The Street Sweeper (66 page)

‘Now I can’t even talk to
you
. I can’t even imagine a private ongoing conversation with you … in my head.’

‘Sweetheart, you can, of course you can.’

‘How?’

‘Like this, just like you’re doing now.’

‘But it was all … It’s always been predicated on us eventually having these conversations for real.’

‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘Yes, it was. Who are you to say? Who am I talking to? Who are you, anyway?’

‘I’m still Diana. I’m your imagining of her.’

‘Yeah but now that I know –’

‘I can still live in your mind.’

‘But who is it that’s living in my mind? You won’t marry me. You won’t have children with me. You’ve met someone else … which I don’t even want to think about.’

‘She
has but
I
haven’t.’

‘What’s the difference between you and her?’

‘I’m
how you remember her. As long as you remember how she was when you two were together, you can keep talking to me.’

‘But she’s gone. She’s met someone.’

‘Yes, that’s right. She has. She really has.’

‘So I just keep talking in my mind to a version of her –’

‘Yes, but it’s based on all those years of knowing her and loving her –’

‘Before I …’

‘Before you fucked everything up.’

‘So I’m talking to myself?’

‘Sort of.’

‘And it’s all my fault?’

‘Yes.’

‘How sad is that?’

‘You know very well how sad that is.’

‘Is there anything sadder than living like this in some sort of permanent state of … knowing it’s all … knowing this is all my fault?’

‘You’re a historian.’

‘So?’

‘Use your imagination.’

‘I’m talking to myself and I don’t even know what that means. What does that mean?’

‘It means, if you think
this
feels bad, imagine being Henry Border.’

*

It was on 6 January 1945. The
Appel
, the roll call, in the women’s camp in Auschwitz began at four o’clock in the afternoon and was all over unusually quickly, not out of consideration for the prisoners but because there was something the SS wanted them all to see. A group of prisoners, men, had been brought to the women’s barracks in the camp and ordered to warm the rock-hard frozen ground. A small fire had been built with kindling in what would otherwise have been only snow. It was still light when the women who had returned from the day shift at the
Weichsel Union Metallwerke
factory and many others returning from other labour details arrived back inside the gates of the camp to see a structure that had been hastily erected on the warmed ground while they had been at work. It had not taken long to construct the scaffolding and gallows once the ground had been prepared. The Russians were coming. The rumours had reached fever pitch among the prisoners. They were coming, always coming, any day now. But then a new day came and on this day they still hadn’t come. But they were coming, any day now. So you tried to survive just one more day. In the late afternoon of 6 January the rows and rows of women were made to form a semi-circle between Block 2 and Block 3 in Auschwitz I. They stood motionless in the cold fading winter light as the SS led two women from the direction of Block 11 to the gallows, Estusia Weiss and Rosa Rabinowicz.

An armed contingent of SS men surrounded the two frail young women who walked slowly towards the scaffolding, their arms unbound, their mouths ungagged; victims of beatings as vicious as any that had ever been meted out to prisoners whose death was to be kept from them a little longer. Four women had been arrested since the
Sonderkommando
uprising. All had been brutally beaten. They had not divulged the name of a single living person. This was widely known among the assembled women prisoners who stood in the snow watching in silence as the two tiny women were led to and then up the steps of the scaffolding.

A prisoner, a hulking man some knew simply as the ‘Hangman’ and whom others knew as the
Kapo
Jakub, was waiting there for them at the top of the stairs. They seemed calm, almost serene. All was silent until a prisoner from within the crowd noticed a tiny gesture from the
Kapo
Jakub. With the noose in one hand, he gently stroked the neck of the
prisoner Estusia Weiss with his other hand before slipping the noose over her head and around her neck. Everyone saw this but only one prisoner was unable to contain herself despite the presence of the guards. A young twig of a woman, a girl of only fifteen, let out a piercing shriek. It was Hannah, the sister of Estusia Weiss. After her shriek she began to cry uncontrollably, offering hysterical moans to the heavens, heaving sobs that shook the cold ground beneath her feet. When Jakub kicked away the wooden stool from under the feet of Estusia Weiss, her sister Hannah fainted. She lay motionless in the snow. But by then the sobbing had spread throughout the ranks of the prisoners. They stood there in the snow watching the execution of two beaten, half-starved, wingless sparrows, each woman knowing that these two, the two on the scaffold, had fought back against the Nazis. Jakub made the same brief gesture, gently touching the neck of young Rosa Rabinowicz, once of Ciechanow. He had fed both Rosa and Estusia a drug half an hour earlier. He whispered something to Rosa as he slipped the noose around her neck and then, despite her tranquillised state, in the seconds before he kicked the wooden stool out from under her feet, she roused herself and called out to the assembled prisoners, to anyone who could hear her, ‘Tell everyone what happened here! Tell everyone! Tell everyone!’ Young Hannah Weiss had recovered in time to hear it.

