Playing for Time (18 page)

It was abominably incongruous.

Almost before I had finished, the fashion-plate colonel and Tauber turned on their heels. A few women listened, sniggering; one tried to join in the refrain, in a broken voice whose singing past was probably all too recent. It was pitiful, excruciating, but I carried on singing about love and cups of tea.

Now it was Jenny’s turn. She floundered instantly, played whatever came into her head. She had forgotten everything. She was red in the face, sweating heavily despite the cold. Alma gave up conducting the caterwauling that her bow produced, for it obeyed no conceivable time signature, but she kept her eyes fixed on Jenny and her stare was so derisive that Jenny could not fail to feel it as intensely as one of the famous slaps. At last Alma put an end to her torture with a sharp flick of her baton. Thoroughly humiliated, Jenny wept copiously while we, oblivious of time and place, laughed till we cried; affected by our own helpless giggling, the women too began to laugh. We were unable to control ourselves, yet each one of us was quite aware that Jenny’s fault was so serious that it could have cost her her life.

We put our things away and left the infirmary like workers going off duty. After our departure a hundred, two hundred of these women would go to the crematoria. Had we already become brutes? How could one explain one’s indifference? I thought of two recent facts, independent of each other, but which had succeeded one another chronologically: the return of Marta and Zocha’s behaviour with the milk.

The morning had ended with the usual metallic clank of bowls which followed the arrival of the soup. Sitting round our tables, we swallowed the viscous liquid. Outside, it rained on interminably. Wet, head streaming, a girl appeared in the open doorway and the wind swept in. She was very thin, verging on the moslem, tall and almost without breasts. Florette and Jenny, in amazement, shouted out, “Marta!” So this was our longed-for cellist. She didn’t smile, her greeting was colourless, she came from another world. The girls’ greeting wasn’t too warm either. She proceeded unsteadily towards her bunk and sat on the edge of it.

“What was wrong with you?” asked Jenny nervously from a distance.

“Typhus.”

“And you pulled through? You lead a charmed life, I must say.”

Informed by Regina, Alma appeared on the scene. Though different physically, they were members of the same haughty and superior race. They exchanged brief and rapid words in German. As far as I could judge, because by now I could speak it fairly fluently, Marta’s German was very pure. Her hollow orbits made her wonderful almost golden eyes larger and darker. When Alma had gone, she sat there dreamily for a bit, then murmured in excellent French: “Alma would like me to accompany you at the next concert, but all my things are dirty…”

I warmed some water on the stove in our little bowl, which was fortunately empty, and said, “Give them to me, I’ll wash them for you.”

She seemed surprised. I didn’t wait for an answer, took them and washed them. Exhausted, Marta stretched out on her mattress. I put her things to dry on the stove, expressing the hope that they would be dry by four o’clock. She acquiesced vaguely, looked at me oddly but didn’t smile. Marta was very proud, and independent. The girls, curiously angry, seemed critical of my action, which I regarded as a gesture of ordinary solidarity, but which was incomprehensible to them. They confronted me: Clara, Jenny, Florette, Helga, Elsa, Anny, backed up by the vigilant chorus of Germans and Poles. The Russians always kept aloof. The two Irenes and Ewa merely observed me. I was judged, condemned: “You’re cracked. So you’ve taken to doing other people’s washing nowadays?”

I defended myself: “She’s just come out of the Revier, she can hardly keep upright. I don’t see why I shouldn’t help her.”

“Because we don’t do that here.” Jenny’s explanation was precise. “Whatever her state of health, she’s got to manage on her own.”

“If you think anyone would do the same for you, you’ve got another think coming,” was Clara’s contribution.

“I don’t expect anything in return and that’s not why I’m doing it. I do it because it’s natural.”

They were staring at me, disapproving and incredulous, a stupid blinkered herd; for them, I was mad or pigheaded.

Jenny, who had become the spokeswoman, attacked: “Who do you think you are? A fuhrer? We don’t take lessons from anyone, and particularly not from you.”

They were all too stupid, too selfish.

“Look, you poor idiots,” I burst out, “if you carry on like this, you’ll never be able to go back to real life. You’re lost! To live with other people you have to have a minimum of solidarity. You may get out of here alive, but inwardly you’ll be deader than any of those poor things they burn every day!”

