she decided, nothing.
“Jewish prisoners,” she began, “were brought here late. They were always a minority at this camp, most others were Slavs and politicals. The arrival of the first permanent group was heralded at the end of August 1939, when all the air vents of blocks 37, 38, and 39—these you see before you—were sealed, and the same thing was done to the windows and the walls, so that no air or sound came out or in. These little barracks were emptied of bunks and tables, and then over a thousand Jewish men were sealed in; only with severe beatings allowed out to the toilets. Soon the rooms were running with moisture and human filth. Sometimes the SS guards came in and told the men to lie down and then ran back and forth over their bodies, apparently for the ‘fun’ of it. One morning a month later, after over a third of the men had died from asphyxiation and starvation, three were found lying outside the barracks. We know from the memoir of a prisoner who wrote about it later: one of the men’s faces was completely destroyed. An eye hung out of his skull, resting on his cheek.” Margaret blinked before she went on. “The Blockälteste reported that in the night the Jews suddenly all said they had to use the toilet at once, and then fell upon the capos and the SS, who ‘defended’ themselves.
“The surviving men, however, told a different story. In the night, SS men arrived armed with legs of chairs, they said, and began to beat them, killing and injuring indiscriminately. In the confusion, some ran out of the barracks, and they were beaten to death.”
Margaret stopped. She blinked again. The twelve closest huddled around, bodies rigid with attention. Margaret’s tension disappeared all at once. She took a deep breath.
“Do you know which version of the story is true?” she asked.
They shook their heads. “No,” came the replies. “No, which one?”
“Maybe there was a revolt of the Jewish prisoners against the SS,” Margaret said. “That would be some kind of consolation, wouldn’t it? To think of a revolt. Or maybe the prisoners were entirely innocent, that’s possible too. That would be some kind of consolation in another way, wouldn’t it?” Margaret’s voice had grown raw.
“Which one is it?” she asked. A slight note of cruelty.
The problem was what to do with truth in matters of the spirit.
“No one knows,” she finally said. “No one has any idea.”
Margaret whirled and entered the Jewish barracks, breathing hard. The tourists had a struggle to keep up with her. Margaret had become reckless in her upset; her movements were quick and lurching. She told them they would have twenty minutes to look around on their own. The group spread apart.
Now, Margaret thought, she would have time to make a plan, to bring herself under control.
At one end of the barracks were the bunks, and the rusty, lidless toilets once used by the prisoners, at the other was a multimedia exhibit. The group trod quickly through the dormitory, that dirty old lumberyard, but soon headed back into the heated exhibition. The charred rooms in the front were even colder than the outdoors; they still smelled of cinders from the arson attack a decade before. Margaret stayed by herself, watching her breath puff out of her mouth. She leaned against one of the primitive bunk beds.
The floor creaked. The bunks creaked. Margaret closed her eyes. She heard—what did she hear?—a tiny scratching sound coming from the corner.
A second scratching sound began soon after the first, as though in canon, this time from a portion of the wall behind the bunks, a little distance away. One mouse in the wall, now two. And then a scratching, scuttling, tunneling—just under Margaret’s feet.
Margaret caught a glimpse of red in her peripheral vision, and turned quickly—it was the English businessman returned. “Aha!” Margaret cried out. She was embarrassed. “I was just noticing the mice in the walls.”
“Mice? Of course, this place built like a cracker tin as it is, there would be no place for a mouse to make a home. No, no insulation here!” He laughed. “Now I have a book in my collection, maybe you would know it, The Death of Adolf Hitler, it’s called, would you know of that one?”
“No, I’m afraid I don’t.”
“A pity really; fascinating book. Hitler had a phobia of cats, it outlines that in detail. And the book also has some interesting words to say about Stalin.