The Little Liar

Truth wonders what angels think about the world and states a desire to have lived in heaven in the months that followed the events of the previous chapter. During this time in history, half of the world ignores the Nazis’ many injustices, and the other half desperately tries to do something about it. Fannie is taken to the woman’s home and fed, Sebastian sleeps in a filthy bunk next to his father, and Nico rides the train north for several days.

After a year in Auschwitz, Sebastian is given the job of whipping fallen prisoners to determine whether they are still alive. During his time here, Sebastian has been given many different jobs that involve the removal of the dead from the trains and the camp itself. On this day, Sebastian whips a middle-aged man who fell after being forced to work. The man opens his eyes, and Sebastian announces that the man is alive. The Nazi officer who ordered Sebastian to whip the man now demands that the man get back to work. The man closes his eyes once more after meeting Sebastian’s gaze. The man is ordered to be sent to the crematorium.

At night, Lev and Lazarre lead several men in prayer. Each man is asked to state one thing that they are grateful for that day. Sebastian has nothing to offer and listens to his father and grandfather offer prayers for the members of his family who have died in the past year. Sebastian refuses to pray, and his father suggests that he pray for his brother. Sebastian, still deeply resentful of Nico, reminds his father that Nico was working for the Nazis. Lev tells Sebastian that Nico was likely coerced or didn’t know what he was doing. Sebastian decides to pray to see Fannie again instead.

The woman who finds Fannie is a Hungarian seamstress named Gizella. She recognizes the yellow star on the girl’s clothing and feels sympathy for her; Gizella has already lost her husband to the war effort. Gizella and Fannie struggle to communicate at first, but over time, they learn enough of the each other’s respective languages to communicate. Fannie hides in a chicken coop in Gizella’s backyard during the day, but she joins Gizella for breakfast and dinner.

In 1944, Fannie begins to help Gizella with her work. One day, Gizella tells Fannie that she thinks of her as her daughter and offers to let Fannie stay with her after the war. The next day, Fannie decides to help Gizella with some extra sewing, but she runs into a woman in Gizella’s sewing room who interrogates her. Fannie hides and decides not to tell Gizella about what happened. Gizella tells Fannie about the rosaries she and her husband have that are made of poisonous peas. She gives Fannie her husband’s rosary.

After the Hungarian leader is replaced with a “puppet government,” Hitler orders all Jewish Hungarian citizens to be sent to death camps. To implement this, he makes use of the Arrow Cross, a political movement whose views mirrored those of the Nazis. The woman who saw Fannie in Gizella’s home reports that Gizella is harboring a Jewish child, and Fannie is captured. In November of 1944, Fannie and dozens of other Jewish prisoners are marched at gunpoint to the banks of the Danube River. They are tied together in groups and lined up against the riverbank. The Arrow Cross begins to execute and drown people. As they move down the line from group to group, Fannie laments that she will never be able to tell the world what happened. Suddenly, she hears her name called and sees Nico wearing a Nazi officer’s coat. This causes her to faint.

The narrative shifts back in time to explain the progression of Nico’s life up until his encounter with Fannie on the riverbank. After heading north, he lies his way from place to place with the help of various people and makes use of a passport of a deceased German man that he finds in Udo’s bag. Nico disembarks from the train in the Greek border city of Edessa to search for someone who can put his photo on the German passport. He finds a barber shop that takes photos of its customers and asks the man inside for a photo. The man tells him to come back in two days. When Nico comes back, the man’s sons tackle him. He cries out in Greek, revealing that he is from Salonika. The man interrogates him and looks through his bag; Nico states that he wants to go to the camps, and the man is baffled. He takes Nico upstairs to meet his father.

The family is of Romani heritage. They ask Nico to read a paper that was stolen from a Nazi official; the paper states that the local people will be sent to camps on the day after tomorrow. The narrative explains that the Nazis were especially hard on the Romani people, often torturing and putting them to death on sight. Nico encourages the family to leave the city. In exchange for his help, the grandfather agrees to give him his photo. Nico pulls out the German passport, and the grandfather reveals that he is a forger and will use Nico’s passport to forge German passports for other people as well. Nico asks the man to teach him how to commit forgeries, but the man refuses. Nico offers to pay the man so that he may go with the family as they flee.

Udo regards the prisoners at Auschwitz with revulsion and goes to a well-maintained villa on the outskirts of the camp. He meets with a high-ranking member of the Nazi SS and is told that his new assignment is to be in charge of camp operations. Udo becomes an “exterminator.” Under his direction, Auschwitz becomes an even more deadly camp. He never learns the names of the prisoners in his camp, except for Sebastian Krispis, Nico’s brother. Udo finds Sebastian to be interesting and remembers how the boy stared at him as he threw the infant from the window on the train. Udo decides to try to break Sebastian’s spirit by giving him the most “gruesome” jobs.

Sebastian quickly learns strategies to help him survive in the camp. He digs potato peels out of the garbage, makes connections with other prisoners, and shares information by using secret nicknames for the guards. One day, a Polish day-laborer secretly gives Sebastian a potato and a can of sardines that he shares with his father and grandfather. They are very grateful, and Lev tells Sebastian that he is proud of him and loves him.