Eyes closed, taking refuge in her weakness, Marta was remote from the commotion she was causing.

The others smirked at me, convinced of the protective strength of their egoism. I was the crank, the simple-minded one, the madwoman spouting gibberish.

I felt that their sarcasm was teetering dangerously on the verge of hatred; and once again the group of Poles, both Aryan and Jewish, struck me as the most fanatical and odious. Was I going to become a racist, here where that was the most monstrous of sins?

I turned away and went to the window, pressing my nose against the pane for a moment; the rain had stopped, and something resembling the sun was trying to pierce through the cloud of smoke no longer driven our way by the wind. A few yards from our hut the enormous, well-fed silhouette of Zocha was blocking my horizon. I saw her gesture before my brain translated it to me: she was raising her arm and, from the bowl she was holding, she was pouring milk into the mud! She had had enough so, from her lordly height of five feet nine, she was throwing it away. About thirty miles from Auschwitz her parents, Poles who hadn’t been displaced, had a farm. Each morning they brought their daughter a parcel which actually reached her. She was big and fat and as strong as a man—a monster! One would have been hard put to it to find any human traits in her at all.

Presumably that day Ewa’s thought had followed a similar course to my own, because that same evening, while we were sitting round our stove, she talked to me about the problem:

“The first trip I’ll make, afterwards, will be to Paris, and you must come to Krakow; I’ll make you love my country.” A fleeting apologetic smile passed across her face. “You must have such a bad opinion of us. I saw Zocha pour away that milk this morning. I’m ashamed of the way some of my compatriots behave. I must admit that I wasn’t overfond of the Jews, but here, how could one continue to hate them as those stupid girls do? How can they feel loathing for people who are so mercilessly massacred? What right have they to despise a race when there are people among us like Zocha who throw milk away? That really upset me. She’s a healthy young girl, she eats all day long, and she wouldn’t even offer her surplus to someone less fortunate than herself; that seems to me scandalous. Then there’s that brute Danka, who bangs the cymbals fit to deafen us. I’ve caught a look in her eyes which shows that she actually enjoys making those poor creatures drag themselves off ”in time‘ to our music. Irena’s a frightful creature, too, vicious, hypocritical, and cunning. Kaja is a solid peasant type, but perhaps the worst of all; she leaves her bread to go mouldy. Then there’s their horrible patron, Tchaikowska, who brought them here in the first place-fancy usurping the name Tchaikowsky. She’s completely unpredictable, stupid and hysterical, and she seems to be fuelled by spite. I suffer when I think that women like these are my compatriots. They’re not all like that, I know; but here, the majority are.“

“Perhaps it’s that one notices it more because they’re
kapos,
blockowas.”

“Yes, but why them?”

“They’re pretty tough physically, and you need to be, in their job. The SS know it and get the message across. Some of these women have been here since 1942. When a young girl is flung into this atrocious atmosphere, her instinct orders her to react. She learns very quickly that you have to please the Nazis in order to survive, and that to do that you have to act like they do—it’s only then that they trust you. That’s the only guarantee of survival one can have here. It’s true for people like Tchaikowska, Founia, and Marila. They’ve ended up thinking like Nazis, feeling that they too are a master race. The Nazis obliterate all traces of humanity in the internees, they appeal to the lowest instincts, set prisoners against each other, arouse all possible forms of savagery, crush the weak, protect those who become monstrous like themselves—and that’s how they attain one of the aims of National Socialism: the destruction of human dignity. And of course with some underprivileged people born in a socially impoverished milieu, where there’s no education of any kind, the ground is already prepared; all you need to do is alternately beat them and reward them for them to become torturers in their turn.”

