The Birthday Buyer (6 page)

Here is the eyewitness account of Yuri Chanicheverov, the nineteen-year-old Russian soldier who reached the Main Camp on the first day of March 1945 and looked through the window of the barrack where Hurbinek and the other sickly people were lodged.

“I had left the route the patrol was following. I couldn’t deal with all those who were coming up to me and asking in Russian and Polish whether I’d come to execute or liberate them. They couldn’t decide one way or the other when they saw I was armed. I stumbled over several bodies that were scattered here and there on the ashen ground. Some still flickered with life, breathed in short bursts, clinging to other inert bodies, skinny as starving dogs. That’s when I wandered off and found myself opposite a window of a shack. Of all the horror we saw in that place, the unburied or half-buried corpses, the lunatics who walked by screaming hysterically, or the living dead who roamed as far as the barbed wire fences, and then threw themselves at them in order to keep standing, it was the inside of that shack crammed with sick people on rickety bunks that made the deepest impression on me. I could hear them moaning inside. They were frozen stiff, wrapped in blankets that stank as much as they did. The unpleasant smell hit me from the other side of the window. Immediately beneath the window I could see a child who filled no more than two or three palm-lengths of his bed. His face was tiny and sunken but his eyes bulged wide open. He was about to die at any second, or so it seemed, because he was surrounded by two other young people who were looking at him sorrowfully and holding his hands. He breathed anxiously, made a constant, hoarse noise, a forlorn moan, and kept shaking from pain that was beyond cure. His suffering was so awful in my eyes that I imagined how his little body that had almost ceased to exist contained all the horrors I had seen so far. I have never forgotten him and that day I think I learned once and for all the stark difference between pity and evil.”

The nurse has switched off the light and gone. The room is now in shadows and perhaps it is time for a snooze, I’m not sure, but the nurse has given me a sedative. The fact is my legs were really hurting, the pain almost made me shout out. I miss Fanny and the children. I haven’t alarmed them too much: it was quite a minor accident. I am really missing my life before I entered this hospital. But I tell myself to be patient and try to put my situation into perspective. They’ll soon come to get me and I’ll soon be home.

Nevertheless, I was going to Auschwitz, but not anymore.

I think about surviving, the very fact that I have passed by the gateway to death but not entered. Survival creates a degree of confusion, of bewilderment. Perhaps it is the greatest bewilderment a human being can ever face. If, for example, I think about Buczko, I get depressed. Like me, he had a car accident. Like him, I could have been left paralyzed. The sinister, curt Dr. Voghs had already said as much,“Broken knees, very bad, physiotherapy . . . but your spine is OK . . . fortunately.” It would have been a very unjust irony of fate if I had traveled to Auschwitz to end up paralyzed like Hurbinek.

But I think about survival, about the harsh business of having to survive. For example, me. Now. Here.

Certainly, I am alive, but everything serves to remind me that I could be dead, that I
should
be dead: my car off to the scrapyard, my knees as well, smashed to smithereens, my face peppered with little cuts from the windshield glass, my clothes soaked in blood, my hands bandaged . . . The room is very similar to an autopsy room; the rest of the patients in this hospital, injured to a greater or lesser extent, have been operated on, are in pain, are confronting, to a greater or lesser extent, the fact that they have made it out of their trial with death well, that they have survived. Are re-making their lives.

Like those who survived Auschwitz. I dare say that and make the comparison. I have no right to, no right at all. I know that only too well, that it’s insulting to compare my survival with theirs. But it is true that something, a unique reality, unites us: the fact that at some point in the chain of “life,” neither they nor I raised the card that says “death,” that’s it. We are united by the death we left behind. Though, evidently, not all deaths are equal. Their horror was incalculable, arbitrary, devastating. Their horror is history’s failure. Their horror cannot and must not be justified. Many live on afterward feeling guilty, wondering why they have survived, what makes them deserve life more than the others who died. A feeling of guilt that has led many to commit suicide. Others have re-made their lives, as best as they could, have created homes, had children, have tried to protect themselves from the pain of remembering. Others meet up periodically with their companions from the camps and keep alive the memory of the men, women and children who were murdered.

