Dachau
Autumn 1944
THE FACES THEMSELVES HELD NO particular meaning. It was only the features that Aleandro focused on—the arch of a nose, an eyebrow lifted slightly higher than the other, a strand of hair like an upside-down question mark over an exceedingly high forehead. Nothing existed beyond these features. The only way he could draw them at all was to deconstruct them in this way, to pull them apart, separate them from the person to whom they belonged.
One by one, the guards came to him—or rather, he was brought to them in that same office where he first painted the commandant, and a choice, if such a thing existed here, had been offered. “If you can do something as good as this,” he recalled the commandant remarking from behind the massive oak desk, brandishing the sketchbook, “I may find a reason to spare you from the firing squad. I may find a way to overlook your… infraction.”
In truth, Aleandro would have preferred facing the wall, yet, in the moments between standing in the courtyard and this stuffy room crammed with dossiers and an oil portrait of der Führer hanging above the desk, something had changed in him. A reversal of sorts. Eva had come to him on the brink of death, not to usher him to it but to pull him back. It wasn’t madness to see it as an omen, a sign that she was out there, still waiting for him. He’d never seen anything more clearly. And so, his choice that day had been more or less made for him. For her, and the chance to see her again, he would live.
Since then, at least a dozen more guards passed through that very same chair. Most of them sat turned in profile, smoking, as Aleandro drew them, his fingers clutching the pastel stick so forcefully that it continued to break. Occasionally, they talked to him, these faces he couldn’t look upon as a whole. They told him about their families back in Munich or Hamburg, their children in Hitler’s youth camps, their wives and girlfriends they hadn’t seen in years and for whom the portrait would come as a welcome surprise. Once in a while came a special request: If he could fill in that slightly receding hairline or omit that scar slicing through the upper cheek, there would be a nice little reward for him at the end. If he could shave off a few years from beneath the weary eyes, he would be spared labor detail, or better yet, the cleaning of the latrines for one week.
He didn’t mind cleaning the latrines, he explained time and time again. He did not want food, either, for what honesty would there be in accepting it? He wouldn’t betray the men in the barracks—not for a moldy bread roll or a grayish scrape of meat they wouldn’t feed to their dogs. All he wanted was to get back his sketchbook. For that alone, he would paint all of the guards ten times over, he would clean the latrines every day, he would work in the quarries until his palms bled. Most times he was laughed at, shoved out of the way, but one day, one day, the miracle he prayed for materialized.
Something was tossed to the floor.
“Here you go, maestro,” said one of the older guards, a man with a leathery, mottled face and bloodshot eyes, which regarded him with some detached curiosity. “This is what you’ve been asking for, isn’t it? Well, consider this an early advance. For what, I’m not sure. But surely there will be something. There always is.”
Aleandro fell at the foot of the chair on which the guard sat and picked up the sketchbook. Holding it to his chest, he turned away, gathered the oil pastels in a tin box, and handed the man his portrait.
“My God, she seems quite above your station, doesn’t she?” There was an indifferent shrug as the guard swiped his coat from the back of the chair, narrowly missing Aleandro’s face. “Well, we all fall for the wrong woman, don’t we? God knows my choices haven’t been all that different. But my one piece of advice for you is that you get yourself together.” He laughed as he made his way to the door. “If I were in your place, I would try to forget her. It’s not like you’ll ever see her again.”
All Aleandro could do was nod numbly. After the guard left, he crouched on the floor, muttering a prayer of thanks to the patch of sky in the window, where a gray column of smoke billowed above the distant scattering of cypress trees.
For many nights after, he held the sketchbook in his hands, sinking into dreams of her. Every detail had become a source of concentration, a source of sleeplessness: The tiny specks of gold in the depth of her blue pupils. The sprinkle of freckles on her tanned shoulders, like stardust flicked from a hand. The silver ball in her earlobe catching a glint of sun as she pushed back her hair and tucked a daisy behind her ear. These simple details were most important to him: from these details he could reconstruct the larger ones. He regretted drawing them in only charcoal, wished he had just once captured Eva in color.
In the morning, he placed the sketchbook underneath the mattress, got on with whatever was required of him, no longer caring what he had become. No longer caring that he was no more than a puppet on a string that the guards would keep alive as long as his hands kept producing.
