Playing for Time (12 page)

No wonder they hated us.

The general atmosphere was even more gloomy since a
Blocksperre
had just been announced.

“Any news of Marta?”

It sounded an insignificant question; there was a pause, then Ewa said: “Alma probably knows.”

I looked forward eagerly to the return of this Marta, our only cellist, whom I’d never seen. With her the music would improve, and thus it seemed to me that we would be more protected, less exposed to the whims of our masters. Had Alma concerned herself with the matter at all? And who would dare to ask Alma these questions? It was Florette who responded: “If we relied on her, we’d all croak!”

Her peevishness annoyed me. “You’re wrong,” I butted in. “I always have to do a cello part for every new arrangement, as though she knew that Marta would be back any minute.”

“I don’t believe it,” Florette persisted. “Her sister Renate never comes to see us anymore, that’s not a good sign; and the Revier isn’t a holiday home, it’s more of an anteroom to Block Twenty-five! ”

“Well, you got out of it.”

“I was lucky, but I couldn’t have hung on another forty-eight hours. Survivors are very rare. When the doctor said that I had a infection and she’d keep me there, Tchaikowska, who’d brought me in, positively gurgled with glee and was already paying her last respects; she was sure she’d never see me again. I stayed there six weeks. It was so ghastly that I’d rather die than go back there: no medicines, no care of any sort, no food. The infirmary is a pool for selections, the SS draw on it every day. Death cures all ills, after all.”

“Still,” said Jenny, “without Marta the orchestra does limp rather, and here limping’s not healthy!”

“She’s been away three weeks already,” Ewa said, trying to calm the situation, “and our double bass player means we can afford to wait.”

“Double bass playing in five lessons! That’s all Yvette’s had,” Jenny sneered, “and she’s never touched a string before in her life. You can’t run up a concert in a matter of hours.”

Jenny’s street-corner banter often made us laugh, but now her spiteful pessimism was exasperating. At the word “double bass” Yvette’s elder sister looked up: “Are you saying my sister doesn’t play well?”

“Jenny’s being unfair,” I intervened. “It takes years to make a good double bass player. Yvette doesn’t do too badly. All we expect from her is some simple accompaniment.”

“I can well do without your views.” Jenny rounded on me cantankerously. “First, what do you know about it? If your Kraut mate Mandel doesn’t like your so-called simple accompaniment, she’ll send us all to take a death shower.”

Not to please—that was what we all feared. Faces turned towards Yvette. Lili planted herself protectively in front of her sister. Hands on hips that still had some semblance of a curve, she was trying desperately to adopt a dignified posture, an attempt annoyingly counteracted by her small figure and round, moonlike face. With
r’s
like drum rolls, she burst out: “You can’t put the blame on Yvette. I’ll protect my little sister from your poisonous jealousy.”

“Cut that out,” interrupted Jenny. “You’re swelling that brat’s head with your rubbish. Don’t do this, don’t do that—you make her sick and us too.”

Lili was almost speechless with indignation but clung to her right of
mater familiae;
she explained to us that she alone, as a former music teacher, was capable of judging her sister’s potential, and that it would be a “grrreat” disaster if Yvette (as a result of our collective stupidity) wound up in the gas chamber because, as she claimed, “our family would thus lose its finest light.”

“Don’t worry, with you it will keep its greatest blight,” said Jenny.

In the face of her opprobrium we collapsed into laughter, schoolgirls giggling in the midst of death.

Four in the morning, one of the worst times to wake up—the mind a prey to nothing but destructive thoughts. Our stove, now cool and bursting with ashes, no longer had anything friendly about it. I was half asleep when a caterwauling, followed by a sort of heavy snore, cut across the stillness: Yvette, upset by Jenny’s sarcasm and her sister’s reproaches, was practising the double bass. I hadn’t time to stop her before an “oooh” of horror rose from the music room. I leapt down to find Yvette in front of the double bass case, sobbing bitterly. “My God! Whose trick was this?”

The front of the case was disgorging an enormous quantity of used sanitary napkins. We were helpless with laughter at the absurdity of the thing; Pani Founia, looking more grotesque than ever, stared at us uncomprehendingly, and Tchaikowska belted out her usual insults. Alma emerged from her room scandalized that we should have dared to make such a noise. She was even more scandalized on seeing the unlovely cause of the uproar.
“Ach! Schwein, Schwein,
where does the rubbish come from?

