According to Margarethe von Bjeck, at the liberation of the camp the dressmaker Ruthmann had been killed by a Russian soldier who had mistaken her for one of the SS. So wrote the soldier’s wife who, seven years after the death of her husband, had felt a need to set down in a book her experience of the Auschwitz camp, claiming she had known nothing of what had happened there, except on the day she went to pick chicory in the fields near the camp, saw smoke rising from the chimney and remembered some incomprehensible words her husband had spoken. She had perhaps understood what was happening but had not gone to see for herself, had not tried to find out more; had kept herself to herself and only after the war had written that ambiguous book so many Austrians bought in an attempt to understand better what had happened in those camps, and how it had been possible for intelligent young women to live for several years shut up in little houses behind embroidered curtains without ever going to poke their noses into the nearby inferno.
That evening, in her bed at the pension Blumental, Amara runs over again in her mind the words of the painter Theodor and the book by the widow of the officer von Bjeck that he had showed them, its page thirty-six creased and marked where it said the dressmaker Magdalena Ruthmann had been killed by a Russian soldier who had mistaken her for one of the SS. But it did not say why she had been wrongly identified as an SS. Had she been given a Nazi uniform in return for her dressmaking work? Difficult to say. It would have been strictly forbidden for a Jewess to go anywhere near a uniform. But the author doesn’t explain and the painter Theodor is consumed by doubt. The man with the gazelles suggests going together to this lady and talking to her about her memories. Theodor replies he has already thought of that, but that the author of the book is dead, or at least so he was told the day he went to look for her.
Had he himself formed any idea of how his mother might have died? He shook his head with a puzzled expression. Yet he had searched everywhere for the name of that Russian soldier who had been one of the first to reach the camp at Auschwitz. He had even been as far as Moscow in his search for this ‘soldat’. He had studied lists shown him by the military authorities. He had examined the newspapers of the time, but had been unable to find any mention of the soldier who had accidentally shot his mother thinking she was an SS. So much so that he had begun to think the man was probably a figment of the imagination of von Bjeck’s wife.
Were the von Bjecks a noble family? Quite likely, said the painter of angels on roofs, but a decayed one. The only noble thing they had left was their name. No property and no culture. Otto von Bjeck himself had studied little and unprofitably and enrolled in the SS because they guaranteed him a fixed salary and a house. He had met his wife at a training camp. They had married and produced four children. Then he had been sent to Auschwitz and had died there a few days before the Russians came. His wife does not say how.
His wife’s book Auschwitz: I Was There Too was a macabre statement that had nonetheless enabled her to sell her small volume as the work of a witness not responsible for what happened. She had died after the war in the house of her mother, where she had ended up with her four small children. It was not until immediately after the war that she first understood the reality of the camp, or so she claimed. When for the first time she had pushed open that gate under the words WORK SETS YOU FREE. And seen the famous chimney tower. And the ovens in which the corpses had been thrown after they were pulled from the gas chambers.
She had passed some of the survivors, thin and dirty, chilled and enfeebled, still crowded behind the barbed wire as they waited to return home.
It was then, according to her own account, that she had begun to weep at the horror. And she had wept for the death of her young husband who, despite everything, had kissed and embraced her passionately during the dark nights in that house with embroidered curtains; she had wept for him too while she wept for those poor people who had starved to death or been gassed, and been shut up in ovens until all trace of their bodies had been destroyed, guilty because they had come from another race. That was how the widow of SS officer von Bjeck had wept, she who was to write the book Auschwitz: I Was There Too, and who would die of a tumour at the age of thirty-five in the house of her mother in Bremen, leaving four small orphans and a photograph of herself with her husband the Obersturmführer, both smiling with their heads pressed together.
Now the painter Theodor is resting exhausted on one of the two chairs in his humble flat, lips trembling and eyes feverish from the effort he has made. Amara smiles at him gratefully. But he has closed his eyes and seems to have nothing more to say. He is as empty as the bottle lying at his feet.
The man with the gazelles suggests it’s time to go. Theodor struggles to open his eyes and focus on the people before him.
‘Goodbye,’ he says half-heartedly. ‘And good luck with your search for Emanuele.’
He makes no effort to accompany them to the door. They leave him sitting with his legs apart, eyes dull and arms hanging loosely at his sides.
‘Perhaps we should take the glasses and the plate with what’s left of the cheese to the kitchen.’
‘He’ll look after that.’
In fact, as they close the door they see the painter struggle up from the chair and distractedly collect the glasses and the plate of Camembert and take everything behind the curtain.
‘He has dazed me with his memories,’ says Hans, shaking his head.
‘He’s been generous.’
‘But not about Emanuele.’
‘Do you really think he knows nothing?’
‘I doubt it.’
17
One time Emanuele and Amara went on their bicycles in the direction of Monte Morello, stopping at the de’ Seppi spring. Babbo Sironi who dearly loved the hills and knew everything about making expeditions, had set them up. Their rucksacks contained two omelette paninis, a bottle of water, some alcohol for use as a disinfectant, some gauze and cotton and a little merbromin antiseptic. In another much smaller box were the glue and patches they needed for their unreliable locally made tyres. They also had some milk chocolate, two apples and a map of Tuscany.
They carried pumps on their bicycle frames in case their tyres went flat as they pedalled. And they did go flat very easily. Because they were made of material produced ‘by spitting’, as Papà Orenstein used to say. A man both pernickety and generous. He had already been married and the father of two children when he met the beautiful Thelma Fink, who played small parts in films. He left his wife and daughters to live with a woman ten years his junior. And Thelma, who had always claimed she never wanted to tie herself down for any reason and hoped to make acting a full-time career, suddenly changed her mind: she left the cinema without suffering any obvious distress and followed her husband to Florence where he owned a toy factory. There they took a beautiful villa surrounded by greenery in the Rifredi area and produced a son whom they called Immanuel, which means ‘God with us’, in Italian Emanuele. In those days cows and sheep grazed the park round Villa Lorenzi, and it was amid those ample pastures that the cherry tree grew, the tree where Emanuele and the little Amara would meet and fall in love.
Amara lived with her shoemaker father and her mother in a small house some three hundred metres from the gardens of the villa, at the junction of Via Incontri and Via Alderotti. An old farmhouse with an added toilet that stuck out from the first floor.