Boris Eltz's concern for Esther Kubis and his promise to Thomsen

Boris Eltz's concern for Esther Kubis and his promise to Thomsen are presented through a relay of care: Boris entrusts Angelus Thomsen with Esther’s protection, and Thomsen later tells Esther that he can no longer fulfill the pledge. The promise survives even when its practical power has been stripped away, linking Boris’s faith in Esther’s defiance to a last, constrained act of truth-telling by Thomsen.

The Promise and Its Terms

In a letter to Thomsen, Boris writes that he has been released six weeks early and is beginning his journey east. The letter makes the promise in a deliberately teasing register: Boris says he will fight to the death to keep Thomsen attractive to Aryan women, then charges Thomsen to protect the blue-eyed, golden-haired “Theres,” described as a contrarian from the High Tatras. The humor gives the exchange the familiarity of friendship, but the protection request carries real weight. Later, Thomsen tells Esther directly that Boris had extracted from him a promise to do everything in his power for her.

Boris’s confidence in Esther is not just a matter of the pledge. He used to say that she would not go down, that although she was rash, her spirit would refuse to give her persecutors the satisfaction. He also repeatedly recalled the first thing she had said to him: that she disliked being there and would not die there. Her words, as Boris preserved and repeated them, make her refusal to be defeated the personal ground of his hope.

Thomsen’s Last Meeting with Esther

Thomsen last saw Esther on May 1, 1943, in a sealed Block where the two of them were alone. He was about to be transferred to another camp, Oranienburg, while Esther was nearing the end of a three-day confinement without food or water. Her punishment concerned the making of her bed, a standard Ilse Grese enforced with particular strictness. The promise between Boris and Thomsen thus came due in a setting where Thomsen was about to lose even the limited ability he had to help her.

He told Esther that Boris had asked him to protect her, but that he could no longer keep the promise: he had nothing to offer her, not even his wristwatch. Esther listened closely, Thomsen thought, because he was now so plainly on the wrong side of the Reich. He did not challenge her silent inference that Boris, too, might not be all he seemed. The scene does not establish what Boris’s political position was; it shows instead how Esther read the men around her, and how Thomsen’s changed standing made his warning credible to her.

Defiance and an Unresolved Fate

Thomsen urged Esther to live long enough to see Germany lose. His words turn Boris’s earlier protective charge into a plea for survival, but the narrative supplies no confirmation that she heard the war’s end. Esther’s fate is explicitly left unknown. Against that uncertainty stands Boris’s remembered conviction that she would resist giving her persecutors the satisfaction of breaking her. Their bond is therefore marked both by an act of protection passed from one friend to another and by the limits of what either man could secure for her.