“You’re probably right,” Ewa said thoughtfully. “But I still see them as Polish, and I wonder what will happen to them when they leave here—after all, they have a better chance of survival than the others. So how will they readapt? Will they ever be able to live like everyone else? What will society do with these women who have learned to live on other people’s corpses? Will they have husbands and children? And what will their place be in a different Poland, freed of the horrors of Nazism? Perhaps it’s not entirely their fault. Is it ours, the fault of the privileged classes? It’s very painful to have to feel partly responsible for them. Before coming here I knew nothing of this kind of feeling, I’d never have talked like that. But I knew practically nothing about society or about the world. I knew only my own milieu, that of the Polish aristocracy, another sort of ghetto! I’m thirty, I’ve got a husband and a son, Mirok, who’s nine now, whom I adore. I’m one of the most successful actresses in Krakow. My life was just like that of any girl born into my sort of society. My father was a count, my husband a member of the aristocracy too. I was brought up in a castle, and learnt French and music. I did what used to be called the ”humanities.“ This education led me into the Resistance—could any member of the aristocracy have acted differently? There was no choice. The invader came, and I did what I thought right for my country. That brought me here. I don’t regret it. My Poland—bled white. I’m Polish first of all, I put that before religion or family. I hate the Germans, I hate the Russians; they’ve made all of us into permanent rebels!”

She was beautiful: Ewa, our grande dame! Like a wild creature, nostrils flaring, she was breathing the air of those heady escapades which led heroes cheerfully to their deaths. Yet here she was without glory; cheeks flaming, she continued:

“When I see those chimneys smoking day and night, I can say that I regret nothing of what I’ve done, and that I’d do it again. If I had to be part of the work group or shut in Block Twenty-five, taken to the gas chambers, I’d do it all again, because I’m certain that this nightmare will end in the defeat of Nazism. It can’t be otherwise. Then what will happen to my country? Shall I still be alive to see it? Though even that hardly matters, because my son will live to see the Liberation; he will live freely in my Poland!”

Marta

A T attention, heads erect, five by five, our gaze apparently fixed on the middle distance, we saw Frau Drexler approaching a bed in my row. This was the first
Bettkontrolle—bed
check—I’d witnessed. The SS woman twitched the cover off sharply. Tchaikowska and Founia didn’t wait for orders, they zealously yanked off the mattress; hidden underneath were a towel, a slip, some soap, a tin plate, a fork, a spoon, all painfully “organized.”

“Confiscated,” barked Drexler. It was devastation. All mattresses were overturned, bedclothes thrown to the ground. Drexler accompanied her purifying action with vigorous
“Verfluchte Juden!”—
damned Jews. She didn’t speak her words, she spat them. The girls were shattered by this general search; gazing into space, they didn’t bat an eyelid. To attract Drexler’s attention could mean death.

She was delighted by her pathetic booty: it represented weeks of privation and she couldn’t fail to know that. Astonishing to enjoy lording it over such a feeble lot. The grace of the Fuhrer, who like God the Father reigned over great and small, had raised her to this exalted post, while in her native Swabia she would have been, perhaps, a waitress. If the well-loved Fuhrer, through the medium of the SS, had recompensed her by putting her here in this camp, the largest and most efficient, she must have deserved it. You could read that in her eyes, in her manner. But this awareness of her justly attained rank didn’t prevent her from being furious with the cold, the boredom, furious because the days and months were so long, because there were too many Jews in the world and she would never manage to exterminate them all! Anyway, she was afraid of getting lice, which were rife everywhere except in our block.

Like the other SS women, she lived in a state of perpetual rage. And now she was taking it out on us, probably because she had recently been subjected to the rudeness of a superior. A posting in Auschwitz rarely struck the members of the SS as an agreeable promotion; this token of trust, this nod in the direction of their high sense of duty and devotion, was the reverse of welcome. Only the camp commandants, the really high-ranking officers, the genial organizers of death, Himmler’s henchmen, could hope to obtain promotion in the Hitlerite hierarchy this way.

Triumphant, with the tip of her toe, Drexler poked about in our belongings—nightdresses, towels, bras, all forbidden things; with a vengeful heel she crushed bits of bread, some biscuits, a miserable bottle of scent. Which of us was going to have to erase the traces of this havoc? Frau Drexler left us, smiling complacently, followed by Pani Founia and Marila bearing off the remains of our fortunes.

After their departure, the girls gave way to their anger and despair. The most important of my belongings—my toothbrush and my precious notebook—had escaped the catastrophe because I always carried them on me. I could no longer remember where that horrible little notebook had come from, nor of course did I know what its original purpose had been. Here everything one got hold of had a past that was best ignored. Already I cared more about that notebook than anything else. Within a few days it had become essential to me, a real friend; I would caress it lovingly like the silky fur of a comforting animal, a warm, familiar, well-loved skin. I kept it to the end, and it was to be an invaluable aide-memoire.