Morris turned away, sorry to have asked.
“Anyway,” he continued after a somber pause, “that’s what she heard when she asked Neumann about the camps. He had much to do with them, working for the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps or Amt D of the WVHA, SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, along with Richard Glücks… Gerlinde must have heard something from someone who later got shot for wagging his tongue. Naturally, she went to Neumann and asked him whether it was true. He satisfied her with the official propaganda photos and she must have believed him because why would daddy dearest lie to his little girl, you understand?” He went silent for a while. “They shared a special bond from what I concluded. Neumann was very strict with his sons but he adored his little girl. It put a strain on her relationship with her mother for some reason. I gathered they weren’t very close, Mathilde and her. Gerlinde was, what we Americans call, a daddy’s girl. That’s why we need her.” He looked at Tadek pointedly. “He won’t just leave her. He’ll come back for her but by that time, we ought to make sure that our little Gerlinde is on our side and not his.”
“Impossible.” Tadek tried obliterating the OSS agent’s hopes by that single word but Morris only smiled mysteriously.
“If I thought it was, I wouldn’t have been wasting my time here.”
Tadek recalled the recent conversation with the American and stepped forward almost in spite of himself. He didn’t know how to speak to this girl; he hardly spoke properly with women in the camp and only when they needed to “organize” something from his grisly depot. However, the prospect of bringing the perpetrator, who was in part guilty of Tadek’s entire family’s fate, to justice, outweighed his anxiety.
“Do you exercise here every morning?” he asked, his voice nearly drowning in the torrents of the rain.
She still heard him. “Twice a day,” came a brisk reply.
“Do they allow you to run? At least around the house?”
“Could you please not talk to me?” She threw an irritated gaze over her shoulder but softened her voice, almost at once, as though cringing at her own rudeness. “I don’t want to lose my breath.”
He patiently waited for her to finish her routine.
“They don’t,” she finally spoke, collecting her equipment from the floor. “Not because they’re afraid that I’ll run away. They just don’t, because they can. This is how they exercise their authority over us, the Amis. So much for ‘we come as conquerors but not as oppressors,’ cock-and-bull. I heard, in the Ivans’ zone, it’s better than here. Those Eastern savages can be coaxed surprisingly easily.”
Tadek honestly doubted that this was the case. He, himself, had nothing to fear from the Russki fellows. They liberated him and allowed him to fight along with them and for that, he would be eternally grateful. He even made quite a few friends among them and considered them good comrades. Some teased him with good-natured disdain and called him our Jew boy but most made him feel at home and among equals. Yet, while he was slowly fighting his way west along with their armies, certain things couldn’t quite be ignored – the rape, the looting, the pure savagery of their revenge.
In Russians, two opposites appeared to be constantly at war – blind, animalistic violence and instant forgiveness that went beyond all comprehension. They obliterated entire army positions at one moment and distributed food from their own field kitchen to the freshly captured POWs right after. They raped women without a second thought and offered chocolate to their crying children afterward to console them. They looted everything they could get their hands on and yet, invariably brought their own food and drink to the table of the civilian who had the fortune – or misfortune – to host such guests that evening. A truly paradoxical nation, if Tadek ever saw one.
“Perhaps, they just fear for your safety,” he suggested.
A mocking snort came before the proper reply. “I was here, in Berlin, when they were showering us with bombs. I was here, volunteering at the Charité hospital when the Ivans entered the city. Now they wish to worry about my well-being?”
He trailed after her, along the hallway, not even sure why. Morris was right about one thing. She wasn’t rude enough not to reply altogether but neither did she display any friendliness beyond that point. What could he, a former camp inmate, do to win her trust, if the trained secret service agents couldn’t?
But then an endless sea of faces stood before him – the former Family camp inmates, men, women, and children alike – and pleaded with him as he was escorting them inside the gas chamber, the Nazis’ slave just like them, alive only because they didn’t wish to dirty their own hands with such work. Avenge us… One day, avenge us all.
With a sudden rush of blood to his head, Tadek caught up with Gerlinde and blurted out before he knew what he was doing, “what if I ask them to? They may listen to reason if asked nicely. And I’ll tell them that I’ll run with you to watch you. They’ll agree to that, no doubt.”
She stopped and regarded him with suspicion. “Why would you do that?”
“I just happen to like to run, too.”
He hated running. Running was all they did in Auschwitz because the guards were never satisfied with inmates walking at a normal pace. But he’d run again if needed. He’d run alongside the Nazi’s daughter three times a day if that would help catch that Nazi.
After a moment’s consideration, Gerlinde shrugged. “You can ask them, I suppose. There’s no harm in asking.”
The photo album was bound in leather and thick with memories and faces of people, now all gone and much too soon. Here’s Vati in his new gray uniform – a welcome change from the mourning black, which she had always detested –