But I started this journey simply because I want Hurbinek to live a life he did not live, one that was snatched away. I want to give him that present, buy him years, birthday parties, if only that wasn’t a delusion. I don’t know what ghosts or lights or shadows inhabit the memories of survivors of Auschwitz. As far as I am concerned, I am only interested in the memory of Hurbinek they retain, the survival of Hurbinek in the future that opened up for some fortunate individuals when they crossed through the camp’s barbed wire fences and returned to their past that had been destroyed. In how often and at what precise moments was Hurbinek remembered by those who knew, however briefly, of his equally brief existence. But I know that what I am attempting is impossible, and life has brought me to a halt here, in this Frankfurt hospital, so the frontier between my fictions and reality, in terms of Hurbinek, will continue to be blurred, porous and minimal.

We know that Berek Goldstein was fated to die in Auschwitz sooner or later and that was why he was recruited to work in a
Sonderkommando
. All those who worked in a
Sonderkommando
were sent to the gas chambers within a few months. Their execution was deferred, their suffering wasn’t. They were forced to undress the people the SS selected every day to be exterminated with Zyklon B. They then entered the chambers and put the bluish bodies onto the trucks that transported them to the crematoria. First they had to cut off the girls and womens’ hair and pull out the gold teeth, acts they sometimes carried out before executing them, depending on the volume of mass-produced dead to be processed. Many recognized their parents, wives and children among the victims. They put the bodies in the ovens and later emptied out their ashes. They had to crush any bones that had resisted.

Berek Goldstein had to undress his five-year-old son and leave him there amidst those screaming in the gas chamber, then take him to the oven and extract his ashes with a spade. He had to do so silently. He had to do so without crying or going crazy. He did consider the idea of throwing himself into the fire with his son’s corpse in his arms. But was unable to do so because he was so befuddled by the whiplashes hitting him and the swift nature of the task. “
Schnell, Shnell, Schnell! Juda verrecke
!”
¹
the German bawled until he was hoarse. But he did see how another companion in the
Sonderkommando
, a Jew from Dalmatia, did throw himself into the oven taking the SS standing next to him and aiming his automatic at him.

The dubious good fortune of Berek Goldstein resided in the fact that he was one of the last to carry out this horrible work and come out alive, even though diphtheria took him to the barrack where Hurbinek was. He never saw him, only heard him. He heard the whistle in his trachea, his weepy, wordless voice, that turned into a long piercing whine that suddenly stopped, as if all his exhausted energy had collapsed. From where he lay, Goldstein could barely see the blanket on the boy’s bed go up and down to the rhythm of his gasps, and Henek coming and going to his side with water or clothes. He wept a lot over him and his son.

We know that, when he was liberated, Berek Goldstein hung himself from a tree on the road to Katowice in April 1945. We know he hadn’t lost his sanity and that it wasn’t an attack of madness. On the contrary, he could still hear Hurbinek’s moan, that melded in his mind with the image of his dead little son, naked in his arms, before he personally cast him into the flames.

Chaim Roth returned to Katowice only to stay a night in the station and hear the saddest news. He left Poland and established himself in Israel, first in Tel Aviv, and then, in 1958, in Jerusalem. In Tel Aviv he went into partnership with an old acquaintance from Katowice, Gus Lazar, who had also survived the Holocaust, and together they resumed their ice-cream business. Roth-Lazar ice-creams are still Israelis’ favorite brand of ice-cream.

He didn’t find any trace of the ghetto in Katowice. He discovered that all his family and friends had died, some executed by the
Einsatzkommandos
in the place of execution set up by the German-Romanian forces in the city outskirts, in the Yar Moriczim valley, between hills where blood ran like a stream, and the workers from his ice-cream factory died, alongside their wives and children. Others were murdered in the middle of the street, like his uncle Ravel and his cousin Yankel, killed by a bullet in the ear, the result of pure whim on the part of an SS officer, who said he saw them walking on the sidewalk when the anti-Jewish laws stipulated quite clearly that they could only walk on the road. Others had worse luck than Chaim in Auschwitz, like Ira his brother, who died in his arms totally out of his mind, in the bed next to Hurbinek’s.

