Two teachers look up in anguish. They are holding something that’s absolutely forbidden in Auschwitz. These items, so dangerous that their mere possession is a death sentence, cannot be fired, nor do they have a sharp point, a blade, or a heavy end. These items, which the relentless guards of the Reich fear so much, are nothing more than books: old, unbound, with missing pages, and in tatters. The Nazis ban them, hunt them down.
Throughout history, all dictators, tyrants, and oppressors, whatever their ideology—whether Aryan, African, Asian, Arab, Slav, or any other racial background; whether defenders of popular revolutions, or the privileges of the upper classes, or God’s mandate, or martial law—have had one thing in common: the vicious persecution of the written word. Books are extremely dangerous; they make people think.
The groups are in their places, singing softly as they wait for the guards to arrive, but one girl disrupts the harmony. She launches herself into a noisy run between the clusters of stools.
“Get down!”
“What are you doing? Are you crazy?” teachers shout at her.
One of them tries to stop her by grabbing her arm, but she avoids him and continues with her dash. She climbs up onto the waist-high stove and chimney that splits the hut in two, and jumps down noisily on the other side. She knocks over a stool, and it rolls away with such a thunderous clatter that all activity stops for a moment.
“You wretched girl! You’re going to betray us all!” shrieks Mrs. K?i?ková, purple with rage. Behind her back, the children call her Mrs. Nasty. She doesn’t know that this very girl invented the nickname. “Sit down at the back with the assistants, you stupid girl.”
But Dita doesn’t stop. She continues her frantic run, oblivious to all the disapproving looks. The children watch, fascinated, as she races around on her skinny legs with their woolen socks. She’s very thin but not sickly, with shoulder-length brown hair that swings from side to side as she rapidly zigzags her way between the groups. Dita Adler is moving among hundreds of people, but she’s running by herself. We always run on our own.
She snakes her way to the center of the hut and clears a path through one group. She brushes aside a stool or two, and a little girl falls over.
“Hey, who do you think you are!” she shouts at Dita from the floor.
The teacher from Brno is amazed to see the young girl come to a halt in front of her, gasping for air. Out of both breath and time, Dita grabs the book from her hands, and the teacher suddenly feels relieved. By the time she responds with her thanks, Dita is already several strides from her. The arrival of the Nazis is only seconds away.
Engineer Maródi, who has seen her maneuvers, is already waiting for her at the edge of his group. He hands her his book as she flies past, as if he were handing off the baton in a relay race. Dita runs desperately toward the back of the hut, where the assistants pretend to sweep the floor.
She’s only halfway there when she notices the voices of the groups have momentarily faltered, wavering like candlelight when a window is opened. Dita doesn’t need to turn around to confirm that the door of the hut has opened and the SS guards are coming in. She instantly drops to the ground, frightening a group of eleven-year-old girls. She puts the books under her smock and crosses her arms over her chest to prevent them from falling. The amused girls steal a glance at her out of the corners of their eyes while the very nervous teacher prompts them to keep on singing by lifting her chin.
After surveying the scene for a few seconds from the entrance to the hut, the SS guards shout one of their favorite words:
“Achtung!”
Silence falls. The little songs and the games of I Spy stop. Everyone freezes. And in the middle of the silence, you can hear someone crisply whistling Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The Priest is a sergeant to be feared, but even he seems somewhat nervous, because he’s accompanied by someone even more sinister.
“May God help us!” Dita hears the teacher nearby whisper.
Dita’s mother used to play the piano before the war, and that’s why Dita knows for sure that it’s Beethoven. She realizes this is not the first time she’s heard that particular way of whistling symphonies. It was after they’d been traveling from the Terezín ghetto for three days, crammed into a freight car without food or water. Night had fallen by the time they reached Auschwitz–Birkenau. It was impossible to forget the screeching sound of the metal door as it opened. Impossible to forget that first breath of icy air that smelled of burnt flesh. Impossible to forget the intense glare of the lights in the night: The platform was lit up like an operating room. Then came the orders, the thud of rifle butts against the side of the metal carriage, the shots, the whistles, the screams. And in the middle of all the confusion, that Beethoven symphony being flawlessly whistled by a captain at whom even the SS guards looked with terror.
That day at the station, the officer passed close to Dita, and she saw his impeccable uniform, his spotless white gloves, and the Iron Cross on the front of his military jacket—the medal that can be won only on the battlefield. He stopped in front of a group of mothers and children and patted one of the children in a friendly manner with his gloved hand. He even smiled. He pointed to a pair of fourteen-year-old twins—Zdeněk and Jirka—and a corporal hurried to remove them from the line. Their mother grabbed the guard by the bottom of his jacket and fell on her knees, begging him not to take them away. The captain calmly intervened.
“No one will treat them like Uncle Josef.”
And in a sense, that was true. No one in Auschwitz touched a hair of the sets of twins that Dr. Josef Mengele collected for his experiments. No one would treat them as Uncle Josef did in his macabre genetic experiments to find out how to make German women give birth to twins and multiply the number of Aryan births. Dita recalls Mengele walking off holding the children by their hands, still calmly whistling.
That same symphony is now audible in Block 31.
Mengele …
*
Block?ltester Hirsch emerges from his tiny cubicle, pretending to be pleasantly surprised by the visit of the SS guards. He clicks his heels together loudly to greet the officer: It’s a respectful way of recognizing the soldier’s rank, but it’s also a way of demonstrating a military attitude, neither submissive nor daunted. Mengele barely gives him a glance; he’s still whistling, with his hands behind his back as if none of this had anything to do with him. The sergeant—the one everyone calls the Priest—scrutinizes the hut with his almost transparent eyes, his hands still tucked inside the sleeves of his greatcoat and hovering over his middle, never far from the holster of his gun.
Jakoubek wasn’t wrong.
“Inspection,” whispers the Priest.
The SS guards repeat his order, amplifying it until it becomes a shout in the prisoners’ ears. Dita, sitting in the midst of a ring of girls, shivers and squeezes her arms against her body. She hears the rustle of the books against her ribs. If they find the books on her, it’s all over.