Their bodies swung above the wooden planking as the
Kommandant
of the women’s camp,
Kommandant
Hössler, made it a point to touch their bodies with his black leather-gloved hands. In a show for the prisoners he explained imperiously that the fate of these dangling women was the fate of anyone who conspired against the Reich. He made a similar speech at around 10 pm that night for the prisoners of the night shift when the other two women of the
Pulverraum
, Ala and Regina, were hanged. ‘Sooner or later the Reich will find all those who conspire against it,’
Kommandant
Hössler bellowed in the floodlights beside the dangling, half-starved, badly beaten corpses of Ala and Regina. Eighteen days later he was nowhere to be found when Russian tanks entered Auschwitz.

*

It happened that in Chicago in the early 1950s a young postgraduate student of psychology, by the name of Wayne Rosenthal, was able to find an ideal thesis advisor and topic for his dissertation. But what could have been even harder, he was also able to convince his parents that this ‘psychology business’ was not some mumbo-jumbo waste of time. His parents were Eastern European Jews and, while they had no special need for their son to come to terms with anything called the ‘Adjective–Verb Quotient’, it made a lot of sense to them for their son to be working with the testimony of the survivors of the camps. It was their civilisation, it was their people. Whether or not their son could earn a living with this ‘psychology business’, for the time being it didn’t matter to them. Moreover, the thesis advisor was a learned man, a cultured man who seemed to have a special fondness for their son. This fondness extended to inviting him to stay back late in his laboratory in the Main building at IIT where the young man took advantage of his first language, Yiddish, to translate wire recordings the professor had made in the summer of 1946. Quickly proficient in the use of the state-of-the-art wire recorder and fluent in Yiddish, the young man was a godsend to the Eastern European émigré.

It would save Border so much time if the student himself could directly translate some of the wire recordings. It was so much faster to edit the translations than to make them from scratch. Perhaps he might get all the wire recordings translated after all. His book of eight translations had sold poorly but now there was the possibility, with the young man’s help, of transcribing and then translating the full complement of wire recordings. Not wanting to be seen to be playing favourites from among his students, Border had hidden the gratitude he felt towards this young graduate student. And knowing the value his mentor placed on integrity, Wayne Rosenthal was content in public to play the role of just another one of the students fortunate to have Dr Border as his thesis advisor. But he knew the way his mentor really felt about him. He would have been grateful enough just to have found the topic, and more so to have found the man who was Border. But there was more.

The scholar had a daughter, a young woman who seemed to blossom a little more every day. At least, that was how Wayne Rosenthal saw her.
With dark eyes for falling into and jet-black hair, she could be both serious and funny, often at the same time. She was gentle, well read, interested in ideas and in the world around her, and all with a sense of humour. It was not easy to concentrate on those seminars at her father’s home when you knew she was there listening in the back only a few feet behind you. When she served tea and coffee, when she cut up the cake while Callie Ford served sandwiches, more than anything else, the graduate student wanted to kiss her. But a seminar was neither the time nor the place. The time and the place, it turned out, was in the back of a movie theatre to which he had, with Dr Border’s willing approval, taken her, where Wayne Rosenthal tentatively bestowed the first of many kisses on the young woman he thought he might one day want to marry. And she seemed to him to reciprocate his feelings. Certainly she never behaved in any way inconsistent with that hypothesis.

