Page 42 of The Little Liar
Udo was led to a study with a mahogany desk. A canterof vodka sat atop it. As he waited, he heard a constant engine noise coming from outside. He would later learn that during the gassing of prisoners, a guard would rev the engines of a motorcycle to drown out the muffled screams of those taking their last breaths.
Suddenly, a high-ranking member of the SS entered the room, his shoes clacking on the polished wooden floor. He filled two glasses with vodka, handed one to Udo, and informed him that he had been summoned to assist him with the operations of this camp, effective immediately. This man was the newKommandant. When a confused Udo asked what happened to the previousKommandant, the new man lowered his voice.
“There was an unfortunate relationship with a female prisoner. An intimate one. A child resulted. He has been sent back to Germany pending a complete investigation.”
TheKommandantpaused. “I trust we will have no such problem with you, Herr Schutzhaftlagerführer?”
The word meant “camp director.” Sothatwas his new job. That was why Udo had been summoned. It wasn’t a betrayal. It was a promotion.
“No such problem,Kommandant,” Udo said.
“Good. Now. In this place, we have one overriding rule. Keep what is worth keeping, get rid of the rest.”
“Can you be more specific?”
The man lowered his glass. “How’s this? When the filthy Jews arrive, sort through them like the trash that they are. Old women, mothers with babies, feeble old men, anyone showing the slightest bit of resistance? Kill them immediately.
“Anyone else, strong men, useful women, you put to work. You did see the sign at the gate, didn’t you? ‘Arbeit macht frei’? ‘Work sets you free’?”
TheKommandantgrinned. “Of course, we don’t really mean ‘free.’”
Udo tried to grin back. His stomach rumbled. He took a sip of vodka and wondered how many people he was expected to exterminate.
***
Prior to his arrival at Auschwitz, Udo had mostly been on the logistical side of murder. Encircle the enemy, bring it to its knees, then ship it off to be dealt with elsewhere. This was different.Kill them immediately?It gave Udo pause. A better conscience would have balked. Walked away. Asked for another assignment.
But you serve the Lord or you serve man, and if you choose man, there may be no limit to the orders you will have to follow, or your cruelty.
So Udo became an exterminator, and discovered he was quite efficient at it. Under his direction, arriving trains were unloaded in a hurry, the prisoners led to gas chambers often within hours. Although every one of them was someone’s terrified mother or father, or someone’s crying child, they were shuffled with equal dispassion to their deaths, like rice being swept off a table. Udo kept copious details in his notebook diary, the numbers, the tallies, his feelings of pride when a day’s exterminations went smoothly.
He also wasted no time bloodying his own hands. BeforeAuschwitz, he hadn’t done much killing himself. He’d shot one old Jewish rabbi who’d been pleading to keep soldiers from burning down a Salonika synagogue. And he’d shot two men who’d broken out of the Baron Hirsch ghetto, after an SS soldier had trouble with his rifle. It was embarrassing, Udo felt, the way the soldier fumbled with it, while the two Jews were on their knees. Udo couldn’t take their whining, so he put a quick end to the matter with his luger.
But those were select occurrences, and Udo had stared at the bodies after his bullets silenced them, feeling a tinge of regret, even anger, that the confrontations had escalated to such a point.
Here at the camp, figuring the guards would be motivated by his actions, Udo insisted on shooting at least one Jew a day, and two on Saturdays. After they were dead, he asked for the numbers that were tattooed in blue ink on their wrists. He wrote those numbers in a list in his notebook.
In all his time at Auschwitz, Udo never learned the name of a single prisoner.
Except one.
Sebastian Krispis.
The brother of his little liar.
Udo remembered him from the train platform. He recalled how, when Nico’s family was yelling and crying and rushing to him, only the older brother held back.
Then, on the train car, when Udo threw that baby out of the window, all the passengers had looked away except thisone, again, the brother, who stared Udo down. Udo could have shot him for that. He’d thought about it.
Instead, once inside Auschwitz, Udo instructed the guards to assign the boy only the most gruesome tasks.
“If you hate that one so much, why not just kill him?” an officer once asked.
“Killing the flesh is easy,” Udo said. “Killing the spirit is a challenge.”
Sebastian Grows Weaker, Gets Stronger
Killing the boy’s spirit, it turns out, would not be as simple as Udo imagined. Stripped of his mother and his siblings, his petty jealousies replaced by starvation and exhaustion, Sebastian matured quickly. He grew stronger. Bolder. His shifting jobs gave him a wider view of the camp and how to survive it. He snatched potato peels from garbage bins. He scooped dog food from bowls. He made connections with other Greek prisoners, who shared information about which block had the fewest inspections, or which guards could be distracted. They invented nicknames to identify them.
