The Birthday Buyer Read Free Page A

foreground of my mind.
    And then I think of a similar face, our family dentist’s, when I was a child. That tooth puller must have been a real Nazi, I recall, because he would tell me or one of my brothers: “Don’t complain, at least I give you an anesthetic. Think about the Jews when their molars were simply wrenched out.” At the time neither my brothers nor I understood what that enigmatic story told by our affable, gray-haired dentist referred to, the resigned warning of someone who knows more than he is letting on. Now, of course, we all know what he meant.

II

THE TEAR AT THE END OF MY NAIL

1

    I make an effort. My legs hurt; the powerful painkiller given me by the elderly nurse made its impact some time ago; the plaster casts are enormously irritating. But what is my
small-scale
grief compared to the
infinite
suffering of Primo Levi or Hurbinek? I wonder in my hospital bed. I make an effort to push myself up on my elbows and sit on the bed; I stretch my neck; in the distance, through the barred window I can see the winged crests of the sculptures of the Alte Oper. It has all been rebuilt—so I’ve been told—the whole city is new, remade after the war. Bombing raids destroyed Frankfurt. In 1944 the wife and children of Heinz Rügen, the
SS Obergruppenführer
who applied for a post in Auschwitz Birkenau, lived on a broad or narrow street—I’m not sure which—near the Alte Oper.
    Against his best wishes Heinz Rügen wasn’t able to celebrate Christmas with his family on December 24, 1944, the day he wrote a letter, his last, to his wife and children; the letter has been preserved and is highly affectionate, moving even. It ends with a beautiful image: “As I write to you, a tear has dropped onto my finger and is rolling down to the end of my nail. It slips onto the paper. I’m sending it to you even though it will be dry by the time it reaches you.” He signed and folded it and put it in an envelope emblazoned with a swastika that he popped into the pocket of his uniform. The Russian soldier who shot him a month later found it there, in the truck that Rügen was riding in, abandoning the death camp where he had so desired to serve the Führer. But before that, that same day when he wrote the letter, on Christmas Eve, Heinz Rüger, well bundled up, left the guard post. It was very cold. He lifted his hand to touch the pocket with the letter, perhaps reminding himself he shouldn’t forget to leave it in the office out-tray or tenderly remembering his beloved ones at home. He approached barrack 346. He strode toward one of the bunks. He pushed out a woman who was probably young but looked aged. Nobody knows who she was, but she was Ángela Pérez León, a Spanish Sephardic Jew married to a train driver from Bohemia whom she’d not seen ever since she’d come to the camp. The woman was clutching a little body that didn’t cry at all when she fell. Rügen dragged her out of the barrack and shot her in the nape of her neck near the door. The bullet came out through her nose. Then he grabbed the baby by an arm and hurled it into the distance as if it were a doll. Hurbinek flew through the air. Rügen thought he wouldn’t waste another bullet, the heavy snow that was falling would be enough to finish off the little monster. To an extent he was carrying out the order he had given that very morning that his men had apparently ignored. He was tired of seeing that kid’s paralytic body time and again. How could it still be alive? Heinz Rügen couldn’t think about his children and be forced to see that scum, day in day out. Now the Russians were at the gates to the camp he ought to quickly complete the task he had undertaken. The tear at the end of my nail, he thought.
    The three-year-old kid shivered on the snow, on the central roadway, until Henek picked him up later.

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    Rügen died in the truck taking him and his men to the old German border after they had abandoned to their fate the walking corpses that