The Storyteller Read online

  "Where else would you go?" he asked, and he did not look up from the list of numbers he was adding.

  Darija had her own news for me that night. The Beast was dead. The man I'd seen at Block 30 had been the SS-Oberfuhrer--Gluecks's deputy at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps--and he had also come through the barracks to do an inspection. According to one of the women in our block, who was part of the underground resistance movement at the camp, this deputy had a reputation for plucking Jews out of cushy jobs and sending them to the gas chamber. We had a new Blockalteste, who attempted to prove herself to the Aufseherin by making us do jumping jacks for over an hour, and beating anyone who tripped or fell in exhaustion. But it was not until a week later, when I was running an errand for the Hauptscharfuhrer, that I realized it was not just the Blockalteste who had been shot. Nearly every other Jew in a job of privilege--from those who worked like me as secretaries to those who served officers' meals at the mess hall to the cellist who played at the theater to the nurse assistant at the hospital--was gone.

  The Hauptscharfuhrer had not been punishing me by firing me and sending me to the hospital. He had been saving my life.

  *

  Two days later, when the camp was thick with snow, we were gathered in the courtyard between the blocks to watch a hanging. Months ago, there had been a revolt by prisoners who worked as Sonderkommandos--disposing of the bodies that came out of the gas chambers. We did not see them, as they were kept separate from the rest of us. From what I heard, the men attacked the guards and blew up one of the crematoria. Prisoners escaped, too--though most of them were recaptured and shot. But at the time, it had created quite a buzz. Three officers were killed, including one who had been pushed alive into one of the ovens--which meant that the prisoners had not died in vain.

  That had been a bad week for everyone else, as the SS officers took their anger out on every prisoner in the camp. But then it had passed, and we had assumed it was over, until we huddled in the cold with our breath frosting before us and saw the women being led to the gallows.

  The gunpowder for the explosions had been traced to four girls who worked at a munitions factory. They would smuggle tiny amounts of powder, wrapped in cloth or paper, and hide it somewhere on their persons. Then it got passed to a girl who worked in the clothing division of our camp, who in turn smuggled it to prisoners who were part of the resistance movement, who got it to the Sonderkommando leaders in time for the uprising. The girl who worked in the clothing division lived in my block. She was a small, mousy thing who did not give any appearance of being a rebel. That's why she is a good one, Darija had pointed out. One day the girl had been dragged away from morning Appell. We knew she had been put in the prison cells for a while, and badly tortured, and eventually sent back to live with us--but by then, she was completely broken. She couldn't speak, couldn't look at us. She pulled long strips of skin from her fingers and chewed her nails till they bled. Every night without fail she would scream in her sleep.

  Today, she had been left behind in the block, and even now, I could hear her shrieks. Her sister was one of the two girls being hanged.

  They were led to the gallows wearing their normal work dresses but no coats. They looked at us, clear-eyed, their heads held high. I could see the family resemblance between one of them and the girl from my block.

  The Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer stood at the base of the gallows. At his command, another officer tied the girls' hands behind their backs. The first one was pulled up onto the table that stood beneath the gallows, and a noose was slipped around her neck. One moment she was standing, and the next she was pulled upward. The second girl followed. They twisted, fish caught on the line.

  All that day, working in the office, I imagined I could hear the screams of the younger sister, whose execution had been delayed. It was impossible, at this distance, but they were etched in my mind, an endless radio loop. It made me think of my own sister. For the first time, I thought that maybe Basia was right, since she had been spared the horrors of a place like this. If you knew you were going to die, wasn't it better to choose the time and place, instead of waiting for fate to drop on you like an anvil? What if Basia's act wasn't one of desperation but a final moment of self-control? The Hauptscharfuhrer had chosen to save me last week, but that did not mean the next time he would be as generous. The only person I could truly depend on was myself.

  I imagined this was how the younger sister in my block felt when she began routing the gunpowder to the resistance. She wasn't any different from Basia. They both were just looking for a way out.

  I was so distracted that the Hauptscharfuhrer asked if I had a headache. I did, but I knew it would get worse when I returned to the block at the end of the day.

  As it turned out, I needn't have worried. The sister and a fourth girl had been hanged just after the sun set, before Appell. I tried not to look as I passed by, but I could hear the creak of the wood as their bodies twirled, macabre ballerinas, with skirts that sang in the bitter wind.

  *

  One night it grew so cold that we awakened with frost matting our hair. In the morning, when we were being given our rations, the Blockalteste took a tin cup of coffee from one of the women and threw it into the air so that it froze instantly, a great white cloud. The dogs that patrolled with the officers now whined and pawed at the icy ground with their tails between their legs as we stood at Appell losing feeling in our extremities. When we walked to work afterward, we had to wrap our scarves around our heads or risk frostbite on any skin that was exposed.

  That week the temperatures dipped so low twenty-two women in our block died. Another fourteen who were assigned to outside labor fell to the ground and froze to death. Darija brought me tights and a sweater from Kanada, so that I would have an extra layer. The price of a blanket on the black market at the camp quadrupled.

  I was never so grateful for my office job with the Hauptscharfuhrer, but I knew that Darija, in the unheated barracks of Kanada, was still in danger of freezing. So as I had done a few times before, when the Hauptscharfuhrer left to get his lunch, I hurriedly typed a note on a stolen piece of his letterhead requesting that prisoner A18557 report to his office. Bundling myself into my coat and hat and mittens and scarf, I hurried across the camp to Kanada to deliver the message and bring my best friend out of the cold, if only for a few minutes.

  We huddled together, arm in arm, and Darija slipped into my mitten a small piece of chocolate she had squirreled away during her work. We didn't talk; it took too much energy. Even after we had entered the building, we had to keep up the pretense that Darija had been summoned by the Hauptscharfuhrer.

  We passed SS officers and guards and kept our eyes averted. By this point I was known to them, nothing suspicious. As was my habit, when I reached the office door, I turned the knob first and peeked inside, just in case I had miscalculated and the Hauptscharfuhrer had returned.

  There was someone in the room.

  Behind the Hauptscharfuhrer's desk was a safe. In it was the money that was found at Kanada, which was shipped out daily under lock and key. Each time the Hauptscharfuhrer made his rounds of Kanada, he would empty the box that sat in the center of the barracks where valuables were kept. The smaller items, like bills and coins and diamonds, were brought to his office. As far as I knew the only person who had the combination to the safe was the Hauptscharfuhrer himself.

  But now, as I saw the Schutzhaftlagerfuhrer standing in front of its open door, I realized I was wrong.

  He was slipping a stack of currency into the inside breast pocket of his coat.

  I saw his eyes widen, as he stared at me as if I were a ghost.

  An upior.

  Something that was supposed to be dead.

  I realized that he had assumed I was killed last week when the Oberfuhrer from Oranienburg had come and systematically liquidated all the Jews working in office jobs.

  I started to back out of the room, panicked. I had to get out of there, and I had to