And so, days passed, months, soon nearly half a year. At some point he no longer saw himself as human, but as a force floating outside of a body, which he regarded with increasing detachment. Flesh set apart only by a sea of armbands: red for Communists, purple for Jehovah’s Witnesses, the yellow star for the Jews. Black for vagrants, criminals. Brown for people like him. They were all just flesh, sleepwalking on the periphery of life.
One afternoon in late October, a new prisoner was shoved into his barrack—a small-framed man with a pronounced Adam’s apple and skin as translucent as a day-old corpse’s. As soon as the guards left, the man went down to his knees, then collapsed to the floor in stages, as if releasing a long-held breath. To have been brought here, to this barrack occupied mostly by labor prisoners, seemed a mistake, for someone drenched in sweat and weak as he was would have been taken straight to the infirmary, or worse, to the brick building in the back of the camp from which no one returned.
The others didn’t notice him: clustered in groups, they talked quietly among themselves while others sat on their bunks with vacant looks, dreaming of food. It was Aleandro who scooped the man up in his arms and carried him to the back, where he laid him in a crevice between the bunks and the wall. From his canteen, he poured water on his sleeve and swiped it across the man’s fevered temples.
“Köszönöm.”
“What did you say?” Gently, Aleandro shook his shoulder, then again, a little more forcefully. “What did you say?” He was nearly sure that he heard it correctly. Thank you. “Tell me, are you Hungarian? Are you from Hungary?”
Hoping to revive him, Aleandro lifted the man’s head and poured some water into his mouth, but only some nonsensical, feeble ramblings came in response. For the rest of the night, all he could do was to keep vigil, rocking him gently as he might have one of his brothers, dribbling more water into his mouth as his frail body thrashed and shivered. “Stay awake, stay with me,” he kept whispering, something that seemed meant not just for him but for his brothers as well, and all the others he’d seen die, far from home, alone, broken. After some time, Aleandro lay down next to him and draped his coat over them both. Warmth was perhaps the only small comfort that he could offer.
At dawn, when Aleandro’s eyes flickered open, the man was no longer beside him. Disoriented, he staggered to his feet, and in the silence of the barrack, his heart plunged.
“Damn it! Damn, Aleandro!” he shouted to himself. Then, in the semidarkness, he spotted a mound on one of the empty bunks and flew like mad over the planks.
The man lay there with his knees drawn to his chest, facing the wall, and at first Aleandro hesitated to touch him, afraid that when he did there would be no movement, only the definitive stillness of a lifeless body. But the man did stir ever so slightly, and when Aleandro rolled him onto his back he was met not by a blank stare but by one so lucid, so present, that it jolted him away.
“I thought you were dead,” murmured Aleandro in Hungarian, overcome with such sharp relief that his throat ached with tears. “I didn’t think you would live to see the sun come up this morning. I was almost certain of it. But here you are, alive.”
The man motioned for Aleandro to come closer. He smelled rank, and his cheeks were hollowed, as if the flesh had been scraped with a scalpel from the bones sustaining them, but his smile was utterly serene and untroubled as a full moon on a clear night.
“I nearly was dead,” he whispered in Aleandro’s ear. “It’s a small miracle. A miracle indeed, my dear friend, that last night you didn’t drown me with all that water.”
His name was Rudolf. Rudolf Luben, born and raised in Budapest, the eldest child of a Romanian Jewish mother and a French father whose ill-fated move to Hungary before the war had landed him in this unfortunate circumstance. He had inherited his mother’s petite stature, but certainly not her fiery temper. No, Rudolf was a man who measured his words as well as his actions, a man who used his intellect as a weapon. An educated man. That much was clear to Aleandro from the way Rudolf spoke, using eloquent words he barely understood, yet somehow managing to make more sense than anyone ever had in all of his twenty-four years. And his eyes: there was a warmth in his whiskey-colored eyes, a glimmering light that seemed to belong to a madman at first, but now he viewed it as something entirely different. Rudolf seemed to float over all this horror as if he were observing it from above, and learning.
“So, tell me, Aleandro,” Rudolf said in the following weeks, challenging Aleandro to see beyond their grim reality. “What of all this bothers you most? Is it the baseness, the humiliation we must endure, or the fact that such cruelty is inherent in human nature?”
