Page 32 of The Little Liar
Being young and strong like Sebastian carried a bittersweet consequence at Auschwitz; you avoided being gassed to death the day you arrived. Instead, your body withered week by week, starved, beaten, frozen, its ailments ignored, until, like this man in the snow, you dropped.
“Hit him harder,” the guard snapped, “or I’ll hit you.”
Sebastian flicked the whip. He didn’t recognize this prisoner, who looked to be in his early fifties. Perhaps he’d just arrived on the train and, like the others disembarking here, had been stripped of his clothes, shaved of every hair on his body, left to stand all night in a shower room, his bare feet soaking in cold, dripping water, only to be rubbed down in the morning with harsh disinfectant, then run naked through the yard to get his striped prisoner clothes and cap. Perhaps this was his very first day of forced labor, and he had already dropped like an exhausted fly.
Or maybe he’d been here for years.
“Again!”
Sebastian did as he was told. For some reason, the jobs he’d been given here were particularly gruesome. While others made bricks or dug trenches, Sebastian had to wheel corpses, or lift the dead bodies of those who did not survive the train journey.
“Once more, then we’re done,” the guard said.
Sebastian flicked the whip hard. The man’s eyes opened slightly.
“He’s alive,” Sebastian said.
“Damn it. Get up, Jew. Now!”
Sebastian watched the man’s face. His eyes were like those of a fish on its side, glassy, lifeless. Sebastian wondered if he could even hear the instructions, let alone comprehend their implications. Did he realize this was the deciding moment between staying in this world or being burned off to the next?
“I said, get up, Jew!”
Despite having taught himself not to care, Sebastian felt his blood rising.Come on, Mister. Whoever you are, remember it. Don’t let them win. Get up.
“I’m giving you five seconds!” the guard yelled.
The man’s head rolled slightly upward, until he was looking straight at Sebastian. He made a high-pitched wheeze, like a rusty squeak. It was a noise Sebastian had never heard from another human being. For a brief moment, the two of them shared a gaze. Then the man’s eyes closed.
“No, no,” Sebastian mumbled. He whacked the whip, again and again, as if to beat the man back into consciousness.
“Enough,” the guard said. “We’re wasting time.”
He signaled for two other prisoners, who raced over, lifted the man, and took him to the crematorium, with no concern for whether there was breath still within him. As they carried the body away, they didn’t even glance at the tall, emaciateddark-haired boy hunched on his knees, staring at his whip, unwittingly playing the angel of death.
He was sixteen.
***
That night, in the block where he, his father, and his grandfather slept, Sebastian refused to take part in any prayers. It was a ritual they had established, at the urging of Lazarre, not to forget their past, their faith, their God. Lying in their filthy bunks, they mumbled the words softly in the darkness while a fellow prisoner coughed purposely to prevent the guards from hearing them. When they finished, Lazarre, now a skeletal version of his old thick self, would ask everyone to recite one thing they were grateful for that day.
“I had an extra spoonful of soup,” one man said.
“My rotted tooth finally fell out,” said another.
“I wasn’t beaten.”
“My foot stopped bleeding.”
“I slept through the night.”
“The guard that was torturing me got switched to another block.”
“I saw a bird.”
Sebastian had nothing to offer. He listened silently as his father and grandfather mumbled the kaddish prayer for his grandmother Eva, who, on her first day here, was deemed by the Nazis as too old to be useful, and was gassed to death. They said kaddish for the twin girls, Anna and Elisabet, who were taken by Nazi doctors for experiments, the details ofwhich were mercifully unknown. They said kaddish for Bibi and Tedros, who didn’t survive the first winter. And finally, they said kaddish for Tanna, who died in her fifth month here, after contracting typhus. The women in her block tried to conceal the rash of her sickness, covering her in hay when they went out to work. But a Nazi guard discovered her shivering in her bunk, and she was put to death that afternoon, nothing to bury but ashes from the black smoke spewing out of the crematorium chimney.
After their prayers were finished, Lazarre and Lev huddled close to Sebastian. The older men had taken a protective posture toward the teenager, perhaps because he now represented the last of the children.