Furious, she expressed doubt as to our mental health, accused us of having no sense of honour; she was within inches of saying that we were unworthy of the camp that housed us!

“Throw it all away immediately,” she flung out in the direction of Tchaikowska, whose gaze was seeking a victim on whom the order could rebound. It was Yvette.

“You found it all, you can remove it.”

This form of justice relieved her. Dignified, Alma withdrew, and Tchaikowska, followed by Founia, did the same.

“Those napkins must have been ”organized,“ observed Florette. ”I can’t believe any of us still has periods.“

All eyes turned towards Lili, who, since she hated taking a shower, perpetually excused herself by saying, “I can’t have a shower, I’ve got my pe
rrr
iod…” which made the Poles say: “Of course she’s dirty, she’s a Yid.”

Little Irene shrugged her shoulders. It was beyond belief: not only would Lili never have played such an unpleasant trick on her sister, but it was quite clear that she was lying—she didn’t have periods any more than we did. She just didn’t like water.

So the centre of interest moved off, the search for the culprit had become unimportant: simply, everyone envied her. It could only be a Russian or a Pole, since some of them still did have their periods. Florette and Jenny claimed that they put something in our soup, but there was no need for that; the trauma we’d undergone and our physiological wretchedness were quite enough to bring it about. It was just as well, too, because at the beginning, for those who did have their periods, the situation was extremely awkward: nothing to wash themselves with, nothing to wear. The blood ran down their thighs and dripped from between their legs. Always sticklers for cleanliness, the blockowas struck them, forced them to wipe up the stains. And yet at this moment everyone envied the unclean unknown, and Margot, the Czech girl, summed up the general feeling: “I’d like to be in her place.”

“It’s upsetting not to go through those unclean periods,” Hilde reflected. “You begin to feel like an old woman.”

Timidly, Big Irene asked: “And what if they never come back afterwards?”

At her words a ripple of horror swept over us. Those who didn’t understand French asked to have the sentence translated. Catholics crossed themselves, others recited the Shema; everyone tried to exorcise this curse the Germans were holding over us: sterility.

How could one sleep after that? Our giggles turned to silence now that the untold privilege of a fruitful womb seemed threatened. Would those who ever got out of here have to pay for the misery of having been here at all by the hidden mutilation of no longer being a woman? None of us had sufficient medical knowledge to be able to say anything helpful about the matter. So we lay awake, this fear lodged within us.

The following day I got three new copyists: one of the German Jews, Elsa, a rather nice girl with red hair, a little freckled face, and dark eyes; and two of the Russians: Alia, aged twenty-two, who always averted her tawny gaze, though whether through shyness or distrust it wasn’t clear; and Sonia, one of the special-status prisoners—not exactly a certificate of excellence. She was a Ukrainian, a solid well-covered girl, also not a point in her favour; but she was meek and unassuming and, much more important from my point of view, a good musician. Alia and Sonia were our pianists but now they had no instrument; some days after my arrival, soldiers had removed our magnificent Bechstein, probably originally taken from a Jewish household, to take it to the mess of the camp’s valorous officers. I was very sad about that; I’d hardly had any time to profit from it! But on the few occasions I’d laid my hands on the keys, I’d thought of the person whose hands must have been there before mine: a concert pianist, child prodigy, rich man’s son?

Alma came towards me smiling: “That’s good, you’ll be able to do us some new arrangements.” Without waiting for my acquiescence, she turned back to her musicians: “Tomorrow there’s a concert, and I want it to be im-pec-cable. I’ve put
Madame Butterfly
on the programme and we’ll rehearse it now.”

Wrong notes seared painfully through my skull. Alma swore:
Blode Ganz! Blode Kuh! Scheiss Kopf!
Her repertoire of insults poured out effortlessly, rhythmically. “Fania, come up here a moment. Where exactly is the wrong note?”

