Playing for Time (23 page)

The SS man hit her, she fell; she was just one mangled mass of blood, a disjointed puppet, but her expression, her eyes… I would never forget them. They carried her off. We didn’t know whether she was still alive.

Silence hung over the camp. Behind the crematoria, the sky was red as Mala’s blood.

On the other side, in the men’s camp, a gallows had been put up. Like us, the men prisoners were there, motionless, silent. Edek Kalinski appeared, hands tied behind his back, unrecognizable. He who had been so handsome seemed no longer to have any face at all: it was a swollen bloody mass. We saw him climb onto a bench. A snatch of the verdict in German, then in Polish, reached us; but before it was concluded I saw Edek move: he himself put his head in the noose and pushed back the bench. Jup, a camp
kapo,
intervened, took his head out, made him get back on the bench. The speech was resumed, but Edek didn’t wait for it to end to shout: “Poland isn’t yet—” We would never know the end. With a kick, Jup, his friend, tipped over the bench. An order rang out in Polish and thousands of hands were lifted to raise their caps. In final homage, the inmates of the men’s camp bared their heads before Edek, who had been their hope.

We learnt the story of their recapture gradually too, piecing together a patchwork of whispered information.

They had walked three miles, Mala with the sink on her head, its weight making her legs tremble, Edek following. This was how they arrived at Kozy, a little village nearby. There a Polish accomplice sent them to a friend’s place and they spent the night under a bale of hay.

I imagined their two bodies together; what a current of love must have joined them that night. Fear must have dropped from them, forgotten. They were alone for the first time, reunited. It was probably their first night, and their last. They had to make contacts in the town. Mala exchanged her blue overalls for a pullover and trousers. For reasons which remained unclear, she went to wait for Edek in a cafe. Germans, mostly in uniform, came and went. A Gestapo officer sat down nearby and stared at her—did he find her beautiful, or odd, or both? Though far from lacking in sangfroid, Mala was uneasy. She decided to leave, got up; quicker than she, he grabbed her by the arm and turned up her sleeve. The truth was revealed in the form of a tattoo. Upheaval in the cafe. Edek appeared at the door in SS uniform; he immediately grasped what was going on. He could have mingled with the other uniforms, turned calmly on his heel and gone away. He went towards Mala; without her, he would give up, without her he couldn’t live, even as a free man. Despite her desperate glance, he joined Mala and let himself be arrested.

The rest we knew.

What piece of recklessness, theirs or their friends“, had led them to this tragic end? Days passed, rumours died down, but the yeast of hope had brought up great bubbles in us which burst:

“They were out long enough to see friends, to talk to them, to tell them what we’re going through; the world knows now, so why don’t they come rushing to our aid?”

“I don’t understand, what are the Allies waiting for?” complained Big Irene.

Florette was bitter. “It’s not difficult to understand: What are we to them? What do a few thousand condemned people more or less matter? They’ve got their war to win, their power to assert. Nothing else interests them. They’ve got the world to carve up!”

I limited the scope of her cynicism. “I don’t believe the Russians can think the way the others do. I’m sure help will come from the Carpathians.”

My enthusiasm convinced no one. Everyday life had now resumed. Once again, the girls were swamped in their own self-centredness. Fear laid down its law. The monsters were now more powerful than ever and already people were jibbering at the idea of the reprisals that would inevitably follow this escape. There was no shortage of criticism either: “We’re the ones who’ll have to pay!” Mala and Edek were blamed. The girls spoke disapprovingly of their thoughtlessness, their impulsiveness, some even dared to say “stupidity.” They became Utopians, madmen, egoists.

Ewa, Little Irene, and I repeated firmly that the girls were wrong, that we had been given a marvellous example, that living wasn’t a question of resigning oneself but of struggling, that we had to help one another, show solidarity, form a block ready for anything… We talked and talked, and no one listened. Life went on.

Our Beloved SS

Seated on a sort of gate, one leg dangling, his whip in his hand, Graf Bobby was preparing for “work.” The doors of the railway carriages were open, and out of them tumbled men, women, and children. Few got up. Others came out shrieking, leaping over the dead. The transports, it seemed, took several days, standing on sidings to give priority to military convoys. These deportees had been travelling for twelve days; twelve days without air, food, or water.