“Both, I suppose. What about you?”
“Well, certainly I don’t enjoy not knowing when my last day will come, but too much focus on the self leads to nothing constructive. Because when all a man thinks about is his own survival, he becomes no better than an animal. Fear can turn you into that, you know.”
Until now, Aleandro had numbed himself in order to survive, but since meeting Rudolf, his humanity began to reawaken a little more each day in the hardened terrain of his soul.
“The body is just a vessel. It is the mind that can’t be destroyed,” Rudolf would remind him as the two stood in the courtyard at roll call before dawn with rain pouring down on them. “I want you to memorize these words, Aleandro, to say them as often as you can. I want you to repeat them in your dreams! Let’s say it together now! Come on, let’s say it now!”
Some mornings they were marched together through the main gates to a merry tune played by the camp orchestra, taken to the outskirts of the camp. Together they carried sandbags, broke concrete, dug ditches and tunnels. More often than not they had to use their bare hands, as tools were scarcely made available and sometimes held back on purpose by the guards. More than once they were harnessed to a massive roller, forced to push it across gravel roads, and they chanted Rudolf’s words, sang them in defiance of their pain.
Aleandro could have easily used whatever influence he had with the guards to get out of this harshest form of labor, but he feared that Rudolf, not fully recovered, would collapse. Many stronger than him died every day, and he felt fiercely protective of the man. He had never begged for anything, but he did beg for Rudolf’s life. On his knees he pleaded, and bargained, and offered anything at all that would be deemed as a payment. Only after accepting to produce a glorifying landscape of the camp and the surrounding grounds was Rudolf given all of two weeks to recuperate and prove himself fit for labor.
To the guards’ surprise and unrelenting mocking, Aleandro began accepting the extra food rations he’d earlier turned down, although he never consumed them on the spot. Rather, he found a way to smuggle them inside of his coat, which had once belonged to a guard, and hand them to Rudolf outside of the bunker at night, while the others slept. To him, it was no longer a betrayal. None of it was a betrayal if he could save just this one man.
“Do you ever make mistakes in your portraits?” Rudolf asked one such night, taking a small, spotted apple from Aleandro’s hand and polishing it fervently with his sleeve. “Do you, for instance, ever find yourself having to start over, to begin the whole thing from scratch on a clean sheet of paper?”
The question took Aleandro aback. “Why do you ask?”
“I’m just curious. Your pastels must run out much too often, do they not?”
“Well, truth is I try not to make mistakes. Mistakes in a place like this can be costly, you know that.”
“That’s just it. Only by making mistakes can you create something that truly counts, something of value.” As Aleandro tried to make sense of his words, Rudolf chewed with relish the last bit of the apple, ate the core, too, giving a great groan of appreciation as he licked the juice off his fingers. “All that discarded paper bearing your errors could be put to a different use. They could reveal a… different reality. Do you see what I am saying?”
He did not, not right away. It took him a few long minutes to understand that all that squandered paper was indeed a precious commodity, that he could use it to document what unfolded inside the camp. A moment longer, he vacillated. The idea was so outlandish. He would no doubt be shot right on the spot. If a breach of this kind was discovered, he would be dragged across the roll-call square, and the wall under the watchtower would be the last thing his eyes would fix on. But, then again, hadn’t he seen how cheap life was in a place like this, how easily crushed? And this, as Rudolf had said, was the one thing worth gambling one’s miserable life on.
“So, Aleandro, are we in agreement, then? The great camp portraitist must embrace his privileges and stop wasting his time with a scrawny little Jew. There are more crucial things to occupy him, yes?”
“I don’t know about this, Rudolf. I just don’t know. Those guards, they are beasts; they will work you into the ground and I cannot let them do that to you, I will not let them…” Aleandro kept rambling, but Rudolf gave him a hearty pat on the back and went inside the barrack, whistling serenely under his breath.