In the late summer of 1944, the allied forces bomb the factories around Auschwitz. The prisoners are forced to take cover in piles of people stacked on top of each other, and as a result, Lazarre becomes ill. He quickly grows weaker, and Sebastian and Lev worry that he will fail the next “selection,” a process in which the Nazis “discard the weak to make room for new bodies” (143). On the day of the selection, the prisoners are given cards with numbers that match the ones tattooed on their wrists and are forced to run to an inspecting officer at the end of the yard. The officer collects the cards and sorts them into piles discerning who will be executed. Knowing that his father will not pass the test, Lev switches his card with Lazarre’s before running down the field. This decision will cost him his life.

Fannie and 20 other children are now living in the basement of an apartment building. A Hungarian actress has come to their aid. The actress bribed and flirted with the members of the Arrow Cross to save the children from execution. Fannie thinks of that day on the Danube and constantly wonders if she imagined seeing Nico there.

Truth explains that Nico was on the river that day. Having learned forgery from Papo, the Romani grandfather, Nico travels with the Romani family in the high woods near the border of Greece and Yugoslavia. When he later decides to leave, Papo tells him to remember that “some lies are easier to believe than the truth” (148). Nico employs this philosophy and adopts various identities as he travels through Yugoslavia and into Hungary, learning Hungarian as he goes. One night, Nico walks to the center of the town of Szeged and sees a beautiful actress who has come to promote her movie. Nico watches the movie and is entranced by it. Suddenly, SS troops swarm the city center and order people out of the theaters. Nico pretends to be a Nazi officer and watches as the actress is arrested and forced into the backseat of a transport. One of the Nazi officers asks Nico to watch the actress, and Nico allows her to escape. As Nico quickly heads for the train station, the actress’s car pulls up; she yells for him to get in the car.

The actress is Katalin Karády. Because she has been very vocally anti-German, her songs and movies are banned in Nazi-occupied Hungary. She and Nico drive to Budapest, and she asks what Nico believes in. Nico remembers the story of the White Tower and tells Katalin that he would do anything to be forgiven. Two days later, Katalin is arrested by German officers and accused of spying. She is beaten and tortured for several months. Upon her release, she returns home to find that her apartment has been emptied by the Nazi soldiers. As she cries, Katalin hears a noise outside her window and sees Nico. She lets him into her apartment and tells him that the Nazis took “everything,” which Nico states is not true.

The night that Lev switches his number with his father’s, Lazarre begs Lev to tell the Nazi officers what he has done. Lev refuses, claiming that the officers would just kill them both. Three days later, the SS guards pull the “selected” from the roll call line; Lev is among them. Lev tells Sebastian to survive and to find Nico and tell him that he is forgiven. Lazarre recites a Jewish prayer that is spoken when someone dies, and Sebastian vows never to pray again. Lev is killed 20 minutes later, and his body is thrown into a trench that Sebastian must help to dig.

Truth says that on January 27, 1945, the war ends differently for each of the characters. Fannie walks in a long line of prisoners. (The Nazis, in an effort to hide their actions, subjected many Jewish prisoners to “death marches” to the “motherland.”) Fannie and the other children who hid in the basement of an apartment building were found when a neighbor reported the suspiciously large food deliveries sent to that building. Fannie is now walking to the Austrian border and forces herself not to stop because she knows that the Nazi officers kill anyone who stops walking. On the fifth day, she walks beside a seven-year-old boy who is struggling to carry a backpack, holding onto him so that he does not fall. In the morning, Fannie awakens to the shouting of Nazi commands, but the little boy does not wake up, and she is forced to leave him behind. Later, when her line intersects with a group of Hungarian refugees, she slips into the group and hides next to a man with a raincoat; the man gives her his coat, and the SS guards do not find her.

On the same day in Auschwitz, Udo burns his uniform and dresses in casual clothing; he plans to walk out of the camp and take a prearranged car ride to the German border. As he leaves, the Russian troops head up the hill to liberate the camp. Udo pretends to be a farmer who is making a delivery; this ruse is successful until Sebastian yells that someone needs to stop him.

Sebastian’s grandfather is taken to the infirmary after contracting typhus. Sebastian barters stolen goods for his grandfather’s life. One morning in January, Sebastian hears that orders have been given to evacuate the camp and leave the old and the sick behind. Refusing to leave his grandfather, Sebastian hides inside of a crate that he buried in snow. Two days later, he emerges from the crate as the Russian Army is approaching. As he walks to the infirmary to find his grandfather, he notices Udo trying to escape. Sebastian screams “Nazi,” and the Russian soldiers spring into action, but Udo shoots Sebastian in the shoulder. One of the Russian soldiers shoots Udo in the leg.

Truth explains that Nico hid some of Katalin’s gold and furs the day before her apartment was ransacked. Nico asks her to use those items to barter for the lives of the Jewish children that will be executed on the Danube River, including Fannie. After Katalin is arrested again, Nico makes his way to Poland, where he poses as a member of the Red Cross. He convinces a Russian captain to use him as a translator when the troops go to liberate Auschwitz. On January 27, Nico arrives at Auschwitz and is sickened by what he sees. He runs into the infirmary asking if anyone speaks Greek and finds Lazarre, who is now blind. Nico pretends to be a member of the Red Cross and asks Lazarre where his family is. Lazarre states that Sebastian is the only one left alive, and Nico cries.