The bricks used to construct this story are facts, and they are held together in these pages with a mortar of fiction. The real name of the librarian of Block 31, whose life has inspired these pages, was Dita Poláchová. Ota Keller, the young teacher in the novel, is based on the person who would become Dita’s husband, the teacher Ota Kraus.
A brief mention of the existence of a minuscule library in a concentration camp made by Alberto Manguel in his book The Library at Night was the point of departure for my journalistic investigation, which gave rise to this book.
There are those who don’t share my fascination for discovering why certain people risked their lives to run a secret school and clandestine library in Auschwitz–Birkenau. There are those who might think that this was an act of useless bravery in an extermination camp when there were other, more pressing concerns—books don’t cure illnesses; they can’t be used as weapons to defeat an army of executioners; they don’t fill your stomach or quench your thirst. It’s true: Culture isn’t necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water. It’s also true that with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies. If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: Nothing significant distinguishes them from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.
There’s a great deal of information about Auschwitz on the internet, but it only talks about the place. If you want a place to speak to you, you have to go there and stay long enough to hear what it has tell you. In order to find some trace of the family camp or some track to follow, I traveled to Auschwitz. I needed not only quantitative data and dates, but to feel the vibration of that accursed place.
I flew to Kraków, and from there I took a train to O?wi?cim (Auschwitz). Nothing in that small, peaceful city hints at the horror experienced on its outskirts. Everything is so normal, and you can even get to the camp entrance by bus.
Auschwitz I has a parking lot for buses and a museum-like entrance. It used to be a Polish army barracks, and the pleasant, rectangular brick buildings separated by wide, paved avenues—complete with pecking birds—give no indication, at first sight, of the horror. But there are various pavilions you can go into. One of them has been designed like an aquarium: You walk along a dark corridor lined with huge illuminated fish tanks. They contain worn-out shoes, mountains—thousands—of them. Two tons of human hair form a dark sea. Dirty prostheses resemble broken toys. And there are thousands of pairs of broken glasses, almost all of them with round frames like the ones Morgenstern wore.
The family camp, BIIb, is three kilometers away, at Auschwitz–Birkenau. The phantasmagorical watchtower at the entrance to the Lager still stands, with a tunnel at its base that was used from 1944 onward to allow the railway line to run right into the camp. The original huts were burned after the war. There are a few reconstructed ones you can go inside: They are horse stables, which seem gloomy even when they are clean and well-ventilated. Behind this first line of huts, which are in what would have been the quarantine camp, BIIa, there is an immense expanse of waste ground that originally contained the rest of the camps. To see the spot that BIIb occupied in its day, you have to abandon the route of the guided tour, which doesn’t go beyond the first row of replica huts, and skirt the entire perimeter. You have to be on your own. Walking through Auschwitz–Birkenau in solitude means enduring a very cold wind that carries echoes of the voices of those who remained there forever and became part of the mud present-day visitors walk on. All that’s left of BIIb is the metal door at the entrance to the camp and an intensely solitary space where even bushes barely grow. Only cobblestones, wind, and silence remain. A tranquil or ghostly place—it depends how much the eyes looking at it know.
I returned from that trip with many questions and almost no answers; some sense of what the Holocaust was that no history book could teach me; and, completely by chance, a copy of an important book: Je me suis évadé d’Auschwitz, the French translation of Rudolf Rosenberg’s memoir, I Cannot Forgive, which I found in the bookstore at the Shoah (Holocaust) Museum in Kraków.
There was another book that particularly interested me and which I started to track down as soon as I got home. It was a novel set in the family camp, with the title The Painted Wall, written by someone called Ota Kraus. There was a website where the book could be purchased and sent to you, cash-on-delivery. It wasn’t a very professional website: You couldn’t pay with a credit card, but there was a contact address. I wrote to the address, expressing my interest in the book and asking how payment should be made. And then I received one of those emails that prove to be a crossroads in your life. The reply, very polite, was that I could send the money via Western Union; there was an address in Netanya, Israel, and the message was signed D. Kraus.
With all the tact I could muster, I asked if she was Dita Kraus, the girl who had been in the family camp at Auschwitz–Birkenau. She was. The librarian of Block 31 was alive and was writing an email to me! Life is full of surprises, but sometimes, it can be truly extraordinary.
Dita was not so young anymore—at that stage she was eighty—but she was still the same passionate and tenacious person she had always been, who was now battling to ensure that her husband’s books were not forgotten.
From that moment, we began to correspond. Her incredible kindness helped us to understand each other despite my poor English. Eventually, we agreed to meet in Prague, where she spent a few weeks every year, and she took me to visit the Terezín ghetto. Dita is not one of those old-style, placid grandmothers. She’s a friendly whirlwind, who immediately found accommodation for me close to her apartment and organized everything. When I arrived at the Hotel T?íska’s reception desk, she was already waiting for me on one of the sofas in the lobby. She was exactly as I had imagined her: thin, restless, active, at once serious and cheerful, totally charming.