Arnost Lustig - Lovely Green Eyes

She felt in her bones that it was better not to know certain things, not to remember certain people. That was easier said than done, as she’d once remarked to Estelle. She remembered Sarazin yawning and telling her that this was how the world would yawn one day if anyone who survived told their story. But what about his eyes, I wanted to know. Did they really have no colour at all? They did, Skinny told me. She just could not remember now. Lies had been like the clothes she put on, like the water she quenched her thirst with, a handrail she held on to. She had not forgotten her fear, just as she had not forgotten her diarrhoea.

Had she been afraid of Sarazin? Yes, certainly. He’d personified for her a Germany that she had not imagined before. In Terezin, the Germans in SS uniform had still seemed comparatively civilized. But they had two faces and they quickly revealed that second face, in the first seconds at the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. That was a world without masks. Sarazin’s eyes remained deep inside her like devil’s eyes gazing at her through the mist, through the night, between valleys and mountains, through the lowlands and wastelands of her soul.

I reflected on the nature of the love that caused such anxiety to both Skinny and me, but at the same time, gave sense to everything. At 16 few people talk about beauty, they just let it warm them, as if in sunshine. With Skinny I felt as if I were on a raft on a turbulent river. Ahead was the bank, where we would land and tie up. To begin with, a small wooden hut would be enough for us. We could sleep under the stars before the dew came down or the frost bit. Then we would see.

When he realized that I’d fallen in love, Adler thought I had gone out of my mind — although he did not criticize my choice. I asked myself the question, on Skinny’s behalf really, how so many people could have lived in safety, out of the wind, when those colourless milky eyes were fixed on her.

“If you add it all up, we were lucky,” she said.

“Who’d add it all up?”

What we call luck has a thousand faces. Who can tell how much it consists of other people’s bad luck? She had created armour for herself, a shield close to her chest, the way gamblers hold their cards to prevent others from peeping.

Adler thought she was tired. He had his own explanation for her reticence. Like the rest of us she was suffering from an incurable disease which one must live with. After the war it was important to forgive others for that very thing we hoped they would forgive us for. Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, was 15 and six months when she got to Feldbordell No. 232 Ost and she was still two months short of 16 when the war ended. She could not forgive what was unforgivable. She did not get free of the net in which they had caught her.

Looking back, she tried to sort out what had been important at No. 232 Ost. She had arrived there unprepared, and survived. She had asked her body to hold out, and it had. She had asked her soul and conscience not to condemn her. But how could she have talked to, lain with, breathed the same air as, her murderers, the murderers of her parents and brother?

She soon discovered that life belonged to the living. For the dead, there was only honour, all the honour she could give them. The soul, too, was an empty place, like that place in her abdomen which her mother had told her about three years earlier. No-one would get to it if she did not let them, no-one without a key. Never mind how many bodies had forced themselves on her.

There were days when I felt I might be given that key, even though I had doubts about it on that train ride to Moravia.

“You know,” she said to me. “They say that when Big Leopolda Kulikowa was about to die she shouted at the execution squad: “God is my pimp!”

The whole time before and afterwards, Skinny, Hanka Kaudersovâ, later my wife, was flesh and blood. A soul in which remembrance and oblivion contended. Her eyes had looked on the devil twelve times a day or more, as had the other girls — every day except Sunday and sometimes Sunday as well. Her eyes had seen good and evil.

When Skinny was fifteen, getting on for sixteen, she had clear skin, shiny hair — carefully brushed and growing long again — and lovely green eyes.