking advantage of the shadows. She can make out the taller figure of the Pole and the bulky one of Bohumila, who doesn’t look the slightest bit undernourished. There’s also another woman, thinner, her head lowered and her hands in her lap.
The Pole lifts her skirt and gropes her intimate parts. Then he separates her arms and fondles her breasts, slowly kneading them while she stands motionless.
“She’s not very young…”
“Better—that way she knows what she has to do.”
Many of the women Bohumila recruits are mothers. They want the extra ration of bread because they can’t bear the sight of their children going hungry.
The Pole nods and leaves.
“Bohumila,” the woman whispers shyly, “this is a sin.”
The other woman looks at her with a fake look of seriousness.
“You shouldn’t worry about that, my dear. It’s God’s design—you have to earn your bread.”
And she bursts into obscene laughter. She leaves the latrines still laughing, with the woman trailing along behind her, head bowed.
Dita feels a bitter taste in her mouth. She can’t even escape back into the French Revolution and continue reading. She returns to her hut pale-faced, and as soon as her mother sees her come in, she abandons her conversation group while one of the women is midsentence and goes over to hug Dita. Just then, Dita is feeling small and vulnerable again. She’d like to spend the rest of her life in her mother’s arms.
The flood of trains into the Lager loaded with Hungarian Jews—147 freight trains in total, carrying 435,000 people—adds even more nervousness to the camp these days. There are always hordes of children close to the camp fence absorbed in the train arrival spectacle: disoriented people being yelled at, pushed around, stripped, beaten.
“Das ist Auschwitz–Birkenau!”
Their bewildered faces demonstrate that the name means nothing to them. Many won’t even learn where they are going to die.
Dita has no idea when the international observers will arrive and the window that Hirsch and Aunt Miriam talked about will open so that the truth can be shouted out. Nor does she know what hoops they’ll have to go through. If she closes her eyes, she sees Dr. Mengele and his blank expression waiting for her in his white lab coat next to a marble slab.
And yet despite this worry, Dita still can’t get Hirsch’s death out of her mind. They’ve told her he decided to give up, but despite the evidence, she refuses to believe it. No explanation has satisfied her, no doubt because none has been what she wants to hear. They tell her she’s stubborn—and they are right. The moment to give up may come, but she doesn’t want to, so she goes to Block 32, the medical block, prepared to play her last remaining card. They were the last people to see Fredy Hirsch still breathing; they heard his final words.
There’s a nurse folding sheets marked with repulsive-looking black rings at the entrance to the hospital.
“I wanted to see the doctors.”
“All of them, child?”
“One of them…”
“Are you ill? Have you informed your Kapo?”
“No, I don’t want them to treat me. I just want to consult them about something.”
“Tell me what’s wrong. I know by now how to treat everything that needs to be treated here.”
“It’s a question about something that happened with the September transport.”
The woman tenses and looks at her suspiciously.
“And what do you want to ask?”
“It’s about a person.”
“A member of your family?”
“Yes, my uncle. I think the September transport doctors who were in the quarantine camp attended to him before he died.”
The woman stares at her. Just then one of the doctors heads toward them; he’s wearing a white coat covered with yellow rings.
“Doctor, here’s a girl asking after someone from the September transport who she says was treated in the quarantine camp.”
The doctor has bags under his eyes and looks tired, but even so, he attempts a friendly smile.
“Who was it you say we treated in the quarantine camp?”
“His name was Hirsch. Fredy Hirsch.”
The smile disappears from his face as if a curtain had been closed. Suddenly, he becomes hostile.
“I’ve already repeated it a thousand times! There was nothing we could have done to save his life!”
“But what I wanted to—”
“We’re not gods! He turned blue; nobody could have done anything. We did what we had to do.”
Dita wants to ask him what Fredy said, but the doctor angrily turns and, clearly irritated, marches off without a good-bye.
“If you don’t mind, sweetheart, we have work to do.” And the nurse points to the door.
As she is leaving, Dita notices that someone is watching her. It’s a slim, long-legged boy she’s occasionally seen going in and out of the hospital block; he works as a messenger. She marches off angrily in search of Margit. She finds her delousing Helga at the back of the hut, so she sits down on a stone nearby.
“How are things, girls?”
“There are more lice since the May transports arrived.”
“It’s not their fault, Helga. There are more people, so there’s more of everything,” Margit replies in a conciliatory tone.
“More chaos, more racket…”
“Yes, but with God’s help, we’ll get through it,” says Margit in an attempt to cheer her up.
“I can’t take any more,” sobs Helga. “I want to leave. I want to go home.” Her sister begins to stroke her head rather than looking for lice.