The first time Aleandro stuffed the scraps of paper and broken pastels in his pocket after a session with one of the guards, his knees shook with fear as he made his way across the campsite. Yet as the treasures under his mattress grew next to his sketchbook, he felt no fear any longer. He was alive, truly alive, in a way he’d never been before. He rose eager to see light budding in the narrow strip of glass across the barrack. While the others slept, he would take out his supplies, then draw in the near-dark, in the latrines, in any moment of solitude when the prisoners were out of the barrack. His agile hands moved with precision, each stroke redeeming him, each finished piece leaving him exhausted yet utterly exhilarated.
Alone, on the screen of his imagination, his drawings of the camp were held in the hands of men in free lands, their eyes filling with knowledge, with truth, with his truth. If even one of his drawings could find their way to the other side of the barbed-wire wall, he would die a content death.
Sometimes after midnight, he and Rudolf would talk freely in Hungarian, but never about their lives from before. It had become a defense mechanism, a way to preserve. Here and now was all that mattered. Their joint reality grounded them to each other, and to depart from it, to revisit the past, seemed a minefield of its own.
That changed one night in late November. In the depth of a cold night, as the wind whipped so fiercely around the barrack that it threatened to pull it from its pivots, Aleandro finally extracted his sketchbook from under his mattress. As Rudolf flipped through the pages, Aleandro began to tell him about the woman in the portraits.
It was the first time he’d said her name since the fire. Eva, Eva. Her name was a destination across a vast sea he navigated without a compass, but saying her name out loud dispelled the fantasy of what he might still be to her. Yet he kept going anyway, knowing he couldn’t stop. Knowing he had to reach the end of the story, or he would never tell it again.
It was for her that he’d been keeping himself alive, he explained, for her that he’d accepted to do portraits for the guards and garlands in the margins of letters, and copy illustrations from photographs of people who did not know him and wished him dead. “Is it foolish?” he kept asking, breaking up the account. “Is it foolish to think it possible?” Foolish to think they could simply resume. The fire and the loss of his brothers had been punishment enough for the simple transgression of loving Eva.
He didn’t want to speak of his brothers now, drained of vigor; he couldn’t speak any further. Instead, he closed his eyes, needing, wanting, to shut out Rudolf’s sad, inquisitive stare.
“It’s all right,” Rudolf said. “It’s all right. It might help ease your burden if you tell me. It might even bring you some peace. So let it out, Aleandro. Get it off your chest. What happened with your brothers after the fire?”
“We were taken by the SS guards, just on the other side of the border, in Austria,” resumed Aleandro after a long silence. “We were on a train for days. It was dark, and there was no air, and my little brother kept asking for water. The stench in that wagon was too much to bear; there was only a common bucket in the corner, and we all had to relieve ourselves, even the women, all of us, in plain view of everyone. We were brought to a forest. I remember, Rudolf, those beautiful lean trees that reached to the sun, as if one still existed. We were forced to sleep there among those trees, in the open air, in mud, in the swarm of worms. Whips came down on our backs; it seemed the beatings kept coming for no reason. No reason. After a couple of weeks, they began selecting the men, separating them from the women and children. By then, there was no need to separate me from my brothers. Lukas… he was always fragile, he’d hardly been conscious since we were let off the train, and Tamás and Attia, too, had fallen ill with dysentery. They just all lay there, staring up at that dreadful sky beyond the peaks of the trees.
“The next day they came and took them, and I kept screaming until they beat me unconscious. Someone told me a few days later that anyone who couldn’t stand was tossed in a ditch at the edge of the forest. With the other bodies.” Aleandro began weeping, raking his hand through his tangled curls as if to expel the horror of those visions. “And that, Rudolf, was the last time I saw my brothers. But above all, what I can’t forgive myself for, what torments me more than anything else, is that the fire, that awful fire had been set for me. It was because of my foolishness that we were forced to flee Sopron, because of my foolishness that my brothers died.”
“The most terrible thing we will ever endure as humans, Aleandro, is losing those we love,” said Rudolf after a long contemplation, “but you must see that you are not to blame for the fire, nor are you to blame for your brothers’ fates. You, just like me, just like everyone else in this godforsaken place, are the victims. Although, do you see? By doing what you’re doing now, you are seeing that they haven’t died in vain. You are honoring your brothers, and you are honoring Eva and what she meant to you. And that, my friend, is your comfort. It is your strength.”
In the darkness and the silence that fell upon them, Aleandro nodded and smiled. It was his first smile in more than a year.