Dita and Margit don’t say a word. To a Jew, a Nazi SS officer who acts as an executioner in an extermination camp … can it really be that he’s not a bad person? It’s hard to accept. And yet, every one of them has stood watching one of those immature young men dressed in his black uniform and high boots. And when they look into his eyes, they don’t see an executioner or a guard; they see a young man.
“Two patrol guards approached me this afternoon. They pointed at me and laughed. They told me that two days ago they arrested—well, those two pigs said he was my lover, but that’s a dirty lie. Anyway, they arrested him at O?wi?cim station.”
“Three kilometers from here! But he escaped almost two months ago! Why didn’t he hide farther away?”
Renée looks thoughtful for a moment. “I know why he was so close.”
“Was he hiding in the town all this time?”
“No, I’m sure he was coming from Prague. He came back to get me out of here—and my mother, of course, I’d never have gone without her. But they caught him.…”
The other two girls remain silent. Renée looks down. She regrets having been so honest with them. She turns and starts to walk back to her hut.
“Renée,” Dita calls after her. “That Viktor, maybe he wasn’t a bad person, after all.”
Renée takes her time in agreeing. In any event, she’ll no longer be able to find out.
Margit heads off to spend some time with her family, and Dita is left on her own. Today, there aren’t any inmates in the quarantine camp, and the neighboring camp on the other side, camp BIIc, is also temporarily empty, its occupants evacuated to where no one knows. It’s unusual for these two neighboring camps to be empty. And because of the unusually hot afternoon, people in the family camp are inside their huts. Dita pauses to take in the rare moment of silence.
Then she notices that someone is looking at her. A solitary figure in camp BIIc waves and gestures at her. It’s a prisoner, a teenager who must be carrying out some repairs. As she walks toward the fence on her side, taking a proper look, she sees that he’s wearing a newer striped suit than usually worn by the prisoners in the camps, and his beret is a sign that he belongs to the maintenance crew, a privileged group. She recalls Arkadiusz, the Pole who takes advantage of his assigned task of covering the barrack roofs with asphalt sheets to do deals in the latrines. His talent for carrying out all sorts of repairs gives him access to all the camps and, what’s even better, to improved food rations. That’s why the maintenance people are instantly recognizable, just like this one, by their healthy look.
Dita makes as if she’s leaving, but he gesticulates wildly, waving her closer. He seems pleasant enough and, between laughs, says a few words in Polish that Dita doesn’t understand. She only manages to decipher the word jabko, which means “apple” in Czech—a magic word. Anything that suggests food is magic.
“Jabko?”
He smiles and signals no with his finger.
“Not jabko … jajko!”
Dita feels a little disillusioned. It’s been so long since she tasted an apple that she’s almost forgotten what it’s like. She thinks they are sweet but a little tart, but what she remembers best is the crunch of their flesh. Her mouth waters. She has no idea what the boy is trying to saying to her. Maybe it’s nothing in particular and he just wants to flirt with her, but she’s determined to find out. It makes her a bit uncomfortable, but she’s not really bothered that older boys now notice her.
She’s frightened of the electric fence. She’s already seen several inmates walking with feverish resolve until they hit the fence and receive a lethal electric shock. After the first time, whenever Dita has seen someone heading toward the fence with that mad look in their eyes, she’s walked away as quickly as she can, away from the horrific cries. She’s never been able to forget that first spark, the frizzy hair of that sickly woman, her body suddenly turning black, the disagreeable smell of singed flesh, the wisps of smoke rising from the charred body.
She really dislikes approaching the fence, but hunger is like a worm that never stops gnawing your innards. It can barely be soothed at night with a piece of bread and a hint of margarine and, if she’s not lucky enough to catch something floating in her soup, it has to wait another twenty-four hours before something solid hits her stomach. Dita isn’t prepared to miss any chance of putting something in her belly, even if she doesn’t understand what the Polish boy is saying.
To avoid attracting the attention of the soldiers in the towers, Dita gestures for the boy to wait and goes into the latrine barrack. She races through the revolting hut and comes out the back door. She’s now at the back of the building, close to the fence. She’s scared she’ll find bodies on the ground, because that’s where they usually bring the people who have died during the night, but the area is clear. The Polish boy has a hooked nose, and his ears stick out like fans. He’s not very handsome, but he has such a cheerful smile that Dita finds him cute. He, in turn, signals to her to wait a moment and goes back inside the rear of his hut as if he were in search of something.
The only person visible in that back part of BIIb is a gaunt prisoner who has lit a fire a few huts away and is burning bundles of ragged clothes. Dita doesn’t know if he has been ordered to burn them because they are infested with lice or because they belonged to someone who died of a contagious disease. Either way, handling infected rags isn’t a great job, but it’s better than many others. From a distance he looks like an old man, but he’s probably not even forty yet.
While she waits for the carpenter boy to return, she keeps herself entertained by watching the ragged clothes burn, shrinking and twisting in the flames before they disintegrate in a puff of smoke. And at that very moment, she senses a presence behind her. When she turns around, the tall black figure of Dr. Mengele is standing two paces away from her. He’s not whistling; he’s not making any sound or movement. He’s just looking at her. Maybe he followed her here. Maybe he thinks the Polish boy is a contact from the Resistance. The man burning the clothes rises and scurries off. At last, she’s on her own with Mengele.
She wonders how she’ll explain the pockets on the inside of her dress when they do a body search. Or if it’s really worth justifying anything. Mengele doesn’t interrogate his prisoners; he’s interested only in their internal organs.
The medical captain says nothing. Dita feels compelled to apologize for her presence at the fence:
“Ich wollte mit dem Mann dort sprechen—” I wanted to speak with the man who’s over there.
She speaks without much conviction. The man is no longer by the fire.