As was often the case, Wayne Rosenthal was alone in Dr Border’s office late that afternoon. It was the night a party was to be held at the home of one of the other graduate students, Evie Harmon. Evie had invited Wayne along with all her classmates as well as Dr Border and his daughter Elly. Caught up in his work, Wayne was only peripherally aware of the time but he knew he was due to leave or risk being late for the party. It was in this hurried frame of mind that he came across a spool of wire that, although numbered, had become separated from the other spools of wire. Was this a mistake or did Dr Border have a reason for separating it from the others? He and Border had organised the spools into piles according to whether the recording had not yet been translated, translated but not yet transcribed, translated and partially transcribed, translated and completely transcribed, transcribed and fully edited. This particular spool was not in any of the piles. It sat under some papers on a shelf in the laboratory half of Border’s two-roomed office.

Initially, Wayne thought that perhaps it was he who had been responsible for its being separated from the other spools. If he listened to just the beginning of it perhaps he would be able to identify which category this particular wire recording belonged to. He didn’t really have time to listen to much of it but he knew he would be unsettled all night if he left the office with the wire recording uncategorised. So he threaded the wire
into Marvin Cadden’s machine and sat down to listen to just the first few minutes of the recording.

Immediately he knew that he hadn’t heard this one at all. He wouldn’t have forgotten it. While each wire recording contained stories that were capable of devastating the listener, none of them began the way this one began. A woman was abusing Henry Border in Yiddish.

‘Now you will listen! No more of your stupid questions!’

What Wayne Rosenthal heard was the story of Estusia Weiss, Ala, Regina and of the
Sonderkommando
uprising. If all this did not astonish him enough, he heard his mentor interrupting the interviewee, a young woman called Hannah, to ask quite specific questions about one of the participants, the woman she called Rosa. He knew Border never interrupted his subjects. If something needed to be clarified he had always waited for his subject to finish a topic or at least to pause.

‘What was her full name?’ he heard Border ask in Yiddish that crackled through the wire in Marvin Cadden’s machine.

‘Rosa Rabinowicz.’

‘Where did this Rosa Rabinowicz come from?’

‘Originally she was from Ciechanow but she’d lived for a time before the war in Warsaw.’

‘What did she look like?’

Wayne Rosenthal had never heard Border ask questions like this in the middle of an interview and he became convinced that Border must have known this Rosa Rabinowicz before the war. Was she a friend perhaps, or a relative?

He was running late for Evie Harmon’s party. He was not going to have time to get changed beforehand and so he went directly to the Borders’ home from where the three of them were to be driving. The Borders’ housekeeper, Callie, and her son Russell, who had been engaged for the evening by the Harmons to help out, were also coming. It was on the way uptown to their place in Sheridan Road that he thought about the fact that the only wire recording to be uncategorised in Border’s office was this one, the only one where the interviewee had been abusive to Dr Border, the only one where he had interrupted to ascertain the precise identity of someone in the interviewee’s story. Wayne Rosenthal
was standing at the Borders’ front door when he heard Elly Border call out, ‘It’s okay, Callie. I’ll get it. It’s probably Wayne.’

He gave her a peck on the cheek to which, a little put out by the fact that he was running late and had not deemed the event worth changing for, she didn’t respond but returned to the kitchen to collect Callie and Russell. This allowed Wayne Rosenthal just a minute or two to ask her father about this one uncategorised wire recording. When they all crammed into the Borders’ car, Henry Border was already agitated. At the Harmons’ party, after the various introductions, offers of drinks and social niceties had been exchanged, Dr Border took Wayne Rosenthal aside and, with uncharacteristic brusqueness, told him, ‘That spool is not for you. Do you understand?’

But Border’s anxiety and his tone had only succeeded in adding weight to what Wayne Rosenthal had already begun to suspect. Rosa Rabinowicz was not only familiar to Border, she had also been involved with him in some way. She could have been a girlfriend or maybe even his wife, Elly’s mother. Could it be that Border, who wanted more than anything to tell the world what had happened to the Jews of Europe, had chanced upon the incredible story of his wife’s fate and yet was not telling her daughter? But why wouldn’t he want Elly to know? For all his respect for Dr Border, Wayne Rosenthal could not pretend that he didn’t suspect what he now suspected.