The musicians carried on. Standing behind Alma, I followed the score as it should be followed, which was something Alma didn’t know how to do: vertically, from top to bottom, with a single glance taking in all the instruments. Then I checked every part. Most of my copyists transcribed badly, since they didn’t know music and reproduced what they saw as mere dots on or between two lines, as they thought fit. So I corrected, explained, went to sit down again, and launched once more into Peter Kreuder, whose “Twelve Minutes” I had to reorchestrate with the help of the piano version, an adorable potpourri, particularly light and tuneful. It was rather urgent, as Ewa, Lotte, Clara, and I had to sing it at an imminent concert. Just at the moment when, once again, the tune was running in my head, everything started up once more. Alma would call me, lose her temper, or shout: “You’ve played it before, you ought to know it!” Then once again we would be treated to the list of despised animals: pigs, cows, and enough shitheads to befoul the globe. Baton blows rained down on guilty fingers, and it was Jenny who received the slap which Alma had been itching to deliver for some time now. As if swept off her feet by some devouring passion, Alma very soon lost her middle-class poise. I found it hard to get used to this method of punishing her players; here in the camp it seemed particularly displeasing.

A moment of calm again; I returned to my “Twelve Minutes,” to escape into the wonderful, enchanted realm of music. Each section unfolded flexibly within me, one bar leading marvellously to the next. My hand transcribed rapidly; I loved this aerial, party music.

Outside, whistles blew, announcing the end of a selection. The
Blocksperre
was lifted.

A runner opened the door:
“Achtung.
Quickly. Herr Kommandant Kramer is coming!”

Alma blanched, stiffened. It was incredible; he wasn’t even in the room and she was already standing to attention. Tchaikowska and Founia bawled frantically: Were we worthy to be in the presence of the master? Could anything in our appearance offend him? Was the room clean? And us? I half expected to have to show my hands and be told to go and wash.

Josef Kramer was the commandant of the camp of Birkenau; the face he showed when he came to listen to the orchestra was certainly not that known to the other men and women of the camp. The only one who had said anything about him at all was Ewa: he loved music, and it was he, with Mandel, who kept us alive; we depended on him. He always behaved correctly with us, but a Polish comrade who worked in the infirmary had told Ewa that he was not immune to the sort of collective hysteria that seized the SS when they loaded their trucks for the crematoria. On occasion he could be as wild as the rest of them, not hesitating to shatter a woman’s skull with a blow of his club.

So this was the brute—I couldn’t think of him as a man—who was about to make his entrance. I was curious to see him. I would have liked to talk with him, to understand. To understand—it was a mania with me. I continued to believe that there was something to understand, that this desire for extermination was motivated by reasons which simply escaped me. One didn’t organize death for death’s sake; there must have been another purpose, but what? Those men who, in defiance of all human laws, obeyed those perpetrators of monstrous genocide, behind what were they taking refuge so as to live with themselves? Of course I knew that they’d been taught that we, the Jews, were an inferior race, that morally and intellectually we were compared to a “beast driven by ungovernable passions, with an unappeasable desire for destruction and characterized by utter vulgarity,” that the behaviour of the SS was ruled by the terrible phrase: “Woe to those who forget that everything that resembles a human being is not necessarily a human being.” But for me, until my arrival here, despite the arrests made in Paris, these words were just theories; they didn’t correspond to any reality. Now I asked myself: How could men and women actually apply it so implacably?

Petrified into an impressive position of attention, we awaited Kramer; he entered, two SS men in his train. This man was a force to be reckoned with; so stocky that his head seemed set directly on his blacksmith’s body, he gave off a positively disturbing sense of power. His ears were huge; the cloth of his uniform was stretched taut over his broad chest, which bulged like a breastplate. He had the heavy yet supple tread of an animal; his presence was crushing.

He walked towards the seat prepared for him, sat down, took off his cap, and put it beside him. His chestnut hair was cut extremely short, accentuating the foursquare look of his solid head. Satisfied, he beamed from his chair and graciously addressed us: “Now, a moment’s respite for all of us. We are going to hear some music.”

Still at attention, the correct position for speaking to an officer, Alma asked nervously what Herr Langerfuhrer would like to hear.

“Schumann’s
Reverie.”
Feelingly, he added that it was a “marvellous, heart-rending” piece. Ewa, translating under her breath for my benefit, added: “Oh, so he’s got a heart then?”