The Keeper of the Walls (76 page)

Irma Griese looked down at the human skeleton on the floor, and started to laugh, a low, merry chuckle. Immediately, Malka the
Kapo
began to laugh, and soon the entire barrack was resounding with the jeering, harsh laughter of animals turning on a weaker species. Then, with the tip of her dark, polished boot, she kicked out once. Maryse fell away, like a dead fly, and did not get up.

Irma Griese touched Lily's cheek with a well-manicured nail. “Well, my lovely,” she declared softly. “You shall have your wish. What a sad challenge to put to sleep one such as your friend. Musulmen finish themselves off, sooner or later, in any case. I shall not select her. But you, my dear, shall report to the gatehouse tomorrow, after
Zeile Appell.
”

Within minutes, the
Oberscharfûhrerin
had selected twenty other names, and had turned her erect back and walked out. “Back to bed!” Malka called out, and in the mad scrambling that ensued, Lily found herself jostled next to the Slovakian
Kapo.

“Why did you do it?” she asked.

“Because you and Magda thought you were smarter than I. You only gave me what you wanted. But that hospital ward, where they put her, is worse than any other barrack. Mengele starts there when he makes his selections!”

Lily, like a stone, lay down on the hard wooden pallet, next to Maryse. She knew, beyond a doubt, that there was to be no exit from this situation. In the morning, she would be sent out to be gassed.

For the rest of the night, Lily lay awake, listening to the groans of her companions, and images of her parents, her children, Mark, Misha slid into her mind like turning pages of a family album. She was too terrified to weep, and her mind felt congealed. At length, toward dawn, she began to whisper the words of the
shma
just to keep from hearing her heart beat.

A
fter the twentieth of August
, everyone knew that the liberation of Paris was imminent. The French and the Allies had recaptured almost all of Normandy, although the fighting was still fierce there, and the Germans savage in the defense of this territory.

In Paris itself, the Germans were already packing up. Truckloads of soldiers rolled away as fast as they could, followed by tanks, all bound for the East or the western fronts. Toward the East, they were hoping to cross the border into their own country, and to the west they were headed for Brittany, where a heavy German contingent awaited them. The Parisians watched them with stupefaction, but didn't dare mock them aloud.

Rumor ran that Paris had been mined in several places, and that Abetz had been ordered to destroy the city when he left it. The Parisians were therefore living in fear of being blown up at any moment. But this rumor proved to have been for naught. Either the ambassador had no time to fulfill his instructions, or, married as he was to a Frenchwoman, he allowed his scruples to overrule his devotion to the Reich.

For several days now, the atmosphere had noticeably lightened, as a five-year hope seemed about to come true. All around, Parisians were making flags to hang outside when the time came. Kira found a small piece of blue cloth, then a torn red rag, and she sewed them together, adding parts of a white handkerchief to form the three stripes. But she was afraid to hang her flag outside, for fear that some of the Germans who had not yet departed might make a last minute raid through the Rue de la Tour, and shoot the ones who had adorned their balconies.

The next morning, on the twenty-fifth, Kira was on her way to the laundress when a group of running people almost knocked her down. “They're here!” she heard. “They arrived this morning, and are going up the Avenue Mozart!”

A tremendous lump rose in Kira's throat. Her first impulse was to follow these excited people; but she thought of Sudarskaya, waiting at home, and wanted her to witness this with her own eyes. To hell with the laundress, she thought, and ran back to the house, taking the stairs two at a time.

Inside the apartment, she seized Sudarskaya, and told her the news. Together they hung the small flag from their balcony, and then raced down the stairs outside. The entire street was adorned with red, white, and blue material, dancing in the wind.

Already, a grumbling noise could be heard growing in intensity as it approached. Hand in hand, the young woman and the small Russian piano teacher made their way to the corner of the Avenue Mozart. Bumper to bumper, enormous tanks were rolling up, in a slow, uninterrupted march. The crowd, pressed together, began to shout and clap, and Kira and Sudarskaya joined in, as loudly as they could, tears flowing freely down their open faces.