It must have been in 1973 when Chaim suddenly remembered Hurbinek. He was walking through the old city of Jerusalem, they were shooting a film and he stopped to watch the actors going through their routines. During a break, one thirstily drank water, because it was the hottest time of day. Chaim’s mind returned to hell, as if he’d gone into a trance. He relived with a wealth of detail the time when he gave Hurbinek something to drink. That healthy young man, Henek, had given him a zinc can of water. The can was brimming over. He had filled it from a tin one of the Polish girls gave him, two nurses who avoided entering the barrack and did everything via young Henek, for whose love they competed. He supported the child’s head, a head with only the sparsest clomps of hair, that fitted in the hollow of his hand. The boy was stiff and kept spasmodically moving his arms. A thread of air struggled to enter his nose. Chaim remembered how his neck seemed to dislocate and separate out from his head, and was very cold. Hurbinek’s back was covered in sores and his open lips drooped. From Hurbinek’s bed he looked at Ira his brother, who was dying and mad (he gnawned at his own fingers), but his brother smiled back at him despite his madness. When he came round, Chaim was pale and wan and leaning on the doorframe. He could hear the film crew shouting urgent instructions. He recovered and continued his walk until he was outside the city, summoning up more memories of that time, before his brother’s delirious smile vanished.

We know that the Bohemian Franz Patzold was tortured and never forgot the face of his torturer, a Moldavian fascist they nicknamed Tod
²
. That led him to commit suicide one summer morning in 1981. We know that previously, under another name—François Fernández—he enrolled in the secret services of the French parachuters and infiltrated the Algerian FLN for several years. We know he was very introverted and shy and lived alone with a bird. His bad accent in any language protected him and helped him and his alibis. He never managed to become what he really wanted to be: a chef like his father living happily, in oblivion of everything and everybody. He could never throw off a feeling of humiliating rancor.

Throughout his life he often remembered Hurbinek, who had moved him deeply. If he had lived, he might have looked after him like a son. Patzold was one of those, along with Henek and Primo Levi, who most tried to understand one of the words that child had uttered, since they presumed he was speaking Bohemian, given that there was some similarity between his name, if it was such, and the word for “meat” in the Bohemian language. Patzold took it in turns with Henek to put his ear close to the child’s lips and try to understand what he was muttering amid his hoarse, panting breath. He used to caress and kiss him. When Patzold committed suicide, he looked back in time and found few moments of tenderness in his life. Hurbinek involved one, perhaps the only one. The rest of his life was filled with hatred, because he never found Tod the Moldavian who tortured him with shears.

There were others who found out about Hurbinek’s existence and shared the air with him in that improvised infirmary shack, but they never remembered him afterward.

That was the case of Jan Vesely, a Hungarian. He joined the Communist Party and devoted himself to municipal politics, and became notorious for his ability to give speeches. A housing estate on the outskirts of Budapest was named after him until 1988.

And that was also the case of the Slovak Ahmed Yildirim, who opened a pet shop in Sarajevo and cared for many sick baby animals, to such an extent that he became a renowned specialist. He was shot dead by a Serbian sniper in 1994.

And the case of Manuel Valiño who returned to Madrid after spending a long time in refugee camps throughout Europe, and from there left for Buenos Aires and under the pseudonym of Alfredo Martel became famous in Hollywood where his traces are lost and he departs our story like a ghost.

And the case of David Bogdanowski, a Polish Jew from Warsaw, who was traumatized at the roll call in Auschwitz-Birkenau when they slit open his father’s belly in front of everyone and filled his guts with iron shavings and empty cartridges, then threw powder on them and set them on fire, simply because he was deaf and didn’t reply when they called out his name. Bogdanowski married an ambulance driver in Israel where he still lives. We know that he roamed the streets of Warsaw in those first days of the liberation trying to find some clue as to the origins of Hurbinek, but soon realized he had found no reliable data and dropped it.