Graf Bobby raised his face gracefully, thankfully, towards the sun. He was smiling, he always looked smug as a cat, pleased with himself and life. The others had hard, closed faces, but not he, though I doubted that that made him any the less deadly. He’d crossed his legs and the tip of his boot gleamed like glass, catching the sun’s rays. The SS soldiers grouped the survivors five by five. His long cigarette holder in his mouth, Graf Bobby, with an airy flick of his switch and as the whim took him, separated those who were to enter the hell of the camps from those who were to make a hasty entrance to paradise. What a noble metier!

Outside, whistles blew more frequently than ever. Tchaikowska, squawking throaty
Verbotens,
crossed our room and went to close the door. What was so special about this
Blocksperre
that we couldn’t have our door open?

Today we were rehearsing the quartet from
Rigoletto.
Despite its somewhat unusual makeup and comical appearance (Lotte, contralto, Maddalena; Ewa, tenor, the lover, the Duke of Mantua; Florette, baritone, Rigoletto, the court jester; me, soprano, Gilda), the SS adored this piece, which meant that we performed it regularly. Hardly had the last note died away than we heard bursts of laughter so violent that, despite orders, we went to the windows and opened the door a crack: a young man, entirely naked, very tall, very thin, with a long nose, was singing and prancing outside the open door of a carriage, his hands flapping in the sunlight. The SS, from the humblest to the highest, were having fun, Graf Bobby among them.

The madman’s tones rang out joyfully. All we could make out was a series of
“Hurrah! Bravo! Bravissimo! Bonjour, bonjour!”

The procession of victims filed slowly past; heads turned towards the madman and some laughed. When they had disappeared in the direction of the ramp which led to the gas chambers the madman was alone with the dead from the carriages; and while the prisoners, in their striped rags, piled them onto the trolleys, he laughed and clapped his hands and capered grotesquely. The empty carriages slowly backed away and new ones arrived at the platform. The simpleton continued with his joyous number, he danced on. The SS continued cackling, slapping each other on the back. Then, doubtless deeming that enough fun had been had by all, Graf Bobby sent him, with a wave of his cigarette holder—how elegant it all was—to join the others on the ramp.

The diversion was over, but not the
Blocksperre. It
was still on at suppertime. It was so stifling in our room, heated for hours by a blazing sun, that Pani Founia and Marila had left the door open when they went to the kitchens to get the supper rations; almost automatically some of us looked out at the platform. Behind barbed wire the hopeless, monotonous cohort of the selected flowed by. A runner had told us they were Belgians, and Big Irene and Anny were looking intently at the new arrivals, as if all this sadness nonetheless brought them a whiff of their own country.

“You know,” remarked Anny, “they really look Belgian.” Then, violent, irrepressible, a strangled shriek rose in her throat:
“Maman!
It’s my mother, my sisters!”

She threw herself forward. Down there on the ramp, her mother and sisters didn’t look round. Brutally Florette planted her hand over Anny’s mouth. Ewa, Little Irene, and Lili pulled her back. Anny struggled desperately, wrenched away Florette’s hand, shrieked, “Let me go. I want to go, I want to see them—to die with them.
Maman, maman!”

Florette landed her a well-judged blow and groggily she allowed herself to be carried to her bed. We took turns mounting guard beside her. She cried all night and fell asleep at dawn.

At rehearsal time, sitting on a chair, she was still stupefied, vacant. Gently Big Irene put her mandolin in her hand: “Play,
h
could be your turn soon, so play!”

From that day, Anny was never the same again. Always secretive, she withdrew further, closed in on herself; at the same time she became more outspoken, less conciliatory in her judgements, but above all, so much colder.

An hour later, this tragic episode was thrust definitively into the past. Word was going round that Kramer and Mandel had left Birkenau. We didn’t know where they’d gone, or why; what concerned us most, of course, was whether they would be back. They loved their orchestra, they were proud of it, they were our most faithful clients, our protectors. Without them, our future was at best uncertain.