The tanks were the color of sand, and on their flanks were scrawled, in large black letters, their war names. Most were geographic appellations: Normandy, Poitou, Rheims, Loire; or of fighter animals: lion, panther, falcon; or, finally, the names of women: Pauline, Jeannette, Valérie, Suzanne. There were no more than four or five men in each tank: tired men, harassed men, tanned, dirty, and unshaven men, so exhausted that only their eyes seemed alive in their heads. But how intensely their eyes shone! The Parisians at the side of the street shouted tender, grateful epithets, and, since the procession was infinitely slow, with many stops and starts, young girls were climbing on the tanks and winding their arms around the heroes, and middle-aged matrons were applying resounding kisses on those unshaven cheeks.

They had been traveling since the previous morning. They had fought and crossed the cities and towns of Normandy, and, knowing that the Americans had stopped at the Porte de Saint-Cloud and at the Porte d'Orléans in order to let the French be the first to enter their city, they had allowed themselves no rest.

After several hours, Kira, feeling hungry, put her arm around Sudarskaya's shoulders and turned back toward home. “You were stupid not to climb aboard, like the other girls,” Raïssa Markovna chided her. “Just think . . . Pierre might be among them!”

But at that moment, a sudden rain of bullets crashed onto the pavement of the small street where they had been walking. Kira and Sudarskaya flattened themselves against the façade of a granite building, terrified. An old man, huddled near them, said sotto voce: “It's the collaborationist militia, trying to get its revenge. Look—on the roof!”

Kira hooded her eyes, and peered upward at the house directly opposite them. Men were crouched behind machine guns, emptying their pellets where they could, haphazardly. But after a few minutes she felt her courage return, and led the way, keeping close to the walls, to the Avenue Paul-Doumer. There, the torrent of bullets seemed far too dense, and the two women waited for half an hour.

Confused, Kira wondered what to do. And then Sudarskaya cried: “Let God protect us!” and, grabbing Kira's hand, ran as fast as she could across the dangerous street. They kept their heads bent, as if this would have helped had they been hit. But, standing on the opposite sidewalk, they realized that they were still intact, and they looked at each other, shaken.

“God has been protecting us for many months now, Raïssa Markovna,” Kira murmured, a stream of perspiration matting her curious red-blond hair. “I think it's time for us to do what's long overdue. On the Sabbath, we'll go to services at the temple on the Rue de la Victoire, and pay our homage to Rabbi Weill.”

Abstractedly, she gazed down at the back of her right hand. It was dripping blood, and the skin was gashed and pulpy. With the hem of her skirt, she dabbed at it. It hardly hurt. “I guess I've been wounded, like a good soldier,” she said, and smiled, the corners of her mouth trembling only a little.

I
t had begun
as a very strange proceeding. SS men and women had handed out postcards to the four hundred women assembled at the gatehouse, and someone had barked out the order to write down their full names and addresses on the back, in neat block letters. And so the women, who had come from all parts of Europe, had done as they were told, wondering what the cards would be used for.

And now Josef Mengele, an ironic smile giving his face the look of a bored, detached aristocrat deigning to supervise an inept staff, walked among the four hundred exhausted, skeletal women. Disseminated among the group were the black-clad, well-fed, muscular SS. Raising his left hand, he made a signal with his thumb, pointing to the door.

At once, the SS moved to marshal the prisoners out. Five abreast as usual, these sad-looking Musulmen shuffled their feet into the rain, and sloshed through the mud to a building they had never seen before. An SS lieutenant held a wooden door open, and the others prodded the women through by jamming the barrels of their rifles into the small of their backs. As soon as all had come inside, the lieutenant locked the door with several bolts and a padlock, and, from the darkened interior, the women heard the SS departing, chatting and laughing easily together as they shared a casual joke.

