Free The Birthday Buyer by Adolfo García Ortega Page A

stuck out. As he pictured Hurbinek’s fragile, pathetic body yet again, he tried unsuccessfully to chase from his head the memory of the earth that shifted in the covered graves where they executed and threw thousands of wounded Jews in Radzyn. He had seen that earth billow by itself as the bodies buried on top of each other swelled up.

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    We know that Ernst Sterman, a German Jew, a china manufacturer, visited high mountain spas and health establishments throughout the United States, where he went in 1946 to cure himself from the aftermath of the tuberculosis he contracted in the final months of his incarceration in Auschwitz. He was spared from one of the fatal “selections” because of a mere arithmetical error on the part of his guards. When it was time to count the bodies that were shaking with fear when they were about to enter the gas chamber though he hadn’t stripped naked like the others yet, a punctilious bureaucrat sent him back to the barrack. There was one too many, and chance meant it was him. He was hidden there for two months and contracted tuberculosis. He lost one lung and more than half the capacity of the other.
    He disappears in 1955 and leaves our story, though not before leaving his testimony: “Life returns, life resumes and you cannot avoid its reality unless you cut your veins or hang yourself from a beam. I tried both, but in both cases there was always a hand, the hand of fate perhaps, to help me stop myself. When I was back home, after being in the extermination camp, and realized it would never be my home again because they were no longer in this world to share this same life with me—neither my children, my wife nor my close friends—when I realized I was alone, completely alone, I understood there were only two paths, death or life. And if I chose to live, though the wound would never heal, I’d have to press on, make money, earn my living day after day once again, shave every morning, laugh at what was funny, cry at what was sad. Except that sometimes I find the memory of Hurbinek intolerable, the child I saw die in Auschwitz, a very small child, sunk in a bunk, unable to overcome his permament shaking. I can never erase from my mind the sight of him dying; it always reminded me of the terrible pain and fear and helplessness my children must have felt in the hour of death.”

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    Scholomo Buczko, the cobbler from Pomerania, opened a new cobblers in Bratislava, where he was taken in by cousins when he came back from Auschwitz. He married a teacher of Russian there and trade prospered. He only remembered Hurbinek four times in the whole of his life, the times, one could say, when he remembered The Camp (Buczko always said “The Camp” when he was referring to Auschwitz).
    The first time was April 13, 1950. He left home and took a tram. There he read in a newspaper that they had put a price on the heads of 25,000 war criminals in Germany. For a few seconds he thought of Hurbinek’s body in the abstract and thought that someone ought to pay for all that hurt they had inflicted.
    The second time was June 21, 1953. When the game had just kicked off at a soccer field in his city, they opened the doors and placed a number of paralyzed and crippled children and adults behind the goals. From the terraces Buczko thought that if Hurbinek had lived he might have been one of those now leaning on crutches or using wheelchairs.
    The third occasion was October 7, 1958. His wife gave birth to their fourth child and he held the baby for a few seconds in his arms. When he saw legs that were so weak and skin that was so white, he remembered the time he lifted Hurbinek up so Henek could change the blankets that were dirty with excrement for ones that were just as dirty. The concept of
clean
didn’t exist in The Camp. The two children weighed the same, despite the age difference, and that was what brought to mind Hurbinek’s tiny body.
    The fourth was March 2, 1970, when Buczko was left paralyzed as