I caught Alma carefully inspecting our premises, her worried air betraying her train of thought: our block was clean, well-kept, adequately heated, and louse-free. Other services could well be installed here; the camp was perpetually short of space, the teeming hordes poured in incessantly. The SS might decide to take it over, and we would land up either in a work detachment or in the gas chamber.

Not having been officially informed of the absence of our patrons, Alma decided to pretend she didn’t know about it. We would rehearse as usual. The Sunday concert, by which time perhaps they’d be back, had to be perfect.

It was a real rag-bag: Viennese waltzes which they loved, a medley of Dvorak which they enjoyed without realizing that it was forbidden music, some Brahms Hungarian Dances, Schubert’s “Lilac Time,” snatches of
Tosca, Whitehorse Inn, Song of the Volga.
They were very eclectic, our SS. In fact they loved music but knew absolutely nothing about it.

This rehearsal gave us a glimmer of hope and we threw ourselves into it wholeheartedly, too much so in fact—it might perhaps have been better to have courted obscurity. A runner came to give the order to stop all rehearsals—the concerts had been discontinued, only the morning and evening sessions were to be kept up.

Discouraged, Alma put down her baton and went to shut herself up in her room, but reappeared almost at once. She strode across the room and went out. Was she going to attempt to intervene? But with whom? Exhausted by a bout of dysentery which had lasted several days, I went to lie down; we’d soon see!

Alma’s return was somewhat unexpected: she came in with her arms full of balls of wool, followed by a runner similarly laden. She plunked the multicoloured harvest down on my table. Now we were a knitting factory!

“You see,” Alma said to me, “I must show them that we’re capable of doing something other than music. If they come in here and see you all nicely turned out sitting hands in lap, they’re going to think you’re useless. So I asked Frau Schmidt for suggestions; she suggested I go to the sewing block for work. They had nothing to give us; they’re far too frightened of having nothing to do themselves. But I saw this wool and asked for it. So that’s it, we’ll do knitting, anything, but a lot of it!”

One hour later, except for Alma, Little Irene, and myself, who didn’t know how to knit, all the girls were hard at work; scarfs and pullovers were the favorites, apparently in great demand. The SS could come along whenever they liked, they would be most edified. I stayed on my bed, ravaged by awful tearing stomach pains. From high up on my perch I could see them all, and I still had enough sense of humour to enjoy the sight: my copyists around their table, and the musicians at their usual places were clicking away busily. Alma passed among them, irritated and irritating; her total lack of expertise preventing her from actually directing operations but her air of chief-warden-in-a-prison-work-shop exasperated them. Florette knitted quickly without lifting her eyes; Ewa was more leisurely, examining her work, measuring it, smoothing it with her hand. The Polish Jews knitted madly as if their lives depended on it, and indeed perhaps they did. Here the most extreme commonplaces took on strange resonances. The Aryan Poles worked slowly. Clara was constantly unpicking what she’d managed to do. The German needles clicked with positively mechanical regularity.

Two or three days went by punctuated by the varying rhythm of the knitters. We were in constant dread of a visit by Tauber, who, in Kramer’s absence, seemed to be fulfilling a number of roles, too many for our liking.

Tauber, a long, angular man, was a melancholic ravaged by ennui. He sought the freakish, the novel; the routine of the “right-left” selection bored him, depressed him. In fact, the convoy routine didn’t interest him; it left no scope to the imagination and he had plenty to spare. What he liked was selections that took place within the camp.

It seemed that we had nothing to fear from him in the immediate future, so absorbed was he in perfecting his latest brain wave, which consisted in putting the whole of the women’s camp outside, with the exception of the Aryans and the staff of the special blocks, Canada, the sewing block, and the music block. He would review them, naked in their ranks, choose fifty or so from among the less sturdy so that they would collapse all the sooner, and order them to dig a ditch. The trickiest feature of this task was not the depth but the width, which had
to
be neither too great nor too small. When this work of art had been completed, the other women who’d been waiting, naked, at attention, had to run and jump the ditch; those who fell were good for “special handling”—the gas chambers.

Tomorrow perhaps we too might serve to distract him and he might be highly inventive in the use he put us to. Anything could happen. We knew he detested Mandel, and we did not doubt that part of his wrath would fall on us useless creatures. He had already forbidden rehearsals and concerts.