The boots of the SS slipping on the mud, and receding into the distance, resounded like the last fragment of hope for these four hundred. They were sure they had been abandoned to die. They found themselves in a long but low enclosure, its wooden walls soggy with moisture, its roof leaking rain. There were no beds, only the hard floor, as wet as the street. Lily was too tall to stand up straight, and the situation reminded her of the boxcars, when one hundred had been crammed inside without food or air. She thought of Magda, in the makeshift infirmary; perhaps she was already on her way to the gas chamber. She felt waves of sadness for this new friend who had done all she could to help Maryse, and who was paying with her own life.

Yet Lily, of the four hundred jammed together in the dark barrack, was probably the only one who felt an enormous sense of reprieve. In the morning, following roll call, she'd been certain that a truck, disguised as a Red Cross ambulance, would drive up to take her and her companions to be gassed. Instead, they were here . . . still alive. A fervent hope crested in her chest. If she'd survived this far, she owed it to God to survive till the end.

But after several hours, the hope began to ebb away as thirst, and a beseeching hunger, crept through her body. Aware that she was among the healthier of the inmates, she made an effort to resist without succumbing to the moaning and groaning of her neighbors. Some were women she knew, from her barrack. She moved quietly to them, finding them in the light from the ripped ceiling, and from tiny clerestory apertures. And then, sitting near them, she tried to speak, to soothe, to calm. By busying herself with women who were really sick, some of whom she knew were dying, from their weakness, the drought, and the closed quarters without air, food, or water, Lily kept herself from going crazy, and proceeded in her idea that the secret of survival lay in doing, not thinking.

She stopped trying to figure out how many hours had passed when, next to her, a young Greek girl passed away. From the clerestory windows, no more light appeared. There were seldom any stars in the Auschwitz-Birkenau skies, so Lily could see nothing. A tremendous sense of futility fell upon her, and she lay on the ground, spreading the dead woman's ripped skirt as a blanket between herself and the muddy floor.

After the second day with no food and water, Lily fell into a kind of dreamless haze, and, like an animal, crawled among her companions, the living and the dead, to lick the moisture from the wooden walls.

And then, on the third day, the door was suddenly thrown open, and Mengele, a riding crop impatiently tapping his freshly pressed pants, was outlined against the clear, even gray that blinded those who, still alive, could still distinguish forms in their line of vision. He wrinkled his nose. Lily sat up, her lips parted with thirst. It had been so long since she'd smelled the odors around her, that the view of human feces spread around, and of decomposing, bloated bodies, maggots already feeding from them, failed to make an impression. But to Mengele, walking in from the outside, the odors and the sight must have been overpowering.
“Scheisse!”
he exclaimed, reeling slightly.

After that, chaos took over. Some of the slave laborers came in, dragging corpses out with strange, twisted hooks, which they'd passed through the heads of the dead. Lily recognized her own
Kapo,
Malka Sandikova, and some of the others from neighboring barracks. One of the
Kapos
was saying to Mengele: “Some of these women are still good for work,
Herr Oberarzt.
We could use them.”

Carelessly, Mengele shrugged. “Very well, then. Bring them for one final selection, in Facility Number Two.”

A tremor passed through Lily. She had accepted Magda's stories of the gas chambers and crematoria, though there were still some who believed that the red flames were bursting from a bakery, or a gigantic factory. The smell of burning flesh was perceptible every day, whether the wind had risen or not. Facility Number Two contained a gas chamber in its west wing, below the ground; and on the first floor, the bodies of the gassed were cremated, their ashes to be dispersed later as fertilizer for the fields.
One final selection.
Josef Mengele had made his ultimate joke, laughing at the Jewish
Kapo
and at what remained of the four hundred women interned for three days and nights without food, water, or sanitary facilities. They'd been left to rot, and the majority had done just that.

Only about one hundred women remained alive, and all in sorry condition. A young female SS, her strong hips swaying, escorted them into the birch grove, where tall, delicate, and poetic pines and birches rose to form a cluster evocative in its distilled sadness. Lily was walking next to a woman her own age, who, surprisingly, was clutching a Bible. Its leather binding was ripped, but its gold-leaved pages attested to its presence in a loving family over several generations. “Which way do you think will condemn us to death?” she asked Lily, her cultured voice hard and toneless, the way all women learned to speak after a few months.