Boris Eltz—Esther Kubis

Boris Eltz’s relationship with Esther Kubis is defined by an uneasy passage from concern to recognition. His quarrel with Ilse Grese has helped make Esther a target, and his attempt to understand the danger she faces cannot undo his part in creating it. When he watches Esther dance among other prisoners, however, her movement forces him to see beyond the role imposed on her as a camp performer: he reads it as a claim to freedom and, more fundamentally, to life and love.

A Connection Formed Through Ilse Grese

Boris explains to Golo Thomsen that his conflict with Ilse began some time earlier, in bed. He calls the quarrel sordid and admits that it was not to his credit. Having seen Ilse use the lash that day, he says, he was affected by it and suffered a sexual failure. In anger, he told her that she could torture a man in bed without using her whip. His account makes the connection to Esther indirect but consequential: the quarrel is between Boris and Ilse, while Esther bears part of its aftermath.

Boris says that Esther is persecuted by Ilse and by Hedwig, whom he describes as Ilse’s subordinate. Asked whether Hedwig herself is a real danger, he answers that the persecution is Ilse’s doing. He also reports that Esther considers being made a pet of especially bad. The detail complicates any simple picture of protection: even treatment that might look like favor can be experienced by Esther as another form of humiliation or control. Boris identifies the source of the harm, but his explanation does not mean that he can make Esther safe.

Esther as a Star Under Guard

Boris takes Golo to a large, free-standing wooden structure, warehouse-sized, with a pitch roof and a high window. Inside, bunk beds and equipment covered by tarpaulins occupy the space. Esther is there with several other female prisoners, while Ilse supervises them in her full guard uniform, with a whip at her belt. Esther is organizing what appears to be a slow waltz. The scene places Boris’s concern inside a stark arrangement of power: Esther can lead the dance, but the guard with the whip controls the conditions under which it happens.

Boris tells Golo that Esther receives triple rations because the guards have to care for her as their star. The provision is conditional and instrumental: it is tied to the performance, not evidence that Esther has escaped the camp’s coercion. Boris understands that Ilse has become invested in the production and sees herself as being raised into high culture. He warns that everything depends on the principal, Esther, and on whether she lets Ilse down. The performance therefore binds Esther’s artistic role to a threat that remains in the hands of her persecutor.

Boris also gives Golo fragments of Esther’s past. Her mother was a corps de ballet dancer in Prague, and Boris says that she was killed in the reprisals associated with Reinhard Heydrich. Esther was born in the High Tatras and spent the first ten years of her childhood there. These facts place her dance within a life already marked by loss and displacement; they do not turn her into a symbol detached from her circumstances. In the present, she dances in a striped prisoner’s uniform, among other prisoners, under Ilse’s supervision.

The Threat Behind the Performance

The risk becomes explicit when Boris tells Golo that Esther has said she will punish him that night. He has given her a long lecture, and she has heard him out before making that declaration. Boris asks why she would do it, but the question does not cancel the grievance Golo recognizes in her. Boris himself warns that, if she is judged to have failed, Ilse will flog her to death half an hour later. His concern is therefore grounded in a precise and immediate danger, not simply in anxiety about whether the performance will succeed.

This threat sharpens the contradiction in Boris’s position. He worries about Esther and brings Golo to see her, yet the possibility of her death is built into the spectacle he is watching. Esther’s apparent prominence as the star, her extra ration, and the attention paid to her dance coexist with her vulnerability to Ilse’s violence. The arrangement grants her visibility without security. Boris can name the danger and recognize the injustice, but the evidence here does not show him removing Esther from Ilse’s power.

Witnessing the Dance

At first, Esther’s movement is reluctant, though fluid. During a lull she rises barefoot onto her toes and forms a circle with her arms, her hands meeting above her head. Later, as the dance gathers force, Boris can no longer remain in his seat: he makes a wet snorting sound, gets up, and heads for the exit bent almost double with an arm raised to his face. The bodily reaction marks a change in the relation. Esther is no longer merely the performer whose success might avert punishment; watching her has overwhelmed Boris.

The next morning, after Boris and Golo have driven toward Cracow without sleep, Boris identifies what he believes he saw in the dance. Esther had been imitating the slaves and the guards: staggering and strutting. He distinguishes that part of the performance from the later moment when she truly danced, and asks what she was expressing. Golo answers that it was her right to freedom. Boris presses the interpretation further, naming her right to life and to love as still more basic. His response does not claim that the performance has freed her. Rather, it recognizes the human demand that the camp’s staged entertainment and violence cannot erase.

The Limits and Significance of Boris’s Concern

Boris’s connection to Esther remains entangled with his earlier conduct. His quarrel with Ilse is not an act of rescue, and the evidence does not establish that Esther is personally attached to him or that he can secure her future. What it does show is a movement from tracing the consequences of his conflict with Ilse to confronting the person endangered by Ilse’s authority. He asks whether Hedwig is harmful, listens to the account of Esther’s grievance, and brings Golo to witness the dance and its stakes.

The performance changes the terms of Boris’s attention. Esther’s movement first appears within the machinery of a coerced show: triple rations for a star, a guard eager for cultural prestige, and death threatened if the principal fails. Boris’s recognition of the imitation—of both the enslaved and those who command them—makes the spectacle legible as something other than entertainment. His final emphasis on life and love gives the relationship its clearest meaning: not a claim of possession or a promise of rescue, but the recognition that Esther’s existence exceeds the role and fate assigned to her by her persecutors.