The Librarian of Auschwitz: Chapters 18–24

Given his rank, he has no difficulty in exiting the quarantine camp on the pretext that he has to pick up some bread rations that are missing.

He knows that many, if not all of them, will die...but a breach might be opened and a few of them—dozens, maybe, or hundreds—might escape into the forest and get away.

Rudi quickens his pace and clenches his fists, overcome by a rage that is turning his despondency into fury.

Rudi looks him over quickly: sinewy, his wet hair impeccably combed back, a serene, slightly severe gaze, as if he is irritated at being roused from his thoughts.

But the person who is speaking isn’t the social leader or the intransigent Zionist or the proud athlete.

Rudi has a lofty view of himself—he is convinced he’s anticipated every possibility and can overcome them all.

It’s true that Rudi has answers to all the questions. He hasn’t left anything out, and there’s no way they can be rebutted.

It has become a nervous anthill teeming with inmates and armed guards, all on edge.

More assistants begin to arrive, their faces ashen, and the children’s smiles gradually disappear as they stop singing and playing games. Their faces reflect more fear than sadness.

He gives Rudi a quick look in the midst of the surrounding maelstrom, recognizes him, and stops his club in midflight.

He walks away, trying to feign indifference, but his legs almost collapse under him.

The music inevitably sounds broken, like a fugue, and diminishes as the trucks move away.

The ground is strewn with trampled hats, an abandoned coat, and empty bowls.

No matter how much the daily roll call normally irritates the children, its brevity this morning has shattered them.

The children are listless; many of them are lying on the floor.

"Are you insinuating that you feel sorry for that Russian enemy soldier?" the lieutenant asks maliciously.

At the sight of Švejk's guileless face and good-natured expression, the lieutenant becomes furious and shouts even louder: “So your brother will be an animal just like you; he must be a complete idiot."

“Prague’s astronomical clock,” she says wistfully.

There are women who sell their own bodies, and informers. There are also some very upright, staid, religious people who insult her...

Dita wants to do a thorough repair job on the book before she lends it to the only person who ever asks for it, a teacher with a somewhat sour disposition called Markéta.

She says that Edmond is an honest, strapping, young man, who’s sailing back to Marseilles in command of the Pharaon, and looking forward to seeing his father and his Catalan fiancée.

As if her own misfortune weren’t enough for her to worry about, Dita now purses her lips and laments poor Dantès’s bad luck.

She summarizes the astute and intricate schemes whereby Dantès, now the Count of Monte Cristo, imposes devastating punishment on the people who ruined his life.

It’s a complex and Machiavellian plan from which there is no escape, even for Mercédès, who when she thought Dantès was dead, finally married her cousin, unaware of his trickery.

She also wonders if, were she successful, she’d dedicate her life to taking revenge on all the SS guards and officers, and if she’d do it in the same methodical, implacable, and yes, even merciless, manner as the Count of Monte Cristo.

Renée looks at him with her pale blue eyes, and she coquettishly pulls one of her curls down to her mouth in the way he loves so much.

The whole business of Block Thirty-One is a pantomime. The whole family camp is a pantomime. Hirsch and the rest of us have played the Nazis’ game.

“Stop brooding over it. Your friend Hirsch became frightened. That’s only human.”

He was writing much more than reports for the camp command. He’d put together facts, dates, names, a complete dossier of what’s going on in Auschwitz, which he’d prepared to hand over to a neutral observer.

The guards don’t even have time to share a complicit laugh because the lieutenant, back ramrod straight, is already walking past.

Later that morning, a thunderous rendition of “Alouette” sounds throughout Block 31. Avi Fischer conducts the choir with his habitual cheerfulness, and the children, no matter their age, delight in singing the song that has become Block 31’s anthem.

The Germans are particularly irritated by this escape because they say Lederer got away thanks to the collaboration of an SS guard who has deserted. Nothing could rile them more.

“On top of that,” adds one of the women who’s calling the shots, “whenever there’s an escape, there are reprisals for rest of us: more restrictions, punishments....In some of the camps they’ve sent people to the gas chambers in retaliation. Who knows what might happen to us? It’s incredible that some people are such egotists that they don’t care about putting the rest of us in danger.”

They must also tell the world—particularly the slow-moving West, which believes the front is in Russia or France—that the real slaughter is taking place in the heart of Poland, in the places they refer to as concentration camps, which only truly concentrate on perpetrating the most heinous criminal operation in history.

They are in a populated area with open fields: It’s inevitable that they’ll come across people like this Polish peasant with a heavily wrinkled face, who is looking at them apprehensively.

She wants to see what sort of men they are: Their unshaven faces and dirty clothes aren’t enough to convince her that they’ve told her the truth, but she also notices their haggard eyes, swollen from lack of sleep and sunken into their thin, almost cadaverous faces.

She wants to see what sort of men they are: Their unshaven faces and dirty clothes aren’t enough to convince her that they’ve told her the truth, but she also notices their haggard eyes, swollen from lack of sleep and sunken into their thin, almost cadaverous faces. She notices how their bones protrude everywhere and almost poke out through their skin.

The partisan introduces himself as Stanis, although they suspect it isn’t his real name.

For the first time, the report described the mechanics of murder on a massive, organized scale, the physical exploitation of slave labor, the appropriation of belongings, the utilization of human hair for the production of cloth, and the extraction of gold and silver teeth and fillings with the objective of melting them down and converting them into coins for the Reich.

After all the pain and suffering, after the joy of freedom, Rudi had to swallow the bitter pill of disillusionment. The report didn’t save the Hungarian lives he believed they’d be able to save.